Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Hatred, Glass, Identification
Why Yes, you can sell the Free books. ProteusQ writes "Project Gutenberg has released a 'Best Of' CD, April 2003 Edition. The CD compilation is copyrighted and licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows unlimited non-commercial duplication and distribution. You can even sell it, provided that you share 20% of the gross profits with Project Gutenberg. It contains almost 500 books, and the 'Best Of' project itself based on the Open Source model. All of the work was performed by volunteers (mostly by me, in this case), with the goal of building a volunteer base to create about three editions per year."
Welcome to the American legal system, mind your footing. An anonymous reader submits: "In an e-mail discussion that took place 24 and 25 April, SCO-Caldera Senior Vice President Chris Sontag told MozillaQuest Magazine that there is SCO-owned code in Red Hat and SuSE Linux distributions. He also told MozillaQuest Magazine that the tainted code is not in the Linux kernel that Linus [Torvalds] and others have helped develop. We're talking about what's on the periphery of the Linux kernel."
On this topic, Random BedHead Ed writes "IBM has released its denial of SCO Group's charges that it borrowed proprietary UNIX code in its development of the GNU/Linux system. Story at News.com.com.com.etc. The battle continues.
Also, check out PCLinuxOnline.com for a good summary of the events thus far. They also have a Boycott SCO page if you're interested."
The height of practicality. Jerami Campbell writes "I just saw your article in Slashdot 'Building a stained glass computer case?' I have made several stained glass computer cases, I thought you might be interested in checking them out. You can see all of my cases at lucentrigs.com. I will have a new one finished in a couple of days. It is black glass with a red lava lamp mounted in the front."
Gun buffs have well-adjusted sights. In regards to the MP3-player-in-a-rifle-magazine posted the other day, Mat S. writes "I would be reaaaaally surprised if this fit a standard AK-47, as it is an SVD (Russian infantry rifle, as opposed to the AK, which is in fact a carbine, although called an assault rifle) mag. It accommodates much more powerful ammo, and the cartridges are about 50% longer than the AK's. Thank you for your attention. I still WANT this player. Might be a bit on the heavy side, though. this case is stamped steel, about 3 mm thick :)"
Fair and balanced, naturally. An anonymous reader writes "For those of you who were unable to obtain the Microsoft propaganda about Unix, it's up at MIT."
Note for the humorless: the UHH is not "Microsoft propaganda."
The best Congress money can buy. If you thought Hilary Rosen writing Iraq's copyright law was an isolated incident, don't worry, she's not alone. theodp writes "The RIAA paid $18,000 for the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to travel to Taiwan and Thailand to make it clear to government officials that the pressure to enforce U.S. laws against pirating of music and movies 'is a unified message coming from all levels of the U.S. government.' Watchdog groups say the trip may have violated House ethics rules, and one is calling for a House Ethics Committee investigation. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said he could have used committee funds to pay for the trip but, 'I thought I would save the taxpayers some money on this.'"
Thanks a bundle.
A considerate way to fool your friends and family. We've mentioned the blink-twice Trompe L'Oeil Windows-looking desktop XPde a few times before; now xexen writes "On April 26th 2003, I received an email. The XPde Team released XPde 0.3.5, a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. Check out the announcement, view the screenshots, or read the detailed ChangeLog."
Build up your frequent flyer miles. A few weeks ago we mentioned that the proceedings of the most recent linux.conf.au (a Linux gathering Down Under) were available as an ISO; hemos, who was on hand at the conference, passes on word that the CDs have been sent out, and points to some more info on the next LCA.
As cool as it might look, I cant imagine having a lava lamp on the front of your case is too practical - those things get verrry hot. If your anything like me, youd prefer to have it as bare bones as possible, concentrating more on temperature, in order to get the fan speeds down ( = less noise).
I.O.U One Sig.
I don't exactly know what the u.s. equivalent is, but in Germany there is something called negative Feststellungsklage which means that Suse could apply for a court order declaring that SCOs claims are false and prohibits them to repeat their allegations.
If SCO seeks to achieve a precedent by sueing Suse this might be the appropriate backfire.
Just a thought.
I grabbed the UHH from the MIT guy and threw it on a Purdue server. Download away.
f
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~anthontj/random/ugh.pd
Can this project be sued by Microsoft?
;-)
We don't know, we are not lawyers. But in any case, we are ready for that. We don't use any of Microsoft's registered trademarks, graphics, logos, or anything. This means someone could create a complete theme that mimics the Windows XP environment - where the dialogs are the same, the controls are positioned in the same places and with the same text.
Maybe that would be illegal, but *we* don't include *copyrighted* material. In the case Microsoft have ownership over (for example) a-dialog-that-shows-running-processes (i.e. TaskManager) and our dialog has the controls in the same positions as the Windows one, we are right now creating the translation system. This translation system will also allow "anyone" to position the controls of any dialog in any place. We can create a version with completely different dialogs (the same controls in different places) and *someone* could create a theme which modifies these controls to the Windows XP places.
But this is not our problem. Could Microsoft have copyrighted an environment like the taskbar concept? Could Microsoft have copyrighted the start menu concept? Could Microsoft have copyrighted the tray icon concept? Could Microsoft have copyrighted the desktop concept? In that case every desktop has a problem
The solution here is that we are not going to ship a complete Windows XP interface clone out-of-the-box, but it will be so easy to configure that *someone* could make it look *exactly* like the Windows XP interface. We won't provide this configuration.
I know that ibiblio exists to serve up stuff like this, but is there someone out there with a compressed copy of April's CD that could post a .torrent?
Slashdotters have been good lately about using BitTorrent to shoulder some of the bandwidth load (for example, when the Matrix Reloaded trailer was released.)
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Yeah, this is huge news. A U.S. congressman spent $18,000 to go to Taiwan and Thailand? I know for a fact that at the most expensive hotels and with the most expensive food, you can only spend about $8,000 on a trip to those countries. So the other $10,000 went to prostitutes, drugs, and... what? Into his pocket?
fifth sigma, inc.
In fact when I was there in the early 90's, the student paper kept making jokes about how even the lightsockets in the hallways had their own IP addresses. the entire 18.x.x.x space is (or at least *was* at the time) MIT, giving them over 16 million IP addresses to assign to students.
No it's not. "Fact-finding"junkets like this are perfectly routine. You may find that reassuring or you may find it cause for even more concern. (In any case, the story of a British MP taking hundreds of thousands of pounds from an Iraqi intelligence agency has gone almost unnoticed in the US.)
Meanwhile, I had a story rejected today that seems like it would be of interest: Boycott Hollywood had their domain revoked after legal threats from the William Morris Agency. They posted contact information for anti-war celebrities and their agents, incurring the wrath of a powerful firm.
Keep that in mind the next time you hear Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen whining about being silenced.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's not huge news because the junket was paid for - It's huge news because Sensenbrenner, the Chairman of the *House Judiciary Committee*, was actually *criticized* for it - and Rupert Murdoch's news empire took notice. It even ran on the front page of foxnews.com for a while.
Unfortunately, THAT is not at all routine, and should be front page news here.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
That's a lame attempt at rewriting history. The book was sarcasm, not humor. And it was driven by a genuine conviction on the part of its authors that the UNIX approach was "the wrong way" (of course, their "right ways" of doing things have proven dismal failures over the last decade).
In addition to just lots of newbie mistakes on the part of the contributors, there was valid criticism of a lot of packages running on UNIX, but most of those were third party, several of them from MIT itself (X11, Kerberos). If MIT graduate students didn't like the way some MIT software worked, they should have blamed themselves, rolled up their sleeves, and fixed it.
I can tell you, a lot of the UNIX creators and hackers hated what MIT and Berkeley had done to UNIX, too.
My recommendation to the authors would be: be glad the book out of print and pretend you never had anything to do with it. As for making it available on a Microsoft site, people who sit in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
I'm a avid reader of Slashdot, I'm a Linux guru, I'm a BOFH, I'm a geek, Why the hell would I want this f#@#ng software?
Heh... Yeah, I liked that, too.
Actually, I think XPde goes a long way toward getting Linux ready for mass adoption on the desktops of the corporate world.
Microsoft has spent millions of dollars on focus groups to have ordinary Joes and Janes sit down and play with Windows, telling them what's good and bad, from a user's perspective.
The open source desktop metaphors don't have that resource - but Windows XP - ugly and inefficient as it may be to most Slashdot readers - does represent a lot of UI design experience.
XPde goes the right way to adopting and trying to learn from the expertise of Microsoft and Apple.
Having a Linux distro ship KDE with fluorescent pink menus and background wallpaper that looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin does very little to encourage IT buyers that they can take the risk and leave Microsoft's comfortable if expensive and unreliable embrace.
XPde also works to try to migrate casual users who don't have very specific or great requirements. There's one in every office: the 66-year-old executive to whom Outlook *is* e-mail, and who gets confused when you present another program with exactly the same features and operations but different icons. Just as there's no way to explain to this user that the Send button still sends e-mail and have him confidently understand it, there's also no reason for that person to run Windows with its vulnerabilities to mailbox Klez and Nimbda attacks.
I can think of a few desktops which I'm going to migrate from XP to XPde.
And I won't tell them they're running Linux until they've been using it for a couple of weeks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
No seriously. I haven't read a more complete load of elephant dung in the past 10 years. (well, it probably ties with "I smoked it, but never inhaled", and "We never had sexual relations" from certain presidents of the US).
My favorite quote section is the "Sytems Administration" section. Now I actually do this as a living. We have a very large base of unix systems as well as a very large base of Windows systems. We have upwards of 100 unix servers, and about 600 clients that my group administers. Which comes to a ratio of about 70-80 systems per admin. That is a hell of a lot more then the "20" the article is saying. We also have something like 1/8 the amount of problems reported then the Windows Admins get reported, and that can't be chalked up to the user base as we have the same user base. It also can't be accounted for in the percentage of usage (i.e. people spending more time on PC's and not on UNIX) as roughly all the work being done is engineering work using the unix systems, with people having a PC for mainly having access to Visio and powerpoint, the majority of work is done on the unix boxes and software. So how it that our systems have been running longer, with less problems, and shorter downtimes, and less admin staff then the Windows boxes? And how is it that someone can honestly believe a single word written in that book?
The story, for those that missed it, is that Galloway was a big anti-war, anti-sanctions guy. He went out to Iraq several times and appeared more than once in public cosily chatting to Saddam-may-he-rest-in-peace. Then, last week, the Daily Telegraph (very right-wing, whereas George Galloway is kinda not), produced documents apparently showing Galloway had taken piles of money for it.
It's interesting to note that on four consecutive days, the same reporter had four different scoops in two different papers, all down to miraculously unburnt secret documents. Private Eye this week has a fairly withering commentary on the whole thing.
[FUCK BETA]
Since the first article (well both of them) I have had a chance to download and read the book. I was expecting to be outraged at the authors' lack of knowledge about my favourite operating system but in fact found myself squirming with embarrassment because many of their criticisms seemed to be perfectly valid.
The lack of a proper undelete support and/or versioning, the utter abortion that is/was ufs and its derivatives, the total lack of consistency in commands and their switches, the other abortion that was NFS, the lack of type information for files, the case sensitive file names (actually they didn't mention that one), the other other abortion that was the mail subsystem, the stoneage development environment.
The thing is, in the mid 80s to early 90s when the book was written, I had the opportunity to work on a variety of commercial operating systems and - except in the area of security - they all seemed just as bad or worse.
One particular example that brings tears to my eyes was the OS called MCP that came with Unisys A-series hardware (a stack based machine for which Algol was effectively its assembler language in the same way as C is PDP 11 assembler). The file system didn't corrupt files but there was no undelete facility and if you didn't defrag the disks every other day, the machine ground to a halt because it wasn't clever enough to split files across multiple blocks of free space. If you did defrag the disk the machine ground to a halt because defrag was taking all the IO bandwidth. Its idea of crash diagnostics was also to dump core but it did it to the line printer (in a readable format) not the file system.
Then there was VMS. I remember it being a total pig (but then I was used to Unix - it was probably unfamiliarity). One of the really annoying things was that when you changed something it kept the all the old versions lying around. Eventually, after a heavy debugging session the disk was full.
There were problems with every operating system I ever used which made Unix nice to come back to. It was probably the simplicity of the beast that appealed to me - we examined it in our operating systems course at University and it was easily the most agricultural architecture we looked at (apart from CP/M). I would definitely not have considered it for large scale commercial apps back then. But it was adequate for most small scale things where most other OSs could suck really badly in some areas.
I definitely recommend anybody who is considering developing and distributing apps on any OS to read this book. If you insist on using cryptic error messages, impose stupid restrictions or illogical behaviour, fail to document properly etc etc this is what people will be saying about you.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe