I wasn't singing the praises of Access except that one can pop in a CD and get busy. There are no turn-key solutions like that available in the OSS world yet.
Although PostgreSQL combined with pgaccess (GTK based) is looking promising. I didn't pursue that too far, but its initial interface is basically MS Access.
It worked fairly well. I was always able to get the information out of the documents. Only formatting was ever broken. Unfortunately that's not always good enough.
Somebody's responded already regarding compatibility concerns, and as they indicated, judging by the ability to read Word documents really isn't an appropriate comparison (even though OpenOffice is extremely impressive in this regard - are there any commercial word processors other than Word that do a better job?).
As far as functionality is concerned, OpenOffice 1.1 is definitely good enough to compete side by side with MS Word. I have some pretty complex needs in my documents, including some reasonably hairy macros attached to the toolbars. I originally implemented these in MS Word.
When I switched to Linux, I thought, there was no way OpenOffice would be able to deal with all this. I was wrong. OpenOffice dealt with the lot. Although I had to rewrite the macros(*), it dealt with all of my complex needs and I was able to produce documents in the 150-200 page range just as easily as I had under Windows - and without the GPFs and reboots I had under Windows all the time that made it so frustrating.
(*) As for the macros, the downloadable book Useful Macro Information For OpenOffice, by Andrew Pitonyak, cannot be praised enough. Using this book you can be writing OpenOffice macros like a pro within hours.
If the US can't even effectively kill spam inside its own borders...
Not "can't"... "won't".
The US is pretty much on its own sticking with the discredited opt-out approach. The reset of the world is going opt-in. It's not even a question anymore outside the US. If you're going to have a spam law (and you are), you go opt-in.
The US is literally set to become the sleazy spam haven that Americans like to say the spammers will run to if the US bans spam.
their security has come more from the fact that it's convenient to have neutral ground during a conflict than from any real military capacity they have
Actually, their security comes from a treaty (actually a couple of them) involving basically the whole of Europe that was entered into after the defeat of Napoleon. The treaty made Switzerland permanently neutral. No other country in the region is willing to attack Switzerland because every other country in the region is basically obliged to descend on the attacker like a plague of locusts.
Unsurprisingly, the Swiss like it that way.
Aside from that, the terrain is just not much fun for an attacking army.
that building is the ugliest thing imaginable to begin with
Which particular of that conglomerate of architectural monstrosities is it? I haven't seen such hideous structures since the building housing the architecture faculty at the first university I attended.
I have had quite a bit of interaction with mormons in my life and they have largly been well meaning honest individuals who seemed no more delusioned then you or I (assuming you are not delusional.)
Well, given their behavior vs IBM, they *might* well do so, I agree. Of course, their less-than-spectacular success in that endeavor, plus the case law IBM is already citing that one cannot do exactly that thing, lead one to suppose they won't be much more successful here, either.
If they try the same crap in these two lawsuits, they're likely to have somebody turn around and have SCO declared a vexatious litigant. This will severely cramp McBride's preferred management strategy - they won't just be able to sue anybody at the drop of a hat anymore, since they'll have to get approval from the court for any law suit.
So? They paid for the original licenses, they can do anything the want with the libraries except re-sell them or reverse engineer them with an intent to reveal the information for profit.
Er, no.
Anything involving copying needs a license. The license they paid for only includes so much copying as is necessary for the license to be effective, and that which is given under the copyright laws. That basically means it allows loading and using the operating system in the normal way, and perhaps making backup copies. It does not allow them to copy the files wherever they please.
If they copied the shared libraries to a Linux system (it seems they didn't, and SCO's case is at best speculative and deserving of summary dismissal), they would be doing so without a licence, and have breached copyright.
Even if they did do this, however, SCO would have to show damage. If these were existing SCO systems that were converted to Linux, they're going to have a hard time showing damage, since they can't point to an alternative scenario in which they would have had more money. It's only if there were additional machines put in place that they'd have a case for damages. Of course they may be seeking other remedies which don't require a showing of damages.
If the interface is as flexible as they claim, they really should do some interface-templates.
My view of the interface is that it's not so much that the interface is flexible, but that they've broken each thing that would be a single feature in other graphics programs into multiple sub-features. The result is that to draw a box, you have to go through a a bunch of steps to do what would be one step in another interface. But you can also combine the sub-steps in different ways to do something different.
This makes technical sense to programmers, but it's insane for a user interface. What it needs is a mechanism for providing an interface to reassemble the sub-features back into the one-step feature you can find in other interfaces. This is closely related to your suggestion, and would be one step in implementing it.
I shouldn't have to select a box area, use fill, and deselect or merge layers to draw a damned box (or worse if I want a border around the box). I should be able to click on the "box" tool, mouse-down for the start point, drag, mouse-down for the end point, and be done with it.
Even other drawing applications that use layers allow for this, and then allow you to customise the appearance of the box later.
I have yet to see a Linux graphical desktop that does not have multiple virtual desktops all over the place. Assign one to the GIMP, and use it for nothing else. The clutter problem is solved.
Not really. I find using multiple desktops for this much clumsier than the MDI capability of Windows. In fact I tried multiple desktops in Windows years before switching to Linux and after about 6 months found the whole capability annoying. The only reason I use multiple desktops under Linux is because so many applications have been written in such a way (may windows popping up in an unstructured and independent way) that there is no viable alternative.
I don't get this insistence that you find among Linux GUI developers that "multiple desktops" enables you to do everything that some other alternative window management strategy allows you to do. It doesn't, unless you look at it on a massively over-simplified level. Different window management strategies have different strengths and weaknesses, and some people find one strength or weakness better than others.
But the greatest weakness is forcing a particular desktop management strategy on other people when it may well not be the best for them.
Not that I expect anything else - the "multiple desktops roolz" camp is a fundamentalist religion, not open to rational discussion.
However, since the majority of spammers are Americans in the United States, an American law that has the right form and the right enforcement should be able to dramatically reduce spam. Unfortunately, the US has neither.
Actually, the spammer is right. Their email cannot be considered SPAM. SPAM may be full of pig lips and pig arse, but email messages aren't one of its ingredients. Nor can I see how an email message can be fashioned out of this tinned meat product.
On the other hand, their message is quite clearly "spam", regardless of their delusions about the effect of the law.
It is hard to shut down a worldwide, decenteralized group of people in a single country!
Since most spammers are Americans in the United States anyway, your statement appears to be -5 irrelevant.
However, the conclusion that CAN SPAM won't stop spam is in the "well, duh" category. Gee, who'd have thought that a law that didn't ban spam wouldn't stop it?
Ignorance rarely is a valid defence in the eyes of the law. If you're speeding at 70mph in an area where the speed limit is 50 mph then you not knowing that you were above the speed limit is not a valid defence.
Ignorance of the law is generally no excuse, but ignorance of a fact may be a defence, or reasonable belief in a fact may be a defence, to an offence.
In the original poster's example, knowledge of the contents of the file is a material part of the offence of copyright infringement, and downloading without that knowledge will not constitute the crime.
In your example of speed limits, the speed law is the law, and the speed limit on any section of road is a fact. If you are mistaken about the speed limit on the section of road, then what happens may vary based on jurisdiction. In Australia, for example, provided your mistake about the speed limit is a reasonable mistake (for example, if a downward change speed sign was obscured and the speed limit wasn't painted on the road, and you don't normally drive that stretch), then this is a reasonable mistake and there's no offence if you're going at the speed limit on the prior stretch.
On the other hand, copyright violations are both an offence, and give rise to civil liability. Knowledge may well be no element of civil liability - normally the case with copyright. In that case, you can be civilly liable whenever you profit from a breach of copyright, or cause damage to the copyright holder by such a breach. Neither of these are the case where there was inadvertent downloading.
You are reviewing a patch... you suspect that it is code taken from a closed-source project... you immediately delete all copies of this patch... How liable are you?
Well the good news is there's no criminal liability whatsoever (no intent).
The really good news is there's no civil liability either. The reason is that to have civil liability for a breach of copyright there has to be (in addition to the breach) one of two things: (1) profit (to you); or (2) damage (to the copyright holder). If you intentionally copy for personal use, courts will infer damage in the amount of the profits the copyright holder would have made if you had purchased. That inference is not available for unwitting copying, so there's no damage.
The difficulty arises if you don't detect the bad code. If you distribute it, it's possible to cause damage, for which you could be liable even though you didn't know of the problem. Of course on the copyright holder discovering this, they would need to notify you of the specific infringing code so as to allow you to remove it - failure to do so would result in them being estopped from claiming damages for subsequent losses.
It sounds like you are saying that there are some instances where you can read copyrighted source code and still write your own code for a similar project and be legally safe. But in this instance simply having a copy of microsoft's code without signing their NDA first is a breach of copyright and would put a person at risk. Is this correct?
This is correct, but they're different risks.
If you look at code, and make use of the knowledge you find it, then if you have sufficiently strong knowledge of copyright law you can avoid your new code being subjected to copyright problems.
However, if you don't have a license to the source code, then making a copy is itself an infringement. That includes downloading it. The consequences aren't normally as serious as putting somebody else's stuff in your code, but you can still get sued. You might also be required to disgorge any profit you make that flows from the infringement.
Now a third scenario - say you know somebody who has a copy. They've breached copyright by doing that. But say they have loaded it in any one of the many editors that retains the source code in memory. If you peruse the file in that editor, you will not be doing anything illegal. If you have sufficient knowledge of copyright law you can make use of knowledge discovered by this means. And then Microsoft couldn't touch you (they could try a trade secret claim, but if the story is true then the trade secret would basically be gone).
Do NOT read that code if you ever wish to program for an open source OS, ever...
Of course those of us who are also lawyers can safely read other peoples' code, because we know exactly what to do to avoid infringing. It is possible to extract knowledge from the code without breaching copyright, but...
Getting a copy of the code at all is a breach of copyright.
To translate: AT&T doesn't own those derivative works -- they're simply restricting licensees' ability to distribute derivative works.
However, to be a derivative work for the purposes of copyright law, the work must contain a "substantial part" (in terms of substance, not quantity) of the prior work. SCO doesn't even pretend that the parts they are disputing with IBM would meet this description - they're trying to claim that if you developed it to attach to the UNIX kernel, it's a derivative work. The law simply doesn't work that way - SCO's position is laughably untenable.
I don't know if you've been inside one, but it turns out corporations are made up of people.
What the OP was referring to, of course, was for-profit corporations, and therein lies the problem. A profit purpose appeals to the basest of motivational factors - greed. It is likely that the greedier a person is, the more power they will wind up with in a corporation. And if greed is their primary driver, there is more chance of them (and hence the corporation) doing something sleazy, unethical, destructive or even illegal, than if their primary motive were, for example, altruism.
As soon as geeks can get organised enough to tell VeriSign and ICANN to take a long walk off a short pier and set up a replacement root registry. VeriSign only has a contract with ICANN, and despite the involvement of the USDoC, ICANN has authority to manage this only for as long as system administrators around the world will tolerate it. If they were to collect together to designate a new root, then the new root could be operational tomorrow (or near enough to tomorrow).
The VeriSign database isn't even protected by copyright in the United States because it's a mechanical compilation of facts (Feist), but even if it were, if enough registrars were to give their data over to the new registry, the rest would have to (otherwise registration through the rest would be of lower value), and presto, no more need for the VeriSign roots.
This threat to reintroduce SiteFinder should be more than enough to give momentum to such a move.
My uncle happens to be a significant (Australian) beef producer, and when speaking to him a couple of days ago, he seemed quite optimistic about the FTA. I wonder if he still is today.
Don't hold us in suspense - ask him and let us know.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, the rest of the world has already moderated GWB -6billion "Scary".
Although PostgreSQL combined with pgaccess (GTK based) is looking promising. I didn't pursue that too far, but its initial interface is basically MS Access.
Somebody's responded already regarding compatibility concerns, and as they indicated, judging by the ability to read Word documents really isn't an appropriate comparison (even though OpenOffice is extremely impressive in this regard - are there any commercial word processors other than Word that do a better job?).
As far as functionality is concerned, OpenOffice 1.1 is definitely good enough to compete side by side with MS Word. I have some pretty complex needs in my documents, including some reasonably hairy macros attached to the toolbars. I originally implemented these in MS Word.
When I switched to Linux, I thought, there was no way OpenOffice would be able to deal with all this. I was wrong. OpenOffice dealt with the lot. Although I had to rewrite the macros(*), it dealt with all of my complex needs and I was able to produce documents in the 150-200 page range just as easily as I had under Windows - and without the GPFs and reboots I had under Windows all the time that made it so frustrating.
(*) As for the macros, the downloadable book Useful Macro Information For OpenOffice, by Andrew Pitonyak, cannot be praised enough. Using this book you can be writing OpenOffice macros like a pro within hours.
Not "can't"... "won't".
The US is pretty much on its own sticking with the discredited opt-out approach. The reset of the world is going opt-in. It's not even a question anymore outside the US. If you're going to have a spam law (and you are), you go opt-in.
The US is literally set to become the sleazy spam haven that Americans like to say the spammers will run to if the US bans spam.
Actually, their security comes from a treaty (actually a couple of them) involving basically the whole of Europe that was entered into after the defeat of Napoleon. The treaty made Switzerland permanently neutral. No other country in the region is willing to attack Switzerland because every other country in the region is basically obliged to descend on the attacker like a plague of locusts.
Unsurprisingly, the Swiss like it that way.
Aside from that, the terrain is just not much fun for an attacking army.
Which particular of that conglomerate of architectural monstrosities is it? I haven't seen such hideous structures since the building housing the architecture faculty at the first university I attended.
Nah - he just had a DNA test and now wants to find his real father.
Sow how do you know you're not delusional?
If they try the same crap in these two lawsuits, they're likely to have somebody turn around and have SCO declared a vexatious litigant. This will severely cramp McBride's preferred management strategy - they won't just be able to sue anybody at the drop of a hat anymore, since they'll have to get approval from the court for any law suit.
Er, no.
Anything involving copying needs a license. The license they paid for only includes so much copying as is necessary for the license to be effective, and that which is given under the copyright laws. That basically means it allows loading and using the operating system in the normal way, and perhaps making backup copies. It does not allow them to copy the files wherever they please.
If they copied the shared libraries to a Linux system (it seems they didn't, and SCO's case is at best speculative and deserving of summary dismissal), they would be doing so without a licence, and have breached copyright.
Even if they did do this, however, SCO would have to show damage. If these were existing SCO systems that were converted to Linux, they're going to have a hard time showing damage, since they can't point to an alternative scenario in which they would have had more money. It's only if there were additional machines put in place that they'd have a case for damages. Of course they may be seeking other remedies which don't require a showing of damages.
My view of the interface is that it's not so much that the interface is flexible, but that they've broken each thing that would be a single feature in other graphics programs into multiple sub-features. The result is that to draw a box, you have to go through a a bunch of steps to do what would be one step in another interface. But you can also combine the sub-steps in different ways to do something different.
This makes technical sense to programmers, but it's insane for a user interface. What it needs is a mechanism for providing an interface to reassemble the sub-features back into the one-step feature you can find in other interfaces. This is closely related to your suggestion, and would be one step in implementing it.
I shouldn't have to select a box area, use fill, and deselect or merge layers to draw a damned box (or worse if I want a border around the box). I should be able to click on the "box" tool, mouse-down for the start point, drag, mouse-down for the end point, and be done with it.
Even other drawing applications that use layers allow for this, and then allow you to customise the appearance of the box later.
Not really. I find using multiple desktops for this much clumsier than the MDI capability of Windows. In fact I tried multiple desktops in Windows years before switching to Linux and after about 6 months found the whole capability annoying. The only reason I use multiple desktops under Linux is because so many applications have been written in such a way (may windows popping up in an unstructured and independent way) that there is no viable alternative.
I don't get this insistence that you find among Linux GUI developers that "multiple desktops" enables you to do everything that some other alternative window management strategy allows you to do. It doesn't, unless you look at it on a massively over-simplified level. Different window management strategies have different strengths and weaknesses, and some people find one strength or weakness better than others.
But the greatest weakness is forcing a particular desktop management strategy on other people when it may well not be the best for them.
Not that I expect anything else - the "multiple desktops roolz" camp is a fundamentalist religion, not open to rational discussion.
It appears that the linked application is no longer available - at least it's not available from the places kde-look says it is.
Well it's a good thing there is an international effort then isn't it?
However, since the majority of spammers are Americans in the United States, an American law that has the right form and the right enforcement should be able to dramatically reduce spam. Unfortunately, the US has neither.
On the other hand, their message is quite clearly "spam", regardless of their delusions about the effect of the law.
Since most spammers are Americans in the United States anyway, your statement appears to be -5 irrelevant.
However, the conclusion that CAN SPAM won't stop spam is in the "well, duh" category. Gee, who'd have thought that a law that didn't ban spam wouldn't stop it?
Ignorance of the law is generally no excuse, but ignorance of a fact may be a defence, or reasonable belief in a fact may be a defence, to an offence.
In the original poster's example, knowledge of the contents of the file is a material part of the offence of copyright infringement, and downloading without that knowledge will not constitute the crime.
In your example of speed limits, the speed law is the law, and the speed limit on any section of road is a fact. If you are mistaken about the speed limit on the section of road, then what happens may vary based on jurisdiction. In Australia, for example, provided your mistake about the speed limit is a reasonable mistake (for example, if a downward change speed sign was obscured and the speed limit wasn't painted on the road, and you don't normally drive that stretch), then this is a reasonable mistake and there's no offence if you're going at the speed limit on the prior stretch.
On the other hand, copyright violations are both an offence, and give rise to civil liability. Knowledge may well be no element of civil liability - normally the case with copyright. In that case, you can be civilly liable whenever you profit from a breach of copyright, or cause damage to the copyright holder by such a breach. Neither of these are the case where there was inadvertent downloading.
Well the good news is there's no criminal liability whatsoever (no intent).
The really good news is there's no civil liability either. The reason is that to have civil liability for a breach of copyright there has to be (in addition to the breach) one of two things: (1) profit (to you); or (2) damage (to the copyright holder). If you intentionally copy for personal use, courts will infer damage in the amount of the profits the copyright holder would have made if you had purchased. That inference is not available for unwitting copying, so there's no damage.
The difficulty arises if you don't detect the bad code. If you distribute it, it's possible to cause damage, for which you could be liable even though you didn't know of the problem. Of course on the copyright holder discovering this, they would need to notify you of the specific infringing code so as to allow you to remove it - failure to do so would result in them being estopped from claiming damages for subsequent losses.
This is correct, but they're different risks.
If you look at code, and make use of the knowledge you find it, then if you have sufficiently strong knowledge of copyright law you can avoid your new code being subjected to copyright problems.
However, if you don't have a license to the source code, then making a copy is itself an infringement. That includes downloading it. The consequences aren't normally as serious as putting somebody else's stuff in your code, but you can still get sued. You might also be required to disgorge any profit you make that flows from the infringement.
Now a third scenario - say you know somebody who has a copy. They've breached copyright by doing that. But say they have loaded it in any one of the many editors that retains the source code in memory. If you peruse the file in that editor, you will not be doing anything illegal. If you have sufficient knowledge of copyright law you can make use of knowledge discovered by this means. And then Microsoft couldn't touch you (they could try a trade secret claim, but if the story is true then the trade secret would basically be gone).
Of course those of us who are also lawyers can safely read other peoples' code, because we know exactly what to do to avoid infringing. It is possible to extract knowledge from the code without breaching copyright, but...
Getting a copy of the code at all is a breach of copyright.
However, to be a derivative work for the purposes of copyright law, the work must contain a "substantial part" (in terms of substance, not quantity) of the prior work. SCO doesn't even pretend that the parts they are disputing with IBM would meet this description - they're trying to claim that if you developed it to attach to the UNIX kernel, it's a derivative work. The law simply doesn't work that way - SCO's position is laughably untenable.
You have obviously mistaken VeriSign executives for people who give a shit.
What the OP was referring to, of course, was for-profit corporations, and therein lies the problem. A profit purpose appeals to the basest of motivational factors - greed. It is likely that the greedier a person is, the more power they will wind up with in a corporation. And if greed is their primary driver, there is more chance of them (and hence the corporation) doing something sleazy, unethical, destructive or even illegal, than if their primary motive were, for example, altruism.
As soon as geeks can get organised enough to tell VeriSign and ICANN to take a long walk off a short pier and set up a replacement root registry. VeriSign only has a contract with ICANN, and despite the involvement of the USDoC, ICANN has authority to manage this only for as long as system administrators around the world will tolerate it. If they were to collect together to designate a new root, then the new root could be operational tomorrow (or near enough to tomorrow).
The VeriSign database isn't even protected by copyright in the United States because it's a mechanical compilation of facts (Feist), but even if it were, if enough registrars were to give their data over to the new registry, the rest would have to (otherwise registration through the rest would be of lower value), and presto, no more need for the VeriSign roots.
This threat to reintroduce SiteFinder should be more than enough to give momentum to such a move.
Don't hold us in suspense - ask him and let us know.