I guess its a matter of whether you want to interpret it as
"The freedom to take stuff" or "The freedom to have stuff taken from you"
Its a matter of whether a given developer has ideological problems with someone using their freely distributed solution to create a new solution that is not free (and thus locking away any potential improvements that tree of development and use might ever produce from every other development and use tree) and thus working to ensure that any future development/use patterns of the solution will also be free to be adopted, improved, etc (the GPL) OR if they're just glad that what they believe is a good solution gets used as widely as possible.
I see merits in both attitudes, and potential for abuse in both. As a person of a rather puritanical bent though, I tend to get itchy about people reaping rewards they didn't earn or contribute to (I don't have much fun in Vegas obviously) and thus tend to favor the GPL outlook.
Frankly though, I just want to beat the ideologues of both camps with clawhammers. In a purely metaphorical sense, of course.
While I'm occassionally fond of the ability to do network transparent graphics, I've found that for the most part I just ssh in and use a terminal if its remote, which begs why I'd want this to be running ALL the time on the system where I am constantly doing graphics work.
At home, I've got a USB KVM switch that bounces me between my dedicated Linux system (yay for BIOS upgrades that finally got USB keyboards working in GRUB) and my dedicated Windows XP system.
While I use the Linux system CONSTANTLY, and it probably ends up doing more WORK than the Windows system, I've found over time that I spend far more time with the KVM flipped over to the Windows box and SSHing back into the Linux box... Its just the snap of the graphics subsystem...
I guess I consider Windows the ultimate graphics shell for Unix: Its not even running in userland on the Linux box: Supreme stability for Linux in that case.
Of course, one part of the reason I may be in Windows is playing with Warcraft III and Neverwinter Nights while I wait for a large compilation, encoding, or render to get done... but I guess its not Linux-PC to like Bioware or Blizzard anymore, is it?
True, but on the converse, there is no ammendment to the Constitution guaranteeing your "right to be entertained." So don't be surprised if the eventual shakeout of this whole deal is that broadcast television/entertainment of all types goes the way of the dodo, so that its all retail purchased. At least until people agitate saying they have the right to copy and distribute anything they "buy". At which point you'll have to finally find a way to keep your own ass entertained for once.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I may be wrong, but I have some memory of them being given the OPTION of a homeland in Brazil, which Brazil was more than happy to give. But they refused. They wanted their historic homeland.
Someone who told me they had been on one of these types of planes in the past said that they have a nifty little thermite reaction in a 1U form factor. Just pull the pings and watch your rack melt.
Just an odd idea, but couldn't manufacturer's build a completely Redbook compliant "CD-ROM"? I.E. Its incapable of reading anything but CD audio but still streams it digitally out? I know it seems like a waste, but you could probably provide it in a half height 5.25 drive, and we know the mechanisms could be cheap...
Running Test10 and iptables 1.1.2 at the moment on my home firewall...
Iptables is a VAST improvement. Things I like:
* Forwarded traffic is no longer processed by the INPUT and OUTPUT chains
* There are seperate match rules for incoming and outgoing interfaces.
* State tracking module lets you match on the state of the connection (ESTABLISHED, NEW, RELATED, etc)
* Limit tracking module lets you match burstyness of incoming packets (So you can block huge bursts of pings, for instance)
* Seperate NAT table allows for more flexible NAT setups (for instance, source NATting out of an IP alias. Or destinating NATing instead of port forwarding, which again with aliases would allow one to have multiple port forwards on the same port with different IPs. Trying to do this in 2.2 is possible, but a pain.). In a playful note: I got Crimson Skies with full MS Zone support with 2.4 masquerading last night. 3 commands all that was necessary.
* Only thing its missing at the moment is a "iptables-save" and "iptables-restore" but the latest CVS snapshots have the beginnings of them.
* PREROUTING and POSTROUTING targets, where DNAT and SNATing are done normally. This makes it MUCH easier to tell how packets are being filtered through the system from a logical point of view. Masquerading on the forwarding rule always made me a bit confused.
Tim Gaastra
Re:You miss the point; but so did Katz
on
Mage The Ascension
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah, in Mage, the original Order of Reason was started by the "Craftmasons" who were VERY obviously the Masons. Of course, they got purged in the 19th century for political unorthodoxy, but it was their idea.
How did you get a standard Aviator 2.4 card to talk between Windows and Linux? I had translation/encapsulation issues that could only be resolved by going to the better firmware of the Aviator Pro's.
By the way, Aviator tech support was some of the nicest people I've ever dealt with to get this resolved.
Wow, what an incredibly strange arguement which I will now extend ad absurdum:
Do we then, have no right to prevent a person from "peacefully" (a rather strange use of the word again) setting up some means to videotape everything we do in our bathrooms or bedrooms and then selling or freely giving it away to our friends, co-workers, bosses, etc etc etc.?
Or here's another one: Say we invent a completely non-intrusive method that is "peaceful" to read other peoples thoughts? Then they could distribute this to whoever they feel like?
If you say yes, this is fine, at least I know you are so extreme on the issue that I don't have to listen to you anymore or take you seriously.
Wow. What a dystopian world that would be. Thank goodness you aren't setting policy.
If copyright law went away overnight (in some soft of magical fairyland, no doubt), I suspect that companies would simply move to a contract form of software distribution, with distribution only from their own company.
Software stores would vanish immediately. The contracts would be horrendously specific in their terms. No person under 18 in the US at least would ever get to use that software again, I'm sure. And you can imagine that the penalties for violation of the contract would be as severe as possible.
Alright, maybe we should stop posting... I never posted (I think) about the Hellmouth series, mainly because I didn't think that my experiences in school as a young teenager (while not particularly pleasent) were so extraordinary as to require my special wisdom on the subject. And at the time it seemed to me to be capitalizing on a tragedy. I'm particulary glad I didn't now. I think what concerns most at this point is not that they aren't getting credit, or money, or whatever... Its that their comments are being lifted from the context they were used, edited and reordered to tell someone elses story and viewpoint, and all of this is being done prior to any form of peer review or their own ability to edit it themselves. Thus, with a bit of creativity, their words could be used to justify viewpoints with which they do not necessarily agree, again without their ability to correct this. This bothers me alot.
Well, to be fair, to license something, you pretty much have to own it. Otherwise I might decided to license your house for frat parties or something. Linux was once, at some indeterminate point in the distant past, owned exclusively by someone. This may have, like all transitory effects, only lasted a microsecond until such person GPL'd it, but for a brief moment in time it was someones singular property. By licensing it, the conditions for its use were stated and this has power because at that time the person owned it. The unique character of the GPL (in my layman's opinion) is that it binds the conditions of use for all parties (including the "owner") from that point on, and prevents any future "ownership" of it. Interesting hypothetical occurence. Joe writes X. Joe GPLs X. People use X. Joe says he was kidding and declares GPL void. Joe gets sued for contract infringement or something. What would be the legal status of X if Joe lost that suit (he did infringe on an agreed contract) but since the licensing was an apparent misrepresentation... would it still be GPL'd or would it effectively be public domain at that point?
This has been a known issue for a long long time. I remember attending a "researcher preview" in Redmond of NT 5 in '97 at which the MIT Kerberos people attended and watching the "discussions" about the proprietary extensions. My understanding that the resolution at the time was that MS was going to give MIT the details of the tag extension field so that it could be folded back into the standard Kerberos distribution. I am not sure whether I should be surprised that this is still an issue 3 years later. Then again, it may be that somebody that isn't directly involved in the issue found out about something that hasn't been an issue for years and decided to blow it out of proportion. Sometimes that does happen on Slashdot.
Would it get you a little upset if another server was run by Bill Gates himself and all linux groups were banned?
There is such a beast (or at least was)... Its called news.microsoft.com, and at least for a while it only carried microsoft.* news groups... and didn't propigate them anywhere.
Was I annoyed that I couldn't get ABPE there? No. Would I have been annoyed if the admin had cancelled every last post with the word Linux in it? N.. Ok maybe, but it was THEIR server. And if I didn't like it, I could go elsewhere.
Quite often, if I post in alt.games.whitewolf, that post will show up in some of the newsservers I check, but not others. Most likely its just an artifact of the feed process, but who knows, perhaps somewhere along the line, I annoyed a news admin at a central feed and he's blacklisted me. Do I lose sleep over this? No.
USENET is, and has been since 1990 when I started messing with it, one of those things that is something of a crapshoot. Expecting some sort of guaranteed carry by every news server "on it" is just plain ridiculous.
Anybody ever watch SNL anymore. I know ITS not funny, but its interesting to note that they have an occasional skit starring "Ed the Tech Support Guy" which is basically just about the most under-socialized, geeky, poorly dressed, unhygenic tech support guy who basically just wanders around, acts arrogantly, insults everyone who asks him questions, and basically considers everyone he works with an idiot.... And people laugh at him... not WITH him, AT him. So every time I wander past a cubicle in tech support with a dozen User Friendly's pasted on the walls, or coffee cups with "I don't have time to explain this to you" or posters on user idiocy... I just have to think back to that skit, and realize that the world at large has only so much respect for our profession as we are willing to give them. Not that I haven't laughed or screamed at the obstinancy and bull-headedness of some users, but I don't really try to make a habit of it. Because I don't really want to be crammed into the already well-established stereotype of the ubergeek jackass.
What this really sounds like is a "turn it into Windows" plea. Which I hope gets ignored. Drive letters? He wants them back? Just because Windows has them. NO. "Make it so that the file system doesn't get corrupt when Linux crashes" OK. Journaling file system. But hey: Just because Windows doesn't repair it doesn't means its not broken. IE and MS Linux? Not likely, and not necessary. Those who are THAT stuck on Windows should stay with it and leave the rest of us alone. Permanantly mount the floppy and cdrom? How do you plan on ejecting? Personally, I'd just remove the floppy from the write cache. Now I'll admit some of the wants are fairly valid, but they mostly have to do with the "more apps" arguement. That is something that is literally improving daily.
Actually, that's what comments in the NIS host map are for, in combination with custom Perl scripts. Then you can have ALL kinds of useful info, including architecture, OS, network connection, physical location, shelf-space #, current primary responsible admin, etc... Try doing that in a 8-16 character hostname.
Well, it DID have the hardware RAID support prior to it being in the main kernel, and I believe it had some knfsd NFS compatability patches although I'm not too sure about that one. If one wanted to upgrade the kernel and was using features patched in, one did have to patch the kernel a bit. I haven't checked lately as to how patched it is (in 6.1)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess its a matter of whether you want to interpret it as
"The freedom to take stuff"
or
"The freedom to have stuff taken from you"
Its a matter of whether a given developer has ideological problems with someone using their freely distributed solution to create a new solution that is not free (and thus locking away any potential improvements that tree of development and use might ever produce from every other development and use tree) and thus working to ensure that any future development/use patterns of the solution will also be free to be adopted, improved, etc (the GPL) OR if they're just glad that what they believe is a good solution gets used as widely as possible.
I see merits in both attitudes, and potential for abuse in both. As a person of a rather puritanical bent though, I tend to get itchy about people reaping rewards they didn't earn or contribute to (I don't have much fun in Vegas obviously) and thus tend to favor the GPL outlook.
Frankly though, I just want to beat the ideologues of both camps with clawhammers. In a purely metaphorical sense, of course.
Then maybe you could spell it right next time? Thanks. :)
Just one English pedants opinion of course.
"herd"
Really? I think you may be getting ripped.
I consistently paid $15-17 for 2 episodes for Season One, and only paid $25 for the first of season 2, which was 4 episodes.
Maybe I'm lucky, but other empirical evidence indicates otherwise.
While I'm occassionally fond of the ability to do network transparent graphics, I've found that for the most part I just ssh in and use a terminal if its remote, which begs why I'd want this to be running ALL the time on the system where I am constantly doing graphics work.
..
At home, I've got a USB KVM switch that bounces me between my dedicated Linux system (yay for BIOS upgrades that finally got USB keyboards working in GRUB) and my dedicated Windows XP system.
While I use the Linux system CONSTANTLY, and it probably ends up doing more WORK than the Windows system, I've found over time that I spend far more time with the KVM flipped over to the Windows box and SSHing back into the Linux box... Its just the snap of the graphics subsystem.
I guess I consider Windows the ultimate graphics shell for Unix: Its not even running in userland on the Linux box: Supreme stability for Linux in that case.
Of course, one part of the reason I may be in Windows is playing with Warcraft III and Neverwinter Nights while I wait for a large compilation, encoding, or render to get done... but I guess its not Linux-PC to like Bioware or Blizzard anymore, is it?
True, but on the converse, there is no ammendment to the Constitution guaranteeing your "right to be entertained." So don't be surprised if the eventual shakeout of this whole deal is that broadcast television/entertainment of all types goes the way of the dodo, so that its all retail purchased. At least until people agitate saying they have the right to copy and distribute anything they "buy". At which point you'll have to finally find a way to keep your own ass entertained for once.
I may be wrong, but I have some memory of them being given the OPTION of a homeland in Brazil, which Brazil was more than happy to give. But they refused. They wanted their historic homeland.
Maybe, just maybe, he was referring to the real Erin Brockovich and the incident with PG&E?
"A Civil Action" may have been a better movie (or not)... but was it true?
Its a bit scary how we cynical savvy Internet jockies still tend to base our opinions around corporate driven media...
Tim Gaastra
Someone who told me they had been on one of these types of planes in the past said that they have a nifty little thermite reaction in a 1U form factor. Just pull the pings and watch your rack melt.
Tim Gaastra
Just an odd idea, but couldn't manufacturer's build a completely Redbook compliant "CD-ROM"? I.E. Its incapable of reading anything but CD audio but still streams it digitally out? I know it seems like a waste, but you could probably provide it in a half height 5.25 drive, and we know the mechanisms could be cheap...
Tim Gaastra
For Win32 I like SecureFX 1.9
Tim Gaastra
Running Test10 and iptables 1.1.2 at the moment on my home firewall...
Iptables is a VAST improvement. Things I like:
* Forwarded traffic is no longer processed by the INPUT and OUTPUT chains
* There are seperate match rules for incoming and outgoing interfaces.
* State tracking module lets you match on the state of the connection (ESTABLISHED, NEW, RELATED, etc)
* Limit tracking module lets you match burstyness of incoming packets (So you can block huge bursts of pings, for instance)
* Seperate NAT table allows for more flexible NAT setups (for instance, source NATting out of an IP alias. Or destinating NATing instead of port forwarding, which again with aliases would allow one to have multiple port forwards on the same port with different IPs. Trying to do this in 2.2 is possible, but a pain.). In a playful note: I got Crimson Skies with full MS Zone support with 2.4 masquerading last night. 3 commands all that was necessary.
* Only thing its missing at the moment is a "iptables-save" and "iptables-restore" but the latest CVS snapshots have the beginnings of them.
* PREROUTING and POSTROUTING targets, where DNAT and SNATing are done normally. This makes it MUCH easier to tell how packets are being filtered through the system from a logical point of view. Masquerading on the forwarding rule always made me a bit confused.
Tim Gaastra
Oh yeah, in Mage, the original Order of Reason was started by the "Craftmasons" who were VERY obviously the Masons. Of course, they got purged in the 19th century for political unorthodoxy, but it was their idea.
Tim Gaastra
Gah, I can't believe I missed that. MUST. RUN. OUT. AT. LUNCH. Buy 30 Gig harddrive...
No sleep till SuSE!
Tim Gaastra
It does 1400x1050 which seems just about perfect for most of my work.
Sadly, I have yet to figure out how to make Linux able to use it, and thus am stuck with Windows on it for the near future.
Its the first time in a linux install that I've ever got sound working before video.
I feel bad though, now I don't have the biggest laptop screen on the block anymore
Tim Gaastra
How did you get a standard Aviator 2.4 card to talk between Windows and Linux? I had translation/encapsulation issues that could only be resolved by going to the better firmware of the Aviator Pro's.
By the way, Aviator tech support was some of the nicest people I've ever dealt with to get this resolved.
Tim Gaastra
Wow, what an incredibly strange arguement which I will now extend ad absurdum:
Do we then, have no right to prevent a person from "peacefully" (a rather strange use of the word again) setting up some means to videotape everything we do in our bathrooms or bedrooms and then selling or freely giving it away to our friends, co-workers, bosses, etc etc etc.?
Or here's another one: Say we invent a completely non-intrusive method that is "peaceful" to read other peoples thoughts? Then they could distribute this to whoever they feel like?
If you say yes, this is fine, at least I know you are so extreme on the issue that I don't have to listen to you anymore or take you seriously.
Wow. What a dystopian world that would be. Thank goodness you aren't setting policy.
Tim Gaastra
If copyright law went away overnight (in some soft of magical fairyland, no doubt), I suspect that companies would simply move to a contract form of software distribution, with distribution only from their own company.
Software stores would vanish immediately. The contracts would be horrendously specific in their terms. No person under 18 in the US at least would ever get to use that software again, I'm sure. And you can imagine that the penalties for violation of the contract would be as severe as possible.
Tim Gaastra
Alright, maybe we should stop posting...
I never posted (I think) about the Hellmouth series, mainly because I didn't think that my experiences in school as a young teenager (while not particularly pleasent) were so extraordinary as to require my special wisdom on the subject. And at the time it seemed to me to be capitalizing on a tragedy.
I'm particulary glad I didn't now.
I think what concerns most at this point is not that they aren't getting credit, or money, or whatever... Its that their comments are being lifted from the context they were used, edited and reordered to tell someone elses story and viewpoint, and all of this is being done prior to any form of peer review or their own ability to edit it themselves. Thus, with a bit of creativity, their words could be used to justify viewpoints with which they do not necessarily agree, again without their ability to correct this. This bothers me alot.
Tim Gaastra
Well, to be fair, to license something, you pretty much have to own it. Otherwise I might decided to license your house for frat parties or something.
Linux was once, at some indeterminate point in the distant past, owned exclusively by someone. This may have, like all transitory effects, only lasted a microsecond until such person GPL'd it, but for a brief moment in time it was someones singular property. By licensing it, the conditions for its use were stated and this has power because at that time the person owned it. The unique character of the GPL (in my layman's opinion) is that it binds the conditions of use for all parties (including the "owner") from that point on, and prevents any future "ownership" of it.
Interesting hypothetical occurence. Joe writes X. Joe GPLs X. People use X. Joe says he was kidding and declares GPL void. Joe gets sued for contract infringement or something.
What would be the legal status of X if Joe lost that suit (he did infringe on an agreed contract) but since the licensing was an apparent misrepresentation... would it still be GPL'd or would it effectively be public domain at that point?
Tim Gaastra
This has been a known issue for a long long time. I remember attending a "researcher preview" in Redmond of NT 5 in '97 at which the MIT Kerberos people attended and watching the "discussions" about the proprietary extensions. My understanding that the resolution at the time was that MS was going to give MIT the details of the tag extension field so that it could be folded back into the standard Kerberos distribution. I am not sure whether I should be surprised that this is still an issue 3 years later. Then again, it may be that somebody that isn't directly involved in the issue found out about something that hasn't been an issue for years and decided to blow it out of proportion. Sometimes that does happen on Slashdot.
Tim Gaastra
Would it get you a little upset if another server was run by Bill Gates himself and all linux groups were banned?
There is such a beast (or at least was)... Its called news.microsoft.com, and at least for a while it only carried microsoft.* news groups... and didn't propigate them anywhere.
Was I annoyed that I couldn't get ABPE there? No. Would I have been annoyed if the admin had cancelled every last post with the word Linux in it? N.. Ok maybe, but it was THEIR server. And if I didn't like it, I could go elsewhere.
Quite often, if I post in alt.games.whitewolf, that post will show up in some of the newsservers I check, but not others. Most likely its just an artifact of the feed process, but who knows, perhaps somewhere along the line, I annoyed a news admin at a central feed and he's blacklisted me. Do I lose sleep over this? No.
USENET is, and has been since 1990 when I started messing with it, one of those things that is something of a crapshoot. Expecting some sort of guaranteed carry by every news server "on it" is just plain ridiculous.
Tim Gaastra
Anybody ever watch SNL anymore. I know ITS not funny, but its interesting to note that they have an occasional skit starring "Ed the Tech Support Guy" which is basically just about the most under-socialized, geeky, poorly dressed, unhygenic tech support guy who basically just wanders around, acts arrogantly, insults everyone who asks him questions, and basically considers everyone he works with an idiot. ... And people laugh at him... not WITH him, AT him. So every time I wander past a cubicle in tech support with a dozen User Friendly's pasted on the walls, or coffee cups with "I don't have time to explain this to you" or posters on user idiocy... I just have to think back to that skit, and realize that the world at large has only so much respect for our profession as we are willing to give them. Not that I haven't laughed or screamed at the obstinancy and bull-headedness of some users, but I don't really try to make a habit of it. Because I don't really want to be crammed into the already well-established stereotype of the ubergeek jackass.
Tim Gaastra
What this really sounds like is a "turn it into Windows" plea. Which I hope gets ignored. Drive letters? He wants them back? Just because Windows has them. NO. "Make it so that the file system doesn't get corrupt when Linux crashes" OK. Journaling file system. But hey: Just because Windows doesn't repair it doesn't means its not broken. IE and MS Linux? Not likely, and not necessary. Those who are THAT stuck on Windows should stay with it and leave the rest of us alone. Permanantly mount the floppy and cdrom? How do you plan on ejecting? Personally, I'd just remove the floppy from the write cache. Now I'll admit some of the wants are fairly valid, but they mostly have to do with the "more apps" arguement. That is something that is literally improving daily.
Tim Gaastra
Actually, that's what comments in the NIS host map are for, in combination with custom Perl scripts. Then you can have ALL kinds of useful info, including architecture, OS, network connection, physical location, shelf-space #, current primary responsible admin, etc... Try doing that in a 8-16 character hostname.
Tim Gaastra
Well, it DID have the hardware RAID support prior to it being in the main kernel, and I believe it had some knfsd NFS compatability patches although I'm not too sure about that one. If one wanted to upgrade the kernel and was using features patched in, one did have to patch the kernel a bit. I haven't checked lately as to how patched it is (in 6.1)
Tim Gaastra