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've never tried Solaris (to my knowledge), but I'd love to. It's a good thing that I found the page where they give it away for free before it got posted on here on Slashdot. Now I might actually have a chance to get a copy ;). Thanks, [H]ardOCP!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Hmm. I looked at the sun link provided above, and it gives you 2 choices:
Solaris 9 for Sparc
Solaris 8 for Intel
Are you sure they're releasing 9 for intel?
FROM THE DESK OF: MR. WORGEE G. SHUB
Corporate (Special) Trust Fund,
United Political Parties of America,
Contract Award Committee,
Washington DC USA
Dear Esteemed Nigerian Sir:
I am the Chairman of the Contract Award committee and my committee is solely responsible for awarding and payment of contracts on behalf of the United Political Parties of America. My Committee has received payments from Enron, Microsoft, Walt Disney, and many other large American companies that we then disbursed in accordance with United States law to the intended politicians in return for government services rendered to The Corporations. We overshot the contracted sum by USD35 Million. We have paid the politicians and withholding the balance of Thirty-Five Million United States Dollars. Since the existing domestic laws forbid civil servants from opening, operating and maintaining foreign accounts, we do not have the expertise to transfer this balance of funds to a foreign account.
Due to the salubrious investment and taxation climate in Nigeria, as outlined in FMF A26 Unit 3B paragraph "D" of the Auditor General of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Report of NOV. 1999 about annual estimated petroleum revenues of 28billion US Dollars, and especially opportunities relateed to the late Head of State General Sani Abacha who died on 8th June 1998, which we have become aware of through various emails we have received from your countrymen about the supply of Agricultural Machines and spare parts to the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, we have prepared to pay a commission to a worthy individual like yourself equal to 25% of the total sum transfered while 5% will be reserved for incidental expenses that both parties will incur in the course of actualizing this transaction and the balance of 70% will be kept for the Committee members.
If you know you are capable of helping us actualize our life's dream, you should send to me immediately the details of your bank particulars or open a new account where we can transfer the money(US$35M)which you will hold in trust for us until we come over there for our own share.
As soon as you open the account, send by e-mail to me immediately the details of the account viz: Name of bank, address, routing number, telex number, Account number, Tel and Fax number.You should also include the name of your company, your personal address, Tel and Fax numbers for further communication.
Note that this transaction will be concluded within 10 working days from the day you give your consent.
Sincerely yours,
Worgee G. Shub
Chairman of Disbursements,
Corporate (Special) Trust Fund,
United Political Parties of America,
Contract Award Committee,
Washington DC USA
tel: 1-900-CON-4YOU
NOTE THAT FOR THE CONFIDENTIALITY OF THIS TRANSACTION, WHEN YOU CALL ME THE FIRST THING YOU DO IS FOR YOU TO ASK ME WHAT IS THE CODE, AND MY RESPONSE WILL BE (055).IF I DO NOT TELL YOU (055) THEN KNOW YOU ARE NOT
TALKING TO ME. DROP THE PHONE IMMEDIATELY AND CALL ME BACK TILL I GIVE YOU THE CODE WORD. THIS IS DUE TO JAMMING TELECOMMUNICATION DEVICES IN YOUR COUNTRY AS A RESULT OF THE BOMB EXPLOSION IN A LAGOS MILITARY BASE.
(Thanks to RobLimo)
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
So say I create an offshoot of Mozilla called Boozila, I can pick the LGPL license for this project, which means anyone who derives from my work must abide by the LGPL (or they can go use the original Mozilla source minus my changes and use GPL, or MPL..up to them!).
In essence, it gives developers a bit of a choice over which licenses they want to support while using the codebase...They are free to choose GPL, LGPL or MPL.
6 Mozilla hackers missing.... 6 People arrested for the 'Nigerian' email.
Juxtaposition saves the day.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there sonny. Did you say "Xtender"? You mean they're making the damned thing even bigger?
*sigh* Someone save me a spot in line at IKEA; I'm gonna need a larger entertainment center.
P.S. - I kid, I kid. I swear. I love my XBox. I'm actually dying to slot Morrowind in it... whenever that game gets around to releasing itself. =)
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?
so the answer is no.
(This assumes the EULA hasn't changed since the time you didn't read it.
Coincidentally, the book "Solaris" by Stansislas Lem is being made into a film (for the second time, first time around was by the brilliant, late Andrei Tarkovsky) by Steven Soderbergh. And that's what I thought this slashback was about, at first glance. Oops.
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/
StarOffice may no longer be free but Open Office will remain free.
I think this is part of some master plan to conquer the problem of corporations who dont like free software because nobody is acountable.
Seems like a win-win situation - we get openoffice, corps get staroffice, microsoft get less sales.
Solaris has been running on the x86 since before linux existed.
Died last year. He left the still to me and the pickup to my sister.
Ma got the coffee makers while Pa got the coon hound.
Which is to say, by LGPL'ing your software, you are effectively dual licensing it with the GPL anyway(it's implied).
So, what's the point?
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
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.
This is a denial of service attack on the spammers:
If you get a lot of the Nigerian spam, here's a cute way to fight them. All it takes is two or more spams. Set your email client to forge the address of the first spammer and use that to reply to the second spammer, then switch addresses and reply to the first spammer. Make the replies good, but not identical. Tell them how excited/honor/glad/etc you are to help them in their important/meaningful/lucrative venture.
You will never see the result of this, but you can count on each spammer trying real hard to con the other spammer for at least a couple of messages back and forth (these guys really are tenacious, I've been baiting them regularly and sometimes they just don't give up unless you out and out call them con men).
This attack wastes there time and energy on their like-minded fellow con-men rather than on the suckers that are their true marks. If even 10% of the people who got Nigerian spam did something like this, they would be overwhelmed and crushed by the weight of their own greed.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's close enough. There are only five proper names on that list, and "Uncle George" is obviously a code word for George Dorn.
You might be surprised at which schools are not accredited. Accreditation is most useful for schools without great reputations. After all, everyone knows about Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and similarly presigious places. They know that those schools aren't just handing out degrees to anyone with a big enough stack of cash, so who cares what some agency says? Some of those schools, though, might not want to do everything that whatever accrediting group claims is important, so they may give up formal accreditation to maintain their academic independence. In fact, when I got my degree, Caltech was not accredited as an institution for exactly that reason. Individual departments and programs were accredited by appropriate professional groups, but not the school as a whole.
OTOH, the average man on the street has probably never heard of Backwater State and doesn't know if they have a real program there or not. The only thing they have to go on is what the accrediting agencies say. If they want anyone to take their degrees seriously, they need the accreditation.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Actually, that's incorrect. According to the table here, and similar info elsewhere, it will reset the region code that the DVD dongle writes to your Xbox, but you still require dongles from different regions to play import DVDs. Playback of any region DVDs may require modding the dongle, not just the Xbox itself.
However, the mod will of course allow you to play import games (great for me - if I move back to Australia, I'd prefer to take my Xbox & games with me, rather than selling the lot & buying it all over again in a new region).
Even more interesting, it will allow the Xbox to run unsigned code. This opens up the box completely to developers - for example, an ISO has already been released to switch the Xbox between PAL & NTSC (excellent :-) and the Enigmah-X group are rumoured to be working on a DivX player. Add an Ethernet-streaming MP3 player to that & you have a very versatile entertainment appliance. Not to mention that it'll give the Xbox Linux Project a huge boost, and may even make that old MAME port useful :-)
This could give Xbox sales a significant boost. I'm sure Microsoft would be delighted - if they were actually making money on each sale.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
I like feeding trolls, so sue me...
You are right that Qt and GTK+ are divided along language lines. For the most part, those who prefer C prefer GTK+ while those who prefer C++ prefer Qt. User interfaces are naturally object oriented, so in my opinion it makes sense to use a language that does OO well, like C++. Thus, everything else being equal, Qt is the better choice for writing GUI applications. Yes, I know you can do OO in C. So what? You can do OO in assembly, but I don't know anyone who does.
Okay, to the meat of the issue: the best and most advanced apps. Since most old time Unix hackers are C fanatics, they tend to use GTK+. But that doesn't rule out the multitude of fantastic advanced applications for Qt such as KOffice, KDevelop, Doxygen, QCad, etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned