As you may know (being such a wiseguy) writing a small script and releasing it to the community does very little towards making a feature available to Linux. There are so many distributions around and so many different approaches to the same thing at this level, that there is nothing you can do as an individual.
I have written and released free software. I have written dedicated scripts to use LDAP in the company where I work. Comparing to the competition, I think the integration of LDAP into Linux is quite far behind. Building blocks for a lot of features are available, but it is just not practical to put it all together and have a working system without 3 months of study and coding.
This is not something an individual can solve by writing some scripts and throwing them on freshmeat.
Well the technical lifespan probably is no more than 2 years anyway. Higher speeds, new protocols and other advancements in technology quickly make those routers obsolete.
What I often find annoying is that only program sourcecode is always allowed to contain comments, but many systems that store data do not allow comments with that. Sure, the programmers that coded those systems must have been familiar with the concept of comments. And so, probably, are the designers.
Then, why can't I put a comment near a Windows registry entry, that explains why I changed it? Or why can't I put a comment in an ACL or Group membership record that explains why a certain access is required?
There are many similar situations where you would want to annotate some piece of data stored in a file or database, but very often there is no such possibility.
This always reminds of how "Label not found" was translated as "Volumenaam niet gevonden" in the Dutch version of MS-DOS.
The translator apparently had seen the DIR output "Volume in drive A: has no label" and believed that the "label" is referring to a "volume label" and translated it as "volumenaam" ("volume name").
But when a.BAT file uses GOTO and specifies a nonexistent label, the translation to "volume name" is completely incorrect. When I first got this errormessage running a.BAT file, it took me quite some time before I understood what was happening.
Of course, with our prime minister Harry Potter being such good friends with the mentally retarded head of the US, there will be no problem to convince the American company and/or courts that this ruling should be upheld.
After all, the countries are already extraditing citizens suspect of crimes, even crimes that are not normally prosecuted in the other country.
It is. Only problem is that they are not registered in the official root servers, so nobody will see them.
Registering in the top level should have been allowed long ago, at the day it became apparent that the world does not lend itself to structuring in.com.net.org and countrycodes.
Now it is of course too late. All multinational companies already have registered under all country code TLDs, or are fighting in court to get "their" names registered.
The software on the CD is voluntarily installed. Autorun starts the installer, and after an OK it is installed on your PC. Clever people have disabled Autorun long ago, and/or they use an OS that is incompatible with the software. So there is no mandatory DRM functionality on the CD, it is just an "I agree to be restricted" type of DRM.
And now, after you have installed it, it would suddenly be illegal to remove that, under the DMCA? In that case, it would be illegal to format the machine and re-install the OS (or install another OS) as well! That would be insane.
The problem with IDTVs is that there are too many local standards. An IDTV set that can be sold in more than one country and/or would need to receive more than one provider will be more complex than a simple FTA set. You will have to cater for terrestrial, cable and satellite modes of DVB, plus the different encryption systems. It seems easier to sell a generic TV (with or without analog tuner) and a separate box that is catered to the needs of the locality and preferences of the user.
Still, it would be nice if there were some remote control standard so everything could be controlled from one remote.
... but those cable companies have become a minority.
Originally they all started like that, but a decade ago the cities who originally built them sold them off to large commercial (foreign-owned) companies who are only in it for the money.
Here, Casema is the operating company, which means we are only slightly better off than the worst (called UPC). We get no free decoder, except when subcribing a premium package. "Free" channels on digital are essentially the same as on analog (about 35) plus some 10 extra that they can not otherwise sell (local TV of different regions, for example).
All the rest is put in several small premium packages that are sold for outrageous amounts of money. 10-20 euro per month for a cultural package, even more for movie channels. And everything is sold exclusively under year contracts, so no flexibility at all.
Years ago, when the networks were sold, we were told that "the customer would be better off because these networks required investments that the original owners would not be able to make". Once the sale was done we heard "the Dutch cable customer has to get accustomed to paying more for TV". And so we did. The base package is now 15 euro per month, about 3 times more than what it was before going commercial.
Worst is the reason for paying so much: this is to enable them to invest in the network to develop new services like Internet, telephony, etc. But other telecom providers are explicitly prohibited from financing one service from the income of another. All services must be sold at cost-determined pricing. Apparently cable companies are exempt from this, and viewers that don't trust them with providing their Internet or phone connections still have to pay for the infrastructure.
In the Netherlands we have 2 types of TV stations:
- public (state) stations. they transmit in analog and in digital.
- commercial stations. they all transmit exclusively in digital.
So this whole thing is pnly about the public TV. The digital transmission is done under license by two commercial companies, one that transmits digital via satellite and of course covers the whole country, and one that transmits digital terrestrial, which covers only part of the country and has been promising to expand for years. But their financial position is not very good. (of course the vast majority of viewers has cable, which converts the digital signals back to analog, at least for now)
The analog transmissions originally were fully run by the state, but this operation was put in a commercial company that also owns part of the digital terrestrial network and operates analog radio transmitters. It is just this analog TV transmission (which is fully state financed) that they want to end, so it is just a matter of ending a contract and let the transmitter company be stuck with a bunch of unusable equipment.
There is nothing in it for the TV stations. They don't have the responsibility for these transmitters and don't need to buy anything or look for anything to replace them. They will only lose some viewers, but as these are not commercial stations that should not matter to them.
The state saves money, and gets some complaining in return. That has been common practice over the past years. The government is short of money and tries to walk a balance between cutting away established services and subsidies and getting too much flack.
Note that this is not related to analog/digital. With analog satellite you had just the same bad weather problems as with digital. The degradation went less abrubtly (first some snow appears before the picture is lost completely) but you need about the same signal for good reception.
There is more rain attenuation on the satellite frequencies than on terrestrial.
Cable is not a safe haven for analog viewers... Here in the Netherlands cable companies are quickly converting everything to digital. All analog channels are available in digital as well, plus some extras, "for free" (= within the analog subscription price). Premium channels will be switched off in analog coming jan 1st, and cable companies offer free decoders (normal price about 100 euro) to anyone subscribing to an extra package. My guess is that by this time next year they will be stating that "many viewers apparently prefer digital" and start switching off analog channels to make room for more digital programmes, to generate extra revenue from optional packages.
... these switchovers are not planned in advance but decided in closed rooms by a government that needs to close the budget.
A couple of months ago it was decided that analog transmission would stop on jan 1st, 2006. That would give analog viewers only about 4 months to look for an alternative. Only part of the country is covered by digital terrestrial TV, the remainder (which is the less densely populated part, so viewers would be less likely to have cable available) would have to switch to satellite TV. These both a subscription services, while the original analog service can be freely received by anyone.
However, today it was decided to cancel the switchover and consider it again. Don't you just love those opportunistic people? Need money... cut something off. Too much protest? reconsider it.
In those days, a virus would delete or damage your files, or generally render your computer inoperative. Today, it upgrades your computer to a spamrelay or a marketing data collection system.
Corporations are what the politician is getting his money from. Now, or in the future when he retires as a politician and wants a new job on a board of directors or as a commisioner. So, what you see is that politicians are allways shaping the laws in such a way that (big) corporations are better off than the rest of us. Why else would you think that a politician is in favour of a patent scheme, a copyright and other rights system, etc? For society as a whole it would be best if flow of knowledge and information were free. But for the pocket of a few, it would not. So corporations that make big money out of knowledge and information are protected, and the poor man is sued.
No. Sony is fully responsible for this. They cannot shift the blame to first4internet.
If you would put the blame on first4internet, would they be able to pass it on to their employee who actually wrote it? No. Would that employee be able to pass it on to the maker of the development environment he used? No.
We have been running IPsec on Cisco routers for quite some time. We have always had an explicit allow list for isakmp packets only for the known peers, and a deny with logging for all other sources. Over the years, there have been only very few logged packets. No need to tell you how many NETBIOS and other wellknown exploitable service packets have been counted (we don't even log these).
It does not look like IPsec is a popular attack vector. Same for PPTP, by the way.
I think we (as consumers) must draft some "consumer contract agreement" that explicitly states that we are not bound by any contracts other than those signed after mutual agreement. This text can explicitly state that the user is not bound by agreements that come into action by clicking on some "I agree" button in a browser or software installation program.
Then we can put this agreement on our own homepage and state that anyone who is selling us something or is trying to enforce such an EULA on us is bound by this agreement. Any party trying to enforce an EULA can simply be referred to this text that states it is null and void. If they don't agree with the text they should not have tried to enforce the EULA on us.
I think such a construct is just as valid as an EULA (i.e. not a mutual agreement and thus no contract) and they would cancel out.
Maybe some legal expert can draft up such a text? When it appears on many personal pages, maybe someone sees the light...
Slashdot Mirror
The firsts where tickets.eu, job.eu, and hotels.eu.
sex.eu was asked for 204 times
This shows that many applicants did not even read the rules!
As you may know (being such a wiseguy) writing a small script and releasing it to the community does very little towards making a feature available to Linux.
There are so many distributions around and so many different approaches to the same thing at this level, that there is nothing you can do as an individual.
I have written and released free software. I have written dedicated scripts to use LDAP in the company where I work.
Comparing to the competition, I think the integration of LDAP into Linux is quite far behind. Building blocks for a lot of features are available, but it is just not practical to put it all together and have a working system without 3 months of study and coding.
This is not something an individual can solve by writing some scripts and throwing them on freshmeat.
The main gripe is that you have to kludge all this yourself.
Every admin in the world must write his or her own script to add a user to the directory.
Why can't we have ready-made programs that perform such simple tasks?
Like useradd, for example.
Well the technical lifespan probably is no more than 2 years anyway. Higher speeds, new protocols and other advancements in technology quickly make those routers obsolete.
What I often find annoying is that only program sourcecode is always allowed to contain comments, but many systems that store data do not allow comments with that.
Sure, the programmers that coded those systems must have been familiar with the concept of comments. And so, probably, are the designers.
Then, why can't I put a comment near a Windows registry entry, that explains why I changed it?
Or why can't I put a comment in an ACL or Group membership record that explains why a certain access is required?
There are many similar situations where you would want to annotate some piece of data stored in a file or database, but very often there is no such possibility.
This always reminds of how "Label not found" was translated as "Volumenaam niet gevonden" in the Dutch version of MS-DOS.
.BAT file uses GOTO and specifies a nonexistent label, the translation to "volume name" is completely incorrect. .BAT file, it took me quite some time before I understood what was happening.
The translator apparently had seen the DIR output "Volume in drive A: has no label" and believed that the "label" is referring to a "volume label" and translated it as "volumenaam" ("volume name").
But when a
When I first got this errormessage running a
I'm sorry, but you are wrong.
299,792,458 / 3*10^9 = 0.0999
Of course, with our prime minister Harry Potter being such good friends with the mentally retarded head of the US, there will be no problem to convince the American company and/or courts that this ruling should be upheld.
After all, the countries are already extraditing citizens suspect of crimes, even crimes that are not normally prosecuted in the other country.
It is. Only problem is that they are not registered in the official root servers, so nobody will see them.
.com .net .org and countrycodes.
Registering in the top level should have been allowed long ago, at the day it became apparent that the world does not lend itself to structuring in
Now it is of course too late. All multinational companies already have registered under all country code TLDs, or are fighting in court to get "their" names registered.
Of course that would not work, because the Web in general is only accessible by name, not by IP address.
Think about virtual hosting.
MSN existed before Bill even cared about the Internet and its standards.
This just show how dumb the DMCA is...
The software on the CD is voluntarily installed. Autorun starts the installer, and after an OK it is installed on your PC.
Clever people have disabled Autorun long ago, and/or they use an OS that is incompatible with the software.
So there is no mandatory DRM functionality on the CD, it is just an "I agree to be restricted" type of DRM.
And now, after you have installed it, it would suddenly be illegal to remove that, under the DMCA?
In that case, it would be illegal to format the machine and re-install the OS (or install another OS) as well!
That would be insane.
The problem with IDTVs is that there are too many local standards.
An IDTV set that can be sold in more than one country and/or would need to receive more than one provider will be more complex than a simple FTA set.
You will have to cater for terrestrial, cable and satellite modes of DVB, plus the different encryption systems.
It seems easier to sell a generic TV (with or without analog tuner) and a separate box that is catered to the needs of the locality and preferences of the user.
Still, it would be nice if there were some remote control standard so everything could be controlled from one remote.
Since Americans are charged in KiloWatt hours
Actually I find that amazing.
You would expect something like square feet pounds per squared fortnight...
... but those cable companies have become a minority.
Originally they all started like that, but a decade ago the cities who originally built them sold them off to large commercial (foreign-owned) companies who are only in it for the money.
Here, Casema is the operating company, which means we are only slightly better off than the worst (called UPC).
We get no free decoder, except when subcribing a premium package.
"Free" channels on digital are essentially the same as on analog (about 35) plus some 10 extra that they can not otherwise sell (local TV of different regions, for example).
All the rest is put in several small premium packages that are sold for outrageous amounts of money. 10-20 euro per month for a cultural package, even more for movie channels.
And everything is sold exclusively under year contracts, so no flexibility at all.
Years ago, when the networks were sold, we were told that "the customer would be better off because these networks required investments that the original owners would not be able to make".
Once the sale was done we heard "the Dutch cable customer has to get accustomed to paying more for TV". And so we did. The base package is now 15 euro per month, about 3 times more than what it was before going commercial.
Worst is the reason for paying so much: this is to enable them to invest in the network to develop new services like Internet, telephony, etc. But other telecom providers are explicitly prohibited from financing one service from the income of another. All services must be sold at cost-determined pricing.
Apparently cable companies are exempt from this, and viewers that don't trust them with providing their Internet or phone connections still have to pay for the infrastructure.
In the Netherlands we have 2 types of TV stations:
- public (state) stations. they transmit in analog and in digital.
- commercial stations. they all transmit exclusively in digital.
So this whole thing is pnly about the public TV.
The digital transmission is done under license by two commercial companies, one that transmits digital via satellite and of course covers the whole country, and one that transmits digital terrestrial, which covers only part of the country and has been promising to expand for years. But their financial position is not very good.
(of course the vast majority of viewers has cable, which converts the digital signals back to analog, at least for now)
The analog transmissions originally were fully run by the state, but this operation was put in a commercial company that also owns part of the digital terrestrial network and operates analog radio transmitters. It is just this analog TV transmission (which is fully state financed) that they want to end, so it is just a matter of ending a contract and let the transmitter company be stuck with a bunch of unusable equipment.
There is nothing in it for the TV stations. They don't have the responsibility for these transmitters and don't need to buy anything or look for anything to replace them. They will only lose some viewers, but as these are not commercial stations that should not matter to them.
The state saves money, and gets some complaining in return. That has been common practice over the past years. The government is short of money and tries to walk a balance between cutting away established services and subsidies and getting too much flack.
Note that this is not related to analog/digital.
With analog satellite you had just the same bad weather problems as with digital. The degradation went less abrubtly (first some snow appears before the picture is lost completely) but you need about the same signal for good reception.
There is more rain attenuation on the satellite frequencies than on terrestrial.
Cable is not a safe haven for analog viewers...
Here in the Netherlands cable companies are quickly converting everything to digital.
All analog channels are available in digital as well, plus some extras, "for free" (= within the analog subscription price).
Premium channels will be switched off in analog coming jan 1st, and cable companies offer free decoders (normal price about 100 euro) to anyone subscribing to an extra package.
My guess is that by this time next year they will be stating that "many viewers apparently prefer digital" and start switching off analog channels to make room for more digital programmes, to generate extra revenue from optional packages.
... these switchovers are not planned in advance but decided in closed rooms by a government that needs to close the budget.
A couple of months ago it was decided that analog transmission would stop on jan 1st, 2006.
That would give analog viewers only about 4 months to look for an alternative.
Only part of the country is covered by digital terrestrial TV, the remainder (which is the less densely populated part, so viewers would be less likely to have cable available) would have to switch to satellite TV.
These both a subscription services, while the original analog service can be freely received by anyone.
However, today it was decided to cancel the switchover and consider it again.
Don't you just love those opportunistic people? Need money... cut something off. Too much protest? reconsider it.
In those days, a virus would delete or damage your files, or generally render your computer inoperative.
Today, it upgrades your computer to a spamrelay or a marketing data collection system.
That will not immediately spoil your day...
Corporations are what the politician is getting his money from. Now, or in the future when he retires as a politician and wants a new job on a board of directors or as a commisioner.
So, what you see is that politicians are allways shaping the laws in such a way that (big) corporations are better off than the rest of us.
Why else would you think that a politician is in favour of a patent scheme, a copyright and other rights system, etc?
For society as a whole it would be best if flow of knowledge and information were free. But for the pocket of a few, it would not. So corporations that make big money out of knowledge and information are protected, and the poor man is sued.
No. Sony is fully responsible for this.
They cannot shift the blame to first4internet.
If you would put the blame on first4internet, would they be able to pass it on to their employee who actually wrote it? No. Would that employee be able to pass it on to the maker of the development environment he used? No.
Office is one of the few MS programs that does not require a restart of the system after install.
We have been running IPsec on Cisco routers for quite some time.
We have always had an explicit allow list for isakmp packets only for the known peers, and a deny with logging for all other sources.
Over the years, there have been only very few logged packets. No need to tell you how many NETBIOS and other wellknown exploitable service packets have been counted (we don't even log these).
It does not look like IPsec is a popular attack vector. Same for PPTP, by the way.
I think we (as consumers) must draft some "consumer contract agreement" that explicitly states that we are not bound by any contracts other than those signed after mutual agreement.
This text can explicitly state that the user is not bound by agreements that come into action by clicking on some "I agree" button in a browser or software installation program.
Then we can put this agreement on our own homepage and state that anyone who is selling us something or is trying to enforce such an EULA on us is bound by this agreement.
Any party trying to enforce an EULA can simply be referred to this text that states it is null and void.
If they don't agree with the text they should not have tried to enforce the EULA on us.
I think such a construct is just as valid as an EULA (i.e. not a mutual agreement and thus no contract) and they would cancel out.
Maybe some legal expert can draft up such a text? When it appears on many personal pages, maybe someone sees the light...