Seriously, Daleks are at best dull, at worst ridiculous. It's ludicrous that Terry Nation, a god-awful writer when compared with Who's greats like Robert Holmes (who as a script editor inclined to totally rewrite stories, made "Genesis of the Daleks" the classic it is), received so much acclaim for something that on paper was the standard evil alien out to conquer the universe.
The effectiveness of the Daleks in the 60's was due to the fact that they didn't look like a guy in a suit, and as others have observed, Nation was not responsible for that.
Slashdot using CSS? I don't think any of us will live to see that.
Anyway, who would want to see all the work that Mozilla put into quirks mode go to waste? And the mid-nineties were good to me, so it's nice to see that era permanently comemorated on my favourite website.
(For the record, Slashdot does appear to use CSS in two places: style attributes in the OSDN bar, and in the iFrame elements that ads appear in.)
Yes Apple has historically been unusually aesthetically-focussed for an IT company. But it seems to me that the partial switch to becoming a free software company has allowed them to concentrate more on their core business: cool devices. At the very least their tentative embrace of free software has not cost them anything; and arguably they have better software to run on their award-winning (and staggeringly popular and profitiable) hardware than if they developed a wholly proprietary OS in-house.
Hopefully they will soon see they have nothing to lose by freeing the rest of their proprietary code.
It may be too much to hope that a competitor of Apple's, whose name I dare not breathe in polite company, will abandon their losing battle against software freedom and follow Apple's lead. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I'm just glad I don't have a vested interest in the future of that company, because it may not have one for much longer.
I tried Lindows from a cover disk recently, and was unimpressed.
The much-praised easy installer failed to detect any ISA hardware (tomsrtbt does a better job), useability and eye-candy is no better than any other mainstream distro out there, and it has an outrageous license that makes me think perhaps "mere aggregation" should be prohibited under the GPL. They even have the audacity to say during installation (I'm paraphrasing), "With Lindows you get the benefits of all this great GPL'd software, now sign this EULA."
Bundling this shambles with a couple of real distros sounds like Corel's last-ditch effort to flog Word Perfect by bundling it with Debian.
are there moral implications for overloading a perfectly innocent site (fortunately, this site seems academic, so we aren't hurting business, per se)?
Forgive me for being hypersensitive, but I was having a conversation with somebody recently about unconscious ideology, and this seems like a perfect example. What you appear to be saying is:
It may be immoral to overload an "innocent" site.
Moral consideration only applies to situations involving loss of money in a for-profit enterprise.
So fortunately, nobody has been hurt here. At least nobody who counts.
Forgive me if I've misinterpreted, or assigned too much significance to a throwaway remark.
Of course the moral considerations wouldn't arise at all if we, and the people upstream from us, behaved like good netizens and cached sensibly. Unfortunately misguided demands for a more "dynamic" web have rendered caching proxies all but useless.
Obviously I don't know for sure, but I think if you were to look into it, if caching at the ISP level were to come back into fashion, Slashdotting would be a thing of the past. Of course, then advertisers wouldn't know how many "hits" they were getting. So we have to pay for the hardware to cope with the traffic, so that we can attract the advertisers to pay for the hardware. Not to mention all the database-driven sites which are updated once a day or less that would lose crucial immediacy.
"The proceeds from a gasoline tax ought to be used to finance cuts in other taxes..."
Am I the only one to see an opportunity here? Reducing taxes on alcohol, while raising taxes on petrol would solve the problem of drink driving, while promoting the use of environmentally friendly mass transportation.
Yes, I suppose there might be a further benefit to those of us who like a drink, but how insignificant is this compared to the future of our planet and the safety of our fellow human beings!
What you say is true for Perl 6 the language, but not perl 6 the interpreter.
My understanding is that the perl 6 interpreter, despite being a ground-up rewrite, will run Perl 5.x scripts perfectly well.
From what I can gather, the perl6 interpreter will consist of a sort of 'meta-interpreter' (Parrot), plus modules that tell it how to interpret a particular language. The interpreter will automatically detect which language (and which variant of the language) you are trying to use. So you could, in principle, use the perl interpreter to run scripts in Perl5, Perl6, Python, Ruby, Basic, whatever.
This is not only cool, but apparently necessary, since the perl6 interpreter uses perl5 regular expressions for parsing scripts. Not only that, but it all allegedly runs faster than ever. This sounds too good to be true of course, so I may have fallen victim to one of Larry Wall's elaborate jokes.
Anyhow, you're right in one sense; that if you want to speak the Perl6 dialect of Perl, you'll need a new book. But if you just want to get the job done as quickly as possible, which is what the cookbook is all about, this edition (and indeed the last, which I won't be trashing any time soon) will be useful for a long time to come.
Meanwhile, Debian will be announcing that it will be charging $5 a pop for advertising in it's installer.
The price difference is only fair; a Mandrake user will see the ads a couple of times a year, while a Debian user will only see the ads once during the lifetime of the machine.
Stay tuned for the announcement when or if the new Debian installer is ready.
If the Department of Defense is in charge of unprovoked attacks on countries that pose no threat, I don't see why the Department of Homeland Security shouldn't be doing everything in it's power to make the U.S. less secure.
INSPECTOR. Anyway, take a look at your professional card and
prescription list. If I'm not mistaken, they read: "Professor
Antonio A. Antonio, Psychiatrist. The Former Professor. University of
Padova." Go on, what do you have to say now?
SUSPECT.
First of all, I really am a professor. Professor of drawing, ornate and
free-hand styles, at the Holy Redeemer night school.
INSPECTOR. Well isn't that nice. Good for you, but it says here, "Psychiatrist!"
SUSPECT
Yes, but after the period! Don't you know about syntax and punctuation?
Look carefully: Professor Antonio A. Antonio. Period. Then there's a
capital P Psychiatrist. Now, you'll admit it isn't acting under false
pretenses to say: "I am a psychiatrist." It's like saying,
"I'm a psychologist, botanist, vegetarian, arthritic " Do you
have a knowledge of Italian grammar and language? You do? Well, then
you should know that if someone describes himself as an archaeologist,
it's as though he had written "Milanese." It doesn't mean he
has a degree in it!
INSPECTOR. All right, but what about Former Professor from the University?
SUSPECT.
There, you see - excuse me, but this time you're the one who's acting
under false pretenses: you told me that you know Italian language and
syntax and punctuation, and then it comes out that you don't even read
correctly.
INSPECTOR. What do you mean. I don t know -
SUSPECT. Didn't you see the comma after "The Former"?
INSPECTOR. Oh yes, there is a comma. You're right, I hadn't noticed.
SUSPECT.
Aha, "I hadn't noticed" . . . And you, simply because you
"hadn't noticed," would throw an innocent man in prison?
INSPECTOR. You know, you really are crazy. ( Without realizing it, he has begun to address the SUSPECT in a more respectful tone.) What does the comma have to do with it?
SUSPECT.
Nothing, for someone who doesn't know Italian language and syntax!
Which reminds me, I'd like to know where you got your degree. And who
granted it to you. . . let me finish! The comma, remember, is the key
to everything! If there's a comma after "The Former," the
entire meaning of the phrase changes at once. After the comma, you have
to catch your breath . . . take a brief pause . . . Because
"the comma always denotes a pause." Therefore, it should be
read, "The Former, Professor," meaning, "the aforesaid,
the one already mentioned, NOT the professor." In fact, I haven't been
a professor for some time. So that could even be read with a little
ironic chuckle: heh, heh. So the correct reading of that phrase is as
follows: The Former, Professor, heh, heh. Pause. From the University of
Padova. Just the same as if you read "retired dentist, from the
city of Bergamo." Because I am from the University of Padova, in the
sense that it was the last place I visited: I had just recently come
from there when I, ah, took up my psychiatric practice. Any other
reading of the phrase would be entirely false and misleading; only an
idiot would make such an error.
INSPECTOR. So, you think I m an idiot!
SUSPECT.
No, just ignorant of basic Italian grammar. But it's lucky for you
you've come to the right person for help. I'll even offer a
discount.
Much as I like the idea of a PDA running a free kernel, it's not much use to me unless the rest of the software is free, or I can run my own software on it. What's the free/non-free status of the bundled software? And can I easily install my favourite free software, XFree86, etc.?
This particular incident may not have been so worrying, but it does seems that Washington's attitude towards security is rather similar to the attitude in Redmond.
For Microsoft, "security" means "DRM". For the US government "security" means "oil". In both cases genuine security holes go unchecked, and in the latter case, resources go towards arresting thousands without charges, barring people like Irish civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and Eugene Angelopoulos, a Professor at the National Technical University of Athens from entering the country, and desperately trying to find a convincing link between Saddam Hussein and September 11.
Ironically, the more "security" you sign up for, the less safe you are.
IRAQ supports terrorists and is trying to build nukes
Which terrorists? What nukes?
The last terrorist activity where there is any evidence of Iraqi involvement was the attempted assasination of George Bush senior about a decade ago.
And nukes aren't like chemical weapons. It's pretty hard to hide a nuclear reactor.
Do you understand that? Do you think that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they would keep them from al Qaeda? If Al Qaeda had one do you think they would hesitate to use it? They tried to buy one from the Russians. Remember that?
Then why not bomb the Russians? Al Qaeda has a better chance of sourcing nukes from there. At least we know Russia has the weapons.
Saddam Hussain has been brutally crushing militant Islamic movements for thirty years. Osama bin Laden (remember him?) despises him. In the tape released last November, bin Laden was careful to speak only of "the sons of Iraq" so as not to imply any support for Saddam, a secular leader (his party was co-founded by a christian) who until 1991 marched to Washington's orders.
If al Quaeda possesed nuclear weapons, Saddam would have no reason to feel sure that they wouldn't be used against him. Furthermore, if any rogue nuke was detonated anywhere in the world by anybody at the moment, it is more than likely that the US would nuke Iraq immediately.
Speaking of bin Laden, wasn't he supposed to be the most wicked and dangerous man on earth? What changed? Could it be that the threat posed to the security of the US is oddly proportionate to the amount of oil the US stands to gain by pre-emtively striking against the threat?
Not just Nav3. I used to be able to crash Nav4 with style sheets. Perfectly valid CSS1. Well, to be fair, that's W3C CSS, not Netscape CSS or MS CSS.
Of course now that we have a number of browsers that implement the standard 99% correctly, crashing a deliberately broken browser designed to sabotage it's competitors and the standards process is a feature, not a bug.
It had to happen eventually. Journalists' errors are finally like banner ads to me! At least now I'll be able to read an article that says something like "Linux, the freeware alternative to Microsoft Windows created by Linus Torvalds in 1991..." without blowing a gasket.
I think you're making some unwarrented assumptions here. Why should a free implementation of SMB upset RMS? It's better than a non-free implementation of SMB. If you're in a position where you can control what you're running on your organisation's file servers, but you can't control what's on the desktop, using Samba is currently the only ethical course of action available to you.
What might even be better, or at least ethically equivalent and practically easier, is to have a free software implementation of NFS for non-free platforms like Windows (I'm not aware of any), as you don't have to reverse engineer, and re-reverse engineer every couple of years, a secret, proprietary standard to make it work. And it means that some proprietary networking software on the client machines has been replaced by free software.
The article is actually quite good (the AFR is the only Australian paper worth reading). It uses the term "free software" several times and doesn't even mention that "open source" fad from a couple of years ago. Whatever happened to that, BTW?
No offense to the Debian folks but Debian is not for beginners...
I don't get this argument at all. The first distro I ever used was Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm), and it was no harder than my first DOS/Win3.1 install. This was with no CS degree, no Unix or GNU experience whatsoever. I read a couple of articles and a HOWTO or two.
What is so hard about pecking at the enter key for half an hour? Granted there are a few tricky questions for newbies, but by and large they are questions you are going to have to answer to get Windows working as well. Ask a Windows user what the IP address and netmask is on their ethernet interface. If they can answer that kind of question, they can install Debian. If they can't, they can't install ANY OS (assuming they want TCP/IP to work).
The big problem with Debian versus other distros is hardware autodetection. Even this is getting better. For my last install I installed the potato (2.2) base system, then dist-upgraded to woody (2.3). The rest of the packages installed (presumably) as they would when woody is finally stable (soon, honestly!).
I had a three-button wheel mouse which I just assumed I wouldn't be using as such. Much to my surprise, after installing X (painlessly), I absently twiddled the mouse wheel, and found Konqueror scrolling up and down. IIRC, I was not asked a single question about the kind of mouse I had during the install. Very cool.
There is another reason why people should choose Debian over this and many other distros. Lycoris evidently doesn't make any distinction between free and non-free software. Adobe Acrobat as default PDF viewer indeed! If you are a newbie who wants a system that works as much like Windows as possible, and don't have any objection to running proprietary software, why don't you just run Windows?
It's be good to get a proper project together to package this sort of thing well. It's a useful fundraiser for local projects, as well as introducing Windows users to free software, and easing them into migrating to a free OS. My introduction to free software was through Perl for Win32 - as ActiveState's port was known back then. I read the GPL, thought "Wow!", and never looked back. BTW, avoid ActivePerl; the "ActiveState Community License," or whatever it's called sucks.
Eureka! I've always wondered why people got so peeved by RMS's GNU/something request. It seems to be a simple misunderstanding.
RMS has never wanted to change the name of Linux. In fact he is quite clear on this point. The kernel is Toorvald's project, and we should use the name he chose for it. However, when speaking of the complete, free operating system we all use and love, we've should choose a name that's appropriate for the system as a whole.
Now before you start making jokes about using GNU/Linux/Perl/Apache/X/KDE/Mozilla, you've got to consider which of these projects set out to make an operating system. Linus intended to make a Unix kernel for the i386 architecture, in the tradition of Minix. Larry Wall wrote a programming language. Apache built a web server, and so on. Only GNU intended from the start to make an operating system (using contributed components where possible). I can't imagine that anybody thought the world was crying out for a new, improved version of ls, or cat, but these had to be written in order to have a complete free operating system, so the GNU Project wrote them.
I use the GNU operating system, and would do so quite happily with a different kernel/webserver/whatever. What's most important to me is that I'm using free software, so the name I use for my system should reflect that. If you value your freedom, you should do likewise.
I'm probably more "extreme" than RMS, in that I think that the term "GNU/Linux" is over-specific for most instances. It's like saying that someone uses "Microsoft Windows 2000" in a situation where just "Windows" will do. There are times when it's significant whether you're using Linux or the HURD as your kernel, or for that matter GNOME or KDE as your desktop environment, but you don't need to specify these details all the time. There's probably an argument to be made that the term GNU/Linux helps people unfamiliar with the issues associate the operating system that is commonly called "Linux" with the free software philosophy, but to me that's a side issue.
If you care about your freedom, I urge you to use the GNU operating system, and use the appropriate name. If, on the other hand you use free software, including parts of the GNU system, for purely pragmatic ("Open Source") reasons, possibly in conjunction with proprietary software, then fine, call it what you like.
I agree with you totally, but it's not even a matter of how much of the system (number of packages, bytes, whatever) is the product of the GNU project. Rather, of the contributors to your favourite Linux distro, who did their work with the intention of building a free operating system?
The Apache project set out to write a webserver, Larry Wall set out to write the "swiss army chainsaw" of programming languages, even Linus "only" intended to write a Unix kernel for the i386 architecture in the tradition of Minix. Only the GNU Project made it their task to build a complete operating system (using contributed components where possible of course, for obvious practical reasons).
Moreover, I use Linux because it's part of the GNU system; because it's free software. I would probably still be using Windows today (or maybe struggling with the HURD) if all we had was something called "Linux", available at no cost, but under a non-free license.
"Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade
the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him."
How? Why?
"The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is."
Because you say so? I think I'll reserve judgement until I hear something more than "He just is, okay!"
This $&%$& demands everything to be labeled in a way which credits him and he does not stop before making completely wrong statements like "its variant".
Aha! So that's what it's all about. I find it surprising that someone working on "the GNU C library" as it's called in these release notes, should take exception to the idea that it's supposed to be a part of the GNU operating system.
Calling the operating system GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd or whatever is not egotism (or not just egotism, anyway). It's an accurate description of what the system is. Look at, for instance, reviews calling openUNIX "Linux without Linux". That just sounds absurd, unless you know that the first "Linux" actually means "GNU".
I find this completely unacceptable and can assure everybody that I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc (which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away.
Slashdot Mirror
Just bookmark your bookmarks file in your bookmarks toolbar, and use Find as You Type to search.
When... you... have... twenty... five... minutes... to... fill... and... no... budget... Daleks... are... very... useful.
Seriously, Daleks are at best dull, at worst ridiculous. It's ludicrous that Terry Nation, a god-awful writer when compared with Who's greats like Robert Holmes (who as a script editor inclined to totally rewrite stories, made "Genesis of the Daleks" the classic it is), received so much acclaim for something that on paper was the standard evil alien out to conquer the universe.
The effectiveness of the Daleks in the 60's was due to the fact that they didn't look like a guy in a suit, and as others have observed, Nation was not responsible for that.
Slashdot using CSS? I don't think any of us will live to see that.
Anyway, who would want to see all the work that Mozilla put into quirks mode go to waste? And the mid-nineties were good to me, so it's nice to see that era permanently comemorated on my favourite website.
(For the record, Slashdot does appear to use CSS in two places: style attributes in the OSDN bar, and in the iFrame elements that ads appear in.)
Yes Apple has historically been unusually aesthetically-focussed for an IT company. But it seems to me that the partial switch to becoming a free software company has allowed them to concentrate more on their core business: cool devices. At the very least their tentative embrace of free software has not cost them anything; and arguably they have better software to run on their award-winning (and staggeringly popular and profitiable) hardware than if they developed a wholly proprietary OS in-house.
Hopefully they will soon see they have nothing to lose by freeing the rest of their proprietary code.
It may be too much to hope that a competitor of Apple's, whose name I dare not breathe in polite company, will abandon their losing battle against software freedom and follow Apple's lead. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I'm just glad I don't have a vested interest in the future of that company, because it may not have one for much longer.
I tried Lindows from a cover disk recently, and was unimpressed.
The much-praised easy installer failed to detect any ISA hardware (tomsrtbt does a better job), useability and eye-candy is no better than any other mainstream distro out there, and it has an outrageous license that makes me think perhaps "mere aggregation" should be prohibited under the GPL. They even have the audacity to say during installation (I'm paraphrasing), "With Lindows you get the benefits of all this great GPL'd software, now sign this EULA."
Bundling this shambles with a couple of real distros sounds like Corel's last-ditch effort to flog Word Perfect by bundling it with Debian.
Forgive me for being hypersensitive, but I was having a conversation with somebody recently about unconscious ideology, and this seems like a perfect example. What you appear to be saying is:
Forgive me if I've misinterpreted, or assigned too much significance to a throwaway remark.
Of course the moral considerations wouldn't arise at all if we, and the people upstream from us, behaved like good netizens and cached sensibly. Unfortunately misguided demands for a more "dynamic" web have rendered caching proxies all but useless.
Obviously I don't know for sure, but I think if you were to look into it, if caching at the ISP level were to come back into fashion, Slashdotting would be a thing of the past. Of course, then advertisers wouldn't know how many "hits" they were getting. So we have to pay for the hardware to cope with the traffic, so that we can attract the advertisers to pay for the hardware. Not to mention all the database-driven sites which are updated once a day or less that would lose crucial immediacy.
Am I the only one to see an opportunity here? Reducing taxes on alcohol, while raising taxes on petrol would solve the problem of drink driving, while promoting the use of environmentally friendly mass transportation.
Yes, I suppose there might be a further benefit to those of us who like a drink, but how insignificant is this compared to the future of our planet and the safety of our fellow human beings!
What you say is true for Perl 6 the language, but not perl 6 the interpreter.
My understanding is that the perl 6 interpreter, despite being a ground-up rewrite, will run Perl 5.x scripts perfectly well.
From what I can gather, the perl6 interpreter will consist of a sort of 'meta-interpreter' (Parrot), plus modules that tell it how to interpret a particular language. The interpreter will automatically detect which language (and which variant of the language) you are trying to use. So you could, in principle, use the perl interpreter to run scripts in Perl5, Perl6, Python, Ruby, Basic, whatever.
This is not only cool, but apparently necessary, since the perl6 interpreter uses perl5 regular expressions for parsing scripts. Not only that, but it all allegedly runs faster than ever. This sounds too good to be true of course, so I may have fallen victim to one of Larry Wall's elaborate jokes.
Anyhow, you're right in one sense; that if you want to speak the Perl6 dialect of Perl, you'll need a new book. But if you just want to get the job done as quickly as possible, which is what the cookbook is all about, this edition (and indeed the last, which I won't be trashing any time soon) will be useful for a long time to come.
Meanwhile, Debian will be announcing that it will be charging $5 a pop for advertising in it's installer.
The price difference is only fair; a Mandrake user will see the ads a couple of times a year, while a Debian user will only see the ads once during the lifetime of the machine.
Stay tuned for the announcement when or if the new Debian installer is ready.
If the Department of Defense is in charge of unprovoked attacks on countries that pose no threat, I don't see why the Department of Homeland Security shouldn't be doing everything in it's power to make the U.S. less secure.
From Dario Fo's play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist:
INSPECTOR. Anyway, take a look at your professional card and prescription list. If I'm not mistaken, they read: "Professor Antonio A. Antonio, Psychiatrist. The Former Professor. University of Padova." Go on, what do you have to say now?
SUSPECT. First of all, I really am a professor. Professor of drawing, ornate and free-hand styles, at the Holy Redeemer night school.
INSPECTOR. Well isn't that nice. Good for you, but it says here, "Psychiatrist!"
SUSPECT Yes, but after the period! Don't you know about syntax and punctuation? Look carefully: Professor Antonio A. Antonio. Period. Then there's a capital P Psychiatrist. Now, you'll admit it isn't acting under false pretenses to say: "I am a psychiatrist." It's like saying, "I'm a psychologist, botanist, vegetarian, arthritic " Do you have a knowledge of Italian grammar and language? You do? Well, then you should know that if someone describes himself as an archaeologist, it's as though he had written "Milanese." It doesn't mean he has a degree in it!
INSPECTOR. All right, but what about Former Professor from the University?
SUSPECT. There, you see - excuse me, but this time you're the one who's acting under false pretenses: you told me that you know Italian language and syntax and punctuation, and then it comes out that you don't even read correctly.
INSPECTOR. What do you mean. I don t know -
SUSPECT. Didn't you see the comma after "The Former"?
INSPECTOR. Oh yes, there is a comma. You're right, I hadn't noticed.
SUSPECT. Aha, "I hadn't noticed" . . . And you, simply because you "hadn't noticed," would throw an innocent man in prison?
INSPECTOR. You know, you really are crazy. ( Without realizing it, he has begun to address the SUSPECT in a more respectful tone.) What does the comma have to do with it?
SUSPECT. Nothing, for someone who doesn't know Italian language and syntax! Which reminds me, I'd like to know where you got your degree. And who granted it to you. . . let me finish! The comma, remember, is the key to everything! If there's a comma after "The Former," the entire meaning of the phrase changes at once. After the comma, you have to catch your breath . . . take a brief pause . . . Because "the comma always denotes a pause." Therefore, it should be read, "The Former, Professor," meaning, "the aforesaid, the one already mentioned, NOT the professor." In fact, I haven't been a professor for some time. So that could even be read with a little ironic chuckle: heh, heh. So the correct reading of that phrase is as follows: The Former, Professor, heh, heh. Pause. From the University of Padova. Just the same as if you read "retired dentist, from the city of Bergamo." Because I am from the University of Padova, in the sense that it was the last place I visited: I had just recently come from there when I, ah, took up my psychiatric practice. Any other reading of the phrase would be entirely false and misleading; only an idiot would make such an error.
INSPECTOR. So, you think I m an idiot!
SUSPECT. No, just ignorant of basic Italian grammar. But it's lucky for you you've come to the right person for help. I'll even offer a discount.
Much as I like the idea of a PDA running a free kernel, it's not much use to me unless the rest of the software is free, or I can run my own software on it. What's the free/non-free status of the bundled software? And can I easily install my favourite free software, XFree86, etc.?
This particular incident may not have been so worrying, but it does seems that Washington's attitude towards security is rather similar to the attitude in Redmond.
For Microsoft, "security" means "DRM". For the US government "security" means "oil". In both cases genuine security holes go unchecked, and in the latter case, resources go towards arresting thousands without charges, barring people like Irish civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and Eugene Angelopoulos, a Professor at the National Technical University of Athens from entering the country, and desperately trying to find a convincing link between Saddam Hussein and September 11.
Ironically, the more "security" you sign up for, the less safe you are.
Powell's address is reviewed by veteran British middle-east correspondant Robert Fisk here.
Which terrorists? What nukes?
The last terrorist activity where there is any evidence of Iraqi involvement was the attempted assasination of George Bush senior about a decade ago.
And nukes aren't like chemical weapons. It's pretty hard to hide a nuclear reactor.
Then why not bomb the Russians? Al Qaeda has a better chance of sourcing nukes from there. At least we know Russia has the weapons.
Saddam Hussain has been brutally crushing militant Islamic movements for thirty years. Osama bin Laden (remember him?) despises him. In the tape released last November, bin Laden was careful to speak only of "the sons of Iraq" so as not to imply any support for Saddam, a secular leader (his party was co-founded by a christian) who until 1991 marched to Washington's orders.
If al Quaeda possesed nuclear weapons, Saddam would have no reason to feel sure that they wouldn't be used against him. Furthermore, if any rogue nuke was detonated anywhere in the world by anybody at the moment, it is more than likely that the US would nuke Iraq immediately.
Speaking of bin Laden, wasn't he supposed to be the most wicked and dangerous man on earth? What changed? Could it be that the threat posed to the security of the US is oddly proportionate to the amount of oil the US stands to gain by pre-emtively striking against the threat?
Not just Nav3. I used to be able to crash Nav4 with style sheets. Perfectly valid CSS1. Well, to be fair, that's W3C CSS, not Netscape CSS or MS CSS.
Of course now that we have a number of browsers that implement the standard 99% correctly, crashing a deliberately broken browser designed to sabotage it's competitors and the standards process is a feature, not a bug.
It had to happen eventually. Journalists' errors are finally like banner ads to me! At least now I'll be able to read an article that says something like "Linux, the freeware alternative to Microsoft Windows created by Linus Torvalds in 1991..." without blowing a gasket.
I think you're making some unwarrented assumptions here. Why should a free implementation of SMB upset RMS? It's better than a non-free implementation of SMB. If you're in a position where you can control what you're running on your organisation's file servers, but you can't control what's on the desktop, using Samba is currently the only ethical course of action available to you.
What might even be better, or at least ethically equivalent and practically easier, is to have a free software implementation of NFS for non-free platforms like Windows (I'm not aware of any), as you don't have to reverse engineer, and re-reverse engineer every couple of years, a secret, proprietary standard to make it work. And it means that some proprietary networking software on the client machines has been replaced by free software.
The article is actually quite good (the AFR is the only Australian paper worth reading). It uses the term "free software" several times and doesn't even mention that "open source" fad from a couple of years ago. Whatever happened to that, BTW?
I don't get this argument at all. The first distro I ever used was Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm), and it was no harder than my first DOS/Win3.1 install. This was with no CS degree, no Unix or GNU experience whatsoever. I read a couple of articles and a HOWTO or two.
What is so hard about pecking at the enter key for half an hour? Granted there are a few tricky questions for newbies, but by and large they are questions you are going to have to answer to get Windows working as well. Ask a Windows user what the IP address and netmask is on their ethernet interface. If they can answer that kind of question, they can install Debian. If they can't, they can't install ANY OS (assuming they want TCP/IP to work).
The big problem with Debian versus other distros is hardware autodetection. Even this is getting better. For my last install I installed the potato (2.2) base system, then dist-upgraded to woody (2.3). The rest of the packages installed (presumably) as they would when woody is finally stable (soon, honestly!).
I had a three-button wheel mouse which I just assumed I wouldn't be using as such. Much to my surprise, after installing X (painlessly), I absently twiddled the mouse wheel, and found Konqueror scrolling up and down. IIRC, I was not asked a single question about the kind of mouse I had during the install. Very cool.
There is another reason why people should choose Debian over this and many other distros. Lycoris evidently doesn't make any distinction between free and non-free software. Adobe Acrobat as default PDF viewer indeed! If you are a newbie who wants a system that works as much like Windows as possible, and don't have any objection to running proprietary software, why don't you just run Windows?
As somebody else said there's http://www.gnusoftware.com. Also, in the last few weeks, I've been putting together a CD of free (as in speech) software for Windows for a volunteer project I'm involved in. You can see the contents list here.
It's be good to get a proper project together to package this sort of thing well. It's a useful fundraiser for local projects, as well as introducing Windows users to free software, and easing them into migrating to a free OS. My introduction to free software was through Perl for Win32 - as ActiveState's port was known back then. I read the GPL, thought "Wow!", and never looked back. BTW, avoid ActivePerl; the "ActiveState Community License," or whatever it's called sucks.
Eureka! I've always wondered why people got so peeved by RMS's GNU/something request. It seems to be a simple misunderstanding.
RMS has never wanted to change the name of Linux. In fact he is quite clear on this point. The kernel is Toorvald's project, and we should use the name he chose for it. However, when speaking of the complete, free operating system we all use and love, we've should choose a name that's appropriate for the system as a whole.
Now before you start making jokes about using GNU/Linux/Perl/Apache/X/KDE/Mozilla, you've got to consider which of these projects set out to make an operating system. Linus intended to make a Unix kernel for the i386 architecture, in the tradition of Minix. Larry Wall wrote a programming language. Apache built a web server, and so on. Only GNU intended from the start to make an operating system (using contributed components where possible). I can't imagine that anybody thought the world was crying out for a new, improved version of ls, or cat, but these had to be written in order to have a complete free operating system, so the GNU Project wrote them.
I use the GNU operating system, and would do so quite happily with a different kernel/webserver/whatever. What's most important to me is that I'm using free software, so the name I use for my system should reflect that. If you value your freedom, you should do likewise.
I'm probably more "extreme" than RMS, in that I think that the term "GNU/Linux" is over-specific for most instances. It's like saying that someone uses "Microsoft Windows 2000" in a situation where just "Windows" will do. There are times when it's significant whether you're using Linux or the HURD as your kernel, or for that matter GNOME or KDE as your desktop environment, but you don't need to specify these details all the time. There's probably an argument to be made that the term GNU/Linux helps people unfamiliar with the issues associate the operating system that is commonly called "Linux" with the free software philosophy, but to me that's a side issue.
If you care about your freedom, I urge you to use the GNU operating system, and use the appropriate name. If, on the other hand you use free software, including parts of the GNU system, for purely pragmatic ("Open Source") reasons, possibly in conjunction with proprietary software, then fine, call it what you like.
I agree with you totally, but it's not even a matter of how much of the system (number of packages, bytes, whatever) is the product of the GNU project. Rather, of the contributors to your favourite Linux distro, who did their work with the intention of building a free operating system?
The Apache project set out to write a webserver, Larry Wall set out to write the "swiss army chainsaw" of programming languages, even Linus "only" intended to write a Unix kernel for the i386 architecture in the tradition of Minix. Only the GNU Project made it their task to build a complete operating system (using contributed components where possible of course, for obvious practical reasons).
Moreover, I use Linux because it's part of the GNU system; because it's free software. I would probably still be using Windows today (or maybe struggling with the HURD) if all we had was something called "Linux", available at no cost, but under a non-free license.
How? Why?
Because you say so? I think I'll reserve judgement until I hear something more than "He just is, okay!"
Aha! So that's what it's all about. I find it surprising that someone working on "the GNU C library" as it's called in these release notes, should take exception to the idea that it's supposed to be a part of the GNU operating system.
Calling the operating system GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd or whatever is not egotism (or not just egotism, anyway). It's an accurate description of what the system is. Look at, for instance, reviews calling openUNIX "Linux without Linux". That just sounds absurd, unless you know that the first "Linux" actually means "GNU".
Does not play well with others. End of story.
Don't you mean value-subtracted?