Anyone who touches the online provisioning portal for AT&T is required to not only use IE, but a specific Java Patch - Too low & it doesn't work, Updated patches also don't work. Great for security when the same box has to access other sites.
If your local government entered into a contract with your local telecom to develop services like higher-speed broadband for your citizens, with tax dollars, and your telecom failed to do that, surely the contract had penalties spelled out for that eventuality? If those penalties were insufficient or nonexistent, that's your community's fault.
Federal Government. The Federal Government gave the telcos tax breaks which have totaled more than 2B/year because they claimed they would have it built out w/ everyone on 4M+ connections by 2005. Since it was legislation bought by telcos, of course it didn't have any penalties associated with it.
I say let municipalities and states alike have the flexibility to do whatever it is that they want in this regard. The federal government has no business sticking its nose here.
The problem is that while it would work in theory, negotiating contracts with every individual municipality will kill any buildout simply through delay. To wire my town, the utility actually would have had to negotiate with 3 seperate municipalities because the population centers are not contiguous. There is the center of town (the municipality), then there is the north & south ends which are actually closer to the population centers of 2 other towns(2 other municipalities). Surrounding the center of town, there is about a mile or so of low population land before you get to the higher populated north & south ends. Given that both ends are bedroom communities w/ expensive houses, the telco really wanted to wire them. What they absolutely do not want to do is wire that wasted mile between the center & the end.
I think some federal minimum standard of buildout might not be bad, as long as it leaves room for the municipalities to achieve their goals by accepting some sort of compromise. IE - a utility must provide it's highest end production service to a minimum of 40% of residences in a municipality within 5 years of offering it commercially. The municipalities can then offer a tax break or other incentive to up that %. It also has to be a realistic minimum. Currently the FCC classes a zip code as having broadband if even 1 house can get non-satallite broadband. That means a telco can wire 1 development & claim it's met it's goal of 'wiring' that zipcode.
Most telcom/broadband suppliers do this in the US. RCN's entire business plan was built around it. The US population is scattered in such a way that close to 75% of the population lives in just 20% of the landmass (Boston - DC & Seattle - LA corridors). One of the biggest things the telcos are fighting is that the municipalities are trying to require that they don't cherry pick who gets the service. AT&T has gone after several Illinois municipalities that are caught between regulations saying they have to provide equitable access to utilities in the municipality & other regulations saying they can't stop 'network improvememnts'.
Thus the telcos are saying that they are doing a network improvement when they are building out for IPTV and are not subject to the laws about buildout requirements that the cable companies are. Thus they claim that they can cherry pick the wealthiest 10% of the municipality & can ignore the rest - while the cable companies are required to do full buildouts.
You are correct. You may own as many backups as you would like as part of 'Fair Use' which the DMCA explicitly states it is not meant to interfier with, and the MPAA & RIAA lawyers argued in front of congress as being acceptable fair use. However, the DMCA does make creating, selling, distributing, and importing the tools to make backups illegal. Additionally, mod chips, which would allow you to use your legal backup - made with illegal tools - are also illegal. So, you are perfectly within your rights to own a backup, so long as you don't posses the tools to make it or the tools to actually use it.
So, while the DMCA explicitly states that your fair use rights are not to be hindered by the DMCA, it simultaniously blocks your ability to impliment those rights by outlawing the tools required to do so.
Rochester Seven - late 80's a group of women were protesting that men can be topless & not women. The courts agreed that it was a gender bias prohibited by the state constitution & required the city to either ban all genders from being topless or remove the restriction on women. The city went with letting women go topless - didn't seem to be many who took advantage of it though - sigh
Image mining still works. Given a quick check of the size of the branches on my newsserver, it seems to have some very active newsgroups in the alt.binaries.pictures tree. The quality of the images & the signal to noise ratio is questionable, but the volume seems to still be as high as it ever was.
Social Services stats indicate 80%+ of the perpetrators are family members or known to the family.
Focusing on the internet as a breeding ground is just a way to ignore the fact that it comprises less than 5% of the events. Put another way - 100% elimination of the molestations that occur because of the internet will result in less than a 5% reduction of the overall number of molestations. Is this really the cost effective means of saving the children?
LOL, 5 years ago I bought a box of boards at a tag sale - got 3 PCI JVEC NE2000 clones w/ Cat5 & Coax support. I know they are at least 10 years old & they still run just fine:) Up until FC5 they were auto detected by Fedora - still recognized by Ubuntu.
Right now I'm running one as the connection between my firewall & the DSL modem w/ the onboard NIC connecting to the 100/1G switch LANside. I don't see that changing in the near future. As it is I have a hard time saturating the DSL connection. Even switching to cable, I won't max the card. I might have to upgrade if I go FIOS when they offer it to me - in oh say 5 years.
We're talking about linux on the DESKTOP. Your average home user does NOT have an admin that works on their desktop.
And how exactly does the average home Windows user set the parameters on the software they install - oh yes, it's all done automagically. Why, I do believe that installation software for linux currently adds things to the SE linux contexts when it installs. But I suppose that would be impossible to do to a simple file when your creating a module to do it.
Here how about rather than toss an idea off my head, I spell it out in a step by step process:
A developer [not the desktop user] creates a daemon that runs with the ability to renice a program above 0. or A developer [not the desktop user] modifies the module in the kernal that starts processes to set the nice level of the process according to a set record already defined in a file [in/etc/nicety for our example].
A developer [not the desktop user] creates a config tool that allows the definition files [in/etc/nicety for our example] to be edited in a graphical manner.
This daemon or modified module and config tool are included in a distro.
The packager of a program includes a file for a directory [/etc/nicety for our example]. This file contains a list of the executable files in the package and the nice level they should be run at.
Someone with administrative rights [not an administrator because your average home user doesn't have an admin] to the computer installs the software with the appropriate package management system.
Users start the program & miraculously their programs are niced to the appropriate level.
Someone with administrative rights [not an administrator because your average home user doesn't have an admin] - uses the config tool [if needed], permitting them to increase or decrease the nicety to aleviate problems caused by the default settings.
There did that include enough detail that your straw men are dispelled? The core protocols exist to minimize the problem - nice. A patch to set the nice level on starting shouldn't be all that hard to do, a daemon to reset them after starting even easier. Your argument that a home user needs an 'admin' who understands daemons & patches etc to do this is only valid if you also feel the average Windows box needs an 'admin' to install AIM.
As several people pointed out, Con's dissatisfaction with the kernel dev team is that they wouldn't change the way nice works to better impliment it's stated purpose - splitting CPU time based on the interactiveness of a program. However, even in it's current state, a system to automate nicing the processes would resolve most of the issues people are seeing with desktop responsiveness. In combination with any of the new schedulers, it should make just about anyone happy.
The average user has no idea how to do that, nor should they have to.
I think you entirely missed the point:
if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start.
A tweak to the start module in the kernal should be able to set the nice level of any program when it starts - giving latency sensative software more priority & dropping those insensative. Skype cares about latency - terminal doesn't care all that much. The whole point of the comment was that a process already exists to deal with the majority of the latency issues described and either a daemon or a tweak to the start module should be able to use that process & adjust usage based on the program without user intervention.
The administrator creates a file/etc/nicety that ranks programs as needed:
[programs]/usr/local/bin/Skype 15/usr/local/bin/gterm -4/usr/local/bin/totem 15...
[user]
bob 45
alice 18...
With the user section, you could even prevent a slob from killing the system in a multi user environment by limiting his total niceness. Anything over nice(max) results in everything being trimmed back proportionally. If you boot into single user mode, that section is ignored.
ulimit does provide some of these constraints, but it works on the whole userspace for its memory & process quotas & per process for the nice limit.
With Windows, there's a support number you can call, or you can take it to a local computer store, or ask for help among the massive number of Windows users - in short, you're not stuck with snobs on forums who think you should be able to hand-edit configuration files without being able to see anything on the screen.
I have 4 computer shops with 45 minutes of me that build linux boxes. All of them are quite capable of restoring one that didn't install properly. Also that support number you can call for Windows is usually a waste of time and money. Every time I've called it's been a 20 - 45 minute wait followed by:
It's not a MS problem call [supplier] - several issues
Please provide a credit card so we can charge you - hard drive replacement & reinstall failed to recognize partitions on the 2nd drive
No speaka da inglish - XP activation of a stand alone box w/ no network connection.
I think once they actually gave me a MS Knowledgebase number to resolve my problem.
As for asking for help among the massive number of Windows users - I almost pissed myself when I read that. I am almost certain that the number of people who can & will tell you how to hand configure your/etc/fstab to register a HD that the system didn't recognize on install is greater than the number of people who can tell you how to go into the registry & reset it to do the same.
As for snobs on the forums, the few times I've gone to ask questions, I have seen people asking for additional information - often with very specific requests & exactly how to get that information - only to be rounded on by the original poster claiming nobody is willing to help them. If expecting you to be able to follow directions to provide the detailed information needed to solve your problem is snobbery, then I guess there are a lot of snobs on the boards.
Unfortunately I guess there just aren't as many people gellering on the Linux boards as there are on the Windows boards. Oh wait, on the Windows boards they tell you to check the MS knowledgebase & if the solutions not there - reinstall.
His point is that the kernels are optimized for servers. That is, focus on throughput, performance, but not latency or responsiveness. A desktop has the latter two as priorities, while sacrificing the former two. As an example, it doesn't matter if that mpeg4 video I/O eats a little more CPU, as long as other tasks don't interrupt its playback.
nice -n 10 totem
if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while still providing the lower latency issue.
You can't patent a mathmatical/logical algorithm. It's part of the paperwork in what is/is not patentable. A patent is supposed to be on an implimentation of a solution, not the concept of how to solve the problem. Thus, you can patent your design of an electric motor, but you can't patent the concept of an electric motor. The only reason software patents are allowed now is because the USPTO & The Fed court that governs patents don't read anything.
How many patents are there on razor blades? I count 8 on the razor I used this morning. How many are there on the MP3 Algorithm? ISTR there is only 1. Why? because the concept was patented not the implimentation.
The problem with software patents is that in order to provide more protection than copyright, they have to patent concepts not implimentations. As soon as they do that, they become broad enough to kill off whole swaths of programming that they don't even touch in the implimentation.
those Westell modems (don't get me started on Westell modems)
LOL, That's exactly what I have. I signed up for a 1 year contract & was supposed to get the wireless DSL/Router. They marked my invoice wireless & then sent me the regular one. I bitched, they dropped my rate for 4 months & dropped the lock in.
Definately nobody knows what the next guy over is doing in that company.
they'll grumble for a while but eventually cave and step you through how to manually connect to and configure the DSL Bridge/Router they ship you.
Funny, the fine person with an Indian accent that I spoke to didn't know the default UN/PW for the DSL Bridge, nor did their supervisor. This is after the previous person had me do a hard reset of the Bridge & then hung up on me. Now I have it taped to the back so that when it craps out on me I can just do the hard reset & re-configure the Bridge myself. I eventually went to the library & googled my Bridge & the server settings for Verizon in my area. Tech support was worthless.
The worst part is that they don't appear to have walkthroughs of the various systems they've sent out. Leading to such wonderful classics as:
Please be finding the tab labeled 'Configure'
There is no tab labeled 'Configure' do you want the tab for 'Connection' or 'Networking'
Please be checking again, you should see 3 green tabs at the top. One says 'Configure'
There are 4 blue tabs:'Connection', 'Networking', 'Advanced', and 'Help'
Those are not the tabs you should be seeing.
...
Disclaimer: Not my conversation but as relayed to me by another satisfied Verizon customer.
Mine wasn't that bad, but I had 5-30 second gaps in my ping reports. 1/2 hour up then gaps for 10 minutes & another 1/2 hour up. All they did was send out a tech who plugged in a laptop & browsed. Middle of his browsing I showed the lack of ping responses & he claimed that the rule was as long as he could IM & browse the connection was fine.
When the node crashed 2 weeks later, fixing it fixed my problem. Turned out only 3 residential customers & the library were on the node, and we had all complained about the problem & been told it wasn't a problem.
Unix security is just not up to today's desktop hardware with scanners, usb stick and whatever else. The inflexible root-centred security system is no good for hot-plugin.
Just because you've never bothered to pay attention to it & figure out how it is supposed to work, doesn't mean it's outdated or of poor quality. I have worked with administrators that don't know how to use groups properly, and they bitch & moan that nothing works right. With 10 minutes of resetting permissions & updating groups, I can fix 4 hours of 'fixing'. If you set them up correctly & maintain them, groups solve 90% of your problems with security.
The key is having a plan & putting the effort into maintaining groups properly. One place I worked wouldn't let IT remove old user accounts when someone left - they would give the new person their own account & then the UN/PW of all the people that had the job before them so they could "check the old files". What they needed was a group for the position, and then add/remove people from the group as needed. Hell they have email addresses for people who quit 6 years ago - actively being checked as independant accounts instead of being aliased to the person who has the posision.
Bluntly, it's a security nightmare that could be solved with some propper planning & an understanding of the actual security model the system uses.
"You're wrong, and even if you had done it right, you would still be wrong!"
From following Groklaw, it seems that judges & lawyers like to layer their coverage. In this case the judge seems to be saying "This is dead. The statute you used to try to pull it doesn't allow it. Furthermore, the only statute I can find where you could do this, doesn't allow you to in this situation." If the RIAA wants to challenge this in the appeals court, they now not only have to show why this judge made a 'gross error of interpretation' in their statute, they also have to justify why his interpretation of the DMCA is wrong.
Perhaps worse, they can't come back & refile under the DMCA because he's just told them it won't work either.
I have had to deal with a lot of standards, both Military and Industrial
I would believe you if one of the pieces required the angle to be described in # of 00 shot to form an arc on a circle the diameter of a 40# cannonball - with a clearly defined composition of the cannonball to ensure referential integrity.
I said specs & standards are supposed to be fully described, not sane.
The EULA doesn't apply until AFTER THE SALE. During the sale there is a legal requirement of Merchantablity. If a product is advertised for a purpose and sold as suitable for that purpose, then you have a minimum of deceptive advertising if it's knowingly not suitable for that purpose.
AIUI, if this ever goes to a full court case in England, they would have to show that their software is for 'Entertainment value only'. Failing that, they would have to take responsibility for merchantablity or stop selling the product & issue a recall.
Now, do you think that MS is going to rebrand Windows & Office as 'Entertainment Software'? How about stop selling everything but the Xbox & ZUNE? I see huge sums of money changing hands long before this ever gets near a judment.
When other people claim a standard is fully defined, it means that all the standard use cases are defined* - units, expected parameters, optional parameters, etc. In the real world, nobody uses radians. Radians are used by engineers & scientists. Pilots, backyard builders, school children, and the occasional office worker use degrees.
To be honest, nobody cares if OOXML defines SIN(x) to take radians, degrees, gradians, or hyperbian-arc-vectors. What we care about is that someplace in the fully defined standard, OOXML needs to say:
DEFINE: SIN(x[,unit])
SIN: geometric function dictating the height of a right triange with a hypotonous of 1 and an angle of x.
x: parameter describing the angle to be operated on by the sin function
unit - optional: one of a predescribed list of standard descriptors for angle:
D: Degree - unit of angle defined as 1/360th of a full circle
R: Radian - defined as the angle at which the length of an arc is the same as the radius of the arc. 1/2Pi of a full circle ~ 57.3 degrees
G: Gradian - unit of angle defined as 1/400th of a full cicle.
Missing unit parameters are defaulted to Radians. Unknown unit parameters will result in a type error.
That's how a proper standard useable for international work in multiple fields is defined. You do not just dump your US help file into the standard & call it done. I have had to deal with a lot of standards, both Military and Industrial, the OOXML standard is well below the grade of the average Mil or Ind standard.
That's before you get to the point of inclusions in the standard like "Must Replicate Office 98 Behaviour for this feature". Now, if there was a reference to another standard that defined Office 98 behaviour, then it's not a problem. However, I don't see a reference included in the OOXML standard. Worse, for dates, OOXML defines the proper behaviour as their broken implimentation of the Gregorian Calendar - a direct conflict to the existing ISO standards.
I don't care who sponsored this standard, it's not a properly writen standard. It has huge holes & it's contradictory to several existing standards. Either one should get it rejected. If MS cleans it up so it meets the actual requirements of a "STANDARD" then they should get approved. If they leave it as the crap heap it is, it should be rejected.
*- if passing sqr(-6) as a unit works in the implimentation, that's not the standards problem. However, if the standard fails to mention the default unit type & the existance of the unit parameter, then there's an issue.
Most of the fiber to aleviate any network congestion has already been layed. It's just not lit. In the boom days of 'Everyone's getting fiber' this stuff was going down with 3-400% surplus in city loops.
As it was explained to me, if your growth projections put you at needing 100 strands over the course of the next 5 years, you plan to lay down 120 strands to cover defects/damage. However, since it's hard to open up the channel but easy to lay the fiber, a lot of companies were laying down 300-400 strands because the bean counters figured it's cheaper to amortize the fiber over the course of 10 years, than to re-open the channel to lay down the next 100 fibers in 6 years. This is the whole issue of dark-fiber. So there are places like DC & NYC that have huge bundles of dark fiber (often many times the volume of lit) waiting to be lit. They don't need to 'run fiber', just connect it to the network. Part of this buildout is why the telcos were given $BB in tax credits over the last decade anyway.
To make things perfectly clear - we don't host any content. And I have never seen child porn on the bay.
and
"We have a police[policy] to not remove torrents. We have however reported the ten or so suspected child porn torrents to the police..."
The 2 are not mutually exclusive. One states he has not seen any child porn, the other states that they have forwarded 10 or so suspected child porn torrents to the police. If they haven't received any confirmations on those 10, then there's no confirmed child porn on TPB and both statements can be made without contradiction.
In many states/municipalities, no they are not allowed to do it. There is frequently 1 telco & 1 cableco in a region & they have granted monopolies based on performance contracts which typically require buildout milestones - ie 80% coverage in 3 years. There are multiple reasons for this but some of them boil down to the amount of land that would need to be taken up by the easments of multiple providers.
So your government made a deal with the telcos, and because they agreed to the deal, there's a hidden provision in there that makes everything they build community property? If you're a budding new community, and there isn't a telco willing to give anybody in your community high-speed Internet, wouldn't you consider giving them deals or concessions to make it happen? Your community is effectively contracting with the telco. The telco isn't "raping" your little town and they don't deserve to automatically have the things that they're building in order to satisfy that agreement simply turned over to the community.
One of the concessions that the big Telco's made in order to be granted their monopoly status on the easments is that they will provide access to the 'last mile' to competing companies. This isn't some new isue. It's the law & has been for close to 20 years. What these communities did was grant a monopoly on the physical plant in exchange for competition in the service. What the telco's are doing in several areas is using the Federal Rules reguarding 'network upgrades' to keep their monopoly on the physical plant and using new FCC rulings on fiber v. copper to claim a monopoly on service.
That's the problem, they were granted easment consessions & monopoly status based on garantees of competition. Competition which is no longer mandate, but the communities are still required to continue the easment & monopoly status of the Telcos.
How do they accomplish this? If your local government is making poor decisions, that's a problem your local government needs to deal with. The solution is not necessarily more government.
In Chicago, they brought several lawsuits agains the municipalities which were debating municiple loops - claiming their garanteed monopoly status prevented the towns from entering into competition with them. Additionally, they mounted several large shill campaigns to persuade the people to vote against fighting the lawsuits.
The thing I have a problem with is the idea that any new infrastructure that these guys roll out should automatically be subject to the same "open to competitors" requirement that copper had.
If the Telco's are willing to give up their monopoly status & their PU easments, then by all means allow them to keep their networks closed. However, if they are going to have a granted monopoly and use PU easments, then they should be held to the rules by which those were granted.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who touches the online provisioning portal for AT&T is required to not only use IE, but a specific Java Patch - Too low & it doesn't work, Updated patches also don't work. Great for security when the same box has to access other sites.
Federal Government. The Federal Government gave the telcos tax breaks which have totaled more than 2B/year because they claimed they would have it built out w/ everyone on 4M+ connections by 2005. Since it was legislation bought by telcos, of course it didn't have any penalties associated with it.
The problem is that while it would work in theory, negotiating contracts with every individual municipality will kill any buildout simply through delay. To wire my town, the utility actually would have had to negotiate with 3 seperate municipalities because the population centers are not contiguous. There is the center of town (the municipality), then there is the north & south ends which are actually closer to the population centers of 2 other towns(2 other municipalities). Surrounding the center of town, there is about a mile or so of low population land before you get to the higher populated north & south ends. Given that both ends are bedroom communities w/ expensive houses, the telco really wanted to wire them. What they absolutely do not want to do is wire that wasted mile between the center & the end.
I think some federal minimum standard of buildout might not be bad, as long as it leaves room for the municipalities to achieve their goals by accepting some sort of compromise. IE - a utility must provide it's highest end production service to a minimum of 40% of residences in a municipality within 5 years of offering it commercially. The municipalities can then offer a tax break or other incentive to up that %. It also has to be a realistic minimum. Currently the FCC classes a zip code as having broadband if even 1 house can get non-satallite broadband. That means a telco can wire 1 development & claim it's met it's goal of 'wiring' that zipcode.
Most telcom/broadband suppliers do this in the US. RCN's entire business plan was built around it. The US population is scattered in such a way that close to 75% of the population lives in just 20% of the landmass (Boston - DC & Seattle - LA corridors). One of the biggest things the telcos are fighting is that the municipalities are trying to require that they don't cherry pick who gets the service. AT&T has gone after several Illinois municipalities that are caught between regulations saying they have to provide equitable access to utilities in the municipality & other regulations saying they can't stop 'network improvememnts'.
Thus the telcos are saying that they are doing a network improvement when they are building out for IPTV and are not subject to the laws about buildout requirements that the cable companies are. Thus they claim that they can cherry pick the wealthiest 10% of the municipality & can ignore the rest - while the cable companies are required to do full buildouts.
You are correct. You may own as many backups as you would like as part of 'Fair Use' which the DMCA explicitly states it is not meant to interfier with, and the MPAA & RIAA lawyers argued in front of congress as being acceptable fair use. However, the DMCA does make creating, selling, distributing, and importing the tools to make backups illegal. Additionally, mod chips, which would allow you to use your legal backup - made with illegal tools - are also illegal. So, you are perfectly within your rights to own a backup, so long as you don't posses the tools to make it or the tools to actually use it.
So, while the DMCA explicitly states that your fair use rights are not to be hindered by the DMCA, it simultaniously blocks your ability to impliment those rights by outlawing the tools required to do so.
Rochester Seven - late 80's a group of women were protesting that men can be topless & not women. The courts agreed that it was a gender bias prohibited by the state constitution & required the city to either ban all genders from being topless or remove the restriction on women. The city went with letting women go topless - didn't seem to be many who took advantage of it though - sigh
Image mining still works. Given a quick check of the size of the branches on my newsserver, it seems to have some very active newsgroups in the alt.binaries.pictures tree. The quality of the images & the signal to noise ratio is questionable, but the volume seems to still be as high as it ever was.
Social Services stats indicate 80%+ of the perpetrators are family members or known to the family.
Focusing on the internet as a breeding ground is just a way to ignore the fact that it comprises less than 5% of the events. Put another way - 100% elimination of the molestations that occur because of the internet will result in less than a 5% reduction of the overall number of molestations. Is this really the cost effective means of saving the children?
LOL, 5 years ago I bought a box of boards at a tag sale - got 3 PCI JVEC NE2000 clones w/ Cat5 & Coax support. I know they are at least 10 years old & they still run just fine :) Up until FC5 they were auto detected by Fedora - still recognized by Ubuntu.
Right now I'm running one as the connection between my firewall & the DSL modem w/ the onboard NIC connecting to the 100/1G switch LANside. I don't see that changing in the near future. As it is I have a hard time saturating the DSL connection. Even switching to cable, I won't max the card. I might have to upgrade if I go FIOS when they offer it to me - in oh say 5 years.
And how exactly does the average home Windows user set the parameters on the software they install - oh yes, it's all done automagically. Why, I do believe that installation software for linux currently adds things to the SE linux contexts when it installs. But I suppose that would be impossible to do to a simple file when your creating a module to do it.
Here how about rather than toss an idea off my head, I spell it out in a step by step process:
or
A developer [not the desktop user] modifies the module in the kernal that starts processes to set the nice level of the process according to a set record already defined in a file [in
There did that include enough detail that your straw men are dispelled? The core protocols exist to minimize the problem - nice. A patch to set the nice level on starting shouldn't be all that hard to do, a daemon to reset them after starting even easier. Your argument that a home user needs an 'admin' who understands daemons & patches etc to do this is only valid if you also feel the average Windows box needs an 'admin' to install AIM.
As several people pointed out, Con's dissatisfaction with the kernel dev team is that they wouldn't change the way nice works to better impliment it's stated purpose - splitting CPU time based on the interactiveness of a program. However, even in it's current state, a system to automate nicing the processes would resolve most of the issues people are seeing with desktop responsiveness. In combination with any of the new schedulers, it should make just about anyone happy.
A tweak to the start module in the kernal should be able to set the nice level of any program when it starts - giving latency sensative software more priority & dropping those insensative. Skype cares about latency - terminal doesn't care all that much. The whole point of the comment was that a process already exists to deal with the majority of the latency issues described and either a daemon or a tweak to the start module should be able to use that process & adjust usage based on the program without user intervention.
The administrator creates a file /etc/nicety that ranks programs as needed:
[programs] /usr/local/bin/Skype 15 /usr/local/bin/gterm -4 /usr/local/bin/totem 15 ...
[user]
bob 45
alice 18 ...
With the user section, you could even prevent a slob from killing the system in a multi user environment by limiting his total niceness. Anything over nice(max) results in everything being trimmed back proportionally. If you boot into single user mode, that section is ignored.
ulimit does provide some of these constraints, but it works on the whole userspace for its memory & process quotas & per process for the nice limit.
I have 4 computer shops with 45 minutes of me that build linux boxes. All of them are quite capable of restoring one that didn't install properly. Also that support number you can call for Windows is usually a waste of time and money. Every time I've called it's been a 20 - 45 minute wait followed by:
I think once they actually gave me a MS Knowledgebase number to resolve my problem.
As for asking for help among the massive number of Windows users - I almost pissed myself when I read that. I am almost certain that the number of people who can & will tell you how to hand configure your /etc/fstab to register a HD that the system didn't recognize on install is greater than the number of people who can tell you how to go into the registry & reset it to do the same.
As for snobs on the forums, the few times I've gone to ask questions, I have seen people asking for additional information - often with very specific requests & exactly how to get that information - only to be rounded on by the original poster claiming nobody is willing to help them. If expecting you to be able to follow directions to provide the detailed information needed to solve your problem is snobbery, then I guess there are a lot of snobs on the boards.
Unfortunately I guess there just aren't as many people gellering on the Linux boards as there are on the Windows boards. Oh wait, on the Windows boards they tell you to check the MS knowledgebase & if the solutions not there - reinstall.
nice -n 10 totem
if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while still providing the lower latency issue.
You can't patent a mathmatical/logical algorithm. It's part of the paperwork in what is/is not patentable. A patent is supposed to be on an implimentation of a solution, not the concept of how to solve the problem. Thus, you can patent your design of an electric motor, but you can't patent the concept of an electric motor. The only reason software patents are allowed now is because the USPTO & The Fed court that governs patents don't read anything.
How many patents are there on razor blades? I count 8 on the razor I used this morning. How many are there on the MP3 Algorithm? ISTR there is only 1. Why? because the concept was patented not the implimentation.
The problem with software patents is that in order to provide more protection than copyright, they have to patent concepts not implimentations. As soon as they do that, they become broad enough to kill off whole swaths of programming that they don't even touch in the implimentation.
LOL, That's exactly what I have. I signed up for a 1 year contract & was supposed to get the wireless DSL/Router. They marked my invoice wireless & then sent me the regular one. I bitched, they dropped my rate for 4 months & dropped the lock in.
Definately nobody knows what the next guy over is doing in that company.
Funny, the fine person with an Indian accent that I spoke to didn't know the default UN/PW for the DSL Bridge, nor did their supervisor. This is after the previous person had me do a hard reset of the Bridge & then hung up on me. Now I have it taped to the back so that when it craps out on me I can just do the hard reset & re-configure the Bridge myself. I eventually went to the library & googled my Bridge & the server settings for Verizon in my area. Tech support was worthless.
The worst part is that they don't appear to have walkthroughs of the various systems they've sent out. Leading to such wonderful classics as:
- Please be finding the tab labeled 'Configure'
- There is no tab labeled 'Configure' do you want the tab for 'Connection' or 'Networking'
- Please be checking again, you should see 3 green tabs at the top. One says 'Configure'
- There are 4 blue tabs:'Connection', 'Networking', 'Advanced', and 'Help'
- Those are not the tabs you should be seeing.
- ...
Disclaimer: Not my conversation but as relayed to me by another satisfied Verizon customer.Mine wasn't that bad, but I had 5-30 second gaps in my ping reports. 1/2 hour up then gaps for 10 minutes & another 1/2 hour up. All they did was send out a tech who plugged in a laptop & browsed. Middle of his browsing I showed the lack of ping responses & he claimed that the rule was as long as he could IM & browse the connection was fine.
When the node crashed 2 weeks later, fixing it fixed my problem. Turned out only 3 residential customers & the library were on the node, and we had all complained about the problem & been told it wasn't a problem.
Just because you've never bothered to pay attention to it & figure out how it is supposed to work, doesn't mean it's outdated or of poor quality. I have worked with administrators that don't know how to use groups properly, and they bitch & moan that nothing works right. With 10 minutes of resetting permissions & updating groups, I can fix 4 hours of 'fixing'. If you set them up correctly & maintain them, groups solve 90% of your problems with security.
The key is having a plan & putting the effort into maintaining groups properly. One place I worked wouldn't let IT remove old user accounts when someone left - they would give the new person their own account & then the UN/PW of all the people that had the job before them so they could "check the old files". What they needed was a group for the position, and then add/remove people from the group as needed. Hell they have email addresses for people who quit 6 years ago - actively being checked as independant accounts instead of being aliased to the person who has the posision.
Bluntly, it's a security nightmare that could be solved with some propper planning & an understanding of the actual security model the system uses.
From following Groklaw, it seems that judges & lawyers like to layer their coverage. In this case the judge seems to be saying "This is dead. The statute you used to try to pull it doesn't allow it. Furthermore, the only statute I can find where you could do this, doesn't allow you to in this situation." If the RIAA wants to challenge this in the appeals court, they now not only have to show why this judge made a 'gross error of interpretation' in their statute, they also have to justify why his interpretation of the DMCA is wrong.
Perhaps worse, they can't come back & refile under the DMCA because he's just told them it won't work either.
I would believe you if one of the pieces required the angle to be described in # of 00 shot to form an arc on a circle the diameter of a 40# cannonball - with a clearly defined composition of the cannonball to ensure referential integrity.
I said specs & standards are supposed to be fully described, not sane.
The EULA doesn't apply until AFTER THE SALE. During the sale there is a legal requirement of Merchantablity. If a product is advertised for a purpose and sold as suitable for that purpose, then you have a minimum of deceptive advertising if it's knowingly not suitable for that purpose.
AIUI, if this ever goes to a full court case in England, they would have to show that their software is for 'Entertainment value only'. Failing that, they would have to take responsibility for merchantablity or stop selling the product & issue a recall.
Now, do you think that MS is going to rebrand Windows & Office as 'Entertainment Software'? How about stop selling everything but the Xbox & ZUNE? I see huge sums of money changing hands long before this ever gets near a judment.
When other people claim a standard is fully defined, it means that all the standard use cases are defined* - units, expected parameters, optional parameters, etc. In the real world, nobody uses radians. Radians are used by engineers & scientists. Pilots, backyard builders, school children, and the occasional office worker use degrees.
To be honest, nobody cares if OOXML defines SIN(x) to take radians, degrees, gradians, or hyperbian-arc-vectors. What we care about is that someplace in the fully defined standard, OOXML needs to say:
DEFINE: SIN(x[,unit])
- D: Degree - unit of angle defined as 1/360th of a full circle
- R: Radian - defined as the angle at which the length of an arc is the same as the radius of the arc. 1/2Pi of a full circle ~ 57.3 degrees
- G: Gradian - unit of angle defined as 1/400th of a full cicle.
Missing unit parameters are defaulted to Radians. Unknown unit parameters will result in a type error.That's how a proper standard useable for international work in multiple fields is defined. You do not just dump your US help file into the standard & call it done. I have had to deal with a lot of standards, both Military and Industrial, the OOXML standard is well below the grade of the average Mil or Ind standard.
That's before you get to the point of inclusions in the standard like "Must Replicate Office 98 Behaviour for this feature". Now, if there was a reference to another standard that defined Office 98 behaviour, then it's not a problem. However, I don't see a reference included in the OOXML standard. Worse, for dates, OOXML defines the proper behaviour as their broken implimentation of the Gregorian Calendar - a direct conflict to the existing ISO standards.
I don't care who sponsored this standard, it's not a properly writen standard. It has huge holes & it's contradictory to several existing standards. Either one should get it rejected. If MS cleans it up so it meets the actual requirements of a "STANDARD" then they should get approved. If they leave it as the crap heap it is, it should be rejected.
*- if passing sqr(-6) as a unit works in the implimentation, that's not the standards problem. However, if the standard fails to mention the default unit type & the existance of the unit parameter, then there's an issue.
Most of the fiber to aleviate any network congestion has already been layed. It's just not lit. In the boom days of 'Everyone's getting fiber' this stuff was going down with 3-400% surplus in city loops.
As it was explained to me, if your growth projections put you at needing 100 strands over the course of the next 5 years, you plan to lay down 120 strands to cover defects/damage. However, since it's hard to open up the channel but easy to lay the fiber, a lot of companies were laying down 300-400 strands because the bean counters figured it's cheaper to amortize the fiber over the course of 10 years, than to re-open the channel to lay down the next 100 fibers in 6 years. This is the whole issue of dark-fiber. So there are places like DC & NYC that have huge bundles of dark fiber (often many times the volume of lit) waiting to be lit. They don't need to 'run fiber', just connect it to the network. Part of this buildout is why the telcos were given $BB in tax credits over the last decade anyway.
In many states/municipalities, no they are not allowed to do it. There is frequently 1 telco & 1 cableco in a region & they have granted monopolies based on performance contracts which typically require buildout milestones - ie 80% coverage in 3 years. There are multiple reasons for this but some of them boil down to the amount of land that would need to be taken up by the easments of multiple providers.
One of the concessions that the big Telco's made in order to be granted their monopoly status on the easments is that they will provide access to the 'last mile' to competing companies. This isn't some new isue. It's the law & has been for close to 20 years. What these communities did was grant a monopoly on the physical plant in exchange for competition in the service. What the telco's are doing in several areas is using the Federal Rules reguarding 'network upgrades' to keep their monopoly on the physical plant and using new FCC rulings on fiber v. copper to claim a monopoly on service.
That's the problem, they were granted easment consessions & monopoly status based on garantees of competition. Competition which is no longer mandate, but the communities are still required to continue the easment & monopoly status of the Telcos.
In Chicago, they brought several lawsuits agains the municipalities which were debating municiple loops - claiming their garanteed monopoly status prevented the towns from entering into competition with them. Additionally, they mounted several large shill campaigns to persuade the people to vote against fighting the lawsuits.
If the Telco's are willing to give up their monopoly status & their PU easments, then by all means allow them to keep their networks closed. However, if they are going to have a granted monopoly and use PU easments, then they should be held to the rules by which those were granted.