Each file on NTFS has a rather abstract constitution - it has no data, it has streams. One of the streams has the habitual for us sense - file data. But the majority of file attributes are also streams! Thus we have that the base file nature is only the number in MFT and the rest is optional. The given abstraction can be used for the creation of rather convenient things - for example it is possible to "stick" one more stream to a file, having recorded any data in it - for example information about the author and the file content as it was made in Windows 2000 (the most right bookmark in file properties which is accessible from the explorer).
Does this qualify as provision for metadata in the FS?
I've heard the NTFS file system is designed to allow the system to add any number of properties (besides the obvious filename, last access time and permissions) to any stored file. This is likely to be exploited by Longhorn, which is planned to be capable of appending metadata to newly created files (for example, if you download a file from the Internet, the system would likely append a Originated-From-URL property to it).
What I wonder is, is there any filesystem in the FOSS world that supports something like this, or are there plans to make it supported before 20??, when Longhorn hits the stores? I see this as a critical feature that must be made available by non-Windows OSes.
Plus no one says when I can read, how many times I'm allowed to read it and if anyone is allowed to borrow it.
At least until our good ol' books are replaced by electronicpaper that retrieves text via some kind of network connectivity (obviously, after you pay for it).
So many religious skeptics (I'm an atheist, in fact) believe that they need to be on the political team opposite those that are religious. It's a mistake. There are plenty of fvcked up ideas on the political left as well as the right and plenty of stupid ahistorical hate-america-firsters. Don't get taken in.
Actually, I am able to discern politics from religion, which is what G.W. Bush (and his fellow men in the Government) apparently can't -- the whole "axis of evil" argument is a religious one, not a political one. That's why I say we must drop our outdated misconceptions of Good and Evil, because they are interfering with what they shouldn't.
As far as Reagan goes, he was a genuinely good man. [...]
What you said applies to most men and women (especially after they are dead). I was focusing solely on his political career, which is what mattered for my post. But then again, perhaps you do have a less distorted view than mine.:)
You can call me a reactionary, I don't mind. As far as I'm concerned, it is best to be a reactionary than to passively accept a reality that seems very wrong to my eyes.
Wrongo. He might have changed the United States for the better, but not the world.
The existence of "two sides of the world" (the capitalist and communist spheres) during the Cold War (mind you: the Cold War was not a war in the physical sense, the Americans and the Russians were at peace!) actually meant stability for the world, because none of the two powers was able to assume the role of the world's leader; the two powers actually regulated each other's actions reciprocally (read about The Prisoner's Dilemma for further insight on this).
Now, remove USSR from the table and what do you get? A single super-power who wants the rest of the world on bended knees. This is true of the American government no matter how hard you try to deny it.
I don't think this is a better world than the one we had before (even though I'm only 18 years old, so I can't really have any memories from those times). An American might think it is a better world because he/she is on the power side. The hate some people have towards America is probably comparable to the hate Americans felt against the evil communists (and the other way round too).
Seriously: Americans can't root for the old "We-Good, They-Evil" bullshit anymore, even if They keeps changing. G.W. is just another fundamentalist, and just like Reagan, does not deserve recognition for what he's done.
The parent is right. Why not focus on the difference between blackhat vs. whitehat hacker instead of the hacker vs. cracker one, which nobody (except whitehat hackers) takes seriously?
Perhaps I'm being too paranoid, but I see some potential for abuse here. Imagine a program that deals with passwords or credit card numbers... They could be still lying around in your non-volatile memory after the machine is switched off.
An intelligent program should then zero out those passwords before freeing memory. Even so, would this kind of storage suffer from the security issue already discussed here and here (ability to retrieve data from many previous writes)?
I believe we should all come out of the hype for a second and stop to think whether we are doing things the Right Way(TM). The Internet is not meant to replace everything else, including phones, TVs, light switches and fridges. It was designed with versatility in mind, sure, but the very philosophy behind it teaches us not to attempt to cover all conceivable tasks with a single tool. Talk about "monocultures"...
"One use, one protocol", remember that thing? It think it does apply to this situation, even though we're not talking simply about software anymore.
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
It would not be a sinister act if Yahoo published their protocol specs so that Trillian (and other clients') developers could know exactly how to "make their own changes". Without this, they have to resort to reverse engineering, which not only means increased difficulty, but also happens to be illegal in the U.S.
No matter how much they pretend they are doing this solely for the sake of a better service, the intrusive effect this has on 3rd-party alternatives is undeniable.
Is it possible to make BitTorrent download only from a specified IP range? I have a nasty 1GB international traffic monthly limit vs. 20GB national traffic (I'm in Portugal and my ISP is Netcabo). I've never heard of such possibility, but perhaps some of you know better than I do.
However, the vast majority of Windows users run MS Office purely because they've managed to get it free from work or a colleague, not because they need all of the features it gives them.
I guess you could say "because they've managed to have someone hand them an illegal copy".
The more Microsoft tries to put an end to illegal copying, the more people will be dissatisfied at having to spend huge quantities of money on Office and Windows, and the more likely they are to consider switching to other (FOSS?) products.
Microsoft will probably manage to shoot themselves in the foot in the end.
People just aren't interested in a system that works any more. If they have something to complain about and go "oh did you hear the voting in florida was rigged!" it gives them 10 minutes of conversation around the watercooler, then they go ahead with their lives.
True. I believe the problem is that people always seem to believe that the <irony>perfect democratic system</irony> they live in guarantees that someone above them (in the ladder of power) will fix any issue that may arise.
Blind trust in the system, that's what I call it. Until everyone understands that it is essential in a democracy to make oneself heard on things that seem to be wrong, the system loses its benefits, and those who actually have the power on their hands win all the time.
I know that many people do this; unfortunately, it seems that a large sector of the population doesn't, perhaps in hope that things will eventually be alright with no effort at all.
China walks all over global standards because China is big enough to get away with it. Same as America, same as Russia, same as Britain (in its time) probably too.
I think it is worth noting that most of the standards we call "global" are of American origin (take ASCII as a simple example -- it means American standard codes etc., not Worldwide SCII). It just happens that the rest of the world adopted them as well.
The same could be true in the future for any new standards developed in China; creating them in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, removing support for the existent ones is.
and last but not least they confiscated lots of illegally burnt CDs
How could they prove they had been burnt ilegally? They could be copies made out of originals those people actually *owned* and had paid for. AFAIK copying CDs you own is not illegal anywhere as long as you don't hand them out to someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. That seems promising enough. Make it as good as it can be, slap the sources into the kernel, and make sure it compiles by default.
Some of us still like to flip through pages to read what's next and not having to push a button.
The whole point is that the future isn't likely going to be what you want, but rather what the media and the government do.
If I was given the choice, I'd prefer the good ol' books, too.
Quoting from http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/:
Each file on NTFS has a rather abstract constitution - it has no data, it has streams. One of the streams has the habitual for us sense - file data. But the majority of file attributes are also streams! Thus we have that the base file nature is only the number in MFT and the rest is optional. The given abstraction can be used for the creation of rather convenient things - for example it is possible to "stick" one more stream to a file, having recorded any data in it - for example information about the author and the file content as it was made in Windows 2000 (the most right bookmark in file properties which is accessible from the explorer).
Does this qualify as provision for metadata in the FS?
I've heard the NTFS file system is designed to allow the system to add any number of properties (besides the obvious filename, last access time and permissions) to any stored file. This is likely to be exploited by Longhorn, which is planned to be capable of appending metadata to newly created files (for example, if you download a file from the Internet, the system would likely append a Originated-From-URL property to it).
What I wonder is, is there any filesystem in the FOSS world that supports something like this, or are there plans to make it supported before 20??, when Longhorn hits the stores? I see this as a critical feature that must be made available by non-Windows OSes.
So, data describing metadata would be called metametadata?
Plus no one says when I can read, how many times I'm allowed to read it and if anyone is allowed to borrow it.
At least until our good ol' books are replaced by electronic paper that retrieves text via some kind of network connectivity (obviously, after you pay for it).
Begin stocking up on books too. :]
So many religious skeptics (I'm an atheist, in fact) believe that they need to be on the political team opposite those that are religious. It's a mistake. There are plenty of fvcked up ideas on the political left as well as the right and plenty of stupid ahistorical hate-america-firsters. Don't get taken in.
Actually, I am able to discern politics from religion, which is what G.W. Bush (and his fellow men in the Government) apparently can't -- the whole "axis of evil" argument is a religious one, not a political one. That's why I say we must drop our outdated misconceptions of Good and Evil, because they are interfering with what they shouldn't.
As far as Reagan goes, he was a genuinely good man. [...]
What you said applies to most men and women (especially after they are dead). I was focusing solely on his political career, which is what mattered for my post. But then again, perhaps you do have a less distorted view than mine. :)
You can call me a reactionary, I don't mind. As far as I'm concerned, it is best to be a reactionary than to passively accept a reality that seems very wrong to my eyes.
He truly changed the world for the better.
Wrongo. He might have changed the United States for the better, but not the world.
The existence of "two sides of the world" (the capitalist and communist spheres) during the Cold War (mind you: the Cold War was not a war in the physical sense, the Americans and the Russians were at peace!) actually meant stability for the world, because none of the two powers was able to assume the role of the world's leader; the two powers actually regulated each other's actions reciprocally (read about The Prisoner's Dilemma for further insight on this).
Now, remove USSR from the table and what do you get? A single super-power who wants the rest of the world on bended knees. This is true of the American government no matter how hard you try to deny it.
I don't think this is a better world than the one we had before (even though I'm only 18 years old, so I can't really have any memories from those times). An American might think it is a better world because he/she is on the power side. The hate some people have towards America is probably comparable to the hate Americans felt against the evil communists (and the other way round too).
Seriously: Americans can't root for the old "We-Good, They-Evil" bullshit anymore, even if They keeps changing. G.W. is just another fundamentalist, and just like Reagan, does not deserve recognition for what he's done.
This could be avoided if people were sensible enough to use the Bcc field when sending out an e-mail to multiple, unrelated recipients. Like I do.
The parent is right. Why not focus on the difference between blackhat vs. whitehat hacker instead of the hacker vs. cracker one, which nobody (except whitehat hackers) takes seriously?
Perhaps I'm being too paranoid, but I see some potential for abuse here. Imagine a program that deals with passwords or credit card numbers... They could be still lying around in your non-volatile memory after the machine is switched off.
An intelligent program should then zero out those passwords before freeing memory. Even so, would this kind of storage suffer from the security issue already discussed here and here (ability to retrieve data from many previous writes)?
I believe we should all come out of the hype for a second and stop to think whether we are doing things the Right Way(TM). The Internet is not meant to replace everything else, including phones, TVs, light switches and fridges. It was designed with versatility in mind, sure, but the very philosophy behind it teaches us not to attempt to cover all conceivable tasks with a single tool. Talk about "monocultures"...
"One use, one protocol", remember that thing? It think it does apply to this situation, even though we're not talking simply about software anymore.
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
It would not be a sinister act if Yahoo published their protocol specs so that Trillian (and other clients') developers could know exactly how to "make their own changes". Without this, they have to resort to reverse engineering, which not only means increased difficulty, but also happens to be illegal in the U.S.
No matter how much they pretend they are doing this solely for the sake of a better service, the intrusive effect this has on 3rd-party alternatives is undeniable.
Is it possible to make BitTorrent download only from a specified IP range? I have a nasty 1GB international traffic monthly limit vs. 20GB national traffic (I'm in Portugal and my ISP is Netcabo). I've never heard of such possibility, but perhaps some of you know better than I do.
However, the vast majority of Windows users run MS Office purely because they've managed to get it free from work or a colleague, not because they need all of the features it gives them.
I guess you could say "because they've managed to have someone hand them an illegal copy".
The more Microsoft tries to put an end to illegal copying, the more people will be dissatisfied at having to spend huge quantities of money on Office and Windows, and the more likely they are to consider switching to other (FOSS?) products.
Microsoft will probably manage to shoot themselves in the foot in the end.
True. I believe the problem is that people always seem to believe that the <irony>perfect democratic system</irony> they live in guarantees that someone above them (in the ladder of power) will fix any issue that may arise.
Blind trust in the system, that's what I call it. Until everyone understands that it is essential in a democracy to make oneself heard on things that seem to be wrong, the system loses its benefits, and those who actually have the power on their hands win all the time.
I know that many people do this; unfortunately, it seems that a large sector of the population doesn't, perhaps in hope that things will eventually be alright with no effort at all.
I think it is worth noting that most of the standards we call "global" are of American origin (take ASCII as a simple example -- it means American standard codes etc., not Worldwide SCII). It just happens that the rest of the world adopted them as well.
The same could be true in the future for any new standards developed in China; creating them in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, removing support for the existent ones is.
How could they prove they had been burnt ilegally? They could be copies made out of originals those people actually *owned* and had paid for. AFAIK copying CDs you own is not illegal anywhere as long as you don't hand them out to someone else.