I'm sure that most of us, like the post above, have used www.lyrics.ch to locate CD's that we purchased. So then, take the time to let'em know how this will hurt them - if nothing else they will get pissed at the huge number of complaint letters that they'll have to deal with.
that MS has become so powerful and rich mainly because of the Win32 API and because of its pricing scheme. Microsoft has used its closed API to make alliances with other companies and the Win32 API has also prevented many applications from easily being ported to other OS's. MS has also used the price of its OS to ensure that VAR's only sold its OS.
RedHat on the other hand is using an open source kernel that will always be open, and so RedHat can't put nasty little hooks in the kernel to control who's software runs best, its a level ground for everyone. Also, because RedHat can be distributed freely, RedHat cannot bully companies around.
RedHat can't have the same power that MS does now. Remember, anyone can burn their own RedHat CD and distribute it. To my knowlege, everything in RedHat is OSS (they even hire full time developers to write OSS). Instead, we should keep a close eye on RedHat, if they begin to make RedHat proprietary (ie they start shipping non-OSS with RedHat Linux) we need to take what OSS has already been developed and continue with an OSS version - a kind of OSS policing by the Linux community.
I don't think Archie has a case here (as the previous post suggests), but I still think it would be a good idea to petition this. We need to send a message to companies that we won't stand for such things. If we don't, we'll only see more and more non-profit and small businesses get run over by larger companies. We need to let corporations know such actions also hurt themselfs by demonizing their public image.
Any chip that is implanted is certian to have IP rights owned by some big corp. Dealing with copyright and patenting laws in software is bad enought, I really don't want to deal with these kind of controls when it comes to my body. Further, if implanting chips becomes common it opens us up to a whole new era of surveillance and loss of privacy - it would be a trivial matter to put GPS (or whatever) into an implanted chip, and the NSA (or FBI, etc) will claim that they will only be used to find missing children.
I agree with the above post. Linux offers a level of code compatability on more platforms that any other OS I know of (except for possibly NetBSD or OpenBSD). You can develop code on a i386, and so long as you aren't using any assembly, it will compile on a Alpha (or PPC, or Sparc, or...) running Linux with little or no effort.
I would like to see IBM offer DB2 both for free and for charge. The only difference would be, the free download of DB2 would be unsupported - great for developers and those that could not normally afford DB2, and the purchased DB2 would come with support - any serious enterprise would go with this option. IMO - this would work great for IBM, companies, and Linux. IBM would still get their money by charging for "official" DB2 support and maintinace, companies would have a support contract, and Linux would gain more users/developers. A company could, at very little cost, buy a Linux box, install Linux and DB2 and begin development. Later, when the project gets closer to production, support for DB2 could be purchased, or the application could be migrated to an existing server running DB2.
"Encryption is freely useable. Patent restrictions are about intellectual property rights, a completely different story altogether."
In other words, encryption is regulted IN the US. Just because the status quo regulates something it doesn't mean that these laws are constitutional. The US has overturn laws that have been in effect for years because they were later ruled as unconstitutional (ie "Jim Crow laws").
"your use of encryption has no affect on me"
Actually, if a company is using little or no encryption (ie because of US export laws) to transmit sesitive data around the world, this could have an effect of you, more so if the data is _your_ personal info.
numbers 2 and 3 basically kill counter attacks all together.
"4) If you make a point of sending out goons to pound on the doors of suspected hackers and threaten them with physical violence, what's to stop the crackers from being prepared for the goons... with something more than just baseball bats? (Like for instance, video cameras taping you saying "Hello, we're from XYZ corporation and we're here to beat the snot out of you!" Can you say "Civil lawsuit?" I knew you could!)Remember, you're at a BIG disadvantage on someone else's home field, where they may or may not be the son of the local police chief! "
Better yet I'd have my gun pointed at thier head as soon as the door opened! I wouldn't let any goon threaten my in my house, and if I felt that my family was in danger (as I might if someone where to break down the door with bats) I wouldn't hesitate to act.
"The applet flooded the browsers used to launch the attack with graphics and messages, causing them to crash."
Why would anyone run this as an applet on the server? But an even better question is, how many serious hackers out there would lanch an attack from a browser? This really makes me question the reliability of this artical.
Please, the last thing I want is a bunch of politicians trying to define what an attack is - the tought of this scares the hell out of me. What's even more scary is all the other legislation they'd try to pass along with it. Besides, the real problem would be enforcing the laws. I can't imagin the FBI taking time away from murder cases and the like to go to someone's house that's been scaning ports. The government is not the answer (since when has the government done anything well except the military and maybe the US Mail), nor is violence or physical action the answer (as the artical talks about 'stealing' hackers machines and using baseball bats). Companies on the net should work together to get these punks off the net. Most of them are probably on their parents accounts and if company were sent a letter or email and got the account canceled, problem solved. For those that use an account at college, same story.
its part of the game. Because development happens behind closed doors and NDA's you're never garenteed that a new version won't come out right after you buy a product. If fact, you aren't even garenteed that a product won't die after you purchase it. Consumers go through this all the time: "hmmm...maybe I should wait for the next version", but of course, the developers won't say when the next version is comming in order to protect sales of the current version. Or even worse is when a company is planning to stop development of a product, but the consumer has no idea untill well after the product is purchased and in production. Such is life with non-open software - if you don't like it (like myself) start using OSS to begin with.
I have to say, I 100% agree with Jon on this. Its about time that the consumer really had choice in what music they buy. I'm so sick of pop music and the never ending crap that gets pushed though MTV, the radio and music stores. For about a year and a half now I've been lurking around in the back of hole-in-the-wall music shops that sell my types of music. While I eventually find what I'm looking for, too often I would get stuck with CD's that I really didn't like, but couldn't take back. The net has been a _huge_ help in helping me find albums that are on small labels, but it hasn't really helped with weeding out those not so good albums. I hope to find more MP3 samples on artist's pages and in the future, I'm planning on eventually just buying MP3's (I need more disk space first)
"Oh yeah, did these people check the pricing of commercial unix software?"
Apples and oranges. A MS OS can hardly be compared to UNIX, which can handle many more processors, much more memory, many more devices, and can handle hundereds users all at the same time. However, if you look at comercial UNIX, most of the flavors are similar in price (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, etc) and they all compete with each other. But, I suppose this will change as Linux continues to get closer to the scalability of comercial UNIX.
"In an ideal world, everyone would be running linux x-stations"
With the Linux making it into the server world, and with the progress of GNOME and KDE, this is not impossible - total world domination!
I normally don't get involved in environmental issues because I think most of it is hype generated by those that are making money off of federal grants (studing O3 and acid rain, bla, bla, bla) _but_, this is a really bad thing. To screw with genetics within a lab is one thing, but releasing genetically altered seeds developed by a company that probably only cares about profits is dangerous. Besides the unknown side effects (DNA's not a simple thing), what about the obvious? How do you confine this new gene pool and keep it from spreading (as the artical suggest is possible)? Further, what if the pollen from these plants have the ability to "infect" other species or relitives of these plants (unlikely, but you never know)?
why in the world would you want to form such a union. look around, a union would only restrict who you work for and where you work and for how much. most unions eventually endup in bed with the employers anyhow - and the union heads end up making a career out of sucking money from your paycheck (you must pay union dues). not only do the union leaders make a living off of you, but they also dictate which political causes will be supported and give those causes YOUR money regardless of your opinion. And after all that you must put into it, the union will do very little for you, except make you go on strike and give you 50lbs of rice and beans every two weeks when you're on strike (do you really want the possibility of a strike?!). I have 3 personal freinds that belong to 3 different unions, all three have shared the same story above. The last thing the tech industry needs is a union, it would be bad for both the worker and the industry. I can promise you, if such a union where ever created, you would have to take their training and you would have very little vertical or horizontal mobility and the only voice you would have would be that of the union leaders. NO THANKS...I would rather control my own life. If you aren't capable enough to defend your self from your employeer (which may mean leaving), then maybe you should get a job in any number of the other non-professional fields that have unions.
that this comparison is acurate. Take for example hotmail, which runs on Solaris and FreeBSD. After it was bought by MS, MS tried to migrate everything over to NT, but NT could not handle the load. I have read other cases just like this, but I have no details, anyone care to cite more such cases?
I agree, why not just put the thing up on a web site for anyone?
"Is Tiger/LINE public domain?"
I just went to the Tiger web site and read their FAQ, all data from the Tiger database is public domain. However, is it possible for anyone to put their copy of the database under a copyright? I thought that even if something was in public domain, only the owner of that thing could copyright it, but I'm not a lawyer so I may be way off on this. Anyone know?
You forget that over 3/4 of the worlds email is routed using sendmail (OSS) and that over 1/2 of the worlds web servers are powered with Apache (OSS). Hummm, I guess OSS is already winning as MS has been forced to adopt open protocals like TCP/IP and HTTP:)
Despite popular belief, skinheads are not a hate group and they are not racists. While there does exist such a thing as Nazi skinheads (aka racist skinheads) they are different from true skinheads and are wrong to call themselvs skinheads. Skinhead's enjoy Oi music and are from every race around the globe, in fact, many of the first skinheads were black Jamaicans. Further, not only aren't skinheads racists, but they are outspoken against it (ever heard of 'Ska Against Racism'). The fact that Neo Nazi's call themselvs skinheads proves thier ignorance. So please, don't make the all too common mistake of calling skinheads a hate group.
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I'm sure that most of us, like the post above, have used www.lyrics.ch to locate CD's that we purchased. So then, take the time to let'em know how this will hurt them - if nothing else they will get pissed at the huge number of complaint letters that they'll have to deal with.
yeah right - that hardly seems worth it. A desktop, now those I build, but laptops are a whole different story.
that MS has become so powerful and rich mainly because of the Win32 API and because of its pricing scheme. Microsoft has used its closed API to make alliances with other companies and the Win32 API has also prevented many applications from easily being ported to other OS's. MS has also used the price of its OS to ensure that VAR's only sold its OS.
RedHat on the other hand is using an open source kernel that will always be open, and so RedHat can't put nasty little hooks in the kernel to control who's software runs best, its a level ground for everyone. Also, because RedHat can be distributed freely, RedHat cannot bully companies around.
RedHat can't have the same power that MS does now. Remember, anyone can burn their own RedHat CD and distribute it. To my knowlege, everything in RedHat is OSS (they even hire full time developers to write OSS). Instead, we should keep a close eye on RedHat, if they begin to make RedHat proprietary (ie they start shipping non-OSS with RedHat Linux) we need to take what OSS has already been developed and continue with an OSS version - a kind of OSS policing by the Linux community.
I don't think Archie has a case here (as the previous post suggests), but I still think it would be a good idea to petition this. We need to send a message to companies that we won't stand for such things. If we don't, we'll only see more and more non-profit and small businesses get run over by larger companies. We need to let corporations know such actions also hurt themselfs by demonizing their public image.
Any chip that is implanted is certian to have IP rights owned by some big corp. Dealing with copyright and patenting laws in software is bad enought, I really don't want to deal with these kind of controls when it comes to my body. Further, if implanting chips becomes common it opens us up to a whole new era of surveillance and loss of privacy - it would be a trivial matter to put GPS (or whatever) into an implanted chip, and the NSA (or FBI, etc) will claim that they will only be used to find missing children.
I agree with the above post. Linux offers a level of code compatability on more platforms that any other OS I know of (except for possibly NetBSD or OpenBSD). You can develop code on a i386, and so long as you aren't using any assembly, it will compile on a Alpha (or PPC, or Sparc, or ...) running Linux with little or no effort.
I would like to see IBM offer DB2 both for free and for charge. The only difference would be, the free download of DB2 would be unsupported - great for developers and those that could not normally afford DB2, and the purchased DB2 would come with support - any serious enterprise would go with this option. IMO - this would work great for IBM, companies, and Linux. IBM would still get their money by charging for "official" DB2 support and maintinace, companies would have a support contract, and Linux would gain more users/developers. A company could, at very little cost, buy a Linux box, install Linux and DB2 and begin development. Later, when the project gets closer to production, support for DB2 could be purchased, or the application could be migrated to an existing server running DB2.
"Encryption is freely useable. Patent restrictions are about intellectual property rights, a completely different story altogether."
In other words, encryption is regulted IN the US. Just because the status quo regulates something it doesn't mean that these laws are constitutional. The US has overturn laws that have been in effect for years because they were later ruled as unconstitutional (ie "Jim Crow laws").
"your use of encryption has no affect on me"
Actually, if a company is using little or no encryption (ie because of US export laws) to transmit sesitive data around the world, this could have an effect of you, more so if the data is _your_ personal info.
numbers 2 and 3 basically kill counter attacks all together.
"4) If you make a point of sending out goons to pound on the doors of suspected hackers and threaten them with physical violence, what's to stop the crackers from being prepared for the goons... with something more than just baseball bats? (Like for instance, video cameras taping you saying "Hello, we're from XYZ corporation and we're here to beat the snot out of you!" Can you say "Civil lawsuit?" I knew you could!)Remember, you're at a BIG disadvantage on someone else's home field, where they may or may not be the son of the local police chief! "
Better yet I'd have my gun pointed at thier head as soon as the door opened! I wouldn't let any goon threaten my in my house, and if I felt that my family was in danger (as I might if someone where to break down the door with bats) I wouldn't hesitate to act.
"The applet flooded the browsers used to launch the attack with graphics and messages, causing them to crash."
Why would anyone run this as an applet on the server? But an even better question is, how many serious hackers out there would lanch an attack from a browser? This really makes me question the reliability of this artical.
Please, the last thing I want is a bunch of politicians trying to define what an attack is - the tought of this scares the hell out of me. What's even more scary is all the other legislation they'd try to pass along with it. Besides, the real problem would be enforcing the laws. I can't imagin the FBI taking time away from murder cases and the like to go to someone's house that's been scaning ports. The government is not the answer (since when has the government done anything well except the military and maybe the US Mail), nor is violence or physical action the answer (as the artical talks about 'stealing' hackers machines and using baseball bats). Companies on the net should work together to get these punks off the net. Most of them are probably on their parents accounts and if company were sent a letter or email and got the account canceled, problem solved. For those that use an account at college, same story.
its part of the game. Because development happens behind closed doors and NDA's you're never garenteed that a new version won't come out right after you buy a product. If fact, you aren't even garenteed that a product won't die after you purchase it. Consumers go through this all the time: "hmmm...maybe I should wait for the next version", but of course, the developers won't say when the next version is comming in order to protect sales of the current version. Or even worse is when a company is planning to stop development of a product, but the consumer has no idea untill well after the product is purchased and in production. Such is life with non-open software - if you don't like it (like myself) start using OSS to begin with.
I have to say, I 100% agree with Jon on this. Its about time that the consumer really had choice in what music they buy. I'm so sick of pop music and the never ending crap that gets pushed though MTV, the radio and music stores. For about a year and a half now I've been lurking around in the back of hole-in-the-wall music shops that sell my types of music. While I eventually find what I'm looking for, too often I would get stuck with CD's that I really didn't like, but couldn't take back. The net has been a _huge_ help in helping me find albums that are on small labels, but it hasn't really helped with weeding out those not so good albums. I hope to find more MP3 samples on artist's pages and in the future, I'm planning on eventually just buying MP3's (I need more disk space first)
"Oh yeah, did these people check the pricing of commercial unix software?"
Apples and oranges. A MS OS can hardly be compared to UNIX, which can handle many more processors, much more memory, many more devices, and can handle hundereds users all at the same time. However, if you look at comercial UNIX, most of the flavors are similar in price (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, etc) and they all compete with each other. But, I suppose this will change as Linux continues to get closer to the scalability of comercial UNIX.
"In an ideal world, everyone would be running linux x-stations"
With the Linux making it into the server world, and with the progress of GNOME and KDE, this is not impossible - total world domination!
I normally don't get involved in environmental issues because I think most of it is hype generated by those that are making money off of federal grants (studing O3 and acid rain, bla, bla, bla) _but_, this is a really bad thing. To screw with genetics within a lab is one thing, but releasing genetically altered seeds developed by a company that probably only cares about profits is dangerous. Besides the unknown side effects (DNA's not a simple thing), what about the obvious? How do you confine this new gene pool and keep it from spreading (as the artical suggest is possible)? Further, what if the pollen from these plants have the ability to "infect" other species or relitives of these plants (unlikely, but you never know)?
why in the world would you want to form such a union. look around, a union would only restrict who you work for and where you work and for how much. most unions eventually endup in bed with the employers anyhow - and the union heads end up making a career out of sucking money from your paycheck (you must pay union dues). not only do the union leaders make a living off of you, but they also dictate which political causes will be supported and give those causes YOUR money regardless of your opinion. And after all that you must put into it, the union will do very little for you, except make you go on strike and give you 50lbs of rice and beans every two weeks when you're on strike (do you really want the possibility of a strike?!). I have 3 personal freinds that belong to 3 different unions, all three have shared the same story above. The last thing the tech industry needs is a union, it would be bad for both the worker and the industry. I can promise you, if such a union where ever created, you would have to take their training and you would have very little vertical or horizontal mobility and the only voice you would have would be that of the union leaders. NO THANKS...I would rather control my own life. If you aren't capable enough to defend your self from your employeer (which may mean leaving), then maybe you should get a job in any number of the other non-professional fields that have unions.
that this comparison is acurate. Take for example hotmail, which runs on Solaris and FreeBSD. After it was bought by MS, MS tried to migrate everything over to NT, but NT could not handle the load. I have read other cases just like this, but I have no details, anyone care to cite more such cases?
I agree, why not just put the thing up on a web site for anyone?
"Is Tiger/LINE public domain?"
I just went to the Tiger web site and read their FAQ, all data from the Tiger database is public domain. However, is it possible for anyone to put their copy of the database under a copyright? I thought that even if something was in public domain, only the owner of that thing could copyright it, but I'm not a lawyer so I may be way off on this. Anyone know?
You forget that over 3/4 of the worlds email is routed using sendmail (OSS) and that over 1/2 of the worlds web servers are powered with Apache (OSS). Hummm, I guess OSS is already winning as MS has been forced to adopt open protocals like TCP/IP and HTTP :)
Despite popular belief, skinheads are not a hate group and they are not racists. While there does exist such a thing as Nazi skinheads (aka racist skinheads) they are different from true skinheads and are wrong to call themselvs skinheads. Skinhead's enjoy Oi music and are from every race around the globe, in fact, many of the first skinheads were black Jamaicans. Further, not only aren't skinheads racists, but they are outspoken against it (ever heard of 'Ska Against Racism'). The fact that Neo Nazi's call themselvs skinheads proves thier ignorance. So please, don't make the all too common mistake of calling skinheads a hate group.