In the movie "Taken", Allison is offered the opportunity to leave Earth and join the aliens, as they believe she is not safe here, and would be better off somewhere else.
It's getting to the point where I don't even bother to read these articles about copyright; they're always almost exactly the same. Like a mantra.
But it just occurred to me that, even if the people who did "Taken" aren't saying it, I think I understand the meaning now.
People with any dignity should just leave. Just hope they don't come back here someday and turn it into a hog farm.
...how do I get a set of large mouse cursors on Linux so I can find the mouse, or what keyboard combination will put the mouse in the center of my screen so I can find it?
Then, there are those of us who cannot see well...
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 1
...and get a lot more done if we don't have to chace a mouse around on a screen. I can only read a few letters at a time. Which "user interface" makes my work easiest, among these stylish GUI's?
Well, actually, Windows.
Gnome and KDE are getting there, but not quite there yet. Close.
When you discuss GUI's, please don't forget about those of us who can't use a mouse very well.
...and 100 years later, they'll still be at it.
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...so, with all this stuff going on, how come Americans aren't questioning why copyright expiration takes over 100 years?
In fact, I can't help but wonder why the publishing industry has the nerve to target public libraries, even though the publishers already have the national legislature in their pockets. Already, they make scads of money on garbage paperbacks, magazines, and other landfill that never even makes it into public libraries, oftentimes, and now they want to outlaw used book and CD sales as well?
So, when do we, the people, get our part of that deal; i.e., a 25-year copyright period, non-renewable, after which the work goes into the public domain?
Richard Stallman had to know this.
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
This practice is very old. It is, in fact, the way many system consultants rip off their clients, who ask that some program be converted from, say, Fortran to COBOL. The consultant engineers (or buys) a converter that produces obfuscated code. That way, the consultant (or the converter developer) gets in on any new changes. If the client wanted to move entirely to COBOL and ditch Fortran, too bad; the converted still works on their new system.
As has been pointed out already here, a lawyer might find that the abuser would have to prove that recipients of the "source code" could continue development and modification, without having to purchase a converter; otherwise, the GEP is violated.
Furthermore, I'd like to see that company's mailbox when their idea of "source code" gets onto the Net. A scam like this could get really, really messy whether the company won in court or not.
For lack of oxygen. As the distance from the earth to a given point in the atmosphere gets greater, the air becomes thinner; hence, the sky has more trouble breathing at those heights, bringing about the blue color.
It becomes black at night because there is no light with which to see the blue color.
OK, if you think the problem with music today is lack of talent, why the Hell did you support MP3.COM's database of talentless music? If I were you (which I'm not,) I would have written them and told them to lay off RIAA for now while developing their own stable of musicians. But I'm not you, and I did it anyway. Wake up, people; RIAA may be "old hat" to you, but you can't cheat them of what they believe to be their rights. If you want good music, you have to support it. Not look as if you're stealing bad music.
MP3.com also provided access to free MP3 music that people could download without violating any copyright, and much of it was contributed by people who wanted to share freely, or become known. If they disappear because of this, who will take their place with MP3's, and provide up-and-coming musicians, college bands, and other not-so-well-known musicians a forum? Some of you may think the free music was not the best in the world, but personally, I have very little truck with the drek provided by regular record companies anyway. The *really* good, really artful music isn't getting played, anywhere. All we get is a bunch of drum-beaters with big hair who start their instruments on fire, or "gangstas" who stand behing a mike and tell us how "bad" they are. Wow-wee. All brought to you by the people who sued MP3.com. Thanks, guys--on both sides. What was the point?
Well, I guess this means I might as well upgrade my MIDI capabilities and hope that someone knows how to work with sound fonts and stuff besides a few techies with extra time on their hands.
And to think; I was just getting ready to upload some Jan Petersen Sweelinck organ music I rendered on an Ensoniq synthesizer to MP3.com, for all o' yall to share.
But then, I guess the people who were *stupid* enough to support MP3.COM with that CD copyright crap wouldn't care about reniassance music--any more than Sony would care to post my renditions to the public Internet for free, even though I want to give it away. No money in it for them, hmmm?
This whole business is absurd. It makes all of us techies look like fools, and it makes the so-called "music" of the 20th century look to me even more like sawdust than it did before.
And thanks to all you College kids who, instead of *supporting your local musicians by going to see them*, supported this lame-brain scheme that MP3.COM came up with. CD players are so ridiculously cheap--couldn't you just have taken some CD's with you? Now, because of this, you're probably going to do it, because otherwise you'll have to play the Internet like a juke-box.
And, finally, thanks to MP3.com executives, who pruved once again that allowing yourself to be under the power of gold will eventually lead you to ruin. Better earlier than later, I guess--you learn more quickly that way.
Micro Standards, in Redmond, Washington is happy with being able to get Microsoft training easily. They don't have to send anyone to North Carolina.
While this argument is valid for someone from, say, Chicago, Illinois, doesn't it seem a bit odd that these guys instigated the whole thing? Surely, they must realize that as Linux grows in popularity, there will be certification programs all over the place for Linux. Why pick on Red Hat, and why now, and why from Redmond, Washington?
I'm going to learn more about MicroStandards Distributors. Lots more. In the beginning of the article, I was actually impressed with their point of view, until I realized that they were pitting Microsoft certification against Red Hat certification; when I read the location information at the end, I suddenly regarded the article as a wash.
...should look into this as a way to preserve the "public" in "public-domain" works. There's too much proprietary "packaging" going on these days on the Internet with the objective of proprietizing works whose authors have been dead for a long time. Since the authours are really the ones who should have gotten credit and recompense for their works, anything we can do to thwart this greedy behavior should be done.
I've noticed that there are an awful lot of questions on this set of pages about packaging systems and what you plan (don't plan) to do about yours. My question is:
Why did you addict me to Linux? The nerve! My life is ruined! You and Stang comspired about this, didn't you? If it weren't for you, I'd still be a Microsoft Worm(R)! So, my question is, are you going ti pay for my rehab sessions or not?
The whole idea here was supposed to be that we only need 1 copy of a system file in 1000 home directories, that sort of thing. If a user has a (read-only) symbolic link to some system file, they can't modify it unless they make a copy and replace that file. So the dumbed-down user interface to "install-whatever" attends to that. Big deal!
To summarize:
1) for large files, this is pointless because modifying one byte does a copy. 2) for small files, all this does is fix system-administration problems they've had all along, because they're trying to make a single-user platform and culture into a multi-user one to glom onto all that Enterprise systems cash.
Oh and BTW, say I have two files located at X, they're the same size and have the same contents. How do I know if one of them is a link? Even better, what if I want one of them to be? Or better still, what if I don't want one of them to be?
Here's another one. How the Hell do I do disk space administration in a situation like this? Buy another ($800/server, $20/user) friggin' package that correctly informs me how much disk space is being used? What? Now all-sudden, all my scripts that detect and calculate file sizes are for shit. A symlink reports its file size as 1K, because it is.
In an earlier post, I speculated whether a UNIX system with, say, the Reiser filesystem would gain anything by doing this at the block or cluster level. On the way home last night, I started brainstorming about the issue, and came to the conclusion that the maintenance blocks might cost as much as the gain in space (purely intuition--I have no proof!) On top of that, such a scheme would make journalling a lot tougher, and straight repair even worse (again, just guessing.)
I'm really impressed with the depth and breadth to which discussion of this "innovation" has taken us. I've already seen a post here about someone doing this with hard links on a news server; I can't imagine that it hasn't been done thousands of time by people trying to economize on mail systems.
The real question is this, in my view: Should such a capability be used at the OS level? Again, just by intuition (and scanning responses here,) I've come to the conclusion that the costs and benefits are about equal. Besides, if there's an application of "automatic links," it's no major task to do it at application development time. Or better still, add the capability to the OS, but leave it an option for the developer.
Besides that, I've heard people parade shortcuts as microsoft's "symbolic links."
Until I can install an OS without running a GUI and get at all the links, and all the long file names the idea of Windows having "symbolic links" because of shortcuts bites my big one.
Case in point: I've installed several different "rescue" linux disks, with no GUI's, and all of them had both symbolic and hard links. How could it be otherwise? If M$ had had a decent "single instance storage" system, I bet we'd have single-diskette Windows by now. Maybe not much of one, but we'd have it.
"single instance storage" is not new; it's been used in mail systems such as Groupwise, WordPerfect Office, and Microsoft Exchange for years. I'd guess that the main reason it hasn't been applied to an OS file system so far is that filesystems are generally searched linearly rather than binarily, at least at a given directory level. Reiser has a new approach to the directory structure; it would only be a matter of time before people would realize that "copy-on-write" technology applies well in such a file system.
As a matter of fact, you could create a nice nightmare for yourself by trying to do single-instance storage at some lower level, like the cluster level. Wouldn't that be fun!
I think the author of the original post definitely had the right sense. This is an Interesting Idea, but it's not God talking. It has more the quality of "I have a shinier shoe polish."
O'Reilly's draining my bank account. Next theing you know, they're gonna hook up to my credit card, and that will be it. Nothing but O'Reilly books everywhere!
I'll know this has happend when all my cookbooks start sprouting fir and feathers.
Ahh---I just figured it out. PETA must have figured that if they can't free the animals, they might as well have their pictures on all the books in the world. Tim, you shouldn't engage in such comspiracies!
There's such a thing as an agent provocateur, I believe. Sometimes, I wonder if the people who work in the technology area understand this.
Actually, there's very clear evidence that political/military organizations like the CIA and the FBI hire people to incite such behavior. Members of the American communist and socialist movements are quite familiar with such people (e.g. "If you want to get somewhere, why don't we blow up some bridges?")
Don't listen to people like that, and don't do what they suggest. If you must engage in demonstrations of opposition to UCITA, find some other way. If you hack Virginia, the politicians will surely blame their problems on you, not the guy who incites you. They may even have hired him.
Eric Raymond, Bob Young, all of you, pay attention!
I've been reading and reading here, and I just thought of something.
If Hollywood was a revolt against the strangulation caused by Thomas Edison's "movie industry" in New York, and if the MPAA and their Content Scrambling System are maybe holding back Linux markets, I have one question:
What are you wealthy people, who got where you were because of the initiative and resourcefulness of people like the DVD hackers, going to do about this?
Hollywood and its other media brothers and sisters may have the upper hand now, but you have a platform at stake here--a platform that a lot of very dedicated people essentially dropped in your lap, many without a single penny of compensation (including me; I've contributed code to at least 2 Linux-related programs, pretty much anonymously.)
Well, you've got your money. So help us on this one.
The lame-brain who put that article up there must have been thinking, in a hyper-coffee or alchohol-stupor sort of way, like this:
The FBI posted DDoS related files for Solaris and Linux; therefore, Solaris and Linux must be responsible. On top of that, I can use this to sell a little web site...
Slashdot Mirror
....I'm listening to tracker mods (MikMod.) I'm also downloading some at the same time. I'm also working on a few of my own.
Granted, they aren't from a "major label", but I think you might get the idea.
The "recording industry" isn't going to get what they want. They don't deserve it...not by a long shot.
...of waterproof watches?
Now, they're "water-resistant."
There's also "shatter-resistant" glass, plastic, etc. I don't even think anyone refers to anything as "rustproof" any more.
These people have to know this is a marketing ploy. It'll work for only as long as people are stupid enough to believe it.
In the movie "Taken", Allison is offered the opportunity to leave Earth and join the aliens, as they believe she is not safe here, and would be better off somewhere else.
It's getting to the point where I don't even bother to read these articles about copyright; they're always almost exactly the same. Like a mantra.
But it just occurred to me that, even if the people who did "Taken" aren't saying it, I think I understand the meaning now.
People with any dignity should just leave. Just hope they don't come back here someday and turn it into a hog farm.
...how do I get a set of large mouse cursors on Linux so I can find the mouse, or what keyboard combination will put the mouse in the center of my screen so I can find it?
...and get a lot more done if we don't have to chace a mouse around on a screen. I can only read a few letters at a time. Which "user interface" makes my work easiest, among these stylish GUI's?
Well, actually, Windows.
Gnome and KDE are getting there, but not quite there yet. Close.
When you discuss GUI's, please don't forget about those of us who can't use a mouse very well.
...so, with all this stuff going on, how come Americans aren't questioning why copyright expiration takes over 100 years?
In fact, I can't help but wonder why the publishing industry has the nerve to target public libraries, even though the publishers already have the national legislature in their pockets. Already, they make scads of money on garbage paperbacks, magazines, and other landfill that never even makes it into public libraries, oftentimes, and now they want to outlaw used book and CD sales as well?
So, when do we, the people, get our part of that deal; i.e., a 25-year copyright period, non-renewable, after which the work goes into the public domain?
This practice is very old. It is, in fact, the way many system consultants rip off their clients, who ask that some program be converted from, say, Fortran to COBOL. The consultant engineers (or buys) a converter that produces obfuscated code. That way, the consultant (or the converter developer) gets in on any new changes. If the client wanted to move entirely to COBOL and ditch Fortran, too bad; the converted still works on their new system.
As has been pointed out already here, a lawyer might find that the abuser would have to prove that recipients of the "source code" could continue development and modification, without having to purchase a converter; otherwise, the GEP is violated.
Furthermore, I'd like to see that company's mailbox when their idea of "source code" gets onto the Net. A scam like this could get really, really messy whether the company won in court or not.
>Why is the sky blue?
For lack of oxygen. As the distance from the earth to a given point in the atmosphere gets greater, the air becomes thinner; hence, the sky has more trouble breathing at those heights, bringing about the blue color.
It becomes black at night because there is no light with which to see the blue color.
OK, if you think the problem with music today is lack of talent, why the Hell did you support MP3.COM's database of talentless music? If I were you (which I'm not,) I would have written them and told them to lay off RIAA for now while developing their own stable of musicians. But I'm not you, and I did it anyway. Wake up, people; RIAA may be "old hat" to you, but you can't cheat them of what they believe to be their rights. If you want good music, you have to support it. Not look as if you're stealing bad music.
MP3.com also provided access to free MP3 music that people could download without violating any copyright, and much of it was contributed by people who wanted to share freely, or become known. If they disappear because of this, who will take their place with MP3's, and provide up-and-coming musicians, college bands, and other not-so-well-known musicians a forum? Some of you may think the free music was not the best in the world, but personally, I have very little truck with the drek provided by regular record companies anyway. The *really* good, really artful music isn't getting played, anywhere. All we get is a bunch of drum-beaters with big hair who start their instruments on fire, or "gangstas" who stand behing a mike and tell us how "bad" they are. Wow-wee. All brought to you by the people who sued MP3.com. Thanks, guys--on both sides. What was the point?
Well, I guess this means I might as well upgrade my MIDI capabilities and hope that someone knows how to work with sound fonts and stuff besides a few techies with extra time on their hands.
And to think; I was just getting ready to upload some Jan Petersen Sweelinck organ music I rendered on an Ensoniq synthesizer to MP3.com, for all o' yall to share.
But then, I guess the people who were *stupid* enough to support MP3.COM with that CD copyright crap wouldn't care about reniassance music--any more than Sony would care to post my renditions to the public Internet for free, even though I want to give it away. No money in it for them, hmmm?
This whole business is absurd. It makes all of us techies look like fools, and it makes the so-called "music" of the 20th century look to me even more like sawdust than it did before.
And thanks to all you College kids who, instead of *supporting your local musicians by going to see them*, supported this lame-brain scheme that MP3.COM came up with. CD players are so ridiculously cheap--couldn't you just have taken some CD's with you? Now, because of this, you're probably going to do it, because otherwise you'll have to play the Internet like a juke-box.
And, finally, thanks to MP3.com executives, who pruved once again that allowing yourself to be under the power of gold will eventually lead you to ruin. Better earlier than later, I guess--you learn more quickly that way.
Q. How many MCSE's does it take to change a light-bulb?
A. Which light-bulb?
Micro Standards, in Redmond, Washington is happy with being able to get Microsoft training easily. They don't have to send anyone to North Carolina.
While this argument is valid for someone from, say, Chicago, Illinois, doesn't it seem a bit odd that these guys instigated the whole thing? Surely, they must realize that as Linux grows in popularity, there will be certification programs all over the place for Linux. Why pick on Red Hat, and why now, and why from Redmond, Washington?
I'm going to learn more about MicroStandards Distributors. Lots more. In the beginning of the article, I was actually impressed with their point of view, until I realized that they were pitting Microsoft certification against Red Hat certification; when I read the location information at the end, I suddenly regarded the article as a wash.
...should look into this as a way to preserve the "public" in "public-domain" works. There's too much proprietary "packaging" going on these days on the Internet with the objective of proprietizing works whose authors have been dead for a long time. Since the authours are really the ones who should have gotten credit and recompense for their works, anything we can do to thwart this greedy behavior should be done.
---------------
Pat:
I've noticed that there are an awful lot of questions on this set of pages about packaging systems and what you plan (don't plan) to do about yours. My question is:
Why did you addict me to Linux? The nerve! My life is ruined! You and Stang comspired about this, didn't you? If it weren't for you, I'd still be a Microsoft Worm(R)! So, my question is, are you going ti pay for my rehab sessions or not?
I'm sure you already know this, but for those who don't...
Give Me Slack (or, give me food (or, kill me...))
...and...raped by Customer Service? I guess that's pretty appropriate for Hump Day, dontcha think?
Bob Malda's the wrong "Bob!"
The whole idea here was supposed to be that we only need 1 copy of a system file in 1000 home directories, that sort of thing. If a user has a (read-only) symbolic link to some system file, they can't modify it unless they make a copy and replace that file. So the dumbed-down user interface to "install-whatever" attends to that. Big deal!
To summarize:
1) for large files, this is pointless because modifying one byte does a copy.
2) for small files, all this does is fix system-administration problems they've had all along, because they're trying to make a single-user platform and culture into a multi-user one to glom onto all that Enterprise systems cash.
Oh and BTW, say I have two files located at X, they're the same size and have the same contents. How do I know if one of them is a link? Even better, what if I want one of them to be? Or better still, what if I don't want one of them to be?
Here's another one. How the Hell do I do disk space administration in a situation like this? Buy another ($800/server, $20/user) friggin' package that correctly informs me how much disk space is being used? What? Now all-sudden, all my scripts that detect and calculate file sizes are for shit. A symlink reports its file size as 1K, because it is.
This bytes!
In an earlier post, I speculated whether a UNIX system with, say, the Reiser filesystem would gain anything by doing this at the block or cluster level. On the way home last night, I started brainstorming about the issue, and came to the conclusion that the maintenance blocks might cost as much as the gain in space (purely intuition--I have no proof!) On top of that, such a scheme would make journalling a lot tougher, and straight repair even worse (again, just guessing.)
I'm really impressed with the depth and breadth to which discussion of this "innovation" has taken us. I've already seen a post here about someone doing this with hard links on a news server; I can't imagine that it hasn't been done thousands of time by people trying to economize on mail systems.
The real question is this, in my view: Should such a capability be used at the OS level? Again, just by intuition (and scanning responses here,) I've come to the conclusion that the costs and benefits are about equal. Besides, if there's an application of "automatic links," it's no major task to do it at application development time. Or better still, add the capability to the OS, but leave it an option for the developer.
My 2 cents.
Besides that, I've heard people parade shortcuts as microsoft's "symbolic links."
Until I can install an OS without running a GUI and get at all the links, and all the long file names the idea of Windows having "symbolic links" because of shortcuts bites my big one.
Case in point: I've installed several different "rescue" linux disks, with no GUI's, and all of them had both symbolic and hard links. How could it be otherwise? If M$ had had a decent "single instance storage" system, I bet we'd have single-diskette Windows by now. Maybe not much of one, but we'd have it.
"single instance storage" is not new; it's been used in mail systems such as Groupwise, WordPerfect Office, and Microsoft Exchange for years. I'd guess that the main reason it hasn't been applied to an OS file system so far is that filesystems are generally searched linearly rather than binarily, at least at a given directory level. Reiser has a new approach to the directory structure; it would only be a matter of time before people would realize that "copy-on-write" technology applies well in such a file system.
As a matter of fact, you could create a nice nightmare for yourself by trying to do single-instance storage at some lower level, like the cluster level. Wouldn't that be fun!
I think the author of the original post definitely had the right sense. This is an Interesting Idea, but it's not God talking. It has more the quality of "I have a shinier shoe polish."
I ought to know--I am too! ;)
O'Reilly's draining my bank account. Next theing you know, they're gonna hook up to my credit card, and that will be it. Nothing but O'Reilly books everywhere!
I'll know this has happend when all my cookbooks start sprouting fir and feathers.
Ahh---I just figured it out. PETA must have figured that if they can't free the animals, they might as well have their pictures on all the books in the world. Tim, you shouldn't engage in such comspiracies!
Right.
There's such a thing as an agent provocateur, I believe. Sometimes, I wonder if the people who work in the technology area understand this.
Actually, there's very clear evidence that political/military organizations like the CIA and the FBI hire people to incite such behavior. Members of the American communist and socialist movements are quite familiar with such people (e.g. "If you want to get somewhere, why don't we blow up some bridges?")
Don't listen to people like that, and don't do what they suggest. If you must engage in demonstrations of opposition to UCITA, find some other way. If you hack Virginia, the politicians will surely blame their problems on you, not the guy who incites you. They may even have hired him.
Eric Raymond, Bob Young, all of you, pay attention!
I've been reading and reading here, and I just thought of something.
If Hollywood was a revolt against the strangulation caused by Thomas Edison's "movie industry" in New York, and if the MPAA and their Content Scrambling System are maybe holding back Linux markets, I have one question:
What are you wealthy people, who got where you were because of the initiative and resourcefulness of people like the DVD hackers, going to do about this?
Hollywood and its other media brothers and sisters may have the upper hand now, but you have a platform at stake here--a platform that a lot of very dedicated people essentially dropped in your lap, many without a single penny of compensation (including me; I've contributed code to at least 2 Linux-related programs, pretty much anonymously.)
Well, you've got your money. So help us on this one.
The lame-brain who put that article up there must have been thinking, in a hyper-coffee or alchohol-stupor sort of way, like this:
The FBI posted DDoS related files for Solaris and Linux; therefore, Solaris and Linux must be responsible. On top of that, I can use this to sell a little web site...