It took them +-5 years to rewrite the whole OS and it's only an incremental advance over the last release? I've never worked at a software company where something like that wouldn't get a few teams fired. At least if they argued that the changes were necessary to make future versions more stable, secure, and easier to add new functionality to then I could see it as a justification for only incremental advancement. But they're writing a new version of Windows for the next release too (MinWin or WinMin or whatever their codename for the kernel is--personally I don't know why they don't just call it DarWin and be honest for once about who they've been copying on-and-off for the past 20 years).
I had a similar experience last spring. I purchased a sack of manure from the gardening wholesaler and when I got home and opened the bag it was full of F# documentation.
Not sure how you got an optional update, but for the past few days every morning when I come in and login at work I get the "Your computer needs to restart" dialog popping up every 10 minutes. Yesterday I finally did restart only to find Windows search in my taskbar. I immediately uninstalled it, only to find this morning it was there again. It may be optional for you, but then again your network might not have automatic network-wide updates configured.
Until Ubuntu or whatever distro user can do every single thing in the GUI that they can do through the CLI, Window will have an advantage. MS writes Windows with a GUI in mind from the ground up. Linux is designed to work with or without a GUI. On rare occasion, such as the one you listed here, there will be an absolute need to use the CLI in Linux. Some people just can't handle that.
What is so different about computers as tools that makes people so damned lazy? Refusing to learn the basics of the command-line is like wanting to own a car but refusing to learn how to pump gas or refill the antifreeze. Sure it's messy, but 1) it doesn't take that long to pick up; 2) although at first it may seem like it because you don't know anything about the subject, you're not actually expected to delve deep into the mechanics of how everything works; and 3) you feel better afterwards for having gained the knowledge. People who claim that the "average" user isn't capable of learning these things obviously is too young or willfully forgetful of the DOS days when everyone's middle-aged neighbour knew the obscure control-code combinations that were required to do anything useful in applications like Wordperfect or Lotus 1-2-3. The fact is, these people haven't become less intelligent since then--just spoiled and expecting everything to be simple and done with buttons and checkboxes. The end result is having to click through those same 400 buttons and 100 checkboxes with puzzling prompts that you don't quite understand just so you can do something that could be done from the command-line in a fraction of the time. You honestly consider that a step forward? Is that the kind of progress I can look forward to from all the Computer Science geniuses graduating in the States who Microsoft gobbles up and puts to work on taking some existing idea and slapping some extra options dialogs onto it? No thanks.
People with that mindset sort of reminded me of some coworkers of mine who seriously prefer using a mouse with VisualAssist to autocomplete C++ code that would take them a few milliseconds to type out manually. A few minutes later and they're still working on that one statement. I'm sure it's a doozy, but meanwhile they could've already been finished if they stopped for a moment and considered whether or not pointing and clicking at things is always a good idea. Then again they tend to be the fellows who come to work dressed in "MICROSOFT C# - Born 2 Code YEAAAAHHH!!!" t-shirts and garbage like that and wonder why half my development environment is crap I had to hand-port to Cygwin just to maintain some kind of sanity and patience when using MSVC. In a word, the reason is because things that should be relatively simple, like creating an empty header file and adding it to a project, end up taking about 45 seconds through Visual Studio's GUI. Yes, that's certainly a step forward over writing a shell script to `touch` and insert a line into a Makefile.
To sum up my thoughts: it's just a perception of greater ease-of-use and efficiency--it doesn't translate well into real productivity. In fact, I've found that most of the improvements to efficiency and maintenance in the workplace have come about by taking some job that I would otherwise have to sit at my desk with the mouse clicking through dialogs and automating it with the command-line.
By the way, the whole fantasy about Windows not needing a command-line and everything can be done from the GUI? Take away the command shell on the computer of a Windows system/network administrator and see if he doesn't punch you right in the face.
No problems with Vista that are Microsoft's fault? I've got one for you:
Try connecting to DB2 in Vista with ODBC and use transactions. You'll be in for a pleasant surprise when the application you're using explodes in your face setting the connection handle's autocommit option. What's the problem? Microsoft's ODBC driver manager throws a null pointer exception. Does it happen in XP? Not at all. When does Microsoft plan to fix it? Your guess is as good as mine. Then again, who uses DB2 or needs transactions?
Another thing: your average consumer wants to know they can walk into the local computer store, and the software they purchase will run.
If their software is so reliable, why do you need to help them with their computers for "over a decade?" Oh, wait, that was approximately when Windows 95 came out, wasn't it? Interesting.
Sincerely,
A FreeBSD fanboy and recent Macbook appreciator who is forced to use XP Pro SP2 with Visual Studio every day at work and wonders why a dual core machine with 4gb of RAM runs like ass after 4 hours of uptime.
There's only one way to find out. I sent an e-mail to hazelton@wikiversity.edu to verify if he's a real professor. If I don't get a response in the next week I'm going to call the Dean of Wikademics and complain about someone impersonating a faculty member.
A PC using that board would be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second, the company said. Jesus Christ. Only 30 minutes for a HD full-length movie? Someone find out where IBM is downloading its torrents.
If FreeBSD is easy enough for my computer-hating wife, it has to be good enough for the public. It took her about 15 minutes to remember the commands "startx" and "reboot -p." Am I missing out on all those fantastic Linux binary only programs? No, because I can run 99% of them anyway with no performance penalty. Hell, I'm using a Linux version of Firefox as we speak because Macromedia are douchebags that won't release a Flash plugin for FreeBSD (I'm also thoroughly enjoying my Adobe plugin and my Java plugin; kudos to the Linux community for badgering support out of those two so it could trickle down to the other OSs they're too lazy to support). Not to mention updating a generic kernel, the modules, and the userland is as easy as typing "freebsd-update fetch && freebsd-update install" and rebooting. Oh, and the fact that when GPLv3 comes along I won't have to pretend that it affects me in any way.
Stop me if I sound crazy, but why doesn't Dell just open the floor to the highest bidder? They don't want to lose all that sweet Windows preinstalled shitware money, right? So fire off a letter to Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, et al, saying: "This is your chance. This is your big opportunity to put your foot in the door and sell Linux to the masses. You're the ones winning, not us. We can go on selling Vista or whatever Microsoft excretes afterwards and continue buying limousines to carry our Picassos home. You can't. What does that mean? It means we'll preinstall your distro instead of the other guy's in exchange for free support for six months and zz% of the $xx.xx we are losing on the shitware." I doubt Ubuntu would be willing or could give up that kind of cash, but I'm certain Novell and Red Hat would be emailing offers to Dell the next day. And as other people have mentioned, the plus would be that if it works on one distro it'll work on any other using the same kernel version (or I assume greater).
Oh, and as much as I love FreeBSD and use it as my only operating system, it is by no means going to be a contender for Dell. Maybe in my bubblegum waterfall fantasy land that might happen, but after I wake up and stumble across the beer-soaked floor to the bathroom mirror, I'll realise Dell is only going to choose between SuSE and Red Hat. They're both similar to that guy in school who always wore a suit and carried a briefcase to class and seemed like an asshole but was predictable and knew a lot. Ubuntu is the fat kid who was kind of funny to hang out with everyday but probably wouldn't be someone you could rely on if you were really in trouble. BTW, I meant no offense to the tons of fat kids on Slashdot. I was one of you fifteen years ago.
I think the printer is actually an underappreciated device in the whole "switch off Windows" game. Most of the focus tends to be on graphics cards, storage devices, etc., but there are a lot of printers that still have closed drivers. One of the reasons I still have a computer running Windows in the other room is because I didn't feel like buying and hoping TurboPrint for Linux would run on FreeBSD in order to support a Canon MP110 copier/scanner/printer that I lack the funds to replace. By the way, the guy in the article seemed kind of harsh and blamed Linux for the lack of printer support. That's not where the blame belongs. And watching the video of his desktop with him narrating, you'd think after 30 days he'd have learned to pronounce "Linux" correctly.
By the way, he probably did his best to avoid getting hardware that a simple Google search would pop up a billion complaints for. He did say in his "rules" in the beginning that he wasn't going to go into the test blindly. Criticizing his report for being unrealistic just because he checked that he'd at least have minimal hardware support is like criticizing someone for running Microsoft's hardware checker utility before installing Vista. Realistically, people are going to make at least a medium amount of effort ensuring their system meets the recommended requirements before plunging into changing operating systems and the potentially expensive costs that they could incur. Maybe that's not "realistic" but it's certainly common sense.
Siemens' image database is a nightmare. I just order components through catalogues now rather than try to swim through what they call a web-application. You didn't make that, did you? By the way, this probably shouldn't happen when someone types in random shit out of frustration that the site has frames but reloads the entire page every click regardless:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e14'
Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '('.
/bilddb/content.asp, line 341 Passing chars for numbers in the GET variable nodeID returns an error like "nvchar cannot be converted to an int." Shouldn't the script be handling those kind of errors instead of trusting Microsoft to do it properly? I can't imagine a huge company like Siemens is printing errors you'd expect to see in some guy's undergrad homework slash PHP messageboard software.
I think he meant public, not republic. There are a handful of typos in the deposition. It sort of looks like the after-effects of a TTS synthesizer in some places (i.e. words have no sense in the context of the sentence but are very similar to something that would make sense in context and only off by a few letters). He's admitting that if a router were connected to the internet that there's nothing stopping someone from having a number of other routers, bridges, switches, etc. behind it, but it is his opinion that there is no router because the P2P network or any other outside party would have to be able to address a computer behind the router running Kazaa and it was never given such an address when Kazaa established the link. It's true that if I go to a computer store and buy a router from Netgear or whatever then that is how it is handled. But what is also possible, and what I think the end of the deposition was establishing, is that if the computer of the woman were infected and just receiving and sending packets and then forwarding them to and from another computer which was abusing that infection, it could be used as a proxy for file sharing. In that case it would indeed be acting as a kind of routing device, but to the Internet at large all of the communication would appear to be coming solely from her PC. As a very simple example, say I write a program that opens two sockets, one to my computer and one to yours and I install this program on your grandfather's computer and it runs in the background and your grandfather never has any idea it's there. Now when this connection to my computer is established, I send data from my computer to your grandfather, and the program on your grandfather's computer then sends whatever data it receives to your computer. And vice versa, whenever the program in your grandfather's computer receives data from your computer, it sends it to my computer. If the analyst for the RIAA went and looked at your grandfather's hard drive and network logs from your computer, he would only be able to determine that there was traffic between the two. He would not have any reason to believe I was ever involved unless he stumbled upon the program I installed. But as he admitted in the deposition, he never bothered to look for anything like that. If it were there, of course he would think there was no router between your grandfather's computer and yours--because in reality your grandfather's computer would be the router. One would think that as part of his investigation he could've bothered to spend ten minutes at least running a virus scanner. But of course if anything turned up it would mean the RIAA had wasted countless dollars and man-hours and he would probably not be asked to investigate for them anymore.
There is a difference between doing something positive and succeeding in one's efforts. Someone who works in a soup kitchen feeding the homeless is doing something positive. They aren't ending homelessness, but that doesn't make what they do pointless.
If you read the timeline of the EFF here, you'll find their "wins" and "losses." Most of the time they seem to just be writing friend of the court briefs rather than being directly involved in the case, so it's difficult to accurately claim they lose a lot in court.
I fix quite a few PCs of coworkers and friends of coworkers for extra money and usually the #1 problem is that the computer is running Windows 98, full of viruses, adware, and all kinds of other crap, and they were under the false impression that the OEM version of Norton that came with their computer 9+ years ago is still protecting them (well, it is, but only from viruses prior to the last definition list). Surprise surprise the last time the virus database was updated was maybe 5 or more years ago. So there are non-technical people with freeware on their computer, even freeware virus products--they're just so nontechnical that they have no idea what got installed, what it does, but are nevertheless afraid to disable it because if they fuck something up they have to pay me again to fix it. I will agree that for many people the fear that they didn't pay for something causes them to become suspicious. My father-in-law went out and spent an assload on MS Office XP just so he can look at e-mail attachments because he was under the assumption that the OpenOffice install I put on his computer for him was doing something illegal and would get him in trouble by opening.doc and.xls files created in Word and Excel. I guess if you have a few hundred euros to waste pointlessly then that's your business, not mine.
I think the grandparent was referring to this rather than saying the phrase didn't appear at all until the 50s:
A law was passed by the 84th United States Congress (P.L. 84-140) and approved by the President on July 30, 1956. The President approved a joint resolution declaring In God We Trust the national motto of the United States. In God We Trust was first used on paper money in 1957 when it appeared on the one-dollar Silver Certificate. The first paper currency bearing the motto entered circulation on October 1, 1957. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) was converting to the dry intaglio printing process. During this conversion, it gradually included In God We Trust in the back design of all classes and denominations of currency.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust Here's another explanation from the US Treasury Department. I see no mention of slavery anywhere in it, but plenty of religious blah-blah about heathens and Christianity: http://www.treas.gov/education/fact-sheets/currenc y/in-god-we-trust.html
I too am a little surprised by how harsh some people here have been to this guy. A certain amount of joke-making is expected, and some of the jokes are funny, but other posts here are just hate-filled examples of pure douchebaggery that beg some sort of psychoanalysis. At least give him credit for thinking he had done something important and new and having the decency to (however illegitimately) try and apply the GPL to his idea instead of having little money symbols glaze his eyes over. Yeah, he hasn't done anything groundbreaking, but cut him some slack. As soon as he realises his algorithm isn't 100% original he's going to feel pretty stupid and embarrassed. Don't make it worse in some sort of pathetic attempt to make yourself feel marginally superior. This isn't gym class.
Okay, it wasn't that great, but you already took the obvious ones. It was very Strauss-ful coming up with new ones. Nonsense. If you try hard you can come up with a pretty big Liszt. Now get Bizet.
I have a strange question: why is the article he supposedly took a screenshot from dated September 29th, 2006, but the calendar for the archive of posts is February 2007? I thought perhaps the calendar in this software might display the current month regardless of which post you're reading, but if you look at this link to the author of the programme's own site, here, you'll see that the calendar does indeed change with the post you're reading. Which means the article on the MPAA blog is supposedly from over 3 months ago but the calendar is showing this month. Either the screencap is faked, the web admin who set up the software doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, or the software needs work. There's also no mention of the blog ever being there in Google or the Internet Archive despite the former surely having a copy and the latter already having an index of tens of thousands of pages from the MPAA site, and not a single one of them matching a search for this blog. Maybe the guy just wants to do some viral marketing, maybe he supports the MPAA philosophically and wants a bunch of overhyped, gullible nerds to get upset so he can make them look foolish later. Or maybe it is legitimate and he just happens to have stumbled upon the site, the link just happens to be taken down, and all mention of it from the face of the Internet has disappeared forever. That seems really likely.
You see the same thing on any real newspaper story about a company with which the newspaper itself has a conflict of interest. It's called responsibly providing all the facts up front in an honest way. Technically it would be more annoying if this was followed more thoroughly, i.e. any story on Slashdot that had to do with closed-source software also disclosing at the end that Slashdot is owned by an open-source organisation and therefore has a possible conflict of interest. Then again it's just a tech website, not CNN or The Guardian or something like that.
AFAIK, they have to be the name of an animal and sound like a character from some sort of terrible children's tv programme. Pernicious Penguin, Whistling Wallaby, Heretical Hermit Crab, Frugal Ferret, Balanced Budgie, and so on. Although I'd like to see a future 3d desktop release called Toucan Playatthatgame.
Why don't you save yourself some time and just get a Wikipedia search bar for your browser? I used to do the same thing, but got tired of going through a Google search just to wind up clicking on the Wikipedia entry link anyway. Might as well spare yourself the extra steps and have a direct Wikipedia search in the corner of your browser window.
Ari David Levie, who was convicted of taking illegal photographs of a nude 9-year-old girl, argued on appeal that the PGP encryption utility on his computer was irrelevant and should not have been admitted as evidence during his trial. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is sold by PGP Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
But the Minnesota appeals court ruled 3-0 that the trial judge was correct to let that information be used when handing down a guilty verdict. And here's the relevant paragraph from the appeals court decision itself:
Evidence of appellant's computer usage and the presence of an encryption program on his computer was relevant to the state's case. We affirm the district court's evidentiary rulings.
I would say "encryption deemed criminal intent" is more of an interpretation by Internet journalists of the ruling than what was actually said. But it is true that if you are on trial for a crime in Minnesota, there's a precedent for the mere fact that you have PGP software on your computer to be used against you as evidence for the prosecution--despite the prosecutor's witness himself saying that PGP capable software is already available in OSX.
I find his claim of fearing for his life just as unfounded as the "threats" used to convict him; It's not like there are huge scientology gangs in prisons. That's because most celebrities get sentenced to drug rehab facilities when they commit crimes. Let's just hope Mr. Henson doesn't develop an addiction and get shivved in pottery class with a Pellegrino shard. I can already see Kirstie Alley ordering an extra large black ninja costume.
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It took them +-5 years to rewrite the whole OS and it's only an incremental advance over the last release? I've never worked at a software company where something like that wouldn't get a few teams fired. At least if they argued that the changes were necessary to make future versions more stable, secure, and easier to add new functionality to then I could see it as a justification for only incremental advancement. But they're writing a new version of Windows for the next release too (MinWin or WinMin or whatever their codename for the kernel is--personally I don't know why they don't just call it DarWin and be honest for once about who they've been copying on-and-off for the past 20 years).
I had a similar experience last spring. I purchased a sack of manure from the gardening wholesaler and when I got home and opened the bag it was full of F# documentation.
Not sure how you got an optional update, but for the past few days every morning when I come in and login at work I get the "Your computer needs to restart" dialog popping up every 10 minutes. Yesterday I finally did restart only to find Windows search in my taskbar. I immediately uninstalled it, only to find this morning it was there again. It may be optional for you, but then again your network might not have automatic network-wide updates configured.
Until Ubuntu or whatever distro user can do every single thing in the GUI that they can do through the CLI, Window will have an advantage. MS writes Windows with a GUI in mind from the ground up. Linux is designed to work with or without a GUI. On rare occasion, such as the one you listed here, there will be an absolute need to use the CLI in Linux. Some people just can't handle that.
What is so different about computers as tools that makes people so damned lazy? Refusing to learn the basics of the command-line is like wanting to own a car but refusing to learn how to pump gas or refill the antifreeze. Sure it's messy, but 1) it doesn't take that long to pick up; 2) although at first it may seem like it because you don't know anything about the subject, you're not actually expected to delve deep into the mechanics of how everything works; and 3) you feel better afterwards for having gained the knowledge. People who claim that the "average" user isn't capable of learning these things obviously is too young or willfully forgetful of the DOS days when everyone's middle-aged neighbour knew the obscure control-code combinations that were required to do anything useful in applications like Wordperfect or Lotus 1-2-3. The fact is, these people haven't become less intelligent since then--just spoiled and expecting everything to be simple and done with buttons and checkboxes. The end result is having to click through those same 400 buttons and 100 checkboxes with puzzling prompts that you don't quite understand just so you can do something that could be done from the command-line in a fraction of the time. You honestly consider that a step forward? Is that the kind of progress I can look forward to from all the Computer Science geniuses graduating in the States who Microsoft gobbles up and puts to work on taking some existing idea and slapping some extra options dialogs onto it? No thanks.
People with that mindset sort of reminded me of some coworkers of mine who seriously prefer using a mouse with VisualAssist to autocomplete C++ code that would take them a few milliseconds to type out manually. A few minutes later and they're still working on that one statement. I'm sure it's a doozy, but meanwhile they could've already been finished if they stopped for a moment and considered whether or not pointing and clicking at things is always a good idea. Then again they tend to be the fellows who come to work dressed in "MICROSOFT C# - Born 2 Code YEAAAAHHH!!!" t-shirts and garbage like that and wonder why half my development environment is crap I had to hand-port to Cygwin just to maintain some kind of sanity and patience when using MSVC. In a word, the reason is because things that should be relatively simple, like creating an empty header file and adding it to a project, end up taking about 45 seconds through Visual Studio's GUI. Yes, that's certainly a step forward over writing a shell script to `touch` and insert a line into a Makefile.
To sum up my thoughts: it's just a perception of greater ease-of-use and efficiency--it doesn't translate well into real productivity. In fact, I've found that most of the improvements to efficiency and maintenance in the workplace have come about by taking some job that I would otherwise have to sit at my desk with the mouse clicking through dialogs and automating it with the command-line.
By the way, the whole fantasy about Windows not needing a command-line and everything can be done from the GUI? Take away the command shell on the computer of a Windows system/network administrator and see if he doesn't punch you right in the face.
No problems with Vista that are Microsoft's fault? I've got one for you:
Try connecting to DB2 in Vista with ODBC and use transactions. You'll be in for a pleasant surprise when the application you're using explodes in your face setting the connection handle's autocommit option. What's the problem? Microsoft's ODBC driver manager throws a null pointer exception. Does it happen in XP? Not at all. When does Microsoft plan to fix it? Your guess is as good as mine. Then again, who uses DB2 or needs transactions?
Another thing: your average consumer wants to know they can walk into the local computer store, and the software they purchase will run.
If their software is so reliable, why do you need to help them with their computers for "over a decade?" Oh, wait, that was approximately when Windows 95 came out, wasn't it? Interesting.
Sincerely,
A FreeBSD fanboy and recent Macbook appreciator who is forced to use XP Pro SP2 with Visual Studio every day at work and wonders why a dual core machine with 4gb of RAM runs like ass after 4 hours of uptime.
ok, you Lisp nerds are hereby officially banned from posting any more comments to Slashdot.
There's only one way to find out. I sent an e-mail to hazelton@wikiversity.edu to verify if he's a real professor. If I don't get a response in the next week I'm going to call the Dean of Wikademics and complain about someone impersonating a faculty member.
Now all we need is to figure out a way to get Yarro to open Firefox in the bathtub.
If FreeBSD is easy enough for my computer-hating wife, it has to be good enough for the public. It took her about 15 minutes to remember the commands "startx" and "reboot -p." Am I missing out on all those fantastic Linux binary only programs? No, because I can run 99% of them anyway with no performance penalty. Hell, I'm using a Linux version of Firefox as we speak because Macromedia are douchebags that won't release a Flash plugin for FreeBSD (I'm also thoroughly enjoying my Adobe plugin and my Java plugin; kudos to the Linux community for badgering support out of those two so it could trickle down to the other OSs they're too lazy to support). Not to mention updating a generic kernel, the modules, and the userland is as easy as typing "freebsd-update fetch && freebsd-update install" and rebooting. Oh, and the fact that when GPLv3 comes along I won't have to pretend that it affects me in any way.
Stop me if I sound crazy, but why doesn't Dell just open the floor to the highest bidder? They don't want to lose all that sweet Windows preinstalled shitware money, right? So fire off a letter to Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, et al, saying: "This is your chance. This is your big opportunity to put your foot in the door and sell Linux to the masses. You're the ones winning, not us. We can go on selling Vista or whatever Microsoft excretes afterwards and continue buying limousines to carry our Picassos home. You can't. What does that mean? It means we'll preinstall your distro instead of the other guy's in exchange for free support for six months and zz% of the $xx.xx we are losing on the shitware." I doubt Ubuntu would be willing or could give up that kind of cash, but I'm certain Novell and Red Hat would be emailing offers to Dell the next day. And as other people have mentioned, the plus would be that if it works on one distro it'll work on any other using the same kernel version (or I assume greater).
Oh, and as much as I love FreeBSD and use it as my only operating system, it is by no means going to be a contender for Dell. Maybe in my bubblegum waterfall fantasy land that might happen, but after I wake up and stumble across the beer-soaked floor to the bathroom mirror, I'll realise Dell is only going to choose between SuSE and Red Hat. They're both similar to that guy in school who always wore a suit and carried a briefcase to class and seemed like an asshole but was predictable and knew a lot. Ubuntu is the fat kid who was kind of funny to hang out with everyday but probably wouldn't be someone you could rely on if you were really in trouble. BTW, I meant no offense to the tons of fat kids on Slashdot. I was one of you fifteen years ago.
I think the printer is actually an underappreciated device in the whole "switch off Windows" game. Most of the focus tends to be on graphics cards, storage devices, etc., but there are a lot of printers that still have closed drivers. One of the reasons I still have a computer running Windows in the other room is because I didn't feel like buying and hoping TurboPrint for Linux would run on FreeBSD in order to support a Canon MP110 copier/scanner/printer that I lack the funds to replace. By the way, the guy in the article seemed kind of harsh and blamed Linux for the lack of printer support. That's not where the blame belongs. And watching the video of his desktop with him narrating, you'd think after 30 days he'd have learned to pronounce "Linux" correctly.
By the way, he probably did his best to avoid getting hardware that a simple Google search would pop up a billion complaints for. He did say in his "rules" in the beginning that he wasn't going to go into the test blindly. Criticizing his report for being unrealistic just because he checked that he'd at least have minimal hardware support is like criticizing someone for running Microsoft's hardware checker utility before installing Vista. Realistically, people are going to make at least a medium amount of effort ensuring their system meets the recommended requirements before plunging into changing operating systems and the potentially expensive costs that they could incur. Maybe that's not "realistic" but it's certainly common sense.
Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '('.
I think he meant public, not republic. There are a handful of typos in the deposition. It sort of looks like the after-effects of a TTS synthesizer in some places (i.e. words have no sense in the context of the sentence but are very similar to something that would make sense in context and only off by a few letters). He's admitting that if a router were connected to the internet that there's nothing stopping someone from having a number of other routers, bridges, switches, etc. behind it, but it is his opinion that there is no router because the P2P network or any other outside party would have to be able to address a computer behind the router running Kazaa and it was never given such an address when Kazaa established the link. It's true that if I go to a computer store and buy a router from Netgear or whatever then that is how it is handled. But what is also possible, and what I think the end of the deposition was establishing, is that if the computer of the woman were infected and just receiving and sending packets and then forwarding them to and from another computer which was abusing that infection, it could be used as a proxy for file sharing. In that case it would indeed be acting as a kind of routing device, but to the Internet at large all of the communication would appear to be coming solely from her PC. As a very simple example, say I write a program that opens two sockets, one to my computer and one to yours and I install this program on your grandfather's computer and it runs in the background and your grandfather never has any idea it's there. Now when this connection to my computer is established, I send data from my computer to your grandfather, and the program on your grandfather's computer then sends whatever data it receives to your computer. And vice versa, whenever the program in your grandfather's computer receives data from your computer, it sends it to my computer. If the analyst for the RIAA went and looked at your grandfather's hard drive and network logs from your computer, he would only be able to determine that there was traffic between the two. He would not have any reason to believe I was ever involved unless he stumbled upon the program I installed. But as he admitted in the deposition, he never bothered to look for anything like that. If it were there, of course he would think there was no router between your grandfather's computer and yours--because in reality your grandfather's computer would be the router. One would think that as part of his investigation he could've bothered to spend ten minutes at least running a virus scanner. But of course if anything turned up it would mean the RIAA had wasted countless dollars and man-hours and he would probably not be asked to investigate for them anymore.
There is a difference between doing something positive and succeeding in one's efforts. Someone who works in a soup kitchen feeding the homeless is doing something positive. They aren't ending homelessness, but that doesn't make what they do pointless. If you read the timeline of the EFF here, you'll find their "wins" and "losses." Most of the time they seem to just be writing friend of the court briefs rather than being directly involved in the case, so it's difficult to accurately claim they lose a lot in court.
I fix quite a few PCs of coworkers and friends of coworkers for extra money and usually the #1 problem is that the computer is running Windows 98, full of viruses, adware, and all kinds of other crap, and they were under the false impression that the OEM version of Norton that came with their computer 9+ years ago is still protecting them (well, it is, but only from viruses prior to the last definition list). Surprise surprise the last time the virus database was updated was maybe 5 or more years ago. So there are non-technical people with freeware on their computer, even freeware virus products--they're just so nontechnical that they have no idea what got installed, what it does, but are nevertheless afraid to disable it because if they fuck something up they have to pay me again to fix it. I will agree that for many people the fear that they didn't pay for something causes them to become suspicious. My father-in-law went out and spent an assload on MS Office XP just so he can look at e-mail attachments because he was under the assumption that the OpenOffice install I put on his computer for him was doing something illegal and would get him in trouble by opening .doc and .xls files created in Word and Excel. I guess if you have a few hundred euros to waste pointlessly then that's your business, not mine.
I too am a little surprised by how harsh some people here have been to this guy. A certain amount of joke-making is expected, and some of the jokes are funny, but other posts here are just hate-filled examples of pure douchebaggery that beg some sort of psychoanalysis. At least give him credit for thinking he had done something important and new and having the decency to (however illegitimately) try and apply the GPL to his idea instead of having little money symbols glaze his eyes over. Yeah, he hasn't done anything groundbreaking, but cut him some slack. As soon as he realises his algorithm isn't 100% original he's going to feel pretty stupid and embarrassed. Don't make it worse in some sort of pathetic attempt to make yourself feel marginally superior. This isn't gym class.
I have a strange question: why is the article he supposedly took a screenshot from dated September 29th, 2006, but the calendar for the archive of posts is February 2007? I thought perhaps the calendar in this software might display the current month regardless of which post you're reading, but if you look at this link to the author of the programme's own site, here, you'll see that the calendar does indeed change with the post you're reading. Which means the article on the MPAA blog is supposedly from over 3 months ago but the calendar is showing this month. Either the screencap is faked, the web admin who set up the software doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, or the software needs work. There's also no mention of the blog ever being there in Google or the Internet Archive despite the former surely having a copy and the latter already having an index of tens of thousands of pages from the MPAA site, and not a single one of them matching a search for this blog. Maybe the guy just wants to do some viral marketing, maybe he supports the MPAA philosophically and wants a bunch of overhyped, gullible nerds to get upset so he can make them look foolish later. Or maybe it is legitimate and he just happens to have stumbled upon the site, the link just happens to be taken down, and all mention of it from the face of the Internet has disappeared forever. That seems really likely.
You see the same thing on any real newspaper story about a company with which the newspaper itself has a conflict of interest. It's called responsibly providing all the facts up front in an honest way. Technically it would be more annoying if this was followed more thoroughly, i.e. any story on Slashdot that had to do with closed-source software also disclosing at the end that Slashdot is owned by an open-source organisation and therefore has a possible conflict of interest. Then again it's just a tech website, not CNN or The Guardian or something like that.
AFAIK, they have to be the name of an animal and sound like a character from some sort of terrible children's tv programme. Pernicious Penguin, Whistling Wallaby, Heretical Hermit Crab, Frugal Ferret, Balanced Budgie, and so on. Although I'd like to see a future 3d desktop release called Toucan Playatthatgame.
Why don't you save yourself some time and just get a Wikipedia search bar for your browser? I used to do the same thing, but got tired of going through a Google search just to wind up clicking on the Wikipedia entry link anyway. Might as well spare yourself the extra steps and have a direct Wikipedia search in the corner of your browser window.
& x=0&y=0&scope=all
u sing+internet+explorer&btnG=Google+Search
For Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/search-engines.php
For Opera:
http://widgets.opera.com/search/?search=wikipedia
For Internet Explorer:
http://www.google.com/search?q=help+me+i'm+still+
http://news.com.com/Minnesota+court+takes+dim+vie
A brief excerpt:
Ari David Levie, who was convicted of taking illegal photographs of a nude 9-year-old girl, argued on appeal that the PGP encryption utility on his computer was irrelevant and should not have been admitted as evidence during his trial. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is sold by PGP Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
But the Minnesota appeals court ruled 3-0 that the trial judge was correct to let that information be used when handing down a guilty verdict. And here's the relevant paragraph from the appeals court decision itself:
Evidence of appellant's computer usage and the presence of an encryption program on his computer was relevant to the state's case. We affirm the district court's evidentiary rulings.
I would say "encryption deemed criminal intent" is more of an interpretation by Internet journalists of the ruling than what was actually said. But it is true that if you are on trial for a crime in Minnesota, there's a precedent for the mere fact that you have PGP software on your computer to be used against you as evidence for the prosecution--despite the prosecutor's witness himself saying that PGP capable software is already available in OSX.
Even if they get locked up they shouldn't be too hard to find. The radix doesn't fall far from the tree, after all.