Man pages are in English only, in fact, this is the biggest gripe of our local sys admins about Linux, is that they have to read all man documentation in English, not Chinese. I just tell them that they need to improve thier English:)
The Chinese is mostly at the GUI level, however there are some terminal based Chinese applications and full support for Chinese locale in the terminal. I believe that there are Chinese man pages available, but translation quality, who knows?
I love man pages, but to tell you the truth, all of our "users" at the workstations would never go near them. Documentation in Linux from a beginner's point of view is still not good enough. But, with a little training most people get "used" to the whatever window manager and desktop they are given, and will get quite comfortable with it over time.
When setting up our office in China last year, we decided to give Red Flag a try, as oppossed to using Mandrake (our new Sysadmin thought it might be easier for staff to learn). The idea appealed to us, because Mandrake requires a lot of tweaking to get Chinese input and display to work correctly. As all new employees had never used anything but Windows, we decided to install four distros on four different boxen and see which one they took to better:
1. Turbo Linux (has good Chinese support out of the box) 2. RedHat linux tweaked to support Chinese input, etc. 3. Mandrake linux tweaked to support Chinese input, etc. 4. RedFlag linux
To cut matters short, all workstations are now running Mandrake 8.1. For applications we are using the latest Chinese build of OpenOffice. Staff seemed to like Mandrake best, and it seemed to be most stable on the desktop. We share printers, disks, scanners, cameras accross the network, and once configured we have a very stable and FREE OS on every single desktop.
RedFlag was just a little too buggy (all gnome and kde config bugs, we did not play with it too long, as Mandrake was stable from install). We have not tried the latest version of Redflag, BUT, I have told our in house IT guys to keep looking at it.
One of our IT guys has been to the RedFlag main development center. It is government funded, but penetration in the Chinese market is low, because one can pick up a pirated copy of Win98 just about on any other street corner for just over 1$. The government is hoping that RedFlag will be a suitable option once they really crack down on piracy, and MS starts to bleed the country for OS and productivity software license fees.
The key for linux on the desktop in China is the same as the rest of the world--productivity applications. C'mon Open Office, we are all cheering for you!
well, they don't, if they did one could use google's cache. that is the point, there ALWAYS are ways around if one is persistant enough to look. what might be scary is if China adopted a form of the DCMA that made circumvention illegal!
I have lived in China for 6 months now. If you want to get the news, there is always ways around the "great firewall". The easiest is looking at cached Google pages. Then comes Safeweb and the like. And my personal favorite, SSH'ing into a US server and browsing news with lynx.
What amazes me, is that the censorship is very content selective and seems to ease over time. For example, in the October releaase of Harpers Index there is one statement about China. The article was blocked the instant it was published, and for the full month Harpers was blocked in China. When the November index came out, one could access the October index and Harpers!
During the APEC meetings here late last year, when all President Bush and other big wigs were in town, CNN, BBC, and other news sites all became miraculasly available! Of course, they were all immediately blocked after APEC had ended.
So, now what should happen, is this guy should be flown to the Antitrust case hearings as a witness. Surely the courts will finally realize the harsh punishment needed, for a company that can actually brainwash even the most anti-capitalist of terrorist organizations into getting Microsoft in the news!
Oh and, after Microsoft releases an official press release on how this scenerio of planted bugs and holes in Microsoft is impossible, the public buys it all and is even MORE comfortable with the insecurity of XP. GREAT!
1. All the real influence and decisions that this guy has in the white house will not be made public, so we won't really ever know what he is doing.
2. He will still be loyal to MS, afterall, most government people don't stay in government forever. What better way to climb the MS corporate ladder than to leave, get lots of power in the government, and then go back to MS. Not to mention the great signing bonus that is actually a payoff for how much he helped get MS into lucrative government software contracts.
3. What better way to kill open source, than send in an MS general onto a government security council?
Unfortunately, we will probably all never know the real effects, due to statement one.
By the grace of God, you were spared. No one should have to listen to Michael Jackson. In fact, I bet that CD player is worth a mint now. I wish my CD players and computers all refused to play any Michael Jackson whatsoever!
Anyone who would plan and coordinate such and attack, would surely use plain text email right? WRONG. These people are not stupid, IF they are using the internet as a communication platform, they are surely using a combination of steanography and cryptography and anonymous newsgroup postings, email, etc.
I completely agree with this. I did a little meta-moderating today, and although posters were offtopic and should be moderated as such, there should have been a place for them to post stuff about the tragedy.
Yeah, really easy to get addicted when watching
Naked News!
Harpers July Index says they have 6 million visitors per month. And
apparently, the are the first net cast to go cable cast as well! Now, I
finally have a reason to watch the news.....
What Patent is it? Well click on this
link here
to see the 11,000 some odd patents that at least refer to M$ patents or
this here
to check out the over 1,700 patents assigned to M$. Then, take your
best guess, a free beer for anyone who guesses correctly on the first guess!
My guess: This
nice little patent
on electronic transactions, the key to M$ Passport strategy. After
all, we all know that is what they want, which is a piece of everybody's
cake. This is what many Fortune 500 financial service (banks, insurance,
finance, investement banks) have been worrying that M$ would do for years.
Passport is the key, you will be borg.
Or maybe
one of these
if you just look for transactions in the patent Abstract field.
I have installed linux on 8 computers in our Taiwan office (although over the past three years, at least 4 times on each computer updating), and will install another 8 in China this month.
I have never paid for a distro. I have always downloaded them and burned ISO's or done FTP installs.
We purchased one bulk 10 user NT license years ago. NT just sits in a cardboard box (not a real boxen) in the backroom. Linux saves us thousands of dollars per year as a company, when considering that we do not need Office, Exchange, etc.
Our company purchased Kylix Server Developer before it was even released. The developers were excited about having a professional RAD platform for linux, of which NONE is available from the open source community. Borland took a very bold step in allocating the massive resources they have into the Kylix project. Now, they are giving the core of that back in the form of GPL, and that is GREAT! This will only lead to even more great things from Borland, as long as it stays PROFITABLE for them After all, they have shareholders to answer to, and cannot just keep allocating resources to projects that are not profitable.
Before I see another flame about Borland on this topic, I hope that all of you do the following:
1. Download the free version of Kylix
2. Play with it and test it
3. When you post flames about Kylix, please be sure to tell us all what comparable RAD environments are available on linux.
Philips have given legal notice last week to all the large US retailers, of manufacturers who are not paying the royalty fee to Philips. Philips obviously is hoping that all the retailers will fall to their knees and therefore help Philips police the royalty payment schema and demand "royalty paid" certificates for all CDR's entering stores.
Yes, the retailers will cave in instead of fighting a legal battle with Philips. For every CDR you buy, or CDRW, or CD Burner or CD-ROM, you can rest assured that some of your hard earned cash is going into Philips pocket.
It sounds like you are planning to profit from your personal pet project.
You could be a very ethical employee and tell your employer that you have already finished the project in your own spare time. This, of course, puts you at risk of all sorts of nasty employer feedback (go read your contract).
If it was me, I would follow the following steps:
1. form an offshore company (British Virgin Islands, or maybe Turks & Caicos Islands or Bahamas, see http://www.soveriegngroup.com ) with about 3000 $USD in savings or borrowed from a friend. You can form it so that it is basically impossible (unless you volantarily disclose the fact) to prove that you are the benificial owner of that company.
2. all the software that has been written should be owned by the offshore company. the offshore company could have developed the software in India or Cambodia for that matter, and it would be difficult to prove (unless they get into your HD with a court order, or you disclose the fact) who actually wrote the software. after all, it is all copywrited under the company name NOT YOUR NAME.
3. get investors and sell out, or just sell the program to another company.
This is all assuming that you have a saleable product.
Then again, you could just GPL it all anonymously, and forget about profiting from it.
I refrain from signing non-competition, non-diclosure, blah blah blah contracts unless I absolutely have to (with clients and employers alike). One of the best ways to get around signing them is to STALL (I have not finished looking over it, my lawyer has not advised me yet......etc.). Stalling will many times create a situation where the employer or client forgets about the contract altogether.
Just use Lynx on a black and white terminal server.
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
on
Embracing Insanity
·
· Score: 1
This is one of the best posts I have seen on/. in quite a long time. The arguments here probably sum up what the entire book sums up, except it is free to read the post!!!
The only argument against this post, is that we live in a capitalist world where business methods, source code, contact, etc. are all valuble and are to be kept secret.
The failure of open source (if it ever happens, and I really hope it does not), will come about because there is no real value to MAKE in embrasing it. Face it, everybody wants to make "value" in the form of money, which is a sad fact of humanity as we know it today.
Every time I try to read an article posted, it is in the midst of being/.'ed. Although it makes me feel like I am part of something really on the fringe, I wish every post could somehow be forwarded to my pager just 10 minutes before it is actually posted to the site.
ebay has proved profitable, although any analyst that claims it is worth it to buy the stock should go back to grade school and take some primary math classes instead of thinking about his yearly bonus size. The stock is still way overvalued by any traditional valuation models. The "new valuation models for the new economy" are a farse, and the market is figuring this out very quickly.
The answer to this question is so simple that I am very surprised it was moderated at "5".
The simple answer is "cash management or lack thereof". The dot-coms, including Amazon used their sky high stock valuations as an excuse to throw money around with out considering profitability and return on capital, the core component of any "REAL" valuation of securitized assets.
Show me a.com that was victom of some other disease.......
Slashdot Mirror
Man pages are in English only, in fact, this is the biggest gripe of our local sys admins about Linux, is that they have to read all man documentation in English, not Chinese. I just tell them that they need to improve thier English :)
The Chinese is mostly at the GUI level, however there are some terminal based Chinese applications and full support for Chinese locale in the terminal. I believe that there are Chinese man pages available, but translation quality, who knows?
I love man pages, but to tell you the truth, all of our "users" at the workstations would never go near them. Documentation in Linux from a beginner's point of view is still not good enough. But, with a little training most people get "used" to the whatever window manager and desktop they are given, and will get quite comfortable with it over time.
I will point you in the right direction and you can do your own research:
http://www.arachnoid.com/boycott/m plenet.com/w .fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-fil es.shtml
p ://www.linux.org/
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/14786.html
http://msbc.si
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/
http://ww
http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/
For alternatives to the bloated, closed source, liberty crashing, over priced, and just plain FUBAR'd OS see:
http://www.mandrake.com/
http://www.apple.com/
http://www.bsd.org/
http://www.redhat.com/
htt
And, how much did you spend on software last year? Are you using any pirated software?
If you asked me I would say:
0$
no, not using ANY pirated software.
I got a alot of FREE BEER last year too!!
When setting up our office in China last year, we decided to give Red Flag a try, as oppossed to using Mandrake (our new Sysadmin thought it might be easier for staff to learn). The idea appealed to us, because Mandrake requires a lot of tweaking to get Chinese input and display to work correctly. As all new employees had never used anything but Windows, we decided to install four distros on four different boxen and see which one they took to better:
1. Turbo Linux (has good Chinese support out of the box)
2. RedHat linux tweaked to support Chinese input, etc.
3. Mandrake linux tweaked to support Chinese input, etc.
4. RedFlag linux
To cut matters short, all workstations are now running Mandrake 8.1. For applications we are using the latest Chinese build of OpenOffice. Staff seemed to like Mandrake best, and it seemed to be most stable on the desktop. We share printers, disks, scanners, cameras accross the network, and once configured we have a very stable and FREE OS on every single desktop.
RedFlag was just a little too buggy (all gnome and kde config bugs, we did not play with it too long, as Mandrake was stable from install). We have not tried the latest version of Redflag, BUT, I have told our in house IT guys to keep looking at it.
One of our IT guys has been to the RedFlag main development center. It is government funded, but penetration in the Chinese market is low, because one can pick up a pirated copy of Win98 just about on any other street corner for just over 1$. The government is hoping that RedFlag will be a suitable option once they really crack down on piracy, and MS starts to bleed the country for OS and productivity software license fees.
The key for linux on the desktop in China is the same as the rest of the world--productivity applications. C'mon Open Office, we are all cheering for you!
well, they don't, if they did one could use google's cache. that is the point, there ALWAYS are ways around if one is persistant enough to look. what might be scary is if China adopted a form of the DCMA that made circumvention illegal!
and, a simple search on Google provides an entire list of sites.
Now how difficult is that? I don't feel sorry for anyone who lacks the initiative to do a simple search.
What amazes me, is that the censorship is very content selective and seems to ease over time. For example, in the October releaase of Harpers Index there is one statement about China. The article was blocked the instant it was published, and for the full month Harpers was blocked in China. When the November index came out, one could access the October index and Harpers!
During the APEC meetings here late last year, when all President Bush and other big wigs were in town, CNN, BBC, and other news sites all became miraculasly available! Of course, they were all immediately blocked after APEC had ended.
Will /. get blocked while running this subject?
Hope Bill sues them when they trademark it! Bill can stop anyone!
So, now what should happen, is this guy should be flown to the Antitrust case hearings as a witness. Surely the courts will finally realize the harsh punishment needed, for a company that can actually brainwash even the most anti-capitalist of terrorist organizations into getting Microsoft in the news!
Oh and, after Microsoft releases an official press release on how this scenerio of planted bugs and holes in Microsoft is impossible, the public buys it all and is even MORE comfortable with the insecurity of XP. GREAT!
Media spin at its best.
Well, as a classical conspiry freak, I reckon:
1. All the real influence and decisions that this guy has in the white house will not be made public, so we won't really ever know what he is doing.
2. He will still be loyal to MS, afterall, most government people don't stay in government forever. What better way to climb the MS corporate ladder than to leave, get lots of power in the government, and then go back to MS. Not to mention the great signing bonus that is actually a payoff for how much he helped get MS into lucrative government software contracts.
3. What better way to kill open source, than send in an MS general onto a government security council?
Unfortunately, we will probably all never know the real effects, due to statement one.
By the grace of God, you were spared. No one should have to listen to Michael Jackson. In fact, I bet that CD player is worth a mint now. I wish my CD players and computers all refused to play any Michael Jackson whatsoever!
Anyone who would plan and coordinate such and attack, would surely use plain text email right? WRONG. These people are not stupid, IF they are using the internet as a communication platform, they are surely using a combination of steanography and cryptography and anonymous newsgroup postings, email, etc.
I completely agree with this. I did a little meta-moderating today, and although posters were offtopic and should be moderated as such, there should have been a place for them to post stuff about the tragedy.
Yeah, really easy to get addicted when watching Naked News!
Harpers July Index says they have 6 million visitors per month. And apparently, the are the first net cast to go cable cast as well! Now, I finally have a reason to watch the news.....
What Patent is it? Well click on this link here to see the 11,000 some odd patents that at least refer to M$ patents or this here to check out the over 1,700 patents assigned to M$. Then, take your best guess, a free beer for anyone who guesses correctly on the first guess!
My guess: This nice little patent on electronic transactions, the key to M$ Passport strategy. After all, we all know that is what they want, which is a piece of everybody's cake. This is what many Fortune 500 financial service (banks, insurance, finance, investement banks) have been worrying that M$ would do for years. Passport is the key, you will be borg.
Or maybe one of these if you just look for transactions in the patent Abstract field.
Anybody have a better idea?
I have installed linux on 8 computers in our Taiwan office (although over the past three years, at least 4 times on each computer updating), and will install another 8 in China this month.
I have never paid for a distro. I have always downloaded them and burned ISO's or done FTP installs.
We purchased one bulk 10 user NT license years ago. NT just sits in a cardboard box (not a real boxen) in the backroom. Linux saves us thousands of dollars per year as a company, when considering that we do not need Office, Exchange, etc.
Our company purchased Kylix Server Developer before it was even released. The developers were excited about having a professional RAD platform for linux, of which NONE is available from the open source community. Borland took a very bold step in allocating the massive resources they have into the Kylix project. Now, they are giving the core of that back in the form of GPL, and that is GREAT! This will only lead to even more great things from Borland, as long as it stays PROFITABLE for them After all, they have shareholders to answer to, and cannot just keep allocating resources to projects that are not profitable.
Before I see another flame about Borland on this topic, I hope that all of you do the following:
1. Download the free version of Kylix
2. Play with it and test it
3. When you post flames about Kylix, please be sure to tell us all what comparable RAD environments are available on linux.
Not just software patents, but IBM has been the clear leader at #1 for over a decade for the entity that files and receives the most patents.
Philips have given legal notice last week to all the large US retailers, of manufacturers who are not paying the royalty fee to Philips. Philips obviously is hoping that all the retailers will fall to their knees and therefore help Philips police the royalty payment schema and demand "royalty paid" certificates for all CDR's entering stores.
Yes, the retailers will cave in instead of fighting a legal battle with Philips. For every CDR you buy, or CDRW, or CD Burner or CD-ROM, you can rest assured that some of your hard earned cash is going into Philips pocket.
It sounds like you are planning to profit from your personal pet project.
You could be a very ethical employee and tell your employer that you have already finished the project in your own spare time. This, of course, puts you at risk of all sorts of nasty employer feedback (go read your contract).
If it was me, I would follow the following steps:
1. form an offshore company (British Virgin Islands, or maybe Turks & Caicos Islands or Bahamas, see http://www.soveriegngroup.com ) with about 3000 $USD in savings or borrowed from a friend. You can form it so that it is basically impossible (unless you volantarily disclose the fact) to prove that you are the benificial owner of that company.
2. all the software that has been written should be owned by the offshore company. the offshore company could have developed the software in India or Cambodia for that matter, and it would be difficult to prove (unless they get into your HD with a court order, or you disclose the fact) who actually wrote the software. after all, it is all copywrited under the company name NOT YOUR NAME.
3. get investors and sell out, or just sell the program to another company.
This is all assuming that you have a saleable product.
Then again, you could just GPL it all anonymously, and forget about profiting from it.
I refrain from signing non-competition, non-diclosure, blah blah blah contracts unless I absolutely have to (with clients and employers alike). One of the best ways to get around signing them is to STALL (I have not finished looking over it, my lawyer has not advised me yet......etc.). Stalling will many times create a situation where the employer or client forgets about the contract altogether.
Just use Lynx on a black and white terminal server.
This is one of the best posts I have seen on /. in quite a long time. The arguments here probably sum up what the entire book sums up, except it is free to read the post!!!
The only argument against this post, is that we live in a capitalist world where business methods, source code, contact, etc. are all valuble and are to be kept secret.
The failure of open source (if it ever happens, and I really hope it does not), will come about because there is no real value to MAKE in embrasing it. Face it, everybody wants to make "value" in the form of money, which is a sad fact of humanity as we know it today.
I love the vaporware like everyone else, but from the drawing board to affordable production to mass market use is another thing altogether.
CDR has finally got to the point that media is a commoditized item. That took a LONG time.
Every time I try to read an article posted, it is in the midst of being /.'ed. Although it makes me feel like I am part of something really on the fringe, I wish every post could somehow be forwarded to my pager just 10 minutes before it is actually posted to the site.
Revenue guys, I would pay for it!
ebay has proved profitable, although any analyst that claims it is worth it to buy the stock should go back to grade school and take some primary math classes instead of thinking about his yearly bonus size. The stock is still way overvalued by any traditional valuation models. The "new valuation models for the new economy" are a farse, and the market is figuring this out very quickly.
The answer to this question is so simple that I am very surprised it was moderated at "5".
.com that was victom of some other disease.......
The simple answer is "cash management or lack thereof". The dot-coms, including Amazon used their sky high stock valuations as an excuse to throw money around with out considering profitability and return on capital, the core component of any "REAL" valuation of securitized assets.
Show me a