Licenses are irrelevant to the normal case, no matter how much stank wind comes from the copyright lobbies asserting otherwise. A license is required under law in order to distribute a work, not in order to make normal use of a particular instance of that work which you have lawfully obtained. For example, I have a Jan Gillou novel sitting on my desk at the moment. I would need a license from the copyright holder to start making copies and distributing them (whether for profit or as a give-away) or to do the same with a work derived from that novel. I do not, however, need any license to read the book, to write in the margins or otherwise alter it for my own use, to sell my copy, to loan it to a friend, etc. Similarly with software, once I buy that disk it is mine and since the uses I intend to put it to do not include redistribution, I have no need to accept any purported license that the manufacturer attempts to impose after sale. Just like the book, it's mine and I have every right to do whatever I desire with it, subject only to the limitations of copyright law.
You couldnt be more wrong. The law in the US is "innocent until proven guilty." A dismissed case means that the prosecution was not only not able to prove you guilty, they failed to even present a prima facie case! In terms of establishing guilt, this is BETTER than if you went through the whole trial and were found not guilty.
I would definitely not let a monkey like you get near my computers if some intense file copy was going on and they wanted to start doing other things while that was going on, sure you can do it but that does not make it a prudent thing to do, and the file may copy over just fine, and it may lose a few bits without even reporting any errors and that can happen on any OS, BSD, Linux, Winders & etc...etc...etc...
Funny, I do that constantly and have never seen any corruption even possibly attributable to it on any system besides Windows.
Well then they really need to change it then. French just doesn't go over well with English-speaking people, who comprise most of the computing world.
Wrong on all points. French goes over great with English-speakers, which only makes sense as English is about 30% French to begin with! And English-speakers are nowhere near the majority even among computer-users only, in fact we are a fast shrinking minority.
Of course, "FreeOffice" just sounds cheesy and crappy (since "free" typically has some bad connotations, evoking the line "you get what you pay for"), and stupid English doesn't have separate words for free/beer and free/speech
Again wrong. The English word you are looking for is 'Liberty.' And yes, like ~30% of English vocabulary it came to English from French; Liberté.
Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a
on
The Hackintosh Guide
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, NT itself ran great on it, but if you needed applications it wasnt very appealing. Of course if your apps were in-house or Free then, yeah, it was workable, so I am assuming that was your situation. But if you wanted the usual commercial apps you would have been very disappointed.
Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a
on
The Hackintosh Guide
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft POSIX subsystem was carefully crafted to satisfy a federal procurement requirement without actually being useable at all. It implemented POSIX.1 only. It could not create a thread, open a socket, use RPC, etc. The one and only practical use for the thing was to circumvent the requirement for POSIX compatibility in the Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2.
Dont confuse this with the third party Interix/SFU implementation which replaced it starting with XP, and is actually somewhat useful.
Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a
on
The Hackintosh Guide
·
· Score: 1
Like the supposed POSIX compliance, this was more vapour than reality.
Yes, you could get a version of NT4 compiled for PPC. But it was never at all useful. Why? Because windows relies on a blobware ecosystem and the vast majority of app vendors simply couldnt be bothered to clean up their code so it would compile on PPC and release it. So you have no apps. There were no 'universal binaries' for NT, and I cant remember a single application that actually offered a PPC port for NT (if there was one, there certainly werent many.) Hardware support was sketchy, and just getting it to install on a PPC machine could be a major hack job. And for what purpose with no apps? You could presumably, with enough work, find a way to get it to run x86 NT apps in emulation, but this would only make your fast, expensive PPC machine run your apps like a slow, cheap x86 box, and with a lot more work, so why bother? These are all the same reasons why NT on Alpha never took off as well, btw.
One possibility would come to mind with NT/PPC that would not with NT/Alpha, of course - the possibility of running apps intended for Macintosh PPC using a much thinner emulation layer since the processor is the same. This doesnt work either, however. PPC processors (and this is an overgeneralisation, in fact in some cases not true, but usually) are bi-endian, meaning they can be set to run little-endian OR big-endian code. However for decent performance you really need to pick one mode and stick to it. Mac software was all big-endian. NT is little-endian. So, like everything else positive about NT on PPC, this was only a theoretical benefit but not a practical one.
Say all paths used by an application are stored in the application's configuration file. Where would the path to this configuration file be stored, other than hardcoding something like ~/.$appname/preferences.ini?
Sure, you caught me out, I didnt phrase that exactly right. The ~/.$appname is the *nix convention for where to keep application preferences, and I didnt mean to imply any different. But it is not at all the same thing as hardcoding/pictures for your data directory. It's not even close.
No, I blame the culture of blobware there. Why do you think so many programs are 'poorly written' and why cant they be fixed? They are poorly written because their roots go back to when the MS OS didnt have any concept of a limited user or a security model at all. You cant fix the issue because, in the MS world, you dont actually get any software - you get a binary blob. ANY modifications, bug-fixes, etc. have to come from the vendor. If the vendor doesnt see a profit in it, they wont do it, and you are stuck with it. That is the MS way, and it can still sting even the most knowledgeable and diligent admin when forced to rely on blobware.
Yeah, this thing (even if it werent vapour-ware) is papering over the problem many layers up, instead of fixing it in the first place. If a browser permits "drive by" downloads like this, it's got a bug, and it should be fixed there. (And yes, firefox is incredibly buggy in this regard, but at least it's easily patched with extensions.)
First, it's not a bug. It's a feature that doesn't exist that he would like to exist. There is a difference between a bug and a feature request.
I disagree. Hardcoded paths in a user-space app is a bug, period, end of story.
Next, the reason use CLI stuff to explain something is because it's faster. The post describing how to do it via CLI was two lines long. The post explaining how to do it in the GUI was much more than that.
This is absolutely correct, and furthermore it's generalisable. It's very simple for one person who knows how to do something using a command line to communicate that to someone else, while it is complicated and problematic to explain a GUI in the same situation.
Can you explain how to get any number of windows, import photo applications to import to different folder
Just because a particular type of buggy behaviour is common and perhaps even widely accepted on Windows doesnt make it right.
Unfortunately this doesnt seem very credible. There is no explanation for why several employees previously, unanimously, and clearly attributed the ban to a union contract in the first place. The rationale given is contrafactual as well, as much CC-licensed content *is* available for commercial use, and it is trivial to filter the works which do or do not allow commercial use. In light of that, the suspicion arises that this statement is merely a spur of the moment fabrication in response to the justified outrage the original explanation sparked.
I am so damn tired of this kind of geek-cred bullshit. With today's computers, there's no good reason not to have a GUI.
GUIs as a class make horrible interfaces for a great number of tasks. There's no reason to use a GUI when you have a better UI for the task available. Yes, it depends on the task - no question I want a GUI when doing photo-editting for instance (though even there some sorts of tasks are better done through a CLI - I can sit here all day applying a filter to a thousand photos individually with the GUI or I can spend 5 minutes working out the command line, then start the batch and go do something else while it runs instead.) But the attitude you seem to be espousing, the unwarranted assumption that a GUI is ipso facto better, is dangerously wrong and quite annoying. GUIs are not the be-all and end-all of UI design, they can do some things well but others... not.
Mandrake/Mandriva has been by far, the best KDE oriented linux distro, amd one the most user friendly. I hope Mageia keeps the good things on! Go Mageia!
A very subjective statement - users of Slackware and OpenSUSE and even Kubuntu might disagree.
I havent tried it in awhile but it always aimed at somewhat the same audience as Ubuntu, only based on RH infrastructure rather than Debian, and defaulting to KDE rather than Gnome. It's good to have choices, even if that makes the assessment of 'the best' more difficult and less emotionally satisfying. For some this is certainly the best choice, and I too hope the distribution continues well beyond its commercial origin.
The links in the summary were useless but I dug back in Ed Feltons blog and found the relevant posts which are still possibly the best explanation around of what this means. Search for DRM and go back to page 5 on the search results or click this. Scan from the bottom up for HDCP.
In a nutshell, this key is all you need to generate every valid key, whether assigned or not. They could revoke every key but then none of the existing hardware would work. Otherwise whenever they kill your key you can just generate a new one with this data.
Seriously, though, who rips 1080dpi raw? Most pirates dont bother, even when it's easily doable. This was never about piracy.
This encryption wasnt designed to hold up against attack. It was simply designed to activate clauses of statute. Judges arent quite as technically illiterate as they were a few years ago, and XOR might be hard to defend today, but this was still designed from the get-go simply to qualify as a 'technical measure' under the DMCA rather than to actually work. Making it work would have cost too many pennies/unit. This lets them call out US Customs to bar consumer-friendly competition at the port, and the US Dept. of State to lobby (bribe/threaten) China into 'cracking down' on such businesses there.
Why bother actually 'protecting' your systems when you can do a half-assed job of it and then call in the power of the state to make it work?
I think you need a bigger star to make heavier elements. One this size comes down to mostly carbon and oxygen. And what it forms cant really be a diamond, since it does have quite a bit of oxygen. But apparently it's a crystal of some sort.
WTF? I didnt delete anything. There are two versions - one was passed by congress, with two commas, a slightly different version was actually copied to the states, with only one comma. Because I happened to quote the latter while you apparently have arbitrarily blessed the former as the one and only true text you call me a liar? Get over it. They attributed no change of meaning to the two variants at the time, they werent so rigidly monotheistic in their spelling and punctuation in those days.
In an otherwise very explicit and very clear document, having one and only one meaningless clause seems to indicate that they did, indeed, intend some meaning in that.
I never said it was meaningless, I agree that would be very odd if it were, but that is just a straw-man.
I would say that one reasonable reading of it would indicate that someone who was not and could never be a a member of the electorate could be considered to be excluded. I'm not saying that's the correct reading, but it is reasonable.
I dont think that would be a reasonable reading at all, as it contradicts the plain meaning of the sentence. It would be simple enough to say "the right of potential voters to keep and read books" if your reading was intended. No, I think the meaning of that sentence is quite clear and unambiguous, to wit: 1. A well-read electorate is necessary to a free society and therefore 2. the state shall in no way interfere with the right of the People to keep and read books. The first clause tells us *why* this right is considered so important as to merit an explicit amendment, while the second clause is the actual operative language of the amendment.
And I assert it isn't explicitly clear because it allows people, purposefully or otherwise, to misinterpret it. If it weren't at least arguable, then there wouldn't be an argument about it, right?
Well, no, actually. Lawyers can argue absolutely anything, that is their stock in trade, and I have found plenty of other people that fit the same mould as well.
So far as I can see, the only thing in the language that is less than clear is the meaning of 'militia' and that is only because we have deviated so far from the founders vision that the word is no longer understood. Delve into the history a bit to figure out what they meant by the word militia and the whole thing makes perfect sense. But even without understanding that word, the operative language and the semantic relation between the clauses could hardly be made more explicit. If it said "The doogliness of the gwantahi being of utmost importance, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" I could still easily determine the effect of the amendment, the only thing I wouldnt understand would be why this was considered so important.
Your fallacy is in assuming that the initial clause of the sentence is either meant to limit the second or is meaningless noise entirely. Neither is correct. The initial clause does not limit the operative clause, it justifies it.
And even if they do have the source code, do you really think an organisation that couldnt figure out they needed to turn off 'auto-run' in their install images has done a thorough audit of all those millions of lines of spaghetti?
Slashdot Mirror
Licenses are irrelevant to the normal case, no matter how much stank wind comes from the copyright lobbies asserting otherwise. A license is required under law in order to distribute a work, not in order to make normal use of a particular instance of that work which you have lawfully obtained. For example, I have a Jan Gillou novel sitting on my desk at the moment. I would need a license from the copyright holder to start making copies and distributing them (whether for profit or as a give-away) or to do the same with a work derived from that novel. I do not, however, need any license to read the book, to write in the margins or otherwise alter it for my own use, to sell my copy, to loan it to a friend, etc. Similarly with software, once I buy that disk it is mine and since the uses I intend to put it to do not include redistribution, I have no need to accept any purported license that the manufacturer attempts to impose after sale. Just like the book, it's mine and I have every right to do whatever I desire with it, subject only to the limitations of copyright law.
You couldnt be more wrong. The law in the US is "innocent until proven guilty." A dismissed case means that the prosecution was not only not able to prove you guilty, they failed to even present a prima facie case! In terms of establishing guilt, this is BETTER than if you went through the whole trial and were found not guilty.
Doesnt look too awful, but still a lot more hassle than with Slack.
Funny, I do that constantly and have never seen any corruption even possibly attributable to it on any system besides Windows.
Not to be snarky, but that sounds like a compelling reason not to use Arch to me. I never tried it and after hearing that, I probably wont.
Wrong on all points. French goes over great with English-speakers, which only makes sense as English is about 30% French to begin with! And English-speakers are nowhere near the majority even among computer-users only, in fact we are a fast shrinking minority.
Again wrong. The English word you are looking for is 'Liberty.' And yes, like ~30% of English vocabulary it came to English from French; Liberté.
Yeah, NT itself ran great on it, but if you needed applications it wasnt very appealing. Of course if your apps were in-house or Free then, yeah, it was workable, so I am assuming that was your situation. But if you wanted the usual commercial apps you would have been very disappointed.
Microsoft POSIX subsystem was carefully crafted to satisfy a federal procurement requirement without actually being useable at all. It implemented POSIX.1 only. It could not create a thread, open a socket, use RPC, etc. The one and only practical use for the thing was to circumvent the requirement for POSIX compatibility in the Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2.
Dont confuse this with the third party Interix/SFU implementation which replaced it starting with XP, and is actually somewhat useful.
Like the supposed POSIX compliance, this was more vapour than reality.
Yes, you could get a version of NT4 compiled for PPC. But it was never at all useful. Why? Because windows relies on a blobware ecosystem and the vast majority of app vendors simply couldnt be bothered to clean up their code so it would compile on PPC and release it. So you have no apps. There were no 'universal binaries' for NT, and I cant remember a single application that actually offered a PPC port for NT (if there was one, there certainly werent many.) Hardware support was sketchy, and just getting it to install on a PPC machine could be a major hack job. And for what purpose with no apps? You could presumably, with enough work, find a way to get it to run x86 NT apps in emulation, but this would only make your fast, expensive PPC machine run your apps like a slow, cheap x86 box, and with a lot more work, so why bother? These are all the same reasons why NT on Alpha never took off as well, btw.
One possibility would come to mind with NT/PPC that would not with NT/Alpha, of course - the possibility of running apps intended for Macintosh PPC using a much thinner emulation layer since the processor is the same. This doesnt work either, however. PPC processors (and this is an overgeneralisation, in fact in some cases not true, but usually) are bi-endian, meaning they can be set to run little-endian OR big-endian code. However for decent performance you really need to pick one mode and stick to it. Mac software was all big-endian. NT is little-endian. So, like everything else positive about NT on PPC, this was only a theoretical benefit but not a practical one.
Sure, you caught me out, I didnt phrase that exactly right. The ~/.$appname is the *nix convention for where to keep application preferences, and I didnt mean to imply any different. But it is not at all the same thing as hardcoding /pictures for your data directory. It's not even close.
No, I blame the culture of blobware there. Why do you think so many programs are 'poorly written' and why cant they be fixed? They are poorly written because their roots go back to when the MS OS didnt have any concept of a limited user or a security model at all. You cant fix the issue because, in the MS world, you dont actually get any software - you get a binary blob. ANY modifications, bug-fixes, etc. have to come from the vendor. If the vendor doesnt see a profit in it, they wont do it, and you are stuck with it. That is the MS way, and it can still sting even the most knowledgeable and diligent admin when forced to rely on blobware.
Yeah, this thing (even if it werent vapour-ware) is papering over the problem many layers up, instead of fixing it in the first place. If a browser permits "drive by" downloads like this, it's got a bug, and it should be fixed there. (And yes, firefox is incredibly buggy in this regard, but at least it's easily patched with extensions.)
I disagree. Hardcoded paths in a user-space app is a bug, period, end of story.
This is absolutely correct, and furthermore it's generalisable. It's very simple for one person who knows how to do something using a command line to communicate that to someone else, while it is complicated and problematic to explain a GUI in the same situation.
Just because a particular type of buggy behaviour is common and perhaps even widely accepted on Windows doesnt make it right.
Unfortunately this doesnt seem very credible. There is no explanation for why several employees previously, unanimously, and clearly attributed the ban to a union contract in the first place. The rationale given is contrafactual as well, as much CC-licensed content *is* available for commercial use, and it is trivial to filter the works which do or do not allow commercial use. In light of that, the suspicion arises that this statement is merely a spur of the moment fabrication in response to the justified outrage the original explanation sparked.
GUIs as a class make horrible interfaces for a great number of tasks. There's no reason to use a GUI when you have a better UI for the task available. Yes, it depends on the task - no question I want a GUI when doing photo-editting for instance (though even there some sorts of tasks are better done through a CLI - I can sit here all day applying a filter to a thousand photos individually with the GUI or I can spend 5 minutes working out the command line, then start the batch and go do something else while it runs instead.) But the attitude you seem to be espousing, the unwarranted assumption that a GUI is ipso facto better, is dangerously wrong and quite annoying. GUIs are not the be-all and end-all of UI design, they can do some things well but others... not.
They dont know either way, so this argument makes no sense.
To this day I still think OpenStep is the best GUI I've ever seen.
A very subjective statement - users of Slackware and OpenSUSE and even Kubuntu might disagree.
I havent tried it in awhile but it always aimed at somewhat the same audience as Ubuntu, only based on RH infrastructure rather than Debian, and defaulting to KDE rather than Gnome. It's good to have choices, even if that makes the assessment of 'the best' more difficult and less emotionally satisfying. For some this is certainly the best choice, and I too hope the distribution continues well beyond its commercial origin.
But only rather large stars go supernova.
The links in the summary were useless but I dug back in Ed Feltons blog and found the relevant posts which are still possibly the best explanation around of what this means. Search for DRM and go back to page 5 on the search results or click this. Scan from the bottom up for HDCP.
In a nutshell, this key is all you need to generate every valid key, whether assigned or not. They could revoke every key but then none of the existing hardware would work. Otherwise whenever they kill your key you can just generate a new one with this data.
Seriously, though, who rips 1080dpi raw? Most pirates dont bother, even when it's easily doable. This was never about piracy.
This encryption wasnt designed to hold up against attack. It was simply designed to activate clauses of statute. Judges arent quite as technically illiterate as they were a few years ago, and XOR might be hard to defend today, but this was still designed from the get-go simply to qualify as a 'technical measure' under the DMCA rather than to actually work. Making it work would have cost too many pennies/unit. This lets them call out US Customs to bar consumer-friendly competition at the port, and the US Dept. of State to lobby (bribe/threaten) China into 'cracking down' on such businesses there.
Why bother actually 'protecting' your systems when you can do a half-assed job of it and then call in the power of the state to make it work?
I think you need a bigger star to make heavier elements. One this size comes down to mostly carbon and oxygen. And what it forms cant really be a diamond, since it does have quite a bit of oxygen. But apparently it's a crystal of some sort.
WTF? I didnt delete anything. There are two versions - one was passed by congress, with two commas, a slightly different version was actually copied to the states, with only one comma. Because I happened to quote the latter while you apparently have arbitrarily blessed the former as the one and only true text you call me a liar? Get over it. They attributed no change of meaning to the two variants at the time, they werent so rigidly monotheistic in their spelling and punctuation in those days.
I never said it was meaningless, I agree that would be very odd if it were, but that is just a straw-man.
I dont think that would be a reasonable reading at all, as it contradicts the plain meaning of the sentence. It would be simple enough to say "the right of potential voters to keep and read books" if your reading was intended. No, I think the meaning of that sentence is quite clear and unambiguous, to wit: 1. A well-read electorate is necessary to a free society and therefore 2. the state shall in no way interfere with the right of the People to keep and read books. The first clause tells us *why* this right is considered so important as to merit an explicit amendment, while the second clause is the actual operative language of the amendment.
Well, no, actually. Lawyers can argue absolutely anything, that is their stock in trade, and I have found plenty of other people that fit the same mould as well.
So far as I can see, the only thing in the language that is less than clear is the meaning of 'militia' and that is only because we have deviated so far from the founders vision that the word is no longer understood. Delve into the history a bit to figure out what they meant by the word militia and the whole thing makes perfect sense. But even without understanding that word, the operative language and the semantic relation between the clauses could hardly be made more explicit. If it said "The doogliness of the gwantahi being of utmost importance, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" I could still easily determine the effect of the amendment, the only thing I wouldnt understand would be why this was considered so important.
Your fallacy is in assuming that the initial clause of the sentence is either meant to limit the second or is meaningless noise entirely. Neither is correct. The initial clause does not limit the operative clause, it justifies it.
And even if they do have the source code, do you really think an organisation that couldnt figure out they needed to turn off 'auto-run' in their install images has done a thorough audit of all those millions of lines of spaghetti?