What I wish X had was an API for creating and switching between multiple video contexts, at different resolutions and color depths, the way Windows does. I'd love to be able to configure Wine to create an 8bit 640x400 video display context for playing StarCraft, rather than having to kill the X server, edit XFree86.conf and restart the whole thing in low-res/color mode.
Amen to that. The one thing I miss about Windows is the ability to switch resolutions without stopping everything else that's going on. With the old 14" monitor that I have, in order to get enough screen real estate I have to run at a ridiculously low refresh rate. This doesn't bother me too much, but my wife notices the waviness/jumpiness a lot more. If we could swap video modes as easily as in Windows, X on Linux would be about perfect for our needs.
But Coca-cola is a soft drink, and soft drinks are not an unrelated area, so actually you couldn't have your own Coke brand of soft drinks. "Famous trademark" issues aside, your example with the shoes was spot on, though.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "proprietary". If by that you mean "manufactured by a known company who has put their name on a Linux distro and charges money for it", then yes, there already exist "proprietary" distributions. If you mean "contains binaries only and we won't provide you with any source code", then theoretically the GPL would prevent that proprietary distribution. Although if a company includes their own applications with the distribution, they aren't obligated to release source to those, because those apps aren't GPL'd. So you could see a Linux distribution which has GPL'd Linux at the core, surrounded by different proprietary applications (installer, GUI, DVD player). This distribution could be licensed so that the GPL'd software may be redistributed, but the closed-source apps can't be. Thus, the CD that you get it on is proprietary in that you can't just make $1.89 copies of the CD and sell them.
You're right about the backwardness of my assumption - I got too worked up and didn't realize that it was my state trying to tax me. However, I'm still unhappy with the the revised situation.
It's not that I don't want my local government to have money, but rather that I don't think I have used any additional services of the local government as a result of the sale, and thus I don't see why they have a right to tax me. I'll admit that I used local phone lines/cable lines to place the order and that UPS used the local streets to deliver the package, but all of those things are already taxed by the state. If UPS makes more trips to my door because I've bought more things online, the taxes that individuals and businesses already pay to keep up the roads should be increased. But we don't need a new tax. There are already taxes which pay for phone lines, roads, law enforcement, etc., and if we need more money for those things it's much better to increase the existing tax rate than to create a new tax with new forms, laws, and general confusion.
Well, it's nice to hear that someone still runs on platitudes like goodness and freedom. Are you sure you didn't want to reply to someone else instead?
Either way, it was very pleasant to see a post by a Christian advocate leading a good life by quiet example rather than passing judgement all the time. If there were more level-headed, calm religious people like you around, I might end up involved in an organized religion once more.
Uh no, thats only 2 years away. Linux will be luck if it has 5% of home users by then.
Actually, I saw a pie chart in an article linked from/. either yesterday or the day before which showed the Linux home user base increasing from.4% in '98 to 4% in '99. 5% home penetration in a couple years is a very low prediction I think, considering the rapid rate of improvement of the Linux desktop experience. The newest "Desktop" distros like Corel already seem far ahead of the Mandrake 6.1 I installed last year. It wouldn't surprise me to see the Mac user base passed this year or next, considering that in upgrading from Windows to Linux you don't have to buy new hardware but to get a Mac you do.
Linux might take over the UNIX market, but believe it or not, there are many people who don't really think UNIX is the OS used by god.
I don't know, if you compare a Unix sysadmin with God, you see that they both have a long white beard and a strange love/hate relationship with users/humanity.
God: "Here's a quarter, kid, get yourself a real operating system." [ducks flames]:)
What the HELL is 'linux compatibility' supposed to mean?
When I read that part, I immediately assumed that he meant binary compatibility. There are a number of products and/or compatibility layers which are supposed to allow x86 binaries to run under many x86 Unices. Of course, these aren't compatibile with PPC Linux or Linux on Alpha, so I'm inclined to agree with you that real compatibility is fleeting.
Doh! You're right; I entirely missed your original point. If at any point you use a binary of a new compiler version, rather than compiling the new compiler from trusted sources with your trusted old compiler, you are vulnerable to this attack. I was thinking more of the case where you have a sizeable number of free software programmers who always upgrade via source patches. In that situation, you would have to compare md5sum of the new binary of gcc with the md5sum of the "trusted source+trusted compiler" gcc to make sure that the new binary gcc distribution really came from the sources that everyone thinks it came from.
If everyone did as you suggested, not only would the execs not understand what was going on, they would just hire new people who know less at a lower salary. Then they would pat themselves on the back for a good cost cutting measure.
One would hope that this "cost cutting" would hurt their business in the long run in terms of technical problems and schedule slippages. Theoretically, the use of a geek walkout in these situations could eventually force such companies to change their ways. I'm not sure that your average exec. would make the connection between lower-quality techies and lower-quality results, though.
Companies run on profits, not platitudes like goodness and freedom.
The point of the comment to which you were replying was that this would be unlikely in free software, because there would be many more people looking at the modified code. If Ken Thompson's backdoor had been distributed to thousands of kernel hackers around the world when he came up with it, someone would have noticed.
Your hilarious satire of Microsoft marketing materials and ZDNet-style managementspeak was truly superb. Please read below for selection of/. readers who didn't quite catch on that this was a troll and/or a joke. Lighten up and smell the grits, folks!
You can do anything you want with 10 lines of code for the same reasons you can do anything with an excerpt out of the paper or a book. It's called fair use.
I don't think you can do anything you want with an excerpt from a book or a paper, though. Fair use allows you to quote for certain scholarly, artistic, or literary purposes, but it doesn't make the excerpt yours somehow, and it doesn't place the excerpt in the public domain.
So you can take some FreeBSD code (for example) and publish it along with annotations as to how it works, etc, but I don't think you can just subsume it into your application as is. In the literary world, including a fair use excerpt but without marking it as quoted or including attribution would be considered plagiarism. In the software world this would probably be opposed under copyright grounds.
If anyone is to have the freedom to publish whatever they want, then NO ONE can have their publications blocked due to content. Not even spam or junk mail.
I don't mind people publishing anything. Spammers can advertise their services on a web page as much as they want. If I decide to spend the money to use my 'net connection to read those pages, that is my choice. However, I refuse to subsidize their advertisements by having their ads forced upon me. By emailing me spam and raising my ISP's prices, they are charging me for their publications. I am under no obligation to pay for another's free speech.
As to being charged for what ya don't want: (a) that happens all the time too, get used to it;
I guess the rest of us just aren't as used to being stolen from as you are. Maybe someday we can attain your level of godlike indifference when we are wronged. I'll start the meditation: OMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Good point - I hadn't considered that some states may have different and/or less organized revenue models than the ones that I am familiar with. However, giving states the ability to tax nonresidents seems like it could be prone to abuses and would cause more problems than it would solve. At the very least, it would cause e-businesses to move to states with no sales taxes.
Ultimately, I don't see a significant difference between ecommerce and catalog or mail order purchases. Sure ordering over the web is quicker (usually) than a phone order, but phone ordering is faster than mail-order and we didn't change all of the tax laws for that. This is one case where the Internet would be in better shape if we stayed within the boundaries of existing laws, rather than reinventing how taxation works online.
It's fine with me if states tax businesses which are residents in order to provide the infrastructure that those businesses make use of. I just don't want to be taxed by states of which I am not a resident, because I won't receive any benefit from those tax revenues. If amazon.com is using resources which could be provided for by a 10% tax, for example, then the 10% tax should be applied to amazon.com in that state and they can pass the higher costs on to me in the price of their products if they want. The wrong solution is to tax them 5% and tax me the customer (and all the other customers too) 5%.
Also, people seem to think that taxes get taken by the government and then thrown out the window.
Granted, taxes are generally intended to pay for services that the government provides for citizens, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, what's important is that the things that are taxed correspond in some way to the expenditure of the tax dollars. To take your examples,
Tax dollars started the ARPA net - mainly revenues of the federal government from individual income taxes and corporate income taxes used to pay for research towards a network which by now is used by many individuals and businesses around the country.
provide education - through high school, local tax income (property taxes generally) are used to provide for the education of the local children. Past the secondary level, public education is funded at the state level through general state income taxes, corporate taxes, and so forth.
and, if you live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance - OK, I can't admit to any first-hand experience with that issue, but I assume that national income and business taxes are used to pay for a national system.
I can't complain about any of these issues - in each case, the people who will receive the benefit from the government expenditures are the people who are being taxed. What's different about this next example:
taxing online purchasers of products in the state where the selling business is located
The difference is that purchasers are being taxed but not receiving any government services in return. All of the pro-taxation arguments which have been made so far are along the lines of "but everybody else is raking it in, why shouldn't we?" without any consideration of what those tax revenues will buy for the people who are being taxed.
It's fine with me if the states want to tax resident e-businesses at whatever rate they see fit, since those businesses do use the roads, fire departments, police, courts, etc. at their physical location. But as a customer of one of those businesses, I haven't used a dime of the resources of the state of California (for example and because many e-businesses are there), and I resent CA's or any state's attempts to extort money from me on that account. There are some situations in which taxation is good and useful, but this is not one of them.
It's unclear from your description whether you got the strange reaction due to lack of knowledge of the existence of the GPL, or just disagreement with its terms on the part of your teacher. If you have a Software Design teacher who is unaware of the existence of such a license and its impact on the current state of software development, you can probably despair of learning much current information in the class. If your teacher has a disagreement with the terms of the GPL then that's one thing; but wholesale ignorance of the contributions of various free software licenses isn't an option anymore in the industry.
I'm not sure what would be a good approach to take as far as making changes; though, since I don't recall any software classes being available in high school. You'll find instructors a lot more cognizant of the GPL in college I expect.
Read more carefully - these comments were solicited by the U.S. Copyright Office in order to get legal opinions on how exactly the DMCA should be enforced. The comments weren't solicited by big corporations in a token effort to prove that they got input from all sides. Theoretically these comments really can make a difference.
Painting your house differently than your neighbor - Who cares if it isn't "technically illegal"?
Legally reverse-engineering encryption software - Who cares if it isn't "technically illegal"?
Belonging to some "weirdo religious cult" - Who cares if it isn't "technically illegal"?
Not voting for the Party - Who cares if it isn't "technically illegal"?
Thoughtcrime - OK, now that really is illegal
I couldn't care less if some company is losing megabucks because of the legal actions of other companies and/or consumers. It's fine with me if companies go after people who really are breaking the law - for example, distribution of mp3 for which you do not have the copyright is illegal in the U.S. What iCraveTV was doing was not illegal in Canada, and it's too bad that they didn't have enough money to buy justice. Corporations are happy to hold consumers to the strict letter of the law; I see no reason that the same standards should not apply to them as well.
Some clever Dutch student invented a harddisk head system that could handle much smaller disktracks, so harddisks could contain much more data. Do you think he got the patent? no. The company who payed for the research did. Wrong? perhaps, but I don't see anyone boycotting any harddiskmanufacturer because he suddenly has larger harddisks for sale and thus supports this patenting issue.
Well, if the company paid for the research and had an agreement with the student that any results were owned by the company, then it seems to be legal to me. It might have been a bad idea for the student to invent such a thing while in that employ, but on the other hand maybe he wouldn't have thought of it without their financial support.
If a person has a clever idea, and patents that what's wrong with that? because in THIS case some people here are NOT agreeing with the US patent commission? And should issue a boycot?
Well, there are really several different complaints going on at once. To sum up:
Some people don't mind patents in general, but think that there was a lot of prior art for this patent, and therefore this patent is a bad patent. They would argue that it wasn't a clever original idea.
Some people think that software patents are OK, but that they should be awarded for a shorter period of time because the software field moves so much more quickly than traditional patent fields.
Some people don't like software patents on the grounds that they are mathematical truisms rather than real inventions, or some similar argument. They disagree with all software patents.
Some people don't like any patents at all (often they say things like "Intellectual Property is Theft"). I don't really understand or agree with this viewpoint, but it does exist.
So what seems to be a lot of confusing ranting is really four different kinds of complaints going on at once. In this article, all four of those groups of people are unhappy with Amazon.com.
Well, you could use NFS rather than FTP, you know. If every machine exports the necessary directories, you basically have a network neighborhood. Especially if you have some sort of automounting magic going on - I can cd into any other developer's/home (assuming I have permissions) for example. So they are my "network neighborhood" in a sense. And you could then access the various NFS mounts through whatever filesystem browser you want: mc, kfm, etc.
Or are you thinking of something totally different?
Because I don't trust my bank to tell me how much money I have there. I balance my statement monthly versus my records in case they make an error. Not that this has ever occurred, but you never know. I wouldn't mind checking my statement online, and having the reconciliation between the bank's version of events and mine done automatically. But I insist on keeping separate records of income and expense rather than trusting a bank to keep the only copy of that information.
[OnTopic]I've tried to updgrade to GnuCash, but the last time I did so, it couldn't import any of my current accounts. I had exported them from MSMoney 2.0a (really old version) with "strict QIF compatibility" (at least, according to Microsoft) but GnuCash couldn't read them. Maybe I'll try it again with this new release, but I really won't be able to upgrade until I can convert my old records. Too bad, because MSMoney is the only reason that I ever boot into Windows anymore. As I get new accounts I'm probably going to create them in GnuCash, but since I don't switch banks and credit cards too often, this migration may take a while.
Speaking of Crow and Tom Servo, did anyone else see the suspiciously MST3K-like silhouettes at the movies at the beginning of Futurama? I could swear I saw Crow, but it went by really quick.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. The one thing I miss about Windows is the ability to switch resolutions without stopping everything else that's going on. With the old 14" monitor that I have, in order to get enough screen real estate I have to run at a ridiculously low refresh rate. This doesn't bother me too much, but my wife notices the waviness/jumpiness a lot more. If we could swap video modes as easily as in Windows, X on Linux would be about perfect for our needs.
But Coca-cola is a soft drink, and soft drinks are not an unrelated area, so actually you couldn't have your own Coke brand of soft drinks. "Famous trademark" issues aside, your example with the shoes was spot on, though.
Move along.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "proprietary". If by that you mean "manufactured by a known company who has put their name on a Linux distro and charges money for it", then yes, there already exist "proprietary" distributions. If you mean "contains binaries only and we won't provide you with any source code", then theoretically the GPL would prevent that proprietary distribution. Although if a company includes their own applications with the distribution, they aren't obligated to release source to those, because those apps aren't GPL'd. So you could see a Linux distribution which has GPL'd Linux at the core, surrounded by different proprietary applications (installer, GUI, DVD player). This distribution could be licensed so that the GPL'd software may be redistributed, but the closed-source apps can't be. Thus, the CD that you get it on is proprietary in that you can't just make $1.89 copies of the CD and sell them.
You're right about the backwardness of my assumption - I got too worked up and didn't realize that it was my state trying to tax me. However, I'm still unhappy with the the revised situation.
It's not that I don't want my local government to have money, but rather that I don't think I have used any additional services of the local government as a result of the sale, and thus I don't see why they have a right to tax me. I'll admit that I used local phone lines/cable lines to place the order and that UPS used the local streets to deliver the package, but all of those things are already taxed by the state. If UPS makes more trips to my door because I've bought more things online, the taxes that individuals and businesses already pay to keep up the roads should be increased. But we don't need a new tax. There are already taxes which pay for phone lines, roads, law enforcement, etc., and if we need more money for those things it's much better to increase the existing tax rate than to create a new tax with new forms, laws, and general confusion.
Well, it's nice to hear that someone still runs on platitudes like goodness and freedom. Are you sure you didn't want to reply to someone else instead?
Either way, it was very pleasant to see a post by a Christian advocate leading a good life by quiet example rather than passing judgement all the time. If there were more level-headed, calm religious people like you around, I might end up involved in an organized religion once more.
Actually, I saw a pie chart in an article linked from /. either yesterday or the day before which showed the Linux home user base increasing from .4% in '98 to 4% in '99. 5% home penetration in a couple years is a very low prediction I think, considering the rapid rate of improvement of the Linux desktop experience. The newest "Desktop" distros like Corel already seem far ahead of the Mandrake 6.1 I installed last year. It wouldn't surprise me to see the Mac user base passed this year or next, considering that in upgrading from Windows to Linux you don't have to buy new hardware but to get a Mac you do.
I don't know, if you compare a Unix sysadmin with God, you see that they both have a long white beard and a strange love/hate relationship with users/humanity.
God: "Here's a quarter, kid, get yourself a real operating system." [ducks flames] :)
When I read that part, I immediately assumed that he meant binary compatibility. There are a number of products and/or compatibility layers which are supposed to allow x86 binaries to run under many x86 Unices. Of course, these aren't compatibile with PPC Linux or Linux on Alpha, so I'm inclined to agree with you that real compatibility is fleeting.
Doh! You're right; I entirely missed your original point. If at any point you use a binary of a new compiler version, rather than compiling the new compiler from trusted sources with your trusted old compiler, you are vulnerable to this attack. I was thinking more of the case where you have a sizeable number of free software programmers who always upgrade via source patches. In that situation, you would have to compare md5sum of the new binary of gcc with the md5sum of the "trusted source+trusted compiler" gcc to make sure that the new binary gcc distribution really came from the sources that everyone thinks it came from.
One would hope that this "cost cutting" would hurt their business in the long run in terms of technical problems and schedule slippages. Theoretically, the use of a geek walkout in these situations could eventually force such companies to change their ways. I'm not sure that your average exec. would make the connection between lower-quality techies and lower-quality results, though.
I can't argue with that (says I on company time :)
The point of the comment to which you were replying was that this would be unlikely in free software, because there would be many more people looking at the modified code. If Ken Thompson's backdoor had been distributed to thousands of kernel hackers around the world when he came up with it, someone would have noticed.
Your hilarious satire of Microsoft marketing materials and ZDNet-style managementspeak was truly superb. Please read below for selection of /. readers who didn't quite catch on that this was a troll and/or a joke. Lighten up and smell the grits, folks!
I don't think you can do anything you want with an excerpt from a book or a paper, though. Fair use allows you to quote for certain scholarly, artistic, or literary purposes, but it doesn't make the excerpt yours somehow, and it doesn't place the excerpt in the public domain.
So you can take some FreeBSD code (for example) and publish it along with annotations as to how it works, etc, but I don't think you can just subsume it into your application as is. In the literary world, including a fair use excerpt but without marking it as quoted or including attribution would be considered plagiarism. In the software world this would probably be opposed under copyright grounds.
I don't mind people publishing anything. Spammers can advertise their services on a web page as much as they want. If I decide to spend the money to use my 'net connection to read those pages, that is my choice. However, I refuse to subsidize their advertisements by having their ads forced upon me. By emailing me spam and raising my ISP's prices, they are charging me for their publications. I am under no obligation to pay for another's free speech.
I guess the rest of us just aren't as used to being stolen from as you are. Maybe someday we can attain your level of godlike indifference when we are wronged. I'll start the meditation: OMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Good point - I hadn't considered that some states may have different and/or less organized revenue models than the ones that I am familiar with. However, giving states the ability to tax nonresidents seems like it could be prone to abuses and would cause more problems than it would solve. At the very least, it would cause e-businesses to move to states with no sales taxes.
Ultimately, I don't see a significant difference between ecommerce and catalog or mail order purchases. Sure ordering over the web is quicker (usually) than a phone order, but phone ordering is faster than mail-order and we didn't change all of the tax laws for that. This is one case where the Internet would be in better shape if we stayed within the boundaries of existing laws, rather than reinventing how taxation works online.
It's fine with me if states tax businesses which are residents in order to provide the infrastructure that those businesses make use of. I just don't want to be taxed by states of which I am not a resident, because I won't receive any benefit from those tax revenues. If amazon.com is using resources which could be provided for by a 10% tax, for example, then the 10% tax should be applied to amazon.com in that state and they can pass the higher costs on to me in the price of their products if they want. The wrong solution is to tax them 5% and tax me the customer (and all the other customers too) 5%.
Granted, taxes are generally intended to pay for services that the government provides for citizens, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, what's important is that the things that are taxed correspond in some way to the expenditure of the tax dollars. To take your examples,
I can't complain about any of these issues - in each case, the people who will receive the benefit from the government expenditures are the people who are being taxed. What's different about this next example:
The difference is that purchasers are being taxed but not receiving any government services in return. All of the pro-taxation arguments which have been made so far are along the lines of "but everybody else is raking it in, why shouldn't we?" without any consideration of what those tax revenues will buy for the people who are being taxed.
It's fine with me if the states want to tax resident e-businesses at whatever rate they see fit, since those businesses do use the roads, fire departments, police, courts, etc. at their physical location. But as a customer of one of those businesses, I haven't used a dime of the resources of the state of California (for example and because many e-businesses are there), and I resent CA's or any state's attempts to extort money from me on that account. There are some situations in which taxation is good and useful, but this is not one of them.
It's unclear from your description whether you got the strange reaction due to lack of knowledge of the existence of the GPL, or just disagreement with its terms on the part of your teacher. If you have a Software Design teacher who is unaware of the existence of such a license and its impact on the current state of software development, you can probably despair of learning much current information in the class. If your teacher has a disagreement with the terms of the GPL then that's one thing; but wholesale ignorance of the contributions of various free software licenses isn't an option anymore in the industry.
I'm not sure what would be a good approach to take as far as making changes; though, since I don't recall any software classes being available in high school. You'll find instructors a lot more cognizant of the GPL in college I expect.
Read more carefully - these comments were solicited by the U.S. Copyright Office in order to get legal opinions on how exactly the DMCA should be enforced. The comments weren't solicited by big corporations in a token effort to prove that they got input from all sides. Theoretically these comments really can make a difference.
s/illgeal/illegal/g and repeat after me:
I couldn't care less if some company is losing megabucks because of the legal actions of other companies and/or consumers. It's fine with me if companies go after people who really are breaking the law - for example, distribution of mp3 for which you do not have the copyright is illegal in the U.S. What iCraveTV was doing was not illegal in Canada, and it's too bad that they didn't have enough money to buy justice. Corporations are happy to hold consumers to the strict letter of the law; I see no reason that the same standards should not apply to them as well.
Well, if the company paid for the research and had an agreement with the student that any results were owned by the company, then it seems to be legal to me. It might have been a bad idea for the student to invent such a thing while in that employ, but on the other hand maybe he wouldn't have thought of it without their financial support.
If a person has a clever idea, and patents that what's wrong with that? because in THIS case some people here are NOT agreeing with the US patent commission? And should issue a boycot?
Well, there are really several different complaints going on at once. To sum up:
So what seems to be a lot of confusing ranting is really four different kinds of complaints going on at once. In this article, all four of those groups of people are unhappy with Amazon.com.
Well, you could use NFS rather than FTP, you know. If every machine exports the necessary directories, you basically have a network neighborhood. Especially if you have some sort of automounting magic going on - I can cd into any other developer's /home (assuming I have permissions) for example. So they are my "network neighborhood" in a sense. And you could then access the various NFS mounts through whatever filesystem browser you want: mc, kfm, etc.
Or are you thinking of something totally different?
Because I don't trust my bank to tell me how much money I have there. I balance my statement monthly versus my records in case they make an error. Not that this has ever occurred, but you never know. I wouldn't mind checking my statement online, and having the reconciliation between the bank's version of events and mine done automatically. But I insist on keeping separate records of income and expense rather than trusting a bank to keep the only copy of that information.
[OnTopic]I've tried to updgrade to GnuCash, but the last time I did so, it couldn't import any of my current accounts. I had exported them from MSMoney 2.0a (really old version) with "strict QIF compatibility" (at least, according to Microsoft) but GnuCash couldn't read them. Maybe I'll try it again with this new release, but I really won't be able to upgrade until I can convert my old records. Too bad, because MSMoney is the only reason that I ever boot into Windows anymore. As I get new accounts I'm probably going to create them in GnuCash, but since I don't switch banks and credit cards too often, this migration may take a while.
Maybe you should get a new bank - the credit union ATM I use has no such charge.
Speaking of Crow and Tom Servo, did anyone else see the suspiciously MST3K-like silhouettes at the movies at the beginning of Futurama? I could swear I saw Crow, but it went by really quick.