On Sun's web page announcing this exciting new release, there's a link to the list of "new features and enhancements". When I clicked on it, it said "404: not found". I think that sums up Java quite nicely.
OK, you're enjoying the quality of life there by your trout stream. And then half the population of California come and live next door to you and build a huge great data centre....
if you know of somewhere nice, it's best to keep quiet about it.
Doing something it wasn't supposed to? But they had no contractual obligation to Google, and it wasn't unlawful. So where does the "not supposed to" come from?
Windows activation looks at your hardware: if you try to run your image on a different machine, with a different drive, different CPU, network card etc then it will ask you to re-activate.
But virtualization creates virtual hardware: the same vitual image will see the same disk drive, the same model of CPU, the same network card (possibly with the same mac address) etc, regardless of the real hardware. So it should be possible to arrange that Windows activation does not notice that anything has changed.
Giving a "this site is blocked" message would allow people to put together parts of the censorship list, which is supposed to be secret. So they don't do it. On the other hand, this (warning: pdf) claims to describe how the system works, including a vulnerability which would allow the list of blocked sites to be discovered.
I would be very surprised if this were the case. It certainly isn't the case for the UK version of Cleanfeed.
Remember that this is touted as a child porn filter. If a government agency published a list of child porn sites, the pedophiles would all rush to look at them (using non-Canadian proxies or the Google cache or whatever is necessary to circumvent the filter). So the people running this sort of censorship always keep the list of censored sites secret.
No, but they'll certainly give a shit if someone discovers how to install and activate Windows in a VM, and then simply distribute snapshots of than VM to all his friends, giving them all free running copies of Windows.
By talking about "fighting it", you've missed my point. If you've tried to import a magazine and it has been impounded by Customs, at least you know what has happened, and you are in a position to argue against it. But with this sort of censorship, in 99% of cases you never know it has happened. You click on a link in a web page and nothing happens: most people will just assume "it's broken", not "it's been censored". So there's no way to fight it. And you might not like Hustler, but many other people do: but I can guarantee that the people who get themselves jobs as censors will be the sort who will object to far milder stuff than that.
The figures in TFA are percentages, yet the total in the bottom row is a sum of money. How the hell did that happen?
And the total for SQL Server 2000 is twice that for SQL Server 2005 on the same version of Windows. Does upgrading a database really make that much difference? How?
Perhaps there are some clues in the document that you can download from Microsoft. This reveals that 100% of the linux servers were hosting dynamic web sites, but 50% of the Windows servers were hosting static web sites. That must make a big reduction in the Windows support costs. And there were 10 times more Windows servers than Linux servers, so the costs of Linux-trained admins were spread amongst fewer servers, making them seem more expensive per server.
My guess is that this study was done at a Windows-only shop that had been forced to install a few Linux servers for tasks that were beyong the capabilities of Windows, and was therefore spending a disproportionate amount of money supporting a few specialist Linux boxes.
On the other hand, if all my virtual machines have the same memory, network, disk size etc, then I'll only need to active Windows once, and I can run as many copies of it as I like: they will all see exactly identical machines, so the same activation code will work for all of them.
Could this be what Microsoft are really afraid of?
So magazines with illegal content are blocked in Canada?
How does that work? Does everyone who wishes to publish any magazine or newspaper have to have each copy examined by the official censor before it is allowed to be sold? Are the decisions of the censor secret, so no-one is allowed to know what is being censored?
That's the difference. There's actually no attempt being made here to discover whether the sites are illegal or not: that's a decision for the courts, and they are not being involved. Instead, web sites will simply vanish at the whim of whoever is running the block list.
Of course, if a major web site, or one of particular interest to Canadians, were censored by mistake, then there would be an outcry and the matter would be put right. But if (for example) my own personal blog were invisible in Canada, I don't suppose anyone would ever notice, and if they did I hardly have the resources to fight the matter in a foreign court. So there's the potential for all sorts of stuff that the censor happens to dislike to simply vanish, without anyone in Canada ever being aware of what they've lost.
Re:If they would have kept their original ideas
on
Vista's Limited Symlinks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At the time, it looked as though many commercial customers (especially the US government, as I recall) would insist on posix compliance. Also, MS wanted to appeal to customers wanting OS2. So NT was indeed designed with posix and OS2 emulation modules, as well as a Windows API layer.
Of course this was just for marketing purposes: once the customer was baited into Microsoft lock-in they would discover that this compatibility stuff was all half-backed and buggy, and would switch to using the Windows API instead.
I'm not familiar with the package you're discussing, but anything that produces clickable links that it's dangerous to click on sounds to me like a disaster waiting to happen.
No, we're still ahead. This company only wasted $4 billion, whereas in the UK we've wasted $24 billion. Granted, this company is ahead on waste-per-patient, but we're well in the lead on the total amount down the drain.
The "overwrite eighty times" stuff comes from some studies done in the days of 1GB drives. Basically, consumer-grade hardware in those days was not making full use of the storage capacity of the disks, and more sophisticated equipment could read information from between the tracks where the data was supposed to be stored.
Drive technology has evolved, and now your disk can store 80 times as much data as in those days, or even more, and there is no longer any wasted space. So the advice about wiping is really out-of-date and useless. But it has passed into folklore, so it still gets done.
Have a google for "Peter Gutmann" if you want to discover the theory behind all this.
I remember seeing several designs for this sort of thing back in the 70s or 80s in electronics magazines for hobbyists. I've no idea whether they worked, but it might be worth asking you local library if they have back issues from that long ago (it was pre-world-wide-web, obviously).
I think people used to hook them up to lights and then smoke weed and admire the pretty patterns...
I've seen those signs. I thought they were quite amusing. And no, you're not supposed to purchase the genuine goods.
The last time I made a purchase there, it worked like this. I went into a shop that had only genuine, full-price software displayed for sale. The shopkeeper looked me up and down and then invited me to step round the back behind the counter, where he showed me pictures of fake software. I chose what I wanted and paid the money. Then he said "why don't you go and look at some other shops for a few minutes".
I strolled around outside for a while, and a complete stranger came up to me and said something to the effect of "I think you dropped this". He handed me a bag containing my purchases.
I suppose that things were done this way to maintain some sort of "plausible denyability" in case of a police raid.
In my experience, Bangkok is still a hell hole. I don't know many Thai people who use the monorail: it's too expensive, doesn't reach out to the residential areas, and you can't show off what an expensive car you've got.
I don't think that "embracing open source" will make the pirates in Pantip Plaza will go away. They're not the ones selling into government contracts. The pirares are selling to private individuals, who have every motivation to buy Microsoft software because it is (a) a near-monopoly, and (b) very reasonably priced so long as you buy it from the pirates.
It's not the government coffers he is thinking of.
A Thai friend once explained to me why Bangkok has both a monorail system and an underground railway. I think the same principle is at work here: a new government always abandons the projects started by the previous government, and starts new ones.
You see, bribes are always paid at the start of a project, during the vendor selection phase. This person is looking to get a large sum of money from Microsoft in exchange for abandoning some open-source projects and switching to Windows.
But now Microsoft, or indeed hundreds of other companies, can extend or corrupt the core libraries as much as they like, so long as they ship the source code.
However, in those days Sun was pushing Java as a language for browser extensions, akin to ActiveX or Flash. Java has failed in that market, despite Sun's best efforts, so Microsoft no longer have the motivation to release an incompatible version - or indeed any version - for the desktop.
The only big market for Java now is on huge servers that have enough processing power and memory to run Java's bloated run-time compiler. That's a market dominated by a few big names: Sun, IBM, Apache,... and they've sold customers on "openness" and "portability" so it's not in their interest to start fragmenting the product.
It looks to me like a good deal of money and effort is going into this OLPC project. It's non-profit, but presumably people are being paid for their time, and manufacturing so much hardware must cost a lot.
Was this project preceded by a published study that shows that this is the best way to spend all that money in order to benefit the intended recipients? Or did the people running this project just decide to "do computers" because that was the field they happened to be working in?
The article says that the researchers found the correct diagnosis amongst the top 3 found by google in 15 cases out of 26.
In other words, they took a very tiny sample, and then cherry-picked the good results from the bad ones. There's no mention of any serious statistical analysis (why pick 26 as a sample size? why pick 3 results instead of 4 or 5?). And there's no mention of any "control" experiment (e.g. guessing the answer, or perhaps looking it up in a medical textbook). This is a classic example of how to fit the facts to the desired conclusion.
I tried to give some code to Novell once. I found a small bug in a Suse program (it was one Suse had written themselves, not a 3rd-party product they were including in their distribution) and I sent them a patch.
I got back an email saying they wouldn't give me any support unless I proved that I'd paid for their product. I tried telling them that I was trying to support them, but to no avail: all my emails just got returned with the same message. I pretty soon gave up.
A distributor like Debian or Slackware is really trying to help Linux, but once money comes into the equation, as with Suse or Redhat, then the spirit of the GPL goes out of the window, even if the legal adherence to the letter or the law remains.
Slashdot Mirror
On Sun's web page announcing this exciting new release, there's a link to the list of "new features and enhancements". When I clicked on it, it said "404: not found". I think that sums up Java quite nicely.
OK, you're enjoying the quality of life there by your trout stream. And then half the population of California come and live next door to you and build a huge great data centre....
if you know of somewhere nice, it's best to keep quiet about it.
PCs won't run z/OS
Have a look at hercules
Doing something it wasn't supposed to? But they had no contractual obligation to Google, and it wasn't unlawful. So where does the "not supposed to" come from?
Windows activation looks at your hardware: if you try to run your image on a different machine, with a different drive, different CPU, network card etc then it will ask you to re-activate.
But virtualization creates virtual hardware: the same vitual image will see the same disk drive, the same model of CPU, the same network card (possibly with the same mac address) etc, regardless of the real hardware. So it should be possible to arrange that Windows activation does not notice that anything has changed.
Giving a "this site is blocked" message would allow people to put together parts of the censorship list, which is supposed to be secret. So they don't do it. On the other hand, this (warning: pdf) claims to describe how the system works, including a vulnerability which would allow the list of blocked sites to be discovered.
The decisions of the censor are not secret.
I would be very surprised if this were the case. It certainly isn't the case for the UK version of Cleanfeed.
Remember that this is touted as a child porn filter. If a government agency published a list of child porn sites, the pedophiles would all rush to look at them (using non-Canadian proxies or the Google cache or whatever is necessary to circumvent the filter). So the people running this sort of censorship always keep the list of censored sites secret.
No, but they'll certainly give a shit if someone discovers how to install and activate Windows in a VM, and then simply distribute snapshots of than VM to all his friends, giving them all free running copies of Windows.
By talking about "fighting it", you've missed my point. If you've tried to import a magazine and it has been impounded by Customs, at least you know what has happened, and you are in a position to argue against it. But with this sort of censorship, in 99% of cases you never know it has happened. You click on a link in a web page and nothing happens: most people will just assume "it's broken", not "it's been censored". So there's no way to fight it. And you might not like Hustler, but many other people do: but I can guarantee that the people who get themselves jobs as censors will be the sort who will object to far milder stuff than that.
The figures in TFA are percentages, yet the total in the bottom row is a sum of money. How the hell did that happen?
And the total for SQL Server 2000 is twice that for SQL Server 2005 on the same version of Windows. Does upgrading a database really make that much difference? How?
Perhaps there are some clues in the document that you can download from Microsoft. This reveals that 100% of the linux servers were hosting dynamic web sites, but 50% of the Windows servers were hosting static web sites. That must make a big reduction in the Windows support costs. And there were 10 times more Windows servers than Linux servers, so the costs of Linux-trained admins were spread amongst fewer servers, making them seem more expensive per server.
My guess is that this study was done at a Windows-only shop that had been forced to install a few Linux servers for tasks that were beyong the capabilities of Windows, and was therefore spending a disproportionate amount of money supporting a few specialist Linux boxes.
On the other hand, if all my virtual machines have the same memory, network, disk size etc, then I'll only need to active Windows once, and I can run as many copies of it as I like: they will all see exactly identical machines, so the same activation code will work for all of them.
Could this be what Microsoft are really afraid of?
So magazines with illegal content are blocked in Canada?
How does that work? Does everyone who wishes to publish any magazine or newspaper have to have each copy examined by the official censor before it is allowed to be sold? Are the decisions of the censor secret, so no-one is allowed to know what is being censored?
That's the difference. There's actually no attempt being made here to discover whether the sites are illegal or not: that's a decision for the courts, and they are not being involved. Instead, web sites will simply vanish at the whim of whoever is running the block list.
Of course, if a major web site, or one of particular interest to Canadians, were censored by mistake, then there would be an outcry and the matter would be put right. But if (for example) my own personal blog were invisible in Canada, I don't suppose anyone would ever notice, and if they did I hardly have the resources to fight the matter in a foreign court. So there's the potential for all sorts of stuff that the censor happens to dislike to simply vanish, without anyone in Canada ever being aware of what they've lost.
At the time, it looked as though many commercial customers (especially the US government, as I recall) would insist on posix compliance. Also, MS wanted to appeal to customers wanting OS2. So NT was indeed designed with posix and OS2 emulation modules, as well as a Windows API layer.
Of course this was just for marketing purposes: once the customer was baited into Microsoft lock-in they would discover that this compatibility stuff was all half-backed and buggy, and would switch to using the Windows API instead.
don't click on referral links in the web logs
I'm not familiar with the package you're discussing, but anything that produces clickable links that it's dangerous to click on sounds to me like a disaster waiting to happen.
No, we're still ahead. This company only wasted $4 billion, whereas in the UK we've wasted $24 billion. Granted, this company is ahead on waste-per-patient, but we're well in the lead on the total amount down the drain.
The "overwrite eighty times" stuff comes from some studies done in the days of 1GB drives. Basically, consumer-grade hardware in those days was not making full use of the storage capacity of the disks, and more sophisticated equipment could read information from between the tracks where the data was supposed to be stored.
Drive technology has evolved, and now your disk can store 80 times as much data as in those days, or even more, and there is no longer any wasted space. So the advice about wiping is really out-of-date and useless. But it has passed into folklore, so it still gets done.
Have a google for "Peter Gutmann" if you want to discover the theory behind all this.
I remember seeing several designs for this sort of thing back in the 70s or 80s in electronics magazines for hobbyists. I've no idea whether they worked, but it might be worth asking you local library if they have back issues from that long ago (it was pre-world-wide-web, obviously).
I think people used to hook them up to lights and then smoke weed and admire the pretty patterns...
I've seen those signs. I thought they were quite amusing. And no, you're not supposed to purchase the genuine goods.
The last time I made a purchase there, it worked like this. I went into a shop that had only genuine, full-price software displayed for sale. The shopkeeper looked me up and down and then invited me to step round the back behind the counter, where he showed me pictures of fake software. I chose what I wanted and paid the money. Then he said "why don't you go and look at some other shops for a few minutes".
I strolled around outside for a while, and a complete stranger came up to me and said something to the effect of "I think you dropped this". He handed me a bag containing my purchases.
I suppose that things were done this way to maintain some sort of "plausible denyability" in case of a police raid.
In my experience, Bangkok is still a hell hole. I don't know many Thai people who use the monorail: it's too expensive, doesn't reach out to the residential areas, and you can't show off what an expensive car you've got.
I don't think that "embracing open source" will make the pirates in Pantip Plaza will go away. They're not the ones selling into government contracts. The pirares are selling to private individuals, who have every motivation to buy Microsoft software because it is (a) a near-monopoly, and (b) very reasonably priced so long as you buy it from the pirates.
It's not the government coffers he is thinking of.
A Thai friend once explained to me why Bangkok has both a monorail system and an underground railway. I think the same principle is at work here: a new government always abandons the projects started by the previous government, and starts new ones.
You see, bribes are always paid at the start of a project, during the vendor selection phase. This person is looking to get a large sum of money from Microsoft in exchange for abandoning some open-source projects and switching to Windows.
Just when I'd kicked my morphine habit, now I'm going to get jailed for posession of saliva.
But now Microsoft, or indeed hundreds of other companies, can extend or corrupt the core libraries as much as they like, so long as they ship the source code.
However, in those days Sun was pushing Java as a language for browser extensions, akin to ActiveX or Flash. Java has failed in that market, despite Sun's best efforts, so Microsoft no longer have the motivation to release an incompatible version - or indeed any version - for the desktop.
The only big market for Java now is on huge servers that have enough processing power and memory to run Java's bloated run-time compiler. That's a market dominated by a few big names: Sun, IBM, Apache,... and they've sold customers on "openness" and "portability" so it's not in their interest to start fragmenting the product.
OK, here's a question that occurs to me.
It looks to me like a good deal of money and effort is going into this OLPC project. It's non-profit, but presumably people are being paid for their time, and manufacturing so much hardware must cost a lot.
Was this project preceded by a published study that shows that this is the best way to spend all that money in order to benefit the intended recipients? Or did the people running this project just decide to "do computers" because that was the field they happened to be working in?
The article says that the researchers found the correct diagnosis amongst the top 3 found by google in 15 cases out of 26.
In other words, they took a very tiny sample, and then cherry-picked the good results from the bad ones. There's no mention of any serious statistical analysis (why pick 26 as a sample size? why pick 3 results instead of 4 or 5?). And there's no mention of any "control" experiment (e.g. guessing the answer, or perhaps looking it up in a medical textbook). This is a classic example of how to fit the facts to the desired conclusion.
I tried to give some code to Novell once. I found a small bug in a Suse program (it was one Suse had written themselves, not a 3rd-party product they were including in their distribution) and I sent them a patch.
I got back an email saying they wouldn't give me any support unless I proved that I'd paid for their product. I tried telling them that I was trying to support them, but to no avail: all my emails just got returned with the same message. I pretty soon gave up.
A distributor like Debian or Slackware is really trying to help Linux, but once money comes into the equation, as with Suse or Redhat, then the spirit of the GPL goes out of the window, even if the legal adherence to the letter or the law remains.