Is there some other way to open PDFs in Firefox? And what is this "acroread" program I keep hearing people mention? I did an "apt-cache search acroread" and got nothing!
Enlightenment is, quite simply, an attempt to prove that even as simple a utility as a window manager can have as much bloat as any of those fancy-pants application programs!
The only thing it's missing is a lisp interpreter, and that may be because a lisp interpreter could actually be useful.:)
Really? 'Cause I've been downloading steadily from the Archive for the last couple of years. Just got a Warren Zevon show yesterday. Streamed it first, liked the sound quality, downloaded the lossless version, and burned copies for me and a friend. Within the last week, I've also grabbed some tasty New Orleans funk and some excellent Japanese surf music. No problems uploading either -- half the Bernie Worell on the Archive is courtesy of yours truly. All in all, I've uploaded over 20 shows, and downloaded maybe 10x that amount. And I have yet to have a connection problem. Perhaps the problems you're having are on your end, not theirs?
Like the Grateful Dead? And all the bands that followed their lead, giving us over 1000 different bands with music on the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive, and thousands more that allow their music to be legally traded on the Etree Torrent server?
Ok, so you may say that's just live music, but if you want studio music, there's the Internet Archive (again) with Netlabels and Open Source Audio. I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing the news here.
Yeah, 'cause you should definitely limit your options as much as possible. How about doing BOTH? Frankly, my expectations of what "the authorities" will do is pretty low, but then my expectations of this "peer-to-peer government" you speak of is also pretty low, especially at present (since it doesn't exist yet).
It's easy to have high expectations of organizations that haven't been formed. Frankly, I suspect that this peer-to-peer organization you have in mind will have all sorts of unexpected problems in practice. I mean, democracy looks good on paper too. But I'm willing to wait and see. In the mean time, I'm going to try to take advantage of the infrastructure that does exist. I may be a cynic, but I'm a practical one.
> Yeah, but 99% of it is Grateful Dead and Phish live shows
Really? 99%? I mean, I have the page with both bands filtered in my bookmarks (that's http://bt.etree.org/index.php?filter=nophgd), but even when I go right to the main site, I only see 10 phish/dead shows out of the first 50. That seems a little more like 20% than 99% to me. Maybe you're using some special sort of mathematics here?:)
I will say that 99% of the stuff there is completely uninteresting to me, but that still leaves enough stuff that I check the site on a regular basis.
Yes, I think you're right, but certainly the implication in the article is that "legal download" means "paid download". The headline for the article says "Legal music downloading leaps...", but the only evidence they show is that paid music downloads have lept. That probably even means they're right, but I still don't like the implication that it's only legal if you've actually paid for it.
the article was about how many legal downloads there were, which they do know.
Do they? There's plenty of music that's not under the purview of the RIAA. If they're measuring by sales, then their methods are about as reliable as those who measure software popularity by sales in a world where open source is growing by leaps and bounds. Anyone who has installed a dozen or more legal copies of Fedora or Debian from a single CD knows how silly that notion is. And the amount of legally redistributable music out there is many orders of magnitude larger than the amount of free/open source software. The fully legal Etree torrent site is reportedly moving Petabytes on a regular basis.
(But your point that the article was not about illegal downloads remains valid.)
Nothing to do with end-users there. If the program does display the required notice, then it will after the end user installs it, and if it doesn't, then the exception applies and it doesn't matter.
Hmm, one thing that bugged me about the last version of the OpenCD was that it insisted you click on "I Agree" to the GPL before you install the software, which is silly, pointless and wrong. The GPL only covers distribution or other activities that would ordinarily be forbidden by copyright law. Installing and using the software is NOT one of those activities, and thus, end users do not and should not have to agree to the GPL.
Now maybe it's because the MS installer requires there to be some text for the user to agree to, but if that's the case, then I'd like to have them put something more appropriate there, like maybe, simply, "I'd like to use this free software".
As it is, people are left with the impression that this "Open Source" stuff has its own set of weird rules, even for end users! It may have weird rules for distributors and developers, but absolutely not for mere users! The GPL is a pretty intimidating thing for an end user to be faced with. Can you imagine how much more impressed they'd be if all they saw was a one-liner as above?
Sounds more like it's time to retire management than time to retire the shuttle! Seems like that would have at least saved the Challenger, and possibly the Columbia as well (although I'm not as sure they could have figured out anything to do in the latter case).
I do agree that we could probably do better than the shuttle, but it still sounds like you're trying to blame it for problems that aren't really its fault. And designing and building something better is a damn expensive proposition! I'd rather get as much value as possible out of the shuttle, even if it means we have to fire or shoot every bureaucrat in Washington!:)
Oh, the Guru Meditation is definitely in there. In fact, I just ran/usr/lib/xscreensaver/bsod, and it was the first one to appear, followed by a Solaris kernel panic, an HPUX kernel panic and a Linux crash and failed fsck. It's a nicely even-handed program.:)
Ooh, OpenVMS! There's something you don't see every day!:)
I'm not sure - it depends on the corporate culture at MS, and how much I thought asking hard questions might be a threat to my job. Since I don't work at MS (and am unlikely to ever do so, given what I've heard of their ageist policies WRT technical staff), I don't know a lot about their corporate culture.
But ultimately, you ask an irrelevent question. Either he's brown-nosing out of fear, or he's doing so because he's a natural brown-noser. But whatever his reasons, he's still clearly brown-nosing.
And yes, I have worked at places where I probably would have ended up brown-nosing myself, out of fear for my job, if I were in a similar position. Can't say I look back on those jobs with great fondness, though.
Not only have they been providing commercial support for Debian for years (and providing employment for many Debian developers), but apparently they're doing well enough at it that some fairly decent-sized companies (neither Mandriva nor Turbo is exactly tiny) are interested in teaming up with them.
OpenLinux? You mean the SCO/Caldera product? No, I don't think it sounds at all like OpenLinux! Perhaps you meant UnitedLinux? Yeah, Connectiva (now half of Mandriva) and Turbo were both members of UnitedLinux Coalition, so this very much looks like another stab at the same thing.
There may be problems maintaining a common base or there may not. UnitedLinux tanked for completely unrelated reasons: one of the players (Suse) got bought by Novell, and another (Caldera) went insane, renamed themselves to The SCO Group, and started suing everyone in sight.
This new effort still has some pretty big players. Mandriva and Turbo may not be household names in the US, but the former basically owns the Latin American market and has a big share in Europe, and the latter used to be number one in Asia (though I'm not sure that's true any more). The interesting thing is the switch to a Debian base. Connectiva (now Mandriva) is the company that originally modified Apt to work with RPM, but Turbo's never shown any interest in anything Debian-related before.
As for support, you're right, that's an important issue. So it's a good thing they've got Progeny along, since Progeny is basically the commercial support wing of Debian. After Ubuntu (which has the backing of a crazy-but-charming billionaire), Progeny is probably the company that employs the most Debian developers. (Including, I believe, the current project leader, Branden Robinson, though you should double-check before you quote me on that.)
I agree that this doesn't all necessarily spell a recipe for instant success, but on the other hand, I think they've got all the right elements present to at least have a shot. I doubt they'll take the US market away from Red Hat any time soon, but I could easily see them going to number two in Europe, and number one in much of the rest of the world. We'll just have to see how it plays out.
> So innovative that the KDE crew does it as well.
Re-e-e-eally? Which OS is it that KDE is an integral part of again? I must have overlooked that one. I've got Linux, Solaris and BSD here, and none of them seem to have KDE or Konquerer installed at all!
Actually, no, that one's a Free/Libre/Open Source innovation (y'know, the kind Balmer claims doesn't exist). The actual answer is Mosaic/CERN httpd.
How about electronic mail (Sendmail, and before that, UUCP)? Dynamic naming services (bind)? Decentralized peer-to-peer services (bittorrent)? Let's see: email, the web and bittorrent - between them, they make up, what, 97% of all Internet traffic? And they're all open source innovations! And let's not forget Netnews/NNTP, which, although it's not as popular as it once was, was still a very innovative design - and again, free/libre/open source. Command/Filename completion? FLOSS. Multiple frames in text editors? FLOSS.
Let's put that up against MS's list of innovations:
Your analysis is blindingly oversimplified. Most companies would rather GPL their own code than release it under a BSD license, but would rather have others release their code under a BSD license.
Actually, most companies don't care! Most companies aren't in the software market, don't want to be in the software market, don't care about the license as long as they can freely use and copy the software for their own purposes, and think all this arguing is insane. As far as they're concerned, the BSD and GPL licenses are functionally equivalent.
But for the tiny percentage of all companies that actually are in the software or computer services market, the BSD license is something they only want to see applied to other people's code. So, saying they "prefer" the BSD license is hopelessly naive and misguided. They prefer to give away as little as possible, while getting as much as possible. And, in general, many of them seem to find the GPL or other copyleft licenses to be a reasonable compromise.
The benefit to businesses of the GPL is quite obvious (at least to smart companies, of which there are an increasing number). They can release their own code without worrying that their competitors will abscond with it, improve it, and not share those improvements.
Me, I tend to prefer the BSD license for my own code, as it's simpler, and there's less to worry about. But it's a very mild preference, and I happily contribute to GPL'd projects as well.
Wow, that's a little bit too close to garderobe, an old word for "toilet".
(According to Terry Pratchett, admittedly not the most reliable of sources, they were called this because clothes were stored there so that the smell would keep away moths.)
Slashdot Mirror
It was a joke - I've tried acroread, and am very very VERY happy to not have it installed any more.
Is there some other way to open PDFs in Firefox? And what is this "acroread" program I keep hearing people mention? I did an "apt-cache search acroread" and got nothing!
Why I hate text files for a text-based article:
It's like running Windows -- if you install acroread instead of a DECENT PDF VIEWER, you've got nobody but yourself to blame, so QUITCHERBITCHEN!
Enlightenment is, quite simply, an attempt to prove that even as simple a utility as a window manager can have as much bloat as any of those fancy-pants application programs!
:)
The only thing it's missing is a lisp interpreter, and that may be because a lisp interpreter could actually be useful.
Really? 'Cause I've been downloading steadily from the Archive for the last couple of years. Just got a Warren Zevon show yesterday. Streamed it first, liked the sound quality, downloaded the lossless version, and burned copies for me and a friend. Within the last week, I've also grabbed some tasty New Orleans funk and some excellent Japanese surf music. No problems uploading either -- half the Bernie Worell on the Archive is courtesy of yours truly. All in all, I've uploaded over 20 shows, and downloaded maybe 10x that amount. And I have yet to have a connection problem. Perhaps the problems you're having are on your end, not theirs?
It's ok, you can get one of the nice Mac PPC machines, dump the crappy OS that comes with it and install Linux, and you'll be all set. Future-proof! :)
Link here. They've only got about 6800 recordings so far, but it's only going to get bigger.
Like the Grateful Dead? And all the bands that followed their lead, giving us over 1000 different bands with music on the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive, and thousands more that allow their music to be legally traded on the Etree Torrent server?
Ok, so you may say that's just live music, but if you want studio music, there's the Internet Archive (again) with Netlabels and Open Source Audio. I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing the news here.
Um. duh, it was an insightful joke! (Not that I modded it, obviously.)
Yeah, 'cause you should definitely limit your options as much as possible. How about doing BOTH? Frankly, my expectations of what "the authorities" will do is pretty low, but then my expectations of this "peer-to-peer government" you speak of is also pretty low, especially at present (since it doesn't exist yet).
It's easy to have high expectations of organizations that haven't been formed. Frankly, I suspect that this peer-to-peer organization you have in mind will have all sorts of unexpected problems in practice. I mean, democracy looks good on paper too. But I'm willing to wait and see. In the mean time, I'm going to try to take advantage of the infrastructure that does exist. I may be a cynic, but I'm a practical one.
> Yeah, but 99% of it is Grateful Dead and Phish live shows
:)
Really? 99%? I mean, I have the page with both bands filtered in my bookmarks (that's http://bt.etree.org/index.php?filter=nophgd), but even when I go right to the main site, I only see 10 phish/dead shows out of the first 50. That seems a little more like 20% than 99% to me. Maybe you're using some special sort of mathematics here?
I will say that 99% of the stuff there is completely uninteresting to me, but that still leaves enough stuff that I check the site on a regular basis.
Yes, I think you're right, but certainly the implication in the article is that "legal download" means "paid download". The headline for the article says "Legal music downloading leaps...", but the only evidence they show is that paid music downloads have lept. That probably even means they're right, but I still don't like the implication that it's only legal if you've actually paid for it.
the article was about how many legal downloads there were, which they do know.
Do they? There's plenty of music that's not under the purview of the RIAA. If they're measuring by sales, then their methods are about as reliable as those who measure software popularity by sales in a world where open source is growing by leaps and bounds. Anyone who has installed a dozen or more legal copies of Fedora or Debian from a single CD knows how silly that notion is. And the amount of legally redistributable music out there is many orders of magnitude larger than the amount of free/open source software. The fully legal Etree torrent site is reportedly moving Petabytes on a regular basis.
(But your point that the article was not about illegal downloads remains valid.)
Nothing to do with end-users there. If the program does display the required notice, then it will after the end user installs it, and if it doesn't, then the exception applies and it doesn't matter.
Hmm, one thing that bugged me about the last version of the OpenCD was that it insisted you click on "I Agree" to the GPL before you install the software, which is silly, pointless and wrong. The GPL only covers distribution or other activities that would ordinarily be forbidden by copyright law. Installing and using the software is NOT one of those activities, and thus, end users do not and should not have to agree to the GPL.
Now maybe it's because the MS installer requires there to be some text for the user to agree to, but if that's the case, then I'd like to have them put something more appropriate there, like maybe, simply, "I'd like to use this free software".
As it is, people are left with the impression that this "Open Source" stuff has its own set of weird rules, even for end users! It may have weird rules for distributors and developers, but absolutely not for mere users! The GPL is a pretty intimidating thing for an end user to be faced with. Can you imagine how much more impressed they'd be if all they saw was a one-liner as above?
> 6km is approx 3.7 miles not 3.5 and
:) :) :)
> 60km is 37 miles and not 35
What? You're full of crap! 6km is approx 3.728 miles, not 3.7, and 60km is 37.28 miles, not 37!
for the humor-impaired:
Sounds more like it's time to retire management than time to retire the shuttle! Seems like that would have at least saved the Challenger, and possibly the Columbia as well (although I'm not as sure they could have figured out anything to do in the latter case).
:)
I do agree that we could probably do better than the shuttle, but it still sounds like you're trying to blame it for problems that aren't really its fault. And designing and building something better is a damn expensive proposition! I'd rather get as much value as possible out of the shuttle, even if it means we have to fire or shoot every bureaucrat in Washington!
Oh, the Guru Meditation is definitely in there. In fact, I just ran /usr/lib/xscreensaver/bsod, and it was the first one to appear, followed by a Solaris kernel panic, an HPUX kernel panic and a Linux crash and failed fsck. It's a nicely even-handed program. :)
:)
Ooh, OpenVMS! There's something you don't see every day!
I'm not sure - it depends on the corporate culture at MS, and how much I thought asking hard questions might be a threat to my job. Since I don't work at MS (and am unlikely to ever do so, given what I've heard of their ageist policies WRT technical staff), I don't know a lot about their corporate culture.
But ultimately, you ask an irrelevent question. Either he's brown-nosing out of fear, or he's doing so because he's a natural brown-noser. But whatever his reasons, he's still clearly brown-nosing.
And yes, I have worked at places where I probably would have ended up brown-nosing myself, out of fear for my job, if I were in a similar position. Can't say I look back on those jobs with great fondness, though.
Not only have they been providing commercial support for Debian for years (and providing employment for many Debian developers), but apparently they're doing well enough at it that some fairly decent-sized companies (neither Mandriva nor Turbo is exactly tiny) are interested in teaming up with them.
OpenLinux? You mean the SCO/Caldera product? No, I don't think it sounds at all like OpenLinux! Perhaps you meant UnitedLinux? Yeah, Connectiva (now half of Mandriva) and Turbo were both members of UnitedLinux Coalition, so this very much looks like another stab at the same thing.
There may be problems maintaining a common base or there may not. UnitedLinux tanked for completely unrelated reasons: one of the players (Suse) got bought by Novell, and another (Caldera) went insane, renamed themselves to The SCO Group, and started suing everyone in sight.
This new effort still has some pretty big players. Mandriva and Turbo may not be household names in the US, but the former basically owns the Latin American market and has a big share in Europe, and the latter used to be number one in Asia (though I'm not sure that's true any more). The interesting thing is the switch to a Debian base. Connectiva (now Mandriva) is the company that originally modified Apt to work with RPM, but Turbo's never shown any interest in anything Debian-related before.
As for support, you're right, that's an important issue. So it's a good thing they've got Progeny along, since Progeny is basically the commercial support wing of Debian. After Ubuntu (which has the backing of a crazy-but-charming billionaire), Progeny is probably the company that employs the most Debian developers. (Including, I believe, the current project leader, Branden Robinson, though you should double-check before you quote me on that.)
I agree that this doesn't all necessarily spell a recipe for instant success, but on the other hand, I think they've got all the right elements present to at least have a shot. I doubt they'll take the US market away from Red Hat any time soon, but I could easily see them going to number two in Europe, and number one in much of the rest of the world. We'll just have to see how it plays out.
> So innovative that the KDE crew does it as well.
Re-e-e-eally? Which OS is it that KDE is an integral part of again? I must have overlooked that one. I've got Linux, Solaris and BSD here, and none of them seem to have KDE or Konquerer installed at all!
> #4. The first web browser/web server.
:)
> Netscape
Actually, no, that one's a Free/Libre/Open Source innovation (y'know, the kind Balmer claims doesn't exist). The actual answer is Mosaic/CERN httpd.
How about electronic mail (Sendmail, and before that, UUCP)? Dynamic naming services (bind)? Decentralized peer-to-peer services (bittorrent)? Let's see: email, the web and bittorrent - between them, they make up, what, 97% of all Internet traffic? And they're all open source innovations! And let's not forget Netnews/NNTP, which, although it's not as popular as it once was, was still a very innovative design - and again, free/libre/open source. Command/Filename completion? FLOSS. Multiple frames in text editors? FLOSS.
Let's put that up against MS's list of innovations:
1. Clippy
2. Uh....
3. profit?
Your analysis is blindingly oversimplified. Most companies would rather GPL their own code than release it under a BSD license, but would rather have others release their code under a BSD license.
Actually, most companies don't care! Most companies aren't in the software market, don't want to be in the software market, don't care about the license as long as they can freely use and copy the software for their own purposes, and think all this arguing is insane. As far as they're concerned, the BSD and GPL licenses are functionally equivalent.
But for the tiny percentage of all companies that actually are in the software or computer services market, the BSD license is something they only want to see applied to other people's code. So, saying they "prefer" the BSD license is hopelessly naive and misguided. They prefer to give away as little as possible, while getting as much as possible. And, in general, many of them seem to find the GPL or other copyleft licenses to be a reasonable compromise.
The benefit to businesses of the GPL is quite obvious (at least to smart companies, of which there are an increasing number). They can release their own code without worrying that their competitors will abscond with it, improve it, and not share those improvements.
Me, I tend to prefer the BSD license for my own code, as it's simpler, and there's less to worry about. But it's a very mild preference, and I happily contribute to GPL'd projects as well.
Wow, that's a little bit too close to garderobe, an old word for "toilet".
(According to Terry Pratchett, admittedly not the most reliable of sources, they were called this because clothes were stored there so that the smell would keep away moths.)