I'm guessing you haven't run a web server more sophisticated than your home blog.
I have, and the post to which you replied was spot on. Once a CA has its root cert distributed with the major browsers, the only risk you assume by using them is that if they screw up, that cert may not be included in the future, and you may need to replace the certificate that you pay them to sign.
"when you log into a server and have agent forwarding turned on, you allow anyone with root access on that server to log into anywhere your agent can log into"
Right, which is why agent forwarding is disabled by default. The only point to this article may be to remind the few users who use an agent and turn forwarding on in their config files that they should use the '-A' flag, instead.
Cool. Could you send me your copy of Red Hat's private keys?
Why do people keep repeating Linus' ridiculous argument? Red Hat's OS does not require that scripts or binaries are signed by them in order to run. You can copy a binary from another system to a RHEL box, and it will run. Likewise, you can import your own keys into rpm, so that the package managers will install them without warning.
GPL3 doesn't require Red Hat to release the keys that they use to sign packages. It would, only if there were no way to install or run software without those keys.
That might have something to do with the ridiculous cost of MS support. My boss has only called MS support once, and they couldn't solve the problem that he had. It cost him $200 up front to make that call, and when they failed to provide anything of value, he had to twist arms to get the money back.
If you think MS's software is bad, I promise you that their support is worse.
I can see where you might be confused. The text that you quote was discussed as one possible responsibility for the foundation, after its creation. However, that was never one of the publicly stated goals of the foundation, neither was it a goal that they accepted for themselves.
If you read the letter again, you should be able to understand the context. The stated purpose of the foundation was to provide an open patent commons. That was it. All of the other numbered items discussed were never goals of the foundation, and the letter discusses the reasons why they were not.
The key is this quote:
Once we announced the intention to form a Foundation, people inside and outside of Red Hat were interested in working beyond the stated purpose -- an intellectual property repository -- and instead saw this new Foundation as a potential tool to solve all sorts of Fedora-related issues. Every Fedora issue became a nail for the Foundation hammer, and the scope of the Foundation quickly became too large for efficient progress.
The Fedora Foundation was never meant to be "an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project". It was meant to be an independent patent holding entity which would defend Free Software from patent infringement suits. The article has it all wrong, even though it's very clearly stated in the open letter to which they link.
No, it wouldn't. The Fedora Foundation would have been an entity that held patents created by Free Software companies, to defend Free Software against patent infringement suit. The foundation was no longer necessary after the founding of the "Open Invention Network".
This was clearly stated in the open letter, despite Ars' flawed description.
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
Whats wrong with having an open source, freely distributed DRM system
Such a system can't work, that's what. In a DRM environment, you hand users content (copyrighted and DRMed media), the lock (DRM software), and the key (encryption keys). DRM only works if users can't manipulate the lock, and can't find the key.
An "open source" implementation of DRM would be pointless. Users have the key to get the data out of the encrypted container.
DRM really can't survive without "Trusted Computing", which will allow software to be DRMed, too. It's exactly the opposite of "open source".
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
We don't have a right to other people's creations.
Yeah, we do. Creative works aren't property in the same sense that a couch or a car are.
Creative works, ultimately, are just information, and we have the right to think about them, talk about them, and share them.
Copyright exists as an effort made by the public to grant a temporary monopoly on copying and distribution of creative works to those who create them, in order to create an environment in which they can realize more profit than would be possible without copyright. The intended purpose of this environment is to promote artistic efforts in order that the public will benefit by having a larger body of creative works. After the temporary monopoly expires, creative works belong to the public.
The continued expansion of copyright to longer terms is not benefitting the public, because it isn't adding incentive to create new works. DRM harms the public by depriving them of the ability to use the works for which they've paid in the manner of their choosing, and disregards the temporary nature of copyright, preventing the copying of protected works forever. That is not the intention of copyright law (or, at least, it wasn't, and it isn't what the public wants).
When you're thinking about copyright, it's important to remember that copyrighted material isn't property. When it's copied, the owner isn't deprived of anything that he owns. The distinction between information and property is important, as is the intended purpose of copyright.
Yes, it is. I'm using FC5, and I'm telling you based on my own experience that GNOME is significantly faster than the version included in FC4.
For that matter, cairo appears to be required by only pango and librsvg2, which means that GTK is not built on top of Cairo. You imply that GTK+ is using Cairo for rendering, which it supports, but is not doing in FC5.
Seriously, the review was short on substance, but I agree that FC5 is by far the best release that I've used, and I encourage other people to try it out.
I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow.
Probably because people experienced enough to write quality reviews don't think the GUI is "slow".
I'll note that GNOME is substantially faster than in any previous release, in terms of application startup time and rendering. A number of applications have been heavily optimized, in addition to the GNOME/GTK+ libraries.
How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?
It's a bug. It was introduced in the final stages of testing, and will be fixed with the first kernel update. It should be available very soon.
Sunbird is the name given to the standalone distribution of the old calendar application. The XPI extension for Thunderbird or Firefox was named Mozilla Calendar. Aside from packaging, they were basically the same application. So, as a minor correction, "Sunbird" does not run within the other Mozilla products, the Mozilla Calendar does.
Lightning is a completely different UI, designed to integrate better with Thunderbird than the Calendar application does. It'll provide some of the same things that Outlook does, which would have been moderately difficult, and possibly confusing in the old Calendar application.
I really don't think this person's experience is representative of the communities.
Anaconda: I've never seen a problem with it, and haven't had to use the text mode installer in years. At least, not when I didn't want to.
User accounts: It's true that this isn't done during the installation. The first time a Fedora or Red Hat OS boots up, it will ask you to add a non-root account or configure the system for "network login" (LDAP, NIS, winbind, or Hesiod). You don't have to "log in" to perform this step, and it's certainly not something that the distribution ignores. It happens after the reboot instead of before. Big deal.
MP3: Seriously, we go over this at every release. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems It's simple. The GPL is explicitly incompatible with patents. Until there is an MP3 library available under a Free Software license that's NOT the GPL, inclusion isn't even an option. It's NOT LEGAL. If there were an MP3 lib, say, under a BSD license, then at least distribution would be legal, and the question would be simply one of politics.
Lightning and Sunbird share the same codebase, and therefore have the exact same functionality and bugs
That's not quite it. Sunbird and Mozilla Calendar share the same codebase, and therefore have the same functionality and bugs. The difference between them is *only* packaging. Sunbird is packaged as a standalone app, while Mozilla Calendar is an extension for Firefox or Thunderbird.
Lightning, however, is a Thunderbird extention that puts the calendar UI directly in the Thunderbird window. The calendar provided by Sunbird/Mozilla Calendar uses a separate window. The group of products probably shares a codebase for handling calendar and related data, but the UI code is different between Lightning and the others. It's going to have its own share of bugs and features.
It's not a "cure" for anything. Commercial developers and businesses that develop in-house software get to claim credits on development costs. This proposal extends the same benefits to individual developers. What's good for the goose...
I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers
Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.
install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...
It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers, you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.
Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.
Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.
The usefullness of a search engine is directly proportional to its ability to discern the relative probability that each page matching your search terms contains useful information. Every major search engine uses its own set of heuristics to decide how useful a page is, and to what extent it is related to the words that it contains. It's not only reasonable to expect that a search engine can guess which, of the millions of pages may match your query, you're looking for, but it may be the only reason search engines are useful at all.
This is just some fancy pantsy liberal trying to wring money from successful businessmen because they are too lazy to do the hard work necessary to accumulate wealth.
It's ironic that you voice that opinion without considering that those "successful businessmen" are too lazy to do the hard work to establish a universally understood and respected ensignia for medical assistance.
In theory I guess it's possible that a terrorist group operating on North American soil could be sufficiently organized to pull off an anthrax-smuggling operation like you describe. It's just very unlikely.
They don't have to. All they have to do is pay the guys who already have the smuggling apparatus in place to move their cargo.
I dunno about faster. When FC4 was release, and included a copy of Eclipse that had been built with gcj, I tried it out. It was painfully slow, and used much more memory than Eclipse running under Sun's JVM. I'll try it again when I load up FC5, but I didn't think the gcj version was really usable. I trust it to get there, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you haven't run a web server more sophisticated than your home blog.
I have, and the post to which you replied was spot on. Once a CA has its root cert distributed with the major browsers, the only risk you assume by using them is that if they screw up, that cert may not be included in the future, and you may need to replace the certificate that you pay them to sign.
"when you log into a server and have agent forwarding turned on, you allow anyone with root access on that server to log into anywhere your agent can log into"
Right, which is why agent forwarding is disabled by default. The only point to this article may be to remind the few users who use an agent and turn forwarding on in their config files that they should use the '-A' flag, instead.
Cool. Could you send me your copy of Red Hat's private keys?
Why do people keep repeating Linus' ridiculous argument? Red Hat's OS does not require that scripts or binaries are signed by them in order to run. You can copy a binary from another system to a RHEL box, and it will run. Likewise, you can import your own keys into rpm, so that the package managers will install them without warning.
GPL3 doesn't require Red Hat to release the keys that they use to sign packages. It would, only if there were no way to install or run software without those keys.
That might have something to do with the ridiculous cost of MS support. My boss has only called MS support once, and they couldn't solve the problem that he had. It cost him $200 up front to make that call, and when they failed to provide anything of value, he had to twist arms to get the money back.
If you think MS's software is bad, I promise you that their support is worse.
If you read the letter again, you should be able to understand the context. The stated purpose of the foundation was to provide an open patent commons. That was it. All of the other numbered items discussed were never goals of the foundation, and the letter discusses the reasons why they were not.
The key is this quote:
The Fedora Foundation was never meant to be "an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project". It was meant to be an independent patent holding entity which would defend Free Software from patent infringement suits. The article has it all wrong, even though it's very clearly stated in the open letter to which they link.
No, it wouldn't. The Fedora Foundation would have been an entity that held patents created by Free Software companies, to defend Free Software against patent infringement suit. The foundation was no longer necessary after the founding of the "Open Invention Network".
This was clearly stated in the open letter, despite Ars' flawed description.
Whats wrong with having an open source, freely distributed DRM system
Such a system can't work, that's what. In a DRM environment, you hand users content (copyrighted and DRMed media), the lock (DRM software), and the key (encryption keys). DRM only works if users can't manipulate the lock, and can't find the key.
An "open source" implementation of DRM would be pointless. Users have the key to get the data out of the encrypted container.
DRM really can't survive without "Trusted Computing", which will allow software to be DRMed, too. It's exactly the opposite of "open source".
We don't have a right to other people's creations.
Yeah, we do. Creative works aren't property in the same sense that a couch or a car are.
Creative works, ultimately, are just information, and we have the right to think about them, talk about them, and share them.
Copyright exists as an effort made by the public to grant a temporary monopoly on copying and distribution of creative works to those who create them, in order to create an environment in which they can realize more profit than would be possible without copyright. The intended purpose of this environment is to promote artistic efforts in order that the public will benefit by having a larger body of creative works. After the temporary monopoly expires, creative works belong to the public.
The continued expansion of copyright to longer terms is not benefitting the public, because it isn't adding incentive to create new works. DRM harms the public by depriving them of the ability to use the works for which they've paid in the manner of their choosing, and disregards the temporary nature of copyright, preventing the copying of protected works forever. That is not the intention of copyright law (or, at least, it wasn't, and it isn't what the public wants).
When you're thinking about copyright, it's important to remember that copyrighted material isn't property. When it's copied, the owner isn't deprived of anything that he owns. The distinction between information and property is important, as is the intended purpose of copyright.
No it's not.
Yes, it is. I'm using FC5, and I'm telling you based on my own experience that GNOME is significantly faster than the version included in FC4.
For that matter, cairo appears to be required by only pango and librsvg2, which means that GTK is not built on top of Cairo. You imply that GTK+ is using Cairo for rendering, which it supports, but is not doing in FC5.
Seriously, the review was short on substance, but I agree that FC5 is by far the best release that I've used, and I encourage other people to try it out.
I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow.
Probably because people experienced enough to write quality reviews don't think the GUI is "slow".
I'll note that GNOME is substantially faster than in any previous release, in terms of application startup time and rendering. A number of applications have been heavily optimized, in addition to the GNOME/GTK+ libraries.
How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?
It's a bug. It was introduced in the final stages of testing, and will be fixed with the first kernel update. It should be available very soon.
ext3 (its not the fastest, but it is one of the most feature filled and stable)
Actually, these days, it does tend to be one of the fastest, as well.
Sunbird is the name given to the standalone distribution of the old calendar application. The XPI extension for Thunderbird or Firefox was named Mozilla Calendar. Aside from packaging, they were basically the same application. So, as a minor correction, "Sunbird" does not run within the other Mozilla products, the Mozilla Calendar does.
Lightning is a completely different UI, designed to integrate better with Thunderbird than the Calendar application does. It'll provide some of the same things that Outlook does, which would have been moderately difficult, and possibly confusing in the old Calendar application.
I really don't think this person's experience is representative of the communities.
Anaconda: I've never seen a problem with it, and haven't had to use the text mode installer in years. At least, not when I didn't want to.
User accounts: It's true that this isn't done during the installation. The first time a Fedora or Red Hat OS boots up, it will ask you to add a non-root account or configure the system for "network login" (LDAP, NIS, winbind, or Hesiod). You don't have to "log in" to perform this step, and it's certainly not something that the distribution ignores. It happens after the reboot instead of before. Big deal.
MP3: Seriously, we go over this at every release. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
It's simple. The GPL is explicitly incompatible with patents. Until there is an MP3 library available under a Free Software license that's NOT the GPL, inclusion isn't even an option. It's NOT LEGAL. If there were an MP3 lib, say, under a BSD license, then at least distribution would be legal, and the question would be simply one of politics.
Lightning and Sunbird share the same codebase, and therefore have the exact same functionality and bugs
That's not quite it. Sunbird and Mozilla Calendar share the same codebase, and therefore have the same functionality and bugs. The difference between them is *only* packaging. Sunbird is packaged as a standalone app, while Mozilla Calendar is an extension for Firefox or Thunderbird.
Lightning, however, is a Thunderbird extention that puts the calendar UI directly in the Thunderbird window. The calendar provided by Sunbird/Mozilla Calendar uses a separate window. The group of products probably shares a codebase for handling calendar and related data, but the UI code is different between Lightning and the others. It's going to have its own share of bugs and features.
It's not a "cure" for anything. Commercial developers and businesses that develop in-house software get to claim credits on development costs. This proposal extends the same benefits to individual developers. What's good for the goose...
Taxpayers are already subsidizing commercial developers. This proposal is intended merely to extend the same benefits to individual developers.
I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers
Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.
install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...
It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers, you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.
Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.
Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.
a search engine can only go on your keywords
I'm glad you don't make search engines.
The usefullness of a search engine is directly proportional to its ability to discern the relative probability that each page matching your search terms contains useful information. Every major search engine uses its own set of heuristics to decide how useful a page is, and to what extent it is related to the words that it contains. It's not only reasonable to expect that a search engine can guess which, of the millions of pages may match your query, you're looking for, but it may be the only reason search engines are useful at all.
I knew this whole "No! Vorbis is the format! OGG is just the container" idea would bite me on the ass some day
... Is there a solution to this absurd problem?
I don't really know why. Most of the media extensions you see on a regular basis are containers in the same way that ogg is.
I clicked on the movie links only to have my Winamp playlist destroyed.
Options -> Preferences -> File types -> "Enqueue files on double click in Windows Explorer..."
I have no idea why that's not the default, but the behavior you're seeing has nothing at all to do with ogg. It's a winamp thing.
This is just some fancy pantsy liberal trying to wring money from successful businessmen because they are too lazy to do the hard work necessary to accumulate wealth.
It's ironic that you voice that opinion without considering that those "successful businessmen" are too lazy to do the hard work to establish a universally understood and respected ensignia for medical assistance.
In theory I guess it's possible that a terrorist group operating on North American soil could be sufficiently organized to pull off an anthrax-smuggling operation like you describe. It's just very unlikely.
They don't have to. All they have to do is pay the guys who already have the smuggling apparatus in place to move their cargo.
I dunno about faster. When FC4 was release, and included a copy of Eclipse that had been built with gcj, I tried it out. It was painfully slow, and used much more memory than Eclipse running under Sun's JVM. I'll try it again when I load up FC5, but I didn't think the gcj version was really usable. I trust it to get there, though.
Which one? The Belkin F5D7050 has GPL drivers from the chipset manufacturer for Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.
http://ralink.rapla.net/