"The GPL only states that if you choose to release (distribute) the code, it must be under the GPL."
Not quite. The code is covered by the GPL, whether you release it or not.
You are still bound by the GPL with that software, even if you continue to use it internally. This means that if one department within your company asks for the source code to a project developed by another entirely-separate department, they are granted the right to receive it. This has happened before.
If you choose to distribute that code, either in source or binary format, you must make the source (including any changes you made to the GPL'd portions of that source), available to anyone who requests it.
The difference is subtle, but it is important to be clear on that.
"...because mysql can't handle the load without munging your data anymore...."
Unless you have some real world data to back this up, your statement is 100% pure FUD. MySQL does not corrupt data under load, at all. If you have load problems with MySQL, the problem isn't MySQL. MySQL will keep on running no matter how much load you throw at it. This isn't MySQL 2.0, you know.
I've had a heavily hit MySQL backed website on a Linux box with a +78 load at one point (a cron job spiraled off and spun the system up so high I could barely log into the console). MySQL kept on chugging, and there was no corruption in any of the 23 very large databases running on it.
These are not straight conversions, they require actual human eyes to look over them, test them, add navigation and other elements. For example, look at the Plucker version of the 9/11 Report that I did. I added a LOT of functionality that wasn't there in the original version. (I also put my pristine HTML source version online for anyone to read. You can see the additional features I've added in that copy).
I'll be making a lot more of my stealth works public soon.
When they're finished with the Slackware Handbook, I'd be more than happy to look it over, do the conversion, and provide it in a mobile format for our user community.
You know, I love how companies are doing this, creating a file extension, and associating that as HTML 4.01 Transitional in their AddType directives. Gentoo did it (and in fact, I still checked, they're STILL doing it), and now Sun is doing it. This document is NOT a valid XML document, nor is it well-formed. In fact, it barely qualifies as HTML (and doesn't even validate against its declared doctype).
Now, for some examples of REAL XML in a browser, go to the Gutenberg XML pages and look at their works. True, valid, well-formed XML, rendered in the browser.
This pseudo "Look ma! I'm using XML" madness needs to end. Its getting tiresome.
"By definition you need SOME kind of network port open for remote administration. Otherwise you can only connect locally."
Almost right.
Since you should, as a good administrator, limit the number of ports open for potential exploits. This means using vnc-over-ssh (locked to specific incoming hosts, of course) to admin the box, instead of vnc (on 5900) and then 3306 for MySQL (which isn't secure anyway). This way, you keep one port open (22) instead of three ports (22, 3306, 5900).
But you can, and should, be using some tools that communicate locally to MySQL, through a remote interface (vnc-over-ssh, phpMyAdmin, etc.).
Take whatever works, I'll use the more-secure approach, while you keep unnecessary ports needlessly open.
99.99% of people who run MySQL run it on the same machine as their webserver that queries it. Most people don't actually do queries across the network to the database server.
Just run MySQL with --skip-networking at startup (skip-networking in my.cnf), to disable MySQL from listening on port 3306. I know on most systems, its probably the default, but in almost all of the cases, its completely unnecessary.
And also, validate your input!! Don't just assume that whatever is passed on the URI field of a browser, is going to be correct. Check it. Then check it again.
Before you Slashdot poor Alexander's server into oblivion (which he funds himself, out of his own pocket), please consider using the Coralized version of the story or the MirrorDot copy first.
Hire a CPA. Seriously. They're going to find a LOT more than a little "questionairre" is going to find by asking you questions.
A highly-skilled CPA (i.e. one who works with technology people) will be able to find places where you can deduct expenditures that your own Intuit and other software can't possibly take into account.
Use your DSL line for sending business emails? That's deductable as a business expense. Power to keep the cable modem and WAP running? Also deductable.
Accept PayPal payments for your Free Software work? That's not income, its a Gift, and deductable. There's a lot more where these come from. Most of them aren't going to be asked on any sort of tax software.
We just finished a website for a local CPA here in Norwich, CT. and he's really skilled in these and other areas.
Definately check out your local CPA, before you head into H&R Block or online for some question-and-answer forms and software.
It'll pay for itself in the first year's return. TRUST ME.
"How long until the "not validated" number makes it into a whine by MS about what percentage of XP is pirated?"
That would be incredibly stupid of them. What if I want to download 1 instance of it externally, and package it up for deployment to 2,300 internal machines via WUS or SMS?
Then again, Microsoft is not a software company, they're a marketing company, so they'll spin this one to suit their own profit margins in some way or another.
"I'm not sure the "big bad Jews" staged multiple terrorist attacks for over 20 years that culminated in 3000 deaths and an economic hit of more than a trillion dollars but I'll google it and see."
"Well, it's called "Internet Explorer". It's got the keyword - internet. That's what they're looking for. How in the nine hells are they supposed to know what "Firefox" is (most of them do not read the times). Firefox is not an intuitive name. It gives the average person absolutely no idea what it does by just looking at what the name is."
But wait... isn't the whole point of icons, so we don't have to read the title below the icon?
Most people are so monkey-trained, we hardly see the icons now, and read the titles under them anyway. (I haven't used a single icon on my desktop in over 8 years, since I run Sawfish, and many other window managers prior to that. No icons, wharfs, docs, titlebars, or window frames. Nice and fast, nice and pure, nothing cluttering my desktop that I don't need there.)
But, I fully agree with your points, which is why I delete the MSIE icon, and install FireFox, and then replace the FireFox icon with the one stored in iexplore.exe, in the Properties dialog. The user never knows the difference, and their browsing is much more secure.
Why does nobody complain that every single ATM takes your picture.
I'm not talking about the obvious camera mounted in the corner of the ATM booth. I'm talking about the camera mounted behind the screen you stare at to process your ATM transaction.
Behind? Yes, there is a secondary camera inside the touchscreen monitor you use to navigate your ATM menus. Nobody seems to have a problem with these, however.
Just interesting how much people are willing to forgive when it comes to convenience vs. security.
"There's no magical way to prevent someone from taking your picture. In the end, your picture can be taken whether you like it or not, and there's nothing you can do about it."
A few years ago, my girlfriend and I were walking through the mall, during a fairly mundane weekday. Traffic in the mall was moderate.
One of the kiosks in the middle of the mall selling those "pictures-on-coffee-mug", and "picture-on-t-shirt", run by two Asian-looking gentlemen, snapped my picture with their digital camera as we walked by. They had 4 21" LCD panels attached to the top of their kiosk, and now my picture was facing all 4 directions.
I whirled around as soon as I noticed, and said (in a VERY loud, insistant voice), "Take that picture off of those monitors, NOW!". One of the Asian gentlemen was hustling and talking to the other one in some non-English language. They were fumbling with buttons on the camera, rapidly, as I walked briskly back towards them.
"NOW!", I reinforced. They removed the picture, scrambling around to not draw attention to their booth as I walked to them.
I thanked them for taking my picture down, and walked away.
My WHOLE LIFE, I have always ducked, eluded, turned, and otherwise obscured my face from being taken by pictures, cameras, and other things. This includes people in restaurants and public places taking pictures of other people, where I'm in the background, etc.
I just hate my picture taken, period. For 30 years of my life, the ONLY two pictures that existed of me, were my yearbook picture, and my driver's license picture. That was it. Now, married and with a child, there are a lot more pictures of me, but I control them, and I took them. I still turn and duck when I see a camera pointed near me.
One argument I see again and again with this, is that "they never possessed the original copyrighted materials, only the torrent file", but that isn't entirely true.
In order to create the.torrent file, you have to have the full original source material. Someone had the original source material (movie, dvd, software, game, etc.) and created the.torrent file from that source material. This person then must have given that.torrent file to the tracker server itself (or the person who created the.torrent is running the tracker themselves).
In fact, since the.torrent file has to directly contain the URL of the tracker itself, you can't simply "upload" the.torrent to a tracker and have it function, unless you know the exact tracker URL that server uses to host its torrent files. If you want to put a.torrent on 10 trackers, you have to create 10 separate.torrent files. You can't reuse the same.torrent file for all 10 trackers.
This means the tracker operator and the people providing torrents are collaborating in some way, or the tracker is publishing its tracker URL to facilitate people creating torrent files for it, from copyrighted source materials.
"I downloaded 0.12.0-rc4 from CVS and it compiled cleanly. There's a new option to pilot-xfer, -D, to install arbitrary files to the filesystem on the memory card."
We're at the equivelent of rc30 or so at this point. You might want to try again. LOTS of speedup fixes and other buglets have been squashed that will increase the performance.
Also, rememeber that with VFS, we're going through several protocol layers (dlp being one of them), so the transfer IS going to be slow. Getting a card reader is always going to be faster, because you're dealing with real filesystems, not virtual filesytems through abstraction like PalmOS does.
The version we're working on in CVS, has had native Darwin USB support for awhile... we've just been working out the other cleanup and userland bugs. We're pushing about 12MiB/minute over USB on that hardware.
If you want it working now, just grab CVS. In a week or two (fingers-crossed) when we finally release 0.12.0-pre1, Fink should suck it in and be able to use it natively.
It'll get there, we just had to get all of these new devices (and all of their bugs) worked around.
"The very first tool you recommend, Plucker, runs on Windows."
The difference is that Plucker was created, developed, and continues to be developed on Linux and UNIX platforms first, and was ported to work on Windows, through cross-platform toolkits like Python and wxWidgets.
"Third-party tools for copying arbitrary files to a device have been around on Windows since pilot-link was a proof of concept."
True, you could copy arbitrary files to the Newton and other non-Palm devices, but for Palm devices, pilot-link was second, right after Palm's own tools. In fact, the original author of pilot-link was a USRobotics employee at the time. Any third-party tools that spoke to Palm devices came second. pilot-link is over 8 years old now.
When you're trying to put something external to the device, onto the device, or convert it to a format suitable for the device, it is logical that you would need external applications to handle such an operation.
"It doesn't seem to want to deal with text files (there is no import feature for the Palm Desktop notepad or memo pad, for example)."
You mean 'in Windows'. In the Linux and UNIX world, there are dozens of choices in how you want to talk to your Palm.
For "text files", nothing beats Plucker when carrying text, ebooks, manuals, HTML pages, HOWTO documents, and other items. The LDP even carries all of their HOWTO documents in Plucker format. Its the only format that is freely available, openly documented, and very extensible.
"Also there seems to be no way to copy arbitrary files to the Palm - all files must be "owned" by an application. With a 256MB SD card I expected to use it to copy files between work and home."
You must mean '...in Windows' again. In the non-Windows side, including OSX, we have pilot-link which talks natively to your Palm and can do all kinds of things that the Windows tools cannot (including operating at 40% faster in some cases).
Commercial companies such as MarkSpace are using pilot-link (the core library of pilot-link anyway) in their commercial product, MissingSync which runs on OSX.
For desktop replacements, PIMs, and other tools, there are dozens of alternatives. Here are several, in no particular order (with Coralized links to protect the bandwidth of the various projects):
There are many others, but these are the top contenders. They all also rely on the libraries and language bindings provided by pilot-link to communicate with your Palm device.
"Has anyone else noticed these or other shortcomings and have figured out ways around them?"
Yes, stop using Windows. Stop using the featureless proprietary tools provided by these vendors who only listen to their profit margins, not to their userbase.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. The code is covered by the GPL, whether you release it or not.
You are still bound by the GPL with that software, even if you continue to use it internally. This means that if one department within your company asks for the source code to a project developed by another entirely-separate department, they are granted the right to receive it. This has happened before.
If you choose to distribute that code, either in source or binary format, you must make the source (including any changes you made to the GPL'd portions of that source), available to anyone who requests it.
The difference is subtle, but it is important to be clear on that.
Unless you have some real world data to back this up, your statement is 100% pure FUD. MySQL does not corrupt data under load, at all. If you have load problems with MySQL, the problem isn't MySQL. MySQL will keep on running no matter how much load you throw at it. This isn't MySQL 2.0, you know.
I've had a heavily hit MySQL backed website on a Linux box with a +78 load at one point (a cron job spiraled off and spun the system up so high I could barely log into the console). MySQL kept on chugging, and there was no corruption in any of the 23 very large databases running on it.
I do this for quite a few other pieces of work (the Gentoo handbook, PHP Documentation (in 21 languages, it looks spectacular in color), the Creating XPCOM book is even available in Plucker format, as well as many others.
These are not straight conversions, they require actual human eyes to look over them, test them, add navigation and other elements. For example, look at the Plucker version of the 9/11 Report that I did. I added a LOT of functionality that wasn't there in the original version. (I also put my pristine HTML source version online for anyone to read. You can see the additional features I've added in that copy).
I'll be making a lot more of my stealth works public soon.
When they're finished with the Slackware Handbook, I'd be more than happy to look it over, do the conversion, and provide it in a mobile format for our user community.
You know, I love how companies are doing this, creating a file extension, and associating that as HTML 4.01 Transitional in their AddType directives. Gentoo did it (and in fact, I still checked, they're STILL doing it), and now Sun is doing it. This document is NOT a valid XML document, nor is it well-formed. In fact, it barely qualifies as HTML (and doesn't even validate against its declared doctype).
Now, for some examples of REAL XML in a browser, go to the Gutenberg XML pages and look at their works. True, valid, well-formed XML, rendered in the browser.
This pseudo "Look ma! I'm using XML" madness needs to end. Its getting tiresome.
Almost right.
Since you should, as a good administrator, limit the number of ports open for potential exploits. This means using vnc-over-ssh (locked to specific incoming hosts, of course) to admin the box, instead of vnc (on 5900) and then 3306 for MySQL (which isn't secure anyway). This way, you keep one port open (22) instead of three ports (22, 3306, 5900).
But you can, and should, be using some tools that communicate locally to MySQL, through a remote interface (vnc-over-ssh, phpMyAdmin, etc.).
Take whatever works, I'll use the more-secure approach, while you keep unnecessary ports needlessly open.
What 'remote administration' tools are you referring to? No open network port is required for remote administration.
99.99% of people who run MySQL run it on the same machine as their webserver that queries it. Most people don't actually do queries across the network to the database server.
Just run MySQL with --skip-networking at startup (skip-networking in my.cnf), to disable MySQL from listening on port 3306. I know on most systems, its probably the default, but in almost all of the cases, its completely unnecessary.
And also, validate your input !! Don't just assume that whatever is passed on the URI field of a browser, is going to be correct. Check it. Then check it again.
This should be the default, not an afterthought!
I dub thee: LENSCAP !
Hire a CPA. Seriously . They're going to find a LOT more than a little "questionairre" is going to find by asking you questions.
A highly-skilled CPA (i.e. one who works with technology people) will be able to find places where you can deduct expenditures that your own Intuit and other software can't possibly take into account.
Use your DSL line for sending business emails? That's deductable as a business expense. Power to keep the cable modem and WAP running? Also deductable.
Accept PayPal payments for your Free Software work? That's not income, its a Gift, and deductable. There's a lot more where these come from. Most of them aren't going to be asked on any sort of tax software.
We just finished a website for a local CPA here in Norwich, CT. and he's really skilled in these and other areas.
Definately check out your local CPA, before you head into H&R Block or online for some question-and-answer forms and software.
It'll pay for itself in the first year's return. TRUST ME.
That would be incredibly stupid of them. What if I want to download 1 instance of it externally, and package it up for deployment to 2,300 internal machines via WUS or SMS?
Then again, Microsoft is not a software company, they're a marketing company, so they'll spin this one to suit their own profit margins in some way or another.
You've obviously never heard of Operation Northwood before.
But wait... isn't the whole point of icons, so we don't have to read the title below the icon?
Most people are so monkey-trained, we hardly see the icons now, and read the titles under them anyway. (I haven't used a single icon on my desktop in over 8 years, since I run Sawfish, and many other window managers prior to that. No icons, wharfs, docs, titlebars, or window frames. Nice and fast, nice and pure, nothing cluttering my desktop that I don't need there.)
But, I fully agree with your points, which is why I delete the MSIE icon, and install FireFox, and then replace the FireFox icon with the one stored in iexplore.exe, in the Properties dialog. The user never knows the difference, and their browsing is much more secure.
Problem solved.
Why does nobody complain that every single ATM takes your picture.
I'm not talking about the obvious camera mounted in the corner of the ATM booth. I'm talking about the camera mounted behind the screen you stare at to process your ATM transaction.
Behind? Yes, there is a secondary camera inside the touchscreen monitor you use to navigate your ATM menus. Nobody seems to have a problem with these, however.
Just interesting how much people are willing to forgive when it comes to convenience vs. security.
A few years ago, my girlfriend and I were walking through the mall, during a fairly mundane weekday. Traffic in the mall was moderate.
One of the kiosks in the middle of the mall selling those "pictures-on-coffee-mug", and "picture-on-t-shirt", run by two Asian-looking gentlemen, snapped my picture with their digital camera as we walked by. They had 4 21" LCD panels attached to the top of their kiosk, and now my picture was facing all 4 directions.
I whirled around as soon as I noticed, and said (in a VERY loud, insistant voice), "Take that picture off of those monitors, NOW!". One of the Asian gentlemen was hustling and talking to the other one in some non-English language. They were fumbling with buttons on the camera, rapidly, as I walked briskly back towards them.
"NOW!", I reinforced. They removed the picture, scrambling around to not draw attention to their booth as I walked to them.
I thanked them for taking my picture down, and walked away.
My WHOLE LIFE, I have always ducked, eluded, turned, and otherwise obscured my face from being taken by pictures, cameras, and other things. This includes people in restaurants and public places taking pictures of other people, where I'm in the background, etc.
I just hate my picture taken, period. For 30 years of my life, the ONLY two pictures that existed of me, were my yearbook picture, and my driver's license picture. That was it. Now, married and with a child, there are a lot more pictures of me, but I control them, and I took them. I still turn and duck when I see a camera pointed near me.
One argument I see again and again with this, is that "they never possessed the original copyrighted materials, only the torrent file", but that isn't entirely true.
In order to create the .torrent file, you have to have the full original source material. Someone had the original source material (movie, dvd, software, game, etc.) and created the .torrent file from that source material. This person then must have given that .torrent file to the tracker server itself (or the person who created the .torrent is running the tracker themselves).
In fact, since the .torrent file has to directly contain the URL of the tracker itself, you can't simply "upload" the .torrent to a tracker and have it function, unless you know the exact tracker URL that server uses to host its torrent files. If you want to put a .torrent on 10 trackers, you have to create 10 separate .torrent files. You can't reuse the same .torrent file for all 10 trackers.
This means the tracker operator and the people providing torrents are collaborating in some way, or the tracker is publishing its tracker URL to facilitate people creating torrent files for it, from copyrighted source materials.
Its a little greyer than originally thought.
They're already starting to do that now, to avoid detection.
Answer: It doesn't.
We're at the equivelent of rc30 or so at this point. You might want to try again. LOTS of speedup fixes and other buglets have been squashed that will increase the performance.
Also, rememeber that with VFS, we're going through several protocol layers (dlp being one of them), so the transfer IS going to be slow. Getting a card reader is always going to be faster, because you're dealing with real filesystems, not virtual filesytems through abstraction like PalmOS does.
The version we're working on in CVS, has had native Darwin USB support for awhile... we've just been working out the other cleanup and userland bugs. We're pushing about 12MiB/minute over USB on that hardware.
If you want it working now, just grab CVS. In a week or two (fingers-crossed) when we finally release 0.12.0-pre1, Fink should suck it in and be able to use it natively.
It'll get there, we just had to get all of these new devices (and all of their bugs) worked around.
The difference is that Plucker was created, developed, and continues to be developed on Linux and UNIX platforms first, and was ported to work on Windows, through cross-platform toolkits like Python and wxWidgets.
True, you could copy arbitrary files to the Newton and other non-Palm devices, but for Palm devices, pilot-link was second, right after Palm's own tools. In fact, the original author of pilot-link was a USRobotics employee at the time. Any third-party tools that spoke to Palm devices came second. pilot-link is over 8 years old now.
Tungsten T3, of course.
You're absolutely right. Talk to your vendor, and have them begin porting their applications to Linux.
This isn't our problem to solve. Thanks for pointing it out.
When you're trying to put something external to the device, onto the device, or convert it to a format suitable for the device, it is logical that you would need external applications to handle such an operation.
If everything was self-contained, I would agree.
You mean 'in Windows'. In the Linux and UNIX world, there are dozens of choices in how you want to talk to your Palm.
For "text files", nothing beats Plucker when carrying text, ebooks, manuals, HTML pages, HOWTO documents, and other items. The LDP even carries all of their HOWTO documents in Plucker format. Its the only format that is freely available, openly documented, and very extensible.
Just look at how beautiful Plucker is with the PHP documentation as one example...
You must mean '...in Windows' again. In the non-Windows side, including OSX, we have pilot-link which talks natively to your Palm and can do all kinds of things that the Windows tools cannot (including operating at 40% faster in some cases).
Commercial companies such as MarkSpace are using pilot-link (the core library of pilot-link anyway) in their commercial product, MissingSync which runs on OSX.
For desktop replacements, PIMs, and other tools, there are dozens of alternatives. Here are several, in no particular order (with Coralized links to protect the bandwidth of the various projects):
There are many others, but these are the top contenders. They all also rely on the libraries and language bindings provided by pilot-link to communicate with your Palm device.
Yes, stop using Windows. Stop using the featureless proprietary tools provided by these vendors who only listen to their profit margins, not to their userbase.
Seriously