how long is it going to take for something on linux to do what installshield does on windows?
I was a build engineer for a large telecom company who had a commercial Windows product which used InstallShield. I wrote the installer for that product (twice). I've been using Linux since 1994 in various ways. I know InstallShield and I know Linux, and trust me, you don't want IS for Linux, no matter how much you think you do. People are better of sticking to whatever package management system comes with their distribution than pining away for something like InstallShield.
Having a single point of installation management is far superior (even with dependancy checking issues, like sometimes happens with RPM) than leaving it up to the software maintainers. Windows should have orginally shipped with such a centralized system IMO. Now they force software developers to jump through hoops (which cost money, incidentally) in order to get a sticker on their box saying their software was "Designed for Windows". Barring that "certification" a person can do whatever the hell they want in an installer, and your system can become an unorganized mess in very short order.
Even now on this Win2K machine I've got more than a dozen apps (most of which are commercially released) that aren't listed in the Add/Remove Programs applet. If I install something via RPM or apt, that can't happen. I just have to hope that one of those Win32 apps doesn't conflict with something else down the road, since there's no way to remove them programmatically. That's a critical flaw of Windows' installation setup, IMO. Just one that happens to come to mind, even. I could go on all day...
I admit not knowing about linux, and am doing little to change that.
Your parents must be terribly proud at having imbued in their progeny such an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
At the university in Southern California where I work there are a lot of Asian students. I'd say they aren't much of a minority. It had been a while since I was in college, so I was fairly surprised at all the changes in the students when I starting working here last year.
I'd say, safely, that your odds of finding an Asian student not carrying (or more likely, not actively chatting away on) a cell phone are about the same as being struck by lightning while being bitten by a shark.
Every Asian student has a cell phone, and they all use them when walking around. I'm serious. You won't see many students walking between classes unless they have a cell phone nearby. You'll even see groups of three, four, six girls walking together... all talking on their phones. I swear they are actually talking to each other.
When I was in school nobody had a cell phone. Now everyone does. It's amazing what ten years can do. I liked it better the old way. Then again I usually leave my cell phone in my truck, and it's never turned on anyway.
He's right. Bullies, in my experience, have responded to only one thing: being stood up to. I got bullied a lot in grade school and high school (I have a large birthmark in my head that makes me stand out somewhat; I was also resented because I was the guy that usually screwed up the grading curve). I was always catching crap, and pleading and cajoling and asking and being friendly never did anything but fan the flames.
Bullies see *any* sign of weakness -- which usually includes trying to talk your way out of an altercation -- and they go for the throat. You can't convince a bully to be your friend (and who'd want them as a friend, anyway?). That's nonsense. They can see right through that. They can smell the blood in the water when you try to back them down.
No, the only way I got rid of the bullies was to beat the living shit out of a few of them. Bullies use the threat of violence to their advantage and you have to call them on it in order to counter them. It helped that I was six foot two in eighth grade, so that may have had something to do with it. But word got around that if you picked on me, you were liable to have an insane person attacking you until one of you was not moving -- and it was likely you that would be left laying on the ground. Even when faced with people bigger than me, going completely berserk always worked. (I learned early on that most people can't take being kicked in the knee, and almost nobody sees it coming. You can take a much larger person down with one fast sideways kick. And once down, you can continue to beat on them or just walk away depending on the example which needs to be set. They wouldn't be walking for a couple months at least, and the fight was over before it started.) Bullies can't stand up to a fight, and always back down. At least in my experience.
I always thought that name calling and pettiness and immaturity would go away once I left school and got to college. I could hardly wait to get out of school. I thought once people became adults, they'd start acting like adults, and I really wanted to be around adults and not children. Not the case. Most people are assholes, and will never grown up.
Oddly enough, I'm one of the most non-violent people I know. I hate getting into fights (I haven't in a long time, thankfully, and if my last stays my last then I'll die a happy man). And I've never ever started a fight. Problem is, there's only one way to stop one: get the other guy to not hit you. If you've been able to accomplish that with words, then more power to you. I was never able to, and always had to resort to violence.
Honestly, I think ACs should have to wait 20 minutes even after a story goes "public" on the front page. Like you said above, the first 30+ posts are usually junk anyway.
I've got filters set sorta high, so I tend to see the interesting stuff. But on new stories, there's still a lot to wade thought since nothing passes until the spill level is hit (I suppose I could set a spill level of like 10 and get the same effect).
I'm all for anonymity. I've personally never posted as AC, but I really like the idea of people being able to if they want or need to. Having said that, I don't think putting a "ACs can't post until a story has been live for 30 minutes" rule will hurt people's "right" to post AC. It won't stifle any speech. The people who post as AC right when a story hits aren't usually whistleblowers risking their careers to give us some inside scoop.
And while I'm already typing, I think what Slashdot really needs is more stories per day. It was really nice around here during that blackout nonsense last year (reminded me of when I first came around, actually; less noise, more signal). I'd susbscribe if it meant seeing more stories. And I'd definitely subscribe if I got the chance to vote on what stories in the submission queue made it to the front page (would that be proto-moderating?).
That patch will be issued immediately after the patch that causes asshole sysadmins to stop requiring a new password every 30 days that doesn't match any of the previous 11 passwords, is at least 8 characters long containing mixed case, a number, and a non-alphanumeric character.
I just did a web-based auth system at work. We have a new web site structure, and we wanted to protect an area for faculty and staff only (I work at a university, in the CS department). I had to come up with a scheme to "force" good passwords for use with the web site (since there will be stuff in that private area that students should never be able to see). It's harder to do than you might think. There's a very fine line between pissing people off with strong passwords and letting them slide by using things like "qwerty".
In the end, I came up with this:
>=6 characters
At least one non-alphanumeric character
Cannot be based on username (forward or backward)
That's it. Pretty easy going, right? Not really. I've had a couple people complain already (it's been two days since we went live). I even removed the "Cannot be based on a dictionary word" requirement. We also removed the "Cannot be the same as your Unix system password" requirement (over my loud protestations).
I actually had a professor (a computer science professor, mind you) ask that I make it more lenient. He lamented to me that because he had to choose a "strange" password (since his "normal" password didn't pass my tests), he had already forgotten what he had chosen. He then asked me to email him and let him know what his password is. After I got done laughing, I prepared a carefully-worded LARTish email explaining to him what a one-way hash is and why I wasn't able to tell him what his word was, even if I wanted to send it to him in email. I also threw in a little bit of "weak passwords are the #1 security hole" boilerplate and explained that I was glad that his normal system password wasn't able to be used on the web site.
I haven't sent the email yet; I thought it might be too harsh so I decided to sit on it overnight. I think on one hand that anyone clueless enough to use a password that can't pass even my lame scheme deserves to be cut down a notch or two. Then I think that he's a tenured prefessor, and I should be more respectful. Then I think that he's a tenured professor, and yet is a complete idiot, and I go back to #1. I've always wanted to give a prof what-for.
removing mass would send it further out, not closer. It is gravitionally attracted to earth by it's mass, reduce that and the earth won't pull as much. (g=(M1*M2)/r2)
Yeah, I dig. That's why I thought the original poster's suggestion that taking mass from the moon would cause it to move closer to Earth (or break up, or anything else) was completely improbable.
BUT, what people don't realize is that the moon increases in mass each day more than what we could mine out of it anyway... (solar wind, picking up other random stuff...)
Right. And even if there wasn't any of this interstellar accretion going on, I'm saying there's no way we could possible get enough equipment to the moon to do it any real harm, change the tides on Earth, etc.
There's a certain kind of hubris that goes with any over-reaching environmentalism. Humans are actually pretty insignificant, especially on a cosmic scale.
But the mining the moon might have direct effect on the population of the Earth. Negative effect in that the moon acts as a shield for the earth as well as has some influence on our environment, ala tides and weather. As more and more of the mass of the moon is exhausted there's a higher likely hood of it shifting, breaking apart, falling into our atmosphere or drifting away.
You're saying that it is not only possible but also probable that we could remove enough material from the moon to cause it to fall to Earth? Or break up? Or affect the tides in any appreciable amount? We'd have to remove a lot of material do get much effect, especially since we'd be mostly concerned about mining volatiles anyway (after all: we'd be forced to get the fuel sources to make it possible to extract heavier elements like Al and Fe and whatnot).
I think it's the pinnacle of self-importance to imagine that we can do anything to the moon. It's a big thing, and it's been there for a long time. We can try to preserve it all we want and it won't make any more difference than if we tried our hardest to strip it bare. It's too large and we're too feeble. On a planetary scale, mind you. That still doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be decent stewards -- and it doesn't mean we should bother utilizing what resources we need.
With morons like you deciding policy we'd soon all run out of resources.
Well, I guess nobody ever said you had to be civil to those you don't know, but it does't cost you anything to at least try refrain from unwarranted personal attacks. The guy just has a point of view that's different from yours. If he called you names simply because your opnion was different that his, would that make you more or less apt to seriously consider anything he said?
Thanks for the info. I'll most certainly have a look at it, see what can be done with it. I was due to head over to tigris.org anyway this afternoon to grab Subversion...
At this point I'm leaning towards using CFEngine since it'll take care of the BSD and Windows machines too. But Current is certainly worth a look.
I'd consider paying to keep 6.2 support, but not otherwise. ... I really hope that we have non-redhat up2date servers soon. Redhat grows less and less tolerable as time goes on
I couldn't agree more on both accounts. I've got a RH 7.3 box that works just fine now that I have it all set up the way I like it. It will continue to work fine long after RH discontinues support for it. Luckily, it's never exposed to the Net directly, but an upatched machine is a less than ideal situation.
Why Red Hat didn't decide to use support for older version as a pay-only feature, I will never know. It sounds like it would have been good for my RHAT stock. I'd pay $60/year to have RHN support for my older machine. I will not, however, incur the cost (even if only in terms of time spent) of upgrading to some new version of Red Hat in order to get that support, even for free. Red Hat just doesn't want my money I guess, because I refuse to get on their upgrade treadmill. If they would have let me pay to upgrade my older machines, they'd have had a customer for certain.
Having said all that, I'd definitely volunteer as a packager for a non-Red Hat up2date server network. I'm going to have to do it all myself now anyway, just like in the old days, so there's not much extra work in letting other people get something out of it.
The RHN/up2date stuff is all open, right? Well then what we need to do is create some Non-Red Hat up2date servers, charge like $20 a year for every point release past current (eg, RH 6.2 would be $40/year), and give all the money after operating costs to the EFF or FSF.
You have a lot of faith in Chinese respect for international intellectual property laws. I give it 6 months before it's leaked.
I personally think this is hilarious. I spit coffee all over when I read it on news.com this morning It's hard to ask to be taken seriously when your proprietary flagship software product is so shoddy and untrustworthy that you have to share the source to get foreign countries to trust it (and compete with other open source projects).
Tell him to take off the jackboots and brown shirt and stop harassing people.
OK, seriously: Tell him to presume innocence rather than immediately assume guilt. Tell him that, believe it or not, there are a lot of people and businesses that use software which is not only ok to copy freely, but such copying is highly encouraged. He needs to find a way to get his mind around that and set policies in place to deal with it.
If I were grilling him, I'd ask him something along the lines of "So if you find this small business that is using illegal copies of non-free/commercial software, do you immediately persecute them or do you suggest free alternatives? Why not? You want businesses to stay in business, right? Well then why not show them the error of their ways, and then show them how not to get in trouble again -- without causing any artifical financial hardships on them? If they pirated MS Office because they couldn't afford it, why try to get blood from a stone?"
Pipe dream, I know. The BSA is basically the brute squad, and exists only to enforce "taxes". But it sure would be nice if they were at least slightly constructive, and actually helped businesses build the economy.
Well, Daniel, I have to say that your reply was one of the most thorough I've ever had.
I don't know what will happen to Avril, whether she'll stand the test of time or not. I don't particularly care, either; it won't befront me either way (apologies to Mr. Thorogood). It's just not my music, not my era. I can't identify with her in the slightest, and find myself rather apathetic if anything.
I do know one thing, however. I'm working late tonight. I just got done listening to London Calling, and now The Ramones are playing. The Specials are up next. You think any of today's Avril fans will have her music playing 20-25 years from now?
Well, I disagree. Even if a developer grants the legal right to use his code in any way, he still retains a moral right to complain if people use his/her creation in a way he does not like.
I don't know about that. With licenses like the GPL, that which is not expressly forbidden is implicitly allowed. By releasing software under a free license, you are saying that people can use your source code freely. You put some restrictions on it (giving changes back, etc), and you let people have it. It's open, except for those stipulations you mentioned. They can do what they want with it because you never said they couldn't.
You can always complain if someone is using your software in ways that you do not like, but unless they agreed to terms set forth when you released the code to them, you have no real right to expect them to stop using it.
The point was that the musical zeitgeist has changed, and angst and rock are back in again.
What could she possibly be angry about? From everything I've heard, she's led a fairly priviledged life. Hell, she's not really even old enough to know what life is about.
At least the "angry" stuff from my era (late 70's to 80's) had some basis in fact, and some truth behind it.
Anyway, I still can't believe I'm talking about some girl I know about only from a badly written virus and a link I saw on fark.com...
Actually, as far as I am aware, Avril writes her own songs. At least the lyrics, you may be talking about the "music" part - but I don't think her stuff is so much about the music as the lyrics.
I would say that based on the interview above, she would have a hard time writing anything more complex than a small grocery list. At very least she's not a friend of the big words.
I confess that I have only heard one of her songs, in passing, on Saturday Night live, so I can't speak to the body of work spanning her entire career. The one song I heard, however, was less than remarkable. I didn't even know who she was until everyone was going on about that virus named after her. And I'm out of her demographic; I'm almost exactly twice her age. Perhaps I'm just not as receptive to the message of teen angst as I once was.
My hunch says she has very good handlers who are actively trying to use her to separate disaffected teens from their parents' money.
Yeah, the same way like saying "I am here to bring you love and not to harm you" and then proceeding to shoot everyone in sight removes any doubt about one's intentions:)
Heh heh.
Well, for those developers worried about maybe getting implicated legally, having a license restriction at very least might give them an "out" in court. That's all I was saying.
I'm still not sure that it's at all possible to get prosecuted. I mean, what if I made some open-source 747 simulator? Or a Palm app that lets people play air traffic controller? Or a "Drug Wars" kind of game that simulates breaking into banking systems? If the FBI found that terrorists had used my software to gain knowledge they otherwise wouldn't have, could I be liable? What if I worked at a banking company, or Boeing, and they thought my "inside" knowledge was something that gave me a unique position to aid foreign enemies?
I think the answer is that I'd be just as liable as the guys who trained them to ply real planes in Florida. They had no prior knowledge that they were showing terrorists how to kill people. If I released software to the wordl, then I would, by definition, have to expect it to be used by whomever happens across it.
Like i said earlier, the more I think about our government the more I dislike the direction it's headed in.
Of course, that will not happen. It's the same thinking that leads to have questions like "Do you want to travel to the U.S. to commit terrorist acts?" on the U.S. visa form (no kidding). Do they REALLY expect the terrorists to say "yes"?
Obvisouly a license won't stop terrorists and the like. But actively saying "You cannot use this if you're a bad guy" removes any doubts about the author's culpability and/or intentions as far as his own government is concerned.
Of course nobody asked me about those Cuban cigars I may or may not have brought back from England and Mexico, so I might not be one to talk about heeding the letter of the law...
Slashdot Mirror
I was a build engineer for a large telecom company who had a commercial Windows product which used InstallShield. I wrote the installer for that product (twice). I've been using Linux since 1994 in various ways. I know InstallShield and I know Linux, and trust me, you don't want IS for Linux, no matter how much you think you do. People are better of sticking to whatever package management system comes with their distribution than pining away for something like InstallShield.
Having a single point of installation management is far superior (even with dependancy checking issues, like sometimes happens with RPM) than leaving it up to the software maintainers. Windows should have orginally shipped with such a centralized system IMO. Now they force software developers to jump through hoops (which cost money, incidentally) in order to get a sticker on their box saying their software was "Designed for Windows". Barring that "certification" a person can do whatever the hell they want in an installer, and your system can become an unorganized mess in very short order.
Even now on this Win2K machine I've got more than a dozen apps (most of which are commercially released) that aren't listed in the Add/Remove Programs applet. If I install something via RPM or apt, that can't happen. I just have to hope that one of those Win32 apps doesn't conflict with something else down the road, since there's no way to remove them programmatically. That's a critical flaw of Windows' installation setup, IMO. Just one that happens to come to mind, even. I could go on all day...
I admit not knowing about linux, and am doing little to change that.
Your parents must be terribly proud at having imbued in their progeny such an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
-B
The corner booth at Denny's doesn't need to be reserved in advance, you know.
-B
-B
Here's your solution:
[siewsk@hostname siewsk]$ tar zxvf perl-5.0.0.4.tar.gz; cd perl-5.0.0.4; rm -f config.sh Policy.sh /bin/sh Configure --prefix=/usr/bin/perl5.0.0.4
/usr/bin/perl5.0.0.4/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl5
[siewsk@hostname siewsk]$
[siewsk@hostname siewsk]$ make; make test
[siewsk@hostname siewsk]$ sudo make install
[siewsk@hostname siewsk]$ sudo ln -s
You now have /usr/bin/perl5 forever and ever, as long as you use #!/usr/bin/perl5 at the top of your scripts.
-B
I'd say, safely, that your odds of finding an Asian student not carrying (or more likely, not actively chatting away on) a cell phone are about the same as being struck by lightning while being bitten by a shark.
Every Asian student has a cell phone, and they all use them when walking around. I'm serious. You won't see many students walking between classes unless they have a cell phone nearby. You'll even see groups of three, four, six girls walking together... all talking on their phones. I swear they are actually talking to each other.
When I was in school nobody had a cell phone. Now everyone does. It's amazing what ten years can do. I liked it better the old way. Then again I usually leave my cell phone in my truck, and it's never turned on anyway.
-B
Bullies see *any* sign of weakness -- which usually includes trying to talk your way out of an altercation -- and they go for the throat. You can't convince a bully to be your friend (and who'd want them as a friend, anyway?). That's nonsense. They can see right through that. They can smell the blood in the water when you try to back them down.
No, the only way I got rid of the bullies was to beat the living shit out of a few of them. Bullies use the threat of violence to their advantage and you have to call them on it in order to counter them. It helped that I was six foot two in eighth grade, so that may have had something to do with it. But word got around that if you picked on me, you were liable to have an insane person attacking you until one of you was not moving -- and it was likely you that would be left laying on the ground. Even when faced with people bigger than me, going completely berserk always worked. (I learned early on that most people can't take being kicked in the knee, and almost nobody sees it coming. You can take a much larger person down with one fast sideways kick. And once down, you can continue to beat on them or just walk away depending on the example which needs to be set. They wouldn't be walking for a couple months at least, and the fight was over before it started.) Bullies can't stand up to a fight, and always back down. At least in my experience.
I always thought that name calling and pettiness and immaturity would go away once I left school and got to college. I could hardly wait to get out of school. I thought once people became adults, they'd start acting like adults, and I really wanted to be around adults and not children. Not the case. Most people are assholes, and will never grown up.
Oddly enough, I'm one of the most non-violent people I know. I hate getting into fights (I haven't in a long time, thankfully, and if my last stays my last then I'll die a happy man). And I've never ever started a fight. Problem is, there's only one way to stop one: get the other guy to not hit you. If you've been able to accomplish that with words, then more power to you. I was never able to, and always had to resort to violence.
-B
I've got filters set sorta high, so I tend to see the interesting stuff. But on new stories, there's still a lot to wade thought since nothing passes until the spill level is hit (I suppose I could set a spill level of like 10 and get the same effect).
I'm all for anonymity. I've personally never posted as AC, but I really like the idea of people being able to if they want or need to. Having said that, I don't think putting a "ACs can't post until a story has been live for 30 minutes" rule will hurt people's "right" to post AC. It won't stifle any speech. The people who post as AC right when a story hits aren't usually whistleblowers risking their careers to give us some inside scoop.
And while I'm already typing, I think what Slashdot really needs is more stories per day. It was really nice around here during that blackout nonsense last year (reminded me of when I first came around, actually; less noise, more signal). I'd susbscribe if it meant seeing more stories. And I'd definitely subscribe if I got the chance to vote on what stories in the submission queue made it to the front page (would that be proto-moderating?).
-B
-B
I just did a web-based auth system at work. We have a new web site structure, and we wanted to protect an area for faculty and staff only (I work at a university, in the CS department). I had to come up with a scheme to "force" good passwords for use with the web site (since there will be stuff in that private area that students should never be able to see). It's harder to do than you might think. There's a very fine line between pissing people off with strong passwords and letting them slide by using things like "qwerty".
In the end, I came up with this:
- >=6 characters
- At least one non-alphanumeric character
- Cannot be based on username (forward or backward)
That's it. Pretty easy going, right? Not really. I've had a couple people complain already (it's been two days since we went live). I even removed the "Cannot be based on a dictionary word" requirement. We also removed the "Cannot be the same as your Unix system password" requirement (over my loud protestations).I actually had a professor (a computer science professor, mind you) ask that I make it more lenient. He lamented to me that because he had to choose a "strange" password (since his "normal" password didn't pass my tests), he had already forgotten what he had chosen. He then asked me to email him and let him know what his password is. After I got done laughing, I prepared a carefully-worded LARTish email explaining to him what a one-way hash is and why I wasn't able to tell him what his word was, even if I wanted to send it to him in email. I also threw in a little bit of "weak passwords are the #1 security hole" boilerplate and explained that I was glad that his normal system password wasn't able to be used on the web site.
I haven't sent the email yet; I thought it might be too harsh so I decided to sit on it overnight. I think on one hand that anyone clueless enough to use a password that can't pass even my lame scheme deserves to be cut down a notch or two. Then I think that he's a tenured prefessor, and I should be more respectful. Then I think that he's a tenured professor, and yet is a complete idiot, and I go back to #1. I've always wanted to give a prof what-for.
-B
Yeah, I dig. That's why I thought the original poster's suggestion that taking mass from the moon would cause it to move closer to Earth (or break up, or anything else) was completely improbable.
BUT, what people don't realize is that the moon increases in mass each day more than what we could mine out of it anyway... (solar wind, picking up other random stuff...)
Right. And even if there wasn't any of this interstellar accretion going on, I'm saying there's no way we could possible get enough equipment to the moon to do it any real harm, change the tides on Earth, etc.
There's a certain kind of hubris that goes with any over-reaching environmentalism. Humans are actually pretty insignificant, especially on a cosmic scale.
-B
You're saying that it is not only possible but also probable that we could remove enough material from the moon to cause it to fall to Earth? Or break up? Or affect the tides in any appreciable amount? We'd have to remove a lot of material do get much effect, especially since we'd be mostly concerned about mining volatiles anyway (after all: we'd be forced to get the fuel sources to make it possible to extract heavier elements like Al and Fe and whatnot).
I think it's the pinnacle of self-importance to imagine that we can do anything to the moon. It's a big thing, and it's been there for a long time. We can try to preserve it all we want and it won't make any more difference than if we tried our hardest to strip it bare. It's too large and we're too feeble. On a planetary scale, mind you. That still doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be decent stewards -- and it doesn't mean we should bother utilizing what resources we need.
With morons like you deciding policy we'd soon all run out of resources.
Well, I guess nobody ever said you had to be civil to those you don't know, but it does't cost you anything to at least try refrain from unwarranted personal attacks. The guy just has a point of view that's different from yours. If he called you names simply because your opnion was different that his, would that make you more or less apt to seriously consider anything he said?
I swear the Internet is making people meaner.
-B
At this point I'm leaning towards using CFEngine since it'll take care of the BSD and Windows machines too. But Current is certainly worth a look.
-B
I really hope that we have non-redhat up2date servers soon. Redhat grows less and less tolerable as time goes on
I couldn't agree more on both accounts. I've got a RH 7.3 box that works just fine now that I have it all set up the way I like it. It will continue to work fine long after RH discontinues support for it. Luckily, it's never exposed to the Net directly, but an upatched machine is a less than ideal situation.
Why Red Hat didn't decide to use support for older version as a pay-only feature, I will never know. It sounds like it would have been good for my RHAT stock. I'd pay $60/year to have RHN support for my older machine. I will not, however, incur the cost (even if only in terms of time spent) of upgrading to some new version of Red Hat in order to get that support, even for free. Red Hat just doesn't want my money I guess, because I refuse to get on their upgrade treadmill. If they would have let me pay to upgrade my older machines, they'd have had a customer for certain.
Having said all that, I'd definitely volunteer as a packager for a non-Red Hat up2date server network. I'm going to have to do it all myself now anyway, just like in the old days, so there's not much extra work in letting other people get something out of it.
The RHN/up2date stuff is all open, right? Well then what we need to do is create some Non-Red Hat up2date servers, charge like $20 a year for every point release past current (eg, RH 6.2 would be $40/year), and give all the money after operating costs to the EFF or FSF.
-B
I personally think this is hilarious. I spit coffee all over when I read it on news.com this morning It's hard to ask to be taken seriously when your proprietary flagship software product is so shoddy and untrustworthy that you have to share the source to get foreign countries to trust it (and compete with other open source projects).
-B
OK, seriously: Tell him to presume innocence rather than immediately assume guilt. Tell him that, believe it or not, there are a lot of people and businesses that use software which is not only ok to copy freely, but such copying is highly encouraged. He needs to find a way to get his mind around that and set policies in place to deal with it.
If I were grilling him, I'd ask him something along the lines of "So if you find this small business that is using illegal copies of non-free/commercial software, do you immediately persecute them or do you suggest free alternatives? Why not? You want businesses to stay in business, right? Well then why not show them the error of their ways, and then show them how not to get in trouble again -- without causing any artifical financial hardships on them? If they pirated MS Office because they couldn't afford it, why try to get blood from a stone?"
Pipe dream, I know. The BSA is basically the brute squad, and exists only to enforce "taxes". But it sure would be nice if they were at least slightly constructive, and actually helped businesses build the economy.
-B
I don't know what will happen to Avril, whether she'll stand the test of time or not. I don't particularly care, either; it won't befront me either way (apologies to Mr. Thorogood). It's just not my music, not my era. I can't identify with her in the slightest, and find myself rather apathetic if anything.
I do know one thing, however. I'm working late tonight. I just got done listening to London Calling, and now The Ramones are playing. The Specials are up next. You think any of today's Avril fans will have her music playing 20-25 years from now?
Didn't think so.
-B
-B
I don't know about that. With licenses like the GPL, that which is not expressly forbidden is implicitly allowed. By releasing software under a free license, you are saying that people can use your source code freely. You put some restrictions on it (giving changes back, etc), and you let people have it. It's open, except for those stipulations you mentioned. They can do what they want with it because you never said they couldn't.
You can always complain if someone is using your software in ways that you do not like, but unless they agreed to terms set forth when you released the code to them, you have no real right to expect them to stop using it.
-B
-B
What could she possibly be angry about? From everything I've heard, she's led a fairly priviledged life. Hell, she's not really even old enough to know what life is about. At least the "angry" stuff from my era (late 70's to 80's) had some basis in fact, and some truth behind it.
Anyway, I still can't believe I'm talking about some girl I know about only from a badly written virus and a link I saw on fark.com...
-B
She's not, like, very smart.
I would say that based on the interview above, she would have a hard time writing anything more complex than a small grocery list. At very least she's not a friend of the big words.
I confess that I have only heard one of her songs, in passing, on Saturday Night live, so I can't speak to the body of work spanning her entire career. The one song I heard, however, was less than remarkable. I didn't even know who she was until everyone was going on about that virus named after her. And I'm out of her demographic; I'm almost exactly twice her age. Perhaps I'm just not as receptive to the message of teen angst as I once was.
My hunch says she has very good handlers who are actively trying to use her to separate disaffected teens from their parents' money.
-B
Heh heh.
Well, for those developers worried about maybe getting implicated legally, having a license restriction at very least might give them an "out" in court. That's all I was saying.
I'm still not sure that it's at all possible to get prosecuted. I mean, what if I made some open-source 747 simulator? Or a Palm app that lets people play air traffic controller? Or a "Drug Wars" kind of game that simulates breaking into banking systems? If the FBI found that terrorists had used my software to gain knowledge they otherwise wouldn't have, could I be liable? What if I worked at a banking company, or Boeing, and they thought my "inside" knowledge was something that gave me a unique position to aid foreign enemies?
I think the answer is that I'd be just as liable as the guys who trained them to ply real planes in Florida. They had no prior knowledge that they were showing terrorists how to kill people. If I released software to the wordl, then I would, by definition, have to expect it to be used by whomever happens across it.
Like i said earlier, the more I think about our government the more I dislike the direction it's headed in.
-B
Obvisouly a license won't stop terrorists and the like. But actively saying "You cannot use this if you're a bad guy" removes any doubts about the author's culpability and/or intentions as far as his own government is concerned.
Of course nobody asked me about those Cuban cigars I may or may not have brought back from England and Mexico, so I might not be one to talk about heeding the letter of the law...
-B
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
/$artist/i } <TITLES>) {
use strict;
my $artist = $ARGV[0] || 'britney';
my $pwd = cwd;
open(TITLES, "./song_titles.txt") || die $!;
open(NOISE, ">/dev/dsp") || die $!;
foreach my $song (grep {
open(SONG, $song) || die $!;
print NOISE $_ while (<SONG>);
close(SONG);
}
close(NOISE);
close(TITLES);
-B