Forsooth, I simply stateth that Debian is not unlike Caldera in that they have interchangeth the kernels there unto. Ye Caldera has chosen Open Unix while ye old Debian can found to use HURD or on occasion FreeBSD.
The similarities there in are obvious to all! Therefore, I must prostest vociferously the my post was most unquestionably On Topic!
Actually, I didn't mean that there was no planning going on for the case of an emergency. Although I did blather on about a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn't have.
What I did mean is that we should work out a simple (from the user perspective) solution for any really terrible security emergency. Something where the user can open a terminal window and type one simple easy to remember word and have the problem delt with.
That's the beauty of 911. Even a small child can remember it. It's easy. It's fast. Any emergency that you have the person on the other end of the line knows how to deal with.
Vendors/Distributions should all provide this functionality.
With code red there were 2 problems. People didn't install the patches when they were released and also the patches didn't entirely fix the problem.
With debian it's pretty easy to install patches regularly by typing apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
But code red could have been much more serious than it was. It could have used a new exploit instead of a known one. And it could have spread much faster. As it was some people were still infected before they could download the patch. A third way it could have been worse is if it had used a more common application than IIS, for example apache.
Maybe now would be a good time to work out emergency infrastructure to deal with an emergency like that instead of waiting until it happens.
Something simple to type that's the same across all distributions that shuts down everything and downloads a patch and installs it automatically. Apt-get is fine for normal patches but it some people could become infected before they downloaded the patch. What I have in mind is more along the lines of slashdot posting something like "type emergencyUpdate" and every single linux user, regardless of distribution, who saw that would type it and within 10 seconds they would be safe from infection because their computer would shut down and then the patch would install itself and they could go back to surfing.
Also don't forget to use/support other web servers besides apache. You can find lots of them on freshmeat.net.
At first it's talking about how apache is losing market share because it doesn't have a GUI configuration tool. Then it moves right along to make sarcastic comments about dotGNU and how it was written by a desktop applications company. And finally, sugests that java is the answer to all your problems.
These are my favorite quotes from the article:
"There is an excellent Open Source J2EE server called JBoss" But later it says:
"There is nothing in the Open Source stables to match J2EE"
On the other hand, I'm biased because I've always felt that.NET was over hyped. Corel is talking about how their new word processor will be fully.NETiffied and how wonderfull that will be. Aparently you'll be able to pay for components individually and get them from all different vendors. You could get your GUI from Corel and your spell checker from Some Other Company! WOW!!! "That's just like open source but even better because you don't have the source code!!!"
Of course, some apps are going to move to the internet and but word processors? Sheesh.
I recently finished a course in data structures and algorythms. It's true that the book had very noticeable gaps where I wanted more information.
But the gaps of information that I noticed were often open problems.
The cool thing about computer math that's different than other math is how new it is. I was continually amazed about quotes like, "this problem was just solved in 1983". In regular math classes you have to go to post graduate studies before you face any open problems, but in computer science they are all over.
Of course, you really don't usually need to know all the details to do regular programming... But it's interesting for me to know.
Perhaps that's the difference between a text book and a reference book.
I was saying that LinuxGram sometimes posts a lot of Crap. Specifically an interview with Volker Wiegand by Maureen OGara where she took everything he said out of context and misquoted him in several places. I cant find the story on their site right now. But here is a summary from fairfax it.
http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/20010208/A20552 -2001Feb8.html
When I posted the comment on Slashdot, two people created new Slashdot logins and replied. One was called SuSE_Rulez and the other was called ingenuity7. You can tell they were knew logins because they hadnt posted before or since. And Slashdot gives the UID numbers out consecutively and I checked to see what slashdot UID I would get on that day and it came right after theirs. Also look how ingenuity7 refers to LinuxGram as CSN which is its less well known parent company. To me he seems to know a lot more than normal people do about LinuxGram.
Of course, when I was astroturfed by LinuxGram I was hardly surprised but this story about LinuxToday is disapointing. Other journalists have replied to my face if I disagreed with them and thats the way it should be done.
Bison is an interesting example, but as far as I know it is somewhat unique. And now that version is obsolete so the whole point is moot.
The spirit of the GPL and precedents are pretty clear that the GPL does not put restrictions on data generated but only on derived works.
Technically, of course, you are right there have been GPL programs where the output also had to be placed under the GPL. But I cant think of any GPL program included in a major distribution that has this problem now. Or perhaps I just havent looked far enough?
>>I was under the impression that no one included OpenOffice because it wasn't ready yet;
It may not be ready yet exactly but that normally doesnt make a big difference for Debian. Debian tends to include programs that comercial distributions wouldnt if they are interesting enough.
Personally, Im quite excited about Open Office. In 2-3 years I think it will be considerred one of the most important Linux applications along with mozilla and apache.
ok ok... I dont think this is the end of the world or a threat to open source thinking like Nicholas Petreley seems to. But I still think its a little bit silly.
1) Mono will be poor quality.
Sure, C# has been submitted to a standards board but that doesnt get you home free. Probably, eventually the Mono C# compiler will be as close to the Microsoft c# compiler as gcc is to vc++. I find that its actually a major pain to switch between the two compilers. For one project I used templated methods a lot throughtout my program and then I found that vc++ did not support this with the version I had (1998). Now vc++ does but fixing it is not a simple "apt-get upgrade."
You would think that java would be another thing that would be very portable but Debian still does not include Open Office because none of the Free java compilers can run the java parts of it.
I guess my point is look how well Microsoft support w3c standards. Mono will be different from the Microsoft c# compiler and thus worse. Different == worse.
2) This is an unpopular idea.
Remember how depressing it was when slashdot used to post articles about mozilla at around m14 or so. Everytime people would post about how crashy and buggie and slow it was. But the good thing about that was that most people recognized the need for Mozilla and how it was perhaps Linuxs best shot at getting a working web browser.
Mono I think is less popular than Mozilla and less obviously necesary. Especially when you consider that a lot of gnome programmers are perfectly content programming in c. I dont see them as the type of people who will switch to c# overnight.
3) This idea wont make any money.
Isnt Ximian a company? How do they think that this will make them any money? Dont they have more pressing things to do with their time?
In the end this isnt an idea that I would focus much attention on. If its an idea thats very fun for you personally then by all means keep at it. But dont expect it to be extremely fun of financially rewarding.
>>Hasn't the idea that open source generates major profit potential been pretty well refuted by the bursting of last year's Linux bubble and the collapse of companies like Eazel and VA Linux?
Please dont be an idiot by using Eazel as an examble of open source businesses failing. Eazel spent millions of dollars in developement and then went broke before they started to sell anything. Seriously, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell you that you need to finish developing a product and before you can make money. It doesnt matter if the product is open source or close source.
Also Eazel was surprisingly unpopular even within the open source community. There was a satire website about it at www.eavel.com.
I don't know if I would have moderated the parent down.
But why is he downloading "the code" at all if he doesn't know what CVS is and how to use it?
Perhaps he meant that he wanted to download the precompiled version. I have to think that almost all the files are recompiled between releases and so it would be completely impractical (for users and developers) to do what he proposes. Just download the whole thing. It's not that big of a deal even on a modem.
If microsoft really cares about all the viruses in their source code they should hire only people with computer backgrounds as programmers. If you ask my opinion, it's just plain stupid to have trained chimps do all the programming.
On the one hand TiVo == good and UltimateTV == bad but on the other hand patents often == bad too.
A lot of people are saying that the patents were ok in this case since they didn't patent obvious things but I want to know what these peoples sources are before I can agree with them. After all if you read the yahoo! article it isn't very specific.
Sure, you can block anyone you want to, but once people find out they're going to start complaining until you change. Heck, you might even get sued or something.
Btw, everyone who says that people should just get a different ISP clealy A) Do not understand that above.net is not an isp. and B) Do not understand the power people have when they start complaining loudly in public places.
Seeing this marked up as informative (instead of funny, since the bbspot article is satirical) reminds me of something else I saw today.
The Weekly World news (the one with the page 5 girl) has a front page article about Tim McViegh's corpse at the morgue. Aparently they printed the article before the excecution was postponed.:P
It's sad really, I mean if you can't trust the tabloids, who can you trust?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you have not heard of the Render extension?
Alpha-blending and anti-aliasing are just some of the symptoms of a more powerful back end.
It is you who is looking at the surface.
Clearly thou miss understandeth my post!
Forsooth, I simply stateth that Debian is not unlike Caldera in that they have interchangeth the kernels there unto. Ye Caldera has chosen Open Unix while ye old Debian can found to use HURD or on occasion FreeBSD.
The similarities there in are obvious to all! Therefore, I must prostest vociferously the my post was most unquestionably On Topic!
Certainly, thou seemest to be on crack!
With debian we have debian on Linux and debian on Hurd.
:( Duty calls.
So in a way Caldera is a little bit like debian.
There are other ways Caldera is like debian which I would list if I had time... But I must be off.
Actually, I didn't mean that there was no planning going on for the case of an emergency. Although I did blather on about a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn't have.
What I did mean is that we should work out a simple (from the user perspective) solution for any really terrible security emergency. Something where the user can open a terminal window and type one simple easy to remember word and have the problem delt with.
That's the beauty of 911. Even a small child can remember it. It's easy. It's fast. Any emergency that you have the person on the other end of the line knows how to deal with.
Vendors/Distributions should all provide this functionality.
With code red there were 2 problems. People didn't install the patches when they were released and also the patches didn't entirely fix the problem.
With debian it's pretty easy to install patches regularly by typing apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
But code red could have been much more serious than it was. It could have used a new exploit instead of a known one. And it could have spread much faster. As it was some people were still infected before they could download the patch. A third way it could have been worse is if it had used a more common application than IIS, for example apache.
Maybe now would be a good time to work out emergency infrastructure to deal with an emergency like that instead of waiting until it happens.
Something simple to type that's the same across all distributions that shuts down everything and downloads a patch and installs it automatically. Apt-get is fine for normal patches but it some people could become infected before they downloaded the patch. What I have in mind is more along the lines of slashdot posting something like "type emergencyUpdate" and every single linux user, regardless of distribution, who saw that would type it and within 10 seconds they would be safe from infection because their computer would shut down and then the patch would install itself and they could go back to surfing.
Also don't forget to use/support other web servers besides apache. You can find lots of them on freshmeat.net.
At first it's talking about how apache is losing market share because it doesn't have a GUI configuration tool. Then it moves right along to make sarcastic comments about dotGNU and how it was written by a desktop applications company. And finally, sugests that java is the answer to all your problems.
.NET was over hyped. Corel is talking about how their new word processor will be fully .NETiffied and how wonderfull that will be. Aparently you'll be able to pay for components individually and get them from all different vendors. You could get your GUI from Corel and your spell checker from Some Other Company! WOW!!! "That's just like open source but even better because you don't have the source code!!!"
These are my favorite quotes from the article:
"There is an excellent Open Source J2EE server called JBoss" But later it says:
"There is nothing in the Open Source stables to match J2EE"
On the other hand, I'm biased because I've always felt that
Of course, some apps are going to move to the internet and but word processors? Sheesh.
I recently finished a course in data structures and algorythms. It's true that the book had very noticeable gaps where I wanted more information.
But the gaps of information that I noticed were often open problems.
The cool thing about computer math that's different than other math is how new it is. I was continually amazed about quotes like, "this problem was just solved in 1983". In regular math classes you have to go to post graduate studies before you face any open problems, but in computer science they are all over.
Of course, you really don't usually need to know all the details to do regular programming... But it's interesting for me to know.
Perhaps that's the difference between a text book and a reference book.
The first thing I noticed was the beans also.
I feel the beans cast an air of suspicion over this whole thing.
Its like this guy is working on his computer but instead of drinking a Coke, he just eats a can of beans? That aint right.
I was once astroturfed by LinuxGram.
. shtml
2 -2001Feb8.html
2 -08-002-20-NW-SS
http://www.slashdot.org/articles/01/05/01/1936218
I was saying that LinuxGram sometimes posts a lot of Crap. Specifically an interview with Volker Wiegand by Maureen OGara where she took everything he said out of context and misquoted him in several places. I cant find the story on their site right now. But here is a summary from fairfax it.
http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/20010208/A2055
Here is a link with Volker Wiegands responce where he says that Maureen OGara deliberately misquoted him. http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-0
When I posted the comment on Slashdot, two people created new Slashdot logins and replied. One was called SuSE_Rulez and the other was called ingenuity7. You can tell they were knew logins because they hadnt posted before or since. And Slashdot gives the UID numbers out consecutively and I checked to see what slashdot UID I would get on that day and it came right after theirs. Also look how ingenuity7 refers to LinuxGram as CSN which is its less well known parent company. To me he seems to know a lot more than normal people do about LinuxGram.
Of course, when I was astroturfed by LinuxGram I was hardly surprised but this story about LinuxToday is disapointing. Other journalists have replied to my face if I disagreed with them and thats the way it should be done.
Bison is an interesting example, but as far as I know it is somewhat unique. And now that version is obsolete so the whole point is moot.
The spirit of the GPL and precedents are pretty clear that the GPL does not put restrictions on data generated but only on derived works.
Technically, of course, you are right there have been GPL programs where the output also had to be placed under the GPL. But I cant think of any GPL program included in a major distribution that has this problem now. Or perhaps I just havent looked far enough?
>>when for $20 used you can get a decent copy of Final Fantasy for PS?
The amazon.com version of ff9 costs $40. But thats an exact copy. For a merely decent copy I would expect to pay $7-$10 and not a penny more.
>>I was under the impression that no one included OpenOffice because it wasn't ready yet;
It may not be ready yet exactly but that normally doesnt make a big difference for Debian. Debian tends to include programs that comercial distributions wouldnt if they are interesting enough.
Personally, Im quite excited about Open Office. In 2-3 years I think it will be considerred one of the most important Linux applications along with mozilla and apache.
ok ok... I dont think this is the end of the world or a threat to open source thinking like Nicholas Petreley seems to. But I still think its a little bit silly.
1) Mono will be poor quality.
Sure, C# has been submitted to a standards board but that doesnt get you home free. Probably, eventually the Mono C# compiler will be as close to the Microsoft c# compiler as gcc is to vc++. I find that its actually a major pain to switch between the two compilers. For one project I used templated methods a lot throughtout my program and then I found that vc++ did not support this with the version I had (1998). Now vc++ does but fixing it is not a simple "apt-get upgrade."
You would think that java would be another thing that would be very portable but Debian still does not include Open Office because none of the Free java compilers can run the java parts of it.
I guess my point is look how well Microsoft support w3c standards. Mono will be different from the Microsoft c# compiler and thus worse. Different == worse.
2) This is an unpopular idea.
Remember how depressing it was when slashdot used to post articles about mozilla at around m14 or so. Everytime people would post about how crashy and buggie and slow it was. But the good thing about that was that most people recognized the need for Mozilla and how it was perhaps Linuxs best shot at getting a working web browser.
Mono I think is less popular than Mozilla and less obviously necesary. Especially when you consider that a lot of gnome programmers are perfectly content programming in c. I dont see them as the type of people who will switch to c# overnight.
3) This idea wont make any money.
Isnt Ximian a company? How do they think that this will make them any money? Dont they have more pressing things to do with their time?
In the end this isnt an idea that I would focus much attention on. If its an idea thats very fun for you personally then by all means keep at it. But dont expect it to be extremely fun of financially rewarding.
>>Hasn't the idea that open source generates major profit potential been pretty well refuted by the bursting of last year's Linux bubble and the collapse of companies like Eazel and VA Linux?
Please dont be an idiot by using Eazel as an examble of open source businesses failing. Eazel spent millions of dollars in developement and then went broke before they started to sell anything. Seriously, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell you that you need to finish developing a product and before you can make money. It doesnt matter if the product is open source or close source.
Also Eazel was surprisingly unpopular even within the open source community. There was a satire website about it at www.eavel.com.
That sounds like a fairly reasonable explanation to me.
But why is he downloading "the code" at all if he doesn't know what CVS is and how to use it?
Perhaps he meant that he wanted to download the precompiled version. I have to think that almost all the files are recompiled between releases and so it would be completely impractical (for users and developers) to do what he proposes. Just download the whole thing. It's not that big of a deal even on a modem.
Setting up the network is a part of the install process. Debian's install sucks. Mandrakes is way better. Nobody denies that.
But with a
It's just a thought.
A lot of people are saying that the patents were ok in this case since they didn't patent obvious things but I want to know what these peoples sources are before I can agree with them. After all if you read the yahoo! article it isn't very specific.
Also the lgpl is slightly more complex than you have explained it. You can't static link non-gpl/lgpl code with lgpl code for example.
Sure, you can block anyone you want to, but once people find out they're going to start complaining until you change. Heck, you might even get sued or something.
Btw, everyone who says that people should just get a different ISP clealy A) Do not understand that above.net is not an isp. and B) Do not understand the power people have when they start complaining loudly in public places.
The Weekly World news (the one with the page 5 girl) has a front page article about Tim McViegh's corpse at the morgue. Aparently they printed the article before the excecution was postponed.
It's sad really, I mean if you can't trust the tabloids, who can you trust?