Keep in mind that if the government is picking up the tab, in the end the end user (the citizen) is paying, since he or she pays taxes. In the proposal you cite, the government merely becomes a middleman.
Your gut reaction may be to say "so what, you are merely arguing semantics," but keep in mind that it is far easier to sneak cost increases into government budgets than it is to raise the price of a product at the local supermarket.
How long until these "symbolic fees" become less symbolic and more concrete, and taxes are raised accordingly. With precedent on the publishers side ("after all, the government has been paying these fees for years") any court challenge by the government, or the people, would presumably face an uphill battle.
Everyone seems content with that, so it will probably pass as a law.
That is the most insidious danger of such a ruse. Everyone is content, because it doesn't appear to affect them immediately. The publisher's can take away a right the people have had for decades if not longer (the ability to lend and borrow books free of charge), begin gouging them via the taxes they already pay. Publishers become a subsidized industry, enjoying both a government enforced monopoly on their products and a government underwritten revinue stream paid for by the taxpayer, whether or not they use the product and irrespective of whether or not they agree to it.
It has come to our attention that the common household telephone has been a key component in numerous crimes, including plots to commit murder, kidnapping, acts of sedition, treason, and, yes, terrorism.
The threat to Our Great Nation (tm) is unacceptable. I hereby call for our congressmen to enact legislation as quickly as possible to eliminate this threat to Our Democracy (tm) and the Wellbeing of Our Children (tm) by banning any and all use of the telephone by unauthorized persons anywhere.
It is critical we do this quickly, lest the Bin Ladens of the world abuse Their Liberties (tm) take More Innocent Lives (tm). Remember, if you want A Safe And Secure America (tm) you must be willing to give up a few personal liberties. You didn't really need them anyway, did you?
I purchased Applix 5.0 several months ago and use it regularly. It is excellent for spread sheets and document editing, and can import and export to many, many formats including most if not all of those obsceneties foisted upon us by Microsoft.
The company is looking to sell the division, not kill the product, indeed, they said as much (follow the next link, search on string "VistaSource Response") in the last round of round of rumor mongering here at slashdot.
There are no plans to discontinue Applix, just to sell it. As with any sale, this may or may not kill the product, depending on whome it is sold to. Even if the product were to be bought (by, say Microsoft) and subsequently killed, the capability to export to so many different file formats makes exporting spreadsheets, documents, etc. into a format something else (like K-office, gnome office, or whatever) understands easy to do.
When one of the open source (read: unkillable) projects reaches the same level of stability, interoperability, and polished design I will consider switching, but until then I find Applix 5.0 an excellent choice for doing my office related stuff without rebooting into Windoze (and much prefer it to the other suite which began its life as a commercial product, namely StarOffice).
It depends on your definition of "won" and "lost."
If your definition is, who was legitimately chosen by the American people, then according to the presse's recount, Gore won Florida handilly by any recount standard (save that which allows only machine recounts and thereby propogates systemic errors such systems entail, with no possible check or balance).
The Usurper, George W. Bush, is in office because of a supreme court willing to throw the constitutional process to the wind in order to pay back political favors 7 of the 9 justices owed the Republicans in general and the Reagan/Bush/W faction in particular.
By the "democratic" definition George W. Bush and the GOP lost, resoundingly.
Now, if you define victory as he who assumes power by whatever means then, yes, The Usurper won, just as Milosevic won (until recently), just as Stalin won, just as Idi Amin won.
The problem with accepting such a nondemocratic outcome without complaint is that it encourages future such actions by one or the other party. It is important for us, the people (who were the only real losers in the last election), to be in the Usurper's face, to call him such to his face and make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that we know what he did, that he is illegitimate, and that he'd better not even think of trying to shove his right wing agenda down our unwilling throats unless he wants to face widespread, vocal, and disruptive discontent.
The alternative is to encourage both parties to rely on increasingly undemocratic means to subvert the electorial process, until the behavior becomes so outrageious and so eggregious that people do rise up in violent reaction, which is the last thing any sane mind would want. Far better to voice our discontent loudly now and strongly discourage any such future behavior on the part of either party.
Be sheeple and lose your democracy, be a vocal, nominally free citizen, and at least you have a chance, however small, of preserving it.
I had the same thing happen, where a root partition filled up with invisible data no files could account for, until a reinstall was required. XFS, in contrast, has never suffered from this. While XFS is beta, I have found it to be better behaved than reiser in this respect, and rock solid thus far.
Don't get me wrong, I like both reiser and XFS (haven't tried ext3 yet), but why reiser should make it into the kernel and XFS not, given my personal experiences which would indicate that, if anything, the opposite order of inclusion would have been more warranted, is beyond me.
There must be other technical and/or political issues involved of which I am unaware. It is, however, no big deal, since the XFS CVS tree is simple enough to download and works great, so while it is less convinient than having it in the official tree would be, and arguably unfair, the decision by no means denies me my own freedom of choice, which, in the end, is what running Linux is all about.
It's time for the U.S. Congress to debate the privacy issue and make some real reforms.
There is really nothing to debate, from the point of view of either the people or congress.
We the people know we should have privacy, and that the practice of selling our personal data without our explicit permission (for each and every sale individually) should be illegal, with penalties containing some real bite, including heavy fines and jail time for the offendors. There is really little if anything to debate.
Likewise, on the congressional side, members of both parties have whored themselves out to their campaign contributors (not just their personal campaigns, but to those who contribute large sums of soft money to their party's funds). Present among these in no small number are the very firms who make so much money at our expense, selling our privacy at wholesale rates to whomever comes their way. So there is nothing for them to debate: they aren't going to turn around and screw those who pay them so well.
Now, there is reason for a boistrous debate between congresses position and that of the people, but alas, since congress makes the laws, and the people have such a short attention span that they need have little fear of voter backlash for ignoring us, it is unlikely that the poeple would win such a debate in anything more than an abstract and theoretical way.
The only thing government truly fears are masses in the street, protesting, day after day, week after week. The only reason they fear this is because such actions represent the clearly implied threat of "shape up or face a toppled government or, worse, armed revolt."
Unfortunately, we the American people have been indoctrinated for thirty years that protesting is "stupid," "uncool," "pointless," "ineffective," and even "counter productive." None of this is true, of course, but it is almost universally beleieved. This makes it hard to get people on the street for issues they do care about in large numbers. Doing so day after day, week after week, for a period long enough to effect real change in policy, has become next to impossible.
Add to that that both The Usurper and his erstwhile opponent, Al Gore, as well as our previous president, Bill Clinton, all persue equally reprehensible policies when it comes to encryption, privacy, search and seizure, and consumer rights in general. While the Usurper is shoving his right wing agenda down our collective throats and taking actions which will probably ignite a new cold war and thereby benefit the bottom line of numerous defense companies who have him in their pocket (against the express will of the American people as the, mostly unreported, press conducted recount has demonstrated), it should be noted that, with respect to the issues most important to the technical community, such as privacy, freedom of speach, and intellectual property, Ralph Nader was indeed correct in saying that the only difference between Al Gore and The Usurper is the speed with which their knees hit the ground when in the presence of their corporate paymasters.
Mandrake has been shipping with an (experimental prerelease) 2.4 for some time now, though it defaults to 2.2.17.
Debian is also mucking with 2.4, and I'm sure other distros are to.
I am using 2.4 in a couple of production environments that benefit from the multithreaded ip stack, under Mandrake 7.2. Everything is fine as long as you do not compile devfs into the kernel... it happilly coexists with the current Mandrake distro, and quite probably with other distros as well.
One caveat... do not run 2.4.0 under Mandrake 7.2 on any NFS clients. There is a bug/incompatability which causes periodic hangs on the client side under 2.4, hangs which only recover with a reboot (which itself usually hangs and requires a reset). This may be an incompatability between the Mandrake nfs utilities and the 2.4 NFS implimentation... I've only looked at it casually, as none of the machines I'm serious about running 2.4 on use NFS.
The other caveat is ieee1394 -- there was a bug in the drivers in 2.4 which has been fixed, so if you want to use dvgrab to capture via firewire download the cvs version of the drivers, install into the 2.4 tree, and recompile.
We need to strongly promote a word or phrase that implies that that person is not one that hacks to undermine a system, but to learn and possibly improve a product.
Does anyone recall the term used for the engineers/hackers in the "Marooned in Realtime" SciFi series? (I don't have the books here at work).
Something like "tweakers" or "tinkerers" I think.
Tinkerer would be an excellent word to promote... it describes exactly what is being done, has no negative connotations, and could apply equally to hardware, software, genetic-ware, nano-ware, or what have you.
My 2 cents...
Re:2GB Limit very easy to bump into
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2.2 vs 2.4
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So how is your experience with XFS? Is it stable?
I've only been using it for a couple of weeks, so I cannot state this with the kind of certainty a few month's experience would grant, but thus far it has been very solid and very fast.
I have been really pleased with it. I actually prefer it over reiser, though reiser is also quite nice. I did have some issues with reiser under Mandrake 7.1... root disk usage growing without any corresponding files, which must have been a bug in the journalling. Nothing like that has happened with XFS, and XFS does support huge numbers of files, huge filesizes, etc. I like having the choice of both, and I do not want to diss either one, but right now my preference leans toward XFS.
I'll be able to comment on the stability with more certainty in a month or two, after I've been using XFS (at work and at home) and beating up on it a while longer
2GB Limit very easy to bump into
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2.2 vs 2.4
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How clueless can this guy be ? If someone went to such great lengths to defeat the 2gb limit, then I'm pretty sure it's because it's been a problem for a while. Uncompressed video comes to mind [...]
You don't even have to reach that far. Compressed video easilly grows to larger than 2 gb for any non-trivial project. For example, I used dvgrab to capture multiple small video clips[1] from my ieee1394 sony trv-900 camcorder and media converter (sony), then edited them together into a 25 minute home video. This is all using compressed DV format, which is small enough that captures work perfectly fine in realtime to ATA33 IDE drives (unlike traditional analog captures which demand much faster drives because the quantity of data is so much greater).
25 minutes of video, even in 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 compressed DV format, is way bigger than 2 GB.
My solution was to upgrade to kernel 2.4.0 (which is easy to do with Mandrake 7.2, as long as you do not compile in devfs support) with the ieee1394 fixes. I opted to use SGI's XFS filesystem (which rocks) but to get around the 2GB limit upgrading to 2.4.0 was sufficient (ext2 and reiser both worked fine for test files of about 5.5 GB in size).
[1]This is a limiting bug in dvgrab which segfaults at around 900MB, but works fine in "looping" mode with filesizes 900MB.
That's ridiculous! I'm sure no copyright court would consider menu prompts and little sentences explaining what a dialog does as containing any significant expressive content, and therefore copyright law does not apply, and therefore the GPL would not apply, even if they had started with the GPL version, which they didn't.
If that is true, then the same may be said of Suse's restrictive license. Put another way, "I'm sure no copyright court would consider menu prompts and little sentences explaining what a dialog does as containing any significant expressive content, and therefore copyright law does not apply, and therefore Suse's license would not apply, even if they had started with Sun's proprietary version, which they did."
However, what is relevant IMO is that copyright law forbids the copyright owner from determining how the user can use their product once they have legally acquired a copy of it. Therefore, I can use their localisation on Windows, because their licence is invalid under international copyright law.
Another interesting point. Two strikes against the enforceability of this license (if true).
BTW, IANAL
Me either. Any lawyers care to step up to the plate and confirm or refute these notions? What PhilHibbs says appears reasonable on the face of it... but the law is often not as reasonable as one would expect...
If however Suse's license really is unenforceably it would be nice to get that out in the open as soon as possible, so that those in the Czech Republic have more freedom of choice sooner rather than later.
Copyright Violation the last reason I'd use DVD-R
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Jobs Plays It Frank
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First, I am not a particular fan of Apple or Macintosh, and have never used PPC Linux (though I'm open to the idea).
up until now, mastering DVDs (that can play on consumer-level players) has been prohibitivly expensive. now Apple has made this available to a huge market for a measly $3500. i personally know many people at advertising agencies and training firms that would love to put their material on DVD as opposed to VHS, but have been holding off until the price comes out of the stratosphere
Here you hit the nail right on the head. Copying DVDs is very uninteresting (except for my legally purchased copy of Galaxy Quest given to me for xmas, in which I'd like to incorporate the "cutting room floor scenes" into the main movie, a "FreeUser's Cut" if you will). BUT I have a lot of footage I've taken over the years which I'd like to do some NLE on and then save to DVD, with english subtitles on portions in languages most of my friends don't speak.
Then there is the recording of television broadcasts direct to hard drive via a sony media converter, which I can then edit the commercials out of, save to DVD, and put in my video library. I would never buy each and every episode of Babylon 5, but if I can simply record and burn them, four episodes to a disk, I'd much rather do that than use Hi-8 or VHS, or even miniDV (which is also susceptible to dropouts over time).
Recordable DVD is way, way overdue, and I may well run out and buy a high end G4 when it hits the street. In fact, I would have done so already, if I could have had it shipped overnight instead of in "7-10 weeks" according to applestore.com.
Specifically, read the partition howto, the man pages for fdisk, and the lilo/grub man/info pages. A good documentation reference point for Linux in general (including links to all the HOWTOs, etc. is the Linux Documentaiton Project.
I have used reiserfs successfully with both grub and lilo, running Mandrake 7.2.
As an aside, I have also used SGI's XFS (downloaded from cvs) successfully with lilo. Grub doesn't seem to like 2.4.0 at all with any filesystem type (the hang happens at the start of the kernel unpacking process and may be filesystem independent, but in any event ext2 and reiser fail equally), so I dumped it in favor of lilo for the time being and thus haven't tested it with XFS.
In short, in my experience either journalling filesystem works fine with lilo.
I am using reiser at work (and quite like it for some things), but have recently begun experimenting with SGI's xfs filesystem as well, and must say that thus far I am very, very impressed.
So impressed that, at home, I have migrated from reiserfs (the reiser 2.4.0 patch and the XFS cvs tree wouldn't coexist, though that will probably change now that reiser is in the official tree). For the video editing I'm doing XFS works very well, and the scalability is astounding!
The only thing that worries me is that SGI has commented that they "won't support competing standards" (paraphrased) if the community chooses something other than their work. While I applaud this stance in principle, I think for filesystems it is very misguided. Linux is designed to support a choice of many filesystem types, and it would be very unfortunate indeed if XFS were not among those choices. Reiser is great, ext3, JFS, etc. are probably fine, and XFS (even in beta form) is just plain awesome.
If anyone from SGI should be reading this, I hope you will not construe the inclusion of reiserfs in the official kernel tree to mean the community "has decided" on a standard, and that even if the community had, that work on XFS will continue. Hopefully, when it comes to chocies like which filesystem one prefers, there will never be a "standard," but rather a standard set of choices which will include ext2, xfs, reiser, and perhaps in the not too distant future one or two encrypted filesystems as well.
The product is called the "FireBox 400" from Procomp and is reviewed here at tom's hardware. It allows you to connect any ATA IDE device to a firewire bus... very cool.
While we should continue to fight this fight in the current standards bodies, I am forced to wonder if an "Open Hardware Standards" or "Free Hardware Standards" process shouldn't be created (perhaps using the successful IETF collaboration/contribution model), in which existing open standards could be rubber stamped as Open Hardware compliant, new standards could be created, and standards which are detrimental to Free Software, Open Source, and Open Hardware (such as DVD CSS and the proposed monstrosity this thread deals with) would be condemned as non-Open compliant.
If handled correctly, and able to garner sufficient mindshare, a condemnation from such a group could nip bad standards such as these in the bud. Hardware manufacturers whose products were "Open Hardware" compliant would almost certainly sell more than non-compliant products, particularly when it comes to fundamental components such as hard drives, cdroms, CPUs, and memory.
Has anyone, anywhere, found a shred of evidence that this story is more than vaporous misinformation?
I am considering the purchase of a powerbook for the dual purposes of NLE video editing under MacOS and as a Linux ppc laptop. However, if (and from the looks of it this is a big if) Apple is indeed suing free software projects for any reason whatsoever I do not wish to support them and will forego that particular toy indefinitely.
On the other hand, I do not wish to unfairly penalize Apple for unfounded rumors which they can hardly be faulted for.
As others have said, what gives? The broken link on such an inflammatory story (and an apparent absence of corraborating information anywhere) is truly a new low in slashdot editorial standards.
censorship ineffective and counter-productive
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Nazis on Napster
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As much as I am against censorship of the Internet, the sad reality in a country where democracy is not as stable as in the U.S. (true only for East Germany which lived under fascist and stalinist dictatorship from 1933 to 1990) makes me wonder whether libertarian truisms will help.
The problem is as much social as political. The neo-nazis were able to instill themselves into the youth culture by tapping into their hitherto repressed national identity (remember that communism subsumed national identity in the satelite nations to the "world communist revolution"), their discontent, and the youthful rebelliousness that is a trait of every generation.
The solution is to offer an alternative that is equally rebellious, allows expression of one's discontent, etc. Not an easy task, but doable. Remember, what's cool in 2000 will look terribly dated in 2010 -- unless nothing is present to displace what was big in 2000.
Censorship just makes neo-nazism appear even cooler in the eyes of the rebellious (which is a huge chunk of any youthful generation) -- how many people here downloaded DeCSS because of efforts to ban it, but have never even bothered to unpack the tarball? I have, multiple times in multiple locations, as I'm sure many thouands of others did. The same phenomenon is true of neo-nazi music (and most things in life, actually) -- ban it and it flourishes all the more. Don't ban it, but speak out against it and emphesize how uncool, idiotic, unsophisticated, and passe it is (come on, the philosophy was a dead end sixty years ago!), and while you won't eliminate it it will lose much of its luster and return to its status of a psychotic fringe element (which every society has and most manage to cope with reasonably well) while the youthful masses move on to the new, cool thing (whatever that is).
Censorship isn't just wrong. It is ineffective, counterproductive, and bought at far too high a cost.
While we're at it, we should require certain types of laws, ie ones that stomp on our constitution, to garner a 2/3 vote in both the house and senate instead of just a majority.
We already have that, plus the added requirement that 3/4 of the states ratify such a "law." It is called amending the constitution, which, as any law which "stomps on our constitution" must, be definition, be a constitutional amendment, is a pretty good safeguard.
The problem is that congress and the president (irrespective of party affiliation), and increasingly the courts as well, play it very fast and loose with the constitution and even ignore it altogether when public opinion is sufficiently strong (currently forfeiture laws wrt the war on drugs, free speech wrt child pornography, historically upholding segregation for decades, etc. etc.)
What we need is for a government which actually adheres to the constitution. However, a very useful stopgap would be a measure/amendment requiring riders to be directly related to the bill's main subject.
I've used 4.0.1 on the following cards with excellent success (testing xinerama at work, etc.)
Note that I have not used 3d acceleration with these boards (my employer has no need of that feature so I did not spend time configuring/testing it, and it is mutually exclusive with xinerama, which we do need).
Guillemot (Hercules) Couger PCI (Nvidia TNT2/M64)
G400 dual head
G400 dual head/digital extention
G450 dual head
G200 single head (agp & pci)
Matrox Millenium II
Voodoo3
Various ATI cards (I can no longer recall the specific models)
FB-dev with kernel frame buffer support
However, I fried an SGI 1600SW monitor trying to get a quad head digital DVI G200 card to work with the multilink adapter -- I believe hardware was more responsible for this than X, but as I never saw an image (and won't risk another monitor trying to get it to work) I cannot say for certain.
We have been using XFree 4.0.1 in production systems (single headed config) for some time with good success. Xinerama will probably be deployed in a few months, perhaps even weeks depending on demand, after some more testing.
A final word on the upgrade question. I would say that, if you absolutely must have a stable system, then upgrading to the latest version of X, no matter how good the release is, is a bad idea.. Wait a few weeks while others try it out, or try it out yourself on a less critical system. Don't be one of the first to upgrade on a system which must be stable -- let others uncover any bugs/work arounds first, then upgrade once a sufficient body of knowledge/consensus exists as to the quality of the release.
I suspect you will find 4.0.2 up to your needs, but be a little patient and wait until you can be reasonably sure before upgrading.
NPR apparently helped toss FUD at this bill. [...] I've always been a huge fan of NPR and PBS subsidies...hmmmm. Mebbe it's time to put pen to paper and let them know they've turned off at least one loyal listener.
I too will no longer be making any donations whatsoever to PBS. Let them rot for supporting such legislation
If each administrative domain could maintain its own key-signing/authentication service, then at least enterprises, ISPs, and the like could provide solid security between their own systems. Contact between such entities could be preceeded by "out-of-band" authentication or exchange of keys (e.g. something like a PGP key signing party, a phone call, or an exchange of keys signed by a trusted third party).
The flexibility of the current approach could be maintained, with added levels of trust ranging from completely secure to completely open to "man-in-the-middle" attack.
There is still the possibility of abuse, however, as the "trusted third party" (particularly in the case of ISPs) could easilly be subverted by a law enforcement or spook agency into signing counterfeit keys. Indeed, they could legally be required to do so with legislation akin to the wiretapping laws requiring phone companies to provide technical facilities that facilitate evesdropping by law enforcement on demand.
If you don't run an ftp server, and a telnet server then you can't have people using unencrypted protocols. But people insist on running these protocols.
Sometimes it is the users, particularly those users with authority over you (like the ones who sign your paycheck). If they demand a service despite your protestations that the service in question compromises security, you are left with little choice but to provide the service knowing full well that it creates a security hole in your network, or look for a new job. In this case it is the user's fault, not the administrator's whose advice is being ignored or overridden.
That being said, you make an excellent point. The first thing anyone should do when building a new system is install ssh (including sshd) and disable telnet and ftp (on Linux/Unix: comment out the two entries in/etc/inetd.conf, then either reboot or kill -1 [pid] where [pid] is the process id of the inetd daemon).
As we've seen in this article, running ssh isn't a panacea, but it is a hell of a lot better than using no encryption at all
OK. But a CD player is called on only to do a small number of tasks. Most cd player apps for computers duplicate a similar interface. I think the issue becomes how you handle more complex stuff.
Who is to say that a command line driven cd player wouldn't be better (or a better example, a cd jukebox or mp3 player with lots of storage).
Pushing icons one after another would imho be far more cumbersome than simply typing (or saying)
mp3> play all songs by Nirvana in random order followed by the predefined mix entitled "punk-party mix", then around 2:30 AM switch to the predifined mix entitled "bach-piano-concertos"
The challenge is to devise a command line language that is both intuitive and powerful -- such projects as the latin perl project offer some hope in this regard.
The command line has gotten a very bum rap, primarilly because no thought went into devising a coherent language. Instead cl languages have consisted of a small collection of arbitary commands, akin to the grunts and gestures of our cave dwelling ancesters.
I find it more than a little ironic that, as computers take on more and more capaabilities, the language the users uses to interact with them becomes more and more dumbed down. I suspect we are going down the path where we replace alphabets with pictograms because pictures are easier for an illiterate to grasp, only to discover that, when that same user later wishes to write a novel, they are forced to use something akin to egyption heiroglyphs in order to communicate their ideas: a writing form vastly more complex and difficult to use than the 26 letter alphabet the illiterate in question should have just learned in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that if the government is picking up the tab, in the end the end user (the citizen) is paying, since he or she pays taxes. In the proposal you cite, the government merely becomes a middleman.
Your gut reaction may be to say "so what, you are merely arguing semantics," but keep in mind that it is far easier to sneak cost increases into government budgets than it is to raise the price of a product at the local supermarket.
How long until these "symbolic fees" become less symbolic and more concrete, and taxes are raised accordingly. With precedent on the publishers side ("after all, the government has been paying these fees for years") any court challenge by the government, or the people, would presumably face an uphill battle.
Everyone seems content with that, so it will probably pass as a law.
That is the most insidious danger of such a ruse. Everyone is content, because it doesn't appear to affect them immediately. The publisher's can take away a right the people have had for decades if not longer (the ability to lend and borrow books free of charge), begin gouging them via the taxes they already pay. Publishers become a subsidized industry, enjoying both a government enforced monopoly on their products and a government underwritten revinue stream paid for by the taxpayer, whether or not they use the product and irrespective of whether or not they agree to it.
It has come to our attention that the common household telephone has been a key component in numerous crimes, including plots to commit murder, kidnapping, acts of sedition, treason, and, yes, terrorism.
The threat to Our Great Nation (tm) is unacceptable. I hereby call for our congressmen to enact legislation as quickly as possible to eliminate this threat to Our Democracy (tm) and the Wellbeing of Our Children (tm) by banning any and all use of the telephone by unauthorized persons anywhere.
It is critical we do this quickly, lest the Bin Ladens of the world abuse Their Liberties (tm) take More Innocent Lives (tm). Remember, if you want A Safe And Secure America (tm) you must be willing to give up a few personal liberties. You didn't really need them anyway, did you?
I purchased Applix 5.0 several months ago and use it regularly. It is excellent for spread sheets and document editing, and can import and export to many, many formats including most if not all of those obsceneties foisted upon us by Microsoft.
The company is looking to sell the division, not kill the product, indeed, they said as much (follow the next link, search on string "VistaSource Response") in the last round of round of rumor mongering here at slashdot.
There are no plans to discontinue Applix, just to sell it. As with any sale, this may or may not kill the product, depending on whome it is sold to. Even if the product were to be bought (by, say Microsoft) and subsequently killed, the capability to export to so many different file formats makes exporting spreadsheets, documents, etc. into a format something else (like K-office, gnome office, or whatever) understands easy to do.
When one of the open source (read: unkillable) projects reaches the same level of stability, interoperability, and polished design I will consider switching, but until then I find Applix 5.0 an excellent choice for doing my office related stuff without rebooting into Windoze (and much prefer it to the other suite which began its life as a commercial product, namely StarOffice).
It depends on your definition of "won" and "lost."
If your definition is, who was legitimately chosen by the American people, then according to the presse's recount, Gore won Florida handilly by any recount standard (save that which allows only machine recounts and thereby propogates systemic errors such systems entail, with no possible check or balance).
The Usurper, George W. Bush, is in office because of a supreme court willing to throw the constitutional process to the wind in order to pay back political favors 7 of the 9 justices owed the Republicans in general and the Reagan/Bush/W faction in particular.
By the "democratic" definition George W. Bush and the GOP lost, resoundingly.
Now, if you define victory as he who assumes power by whatever means then, yes, The Usurper won, just as Milosevic won (until recently), just as Stalin won, just as Idi Amin won.
The problem with accepting such a nondemocratic outcome without complaint is that it encourages future such actions by one or the other party. It is important for us, the people (who were the only real losers in the last election), to be in the Usurper's face, to call him such to his face and make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that we know what he did, that he is illegitimate, and that he'd better not even think of trying to shove his right wing agenda down our unwilling throats unless he wants to face widespread, vocal, and disruptive discontent.
The alternative is to encourage both parties to rely on increasingly undemocratic means to subvert the electorial process, until the behavior becomes so outrageious and so eggregious that people do rise up in violent reaction, which is the last thing any sane mind would want. Far better to voice our discontent loudly now and strongly discourage any such future behavior on the part of either party.
Be sheeple and lose your democracy, be a vocal, nominally free citizen, and at least you have a chance, however small, of preserving it.
i had tried reiser previously and it ate my disk
I had the same thing happen, where a root partition filled up with invisible data no files could account for, until a reinstall was required. XFS, in contrast, has never suffered from this. While XFS is beta, I have found it to be better behaved than reiser in this respect, and rock solid thus far.
Don't get me wrong, I like both reiser and XFS (haven't tried ext3 yet), but why reiser should make it into the kernel and XFS not, given my personal experiences which would indicate that, if anything, the opposite order of inclusion would have been more warranted, is beyond me.
There must be other technical and/or political issues involved of which I am unaware. It is, however, no big deal, since the XFS CVS tree is simple enough to download and works great, so while it is less convinient than having it in the official tree would be, and arguably unfair, the decision by no means denies me my own freedom of choice, which, in the end, is what running Linux is all about.
It's time for the U.S. Congress to debate the privacy issue and make some real reforms.
There is really nothing to debate, from the point of view of either the people or congress.
We the people know we should have privacy, and that the practice of selling our personal data without our explicit permission (for each and every sale individually) should be illegal, with penalties containing some real bite, including heavy fines and jail time for the offendors. There is really little if anything to debate.
Likewise, on the congressional side, members of both parties have whored themselves out to their campaign contributors (not just their personal campaigns, but to those who contribute large sums of soft money to their party's funds). Present among these in no small number are the very firms who make so much money at our expense, selling our privacy at wholesale rates to whomever comes their way. So there is nothing for them to debate: they aren't going to turn around and screw those who pay them so well.
Now, there is reason for a boistrous debate between congresses position and that of the people, but alas, since congress makes the laws, and the people have such a short attention span that they need have little fear of voter backlash for ignoring us, it is unlikely that the poeple would win such a debate in anything more than an abstract and theoretical way.
The only thing government truly fears are masses in the street, protesting, day after day, week after week. The only reason they fear this is because such actions represent the clearly implied threat of "shape up or face a toppled government or, worse, armed revolt."
Unfortunately, we the American people have been indoctrinated for thirty years that protesting is "stupid," "uncool," "pointless," "ineffective," and even "counter productive." None of this is true, of course, but it is almost universally beleieved. This makes it hard to get people on the street for issues they do care about in large numbers. Doing so day after day, week after week, for a period long enough to effect real change in policy, has become next to impossible.
Add to that that both The Usurper and his erstwhile opponent, Al Gore, as well as our previous president, Bill Clinton, all persue equally reprehensible policies when it comes to encryption, privacy, search and seizure, and consumer rights in general. While the Usurper is shoving his right wing agenda down our collective throats and taking actions which will probably ignite a new cold war and thereby benefit the bottom line of numerous defense companies who have him in their pocket (against the express will of the American people as the, mostly unreported, press conducted recount has demonstrated), it should be noted that, with respect to the issues most important to the technical community, such as privacy, freedom of speach, and intellectual property, Ralph Nader was indeed correct in saying that the only difference between Al Gore and The Usurper is the speed with which their knees hit the ground when in the presence of their corporate paymasters.
Mandrake has been shipping with an (experimental prerelease) 2.4 for some time now, though it defaults to 2.2.17.
... it happilly coexists with the current Mandrake distro, and quite probably with other distros as well.
... do not run 2.4.0 under Mandrake 7.2 on any NFS clients. There is a bug/incompatability which causes periodic hangs on the client side under 2.4, hangs which only recover with a reboot (which itself usually hangs and requires a reset). This may be an incompatability between the Mandrake nfs utilities and the 2.4 NFS implimentation ... I've only looked at it casually, as none of the machines I'm serious about running 2.4 on use NFS.
Debian is also mucking with 2.4, and I'm sure other distros are to.
I am using 2.4 in a couple of production environments that benefit from the multithreaded ip stack, under Mandrake 7.2. Everything is fine as long as you do not compile devfs into the kernel
One caveat
The other caveat is ieee1394 -- there was a bug in the drivers in 2.4 which has been fixed, so if you want to use dvgrab to capture via firewire download the cvs version of the drivers, install into the 2.4 tree, and recompile.
We need to strongly promote a word or phrase that implies that that person is not one that hacks to undermine a system, but to learn and possibly improve a product.
... it describes exactly what is being done, has no negative connotations, and could apply equally to hardware, software, genetic-ware, nano-ware, or what have you.
Does anyone recall the term used for the engineers/hackers in the "Marooned in Realtime" SciFi series? (I don't have the books here at work).
Something like "tweakers" or "tinkerers" I think.
Tinkerer would be an excellent word to promote
My 2 cents...
So how is your experience with XFS? Is it stable?
... root disk usage growing without any corresponding files, which must have been a bug in the journalling. Nothing like that has happened with XFS, and XFS does support huge numbers of files, huge filesizes, etc. I like having the choice of both, and I do not want to diss either one, but right now my preference leans toward XFS.
I've only been using it for a couple of weeks, so I cannot state this with the kind of certainty a few month's experience would grant, but thus far it has been very solid and very fast.
I have been really pleased with it. I actually prefer it over reiser, though reiser is also quite nice. I did have some issues with reiser under Mandrake 7.1
I'll be able to comment on the stability with more certainty in a month or two, after I've been using XFS (at work and at home) and beating up on it a while longer
How clueless can this guy be ? If someone went to such great lengths to defeat the 2gb limit, then I'm pretty sure it's because it's been a problem for a while. Uncompressed video comes to mind [...]
You don't even have to reach that far. Compressed video easilly grows to larger than 2 gb for any non-trivial project. For example, I used dvgrab to capture multiple small video clips[1] from my ieee1394 sony trv-900 camcorder and media converter (sony), then edited them together into a 25 minute home video. This is all using compressed DV format, which is small enough that captures work perfectly fine in realtime to ATA33 IDE drives (unlike traditional analog captures which demand much faster drives because the quantity of data is so much greater).
25 minutes of video, even in 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 compressed DV format, is way bigger than 2 GB.
My solution was to upgrade to kernel 2.4.0 (which is easy to do with Mandrake 7.2, as long as you do not compile in devfs support) with the ieee1394 fixes. I opted to use SGI's XFS filesystem (which rocks) but to get around the 2GB limit upgrading to 2.4.0 was sufficient (ext2 and reiser both worked fine for test files of about 5.5 GB in size).
[1]This is a limiting bug in dvgrab which segfaults at around 900MB, but works fine in "looping" mode with filesizes 900MB.
That's ridiculous! I'm sure no copyright court would consider menu prompts and little sentences explaining what a dialog does as containing any significant expressive content, and therefore copyright law does not apply, and therefore the GPL would not apply, even if they had started with the GPL version, which they didn't.
... but the law is often not as reasonable as one would expect...
If that is true, then the same may be said of Suse's restrictive license. Put another way, "I'm sure no copyright court would consider menu prompts and little sentences explaining what a dialog does as containing any significant expressive content, and therefore copyright law does not apply, and therefore Suse's license would not apply, even if they had started with Sun's proprietary version, which they did."
However, what is relevant IMO is that copyright law forbids the copyright owner from determining how the user can use their product once they have legally acquired a copy of it. Therefore, I can use their localisation on Windows, because their licence is invalid under international copyright law.
Another interesting point. Two strikes against the enforceability of this license (if true).
BTW, IANAL
Me either. Any lawyers care to step up to the plate and confirm or refute these notions? What PhilHibbs says appears reasonable on the face of it
If however Suse's license really is unenforceably it would be nice to get that out in the open as soon as possible, so that those in the Czech Republic have more freedom of choice sooner rather than later.
First, I am not a particular fan of Apple or Macintosh, and have never used PPC Linux (though I'm open to the idea).
up until now, mastering DVDs (that can play on consumer-level players) has been prohibitivly expensive. now Apple has made this available to a huge market for a measly $3500. i personally know many people at advertising agencies and training firms that would love to put their material on DVD as opposed to VHS, but have been holding off until the price comes out of the stratosphere
Here you hit the nail right on the head. Copying DVDs is very uninteresting (except for my legally purchased copy of Galaxy Quest given to me for xmas, in which I'd like to incorporate the "cutting room floor scenes" into the main movie, a "FreeUser's Cut" if you will). BUT I have a lot of footage I've taken over the years which I'd like to do some NLE on and then save to DVD, with english subtitles on portions in languages most of my friends don't speak.
Then there is the recording of television broadcasts direct to hard drive via a sony media converter, which I can then edit the commercials out of, save to DVD, and put in my video library. I would never buy each and every episode of Babylon 5, but if I can simply record and burn them, four episodes to a disk, I'd much rather do that than use Hi-8 or VHS, or even miniDV (which is also susceptible to dropouts over time).
Recordable DVD is way, way overdue, and I may well run out and buy a high end G4 when it hits the street. In fact, I would have done so already, if I could have had it shipped overnight instead of in "7-10 weeks" according to applestore.com.
Specifically, read the partition howto, the man pages for fdisk, and the lilo/grub man/info pages. A good documentation reference point for Linux in general (including links to all the HOWTOs, etc. is the Linux Documentaiton Project.
I have used reiserfs successfully with both grub and lilo, running Mandrake 7.2.
As an aside, I have also used SGI's XFS (downloaded from cvs) successfully with lilo. Grub doesn't seem to like 2.4.0 at all with any filesystem type (the hang happens at the start of the kernel unpacking process and may be filesystem independent, but in any event ext2 and reiser fail equally), so I dumped it in favor of lilo for the time being and thus haven't tested it with XFS.
In short, in my experience either journalling filesystem works fine with lilo.
I am using reiser at work (and quite like it for some things), but have recently begun experimenting with SGI's xfs filesystem as well, and must say that thus far I am very, very impressed.
So impressed that, at home, I have migrated from reiserfs (the reiser 2.4.0 patch and the XFS cvs tree wouldn't coexist, though that will probably change now that reiser is in the official tree). For the video editing I'm doing XFS works very well, and the scalability is astounding!
The only thing that worries me is that SGI has commented that they "won't support competing standards" (paraphrased) if the community chooses something other than their work. While I applaud this stance in principle, I think for filesystems it is very misguided. Linux is designed to support a choice of many filesystem types, and it would be very unfortunate indeed if XFS were not among those choices. Reiser is great, ext3, JFS, etc. are probably fine, and XFS (even in beta form) is just plain awesome.
If anyone from SGI should be reading this, I hope you will not construe the inclusion of reiserfs in the official kernel tree to mean the community "has decided" on a standard, and that even if the community had, that work on XFS will continue. Hopefully, when it comes to chocies like which filesystem one prefers, there will never be a "standard," but rather a standard set of choices which will include ext2, xfs, reiser, and perhaps in the not too distant future one or two encrypted filesystems as well.
The product is called the "FireBox 400" from Procomp and is reviewed here at tom's hardware. It allows you to connect any ATA IDE device to a firewire bus ... very cool.
While we should continue to fight this fight in the current standards bodies, I am forced to wonder if an "Open Hardware Standards" or "Free Hardware Standards" process shouldn't be created (perhaps using the successful IETF collaboration/contribution model), in which existing open standards could be rubber stamped as Open Hardware compliant, new standards could be created, and standards which are detrimental to Free Software, Open Source, and Open Hardware (such as DVD CSS and the proposed monstrosity this thread deals with) would be condemned as non-Open compliant.
If handled correctly, and able to garner sufficient mindshare, a condemnation from such a group could nip bad standards such as these in the bud. Hardware manufacturers whose products were "Open Hardware" compliant would almost certainly sell more than non-compliant products, particularly when it comes to fundamental components such as hard drives, cdroms, CPUs, and memory.
Has anyone, anywhere, found a shred of evidence that this story is more than vaporous misinformation?
I am considering the purchase of a powerbook for the dual purposes of NLE video editing under MacOS and as a Linux ppc laptop. However, if (and from the looks of it this is a big if) Apple is indeed suing free software projects for any reason whatsoever I do not wish to support them and will forego that particular toy indefinitely.
On the other hand, I do not wish to unfairly penalize Apple for unfounded rumors which they can hardly be faulted for.
As others have said, what gives? The broken link on such an inflammatory story (and an apparent absence of corraborating information anywhere) is truly a new low in slashdot editorial standards.
As much as I am against censorship of the Internet, the sad reality in a country where democracy is not as stable as in the U.S. (true only for East Germany which lived under fascist and stalinist dictatorship from 1933 to 1990) makes me wonder whether libertarian truisms will help.
The problem is as much social as political. The neo-nazis were able to instill themselves into the youth culture by tapping into their hitherto repressed national identity (remember that communism subsumed national identity in the satelite nations to the "world communist revolution"), their discontent, and the youthful rebelliousness that is a trait of every generation.
The solution is to offer an alternative that is equally rebellious, allows expression of one's discontent, etc. Not an easy task, but doable. Remember, what's cool in 2000 will look terribly dated in 2010 -- unless nothing is present to displace what was big in 2000.
Censorship just makes neo-nazism appear even cooler in the eyes of the rebellious (which is a huge chunk of any youthful generation) -- how many people here downloaded DeCSS because of efforts to ban it, but have never even bothered to unpack the tarball? I have, multiple times in multiple locations, as I'm sure many thouands of others did. The same phenomenon is true of neo-nazi music (and most things in life, actually) -- ban it and it flourishes all the more. Don't ban it, but speak out against it and emphesize how uncool, idiotic, unsophisticated, and passe it is (come on, the philosophy was a dead end sixty years ago!), and while you won't eliminate it it will lose much of its luster and return to its status of a psychotic fringe element (which every society has and most manage to cope with reasonably well) while the youthful masses move on to the new, cool thing (whatever that is).
Censorship isn't just wrong. It is ineffective, counterproductive, and bought at far too high a cost.
While we're at it, we should require certain types of laws, ie ones that stomp on our constitution, to garner a 2/3 vote in both the house and senate instead of just a majority.
We already have that, plus the added requirement that 3/4 of the states ratify such a "law." It is called amending the constitution, which, as any law which "stomps on our constitution" must, be definition, be a constitutional amendment, is a pretty good safeguard.
The problem is that congress and the president (irrespective of party affiliation), and increasingly the courts as well, play it very fast and loose with the constitution and even ignore it altogether when public opinion is sufficiently strong (currently forfeiture laws wrt the war on drugs, free speech wrt child pornography, historically upholding segregation for decades, etc. etc.)
What we need is for a government which actually adheres to the constitution. However, a very useful stopgap would be a measure/amendment requiring riders to be directly related to the bill's main subject.
Note that I have not used 3d acceleration with these boards (my employer has no need of that feature so I did not spend time configuring/testing it, and it is mutually exclusive with xinerama, which we do need).
However, I fried an SGI 1600SW monitor trying to get a quad head digital DVI G200 card to work with the multilink adapter -- I believe hardware was more responsible for this than X, but as I never saw an image (and won't risk another monitor trying to get it to work) I cannot say for certain.
We have been using XFree 4.0.1 in production systems (single headed config) for some time with good success. Xinerama will probably be deployed in a few months, perhaps even weeks depending on demand, after some more testing.
A final word on the upgrade question. I would say that, if you absolutely must have a stable system, then upgrading to the latest version of X, no matter how good the release is, is a bad idea.. Wait a few weeks while others try it out, or try it out yourself on a less critical system. Don't be one of the first to upgrade on a system which must be stable -- let others uncover any bugs/work arounds first, then upgrade once a sufficient body of knowledge/consensus exists as to the quality of the release.
I suspect you will find 4.0.2 up to your needs, but be a little patient and wait until you can be reasonably sure before upgrading.
NPR apparently helped toss FUD at this bill. [...] I've always been a huge fan of NPR and PBS subsidies...hmmmm. Mebbe it's time to put pen to paper and let them know they've turned off at least one loyal listener.
I too will no longer be making any donations whatsoever to PBS. Let them rot for supporting such legislation
If each administrative domain could maintain its own key-signing/authentication service, then at least enterprises, ISPs, and the like could provide solid security between their own systems. Contact between such entities could be preceeded by "out-of-band" authentication or exchange of keys (e.g. something like a PGP key signing party, a phone call, or an exchange of keys signed by a trusted third party).
The flexibility of the current approach could be maintained, with added levels of trust ranging from completely secure to completely open to "man-in-the-middle" attack.
There is still the possibility of abuse, however, as the "trusted third party" (particularly in the case of ISPs) could easilly be subverted by a law enforcement or spook agency into signing counterfeit keys. Indeed, they could legally be required to do so with legislation akin to the wiretapping laws requiring phone companies to provide technical facilities that facilitate evesdropping by law enforcement on demand.
If you don't run an ftp server, and a telnet server then you can't have people using unencrypted protocols. But people insist on running these protocols.
/etc/inetd.conf, then either reboot or kill -1 [pid] where [pid] is the process id of the inetd daemon).
Sometimes it is the users, particularly those users with authority over you (like the ones who sign your paycheck). If they demand a service despite your protestations that the service in question compromises security, you are left with little choice but to provide the service knowing full well that it creates a security hole in your network, or look for a new job. In this case it is the user's fault, not the administrator's whose advice is being ignored or overridden.
That being said, you make an excellent point. The first thing anyone should do when building a new system is install ssh (including sshd) and disable telnet and ftp (on Linux/Unix: comment out the two entries in
As we've seen in this article, running ssh isn't a panacea, but it is a hell of a lot better than using no encryption at all
OK. But a CD player is called on only to do a small number of tasks. Most cd player apps for computers duplicate a similar interface. I think the issue becomes how you handle more complex stuff.
Who is to say that a command line driven cd player wouldn't be better (or a better example, a cd jukebox or mp3 player with lots of storage).
Pushing icons one after another would imho be far more cumbersome than simply typing (or saying)
mp3> play all songs by Nirvana in random order followed by the predefined mix entitled "punk-party mix", then around 2:30 AM switch to the predifined mix entitled "bach-piano-concertos"
The challenge is to devise a command line language that is both intuitive and powerful -- such projects as the latin perl project offer some hope in this regard.
The command line has gotten a very bum rap, primarilly because no thought went into devising a coherent language. Instead cl languages have consisted of a small collection of arbitary commands, akin to the grunts and gestures of our cave dwelling ancesters.
I find it more than a little ironic that, as computers take on more and more capaabilities, the language the users uses to interact with them becomes more and more dumbed down. I suspect we are going down the path where we replace alphabets with pictograms because pictures are easier for an illiterate to grasp, only to discover that, when that same user later wishes to write a novel, they are forced to use something akin to egyption heiroglyphs in order to communicate their ideas: a writing form vastly more complex and difficult to use than the 26 letter alphabet the illiterate in question should have just learned in the first place.