Re: [Discuss] RMS

As has often been noted before, the law is an ass! On 9/24/19 12:20 PM, Rich Braun wrote: Seth Gordon wrote:That's what we have when we define everything from taking a leak in a woods where, unknown to you, a child was watching, to jumping out from behind bushes and raping an 80 year old woman

[Discuss] Accusations are not "facts". And they are disputed.

On 9/23/19 2:46 PM, Seth Gordon wrote: But these debate does not seem apposite to the simple question of whether or not Minsky (based on the facts that nobody seems to be disputing) committed sexual assault at all. I take issue with your assertion that nobody seems to be disputing "the facts".

Re: [Discuss] RMS

I think Thomas Lord's rebuttal of Thomas Bushnell's article is well worth reading. (See https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433645110513664). From Lord's comments: "One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of

Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news

I've known RMS since the 1970s when we were both regular attendees at the MIT Folk Dance Club. His Aspergers has always made him a difficult person to deal with. You say you "wonder if he would have done the same call out with a male professor in the same situation". I'm pretty sure that the

Re: [Discuss] [ OT] Google- GoDaddy registre renovation nightmare loop

Hi Julian. In your email you write that the email was from "seccuresrever.net". GoDaddy is the registrant of the domain "secureserver.net", not "seccuresrever.net". If you copied and pasted this domain name from the email you received into this email, then it seems that you were tricked into p

Re: [Discuss] Fidelity voice-recognition security?

And how, exactly, do they distinguish between your voice and someone playing back a recording of your voice? The big problem is that this discussion reaches only a very small subset of their customers - the techies. To have any effect, the stupidity of this feature needs to be broadcast to th

Re: [Discuss] Question regarding parking at MIT for BLU meetings

Where can I find out what the new parking restrictions are? In particular, is the Hayward Lot now off limits? On 11/15/17 7:58 PM, John Abreau wrote: We've had unusually low turnout at the past couple of BLU meetings, and I'm wondering how much of it is due to the changes in MIT's parking pol

Re: [Discuss] AT&T eliminating copper phone lines

According to the FCC (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-phone-number-when-you-change-providers) porting "can be done between wireline, IP and wireless providers". The only circumstances under which you can't port your phone number, again according to the FCC, are either:

Re: [Discuss] [OT] Google Found Disastrous Symantec and Norton Vulnerabilities That Are 'As Bad As It Gets'

Thanks, Rich. On 6/29/16 2:41 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: On 6/29/2016 2:36 PM, MBR wrote: Does anyone have a technical description of how exactly this vulnerability operates? https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compromise-enterprise-endpoint.html

Re: [Discuss] [OT] Google Found Disastrous Symantec and Norton Vulnerabilities That Are 'As Bad As It Gets'

Does anyone have a technical description of how exactly this vulnerability operates? A magazine like Fortune won't provide that information because 99% of their readers couldn't understand it. The nearest they come is the sentence: "The vulnerabilities affect a “decomposer engine”—a progra

Re: [Discuss] GNU xargs trick

Very cool! I've used xargs for many years, but I never knew about the -I or -P options. Are they only in the GNU implementation, or have they been ported to other platforms? Mark Rosenthal On 4/27/16 10:25 AM, Rich Pieri wrote: There is a trick to GNU xargs that lets you easily parallel

Re: [Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

The critical piece of information missing is what license they plan to release it under. Will it be GPL? Some other GPL-compatible license? Some GPL-incompatible license? Public domain? They don't say. But they are asking for public comment. As important as it may be to get them to use t

Re: [Discuss] What was once old is new again...

On 2/18/16 12:27 AM, Bill Horne wrote: Bill, who thinks that loading FOCAL from paper tape is the true test of computer wizardry! I never used FOCAL, but I frequently loaded EDU20 from paper tape. EDU20 was the version of DEC's PDP-8 multi-user BASIC that ran without a mass storage device. I

Re: [Discuss] Consumer's Union attempts to end robocalls [OT]

Could we please change the Subject line to "Consumer's Union attempts to end robocalls"? Every time I see "CU attempts to end robocalls" the subject line, I think we're talking about the venerable Unix utility 'cu', and I wonder what clever technique someone's come up with to use a modem dialer

Re: [Discuss] Stallman stubborn

LPF was the League for Programming Freedom. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom. Mark Rosenthal On 11/12/15 1:38 PM, Derek Martin wrote: I can't parse LPF ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.o

Re: [Discuss] Linux on laptops

I learned about Costco's return policy about 10 years ago from a manager at Costco. I found it unbelievable, but she was true to her word. I bought a combination VCR/DVD player at Costco and the video quality was quite poor from the start. But I just never got around to taking it back. I wa

[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

About Stallman being "stubborn", I think that's a good thing, or at least a necessary thing. He is, after all, the founder of a movement that has had worldwide impact. And founders of movements are, more often than not, stubborn and difficult to deal with. In its obituary for Betty Friedan,

Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Hey FCC, Don't Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers | WIRED

Unfortunately, Torvalds despises GPLv3, so the Linux kernel and anything else he has copyright on will stay with GPLv2. Mark Rosenthal On 10/5/15 1:33 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+blu=nedharve

Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Hey FCC, Don't Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers | WIRED

There's one HUGE difference between the FCC ruling the GPL to be unenforceable and the FCC ruling Microsoft's licenses to be unenforceable -- The amount of money Microsoft could spend on lawyers to bludgeon the FCC into submission is astronomical compared to the amount of money FSF could spend

Re: [Discuss] Most common (or Most important) privacy leaks

If you're going to tell us all about how the originating company is stiffing you, at least tell us the company's name so we can steer clear of them. Mark Rosenthal On 2/20/15 10:23 PM, Peter Olson wrote: I've been mugged three times, but not recently. The first time was in Cambridge, abou

Re: [Discuss] Insync vs Google Drive client

On 2/11/15 7:51 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: they openly state they provide it to the government, and they scan peoples content for anything they suspect being illegal (child porn and copyright infringement top the list) and they turn their own users in to law enforcement. I don't doubt

Re: [Discuss] Looking for WiFi router with certain characteristics

What exactly is meant by "Access Point" nowadays? I ask because the thing I knew as an "Access Point"in the early 2000s was a simple-minded device that sold for $25. This was before routers incorporated WiFi, so my router had 4 RJ-45 LAN ethernet ports and one WAN port. In order to do WiFi,

[Discuss] Looking for WiFi router with certain characteristics

Apologies to Lewis Carroll. I'm afraid the following doesn't scan as well as his version: "The time has come," my router said, "to talk of many things. Of 802.11 ac and n and g and b, And why Cisco updates without permission. And the safety of ASUS settings." :-) It's long past

Re: [Discuss] Verizon getting out of being regulated by coercing customers to switch from copper to FIOS

Where does AT&T provide landline service? They don't seem to be in Arlington. Mark On 7/25/14 12:17 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote: In case this is helpful... I use Verizon for FIOS and super-basic TV, and AT&T for copper phone service (local & long distance). Nobody has ever pushed me to switch

[Discuss] Verizon getting out of being regulated by coercing customers to switch from copper to FIOS

On 7/24/14 10:51 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Tom Metro wrote: Bill Bogstad wrote: VZ for land lines (and even FIOS) is at least somewhat a regulated monopoly. ...you could get the appropriate state regulatory agency involved on your side. My understanding is that

Re: [Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

On 5/5/14 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: Kent Borg wrote: - Flash can die with no warning and no recourse. Any medium can fail with no warning. Good backups have always been the go-to recourse for these occurrences. While it's true that any medium can fail with no warning, if your data's on

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

about Free Software, though they may well be very interested in free software. Most people just want to get stuff done, in my experience", I think Randall Monroe said it best: http://xkcd.com/743 MBR On 2/12/2014 12:49 PM, Derek Martin wrote: On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 04:47:02AM -0500,

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

On 2/11/2014 7:37 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: "Trust in the transparency and benevolence of Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft" is a slogan I don't foresee catching on anytime soon. Actually, I /can/ see it catching on - as a sarcastic slogan promoting Linux! Mark

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

A few years back, I wrote an article for O'Reilly about something I'd noticed starting in the 1980s. Unix (and later Linux) had grown in the direction of readable (i.e. ASCII) file formats, where MS-DOS had grown in the direction of unreadable formats. I think this is related to what you're t

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

ople who might approach her after her talk. Mark On 2/11/2014 8:23 AM, Kent Borg wrote: On 02/11/2014 04:47 AM, MBR wrote: > [...] > might be best if you were to call it "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" and explain why > [...] > The essence of Free Software,

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

Hi Micky. If you're going to mention Linux and the FSF, it might be best if you were to call it "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" and explain why the FSF (and Stallman in particular) prefers "GNU/Linux" to simply "Linux". (See "What's in a Name? ", "Li

Re: [Discuss] protecting kids online

How long ago was that? Google has refined their search algorithm so you get far fewer such results than you used to. I just Googled "Soapbox Derby", and all the first page search results were legitimate. Mark On 2/5/2014 11:21 PM, Bill Horne wrote: Sorry to say it's much harder than you m

Re: [Discuss] 4K monitors

Actually, they did the transition from 1600x1200 to 1920x1080 in two steps. I went from a 1600x1200 (UXGA) screen to a 1920x1200 (WUXGA) screen on 15" laptops, and I agree that the increase in width wasn't a really big deal for me. Then they dropped from 1920x1200 (WUXGA) to 1920x1080 (FHD),

Re: [Discuss] what news do you read?

On 12/10/2013 10:26 AM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: I usually start my day with a cup of coffee and read through about a half dozen sites before starting work. The technical websites I go to generally keep me happy. The general news websites do not. I hate the design. I hate the writing. I am ann

Re: [Discuss] why don't web hosts scan their sites?

On 11/18/2013 1:35 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: As a more serious take on the topic, hosting providers are -- or are supposed to be -- common carriers. They can't scan users' content. If they did that then they'd cease being common carriers and they'd lose their safe harbor and Good Samaritan prote

[Discuss] Effort to repeal Mass Tax on Software Services

I called my Rep. in the Mass. Legislature. He said he'd be willing to consider a bill to repeal this tax, but he could use help figuring out who else in the Legislature would support such a bill. I mentioned that, as a software engineer, I participate in some software-related mailing lists and

[Discuss] Mass. outlawed independent contractors in software and other creative professions in 2004

The cracking down on companies using contractors instead of employees is another case of state legislators discriminating against software developers and other professions that create intellectual property. People who create intellectual property often want to be independent contractors. Amon

Re: [Discuss] Comcast's IPv6 deployment

nday, June 5 2006, and click the link to the audio. Mark Rosenthal m...@arlsoft.com <mailto:m...@arlsoft.com> Subject:Re: nanog37-100million.rm missing from your website Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 09:39:52 -0700 From: Duane Wessels

Re: [Discuss] Comcast's IPv6 deployment

FWIW, I just emailed the nanog.org website administrator to ask if he could restore that file. I'll let you know if I get a response. Mark Rosenthal m...@arlsoft.com On 5/15/2013 11:48 PM, John Abreau wrote: I tried fetching that with wget, and the RAM file jus

Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

On 3/1/2013 10:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: In the old days they had a single landline in a house shared by all members of the family, and parents could snoop. Today, with text messaging the device is portable so while their parents can check on the bills and usage, they can't see anything about

Re: [Discuss] GPL and code linkages

Just a couple of comments. On 12/30/2012 12:25 PM, Derek Martin wrote: The Drupal people are wrong, and this is the nature of their mistake. I never said anything about what interpretation others in the Drupal community put on this. I was giving my own interpretation based on my best understa

[Discuss] GPL and code linkages

A question came up on another mailing list dealing with Drupal and PHP that raised questions in my mind about the GPL. discuss@blu.org seemed more likely to have members knowledgeable about GPL issues, so I'm asking my questions here. I thought I understood the GPL until I read a posting aski

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

On 6/19/2012 3:11 PM, Derek Martin wrote: On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 12:59:44PM -0400, MBR wrote: On 6/12/2012 11:22 PM, Jack Coats wrote: In old SunOS days, we could issue the 'sync' command, twice, to ensure all system buffers had been written to disk. You could experiment to see if

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

Exactly. But as I was looking it up, I was surprised to find the warning in the sync(2) manpage that, although modern Linuxes now wait till the write is complete before the system call returns, it's still not safe to power down immediately because the data may be in the drive's on-board cache

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

I'm not disagreeing with you on that. When I worked at Fortune, standard procedure was to type: sync sync sync halt Even though the OS guys knew that typing 'sync', waiting about 5 seconds, then typing 'halt' was really all that was necessary, most of the programmers writing appl

[Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

On 6/12/2012 11:22 PM, Jack Coats wrote: In old SunOS days, we could issue the 'sync' command, twice, to ensure all system buffers had been written to disk. You could experiment to see if issuing it occasionally in your script helps. Or issue it outside the script, even in a chron might help.

Re: [Discuss] Versioning File Systems

On 5/4/2012 7:13 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Versioning isn't revision control. Revision control isn't versioning. There is some overlap in what they do but they aren't the same thing. --Rich P. That's becoming clear. I'm trying to understand the difference. It seems like versioning is having t

Re: [Discuss] Versioning File Systems

One of the possible changes you might make to your codebase is to delete or rename a file. Git will track that. In a versioning filesystem, doesn't that cause all the versions of the file to get deleted or renamed? Mark On 5/4/2012 4:46 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote: On 05/04/2012 09:18 AM, G

Re: [Discuss] Versioning File Systems

Other operating systems in existence at the time Unix was being designed required you to call different system calls depending on what device you were trying to do I/O to. And some operating systems knew about file types and defined the complete set of file types you could deal with - e.g. sou

Re: [Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running

I can definitely vouch for Jerry's statement, "you cannot remove ALL cat hair from a years old laptop keyboard. Ever." A few weeks ago the "x" key on my keyboard became intermittent. For most people, this is merely a problem. For us Emacs users, an intermittent "x" key is an unmitigated disa

Re: [Discuss] web file download

I don't know what happened to the rest of my sentence, but what I was trying to say was: I recently started using HttpFox instead of Live HTTP Headers with Firefox. It shows you the content of the reply as well as the headers. Mark On 2/29/2012 12:20 PM, MBR wrote: On 2/29/2012

Re: [Discuss] web file download

On 2/29/2012 6:41 AM, Westcott IV, John wrote: As a web developer you may also want to consider use something Live HTTP Headers for firefox as it will give you the headers going to the server and coming back to the client without having to set up a full trace. I recently started using HttpFox i

[Discuss] Another reason government licensing of software engineers is a bad, bad, bad idea (Was: Programming vs Engineering)

Whenever government, be it Federal, state, or local, is given the power to decide who is allowed to do a particular thing, that power is inevitably abused to satisfy the demands of some powerful lobbying group. In the Constitution, the Founding Fathers gave Congress the right to grant copyrigh

Re: [Discuss] SOPA

In your grandfather's day, nobody had yet mailed weaponized anthrax spores to Congress. But after envelopes of anthrax were sent to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in 2001, letters sent via U.S. mail to members of Congress go through a screening that delays them by at least two weeks. Since the

[Discuss] WRT Dell trashing their own reputation by offshoring support to India [Was: Justify your existence]

I strongly object to being characterized as someone who "did not like the foreign accent". And, based on my own experiences with Dell's support, I think that for most people who disliked Dell's offshoring of their support function, that characterization is wholly inaccurate. I've been a softw

Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

On 10/8/2011 11:42 AM, Rich Braun wrote: Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer: My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people. At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a MITS Altair The f

Re: [Discuss] more on software patent

On 10/2/2011 9:10 PM, Tom Metro wrote: The NPR piece cited above makes the point that current patents fail at the objective of disclosure because they are intentionally worded to obscure the invention as much as possible while also being as broad as possible. (This is the difference between a "pr

Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

On 9/28/2011 2:13 PM, Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote: Thanks for challenging my point of view by attacking my profession. Does this mean that Derek guessed right and you really are a lawyer, not a software engineer? I'm not implying that you're not welcome here, but since most participants here are p

Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

Hsuan-Yeh: You just introduced changed the wording from "should be" to "are", and that means you're now arguing against a claim that nobody in this conversation has made. On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 02:58:36PM -0700, you wrote: However, it doesn't necessarily mean that all software patents shou

Re: [Discuss] Firefox vs. Chrome

What have they warned you about Firebug? Does that make Firefox more of a memory hog? Does it use more CPU? Does it affect performance if Firebug's installed even if you're not using it? Mark On 7/25/2011 3:57 PM, Ian Stokes-Rees wrote: FF5 can be a huge memory hog. I stick with it beca

Re: [Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

On 7/20/2011 8:01 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: > Macintosh is a much harder target than Windows/NT simply because of > the OS architecture. Similarly, Linux is a harder target than Windows > for reasons similar to Macintosh. Besides the fact that users generally aren't logged in as root, what other

Re: [Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

gt; On Jul 20, 2011, at 7:28 PM, MBR wrote: >> There's a general belief that Macs aren't >> targeted as much as Windows systems are. Also, the fact that you're >> generally not logged in as root limits the potential damage. > More the latter than the former. Th

[Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

Although I've done software development under various flavors of Unix since 1980, I haven't done much administration on anything Unix-like in a long time. And for the past decade or so I've used laptops running some flavor of Windows. Currently I'm still on XP. Having just installed Ubuntu (N

Re: [Discuss] How do you deal with domain transfer problems?

ICANN policy at http://www.icann.org/en/transfers/policy-12jul04.htm states: The Registrar of Record may deny a transfer request only in the following specific instances: . . . 8. A domain name is in the first 60 days of an initial registration period.

Re: How do hard drives handle bad blocks nowadays?

Thanks a lot for your very informative response. I'll have to read through the man-pages for hdparm and smartctl. Mark On 4/3/2011 5:57 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote: > On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 05:00:27PM -0400, MBR wrote: >> It's now two decades later, and I'm try

How do hard drives handle bad blocks nowadays?

I administered Unix systems for a while in the late 1980s. I remember that when I had to configure SCSI disks I first had to run a surface scan to verify that all blocks on the disk were both readable and writable. I'd then have to edit into the disk's bad block list any bad blocks encountere

Re: drupal on linux?

On 2/16/2011 3:47 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: > > I suspect most users of Wordpress and Drupal don't need that feature. > They only have production. > > I personally just do it manually. My laptop is dev, and there's a test > and prod on my server. Easy enough for a few not heavily trafficked site

Re: No-cost web hosting for home business

That's great until you have to get your data back out. I recently had to move a client from Google Sites to a more traditional server environment. It wasn't that hard for me because I've been a Unix developer for decades, and I'm pretty proficient with Emacs. So I spent some quality time wit

Re: keyboard trends

On 1/18/2011 3:35 PM, Tom Metro wrote > F-keys on laptops have had a second function to control the hardware, > such as changing the display brightness, when used with an Fn modifier > key. Newer HP laptops reverse the logic of the Fn modifier key, such > that you have to press the modifier to get