My ProGen laptop did this. If you hit a certain key combination at any time, the BIOS would come to the forefront and copy the entire RAM contents to a 70-something Meg partition at the end of the drive. This did take awhile, though... waking the system up was a small bit faster than booting, but shutting down the system took a LOT longer.
All of that worked fine for windows, but last I tried it, Linux would begin acting very strangely shortly after waking up. I keep my laptop on all the time (it's only portable when I need it to be.:P), and I blasted the Save-To-RAM partition a long time ago, so I couldn't check to see if newer kernels don't mind it.
This world is looking more and more like Fahrenheit 451. With the exception that self-education itself is not illegal, but being able to watch a movie for free is punishable by house-burning.
But, the music and movies do belong to someone, and taking it from them is stealing.
At the risk of sounding like a troll... I don't believe you've been keeping up on the RIAA vs Everyone case. I will agree that in *this* instance, the kid was dumb and rather deserved to have his FTP shut down. My main reason in supporting the electronic distribution of music (yet, even copyrighted ones) is that I personally use the MP3s I download as an evaluation of the music before I buy it.
And I just thought of something rather interesting regarding the copyright laws as a whole. I am under the impression that copyright originated as a way of authors to prevent the plagarism or misuse of their creative work. Were this true now, Napster, et al would be breaking no laws, as no one that I know of is making absurd claims that THEY were the ones who wrote and performed songs that are up Napster or FTP sites.
But I suppose Copyright is just another term for "If you listen to this song without paying ME a large amount of money, then I reserve the right to kill you."
Going back to the original statement you made, I'd like to point out that your use of the word "stealing" is inadequate since the RIAA's member companies still hold the masters for every song they produced. If it WERE stealing, then I'd be stealing music every day (albiet legally), by listening to my car radio and changing the station whenver a commercial came on. Which I do.
Back when I was reading up on the hacker scene (5+ years ago) there were many stories just like this. I'm sure there was exaggeration, but the fact that police actions like this get reported so often is proof enough to me that it does happen.
And quite frequently. Most of the seizures were on kiddies who were charged with some kind of fraud. And when it's a well-known corporation doing the legal action, you can bet that this kiddies life was pretty much ruined, record-wise.
Police raids upon law-infringing hackers have been known to range from simple bangering of the suspect to an all-out SWAT Team raid with guns and gas masks. (This, in a low-income apartment building.)
And you might think that the police tactics are at least somewhat proportional to the crime committed, but that's not the case. I don't feel sorry for the script kiddie who tried to gain a little cash on the side, but I DO feel sympathy for the hacker who's learning got both him and his family harrassed, embarrassed, and these days, physically hurt.
Anyway... what? MP3's? Oh sorry. Disregard the entire above.:)
But DeCSS is as harmless as it gets. There is absolutely 0 threat that a bunch of letters and numbers on somebody's hard drive is going to harm anybody in any way.
Or so a logical being would conclude. But CSS was created as method of content control... a phrase which has a far great reach than mere copyright infringement. Part of CSS is determining who can watch what movie and where. Helps keep prices high in some regions, while affordable enough to be proitable in others. Also, (and this is where the MPAA has a beef with DeCSS) in order to manufacture a DVD player or develop one, you need to purchase a license and the CSS algorithm. This allows certain electronics manufacturers to arrange a kind of consortium. If a company wants to develop and manufacture a DVD player with the consumer in mind, they simply aren't sold a license or has it revoked. I'm sure there are certain clauses in the contract that say things like "you may not make a DVD player that can play movies for other regions or output the decoded information in any other format than copy-protected analog, etc, etc"
You can see for yourself that DeCSS and the precedent that it would have set without being fought would have been quite harmful, from a corporate persepective at least.
As always, much of this is pure speculation, and I enjoy being proven wrong if truth accompanies the counterargument. Have a good day.
Dunno if anyone's mentioned it yet, but I do believe CmdrTaco is off his rocker with his comment to this story:
its so unfair that I can't play them on the plane without rebooting.
STOP the presses, THIS is important! The collapse of western civilization is now imminent! Oh, and while you're at it, drag the Blizzard development team out into the streets to be drawn and quartered, for not having a bestselling title *NIX compatible is obviously a gross violation of the Unspoken Cardinal Rules of the Universe!
(disclaimer: I do not own any DVDs. My VCR is working fine.)
Well, I'll go ahead and say why it was important for me, at least this time around... I wanted to start a homebrew Linux setup, but I was waiting for 2.2.17 to be released. And now it is. And thanks to/., I KNOW that it is, and can thus start my little project.
So there, naysayers. This human was satisfied. I'm not into all that anime stuff as much as everyone else here.
Re:Updating the kernel is like updating the bios..
on
Linux 2.2.17 Released
·
· Score: 2
I'd have to agree... at this point I don't have any systems that I can consider as "spare" boxes. I installed FreeBSD (and winders, on another drive) on my "power geek" system, an Athlon 750, and that leaves my Linux laptop for production use. (Things such as email, web browsing, IRC, etc) On the laptop I've got Mandrake 7.0 (with many upgrades) with a 2.2.14 kernel and everything works beautifully.
And I KNOW from EXPERIENCE that whenever I go upgrading something that ain't broke, it gets broke in a hurry.:^)
Thinking of putting together a homebrew Linux system alongside windows on the second drive, though, just to see if I can do it.
Well I've got a "classic" Athlon 750 and a 56k modem... only the phone lines 'round here are so shitty that 28.8 is akin to winning the lottery for me.:P
But it's only GNU/Linux if it's a distribution based on GNU tools. As of yet, I haven't seen any other systems with non-GNU tools (not speaking of applications such as X-Chat), but it's entirely possible. Despite that, I'll agree that I still like to think of it merely as "Linux" because well... that's the heart of my OS.
CmdrTaco:
That's right, because if someone you hired
doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
That's not what he was talking about, Taco. That's the second time this week I caught you missing the point of a statement in a news article.
He was referring to the fact that a sysadmin running Linux could more than easily backdoor any or all of the systems they supervise. Of course, while they call this crap security, we call it job security.;) [So Peter Firstbrook is obviously just trying to get us all fired and we shouldn't let our bosses listen to him!!]
This isn't as easy to do with an unopen OS... you can open up certain services that only you know about, but the first thing the next admin is going to do is go over all the config files and running daemons to get familiar with the system and shut down anything that doesn't look right. On a closed OS, it might also be possible to patch a few binaries, but that's not quite so easy as throwing a few extra lines into something like/usr/src/login/login.c and recompiling.
I would have to agree with Firstbrook that this is a risk that can mainly be attributed to open source operating systems, but you need to go back to the old question, Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
In the case of Linux, *BSD, and others I think they certainly do.
Upon further reflection of the whole incident, combined with the obscenely small amount of information being released about anything at all dealing with these riots, I'm inclined to agree that not everything is being said here.
While Mr. Phone guy was probably doing something suspicious (he is a cracker / cracker / phreak, I would presume) I don't know that he'd do something to get him into trouble, as those 2600 blokes are in more than enough. But I guess we'll see what happens eventually.
First off, thanks for a reply. And I think now that I've calmed down a bit, I can probably accept the fact that many of the accusations made against the police are pretty much false or blown way out of proportion.
I'm a loyal 2600 subscriber myself, and I believe in the things that they are fighting for, but sometimes I get the feeling that the whole truth isn't being told.
I'll try to be patient while waiting to find out exactly what whatshisname did to get arrested.
Re:TRGpro gives the best of Palm and Handspring
on
The new Palm VIIx
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· Score: 2
Schwing! I just bought one less than a week ago and have no regrets considering how well this thing seems like it will keep me entertained until as least the end of the year.
Perhaps some are cheaper, some are smaller, some are more colourful, but NONE are as GEEKY as a TRGpro.
Oh, and did I mention the non-proprietary CompactFlash slot? With 3rd party hardware on the market before the handheld was?
I just bought my first PDA, (the PalmOS-based TRGpro) and I am loving it.
Anyway, about the star trek padd thing... I remember way back when watching Data and Geordi LaForge poke and prod on this little notebook-sized device that was possibly hundreds of thousands of times times more powerful than my 386 (16 MHz with 4MB RAM) and this thing's sole purpose was to *display data*. I wondered, back then, if I would ever see anything like it in my lifetime.
I turn 21 in 7 days, and my PalmOS device is about as fast as my old 386 with twice the amount of memory. I'm beginning to feel nostalgic.:)
[And about how they got data into a padd on ST, the data "synched" to the padd from the main computer using little memory sticks called isolinear data chips. They looked a lot like Sony's memory stick things, except translucent and colourful. Why not radio or infrared synching? I guess Star Trek writers were visionaries rather than inventors.:P]
There are lots of free calculator programs that you can download right off the net. I will agree that Palm's default calc app sucks (order of operations isn't even correct) but I don't agree that a visor is the better machine because the calculator app doesn't suck.
Thank you! I've been searching these comments waiting for people to stop putting that damned Visor up on such a high pedestal... I think they just like the pretty colours...
Anyway, I just bought my first handheld (until recently I considered them rather silly) and I opted for a TRGpro. Yeah, they're a bit expensive but if you happen to want expandability they are definitely the only way to go. I've had mine for a little under a week now, and I've been having *great* fun just toying around with it. Pretty soon I may decide to buy a CF modem (or heck, even a serial port would do) so I can play around with a few of the internet apps.
The CF slot is an industry standard (or so I believe), with lots of hardware already on the market, whereas that Spingboard is proprietary.
And now I shall commence in pointing out to all of you Palm and Visor users that I have the ability to buy a 340MB hard disk or 56k modem for my PalmOS device of choice. Nyah.
I'm sure you have a certain degree of loyalty to the law enforcement in your town, but I'm curious to know how you feel that people were arrested and put in jail for over 48 without being able to make a phone call, eat, or go to the bathroom. Many of these people were taken into custody for talking on cell phones, jogging, wearing black, etc.
I'm not attacking the Philidelphia police. I would really like to know more about what really happened. But with what I've heard so far, it doesn't look good for the police.
You forgot to mention in your parting quip, that after the policeman walked away from the carjacking victim, he proceeded to arrest a man for walking down the street while talking on a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
My ProGen laptop did this. If you hit a certain key combination at any time, the BIOS would come to the forefront and copy the entire RAM contents to a 70-something Meg partition at the end of the drive. This did take awhile, though... waking the system up was a small bit faster than booting, but shutting down the system took a LOT longer.
All of that worked fine for windows, but last I tried it, Linux would begin acting very strangely shortly after waking up. I keep my laptop on all the time (it's only portable when I need it to be.
TRGPro has had PalmOS 3.5.1 on their website free for download, for the last few months. I've been using it since. Love my TRGPro.
This world is looking more and more like Fahrenheit 451. With the exception that self-education itself is not illegal, but being able to watch a movie for free is punishable by house-burning.
But, the music and movies do belong to someone, and taking it from them is stealing.
At the risk of sounding like a troll... I don't believe you've been keeping up on the RIAA vs Everyone case. I will agree that in *this* instance, the kid was dumb and rather deserved to have his FTP shut down. My main reason in supporting the electronic distribution of music (yet, even copyrighted ones) is that I personally use the MP3s I download as an evaluation of the music before I buy it.
And I just thought of something rather interesting regarding the copyright laws as a whole. I am under the impression that copyright originated as a way of authors to prevent the plagarism or misuse of their creative work. Were this true now, Napster, et al would be breaking no laws, as no one that I know of is making absurd claims that THEY were the ones who wrote and performed songs that are up Napster or FTP sites.
But I suppose Copyright is just another term for "If you listen to this song without paying ME a large amount of money, then I reserve the right to kill you."
Going back to the original statement you made, I'd like to point out that your use of the word "stealing" is inadequate since the RIAA's member companies still hold the masters for every song they produced. If it WERE stealing, then I'd be stealing music every day (albiet legally), by listening to my car radio and changing the station whenver a commercial came on. Which I do.
Book 'em, Danno.
Feh, "bangering" should have read "badgering".
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
Back when I was reading up on the hacker scene (5+ years ago) there were many stories just like this. I'm sure there was exaggeration, but the fact that police actions like this get reported so often is proof enough to me that it does happen.
And quite frequently. Most of the seizures were on kiddies who were charged with some kind of fraud. And when it's a well-known corporation doing the legal action, you can bet that this kiddies life was pretty much ruined, record-wise.
Police raids upon law-infringing hackers have been known to range from simple bangering of the suspect to an all-out SWAT Team raid with guns and gas masks. (This, in a low-income apartment building.)
And you might think that the police tactics are at least somewhat proportional to the crime committed, but that's not the case. I don't feel sorry for the script kiddie who tried to gain a little cash on the side, but I DO feel sympathy for the hacker who's learning got both him and his family harrassed, embarrassed, and these days, physically hurt.
Anyway... what? MP3's? Oh sorry. Disregard the entire above.
But DeCSS is as harmless as it gets. There is absolutely 0 threat that a bunch of letters and numbers on somebody's hard drive is going to harm anybody in any way.
Or so a logical being would conclude. But CSS was created as method of content control... a phrase which has a far great reach than mere copyright infringement. Part of CSS is determining who can watch what movie and where. Helps keep prices high in some regions, while affordable enough to be proitable in others. Also, (and this is where the MPAA has a beef with DeCSS) in order to manufacture a DVD player or develop one, you need to purchase a license and the CSS algorithm. This allows certain electronics manufacturers to arrange a kind of consortium. If a company wants to develop and manufacture a DVD player with the consumer in mind, they simply aren't sold a license or has it revoked. I'm sure there are certain clauses in the contract that say things like "you may not make a DVD player that can play movies for other regions or output the decoded information in any other format than copy-protected analog, etc, etc"
You can see for yourself that DeCSS and the precedent that it would have set without being fought would have been quite harmful, from a corporate persepective at least.
As always, much of this is pure speculation, and I enjoy being proven wrong if truth accompanies the counterargument. Have a good day.
LinuxOne. I would suppose they quietly shut their doors and laid off their two employees after getting a mountain of negative press.
Dunno if anyone's mentioned it yet, but I do believe CmdrTaco is off his rocker with his comment to this story:
its so unfair that I can't play them on the plane without rebooting.
STOP the presses, THIS is important! The collapse of western civilization is now imminent! Oh, and while you're at it, drag the Blizzard development team out into the streets to be drawn and quartered, for not having a bestselling title *NIX compatible is obviously a gross violation of the Unspoken Cardinal Rules of the Universe!
(disclaimer: I do not own any DVDs. My VCR is working fine.)
Well, I'll go ahead and say why it was important for me, at least this time around... I wanted to start a homebrew Linux setup, but I was waiting for 2.2.17 to be released. And now it is. And thanks to
So there, naysayers. This human was satisfied. I'm not into all that anime stuff as much as everyone else here.
I'd have to agree... at this point I don't have any systems that I can consider as "spare" boxes. I installed FreeBSD (and winders, on another drive) on my "power geek" system, an Athlon 750, and that leaves my Linux laptop for production use. (Things such as email, web browsing, IRC, etc) On the laptop I've got Mandrake 7.0 (with many upgrades) with a 2.2.14 kernel and everything works beautifully.
And I KNOW from EXPERIENCE that whenever I go upgrading something that ain't broke, it gets broke in a hurry.
Thinking of putting together a homebrew Linux system alongside windows on the second drive, though, just to see if I can do it.
Well I've got a "classic" Athlon 750 and a 56k modem... only the phone lines 'round here are so shitty that 28.8 is akin to winning the lottery for me.
But it's only GNU/Linux if it's a distribution based on GNU tools. As of yet, I haven't seen any other systems with non-GNU tools (not speaking of applications such as X-Chat), but it's entirely possible. Despite that, I'll agree that I still like to think of it merely as "Linux" because well... that's the heart of my OS.
Any comparable (in quality) *nix client? I like pan, but it's interface could use some teaking and it's still a bit buggy.
CmdrTaco:
;) [So Peter Firstbrook is obviously just trying to get us all fired and we shouldn't let our bosses listen to him!!]
/usr/src/login/login.c and recompiling.
That's right, because if someone you hired
doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
That's not what he was talking about, Taco. That's the second time this week I caught you missing the point of a statement in a news article.
He was referring to the fact that a sysadmin running Linux could more than easily backdoor any or all of the systems they supervise. Of course, while they call this crap security, we call it job security.
This isn't as easy to do with an unopen OS... you can open up certain services that only you know about, but the first thing the next admin is going to do is go over all the config files and running daemons to get familiar with the system and shut down anything that doesn't look right. On a closed OS, it might also be possible to patch a few binaries, but that's not quite so easy as throwing a few extra lines into something like
I would have to agree with Firstbrook that this is a risk that can mainly be attributed to open source operating systems, but you need to go back to the old question, Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
In the case of Linux, *BSD, and others I think they certainly do.
Taco, the next time you post a blurb about a story, would you please include a link to it?
Just my opinion, thanks.
Upon further reflection of the whole incident, combined with the obscenely small amount of information being released about anything at all dealing with these riots, I'm inclined to agree that not everything is being said here.
While Mr. Phone guy was probably doing something suspicious (he is a cracker / cracker / phreak, I would presume) I don't know that he'd do something to get him into trouble, as those 2600 blokes are in more than enough. But I guess we'll see what happens eventually.
First off, thanks for a reply. And I think now that I've calmed down a bit, I can probably accept the fact that many of the accusations made against the police are pretty much false or blown way out of proportion.
I'm a loyal 2600 subscriber myself, and I believe in the things that they are fighting for, but sometimes I get the feeling that the whole truth isn't being told.
I'll try to be patient while waiting to find out exactly what whatshisname did to get arrested.
Schwing! I just bought one less than a week ago and have no regrets considering how well this thing seems like it will keep me entertained until as least the end of the year.
Perhaps some are cheaper, some are smaller, some are more colourful, but NONE are as GEEKY as a TRGpro.
Oh, and did I mention the non-proprietary CompactFlash slot? With 3rd party hardware on the market before the handheld was?
I just bought my first PDA, (the PalmOS-based TRGpro) and I am loving it.
Anyway, about the star trek padd thing... I remember way back when watching Data and Geordi LaForge poke and prod on this little notebook-sized device that was possibly hundreds of thousands of times times more powerful than my 386 (16 MHz with 4MB RAM) and this thing's sole purpose was to *display data*. I wondered, back then, if I would ever see anything like it in my lifetime.
I turn 21 in 7 days, and my PalmOS device is about as fast as my old 386 with twice the amount of memory. I'm beginning to feel nostalgic.
[And about how they got data into a padd on ST, the data "synched" to the padd from the main computer using little memory sticks called isolinear data chips. They looked a lot like Sony's memory stick things, except translucent and colourful. Why not radio or infrared synching? I guess Star Trek writers were visionaries rather than inventors.
There are lots of free calculator programs that you can download right off the net. I will agree that Palm's default calc app sucks (order of operations isn't even correct) but I don't agree that a visor is the better machine because the calculator app doesn't suck.
Thank you! I've been searching these comments waiting for people to stop putting that damned Visor up on such a high pedestal... I think they just like the pretty colours...
Anyway, I just bought my first handheld (until recently I considered them rather silly) and I opted for a TRGpro. Yeah, they're a bit expensive but if you happen to want expandability they are definitely the only way to go. I've had mine for a little under a week now, and I've been having *great* fun just toying around with it. Pretty soon I may decide to buy a CF modem (or heck, even a serial port would do) so I can play around with a few of the internet apps.
The CF slot is an industry standard (or so I believe), with lots of hardware already on the market, whereas that Spingboard is proprietary.
And now I shall commence in pointing out to all of you Palm and Visor users that I have the ability to buy a 340MB hard disk or 56k modem for my PalmOS device of choice. Nyah.
I'm sure you have a certain degree of loyalty to the law enforcement in your town, but I'm curious to know how you feel that people were arrested and put in jail for over 48 without being able to make a phone call, eat, or go to the bathroom. Many of these people were taken into custody for talking on cell phones, jogging, wearing black, etc.
I'm not attacking the Philidelphia police. I would really like to know more about what really happened. But with what I've heard so far, it doesn't look good for the police.
You forgot to mention in your parting quip, that after the policeman walked away from the carjacking victim, he proceeded to arrest a man for walking down the street while talking on a cell phone.
I put a Mozilla entry in my lilo.conf once... no one has gotten the joke yet.