You might want to consider ant (http://ant.berlios.de/) as a replacement. Obviously there are the same drawbacks as for *TeX: command line compilation etc.
But you can include TrueType and other fonts.
Given that this is a clean rewrite, some other problems might have been solved on the way.
I read through a lot of documentation on this at the time I wanted the new router from BT... I found (without being able to link to it now) that the UK law is even better for the consumer, the warranty is actually 5 years (6 years in Scotland if I remember correctly). The only problem with this long lasting warranties is the fact that after a certain period the consumer has the burden of proof that the problem existed at delivery which he has not in the normal case. That reduces effectively the number of cases where you would want to go through the process of getting this warranty enforced.
In short: The UK does comply with enough of the directive to protect the consumer quite thoroughly.
The Parliament of the EU has issued a directive in 1999 - to be implemented by the member countries by 2002 (1999/44/EC, see http:////www.ugal.be/docs/en/pdf/docum/jol171-garant-e.pdf) that imposes high standard consumer protection laws on resellers.
This is known to few people and resellers who might refuse to acknowledge it... which does not make the directive non applicable. See below for personal experience.
The Directive applies to
any defective movable consumer product
any seller, that is to say any person who, under a contract, sells consumer goods in the course of their trade, profession or business
a producer, meaning the manufacturer of consumer goods, the importation of goods or any other person who purports to be a producer by virtue of their name, brand or other distinctive sign
The directive calls for a guarantee of at least 2 years for new goods (or longer if the Member State wishes) where the seller will undertake without extra charge to reimburse the price paid or to replace and/or repair consumer goods if they do not meet the specifications set out in the guarantee statement or relevant advertising.
The goods must
comply with the description given by the seller and posses the same qualities and characteristics as other similar goods
be fit for the purpose which the consumer requires them and which was made known to the seller at the time of purchase.
are fit for the purpose for which goods of the same type are used
show the same quality and performance, which are normal in goods of the same type and which consumers can reasonably expect . This will also take into account any public statements made about the specific characteristics of the goods by the producer, seller or in their advertising.
If a defect appears during the first six months following purchase the consumer will not have to prove the product was defective at the moment of delivery. The onus will be on the seller to prove the product was without defect. A consumer will have up to two months following the discovery of the fault to inform the seller. If a defect becomes apparent within the two, or one year, period depending on the type of goods, then the consumer has the right to choose a remedy using the following hierarchy. They can
Demand repair or replacement within a reasonable time and without any significant inconvenience. (Free of charge repair refers to the necessary costs to bring the goods "back to conformity")
If this is impossible, unproportionate or cannot be done within a reasonable time or without significant inconvenience then the consumer can demand a price reduction or can rescind the contract (though not if the defect is minor)
All these rights are free of charge to the customer.
See also http://www.wak-tt.com/tt/2yearwarranty1.htm for a summary of the directive (the above is quoted from there).
My personal experience (with BT in this case) is that the various persons I had to talk to all referenced the companys warranty period of 1y to refuse me. I was finally forwarded to a last person who declared my router to be still under 1y guarantee (which it clearly wasn't - I was several months over, but still below 2y). My guess is that companies would rather not admit that they are really subject to this legislation.
You might need some patience - but the law is on your side. This is at least one good thing that the EU has done for us.
While it might be true that many of the existing software patents would not hold up, nobody really knows for a specific patent as long as there has been no research. But hey - patents are public. Would it not be a good idea to have one wiki repository listing patents AND their prior art?
And since Microsoft started the show now - why not start with Microsoft patents?
I don't agree that this is a lesser way of getting to the content. Protection is not only the fence, it is also the key to the door. If you can't properly protect the key, the fence is not worth noting.
As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found on craphound.com):
... Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [... A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.
This is why DRM is bound to fail... they always will have to provide the key. The algorithms for encryption themselves should be rather safe.
Yes, many other companies will sink their money in DRM systems, and many of these platforms are still bound to fail. Unfortunately the legal provisions will make many people bleed until a reasonable way of dealing with digital technology will have been found. As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here: http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt):
... Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [... A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.
True freedom is when you don't have to be afraid to be impopular. The fear of having less privacy is an implicit fear that we do not have the freedom of being impopular. I am concerned about losing my freedom. I am living in Paris, France.
I can't believe that there are so many defendants of the bugs of MS Word out here... why should a bug free word processor be as expensive as the Golden Gate Bridge? A free, to my knowledge relatively bug free wp does already exist: LaTeX. (And please don't tell me that LaTeX is a simple program...)
On the other side, just by picking another example than Word, I must agree with you: The market wants cheap, buggy software with the last pretty zooooming feature more than all the rest. See the popularity of LaTeX.
I am asking myself the following: It would be really nice if this could be made possible by the following small changes in already existing technology:
1) Make wikipedia entries searcheable by proximity to global coordinates. The data is probably very quickly entered by the community and the search function does not sound difficult to me.
2) Owners of private wireless access points make them open for everyone... but all unknown or unidentified users/MAC addresses will _only_ be able to access wikipedia. Nothing else, everything is redirected. This is naturally the more difficult point.
Has anybody experience with configurations like this? I am interested...
Yes, I made nearly the same post before, but it remains true:
Cory Doctorow explained it very nicely (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here):
Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.
DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not
because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn't a secret anymore.
As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here):
... Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties:
a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [... A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just
Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.
Hilarity ensues.
"Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he
can't see its flaws."
The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. It is never helpful to punish those who help to find the flaws without causing damage.
This is the same for the circumvention laws. It is now illegal to prove if certain systems are flawed or not.
I have a probably very classic story: A colleague of mine ignored the bios message of the kind "Disk error - press any key to continue", which nevertheless made the machine boot into Win2K for some while... until it stopped. I could convince our sysadmin not to try to rescue the installation by installing XP over it. He was really convinced this would give him the chance of accessing the NTFS-partition. Running knoppix and clicking on "Start samba server" made it incredibly easy to save the data. And naturally the disk was never useable again after a trial to install XP over it. Nothing could ever access it again.
If I understood rightly, google desktop does caching on its own. This means to me that it enhances the time of memory for certain things. This is inherently different to what you can do with old caches (which you might have erased...).
I had this problem at work... One PC (W2k) had a severe hard drive problem, even the bios complained on startup. The guy working on this computer found nothing dodgy in hitting del before Win started up. Until, one day, it didn't any more. All recovery disks and CD-Roms from Microsoft didn't even recognize that there was an OS installed.
Knoppix booted fine, found the drive, read the NTFS without problems (read only, but I think you can mount it with write access) and within the first two clicks we started samba and sshd so that we could save the data. I was quite glad about that...
On the other hand... we didn't fix the partition afterwards, we had to throw the disk away.
I am working in a small french engineering company and we recently bought a (small) IBM server (for calculation purposes - yes we are pipe stress freaks...). The two Linux options which they offered us were Red Hat OR Debian. Finally Red Hat was chosen because some of the programs we want to use are running on the same version of Red Hat at the developpers place (an american university), so my bosses didn't want to run into random trouble. I was a little sad, being a Debian fan myself.
I have to add that it was an IBM reseller (but who does the support and everything) and not directly IBM, but Debian was - as far as I understood - their first choice.
This is so true. A system can require the strangest things of people without them thinking that there is something wrong. I have a portable mac now and never switch it off... it is so much simpler just to close it and let it sleep. And one day something didn't work any more. I tried a lot of things until I finally thought: A reboot could help. I had already lost the sense for the first rule of PC's: Reboot On Problem. But still: After booting the thing worked, so there is still a way to go for MacOSX.
Funny, the communist was the thing I was really sure of... but, blame it on my memory, secret inclinations or on a bad journalist on TV, the shame is that I did not know the quote of Churchill. But I am a little wiser now, thanks to you all.
This reminds me of something I heard long ago: "Someone who ist not a communist when is young has no heart, someone who is not conservative when old, has no brains." I hope I don't misquote. I am still young, not yet conservative and - if I remember rightly - this has been said by a communist. An old one?
You can use the native Cocoa interface for more languages than Java, ObjC and now Mono. Good for those who like Ruby for example: http://www.fobj.com/rubycocoa/doc/.
Mod parent up! Ruby is one of the most easily readable languages around. And is by the way (sorry for being slightly OT) nicely integrated into developing environments like XCode for Mac OS X, even for access to Cocoa through RubyCocoa. Just have a look at http://www.fobj.com/rubycocoa/doc/
This is the whole point: Encryption works fine when the receiver and the attacker are on different sides. As soon as the receiver is the potential attacker, you will run into problems. The DRM guys will have a hard time to cure this problem. But only as long as we don't give away root access to our own machines, like already projected by some large and well known companies.
Slashdot Mirror
But you can include TrueType and other fonts.
Given that this is a clean rewrite, some other problems might have been solved on the way.
Good comment and very true.
... I found (without being able to link to it now) that the UK law is even better for the consumer, the warranty is actually 5 years (6 years in Scotland if I remember correctly). The only problem with this long lasting warranties is the fact that after a certain period the consumer has the burden of proof that the problem existed at delivery which he has not in the normal case. That reduces effectively the number of cases where you would want to go through the process of getting this warranty enforced.
I read through a lot of documentation on this at the time I wanted the new router from BT
In short: The UK does comply with enough of the directive to protect the consumer quite thoroughly.
This is known to few people and resellers who might refuse to acknowledge it
The Directive applies to
The directive calls for a guarantee of at least 2 years for new goods (or longer if the Member State wishes) where the seller will undertake without extra charge to reimburse the price paid or to replace and/or repair consumer goods if they do not meet the specifications set out in the guarantee statement or relevant advertising.
The goods must
If a defect appears during the first six months following purchase the consumer will not have to prove the product was defective at the moment of delivery. The onus will be on the seller to prove the product was without defect. A consumer will have up to two months following the discovery of the fault to inform the seller. If a defect becomes apparent within the two, or one year, period depending on the type of goods, then the consumer has the right to choose a remedy using the following hierarchy. They can
- Demand repair or replacement within a reasonable time and without any significant inconvenience. (Free of charge repair refers to the necessary costs to bring the goods "back to conformity")
- If this is impossible, unproportionate or cannot be done within a reasonable time or without significant inconvenience then the consumer can demand a price reduction or can rescind the contract (though not if the defect is minor)
All these rights are free of charge to the customer.See also http://www.wak-tt.com/tt/2yearwarranty1.htm for a summary of the directive (the above is quoted from there).
My personal experience (with BT in this case) is that the various persons I had to talk to all referenced the companys warranty period of 1y to refuse me. I was finally forwarded to a last person who declared my router to be still under 1y guarantee (which it clearly wasn't - I was several months over, but still below 2y). My guess is that companies would rather not admit that they are really subject to this legislation.
You might need some patience - but the law is on your side. This is at least one good thing that the EU has done for us.
And since Microsoft started the show now - why not start with Microsoft patents?
As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found on craphound.com):
This is why DRM is bound to fail ... they always will have to provide the key. The algorithms for encryption themselves should be rather safe.
Yes, many other companies will sink their money in DRM systems, and many of these platforms are still bound to fail. Unfortunately the legal provisions will make many people bleed until a reasonable way of dealing with digital technology will have been found. As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here: http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt):
True freedom is when you don't have to be afraid to be impopular. The fear of having less privacy is an implicit fear that we do not have the freedom of being impopular. I am concerned about losing my freedom. I am living in Paris, France.
On the other side, just by picking another example than Word, I must agree with you: The market wants cheap, buggy software with the last pretty zooooming feature more than all the rest. See the popularity of LaTeX.
1) Make wikipedia entries searcheable by proximity to global coordinates. The data is probably very quickly entered by the community and the search function does not sound difficult to me.
2) Owners of private wireless access points make them open for everyone ... but all unknown or unidentified users/MAC addresses will _only_ be able to access wikipedia. Nothing else, everything is redirected. This is naturally the more difficult point.
Has anybody experience with configurations like this? I am interested ...
Cory Doctorow explained it very nicely (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here):
When will they ever understand?The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. It is never helpful to punish those who help to find the flaws without causing damage.
This is the same for the circumvention laws. It is now illegal to prove if certain systems are flawed or not.
I have a probably very classic story: A colleague of mine ignored the bios message of the kind "Disk error - press any key to continue", which nevertheless made the machine boot into Win2K for some while ... until it stopped. I could convince our sysadmin not to try to rescue the installation by installing XP over it. He was really convinced this would give him the chance of accessing the NTFS-partition. Running knoppix and clicking on "Start samba server" made it incredibly easy to save the data. And naturally the disk was never useable again after a trial to install XP over it. Nothing could ever access it again.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Knoppix booted fine, found the drive, read the NTFS without problems (read only, but I think you can mount it with write access) and within the first two clicks we started samba and sshd so that we could save the data. I was quite glad about that ...
On the other hand ... we didn't fix the partition afterwards, we had to throw the disk away.
Cheers, F.
I have to add that it was an IBM reseller (but who does the support and everything) and not directly IBM, but Debian was - as far as I understood - their first choice.
This is so true. A system can require the strangest things of people without them thinking that there is something wrong. I have a portable mac now and never switch it off ... it is so much simpler just to close it and let it sleep. And one day something didn't work any more. I tried a lot of things until I finally thought: A reboot could help. I had already lost the sense for the first rule of PC's: Reboot On Problem. But still: After booting the thing worked, so there is still a way to go for MacOSX.
Funny, the communist was the thing I was really sure of ... but, blame it on my memory, secret inclinations or on a bad journalist on TV, the shame is that I did not know the quote of Churchill. But I am a little wiser now, thanks to you all.
This reminds me of something I heard long ago: "Someone who ist not a communist when is young has no heart, someone who is not conservative when old, has no brains." I hope I don't misquote. I am still young, not yet conservative and - if I remember rightly - this has been said by a communist. An old one?
... that makes us think everything is determined by genes!
You can use the native Cocoa interface for more languages than Java, ObjC and now Mono. Good for those who like Ruby for example: http://www.fobj.com/rubycocoa/doc/.
Anybody out there desperately trying to get mod-points?
Mod parent up! Ruby is one of the most easily readable languages around. And is by the way (sorry for being slightly OT) nicely integrated into developing environments like XCode for Mac OS X, even for access to Cocoa through RubyCocoa. Just have a look at http://www.fobj.com/rubycocoa/doc/
This is the whole point: Encryption works fine when the receiver and the attacker are on different sides. As soon as the receiver is the potential attacker, you will run into problems. The DRM guys will have a hard time to cure this problem. But only as long as we don't give away root access to our own machines, like already projected by some large and well known companies.