I would agree with all of the above _EXCEPT_ point number three.
Screw the phone home stuff - build a serial number generator and call it good.
I used to work for a prominent software house that made plugins for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc, and that's all we ever had. The pirate networks had figured out our algorithm, but who cares? They were never our customers in the first place. And for support, we required our callers to give their serial number before we would help them - we kept an account of which serials had been sold, so it was easy to cut off the freeloaders.
Go with an offline serial scheme that is non-obvious, but simple to code and you will be fine.
Bonus points - if you are doing online sales only, use the customer's CC or PayPal ID or whatever as the salt against a serial number for validation... you can not only spot pirates, you know where they got their copy.
Extra bonus points if you embed that hash into the IPTC or EXIF data of exported images...
CJ: Japan has traditionally had a problem with software piracy on a home user level: users passing along copies of programs to their friends. Do you have problems with this, and what do you do about it ?
Krause: Yes, many people do steal the software and copy it. It's a very tricky problem for software manufacturers. But what we keep saying to people is, it's OK for their friends to use something, and play with it to see what it's like. But we appeal t o them that, "If you use it more than once a week, or if you do a serious project with it, then you should invest in your tools, and help those that make the tools to make better tools." So with that ethics angle, we find a lot of people understand that a nd buy the software. We get a lot of letters from people who say it's the only program they ever paid for. It's OK with me if they give it to a friend so they can at least see what it is like -- but it is a little tricky in Japan.
This is so sadly true -- I work in a data processing facility for an eDiscovery firm. When our clients want their old drives destroyed, we run them over a large (no idea as to the specs, make, whatever) electromagnet for several minutes (long enough to heat the casing up) and THEN we ship 'em out at USD$10/per for physical destruction.
I'd rather give them a single-pass random write and then take them to the range -- faster, cheaper, and much more fu.
4. Adopt Unix user conventions. OS X is based on Unix. You need to have a root (admin) account and an everyday use account. If you need to do anything that requires admin privileges (installing software), OS X will ask you for your admin password seamlessly.
Root is disabled by default on any new machine and after any fresh install, and this is a fine thing over all.
Any user who is identified as an 'Administrator' is a sudoer, and 'sudo su -' works wonders.
Yeargh. Our CEO pointed this out to me today, and couldn't understand why I burst into tears.
We have two Xserves and a G4 tower running Server 10.2.8... They have been tweaked for our workflow (which involves a mix of open and comercial software), and I haven't the time/energy to worry about an appropriate upgrade strategy yet (IT department of 1). I've just recently made sense of the workflow and gotten most of the cruft out or documented... and now I'm expected to upgrade (not from Crapple, but my fanboy boss...)?
I wish they (Apple) would change their naming conventions and release schedules to reflect the drastic difference between client machine needs and improvements and needs of server software... I hate upgrading production servers (Apple has been a little on the cavalier side when it comes to "their" config files) but I am willing to do it every two to three years, and have few qualms about various hotfixes and security patches they release.
But every year? Isn't that a bit much?
grump grump grump
[NOTE: There is no specific mention of Mac OS X Tiger Server, but they've been releasing Server a few months after client since 10.1 came out. So there.]
Interestingly enough, I just picked up Mac OS X for Unix Geeks, and it states there (not that this is definitive, mind you) that the PPC arch can do either big-endian or little-endian. This is controlled (on Apple products) through an Open Firmware variable. Makes me wonder how big a deal this actually is, and whether or not this feature is still present on a G5 and/or if this is a convenient excuse on the part of the Beast of Redmond.
Then again, I also am a bit inclined toward tin-foil hats.
For example, the mere presence of words uttered by he who has a low user number shines forth radiantly upon all, bestowing in them great wisdom and happiness.
I hope this is not true, else this comment -- while devoid of content -- will be ranked far too highly.
Note to mods - please mark this as 'Over-rated'. Thank you.
I'd like to thank the community (those whose posts are at +2, at least) for the great variety of responses, ideas and flames both.
My main thought is that her computer is already in her room, and I feel that if I were to move it for 'net access, she would probably take it poorly. In her shoes, I would too.
So, I think we're going to go with a slight fiction - that I know all and see all. This isn't to terrify my step-daughter in some Big Brother sense, but to let her know that she can always talk to me about anything she sees, beacause I will already know about it (that goes for Mom, too). And if she figures out my secret and starts dumping her history files, well - I guess squid is the next step, along with any extra-curricular computing courses she wants to take.
My step-mother was convinced I was up to Bad Things(TM) on those nasty ol' BBS's and did her best to interrupt my access - that just made me learn a lot more on the tech end.
Imagine, if you will... Being able to write docs in any app of your choice.
Imagine a utility that would convert your docs to a crossplatform (*NIX, MacOS, Win32) information container - one that would allow true device and platform independance, as well as allow internal and external hyperlinking, presentation-style slideshows, full Unicode support, and it should be an open standard.
What would this magic format be called? PDF, maybe?
There is already at least one OSS engine for directly creating PDF without using any Adobe products, either:ReportLab
Call me a luddite, but I'm not certain what YAFF will provide in the long run, other than splintering the non-.DOC users further. Adobe may be an evil, greedy, closed-source corporation, but PDF as a file spec is open and documented. Also current viewer products have no troubles (that I've seen) with much older versions of the file format. PDF allows for indexing of documents for fast searches, bookmark creation for a table of contents/index, thumbnail creation for quick navigation, granular document security (allow some/none/all modification), and can be entirely self contained (supports RLE, LZW and JPEG encoding for embedded graphics), allowing a PDF to look the same anywhere it is viewed and be easily transferrable.
Disclaimer: I distribute everything in PDF. My resume, invoices, proposals and other similar things. The only problem I have is trying to be polite when people ask why I don't use Word.
PS: anyone who feels that PDAs are a limiting factor in the use of PDF - huh? They're grand for PIM/phone/GPS/GameBoy functionality, but who really wants to slog through a tech ref manual (or equiv.) on the thing? I'm honestly curious, not trying to flame.
I figured the price point might be to both limit the beta pool to "serious" testers and to cover support costs (there are three options - built-in help, online kbase and telephone support). Phone support is provided on a pay-per-incident basis. No price listed. I called the number and asked about the cost - US$49.95 per incident.
Ouch.
But, it'll probably keep the calls down to a manageable number of truly serious testers/early-adopters.
but what I _really_ want to see is what it looks like when there's a crash.
I'm a mac geek, not a *nix geek (though I'm currently fiddling with a NetBSD install onto an old mac IIci). After firing up ping under terminal app (OS X DP4), I forgot how to make the process stop. Z wasn't right, so I tried kill to get a look at the options. I knew that my ping had been listed as process 1, so - 'kill -1'. Oops. The whole thing paused for a bit and *BANG* full command line, no GUI. But it was fully functional from the CLI, and it appeared that I was still logged in. Now if only I could figure out how to relaunch the GUI portion, I wouldn't have felt quite so dumb.
out of the *BSD family, you'll have to go to FreeBSD or BSDi if you want SMP
My recollection is that Darwin is a branch off of FreeBSD, but I'm not certain - is there a good visual representation of the history of the *BSD family, showing which came from what? I have seen charts like this but they are all fairly old.
I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason). I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe.
Adobe? Don't bother - they've nothing to do with Quartz. PDF is an open standard. Quartz is using PDF because Display PostScript was fairly expensive due to Adobe royalties (and, IIRC, there may have been some technical issues, too).
Just a clarification, hassling those folk will accomplish about spit in this arena.
this kind of thing sounds like something they would choose on their own
But doesn't that say something about the corporate culture at large, in their workplace? I mean - this is one hell of a risk for them to take. If this type of behavior was not encouraged, why would any professional engineer/code monkey take such a chance?
It seems to me to further illustrate the overall evil that has been bred corporation wide at Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I know a few folk who work there and they are generally good people. But to take risks like this with one's livelihood doesn't make any sense unless it has some sort of tacit approval.
Hmmm. Funny to see this here - recently ran across a ref to this on... don't recall, some site on memepool. Anyway, it linked to some former Scientologist's complete *rant* against the...religion/belief system/cult/whatever. But this (forgotten) site indicated that there may be a number of signifigant roadblocks preventing the release of this flick.
'Course, I've read on some sites how to construct the functional aluminum hat to keep the alien space-rays out, so....
WordPerfect is *the* standard format amongst the legal crowd (IANAL, but a friend is). And PDF is mostly cross platform (no reader for the C64 yet tho').
Slashdot Mirror
Set it on fire and collect the insurance money.
I would agree with all of the above _EXCEPT_ point number three.
Screw the phone home stuff - build a serial number generator and call it good.
I used to work for a prominent software house that made plugins for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc, and that's all we ever had. The pirate networks had figured out our algorithm, but who cares? They were never our customers in the first place. And for support, we required our callers to give their serial number before we would help them - we kept an account of which serials had been sold, so it was easy to cut off the freeloaders.
Go with an offline serial scheme that is non-obvious, but simple to code and you will be fine.
Bonus points - if you are doing online sales only, use the customer's CC or PayPal ID or whatever as the salt against a serial number for validation... you can not only spot pirates, you know where they got their copy.
Extra bonus points if you embed that hash into the IPTC or EXIF data of exported images...
from an interview with Kai Krause in 1994:
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
-- Wayne Gretzky
This is so sadly true -- I work in a data processing facility for an eDiscovery firm. When our clients want their old drives destroyed, we run them over a large (no idea as to the specs, make, whatever) electromagnet for several minutes (long enough to heat the casing up) and THEN we ship 'em out at USD$10/per for physical destruction.
I'd rather give them a single-pass random write and then take them to the range -- faster, cheaper, and much more fu.
4. Adopt Unix user conventions. OS X is based on Unix. You need to have a root (admin) account and an everyday use account. If you need to do anything that requires admin privileges (installing software), OS X will ask you for your admin password seamlessly.
Root is disabled by default on any new machine and after any fresh install, and this is a fine thing over all.
Any user who is identified as an 'Administrator' is a sudoer, and 'sudo su -' works wonders.
Yeargh. Our CEO pointed this out to me today, and couldn't understand why I burst into tears.
We have two Xserves and a G4 tower running Server 10.2.8... They have been tweaked for our workflow (which involves a mix of open and comercial software), and I haven't the time/energy to worry about an appropriate upgrade strategy yet (IT department of 1). I've just recently made sense of the workflow and gotten most of the cruft out or documented... and now I'm expected to upgrade (not from Crapple, but my fanboy boss...)?
I wish they (Apple) would change their naming conventions and release schedules to reflect the drastic difference between client machine needs and improvements and needs of server software... I hate upgrading production servers (Apple has been a little on the cavalier side when it comes to "their" config files) but I am willing to do it every two to three years, and have few qualms about various hotfixes and security patches they release.
But every year? Isn't that a bit much?
grump grump grump
[NOTE: There is no specific mention of Mac OS X Tiger Server, but they've been releasing Server a few months after client since 10.1 came out. So there.]
...both here and here .
C'mon people - a little Google can take you a long way.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up Mac OS X for Unix Geeks, and it states there (not that this is definitive, mind you) that the PPC arch can do either big-endian or little-endian. This is controlled (on Apple products) through an Open Firmware variable. Makes me wonder how big a deal this actually is, and whether or not this feature is still present on a G5 and/or if this is a convenient excuse on the part of the Beast of Redmond.
Then again, I also am a bit inclined toward tin-foil hats.[T]his is starting to seem like the technology equivalent of Days of our Lives or something!
No, that's actually over here...
- /usr/share/terminfo/41/Apple_Terminal
works great. Arrows and _PROPER_ vim syntax coloring.And if you were to use teh One True Edit0r
sorry about that. It just sorta came out.
For example, the mere presence of words uttered by he who has a low user number shines forth radiantly upon all, bestowing in them great wisdom and happiness.
I hope this is not true, else this comment -- while devoid of content -- will be ranked far too highly.
Note to mods - please mark this as 'Over-rated'. Thank you.
Build 6G30
My main thought is that her computer is already in her room, and I feel that if I were to move it for 'net access, she would probably take it poorly. In her shoes, I would too.
So, I think we're going to go with a slight fiction - that I know all and see all. This isn't to terrify my step-daughter in some Big Brother sense, but to let her know that she can always talk to me about anything she sees, beacause I will already know about it (that goes for Mom, too). And if she figures out my secret and starts dumping her history files, well - I guess squid is the next step, along with any extra-curricular computing courses she wants to take.
My step-mother was convinced I was up to Bad Things(TM) on those nasty ol' BBS's and did her best to interrupt my access - that just made me learn a lot more on the tech end.
Imagine a utility that would convert your docs to a crossplatform (*NIX, MacOS, Win32) information container - one that would allow true device and platform independance, as well as allow internal and external hyperlinking, presentation-style slideshows, full Unicode support, and it should be an open standard.
What would this magic format be called? PDF, maybe?
There is already at least one OSS engine for directly creating PDF without using any Adobe products, either:ReportLab
Call me a luddite, but I'm not certain what YAFF will provide in the long run, other than splintering the non-.DOC users further. Adobe may be an evil, greedy, closed-source corporation, but PDF as a file spec is open and documented. Also current viewer products have no troubles (that I've seen) with much older versions of the file format. PDF allows for indexing of documents for fast searches, bookmark creation for a table of contents/index, thumbnail creation for quick navigation, granular document security (allow some/none/all modification), and can be entirely self contained (supports RLE, LZW and JPEG encoding for embedded graphics), allowing a PDF to look the same anywhere it is viewed and be easily transferrable.
Disclaimer: I distribute everything in PDF. My resume, invoices, proposals and other similar things. The only problem I have is trying to be polite when people ask why I don't use Word.
PS: anyone who feels that PDAs are a limiting factor in the use of PDF - huh? They're grand for PIM/phone/GPS/GameBoy functionality, but who really wants to slog through a tech ref manual (or equiv.) on the thing? I'm honestly curious, not trying to flame.
I figured the price point might be to both limit the beta pool to "serious" testers and to cover support costs (there are three options - built-in help, online kbase and telephone support). Phone support is provided on a pay-per-incident basis. No price listed. I called the number and asked about the cost - US$49.95 per incident.
Ouch.
But, it'll probably keep the calls down to a manageable number of truly serious testers/early-adopters.
but what I _really_ want to see is what it looks like when there's a crash.
I'm a mac geek, not a *nix geek (though I'm currently fiddling with a NetBSD install onto an old mac IIci). After firing up ping under terminal app (OS X DP4), I forgot how to make the process stop. Z wasn't right, so I tried kill to get a look at the options. I knew that my ping had been listed as process 1, so - 'kill -1'. Oops. The whole thing paused for a bit and *BANG* full command line, no GUI. But it was fully functional from the CLI, and it appeared that I was still logged in. Now if only I could figure out how to relaunch the GUI portion, I wouldn't have felt quite so dumb.
out of the *BSD family, you'll have to go to FreeBSD or BSDi if you want SMP
My recollection is that Darwin is a branch off of FreeBSD, but I'm not certain - is there a good visual representation of the history of the *BSD family, showing which came from what? I have seen charts like this but they are all fairly old.
I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason). I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe.
Adobe? Don't bother - they've nothing to do with Quartz. PDF is an open standard. Quartz is using PDF because Display PostScript was fairly expensive due to Adobe royalties (and, IIRC, there may have been some technical issues, too).
Just a clarification, hassling those folk will accomplish about spit in this arena.
this kind of thing sounds like something they would choose on their own
But doesn't that say something about the corporate culture at large, in their workplace? I mean - this is one hell of a risk for them to take. If this type of behavior was not encouraged, why would any professional engineer/code monkey take such a chance?
It seems to me to further illustrate the overall evil that has been bred corporation wide at Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I know a few folk who work there and they are generally good people. But to take risks like this with one's livelihood doesn't make any sense unless it has some sort of tacit approval.
AHA!
FACTNET!
Hmmm. Funny to see this here - recently ran across a ref to this on... don't recall, some site on memepool. Anyway, it linked to some former Scientologist's complete *rant* against the...religion/belief system/cult/whatever. But this (forgotten) site indicated that there may be a number of signifigant roadblocks preventing the release of this flick.
'Course, I've read on some sites how to construct the functional aluminum hat to keep the alien space-rays out, so....
Damn. Now I have research to do.
WordPerfect is *the* standard format amongst the legal crowd (IANAL, but a friend is). And PDF is mostly cross platform (no reader for the C64 yet tho').
crap
2 48&mode=thread
Utterly off topic
here's the link
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/23/147
FYI: this was reviewed here a spell ago -