But what about web and cloud-specific standards? Microsoft has enjoyed a long and productive history working with many companies regarding standardization projects; a great example being the WS* work which we continue to help evolve.
You want to talk web standards? I mean, Really?
Let's see: - IE-specific extensions to HTML since forever - IE-specific extensions to HTML used by MS-Office exporters (which is actually a big deal when MS-Office controls the market) - Lack of standards support in IE without any sane reason (remember png alpha transparency?)
It sounds like Microsoft is making headway in the interoperability space, and it sounds like the latest releases of IE are trying to implement standards, but when you've got a history of not only having proprietary, opaque, not-for-release MS-Office binary file formats, but also stacking the ISO voting organizations for OOXML, please understand that people are going to hesitate to trust you.
We expect interoperability and standards efforts to evolve organically as the industry gradually shifts focus to the huge opportunity provided by cloud computing.
Yeah, except Microsoft's traditional version of "develop organically" is usually "use Microsoft standards or get locked out of playing in the sandbox," or do you not remember what's been happening at Redmond for the last decade? Maybe it's not you, but look at the company (no pun intended) you keep.
When the center of gravity is standards and interoperability, we are even more enthusiastic because we believe these are the key to the long term success for the industry, as we are demonstrating through a variety of technologies such as Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8, and the Azure Services Platform.
Do you mean open standards? Because if the standards aren't open, then how do you expect "long term success" for multiple players in the industry?
Taking a look at the services you mentioned, IE8 has improved standards support, which is great, but Sliverlight is a Proprietary system, with most (nearly all?) deployments using patented, non-open-standard codecs. The Azure Platform seems like it's mostly all Microsoft software stack, with some.Net integration for Java and Ruby and several open standards. Maybe those services are a little more open than previous Microsoft offerings, but your platforms don't appear to be anywhere as near as open as offerings from other players like Amazon and Google.
We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto. What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience.
I'm somewhat unclear as to how this Cloud Manifesto came into being, so I understand some amount of concern from the Microsoft camp as well. That being said, what enhancements does Microsoft have to offer? Instead of just complaining about this document, why don't you link to some "best practices" documents for all providers and consumers of cloud computing.
It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an "open" process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.
And what of OOXML? Is Microsoft willing to hand over control of the current and all future versions of OOXML to a standards body completely? Was Microsoft interested in "reaching a consensus across key stakeholders...through an open process" ? I find your comments about open standards "emerging from a closed process...at least mildly ironic."
RMS has always been about being as free as possible.
Remember that he started out writing Free Software (we really should just call it Software Libre so the 'Free' isn't misunderstood) on non-Free Software computer systems.
I think that RMS would love to not have to interact with non-free Cisco routers, nor medical devices running non-free device drivers, but sometimes that's the only choice.
I DO admire much of what Mr. Stallman stands for, and I'm glad there is a champion for free software... but I live in the real world, where to buy goods, you need some government's currency, and to do anything electronically, you have to use SOME commercial software somewhere.
Ten years ago it was 1999, and running a Free Software desktop like RedHat wasn't the easiest thing to do. Over the past decade Free Software has come a long way and is being used in all kinds of new applications. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop here and not be used to a greater extent over the next decade.
I'm not sure if there's a fully Free-Software credit-card processing library you can use to take credit cards online right now, but I'm pretty sure that most of the pieces exist already. Can you think of some limitation on why one couldn't implement such an online interface using completely Free Software?
I wonder, too... does Mr. Stallman's PC have a proprietary BIOS, or did he write that code, too?
The FSF runs coreboot on most or all of their servers now. Due to lack of documentation, coreboot is still unable to run on any laptop (AFAIK).
RMS started working with an XO laptop (as that had a Free BIOS), but then abandoned that hardware when he felt that the project betrayed its commitment to providing children in developing worlds with a Free and Open software/hardware stack, snuggling up with Microsoft instead.
Right now I believe that he's using a Lemote Yeelong, which has a Free BIOS.
I don't think that RMS had a hand in writing any of the Free BIOS code that runs his laptop -- I think that he's benefiting from code that other people have written, the same way that some of those people have undoubtedly benefited from code that RMS has written or advocacy work he's done for Free Software.
STTNG, Voyager, Stargate, Atlantis are online via ShoutCast...
ShoutCast is the Nullsoft/AOL internet radio site. Do you mean Fancast?
Assuming you meant the latter, I went to their site and found ST:TOS, but nothing about ST:TNG. I don't think that TNG is available on any of these ad-supported, media-company-supported sites.
Or it's just lurking in the shadows? It's great when low uids come out en masse in a thread...
The new/. is like a youtube comments page, nothing but vitriol and hate, smart-arse comments by half-wits.
You forgot grate spelings. and good punctuations.
This is a huge political upheaval in a Virtual World.
True enough. The first thought I had was: what are the ramifications in the real world? If participants in BoB are invested enough to hop on planes in the Real World and try to re-form the alliance, the in-game environment is obviously having a tremendous effect on the Real World. If activities like camping and ransom are acceptable in-game, what happens when a powerful player in the game decides to stop playing?
In the Real World there's no way that you can "stop playing" -- if you decide to do something like rob a bank or steal a car, you're going to have to live with the ramifications of that action for the rest of your life. If you decide to participate in a virtual world, especially if you become highly invested in that world, other players will certainly become reliant upon your presence in-game. So what happens if your character in-game decides to do something really big -- like defect to the enemy -- and then you decide to "stop playing" ?
Is it reasonable to expect that someone's virtual world actions will have Real World consequences? If people who play characters in the game came to an in-game defector's Real World address and asked for an explanation, some kind of closure to the defector's actions, or even tried to seek retribution, how would a court interpret that?
What if the setting is an environment that has currency that can be exchanged for real money, such as Second Life? When does a game stop being just a game?
If you're not the copyright-holder of a piece of GPLed software, you have the right to sell copies of the software, but you do not have the right to sell the legal, controlling rights to that software.
Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)
It's interesting that the FSF talks about selling copies rather than just about licensing a copy. I believe their point is that in order to distribute the software (for free or for money) it's necessary for you to transmit a copy to someone else, and because the GPL puts restrictions on distribution, not use, there's no point in using the term "licensing".
There's ~47,000,000 Americans without health insurance. Out of a population of ~300,000,000. That's 15.67%, not 50%
I don't know anything about those source numbers, so I'll just go ahead and believe them, but I've gotta call you on those sig figs there. 15.67? 4 sig figs? How about just 20%.
(I'm not sure whether to thank or to blame all of my physics teachers for drilling us in sig figs)
The complexity of git robs it of quite a bit of the value of it's features. For God only knows what reason, a 5-6 person project that i'm working on is using git instead of subversion, and only the person who setup the project actually has any idea how to use git.
It sounds like the first person set up the project, and now expects everyone else to just "make it work", even if they're not programmers and have a good understanding of Git. Fair 'nuff.
Now I don't know your situation, but if you're actually in a work situation, the lead programmer (or user, if you're not storing code in this repository) should be giving you guys some kind of help or crash course in using Git. The Git model is quite a bit different than SVN, and it has taken me some time to wrap my head around it -- kind of like learning a functional programming language after working with imperative languages for several years.
It's awesome to have the whole thing where it merges all the changes in a same file together, fairly intelligently, but even the GUI version for Windows has no functional interface for how to deal with conflicts (which should be easily done as a "which bit of code is the proper piece to use here?" instead of jamming diffs into a file.
Which Windows GUI tool(s) are you using? Right now I can think of several -- gitk, git-gui, qgit, git extensions, CheetahGit, TortoiseGit,...
I think that part of the problem right now is that there is no definitive Git GUI for Windows. Even if the TortoiseGit project gets more mature, users of TortoiseSVN or TortoiseCVS will have to learn a new version-control paradigm and understand some new terms before they'll be able to successfully use TortoiseGit.
Also, the Windows and Linux versions of GIT have several problems interoperating with each other.
Are you referring to line-ending problems? If so, take a look at the "core.autocrlf" attribute. If you're not talking about line endings, and you can't find any help online, I'd just go ahead and file a bug report or hop on the git mailing list.
In short, Git appears to have been designed entirely with features in mind, and not one bit of usability for anyone other than Linus himself.
Oh, I think most people would agree with that -- especially Linus. Of course, I think that this is partially a Plumbing vs. Porcelain issue: a number of geeks love to use a command-line shell, but most ordinary users feel much more comfortable with a GUI windowing environment. Many programmers really like the power they get from using Git on the command line, but some people want something a bit more user-friendly like Easy Git or a Git GUI.
It is a nightmare for people who only have the need for version control and a handful of people working together. It reminds me very, very much of early Linux, before anyone else besides Linus had been hacking on it.
Yes -- I can see that. The Git workflow is pretty different from that of a tool like SVN. Unless the team leader is willing to sit down with the group and work through examples -- and then also be ready to answer questions anytime during the workday for the first few weeks -- then it's going to be a really rough, potentially unproductive month. Even if they grumble about it, it's probably worth their time to train everyone up front.
You've probably seen this before, but for anyone who's moving from SVN to Git, there's a really good Intro to Git for SVN users.
Of course I can't find the reference now that I need to quote from it, but I remember reading that overwriting your drive with/dev/random is problematic.
First off,/dev/random on most machines is a pseudo-random number generator. It's slow to generate huge volumes of "random" numbers, and once you try to generate tons and tons of such numbers a second, I believe you'll get what Wikipedia terms "correlation of successive values". If you could get some random number generator coprocessor, that might make it feasible -- and it sounds like some secure-delete systems actually use such a device!
What I wonder is if anyone has done any research (or simple reasoning) into whether overwriting your drive with random data (pseudo or not) is any more destructive than a simple 0,1,0 series of overwrites.
At work we're trying to get all our our repos moved to Git. We moved off of CVS to SVN a year or so (which was a huge improvement), but now that all of the non-programmers in the office are used to using TortoiseSVN, lack of a good windows GUI for Git has been a bit of a roadblock.
The msysgit folks started work on Tortoise-inspired GitCheetah GUI, but that project basically fizzled out. Lots of people wanted a Windows GUI, but no one had both the resources and drive to step up and do it.
Then, exactly two months ago, Frank Li started working on TortoiseGit. From what I can tell, this is a fork of TortoiseSVN with most of the Subversion guts pulled out and replaced with git commands. TortoiseGit is not done yet: 'git add' has some issues, Submodules don't seem to work at all, etc..., but development on the tool is in high gear and the primary developer is going the extra mile to help users.
If you're looking to deploy tools right now, gitk is a bit more powerful than the log in TortoiseGit, but might be more confusing for naive users.
When I was working on a grizzly bear census about a decade ago (it wasn't as dangerous as it sounds...), we collected tufts of hair from rub trees and scat.
I think that doing the DNA workup on a hair sample was a bit more than the scat, but that both of them were at least $5, maybe $10 each. The census didn't have enough money to do it all up front, so they were stashing samples in freezers while they tried to get more grant money.
Prices may have gone done since then, but I'd guess that doing a sample on each dog crap is going to take a lot of time and money. And besides, don't they imagine that people are going to put the dog crap from their yard into the boxes as well? I mean, if you get a toy or something each time, aren't people going to load the boxes up?
The gigantic, fearsome, cubic Crouton-o-saurians cam rumbling through the low frisee, green leaf, and iceberg lettuces, smashing every living thing in their path. But they were lightweights, and when the comet smashed into Earth they knew they were in trouble. "Crumbs!," cried the Crouton-o-saurians, "we're toast!"
Now that it looks like this "American Rights Council" doesn't exist, I wonder if Google is going to start to require notarized DMCA take-down notices. Prior to this 4000-long list of notices, Google might not have had the evidence to show that DMCA notices were being abused, but this should provide ample evidence should Google ever get in legal trouble if they only accept notarized DMCA take down notices in the future.
The benefit for Google is obvious, as is the benefit for all of their users, etc. It's a big enough win to make me wonder if someone didn't just plan this as a way to weed out the chaff that is getting sent to YouTube legal; this event should hopefully send a warning to the RIAA and other groups that shoot from the hip with take-down notices: abuse of the DMCA's provisions will have negative ramifications.
Granted, it doesn't run Linux (or if it does, it's kept hidden from the user.)
Are you sure it's kept hidden? The azul system specs page says that all of their hardware can run multiple OSes, including some GNU/Linux distros:
"Operating Systems: Interoperable with Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) on SPARC(TM) and x86; IBM® AIX® on Power Architecture, HP-UX on PA-RISC, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and SuSe(TM) Linux on x86"
I'm going to guess that you can get a console by sticking a keyboard in...
I have never had 50 tabs open at once. I think my limit has been around 20, but I usually do not average more than 5. 50, for real? Does not sound like a real world test to me.
No, it's totally real -- I have friends that browse like that. They have multiple rows of tabs (instead of some of the tabs being off the screen), so they start to squish the window and give them an ultra-widescreen view of webpages.
I'm not saying that it's a good way to browse the net, I'm just saying that people do it.
I would have liked to see a ruling that established a precident for dealing with this kind of violation.
Sure -- a lot of us would like to see the certainty (well, some certainty, anyhow) that a precedent would set, but I can't think of a single FOSS developer who is in it for the litigation. Harald Welte, the founder of gpl-violations.org, has stated several times that as important as it has been for him to address violations of the GPL, he really wants to get back to developing software, not spending time with lawyers and courtrooms.
Besides, we're the "good guys" -- even if it looks like a company should have known better, and even if it's pretty much a given that the company did know better (and is just trying to get away with not releasing source code), then we need to keep on taking the moral high ground and try to resolve the issue in a settlement out of court. At the end of the day, what most FOSS software developers want is to be recognized for their work and to have people respect the terms of the license under which they released their code.
If a company keeps on committing violations time and time again, then sure -- give ESR and RMS their swords and wish them Happy Hacking -- but otherwise, deal with the underlying gpl violation issue, and move on.
Microsoft publishes its "Open Specification Promise" -- a document which at first glance appears to give independent developers the freedom to implement OOXML without worrying about infringing on Microsoft's patents. (This document was undoubtedly drafted and/or reviewed by Microsoft's legal department)
The Software Freedom Law Center -- an organization staffed with lawyers very knowledgeable about IP law as it relates to software licensing -- publishes a paper stating that developers should not rely on Microsoft's OSP as patent indemnification as "[the OSP] provides no assurance to GPL developers" and "[it] is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation".
Gray Knowlton, a product manager for Microsoft Office, writes a rebuttal to the SFLC's paper on his blog.
Now Knowlton may have some good points in his rebuttal, but AFAIK he's not a lawyer. Until some Microsoft lawyer (or some other lawyer who is versed in software licensing and patent law) wants to step up and rebut the SFLC, I'm going to be inclined to believe that the OSP is not strong enough to protect me from lawsuits.
Microsoft has an absolutely abysmal record when it comes to interoperability and free and open access to their file formats. "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish" is their watchword. In March of 2005 I wrote to Microsoft's legal department and the Free Software Foundation, asking if the licensing of the Office 2003 XML Schemas (the ancestor of OOXML) were compatible with the GPL. Microsoft didn't even give me the courtesy of a reply. So even if, as Knowlton claims, "[Office] Open XML's terms are the same or more liberal than rival document standard OpenDocument," if there's any doubt in my mind as to whether I am legally protected when working with the OOXML format, why should I believe that Microsoft will act in good faith in the future when it never has in the past?
I agree with the parent: it looks like they are just distributing patches, not full source, for several files.
If you follow the given link you will download splashtop_src.zip, which contains dvm-dist-20071019.tar.bz2 (don't ask ME why it was compressed twice), which in turn contains two folders "appliance" and "core". The "core" folder contains several patchfiles (core/patches/dvm_tag.patch, core/patches/squashfs3.2.patch, core/patches/get_cmos_time.patch, etc...) which were obviously made against the linux kernel tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Steven Martin @ Microsoft writes:
But what about web and cloud-specific standards? Microsoft has enjoyed a long and productive history working with many companies regarding standardization projects; a great example being the WS* work which we continue to help evolve.
You want to talk web standards? I mean, Really?
Let's see:
- IE-specific extensions to HTML since forever
- IE-specific extensions to HTML used by MS-Office exporters (which is actually a big deal when MS-Office controls the market)
- Lack of standards support in IE without any sane reason (remember png alpha transparency?)
It sounds like Microsoft is making headway in the interoperability space, and it sounds like the latest releases of IE are trying to implement standards, but when you've got a history of not only having proprietary, opaque, not-for-release MS-Office binary file formats, but also stacking the ISO voting organizations for OOXML, please understand that people are going to hesitate to trust you.
We expect interoperability and standards efforts to evolve organically as the industry gradually shifts focus to the huge opportunity provided by cloud computing.
Yeah, except Microsoft's traditional version of "develop organically" is usually "use Microsoft standards or get locked out of playing in the sandbox," or do you not remember what's been happening at Redmond for the last decade? Maybe it's not you, but look at the company (no pun intended) you keep.
When the center of gravity is standards and interoperability, we are even more enthusiastic because we believe these are the key to the long term success for the industry, as we are demonstrating through a variety of technologies such as Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8, and the Azure Services Platform.
Do you mean open standards? Because if the standards aren't open, then how do you expect "long term success" for multiple players in the industry?
Taking a look at the services you mentioned, IE8 has improved standards support, which is great, but Sliverlight is a Proprietary system, with most (nearly all?) deployments using patented, non-open-standard codecs. The Azure Platform seems like it's mostly all Microsoft software stack, with some .Net integration for Java and Ruby and several open standards. Maybe those services are a little more open than previous Microsoft offerings, but your platforms don't appear to be anywhere as near as open as offerings from other players like Amazon and Google.
We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto. What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience.
I'm somewhat unclear as to how this Cloud Manifesto came into being, so I understand some amount of concern from the Microsoft camp as well. That being said, what enhancements does Microsoft have to offer? Instead of just complaining about this document, why don't you link to some "best practices" documents for all providers and consumers of cloud computing.
It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an "open" process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.
And what of OOXML? Is Microsoft willing to hand over control of the current and all future versions of OOXML to a standards body completely? Was Microsoft interested in "reaching a consensus across key stakeholders...through an open process" ? I find your comments about open standards "emerging from a closed process...at least mildly ironic."
My comment nearly writes itself:
To ensure that the w
RMS has always been about being as free as possible.
Remember that he started out writing Free Software (we really should just call it Software Libre so the 'Free' isn't misunderstood) on non-Free Software computer systems.
I think that RMS would love to not have to interact with non-free Cisco routers, nor medical devices running non-free device drivers, but sometimes that's the only choice.
I DO admire much of what Mr. Stallman stands for, and I'm glad there is a champion for free software ... but I live in the real world, where to buy goods, you need some government's currency, and to do anything electronically, you have to use SOME commercial software somewhere.
Ten years ago it was 1999, and running a Free Software desktop like RedHat wasn't the easiest thing to do. Over the past decade Free Software has come a long way and is being used in all kinds of new applications. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop here and not be used to a greater extent over the next decade.
I'm not sure if there's a fully Free-Software credit-card processing library you can use to take credit cards online right now, but I'm pretty sure that most of the pieces exist already. Can you think of some limitation on why one couldn't implement such an online interface using completely Free Software?
I wonder, too ... does Mr. Stallman's PC have a proprietary BIOS, or did he write that code, too?
The FSF runs coreboot on most or all of their servers now. Due to lack of documentation, coreboot is still unable to run on any laptop (AFAIK).
RMS started working with an XO laptop (as that had a Free BIOS), but then abandoned that hardware when he felt that the project betrayed its commitment to providing children in developing worlds with a Free and Open software/hardware stack, snuggling up with Microsoft instead.
Right now I believe that he's using a Lemote Yeelong, which has a Free BIOS.
I don't think that RMS had a hand in writing any of the Free BIOS code that runs his laptop -- I think that he's benefiting from code that other people have written, the same way that some of those people have undoubtedly benefited from code that RMS has written or advocacy work he's done for Free Software.
STTNG, Voyager, Stargate, Atlantis are online via ShoutCast...
ShoutCast is the Nullsoft/AOL internet radio site. Do you mean Fancast?
Assuming you meant the latter, I went to their site and found ST:TOS, but nothing about ST:TNG. I don't think that TNG is available on any of these ad-supported, media-company-supported sites.
I think the /. i grew up with is dead.
Or it's just lurking in the shadows? It's great when low uids come out en masse in a thread...
The new /. is like a youtube comments page, nothing but vitriol and hate, smart-arse comments by half-wits.
You forgot grate spelings. and good punctuations.
This is a huge political upheaval in a Virtual World.
True enough. The first thought I had was: what are the ramifications in the real world? If participants in BoB are invested enough to hop on planes in the Real World and try to re-form the alliance, the in-game environment is obviously having a tremendous effect on the Real World. If activities like camping and ransom are acceptable in-game, what happens when a powerful player in the game decides to stop playing?
In the Real World there's no way that you can "stop playing" -- if you decide to do something like rob a bank or steal a car, you're going to have to live with the ramifications of that action for the rest of your life. If you decide to participate in a virtual world, especially if you become highly invested in that world, other players will certainly become reliant upon your presence in-game. So what happens if your character in-game decides to do something really big -- like defect to the enemy -- and then you decide to "stop playing" ?
Is it reasonable to expect that someone's virtual world actions will have Real World consequences? If people who play characters in the game came to an in-game defector's Real World address and asked for an explanation, some kind of closure to the defector's actions, or even tried to seek retribution, how would a court interpret that?
What if the setting is an environment that has currency that can be exchanged for real money, such as Second Life? When does a game stop being just a game?
(IANAL, blah, blah...)
If you're not the copyright-holder of a piece of GPLed software, you have the right to sell copies of the software, but you do not have the right to sell the legal, controlling rights to that software.
Here's the relevant bit from the FSF's GPL Licensing FAQ:
Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)
It's interesting that the FSF talks about selling copies rather than just about licensing a copy. I believe their point is that in order to distribute the software (for free or for money) it's necessary for you to transmit a copy to someone else, and because the GPL puts restrictions on distribution, not use, there's no point in using the term "licensing".
There's ~47,000,000 Americans without health insurance. Out of a population of ~300,000,000. That's 15.67%, not 50%
I don't know anything about those source numbers, so I'll just go ahead and believe them, but I've gotta call you on those sig figs there. 15.67? 4 sig figs? How about just 20%.
(I'm not sure whether to thank or to blame all of my physics teachers for drilling us in sig figs)
Lots to talk about here!
The complexity of git robs it of quite a bit of the value of it's features. For God only knows what reason, a 5-6 person project that i'm working on is using git instead of subversion, and only the person who setup the project actually has any idea how to use git.
It sounds like the first person set up the project, and now expects everyone else to just "make it work", even if they're not programmers and have a good understanding of Git. Fair 'nuff.
Now I don't know your situation, but if you're actually in a work situation, the lead programmer (or user, if you're not storing code in this repository) should be giving you guys some kind of help or crash course in using Git. The Git model is quite a bit different than SVN, and it has taken me some time to wrap my head around it -- kind of like learning a functional programming language after working with imperative languages for several years.
It's awesome to have the whole thing where it merges all the changes in a same file together, fairly intelligently, but even the GUI version for Windows has no functional interface for how to deal with conflicts (which should be easily done as a "which bit of code is the proper piece to use here?" instead of jamming diffs into a file.
Which Windows GUI tool(s) are you using? Right now I can think of several -- gitk, git-gui, qgit, git extensions, CheetahGit, TortoiseGit, ...
I think that part of the problem right now is that there is no definitive Git GUI for Windows. Even if the TortoiseGit project gets more mature, users of TortoiseSVN or TortoiseCVS will have to learn a new version-control paradigm and understand some new terms before they'll be able to successfully use TortoiseGit.
Also, the Windows and Linux versions of GIT have several problems interoperating with each other.
Are you referring to line-ending problems? If so, take a look at the "core.autocrlf" attribute. If you're not talking about line endings, and you can't find any help online, I'd just go ahead and file a bug report or hop on the git mailing list.
In short, Git appears to have been designed entirely with features in mind, and not one bit of usability for anyone other than Linus himself.
Oh, I think most people would agree with that -- especially Linus. Of course, I think that this is partially a Plumbing vs. Porcelain issue: a number of geeks love to use a command-line shell, but most ordinary users feel much more comfortable with a GUI windowing environment. Many programmers really like the power they get from using Git on the command line, but some people want something a bit more user-friendly like Easy Git or a Git GUI.
It is a nightmare for people who only have the need for version control and a handful of people working together. It reminds me very, very much of early Linux, before anyone else besides Linus had been hacking on it.
Yes -- I can see that. The Git workflow is pretty different from that of a tool like SVN. Unless the team leader is willing to sit down with the group and work through examples -- and then also be ready to answer questions anytime during the workday for the first few weeks -- then it's going to be a really rough, potentially unproductive month. Even if they grumble about it, it's probably worth their time to train everyone up front.
You've probably seen this before, but for anyone who's moving from SVN to Git, there's a really good Intro to Git for SVN users.
Good luck!
Or...just dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
Of course I can't find the reference now that I need to quote from it, but I remember reading that overwriting your drive with /dev/random is problematic.
First off, /dev/random on most machines is a pseudo-random number generator. It's slow to generate huge volumes of "random" numbers, and once you try to generate tons and tons of such numbers a second, I believe you'll get what Wikipedia terms "correlation of successive values". If you could get some random number generator coprocessor, that might make it feasible -- and it sounds like some secure-delete systems actually use such a device!
What I wonder is if anyone has done any research (or simple reasoning) into whether overwriting your drive with random data (pseudo or not) is any more destructive than a simple 0,1,0 series of overwrites.
At work we're trying to get all our our repos moved to Git. We moved off of CVS to SVN a year or so (which was a huge improvement), but now that all of the non-programmers in the office are used to using TortoiseSVN, lack of a good windows GUI for Git has been a bit of a roadblock.
The msysgit folks started work on Tortoise-inspired GitCheetah GUI, but that project basically fizzled out. Lots of people wanted a Windows GUI, but no one had both the resources and drive to step up and do it.
Then, exactly two months ago, Frank Li started working on TortoiseGit. From what I can tell, this is a fork of TortoiseSVN with most of the Subversion guts pulled out and replaced with git commands. TortoiseGit is not done yet: 'git add' has some issues, Submodules don't seem to work at all, etc..., but development on the tool is in high gear and the primary developer is going the extra mile to help users.
If you're looking to deploy tools right now, gitk is a bit more powerful than the log in TortoiseGit, but might be more confusing for naive users.
Can you also point me to where the rainbow-powered unicorn factories are?
They used to be here on Slashdot...
I first read Apple's lawyer's name as "Rampage"...then when I looked more closely I noticed that his name was just "Ramage".
Pity. It would be so appropriate.
Try searching for 'marad0na' - I'm guessing that people will start to use alternate spellings to bypass the filters... :-)
Really? What exactly is being delivered, and to whom is it being delivered?
If the carrier promises look, then can I get some, and does it come in Kilograms?
I think that what they're trying to say is:
Of course, that's still horribly confusing. Let's move that around:
Much better.
When I was working on a grizzly bear census about a decade ago (it wasn't as dangerous as it sounds...), we collected tufts of hair from rub trees and scat.
I think that doing the DNA workup on a hair sample was a bit more than the scat, but that both of them were at least $5, maybe $10 each. The census didn't have enough money to do it all up front, so they were stashing samples in freezers while they tried to get more grant money.
Prices may have gone done since then, but I'd guess that doing a sample on each dog crap is going to take a lot of time and money. And besides, don't they imagine that people are going to put the dog crap from their yard into the boxes as well? I mean, if you get a toy or something each time, aren't people going to load the boxes up?
The gigantic, fearsome, cubic Crouton-o-saurians cam rumbling through the low frisee, green leaf, and iceberg lettuces, smashing every living thing in their path. But they were lightweights, and when the comet smashed into Earth they knew they were in trouble. "Crumbs!," cried the Crouton-o-saurians, "we're toast!"
Slashcode picked up your trailing paren and thought it was part of that URL. This should work better:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7604311.stm
Now that it looks like this "American Rights Council" doesn't exist, I wonder if Google is going to start to require notarized DMCA take-down notices. Prior to this 4000-long list of notices, Google might not have had the evidence to show that DMCA notices were being abused, but this should provide ample evidence should Google ever get in legal trouble if they only accept notarized DMCA take down notices in the future.
The benefit for Google is obvious, as is the benefit for all of their users, etc. It's a big enough win to make me wonder if someone didn't just plan this as a way to weed out the chaff that is getting sent to YouTube legal; this event should hopefully send a warning to the RIAA and other groups that shoot from the hip with take-down notices: abuse of the DMCA's provisions will have negative ramifications.
Stop looking at me!
Also, there's nothing under this huge tarp. Nope. Nothing at all...
Is that the project to bus all of the patent trials away from the Marshall, Texas courts?
Are you sure it's kept hidden? The azul system specs page says that all of their hardware can run multiple OSes, including some GNU/Linux distros:
"Operating Systems: Interoperable with Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) on SPARC(TM) and x86; IBM® AIX® on Power Architecture, HP-UX on PA-RISC, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and SuSe(TM) Linux on x86"
I'm going to guess that you can get a console by sticking a keyboard in...
I'm not saying that it's a good way to browse the net, I'm just saying that people do it.
Sure -- a lot of us would like to see the certainty (well, some certainty, anyhow) that a precedent would set, but I can't think of a single FOSS developer who is in it for the litigation. Harald Welte, the founder of gpl-violations.org, has stated several times that as important as it has been for him to address violations of the GPL, he really wants to get back to developing software, not spending time with lawyers and courtrooms.
Besides, we're the "good guys" -- even if it looks like a company should have known better, and even if it's pretty much a given that the company did know better (and is just trying to get away with not releasing source code), then we need to keep on taking the moral high ground and try to resolve the issue in a settlement out of court. At the end of the day, what most FOSS software developers want is to be recognized for their work and to have people respect the terms of the license under which they released their code.
If a company keeps on committing violations time and time again, then sure -- give ESR and RMS their swords and wish them Happy Hacking -- but otherwise, deal with the underlying gpl violation issue, and move on.
Now Knowlton may have some good points in his rebuttal, but AFAIK he's not a lawyer. Until some Microsoft lawyer (or some other lawyer who is versed in software licensing and patent law) wants to step up and rebut the SFLC, I'm going to be inclined to believe that the OSP is not strong enough to protect me from lawsuits.
Microsoft has an absolutely abysmal record when it comes to interoperability and free and open access to their file formats. "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish" is their watchword. In March of 2005 I wrote to Microsoft's legal department and the Free Software Foundation, asking if the licensing of the Office 2003 XML Schemas (the ancestor of OOXML) were compatible with the GPL. Microsoft didn't even give me the courtesy of a reply. So even if, as Knowlton claims, "[Office] Open XML's terms are the same or more liberal than rival document standard OpenDocument," if there's any doubt in my mind as to whether I am legally protected when working with the OOXML format, why should I believe that Microsoft will act in good faith in the future when it never has in the past?
I agree with the parent: it looks like they are just distributing patches, not full source, for several files.
If you follow the given link you will download splashtop_src.zip, which contains dvm-dist-20071019.tar.bz2 (don't ask ME why it was compressed twice), which in turn contains two folders "appliance" and "core". The "core" folder contains several patchfiles (core/patches/dvm_tag.patch, core/patches/squashfs3.2.patch, core/patches/get_cmos_time.patch, etc...) which were obviously made against the linux kernel tree.