I think it is a new form of "reverse-psychology" modding. Someone thinks it is a real good post, so s/he mods it as a troll. Then several dozen moderators load the page and see the -1 there and say "WTF" and immediately burn one of their +1 mod points. Six mods later, it is at +5.
Read the article! Yes, Ballmer does seriously confuse GPL with open source and Linux. But assuming he in fact does mean GPL, what he was specifically referring/objecting to was government-funded work. Not work of other companies. I thoroughly diasgree with Ballmer, but at least lets make sure we are arguing against what he actually said (or in the case of confusing Linux and "open source" with GPL, what he meant to say.
I thought I read somewhere here that to use XP, you had to sign up with Passport. Of course, saying "I think I read on Slashdot..." is probably about the least reliable way of saying anything. Anyone who knows better care to comment?
Unfortunatley for them, the CLEC's were smarter than the LD companies and signed up huge numbers of ISP's. Suddenly the RBOC's were paying $2 billion per year to competitors. They didn't like this one bit so they just decided to stop paying. The CLEC's were forced to sue, and more than five years after the Telecom Act, the RBOC's still are trying to get out of paying. And they finally found someone who will help them out. The FCC has basically adopted a plan that will end reciprocal compensation - but only for ISP traffic, the only kind CLEC's really benefited from - after a two year transition period.
Do you have any reference for this new FCC policy? I've heard my ISP works under a situation like you describe. They are a great ISP and I fear for them if some FCC policy kills their business model.
What about ISDN? Oh sure, it gets a bad rap for whatever reasons, but most places offer it, and depending on the tarriff situation where you live, it could be the answer. It is plenty fast enough for me. Sure, I probably wouldn't want to be downloading new Linux bistro ISOs, but for most stuff, 128 kps is just fine. I don't have to pay by the minute where I live, which makes it more economical. If you have to pay by the minute, I suppose that is another story. Cost is only slightly higher (maybe $10-$15/month) than the cost to have two separate analogue lines (one for phone, one for computer access) which is the right comparison since ISDN gives you two lines and if you have two data line up, your router drops one for incoming calls. And with the router dialling on demand and with connections within seconds, it is like always-on. Only drawback is dynamic IP, so it is hard to run servers.
Well, there is 2 minutes left on April 16 as I start to write this, and earlier tonight I saw that Debian 2.2r3 was [sic] released on April 17, so RH 7.1 is no longer the lastest distro.
Must be April 17 in Europe when that Debian page was updated.
Does this apply only to cardbus cards, or to all pcmcia cards? I specifically stayed away from cardbus cards and stuck with 16-bit ones because of the problems with cardbus.
No, Bob's bank account is not an exception. The bank takes that money and invests it in other companies. Arguably, that banked money is doing even more for the economy.
I can't tell if this is a troll or if he is serious, but I will assume he is serious, amazing as that may be.
If people now buy one $50 Redhat installer instead of 10,000 Microsoft licenses, there is that much less money into the economy. Companies such as Microsoft will find that they will do less well, and the knockon effect will be on the economy
This ignores the fact that MS did not create the money it would take to buy these 10,000 licenses. It was generated through some other field of endeavor (probably ultimately tracable to some sort of extractive practive like agriculture, mining, etc.). This money is already in the economy!. If it isn't spent on Microsoft, it will be spent on something else. Since free software specifically promotes reuse of code (its whole purpose), then the process of creating software is more efficient. Thus this funding, which is already in the ecomony, can be put towards someting more useful, rather than being used on the inherently inefficient process of proprietary software.
Free software has every little to do with communism. It has everything to do with increasing efficiency, making capitalism work better.
Come on, don't rag on Adobe. They aren't prohibiting you from copying anything. All they did was put something into the acrobat format, which they designed, that would allow some authors to prohibit you from copying. All they did is add an optional feature to their spec. If you have a problem with someone not wanting you to print their file, take it up with the author (or apply the patch yourself)!
Note, none of this actually has anything to do with preventing copying the.pdf file, only for copying done through cutting and pasting text from it.
I'm no fan of proprietary software, but I give credit to Adobe for opening up this format to the extent they have. You could be damn sure that if M$ had managed to capture the defacto "standard" for formated document transfer (others tried, remember envoy?), then you probably wouldn't even be able to open a.msd (or what ever they would have called it) on Linux, never mind being able to write your own app to do it.
Here goes my karma, but what the hell is all this about "all your base belong to us" stuff? I never heard it before, now in the last week I've seen it everywhere, first on a web page demoing a weblog perl script (in a post written by some random user), then dot.kde.org claims this term when there internet connection goes away, and of course, now on about 5% of slashdot posts.
Actually, the website doesn't tell them how to encode them. It says you have to download the.exe to do the encoding (what no Linux version? I'm outraged!!). It merely says that it "rearranges the letters".
Now, someone of superior intellect may be able to reverse engineer the algorithm solely by looking at the before and after strings! However, the fact that such reverse engineering is done without the aid of any computational devices or even a pen and paper in no way defeats the fact that this person of superior intellect reverse engineered the encription scheme.
The web page does say the encription scheme is similar to the well known pig latin scheme. But it doesn't say how it is different. That is the key point.
Re:Bring the others into line then.
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
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· Score: 1
In my case, "they" are clients. You don't go around telling clients what format to save their work in. Or that they aren't intelligent. Unless you want to get fired. Clients hire folks to do stuff for them, they aren't going to tolerate consultants that make them have to do more work!
Re:I have had a fearful thought....
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
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· Score: 1
Konquerer (I use the one from 2.01) has a lot of roblems with javascripts. Not always, but enough. For example, I can't use it to manage my ISDN router (the 3com OCLM can only be managed through a javascript, frames-capable browser - I miss the telnet interface of the netgear!). It also doesn't work on a javascript-based on-line calander editor that I use for a club I belong to. I've had other problems, too. It works well most of hte time,. But if you need to rely on it regularly, it doesn't cut it.
Not without finding all the copyright holders and securing their unanimous permission. Given that copyright is intended to protect the author and two subsequent generations, if that problem is not yet unsolvable it will be eventually. If a GPL'd work is held exclusively by the Government, the Government could sell it under a second license, but why not make that second license BSD?
This is not correct. All previous contributers must be contacted and give consent if you change the license. But the GPL license allows to sell software even if there are other contributors.
I disagree with your oter points as well, but don't have the time or energy to discuss it right now (call it a cop out if you will, but it has been a long week!)
Government investments are often justified as adding in some meaningful way to the economy as measured by GDP and other economic statistics. Proprietary software lives up to this expectation - it can be sold, it has value. How can the "product" of GPL software be quantified in such a way as to add to these statistics?
a) GPL software can be sold, although it of course will sell less since you have the rights to copy it.
b) Software doesn't create wealth. Proprietary software is a mechanism for persuading someone else with wealth to give it to you because of it is of value to that person/organization doing the buying. If software to perform a certain task were available elsewhere for less money or for free, then that person/organization would get it from there, and then still have the $$ to contribute to the economy, mostly likely in some other way. Free software doesn't diminish the amount of wealth in the economy.
Take a look at the passionate discussions on this board about Napster. If it is proven that the growth of GPL crashes markets and lays off workers...
I've asked this before here and will again. What does Napster or MP3s in general have to do with free software? Napster is about the illegal trading of copyrighted material. It is a dissing of copyright. On the contrary, the GPL relies on copyright to function. If I had to think of analogy with napster and MP3s, I would think that internet explorer would be closer, as both are related to downloading and using closed, proprietary IP, with the crucial difference that MS wants you to download IE, while the RIAA doesn't want you to download copyrighted MP3s.
OK, this is about the 4th time you posted this. I'm sorry, Buffnet is my ISP and I've followed the case since it happened in 1998. Where did you get the idea that there were complaints about a specific newsgroup for months? Or did you make this up? I can't claim I know all the details, and I won't rely simply on Buffnet's take on it, but it apparently was a reelection ploy by Vacco timed just before the election. Secondly, I know all to well that Buffnet expires their news way too quickly, so there's no way someting objectionable would be there for months. If you are saying that someone objected to the entire group, well, there's plenty of other discussion here on why removing individual groups from your NNTP feed is (a) useless, and (b) leading down a slippery slope (remember, open source is UnAmerican according to Microsoft, better remove the comp.os.linux.* heirarchy!)
BuffNet is my ISP. They were one of the first in Buffalo and I was one of their first subscribers, and have been with them for over six years. They are a really really great ISP, and as with the recent slashdot topic on the decline of mom & pop ISPs, I am terrified that this may drive them out of business (they offer great service, and no extra charge for ISDN. I'd never find another ISP like that.)
But as for context, the orginal "raid" on Buffnet and another ISP (in Syracuse) happened just before elections a year or two ago. The Attorney General was up for reelection, and this was nothing but a set up to get him publicity. The way it worked was not that some J. Random User found the kiddie-porn, but someone from the AG's office posing as J. Random User setting them up. I'm not sure to what extent an ISP should be responding to every random caller on the line who is complaining about a Usenet article. If so, any ISP should start doing it to their competitors right now full time - that would tie up there customer service abilities!
Anyway, it didn't work and the AG lost the election. However, the new AG now had the case on his books and had to carry it through.
Let's hope Ashcroft does the same with the cases he inherited at the Federal level. I can think of one in particular;-)
I'm not anti-union (but maybe I should be?) but my local trails organization is not allowed to do volunteer trail maintenance in county parks because the unions object to havin gvolunteers do the work. It doesn't matter that we all kinds of work on state land to universal plaudits about the quality of the work and energy of hte volunteers. Nor does it matter that the unions do absolutely nothing on the trails on the county land.
So maybe this Allchin thing isn't as totally far-fetched when I first incredously read it.
Unfortunately it has been more off than on, by a long shot. As in I haven't mastered the key areas you mention. Maybe my mind is already in the mode of admission application essays, etc. so I may have overstated how much I've done in the past. My experience is mainly in FORTRAN as an undergrad in the 80's (very limited, although at the time it seemed trivial putting together the programs I needed for the one CS class I took or for the projects I needed it for in my engineering major). Then a few years ago, I needed to write a searchable front end to a database of reasearch papers, and without any background taught myself objectPAL (for Paradox) from scratch. This is very onject oriented and completely different from what I had experienced in the past, but I picked it up pretty quickly from a book. Came up with a pretty cool stand alone application. Then there are a bunch of shell scripts in Bash for my linux boxes, but these are of limited scope. So I really need a good basis in the key areas you talk about above, something that doesn't seem to be in the programming books I've seen; they mainly focus on syntax of the language. The algorythm and data structure books I've looked at get these issues, but they require more of an understanding of the language than I have, so it is a catch-22.
Otherwise what you say is correct. As many have pointed out here, Java is something I should be considering seriously. I figure that once I get a firm foundation in C, then I would hope to jump to Java in the proverbial weekend.
Slashdot Mirror
no word wrap
I think it is a new form of "reverse-psychology" modding. Someone thinks it is a real good post, so s/he mods it as a troll. Then several dozen moderators load the page and see the -1 there and say "WTF" and immediately burn one of their +1 mod points. Six mods later, it is at +5.
Read the article! Yes, Ballmer does seriously confuse GPL with open source and Linux. But assuming he in fact does mean GPL, what he was specifically referring/objecting to was government-funded work. Not work of other companies. I thoroughly diasgree with Ballmer, but at least lets make sure we are arguing against what he actually said (or in the case of confusing Linux and "open source" with GPL, what he meant to say.
I thought I read somewhere here that to use XP, you had to sign up with Passport. Of course, saying "I think I read on Slashdot..." is probably about the least reliable way of saying anything. Anyone who knows better care to comment?
Do you have any reference for this new FCC policy? I've heard my ISP works under a situation like you describe. They are a great ISP and I fear for them if some FCC policy kills their business model.
What about ISDN? Oh sure, it gets a bad rap for whatever reasons, but most places offer it, and depending on the tarriff situation where you live, it could be the answer. It is plenty fast enough for me. Sure, I probably wouldn't want to be downloading new Linux bistro ISOs, but for most stuff, 128 kps is just fine. I don't have to pay by the minute where I live, which makes it more economical. If you have to pay by the minute, I suppose that is another story. Cost is only slightly higher (maybe $10-$15/month) than the cost to have two separate analogue lines (one for phone, one for computer access) which is the right comparison since ISDN gives you two lines and if you have two data line up, your router drops one for incoming calls. And with the router dialling on demand and with connections within seconds, it is like always-on. Only drawback is dynamic IP, so it is hard to run servers.
Must be April 17 in Europe when that Debian page was updated.
Does this apply only to cardbus cards, or to all pcmcia cards? I specifically stayed away from cardbus cards and stuck with 16-bit ones because of the problems with cardbus.
No, Bob's bank account is not an exception. The bank takes that money and invests it in other companies. Arguably, that banked money is doing even more for the economy.
If people now buy one $50 Redhat installer instead of 10,000 Microsoft licenses, there is that much less money into the economy. Companies such as Microsoft will find that they will do less well, and the knockon effect will be on the economy
This ignores the fact that MS did not create the money it would take to buy these 10,000 licenses. It was generated through some other field of endeavor (probably ultimately tracable to some sort of extractive practive like agriculture, mining, etc.). This money is already in the economy!. If it isn't spent on Microsoft, it will be spent on something else. Since free software specifically promotes reuse of code (its whole purpose), then the process of creating software is more efficient. Thus this funding, which is already in the ecomony, can be put towards someting more useful, rather than being used on the inherently inefficient process of proprietary software.
Free software has every little to do with communism. It has everything to do with increasing efficiency, making capitalism work better.
signed,
a hardcore capitalist.
(hey, devil's advocate and all that..)
Note, none of this actually has anything to do with preventing copying the .pdf file, only for copying done through cutting and pasting text from it.
I'm no fan of proprietary software, but I give credit to Adobe for opening up this format to the extent they have. You could be damn sure that if M$ had managed to capture the defacto "standard" for formated document transfer (others tried, remember envoy?), then you probably wouldn't even be able to open a .msd (or what ever they would have called it) on Linux, never mind being able to write your own app to do it.
Now, someone of superior intellect may be able to reverse engineer the algorithm solely by looking at the before and after strings! However, the fact that such reverse engineering is done without the aid of any computational devices or even a pen and paper in no way defeats the fact that this person of superior intellect reverse engineered the encription scheme.
The web page does say the encription scheme is similar to the well known pig latin scheme. But it doesn't say how it is different. That is the key point.
In my case, "they" are clients. You don't go around telling clients what format to save their work in. Or that they aren't intelligent. Unless you want to get fired. Clients hire folks to do stuff for them, they aren't going to tolerate consultants that make them have to do more work!
Konquerer (I use the one from 2.01) has a lot of roblems with javascripts. Not always, but enough. For example, I can't use it to manage my ISDN router (the 3com OCLM can only be managed through a javascript, frames-capable browser - I miss the telnet interface of the netgear!). It also doesn't work on a javascript-based on-line calander editor that I use for a club I belong to. I've had other problems, too. It works well most of hte time,. But if you need to rely on it regularly, it doesn't cut it.
This is not correct. All previous contributers must be contacted and give consent if you change the license. But the GPL license allows to sell software even if there are other contributors.
I disagree with your oter points as well, but don't have the time or energy to discuss it right now (call it a cop out if you will, but it has been a long week!)
a) GPL software can be sold, although it of course will sell less since you have the rights to copy it.
b) Software doesn't create wealth. Proprietary software is a mechanism for persuading someone else with wealth to give it to you because of it is of value to that person/organization doing the buying. If software to perform a certain task were available elsewhere for less money or for free, then that person/organization would get it from there, and then still have the $$ to contribute to the economy, mostly likely in some other way. Free software doesn't diminish the amount of wealth in the economy.
Take a look at the passionate discussions on this board about Napster. If it is proven that the growth of GPL crashes markets and lays off workers...
I've asked this before here and will again. What does Napster or MP3s in general have to do with free software? Napster is about the illegal trading of copyrighted material. It is a dissing of copyright. On the contrary, the GPL relies on copyright to function. If I had to think of analogy with napster and MP3s, I would think that internet explorer would be closer, as both are related to downloading and using closed, proprietary IP, with the crucial difference that MS wants you to download IE, while the RIAA doesn't want you to download copyrighted MP3s.
Um, the GPL is all about, and depends on, copyright. Without copyright law the GPL is nothing. How does this post make your day?
I'm not convinced that this won't happen in ten years or so with the increasing corporatism developing unabated in America.
OK, this is about the 4th time you posted this. I'm sorry, Buffnet is my ISP and I've followed the case since it happened in 1998. Where did you get the idea that there were complaints about a specific newsgroup for months? Or did you make this up? I can't claim I know all the details, and I won't rely simply on Buffnet's take on it, but it apparently was a reelection ploy by Vacco timed just before the election. Secondly, I know all to well that Buffnet expires their news way too quickly, so there's no way someting objectionable would be there for months. If you are saying that someone objected to the entire group, well, there's plenty of other discussion here on why removing individual groups from your NNTP feed is (a) useless, and (b) leading down a slippery slope (remember, open source is UnAmerican according to Microsoft, better remove the comp.os.linux.* heirarchy!)
But as for context, the orginal "raid" on Buffnet and another ISP (in Syracuse) happened just before elections a year or two ago. The Attorney General was up for reelection, and this was nothing but a set up to get him publicity. The way it worked was not that some J. Random User found the kiddie-porn, but someone from the AG's office posing as J. Random User setting them up. I'm not sure to what extent an ISP should be responding to every random caller on the line who is complaining about a Usenet article. If so, any ISP should start doing it to their competitors right now full time - that would tie up there customer service abilities!
Anyway, it didn't work and the AG lost the election. However, the new AG now had the case on his books and had to carry it through.
Let's hope Ashcroft does the same with the cases he inherited at the Federal level. I can think of one in particular ;-)
How does MP3s have anything at all to do with open source?
So maybe this Allchin thing isn't as totally far-fetched when I first incredously read it.
Otherwise what you say is correct. As many have pointed out here, Java is something I should be considering seriously. I figure that once I get a firm foundation in C, then I would hope to jump to Java in the proverbial weekend.