Slashdot Mirror

Who said what now? bratgrrl writes "eWeek's "Red Hat: Next Redmond?"article was quietly and without comment altered- they deleted the crucial "Red Hat backlash" quote from the original article. No retraction, no explanation, just an Orwellian revision. Thank goodness for Google, which cached the original article.

I suspect the original quote never happened."

Because not everyone needs Chatzilla. Mozilla gets a lot of attention around here -- after all, it is the giant lizard of the open source browser world. But to the question "What about Galeon?", Nachtjäger writes: "The answer: LOTS is happening to Galeon. Given the length of time since the last release, we decided to write up an update on how things are going on Galeon2. Check it out here"

I hope certain aspects of Galeon (tab-name shortening and color coding, for two) are soon rolled back into Mozilla.

OK, now you can have it. Esekla writes "Slashdot did an article about the announcement of Kylix 3 (the first Kylix to support C++ code), but at the time it was not actually available for download. Now both Open and Enterprise Trial editions finally can be downloaded."

Now you can assemble your yard-sale cluster. Speaking of things now really available, BJH writes: "The site featured in last week's Dreamcast BBA story is now accepting orders! The good news is, they're only $US80 each. The bad news is, they're not accepting orders from outside Japan ;) (If there's enough interest, perhaps someone could be convinced to do a bulk buy and ship to people overseas...)"

Anyone who offers something interesting enough in trade can have my Dreamcast for mucking about ;)

When you trace things back far enough ... Dennis writes: "Although Chris has a valid point about the catch 22 between Win2K, SP3 and HIPAA, his example is not accurate because medical records that are related to students are protected by FERPA regulations and not by HIPAA. Here's a reference link with more info."

The fat ladies are still warming up. john82 writes "With all the hoopla still swirling about MP3s, there is fresh information in the JPEG saga. Dateline Berlin: Algovision-Luratech GmbH says that Forgent's patent claim (4,698,672) is all wet. Technical experts have laid out the technical and legal arguments against the claim. And they intend to air the dirty laundry at a meeting Sept 4. The announcement by Forgent earlier this year caused quite a stir here. Wonder if Sony can get their money back?"

Of especial interest to iBook owners. Earlier this month, Slashdot posted the news that rather than wiping your Mac's OS to put on a GNU/Linux system, you could order Yellow Dog Linux preinstalled on Apple hardware. Ray Sanders of Qli Tech Linux Computers writes: "We also are selling Apple Systems with Linux installed, however, Terrasoft is only installing Yellow Dog Linux, we offer Gentoo PPC, Debian PPC, Mandrake PPC, and SuSE PPC. We also have full working sound and video on the iBook and Powerbook with XFree86, whereas YDL Does not yet support the mobile Radeon chipset found on those two units."

Making your computer worth even less. Acid-F1ux writes: "Advanced Micro Devices has slashed prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon processors just days after a similar move by rival Intel. The cuts range from 17 percent to 52 percent for mobile Athlon XP chips and between 11 percent and 32 percent for desktop Athlon XP chips. On Sunday, Intel dropped prices of its Pentium 4 processors by as much as 53 percent."

Progressive Education strikes a blow. darnellmc writes: "According to this Atlanta Journal-Constitution news article GA Tech had so many students violate the school's "honor code" that they have decided to change it.

"In the wake of the investigation, Tech officials have decided to allow students in introductory computer science courses to share information and collaborate on homework, previously prohibited under the school's academic honor code."

Of course code sharing also teaches the value of Open Source ;o) . Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."

How many letters will the next big threat have? matthew writes: "LWN is carrying the notes from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) conference (more info at the EFF). The BPDG is the body that will be suggesting future technological control measures; they make the DMCA and CBDTPA seem like trivial problems. The BPDG conference was last week and it was open to the public so anyone could call in. You can read about what the FSF's Bradley M. Kuhn digitalspeech.org's Jonathan Watterson thought of the conference. The basic summary is that we're screwed if people don't start fighting against this kind of injustice."

This is what's called taking license. infochuck writes "Back in January, this story on Slashdot focused on Borland's licensing PR fiasco, and how they promised to remedy the situation (in short, their license permitted them to search at any time any of your computers looking for stolen software). Well, here we are, five months later, and their license hasn't changed one bit - at least not the two most unreasonable clauses, 12 and 14.4, and not in the license included with the Windows version of the Personal Edition. Download for yourself to see, but be warned, you'll have to register, which involves many questions and no less than 5 checkboxes to uncheck, as well as at least a 25MB DL. I believe pr@borland.com is still the place to write..."

Playful is good. If the last month of pre-hype hype, pre-hype, actual hype and post-hype weren't enough, you'll be pleased to read that E3 coverage continues, at Gamespy (some cool reviews), Gamegal (good photos) and other sites beginning with "Game."

It's the little things. Time for another cumulative patch for IE, it seems. (Mozilla may have its share of security problems, but at least there's a new build broken in unique and exciting ways more frequently :)). Logica writes with a snippet from this ZDNet article, which reads: "Microsoft released a collection of software fixes Monday to plug six security problems in its Internet Explorer browser, including one that could be exploited to take over a victim's computer."

"Users are urged to download the latest patch."

What happened to the tar-and-feather clause? djmurdoch writes "Back in January, Borland promised to come up with new EULAs without some objectionable terms. They've just posted the new EULAs. Gone are the anti-competitive product clause, the right to audit, and the requirement to give up a jury trial. They still have required registration, and you can't use a 2nd hand copy. They've added a requirement that it be licensed to one named user; you need extra licenses to share a copy. Not perfect, but a big improvement."

Keep in the loop as consolidation continues. craig writes: "AT&T Broadband has now posted instructions for their cable modem users to change their e-mail addresses from @mediaone.net to @attbi.com. The instructions have been posted here. The instructions seem to work, and my upgrade has been smooth.

The instructions have been posted on the web, but it looks like they have not been e-mailed to current AT&T Broadband subscribers. It is probably a good idea to follow these instructions before they are mailed to the masses, because chances are, this is migration is going to keep AT&T Broadband customer support very busy. The old @mediaone.net addresses will stop working on March 15, as was mentioned in this previous posting on Slashdot."

And although it's been said many times, many ways ... LiquidPC writes: "Apple's Ernest Prabhakar is reporting that BSD is now 3 times as popular on the desktop as Linux, largely thanks to MacOSX, of course. He also commented that Microsoft now has Office running on a Berkeley UNIX."

Borland sponsored and is distributing this study -- take it for what you will. Interested parties can still produce useful studies, and may even be in the best position for collecting this sort of data. But whether Kylix matches your development environment or licensing philosophy is up to you.

Borland sponsored and is distributing this study -- take it for what you will. Interested parties can still produce useful studies, and may even be in the best position for collecting this sort of data. But whether Kylix matches your development environment or licensing philosophy is up to you.

Borland sponsored and is distributing this study -- take it for what you will. Interested parties can still produce useful studies, and may even be in the best position for collecting this sort of data. But whether Kylix matches your development environment or licensing philosophy is up to you.

"BlackAdder supports a Python-Qt synthesis that is very attractive as both languages have Open Source verisons. Their IDE costs only $250, which is doubly attractive.

Kylix is apparently a full featured IDE based on Borland's many years of experience with Delphi. However, one has to buy both Kylix ($199) and Delphi 6 ($999) and the language is proprietary.

Komodo suffers from the lack of a widget/forms set (as far as I can tell). However, their IDE supports 3 languages right now and will support more in the future. The $295 per user price is also attractive, as is the large knowledge base of advice and code snippets."

Are there other decent RAD packages out there for Unix systems or is this pretty much the cream of the crop?

"The conference opened with a "Matrix" themed intro, and there have been blue and red jellybeans all over the place. The major announcement at the intro was that JBuilder will be ported to Mac OS X, with full support for Aqua. The press release is here.

Paul Beach, Interbase VP of marketing and sales, gave a very informative talk. It's very clear that he has a clue. Many of his talking points were interchangeable with what Bob Young would say, asked similar questions. He even alluded to the tired old Heinz ketchup analogy to explain brand equity. Interbase's plan is to sell support contracts and box sets, just like the other big open source companies. Paul is very realistic and down-to-earth about what they expect to happen. I think they are going to do very well indeed.

The most startling revelation, though, was that Interbase 6.0 is done and ready to ship the manuals and CDs are duplicated and printed and sitting in boxes. He even brought a box of CDs to the talk. Reading between the lines, it seems like these CDs have been sitting around for some time. But Dale Fuller (Inprise CEO), who also showed up at the Interbase product address, will not permit the CDs to be distributed until all the contracts are signed and executed and appropriately lawyered. Dale promised, both at the opening keynote and at the Interbase talk, that the contracts would be done and the product would ship within two weeks. Here's hoping he holds himself accountable to that promise.

Many details about Kylix have been revealed. Kylix is installed on several machines in the lab, but unfortunately these machines are off the net, so you can't steal a copy (darnit). The IDE was demoed at one of the talks, but it wasn't in the lab. What was on the lab machines was the command-line Delphi compiler only. It seems quite solid. I played around with it, built some projects that displayed various forms and controls, that sort of thing. As expected, the compiler is blindingly fast, builds genuine native executables, and looks very similar to Delphi on Windows. The new class libraries, called CLX, are very nearly 100% source-compatible with the Delphi VCL. The CLX visual components are wrappers around QT, and will be available on Windows as well in Delphi 6, so if you code to CLX you will be cross-platform. Kylix builds fully compliant QT apps, with KDE-style theming and all the bells and whistles. As with all QT/KDE apps, you can run a Kylix-developed app under Gnome but it isn t seamless for purposes of theming or UI consistency.

Kylix will, of course, be closed-source, closed-process, proprietary, and will have a price notably divergent from zero. The initial release will be Delphi standard and professional, followed quite quickly by C++ standard and professional. The enterprise version of Kylix will be called "Kylix Studio" (or similar) and will include both compilers in a single SKU. Someone in the audience suggested that they do a combined SKU under Windows as well, which got a lot of applause. At the opening keynote, Dale said that a major goal for Kylix is to make it possible for developers to release their own projects under any license, including full-strength GPL. This is a worthy objective, but I'm not sure Borland truly understands the ramifications. Then again, I'm not sure I do myself. What would it mean to have a GPL project, but you have to use a proprietary compiler to build it? Presumably the compiler libraries will be proprietary, and you have to link with them if you want a usable binary. This bears thinking about.

For database access from Kylix, there's a new library called dbDirect. Or perhaps it's called dbExpress. And I think it might also be called DataCLX, or perhaps DataCLX is a superset including dbDirect plus other things. Anyway, whatever it's called, it's a new library that lets applications talk to databases in a consistent way just like the BDE. But unlike the BDE, it tries to be as 'thin' as possible, bringing the application code as close as feasible to the native database vendor APIs while still providing relatively good code portability. With the BDE, Borland has to write a complex driver for every new database they support. With dbDirect, it's a simple matter of wrapping a few vendor API calls. Application developers can mix and match calls to dbDirect with calls to native database APIs. dbDirect will also have a tiny footprint compared to the BDE, including the ability to statically link right into the application. DataCLX will be the only database API in Kylix, and will ship in Delphi 6 side by side with the traditional BDE setup.

Kylix will also include a web broker architecture, very similar to what's in Delphi 5 today. Where Delphi web modules can compile to traditional CGIs or ISAPIs, Kylix web modules will compile to traditional CGIs or Apache modules. The level of integration between Kylix and Apache is impressive. This part of things is called NetCLX and also includes the usual socket components and TCP-suite stuff like telnet, smtp, etc.

In addition to the Borland announcements, there are a few dozen vendors on the trade show floor. Big names include Sun, Caldera, Linuxcare and Cobalt. Corel is pointedly absent. And of course we have the usual gang of third-party component vendors people like TurboPower, Woll2Woll, Raize, Digial Metaphors, etc. Everyone seems to be planning to port their tools to Linux, promising release dates from a couple weeks to a couple months after Kylix ships.

The bottom line is, I'll be coming home empty-handed. No Kylix beta, no Interbase source. But I have a very strong sense that the Delphi community is gathering behind Kylix in a big way, and I'm very pleased to see Interbase poised on the verge of release. Just get those contracts signed, Dale!"

Leveling mountains back to molehills ... Mitch writes "I have read further in the Borland license agreement. People need to be more careful before posting news. Twisting words or only giving half the facts can cause problems and does most of time. This, in my opinion, was an unfair thing to do to Borland. If anyone looked at the rest of the agreement, it says:

'Nothing in this license statement permits you to derive the source code of files that Borland has provided to you in executable form only, or to reproduce, modify, use, or distribute the source code of such files. You are not, of course, restricted from distributing source code that is entirely your own. Code which you generate with a Borland code generator, such as AppExpert, is considered by Borland to be your code.'" Michael Swindell from Borland wrote with much the same information. Thanks to both for the level-headed clarification.

deet-de-deet-deet deet HAVANA: Steve Arner writes "On May 18, 2000, the Associated Press ('The AP') declared that it would not pursue legal action against the creators of a widely-viewed parody combining images of the goverment?s recent seizure of Elián Gonzalez at gunpoint with sounds from Budweisers popular 'Whazzup?' advertising campaign."

Sneaky little devil. Nik would like you to read this Salon article about BSD. Trust him -- it's an interesting overview. It will make you want to spend more time poring through the BSD Section of Slashdot.

No towel-throwing just yet bork bork bork. Audent writes "There's a nice thank you note on the Dialectizer site saying he's still reviewing his options and to check back regularly". You can read his notice here, and since it's on the rinkworks site, you can even read it in psuedo-Swedish or redneck.

Don't line up for tickets yet ... they're still fixing the odds. emmons writes "Judge Kaplan has ordered that the trial concerning DeCSS' legality under the DMCA be moved from December 5th to July 17th. The order is posted on cryptome.org's website." By that time, the law could say that the moon in made of green cheese until proven otherwise, while forbidding lunar analysis.

Aren't you glad you use ... pine? pq writes "John Markoff at the NYT followed up on the Love bug with this story (no login needed). Apparently it simply faxed itself as text to fax numbers in your Outlook addressbook - an interesting article for the Neal Stephenson 'Life imitates Art' angle." Also nice to know that the NY Times writers are reading Neal Stephenson.