Now that there exists a free software virtual computer, plex86, what prevents this whole scheme from being circumvented by adding virtual copy-protected disks to plex86 ?
That is, suppose someone takes a windows installation disk from their workplace, brings it home, and attempts to install it onto a plex86 running inside linux or FreeBSD or whatever. Can't they modify plex86 to make it virtualize the machine that the software was licensed to, down to any harddrive copyprotection and ethernet mac addresses or processor serial numbers or what have you ? Once one person figured out the details, couldn't they come up with simple, easy to use tools that would probe a computer and produce a configuration file to give the virtual computer software ?
I'm thinking that the PC, or any architecture which is open enough to be virtualized or emulated, is hard to use to control the delivery or use of content. In addition to lobbying to stop the copy-protection scheme, should we be focusing on making sure that the mechanisms to virtualize or emulate it are available in software ? If the proponents of the scheme where well informed of the efforts, then maybe they would see the futility of it and stop, devoting their resources to making their devices more useful (faster and bigger harddrives), not less useful.
Well, that's exactly the mode I operate under with CVS. It's just that the "merging back to the main" step is replaced by a "cvs commit" to the branch we are both working on (main or otherwise). I check out a copy of the files; I edit and compile and run and test; I do a cvs commit, and it warns me that someone else has committed changes since I checked them out, so I do a cvs update and get those changes merged into the local copy, test again, then commit.
One thing that I sometimes did is make a separate repository local to my system for extended work on something, and then only put the end product in the main project repository.
With ClearCase, do you have a local copy of the code at all ? I was confused by some of these references to a clearcase file system, and of the build process being integrated to the point that it took other developers object files instead of recompiling provided it met the dependancies. Can you work disconnected from the "repository" ? I used to check out code onto my laptop, work on it on a plane trip, and then commit it from my destination. Would I be able to compile if my machine couldn't talk to the repository ?
In reference to your complaint about making changes in area A only, and having to keep merging because of changes made in another branch to area B --
If the two areas are really that distinct, so that you know your changes will compartmentalized, then you can solve this by making the two "areas" be CVS modules, which will keep their own separate branching history. So your code tree is made up of two modules, one on a main branch, the other on your private development branch.
If they are really extremely disconnected, then you might even keep them in different repositories.
Creating copy protected content with their schemes and granting permission to break them is one trick to stir into the mix, but I think that the DCMA will fall in another manner.
If circumventing any copy protection or use restriction on media is really illegal, then Congress has given away a huge piece of their regulatory powers to the media producers. (Because those producers can decide what use is legal and illegal.) Conservative decisions have ruled that Congress (in some cases, if they go far enough) cannot delegate such legislative powers to others. (I think the example would be one of the rulings against the EPA, or otherwise environmentally related -- I seem to remember a good one involving that attempt to get coal burning power plants in the West Virginia and Ohio area to stop producing pollution which blows into the Northeast.)
So what you have to do is find a clever liberal judge, and contrive the appropriate case to present him. If the guy is not a moron, he'll write a simple decision that says that the DCMA can't possibly mean that ALL copy protection circumvention is illegal, because then it would be unconstitutional, and use that conservative argument against delegation of legislative powers. The smart thing to do is probably not to rule the law unconstitutional, but simply to say that whatever the law means, it can't possibly mean ALL copy protection circumvention, because Congress would have known such a law was unconstitutional. Then you leave the law, the big producers, and the congressmen who voted for it in an uncomfortable limbo. Do they publically say "Yes, that's what we wanted?" Or do they come out with some weaker interpretation of the law, subject to more examination ? Probably, Congress would revisit the issue and pass some clarification that would withstand court review.
But I do most of my work on Solaris, I don't have the same complaints about them. True, they don't give out the source code to the system, but I've never really had problems getting any free software packages to compile on it; they are pretty much a commodity with a standard (if high) price; if you go to news groups, everybody uses solaris and can help you; and things like fvwm and man actually work.
One of the compliants I left out above is that when I use fvwm instead of 4dwm the "K" key stops working on the keyboard. What's up with that ? If something like that happened on a solaris machine, a deja or google search would find the answer, and you wouldn't have to post. If you did, you would get an answer. Your "K" key works if you turn off CDE.
I know SGI has some good stuff, but I think they have a layer of crappy sales and crappy software hiding it. The problem is, for the price and effort, someone can just buy more PCs and spend more time organizing the system to get around the disk and memory bottlenecks.
SGI needs to die as quickly as possible. People like you need to stop sending them money, so that they go out of business, and the engineers, marketeers, managers, etc of SGI go out and find economically and socially useful work.
In my experience, SGI doesn't charge a single price for a machine; they want to know details about the purchaser so they know if they can charge more or less, and bargain with each purchaser separately, making it difficult to get a quote for a proposal. Things like memory have to be bought from third parties to save money, and the SGI salesman behaves all nasty like he worked for IBM back in their heyday. The machines themselves are rarely better than one tenth the money spent on cheap PC technology and running linux or FreeBSD (where they do work is in fast access to memory and disks -- I think the payoff isn't great enough though, you can often re-think your task to work as fast on cheap intel architecture).
I've also had problems with IRIX. There's no port of glibc; if you use a window manager other than than 4dwm piece of crap, annoying problems happen; setting the MANPATH variable to anything seems to make it so you can't get any man pages at all, so how are you supposed to add man pages to a package you just installed in some non-standard place ?
The final kicker is, there seems to be precious little answer to these things on the SGI newsgroups. Just a bunch of morons posting "Do you think SGI can survive by embracing linux?" and "My work gave me an old broken Indy. Can I install Windows and IE on this thing ?" and "Hey guys I love SGI ! Am cool cause I don't like Microsoft or what?" It seems to just rub in the fact that all the smart people have already abandoned the platform.
I will never work on a project that uses anything SGI again. As far as I am concerned, they are already deader than SCO.
Bluetooth is a poor bet also. It isn't designed for net access; it's designed for communication between various pieces of hardware that you own, such as your headphones and walkman. It replaces short cables and wires. Bluetooth on a cell phone won't get you the web, too short a range.
You are both wrong. The answer is neither to avoid them completely or to roll over simply because they want to place controls on how you can view and use the information on their page.
Ever since they started spreading stories out across multiple pages, I have been planning a program to get around their broken ideas of presentation. What I want to do is write a script using perl and lynx to download the complete nytimes everyday, in a one-page-per-article format, with a single big index page that links to all the articles, and archive it on my disk.
This could be set to run at 3am every night, making for much speedier consumption of the times when I get up in the morning, making my day a tiny bit more efficient. The fact that you would build up a searchable archive of the paper over time would also be highly useful. Who wants to pay two bucks for an article just because its a week old ?
You'd have to maintain the script against their periodic redesigns. If I ever get the energy, I'll do it one weekend and then post it on freshmeat.
The reason why I this would solve the account/privacy/tracking issue, is that I'd make it have a rotating set of accounts and it would use a different one for each article. There would be a simple text file with "account_name password" format, so that people could trade and merge these files, totally screwing tracking because random stories would be loaded from each account from different machines.
I guess my moral is that if you care, no one can put content on the internet and also control and meter access and use. All you have to do is sit down, and write the program that makes it easy for all the idiots out there to do what they want.
One last thing -- if they'd put all their articles on a news server I'd never visit the web page, I think the news group format is best for fast efficient consumption of the morning paper (well, best electronically -- I still cannot read the same amount of information as I can if I have the actual printed version in hand.)
What about those personal organizers ? There are the Franklins, the Sharps, and what else ? Anybody play around with those cybikos ?
I'm thinking of building a prototype for a product, which will be a small organizer or two way pager like device with a key board and small 4 line screen. I know nothing about ergonomics, so I'd like to examine the best example.
If you ever do find the product site you were looking for, could you send me an email ? I'm about to start a project possibly using PICs, and it sounds interesting.
Why actually pay money for a domain when you can use dyndns.org ? The email address probably won't be as cool, but a donation to dyndns every once in a while is probably a lot cheaper.
For example, you could get the domain doorframe.dyndns.org, and always map that to your machine however it was connecting to the net at the time; then you could bounce around from free ISP to free ISP as they went under, keeping the same permanent email address. Of course, you have simply moved the stability issue from the free email provider to dyndns.org, but dyndns.org is a little better I think -- it I expect it will be around longer, and you have a little bit of control over it in terms of being able to donate money to them.
it probably will go into ada mode automatically when you open a source file. M-x compile to build, and configure hot keys as you wish, to cut down on all the M-x'ing. As for object-browsers, and all the other more advanced IDE crap, my advice is to avoid them -- etags is cool though. They are available for your emace/xemacs setup if you insist.
And, you can use it all though a non-X dialup connection.
Your desktop environment should not be tuned to the language you program in. Just edit your.xinitrc to something simple like
xrdb -r ~/.Xresources
xterm &
fvwm
and be done with it. Replace "fvwm" with "enlightenment" or "fvwm2" if you want.
Once you learn to work with and modify an emacs based environment, you will find that you can transfer it between projects and operating systems (xemacs works on NT and pretty much all unixes) and programming environments, instead of wasting time searching for the new place they put the "debug" button in yet another bloated ill-designed GUI system.
LaTeX is nice for creating documents. For displaying them in browsers, you should pre-compile them, by using latex2html.
That's the best way to do static documents of large size, in my opinion. Tutorials and books on the web, that sort of thing.
If you use a system such as doxygen to automatically generate documentation from code, then LaTeX is nice as an intermediate output because you can make a web page as well as nice printed output.
So I aggree with you that browsers should not be interpreting or compiling LaTeX; that doesn't mean that you have to refrain from using it when it might happen to be the best tool, however, just translate the LaTeX to HTML when you are done.
Microsoft (and other large companies) will still be vulnerable to this because they won't trust their employees with encrypted mail. Those large corporations like to be able to read their employees' mail, or at least have the threat of being able to.
Some large corporations ban encrypted traffic through the firewall, because they think it will keep employees from sharing or selling all their secretes. You have to jump up and down and beg and make a "special business case" to get the ssh port opened up for a specific machine. Some of the big defense contractors are alledged to have special versions of PGP for their employees, which keep keys where the company can access them.
It's a bit ironic, but the big corporations will keep themselves vulnerable. Otherwise, they will be hobbled by their own idealistic or disgruntled employees -- which may cost the bottom line more than the government does.
In general, it is rare that banning one type of weapon or another swings the balence of power very permenantly or very much. Banning the crossbow didn't stop the end of knights in armor, banning the saw-toothed bayonet didn't stop mutilating war injuries. The reason why the crimes of big corporations will usually eventually be discovered is a basic human rule: three men can keep a secrete if two of them are dead.
If you want to stop the types of abuses big companies often carry out, you have to change human culture and behaviour. It's harder and takes longer, but works.
I think the fact that you don't need a license for 900 MHz isn't related to the directional antennea thing. That band is set aside for unlicensed use, but there still might be power restrictions, which a directional antennea could violate along it's axis.
Maybe someone can post a link to a listing of FCC regulations regarding the various unlicensed bands ?
But I think it does make sense that using directional antenneas point-to-point should cut down on interference with other devices. It should cut down on your interference with them as well.
I was surprised to see that so far no one had mentioned what I consider to be the one of the more wide reaching implecations of these kinds of virtual machines. You can use them for getting through programs that attempt to display content to a user without allowing them to copy or save the content.
What you should be able to do, is run plex86 in a debugger (or if you have to do it a lot, add in some kind of extra interface), and load up windows with the appropriate viewer, and display the stuff you want in it, and then switch over to linux and dig the image out of the appropriate memory location.
Should any of these types of technologies ever catch on, it should be possible to automate the system. You can either modify plex86 to make it easier or automatic, or for certain types of things (like a web site open to all but Clever Content protected) you could even set up a web service to do it automatically. Imagine being able to submit a protected URL to a proxy type service similar to bablefish.
If the windows install program can tell that you are not running on "bare hardware," doesn't that mean that VMWare isn't doing it's job ?
I think the point of emulators is to make sure the guest or second OS can't tell; otherwise, the people writing the second OS will make it so it doesn't work.
That actual nuclear reactor consisted of some radioactive material and it used a thermocouple to make electricity. That's not very efficient, but it has no moving parts or steam turbines or stuff to break.
This is one of the good discriptions -- it mentions that the reactor had liquid sodium-potassium cooling. I wonder if they actually had moving parts to move the coolant ? It would make more sense just to have a conducting channel as a heat sink. It's about a tenth of the way into this page.
They planned to boost the hot reactor out to an orbit which would decay into the earth after the reactor was no longer a danger. 954 was a malfunction.
The russian satillite that crashed into Canada was Cosmos 954. A google search on "Cosmos 954" gives you more information than you wanted to know.
I think the Cosmos worries were justifiable -- the satillite had a small radioactive power source. I think that they just have some warm radioactive material that heats a thermocouple to make electricity -- it makes the satillite smaller and harder to see, nice for a spy satillite (which cosmos 954 was) or a space probe going far away from the sun (like Cassini, if I remember correctly). Cosmos apparently spread a lot of small radioactive dust particles over the Northern Territories. If NASA had had a disaster with Cassini, they could have done the same thing.
But I don't think that Mir has any radioactive power sources like that. Pictures of it show all kinds of solar panels hanging off of it. So rather than comparing this to Cosmos 954, it is more accurate to compare it to the Sky Lab return. They got most of that into the ocean, although a few big chunks came down in Australia.
The reason why sending it into space doesn't make much sense, is that it would require a lot more power than simply twitching it down a bit so the atmosphere starts to drag it in. If you don't send it completely on its way out of the earth's orbit, it might eventually come back anyway, decades or longer from now, when we have no way of controlling where it will fall. Then there's the whole issue of cultering up space with junk that gets in our way later; I'm sure no one wants to put the dead Mir anywhere near the useful slots like a geo-synchronous orbit or anything.
I don't think the polls have any information in them whatsoever. On any poll with an interesting question, the statistics will be skewed by scripts and multiple voting.
For example, I was just working at site different from my usual workplace, and I popped up netscape on a different machine to check slashdot real quick -- I threw in a second vote (different from my first, but oh well) while I was at it. Given the machines I have access to in some scriptable way (rsh), I could vote about a hundred times. And that doesn't even get into the people who keep multiple accounts for the purpose of trolling/modding themselves up.
Yeah, but with out the ability to generate diffs, it really isn't configuration management -- it's just a back up system.
I expect that at some point Microsoft will comeout with some type of CVS server system that can be accessed through that "track changes" ability that Word has.
I think that the question you are asking indicates that the company is doomed. But first a few remarks on these features:
"easily be used by suits"
No, you don't. Why oh why oh why would you ever let one of them touch your precious code repository ? Use a tool like doxygen or doc++ to spew some html to keep them busy clicking around. You can integrate it into your build system and have a web page updated every night with the new build. That should be enough to make them think they know what's going on.
But, if you want to waste some resources setting it up, there are ways to browse a CVS repository graphically -- Tk/Tcl and Jave front ends, etc. Check out this one which is a web based interface to the gnome project's cvs repository.
"access control lists on project folders with recursive attributes"
This is interesting and might actually be useful. Just consider that to a large extent, the point of all the history that CVS keeps is so that you can back out of unwise or authorized commits. I think what you really want to do is learn a very good, well thought out scheme for naming and taging branches in the repository, to ease the recovery from mistakes.
Restrictin access should be a rare enough case that you can implement this using the file system. Consider that most projects which are limiting the commit ability of people working on them aren't really using configuration management, they are just using CVS as a networked backup device.
"supports versioning of documents (MSWord, HTML)"
If the file is text, CVS can handle it. Keep your documentation in LaTeX, or in machine parseable comments, and use the various LaTeX tools (like latex2html) to generate the viewable documentation on the fly. If someone absolutely, desperately, in a save-their-life, give-you-a-raise type situation, needs a copy in Word, then the best way I have found to convert is to view the html version (from latex2html) on IE on windows and cut-and-paste the whole thing into Word and save it out. But nothing in Work should matter enough to be kept in configuration management.
"RCS style checkouts where only a single developer . .."
Why the hell do you want to allow that ? Anyone should be able to at least read the repository, at least within the group or company. I can understand locking commits, but even that should be by code branch, not really directory oriented. People who use that style of development usually aren't checking out and building each other's code enough, or are using the entire repository to keep track of a branch on it's way to final production status, instead of a separate branch or an entirely separate repository. I would make it a clause in this policy not allow that kind of nonsense.
"I'm pretty sure that using pre- and post-checkin scripts and wrapper programs around CVS (better than WinCVS) can make this work, but we don't have the time to write them."
If the developers actually have use for any of the features you mention, then they will find the time to write them; more likely, they will do a news group query or web search and find them already written. There will be no need for allocation of company-wide resources, it will just happen. But if you can waste a huge amount of time throughout the company by mandating a stupid universal policy, why not get a couple of guys to write some scripts ?
What you need to do is step back and consider where this company is really going.
If a company has the mindset that they have to mandate or select a company-wide "unified Configuration Management Policy," then they are doomed. You appear to be sucked into the mindset; my clue here is that you capitialized the phrase. (You did not capitalize "unified," so I hold out hope for you.) There is absolutely no reason for such a beast.
I've worked at a few places where management went through occasional periods of panic, or general low-level unease, about the quality of the product. This was justified. But bad practices like poor configuration management are symptoms, not causes, of the problem. The problem was that people were either just dumb or didn't give a shit. The smart people attended a few meetings, ignored the policy, and got the job done. The people who were the problem attended even more meetings, spent a lot of time writing email and talking about it, and didn't get any smarter.
Is this "unified Configuration Management Policy" actually addressing a problem, or is some manager just nervous because they bought a lot of new companies and he doesn't feel in control ? Maybe you need to gently re-direct their energies toward doing useful stuff, like finding new markets and customers for your products.
Why are you worried about the development time of a few pre and post commit scripts compared to the time you are going to waste talking about this policy ? When managers get all twitchy and sweaty about a few hours of script hacking, but want to implement a company-wide new policy with all the meetings and overhead that comes with it, it is a sign that you are going down.
I might be able to hook you up with a job at my place; but if you want me to get you an interveiw, you have to promise never to capitalize "Configuration Management Policy" like it was the Constitution or something.
If it is a duplicate question why doesn't some moderator moderate it as (-1, Redundant) ? If there are more than 10 questions at 5, why doesn't a moderator moderate one down as (-1, Overated) ?
Because the moderators are on $3 crack.
Will someone with moderator points please moderate me down instead of using their points to increase the quality of the +5 level section ?
You are still wrong. I will send a more detailed reply via email this weekend.
But here is the summary: DA doesn't have the right to prevent me from doing anything. He has the right to recover from me in explicit ways for explicit acts. If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't. They spent the majority of the effort on the bill building an admittedly vague exception. I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that; but the tendency of the legislature is to spell out what you can't do explicitly and leave everything else vague; so the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
I'm not interested in excerpt or partial reproduction at all. Let's leave that out to keep it simple.
What I will send you this weekend, provided I can find them, will be a court case citation in which someone photocopied a book and was let off for it. I won't use the LaMachia case, but the rulling does explicitly state that that his actions didn't run afoul of the copyright statutes; the Judge was observing that the prosecution was seaking to make their case with the Wire Fraud exactly because they couldn't make their case under copyright.
DA has no such right to place restrictions on what I do with his works. Congress has placed some restrictions on what I do with his work, and that is it. Any restrictions on me can't simply be declared by the author, they must come about from an agreement between myself and him, just like any other contract. Why do think they invented the EULA, if they could just place arbitrary restrictions ? (The invalidity of EULA's is another flame war altogether.) Also, the GPL is a license; books don't come with licenses (yet anyway), you just buy them.
As for your reference to Title 17 section 107 paragraphs 1 and 3, you really mean section 106 don't you ? There is no such phrase in section 107. Another nitpick: in legelese don't say "negate copyright", because that means something else. Say "infringe copyright." I think "negating a copyright" means that the copyright holder looses everything he was given -- for example if he infringed on someone else's copyright by putting their stuff in his work. It is obvious that if I make a photocopy of DA's work his copyright to it does not vanish.
And finally, why are you wrong ? Because of the modifier clause where it says "Subject to sections 107 through 121." Those are the sections that outline "fair use".
The whole of Section 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of
the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Finally, if you go to look at the Sections 107 through 121 that this is subject to, the first thing you see is:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . ..
There's more to it, I won't quote the whole thing here; it is kind of vague, but you have a lot more work to do to make an argument that uncompensated copying doesn't fall under fair use.
If you want to see an actual court rulling, in which someone made thousands of copies of Word and other commercial software and was ruled to not be in infringement of copyrights because they didn't receive money for it, look at US vs. LaMachia. Search for the phrase "what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal
conduct."
Do you happen to know where I could get a copy of British copyright law online ?
Slashdot Mirror
Now that there exists a free software virtual computer, plex86, what prevents this whole scheme from being circumvented by adding virtual copy-protected disks to plex86 ?
That is, suppose someone takes a windows installation disk from their workplace, brings it home, and attempts to install it onto a plex86 running inside linux or FreeBSD or whatever. Can't they modify plex86 to make it virtualize the machine that the software was licensed to, down to any harddrive copyprotection and ethernet mac addresses or processor serial numbers or what have you ? Once one person figured out the details, couldn't they come up with simple, easy to use tools that would probe a computer and produce a configuration file to give the virtual computer software ?
I'm thinking that the PC, or any architecture which is open enough to be virtualized or emulated, is hard to use to control the delivery or use of content. In addition to lobbying to stop the copy-protection scheme, should we be focusing on making sure that the mechanisms to virtualize or emulate it are available in software ? If the proponents of the scheme where well informed of the efforts, then maybe they would see the futility of it and stop, devoting their resources to making their devices more useful (faster and bigger harddrives), not less useful.
Well, that's exactly the mode I operate under with CVS. It's just that the "merging back to the main" step is replaced by a "cvs commit" to the branch we are both working on (main or otherwise). I check out a copy of the files; I edit and compile and run and test; I do a cvs commit, and it warns me that someone else has committed changes since I checked them out, so I do a cvs update and get those changes merged into the local copy, test again, then commit.
One thing that I sometimes did is make a separate repository local to my system for extended work on something, and then only put the end product in the main project repository.
With ClearCase, do you have a local copy of the code at all ? I was confused by some of these references to a clearcase file system, and of the build process being integrated to the point that it took other developers object files instead of recompiling provided it met the dependancies. Can you work disconnected from the "repository" ? I used to check out code onto my laptop, work on it on a plane trip, and then commit it from my destination. Would I be able to compile if my machine couldn't talk to the repository ?
In reference to your complaint about making changes in area A only, and having to keep merging because of changes made in another branch to area B --
If the two areas are really that distinct, so that you know your changes will compartmentalized, then you can solve this by making the two "areas" be CVS modules, which will keep their own separate branching history. So your code tree is made up of two modules, one on a main branch, the other on your private development branch.
If they are really extremely disconnected, then you might even keep them in different repositories.
Creating copy protected content with their schemes and granting permission to break them is one trick to stir into the mix, but I think that the DCMA will fall in another manner.
If circumventing any copy protection or use restriction on media is really illegal, then Congress has given away a huge piece of their regulatory powers to the media producers. (Because those producers can decide what use is legal and illegal.) Conservative decisions have ruled that Congress (in some cases, if they go far enough) cannot delegate such legislative powers to others. (I think the example would be one of the rulings against the EPA, or otherwise environmentally related -- I seem to remember a good one involving that attempt to get coal burning power plants in the West Virginia and Ohio area to stop producing pollution which blows into the Northeast.)
So what you have to do is find a clever liberal judge, and contrive the appropriate case to present him. If the guy is not a moron, he'll write a simple decision that says that the DCMA can't possibly mean that ALL copy protection circumvention is illegal, because then it would be unconstitutional, and use that conservative argument against delegation of legislative powers. The smart thing to do is probably not to rule the law unconstitutional, but simply to say that whatever the law means, it can't possibly mean ALL copy protection circumvention, because Congress would have known such a law was unconstitutional. Then you leave the law, the big producers, and the congressmen who voted for it in an uncomfortable limbo. Do they publically say "Yes, that's what we wanted?" Or do they come out with some weaker interpretation of the law, subject to more examination ? Probably, Congress would revisit the issue and pass some clarification that would withstand court review.
But I do most of my work on Solaris, I don't have the same complaints about them. True, they don't give out the source code to the system, but I've never really had problems getting any free software packages to compile on it; they are pretty much a commodity with a standard (if high) price; if you go to news groups, everybody uses solaris and can help you; and things like fvwm and man actually work.
One of the compliants I left out above is that when I use fvwm instead of 4dwm the "K" key stops working on the keyboard. What's up with that ? If something like that happened on a solaris machine, a deja or google search would find the answer, and you wouldn't have to post. If you did, you would get an answer. Your "K" key works if you turn off CDE.
I know SGI has some good stuff, but I think they have a layer of crappy sales and crappy software hiding it. The problem is, for the price and effort, someone can just buy more PCs and spend more time organizing the system to get around the disk and memory bottlenecks.
SGI needs to die as quickly as possible. People like you need to stop sending them money, so that they go out of business, and the engineers, marketeers, managers, etc of SGI go out and find economically and socially useful work.
In my experience, SGI doesn't charge a single price for a machine; they want to know details about the purchaser so they know if they can charge more or less, and bargain with each purchaser separately, making it difficult to get a quote for a proposal. Things like memory have to be bought from third parties to save money, and the SGI salesman behaves all nasty like he worked for IBM back in their heyday. The machines themselves are rarely better than one tenth the money spent on cheap PC technology and running linux or FreeBSD (where they do work is in fast access to memory and disks -- I think the payoff isn't great enough though, you can often re-think your task to work as fast on cheap intel architecture).
I've also had problems with IRIX. There's no port of glibc; if you use a window manager other than than 4dwm piece of crap, annoying problems happen; setting the MANPATH variable to anything seems to make it so you can't get any man pages at all, so how are you supposed to add man pages to a package you just installed in some non-standard place ?
The final kicker is, there seems to be precious little answer to these things on the SGI newsgroups. Just a bunch of morons posting "Do you think SGI can survive by embracing linux?" and "My work gave me an old broken Indy. Can I install Windows and IE on this thing ?" and "Hey guys I love SGI ! Am cool cause I don't like Microsoft or what?" It seems to just rub in the fact that all the smart people have already abandoned the platform.
I will never work on a project that uses anything SGI again. As far as I am concerned, they are already deader than SCO.
Bluetooth is a poor bet also. It isn't designed for net access; it's designed for communication between various pieces of hardware that you own, such as your headphones and walkman. It replaces short cables and wires. Bluetooth on a cell phone won't get you the web, too short a range.
You are both wrong. The answer is neither to avoid them completely or to roll over simply because they want to place controls on how you can view and use the information on their page.
Ever since they started spreading stories out across multiple pages, I have been planning a program to get around their broken ideas of presentation. What I want to do is write a script using perl and lynx to download the complete nytimes everyday, in a one-page-per-article format, with a single big index page that links to all the articles, and archive it on my disk.
This could be set to run at 3am every night, making for much speedier consumption of the times when I get up in the morning, making my day a tiny bit more efficient. The fact that you would build up a searchable archive of the paper over time would also be highly useful. Who wants to pay two bucks for an article just because its a week old ?
You'd have to maintain the script against their periodic redesigns. If I ever get the energy, I'll do it one weekend and then post it on freshmeat.
The reason why I this would solve the account/privacy/tracking issue, is that I'd make it have a rotating set of accounts and it would use a different one for each article. There would be a simple text file with "account_name password" format, so that people could trade and merge these files, totally screwing tracking because random stories would be loaded from each account from different machines.
I guess my moral is that if you care, no one can put content on the internet and also control and meter access and use. All you have to do is sit down, and write the program that makes it easy for all the idiots out there to do what they want.
One last thing -- if they'd put all their articles on a news server I'd never visit the web page, I think the news group format is best for fast efficient consumption of the morning paper (well, best electronically -- I still cannot read the same amount of information as I can if I have the actual printed version in hand.)
What about those personal organizers ? There are the Franklins, the Sharps, and what else ? Anybody play around with those cybikos ?
I'm thinking of building a prototype for a product, which will be a small organizer or two way pager like device with a key board and small 4 line screen. I know nothing about ergonomics, so I'd like to examine the best example.
If you ever do find the product site you were looking for, could you send me an email ? I'm about to start a project possibly using PICs, and it sounds interesting.
For example, you could get the domain doorframe.dyndns.org, and always map that to your machine however it was connecting to the net at the time; then you could bounce around from free ISP to free ISP as they went under, keeping the same permanent email address. Of course, you have simply moved the stability issue from the free email provider to dyndns.org, but dyndns.org is a little better I think -- it I expect it will be around longer, and you have a little bit of control over it in terms of being able to donate money to them.
emacs or xemacs, do
.xinitrc to something simple like
M-x ada-mode
it probably will go into ada mode automatically when you open a source file. M-x compile to build, and configure hot keys as you wish, to cut down on all the M-x'ing. As for object-browsers, and all the other more advanced IDE crap, my advice is to avoid them -- etags is cool though. They are available for your emace/xemacs setup if you insist.
And, you can use it all though a non-X dialup connection.
Your desktop environment should not be tuned to the language you program in. Just edit your
xrdb -r ~/.Xresources
xterm &
fvwm
and be done with it. Replace "fvwm" with "enlightenment" or "fvwm2" if you want.
Once you learn to work with and modify an emacs based environment, you will find that you can transfer it between projects and operating systems (xemacs works on NT and pretty much all unixes) and programming environments, instead of wasting time searching for the new place they put the "debug" button in yet another bloated ill-designed GUI system.
That's the best way to do static documents of large size, in my opinion. Tutorials and books on the web, that sort of thing.
If you use a system such as doxygen to automatically generate documentation from code, then LaTeX is nice as an intermediate output because you can make a web page as well as nice printed output.
So I aggree with you that browsers should not be interpreting or compiling LaTeX; that doesn't mean that you have to refrain from using it when it might happen to be the best tool, however, just translate the LaTeX to HTML when you are done.
Microsoft (and other large companies) will still be vulnerable to this because they won't trust their employees with encrypted mail. Those large corporations like to be able to read their employees' mail, or at least have the threat of being able to.
Some large corporations ban encrypted traffic through the firewall, because they think it will keep employees from sharing or selling all their secretes. You have to jump up and down and beg and make a "special business case" to get the ssh port opened up for a specific machine. Some of the big defense contractors are alledged to have special versions of PGP for their employees, which keep keys where the company can access them.
It's a bit ironic, but the big corporations will keep themselves vulnerable. Otherwise, they will be hobbled by their own idealistic or disgruntled employees -- which may cost the bottom line more than the government does.
In general, it is rare that banning one type of weapon or another swings the balence of power very permenantly or very much. Banning the crossbow didn't stop the end of knights in armor, banning the saw-toothed bayonet didn't stop mutilating war injuries. The reason why the crimes of big corporations will usually eventually be discovered is a basic human rule: three men can keep a secrete if two of them are dead.
If you want to stop the types of abuses big companies often carry out, you have to change human culture and behaviour. It's harder and takes longer, but works.
I think the fact that you don't need a license for 900 MHz isn't related to the directional antennea thing. That band is set aside for unlicensed use, but there still might be power restrictions, which a directional antennea could violate along it's axis.
Maybe someone can post a link to a listing of FCC regulations regarding the various unlicensed bands ?
But I think it does make sense that using directional antenneas point-to-point should cut down on interference with other devices. It should cut down on your interference with them as well.
A couple of examples are InThether and Clever Content.
What you should be able to do, is run plex86 in a debugger (or if you have to do it a lot, add in some kind of extra interface), and load up windows with the appropriate viewer, and display the stuff you want in it, and then switch over to linux and dig the image out of the appropriate memory location.
Should any of these types of technologies ever catch on, it should be possible to automate the system. You can either modify plex86 to make it easier or automatic, or for certain types of things (like a web site open to all but Clever Content protected) you could even set up a web service to do it automatically. Imagine being able to submit a protected URL to a proxy type service similar to bablefish.
If the windows install program can tell that you are not running on "bare hardware," doesn't that mean that VMWare isn't doing it's job ?
I think the point of emulators is to make sure the guest or second OS can't tell; otherwise, the people writing the second OS will make it so it doesn't work.
This is one of the good discriptions -- it mentions that the reactor had liquid sodium-potassium cooling. I wonder if they actually had moving parts to move the coolant ? It would make more sense just to have a conducting channel as a heat sink. It's about a tenth of the way into this page.
They planned to boost the hot reactor out to an orbit which would decay into the earth after the reactor was no longer a danger. 954 was a malfunction.
The russian satillite that crashed into Canada was Cosmos 954. A google search on "Cosmos 954" gives you more information than you wanted to know.
I think the Cosmos worries were justifiable -- the satillite had a small radioactive power source. I think that they just have some warm radioactive material that heats a thermocouple to make electricity -- it makes the satillite smaller and harder to see, nice for a spy satillite (which cosmos 954 was) or a space probe going far away from the sun (like Cassini, if I remember correctly). Cosmos apparently spread a lot of small radioactive dust particles over the Northern Territories. If NASA had had a disaster with Cassini, they could have done the same thing.
But I don't think that Mir has any radioactive power sources like that. Pictures of it show all kinds of solar panels hanging off of it. So rather than comparing this to Cosmos 954, it is more accurate to compare it to the Sky Lab return. They got most of that into the ocean, although a few big chunks came down in Australia.
The reason why sending it into space doesn't make much sense, is that it would require a lot more power than simply twitching it down a bit so the atmosphere starts to drag it in. If you don't send it completely on its way out of the earth's orbit, it might eventually come back anyway, decades or longer from now, when we have no way of controlling where it will fall. Then there's the whole issue of cultering up space with junk that gets in our way later; I'm sure no one wants to put the dead Mir anywhere near the useful slots like a geo-synchronous orbit or anything.
I say it's better to take care of it now.
I don't think the polls have any information in them whatsoever. On any poll with an interesting question, the statistics will be skewed by scripts and multiple voting.
For example, I was just working at site different from my usual workplace, and I popped up netscape on a different machine to check slashdot real quick -- I threw in a second vote (different from my first, but oh well) while I was at it. Given the machines I have access to in some scriptable way (rsh), I could vote about a hundred times. And that doesn't even get into the people who keep multiple accounts for the purpose of trolling/modding themselves up.
But it matters even less than the real election.
Yeah, but with out the ability to generate diffs, it really isn't configuration management -- it's just a back up system.
I expect that at some point Microsoft will comeout with some type of CVS server system that can be accessed through that "track changes" ability that Word has.
"easily be used by suits"
No, you don't. Why oh why oh why would you ever let one of them touch your precious code repository ? Use a tool like doxygen or doc++ to spew some html to keep them busy clicking around. You can integrate it into your build system and have a web page updated every night with the new build. That should be enough to make them think they know what's going on.
But, if you want to waste some resources setting it up, there are ways to browse a CVS repository graphically -- Tk/Tcl and Jave front ends, etc. Check out this one which is a web based interface to the gnome project's cvs repository.
"access control lists on project folders with recursive attributes"
This is interesting and might actually be useful. Just consider that to a large extent, the point of all the history that CVS keeps is so that you can back out of unwise or authorized commits. I think what you really want to do is learn a very good, well thought out scheme for naming and taging branches in the repository, to ease the recovery from mistakes.
Restrictin access should be a rare enough case that you can implement this using the file system. Consider that most projects which are limiting the commit ability of people working on them aren't really using configuration management, they are just using CVS as a networked backup device.
"supports versioning of documents (MSWord, HTML)"
If the file is text, CVS can handle it. Keep your documentation in LaTeX, or in machine parseable comments, and use the various LaTeX tools (like latex2html) to generate the viewable documentation on the fly. If someone absolutely, desperately, in a save-their-life, give-you-a-raise type situation, needs a copy in Word, then the best way I have found to convert is to view the html version (from latex2html) on IE on windows and cut-and-paste the whole thing into Word and save it out. But nothing in Work should matter enough to be kept in configuration management.
"RCS style checkouts where only a single developer . . ."
Why the hell do you want to allow that ? Anyone should be able to at least read the repository, at least within the group or company. I can understand locking commits, but even that should be by code branch, not really directory oriented. People who use that style of development usually aren't checking out and building each other's code enough, or are using the entire repository to keep track of a branch on it's way to final production status, instead of a separate branch or an entirely separate repository. I would make it a clause in this policy not allow that kind of nonsense.
"I'm pretty sure that using pre- and post-checkin scripts and wrapper programs around CVS (better than WinCVS) can make this work, but we don't have the time to write them."
If the developers actually have use for any of the features you mention, then they will find the time to write them; more likely, they will do a news group query or web search and find them already written. There will be no need for allocation of company-wide resources, it will just happen. But if you can waste a huge amount of time throughout the company by mandating a stupid universal policy, why not get a couple of guys to write some scripts ?
What you need to do is step back and consider where this company is really going.
If a company has the mindset that they have to mandate or select a company-wide "unified Configuration Management Policy," then they are doomed. You appear to be sucked into the mindset; my clue here is that you capitialized the phrase. (You did not capitalize "unified," so I hold out hope for you.) There is absolutely no reason for such a beast.
I've worked at a few places where management went through occasional periods of panic, or general low-level unease, about the quality of the product. This was justified. But bad practices like poor configuration management are symptoms, not causes, of the problem. The problem was that people were either just dumb or didn't give a shit. The smart people attended a few meetings, ignored the policy, and got the job done. The people who were the problem attended even more meetings, spent a lot of time writing email and talking about it, and didn't get any smarter.
Is this "unified Configuration Management Policy" actually addressing a problem, or is some manager just nervous because they bought a lot of new companies and he doesn't feel in control ? Maybe you need to gently re-direct their energies toward doing useful stuff, like finding new markets and customers for your products.
Why are you worried about the development time of a few pre and post commit scripts compared to the time you are going to waste talking about this policy ? When managers get all twitchy and sweaty about a few hours of script hacking, but want to implement a company-wide new policy with all the meetings and overhead that comes with it, it is a sign that you are going down.
I might be able to hook you up with a job at my place; but if you want me to get you an interveiw, you have to promise never to capitalize "Configuration Management Policy" like it was the Constitution or something.
If it is a duplicate question why doesn't some moderator moderate it as (-1, Redundant) ? If there are more than 10 questions at 5, why doesn't a moderator moderate one down as (-1, Overated) ?
Because the moderators are on $3 crack.
Will someone with moderator points please moderate me down instead of using their points to increase the quality of the +5 level section ?
Thank you.
You are still wrong. I will send a more detailed reply via email this weekend.
But here is the summary: DA doesn't have the right to prevent me from doing anything. He has the right to recover from me in explicit ways for explicit acts. If congress wanted to say simply "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited", they could have said so in those four words. But they didn't. They spent the majority of the effort on the bill building an admittedly vague exception. I believe that under some circumstances photocopying a book might run afoul of the law, even if you didn't get money for that; but the tendency of the legislature is to spell out what you can't do explicitly and leave everything else vague; so the fact it doesn't explicitly prevent me from making copies is in my favor.
I'm not interested in excerpt or partial reproduction at all. Let's leave that out to keep it simple.
What I will send you this weekend, provided I can find them, will be a court case citation in which someone photocopied a book and was let off for it. I won't use the LaMachia case, but the rulling does explicitly state that that his actions didn't run afoul of the copyright statutes; the Judge was observing that the prosecution was seaking to make their case with the Wire Fraud exactly because they couldn't make their case under copyright.
As for your reference to Title 17 section 107 paragraphs 1 and 3, you really mean section 106 don't you ? There is no such phrase in section 107. Another nitpick: in legelese don't say "negate copyright", because that means something else. Say "infringe copyright." I think "negating a copyright" means that the copyright holder looses everything he was given -- for example if he infringed on someone else's copyright by putting their stuff in his work. It is obvious that if I make a photocopy of DA's work his copyright to it does not vanish.
And finally, why are you wrong ? Because of the modifier clause where it says "Subject to sections 107 through 121." Those are the sections that outline "fair use".
The whole of Section 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Finally, if you go to look at the Sections 107 through 121 that this is subject to, the first thing you see is:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - .
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
There's more to it, I won't quote the whole thing here; it is kind of vague, but you have a lot more work to do to make an argument that uncompensated copying doesn't fall under fair use.
If you want to see an actual court rulling, in which someone made thousands of copies of Word and other commercial software and was ruled to not be in infringement of copyrights because they didn't receive money for it, look at US vs. LaMachia. Search for the phrase "what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal conduct."
Do you happen to know where I could get a copy of British copyright law online ?