kernel.org may be better off not providing a tarball for each release, instead providing some kind of utility that downloads the latest available full kernel, but only if necessary, plus patches
I agree, that's a great idea. But it needs a good name... how about calling it CVSup?
For all the discussion about whether this would be good or bad for RedHat, linux, open source software, etc. an important point has been neglected. RedHat is a public company. It has an obligation to its shareholders.
If AOL offers enough money, RedHat is obliged to accept, even if they believe that being bought by AOL will mean the end of the RedHat distribution.
You'll find that the first page of results gives you a pretty good overview of who I am. One page is a project I ran while an undergraduate student; one page is a press release from my undergraduate university talking about me; one page is from an orchestra of which I was a member; one page is from Oxford's computing lab. I don't need to tell people my email address; they can find it very easily through the pages google provides.
All that is good and useful for me, but what of the other people (I know of three so far) who share my name? What if someone wants to contact them?
If we're going to rely upon Google to translate names into URLs, we're inevitably going to run into such problems, where only the most famous person/company using a name is brought up, even though some people will be searching for their lesser known isonyms.
Think back for a moment: How would you like *not* to have iptables, reiser, proper software RAID, etc.
Personally, I prefer ipfw, softupdates, and vinum over iptables, reiserfs, and linux software RAID... and by using FreeBSD I can get all those neatly packaged in a *stable* distribution.
ONLY in cases where the free market doesnt work (because of practical barriers to competition) (Utilities,Transportation, and "Last mile" Communications) should government oversight be accepted as the lesser evil. And in those area's, the government might restrict your right to produce faulty products.
I put it to you that the security of software is a case where the free market does not work.
One element which you are forgetting is that the free market depends upon its participants being knowledgeable. In order for the free market to function, the participants are expected to be both informed and rational in their decisions.
Software, just like bridge-building, is a case where the participants are not well informed. Even if you provide everyone with source code, 99.9% of people will not understand any of it; likewise, even if you provide people with detailed plans to a bridge, they will have no idea if it is safe -- unless you have a government which regulates public bridge building.
This raises some constitutional issues - Do I have the right of freedom of speech ( as code has been found to be in some cases ) to utter an incorrect program?
Do you have the right of freedom of speech to utter other potentially hazardous comments? Yelling "FIRE!" in the middle of a crowded theatre is dangerous, and illegal. If you're engineering a bridge, does "freedom of speech" give you the right to design it so that it will collapse when people try to use it?
There is a wide legal history for freedom of speech ending when it causes harm to others.
It doesn't seem to me that FreeBSD is "controlled" by any one commercial venture. If I were to name two companies which come first to mind, it would have to be Yahoo and Apple; certainly neither FreeBSD Mall nor Daemon News.
As far as the trademark goes, while I agree that it should be transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation, I doubt that FreeBSD Mall could exert any legal pressure against "legitimate" distributors of FreeBSD. If nothing else, trademark dilution law would apply: After people have been calling something "FreeBSD" for years, you can't suddenly tell them to pick a different name, trademark or not. The utility of the trademark comes in barring people from misrepresenting something else as FreeBSD.
When reading these licenses, keep in mind that some statements are completely void. If a license includes the statement that "the licensor will give his or her first-born child to the copyright holder", you can safely go ahead and agree, because no court is ever going to uphold that clause. Even if both parties agree to a contract, if the contract is grossly unfair it can (and will) be struck down by the courts.
It wouldn't surprise me if the audit clause was upheld, but clause 14.4 (which limits your recourse to legal remedy) would just be laughed away if it was ever presented in court.
... until you can provide me with an alternative. Windows 2000, MS Office, and Eudora meet my needs quite well; I tried Star Office about a year ago, and based on that experience I'm not going to try again very soon.
Rant and rave all you like about "free software", "open standards", and "GNU/linux", but I have work to do.
GNU purists might think it's in bad taste to use the code as a hostage
Am I reading this right? I thought the entire *point* of the GPL was that it holds code hostage... the code owned by anyone who wants to link to GPL libraries.
IANA tax lawyer, but from my reading of the rules Canadians can claim taxable donations to US charities normally up to 75% of their US income. This might or might not help the original poster, but it might help any Canadians doing freelance work online.
"The USA, a nation which is routinely condemned by Amnesty International for its human rights record, which has recently been accused by many nations of violating international law and the convention on consular relations through its practice of arresting foreign nationals and holding them incommunicado for months without charge, and which is known to have a powerful nuclear arsenal, has recently sent troops to back up the attempts of a puppet regime to maintain control of a central asian nation located in a strategic position vis-a-vis the international hydrocarbon trade."
If anyone is going to know details about these companies, it is going to be the companies themselves. If you're considering working for them, surely they'd be willing to give you some idea of what they're doing?
If they don't want to tell a potential employee what business they're in, you probably don't want to work there.
By "embed" they mean "stick the core into a hole so that the top of the core is level with the surface of the packaging".
In other words, your heatsink will have more or less direct contact with the core, but there will be other material around which will make sure that you don't accidentally crush the core when you push down on the heatsink.
Reading this story, I really have to wonder if it's about to be followed by a story about people who switched to riding Segways around, thereby saving $40,000.
I believe that farmer counter-sued Monsanto because he made it a point to grow non-GM crops.
Correction: The farmer *claimed* that he wanted to grow non-GM crops.
To quote the judge who ruled on the case: "Based on all the available expert testimony, I find it hard to accept that cross-polination could have resulted in an entire field possessing the genetic traits of Monsanto's proprietary seed."
'such as oceans, continents or ice caps, or even the impact of civilization on such features
You think we've got global warming problems just because our ice caps are melting? Go talk to the aliens over on Alpha Centauri, they've got so much global warming that their continents are melting!
next time my doctor needs to take a blood sample maybe they'll be able to take a small enough quantity of blood that I won't faint. It's not a problem if they only need to run one test, but when they need four or five tests this will be a major improvement.
Why are you considering a *relational* database? Unless you're planning on completely changing filesystem semantics I don't see why you wouldn't just use a simple hierarchical database.
I mean, seriously, you want to have a filesystem which acts like a distributed database; but you don't really need to be able to run RDBMS queries do you? You'll probably end up with a much better result if you work down a checklist and decide which database features you want and which will just add bloat.
Re:In response to others...
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Helicopters won't work well on mars, you'll need to have your props spinning 10 times faster to get the same lift, which will be somewhat diffucult, no?
It might work actually, but AFAIK there aren't any easily manufacturable materials that will stand up to the centripetal forces, since there will be 100 times as much force on the end of the prop (centripetal force is the square of velocity). You might be able to do this by increasing the surface area of the prop (longer blades, or more blades).
Sounds like another potential use for carbon nanotubes. After all, if they're strong enough to build a space elevator (see earlier/. article) they're probably strong enough to make a helicopter, right?
Slashdot Mirror
kernel.org may be better off not providing a tarball for each release, instead providing some kind of utility that downloads the latest available full kernel, but only if necessary, plus patches
I agree, that's a great idea. But it needs a good name... how about calling it CVSup?
For all the discussion about whether this would be good or bad for RedHat, linux, open source software, etc. an important point has been neglected. RedHat is a public company. It has an obligation to its shareholders.
If AOL offers enough money, RedHat is obliged to accept, even if they believe that being bought by AOL will mean the end of the RedHat distribution.
You'll find that the first page of results gives you a pretty good overview of who I am. One page is a project I ran while an undergraduate student; one page is a press release from my undergraduate university talking about me; one page is from an orchestra of which I was a member; one page is from Oxford's computing lab. I don't need to tell people my email address; they can find it very easily through the pages google provides.
All that is good and useful for me, but what of the other people (I know of three so far) who share my name? What if someone wants to contact them?
If we're going to rely upon Google to translate names into URLs, we're inevitably going to run into such problems, where only the most famous person/company using a name is brought up, even though some people will be searching for their lesser known isonyms.
Think back for a moment: How would you like *not* to have iptables, reiser, proper software RAID, etc.
Personally, I prefer ipfw, softupdates, and vinum over iptables, reiserfs, and linux software RAID... and by using FreeBSD I can get all those neatly packaged in a *stable* distribution.
ONLY in cases where the free market doesnt work (because of practical barriers to competition) (Utilities,Transportation, and "Last mile" Communications) should government oversight be accepted as the lesser evil. And in those area's, the government might restrict your right to produce faulty products.
I put it to you that the security of software is a case where the free market does not work.
One element which you are forgetting is that the free market depends upon its participants being knowledgeable. In order for the free market to function, the participants are expected to be both informed and rational in their decisions.
Software, just like bridge-building, is a case where the participants are not well informed. Even if you provide everyone with source code, 99.9% of people will not understand any of it; likewise, even if you provide people with detailed plans to a bridge, they will have no idea if it is safe -- unless you have a government which regulates public bridge building.
my giraffe scarecrow .. works like a charm, I havn't ever seen any giraffes around my lawn.
Wouldn't that be called a scaregiraffe?
This raises some constitutional issues - Do I have the right of freedom of speech ( as code has been found to be in some cases ) to utter an incorrect program?
Do you have the right of freedom of speech to utter other potentially hazardous comments? Yelling "FIRE!" in the middle of a crowded theatre is dangerous, and illegal. If you're engineering a bridge, does "freedom of speech" give you the right to design it so that it will collapse when people try to use it?
There is a wide legal history for freedom of speech ending when it causes harm to others.
OSS companies/programmers will be just as liable as closed source ones.
And how, exactly, is this a bad thing? Personally if RedHat got hauled into court due to their history of sloppiness, I'd be cheering.
It doesn't seem to me that FreeBSD is "controlled" by any one commercial venture. If I were to name two companies which come first to mind, it would have to be Yahoo and Apple; certainly neither FreeBSD Mall nor Daemon News.
As far as the trademark goes, while I agree that it should be transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation, I doubt that FreeBSD Mall could exert any legal pressure against "legitimate" distributors of FreeBSD. If nothing else, trademark dilution law would apply: After people have been calling something "FreeBSD" for years, you can't suddenly tell them to pick a different name, trademark or not. The utility of the trademark comes in barring people from misrepresenting something else as FreeBSD.
This work was brought to you by the country US and the letters P, T, and O.
When reading these licenses, keep in mind that some statements are completely void. If a license includes the statement that "the licensor will give his or her first-born child to the copyright holder", you can safely go ahead and agree, because no court is ever going to uphold that clause. Even if both parties agree to a contract, if the contract is grossly unfair it can (and will) be struck down by the courts.
It wouldn't surprise me if the audit clause was upheld, but clause 14.4 (which limits your recourse to legal remedy) would just be laughed away if it was ever presented in court.
... until you can provide me with an alternative. Windows 2000, MS Office, and Eudora meet my needs quite well; I tried Star Office about a year ago, and based on that experience I'm not going to try again very soon.
Rant and rave all you like about "free software", "open standards", and "GNU/linux", but I have work to do.
GNU purists might think it's in bad taste to use the code as a hostage
Am I reading this right? I thought the entire *point* of the GPL was that it holds code hostage... the code owned by anyone who wants to link to GPL libraries.
After all, the dophin has been qmail's mascot since qmail-1.00 in February 1997.
Like it or not, DJB claimed the dophin first... what would people say if Microsoft started using a Penguin as mascot and held a naming contest?
IANA tax lawyer, but from my reading of the rules Canadians can claim taxable donations to US charities normally up to 75% of their US income. This might or might not help the original poster, but it might help any Canadians doing freelance work online.
We could take that even further:
"The USA, a nation which is routinely condemned by Amnesty International for its human rights record, which has recently been accused by many nations of violating international law and the convention on consular relations through its practice of arresting foreign nationals and holding them incommunicado for months without charge, and which is known to have a powerful nuclear arsenal, has recently sent troops to back up the attempts of a puppet regime to maintain control of a central asian nation located in a strategic position vis-a-vis the international hydrocarbon trade."
If anyone is going to know details about these companies, it is going to be the companies themselves. If you're considering working for them, surely they'd be willing to give you some idea of what they're doing?
If they don't want to tell a potential employee what business they're in, you probably don't want to work there.
By "embed" they mean "stick the core into a hole so that the top of the core is level with the surface of the packaging".
In other words, your heatsink will have more or less direct contact with the core, but there will be other material around which will make sure that you don't accidentally crush the core when you push down on the heatsink.
what is so good about a compiler being able to compile itself?
Once the compiler can compile itself, you can stick a trojan into it and have a good chance of nobody noticing.
Reading this story, I really have to wonder if it's about to be followed by a story about people who switched to riding Segways around, thereby saving $40,000.
I believe that farmer counter-sued Monsanto because he made it a point to grow non-GM crops.
Correction: The farmer *claimed* that he wanted to grow non-GM crops.
To quote the judge who ruled on the case: "Based on all the available expert testimony, I find it hard to accept that cross-polination could have resulted in an entire field possessing the genetic traits of Monsanto's proprietary seed."
'such as oceans, continents or ice caps, or even the impact of civilization on such features
You think we've got global warming problems just because our ice caps are melting? Go talk to the aliens over on Alpha Centauri, they've got so much global warming that their continents are melting!
next time my doctor needs to take a blood sample maybe they'll be able to take a small enough quantity of blood that I won't faint. It's not a problem if they only need to run one test, but when they need four or five tests this will be a major improvement.
IANADE (... Database Expert), but...
Why are you considering a *relational* database? Unless you're planning on completely changing filesystem semantics I don't see why you wouldn't just use a simple hierarchical database.
I mean, seriously, you want to have a filesystem which acts like a distributed database; but you don't really need to be able to run RDBMS queries do you? You'll probably end up with a much better result if you work down a checklist and decide which database features you want and which will just add bloat.
Helicopters won't work well on mars, you'll need to have your props spinning 10 times faster to get the same lift, which will be somewhat diffucult, no?
/. article) they're probably strong enough to make a helicopter, right?
It might work actually, but AFAIK there aren't any easily manufacturable materials that will stand up to the centripetal forces, since there will be 100 times as much force on the end of the prop (centripetal force is the square of velocity). You might be able to do this by increasing the surface area of the prop (longer blades, or more blades).
Sounds like another potential use for carbon nanotubes. After all, if they're strong enough to build a space elevator (see earlier