> Experts from the Society of Biblical Literature?? Wtf?? What the hell > have they got to do with a computer data formatting standard??
Oh I dunno. ODF had as design goals support for longterm document storage and seamless internationalization support. I suspect the Society of Biblical Literature has an interest in both. Unless you are so ignorant that you believe Moses and Jesus spoke the English of King James that is. You probably wouldn't believe just how many languages and scripts the original texts are written in. If ODF can deal with all of those it shouldn't have a problem with any of the modern encodings.
And if you know of anyone with older documents, and likely to still be using them a thousand years hence, speak up.
Haven't done it many times but I use the GPL. Reasoning thus:
Look Mr Client, I ain't writing a work for hire, at least not unless you add a zero to the check. Because I'll be cutting and pasting code in from my own stash and from other Free/Open code under normal conditions and I priced this job on the basis that I'd be doing likewise with the new code written for this project on the next one, and it is a lot simpler to use one uniform license. Now, the benefit to YOU is that I'm giving you the source code. This means that WHEN it needs modifications you can get anyone to fix it. Sure I will understand it best and I hope to get that future work but I might move or get hit by a bus. You can mark the boundaries around what you consider your 'business logic' that gives you an advantage and I'll agree not to disclose that part, although I will still mine it for code fragments. Since you got it under the GPL though, YOU are still be free to do as you please with it, even resell it so long as it is under the terms of the GPL.
The only grey area is that by a strict reading of the GPL I can't waive my right to redistribute the modified work if it incorporates GPL code from other projects, but since I do pass full GPL rights to the customer I don't think my reasoning would fail even a FSF zealot's test.
> Who said you can't? Remember, the first sale and fair use doctrines merely say that the > copyright holder lacks authority over copies and works under certain circumstances on the > grounds of copyright. They don't bar the establishment of independent authority over copies > by means of contracts. And if someone agrees not to engage in a fair use, why would a court > let them get out of it?
It is part of the deal made between the State and the copyright holder. The State grants an artificial monopoly in return for certain considerations from the creator of the work. Fair Use use is one of them. Similarly a Patent is granted on the condition that it be fully disclosed, so that even before it expires others are able to build on the invention.
If you don't believe me, look to the Blockbbuster vs damn near every video game maker court battle. The EULA clause against rental was held to be unenforcable and consider that Blockbuster wasn't buying off the rack at Walmart so a 'real contract' would have been in force as part of the bulk purchasing they would be doing. Except under very limited conditions a contract can't waive a fundamental right. Especially when dealing with a monopolist. All copyright and patent holders are by definition monopolists, holding officially granted monopolies by the State.
> Tempting as it is, no one is suggesting actual violence
Speak for yourself, because I certainly am. As in violently removing their freedoms and placing them in "pound me in the ass" Federal Prisions for years at a time. And if that doesn't work I'm all for public flogging, caning, etc. These people must be stopped. Period.
> Sometimes, violence simply ends violence, because there is no other way.
Exactly, violence SOLVES things. We might not always like the solution, we might not approve of the means. But violence does work. Sometimes you have to tell the hippies to STFU and "Give War a chance." If spammers were in actual FEAR of our wrath most would find a safer line of work.
It might be messy, it certainly WOULD be illegal, but if the major network operators took 1% of the billions they spend fighting spam and oversizing their networks to transport it and hired ninjas to take out the spammers it would cease to be a problem overnight.
> When will the world learn, violence begets violence
What a load of hippie crap. Next thing you will probably move on to even more idiotic bumpersticker philosophy like "violence never solved anything."
Learn the difference between initiating force and resisting it. One is perfectly moral and one isn't. Resisting violence often reduces future violence instead of 'begating violence.' Since you lack clue I'll state the obvious, the violent only attack those who they believe to be weaker. (unless they are truly insane, then all bets are off)
Spammers are attacking our systems hourly with impunity. We build our defenses higher and higher yet they continue to attack. Because they know we will sit there and take it as they learn to penetrate each new defense. Failing to resist their violence is only begating more violence.
They don't believe we can hurt them in return so they prey upon us with impunity. These parasites cost the world millions for every thousand dollars they scam off some idiot who falls for their 'herbal viagra' scams. Governments can't stop these people. ISPs won't do it, preferring to sign 'pink contracts' instead. Hosting companies won't turn away the money. That leaves US to evolve some sort of collective defense. Ultimately self defense is our own responsibility anyway. The police just pick up the body parts and attempt to arrest the killer, if you don't want to get killed in the first place that is your responsibility. Same with spam.
Personally I think the solution is something like the Usenet Death Penalty. A collective decision to simply disconnect users, networks, ISPs and even whole nation states who refuse to curb their network abuse. A distributed list loaded into the routers of who is currently failing to police their system and simply refuse all traffic for a few weeks as a punishment. The Internet is a peer to peer network, but there is no inferent 'Right' to connect to any system and no duty to allow connection from anyone.
Really. At this point, who cares? If they did it at this late date it would speed up the process by a year or so at the cost of keeping Sun in the driver's seat. If they don't open their implementation GCJ will catch in a year or so and it will quickly become the reference implementation that everyone will track in server environments.
Why do I say that? Because it is the one all non-Sun/Microsoft server environments (meaning Linux & *BSD) will be shipping. RedHat is already there. If you want a different Java you have to deal with the implications of having it co-exist with GCJ. Although they do use alternatives to make that managable, they ship the IBM JDK on their extras CD, not Sun's and the Sun packages almost certainly (haven't bothered to check a recent vintage) don't deal with that, their 'rpms' are brain damaged tarballs wrapped in a thin rpm wrapper.
So it no longer matters what Sun does. Five years ago they could have turned around the fortunes of Java when it was under serious threats. Ten years ago OPening Java would have meant we wouldn't be dealing with.NET today. But that is history that could have been and wasn't, now Sun needs to just continue to quietly fade away.
Pretty much. Have some Xeon servers here and they are nice, but I love the price/performance of AMD. But if Intel can offer Open Source 3D and AMD can't...... Right now all Intel has is some very low end shared memory rubbish, but it keeps improving and the Radeon 9250 gets older and older. The r300 guys could finally hit stability or VIA could finally see reason, but otherwise Intel is going to win back my business.
> The ATI Radeon 1600Pro can be had for $99. The GF6600GT is $115.
Ok, just went looking and see that. So they can't even get the prices right.
> In their conclusion they very clearly pan it for performance.
Read the last line in the article (in the update):
"Though this price may have affected which competing products we chose to benchmark against, we're not going to backpedal on our score, which is primarily the result of bugs and feature deficiencies."
Would you care to revise and extend your remarks?
> They appear to have as much hardware as the competition. In fact, more than the competition > does in the same price range.
Yes, improbably fast. Assuming it is actually as complex as the competing stuff that is. But the benchmarks clearly shows it isn't clock for clock as fast but that higher clock rates are saving it, at least on some of the benchmarks. But if they can perfect their idea of throwing a lot of fast and obviously cheap (based on the pricing) hardware at the problem they might have something viable.
> Better hope that 9250 doesn't die then, because that's not happening anytime soon. Go > read one of my other posts in this article if you'd care to know why.
But the 9250 WILL be dying soon, at any rate it will die as AGP becomes obsolete. We need a replacement in the catagory of 3D hardware with Open drivers. Via (S3) seems to have a love/hate thing with the Linux crowd, knowing they need us to buy their EPIAs but reluctant to go whole hog, always doing something half assed.
Which at least gives hope of an eventual breakthrough, where with ATI & Nvidia there is no such hope. The 'powers that be' (RedHat, SUSE and the GNOMES) in the Open Source camp are hellbent on ramming a 3D desktop down our throats, oblivious to the reality that there is currently little available hardware to run it on.
First they compare a $115 card to cards costing $125 and $129. Then the price drops to $99 and they 'stand by their review' against those more capable boards because they didn't pan it for performance, but for basic flaws? Uh huh. That would be because SLI mode doesn't work? What sort of idiot would buy a $99 card for SLI work? Ok, AA doesn't appear to work for GL, that is bad but will almost certainly get fixed in the drivers pretty soon.
It looks like S3 is trying something interesting, throw high speed but dumb hardware at the problem of 3D instead of trying to put more compute power than a P4 on a board. But they are going to discover that the drivers are a big part of the equation, it was clear that their drivers probably what was holding their scores down on several of the tests. Since they obviously don't have a lot invested in them yet perhaps they are the ones we should be pushing to support open source. Despite what that PR moron at Nvidia said I suspect the Open Source crowd could whip those drivers into shape in short order, Use the right license (MPL or BSD) and they could roll those improvements back to Windows and carry the fight to ATI and Nvidia.
I know I'd certainly switch from ATI Radeon 9250 (most current 3D with Open drivers) to this new S3 tech if it had an open driver.
> Isn't that what Solaris was, prior to them shitcanning CDE in favor of Gnome?
Mostly. Of course it was a piece of designed by corporate committee closed source crap, but other than that it was ok...... for the early 1990's. Big hunks are closed still although Motif was opened once it was too old to be relevent. Had they opened it in say 1995 it could have been a contender, since it would have been allowed to evolve.
Openstep is a potential contender but a real dark horse right now.
> Last time I looked Windows had file permissions as well, in the form of ACLs.
True enough, but only admins appear to be supposed to use them. In theory Windows users could get just as much use out of them as us UNIX folk but their customs and usages don't encompass anything related to security. And neither does GNOME. Look at.desktop files. They are executable (by nautilus and friends) yet lack both the #! that other 'script like' files of it's sort would normally have AND can invoke executable content without having the x bit. When called on it their reaction is a big yawn, file bits are so old UNIX we can't be bothered with that. On many GNOME versions you can't even see what is IN a.desktop file without invoking a shell. They are allowed to present their choice of icon AND caption text without any sanity checks.
> so fucking what if it looks like Windows or MacOS, funnily enough the vast majority > of people who use computers use Windows or Macs and a familiar interface
The look too often implies the underlying broken assumptions from those broken systems. Ideas that underpin the mindset that graphical is always good, the UNIX toolset is deprecated legacy baggage and that if a command line is needed for ANYTHING it is a flaw. What part of "if I was the sort of IDIOT who wanted a TV like click n drool interface I'd buy a fucking Mac" do you fail to grasp? I like the more literate UNIX interface and would like to see that intelligently extended to a graphical interface where it makes sense.
> I do think that adding the ability to set permissions on a file would be a welcome > addition to the GTK 2.6+ dialog box.
I'm afraid the first questions a GNOME developer would ask is "Does Windows have that? Does Apple do that? Would idiots know what it is useful for?" Then you would be laughed at and the proposal ignored. File permissions are a 'legacy UNIX' thing and have no place in a 'modern graphical environment'. Which is why I'd dearly love to see some UNIX folk get together and rethink a desktop for UNIX instead of our current fashion of imitation Mac/Windows.
It was clear Applix was designed as a UNIX app. It encouraged a 'toolkit' approach, even allowing bash scripts to populate spreadsheet cells. It has its odd bits but I have to give it props for being the closest thing to a true UNIX graphical 'office suite' written to date. My previous laptop had a copy installed but this one doesn't, too much trouble installing ancient compat libs. But my boss still has a copy on hers to access the documents created with it.
(And no, STFU you KDE fanboi waiting to pounce into the conversation because KDE is just as bad only different. GNOME wants to clone the guts of Windows with a braindamaged Mac like face while KDE wants the Windows look and whatever plumbing TrollTech delivers.)
> For example, apply it to a bridge, or an airplane, or a vital component in an airplane. > You don't really get to roll out Eads Bridge 1.1.6. And if an airplane has a fatal flaw, > it can actually be fatal.
And your point is? In case you didn't know airplanes DO have fatal problems. It is fairly common for updates to be issued when a crash report reveals a defect in the original design caused a loss. Bridges have failed from faulty designs. Sure they actually try a lot harder and there real liability unlike software but they are still humans and they make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes and build it better the next time, this is how progress happens.
> Is it any more "legal" to install Quicktime on Crossover than to just take the codec and plug it > into mplayer?
I'll leave that argument to Apple & Codeweavers and their lawyers since Crossover featured a one click download & install for Quicktime and several other helpful things, including IE. It would be hard for US to end up paying a settlement, which is all I cared about.
> Did your machines have OEM Windows or did you avoid the MS tax?
Oh yea, we had a build party. Not only do you avoid the Microsoft Tax you avoid the Dell crap hardware by rolling your own. Plus, had we bought full PCs we would have been forced to bid them out and either take whatever crap we got or spend weeks gaming the bid system to write a bid that could only give us exactly what we had picked out. Instead we bought parts from Newegg.com and other such deep discounters in batches, fairly low spec but SOLID hardware that I knew would work with Linux. Radeon 9250 video cards, AMD64 processors, VIA chipset motherboard, decent power supplies, etc. And it all does work and we have only had a couple power supplies (meaning I should have bought one more notch up the food chain) and hard drives (that is what RAID and storing all user files on a server are for) crap out so far. So we got better systems and saved the taxpayers a few thousand dollars.
> Making a public site for refugees that only works on one OS and Browser. That's should be criminal.
Well the flames they got over it has caused them to finally correct their site. But that is just one down and thousands to go, all too many of them government agencies that have idiot MCSE types designing web portals. The point is that we have to be able to provide a solution that allows patrons to get to IE only sites. It just isn't something that we can compromise on. So a 100% Free Software stack isn't possible. And once you admit that you can go for what you can actually do. Linux on the desktop can work if you are willing to drop in several closed parts. But things are getting better, it was only a couple of years ago that Office was just as much a 'must have' item.
It is a total bitch. Realplayer helps a little, the Crossover plugin gets us a few others, including Quicktime. Since Fraunhaufer doesn't seem to be chasing decoders I took a chance and deployed a version of xmms with mp3 support enabled.
The problem is most of the interesting (to the kids in the labs anyway) content isn't in html, it is in flash, windows media and such. You either find ways to deal with a fair percentage of it or the calls to install Windows will grow out of control. We do offer patrons NFS mounted homedirectories and they really like that, which helps. I can explain that we could never afford the CALs to offer that sort of thing, plus many remember the horror of the lab we had for a while that the Gates Foundation setup. So locked down they can't even set a cookie, no floppy/cd/hdd access at all, etc. (And they still have the 'GLF model' in the neighboring parishes, one exposure and people stop complaining about a random java glitch/etc in our lab.) While everything might not work perfectly in ours, we have unlocked systems with Crossover Office installed so they can actually get a lot of stuff working. They idea that they can download and run programs is shocking to people who move into the area and see it for the first time.
> Personally, I've wondered when I'd be able to use a both free and legal DVD player in the US.
Exactly. While all the FSF absolutists will flame away I say it is about darned time. Of course I wouldn't switch distros JUST for the DVD player or any of the other closed bits, but if I could buy em and run them on my preferred distro I'd get a P.O. to em.
You see, it is only by being willing to compromise (the minimum I can get away with) on the Free principles have I been able to deploy a linux based desktop into a public library setting. Just one example, we use Crossover Office to get IE running. IE isn't negotiable, the only question is Crossover, VMWare or which other method I was going to use to get it running. Too many sites just don't work any other way. For example, assume I'd brazened my way past all the other objections and deployed without IE. Last year wne the Katrina refugees flooded in and discovered they couldn't file an application with FEMA from our labs I'd have been tasked with getting XP installed on am post haste. Especially when Rita hit us directly, making it OUR patrons that we wouln't have been able to help get disaster assistance.
We don't have much of a need to play video DVDs thankfully, but it doesn't go down all that well when I explain that it would be illegal to do it. People just can't believe it and I really don't have the time to explain the complicated legal probems involved. At home I use libdecss and say "screw em if they don't like it." Hell, I have even mentioned it in protest letters to elected officials. But I won't deploy it at work, the legal liability is just too great. This isn't a problem Free Software can solve. We already HAVE the code but there isn't any path to lagalizing it. Same for Windows Media, Real, etc.
> I used to get mod points almost once a week, then I started exerting my Republican
> viewpoint on Slashdot and I havent seen mod points in over a year and a half.
Yes conservative posts will usually get modded into oblivion, but that isn't the editors being bitchy, that is the users. Keep that karma up by posting ontopic posts that add to the conversation in the non political threads and you can absorb the hits when you speak out against the slashdot hivemind on the political threads.
Go look through my posting history if you want to see proof that it is possible to keep good karma and still do unthinkable things like
defend Dibold and insult 90% of slashdot readers. (You might need to be a subscriber to go back that far though.)
> After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down > to -1), I haven't seen them since.
You had to do more than just bitch about one of the/. admins dude. I'm a conservative leaning libertarian and post often in the 'daily hate bushitler' threads just to stir the pot a bit. I tend to refer to the admins as socialist kids who had their minds damaged by their higher education, and even less flattering terms. When I really get on a tear (meaning I speak too many unspeakable truths in one post) I get modded straight into oblivion by the slashdot hivemind's defensive reflexes. But I still get mod points regularly, even have one leftover mod point at the moment that I really should find a good use for before it expires.
The trick is to make enough posts that are ontopic and add to the conversation that an occasional rant modded to -1 won't ruin your karma.
> That's pretty much what the judge said, from what I can tell.
Yea, but he took a heck of a lot more time and words to say essentially what I said in less than a screen of text, which is my point. Courts need to start ending cases in minutes instead of months.
> Enforcing the laws of a foreign nation should be impeachable as treason. Never mind "speech" issues. > What about "survival"
Dude, you are a fucking idiot. We enforce foreign laws for the same reason they usually enforce ours, because otherwise the world would come to a big crashing stop. 90% of the time there isn't a problem because there isn't all that much difference between the basic laws governing Western Civilization and thankfully most cases that hit a US court involve another Western country. Murder is basically murder in any of them, fraud is fraud. Where things get tricky is the cases where the laws differ but that is why we have judges.
And now, just to be more ontopic, I'll say this case isn't going very far. Personally I'd settle it in ten minutes with a few pointed questions.
1. Mr. French lawyer, you assert the images shouldn't be protected as speech because they con't 'communicate.' Assuming I can swallow that, on what grounds to I disallow the site then, since they don't communicate they can't harm you, seeing as they can't communicate anything to your competitors.
2. Or we have the position of the website, that they are reporting on fashion trends, something that 'communicates' information, certainly looks like journalism and is therefore protected by the 1st. We kill millions of trees annually with print publications devoted to the subject of fashion so it certainly doesn't sound like they are doing anything new except publishing online. So Mr. French lawyer, care to poke holes in that logic?
Or perhaps you have a new and improved argument you would like to try? Didn't think so, case dismissed.
Not only would more nuke plants cut burning coal, the goal of the article's author, if we were aggressive enough in building plants we just might be able to generate enough energy cleaply enough to consider using some of it to get a hydrogen enonomy going. That breaks our dependency on oil imported from nations that range from neutral, at the most optimistic reading, to violently hostile to our very survival.
No guys, biodeisel isn't the answer. Solar isn't the answer. Wind power is promising but it isn't the answer. As the article points out hydro is already maxxed out. Until fusion becomes viable our only sources of energy are fossil fuels, with their polution and political instability or the big N. I vote for building em as fast as we can safely bring em online.
> I'd never run that command. I'd 'cd' to the level above and then use 'rm -rf dirname'.
Just because you have never needed to erase the contents of a directory while leaving the dir itself is no reason to assume nobody ever needs to do it.
Consider the case of building RPM packages. After you are done you routinely clean out the stuff in the SPECS, SOURCES and BUILD directories but you need to leave the top levels intact.
Yes you would probably delete them all with one command from the common ~/rpmbuild directory but it serves as the trivial example to call your overly broad statement into question.
> I find it fascinating that you conflate "pollute less" with "destroy Western Civilisation.
Have you looked into just what we would have to do here in the US to comply with Kyoto, being that we seem to be expected to account for most of the reduction in CO2 while 'the developing world' is permitted to merrily belch the stuff out? Yes, it would pretty much end our modern energy dependent civilization. Which just happens to be what the usual suspects have been arguing for in various guises since the 1960s at least. So many scares, every one fallen into history.
First we were going to all die from overpopulation. Then all of the developed world went into negative population growth and China took a hankering for infanticide. Oh well, try again.
Polution is going to kill us all, make the survivors into three headed freaks! Ok, there were some real dangers this time so we took steps. Now we have cleaner water than we have had in a century, more trees than when the first Europeans showed up, etc. But we didn't have to tear it all down and 'return to a more agrarian existance' as so many of the Gaian eco freaks were preaching.
Global cooling is coming! Run! Hide! The glaciers will be here any year now.... unless we act swiftly and decisively to dismantle all this industrial civilization. Oops, they ain't going for it, so how about GLOBAL WARMING!
Is Chicken Little right? As time has passed they have become so good at manipulating the media, the science establishment, etc. it is hard to say. Which is the whole point of the article, science has become so political it isn't useful anymore.
> Tell me, do you also conflate "pay workers enough to survive on" with "socialism?"
Only when a third party thinks they are all wise enough to make that decision for both parties. The invisible hand of the marketplace is the ONLY force with the knowledge to set prices. If the workers really can't survive on the wages offered they will move to a different line of work, migrate somewhere that is paying more or their lifestyle will adapt to the changed economic reality. There are NO other options.
Government intervention only creates the illusion of wealth for a privledged few in political favor, in reality it only moves it around while losing most of it as system losses. Yes you can mandate higher wages for Widgetco. Yes you can even forbid them from laying off workers to make up the gap and working the remaining few harder. Which makes the lives of those workers better than they were before. But at what cost? At a cost to the customers of Widgetco and the shareholders of Widgetco and longterm to the viability of Widgetco to compete in the marketplace. Unless you do the same to their competitors they will soon close up. Assuming you do you run the risk of their customers simply importing. And forget the investors sinking money into captical improvements. (See the US auto industry for all of these lessons played out in the real world.)
> Whether or not you 'believe' global warming is happening or is a problem, it's clear that > something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and > warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Agreed. But for all too many psuedoscientists the question is already settled, Global Warming is happening, humans are causing it and if we don't adopt Kyoto (and thereby destroy Western Civilization, which just happens to be another stated goal of most of the Green lobby, total coincidence of course) we will all DIE HORRIBLY!!!!
Since the psuedo intellectuals and Green political hacks are running most of the government and university sources of research funding it isn't possible to do real science on the issue. Something we desperately need.
Look, Global Warming might be real. Who cares if we caused it or we are entering a period of natural warming. If it can be proven that it is really happening we need to be looking at ways to negate the more nasty effects. But once we discard the Gaian Religion and the Green Politics we can look at more politically possible solutions than dismantling our Civilization. If the problem is too much energy input we could simply take steps to lower the solar input to the Earth. Fly a few square miles of mylar in low orbit for example. It would probably only take shading a fraction of a percent of the surface to balance the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
> Experts from the Society of Biblical Literature?? Wtf?? What the hell
> have they got to do with a computer data formatting standard??
Oh I dunno. ODF had as design goals support for longterm document storage and seamless internationalization support. I suspect the Society of Biblical Literature has an interest in both. Unless you are so ignorant that you believe Moses and Jesus spoke the English of King James that is. You probably wouldn't believe just how many languages and scripts the original texts are written in. If ODF can deal with all of those it shouldn't have a problem with any of the modern encodings.
And if you know of anyone with older documents, and likely to still be using them a thousand years hence, speak up.
Haven't done it many times but I use the GPL. Reasoning thus:
Look Mr Client, I ain't writing a work for hire, at least not unless you add a zero to the check. Because I'll be cutting and pasting code in from my own stash and from other Free/Open code under normal conditions and I priced this job on the basis that I'd be doing likewise with the new code written for this project on the next one, and it is a lot simpler to use one uniform license. Now, the benefit to YOU is that I'm giving you the source code. This means that WHEN it needs modifications you can get anyone to fix it. Sure I will understand it best and I hope to get that future work but I might move or get hit by a bus. You can mark the boundaries around what you consider your 'business logic' that gives you an advantage and I'll agree not to disclose that part, although I will still mine it for code fragments. Since you got it under the GPL though, YOU are still be free to do as you please with it, even resell it so long as it is under the terms of the GPL.
The only grey area is that by a strict reading of the GPL I can't waive my right to redistribute the modified work if it incorporates GPL code from other projects, but since I do pass full GPL rights to the customer I don't think my reasoning would fail even a FSF zealot's test.
> Who said you can't? Remember, the first sale and fair use doctrines merely say that the
> copyright holder lacks authority over copies and works under certain circumstances on the
> grounds of copyright. They don't bar the establishment of independent authority over copies
> by means of contracts. And if someone agrees not to engage in a fair use, why would a court
> let them get out of it?
It is part of the deal made between the State and the copyright holder. The State grants an artificial monopoly in return for certain considerations from the creator of the work. Fair Use use is one of them. Similarly a Patent is granted on the condition that it be fully disclosed, so that even before it expires others are able to build on the invention.
If you don't believe me, look to the Blockbbuster vs damn near every video game maker court battle. The EULA clause against rental was held to be unenforcable and consider that Blockbuster wasn't buying off the rack at Walmart so a 'real contract' would have been in force as part of the bulk purchasing they would be doing. Except under very limited conditions a contract can't waive a fundamental right. Especially when dealing with a monopolist. All copyright and patent holders are by definition monopolists, holding officially granted monopolies by the State.
> Tempting as it is, no one is suggesting actual violence
Speak for yourself, because I certainly am. As in violently removing their freedoms and placing them in "pound me in the ass" Federal Prisions for years at a time. And if that doesn't work I'm all for public flogging, caning, etc. These people must be stopped. Period.
> Sometimes, violence simply ends violence, because there is no other way.
Exactly, violence SOLVES things. We might not always like the solution, we might not approve of the means. But violence does work. Sometimes you have to tell the hippies to STFU and "Give War a chance." If spammers were in actual FEAR of our wrath most would find a safer line of work.
It might be messy, it certainly WOULD be illegal, but if the major network operators took 1% of the billions they spend fighting spam and oversizing their networks to transport it and hired ninjas to take out the spammers it would cease to be a problem overnight.
> When will the world learn, violence begets violence
What a load of hippie crap. Next thing you will probably move on to even more idiotic bumpersticker philosophy like "violence never solved anything."
Learn the difference between initiating force and resisting it. One is perfectly moral and one isn't. Resisting violence often reduces future violence instead of 'begating violence.' Since you lack clue I'll state the obvious, the violent only attack those who they believe to be weaker. (unless they are truly insane, then all bets are off)
Spammers are attacking our systems hourly with impunity. We build our defenses higher and higher yet they continue to attack. Because they know we will sit there and take it as they learn to penetrate each new defense. Failing to resist their violence is only begating more violence.
They don't believe we can hurt them in return so they prey upon us with impunity. These parasites cost the world millions for every thousand dollars they scam off some idiot who falls for their 'herbal viagra' scams. Governments can't stop these people. ISPs won't do it, preferring to sign 'pink contracts' instead. Hosting companies won't turn away the money. That leaves US to evolve some sort of collective defense. Ultimately self defense is our own responsibility anyway. The police just pick up the body parts and attempt to arrest the killer, if you don't want to get killed in the first place that is your responsibility. Same with spam.
Personally I think the solution is something like the Usenet Death Penalty. A collective decision to simply disconnect users, networks, ISPs and even whole nation states who refuse to curb their network abuse. A distributed list loaded into the routers of who is currently failing to police their system and simply refuse all traffic for a few weeks as a punishment. The Internet is a peer to peer network, but there is no inferent 'Right' to connect to any system and no duty to allow connection from anyone.
Really. At this point, who cares? If they did it at this late date it would speed up the process by a year or so at the cost of keeping Sun in the driver's seat. If they don't open their implementation GCJ will catch in a year or so and it will quickly become the reference implementation that everyone will track in server environments.
.NET today. But that is history that could have been and wasn't, now Sun needs to just continue to quietly fade away.
Why do I say that? Because it is the one all non-Sun/Microsoft server environments (meaning Linux & *BSD) will be shipping. RedHat is already there. If you want a different Java you have to deal with the implications of having it co-exist with GCJ. Although they do use alternatives to make that managable, they ship the IBM JDK on their extras CD, not Sun's and the Sun packages almost certainly (haven't bothered to check a recent vintage) don't deal with that, their 'rpms' are brain damaged tarballs wrapped in a thin rpm wrapper.
So it no longer matters what Sun does. Five years ago they could have turned around the fortunes of Java when it was under serious threats. Ten years ago OPening Java would have meant we wouldn't be dealing with
> I take it you're an AMD guy?
Pretty much. Have some Xeon servers here and they are nice, but I love the price/performance of AMD. But if Intel can offer Open Source 3D and AMD can't...... Right now all Intel has is some very low end shared memory rubbish, but it keeps improving and the Radeon 9250 gets older and older. The r300 guys could finally hit stability or VIA could finally see reason, but otherwise Intel is going to win back my business.
> The ATI Radeon 1600Pro can be had for $99. The GF6600GT is $115.
Ok, just went looking and see that. So they can't even get the prices right.
> In their conclusion they very clearly pan it for performance.
Read the last line in the article (in the update):
"Though this price may have affected which competing products we chose to benchmark against, we're not going to backpedal on our score, which is primarily the result of bugs and feature deficiencies."
Would you care to revise and extend your remarks?
> They appear to have as much hardware as the competition. In fact, more than the competition
> does in the same price range.
Yes, improbably fast. Assuming it is actually as complex as the competing stuff that is. But the benchmarks clearly shows it isn't clock for clock as fast but that higher clock rates are saving it, at least on some of the benchmarks. But if they can perfect their idea of throwing a lot of fast and obviously cheap (based on the pricing) hardware at the problem they might have something viable.
> Better hope that 9250 doesn't die then, because that's not happening anytime soon. Go
> read one of my other posts in this article if you'd care to know why.
But the 9250 WILL be dying soon, at any rate it will die as AGP becomes obsolete. We need a replacement in the catagory of 3D hardware with Open drivers. Via (S3) seems to have a love/hate thing with the Linux crowd, knowing they need us to buy their EPIAs but reluctant to go whole hog, always doing something half assed.
Which at least gives hope of an eventual breakthrough, where with ATI & Nvidia there is no such hope. The 'powers that be' (RedHat, SUSE and the GNOMES) in the Open Source camp are hellbent on ramming a 3D desktop down our throats, oblivious to the reality that there is currently little available hardware to run it on.
First they compare a $115 card to cards costing $125 and $129. Then the price drops to $99 and they 'stand by their review' against those more capable boards because they didn't pan it for performance, but for basic flaws? Uh huh. That would be because SLI mode doesn't work? What sort of idiot would buy a $99 card for SLI work? Ok, AA doesn't appear to work for GL, that is bad but will almost certainly get fixed in the drivers pretty soon.
It looks like S3 is trying something interesting, throw high speed but dumb hardware at the problem of 3D instead of trying to put more compute power than a P4 on a board. But they are going to discover that the drivers are a big part of the equation, it was clear that their drivers probably what was holding their scores down on several of the tests. Since they obviously don't have a lot invested in them yet perhaps they are the ones we should be pushing to support open source. Despite what that PR moron at Nvidia said I suspect the Open Source crowd could whip those drivers into shape in short order, Use the right license (MPL or BSD) and they could roll those improvements back to Windows and carry the fight to ATI and Nvidia.
I know I'd certainly switch from ATI Radeon 9250 (most current 3D with Open drivers) to this new S3 tech if it had an open driver.
> Isn't that what Solaris was, prior to them shitcanning CDE in favor of Gnome?
Mostly. Of course it was a piece of designed by corporate committee closed source crap, but other than that it was ok...... for the early 1990's. Big hunks are closed still although Motif was opened once it was too old to be relevent. Had they opened it in say 1995 it could have been a contender, since it would have been allowed to evolve.
Openstep is a potential contender but a real dark horse right now.
> Last time I looked Windows had file permissions as well, in the form of ACLs.
.desktop files. They are executable (by nautilus and friends) yet lack both the #! that other 'script like' files of it's sort would normally have AND can invoke executable content without having the x bit. When called on it their reaction is a big yawn, file bits are so old UNIX we can't be bothered with that. On many GNOME versions you can't even see what is IN a .desktop file without invoking a shell. They are allowed to present their choice of icon AND caption text without any sanity checks.
True enough, but only admins appear to be supposed to use them. In theory Windows users could get just as much use out of them as us UNIX folk but their customs and usages don't encompass anything related to security. And neither does GNOME. Look at
> so fucking what if it looks like Windows or MacOS, funnily enough the vast majority
> of people who use computers use Windows or Macs and a familiar interface
The look too often implies the underlying broken assumptions from those broken systems. Ideas that underpin the mindset that graphical is always good, the UNIX toolset is deprecated legacy baggage and that if a command line is needed for ANYTHING it is a flaw. What part of "if I was the sort of IDIOT who wanted a TV like click n drool interface I'd buy a fucking Mac" do you fail to grasp? I like the more literate UNIX interface and would like to see that intelligently extended to a graphical interface where it makes sense.
> I do think that adding the ability to set permissions on a file would be a welcome
> addition to the GTK 2.6+ dialog box.
I'm afraid the first questions a GNOME developer would ask is "Does Windows have that? Does Apple do that? Would idiots know what it is useful for?" Then you would be laughed at and the proposal ignored. File permissions are a 'legacy UNIX' thing and have no place in a 'modern graphical environment'. Which is why I'd dearly love to see some UNIX folk get together and rethink a desktop for UNIX instead of our current fashion of imitation Mac/Windows.
It was clear Applix was designed as a UNIX app. It encouraged a 'toolkit' approach, even allowing bash scripts to populate spreadsheet cells. It has its odd bits but I have to give it props for being the closest thing to a true UNIX graphical 'office suite' written to date. My previous laptop had a copy installed but this one doesn't, too much trouble installing ancient compat libs. But my boss still has a copy on hers to access the documents created with it.
(And no, STFU you KDE fanboi waiting to pounce into the conversation because KDE is just as bad only different. GNOME wants to clone the guts of Windows with a braindamaged Mac like face while KDE wants the Windows look and whatever plumbing TrollTech delivers.)
> For example, apply it to a bridge, or an airplane, or a vital component in an airplane.
> You don't really get to roll out Eads Bridge 1.1.6. And if an airplane has a fatal flaw,
> it can actually be fatal.
And your point is? In case you didn't know airplanes DO have fatal problems. It is fairly common for updates to be issued when a crash report reveals a defect in the original design caused a loss. Bridges have failed from faulty designs. Sure they actually try a lot harder and there real liability unlike software but they are still humans and they make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes and build it better the next time, this is how progress happens.
> Is it any more "legal" to install Quicktime on Crossover than to just take the codec and plug it
> into mplayer?
I'll leave that argument to Apple & Codeweavers and their lawyers since Crossover featured a one click download & install for Quicktime and several other helpful things, including IE. It would be hard for US to end up paying a settlement, which is all I cared about.
> Did your machines have OEM Windows or did you avoid the MS tax?
Oh yea, we had a build party. Not only do you avoid the Microsoft Tax you avoid the Dell crap hardware by rolling your own. Plus, had we bought full PCs we would have been forced to bid them out and either take whatever crap we got or spend weeks gaming the bid system to write a bid that could only give us exactly what we had picked out. Instead we bought parts from Newegg.com and other such deep discounters in batches, fairly low spec but SOLID hardware that I knew would work with Linux. Radeon 9250 video cards, AMD64 processors, VIA chipset motherboard, decent power supplies, etc. And it all does work and we have only had a couple power supplies (meaning I should have bought one more notch up the food chain) and hard drives (that is what RAID and storing all user files on a server are for) crap out so far. So we got better systems and saved the taxpayers a few thousand dollars.
> Making a public site for refugees that only works on one OS and Browser. That's should be criminal.
Well the flames they got over it has caused them to finally correct their site. But that is just one down and thousands to go, all too many of them government agencies that have idiot MCSE types designing web portals. The point is that we have to be able to provide a solution that allows patrons to get to IE only sites. It just isn't something that we can compromise on. So a 100% Free Software stack isn't possible. And once you admit that you can go for what you can actually do. Linux on the desktop can work if you are willing to drop in several closed parts. But things are getting better, it was only a couple of years ago that Office was just as much a 'must have' item.
> What do you do about the w32codecs?
It is a total bitch. Realplayer helps a little, the Crossover plugin gets us a few others, including Quicktime. Since Fraunhaufer doesn't seem to be chasing decoders I took a chance and deployed a version of xmms with mp3 support enabled.
The problem is most of the interesting (to the kids in the labs anyway) content isn't in html, it is in flash, windows media and such. You either find ways to deal with a fair percentage of it or the calls to install Windows will grow out of control. We do offer patrons NFS mounted homedirectories and they really like that, which helps. I can explain that we could never afford the CALs to offer that sort of thing, plus many remember the horror of the lab we had for a while that the Gates Foundation setup. So locked down they can't even set a cookie, no floppy/cd/hdd access at all, etc. (And they still have the 'GLF model' in the neighboring parishes, one exposure and people stop complaining about a random java glitch/etc in our lab.) While everything might not work perfectly in ours, we have unlocked systems with Crossover Office installed so they can actually get a lot of stuff working. They idea that they can download and run programs is shocking to people who move into the area and see it for the first time.
> Personally, I've wondered when I'd be able to use a both free and legal DVD player in the US.
Exactly. While all the FSF absolutists will flame away I say it is about darned time. Of course I wouldn't switch distros JUST for the DVD player or any of the other closed bits, but if I could buy em and run them on my preferred distro I'd get a P.O. to em.
You see, it is only by being willing to compromise (the minimum I can get away with) on the Free principles have I been able to deploy a linux based desktop into a public library setting. Just one example, we use Crossover Office to get IE running. IE isn't negotiable, the only question is Crossover, VMWare or which other method I was going to use to get it running. Too many sites just don't work any other way. For example, assume I'd brazened my way past all the other objections and deployed without IE. Last year wne the Katrina refugees flooded in and discovered they couldn't file an application with FEMA from our labs I'd have been tasked with getting XP installed on am post haste. Especially when Rita hit us directly, making it OUR patrons that we wouln't have been able to help get disaster assistance.
We don't have much of a need to play video DVDs thankfully, but it doesn't go down all that well when I explain that it would be illegal to do it. People just can't believe it and I really don't have the time to explain the complicated legal probems involved. At home I use libdecss and say "screw em if they don't like it." Hell, I have even mentioned it in protest letters to elected officials. But I won't deploy it at work, the legal liability is just too great. This isn't a problem Free Software can solve. We already HAVE the code but there isn't any path to lagalizing it. Same for Windows Media, Real, etc.
> I used to get mod points almost once a week, then I started exerting my Republican > viewpoint on Slashdot and I havent seen mod points in over a year and a half.
Yes conservative posts will usually get modded into oblivion, but that isn't the editors being bitchy, that is the users. Keep that karma up by posting ontopic posts that add to the conversation in the non political threads and you can absorb the hits when you speak out against the slashdot hivemind on the political threads.
Go look through my posting history if you want to see proof that it is possible to keep good karma and still do unthinkable things like defend Dibold and insult 90% of slashdot readers. (You might need to be a subscriber to go back that far though.)
> After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down
/. admins dude. I'm a conservative leaning libertarian and post often in the 'daily hate bushitler' threads just to stir the pot a bit. I tend to refer to the admins as socialist kids who had their minds damaged by their higher education, and even less flattering terms. When I really get on a tear (meaning I speak too many unspeakable truths in one post) I get modded straight into oblivion by the slashdot hivemind's defensive reflexes. But I still get mod points regularly, even have one leftover mod point at the moment that I really should find a good use for before it expires.
> to -1), I haven't seen them since.
You had to do more than just bitch about one of the
The trick is to make enough posts that are ontopic and add to the conversation that an occasional rant modded to -1 won't ruin your karma.
> That's pretty much what the judge said, from what I can tell.
Yea, but he took a heck of a lot more time and words to say essentially what I said in less than a screen of text, which is my point. Courts need to start ending cases in minutes instead of months.
> Enforcing the laws of a foreign nation should be impeachable as treason. Never mind "speech" issues.
> What about "survival"
Dude, you are a fucking idiot. We enforce foreign laws for the same reason they usually enforce ours, because otherwise the world would come to a big crashing stop. 90% of the time there isn't a problem because there isn't all that much difference between the basic laws governing Western Civilization and thankfully most cases that hit a US court involve another Western country. Murder is basically murder in any of them, fraud is fraud. Where things get tricky is the cases where the laws differ but that is why we have judges.
And now, just to be more ontopic, I'll say this case isn't going very far. Personally I'd settle it in ten minutes with a few pointed questions.
1. Mr. French lawyer, you assert the images shouldn't be protected as speech because they con't 'communicate.' Assuming I can swallow that, on what grounds to I disallow the site then, since they don't communicate they can't harm you, seeing as they can't communicate anything to your competitors.
2. Or we have the position of the website, that they are reporting on fashion trends, something that 'communicates' information, certainly looks like journalism and is therefore protected by the 1st. We kill millions of trees annually with print publications devoted to the subject of fashion so it certainly doesn't sound like they are doing anything new except publishing online. So Mr. French lawyer, care to poke holes in that logic?
Or perhaps you have a new and improved argument you would like to try? Didn't think so, case dismissed.
Not only would more nuke plants cut burning coal, the goal of the article's author, if we were aggressive enough in building plants we just might be able to generate enough energy cleaply enough to consider using some of it to get a hydrogen enonomy going. That breaks our dependency on oil imported from nations that range from neutral, at the most optimistic reading, to violently hostile to our very survival.
No guys, biodeisel isn't the answer. Solar isn't the answer. Wind power is promising but it isn't the answer. As the article points out hydro is already maxxed out. Until fusion becomes viable our only sources of energy are fossil fuels, with their polution and political instability or the big N. I vote for building em as fast as we can safely bring em online.
> I'd never run that command. I'd 'cd' to the level above and then use 'rm -rf dirname'.
Just because you have never needed to erase the contents of a directory while leaving the dir itself is no reason to assume nobody ever needs to do it.
Consider the case of building RPM packages. After you are done you routinely clean out the stuff in the SPECS, SOURCES and BUILD directories but you need to leave the top levels intact.
Yes you would probably delete them all with one command from the common ~/rpmbuild directory but it serves as the trivial example to call your overly broad statement into question.
> I find it fascinating that you conflate "pollute less" with "destroy Western Civilisation.
Have you looked into just what we would have to do here in the US to comply with Kyoto, being that we seem to be expected to account for most of the reduction in CO2 while 'the developing world' is permitted to merrily belch the stuff out? Yes, it would pretty much end our modern energy dependent civilization. Which just happens to be what the usual suspects have been arguing for in various guises since the 1960s at least. So many scares, every one fallen into history.
First we were going to all die from overpopulation. Then all of the developed world went into negative population growth and China took a hankering for infanticide. Oh well, try again.
Polution is going to kill us all, make the survivors into three headed freaks! Ok, there were some real dangers this time so we took steps. Now we have cleaner water than we have had in a century, more trees than when the first Europeans showed up, etc. But we didn't have to tear it all down and 'return to a more agrarian existance' as so many of the Gaian eco freaks were preaching.
Global cooling is coming! Run! Hide! The glaciers will be here any year now.... unless we act swiftly and decisively to dismantle all this industrial civilization. Oops, they ain't going for it, so how about GLOBAL WARMING!
Is Chicken Little right? As time has passed they have become so good at manipulating the media, the science establishment, etc. it is hard to say. Which is the whole point of the article, science has become so political it isn't useful anymore.
> Tell me, do you also conflate "pay workers enough to survive on" with "socialism?"
Only when a third party thinks they are all wise enough to make that decision for both parties. The invisible hand of the marketplace is the ONLY force with the knowledge to set prices. If the workers really can't survive on the wages offered they will move to a different line of work, migrate somewhere that is paying more or their lifestyle will adapt to the changed economic reality. There are NO other options.
Government intervention only creates the illusion of wealth for a privledged few in political favor, in reality it only moves it around while losing most of it as system losses. Yes you can mandate higher wages for Widgetco. Yes you can even forbid them from laying off workers to make up the gap and working the remaining few harder. Which makes the lives of those workers better than they were before. But at what cost? At a cost to the customers of Widgetco and the shareholders of Widgetco and longterm to the viability of Widgetco to compete in the marketplace. Unless you do the same to their competitors they will soon close up. Assuming you do you run the risk of their customers simply importing. And forget the investors sinking money into captical improvements. (See the US auto industry for all of these lessons played out in the real world.)
> Whether or not you 'believe' global warming is happening or is a problem, it's clear that
> something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and
> warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Agreed. But for all too many psuedoscientists the question is already settled, Global Warming is happening, humans are causing it and if we don't adopt Kyoto (and thereby destroy Western Civilization, which just happens to be another stated goal of most of the Green lobby, total coincidence of course) we will all DIE HORRIBLY!!!!
Since the psuedo intellectuals and Green political hacks are running most of the government and university sources of research funding it isn't possible to do real science on the issue. Something we desperately need.
Look, Global Warming might be real. Who cares if we caused it or we are entering a period of natural warming. If it can be proven that it is really happening we need to be looking at ways to negate the more nasty effects. But once we discard the Gaian Religion and the Green Politics we can look at more politically possible solutions than dismantling our Civilization. If the problem is too much energy input we could simply take steps to lower the solar input to the Earth. Fly a few square miles of mylar in low orbit for example. It would probably only take shading a fraction of a percent of the surface to balance the equation.