Who the hell cares besides RMS? I love using my machine and it has an nVidia card in it. I don't care that their "driver" is closed source, I can play a lot of heavy duty games with it.
It's not about RMS. Open source drivers benefit the development of the kernel, and also the users of the drivers and hardware those drivers support. Remember when the linux kernel was at 2.6, but we had to wait some time before nvidia released 2.6 compatible drivers? If they were GPL, the kernel developers could have incorporated the drivers into the kernel and development would have gone concurrently.
Even now, sticking a closed source driver in there is problematic if there's a kernel panic. How are you going to debug it? What about security? Nobody ourside of nvidia has audited the code. There could be a potential vulnerability that they missed. We negate the benefits of open source if only *part* of our program is open source.
Yup, Mac's were great, but beacuse they were in locked down proprietary mode, while IBM PC's were being assmbled by eveyone and his dog, they got left wayy behind...
And yet curiously it does not work the same way with software. Now, it is Windows that is locked down in proprietary mode, with expensive and draconian licenses. Linux distros can be assembled by everyone and his dog, but yet, it is still a mostly a niche OS on the desktop.
Sure, they have their shortcoming, but they Human Interface designs are uniform at least..
Ugly as heck, but uniform;)
Nowadays people love bashing OSS (and Linux especially) for being "inconsistant". They also enjoy pointing out that Linux's cryptic CLI scares away new users. Now I have to wonder, why did DOS and Windows 3.x become so popular? The command prompt to DOS was as cryptic as *nix, and in addition it was quite retarded as well. Win 3.x doesn't win any prizes for consistency either. Plug and play hardware was non-existant. Yet it was hugely popular, more so than the more user-friendly Macintosh. If people could put up with the crappiness of DOS and Win 3.x (the infancy of MS operating systems), why is Linux being bashed constantly during its infancy for stuff MS got away with?
Frodo: How do we know it's source to the One OS of the Dark Lord?
Gandalf tosses a CD-R into the burner, and burns Windows.Source.Code.w2k.nt4.wxp.tar onto it. When the CD is done, there are glowing fiery letters on it.
Frodo : I can't read the fiery letters.
Gandalf : There are few who can. The language is that of Redmond, which I will not utter here. In the common tongue, it says "One OS To Rule Them All, One OS To Find Them, One OS To Bring Them All And With The NDA Bind Them"
Frodo: Take the source code Gandalf!
Gandalf : Noo! Do not tempt me with it! I dare not take it! Not even to keep it safe! You must understand Frodo, that I would be tempted to use this source code, for good. To disclose hidden API's, help the WINE project. But through me, all of open source would be tainted, and the LawyerWraiths of The Dark Lord will sure destroy us.
Frodo : But it cannot stay here!
Gandalf : No, no it can't.
Frodo : What must I do?
Gandalf : It must be sent to the fires of/dev/null, where it will be undone, and we will be kept safe from the Lawyers of Evil.
So remember folks, don't download it, or look at it, or attempt to build it! It is evil, and answers only to the hand of The Dark One.
I skimmed over it, laughing out loud at the incredibly great and skillfully humourous page that someone took great lengths to make in parody of SCO... until I realized it was at scogroup.com, and it was:
I actually printed out that article, with the Star Wars references and all, and kept it in a nice thick binder:) I was a slashdot newbie then, and every story fascinated me. Whenever I read it, I think, "if only this article were seen in context today, with the success of Mozilla"... and today I see this. Great job:)
...here. The other open source project in question is a database (obviously) called Firebird.
The mail client is still called "Thunderbird", which IMHO introduces and incongruity in the naming schemes. But then again, what's in a name, eh? Besides, "Thunderfox" would sound dumb.
There have been exploitable buffer overflows in going from memory here) PINE, MetaMail and Mutt, all of which in theory could allow a trojan email to be sent to a unix user, and none of which required clicking on an executable.
Are you willing to warrant that there are no such holes in Evolution, Thunderbird or KMail?
All very true. However, for a virus such as mydoom to spread like wildfire and do the DDoS damage it was designed to do, it needs to acheive a "critical mass" that can only be acheived through homegeneity which Windows provides. Sure there are some clueless Linux users using unpatched Pine, Mutt, but they all have *different* vulnerabilities, and a single worm or virus could not propogate quickly using the same method.
I can't agree with their conclusions. Three days after I bought Thief: The Dark Project I was out shopping for a blackjack, dark cloak and rope arrows.
The rope arrows were a bit hard to find..
Hey that's nothing. Three days after I bought Tetris, I started laying bricks in the garden like crazy.
I found this sticky at linuxquestions.org's forums to be most helpful in doing an easy and straightforward 2.6 compile on a slackware system.
Compiling kernels on Slackware has always been easy and straightforward. Kernel 2.6 works out of the box (well, as out of the box as you can be for a source tarball) on Slack 9.1, without the need for patches, tweaking daemons etc. It just works. That's one of the reasons I switched to Slack early on when I was learning Linux. It's so simple, it's newbie-friendly. I know, because back in the 2.2->2.4 days, I tried using Redhat for the transition. It was painful for a clueless newbies like me.
Hmm, I wonder if we can have an anime fans vs. Tolkien fans flamewar? That might be fun:-)
If Tolkien was remade as anime, every character would be 14 years old, speak in an annoying high-pitched voice, and would brood a lot. We would get a lot of slow motion shots for no apparent reason. Gollum won't be the only one with big eyes, nooo, every single freakin' character would have 'em. And to top it off, the ending would make no sense, but it would be be flashy and bright and every character would smile and nod knowingly.
...I've always found slashdot to be rather GNOME-hostile, with many vocal critics always bashing it rather nastily (especially in comparison to the more "integrated" KDE). I use GNOME, and I don't get the hang-ups over "integration" and "consistency". I care more about applications (My favourites are Evolution, Gaim, Galeon, XChat...all of them GTK apps), so even though I don't require GNOME to use them, it seems all of my favourite stuff uses GTK, so using the GTK-based GNOME is only natural.
I adore Tolkein as much as the next nerd, but he really had a blind spot for female characters.
Eh? I never understood people who claimed this. What about Luthien Tinuviel? Not only was she an important character in the first age, but she was the only one to have confronted MORGOTH (yes, the Big Evil One himself), knocked him out, helped Beren steal a silmaril from his crown AND appealed to the Valar to bring them both to life again! She defeated MORGOTH, for crying out loud. Sauron was just Morgoth's flunkie, and she totally kicked his sorry ass too! If that's not a powerful female character, I don't know what else to say.
Slashdot Mirror
This is taking "cosplay" to a whole new level. Now with real working props!
Who the hell cares besides RMS? I love using my machine and it has an nVidia card in it. I don't care that their "driver" is closed source, I can play a lot of heavy duty games with it.
It's not about RMS. Open source drivers benefit the development of the kernel, and also the users of the drivers and hardware those drivers support. Remember when the linux kernel was at 2.6, but we had to wait some time before nvidia released 2.6 compatible drivers? If they were GPL, the kernel developers could have incorporated the drivers into the kernel and development would have gone concurrently.
Even now, sticking a closed source driver in there is problematic if there's a kernel panic. How are you going to debug it? What about security? Nobody ourside of nvidia has audited the code. There could be a potential vulnerability that they missed. We negate the benefits of open source if only *part* of our program is open source.
"My life for Aiur" always sounded like "My life for hire". And here's another one "Gee, house". What he's really saying, I have no clue.
Yup, Mac's were great, but beacuse they were in locked down proprietary mode, while IBM PC's were being assmbled by eveyone and his dog, they got left wayy behind...
And yet curiously it does not work the same way with software. Now, it is Windows that is locked down in proprietary mode, with expensive and draconian licenses. Linux distros can be assembled by everyone and his dog, but yet, it is still a mostly a niche OS on the desktop.
When DOS and 3.1 were around, there was nothing to compare them to.
Ehem. Apple Macintoshes. They had nice friendly GUI's, but more people bought PC's with the "cryptic" DOS and the "inconsistent" Windows 3.x.
Sure, they have their shortcoming, but they Human Interface designs are uniform at least..
;)
Ugly as heck, but uniform
Nowadays people love bashing OSS (and Linux especially) for being "inconsistant". They also enjoy pointing out that Linux's cryptic CLI scares away new users. Now I have to wonder, why did DOS and Windows 3.x become so popular? The command prompt to DOS was as cryptic as *nix, and in addition it was quite retarded as well. Win 3.x doesn't win any prizes for consistency either. Plug and play hardware was non-existant. Yet it was hugely popular, more so than the more user-friendly Macintosh. If people could put up with the crappiness of DOS and Win 3.x (the infancy of MS operating systems), why is Linux being bashed constantly during its infancy for stuff MS got away with?
Has anyone actually built this code?
/dev/null, where it will be undone, and we will be kept safe from the Lawyers of Evil.
Gandalf: No! Don't ever use it!
Frodo: How do we know it's source to the One OS of the Dark Lord?
Gandalf tosses a CD-R into the burner, and burns Windows.Source.Code.w2k.nt4.wxp.tar onto it. When the CD is done, there are glowing fiery letters on it.
Frodo : I can't read the fiery letters.
Gandalf : There are few who can. The language is that of Redmond, which I will not utter here. In the common tongue, it says "One OS To Rule Them All, One OS To Find Them, One OS To Bring Them All And With The NDA Bind Them"
Frodo: Take the source code Gandalf!
Gandalf : Noo! Do not tempt me with it! I dare not take it! Not even to keep it safe! You must understand Frodo, that I would be tempted to use this source code, for good. To disclose hidden API's, help the WINE project. But through me, all of open source would be tainted, and the LawyerWraiths of The Dark Lord will sure destroy us.
Frodo : But it cannot stay here!
Gandalf : No, no it can't.
Frodo : What must I do?
Gandalf : It must be sent to the fires of
So remember folks, don't download it, or look at it, or attempt to build it! It is evil, and answers only to the hand of The Dark One.
They where not married, they where just dating.
Ah, thanks for clearing the confusion surrounding the marital status of Barbie and Ken for us geeks. I can understand why you're posting anonymously.
Inspired by real life events...Raiders of the Lost Code.
And like in that movie, our hero yells "don't look at it...don't look at it"... and the bad guys who do look at it have their faces melt off.
I actually printed out that article, with the Star Wars references and all, and kept it in a nice thick binder :) I was a slashdot newbie then, and every story fascinated me. Whenever I read it, I think, "if only this article were seen in context today, with the success of Mozilla"... and today I see this. Great job :)
...here. The other open source project in question is a database (obviously) called Firebird.
The mail client is still called "Thunderbird", which IMHO introduces and incongruity in the naming schemes. But then again, what's in a name, eh? Besides, "Thunderfox" would sound dumb.
Miguelomir : The weapon of the Enemy is a gift! Let is use it against him!
There have been exploitable buffer overflows in going from memory here) PINE, MetaMail and Mutt, all of which in theory could allow a trojan email to be sent to a unix user, and none of which required clicking on an executable.
Are you willing to warrant that there are no such holes in Evolution, Thunderbird or KMail?
All very true. However, for a virus such as mydoom to spread like wildfire and do the DDoS damage it was designed to do, it needs to acheive a "critical mass" that can only be acheived through homegeneity which Windows provides. Sure there are some clueless Linux users using unpatched Pine, Mutt, but they all have *different* vulnerabilities, and a single worm or virus could not propogate quickly using the same method.
But do they disappear when you complete a line?
After the first 12 hours of doing it nonstop, yeah, they do!
I can't agree with their conclusions. Three days after I bought Thief: The Dark Project I was out shopping for a blackjack, dark cloak and rope arrows.
The rope arrows were a bit hard to find..
Hey that's nothing. Three days after I bought Tetris, I started laying bricks in the garden like crazy.
I found this sticky at linuxquestions.org's forums to be most helpful in doing an easy and straightforward 2.6 compile on a slackware system.
Compiling kernels on Slackware has always been easy and straightforward. Kernel 2.6 works out of the box (well, as out of the box as you can be for a source tarball) on Slack 9.1, without the need for patches, tweaking daemons etc. It just works. That's one of the reasons I switched to Slack early on when I was learning Linux. It's so simple, it's newbie-friendly. I know, because back in the 2.2->2.4 days, I tried using Redhat for the transition. It was painful for a clueless newbies like me.
Hmm, I wonder if we can have an anime fans vs. Tolkien fans flamewar? That might be fun :-)
If Tolkien was remade as anime, every character would be 14 years old, speak in an annoying high-pitched voice, and would brood a lot. We would get a lot of slow motion shots for no apparent reason. Gollum won't be the only one with big eyes, nooo, every single freakin' character would have 'em. And to top it off, the ending would make no sense, but it would be be flashy and bright and every character would smile and nod knowingly.
Like VMWare, it just *expects* Sys V init, so installing it in Slackware is kinda painful for a newbie.
...to cyberspace. So go ahead businesses, pay tribute to your new Google overlords.
When one of us sleeps with J Lo, then we've got a good story
It would be easier to have Ben Affleck learn how to write device drivers.
...I've always found slashdot to be rather GNOME-hostile, with many vocal critics always bashing it rather nastily (especially in comparison to the more "integrated" KDE). I use GNOME, and I don't get the hang-ups over "integration" and "consistency". I care more about applications (My favourites are Evolution, Gaim, Galeon, XChat...all of them GTK apps), so even though I don't require GNOME to use them, it seems all of my favourite stuff uses GTK, so using the GTK-based GNOME is only natural.
I adore Tolkein as much as the next nerd, but he really had a blind spot for female characters.
Eh? I never understood people who claimed this. What about Luthien Tinuviel? Not only was she an important character in the first age, but she was the only one to have confronted MORGOTH (yes, the Big Evil One himself), knocked him out, helped Beren steal a silmaril from his crown AND appealed to the Valar to bring them both to life again! She defeated MORGOTH, for crying out loud. Sauron was just Morgoth's flunkie, and she totally kicked his sorry ass too! If that's not a powerful female character, I don't know what else to say.
...and finds that I hang out on Slashdot most of the time, and also on techie forums and mailing lists. Poof! There goes all my chances.
OR ELSE!