Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Buzzwords, Fruit, DIY
How soon is now? Unlike a lot of cool-sounding soon-to-be-released, wouldn't-it-be-cool promiseware, it's interesting to see hardware that actually makes it to market before its underlying idea is doomed by advances sweeping past. Larry Ellison's $199 Linux box mentioned on Slashdot a while back appears to have reached that point. The NIC Web site has changed, and no longer is the only way to order one donating it to an underserved school.
Why don't you find out for yourself? jesser writes "Many slashdotters asked on the lock-in attack story whether/when mozilla would be safe from this type of attack. Here are some links to bugzilla bug entries in case any slashdotters would like to work on making mozilla more secure:
- bug 29346: Prevent repeating pop-up windows
- bug 33448: disable 'new window' when close box clicked
- bug 22049: javascript alert should not put up extermely modal dialog"
You've got everything now. Patrick Mullen writes "I just finished my review of XFree86 4.0.1. I've had a lot of requests to see a feature on this when it hit (apparently they liked the last article), and here it is. There's benchmarks, overview of the bug fixes, and new features. In addition to the review, I've also got the new NVidia 0.9-4 drivers which allow NVidia's line of cards to function correctly on XFree86 4.0.1 available on the website-and these are not available on even NVidia's website at the time."
That joke isn't funny any more. A number of readers wrote in with harsh words about the report that Apple forced the removal of rumors regarding an alleged next-generation translucent-cased machine.
Kaufmann, for instance, wrote: "Remember the whole story about MOSR's article regarding the new generation of Macs getting pulled at the request of Apple Legal? Well, an Alan Smithee is claiming that it's a hoax. To prove it, he's put up the very same article on the Personal Homepage service provided by Apple at Mac.com. Further investigation seems necessary." Note: not that putting an article on Apple's Personal Homepage service proves it's worthiness, but it does beg the question of Apple being quick to pounce on it. "Alan Smithee" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, though -- that's the pseudonym directors traditionally use to distance themselves from films they consider too bad to bear their real names;)
Similarly, an unnamed correpsondent had this to say: "The Apple cube that has been talked about the past few days is a total hoax. Some guy sent an email with fake specs to MacOSRumors and they posted it. Kind of makes one question the credibility of Ryan Meader saying that Apple forced him to take it down. Anyways you can see the fake email at: [this link]."
Stop me if you think you've heard this one before ... QBasic_Dude writes "Richard Stallman wrote about the Problems of the Plan Nine License. Technocrat has a discussion about this, and so does Advogato."
Richard cites what he considers odious provisions in the putatively "open source" Plan 9 license (like this one: "You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.") and responds with typical Stallman pithiness, "This prohibits modifications for private use, denying the users a basic right." There's much more to read there, and worth your time. (As are the discussions at Advogato and Technocrat!)
These NIC's may very well be cool...if you can hack it to accept a hard drive. Has anyone tried this yet??
phuzzie
The GPL - and Stallman himself - are quite clear that you aren't forced to relase stuff you hack on for your own use, even if the output (eg, gcc generated binaries, HTML pages sent over HTTP) is sent out to people.
Um, I believe that if you distribute binaries, you have to give away source code.
-jfedor
offtopic but yeah..there was an effort to start a debian gnu/bsd..i believe its died or in secret for now. i remember seeing a few webpages but the BSD guys attacked the project initiators fairly viciously and it died. it was hosted at some university from what i recall. again this is IMHO. i dont know exactly what happenned...feel free to correct me if you wish. having a freebsd with a redhat look and feel (red hat BSD?) would be *really* kewl IMHO. are you listening redhat ?
/me wishing openbsd could do SMP and had more drivers..*sigh*
I read the original article and I've followed the NIC almost on a daily basis. The article I submitted announced the general availability of the device, which was news, and included the information contained here, plus a "micro-review." I love Slashdot, but I see my complaint repeated regularly in Slashback. I know the sheer volume of submissions must be overwhelming, but it would be great if you could catalog recent *quality* attributions so as to avoid this. Each time it happens, you alienate a Slashdotter and contributor. And, yes, I see *lots* of feedback from people who obviously haven't bothered to even read their referenced article. I'm very sure that the same people are prolific in submitting articles, too.
that's not true:)
Lots of people submitted news about the NIC before it was really on sale again. The thing itself isn't that new (we covered it a while ago - the link I gave is to May 9th) but a lot of folks didn't use the search engine to find that out.
Your accusation of "rewriting without attribution" is simply way off base. In a snippet that short, there's bound to be overlap of information (now selling, cost, no longer donationware), but saying that someone plagiarized you is simply not nice. I saw several submissions about this, but yours was not among the ones that I read.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Ah so no cookies? that is nice.
Too bad they still qualify as web bugs, since they do point at doubleclick's servers. And /.'s cookie is not secure, therefore stealable and sendable to any site (a troll recently created a cokie stealing exploit that forged trolls from /. users unwary enough to click on a link to his homepage).
So /. might not only allow doubleclick to see ip based profiles, but give it a username as well.
Sure it's (afaik) completely unsubstantianted, but it's plausible, and who doesn't love a nice major-version-number rumor!
What's that? Gnome 1.2's already out and mainstream? Damn. It's a conspiracy against the conspiracy theorists, I tell ya!
It's only software!
Actually this is an old joke albeit not necessarily in reference to Ellison.
Not from what I've heard, but from a reliable drunken lunatic source I have heard that they've started attending Hope Chapel (local church in my area)
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Hey, Timothy, why does Slashdot tell me that my page was generated for me by a "flock of rabid geese"? Geese come in gaggles, not flocks, and they're avians, not mammals, so they can't get rabies. It's randomly generated, I know, but you have to fix this one. It's a showstopper.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
My experience is different. The partition table on my completely standard Western Digital 27 gig drive with RedHat linux on it, and spare partitions I originally created with the intention of putting a future OS upgrade on Mandrake 7.1 install managed to trash. You can duplicate the test: create with fdisk a disk that has two / parts, 1 swap, 1 extended, 2 /vars, 2 /usr's, etc, alternating. If you use mandrake's GUI (which something led me to believe is disk druid? Am I wrong about that?) you cannot rewrite the same partition table "boundaries" (to get Reiser) and suddenly, partitions that were not overlapping are overlapping. Furthermore, it screws you in the very first step where it says "need to save the partition table."
I completely agree that not everyone needs to edit partition tables, but there is no excuse for trashing existing disks without warning or recourse, and they provide no fdisk alternative. That's why I called it a piece of shit.
I go back to my point about why would you want to switch distros just to get a point release of a couple dozen apps? You could just as easilly download the latest release of those apps and install them -- or wait a month or so for the next release of the distro that you're using.
because I'm not interested in keeping track of what is in dozens of point releases, but I like to benefit from the bug fixes, and I like to upgrade as soon as possible when there are spec and format changes in config files and stuff like that. I find if I fall too far behind, an upgrade can become quite onerous because there are too many /etc files that have totally changed. Also, by getting good at it and streamlining the system build process, I live in less fear of trashing my system. I also get to experiment with many more distros and installs so I can make informed decisions about what choices to make next time.
for example, if I want to use Reiser, I wouldn't just have to ugrade the RedHat kernel on my system, I'd have to ugrade it on several systems, and remember that I'd need to upgrade it on any future installs, and merge in the other kernel features (e.g. ATA66) that I need. Using a complete distro is much cleaner, and the alternative is not "wait a month" but 3 or 4 months which can be a long time.
only if you redistribute a copy of program are you required to give the modified version. this would onyl apply to binary only programs. You aren't redistributing the program when someone goes to your site. You are giving them the output of the program. that is different. You are entitled to keep your changes secret.
That is all,
Joseph Nicholas Yarbrough
Attorney at Heart
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
You are not violating the GPL.
What you are doing is not forbidden by the GPL. The GPl just says that if you wanted to distribute it, the source code would have to be included (its quite hard to distribute php w/o the source). So as long as you dont distribute it, the GPL does not applies to you.
What you are doing is exactly the right that RMS is trying to protect and that the Plan9 License violates.
Anyway, thanks for your take on it; I'm gonna sleep a little better now I think. ;-)
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Huh? Your proposition is as ridiculous as saying that any email that I compose with an Open Source email program should be available for others to use, or that my GnuCash balance sheets should be open for RMS to go over, or that my thesis, written in TeX with emacs, should be freely available on my website for others to download...
Oh, wait, my thesis will be available on my website for others to download. Now if only I could finish it, instead of responding to trollbait like this... :)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
The four step method is a trade secret of the collective. We have already identified you. The personal contents of you cubicle have been assimilated and the stuffed penguin in your bottom draw vaporized. The collective cannot be stopped.
We are Microsoft. You will be Innovated(tm). Resistance it futile.
IMHO you won't ever see a Redhat branded BSD - Bob Young doesn't like the license (I asked him about it at an expo) - GPL protects the code they release, whereas BSD License doesn't - that was his specific concern.
ok, so he's complaining about not being able to make private modifications, when the GPL doesn't allow this either? is he going BSDL then? that'd be a nice turn of events...doubt if anyone would really give a damn either way.
The only time I have netscape (4.73) lock on me is on some far out dns calls to ad sites, or one of those "ping-pong" situations when News.com tries to hook up an ad. The best solution is to install Junkbuster and block ads.* etc, and a lot of the ad lookups go away. I think this mostly has to do with dblclk's cookie situation (it tosses about a dozen if you trap them) and the fact that one cookie goes to various servers in their empire. DNS makes a locking call for a lookup for some reason under netscape. Using a proxy such as squid (lost the url) will greatly reduce this problem.
good luck!
Lowmag.net
You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.
... and so on?
I thought that the GPL essentially demanded this too, except that 'Original Contributor' is replaced with 'Anyone you distribute to'. Granted, if you never distribute, under the GPL you don't have to release source (if I'm correct), but this still seems relatively reasonable.
and may, at Your option, include a reasonable charge for the cost of any media.
So he shut out commercial distros from making money from selling CDs. But they can still provide support, and make money that way, right? Again, I don't see a huge problem here.
Distribution of Licensed Software to third parties pursuant to this grant shall be subject to the same terms and conditions as set forth in this Agreement,
How is this different than 'your modified versions must be distributed under the GPL also,' which if IIRC is one of the GPL's conditions?
Anybody know if the other "redhat-like" RPM distros are as similar and painless?
Yup. Looking back, I can see why people would have parse errors. I wan't very clear.
You can get some nice insight into the huge problems with Meader's sight over at http://www.mosr.net/. The problem seems to be that certain Slashdot editors like him, unaware of the gaping holes which appear in his reporting on an alarmingly consistent basis. Perhaps he'll finally be exposed with this latest fabricated story. Apple should sue him for libel. Bongs away!
--
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I'd be happy to buy a $1,000 Linux box - I'm tired of duel booting, and also sick of buying something only to find out that it's not the ideal component for Linux.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
"I've also got the new NVidia 0.9-4 drivers which allow NVidia's line of cards to function correctly on XFree86 4.0.1"
Have you tried this with anything requires OGL? I've had bad luck in the past with "drivers that function" with X-Free only to have problems with programs that make use of OGL.
I would like to "slash back" to timothy and ask the question nobody will answer:
"Why does slashdot have doubleclick ads on it's site?"
Why! Why? Why.... Here on slashdot you're hard pressed to find a reader that doesn't have something bad to say about doubleclick or knows how to setup junkbuster just to filter doubleclicks nonsense. Why does slashdot use them?
Sure, I'm offtopic, but where else can this post be made.
Ergo, the reason that, at least for a while longer, the Matrox G400 remains the card of choice for Linux/BSD (and a good card for Windows, too, if you care :-)... though Voodoo 3 still has the best 3D support (2D is a bit lackluster, IMHO, unfortunately)
If violence isn't solving your problems, you're not using enough of it. - MAJ Misato Katsuragi
I second the question. I know it probably pays the rent, but there sure are other ways of accomplishing the same. I don't like doubleclick and I'd like to see an answer to ashpool7's question.
That joke isn't funny any more. A number of readers wrote in with harsh words about the report that Apple forced the removal of rumors regarding an alleged next-generation translucent-cased machine.
The link points to http://slashdot.org and not to what it supposed to. Please fix.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Interesting, Microsoft refers to bugs as features, and Mozilla refers to features as bugs.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
I mean, MOSR never had a real reputation to begin with. They knew nobody would really believe that ridiculous story. So they decided to blow it up, and make a nice mess while they're at it.
After this whole embarassing mess, they remain an untrustworthy rumour site - but now they're an untrustworthy site that's on Slashdot twice, an untrustworthy site that's got a lot of people talking about it, an untrustworthy site with a shitload of page views.
Whether it's true or not, Ryan Meader can only win from this. Evidently, he did.
(Makes me wonder about the Alan Smithee who allegedly denounced him... if Ryan can make up the story, he can sure call himself a liar and put it up for display on homepage.mac.com.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Everyone is out to make a buck, don't deny it. People don't mind making some extra money. Why does slashdot publish articles by john katz and take things out of context? To generate banner hits. Check out the slogan on andover.net and then check my .sig line.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They told you to stop? Can I see some of those bug numbers? That's crazy.
(And I did put a but I think Mozilla is munging it to lt sp sl A gt
Joseph Elwell.
It boils down to: you only have to release the source to what you choose to distribute. If you choose only to distribute the unmodified pages, that's all the source you need to distribute.
The GPL - and Stallman himself - are quite clear that you aren't forced to relase stuff you hack on for your own use, even if the output (eg, gcc generated binaries, HTML pages sent over HTTP) is sent out to people.
I've been trying to get the NIC story posted for days. And that's not the first time they did this to me either: last April 1st, the editors thought it was somehow funny to run entire articles through crappy automated translators and post them. They happened to choose Portuguese, so, being a good sport and a native speaker, I posted a translation of the article text. So they simply copied the whole thing, verbatim, and posted it under the Portuguese text, on the main article body. Without any kind of attribution.
This is only one out of several episodes. Just goes to show how much we can trust Slashdot. At least on this Slashback they bothered to give me credit on one out of two stories.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think the poster means that if you alter gcc, compile a program with it, and distribute the binary of that program, you don't have to distribute your modified version of gcc, or the source of the program you compiled using your modified gcc.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
I should point out that David Tseng (of http://www.morrissey-solo.com) helped me find those titles by pointing me to http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/.
...
And re: The Smiths: The day I turned 12, I got The Queen is Dead on cassette from a guy named Jeff Wilke, which cassette then took up a very large space in my brain as I listened to it nonstop for months. The older sister of a middle-school chum (Meg, sister of Mike Storey) got me hooked on Meat is Murder, Hatful of Hollow and Louder than Bombs. "I won't share you" has a pretty emotional twist for me, lemme tell you
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Geese can be said to come in flocks as well as in gaggles; gaggle is mostly an archaism, though it is a nice one.
And the geese around Holland (where the scripts were thought of) have been hardened by years of industrial pollution, foul weather, fouler Norweigan- and Dutch-based swearing, and the day-of-the-dead fumes which permeate the region, whitening flesh and bracing the lungs. Evolution has formed them into extraordinary birds -- they can catch rabies, write symphonies and cook a six-course dinner -- and think nothing of it. They manifest more tropical diseases than you'd care to know about, too. Just shrug 'em off.
Or so I hear.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Great message Kaufmann! Nailed it right on the head.
I have too complained often on Slashdot regarding the lack of credibility of Ryan Meader. However, it appears the editors of Slashdot have not gotten the message, at least until now. I can understand getting scammed by a potato powered Linux server once but not by Ryan Meader four times. I am always amazed by the 'credibility' placed on MacOSRumors. I guess its like P.T. Barnum said, "A sucker born every minute!".
Ryan Meader's reporting can be best described as FUD and harmful to consumers of Apple products. His unfounded rumor mongering has negatively affected the sales of Apple products. My main Macintosh vendor rep once complained to me regarding lost PowerBook G3 (Lombard) sales because of persistent rumors of a new model (Pismo) appearing in the short term. Those (completely unfounded) rumors were fostered by MacOSRumors. His information turned out to be false (a shocker!).
I buy six figure amounts of computer hardware a year for myself and company -- mainly Mac. Because of Mr. Ryan's reporting, I passed along that fact to the main sponsor, Club Mac, explaining that the cost of advertising on MacOSRumors is much more than the rates charged by Mr. Meader. They were losing access to a budget I control and probably more than just mine. However, I noticed that Ryan Meader has just 'signed up' PayPal as a new sponsor. I guess this, more than anything, is signaling the end of MacOSRumors. Rest in pieces!
P.S. If you visit MacOSRumors now, you will find that all traces of the 'G4 Cube' story and the 'Take down the story' e-mail from the lawyer at Apple named 'Sue' have been erased. I wonder if Apple has any legal recourse for the fake e-mail. It would be wonderful to see the Apple lawyers (the real kind) go after a worthwhile target for a change!
Has anyone actually managed to download those drivers? I've been trying for around an hour now, and the site is still down. Anyone care to post a mirror, or I'll mirror if someone'll get me the drivers.
My email is dyfrgi at otter dot yi dot org, btw.
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END OF LINE
Thats a feature that might cause me to actually install the thing!!!
X-Window 3.6+
Are they just confused, or are they spewing misinformation? Here's another example: What resolutions does the video support?
The NIC displays at 800 x 600 resolution with 65,536 million colors.
Wow, 65,536 million colors... that's an amazing color depth!
RMS won't be happy until they change the name to Plan GNine. Sheesh.
It looks like the 3D acceleration support is expanding. For instance, 4.0 accelerated the G400 but not the G200, but now the G200 has been added to the list.
For the current status of your favorite 3D acceleration card, visit the DRI User's Guide at SourceForge.
Caveat: Before you rush out to upgrade, notice that some of the cards require recent 2.3.* kernels. (Of course, kernel testers are needed too!)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I wonder if you could extract the code from the cd and write your own code.
Something like making the cd a type of BIOS so that you can add a usb
hard drive and be able to run a real linux and do real stuff.
Yes linux does have usb support but I am not sure about support for drives
last I heard it was rather ifffy.
How about hacking a Hard drive on to it and having the linux of choice on it.
Just a thought!
Elephant: a mouse built to government specs
Since installing the package and configuring it, I have already had visitors ask me for the source, which I gladly provided of course. However, I provided them the source to the original package, --not-- the altered PHP scripts (which incidentally contain sensitive information such as my MySQL database name and password.)
My main concern is this; if I use this software to create a web site, and it is GPL'ed, I do not want to redistribute the exact files that are in my HTML directory, for obvious reasons. Am I in violation of the GPL, if someone decides they want to enforce it? Are they subsequently entitled to a tarball of my web site root directory? If they are, there is no possible way I can continue using this package, and therefore could not continue to support Open Source for this project. :-(
I have already find a few minor bugs and have been submitting them back into the CVS tree, so I'm still contributing to the development of the package; however, some people are now talking about the GPL being modified to encompass web sites being made with Open Source tools. If the GPL is changed to encompass web sites as opposed to binary distributions, could mean some serious problems for me.
Any advice that anyone has about this matter would definitely be something I would appreciate. Thanks!
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I guess so...
Look at the colour depth of the video card on that NIC:
What resolutions does the video support?
The NIC displays at 800 x 600 resolution with 65,536 million colors.
Verbatim from their FAQ.
With the cheapness of video cards these days, I would have thought it was difficult to find a 1Mb card...
--
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
I personally believe that the best way to help mozilla is to use it daily. Report bugs when you can, and try hanging out in #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org on a regular basis. #mozillazine is a really good way to get started, although if you want to code #mozilla can be more educational.
Joseph Elwell.
IIRC, isn't the JavaScript "onunLoad" event the one that allows for popup ads when you close the window in the first place? Wouldn't disabling that disable the porn ads?
I'd also recommend a way to completely break out of javascript popup windows. You could theoretically have popup windows that go forever, locking you in the program since there's no native "escape out of script" button.
finally some funny stuff on the internet.had me laughing my ass off.thanks.
Hm... I just saw this add on slashdot... looks an awfull lot like doubleclick to me.
n er2.gif
I needed to reload the page ~10 times to see it.
Slashdot also seems to use ads from akaimatech.
http://m.doubleclick.net/viewad/448249-suse_ban
What is the reason behind the poor (apalling, actually) performance of 3Dfx Voodoo3 cards on XFree86 4.x? I thought 3Dfx have had their DRI drivers around for a good while now. More hacking, is that the answer, or are there some architechtural structures that cause the slowdown?
Are you James Glassman, or are you just trolling for him?
On one of the most recent columns that OSOpinion (for what reason I don't know) republished from Glassman's crappy securities site TechCentralStation, he told that exact same joke. In the exact same words.
So, are you him, or are you just a market-enamored troll who happened to read Glassman's article, liked the joke and decided to go around spreading this stupid meme?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Slashdot does NOT use doubleclick.net for any of its ads. Apparently you are unware that there are other ways to put images on pages for revenue -- ways that don't involve leaving cookies or tracking you as you surf. This article explains AndOver.Net's ad delivery system, which incidentally is an open-source project hosted on Sourceforge. As a matter of fact, /. only sets one cookie, which contains your login information.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Go eat a carrot.
http://dtum.livejournal.com