Really! Good, I did not know Gentoo had done this. I'm generally unhappy with such behavior, because it can make package tracking and integration quite nightmarish, but this is a single instance where it could be very useful to work around NVidia's stupidity. I hope that Gentoo has entirely ignored NVidia's truly awful installer and uses their own?
Much of that is a licensing issue. There is no available Linux commercial license for MP3 players, for example, that I've been able to find, and there are _especially_ no available licensed DVD players. There are certainly useful download sites such as the Penguin Liberation Front for getting the tools, but the creators of those technologies refuse to license them for Linux, so major distributions _cannot_ include them in their basic distribution or they face very dangerous lawsuits.
Look up the history of the libdvdcss library for more details of this kind of licensing craziness that directly interferes with the consumer success of Linux.
The NVidia blobs remain a big problem. It's not the kernel blob: it's their replacement by setting aside of the OpenGL libraries, used to access the NVidia features. This part of the NVidia process destabilizes every OS that it touches because any updates to those libraries overwrite the NVidia libraries and seriously break your graphical setup.
It's theoretically possible to rewrite the Xorg and Mesa packages to cooperate with this by bundling the Nvidia package and its libraries to a package matching the Mesa components and install one or the other, but no one has yet done so. So NVidia remains a dangerously unstable set of tools to install in any sytem that gets any updates otherwise.
Well, I'm not a 'developer' per se. I primarily clean up messes left by developers who've not paid attention to necessary resources or software requirements. But as a technically adept person who sometimes writes their own tools or tries to integrate tools from others, I see a lot of small "innocations" in both core projects and ancillary toolkits hamstrung by the bureaucracy and infrastructure of large companies. It can be extremely nasty to get an Active Directory management team, for example, to cooperate in setting up consistent account information or hardware management for Radius, LDAP, NIS, DNS, DHCP, or Kerberos services that are not part of their existing desktop deployment model. So systems administrators or developers can 'innovate' all they want, but they're often blocked from testing and integrating their changes by the infrastructure team.
Even simple resources such as source control or backup tools to provide developer access to snapshots of their work areas can be a nightmare to implement because there are 'data retention policies' which have to do with regulations but nothing to do with actual usage. So there's a tremendous amount of 'innovation' that gets wasted dealing with the very slow responses of large companies to local requirements.
They don't provide immunity, but the contracts provide tremendous protection. For example, if I report criminal behavior in my workplace, I'm liable for serious lawsuit for revealing NDA material. Unless the criminal behavior is actually proven, and the company gets convicted, and unless I have very good legal representation, I'm at serious danger of industry wide blackballing, losing all my assets trying to protect myself from lawsuit even if I was correct about the felony, and anyone else who testifies with me is in the same danger.
And the likelihood of the incompetent FBI personnel, or overwhelmed SEC personnel, in convicting a company of the kind of criminal behavior I might be able to report is basically zero. They don't have the time or resources to protect me in such circumstances.
Fortunately, there used to be www.fuckedcompany.com, and now there is www.wikileaks.org, to leak corporate malfeasance. But cover your tracks carefully if you hsve to make a leak: it's always a bit dangerous.
From having worked on both small and large environments: you have been drinking too many middle management martinis. Large companies create layers of bureaucracy and 'resource management' that may be necessary to keep a large group organized, but directly interfere with new development. The ease of trying out a new idea when you can find the person who controls the server, or wrote the original tool, down the hall and don't have to percolate your idea up and back down through 4 layers of manager, each of whom requires a full justificationi for spending the manpower, none of whom are technically adept enough to understand what you're talking about, is an amazing pain.
Worse, those layers of management also cost money and time to support, so the benefit of small, incremental improvements has to be weighed against the cost of the management to do them, and this alone makes many small improvements no longer worth pursuing. This also gets worse when the installed client base for a product is larger: Q/A to test a change against the full range of configurations becomes hideously expensive, so small changes become far more dangerous to even try.
It's true that for some large scale technologies, you need large scale resources to pursue them. Hybrid cars are such a case, because building big factories to get economies of scale takes a lot of money. But frankly, there is very little innovative about electic cars.
I agree with much of what you said, but the export restriction is not on 'firearms'. It's on 'munitions', or materials of war. The Wikipedia article on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography is pretty clear on the history, but not clear on the primary purpose of such regulation, which is to discourage robust encryption on *all* communications, both domestic and foreign. This is designed to preserve government access to private data: the legality or proper use of such access is irrelevant to the desire to preserve such access. And historically, it hasn't mattered whether such access is legal: access has been considered vital.
Unfortunately, it also interrupts SSH sessions. Those are basically IP based: the forward and revrese DNS lookups are done at connect time, and I've also tried it with other DNS services. It's definitely a network issue, not merely a DNS issue.
The interference with SSH indicaes that it's not just an RST of popular Bitorrent ports: I can easily believe that these idiots drop RST's into *all* services, unannounced, to do traffic shaping.
I see. Your planners successfully assign 1 1/2 programmers to complete 1 1/2 programs in 1 1/2 months, and are never surprised when the hardware arrives a week late or a programmer goes on maternity leave? Infinite amounts of planning can spend thousands of hours of overpaid manager time to replace 2 programmers actually doing the work.
Thank you for the thought. But you just did what the call center in Delhi does: suggest some possible issue that pretty clearly has _nothing_ to do with my problem because of the other facts I've already given, namely that it also happens to my neighbors. I can also verify that it occurs SSH, and rsync, and it disables DNS when it occurs. I can actually watch Bittorrent being happy, watch the connections start timing out, fail completely, then eventually re-establish new connetions. And via SSH, the screen freezes for as much as a minute and only then allows interaction again. And it doesn't matter if I switch router, and at least two of my neighbors have similar problems, but it doesn't bother them as much because they don't do interactive things so much.
So please don't suggest more ways for me to waste my time on my end. That's what the call centers in India have done already for hours of my time on the phone, passing the buck around and around. And they keep starting their scripts over at the beginning, _every time_ I call, so that they can pretend that when this intermmittent issue is not active their useless little 'did you plug in your computer? did you restart your router? did you replace your filter? I can't see your problem from my end!' script fixed the problem and they can close the call.
I'm switching providers, and put the ISP on the 'do not use this company, and warn employees using the VPN that we cannot support connections with them' list at work.
Well, considering that a lot of the Steam games are pretty cheap, I'd be willing to pay a premium for downloading it online while overseas rather than having to find media there. This came up when I was looking for Team Fortress 2.
As a Steam user, I have to say "not quite". My slightly older system without a recent video card has no chance of playing Left 4 Dead because it lacks some of the rendering features, and my laptop has no chance of playing Darwinia because it lacks enough RAM. But in general, yes, their licensing works very well.
Unfortunately for me, my ISP seems to have installed some sort of brain-dead filtering that interrupts continuous connections after about 2 minute and makes them hang, probably as a Bittorrent blocking feature. They won't admit it, the call center in Delhi is clearly tired of the sound of my voice explaining that I've *ALREADY* done all their scripts call for and need to talk to an engineer who can spell 'TCP', and that no, I haven't installed any radiation generating equipment near my hub, my neighbors have the same problem, etc. So playing Team Fortress 2 is impossible for me.
Yeah. I was sad to find out that Andromeda, which was cheesy fun at first, was originally planned to be a *Federation* ship lost for 500 years. I'd have sympathized with our hero more, like being the only Trek fan in a company, trying to teach the mundanes about the dreams many of us learned from that show, trying to live up to those ideals and having to make compromises along the way.
I would love to give Majel Roddenberry in my car. The woman was wonderfully hot, even when I saw her as a child, in a mature and seasoned sort of way. Watching her appearances in every Star Trek, and in Babylon Five, was a treat.
You got it in one. 'National Security' claims from big governments that can cut off Facebook at the routers have a lot more power than a straightforward civil suit. I've actually attempted to get law enforcement involved in tracking criminal activity from spammers. They couldn't be bothered to get the necessary subpoenas unless the case was quite large: I imagine that the threshold for a lawyer on a budget to get such subpoenas is also pretty high.
I'm still sadly amused at Microsoft's solution to this, the 'SenderID'. Here, we'll sell lots of authentication keys that only work with our software, that you can only buy from us, and that we'll happily sell to spammers to get past your mail filters.
That's wire fraud, that's the Secret Service's responsibility as the enforcement arm of the Department of the Treasure. Of course, they're incompetent: there's not a single sign that they're any more competent now than when they raided Steve Jackson Games and every cracker they were incompetent enough to bother in Operation Sun Devil, and failed to get a single conviction.
Quite seriously, this law was specifically not aimed at spam. It was aimed at certain types of online fraud, and it deliberately took power away from local law enforcement to put it in the hands of a federal power that does _nothing_ about mere spam. It was carefully designed to allow 'opt-out' advertisements, and that first advertisement from any spammer, and it was carefully legislated that way by the Direct Marketing Association to avoid interfering with the advertisements of their funding agancies. It was also carefully designed to overrule more effective, state efforts.
Such laws should instead be modeled on the junk fax law, which has withstood the test of free speech challenges and ease of prosecution.
I'm afraid that a 'Congressional oversight committee' would have been silenced very quickly. Remember, this was post 9/11. 'National security' was a 'get out of oversight free' card, and to some extent still is. It took the press to reveal the extent and nature of the taps, with the aid of the whistleblowers.
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Really! Good, I did not know Gentoo had done this. I'm generally unhappy with such behavior, because it can make package tracking and integration quite nightmarish, but this is a single instance where it could be very useful to work around NVidia's stupidity. I hope that Gentoo has entirely ignored NVidia's truly awful installer and uses their own?
Much of that is a licensing issue. There is no available Linux commercial license for MP3 players, for example, that I've been able to find, and there are _especially_ no available licensed DVD players. There are certainly useful download sites such as the Penguin Liberation Front for getting the tools, but the creators of those technologies refuse to license them for Linux, so major distributions _cannot_ include them in their basic distribution or they face very dangerous lawsuits.
Look up the history of the libdvdcss library for more details of this kind of licensing craziness that directly interferes with the consumer success of Linux.
The NVidia blobs remain a big problem. It's not the kernel blob: it's their replacement by setting aside of the OpenGL libraries, used to access the NVidia features. This part of the NVidia process destabilizes every OS that it touches because any updates to those libraries overwrite the NVidia libraries and seriously break your graphical setup.
It's theoretically possible to rewrite the Xorg and Mesa packages to cooperate with this by bundling the Nvidia package and its libraries to a package matching the Mesa components and install one or the other, but no one has yet done so. So NVidia remains a dangerously unstable set of tools to install in any sytem that gets any updates otherwise.
Well, I'm not a 'developer' per se. I primarily clean up messes left by developers who've not paid attention to necessary resources or software requirements. But as a technically adept person who sometimes writes their own tools or tries to integrate tools from others, I see a lot of small "innocations" in both core projects and ancillary toolkits hamstrung by the bureaucracy and infrastructure of large companies. It can be extremely nasty to get an Active Directory management team, for example, to cooperate in setting up consistent account information or hardware management for Radius, LDAP, NIS, DNS, DHCP, or Kerberos services that are not part of their existing desktop deployment model. So systems administrators or developers can 'innovate' all they want, but they're often blocked from testing and integrating their changes by the infrastructure team.
Even simple resources such as source control or backup tools to provide developer access to snapshots of their work areas can be a nightmare to implement because there are 'data retention policies' which have to do with regulations but nothing to do with actual usage. So there's a tremendous amount of 'innovation' that gets wasted dealing with the very slow responses of large companies to local requirements.
They don't provide immunity, but the contracts provide tremendous protection. For example, if I report criminal behavior in my workplace, I'm liable for serious lawsuit for revealing NDA material. Unless the criminal behavior is actually proven, and the company gets convicted, and unless I have very good legal representation, I'm at serious danger of industry wide blackballing, losing all my assets trying to protect myself from lawsuit even if I was correct about the felony, and anyone else who testifies with me is in the same danger.
And the likelihood of the incompetent FBI personnel, or overwhelmed SEC personnel, in convicting a company of the kind of criminal behavior I might be able to report is basically zero. They don't have the time or resources to protect me in such circumstances.
Fortunately, there used to be www.fuckedcompany.com, and now there is www.wikileaks.org, to leak corporate malfeasance. But cover your tracks carefully if you hsve to make a leak: it's always a bit dangerous.
From having worked on both small and large environments: you have been drinking too many middle management martinis. Large companies create layers of bureaucracy and 'resource management' that may be necessary to keep a large group organized, but directly interfere with new development. The ease of trying out a new idea when you can find the person who controls the server, or wrote the original tool, down the hall and don't have to percolate your idea up and back down through 4 layers of manager, each of whom requires a full justificationi for spending the manpower, none of whom are technically adept enough to understand what you're talking about, is an amazing pain.
Worse, those layers of management also cost money and time to support, so the benefit of small, incremental improvements has to be weighed against the cost of the management to do them, and this alone makes many small improvements no longer worth pursuing. This also gets worse when the installed client base for a product is larger: Q/A to test a change against the full range of configurations becomes hideously expensive, so small changes become far more dangerous to even try.
It's true that for some large scale technologies, you need large scale resources to pursue them. Hybrid cars are such a case, because building big factories to get economies of scale takes a lot of money. But frankly, there is very little innovative about electic cars.
I agree with much of what you said, but the export restriction is not on 'firearms'. It's on 'munitions', or materials of war. The Wikipedia article on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography is pretty clear on the history, but not clear on the primary purpose of such regulation, which is to discourage robust encryption on *all* communications, both domestic and foreign. This is designed to preserve government access to private data: the legality or proper use of such access is irrelevant to the desire to preserve such access. And historically, it hasn't mattered whether such access is legal: access has been considered vital.
As soon as you get Theo de Raadt off my leg.
_NOT_ naked. No, you've forced me to overwrite my hypothalamus with /dev/zero to prevent that idea from being remembered.
However, Richard actually dances quite well: he's apparently a very active folk dancer.
Unfortunately, it also interrupts SSH sessions. Those are basically IP based: the forward and revrese DNS lookups are done at connect time, and I've also tried it with other DNS services. It's definitely a network issue, not merely a DNS issue.
The interference with SSH indicaes that it's not just an RST of popular Bitorrent ports: I can easily believe that these idiots drop RST's into *all* services, unannounced, to do traffic shaping.
I see. Your planners successfully assign 1 1/2 programmers to complete 1 1/2 programs in 1 1/2 months, and are never surprised when the hardware arrives a week late or a programmer goes on maternity leave? Infinite amounts of planning can spend thousands of hours of overpaid manager time to replace 2 programmers actually doing the work.
Thank you for the thought. But you just did what the call center in Delhi does: suggest some possible issue that pretty clearly has _nothing_ to do with my problem because of the other facts I've already given, namely that it also happens to my neighbors. I can also verify that it occurs SSH, and rsync, and it disables DNS when it occurs. I can actually watch Bittorrent being happy, watch the connections start timing out, fail completely, then eventually re-establish new connetions. And via SSH, the screen freezes for as much as a minute and only then allows interaction again. And it doesn't matter if I switch router, and at least two of my neighbors have similar problems, but it doesn't bother them as much because they don't do interactive things so much.
So please don't suggest more ways for me to waste my time on my end. That's what the call centers in India have done already for hours of my time on the phone, passing the buck around and around. And they keep starting their scripts over at the beginning, _every time_ I call, so that they can pretend that when this intermmittent issue is not active their useless little 'did you plug in your computer? did you restart your router? did you replace your filter? I can't see your problem from my end!' script fixed the problem and they can close the call.
I'm switching providers, and put the ISP on the 'do not use this company, and warn employees using the VPN that we cannot support connections with them' list at work.
Well, considering that a lot of the Steam games are pretty cheap, I'd be willing to pay a premium for downloading it online while overseas rather than having to find media there. This came up when I was looking for Team Fortress 2.
That's actually a good feature request to Steam: "disconnect my other logins".
As a Steam user, I have to say "not quite". My slightly older system without a recent video card has no chance of playing Left 4 Dead because it lacks some of the rendering features, and my laptop has no chance of playing Darwinia because it lacks enough RAM. But in general, yes, their licensing works very well.
Unfortunately for me, my ISP seems to have installed some sort of brain-dead filtering that interrupts continuous connections after about 2 minute and makes them hang, probably as a Bittorrent blocking feature. They won't admit it, the call center in Delhi is clearly tired of the sound of my voice explaining that I've *ALREADY* done all their scripts call for and need to talk to an engineer who can spell 'TCP', and that no, I haven't installed any radiation generating equipment near my hub, my neighbors have the same problem, etc. So playing Team Fortress 2 is impossible for me.
Yeah. I was sad to find out that Andromeda, which was cheesy fun at first, was originally planned to be a *Federation* ship lost for 500 years. I'd have sympathized with our hero more, like being the only Trek fan in a company, trying to teach the mundanes about the dreams many of us learned from that show, trying to live up to those ideals and having to make compromises along the way.
I would love to give Majel Roddenberry in my car. The woman was wonderfully hot, even when I saw her as a child, in a mature and seasoned sort of way. Watching her appearances in every Star Trek, and in Babylon Five, was a treat.
She was wasted on Spock.....
You got it in one. 'National Security' claims from big governments that can cut off Facebook at the routers have a lot more power than a straightforward civil suit. I've actually attempted to get law enforcement involved in tracking criminal activity from spammers. They couldn't be bothered to get the necessary subpoenas unless the case was quite large: I imagine that the threshold for a lawyer on a budget to get such subpoenas is also pretty high.
Your upstream may be blocking a lot of it. Do you have direct incoming SMTP, and do you record things that are blocked by your blacklists?
Or run a botnet.
I'm still sadly amused at Microsoft's solution to this, the 'SenderID'. Here, we'll sell lots of authentication keys that only work with our software, that you can only buy from us, and that we'll happily sell to spammers to get past your mail filters.
This just happened with the Mccolo botnet.
That's wire fraud, that's the Secret Service's responsibility as the enforcement arm of the Department of the Treasure. Of course, they're incompetent: there's not a single sign that they're any more competent now than when they raided Steve Jackson Games and every cracker they were incompetent enough to bother in Operation Sun Devil, and failed to get a single conviction.
Quite seriously, this law was specifically not aimed at spam. It was aimed at certain types of online fraud, and it deliberately took power away from local law enforcement to put it in the hands of a federal power that does _nothing_ about mere spam. It was carefully designed to allow 'opt-out' advertisements, and that first advertisement from any spammer, and it was carefully legislated that way by the Direct Marketing Association to avoid interfering with the advertisements of their funding agancies. It was also carefully designed to overrule more effective, state efforts.
Such laws should instead be modeled on the junk fax law, which has withstood the test of free speech challenges and ease of prosecution.
No, that's super glue (surgical cyanoacrolate).
I'm afraid that a 'Congressional oversight committee' would have been silenced very quickly. Remember, this was post 9/11. 'National security' was a 'get out of oversight free' card, and to some extent still is. It took the press to reveal the extent and nature of the taps, with the aid of the whistleblowers.