The license change according to TFA: "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
Well... that can apply to lots of other areas other than the military. Does it also cover monetary damage? Harm can come in many forms and it does not specifically state bodily harm. Apparently military can use it to do good. (i.e. humanitarian missions) and organizations like NSA can use it to process recorded conversations as their end use may be ambiguous...
I wonder if those stats include the topic specific search at http://www.google.com/linux Does anyone actually use that anyway? (I mean besides just a couple times for fun)
Maybe Apple and Steve are not making a splashy celebration this time around because a decade ago, Apple's "big idea" of a 20th anniversay Mac was an utter failure. The machine was nice - sleek design, TV/FM radio, S-video inputs, Bose sound, and was limited to the production of 12,000 machines with a cost of $10,000 a pop that was delivered to and installed at your home by an Apple authorized rep. (If I recall correctly... I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm not)
Eventually after only selling a couple thoasand at that cost... they were sold at the "bargain basement" price of 2 grand.
"After all, Apple could release its office suite for Windows and pose a direct threat to MS on their own turf, something that has never happened before."
Appleworks is a cross-platform office suite that Apple is still selling. It's not exactly proffessional quality, but it's there and competes nicely with MS Works.
I would agree that Apple also has their latest office wuite running under Windows, along with a robust spreadsheet app -- all there as "plan B". As for the overall quality of it, I doubt it would blow MS out of the water on the PC. Apple has been building office apps since the orignial Appleworks that ran on the Apple II - and even when they spun-off their software division as Clarisworks, (that's where the crossplatform Appleworks was first born as "ClarisWorks"), they only produced a mediocre office suite. Office productivity software is just not Apple's forte. Creative stuff/Ease of use... that's a different story.
Apple will introduce an E-ink paper add on to the Ipod. A little clip-on device, that rolls/folds into a convenient to carry size. The device will need no storage of its own, and no logic, perhaps not even its own power source, just clip it on, and use the familiar iPod click wheel to navigate your documents. Of course, it will support PDF, and some other form of DRM content that works with your existing iTunes/Fairplay account with a similiar set of restrictions.
Just as Apple was certainly not the first to market with an mp3 player, they just made one that was really great to use... don't be surprised if they do the same for e-reading - should the market show there's sufficient demand for the device.
And while I'm doing some wild speculation, why don't I add.... There will then be an iPod with built-in WiFi, that will allow you to use this hi-res 1 bit display to browse the web with on-the-fly dithering of color graphics into pseudo-greyscale images. There will even be an option of sending a particular image to the color iPod display for viewing in color if it's critical... but let's face we can read/. just as well in B&W. Quick, large screen format, hi-res web browsing, on the go, that folds into a tiny package. cool!
ok... my minds getting carried way, I really should get some sleep - it's almost 4:30am where I am.
My first throught exactly. I'm thinking that not much more than 70,000 personnel are being swiched over in total. I think there must be a tremendous overlap... probably nearly all involved are getting Firefox, and perhaps not all personnel have email or some choose to use a web-based interface, so they don't need Thunderbird.
Personally... I'm in favor of using ROT13 encoding:) It will be as effective in blocking the casual snooper, but equally useless in protecting the password from a determined individual. It also has the added benefit of there being no password to store...hehe...
Re:Will it trickle down to the low end?
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 1
Thank you all who have replied for your suggestions. I guess the one I like the KVMA. - I already have two of the computers on regular KVM, but the other on the other side of the room, has it's own monitor,ketyboard etc. (I've had the KVM before the ones with audio were readily available)
As for DivideByZero's suggestion, essentially a passive mixer, it's got the same drawback of running more wires around the room... not such a big deal, but I guess when I got most of my "$20" speakers, they were actually free of $5 after rebate... so I went with that.
As for the stereo amplifier- well they have multiple inputs but only one is selected for output at a time. Not exactly what I want.
If only arts or esd worked with Linux, Windows, and Macs... heck if only everything on linux worked with one standard audio server, I'd be happy.
Thanks again for your input. -Aaron
Will it trickle down to the low end?
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have three computers in my office, three different OS's etc. If I could have one pair of speakers that I can plug into my switch and have all systems share would be really nice. (Assuming they opened the spec so someone would write linux drives for them)
Right now, the only solution I've seen, has been to buy a mixer, but that would be more cables to string around. so I use three sets of $20 speakers...
Thank you... I know what JS/UIX is. I would like to see an SSH app. It's one of those useful applications for a project like this. Right now it's just a technology demo without any useful apps that I've seen.
Command line apps and X Windows apps are one thing... Re-creating the Cocoa/Aqua API (a la Wine for Winodws apps) is quite another. How long have the Wine folks been trying to perfect their product? Sure they've had much success over the last.. I don't eight years... and still 75%? of all Windows apps will not run without some sort of problem.
I also don't think you'll see the same number of motivated developers and corporate interest (CodeWeavers) to fuel such a project. I may be wrong about that but some how I think the drive to run Windows apps on Linux/*BSD is much greater than that of running Mac apps on anything.
Yes, I know the beauty of Mac apps, but the dedicated will just by a mini-Mac rather than spend hours of coding to run it on Linux/BSD. There is a certain mentality that says I would rather fork over my first-born child rather than run MS Windows that exists in the open source community. This same sentiment isn't really felt against the Macintosh. So, while I'm sure it will happen eventually, running Mac Apps like Photoshop under Linux/*BSD is still years away.
"Apple has said it would not allow Apple OS X to run on any machine other than an Apple Macintosh. It seems likely, however, that users would be able to use Windows on Macs running on Intel. This may motivate some devious users to steal Mac software, which would be a new type of problem for Apple, Kay said. Previously, Apple has not had to deal with these kinds of security concerns, since Mac software previously only would run on a Mac. And the company doesn't have anywhere near the piracy rate for its software that Microsoft has."
This reporter doesn't seem to understand that even if the Apple Intel Macs run Windows OS, you still will not be able to run Macintosh apps on Windows XP/Longhorn.
e.g. Demand for pirated Apple apps won't go up unless someone figures out how to install MacOS X on stock PC hardware. (not counting the dev version out in the wild as recently reported.
)
The LinuxFund was/is a non-profit organization that was founded to help fund open source development. The source of funds was from credit cards issued by MBNS America and later MBNA Canada too. A percentage of all items charged to the card was credited to the fund by MBNA. It cost the card holder $0.00, nothing, nada - there were no annual fees. (Of course moderate interest rates applied to anyone carrying a balance and there's the opportunity cost of not using a miles card or cash back card, etc).
Users of the card contributed to open source merely by using the card. it's a fun card to hold too - people ask about the cure penguin on that card and open the door to telling them all about Linux. Even Linus Torvald's himself was (maybe still is) a card holder. He held up his card up at Comdex back several years ago.
The card was marketed largely at tradeshows like Comdex, Linux World Expo, etc. My understanding is: Funding from a lot of the companies that at one time could spend liberally on the linux non-profits slowed. The companies that once spent lots of money on tradeshow booths for non-profits started to spend less, and LinuxFund was not able to get tradeshow space. Same goes for the companies that once spent liberally on plush penguins, tee shirts, beach towels, and Loki Games to give away at the shows. Some didn't have the extra cash to spend, and some went belly-up. (Loki Games, LinuxMall, etc)
I think once the tradeshow biz went south, and new subscribers were harder to recruit, the momentum was lost. The tradeshows gave the group notoriety and led to lots of willing volunteers. When that all died down... the group slowly withered.
Try the Damn Small Linux bootable 128MB thumb drive. Sure, it costs more than a 128 MB thumb drive should cost, but you're supporting a cool Linux project. (Note: I have no affiliation with the DSL project)
If your friends boot it and don't like what they see, they can alway reformat and have a handy thumb drive.
As an aside: While DSL is cool, it is not the best presentation of Linux to a first time user. Its minamilist configuration (under 50 MB) is a little too sparse... Anyone know of a good distro that aims to stay under 128MB that's a little more full-featured and will fit on a cheap thumb drive?
I would have expected IBM to promote the performace of their processors designs present in Macintosh G5 computers. A little optimazation can skew figures a long way..and voila their CPU really shines.
A cross-platform, CLI client would allow one development effort for MacOS X, and Linux and FreeBSD and Solaris...you get the idea.
"[Bill Atkinson's] Hypercard did not have the properties to make its use unconscious. It was wonderful in many ways, however, and it would have been wise to keep it working on Apple's newer systems."
HyperCard was wonderful. I did a lot of programming in HyperCard, embedded sounds and movies, and controlled an externel Laser Video Disc (the 12" variety) with XCMD "plugins".
However, the basic functions of HyperCard can be simulated with web technologies and are available to any platform, not just a HyperCard playing Mac. In a Net connected World (and most Macs users have Internet access) the old HyperCard stacks lose their appeal. This probably was a large factor in Apple's decision to give up HyperCard.
There are still two downsides to HyperCard's demise. (1) You can't distribute Apache/Mysql/PHP environment on a floppy/CD/thumb drive and just have a user double click on your creation, without an internet connection, and run your "stack"/Application. (2) The ease of development and debugging offered by HyperCard is till unparalled by any app/web development environment today, IMHO.
Have you completely forgotten Windows 98 Second Edition?
That was not a free upgrade, and not even a year later. Sure, they introduced some new features (internet sharing to name one) but it was widely recognized at the time that it was mostly bug fixes that should have been released for free.
chroot for a browser seems a bit extreme... It's a lot of effort and I think the following offers similiar protection for a lot less work.
Create a disposable unprivledged account "luser". From your primary user account enter at the shell prompt:
$ xhost + local: $ su luser (enter password) $ mozilla &
You can keep a publicly readable download directory in that account to retreive files you downloaded. Otherwise "luser" should have no access to other user files anywhere else, and that account can be easily deleted and recreated if problems arise.
I set this up in about two minutes. I know chroot would have taken me a lot longer.
The article's author hints that Microsoft's XNA will almost be a "gaming OS". A set of standards that various consumer electronic companies can build consoles for.
This will bring to console gaming the unreliability of the Desktop PC. An often cited benefit Apple has over the PC platform is that it knows its hardware. There are no wild cards. Console game developers have been able to count on this until now. You test and test, on a given company's box and you know your good.
If XNA takes off, look for crashes, due to one Manufacturer cutting corners, or another trying to add a beefier new edition of some chip.
There are some things where standards are great, and being able to commoditize the hardware is a great benefit to consumers. On the other hand gamers, who as a whole have demonstrated a willingness to spend for top of the line systems every few years are probably not looking for a less expensive systems at the cost of quality.
No doubt odds are in favor of something like this winning the mass market. In the mass market, the commodity item always succeeds, VHS over Meta, PC over Mac, etc. _However_, one of the console system may yet survive this if they can succeed in filling a niche in for a superior gaming experience that only a few percent of the market care about and build a fiercly, loyal following. -- Just as Apple Computers exists today.
The solution I would recommend is for you to purchase your own domain name. Then you can add your own SMTP server as a valid origination IP for your email.
The allowance of email "forgery", while convenient, and has been used by all of us here in the past, can not, and should not continue. -- Just wait until some spammer forges email from your own domain and you have to deal with the fallout!
It's just one more situation where the bad guys have ruined things for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
The license change according to TFA: "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
Well... that can apply to lots of other areas other than the military. Does it also cover monetary damage? Harm can come in many forms and it does not specifically state bodily harm. Apparently military can use it to do good. (i.e. humanitarian missions) and organizations like NSA can use it to process recorded conversations as their end use may be ambiguous...
Just my $0.02...
Personally, I'm looking forward to the luckiest day of the century next year - 7/7/7 :) Works for both Americans and Europeans too.
I wonder if those stats include the topic specific search at http://www.google.com/linux
Does anyone actually use that anyway? (I mean besides just a couple times for fun)
Maybe Apple and Steve are not making a splashy celebration this time around because a decade ago, Apple's "big idea" of a 20th anniversay Mac was an utter failure. The machine was nice - sleek design, TV/FM radio, S-video inputs, Bose sound, and was limited to the production of 12,000 machines with a cost of $10,000 a pop that was delivered to and installed at your home by an Apple authorized rep. (If I recall correctly... I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm not)
Eventually after only selling a couple thoasand at that cost... they were sold at the "bargain basement" price of 2 grand.
Some sites for more info:
Wikipedia
Apple-History
Fan club web site
Err... What about Appleworks.
Appleworks is a cross-platform office suite that Apple is still selling. It's not exactly proffessional quality, but it's there and competes nicely with MS Works.
I would agree that Apple also has their latest office wuite running under Windows, along with a robust spreadsheet app -- all there as "plan B". As for the overall quality of it, I doubt it would blow MS out of the water on the PC. Apple has been building office apps since the orignial Appleworks that ran on the Apple II - and even when they spun-off their software division as Clarisworks, (that's where the crossplatform Appleworks was first born as "ClarisWorks"), they only produced a mediocre office suite. Office productivity software is just not Apple's forte. Creative stuff/Ease of use... that's a different story.
Let me do some wild speculation...
/. just as well in B&W. Quick, large screen format, hi-res web browsing, on the go, that folds into a tiny package. cool!
Apple will introduce an E-ink paper add on to the Ipod. A little clip-on device, that rolls/folds into a convenient to carry size. The device will need no storage of its own, and no logic, perhaps not even its own power source, just clip it on, and use the familiar iPod click wheel to navigate your documents. Of course, it will support PDF, and some other form of DRM content that works with your existing iTunes/Fairplay account with a similiar set of restrictions.
Just as Apple was certainly not the first to market with an mp3 player, they just made one that was really great to use... don't be surprised if they do the same for e-reading - should the market show there's sufficient demand for the device.
And while I'm doing some wild speculation, why don't I add....
There will then be an iPod with built-in WiFi, that will allow you to use this hi-res 1 bit display to browse the web with on-the-fly dithering of color graphics into pseudo-greyscale images. There will even be an option of sending a particular image to the color iPod display for viewing in color if it's critical... but let's face we can read
ok... my minds getting carried way, I really should get some sleep - it's almost 4:30am where I am.
My first throught exactly. I'm thinking that not much more than 70,000 personnel are being swiched over in total. I think there must be a tremendous overlap... probably nearly all involved are getting Firefox, and perhaps not all personnel have email or some choose to use a web-based interface, so they don't need Thunderbird.
My $0.02 or should that be Euros...
Personally... I'm in favor of using ROT13 encoding :) ...hehe...
It will be as effective in blocking the casual snooper, but equally useless in protecting the password from a determined individual. It also has the added benefit of there being no password to store
Thank you all who have replied for your suggestions. I guess the one I like the KVMA. - I already have two of the computers on regular KVM, but the other on the other side of the room, has it's own monitor,ketyboard etc. (I've had the KVM before the ones with audio were readily available)
As for DivideByZero's suggestion, essentially a passive mixer, it's got the same drawback of running more wires around the room... not such a big deal, but I guess when I got most of my "$20" speakers, they were actually free of $5 after rebate... so I went with that.
As for the stereo amplifier- well they have multiple inputs but only one is selected for output at a time. Not exactly what I want.
If only arts or esd worked with Linux, Windows, and Macs... heck if only everything on linux worked with one standard audio server, I'd be happy.
Thanks again for your input.
-Aaron
I have three computers in my office, three different OS's etc. If I could have one pair of speakers that I can plug into my switch and have all systems share would be really nice. (Assuming they opened the spec so someone would write linux drives for them)
Right now, the only solution I've seen, has been to buy a mixer, but that would be more cables to string around. so I use three sets of $20 speakers...
Thank you... I know what JS/UIX is. I would like to see an SSH app. It's one of those useful applications for a project like this. Right now it's just a technology demo without any useful apps that I've seen.
An in browser SSH client in Java has been done before... but I would love one in Javascript, no extra components to install in the browser.
Command line apps and X Windows apps are one thing... Re-creating the Cocoa/Aqua API (a la Wine for Winodws apps) is quite another. How long have the Wine folks been trying to perfect their product? Sure they've had much success over the last .. I don't eight years... and still 75%? of all Windows apps will not run without some sort of problem.
I also don't think you'll see the same number of motivated developers and corporate interest (CodeWeavers) to fuel such a project. I may be wrong about that but some how I think the drive to run Windows apps on Linux/*BSD is much greater than that of running Mac apps on anything.
Yes, I know the beauty of Mac apps, but the dedicated will just by a mini-Mac rather than spend hours of coding to run it on Linux/BSD. There is a certain mentality that says I would rather fork over my first-born child rather than run MS Windows that exists in the open source community. This same sentiment isn't really felt against the Macintosh. So, while I'm sure it will happen eventually, running Mac Apps like Photoshop under Linux/*BSD is still years away.
e.g. Demand for pirated Apple apps won't go up unless someone figures out how to install MacOS X on stock PC hardware. (not counting the dev version out in the wild as recently reported. )
The LinuxFund was/is a non-profit organization that was founded to help fund open source development. The source of funds was from credit cards issued by MBNS America and later MBNA Canada too. A percentage of all items charged to the card was credited to the fund by MBNA. It cost the card holder $0.00, nothing, nada - there were no annual fees. (Of course moderate interest rates applied to anyone carrying a balance and there's the opportunity cost of not using a miles card or cash back card, etc).
Users of the card contributed to open source merely by using the card. it's a fun card to hold too - people ask about the cure penguin on that card and open the door to telling them all about Linux. Even Linus Torvald's himself was (maybe still is) a card holder. He held up his card up at Comdex back several years ago.
The card was marketed largely at tradeshows like Comdex, Linux World Expo, etc. My understanding is: Funding from a lot of the companies that at one time could spend liberally on the linux non-profits slowed. The companies that once spent lots of money on tradeshow booths for non-profits started to spend less, and LinuxFund was not able to get tradeshow space. Same goes for the companies that once spent liberally on plush penguins, tee shirts, beach towels, and Loki Games to give away at the shows. Some didn't have the extra cash to spend, and some went belly-up. (Loki Games, LinuxMall, etc)
I think once the tradeshow biz went south, and new subscribers were harder to recruit, the momentum was lost. The tradeshows gave the group notoriety and led to lots of willing volunteers. When that all died down... the group slowly withered.
Sad... it seemed like a great idea.
Technically, it started with Netscape
:-)
Technically, the original Netscape was a derivative of NCSA Mosaic
Conclusion: Firefox started off as Mosaic, written by grad students... like all good software
I'm sorry if I appear to be to be knit-picking but...
You have the client-server relationship wrong, a common mistake when talking about X windows.
The application running on Unix is the client to the X-server running, in this case, off a Windows machines.
Client examples: xterm, konqueror, Kmail, Evolution running on *nix
Server: X.org running on _Windows_ via Cygwin
Try the Damn Small Linux bootable 128MB thumb drive. Sure, it costs more than a 128 MB thumb drive should cost, but you're supporting a cool Linux project. (Note: I have no affiliation with the DSL project)
If your friends boot it and don't like what they see, they can alway reformat and have a handy thumb drive.
As an aside: While DSL is cool, it is not the best presentation of Linux to a first time user. Its minamilist configuration (under 50 MB) is a little too sparse... Anyone know of a good distro that aims to stay under 128MB that's a little more full-featured and will fit on a cheap thumb drive?
What about MacOS X too?
I would have expected IBM to promote the performace of their processors designs present in Macintosh G5 computers. A little optimazation can skew figures a long way..and voila their CPU really shines.
A cross-platform, CLI client would allow one development effort for MacOS X, and Linux and FreeBSD and Solaris...you get the idea.
HyperCard was wonderful. I did a lot of programming in HyperCard, embedded sounds and movies, and controlled an externel Laser Video Disc (the 12" variety) with XCMD "plugins".
However, the basic functions of HyperCard can be simulated with web technologies and are available to any platform, not just a HyperCard playing Mac. In a Net connected World (and most Macs users have Internet access) the old HyperCard stacks lose their appeal. This probably was a large factor in Apple's decision to give up HyperCard.
There are still two downsides to HyperCard's demise. (1) You can't distribute Apache/Mysql/PHP environment on a floppy/CD/thumb drive and just have a user double click on your creation, without an internet connection, and run your "stack"/Application. (2) The ease of development and debugging offered by HyperCard is till unparalled by any app/web development environment today, IMHO.
Have you completely forgotten Windows 98 Second Edition?
That was not a free upgrade, and not even a year later. Sure, they introduced some new features (internet sharing to name one) but it was widely recognized at the time that it was mostly bug fixes that should have been released for free.
chroot for a browser seems a bit extreme... It's a lot of effort and I think the following offers similiar protection for a lot less work.
Create a disposable unprivledged account "luser".
From your primary user account enter at the shell prompt:
$ xhost + local:
$ su luser
(enter password)
$ mozilla &
You can keep a publicly readable download directory in that account to retreive files you downloaded. Otherwise "luser" should have no access to other user files anywhere else, and that account can be easily deleted and recreated if problems arise.
I set this up in about two minutes. I know chroot would have taken me a lot longer.
640K ought to be enough for any BIOS :)
The article's author hints that Microsoft's XNA will almost be a "gaming OS". A set of standards that various consumer electronic companies can build consoles for.
This will bring to console gaming the unreliability of the Desktop PC. An often cited benefit Apple has over the PC platform is that it knows its hardware. There are no wild cards. Console game developers have been able to count on this until now. You test and test, on a given company's box and you know your good.
If XNA takes off, look for crashes, due to one Manufacturer cutting corners, or another trying to add a beefier new edition of some chip.
There are some things where standards are great, and being able to commoditize the hardware is a great benefit to consumers. On the other hand gamers, who as a whole have demonstrated a willingness to spend for top of the line systems every few years are probably not looking for a less expensive systems at the cost of quality.
No doubt odds are in favor of something like this winning the mass market. In the mass market, the commodity item always succeeds, VHS over Meta, PC over Mac, etc. _However_, one of the console system may yet survive this if they can succeed in filling a niche in for a superior gaming experience that only a few percent of the market care about and build a fiercly, loyal following. -- Just as Apple Computers exists today.
The solution I would recommend is for you to purchase your own domain name. Then you can add your own SMTP server as a valid origination IP for your email.
The allowance of email "forgery", while convenient, and has been used by all of us here in the past, can not, and should not continue. -- Just wait until some spammer forges email from your own domain and you have to deal with the fallout!
It's just one more situation where the bad guys have ruined things for the rest of us.