You know, that's not entirely out of the question. This guy stole a hard drive with personal information on it for his "personal use at home". (The referenced article doesn't say that, but I remember reading the results of the investigation and court case in the paper at that time.) He didn't want the data on it at all, just the hardware.
I used to have my fax number on my business's webpage (along with the other address information and whatnot). I started receiving a ridiculous number of junk faxes. I then took my fax number off of my webpage and about a year later (i.e. now) I receive maybe one junk fax every two months.
Even if you own all of a private company - if it does not grow then you don't have too many options as to how to run it.
Eh? How so?
I own my own small business and it's been about the same size and doing about the same thing for the past fifteen years, and will continue to be about the same for the next fifty years (or at least I hope it does.)
I do what I want to do, when I want to do it. And I get to make a living doing what I like to do.
How does that translate to a lack of control?
I think you have been listening to too many get-rich-fast people. Try something like The Wealthy Barber instead, as a change of perspective.
You are trying extremely hard to find reasons not to release your program on Linux. This is, of course, your perogative.
However, I can't help but get the feeling that if you put a portion of that effort into finding a way to release your program on Linux, you would find a way to do so.
"It can't be done" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously, it can be done if you really, really want to. If you really, really don't want to, then it can't.
Standard API calls to GTK won't change much, if at all, for quite some time. And if they do, a simple re-compile for the new version will fix it; by then you will probably have a new and updated version of your software to release anyway. If you are seriously concerned about future API breakage (I doubt it, frankly) you may want to consider using Lesstif instead of GTK. Lesstif is also LGPL, but it is very mature and rock-solid. As I said, I would be rather surprised if GTK changed its standard API's; I would be absolutely shocked if Lesstif did so.
I don't want to sound harsh, but your point about problems with dynamic linking is an excuse, not a reason.
Again, you're within your rights and I won't pretend to tell you what to do. But please don't pretend to be willing to do something that you're not actually prepared to follow through with on a reasonable basis; it's a waste of both your time and everyone else's. Really.
This is a more confrontational tone than I intended to take, but I hope you will consider what I say and not be offended by the way that I have expressed it. I have done the best that I can.
Get a standard GUI layer that all desk/lap/tablet-top distributions carry (just as they do xwindows), unencumbered by licensing terms that in any way require that we release our IP to the community, free, and I'd be able to authorize release of a port that won't step on anyone's toes, incur any hidden liabilities, or cost anyone any more money. Obviously, we've spent a lot of money on our application development, but I consider that a fair trade for years of use of apache and perl and python and so forth.
It really sounds to me that what you want is GTK.
GTK applications run on KDE desktops just fine, and the vast, vast majority of Linux desktops include the GTK libraries that are required to do that simply because a lot of GTK applications exist that folks want to run on both Gnome and KDE.
GTK is LGPL, so you can compile and release proprietary applications using that without any requirement to release your source code, if that is your choice.
Your system administrator installs the software for you and you call the IT department if you need more than what's currently available, or if you have a problem.
Many businesses would be a lot better off if they followed this computing model (viruses, incompatible software); even your grandmother would be better off with this model.
Hotmail is a problem. I do computer work for a company that puts out a "free classified ads" paper. (Sell the paper, give away the classified ads is the business model.) I set up an automated online subscription service for them a while back so people can subscribe and pay through their website and then read the weekly paper online. Subscribers who use a hotmail address never receive the reply email that advises them of their password after they have paid.
I suspect it's because the domain name contains the word "bargain" and the email talks about things like "Be the first to get the deals" and so on.
It's a nuisance as the company gets new subscribers calling to ask why they didn't get their password like it says they should on the website. I put a special note to hotmail users on the site to explain, but of course nobody reads that.
Does anyone know how to get globally whitelisted on hotmail? That domain has never sent spam (I know becaus I run the mailserver) and the folks who aren't receiving the emailed passwords obviously want to receive them because they have paid $75 for them.
Fax? I used to get letters in the mail from Nigeria in the mid-80's. They stopped after the email thing got going, but to my great surprise I got another letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago. First one in fifteen years or so.
Maybe the email thing isn't paying off as well as it once did, so they are back to sending letters, hoping to find a new audience?
The C64 used several copy protection schemes. Many of them involved bad or weak sectors on the disk. Some of the simpler schemes just put an error on a sector and forced the drive to attempt to read that sector. If the error was returned, the program ran.
The simplest one that I ever saw was when they put a bad track on the disk, but didn't actually have the program refer to it. If you tried copying the complete disk, it would error out. If you just copied the prg file from one disk to another, it was fine. (This was in the very early days of the C64.)
I head a rumour (but never actually saw) about floppy disks that had a hole punched in them. Theoretically, the program never sent the drive head to that track; if your drive head went to the track it would fall into the hole and be torn off. I never understood how they could guarantee that my drive head wouldn't be at that track before I attempted to load the program, though.
It depends where you are. Every Canadian province has laws regarding film and video classification, with penalties for non-compliance (including exhibition, sale or rental of "unclassified" materials.)
That is extremely interesting, indeed. Thank you for a very enlightening explanation.
One further question: How do you assign internal IP addresses in that situation?
For example, if I have a common router (Dlink or whatever), it will assign internal addresses from the 192.168.0.x range; I have always taken that to mean 253 users per router (192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.254). How do I get more on the external IP that the first router is talking through? Plug in another router to the existing router and get another 253 users again?
Suppose I write a program that says "Hit ESC to exit." This random tester randomly hits . My program exits. "Gosh, it only ran three seconds before I'm back at a prompt. There must be a bug."
Experts exchange does something almost as bad as huge flashing graphical ads: they show up in google searches for programming questions.
They don't have to. Get http://www.customizegoogle.com/ (yes, another Firefox extension) and tell it to filter Experts Exchange from your search results.
So I did the only thing I could do to return the system to service, and used a Corporate license key that didn't need to be run through Product Activation and would not trip of on WGA.
I wouldn't dream of doing this. If someone has problem with Windows and asks me for help my usual response is that I really don't know too much about Windows. Which is actually true.
Were I in your situation as described, I would be more inclinded to say, "Sorry, you'll have to deal with Microsoft directly on this one." and leave it at that.
Books are a little harder, but as soon as Google Books is cracked there will be little need for anyone to actually do something hard to acquire the text of a book.
Eh? There are all kinds of books of every sort available for download. Text, PDF, Palm format, Sony Reader format, you-name-it. You haven't been looking very hard if you haven't run across them.
I think that it's a lower profile thing than movies, music and the like, becuase there seems to be a smaller market for a major novel than there is for a major motion picture. (Insert comment about what this says about the state of modern society here.)
Just like movies: it only takes one person to crack the copy protection. It takes only one person to scan-and-ocr a book as well.
If I close my eyes really tight and stick my fingers in my ears and yell "Na Na Na Na", I see no prior art at all while I'm hot-footing it to the patent office.
A couple of years ago we tried making a small (32-page) classified ad newspaper with OpenOffice. It worked great with a 28 page paper, but when we got up to 30 pages all kinds of weirdness started. Graphics magically moved from one page to another (even though they were anchored to the page), columns went missing randomly, and a few other things that I don't recall offhand.
We switched to using Scribus to do this job and it was the smartest thing we ever did. Especially now that the paper has grown to 40 pages (some weeks 44).
OpenOffice is great for complex documents under about 30 pages. After that it goes strange. Or at least, it did. This was pre-version 2.0 so things may have changed since then. Scribus is a better tool for the job we have for it to do, anyway, so we don't need to switch back.
It would be interesting if you had a Linux version of that clipart fetcher thing.
I just tried looking at the MS site that you posted but it won't let me past the first page. It tells me that it is checking to see if I have an Office 2007 product installed, and that's the end of the line.
Word runs under Wine? I thought you needed that spend-money-on-the-enhanced-version Wine-derivative to run Word. Or is my information out of date now? (Which wouldn't surprise me, actually, as I have zero intention and very little interest in actually running any MS software under Wine or otherwise.)
They judge just tossed the whole thing out, and then as a bonus, said they were so ridiculously bad, that Kinderstart should have known not to bring such a steaming pile into the courtroom, in the first place.
How does this differ from the SCO case? It appears that this Kinderstart thing was in-and-out within a matter of several months, as no evidence was presented.
No evidence has been presented in SCO yet, either, and it's dragging on for years.
If Spamhaus were worried that any of their people might get served in the US, they could have spent the $10,000 or so to have the suit tossed out on jurisdictional grounds.
Why? I suspect that Spamhaus has better things to spend $10,000 on than a lawyer's bill in another country.
If you were suddenly served with a summons to appear in court in Mogadishu, would you immediately hire a Somali lawyer and send him $10,000 to defend you? Or would you, like most of us, simply say, "Ridiculous!" and toss the paperwork into the trash.
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You know, that's not entirely out of the question. This guy stole a hard drive with personal information on it for his "personal use at home". (The referenced article doesn't say that, but I remember reading the results of the investigation and court case in the paper at that time.) He didn't want the data on it at all, just the hardware.
I used to have my fax number on my business's webpage (along with the other address information and whatnot). I started receiving a ridiculous number of junk faxes. I then took my fax number off of my webpage and about a year later (i.e. now) I receive maybe one junk fax every two months.
author reuse any of their own material in future work... permission to use the tables/figures/whatever, so long as there is proper attribution.
So you would want me to attribute you for my own work?
BOGGLE
Even if you own all of a private company - if it does not grow then you don't have too many options as to how to run it.
Eh? How so?
I own my own small business and it's been about the same size and doing about the same thing for the past fifteen years, and will continue to be about the same for the next fifty years (or at least I hope it does.)
I do what I want to do, when I want to do it. And I get to make a living doing what I like to do.
How does that translate to a lack of control?
I think you have been listening to too many get-rich-fast people. Try something like The Wealthy Barber instead, as a change of perspective.
Of course, no password was ever shared or stolen at that university....
You are trying extremely hard to find reasons not to release your program on Linux. This is, of course, your perogative.
However, I can't help but get the feeling that if you put a portion of that effort into finding a way to release your program on Linux, you would find a way to do so.
"It can't be done" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously, it can be done if you really, really want to. If you really, really don't want to, then it can't.
Standard API calls to GTK won't change much, if at all, for quite some time. And if they do, a simple re-compile for the new version will fix it; by then you will probably have a new and updated version of your software to release anyway. If you are seriously concerned about future API breakage (I doubt it, frankly) you may want to consider using Lesstif instead of GTK. Lesstif is also LGPL, but it is very mature and rock-solid. As I said, I would be rather surprised if GTK changed its standard API's; I would be absolutely shocked if Lesstif did so.
I don't want to sound harsh, but your point about problems with dynamic linking is an excuse, not a reason.
Again, you're within your rights and I won't pretend to tell you what to do. But please don't pretend to be willing to do something that you're not actually prepared to follow through with on a reasonable basis; it's a waste of both your time and everyone else's. Really.
This is a more confrontational tone than I intended to take, but I hope you will consider what I say and not be offended by the way that I have expressed it. I have done the best that I can.
Get a standard GUI layer that all desk/lap/tablet-top distributions carry (just as they do xwindows), unencumbered by licensing terms that in any way require that we release our IP to the community, free, and I'd be able to authorize release of a port that won't step on anyone's toes, incur any hidden liabilities, or cost anyone any more money. Obviously, we've spent a lot of money on our application development, but I consider that a fair trade for years of use of apache and perl and python and so forth.
It really sounds to me that what you want is GTK.
GTK applications run on KDE desktops just fine, and the vast, vast majority of Linux desktops include the GTK libraries that are required to do that simply because a lot of GTK applications exist that folks want to run on both Gnome and KDE.
GTK is LGPL, so you can compile and release proprietary applications using that without any requirement to release your source code, if that is your choice.
Your system administrator installs the software for you and you call the IT department if you need more than what's currently available, or if you have a problem.
Many businesses would be a lot better off if they followed this computing model (viruses, incompatible software); even your grandmother would be better off with this model.
How do these handle cold weather?
Batteries tend to go dead in -40 degree weather, so if you're locking an unheated shed in the winter, where do those things get their power?
In fact, I wonder if they work at all in extreme cold, even if they are locking a heated building.
Hotmail is a problem. I do computer work for a company that puts out a "free classified ads" paper. (Sell the paper, give away the classified ads is the business model.) I set up an automated online subscription service for them a while back so people can subscribe and pay through their website and then read the weekly paper online. Subscribers who use a hotmail address never receive the reply email that advises them of their password after they have paid.
I suspect it's because the domain name contains the word "bargain" and the email talks about things like "Be the first to get the deals" and so on.
It's a nuisance as the company gets new subscribers calling to ask why they didn't get their password like it says they should on the website. I put a special note to hotmail users on the site to explain, but of course nobody reads that.
Does anyone know how to get globally whitelisted on hotmail? That domain has never sent spam (I know becaus I run the mailserver) and the folks who aren't receiving the emailed passwords obviously want to receive them because they have paid $75 for them.
Fax? I used to get letters in the mail from Nigeria in the mid-80's. They stopped after the email thing got going, but to my great surprise I got another letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago. First one in fifteen years or so.
Maybe the email thing isn't paying off as well as it once did, so they are back to sending letters, hoping to find a new audience?
The C64 used several copy protection schemes. Many of them involved bad or weak sectors on the disk. Some of the simpler schemes just put an error on a sector and forced the drive to attempt to read that sector. If the error was returned, the program ran.
The simplest one that I ever saw was when they put a bad track on the disk, but didn't actually have the program refer to it. If you tried copying the complete disk, it would error out. If you just copied the prg file from one disk to another, it was fine. (This was in the very early days of the C64.)
I head a rumour (but never actually saw) about floppy disks that had a hole punched in them. Theoretically, the program never sent the drive head to that track; if your drive head went to the track it would fall into the hole and be torn off. I never understood how they could guarantee that my drive head wouldn't be at that track before I attempted to load the program, though.
It depends where you are. Every Canadian province has laws regarding film and video classification, with penalties for non-compliance (including exhibition, sale or rental of "unclassified" materials.)
That is extremely interesting, indeed. Thank you for a very enlightening explanation.
One further question: How do you assign internal IP addresses in that situation?
For example, if I have a common router (Dlink or whatever), it will assign internal addresses from the 192.168.0.x range; I have always taken that to mean 253 users per router (192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.254). How do I get more on the external IP that the first router is talking through? Plug in another router to the existing router and get another 253 users again?
There must be more to it than that, though.
Suppose I write a program that says "Hit ESC to exit." This random tester randomly hits . My program exits. "Gosh, it only ran three seconds before I'm back at a prompt. There must be a bug."
??
I never really understood why someone would name a company after a large hole in the ground...
Experts exchange does something almost as bad as huge flashing graphical ads: they show up in google searches for programming questions.
They don't have to. Get http://www.customizegoogle.com/ (yes, another Firefox extension) and tell it to filter Experts Exchange from your search results.
So I did the only thing I could do to return the system to service, and used a Corporate license key that didn't need to be run through Product Activation and would not trip of on WGA.
I wouldn't dream of doing this. If someone has problem with Windows and asks me for help my usual response is that I really don't know too much about Windows. Which is actually true.
Were I in your situation as described, I would be more inclinded to say, "Sorry, you'll have to deal with Microsoft directly on this one." and leave it at that.
Books are a little harder, but as soon as Google Books is cracked there will be little need for anyone to actually do something hard to acquire the text of a book.
Eh? There are all kinds of books of every sort available for download. Text, PDF, Palm format, Sony Reader format, you-name-it. You haven't been looking very hard if you haven't run across them.
I think that it's a lower profile thing than movies, music and the like, becuase there seems to be a smaller market for a major novel than there is for a major motion picture. (Insert comment about what this says about the state of modern society here.)
Just like movies: it only takes one person to crack the copy protection. It takes only one person to scan-and-ocr a book as well.
If I close my eyes really tight and stick my fingers in my ears and yell "Na Na Na Na", I see no prior art at all while I'm hot-footing it to the patent office.
A couple of years ago we tried making a small (32-page) classified ad newspaper with OpenOffice. It worked great with a 28 page paper, but when we got up to 30 pages all kinds of weirdness started. Graphics magically moved from one page to another (even though they were anchored to the page), columns went missing randomly, and a few other things that I don't recall offhand.
We switched to using Scribus to do this job and it was the smartest thing we ever did. Especially now that the paper has grown to 40 pages (some weeks 44).
OpenOffice is great for complex documents under about 30 pages. After that it goes strange. Or at least, it did. This was pre-version 2.0 so things may have changed since then. Scribus is a better tool for the job we have for it to do, anyway, so we don't need to switch back.
It would be interesting if you had a Linux version of that clipart fetcher thing.
I just tried looking at the MS site that you posted but it won't let me past the first page. It tells me that it is checking to see if I have an Office 2007 product installed, and that's the end of the line.
Word runs under Wine? I thought you needed that spend-money-on-the-enhanced-version Wine-derivative to run Word. Or is my information out of date now? (Which wouldn't surprise me, actually, as I have zero intention and very little interest in actually running any MS software under Wine or otherwise.)
They judge just tossed the whole thing out, and then as a bonus, said they were so ridiculously bad, that Kinderstart should have known not to bring such a steaming pile into the courtroom, in the first place.
How does this differ from the SCO case? It appears that this Kinderstart thing was in-and-out within a matter of several months, as no evidence was presented.
No evidence has been presented in SCO yet, either, and it's dragging on for years.
Does SCO just have better lawyers than this lot?
If Spamhaus were worried that any of their people might get served in the US, they could have spent the $10,000 or so to have the suit tossed out on jurisdictional grounds.
Why? I suspect that Spamhaus has better things to spend $10,000 on than a lawyer's bill in another country.
If you were suddenly served with a summons to appear in court in Mogadishu, would you immediately hire a Somali lawyer and send him $10,000 to defend you? Or would you, like most of us, simply say, "Ridiculous!" and toss the paperwork into the trash.