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There is no law that prohibits Apple from buying there own products from Ireland at whichever price they like.
I support regulation against this. As most people do.
I do NOT support Apple when they whine about tax laws being changed. I cannot stand it, however, when governments make baseless requests to companies NOT to follow their laws.

Make laws against what Apple (and everybody else) is doing. Then force them to follow the new rules.

Till then, keep the plebes (us) happy with big speeches about morality.

Free Software Magazine

This is insane. A country has the power to make laws. New Zealand has laws and agreements in place that ALLOW this. Then, the same government whines if these agreements are used by companies.
If I make a rule in my house, where anybody coming in can take a candy per person, I should not complain about a greedy family of 36 shows up and takes 36 candies. I can change the rules, adjust them, fix them, but definitely not whinge about it.

Those laws are made to please the politician's rich friends -- as well as the politicians themselves -- so that they can move their assets and income to countries with stupidly low rates (Ireland, Caribbean, etc.). If you don't want this to happen, change the laws. If you can't change the laws without upsetting your rich friends, put up and shut up.

Free Software Magazine

Created by Compuserve to save bandwidth, and used for years with no complaints. When WWW took off Gif's were the format of choice of many; their value in that Gif's could be made invisible. 2006 A lawsuit claiming rights to the Gif format I took as a joke at first, yet Unisys and IBM both applied for patents in 1983.

It caused some major concern to big business and the PNG format.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazin...

I haven't searched but take this just as joke worthy as IIRR the Jpg format was release to the public, or at the least now considered fair play.

JPEG and GIF both have licensing issues; They are not free.

Are you kidding me? The patents for GIF expired long ago. As for JPEG, that's as much a "living standard" as HTML5 is. It's worth researching further, but I'd think the older parts of JPEG aren't too problematic.

The intended replacement for these, PNG, hasn't seen widespread adoption, can't do animations, but has no licensing issues.

PNG has never been and never will be an intended replacement for JPEG, as PNG is lossless and JPEG is (mostly) lossy. And in what way hasn't PNG seen widespread adoption? It is the dominant lossless image format and is used absolutely everywhere. PNG can do animations too (though it's not supported anywhere meaningful), but WebM makes more sense for that. Don't like it? Use good ol' GIF then.
A replacement for JPEG would be WEBP.

An old 16k Apple ][ in 1979, in a logging camp in Southeast Alaska. First integer BASIC, then Applesoft BASIC, then assembly via the Sweet16 mini-assembler. Then Pascal. Then I graduated and went to college and learned how to program.

And I wrote my "One Time, at computer camp...." a long time ago.

Tell me then, if you're not a PR flack, just why are you so invested in a Microsoft product that you have to continuously have to write humongous screeds to defend every minor criticism?

Because I utterly despise idiots who spout nonsense about something they know nothing at all about. I develop in Ruby on Linux, in C# on Windows. I have been using Linux since SLS (and later Slackware), and I really, really like a lot of aspects of it. Morons who think that they have found Jesus just because they have moved into Linux or Apple rub me the wrong way. I hate religion, whether it involves fantasy bearded meanies in the sky or operating systems or hardware. Religion is bad for men no matter what form it comes in. The inane and insane ramblings of /. morons who feel superior for being off MS products are religious nuts, and they nothing but detrimental to software development, far more so than Microsoft, Apple, Google or whatever company it is fashionable to hate today. There is no difference between the average /. Linux (or Apple or...) fanboi and the average born-again evangelical nutcase. Someone who thinks an OS is terrible just because the cheese moved a tiny, tiny fraction, is a religious nut with a serious case of Aspergers.

Here is some reality for you: For the vast majority of the population, Windows is, by a very large margin, the best operating system out there. It beats OSX on availability, openness and usability, and it beats Linux (for users) on almost every single account. As great a system Linux is for development it is equally bad for production usage for the average user. An average user has no business using Linux simply because the few apps it has are poorly designed with crappy user interfaces.

For the Enterprise, Windows beats Linux in just about every area. Linux is not in the same ballpark as a well developed Windows network with AD etc. That's a simple fact. Linux is good for development on the desktop and for web deployment otherwise. To a degree also for database deployment, though I generally prefer other Unix(-like) systems to run my Oracle stuff. It wasn't always like that for sure, Microsoft was terribly late to the whole network thing in general (not even an IP stack available until Windows 3.1). That was then though, and judging a product on what it was 20 years ago is more than a little insane.

Now, to my PR shill aspects. It should be easy, even for religious nuts, to see that I am not a paid shill. There is no way any company PR person would allow their paid shills to call you a f*cking moron for bitching about the fact that someone moved your cheese a quarter of an inch. That type of statement is generally avoided by PR professionals given the fact that it tends to reflect negatively upon the company they work for. That also shows you that I am not defending MS here, not even close. I am attacking you for being a religious nut with Aspergers and too low an intelligence to be allowed out. I hate religious nuts. As the blog said: Yes Linus, Microsoft hating is a disease. And it's a pandemic. Disease is bad for the world, and we should be ridding the world of such diseases, one by one.

computers are available for just a few hundred $, even portable ones.

Just as they were 30 years ago:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/nodes/1210/vic20.jpg

http://www.trs-80.com/adver/ad-model-102-computer-%5B26-3803%5D-(rs).jpg

http://www.ganjatron.net/retrocomputing/zx81/cc128207a.jpg

RMS sure thinks you are evil if you get paid.

Could you find a quote that refutes this other quote of his, to prove your story? It would have significant weight if it's a quote made after 2008 (when this quote was published).

Paying isn't wrong, and being paid isn't wrong. Trampling other people's freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

Source: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/interview_with_richard_stallman

You can give away your product perfectly free and it still wont satisfy the extremists.

I think you've completely confused Stallman's standing on the matter.

But now we see the strategy of Canonical and why the (at the time) weird decisions were being made

Um duh, it was made for Instant-On web devices, it just so happens that tablets fall into that category nicely.

But let's look at each point individually because not everything you stated relates to Canonical's desire to go to Tablet's, it's more along the lines of, "it just happens to also help them out towards tablets."

1) The nasty split, isn't any more nasty than other things in the Linux world. Canonical wants Canonical stuff in Canonical's distro. GNOME 3 is still used in Unity, but just differently. It's hard for me to explain because I suck at summing things up, but trust me, Unity is GNOME 3 at the core and Unity runs more with how people predicted GNOME3 to be used more as a platform and less like a standard desktop. The main facet is that it removes a lot of upstream push from the GNOME community. Canonical wants their desktop to look the way they want it to look, not what GNOME developers want it to look like. You'll see this type of mentality in a lot of Ubuntu. Also, let's face it GNOME developers are difficult to work with at best. It's very easy to paint the main developers as being the pearly towers (metaphor for someone who dictates how things should happen, but have little to zero real-world experience to back up exactly why that's right.)

2) The choice to use Wayland over X boils down to the same debate that was had on xgl versus aiglx. Mark thinks running direct to the video card is a better method than the way X provides. This has been a common thing that comes up ooo, I'd say every five to six years. Someone comes up with a better way to run direct to the card and someone jumps on the band wagon. Usually there is just too much inertia to make the jump from X to the something else happen and we all go back to using X happily. There's a lot of misconception that Xorg (specifically) and X11 (in general) are bloated, slow, won't run well on older machines. X11 is a pretty hefty "standard," but not everything in it is in every implementation. There are multiple of X11 implementations (I'm given too, Google can help you see more) that target embedded systems that run quite well. Xorg implements a lot of stuff to keep backwards compatibility with older machines. Wayland doesn't. However, don't confuse that because just because it is implemented does not mean that it gets loaded if it is not needed. You aren't going to be using XRender when your video card offers the ability to use OpenGL pixmap to texture. The biggest problem with X is drivers (and that shouldn't surprise anyone) and the low quality those drivers exist in. That problem will not go away with Wayland. The idea is, and to me it's a bad bet, if we make the model more simple (remember the X11 "spec" is a pretty big tome) then vendors will be more incline to write better drivers since the model for those drivers is more simplistic. However, as bets go, that's immaterial to why Canonical wants to go Wayland. It really boils down to the fact that they want to do Window Decorations the way they want to do Window Decora

It's been a long time since I wrote up some spam-filtering instructions, but I'd still stand by most of my recommendations. In general, yes: just increase the spam score. I do have several litmus tests, though. If you fail one of these, I'm not accepting your mail:

• Your HELO has to send something that actually looks like a hostname. "server" doesn't work, and neither does "5626^^^". Rationale: a server this badly misconfigured is either a spambot or so horribly broken that I don't want to talk to it. I look at the output of this rule from my logs and I've literally never seen anything blocked that looked like it might have been legitimate.
• Don't send me my own hostname in the HELO. You're lying. The only reason to do this is to trick me into relaying for you.
• Don't send mail From: an unresolvable address. "someone@server" isn't a legitimate email address. Neither is "joe@nonexistent.example.com". If it would be impossible to send you a reply because the address you've given can't possibly be valid, I don't need to hear from you.
• I use zen.spamhaus.org, bl.spamcop.net, and b.barracudacentral.org to generate a likely spam score for incoming servers. If their combined score exceeds a certain threshold, I outright block email from that server. A server might accidentally end up on a blacklist, but it's unlikely that one would accidentally end up on more than one of those (in my opinion and experience) very conservative lists.

"Be liberal with what you accept" is a great idea to a point, but there are some things that correlate very strongly with spamminess. Back to the subject at hand: I don't think that lack of reverse DNS is one of those things.

Hi,

The actual link to the article is:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/googles_real_name_policy_or_why_you_are_product

The link posted in the story was an iFrame sandwich -- the one above is the actual link!

Merc.

First thing you should know is that its free, so comparison of "revenues" is completely irrelevant.

I disagree. Corporate customers don't torrent down a distro and install it by hand. They pay someone like Red Hat for corporate support and services. If it were completely free then the Linux share of server revenue would always be 0%. But it's not. Red Hat et. al. are charging money for a product. They're just not charging very much money relative to what Microsoft is able to command.

If its not a personal question, are you a Microsoft troll?

No. But linux fanboyism really irritates me.

Agree with you on notebooks, but it would be a more interesting comparison if the playing field was levelled by removal of any requirement for OEMs to supply Windows preinstalled.

If there were a compelling reason for them to do so then they would.

I bet Microsoft would be reeeeeeal grumpy (endless lawsuits, FUD and hypocrisy).

Actually I expect they'd be overjoyed. Free P.R. opportunity. I can't imagine a lawsuit coming of it, but I'm sure they'd milk it for all the P.R. value they could extract. Which is pretty much what you're doing in reverse. Honestly, though, it surprises me to learn that this happened in the manner you describe. Mainly because in the past Microsoft has been completely obvious about blocking non-IE/Win configurations from Hotmail. Presumably they don't develop to or test these configurations so they can't be sure the site will work, and they'd rather just block them than hassle with all the support tickets they would generate. Silently dropping HTTP requests is 100% counterproductive to that goal. It allows non-IE folks to use the site but results in inexplicably crappy performance, thus generating more support tickets and giving any non-IE user the impression that Hotmail is hopelessly bugged. Not only that, it's fairly easy to detect, so it's hard to imagine them not expecting to get caught. Once caught it generates bad P.R. and generally makes them look like tools. So I'm not seeing a cogent motive.

If you want me to. But please don't make this an excuse to re-start the conversation then (if at all possible).

I apologize in advance for not making my first answer black or white (yes, or no) for you, as you'd probably like it. I honestly don't see it black and white. So here's my answer: Denying source code of a published original work (which does not integrate or build upon free software) is not a right. I tolerate it, because the big part of the industry relies on it, and I don't want to take anyone's bread away over night. However, I fully support copyleft efforts of changing that. So, not a right (as in: freedom), simply how the law works now. But if the law was different, if it mandated that software was free, I wouldn't have a problem with that. In fact I'd support that law. And before you think you've got me again, please understand for once that I'm not talking about practical benefits for the society. And I certainly do not superimpose those above freedoms. "Your freedom to swing your fits ends where my nose begins". That is, it's not by denying freedoms (a freedom not to slave over a piece of code) that we should try to secure freedoms for the users. And mandating software to be free does not do that - it doesn't compromise RL freedoms. It just takes away a "right" to monopoly of one's own source. I don't consider monopoly to be beneficial for the society. So steps to take are 1) viral copyleft, 2) copyright reform (perhaps.. in the future).

Now, using software with no source is ok. However, this does not excuse the proprietor for not releasing the source. You'll have to forgive another analogy, but I personally view proprietary software users very much like I view smokers. That is, the evident demand for cigarettes does not exonerate tobacco manufacturers, or cigarette sellers. Using this stuff should not be criminalized just like that, but producing the stuff? That's another matter.

Peace be with you.
P.S. You might perhaps want to check out the idea of "Distributism" (as opposed to both capitalism and socialism). I think it fits very well with free software, and a free software commercial model I've presented in http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/community_posts/pay_patch_free_software_market_model

Interesting point and one I agree with and I suspect we are not alone. Indeed some have recently argued that free software should not only have a "universal app store" but that it is the way forward. I'm not sure I agree with that but it certainly flies in the face of Wales' remarks.

I don't see how this can be seen as anything but a giant loss for FOSS and the 4 freedoms.

You noticed that, huh? Me too.

For the record, I was clarifying the point of the article, in my response to h4rr4r - I wasn't necessarily saying I agreed that it's a good thing for open source, but it is an *interesting* turn of events when you see a bunch of repressive governments suddenly discovering true religion and embracing open source and "freedom".

I also thought that Stallman's 2007 visit to Cuba, and Cuba's subsequent announcement that it was embracing FOSS, and following in the footsteps of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez was comedy gold. That visit got a writeup here in Slashdot, and I was roundly down-modded for stating the obvious: that FOSS was just going to be used as a tool for exerting more state control over the people of Cuba and Venezuela.

Of course, the activists were too busy being offended by being described as ponytailed geeks to comprehend the actual point of this article. Apparently, reading comprehension is not a strong point.

> Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich

Er, you got that backwards. The Munich transition is going more or less OK if not on time, however, there have been quite a few other failures: an internationally obscure Swiss canton failed, and also the city of Vienna.

After Munich actually finishes its transition, we will get to see whether the long-term TCO is smaller. It will be very interesting, assuming that Microsoft won't manage to somehow corrupt the flow of objective information about it. Unfortunately, it won't necessarily prove anything about the profitability of future migrations, since Munich hadn't even bought XP licenses (they were running NT!) at the time it decided to go for Linux, yet even like that they had a horrific amount of lock-in via Office macros. They also used the transition as an opportunity to "clean house" and prevent every department independently writing its own Office macros for shared tasks, which will also save them maintenance costs in the long run.

I've just recently been in the situation of selecting a build system for a project with an existing codebase. I looked at the obvious alternatives, including cmake.

In the end, I chose autotools.

When you're doing a non-trivial project, cmake doesn't become any less complicated than autoconf and automake anymore - if your build is complex, you have to deal with that complexity somewhere after all. And there's a lot more and better resources for using autotools than cmake around, for figuring out odd corner cases. If you have a somewhat odd build requirement, chances are somebody else has already solved it using autotools already.

From my experience so far, most of what people dislike about using autotools come from Automake. But Automake is of course completely optional to use, and Autoconf - which provides most of the benefits - was made to be standalone. If you have a system with existing makefiles, it makes a lot of sense to simply use Autoconf to configure the app and the makefiles and leave Automake alone.

This is a lengthy but really illuminating document on using the autotools, that specifically goes through using autoconf alone and on how to adapt an existing project: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/books/agaal/brief_introduction_to_gnu_autotools/

an article with a somehwat anti MS slant but here is one example for ya. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/yes_linus_microsoft_hating_disease_and_its_pandemic

Really? Again with the "desktop dead" speech? Haven't I heard this in 2006, 2007 and 2009? Does this guy really need to redo the same article we've been hearing for 4 years?

Author claims 2009 was the first year laptop sales surpassed desktop, but they were saying the same thing in 2008 and 2009.

The "desktop dead" story is dead, stop beating a dead horse.

And if all else fails, you can always try here. Only problem you'll have then might be the drivers, although in that case there still may be help for you.

I have been using Gentoo (and love it) for several years now. I have not actually tried LFS although I am familiar with its basic concepts. Can you advise why you would prefer LFS over Gentoo? It seems you'd be giving up the ease of long-term administration that Portage offers, and so far as I know Gentoo does support the ARM platform.

And if all else fails, you can always try here. Only problem you'll have then might be the drivers, although in that case there still may be help for you.

He was referring to the climate model software written by CRU, I cou;dn't find an actual name for it but I did find the read me and along with it a great write up on why "open source science" would've helped avoid this scandal:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/open_science_climategate_ipcc_cru_needs_take_leaf_out_cerns_book
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm

The latest studies seem to say that Ogg Theora is "more than good enough" for web video. See: http://hacks.stage.mozilla.com/2009/06/open-video-codecs-and-quality/ http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/firefogg_transcoding_videos_open_web_standards_mozilla_firefox

Change the default port, disable SSH access for root, disable password access entirely (login with public keys), install fcheck to monitor changed files and hence intrusions. If you have the luxury, remove SSH access entirely from your web server and block everything but ports 80 and 443, and enter via another server behind the same firewall. As a nOOb, I gained quite a lot from following this Hardening Linux Web Servers guide: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/hardening_linux

Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.

As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing

Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/

And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/

Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."

And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...

Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money. :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha

Places with huge problems also tend to have legacies of intervention by foreign governments and foreign corporations. The Earth has no resource limitation problems in the long term:
"Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html

But, with robots on the way, it's easy to see why many think life is cheap because masses of human labor are no longer needed for the earlier exploitation:
"Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

That is the deeper problem we need to address as a society, how to move past the irony of having all these tools of abundance but people using them to make artificial scarcity. We need to stop using military robots to enforce a culture of work on humans and instead make robots to do the work. We need to stop building nuclear missiles to fight over oil wells on Earth and instead use the same basic technologies to produce power or make accessible resources in space (I'm a renewable energy fan more than nuclear though). Here are some other ways to move past that irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C (Surviving America's Depression Epidemic)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964:
http://educationanddemocra

Well, we don't know whether the government was playing politics, or was honest in their intentions. Either way, it's fair to characterise Microsoft's moves as good business for them, but problematic for everyone else.

By problematic, I'd use the analogy of a loan shark giving you a special rate on a new load to get you past the missed interest payment you missed on your last unpaid loan. Sure it resolves the crisis, but the underlying problems and high costs remain.

And speaking of underlying problems and high costs, the following article is appearing on news.google.com.

Are Microsoft to blame for "hidden" malware costs

> The demand for XP came from the bottom up - from OLPC's potential customers.

Bottom up indeed.

> The geek for all his talk of the cathedral and the bazaar tends to think top-down.

Remember to think bottom-up. First the cash under the table. Then the contracts on the table. Bottom-up.

As usual in the discussion on blocklisting, Slashdot is being overrun by, ehm, 'legitimate biznizmen' and their supporters, and people who know jack shit about blocklisting and its history, but believe those who shout the loudest.

I got paid to write an article on how to block spam, partially by using DNSBLs. Am I qualifed to say that SORBS sucks, or am I still in your "amateur" or "'legitimate biznizmen" categories?

What's the difference between waiting for a web page to update and waiting for an email to hit your inbox?

In this case, it's the difference between the OP sending the results to everyone listening, and one of those listeners taking the data and uploading it to a website. In other words, between primary and secondary sources.

People know how to use email. Subscribing to a mail list is trivial. Last time I did it it involved sending the word subscribe to an email address. Everyone knows how to do this.

Your mouse-incapable uncle surely doesn't.

You also set up your example is invalid due to the artificial limitations you put on it. Why would you create a one off list? Why not leave the list around for the team?

That's possible, sure, but not in the context of the OP's situation. He was able to send text messages but quite likely not able to set up a mailing list while sitting on the bleachers watching the wrestling.

You're saying rather than doing that trivial step it's some how easier to have people create yet another account, this time with a system they are not familiar with.

You mean, like creating an account on the hypothetical listserv? Why are you under the impression that subscribing to a listserv is inherently easier than subscribing to Twitter?

Email is not one to one. You know you can put a semi colon followed by another address on the To: line right?

I'm pretty new to email, but even I know that it's one-to-one. Adding multiple To: or Cc: or Bcc: entries is functionally identical to sending multiple copies of the message, unless you want to get into gray areas like single instance store on the recipient's end.

Texting, at least for me and I have a bare bare bones phone, is one to many. I can send the same text to multiple people just by selecting multiple recipients.

No. Texting is one-to-one, albeit repeatable. BTW, you might ask your carrier whether sending a single text to 50 recipients is billable as one message or 50. I bet the answer might surprise you.

I ask again. What advantages does it offer over existing technology other than being new?

Well, in the OP's case, it offered the rather huge advantage of letting him send one single SMS to Twitter instead of making him keep track of everyone who was interested so that he could notify each person individually, all without having to set up a listserv in advance and convincing everyone to subscribe to it. You might take note that despite your reasons why it shouldn't work, it did.

We'll be seeing alot of these http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/nodes/3027/c20081015_broken_monitor.jpg when people start to lose in blackjack?

Occasional Linux user here.

3) Why do Linux programs close themselves? I dont' think they are crashing. Like I add a software source then hit close, it updates, gives me an error about my key not working, then terminates! So I have to reopen it.

This shouldn't happen (the program terminating part). I suspect a bug in Synaptic itself or a broken package of Synaptic in Ubuntu.

4) Step 3 gave me an error, so naturally, I copied it to the clipboard. I click on okay and the error dissapears, terminating the program. My error, that WAS in the clipboard is now gone... Awesome.

I'm not familiar with Gnome, but according to Wikipedia, it should retain clipboard contents after the original window has closed. That's of course not very helpful, since from your description, it didn't work for some reason.

I'd suggest installing Glipper from the repository. It sits in the system tray and when you click on it, gives you a list of a bunch of recent clipboard contents, from which you can pick one to put back onto the clipboard. This should at least work as a workaround.

I've used the similar Klipper app in KDE and can say that it's really handy when you have more than one thing you'd like to paste in multiple places.

5) Key signing for software packages is a pain in the ass & comlpicated. Surely there can be an easier way to get this working. How about downloading a file that contains the software source, and the key togeather and then import the file? I still can't get this thing working...

Agreed. Adding third-party repositories can be a pain because of the keys.

The command-line method documented here should work, at the very least. I've used it successfully several times in the past. (The screenshot on that page also sports a promising "Add key file" button in Synaptic, if you happen to have such a file.)

6) Synaptic Software manager's sorting is crappy. I open it up search for xbmc and see packages availalbe for installation. I can click the column headers and sort, but for some reason, when I select a package, the list unsorts! This makes it hard to select packages of similar type (skins in this case).

That sounds like a bug. I suggest filing a bug report (saying what you already told us) to Ubuntu so they can fix it.

A quick Googling gave me these instructions. Basically, this link at Ubuntu's bug tracker is the one you want, but unfortunately you have to create an account to be able to file bugs. Judge for yourself if it's worth the trouble :)

  -AC

I first used SLS 1.02, in late July of 1993. I downloaded a slew of floppies and booted up on a generic 386 with 8M of RAM and a 30M hard drive. The install took a couple of hours, doin' the floppy shuffle.

After getting on-line and checking out several gopher sites, I finally found all the info I needed to configure the Cyrus video card (which had 256K video RAM). When I got X up and running, I ran xgas. And then, the coolest thing: I ran xgas again. And again. Until I had the screen filled with xgas windows.

It was the coolest thing, seeing all of those xgas programs doing their thing at once. This was true multitasking, and I finally understood what the term meant. I realized this OS was so

Then I learned all about virtual desktops with olvwm. I eventually moved over to FVWM, which is still around. Man, was FVWM cool when they included the ability to use .bmp textures in window decorations.

I wrote up how to install SLS 1.03 in this article. I know I'm geeky, but it was a lot of fun to go back to see the early days again.

I don't believe it's just about unfamiliar look-and-feel for non-geek Windows users. I've seen so many non-geeks switch from Windows to Mac because Macs are shinier and they're in all the Hollywood movies, but also because OSX seems to "just work" for them. People have no problem learning how to handle a new operating system if the UI is well designed. Despite Ubuntu's efforts this is not true for Linux of any flavor.

This is not only due to a lack of design skills in Linuxers. I think the more important reason is what Thomas calls machismo:

Now at this point, a wise user will hit Google and find instructions on how to fix their problems. Sadly, these instructions are usually complicated. Often deliberately so, because some of the people who write them like to express their machismo by creating inordinately complicated tutorials.

While the following anecdotal evidence he presents might be flawed (it could just be an outdated tutorial or one specifically intended for hardware hackers), that machista attitude is a salient feature of the FLOSS community as it is. It's also the reason for the extreme gender gap in FLOSS vs proprietary software developers.

What I find weird is that Thomas is able to diagnose that attitude in Linuxers and then pretends there's nothing "we" can do about it.

Actually, youtube content is reasonably accessible with freedomware.

For those who will run non-freedomware, I read that some of the "downloaders" actually simply grab it from cache, where it was placed by the (servant-ware) flash.

For iceweasel/firefox, for those that won't like myself, I know for a fact that swfdec with the swfdec-mozilla plugin play it in-place in the web page reasonably well (altho last time I used it the "extra" functionality like replay, etc, didn't work), and there's various extensions (such as download-helper) that work reasonably well for as-file downloading, with or without whatever plugin to play it in-place.

On konqueror, the browser I use most of the time, I never got swfdec working, but there's a KDE servicemenu (youtube-servicemenu, in the kde-misc category on Gentoo) that downloads most (but not all, apparently it doesn't correctly deal with some weird characters that sometimes show up in the parameters) youtube videos in either flv or even the higher quality mp4 format.

A quick search of the Gentoo package tree also returns net-misc/youtube-dl, a CLI youtube downloader, and I've seen several articles covering the topic, including this one from fresoftwaremagazine, with various solutions. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/youtube_and_gnu_linux_download_and_convert_videos_easy_way

For playing the downloaded flvs/mp4s, I use kaffeine, based on xinelib so various non-KDE players based on xinelib should work just as well. IIRC xinelib uses ffmpeg for flv (among other codecs) playback.

I prefer downloading and kaffeine playback anyway, since I can do full-screen playback and have all sorts of other controls not available when played embedded on the web page, and I can save the ones I like and play them back whenever, regardless of what youtube has done with them or whether I'm net connected at the time. FWIW, apart from the better quality of the mp4 versions, they work better than FLVs, which are slightly broken at least on kaffeine and I'd suspect in xinelib (and maybe back to ffmpeg) as they play once but don't repeat well -- apparently due to a rebuffering error of some sort.

But you are absolutely correct on the licensing aspects and etc. Most youtube content must be assumed to be proprietary, and could be removed at any time, for legal reasons or simply at the whim of Google or the rights owners. Wiki-pedia/commons does well to ensure they have secured free(dom) license to the content, that their users can confidently use as well, without fear.

hv3 uses tkhtml3, and, while it is not as complete as the big four rendering engines, it seems well ahead of the other light alternatives, in that it has Javascript and passes Acid 2, it uses little memory and is going to show up in at least one distro's repo.

See these:
Venezuela's National Strike
Venezuela Kubuntu -- must read
The Venezuelan Educational System
Venezuela Embraces Linux and Open Source Software, but Faces Challenges
Venezuela - Stepping Forward With Debian
Enterprise Unix Roundup: Oracle's Open World
Trollparty in Caracas during World Social Forum
Free software liberates Venezuela
Free Software: Technological Democratization?
No More Microsoft blood in the veins of the Venezuela
Free Software Developers program continues successfully
Open standard Venezuelan law definition

That will work only if your boss is an idiot and doesn't realize that you cost money.

Not really. I've built up a track record for making fun projects into useful systems. When I played around with Jabber, we ended up with a secure intra-office IM system. I took some time to write an article on spam blocking and we ended up moving a big chunk of our email service onto a Postfix+Cyrus system, plus spam/virus filtering for the Exchange server. When I tell him I want to check out $SHINYTOY, I usually get to.

You can see a sample of his handwriting in an interview he did with Free Software Magazine in 2005: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/interview_knuth

Talking about "look aways" (forced/suggested by hardware/software), I've lately been enlightened by an article on FSM ( http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/workrave_combating_rsi_free_software_way ) about WorkRave ( http://www.workrave.org/ ), a tiny OSS utility that was created thinking of RSI, but can be configured for almost any need...

I've installed it here in the company I work for, and now they all like it very much...

Give it a try!
P.

The KGI project still seems to have a website but mostly deals with FreeBSD.

There is also the GGI project which has been ported to both Vista, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

But have these projects been overtaken by 3D desktop environments?

AFAIK, most good spam systems involve defense in depth. My suggestions are:

greylisting, which will cause some messages to be delayed, but is a fantastic weapon against spam when used with...

RBLs (see other comments). Pick one that suits. The reason this is so good when combined with greylisting is that messages that have been delayed may well now have their originating IP address one of you RBLs.

Optionals at this point are SPF (requires other mail servers to have the appropriate dns records), checking that emails sent are valid (there are other comments here about this).

Up to this point, you have spent very little bandwidth. All messages that are considered spammy have been dropped. You have also spent very little CPU time.

Next line of defence is something like spam assasin. This can perform bayesian filtering on the email. This is configurable, but generally the best option is to set a header in the messsage, so that client side email applications can filter them out. This then leaves it up to the users to check their own spam folders.

Lastly you could add something on the client, but it might be a little overkill.

All this can be done on a standalone server sitting between your current mailserver and your router. There should be plenty of guides out there for this. Eg this or this.

The arguments for and against software patents are old and boring, so I wrote a devil's advocate defense of software patents a few months back.

In fact most of the arguments for software patents are based on 150-year old arguments that protection from competition is the best way to push innovation.

The arguments were bogus in 1820 and they are bogus today.

Innovation does not need protection from competition, it needs as much competition as possible, in the most free market possible.

Kill software patents!

You asked:

If you really hold the honest opinion that OOXML is objectively a superior as a standard for multiple vendors, just read this page (not even the whole study, just the one page) and try to reconcile the very specific examples with your opinion.

I did - and I looked at the full paper as well. What I see, essentially, is that the author created very simple documents then saved them as .odf and as .docx, and compared the underlying XML representations of the files (same for spreadsheet, using .ods and .xlsx). Oddly, I find no place in the PDF (either the version at ftp://officeboxsystems.com/odfa_ukag or the one at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf) where he says exactly what programs and options he used to render the docs.

I'll admit that for the purposes of a Slashdot reply I'm not about to subject this to hours of thought and reference checking. So I'll just give my highlevel opinion: he went searching for nits to pick in furtherance of his anti-OOXML bias, and he found some. But they are primarily style nits, not substance nits.

Macnaghten suggests that OOXML is largely about backwards compatibility to older MS binary formats, and in this I agree. There are billions of documents in those formats, and they need a way forward. He stresses that MS had 'no visible public consultation or design input', which I disagree with, since those older formats which OOXML translates are the result of a decades long conversation with the market by MS. He says that "Microsoft suggested that its own OOXML should perform that role instead" which is also not an exact representation of truth - MS have never said there should only be one standard; in fact when asked the question they have always said they are happy to see a choice in standards. We know they voted for ODF.

For me, the rest of it boiled down to preference issues like 'MS shouldn't name their own products and then say any other product too - since "any product" would also include MS products' and quibbling over the verbosity of tag names. His comment about percentages might be worth looking into - if he had bothered to cite section or page numbers where he found the apparent inconsistencies. Since he didn't, I won't read the entire SpreadsheetML portion of the document looking for the problem.

Macnaghten concludes that he sees no reason for OOXML; he thinks ODF does the job just fine. And for his test cases, it probably does. But they were purposefully simple test cases - not legacy docs which have accreted over the course of years in the bowels of some company's Accounting division.

Also, I should note that I have never really thought or suggested that OOXML is generally "superior". I think this is a fallacy of many of the anti-OOXML arguments. Horses for courses - ODF is well suited to many tasks; I'd never say otherwise. But neither would I call it the solution to all problems. Companies with large repositories of highly formatted Word and Excel documents should run a few of the old ones through ODF convertors and OOXML ones, and choose what works best for them. Also I note that it's not just about calling up an old memo or spreadsheet - other times there will be a need for automatically parsing documents in various ways (think resume databases or software requirements tracing, as two easy examples).

I do fundamentally reject the position you and Macnaghten seem to share: that there should only ever be one single standard for any given area of competence. There are many reasons why multiple standards (or multiple levels of conformance with any one given standard) can be good things. We may need different standards for differing applications of a single discip

You asked:

If you really hold the honest opinion that OOXML is objectively a superior as a standard for multiple vendors, just read this page (not even the whole study, just the one page) and try to reconcile the very specific examples with your opinion.

I did - and I looked at the full paper as well. What I see, essentially, is that the author created very simple documents then saved them as .odf and as .docx, and compared the underlying XML representations of the files (same for spreadsheet, using .ods and .xlsx). Oddly, I find no place in the PDF (either the version at ftp://officeboxsystems.com/odfa_ukag or the one at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf) where he says exactly what programs and options he used to render the docs.

I'll admit that for the purposes of a Slashdot reply I'm not about to subject this to hours of thought and reference checking. So I'll just give my highlevel opinion: he went searching for nits to pick in furtherance of his anti-OOXML bias, and he found some. But they are primarily style nits, not substance nits.

Macnaghten suggests that OOXML is largely about backwards compatibility to older MS binary formats, and in this I agree. There are billions of documents in those formats, and they need a way forward. He stresses that MS had 'no visible public consultation or design input', which I disagree with, since those older formats which OOXML translates are the result of a decades long conversation with the market by MS. He says that "Microsoft suggested that its own OOXML should perform that role instead" which is also not an exact representation of truth - MS have never said there should only be one standard; in fact when asked the question they have always said they are happy to see a choice in standards. We know they voted for ODF.

For me, the rest of it boiled down to preference issues like 'MS shouldn't name their own products and then say any other product too - since "any product" would also include MS products' and quibbling over the verbosity of tag names. His comment about percentages might be worth looking into - if he had bothered to cite section or page numbers where he found the apparent inconsistencies. Since he didn't, I won't read the entire SpreadsheetML portion of the document looking for the problem.

Macnaghten concludes that he sees no reason for OOXML; he thinks ODF does the job just fine. And for his test cases, it probably does. But they were purposefully simple test cases - not legacy docs which have accreted over the course of years in the bowels of some company's Accounting division.

Also, I should note that I have never really thought or suggested that OOXML is generally "superior". I think this is a fallacy of many of the anti-OOXML arguments. Horses for courses - ODF is well suited to many tasks; I'd never say otherwise. But neither would I call it the solution to all problems. Companies with large repositories of highly formatted Word and Excel documents should run a few of the old ones through ODF convertors and OOXML ones, and choose what works best for them. Also I note that it's not just about calling up an old memo or spreadsheet - other times there will be a need for automatically parsing documents in various ways (think resume databases or software requirements tracing, as two easy examples).

I do fundamentally reject the position you and Macnaghten seem to share: that there should only ever be one single standard for any given area of competence. There are many reasons why multiple standards (or multiple levels of conformance with any one given standard) can be good things. We may need different standards for differing applications of a single discip

Hi,

We recently published an article about open hardware licenses in Free Software Magazine:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/making_open_hardware_possible

As well as Terry Hancock's article about purchasing free software friendly hardware:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/purchasing_hardware_for_free_software

I think it will complement the linked articles above nicely!

Merc.

Hi,

We recently published an article about open hardware licenses in Free Software Magazine:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/making_open_hardware_possible

As well as Terry Hancock's article about purchasing free software friendly hardware:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/purchasing_hardware_for_free_software

I think it will complement the linked articles above nicely!

Merc.

Hotmail does not work with Firefox 2.0 on Linux. You get the "classic" limited version, which tells you the Full version works with Firefox 1.5 or better. On Firefox 2 on Windows or the Mac you have the option to switch to the full version, but not on Linux. Here's Microsoft's response:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/hotmail_doesnt_work_with_firefox_2

I don't have idea what would happen with music copied in from iTunes next to music copied in from a third party app - maybe it's all good, I don't know.

It works fine. We have put some MP3's on an iPod and backed up the entire iPod to hard disk under Linux. I guess the only thing you don't get backed up is the keys, but that iPod has never had DRM tracks, so it's a moot point.

Pick your fav program here. Some are multi-platform.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/managing_your_ipod_without_itunes

How long before someone packages up a Linux live CD with Skype preinstalled so that you can ensure you're computer isn't compromised when making phone calls?

Whatever makes you think that packaging Skype with Linux is going to make it more secure? Skype is proprietary and closed source, and security and privacy are both as strong as its weakest link. You can't see the source, you can't know how the protocol works, hence you're vulnerable to privacy invasions. No amount of bundling it with free software is going to fix that unless you use a free protocol and client to begin with.

I personally would prefer to see Wengophone really get off the ground instead, but it seems that the project is already dead. :-(