Yip... I remember seeing that on a version of "Grail" I taped off BBC1 (UK), and not on a rented CBS/FOX (late 80s) videotape of it. Seemed about 24 seconds to me. This lost 24 seconds apparently appears in the "Holy Grail" video game and all UK releases since about 1995.
The Castle Anthrax scene is lovely, though, even without it. And I wish they'd put in the King Brian the Wild scene...but I believe the Pythons ran out of cash (the reason that ending is in there). What a pity...
What Macromedia's newsletter appears to be is opt-in in one sense: you enter the email address into a webform and check a box where you recieve it. However, this is NOT confirmed opt-in: confirmed opt-in goes something like this:
Macromedia recieves subscription request from a webpage. It then sends out what is a confirmation email - it asks you whether it was you that elected to have the letter sent [email boxes on websites can be abused, thus "listbombing" attempts can be made.] It includes a unique, random code - most mailing software, including recent Majordomo, listserv and GNU mailman can do this - which is either sent back to Macromedia using a WWW link or by an email reply.
If this is recieved, the list is confirmed and the list will begin sending - if it isn't, the list will not send until it is. That is confirmed opt-in, because the list sender is definitely sure that you elected to recieve the mail.
eBay and company abuse this by rechecking your "I don't want marketing email" boxes; companies like FloNetworks (my personal hate) or Exactis don't confirm and share your address with other lists. That's why Exactis went on the RBL; that's why RealNetworks is on the RBL. (And has been for a long time - Real under and after Maria Cantwell [now a Democrat senator] were and are unrepentant spammers. Online privacy? HAH! TrustE certificates don't mean s*#t.)
By the way, as a reply to Jamie, it just didn't appear from the article that you had checked the RBL evidence file - and, of course, I had no ability to check it myself, as Macromedia are off the RBL. Thanks for replying, though...helped to clear up a few things. (I wrote that message whilst very tired. Surprised it was as comprehensible as it was.)
I ignore-lined most of Bennett's discussions on NANAE and SPAM-L because they turned into major-scale flamewars even before he made his comments about date - and I have no wish to start another now. As a former PF supporter, I still visit from time to time. Certainly, his argument is flawed - but so is everyone else's. It's hard to rationalise any other way.
As far as I can see from Jamie's admittedly biased reporting, Macromedia got on the RBL because of an open, unconfirmed mailing list they REFUSED to fix - and they got off again very soon afterwards, probably by promising to fix it.
Remember that the MAPS RBL is very strict about entry requirements, and very trusting. A RBL nomination is _very_ hard, and requires a large amount of evidence. I don't suppose Jamie checked the RBL evidence files before writing the article, did he? The only comment's from Macromedia PR, who are anxious to make themselves look good. Sigh.
What the RBL administrators will have done would be to list the entire Macromedia netblock in which the spewing mailserver exists - NOT just two IPs, as Jamie says. This is 216.35.148.0/23, on Exodus - which contains not only the mail server, but also secondary DNS service (primary is on Concentric) and the Macromedia web server.
Today's traceroute to macromedia.com goes into a loop at a border router in Exodusland, by the way.
Remember that Above.net and Teleglobe are two of the VERY few providers that use what is called a BGP feed to the RBL. This is the original RBL - it provides a feed of RBL data to the border routers, where the IPs are cut off. As they are very private networks, they're entitled to do to them what they like - ISPS ARE NOT COMMON CARRIERS IN LAW. When a second tier ISP decides to connect to the above.net backbone (Above don't sell to consumers, but only to big webhosters - ironically, some of which spam loads themselves, like eBay) they KNOW about the RBL BGP feed. It's one of Above's selling points, the network most free of spam trouble.
Of course, BGP is becoming more troublesome than it's worth. But Peacefire, your favoured "hey, there's another example", is collateral too - it is in the middle of a netblock containing a load of spam support sites (Sam Al's Samco, in this case) and was MOVED there by Media3 in August 2000, after the RBL listing for that particular netblock was in place (the listing is dated June). And Media3 is suing MAPS, and so MAPS is not going to remove the listing. I wonder whether Media3 was trying a publicity stunt, and using Bennett as a figurehead?
Whatever. As for Macromedia, they're not blocked now. Obviously, they've been educated. Let's move on.
(Oh, by the way...whichever comment referred to us antispammers [and we are no means a coherent whole - some of us oppose the RBL, some of us oppose ORBS, some oppose both, some of us have HUGE private blocklists of our own] as "spam nazis" is violating Godwin's Law at stage one, as well as being factually inaccurate. We support free speech, just not your right to force it on others at the expense of theirs. Shame on you.)
You have to say "yes" to the "use experimental/development drivers" option before you see Reiser or framebuffers or many of the other interesting features of Linux 2.4.x. It's one of the first options you get asked.
VIA fixes, apparently in this one - and I have a 686B. Downloading the patch right now. This should be good...
It's not WinXP we're actually discussing here, but Windows Media Player 8 (which will, however, be a part of WinXP.) However, it is a replaceable component.
WMP8 won't allow you to rip at anything other than 56Kbps for MP3s. 56KBps is ideal for Net streaming, which will probably be the last bastion of the MP3 format. Ogg Vorbis, WMA and the other competitors will oust MP3 eventually - but WMA's a pig to stream, and you can do Shoutcast from an ordinary web server.
And besides, why does Microsoft do this sort of thing? Legal problems. If they were to integrate a MP3 encoder that does the full range of functions, they could be seen to be killing off their competitors, and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. On the other hand if they *didn't* integrate an MP3 encoder, they could be seen to be forcing people to use WMA - and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. They can't win.
Who uses WMP for ripping under Windows anyway? No-one. I use, for example, the wonderful (and open source) CDex. Also, MusicMatch Jukebox is a good point-and-click package for the intelligent newbie (it can do VBR, among other things.) Either are probably used a lot more than WMP, or Creative PlayCenter, or RealJukebox - all of which are bloated, awful software.
WinXP hasn't crippled either package as far as I can see - these "problems" probably come from a missing (unincluded) wnaspi32.dll. NT series operating systems have never included this file by default, as it is not generally needed - except for back compatibility. It does, however, come with Win9x.
As another idea, how about Nero Burning ROM's "ignore illegal TOC type" option? Or CloneCD, or ddump?
That's just on Windows - dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.raw would probably work correctly, when combined with cdrecord, cdrdao and company.
Remember, this is Macrovision - the company responsible for the SafeDisc CD game protection system [thank you BlindRead]and their infamous video mechanism. I have a DVD card in my PC, and only RF output into my TV. So video out has to go through my VCR's SCART, and so I have to crack my Creative DXR3 to remove Macrovision. In doing so, I happen to come across an ability to pirate my DVDs to VHS - something I don't want to do.
All copy protection ever does is hassle the legitimate user. The big pirates found ways around Macrovision almost as soon as the system came out. It's the same with their game copy protection as well - you can just patch the game. It'll be the same here. Only the consumer will lose.
Not really. They can't even control their own open relays, which are mostly ancient Sun boxes running a version of Sendmail known, infamously, as (8.6/SMI-SVR4). (This is common in.tw,.kr and.jp as well.) This allows anonymous open relaying - it won't display the IP of the machine connecting to it in the message headers.
Their admins are Clueless, unfortunately. They have (supposedly) an antispam address, but it leads back to an autoresponder saying "In your Email, I can find no record of an IP address" EVEN WHEN the relay's address in there. They just don't seem to care.
So the net-abuse community would be quite happy to see China shut themselves off from the world - it would reduce untraceable spam by about 90%. The only other problem we'd have then would be UU.net (sigh).
But they'd block incompetently - just in the same way they don't care about their abused SMI boxes. They'd always leave a way in.
So no, we're not as bad as we used to be. Even then, we still ban all kinds of stuff and FACT will raid markets and/or shops for R1 discs at any chance it gets (ignoring pirated stuff while it does it.) We're not a panacea, and our Customs are paranoid. Still, at least we can import our stuff whenever we like...
I suppose it's like the ban the French had, until a few years ago, on encryption software: a futile attempt to keep their citizens at bay. They seem to be more recipient of this than we are (although we have RIP); no wonder they think their government is screwing them over. Because they are.
They *did* sell them. I've got a boxed copy of Corel Draw 9 for Linux sitting in a corner, from the beta testing programme. And they released Photopaint for free. And I've seen Wordperfect Office in the shops; so they did release stuff. It just didn't sell.
You think *that's* bad? eMachines are selling GHz P3s with - get this - a i810 chipset over here. *810*!!! Not even 815 (the one with the AGP slot). Now, the 810 steals RAM also, and is dog slow. And SiS are not exactly well known for their cheap chipsets either...
Of course, I don't have this problem. I just bought an Athlon with a *real* mobo. But there could be problems elsewhere...
Given the evidence, especially the fact it was written in visual studio, it would seem that this is a perfectly valid thing for a judge to say, and probably is the truth.
Wrong. Johannsen and MoRE wrote DeCSS in Windows because, at the time they wrote it, UDF (the DVD file system) was not supported under Linux. DeCSS compiles fine under Linux, as LiVID have proven. Also, there is no such language as "visual studio" - you must mean Microsloth C++, which compiles normal C just fine. DeCSS is normal C. Try again, troll.
"
As an eighth-grader, Blackbear said she was suspended after officials, acting on rumors of a possible gun, allegedly searched her backpack in a locker and seized a short story she had written. It contained a reference to a student carrying a gun on a bus."
The second time? These school officials *really* have too much time on their hands. And why suspend someone for a short story?
If that's the state of the American school system, then at the moment I'm thanking $DEITY that I live in the UK.
My school's a lot like this - but worse. It's a network of (drumroll please) Windows 95 boxes.
Running Research Machines (RM) tacked on security software.
The server? NT 4.0 Server. You know how incompetently this NT 4.0 server is set up? It's not set up to reboot automatically after a BSOD.
That's right, the system can BSOD - remember, this is controlling the entire network, and the RM software is buggy as hell - and the other systems on it have to wait for someone to *MANUALLY* reboot it. That is moronic. As for its Internet access - the less said the better.
Not only that, but the RM software and the censorware transport passwords unencrypted, allow them to be seen on screen by the sysadmin ETC. This is the most moronic security solution I've seen. The censorware even pops up an Internet Explorer box saying "this is unencrypted - possible security risk".
The network could only be improved by sticking a Linux box - or even better an OpenBSD one - on it, to handle proxying (using Squid blocklists if they really must), mail (there's no mail and freemail sites are blocked), login et al. And if the student computers had NT 4.0 Workstation on them, then security could be improved further.
But no. <SARCASM> They're too intelligent for that. </SARCASM> Instead they're going to keep it the same.
Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn't Microsoft stopped OEMs from giving the buyer the OS CD. Instead they just give them that "recovery" CD.
On top of everything else, they're liars? Oh, heavens.
From what I've heard, this is only for the huge companies that can't be bothered giving out 500,000 CDs of Microsoft products that they haven't branded or added anything to. Besides, I was using a "naked" PC the other day (a friend bought a £250 Cyrix-300 former business machine) and had to install Windows 98. The only CD we had available was an old OEM recovery CD (Packard Bell, if you must know.) So, here's how to get around this particular problem:
1. First restore Win98 from Packard Bell CD. It will work fine until P$ck$rd Hell run their restore procedure, at which point everything begins to go wrong.
2. Get DOS boot disk from old corner, preferably supporting FAT32.
3. Now enter the directory \WINDOWS\OPTIONS\INSTALL. Note all the CAB files? And the file marked "setup.exe"? Thought so. Copy all these to another directory.
4. Now deltree \WINDOWS, go into the moved directory, delete the premade setup file and then type SETUP. Enter in ID number during install process and... problem solved.
Sadly, I didn't have the option of Linux while doing this - but it's not ready for the untrained consumer at the moment, and Microsloth software is about as easy as can get.
And anyway - all of my copies of Windows (apart from 2000, which came via the Microsoft UK student programme) have come via Microsoft beta testing. I have all the versions of Windows (except 3.0 and before, 95 OSR1 and 95 OSR2.5) that there ever has been - 98, 98SE and ME having been gained by me free. All of them are legal, and my system is reformatted regularily. If Microsoft was to do this to the UK, then I would be very dissatisfied indeed.
Admittedly, my beta testing license says that I can only use my BTA complimentary copies on the machine I tested them on, so maybe they do have a point... But still, there's my student 2000 Professional, my NT4, Mandrake 7.1, S.u.S.E. - I'd like to be able to pay only for what I use. And I wouldn't use the operating systems supplied with the machine.
Of course, my next machine's going to be a homebuild anyway...
They *didn't*. AOL *block* these other clients. MSN Instant Messenger is smaller than AIM and a lot nicer - AOL stopped it from communicating with their service, there was a bit of a war, and eventually Microsoft gave up. Ditto Yahoo!. Why don't they want an open service? Because they want their crapware to rule.
BUT Tom, Kyle, and Anandtech were the only people to have 1.13GHz PIII samples. Two out of three failed, three out of three won't do a simple gcc kernel compile.
There are people who will go out and buy the PIII 1.13GHz when it finally makes it out. (And it will - Intel are never going to leave an advantage for long.) What's the point of the 1.13? Gaming, 3D modelling, on-line video editing...hmm, that's it. And it's going to be very interesting watching the price war - AMD will be selling the Athlon 1.1GHz (and AMD don't announce and run as often as Intel do) at the lovely price of $719 (according to Tom's Hardware, of all places - a huge jump of 100MHz from $475, of course) - and Intel would have been selling the 1.13 for $950. AMD's chips are beating Intel into the ground on price grounds - and this is why they are so scared.
And frankly, I don't think I have any need to worry. It'll push the price of Socket A boards down, maybe a dual one might come out, and I can run dual 900MHz Thunderbirds ($267 x 2 = $534 - more than a single GHz one, but with Win2K, Be or SMP Linux, it should be a stunner.) I'd love to have that.
All I need to hope is that AMD can carry on like this - competition is good, and AMD provides much-needed competition to Intel (Cyrix/VIA is low-price, Rise is dead, IDT never came to surface, Transmeta is for low-power situations.) And at clock-for-clock parity (and soon, when P4 comes out, AMD will be clock-for-clock faster, as P4 is slower CfC than P3:-D) the Athlon is the best choice at the moment.
> Is there ANY graphics card in the same class (or better) as NVidia
No. The Voodoo5 needs to be plugged into a hard disk cable (in the V5 6000, the mains - whoever heard of a video card you had to plug into a wall?) and still gets beaten by the GTS (and even the GeForce DDR) in benchmarks, the Matrox G400 [although nice] is a few generations old (it's TNT2-Ultra generation), and... what's left? S3 makes budget chips, PowerVR's no longer a factor (or has drivers)... nVidia's the best we've got!
If you want something in a lesser class than a nVidia card (and I'm just thankful that there are drivers, whether they're OSS or not) you might like to head towards the Matrox G400, which is a Nice Card. But not a GeForce GTS, which is hopefully going to be my next video unit. Until the NV20 comes along...
I was a ME beta tester (and am running it at the moment), so I can explain the entire thing to you.
The command shell is still available. What you do is that you create a "Boot Disk" from Add/Remove Programs, and then you boot from this disk. There is an option called "Minimal Boot." Select this option, and you will find a small file called FDISK.EXE on this floppy. FORMAT and so on are in the zipped RAMDISK you can get by selecting any of the other menu options.
Not having DOS on isn't a problem at all - BEloader uses a floppy *anyway*, as do most UMSDOS type distros (and there *aren't* any UMSDOS distros - the last one I saw was Slackware a *long* long time ago, and Corel uses a disk image file.) I installed BeOS 5 under *Windows 2000*. The only distro I can see screwed is Corel's image system, but no-one uses that anyway.
In fact, WinME just removes one of the last Windows burdens left. Now all that's left is the Win9x kernel... and that's going with Whistler, thankfully.
Assuming you're not a troll, I can explain exactly what I need to do with USENET searches.
I am a small-time computer programmer (for my own enjoyment) and local technical expert (called upon for practically all Windows installations). I fiddle with Linux a lot - my computer has a 17.2G drive for bloated software like Windows 2000, and a 4.3G hard drive devoted entirely to Linux distros (PC PLUS in the UK is great with this [Mandrake 7.1 this month.]) I also do a bit of amateur spamhunting (you'll see me a lot on news.admin.net-abuse.email.)
One of my most used tools is Deja.com/usenet. I have it on my slashboxes. With deja.com, I can immediately search out whether this pernicious "Find Out About Any Poor Shmuck Fast Now" spam (I recieve it every week or so) has been posted to N.A.N-A.S yet. Also, if I have technical problems I need to solve, I call up Deja first. I don't search AltaVista, partly because I don't like AltaVista (I prefer Excite or Lycos) and because all Web search engines, especially when faced with computer support queries, don't successfully find what I want. Also, several big pr0n and other dubious sites will definitely use support queries in META tags to drive you off the route - I've had this happen to me before.
Therefore, services like Deja help me to find out about new drivers, or how to make my Sony tape drive work - they help solve problems. This is the entire purpose of Deja - not to make up a huge Britney Spears fan collection, but for technical information. And yes, there is a demand for a better engine (for a start, one that you don't have to click three different time-consuming links to move into a thread) - but at the moment, Deja and remarQ are all we've got. And thankfully, we have them.
Corel Linux, at the moment at least, is a castrated version of Debian. For example, Corel (at least on my free copy) runs a special version of KDE. That's too big for this kind of thing. It has a really, really, really cruddy library setup, so trying to compile anything comes out with messages such as "missing libc" or whatever, even when I can see the files in the directories in the libpath.
Easy to install? You can't select singular packages, it installs LILO to the MBR whether you want it or not (I don't - I dualboot already, using XOSL and LILO in the root partition), and it's slow as hell. Oh, and only the paid-for version has WordPerfect 8 with it, and there's not much other software (not even a complete KDE) with it either.
Why has no-one suggested Mandrake? It's got the fastest RPM-based installation I've seen (and RPM has some nasty inherent timings after it's finished installing files), it allows singular package selection, it's got StarOffice (which is better), it's based on a version of Redhat and so has all the utilities you've come to know, and is supplied with Blackbox, my favourite WM. Small, takes up almost no memory whatsoever, and exquisitely stylish, especially in the blue mode. (SuSE supplies an outdated version - watch for this.) Also, it supplies network install, which is a plus, and can be installed very small.
-------------------- This message is not written by an employee of any Linux distribution firm, which is obvious as, at the moment, I am on a student footing.
It's interesting about this article, because JC has previously recommended nVidia as the best card maker around. Guess who's the chip maker for the X-Box?
Hmm...interesting. I think we may be seeing Doom 2000/III/3 or whatever on the X-Box. Personally, I'd love to see Q3A on the NV25...
Slashdot Mirror
Yip... I remember seeing that on a version of "Grail" I taped off BBC1 (UK), and not on a rented CBS/FOX (late 80s) videotape of it. Seemed about 24 seconds to me. This lost 24 seconds apparently appears in the "Holy Grail" video game and all UK releases since about 1995.
The Castle Anthrax scene is lovely, though, even without it. And I wish they'd put in the King Brian the Wild scene...but I believe the Pythons ran out of cash (the reason that ending is in there). What a pity...
What Macromedia's newsletter appears to be is opt-in in one sense: you enter the email address into a webform and check a box where you recieve it. However, this is NOT confirmed opt-in: confirmed opt-in goes something like this:
Macromedia recieves subscription request from a webpage. It then sends out what is a confirmation email - it asks you whether it was you that elected to have the letter sent [email boxes on websites can be abused, thus "listbombing" attempts can be made.] It includes a unique, random code - most mailing software, including recent Majordomo, listserv and GNU mailman can do this - which is either sent back to Macromedia using a WWW link or by an email reply.
If this is recieved, the list is confirmed and the list will begin sending - if it isn't, the list will not send until it is. That is confirmed opt-in, because the list sender is definitely sure that you elected to recieve the mail.
eBay and company abuse this by rechecking your "I don't want marketing email" boxes; companies like FloNetworks (my personal hate) or Exactis don't confirm and share your address with other lists. That's why Exactis went on the RBL; that's why RealNetworks is on the RBL. (And has been for a long time - Real under and after Maria Cantwell [now a Democrat senator] were and are unrepentant spammers. Online privacy? HAH! TrustE certificates don't mean s*#t.)
By the way, as a reply to Jamie, it just didn't appear from the article that you had checked the RBL evidence file - and, of course, I had no ability to check it myself, as Macromedia are off the RBL. Thanks for replying, though...helped to clear up a few things. (I wrote that message whilst very tired. Surprised it was as comprehensible as it was.)
I ignore-lined most of Bennett's discussions on NANAE and SPAM-L because they turned into major-scale flamewars even before he made his comments about date - and I have no wish to start another now. As a former PF supporter, I still visit from time to time. Certainly, his argument is flawed - but so is everyone else's. It's hard to rationalise any other way.
As far as I can see from Jamie's admittedly biased reporting, Macromedia got on the RBL because of an open, unconfirmed mailing list they REFUSED to fix - and they got off again very soon afterwards, probably by promising to fix it.
Remember that the MAPS RBL is very strict about entry requirements, and very trusting. A RBL nomination is _very_ hard, and requires a large amount of evidence. I don't suppose Jamie checked the RBL evidence files before writing the article, did he? The only comment's from Macromedia PR, who are anxious to make themselves look good. Sigh.
What the RBL administrators will have done would be to list the entire Macromedia netblock in which the spewing mailserver exists - NOT just two IPs, as Jamie says. This is 216.35.148.0/23, on Exodus - which contains not only the mail server, but also secondary DNS service (primary is on Concentric) and the Macromedia web server.
Today's traceroute to macromedia.com goes into a loop at a border router in Exodusland, by the way.
Remember that Above.net and Teleglobe are two of the VERY few providers that use what is called a BGP feed to the RBL. This is the original RBL - it provides a feed of RBL data to the border routers, where the IPs are cut off. As they are very private networks, they're entitled to do to them what they like - ISPS ARE NOT COMMON CARRIERS IN LAW. When a second tier ISP decides to connect to the above.net backbone (Above don't sell to consumers, but only to big webhosters - ironically, some of which spam loads themselves, like eBay) they KNOW about the RBL BGP feed. It's one of Above's selling points, the network most free of spam trouble.
Of course, BGP is becoming more troublesome than it's worth. But Peacefire, your favoured "hey, there's another example", is collateral too - it is in the middle of a netblock containing a load of spam support sites (Sam Al's Samco, in this case) and was MOVED there by Media3 in August 2000, after the RBL listing for that particular netblock was in place (the listing is dated June). And Media3 is suing MAPS, and so MAPS is not going to remove the listing. I wonder whether Media3 was trying a publicity stunt, and using Bennett as a figurehead?
Whatever. As for Macromedia, they're not blocked now. Obviously, they've been educated. Let's move on.
(Oh, by the way...whichever comment referred to us antispammers [and we are no means a coherent whole - some of us oppose the RBL, some of us oppose ORBS, some oppose both, some of us have HUGE private blocklists of our own] as "spam nazis" is violating Godwin's Law at stage one, as well as being factually inaccurate. We support free speech, just not your right to force it on others at the expense of theirs. Shame on you.)
You have to say "yes" to the "use experimental/development drivers" option before you see Reiser or framebuffers or many of the other interesting features of Linux 2.4.x. It's one of the first options you get asked.
VIA fixes, apparently in this one - and I have a 686B. Downloading the patch right now. This should be good...
Precisely.
It's not WinXP we're actually discussing here, but Windows Media Player 8 (which will, however, be a part of WinXP.) However, it is a replaceable component.
WMP8 won't allow you to rip at anything other than 56Kbps for MP3s. 56KBps is ideal for Net streaming, which will probably be the last bastion of the MP3 format. Ogg Vorbis, WMA and the other competitors will oust MP3 eventually - but WMA's a pig to stream, and you can do Shoutcast from an ordinary web server.
And besides, why does Microsoft do this sort of thing? Legal problems. If they were to integrate a MP3 encoder that does the full range of functions, they could be seen to be killing off their competitors, and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. On the other hand if they *didn't* integrate an MP3 encoder, they could be seen to be forcing people to use WMA - and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. They can't win.
Who uses WMP for ripping under Windows anyway? No-one. I use, for example, the wonderful (and open source) CDex. Also, MusicMatch Jukebox is a good point-and-click package for the intelligent newbie (it can do VBR, among other things.) Either are probably used a lot more than WMP, or Creative PlayCenter, or RealJukebox - all of which are bloated, awful software.
WinXP hasn't crippled either package as far as I can see - these "problems" probably come from a missing (unincluded) wnaspi32.dll. NT series operating systems have never included this file by default, as it is not generally needed - except for back compatibility. It does, however, come with Win9x.
Can you say FUD? I knew you could.
As another idea, how about Nero Burning ROM's "ignore illegal TOC type" option? Or CloneCD, or ddump?
That's just on Windows - dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.raw would probably work correctly, when combined with cdrecord, cdrdao and company.
Remember, this is Macrovision - the company responsible for the SafeDisc CD game protection system [thank you BlindRead]and their infamous video mechanism. I have a DVD card in my PC, and only RF output into my TV. So video out has to go through my VCR's SCART, and so I have to crack my Creative DXR3 to remove Macrovision. In doing so, I happen to come across an ability to pirate my DVDs to VHS - something I don't want to do.
All copy protection ever does is hassle the legitimate user. The big pirates found ways around Macrovision almost as soon as the system came out. It's the same with their game copy protection as well - you can just patch the game. It'll be the same here. Only the consumer will lose.
Not really. They can't even control their own open relays, which are mostly ancient Sun boxes running a version of Sendmail known, infamously, as (8.6/SMI-SVR4). (This is common in .tw, .kr and .jp as well.) This allows anonymous open relaying - it won't display the IP of the machine connecting to it in the message headers.
Their admins are Clueless, unfortunately. They have (supposedly) an antispam address, but it leads back to an autoresponder saying "In your Email, I can find no record of an IP address" EVEN WHEN the relay's address in there. They just don't seem to care.
So the net-abuse community would be quite happy to see China shut themselves off from the world - it would reduce untraceable spam by about 90%. The only other problem we'd have then would be UU.net (sigh).
But they'd block incompetently - just in the same way they don't care about their abused SMI boxes. They'd always leave a way in.
"A Clockwork Orange" is in my local Woolworth's, with an 18 certificate on it. You're about a year out of date. We have "The Exorcist" too, now...
BBFC decision on ACO
BBFC decision on The Exorcist
So no, we're not as bad as we used to be. Even then, we still ban all kinds of stuff and FACT will raid markets and/or shops for R1 discs at any chance it gets (ignoring pirated stuff while it does it.) We're not a panacea, and our Customs are paranoid. Still, at least we can import our stuff whenever we like...
I suppose it's like the ban the French had, until a few years ago, on encryption software: a futile attempt to keep their citizens at bay. They seem to be more recipient of this than we are (although we have RIP); no wonder they think their government is screwing them over. Because they are.
They *did* sell them. I've got a boxed copy of Corel Draw 9 for Linux sitting in a corner, from the beta testing programme. And they released Photopaint for free. And I've seen Wordperfect Office in the shops; so they did release stuff. It just didn't sell.
You think *that's* bad? eMachines are selling GHz P3s with - get this - a i810 chipset over here. *810*!!! Not even 815 (the one with the AGP slot). Now, the 810 steals RAM also, and is dog slow. And SiS are not exactly well known for their cheap chipsets either...
Of course, I don't have this problem. I just bought an Athlon with a *real* mobo. But there could be problems elsewhere...
I do believe they were disbarred, so it wouldn't be advisable.
See, that's what spam can do to you... get disbarred, go to jail, go directly to jail...
I'm not sure about Linux, but they *definitely* have borrowed code from BSD. All perfectly legal, of course. Try it on your own NT box:
I:\WINDOWS\system32>find "Regent" ftp.exe
---------- FTP.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I:\WINDOWS\system32>
That's UC at Berkeley. The code is from original BSD. I'm sure some of it's in the TCP stack as well...
The second time? These school officials *really* have too much time on their hands. And why suspend someone for a short story?
If that's the state of the American school system, then at the moment I'm thanking $DEITY that I live in the UK.
Mod this up, please.
My school's a lot like this - but worse. It's a network of (drumroll please) Windows 95 boxes.
Running Research Machines (RM) tacked on security software.
The server? NT 4.0 Server. You know how incompetently this NT 4.0 server is set up? It's not set up to reboot automatically after a BSOD.
That's right, the system can BSOD - remember, this is controlling the entire network, and the RM software is buggy as hell - and the other systems on it have to wait for someone to *MANUALLY* reboot it. That is moronic. As for its Internet access - the less said the better.
Not only that, but the RM software and the censorware transport passwords unencrypted, allow them to be seen on screen by the sysadmin ETC. This is the most moronic security solution I've seen. The censorware even pops up an Internet Explorer box saying "this is unencrypted - possible security risk".
The network could only be improved by sticking a Linux box - or even better an OpenBSD one - on it, to handle proxying (using Squid blocklists if they really must), mail (there's no mail and freemail sites are blocked), login et al. And if the student computers had NT 4.0 Workstation on them, then security could be improved further.
But no. <SARCASM> They're too intelligent for that. </SARCASM> Instead they're going to keep it the same.
I wish I had root.
Most TVs and VCRs over in the UK are NTSC-compatible from UKP100 - it's not that bad at all. NTSC isn't a worry - region encoding is.
Still, at least I have Zone Selector (wink, wink.)
1. First restore Win98 from Packard Bell CD. It will work fine until P$ck$rd Hell run their restore procedure, at which point everything begins to go wrong.
2. Get DOS boot disk from old corner, preferably supporting FAT32.
3. Now enter the directory \WINDOWS\OPTIONS\INSTALL. Note all the CAB files? And the file marked "setup.exe"? Thought so. Copy all these to another directory.
4. Now deltree \WINDOWS, go into the moved directory, delete the premade setup file and then type SETUP. Enter in ID number during install process and... problem solved.
Sadly, I didn't have the option of Linux while doing this - but it's not ready for the untrained consumer at the moment, and Microsloth software is about as easy as can get.
And anyway - all of my copies of Windows (apart from 2000, which came via the Microsoft UK student programme) have come via Microsoft beta testing. I have all the versions of Windows (except 3.0 and before, 95 OSR1 and 95 OSR2.5) that there ever has been - 98, 98SE and ME having been gained by me free. All of them are legal, and my system is reformatted regularily. If Microsoft was to do this to the UK, then I would be very dissatisfied indeed.
Admittedly, my beta testing license says that I can only use my BTA complimentary copies on the machine I tested them on, so maybe they do have a point... But still, there's my student 2000 Professional, my NT4, Mandrake 7.1, S.u.S.E. - I'd like to be able to pay only for what I use. And I wouldn't use the operating systems supplied with the machine.
Of course, my next machine's going to be a homebuild anyway...
They *didn't*. AOL *block* these other clients. MSN Instant Messenger is smaller than AIM and a lot nicer - AOL stopped it from communicating with their service, there was a bit of a war, and eventually Microsoft gave up. Ditto Yahoo!. Why don't they want an open service? Because they want their crapware to rule.
I mean, look what they did to ICQ.
Yeah, but now they've added a few extra options to allow Harass spam through...
Still, at least we can do something about it (hits "Block Sender".) I wonder how long it'll take Harris to realise *that* exists?
Guess who's getting pride of place in my upcoming site, under the "CULPRITS" section? I wonder.
BUT Tom, Kyle, and Anandtech were the only people to have 1.13GHz PIII samples. Two out of three failed, three out of three won't do a simple gcc kernel compile.
:-D) the Athlon is the best choice at the moment.
There are people who will go out and buy the PIII 1.13GHz when it finally makes it out. (And it will - Intel are never going to leave an advantage for long.) What's the point of the 1.13? Gaming, 3D modelling, on-line video editing...hmm, that's it. And it's going to be very interesting watching the price war - AMD will be selling the Athlon 1.1GHz (and AMD don't announce and run as often as Intel do) at the lovely price of $719 (according to Tom's Hardware, of all places - a huge jump of 100MHz from $475, of course) - and Intel would have been selling the 1.13 for $950. AMD's chips are beating Intel into the ground on price grounds - and this is why they are so scared.
And frankly, I don't think I have any need to worry. It'll push the price of Socket A boards down, maybe a dual one might come out, and I can run dual 900MHz Thunderbirds ($267 x 2 = $534 - more than a single GHz one, but with Win2K, Be or SMP Linux, it should be a stunner.) I'd love to have that.
All I need to hope is that AMD can carry on like this - competition is good, and AMD provides much-needed competition to Intel (Cyrix/VIA is low-price, Rise is dead, IDT never came to surface, Transmeta is for low-power situations.) And at clock-for-clock parity (and soon, when P4 comes out, AMD will be clock-for-clock faster, as P4 is slower CfC than P3
> Is there ANY graphics card in the same class (or better) as NVidia
No. The Voodoo5 needs to be plugged into a hard disk cable (in the V5 6000, the mains - whoever heard of a video card you had to plug into a wall?) and still gets beaten by the GTS (and even the GeForce DDR) in benchmarks, the Matrox G400 [although nice] is a few generations old (it's TNT2-Ultra generation), and... what's left? S3 makes budget chips, PowerVR's no longer a factor (or has drivers)... nVidia's the best we've got!
If you want something in a lesser class than a nVidia card (and I'm just thankful that there are drivers, whether they're OSS or not) you might like to head towards the Matrox G400, which is a Nice Card. But not a GeForce GTS, which is hopefully going to be my next video unit. Until the NV20 comes along...
I was a ME beta tester (and am running it at the moment), so I can explain the entire thing to you.
The command shell is still available. What you do is that you create a "Boot Disk" from Add/Remove Programs, and then you boot from this disk. There is an option called "Minimal Boot." Select this option, and you will find a small file called FDISK.EXE on this floppy. FORMAT and so on are in the zipped RAMDISK you can get by selecting any of the other menu options.
Not having DOS on isn't a problem at all - BEloader uses a floppy *anyway*, as do most UMSDOS type distros (and there *aren't* any UMSDOS distros - the last one I saw was Slackware a *long* long time ago, and Corel uses a disk image file.) I installed BeOS 5 under *Windows 2000*. The only distro I can see screwed is Corel's image system, but no-one uses that anyway.
In fact, WinME just removes one of the last Windows burdens left. Now all that's left is the Win9x kernel... and that's going with Whistler, thankfully.
Assuming you're not a troll, I can explain exactly what I need to do with USENET searches.
I am a small-time computer programmer (for my own enjoyment) and local technical expert (called upon for practically all Windows installations). I fiddle with Linux a lot - my computer has a 17.2G drive for bloated software like Windows 2000, and a 4.3G hard drive devoted entirely to Linux distros (PC PLUS in the UK is great with this [Mandrake 7.1 this month.]) I also do a bit of amateur spamhunting (you'll see me a lot on news.admin.net-abuse.email.)
One of my most used tools is Deja.com/usenet. I have it on my slashboxes. With deja.com, I can immediately search out whether this pernicious "Find Out About Any Poor Shmuck Fast Now" spam (I recieve it every week or so) has been posted to N.A.N-A.S yet. Also, if I have technical problems I need to solve, I call up Deja first. I don't search AltaVista, partly because I don't like AltaVista (I prefer Excite or Lycos) and because all Web search engines, especially when faced with computer support queries, don't successfully find what I want. Also, several big pr0n and other dubious sites will definitely use support queries in META tags to drive you off the route - I've had this happen to me before.
Therefore, services like Deja help me to find out about new drivers, or how to make my Sony tape drive work - they help solve problems. This is the entire purpose of Deja - not to make up a huge Britney Spears fan collection, but for technical information. And yes, there is a demand for a better engine (for a start, one that you don't have to click three different time-consuming links to move into a thread) - but at the moment, Deja and remarQ are all we've got. And thankfully, we have them.
Corel Linux, at the moment at least, is a castrated version of Debian. For example, Corel (at least on my free copy) runs a special version of KDE. That's too big for this kind of thing. It has a really, really, really cruddy library setup, so trying to compile anything comes out with messages such as "missing libc" or whatever, even when I can see the files in the directories in the libpath.
Easy to install? You can't select singular packages, it installs LILO to the MBR whether you want it or not (I don't - I dualboot already, using XOSL and LILO in the root partition), and it's slow as hell. Oh, and only the paid-for version has WordPerfect 8 with it, and there's not much other software (not even a complete KDE) with it either.
Why has no-one suggested Mandrake? It's got the fastest RPM-based installation I've seen (and RPM has some nasty inherent timings after it's finished installing files), it allows singular package selection, it's got StarOffice (which is better), it's based on a version of Redhat and so has all the utilities you've come to know, and is supplied with Blackbox, my favourite WM. Small, takes up almost no memory whatsoever, and exquisitely stylish, especially in the blue mode. (SuSE supplies an outdated version - watch for this.) Also, it supplies network install, which is a plus, and can be installed very small.
--------------------
This message is not written by an employee of any Linux distribution firm, which is obvious as, at the moment, I am on a student footing.
It's interesting about this article, because JC has previously recommended nVidia as the best card maker around. Guess who's the chip maker for the X-Box?
Hmm...interesting. I think we may be seeing Doom 2000/III/3 or whatever on the X-Box. Personally, I'd love to see Q3A on the NV25...