So he's a student. He downloads a copy of $5000 AutoCAD instead of... what? Buying $5000 AutoCAD?
And if he passes the exam from AutoCAD because he had one at home, and could train it outside of the classroom hours, he may start a company and purchase 30 licenses (he has to, can't run a company on a pirated product). If he fails the exam, because he wanted to obey the law and didn't get the pirate copy, he will never look at AutoCAD again and just get a job of a janitor.
It's interesting how the value of the media is calculated. Is a high-compression DIVX of a shaky video of screen in cinema valued the same as retail 4-DVD "special edition" release? Is a rip of a 4-CD game squeezing it into 300MB calculated as the same game, with a T-shirt and a manual in the box? Is software that was released 10 years ago valued at the prices of its release or at current "bargain bin" prices? Is a mono MP3 made through hand-hacked cable from a poor quality cable counted the same as a new audio CD album?
I don't think the real value is taken into consideration. They just match title-price and neglect quality altogether. My friend was caught. The value they calculated on his software was something like $30.000. The real value of the crap if he wanted to sell that, was around $500.
Get one really OLD HP printer. One that uses cartridges like #14 or so. The cartridges are slightlu more expensive than "modern" ones, but - they don't contain any evil "protection tricks" - "out of the box" they contain about 5x as much ink as "modern" ones - they are "refill friendly" (a rubber cork to inject ink with syringe) - they can be refilled to some 180% of "original capacity" - refill kit is like 70% the price of cartridge and suffices for 2 "full" refills - a cartridge lasts about 5-6 refills - if the cartridge dries up, dip in warm water for a while, then dry with a clean hanky, then print a "test page" to finish cleaning the noozles. This way it will work for years.
Result: One cartridge + 2 refill sets = 10 years worth of printing.
Of course the paper feed mechanism will start feeding 2-3 sheets at once after a year or so, but there is a special paste you apply on the cork "rub pads" to fix it.
Firefox seems to consume 100% CPU for up to 20 seconds upon attempting to start a download, even for small files.
Haven't observed. Maybe because I never keep more than 20-40 old downloads on the list?
Really annoying when you combine it with the sluggishness of multiple tabs
Open as many IE windows as you have tabs open and see what is faster. If you displayed a list of threads, you'd see greatest part of CPU time and memory wasted on tabs are Flash and Java threads. (open 40 tabs of a web forum, each with one Flash banner. You get 40 Flash threads running, slowing your system down to a crawl.)
Huh? If RPM finds a file that it needs to write, it'll prompt if the file isn't in the database and will prompt with a "this package conflicts with x" if it is. Yes. Only during install. Not at package selection time. Last time I checked, even --test didn't support that (that's what I meant no --simulate)
--whatprovides and --provides --whatrequires and --requires
These show file ownership, not package dependencies. Debian "provides" is something that allows you to install any demon that does certain task satisfying all dependencies on this particular kind of service without specifying the particular package that provides this service. In RPM it's notorious that package a) depends on Sendmail, package b) on Postfix and Postfix conflicts with Sendmail (on some files) so I can't install both a) and b) from RPM. Of course if I download a) and compile it from sources, it goes smoothly along with Postfix. It was just the packager who decided Sendmail is necessary, not ANY mail demon.
Okay, I don't know too much about internals of the RPM format, I was just an user of the RPM package manager, and it was a few years ago when I abandonned it, but what I've seen...
no automatic source selection. no automatic dependency satisfying. no "recommends". no "suggests" no "conflicts with (anything other than its own other version)" no "replaces" no "provides" Harder source rebuild. no "hold current". no install-time configuration (some consider this advantage. I don't.) no dist-upgrade alike. no --simulate
It drove me mad when LILO required Linuxconf (and reading the config file I've seen comment like "# not really necessary, but why not?"), that packages that obviously needed ANY httpd, required Apache, ANY mailer required Sendmail, that with a dir full of RPMs which created a full dependency tree to install a package I couldn't rpm -i *.rpm but had to manually pick them from the bottom up, so before I install something, all its dependencies must be satisfied. And because of such bogosities I just kept abusing --force --nodeps ruining the integrity of the tree more and more..deb has its problems. There are some conflicts that exclude half the tree, there are some dependencies that got lost and are unobtainable. But these are issues simple to fix. RPM on the other hand was causing problems I was just unable to fix...
Rebooting. Drivers. (yes, Knoppix doesn't work out-of-the-box with ALL the hardware out there) Install To HD (shorter load times) Savegame (need HDD access) Network setup (not everyone uses DHCP) Messing with BIOS (Boot from CD) CD spinup delay.
Enterprise: Price +100% Professional: Price +80% Solution: Price based on predicted profit, not cost Robust: Price +40% Scalable: Price +30% Synchronous: Price +5% Asynchronous: Price +10% Crossplatform: Price +40% Groundbreaking: Price +150% for next 3 months. Cutting-edge: Price +50% for next 6 months. Modern: Price +30% for next 3 years Obsolete: Price will only keep raising from now on. Mission-critical: Price +300%, you can sue us for screw-up. Safety: Price +500%, you can sue us if you survive. Strategical: Price +100%, you can sue us for too long tongue. Aggressive: Price +30% Creative: Price +20% Exciting: Price +20% Confidence: Price +40%, you can believe you can sue us. Secure: Price +50%, you can sue the insurance company. Award-winning: Price +40%, we have friends up there. Consulting: Price -10%, you do all the work. Support: Price +20%, manual included. Analysis: Price +30%, you're likely to believe what we say. Feel: Price +40%. e-*: Price +40%, uses MSIE. Research: Price +10% for every month it takes. Design: Price +20%, can be shown on parties. Report: Price +30%, you get the paperwork we don't need anymore. Success: Price +30%, you're a sucker. Global: Price +40%, our boss has a villa in Italy. Targetted: Price -10%, efficiency -80%. Economy: Price -20%, quality -95% Intelligent: Price +70% Cost-efficient: Price +40% in hidden costs. Competitive: Price +30%, all spent on nuking the competition to hell. Unique: Price +90%
Note: Not more efficient. Not easier. Not faster. Not higher quality. Not less tiring. Exactly: "interesting". As in "WTF? Who would expect that option THERE?!" "Uh.... Not quite what I wanted, but interesting nevertheless". "And what does the picture on THAT icon mean?" "Maybe THIS option will do what I want? No? Maybe this one then?" It was really interesting to follow an official Microsoft's troubleshooting guide on some problem, some 60 steps like "open this, click that, select this, scroll down to that, doubleclick this, rightclick that and pick option n, then press button X" only to realize around step 40 that there's no button X where it was supposed to be according to the guide. Not really efficient. Rather annoying. Completely futile. But interesting nevertheless.
Not necessarily. Consider contents of the file, compressed, to be the hash. It fulfills the premises: depends on the file contents, is shorter than the file (or at least not longer), uniquely identifies the file. So, while md5 is not unique, bzip2 can be treated as a 100% duplicate-free hash creation program. Of course such "granted" hashes are MUCH longer than what is typically used, but they still fulfill the premises of a hash.
Note it's still possible to create a hash that is unique (like the above) but retrieving the content of the file from it (decompressing) is impossible. Just take your.bz2 "hash" and encrypt it, using its own MD5 as password. You can't decrypt without knowing the MD5, you won't know the MD5 without owning the unencrypted content.
Unique association of identification string ("the patent number") with the content of the patent is obviously patented under patent# 5,978,791 for which USPTO most obviously doesn't have patent rights. So most obviously they are in violation of a patent they have granted.
...why patent it? I mean, they HAD to know the patent is bogus. They hoped it will pass through USPTO, and they hoped right. But how can they hope anyone will agree to pay them money for that?...while the lawsuit will be thrown out of court as soon as the P2P company will show: "We use MD5 which expired even before this patent was granted, and this patent covers exactly the same thing as MD5 only without technical details how to accomplish the task." And even if not, sooner or later some company WILL start a lawsuit, and once the obvious result makes the patent invalid, all companies that actually paid, may counter-sue for damages.
If I wanted to sell Eiffel Tower, I don't think I'd avoid jail. Why people who try to sell (force!) idea they don't own could go free?
Look it up on Bugzilla, there's a bug about it:) A "led-like" indicator on status bar that shows "green" for valid code, "yellow" for minor bugs, "red" for errors that break rendering and clicking would display a summary of errors. (extra profit: people stop bitching about "crappy browser" and start bitching about "crappy webmasters":)
optimoz.mozdev.org gesture "3" (down-right diagonal) - zoom in, "7" (upper-left) smaller, "1" (down-left) default. (alternatively assign to "wheel rockers" and use with mouse wheel)
BTW, don't bitch "But Opera has it built in and for Firefox you need extension". Firefox is ALL about extensions. The rule is "install bare bones, add whatever you need", not "install everything, remove what you don't need".
...and include one central firewall-like facility that lets you perform advanced selection of media you allow/deny from a host, domain, IP range etc. (plus access to ports, like 8080 hurting Mozilla for a long time...)
ad.* DENY images, flash, cookies *.mozdev.org ALLOW xpi *.yahoo.com DENY flash *.gmail.com ALLOW cookies, store-passwd *.microsoft.com DENY all
Watch out while converting. PNG is a lossless open format with a decent lossless compression, but sometimes the process of conversion can generate some distortions, i.e. changing the palette. Depends on the converter. Most of "optimizers" include some data loss to help the compression so don't trust them.
If they've really achieved 25-30% over jpg, and it looks like they have, then its a truly amazing invention considering that jpeg has been around for so long....because JPEG is free for all. Look up JPEG2000, DJVU and several other revolutionary "JPEG killers" that would rule the net nowadays if only the authors were insightful enough to release them as open standards. Now they all rot forgotten as nobody uses them, because nobody is willing to pay for using formats nobody uses because nobody is willing to pay...
SIF will die the same death if they don't release it as a free standard.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the depriving of a sale that matters
So he's a student. He downloads a copy of $5000 AutoCAD instead of... what? Buying $5000 AutoCAD?
And if he passes the exam from AutoCAD because he had one at home, and could train it outside of the classroom hours, he may start a company and purchase 30 licenses (he has to, can't run a company on a pirated product). If he fails the exam, because he wanted to obey the law and didn't get the pirate copy, he will never look at AutoCAD again and just get a job of a janitor.
What deal is better to the software authors?
- cinema ticket + VCR tape
- Used harddrive with badsectors from e-bay, data recovery software (shareware/free)
- "bargain bin"
- Radio, jack-jack wire (earphones-line in)
That are the costs of obtaining such media.
It's interesting how the value of the media is calculated.
Is a high-compression DIVX of a shaky video of screen in cinema valued the same as retail 4-DVD "special edition" release?
Is a rip of a 4-CD game squeezing it into 300MB calculated as the same game, with a T-shirt and a manual in the box?
Is software that was released 10 years ago valued at the prices of its release or at current "bargain bin" prices?
Is a mono MP3 made through hand-hacked cable from a poor quality cable counted the same as a new audio CD album?
I don't think the real value is taken into consideration. They just match title-price and neglect quality altogether. My friend was caught. The value they calculated on his software was something like $30.000. The real value of the crap if he wanted to sell that, was around $500.
Get one really OLD HP printer. One that uses cartridges like #14 or so.
The cartridges are slightlu more expensive than "modern" ones, but
- they don't contain any evil "protection tricks"
- "out of the box" they contain about 5x as much ink as "modern" ones
- they are "refill friendly" (a rubber cork to inject ink with syringe)
- they can be refilled to some 180% of "original capacity"
- refill kit is like 70% the price of cartridge and suffices for 2 "full" refills
- a cartridge lasts about 5-6 refills
- if the cartridge dries up, dip in warm water for a while, then dry with a clean hanky, then print a "test page" to finish cleaning the noozles. This way it will work for years.
Result: One cartridge + 2 refill sets = 10 years worth of printing.
Of course the paper feed mechanism will start feeding 2-3 sheets at once after a year or so, but there is a special paste you apply on the cork "rub pads" to fix it.
Just write "If you have problems with rendering this site, write Microsoft to fix errors their browser and get Firefox (standard-compilant browser)"
Firefox seems to consume 100% CPU for up to 20 seconds upon attempting to start a download, even for small files.
Haven't observed. Maybe because I never keep more than 20-40 old downloads on the list?
Really annoying when you combine it with the sluggishness of multiple tabs
Open as many IE windows as you have tabs open and see what is faster.
If you displayed a list of threads, you'd see greatest part of CPU time and memory wasted on tabs are Flash and Java threads. (open 40 tabs of a web forum, each with one Flash banner. You get 40 Flash threads running, slowing your system down to a crawl.)
...webservers running on port 1080.
Bug#85601
It isn't a valid file URL.
C: is not a protocol. It's a drive.
Use file://c:\...
Finally we can start research stating that P=NP without worry that our discovery would empty our accounts.
2. the companies in question have some lame policies
All of them. No "competition".
Huh? If RPM finds a file that it needs to write, it'll prompt if the file isn't in the database and will prompt with a "this package conflicts with x" if it is.
Yes. Only during install. Not at package selection time. Last time I checked, even --test didn't support that (that's what I meant no --simulate)
--whatprovides and --provides
--whatrequires and --requires
These show file ownership, not package dependencies.
Debian "provides" is something that allows you to install any demon that does certain task satisfying all dependencies on this particular kind of service without specifying the particular package that provides this service. In RPM it's notorious that package a) depends on Sendmail, package b) on Postfix and Postfix conflicts with Sendmail (on some files) so I can't install both a) and b) from RPM. Of course if I download a) and compile it from sources, it goes smoothly along with Postfix. It was just the packager who decided Sendmail is necessary, not ANY mail demon.
Okay, I don't know too much about internals of the RPM format, I was just an user of the RPM package manager, and it was a few years ago when I abandonned it, but what I've seen...
.deb has its problems. There are some conflicts that exclude half the tree, there are some dependencies that got lost and are unobtainable. But these are issues simple to fix. RPM on the other hand was causing problems I was just unable to fix...
no automatic source selection.
no automatic dependency satisfying.
no "recommends".
no "suggests"
no "conflicts with (anything other than its own other version)"
no "replaces"
no "provides"
Harder source rebuild.
no "hold current".
no install-time configuration (some consider this advantage. I don't.)
no dist-upgrade alike.
no --simulate
It drove me mad when LILO required Linuxconf (and reading the config file I've seen comment like "# not really necessary, but why not?"), that packages that obviously needed ANY httpd, required Apache, ANY mailer required Sendmail, that with a dir full of RPMs which created a full dependency tree to install a package I couldn't rpm -i *.rpm but had to manually pick them from the bottom up, so before I install something, all its dependencies must be satisfied. And because of such bogosities I just kept abusing --force --nodeps ruining the integrity of the tree more and more.
Only as option.
Rebooting.
Drivers. (yes, Knoppix doesn't work out-of-the-box with ALL the hardware out there)
Install To HD (shorter load times)
Savegame (need HDD access)
Network setup (not everyone uses DHCP)
Messing with BIOS (Boot from CD)
CD spinup delay.
Enterprise: Price +100%
Professional: Price +80%
Solution: Price based on predicted profit, not cost
Robust: Price +40%
Scalable: Price +30%
Synchronous: Price +5%
Asynchronous: Price +10%
Crossplatform: Price +40%
Groundbreaking: Price +150% for next 3 months.
Cutting-edge: Price +50% for next 6 months.
Modern: Price +30% for next 3 years
Obsolete: Price will only keep raising from now on.
Mission-critical: Price +300%, you can sue us for screw-up.
Safety: Price +500%, you can sue us if you survive.
Strategical: Price +100%, you can sue us for too long tongue.
Aggressive: Price +30%
Creative: Price +20%
Exciting: Price +20%
Confidence: Price +40%, you can believe you can sue us.
Secure: Price +50%, you can sue the insurance company.
Award-winning: Price +40%, we have friends up there.
Consulting: Price -10%, you do all the work.
Support: Price +20%, manual included.
Analysis: Price +30%, you're likely to believe what we say.
Feel: Price +40%.
e-*: Price +40%, uses MSIE.
Research: Price +10% for every month it takes.
Design: Price +20%, can be shown on parties.
Report: Price +30%, you get the paperwork we don't need anymore.
Success: Price +30%, you're a sucker.
Global: Price +40%, our boss has a villa in Italy.
Targetted: Price -10%, efficiency -80%.
Economy: Price -20%, quality -95%
Intelligent: Price +70%
Cost-efficient: Price +40% in hidden costs.
Competitive: Price +30%, all spent on nuking the competition to hell.
Unique: Price +90%
I remember a slogan from Microsoft's leaflet.
(some MS product) makes your work interesting.
Note: Not more efficient. Not easier. Not faster. Not higher quality. Not less tiring.
Exactly: "interesting". As in "WTF? Who would expect that option THERE?!" "Uh.... Not quite what I wanted, but interesting nevertheless". "And what does the picture on THAT icon mean?" "Maybe THIS option will do what I want? No? Maybe this one then?"
It was really interesting to follow an official Microsoft's troubleshooting guide on some problem, some 60 steps like "open this, click that, select this, scroll down to that, doubleclick this, rightclick that and pick option n, then press button X" only to realize around step 40 that there's no button X where it was supposed to be according to the guide.
Not really efficient. Rather annoying. Completely futile. But interesting nevertheless.
Not necessarily.
.bz2 "hash" and encrypt it, using its own MD5 as password. You can't decrypt without knowing the MD5, you won't know the MD5 without owning the unencrypted content.
Consider contents of the file, compressed, to be the hash. It fulfills the premises: depends on the file contents, is shorter than the file (or at least not longer), uniquely identifies the file. So, while md5 is not unique, bzip2 can be treated as a 100% duplicate-free hash creation program.
Of course such "granted" hashes are MUCH longer than what is typically used, but they still fulfill the premises of a hash.
Note it's still possible to create a hash that is unique (like the above) but retrieving the content of the file from it (decompressing) is impossible. Just take your
Unique association of identification string ("the patent number") with the content of the patent is obviously patented under patent# 5,978,791 for which USPTO most obviously doesn't have patent rights. So most obviously they are in violation of a patent they have granted.
...why patent it? ...while the lawsuit will be thrown out of court as soon as the P2P company will show: "We use MD5 which expired even before this patent was granted, and this patent covers exactly the same thing as MD5 only without technical details how to accomplish the task." And even if not, sooner or later some company WILL start a lawsuit, and once the obvious result makes the patent invalid, all companies that actually paid, may counter-sue for damages.
I mean, they HAD to know the patent is bogus. They hoped it will pass through USPTO, and they hoped right. But how can they hope anyone will agree to pay them money for that?
If I wanted to sell Eiffel Tower, I don't think I'd avoid jail. Why people who try to sell (force!) idea they don't own could go free?
Look it up on Bugzilla, there's a bug about it :) :)
A "led-like" indicator on status bar that shows "green" for valid code, "yellow" for minor bugs, "red" for errors that break rendering and clicking would display a summary of errors. (extra profit: people stop bitching about "crappy browser" and start bitching about "crappy webmasters"
Waiting for Mozilla Desktop Manager. (competition to Gnome/KDE)
optimoz.mozdev.org
gesture "3" (down-right diagonal) - zoom in, "7" (upper-left) smaller, "1" (down-left) default. (alternatively assign to "wheel rockers" and use with mouse wheel)
BTW, don't bitch "But Opera has it built in and for Firefox you need extension".
Firefox is ALL about extensions. The rule is "install bare bones, add whatever you need", not "install everything, remove what you don't need".
...and include one central firewall-like facility that lets you perform advanced selection of media you allow/deny from a host, domain, IP range etc. (plus access to ports, like 8080 hurting Mozilla for a long time...)
ad.* DENY images, flash, cookies
*.mozdev.org ALLOW xpi
*.yahoo.com DENY flash
*.gmail.com ALLOW cookies, store-passwd
*.microsoft.com DENY all
...except it IS lossy then.
Watch out while converting. PNG is a lossless open format with a decent lossless compression, but sometimes the process of conversion can generate some distortions, i.e. changing the palette. Depends on the converter.
Most of "optimizers" include some data loss to help the compression so don't trust them.
If they've really achieved 25-30% over jpg, and it looks like they have, then its a truly amazing invention considering that jpeg has been around for so long. ...because JPEG is free for all. Look up JPEG2000, DJVU and several other revolutionary "JPEG killers" that would rule the net nowadays if only the authors were insightful enough to release them as open standards. Now they all rot forgotten as nobody uses them, because nobody is willing to pay for using formats nobody uses because nobody is willing to pay...
SIF will die the same death if they don't release it as a free standard.
Seesh.
Every kid of a hacker knows that 1+1=10