May I remind you that Alan pulling that changelog was not just a whim 'oh-lets-protest-this' thing. Instead, he did that after recieving legal advice on the matter of the DMCA and how it could affect him as the employee of a US-based corporation.
He doesn't want to discuss said bugs because doing so could open him up to being sued or thrown in jail without trial for weeks.
Microsoft, OTOH, doesn't want to release security hole reports because that would make them look bad. Notice that they do not mention the DMCA once. Also notice that Microsoft is a very large corporation, with both the money and legal muscle to defend itself in court.
Heck with a minimum of a BSCS. I know people who've gotten a BSCS who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. (I've been taught by PROFS who couldn't!) A minimum of four years of experience working in the tech industry as a sysadmin or coder (as needed for the case at hand) with a certant expertise in current technology (not just NT and not just Unix, for example) AND a provably detailed knowledge of civil rights and legal process in the USA. Or require a short course on said topic.
The last should, IMHO, be a requirement for regular jurors, too. But that's not likely, as lawyers love having impressionable, stupid blobs sitting in those jury seats. And guess who has a stranglehold on the USA's legal system?
No, A Linux developer fucked up here. What, Linus is supposed to know the code of all other variants of Unix off by heart or something? Since the code is (a) Open and (b) Accredited to the person responsible, it is possible to fix the error.
How do you know that Microsoft kept the copyrights intact everywhere they used BSD code? Because they did in some places, they must have in all places? Doesn't work that way. Prove to me that they haven't included BSD code in places and filed off the copyright, and I'll believe you.
Troll or flamebait - any comment on Slashdot that is less than wildly enthusiastic about any Microsoft-related product, or is even remotely supportive of non-Microsoft software of any kind.
Your post raises a good point. These ISPs are paying for this traffic that's being caused by faults in Microsoft's products. Why shouldn't Microsoft be held accountable for these costs? If we cause any dip in the revenue of Microsoft's products, or any cost to them, we're accountable. Why shouldn't they be?
Am I the only one reminded of the mutual defense pacts that indirectly caused World War I? I hope nothing of that scale happens here - but then again, there is no enemy with the resources or dedication of Germany at that time. Whoever it is won't be able to keep up a sustained war for long.
Not only that, but how will you be able to tell what's copyrighted and what isn't? If you ban all copying, well, then the computer's just an expensive-looking lump of electronics. If you ban copying of a certant stream of bits, how can you prove that stream of bits isn't an encrypted version of something I have a copyright on?
Short answer: you can't. What this amounts to is turning computers from general-purpose computation devices into fancy black-box television sets.
Re:For every action, there is an equal and opposit
on
Quicktime In Linux
·
· Score: 1
That needs to change first! 99% of the computing population can not, and will not understand the command line!
From that statement, I can see you've been involved in the technical community for even less time than I have. People will use whatever interface they've been trained to use. All the people screaming for Linux UIs to imitate Windows don't want an easy-to-use or easy-to-learn UI. They don't want a UI that they have to learn any more to use.
I know numerous non-technical people who got by just fine with a command line and text-based programs for years. Switching them over to a GUI system is almost invariably painful, especially a Microsoft GUI. There's too much inconsistancy and randomness (from the view of the user).
As for install, what about having two files in a.gz archive, one being quicktime_plugin.i386.rpm and the other being install.sh, containing the fillowing:
#!/usr/bin/sh
rpm -iv quicktimeplugin.i386.rpm
That brainless enough for you?
Or you could just use a distribution with a halfway-decent package management system and type: apt-get install quicktime_plugin
(This post will be modded down for containing a clue, a real-world estimate of the intelligence of the average human being, and a positive opinion of Linux.)
The moderators must be smoking some good crack today.
This guy's calling for statically linking all programs...
And he gets modded up? Come on, get a clue! It sounds like the 'distros these days' he's talking about consists exclusively of RedHat 4.x. Almost every single one of his mentioned problems has been addressed by "newbie" distros, and some have even been addressed by Debian and Slackware. (which don't try to cater to newbies)
Yet another case of a post getting modded up because of the poster claiming he's going to get modded down, it appears.
Re:I'm a disappointed GNOME user...
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
Amen, Brother!;)
I've recently switched from GNOME to KDE, after horrible experiences with Ximian's packaging of GNOME. I'm not even thinking about looking back. I personally find that KDE has more Windows-style eye candy, but I can turn most of it off and get a clean, functional, well-designed desktop experience. Importing my GNOME themes and having a built-in theme editor put it way ahead from the start.
And this is just the 2.1 release - I think most of the things that really annoy me about it are due to be cleaned up for the 2.2 release. (Like not letting one set the Meta (AKA WinKey) modifier for keyboard shortcuts.)
And having most of its programs (all I can think of off the top of my head) keep their config files under.kde is nice - GNOME was mostly good about that, but some still scattered things all over my home directory.
I don't necessarily mean do your job using Linux... I mean other things you use your computer at home for that you can do under Linux.
And many Windows tools are getting Linux equivalents. I'm sure that both GNOME and KDE have projects to create Outlook-compatible mail clients (that are actually secure).
Having been in the same situation a year ago, allow me to ask you this. If you want to learn Linux, why are you using Windows for your everyday work? If you're using Linux every day to get your work done (not even complicated things - just getting familiar with the text editor and some of the other common tools available), you'll find that it becomes much easier to use very quickly. Even if you avoud the config files initially - once you learn how to read (not access, read) man and info pages, they're easy. (Although the fact that Debian's config files are very well-commented helped a bit...)
Yeah, there's a learning curve. But if you don't jump back to Windows every time something starts looking difficult, you'll get past it fast.
So you're saying that part of the GPL is meaningless. Wouldn't it be better to eliminate it then?
Its not meaningless. Copyright law says what a derived work is, the GPL says what you're allowed to do with a derived work above and beyond what copyright law allows, if you agree to the license. (That is the crucial difference between the GPL and EULAs, which many people fail to grasp or intentionally do not grasp.)
Jon Johnson was not actually arrested or detained in America. He was arrested by a Norwegian police agency under similar circumstances to the arrest of Dimitri Skylarov (sp?). The MPAA informed the Norwegian police agency in question that Jon Johnson had violated "intellectual property laws" and told them to arrest him and confiscate all electronic devices in his or his family's possesion.
I believe the order was reversed a week or so later and the devices returned when someone higher-up in the Norwegian government reminded the agency in question that the MPAA was an American organization and were talking about an American law, and that what Johnson had done was perfectly 100% legal in Norway.
Needless to say, the entire affair was quite embarassing for the Norwegian government, but never recieved mention this side of the pond.
Although I wouldn't give good odds on the chances of him not being tossed in jail the instant he sets foot in America, if he's ever foolish enough to visit the "Land of the Free (TM)".
This is perhaps a legitimate point, and a clear definition of a derivative work should be incorporated into the next version of the GPL.
Impossible. Know why? The GPL's definition, or the definition of its authors, of deriviatve work doesn't matter at all. What matters is what copyright law considers to be a derivative work, and therefor what the copyright holder on the original work can apply terms to. Maybe if the company in question had a decent team of lawyers, they'd know this.
This is all clearly spelled out on the GNU pages, which no-one involved in this debate seems to have bothered to read.
Yeah. And just scanning the headlines, I'm already wondering whose side the media's on. Four of those five outlets are referring to Skylarov as a "hacker". And what has the media spent the last twenty years doing to that word? Looked at in that light, it doesn't look very much like they're trying to induce sympathy, does it?
IIRC, some of Cowboy Bebop was so explicit that it wasn't allowed to air unedited on Japanese TV. So I'm betting that an American release is going to be heavily butchered.
Got it running on a P166, and seen it running on everything from an old 386 on up. (Why is it that everyone forgets Debian when they're talking about Linux distros, until the Debian users come by and point it out? Its like most people believe Linux is four distributions: Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Slack) Worked beautifully, especially since you can use make-kpkg on a larger machine to make a kernel package you can then install with a minimum of fuss on your smaller machine.
American politicians, as it is well known, have no actual morals, causes, or beliefs of their own. Rather, they are a chameleon-like subspecies of humanity, adapting themselves to whatever ideologies will get them votes and payoffs from special interest groups.
Censoring the Internet's just an unfortunate side-effect of this condition.
Clue: Open Source does not mean that everyone has access to the source. GPL-style free software licenses mean that those who can get a binary can get the source for free, which in this case would've been a good idea. Then the facility in question could've found and fixed the bug long ago.
Or would you rather confidential government systems be running a closed-source solution like NT and not know who's getting what data from them?
(Well, there goes any chance of this getting up above -1 - criticizing Microsoft is a sure way to attract 'troll' and 'flamebait' ratings.)
I'd say Technic is the exception to the rule with Lego. Most Lego sets these days are horrible - you get a few single-use big pieces and a few general use pieces to fill out the shape. But from what I've seen, Technic hasn't changed much - you still get lots of the extremely flexible basic pieces, with which you can then build pretty much anything.
Hmm... A Difference Engine built out of Technic. That'd be interesting.;-)
An anonymous coward already posted this, but didn't provide enough info.
Check out Independence War, by Particle Systems, published by Infogrames. You should be able to find a copy of the deluxe edition for quite a low price. They'll also be releasing Independence War II later this year - check out their web site at http://www.independencewar.com for more details.
Every single BSD advocate I've met or read articles by has not only been zealous, but rabidly so, to the point of insulting every other operating system or point of view. Things like the GPL being "viral" and GPL software authors "stealing from the community", the Linsux line, the widely-distributed picture of Chuck raping Tux, and other such things don't paint a picture of a "tolerant" community to me.
OTOH, I find that a vastly larger percentage of Linux users and developers are polite, approachable, helpful, and provide well-balanced opinions. The loud-mouthed detractors of Windows, BSD, and whichever DE/WM they don't use are a definite minorty.
BSD people I find to be even more zealous and rabid than Windows users, and that takes a lot.
Yes, BSDs are technically superior to Linux in many ways. And I'd be surprised if it weren't - not only are they older, but their development heads often had more experience with managing development (from what I've seen). So they've got the technical excellence, and some good dev teams, but the community that's grown up around them tends to be very hostile and exclusionary.
But posting something that doesn't critcize Linux, the nebulous "Slashdot mentality", the even more nebulous "Linux community", RMS, ESR, or the GPL is an easy way to not only get moderated down, but to attract endless flames, so I've no clue why I'm doing this...
This, for some reason, makes me somewhat suspicious of these answers. If the lawyer was treating the GPL as an EULA that grants rights instead of taking them away, he's likely been barking up the wrong tree, as RMS will no doubt point out. You are in no way required to even that a program is licensed under the GPL unless you step beyond the bounds of what copyright law allows you to do "by default".
A post is not (+1, Insightful) if it makes a statement like "Chances are, it's a quote taken out of context or a wholesale fabrication by a reporter." when the article in question is an exact transcript of an interview. Or "Microsoft didn't get where it is today by putting its collective foot in its mouth like that" after some of Microsoft's stupider recent PR blunders. (Like, oh say, Allchin, Mundie, former Ballmer statements, Halloween documents...)
In fact, Microsoft has quite a history of putting its "collective foot in its mouth" and then somehow pursuading the media to forget it ever said or did anything wrong.
Modration predictions for this post: moderated down for criticizing moderators, moderated down for critizing Microsoft and "quoting the Slashdot party line". (Which is defined as anything but: Microsoft is god! Microsoft is god!)
Slashdot Mirror
May I remind you that Alan pulling that changelog was not just a whim 'oh-lets-protest-this' thing. Instead, he did that after recieving legal advice on the matter of the DMCA and how it could affect him as the employee of a US-based corporation.
He doesn't want to discuss said bugs because doing so could open him up to being sued or thrown in jail without trial for weeks.
Microsoft, OTOH, doesn't want to release security hole reports because that would make them look bad. Notice that they do not mention the DMCA once. Also notice that Microsoft is a very large corporation, with both the money and legal muscle to defend itself in court.
Heck with a minimum of a BSCS. I know people who've gotten a BSCS who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. (I've been taught by PROFS who couldn't!) A minimum of four years of experience working in the tech industry as a sysadmin or coder (as needed for the case at hand) with a certant expertise in current technology (not just NT and not just Unix, for example) AND a provably detailed knowledge of civil rights and legal process in the USA. Or require a short course on said topic.
The last should, IMHO, be a requirement for regular jurors, too. But that's not likely, as lawyers love having impressionable, stupid blobs sitting in those jury seats. And guess who has a stranglehold on the USA's legal system?
No, A Linux developer fucked up here. What, Linus is supposed to know the code of all other variants of Unix off by heart or something? Since the code is (a) Open and (b) Accredited to the person responsible, it is possible to fix the error.
How do you know that Microsoft kept the copyrights intact everywhere they used BSD code? Because they did in some places, they must have in all places? Doesn't work that way. Prove to me that they haven't included BSD code in places and filed off the copyright, and I'll believe you.
What about those killed by second-hand smoke? By living in the same house as a smoker, say? Are they innocent?
Heh, more like:
Troll or flamebait - any comment on Slashdot that is less than wildly enthusiastic about any Microsoft-related product, or is even remotely supportive of non-Microsoft software of any kind.
Your post raises a good point. These ISPs are paying for this traffic that's being caused by faults in Microsoft's products. Why shouldn't Microsoft be held accountable for these costs? If we cause any dip in the revenue of Microsoft's products, or any cost to them, we're accountable. Why shouldn't they be?
Am I the only one reminded of the mutual defense pacts that indirectly caused World War I? I hope nothing of that scale happens here - but then again, there is no enemy with the resources or dedication of Germany at that time. Whoever it is won't be able to keep up a sustained war for long.
Not only that, but how will you be able to tell what's copyrighted and what isn't? If you ban all copying, well, then the computer's just an expensive-looking lump of electronics. If you ban copying of a certant stream of bits, how can you prove that stream of bits isn't an encrypted version of something I have a copyright on?
Short answer: you can't. What this amounts to is turning computers from general-purpose computation devices into fancy black-box television sets.
That needs to change first! 99% of the computing population can not, and will not understand the command line!
From that statement, I can see you've been involved in the technical community for even less time than I have. People will use whatever interface they've been trained to use. All the people screaming for Linux UIs to imitate Windows don't want an easy-to-use or easy-to-learn UI. They don't want a UI that they have to learn any more to use.
I know numerous non-technical people who got by just fine with a command line and text-based programs for years. Switching them over to a GUI system is almost invariably painful, especially a Microsoft GUI. There's too much inconsistancy and randomness (from the view of the user).
As for install, what about having two files in a .gz archive, one being quicktime_plugin.i386.rpm and the other being install.sh, containing the fillowing:
#!/usr/bin/sh
rpm -iv quicktimeplugin.i386.rpm
That brainless enough for you?
Or you could just use a distribution with a halfway-decent package management system and type: apt-get install quicktime_plugin
(This post will be modded down for containing a clue, a real-world estimate of the intelligence of the average human being, and a positive opinion of Linux.)
The moderators must be smoking some good crack today.
This guy's calling for statically linking all programs...
And he gets modded up? Come on, get a clue! It sounds like the 'distros these days' he's talking about consists exclusively of RedHat 4.x. Almost every single one of his mentioned problems has been addressed by "newbie" distros, and some have even been addressed by Debian and Slackware. (which don't try to cater to newbies)
Yet another case of a post getting modded up because of the poster claiming he's going to get modded down, it appears.
Amen, Brother! ;)
I've recently switched from GNOME to KDE, after horrible experiences with Ximian's packaging of GNOME. I'm not even thinking about looking back. I personally find that KDE has more Windows-style eye candy, but I can turn most of it off and get a clean, functional, well-designed desktop experience. Importing my GNOME themes and having a built-in theme editor put it way ahead from the start.
And this is just the 2.1 release - I think most of the things that really annoy me about it are due to be cleaned up for the 2.2 release. (Like not letting one set the Meta (AKA WinKey) modifier for keyboard shortcuts.)
And having most of its programs (all I can think of off the top of my head) keep their config files under .kde is nice - GNOME was mostly good about that, but some still scattered things all over my home directory.
I don't necessarily mean do your job using Linux... I mean other things you use your computer at home for that you can do under Linux.
And many Windows tools are getting Linux equivalents. I'm sure that both GNOME and KDE have projects to create Outlook-compatible mail clients (that are actually secure).
-RickHunter
Having been in the same situation a year ago, allow me to ask you this. If you want to learn Linux, why are you using Windows for your everyday work? If you're using Linux every day to get your work done (not even complicated things - just getting familiar with the text editor and some of the other common tools available), you'll find that it becomes much easier to use very quickly. Even if you avoud the config files initially - once you learn how to read (not access, read) man and info pages, they're easy. (Although the fact that Debian's config files are very well-commented helped a bit...)
Yeah, there's a learning curve. But if you don't jump back to Windows every time something starts looking difficult, you'll get past it fast.
-RickHunter
So you're saying that part of the GPL is meaningless. Wouldn't it be better to eliminate it then?
Its not meaningless. Copyright law says what a derived work is, the GPL says what you're allowed to do with a derived work above and beyond what copyright law allows, if you agree to the license. (That is the crucial difference between the GPL and EULAs, which many people fail to grasp or intentionally do not grasp.)
-RickHunter
Jon Johnson was not actually arrested or detained in America. He was arrested by a Norwegian police agency under similar circumstances to the arrest of Dimitri Skylarov (sp?). The MPAA informed the Norwegian police agency in question that Jon Johnson had violated "intellectual property laws" and told them to arrest him and confiscate all electronic devices in his or his family's possesion.
I believe the order was reversed a week or so later and the devices returned when someone higher-up in the Norwegian government reminded the agency in question that the MPAA was an American organization and were talking about an American law, and that what Johnson had done was perfectly 100% legal in Norway.
Needless to say, the entire affair was quite embarassing for the Norwegian government, but never recieved mention this side of the pond.
Although I wouldn't give good odds on the chances of him not being tossed in jail the instant he sets foot in America, if he's ever foolish enough to visit the "Land of the Free (TM)".
-RickHunter
This is perhaps a legitimate point, and a clear definition of a derivative work should be incorporated into the next version of the GPL.
Impossible. Know why? The GPL's definition, or the definition of its authors, of deriviatve work doesn't matter at all. What matters is what copyright law considers to be a derivative work, and therefor what the copyright holder on the original work can apply terms to. Maybe if the company in question had a decent team of lawyers, they'd know this.
This is all clearly spelled out on the GNU pages, which no-one involved in this debate seems to have bothered to read.
-RickHunter
Yeah. And just scanning the headlines, I'm already wondering whose side the media's on. Four of those five outlets are referring to Skylarov as a "hacker". And what has the media spent the last twenty years doing to that word? Looked at in that light, it doesn't look very much like they're trying to induce sympathy, does it?
-RickHunter
IIRC, some of Cowboy Bebop was so explicit that it wasn't allowed to air unedited on Japanese TV. So I'm betting that an American release is going to be heavily butchered.
-RickHunter
Got it running on a P166, and seen it running on everything from an old 386 on up. (Why is it that everyone forgets Debian when they're talking about Linux distros, until the Debian users come by and point it out? Its like most people believe Linux is four distributions: Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Slack) Worked beautifully, especially since you can use make-kpkg on a larger machine to make a kernel package you can then install with a minimum of fuss on your smaller machine.
-RickHunter
You are mistaken.
American politicians, as it is well known, have no actual morals, causes, or beliefs of their own. Rather, they are a chameleon-like subspecies of humanity, adapting themselves to whatever ideologies will get them votes and payoffs from special interest groups.
Censoring the Internet's just an unfortunate side-effect of this condition.
-RickHunter
Clue: Open Source does not mean that everyone has access to the source. GPL-style free software licenses mean that those who can get a binary can get the source for free, which in this case would've been a good idea. Then the facility in question could've found and fixed the bug long ago.
Or would you rather confidential government systems be running a closed-source solution like NT and not know who's getting what data from them?
(Well, there goes any chance of this getting up above -1 - criticizing Microsoft is a sure way to attract 'troll' and 'flamebait' ratings.)
-RickHunter
I'd say Technic is the exception to the rule with Lego. Most Lego sets these days are horrible - you get a few single-use big pieces and a few general use pieces to fill out the shape. But from what I've seen, Technic hasn't changed much - you still get lots of the extremely flexible basic pieces, with which you can then build pretty much anything.
Hmm... A Difference Engine built out of Technic. That'd be interesting. ;-)
-RickHunter
An anonymous coward already posted this, but didn't provide enough info.
Check out Independence War, by Particle Systems, published by Infogrames. You should be able to find a copy of the deluxe edition for quite a low price. They'll also be releasing Independence War II later this year - check out their web site at http://www.independencewar.com for more details.
-RickHunter
Every single BSD advocate I've met or read articles by has not only been zealous, but rabidly so, to the point of insulting every other operating system or point of view. Things like the GPL being "viral" and GPL software authors "stealing from the community", the Linsux line, the widely-distributed picture of Chuck raping Tux, and other such things don't paint a picture of a "tolerant" community to me.
OTOH, I find that a vastly larger percentage of Linux users and developers are polite, approachable, helpful, and provide well-balanced opinions. The loud-mouthed detractors of Windows, BSD, and whichever DE/WM they don't use are a definite minorty.
BSD people I find to be even more zealous and rabid than Windows users, and that takes a lot.
Yes, BSDs are technically superior to Linux in many ways. And I'd be surprised if it weren't - not only are they older, but their development heads often had more experience with managing development (from what I've seen). So they've got the technical excellence, and some good dev teams, but the community that's grown up around them tends to be very hostile and exclusionary.
But posting something that doesn't critcize Linux, the nebulous "Slashdot mentality", the even more nebulous "Linux community", RMS, ESR, or the GPL is an easy way to not only get moderated down, but to attract endless flames, so I've no clue why I'm doing this...
-RickHunter
This, for some reason, makes me somewhat suspicious of these answers. If the lawyer was treating the GPL as an EULA that grants rights instead of taking them away, he's likely been barking up the wrong tree, as RMS will no doubt point out. You are in no way required to even that a program is licensed under the GPL unless you step beyond the bounds of what copyright law allows you to do "by default".
-RickHunter
A post is not (+1, Insightful) if it makes a statement like "Chances are, it's a quote taken out of context or a wholesale fabrication by a reporter." when the article in question is an exact transcript of an interview. Or "Microsoft didn't get where it is today by putting its collective foot in its mouth like that" after some of Microsoft's stupider recent PR blunders. (Like, oh say, Allchin, Mundie, former Ballmer statements, Halloween documents...)
In fact, Microsoft has quite a history of putting its "collective foot in its mouth" and then somehow pursuading the media to forget it ever said or did anything wrong.
Modration predictions for this post: moderated down for criticizing moderators, moderated down for critizing Microsoft and "quoting the Slashdot party line". (Which is defined as anything but: Microsoft is god! Microsoft is god!)
-RickHunter