It's not the air, it's the the dead trees. CD packaging used to be just as bad, but rather than an authority dicatating CD packaging changes, consumer pressure got the industry to change. We need something similar for software.
The difference isn't going to be between the paper statement from the bank and the electronically imported statement, it's going to be between your ATM receipts and the information from the bank. Maybe I'm paranoid; but I don't trust either my memory of the transactions or the low-wage employees at the bank's office.
I've seen discussion of syncing Palm accounts with GnuCash on the mailing list recently, I don't know how far along they are.
I was able to export QIF format from MS Money when I moved to GnuCash a few months ago. I had to select "Strict QIF compatibility". This was with MS Money 2.0a, YMMV.
I enter my paper receipts into GnuCash by hand, and then reconcile the GnuCash record with the bank/CC statement every month. If you just download from your bank and import, you're taking their word for the transactions you made. Better to compare from two different sources to find any discrepancies.
Oh well, another registration-required site that I won't be visiting. How about including that info in the story summary, so that we don't have to waste our time clicking on the link?
The really funny thing about the "NakedPC" page is this part:
Point out the benefits of a legally licensed, preinstalled operating system. Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software. They also have a manual for everyday troubleshooting, and a Certificate of Authenticity that proves the software is legal.
Except, as we've found from the article above, customers don't have a CD that can reload the software, they just have a CD that reloads the software on that machine and zaps their data into oblivion.
On the linked piracy page from the NakedPC page, Microsoft goes on to say that illegal software flourishes more in underdeveloped markets where people make less of a distinction between hardware and software. Doesn't tying the OS to the BIOS of a particular machine erase that line as well?
I didn't know if it was different code or not. Even if it was the same code that was re-released as GPL'd code, the point I was aiming for was that the GPL'd re-release doesn't change the license of any prior releases. Earlier releases remain under their original licenses unless iD included some sort of upwards-license-compatibility (like the GPL: version 2 or, at your option, any later version of the GPL) which I doubt.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
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· Score: 1
There's one in my i-opener, so apparently you can still get them somewhere.
Changing the license in 1999 only affects new releases of the source code after that date. Previous distributions will still be under their old licenses. Of course, you would probably just go and replace your old distribution with the new GPL'd code, but just because a particular distribution is GPL'd doesn't retroactively change all of the others.
The owners of the original source code are free to license it as many different ways as they want - like perl is licensed, for example. The only issue is that if you have one project that is source release A + improvements, and another project that is from source release B + improvements. If the license of A and the license of B aren't compatible, then you will have problems picking up the improvements to A into the B project, and vice versa. But it's not like a new source release retroactively changes the licensing of any prior releases; they stay licensed the way they were originally.
BTW, lxdoom rocks! The atmosphere of Doom, unaffected (some would say enhanced) by the lower-quality textures and lack of polys, is probably the best atmosphere for a FPS that I've played. It could have something to do with the fact that I prefer sprite-based objects to polygonal ones, though. I feel like if I can look at a well-drawn sprite object, even if from only a few perspectives, that's still better than a spiky, unrealistic-looking polygon object. I won't really enjoy polygon-mapped games until they reach the 1000s of polys needed to effectively mimic reality to my eye.
[ClearCASE] Distributed development over many cities seems unlikely.
A project that I work on every day is in ClearCASE at multiple sites, and it more-or-less works OK. We only get updates from the other sites on a defined update schedule, so you don't always see others' changes at once. But as long as you divide responsibility so that most of the responsibility for this half of the project is in city A, and the rest in city B, you can stay out of each others' way fairly well. We also use project, bug-fix, and site-specific branches for any changes, so there are no multi-site fights for the project mainlines. There are some locking mechanisms built-in to help smooth over multisite issues; we use them and have only a few more issues with concurrent development in other states or countries than we do with development on the other side of the building.
I'll agree with the rest of your points, though - it is expensive and very complicated. Parts of it start to make a lot more sense after you use it for a couple years, and it really is a powerful tool for large projects, multisited projects, or multiple concurrent projects using the same codebase. It's fairly stable - we've only had one episode of vob corruption (for my project, at least) in the last couple years, and that was due to hardware rather than ClearCASE failing.
Speaking as a ClearCASE user (all hail the most overengineered of source repositories) locking the file while you are editing it sounds like a disaster. For the projects that I've worked on we use ClearCASE to make branches of the file, and then users can modify their branches without affecting the project mainline. Sure, they have to merge in sometime, but ClearCASE has tools to do that also.
I'm not familiar with CVS and VSS - how would those tools handle this?
ClearCASE warning: don't upgrade from v2.1 to v3.x, the GUI becomes much more painful to use. Imagine a confirmation dialog every time you try to close a window, for example - not pretty.
Open Source and Commercial aren't opposites; mozilla for example is run as both. I don't see why issues of access control and multiple servers wouldn't be germane to a large open-source project as well.
The answer is, any time that you circumvent an encryption for whatever reason you are breaking the law.
He is lying in court. Is it even possible for very powerful people to be honest in court?
Really this is a question of legal opinion. Some lawyers apparently do interpret the law in that manner and believe that they have a case, otherwise this whole suit wouldn't be occurring. In this case Mr. Valenti is just saying what his lawyers tell him is the truth. Hopefully the courts will not side with this legal analysis, though.
Worst case you could argue that Mr. Valenti isn't really qualified to answer this question, since he isn't a lawyer, and thus it isn't really perjury. It would be as if you were asked whether a certain lighting level is appropriate for a movie set - you aren't an expert, so you're basically guessing. Although the witness really should say that, rather than taking a guess that happens to coincide with what they would like to be true.
All the questions that where asked "could a librarian use a few minutes of a DVD" and stuff like that seem quite easy to answer to me. No she cannot. Now in reality, she would, and no one would throw her in jail for it, but its not legal.
It's only illegal due to the DMCA; under general copyright law and the precedents of past court cases, citing part of a copyrighted work falls under the protection of fair use. Perhaps Mr. Garbus is bringing this up to set up a later appeal and constitutional challenge to the DMCA.
In response to some previous comments in another article about Mr. Garbus: perhaps he isn't the most technologically savvy lawyer in the world, but he seems to be a deep thinker and I'm sure he knows his way around the courtroom very well. The 2600 defendants and the technical community at large are very lucky to have his help in this case. And when you think about it, this isn't really a technical issue. The boundaries of copyright and intellectual property have been in the courts for hundreds of years; this is just the latest instalment of those court battles. If I were Mr. Goldstein, I would be much happier to have a lawyer well-versed in IP law and first amendment issues, than a lawyer who is intimately familiar with all of the technical details. After all, you can probably pick up the technical details faster than you can learn hundreds of years of legal precedents.
Taskbar? I don't have room for a taskbar on my tiny monitor, so I turned it off and got used to using Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc, or the middle mouse button to switch between what I have running. Once you get used to it, it works pretty well.
What I want to know is: what determines the icon used in the task switching window (from pressing Alt-Tab)? All of my xterms have the default icon along with various gnome programs. But on the panel, they have different icons. Is there a way to force the panel icon to always be the icon for the application?
Re:Cool! A tux logo at boot time?
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 1
Actually, you can already flash your BIOS to do this, although I can't remember where I saw it. It replaces the Energy Star logo IIRC. That sounds like a fun project for my evening, does anyone have a pointer to instructions?
A day care center can refuse to hire a ex-con child abuser, and a security firm might refuse to hire Kevin Mitnick (once his parole is up).
Speaking of whom, I listened to an interview with him on NPR last week that also involved someone from CIO magazine, and they said that in a survey in that magazine, 1/3 of survey respondents would hire Mitnick. Presumably to turn his knowledge to good use. The story also covered how he can't be near any type of computer, although apparently the terms of his parole (or "supervised release", as he called it) have been altered recently to allow him to have a cell phone.
So are felons convicted for speeding also denied the vote, like "normal" felons? Maybe people would speed less (or change the speeding laws to make it a misdemeanor) if that was more widely known.
Um, no. Trademarks can no longer be enforced if they have become a standard term due to lack of enforcement, but copyrights are good as long as the government says they are, regardless of enforcement. Copyrights do revert to the public domain at the end of their term, but that happens whether or not they are enforced.
Now from my understanding, it is simply not possible to be both a UI designer and have Linux experience simply because until the past year there was no Linux UI design experience to be obtained by a professional designer.
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. Linux UIs have been designed in the past, therefore they must have had a designer (we're assuming that KDE code isn't evolving on its own yet). Maybe not a professional designer, but a designer nonetheless. I understand the assistance that a professional UI designer can bring to a project, but you can't just say that no Linux UI design has occurred in the past just because it wasn't done by a professional.
That aside, I think the article did unnecessarily vilify Corel. If you're going to set up an open source project, you have to be willing to accept comments from anyone. You don't have to act on those comments, but it would be a mistake for the KDE team to tell anyone, whether Corel or a total Linux/KDE newbie, that their comments aren't wanted.
One point that the article didn't touch on very much was that you have a greater chance of your comments being acted on if you provide patches that implement them. Then it's easy for the user base to try them out and come out in favor of the changes. Just tossing out suggestions, especially in a field like UI design that a lot of coders admittedly don't have as much experience with, may not arouse a lot of interest. Submitting a patch and saying "hey, look how much more understandable this dialog is now" is almost always better.
Just out of curiosity, is that why my above post is marked "Score:5, Troll"? Since Troll is -1, that would imply that the post previously was +6, which I didn't think was possible.
Of course, if you really thought it was troll-like then don't answer that...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the air, it's the the dead trees. CD packaging used to be just as bad, but rather than an authority dicatating CD packaging changes, consumer pressure got the industry to change. We need something similar for software.
The difference isn't going to be between the paper statement from the bank and the electronically imported statement, it's going to be between your ATM receipts and the information from the bank. Maybe I'm paranoid; but I don't trust either my memory of the transactions or the low-wage employees at the bank's office.
I've seen discussion of syncing Palm accounts with GnuCash on the mailing list recently, I don't know how far along they are.
I was able to export QIF format from MS Money when I moved to GnuCash a few months ago. I had to select "Strict QIF compatibility". This was with MS Money 2.0a, YMMV.
I enter my paper receipts into GnuCash by hand, and then reconcile the GnuCash record with the bank/CC statement every month. If you just download from your bank and import, you're taking their word for the transactions you made. Better to compare from two different sources to find any discrepancies.
D'oh!
Oh well, another registration-required site that I won't be visiting. How about including that info in the story summary, so that we don't have to waste our time clicking on the link?
The really funny thing about the "NakedPC" page is this part:
Except, as we've found from the article above, customers don't have a CD that can reload the software, they just have a CD that reloads the software on that machine and zaps their data into oblivion.
On the linked piracy page from the NakedPC page, Microsoft goes on to say that illegal software flourishes more in underdeveloped markets where people make less of a distinction between hardware and software. Doesn't tying the OS to the BIOS of a particular machine erase that line as well?
< scooby > rrromander raco?</scooby>
I didn't know if it was different code or not. Even if it was the same code that was re-released as GPL'd code, the point I was aiming for was that the GPL'd re-release doesn't change the license of any prior releases. Earlier releases remain under their original licenses unless iD included some sort of upwards-license-compatibility (like the GPL: version 2 or, at your option, any later version of the GPL) which I doubt.
There's one in my i-opener, so apparently you can still get them somewhere.
Changing the license in 1999 only affects new releases of the source code after that date. Previous distributions will still be under their old licenses. Of course, you would probably just go and replace your old distribution with the new GPL'd code, but just because a particular distribution is GPL'd doesn't retroactively change all of the others.
Of course, we had to pay for a lot more software back then. License-haggling and politics are unpleasant, but the results are good.
The owners of the original source code are free to license it as many different ways as they want - like perl is licensed, for example. The only issue is that if you have one project that is source release A + improvements, and another project that is from source release B + improvements. If the license of A and the license of B aren't compatible, then you will have problems picking up the improvements to A into the B project, and vice versa. But it's not like a new source release retroactively changes the licensing of any prior releases; they stay licensed the way they were originally.
BTW, lxdoom rocks! The atmosphere of Doom, unaffected (some would say enhanced) by the lower-quality textures and lack of polys, is probably the best atmosphere for a FPS that I've played. It could have something to do with the fact that I prefer sprite-based objects to polygonal ones, though. I feel like if I can look at a well-drawn sprite object, even if from only a few perspectives, that's still better than a spiky, unrealistic-looking polygon object. I won't really enjoy polygon-mapped games until they reach the 1000s of polys needed to effectively mimic reality to my eye.
A project that I work on every day is in ClearCASE at multiple sites, and it more-or-less works OK. We only get updates from the other sites on a defined update schedule, so you don't always see others' changes at once. But as long as you divide responsibility so that most of the responsibility for this half of the project is in city A, and the rest in city B, you can stay out of each others' way fairly well. We also use project, bug-fix, and site-specific branches for any changes, so there are no multi-site fights for the project mainlines. There are some locking mechanisms built-in to help smooth over multisite issues; we use them and have only a few more issues with concurrent development in other states or countries than we do with development on the other side of the building.
I'll agree with the rest of your points, though - it is expensive and very complicated. Parts of it start to make a lot more sense after you use it for a couple years, and it really is a powerful tool for large projects, multisited projects, or multiple concurrent projects using the same codebase. It's fairly stable - we've only had one episode of vob corruption (for my project, at least) in the last couple years, and that was due to hardware rather than ClearCASE failing.
Speaking as a ClearCASE user (all hail the most overengineered of source repositories) locking the file while you are editing it sounds like a disaster. For the projects that I've worked on we use ClearCASE to make branches of the file, and then users can modify their branches without affecting the project mainline. Sure, they have to merge in sometime, but ClearCASE has tools to do that also.
I'm not familiar with CVS and VSS - how would those tools handle this?
ClearCASE warning: don't upgrade from v2.1 to v3.x, the GUI becomes much more painful to use. Imagine a confirmation dialog every time you try to close a window, for example - not pretty.
Open Source and Commercial aren't opposites; mozilla for example is run as both. I don't see why issues of access control and multiple servers wouldn't be germane to a large open-source project as well.
Really this is a question of legal opinion. Some lawyers apparently do interpret the law in that manner and believe that they have a case, otherwise this whole suit wouldn't be occurring. In this case Mr. Valenti is just saying what his lawyers tell him is the truth. Hopefully the courts will not side with this legal analysis, though.
Worst case you could argue that Mr. Valenti isn't really qualified to answer this question, since he isn't a lawyer, and thus it isn't really perjury. It would be as if you were asked whether a certain lighting level is appropriate for a movie set - you aren't an expert, so you're basically guessing. Although the witness really should say that, rather than taking a guess that happens to coincide with what they would like to be true.
It's only illegal due to the DMCA; under general copyright law and the precedents of past court cases, citing part of a copyrighted work falls under the protection of fair use. Perhaps Mr. Garbus is bringing this up to set up a later appeal and constitutional challenge to the DMCA.
In response to some previous comments in another article about Mr. Garbus: perhaps he isn't the most technologically savvy lawyer in the world, but he seems to be a deep thinker and I'm sure he knows his way around the courtroom very well. The 2600 defendants and the technical community at large are very lucky to have his help in this case. And when you think about it, this isn't really a technical issue. The boundaries of copyright and intellectual property have been in the courts for hundreds of years; this is just the latest instalment of those court battles. If I were Mr. Goldstein, I would be much happier to have a lawyer well-versed in IP law and first amendment issues, than a lawyer who is intimately familiar with all of the technical details. After all, you can probably pick up the technical details faster than you can learn hundreds of years of legal precedents.
Taskbar? I don't have room for a taskbar on my tiny monitor, so I turned it off and got used to using Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc, or the middle mouse button to switch between what I have running. Once you get used to it, it works pretty well.
What I want to know is: what determines the icon used in the task switching window (from pressing Alt-Tab)? All of my xterms have the default icon along with various gnome programs. But on the panel, they have different icons. Is there a way to force the panel icon to always be the icon for the application?
Actually, you can already flash your BIOS to do this, although I can't remember where I saw it. It replaces the Energy Star logo IIRC. That sounds like a fun project for my evening, does anyone have a pointer to instructions?
Speaking of whom, I listened to an interview with him on NPR last week that also involved someone from CIO magazine, and they said that in a survey in that magazine, 1/3 of survey respondents would hire Mitnick. Presumably to turn his knowledge to good use. The story also covered how he can't be near any type of computer, although apparently the terms of his parole (or "supervised release", as he called it) have been altered recently to allow him to have a cell phone.
So are felons convicted for speeding also denied the vote, like "normal" felons? Maybe people would speed less (or change the speeding laws to make it a misdemeanor) if that was more widely known.
Um, no. Trademarks can no longer be enforced if they have become a standard term due to lack of enforcement, but copyrights are good as long as the government says they are, regardless of enforcement. Copyrights do revert to the public domain at the end of their term, but that happens whether or not they are enforced.
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. Linux UIs have been designed in the past, therefore they must have had a designer (we're assuming that KDE code isn't evolving on its own yet). Maybe not a professional designer, but a designer nonetheless. I understand the assistance that a professional UI designer can bring to a project, but you can't just say that no Linux UI design has occurred in the past just because it wasn't done by a professional.
That aside, I think the article did unnecessarily vilify Corel. If you're going to set up an open source project, you have to be willing to accept comments from anyone. You don't have to act on those comments, but it would be a mistake for the KDE team to tell anyone, whether Corel or a total Linux/KDE newbie, that their comments aren't wanted.
One point that the article didn't touch on very much was that you have a greater chance of your comments being acted on if you provide patches that implement them. Then it's easy for the user base to try them out and come out in favor of the changes. Just tossing out suggestions, especially in a field like UI design that a lot of coders admittedly don't have as much experience with, may not arouse a lot of interest. Submitting a patch and saying "hey, look how much more understandable this dialog is now" is almost always better.
Just out of curiosity, is that why my above post is marked "Score:5, Troll"? Since Troll is -1, that would imply that the post previously was +6, which I didn't think was possible.
Of course, if you really thought it was troll-like then don't answer that...