This is sad but true. I personally support free software, but it was still nice that the little guys were trying to make money without being sucked into yet another giantfacelesscorporation.
Personally, I wouldn't want to make my living off of the free software I write. I think it would create too much of a conflict of interest for me. It would be nice, though, if there was a better way to encourage (voluntary) profits for free software developers. Right now, at least, "libre" == "gratis".
Do what ESR did with the jargon file... He released it both on paper and electronically. Sales don't seem to do too badly, either, as I've seen it in print many times. Plus if you make it good enough, people will want a physical copy just for sentimental purposes.
As for the format, I'd suggest LaTeX. You can then use that to create Postscript, PDF, HTML, text, and whatever else you desire.
second of all, i don't want to hear about how this has the potential to hurt innocent bystanders. i'm sorry, but if your system is so insecure as to allow a hacker to use it as a staging point, then you deserve what you get. perhaps if everyone fought back against DoS's and such, and enough "innocent bystanders" were injured, they would take the time to secure their system the way they should have in the first place.
Very true. But what about, say, a multiuser system? Sadly, there aren't many of these around anymore, but...
Say you're user ionized on your shell account. You're working on something useful for the community. But unknown to you, user l33thax0r is busy attacking some other site. It's not your fault, because you don't administer the system, and l33thax0r is just using the same system capabilities available to you. Strangely, this type of friendly fire seems less excusable to me than the type you mentioned.
I definitely agree that if you're being attacked, your primary responsibility is to protect your system. And if some idiot forgets to lock down the appropriate things and gets turned into a zombie system, well, sucks to be him. But I still feel sorry for the l^Husers stuck on this guy's system...
...by some weirdo in England, going through somewhere in Virginia (Langley, according to other information I managed to dig up!!!). They did a good job. My Debian box showed nothing with finger, who, or anything similar, and I only noticed it because my net load meter was full up, and I wasn't doing anything.
A random netstat showed a ton of packets going to a domain named after the Soviet Union's tourist agency, and as soon as I went to the page for Ethereal so I could scan the packets, it stopped.
That was too weird for me, so I notified the FBI. Two months later, a computer crimes guy got back to me and asked if Linux was anything like RedHat... =)
He's busily finishing up rewriting the Linux kernel configuration stuff in Python, instead of TCL/Tk. This over the rather loud protests of many of the kernel mailing list members...
That's true... In fact, it's the reason for the whole Apple vs. Microsoft lawsuit a while back. Microsoft had initially copied the tiled layout of another windowing system (I forget which), but later switched to a cascaded layout.
Bill Gates seems to have had a serious inferiority complex. According to books I've read, he rejected many ideas, including tiled windowing, because, he said, "I want Mac on a PC". I've also heard that this was the reason Windows was cooperatively multitasked, like the Mac.
I saw this a couple of days ago... Apparently the WeirdX programmer got the idea from Berlin.
Whether or not Berlin ever becomes the replacement windowing system, it's pretty cool that MacOS X and now X11 are getting neat toys from them. What'll they come up with next, I wonder?
I have to admit, those screenshots do look rather impressive. The question is, how is the actual gameplay? Great graphics don't mean a thing if the game isn't any fun.
The other issue is market share. Currently, the PlayStation* is the thing to beat, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. A number of gamer friends of mine have mentioned, "I like System X better, but System Y has all the games". Especially with the whole antitrust thing, is Microsoft going to be able to attract enough developers to this platform, and then keep them long-term?
I'll still use open source programs for another reason. Security flaws can also be intentionally introduced for several reasons. This is one type of bug which is extremely unlikely to occur in an open source program.
Or we just don't notice it... Remember that UNIX backdoor perpetuated through the C compiler? The one that would perpetuate itself when the compiler was recompiled? It would be completely invisible when looking at the source.
3) Ripping code that isn't tested with that setup. *cough* This part really bit me once with some network stuff. Ohh, they did it this way - I want it that way too! Not the best approach in my experiences. It's great to re-use code, but check it out first. I've seen snippets from other peoples code that is both broken and misused, and of course causes small bugs to show up in the app.
I think this is possibly one of the worst habits in programming, and it's why I never rip code unless I know why and how it does what it does. At least, I think I don't... =)
There's a guy at work who has no clue how to program, and yet somehow has ended up with the job of writing various stuff, usually shell scripts or Windows batch files. He is literally unable to do anything unless he rips an example from somewhere and tweaks it. Problem is, he can't find relevant examples.
For example, he needed to check whether a file existed. I suggested various methods, but instead he found some code to automatically compress the largest file in a directory. I have no idea why he did this, except maybe because both problems had the word "file" in them. He ended up adding 20 more lines which somehow made it sort of do what was needed. Now there are 30 lines of DOS batch file code, only 2 of which are needed or even relevant.
In this light, setting up that wonderfully named Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board is perfectly logical. Create a board so it looks like they care about privacy, and populate it with stooges (carefully selected from other organizations so it doesn't look too obvious) to prevent the board from actually interfering with their operations. Downright brilliant... unless you're a consumer.
I can't help remembering that both Reign of Terror France and the Soviet Union had a "wonderfully named" Committee of Public Safety.
If Redhat doesn't do it, some other distribution will. At the very least Debian will, as they're pretty non-commercial. In which case a lot of people will say "Fuck Redhat if they don't want to do it. I'll go use distribution X".
Yeah, sure. You're forgetting that RedHat's market is, deliberately, people who have absolutely no clue what they are doing.
...when all you have to do is send a letter on special paper with big words?
Seriously, though, things like the DMCA and UCITA may be irrelevant. In many cases, the person providing the material does not own his or her own server, and the people running such things have shown all too much willingness to remove anything that might be vaguely illegal or controversial. As long as corporations can bully the providers, there's no need for laws.
It's also rather sad that, judging by that message, the administrators are blaming the student for their own confusion and hasty decisions.
I notice the article only says "parts of the Windows operating system code used by independent software companies to design their software applications to run on Windows." Especially given that qualification, I wonder what counts as "parts". Header files? Tiny bits of APIs that aren't part of the core OS?
Businesses might be happy, because they can write programs that further extend their tentacles into the system, but hackers will still be disappointed. And Windows will be as unstable as ever.
Linux will never achieve a significant market share in the corporate desktop market so long as it lacks a version of MS Office. Divorcing MS Office from Windows will almost certainly result in a Linux version of Office.
I personally couldn't care less about "the corporate desktop market". They're clueless annoyances. What happened to Linux being an OS "by hackers for hackers"?
And you know if Office ever gets released for anything other than a Micros~1 OS, it will either be binary-only or the source will be so restricted it's pointless.
Company foo will not only buy foo.com, foo.net, and foo.org, but now also foo.shop, foo.bank, and foo.bar or whatever else they come up with. This really won't increase the namespace.
The average person will just be confused again. "Naw, that ain't a web site... It don't got no.com on the end!"
I remember when I saw a URL on a flier at school. It was in the form http://domain/ --- no "www" at the front. One girl said, "Of course that's not a web page, stupid. There's no 'www'!" The other replied, "No, they don't make you do that any more."
I think this is a valid question, but I think it is quite a testament to the power of Free Software that even RMS, who invented it, cannot shut down a code fork that he disagrees with. It also shows how strong the community is when instead of being bitter (well, more than they are, perhaps), there is a conscious effort to preserve compatibility and interoperability between the two versions.
I, too, wish for a feature merge at times, but it's interesting to note that the competing versions are more of a testament to RMS's ideals than a single controlled version could ever be.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I wouldn't want to make my living off of the free software I write. I think it would create too much of a conflict of interest for me. It would be nice, though, if there was a better way to encourage (voluntary) profits for free software developers. Right now, at least, "libre" == "gratis".
This reminds me of a story by RMS.
As for the format, I'd suggest LaTeX. You can then use that to create Postscript, PDF, HTML, text, and whatever else you desire.
Very true. But what about, say, a multiuser system? Sadly, there aren't many of these around anymore, but...
Say you're user ionized on your shell account. You're working on something useful for the community. But unknown to you, user l33thax0r is busy attacking some other site. It's not your fault, because you don't administer the system, and l33thax0r is just using the same system capabilities available to you. Strangely, this type of friendly fire seems less excusable to me than the type you mentioned.
I definitely agree that if you're being attacked, your primary responsibility is to protect your system. And if some idiot forgets to lock down the appropriate things and gets turned into a zombie system, well, sucks to be him. But I still feel sorry for the l^Husers stuck on this guy's system...
A random netstat showed a ton of packets going to a domain named after the Soviet Union's tourist agency, and as soon as I went to the page for Ethereal so I could scan the packets, it stopped.
That was too weird for me, so I notified the FBI. Two months later, a computer crimes guy got back to me and asked if Linux was anything like RedHat... =)
Except you're then vulnerable to a new DoS attack. If they switch spoofed IPs rapidly, they can fill up your routing table. Whoops!
He's busily finishing up rewriting the Linux kernel configuration stuff in Python, instead of TCL/Tk. This over the rather loud protests of many of the kernel mailing list members...
Bill Gates seems to have had a serious inferiority complex. According to books I've read, he rejected many ideas, including tiled windowing, because, he said, "I want Mac on a PC". I've also heard that this was the reason Windows was cooperatively multitasked, like the Mac.
Whether or not Berlin ever becomes the replacement windowing system, it's pretty cool that MacOS X and now X11 are getting neat toys from them. What'll they come up with next, I wonder?
Man, 2.0 was ugly! 95/98/etc are just so pathetically bland...
You mean like this, this, or this? Come to think of it, the third one is labeled "Striking poses"...
The other issue is market share. Currently, the PlayStation* is the thing to beat, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. A number of gamer friends of mine have mentioned, "I like System X better, but System Y has all the games". Especially with the whole antitrust thing, is Microsoft going to be able to attract enough developers to this platform, and then keep them long-term?
Or we just don't notice it... Remember that UNIX backdoor perpetuated through the C compiler? The one that would perpetuate itself when the compiler was recompiled? It would be completely invisible when looking at the source.
I think this is possibly one of the worst habits in programming, and it's why I never rip code unless I know why and how it does what it does. At least, I think I don't... =)
There's a guy at work who has no clue how to program, and yet somehow has ended up with the job of writing various stuff, usually shell scripts or Windows batch files. He is literally unable to do anything unless he rips an example from somewhere and tweaks it. Problem is, he can't find relevant examples.
For example, he needed to check whether a file existed. I suggested various methods, but instead he found some code to automatically compress the largest file in a directory. I have no idea why he did this, except maybe because both problems had the word "file" in them. He ended up adding 20 more lines which somehow made it sort of do what was needed. Now there are 30 lines of DOS batch file code, only 2 of which are needed or even relevant.
GnuPG is okay, right?
I can't help remembering that both Reign of Terror France and the Soviet Union had a "wonderfully named" Committee of Public Safety.
Yeah, sure. You're forgetting that RedHat's market is, deliberately, people who have absolutely no clue what they are doing.
Seriously, though, things like the DMCA and UCITA may be irrelevant. In many cases, the person providing the material does not own his or her own server, and the people running such things have shown all too much willingness to remove anything that might be vaguely illegal or controversial. As long as corporations can bully the providers, there's no need for laws.
It's also rather sad that, judging by that message, the administrators are blaming the student for their own confusion and hasty decisions.
iso-accents-mode is yet another reason why Emacs is The One True Editor(tm).
Businesses might be happy, because they can write programs that further extend their tentacles into the system, but hackers will still be disappointed. And Windows will be as unstable as ever.
I personally couldn't care less about "the corporate desktop market". They're clueless annoyances. What happened to Linux being an OS "by hackers for hackers"?
And you know if Office ever gets released for anything other than a Micros~1 OS, it will either be binary-only or the source will be so restricted it's pointless.
I remember when I saw a URL on a flier at school. It was in the form http://domain/ --- no "www" at the front. One girl said, "Of course that's not a web page, stupid. There's no 'www'!" The other replied, "No, they don't make you do that any more."
sigh.
the dot shortage may quickly become unbearable...
By the way, in my experience on lower-end (P133) machines, XEmacs always seemed more sluggish than Emacs by at least a factor of 2. Weird...
I, too, wish for a feature merge at times, but it's interesting to note that the competing versions are more of a testament to RMS's ideals than a single controlled version could ever be.
Go RMS!