My late father was an assignment editor for a news operation and I can recall multiple instances a decade ago where he told me about some late breaking tech story to which I responded "Oh, yeah, I read about that on/. a couple weeks ago." I have to agree with the currently-highest-rated-comment that it's hard to imagine Reddit, Digg, or Fark without/. I would even go further and say that your comment moderation system was revolutionary. It's certainly possible to imagine that someone else would have thought about it if you hadn't, but you had it first and the political blogs I read still rank comments by order posted, which is why their comments are a morass of inanity while/. comments (and digg, and Stack Overflow (so long as you have a sufficiently high display threshold)) are often more informative than the article.
He raised an interesting point. The samba team doesn't have to pull their license. The GPL makes specific provisions for what rights you have if you reject the license (those afforded under US copyright law, which doesn't include distribution).
I think you're correct that Samba would lose a suit against SCO for violating the GPL, but that's not what they should charge. They should charge that SCO has violated the much more stringent US copyright laws. SCO would have two ways out of this: public humiliation by announcing that they accepted a license they claim they don't believe in or actually trying to defend their disregard for US copyright law.
Without a license, you cannot use copyrighted material. If you use copyrighted material, without a license, you are in violation of that copyright. The only matters before the court would be "did you use the software" and "are you licensed to do so".
This isn't technically true. You are allowed to use copyrighted materials without a license, but you aren't allowed to copy, distribute, modify or derive from copyrighted material without a license. The DMCA has restricted this a little more so that now a company can require you give up some of the rights you would have had without a license in order to use their product (which is one of the huge issues with the DMCA), but the GPL doesn't rely on this.
The GPL specifically provides that you are not required to accept the license, but without accepting it the author gives you no rights above the standard ones provided by copyright law (pretty much reading the source code and running the software)
The winner of the most recent Presidential election studied at Vanderbilt Law School, and the people who gave the Presidency to the other guy were all law graduates.
I didn't realize the framers graduated from law school.
Shoot, forgot to respond to your last sentence: Taco/Roblimo will never/have never given timely, straight up answers to any question asked about slashdot.
I can't speak for Roblimo, but Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) has always replied to my questions concerning slashdot. He even discussed what he was thinking of including in customization when user ids were put in. I admit, it's been a while since I've asked him anything (like before/. was sold to Andover kind of a while), but I can testify that the statement "Taco [has] never given timely, straight up answers to any question asked about slashdot" is incorrect.
If you bought a CD from Apple, you received something that you did pay for, namely the contents of said CD. You may choose to do as you like with it so long as you don't violate Apples copyright by distributing copies of it without permission.
If I give you a lottery ticket that just won because I misread the paper you have no responsibility to share the winnings with me. If I sell you a Picaso knock-off and you have it appraised and find out it is an original you have no responsibility to pay me for the actual worth of the product. If I sell you a used car and you find that the previous owner had thousands of dollars in the gas tank, you have no responsibility to return the money to the previous owner (you may have to return the money to the government, unless you bought the car from them, but that is another story).
I occasionally use my pliers to hammer in tacks. By your logic I would think that should be illegal. I should be responsible for paying the company that made them an extra $6 to cover the cost of a hammer. This makes no sense to me at all.
I would more chose a symbolic large city in order to crush the american pride and kill as many as possible...Washington? (Yes, I know Redmond is near Washington)
At least your not from the US. Redmond is in Washington State, and is around 4500km from the city of Washingon DC. I don't think anyone has an atomic bomb that could take out that.
It's not that I don't agree with you. I do. But, for the love of all that is good and holy, don't base your philosophical opinions on Enemy of the State.
Whew, I can still base my views on Technology on it though. So when can I get one of those computers that can take the output of a single camera and show me the back side of a paper bag (but for some reason can't look in the bag).
They do. There are Apple computers available. Furthermore, selling Linux based systems is not very viable business idea as recent problems with VA Linux demonstrated. As I said, people do not want other stuff.
You seem to be missing the entire point. You're right. Most people prefer Microsoft to the strawman competition that Microsoft has chosen to allow to remain in the marketplace. Of course they do. Do you really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple or ported Office and IE to the platform if they thought it was going to offer real competition? I don't understand how you can offer the majority's preference of Microsoft over Apple or Microsoft over what is still essentially a hobbist platform as proof that Microsoft's monopoly has been noninjurious. The question is not MS versus those not worthy of MS's consideration. The question is would consumers prefer the operating systems that would have come out of a competitive market to Microsoft's. The cheaper, faster systems that could have competed with Windows. The systems we will not see so long as Microsoft has a monopoly because they continue to crush anyone who might offer a superior platform.
Overall, it is still cheaper than systems from its biggest competitor Apple.
So Microsoft, as a monopoly, has pressured nearly everyone else out of the market. Now, with all of the competition gone, they are cheaper than their remaining competitor and therefore have not cost the consumer by having prices higher than they would have had the competitors they put out of buisness still existed. Does this seem like faulty logic to anyone else?
Do something about it, don't buy their OS and switch to Unix or Linux.You have that freedom.
You have that freedom so long as you don't have to view documents from, or share documents with, the 95% of the world that insists on having everything in Word. You have that freedom so long as you never have to view a web page with proprietary IE or VB functionality. You have that freedom so long as you never have to use a Windows only application. You, in reality, rarely have that freedom. I have two Linux boxes and a Solaris box, but I still have to have Windows on my laptop at work to be able to operate in a modern, all microsoft, corporate environment.
18 USC 1696a:
Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, or in any manner
causes or provides for the conveyance of the same by regular trips or at stated periods over any post route which is or may be established by law, or from any city, town, or place to any other city, town, or place, between which the mail is regularly carried, shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
No, you don't have to agree. But you still won't have permission to execute a non-GPL application that dynamically links to a
GPL library. Doing so is not in violation of any copyright laws, but it is in violation of the GPL.
IANAL, but to my knowledge this is false. You don't have permission to distribute a non-GPL application that links to a GPL library, but nothing is stopping you from executing one.
Furthermore the GPL explicitly states (in item 5) "You are not required to accept this license..." Meaning that you could always just not accept the license. You wouldn't be able to prepare a derivate or redistribute the work, but you could execute a non-GPL application that links to it.
An important difference is that most BSA members have EULAs that are you must accept in order to use the software, because they are more restrictive than normal copyrights. This is why they need shrink-wrap licenses.
No one is forced to agree to the GPL in order to use GPL software.
Even if I refuse to accept the GPL, I can still legally use gcc (or linux) so long as I obey traditional copyright law (as I would have to if gcc had no license at all). If I want more rights than that (such as the right to make copies without the authors explicit permission, or the right to produce a derivate work), then the GPL comes into play by setting the conditions I must meet in order to do that.
That's news to me. I realize completely that Murdock is a pretty solid Republican, but I think you need to do a little more background research on Turner. Reed Hundt (FCC chairman during Clinton's first term, helped Gore invent the internet) in his book "So you want a Revolution" talks of Turner as wishing to build a competitor to Fox, only liberal. I wouldn't be suprised to find out that he gives large donations to both parties (most public figures do), but he is definately a loyal Democrat.
It also says that it can be used to guess the lenght of the password, which could make a brute force MUCH quicker
I wouldn't say "MUCH quicker."
Say you have passwords that are a series of bits (and you have to type in "1" or "0" by hand each time). Say your password is n digits long. By eliminating all items smaller than n digits, you would eliminate only half of the keyspace (and thus an exactly n+1 digit password offers equal security to a n or less digit password).
This is the worst case. For cases where the number of possiblities in each digit are comparitively large (like 62 for upper and lowercase letters and numbers) the difference is much less significant. For instance for upper and lowercase letters the number of passwords 9 characters or shorter is only 13759005997841643, while the number of 10 character passwords is 839299365868340224. Meaning that the total number of less than 10 character passwords is less than 2 percent of the number of exactly 10 character passwords.
Even if it were a needle in a hay stack, which I'm not willing to admit that it is, I wouldn't say that it's not worthwhile. People have been practicing stenography for hundreds of years, and the technologies to find it have always been just behind.
For literally hundreds of years encryption technologies have stayed just ahead of cryptanalysis technologies.
We now have entirely new criterium by which we judge crypto, and new methods by which we develop it.
It used to be considered good data hiding to hide a message in a cake or a bottle.
For a several hundred years it was accepted that the strength of a cypher was in keeping the cypher itself secret, now its thought foolish to have a cypher whose security remains on the secrecy of anything but the key.
Current systems are based on complex, provable, mathematical models. Quite a departure from the Ceaser cypher and a secret bottle cap. In spite of this, though, we still occasionally come up with something like a faster method to solve knapsack cyphers and turn the world around.
If you have any question of the value of good steno/anti-steno or crypto/anti-crypto, just ask Mary Queen of Scotts or thousands of dead U-boat sailors.
Just because the GPL is viral shouldn't mean any GPL'd software must remain free in perpetuity.
To some degree it does. I have submitted patches to several GPL projects. When I submitted those patches I released my patches under the GPL, with the presumption that my work would only be used in open projects, and that no one would come along later and make a derivate of my work which they wouldn't share with me. The price of using me as a programmer is that you agree to always share the source. That is why I use the GPL and not a BSDish license.
TuxRacer has accepted patches from lots of developers who were just like me, and to go closed source would mean that they either have permission from the authors of all of those patches (highly doubtful), that they have removed all of those patches and replaced them with something not derived from those patches (also highly doubtful), or that they are violating the implied conditions placed on that work by its author.
You can easily survive 10 years without releasing "really good software". How many people bought Mechwarrior Mercenaries? Win95? How many installations of sendmail are out there? bind 8? I think we would all agree that the likelyhood of encountering a bug in these is pretty darned high, and yet people bought and installed them anyway.
"Four years without a remote hole in the default install"
What do you think the chances are that what dudle is doing with Debian will work automatically with the default install of OpenBSD? IIRC the default install runs the following list of services: inetd. I think most people probably want more services running on their server than that. Also the problem with sourceforge (and probably t.o too, I haven't looked) was bad password/shared password with another system/password transmitted cleartext, which BSD certainly won't fix.
The original author was not stating that BSD wasn't more secure out of the box than Debian; he was saying that their security was similar enough that having a competent admin on a Debian server is more secure than an incompetent admin on a BSD server running the same services. OpenBSD well be the most secure Unix on the face of the earth, but no system is so secure that it solves ignorance.
Even if it is DES, there is no backdoor. There is no known "better than bruteforce way" of cracking DES. What EFF and d.net did was simply design systems to exhaust the keyspace (bruteforce) of DES in a shorter about of time. In particular EFF (who did about half of the keys done on d.net in the last DES challenge) designed a system that was specifically optimized at the hardware level for trying DES keys as fast as possible.
I'm not suggesting that we should all run out and use DES for serious security, but please don't spread the misinformation that it has a backdoor.
I can say with 99% certainty that your segfault problems on Linux are caused by system overheating and hardware failure. Linux (unlike Windows IIRC) does not try to recover from an invalid hardware state, so running at 90-100% usage for a couple days could easily have caused a fatal hardware error.
Slashdot Mirror
My late father was an assignment editor for a news operation and I can recall multiple instances a decade ago where he told me about some late breaking tech story to which I responded "Oh, yeah, I read about that on /. a couple weeks ago." I have to agree with the currently-highest-rated-comment that it's hard to imagine Reddit, Digg, or Fark without /. I would even go further and say that your comment moderation system was revolutionary. It's certainly possible to imagine that someone else would have thought about it if you hadn't, but you had it first and the political blogs I read still rank comments by order posted, which is why their comments are a morass of inanity while /. comments (and digg, and Stack Overflow (so long as you have a sufficiently high display threshold)) are often more informative than the article.
He raised an interesting point. The samba team doesn't have to pull their license. The GPL makes specific provisions for what rights you have if you reject the license (those afforded under US copyright law, which doesn't include distribution).
I think you're correct that Samba would lose a suit against SCO for violating the GPL, but that's not what they should charge. They should charge that SCO has violated the much more stringent US copyright laws. SCO would have two ways out of this: public humiliation by announcing that they accepted a license they claim they don't believe in or actually trying to defend their disregard for US copyright law.
This isn't technically true. You are allowed to use copyrighted materials without a license, but you aren't allowed to copy, distribute, modify or derive from copyrighted material without a license. The DMCA has restricted this a little more so that now a company can require you give up some of the rights you would have had without a license in order to use their product (which is one of the huge issues with the DMCA), but the GPL doesn't rely on this.
The GPL specifically provides that you are not required to accept the license, but without accepting it the author gives you no rights above the standard ones provided by copyright law (pretty much reading the source code and running the software)
I didn't realize the framers graduated from law school.
I can't speak for Roblimo, but Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) has always replied to my questions concerning slashdot. He even discussed what he was thinking of including in customization when user ids were put in. I admit, it's been a while since I've asked him anything (like before /. was sold to Andover kind of a while), but I can testify that the statement "Taco [has] never given timely, straight up answers to any question asked about slashdot" is incorrect.
If you bought a CD from Apple, you received something that you did pay for, namely the contents of said CD. You may choose to do as you like with it so long as you don't violate Apples copyright by distributing copies of it without permission.
If I give you a lottery ticket that just won because I misread the paper you have no responsibility to share the winnings with me. If I sell you a Picaso knock-off and you have it appraised and find out it is an original you have no responsibility to pay me for the actual worth of the product. If I sell you a used car and you find that the previous owner had thousands of dollars in the gas tank, you have no responsibility to return the money to the previous owner (you may have to return the money to the government, unless you bought the car from them, but that is another story).
I occasionally use my pliers to hammer in tacks. By your logic I would think that should be illegal. I should be responsible for paying the company that made them an extra $6 to cover the cost of a hammer. This makes no sense to me at all.
At least your not from the US. Redmond is in Washington State, and is around 4500km from the city of Washingon DC. I don't think anyone has an atomic bomb that could take out that.
Whew, I can still base my views on Technology on it though. So when can I get one of those computers that can take the output of a single camera and show me the back side of a paper bag (but for some reason can't look in the bag).
You seem to be missing the entire point. You're right. Most people prefer Microsoft to the strawman competition that Microsoft has chosen to allow to remain in the marketplace. Of course they do. Do you really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple or ported Office and IE to the platform if they thought it was going to offer real competition? I don't understand how you can offer the majority's preference of Microsoft over Apple or Microsoft over what is still essentially a hobbist platform as proof that Microsoft's monopoly has been noninjurious. The question is not MS versus those not worthy of MS's consideration. The question is would consumers prefer the operating systems that would have come out of a competitive market to Microsoft's. The cheaper, faster systems that could have competed with Windows. The systems we will not see so long as Microsoft has a monopoly because they continue to crush anyone who might offer a superior platform.
So Microsoft, as a monopoly, has pressured nearly everyone else out of the market. Now, with all of the competition gone, they are cheaper than their remaining competitor and therefore have not cost the consumer by having prices higher than they would have had the competitors they put out of buisness still existed. Does this seem like faulty logic to anyone else?
Do something about it, don't buy their OS and switch to Unix or Linux.You have that freedom.
You have that freedom so long as you don't have to view documents from, or share documents with, the 95% of the world that insists on having everything in Word. You have that freedom so long as you never have to view a web page with proprietary IE or VB functionality. You have that freedom so long as you never have to use a Windows only application. You, in reality, rarely have that freedom. I have two Linux boxes and a Solaris box, but I still have to have Windows on my laptop at work to be able to operate in a modern, all microsoft, corporate environment.
18 USC 1696a: Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, or in any manner causes or provides for the conveyance of the same by regular trips or at stated periods over any post route which is or may be established by law, or from any city, town, or place to any other city, town, or place, between which the mail is regularly carried, shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
IANAL, but to my knowledge this is false. You don't have permission to distribute a non-GPL application that links to a GPL library, but nothing is stopping you from executing one.
Furthermore the GPL explicitly states (in item 5) "You are not required to accept this license..." Meaning that you could always just not accept the license. You wouldn't be able to prepare a derivate or redistribute the work, but you could execute a non-GPL application that links to it.
No one is forced to agree to the GPL in order to use GPL software. Even if I refuse to accept the GPL, I can still legally use gcc (or linux) so long as I obey traditional copyright law (as I would have to if gcc had no license at all). If I want more rights than that (such as the right to make copies without the authors explicit permission, or the right to produce a derivate work), then the GPL comes into play by setting the conditions I must meet in order to do that.
That's news to me. I realize completely that Murdock is a pretty solid Republican, but I think you need to do a little more background research on Turner. Reed Hundt (FCC chairman during Clinton's first term, helped Gore invent the internet) in his book "So you want a Revolution" talks of Turner as wishing to build a competitor to Fox, only liberal. I wouldn't be suprised to find out that he gives large donations to both parties (most public figures do), but he is definately a loyal Democrat.
I wouldn't say "MUCH quicker."
Say you have passwords that are a series of bits (and you have to type in "1" or "0" by hand each time). Say your password is n digits long. By eliminating all items smaller than n digits, you would eliminate only half of the keyspace (and thus an exactly n+1 digit password offers equal security to a n or less digit password).
This is the worst case. For cases where the number of possiblities in each digit are comparitively large (like 62 for upper and lowercase letters and numbers) the difference is much less significant. For instance for upper and lowercase letters the number of passwords 9 characters or shorter is only 13759005997841643, while the number of 10 character passwords is 839299365868340224. Meaning that the total number of less than 10 character passwords is less than 2 percent of the number of exactly 10 character passwords.
For literally hundreds of years encryption technologies have stayed just ahead of cryptanalysis technologies. We now have entirely new criterium by which we judge crypto, and new methods by which we develop it. It used to be considered good data hiding to hide a message in a cake or a bottle. For a several hundred years it was accepted that the strength of a cypher was in keeping the cypher itself secret, now its thought foolish to have a cypher whose security remains on the secrecy of anything but the key.
Current systems are based on complex, provable, mathematical models. Quite a departure from the Ceaser cypher and a secret bottle cap. In spite of this, though, we still occasionally come up with something like a faster method to solve knapsack cyphers and turn the world around.
If you have any question of the value of good steno/anti-steno or crypto/anti-crypto, just ask Mary Queen of Scotts or thousands of dead U-boat sailors.
To some degree it does. I have submitted patches to several GPL projects. When I submitted those patches I released my patches under the GPL, with the presumption that my work would only be used in open projects, and that no one would come along later and make a derivate of my work which they wouldn't share with me. The price of using me as a programmer is that you agree to always share the source. That is why I use the GPL and not a BSDish license.
TuxRacer has accepted patches from lots of developers who were just like me, and to go closed source would mean that they either have permission from the authors of all of those patches (highly doubtful), that they have removed all of those patches and replaced them with something not derived from those patches (also highly doubtful), or that they are violating the implied conditions placed on that work by its author.
I'd give bonus points. :-)
you mispelled it. Soil and plant studies would be agronomics.
You can easily survive 10 years without releasing "really good software". How many people bought Mechwarrior Mercenaries? Win95? How many installations of sendmail are out there? bind 8? I think we would all agree that the likelyhood of encountering a bug in these is pretty darned high, and yet people bought and installed them anyway.
What do you think the chances are that what dudle is doing with Debian will work automatically with the default install of OpenBSD? IIRC the default install runs the following list of services: inetd. I think most people probably want more services running on their server than that. Also the problem with sourceforge (and probably t.o too, I haven't looked) was bad password/shared password with another system/password transmitted cleartext, which BSD certainly won't fix.
The original author was not stating that BSD wasn't more secure out of the box than Debian; he was saying that their security was similar enough that having a competent admin on a Debian server is more secure than an incompetent admin on a BSD server running the same services. OpenBSD well be the most secure Unix on the face of the earth, but no system is so secure that it solves ignorance.
I'm not suggesting that we should all run out and use DES for serious security, but please don't spread the misinformation that it has a backdoor.
I can say with 99% certainty that your segfault problems on Linux are caused by system overheating and hardware failure. Linux (unlike Windows IIRC) does not try to recover from an invalid hardware state, so running at 90-100% usage for a couple days could easily have caused a fatal hardware error.
As any serious Python programmer knows, Python already supports block delimiting. For instance the statement:
if (a==b):
#begin
x=2;
y=3;
#end
is correct, as is
if (a==b):
#{
x=2;
y=3;
#}
print x;
This is all explained in the Python documentation for those of you who have not seen this before.
Ed is the standard Unix Editor