Oh dear god... that's the worst serious implementation decision I've heard in ages. If it weren't for Pandora I'd probably have ripped Flash off long ago, this makes me want to do it anyway (and send Adobe an angry letter as well).
There's no really easy way to undo this setting, it seems. Clicking the Reset button in IE7's Internet Options -> Advanced tab will do it, but will generally reset a lot of other stuff too. The best info I've found on fixing this is on http://www.errorforum.com/microsoft-windows-vista-error/16233-ie7-windows-vista-configuring-your-view-source-editor.html which mentions that the relevant registry keys are at [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\{9F5511FE-4BB1-474D-B6ED-8877567E7F36}].
I can't confirm this works on my own machine; IE8 seems to have moved the relevant keys. I'll suggest allowing easy changes to this list as a feature request.
I knew SP1 was out, but it wasn't appearing in Microsoft Update. I downloaded the standalone installer, set it to run and restart automatically, and went to dinner. When I came back I found it was working perfectly, but that there was no audio. At the time I was a little surprised but I guess that must have been the problem.
I connected to MS Update again, and sure enough there was an audio driver listed - installing it took a few seconds, no reboot needed, configuration was correct on install. As a matter of fact, that update had been there for a while, but I'd never installed it before - it was marked optional, and I'd gone with a "don't fix what's not broken" approach.
No other issues whatsoever. On the other hand, if I hadn't known to look for the service pack on the web, I'd probably have thought that it wasn't released yet.
MicroB, the full-featured browser on the Nokia n800/n810 (not technically a phone, but certainly a mobile device and similar in form-factor and performance to the iPhone) uses the Gecko engine (minus XUL) and supports plugins. It comes with Flash 9 (the real thing, and it works TYVM... perhaps Jobs' "no interpreted languages" thing is the real reason behind not supporting Flash?) and some proprietary media codecs, but I have installed AdBlock Plus (special version for the n8x0 that doesn't use XUL), spell-chcking, and if I wanted to I could add Greasemonkey... and the guy porting these extensions has more in the pipeline.
Oh, I don't think an extra quarter second or so of latency is that bad. You will probably notice it, but honestly intercontinental calls (which I make all the time) are so much worse that I really barely notice the GPRS delay anymore.
You should really check the date on any tech articles you read online. Chinook (the latest version of Maemo, the Linux distribution on the n8x0) runs Flash 9. YouTube is now quite usable, as is Pandora.com and every other site I've tried.
It's almost got to be the processing power. My Nokia n800 can do Skype (over WiFi, not tested on cellular) but it's slow to load and can barely do anything else at the same time. Call quality is inferior too. This is on a device with roughly a 400MHz processor, similar to the iPhone.
On the other hand, my family uses a 3G USB modem on their laptop to Skype me from southern Africa. Latency is a problem but quality is not - at least, it's better than my cell phone.
You REALLY need to install AdBlock Plus on the N8x0. It's incredible how much difference it makes. Pages load faster, you can have more pages open (less RAM wasted), see more on the screen, less risk of accidentally clicking a link while scrolling, and (most relevant to the conversation) don't waste massive amounts of CPU rendering Flash ads.
Technically it's not a phone in and of itself - it can use Bluetooth to go online through your cell phone, but has no cellular chip itself - but it does have WiFi. It's a little bigger than the iPhone but still fits in a pocket. Its processor is about 400MHz ARM, it runs a version of Debian, and it uses a Gecko-based browser.
Most relevant to the discussion, it has full Flash support. Full in this sense meaning it can visit Pandora.com, Youtube, and every other Flash-based site I've ever tried to access. Its RAM and CPU are weak enough that performance sometimes suffers - Pandora takes about 3x as long to load as on my desktop, and Youtube drops some frames - but it works. Battery life is affected, down from about 7 hours of constant usage to about 2 hours while playing Flash (the battery life meter isn't very precise). This is using WiFi, not a cell link (Bluetooth turned off).
Maybe there's some reason that the iPhone - which has similar CPU, etc. and doesn't even use X - can't use Flash when the N800/N810 (same but a hardware keyboard is built in) can. I can't think of a particularly good reason, though.
I'm aware of that. I'm just surprised that they bothered to list a bunch of OSS projects they use, but not link to them. I wouldn't expect a commercial entity to redistribute their modifications to non-customers, but I just found it curious. If nothing else, I'm surprised they don't link to the (descriptions of the) licenses themselves.
On a vaguely related note, if it turns out that this company is purely on the straight and level with regard to the GPL and other OSS licenses, I'd like to mention that I'm very pleased to see this kind of thing. The more exposure OSS gets, the better; some purists might complain about people who don't make their modifications open to literally everybody, but overall I believe commercial interest in (and, hopefully, support of) OSS projects is a good thing.
Considering how many programmers have trouble just covering all the tasks that go into producing a polished product (I'm terrible at user interfaces, for an extremely broad example - I'm far more comfortable with back-end code), I'd be amazed if even 10% of programmers who try to develop and market their own product get anywhere. I suppose there must be exceptions - Irfanview is a great program that AFAIK is backed by only one person (it's distributed for free and source isn't available, however; this probably cuts down on the extraneous headaches quite effectively) - but in general it doesn't work that way. What, do you imagine that everybody at the Mozilla Foundation is there to write code? Even if you ignore the related tasks (going through bug reports, running various forms of tests across the code, even writing documentation), you've got people who handle money, who handle marketing, who handle legal issues...
Don't ever fall into the trap of assuming just because you're a 1337 programmer who wrote some truly awesome program/utility/library/framework, you know anything about promoting its use in the real world.
Very true. A simple Google search for OpenNMS on cittio.com comes up with two pages (one linked in the parent). Each lists, with licenses, the open source projects they use. At the bottom of both pages they have "Contact us" info, one of them (not the one linked above) even has a mailto: link for questions about their open source components.
I'm a little surprised they don't provide links to the projects directly - either by project site or downloadable tarball - but it doesn't exactly look like they're hiding their use of OSS code. Technically just announcing that they use OSS (especially without linking to the projects, let alone any modifications they made) isn't enough for compliance, but the summary gave the impression that Cittio gave no indication that they use any OSS. This is patently false.
Oh, and document EVERYTHING. Every email, every phone call (you may need to tell the other party if you record the call, I don't know the law in your area), every letter, every step of your research. I'm guessing a single subpoena would get all the evidence you need, but no point taking risks when money is at stake (as it will be if this goes to court).
First issue: are you SURE they're in violation? This could be as simple as calling their support line and asking how you can get the source code (this assumes you've confirmed that GPLed code is included). If you can't get to the support people without being a customer, search their website for any indications and/or try and get a demo.
Once you're reasonably sure they're in violation, consult a lawyer who knows IP law, preferably one familiar with the GPL in particular. Even on Slashdot, I'm not going to try giving you advice beyond that. It's not cheap, but there's a decent chance of getting legal expenses awarded in court.
Unless, of course, you TURN OFF PERMISSION FOR JAVASCRIPT TO MODIFY THE STATUS BAR, like virtually every browser allows. It's not rocket science, you know - it's even prohibited by default in some browsers, including IE7.
Hiding a useful feature because of a the risk of a potentially dangerous misconfiguration makes absolutely NO sense!
Interesting... I hadn't looked into the history of POSIX much (and it was before my time, so it's all history to me). No disagreement with your characterization of MS in general, but the comment about #ifdef s surprised me a little... I just finished a rather complicated multi-threaded server/client networked app that required interprocess communication in C. It had to compile and run on a Nokia N800 (uses a variant of Debian Linux on a ARM processor) but I used (among other things) my Windows box via Interix for building and testing... and there were only two places I had to check for Interix: the one to get/change the IP address (there's surely a better way to do this than system("/sbin/ifconfig wlan0..."); but I didn't know of one that would allow us to change the IP to a static value - and it's what we were told to use for this particular school project - except on Interix I needed to use the Win32 program netsh instead) and reading the MAC address (there's GOT to be a getter way to do this on Windows/Interix, but I ended up just using popen("ipconfig/all | grep..."); which, since it only had to run once at server startup was sufficient). Note that the Linux alternative to this used an ioctl #define not present in anything EXCEPT Linux, as best I can tell. Named pipes (FIFOs) were used for the interprocess communication and worked fine. I couldn't compile the GUI client in Interix - it relied on a number of libs specific to the N800 - but the server worked without a hitch. Some of the development was done on Linux (Fedora Core 7) as well, but I actually found the manpages often more useful in Interix.
I've only used SFU (properly speaking) a little, on an XP box I had to use for work, but was pleasantly surprised. However, it has in fact been updated - it just had the name changed. SUA, or Subsystem for Unix Applications, is present in Server 2003 (v5.2, like the s2003 kernel version) and in Vista (6.0). I've used 6.0 extensively, both with third-party tools (pre-compiled or from source) and for my own development projects. Many 3.5 (last official SFU version) programs run fine on 6.0, but many have also been updated or modified to use new features or fix old issues. It's not without issues, but it does the job and does it pretty well.
On source compatibility, it's actually quite good. Sure, there's a lot of individual things in Linux/BSD/Solaris that aren't supported, but almost anything that will compile across them will compile on Interix as well. The biggest issues are often with the configuration scripts; newer versions of config.guess and config.sub handle Interix but a couple years ago they tended not to.
I only discovered the POSIX subsystem in NT when I started running Vista betas, but if it's "implemented in the worst possible way"
then POSIX must be a very well-designed spec indeed. There are quite a few programs that run just flawlessly on Interix (the Unix-like environment that runs in the POSIX subsystem, you can think of it as the OS and indeed uname identifies it as such). Bash is one such program - I have powershell installed, and quite like it, but I know bash better and often end up using it instead. ssh/sshd, svn, GNU make, and quite a bit more runs easily and essentially flawlessly. It may just be that MS has patched up a lot of the initial issues, but overall I'm very happy with bash in Interix - it even deals nicely with Win32 programs, which makes it suitable for replacing cmd.exe as long as I don't need Win16 (it won't do those).
I use Interix (the Unix-like "OS" taht runs in the NT kernel's POSIX subsystem) almost every day. I've got everything from vi (came with it), to ssh and sshd (installed binaries from Interop systems), to programs like sox - I needed it for something a while ago - that I compiled myself, using (a modified, and redistributed with source from Microsoft, version of) the GNU build toolchain.
To those who ask "Why?" and point out that I could just use Linux/Cygwin, there's a couple of noteworthy points here:
I do use Linux, but I don't always want to reboot just to run a bash script or compile a tarball that requires a Unix-like environment.
I can, from the shell (bash, though I have a few others as well), run Win32 programs as well, including piping or redirecting their output. This even works with popen() or system() calls.
It's native to the system, and probably runs faster that cygwin (no syscall interpretation layer).
There's probably a few other issues, both good and bad. I've not used Cygwin enough to know, for example, how it works with limited accounts (on XP, or using UAC on Vista); Interix handles it quite nicely including the use of su and sudo (in Vista, su to "root" will require enabling the full Administrator account, however... note that this should be password protected even if disabled since it gets enabled if the computer is booted to Safe Mode). Interix does not come with an X server, but it does come with the X client libraries; I use Xming (a port of the freedesktop.org X server to win32) for an X server when I need it.
The only real problems are that you can't get block device access to hard drives, etc. and you can't use Linux-specific code or libraries (syscalls or things like the varius Linux-only ioctl tricks). Some programs won't compile because of this. It also uses Windows PE format executables, not ELF binaries (although it does have.so libraries) so it isn't binary-compatible with non-Interix compilations even if it has the needed libraries.
Sorry to be pedantic, but as a sailor and friend of pilots, it bugs me when people get this wrong (and I see it a lot). Knots are a unit of speed. They were originally determined by dropping a heavy piece of wood in the water, attached to a rope with regularly spaced knots. Speed was measured by seeing how many of the knots were pulled off the vessel in a specific period of time.
In modern usage, it means 1 nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is just over 6000 feet (1892m, by definition), or about 15% more than a statute (normal) mile, and is based on 1 minute of arc (1/60 of a degree) around the Earth.
Talking about range in knots makes as much sense as discussing top speed in miles. Cheers!
As does kopete (KDE's IM app), at least for MSN. The thing that REALLY amazed me is when my HP dv9000's integerated webcam worked OOTB in openSuse 10.3 - it's a USB webcam internally, but my previous Linux system hadn't had the needed firmware and had been a right bitch to get working.
You *can* fly that way, yes. I used to... and I wondered how I'd get my ass kicked by ships that, on paper, should get crushed in seconds. Then I learned a few things:
The orbit/keep at reange functions are *very* loose. For example, orbiting a target moving even in just a straight line, there will be periods with almost no transverse velocity (For those who don't know EVE's combat system, weapon turrets have a max tracking speed and if the angular velocity between you and your target exceeds that speed, you'll miss every shot) and periods where it's very high. Your distance will vary a lot too, even if your ship is faster and more maneuverable than the enemy. Either bumping an enemy ship (to knock it away from a stargate or station, or separate it from a fleet) or avoiding being bumped requires custom maneuvering (it might just be "double click in space" but knowing when and where to do it, not to mention controlling your speed, afterburner/MWD, and the additional hassles if you're trying to stay in some resemblance of alignment or at a given range to something else, takes a lot of skill). I've caught noobs flying Interceptors (I was in an assault frigate, fast but nothing on a 'ceptor's league) with tricks that you simply can't do without careful timing and both planning your maneuvers and adapting them to enemy responses.
It's a bit different from the Fantasy-based MMOs you've been playing, but you really might want to give EVE Online a try (free client download and 2 week trial, cross-platform). It's not perfect - there are a couple things not on your list that are minor irritations to me as well - but it's damn good. Point-by-point:
"Cities are never overrun..." The equivalent to cities in EVE is probably the station where you dock your ships, or even the systems that given factions can have control over. While there are NPC-controlled "Empire" regions where players have very limited control, most of the galaxy is 0.0 security status (EVE-speak for you make your own rules, pretty much) and out there, players BUILD the "cities" and must fight to protect them from other players. If you lose, they will destroy your starbases, conquer your stations, and gain control of the system. My own (very young and small) alliance is currently trying to carve out our own piece of 0.0, and we're already needing to fight for it.
"Quest givers never die..." This is true enough of the NPC-given missions you can find in Empire, but out in 0.0 you find (scan down) your own "quests" (plexes). Of course, you can also choose not to run plexes - it takes time to find them (like a real-world quest might) and there's no guarantee of any decent reward for completion, or that your ship will survive. Plexes do spawn on their own - they would run out quickly otherwise - but they do so randomly.
There are also player-given contracts you can take on. Most are fairly trivial - move a lot of cargo (no instant transportation of goods in EVE) or similar - but almost anything (up to and including putting a price on another player's head) is possible.
"Trees never grow..." No trees in space. You can mine asteroids to exhaustion, but they re-spawn. Planets don't actually orbit their stars or anything though, so I'll have to give you this one (fixed terrain).
"Monsters always spawn in the same place..." NPC pirates (rats) do tend to spawn in asteroid belts, but when and where seems quite random - and they'll show up at other places like right outside stations, at stargates (fixed NPC structures used to move between systems), and in the (randomly appearing) plexes and missions I mentioned above.
"Players and NPCs don't need to eat..." This one isn't actually universal, though it's common enough. It partially applies to EVE - your ship's reactor will never stop making energy, and you can sit in deep space for a year if you want to, never docking at a station or even seeing another player (would be boring as hell though). However, starbases need constant resupply or they go offline, and some ship modules require supplies (ammo/missiles for weaponry is pretty common, but some advanced modules consume special materials each time they are used)
"Items magically spawn... Money spent disappears... A town doesn't trade..." In EVE, the market is player driven. Almost everything you see offered for sale is being sold by players to players (some NPCs will buy/sell certain items, generally very low-level stuff). Items are created by manufacturing (using the minerals that players mined from asteroids, which typically get sold to the manufacturers) and require blueprints (and sometimes rare materials); some blueprints (especially those for high-grade "tech 2" items) are very hard to acquire, and items produced using such blueprints often sell for vastly more than per-item production costs because demand is high and supply low. It's possible to buy out all of a certain item in an area, then sell them back while basically naming your own price (though somebody may then either import them from other regions or start producing that item, if either becomes economically feasible). CCP, the company that owns EVE, has a (real-world) economist on their staff who helps make sure the game's economy remains functional.
As for leveling, there's no standard level system in EVE; you train skills in real-time (even while offline). Starting a skill train
If I'm reading you right, you're basically saying that because ReadyBoost means less data needs to be pulled off the disk when starting programs, swap operations go faster because there's less demand on the hard drive. I'm not sure I've seen any sign of this but the concept makes sense, so long as you're doing things that Superfetch will have pre-cached. If not (if, say, you've got a bunch of program open and are just alt-tabbing between them and noticing the swap delay) I can't imagine ReadyBoost will help.
Depends on the exploit and on your definition of "trap." UAC is just an easy way to run programs with limited permissions by default without a big hassle when you want to run them with full permissions. If the exploit wanted to do something needing full permissions (it probably would, if it's targeted at Windows) then yes, UAC would stop it (to use a Linux parallel, imagine a user-permissions program trying to run $/sbin/modprobe rp_exploit_rootkit . It would fail, of course, with a permission denied message. Depending on how it's implemented, on Vista this would either cause a UAC prompt to install a driver (or whatever), or silently fail. One hopes you would realize the first isn't even close to expected behavior.
Of course, if the attack were something that can be done with limited user permissions, then you would get no prompt at all - on Vista or Linux (or OS X, *BSD, etc.)
On very rare occasions over the last (nearly) two years that I've been testing and running Vista, I've seen only a couple of unexpected UAC prompts. Despite worries that clicking through them would become automatic, it hasn't been a problem for me; believe me, if visiting a website pops up a UAC message you bloody well notice. Not sure what it would have done if I'd allowed it; I didn't have a handy disposable environment to test in and didn't want to possibly need to reinstall the whole system.
"Unused" space to store volume shadow copies (Server 2003, "Previous Versions" feature) Symbolic links (Vista, tricky though not impossible to user-create and not quite as good as in *nix, used to provide backward compatibility regarding folders that have been moved/renamed) Ability to resize partition while mounted (Vista, though this might just be the partitioning software not the FS itself) Features it has had for an unknown time: Hard links Case-sensitivity (disabled by default, not used for Win32 subsystem)
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Oh dear god... that's the worst serious implementation decision I've heard in ages. If it weren't for Pandora I'd probably have ripped Flash off long ago, this makes me want to do it anyway (and send Adobe an angry letter as well).
There's no really easy way to undo this setting, it seems. Clicking the Reset button in IE7's Internet Options -> Advanced tab will do it, but will generally reset a lot of other stuff too. The best info I've found on fixing this is on http://www.errorforum.com/microsoft-windows-vista-error/16233-ie7-windows-vista-configuring-your-view-source-editor.html which mentions that the relevant registry keys are at [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\{9F5511FE-4BB1-474D-B6ED-8877567E7F36}].
I can't confirm this works on my own machine; IE8 seems to have moved the relevant keys. I'll suggest allowing easy changes to this list as a feature request.
Good to know.
I knew SP1 was out, but it wasn't appearing in Microsoft Update. I downloaded the standalone installer, set it to run and restart automatically, and went to dinner. When I came back I found it was working perfectly, but that there was no audio. At the time I was a little surprised but I guess that must have been the problem.
I connected to MS Update again, and sure enough there was an audio driver listed - installing it took a few seconds, no reboot needed, configuration was correct on install. As a matter of fact, that update had been there for a while, but I'd never installed it before - it was marked optional, and I'd gone with a "don't fix what's not broken" approach.
No other issues whatsoever. On the other hand, if I hadn't known to look for the service pack on the web, I'd probably have thought that it wasn't released yet.
MicroB, the full-featured browser on the Nokia n800/n810 (not technically a phone, but certainly a mobile device and similar in form-factor and performance to the iPhone) uses the Gecko engine (minus XUL) and supports plugins. It comes with Flash 9 (the real thing, and it works TYVM... perhaps Jobs' "no interpreted languages" thing is the real reason behind not supporting Flash?) and some proprietary media codecs, but I have installed AdBlock Plus (special version for the n8x0 that doesn't use XUL), spell-chcking, and if I wanted to I could add Greasemonkey... and the guy porting these extensions has more in the pipeline.
Oh, I don't think an extra quarter second or so of latency is that bad. You will probably notice it, but honestly intercontinental calls (which I make all the time) are so much worse that I really barely notice the GPRS delay anymore.
You should really check the date on any tech articles you read online. Chinook (the latest version of Maemo, the Linux distribution on the n8x0) runs Flash 9. YouTube is now quite usable, as is Pandora.com and every other site I've tried.
It's almost got to be the processing power. My Nokia n800 can do Skype (over WiFi, not tested on cellular) but it's slow to load and can barely do anything else at the same time. Call quality is inferior too. This is on a device with roughly a 400MHz processor, similar to the iPhone.
On the other hand, my family uses a 3G USB modem on their laptop to Skype me from southern Africa. Latency is a problem but quality is not - at least, it's better than my cell phone.
You REALLY need to install AdBlock Plus on the N8x0. It's incredible how much difference it makes. Pages load faster, you can have more pages open (less RAM wasted), see more on the screen, less risk of accidentally clicking a link while scrolling, and (most relevant to the conversation) don't waste massive amounts of CPU rendering Flash ads.
.install file directly. otherwise, the relevant repository is
Link: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/news/5/ Visit it in the n8x0 and you can download the
Catalog name: Browser Extras
Web Address: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/browser-extras
Components: browser-extras
Probably requires the chinook distribution (OS2008) but I'm not sure.
Technically it's not a phone in and of itself - it can use Bluetooth to go online through your cell phone, but has no cellular chip itself - but it does have WiFi. It's a little bigger than the iPhone but still fits in a pocket. Its processor is about 400MHz ARM, it runs a version of Debian, and it uses a Gecko-based browser.
Most relevant to the discussion, it has full Flash support. Full in this sense meaning it can visit Pandora.com, Youtube, and every other Flash-based site I've ever tried to access. Its RAM and CPU are weak enough that performance sometimes suffers - Pandora takes about 3x as long to load as on my desktop, and Youtube drops some frames - but it works. Battery life is affected, down from about 7 hours of constant usage to about 2 hours while playing Flash (the battery life meter isn't very precise). This is using WiFi, not a cell link (Bluetooth turned off).
Maybe there's some reason that the iPhone - which has similar CPU, etc. and doesn't even use X - can't use Flash when the N800/N810 (same but a hardware keyboard is built in) can. I can't think of a particularly good reason, though.
I'm aware of that. I'm just surprised that they bothered to list a bunch of OSS projects they use, but not link to them. I wouldn't expect a commercial entity to redistribute their modifications to non-customers, but I just found it curious. If nothing else, I'm surprised they don't link to the (descriptions of the) licenses themselves.
On a vaguely related note, if it turns out that this company is purely on the straight and level with regard to the GPL and other OSS licenses, I'd like to mention that I'm very pleased to see this kind of thing. The more exposure OSS gets, the better; some purists might complain about people who don't make their modifications open to literally everybody, but overall I believe commercial interest in (and, hopefully, support of) OSS projects is a good thing.
Considering how many programmers have trouble just covering all the tasks that go into producing a polished product (I'm terrible at user interfaces, for an extremely broad example - I'm far more comfortable with back-end code), I'd be amazed if even 10% of programmers who try to develop and market their own product get anywhere. I suppose there must be exceptions - Irfanview is a great program that AFAIK is backed by only one person (it's distributed for free and source isn't available, however; this probably cuts down on the extraneous headaches quite effectively) - but in general it doesn't work that way. What, do you imagine that everybody at the Mozilla Foundation is there to write code? Even if you ignore the related tasks (going through bug reports, running various forms of tests across the code, even writing documentation), you've got people who handle money, who handle marketing, who handle legal issues...
Don't ever fall into the trap of assuming just because you're a 1337 programmer who wrote some truly awesome program/utility/library/framework, you know anything about promoting its use in the real world.
Very true. A simple Google search for OpenNMS on cittio.com comes up with two pages (one linked in the parent). Each lists, with licenses, the open source projects they use. At the bottom of both pages they have "Contact us" info, one of them (not the one linked above) even has a mailto: link for questions about their open source components.
I'm a little surprised they don't provide links to the projects directly - either by project site or downloadable tarball - but it doesn't exactly look like they're hiding their use of OSS code. Technically just announcing that they use OSS (especially without linking to the projects, let alone any modifications they made) isn't enough for compliance, but the summary gave the impression that Cittio gave no indication that they use any OSS. This is patently false.
Oh, and document EVERYTHING. Every email, every phone call (you may need to tell the other party if you record the call, I don't know the law in your area), every letter, every step of your research. I'm guessing a single subpoena would get all the evidence you need, but no point taking risks when money is at stake (as it will be if this goes to court).
First issue: are you SURE they're in violation? This could be as simple as calling their support line and asking how you can get the source code (this assumes you've confirmed that GPLed code is included). If you can't get to the support people without being a customer, search their website for any indications and/or try and get a demo.
Once you're reasonably sure they're in violation, consult a lawyer who knows IP law, preferably one familiar with the GPL in particular. Even on Slashdot, I'm not going to try giving you advice beyond that. It's not cheap, but there's a decent chance of getting legal expenses awarded in court.
Unless, of course, you TURN OFF PERMISSION FOR JAVASCRIPT TO MODIFY THE STATUS BAR, like virtually every browser allows. It's not rocket science, you know - it's even prohibited by default in some browsers, including IE7.
Hiding a useful feature because of a the risk of a potentially dangerous misconfiguration makes absolutely NO sense!
Interesting... I hadn't looked into the history of POSIX much (and it was before my time, so it's all history to me). No disagreement with your characterization of MS in general, but the comment about #ifdef s surprised me a little... I just finished a rather complicated multi-threaded server/client networked app that required interprocess communication in C. It had to compile and run on a Nokia N800 (uses a variant of Debian Linux on a ARM processor) but I used (among other things) my Windows box via Interix for building and testing... and there were only two places I had to check for Interix: the one to get/change the IP address (there's surely a better way to do this than ..."); /all | grep ...");
system("/sbin/ifconfig wlan0
but I didn't know of one that would allow us to change the IP to a static value - and it's what we were told to use for this particular school project - except on Interix I needed to use the Win32 program netsh instead) and reading the MAC address (there's GOT to be a getter way to do this on Windows/Interix, but I ended up just using
popen("ipconfig
which, since it only had to run once at server startup was sufficient). Note that the Linux alternative to this used an ioctl #define not present in anything EXCEPT Linux, as best I can tell. Named pipes (FIFOs) were used for the interprocess communication and worked fine. I couldn't compile the GUI client in Interix - it relied on a number of libs specific to the N800 - but the server worked without a hitch. Some of the development was done on Linux (Fedora Core 7) as well, but I actually found the manpages often more useful in Interix.
I've only used SFU (properly speaking) a little, on an XP box I had to use for work, but was pleasantly surprised. However, it has in fact been updated - it just had the name changed. SUA, or Subsystem for Unix Applications, is present in Server 2003 (v5.2, like the s2003 kernel version) and in Vista (6.0). I've used 6.0 extensively, both with third-party tools (pre-compiled or from source) and for my own development projects. Many 3.5 (last official SFU version) programs run fine on 6.0, but many have also been updated or modified to use new features or fix old issues. It's not without issues, but it does the job and does it pretty well.
On source compatibility, it's actually quite good. Sure, there's a lot of individual things in Linux/BSD/Solaris that aren't supported, but almost anything that will compile across them will compile on Interix as well. The biggest issues are often with the configuration scripts; newer versions of config.guess and config.sub handle Interix but a couple years ago they tended not to.
I only discovered the POSIX subsystem in NT when I started running Vista betas, but if it's "implemented in the worst possible way"
then POSIX must be a very well-designed spec indeed. There are quite a few programs that run just flawlessly on Interix (the Unix-like environment that runs in the POSIX subsystem, you can think of it as the OS and indeed uname identifies it as such). Bash is one such program - I have powershell installed, and quite like it, but I know bash better and often end up using it instead. ssh/sshd, svn, GNU make, and quite a bit more runs easily and essentially flawlessly. It may just be that MS has patched up a lot of the initial issues, but overall I'm very happy with bash in Interix - it even deals nicely with Win32 programs, which makes it suitable for replacing cmd.exe as long as I don't need Win16 (it won't do those).
To those who ask "Why?" and point out that I could just use Linux/Cygwin, there's a couple of noteworthy points here:
There's probably a few other issues, both good and bad. I've not used Cygwin enough to know, for example, how it works with limited accounts (on XP, or using UAC on Vista); Interix handles it quite nicely including the use of su and sudo (in Vista, su to "root" will require enabling the full Administrator account, however... note that this should be password protected even if disabled since it gets enabled if the computer is booted to Safe Mode). Interix does not come with an X server, but it does come with the X client libraries; I use Xming (a port of the freedesktop.org X server to win32) for an X server when I need it.
The only real problems are that you can't get block device access to hard drives, etc. and you can't use Linux-specific code or libraries (syscalls or things like the varius Linux-only ioctl tricks). Some programs won't compile because of this. It also uses Windows PE format executables, not ELF binaries (although it does have
Sorry to be pedantic, but as a sailor and friend of pilots, it bugs me when people get this wrong (and I see it a lot). Knots are a unit of speed. They were originally determined by dropping a heavy piece of wood in the water, attached to a rope with regularly spaced knots. Speed was measured by seeing how many of the knots were pulled off the vessel in a specific period of time.
In modern usage, it means 1 nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is just over 6000 feet (1892m, by definition), or about 15% more than a statute (normal) mile, and is based on 1 minute of arc (1/60 of a degree) around the Earth.
Talking about range in knots makes as much sense as discussing top speed in miles. Cheers!
As does kopete (KDE's IM app), at least for MSN. The thing that REALLY amazed me is when my HP dv9000's integerated webcam worked OOTB in openSuse 10.3 - it's a USB webcam internally, but my previous Linux system hadn't had the needed firmware and had been a right bitch to get working.
You *can* fly that way, yes. I used to... and I wondered how I'd get my ass kicked by ships that, on paper, should get crushed in seconds. Then I learned a few things:
The orbit/keep at reange functions are *very* loose. For example, orbiting a target moving even in just a straight line, there will be periods with almost no transverse velocity (For those who don't know EVE's combat system, weapon turrets have a max tracking speed and if the angular velocity between you and your target exceeds that speed, you'll miss every shot) and periods where it's very high. Your distance will vary a lot too, even if your ship is faster and more maneuverable than the enemy. Either bumping an enemy ship (to knock it away from a stargate or station, or separate it from a fleet) or avoiding being bumped requires custom maneuvering (it might just be "double click in space" but knowing when and where to do it, not to mention controlling your speed, afterburner/MWD, and the additional hassles if you're trying to stay in some resemblance of alignment or at a given range to something else, takes a lot of skill). I've caught noobs flying Interceptors (I was in an assault frigate, fast but nothing on a 'ceptor's league) with tricks that you simply can't do without careful timing and both planning your maneuvers and adapting them to enemy responses.
It's a bit different from the Fantasy-based MMOs you've been playing, but you really might want to give EVE Online a try (free client download and 2 week trial, cross-platform). It's not perfect - there are a couple things not on your list that are minor irritations to me as well - but it's damn good. Point-by-point:
"Cities are never overrun..." The equivalent to cities in EVE is probably the station where you dock your ships, or even the systems that given factions can have control over. While there are NPC-controlled "Empire" regions where players have very limited control, most of the galaxy is 0.0 security status (EVE-speak for you make your own rules, pretty much) and out there, players BUILD the "cities" and must fight to protect them from other players. If you lose, they will destroy your starbases, conquer your stations, and gain control of the system. My own (very young and small) alliance is currently trying to carve out our own piece of 0.0, and we're already needing to fight for it.
"Quest givers never die..." This is true enough of the NPC-given missions you can find in Empire, but out in 0.0 you find (scan down) your own "quests" (plexes). Of course, you can also choose not to run plexes - it takes time to find them (like a real-world quest might) and there's no guarantee of any decent reward for completion, or that your ship will survive. Plexes do spawn on their own - they would run out quickly otherwise - but they do so randomly.
There are also player-given contracts you can take on. Most are fairly trivial - move a lot of cargo (no instant transportation of goods in EVE) or similar - but almost anything (up to and including putting a price on another player's head) is possible.
"Trees never grow..." No trees in space. You can mine asteroids to exhaustion, but they re-spawn. Planets don't actually orbit their stars or anything though, so I'll have to give you this one (fixed terrain).
"Monsters always spawn in the same place..." NPC pirates (rats) do tend to spawn in asteroid belts, but when and where seems quite random - and they'll show up at other places like right outside stations, at stargates (fixed NPC structures used to move between systems), and in the (randomly appearing) plexes and missions I mentioned above.
"Players and NPCs don't need to eat..." This one isn't actually universal, though it's common enough. It partially applies to EVE - your ship's reactor will never stop making energy, and you can sit in deep space for a year if you want to, never docking at a station or even seeing another player (would be boring as hell though). However, starbases need constant resupply or they go offline, and some ship modules require supplies (ammo/missiles for weaponry is pretty common, but some advanced modules consume special materials each time they are used)
"Items magically spawn... Money spent disappears... A town doesn't trade..." In EVE, the market is player driven. Almost everything you see offered for sale is being sold by players to players (some NPCs will buy/sell certain items, generally very low-level stuff). Items are created by manufacturing (using the minerals that players mined from asteroids, which typically get sold to the manufacturers) and require blueprints (and sometimes rare materials); some blueprints (especially those for high-grade "tech 2" items) are very hard to acquire, and items produced using such blueprints often sell for vastly more than per-item production costs because demand is high and supply low. It's possible to buy out all of a certain item in an area, then sell them back while basically naming your own price (though somebody may then either import them from other regions or start producing that item, if either becomes economically feasible). CCP, the company that owns EVE, has a (real-world) economist on their staff who helps make sure the game's economy remains functional.
As for leveling, there's no standard level system in EVE; you train skills in real-time (even while offline). Starting a skill train
If I'm reading you right, you're basically saying that because ReadyBoost means less data needs to be pulled off the disk when starting programs, swap operations go faster because there's less demand on the hard drive. I'm not sure I've seen any sign of this but the concept makes sense, so long as you're doing things that Superfetch will have pre-cached. If not (if, say, you've got a bunch of program open and are just alt-tabbing between them and noticing the swap delay) I can't imagine ReadyBoost will help.
Depends on the exploit and on your definition of "trap." UAC is just an easy way to run programs with limited permissions by default without a big hassle when you want to run them with full permissions. If the exploit wanted to do something needing full permissions (it probably would, if it's targeted at Windows) then yes, UAC would stop it (to use a Linux parallel, imagine a user-permissions program trying to run /sbin/modprobe rp_exploit_rootkit
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. It would fail, of course, with a permission denied message. Depending on how it's implemented, on Vista this would either cause a UAC prompt to install a driver (or whatever), or silently fail. One hopes you would realize the first isn't even close to expected behavior.
Of course, if the attack were something that can be done with limited user permissions, then you would get no prompt at all - on Vista or Linux (or OS X, *BSD, etc.)
On very rare occasions over the last (nearly) two years that I've been testing and running Vista, I've seen only a couple of unexpected UAC prompts. Despite worries that clicking through them would become automatic, it hasn't been a problem for me; believe me, if visiting a website pops up a UAC message you bloody well notice. Not sure what it would have done if I'd allowed it; I didn't have a handy disposable environment to test in and didn't want to possibly need to reinstall the whole system.
"Unused" space to store volume shadow copies (Server 2003, "Previous Versions" feature)
Symbolic links (Vista, tricky though not impossible to user-create and not quite as good as in *nix, used to provide backward compatibility regarding folders that have been moved/renamed)
Ability to resize partition while mounted (Vista, though this might just be the partitioning software not the FS itself)
Features it has had for an unknown time:
Hard links
Case-sensitivity (disabled by default, not used for Win32 subsystem)