Seems like the real problem is that software installs on Linux are the suck.
I know you're trying to troll, but you're actually exactly right. Software that is prepared nicely for installation on the distro I work on is incredibly easy to install even for a non-technical user. But Sun doesn't distribute Java in a convenient way, and they don't allow me (or anyone else) to make it convenient, even though I would if I could.
I work on a minor, highly targetted Linux distribution. I'd love to include Java, and I actually get a lot of requests for it. But, here's an excerpt from the license agreement you'll find if you look to download the software:
B. License to Distribute Software. Subject to the terms and
conditions of this Agreement and restrictions and
exceptions set forth in the Software README file,
including, but not limited to the Java Technology
Restrictions of these Supplemental Terms, Sun grants you a
non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without
fees to reproduce and distribute the Software, provided
that (i) you distribute the Software complete and
unmodified and only bundled as part of, and for the sole
purpose of running, your Programs, (ii) the Programs add
significant and primary functionality to the Software,
(iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to
replace any component(s) of the Software, (iv) you do not
remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices
contained in the Software, (v) you only distribute the
Software subject to a license agreement that protects Sun's
interests consistent with the terms contained in this
Agreement, and (vi) you agree to defend and indemnify Sun
and its licensors from and
(Yes, it really does just end abruptly without finishing the sentence. That trailing "and" there doesn't lead into the next section; it's just not done. Obviously I'm the only one who bothers to read these things -- *including* the people at Sun. Anyway....)
My wish to give the software to my users fails almost every test....
i: I don't want to distribute it for the "sole purpose of running [my] Programs". I want to distribute it so people can run other people's programs, including possibly their own.
ii: uh, well, actually, my "Programs" don't add any functionality to Java, let alone "significant and primary".
iii: oops, I include gcc, which has a Java compiler. And I'm definitely not going to drop that.
iv: ahh, now this one I can agree with -- fine keep your copyright notices, etc.
v: my distribution as a whole is under the GPL. I'd have to run this by our lawyers, but this looks like it'd conflict by requring additional restrictions (even if I could get special dispensation to deal with the other issues).
vi: I don't really have the resources to defend and indemnify Sun "from and", even if I wanted to, thanks.
And frankly, that's why I wish people would stop writing things in Java. It's a pain to deal with. I want to make everything as slick, integrated, and as easy as possible for my end users. Sun makes that impossible for Java applications. If you want your code to be easily integrated and made available to users like mine -- and really, that's users of any Linux distro targetted more broadly than the super-geek sector -- please don't use Java. If you must, at least design it to work with gcj instead of Sun's virtual machine.
Unless Sun changes the license terms, their Java can never fill the "write once, run anywhere" goal -- but cleanly written source in an open language can.
First of all, I can't see how a major offering from a for-profit company can be classified as "not commercial". "Non-profit" doesn't just mean that you're failing to make any money. Even if they don' have ads on this specific section of their site, the *whole thing* is a big ad for Look How Cool And Useful Google Is.
Adding advertising might cause the site to push the site's whose content they are linking to over the edge, but I don't really see how one can even argue that there's a fundamental difference.
Likewise, there's not a fundamental difference between Google News and the main Google search site, which _does_ have paid advertising.
And in both cases, sites which _wouldn't_ want to be indexed seem pretty silly. If you don't want people to find your web site, okay, keep it out of the search engines. Or save your money and don't put it on the web at all. This isn't a matter of fair use doctrine -- it's common sense.
This idea actually fits in with my idea that the goal of humanity should be to create its successors, a race of perfect robot creatures who will live forever without death.
Oh, sure, until the heat-death of the universe. Then what?
Actually, since he's updated that page, he made a VGA-mode graphics board and connected it to a real monitor. So the game (which I haven't actually played yet) is a spaceship piloting thing played on that.
Back in the days of the Homebrew computer club, you literally did build a PC. These days, whacking a load of PCBs into a case isn't quite the same level of complexity. I remeber telling people I built PCs where I worked and they looked amazed. As far as I was concerned, it was nothing more complex than Lego with static. The hardest part was installing software.
Things have definately changed.
Yeah, totally. Which was why I was surprised when I heard that one of my co-workers has designed and built (well, is building -- it's a work in progress) one ompletely from scratch. Although he doesn't mention it on the page, he's written games for it and everything. (I said, "does it have games?" and the next week it did). It's pretty much the most amazingly geeky thing I've ever seen, and seriously deserves to get slashdotted.:)
I've written and edited the first book, over 400 pages, and now have started in on book two. I've queried a dozen literary agents who specialize in fantasy fiction, but I've yet to find one who is willing to even read a sample. They all sent back rejection notes that were remarkably similar: Too busy, best of luck with someone else.
Here's someone else you might try. Jim Munroe spoke at this year's OLS about independent media, Linux and free software, and self-publishing. Very interesting, and maybe helpful for what you're trying to do.
It does if you had something related to quantum physics sitting on your desk, you used it every day, couldn't live without it (e-mail), bought new things for it and yet actively refused to learn even the simplest things about it.
I dunno. I'm pretty attached to my CD player -- I use it every day, and despite mp3s, I buy new things for it. And yet, I really don't know all that much about the quantum mechanical effect that makes the laser work. It just generally does, and if it doesn't, I'll shrug and either get someone else to look at it or buy a new one.
Source code watermarking is a hot research topic. You do it by inserting *logic* into the code, not just text. The logic, thanks to the hardness of SAT, can be constructed so that it is nigh impossible to see which parts will be run and which will not. Thus it becomes impossible to remove the logic, even for a nice optimizing compiler. There are side effects built into these bits of code, such that no matter how it is modified, rearranged, and compiled, the side effects can be read (by you, the programmer) to identify which copy of the source code it comes from. Of course, the code will become somewhat obfuscated and difficult to read, but hey:P [....]
Greaaat. That'll make the security audits even easier, I'm sure.
What is much better than Google, however, is Vivisimo. The search results are topically organized via clustering, making them easier to navigate by orders of magnitude.
I'm not convinced -- it doesn't seem to work well with anything I search for. It simply produces a list of vaguely relevant and vaguely irrelevant groups on the side. The only time I can see this being useful is when you search for words which are actually homonyms (or homographs, at least) -- but that's not actually incredibly common, and can be resolved easily by adding a second term to clarify.
Um, you're just wrong. If you look up "poorly" in Merriam-Webster, you'll find it *defined* as a synonym for "badly". And if you look it up in OED, you'll find, as definition 1:
In a manner below the proper standard; poorly, insufficiently, defectively.
Which is pretty much exactly what I meant. (OED also gives "rather badly" as part of one definition of "poorly", by the way -- go recursiveness.)
Speaking of Kafka and the US government, check out the wonderful quote in the last paragraph of this AP interview with Porter Goss, Florida Republican and Bush's nominee for director of the CIA:
"We don't want Kafka knocking on the door in the middle of the night," he said. But "there is some risk."
Oh that Kafka, he's a scary one.
Seriously, if the people in positions of power like this are so badly educated, we are screwed.
"The laws of Newton and Kepler don't explain the orbit of Mercury. This whole 'science' stuff needs to change. It was created a long time ago, and it's time to throw it all out and start with something new."
Maybe that's not flamebait, but it is silly. Changing theories to match new data metaphorically maps very well to adding SPF to SMTP -- not to throwing the whole thing away.
I had my couple of domains at register.com which increasingly sucked. This was the last straw, and I finally switched over to pairnic and I've been much happier. Although I haven't gotten around to setting up SPF yet, they *do* let you set arbitrary TXT records.
Because this is one very specific weird peculiar issue widely known only among geeks -- even if it does affect the population at large. Even if the polititions in question get voted out of office, it'll get blamed on the economy or the Iraq war or abortion or some other big-name issue. Your concerns won't even cross anyone else's minds.
Don't get me wrong, I approve of SPF, but here's my gripe from a best practice point of view. If you're capable of identifying the mail server(s) authorized to send mail from your network and publishing SPF records, why are you letting other hosts send SMTP out of your network at all?
That's the point -- it's NOT coming out of your network. It's coming from someone else's network entirely beyond your control.
SPF lets you list which source networks *are* in your control, and if a message comes from somewhere that doesn't match, that's a warning sign.
THANK YOU! Finally, someone else with a sense of humor.:)
Ahhhh, I see the ":)" you have there. Now I understand. Because, see, on the in-ter-net, one can't tell if anything is funny unless the author puts a smile symbol after it. Without that cue, how could anyone possibly recognize humor? Well, they couldn't, that's how. Well, that's how not. Anyway: it would be impossible. Text on computers just doesn't have the same social cues we get in person, or from reading printed words that might be funny. The original post didn't have the right explanatory code, so of course no one realized the hilarity of the jest. But now we do. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the real problem is that software installs on Linux are the suck.
I know you're trying to troll, but you're actually exactly right. Software that is prepared nicely for installation on the distro I work on is incredibly easy to install even for a non-technical user. But Sun doesn't distribute Java in a convenient way, and they don't allow me (or anyone else) to make it convenient, even though I would if I could.
I work on a minor, highly targetted Linux distribution. I'd love to include Java, and I actually get a lot of requests for it. But, here's an excerpt from the license agreement you'll find if you look to download the software:
(Yes, it really does just end abruptly without finishing the sentence. That trailing "and" there doesn't lead into the next section; it's just not done. Obviously I'm the only one who bothers to read these things -- *including* the people at Sun. Anyway....)
My wish to give the software to my users fails almost every test....
i: I don't want to distribute it for the "sole purpose of running [my] Programs". I want to distribute it so people can run other people's programs, including possibly their own.ii: uh, well, actually, my "Programs" don't add any functionality to Java, let alone "significant and primary".
iii: oops, I include gcc, which has a Java compiler. And I'm definitely not going to drop that.
iv: ahh, now this one I can agree with -- fine keep your copyright notices, etc.
v: my distribution as a whole is under the GPL. I'd have to run this by our lawyers, but this looks like it'd conflict by requring additional restrictions (even if I could get special dispensation to deal with the other issues).
vi: I don't really have the resources to defend and indemnify Sun "from and", even if I wanted to, thanks.
And frankly, that's why I wish people would stop writing things in Java. It's a pain to deal with. I want to make everything as slick, integrated, and as easy as possible for my end users. Sun makes that impossible for Java applications. If you want your code to be easily integrated and made available to users like mine -- and really, that's users of any Linux distro targetted more broadly than the super-geek sector -- please don't use Java. If you must, at least design it to work with gcj instead of Sun's virtual machine.
Unless Sun changes the license terms, their Java can never fill the "write once, run anywhere" goal -- but cleanly written source in an open language can.
sites, not site's.
First of all, I can't see how a major offering from a for-profit company can be classified as "not commercial". "Non-profit" doesn't just mean that you're failing to make any money. Even if they don' have ads on this specific section of their site, the *whole thing* is a big ad for Look How Cool And Useful Google Is.
Adding advertising might cause the site to push the site's whose content they are linking to over the edge, but I don't really see how one can even argue that there's a fundamental difference.
Likewise, there's not a fundamental difference between Google News and the main Google search site, which _does_ have paid advertising.
And in both cases, sites which _wouldn't_ want to be indexed seem pretty silly. If you don't want people to find your web site, okay, keep it out of the search engines. Or save your money and don't put it on the web at all. This isn't a matter of fair use doctrine -- it's common sense.
This idea actually fits in with my idea that the goal of humanity should be to create its successors, a race of perfect robot creatures who will live forever without death.
Oh, sure, until the heat-death of the universe. Then what?
Sure, they like to let you think that. But increasingly, you're the product.
Actually, since he's updated that page, he made a VGA-mode graphics board and connected it to a real monitor. So the game (which I haven't actually played yet) is a spaceship piloting thing played on that.
Yes; it means "an American brand of cigarettes".
Back in the days of the Homebrew computer club, you literally did build a PC. These days, whacking a load of PCBs into a case isn't quite the same level of complexity. I remeber telling people I built PCs where I worked and they looked amazed. As far as I was concerned, it was nothing more complex than Lego with static. The hardest part was installing software.
:)
Things have definately changed.
Yeah, totally. Which was why I was surprised when I heard that one of my co-workers has designed and built (well, is building -- it's a work in progress) one ompletely from scratch. Although he doesn't mention it on the page, he's written games for it and everything. (I said, "does it have games?" and the next week it did). It's pretty much the most amazingly geeky thing I've ever seen, and seriously deserves to get slashdotted.
And your street address change less often than your e-mail address.
I've had five different street addresses in the past seven years -- and still just the one e-mail address...
I've written and edited the first book, over 400 pages, and now have started in on book two. I've queried a dozen literary agents who specialize in fantasy fiction, but I've yet to find one who is willing to even read a sample. They all sent back rejection notes that were remarkably similar: Too busy, best of luck with someone else.
Here's someone else you might try. Jim Munroe spoke at this year's OLS about independent media, Linux and free software, and self-publishing. Very interesting, and maybe helpful for what you're trying to do.
It does if you had something related to quantum physics sitting on your desk, you used it every day, couldn't live without it (e-mail), bought new things for it and yet actively refused to learn even the simplest things about it.
I dunno. I'm pretty attached to my CD player -- I use it every day, and despite mp3s, I buy new things for it. And yet, I really don't know all that much about the quantum mechanical effect that makes the laser work. It just generally does, and if it doesn't, I'll shrug and either get someone else to look at it or buy a new one.
Slashdot doesn't sell the right to post advertisements as news. Just FYI.
Yeah; why would anyone buy it when it's been given away for free for so long?
They are only in a difficult position if you fall into the ideology that Google has a responsibility only to its shareholders.
That's not ideology -- it's US law. If they do anything else, they can be sued.
Source code watermarking is a hot research topic. You do it by inserting *logic* into the code, not just text. The logic, thanks to the hardness of SAT, can be constructed so that it is nigh impossible to see which parts will be run and which will not. Thus it becomes impossible to remove the logic, even for a nice optimizing compiler. There are side effects built into these bits of code, such that no matter how it is modified, rearranged, and compiled, the side effects can be read (by you, the programmer) to identify which copy of the source code it comes from. Of course, the code will become somewhat obfuscated and difficult to read, but hey
Greaaat. That'll make the security audits even easier, I'm sure.
What is much
better than Google, however, is Vivisimo. The
search results are topically organized via
clustering, making them easier to navigate by
orders of magnitude.
I'm not convinced -- it doesn't seem to work well with anything I search for. It simply produces a list of vaguely relevant and vaguely irrelevant groups on the side. The only time I can see this being useful is when you search for words which are actually homonyms (or homographs, at least) -- but that's not actually incredibly common, and can be resolved easily by adding a second term to clarify.
Yep -- it's a good language.
Which is pretty much exactly what I meant. (OED also gives "rather badly" as part of one definition of "poorly", by the way -- go recursiveness.)
Oh that Kafka, he's a scary one.
Seriously, if the people in positions of power like this are so badly educated, we are screwed.
A T1 isn't much more than this. If I were a local business, I would just buy the T1 and share it out with a few others to defray the costs.
Have you priced out local telco loops for a t1 in a rural area before? It's surprisingly non-economical.
Sounded more like:
"The laws of Newton and Kepler don't explain the orbit of Mercury. This whole 'science' stuff needs to change. It was created a long time ago, and it's time to throw it all out and start with something new."
Maybe that's not flamebait, but it is silly. Changing theories to match new data metaphorically maps very well to adding SPF to SMTP -- not to throwing the whole thing away.
I had my couple of domains at register.com which increasingly sucked. This was the last straw, and I finally switched over to pairnic and I've been much happier. Although I haven't gotten around to setting up SPF yet, they *do* let you set arbitrary TXT records.
Because this is one very specific weird peculiar issue widely known only among geeks -- even if it does affect the population at large. Even if the polititions in question get voted out of office, it'll get blamed on the economy or the Iraq war or abortion or some other big-name issue. Your concerns won't even cross anyone else's minds.
Don't get me wrong, I approve of SPF, but here's my gripe from a best practice point of view. If you're capable of identifying the mail server(s) authorized to send mail from your network and publishing SPF records, why are you letting other hosts send SMTP out of your network at all?
That's the point -- it's NOT coming out of your network. It's coming from someone else's network entirely beyond your control.
SPF lets you list which source networks *are* in your control, and if a message comes from somewhere that doesn't match, that's a warning sign.
THANK YOU! Finally, someone else with a sense of humor. :)
Ahhhh, I see the ":)" you have there. Now I understand. Because, see, on the in-ter-net, one can't tell if anything is funny unless the author puts a smile symbol after it. Without that cue, how could anyone possibly recognize humor? Well, they couldn't, that's how. Well, that's how not. Anyway: it would be impossible. Text on computers just doesn't have the same social cues we get in person, or from reading printed words that might be funny. The original post didn't have the right explanatory code, so of course no one realized the hilarity of the jest. But now we do. Thank you.