I can't believe I'm arguing with Bruce Perens but here goes:
Not exactly. BSD lets you modify the BSD code and then redistribute it under a proprietary license. Or even distribute the unmodified BSD code under a proprietary license.
With LGPL, proprietary code can statically link to the LGPL code, but you can't modify the LGPL code and close the source to that.
In this case, I believe TransGaming wants to modify the (now) LGPLed Wine code so that they can add a copy protection scheme. Under BSD they could do this. Under LGPL, they have to publish any changes they make directly to the LGPLed source. Which of course would be bad for a copy protection scheme.:)
... why no one has latched on to the fact that you can't install products after the computer is delivered in Windows XP Embedded. The author of the linked article (which can be found in the sidebar of the article linked in this story) makes a really good case as to why a system based on Windows XP Embedded won't fly in the consumer marketplace.
The point is to demonstrate that modular versions of Windows can and do exist.
It is not the point to demonstrate that Windows XP Embedded is a viable solution for the end-user. In fact, if we check out Microsoft's own language that says that Windows XP Embedded uses the same binaries as Windows XP, then the proof is in the pudding, so to speak, that XP can be made into a modular system, and that this is in fact a feasible thing.
Nevermind the fact that many people have successfully removed Internet Exploiter and other so-called "integrated" components from other versions of Windows wuch as Windows 95 and Windows 98.
If you read books written by Microsoft Press (or other companies) about the architecture of Windows 9x, Windows NT, 2000 and XP you will find that all of these systems are in fact quite modular, and that it is the modular design of Windows that has allowed Microsoft to evolve it over time.
Mind you, they're not quite as modular as say a UNIX system because the protocols that define the communications between say, GUI components such as GDI and the kernel are mostly undocumented, whereas UNIX stuff tends to be documented to the nth degree. But suffice it to say that *is* possible to swap components in and out if you know something about the underlying OS structure. Microsoft does it all the time.
You can do things in The Bat that make Linux email clients look crippled. I've setup customised autoreplies for messages meeting certain criteria, size limits on emails, size limits with a password to bypass them, domain-filters (taiwan, china, etc), native support for PGP, or use PGP itself, GPG, or native support for S-MIME encryption.
Um, procmail will do this. I think qmail will do this too. You'd need to write only a very basic Perl or Python script.
*Several* bands, including the Smashing Pumpkins have already done this.
It would take a whole lot of major headliners to do this all at the same time before it would make a difference. One or two bands here and there doesn't really tell the RIAA anything...they'll just find the next cookie-cutter band to fill their shoes.
Some of us knew Phil Katz, the 'PKZIP guy' on a somewhat personal level.:) Somewhere around here I have archives of messages I exchanged PK during the PKZIP pre-1.0 beta days.:)
While I've heard decent things about HP PCs and servers, and I love the Laserjets, I can't help but think Compaq will have a negative effect on HP's altogether decent PC division.
'Decent PC division'? I guess that depends on which HP PCs you're talking about. Their Kayak and Visualize Workstations are nice... their Pavilions are wretched heaps.
Because free speech means freedom to say what you want, yes. But with freedom comes responsibility. You must be RESPONSIBLE for what you say.
The classic argument against free speech is that you can't yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre... of course this really isn't an argument against free speech. You can't yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre because you are violating the private property rights of the theatre owner. Just as in this case, when make fraudulent statements, you are violating the consumers' rights to equitable commerce.
I thought of this as well, a few times in different incarnations. The idea started when I was in high school... my computer operations teacher there had written a system of taking attendance that used barcodes. Each student in each class had a COBOL card (yes, kiddies, actual PUNCH CARDS were used:) that had a barcoded sticker attached to it. Absent students had their punch cards turned in, I believe. These were scanned in.
My teacher had thought of the idea of using a "card hopper" that could scan the barcode. My wild imagination said, hell, who needs barcodes. Use little micro RF transmitters, each transmitting a unique signal. Read them all at once.:)
Anyway, my imagination was quite wild and the next logical step was hey, if you could do this for students, you could do this for ANYTHING. So when people started talking ID chips for people and then now ID chips for products, I wasn't the least bit surprised. What I was more surprised about is that no one thought of this sooner.:)
Yeah, otherwise, "our advertising claims that our shoes are made out of leather, when they are in fact made out of naugahyde, while they were false, are protected from liability because of the 1st amendment."
I mean, come on... I'm all for free speech and whatnot, but making blatantly false statements in a deliberate attempt to deceive the public does NOT fall under first amendment protection.
Maybe I just don't get it. Keeping tabs on 300 million US citizens is well-nigh impossible - noone cares about the individual, and actually logging this much data is pretty much a moot point.
Not impossible at all. Just about everyone in the US has *some* data stored about them somewhere on a computer. It's just not all centralized into one big database. You have your social security record. Everyone in the country has one (or is supposed to have one anyway).
Using that as a key, we can come up with some interesting data. If we look at your mortgage company's database, for instance, we can use that SSN to search for your mortgage records, which will will tell us where you live. Doing a search for that SSN in either the IRS database or your state Dept of Treasury's database, we can find out who your current and past employers are.
You get the picture. The data is there, its just not centralized and easily crossreferenced, but it is there. So yes, it IS possible to keep track of 300 million citizens.
Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods.
As for your shopping habits, these would be, again, recorded by different individual corporations interested in different pieces of data. Not one big database. Manufacturers of consumer electronics devices, for instance, are probably NOT interested in what brand of tuna you buy. But they probably *are* interested in that digital camera you bought, or the cell phone you carry around.
Linux is probably their #1 competitor, and #1 hope. If I have a choice between Solaris, or Red Hat, I'd pick Red Hat every time. Cheaper, runs on cheaper hardware, and I still get great support for $60 to $240 a year, as well as getting all the power of Open Source, which is making Linux more powerful every single day.
Since when is Solaris cheaper? I should point out that both Sparc and x86 versions of Solaris 8 are available for free download here.
Actually, UG has been very usable as a native Windows app since version 16. Most of the suppliers that do UG work are on Windows 2000, while GM has been moving there, but only very slowly....
With 30,000 seats, changing the infrastructure is more of a PITA then you might realize. You've gotta retrain users (a lot of UG designers don't know Windows... really.:), get the networking infrastructure in place with servers, replacing NIS with ActiveDirectory, create platform standards, test everything out...for applications that you take for granted on Unix, you've gotta find Windows equivalents... you've gotta get things like the PDL (a set of UG plugins written mostly in C/UFUNC) running right on Windows...
They've got a few seats running the last year or so, but its still not considered production ready.:)
Actually, OpenOffice has one very small feature that Excel doesn't have. Upon the bringing in of a comma-delimited ASCII file, it automagically does the equivalent of Excel's "AutoFit Selection" for column width. This sounds small, but I have to import a LOT of comma-delimited files into Excel and this little timesaver is a major reason for me to use OpenOffice instead of Excel.
(Yes, you could always do this in an Excel macro, but most users aren't that bright.:)
It will come with the 1.0 versions of OpenOffice, Mozilla, AbiWord and other programs as well...
The Windows port of GIMP might be cool, but its a bit buggy and is based on a buggier port of Gtk.
For programmers, the Free Pascal compiler (which has been 1.0 for a while now) and tools might be cool as well, along with WinCVS and Emacs or XEmacs. Vim, too.
The Cygwin ports of XFree86 and KDE might be cool, too.:)
The Windows port of PINE? (Or is that not Open Source) Ok, never mind, PINE sucks.:)
I can tell you at least one thing that would be considered useful in Cygwin to GUI Windows users: the Cygwin Xfree86 port, configured to remotely control UNIX boxes ala Hummingbird Exceed.
It wouldn't have the mass popularity that, say Mozilla or OpenOffice offer, but it would get the CD in the door of shops like GM that have Unix boxes setup to run stuff like Unigraphics. These places have users that need a major Unix app like Unigraphics, but don't necessarily need it all the time. For instance, I supported Unigraphics at GM and didn't really need a UG seat all the time, so I ran Hummingbird Exceed.
But at GM, like all the Big Three automakers, its difficult to Hummingbird Exceed on your seat because it costs money. So some users that would otherwise be using Exceed end up walking up to a shared walkup Unix box.
If these people could access Unix boxes remotely from their Windows seat for FREE they'd do it en masse.
Furthermore, the "save for the monthy subscription revenue"... Dude, the monthly subscription revenue is what makes the company so attractive. If you can count on $21 * (areallylotofusers) / mo. guarenteed, you're already way better off than say, the services industry which is a lot more affected by economic downturns.
Yeah, but the costs to support those (areallylotofusers) users is probably much greater than $21/month.
Bandwidth, equipment, maintenance, storage space, etc. all cost money, even for AOL. I'll bet AOL's costs are SIGNIFICANTLY higher than a lot of other ISPs, given the VAST number of users they have.
Do it anyways. IANAL, but I doubt that such a license provision would standup in court. If I have a book, no one can prevent me from giving that book to you, as long as I do not retain a copy that book.
A license should be transferrable between computers. This IS allowed under copyright. A license should give the copyright holder no more rights than copyright allows... if anything it should give the end user more rights.
Yep. It appears to be something like a Gill Sans Light (or perhaps Demibold)
My guess is to either A) psychologically distinguish it from rest of the Mac lineup or B) they're eventually switching everything to that typeface. Apple hasn't always used the Garamond-derived thing, though some of the youngsters out there might think so.;) Some of us remember when apple had that whole oblique Helvetica Condensed thing going on (for the Apple IIc), and earlier the whole Revue-like font for the Apple ealier Apple IIs and the Apple III.
Quite frankly, Apple is probably overdue for a change.:)
I'm not trying to say that Gateway is some sort of Utopian selfless corporation or anything, but I just have to cheer when I see big-name companies taking on the big bullies.
I think this has more to do with the personality of their CEO than anything. Ted Waite is something of a rebel himself. One time a couple of years ago, Intel really pissed him off, so he publically vowed to change Gateway's entire line of PCs to AMD chips. Unfortunately, Gateway is a publically traded company and their stock consequently dropped like a rock the next day, so he had to take it back, and I believe they ended up switching all their PCs to Intel-only chips later on...
Also, Waite caved in to Microsoft's pressure about the Amigas, so Gateway spun that off. But we can't really fault them for that, after all at that point in history nobody dared to stand up to Microsoft... they wielded too much power, even more than they do today (the DOJ case has [temporarily] partially defanged them.)
In related news, Richard Stallman has insisted that Apple rename its OS X operating system to GNU/OS X. Stallman also called for Apple's renaming of its new eMac computers for education to GNU/eMacs, so as to distinguish it from clones such as X/eMacs.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe I'm arguing with Bruce Perens but here goes:
:)
Not exactly. BSD lets you modify the BSD code and then redistribute it under a proprietary license. Or even distribute the unmodified BSD code under a proprietary license.
With LGPL, proprietary code can statically link to the LGPL code, but you can't modify the LGPL code and close the source to that.
In this case, I believe TransGaming wants to modify the (now) LGPLed Wine code so that they can add a copy protection scheme. Under BSD they could do this. Under LGPL, they have to publish any changes they make directly to the LGPLed source. Which of course would be bad for a copy protection scheme.
I guess it depends on how much Angelfire or DoubleClick pay Microsoft to leave it out. :)
Note you said blackbox, not KDE. He said KDE.
... why no one has latched on to the fact that you can't install products after the computer is delivered in Windows XP Embedded. The author of the linked article (which can be found in the sidebar of the article linked in this story) makes a really good case as to why a system based on Windows XP Embedded won't fly in the consumer marketplace.
The point is to demonstrate that modular versions of Windows can and do exist.
It is not the point to demonstrate that Windows XP Embedded is a viable solution for the end-user. In fact, if we check out Microsoft's own language that says that Windows XP Embedded uses the same binaries as Windows XP, then the proof is in the pudding, so to speak, that XP can be made into a modular system, and that this is in fact a feasible thing.
Nevermind the fact that many people have successfully removed Internet Exploiter and other so-called "integrated" components from other versions of Windows wuch as Windows 95 and Windows 98.
If you read books written by Microsoft Press (or other companies) about the architecture of Windows 9x, Windows NT, 2000 and XP you will find that all of these systems are in fact quite modular, and that it is the modular design of Windows that has allowed Microsoft to evolve it over time.
Mind you, they're not quite as modular as say a UNIX system because the protocols that define the communications between say, GUI components such as GDI and the kernel are mostly undocumented, whereas UNIX stuff tends to be documented to the nth degree. But suffice it to say that *is* possible to swap components in and out if you know something about the underlying OS structure. Microsoft does it all the time.
You can do things in The Bat that make Linux email clients look crippled. I've setup customised autoreplies for messages meeting certain criteria, size limits on emails, size limits with a password to bypass them, domain-filters (taiwan, china, etc), native support for PGP, or use PGP itself, GPG, or native support for S-MIME encryption.
Um, procmail will do this. I think qmail will do this too. You'd need to write only a very basic Perl or Python script.
*Several* bands, including the Smashing Pumpkins have already done this.
It would take a whole lot of major headliners to do this all at the same time before it would make a difference. One or two bands here and there doesn't really tell the RIAA anything...they'll just find the next cookie-cutter band to fill their shoes.
Some of us knew Phil Katz, the 'PKZIP guy' on a somewhat personal level. :) Somewhere around here I have archives of messages I exchanged PK during the PKZIP pre-1.0 beta days. :)
While I've heard decent things about HP PCs and servers, and I love the Laserjets, I can't help but think Compaq will have a negative effect on HP's altogether decent PC division.
'Decent PC division'? I guess that depends on which HP PCs you're talking about. Their Kayak and Visualize Workstations are nice... their Pavilions are wretched heaps.
Because free speech means freedom to say what you want, yes. But with freedom comes responsibility. You must be RESPONSIBLE for what you say.
The classic argument against free speech is that you can't yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre... of course this really isn't an argument against free speech. You can't yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre because you are violating the private property rights of the theatre owner. Just as in this case, when make fraudulent statements, you are violating the consumers' rights to equitable commerce.
I thought of this as well, a few times in different incarnations. The idea started when I was in high school... my computer operations teacher there had written a system of taking attendance that used barcodes. Each student in each class had a COBOL card (yes, kiddies, actual PUNCH CARDS were used :) that had a barcoded sticker attached to it. Absent students had their punch cards turned in, I believe. These were scanned in.
:)
:)
My teacher had thought of the idea of using a "card hopper" that could scan the barcode. My wild imagination said, hell, who needs barcodes. Use little micro RF transmitters, each transmitting a unique signal. Read them all at once.
Anyway, my imagination was quite wild and the next logical step was hey, if you could do this for students, you could do this for ANYTHING. So when people started talking ID chips for people and then now ID chips for products, I wasn't the least bit surprised. What I was more surprised about is that no one thought of this sooner.
Yeah, otherwise, "our advertising claims that our shoes are made out of leather, when they are in fact made out of naugahyde, while they were false, are protected from liability because of the 1st amendment."
I mean, come on... I'm all for free speech and whatnot, but making blatantly false statements in a deliberate attempt to deceive the public does NOT fall under first amendment protection.
Maybe I just don't get it. Keeping tabs on 300 million US citizens is well-nigh impossible - noone cares about the individual, and actually logging this much data is pretty much a moot point.
Not impossible at all. Just about everyone in the US has *some* data stored about them somewhere on a computer. It's just not all centralized into one big database. You have your social security record. Everyone in the country has one (or is supposed to have one anyway).
Using that as a key, we can come up with some interesting data. If we look at your mortgage company's database, for instance, we can use that SSN to search for your mortgage records, which will will tell us where you live. Doing a search for that SSN in either the IRS database or your state Dept of Treasury's database, we can find out who your current and past employers are.
You get the picture. The data is there, its just not centralized and easily crossreferenced, but it is there. So yes, it IS possible to keep track of 300 million citizens.
Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods.
As for your shopping habits, these would be, again, recorded by different individual corporations interested in different pieces of data. Not one big database. Manufacturers of consumer electronics devices, for instance, are probably NOT interested in what brand of tuna you buy. But they probably *are* interested in that digital camera you bought, or the cell phone you carry around.
Linux is probably their #1 competitor, and #1 hope. If I have a choice between Solaris, or Red Hat, I'd pick Red Hat every time. Cheaper, runs on cheaper hardware, and I still get great support for $60 to $240 a year, as well as getting all the power of Open Source, which is making Linux more powerful every single day.
Since when is Solaris cheaper? I should point out that both Sparc and x86 versions of Solaris 8 are available for free download here.
While Sun announced that it would it would kill Solaris x86 in v9, they are also reconsidering.
So, at least for the moment, Linux and Solaris are the same price: free (beer).
Oh...so THAT's what happened to Taco. :-P
It's a joke, people, laugh, it's funny!
Actually, UG has been very usable as a native Windows app since version 16. Most of the suppliers that do UG work are on Windows 2000, while GM has been moving there, but only very slowly....
... really. :), get the networking infrastructure in place with servers, replacing NIS with ActiveDirectory, create platform standards, test everything out...for applications that you take for granted on Unix, you've gotta find Windows equivalents... you've gotta get things like the PDL (a set of UG plugins written mostly in C/UFUNC) running right on Windows...
:)
With 30,000 seats, changing the infrastructure is more of a PITA then you might realize. You've gotta retrain users (a lot of UG designers don't know Windows
They've got a few seats running the last year or so, but its still not considered production ready.
Actually, OpenOffice has one very small feature that Excel doesn't have. Upon the bringing in of a comma-delimited ASCII file, it automagically does the equivalent of Excel's "AutoFit Selection" for column width. This sounds small, but I have to import a LOT of comma-delimited files into Excel and this little timesaver is a major reason for me to use OpenOffice instead of Excel.
:)
(Yes, you could always do this in an Excel macro, but most users aren't that bright.
Dude, that's what the CD is.
:)
:)
It will come with the 1.0 versions of OpenOffice, Mozilla, AbiWord and other programs as well...
The Windows port of GIMP might be cool, but its a bit buggy and is based on a buggier port of Gtk.
For programmers, the Free Pascal compiler (which has been 1.0 for a while now) and tools might be cool as well, along with WinCVS and Emacs or XEmacs. Vim, too.
The Cygwin ports of XFree86 and KDE might be cool, too.
The Windows port of PINE? (Or is that not Open Source) Ok, never mind, PINE sucks.
Look at GNU Software For Windows Site for more ideas.
I can tell you at least one thing that would be considered useful in Cygwin to GUI Windows users: the Cygwin Xfree86 port, configured to remotely control UNIX boxes ala Hummingbird Exceed.
It wouldn't have the mass popularity that, say Mozilla or OpenOffice offer, but it would get the CD in the door of shops like GM that have Unix boxes setup to run stuff like Unigraphics. These places have users that need a major Unix app like Unigraphics, but don't necessarily need it all the time. For instance, I supported Unigraphics at GM and didn't really need a UG seat all the time, so I ran Hummingbird Exceed.
But at GM, like all the Big Three automakers, its difficult to Hummingbird Exceed on your seat because it costs money. So some users that would otherwise be using Exceed end up walking up to a shared walkup Unix box.
If these people could access Unix boxes remotely from their Windows seat for FREE they'd do it en masse.
Just a thought.
Furthermore, the "save for the monthy subscription revenue"... Dude, the monthly subscription revenue is what makes the company so attractive. If you can count on $21 * (areallylotofusers) / mo. guarenteed, you're already way better off than say, the services industry which is a lot more affected by economic downturns.
Yeah, but the costs to support those (areallylotofusers) users is probably much greater than $21/month.
Bandwidth, equipment, maintenance, storage space, etc. all cost money, even for AOL. I'll bet AOL's costs are SIGNIFICANTLY higher than a lot of other ISPs, given the VAST number of users they have.
Do it anyways. IANAL, but I doubt that such a license provision would standup in court. If I have a book, no one can prevent me from giving that book to you, as long as I do not retain a copy that book.
A license should be transferrable between computers. This IS allowed under copyright. A license should give the copyright holder no more rights than copyright allows... if anything it should give the end user more rights.
Yep. It appears to be something like a Gill Sans Light (or perhaps Demibold)
;) Some of us remember when apple had that whole oblique Helvetica Condensed thing going on (for the Apple IIc), and earlier the whole Revue-like font for the Apple ealier Apple IIs and the Apple III.
:)
My guess is to either A) psychologically distinguish it from rest of the Mac lineup or B) they're eventually switching everything to that typeface. Apple hasn't always used the Garamond-derived thing, though some of the youngsters out there might think so.
Quite frankly, Apple is probably overdue for a change.
I'm not trying to say that Gateway is some sort of Utopian selfless corporation or anything, but I just have to cheer when I see big-name companies taking on the big bullies.
I think this has more to do with the personality of their CEO than anything. Ted Waite is something of a rebel himself. One time a couple of years ago, Intel really pissed him off, so he publically vowed to change Gateway's entire line of PCs to AMD chips. Unfortunately, Gateway is a publically traded company and their stock consequently dropped like a rock the next day, so he had to take it back, and I believe they ended up switching all their PCs to Intel-only chips later on...
Also, Waite caved in to Microsoft's pressure about the Amigas, so Gateway spun that off. But we can't really fault them for that, after all at that point in history nobody dared to stand up to Microsoft... they wielded too much power, even more than they do today (the DOJ case has [temporarily] partially defanged them.)
Hmmm...I wonder if the RIAA reads Slashdot? :-)
In related news, Richard Stallman has insisted that Apple rename its OS X operating system to GNU/OS X. Stallman also called for Apple's renaming of its new eMac computers for education to GNU/eMacs, so as to distinguish it from clones such as X/eMacs.
vi DOES run within Emacs, sorta. It's called VIPER. :)
:)
So you could run vi within Emacs on your eMacs....