Yer selling the kids short, sport. They is always posers in a crowd. Use the zeitgeist when you have it and bide your time when you don't.
The dynamic has been the same since at least 1848. We don't need them to voice the arguments with eloquence or even understand the issues, we need their bodies on the street and on the tube.
No. There are several naïve assumptions about culture at play here. Culture does not organize itself organically around one's ethnic, economic or political identification or modern notions of the nation/state. This is a consequence of our need for naming and the pervasiveness of cultural critique informed by or patterned after demographic analysis. Nor can we speak of an original culture or a primary identity outside of a simple normative gesture. A gesture which, with its individuating obverse, is equally available to all and uninfluenced by questions of economic status or the availability of advanced digital communications.
To whit: the Bhagavad Gita quoting coker from W. Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge or the trucker who once gave me a lift from Jackson, MS to Memphis, TN. He sang from operatic arias in three languages and I shared some of my shoddy poems with him.
To be sure, Katz's mythic modern Shakespeare is giving little or no consideration to such questions as he clatters over whatever he is clattering over.
This is absolutely correct and the sites should have stood on this ground. I argue that you would not need a hefty legal team to fight such a battle, just make your court dates and breath the same two words in response to each question: "fair use."
Your chances of publishing the book in dead-tree format are really quite slim, whether or no it has merit. Publishing a first-book without an agent is only slightly more likely than hitting the Powerball. You have about a 1/100 chance of getting an agent to respond to a query with a request to read. Once your get your sample chapters over the gunwale, they'll be handed to an editor who will skim the thing in an evening and give a yea or nay to read the complete work. My wife does just this for a local agency and reads something like four novels a week, has been for a year, is one of eight editors working for the agency and she has yet to recommend a book be represented by the agency. Should this unlikely event occur for you, you can then count yourself among the successful. Your book is actively being shopped by one of the thousands of literary agents in America. You've still got a long way to go.
But there is hope; nothing succeeds like success! Get the book in the hands of a small publisher distributing in the open e-book format (XHTML -- readable by modern browsers, all the e-readers and some accessiblity systems). Offer the book for free or next to it (i.e. at cost). Make a market and then turn to an agency or go directly to a publisher with some numbers: x downloads in x weeks/months.
Yes, it varies by state and even locality. No, it is not something one would willingly discuss with a policeman in certain jurisdictions and particularly if one is of the wrong ethnicity. Yes, the police in Amerikkka are generally scary. The majority are good eggs, but more than a few are in blue because it allows them to carry weapons and exercise authority (brutality) legally. Cops are where the rubber hits the road, the interface between our legal guarantees and their enforcement. The really scary part is that in most jurisdictions, law enforcement is not directly subject to review and oversight by civilian or even legislative councils, they are answerable only to internal/administrative proceedings. The only civilian recourse is a charge under criminal statutes and the burden of proof is tremendous. A trial attorney would scoff at such a recourse. In consequence, police corruption and brutality is endemic.
Are these trolls with C(++) suggestions!? Emacs and VIM, commandline gcc...
You want an interpreted language with an interactive mode for immediate feedback. The answer is Scheme or Python and I vote Python. The syntax is simple, its got a straightforward object orientation, its got drawing and GUI modules for that all-important sense of accomplishment.
You categorically do *not* want to start them out with the sort of stuff that got you into it 10-20 years ago. Your kids are growing up in a world where programming will no longer be a specialists' occupation. The frontier of userspace is changing. The languages will be high-level, the grammar OO, and with a blurring of the line between system and apps. Don't saddle them with a lot of baggage they will just have to unlearn. Let 'em come to the low level stuff if/when they show an interest.
I was aware of the legal concept of the treatment of incorporations as persons. I consider it the basis of considerable injustice, but I did not know where it arose and I appreciate the reference. Time to do a little reading...
"a fair use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal a book."
The "technological protection" clauses of the DMCA are not an inadvertent extension of copywrite holders' rights by a naïve Congress, the limitation of fair use is entirely intentional. The argument that a digital work is fundamentally different from a pre-digital work was swallowed hook, line and sinker. The statement quoted above is absurd hyperbole; in a more accurate analogy, loaning a copy of Orifice2K to a friend is likened not to loaning a book but to loaning the press-plates for the book. The previously sufficient technical protection inherent in the expense of building a letterpress allowed for fair use to function without undue anxiety on the part of copywrite holders.
Congress is only too well aware of the technical issues, thanks to their friends in the content industries. Their eyes were wide open and their ears filled with the sound of the bell on the till.
Fair use is a dead letter, as intended. Arguments to restore it will fall on deaf ears. It remains to make clear that, in consequence, the very basis of copywrite, its ostensible role in supporting productive endeavor and the common weal, is subverted. Is this line persuasive? I doubt it. The DMCA effectively creates the conditions for a lively black market, essentially ensuring piracy. And this may be the key to its undoing. We may thus look on software piracy as a moral imperative.
In the immortal words of Wat Tyler (the punkers, not the 14th C. revolutionary):
Something I've been rolling around in my head for a few months is perhaps applicable here. I am concerned about the penetration of personal computing in disadvantaged communities, among people of color, new immigrant communities, etc. The tech have/have-not divide is a real one and a real problem.
My thought was to get some grant/foundation money together and begin working with the few agencies and services involved in recycling computer hardware, contributing to their efforts and handing out boxes with Linux pre-installed. Perhaps even doing some ultra-newbie classes, getting free ISP service, how to find help.
Linux makes old gear new, is an astounding tool for learning both the history and the current state of computing and extremely powerful development tools are freely available.
Admittedly, a majority of these machines will end up stacked next to a dumpster somewhere, but the cost is negligible and the potential gain represented by the 10% who would actually learn something, get interested, go further, is immense.
I couldn't agree more. My intent was a defense of the importance of the concepts behind markup theory and the fact that such theory has been broadly applied. I certainly don't think the overhead of such a system is warranted for SOHO or personal computing. I do think that it would be beneficial for the typical desktop wordprocessing/publishing apps to speak some form of *ML, always keeping in mind the tradeoff between the users desire to apply on-off local formatting to get the job done and the need to do something else with the data later.
I cannot argue with the lack of functional, friendly editors for either *ML or its stylesheets. Have we identified a need? Is there a place for a WYSIWYG word processor which manages the tension between local formatting and reuse for the user, which integrates and abstracts away the management of DTD/schemas and stylesheets? Maybe, maybe not. Does our friend want to post his chemistry paper to the web, archive it? Does giving LyX an *ML fluent backend accomplish this goal?
I find it absolutely incredibly that a publisher is shooting plates from 600dpi laser output, although I can probably guess the publisher.
SGML's "takeoff" is pretty well established, friend. You would be hard pressed to find a professional, hot-type emulating typsetting system which does not speak SGML. And as a basis for solid, enterprise level document management system, it's fundamental constructs (and by extension XML's) are unparalleled. Largely thanks to SGML's age (20+ years), these tools are typically proprietary and originally written for mini's. Ports to current hardware are thin on the ground thanks to the advent of "desktop publishing" and the triumph of the "good-enough" school of page-layout. You may have noticed the diminishing quality of type layout in major magazines and newspapers in the last decade, or perhaps its just I and the other old dogs of the typesetting trade. I digress. The fact is that outside of scientific publishing, where TeX and its children rightfully rule, tools for generating Postscript all speak SGML fluently.
...it would be fairly trivial to create a standard set of such commands (with a new document class or package), and using them consistently...
This is the trivial point of markup languages in general. Agreed that for the exercise of personal writing the overhead of XML/SGML validating and processing is absurd, but in any environment requiring the repurposing of content and/or extensive, multi-authored revisions, the structure/style distinction is vital.
The balance of your critique is specific to the desktop platforms and Linux in particular, where the demand for professional-quality type layout and DMS are somewhat limited and, as you say, the popularity and quality of the TeX tools have discouraged innovation. As to the general transformation of arbitrary SGML/XML, have a look at the W3C's XSLT specification and particularly its implementation at xml.apache.org.
I can't quite see how this system is much different, let alone better, than having to use a TeX system to translate LaTeX source code into other formats.
Neither more nor less, but for LaTeX file formats being proprietary to a particular layout/pagination engine. The dearth of quality free editors should remedy itself shortly. AUCTeX exists thanks to the desire to simplify TeX/LaTeX.
Lastly, it is not that appearance is unimportant, quite the contrary. It is important enough to deserve treatment separate from the management of content. The last time you opened a trade publication of almost any sort, including your O'Reilly books, a financial prospectus, any printed material not devoted to marketing or enslaved by graphic content (which sadly includes most newspapers and magazines, it seems) you saw a document whose content was managed with SGML. Interestingly, many of the latter types of publications which rushed to tools like Quark are now clamoring for XML compliance from these vendors in order to manage their content and streamline its repurposing for the Web.
The ACLU will, I'm sure, be glad to defend the right of conservative christians to share their beliefs in a "highly public forum." The public forum is not the issue, that term would easily apply to the lobby of your local grocery store. The issue is an "institution of religion." That's a verb and it applies to the state. The public schools are an institute of the state. Their "sponsorship" of religious views is what is being fought. Any youngster is welcome to walk the halls of their local school preaching the good word, whatever that may be by their lights, at the top of their lungs. The moment the school provides a meeting room or PA system for said student, it crosses the line.
One of the original suggestions of a use for XML was as a means to bring order to the blizzard of.*rc and config files in the *nix. As someone here pointed out, Mac 10 will be using this format for the data formerly known as the resource fork.
As someone else noted, a standard schema for config files across different kernels could be useful, but would in fact be redundant effort because once you have XML, transformation into a different content model is next to trivial. In point of fact, modification of the kernel would be unnecessary as proper stylesheet processing could write the config and.*rc files in whatever form required by your kernel of choice. Is this worth the effort? I'll leave it to others, I'm merely a markup theorist.
XSLT: its not just for serving to old browsers. Use it.
In other words, the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made.
The notion of generic RP rulez been around a long time and the ability to publish peripheral material which has reference to a specific system has always existed, covered under fair use, just don't use the ® marks. Such use remains restricted, you'll notice.
Speaking as one who found AD&D an abomination, I remind you that the players are the source and they are only as closed-minded as they choose to be. Tsk. You young-uns.... I remember when my gaming gear would fit in a spiral notebook and a ziplock baggie. Um, two ziplock baggies.
Other than the cute sci-fi details (greenleafyshade.com) and the refraction of the economics, the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Well said, if a bit long-winded. I guess the paid-by-the-line habit is difficult to break.
The stab at Q*bert was pointed and right on target.
The only way I can perceive civil discussions happening on sites like this is if topics were clearly identified, people were required to post under some form of recognizable ID. ..
There is a long Katz-like essay waiting to be written about the relationship between anonymity and the notion of *free-speech* prevalent on the 'net. The anonymity of the 'net is akin to the anonymity of the mob and enables the same sort of unregulated animal behaviour. The self-regulation imposed by the knowledge that ones utterance is being weighed by ones interlocutors carries little weight here, much less than in a true public forum where the shock/horror/outrage of ones listeners is immediately registered on their faces.
While it is true that the many-to-many relationships engendered by the new media shatter the incipient facism Bertolt Brecht and others have identified in radio and other broadcast media, it conversly enables the kind of brutishness formerly the exclusive domain of mob-psychology.
Can this be doing anything other than running the scan released with source by Dr. Dittrich yesterday? I believe that this can be run remotely and sans root and is not as thorough as the one released by the FBI, which has its own problems.
The statements re Linux and Solaris are patent nonsense. These folks are just haymaking, to the discredit of anyone publishing their advertising spot masquerading as news.
Either there is no such thing as God, or science - which embodies our ability to reason - must be able to frame the question and provide us with the answers.
Kant covered the problems with this statement pretty thoroughly in the 18th century, from the preface of The Critique of Pure Reason: Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as pre-scribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
I turned off after this slipshod statement. The book sounds like drivel; The Dancing Wu-Li Masters with footnotes.
As soon as I heard of M$' bogus Freedom to Innovate site I went and used their handy forms and links to mail every one of my representatives and senator, as well as Wee Willie Clinton. I pointed out that I was using the resources M$ provided to urge their support of the DOJ action. Quoting myself from memory: It is my view that the single greatest impediment to true innovation and competition in the software industry is the breadth of Microsoft's dominance.
Go there and hoist the bastards on their own petard. You'll get some nice auto-responders, in some cases several, as well as some autographed letters. All but one actually responded to the issues I raised directly. Written by staffers, I'm sure, but they are also paid to register opinion and I made mine clear. Do it!
BTW, I have patented a means of navigating through a printed document by including a synopsis of chapter headings collected in the initial pages of the document, with references to the page number upon which the chapter begins tabulated alongside the aforesaid headings. Interested parties should contact my counsel regarding licensing fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Yer selling the kids short, sport. They is always posers in a crowd. Use the zeitgeist when you have it and bide your time when you don't.
The dynamic has been the same since at least 1848. We don't need them to voice the arguments with eloquence or even understand the issues, we need their bodies on the street and on the tube.
No. There are several naïve assumptions about culture at play here. Culture does not organize itself organically around one's ethnic, economic or political identification or modern notions of the nation/state. This is a consequence of our need for naming and the pervasiveness of cultural critique informed by or patterned after demographic analysis. Nor can we speak of an original culture or a primary identity outside of a simple normative gesture. A gesture which, with its individuating obverse, is equally available to all and uninfluenced by questions of economic status or the availability of advanced digital communications.
To whit: the Bhagavad Gita quoting coker from W. Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge or the trucker who once gave me a lift from Jackson, MS to Memphis, TN. He sang from operatic arias in three languages and I shared some of my shoddy poems with him.
To be sure, Katz's mythic modern Shakespeare is giving little or no consideration to such questions as he clatters over whatever he is clattering over.
This is absolutely correct and the sites should have stood on this ground. I argue that you would not need a hefty legal team to fight such a battle, just make your court dates and breath the same two words in response to each question: "fair use."
Your chances of publishing the book in dead-tree format are really quite slim, whether or no it has merit. Publishing a first-book without an agent is only slightly more likely than hitting the Powerball. You have about a 1/100 chance of getting an agent to respond to a query with a request to read. Once your get your sample chapters over the gunwale, they'll be handed to an editor who will skim the thing in an evening and give a yea or nay to read the complete work. My wife does just this for a local agency and reads something like four novels a week, has been for a year, is one of eight editors working for the agency and she has yet to recommend a book be represented by the agency. Should this unlikely event occur for you, you can then count yourself among the successful. Your book is actively being shopped by one of the thousands of literary agents in America. You've still got a long way to go.
But there is hope; nothing succeeds like success! Get the book in the hands of a small publisher distributing in the open e-book format (XHTML -- readable by modern browsers, all the e-readers and some accessiblity systems). Offer the book for free or next to it (i.e. at cost). Make a market and then turn to an agency or go directly to a publisher with some numbers: x downloads in x weeks/months.
Yes, it varies by state and even locality. No, it is not something one would willingly discuss with a policeman in certain jurisdictions and particularly if one is of the wrong ethnicity. Yes, the police in Amerikkka are generally scary. The majority are good eggs, but more than a few are in blue because it allows them to carry weapons and exercise authority (brutality) legally. Cops are where the rubber hits the road, the interface between our legal guarantees and their enforcement. The really scary part is that in most jurisdictions, law enforcement is not directly subject to review and oversight by civilian or even legislative councils, they are answerable only to internal/administrative proceedings. The only civilian recourse is a charge under criminal statutes and the burden of proof is tremendous. A trial attorney would scoff at such a recourse. In consequence, police corruption and brutality is endemic.
Are these trolls with C(++) suggestions!? Emacs and VIM, commandline gcc...
You want an interpreted language with an interactive mode for immediate feedback. The answer is Scheme or Python and I vote Python. The syntax is simple, its got a straightforward object orientation, its got drawing and GUI modules for that all-important sense of accomplishment.
You categorically do *not* want to start them out with the sort of stuff that got you into it 10-20 years ago. Your kids are growing up in a world where programming will no longer be a specialists' occupation. The frontier of userspace is changing. The languages will be high-level, the grammar OO, and with a blurring of the line between system and apps. Don't saddle them with a lot of baggage they will just have to unlearn. Let 'em come to the low level stuff if/when they show an interest.
...trojan advertising...
I thought that's what television was.
I was aware of the legal concept of the treatment of incorporations as persons. I consider it the basis of considerable injustice, but I did not know where it arose and I appreciate the reference. Time to do a little reading...
From TWX:
"a fair use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal a book."
The "technological protection" clauses of the DMCA are not an inadvertent extension of copywrite holders' rights by a naïve Congress, the limitation of fair use is entirely intentional. The argument that a digital work is fundamentally different from a pre-digital work was swallowed hook, line and sinker. The statement quoted above is absurd hyperbole; in a more accurate analogy, loaning a copy of Orifice2K to a friend is likened not to loaning a book but to loaning the press-plates for the book. The previously sufficient technical protection inherent in the expense of building a letterpress allowed for fair use to function without undue anxiety on the part of copywrite holders.
Congress is only too well aware of the technical issues, thanks to their friends in the content industries. Their eyes were wide open and their ears filled with the sound of the bell on the till.
Fair use is a dead letter, as intended. Arguments to restore it will fall on deaf ears. It remains to make clear that, in consequence, the very basis of copywrite, its ostensible role in supporting productive endeavor and the common weal, is subverted. Is this line persuasive? I doubt it. The DMCA effectively creates the conditions for a lively black market, essentially ensuring piracy. And this may be the key to its undoing. We may thus look on software piracy as a moral imperative.
In the immortal words of Wat Tyler (the punkers, not the 14th C. revolutionary):
Copywrite is for tools.
Something I've been rolling around in my head for a few months is perhaps applicable here. I am concerned about the penetration of personal computing in disadvantaged communities, among people of color, new immigrant communities, etc. The tech have/have-not divide is a real one and a real problem.
My thought was to get some grant/foundation money together and begin working with the few agencies and services involved in recycling computer hardware, contributing to their efforts and handing out boxes with Linux pre-installed. Perhaps even doing some ultra-newbie classes, getting free ISP service, how to find help.
Linux makes old gear new, is an astounding tool for learning both the history and the current state of computing and extremely powerful development tools are freely available.
Admittedly, a majority of these machines will end up stacked next to a dumpster somewhere, but the cost is negligible and the potential gain represented by the 10% who would actually learn something, get interested, go further, is immense.
I couldn't agree more. My intent was a defense of the importance of the concepts behind markup theory and the fact that such theory has been broadly applied. I certainly don't think the overhead of such a system is warranted for SOHO or personal computing. I do think that it would be beneficial for the typical desktop wordprocessing/publishing apps to speak some form of *ML, always keeping in mind the tradeoff between the users desire to apply on-off local formatting to get the job done and the need to do something else with the data later.
I cannot argue with the lack of functional, friendly editors for either *ML or its stylesheets. Have we identified a need? Is there a place for a WYSIWYG word processor which manages the tension between local formatting and reuse for the user, which integrates and abstracts away the management of DTD/schemas and stylesheets? Maybe, maybe not. Does our friend want to post his chemistry paper to the web, archive it? Does giving LyX an *ML fluent backend accomplish this goal?
I find it absolutely incredibly that a publisher is shooting plates from 600dpi laser output, although I can probably guess the publisher.
SGML's "takeoff" is pretty well established, friend. You would be hard pressed to find a professional, hot-type emulating typsetting system which does not speak SGML. And as a basis for solid, enterprise level document management system, it's fundamental constructs (and by extension XML's) are unparalleled. Largely thanks to SGML's age (20+ years), these tools are typically proprietary and originally written for mini's. Ports to current hardware are thin on the ground thanks to the advent of "desktop publishing" and the triumph of the "good-enough" school of page-layout. You may have noticed the diminishing quality of type layout in major magazines and newspapers in the last decade, or perhaps its just I and the other old dogs of the typesetting trade. I digress. The fact is that outside of scientific publishing, where TeX and its children rightfully rule, tools for generating Postscript all speak SGML fluently.
...it would be fairly trivial to create a standard set of such commands (with a new document class or package), and using them consistently...
This is the trivial point of markup languages in general. Agreed that for the exercise of personal writing the overhead of XML/SGML validating and processing is absurd, but in any environment requiring the repurposing of content and/or extensive, multi-authored revisions, the structure/style distinction is vital.
The balance of your critique is specific to the desktop platforms and Linux in particular, where the demand for professional-quality type layout and DMS are somewhat limited and, as you say, the popularity and quality of the TeX tools have discouraged innovation. As to the general transformation of arbitrary SGML/XML, have a look at the W3C's XSLT specification and particularly its implementation at xml.apache.org.
I can't quite see how this system is much different, let alone better, than having to use a TeX system to translate LaTeX source code into other formats.
Neither more nor less, but for LaTeX file formats being proprietary to a particular layout/pagination engine. The dearth of quality free editors should remedy itself shortly. AUCTeX exists thanks to the desire to simplify TeX/LaTeX.
Lastly, it is not that appearance is unimportant, quite the contrary. It is important enough to deserve treatment separate from the management of content. The last time you opened a trade publication of almost any sort, including your O'Reilly books, a financial prospectus, any printed material not devoted to marketing or enslaved by graphic content (which sadly includes most newspapers and magazines, it seems) you saw a document whose content was managed with SGML. Interestingly, many of the latter types of publications which rushed to tools like Quark are now clamoring for XML compliance from these vendors in order to manage their content and streamline its repurposing for the Web.
The ACLU will, I'm sure, be glad to defend the right of conservative christians to share their beliefs in a "highly public forum." The public forum is not the issue, that term would easily apply to the lobby of your local grocery store. The issue is an "institution of religion." That's a verb and it applies to the state. The public schools are an institute of the state. Their "sponsorship" of religious views is what is being fought. Any youngster is welcome to walk the halls of their local school preaching the good word, whatever that may be by their lights, at the top of their lungs. The moment the school provides a meeting room or PA system for said student, it crosses the line.
One of the original suggestions of a use for XML was as a means to bring order to the blizzard of .*rc and config files in the *nix. As someone here pointed out, Mac 10 will be using this format for the data formerly known as the resource fork.
.*rc files in whatever form required by your kernel of choice. Is this worth the effort? I'll leave it to others, I'm merely a markup theorist.
As someone else noted, a standard schema for config files across different kernels could be useful, but would in fact be redundant effort because once you have XML, transformation into a different content model is next to trivial. In point of fact, modification of the kernel would be unnecessary as proper stylesheet processing could write the config and
XSLT: its not just for serving to old browsers. Use it.
This is raw marketing.
In other words, the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made.
The notion of generic RP rulez been around a long time and the ability to publish peripheral material which has reference to a specific system has always existed, covered under fair use, just don't use the ® marks. Such use remains restricted, you'll notice.
Speaking as one who found AD&D an abomination, I remind you that the players are the source and they are only as closed-minded as they choose to be. Tsk. You young-uns.... I remember when my gaming gear would fit in a spiral notebook and a ziplock baggie. Um, two ziplock baggies.
Other than the cute sci-fi details (greenleafyshade.com) and the refraction of the economics, the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Well said, if a bit long-winded. I guess the paid-by-the-line habit is difficult to break.
.
The stab at Q*bert was pointed and right on target.
The only way I can perceive civil discussions happening on sites like this is if topics were clearly identified, people were required to post under some form of recognizable ID. .
There is a long Katz-like essay waiting to be written about the relationship between anonymity and the notion of *free-speech* prevalent on the 'net. The anonymity of the 'net is akin to the anonymity of the mob and enables the same sort of unregulated animal behaviour. The self-regulation imposed by the knowledge that ones utterance is being weighed by ones interlocutors carries little weight here, much less than in a true public forum where the shock/horror/outrage of ones listeners is immediately registered on their faces.
While it is true that the many-to-many relationships engendered by the new media shatter the incipient facism Bertolt Brecht and others have identified in radio and other broadcast media, it conversly enables the kind of brutishness formerly the exclusive domain of mob-psychology.
Care to take a stab at it, Jon?
anonymity != privacy; anonymity != free speech
myCIO.com? Puhleeze.
Can this be doing anything other than running the scan released with source by Dr. Dittrich yesterday? I believe that this can be run remotely and sans root and is not as thorough as the one released by the FBI, which has its own problems.
The statements re Linux and Solaris are patent nonsense. These folks are just haymaking, to the discredit of anyone publishing their advertising spot masquerading as news.
Either there is no such thing as God, or science - which embodies our ability to reason - must be able to frame the question and provide us with the answers.
Kant covered the problems with this statement pretty thoroughly in the 18th century, from the preface of The Critique of Pure Reason:
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as pre-scribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
I turned off after this slipshod statement. The book sounds like drivel; The Dancing Wu-Li Masters with footnotes.
As opposed to paving your yard, painting it green and calling it an operating system, running-dog?
As soon as I heard of M$' bogus Freedom to Innovate site I went and used their handy forms and links to mail every one of my representatives and senator, as well as Wee Willie Clinton. I pointed out that I was using the resources M$ provided to urge their support of the DOJ action. Quoting myself from memory: It is my view that the single greatest impediment to true innovation and competition in the software industry is the breadth of Microsoft's dominance.
Go there and hoist the bastards on their own petard. You'll get some nice auto-responders, in some cases several, as well as some autographed letters. All but one actually responded to the issues I raised directly. Written by staffers, I'm sure, but they are also paid to register opinion and I made mine clear. Do it!
Caldera and TurboLinux will be including this in their distros as well, apparently.
It's freely downloadable.
Anyone care to venture an opinion regarding the quality, speed of these tools vs. the JDK from Sun (the one they ripped from Blackdown)?
Does this package from IBM include their fast VM?
over which TiVo is being sued: Electronic Program Guides
BTW, I have patented a means of navigating through a printed document by including a synopsis of chapter headings collected in the initial pages of the document, with references to the page number upon which the chapter begins tabulated alongside the aforesaid headings. Interested parties should contact my counsel regarding licensing fees.