But why would a Microsoft only shop want/need virtualization ? I imagine that a vast majority of hyper-v's customers will be those who want to run two OS-es on one system, and lets face it - the OS they're most likely to want to virtualize on a windows machine will be Linux.
I still don't understand what they mean by "supported" though. How can this *only* work for SuSe ? Are there going to be proprietary programs running on the SuSe guest - and if so, what really prevents me from running them on my Gentoo box. Or do they mean that they only guarantee that SuSe will work - anything else may work, but you're on your own.
Hmm - I don't know. Last year, after the terrorist attack in Bombay, the Indian govt. tried blocking some blogs that were exhorting
people to retaliate against muslims, and because of a fuck-up, ISPs ended up blocking all of blogspot. This was of course reversed pretty quickly (and infact, show-cause notices were sent to the people responsible for the fuck-up). It is quite conceivable that
the govt. in Iran merely wanted to block searches for particular keywords and due to some bonehead who doesn't understand the Internet (series of tubes anyone ?) ended up blocking all of Google.
You are of course free to believe that Iran is worse at guaranteeing freedom of speech to its citizens than other countries like India/Germany that do not have absolute free speech laws (and I would agree with you), but you can not reach that conclusion from just this incident. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
So here's the deal - if you boot off a disk other than the infected one (say an installation CD) and can still read the infected drive (mount it, etc)- then (re-)installing a bootloader should get rid of the virus.
Your boot sector (MBR) has a data section that stores the partition table/drive information for that hard drive/disk and a code section that contains the actual boot loader. A virus could either overwrite only the code section - in which case your data is still readable and the virus can simply be removed by the above method - or it could overwrite the whole sector (this is pretty rare) in which case your disk is only readable when you boot off it (and the virus hijacks the bios disk read/write interrupt and redirects reads to the boot sector).
Doing a bootloader install after you boot off an infected disk is, of course, pointless!
How about just "not demanding" it? You are free to "do without" the content... Umm, because its a Public Service Broadcaster that is primarily funded by levying a telivision license fee on the public.
but that's not a concept that today's society understands... Broad generalizations from inaccurate assumptions - I wonder why you posted as an AC.
Nice Try. But Dell's not just selling you Ubuntu, its also selling you the computer on which you're running it. And they *can* place additional restrictions on the hardware.
They probably have a system in place that allows only businesses to buy business PCs, irrespective of whether its running Linux or not. And they probably see Ubuntu as only being appropriate for personal work, hence..
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. Doesn't make this any less annoying though !
Well, most of the ideals in most democratic constitutions and the UN go back to the French revolution. But that's beside the point.
By law, I meant the actual implementation of these ideals. It is not as if the Chinese republic has as its motto, "Torture and detain !". Note that its not as if the Chinese govt. is engaging in ethnic cleansing or some such, which can be unambiguously called evil. In the IHT article I spoke of, the Chinese official defended the extreme acts of his govt. as necessary for the greater good in times of emergency / in the face of an imminent threat. They're trying to censor "inappropriate" content and "arrest" the people who're spreading them - for the "stability" of their govt.
So the question is, do we get to dictate what inappropriate implies for a different nation ? Would the Chinese be right to then tell us to mind our own business and clean up Guantanamo first ?
Criticising Google and Yahoo for capitulating to the Chinese govt. seems to be "the thing" to do on Slashdot these days. But let's see if it is indeed clear what the "right" thing is here.
1. Can we really blame Google and Yahoo for following the law of the land ? What gives an American (or any foreign) company the right to decide which laws are fair in China ? Even democratic countries have different opinions on what exactly freedom of speech is. Should google decide whether it agrees with German holocaust-denial laws, or Indian laws against whipping up religious hate ? Also, isn't it a bit arrogant to assume that American laws are the moral optimum ? Shouldn't Google also refuse to honour DMCA take down requests ?
I recently read an article in the IHT, speaking about how a Chinese official once justified their censorship / torture system by saying that these laws were necessary given China's economic and social conditions (and you can't deny that China has indeed seen phenomenal progress under these laws). The article goes on to then discuss the west's moral dilemma in criticizing China given the recent happenings since 9/11 - basically, when America felt threatened it almost instantly decided that torture was ok for the greater good. I'm not trying to troll with this paragraph. I'd choose liberty with poverty over affluent slavery any day. But who are we to dictate what kind of laws China should have in terms of protection of dissenters and minorities ? Why do we assume that a majority of the Chinese population isn't ok with this tradeoff between liberty and stability - given that half of the US is probably OK with torturing terrorists and holding them without trial ?
2. There's also the dilemma of turning over information that'll help identify a dissenter. Now, does Google get to decide that its more competent and fair than the Chinese judicial system ? Didn't ISPs in the US hand over private customer data, all in the name of "homeland security" ? I'm not suggesting that even with recent happenings the American human rights / judicial system is even a tenth as bad as that of China. But at the end of the day, I think all systems of govt. are imperfect (some a lot more than others) and it is not for private foreign companies to be the vehicles of political change.
3. If Google and Yahoo do not follow these laws, they'll be kicked out out of China(just like they'll be sued to oblivion if they don't honour DMCA takedowns). The Chinese govt. will not be brought to its knees and forced to reverse its policies because of pressure from a freakin' foreign search engine company ! So who will this help ? The Chinese people who will now have no access to google at all ? Is it ok for us (google/yahoo/slashdot reader) to decide for the Chinese people that no access to information is better than tainted access ?
Yes, which is why I said that as long as you have a job offer above minimum wage, you should be let in. Currently immigrants have restrictions like needing to prove that they'll return to their country, waiting for 6 months in their home country between jobs. Let's be fair - most people here on Slashdot aren't worried just about the possibility of foreign immigrants ending up as hobos in their neighbourhoods - they're also worried about increased competition from skilled workers who'll take their jobs.
There are lots of good arguments for keeping the policy as it is - most of them based on the general theme that think of Americans first. And that doesn't make anybody xenophobic. But you have to realize that this policy is bound to come across as hypocritical to countries that have been arm-twisted by the US into removing any and all kinds of tarrifs. And it is these reduced tarrifs that account for a huge amount of the prosperity that you see around you - that's why hobos in the US lead lives of relative luxury.
You can't believe that free trade is good and free movement of labour isn't. All countries have the right to either protect both their developing industries and their citizens from competition, or neither. Believe me, free trade IS a nightmare for lots of countries and their people.
Would you have a billion jobs in the US for indians and chinese ? That's like saying, how would trade work - if you export trillions of tons of fruit to India, who would eat all of them ?
That's a very interesting idea actually ! There was recently some article about how, though most modern economies are all about free trade _of goods_, nobody likes free exchange of labour - basically, a world without immigration boundaries. If you think about it, these are double standards ! Essentially, a country rich in production facilities and raw materials is adamant that poorer/newly independent countries afford no protection to their developing industries, but at the same time cave in to demands from their workers that labour be restricted, even from poorer developing countries whose citizens are likely to be at a disadvantage educationally.
The irony of it is that the arguments for free trade are true. Protectionism _does_ lead to stagnation - and this is true for labour as well. This is why outsourcing to India and China have taken off. Its true that managers are bastards - and its probably justified to be angry about how you're being bumped off and the work goes to some dude who works for cheaper, just so that your manager can continue to enjoy his fat salary. But, managers have always been bastards, and will continue to be so.
The fundamental problem today is that an IT guy sitting in the US can't hope to compete with an equally skilled guy working from India - the cost of living there is amazingly low. So, even if the management had morals and drew salaries proportional to the amount of work they did - it would still make sense to outsource, now to pass on the benefits to the consumer.
The answer: open your borders, woo the workers with the quality of life in a first world country, and then compete with them on home ground. I've seen people crib about H1B workers and outsourcing simultaneously. You really can't have the best of both worlds.
Most of the responses in here seem to assume that people already know where the buildings are / details are visible from outside / its security through obscurity.
What the Indian govt. wants to hide here are the layouts and security stations within buildings like the parliament. Its not a question of whether the terrorists already know where the parliament is - they do ! But, I guess the govt. doesn't want them to know the exact layout, where the security posts are, which of them are armed, etc.
This is a perfectly legitimate request, and sensitive sites in the US and Japan are already blurred.
So then essentially all of New Zealand's citizens are.... two-legged reptiles ?
Seriously, how difficult would it have been to give a title like.. "New Zealand's First Land Mammal Fossils Discovered" ?
Why is this on the front page of slashdot anyways?
Well for one, because stories on Slashdot are sorted by when they're posted, and not by their apparent importance ? If you wait a while, it'll no longer be on the front page.
So this is just Yahoo saying that record-labels shouldn't protect their music with DRM because that locks third party vendors out, but it's ok when Yahoo does the same thing (with things like Yahoo! Unlimited) that locks non-windows users out.
I think we all need to wait a few more years till digital audio watermarking comes of age, and embedded buyer identification is able to sustain compression and re-recording (say, putting soundcard out to soundcard in and recording). Once that sort of technology exists, all the crap that the music industry keeps on throwing (like harassing P2P developers, locking out non-DRM platforms) will no longer be legally justifiable - if for each pirated song they can actually identify the guy who bought it and shared it, they needn't go after the medium used for doing the sharing.
The same way that some ISPs (including NIC dial-up - which is what most civil servants and MPs use) are doing it. They route all port 80 traffic to a proxy of sorts, analyze the Host: header and the URL, and block out the offending site.
Difficult, but not impossible. Since the civil servants who issued said orders knew that their own ISP was capable of blocking out particular subdomains/urls even on multihomed IPs, they assumed every ISP could do the same. The "withdrawal" came after they realized that most infact didn't have the technical knowhow.
a) The govt. had infact NOT asked for all blogs to be banned. It was just ISPs being clueluess. Repeat after me.. the blanket ban on blogspot and typepad was in ERROR... the ISPs' mistake.. not the big bad govt's.
b) The govt. had infact asked for 20 odd blogs and sites to be blocked - these were allegedly trying to incite hatred against certain minority communities, by blaming them for the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai. It was felt that such hate campaigns may lead to a violent reprisal against these communities.
c) While banning said sites may also be an attack of freedom of speech (though I think this is similar to the ban on Nazi propoganda in Germany). it is NOT in the same league as that in China and North Korea.
d) This (and by this, I mean blocking the original 20 sites, not the whole of blogspot, etc) is ALSO different from the US govt's reaction after 9/11. There was no attempt to use temporary public anger to justify aggression, infact quite the opposite - the govt. has tried to defuse such tensions and ensure sanity prevails.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't understand what they mean by "supported" though. How can this *only* work for SuSe ? Are there going to be proprietary programs running on the SuSe guest - and if so, what really prevents me from running them on my Gentoo box. Or do they mean that they only guarantee that SuSe will work - anything else may work, but you're on your own.
Err .. if you gave ESR and RMS swords, they'd probably hack each other to death :).
You are of course free to believe that Iran is worse at guaranteeing freedom of speech to its citizens than other countries like India/Germany that do not have absolute free speech laws (and I would agree with you), but you can not reach that conclusion from just this incident. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
So here's the deal - if you boot off a disk other than the infected one (say an installation CD) and can still read the infected drive (mount it, etc)- then (re-)installing a bootloader should get rid of the virus.
Your boot sector (MBR) has a data section that stores the partition table/drive information for that hard drive/disk and a code section that contains the actual boot loader. A virus could either overwrite only the code section - in which case your data is still readable and the virus can simply be removed by the above method - or it could overwrite the whole sector (this is pretty rare) in which case your disk is only readable when you boot off it (and the virus hijacks the bios disk read/write interrupt and redirects reads to the boot sector).
Doing a bootloader install after you boot off an infected disk is, of course, pointless!
Nice Try. But Dell's not just selling you Ubuntu, its also selling you the computer on which you're running it. And they *can* place additional restrictions on the hardware.
They probably have a system in place that allows only businesses to buy business PCs, irrespective of whether its running Linux or not. And they probably see Ubuntu as only being appropriate for personal work, hence ..
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. Doesn't make this any less annoying though !
Well, most of the ideals in most democratic constitutions and the UN go back to the French revolution. But that's beside the point.
By law, I meant the actual implementation of these ideals. It is not as if the Chinese republic has as its motto, "Torture and detain !". Note that its not as if the Chinese govt. is engaging in ethnic cleansing or some such, which can be unambiguously called evil. In the IHT article I spoke of, the Chinese official defended the extreme acts of his govt. as necessary for the greater good in times of emergency / in the face of an imminent threat. They're trying to censor "inappropriate" content and "arrest" the people who're spreading them - for the "stability" of their govt.
So the question is, do we get to dictate what inappropriate implies for a different nation ? Would the Chinese be right to then tell us to mind our own business and clean up Guantanamo first ?
Criticising Google and Yahoo for capitulating to the Chinese govt. seems to be "the thing" to do on Slashdot these days. But let's see if it is indeed clear what the "right" thing is here.
1. Can we really blame Google and Yahoo for following the law of the land ? What gives an American (or any foreign) company the right to decide which laws are fair in China ? Even democratic countries have different opinions on what exactly freedom of speech is. Should google decide whether it agrees with German holocaust-denial laws, or Indian laws against whipping up religious hate ? Also, isn't it a bit arrogant to assume that American laws are the moral optimum ? Shouldn't Google also refuse to honour DMCA take down requests ?
I recently read an article in the IHT, speaking about how a Chinese official once justified their censorship / torture system by saying that these laws were necessary given China's economic and social conditions (and you can't deny that China has indeed seen phenomenal progress under these laws). The article goes on to then discuss the west's moral dilemma in criticizing China given the recent happenings since 9/11 - basically, when America felt threatened it almost instantly decided that torture was ok for the greater good. I'm not trying to troll with this paragraph. I'd choose liberty with poverty over affluent slavery any day. But who are we to dictate what kind of laws China should have in terms of protection of dissenters and minorities ? Why do we assume that a majority of the Chinese population isn't ok with this tradeoff between liberty and stability - given that half of the US is probably OK with torturing terrorists and holding them without trial ?
2. There's also the dilemma of turning over information that'll help identify a dissenter. Now, does Google get to decide that its more competent and fair than the Chinese judicial system ? Didn't ISPs in the US hand over private customer data, all in the name of "homeland security" ? I'm not suggesting that even with recent happenings the American human rights / judicial system is even a tenth as bad as that of China. But at the end of the day, I think all systems of govt. are imperfect (some a lot more than others) and it is not for private foreign companies to be the vehicles of political change.
3. If Google and Yahoo do not follow these laws, they'll be kicked out out of China(just like they'll be sued to oblivion if they don't honour DMCA takedowns). The Chinese govt. will not be brought to its knees and forced to reverse its policies because of pressure from a freakin' foreign search engine company ! So who will this help ? The Chinese people who will now have no access to google at all ? Is it ok for us (google/yahoo/slashdot reader) to decide for the Chinese people that no access to information is better than tainted access ?
Just my 2 cents.
There are lots of good arguments for keeping the policy as it is - most of them based on the general theme that think of Americans first. And that doesn't make anybody xenophobic. But you have to realize that this policy is bound to come across as hypocritical to countries that have been arm-twisted by the US into removing any and all kinds of tarrifs. And it is these reduced tarrifs that account for a huge amount of the prosperity that you see around you - that's why hobos in the US lead lives of relative luxury.
You can't believe that free trade is good and free movement of labour isn't. All countries have the right to either protect both their developing industries and their citizens from competition, or neither. Believe me, free trade IS a nightmare for lots of countries and their people.
Would you have a billion jobs in the US for indians and chinese ? That's like saying, how would trade work - if you export trillions of tons of fruit to India, who would eat all of them ?
The irony of it is that the arguments for free trade are true. Protectionism _does_ lead to stagnation - and this is true for labour as well. This is why outsourcing to India and China have taken off. Its true that managers are bastards - and its probably justified to be angry about how you're being bumped off and the work goes to some dude who works for cheaper, just so that your manager can continue to enjoy his fat salary. But, managers have always been bastards, and will continue to be so.
The fundamental problem today is that an IT guy sitting in the US can't hope to compete with an equally skilled guy working from India - the cost of living there is amazingly low. So, even if the management had morals and drew salaries proportional to the amount of work they did - it would still make sense to outsource, now to pass on the benefits to the consumer.
The answer: open your borders, woo the workers with the quality of life in a first world country, and then compete with them on home ground. I've seen people crib about H1B workers and outsourcing simultaneously. You really can't have the best of both worlds.
Most of the responses in here seem to assume that people already know where the buildings are / details are visible from outside / its security through obscurity. What the Indian govt. wants to hide here are the layouts and security stations within buildings like the parliament. Its not a question of whether the terrorists already know where the parliament is - they do ! But, I guess the govt. doesn't want them to know the exact layout, where the security posts are, which of them are armed, etc. This is a perfectly legitimate request, and sensitive sites in the US and Japan are already blurred.
Licensing is the hot air that's helped your OS take off.
lot of hot air to me ! *ducks*
So then essentially all of New Zealand's citizens are .... two-legged reptiles ?
Seriously, how difficult would it have been to give a title like .. "New Zealand's First Land Mammal Fossils Discovered" ?
Well for one, because stories on Slashdot are sorted by when they're posted, and not by their apparent importance ? If you wait a while, it'll no longer be on the front page.
So this is just Yahoo saying that record-labels shouldn't protect their music with DRM because that locks third party vendors out, but it's ok when Yahoo does the same thing (with things like Yahoo! Unlimited) that locks non-windows users out.
I think we all need to wait a few more years till digital audio watermarking comes of age, and embedded buyer identification is able to sustain compression and re-recording (say, putting soundcard out to soundcard in and recording). Once that sort of technology exists, all the crap that the music industry keeps on throwing (like harassing P2P developers, locking out non-DRM platforms) will no longer be legally justifiable - if for each pirated song they can actually identify the guy who bought it and shared it, they needn't go after the medium used for doing the sharing.
The same way that some ISPs (including NIC dial-up - which is what most civil servants and MPs use) are doing it. They route all port 80 traffic to a proxy of sorts, analyze the Host: header and the URL, and block out the offending site.
Difficult, but not impossible. Since the civil servants who issued said orders knew that their own ISP was capable of blocking out particular subdomains/urls even on multihomed IPs, they assumed every ISP could do the same. The "withdrawal" came after they realized that most infact didn't have the technical knowhow.
So, the article says that ..
.. the blanket ban on blogspot and typepad was in ERROR ... the ISPs' mistake .. not the big bad govt's.
a) The govt. had infact NOT asked for all blogs to be banned. It was just ISPs being clueluess. Repeat after me
b) The govt. had infact asked for 20 odd blogs and sites to be blocked - these were allegedly trying to incite hatred against certain minority communities, by blaming them for the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai. It was felt that such hate campaigns may lead to a violent reprisal against these communities.
c) While banning said sites may also be an attack of freedom of speech (though I think this is similar to the ban on Nazi propoganda in Germany). it is NOT in the same league as that in China and North Korea.
d) This (and by this, I mean blocking the original 20 sites, not the whole of blogspot, etc) is ALSO different from the US govt's reaction after 9/11. There was no attempt to use temporary public anger to justify aggression, infact quite the opposite - the govt. has tried to defuse such tensions and ensure sanity prevails.