While you are probably correct, there is the possibility that Microsoft is starting to learn it's lesson. Their IIS market share is dropping, Mozilla (and unfortunatly the neutered AOL version - Netscape) are taking back the users from IE, Linux is starting to actually see some desktop share, and OpenOffice is quickly becoming a viable alternative to MS Office.
They will probably just go "Time for more lock-in! Then our competitors can't beat us." It would certainly coinside with their history. However, they still exist to make money, and the odds say they have hired at least one person with a clue. At some point, they will realize they can't compete on price or monopoly, and start to compete on features.
Two questions remain then "When will they figure this out?", and "Will it be too late for them?". Only time will tell.
Microsoft's cash reserves as of Dec 31, were 53 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, it is enough to "fund NASA for a year, assemble a fleet of 100 Boeing 747s, and buy every person in Seattle a 2004 Subaru Outback -- with a few billion left over for incidentals."
Math:
NASA's 2004 budget: $15.4 billion
A fleet of 100 Boeing 747-400s (at $215 million each at 2002 prices): $21.5 billion
A Subaru Outback (at $23,470 MSRP) for every person in Seattle (pop. 563,374 in 2000 census): $13.2 billion.
Depending on how well the Distribution creators handle this, this can be a blessing or a curse for Linux. Generally speaking, companies want equal or better features before they consider switching (equal, if price is the main concern - better, if it's not).
The long delay between releases will give Linux a chance to improve itself, and present a better alternative to Windows, with more features, better security, and a lower price.
However, this can also be a curse - MS is taking their sweet time, and this may be due to fixes, or it may simply be that they are developing stable, great features. If Microsoft releases a slew of new features which businesses find to be essential, Linux will once again be playing the "catch up" game.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next few years.
Ever heard of multithreading or parrellizing? It's quite possible to scan all 65,536 ports at once, resulting in a 1 second port scan. Take that, bitbucket.
As for the ebooks, I grabbed a bunch of the project gutenburg books, and converted them over. I probably still have them on my HD, if anyone wants them.
"And this is exactly what you're not allowed to do by releasing something under the GPL!".
Actually, if you are the copyright holder, you can do pretty much whatever you want, as the GPL is a license, and you don't have to license your own works.
Where the restrictions start to matter is when you use other people's code. However, there is nothing to stop you from doing something along the lines of using someone elses' code for a client-server application, using Palladium to ensure that only binaries built by you work, and releasing it fully open source. People can modify it according to the terms of the GPL, but it's fairly useless to do so. If anything, palladium can be used to violate the spirit of the GPL without violating the letter of it.
One advantage of a Linux-Based smartphone is that their software is often written with a slightly more "open" mentality (possibly because parts of it are under the GPL). I have found that it makes writing simple tools and utilities easer, when compared to (for example) a Windows CE based phone. This is kind of surprising, as I do most of my software development (for work) on windows.
As for my sig, it refers to home, not work. After all, commercial software is written for people willing to buy it.
I've found that the best way for me to review a distro is to grab people representative of a wide array of user groups (die-hard linux guys, people who have never touched a PC, and in between), and have different members of each group try out different OSes. The results are sometimes surprising.
For a research paper I did once, I made liberal use of VMWare to limit damage, and even had a couple technophobes compare the installation procedures for Gentoo, Redhat, and Mandrake. Unsurprisingly, nobody managed to get a gentoo install working, but much to my surprise, they found Mandrake "easier" and more "friendly" to install than RedHat.
I've actually given this a great deal of thought, and although I'm still rather young, I do have a contingency plan in place.
Every 6 months, I have a web site I must login to, or a mass e-mail is sent out. I have instructions for different family and friends to carry out, in the event of my untimely demise. These include open-sourcing some software I sell, how to access my online bank accounts, setting DNS on my domains to point to a page informing the visitors to my sites what happened, and informing my online acquantances about my death.
(Yes, the system will page me and email me after 3 months, as a reminder. I definatly don't want those messages going out before I die).
Access to hardware serial numbers can only be accomplished reliably using things like plugins and ActiveX. Besides the security implications, the long download time, the inability to target non-windows platforms, and the added cost involved, the installation dialogs can scare off some of the clueless masses, precisely the people they are trying to target.
By adding functionality to a PC emulator, anything that can be played can be decrypted. For hardware-stored encryption keys, it is slightly harder, but nonetheless doable. Once a key is obtained (and it will be), the only thing really necessary to keep the crack working is to disable watermarking. While this may not work for items downloaded off of the internet, pressed CDs/DVDs/etc will still work just fine. Removing the watermark is not too hard, as debugging the virtual machine can easily show any attempts to access the stored key.
While the growing of teeth is certainly an interesting and useful application of this technology, I personally would like to see how they handle connecting the nerves in the new teeth to the roots in the host.
Depending on how it's handled, it could possibly be applied to a number of other useful medical advances, such as helping repair nerve damage, prosthetic limbs, and spinal cord injuries.
"how would the copyright holder know that the downloads weren't legitimate and the original art wasn't owned in some form?" Because the movie is still in theaters?
"Moreover what the heck business is it of anyone to snoop on what I've been downloading." MGM, since it's their movie. As for the snooping, all they have to do is connect to the tracker - they get the same information every other user of the tracker does. They just handle it a little different.
"Where's the warrant? Where's the judicial process in all of this?" They don't need a warrant. The purpose of a warrant is to allow Law Enforcement officers to obtain access which is not normally available to them. In this case, your IP, and the file being transfered are publically visible. It's akin to you posting your IP in a bulletin board, and saying "here I am".
As for the judicial process, that is what comes next. They have reason to believe that you have infringed their rights, and are telling you to stop. If they believe that you are still infringing, they can take you to court, whose purpose is (among other things) to resolve disputes like this. At this point, due process occurs. There is nothing to stop people (and companies) from trying to resolve things peacfully , outside of court.
"Comcast,... it's none of your friking business." Actually, they are a _company_. Their business, like any other [publically owned] company, is to make money. Lawsuits are a risk, and they are attempting to reduce it, because the users in question are not worth the risk. Don't try to assign ethics to corporations, it's nice, but it's not their purpose. In fact, they can be sued (breach of fidicuary duty), for doing the right thing, instead of doing the money-making thing.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the copyright system, and would gladly do away with it. However, invalid arguments such as these do nothing to help the cause.
Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever
to start using Thunderbird!
New Default Theme on Mac OS X
The new Pinstripe theme fits in with the look of Mac OS X.
Improved Junk Mail Controls
The algorithm for the adaptive junk mail controls has been heavily redesigned
to learn faster and catch more spam.
New Brand Identity
To be consistent with the Mozilla Foudation's goal of brand identity,
Thunderbird has a new logo and supporting artwork thanks to the fine work of
the Mozilla Visual Identity team.
Other New Features...
IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows
the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it
arrives.
Thunderbird supports server-wide news filters that apply to all newsgroups on
a server.
Thunderbird includes Secure Password Authentication using a new
cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
Mail filters can now mark messages as junk.
Offline support is an optional download component in the Windows installer and is
no longer a separately-downloaded extension.
Mac OS X users now get new mail notification in the system dock.
The DOM Inspector is an optional download component in the Windows
installer for theme authors.
Tools > Options > Compose > HTML Options
allows you to set up default HTML compose options such as font, size and color.
Attachments can be opened directly from the compose window to verify their
contents before sending.
Thunderbird now supports the notion of multiple identities per mail account. This makes
it easy to have several e-mail addresses which end up going into the same
account. Read
More about how to set this up.
Recently Fixed Bugs
In the case of a failure when copying a message to an online Sent folder,
Thunderbird will now ask if you would like it to try again.
0.6 on Windows includes several improvements to Simple MAPI that allow it to
work with older versions of Microsoft Office.
Pasting data from an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet no longer pastes random HTML
garbage before the actual spreadsheet data into HTML compose.
Fixed several situations where LDAP connections were left open when using LDAP
auto complete or performing searches on LDAP directories.
Improved view source behavior.
Mail notification for POP3 messages that are marked deleted or marked read by
mail filters no longer occurs.
The "Mark All Read" keyboard shortcut now works for Linux GTK2.
My server (which I have easy access to if necessary) is on a GigE feed from the guys over at Level3. I have all the bandwidth I _need_ for "leet" warez.
My point is that it's a shame I can't access the content that _is_ there because my ISP doesn't carry it, and I was wondering if there was any content really worth having that I was missing.
According to the Linux Counter, Egypt has 2262 registered machines (with 156 registered users), or 2.26 users for every million people that live there. With a really low turnover, and half the people being actually getting linux installed, they could easily have enough people to quadruple the counter stats. Perhaps the organizers should invite people to Register.
Hmm - it seems to be available over the regular internet as well.
It would be nice if more ISPs (non-university) supported Internet2. I suspect that the profit margins are insufficient to justify it at this point in time though.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any good content, which happens to be Internet2-Specific (not found on the regular 'Net)?
I've held a couple of small-scale linux "Installfests" in the past, and the availability of CDs (and CD-Rom drives, in some cases) can certainly be an issue.
I found that many computers support Network Booting, which RedHat supports easily. While not every machine supports it, doing net installs on the machines that do frees up CD-ROM drives and CDs for the ones that don't.
While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.
Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.
Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.
I had a Camaro in the 70s, and compared to today's cars it was a total piece of garbage. It had dangerous handling, it broke down constantly, it was shoddily constructed, and chunks were falling off of it when it was only 8 years old.
Maybe a few cars from back then claimed more horsepower than what you can get today. (I kind of doubt it with cars like the Dodge Viper on the market). Keep in mind that horsepower numbers were inflated back then, and the drivetrains and suspensions were not capable of utilizing the horsepower that they had.
If you read any car magazine, there are plenty of aftermarket shops that do modify today's cars, and they manage to keep them legal as well.
While it would be nice if the eds checked the Last-Modified header, I still found this story to be interesting (well, the mirror anyway).
I personally had not seen this before, and enjoyed the "article". Not everyone has been to every site you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you've been trolled. I've gotten my karma up to excellent in a few days, with meaningless, stupid, groupthink drivel.
Thank you for playing.
While you are probably correct, there is the possibility that Microsoft is starting to learn it's lesson. Their IIS market share is dropping, Mozilla (and unfortunatly the neutered AOL version - Netscape) are taking back the users from IE, Linux is starting to actually see some desktop share, and OpenOffice is quickly becoming a viable alternative to MS Office.
They will probably just go "Time for more lock-in! Then our competitors can't beat us." It would certainly coinside with their history. However, they still exist to make money, and the odds say they have hired at least one person with a clue. At some point, they will realize they can't compete on price or monopoly, and start to compete on features.
Two questions remain then "When will they figure this out?", and "Will it be too late for them?". Only time will tell.
Microsoft's cash reserves as of Dec 31, were 53 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, it is enough to "fund NASA for a year, assemble a fleet of 100 Boeing 747s, and buy every person in Seattle a 2004 Subaru Outback -- with a few billion left over for incidentals."
Math:
Depending on how well the Distribution creators handle this, this can be a blessing or a curse for Linux. Generally speaking, companies want equal or better features before they consider switching (equal, if price is the main concern - better, if it's not).
The long delay between releases will give Linux a chance to improve itself, and present a better alternative to Windows, with more features, better security, and a lower price.
However, this can also be a curse - MS is taking their sweet time, and this may be due to fixes, or it may simply be that they are developing stable, great features. If Microsoft releases a slew of new features which businesses find to be essential, Linux will once again be playing the "catch up" game.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next few years.
Ever heard of multithreading or parrellizing? It's quite possible to scan all 65,536 ports at once, resulting in a 1 second port scan. Take that, bitbucket.
I actually found the Texas Instruments 92 (now the Voyage 200 to be quite good for reading e-books on, and the batteries can last quite some time.
All you need is the Ti Ebook Reader.
As for the ebooks, I grabbed a bunch of the project gutenburg books, and converted them over. I probably still have them on my HD, if anyone wants them.
If you don't trust the sysadmin, don't use the system.
For one thing, the sysadmin probably has physical access to the machine, in which he can backdoor (or whatever) almost anything he wants.
As for Windows, with physical access to the machine, it's trivial to change your password, do something evil as you, and change your password back.
For MacOSX, just mount the hard disk under linux (or what have you).
"And this is exactly what you're not allowed to do by releasing something under the GPL!".
Actually, if you are the copyright holder, you can do pretty much whatever you want, as the GPL is a license, and you don't have to license your own works.
Where the restrictions start to matter is when you use other people's code. However, there is nothing to stop you from doing something along the lines of using someone elses' code for a client-server application, using Palladium to ensure that only binaries built by you work, and releasing it fully open source. People can modify it according to the terms of the GPL, but it's fairly useless to do so. If anything, palladium can be used to violate the spirit of the GPL without violating the letter of it.
One advantage of a Linux-Based smartphone is that their software is often written with a slightly more "open" mentality (possibly because parts of it are under the GPL). I have found that it makes writing simple tools and utilities easer, when compared to (for example) a Windows CE based phone. This is kind of surprising, as I do most of my software development (for work) on windows.
As for my sig, it refers to home, not work. After all, commercial software is written for people willing to buy it.
I've found that the best way for me to review a distro is to grab people representative of a wide array of user groups (die-hard linux guys, people who have never touched a PC, and in between), and have different members of each group try out different OSes. The results are sometimes surprising.
For a research paper I did once, I made liberal use of VMWare to limit damage, and even had a couple technophobes compare the installation procedures for Gentoo, Redhat, and Mandrake. Unsurprisingly, nobody managed to get a gentoo install working, but much to my surprise, they found Mandrake "easier" and more "friendly" to install than RedHat.
Yes, the die hard linux guys preferred gentoo.
I've actually given this a great deal of thought, and although I'm still rather young, I do have a contingency plan in place.
Every 6 months, I have a web site I must login to, or a mass e-mail is sent out. I have instructions for different family and friends to carry out, in the event of my untimely demise. These include open-sourcing some software I sell, how to access my online bank accounts, setting DNS on my domains to point to a page informing the visitors to my sites what happened, and informing my online acquantances about my death.
(Yes, the system will page me and email me after 3 months, as a reminder. I definatly don't want those messages going out before I die).
Access to hardware serial numbers can only be accomplished reliably using things like plugins and ActiveX. Besides the security implications, the long download time, the inability to target non-windows platforms, and the added cost involved, the installation dialogs can scare off some of the clueless masses, precisely the people they are trying to target.
If it can be played, it can be cracked.
By adding functionality to a PC emulator, anything that can be played can be decrypted. For hardware-stored encryption keys, it is slightly harder, but nonetheless doable. Once a key is obtained (and it will be), the only thing really necessary to keep the crack working is to disable watermarking. While this may not work for items downloaded off of the internet, pressed CDs/DVDs/etc will still work just fine. Removing the watermark is not too hard, as debugging the virtual machine can easily show any attempts to access the stored key.
While the growing of teeth is certainly an interesting and useful application of this technology, I personally would like to see how they handle connecting the nerves in the new teeth to the roots in the host.
Depending on how it's handled, it could possibly be applied to a number of other useful medical advances, such as helping repair nerve damage, prosthetic limbs, and spinal cord injuries.
Aren't stem cells wonderful things?
"how would the copyright holder know that the downloads weren't legitimate and the original art wasn't owned in some form?"
... it's none of your friking business."
Because the movie is still in theaters?
"Moreover what the heck business is it of anyone to snoop on what I've been downloading."
MGM, since it's their movie. As for the snooping, all they have to do is connect to the tracker - they get the same information every other user of the tracker does. They just handle it a little different.
"Where's the warrant? Where's the judicial process in all of this?"
They don't need a warrant. The purpose of a warrant is to allow Law Enforcement officers to obtain access which is not normally available to them. In this case, your IP, and the file being transfered are publically visible. It's akin to you posting your IP in a bulletin board, and saying "here I am".
As for the judicial process, that is what comes next. They have reason to believe that you have infringed their rights, and are telling you to stop. If they believe that you are still infringing, they can take you to court, whose purpose is (among other things) to resolve disputes like this. At this point, due process occurs. There is nothing to stop people (and companies) from trying to resolve things peacfully , outside of court.
"Comcast,
Actually, they are a _company_. Their business, like any other [publically owned] company, is to make money. Lawsuits are a risk, and they are attempting to reduce it, because the users in question are not worth the risk. Don't try to assign ethics to corporations, it's nice, but it's not their purpose. In fact, they can be sued (breach of fidicuary duty), for doing the right thing, instead of doing the money-making thing.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the copyright system, and would gladly do away with it. However, invalid arguments such as these do nothing to help the cause.
Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever to start using Thunderbird!
The new Pinstripe theme fits in with the look of Mac OS X.
The algorithm for the adaptive junk mail controls has been heavily redesigned to learn faster and catch more spam.
To be consistent with the Mozilla Foudation's goal of brand identity, Thunderbird has a new logo and supporting artwork thanks to the fine work of the Mozilla Visual Identity team.
IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it arrives.
Thunderbird supports server-wide news filters that apply to all newsgroups on a server.
Thunderbird includes Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
Mail filters can now mark messages as junk.
Offline support is an optional download component in the Windows installer and is no longer a separately-downloaded extension.
Mac OS X users now get new mail notification in the system dock.
The DOM Inspector is an optional download component in the Windows installer for theme authors.
Tools > Options > Compose > HTML Options allows you to set up default HTML compose options such as font, size and color.
Attachments can be opened directly from the compose window to verify their contents before sending.
Thunderbird now supports the notion of multiple identities per mail account. This makes it easy to have several e-mail addresses which end up going into the same account. Read More about how to set this up.
In the case of a failure when copying a message to an online Sent folder, Thunderbird will now ask if you would like it to try again.
0.6 on Windows includes several improvements to Simple MAPI that allow it to work with older versions of Microsoft Office.
Pasting data from an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet no longer pastes random HTML garbage before the actual spreadsheet data into HTML compose.
Fixed several situations where LDAP connections were left open when using LDAP auto complete or performing searches on LDAP directories.
Improved view source behavior.
Mail notification for POP3 messages that are marked deleted or marked read by mail filters no longer occurs.
The "Mark All Read" keyboard shortcut now works for Linux GTK2.
My server (which I have easy access to if necessary) is on a GigE feed from the guys over at Level3. I have all the bandwidth I _need_ for "leet" warez.
My point is that it's a shame I can't access the content that _is_ there because my ISP doesn't carry it, and I was wondering if there was any content really worth having that I was missing.
According to the Linux Counter, Egypt has 2262 registered machines (with 156 registered users), or 2.26 users for every million people that live there. With a really low turnover, and half the people being actually getting linux installed, they could easily have enough people to quadruple the counter stats. Perhaps the organizers should invite people to Register.
With 3 more users, they could pass nepal.
Hmm - it seems to be available over the regular internet as well.
It would be nice if more ISPs (non-university) supported Internet2. I suspect that the profit margins are insufficient to justify it at this point in time though.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any good content, which happens to be Internet2-Specific (not found on the regular 'Net)?
Not really. However, I did think that the picture could really have benefited from the "Auto Levels" or "Auto Contrast" features of photoshop.
No CDs? Why not Net Install?
I've held a couple of small-scale linux "Installfests" in the past, and the availability of CDs (and CD-Rom drives, in some cases) can certainly be an issue.
I found that many computers support Network Booting, which RedHat supports easily. While not every machine supports it, doing net installs on the machines that do frees up CD-ROM drives and CDs for the ones that don't.
While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.
Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.
Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.
I had a Camaro in the 70s, and compared to today's cars it was a total piece of garbage. It had dangerous handling, it broke down constantly, it was shoddily constructed, and chunks were falling off of it when it was only 8 years old.
Maybe a few cars from back then claimed more horsepower than what you can get today. (I kind of doubt it with cars like the Dodge Viper on the market). Keep in mind that horsepower numbers were inflated back then, and the drivetrains and suspensions were not capable of utilizing the horsepower that they had.
If you read any car magazine, there are plenty of aftermarket shops that do modify today's cars, and they manage to keep them legal as well.
While it would be nice if the eds checked the Last-Modified header, I still found this story to be interesting (well, the mirror anyway). I personally had not seen this before, and enjoyed the "article". Not everyone has been to every site you have.