I must express my sympathy for this Primer guy. You can't compare his occasional mistakes (or mine, or yours) to the mistakes of someone who claims to be an editor. Language is the basic tool of a journalist, it can't be neglected.
A small misspelling (although this one was on the name of a country) here and there is something we have to live with, unfortunately. This is not the problem. The problem is this attitude of regarding proper use of the language as a secondary concern. Check out/. FAQ and you will see they take their bad spelling/grammar with a bit of pride. The mistakes are so many that they hurt even *my* eyes, for I'm brazilian and my English is barely operational. If I had to choose between correctness and content, I would pick the latter, but these are *not* mutually exclusive, they are complementary, for bad language (I mean "rules") can distort the best intentions.
This issue raises a point that has already been highlighted in a previous discussion in Slashdot, and I think it is the central point. First let me say what is not an issue here:
GPL isn't being broken in any way.
They applied for a trademark, not a patent (some still mistake one for the other).
They do not seem to be willing to enforce this trademark ownership. In their first page there is a button entitled "How to get Linux" which links to this page, which I dare to try to translate, despite my lousy Spanish (worse than my English!): Linux is free and you don't have to pay for licenses or to obtain it. There are companies in the world market which take the burden to prepare Linux "distributions". These distributions are CD's that in genneral include an extensive set of applications, manuals, plus an applications that allows you to install and even administrate your system in a user-friendly way. Many development hours are invested in these distributions so as the finished product owns nothing to its commercial alternatives, in most cases including 30 or more days of free installation support. Its cost is much more accessible than that of any commercial software. Anyway, these companies have publicly available free internet sites where one can download or update these distributions. It is worth clarifying that if you do not have the time or a very fast connection, it is always much more convenient to buy an already assembled and tested distribution. Then you have links to the major distributors.
I am convinced that their intention is to protect themselves from an oportunistic move from someone else. I may be wrong.
What is really an issue here is that Linux (and GPL) seem to be pretty orphan when the time comes to protect trademarks and so on. I remember there was a company in Brazl back in 83 called "Microsoft", they started their business about the same time as M$, and the association which leads to the brand name seems to be quite an obvious one, so I don't have reasons to believe that they wanted to fool anyone into thinking they were something else other than themselves. A couple of years later, M$ was already established in Brazil and demanded them to change their name and got a court ruling for that, so the company was renamed "Multisoft". Now, who would act as a legitimate party in such cases so as to protect Linux's name and image? Linus owns the tm alright, but is he willing to put all the energy and resources needed in each case, considering he has other interests right now? (BTW, I'm damn curious about it!) Once we all have an interest in this, would it be fair to put such a burden on his shoulders?
Folks, if you're so pissed off at Slashdot, why do you keep reading it?
Because people is the stuff this site is made up of. We don't read what's in here because of the editors. Even the articles themselves are not that important when compared to the warmth (sometimes heat) contained in discussions like this one. We seek information and knowledge, of course, but there are many folks here who know each other for some time, even if only through this very channel, and this is the kind of thing we are not willing to leave behind. We may disagree, we may flame each other sometimes, but we like the presence of other human beings, so as to exchange points of view and wishes. Check ou your tagline/footnote, it's pure Slashdot! This site has a culture.
Did I answer your question?
Now, the source code part. If they don't release the code, they are in their right. I've never seen even the old version, but it must be sheer spaghetti, for they don't come up with a reasonable explanation why not to release it. One can understand that, they are understaffed and things there seem to be made in a hurry, right? Rob himself used the comunity analogy. It is like a mayor asking everyone to keep the city clean, just to litter around when no one is looking.
A wise move, for they will be able to keep lots of 486's in business. I think Bill Gates himself advised people not to upgrade to W2K until their next computer purchase. The thing ought to be bloated!
The interesting aspect is that this Red Flag distro will certainly not be kept within the gov't . As the chinese seem not to be very fond of purchasing software, we may well have a nation of 1 billion using mostly Linux in the near future.
That's what I'm saying: if you regard every port scan as an attack you may consider these numbers to be true. But they are as harmless as the pictures I took from the White House during a trip to D.C. .
A dangerous attack is something else entirely, demanding planning and skills from a methodical hacker and there aren't *that* many people in the world who fit this profile. The average citizen would never tell the difference so they buy it, but you can do better than that.
While you're talking about this, I'm behind a proxy/firewall too, so you have my sympathy:). At least they left *one* port open.
This story reminds me that one about Bill Clinton's call for crackers to stay put during the turn of the year. That sounded to me like a bait for script kids. Picture a scenario in which a lot of unimportant web pages had been defaced. The media would make a lot of noise around it, and then the government would come up with this story. All in perfect synch. Unfortunately for them, the kids were probably all well-oiled that evening. Serious hackers knew that was not the right time for cage-rattling (everyone was complaining about having to work on new year's eve, right?).
An evidence showing that this is not 100% serious is that one of those 3 articles (there's one in CNN too) claims that millitary computers were subjected to +- 18.000 attacks last year, IIRC. That means almost 50 a day! No way, unless you consider every single port scan attempt as an attack.
Ok, coincidently our phones here in our office happen to be silent right now (some moron plugged the exchange into the wrong voltage) and still I can post this. That's not the point. The internet depends a lot on phone lines to be what it is today. That post is sure off-topic but you may be as well in bad need of taking a look through your lab's window, no matter whether you like windows or not, so as to see some more of the world out there.
It seems clear that I2 will be closed to "general public" for some time, then I wonder how this could affect the life of those who (like me) are already out of campus life.
I wonder if the text content available through I2 will be the same as the one we can reach by means of the Internet. It would be sad if I1 and I2 servers were separated and scientists decided to give a higher priority to I2 material (which they probably would), and we couldn't access new papers and so on. I believe servers will be separated (if not yet) for security reasons. If they aren't, someone may hack a way to use an I2 connection at some university through poor-cousin internet. The bandwidth bottleneck would still exist, but people would do it, either for the fun of it or for malicious reasons. (Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to do that.)
On the good side, I see this as, if not an embryo, at least a test bed for something that will be needed sooner or later: a replacement for the internet as we know it. The experience gathered with I2 will be a very usefull when the time comes to draw the standards for such a replacement. Intelligent routing, for instance, is a wonderfull idea.
As someone has already posted in a funny way, the small bandwidth relief originated by students using I2 instead of I1(?) is pretty welcome too!
The role of a judge is to interpret law and apply it to the concrete case that is shown before him. The role of lawyers is to take advantage of whatever provision there may be in the law, to their client's benefit.
The problem seems to be that no matter how well informed a judge or lawyer may be, the decisions must be in harmony with the legal system. Laws are not prepared to deal with things so unmaterial and fast-changing as internet, cookie technology, linking to copyrighted material, port scanning, GPL, ad caching and so on.
Given the slow nature of the legislative process my bet is that this mess will remain for a while. And no matter how well intentioned a judge can be. Law makers are the ones who can make a difference.
I would like to know what kind of people read/., what percentage of male/female readers, ages, country, profession and so on. Did you ever think of such a poll? Sure, knowing your audience better would help!
Picture if you would a grotesque little monster with greying hair named Clintoboinko that defeats his opponents by whipping out his...
On the other hand, wouldn't it be nice to have a Bill-Gates-like character? Maybe serving as a dart target or for vodoo porpouses...
-------------------------
Re:I suspect that the hype prevented the disaster
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
You change the typedef of time_t to a 64 bit signed integer (long long) rather than the 32 bit signed integer (long)
Still non-standard!
My bet is that whoever decided to typedeef time_t was planning to do this one day, but I would like to see this coming from an ANSI comitee.
-------------------------
Re:I suspect that the hype prevented the disaster
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for putting it in a better perspective. If you're talking early 60's, well then things were very different. But there was a moment when the two lines of RAM/fixed-storage cost and system revision cost crossed, and this was not a recent event IMO.
This post of yours should have been moderated up!
-------------------------
Re:I suspect that the hype prevented the disaster
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
Amem!
Y2k was a major f***up. I don't think disk space was that expensive in the past to justify such bad planning.
Y2038 may be a problem, or may not (if something is done now). And we won't have to wait until year 2038 to see problems popping up here and there. It's not a Unix-only problem, but affects any software that uses standard C time functions.
Does anyone know of a C library with a good implementation of time_t like 64bit representation and related functions? Is anyone working on that yet? I would hate to have to use non-standard code.
However some of the more obscure companies will not, it doesn't make economic sense for them to do so, they have very little to gain from spending lots of money on it, they follow the 80/20 rule.
This "spending-lots-of-money-on-it" part doesn't ring right. Device drivers are a nuissance for hardware companies and they would love not to have to worry about it. There could be a way out:
Let's say a given company discloses hardware specs of a new card so that someone in the OS community can write a device driver. The driver would be available for everyone, the programmer would get the credit and sales could be a bit higher, for now there are a few more potential buyers. All pretty GPL.
Now consider a different scenario: someone volunteers or is asked to write a Linux (or whatever) device driver for a new card, the company gives this guy (or group) specifications, the guy does the job and the company owns the binary. They ship the driver with the card or you can download it from the company's site. The driver would be available for everyone, the programmer would still get the credit and sales could be a bit higher, for now there are a few more potential buyers. Much the same effect as the one obtained by a GPL solution, except that there would be no room for improvement (which is not about to occour anyway, unless the thing is buggy) and that it would hurt someone's feelings.
Personally, I have this small piece of hardware that I love and cannot use if I boot Linux, so I see no way other than keeping the "other" partition. Now, if I were capable of writing a device driver (I have no idea how it differs from an executable or a DLL) and if that famous company gave me the specs, I would be glad to write a driver and give away ownership of it. It's something that would never be sold, anyway!
All I can do is choose from another manufacturer next time I upgrade.
Does anyone remember the name of that car manufacturer who built a whole plant, a few units, and shut his doors closed? There was a movie about it, with Jeff Bridges, I guess.
Pitty... But that's a good example of how fundamental it is to have good management tied to cutting-edge technology.
Couldn't agree more! I'm new to Linux, but when I saw all the services running in my machine, all turned on by default, I decided I won't boot it Linux with a phone cable even close by until I've figured out what each and every one of those services do. It may not be "cool", but at least no one is touching my SAM, that's for sure.
A good part of this discussion reminds me of that "Time Magazine/Amazon.com" issue discussed a few days ago. The average understanding was that journalists are in general pretty ignorant on tech matters. Fair, you were in your element, they weren't.
Now I see lots of people posting their views on how a tax system should work. While I support free speech, I must point out that:
This is way off topic, the guy is asking about what software is available for Linux.
Most opinions on taxation (calling for regressive consumption-based taxes) seem to be as well informed as the average CNN reporter's on how to configure a firewall.
For those of you interested in what are the goals and consequences of a tax system, I suggest this book. There are a many others, but this one is not U.S. intensive.
As for the guy asking about what software there would be, I don't know of any, but I strongly advice him not to rely on anything that is not liable, it may not be worth the savings.
Slashdot Mirror
I must express my sympathy for this Primer guy. You can't compare his occasional mistakes (or mine, or yours) to the mistakes of someone who claims to be an editor. Language is the basic tool of a journalist, it can't be neglected.
A small misspelling (although this one was on the name of a country) here and there is something we have to live with, unfortunately. This is not the problem. The problem is this attitude of regarding proper use of the language as a secondary concern. Check out /. FAQ and you will see they take their bad spelling/grammar with a bit of pride. The mistakes are so many that they hurt even *my* eyes, for I'm brazilian and my English is barely operational. If I had to choose between correctness and content, I would pick the latter, but these are *not* mutually exclusive, they are complementary, for bad language (I mean "rules") can distort the best intentions.
Else, let Homer Simpson do the editing...
-------------------------
This issue raises a point that has already been highlighted in a previous discussion in Slashdot, and I think it is the central point. First let me say what is not an issue here:
GPL isn't being broken in any way.
They applied for a trademark, not a patent (some still mistake one for the other).
They do not seem to be willing to enforce this trademark ownership. In their first page there is a button entitled "How to get Linux" which links to this page, which I dare to try to translate, despite my lousy Spanish (worse than my English!):
Linux is free and you don't have to pay for licenses or to obtain it. There are companies in the world market which take the burden to prepare Linux "distributions". These distributions are CD's that in genneral include an extensive set of applications, manuals, plus an applications that allows you to install and even administrate your system in a user-friendly way.
Many development hours are invested in these distributions so as the finished product owns nothing to its commercial alternatives, in most cases including 30 or more days of free installation support. Its cost is much more accessible than that of any commercial software.
Anyway, these companies have publicly available free internet sites where one can download or update these distributions.
It is worth clarifying that if you do not have the time or a very fast connection, it is always much more convenient to buy an already assembled and tested distribution.
Then you have links to the major distributors.
I am convinced that their intention is to protect themselves from an oportunistic move from someone else. I may be wrong.
What is really an issue here is that Linux (and GPL) seem to be pretty orphan when the time comes to protect trademarks and so on. I remember there was a company in Brazl back in 83 called "Microsoft", they started their business about the same time as M$, and the association which leads to the brand name seems to be quite an obvious one, so I don't have reasons to believe that they wanted to fool anyone into thinking they were something else other than themselves. A couple of years later, M$ was already established in Brazil and demanded them to change their name and got a court ruling for that, so the company was renamed "Multisoft". Now, who would act as a legitimate party in such cases so as to protect Linux's name and image? Linus owns the tm alright, but is he willing to put all the energy and resources needed in each case, considering he has other interests right now? (BTW, I'm damn curious about it!) Once we all have an interest in this, would it be fair to put such a burden on his shoulders?
-------------------------
Folks, if you're so pissed off at Slashdot, why do you keep reading it?
Because people is the stuff this site is made up of. We don't read what's in here because of the editors. Even the articles themselves are not that important when compared to the warmth (sometimes heat) contained in discussions like this one. We seek information and knowledge, of course, but there are many folks here who know each other for some time, even if only through this very channel, and this is the kind of thing we are not willing to leave behind. We may disagree, we may flame each other sometimes, but we like the presence of other human beings, so as to exchange points of view and wishes. Check ou your tagline/footnote, it's pure Slashdot! This site has a culture.Did I answer your question?
Now, the source code part. If they don't release the code, they are in their right. I've never seen even the old version, but it must be sheer spaghetti, for they don't come up with a reasonable explanation why not to release it. One can understand that, they are understaffed and things there seem to be made in a hurry, right? Rob himself used the comunity analogy. It is like a mayor asking everyone to keep the city clean, just to litter around when no one is looking.
-------------------------
-------------------------
Let's stretch the concept a little: how about a (web?)mail server? Wouldn't it be cool to have an yourname@slashdot.org address?
-------------------------
A wise move, for they will be able to keep lots of 486's in business. I think Bill Gates himself advised people not to upgrade to W2K until their next computer purchase. The thing ought to be bloated!
The interesting aspect is that this Red Flag distro will certainly not be kept within the gov't . As the chinese seem not to be very fond of purchasing software, we may well have a nation of 1 billion using mostly Linux in the near future.
Maybe there won't be a LinuxOne IPO at all!
-------------------------
That's what I'm saying: if you regard every port scan as an attack you may consider these numbers to be true. But they are as harmless as the pictures I took from the White House during a trip to D.C. .
A dangerous attack is something else entirely, demanding planning and skills from a methodical hacker and there aren't *that* many people in the world who fit this profile. The average citizen would never tell the difference so they buy it, but you can do better than that.
While you're talking about this, I'm behind a proxy/firewall too, so you have my sympathy :). At least they left *one* port open.
-------------------------
-------------------------
This story reminds me that one about Bill Clinton's call for crackers to stay put during the turn of the year. That sounded to me like a bait for script kids. Picture a scenario in which a lot of unimportant web pages had been defaced. The media would make a lot of noise around it, and then the government would come up with this story. All in perfect synch. Unfortunately for them, the kids were probably all well-oiled that evening. Serious hackers knew that was not the right time for cage-rattling (everyone was complaining about having to work on new year's eve, right?).
An evidence showing that this is not 100% serious is that one of those 3 articles (there's one in CNN too) claims that millitary computers were subjected to +- 18.000 attacks last year, IIRC. That means almost 50 a day! No way, unless you consider every single port scan attempt as an attack.
-------------------------
Easy, pal!
Ok, coincidently our phones here in our office happen to be silent right now (some moron plugged the exchange into the wrong voltage) and still I can post this. That's not the point. The internet depends a lot on phone lines to be what it is today. That post is sure off-topic but you may be as well in bad need of taking a look through your lab's window, no matter whether you like windows or not, so as to see some more of the world out there.
-------------------------
It seems clear that I2 will be closed to "general public" for some time, then I wonder how this could affect the life of those who (like me) are already out of campus life.
I wonder if the text content available through I2 will be the same as the one we can reach by means of the Internet. It would be sad if I1 and I2 servers were separated and scientists decided to give a higher priority to I2 material (which they probably would), and we couldn't access new papers and so on. I believe servers will be separated (if not yet) for security reasons. If they aren't, someone may hack a way to use an I2 connection at some university through poor-cousin internet. The bandwidth bottleneck would still exist, but people would do it, either for the fun of it or for malicious reasons. (Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to do that.)
On the good side, I see this as, if not an embryo, at least a test bed for something that will be needed sooner or later: a replacement for the internet as we know it. The experience gathered with I2 will be a very usefull when the time comes to draw the standards for such a replacement. Intelligent routing, for instance, is a wonderfull idea.
As someone has already posted in a funny way, the small bandwidth relief originated by students using I2 instead of I1(?) is pretty welcome too!
-------------------------
The role of a judge is to interpret law and apply it to the concrete case that is shown before him. The role of lawyers is to take advantage of whatever provision there may be in the law, to their client's benefit.
The problem seems to be that no matter how well informed a judge or lawyer may be, the decisions must be in harmony with the legal system. Laws are not prepared to deal with things so unmaterial and fast-changing as internet, cookie technology, linking to copyrighted material, port scanning, GPL, ad caching and so on.
Given the slow nature of the legislative process my bet is that this mess will remain for a while. And no matter how well intentioned a judge can be. Law makers are the ones who can make a difference.
-------------------------
-------------------------
-------------------------
Picture if you would a grotesque little monster with greying hair named Clintoboinko that defeats his opponents by whipping out his...
On the other hand, wouldn't it be nice to have a Bill-Gates-like character? Maybe serving as a dart target or for vodoo porpouses...
-------------------------
You change the typedef of time_t to a 64 bit signed integer (long long) rather than the 32 bit signed integer (long)
Still non-standard!
My bet is that whoever decided to typedeef time_t was planning to do this one day, but I would like to see this coming from an ANSI comitee.
-------------------------
Thanks for putting it in a better perspective. If you're talking early 60's, well then things were very different. But there was a moment when the two lines of RAM/fixed-storage cost and system revision cost crossed, and this was not a recent event IMO.
This post of yours should have been moderated up!
-------------------------
Amem!
Y2k was a major f***up. I don't think disk space was that expensive in the past to justify such bad planning.
Y2038 may be a problem, or may not (if something is done now). And we won't have to wait until year 2038 to see problems popping up here and there. It's not a Unix-only problem, but affects any software that uses standard C time functions.
Does anyone know of a C library with a good implementation of time_t like 64bit representation and related functions? Is anyone working on that yet? I would hate to have to use non-standard code.
-------------------------
That's the *exact* idea!
-------------------------
However some of the more obscure companies will not, it doesn't make economic sense for them to do so, they have very little to gain from spending lots of money on it, they follow the 80/20 rule.
This "spending-lots-of-money-on-it" part doesn't ring right. Device drivers are a nuissance for hardware companies and they would love not to have to worry about it. There could be a way out:
Let's say a given company discloses hardware specs of a new card so that someone in the OS community can write a device driver. The driver would be available for everyone, the programmer would get the credit and sales could be a bit higher, for now there are a few more potential buyers. All pretty GPL.
Now consider a different scenario: someone volunteers or is asked to write a Linux (or whatever) device driver for a new card, the company gives this guy (or group) specifications, the guy does the job and the company owns the binary. They ship the driver with the card or you can download it from the company's site. The driver would be available for everyone, the programmer would still get the credit and sales could be a bit higher, for now there are a few more potential buyers. Much the same effect as the one obtained by a GPL solution, except that there would be no room for improvement (which is not about to occour anyway, unless the thing is buggy) and that it would hurt someone's feelings.
Personally, I have this small piece of hardware that I love and cannot use if I boot Linux, so I see no way other than keeping the "other" partition. Now, if I were capable of writing a device driver (I have no idea how it differs from an executable or a DLL) and if that famous company gave me the specs, I would be glad to write a driver and give away ownership of it. It's something that would never be sold, anyway!
All I can do is choose from another manufacturer next time I upgrade.
-------------------------
Pitty... But that's a good example of how fundamental it is to have good management tied to cutting-edge technology.
-------------------------
Couldn't agree more! I'm new to Linux, but when I saw all the services running in my machine, all turned on by default, I decided I won't boot it Linux with a phone cable even close by until I've figured out what each and every one of those services do. It may not be "cool", but at least no one is touching my SAM, that's for sure.
-------------------------
-------------------------
A good part of this discussion reminds me of that "Time Magazine/Amazon.com" issue discussed a few days ago. The average understanding was that journalists are in general pretty ignorant on tech matters. Fair, you were in your element, they weren't.
Now I see lots of people posting their views on how a tax system should work. While I support free speech, I must point out that:This is way off topic, the guy is asking about what software is available for Linux.
Most opinions on taxation (calling for regressive consumption-based taxes) seem to be as well informed as the average CNN reporter's on how to configure a firewall.
For those of you interested in what are the goals and consequences of a tax system, I suggest this book. There are a many others, but this one is not U.S. intensive.
As for the guy asking about what software there would be, I don't know of any, but I strongly advice him not to rely on anything that is not liable, it may not be worth the savings.
-------------------------