Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Galeon, Forgent, Platformation
Who said what now? bratgrrl writes "eWeek's "Red Hat: Next Redmond?"article was quietly and without comment altered- they deleted the crucial "Red Hat backlash" quote from the original article. No retraction, no explanation, just an Orwellian revision. Thank goodness for Google, which cached the original article.
I suspect the original quote never happened."
Because not everyone needs Chatzilla. Mozilla gets a lot of attention around here -- after all, it is the giant lizard of the open source browser world. But to the question "What about Galeon?", Nachtjäger writes: "The answer: LOTS is happening to Galeon. Given the length of time since the last release, we decided to write up an update on how things are going on Galeon2. Check it out here"
I hope certain aspects of Galeon (tab-name shortening and color coding, for two) are soon rolled back into Mozilla.
OK, now you can have it. Esekla writes "Slashdot did an article about the announcement of Kylix 3 (the first Kylix to support C++ code), but at the time it was not actually available for download. Now both Open and Enterprise Trial editions finally can be downloaded."
Now you can assemble your yard-sale cluster. Speaking of things now really available, BJH writes: "The site featured in last week's Dreamcast BBA story is now accepting orders! The good news is, they're only $US80 each. The bad news is, they're not accepting orders from outside Japan ;) (If there's enough interest, perhaps someone could be convinced to do a bulk buy and ship to people overseas...)"
Anyone who offers something interesting enough in trade can have my Dreamcast for mucking about ;)
When you trace things back far enough ... Dennis writes: "Although Chris has a valid point about the catch 22 between Win2K, SP3 and HIPAA, his example is not accurate because medical records that are related to students are protected by FERPA regulations and not by HIPAA. Here's a reference link with more info."
The fat ladies are still warming up. john82 writes "With all the hoopla still swirling about MP3s, there is fresh information in the JPEG saga. Dateline Berlin: Algovision-Luratech GmbH says that Forgent's patent claim (4,698,672) is all wet. Technical experts have laid out the technical and legal arguments against the claim. And they intend to air the dirty laundry at a meeting Sept 4. The announcement by Forgent earlier this year caused quite a stir here. Wonder if Sony can get their money back?"
Of especial interest to iBook owners. Earlier this month, Slashdot posted the news that rather than wiping your Mac's OS to put on a GNU/Linux system, you could order Yellow Dog Linux preinstalled on Apple hardware. Ray Sanders of Qli Tech Linux Computers writes: "We also are selling Apple Systems with Linux installed, however, Terrasoft is only installing Yellow Dog Linux, we offer Gentoo PPC, Debian PPC, Mandrake PPC, and SuSE PPC. We also have full working sound and video on the iBook and Powerbook with XFree86, whereas YDL Does not yet support the mobile Radeon chipset found on those two units."
Competition is good.
I think this has interesting implications for the future. I certainly don't like the idea of Internet news sites silently changing pages, but the problem is that there is no definite way (besides Google and the like) to know if a page has been changed. It was sneaky enough when we found out that CNN does it, but at least they update the timestamp. Everything regarding modification date is controlled on the server that returns the page. What I'd like to see, if it doesn't exist already, is a system for clients to verify that a page has not been changed. Perhaps something like a MD5 hash of each webpage you visit being stored on your computer, and a warning displayed if it doesn't match upon future views. Of course this would cause massive false alarms on dynamic sites, but perhaps there could be introduced a standard for putting tags around the actual article on news sites, so they would know what else to filter out?
Otherwise, I can see these sort of changes becoming more and more prevalent, until eventually the fear of political-correctness and not insulting anyone completely drives us to immediately change anything considered "offensive" and deny it ever existed. Then, we will have 1984.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There lie they, and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree."
I wonder if the behavior of organizations like eWeek will eventually change, as it becomes clear that when some questionable behavior is noticed and discussed publicly, that said organization can't just get away with quietly trying to hide the original problem?
I think a big part of the behavior of execs at these companies - aside from the fact that they're businessmen, not journalists, and wouldn't know a journalistic ethic if it bit them in the MBA - is that the execs don't "feel" the criticism, because they don't participate in online forums, so at best, hear about it secondhand, and certainly don't feel threatened by it - they don't perceive it as "real".
Before you scoff, I have an example. It was reported on TV the other day that Jeff Skilling, ex-CEO of Enron, currently hangs out at some chic club in Houston, essentially crying in his beer and asking people if they believe his claims of being innocent of wrongdoing.
Regardless of Skilling's innocence or guilt, he clearly feels a great deal of shame (or is doing a decent job of pretending that). This guy's a Harvard-educated MBA, he's taught essentially that ethics are secondary to profit, and how to put that into practice, so why the shame?
Because he has been publicly attacked and judged, in venues that he and his peers understand and participate in themselves - in this case, the major media, especially TV and print.
When we have executives who've grown up IM'ing their buddies from their bedrooms, who have a feel for online media, will they be as averse to being excoriated in those media, as current execs are to the old media? Are we simply seeing a bunch of tired old companies trying to hide their heads in the sand and pretend that no-one sees what they're doing? When it's finally realized that this doesn't work, will it stop?
Oh wait. This is the real world, and I'm talking about interminably idiotic human beings. Please ignore everything I've just said.
When I bought my iBook, I also purchased Yellow Dog, because I feared that even though OSX is BSD under the hood, it wouldn't feel "Unixy" enough for me. But thanks to the porting efforts of the fink team, I have pretty much everything I'd want on my OSX box. In fact with X & Gnome, I have it set up to look exactly like my Solaris box at work. I ended up never installing YDL.
Of course, I'm not everyone, so I'll ask: Is there any really compelling reason to go to a Linux distro left?
I've just gotta say that I think Galeon is the best thing to come out of the Mozilla work to date. Maybe newbs like mediocre e-mail clients and other whiz-bangs built into their browsers, me... I like a browser. One that's fast, intuitive, fast, simple, feature-rich, and fast. Galeon is all of these, and fast to boot! My biggest complaint about it is there isn't (nor likely ever will be) a Windows version I can use when surfing at work. But from home, nothing can top it!
MP3 has a right to do anything they want with their patent; we have Ogg so if Thompson gets to be too nasty about enforcing MP3, we can simply switch over (as RedHat is doing). Remember: Thompson has never hid the fact that they had a patent on MP3; the people who made MP3 a popular format for pirating music in fact broke Thompson license agreements and copyrights. I seriously doubt that they will go after the XMMS developers (free MP3 decoder for Linux); they aren't even going after the Lame developers (Free MP3 encoder for Linux). They make a good deal from money from MP3 hardware players and from commercial MP3 encoders/decoders for Windows (money they deserve to earn); they won't go after anything free for Linux because that will just make for less MP3 users and more OGG users.
Forgent, on the other hand, has no right to JPEG. This is simply a case of some greedy corporate types who saw that their company was going down the tubes--this happens to companies which do not provide goods and services of value for people any more. Instead of providing something of value, they went through their patent profile and found something that looked like a patent on JPEG. In their greed, they blackmailed some large Japanese corporations, some of whom gave in easily--I guess giving money to shady organizations is an accepted norm in their culture.
Naturally, once their actions became public, the reaction was outrage. And well it should have been--Forgent did nothing to help invent JPEG or make the JPEG image format a reality. All they did was make a different motion video format which had some similarities to JPEG--simply because the cutting edge of image compression at the time was based on DCTs and run-length encoding. Any similarities their format has to JPEG is because both JPEG and Forgent's thingy used the same previously invented principles. If Forgent did, in fact, invent JPEG, and never hid the fact it was patented, we would be in a different situtation. Since Forgent did neither, they do not have a chance of winning a court case.
If I were Sony, I would sue Forgent for making false patnet claims or some such.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.