I didn't read the whole thing an IANAL, but the part that stood out to me was
Sections 4 and 5 of the Computer Spyware Protection Act shall not apply to the monitoring of, or interaction with, the Internet or other network connection, service, or computer of an owner or operator, by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service or interactive computer service for network or computer security purposes, diagnostics, technical support, maintenance, repair, network management, authorized updates of computer software or system firmware, authorized remote system management, or detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software, including scanning for and removing computer software prescribed under this act.
From the italicized part, it sort of seems like companies could use "trying to find people who are pirating our software" as an excuse to search on people's computers for information, without the user being able to go after them with this law.
Also,
A. No provider of computer software or of an interactive computer service may be held liable for identifying, naming, removing, disabling, or otherwise affecting a computer program through any action voluntarily undertaken, or service provided, where the provider:
1. Intends to identify accurately, prevent the installation or execution of, remove, or disable another computer program on a computer of a customer of such provider;
2. Reasonably believes the computer program exhibits behavior that violates the Computer Spyware Protection Act; and
3. Notifies the authorized user and obtains clear and conspicuous consent before undertaking the action or providing the service.
It seems from #3 that the user would have to agree.
But IANAL so I really don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe someone who knows more about the law can interpet this.
I have a Google customized news page with one section on news related to Linux. Believe it or not, this/. article actually made it there. Nice to know Google is good at filtering out BS.
I've not really had any problems on CentOS 4 or SuSE 9.2 thru 10. In contrast, I think they've worked much better than the 2.4 based stuff I've used in the past.
hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver
Why is having support for more hardware a bad thing? I can't see how having more devices that are atleast partially supported can hurt.
VM scheme that breaks thing
I assume you're talking about Xen here? If so, what has it broken? I've not heard of people having any huge issues with it, but then I haven't paid real close attention. I use VMware irregardless because I run things other than *nix in a lot of the VMs.
Honestly, I think calling a lack of progress "retaining stability" might be sort of ignoring the point. I think it's certainly possible to progress a lot without hurting stability, and even possibly making the system more stable. If you want to keep using a 2.2 kernel because you feel people are progressing too quickly, nobody's stopping you.
I don't have any major problems with the BSD's(well, atleast with FreeBSD, I've not tried OpenBSD and only used NetBSD briefly on one occasion). The several versions FreeBSD has seemed to work alright for me, but it has never made me think, "wow! This is so much better than Linux! I need to move all my *nix boxes over to this ASAP!" If anything, it might have seemed like a little bit of a step backwards, though I will admit that much of that could be because I'm more familiar with Linux that I am with the BSD's.
Sorry if I sound rude, or arrogant/sarcastic. I didn't really mean to be, I just would have to disagree with you. And would probably agree with the person who posted the original reply, that you can have a strong, successful OSS project without a company behind it.
That sounds waaaay to close to TPM for my liking. I tend to go along with the thought process that the hardware is along for the ride and shouldn't give a fuck about what's running on it.
You can do iSCSI pretty much entirely in software(I've done it with two VMWare VM's before) The only "special" hardware things that you would need to have are GbE NIC's that support jumbo frames as well as a switch that does. And you don't have to have those, though performance might not be quite as good. I don't know if there's iSCSI target/initiator software for NetBSD though.
I'm sure having expensive HBA's can give you a lot better performance(as well as the ability to boot from an iSCSI drive), but just replicating stuff probably doesn't need really, really, top of the line $$$$$ hardware.
If its this huge of an issue for them, then they should atleast be willing to take a trivial amount of time to prevent it from happening to them. It's kind of hard for me to have sympathy for someone who takes absolutely *no* precautions at all.
Which totally defeats the point of banning USB keys/external HDD's/iPod. I mean it is brain-dead easy to copy files on to a Palm or PocketPC, and with an CF or SD card(I believe they are up to the 2 or 4 GB range now-days) you could get a ton of stuff out of work. Hell, you could even hide the card in your shoe or something afterwards if you weren't allowed to take your PDA home or something. And even without their USB ports, there's Bluetooth(for some phones/PDAs and a few computers). There is no way that a company can absolutely prevent someone from taking home files that they have access to, unless they're like the CIA/NSA or something(And haven't there been a few cases of people getting computer files out of those places?). There are too many ways to get the data out, and too many ways to get around security.
I don't read Al Jazeera on a regular basis(and have only seen their only articles, not their TV shows or anything), but atleast their headlines seem rather exagerated/sensationalistic. I've seen their articles on my Google customized homepage before, and each time the headline (before I saw the source) made me think to myself "WTF!?" In each of the instances(I think this has happened 3 or 4 times that I can think of), all of the rest of the news sites reporting that story that were on Google News had a fairly similar headline(and this isn't just CNN/ABC/Fox/etc, there are quite a few news sources from India and the far east on Google News too), and then there was Al Jazeera's. Now, maybe its just they didn't do a good job of translation, and perhaps it was just those few articles that happened to be on Google News. I don't know. But I have a hard time believing that nearly every other news source in the world is biased, and Al Jazeera is not.
I'm not sure if its exactly what you're talking about, but doesn't Cisco have some sort of a wireless mesh thing? I'm not sure if it does routing, or if each of the AP's just amplify/repeat the signal though.
AFAIK NASA generally doesn't copyright any of the images or data from their missions(Hubble might be an exception though, atleast for the first year). More info here.
I agree. I'm really, really tired of hearing about stuff like that - stuff that has basically no chance of ever developing into anything meaningful. And this goes for the technology stuff, not just the science. Even more tired than I am of seeing dupes. Call me back when someone has developed a treatment for AIDs that has actually been tested on humans and works.
An Internet Service Provider has absolutely no business giving a flying fuck what protocols are used by their customers *cough* victims *cough* They are a provider of Internet Service and HTTP is not the only protocol used on the Internet. If they don't like it - tough - but they shouldn't be advertising themselves as ISP's when they don't provider true Internet service.
On the flip side though, I would thinkthat *nix boxes would be bigger targets because (generally speaking), stuff that's running on the average *nix box is probably more mission critical than the the stuff running on the average Windows box. If a Unix box went down it would probably affect more people than a Windows box going down would. A web/database/email server is a hell of a lot more important than grannie's Windows desktop that she uses to get to this new-fangled InterWeb thing.
For $299/year you can get a VMTN(I think VMware Technology Network or something like that) which will give you development licenses for VMWare products. I'm not sure exactly what their idea of development use is, but if you just use it to play-around with some server stuff, you could probably twist whatever you're doing into "development."
That being said, the users of Oracle are paying outrageous prices for the database
Bingo, with as expensive as Oracle is, something like this is inexcusable. WTF is Oracle doing with all of that money? Oracle AS and DB are probably two of the most expensive pieces of software out there(atleast of stuff that is somewhat common). Each copy of Oracle AS or DB Enterprise could pay for practically someone's yearly salary(even if it was just a 1-CPU license). And I'm assuming(though I do not know) that Oracle's support prices are atronomical as well.
This brings up an important advantage of OSS as well. With proprietary software like Oracle, you don't really have any way to remedy a situation like this: a reasonably fine piece of software isn't fixed or secured because the company is lazy or just doesn't care. With OSS, if you could secure it yourself(or pay someone to do so). And in most cases, you wouldn't even have to do that - if the original maintainer of the OSS software slacked off or stopped maintaining it, then someone else could take over and make the improvements. Which accomplishes what capitalism and big businesses should be focused on: creating a better product to gain customers or users. Not making more money by screwing customers/other business over and not abusing the justice/legal system.
While the Nemesis theory sounds really cool (and IANA astrophysicist), I think that I've heard that some of the calculations that were used as justification for looking for Planet X back in the early 1900's were off or something. I can't remember where it was that I heard that, it was probably either on one of the BBC The Planets series or Cosmos.
I would agree, especially with the second point. Does your employer pay you for every minute you worry or think about your job when you're at home? If not, then what reasonable basis do they have for forcing you to spend every minute at work thinking about your job. I mean its one thing if someone is spending the entire fscking work day reading/. (I'm available for any jobs that entail that;) ), but its another thing entirely if they spend like 2 or 3 minutes here and there reading a website/usenet or emailing/calling a friend or spouse or something.
At one point in time I used Symantec Corp. I don't remember all of the details exactly, but I think I was trying to uninstall it because LiveUpdate wasn't working. Anyways, after uninstalling it my computer would not start except to safe mode. It took a couple hours of deleting useless fscking registry keys that Symantec had left behind to get everything to work normally again. I believe there was a support article on Symantec's website that told me what registry keys to delete, so they were obviously aware of the issue. Why they didn't bother to have their uninstaller to do that, I have no idea. But, from that day on, Symantec AV has not touched any of the computers I manage. Currently, I'm running McAfee Enterprise on my boxes, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that I don't like about it is that if I'm in a directory(in Windows Explorer) that has a shit load of stuff in it(think greater than 1000 files and greater than 30 GB), McAfee will take massive amounts of CPU trying to scan them all. Because of that, I usually disable the on-access scan, atleast when I'm doing that sort of thing. And, while that really pisses me off, its not like that's a very common occurence for most people.
Which raises the questions: why the hell aren't they using PCL or atleast postscript? My experiences with exporting WMF's from various apps(I think Illustrator, possible PSP), was that it was a god-awful format. I mean if you had like two things overlapped, it would totally screw up. Maybe the print drivers that use WMF do something differently, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to use a printer that used WMF.
This isn't the first time that people have seen meteors hitting the moon. In the 1500's I think it was, some monks in Europe saw what may have been a meteor/asteroid hitting the moon. It was mentioned in one movies/episodes of the Cosmos series. Though I have heard that some people think that it was just a metor breaking up in the Earth's atmosphere and that it just appeared to be over the moon because of their position. Also, some time around the 50's I think(either in the 40's, 50's, or 60's I think I'm not sure), a Japanese scientist saw a small flash of light that was almost certainly a meteor. I almost think that he had a picture of it as well, though I'm not certain.
When will our governments, and consumers, realise that regionalisation is nothing more than a mechanism of creating continental price disparity and deliberate market manipulation? It has nothing to do with "costs" but maximising profits by restricting parallel imports. It does nothing for quality, or support....
When the media and software companies stop giving bribes, err excuse me "campaign contributions" to our so-called representitives.
I'm not sure what Oracle version that's for. Oracle DB Stadnard is $15k per processor. Enterprise is $40,000 per CPU. There is also a Standard One edition that's "only" $5k per CPU. In addition to the in-beta Oracle XE(free). On the bright side, pretty much all of Oracle's stuff is free for development use.
Slashdot Mirror
Also,
It seems from #3 that the user would have to agree.
But IANAL so I really don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe someone who knows more about the law can interpet this.
I have a Google customized news page with one section on news related to Linux. Believe it or not, this /. article actually made it there. Nice to know Google is good at filtering out BS.
broken 2.6 development
I've not really had any problems on CentOS 4 or SuSE 9.2 thru 10. In contrast, I think they've worked much better than the 2.4 based stuff I've used in the past.
hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver
Why is having support for more hardware a bad thing? I can't see how having more devices that are atleast partially supported can hurt.
VM scheme that breaks thing
I assume you're talking about Xen here? If so, what has it broken? I've not heard of people having any huge issues with it, but then I haven't paid real close attention. I use VMware irregardless because I run things other than *nix in a lot of the VMs.
Honestly, I think calling a lack of progress "retaining stability" might be sort of ignoring the point. I think it's certainly possible to progress a lot without hurting stability, and even possibly making the system more stable. If you want to keep using a 2.2 kernel because you feel people are progressing too quickly, nobody's stopping you.
I don't have any major problems with the BSD's(well, atleast with FreeBSD, I've not tried OpenBSD and only used NetBSD briefly on one occasion). The several versions FreeBSD has seemed to work alright for me, but it has never made me think, "wow! This is so much better than Linux! I need to move all my *nix boxes over to this ASAP!" If anything, it might have seemed like a little bit of a step backwards, though I will admit that much of that could be because I'm more familiar with Linux that I am with the BSD's.
Sorry if I sound rude, or arrogant/sarcastic. I didn't really mean to be, I just would have to disagree with you. And would probably agree with the person who posted the original reply, that you can have a strong, successful OSS project without a company behind it.
That sounds waaaay to close to TPM for my liking. I tend to go along with the thought process that the hardware is along for the ride and shouldn't give a fuck about what's running on it.
You can do iSCSI pretty much entirely in software(I've done it with two VMWare VM's before) The only "special" hardware things that you would need to have are GbE NIC's that support jumbo frames as well as a switch that does. And you don't have to have those, though performance might not be quite as good. I don't know if there's iSCSI target/initiator software for NetBSD though.
I'm sure having expensive HBA's can give you a lot better performance(as well as the ability to boot from an iSCSI drive), but just replicating stuff probably doesn't need really, really, top of the line $$$$$ hardware.
If its this huge of an issue for them, then they should atleast be willing to take a trivial amount of time to prevent it from happening to them. It's kind of hard for me to have sympathy for someone who takes absolutely *no* precautions at all.
Which totally defeats the point of banning USB keys/external HDD's/iPod. I mean it is brain-dead easy to copy files on to a Palm or PocketPC, and with an CF or SD card(I believe they are up to the 2 or 4 GB range now-days) you could get a ton of stuff out of work. Hell, you could even hide the card in your shoe or something afterwards if you weren't allowed to take your PDA home or something. And even without their USB ports, there's Bluetooth(for some phones/PDAs and a few computers). There is no way that a company can absolutely prevent someone from taking home files that they have access to, unless they're like the CIA/NSA or something(And haven't there been a few cases of people getting computer files out of those places?). There are too many ways to get the data out, and too many ways to get around security.
I don't read Al Jazeera on a regular basis(and have only seen their only articles, not their TV shows or anything), but atleast their headlines seem rather exagerated/sensationalistic. I've seen their articles on my Google customized homepage before, and each time the headline (before I saw the source) made me think to myself "WTF!?" In each of the instances(I think this has happened 3 or 4 times that I can think of), all of the rest of the news sites reporting that story that were on Google News had a fairly similar headline(and this isn't just CNN/ABC/Fox/etc, there are quite a few news sources from India and the far east on Google News too), and then there was Al Jazeera's. Now, maybe its just they didn't do a good job of translation, and perhaps it was just those few articles that happened to be on Google News. I don't know. But I have a hard time believing that nearly every other news source in the world is biased, and Al Jazeera is not.
I'm not sure if its exactly what you're talking about, but doesn't Cisco have some sort of a wireless mesh thing? I'm not sure if it does routing, or if each of the AP's just amplify/repeat the signal though.
AFAIK NASA generally doesn't copyright any of the images or data from their missions(Hubble might be an exception though, atleast for the first year). More info here.
I agree. I'm really, really tired of hearing about stuff like that - stuff that has basically no chance of ever developing into anything meaningful. And this goes for the technology stuff, not just the science. Even more tired than I am of seeing dupes. Call me back when someone has developed a treatment for AIDs that has actually been tested on humans and works.
An Internet Service Provider has absolutely no business giving a flying fuck what protocols are used by their customers *cough* victims *cough* They are a provider of Internet Service and HTTP is not the only protocol used on the Internet. If they don't like it - tough - but they shouldn't be advertising themselves as ISP's when they don't provider true Internet service.
On the flip side though, I would thinkthat *nix boxes would be bigger targets because (generally speaking), stuff that's running on the average *nix box is probably more mission critical than the the stuff running on the average Windows box. If a Unix box went down it would probably affect more people than a Windows box going down would. A web/database/email server is a hell of a lot more important than grannie's Windows desktop that she uses to get to this new-fangled InterWeb thing.
I think you have to hvae Admin(or atleast power user) rights to do that for some outrageous reason. That's M$'s fault, not your company's.
For $299/year you can get a VMTN(I think VMware Technology Network or something like that) which will give you development licenses for VMWare products. I'm not sure exactly what their idea of development use is, but if you just use it to play-around with some server stuff, you could probably twist whatever you're doing into "development."
That being said, the users of Oracle are paying outrageous prices for the database Bingo, with as expensive as Oracle is, something like this is inexcusable. WTF is Oracle doing with all of that money? Oracle AS and DB are probably two of the most expensive pieces of software out there(atleast of stuff that is somewhat common). Each copy of Oracle AS or DB Enterprise could pay for practically someone's yearly salary(even if it was just a 1-CPU license). And I'm assuming(though I do not know) that Oracle's support prices are atronomical as well.
This brings up an important advantage of OSS as well. With proprietary software like Oracle, you don't really have any way to remedy a situation like this: a reasonably fine piece of software isn't fixed or secured because the company is lazy or just doesn't care. With OSS, if you could secure it yourself(or pay someone to do so). And in most cases, you wouldn't even have to do that - if the original maintainer of the OSS software slacked off or stopped maintaining it, then someone else could take over and make the improvements. Which accomplishes what capitalism and big businesses should be focused on: creating a better product to gain customers or users. Not making more money by screwing customers/other business over and not abusing the justice/legal system.
While the Nemesis theory sounds really cool (and IANA astrophysicist), I think that I've heard that some of the calculations that were used as justification for looking for Planet X back in the early 1900's were off or something. I can't remember where it was that I heard that, it was probably either on one of the BBC The Planets series or Cosmos.
I would agree, especially with the second point. Does your employer pay you for every minute you worry or think about your job when you're at home? If not, then what reasonable basis do they have for forcing you to spend every minute at work thinking about your job. I mean its one thing if someone is spending the entire fscking work day reading /. (I'm available for any jobs that entail that ;) ), but its another thing entirely if they spend like 2 or 3 minutes here and there reading a website/usenet or emailing/calling a friend or spouse or something.
At one point in time I used Symantec Corp. I don't remember all of the details exactly, but I think I was trying to uninstall it because LiveUpdate wasn't working. Anyways, after uninstalling it my computer would not start except to safe mode. It took a couple hours of deleting useless fscking registry keys that Symantec had left behind to get everything to work normally again. I believe there was a support article on Symantec's website that told me what registry keys to delete, so they were obviously aware of the issue. Why they didn't bother to have their uninstaller to do that, I have no idea. But, from that day on, Symantec AV has not touched any of the computers I manage. Currently, I'm running McAfee Enterprise on my boxes, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that I don't like about it is that if I'm in a directory(in Windows Explorer) that has a shit load of stuff in it(think greater than 1000 files and greater than 30 GB), McAfee will take massive amounts of CPU trying to scan them all. Because of that, I usually disable the on-access scan, atleast when I'm doing that sort of thing. And, while that really pisses me off, its not like that's a very common occurence for most people.
Which raises the questions: why the hell aren't they using PCL or atleast postscript? My experiences with exporting WMF's from various apps(I think Illustrator, possible PSP), was that it was a god-awful format. I mean if you had like two things overlapped, it would totally screw up. Maybe the print drivers that use WMF do something differently, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to use a printer that used WMF.
This isn't the first time that people have seen meteors hitting the moon. In the 1500's I think it was, some monks in Europe saw what may have been a meteor/asteroid hitting the moon. It was mentioned in one movies/episodes of the Cosmos series. Though I have heard that some people think that it was just a metor breaking up in the Earth's atmosphere and that it just appeared to be over the moon because of their position. Also, some time around the 50's I think(either in the 40's, 50's, or 60's I think I'm not sure), a Japanese scientist saw a small flash of light that was almost certainly a meteor. I almost think that he had a picture of it as well, though I'm not certain.
When will our governments, and consumers, realise that regionalisation is nothing more than a mechanism of creating continental price disparity and deliberate market manipulation? It has nothing to do with "costs" but maximising profits by restricting parallel imports. It does nothing for quality, or support....
When the media and software companies stop giving bribes, err excuse me "campaign contributions" to our so-called representitives.
OK, that would make sense for a .au site and all.
I'm not sure what Oracle version that's for. Oracle DB Stadnard is $15k per processor. Enterprise is $40,000 per CPU. There is also a Standard One edition that's "only" $5k per CPU. In addition to the in-beta Oracle XE(free). On the bright side, pretty much all of Oracle's stuff is free for development use.
Sony sues you for violating the DMCA.
(There's gotta be a Soviet Russia joke in there somewhere...)
Hey, its not that far fetched.