I think what he's saying is that GPL projects should not be tax funded, as the intellectual property derived from said projects cannot be used to spur on commercial development.
Personally, I agree. But I'm open-minded. Anyone have good reasons why taxpayer funded projects should be GPL'd?
Well the thing is, when the closed source Morpheus/Kazaa originally came out, they worked much better than gnutella. So yeah, if something is a lot better they will use it instead of the open source version.
Now there is a better version of gnutella, it has a real chance of succeeding with Morpheus. I just tried it and it works a lot better than the original gnutella. It works well enough for me to stick with it.
From non-technical standpoints, here's why:
1 - Its pretty obvious to me that this was a power play to get Morpheus users to switch to Kazaa.
2 - Kazaa uses spyware.
So even though the performance is slightly sub-par(although still acceptable), I think I will stick with it because I now view Morpheus to be the better company. And not just for technical or open-source reasons.
holy bejeezus thats a lot of people using Morpheus.
I've been using Morpheus for quite awhile, although I had always wished that it was an open source product. Now it is, thanks to improvements to gnutella.
If Fast Track/Kazaa really did kick Morpheus off their network then they just committed suicide because given the choice between closed source spyware and open source, assumming both products work equally well, people will go for the open source version.
53,000,000 downloads! I think that makes Morpheus the single most popular GPL'd software ever. Good job, guys.
Slashdots saving grace is that it is very popular amongst the people who use products made by companies it criticizes. For example 80%+ of Slashdot readers use Internet Explorer. If someone was to even threaten to sue, it would bring such a negative backlash against them that would be even more damaging than anything they could recover in a lawsuit. Microsoft once asked Slashdot to remove a post and the response was overwhelming. They backed down.
Where Slashdot has to be careful is with groups that could care less about the Slashdot population. Like Scientology. They have been the only group to successfully get a post removed from Slashdot. A group that is not affected by the geek population could successfully sue without worrying about popular repercussions.
As long as what is said is either the truth or expressing your opinion, its not libel. Its only libel when you express a negative opinion and pass it off as a statement of fact.
jeez, I would say so. They wrote the program, they hold the trademark. It's theirs. They have every right to say how their name is used.
If you don't like the way someone runs their GPL project you have one choice: fork it, and call it something else. But if NuSphere wants to sell "NuSphere MySQL" I would think it would be in its best interest to respect the trademark and hard work of its owners and inventors.
I believe I've been $rtbl'd, and whatever the reason(or glitch) might be, its a mistake because I've never abused posting or moderation. Yet, from what I understand, its a lifetime ban from moderation. I'd feel kind of weird subscribing to a site I'm not allowed to fully participate in.
Would you consider lifting a blacklist mark for a subscriber?
I would rather not have movies at all than to be forced to use copy prevention on my PC. If the lack of copy prevention is what is keeping the MPAA from joining the internet age, well, they can just stay where they are as far as I'm concerned.
I will buy neither digital products that cannot be backed up, converted into other formats, or otherwise copied. I still use VHS for this reason. I'll buy a DVD player when I can finally make backups with DVD's. Nor will I buy disabled computers. Somehow I doubt the Pacific Rim manufacturers I buy computer parts from are going to bend over backwards for this.
The technologies that I can backup, copy and preserve? Sure, I download MP3's, but usually just to check out a band or to find something thats not available on CD. If its something I like I buy the CD, because MP3 takes away too much for me to fully enjoy the sound. I spend at least $100 a month on music, and another $50 or so buying movies. But I will spend $0 on products I can't back up or copy, or computers that are bastardized with copy protection.
The problem with strlcat and strlcpy is that they assume that it's okay to arbitrarily discard data for the sake of preventing a buffer overflow.
A function should always throw out data that doesn't match its parameters. If a function expects an int and the user passes a double, it gets changed back to an int. The user's data gets lost, but thats his fault for using the program incorrectly. Every C compiler known to man behaves this way. Why should strings be any different?
hmm...From what I understand it San Francisco is unlivable(ie way too expensive) for average working citizens - teachers, government employees, cab drivers, etc. So it must be a place where the people who live there are served by a lower class that can't even afford to live in the city they work in and must commute to serve the elite that lives there.
Compare that to the SF of the late 60s where it was a bohemian paradise and had real culture there.
What game(s) are you playing? I won some money in St. Louis last year at a riverboat casino playing blackjack. My strategy was simply this - play by the same rules the dealer adheres to and take advantage of the special rules(splits, etc.) whenever they applied. I figure playing by the dealers rule(play up to 16, hold on 17) gets you at least a breakeven in your odds of winning - then you get advantage with your splits, 3/2 bets, etc.
I came away thinking that blackjack just might be a game that can be consistently beaten. I wouldn't "gamble" on a regular basis, but I sure as hell would employ a reliable mathematical system for some extra $$$. If there really was a reliable, mathematical way to beat the casinos. I haven't convinced myself that it wasn't just luck that I won.
Re:The Net is not a way to promote free expression
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 1
Katz only has superior writing skills to a fungus
and yet, here you are, posting a comment 3 levels deep in a Katz article. Hmm.
Katz may be clueless(compared to the average/. reader) about technology, but he's had several books published and written for several large magazines like Rolling Stone and Wired. You don't get to do that without significant writing talent. Show me a single other Slashdot editor who has written anything for another publication(articles for linux.com don't count) and I'll make a retraction.
All of academia is inherited from schools that primarily taught priests. Latin was the language of those priests. Latin was used because the Church didn't want the peasants to hear or read the Bible in their native language.
Since those times, every profession has come up with a jargon designed to be unintelligible to the laymen. Personally, I think thats a standard that needs to be done away with, because its very clear that in this day in age 1) the average person should be well-educated and 2) different professions need to understand each other. Witness the suffering caused by the lack of understanding between the legal and technical professions.
Then again, the phrase ad hominem is pretty common...
Re:The Net is not a way to promote free expression
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 2
Really, we shouldn't be surprised that the "mainstream" media is boring -- most people don't like to hear views that strongly conflict with their own.
So, you don't think the fact that huge corps like Microsoft, Disney, and Time-Warner/AOL directly influence what their paid journalists can say and not say? How many articles critical of Microsoft are you going to see on msn.com, despite the fact that they may be extremely popular(lots of people love to dis MS and AOL, for example)
I really can't think of any reason for MS, AOL, et. al. to be so interested in buying big media outlets other than the fact that they want to influence what people think. There are certainly other more profitable businesses to be in, and news is certainly not the area of expertise for tech companies like MS and AOL. They are in it to influence public opinion(and for free advertising). The bias generated by this arrangement is overwhelming. I personally cannot completely trust a site like msn.com to report fairly on issues like the Microsoft antitrust case, and thats just one example.
I agree most people are going to gravitate towards infomation sources that they agree with. Heck, the people here on/. never fail to slam Jon Katz, even though he clearly has superior writing skills compared to the other editors(because he's not "one of us"). But you can't discount the fact that the big players are basically buying public opinion and directly influencing the course of media with their money.
Consider all the small and medium sized businesses out there. They may be lucky to have even one admin, yet still need to provide email to all their employees. That one(if even that) overworked admin may have many responsibilities, one of which is running a mail server. I know some of you would like to say, "hey if he can't run his mail server right, he shouldn't be doing it at all". That's a bad attitude to take, and putting someone on a blacklist without giving him the chance to correct the problem first is just plain wrong. Yet thats what these blacklists do. Only after you take care of the problem are you taken off the blacklist.
IMO, the way it should work, to be fair, is to send a warning email to someone from the company. Then, if that email goes unnoticed, put the company in the blacklist. Even better, put something informative in that email letting people know how they can stop their server from being an open relay.
I should know. I've been in this situation, where my email server was way down on my list of priorities. I was blacklisted without warning or explanation. I had to investigate the whole matter myself, fix the problem, find the people who blacklisted me and go through their procedures to get off the blacklist. While I see the need to have blacklists, they certainly could do a better job dealing with buisnesses who have no intention of spamming and who may have just overlooked or not even known about the problem.
Its the only thing that will fit your bill. One of your req's was that you have an IDE. Well, forget Eiffel or any other language that you haven't listed. IDE's like your boss wants come from big companies and support very popular languages.
I'm not sure where you can get a GC library, but they are out there and undoubtedly someone else has mentioned one or two of these.
As many others have said, Java, VB.Net etc. fall short. No operator overloading, templates, MI.
C++ and good libraries are your best bet.
At least they acknowledge they do this.
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I usually don't like to hawk commercial products, but I've been awfully fond of Zone Alarm ever since I started using it.
I'm actually appalled at the number of applications that "phone home" while you're on the internet - sending back to the companies that created them information about themselves and the computer they are running on. Were it not for Zone Alarm, they would be doing this in secret without me ever knowing it.
At any rate, at least MS says that they do this. There are a lot of others. Even if you are using an Linux or BSD firewall, as I do, those probably are set up to allow you do send any sort of communication out without checking. Something like Zone Alarm will tell you what applications are trying to access the internet by themselves. Its been highly enlightening ever since I started using it.
In the case of something that runs over port 80 like IE, I'm not sure how you could use the internet while preventing it from sending back info to its parent company. I guess you would have to use something that promises not to have spyware built into it.
If people who sell software for money want to continue to do so they have exactly one choice: pay the people who are willing to write software for free.
The Harvard model(turning away qualified applicants because you have more applicants than slots to fill) ain't gonna cut it in the world of software. If the software industry expects to sell its wares, it damn well better hire all the qualified applicants.
Elitism will not work. Because if people have the ability and the time, but no job, they will sit around making high quality software and giving it away for free. And that poses quite a little problem if you have a similar product and want to charge for it, now doesn't it?
The current downturn in the computer industry is by far the worst I have ever seen. Ever since I can remember(back to the early 80's when PC's first arrived) the computer industry had always expanded and provided more jobs. Now its experiencing its first real downturn and you have a lot of skilled people without jobs. If those skilled people continue to produce software, but they give it away for free, that spells disaster for software companies who expect to sell their product for money.
Open source software will indeed "catch up" to its commercial equivalents. I give KDE less than five years before it is equivalent or superior in every way to Windows. Same thing with the Open Offices, the databases, the programming languages, etc. The software industry has one choice - start paying open-source programmers or die.
I'm not sure if our current economic model can deal with the situation of high quality products being given away en masse for free. I certainly don't see how the software industry can grow like it did in years past. Since the computer industry has led the economy for the last 20 years prior to the current recession, we may never see a recovery. Unless we revamp our current economic system to deal with the fact that what had previously been leading the economy into prosperity(software) is now being given away for free. Also, on a global scale we have to compete with entire economies of scale(China) that don't pay for software.
Slashdot Mirror
BSD would let anybody do what they wanted with it. The corporations pay taxes too. Why GPL over BSD?
I think what he's saying is that GPL projects should not be tax funded, as the intellectual property derived from said projects cannot be used to spur on commercial development.
Personally, I agree. But I'm open-minded. Anyone have good reasons why taxpayer funded projects should be GPL'd?
Well the thing is, when the closed source Morpheus/Kazaa originally came out, they worked much better than gnutella. So yeah, if something is a lot better they will use it instead of the open source version.
Now there is a better version of gnutella, it has a real chance of succeeding with Morpheus. I just tried it and it works a lot better than the original gnutella. It works well enough for me to stick with it.
From non-technical standpoints, here's why:
1 - Its pretty obvious to me that this was a power play to get Morpheus users to switch to Kazaa.
2 - Kazaa uses spyware.
So even though the performance is slightly sub-par(although still acceptable), I think I will stick with it because I now view Morpheus to be the better company. And not just for technical or open-source reasons.
holy bejeezus thats a lot of people using Morpheus.
I've been using Morpheus for quite awhile, although I had always wished that it was an open source product. Now it is, thanks to improvements to gnutella.
If Fast Track/Kazaa really did kick Morpheus off their network then they just committed suicide because given the choice between closed source spyware and open source, assumming both products work equally well, people will go for the open source version.
53,000,000 downloads! I think that makes Morpheus the single most popular GPL'd software ever. Good job, guys.
Slashdots saving grace is that it is very popular amongst the people who use products made by companies it criticizes. For example 80%+ of Slashdot readers use Internet Explorer. If someone was to even threaten to sue, it would bring such a negative backlash against them that would be even more damaging than anything they could recover in a lawsuit. Microsoft once asked Slashdot to remove a post and the response was overwhelming. They backed down.
Where Slashdot has to be careful is with groups that could care less about the Slashdot population. Like Scientology. They have been the only group to successfully get a post removed from Slashdot. A group that is not affected by the geek population could successfully sue without worrying about popular repercussions.
As long as what is said is either the truth or expressing your opinion, its not libel. Its only libel when you express a negative opinion and pass it off as a statement of fact.
Actually, you can use all the GPL code you want on your web site and never tell anyone.
Its only when you try to package and distribute GPL code that you are required to make the code public and submit any modifications back to its owner.
jeez, I would say so. They wrote the program, they hold the trademark. It's theirs. They have every right to say how their name is used.
If you don't like the way someone runs their GPL project you have one choice: fork it, and call it something else. But if NuSphere wants to sell "NuSphere MySQL" I would think it would be in its best interest to respect the trademark and hard work of its owners and inventors.
What kind of house can you buy for $20-$40K?
I believe I've been $rtbl'd, and whatever the reason(or glitch) might be, its a mistake because I've never abused posting or moderation. Yet, from what I understand, its a lifetime ban from moderation. I'd feel kind of weird subscribing to a site I'm not allowed to fully participate in.
Would you consider lifting a blacklist mark for a subscriber?
I would rather not have movies at all than to be forced to use copy prevention on my PC. If the lack of copy prevention is what is keeping the MPAA from joining the internet age, well, they can just stay where they are as far as I'm concerned.
I will buy neither digital products that cannot be backed up, converted into other formats, or otherwise copied. I still use VHS for this reason. I'll buy a DVD player when I can finally make backups with DVD's. Nor will I buy disabled computers. Somehow I doubt the Pacific Rim manufacturers I buy computer parts from are going to bend over backwards for this.
The technologies that I can backup, copy and preserve? Sure, I download MP3's, but usually just to check out a band or to find something thats not available on CD. If its something I like I buy the CD, because MP3 takes away too much for me to fully enjoy the sound. I spend at least $100 a month on music, and another $50 or so buying movies. But I will spend $0 on products I can't back up or copy, or computers that are bastardized with copy protection.
buffer overflow.
A function should always throw out data that doesn't match its parameters. If a function expects an int and the user passes a double, it gets changed back to an int. The user's data gets lost, but thats his fault for using the program incorrectly. Every C compiler known to man behaves this way. Why should strings be any different?
hmm...From what I understand it San Francisco is unlivable(ie way too expensive) for average working citizens - teachers, government employees, cab drivers, etc. So it must be a place where the people who live there are served by a lower class that can't even afford to live in the city they work in and must commute to serve the elite that lives there.
Compare that to the SF of the late 60s where it was a bohemian paradise and had real culture there.
I came away thinking that blackjack just might be a game that can be consistently beaten. I wouldn't "gamble" on a regular basis, but I sure as hell would employ a reliable mathematical system for some extra $$$. If there really was a reliable, mathematical way to beat the casinos. I haven't convinced myself that it wasn't just luck that I won.
Katz only has superior writing skills to a fungus
/. reader) about technology, but he's had several books published and written for several large magazines like Rolling Stone and Wired. You don't get to do that without significant writing talent. Show me a single other Slashdot editor who has written anything for another publication(articles for linux.com don't count) and I'll make a retraction.
and yet, here you are, posting a comment 3 levels deep in a Katz article. Hmm.
Katz may be clueless(compared to the average
Have you ever wondered why its the standard?
All of academia is inherited from schools that primarily taught priests. Latin was the language of those priests. Latin was used because the Church didn't want the peasants to hear or read the Bible in their native language.
Since those times, every profession has come up with a jargon designed to be unintelligible to the laymen. Personally, I think thats a standard that needs to be done away with, because its very clear that in this day in age 1) the average person should be well-educated and 2) different professions need to understand each other. Witness the suffering caused by the lack of understanding between the legal and technical professions.
Then again, the phrase ad hominem is pretty common...
So, you don't think the fact that huge corps like Microsoft, Disney, and Time-Warner/AOL directly influence what their paid journalists can say and not say? How many articles critical of Microsoft are you going to see on msn.com, despite the fact that they may be extremely popular(lots of people love to dis MS and AOL, for example)
I really can't think of any reason for MS, AOL, et. al. to be so interested in buying big media outlets other than the fact that they want to influence what people think. There are certainly other more profitable businesses to be in, and news is certainly not the area of expertise for tech companies like MS and AOL. They are in it to influence public opinion(and for free advertising). The bias generated by this arrangement is overwhelming. I personally cannot completely trust a site like msn.com to report fairly on issues like the Microsoft antitrust case, and thats just one example.
I agree most people are going to gravitate towards infomation sources that they agree with. Heck, the people here on
according to this study, if you wear a special kind of ring on your pinky fingers while you sleep, you will live forever!
IMO, the way it should work, to be fair, is to send a warning email to someone from the company. Then, if that email goes unnoticed, put the company in the blacklist. Even better, put something informative in that email letting people know how they can stop their server from being an open relay.
I should know. I've been in this situation, where my email server was way down on my list of priorities. I was blacklisted without warning or explanation. I had to investigate the whole matter myself, fix the problem, find the people who blacklisted me and go through their procedures to get off the blacklist. While I see the need to have blacklists, they certainly could do a better job dealing with buisnesses who have no intention of spamming and who may have just overlooked or not even known about the problem.
I should've learned by now to check Slashdot for news first.
If you've ever seen DeNiro in Awakenings, you'll know what I mean.
I'm not sure where you can get a GC library, but they are out there and undoubtedly someone else has mentioned one or two of these.
As many others have said, Java, VB.Net etc. fall short. No operator overloading, templates, MI.
C++ and good libraries are your best bet.
I'm actually appalled at the number of applications that "phone home" while you're on the internet - sending back to the companies that created them information about themselves and the computer they are running on. Were it not for Zone Alarm, they would be doing this in secret without me ever knowing it.
At any rate, at least MS says that they do this. There are a lot of others. Even if you are using an Linux or BSD firewall, as I do, those probably are set up to allow you do send any sort of communication out without checking. Something like Zone Alarm will tell you what applications are trying to access the internet by themselves. Its been highly enlightening ever since I started using it.
In the case of something that runs over port 80 like IE, I'm not sure how you could use the internet while preventing it from sending back info to its parent company. I guess you would have to use something that promises not to have spyware built into it.
In the 20's and 30's the most popular novelists were Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.
Today its Anne Rice, John Grisham, and Stephen King.
Not exactly a quantum leap in novel writing.
If people who sell software for money want to continue to do so they have exactly one choice: pay the people who are willing to write software for free.
The Harvard model(turning away qualified applicants because you have more applicants than slots to fill) ain't gonna cut it in the world of software. If the software industry expects to sell its wares, it damn well better hire all the qualified applicants.
Elitism will not work. Because if people have the ability and the time, but no job, they will sit around making high quality software and giving it away for free. And that poses quite a little problem if you have a similar product and want to charge for it, now doesn't it?
The current downturn in the computer industry is by far the worst I have ever seen. Ever since I can remember(back to the early 80's when PC's first arrived) the computer industry had always expanded and provided more jobs. Now its experiencing its first real downturn and you have a lot of skilled people without jobs. If those skilled people continue to produce software, but they give it away for free, that spells disaster for software companies who expect to sell their product for money.
Open source software will indeed "catch up" to its commercial equivalents. I give KDE less than five years before it is equivalent or superior in every way to Windows. Same thing with the Open Offices, the databases, the programming languages, etc. The software industry has one choice - start paying open-source programmers or die.
I'm not sure if our current economic model can deal with the situation of high quality products being given away en masse for free. I certainly don't see how the software industry can grow like it did in years past. Since the computer industry has led the economy for the last 20 years prior to the current recession, we may never see a recovery. Unless we revamp our current economic system to deal with the fact that what had previously been leading the economy into prosperity(software) is now being given away for free. Also, on a global scale we have to compete with entire economies of scale(China) that don't pay for software.