If this is for real, Jon probably has a good case before the European Court for Human Rights. For starters, it appears his incarceration would violate Article 10 of the ECHR, which provides for freedom of expression (even though its "exceptions" are wide enough to drive a train through).
For 33 cents, you can put a letter in a box out in front of your house. A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, take it to the airport, fly it to anywhere in north america, and drive it to the recipients house. For 33 cents.
Actually, it's more like: A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, stick it in a big sorting machine, put it on a series of trucks (unless it's Priority or Express mail or going to Alaska/Hawaii or it just happens to end up on a plane), and drive it to somewhere near the recipient's house, for 33 cents if and only if it weighs less than an ounce.
I say "somewhere near" because at least 25% of the time I receive mail for one of my neighbors.
OTOH, UPS has this annoying habit of shipping ground packages from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi via Philadelphia (yes, the one in Pennsylvania), on an apparently-regular basis. FedEx seems to actually know it's ass from a hole in the ground, but you pay through the nose for it. Maybe RPS (now FedEx Ground) can extend their cluefulness into ground package delivery.
But, to get back on target, isn't anyone else concerned about the privacy implications of giving out your snail-mail address on the internet? Unless your address is going to be mangled by a one-way hash function (whcih seems to defeat the purpose), I'd be leery about associating my physical address with an email.
I can hardly wait for the MPAA to try to go after a legitimate site (sorry, I don't think 2600 counts) or company. For example, VA Linux Systems hosts DiBona.com, which posts a copy of the DeCSS code, yet oddly enough VA hasn't been a defendant yet. Who cares about VA taking over SGI? I'd rather see them sue the pants off the MPAA; maybe they'd give up Disney to settle;-).
While they're at it, I'd like to see them sue Sima, who market this neat little gadget that defeats Macrovision I and II (save cash by getting it from these guys). It also cleans up the picture my DVD player puts out (tip: use the S-Video inputs whether or not you use S-Video for output; this stops you from using the bypass switch if you use the composite out, but that's a small sacrifice). Let's all watch the MPAA get laughed straight out of court when they go after people who have nothing to do with the WaReZ culture...
(I'd also like them to sue someone who's running for Congress and who's posted several links that apparently violate the DMCA. Bring it on, MPAA; I could use the free publicity...)
Re:Is this actually a good thing?
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 2
This item from the FAQ really worries me. "Q: Will Be continue to update BeOS? A: Yes, we plan on continuing to develop and release new versions of BeOS."
Yes, it's the official Commodore Kiss of Death; named for Commodore and Amiga magazines' habit of running an editorial saying "We're here to stay" and then folding before printing another issue. Examples include:.info, AmigaWorld, and Commodore Magazine. I think RUN did it too...
Maybe the Linux/m68k for Mac people have been living in a parallel universe or something, because Apple has shown itself highly uncooperative with people trying to port Linux to their hardware.
I find their experience highly inconsistent with Apple's recent lip service to open source. So which is it?
Minor problem: the story is ineligible for this award, since it was posted in 1998.
But I agree, it is Slashdot writ small. OTOH, the article quality demonstrated there was really low, relative to "typical"./ standards. Usually, there's only one blatant factual error in the story;-). (Shame, too, since I did agree with sengan's central thesis.)
Here's a way to make a cheap buck off the clueless Wall Street types who haven't gotten the message yet (but will as soon as an analyst comes out with a fifty cent price target):
On the day of the IPO, when its price rises to ridiculous levels, short sell it. About a week later, once everyone else's figured out how stupid this company is, buy to cover. Invest the proceeds in SGI, Cobalt, VA Linux, or Red Hat (or if you feel really suicidal, CORL... all the price volatility of an IPO in an established company;-)); better yet, donate it to SPI or the FSF.
Having done a bit of tech support myself, I suspect 90% of users who call are clueless for the reason they don't read the documentation and then expect the thing to work.
Let's illustrate from an example from consumer electronics: setting the time on your VCR. Any half-competent geek will figure out it's under the menus somewhere (since you've probably been roped into setting the time for friends, family, and people who've flagged you down when driving past on the interstate). For everyone else, that's why they pay some poor people to write a manual in really simplified English and 6 other languages. Most of the manuals written since the 1980s actually make sense. Even my mother (no technical genious) can set the clock and set programs on several different brands of VCR... because she has the good sense to read the books in the first place.
I think Illiad is making fun of the mentality that you can just open the box and it will do everything on its own. Maybe the Internet makes people think they don't have to read the book... I dunno. I don't analyze most of it.
But I do know UF is funny. Besides which, many of the strips have nothing to do with users... they deal with the boneheadedness of the computer industry, or corporate culture in general. And then there are the dust puppy plots...
LWN (the source of this story, uncredited as per the norm on Slashdot) has a fairly consistent habit of presenting the original email it received, pretty much unchanged. That means whatever.sig you attach ends up in the email.
I don't know why they have this policy, but I doubt it was a conscious effort by ESR to put the "propoganda" (as you put it) in an article about the DVD CCA.
Anyway, it's debatable that the mere presentation of statistics is propoganda. It's up to you to interpret them however you like.
I'd have to second what AC and WhyPanic have said.
In fairness, I think Tobin et al. are aware of the problems; the main issue is that it is tough to find people with Linux expertise in Oxford, Mississippi, and once you find them it's hard to keep them on at $10/hr doing tech reviews. Another problem: writing readable technical books is hard. Probably 30 people, including me, read Running Linux (3rd ed) before it was published, and I'm sure some stuff still slipped through the cracks. Sair maybe had 3 people qualified to do that when I was there, hence the issues identified here...
I severely doubt it; on issues of already-commercialized segments of the spectrum (i.e. everything except Ham), the FCC is in bed with the big corporations that own the spectrum (and don't want competitors). For starters, try this article from Reason.
Chris DiBona (better known to CNN reporters as "DiBona.com") has put up a page reporting on the hearing. Not much you don't see elsewhere, but some of the comments are priceless.
My favorite:
Probably the best part was when they did "Big lawyer fu" and tried to make it seem like unless they acted now, more and more people would take the code and put it on their sites. And that a TRO would stop it. Which, if you were a bunny rabbit who had been eating carrots in a salt mine for a decade and hadn't ever seen much less used a mouse, would make sense. But I mean -jeez- the judge had obviously seen that mahir guys web site or something, because his eventual ruling to quash the TRO showed he understood the velocity of information on the net.
Ah yes, the juxtaposition of the DVD crack and Mahir. Don't think too much about it, you might get sick at your stomach...
Alien allows you to convert Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg.
It can also convert into Slackware, Red Hat, and Stampede packages.
alien will try to include as many of the dependencies it can grok from the RPM, so it will protect you a little better than using "raw" rpm. The maintainer, Joey Hess, did a great job here... it's not often needed, but when it is, it can be a lifesaver.
I think you're confusing the definitions of "unstable" here. The unstable distribution is "unstable" because it changes (i.e. is the oppposite of "stable", which is something that doesn't change). That does not mean it is "unstable" as in every program will provide a blue screen of death every third time you try to run it.
Since no distribution but Debian has a continuously-updated (i.e. unstable) pre-release, you can think of unstable as "all the cool neat new stuff those darned Open Source developers can put together"; stable is "all the cool neat stuff that we were sure would play nicely because people have been trying it for months and it's boffo, dude." Or something like that...
I know potato closes a lot more ports by default... most udp services are disabled by inetd by default, for example. Also, the r* servers are separate packages now, so those ports won't be open unless you install them, and ssh will disable rsh and pals by default.
3. Has nothing to gain from being President. This probably precludes anyone who actually wants to be President. If you want to be President, you're probably not qualified.
Reminds me of an Arthur C. Clarke novel I once read ("Children of a Distant Sun" or somesuch). The colony had a constitution that basically forbade anyone who wanted to be the leader from doing it, and the person was chosen randomly. I think; it's been eons since I read it.
Of course, then some refugees from Earth show up and all hell breaks loose...
In theory, he could be eligible to run for President in the (very unlikely) event that wherever he was born in Mexico was ever annexed by the United States. That's where the "14 years" clause in the qualifications for office comes in. I don't know how exactly the interpretation would come down on that if it were ever litigated, though I suspect for reasons of expediency (if nothing else) any citizen of the former sovereign would be considered a natural-born U.S. citizen.
I'll choose a different horse to beat with this post...;-)
Seriously, most of the accounts I've read of what LinuxOne is planning indicate that they're going for the Asian market, particularly the Chinese community in these countries (i.e. mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, and the overseas Chinese elsewhere). If RH is ratcheting up their efforts in this area, will LinuxOne have a decent shot at establishing a market? Will being run by ethnic Chinese help LinuxOne's "China cred" enough to overcome the "Red Hat is Linux" impression out there?
VA basically has done their own distribution in conjunction with O'Reilly and SGI; a lightly-customized Debian (basically a revamp of 2.1r3 with the most egregious bugs corrected and updated "boot floppies" for CardBus laptops and the like). It may include the 2.2 kernel as well; I haven't bothered to boot the CD-ROM yet.
In reviews of their other systems, I've read that they provided a custom version of Red Hat too. I think in that case, the main difference was in the kernel (tuning for the particular configuration, no doubt). But there may have been other changes too...
Re:WHEN is the stock going to start going public??
on
VA Reprices Again
·
· Score: 2
The word from CNBC (in my xawtv window) is that LNUX goes public at 12:40 Eastern. The anchor (Sue Herera) just said (@12:28 ET) that "this is shaping up to be the biggest IPO ever."
(Disclaimer: I have been allocated 140 shares. Hence my interest...)
Underwriting vs Investment Banking
on
VA Reprices Again
·
· Score: 2
E*Trade probably got its share allocation via its partner E*Offering, which is an investment bank.
AFAIK E*Trade has nothing to do with the underwriting; it's just buying a hunk of shares as an investment (and passing some on to its customers [mainly those "Power E*Trade" people] at the IPO price as a perk).
Here's E*Offering's page on the VA Linux IPO. Nowhere under "Underwriters" will you see the name "E*Trade" or "E*Offering".
Slashdot Mirror
If this is for real, Jon probably has a good case before the European Court for Human Rights. For starters, it appears his incarceration would violate Article 10 of the ECHR, which provides for freedom of expression (even though its "exceptions" are wide enough to drive a train through).
For 33 cents, you can put a letter in a box out in front of your house. A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, take it to the airport, fly it to anywhere in north america, and drive it to the recipients house. For 33 cents.
Actually, it's more like: A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, stick it in a big sorting machine, put it on a series of trucks (unless it's Priority or Express mail or going to Alaska/Hawaii or it just happens to end up on a plane), and drive it to somewhere near the recipient's house, for 33 cents if and only if it weighs less than an ounce.
I say "somewhere near" because at least 25% of the time I receive mail for one of my neighbors.
OTOH, UPS has this annoying habit of shipping ground packages from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi via Philadelphia (yes, the one in Pennsylvania), on an apparently-regular basis. FedEx seems to actually know it's ass from a hole in the ground, but you pay through the nose for it. Maybe RPS (now FedEx Ground) can extend their cluefulness into ground package delivery.
But, to get back on target, isn't anyone else concerned about the privacy implications of giving out your snail-mail address on the internet? Unless your address is going to be mangled by a one-way hash function (whcih seems to defeat the purpose), I'd be leery about associating my physical address with an email.
I can hardly wait for the MPAA to try to go after a legitimate site (sorry, I don't think 2600 counts) or company. For example, VA Linux Systems hosts DiBona.com, which posts a copy of the DeCSS code, yet oddly enough VA hasn't been a defendant yet. Who cares about VA taking over SGI? I'd rather see them sue the pants off the MPAA; maybe they'd give up Disney to settle ;-).
While they're at it, I'd like to see them sue Sima, who market this neat little gadget that defeats Macrovision I and II (save cash by getting it from these guys). It also cleans up the picture my DVD player puts out (tip: use the S-Video inputs whether or not you use S-Video for output; this stops you from using the bypass switch if you use the composite out, but that's a small sacrifice). Let's all watch the MPAA get laughed straight out of court when they go after people who have nothing to do with the WaReZ culture...
(I'd also like them to sue someone who's running for Congress and who's posted several links that apparently violate the DMCA. Bring it on, MPAA; I could use the free publicity...)
This item from the FAQ really worries me.
.info, AmigaWorld, and Commodore Magazine. I think RUN did it too...
"Q: Will Be continue to update BeOS?
A: Yes, we plan on continuing to develop and release new versions of BeOS."
Yes, it's the official Commodore Kiss of Death; named for Commodore and Amiga magazines' habit of running an editorial saying "We're here to stay" and then folding before printing another issue. Examples include:
Maybe the Linux/m68k for Mac people have been living in a parallel universe or something, because Apple has shown itself highly uncooperative with people trying to port Linux to their hardware.
I find their experience highly inconsistent with Apple's recent lip service to open source. So which is it?
Minor problem: the story is ineligible for this award, since it was posted in 1998.
./ standards. Usually, there's only one blatant factual error in the story ;-). (Shame, too, since I did agree with sengan's central thesis.)
But I agree, it is Slashdot writ small. OTOH, the article quality demonstrated there was really low, relative to "typical"
Here's a link to the most recent version of the bill.
./ers.
I can't make heads or tails about what this guy is complaining about. Probably black helicopters are involved, somehow...
Section 303, requesting an investigation of business model patents, is probably of the most interest to
- RHAT
- LNUX
- LINX
Bear in mind that all prospectuses will be similar in form; however, they should not (normally) be word-for-word copies.Here's a way to make a cheap buck off the clueless Wall Street types who haven't gotten the message yet (but will as soon as an analyst comes out with a fifty cent price target):
;-)); better yet, donate it to SPI or the FSF.
On the day of the IPO, when its price rises to ridiculous levels, short sell it. About a week later, once everyone else's figured out how stupid this company is, buy to cover. Invest the proceeds in SGI, Cobalt, VA Linux, or Red Hat (or if you feel really suicidal, CORL... all the price volatility of an IPO in an established company
Repeat when the next LINX comes down the pike.
Having done a bit of tech support myself, I suspect 90% of users who call are clueless for the reason they don't read the documentation and then expect the thing to work.
Let's illustrate from an example from consumer electronics: setting the time on your VCR. Any half-competent geek will figure out it's under the menus somewhere (since you've probably been roped into setting the time for friends, family, and people who've flagged you down when driving past on the interstate). For everyone else, that's why they pay some poor people to write a manual in really simplified English and 6 other languages. Most of the manuals written since the 1980s actually make sense. Even my mother (no technical genious) can set the clock and set programs on several different brands of VCR... because she has the good sense to read the books in the first place.
I think Illiad is making fun of the mentality that you can just open the box and it will do everything on its own. Maybe the Internet makes people think they don't have to read the book... I dunno. I don't analyze most of it.
But I do know UF is funny. Besides which, many of the strips have nothing to do with users... they deal with the boneheadedness of the computer industry, or corporate culture in general. And then there are the dust puppy plots...
I'm pretty sure she was the main female on Monty Python; see her Everything entry. You can also see her filmography at IMDB.
LWN (the source of this story, uncredited as per the norm on Slashdot) has a fairly consistent habit of presenting the original email it received, pretty much unchanged. That means whatever .sig you attach ends up in the email.
I don't know why they have this policy, but I doubt it was a conscious effort by ESR to put the "propoganda" (as you put it) in an article about the DVD CCA.
Anyway, it's debatable that the mere presentation of statistics is propoganda. It's up to you to interpret them however you like.
In fairness, I think Tobin et al. are aware of the problems; the main issue is that it is tough to find people with Linux expertise in Oxford, Mississippi, and once you find them it's hard to keep them on at $10/hr doing tech reviews. Another problem: writing readable technical books is hard. Probably 30 people, including me, read Running Linux (3rd ed) before it was published, and I'm sure some stuff still slipped through the cracks. Sair maybe had 3 people qualified to do that when I was there, hence the issues identified here...
I severely doubt it; on issues of already-commercialized segments of the spectrum (i.e. everything except Ham), the FCC is in bed with the big corporations that own the spectrum (and don't want competitors). For starters, try this article from Reason.
Chris DiBona (better known to CNN reporters as "DiBona.com") has put up a page reporting on the hearing. Not much you don't see elsewhere, but some of the comments are priceless.
My favorite:
Probably the best part was when they did "Big lawyer fu" and tried to make it seem like unless they acted now, more and more people would take the code and put it on their sites. And that a TRO would stop it. Which, if you were a bunny rabbit who had been eating carrots in a salt mine for a decade and hadn't ever seen much less used a mouse, would make sense. But I mean -jeez- the judge had obviously seen that mahir guys web site or something, because his eventual ruling to quash the TRO showed he understood the velocity of information on the net.
Ah yes, the juxtaposition of the DVD crack and Mahir. Don't think too much about it, you might get sick at your stomach...
Alien allows you to convert Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg.
It can also convert into Slackware, Red Hat, and Stampede packages.
alien will try to include as many of the dependencies it can grok from the RPM, so it will protect you a little better than using "raw" rpm. The maintainer, Joey Hess, did a great job here... it's not often needed, but when it is, it can be a lifesaver.
I think you're confusing the definitions of "unstable" here. The unstable distribution is "unstable" because it changes (i.e. is the oppposite of "stable", which is something that doesn't change). That does not mean it is "unstable" as in every program will provide a blue screen of death every third time you try to run it.
Since no distribution but Debian has a continuously-updated (i.e. unstable) pre-release, you can think of unstable as "all the cool neat new stuff those darned Open Source developers can put together"; stable is "all the cool neat stuff that we were sure would play nicely because people have been trying it for months and it's boffo, dude." Or something like that...
I know potato closes a lot more ports by default... most udp services are disabled by inetd by default, for example. Also, the r* servers are separate packages now, so those ports won't be open unless you install them, and ssh will disable rsh and pals by default.
3. Has nothing to gain from being President. This probably precludes anyone who actually wants to be President. If you want to be President, you're probably not qualified.
Reminds me of an Arthur C. Clarke novel I once read ("Children of a Distant Sun" or somesuch). The colony had a constitution that basically forbade anyone who wanted to be the leader from doing it, and the person was chosen randomly. I think; it's been eons since I read it.
Of course, then some refugees from Earth show up and all hell breaks loose...
In theory, he could be eligible to run for President in the (very unlikely) event that wherever he was born in Mexico was ever annexed by the United States. That's where the "14 years" clause in the qualifications for office comes in. I don't know how exactly the interpretation would come down on that if it were ever litigated, though I suspect for reasons of expediency (if nothing else) any citizen of the former sovereign would be considered a natural-born U.S. citizen.
I believe the current release manager's preference is to use names of flavors of ice cream for releases after woody (2.3?).
I'll choose a different horse to beat with this post... ;-)
Seriously, most of the accounts I've read of what LinuxOne is planning indicate that they're going for the Asian market, particularly the Chinese community in these countries (i.e. mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, and the overseas Chinese elsewhere). If RH is ratcheting up their efforts in this area, will LinuxOne have a decent shot at establishing a market? Will being run by ethnic Chinese help LinuxOne's "China cred" enough to overcome the "Red Hat is Linux" impression out there?
VA basically has done their own distribution in conjunction with O'Reilly and SGI; a lightly-customized Debian (basically a revamp of 2.1r3 with the most egregious bugs corrected and updated "boot floppies" for CardBus laptops and the like). It may include the 2.2 kernel as well; I haven't bothered to boot the CD-ROM yet.
In reviews of their other systems, I've read that they provided a custom version of Red Hat too. I think in that case, the main difference was in the kernel (tuning for the particular configuration, no doubt). But there may have been other changes too...
The word from CNBC (in my xawtv window) is that LNUX goes public at 12:40 Eastern. The anchor (Sue Herera) just said (@12:28 ET) that "this is shaping up to be the biggest IPO ever."
(Disclaimer: I have been allocated 140 shares. Hence my interest...)
E*Trade probably got its share allocation via its partner E*Offering, which is an investment bank.
AFAIK E*Trade has nothing to do with the underwriting; it's just buying a hunk of shares as an investment (and passing some on to its customers [mainly those "Power E*Trade" people] at the IPO price as a perk).
Here's E*Offering's page on the VA Linux IPO. Nowhere under "Underwriters" will you see the name "E*Trade" or "E*Offering".