These people would have been owned and disconnected within hours of this being discovered.
Are you kidding me? These are the guys that would be owning you not the other way around. They're beating the copyright infringers at their own game. They're using technical measures to thwart downloading of material they own the copyright to. I'd rather see more of this type of geek warfare than another letter from a lawyer. It reminds me of when DirecTV did a similar thing to people hacking the cards for their satellite systems. Again, better this than resorting to lawyers.
Re:The Supreme Court disagrees
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Haha, I love how people will debate to no end whether it's theft or not. As if it's morally okay, as long as nobody is allowed to call it theft.
Debating whether you are using the correct terms or not doesn't endorse the behaviour that we're discussing. I can discuss the difference in the legal definition of murder versus manslaughter but it doesn't mean that I endorse either of those. Whether you like the legal definition of "Theft" versus "Infrignement of Copright" is irrelevant. There's an overwhelming amount of case law that makes a distinction. The use of these definitions have been around for longer than most of us on this site have been alive.
You may often say one thing when you meant another but courts and the legal system don't work that way. For some of us this proper usage and understanding of such terminology is important. Copyrights are the primary protection for our free-software and open-source works (BSD license, GPL, etc).
The parent comment is a known troll. This same comment gets posted over and over and over again. Stop responding to it. Mod it down. All the responses to it have been said over and over and beat to death.
As everyone else is saying, you lose your disk cache that way.
No write cache. It is disabled both in OS and the hard drive. When I save it's written to disk.
The solution to long shutdown sequences is rm/etc/rc.d/rc?.d/K* (or the equivalent for your distribution).
I've already trimmed those, years ago before I started my current practice of just removing power. In my opinion a "long shutdown sequence" is if there is still power to the machine when I remove my finger from the power button. It used to be that power supplies cut the curcuit of power when you flipped the switch. Now it's "smart" power supplies that signal the machine to shut down. Sorry, I prefer it how it used to be. Done using the computer? Turn it off. No waiting.
My next step is to figure out how to get Linux, or some other OS of choice, into a ROM for instant booting. Waiting for booting sucks more than waiting to shut down.
Even assuming that the file system returns in the same state you left it in, you've killed all running processes.
That's the point. I'm done using my computer. I want to turn it off.
Data still in RAM, etc. Unsaved changes.
I save my changes and close programs before I turn off my machine. Sometimes I don't bother to close the programs. It depends. I turn off caching in the OS and hard drives. I've never lost data (two years and counting).
if your model is supported by your operational system's ACPI, then pressing power button will shutdown your operational system, including Linux, by itself. No loss of data
That sounds great until a program hangs and the machine stay on in the shutdown procedure because of some problem. As far as I'm concerned power switches for computers should break the curcuit for power. Instant power off. No write caching. The machine should be ready to lose power at any moment. None of this ATX power supply nonsense that sends signals to the motherboard.
correct shutdown, no waiting for that to happen.
If the power is still on when I remove my finger from the power button then I'm waiting. My powerstrip method assures no waiting.
If you mean having to shut down as opposed to power off, then I agree, it's a very bad idea. It seems that the trend in the last 10 years has been to move to having to shut down the machine. We need to make an effort to improve operating systems to the point where they can be turned off when you are done with them, just like any other appliance.
More file integrity is always good. Ever since journaling file systems became available I just started turning the power off to my computers (via a power strip) rather than going through the shutdown command. It never made sense to me that we'd have to "shut down" as opposed to just turning the thing off.
In fact, a majority (approx. 90% by some counts) of all programmers already do earn a living working directly for companies that use the software
Where did you get the 90% figure? I've seen comments like this before but I've never been able to find details on the studies that arrived at numbers such as this.
This might be more work than you want to do. You can re-enter the music in Lilypond's format and then use Lilypond to convert the score to a MIDI file for playback. You can covert a score by doing the following:
lilypond -m score.ly
which should output a MIDI file for you.
As an alternative you can use the ABC format. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:
abc2ly score.abc lilypond -m score.ly
I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.
I understand your argument, but do you REALLY believe what you're saying?
Yep, 100%. Remember the domain name I was talking about in my original post? I get several offers a year to buy it. I tell people the same thing: "It's in use and it's not for sale." It's not my problem if they think it looks like it's not being used.
He's been squatted, plain and simple.
Yet he's unwilling to sell at any price, according to the submitter. There's no profit motive. Why "squat" on the domain? Maybe he's using it. D'ya think?!
He would be able to help us out if he'd just do a dump of all of the DNS entries for that zone.
You mean provide you with security information for no reason? There's a reason why you can restrict who can initiate zone transfers. When you make that request why not ask him to enable fingerd and provide a list of usernames from/etc/passwd as well.
Bottom line is that he has nothing to prove. He doesn't want to sell. It's his domain. He's doing nothing wrong. He registered the domain before the submitter. End of story.
The real lesson to be learned here is that if you are going to start a company then in addition to investigating company names with the Secretary of State you should also think about a web presence and investigate what domain names are available. A person reading Slashdot should have known that much back in 2001. It's the submitters fault for not getting the domain name he wanted. If he's unhappy about that then he might want to talk to a lawyer that specializes in this type of law rather than submit a question to Slashdot. A lawyer can tell him if he thinks he has a case and let him know how much it would cost to retain him for the job.
There are more services than web sites. They may use their domain name for other services such as mail, DNS, Jabber, IRC, FTP, and so on. They probably decided to put up banner ads to get some revenue from people who hit the page. I have one such domain which handles some mailing lists and nothing more. The server that it is on has a web server for some other domains so I have a page appear with a joke on it when the domain is accessed.
Also, if the domain owner was willing to talk to you and told you that he didn't want to sell, as opposed to asking for a huge amount of money, then I don't see what reason you have to say that they are squating. They have it and want to hold on to it. I really think that if you didn't register the domain name before hand you might just be out of luck.
and the fact that the menus etc take up very little screen space so I can see much more of a webpage than with IE.
Huh? Right click on the toolbar and choose customize. Remove the items that you don't want. Unlock the toolbars to rearrange them. You can even put the toolbar buttons and address field in the same section as the pull down menus. I have more screen space in IE at work than I do with firefox at home.
As an aside, it's hard to recommend Firefox to some friends/family when they can't comprehend how useful tabbed browsing it.
I think for some people it's a matter of using it to understand it. Personally I don't like tabbed browsing and I think it makes my browsing experience worse rather than better (I have to manage windows in two places instead of one). I gave up on tabbed browsing after several months of trying to get used to it. Not everyone is going to see tabbed browsing as an advantage.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Every time I read a story like this I wonder why a company would publically discuss the inner workings of their IT department with a reporter. It's amazing now much competitive information can be leaked from these stories.
It seems that, if they derive their distro from RedHat's, then there should be some perfectly legal way of explaining that fact in their advertising, on their website, etc.
I'm sure there is. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know for sure. However, I think when dealing with trademarks it's more about making sure that the party that owns the trademark is happy with your wording and consents with your usage. Having that express consent is important to them. In my experience the trademark owners wanted to make sure that we put the ® symbol after their mark and indicated that we weren't affiliated nor endorsed by them in our printed materials.
Still, I wonder if they talked to RedHat about it.
We understand that our client has failed to receive a response from you to its correspondence, including its letter of January 7, 2005, and, therefore has requested that we follow up with you to bring this matter to closure.
So it looks like Red Hat contacted CentOS but they ignored them. Receiving mail from someone about their trademark and then failing to respond is really bad. That explains a lot. That's most likely why the law firm got involved and sent the letter linked above. Had CentOS not responded and not taken down the trademarks then they probably could have been taken to court and lost as it would seem that they failed to act in good faith. Always respond to important letters and always follow up a phone call with a written summary. If it's not in writing it doesn't mean anything.
The more I see stuff like this and the methlabs.org web site situation, I see a need for a book or document that gives a crash course in management and simple legal matters. I think this is going to be more important as open source projects grow. There's a lot CentOS could have done to prevent or resolve the situation they found themselves in. There's a lot that methlabs people could have done to protect their donations and servers. I thought stuff like this was common sense but I guess it isn't. Some chapters on dealing with end users and managing developers probably wouldn't hurt either.
Just one example - they threatened CentOS with legal action.
No they didn't. They wrote to CentOS to inform them that they were using Red Hat's trademark in a way that Red Hat felt was inappropriate. The letter also stated that people were not allowed to use their trademark in that matter without "express agreement." What CentOS had to opportunity to do was call or write the lawyer, state their side of things, and work out an agreement that would work for both parties. Working out such an agreement wouldn't have cost more than a phone call and several hours of time. I've worked out several such agreements myself in the past (although not with Red Hat or anything doing with open source). It's not a big deal. What CentOS decided to do was remove references to Red Hat from their site. That's their prerogative.
Please stop making it look like CentOS was a victim and Red Hat was a villain. CentOS chose a different course of action when several options were available to them. I'm really tired of seeing people not standing up for themselves but then turn around and act like they're getting pushed around.
A real database user that needed to hold a value of 300 would not use a column type that has a range of 0 to 255 or -127 to 127, since they would have read the page on choosing types [mysql.com].
You missunderstand his example. It's not that the user needed to hold a value of 300. It's that a value of 300 was attempted to be inserted and was accepted. That value could have been caused by a bug in a program that was submitting the value. In any case, the database should not accept values outside the range of the datatype specified for a column (it should cause an error not a warning).
MySQL 5.0 has a strict mode that will make it operate that way so this argument is going to become a non-issue once MySQL 5 is finalized.
Slashdot Mirror
You may often say one thing when you meant another but courts and the legal system don't work that way. For some of us this proper usage and understanding of such terminology is important. Copyrights are the primary protection for our free-software and open-source works (BSD license, GPL, etc).
The parent comment is a known troll. This same comment gets posted over and over and over again. Stop responding to it. Mod it down. All the responses to it have been said over and over and beat to death.
My next step is to figure out how to get Linux, or some other OS of choice, into a ROM for instant booting. Waiting for booting sucks more than waiting to shut down.
You really should work on improving your self-esteem.
More file integrity is always good. Ever since journaling file systems became available I just started turning the power off to my computers (via a power strip) rather than going through the shutdown command. It never made sense to me that we'd have to "shut down" as opposed to just turning the thing off.
Sounds neat. Would you be willing to publish the code somewhere so I could try it out?
du -sS */ should do what you want.
I use xargs all the time and not to get around shell line length restrictions.
As an alternative you can use the ABC format. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:
I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.
Bottom line is that he has nothing to prove. He doesn't want to sell. It's his domain. He's doing nothing wrong. He registered the domain before the submitter. End of story.
The real lesson to be learned here is that if you are going to start a company then in addition to investigating company names with the Secretary of State you should also think about a web presence and investigate what domain names are available. A person reading Slashdot should have known that much back in 2001. It's the submitters fault for not getting the domain name he wanted. If he's unhappy about that then he might want to talk to a lawyer that specializes in this type of law rather than submit a question to Slashdot. A lawyer can tell him if he thinks he has a case and let him know how much it would cost to retain him for the job.
Next Ask Slashdot, please.
Also, if the domain owner was willing to talk to you and told you that he didn't want to sell, as opposed to asking for a huge amount of money, then I don't see what reason you have to say that they are squating. They have it and want to hold on to it. I really think that if you didn't register the domain name before hand you might just be out of luck.
First link goes to the goatse.cx pictures. How did this troll article make it past the editors? Slashdot has definitely hit its nadir.
The more I see stuff like this and the methlabs.org web site situation, I see a need for a book or document that gives a crash course in management and simple legal matters. I think this is going to be more important as open source projects grow. There's a lot CentOS could have done to prevent or resolve the situation they found themselves in. There's a lot that methlabs people could have done to protect their donations and servers. I thought stuff like this was common sense but I guess it isn't. Some chapters on dealing with end users and managing developers probably wouldn't hurt either.
Please stop making it look like CentOS was a victim and Red Hat was a villain. CentOS chose a different course of action when several options were available to them. I'm really tired of seeing people not standing up for themselves but then turn around and act like they're getting pushed around.
MySQL 5.0 has a strict mode that will make it operate that way so this argument is going to become a non-issue once MySQL 5 is finalized.