Oh, I get it now - Google can put up ads as long as they're in self defense, right? Er, as long as they didn't mean to? Um... they can put up ads as long as it's not... motivated by hate... errrr...
That would be true if the code were unmodified versions of GPL'd code, but glancing through the two helper EXEs (spcplink.exe and spcwinv.exe) reveals quite a few references that look like they might be directly pulled from VNC or OpenSSH. Interestingly enough, these two helper apps are written in Visual C++, while the main app is written in VB6.
Whereas GotoMyPC is a serious business with a vested interest in keeping users' machines secure, this site has no such commitments, and as such it seems like a pretty bad idea to use it without being able to check the source code. Potential GPL violations aside, a significant reason that we need the source is to confirm that it does what they say it does. Without it, who knows what backdoors they could be offering; it's especially concerning since it's specifically designed to penetrate firewalls. Beware!
Did anyone else see Terminator 3? They predicted this "Storm" virus. It was only a matter of time before it became self-aware and began making emo blog posts without human intervention.
Is it possible to determine how many window handles have been allocated to a program? I've run across this error many times, often when running Windows Update, where new programs won't open until I kill an existing one or manage to get Windows Update to stop. Thanks for the enlightenment.
Watch out for one gotcha - I've read that some (many? all?) RAID arrays are built so that they're only usable with the controller that built them. In the case of software RAID arrays, you're probably pretty safe because Windows/Linux/whatever will probably work the same way over a long period of time.
However, in the case of hardware controllers, the array format may be different between implementations. This means that you're protected against drive failure but not against controller failure/theft/burnination. Before you rely on a single drive from your RAID1 as a backup, check to make sure that the single drive is usable in a situation when the original RAID controller is dead.
I'm curious if anyone else has any experience rebuilding a RAID array from a single disk with a new controller.
The problem is not with the jumping in - it's with the distinct cases where the jumping in was initiated because MS bought the votes. Granted, I don't think we can prove that yet, but the coincidence is pretty absurd, otherwise.
Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.
Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.
It's not the same thing. They provide you with legal copies of books and the means to produce illegal ones, but it's up to you, the library patron, to do the copying. A proper analog would be that the library made copies beforehand and provided stacks of B+W, full-page, stapled duplicates for you to take home with you.
Part of the reason people aren't willing to pay for this quality difference (other than the format war) is that they simply haven't been exposed to true HD. They watch their over-the-air SDTV and figure they can see the actors just fine. Every friend of mine who has seen an actual HD broadcast on a good TV immediately begins singing the praises of HDTV, while the other friends who've never seen HD don't know what all the fuss is about.
Once people get used to HD, they'll begin to hate the fuzzy images of standard def and the job will be complete. Of course, when even early adopters like us refuse to buy either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player because of the format war, our friends are less likely to have that enlightening experience and understand how DVD is lacking in quality in the first place.
Also, your music comparison is apt, but remember that the SDTV->HDTV jump is a much more noticeable boost in quality than a 128kbps MP3 -> SACD/DVD-Audio, to the typical person.
Yeah, the hardest part about implementing this would be recognizing non-computer charging devices in legitimate cases. If the cutoff circuitry is in the iPod itself, that means each "dumb" charger would need to have electronics capable of providing identification. If this were not the case (and it would be very impractical), your point would be very much in effect.
This is certainly just another case of a company filing a patent to protect an idea, not one they necessarily plan to take to market.
"My position: EULA's are rarely binding. And if you're afraid they are, just give all your software to your (under 18 year old) kid as a present."
Or your dog...
Re:Did you ever play "Suicide" in the school yard?
on
School Bans 'Tag'
·
· Score: 1
No, we played the other kind of "suicide", but I wasn't very good at it, and they eventually banned it before I could win. Now I have to live with myself.
They're talking about the spray. Haven't you seen the commericals? The guy practically gets pummeled by women. It's really dangerous and I hope they put a stop to it. Think of the single adults!
Get a User Agent changer for your browser, set it to something weird (that google won't recognize), and visit the Google Video page again. You'll notice that the download link now sends you an AVI instead.
In most cases, it's not the lack of DRM that keeps people away from music downloads, it's the lack of a tangible physical product. People don't trust their computers these days - in the eyes of most common computer users, viruses and other disasters routinely kill computers and destroy data. On the other hand, people do trust CDs. They know that, as long as they take care of it and keep it mostly scratch-free, the CD will always work; it's clear that pressed CDs (recordable CDs excluded) last for a very long time. I'm guessing that most people see downloads as having a shelf-life, while CDs last forever.
CDs also make for a nice automatic backup if you only listen to music in a compressed format. Once you've ripped the CD then it becomes a backup that can be stored in the closet or hidden away from risk of damage or theft. Music downloads have no such automatic protection. Then again, I buy used CDs on eBay and Half.com because they're cheaper than iTunes anyway.
Why don't patents have a "genericized" sort of clause like trademarks do? In the trademark world, if you don't protect your trademark by at least pretending to control its use, then after a reasonable period of time you lose the right to control it. Is this not a reasonable stance to take on patents? Cases like this seem to have become more and more common with popular products violating patents.
If someone is violating your patent, you should be required to ask them for compensation within say, a year, or you lose the right to enforce that patent. It seems very unfair that a patent holder can quietly wait years for a violating product to become incredibly popular before he pops in and says "Hey! That's all mine!"
The fact is, most corporations with big money and big lawyers also have big brains. If a huge corporation finds out that it is violating the GPL (or it becomes public that it was secretly doing so), any corporation with a brain is going to either settle or cease violating the license. They would never allow it to get to court. Only small organizations are dumb enough to continue violating the GPL, and even if a case is brought against them and they lose, it will not gain much press outside the Open Source world anyway. I certainly wouldn't expect my local news to cover such a case - 99% of people would say "huh?".
The only way a case like this would garner widespread public exposure would be if it went against a well-known corporation, but like I said, such corporations are not stupid.
It seems the Slashdot editors and contributors get their kicks by watching the comment count shoot through the roof. The only way to do that is to misconstrue the truth to get people infuriated about nothing. Unfortunately articles like these distract from those that warrant relevent discussions.
"(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press"
You know, 'cause we're so well respected now. We wouldn't want to tarnish the US' image in the international community.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point about OpenSSH, but VNC is indeed GPL.
The best search engine for a given individual is the one that returns the most desirable results when searching for one's own name.
Oh, I get it now - Google can put up ads as long as they're in self defense, right? Er, as long as they didn't mean to? Um ... they can put up ads as long as it's not ... motivated by hate ... errrr ...
That would be true if the code were unmodified versions of GPL'd code, but glancing through the two helper EXEs (spcplink.exe and spcwinv.exe) reveals quite a few references that look like they might be directly pulled from VNC or OpenSSH. Interestingly enough, these two helper apps are written in Visual C++, while the main app is written in VB6.
Now that I look closer, I notice that spcwinv.exe is actually referred to as "VNC Server Free Edition for Win32", and the copyright is "Copyright © RealVNC Ltd. 2002-2005", yet the strings within the file have been modified to refer to it as a ShowMyPC product. I'd say that's a dead giveaway.
Whereas GotoMyPC is a serious business with a vested interest in keeping users' machines secure, this site has no such commitments, and as such it seems like a pretty bad idea to use it without being able to check the source code. Potential GPL violations aside, a significant reason that we need the source is to confirm that it does what they say it does. Without it, who knows what backdoors they could be offering; it's especially concerning since it's specifically designed to penetrate firewalls. Beware!
Why hasn't Microsoft added Storm to its Malicious Software Removal Tool?
Did anyone else see Terminator 3? They predicted this "Storm" virus. It was only a matter of time before it became self-aware and began making emo blog posts without human intervention.
Is it possible to determine how many window handles have been allocated to a program? I've run across this error many times, often when running Windows Update, where new programs won't open until I kill an existing one or manage to get Windows Update to stop. Thanks for the enlightenment.
Watch out for one gotcha - I've read that some (many? all?) RAID arrays are built so that they're only usable with the controller that built them. In the case of software RAID arrays, you're probably pretty safe because Windows/Linux/whatever will probably work the same way over a long period of time.
However, in the case of hardware controllers, the array format may be different between implementations. This means that you're protected against drive failure but not against controller failure/theft/burnination. Before you rely on a single drive from your RAID1 as a backup, check to make sure that the single drive is usable in a situation when the original RAID controller is dead.
I'm curious if anyone else has any experience rebuilding a RAID array from a single disk with a new controller.
The problem is not with the jumping in - it's with the distinct cases where the jumping in was initiated because MS bought the votes. Granted, I don't think we can prove that yet, but the coincidence is pretty absurd, otherwise.
Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.
Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.
It's not the same thing. They provide you with legal copies of books and the means to produce illegal ones, but it's up to you, the library patron, to do the copying. A proper analog would be that the library made copies beforehand and provided stacks of B+W, full-page, stapled duplicates for you to take home with you.
Part of the reason people aren't willing to pay for this quality difference (other than the format war) is that they simply haven't been exposed to true HD. They watch their over-the-air SDTV and figure they can see the actors just fine. Every friend of mine who has seen an actual HD broadcast on a good TV immediately begins singing the praises of HDTV, while the other friends who've never seen HD don't know what all the fuss is about.
Once people get used to HD, they'll begin to hate the fuzzy images of standard def and the job will be complete. Of course, when even early adopters like us refuse to buy either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player because of the format war, our friends are less likely to have that enlightening experience and understand how DVD is lacking in quality in the first place.
Also, your music comparison is apt, but remember that the SDTV->HDTV jump is a much more noticeable boost in quality than a 128kbps MP3 -> SACD/DVD-Audio, to the typical person.
Yeah, the hardest part about implementing this would be recognizing non-computer charging devices in legitimate cases. If the cutoff circuitry is in the iPod itself, that means each "dumb" charger would need to have electronics capable of providing identification. If this were not the case (and it would be very impractical), your point would be very much in effect. This is certainly just another case of a company filing a patent to protect an idea, not one they necessarily plan to take to market.
Slashdot headline, July 27, 2008: "800,000 identities stolen in Ohio"
Or your dog...
No, we played the other kind of "suicide", but I wasn't very good at it, and they eventually banned it before I could win. Now I have to live with myself.
They're talking about the spray. Haven't you seen the commericals? The guy practically gets pummeled by women. It's really dangerous and I hope they put a stop to it. Think of the single adults!
Get a User Agent changer for your browser, set it to something weird (that google won't recognize), and visit the Google Video page again. You'll notice that the download link now sends you an AVI instead.
That's when you take a pair of pliers and rip out the screws from the connector. :)
In most cases, it's not the lack of DRM that keeps people away from music downloads, it's the lack of a tangible physical product. People don't trust their computers these days - in the eyes of most common computer users, viruses and other disasters routinely kill computers and destroy data. On the other hand, people do trust CDs. They know that, as long as they take care of it and keep it mostly scratch-free, the CD will always work; it's clear that pressed CDs (recordable CDs excluded) last for a very long time. I'm guessing that most people see downloads as having a shelf-life, while CDs last forever.
CDs also make for a nice automatic backup if you only listen to music in a compressed format. Once you've ripped the CD then it becomes a backup that can be stored in the closet or hidden away from risk of damage or theft. Music downloads have no such automatic protection. Then again, I buy used CDs on eBay and Half.com because they're cheaper than iTunes anyway.
Why don't patents have a "genericized" sort of clause like trademarks do? In the trademark world, if you don't protect your trademark by at least pretending to control its use, then after a reasonable period of time you lose the right to control it. Is this not a reasonable stance to take on patents? Cases like this seem to have become more and more common with popular products violating patents.
If someone is violating your patent, you should be required to ask them for compensation within say, a year, or you lose the right to enforce that patent. It seems very unfair that a patent holder can quietly wait years for a violating product to become incredibly popular before he pops in and says "Hey! That's all mine!"
The fact is, most corporations with big money and big lawyers also have big brains. If a huge corporation finds out that it is violating the GPL (or it becomes public that it was secretly doing so), any corporation with a brain is going to either settle or cease violating the license. They would never allow it to get to court. Only small organizations are dumb enough to continue violating the GPL, and even if a case is brought against them and they lose, it will not gain much press outside the Open Source world anyway. I certainly wouldn't expect my local news to cover such a case - 99% of people would say "huh?".
The only way a case like this would garner widespread public exposure would be if it went against a well-known corporation, but like I said, such corporations are not stupid.
It seems the Slashdot editors and contributors get their kicks by watching the comment count shoot through the roof. The only way to do that is to misconstrue the truth to get people infuriated about nothing. Unfortunately articles like these distract from those that warrant relevent discussions.
From the article:
You know, 'cause we're so well respected now. We wouldn't want to tarnish the US' image in the international community.