people have for a long time shared copies of music with friends, this has been known and tollerated (and in some contries even explicitly legal under certain conditional) since long before the days of digital audio or the internet. However audio tape copies weren't very high quality to start with and there was high degradation involved both over the life of a tape and between a tape and a copy of it. Therefore those who had more money to sped bought thier music from official sources.
the first blow came when uncrippled digitial copying became availible to the masses with the arival of the PC based CD recorder (hi-fi based recorders generally had SCMS afaict). This meant perfect copies with virtually no generation loss (there was some as audio CDs error correction is far from perfect but it was rarely noticed unless the original was scratched).
the second blow came with the rise of napster, suddenly people weren't just sharing with friends they were sharing with the whole bloody internet.
The third blow they dealt to themselves through incompetant handling of the situation. Legit online services are viewed with disdain because they often had a poor range (many of them even had different ranges depending on where you lived) the music they offered (at least until recently) was often of worse quality that that availible on P2P networks and was also encumbered with DRM.
Things did improve with iTunes offering DRM that wasn't too bad provided your only portable players were iPods and then eventually higher quality files with no DRM at all. However by that time everyone had got used to downloading thier music free.
scare tactics like ruining peoples lives with vastly inflated damages will scare some people into compliance but they will make others respect the music industry even less and they can only ruin so many lives before the public sit up and demand changes in the law.
I don't see any easy way out of this. Some will pay out of respect for the artist. Some will pay because there only internet access is either slow or through networks with a tough anti-fileshareing policy. Some will pay out of conviniance but lots and lots of people will have never payed for music and are unlikely to start.
serious debate to find a middle ground in places where it matters is almost impossible at the moment because at least in the UK and the USA both major parties are heavilly lobbyed by the local record company cartels. Even if such debate was possible we would still have to find a way of making our youth respect this middle ground or enforcing it.
only one of the major linux distros runs on the arm and even with that its been looking pretty dicy for a while, i'm surprised arm made it into etch. The debian arm port also leaves a lot to be desired. Its floating point performance sucks on most hardware because they compile for a FPU that is not in most arm boxes and use kernel emulation on machines that don't have it. The ABI they are using makes it very hard to switch away from this (some people are doing a port using a new abi called armel and the performance increases are apparently masive but its unofficial and unstable only atm).
getting stuff to cross compile is a pain as is building stuff on slow low memory machines (most arm machines fit in this category) so without a good distro backing you up the software that is availible to you without a lot of work is going to be pretty limited.
There are specialist distros of course but i highly doubt any of them build anything like the selection of software that debian or fedora do.
with x86 linux there is a wide choice of distros for different needs most of which can run quite happilly on a machine like the epia-n or this new pico-itx board (though you may need to slim some of them down depending on the storage device you use). The exact same distros can run on a powerhouse desktop PC allowing you to easilly build binaries at a reasonable speed.
over here in the uk we have what are known of as "points" on your license, get more than a certain number (how many depends on how long you've had your license) and you can lose your license for a period of time.
generally people are far more concerned about the points than the fines that go with them. Some even go to court to try and avoid the points even though the possible fines in court are FAR larger than the fixed penalties.
It's not clear whether VIA will make these tiny motherboards available to end users, or if they will only be sold directly to device makers mini-itx.com are already taking pre-orders so presumablly via have said they are prepared to sell to them.
The only reason this is "impressive" is because Via is the first company to show it off as if it were sexy. The industry has already been producing small, PCI bus motherboards [pc104plus.com] for years. right: 133 mhz maximum processor speed and no mention of price (which i'm guessing means its very expensive) and maximum 256 megs of ram. I can't find a price but i suspect it is not cheap.
what via did was release smallish (though not tiny at least in the intial generation) boards that could run current versions of windows at acceptable though not outstanding speeds that were availible at prices where hobbyists could afford them.
i don't think there is a way to turn off the journal from linux though other than reformating which may be a problem if you are working with an existing hfs plus volume and can't easilly get it onto an OS-X box for journal removal first.
I wonder if there's an Expresscard that can handle the requirements for a monitor or two. belkin do an expresscard docking station that includes a graphics adaptor.
every educational establishment i've been to since COA stickers on the machines themselves became a requirement of OEM windows has had OEM stickers for windows on all of the lab machines (rules do get broken on machines that aren't so public but to do that for a large student lab would be asking for trouble).
They don't run the versions of windows they came with. The establishments have an upgrade site license for windows with downgrade rights so provided the machine has an OEM license for some version of windows they can run whatever version of windows they like on it but that initial OEM or retail license has to be there or the installation is not legit.
I don't know if they bother to keep the original CDs or not but i doubt it. It's the COA stickers that matter. Indeed OEM windows from some of the big brands doesn't come with any CDs anyway just a recovery partition.
one slight problem is that if you want to run windows on a mac in a fully legit manner (e.g. not dubious use of OEM software that wasn't bought with the machine) then afacit your only option is to buy full retail. Microsoft volume licenses for windows are upgrades only (despite the fact that the media they ship with them does not enforce this) and i'm pretty sure educational licenses are too.
Full retail (not upgrade and not oem) for windows is about £200 iirc.
this puts up the overall price of the mac quite sigificantly (half as much again for those who buy a mac mini) for those who really care about staying legit and who can't afford to drop windows based software.
imo it would be a very good move for apple to offer OEM windows as an option at purchase time.
Apple just happens to sell more of those more revolutionary and specialized form factors than the PC industry in general. What an understatement.
If you buy a PC desktop then you will almost certainly get a traditional case that allows easy modifications unless you explicitly go looking for a small form factor machine.
If you buy a MAC desktop then you will have to spend a minimum of $2499 to get a machine with a case that allows easy modifications.
I presume LED in this context means an LED based backlight, backlighting an LCD screen right is pretty difficult, whatever light source is used it must provide illumination with a suitable wavelength makeup and have its light spread evenly accross teh screen.
the normal way to do this is with a very thin mercury floursencent lamp that runs along the bottom of the screen and then some clever optics that spread the light vertically.
LEDs tend to concentrate thier light at a point rather than along a strip which i would imagine makes spreading the light much harder. White LEDs also tend to have an unusual spectrum which may be an issue too.
PC desktops in general can be modified by someone with general knowlage of PC hardware but no specific knowlage of the individual machine and a very limited set of tools (most of the time one screwdriver is enough).
Laptops in general can't, detailed instructions on how to get in without breaking anything are pretty essential. Most macs (the exception being the mac pro) are laptop like and sometimes demand things that are unusual even by laptop standards (such as the very thin putty knife needed to open the mini or the very small torx screwdriver needed to remove the macbooks hard drive from its caddy).
Are you sure the function keys are set up to act as function keys? As I recall, the default on OS X binds them to things like volume controls (on the mobiles, at least. Not sure about desktops). you wouldn't happen to know where that setting is would you?
my command line editor of choice for quick edits is mcedit but its totally unusuable in the OS-X terminal because the terminal eats the function keys, any advice?
VB (classic VB at least) defaults to fail=>terminate application. Turbo pascal for dos does the same. This was effective at preventing errors spiraling but can cause the user to lose a lot of work.
Delphi defaults to fail=>leave event handler and give user a criticial stop message box. This means the user has a chance to recover thier work but depending on the failure things may be left in a very bad inconsistant state.
neither solves the root problem which is going from deep in a nested tree of functions that touch data back to a state where the data is consistant while throwing away the minimum information possible.
Checked exceptions are a possibility but i susepect few programmers would tollerate having every exception checked and it takes very strong discipline to write good catch blocks for every exception.
Fail=>rollback is an option (this is what database servers tend to do) but it requires a lot of infrastructure to handle the rollbacks. This can be done at the OS level the compiler level or the application level but either way it is a LOT of overhead.
I don't think institutions are allowed to use the student/teacher edition, i belive thats only for individual purchases by staff and students.
the fact is MS has educational institutions pretty well locked into leasing schemes like campus agreement. For a university to get out they would have to spend a huge ammount of money on buying licenses AND a huge ammount of money on auditing as well (campus agreement does not require you to keep track of how many installations you have). There would also be the throny issue of staff using it on thier own machines under work from home provisions again with no tracking of the number of installations done.
FYI, there is no countdown timer with an automatic reboot on Windows XP. There is an annoying nag that pops up every 30 minutes or so, asking whether the system could be rebooted. But no automatic reboot. But I guess you knew that already, didn't you? iirc if you ignore that dialog (or happen to be going to the bog when it happens or whatever) then it auto reboots.
also iirc that reboot is done with force options on so if you aren't there to answer the save prompts from your apps (or aren't quick enough) then they will just get terminated.
install a linux distro you can admin remotely and that won't need to be upgraded to a new release too often. something like debian stable or one of the rhel rebuilds.
install a nice lightweight desktop and customise it to have easy links to the instant messaging and videoconfrencing apps, possibblly a web browser too. Set up all the software so it just works for her.
for emergency communication i think your better off sticking to the phone even if it is a little expensive, maybe get her a standalone VOIP desk phone.
My general impression of the wayback machine and googles cache is that they are very hit and miss. Certainly not something i would want to rely on catching my bookmarks.
If you have ever seen a talk by Geoff Huston, the man behind Potaroo, he talks in depth about how there has never, to date, been any attempt to take back an allocation through legal action. Should that ever become necessary, it would be costly and require years in the court systems allowing for appeals. He addresses every concern voiced by the ignorant/. masses in this story. Surely that means they should be starting proceedings towards taking them back by force NOW so that they have got through the legal crap by the time the adresses are needed.
Slashdot Mirror
afaict the following is what happened:
people have for a long time shared copies of music with friends, this has been known and tollerated (and in some contries even explicitly legal under certain conditional) since long before the days of digital audio or the internet. However audio tape copies weren't very high quality to start with and there was high degradation involved both over the life of a tape and between a tape and a copy of it. Therefore those who had more money to sped bought thier music from official sources.
the first blow came when uncrippled digitial copying became availible to the masses with the arival of the PC based CD recorder (hi-fi based recorders generally had SCMS afaict). This meant perfect copies with virtually no generation loss (there was some as audio CDs error correction is far from perfect but it was rarely noticed unless the original was scratched).
the second blow came with the rise of napster, suddenly people weren't just sharing with friends they were sharing with the whole bloody internet.
The third blow they dealt to themselves through incompetant handling of the situation. Legit online services are viewed with disdain because they often had a poor range (many of them even had different ranges depending on where you lived) the music they offered (at least until recently) was often of worse quality that that availible on P2P networks and was also encumbered with DRM.
Things did improve with iTunes offering DRM that wasn't too bad provided your only portable players were iPods and then eventually higher quality files with no DRM at all. However by that time everyone had got used to downloading thier music free.
scare tactics like ruining peoples lives with vastly inflated damages will scare some people into compliance but they will make others respect the music industry even less and they can only ruin so many lives before the public sit up and demand changes in the law.
I don't see any easy way out of this. Some will pay out of respect for the artist. Some will pay because there only internet access is either slow or through networks with a tough anti-fileshareing policy. Some will pay out of conviniance but lots and lots of people will have never payed for music and are unlikely to start.
serious debate to find a middle ground in places where it matters is almost impossible at the moment because at least in the UK and the USA both major parties are heavilly lobbyed by the local record company cartels. Even if such debate was possible we would still have to find a way of making our youth respect this middle ground or enforcing it.
Linux already runs on the ARM
it does, sort of.
only one of the major linux distros runs on the arm and even with that its been looking pretty dicy for a while, i'm surprised arm made it into etch. The debian arm port also leaves a lot to be desired. Its floating point performance sucks on most hardware because they compile for a FPU that is not in most arm boxes and use kernel emulation on machines that don't have it. The ABI they are using makes it very hard to switch away from this (some people are doing a port using a new abi called armel and the performance increases are apparently masive but its unofficial and unstable only atm).
getting stuff to cross compile is a pain as is building stuff on slow low memory machines (most arm machines fit in this category) so without a good distro backing you up the software that is availible to you without a lot of work is going to be pretty limited.
There are specialist distros of course but i highly doubt any of them build anything like the selection of software that debian or fedora do.
with x86 linux there is a wide choice of distros for different needs most of which can run quite happilly on a machine like the epia-n or this new pico-itx board (though you may need to slim some of them down depending on the storage device you use). The exact same distros can run on a powerhouse desktop PC allowing you to easilly build binaries at a reasonable speed.
over here in the uk we have what are known of as "points" on your license, get more than a certain number (how many depends on how long you've had your license) and you can lose your license for a period of time.
generally people are far more concerned about the points than the fines that go with them. Some even go to court to try and avoid the points even though the possible fines in court are FAR larger than the fixed penalties.
if you could avoid external connections it may not even need to be an isolating power supply......
It's not clear whether VIA will make these tiny motherboards available to end users, or if they will only be sold directly to device makers
mini-itx.com are already taking pre-orders so presumablly via have said they are prepared to sell to them.
The only reason this is "impressive" is because Via is the first company to show it off as if it were sexy. The industry has already been producing small, PCI bus motherboards [pc104plus.com] for years.
right: 133 mhz maximum processor speed and no mention of price (which i'm guessing means its very expensive) and maximum 256 megs of ram. I can't find a price but i suspect it is not cheap.
what via did was release smallish (though not tiny at least in the intial generation) boards that could run current versions of windows at acceptable though not outstanding speeds that were availible at prices where hobbyists could afford them.
AFAIK he wrote git because he got bitten by bitkeeper :)
iirc the story goes something like
linus didn't want to use version control
linus justified his not using version control by saying all the options were crap.
The bitkeeper guys were carefully watching his arguments and moulding thier tool based on them.
linus was finally backed into a corner by the bitkeeper guys and ended up using bitkeeper
bitkeeper was reverse engineered as a result of its use for the linux kernel.
there was a big fallout between the linux kernel team and the bitkeeper guys rendering its continued use for the linux kernel impractical.
linus wrote git because he could no longer live without version control but didn't think any of the availible soloutions were acceptable.
afaict creating filesystems is never handled by the kernel and theres no real reason for it to be.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus claims there are tools for creating hfs plus filesystems and an ebuild for installing them on gentoo.
i don't think there is a way to turn off the journal from linux though other than reformating which may be a problem if you are working with an existing hfs plus volume and can't easilly get it onto an OS-X box for journal removal first.
There's already support for reading HFS+ in Linux
and for writing it.
Unfrotunately the write support doesn't support journaling meaning you have to turn off the journal in OS-X first.
I wonder if there's an Expresscard that can handle the requirements for a monitor or two.
/ m/28171911/
c king%20station_mnl.pdf ) it seems it uses the PCI-express part of expresscard for the video and the USB 2 part for everything else.
belkin do an expresscard docking station that includes a graphics adaptor.
http://www.belkin.com/highspeeddock/howitworks/
http://computers.pricegrabber.com/docking-station
from a quick perusal of the manual ( http://www.belkin.com/support/dl/P75420_F5U273_do
every educational establishment i've been to since COA stickers on the machines themselves became a requirement of OEM windows has had OEM stickers for windows on all of the lab machines (rules do get broken on machines that aren't so public but to do that for a large student lab would be asking for trouble).
They don't run the versions of windows they came with. The establishments have an upgrade site license for windows with downgrade rights so provided the machine has an OEM license for some version of windows they can run whatever version of windows they like on it but that initial OEM or retail license has to be there or the installation is not legit.
I don't know if they bother to keep the original CDs or not but i doubt it. It's the COA stickers that matter. Indeed OEM windows from some of the big brands doesn't come with any CDs anyway just a recovery partition.
one slight problem is that if you want to run windows on a mac in a fully legit manner (e.g. not dubious use of OEM software that wasn't bought with the machine) then afacit your only option is to buy full retail. Microsoft volume licenses for windows are upgrades only (despite the fact that the media they ship with them does not enforce this) and i'm pretty sure educational licenses are too.
Full retail (not upgrade and not oem) for windows is about £200 iirc.
this puts up the overall price of the mac quite sigificantly (half as much again for those who buy a mac mini) for those who really care about staying legit and who can't afford to drop windows based software.
imo it would be a very good move for apple to offer OEM windows as an option at purchase time.
Apple just happens to sell more of those more revolutionary and specialized form factors than the PC industry in general.
What an understatement.
If you buy a PC desktop then you will almost certainly get a traditional case that allows easy modifications unless you explicitly go looking for a small form factor machine.
If you buy a MAC desktop then you will have to spend a minimum of $2499 to get a machine with a case that allows easy modifications.
I presume LED in this context means an LED based backlight, backlighting an LCD screen right is pretty difficult, whatever light source is used it must provide illumination with a suitable wavelength makeup and have its light spread evenly accross teh screen.
the normal way to do this is with a very thin mercury floursencent lamp that runs along the bottom of the screen and then some clever optics that spread the light vertically.
LEDs tend to concentrate thier light at a point rather than along a strip which i would imagine makes spreading the light much harder. White LEDs also tend to have an unusual spectrum which may be an issue too.
PC desktops in general can be modified by someone with general knowlage of PC hardware but no specific knowlage of the individual machine and a very limited set of tools (most of the time one screwdriver is enough).
Laptops in general can't, detailed instructions on how to get in without breaking anything are pretty essential. Most macs (the exception being the mac pro) are laptop like and sometimes demand things that are unusual even by laptop standards (such as the very thin putty knife needed to open the mini or the very small torx screwdriver needed to remove the macbooks hard drive from its caddy).
And if you were on a Mac Pro you could buy a new one that didn't have the high end optical drive
afaict you cannot buy a mac pro without a superdrive.
Are you sure the function keys are set up to act as function keys? As I recall, the default on OS X binds them to things like volume controls (on the mobiles, at least. Not sure about desktops).
you wouldn't happen to know where that setting is would you?
btw on the subject of the command line
my command line editor of choice for quick edits is mcedit but its totally unusuable in the OS-X terminal because the terminal eats the function keys, any advice?
the problem is how to fail safely.
VB (classic VB at least) defaults to fail=>terminate application. Turbo pascal for dos does the same. This was effective at preventing errors spiraling but can cause the user to lose a lot of work.
Delphi defaults to fail=>leave event handler and give user a criticial stop message box. This means the user has a chance to recover thier work but depending on the failure things may be left in a very bad inconsistant state.
neither solves the root problem which is going from deep in a nested tree of functions that touch data back to a state where the data is consistant while throwing away the minimum information possible.
Checked exceptions are a possibility but i susepect few programmers would tollerate having every exception checked and it takes very strong discipline to write good catch blocks for every exception.
Fail=>rollback is an option (this is what database servers tend to do) but it requires a lot of infrastructure to handle the rollbacks. This can be done at the OS level the compiler level or the application level but either way it is a LOT of overhead.
I don't think institutions are allowed to use the student/teacher edition, i belive thats only for individual purchases by staff and students.
the fact is MS has educational institutions pretty well locked into leasing schemes like campus agreement. For a university to get out they would have to spend a huge ammount of money on buying licenses AND a huge ammount of money on auditing as well (campus agreement does not require you to keep track of how many installations you have). There would also be the throny issue of staff using it on thier own machines under work from home provisions again with no tracking of the number of installations done.
FYI, there is no countdown timer with an automatic reboot on Windows XP. There is an annoying nag that pops up every 30 minutes or so, asking whether the system could be rebooted. But no automatic reboot. But I guess you knew that already, didn't you?
iirc if you ignore that dialog (or happen to be going to the bog when it happens or whatever) then it auto reboots.
also iirc that reboot is done with force options on so if you aren't there to answer the save prompts from your apps (or aren't quick enough) then they will just get terminated.
get a PC
install a linux distro you can admin remotely and that won't need to be upgraded to a new release too often. something like debian stable or one of the rhel rebuilds.
install a nice lightweight desktop and customise it to have easy links to the instant messaging and videoconfrencing apps, possibblly a web browser too. Set up all the software so it just works for her.
for emergency communication i think your better off sticking to the phone even if it is a little expensive, maybe get her a standalone VOIP desk phone.
there is also the trivial method of simply reimaging when the grace period runs out.
I don't see how MS can get arround that one.
My general impression of the wayback machine and googles cache is that they are very hit and miss. Certainly not something i would want to rely on catching my bookmarks.
If you have ever seen a talk by Geoff Huston, the man behind Potaroo, he talks in depth about how there has never, to date, been any attempt to take back an allocation through legal action. Should that ever become necessary, it would be costly and require years in the court systems allowing for appeals. He addresses every concern voiced by the ignorant /. masses in this story.
Surely that means they should be starting proceedings towards taking them back by force NOW so that they have got through the legal crap by the time the adresses are needed.