Or use my solution... put the laptop in your backpack, and wear that onto the plane. It's a lot harder to steal a backpack most of the time, and most people don't expect a plain old backpack to contain something of such value.;)
Ok all, there's lots of good comments here, but one thing missing... links to places to get *legal* MP3s!
GoodNoise - I like this place, they have some free mp3s, plus mp3s at $1/song or $10 for an entire album. They even are set up so if your download is interuppted, you can still go and get the music. They have some good artists, including my personal fave, They Might Be Giants.
MP3.com - I haven't really used this place much, they have a *ton* of mp3s available for download free, but last I checked it was kind've hard to find out who was good and who isn't, this may have improved now though.
Also, if you're an artist, check out D.A.M. (Digital Automatic Music) System. They give you 50% of the sales from CDs! With a non-exclusive contract! I don't make music myself, but this sounds like a really great deal to me.
Be truthful with yourselves, for MOST of you, having access to the source code is nothing more than a banner to wave over your head. Most have never even looked at any source code...never mind knowing what to do with it.
Yes, truthfully, I have almost never even looked at the source for most of the programs I use in linux. Despite the fact that I'm a C programmer with years of experience, I rarely look any deeper than some of the shell scripts for boot and starting X.
But, I consider open source to be a seal of quality on the programs. If a program is open source, then more than likely someone else will have already encountered any problems I'd have with it, and fixed it. You know what the only two programs I use in linux are that I have an urge to modify the source? Netscape and RealPlayer - the only two closed source programs I use. They frequently cause me to wish I had source to fix, and in fact, I even had to hack the binary for one version of netscape, because it was missing a paren in the shell statement to call external programs. The amazing thing is that it worked after I edited the binary.;)
Yes, I do know about mozilla, and can't wait for it to be ready to use, but don't have enough time myself to help it. When I want to webrowse, I want something that will work, and last time I checked mozilla(M5), it just isn't up to snuff for that yet. The release notes for M7 look like it has most of the same deficiencies - I really wish they'd have notes on what changed since the last milestone though, so it'd be easy to know how much it has improved. Maybe by M10 or 15 it'll be ready for me to start using/contributing.;)
You could replace the compile command in your makefile (via a variable replacement or rule) with rsh roundrobin gcc whatever, or maybe ssh but I think the keys would interfere unless the machines all shared the same host key.
roundrobin would be a DNS entry that automatically gave you a random server.
The machines would all have to share filesystem via NFS or something though, and you'd want a minimum of 100 megabit ethernet for that, cuz compiling is fairly disk intensive as well.
Warning: This is just off the top of my head, I haven't actually tested this method, there might be some complications, but they shouldn't be hard to work around. (e.g. if rsh roundrobin doesn't work, replace it with a script that passes the command off to another machine)
If you want help, email me at echo 'LeBleu@NOSPAM@prefer.net' | sed -e 's/@NOSPAM//'
I would of course be better able to test this method if you gave me a couple of PII machines to play with^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperiment on.
Oh, and if that's not a satisfactory enough solution, you could always hire me to modify GNU make to add a distributed option to it, hourly rate negotiable.;)
Wnat a workstation? SGI's the coolest.
on
Script Kiddy HOWTO
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, but I work as an SGI admin, and I just have to disagree. Try comparing that Indigo 2 to the computer you can get for $1150. I have an AMD K6-2 300 w/ 128 meg ram and 8.4 gig HD, cost me $700 back in october, though that's without monitor, but it's brand new. In CPU power it can kick an Indigo 2's ass easy. Comparing an Indigo 2 to a first class PC is just unreasonable. New SGIs are way overpriced, maybe the used ones are ok though, I guess $1150 isn't too bad. The new O2s start at like $5000 or so, it's ludicrous for the machine you get.
BTW, um, I hope you have that machine behind a firewall, because SGI security sucks. Though Irix 6.5 improved that, but you're more likely to have 6.2 on an Indigo 2. Make sure to close the 4 default accounts that have no password(lpr and etc.), make sure to disable the xhost + on login(lets anyone anywhere connect to your X server... when I first found that I was in such disbelief... found a program though that would let me monitor ppls keystrokes remotely... connected fine.:/(was monitoring my own keystrokes actually, but from a remote account)), and of course the standard, disable anything in inetd.conf you don't use.
I fail to see what makes freemware so much better than VMWare until the licence is fixed. Until then, I have to pay the author money after 30 days. This is no different than VMWare, and VMWare works--now. Bochs/freemware doesn't (the speed of an 8086/10 on an Ultra 5 is unacceptable).
Go reread the page... Bochs is not freemware. Bochs is shareware with source included. Right now he's trying to figure out how to use code from bochs while putting freemware under a real open source/free software license.
On the topic of world domination and us freed software developers, I really don't see how it has any meaning at all. Who cares how many people are using my code or some code that has some contributions of mine? It doesn't affect me, except in the remote sense that better software makes the world a slightly nicer place.
There's no-one clamoring for my resources. Freed software will go on long after the current Linux hype is over. GNU will still be around. I'll probably still be using the Linux kernel. My PS/2s will still be running. I'll still be maintaing the XGA XFree86 Xserver. Who cares if Linux has.01% of the desktop or 99%?
I really don't care what percent of desktop marketshare linux has, though I would like it if my less computer savvy friends didn't have to suffer crappy Microsoft software.
What I do care about though, is how many developers use the software. I care how many people are using my code or some code that has some contributions of mine, because I want to see it to continue to improve. It improves faster if I'm not the only one contributing.
On the other hand, something I've really noticed since I switched to linux a year and a half ago... in general, open source/free software/freedomware already does what I want it to pretty well, and I infrequently find myself wanting to fix it. Closed source software(particularly Netscape, simply because that is the main closed source software I still use) constantly seems to be bugging me with changes I want to make or bugs I want to fix, but can't. The more people that use the opensource/free software/freedomware programs I'm using, the more likely one of them has already suggested/implemented the feature I want, or has already reported/fixed the bug I might have encountered.
P.S. Yes, I know about Mozilla, but last I checked it wasn't usable enough for me. I don't have time right now to spend more time developing my webbrowser than webrowsing. Maybe by M4 or something Mozilla will be usable, and then I'll start using it and contributing.
Although I mostly agree with you, I disagree about X11amp. X11amp is a poor knockoff of the winamp interface wrapped around an mp3 player. The playlist support in x11amp is exceedingly limited. Unfortunately I haven't found any decent GUI mp3 players under linux yet. Feel free to offer suggestions. Just as a note, my favorite feature of the winamp playlist is the ability to add entire directory trees to the list... maybe I should just use mpg123 in a shell script with find.
If you're happy with the constraints placed by proprietary licences (as it seems you are) then why do you consider the constraints placed by GPL to be unreasonable in comparison?
Because I can make money by selling the software I write under those other licenses. I can't make money selling software I write under the GPL because people can get it without paying a dime.
You can make money by selling the software you write under those other licenses? What are the odds of that? Just what percentage of software startups go bankrupt before they get anywhere? What about the 70-80% of programming that is for vertical markets? What about the more and more common practice of software piracy/warez?(Personally, I'm against warez... why use poorly written closed source software illegally for free when I can use well written free source software legally for free?)
You can't make money by writing free source software? What about Redhat? What about all the people who were hired because they had proven themselves by working on free source software?
If you try to sell closed source software, you're going to have to support it, right? The old model was that you got support free with paying for the software, but this is less and less common, probably because support costs are not directly proportional to (what people will pay for the software) times (number of copies sold). Most users will require some amount of support, although the top 20% or so are going to know how to do it themselves. Why should those 20% pay for support they never use while those who use support the most don't pay any extra? Why not fund your company entirely off of providing support for your software? You'll have to keep writing good code for it, because otherwise people might switch to some other software that you don't support. (Alhough, I do have to wonder if this model will encourage companies to keep software hard to use to keep support usage up... but I suspect that there are so many AOLers and people who don't know a cd drive from a cup holder out there that if they make it easy enough for those people to attempt to use it, they can rely on plenty of support calls from them.;)
By the way, you can build any commercial software you want on top of LGPLed libraries, and personally I object to any library that is GPLed rather than LGPLed.
But the GPL is the way it is for a very good reason. If you had contributed code to a GPLed project, would you want someone else to be able to take it away, make improvements without returning them to the community(and most importantly, back to you!;), and then charge people money for something that isn't their own work? I wouldn't.
Actually, I prefer the LGPL over the GPL, or perhaps the MPL... something that would make anyone who uses the licensed code contribute their fixes and improvements to the licensed code back, but let them combine it easily with alternatively licensed(even closed source!) code. Might also help with patent issues, because then you could have a piece of code that pays to be licensed to use the patent, but is essentially integrated with the rest of an open source project.
Hmm... an interesting alternative license might be one that requires percentage donation to an open source software fund if you charge for reproducing the software... so, if someplace distributes it on cd for $3 or whatever, they have to give $0.30 to a fund that funds the development... Redhat sort of does the same thing by funding RedHat Advanced Development labs... This would be a license that does the same thing... it'd have to make the percentage based on percentage of their code or something though... so if you're selling, say, an entire distribution with one program by them on there, let's say their code is 1% of the code on the cd, then they'd get 1% of what they would get if it was 100% their code.(.3 cents per copy, in above example) OTOH, if you have many fractured little groups using this method, you run into problems like the BSD-style advertising clause, only in this case it's a problem of accounting for the hundreds of different groups you have to pay money to. Just a thought.
Just a note, I totally agree on the not allowing moderating and posting in the same article issue... makes me glad I'm not a moderator.;) By thread sounds good to me, that way someone(obviously not you, but some less scrupulous moderator) can't just down moderate all dissenting replies, but they *can* still moderate the rest of the comments.
2) what's with the middle 2/3 junk? If the moderator guidlines make sure the moderator isn't abusing thier privilage, what's wrong if they only load slashdot once every other day and read just what they like, OR, read through every single story 10 times a day?
Excluding the bottom 1/6th makes sense(even though I might well fall in it) because moderation after the majority of readers have already read the article is useless... you want people who keep up with things enough to make sure stuff gets moderated promptly.
Excluding the top 1/6th seems motivated purely by avoiding abuse... I think this may be misguided, and the abuse should be prevent elsewhere in the system. Just make sure that reloading more frequently doesn't increase your moderation abilities. You might still filter out the top 1 or 2% just to make sure those who put excessive load on/.(probably via some script, designed to keep their apparant reading frequency high enough to moderate even if they aren't paying attention?) are penalized in some way... adding a message in big letters at the top of the article that says "STOP RELOADING SO OFTEN!" would be better though.:)
While I agree with alot of the comments concerning the question over real criminality and how microsoft definatitly has a certian amount of due negligence. This post is probably the most interesting.
A class action suit should be filed against Microsoft for it's negligent behavior in not creating preventitive measures by the people and corporations impacted by this virus.
The fundimental question is really what sort of ietf standard could be applied to prevent this from happening again?
The forced re-entry of password check when sending out Userid (eg. non root) messages with over 5 to 10 recepients? One of the major problems is that this type of mail type virus has not been considered by any of the rfc and ietf drafters.. It is a new 'concept', pardon the pun.
I don't think virus prevention of this kind is the realm of the IETF, it is the realm of application writers. Now, the IETF should make sure that all protocols are secure, which will help... for example, right now it is possible to spoof the From: address(the field is added on the client side... it's not easy to hide all traces of the fact it was spoofed, but for a non-technical user, it isn't necessary) or intercept email and add an attachment containing a virus to it. So, I could pretend I was someone you trust, and send you a virus.
But, there already is an RFC on how to prevent this - RFC2311 - S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification All email readers and writers should start supporting this(hopefully in reasonably secure ways such that you can verify any automatically generated email before letting it get signed!), so that sometime soon we even have the reasonable option of not accepting any email without a verified digital signature. (Imagine the possibilities for eliminating/filtering SPAM! Delete or filter into a separate folder all mail received from someone who isn't in your key ring and doesn't have a key verified by one of your friends!)
The outcome of various ideas to eliminate this type of attack mean that every major mail distribution system must be reconfigured. All clients would have to make allowances for the change in standards as well. - While this is not a big issue for open source, the effects of a major revamp of closed source applications is huge.
This is not true. No change in the mail distribution system is necessary to prevent this type of virus. Merely changes on the clients to prevent a script received via email from automatically emailing people. Note that Java already has protections against such things, whereas Visual Basic does not. Also changes to implement S/MIME so as to verify who sent the email, so that you know whether or not the mail was received from a trusted individual. (Note: This won't help unless scripts are also prevented from sending signed mail!)
2) therefore I propose that while sending a reply I may choose between displaying the resulting message, or returning to the message I replied to, or to the top of the story, or even to www.slashdot.org that way you can even reduce the load of the server since I do not have to do Back()
Using back does not put load on the server in most cases, because your browser caches the file locally
Suggestion: Just use the same aging system that is used for the load average.:) I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it is basically an exponential decay over time... of course, you would want a *much* longer decay period than for a load average.;)
Excuse me, but shouldn't you be reporting this to mozilla.org(possibly straight into BugZilla?), so that they can fix this bug, rather than reporting it to/. readers, who if they really want to know all the current bugs in Mozilla can go read the bug database at Mozilla? -- Kevin
The new zero should be in the same Random location the old one is, cuz otherwise conversion is a bitch, and days don't change at the right time.
For example, if we used millidays, but keeping the meridian right where it is instead of moving it to some marketing company's headquarters, then you could find out the time as simple as time(NULL) / 86.4, and we could define a new day standard of days since Jan 1 1970, which could be calculated as time(NULL) / 86400, and would simplify date/time arithmetic because then you wouldn't need to convert the day and time into the same format first. So then this post would have been posted at 10668.239IT (239th milliday of the 10668th day)
Yeah, people should be able to disable the ad banner... of course, they would have to pay for their subscription instead, so that/. still gets necessary revenue;) -- Kevin
They were created for a utilitiarian purpose: to promote the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. (Check the Constitution.) Insofar as copyrights, patents, etc. in fact do this, they may be considered constitutional and beneficial.
However, in recent years it has become increasingly evident that in some situations, copyright and patent have not promoted advances, but have in fact held them back. This is the case with software patents, algorithm patents, and so forth: progress and productivity have been held back by a so-called "right" that was in fact created to further them.
Actually, something people forget is, what happens without patents? Without patents, companies keep new advances as trade secrets instead, because that is the only way to get an edge over the competition... with a patent, they have exclusive use of it for a certain period of time, but the method is public knowledge. Once the patent expires, anyone can use this new advance.(hence why the Coca-Cola(tm) formula has never been patented)
I think that the problem is that the length of patents hasn't been shortened to keep up with the rate of technological advance. A software patent should be limited to something more like 6 months - 2 years. After that, everyone can use it, and the method is well publicized, instead of hidden away in closed source.
--LeBleu
Barriers to entry - text vs. video vs. audio
on
World Without Walls
·
· Score: 1
If the net manages to cater to those other folks, it's not the net anymore, it's something else - because the barriers to entry in creating good video are quite high, and most likely promotional costs would prevent anyone but a large corporation from getting the non-reading eyeballs.
You made a bit of a jump there - straight from text, which is relatively easy to produce(good text isn't easy, but it isn't as obvious either), to video, which is difficult, at least right now. (think on the effects of the growing amount of CPU power available and what that could do for the average person's ability to do computer generated animation) You missed an important one - audio. I'm currently a manager for a small internet "radio" station(PaganPaths CyberRadio). All you need is someone on a fast connection(cable modem, dorm ethernet, etc.) to run a server, and then lots of people can DJ.(It takes about a pentium 120 or better, a 28.8k modem, decent ISP, a decent soundcard, and a mic to be a DJ.) Sounds like low enough barriers to entry to me. How low will the barriers to entry on video become in 10 years?
Linux runs fine on anything from one to sixteen processors. With kernel 2.2.x, this has gotten better. Linux handles SMP just fine.
The point is, it only handles it just fine. One of the major things about BeOS is it isn't just fine SMP support, it is excellent, thorough SMP support. Be will really shine on 16 processors, because the entire OS, and all standard applications, are heavily threaded. How many programs do you have to be running under linux before it can use all 16 processors at once?
It will take a very, very long time for linux to ever acheive this. In fact, an OSS OS that is more modern, including features such as Be has, may be the OS that replaces linux a few decades down the line. (Yes, the implicit assumption is that linux is going to replace windows in between now and then. Both OSes are somewhat archaic, linux is better at adapting new features though, and has a much more sound foundation than windows.)
Disclaimer: I've never actually used Be, just read about it... It looks *really* cool, but the price is outside my meager budget, otherwise I'd try it out on the 3rd partition on my machine.
partition for WinNT so I can play games(WINE isn't good enough yet, espescially since it won't run starsiege tribes, a really really cool game that I've been playing lately), and so I can do my RealAudio broadcast, because the linux port of realencoder has trouble recognizing input devices(dunno why, but it doesn't even detect an available recording device with either of my soundcards under linux, though one is using ALSA drivers). What I'd really like though is open source shoutcast player and encoder for linux and windoze, my station would switch to shoutcast if we had that.
partition with debian linux 2.1(slink) The OS I miss almost every time I go to that slow, ugly, unstable thing called windoze
parition for trying out other OSes, except I never got around to using it, and am using it for additional storage for windoze, cuz 2 gig isn't enough. (would have installed win98 for playing games, but fucking 98 won't handle multiple real partitions on a drive(as opposed to extended partitions))
The articles mentions that the GTK libraries have been ported to win32 and OS/2 as well... what I want to know is, how easy is it to make a platform-agnostic GTK app, or, in other words, one that will run on linux, win32, and other platforms.
Ultimate goal here would be that I could develop and use the same programs as my less fortunate friends who are stuck using the win32 platform at this time. Also intertwined in that is the encroachment of open source software into the win32 platform, where even the (semi)free(in the beer sense) software is closed source. I would hope this could help open up win32, and perhaps replace the current closed source shareware and freeware environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Or use my solution... put the laptop in your backpack, and wear that onto the plane. It's a lot harder to steal a backpack most of the time, and most people don't expect a plain old backpack to contain something of such value. ;)
Ok all, there's lots of good comments here, but one thing missing... links to places to get *legal* MP3s!
GoodNoise - I like this place, they have some free mp3s, plus mp3s at $1/song or $10 for an entire album. They even are set up so if your download is interuppted, you can still go and get the music. They have some good artists, including my personal fave, They Might Be Giants.
MP3.com - I haven't really used this place much, they have a *ton* of mp3s available for download free, but last I checked it was kind've hard to find out who was good and who isn't, this may have improved now though.
Also, if you're an artist, check out D.A.M. (Digital Automatic Music) System . They give you 50% of the sales from CDs! With a non-exclusive contract! I don't make music myself, but this sounds like a really great deal to me.
Yes, truthfully, I have almost never even looked at the source for most of the programs I use in linux. Despite the fact that I'm a C programmer with years of experience, I rarely look any deeper than some of the shell scripts for boot and starting X.
But, I consider open source to be a seal of quality on the programs. If a program is open source, then more than likely someone else will have already encountered any problems I'd have with it, and fixed it. You know what the only two programs I use in linux are that I have an urge to modify the source? Netscape and RealPlayer - the only two closed source programs I use. They frequently cause me to wish I had source to fix, and in fact, I even had to hack the binary for one version of netscape, because it was missing a paren in the shell statement to call external programs. The amazing thing is that it worked after I edited the binary. ;)
Yes, I do know about mozilla, and can't wait for it to be ready to use, but don't have enough time myself to help it. When I want to webrowse, I want something that will work, and last time I checked mozilla(M5), it just isn't up to snuff for that yet. The release notes for M7 look like it has most of the same deficiencies - I really wish they'd have notes on what changed since the last milestone though, so it'd be easy to know how much it has improved. Maybe by M10 or 15 it'll be ready for me to start using/contributing. ;)
Actually, no, I've never heard of ANI... could you please explain what it stands for and/or where I could find a URL for more information?
You could replace the compile command in your makefile (via a variable replacement or rule) with rsh roundrobin gcc whatever, or maybe ssh but I think the keys would interfere unless the machines all shared the same host key.
roundrobin would be a DNS entry that automatically gave you a random server.
The machines would all have to share filesystem via NFS or something though, and you'd want a minimum of 100 megabit ethernet for that, cuz compiling is fairly disk intensive as well.
Warning: This is just off the top of my head, I haven't actually tested this method, there might be some complications, but they shouldn't be hard to work around. (e.g. if rsh roundrobin doesn't work, replace it with a script that passes the command off to another machine)
If you want help, email me at echo 'LeBleu@NOSPAM@prefer.net' | sed -e 's/@NOSPAM//'
I would of course be better able to test this method if you gave me a couple of PII machines to play with^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperiment on.
Oh, and if that's not a satisfactory enough solution, you could always hire me to modify GNU make to add a distributed option to it, hourly rate negotiable. ;)
I'm sorry, but I work as an SGI admin, and I just have to disagree. Try comparing that Indigo 2 to the computer you can get for $1150. I have an AMD K6-2 300 w/ 128 meg ram and 8.4 gig HD, cost me $700 back in october, though that's without monitor, but it's brand new. In CPU power it can kick an Indigo 2's ass easy. Comparing an Indigo 2 to a first class PC is just unreasonable. New SGIs are way overpriced, maybe the used ones are ok though, I guess $1150 isn't too bad. The new O2s start at like $5000 or so, it's ludicrous for the machine you get.
BTW, um, I hope you have that machine behind a firewall, because SGI security sucks. Though Irix 6.5 improved that, but you're more likely to have 6.2 on an Indigo 2. Make sure to close the 4 default accounts that have no password(lpr and etc.), make sure to disable the xhost + on login(lets anyone anywhere connect to your X server... when I first found that I was in such disbelief... found a program though that would let me monitor ppls keystrokes remotely... connected fine. :/(was monitoring my own keystrokes actually, but from a remote account)), and of course the standard, disable anything in inetd.conf you don't use.
Go reread the page... Bochs is not freemware. Bochs is shareware with source included. Right now he's trying to figure out how to use code from bochs while putting freemware under a real open source/free software license.
I really don't care what percent of desktop marketshare linux has, though I would like it if my less computer savvy friends didn't have to suffer crappy Microsoft software.
What I do care about though, is how many developers use the software. I care how many people are using my code or some code that has some contributions of mine, because I want to see it to continue to improve. It improves faster if I'm not the only one contributing.
On the other hand, something I've really noticed since I switched to linux a year and a half ago... in general, open source/free software/freedomware already does what I want it to pretty well, and I infrequently find myself wanting to fix it. Closed source software(particularly Netscape, simply because that is the main closed source software I still use) constantly seems to be bugging me with changes I want to make or bugs I want to fix, but can't. The more people that use the opensource/free software/freedomware programs I'm using, the more likely one of them has already suggested/implemented the feature I want, or has already reported/fixed the bug I might have encountered.
P.S. Yes, I know about Mozilla, but last I checked it wasn't usable enough for me. I don't have time right now to spend more time developing my webbrowser than webrowsing. Maybe by M4 or something Mozilla will be usable, and then I'll start using it and contributing.
Although I mostly agree with you, I disagree about X11amp. X11amp is a poor knockoff of the winamp interface wrapped around an mp3 player. The playlist support in x11amp is exceedingly limited. Unfortunately I haven't found any decent GUI mp3 players under linux yet. Feel free to offer suggestions. Just as a note, my favorite feature of the winamp playlist is the ability to add entire directory trees to the list... maybe I should just use mpg123 in a shell script with find.
You can make money by selling the software you write under those other licenses? What are the odds of that? Just what percentage of software startups go bankrupt before they get anywhere? What about the 70-80% of programming that is for vertical markets? What about the more and more common practice of software piracy/warez?(Personally, I'm against warez... why use poorly written closed source software illegally for free when I can use well written free source software legally for free?)
You can't make money by writing free source software? What about Redhat? What about all the people who were hired because they had proven themselves by working on free source software?
If you try to sell closed source software, you're going to have to support it, right? The old model was that you got support free with paying for the software, but this is less and less common, probably because support costs are not directly proportional to (what people will pay for the software) times (number of copies sold). Most users will require some amount of support, although the top 20% or so are going to know how to do it themselves. Why should those 20% pay for support they never use while those who use support the most don't pay any extra? Why not fund your company entirely off of providing support for your software? You'll have to keep writing good code for it, because otherwise people might switch to some other software that you don't support. (Alhough, I do have to wonder if this model will encourage companies to keep software hard to use to keep support usage up... but I suspect that there are so many AOLers and people who don't know a cd drive from a cup holder out there that if they make it easy enough for those people to attempt to use it, they can rely on plenty of support calls from them. ;)
By the way, you can build any commercial software you want on top of LGPLed libraries, and personally I object to any library that is GPLed rather than LGPLed.
But the GPL is the way it is for a very good reason. If you had contributed code to a GPLed project, would you want someone else to be able to take it away, make improvements without returning them to the community(and most importantly, back to you!;), and then charge people money for something that isn't their own work? I wouldn't.
Actually, I prefer the LGPL over the GPL, or perhaps the MPL... something that would make anyone who uses the licensed code contribute their fixes and improvements to the licensed code back, but let them combine it easily with alternatively licensed(even closed source!) code. Might also help with patent issues, because then you could have a piece of code that pays to be licensed to use the patent, but is essentially integrated with the rest of an open source project.
Hmm... an interesting alternative license might be one that requires percentage donation to an open source software fund if you charge for reproducing the software... so, if someplace distributes it on cd for $3 or whatever, they have to give $0.30 to a fund that funds the development... Redhat sort of does the same thing by funding RedHat Advanced Development labs... This would be a license that does the same thing... it'd have to make the percentage based on percentage of their code or something though... so if you're selling, say, an entire distribution with one program by them on there, let's say their code is 1% of the code on the cd, then they'd get 1% of what they would get if it was 100% their code.(.3 cents per copy, in above example) OTOH, if you have many fractured little groups using this method, you run into problems like the BSD-style advertising clause, only in this case it's a problem of accounting for the hundreds of different groups you have to pay money to. Just a thought.
Just a note, I totally agree on the not allowing moderating and posting in the same article issue... makes me glad I'm not a moderator. ;) By thread sounds good to me, that way someone(obviously not you, but some less scrupulous moderator) can't just down moderate all dissenting replies, but they *can* still moderate the rest of the comments.
Excluding the bottom 1/6th makes sense(even though I might well fall in it) because moderation after the majority of readers have already read the article is useless... you want people who keep up with things enough to make sure stuff gets moderated promptly.
Excluding the top 1/6th seems motivated purely by avoiding abuse... I think this may be misguided, and the abuse should be prevent elsewhere in the system. Just make sure that reloading more frequently doesn't increase your moderation abilities. You might still filter out the top 1 or 2% just to make sure those who put excessive load on /.(probably via some script, designed to keep their apparant reading frequency high enough to moderate even if they aren't paying attention?) are penalized in some way... adding a message in big letters at the top of the article that says "STOP RELOADING SO OFTEN!" would be better though. :)
A class action suit should be filed against Microsoft for it's negligent behavior in not creating preventitive measures by the people and corporations impacted by this virus.
I don't think virus prevention of this kind is the realm of the IETF, it is the realm of application writers. Now, the IETF should make sure that all protocols are secure, which will help... for example, right now it is possible to spoof the From: address(the field is added on the client side... it's not easy to hide all traces of the fact it was spoofed, but for a non-technical user, it isn't necessary) or intercept email and add an attachment containing a virus to it. So, I could pretend I was someone you trust, and send you a virus.
But, there already is an RFC on how to prevent this - RFC2311 - S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification All email readers and writers should start supporting this(hopefully in reasonably secure ways such that you can verify any automatically generated email before letting it get signed!), so that sometime soon we even have the reasonable option of not accepting any email without a verified digital signature. (Imagine the possibilities for eliminating/filtering SPAM! Delete or filter into a separate folder all mail received from someone who isn't in your key ring and doesn't have a key verified by one of your friends!)
This is not true. No change in the mail distribution system is necessary to prevent this type of virus. Merely changes on the clients to prevent a script received via email from automatically emailing people. Note that Java already has protections against such things, whereas Visual Basic does not. Also changes to implement S/MIME so as to verify who sent the email, so that you know whether or not the mail was received from a trusted individual. (Note: This won't help unless scripts are also prevented from sending signed mail!)
I think at this point we can rely on Hemos to tell us when CT's birthday is... just out of revenge. ;)
--LeBleu
Using back does not put load on the server in most cases, because your browser caches the file locally
4 is a good idea!
--Kevin
Suggestion: Just use the same aging system that is used for the load average. :) I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it is basically an exponential decay over time... of course, you would want a *much* longer decay period than for a load average. ;)
--Kevin
P.S. Taco, I love the new way preview works!
Excuse me, but shouldn't you be reporting this to mozilla.org(possibly straight into BugZilla?), so that they can fix this bug, rather than reporting it to /. readers, who if they really want to know all the current bugs in Mozilla can go read the bug database at Mozilla? -- Kevin
The new zero should be in the same Random location the old one is, cuz otherwise conversion is a bitch, and days don't change at the right time.
For example, if we used millidays, but keeping the meridian right where it is instead of moving it to some marketing company's headquarters, then you could find out the time as simple as time(NULL) / 86.4, and we could define a new day standard of days since Jan 1 1970, which could be calculated as time(NULL) / 86400, and would simplify date/time arithmetic because then you wouldn't need to convert the day and time into the same format first. So then this post would have been posted at 10668.239IT (239th milliday of the 10668th day)
--Kevin
Yeah, people should be able to disable the ad banner... of course, they would have to pay for their subscription instead, so that /. still gets necessary revenue ;) -- Kevin
Actually, something people forget is, what happens without patents? Without patents, companies keep new advances as trade secrets instead, because that is the only way to get an edge over the competition... with a patent, they have exclusive use of it for a certain period of time, but the method is public knowledge. Once the patent expires, anyone can use this new advance.(hence why the Coca-Cola(tm) formula has never been patented)
I think that the problem is that the length of patents hasn't been shortened to keep up with the rate of technological advance. A software patent should be limited to something more like 6 months - 2 years. After that, everyone can use it, and the method is well publicized, instead of hidden away in closed source.
--LeBleu
You made a bit of a jump there - straight from text, which is relatively easy to produce(good text isn't easy, but it isn't as obvious either), to video, which is difficult, at least right now. (think on the effects of the growing amount of CPU power available and what that could do for the average person's ability to do computer generated animation) You missed an important one - audio. I'm currently a manager for a small internet "radio" station(PaganPaths CyberRadio). All you need is someone on a fast connection(cable modem, dorm ethernet, etc.) to run a server, and then lots of people can DJ.(It takes about a pentium 120 or better, a 28.8k modem, decent ISP, a decent soundcard, and a mic to be a DJ.) Sounds like low enough barriers to entry to me. How low will the barriers to entry on video become in 10 years?
--LeBleu
The point is, it only handles it just fine. One of the major things about BeOS is it isn't just fine SMP support, it is excellent, thorough SMP support. Be will really shine on 16 processors, because the entire OS, and all standard applications, are heavily threaded. How many programs do you have to be running under linux before it can use all 16 processors at once?
It will take a very, very long time for linux to ever acheive this. In fact, an OSS OS that is more modern, including features such as Be has, may be the OS that replaces linux a few decades down the line. (Yes, the implicit assumption is that linux is going to replace windows in between now and then. Both OSes are somewhat archaic, linux is better at adapting new features though, and has a much more sound foundation than windows.)
Disclaimer: I've never actually used Be, just read about it... It looks *really* cool, but the price is outside my meager budget, otherwise I'd try it out on the 3rd partition on my machine.
The articles mentions that the GTK libraries have been ported to win32 and OS/2 as well... what I want to know is, how easy is it to make a platform-agnostic GTK app, or, in other words, one that will run on linux, win32, and other platforms.
Ultimate goal here would be that I could develop and use the same programs as my less fortunate friends who are stuck using the win32 platform at this time. Also intertwined in that is the encroachment of open source software into the win32 platform, where even the (semi)free(in the beer sense) software is closed source. I would hope this could help open up win32, and perhaps replace the current closed source shareware and freeware environment.