That's not too bad, really. A bit overboard on the accept Jesus graphic, but white text quoting a couple Bible verses, on a black background, with a door and a cat doing a single animation sequence, that's not so bad.
Oh, you mean what it must look like UNFILTERED! [Bypass privoxy with my light text on dark background enforcement filter that kills background images, turn on scripting, toggle animation from once to enabled, refresh.]
Well, given the site name... and that the tech obviously knew a reasonable amount about Linux as well, I'd say he probably handled both Linux and Windows. But I agree, it does sound like the thinking of a Windows tech. He didn't seem to be thinking like a Linux native, in any case.
As for the AV, see muckracer's reply (to my original citing the story). In deference to his experience I'm reducing the scope of my original claim, tho I don't believe there's evidence I should entirely recant. It seems that at least in regard to servers, at least some AV products detect enough flooder scripts and other malware to be worth periodic scans. However, I still hold that the position of the kernel devs, that Linux doesn't need on-demand/per-access scanning, is correct. Periodic scanning may indeed be helpful it would seem, but I don't believe there's a need for real-time on-demand/per-access scanning on Linux.
The guy was checking out a malware site, laughed at the standard fake AV dialog using the standard Windows scheme, as if it could do anything to him running Linux. Then he went on about his business, apparently including logging onto his website to upload something.
Well, unbeknownst to him, the malware site was still running in the browser in the background, and took advantage of the login to spread itself to his site. So while his computer itself didn't catch anything, his site did.
Fortunately his hosting provider caught (part of) the malware as it uploaded, and warned him. Of course at that point the guy was SCARED, as had no idea WHAT was up except that he had been browsing that malware site. The rest of the tale is how they figured out what happened, that his computer itself was (luckily) not infected (only that browser session), and how they cleaned up.
Now I don't agree with all the suggestions made in the column. In particular, AV to protect a Linux system (as opposed to scanning stuff before it's passed on to help protect downline Windows systems) isn't likely to catch any Linux targeted malware that does exist, at least not right away, because the AV vendors simply aren't particularly checking for Linux malware at this point, because even if there were malware to check for, they simply don't have the customers in that market to support it. As the comments point out, noscript or similar is a better bet -- don't let it run in the first place, tho perhaps he'd have had to to get the animation to run.
However, the base message, that if you are playing with fire you better have tested that asbestos suit and not be simply trusting some claim you heard about it somewhere, rings as true as ever. As I said above, noscript (or similar scripting-off-by-default in other browsers, the konqueror I use for instance, tho noscript on firefox certainly has better control than most) would have likely saved him, possibly even if he had turned scripts on for that particular site, due to its cross-site-scripting measures, etc. Or, simply being prudent and not using the same browser session he had JUST been browsing the malware site with to login to his web site, would have saved him.
Just be careful out there, alright! I don't want it to be you I'm reading about the next time an article like this comes to my attention, as it surely will!
That's a bit harder on x86_64, with its required -fPIC (position independent code) for dynamically loaded libraries, randomizing their load address, than on ia32 (tho it's possible to use position independent code there as well, but few do as it's a de-optimization speed-wise). And it's harder still attacking someone whose binaries are basically unique, as is the case on a from-source distribution like Gentoo, with individualized USEflags/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/LDFLAGS, as opposed to say some mass-distributed binary distribution with thousands of people running the same easily procured and examined binary.
OTOH, while Gentoo has some security signing and source checksumming, at present it's not at the level of verification some of the other distributions have, so it's theoretically possible someone could sneak some compromised code in somewhere in my upstream sources (Gentoo or upstream package) without detection.
In any case, I've no illusions. If someone with the resources (say the NSA) wanted me cracked bad enough, I'd be split open like an egg dropped on concrete, as would most of us.
I look at software like this. If I am expected to agree to a liability waiver, I better be able to examine the code, and/or have someone I trust do so, without an NDA or restrictions on modification, use, and further distribution, should I decide to do so, because I simply don't give up those rights.
If the software cannot provide me the ability to examine the source and/or have others I trust do so without requiring me (or that trusted third party) to agree not to copy, modify and distribute, then I can't sign the liability waiver.
Since in today's litigious climate (at least here in the US) it's insane to distribute software/without/ a liability waiver, at least unless you're charging enough to cover the liability yourself which no bones about it would put it out of/my/ budget range (they do have such software, the fly by wire stuff in planes, etc), that rather neatly makes my decision for me. Proprietaryware folks aren't going to let me (or someone that I trust acting in my behalf) examine their software before I agree to that waiver, nor run it without agreeing to it, and I'm not going to agree to the waiver if it's a black box because I then can't see what I'm agreeing to be responsible for, so the question's pretty much settled. I can't run (most, nearly all, I don't know any that I could) proprietary software even if I'd otherwise want to.
Thus, I don't even have to think about proprietaryware. It's simply not an option on my list, nor could it be on my list. Of course, that means no Adobe PDF reader or Flash, and no nVidia or the like proprietary drivers, either.
(Yet there remains one one single caveat. I still run a now rather old game, Master of Orion, original edition. I agreed on it years before I knew any better and well, in the spirit of my sig, I guess they/are/ pretty much my master at this point. I've continued to copy over the old binaries from one drive to the next for over a decade and a half, now, from MS-DOS 6, to MS Windows 95 and 98's DOS window, to DOSBOX on 32-bit Mandrake Linux when MS drove me away with what they did with eXPrivacy (Thanks, MS! I'm honestly not sure I'd have ever jumped had you not pushed. =:^), to the present, DOSBOX on Gentoo/AMD64 Linux.)
Wha?/Tyler/ Bell? Who wants to eat floor tile, or for that matter, the floor tiler? Taco Bell has floor tiles...
Honestly, it looked like Taco Bell to me when I first glanced at the feed and I wondered what that had to do with Yahoo. Yes, I/am/ hungry. How'd you know?
The best way to make a computer safe from hackers is to remove the power cord. The second best is to remove all network connections.
So an un-firewalled un-updated Windows XP original laptop with a clicky ID10T browsing warez sites AND checking his bank balance over unsecured open wifi on battery must be pretty good then, since both the power cord and any networking connections are unattached?
At the MS pub after a bender... the chair throws you!
Ballmer probably considered that, decided he'd be too scared to join in the fun, and vetoed the idea.
(FWIW I don't usually do funny posts and have them scored down in prefs, but the image of the chair throwing a drunk Ballmer and the shocked/confused/scared/sick look on his face as it did so was just too much for me! I/had/ to post after that!)
Well, the problem of a listening booth from the perspective of someone trying to sell the music, besides the "if you travel to the store, you're probably already going to buy something" bit mentioned by an AC, which in the context of trying to sell means you still have to get them to the store, is that the listening once or twice is just that, listening once or twice -- it doesn't let you get/addicted/ to it.
Now what I do most of the time is listen to shoutcast streams, but this would go for the radio (too many programmable zombie targeted ads, content generally to broad and/or bland) or P2P/USENET/Web downloading (too troublesome when I can get exactly what I'm in the mood for off a dozen shoutcast channels) too. After I've heard a song a few times, I may decide I like even more than the usual channel content -- and want more from that (group of) artist(s).
With shoutcast metadata streams too, it's easy enough to note the artist, album, etc, and watch for more. The next (intermediate) step would be actively searching out more, P2P, web, streamripper-and-filesearch. The final step is finding it actually interesting enough to buy the whole album or often whole series of albums of. That can mean checking at the store next time you're in, or buying online.
The problem with listening stations is that it doesn't allow that interest build-up to the point I'm willing to go to the trouble to find and then pay the money to buy the album, or often, entire series of albums. I'm not going to spend hours in the listening booth, doing JUST that, but if I have the songs available to listen to at my leisure, while I'm doing my Gentoo updates, reading/., playing a game, working around the house or in the car on the way to work (or/at/ work, for the lucky ones), I AM going to find some of them "addictive" enough to buy, and from experience, when I do, it's often NOT just a single album.
Of course, that's the whole P2P/streaming users buy MORE music, not less, phenomenon so often mentioned 'round these parts.
Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low.
As for the message-id/nntp issues, that's reasonably easily solved. One could hash the torrent title (or tracker URL) into the subject header, with a block sequence number replacing the M/N series number. That would put the relevant data all in the overview so a client wouldn't have to pull more than that to see what was available. (Users could still track poster reputation that way. An alternative would replace a portion of the author header as well, but that would make it harder to track poster reputation.)
The biggest problems I see would be two, USENET is obscure enough it might be a hard feature to explain and to explain how to configure for one's USENET provider, and depending on how it was introduced and what sort of standard was agreed (or not), there could be conflicting implementations.
Also, given the amount of data involved, there'd certainly need to be a whole hierarchy, alt.binaries.torrent-parts.*, perhaps organized by tracker host, with a misc-tracker hierarchy for the little ones, then by genre, or maybe more generically by first letter or two of the torrent title (with or without tracker host).
But OTOH, part of the appeal of USENET is its relative obscurity, in part due to the relative technical literacy one must have to make it work at any decent level of efficiency. Think the general idea of Eternal September and etc tho if someone's open enough to learning netiquette and can RTFM and FAQ if pointed at them, glad to have 'em. Making USENET an extension of a very popular P2P protocol would NOT do anything to keep it that way.
You-Tube is losing money, so use their services even more of you don't like them
They give us content at a loss, but make up for it in volume.
I may having a bit of a slow day. This series of statements doesn't seem logically sound.
I take it you weren't around for the Y2K dot-com bust?
pj_rules had the right idea on this one. The second half of the statement, the bit about selling at a loss but making up for it in volume, was popular as an explanation for the illogic that fueled the dot-com boom and then bust in Y2K (tho I don't either know its origin before that). It's thus a reference by allusion to "crazy dot-commers".
Taken in that context, the first half makes should now make sense. Youtube (and thus its owner, Google) is being called a crazy dot-commer. Google has lots of money to poor down a rat hole, but at this point that's all it is. The suggestion is that if you don't like them, you make that rat hole bigger, by using their service even more. =:^)
I honestly don't know whether or how Google might pull Youtube into profitability tho I do know they're losing money on it ATM, according to reports. Actually, since I adblock, if the suggestion is true I'm making them lose even MORE money. It doesn't matter particularly to me either way, however, because as I've explained in my adblocking story comments, while I realize the Internet world would change significantly if everybody adblocked and ads suddenly couldn't fund anything, I'm not at all sure it would be for the worse. Some folks would no doubt subscribe to sites for what they wanted if there weren't a dozen or a dozen hundred waiting in line to take their place, but even if that failed as well, a world where the real enthusiasts ruled, where the folks that do it with money out of their own pocket if they have to to share what they truly enjoy, instead of the folks who couldn't care less as long as they get paid in some way for it ruled as they tend to now, wouldn't/couldn't be an entirely/bad/ place! One only has to take a look at FLOSS, or indeed, all those garage bands that may haul their instruments (bought with their own money) across two states to play a few hours of tunes, in exchange for a few beers, a dinner, some applause, and not even enough money to cover the gas, to see that it can and does actually work that way, as long as money and the greed that comes with it doesn't crowd out the guy's doing it just for fun.
Meanwhile, I could certainly see myself boycotting Youtube over this... if I thought it would do anything. Most boycotts don't, really, tho some (the boycott of South Africa over Apartheid, for example) do. Using them more? In my case, maybe it would be more effective, given I don't do ads. OTOH, they can and I'm sure do still count adblocker folks in their number of vistors, so it could still add to their revenue. I don't know.
You are correct, but that's only the half of it. Ads don't tend to be aimed at actually/thinking/ people -- the advertisers prefer zombies they can program (by X repeated impressions, why else would they repeat as they do) to go buy that brand new car even tho they don't need it, and only just paid down the debt on their current car to the point it's now actually worth more than they owe on it. They want the fat ass they can program to continue to upsize the drink and add their deep-fried (fat) bacon (more fat) and cheese (more fat) potatoes (starch) to their fat dripping burger with fat-based mayo and cheese (more fat), that can then be programmed to buy the gym membership to burn off some of that fat because instead of biking to work they drive that new car that they just bought, all based on ads programming them to buy stuff they don't need and would be better off without.
I've become convinced that's actually why the ads are so repulsive to thinking people. Not only are they not the target in the first place, but an actual thinking person is harder to please as a customer. They'll ask too many questions, demand too much for their money, or become offended, and everybody knows the LAST thing sellers want is offended customers telling others about it. Better some zombie they can continue to program how good the product is after they bought it by continued ads!
Think about it! How else could ads possibly justify their cost -- but obviously they do, with at least some segment of the population! They convince easily programmed zombies that they NEED stuff they don't (or people would by buying without the ads), paid for with credit (more ads!), which is money they don't have, but can "rent" for a "small" fee! If people actually needed it, the ads wouldn't do any good!
Now, think what kind of person with what kind of ethics and what kind of care for their fellow man it takes to be in the ad business!
"Oh, but the poor site owners might go bankrupt without the ad revenue!" Yeah, and the million-dollar-lip-syncers and scandalous actors might disappear along with the **AA if we refuse to continue to pay for recordings of performances that happened years ago, that they should have been paid for then.
Too bad, so sad! If there's one thing the FLOSS movement has demonstrated once again, if the enthusiasts web sites and music and community playhouses hadn't done a good enough job demonstrating it before, it's that there's plenty of people with plenty of talent and ideas and content out there to share, paid for it or not -- they'll even pay significant amounts out of their own pocket as hundreds of local garage bands do every time they do a gig for dinner and a few beers -- and while the world would certainly change if all the paid providers suddenly disappeared, arguably, it'd be a better place for it if the only folks left doing it were doing it for the love of the subject, not the love of money!
You are correct about the access from the computer, but in that case, it's the host operating system's (presumably MS OS or OS licensed, not TomTom's problem in any case) code on the computer that's doing the LFN access. The USB mass storage protocol is setup so it's all host system in that case, and any TomTom software running on the computer is simply using the host system's filesystem code. No patent violation there, at least not on TomTom's part.
The problem is only when the files are accessed from the device itself (not from the host computer when connected via USB), and then (apparently) only if the LFNs are written. Apparently, the on-device software doesn't have a file dialog or similar UI that exposes filenames at all, so if the device writes to the FAT filesystem at all, it's entirely outside the view of the user, and thus, if it does happen to be using long filenames, it can be changed without affecting the user experience at all.
This is apparently what they've agreed to do, if indeed they were writing LFNs at all. Regardless, however, apparently the kernel they shipped was configured with the (generic Linux vfat module) ability to write LFNs, regardless of whether they were actually using that ability/for/ anything or not. They now have to configure that/out/ of the kernel they ship, so it doesn't even have the ability to write LFNs. Thus, they avoid having to license that patent, and avoid triggering the kernel's GPLv2 "live free or die" clause in the process.
TomTom's problem wasn't FAT, the 8.3 filename version, but LFN aka VFAT, and AFAIK, reading them isn't covered, only writing. The MS patents are specifically on the long file name stuff, apparently only on writing, and any patents on the original 8.3 format will have expired by now. Since with USB it's the host that controls the writing, TomTom's window of patent vulnerability on that particular patent is quite small anyway, and it's entirely possible to avoid infringement, especially since from all reports I've seen the TomTom devices themselves don't expose the filenames they are working with.
It's actually quite possible that TomTom wasn't actually using the LFN code anyway, but was simply shipping it as it was configured in their default Linux kernel load. As such, it should be fairly trivial to simply avoid turning on that option, and if necessary, rewriting any other code that they had internally that expected the LFN so it works with the 8.3 name.
Thus, the case never really was about the FAT LFN patents in the first place. It was simply one more arrow in the legal quiver that MS unloaded on TomTom. It was the other patents, including the broad mobile computer mounted in a car patent and a couple of the navigation patents, at issue.
That's why it's possible for TomTom to take the easy way out of this one. The GPL "live free or die" clause need not be invoked since they can simply toggle off the VFAT functionality (and if necessary entirely patch the code out of what they ship) in their shipping kernels, and they can license the other patents without triggering the "live free or die" clause since their userspace code didn't need covered under the GPL.
AFAIK, it works this way. No, they can't force you to do the logging. But they are very helpful and can be pretty persuasive, too. If you don't have a box that can do the logging, they helpfully provide one... one that's NOT named "Carnivore", that does NOT collect anything but the information they have an order to collect, "honest".
Under those sorts of conditions what would you do? Would you suddenly find you had the equipment to log the ordered information after all, or would you provide the entire feed for their box to log "only the ordered information on only the ordered person, honest"?
And that was BEFORE 9/11, the (anti-)PATRIOT Bill, etc.
FWIW, I was once on an ISP that didn't log downloads. At one point there was a troublesome (performance-wise) "mystery hop" added to the routing to the news server, that the normally friendly news admin couldn't talk about. A few months later, the routing changed once again and the hop disappeared. Some of us regulars had our suspicions, but of course that's what they remained.
AACCKKK, slashdot now kills moderation even if you check the post annon box! So much for modding THIS story!
I guess one has to post using another not-logged-in browser if one is moderating, now. I wish I had known that before I posted the above as AC, I'd have just posted regularly. Well, at least/. is giving more modpoints now. I got 15 this time instead of the usual 5, so the couple lost modpoints don't hurt quite so badly. But unnecessarily posting a comment as AC that's useful enough a lot of folks can probably use, does!
According to TFA, which I read at Ars earlier, they will specifically NOT be logging. So billing records, sure, but logging, no -- at least not pre-case. At least in the US (which this is not, what laws apply there I don't know), the service provider can be ordered to keep logs on a specific account, given sufficient cause. Originally the provider could demand a warrant (whether they did or not was of course up to them, the AOLs of the world infamously did NOT), but of course the (non-)Patriot Act did away with that and the Bush admin pushed even further, with fallout still winding its way thru the courts and the Obama admin justice dept. unfortunately often siding with the Bush admin justice dept. arguments.
So while general logging may not be the case, individual logging must be assumed as possible by anyone using the service, at least beyond whatever reaction period might be necessary to actually get such an order.
You're correct, tho I'd not put it in quite those terms.
It's important to remember that for the most part, the FLOSS (Free/libre and open source software) community is composed of volunteers. While few would have the crass my way or no way reaction you suggest, the point is that there's always other things a good coder could be working on, always a dozen other projects he's interested in too, competing for his attention, and when motivation on a particular one he's spending a lot of time on goes down, so, ultimately, does his level of contribution to that project.
Thus the effect in practice is the same even if the reasons given differ. If a project doesn't closely enough follow a dev's ideals, he'll be less committed to it, and there's always more projects competing for his time and interest than he has time and interest to give anyway, so his participation by defining characteristic ultimately goes down as well. Thus, form a combined KDE/GNOME/XFCE/whatever, and the loss of interest will almost certainly mean it progresses little if any faster than each of the projects is doing on its own, now. At the same time, the competitiveness and copying of great ideas from one to the other will decrease as well, and Linux and larger FLOSS (including the freedomware BSDs and OpenSolaris) community will suffer not only the loss of variety, but the loss of internal competitive pressure and innovation it now has, with little if any gain in trade.
Meanwhile, there's actually quite a decent amount of cooperation and standard setting going on as it is. The freedesktop.org effort has standardized a quite a lot in the last few years, including among other things both *.desktop file format and the dbus interprocess communication protocol, both of which now are a common format used by both desktops. xorg itself is now a freedesktop.org project too, and there are continuing efforts in other areas. Where it makes sense, there's common standards, with each desktop having its own implementation, bringing its own flavor to the standard, while allowing a much higher level of cooperation than before, and apps from the one desktop that fit into the scheme configured for the other, or for both. It is in fact rather sad that the original "I have a dream" poster didn't mention these efforts at all.
I'm honestly not sure it still applies to KDE in the 4.x era, but at least in the 3.x era, the philosophies were quite different. Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that/like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
The point is, forcing the devs and users who find the one policy most useful to follow the other one, surely is effective... at causing useless squabbles and getting nothing done! Keep the "there's only one true way" folks away from the "make it configurable for everyone" folks, and both types can continue to improve their product without getting in the way of each other.
Similarly of course with all the other "Linux is too divided" debates, from too many distributions, to vi/emacs, to... whatever. It's a free community and part of the strength therein lies in the freedom. Even if it were possible to take away that freedom to create one's own product, there'd be little point, as were it to happen, we'd just end up back with the monopolistic monstrosity that is MS. One size does NOT fit all, and encouraging differentiation and innovation, certainly based on common standards, but/only//based/ on common standards, is a/good/ thing.
That said, the one thing that does keep the Linux community from incompatibly splitting up much like the proprietary Unix community did is again, that it's all open and shared. Each distribution and individual app therefore has an interest not only in doing what it was created for really well, even if that splits from the community, but ALSO in following the common solution where it really doesn't matter for what it was created for, because every deviation from the common solution costs maintenance time and resources, time and resources that could otherwise be invested in bettering either the differentiating aspects further, or in advancing the common ones. In practice this dynamic ensures that individual solutions only diverge from the common where it really matters to them, because every divergence costs resources, and divergence just for the sake of it is thus less efficient and dies out relatively quickly, compared to those who focus resources on divergence only where it directly furthers their goals and on otherwise bettering the common solution, submitting patches upstream, etc. Thus, unlike the proprietary Unix solutions, divergence for the sake of divergence simply isn't efficient enough to survive, and ultimately dies. But where there's a good reason for divergence, that only serves to drive a sharper focus on bettering the different solutions that remain, driving the evolution of the community as a whole even faster.
(Umm... (looking around) I guess it's pretty obvious that I'm a "True Believer" (tm), isn't it. Yes, I am, and for that I'm not going to apologize! =:^)
I am impressed that Torvalds knows about this issue, and credo to him for raising people's awareness.
There's rather more community history behind it than that. The below is from memory based on various coverage I read on LWN and the like, but not fact-checked to be positive my memory is correct, so verify before acting on it as fact.
I believe it was at the annual linux.conf.au, tho I'm not sure but it was some such conference, widely attended by Linux kernel hackers, that the presentation was made. There was apparently a fairly big charity pledge drive related to the issue, with many of the kernel hackers taking part. Various ones of them, in addition to pledging their own money, pledged various acts should the conference pledge drive reach whatever goal ($10K, maybe?).
Well, the pledge drive was quite a success, and the various hackers either have or are in the process of fulfilling their various promises as a result. One of the ones that made Linux hacker community (and LWN) headlines was Bdale Garbee's pledge, to shave his beard. He hadn't been beardless in, I think, well over a decade (15 years? longer?). There was an LWN article on it with a photo (taken I believe at the closing ceremony or traditional post-conference party) of Linus as barber, doing the honors! =:^)
That's actually how I first heard about the whole thing, seeing that photo and reading the accompanying article. But apparently Linus' own pledge was to name a kernel version after the Tazmanian Devil. But he has actually gone one better, changing the logo for.29 as well as the name.
This logo, BTW, is the one the kernel framebuffer driver optionally displays at the top of the screen during boot, if the framebuffer is activated and the config option set to do so. There's a single logo displayed for every CPU/core, so my dual dual-core Opteron displays a nice row of four such logos. I can only imagine the row of 32 of the things on say a quad-socket oct-core machine. =:^)
Anyway, I've been running a kernel compiled directly from git for a few months now (switching to the stable series between release and rc2 or so, only running mainline git between rc2 and release), and am currently running:
$uname -r 2.6.29-rc8-223-ga1e4ee2
So I've had the pleasure of seeing four of these little beasties at boot for a week or so, now. =:^)
Anyway, it's not just Linus. It's the entire kernel hacker community that got involved, thanks to linux.conf.au. =:^)
All that said, while I obviously knew more about the Linux/kernel community side of things and had a bit of general awareness from that, I hadn't bothered reading up on the disease itself until taking the opportunity to click that nice wikipedia link you so thoughtfully provided. Now I know a bit more about it, and am hopefully returning the favor with the above info on the Linux community side of things.
OK, I did an LWN search and here's some relevant links, so folks can fact-check what I wrote above, as well as quote something more authoritative than just some/. post.
Beardless Bdale (It'd be interesting to see the stats for this one as related to the Linus in a swimsuit one, I think also linux.conf.au from a few years ago, dunk tank FWIW, see below.) http://lwn.net/Articles/316282/
(FWIW, LCA/linux.conf.au, correct. AU$35-40K raised according to "beardless". With the awareness brought by 2.6.29 related publicity, hopefully much more
To argue that propping up Windows (or anything artificially, considering the bailouts) for its own sake is like arguing you create jobs by hiring 100 people to digg ditches and another 100 to filling them.
Actually, hiring people to dig ditches and then fill them is done all the time (especially where ditch-witch type machines are too expensive to be viable), and it's anything/but/ the do-nothing you propose. You just put a pipe in, or lay a foundation in, or whatever, before you have the second group come along and fill the ditch!
As for the MS, or any proprietary/slavery-ware for that matter, my sig makes plain enough my position on that.
Probably because Bi-Mart is smaller, a membership-store, and NW regional-only. I last even thought of them about a decade and a half ago when I lived in the area, but I just googled them, and their website (bimart.com) says even now, they have 70 locations, all in the northwest (US, Washington/Oregon/Idaho, apparently only, according to the website), and stresses the membership-only (or guest of member, tho membership is open to all, it's $5, so not free, which limits the walk-in-and-browse aspect) aspect.
That's OK for a limited regional store, but it's nothing like the national chains mostly being discussed here. Seattle or Portland are probably their biggest metro service areas, so even for a regional store they're not going to be that well known, as there's no presence in any of the bigger California or eastern seaboard metro areas. Of course, that's not even mentioning the international aspect, give the number of/. readers in Europe or otherwise elsewhere than the US.
Not to say it's not a formula that doesn't work, as it obviously has, since they opened the first store in 1955 in someone's garage, and second in 1962 in Eugene, Or, now their corporate HQ (all again from the website), but they're still small potatoes on a site as big and widely read as/., where the question seems about like asking about the friendly neighborhood no-name convenience store. Maybe in another 20 or 50 years, if they continue growing (tho I'm not sure what their recent growth rate has been, when did they hit 50 stores, say? 1980, or 2002, and is 70 as big as they've ever been or are they actually shrinking now? given 70 stores now, that'd say a lot more about activity in the current century).
I actually live in 'slope, within sight of JCLincoln Hospital. True enough many of my neighbors speak Spanish, but one of the great things about it is that the cable node is mostly CATV, few enough CHSI users that I don't think I've/ever/ had node congestion issues. Speeds are always very the label on the box, as long as the host at the other end can handle it. =:^) And DSL is available too... provided you can ever get the trained monkeys the telco calls techs to get it installed correctly.
The N Phoenix Fry's isn't bad. Location-wise for the public-transit users, it's right on a bus route (27) that stops at the Metro Center transit station, which is well connected enough many can do it with just that single transfer, which allows stops at Metro Center too. (I used to check Best Buy and CompUSA at Metro Center, then catch Frys, which always had a MUCH better selection and competitive prices. Too bad CompUSA died and BB moved,/they're/ the ones with a bad public transit location, now.)
I've never has problems with broken stuff from Fry's either, even when I buy the mildly discounted returned-item stock. That may be because I do reasonable checks in-store if it's returned, and sometimes I'll pass up the return/discounted stuff if it doesn't look good or would be more hassle to return if broken than the discount is worth. Part of that may be luck, but part of that is decent computer literacy too, I think. Before the N Phoenix location opened I was called in to look at a number of friend's systems where they'd gotten something at Fry's that didn't work, and honestly, I had a rather poor opinion of them based on that back then. But looking back, I think much of that may well have been computer illiteracy on the part of the purchaser. Not knowing what they were buying and how to treat it, maybe dropping the hard drive before installation (or buying a return that may have been dropped, I'd probably stay away from hard drive returns for that reason), etc. I've had absolutely no problems with what I've bought at Fry's.
But even before CompUSA closed and Best Buy moved, I was buying more and more of my stuff either online, or at Fry's, and now it's pretty much/just/ those two. I had to go online for my dual socket Opteron mobo as Fry's didn't get/that/ exotic, and I generally buy memory, CPUs, etc, online as well, because while Fry's has them, it's simply a fact that no brick and mortar is likely to touch online pricing for that sort of stuff. But for the same machine I bought the powersupply (complete with semi-exotic power cable connector since it was for a dual socket Opteron board) at Fry's, the price difference vs online after shipping just wasn't enough to hassle the delivery, and I bought all four of my latest monitors at Frys. (Refurbished 22" Viewsonic CRT and 21" Dell CRT a few years ago as they finally came into budget range, $400 and $200 respectively, then upgraded to identical dual 24" Optiquest 1920x1200 LCDs, $350 each pre-rebate IIRC, last summer, after/they/ dropped into budget range.)
BTW, 22" CRTs in the box can be a bit of a challenge to get home on the bus, thru one bus transfer even, but I managed. =:^) Suffice it to say I was glad I didn't have to do a return on/that/ one!
Meanwhile, Circuit City ultimately never seemed worth the trouble going in there, even a decade and a half ago, and I probably hadn't even been in there in a decade. They were significantly higher priced, and while service, etc, can make up for that, when I gave the sales guys a chance to work for their commission (which they still got at that time) and explain to me why I should pay X dollars and Y percent more to buy it there than at the competition, they couldn't come up with an answer that satisfied me. Basically, by the time I was prepared to buy I was already informed enough on what I wanted (and its competitive price point) that they didn't offe
Slashdot Mirror
What, this link: http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/ ?
That's not too bad, really. A bit overboard on the accept Jesus graphic, but white text quoting a couple Bible verses, on a black background, with a door and a cat doing a single animation sequence, that's not so bad.
Oh, you mean what it must look like UNFILTERED! [Bypass privoxy with my light text on dark background enforcement filter that kills background images, turn on scripting, toggle animation from once to enabled, refresh.]
OK, NOW I see what you mean!
Well, given the site name... and that the tech obviously knew a reasonable amount about Linux as well, I'd say he probably handled both Linux and Windows. But I agree, it does sound like the thinking of a Windows tech. He didn't seem to be thinking like a Linux native, in any case.
As for the AV, see muckracer's reply (to my original citing the story). In deference to his experience I'm reducing the scope of my original claim, tho I don't believe there's evidence I should entirely recant. It seems that at least in regard to servers, at least some AV products detect enough flooder scripts and other malware to be worth periodic scans. However, I still hold that the position of the kernel devs, that Linux doesn't need on-demand/per-access scanning, is correct. Periodic scanning may indeed be helpful it would seem, but I don't believe there's a need for real-time on-demand/per-access scanning on Linux.
I yield to your experience, then. It would seem my "Linux AV" claim may be a bit dated.
The particulars of the following story might not apply to you, but you owe it to yourself (and your security) to check it out.
http://www.handlewithlinux.com/are-you-safe-internet-security-on-linux
Briefly...
The guy was checking out a malware site, laughed at the standard fake AV dialog using the standard Windows scheme, as if it could do anything to him running Linux. Then he went on about his business, apparently including logging onto his website to upload something.
Well, unbeknownst to him, the malware site was still running in the browser in the background, and took advantage of the login to spread itself to his site. So while his computer itself didn't catch anything, his site did.
Fortunately his hosting provider caught (part of) the malware as it uploaded, and warned him. Of course at that point the guy was SCARED, as had no idea WHAT was up except that he had been browsing that malware site. The rest of the tale is how they figured out what happened, that his computer itself was (luckily) not infected (only that browser session), and how they cleaned up.
Now I don't agree with all the suggestions made in the column. In particular, AV to protect a Linux system (as opposed to scanning stuff before it's passed on to help protect downline Windows systems) isn't likely to catch any Linux targeted malware that does exist, at least not right away, because the AV vendors simply aren't particularly checking for Linux malware at this point, because even if there were malware to check for, they simply don't have the customers in that market to support it. As the comments point out, noscript or similar is a better bet -- don't let it run in the first place, tho perhaps he'd have had to to get the animation to run.
However, the base message, that if you are playing with fire you better have tested that asbestos suit and not be simply trusting some claim you heard about it somewhere, rings as true as ever. As I said above, noscript (or similar scripting-off-by-default in other browsers, the konqueror I use for instance, tho noscript on firefox certainly has better control than most) would have likely saved him, possibly even if he had turned scripts on for that particular site, due to its cross-site-scripting measures, etc. Or, simply being prudent and not using the same browser session he had JUST been browsing the malware site with to login to his web site, would have saved him.
Just be careful out there, alright! I don't want it to be you I'm reading about the next time an article like this comes to my attention, as it surely will!
That's a bit harder on x86_64, with its required -fPIC (position independent code) for dynamically loaded libraries, randomizing their load address, than on ia32 (tho it's possible to use position independent code there as well, but few do as it's a de-optimization speed-wise). And it's harder still attacking someone whose binaries are basically unique, as is the case on a from-source distribution like Gentoo, with individualized USEflags/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/LDFLAGS, as opposed to say some mass-distributed binary distribution with thousands of people running the same easily procured and examined binary.
OTOH, while Gentoo has some security signing and source checksumming, at present it's not at the level of verification some of the other distributions have, so it's theoretically possible someone could sneak some compromised code in somewhere in my upstream sources (Gentoo or upstream package) without detection.
In any case, I've no illusions. If someone with the resources (say the NSA) wanted me cracked bad enough, I'd be split open like an egg dropped on concrete, as would most of us.
No kidding.
I look at software like this. If I am expected to agree to a liability waiver, I better be able to examine the code, and/or have someone I trust do so, without an NDA or restrictions on modification, use, and further distribution, should I decide to do so, because I simply don't give up those rights.
If the software cannot provide me the ability to examine the source and/or have others I trust do so without requiring me (or that trusted third party) to agree not to copy, modify and distribute, then I can't sign the liability waiver.
Since in today's litigious climate (at least here in the US) it's insane to distribute software /without/ a liability waiver, at least unless you're charging enough to cover the liability yourself which no bones about it would put it out of /my/ budget range (they do have such software, the fly by wire stuff in planes, etc), that rather neatly makes my decision for me. Proprietaryware folks aren't going to let me (or someone that I trust acting in my behalf) examine their software before I agree to that waiver, nor run it without agreeing to it, and I'm not going to agree to the waiver if it's a black box because I then can't see what I'm agreeing to be responsible for, so the question's pretty much settled. I can't run (most, nearly all, I don't know any that I could) proprietary software even if I'd otherwise want to.
Thus, I don't even have to think about proprietaryware. It's simply not an option on my list, nor could it be on my list. Of course, that means no Adobe PDF reader or Flash, and no nVidia or the like proprietary drivers, either.
(Yet there remains one one single caveat. I still run a now rather old game, Master of Orion, original edition. I agreed on it years before I knew any better and well, in the spirit of my sig, I guess they /are/ pretty much my master at this point. I've continued to copy over the old binaries from one drive to the next for over a decade and a half, now, from MS-DOS 6, to MS Windows 95 and 98's DOS window, to DOSBOX on 32-bit Mandrake Linux when MS drove me away with what they did with eXPrivacy (Thanks, MS! I'm honestly not sure I'd have ever jumped had you not pushed. =:^), to the present, DOSBOX on Gentoo/AMD64 Linux.)
Taco Bell. That sounds good right about now!
Wha? /Tyler/ Bell? Who wants to eat floor tile, or for that matter, the floor tiler? Taco Bell has floor tiles...
Honestly, it looked like Taco Bell to me when I first glanced at the feed and I wondered what that had to do with Yahoo. Yes, I /am/ hungry. How'd you know?
The best way to make a computer safe from hackers is to remove the power cord. The second best is to remove all network connections.
So an un-firewalled un-updated Windows XP original laptop with a clicky ID10T browsing warez sites AND checking his bank balance over unsecured open wifi on battery must be pretty good then, since both the power cord and any networking connections are unattached?
Surprised nobody posted this...
At the MS pub after a bender... the chair throws you!
Ballmer probably considered that, decided he'd be too scared to join in the fun, and vetoed the idea.
(FWIW I don't usually do funny posts and have them scored down in prefs, but the image of the chair throwing a drunk Ballmer and the shocked/confused/scared/sick look on his face as it did so was just too much for me! I /had/ to post after that!)
Well, the problem of a listening booth from the perspective of someone trying to sell the music, besides the "if you travel to the store, you're probably already going to buy something" bit mentioned by an AC, which in the context of trying to sell means you still have to get them to the store, is that the listening once or twice is just that, listening once or twice -- it doesn't let you get /addicted/ to it.
Now what I do most of the time is listen to shoutcast streams, but this would go for the radio (too many programmable zombie targeted ads, content generally to broad and/or bland) or P2P/USENET/Web downloading (too troublesome when I can get exactly what I'm in the mood for off a dozen shoutcast channels) too. After I've heard a song a few times, I may decide I like even more than the usual channel content -- and want more from that (group of) artist(s).
With shoutcast metadata streams too, it's easy enough to note the artist, album, etc, and watch for more. The next (intermediate) step would be actively searching out more, P2P, web, streamripper-and-filesearch. The final step is finding it actually interesting enough to buy the whole album or often whole series of albums of. That can mean checking at the store next time you're in, or buying online.
The problem with listening stations is that it doesn't allow that interest build-up to the point I'm willing to go to the trouble to find and then pay the money to buy the album, or often, entire series of albums. I'm not going to spend hours in the listening booth, doing JUST that, but if I have the songs available to listen to at my leisure, while I'm doing my Gentoo updates, reading /., playing a game, working around the house or in the car on the way to work (or /at/ work, for the lucky ones), I AM going to find some of them "addictive" enough to buy, and from experience, when I do, it's often NOT just a single album.
Of course, that's the whole P2P/streaming users buy MORE music, not less, phenomenon so often mentioned 'round these parts.
Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low.
As for the message-id/nntp issues, that's reasonably easily solved. One could hash the torrent title (or tracker URL) into the subject header, with a block sequence number replacing the M/N series number. That would put the relevant data all in the overview so a client wouldn't have to pull more than that to see what was available. (Users could still track poster reputation that way. An alternative would replace a portion of the author header as well, but that would make it harder to track poster reputation.)
The biggest problems I see would be two, USENET is obscure enough it might be a hard feature to explain and to explain how to configure for one's USENET provider, and depending on how it was introduced and what sort of standard was agreed (or not), there could be conflicting implementations.
Also, given the amount of data involved, there'd certainly need to be a whole hierarchy, alt.binaries.torrent-parts.*, perhaps organized by tracker host, with a misc-tracker hierarchy for the little ones, then by genre, or maybe more generically by first letter or two of the torrent title (with or without tracker host).
But OTOH, part of the appeal of USENET is its relative obscurity, in part due to the relative technical literacy one must have to make it work at any decent level of efficiency. Think the general idea of Eternal September and etc tho if someone's open enough to learning netiquette and can RTFM and FAQ if pointed at them, glad to have 'em. Making USENET an extension of a very popular P2P protocol would NOT do anything to keep it that way.
You-Tube is losing money, so use their services even more of you don't like them
They give us content at a loss, but make up for it in volume.
I may having a bit of a slow day. This series of statements doesn't seem logically sound.
I take it you weren't around for the Y2K dot-com bust?
pj_rules had the right idea on this one. The second half of the statement, the bit about selling at a loss but making up for it in volume, was popular as an explanation for the illogic that fueled the dot-com boom and then bust in Y2K (tho I don't either know its origin before that). It's thus a reference by allusion to "crazy dot-commers".
Taken in that context, the first half makes should now make sense. Youtube (and thus its owner, Google) is being called a crazy dot-commer. Google has lots of money to poor down a rat hole, but at this point that's all it is. The suggestion is that if you don't like them, you make that rat hole bigger, by using their service even more. =:^)
I honestly don't know whether or how Google might pull Youtube into profitability tho I do know they're losing money on it ATM, according to reports. Actually, since I adblock, if the suggestion is true I'm making them lose even MORE money. It doesn't matter particularly to me either way, however, because as I've explained in my adblocking story comments, while I realize the Internet world would change significantly if everybody adblocked and ads suddenly couldn't fund anything, I'm not at all sure it would be for the worse. Some folks would no doubt subscribe to sites for what they wanted if there weren't a dozen or a dozen hundred waiting in line to take their place, but even if that failed as well, a world where the real enthusiasts ruled, where the folks that do it with money out of their own pocket if they have to to share what they truly enjoy, instead of the folks who couldn't care less as long as they get paid in some way for it ruled as they tend to now, wouldn't/couldn't be an entirely /bad/ place! One only has to take a look at FLOSS, or indeed, all those garage bands that may haul their instruments (bought with their own money) across two states to play a few hours of tunes, in exchange for a few beers, a dinner, some applause, and not even enough money to cover the gas, to see that it can and does actually work that way, as long as money and the greed that comes with it doesn't crowd out the guy's doing it just for fun.
Meanwhile, I could certainly see myself boycotting Youtube over this... if I thought it would do anything. Most boycotts don't, really, tho some (the boycott of South Africa over Apartheid, for example) do. Using them more? In my case, maybe it would be more effective, given I don't do ads. OTOH, they can and I'm sure do still count adblocker folks in their number of vistors, so it could still add to their revenue. I don't know.
You are correct, but that's only the half of it. Ads don't tend to be aimed at actually /thinking/ people -- the advertisers prefer zombies they can program (by X repeated impressions, why else would they repeat as they do) to go buy that brand new car even tho they don't need it, and only just paid down the debt on their current car to the point it's now actually worth more than they owe on it. They want the fat ass they can program to continue to upsize the drink and add their deep-fried (fat) bacon (more fat) and cheese (more fat) potatoes (starch) to their fat dripping burger with fat-based mayo and cheese (more fat), that can then be programmed to buy the gym membership to burn off some of that fat because instead of biking to work they drive that new car that they just bought, all based on ads programming them to buy stuff they don't need and would be better off without.
I've become convinced that's actually why the ads are so repulsive to thinking people. Not only are they not the target in the first place, but an actual thinking person is harder to please as a customer. They'll ask too many questions, demand too much for their money, or become offended, and everybody knows the LAST thing sellers want is offended customers telling others about it. Better some zombie they can continue to program how good the product is after they bought it by continued ads!
Think about it! How else could ads possibly justify their cost -- but obviously they do, with at least some segment of the population! They convince easily programmed zombies that they NEED stuff they don't (or people would by buying without the ads), paid for with credit (more ads!), which is money they don't have, but can "rent" for a "small" fee! If people actually needed it, the ads wouldn't do any good!
Now, think what kind of person with what kind of ethics and what kind of care for their fellow man it takes to be in the ad business!
"Oh, but the poor site owners might go bankrupt without the ad revenue!" Yeah, and the million-dollar-lip-syncers and scandalous actors might disappear along with the **AA if we refuse to continue to pay for recordings of performances that happened years ago, that they should have been paid for then.
Too bad, so sad! If there's one thing the FLOSS movement has demonstrated once again, if the enthusiasts web sites and music and community playhouses hadn't done a good enough job demonstrating it before, it's that there's plenty of people with plenty of talent and ideas and content out there to share, paid for it or not -- they'll even pay significant amounts out of their own pocket as hundreds of local garage bands do every time they do a gig for dinner and a few beers -- and while the world would certainly change if all the paid providers suddenly disappeared, arguably, it'd be a better place for it if the only folks left doing it were doing it for the love of the subject, not the love of money!
Wow! The educational power of youtube! I'm a Bach fan too. Thanks for the link!
You are correct about the access from the computer, but in that case, it's the host operating system's (presumably MS OS or OS licensed, not TomTom's problem in any case) code on the computer that's doing the LFN access. The USB mass storage protocol is setup so it's all host system in that case, and any TomTom software running on the computer is simply using the host system's filesystem code. No patent violation there, at least not on TomTom's part.
The problem is only when the files are accessed from the device itself (not from the host computer when connected via USB), and then (apparently) only if the LFNs are written. Apparently, the on-device software doesn't have a file dialog or similar UI that exposes filenames at all, so if the device writes to the FAT filesystem at all, it's entirely outside the view of the user, and thus, if it does happen to be using long filenames, it can be changed without affecting the user experience at all.
This is apparently what they've agreed to do, if indeed they were writing LFNs at all. Regardless, however, apparently the kernel they shipped was configured with the (generic Linux vfat module) ability to write LFNs, regardless of whether they were actually using that ability /for/ anything or not. They now have to configure that /out/ of the kernel they ship, so it doesn't even have the ability to write LFNs. Thus, they avoid having to license that patent, and avoid triggering the kernel's GPLv2 "live free or die" clause in the process.
TomTom's problem wasn't FAT, the 8.3 filename version, but LFN aka VFAT, and AFAIK, reading them isn't covered, only writing. The MS patents are specifically on the long file name stuff, apparently only on writing, and any patents on the original 8.3 format will have expired by now. Since with USB it's the host that controls the writing, TomTom's window of patent vulnerability on that particular patent is quite small anyway, and it's entirely possible to avoid infringement, especially since from all reports I've seen the TomTom devices themselves don't expose the filenames they are working with.
It's actually quite possible that TomTom wasn't actually using the LFN code anyway, but was simply shipping it as it was configured in their default Linux kernel load. As such, it should be fairly trivial to simply avoid turning on that option, and if necessary, rewriting any other code that they had internally that expected the LFN so it works with the 8.3 name.
Thus, the case never really was about the FAT LFN patents in the first place. It was simply one more arrow in the legal quiver that MS unloaded on TomTom. It was the other patents, including the broad mobile computer mounted in a car patent and a couple of the navigation patents, at issue.
That's why it's possible for TomTom to take the easy way out of this one. The GPL "live free or die" clause need not be invoked since they can simply toggle off the VFAT functionality (and if necessary entirely patch the code out of what they ship) in their shipping kernels, and they can license the other patents without triggering the "live free or die" clause since their userspace code didn't need covered under the GPL.
AFAIK, it works this way. No, they can't force you to do the logging. But they are very helpful and can be pretty persuasive, too. If you don't have a box that can do the logging, they helpfully provide one... one that's NOT named "Carnivore", that does NOT collect anything but the information they have an order to collect, "honest".
Under those sorts of conditions what would you do? Would you suddenly find you had the equipment to log the ordered information after all, or would you provide the entire feed for their box to log "only the ordered information on only the ordered person, honest"?
And that was BEFORE 9/11, the (anti-)PATRIOT Bill, etc.
FWIW, I was once on an ISP that didn't log downloads. At one point there was a troublesome (performance-wise) "mystery hop" added to the routing to the news server, that the normally friendly news admin couldn't talk about. A few months later, the routing changed once again and the hop disappeared. Some of us regulars had our suspicions, but of course that's what they remained.
AACCKKK, slashdot now kills moderation even if you check the post annon box! So much for modding THIS story!
I guess one has to post using another not-logged-in browser if one is moderating, now. I wish I had known that before I posted the above as AC, I'd have just posted regularly. Well, at least /. is giving more modpoints now. I got 15 this time instead of the usual 5, so the couple lost modpoints don't hurt quite so badly. But unnecessarily posting a comment as AC that's useful enough a lot of folks can probably use, does!
Oh, well...
According to TFA, which I read at Ars earlier, they will specifically NOT be logging. So billing records, sure, but logging, no -- at least not pre-case. At least in the US (which this is not, what laws apply there I don't know), the service provider can be ordered to keep logs on a specific account, given sufficient cause. Originally the provider could demand a warrant (whether they did or not was of course up to them, the AOLs of the world infamously did NOT), but of course the (non-)Patriot Act did away with that and the Bush admin pushed even further, with fallout still winding its way thru the courts and the Obama admin justice dept. unfortunately often siding with the Bush admin justice dept. arguments.
So while general logging may not be the case, individual logging must be assumed as possible by anyone using the service, at least beyond whatever reaction period might be necessary to actually get such an order.
You're correct, tho I'd not put it in quite those terms.
It's important to remember that for the most part, the FLOSS (Free/libre and open source software) community is composed of volunteers. While few would have the crass my way or no way reaction you suggest, the point is that there's always other things a good coder could be working on, always a dozen other projects he's interested in too, competing for his attention, and when motivation on a particular one he's spending a lot of time on goes down, so, ultimately, does his level of contribution to that project.
Thus the effect in practice is the same even if the reasons given differ. If a project doesn't closely enough follow a dev's ideals, he'll be less committed to it, and there's always more projects competing for his time and interest than he has time and interest to give anyway, so his participation by defining characteristic ultimately goes down as well. Thus, form a combined KDE/GNOME/XFCE/whatever, and the loss of interest will almost certainly mean it progresses little if any faster than each of the projects is doing on its own, now. At the same time, the competitiveness and copying of great ideas from one to the other will decrease as well, and Linux and larger FLOSS (including the freedomware BSDs and OpenSolaris) community will suffer not only the loss of variety, but the loss of internal competitive pressure and innovation it now has, with little if any gain in trade.
Meanwhile, there's actually quite a decent amount of cooperation and standard setting going on as it is. The freedesktop.org effort has standardized a quite a lot in the last few years, including among other things both *.desktop file format and the dbus interprocess communication protocol, both of which now are a common format used by both desktops. xorg itself is now a freedesktop.org project too, and there are continuing efforts in other areas. Where it makes sense, there's common standards, with each desktop having its own implementation, bringing its own flavor to the standard, while allowing a much higher level of cooperation than before, and apps from the one desktop that fit into the scheme configured for the other, or for both. It is in fact rather sad that the original "I have a dream" poster didn't mention these efforts at all.
No kidding.
I'm honestly not sure it still applies to KDE in the 4.x era, but at least in the 3.x era, the philosophies were quite different. Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that /like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
The point is, forcing the devs and users who find the one policy most useful to follow the other one, surely is effective... at causing useless squabbles and getting nothing done! Keep the "there's only one true way" folks away from the "make it configurable for everyone" folks, and both types can continue to improve their product without getting in the way of each other.
Similarly of course with all the other "Linux is too divided" debates, from too many distributions, to vi/emacs, to... whatever. It's a free community and part of the strength therein lies in the freedom. Even if it were possible to take away that freedom to create one's own product, there'd be little point, as were it to happen, we'd just end up back with the monopolistic monstrosity that is MS. One size does NOT fit all, and encouraging differentiation and innovation, certainly based on common standards, but /only/ /based/ on common standards, is a /good/ thing.
That said, the one thing that does keep the Linux community from incompatibly splitting up much like the proprietary Unix community did is again, that it's all open and shared. Each distribution and individual app therefore has an interest not only in doing what it was created for really well, even if that splits from the community, but ALSO in following the common solution where it really doesn't matter for what it was created for, because every deviation from the common solution costs maintenance time and resources, time and resources that could otherwise be invested in bettering either the differentiating aspects further, or in advancing the common ones. In practice this dynamic ensures that individual solutions only diverge from the common where it really matters to them, because every divergence costs resources, and divergence just for the sake of it is thus less efficient and dies out relatively quickly, compared to those who focus resources on divergence only where it directly furthers their goals and on otherwise bettering the common solution, submitting patches upstream, etc. Thus, unlike the proprietary Unix solutions, divergence for the sake of divergence simply isn't efficient enough to survive, and ultimately dies. But where there's a good reason for divergence, that only serves to drive a sharper focus on bettering the different solutions that remain, driving the evolution of the community as a whole even faster.
(Umm... (looking around) I guess it's pretty obvious that I'm a "True Believer" (tm), isn't it. Yes, I am, and for that I'm not going to apologize! =:^)
I am impressed that Torvalds knows about this issue, and credo to him for raising people's awareness.
There's rather more community history behind it than that. The below is from memory based on various coverage I read on LWN and the like, but not fact-checked to be positive my memory is correct, so verify before acting on it as fact.
I believe it was at the annual linux.conf.au, tho I'm not sure but it was some such conference, widely attended by Linux kernel hackers, that the presentation was made. There was apparently a fairly big charity pledge drive related to the issue, with many of the kernel hackers taking part. Various ones of them, in addition to pledging their own money, pledged various acts should the conference pledge drive reach whatever goal ($10K, maybe?).
Well, the pledge drive was quite a success, and the various hackers either have or are in the process of fulfilling their various promises as a result. One of the ones that made Linux hacker community (and LWN) headlines was Bdale Garbee's pledge, to shave his beard. He hadn't been beardless in, I think, well over a decade (15 years? longer?). There was an LWN article on it with a photo (taken I believe at the closing ceremony or traditional post-conference party) of Linus as barber, doing the honors! =:^)
That's actually how I first heard about the whole thing, seeing that photo and reading the accompanying article. But apparently Linus' own pledge was to name a kernel version after the Tazmanian Devil. But he has actually gone one better, changing the logo for .29 as well as the name.
This logo, BTW, is the one the kernel framebuffer driver optionally displays at the top of the screen during boot, if the framebuffer is activated and the config option set to do so. There's a single logo displayed for every CPU/core, so my dual dual-core Opteron displays a nice row of four such logos. I can only imagine the row of 32 of the things on say a quad-socket oct-core machine. =:^)
Anyway, I've been running a kernel compiled directly from git for a few months now (switching to the stable series between release and rc2 or so, only running mainline git between rc2 and release), and am currently running:
$uname -r
2.6.29-rc8-223-ga1e4ee2
So I've had the pleasure of seeing four of these little beasties at boot for a week or so, now. =:^)
Anyway, it's not just Linus. It's the entire kernel hacker community that got involved, thanks to linux.conf.au. =:^)
All that said, while I obviously knew more about the Linux/kernel community side of things and had a bit of general awareness from that, I hadn't bothered reading up on the disease itself until taking the opportunity to click that nice wikipedia link you so thoughtfully provided. Now I know a bit more about it, and am hopefully returning the favor with the above info on the Linux community side of things.
OK, I did an LWN search and here's some relevant links, so folks can fact-check what I wrote above, as well as quote something more authoritative than just some /. post.
LWN 2.6.29 kernel announcement (mentions the code name):
http://lwn.net/Articles/325047/
That points to Linus' actual announcement (LKML announcement as seen on LWN):
http://lwn.net/Articles/325048/
The kernel gets a new logo (a comment links the actual git commit by Rusty Russel):
http://lwn.net/Articles/323966/
Beardless Bdale (It'd be interesting to see the stats for this one as related to the Linus in a swimsuit one, I think also linux.conf.au from a few years ago, dunk tank FWIW, see below.)
http://lwn.net/Articles/316282/
(FWIW, LCA/linux.conf.au, correct. AU$35-40K raised according to "beardless". With the awareness brought by 2.6.29 related publicity, hopefully much more
To argue that propping up Windows (or anything artificially, considering the bailouts) for its own sake is like arguing you create jobs by hiring 100 people to digg ditches and another 100 to filling them.
Actually, hiring people to dig ditches and then fill them is done all the time (especially where ditch-witch type machines are too expensive to be viable), and it's anything /but/ the do-nothing you propose. You just put a pipe in, or lay a foundation in, or whatever, before you have the second group come along and fill the ditch!
As for the MS, or any proprietary/slavery-ware for that matter, my sig makes plain enough my position on that.
Probably because Bi-Mart is smaller, a membership-store, and NW regional-only. I last even thought of them about a decade and a half ago when I lived in the area, but I just googled them, and their website (bimart.com) says even now, they have 70 locations, all in the northwest (US, Washington/Oregon/Idaho, apparently only, according to the website), and stresses the membership-only (or guest of member, tho membership is open to all, it's $5, so not free, which limits the walk-in-and-browse aspect) aspect.
That's OK for a limited regional store, but it's nothing like the national chains mostly being discussed here. Seattle or Portland are probably their biggest metro service areas, so even for a regional store they're not going to be that well known, as there's no presence in any of the bigger California or eastern seaboard metro areas. Of course, that's not even mentioning the international aspect, give the number of /. readers in Europe or otherwise elsewhere than the US.
Not to say it's not a formula that doesn't work, as it obviously has, since they opened the first store in 1955 in someone's garage, and second in 1962 in Eugene, Or, now their corporate HQ (all again from the website), but they're still small potatoes on a site as big and widely read as /., where the question seems about like asking about the friendly neighborhood no-name convenience store. Maybe in another 20 or 50 years, if they continue growing (tho I'm not sure what their recent growth rate has been, when did they hit 50 stores, say? 1980, or 2002, and is 70 as big as they've ever been or are they actually shrinking now? given 70 stores now, that'd say a lot more about activity in the current century).
Snotsdale resident?
I actually live in 'slope, within sight of JCLincoln Hospital. True enough many of my neighbors speak Spanish, but one of the great things about it is that the cable node is mostly CATV, few enough CHSI users that I don't think I've /ever/ had node congestion issues. Speeds are always very the label on the box, as long as the host at the other end can handle it. =:^) And DSL is available too... provided you can ever get the trained monkeys the telco calls techs to get it installed correctly.
The N Phoenix Fry's isn't bad. Location-wise for the public-transit users, it's right on a bus route (27) that stops at the Metro Center transit station, which is well connected enough many can do it with just that single transfer, which allows stops at Metro Center too. (I used to check Best Buy and CompUSA at Metro Center, then catch Frys, which always had a MUCH better selection and competitive prices. Too bad CompUSA died and BB moved, /they're/ the ones with a bad public transit location, now.)
I've never has problems with broken stuff from Fry's either, even when I buy the mildly discounted returned-item stock. That may be because I do reasonable checks in-store if it's returned, and sometimes I'll pass up the return/discounted stuff if it doesn't look good or would be more hassle to return if broken than the discount is worth. Part of that may be luck, but part of that is decent computer literacy too, I think. Before the N Phoenix location opened I was called in to look at a number of friend's systems where they'd gotten something at Fry's that didn't work, and honestly, I had a rather poor opinion of them based on that back then. But looking back, I think much of that may well have been computer illiteracy on the part of the purchaser. Not knowing what they were buying and how to treat it, maybe dropping the hard drive before installation (or buying a return that may have been dropped, I'd probably stay away from hard drive returns for that reason), etc. I've had absolutely no problems with what I've bought at Fry's.
But even before CompUSA closed and Best Buy moved, I was buying more and more of my stuff either online, or at Fry's, and now it's pretty much /just/ those two. I had to go online for my dual socket Opteron mobo as Fry's didn't get /that/ exotic, and I generally buy memory, CPUs, etc, online as well, because while Fry's has them, it's simply a fact that no brick and mortar is likely to touch online pricing for that sort of stuff. But for the same machine I bought the powersupply (complete with semi-exotic power cable connector since it was for a dual socket Opteron board) at Fry's, the price difference vs online after shipping just wasn't enough to hassle the delivery, and I bought all four of my latest monitors at Frys. (Refurbished 22" Viewsonic CRT and 21" Dell CRT a few years ago as they finally came into budget range, $400 and $200 respectively, then upgraded to identical dual 24" Optiquest 1920x1200 LCDs, $350 each pre-rebate IIRC, last summer, after /they/ dropped into budget range.)
BTW, 22" CRTs in the box can be a bit of a challenge to get home on the bus, thru one bus transfer even, but I managed. =:^) Suffice it to say I was glad I didn't have to do a return on /that/ one!
Meanwhile, Circuit City ultimately never seemed worth the trouble going in there, even a decade and a half ago, and I probably hadn't even been in there in a decade. They were significantly higher priced, and while service, etc, can make up for that, when I gave the sales guys a chance to work for their commission (which they still got at that time) and explain to me why I should pay X dollars and Y percent more to buy it there than at the competition, they couldn't come up with an answer that satisfied me. Basically, by the time I was prepared to buy I was already informed enough on what I wanted (and its competitive price point) that they didn't offe