... if you read the first paragraph, it does say that Columbia "streaked toward" a landing, not that it had actually landed safely, and all of the quotes were very likely taken before the (presumed) safe landing.
I would say though that the person in charge of the story database should be beaten severely -- I printed a copy of this story out at 11:30 p.m. PST, about 14 hours after the Columbia broke up....
I used to work (until quite recently) in the Entertainment section of a Kmart. When they released the Lord Of The Rings DVD (2 disc), people bought it in droves, and as I'm sure you'd guess, it was a best seller for months. Then once all the fuss has died down, they re release it in a special four disc edition, the extra discs containing a few average documentaries on the making of LOTR plus an extra half an hour of unseen footage. Of course, it sold like crazy again.
And anybody who was paying attention at the time would know that they announced the extended edition of the DVD at the same time as the original one.
Everyone thought the antitrust trial was where MS was going to meet up with its karma, too. Look where that got us -- a watered-down sweetheart "settlement" which does nothing to address the real problems with MS, let alone the issues presented at the antitrust trial.
If this case turns into a serious legal threat, I wonder how many bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonations and contributions MS will have to make in order to get another toothless "settlement".
Quick! Call John Ashcroft! These pirates want to take copyrighted "news stories" and distribute them freely!
Nah, if you really want to shut it down, point out to the Oval Office that this network could be used during Desert Storm II: The Final Battle (coming Spring 2003, buy your tickets) to provide uncensored reports of the results of U.S. military operations. You'll have the FBI kicking this guy's door in within an hour.
...I mean, seriously. If a website cares more for the (dubious amount of) money that it makes off of serving popup ads to me than it does with providing me useful content to make me come to their site in the first place, then I'm going to have to keep track of which sites are that hostile to users, and make sure that others know as well.
I would point out to all the trolls who can't wait to call me a thief for doing so that I do not block banner ads (though I do not have Flash installed); only the ads that interfere with my surfing habits are the ones that have to go.
I don't care what the marketing weasels at these companies think, their ads are not so fucking important that they have the God-given right to shove it into my face and make me chase some stupid window around to get rid of it. I won't buy something from someone who runs up and screams "DRINK PEPSI!" into my face; I don't see pop-ups as being much different.
Well. If you don't defend your copyright. You loose it. If someone gets to reverse engineer your code and you let them. Everyone can.
I never thought I'd be the one to complain about "crack-smoking moderators" but the above statement is completely untrue.
It is true that you have to vigorously defend your trademark lest it fall into common usage (see "Q-Tip" vs. "cotton swab", "Xerox" vs. "photocopy", et al.) but the same does not apply to copyrights. (To be fair,
And reverse-engineering has nothing to do with copyrights, that's a patent issue. Barring any patent infringements, I am perfectly within my rights to create source code that produces an identical effect or product as yours, so long as I don't actually use any of your code in my proejct.
You can attempt to distribute copyright source code under a license that says "you shalll not attempt to reverse-engineer this software" but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax...
Actually, when I first saw Treasure Planet I immediately thought of The Swords of the Swashbucklers, a graphic novel/comic series for Marvel Comics back in the mid-1980's.
Of course, let's not forget that this a science-fantasy adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel...
...about not having run the client for the past few yeras. I used to have a copy of the SETI@Home client running on every machine I had legitimate access to, but after a few reinstalls of Windows here and there, I've never bothered to reiinstall it.
I did take part in the original RC-5 challenge, and put some work into the RC-64 (forgive me if the names aren't accurate, it's been a while) but I just could never get behind any of the new projects. The RC5 project had a definite timeline to it; it was kinda like playing the lottery -- sure, I didn't find the winning key, but I could have.
And now to have an open admission of cheating on the SETI project -- even if it's not to the degree the article suggests -- just leads me to believe that there are people who care more about the imaginary "score" than the goals of the project, so much so that they're willing to potentially corrupt the findings to "win".
And if the article is correct in saying that the project leaders at SETI don't care about the cheating, then I think it's especially tragic. I won't be donating any spare CPU cycles I have to this project, and I'll certainly be thinking twice about other similar projects.
I'm sure my computer will be just as happy drawing little hypecubes as crunching data on a cure for cancer or figuring out Saddam Hussein's email password (whoops, that's been done already)...
Great idea! Lets hold up pogress on 99% of Debian installs to insure compatibility with platforms that make up a a ridiculously low amount of the installed base.
Why not? Debian is a "by the users, for the users" kind of noncommercial distribution. Compatibility with minority architectures may not be important to you, but it is a stated goal of Debian, and it is something that the developers and packagers wrangle with on a regular basis.
Branden Robinson, the XFree86 maintainer for Debian, has XFree86 running on more architectures than the XFree people themselves officially support -- his packages are the "de facto portabiltiy standard" for XFree86.
If you think progress is being "held up", then contribute to development on the arches you want supported, and let the developers who want to work on the minority platforms do so. Because they're not going away any time soon.
1) Make a log of all the prompts that WOULD have been shown so that those who want to can go back and see what else they might have customized.
That might be a good amendment to the Debian packaging policy: we could have a debconf-options file included in the package's documentation. Also, there's always the source code for the package...
3) Give people the option of seeing more or less prompts. Some people may want to see them all. Others may want to only see prompts for things that could make their computer stop working if configured wrong. Others may want more than that, but not every grizzly little detail about configuration files they've never looked at and never will look at.
debconf does that. When I installed woody, it asked me what priority level I wanted to see configuration messages for:
low: set a few reasonable defaults, prompts for everything else
medium: the recommended threshold, ignores most braindead config options
high: makes a few more assumptions about various config options, prompts for the rest
critical: makes you pick stuff that HAS to be configured in order to make the package run, sets reasonable defaults for everything else.
If you're seeing too many debconf prompts, do dpkg-reconfigure debconf and select a higher threshold priority. Also, dpkg-reconfigure [packagename] should allow you to re-select all of your options for a given package.
I'd love to see debconf used more, personally; let's get all of the configuration handled through one interface with multiple frontends -- it even has a GNOME interface (so far as I know, no one's made a QT/KDE-based one yet).
>...and the kernel development team could easily change which product they use as a response.
>Works both ways. Choice you see.
The point RMS is trying to make in this case is, they wouldn't be forced into this choice if they'd used a Free tool in the first place.
RMS doesn't like the fact that a Free software project uses a non-Free software tool in its development. Linus and the kernel maintainers said "hey, we'll use what we feel works best".
Now BitMover has changed their free license, meaning that kernel developers that were using BitKeeper under a free license just fine now are faced with a choice they'd not have to make otherwise:
1) Do not contribute code to any product that BitMover feels is a "reasonable" competitor for BitKeeper (and stop working for an employer who does) 2) Pay for a commercial license (which, according to one source is almost $6000, plus $1200/year; a bit out of the range of most non-sponsored programmers) 3) Stop using BitKeeper
And, if they do shell out for a commercial license, there's nothing to say that BitMover won't change that license down the road, which puts you back into the same boat (only now they have your money).
You misunderstand the parent's point. Why don't we (and RMS) try to objectively evaluate which tool and development model is better for a given project,
Licensing must be considered in the objective evaluation of a product's fitness for a task; the software's no good to me if I have to violate the terms of its use to do what I want.
If I can't afford to pay for an "unrestricted" license (and it sounds like few private individuals can), and if I am in a situation where I directly or indirectly contribute to the development of a competing product, I cannot use BitKeeper.
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
Just because you don't choose to exercise a freedom doesn't mean that you're not less free if that freedom is taken away. Even if a user has never read a line of code in his life, the fact that the source code to Word is there gives him, or someone who acts on his behalf, the ability to better understand the product, correct its faults, or make improvements.
On the contrary, proprietary software must respect the needs of its users, otherwise they won't buy it. There are no such incentives for free software, which doesn't have to respect the needs of anyone but its author.
Actually, in this case I (and probably RMS) see it as the exact opposite: since vendors for Free software cannot restrict its users with one-sided "contracts" that restrict what they can do with a product or where they can go for support, they have to respect their users' wishes if they want that users' business. If I'm not happy with the way Red Hat does their Linux distro, I'm free to switch to a different vendor (or even start my own, using the parts of Red Hat Linux that I like).
Compare this to Microsoft, who tries its best to lock its developers & users into a single source for all of their software needs regardless of the quality of the products it offers (even if it has to break the law to do so). This is what makes Microsoft "the enemy" to so many [Linux|Open Source|Free Software] enthusiasts: it's the purest example of all of the evils of non-Free software.
I download the tarball and MD5s. Then I want to verify the signature. For that I need a public key or something like that of the developer that signed the tarball.Since I never met him, I must resort to download also that from an internet place, probably the same from which I downloaded the source.
There's where your error in understanding occurs. Public keys should never be received through the same channel as the files to be verified. If you are, then something is very wrong.
Many people who use them make them available through an email autoresponder, on a separate website, or through a public keyserver. Some distros ship them on their CDs.
I'll agree that there's still a certain amount of paranoia involved ("How do we know the box Red Hat generates its master CD image from wasn't cracked?") but at some point you have to trust the sender or the delivery machanism. If not, you might as well yank the net connection from your computer...
Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.
So BitMover gets a say in what Red Hat gets to ship in their distribution now? That's good to hear...
[McVoy is] a reasonable guy, and wants to do the right thing,
Bullshit. In one of the linked articles, Larry McVoy specifically tells Ben Collins that "you work on Subversion, which places you in violation of our license, and you wouldn't give us a netwinder to test on when I asked for one because you didn't like our license, so you specifically are in violation."
The fact that McVoy dredged up an incident that is totally irrelevant to Collins' work on Subversion and uses it to justify revoking Collins' gratis license for BitKeeper tells me just how "reasonable" McVoy is (and BitMover is by extension, if McVoy decides who is in compliance with their license).
This is something that seems to often get forgotten within the Linux world. When people complain that something hasn't worked, they tend to get a response like this:
It's easy to fix. All you need to do is edit...
Lindows isn't perfect in this regard, either. From the article:
No built-in firewall. Most distros these days are shipping with software firewalls. We couldn't find anything comparable to SuSE's firewall in Lindows. Given how easy it is to install and use Lindows, it should be equally easy to configure and use a firewall. For newbies without a hardware firewall, it's a good idea to have some kind of protection.
Editor's Note: After posting this story, Lindows.com contacted us and said that yes, in fact, there is a firewall in Lindows, and it is turned on by default. [emphasis mine] According to Jeremy Shaw: "The configuration can be modified by editing etc/init.d/lindows_fw."
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes [...] is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf.
My God, you're right! How dare Red Hat take Free/open-source code and use it the way the licenses mean for it to be used?
If KDE developers are going to whine about Red Hat modifying code that the KDE developers damn well gave them the right to modify, then they're definitely in the wrong business.
Forking code is prefectly natural in the open-source world. There are a few forks of the Linux kernel (probably more in various in-house projects around the world), you have GNU emacs and XEmacs, etc., etc. Generally, this is a good thing, as new ideas get tested out without needing the "blessing" of the official code tree maintainer. (As I recall, the original USB support started off as a forked project without Linus' blessing, until something usable was available.)
All Red Hat has done is forked the KDE and GNOME desktops to create a unified look for both of them. Yes, Red Hat will have to redo all of their changes when KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.0.2 come out. That's their perogative, and I'm pretty sure they realized what they were doing when they made the decision.
It boils down to three options: 1) Learn to use Red Hat's desktop environment 2) Replace Red Hat's with another; it probably wouldn't take long for some enterprising people to create a set of RPMs from the "official" KDE/GNOME releases 3) Start using a different distribution; maybe rolling your own is the best answer if you want things exactly your way?
You need look no farther then the recent CARP ruling on Internet radio broadcasting royalties -- a quick summary can be found here -- to see what "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" will do to freedom of choice: kill off all of the small players, making sure the Old Boy's Club has free reign.
... if you read the first paragraph, it does say that Columbia "streaked toward" a landing, not that it had actually landed safely, and all of the quotes were very likely taken before the (presumed) safe landing.
I would say though that the person in charge of the story database should be beaten severely -- I printed a copy of this story out at 11:30 p.m. PST, about 14 hours after the Columbia broke up....
Jay (=
I used to work (until quite recently) in the Entertainment section of a Kmart. When they released the Lord Of The Rings DVD (2 disc), people bought it in droves, and as I'm sure you'd guess, it was a best seller for months. Then once all the fuss has died down, they re release it in a special four disc edition, the extra discs containing a few average documentaries on the making of LOTR plus an extra half an hour of unseen footage. Of course, it sold like crazy again.
And anybody who was paying attention at the time would know that they announced the extended edition of the DVD at the same time as the original one.
Jay (=
Explains why they dislike the GPL. It puts a damper on their research and innovation.
No, it puts a damper on their ability to exploit the freely-offered code and sell it back to people.
You can innovate on GPL'ed code, you just can't keep your innovations to yourself.
Jay (=
I guess finally history is catching up to MS.
Everyone thought the antitrust trial was where MS was going to meet up with its karma, too. Look where that got us -- a watered-down sweetheart "settlement" which does nothing to address the real problems with MS, let alone the issues presented at the antitrust trial.
If this case turns into a serious legal threat, I wonder how many bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonations and contributions MS will have to make in order to get another toothless "settlement".
Jay (=
Quick! Call John Ashcroft! These pirates want to take copyrighted "news stories" and distribute them freely!
Nah, if you really want to shut it down, point out to the Oval Office that this network could be used during Desert Storm II: The Final Battle (coming Spring 2003, buy your tickets) to provide uncensored reports of the results of U.S. military operations. You'll have the FBI kicking this guy's door in within an hour.
Jay (=
...I mean, seriously. If a website cares more for the (dubious amount of) money that it makes off of serving popup ads to me than it does with providing me useful content to make me come to their site in the first place, then I'm going to have to keep track of which sites are that hostile to users, and make sure that others know as well.
I would point out to all the trolls who can't wait to call me a thief for doing so that I do not block banner ads (though I do not have Flash installed); only the ads that interfere with my surfing habits are the ones that have to go.
I don't care what the marketing weasels at these companies think, their ads are not so fucking important that they have the God-given right to shove it into my face and make me chase some stupid window around to get rid of it. I won't buy something from someone who runs up and screams "DRINK PEPSI!" into my face; I don't see pop-ups as being much different.
Jay (=
This is totally off-topic, but just FYI, Leia is talking to Grand Moff Tarkin, not Darth Vader.
Interestingly enough, if you want A New Hope over again, Darth Vader seems more like a bullyboy for Tarkin than the #2 guy in the Empire...
Jay
Well. If you don't defend your copyright. You loose it. If someone gets to reverse engineer your code and you let them. Everyone can.
I never thought I'd be the one to complain about "crack-smoking moderators" but the above statement is completely untrue.
It is true that you have to vigorously defend your trademark lest it fall into common usage (see "Q-Tip" vs. "cotton swab", "Xerox" vs. "photocopy", et al.) but the same does not apply to copyrights. (To be fair,
And reverse-engineering has nothing to do with copyrights, that's a patent issue. Barring any patent infringements, I am perfectly within my rights to create source code that produces an identical effect or product as yours, so long as I don't actually use any of your code in my proejct.
You can attempt to distribute copyright source code under a license that says "you shalll not attempt to reverse-engineer this software" but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax...
Jay (=
Actually, when I first saw Treasure Planet I immediately thought of The Swords of the Swashbucklers, a graphic novel/comic series for Marvel Comics back in the mid-1980's.
Of course, let's not forget that this a science-fantasy adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel...
Jay (=
Well, for one, there's this nifty Search pane in my web browser of choice that I can just flip open.
Then, for those using that other web browser, you can add a toolbar to your browser window.
If you're running your own site, you can roll your own Google interface.
I'll be checking out the new AltaVista for a while, but I can't see anyone displacing Google as my search engine of choice for a while...
Jay (=
...about not having run the client for the past few yeras. I used to have a copy of the SETI@Home client running on every machine I had legitimate access to, but after a few reinstalls of Windows here and there, I've never bothered to reiinstall it.
I did take part in the original RC-5 challenge, and put some work into the RC-64 (forgive me if the names aren't accurate, it's been a while) but I just could never get behind any of the new projects. The RC5 project had a definite timeline to it; it was kinda like playing the lottery -- sure, I didn't find the winning key, but I could have.
And now to have an open admission of cheating on the SETI project -- even if it's not to the degree the article suggests -- just leads me to believe that there are people who care more about the imaginary "score" than the goals of the project, so much so that they're willing to potentially corrupt the findings to "win".
And if the article is correct in saying that the project leaders at SETI don't care about the cheating, then I think it's especially tragic. I won't be donating any spare CPU cycles I have to this project, and I'll certainly be thinking twice about other similar projects.
I'm sure my computer will be just as happy drawing little hypecubes as crunching data on a cure for cancer or figuring out Saddam Hussein's email password (whoops, that's been done already)...
Jay (=
Yes, Debian is volunteer driven, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be managed much better.
So when are you volunteering?
Jay (=
Great idea! Lets hold up pogress on 99% of Debian installs to insure compatibility with platforms that make up a a ridiculously low amount of the installed base.
Why not? Debian is a "by the users, for the users" kind of noncommercial distribution. Compatibility with minority architectures may not be important to you, but it is a stated goal of Debian, and it is something that the developers and packagers wrangle with on a regular basis.
Branden Robinson, the XFree86 maintainer for Debian, has XFree86 running on more architectures than the XFree people themselves officially support -- his packages are the "de facto portabiltiy standard" for XFree86.
If you think progress is being "held up", then contribute to development on the arches you want supported, and let the developers who want to work on the minority platforms do so. Because they're not going away any time soon.
Jay (=
That might be a good amendment to the Debian packaging policy: we could have a debconf-options file included in the package's documentation. Also, there's always the source code for the package...
3) Give people the option of seeing more or less prompts. Some people may want to see them all. Others may want to only see prompts for things that could make their computer stop working if configured wrong. Others may want more than that, but not every grizzly little detail about configuration files they've never looked at and never will look at.
debconf does that. When I installed woody, it asked me what priority level I wanted to see configuration messages for:
If you're seeing too many debconf prompts, do dpkg-reconfigure debconf and select a higher threshold priority. Also, dpkg-reconfigure [packagename] should allow you to re-select all of your options for a given package.
I'd love to see debconf used more, personally; let's get all of the configuration handled through one interface with multiple frontends -- it even has a GNOME interface (so far as I know, no one's made a QT/KDE-based one yet).
Jay (=
>>Bitkeeper could easily change their license
>...and the kernel development team could easily change which product they use as a response.
>Works both ways. Choice you see.
The point RMS is trying to make in this case is, they wouldn't be forced into this choice if they'd used a Free tool in the first place.
RMS doesn't like the fact that a Free software project uses a non-Free software tool in its development. Linus and the kernel maintainers said "hey, we'll use what we feel works best".
Now BitMover has changed their free license, meaning that kernel developers that were using BitKeeper under a free license just fine now are faced with a choice they'd not have to make otherwise:
1) Do not contribute code to any product that BitMover feels is a "reasonable" competitor for BitKeeper (and stop working for an employer who does)
2) Pay for a commercial license (which, according to one source is almost $6000, plus $1200/year; a bit out of the range of most non-sponsored programmers)
3) Stop using BitKeeper
And, if they do shell out for a commercial license, there's nothing to say that BitMover won't change that license down the road, which puts you back into the same boat (only now they have your money).
Jay (=
You misunderstand the parent's point. Why don't we (and RMS) try to objectively evaluate which tool and development model is better for a given project,
Licensing must be considered in the objective evaluation of a product's fitness for a task; the software's no good to me if I have to violate the terms of its use to do what I want.
If I can't afford to pay for an "unrestricted" license (and it sounds like few private individuals can), and if I am in a situation where I directly or indirectly contribute to the development of a competing product, I cannot use BitKeeper.
Jay (=
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
Just because you don't choose to exercise a freedom doesn't mean that you're not less free if that freedom is taken away. Even if a user has never read a line of code in his life, the fact that the source code to Word is there gives him, or someone who acts on his behalf, the ability to better understand the product, correct its faults, or make improvements.
On the contrary, proprietary software must respect the needs of its users, otherwise they won't buy it. There are no such incentives for free software, which doesn't have to respect the needs of anyone but its author.
Actually, in this case I (and probably RMS) see it as the exact opposite: since vendors for Free software cannot restrict its users with one-sided "contracts" that restrict what they can do with a product or where they can go for support, they have to respect their users' wishes if they want that users' business. If I'm not happy with the way Red Hat does their Linux distro, I'm free to switch to a different vendor (or even start my own, using the parts of Red Hat Linux that I like).
Compare this to Microsoft, who tries its best to lock its developers & users into a single source for all of their software needs regardless of the quality of the products it offers (even if it has to break the law to do so). This is what makes Microsoft "the enemy" to so many [Linux|Open Source|Free Software] enthusiasts: it's the purest example of all of the evils of non-Free software.
Jay (=
I download the tarball and MD5s. Then I want to verify the signature. For that I need a public key or something like that of the developer that signed the tarball.Since I never met him, I must resort to download also that from an internet place, probably the same from which I downloaded the source.
There's where your error in understanding occurs. Public keys should never be received through the same channel as the files to be verified. If you are, then something is very wrong.
Many people who use them make them available through an email autoresponder, on a separate website, or through a public keyserver. Some distros ship them on their CDs.
I'll agree that there's still a certain amount of paranoia involved ("How do we know the box Red Hat generates its master CD image from wasn't cracked?") but at some point you have to trust the sender or the delivery machanism. If not, you might as well yank the net connection from your computer...
Jay (=
WOuld it be Orson Welles, by anyc hance?
Jay (=
Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.
So BitMover gets a say in what Red Hat gets to ship in their distribution now? That's good to hear...
[McVoy is] a reasonable guy, and wants to do the right thing,
Bullshit. In one of the linked articles, Larry McVoy specifically tells Ben Collins that "you work on Subversion, which places you in violation of our license, and you wouldn't give us a netwinder to test on when I asked for one because you didn't like our license, so you specifically are in violation."
The fact that McVoy dredged up an incident that is totally irrelevant to Collins' work on Subversion and uses it to justify revoking Collins' gratis license for BitKeeper tells me just how "reasonable" McVoy is (and BitMover is by extension, if McVoy decides who is in compliance with their license).
Jay (=
It's easy to fix. All you need to do is edit...
Lindows isn't perfect in this regard, either. From the article:
McFarlane is one of the big guys,
He wasn't at the time he hired Gaiman to write SPAWN #9 for him...
Jay (=
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes [...] is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf.
My God, you're right! How dare Red Hat take Free/open-source code and use it the way the licenses mean for it to be used?
If KDE developers are going to whine about Red Hat modifying code that the KDE developers damn well gave them the right to modify, then they're definitely in the wrong business.
Forking code is prefectly natural in the open-source world. There are a few forks of the Linux kernel (probably more in various in-house projects around the world), you have GNU emacs and XEmacs, etc., etc. Generally, this is a good thing, as new ideas get tested out without needing the "blessing" of the official code tree maintainer. (As I recall, the original USB support started off as a forked project without Linus' blessing, until something usable was available.)
All Red Hat has done is forked the KDE and GNOME desktops to create a unified look for both of them. Yes, Red Hat will have to redo all of their changes when KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.0.2 come out. That's their perogative, and I'm pretty sure they realized what they were doing when they made the decision.
It boils down to three options:
1) Learn to use Red Hat's desktop environment
2) Replace Red Hat's with another; it probably wouldn't take long for some enterprising people to create a set of RPMs from the "official" KDE/GNOME releases
3) Start using a different distribution; maybe rolling your own is the best answer if you want things exactly your way?
Jay (=
Everybody knows real geeks use Blackbox, joe, Objective-C, Amaya, and Eiffel on a Debian GNU/Hurd box.
Yeah, both of them.
Jay (=
You need look no farther then the recent CARP ruling on Internet radio broadcasting royalties -- a quick summary can be found here -- to see what "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" will do to freedom of choice: kill off all of the small players, making sure the Old Boy's Club has free reign.
Jay (=