Many emails like that do not actually contain an ad or commercial message: they're email address probes, being sent by the million to gather email addresses, and often with a webbug (a one-pixel GIF in a URL) to track exactly which email address's HTML-reading client received the message.
Those valid email addresses are themselves highly saleable to spam companies, whether the company is even vaguely legitimate or not.
If Linux meant "download and install everything on the spot", I'd agree. But the only distributions that really insist on that are Gentoo and its variants: most distributions have pretty stable releases, easily installed from CD.
Oh, RedHat 3 was horrible for Firewire, I agree. Go directly to RedHat 4, which had much better support, or to CentOS 4.x, which is binary compatible and more likely to have newer drivers and features.
Have you paid your MySQL license fees? Seriously, this is not a small legal problem for RedHat, and is a compelling reason to move to PostgreSQL. MySQL "basic" licenses, suitable for commercial uses such as you seem to describe here, are $600 each. If you're using the software commercially without paying the additional licensing fees, you may be in violation of their limited software agreement as included in basic RedHat installations.
It's a problem for RedHat: they're big enough to be a lawsuit target if they accidentally integrate MySQL into commercial installations inappropriately or unn">shsarily.
Agreed. I've seen the deep concern on the RedHat salesperson's face when a several thousand system company speaks openly at its licensing discussion with RedHat about using CentOS instead, simply because managing the up2date licensing was considered too painful, and the client tried to get RedHat to drop their price by the time and resources wasted maintaining an internal yum repository by pulling and rebuilding it from the RedHat up2date download system. That actually led to a talk with the lawyers about the legality of that, which I never did hear the end result of, but the company continued with commercial RedHat support.
Oh, having a few hundred licenses of RedHat commercial support is in fact very helpful when you have issues that really require RedHat's expertise. Integrating kernel drivers for new hardware, or gettng a bugfix or feature support into the next official update from RedHat gets one heck of a lot more attention and speed from RedHat if you call them with your support contract number, and that's what you're paying them for. It's often much cheaper than hiring your own kernel geeks, especially in a setup with only a few core Linux servers, and RedHat has been pretty responsive there, too: it's a big reason they publish kernel and hardware driver updates.
But Oracle stepping away from RedHat for support means they may be able to support CentOS installations without legal repercussions. A lot of folks prefer CentOS for the ease of package management (because up2date favors user authentication over ease of use, and yum works well for mixed CentOS and local repositories), and because building CentOS installers and keeping your setups away from RedHat allows including some tools that RedHat is unlikely or unwilling to provide directly for understandable legal reasons. (DVD decoders and NVidia drivers, anyone?)
Excuse me, but I've supported Linux in actually those setups. It's PPP and VPN software is easily configured, with every major Linux distribution, and the difficulties with dealing with those awful Winmodems have been hammered out so that Linux does dialup and VPN for almost every provider in the world, with only a bit of handholding to get people the settings they need.
Few companies provide Linux installers to set up their custom dialup software package, but those are usually quite unnecessary.
What slows down the migration is what doesn't work: familiar video tools, CD players for DRM managed discs, the browsers cannot work on sites that *insist* on Internet Explorer for their web service, MS Word and Adobe Photoshop aren't available for it, there's very little good CAD and automatic backinng software for SuSE or the other commercial Linuxes, and most popular computer games simply won't run on it, or won't run without massive support from somebody really clever at integrating tools.
There are often good replacements for many of those in freeware, but SuSE doesn't even dare include a DVD capable video player or MP3 equipped version of Mplayer for legal licensing reasons. So it's no Vista killer: it may be a good desktop replacement for corporate environements where you really don't want people playing minesweeper all day.
We seem to be speaking orthogonally. I agree that pirates are taking some extra steps to protect themselves: but it's so cheap and easy to start such piracy, and so easy to protect oneself from the demonstrably foolish and ineffective efforts of RIAA and MPAA to frighten people from file-sharing, that such piracy is certainly going to continue with very considerably success, despite additional technical hurdles raised.
It only takes a single copy or two, consistently introduced to file-sharing or DVD piracy, to keep the business seeded. If the consumer digital recordings become more difficult to copy directly, the more 3l33t of the crackers will simply move their source of materials upstream, to pirating the files from the often poorly secured networks of movie and CD producers. That raises the initial cost to the pirate, in time and perhaps money and risk of prosecution, but there's just too darned many of them and many of them are too happy to steal their resources.
And it doesn't matter if, in the long run, individual pirates find it too expensive or time-wasting or dangerous to continue. There continues to be a new group of hopeful crackers to seed the next round of piracy. Such behavior can only be managed somewhat, not prevented, by current efforts. Efforts like Trusted Computing are trying to be more effective, by getting the access to the DVD drive and software tools to play it signature-enforced at a very deep level that would be too expensive for most people to subvert, but I suggest that this will not work well until and unless digital media players are rendered incapable of playing anything *without* a mothership authorized signature. And folks in the recording industry are unlikely to admit this as a goal for some time, or ever to achieve it, even with efforts like Trusted Computing underway.
Who cares how long they last? Seriously, there are enough eager thieves and hopeful scammers to keep the flow of downloadable DVD images alive for years. And there are plenty of small mom&pop companies in places like China, where copyright enforcement is a tragic joke, that will keep the market well supplied with pirated DVD's for years.
It only takes a few crackers begging, borrowing, or stealing pre-release review DVD's to keep the crackers ready with their works even before the commercial DVD's are released.
That's part of Trusted Computing's jub: it's real commercial purpose seems to be aimed not at protecting users from attack, but at controlling their authorized use of software tools. This is reasonable for software updates, but it seems to be particularly focused on DVD and CD software: disabling the "printscreen" should be quite easy in such an encyption and software encryption burdened configuration, especially to prevent the use of any DVD players not authorized by the DVD vendor.
Yes, and Lois Lane still smells like a hairless ape to him. Check out the old Larry Niven essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" for some fun ideas about why Clark as a teenager had to keep fixing the roof after he did what all teenagers do in their bedroom.
You can get them quite a lot stronger before reaching the crushing strength of bone, which is essentially a slightly porous form of rock.
The cardiovascular damage alone from the necessarily higher blood pressure to get blood to the brain of someone standing up at 2 g's is begging to kill them pretty quickly..
Good point. But most BIOS's themselves frankly need to be replaced. Take a good look at www.linuxbios.org for what you can accomplish when you discard the amazingly bad proprietary and bugpatch layered on broken workaround htat most BIOS's actually consist of: if you ever get into the guts of current commercial BIOS's, they're really quite horrible, and the hardware really does benefit in boot time, robustness, and flexibility from switched to an open source code base.
Name inheritance is related to other inheritance, especially land and inherited titles (which have usually meant land, when you look closely at them). For Germans, the "van" prefix for the last name indicated the clan, and for Spaniards the "de la" prefix referred to the clan or land owned by the family.
When trades ran in families, "Farmer" or "Carpenter" had a lot more meaning as a name: the modern mobility of home, trade, social class, religion, and other aspects of an adult's life has reduced this association a lot, and led to exactly the kind of creative oddity you suggest, where the name is associated with a person or their family, rather than their trade or assets.
I see nothing wrong with it, but it can get awfully confusing for children when they try to trace their family roots.
Re:Modularizable filesystem
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
I have seen ReiserFS failures, in Terabyte scale RAID arrays on several operating systems, where ext3 filesystems remained reliable and usable long-term. The early 2.5 kernel ext3 versions were not that stable: after 2.6 was released, it's been a serious workhorse, competing well with ReiserFS for speed and reliability.
When you start seeing randomly named files that cannot be deleted in a ReiserFS system, you may as well scrub the whole partition and revert to your previous backup: it can't be recovered, can't be fixed, and can't even be reliably backed up anymore, unless ReiserFS has done some serious evolution in the last 18 months.
Re:Modularizable filesystem
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Like the Abrams tank going 60 miles an hour, ReiserFS is fine for doing all sorts of amazing things, once. Actually being trying to recover any data from ReiserFS if any hardware errors creep in, such as a failing drive in a RAID array, is like the drive train seizing up on the Abrams: it's a big development effort to get spectacular features which don't actually work well in the field.
Ext2 and its descendants have been less ambitious and thus considerably more robust.
That feature is like most car's proximity alarms. It's almost invariably a false alarm, and irritates the people who get "ALERTED" about legitimate operations, and thus often if not usually winds up left off except in a few instances where it helps create a false sense of security.
Hitting F8 is fine, when the USB keyboard works at boot time and the monitor starts up fast enough and it doesn't prevent the system from correctly rebooting after a power failure or require expensive KVM setups for a rack full of servers, etc., etc., etc. It's like that "Hit F1 if no keyboard was detected", it's almost always a waste of someone's time.
One good thing: it helps keep those MMORPG kiddies who play 12 hours a day from having such a huge advantage over gamers who only play a few hours a day and never get a chance to level up the same way. And it reduces the load on the gaming companies from those 12 hour a day players, who never free up resources for others to play on the same servers.
What you're asking for is a convenient loophole. Unfortunately, it's very easy for a discarded GPL project to be used in another GPL product. That would prevent new contributorss from gaining a full set of source code: the modifier would only have to provide their changes, even if the original is over 3 years old and is no longer distributed or is even deprecated and the earlier GPL copyright holder has gone out of business.
Such loopholes are nasty indeed to cope with. Let's face it: the burden of keeping a full copy of a distributed source code tree is very modest, and worth doing to avoid something actively in use having its source code lost even though it's still in use.
It's tough to convince anyone of a political point while you call them names. It can help rabble rouse people who already agree with you, but for someone not yet convinced, it usually convinces them that you're a fool with nothing to add.
Look at the law again, or rather actually for the first time. As near as I can tell, it says that the police cannot compel the library to surrender the information without a subpoena. That's very different from it being illegal to ask for it. Just as an attorney in court can ask a husband to testify against their house, and cannot force them to do so, it's still legal to ask the questions (barring some other issue).
Also, let's be clear: there is political capital in any request for approval of anything, such as a warrant. It is part of the judge's job to review and approve or refuse such requests: but wasting the judge's time if the recipient of the warrant would have given up the information without the warrant is a waste of the judge's time, and the judge will react to that one way or another, usually to the detriment of the officer seeking the next subpoenas.
You seem to have neglected the closed source, and increasingly discarded use of resource forks in MacOS as an old predecessor to this type of additional data about a file, stored orthogonally to the file itself.
Managing that kind of data gets extremely nasty over a network: because a file and its resource data need to be handled in a very atomic fashion, it makes network filesystem handling far more difficult. Anyone who'd worked extensively with Appletalk could have told Microsoft this: it looks like they just wasted several years of effort and a lot of development work to verify that it's a very fragile approach.
Calm down anyway: your rancor hurts your point. It's usually not illegal for the police to *ask* for the information they're not allowed to seize without a subpoena. It's also quite possible that a cop might not be aware of the subtleties fo the law as they apply to libraries. So there's little reason the think the police broke the law, or if it was illegal that they did so knowing it was illegal: the article simply doesn't cover that.
Getting a subpoena costs time, money, and political capital. Why waste those resources if they need only ask? Why do you think, when the police come knocking at your door, they ask to come inside instead of discussing things outside? Besides it being more comfortable, it's so they can do a surreptitious look around. And yes, it's perfectly legal, even if they can't force their way in without a warrant.
Calm down here. It's not unreasonable for a cop in a hurry to ask if he or she can get the evidence *without* spending the time calling the judge, spending the political capital and man-hours to get a warrant or subpoena, etc. Especially if the cop is in a hurry and doesn't want to tip off a suspect who might be aware of the subpoena, it's reasonable to first ask and try to get the data without the court order. If a cop asks nicely, or even uses vague threats, and the people feel frightened or concerned about whatever the police are investigating, it's not uncommon for them to allow a search or give up information that don't have to. And it's not illegal for the cop to ask for it: it might be illegal for the library to *give* that information, which is why Ms. Reutty called an appropriate attorney.
I do wonder why she called a state library association attorney, rather than the borough attorney. She's in trouble for that as well, and I suspect it's because the borough attorney has the manhood of a gelded gerbil and would have said "hand over the records", and she'd have had no procedural recourse but to do so. Does anyone know anything about the borough attorney?
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Many emails like that do not actually contain an ad or commercial message: they're email address probes, being sent by the million to gather email addresses, and often with a webbug (a one-pixel GIF in a URL) to track exactly which email address's HTML-reading client received the message.
Those valid email addresses are themselves highly saleable to spam companies, whether the company is even vaguely legitimate or not.
If Linux meant "download and install everything on the spot", I'd agree. But the only distributions that really insist on that are Gentoo and its variants: most distributions have pretty stable releases, easily installed from CD.
Oh, RedHat 3 was horrible for Firewire, I agree. Go directly to RedHat 4, which had much better support, or to CentOS 4.x, which is binary compatible and more likely to have newer drivers and features.
Have you paid your MySQL license fees? Seriously, this is not a small legal problem for RedHat, and is a compelling reason to move to PostgreSQL. MySQL "basic" licenses, suitable for commercial uses such as you seem to describe here, are $600 each. If you're using the software commercially without paying the additional licensing fees, you may be in violation of their limited software agreement as included in basic RedHat installations.
It's a problem for RedHat: they're big enough to be a lawsuit target if they accidentally integrate MySQL into commercial installations inappropriately or unn">shsarily.
Agreed. I've seen the deep concern on the RedHat salesperson's face when a several thousand system company speaks openly at its licensing discussion with RedHat about using CentOS instead, simply because managing the up2date licensing was considered too painful, and the client tried to get RedHat to drop their price by the time and resources wasted maintaining an internal yum repository by pulling and rebuilding it from the RedHat up2date download system. That actually led to a talk with the lawyers about the legality of that, which I never did hear the end result of, but the company continued with commercial RedHat support.
Oh, having a few hundred licenses of RedHat commercial support is in fact very helpful when you have issues that really require RedHat's expertise. Integrating kernel drivers for new hardware, or gettng a bugfix or feature support into the next official update from RedHat gets one heck of a lot more attention and speed from RedHat if you call them with your support contract number, and that's what you're paying them for. It's often much cheaper than hiring your own kernel geeks, especially in a setup with only a few core Linux servers, and RedHat has been pretty responsive there, too: it's a big reason they publish kernel and hardware driver updates.
But Oracle stepping away from RedHat for support means they may be able to support CentOS installations without legal repercussions. A lot of folks prefer CentOS for the ease of package management (because up2date favors user authentication over ease of use, and yum works well for mixed CentOS and local repositories), and because building CentOS installers and keeping your setups away from RedHat allows including some tools that RedHat is unlikely or unwilling to provide directly for understandable legal reasons. (DVD decoders and NVidia drivers, anyone?)
Excuse me, but I've supported Linux in actually those setups. It's PPP and VPN software is easily configured, with every major Linux distribution, and the difficulties with dealing with those awful Winmodems have been hammered out so that Linux does dialup and VPN for almost every provider in the world, with only a bit of handholding to get people the settings they need.
Few companies provide Linux installers to set up their custom dialup software package, but those are usually quite unnecessary.
What slows down the migration is what doesn't work: familiar video tools, CD players for DRM managed discs, the browsers cannot work on sites that *insist* on Internet Explorer for their web service, MS Word and Adobe Photoshop aren't available for it, there's very little good CAD and automatic backinng software for SuSE or the other commercial Linuxes, and most popular computer games simply won't run on it, or won't run without massive support from somebody really clever at integrating tools. There are often good replacements for many of those in freeware, but SuSE doesn't even dare include a DVD capable video player or MP3 equipped version of Mplayer for legal licensing reasons. So it's no Vista killer: it may be a good desktop replacement for corporate environements where you really don't want people playing minesweeper all day.
We seem to be speaking orthogonally. I agree that pirates are taking some extra steps to protect themselves: but it's so cheap and easy to start such piracy, and so easy to protect oneself from the demonstrably foolish and ineffective efforts of RIAA and MPAA to frighten people from file-sharing, that such piracy is certainly going to continue with very considerably success, despite additional technical hurdles raised.
It only takes a single copy or two, consistently introduced to file-sharing or DVD piracy, to keep the business seeded. If the consumer digital recordings become more difficult to copy directly, the more 3l33t of the crackers will simply move their source of materials upstream, to pirating the files from the often poorly secured networks of movie and CD producers. That raises the initial cost to the pirate, in time and perhaps money and risk of prosecution, but there's just too darned many of them and many of them are too happy to steal their resources.
And it doesn't matter if, in the long run, individual pirates find it too expensive or time-wasting or dangerous to continue. There continues to be a new group of hopeful crackers to seed the next round of piracy. Such behavior can only be managed somewhat, not prevented, by current efforts. Efforts like Trusted Computing are trying to be more effective, by getting the access to the DVD drive and software tools to play it signature-enforced at a very deep level that would be too expensive for most people to subvert, but I suggest that this will not work well until and unless digital media players are rendered incapable of playing anything *without* a mothership authorized signature. And folks in the recording industry are unlikely to admit this as a goal for some time, or ever to achieve it, even with efforts like Trusted Computing underway.
It's specifically called "Trusted Computing".
Who cares how long they last? Seriously, there are enough eager thieves and hopeful scammers to keep the flow of downloadable DVD images alive for years. And there are plenty of small mom&pop companies in places like China, where copyright enforcement is a tragic joke, that will keep the market well supplied with pirated DVD's for years.
It only takes a few crackers begging, borrowing, or stealing pre-release review DVD's to keep the crackers ready with their works even before the commercial DVD's are released.
That's part of Trusted Computing's jub: it's real commercial purpose seems to be aimed not at protecting users from attack, but at controlling their authorized use of software tools. This is reasonable for software updates, but it seems to be particularly focused on DVD and CD software: disabling the "printscreen" should be quite easy in such an encyption and software encryption burdened configuration, especially to prevent the use of any DVD players not authorized by the DVD vendor.
Yes, and Lois Lane still smells like a hairless ape to him. Check out the old Larry Niven essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" for some fun ideas about why Clark as a teenager had to keep fixing the roof after he did what all teenagers do in their bedroom.
You can get them quite a lot stronger before reaching the crushing strength of bone, which is essentially a slightly porous form of rock.
The cardiovascular damage alone from the necessarily higher blood pressure to get blood to the brain of someone standing up at 2 g's is begging to kill them pretty quickly..
Good point. But most BIOS's themselves frankly need to be replaced. Take a good look at www.linuxbios.org for what you can accomplish when you discard the amazingly bad proprietary and bugpatch layered on broken workaround htat most BIOS's actually consist of: if you ever get into the guts of current commercial BIOS's, they're really quite horrible, and the hardware really does benefit in boot time, robustness, and flexibility from switched to an open source code base.
Name inheritance is related to other inheritance, especially land and inherited titles (which have usually meant land, when you look closely at them). For Germans, the "van" prefix for the last name indicated the clan, and for Spaniards the "de la" prefix referred to the clan or land owned by the family.
When trades ran in families, "Farmer" or "Carpenter" had a lot more meaning as a name: the modern mobility of home, trade, social class, religion, and other aspects of an adult's life has reduced this association a lot, and led to exactly the kind of creative oddity you suggest, where the name is associated with a person or their family, rather than their trade or assets.
I see nothing wrong with it, but it can get awfully confusing for children when they try to trace their family roots.
I have seen ReiserFS failures, in Terabyte scale RAID arrays on several operating systems, where ext3 filesystems remained reliable and usable long-term. The early 2.5 kernel ext3 versions were not that stable: after 2.6 was released, it's been a serious workhorse, competing well with ReiserFS for speed and reliability.
When you start seeing randomly named files that cannot be deleted in a ReiserFS system, you may as well scrub the whole partition and revert to your previous backup: it can't be recovered, can't be fixed, and can't even be reliably backed up anymore, unless ReiserFS has done some serious evolution in the last 18 months.
Like the Abrams tank going 60 miles an hour, ReiserFS is fine for doing all sorts of amazing things, once. Actually being trying to recover any data from ReiserFS if any hardware errors creep in, such as a failing drive in a RAID array, is like the drive train seizing up on the Abrams: it's a big development effort to get spectacular features which don't actually work well in the field.
Ext2 and its descendants have been less ambitious and thus considerably more robust.
That feature is like most car's proximity alarms. It's almost invariably a false alarm, and irritates the people who get "ALERTED" about legitimate operations, and thus often if not usually winds up left off except in a few instances where it helps create a false sense of security.
Hitting F8 is fine, when the USB keyboard works at boot time and the monitor starts up fast enough and it doesn't prevent the system from correctly rebooting after a power failure or require expensive KVM setups for a rack full of servers, etc., etc., etc. It's like that "Hit F1 if no keyboard was detected", it's almost always a waste of someone's time.
One good thing: it helps keep those MMORPG kiddies who play 12 hours a day from having such a huge advantage over gamers who only play a few hours a day and never get a chance to level up the same way. And it reduces the load on the gaming companies from those 12 hour a day players, who never free up resources for others to play on the same servers.
What you're asking for is a convenient loophole. Unfortunately, it's very easy for a discarded GPL project to be used in another GPL product. That would prevent new contributorss from gaining a full set of source code: the modifier would only have to provide their changes, even if the original is over 3 years old and is no longer distributed or is even deprecated and the earlier GPL copyright holder has gone out of business.
Such loopholes are nasty indeed to cope with. Let's face it: the burden of keeping a full copy of a distributed source code tree is very modest, and worth doing to avoid something actively in use having its source code lost even though it's still in use.
It's tough to convince anyone of a political point while you call them names. It can help rabble rouse people who already agree with you, but for someone not yet convinced, it usually convinces them that you're a fool with nothing to add.
Look at the law again, or rather actually for the first time. As near as I can tell, it says that the police cannot compel the library to surrender the information without a subpoena. That's very different from it being illegal to ask for it. Just as an attorney in court can ask a husband to testify against their house, and cannot force them to do so, it's still legal to ask the questions (barring some other issue).
Also, let's be clear: there is political capital in any request for approval of anything, such as a warrant. It is part of the judge's job to review and approve or refuse such requests: but wasting the judge's time if the recipient of the warrant would have given up the information without the warrant is a waste of the judge's time, and the judge will react to that one way or another, usually to the detriment of the officer seeking the next subpoenas.
You seem to have neglected the closed source, and increasingly discarded use of resource forks in MacOS as an old predecessor to this type of additional data about a file, stored orthogonally to the file itself.
Managing that kind of data gets extremely nasty over a network: because a file and its resource data need to be handled in a very atomic fashion, it makes network filesystem handling far more difficult. Anyone who'd worked extensively with Appletalk could have told Microsoft this: it looks like they just wasted several years of effort and a lot of development work to verify that it's a very fragile approach.
Calm down anyway: your rancor hurts your point. It's usually not illegal for the police to *ask* for the information they're not allowed to seize without a subpoena. It's also quite possible that a cop might not be aware of the subtleties fo the law as they apply to libraries. So there's little reason the think the police broke the law, or if it was illegal that they did so knowing it was illegal: the article simply doesn't cover that.
Getting a subpoena costs time, money, and political capital. Why waste those resources if they need only ask? Why do you think, when the police come knocking at your door, they ask to come inside instead of discussing things outside? Besides it being more comfortable, it's so they can do a surreptitious look around. And yes, it's perfectly legal, even if they can't force their way in without a warrant.
Calm down here. It's not unreasonable for a cop in a hurry to ask if he or she can get the evidence *without* spending the time calling the judge, spending the political capital and man-hours to get a warrant or subpoena, etc. Especially if the cop is in a hurry and doesn't want to tip off a suspect who might be aware of the subpoena, it's reasonable to first ask and try to get the data without the court order. If a cop asks nicely, or even uses vague threats, and the people feel frightened or concerned about whatever the police are investigating, it's not uncommon for them to allow a search or give up information that don't have to. And it's not illegal for the cop to ask for it: it might be illegal for the library to *give* that information, which is why Ms. Reutty called an appropriate attorney. I do wonder why she called a state library association attorney, rather than the borough attorney. She's in trouble for that as well, and I suspect it's because the borough attorney has the manhood of a gelded gerbil and would have said "hand over the records", and she'd have had no procedural recourse but to do so. Does anyone know anything about the borough attorney?