I've installed Red Hat and Slackware. I have machines at home running Red Hat 5.0 and Slackware 7. I admin both Slackware and Red Hat. I configure, compile, and install software on both. I can make valid comparisons between Slackware and Red Hat. I don't have any ground to stand on when talking about other distros, so I won't talk about other distros.
I use Slackware on my personal workstation and Red Hat on a machine that I don't use for much other than network routing. I don't fool much with the Red Hat machine, since I have it configured the way I like it. I didn't pick Red Hat to use as a gateway for any logical reason. I just had that machine available that had Red Hat on it at the time, so I configured it as a gateway.
I chose Slackware for my desktop workstation because I like the Slackware philosophy and it fits the way I work. Slackware has a more streamlined configuration that is better suited to manual changes with a text editor than is Red Hat's. I can configure Red Hat by hand, if I must, but Red Hat's SysV style of init is more suited to configuration by software. Overall, this makes Slackware more flexible because you can add scripts to rc.local or remove scripts from rc.d and worry less about breaking things than with Red Hat. Also, when you want some daemon banished from your machine for good, you don't have to remove a link from three or four directories. You can comment it out of one script and be done with it.
I am a tinkerer. I like to know how things work. I like to try different changes to see how they affect the system. I install from source, and you are kind of required to do so with Slackware since most RPMs are designed for some other system. That said, RPMs will work with Slackware, if you create the proper rc.d subdirectories first. Slackware still uses SysVInit, though inittab is set up more like BSD. Anyway, as I was saying, I install from source. I like to peruse the source of most applications before installing. And, yes, I install from source on Red Hat, too. I most recently installed OpenSSH on my Red Hat box. The big bonus of installing this way is there's no RPM database to get corrupted.
Slackware is great for someone who wants to learn about GNU/Linux and really understand what goes on under the hood. It's easier than Red Hat to install and to configure by hand. The rc scripts are all in one directory for the most part and it's easy to find where some daemon gets run so you can shut it down by commenting it out of the script.
If I were to create my own distro, I'd start from Slackware and build up from there. I think we need more GNU/Linux distros, not less. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of users' needs that are not being addressed by the larger distros. They may have three products (a Workstation, Server, and Web Server models) but those don't address everyone's needs. Slack, of course, comes in just one flavor, but that one flavor has most of what you need. Yet, Slackware is not perfect for all situations or all users, just as Red Hat is not perfect in all situations, either.
If Patrick and the gang can't carry the Slackware torch for some reason, then I'll be more than happy to pick it up and run with it. I practically have Slack 7 mirrored on my machine, anyway.
The suit was not about copyright or patents. It was about "trade dress" which more akin to trademark. It's a fuzzy bit of law, but then again it's a fuzzy world.
Jeez, I wish you weenies would read the damn articles and look up the big words that you don't understand in a dictionary before you post these things.
It's called "research," Katz. Do some. How 'bout citing some sources? How 'bout offering something other than your opinion?
You say "The DMCA stipulates that unlike ordinary radio and TV broadcasters, Webcasters must pay royalties to record companies." Uh, since when do regular radio stations not pay royalties to record companies? Why don't you try asking a station manager at a local radio station? I'm sure they'll be glad to explain to you how it works.
Once again, Katz is full of tripe! Not only is he clueless about the "new media," he's clueless about the old, too!
I'm turning the "Katz filter" back on. Evidently, Slashdot is just the dumping ground for the junk he can't sell to real editors.
Feel free to moderate me down. To paraphrase Tricky Dick, "I am not a whore."
Here's what I told O'Reilly this morning. I'm reposting it here with minor corrections:
I read all these comments saying, "Way to go Tim!" and "Amazon isn't so bad after all." And, I'm disgusted.
Bezos and his crew appear to be nothing but a greedy bunch of boomers out to screw everybody they can out of all the money they can. I'm sorry, but they come off that way to me. It's great they haven't made a profit, yet, so maybe they'll put themselves out of business soon, just like Netscape did. Hiding behind "unfair competition" and patents is a copout. Netscape lost because they got big [in their own minds] and arrogant. I see Amazon going the same way.
O'Reilly appears to [be] Amazon and Bezos' apologist. He sees the writing on the wall: O'Reilly books are consistently on the Amazon bestseller list and they are consistently bought by the very tech-oriented people who are shouting "Boycott!" Tim's afraid of losing all those sales through Amazon and those sales not materializing elsewhere in the market. Face it, he stands to lose money, too.
I'm adding O'Reilly to my list of companies to boycott, at least until they stop doing business with Amazon. Amazon, I won't be doing business with you ever, unless you're going under and you want to sell me the amazon.com address.
How to you show there were damages when the software is free.
That's the beauty of the new copyright laws, which UCITA would only serve to augment. You don't have to show damage to actually ask for damage in a copyright infringement case, which is how I would go after someone who violated the GPL.
I would slap 'em with a suit and ask for maximum claim under the law. After all, the copyright law is intended to protect the free flow of ideas and innovation. I use the GPL because it protects that very same notion and is well within Constitutional and legal mandates. These guys are not only "stealing my work," but they are impeding the free flow of information and ideas that I set ought to encourage by careful application of the Copyright code. Clearly, they are not only breaking the law, but they are also in opposition to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States. I got a feeling you'd get the damages.
I wouldn't bother with a civil suit though. I'd hit 'em with criminal charges under Copyright. (That FBI warning appears on video tapes for a reason. You ought to read it.)
It would also be very easy to prove a Copyright violation too. All the data on all their computers and all their employee's home computers and anyone whoever worked for the company or contracted with them or did business with them, or came within a two-mile radius of the place would be discoverable! A litigator's wet dream.
You guys ought to spend some time in your local University's law school: browse the library, attend a couple of classes. It's very enlightening if the school is any good.
One of the major (IMO) problems for GPL'ed software still exist under this dreamy picture of the UCITA. That is the problem of who's going to do the suing?
For instance, you put together a neat little GPL'ed widget, and put it out there every one to use. Six months later you get an email from a friend of yours commenting that the latest Windows beta (or to be fair MacOS X DR) has a suspiciously similar widget in it. What are you going to do? Take on the hords of corporate lawyers?
Yes, you are. As primary author (i.e. the originator) it is your responsibility to sue the corporations. Unless you sign the rights over to a publisher (temporarily), in which case they would be responsible for suing.
You see this all falls back onto Copyright law, and UCITA is a lame attempt to circumvent perfectly good laws that exist now. Mainly because corporations are lazy and they want more "protections" than are really allowed by law.
The GPL really is a great license, and I imagine that with the proper lawyers making the proper arguments, before the proper judge, then no one would stand chance if they were really in violation of it. That's the kicker though, "the proper judge." IME, most American judges don't much about the law, and IP law in particular, they know even less about software and computers. (Hey, they're mostly conservative, old men.) Often they'll side with the lawyer wearing the more expensive suit. (Ok, maybe that last crach was uncalled for, but I couldn't help it.) This doesn't mean that they aren't in general well-meaning or well-educated people, just that like the rest of us that are not experts in all things and not always infallible.
Again, this doesn't constitute legal advice. If you need help, get a lawyer. We're just discussing opinions on the law and how things might play out in court. If you really needed to read this disclaimer, then buy a clue.
Specifially, the GPL refuses to let you take your changes private. That's a restriction, if i'd ever seen one.
No, that's not true. You can make your changes private. You can make all the changes you want and keep them private. However, keeping them private means not distributing them in any form: source or binary. Of course, if you distribute them in source, you are probably following the GPL.
This would be like buying a book, crossing out words and adding your own words. Rewriting sentences and paragraphs. It's perfectly all right for you to do that within the law, as long as you don't publish (i.e. distribute) it.
The GPL says that you can distribute those changes as long as you don't stop anyone else from doing the same. It is quite literally a grant of license from the software author.
Also, I could have sworn that there were restrictions on the computational power that we could export from the U.S. Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
And your point is? There are restrictions on "technology transfers" of this nature. So what. Naturally, they've gotten the export license for this thing, or they wouldn't be telling the world about it, now would they?
As for the crack about encryption, who needs encryption when you're "breezing" through simulations of nuclear explosions? Why decrypt intercepts from other nations, when you can explode nuclear devices in the atmosphere and take out their communications infrastructure?
Just as a side note, the last I heard, use of encryption in France by private citizens requires governmental permission. Anyone in France care to correct/comment on this?
One thing I forgot to mention in my post about UCITA above is that the GPL is enforceable (in the U.S. at least) under current law. Because the GPL grants you additional rights than those you are allowed under Copyright, you may bring copyright infringement charges against anyone who attempts to assert those additional rights without following the conditions as outlined in the license. There's no signature required for this, because if you refuse to abide by the GPL, then you are bound by copyright law, which in the United States, does not grant you the right to redistribute the code in any form.
Of course, the standard disclaimer about the above not constituting legal advice applies. If you're in legal trouble or contemplating doing something that requires legal assistance, don't ask for advice here, hire a lawyer.
The GPL is actually a license (i.e. granting you additional rights to the ones that you already have) as opposed to most other "licenses" which are really restrictions on rights you have. Most jurisdictions allow someone to grant you additional rights without requiring your permission, but you must explicitly agree (i.e. sign something) to give up rights. Therefore, "shrink wrap licenses" are not enforceable in most jurisdictions.
Here's where UCITA comes in. Everyone knows that it's evil because it will put teeth in those "shrink wrap licenses." To those of us who do not use shrink wrap software, this is no big deal. The flip side is that it would give razor-sharp piranha teeth to the GPL, and if you could actually prove that someone was distributing software in violation of the GPL (i.e. I take GNU Emacs, hack it a little bit, and sell it without releasing source code), then they can be not only sued, but also charged with a crime! Chances are if you can prove they did, they'll be convicted or found liable for damages.
If you think about it, UCITA is our friend. It could have the effect of driving people away from the ridiculous and uncertain "licenses" of shrink wrap, commercial software providers towards Open Source, GPL software.
As the dude above pointed out, it's not a precedent because it's not a ruling. This was a settlement, so whenever something is dismissed (with or without prejudice) then there's no ruling, or judge's decision on record, so there's no precedent to cite in future cases. A settlement is a way to avoid a decision and to avoid setting a precedent (in some cases).
If I had moderator today, I'd moderate that post by Crush up one to take him all the way to 5. If you've got a spare moderator point and haven't commented in this discussion, please moderate that post up!
Trust nothing. Trust no one on the 'Net. You don't get something for nothing, so stay away from sites that offer anything "free." It's most likely a scam.
READ those agreements before you click on 'Accept.' You'd read a contract before signing it wouldn't you? Under UCITA those click agreements just might become legally binding.
Most of all, don't use IE and don't use Windoze. You don't need ActiveX or any of that other flashy shit to use the WWW.
Disable anything that allows some site to run code on your machine. Use SSH. Use crypto. Encrypt your hard drive. Lose your keys, and then your data is even safe from your own prying eyes.
Be paranoid, be very paranoid.
Install from source, not RPMS. Read every line of code. Make sure you understand what every line of code does in a package before you type "make." Know the code better than its maintainer before you even dream of running it.
Knowledge is power. Forewarned is fore-armed. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Pick a cliche, any cliche, and apply it to evey situation.
After reading his article, and many of the other comments here. (Yes, I also read the original article, and I sent Mr. Connell some comments on his article in e-mail.) Also, after thinking on my comments and the replies to my comments on the Nautilus article, I've come to the following conclusion: PCs are not for everyone.
If you stop and think about it, PCs are too complicated for most people to use, regardless of what operating system they have installed. There are too many different kinds of hardware to install, too many different software applications to learn, and so on. I'm not saying that people are stupid, I'm just saying that they may not have the time or the inclination to learn enough about their machine or their OS to be able to use it effectively. Remember my comment about the doctor from before, the doctor is intelligent and highly skilled at being a doctor and shouldn't have to become an expert at computers to be able to use them.
Look, most people can operate their car, but they don't know really what makes it tick. If they have problems, they take it to their mechanic. Should computers be like this? Tina Gasperson had a pretty good article on this topic yesterday at Andover.
I don't think that what most people really need is a PC, regardless of OS, but rather information appliances that are designed to do a small number of jobs, and to do them really well. A palmtop with the right software could be good for my doctor. He could use it to update my chart, look at my records from the computer in the office, etc. He wouldn't have to learn a lot of arcane commands or icons to use it, if it were properly designed.
It's not really a question of GNU/Linux not being right for the masses. It's really a question of PCs not being right for the masses. In general, the PC is probably technological overkill for what most users want to do.
I'm convinced and what I'm trying to say below is that what "mere mortals" want and need is something like what you're talking about. They don't want a beige box, or any box for that matter. They just want something that does the job with no muss and no fuss.
I believe that web-enabled cell phones and PDAs are steps in the right direction even if we're not there yet. A new Window Manager/File Manager/Eye Candy for X is not the holy grail of UI.
Soon, if you believe the hype, computers will be everywhere and then mortals won't have to think about using the computer. They'll have "smart appliances" which is all they really want or need. What is really required is for the OS to become invisible. No UI is the best UI!
Yeah, I could see someone creating something like the "secretary" you describe above and making a killing with the home office crowd. Just think, if it could screen for junk calls and junk e-mail, too. Hmm.......... (?) - the lightbulb goes on!
Now, is there a link for the MIT Oxygen project that you could share with the rest of us, or are you gonna make us hunt for it?
I see a lot of posts on here that pretty much parrot the line: "this is what Linux really needs." That's a load of crap.
If you want Linux to succeed in a mass market where the majority of VCRs silently blink 12:00 into infinity, then it must have something truly compelling to offer over the competition. This means that Linux needs to be simplified to the extreme. Sticking some pretty eye-candy on top of X isn't going to do it. To wit:
A bulletproof install. It must work, out of the box, no questions asked.
Hardware support for everything. Drivers need to be there for the hardware and they have to be installed automatically. Don't make the user guess what brand of video or sound card they have, 'cause generally, they don't know.
Get rid of the UNIX model. Yeah, no more user IDs, passwords or any of that. It can be too confusing on your grandma to have more names and numbers to remember.
Get rid of GNU. Yeah, that's right, drop the command line utilities that you know and love, and lose all that power. If granny can't remember her password how's she supposed to remember arcane commands?
The gui must be the OS. This means, goodbye X. Most of the newbies who ask me for help request help with setting up X (well, networking comes close). X must disappear, or it must become so much a part of Linux that it's just there, and it just works, no matter what video card, RAMDac, or whatever the user has on their machine.
This GUI must be slicker than whale shit in an ice flow. Yeah, it must blow all other existing GUIs out of the water for ease of use, configurability, etc.
Did I mention that this stuff must work, right out of the box? It has to be so simple that the user can install it and configure it without a thought.
In short, Linux needs to be something totally different from what it is.
I use GNU/Linux because it works for me. I've used various flavors of UNIX, MacOS, and MS Windows as a professional programmer, student, home computer user, and employee. I've set up, installed, configured, even built machines targeted at all three operating systems. I use GNU/Linux at home (while my wife uses MacOS). I don't expect everyone to have the technical knowledge that I do, nor have the desire to acquire that knowledge. I mean, look, I do this stuff for a living, it's my business to know, but my doctor doesn't do this stuff for a living, so I don't expect him to want to learn to operate a computer just to get his work done, and neither should you.
What the world really needs is a new OS (perhaps based on the Linux kernel, perhaps not) that bundles ease of use and robustness in a single package.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
Ok, this is off-topic and it's a major troll, but I wish that all the clueless lusers who write their web pages with word processing software would learn to turn off Smart Quotes. That crap just doesn't look right on the web, and as a result of the luser using Smart Quotes in this article, I stopped reading after the third or fourth sentence.
Perl Poetry has been going on for quite some time. You'll notice that the article sites one of the earlier examples as having been posted in April of 1990.
I've been trying to write Perl Poems off and on since 1996. I'm trying to write code that functions not only as a poem, but as useful code. That's not as easy as it sounds. I'm definitely going to enter the competition this year. (If they're planning to do this next year, I'll definitely be entering then, too, but with some more sophisticated.)
As for writing poetry in other programming languages, I have written some Lisp code that I thought was a bit poetic (though by accident) and quite beautiful to look at. I've not tried this in C or C++, but that might be fun, too.
Contrary to some other opinions expressed here, I don't think writing poetry in a programming language is a waste of time, particularly if the object is to write a poem and not hold it up as an example of good coding practice! I view programming more as an art than a science anyway. Yeah, there's abstract Computer Science with all it's attendant math and theories, then there's the actual ART of programming which EXPRESSES those theories in a LANGUAGE.
I don't think the system in the US is fundamentally corrupt; otherwise, I wouldn't be so outraged. If it were that corrupt, this sort of thing would be commonplace.
You don't get out much, do you?
This sort of thing is more than just commonplace, it is a daily occurrence. Why do you think the tax code in the U.S. is so complicated and skewed toward the big corporations who can get all the big deductions? Why do you think the MPAA even dreams that they can get away with these lawsuits? Because the gov't of the United States of America has become fundamentally corrupt.
What has voter turnout been in most recent elections: less than 50% of registered voters. What percentage of Americans eligible to vote are registered to vote: less than 50%. What that means is your elected officials are voted into office by less than 25% of the population. A block that small is very easy for a small, organized special interest to control. (I wonder how many American Slashdotters who are eligible to vote actually vote.)
The trouble is that the big money interests maintain a strangle hold on the candidates who are put up by the two major parties. These are the only candidates who can afford to run national ads and the only ones who get any kind of attention from the press. When was the last time you heard Harry Browne or David McReynolds mentioned on the news? They're running for President on the Libertarian and Socialist ballots respectively.
The corruption begins at the base of our republican process: the election cycle. American voters are aware of this corruption and so stay away from the polls in droves. Most of them could care less about the gov't because they don't see it as doing anything that even affects their daily life, but rather they see it as protecting the special interests (read: corporations, because special interest is Washingtonspeak for corporation).
Jane & John Q. Dumbass don't give a flip about your DeCSS. They either believe the coroporate hype about people who use it being software pirates, or they just don't see it as affecting them. I mean, they use Windoze, right?
Now, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Are you gonna bitch and moan here on/.? Are you going to fight in the courts? (That can take years, by the way?) Or, are you gonna vote with your ballot and with your dollars? Are you gonna get involved with the EFF or even in a political party that supports your views? It is going to take more than dollars to stop this thing, because the special interests will be able to outspend you every time. Are you gonna run for political office?
I'm thinking seriously about running for the office of President of the United States of America in 2008 and in every election after that. I may never get elected, but I can make a lot of noise.
The system is corrupt, but we can change it. What do you think 1776 was about?
Oh man, what did I just say? My head hurts.
USENET is dead! Long Live Usenet!
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 1
I didn't have to read the article to tell you all what I think on the matter of Usenet. Usenet is dead and has been dead in my mind for quite some time now. I have not checked any Usenet groups for messages on a regular basis since 1997. I began to notice Usenet was seriously ill in 1994. The slow death march began in 1996. Just so you know I have some frame of reference, I've been using Usenet since 1990.
I don't know for sure if AOL coming online had any direct correlation to the decay of Usenet, but it was at about that time that I began to notice the decline. There were suddenly more press releases, more spam, more "Get your Green Card here" messages. The number of alt.binaries.* groups skyrocketed, mostly in the pictures.erotica categories. At the same time I started receiving more spam in my inbox. You could no longer post on Usenet without spam protecting your e-mail address because direct marketers were trolling Usenet collecting e-mails and sending out mass mailings. Thanks to DejaNews, I believe that I still get spam related to Usenet postings made two and three years ago.
Usenet used to be a fun and informative way to waste a boring evening in the dorm room, and now its just a colossal waste of bandwidth and time.
I have not checked any of my old Usenet haunts yet in 2000, and in 1999 I checked some of the old groups I used to read and post to once or twice one weekend in November, just to check that I had my newsreader configured properly on GNU/Linux and that it would get through my little firewall.
I now subscribe to a few e-mail lists and read Slashdot and visit a few web sites that pertain to my current programming interests, and I've abandoned Usenet, probably for good.
As a side note, I find it troubling when people say 'this is a legal issue, only talk to lawyers about it.' The law is complicated, but information and thoughts regarding it should not be restricted to just 'the Sacred Priesthood.'
That's very well put. However, in some parts, if you are not a lawyer and your are caught giving what would be considered legal advice, you can get in serious trouble. You certainly open yourself up for a law suit if you tell someone something is legal and it turns out that it isn't.
I don't like all the questions of "can I do this or can I do that" that pop up on here from time to time. These folks should really be speaking to a lawyer because laws vary from region to region. Slashdot may be a good place to get help and advice on technical issues, but the law is not one of them.
As far as restricting what gets posted on Slashdot, the Slashdot crew makes editorial choices about which submissions to post out of the hundreds that they receive in a day, so in essence the content is already restricted. I guess if they could add a filter (like the one for Jon Katz) to block me from viewing these articles, then that might be better.
Affiliate sites will be given the HTML code to feature an AltaVista search box and other services on their Web pages. Once a visitor has typed in a search request, the results will be served up on an AltaVista page.
I went there expecting to read that the search engine code itself had been open sourced. Instead, they're going to let you link to their search engine from your site. I could do that anyway, their cgi's parameters weren't that hard to decipher.
I'm pretty sure they think that we are stupid, and don't realize that they haven't released anything. Everything is talk, just so we will slow down our efforts at reverse enginneering there technology. I say that we continue to work hard at reverse enginneering and that we show them, that weather or not they want it, we will use thier propritery standards.
I agree with you that these announcements are designed to stifle competition, because they aren't new product announcements, but rather announcements that "we're looking into doing something and it sounds like a good idea."
Truth is, these announcements aren't aimed at us. Micro$oft knows that we know better, and could care less what we think of them. After all, we don't use their products, right? These announcements are aimed at the press, who in turn distill them down to drivel for the "consumer." These announcements are supposed to make those users of M$ software feel better about M$.
So, in other words, M$ doesn't think you're stupid. They think the people who buy their software are stupid.
Who, exactly, is trying to reverse engineer the M$ streaming media format? I hadn't heard of anyone undertaking such an operation.
What would be cool, would be an Open Source video streaming format with Open Source server and viewer software. This could then be ported to any platform: Mac, Sun, M$, you name it. It would also break the stranglehold that just three companies have on the whole market: Real, M$, and Apple. Of course, it would also help if this format could blow the others away in performance and quality.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not the pretty X that makes Slack great.
I've installed Red Hat and Slackware. I have machines at home running Red Hat 5.0 and Slackware 7. I admin both Slackware and Red Hat. I configure, compile, and install software on both. I can make valid comparisons between Slackware and Red Hat. I don't have any ground to stand on when talking about other distros, so I won't talk about other distros.
I use Slackware on my personal workstation and Red Hat on a machine that I don't use for much other than network routing. I don't fool much with the Red Hat machine, since I have it configured the way I like it. I didn't pick Red Hat to use as a gateway for any logical reason. I just had that machine available that had Red Hat on it at the time, so I configured it as a gateway.
I chose Slackware for my desktop workstation because I like the Slackware philosophy and it fits the way I work. Slackware has a more streamlined configuration that is better suited to manual changes with a text editor than is Red Hat's. I can configure Red Hat by hand, if I must, but Red Hat's SysV style of init is more suited to configuration by software. Overall, this makes Slackware more flexible because you can add scripts to rc.local or remove scripts from rc.d and worry less about breaking things than with Red Hat. Also, when you want some daemon banished from your machine for good, you don't have to remove a link from three or four directories. You can comment it out of one script and be done with it.
I am a tinkerer. I like to know how things work. I like to try different changes to see how they affect the system. I install from source, and you are kind of required to do so with Slackware since most RPMs are designed for some other system. That said, RPMs will work with Slackware, if you create the proper rc.d subdirectories first. Slackware still uses SysVInit, though inittab is set up more like BSD. Anyway, as I was saying, I install from source. I like to peruse the source of most applications before installing. And, yes, I install from source on Red Hat, too. I most recently installed OpenSSH on my Red Hat box. The big bonus of installing this way is there's no RPM database to get corrupted.
Slackware is great for someone who wants to learn about GNU/Linux and really understand what goes on under the hood. It's easier than Red Hat to install and to configure by hand. The rc scripts are all in one directory for the most part and it's easy to find where some daemon gets run so you can shut it down by commenting it out of the script.
If I were to create my own distro, I'd start from Slackware and build up from there. I think we need more GNU/Linux distros, not less. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of users' needs that are not being addressed by the larger distros. They may have three products (a Workstation, Server, and Web Server models) but those don't address everyone's needs. Slack, of course, comes in just one flavor, but that one flavor has most of what you need. Yet, Slackware is not perfect for all situations or all users, just as Red Hat is not perfect in all situations, either.
If Patrick and the gang can't carry the Slackware torch for some reason, then I'll be more than happy to pick it up and run with it. I practically have Slack 7 mirrored on my machine, anyway.
Once again, you guys get it wrong.
The suit was not about copyright or patents. It was about "trade dress" which more akin to trademark. It's a fuzzy bit of law, but then again it's a fuzzy world.
Jeez, I wish you weenies would read the damn articles and look up the big words that you don't understand in a dictionary before you post these things.
It's called "research," Katz. Do some. How 'bout citing some sources? How 'bout offering something other than your opinion?
You say "The DMCA stipulates that unlike ordinary radio and TV broadcasters, Webcasters must pay royalties to record companies." Uh, since when do regular radio stations not pay royalties to record companies? Why don't you try asking a station manager at a local radio station? I'm sure they'll be glad to explain to you how it works.
Once again, Katz is full of tripe! Not only is he clueless about the "new media," he's clueless about the old, too!
I'm turning the "Katz filter" back on. Evidently, Slashdot is just the dumping ground for the junk he can't sell to real editors.
Feel free to moderate me down. To paraphrase Tricky Dick, "I am not a whore."
Here's what I told O'Reilly this morning. I'm reposting it here with minor corrections:
I read all these comments saying, "Way to go Tim!" and "Amazon isn't so bad after all." And, I'm disgusted.
Bezos and his crew appear to be nothing but a greedy bunch of boomers out to screw everybody they can out of all the money they can. I'm sorry, but they come off that way to me. It's great they haven't made a profit, yet, so maybe they'll put themselves out of business soon, just like Netscape did. Hiding behind "unfair competition" and patents is a copout. Netscape lost because they got big [in their own minds] and arrogant. I see Amazon going the same way.
O'Reilly appears to [be] Amazon and Bezos' apologist. He sees the writing on the wall: O'Reilly books are consistently on the Amazon bestseller list and they are consistently bought by the very tech-oriented people who are shouting "Boycott!" Tim's afraid of losing all those sales through Amazon and those sales not materializing elsewhere in the market. Face it, he stands to lose money, too.
I'm adding O'Reilly to my list of companies to boycott, at least until they stop doing business with Amazon. Amazon, I won't be doing business with you ever, unless you're going under and you want to sell me the amazon.com address.
How to you show there were damages when the software is free.
That's the beauty of the new copyright laws, which UCITA would only serve to augment. You don't have to show damage to actually ask for damage in a copyright infringement case, which is how I would go after someone who violated the GPL.
I would slap 'em with a suit and ask for maximum claim under the law. After all, the copyright law is intended to protect the free flow of ideas and innovation. I use the GPL because it protects that very same notion and is well within Constitutional and legal mandates. These guys are not only "stealing my work," but they are impeding the free flow of information and ideas that I set ought to encourage by careful application of the Copyright code. Clearly, they are not only breaking the law, but they are also in opposition to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States. I got a feeling you'd get the damages.
I wouldn't bother with a civil suit though. I'd hit 'em with criminal charges under Copyright. (That FBI warning appears on video tapes for a reason. You ought to read it.)
It would also be very easy to prove a Copyright violation too. All the data on all their computers and all their employee's home computers and anyone whoever worked for the company or contracted with them or did business with them, or came within a two-mile radius of the place would be discoverable! A litigator's wet dream.
You guys ought to spend some time in your local University's law school: browse the library, attend a couple of classes. It's very enlightening if the school is any good.
One of the major (IMO) problems for GPL'ed software still exist under this dreamy picture of the UCITA. That is the problem of who's going to do the suing?
For instance, you put together a neat little GPL'ed widget, and put it out there every one to use. Six months later you get an email from a friend of yours commenting that the latest Windows beta (or to be fair MacOS X DR) has a suspiciously similar widget in it. What are you going to do? Take on the hords of corporate lawyers?
Yes, you are. As primary author (i.e. the originator) it is your responsibility to sue the corporations. Unless you sign the rights over to a publisher (temporarily), in which case they would be responsible for suing.
You see this all falls back onto Copyright law, and UCITA is a lame attempt to circumvent perfectly good laws that exist now. Mainly because corporations are lazy and they want more "protections" than are really allowed by law.
The GPL really is a great license, and I imagine that with the proper lawyers making the proper arguments, before the proper judge, then no one would stand chance if they were really in violation of it. That's the kicker though, "the proper judge." IME, most American judges don't much about the law, and IP law in particular, they know even less about software and computers. (Hey, they're mostly conservative, old men.) Often they'll side with the lawyer wearing the more expensive suit. (Ok, maybe that last crach was uncalled for, but I couldn't help it.) This doesn't mean that they aren't in general well-meaning or well-educated people, just that like the rest of us that are not experts in all things and not always infallible.
Again, this doesn't constitute legal advice. If you need help, get a lawyer. We're just discussing opinions on the law and how things might play out in court. If you really needed to read this disclaimer, then buy a clue.
Specifially, the GPL refuses to let you take your changes private. That's a restriction, if i'd ever seen one.
No, that's not true. You can make your changes private. You can make all the changes you want and keep them private. However, keeping them private means not distributing them in any form: source or binary. Of course, if you distribute them in source, you are probably following the GPL.
This would be like buying a book, crossing out words and adding your own words. Rewriting sentences and paragraphs. It's perfectly all right for you to do that within the law, as long as you don't publish (i.e. distribute) it.
The GPL says that you can distribute those changes as long as you don't stop anyone else from doing the same. It is quite literally a grant of license from the software author.
Also, I could have sworn that there were restrictions on the computational power that we could export from the U.S. Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
And your point is? There are restrictions on "technology transfers" of this nature. So what. Naturally, they've gotten the export license for this thing, or they wouldn't be telling the world about it, now would they?
As for the crack about encryption, who needs encryption when you're "breezing" through simulations of nuclear explosions? Why decrypt intercepts from other nations, when you can explode nuclear devices in the atmosphere and take out their communications infrastructure?
Just as a side note, the last I heard, use of encryption in France by private citizens requires governmental permission. Anyone in France care to correct/comment on this?
Now, that's News for Nerds!
Watch out Jon Katz, and take note, that's the kind of article you should be writing.
One thing I forgot to mention in my post about UCITA above is that the GPL is enforceable (in the U.S. at least) under current law. Because the GPL grants you additional rights than those you are allowed under Copyright, you may bring copyright infringement charges against anyone who attempts to assert those additional rights without following the conditions as outlined in the license. There's no signature required for this, because if you refuse to abide by the GPL, then you are bound by copyright law, which in the United States, does not grant you the right to redistribute the code in any form.
Of course, the standard disclaimer about the above not constituting legal advice applies. If you're in legal trouble or contemplating doing something that requires legal assistance, don't ask for advice here, hire a lawyer.
The GPL is actually a license (i.e. granting you additional rights to the ones that you already have) as opposed to most other "licenses" which are really restrictions on rights you have. Most jurisdictions allow someone to grant you additional rights without requiring your permission, but you must explicitly agree (i.e. sign something) to give up rights. Therefore, "shrink wrap licenses" are not enforceable in most jurisdictions.
Here's where UCITA comes in. Everyone knows that it's evil because it will put teeth in those "shrink wrap licenses." To those of us who do not use shrink wrap software, this is no big deal. The flip side is that it would give razor-sharp piranha teeth to the GPL, and if you could actually prove that someone was distributing software in violation of the GPL (i.e. I take GNU Emacs, hack it a little bit, and sell it without releasing source code), then they can be not only sued, but also charged with a crime! Chances are if you can prove they did, they'll be convicted or found liable for damages.
If you think about it, UCITA is our friend. It could have the effect of driving people away from the ridiculous and uncertain "licenses" of shrink wrap, commercial software providers towards Open Source, GPL software.
So, that's my new mantra: "UCITA is your friend."
As the dude above pointed out, it's not a precedent because it's not a ruling. This was a settlement, so whenever something is dismissed (with or without prejudice) then there's no ruling, or judge's decision on record, so there's no precedent to cite in future cases. A settlement is a way to avoid a decision and to avoid setting a precedent (in some cases).
If I had moderator today, I'd moderate that post by Crush up one to take him all the way to 5. If you've got a spare moderator point and haven't commented in this discussion, please moderate that post up!
The real morale of the story?
Trust nothing. Trust no one on the 'Net. You don't get something for nothing, so stay away from sites that offer anything "free." It's most likely a scam.
READ those agreements before you click on 'Accept.' You'd read a contract before signing it wouldn't you? Under UCITA those click agreements just might become legally binding.
Most of all, don't use IE and don't use Windoze. You don't need ActiveX or any of that other flashy shit to use the WWW.
Disable anything that allows some site to run code on your machine. Use SSH. Use crypto. Encrypt your hard drive. Lose your keys, and then your data is even safe from your own prying eyes.
Be paranoid, be very paranoid.
Install from source, not RPMS. Read every line of code. Make sure you understand what every line of code does in a package before you type "make." Know the code better than its maintainer before you even dream of running it.
Knowledge is power. Forewarned is fore-armed. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Pick a cliche, any cliche, and apply it to evey situation.
The truth is...out there.
After reading his article, and many of the other comments here. (Yes, I also read the original article, and I sent Mr. Connell some comments on his article in e-mail.) Also, after thinking on my comments and the replies to my comments on the Nautilus article, I've come to the following conclusion: PCs are not for everyone.
If you stop and think about it, PCs are too complicated for most people to use, regardless of what operating system they have installed. There are too many different kinds of hardware to install, too many different software applications to learn, and so on. I'm not saying that people are stupid, I'm just saying that they may not have the time or the inclination to learn enough about their machine or their OS to be able to use it effectively. Remember my comment about the doctor from before, the doctor is intelligent and highly skilled at being a doctor and shouldn't have to become an expert at computers to be able to use them.
Look, most people can operate their car, but they don't know really what makes it tick. If they have problems, they take it to their mechanic. Should computers be like this? Tina Gasperson had a pretty good article on this topic yesterday at Andover.
I don't think that what most people really need is a PC, regardless of OS, but rather information appliances that are designed to do a small number of jobs, and to do them really well. A palmtop with the right software could be good for my doctor. He could use it to update my chart, look at my records from the computer in the office, etc. He wouldn't have to learn a lot of arcane commands or icons to use it, if it were properly designed.
It's not really a question of GNU/Linux not being right for the masses. It's really a question of PCs not being right for the masses. In general, the PC is probably technological overkill for what most users want to do.
Yes!!! You are right on the money with that one!
I'm convinced and what I'm trying to say below is that what "mere mortals" want and need is something like what you're talking about. They don't want a beige box, or any box for that matter. They just want something that does the job with no muss and no fuss.
I believe that web-enabled cell phones and PDAs are steps in the right direction even if we're not there yet. A new Window Manager/File Manager/Eye Candy for X is not the holy grail of UI.
Soon, if you believe the hype, computers will be everywhere and then mortals won't have to think about using the computer. They'll have "smart appliances" which is all they really want or need. What is really required is for the OS to become invisible. No UI is the best UI!
Yeah, I could see someone creating something like the "secretary" you describe above and making a killing with the home office crowd. Just think, if it could screen for junk calls and junk e-mail, too. Hmm.......... (?) - the lightbulb goes on!
Now, is there a link for the MIT Oxygen project that you could share with the rest of us, or are you gonna make us hunt for it?
I see a lot of posts on here that pretty much parrot the line: "this is what Linux really needs." That's a load of crap.
If you want Linux to succeed in a mass market where the majority of VCRs silently blink 12:00 into infinity, then it must have something truly compelling to offer over the competition. This means that Linux needs to be simplified to the extreme. Sticking some pretty eye-candy on top of X isn't going to do it. To wit:
In short, Linux needs to be something totally different from what it is.
I use GNU/Linux because it works for me. I've used various flavors of UNIX, MacOS, and MS Windows as a professional programmer, student, home computer user, and employee. I've set up, installed, configured, even built machines targeted at all three operating systems. I use GNU/Linux at home (while my wife uses MacOS). I don't expect everyone to have the technical knowledge that I do, nor have the desire to acquire that knowledge. I mean, look, I do this stuff for a living, it's my business to know, but my doctor doesn't do this stuff for a living, so I don't expect him to want to learn to operate a computer just to get his work done, and neither should you.
What the world really needs is a new OS (perhaps based on the Linux kernel, perhaps not) that bundles ease of use and robustness in a single package.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
Ok, this is off-topic and it's a major troll, but I wish that all the clueless lusers who write their web pages with word processing software would learn to turn off Smart Quotes. That crap just doesn't look right on the web, and as a result of the luser using Smart Quotes in this article, I stopped reading after the third or fourth sentence.
Some people just need to get their asses kicked!
Dude, posting your e-mail addres on Slashdot...You're, like, asking for mondo-flamage in your inbox.
Cheers!
Perl Poetry has been going on for quite some time. You'll notice that the article sites one of the earlier examples as having been posted in April of 1990.
I've been trying to write Perl Poems off and on since 1996. I'm trying to write code that functions not only as a poem, but as useful code. That's not as easy as it sounds. I'm definitely going to enter the competition this year. (If they're planning to do this next year, I'll definitely be entering then, too, but with some more sophisticated.)
As for writing poetry in other programming languages, I have written some Lisp code that I thought was a bit poetic (though by accident) and quite beautiful to look at. I've not tried this in C or C++, but that might be fun, too.
Contrary to some other opinions expressed here, I don't think writing poetry in a programming language is a waste of time, particularly if the object is to write a poem and not hold it up as an example of good coding practice! I view programming more as an art than a science anyway. Yeah, there's abstract Computer Science with all it's attendant math and theories, then there's the actual ART of programming which EXPRESSES those theories in a LANGUAGE.
I don't think the system in the US is fundamentally corrupt; otherwise, I wouldn't be so outraged. If it were that corrupt, this sort of thing would be commonplace.
You don't get out much, do you?
This sort of thing is more than just commonplace, it is a daily occurrence. Why do you think the tax code in the U.S. is so complicated and skewed toward the big corporations who can get all the big deductions? Why do you think the MPAA even dreams that they can get away with these lawsuits? Because the gov't of the United States of America has become fundamentally corrupt.
What has voter turnout been in most recent elections: less than 50% of registered voters. What percentage of Americans eligible to vote are registered to vote: less than 50%. What that means is your elected officials are voted into office by less than 25% of the population. A block that small is very easy for a small, organized special interest to control. (I wonder how many American Slashdotters who are eligible to vote actually vote.)
The trouble is that the big money interests maintain a strangle hold on the candidates who are put up by the two major parties. These are the only candidates who can afford to run national ads and the only ones who get any kind of attention from the press. When was the last time you heard Harry Browne or David McReynolds mentioned on the news? They're running for President on the Libertarian and Socialist ballots respectively.
The corruption begins at the base of our republican process: the election cycle. American voters are aware of this corruption and so stay away from the polls in droves. Most of them could care less about the gov't because they don't see it as doing anything that even affects their daily life, but rather they see it as protecting the special interests (read: corporations, because special interest is Washingtonspeak for corporation).
Jane & John Q. Dumbass don't give a flip about your DeCSS. They either believe the coroporate hype about people who use it being software pirates, or they just don't see it as affecting them. I mean, they use Windoze, right?
Now, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Are you gonna bitch and moan here on /.? Are you going to fight in the courts? (That can take years, by the way?) Or, are you gonna vote with your ballot and with your dollars? Are you gonna get involved with the EFF or even in a political party that supports your views? It is going to take more than dollars to stop this thing, because the special interests will be able to outspend you every time. Are you gonna run for political office?
I'm thinking seriously about running for the office of President of the United States of America in 2008 and in every election after that. I may never get elected, but I can make a lot of noise.
The system is corrupt, but we can change it. What do you think 1776 was about?
Oh man, what did I just say? My head hurts.
I didn't have to read the article to tell you all what I think on the matter of Usenet. Usenet is dead and has been dead in my mind for quite some time now. I have not checked any Usenet groups for messages on a regular basis since 1997. I began to notice Usenet was seriously ill in 1994. The slow death march began in 1996. Just so you know I have some frame of reference, I've been using Usenet since 1990.
I don't know for sure if AOL coming online had any direct correlation to the decay of Usenet, but it was at about that time that I began to notice the decline. There were suddenly more press releases, more spam, more "Get your Green Card here" messages. The number of alt.binaries.* groups skyrocketed, mostly in the pictures.erotica categories. At the same time I started receiving more spam in my inbox. You could no longer post on Usenet without spam protecting your e-mail address because direct marketers were trolling Usenet collecting e-mails and sending out mass mailings. Thanks to DejaNews, I believe that I still get spam related to Usenet postings made two and three years ago.
Usenet used to be a fun and informative way to waste a boring evening in the dorm room, and now its just a colossal waste of bandwidth and time.
I have not checked any of my old Usenet haunts yet in 2000, and in 1999 I checked some of the old groups I used to read and post to once or twice one weekend in November, just to check that I had my newsreader configured properly on GNU/Linux and that it would get through my little firewall.
I now subscribe to a few e-mail lists and read Slashdot and visit a few web sites that pertain to my current programming interests, and I've abandoned Usenet, probably for good.
As a side note, I find it troubling when people say 'this is a legal issue, only talk to lawyers about it.' The law is complicated, but information and thoughts regarding it should not be restricted to just 'the Sacred Priesthood.'
That's very well put. However, in some parts, if you are not a lawyer and your are caught giving what would be considered legal advice, you can get in serious trouble. You certainly open yourself up for a law suit if you tell someone something is legal and it turns out that it isn't.
I don't like all the questions of "can I do this or can I do that" that pop up on here from time to time. These folks should really be speaking to a lawyer because laws vary from region to region. Slashdot may be a good place to get help and advice on technical issues, but the law is not one of them.
As far as restricting what gets posted on Slashdot, the Slashdot crew makes editorial choices about which submissions to post out of the hundreds that they receive in a day, so in essence the content is already restricted. I guess if they could add a filter (like the one for Jon Katz) to block me from viewing these articles, then that might be better.
From the article:
I went there expecting to read that the search engine code itself had been open sourced. Instead, they're going to let you link to their search engine from your site. I could do that anyway, their cgi's parameters weren't that hard to decipher.
Gad, but journalists so gullible!
I'm pretty sure they think that we are stupid, and don't realize that they haven't released anything. Everything is talk, just so we will slow down our efforts at reverse enginneering there technology. I say that we continue to work hard at reverse enginneering and that we show them, that weather or not they want it, we will use thier propritery standards.
I agree with you that these announcements are designed to stifle competition, because they aren't new product announcements, but rather announcements that "we're looking into doing something and it sounds like a good idea."
Truth is, these announcements aren't aimed at us. Micro$oft knows that we know better, and could care less what we think of them. After all, we don't use their products, right? These announcements are aimed at the press, who in turn distill them down to drivel for the "consumer." These announcements are supposed to make those users of M$ software feel better about M$.
So, in other words, M$ doesn't think you're stupid. They think the people who buy their software are stupid.
Who, exactly, is trying to reverse engineer the M$ streaming media format? I hadn't heard of anyone undertaking such an operation.
What would be cool, would be an Open Source video streaming format with Open Source server and viewer software. This could then be ported to any platform: Mac, Sun, M$, you name it. It would also break the stranglehold that just three companies have on the whole market: Real, M$, and Apple. Of course, it would also help if this format could blow the others away in performance and quality. :-)