Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Film, Solaris, Contention
Sun giveth and taketh away. axehind writes: "This ZDNet article tells us StarOffice will no longer be free. The decision completes the transition of the StarOffice suite back to being a paid product, as it was when Sun bought the software along with its maker, Germany's Star Division, in 1999. Sun says it will stop free downloads of StarOffice 5.2 at midnight on Wednesday night."
On the other hand, The Pi-Guy writes: "It has been confirmed by Sun that Solaris 9 will be on Intel platforms - you can get it for free on DVD here. Quite surprising considering that a few months ago they were saying 'No S9 at all on x86!'"
Update: 05/29 03:03 GMT by T : As several readers have noticed, the page no longer indicates Solaris 9 once you've chosen x86 as your platform of choice -- looks like a case of mistaken identity.
Strong opinions tend to draw answers. Guillaume Laurent writes "Given that Murray mentions me in his interview, and that I disagree with most of what he says, I felt the need to reply. Enjoy."
Six seems a tad low. supafly613 writes: "Six people were arrested in South Africa over the weekend on suspicion of being involved in the infamous 'Nigerian' e-mail and letter fraud. Four of those detained were Nigerian, one was Cameroonian and the sixth was South African. Police in South Africa believe that the six are part of an international fraud and drug-dealing cartel, sending out thousands of e-mail and letters in an attempt to defraud."
Lost in cyberspace ... Mindphunk writes "Six hackers remain to be found so that Mozilla can be relicensed under the LGPL and GPL as well as the MPL original license. This is really important if Mozilla is going to interoperate readily with all kinds of free software. Perhaps the power of Slashdot can find them in time for the 1.0 release?? The missing hackers are:
- David Nebinger
- 'Uncle George'
- Sanjay Gupta
- Makoto Kato
- Thierry LeBouiland
- Jiwei Wang"
This is a followup to our earlier mention of the missing hackers.
Still waiting for NetBSD :) llordsmiff writes: "According to this, the world's first Xtender Xbox modchip preorders were shipped today (24 May). There are installation pictures also. "It plays back all import and backups on all worldwide sold Xbox machines." It's also supposed to play any DVD, regardless of region."
Wonder if this will be 'content protected.' neema writes: "Just a bit of an update to an older post, but Revolution OS will apparently be released on DVD (region free) in September for 20 dollars. Trailer and first 8 minutes can be found here. I, for one, welcome the chance to see it."
I dont understand how something can be licensed under both LGPL and GPL at the same time.. That seems like a contradiction.. Can someone explain it?.. TIA..
It sure looks like it reads "Solaris 8 on Intel" to me.
signal, noise, to me it's all the same.
I juste tried to download the trailer of Revolution OS, and since I use Mozilla 1.0rc2 (yes, I know 1.0rc3 has been released) on Linux, I'm not able to view it. It seems to be offered in Real, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and Flash(?, probably for surfing the site and not the actual film). So I'm not sure who's targetted by this... but I know I'm not able to view it easily (could fire up Mplayer, but still need a copy of the actual file). Not very good for a film of this nature.
Anybody had more luck than me?
But when I submitted the page I got this msg:
And of course it was *not* blank. And when I went back - i didn't have the option for Solaris 9 but then it was " Solaris 8 on Intel". Guess you gotta be quick...
The info I got on the scam was that there is a definite Nigerian connection. A number of people duped in the scheme have gone off to meet people in Nigeria, some have disappeared entirely.
Scams of that sort are much easier to conduct in a country where laws are not exactly diligently enforced so Nigeria would be a much more likely base than the US. Compared to the Nigerian mafia Tony Soprano is a real small time player, all he has is a garbage business and a strip joint, in Nigeria they run the country.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It would be better if they released it for region 2 only instead, at least for a while. People could then complain to them about how they can't view it in the USA. Then, they could make an official statement that they as the copyright holders do not mind if viewers in region 1 use any other player or process (including DeCSS) to play their own legitimately purchased DVDs.
Voilla! Now DeCSS has substantial non-infringing uses and since they have the explicit authorization of the copyright-holder, the DMCA can no longer be used against it.
Sure, it might cost them a few sales at the beginning. But the free press would more than make up for it when they quietly release region 1 disks a few months later.
Find free books.
No doubt this will be modded as a troll by some stupid moderator, but:
I keep hearing TrollTech/Qt supporters saying that it makes writing software easier - and yet, all the best and most advanced apps are available for GTK and GNOME. There's a pretty big conceptual break here, either there are better hackers writing GTK/Gnome stuff, or it's simply not true that writing quality apps is easier with Qt. It may be easier to write a 4 lines "Click me" demo, but like Visual Basic it's claims of being easier are hollow when faced with *real* programs.
My opinion is that Qt and GTK divide pretty strictly along language lines (which is why the front lines like gtkmm are such battlegrounds) - C++ and-nothing-else zealots go with Qt. Anyone who realises that multiple languages are important goes with GTK/Gnome. Me? I'm a multiple language man... the bindings that have been hacked together for Qt are extremely low quality and very fragile (not surprising given the mess that is the C++ ABI). Gtk/GNOME gives me a huge choice of lanugages and lots of flexiblity... and it is this that I think has fostered so many of the excellent applications.
As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.
(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
If you are still in Knoxville, then it is a "pot luck." And, by Gawd, any carbonated drink is a Coke irregardless of flavor or manufacturer.
Don't mean to be a nerd, but a potlatch was an orgy of a social festival from what is now the Pacific Northwest USA / Southwest CA in which the chieftan who gave away the most stuff to his opponents and killed the most of his own slaves was officially the most important chief for the next year. Sounds like quite the party to me, they probably ate better during the potlatch than otherwise.
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'