"According to Ars Technica, Google's EULA for Chrome was just copy-and-pasted from its EULA for other services [CC], a practice that is apparently common at Google."
Let me get this straight. If a company (even a "good" company like Google) can't even be bothered to read and understand their own EULA, how can all the users be expected to? What a joke. Even the lawyers forcing these EULAs down our throats pay no more attention than the average user. Where is the "meeting of the minds" that a (valid) contract supposedly represents, when nobody thinks through the details?
This is a REALLY aggressive spam campaign. I never received a message with the subject of "CNN.com Daily Top 10" until 2 days ago at 1:49 PM. Since then, I have received 1,799 of these messages and counting. Of course, I get spammed to death already -- my email address (deven@ties.org) has been public for many years, and I don't even hide it here on Slashdot, even though it really is my primary email address. Spam has grown to the point where I am receiving over 10,000 messages every single day. (Yes, that's about a million messages in 3 months.)
On a separate note, I received an email yesterday with the title "Action required to avoid account access interruption" -- and it was actually a legitimate email! I receive such emails daily from phishing attempts, but this one was actually sent to me by TD Ameritrade.
It's a sad state of affairs when it's the legitimate email that comes as a surprise.
It's not like Firefox makes it impossible to access a web site with a self signed certificate. It just makes it very obvious that something is wrong with the certificate, and tells the user that he shouldn't trust it to much.
I am running Firefox 3.0.1 under Windows right now, and I tried to visit this web page. Firefox displayed a full-page error message that looks exactly like the error message you get when a site is down:
Cannot Complete Request
www.cacert.org uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
Let's try to troubleshoot the problem:
Check Internet connection: Your Internet connection seems to be working.
Try to perform some diagnostic tests:
[Ping Server][Trace to Server][Ping Myself][Trace to Myself] [Retry This][Google Cache][Wayback][Whois]
General troubleshooting tips:
Additional information about this problem or error is currently unavailable.
Yes, Firefox 3.01 did block me from accessing the website. The error message is completely unhelpful. There's no visible way around it. There's no explanation of how to resolve the problem. I was able to load the page by installing the root certificate manually, but any normal user would see this message and just think it's a broken website.
How does it benefit the world to get people to STOP using SSL?
A very good use of these folks' time would be to reach some milestones on the Linux driver API so that the dang thing will stop changing all the time.
An even better use of their time would be to write drivers for the Project UDI interface, since those people spent many years perfecting a stable, cross-platform API only to have the project stall because of the chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody wanted to support UDI without a base of drivers to use, and nobody wanted to write drivers without a base of operating systems supporting UDI.
I still think it would make Linux more useful to split the difference and occasionally define an interface (doesn't have to be the default as long as you can ask for it somehow) which is guaranteed to work for some number of years.
There is a UDI reference implementation for Linux, although it's probably suffered from bit rot by now. If UDI were properly supported, kernel and driver development could be decoupled, and the kernel folks could experiment with their side quite extensively without requiring the slightest code change for the drivers. (It might require a recompile in certain circumstances.)
Okay, here's what I don't get about Slashdot's tagging system. Supposedly it takes the most frequently-tagged values and puts them on the story. All well and good, but did lots of people really randomly type shootpeoplethatshoutintotheirphone into the tagging system?? It seems more likely that someone noticed that tag, thought it was funny, and promoted it.
What is the real criteria for the tags to be used?
In the file? OK, how do you make sure the processing program that reads the docuemnt in fifty years understands your peculiar way of separating data from metadata.
If you really feel the need to make the data self-identifying as UTF-8, you can use the Byte Order Mark for that purpose.
Excellent analysis. I've spent 30 minutes before writing a well-researched summary with links to informative pages, on topics of clear interest to the community, only to have them randomly rejected with no explanation. As a result, I've mostly given up on submitting stories -- it's a waste of my valuable time.
An obvious solution presents itself -- extend the moderation system to allow moderators to rate stories, much like Kuro5hin does. Then present only the +5 (or maybe +10) stories to the editors to be approved or denied. Better yet, require every such rating to be accompanied by a comment explaining why the story was ranked +1, 0 or -1 by the moderator, and show that list of comments to the editor and the original submitter.
And create a mechanism for moderators to link duplicate sumissions together, so that the editors can see all the related submissions together and select the best one -- and automatically reject the rest as duplicates once one of the submissions is accepted.
Such a system could raise the quality of the stories substantially, and actually make it worthwhile to submit stories...
The RMSE score (lower is better) currently posted by wxyzconsulting.com (0.9430) does indeed beat the CineMatch score (0.9514), which is almost good enough to qualify for the Progress Prize 2007 (0.9419 required), but not close to winning the Grand Prize (0.8563 required), so don't assume that this story means that the contest is over!
Lots of people pay for software without specifically wanting support. First, you have consumers who don't really know how to pirate or get around activation schemes. Also, there are businesses for whom the cost of a license is cheaper than a visit from the BSA. Gosh, there are even people for whom paying for the software they use is a moral issue.
Redhat, on the other hand, has given moral and legal permission to use their software for free. I myself have purchased copies of Windows and Photoshop, but downloaded Linux and GIMP without paying anything. Maybe I'll donate some money to the projects one of these days, but I don't anticipate paying for Redhat anytime soon. However, everything else being equal, if there were no FOSS Linux distros available, would I be willing to buy a copy of Redhat? Probably.
And herein lies the problem. Since we have no legal or even moral obligation to pay for OSS code, we happily accept this largesse without a second thought. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone.) Millions of us benefit from OSS code these days, and rarely do we give a penny to the actual authors of most of that code, whether or not we buy a boxed copy of Redhat. Yet most of us would be willing to pay a certain amount if we had to, knowing the quality and value of the software. (It sure beats paying Microsoft for an inferior product!)
Just imagine how much we could all benefit, if we could find a way to actually collect all that money that the users would be willing to pay (but don't pay because they don't have to), and use that money to pay programmers to work on OSS code as their day job!
Now the sweet part is... with Free/Open Source licensing model, you can "steal" it back from where this allegedly successful competitor of yours left it, and since you are more into it, you can easily stay ahead of such hijackers, steer the project into directions which converge with your other projects... (enter, politics) in a way, do what Microsoft does, embrace and extend anything that crosses your path, without the need to buy them out.
That doesn't resolve the fundamental problem -- that others can undercut you and decimate any potential revenue that you could have made from the project. This means that you can't recoup the initial investment that you made by paying programmers to write the software in the first place, so nobody in their right mind would make the initial investment to begin with. The fact that you can "steal" enhancements back (if you use a license like the GPL, not BSD) doesn't change the fundamental economics of the situation -- the money paid to hire programmers to write OSS code is a parasitic expense that must be supported by some other revenue stream. Your competitors can probably compete for that other revenue stream while avoiding your expenses. It's just not a good model.
Go ahead, ask the developers of 100 typical one-person OSS projects just how much hard cash they've ever received from end users who benefit from using their software and appreciate their efforts. I'm guessing you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who gets enough for an occasional pizza (if that), much less enough to live on! Even the larger projects that are well-known and used by many people probably lead to very little (if any) actual money in the pockets of those contributors who aren't lucky enough to be working for a company who pays them to work on the project, no matter how many hours they're investing in the project...
Thank you for posting one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot in years. (Please send me some email; I'd like to talk to you further offline.)
In my view, the difficulty of finding a viable, self-sustaining means of paying programmers to write OSS code (without exploiting something else) is one of the greatest challenges the OSS community faces. Of course, we'd all love for all OSS code to be contributed for altruistic reasons, and much is, but the fact of the matter is that programmers gotta eat too. We all have bills to pay and expenses in life (and toys to buy!) -- and most of us are not independently wealthy, free to spend our time as we'd prefer.
I would love to spend my days writing OSS code to benefit the world, and not having to worry about earning money. But that's easier said than done. I have bills to pay and a family to support. My family keeps me pretty busy, but there's only so many hours per day that I actually want to spend at a computer hacking code these days anyhow! Much as I love hacking, my larval stage is well behind me, and these days, I know there's more to life than computers. Besides, I spend my days working on the computer all day at my day job for a proprietary company; by the time I get home, eat dinner, spend time with my wife and daughters, and finally have some free time, I'm simply too tired to go back to working on the computer at night, knowing that I have to wake up early in the morning to go to work. I just don't have the mental energy for it at that point. Meanwhile, on days off, I'm usually either booked solid by family events, errands or other activities -- or relaxing to take a break from this busy routine when I actually do have some spare time.
In practice, I rarely find the time and energy anymore to work on the computer projects I want to be working on. My Gangplank project is a good example. I've released the code as Open Source (after years as a private codebase), but I've rarely found the time to work on it, even though I have a TODO list a mile long. Finally, at the start of 2003, I decided to start tracking just how much time I actually spent on the project, knowing that I was neglecting it more than working on it. While I did spend 34.5 hours in 2003 working on it, most of that was over a span of about 2 weeks when I was motivated to work on it for a while. I didn't touch the project at all in 2004. Throughout all of 2005, I spent 2.5 hours on it. So far, I've spent 15 minutes in 2006 on it. So, in almost 4 years now, I've spent only 37.25 hours on a project that I started way back in 1992. In the last 3 years, it's only been 2.75 hours -- less than 1 hour per year on average!
Now, I'm sure with better time management, I could accomplish more than that, but that's a separate issue. My point is, if my employer was willing to pay me to work on this project, I could have put in all those hours in less than a week, instead of taking 4 years. And I'm sure I'm not the only hacker facing this dilemma. I'm no longer willing to sacrifice any hope of having a life outside of computers in order to spend all my available time hacking on my computer. I'm also a husband and father now, and my family demands and deserves my time. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much mental energy available to expend. There's gotta be a better way.
I don't have a solution to this problem, but I'm trying to think of one. We need a way that programmers can be paid to write OSS code as their "day job", but there seems to be no viable way to make paid development work self-supporting without sacrificing one of the "sacred cows" of free software -- the "free" part. While the FSF will swear up and down that "Free Software" is really about freedom, not price, we all know that it's equally about both. And as long as someone else can undercut you by giving away your own software for free, you ca
As a (recent) Slashdot subscriber, I've played with the new discussion system. I like a lot of it, but I find the arrows awkward to use, the thresholds confusing, and sometimes it was impossible to make that side box appear or disappear when you need it to. I did like the ability to see abbreviated comments, but it was hard to control.
But one critical problem forced me to turn it off. I make heavy use of tabbed browsing, and I often have 100+ tabs open across a number of browser windows. Generally, if I'm quickly scanning Slashdot's homepage, if I see an article that looks like it might be interesting, I open it in a new tab and move on. I usually don't have time to read most of them, and typically I'll end up bookmarking and closing the tabs eventually (in which case it's even less likely I'll ever read it).
It's not uncommon for me to have 50 or more tabs containing Slashdot stories that I'll never get around to reading. This is already bad enough when it comes to memory usage (and my machine has 1GB of RAM), but with the new discussion system, the Slashdot stories became unreadable because the navigation was taking too long. I'm not sure if this was because of paging enormous amounts of memory or because the dozens of background Slashdot tabs were somehow consuming CPU time. One way or the other, it was unbearable, and I stopped testing the new discussion system.
It would be nice if I could click a button on a story that would bookmark the story under my user page as one I want to return to later. Couple that with some tools to organize and manage that list, and I wouldn't have to open new tabs to keep track of the stories of interest...
Why would this be such a bad thing? rm doesn't expand "." or ".." to the current directory or the parent directory.
I assume this is a troll. Nevertheless, I'll respond before you lure some newbie into a false sense of security.
The shell (not the command) expands wildcards, and the wildcard ".*" will indeed include "." and ".." in the expansion. (Expanding "*", on the other hand, will leave out all files starting with ".", including the "." and ".." directories.) On some Unix systems "rm.." may indeed delete the parent directory and everything under it. Don't assume "rm.*" is a safe operation.
That being said, current versions of GNU "rm", which Linux uses, will report an error:
rm: cannot remove `.' or `..'
Obviously, this is to protect the user against such mistakes, but not all versions of "rm" out there will be so accomodating. Note that this error is a special feature of the application; it's still receiving "." and ".." as targets to remove if you run "rm.*"...
Use the technique described in this article. Configure your DHCP server to hand out unrestricted "trusted" IP addresses to your equipment, and "untrusted" IP addresses with less access to strangers...
All the more reason to get to a "dog food" release as soon as possible, so users can actually start using the application instead of just playing with it. Of course, it's hard to convince people to switch until the new system is better than the old one, but that's the point at which truly valuable feedback is inevitable. Until it's being used for real, you're likely to get only cursory feedback from most users.
Re:The rules apply, but it's more subtle than that
on
Phishers Get Phoney
·
· Score: 1
So, the point is, you can call the number. But you have to get a human on the line, and you have to make them prove to you that they already know your account information.
That doesn't make you safe. What if the scammer gave you a fake phone number that gets (illegally) recorded while routing the call through to your REAL bank? Then, since you're talking to your real bank, any mutual identification sequence you and the bank perform will pass, but the scammer now knows how to pass themselves off as you when talking to your bank, because they've heard you identify yourself to your bank...
If you want to be safe, you should still be calling a trusted phone number.
Depriving customers of their restore CDs wouldn't be a waste of time if your goal is to ensure service calls by preventing customers from being able to restore their computers without help. It's clear that a business could benefit from such behavior, even if it is unscrupulous and probably illegal. I'm not alleging that Best Buy did any such thing (someone else did), but you can't simply rule out the possibility as a logic exercise by claiming there's no benefit in it -- there's a clear possible benefit there...
At which point all the original developers reform the original company, grab the original source (the last release is still out there with its OSS license!), and start releasing the same product. Only now they're a lot richer with Oracle's money in their pockets.
Except that the new company would lack the copyrights that gave Sleepycat the ability to dual-license the code for commercial use. Without that business model, a "new Sleepycat" could not survive. If Oracle lays off the developers, they could work on the code, but they would no longer be able to make a living at it...
Too bad there isn't a good free library for handling transactions.
Well, there's always the Berkeley DB 1.x libraries -- those remain available under the original BSD license. Of course, Sleepycat has made tremendous improvements since then, but it's still a viable starting point that someone could work from...
Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me.
I should point out that the Slashdot editor changed my words while leaving them attributed to me.
I said nothing about diversity. My original quote was "Having previously acquired Innobase, what does the future hold for these open-source databases?" The editor changed the end of the sentence to "Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity." -- those weren't my words, despite remaining inside the quotes.
But hey, I got a submission accepted, and that's always nice!:-)
Yep. It premiered on Showtime, which was the only place it could show full frontal nudity (and yes, there was some in the first episode). After Showtime didn't think it was doing well enough, they dropped it. Unlike FOX, however, they were willing to let the rights go. UPN then picked it up and it did well for a few seasons until it wasn't doing well enough. Then they, again, sold the rights. It's been on Sci-Fi and sucessful ever since.
What are you talking about? UPN never produced Stargate SG-1. Yes, it was a Showtime original series -- but after 5 seasons on Showtime, the show went straight to SciFi channel for Season 6 and beyond. UPN has never been part of the picture, though you have have seen syndicated episodes on UPN. Showtime and SciFi are the only homes Stargate SG-1 has had for original episodes.
Also, I seem to recall hearing, way back when the first season was airing on Showtime, that Showtime had made a 5-year commitment to Stargate SG-1. Indeed, the show was aired on Showtime for the full 5 years. After that contract expired, Showtime decided not to renew it, and SciFi picked up the show for a 6th season, and has continued producing new episodes since then.
Imagine if a broadcast network were actually willing to make a multi-year commitment to a new show! Showtime should be applauded for their foresight. Stargate SG-1 is an excellent show, especially seasons 3-5 from Showtime's watch...
Slashdot Mirror
Fundamentals of Database Systems
"According to Ars Technica, Google's EULA for Chrome was just copy-and-pasted from its EULA for other services [CC], a practice that is apparently common at Google."
Let me get this straight. If a company (even a "good" company like Google) can't even be bothered to read and understand their own EULA, how can all the users be expected to? What a joke. Even the lawyers forcing these EULAs down our throats pay no more attention than the average user. Where is the "meeting of the minds" that a (valid) contract supposedly represents, when nobody thinks through the details?
This is a REALLY aggressive spam campaign. I never received a message with the subject of "CNN.com Daily Top 10" until 2 days ago at 1:49 PM. Since then, I have received 1,799 of these messages and counting. Of course, I get spammed to death already -- my email address (deven@ties.org) has been public for many years, and I don't even hide it here on Slashdot, even though it really is my primary email address. Spam has grown to the point where I am receiving over 10,000 messages every single day. (Yes, that's about a million messages in 3 months.)
On a separate note, I received an email yesterday with the title "Action required to avoid account access interruption" -- and it was actually a legitimate email! I receive such emails daily from phishing attempts, but this one was actually sent to me by TD Ameritrade.
It's a sad state of affairs when it's the legitimate email that comes as a surprise.
It's not like Firefox makes it impossible to access a web site with a self signed certificate. It just makes it very obvious that something is wrong with the certificate, and tells the user that he shouldn't trust it to much.
I am running Firefox 3.0.1 under Windows right now, and I tried to visit this web page. Firefox displayed a full-page error message that looks exactly like the error message you get when a site is down:
Yes, Firefox 3.01 did block me from accessing the website. The error message is completely unhelpful. There's no visible way around it. There's no explanation of how to resolve the problem. I was able to load the page by installing the root certificate manually, but any normal user would see this message and just think it's a broken website.
How does it benefit the world to get people to STOP using SSL?
A very good use of these folks' time would be to reach some milestones on the Linux driver API so that the dang thing will stop changing all the time.
An even better use of their time would be to write drivers for the Project UDI interface, since those people spent many years perfecting a stable, cross-platform API only to have the project stall because of the chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody wanted to support UDI without a base of drivers to use, and nobody wanted to write drivers without a base of operating systems supporting UDI.
I still think it would make Linux more useful to split the difference and occasionally define an interface (doesn't have to be the default as long as you can ask for it somehow) which is guaranteed to work for some number of years.
There is a UDI reference implementation for Linux, although it's probably suffered from bit rot by now. If UDI were properly supported, kernel and driver development could be decoupled, and the kernel folks could experiment with their side quite extensively without requiring the slightest code change for the drivers. (It might require a recompile in certain circumstances.)
Wouldn't that be worthwhile?
Okay, here's what I don't get about Slashdot's tagging system. Supposedly it takes the most frequently-tagged values and puts them on the story. All well and good, but did lots of people really randomly type shootpeoplethatshoutintotheirphone into the tagging system?? It seems more likely that someone noticed that tag, thought it was funny, and promoted it.
What is the real criteria for the tags to be used?
In the file? OK, how do you make sure the processing program that reads the docuemnt in fifty years understands your peculiar way of separating data from metadata.
If you really feel the need to make the data self-identifying as UTF-8, you can use the Byte Order Mark for that purpose.
Perhaps you just haven't found the right email gateway yet...
I sent you an email; did you get it?
Excellent analysis. I've spent 30 minutes before writing a well-researched summary with links to informative pages, on topics of clear interest to the community, only to have them randomly rejected with no explanation. As a result, I've mostly given up on submitting stories -- it's a waste of my valuable time.
An obvious solution presents itself -- extend the moderation system to allow moderators to rate stories, much like Kuro5hin does. Then present only the +5 (or maybe +10) stories to the editors to be approved or denied. Better yet, require every such rating to be accompanied by a comment explaining why the story was ranked +1, 0 or -1 by the moderator, and show that list of comments to the editor and the original submitter.
And create a mechanism for moderators to link duplicate sumissions together, so that the editors can see all the related submissions together and select the best one -- and automatically reject the rest as duplicates once one of the submissions is accepted.
Such a system could raise the quality of the stories substantially, and actually make it worthwhile to submit stories...
The RMSE score (lower is better) currently posted by wxyzconsulting.com (0.9430) does indeed beat the CineMatch score (0.9514), which is almost good enough to qualify for the Progress Prize 2007 (0.9419 required), but not close to winning the Grand Prize (0.8563 required), so don't assume that this story means that the contest is over!
Lots of people pay for software without specifically wanting support. First, you have consumers who don't really know how to pirate or get around activation schemes. Also, there are businesses for whom the cost of a license is cheaper than a visit from the BSA. Gosh, there are even people for whom paying for the software they use is a moral issue.
Redhat, on the other hand, has given moral and legal permission to use their software for free. I myself have purchased copies of Windows and Photoshop, but downloaded Linux and GIMP without paying anything. Maybe I'll donate some money to the projects one of these days, but I don't anticipate paying for Redhat anytime soon. However, everything else being equal, if there were no FOSS Linux distros available, would I be willing to buy a copy of Redhat? Probably.
And herein lies the problem. Since we have no legal or even moral obligation to pay for OSS code, we happily accept this largesse without a second thought. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone.) Millions of us benefit from OSS code these days, and rarely do we give a penny to the actual authors of most of that code, whether or not we buy a boxed copy of Redhat. Yet most of us would be willing to pay a certain amount if we had to, knowing the quality and value of the software. (It sure beats paying Microsoft for an inferior product!)
Just imagine how much we could all benefit, if we could find a way to actually collect all that money that the users would be willing to pay (but don't pay because they don't have to), and use that money to pay programmers to work on OSS code as their day job!
Now the sweet part is... with Free/Open Source licensing model, you can "steal" it back from where this allegedly successful competitor of yours left it, and since you are more into it, you can easily stay ahead of such hijackers, steer the project into directions which converge with your other projects ... (enter, politics) in a way, do what Microsoft does, embrace and extend anything that crosses your path, without the need to buy them out.
That doesn't resolve the fundamental problem -- that others can undercut you and decimate any potential revenue that you could have made from the project. This means that you can't recoup the initial investment that you made by paying programmers to write the software in the first place, so nobody in their right mind would make the initial investment to begin with. The fact that you can "steal" enhancements back (if you use a license like the GPL, not BSD) doesn't change the fundamental economics of the situation -- the money paid to hire programmers to write OSS code is a parasitic expense that must be supported by some other revenue stream. Your competitors can probably compete for that other revenue stream while avoiding your expenses. It's just not a good model.
Go ahead, ask the developers of 100 typical one-person OSS projects just how much hard cash they've ever received from end users who benefit from using their software and appreciate their efforts. I'm guessing you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who gets enough for an occasional pizza (if that), much less enough to live on! Even the larger projects that are well-known and used by many people probably lead to very little (if any) actual money in the pockets of those contributors who aren't lucky enough to be working for a company who pays them to work on the project, no matter how many hours they're investing in the project...
We need a better solution.
Thank you for posting one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot in years. (Please send me some email; I'd like to talk to you further offline.)
In my view, the difficulty of finding a viable, self-sustaining means of paying programmers to write OSS code (without exploiting something else) is one of the greatest challenges the OSS community faces. Of course, we'd all love for all OSS code to be contributed for altruistic reasons, and much is, but the fact of the matter is that programmers gotta eat too. We all have bills to pay and expenses in life (and toys to buy!) -- and most of us are not independently wealthy, free to spend our time as we'd prefer.
I would love to spend my days writing OSS code to benefit the world, and not having to worry about earning money. But that's easier said than done. I have bills to pay and a family to support. My family keeps me pretty busy, but there's only so many hours per day that I actually want to spend at a computer hacking code these days anyhow! Much as I love hacking, my larval stage is well behind me, and these days, I know there's more to life than computers. Besides, I spend my days working on the computer all day at my day job for a proprietary company; by the time I get home, eat dinner, spend time with my wife and daughters, and finally have some free time, I'm simply too tired to go back to working on the computer at night, knowing that I have to wake up early in the morning to go to work. I just don't have the mental energy for it at that point. Meanwhile, on days off, I'm usually either booked solid by family events, errands or other activities -- or relaxing to take a break from this busy routine when I actually do have some spare time.
In practice, I rarely find the time and energy anymore to work on the computer projects I want to be working on. My Gangplank project is a good example. I've released the code as Open Source (after years as a private codebase), but I've rarely found the time to work on it, even though I have a TODO list a mile long. Finally, at the start of 2003, I decided to start tracking just how much time I actually spent on the project, knowing that I was neglecting it more than working on it. While I did spend 34.5 hours in 2003 working on it, most of that was over a span of about 2 weeks when I was motivated to work on it for a while. I didn't touch the project at all in 2004. Throughout all of 2005, I spent 2.5 hours on it. So far, I've spent 15 minutes in 2006 on it. So, in almost 4 years now, I've spent only 37.25 hours on a project that I started way back in 1992. In the last 3 years, it's only been 2.75 hours -- less than 1 hour per year on average!
Now, I'm sure with better time management, I could accomplish more than that, but that's a separate issue. My point is, if my employer was willing to pay me to work on this project, I could have put in all those hours in less than a week, instead of taking 4 years. And I'm sure I'm not the only hacker facing this dilemma. I'm no longer willing to sacrifice any hope of having a life outside of computers in order to spend all my available time hacking on my computer. I'm also a husband and father now, and my family demands and deserves my time. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much mental energy available to expend. There's gotta be a better way.
I don't have a solution to this problem, but I'm trying to think of one. We need a way that programmers can be paid to write OSS code as their "day job", but there seems to be no viable way to make paid development work self-supporting without sacrificing one of the "sacred cows" of free software -- the "free" part. While the FSF will swear up and down that "Free Software" is really about freedom, not price, we all know that it's equally about both. And as long as someone else can undercut you by giving away your own software for free, you ca
As a (recent) Slashdot subscriber, I've played with the new discussion system. I like a lot of it, but I find the arrows awkward to use, the thresholds confusing, and sometimes it was impossible to make that side box appear or disappear when you need it to. I did like the ability to see abbreviated comments, but it was hard to control.
But one critical problem forced me to turn it off. I make heavy use of tabbed browsing, and I often have 100+ tabs open across a number of browser windows. Generally, if I'm quickly scanning Slashdot's homepage, if I see an article that looks like it might be interesting, I open it in a new tab and move on. I usually don't have time to read most of them, and typically I'll end up bookmarking and closing the tabs eventually (in which case it's even less likely I'll ever read it).
It's not uncommon for me to have 50 or more tabs containing Slashdot stories that I'll never get around to reading. This is already bad enough when it comes to memory usage (and my machine has 1GB of RAM), but with the new discussion system, the Slashdot stories became unreadable because the navigation was taking too long. I'm not sure if this was because of paging enormous amounts of memory or because the dozens of background Slashdot tabs were somehow consuming CPU time. One way or the other, it was unbearable, and I stopped testing the new discussion system.
It would be nice if I could click a button on a story that would bookmark the story under my user page as one I want to return to later. Couple that with some tools to organize and manage that list, and I wouldn't have to open new tabs to keep track of the stories of interest...
I assume this is a troll. Nevertheless, I'll respond before you lure some newbie into a false sense of security.
The shell (not the command) expands wildcards, and the wildcard ".*" will indeed include "." and ".." in the expansion. (Expanding "*", on the other hand, will leave out all files starting with ".", including the "." and ".." directories.) On some Unix systems "rm
That being said, current versions of GNU "rm", which Linux uses, will report an error:Obviously, this is to protect the user against such mistakes, but not all versions of "rm" out there will be so accomodating. Note that this error is a special feature of the application; it's still receiving "." and ".." as targets to remove if you run "rm
Use the technique described in this article. Configure your DHCP server to hand out unrestricted "trusted" IP addresses to your equipment, and "untrusted" IP addresses with less access to strangers...
All the more reason to get to a "dog food" release as soon as possible, so users can actually start using the application instead of just playing with it. Of course, it's hard to convince people to switch until the new system is better than the old one, but that's the point at which truly valuable feedback is inevitable. Until it's being used for real, you're likely to get only cursory feedback from most users.
So, the point is, you can call the number. But you have to get a human on the line, and you have to make them prove to you that they already know your account information.
That doesn't make you safe. What if the scammer gave you a fake phone number that gets (illegally) recorded while routing the call through to your REAL bank? Then, since you're talking to your real bank, any mutual identification sequence you and the bank perform will pass, but the scammer now knows how to pass themselves off as you when talking to your bank, because they've heard you identify yourself to your bank...
If you want to be safe, you should still be calling a trusted phone number.
Depriving customers of their restore CDs wouldn't be a waste of time if your goal is to ensure service calls by preventing customers from being able to restore their computers without help. It's clear that a business could benefit from such behavior, even if it is unscrupulous and probably illegal. I'm not alleging that Best Buy did any such thing (someone else did), but you can't simply rule out the possibility as a logic exercise by claiming there's no benefit in it -- there's a clear possible benefit there...
This is an important point.
At which point all the original developers reform the original company, grab the original source (the last release is still out there with its OSS license!), and start releasing the same product. Only now they're a lot richer with Oracle's money in their pockets.
Except that the new company would lack the copyrights that gave Sleepycat the ability to dual-license the code for commercial use. Without that business model, a "new Sleepycat" could not survive. If Oracle lays off the developers, they could work on the code, but they would no longer be able to make a living at it...
Too bad there isn't a good free library for handling transactions.
Well, there's always the Berkeley DB 1.x libraries -- those remain available under the original BSD license. Of course, Sleepycat has made tremendous improvements since then, but it's still a viable starting point that someone could work from...
Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me.
:-)
I should point out that the Slashdot editor changed my words while leaving them attributed to me.
I said nothing about diversity. My original quote was "Having previously acquired Innobase, what does the future hold for these open-source databases?" The editor changed the end of the sentence to "Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity." -- those weren't my words, despite remaining inside the quotes.
But hey, I got a submission accepted, and that's always nice!
Yep. It premiered on Showtime, which was the only place it could show full frontal nudity (and yes, there was some in the first episode). After Showtime didn't think it was doing well enough, they dropped it. Unlike FOX, however, they were willing to let the rights go. UPN then picked it up and it did well for a few seasons until it wasn't doing well enough. Then they, again, sold the rights. It's been on Sci-Fi and sucessful ever since.
What are you talking about? UPN never produced Stargate SG-1. Yes, it was a Showtime original series -- but after 5 seasons on Showtime, the show went straight to SciFi channel for Season 6 and beyond. UPN has never been part of the picture, though you have have seen syndicated episodes on UPN. Showtime and SciFi are the only homes Stargate SG-1 has had for original episodes.
Also, I seem to recall hearing, way back when the first season was airing on Showtime, that Showtime had made a 5-year commitment to Stargate SG-1. Indeed, the show was aired on Showtime for the full 5 years. After that contract expired, Showtime decided not to renew it, and SciFi picked up the show for a 6th season, and has continued producing new episodes since then.
Imagine if a broadcast network were actually willing to make a multi-year commitment to a new show! Showtime should be applauded for their foresight. Stargate SG-1 is an excellent show, especially seasons 3-5 from Showtime's watch...