API, London. In an unusual atempt to reasert the power of the monarchy, Her Magisty today ruled that all English character domain names, trade marks, and works published in the English language are in fact Royal property.
Her prepared statement read, "It's my language, and you only have a liscene to use it. As gaurdian of the language, I must see to it that it is not abused."
Nothing is tamperproof except a stand alone machine, but then you can't verify keys. Did you really sign, or did your "tamper proof" thingy do it? Did anyone, or have you fooled the notary?
Where is the record of the event? Is your private key unique like a real signature, or do you have many?
Why would you want to replace a standard document that can be seen, handled and read without the aid of an expensive machine? Standard contracts are unambiguous, routine and far less prone to deletion.
In law, a signature serves to indicate agreement to, or at least acknowledgment of, the document signed. When a judge sees a paper
document signed by Alice, he knows that Alice held the document in her hands, and has reason to believe that Alice read and agreed
to the words on the document. The signature provides evidence of Alice's intentions. (This is a simplification. With a few exceptions,
you can't take a signed document into court and argue that Alice signed it. You have to get Alice to testify that she signed it, or bring
handwriting experts in and then it's your word against hers. That's why notarized signatures are used in many circumstances.)
When the same judge sees a digital signature, he doesn't know anything about Alice's intentions. He doesn't know if Alice agreed to
the document, or even if she ever saw it.
The problem is that while a digital signature authenticates the document up to the point of the signing computer, it doesn't authenticate
the link between that computer and Alice. This is a subtle point. For years, I would explain the mathematics of digital signatures with
sentences like: "The signer computes a digital signature of message m by computing m^e mod n." This is complete nonsense. I have
digitally signed thousands of electronic documents, and I have never computed m^e mod n in my entire life. My computer makes that
calculation. I am not signing anything; my computer is.
and he's right.
It's about shortcomings in technology and infrarsturcture. Regular signatures can be witnessed by disinterested, registered third parties as well as the parties to an agreement and stored for life. Digital information has yet to be stored longer than 60 years and no computer connected to the world at large can be trusted, yet.
You missed it. Bruce's point was that there is no way to independently verify a digital signature. A notary can see you stamp your thumb, drool or what ever else. A disinterested, registered, third party has no way to know if you or some one else sent them a document with your digital signature. The process itself can not be withnessed.
Do you have any idea how recent the idea that sex can kill you really is?
It's about as old as STD's and single motherhood. Before penicilin STD's would not only remove you from the gene pool, they could also kill you. All sorts of goodies have been around for ever. It should not be hard to dig up specific diseases and cases in literature, but I'm too lazy. Before cheap contraceptives (made possible by modern polymers about 100 years ago) only women who did not mind bearing children would consent to sex. You might imagine the shame of single motherhood in a society in which starvation and death by childbirth and dissease were common.
Promiscuity in western societies has always been looked down on. Hesiod (Greek, 600BC or so) warns men to master their wives so as not to provide their neighbor's amusement. Tacitus (Roman 125 AD) warns us about rascals who seek to seduce rich women for power and says, "A woman who has surrendered her virtue will commit any crime." My favorite quote on the mater from his is "Outrage is the senualist's ultimate pleasure." Childlessness, mistresses and all the rest of that kind of common, irresponsible foolishness that each new generation discovers and terms "modern", have been refuted and derided in all cultures capable of reason and writing.
The view of sex as an act without consequences and as some kind of right is modern. Don't try to project it on others. It's abhorent to all but careless young men and misogynists.
Look for them at University and Government dumpsters and surplus sales. In my state, the keyboard goes with the computer as a system to the graveyard or trash when shiny new things arive. Oh the cries of anguish that you can hear when the plastic things come in. Most don't have the time to go get them back and some are discouraged from "seperating computer components" on their new systems and can't use the old ones even if they could get them.
This message typed on one hardly used 1995 Model M (82G2383) rescued from the trash at a research center, but I could have used the 1984 model M (part 1391401) just as well. They really don't die.
Stupid kid must think it's obsolete because it's not USB. Anyone who has ever used one of these boards never wants to go back.
But like most, it's false. 58% of Debian users not being interested in any other than pure Debian is very different from 58% of Britany Spears fans not being interested in any other music.
I'd be disturbed, and your overall optimism would be false, if the statistics were not so poor. Slaving away in an MS only shop, I'd be jumping for joy if any Free distro made it in, backed and supported by people with a clue. (It would be especially gratifying if those folks were contributing to the FSF codebase, though especially bitter if they started to close things off.) Who would not be happy about something like this? About 213 people, it seems, who answered some very leading questions:
Would you use a commercial variant of Debian GNU/Linux?
No, because it against my ideals.
No, because I support Debian only.
Yes, because it has better features.
Yes, but only a few apt-gettable packages.
I don't care.
Note the very negative first statement. You might as well have asked these 377 people if they would wear pant XYZ, and put as the first response, "No because they cause infertility." (cool, my own analogy) Note also the very small sample size. This can not represent a large portion of the Debian user community, can it? As it is, I don't think this poll reflects the willingness of the Debian community to adopt commercial Debian, and how big that base can become because of it.
Your company pay idea is right in line. It's not just individual systems that you should be thinking about for a comercial distro. A well organized company could make a killing off consulting services like this, without ever making a single non free application. Would'nt that just represent an enlargement of the developer base, funded by consulting fees? As an individual, I'm not willing to spend cash on Free software, just the media thanks. A good book, even donations to FSF are a different matter. So's company money. I would not hesitate to recomend the deployment of a comerical variant where I work, so long as it can be backed by training, service duplication or betterment and complete data recovery. Train the administrators, have packages set up to migrate servers and desktops and get it all done in a week. There's more than one company with MS money flowing down the drain that would jump at that.
Yeah, its made by Microsoft, but they have a history of making
excellent input devices. The controller puts a lot of buttons on the mouse,
and I gotta say I'm pretty curious. Wonder how long before we have x11 drivers...
I simply ask for a 3 button MS mouse. Do they make one? I don't like my 3 button mouse, cheap non MS, that does not work.
Consider the number of hours a day smokers spend outside on smoke
breaks - surely a parent could justify that much time on "child breaks".) Plus you'd be better able to keep an eye on quality.
Now that's responsible parenting. Your child is just as important as smokes, cool. Just think of the continuity this would provide for your child. Though their primary care giver might change out as frequently as other blue colar workers, you will always be there three or four times a day. In the morning, at coffee breaks, at lunch, and in the evening, your 15 minute stop by will provide your child with all the warmth an infant needs from a mother.
Quality control is another good point. You could make sure your baby only drinks your milk, not the wrong bottle filled by someone else. Other details can be monitored as well, like temperature, diaper changes, and the rest. You might even cutomize your baby's crib with pictures and playthings like any other cubicle at your work place. We all know how important such personal touches are.
Who says wood is aesthetically pleasing. I got one really ugly wood, plywood and particle board desk. Sometimes I worry about fire, then I don't. I suppose I would not be too hurt if I had shelled out PHB money on a wood case for my 486, it's been around long enough to enjoy. Nah, I'm glad I saved that money for another ugly box that does stuff.
My house is ugly too. Oh well, it works. One day, I might have money. Hell, if I make enough, I might even be able to buy spiffy looking things, wow. I don't have ugly things because I'm trying to prove I'm a real man, I have them because I'm not a real rich man.
More power to those who make nice things, but I'm afraid I'm not in the market for a long, long time.
The benefits of a client-server architecture became apparent to all in the late 80s, but until the web appeared, writing a
decent client-server application either required an advanced degree on networking and distributed systems, or the
purchase of a closed-platform solution.
Is that why MS ignored the internet until 1995? Give me a break, MS wanted all things to go through individual applications that you'd have to buy piece by piece over and over. Netscape popularized the web. MS suck it's head in the sand.
Make what you will of Mozilla, but keep that Spyglass away from me.
Uh, no Windows does not work. It blows up. It blows up if you leave it on for more than a few days and it's fragile registry is a prime mover on the upgrade treadmill. I know, I use it at home and at work. I've worked in small places and now I work at a big place. Same story in both places, there's just more money to throw at the problems in the big place. The more I learn the less adequate Windows looks. That Linux can contain the mess for any period of time is a huge achievement of stability.
Criticism is only good when it's accurate. You focus on negative things and ignore useful stuff. GNOME is both beautiful and functional, why ignore it to sneer at some minor problems with KDE? Your orignial question was something along the lines of "what's the use of swithching from windows to linux when linux is slower?" I told you a few good reasons. What's the use of asking questions when you don't want an answer?
Huh? I'm not sure why a user would think a secret hardware API is easy. I'd rather attribute the availability of drivers to the power of that little windows certified flag on the box. "Pay us, do what we want, and you can display that symbol and people will buy your hardware," it says to me. That power is fading fast. Were you implying that most hardware manufacturers only felt comfortable with a binary only distrobution for their drivers?
Preinstalled is a great part of it, until it blows up and the poor user has to do it again. Indeed, installation is what our poster is complaining about and what I tried to offer help with. Why his post has hit a stellar +5 rating, I just don't understand, but hope he gets his help.
In any case, you should not downplay the seven years that people have had to familirize themselves with the way M$ does things. Hell, knowing how to type made learning the first version of Word Perfect easy for me because they kept all the typo terms. I've met people who thought it was difficult and loved the early versions of MS Word, which I hate. It's all what you are used to. Think about it, there's not been much of a change since Windows 93 (as my wife likes to call win 3.1).
Really! If you can, find help for that install. Most people understand that it's not easy to install for the first time, because they did it. Talk to someone in your local Linux Users Group (LUG). Drag your box and an extra hard disk to an install fest. If you seek, you will find.
Don't think this is a linux problem and don't give up. Windows only seems easy because it is familiar. I know that I needed help figuring all of the usefull things like shortcuts for Windows, which were not documented with all of the manuals that came with my first GUI box. Linux documentation, by compairison rocks. Get help with your install, learn "man command" buy a book and enjoy. Once you get over the hump, you'll find that many things are much easier to do and you will wonder how you ever got along with Windows.
If you really can't find any help, try the red hat 6.0 that came with Linux Unleashed. It works, unlike the 6.1 and 6.2 installs that I've tried and it's not that hard. Your miliage may vary I got CDs from LinuxCentral.com as soon as I read about the releases on Slashdot, so 6.2 might work great now. If you can install a windows box, you can make this one work. As a bonus, you get a helpfull book that works anywhere there is enough light to read. As pointed out above, Mandrake 7.1 works well too and it is easier, but I can not vouch personally for the documentation. It looked OK.
Have you ever heard of "cigarrete violence" or "alcohol violence", recently in the United States?
Why, yes I have. The corner liquor store was robbed the other week, probably to get money to buy drugs, though I'm sure the creep enjoys a smoke and a drink as well.
The New York Times article won't have been indexed by Google, because of the NYT's registration
requirement.
The article that I was looking for is kind of beside the point. In fact, a search of the New York Post turned up nothing at the time so the reference may have been mistaken all together. What was interesting to me was the prominance of the same junk article. It seems obvious that someone who likes Gore figured out how to manipulate the search engine.
Have a look for yourself here. This search brings up 1700 or so documents the first 10 are all this junk article with different names on differnt boxes. There is one different article in the second 10, and a few more in the next. Who could argue that this is not a spam that has worked very well?
Pure FUD. Neither of your examples shows the slightest loss of freedom. In fact, in both of your examples people were exercising their freedom to use and modify other people's code. Why they would not want to exercise their freedom to share that code is beyond me, but only your second example distributor would be bothered.
In the first case, the proffesor only distributed the product of the programs she was using. Though I would hope that she would share her little modifications with her peers, no one would force her. People would only force her to open her code if she tried to distribute a modified version of OTHER PEOPLE'S work as her own. As a proffesor she would know that this is called plagerism! It's an attempt to garner credit for other people's work. In this case it could even harm the original work's reputation because the modifications were not visible and the modified version could be mistaken as the orignial version she enjoyed using so much.
The same problems exist in your second multivariant example. Give it up! It's easy to tell the difference between using a tool to create something and modifying something else. The details of your convelouted cases are hardly worth getting into.
The fact of the matter is that the GPL is much closer to traditional views of intelectual property than modern copyright law especially as applied to software. A quick review of any accademic honor code will confirm this. They all hope and pray that you will make good use of all the information that is out there and site it in publications. Information has always wanted to be free. It is those who would close off those freedoms and keep knowledge to themselves who are strange and perverse. Who, before Gilbert and Sullivan, would think that they owned a song? How strange it was that the Girl Scouts of America should be sued for singing "America the Beautiful" around the campfire! Fine, they won't sing it. The GPL uses the force of law to ensure that code released under it will remain free. So long as the law is consistent, the wishes of RMS will have to be respected and the considerable intelectual capital that has been put into the GNU projects will never be used to limit anyone's freedom to use, modify and share code.
Do as you will with your code and your liscences, the GPL is here to stay and I like it.
Google is still the best, but I'm afraid this scam is working. I've noticed that I've had to dig deeper and deeper to find what I'm looking for, and loads of junk sites rank high.
For intstance The New York Times claimed that the New York Post ran a story called "Liar, Liar" about Al Gore. Looking for Gore and "Liar, Liar" brought up a pile of duplicate pro Gore pages so badly written that they might as well have been porn. It seems obvious that the Gore team knew this trick and that it worked.
Oh well, it's politics who cares right? Wrong. In fields closer to my heart, such as nuclear information, it's really a pain in the neck to find useful stuff. He who shouts loudest is not always best, and is more often just an ass.
Email from within M$ asked questions like, "How will this kill Unix?" Way back in 1995 or so. They really are out to get everyone else and force their crappy code on everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Her prepared statement read, "It's my language, and you only have a liscene to use it. As gaurdian of the language, I must see to it that it is not abused."
Where is the record of the event? Is your private key unique like a real signature, or do you have many?
Why would you want to replace a standard document that can be seen, handled and read without the aid of an expensive machine? Standard contracts are unambiguous, routine and far less prone to deletion.
In law, a signature serves to indicate agreement to, or at least acknowledgment of, the document signed. When a judge sees a paper document signed by Alice, he knows that Alice held the document in her hands, and has reason to believe that Alice read and agreed to the words on the document. The signature provides evidence of Alice's intentions. (This is a simplification. With a few exceptions, you can't take a signed document into court and argue that Alice signed it. You have to get Alice to testify that she signed it, or bring handwriting experts in and then it's your word against hers. That's why notarized signatures are used in many circumstances.)
When the same judge sees a digital signature, he doesn't know anything about Alice's intentions. He doesn't know if Alice agreed to the document, or even if she ever saw it.
The problem is that while a digital signature authenticates the document up to the point of the signing computer, it doesn't authenticate the link between that computer and Alice. This is a subtle point. For years, I would explain the mathematics of digital signatures with sentences like: "The signer computes a digital signature of message m by computing m^e mod n." This is complete nonsense. I have digitally signed thousands of electronic documents, and I have never computed m^e mod n in my entire life. My computer makes that calculation. I am not signing anything; my computer is.
and he's right.
It's about shortcomings in technology and infrarsturcture. Regular signatures can be witnessed by disinterested, registered third parties as well as the parties to an agreement and stored for life. Digital information has yet to be stored longer than 60 years and no computer connected to the world at large can be trusted, yet.
You missed it. Bruce's point was that there is no way to independently verify a digital signature. A notary can see you stamp your thumb, drool or what ever else. A disinterested, registered, third party has no way to know if you or some one else sent them a document with your digital signature. The process itself can not be withnessed.
It's about as old as STD's and single motherhood. Before penicilin STD's would not only remove you from the gene pool, they could also kill you. All sorts of goodies have been around for ever. It should not be hard to dig up specific diseases and cases in literature, but I'm too lazy. Before cheap contraceptives (made possible by modern polymers about 100 years ago) only women who did not mind bearing children would consent to sex. You might imagine the shame of single motherhood in a society in which starvation and death by childbirth and dissease were common.
Promiscuity in western societies has always been looked down on. Hesiod (Greek, 600BC or so) warns men to master their wives so as not to provide their neighbor's amusement. Tacitus (Roman 125 AD) warns us about rascals who seek to seduce rich women for power and says, "A woman who has surrendered her virtue will commit any crime." My favorite quote on the mater from his is "Outrage is the senualist's ultimate pleasure." Childlessness, mistresses and all the rest of that kind of common, irresponsible foolishness that each new generation discovers and terms "modern", have been refuted and derided in all cultures capable of reason and writing.
The view of sex as an act without consequences and as some kind of right is modern. Don't try to project it on others. It's abhorent to all but careless young men and misogynists.
You know, the Microsoft future of computing that never comes.
This message typed on one hardly used 1995 Model M (82G2383) rescued from the trash at a research center, but I could have used the 1984 model M (part 1391401) just as well. They really don't die.
Stupid kid must think it's obsolete because it's not USB. Anyone who has ever used one of these boards never wants to go back.
I'd be disturbed, and your overall optimism would be false, if the statistics were not so poor. Slaving away in an MS only shop, I'd be jumping for joy if any Free distro made it in, backed and supported by people with a clue. (It would be especially gratifying if those folks were contributing to the FSF codebase, though especially bitter if they started to close things off.) Who would not be happy about something like this? About 213 people, it seems, who answered some very leading questions:
Would you use a commercial variant of Debian GNU/Linux?
No, because it against my ideals.
No, because I support Debian only.
Yes, because it has better features.
Yes, but only a few apt-gettable packages.
I don't care.
Note the very negative first statement. You might as well have asked these 377 people if they would wear pant XYZ, and put as the first response, "No because they cause infertility." (cool, my own analogy) Note also the very small sample size. This can not represent a large portion of the Debian user community, can it? As it is, I don't think this poll reflects the willingness of the Debian community to adopt commercial Debian, and how big that base can become because of it.
Your company pay idea is right in line. It's not just individual systems that you should be thinking about for a comercial distro. A well organized company could make a killing off consulting services like this, without ever making a single non free application. Would'nt that just represent an enlargement of the developer base, funded by consulting fees? As an individual, I'm not willing to spend cash on Free software, just the media thanks. A good book, even donations to FSF are a different matter. So's company money. I would not hesitate to recomend the deployment of a comerical variant where I work, so long as it can be backed by training, service duplication or betterment and complete data recovery. Train the administrators, have packages set up to migrate servers and desktops and get it all done in a week. There's more than one company with MS money flowing down the drain that would jump at that.
Yeah, its made by Microsoft, but they have a history of making excellent input devices. The controller puts a lot of buttons on the mouse, and I gotta say I'm pretty curious. Wonder how long before we have x11 drivers...
I simply ask for a 3 button MS mouse. Do they make one? I don't like my 3 button mouse, cheap non MS, that does not work.
Microsoft!Yet I'll tell my boss this, he likes things with exclaimations.
Now that's responsible parenting. Your child is just as important as smokes, cool. Just think of the continuity this would provide for your child. Though their primary care giver might change out as frequently as other blue colar workers, you will always be there three or four times a day. In the morning, at coffee breaks, at lunch, and in the evening, your 15 minute stop by will provide your child with all the warmth an infant needs from a mother.
Quality control is another good point. You could make sure your baby only drinks your milk, not the wrong bottle filled by someone else. Other details can be monitored as well, like temperature, diaper changes, and the rest. You might even cutomize your baby's crib with pictures and playthings like any other cubicle at your work place. We all know how important such personal touches are.
My house is ugly too. Oh well, it works. One day, I might have money. Hell, if I make enough, I might even be able to buy spiffy looking things, wow. I don't have ugly things because I'm trying to prove I'm a real man, I have them because I'm not a real rich man.
More power to those who make nice things, but I'm afraid I'm not in the market for a long, long time.
Who would want a 2x4 case anyway? It would be more like a cigar box.
Is that why MS ignored the internet until 1995? Give me a break, MS wanted all things to go through individual applications that you'd have to buy piece by piece over and over. Netscape popularized the web. MS suck it's head in the sand.
Make what you will of Mozilla, but keep that Spyglass away from me.
SPU - secondary or slave processing unit
Someone must have thought of this by now.
after all, trig functions are simply complex exponentials.
Criticism is only good when it's accurate. You focus on negative things and ignore useful stuff. GNOME is both beautiful and functional, why ignore it to sneer at some minor problems with KDE? Your orignial question was something along the lines of "what's the use of swithching from windows to linux when linux is slower?" I told you a few good reasons. What's the use of asking questions when you don't want an answer?
Preinstalled is a great part of it, until it blows up and the poor user has to do it again. Indeed, installation is what our poster is complaining about and what I tried to offer help with. Why his post has hit a stellar +5 rating, I just don't understand, but hope he gets his help.
In any case, you should not downplay the seven years that people have had to familirize themselves with the way M$ does things. Hell, knowing how to type made learning the first version of Word Perfect easy for me because they kept all the typo terms. I've met people who thought it was difficult and loved the early versions of MS Word, which I hate. It's all what you are used to. Think about it, there's not been much of a change since Windows 93 (as my wife likes to call win 3.1).
Don't think this is a linux problem and don't give up. Windows only seems easy because it is familiar. I know that I needed help figuring all of the usefull things like shortcuts for Windows, which were not documented with all of the manuals that came with my first GUI box. Linux documentation, by compairison rocks. Get help with your install, learn "man command" buy a book and enjoy. Once you get over the hump, you'll find that many things are much easier to do and you will wonder how you ever got along with Windows.
If you really can't find any help, try the red hat 6.0 that came with Linux Unleashed. It works, unlike the 6.1 and 6.2 installs that I've tried and it's not that hard. Your miliage may vary I got CDs from LinuxCentral.com as soon as I read about the releases on Slashdot, so 6.2 might work great now. If you can install a windows box, you can make this one work. As a bonus, you get a helpfull book that works anywhere there is enough light to read. As pointed out above, Mandrake 7.1 works well too and it is easier, but I can not vouch personally for the documentation. It looked OK.
Why, yes I have. The corner liquor store was robbed the other week, probably to get money to buy drugs, though I'm sure the creep enjoys a smoke and a drink as well.
The article that I was looking for is kind of beside the point. In fact, a search of the New York Post turned up nothing at the time so the reference may have been mistaken all together. What was interesting to me was the prominance of the same junk article. It seems obvious that someone who likes Gore figured out how to manipulate the search engine.
Have a look for yourself here. This search brings up 1700 or so documents the first 10 are all this junk article with different names on differnt boxes. There is one different article in the second 10, and a few more in the next. Who could argue that this is not a spam that has worked very well?
In the first case, the proffesor only distributed the product of the programs she was using. Though I would hope that she would share her little modifications with her peers, no one would force her. People would only force her to open her code if she tried to distribute a modified version of OTHER PEOPLE'S work as her own. As a proffesor she would know that this is called plagerism! It's an attempt to garner credit for other people's work. In this case it could even harm the original work's reputation because the modifications were not visible and the modified version could be mistaken as the orignial version she enjoyed using so much.
The same problems exist in your second multivariant example. Give it up! It's easy to tell the difference between using a tool to create something and modifying something else. The details of your convelouted cases are hardly worth getting into.
The fact of the matter is that the GPL is much closer to traditional views of intelectual property than modern copyright law especially as applied to software. A quick review of any accademic honor code will confirm this. They all hope and pray that you will make good use of all the information that is out there and site it in publications. Information has always wanted to be free. It is those who would close off those freedoms and keep knowledge to themselves who are strange and perverse. Who, before Gilbert and Sullivan, would think that they owned a song? How strange it was that the Girl Scouts of America should be sued for singing "America the Beautiful" around the campfire! Fine, they won't sing it. The GPL uses the force of law to ensure that code released under it will remain free. So long as the law is consistent, the wishes of RMS will have to be respected and the considerable intelectual capital that has been put into the GNU projects will never be used to limit anyone's freedom to use, modify and share code.
Do as you will with your code and your liscences, the GPL is here to stay and I like it.
For intstance The New York Times claimed that the New York Post ran a story called "Liar, Liar" about Al Gore. Looking for Gore and "Liar, Liar" brought up a pile of duplicate pro Gore pages so badly written that they might as well have been porn. It seems obvious that the Gore team knew this trick and that it worked.
Oh well, it's politics who cares right? Wrong. In fields closer to my heart, such as nuclear information, it's really a pain in the neck to find useful stuff. He who shouts loudest is not always best, and is more often just an ass.
Email from within M$ asked questions like, "How will this kill Unix?" Way back in 1995 or so. They really are out to get everyone else and force their crappy code on everyone.
What if M$ decides to copy a chunk of GPL'd code and claim it was part of the super secret stolen source? Would anyone believe such a forgery?