The application, though, is absolutely in use by the client, he just can't see the source code.
The GPL explicitly does not cover use of the software, only distribution. If I allow you to sit at my desk and use my PC, do I then have to give you the source of any GPLed app that you use? If not, then why should it be the case that allowing you to connect to my server and use a GPLed app changes that?
It is use, not distribution. If GPL3 changes that, then it's stepping into the boundary of a usage licence, not a distribution one, and I'm uncomfortable about that.
internet geeks, as soon as screen shots are out... they hammer down servers to look out for the eye candy.
I used Linux exclusively as my desktop OS at work for about 2 years. Then I had to do some MS stuff (C# accessing Active Directory and MS SQL Server) which took a couple of weeks in all, so I was mostly running XP Pro.
I went back to Linux and it just seemed so flat and dull in comparison. What really did it for me in the end was the lack of a drop shadow on the mouse cursor. A tiny, stupid little thing, but it was the final straw. I rebooted to Windows and haven't used Linux at work since. My home install of Linux was wiped during my next upgrade. I installed a couple of different distros on a spare disk I had a while later, but never really used it and so ditched it again.
I've not used Linux (as a desktop OS) for a good couple of years now; before that, I'd been using it at least in a dual-boot config for about 4 years.
Call me shallow, but eye candy matters to me. If I'm going to spend so much of my time every day staring at a monitor, I had better like what I see on it.
If the hospital is drumming up trade with an advertising campaign along the lines of "Don't worry! Do your worst! We'll patch 'em back up!" or by actively harming people, or the pawn shop is advertising weapons with slogans along the lines of "Life was never so cheap" or "We'll supply the ammo, you supply the vengeance" then yes, they should face the consequences. Similarly, if eDonkey was advertised with campaigns along the lines of "Still paying for music? Chump! Download all the Top 10 tunes for free!", it too should face the consequences.
I do agree that this is a worrying precedent though; how long before it's actually illegal to rip legally-owned CDs to mp3 for my iRiver? (Oh wait, I forgot - it technically already is in the UK)
How about offering signed downloads of the frontend as firefox extensions?
And stuff the Opera, Mozilla and IE users. I'm a Firefox user and I'd not support that.
Running script directly from webservers is a security risk preserved for the completely retarded, which is exactly why Java applets never took off
No, applets never took off because of the crappy early implementations of the JVM and incompatibilities between MS's JVM and Sun's one. Java was also a little ahead of its time in terms of resource requirements; it's only recently been the case that low- to mid-end PCs can expect good responsiveness using GUI Java apps.
Windows Vista is embracing the idea of lesser privileges and a `sudo'-like authentication model
I'm not familiar with Vista, but the "Run as..." service has existed since at least Win2k. It is perfectly possible to run as a limited user account and only run those things that absolutely require admin access as an admin account. Some recent installers even make use of the facility to have Windows prompt you for details of an account with admin access.
If your users can't make good decisions, nothing short of a total system lock-down will help.
Which is the point I think the OP was trying to make, and the point that I often try to make - no OS is secure from a rogue user with administrative access. As long as a user can install software system-wide, they can compromise or trash the system. No system is immune from that; yet still we hear Linux and OS X fans describe their system of choice as though it were. They raise the bar, that's all. As and when the more naive computer users make the switch, so will all the problems. Sure, those of us in the know won't fall for them - but then, those of us in the know who use Windows don't fall for them now.
You're not making it any better - I remember our Sony C5 Betamax VCR well. Big silver thing, top-loading (rather than slotting the tape in the front), and the remote control actually had a lead that plugged into a socket in the front of the machine.
I worked on a system used predominately by legal people - lawyers, their secretaries and assistants, etc. This system enforced a password policy that mandated changing passwords every 30 or so days, and prevented the reuse of the previous 5 passwords.
*Every* single user I came in contact with used passwords of the form $password1, $password2, $password3, $password4, $password5, then back to $password1...
Sony's entertainment arm is a media distributor, Sony's electronics arm isn't. I work for a fairly large corporation (not Sony or a competitor), and don't make the mistake of thinking that any large organisation isn't essentially a large collection of smaller organisations. Any one department doesn't necessarily like, support, agree with or even understand or talk to any other department. Yes, there is unity at the top, but that often doesn't filter down as far as you'd expect - sometimes it dies at the boardroom door.
That said, I read recently (ie in the last 7 days) that the entertainment arm has been more or less keeping the electronics arm afloat for a while now, as it's been losing money. Corporate politics would tend to suggest that the electronics arm will do whatever the hell the entertainment arm tells it to.
Money is power, and in the corporate world profitability rules. If Sony Music want DRM, Sony Electronics will supply it.
That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life.
Netscape 3 wiped the floor with IE 3. Netscape 4 wiped the floor with IE 3. IE 4 absolutely shat all over Netscape 4 from a very great height.
Netscape 4 crashed at the drop of a hat. It was a resource hog. It was slow - I remember one deeply nested table test that rendered in a second or two in IE 4 that literally took minutes in Netscape 4. It couldn't resize its window without reloading the page it was displaying from the server. IE 4 was faster, more stable, didn't have to reload the page to resize the window, offered more features for web-app development and was all-round better.
Basically, Netscape Navigator 4.0 sucked big time compared to the competition. Don't get me wrong though, I used it exclusively until Mozilla became a viable alternative - I have never used and will never use IE as my primary browser.
To try to claim that IE won the browser war merely because it was bundled with the OS and people are lazy is at best disingenuous though - it was simply far superior to NN, even at version 4.
As for WiMP, I have to admit I actually quite like it. That's mostly because of the toolbar mode, though. I used to use WinAmp (or XMMS when I ran Linux), but I fell out with that around about version 3. While 5 sucked less, it still sucked. iTunes I simply can't get on with - too big, too clunky.
Other than that, I agree with you - people tend to avoid learning new things unless there's a compelling reason to do so. What people here need to keep in mind is that what's compelling to them (Freedom, access to the source, etc) simply isn't a concern for (some/most) other people.
Why would a Linux user need a 3D graphics card? This kind of card is for people that play video games on Windows.
Actually, a 3d card is for anyone who wants to perform 3d vector operations at a decent rate. The most obvious application of that is 3d graphics, but even that doesn't limit you just to playing games.
You might as well ask why a Linux user would want sound, or high resolution displays, or a GUI...
Its not just for XML and its not just a J language either
Technically, the X in AJAX is XML, while the J is JavaScript, so yes AJAX is just for XML. You can do the same sort of thing using whatever technology you want, of course, but to do AJAX requires:
a browser XML JavaScript
The server can be written in anything you want, as long as it can receive HTTP requests and interpret XML. You're free to implement AJAX-style functionality using whatever collection of technologies and languages you wish, but unless you're using the above three things it's not AJAX. For instance, while you could replace JavaScript with VBScript (in IE), that'd more correctly be called AVAX.
Personally, I think calling AJAX AJAX is stupid, as it leads to the sort of misunderstandings that you seem to have, but I guess most people like to have short, snappy names for things.
Postgres is a worthy RDBMS in its own right, but it's no Oracle. Of course, a lot of people use Oracle's RDBMS when postgres or MySQL would do just as well, but when you need Oracle, you need Oracle, and postgres (currently) just won't do.
Possibly, but you generally represent yourself before that happens.
Hiring a lawyer to represent you in court is advisable but by no means compulsory. In fact, the concept of being innocent until proven guilty means that it's perfectly possible to offer no defence at all, and to merely challenge the plaintiff to prove your guilt. (Note that that's not generally advisable, but it's certainly possible)
It's not that assignments aren't allowed in if statements, but that Java has boolean types. So while a statement like i = 0 does return 0 (as in C), unlike C 0 is not false, it's an int, and so if (0) is a compile time error.
You can still do things like if ((line = in.readLine()) == null) of course
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The application, though, is absolutely in use by the client, he just can't see the source code.
The GPL explicitly does not cover use of the software, only distribution. If I allow you to sit at my desk and use my PC, do I then have to give you the source of any GPLed app that you use? If not, then why should it be the case that allowing you to connect to my server and use a GPLed app changes that?
It is use, not distribution. If GPL3 changes that, then it's stepping into the boundary of a usage licence, not a distribution one, and I'm uncomfortable about that.
internet geeks, as soon as screen shots are out... they hammer down servers to look out for the eye candy.
I used Linux exclusively as my desktop OS at work for about 2 years. Then I had to do some MS stuff (C# accessing Active Directory and MS SQL Server) which took a couple of weeks in all, so I was mostly running XP Pro.
I went back to Linux and it just seemed so flat and dull in comparison. What really did it for me in the end was the lack of a drop shadow on the mouse cursor. A tiny, stupid little thing, but it was the final straw. I rebooted to Windows and haven't used Linux at work since. My home install of Linux was wiped during my next upgrade. I installed a couple of different distros on a spare disk I had a while later, but never really used it and so ditched it again.
I've not used Linux (as a desktop OS) for a good couple of years now; before that, I'd been using it at least in a dual-boot config for about 4 years.
Call me shallow, but eye candy matters to me. If I'm going to spend so much of my time every day staring at a monitor, I had better like what I see on it.
If the hospital is drumming up trade with an advertising campaign along the lines of "Don't worry! Do your worst! We'll patch 'em back up!" or by actively harming people, or the pawn shop is advertising weapons with slogans along the lines of "Life was never so cheap" or "We'll supply the ammo, you supply the vengeance" then yes, they should face the consequences. Similarly, if eDonkey was advertised with campaigns along the lines of "Still paying for music? Chump! Download all the Top 10 tunes for free!", it too should face the consequences.
I do agree that this is a worrying precedent though; how long before it's actually illegal to rip legally-owned CDs to mp3 for my iRiver? (Oh wait, I forgot - it technically already is in the UK)
It's called sarcasm.
How about offering signed downloads of the frontend as firefox extensions?
And stuff the Opera, Mozilla and IE users. I'm a Firefox user and I'd not support that.
Running script directly from webservers is a security risk preserved for the completely retarded, which is exactly why Java applets never took off
No, applets never took off because of the crappy early implementations of the JVM and incompatibilities between MS's JVM and Sun's one. Java was also a little ahead of its time in terms of resource requirements; it's only recently been the case that low- to mid-end PCs can expect good responsiveness using GUI Java apps.
Sounds an awful lot like what Java applets were supposed to give you, before crappy implementations of the early JVMs killed them.
Cool - that's as easy as pie to remember!
Windows Vista is embracing the idea of lesser privileges and a `sudo'-like authentication model
I'm not familiar with Vista, but the "Run as..." service has existed since at least Win2k. It is perfectly possible to run as a limited user account and only run those things that absolutely require admin access as an admin account. Some recent installers even make use of the facility to have Windows prompt you for details of an account with admin access.
If your users can't make good decisions, nothing short of a total system lock-down will help.
Which is the point I think the OP was trying to make, and the point that I often try to make - no OS is secure from a rogue user with administrative access. As long as a user can install software system-wide, they can compromise or trash the system. No system is immune from that; yet still we hear Linux and OS X fans describe their system of choice as though it were. They raise the bar, that's all. As and when the more naive computer users make the switch, so will all the problems. Sure, those of us in the know won't fall for them - but then, those of us in the know who use Windows don't fall for them now.
You're not making it any better - I remember our Sony C5 Betamax VCR well. Big silver thing, top-loading (rather than slotting the tape in the front), and the remote control actually had a lead that plugged into a socket in the front of the machine.
Of course, this was about 25 years ago...
I worked on a system used predominately by legal people - lawyers, their secretaries and assistants, etc. This system enforced a password policy that mandated changing passwords every 30 or so days, and prevented the reuse of the previous 5 passwords.
*Every* single user I came in contact with used passwords of the form $password1, $password2, $password3, $password4, $password5, then back to $password1...
Indeed. From "eat(ing) your own dogfood", ie using your own products inhouse.
Sony is a media distributer.
Sony's entertainment arm is a media distributor, Sony's electronics arm isn't. I work for a fairly large corporation (not Sony or a competitor), and don't make the mistake of thinking that any large organisation isn't essentially a large collection of smaller organisations. Any one department doesn't necessarily like, support, agree with or even understand or talk to any other department. Yes, there is unity at the top, but that often doesn't filter down as far as you'd expect - sometimes it dies at the boardroom door.
That said, I read recently (ie in the last 7 days) that the entertainment arm has been more or less keeping the electronics arm afloat for a while now, as it's been losing money. Corporate politics would tend to suggest that the electronics arm will do whatever the hell the entertainment arm tells it to.
Money is power, and in the corporate world profitability rules. If Sony Music want DRM, Sony Electronics will supply it.
On behalf of the 30something slashdot crowd who are old enough to remember that format war, let me just say this:
YOU BASTARD! Now I feel REALLY old!
That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life.
Netscape 3 wiped the floor with IE 3. Netscape 4 wiped the floor with IE 3. IE 4 absolutely shat all over Netscape 4 from a very great height.
Netscape 4 crashed at the drop of a hat. It was a resource hog. It was slow - I remember one deeply nested table test that rendered in a second or two in IE 4 that literally took minutes in Netscape 4. It couldn't resize its window without reloading the page it was displaying from the server. IE 4 was faster, more stable, didn't have to reload the page to resize the window, offered more features for web-app development and was all-round better.
Basically, Netscape Navigator 4.0 sucked big time compared to the competition. Don't get me wrong though, I used it exclusively until Mozilla became a viable alternative - I have never used and will never use IE as my primary browser.
To try to claim that IE won the browser war merely because it was bundled with the OS and people are lazy is at best disingenuous though - it was simply far superior to NN, even at version 4.
As for WiMP, I have to admit I actually quite like it. That's mostly because of the toolbar mode, though. I used to use WinAmp (or XMMS when I ran Linux), but I fell out with that around about version 3. While 5 sucked less, it still sucked. iTunes I simply can't get on with - too big, too clunky.
Other than that, I agree with you - people tend to avoid learning new things unless there's a compelling reason to do so. What people here need to keep in mind is that what's compelling to them (Freedom, access to the source, etc) simply isn't a concern for (some/most) other people.
Why would a Linux user need a 3D graphics card? This kind of card is for people that play video games on Windows.
Actually, a 3d card is for anyone who wants to perform 3d vector operations at a decent rate. The most obvious application of that is 3d graphics, but even that doesn't limit you just to playing games.
You might as well ask why a Linux user would want sound, or high resolution displays, or a GUI...
More like they'll write a support entry of the form "Don't scratch your iPod Nano. HTH. HAND."
Funny you should say that - I recently bought a lawnmower. Included in the instruction booklet was a prominent box containg the following:
"Warning! Do not sever fingers or toes!"
Y'think?
^W is even geekier?
Damn, what does also knowing that ^U is "delete to start of line" make me?
Its not just for XML and its not just a J language either
Technically, the X in AJAX is XML, while the J is JavaScript, so yes AJAX is just for XML. You can do the same sort of thing using whatever technology you want, of course, but to do AJAX requires:
a browser
XML
JavaScript
The server can be written in anything you want, as long as it can receive HTTP requests and interpret XML. You're free to implement AJAX-style functionality using whatever collection of technologies and languages you wish, but unless you're using the above three things it's not AJAX. For instance, while you could replace JavaScript with VBScript (in IE), that'd more correctly be called AVAX.
Personally, I think calling AJAX AJAX is stupid, as it leads to the sort of misunderstandings that you seem to have, but I guess most people like to have short, snappy names for things.
The specific response: It's already patched.
So was the vulnerability that Slammer exploited.
If you run mozilla as a normal user
But you'll have installed it as root, and the installer was infected, and you're still screwed.
That's fine, but this was a custom build - the official md5sums wouldn't have matched even if the binaries hadn't been infected.
Postgres is a worthy RDBMS in its own right, but it's no Oracle. Of course, a lot of people use Oracle's RDBMS when postgres or MySQL would do just as well, but when you need Oracle, you need Oracle, and postgres (currently) just won't do.
Possibly, but you generally represent yourself before that happens.
Hiring a lawyer to represent you in court is advisable but by no means compulsory. In fact, the concept of being innocent until proven guilty means that it's perfectly possible to offer no defence at all, and to merely challenge the plaintiff to prove your guilt. (Note that that's not generally advisable, but it's certainly possible)
It's not that assignments aren't allowed in if statements, but that Java has boolean types. So while a statement like i = 0 does return 0 (as in C), unlike C 0 is not false, it's an int, and so if (0) is a compile time error.
You can still do things like if ((line = in.readLine()) == null) of course
When Quake was originally released, my housemate had a PC with 64MB of RAM and a 200MHz Pentium Pro, and I remember Quake running just fine.
Of course, when he later downloaded GLQuake it ran like an aboslute dog without a 3d accelerator card, but that's a different story...