Actually, if you read the profiles on the front page of the roundtable and the comments posted by the various members of the panel, you will notice many more than two viewpoints. This issue extends beyond GPL vs. Microsoft.
Here is my take on the members' stances:
Larry Augustin: Silent so far.
James V. DeLong: Seems to be bringing a legal and philosophical angle to the discussion. He believes in IP rights to software, and sees open source and proprietary software as competing business models.
Dan Gilmoor: One comment of substance so far, in which he makes an attempt to get Mundie to take a stand on open source licenses other than GPL.
Brett Glass: Fairly prolific up to now. Falls very cleanly into the BSD camp here at Slashdot, and makes it clear that he believes in a developer's right to control how his software is used and reused. Makes some salient points about Microsoft licensing, but paints GPL as commercially unviable and as a "poison pill" to commercial software vendors.
David McGowan: Comes in as a legal mind placed fairly clearly against Microsoft and pro-GPL, if a little conservatively. Also fairly active.
Craig Mundie: Pretty active in the discussion. Makes some interesting points concerning innovation and the benefactors of publicly funded research. Pro-MS, of course.
Bruce Perens: Active participant, and arguably the most Pro-GPL, anti-MS panel member. Asks some inflammatory questions, and makes some good points about corporations who use software vs corporations who sell software.
David Winer: One of the less vocal members. Gives a good background on his decision to use the MIT license, and believes that commercial software is just as moral as open source software.
So I think the panel is fairly balanced, when you consider that the roundtable is not about MS vs. GPL anymore (despite the stated topic on the introductory page.) The real meat of the discussion is intellectual property, the ins and outs of licensing, and the relative merits of many different licensing models.
I regret Stallman's withdrawal from the panel, as his presence would have steered the discussion towards ethical issues as well as legal ones.
Depends on your definition of "operating system." GNU has created plenty Utilities, Applications, and Compilers. In addition, GNU has created a kernel, the HURD. One of the most significant contributions GNU has made is their C Library and their linker.
I would argue that GNU's goal is exactly that: to create an operating system that is free software.
Don't take my word for it, read The GNU Project for a complete description of the project.
From what I remember, I think a lot of the sounds in Duke Nukem 3D came from Army of Darkness, which is a fun pseudo-horror movie from the 80s.
So, I found a manuscript on some poor schmuck's fan page that I hope you people don't slashdot into weblivion. Grep away, folks!
By the way, Army of Darkness was actually the third in a trilogy including Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 (info here) so feel free to get cool samples from those too.
And for the real geeks, episode 107 from the first season of South Park is a take off on the first Evil Dead.
Re:Why Ogg Vorbis will fail (rebuttal)
on
MP3Pro Released
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· Score: 1
Why Ogg Vorbis will not fail:
...because independent developers like me are going to use Ogg or someone at his family reunion to internally store audio. (and video, and images, etc.) Game developers and developers of other software that works extensively with media have a lot to gain by using a free algorithm, and a lot to lose by embedding support for proprietary algorithms. With Ogg Vorbis, I can embed support for compressed audio in my application easily and in good conscience without becoming hopelessly tied to a company who patented a mathematical formula for digitally encoding audio. Which is all any audio "format" is. If I take a chance with MP3 or MP3Pro, I risk owing royalties or being forced to cripple all or part of my application (at least nominally for the countries that force software patents on the public.)
Like Soundblaster Pro. It was better than the Soundblaster original but not by much! And for some reason, the Soundblaster 16 was an upgrade from the Soundblaster Pro. And then the AWE32, AWE64, the PCI64/128/512, and the Live, then Live 5.1. Creative has a way of bouncing around on this stuff... anyone guessing their next name based on the above is a genius.
<ONTOPIC>I sure hope this doesn't make my mom run out and buy a Soundblaster Pro to play her MP3Pro files on...</ONTOPIC>
One thing that jumped out at me about this interview was that Terry asked a lot of questions about Linus's personal finances. The VALinux IPO, why he didn't want to "sell" Linux, etc. Hardly two sentences about his book, definitely no gratuitous plugs. That was nice. Interesting that Linus was careful to present Linux as the kernel and separate it from the programs that run on it, but still manage not to mention GNU or the FSF the whole time.
All in all an interesting peek into Linus's life, and a peek into what Linux is for the masses. I may actually check out his book.
I've seen this suggestion to cut out the metal grate to reduce noise a couple times now. What about dust? I have filters on two of my air intake fans' ports and they catch a fair amount of dust. They add noise but preserve cleanliness. Ideas?
Unfortunately, this discussion is in danger of degenerating to an OS war.
As it stands, the netfilter project is composed of a set of kernel features in the 2.4.x kernel and a userspace tool called iptables. As the featuresets of IPFilter vs netfilter can be argued, I have serious doubts that the netfilter project has much to contribute to firewalling on BSD. Programmers would have much greater impact contributing to the IPFW project.
Much better than layered LCD has been achieved
on
3D w/o Goggles
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· Score: 1
I found this page on Stereo3D about two months ago. It is a showcase of several 3D-sans-glasses products.
If it wasn't so expensive it would be a great hobby. I got a pair of discontinued shutter glasses on E-Bay, and they are pretty good, if glitchy. And so far they only work on Win98.
I noticed that the Samsung SPH-I300 (review) hadn't been linked here yet. It blows away the Kyocera QCP 6035 (review) in my mind, but it will run on Sprint's network. The Kyocera is only on Verizon's network in my area (Washington DC.) Meanwhile, I haven't seen anything about the Magcom Mobile Phone here in the US.
Hi, with the recent addition of OpenSSL and OpenSSH to the tree, I am thrilled with Slackware. I disagree with the exclusion of PAM, but am impressed with the response I got from Patrick about it and the fact that he replied intelligently in less than three hours on a weekend. And that it is excluded for a reason.
Now, the real point of this post is that I would like some kind of assurance that the Paypal account is really to the Project. This Slashdot post is hardly enough assurance. Maybe post it in the News or Get Slack sections of the site?
The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. In order to make this vision a reality for the Web, supporting standards, technologies and policies must be designed to enable machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans. Facilities and technologies to put machine-understandable data on the Web are rapidly becoming a high priority for many communities. For the Web to scale, programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.
This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.
And where does "fair use" come in? Say I'm an artist who wants to use The Legend of Zelda (tm) as the foundation for a work of satire? The Andy Warhol of video games?
In any case, the coder in question can do no harm to Nintendo corporation with his work. In fact, the only market change I foresee is an increase in game sales due to curiosity by players who have only tried the modified version.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, what with the Napster mess. I have been able to check out music for over five years at my local library. The same goes for videos, e-books, magazines... libraries have always distributed all sorts of media.
The question is, do the authors care? Both kinds too. For one, I'm sure Stephen King isn't at the forefront of the movement considering he's making more money than God. However, smaller authors might really stand to gain a lot. Curiously, it's the DIYs that seem to be against the whole copy protection thing in the first place.
The bottom line is, if libraries go, book piracy will emerge. Just like Scour, Napster, Gnutella, and every other P2P out there.
Interesting approach from Microsoft on this: that "Internet Explorer" is a generic name like "cola."
If they did this with "XBox," we could all release our own branded "X-Box" running an "Internet Explorer." Then sell them in the same shops as the MS X-Box, and make them better (Throw in a next-gen GEForce2 dualhead, Soundblaster Live Platinum 5.1, bigger monitor, maybe a Bleem PS2 emulator... the possibilities are endless!
Microsoft is putting a lot into its.NET initiative.
Sun has been nurturing Java for over 4 years.
Both.NET and Java provide platforms for distributed processing in desktop applications.
My opinion is that this is the beginning of an enterprise computing paradigm that Sun hopes will give Java an edge in the desktop market, after Microsoft's 15 year reign.
Imagine an entire office of computers efficiently sharing resources. I get up for coffee, my cycles are used for my co-worker's application compile. He goes to lunch, his cycles are mine for Unreal Tournament.
Long ago, there was an article on Slashdot about a free, high quality online university subsidized by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy. This was the missing link. There are already a few good free sources of information out there (Project Gutenberg, The Baen Library), but a comprehensive educational program available for free would provide a much more "equal opportunity." Has anyone heard anything from this, or is it vaporware?
When it takes several minutes to failover anyway (as is the case with Windows 2000Advanced ServerClustering) it would be a tremendous savings to have the hard drives spun-down most of the time. The server's only purpose is to take over operations in the eventuality of a failed master server; it's power consumption most of the time is a complete waste.
The International Biometrics Consortium is an organization of individuals, companies, and institutions that concerns itself with all aspects of Biometric technology. Fingerprinting is one of the most talked about, but retinal scans, voice prints, face recognition, behavioral recognition (such as gait or common hours of arrival and departure,) hand geometry, and other measures of "what you are" instead of "what you have" or "what you know." To become a member, you must join the listserv here.
Every November they have an annual Conference, but there are many events throughout the year, throughout the world.
There are many other organizations such as BioAPI that are concerned with aspects of the technology such as multivendor hardware and software support.
I attended the Consortium's 2000 conference at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD, USA. I was quite impressed with the state of the technology and the amount of research that has been done in this area, but surprised at the lack of large scale corporate interest.
Happy hunting, and please post your experiences!
Well, I tried it. And I'm afloat. To summarize what follows, you have to work long hard hours and sacrifice the financial benefits of full-time employment for a while. And you have to spend a lot of time doing non-programming related duties such as accounting, bookkeeping, marketing/networking, and writing proposals.
First, I got some paper behind my name while I was still full-time and made sure I did my full-time job well. At the time I was doing networking, server installations, and desktop support.
Then, some friends and I decided to do a network upgrade for a guy we knew over a weekend, and it went well. We continued to do small, hourly contracts for a fairly small rate (about triple my salary rate though) and built up a reputation with that client. Over time, we got larger and larger contracts for him, including a small database application he needed on short notice.
After delivering that, we agreed to do a larger database application without fully understanding the requirements and settled on a flat rate. Although financially we suffered for this, the fact that the application we turned out performed as we believed it should impressed the client that we had programming skills. However, in the course of four days of programming with a grand total of four hours of sleep, I lost my partners. They like networking, not development.
Since then, I have done several successful development projects for the client and refined my methodology for understanding customer requirements and providing a satisfactory solution in budget while turning a profit.
In the meantime (I know, what meantime!) I spent a lot of time calling up former coworkers and making contacts and buying people lunch. Out of that came my current largest client for whom I am subcontracting on two very large web applications. The original client has brought me on for a large e-commerce project, and I have brought on two friends as subcontractors to help.
The downside to this is that I spend sixty to eighty hours a week programming and driving to customer sites. On top of that, I spend ten to fifteen logging my hours, making invoices, accounting, marketing, and attempting to get a good lawyer. My next business strategy change is to try to convert all this hourly work into contract work.
All of that probably sounded like complaining. The clincher of the whole deal is that, if you are up to the work, it is a highly rewarding experience to provide solutions directly to clients and make a living doing it.
Whenever I finish my website, it will be here. Good luck!
Actually, I am a consultant for a corporation who, on a totally switched network, monitors almost every e-mail coming in or out by hand. It would be trivial, if the web usage logs showed a large amount of web-based e-mail, to capture the sessions for later perusal. The usage of SSL like on http://www.Hushmail.com would be the only way to get around it. At that point, I am almost positive the management would block hushmail at the firewall.
Point being: if your company wants to know what your'e doing bad enough, it doesn't matter whether or not web-based e-mail is in plaintext. They own your workstation, and can block what they can't watch.
Not true. The GPL pretty much guarantees that Microsoft cannot just "buy linux." Not only that, if they buy Redhat, Caldera, Debian, SuSE, AND Slackware, all they've done is buy distributions. They still wouldn't "own" linux. The kernel and the source to all the GNU software would STILL fall under the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you read the profiles on the front page of the roundtable and the comments posted by the various members of the panel, you will notice many more than two viewpoints. This issue extends beyond GPL vs. Microsoft.
Here is my take on the members' stances:
So I think the panel is fairly balanced, when you consider that the roundtable is not about MS vs. GPL anymore (despite the stated topic on the introductory page.) The real meat of the discussion is intellectual property, the ins and outs of licensing, and the relative merits of many different licensing models.
I regret Stallman's withdrawal from the panel, as his presence would have steered the discussion towards ethical issues as well as legal ones.
Depends on your definition of "operating system." GNU has created plenty Utilities, Applications, and Compilers. In addition, GNU has created a kernel, the HURD. One of the most significant contributions GNU has made is their C Library and their linker.
I would argue that GNU's goal is exactly that: to create an operating system that is free software.
Don't take my word for it, read The GNU Project for a complete description of the project.
better late than never...
Congrats!
From what I remember, I think a lot of the sounds in Duke Nukem 3D came from Army of Darkness, which is a fun pseudo-horror movie from the 80s.
So, I found a manuscript on some poor schmuck's fan page that I hope you people don't slashdot into weblivion. Grep away, folks!
By the way, Army of Darkness was actually the third in a trilogy including Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 (info here) so feel free to get cool samples from those too.
And for the real geeks, episode 107 from the first season of South Park is a take off on the first Evil Dead.
Why Ogg Vorbis will not fail:
...because independent developers like me are going to use Ogg or someone at his family reunion to internally store audio. (and video, and images, etc.) Game developers and developers of other software that works extensively with media have a lot to gain by using a free algorithm, and a lot to lose by embedding support for proprietary algorithms. With Ogg Vorbis, I can embed support for compressed audio in my application easily and in good conscience without becoming hopelessly tied to a company who patented a mathematical formula for digitally encoding audio. Which is all any audio "format" is. If I take a chance with MP3 or MP3Pro, I risk owing royalties or being forced to cripple all or part of my application (at least nominally for the countries that force software patents on the public.)
For me, it's a no-brainer.
Like Soundblaster Pro. It was better than the Soundblaster original but not by much! And for some reason, the Soundblaster 16 was an upgrade from the Soundblaster Pro. And then the AWE32, AWE64, the PCI64/128/512, and the Live, then Live 5.1. Creative has a way of bouncing around on this stuff... anyone guessing their next name based on the above is a genius.
<ONTOPIC>I sure hope this doesn't make my mom run out and buy a Soundblaster Pro to play her MP3Pro files on...</ONTOPIC>
One thing that jumped out at me about this interview was that Terry asked a lot of questions about Linus's personal finances. The VALinux IPO, why he didn't want to "sell" Linux, etc. Hardly two sentences about his book, definitely no gratuitous plugs. That was nice. Interesting that Linus was careful to present Linux as the kernel and separate it from the programs that run on it, but still manage not to mention GNU or the FSF the whole time.
All in all an interesting peek into Linus's life, and a peek into what Linux is for the masses. I may actually check out his book.
I've seen this suggestion to cut out the metal grate to reduce noise a couple times now. What about dust? I have filters on two of my air intake fans' ports and they catch a fair amount of dust. They add noise but preserve cleanliness. Ideas?
Unfortunately, this discussion is in danger of degenerating to an OS war.
As it stands, the netfilter project is composed of a set of kernel features in the 2.4.x kernel and a userspace tool called iptables. As the featuresets of IPFilter vs netfilter can be argued, I have serious doubts that the netfilter project has much to contribute to firewalling on BSD. Programmers would have much greater impact contributing to the IPFW project.
I found this page on Stereo3D about two months ago. It is a showcase of several 3D-sans-glasses products.
If it wasn't so expensive it would be a great hobby. I got a pair of discontinued shutter glasses on E-Bay, and they are pretty good, if glitchy. And so far they only work on Win98.
I noticed that the Samsung SPH-I300 (review) hadn't been linked here yet. It blows away the Kyocera QCP 6035 (review) in my mind, but it will run on Sprint's network. The Kyocera is only on Verizon's network in my area (Washington DC.) Meanwhile, I haven't seen anything about the Magcom Mobile Phone here in the US.
The demoscene is not dead, just got a little crotchety as the kids all grew up. Check out scene.org for a starter.
I wrote trax and hung out in #trax as Ned Funky. hehe.
Hi, with the recent addition of OpenSSL and OpenSSH to the tree, I am thrilled with Slackware. I disagree with the exclusion of PAM, but am impressed with the response I got from Patrick about it and the fact that he replied intelligently in less than three hours on a weekend. And that it is excluded for a reason.
Now, the real point of this post is that I would like some kind of assurance that the Paypal account is really to the Project. This Slashdot post is hardly enough assurance. Maybe post it in the News or Get Slack sections of the site?
Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.
The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. In order to make this vision a reality for the Web, supporting standards, technologies and policies must be designed to enable machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans. Facilities and technologies to put machine-understandable data on the Web are rapidly becoming a high priority for many communities. For the Web to scale, programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.
And where does "fair use" come in? Say I'm an artist who wants to use The Legend of Zelda (tm) as the foundation for a work of satire? The Andy Warhol of video games? In any case, the coder in question can do no harm to Nintendo corporation with his work. In fact, the only market change I foresee is an increase in game sales due to curiosity by players who have only tried the modified version.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, what with the Napster mess. I have been able to check out music for over five years at my local library. The same goes for videos, e-books, magazines... libraries have always distributed all sorts of media.
The question is, do the authors care? Both kinds too. For one, I'm sure Stephen King isn't at the forefront of the movement considering he's making more money than God. However, smaller authors might really stand to gain a lot. Curiously, it's the DIYs that seem to be against the whole copy protection thing in the first place.
The bottom line is, if libraries go, book piracy will emerge. Just like Scour, Napster, Gnutella, and every other P2P out there.
Interesting approach from Microsoft on this: that "Internet Explorer" is a generic name like "cola."
If they did this with "XBox," we could all release our own branded "X-Box" running an "Internet Explorer." Then sell them in the same shops as the MS X-Box, and make them better (Throw in a next-gen GEForce2 dualhead, Soundblaster Live Platinum 5.1, bigger monitor, maybe a Bleem PS2 emulator... the possibilities are endless!
My opinion is that this is the beginning of an enterprise computing paradigm that Sun hopes will give Java an edge in the desktop market, after Microsoft's 15 year reign.
Imagine an entire office of computers efficiently sharing resources. I get up for coffee, my cycles are used for my co-worker's application compile. He goes to lunch, his cycles are mine for Unreal Tournament.
I think it's got potential.
Long ago, there was an article on Slashdot about a free, high quality online university subsidized by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy. This was the missing link. There are already a few good free sources of information out there (Project Gutenberg, The Baen Library), but a comprehensive educational program available for free would provide a much more "equal opportunity." Has anyone heard anything from this, or is it vaporware?
When it takes several minutes to failover anyway (as is the case with Windows 2000 Advanced Server Clustering) it would be a tremendous savings to have the hard drives spun-down most of the time. The server's only purpose is to take over operations in the eventuality of a failed master server; it's power consumption most of the time is a complete waste.
The International Biometrics Consortium is an organization of individuals, companies, and institutions that concerns itself with all aspects of Biometric technology. Fingerprinting is one of the most talked about, but retinal scans, voice prints, face recognition, behavioral recognition (such as gait or common hours of arrival and departure,) hand geometry, and other measures of "what you are" instead of "what you have" or "what you know." To become a member, you must join the listserv here.
Every November they have an annual Conference, but there are many events throughout the year, throughout the world.
There are many other organizations such as BioAPI that are concerned with aspects of the technology such as multivendor hardware and software support.
I attended the Consortium's 2000 conference at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD, USA. I was quite impressed with the state of the technology and the amount of research that has been done in this area, but surprised at the lack of large scale corporate interest. Happy hunting, and please post your experiences!
Well, I tried it. And I'm afloat. To summarize what follows, you have to work long hard hours and sacrifice the financial benefits of full-time employment for a while. And you have to spend a lot of time doing non-programming related duties such as accounting, bookkeeping, marketing/networking, and writing proposals. First, I got some paper behind my name while I was still full-time and made sure I did my full-time job well. At the time I was doing networking, server installations, and desktop support. Then, some friends and I decided to do a network upgrade for a guy we knew over a weekend, and it went well. We continued to do small, hourly contracts for a fairly small rate (about triple my salary rate though) and built up a reputation with that client. Over time, we got larger and larger contracts for him, including a small database application he needed on short notice. After delivering that, we agreed to do a larger database application without fully understanding the requirements and settled on a flat rate. Although financially we suffered for this, the fact that the application we turned out performed as we believed it should impressed the client that we had programming skills. However, in the course of four days of programming with a grand total of four hours of sleep, I lost my partners. They like networking, not development. Since then, I have done several successful development projects for the client and refined my methodology for understanding customer requirements and providing a satisfactory solution in budget while turning a profit. In the meantime (I know, what meantime!) I spent a lot of time calling up former coworkers and making contacts and buying people lunch. Out of that came my current largest client for whom I am subcontracting on two very large web applications. The original client has brought me on for a large e-commerce project, and I have brought on two friends as subcontractors to help. The downside to this is that I spend sixty to eighty hours a week programming and driving to customer sites. On top of that, I spend ten to fifteen logging my hours, making invoices, accounting, marketing, and attempting to get a good lawyer. My next business strategy change is to try to convert all this hourly work into contract work. All of that probably sounded like complaining. The clincher of the whole deal is that, if you are up to the work, it is a highly rewarding experience to provide solutions directly to clients and make a living doing it. Whenever I finish my website, it will be here. Good luck!
Actually, I am a consultant for a corporation who, on a totally switched network, monitors almost every e-mail coming in or out by hand. It would be trivial, if the web usage logs showed a large amount of web-based e-mail, to capture the sessions for later perusal. The usage of SSL like on http://www.Hushmail.com would be the only way to get around it. At that point, I am almost positive the management would block hushmail at the firewall. Point being: if your company wants to know what your'e doing bad enough, it doesn't matter whether or not web-based e-mail is in plaintext. They own your workstation, and can block what they can't watch.
Not true. The GPL pretty much guarantees that Microsoft cannot just "buy linux." Not only that, if they buy Redhat, Caldera, Debian, SuSE, AND Slackware, all they've done is buy distributions. They still wouldn't "own" linux. The kernel and the source to all the GNU software would STILL fall under the GPL.