Regardless of how much money they can throw at a technical solution, nothing will be as cost effective as paying a bunch of guys in blaze orange vests to shoot at birds near the airports.
As someone who has lived in the midwest, I can tell you those guys in orange vests have a hard enough time recognizing the difference between animals with two legs and four, I wouldn't count on them to be able to tell the difference between birds that flap their wings and those that don't.
TPM, from my understanding, just makes it more difficult to tinker with things that were designed not to be tinkered with. Those of us who buy hardware and use software that explicitly *was* meant to be tinkered with will see no change, so TPM support in the kernel ultimately means little to me. If a company releases a cool gadget or computer with a TPM but doesn't give me the keys, then I simply don't buy that gadget.
And for my own personal use, I'd love to be able to throttle a dos 6.22 VM to 486 speeds so some of those ancient programs can be ran for historical purposes. (Without bombing the processor with dummy NOP and other MOSLO crap so we keep our power consumption down.)
I think the "correct" solution to that is a 486 hardware "emulator" that uses a timer to run the virtualized CPU's clock at a certain rate. You're not going to get very far telling Intel and AMD that they need an instruction to slow down their chips.
So I've been reading that NILFS is the dog bollocks when it comes to solid-state disks in terms of speed and longevity of the disk. However, what I'd like to know is whether any of the advantages will hold for regular old mechanical disks as well. If so, I'd love to try NILFS. Having a real honest-to-goodness versioning filesystem with instant snapshots on my file servers would be so great, I can hardly find the words to describe it.
That would allow me to store all my work on one partition, and access it from Mac OS X, from Windows via Boot Camp, or from Windows inside Parallels or VMware Fusion.
Most of us handle this by setting up a NAS that exports the filesystem as CIFS, which is supported by every major OS. Not only does this mean you can mount the filesystem from different operating systems, but also from different computers. And it makes backups a snap. The caveat is that this limits disk access speed to the speed of your network. If that isn't acceptable, then you really need a more complex (read: expensive) solution than either this or the one you propose.
I must have it backwards then, I've spent my entire sysadmin career trying to be more BOFH-like. Still haven't quite gotten 'round to "replacing" the boss through a series of entirely coincidental yet unfortunate events, but that's mainly because he doesn't seem to mind that 15% of my day is spend administering to systems while the other 85% is divided evenly between light reading, Slashdot, and trips to the pub.
Why is it not an option? It isn't the best option, which is to announce that an exploit exists, but not release the details.
Releasing the announcement of a security vulnerability without all of the details is a pretty silly thing to do.
For one thing, it's usually impossible to prove that the vulnerability exists without going into enough detail that others could use to figure out the full nature of the vulnerability for themselves. In the security field, nobody pays attention to you if you don't have evidence or hard data to back up your claims and that's the way it always should be.
Second, it's just one uncomfortable step away from blackmail. There are already groups out there who look for critical vulnerabilities in common software so that they can sell the exploits to the highest bidders, we don't need even the potential for this kind of thing in otherwise legitimate security research.
It would have been far easier for them to announce that an exploit exists so customers could get out of a bad position instead of releasing the code which guarantees the end result we see here (For the customer, not the owner of LxLabs)
And if they did, they would be accused of scare-mongering, or even collusion with a competitor. They might even find themselves in slander/libel territory without the hard evidence to back up their claims.
I've been something of an AMD fanboy ever since the Athlon came out, but I just bought an Intel Atom 330 for a lightweight file server, and I have to say I'm thoroughly impressed. 64-bit, dual-core, virtualization extensions, and low-power to boot for around $80 which includes the motherboard. Simply unbeatable.
Also wanted to mention that these guys have easy-to-read benchmark charts of a wide variety of CPUs. Certainly more than the 26 in TFA. Benchmarks don't tell the whole story of course, but it's a good start for quick-and-dirty comparison.
These mirrors mounted on laptops get really annoying, and I'm not the only one who thinks that non-glossy displays are superior to their allegedly cheaper glossy displays.
What bugged me the most about these when they came out was that all the laptop makers (especially Apple) hyped it as a cool hip new feature when all they did was remove the anti-glare coating from the manufacturing process.
I found that amusing that he finds some form of entertainment to (music & movies) to benefit humanity more so than games.
What Moshe means is that today's video games are basically engineered to be time wasters. There's no real intellectual challenge to them, nothing to be learned. Just mow down the bad guys, pick up the loot, and move on to the next level. I used to be a huge gamer when I was a teen, playing PC and console games anywhere from 2 to 8 hours a day until one evening I realized I wasn't "getting" anything out of it. I quit cold-turkey, picked up programming and system administration instead and haven't looked back.
"Perhaps a rather odd statement coming from a lad whose passions include martial arts, scuba diving and playing piano. He also aspires to be a movie actor."
I don't find this odd at all. If you take up martial arts, you learn discipline and self-defense. These are pretty important lessons for anyone, even better if they're internalized at a young age. Scuba diving allows one to study and sometimes interact with underwater life. An understanding of aquatic ecosystems could inspire him to contribute to the field of biology some day. Learning the piano (or any instrument) can be the first step to an advanced understanding of music theory and creativity. Could we be looking at our next Bach? Probably not, but you never know for sure. Being a good actor is really hard and is a pretty lofty goal. You have to understand a lot about the human condition and be able to reproduce any aspect of it on cue.
Video games? Well, I have nothing against people who choose to spend their free time playing them. I'm known to fire up a game of Quake once in awhile, but I don't try to delude myself into thinking that I'm not just deliberately killing some time. And games are perfectly fine when added to a social gathering (e.g., "party games" like Smash Bros or Mario Kart), but by and large, nothing is really learned from solitary or online gaming. No matter how good you get, a high score or x number of frags will never contribute to society or individual development in any conceivable sense.
but he's still been brainwashed into thinking that he's not unusual. What a shame. And how typical.
Don't confused learned mediocrity with modesty. We have a society (and a Slashdot comments section) literally full of people who think that they're better than everyone else, so it's encouraging to see an 11-year-old who knows better despite his intellectual gifts.
If you don't run the scan with the agent, you will not have any network access. If you take some of the suggestions here and bypass the security agent, you are violating the AUP and, if caught, could face academic misconduct charges.
I think what you say is reasonable if (and only if) the university is providing the computers. If I bring my own Linux laptop for educational and/or recreational use at school, there's no way I'm installing some random software only for "policy compliance" reasons. Especially if all it's for is to scan for supposed vulnerabilities on my machine. I'm sorry, but I run Linux exactly to avoid that kind of crap in the first place.
Besides, software like this actively harms user security education. Software like this gives you and your users a false sense of security. You should be instructing them on how to use the Internet safely, not handing them a CD and saying, "now you're all good!" Plus, you open up the door for some semi-clever attacker to send an email to every osu.edu address saying, "click on this legit-looking link to install an update to your OSU network policy compliance software. Failure to do so in 24 hours will result in loss of network access, etc..." Then you have a campus-wide botnet on your hands which was kind of the think you were looking to prevent in the first place.
I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to scan your computer for anything else (they do not), they would not be able to.
You say this, and you probably even mean it. However, the time will come when somebody will want to. (Think: child porn investigation or RIAA lawsuit.) And they certainly will be able to because there's this handy-dandy software installed on every campus and personal computer and most of the students have no clue what it really does and will click "Yes" on any box telling them that an update is available. Once it's been used for a Real Important Reason, using it for less important reasons (software piracy, copyright infringement, saying bad things about the University) looks much easier to those in charge. If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, then you're spot-on because it damn well is an extremely slippery, extremely steep slope and it would be better for all involved, even your network security, if the line was firmly drawn at compulsory software installation.
I went to school to learn and broaden my mind, not have odious policies shoved down my throat at every turn. I wish today's college students could be afforded the same privilege.
"He acknowledged two concerns for smartbooks are the lack of native support for Adobe Flash on ARM and the fragmentation of Linux application environments. However, he said solutions to both issues are in the works." Emphasis in bold mine.
The notion of "fragmentation" being a negative attribute of open source software is idiotic. What you call fragmentation, I call freedom. If somebody doesn't like the window manager on their computer, they can change it to one they do like. Or, in the worst case, they can make their own. You simply can't do that (and many other things) effectively or efficiently on a proprietary system with One Blessed User Interface.
You can't have an open source ecosystem that isn't "fragmented" in the first place, so fighting it is pointless. Every person is going to have a different idea of how a particular line of code should be written, let alone how an entire project should be structured. They are going to arrive at different solutions and are going to prefer their own solutions to others'. It's competition and, in a way, rather like natural selection. The software that solves the problem the best, wins. If there is no clear winner, then at least there are multiple alternatives for users and developers to choose from. I will keep preaching this on Slashdot and everywhere else until it finally sinks in: If you don't want the freedom that open source offers, then don't use it. Really, you won't be hurting anyone's feelings by not jumping on the Linux buzzwagon.
Now, these are folks doing very serious work with Linux. Many Slashdoters have said the same things only to be branded as trolls. I can see a future for Android if Google continues to do a good job.
The difference between the trolls and Google is that Google is doing something about their complaints. Rather than bitching and doing, the trolls were just bitching, which is a very trollish thing to do hence they were correctly modded as such.
Also, doesn't it strike you as rather hypocritical that Google would bemoan the fragmentation of the "Linux application environments" and then sets out to create their own? I mean, if fragmentation were really that big an issue for them, then they should have taken an existing solution like Hildon, Moblin, or Maemo and improved or extended it to get the features they wanted. Creating Android only increased the fragmentation of the Linux's mobile interface offerings.
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
wonderful, cryptic commands like 'ls, cp, rm, mv, etc.
I know you're just going for a +5, Funny, but:
ls = list cp = copy rm = remove mv = move
Not so cryptic? They were deliberately intended to be short so that they were easy to remember and easy to type. Rather important details to an administrator like myself who might use them dozens or even hundreds of times each day.
IANAL, but... In a U.S. court, you can be successfully sued or convicted for doing something that's against the law, even if there is an abundance of evidence that the "victim" gave you permission to do so. There is no reason to believe that the same couldn't happen to this team of researchers.
In the late 80's and early 90's, various police departments and government agencies were trying to make examples out of evil computer hackers (who would probably be called "digital terrorists" or some such nonsense these days). They managed to put many behind bars even though the companies they "hacked" refused to press charges because in most cases no damage was done, the company plugged the security hole, and the hackers often told the companies how they got in after the fact. A sufficiently evil prosecutor could easily charge the researchers in this case with unauthorized access of an information system and win, because a judge and jury are bound to follow the letter of the law and the law doesn't allow for exceptions when permission is granted.
Intel has made it very clear to WRS that WRS will be maintained [semi] autonomously
It's not that I don't believe the AC, nor do I wish to be overly cynical here, but doesn't the big company always say this to the management of the little company after an acquisition? Then later on they all get sacked and replaced with promoted managers from the big company?
I'm not predicting it will happen in this case, but I've seen it happen so many times...
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!" I blurt. "In fact, a REAL computer would have a hole in the front to push trees into and an exhaust pipe out the back for the black smoke to come out of."
Because the Windows codebase has just about the worst security track record in history?
Because it was never designed to be a even general-purpose operating system?
Because there are many other operating systems that are designed and tested exclusively to operate reliably in embedded environments where security is a top priority?
The future of "radio" is on the Internet, period. Although we'll probably never be fully free of the copyright cartel's grasp when it comes to music, the Internet levels the playing field and gives independent artists and stations equal footing and gives the listener a potentially unlimited amount of choice. And really, it's already happening. You can find sites and streams playing really good music by independent artists that meets or exceeds the quality of any professionally-produced stuff, just like open source software tends to best proprietary offerings because the creators are focused first on quality and their own idea of what's "good" instead of rushing to meet deadlines or achieve monetary gain.
After all the crap that the RIAA has pulled over the last decade, I try very to find music and streams that don't fund them or their artists every time I listen to or buy a song. On of my favorite "stations" is scenesat.com. They play music only from demoscene artists who give their work away freely. If you're into electronica, you'd do well to give them a listen. It's not all chiptunes and rehashed trance, some of it beats the pants off the offerings of similar commercial artists. I'd like to see more stations like this around. If the RIAA and PRS aren't careful, they could start to see some real competition in the near future from musicians who do what they do not because they want a phat paycheck someday, but because they love what they do and want to share their art with anyone who cares to listen.
If you know of more stations that stream independent royalty-free music, please share with the rest of us.
To implement DVB-T legally, you need to pay the DVB-T license pool.
If I understand the language of that page properly, you only need the patent license to manufacture and sell the receiver hardware (e.g., a DVB tuner card). Unless the drivers require a non-trivial amount of signal processing to pass the video stream off to userland, I don't think they run afoul of any DVB patents. (But again, I haven't examined this nor the DVB patents closely.)
Huh. I thought it was my ad-blocker or something acting up. I didn't seriously think that the Slashdot coders would let such an obvious and annoying bug persist for a full week (or more?) but I guess I was wrong.
If the FCC mandates that all television must be broadcast in digital they either A) Need to remove that requirement, B) Have someone invalidate the patent or C) Buy the patent and release it to the public. This is nothing more than government assisted extortion.
Yes, and it's a shame that practically nobody realized this until these systems were already rolled out.
Europe, Russia, India, Australia, and China have been using DVB-T for their digital broadcast television. Support for DVB hardware in free operating systems like Linux is already in-place and also covers digital satellite and digital cable (DVB-S and DVB-C, respectively) because the standards are so similar.
I guess using existing, deployed, open standards would have just made too much sense.
I'm sure the submitter will never get this far in the thread, but I just wanted to add my 2 cents here anyway.
1. If the submitter thinks that telling people "no" is rude, has he thought about how rude it is of them to ask in the first place? Suppose someone you walk up to someone on the street and ask to borrow their cell phone so you can call your girlfriend for a little chat. What do you think the answer will be? And why should your response be any different when someone randomly asks to use your laptop to check their email or facebook?
2. If you're really the type who can't say no to inconvenient requests from random people, and you happen to run Linux, create a guest account (with a password of "toocheaptobuymyownlaptop") with a really obnoxious window manager and use a web browser that has Javascript, Flash, etc all disabled. Or perhaps install Windows 95 in a virtual machine and make that your "guest account". Your goal here is to make people not want to use your computer. Eventually, the requests will dwindle down to virtually none.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
Amazon hasn't released any numbers on how many were sold. However, I frequently use the Mom Scale to informally gauge the popularity of a given technology. How it works is like this: if my 65-year-old mom has heard of a piece of technology, then it's popular. If she has purchased or downloaded a piece of technology, then it's enormously popular.
I found out yesterday that my mom just bought a Kindle, hence the Kindle is enormously popular.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has lived in the midwest, I can tell you those guys in orange vests have a hard enough time recognizing the difference between animals with two legs and four, I wouldn't count on them to be able to tell the difference between birds that flap their wings and those that don't.
TPM, from my understanding, just makes it more difficult to tinker with things that were designed not to be tinkered with. Those of us who buy hardware and use software that explicitly *was* meant to be tinkered with will see no change, so TPM support in the kernel ultimately means little to me. If a company releases a cool gadget or computer with a TPM but doesn't give me the keys, then I simply don't buy that gadget.
I think the "correct" solution to that is a 486 hardware "emulator" that uses a timer to run the virtualized CPU's clock at a certain rate. You're not going to get very far telling Intel and AMD that they need an instruction to slow down their chips.
So I've been reading that NILFS is the dog bollocks when it comes to solid-state disks in terms of speed and longevity of the disk. However, what I'd like to know is whether any of the advantages will hold for regular old mechanical disks as well. If so, I'd love to try NILFS. Having a real honest-to-goodness versioning filesystem with instant snapshots on my file servers would be so great, I can hardly find the words to describe it.
Most of us handle this by setting up a NAS that exports the filesystem as CIFS, which is supported by every major OS. Not only does this mean you can mount the filesystem from different operating systems, but also from different computers. And it makes backups a snap. The caveat is that this limits disk access speed to the speed of your network. If that isn't acceptable, then you really need a more complex (read: expensive) solution than either this or the one you propose.
I must have it backwards then, I've spent my entire sysadmin career trying to be more BOFH-like. Still haven't quite gotten 'round to "replacing" the boss through a series of entirely coincidental yet unfortunate events, but that's mainly because he doesn't seem to mind that 15% of my day is spend administering to systems while the other 85% is divided evenly between light reading, Slashdot, and trips to the pub.
Releasing the announcement of a security vulnerability without all of the details is a pretty silly thing to do.
For one thing, it's usually impossible to prove that the vulnerability exists without going into enough detail that others could use to figure out the full nature of the vulnerability for themselves. In the security field, nobody pays attention to you if you don't have evidence or hard data to back up your claims and that's the way it always should be.
Second, it's just one uncomfortable step away from blackmail. There are already groups out there who look for critical vulnerabilities in common software so that they can sell the exploits to the highest bidders, we don't need even the potential for this kind of thing in otherwise legitimate security research.
And if they did, they would be accused of scare-mongering, or even collusion with a competitor. They might even find themselves in slander/libel territory without the hard evidence to back up their claims.
I've been something of an AMD fanboy ever since the Athlon came out, but I just bought an Intel Atom 330 for a lightweight file server, and I have to say I'm thoroughly impressed. 64-bit, dual-core, virtualization extensions, and low-power to boot for around $80 which includes the motherboard. Simply unbeatable.
Also wanted to mention that these guys have easy-to-read benchmark charts of a wide variety of CPUs. Certainly more than the 26 in TFA. Benchmarks don't tell the whole story of course, but it's a good start for quick-and-dirty comparison.
What bugged me the most about these when they came out was that all the laptop makers (especially Apple) hyped it as a cool hip new feature when all they did was remove the anti-glare coating from the manufacturing process.
What Moshe means is that today's video games are basically engineered to be time wasters. There's no real intellectual challenge to them, nothing to be learned. Just mow down the bad guys, pick up the loot, and move on to the next level. I used to be a huge gamer when I was a teen, playing PC and console games anywhere from 2 to 8 hours a day until one evening I realized I wasn't "getting" anything out of it. I quit cold-turkey, picked up programming and system administration instead and haven't looked back.
I don't find this odd at all. If you take up martial arts, you learn discipline and self-defense. These are pretty important lessons for anyone, even better if they're internalized at a young age. Scuba diving allows one to study and sometimes interact with underwater life. An understanding of aquatic ecosystems could inspire him to contribute to the field of biology some day. Learning the piano (or any instrument) can be the first step to an advanced understanding of music theory and creativity. Could we be looking at our next Bach? Probably not, but you never know for sure. Being a good actor is really hard and is a pretty lofty goal. You have to understand a lot about the human condition and be able to reproduce any aspect of it on cue.
Video games? Well, I have nothing against people who choose to spend their free time playing them. I'm known to fire up a game of Quake once in awhile, but I don't try to delude myself into thinking that I'm not just deliberately killing some time. And games are perfectly fine when added to a social gathering (e.g., "party games" like Smash Bros or Mario Kart), but by and large, nothing is really learned from solitary or online gaming. No matter how good you get, a high score or x number of frags will never contribute to society or individual development in any conceivable sense.
Don't confused learned mediocrity with modesty. We have a society (and a Slashdot comments section) literally full of people who think that they're better than everyone else, so it's encouraging to see an 11-year-old who knows better despite his intellectual gifts.
I think what you say is reasonable if (and only if) the university is providing the computers. If I bring my own Linux laptop for educational and/or recreational use at school, there's no way I'm installing some random software only for "policy compliance" reasons. Especially if all it's for is to scan for supposed vulnerabilities on my machine. I'm sorry, but I run Linux exactly to avoid that kind of crap in the first place.
Besides, software like this actively harms user security education. Software like this gives you and your users a false sense of security. You should be instructing them on how to use the Internet safely, not handing them a CD and saying, "now you're all good!" Plus, you open up the door for some semi-clever attacker to send an email to every osu.edu address saying, "click on this legit-looking link to install an update to your OSU network policy compliance software. Failure to do so in 24 hours will result in loss of network access, etc..." Then you have a campus-wide botnet on your hands which was kind of the think you were looking to prevent in the first place.
You say this, and you probably even mean it. However, the time will come when somebody will want to. (Think: child porn investigation or RIAA lawsuit.) And they certainly will be able to because there's this handy-dandy software installed on every campus and personal computer and most of the students have no clue what it really does and will click "Yes" on any box telling them that an update is available. Once it's been used for a Real Important Reason, using it for less important reasons (software piracy, copyright infringement, saying bad things about the University) looks much easier to those in charge. If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, then you're spot-on because it damn well is an extremely slippery, extremely steep slope and it would be better for all involved, even your network security, if the line was firmly drawn at compulsory software installation.
I went to school to learn and broaden my mind, not have odious policies shoved down my throat at every turn. I wish today's college students could be afforded the same privilege.
The notion of "fragmentation" being a negative attribute of open source software is idiotic. What you call fragmentation, I call freedom. If somebody doesn't like the window manager on their computer, they can change it to one they do like. Or, in the worst case, they can make their own. You simply can't do that (and many other things) effectively or efficiently on a proprietary system with One Blessed User Interface.
You can't have an open source ecosystem that isn't "fragmented" in the first place, so fighting it is pointless. Every person is going to have a different idea of how a particular line of code should be written, let alone how an entire project should be structured. They are going to arrive at different solutions and are going to prefer their own solutions to others'. It's competition and, in a way, rather like natural selection. The software that solves the problem the best, wins. If there is no clear winner, then at least there are multiple alternatives for users and developers to choose from. I will keep preaching this on Slashdot and everywhere else until it finally sinks in: If you don't want the freedom that open source offers, then don't use it. Really, you won't be hurting anyone's feelings by not jumping on the Linux buzzwagon.
The difference between the trolls and Google is that Google is doing something about their complaints. Rather than bitching and doing, the trolls were just bitching, which is a very trollish thing to do hence they were correctly modded as such.
Also, doesn't it strike you as rather hypocritical that Google would bemoan the fragmentation of the "Linux application environments" and then sets out to create their own? I mean, if fragmentation were really that big an issue for them, then they should have taken an existing solution like Hildon, Moblin, or Maemo and improved or extended it to get the features they wanted. Creating Android only increased the fragmentation of the Linux's mobile interface offerings.
I know you're just going for a +5, Funny, but:
ls = list
cp = copy
rm = remove
mv = move
Not so cryptic? They were deliberately intended to be short so that they were easy to remember and easy to type. Rather important details to an administrator like myself who might use them dozens or even hundreds of times each day.
IANAL, but... In a U.S. court, you can be successfully sued or convicted for doing something that's against the law, even if there is an abundance of evidence that the "victim" gave you permission to do so. There is no reason to believe that the same couldn't happen to this team of researchers.
In the late 80's and early 90's, various police departments and government agencies were trying to make examples out of evil computer hackers (who would probably be called "digital terrorists" or some such nonsense these days). They managed to put many behind bars even though the companies they "hacked" refused to press charges because in most cases no damage was done, the company plugged the security hole, and the hackers often told the companies how they got in after the fact. A sufficiently evil prosecutor could easily charge the researchers in this case with unauthorized access of an information system and win, because a judge and jury are bound to follow the letter of the law and the law doesn't allow for exceptions when permission is granted.
It's not that I don't believe the AC, nor do I wish to be overly cynical here, but doesn't the big company always say this to the management of the little company after an acquisition? Then later on they all get sacked and replaced with promoted managers from the big company?
I'm not predicting it will happen in this case, but I've seen it happen so many times...
Oblig. BOFH:
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!" I blurt. "In fact, a REAL computer would have a hole in the front to push trees into and an exhaust pipe out the back for the black smoke to come out of."
Because the Windows codebase has just about the worst security track record in history?
Because it was never designed to be a even general-purpose operating system?
Because there are many other operating systems that are designed and tested exclusively to operate reliably in embedded environments where security is a top priority?
The future of "radio" is on the Internet, period. Although we'll probably never be fully free of the copyright cartel's grasp when it comes to music, the Internet levels the playing field and gives independent artists and stations equal footing and gives the listener a potentially unlimited amount of choice. And really, it's already happening. You can find sites and streams playing really good music by independent artists that meets or exceeds the quality of any professionally-produced stuff, just like open source software tends to best proprietary offerings because the creators are focused first on quality and their own idea of what's "good" instead of rushing to meet deadlines or achieve monetary gain.
After all the crap that the RIAA has pulled over the last decade, I try very to find music and streams that don't fund them or their artists every time I listen to or buy a song. On of my favorite "stations" is scenesat.com. They play music only from demoscene artists who give their work away freely. If you're into electronica, you'd do well to give them a listen. It's not all chiptunes and rehashed trance, some of it beats the pants off the offerings of similar commercial artists. I'd like to see more stations like this around. If the RIAA and PRS aren't careful, they could start to see some real competition in the near future from musicians who do what they do not because they want a phat paycheck someday, but because they love what they do and want to share their art with anyone who cares to listen.
If you know of more stations that stream independent royalty-free music, please share with the rest of us.
If I understand the language of that page properly, you only need the patent license to manufacture and sell the receiver hardware (e.g., a DVB tuner card). Unless the drivers require a non-trivial amount of signal processing to pass the video stream off to userland, I don't think they run afoul of any DVB patents. (But again, I haven't examined this nor the DVB patents closely.)
See this.
Huh. I thought it was my ad-blocker or something acting up. I didn't seriously think that the Slashdot coders would let such an obvious and annoying bug persist for a full week (or more?) but I guess I was wrong.
Yes, and it's a shame that practically nobody realized this until these systems were already rolled out.
Europe, Russia, India, Australia, and China have been using DVB-T for their digital broadcast television. Support for DVB hardware in free operating systems like Linux is already in-place and also covers digital satellite and digital cable (DVB-S and DVB-C, respectively) because the standards are so similar.
I guess using existing, deployed, open standards would have just made too much sense.
I'm sure the submitter will never get this far in the thread, but I just wanted to add my 2 cents here anyway.
1. If the submitter thinks that telling people "no" is rude, has he thought about how rude it is of them to ask in the first place? Suppose someone you walk up to someone on the street and ask to borrow their cell phone so you can call your girlfriend for a little chat. What do you think the answer will be? And why should your response be any different when someone randomly asks to use your laptop to check their email or facebook?
2. If you're really the type who can't say no to inconvenient requests from random people, and you happen to run Linux, create a guest account (with a password of "toocheaptobuymyownlaptop") with a really obnoxious window manager and use a web browser that has Javascript, Flash, etc all disabled. Or perhaps install Windows 95 in a virtual machine and make that your "guest account". Your goal here is to make people not want to use your computer. Eventually, the requests will dwindle down to virtually none.
Amazon hasn't released any numbers on how many were sold. However, I frequently use the Mom Scale to informally gauge the popularity of a given technology. How it works is like this: if my 65-year-old mom has heard of a piece of technology, then it's popular. If she has purchased or downloaded a piece of technology, then it's enormously popular.
I found out yesterday that my mom just bought a Kindle, hence the Kindle is enormously popular.