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funny you mentioned rms on your trolling. i was reading this and basically thinking about the role of fsf in this new world order. i mean, the free os is well on its way - albeit not 100% gnu like they wanted, but hey - and they're offloading more and more projects to the community. even emacs is going to leave the cathedral (starting with v21). so programming is not really the way forward.

i mean, we do need them to be as vocal as only rms can be on things like the dmca - but here its important everyone backs them up, they can't do it by themselves. so whats left?

i've been reading lots of articles about how business is really getting fedup with ms and how expensive things are nowadays in terms of licences. that tells me there's a lot of money available, if people are unwilling to spend x on licences they will probably be willing to spend x/2 or x/4 to solve that problem once and for all. and there's a lot of companies in this situation, they want to move out of ms's upgrade cycle but gnu/linux doesnt quite cut it in the desktop yet. at the same time, the open source dudes seem to be morally bankrupt (just look at esr...); why doesnt the fsf negotiate with companies to create sort of a fund where everybody chips in and they re-distribute the money according to the votes of the community? (i mean ALL of the community, not only the gnu people). they're like a foundation, so you probably get some tax of that contribution and perhaps a list of sponsors on the website could be done, to make their names more visible. and with the community overseeing it, no one will monopolise the cash, which means gnome/kde people would get a proportional share to the number of developers who vote. also, we could give companies that contribute a vote as well, so that they can say where they'd like the money to be spent.

what y'all think?

"Michael L. Love says the "open-signing" form of encryption that's available with encryption programs such as PGP and GnuPG would keep would-be terrorists from hijacking other people's email to send their messages. Under open signing, the text of the email is open for all to read, but the identify of the sender is authenticated."

There is also some discussion of .NET, and Love says that PGP keyservers could provide an authentication infrastructure to compete with Microsoft in the net services arena. Be sure to see the related Slashdot thread about Microsoft's new authentication proposals.

"Michael L. Love says the "open-signing" form of encryption that's available with encryption programs such as PGP and GnuPG would keep would-be terrorists from hijacking other people's email to send their messages. Under open signing, the text of the email is open for all to read, but the identify of the sender is authenticated."

There is also some discussion of .NET, and Love says that PGP keyservers could provide an authentication infrastructure to compete with Microsoft in the net services arena. Be sure to see the related Slashdot thread about Microsoft's new authentication proposals.

I see some complaints about RMS's speaking out. I found ESR to be much worse, especially considering the fact that ESR didn't even take 24 hours to take political advantage of the situation.
here

According to the comments at newsforge, complaints should not be addressed to SUN. See these comments.

It seems that ESR has written an opinion piece on Newsforge that is sure to get slashdotters up in arms. Sorry couldn't resist the lame pun. Seriously though, it seems like ESR is promoting his personal agenda during this time of crisis. Hardly appropriate.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/11/2 048256&mode=nocomment

The reasons are complicated, and IANAL.

Its explained here to some extent. That story claims its because Maryland has a law (that microsoft helped to pass) which is incompatible with the passport legal B.S.

Take a look at this. It claims to be a "Report" but is obviously whoring for va-linux, who happens to own Newsforge.

Initially it tries to be critical but towards the end we get this wonderful commercial for sourceforge.

The PR rep had a couple of short comments that, while not earth-shaking in their revelation, at least shed a little bit of light on Hohndel's mindset-- here at Newsforge.

We now return you regularly.

Tina Gasperson

It outlines how Largo, in Florida, uses KDE 2.1.1 on 400 NCD thin clients to cater for 800 users. Centered around a single dual 933Mhz processor server, that has 3GB of memory, 18GB of hard disk and redundant power supplies.

1) Largo has been running a Unix shop and thin client network for years. Only the switch to Linux and KDE 2.1.1 is new. I doubt that one or two sysadmins leaving would change things.

2) This is a done deal, not a "someday" or "we plan to" thing. I wandered around Largo city hall and talked to actual, everyday users.

3) I'd like to go back and speak to Dave and Mike in a year, yes -- to see how their plans to use OpenOffice pan out. The biggest holdup (as I wrote in the NewsForge story linked to above) is the lack of a good OpenOffice filter for WordPerfect files.

- Robin

This has been a long time coming, as Newsforge reported on this a month ago :)

No, we should not. The music industry perhaps but not Adobe. Adobe did something "corporately unique" by admitting their mistake. If you have read the strongly worded statement that appeared briefly on adobe.com (it was withdrawn shortly before it was announced that they backed down), you know how a painful mental U-turn it must have been for those whose rage is expressed in that statement. The suits should get the lesson that "hey, if we actually listen to these hippies they will stop spreading that profit-burning bad publicity". Remember that this is about freeing a man who was wrongfully accused, not about lynching a company that had no idea what an outrage their foolish actions would cause.

There is no more to get from Adobe. Next in line is the prosecutors, move along.

Clearly this means that, ultimately, Microsoft's Database Software (which, the commercials tell me, is able to adjust itself if I buy Seymore Butts' latest pic right after picking up Bananas in Pajamas for my non-existent kids) will be able to target customers based on both sitre selection and ass-size.

"We've got a 210-pound male browsing Slashdot, NewsForge and some site in Christmas Island featuring what appears to be an H.R. Giger drawing."

"Narrowing selections... Ok, hit him with the buttered milk duds, Frank Zappa CDs, and all those surplus DeCSS shirts."

"Game, set, and match, bitch."

I've got a cookie I'd like to leave on that server... or bench as the case may be...

For some reason the link didn't link to the article!
Try this one:
here
(http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/07/11/ 185221&mode=thread)
for goat phoebia

Celebrating the release of version 1.0 this last July, 4th. let me impersonate a car-dealer:

Do you want a computer-lab in your school?

Do you need 100% uptime?

Do you want to have a maintenance-free environment?

Do you want to teach, not re-install Windows?

... but you do not want to spend $20,000 and need crash-less computers?

Well, we have a solution. The K-12LTSP v.1.0 project

For about $6,000 (less if you already have "old" computers), you can set-up a lab with e-mail, browsers, office suites, image programs...

On Linux, of course.

Newsforge article

K12LTSP home page

Work with Legacy equipment

... and a " girl magnet " as stated on their site:

Salut and education,

More from Roblimo over at NewsForge Sunday June 24, @07:30PM
- by Robin "Roblimo" Miller - On Saturday, June 23, the primary controller in the router that controls access to all OSDN servers hosted at the Exodus facility in Waltham, MA, suffered a catastrophic failure. The sites affected were Slashdot, freshmeat, NewsForge, and Mediabuilder, among others. The secondary controller did not automatically take over as it shoud have. It did not work when activated manually, either. The first Cisco support people contacted professed to be "amazed" at the situation, saying it was the first time they had seen a failure of this kind. OSDN and Cisco people, working through Saturday night, were unable to cure the problem. Sunday afternoon, OSDN employee Kurt Gray and Cisco rep Scott, working by telephone, were stepping through the router's configuration and, says Kurt, as they worked to undo other changes that had been made, "on one reset everything came back." OSDN network operations were already in the process of rebuilding the company's network to eliminate the router as a potential single point of failure. As of 7 p.m. US EDT most of the sites were available at least part of the time, but full service was not yet restored. There may still be slowdowns or intermttent failures until a permanent fix is made. We'll have a more complete story within a few days. Right now, OSDN network operations staff members are too busy working to talk.

On a much lighter note, it would appear that RedHat, at least, is actually profitable. What's more, they are making a profit at a time when everyone else is feeling a definite crunch.

VA Linux's business plan of selling servers to dot coms looked like a pretty good idea when VC funded flowed like a river, but now that times are tight the hardware market is pretty amazingly brutal.

You should try Newsforge. That's not a shameless plug.

Grant Gross' Newsforge article detailing LinuxOne's tangled web was a great read and showed some impressive investigative journalism.

Get a grip, people.

It's nice to see the small show that my local LUG was in on the front page of Slashdot. I myself could not attend, but reading through the messages on the SLUG mailing list it sounded like a lot of fun, and that they also had a very popular booth. Anyways, if you're interested, a SLUG member posted another article to Newsforge about CTS and SLUG's presence there. And of course you can find pictures here in case you missed that part in the original newsforge article.

With Jacques Le Marois (CEO & Co-Founder of Mandrakesoft) on: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/05/22/1 754212&mode=thread

With Gaël Duval (Creator of Linux-Mandrake & Co-Founder of Mandrakesoft) on: http://lwn.net/2001/features/MandrakeSoft.php3

Worth a read.

Converting MBR System Disks for 64-bit Windows Whistler

Partition Manager Help

LILO

LILO mini-HOWTO

Multi-Booting with LILO

Multiple Boot Advice for x86

The Ultimate Windows Whistler News

Usability comparison: Windows Whistler vs. Gnome 1.2, KDE 2.0, Mandrake Update

Agreed. I submitted this interview/article about a great fellow in our community, Loïc Dachary, (well ok my community) and it was rejected. I believe my problem was in mentioning the fact that I've worked with him. I guess being an insider isn't all that it's cracked up to be. :-)

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;

I can't see how this is bad for Linux gaming in general. Maybe Loki and Tribsoft have publishers beating down their doors, saying "Please port my game so we can sell a few thousand more copies in three months!" That's probably not happening.

TransGaming's subscriber base could really legitimise Linux gaming in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised if that helps the porters in the long term.

--

To me, the real story here is that IBM has decided to promote KDE. Why? Is it:

1. That KDE has a reputation for being a pretty easy transition from Windows?
2. KDE needs themes?
3. GNOME still has a too far to go before meta-themeing makes us all weep tears of joy?
4. IBM is leaning toward KDE for some other reason?

Coincidentally, a piece I wrote for Newsforge about this very topic just went live in time for this story: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/16/1 931237

The SMP Athlon Motherboard will be arriving this quarter. The First of which will be the Tyan Thunder K7.

And above all else, avoid "clueless suit" quotes in press releases. No corporate officer in a computer or Internet company with more than a few dozen employees ever has anything to say about a product that a journalist wants to hear. You're better off quoting some of the people who actually made the product -- and making sure tech reporters can get hold of that person easily for more info.

But you won't be allowed to follow these rules. Most PR material is put out to make execs feel studly, not to get stories written.

- Robin

I though i rememberd a story like this not too long ago. Here's the link.

Seriously.

I was genuinely happy to see Rob and Jeff get a big payday. They've created a fantastic site and they deserve wealth far more than any of the guys who started lookalike pet food or B2B sites.

But the level of arrogance in the Linux world of 1999-2000 was just so out of hand that it simply had to get spanked. If you believe in karma in the original sense, there's no way the people shouting about world domination on the basis of some slipshod desktops and clones of Photoshop and Excel circa 1993 could continue to prosper without throwing the whole universe out of whack.

Speaking of ESR, he and Bruce Perens are back in the news. Gee, with journalism like this, you wonder why OSDN is in trouble?

By the way, the post about Bowie Poag is probably the funniest thing I've ever read here.

... Two authors of other popular SSH products posted messages at securepoint.com Wednesday, saying Ylönen hasn't moved to halt their use of the SSH name.

Ian Goldberg, author of Top Gun ssh for the Palm Pilot, wrote that he exchanged email with Ylönen and others at SSH Communications Security in the summer of 1997. "Tatu even asked me if I'd be willing to do an implementation of the 2.0 protocol," Goldberg wrote. "No one ever asked me to not use the 'ssh' name in the program title."

Robert O'Callahan, who released Teraterm SSH for Windows in 1998, wrote that several universities have distributed his product to their students, and it's been distributed on CD software collections, including with the book "Unix Secure Shell." He said he's never heard from SSH Communications Security about a trademark violation...

makes you think about the real reasons behind SSH's sudden change of mind...huh!!

maybe we should pettition SSH to change their name to something else so we stop confusing their product with the protocol !!! showmethemoneySSH or even just $$H (thats going to hurt the shell now!)

It seems pretty obvious, at least among people posting here, that "ssh" is thought of as the name of a protocol first, a command second, and MAYBE a "brand name" after that.

For marketing reasons, maybe SSH, Inc might be better off changing THEIR name to something less generic.

On the "OpenSSH" side, perhaps instead of removing/changing the "ssh" part of the name, they could change the name to something like "OtherSSH" or "DifferentSSH" or something equally obviously "not the SSH, inc product".

While I've got to give the guy credit for apparently writing his own cease-and-desist letters before shoveling money on lawyers, the wording of the letter posted to Bugtraq (as reported by this Newsforge article) didn't give me a good impression. In the last paragraph he writes:

"I now ask you to also change the name ScanSSH to something else. Since you have already been notified of the trademark and have been asked to cease the infringement of the SSH trademark, I can see no other possible reason for your choice of this name than to willfully damage our trademarks and brand name."[emphasis added]

Maybe this is just standard issue legal blather, but to a non-lawyerly person like me it sounds like he's completely refusing to acknowledge the established use of SSH as a "generic" description for things involving the SSH protocol, and instead claiming everyone using it is obviously just out to "get" him.

My take, anyway...

Here's the story they did about LinuxOne a little while ago.

Here's the story they did about LinuxOne a little while ago.

Linuxworld invites you to design the LSB logo. "The winner will be announced on LinuxWorld.com and will become eligible for an award given at the August LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. Best of all, this logo will appear on every Linux product box that conforms to the LSB standard." Not too much extra info there though :-(

This is the so called ASP Loophole.

Hopefully this will in fact be fixed in version 3.0 of the GPL.
--

The review is pretty unfavorable, still won't keep me away though.

Um, no, Vistasource is continueing to support Applixware, they've just decided to integrate it with their line of server-based office apps (anyware).

here's one story on it (see the response at the bottom and a the direct link story. Note that the major change is the the name - from Applixware to Anyware Office Client. I don't know, but this may be because the original company, Applix, still exists, but doesn't do the office suite, they spun that off to VistaSource.

Well, not for the My Computer Idea - but take a look at the tasklist - it seems to indicate that there are 8 Internet Explorer Windows Running, but they only take one slot up! Great! Personally, when you have a lot of windows of the same task open (generally netscape, emacs, etc) - You don't want clutter. Lets steal this feature before MS even comes out with it!

Ok, thats my 5 cents. (which is about 2 Cents USD)

There's an article on this very subject at Newsforge, which brings up the very real problem of MS pushing home users to reject unsigned apps as being inferior or 'dangerous'.

Your Linux news sites on OSDN are Linux.com and NewsForge. Slashdot is just News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.

And yes, both BSD and LSD came out of Berkeley.

Slashdot is Slashdot. It are what it are and it ain't what it ain't. I have always liked it the way it is, and hope like hell it never loses its character by trying to be something it isn't.

- Robin

But even in the best-organized company, your expectation that you will only spend 20% of your time managing is totally unrealistic. This never happens. If you're lucky, you *may* spend close to 50% of your time coding in between taking care of your crew, and as far as I'm concerned, taking care of your crew is a manager's primary responsibility in any field of endeavor from fast food to programming.

I am also a big believer in hands-on leadership; if you spend time working alongside your people you will always have a better grasp of what they are doing than if you are separated from them.

But you will *not* do all that much coding once you start taking responsibility for others' work.

How much have you seen me post on Slashdot lately? And how much do I really write on NewsForge, our latest site? It's frustrating, because writing is the *fun* part of my job.

But there is also a great deal of satisfaction to be found in helping others do their jobs well. In my case, I work with great people who are also my friends -- the ones you see on Slashdot, NewsForge, Linux.com, and the rest of the OSDN sites -- and what keeps me going on the detail-bogged days is knowing that if I can keep upper-upper management from screwing with Taco, Hemos, Emmett, timothy, and the rest of the gang, I am helping to get more done than if I was simply busting my own ass and not worrying about anything else. Plus, they know what I do and appreciate it. This is the big reward of being a *competent* manager -- kudos from coworkers whose lives you make easier by taking shit they'd otherwise be forced to take themselves. Any extra money you get is nothing compared to the respect and gratitude of the people you work with every day.

I view front-line management as a necessary task, one that *somebody* has to do, and if those of us who have some competence at [coding; writing; art; design; auto repair; you name it] don't take it on, we and all our friends/coworkers will be cursed with incompetent bosses forevermore.

I have never wanted to be in management, and don't really enjoy it. You probably won't like it much either (most of the time). But it's clean indoor work with no heavy lifting, and somebody has to do it, so why not you? :)

Robin 'roblimo' Miller
reluctant editor-in-chief,
Open Source Development Network

Think of how schools in snow country sometimes tack on extra class days at the end of the school year if they've had more winter snow days than expected. Same thing. :)

Back to my stupor now...

- Robin