The copyright owner isn't the issue in most GPL cases, it's a question of abusing it, of which anyone can accuse the entity who breaches the license.
For example, if I find that foo.bar.example.com include foo.bar.sourceforge.net GPL'd code, I can blow the whistle on foo.bar.example.com even though I've never had any involvement in foo.bar.sourceforge.net.
I've got the same rights to foo.bar.sourceforge.net as the original author, thanks to the GPL.
So the copyright ownership issue isn't that great.
It can become an issue if you wish to relicense the code - you need the permission of all copyright holders. But that's an obscure case, and only the kind of thing which "something for nothing" corporates would normally be interested in.
TV is evolving into a similar set of niche markets, and expect clickable TV ads to come (shopping channels already do).
We already have "click-through" TV ads on digital TV... here in the UK, at least, it takes the form of "Press the red button to get more details on " shown (normally at the top-right of the screen) for the duration of the advert
I'm not a fanboy though, I just use what works best at the moment for the things I do. If someone shows me how to reproduce this "Apply Source Formatting" feature from DW in Kate/KDevelop and how to synchronize sites like in DW, I'm switching my machine at work from Win2K with DW to KDevelop/nvu on FreeBSD tomorrow, because it better fits the things I do nowadays. It will then match my setup at home.
But keeping the iTunes system a proprietary technology to prevent anyone from using multiple (read Microsoft) music systems is the most anti-consumer and user unfriendly thing any god can do.
What Rosen is saying is that iTunes doesn't support Windows Media (with all the additional restrictions which that implies). It's there in black and white. "multiple (read Microsoft)"
She's actually complaining that some bastard has the audacity to come up with a file format which isn't open for Microsoft to copy.
The implication is that if iTunes dished out WMA, then she'd be happy, because MSFT are already bum-buddies with the RIAA. The rest is just whitewash.
It's been a long time since I last heard anyone complain that a system is too closed, because Microsoft don't have the license to use it.
I'm no fan of iTunes - it's still DRM'd music. I'd rather own a CD and the rights to the music on that CD - to play it in my car, at home, on my laptop, wherever I wish. Apple and Microsoft are apparently intent on denying these rights; from a PC speaker, MP3 will do okay for me. In the car, at home, I'll copy the CD, thank you.
I don't download music which I don't already own (unless the publisher allows it - eg www.slidepheromone.com) and I certainly don't pay to download music, as the only options are limited-rights downloads.
The 8-CPU server which produced the 300% improvement isn't documented - Figure 39 in Appendix A does not exist (or, at least, doesn't show up in GGV or AcroRead).
On the other hand, the report seems to say that they didn't use ISAPI, which would have produced better results for IIS (but isn't available for Apache) - Figure 9.
The doc also says that they contacted RedHat about some apparently contradictory results, that RedHat escalated the issues, but didn't get back to them in the 30 day limit they had the servers on loan from HP. They didn't have a comparative escalation issue with Microsoft, which would have been useful, but failing to get back to a benchmarker within 30 days is a pretty poor indicator of RedHat in 2003.
This sounds pretty solid to me; of course, without any info of how the software was configured, it's meaningless, unfortunately. And as it doesn't cover security issues, necessary downtime for security patches, or any outages (due to software crashes, or hack attempts... how about 10 of each config in a honeypot?), the business value of a report shouting "300%" diminishes. Well, no - to some people, the "300%!!!" will end the argument. To people who understand the issues, that's an interesting and useful figure, to be balanced against the costs.
Bully for you. You should pay a high premium for an ISP which allows you to send packets out as 192.168/16, or maybe you even want to send out as 127/8?!!
Between your PC and your ISP, you're effectively on the ISP's network - you're not on the internet. Your ISP passes packets out to the internet on your behalf.
If those are TCP packets which claim to be from Germany when you are in Japan, you have no chance of a connection-oriented communication, so why the hell should you expect the packet to be sent out over the internet?
OSes should work correctly, but as that is (often) in the hands of [ malicious | incompetent ] users, the ISP has a perfect right to block clearly-non-RFC-compliant packets.
As a previous poster has mentioned, there seems to be little incentive for ISPs to do this, as it makes the internet as a whole safer, but does nothing that they can sell as a "plus point" to their own customers.
Care to cite a page? I've got a text version (== searchable, of course), and I can't find any reference to Marvin's head.
Brain the size of a planet, yet, but no mention of "brain the shape of a planet."
If you can give a chapter, or page number, or episode of the radio series, or... well, anything, please elaborate.
There is no reference to the shape of Marvin's head in any prior DNA work.
That doesn't mean that it can't be spherical, of course. The only physical mentions of Marvin are about his legs - one gets stuck in Squornshellous Zeta), and that's about it. There's also "this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side", and the fact that he ended up shot into a star after Zaphod and Ford stole Hotblack Desiato's starship
Maybe if a master were doing their makeup effects, they could get it right, and maybe not.
Disney are pretty large in the Hollywood mini-galaxy; if anyone can do it, surely the large Hollywood studios could be expected to do it.
Where (books, radio, etc) does it say how many legs Zaphod has?
From the planetmagrathea.com review, it sounds like there's very few opportunities for C21st technologies in this film - with a project of this scale, that's just laziness.
In the 1980s, the BBC did a pretty low-budget TV version with a workable interpretation of Zaphod's two heads.
We have a problem at our church - we have a projector attached to a (don't laugh) Windows ME PC with PowerPoint 2000. Preachers bring in their PowerPoint presentations, be it sermon notes, song words, etc, and often it'll fail to work as expected - ruining the work put into the sermon.
A typical problem, beyond missing fonts, and dodgy font-substitution, is that newer versions of PowerPoint do fade-ins differently than PPT2000; stuff which should fade-in appears instantly; other stuff which should appear instantly fades-in later.
Imagine making a sales pitch on that basis.
The more that people expect from software, the less they'll get, if they're depending on MS Office file formats.
The only way I can explain anyone's preference for MS file formats is by saying that they have not tried to use such files between varying versions of MS software.
Data is created, and needs to be kept. Governments, corporations, charities, and even individuals, need their data to be kept across decades, not just for 3 years until they next upgrade their software.
Microsoft don't address this (though they must understand it), and the average user doesn't even appreciate the problem.
OpenOffice.org is one solution - at least the data is still there, in readable (text-file XML) format, even if the app disappears in the next few decades.
I agree - Piracy is one major reason.
My wife insisted on MS Office after a reinstall, so I told her to go out and buy a copy - until then, she can have OpenOffice.org.
She really doesn't like it (she's trained as a PA - that's more-than-just-a-secretary in simple English) and has come to expect an office suite to do exactly what MS Office does (bugs'n'missing-features'n'all).
She's not shelled out the cash for MS Office, though.
As for file formats, I think there's a golden opportunity for anyone who can keep hold of installation disks of MS Windows and MS Office (and maybe even keeping 32-bit x86 boxes running) over the next few decades, as companies find that their precious archives are unreadable.
Microsoft do not appear to treat this issue at all, let alone offer a solution to the problem.
For now, it's a PITA if you can't open a Word97 document in Word2003; in 2020, when you need that document, and you can't even read a Word2003 document, what are you supposed to do? (even if the MS monopoly doesn't last that long, I'm sure that MS will exist in some form, if only due to their current strength) - Some people will be using MS Office in 2020; this week I saw a firm who were still basing their (not very small) business on an application installed in 1986.
I'm using FC3 at the moment, and at some point, opening new windows became v v slow... like, 10 seconds or more, on a 1.8GHz P4.
What's awkward, is that I changed a few things at the same time - connected to a customer network, installed Java 1.5, installed more plugins.
So I backed out FC3's FireFox, moved my ~/.mozilla out of the way, installed the Mozilla.org FireFox, and still get the same problem.
Must be something somewhere in FC3, but I can't locate the cause at all.
It's not a FF problem, though - I know that much, because FF works fine elsewhere.
PITA to resolve; if I reinstalled FC3, it'd probably "magically" disappear.
That's the kind of user problem which is a PITA to resolve; in this case, it must be something which FC3 does at some point - there's no other sane explanation, so Occam's Razor says FC3. A reinstall would fix it, but that's the Windows approach.
I hate not knowing the cause, but I open new tabs more than new windows, so the cost of reinstalling is higher than the cost of living with it.
I'll take FireFox even with hassles over Windows+MSIE, all the same.
I must get around to reinstalling, but work schedules just don't permit right now.
It's worth acknowledging that bugs do exist- the end-user doesn't care whose bug it is, it's a bug.
I'd prefer my "new windows take a while to load" bug over MSIE users' "new windows install new spyware" bug any day of the week.
Adverts pay my hosting costs. Not much more, but it currently covers my costs. Hosting is pretty damn cheap these days, anyway.
I've no problem if people block the ads (I only use Google ads, as they're pretty inobstructive, and easy to block).
I put the info there because I want it to be available. In doing so, I get a lot of emails asking me questions (the page which gets the most hits is http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml) which also take up a lot of my time - it also hits the http://steve-parker.org/forum/ page, which I have to keep up with.
That's all use of my time, which is valuable to me. I don't mind creating the content and putting it on the web - it costs me the time it takes to write it - but dealing with everyone who replies back also takes up a lot of my time.
Of course, I've got a day job, and that pays my real costs... Running the site is effectively a volunteer job I do out of choice - there's no financial gain for me.
To try to make it work, I offer the pages for purchase (via PayPal - crude but easy) but let's not pretend that I'm sitting here raking in bath-fulls of cash.
Can't complain that F/OSS tools were used - some of the best tools are F/OOS. That's a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing. The idea of "But I could've thought of that" is worthless if you didn't think of it.
If the "hole" is something like "imap can be insecure unless properly configured, in which case it can be quite secure", then show how your implementation is secure, and any example exploits fail on your systems.... Otherwise, fix 'em!
The choice between smoothly-running vs secure is for management to make... to an extent. I'd expect mgmt to choose easy, and techies to choose secure. In this case, it sounds like it's the other way around.
Personally, I'd rather take grief from users about "But I used to be able to do 'X' without any hassle" than deal with security holes... especially when you can answer "It's a management decision - out of my hands. Your boss wants it that way".
Sounds like a dream job
I maintain the speedtouchconf.sf.net project, and have just been told that, amongst the many/etc/*conf*modules*conf* files, Ubuntu instead uses/etc/modules.
It's hard enough keeping track of the flavours, without people (apparently) randomly introducing new stuff... okay, I can add support for/etc/modules as a config file, unless someone else introduces/etc/modules/ as a directory.
Support isn't just a problem for commercial distro's (in fact, it's less of a problem for them) - it creates problems for hundreds (thousands) of volunteer developers worldwide.
All OSes allow for changes in DST regulations - remember (oh, sorry, it's slashdot) there are more places than the USA.
For Linux, look at/usr/share/zoneinfo/... update the appropriate file, and go on as normal.
If you want difficult, look into Easter!
I suspect you're getting too bogged-down in the detail... what if I download the source afresh - I get a new license to use that source (not the one I downloaded a year ago and abused the license)
I run a site, which has adverts. It started out with no adverts at all, then I added Google ads, as they're so low-key (and very easily blocked). I made a little bit to start with; now, it's minimal, but it pays my hosting fees.
I'm not going to block anyone from my site - I didn't put it up there to make money, I put it up there to help people.
These days, that seems to be a strange concept.
It's how t'internet started!
My site (steve-parker.org, FWIW) is there to offer assistance to people who want it. I added adverts when I moved from freeloading off my employer to a "real" content provider.
Right now, so many people block Google ads, it provides very little income, but it covers my hosting costs (if not my time) so I'm back to where I started... I maintain the site because I believe that people will benefit from it.
I don't see a huge "war" here... I don't block Google ads because I want to see what they're putting on my site (otherwise, I would block them, and have no problem with others doing so). I block as many advertisers as possible. I, as a "publisher" know that people will block adverts. What do people want?
I don't want an Internet which consists solely of people trying to sell stuff to me... that isn't the internet I grew up with in the 90s. That's the internet I liked.
If I want to buy stuff, I'll go to amazon.com / etc; if I want info, I'll go to the "real" internet - sites like mine. If they've got adverts, I'll block them - others won't block them; someone (I don't know who these people are!) click on the adverts.
That keeps the cycle going for now;
In a few years time, when (hopefully) the majority are using FireFox and understand the features, then doubleclick, Google adsense, etc, will drop off even more quickly (my Google revenue is 50% at best of what it was a year ago).
So what? There seem to be 3 motivations for putting stuff on the web:
Interesting stuff people would like to see
Stuff I want to sell to you
Fuck all, but here are some adverts
I'm only interested in the first item - the second is useful, if I go to the vendor, but #3 is of no interest to me.
That doesn't stop me from putting adverts on my #1 site, though. It pays the costs, and it's easy to block.
So I'm a happy content-provider, because I believe that what I'm putting out there is a Good Thing.
I'm chuffed. I got a pair of jeans from Tesco (UK equivalent of Wal*Mart) for £4 ($2).
OTOH, I'm not chuffed... for that price, what was the machine operator paid?
I don't cherish brand-names at all IRL... in IT, I prefer Intel, etc, but IRL, I'd rather have a fucking shirt than a £50 shirt with another man's name on it.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, if I find that foo.bar.example.com include foo.bar.sourceforge.net GPL'd code, I can blow the whistle on foo.bar.example.com even though I've never had any involvement in foo.bar.sourceforge.net.
I've got the same rights to foo.bar.sourceforge.net as the original author, thanks to the GPL.
So the copyright ownership issue isn't that great.
It can become an issue if you wish to relicense the code - you need the permission of all copyright holders. But that's an obscure case, and only the kind of thing which "something for nothing" corporates would normally be interested in.
RTFM (strike-HOWTO-1.4.23, by N. Kinnock)
We already have "click-through" TV ads on digital TV ... here in the UK, at least, it takes the form of "Press the red button to get more details on " shown (normally at the top-right of the screen) for the duration of the advert
It's there in black and white. "multiple (read Microsoft)"
She's actually complaining that some bastard has the audacity to come up with a file format which isn't open for Microsoft to copy.
The implication is that if iTunes dished out WMA, then she'd be happy, because MSFT are already bum-buddies with the RIAA. The rest is just whitewash.
It's been a long time since I last heard anyone complain that a system is too closed, because Microsoft don't have the license to use it.
I'm no fan of iTunes - it's still DRM'd music. I'd rather own a CD and the rights to the music on that CD - to play it in my car, at home, on my laptop, wherever I wish. Apple and Microsoft are apparently intent on denying these rights; from a PC speaker, MP3 will do okay for me. In the car, at home, I'll copy the CD, thank you.
I don't download music which I don't already own (unless the publisher allows it - eg www.slidepheromone.com) and I certainly don't pay to download music, as the only options are limited-rights downloads.
On the other hand, the report seems to say that they didn't use ISAPI, which would have produced better results for IIS (but isn't available for Apache) - Figure 9.
The doc also says that they contacted RedHat about some apparently contradictory results, that RedHat escalated the issues, but didn't get back to them in the 30 day limit they had the servers on loan from HP. They didn't have a comparative escalation issue with Microsoft, which would have been useful, but failing to get back to a benchmarker within 30 days is a pretty poor indicator of RedHat in 2003.
This sounds pretty solid to me; of course, without any info of how the software was configured, it's meaningless, unfortunately. And as it doesn't cover security issues, necessary downtime for security patches, or any outages (due to software crashes, or hack attempts ... how about 10 of each config in a honeypot?), the business value of a report shouting "300%" diminishes. Well, no - to some people, the "300%!!!" will end the argument. To people who understand the issues, that's an interesting and useful figure, to be balanced against the costs.
Between your PC and your ISP, you're effectively on the ISP's network - you're not on the internet. Your ISP passes packets out to the internet on your behalf.
If those are TCP packets which claim to be from Germany when you are in Japan, you have no chance of a connection-oriented communication, so why the hell should you expect the packet to be sent out over the internet?
OSes should work correctly, but as that is (often) in the hands of [ malicious | incompetent ] users, the ISP has a perfect right to block clearly-non-RFC-compliant packets.
As a previous poster has mentioned, there seems to be little incentive for ISPs to do this, as it makes the internet as a whole safer, but does nothing that they can sell as a "plus point" to their own customers.
Bring back 1992.
Brain the size of a planet, yet, but no mention of "brain the shape of a planet."
If you can give a chapter, or page number, or episode of the radio series, or ... well, anything, please elaborate.
There is no reference to the shape of Marvin's head in any prior DNA work.
That doesn't mean that it can't be spherical, of course. The only physical mentions of Marvin are about his legs - one gets stuck in Squornshellous Zeta), and that's about it. There's also "this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side", and the fact that he ended up shot into a star after Zaphod and Ford stole Hotblack Desiato's starship
Disney are pretty large in the Hollywood mini-galaxy; if anyone can do it, surely the large Hollywood studios could be expected to do it.
Where (books, radio, etc) does it say how many legs Zaphod has?
From the planetmagrathea.com review, it sounds like there's very few opportunities for C21st technologies in this film - with a project of this scale, that's just laziness.
In the 1980s, the BBC did a pretty low-budget TV version with a workable interpretation of Zaphod's two heads.
A typical problem, beyond missing fonts, and dodgy font-substitution, is that newer versions of PowerPoint do fade-ins differently than PPT2000; stuff which should fade-in appears instantly; other stuff which should appear instantly fades-in later.
Imagine making a sales pitch on that basis.
The more that people expect from software, the less they'll get, if they're depending on MS Office file formats.
The only way I can explain anyone's preference for MS file formats is by saying that they have not tried to use such files between varying versions of MS software.
Data is created, and needs to be kept. Governments, corporations, charities, and even individuals, need their data to be kept across decades, not just for 3 years until they next upgrade their software.
Microsoft don't address this (though they must understand it), and the average user doesn't even appreciate the problem.
OpenOffice.org is one solution - at least the data is still there, in readable (text-file XML) format, even if the app disappears in the next few decades.
My wife insisted on MS Office after a reinstall, so I told her to go out and buy a copy - until then, she can have OpenOffice.org.
She really doesn't like it (she's trained as a PA - that's more-than-just-a-secretary in simple English) and has come to expect an office suite to do exactly what MS Office does (bugs'n'missing-features'n'all).
She's not shelled out the cash for MS Office, though.
As for file formats, I think there's a golden opportunity for anyone who can keep hold of installation disks of MS Windows and MS Office (and maybe even keeping 32-bit x86 boxes running) over the next few decades, as companies find that their precious archives are unreadable.
Microsoft do not appear to treat this issue at all, let alone offer a solution to the problem.
For now, it's a PITA if you can't open a Word97 document in Word2003; in 2020, when you need that document, and you can't even read a Word2003 document, what are you supposed to do? (even if the MS monopoly doesn't last that long, I'm sure that MS will exist in some form, if only due to their current strength) - Some people will be using MS Office in 2020; this week I saw a firm who were still basing their (not very small) business on an application installed in 1986.
I'm using FC3 at the moment, and at some point, opening new windows became v v slow... like, 10 seconds or more, on a 1.8GHz P4. What's awkward, is that I changed a few things at the same time - connected to a customer network, installed Java 1.5, installed more plugins. So I backed out FC3's FireFox, moved my ~/.mozilla out of the way, installed the Mozilla.org FireFox, and still get the same problem. Must be something somewhere in FC3, but I can't locate the cause at all. It's not a FF problem, though - I know that much, because FF works fine elsewhere. PITA to resolve; if I reinstalled FC3, it'd probably "magically" disappear. That's the kind of user problem which is a PITA to resolve; in this case, it must be something which FC3 does at some point - there's no other sane explanation, so Occam's Razor says FC3. A reinstall would fix it, but that's the Windows approach. I hate not knowing the cause, but I open new tabs more than new windows, so the cost of reinstalling is higher than the cost of living with it. I'll take FireFox even with hassles over Windows+MSIE, all the same. I must get around to reinstalling, but work schedules just don't permit right now. It's worth acknowledging that bugs do exist- the end-user doesn't care whose bug it is, it's a bug. I'd prefer my "new windows take a while to load" bug over MSIE users' "new windows install new spyware" bug any day of the week.
.... oh, and she's going to sue you for exposing her to those explict images ;)
Pah! My daughter is only 2 years old, and she's already r00ted your box ;)
I've no problem if people block the ads (I only use Google ads, as they're pretty inobstructive, and easy to block).
I put the info there because I want it to be available. In doing so, I get a lot of emails asking me questions (the page which gets the most hits is http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml) which also take up a lot of my time - it also hits the http://steve-parker.org/forum/ page, which I have to keep up with.
That's all use of my time, which is valuable to me. I don't mind creating the content and putting it on the web - it costs me the time it takes to write it - but dealing with everyone who replies back also takes up a lot of my time.
Of course, I've got a day job, and that pays my real costs... Running the site is effectively a volunteer job I do out of choice - there's no financial gain for me.
To try to make it work, I offer the pages for purchase (via PayPal - crude but easy) but let's not pretend that I'm sitting here raking in bath-fulls of cash.
If the "hole" is something like "imap can be insecure unless properly configured, in which case it can be quite secure", then show how your implementation is secure, and any example exploits fail on your systems.... Otherwise, fix 'em!
The choice between smoothly-running vs secure is for management to make... to an extent. I'd expect mgmt to choose easy, and techies to choose secure. In this case, it sounds like it's the other way around.
Personally, I'd rather take grief from users about "But I used to be able to do 'X' without any hassle" than deal with security holes... especially when you can answer "It's a management decision - out of my hands. Your boss wants it that way".
Sounds like a dream job
I maintain the speedtouchconf.sf.net project, and have just been told that, amongst the many /etc/*conf*modules*conf* files, Ubuntu instead uses /etc/modules.
It's hard enough keeping track of the flavours, without people (apparently) randomly introducing new stuff... okay, I can add support for /etc/modules as a config file, unless someone else introduces /etc/modules/ as a directory.
Support isn't just a problem for commercial distro's (in fact, it's less of a problem for them) - it creates problems for hundreds (thousands) of volunteer developers worldwide.
The review is /.'ed, but the radio version is 12 half-hour episodes... 6 hours.
All OSes allow for changes in DST regulations - remember (oh, sorry, it's slashdot) there are more places than the USA. For Linux, look at /usr/share/zoneinfo/ ... update the appropriate file, and go on as normal.
If you want difficult, look into Easter!
I suspect you're getting too bogged-down in the detail... what if I download the source afresh - I get a new license to use that source (not the one I downloaded a year ago and abused the license)
There's no need to acknowledge the original project (though it's considered polite).
I'm not going to block anyone from my site - I didn't put it up there to make money, I put it up there to help people.
These days, that seems to be a strange concept.
It's how t'internet started!
My site (steve-parker.org, FWIW) is there to offer assistance to people who want it. I added adverts when I moved from freeloading off my employer to a "real" content provider. Right now, so many people block Google ads, it provides very little income, but it covers my hosting costs (if not my time) so I'm back to where I started... I maintain the site because I believe that people will benefit from it.
I don't see a huge "war" here... I don't block Google ads because I want to see what they're putting on my site (otherwise, I would block them, and have no problem with others doing so). I block as many advertisers as possible. I, as a "publisher" know that people will block adverts. What do people want?
I don't want an Internet which consists solely of people trying to sell stuff to me... that isn't the internet I grew up with in the 90s. That's the internet I liked.
If I want to buy stuff, I'll go to amazon.com / etc; if I want info, I'll go to the "real" internet - sites like mine. If they've got adverts, I'll block them - others won't block them; someone (I don't know who these people are!) click on the adverts. That keeps the cycle going for now;
In a few years time, when (hopefully) the majority are using FireFox and understand the features, then doubleclick, Google adsense, etc, will drop off even more quickly (my Google revenue is 50% at best of what it was a year ago).
So what? There seem to be 3 motivations for putting stuff on the web:
- Interesting stuff people would like to see
- Stuff I want to sell to you
- Fuck all, but here are some adverts
I'm only interested in the first item - the second is useful, if I go to the vendor, but #3 is of no interest to me.That doesn't stop me from putting adverts on my #1 site, though. It pays the costs, and it's easy to block.
So I'm a happy content-provider, because I believe that what I'm putting out there is a Good Thing.
Just like I put out Free Software (http://speedtouchconf.sf.net/) because that's a Good Thing.
Fairy nuff? Some people actually want to benefit the world, and don't want to profit from it
Windows users do ;)
OTOH, I'm not chuffed... for that price, what was the machine operator paid?
I don't cherish brand-names at all IRL ... in IT, I prefer Intel, etc, but IRL, I'd rather have a fucking shirt than a £50 shirt with another man's name on it.
Does that answer your question?