I'm not sure it matters whether we believe it or not.
Cisco stuff is manufactured in China. Can you prove that every single component is manufactured to American specs,
with no 'spurious unknown compromising parts' or hardware microcode patches burned in 'by accident' ?
If the source code were free and publicly available.... still... how do you verify the code on the device was compiled from the source you were given, and
there's not a hardware component that changes the code after it's in memory?
Redundant internet connections are no guarantee of no single points of failure.
"Redundant" connections can sometimes wind up on the same fiber somewhere upstream, unbeknownst to the subscriber.
Most telecommunications infrastructure in any area has some very large aggregation points also...
Telco Central Offices; a single point of failure for telecommunications services served by that office.
What good is working 911 service, if nobody can call in, because all their phones are rendered useless by a failure of the Class5 switch that all the phones in the city are connected to?
This kind of equipment typically has redundancy built in to survive the failure of any one processing unit or card, and telco facilities may be
constructed with steel-reinforced concrete walls, and many protections against external events such as tornados.. but when you consider catastrophic disaster scenarios, where the problem originates inside, you are still faced with single points of failure
It's not like the average household is willing to pay for two phone lines, each to a different exchange, and some kind of "automatic failure switching" mechanism to select the working telco exchange office.
By assuming the possibility of a catastrophic event, such as a nuclear war, a comet strike, a particularly nasty pandemic, or a dozen other things that can set civilization back significantly.
Oh... great... so if that happens then... question: How the heck are we going to read the data off the million year hard drive?
A million year hard drive is kind of pointless without a million year reading device attached to it
A more reliable way to mark the locations of hazardous waste disposal, would be to carve "universal" danger messages
in durable substances such as rock, and bury them all over the waste sites
And build large structures out of rock near waste disposal areas, designed in a shape to convey a danger message,
and durable enough to withstand earthquakes and thousands of years worth of wear and tear caused by the elements.
Will we see Digg's new owners taking up arms against Reddits, and all the other hundreds of sites that 'copied' their idea of user-rated submissions
based on a thumbs up / thumbs down or "Like" / "Hate" system?
Perhaps Facebook could be a target. Digg's "Digg" button did predate Facebook's "Like" button,
and FB's "Like" functionality can be construed as a shameless copy of Digg's Digg function;
granted FB didn't copy the counter, and Digg didn't provide a list of users that liked the article, or
publish lists of articles liked by a user.
The GPL requires that redistributors do this, he, as the copyright owner, may distribute as he pleases.
The makers of NeoOffice are redistributors. They are redistributing a derivative work that contains both their
code and LGPL-licensed upstream code. They don't have the right to distribute the work if they do not adhere to the GPL
if they choose to redistribute a project based on any LGPL code under the GPL.
If NeoOffice were not actually a derived work, then yes, they could name their terms, but if they distributed under a license
whose terms they made impossible to satisfy, then the code wouldn't actually be open source software.
It's like being totally ignorant about how a car works, and then going to the mechanic and being puzzled and confused when you get the bill. It's your fault for not doing the least amount of research.
Your auto mechanic doesn't put out a "Free Auto Service" sign, like developers do when they say put in the about page for their GPL licensed project; "xxx is Free Software that does yyy"
People choose to have precompiled binaries instead of learning how to compile. They can pay for that choice.
That's just any old commercial software product. People have a perception that with free software, they get that without having to pay, because the code is contributed to the community.
Take away that benefit of free software, and most people will pick a proprietary, but more popular alternative, based on their perception that they are getting more for their money.
Lo and behold there are books in the bookstores and libraries that can teach you this, along with how-tos and manpages. And it's not that hard. Really, it isn't. It's like cooking from a cookbook.
That only works if you are capable of comprehending and implementing the instructions in the book.
Most users get lost as soon as they have to enter a command.
Many users aren't capable of learning how to do it at all.
Even further still, the entire point of Linux distributions is to either sell services or sell precompiled binaries as a business model going all the way back to the first commercial venture in Linux distros - Yggdrasil.
It's not RAM usage alone i'm concerned about. I can appreciate lower RAM usage for resource-constrained systems, but speed efficiency seems a problem for FF.
I upgraded my desktop from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM, in my effort to combat extremely poor Firefox performance after a few days of uptime and ~20 or so tabs open, and I do have a Quad core 3.2Ghz Intel i3 CPU.
So far I have been highly disappointed with Firefox, because there has been little/no performance improvement with Firefox, despite making available on the system just about all the unused RAM a web browser could ever want
Scalability is the important thing.
How many tabs, bookmarks, and history items can Firefox scale to, and have good performance on my desktop?
20 or 30 tabs don't seem like a lot.... why the heck does it take 30 seconds to close an open tab or 20 seconds to open a new one after my browser has been open for a week or so, with about that much browsing?
The performance of Chrome has been absolutely stellar by comparison, with this amount of system memory available.
It's a much MUCH smaller deal than has been suggested.
At this point, the only way you have much chance of being impacted, is if someone's been totally negligent in the maintenance of
the computer, and just does simply no security work at all for the computer and their LAN,
or you are in a position of providing support for such a user, for network connectivity.
And I say that, because by now any DNSChanger impacted user has had a year to recognize the problem,
and it's been a well-publicized threat.
Unless the application is specifically targetted for software developers, who know how to use the tools, then.
It's equivalent to saying they don't need health insurance to pay for a doctor -- they can just the surgery
on themselves.
The end users arenot going to go through all that work to try out an unfamiliar application.
It will be passed over, and they'll not learn about it through word-of-mouth, because
the average user cannot compile software; the popularity of the app will be so low, that
noone will be aware of it to consider donating in the first place, therefore it's counter-productive and hurts
the developer.
Distributing a very old binary, and requiring a donation for the recent versions that have bugfixes
and new features is better strategy than that.
"By only providing the binaries to donors, it looks like you are only charging nontechnical users, while more technically inclined users get it for free."
Technically inclined users don't just get it for free, they have to either pay for the binary,
OR follow build instructions, and do all the work compile the binary their own, which depending if they did it properly
or not might or might not match the developer's "blessed" binary
Their "Work" is a cost.
Just like an auto mechanic changing their own oil to avoid paying the dealer fee for maintenance service is a cost.
Non-technically inclined users can either read the directions and attempt to learn while struggling through the build process,
or they can pay a technically inclined person to do it for them --- but donating will probably be cheaper.
In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications)
You don't have to meet requirements to have a.ORG domain anymore; commercial enterprises can register.ORG domains and use them.
If the developer is not providing the exact build scripts and exact source code,
then he is not following the GPL; the GPL requires that the exact source code (including all build scripts and build directions) be included.
Not to mention it should all be done on military ISP's over military connections/wireless frequencies
Not if its for personal entertainment purposes. Obviously, devices that connect to this insecure network should not be used for military communications or military data storage, ever, that would be a huge security risk.
They should also not be used, if the signals will be compromising.
It does make sense to separate that entertainment stuff and not use the military network for that.
The devices for military communications should never be connectable to the entertainment network, also.
Which uses VPN or Proxy, and also provides security services, such
as web filtering/policy enforcement, but according to your network's rules.
Still, over such a long distance, there is likely to be latency issues with any VPN setup;
you're making a bad problem potentially worse adding that extra little bit of latency.
I don't think you'll have high-bandwidth media streaming working very well,
although there may be some WAN optimization products that could help with that,
if only your oganization had network endpoints both in the US and outside the US.........
The problem with that is... they don't get the binaries, they can't try out the software and learn how good it is.
I would suggest an alternative: people who don't donate get different binaries.
Binaries with a nag screen, or binaries that expire and must be manually updated after a certain date
to continue using the software.
Whereas folks who donate get auto-update or binaries that can be used indefinitely (even an old version),
and maybe some additional 'add-on' content elements like themes that aren't part of the code
And of course, they can build the source themselves.
Actually you still need people with money to finance new artists and bands
People in any business need financing to get started with their business, if the costs are significant.
The costs of starting a band are much lower today than they were in the past.
But still, this is a service provided by banks; there isn't a market for dedicated companies just to finance bands.
and make them known to the public.
That is just marketing. You don't have to have a distributor or label to do that.
Labels may be able to do that more cost effectively at scale; for example,
they might have agreements in place with retailers, so the cost may be less for the band
to get their content on store shelves and marketed.
This is not debatable.
Sure it's debatable. You have essentially downgraded the record labels' status to
bank and marketing agency.
I think that's not the reason any band goes to a label.
Those services are easy to obtain through numerous competitors who would not demand such a high cut of the proceeds.
I think they go to the labels as a one-stop shop, to totally run the business for them, because the Labels
have experience at taking content and turning it to dollars, so they can concentrate on making music,
and avoid doing any of that "business stuff" themselves, which if done wrong, could cause them to fail.
The labels don't "finance them", the labels reduce their business risk.
I suspect most people will "change their behavior" after the warnings or speed throttling by switching ISP's.
A lot of the infringers are probably children, who are not aware of the law or haven't learned to respect the law.
Their parents will call the ISP and get their internet turned back on after grounding their child.
In many areas of the US there isn't even a competing provider to switch to.
And I suspect ISPs will not be very reluctant to resume a service they were being paid for.
The blank media tax is a brilliant idea in my opinion. But yes, it seems to have been written for physical media and doesn't extend very well to the Internet.
Computers still have hard drives. It's not completely out of the question for the government to require consumers to report how much hard drive space is utilized for media storage, and charge a $/GB tax.
A lot of the infringement problems would go away though, if media companies would just be willing to license their content to end users for personal use or sharing with friends at a reasonable price,
without paying huge retail markups for unwanted shiny boxes.
That is terrible -- the Internet is supposed to be for us, that is, for the computer users of the world. We are supposed to have a network where we can communicate freely
It will be when someone develops a system kind of like FreeNet or ToR that actually works
well for content distribution and consumption without revealing responsible IP addresses, doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge to publish and update content, is very fast, scales very well, and replaces BitTorrent and other protocols, which only provide file transfer, not content discovery and easy publication of media.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it matters whether we believe it or not. Cisco stuff is manufactured in China. Can you prove that every single component is manufactured to American specs, with no 'spurious unknown compromising parts' or hardware microcode patches burned in 'by accident' ?
If the source code were free and publicly available.... still... how do you verify the code on the device was compiled from the source you were given, and there's not a hardware component that changes the code after it's in memory?
Redundant internet connections are no guarantee of no single points of failure.
"Redundant" connections can sometimes wind up on the same fiber somewhere upstream, unbeknownst to the subscriber.
Most telecommunications infrastructure in any area has some very large aggregation points also... Telco Central Offices; a single point of failure for telecommunications services served by that office.
What good is working 911 service, if nobody can call in, because all their phones are rendered useless by a failure of the Class5 switch that all the phones in the city are connected to?
This kind of equipment typically has redundancy built in to survive the failure of any one processing unit or card, and telco facilities may be constructed with steel-reinforced concrete walls, and many protections against external events such as tornados.. but when you consider catastrophic disaster scenarios, where the problem originates inside, you are still faced with single points of failure
It's not like the average household is willing to pay for two phone lines, each to a different exchange, and some kind of "automatic failure switching" mechanism to select the working telco exchange office.
Do they need to add more LCD panels? :)
By assuming the possibility of a catastrophic event, such as a nuclear war, a comet strike, a particularly nasty pandemic, or a dozen other things that can set civilization back significantly.
Oh... great... so if that happens then... question: How the heck are we going to read the data off the million year hard drive?
A million year hard drive is kind of pointless without a million year reading device attached to it
A more reliable way to mark the locations of hazardous waste disposal, would be to carve "universal" danger messages in durable substances such as rock, and bury them all over the waste sites
And build large structures out of rock near waste disposal areas, designed in a shape to convey a danger message, and durable enough to withstand earthquakes and thousands of years worth of wear and tear caused by the elements.
Will we see Digg's new owners taking up arms against Reddits, and all the other hundreds of sites that 'copied' their idea of user-rated submissions based on a thumbs up / thumbs down or "Like" / "Hate" system?
Perhaps Facebook could be a target. Digg's "Digg" button did predate Facebook's "Like" button, and FB's "Like" functionality can be construed as a shameless copy of Digg's Digg function; granted FB didn't copy the counter, and Digg didn't provide a list of users that liked the article, or publish lists of articles liked by a user.
Perhaps Diggs' new owners will use "cvs update -r DIGG_UPDATE_3" or whatever and undo the heinous redesign ?
The GPL requires that redistributors do this, he, as the copyright owner, may distribute as he pleases.
The makers of NeoOffice are redistributors. They are redistributing a derivative work that contains both their code and LGPL-licensed upstream code. They don't have the right to distribute the work if they do not adhere to the GPL if they choose to redistribute a project based on any LGPL code under the GPL.
If NeoOffice were not actually a derived work, then yes, they could name their terms, but if they distributed under a license whose terms they made impossible to satisfy, then the code wouldn't actually be open source software.
It's like being totally ignorant about how a car works, and then going to the mechanic and being puzzled and confused when you get the bill. It's your fault for not doing the least amount of research.
Your auto mechanic doesn't put out a "Free Auto Service" sign, like developers do when they say put in the about page for their GPL licensed project; "xxx is Free Software that does yyy"
People choose to have precompiled binaries instead of learning how to compile. They can pay for that choice.
That's just any old commercial software product. People have a perception that with free software, they get that without having to pay, because the code is contributed to the community.
Take away that benefit of free software, and most people will pick a proprietary, but more popular alternative, based on their perception that they are getting more for their money.
Lo and behold there are books in the bookstores and libraries that can teach you this, along with how-tos and manpages. And it's not that hard. Really, it isn't. It's like cooking from a cookbook.
That only works if you are capable of comprehending and implementing the instructions in the book.
Most users get lost as soon as they have to enter a command.
Many users aren't capable of learning how to do it at all.
Even further still, the entire point of Linux distributions is to either sell services or sell precompiled binaries as a business model going all the way back to the first commercial venture in Linux distros - Yggdrasil.
What's Debian, then?
It's not RAM usage alone i'm concerned about. I can appreciate lower RAM usage for resource-constrained systems, but speed efficiency seems a problem for FF.
I upgraded my desktop from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM, in my effort to combat extremely poor Firefox performance after a few days of uptime and ~20 or so tabs open, and I do have a Quad core 3.2Ghz Intel i3 CPU.
So far I have been highly disappointed with Firefox, because there has been little/no performance improvement with Firefox, despite making available on the system just about all the unused RAM a web browser could ever want
Scalability is the important thing.
How many tabs, bookmarks, and history items can Firefox scale to, and have good performance on my desktop?
20 or 30 tabs don't seem like a lot.... why the heck does it take 30 seconds to close an open tab or 20 seconds to open a new one after my browser has been open for a week or so, with about that much browsing?
The performance of Chrome has been absolutely stellar by comparison, with this amount of system memory available.
It's a much MUCH smaller deal than has been suggested.
At this point, the only way you have much chance of being impacted, is if someone's been totally negligent in the maintenance of the computer, and just does simply no security work at all for the computer and their LAN, or you are in a position of providing support for such a user, for network connectivity.
And I say that, because by now any DNSChanger impacted user has had a year to recognize the problem, and it's been a well-publicized threat.
They can compile it their own damn selves.
Unless the application is specifically targetted for software developers, who know how to use the tools, then. It's equivalent to saying they don't need health insurance to pay for a doctor -- they can just the surgery on themselves.
The end users arenot going to go through all that work to try out an unfamiliar application. It will be passed over, and they'll not learn about it through word-of-mouth, because the average user cannot compile software; the popularity of the app will be so low, that noone will be aware of it to consider donating in the first place, therefore it's counter-productive and hurts the developer.
Distributing a very old binary, and requiring a donation for the recent versions that have bugfixes and new features is better strategy than that.
"By only providing the binaries to donors, it looks like you are only charging nontechnical users, while more technically inclined users get it for free."
Technically inclined users don't just get it for free, they have to either pay for the binary, OR follow build instructions, and do all the work compile the binary their own, which depending if they did it properly or not might or might not match the developer's "blessed" binary
Their "Work" is a cost. Just like an auto mechanic changing their own oil to avoid paying the dealer fee for maintenance service is a cost.
Non-technically inclined users can either read the directions and attempt to learn while struggling through the build process, or they can pay a technically inclined person to do it for them --- but donating will probably be cheaper.
In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications)
You don't have to meet requirements to have a .ORG domain anymore; commercial enterprises can register .ORG domains and use them.
If the developer is not providing the exact build scripts and exact source code,
then he is not following the GPL; the GPL requires that the exact source code (including all build scripts and build directions) be included.
The US Government is trusting Slashdot users to determine the wireless/wired VPN configuration aboard a US Navy ship?
Well, there are worse places they could go ask the question, like uh, 4chan /b/.
Not to mention it should all be done on military ISP's over military connections/wireless frequencies
Not if its for personal entertainment purposes. Obviously, devices that connect to this insecure network should not be used for military communications or military data storage, ever, that would be a huge security risk. They should also not be used, if the signals will be compromising.
It does make sense to separate that entertainment stuff and not use the military network for that.
The devices for military communications should never be connectable to the entertainment network, also.
eg Zscaler
Which uses VPN or Proxy, and also provides security services, such as web filtering/policy enforcement, but according to your network's rules.
Still, over such a long distance, there is likely to be latency issues with any VPN setup; you're making a bad problem potentially worse adding that extra little bit of latency.
I don't think you'll have high-bandwidth media streaming working very well, although there may be some WAN optimization products that could help with that, if only your oganization had network endpoints both in the US and outside the US.........
The problem with that is... they don't get the binaries, they can't try out the software and learn how good it is.
I would suggest an alternative: people who don't donate get different binaries. Binaries with a nag screen, or binaries that expire and must be manually updated after a certain date to continue using the software.
Whereas folks who donate get auto-update or binaries that can be used indefinitely (even an old version), and maybe some additional 'add-on' content elements like themes that aren't part of the code
And of course, they can build the source themselves.
Actually you still need people with money to finance new artists and bands
People in any business need financing to get started with their business, if the costs are significant. The costs of starting a band are much lower today than they were in the past. But still, this is a service provided by banks; there isn't a market for dedicated companies just to finance bands.
and make them known to the public.
That is just marketing. You don't have to have a distributor or label to do that. Labels may be able to do that more cost effectively at scale; for example, they might have agreements in place with retailers, so the cost may be less for the band to get their content on store shelves and marketed.
This is not debatable.
Sure it's debatable. You have essentially downgraded the record labels' status to bank and marketing agency.
I think that's not the reason any band goes to a label. Those services are easy to obtain through numerous competitors who would not demand such a high cut of the proceeds.
I think they go to the labels as a one-stop shop, to totally run the business for them, because the Labels have experience at taking content and turning it to dollars, so they can concentrate on making music, and avoid doing any of that "business stuff" themselves, which if done wrong, could cause them to fail.
The labels don't "finance them", the labels reduce their business risk.
I suspect most people will "change their behavior" after the warnings or speed throttling by switching ISP's.
A lot of the infringers are probably children, who are not aware of the law or haven't learned to respect the law. Their parents will call the ISP and get their internet turned back on after grounding their child.
In many areas of the US there isn't even a competing provider to switch to.
And I suspect ISPs will not be very reluctant to resume a service they were being paid for.
The blank media tax is a brilliant idea in my opinion. But yes, it seems to have been written for physical media and doesn't extend very well to the Internet.
Computers still have hard drives. It's not completely out of the question for the government to require consumers to report how much hard drive space is utilized for media storage, and charge a $/GB tax.
A lot of the infringement problems would go away though, if media companies would just be willing to license their content to end users for personal use or sharing with friends at a reasonable price, without paying huge retail markups for unwanted shiny boxes.
That is terrible -- the Internet is supposed to be for us, that is, for the computer users of the world. We are supposed to have a network where we can communicate freely
It will be when someone develops a system kind of like FreeNet or ToR that actually works well for content distribution and consumption without revealing responsible IP addresses, doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge to publish and update content, is very fast, scales very well, and replaces BitTorrent and other protocols, which only provide file transfer, not content discovery and easy publication of media.
Last I checked Tomato and DD wrt weren't capable of running on my Cisco 7204VXR
But then again, as far as I am aware, IOS 12.x has no auto-update features, either.