Come on guys, lets face the truth about this naming conflict: it's not about giving credit to RMS, it's not about freedom. GNU/Linux as a name sucks! The very same thing applies to "Free Software" - everybody (almost) uses "Open Software" today, because that is a much better term.
People didn't suddenly change their minds about free software when the term "Open Software" appeared. They immediately locked onto the better term. Free in reference to a product means you don't have to pay for it. So going through this whole "free as in..." thingy was annoying to most people.
A good term has to roll of your tongue nicely. Replacing a good term with something wierd and awkward is extremely unlikely to work, even if it may be more accurate.
I might favour the name "United States of sorta North America, but not the Canadian bit" (USNnC).
Honestly how good do you think my chances are to bring that about?
What you're talking about is COMMON BUSINESS PRACTICE
I disagree, what we are seeing here is not common. It's not unheard of, to that point I agree, but the vast majority of suppliers don't work out strategies to screw their customers. They can't afford to treat business relationships that way.
This behaviour only becomes common in market-driven economies when there is no properly functioning market. The capitalist economic theorie is all about huge benefits arrising from competition, that's why monopolies are bad.
Well, if your service provider does in fact provide bad service - e.g. messing up headers in Usenet posts - why wouldn't you complain?
It seems that complaining about problems is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even if there is no way to legally force the ISP to remedy them. Service companies which stay in business tend to pay attention to complaints, occassionally.:)
As far as RoadRunner getting trouble: I think that wouldn't necessarily have to be legal trouble. Lots of customers complaining or going somewhere else is trouble, too.
Well, usually getting virus warnings just annoy me,
but this one was really special:
Klez.E is the most common world-wide spreading worm.It's very dangerous
by corrupting your files. Because of its very smart stealth and
anti-anti-virus technic,most common AV software can't detect or clean it.
We developed this free immunity tool to defeat the malicious virus. You
only need to run this tool once,and then Klez will never come into your
PC. NOTE: Because this tool acts as a fake Klez to fool the real
worm,some AV monitor maybe cry when you run it. If so,Ignore the
warning,and select 'continue'.
If you have any question,please mail to me.
No, no questions - lol.
It had a nice executable with the worm attached, too.:)
Re:What's the correct way to upgrade my KDE?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Is it necessary/a good thing to remove the old packages at all? I remember that for the switch to KDE2, there was a seperate/opt/kde2 directory.
I kept both/opt/kde and/opt/kde2, so that I
could continue to use a few old kde1 apps.
I'm not sure whether this applies to the
problems discussed, I'm compiling from source, so the RPM install may have different constraints which I'm not aware of. Also I should add another disclaimer, that I haven't compiled any version of kde3 yet.
I mean, if your company wants to steal they can, they'll just be a bunch a crooks. Maybe that can't be proven in court, but it won't change the fact that they are thieves.
So really, they could just steal and modify the code, obfuscate it, then release in binary. That might even lower the chances of them getting caught. If morality is not an issue, why not take the easier route in the first place?
In any case, you might want to consider getting your resume out, as soon as you can. Dealing with unethical people like that, is a major risk - chances are you'll get screwed by them some day, too.
Never understimate the power of UNIX text-processing tools.
Well, they would presumably use some sort of
lossy obfuscation, i.e. naming all their variables x0, x1, x2... xn, removing all comments
etc. Since that info is lost, it can't be extracted with any sort of text processing anymore.
It's possible though, that some damage of obfuscation might be removable.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and four major law school legal clinics announced the launch today of a project and website to empower Internet users with detailed information about their legal rights in response to cease-and-desist letters designed to restrict their online activities.
This is the clincher for pretty much any temporary injunction filed based on the GPL. The GPL requires that no money can be due to authors of the work for its use. No money, no damages. No damages, no injunction without a full blown trial.
I'm not sure whether that point is valid. Just because I choose not to sell something doesn't mean stealing it, is ok. If I lend a book to a friend, I don't loose ownership of it - he still has to give it back. The same applies if it's not a book,
but say a bicycle which I made myself, and which I lend to all my friends freely.
Courts are quite used to assign values to goods, even if they don't have a price sticker. I doubt they'd be stumped in this case.
Anything you create on corporate time becomes the property of the company.
Sorry for taking this a bit out of context, but I don't want to accept this "the company pay you, therefore they owe you". If I spent time at work composing a love poem for my girl friend, the company is perfectly entiteled to tell me off, for not doing my work. They are not entiteled to my poem.
They have every right to tell you not to print it out.
Normally yes, you will have to comply with company policy - however if the company engages in criminal behaviour, their rights have just ended. Collecting evidence about that is normally perfectly lawful, if it's not in you jurisdiction, I think it ought to be. I believe the US has "whistle-blower" laws too, though.
You're making a very good point about the proof issue, unless the email is PGP-signed (or something similar) it's not a terribly good proof. However, looking at a text it's sometimes possible to associate it with a writer anyway e.g. looking for typical spelling mistakes, a certain style of writing, etc. Basically there are signs which could be used to prove that you faked the email, so if those can't be found it increases your credibility. So it might help somewhat.
Well, I just got an answer letter from my representative in the Bundestag. What I found very interesting, was that he seemed rather pissed off, about MS efforts to influence their decision. Also apparently the SPD (which together with the Greens form the German federal government currently) has alread used Linux for their internal work for a while.
So, really things seem to look rather good for Linux.
If you are a German citizen you might want to consider writing your MdB (=representative) it seems to work.:)
I would like to ask for a more formal process. I would like each and every contributor to Wine to send Alexandre a private email with an 'Agree' or 'Disagree' opinion
It seems to me, that they really want Wine contributors to express their opinion, not the general public. They might be interested to hear from users, too, but it doesn't state that anywhere.
What I don't get is this: this exact same miscalculation was already in an article referred to by slashdot, about a year ago. Neither slashdot nor the writer of the article seem to have learned anything... I'm somewhat surprised that the slashdot editors didn't point out that mistake right away. It also seems strange that Security Focus would still publish these "aggregate" numbers - they seem to only confuse people, and I don't see what sense these numbers would make?
Anyway, what I found interesting is that Redhat faires so badly - about as bad as Win2k, and about twice as bad as any other Linux distribution. If SuSE has only 21 tracked bugs, and comes with a lot of software (7 CDs now, I think) is Redhat with 54 entries doing something wrong?
Well, since I'm below the 1024 cylinders I shouldn't have a problem anyhow. However, as I understand the LILO doc, the 1024 cylinder limit is gone "for certain BIOSes". Since my BIOS doesn't even recognize the drive (it's an 80 GB Maxtor too, btw) it's probably not one of those.:)
It's really not much of a problem (the system does boot from hda, after all) and it's quite impressive that Linux can handle the drive anyway (Windows has no way to get to it, because of the older BIOS). I'm just sorta curious why LILO has problems with it. Maybe the high partition number hdb5, is an issue? Or maybe it's plainly the fact, that LILO doesn't like it, if the BIOS says, it's
boot drive isn't even there? I'm really just curious what it might be.:)
Hmmmm.... I wonder, I have a system which
has a hdb which the BIOS doesn't recognize
(too big) and which has a Linux install on
hdb5 (belonging to an extended partition) but
below the first 1024 cylinders.
LILO can handle that only with the kernel
copied on hda2, and booting from there.
If you think GRUB might let me boot this from hdb5, I'll give it a try.;)
Well, the claim that it's *not* saving me time, effort or improves my life is a tall order. (If I interpret what you write, as making that claim.)
Obviously it might depend on what your application is, but being able to script things, and to use perl/gawk etc helps me a lot at my work.
On the other hand, the periodic virus outbreaks with Windows are rather a drain on productivity.
I'm also fed up with Office continually changing it's file formats - documents I created some years ago in Excel, are almost completely unreadable with today's Excel. The embedded graphics have just disappeared onto seperate pages - great job really.
As for features - the only time I run into limitations with StarOffice (like integrating large documents), MS Office doesn't do any better either. If it comes to that I'd be better of using FrameMaker. YMMV of course.
It seems one of the viruses mentioned is actually just an infected.exe file, and the other problem only occurs with the standalone player, not with
the browser plugin.
So if I understand this correctly, if you don't use.exe attachments and don't have the standalone player, then you should be save?
A while ago I wrote a filter, which takes
a flash exe, and strips out the flash player,
leaving you with the.swf part. I did that, so that I could view those movies on Linux, but it should work for Windows systems, too. Usually there is no reason to include the flash player anyway - most people have the flash plugin already, and don't need yet another copy of the flash player.
Apologies for the really bad code (I don't actually know C), and the horrible formatting (the latter I blame on the slashdot lameness filter, though). You'll have to use "View Source" to
look at it.:)
/* exe2swf.c
**
*/
#include
#include
void main ()
{
int ch;
int match;// start of swf file
int search;
int sig_len;
int sig[3];
int i;
int k;
match = 0;
search = 1;
i = 0;
sig_len = 3;
sig[0] = 'F';
sig[1] = 'W';
sig[2] = 'S';
while ((ch = getchar()) != EOF) {
if (match) putchar(ch);
if (ch == sig[i]) i++;
else i = 0;
if (i == sig_len-1 && search) {// detected signature
match = 1;
search = 0;// output signature again
for(k=0;k
Slashdot Mirror
People didn't suddenly change their minds about free software when the term "Open Software" appeared. They immediately locked onto the better term. Free in reference to a product means you don't have to pay for it. So going through this whole "free as in..." thingy was annoying to most people.
A good term has to roll of your tongue nicely. Replacing a good term with something wierd and awkward is extremely unlikely to work, even if it may be more accurate.
I might favour the name "United States of sorta North America, but not the Canadian bit" (USNnC).
Honestly how good do you think my chances are to bring that about?
I disagree, what we are seeing here is not common. It's not unheard of, to that point I agree, but the vast majority of suppliers don't work out strategies to screw their customers. They can't afford to treat business relationships that way.
This behaviour only becomes common in market-driven economies when there is no properly functioning market. The capitalist economic theorie is all about huge benefits arrising from competition, that's why monopolies are bad.
Had no problems, and I'm getting no spam. So at least some of the time it seems to have worked.
It seems that complaining about problems is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even if there is no way to legally force the ISP to remedy them. Service companies which stay in business tend to pay attention to complaints, occassionally. :)
As far as RoadRunner getting trouble: I think that wouldn't necessarily have to be legal trouble. Lots of customers complaining or going somewhere else is trouble, too.
Well in Germany there is Bundestux. Not exactly the right organization, but it's a political group supporting Linux, so that may be a starting point.
Klez.E is the most common world-wide spreading worm.It's very dangerous by corrupting your files. Because of its very smart stealth and anti-anti-virus technic,most common AV software can't detect or clean it. We developed this free immunity tool to defeat the malicious virus. You only need to run this tool once,and then Klez will never come into your PC. NOTE: Because this tool acts as a fake Klez to fool the real worm,some AV monitor maybe cry when you run it. If so,Ignore the warning,and select 'continue'. If you have any question,please mail to me.
No, no questions - lol.
It had a nice executable with the worm attached, too. :)
I kept both /opt/kde and /opt/kde2, so that I
could continue to use a few old kde1 apps.
I'm not sure whether this applies to the problems discussed, I'm compiling from source, so the RPM install may have different constraints which I'm not aware of. Also I should add another disclaimer, that I haven't compiled any version of kde3 yet.
$25 million for a GUI? Doesn't seem like a fair price.
So really, they could just steal and modify the code, obfuscate it, then release in binary. That might even lower the chances of them getting caught. If morality is not an issue, why not take the easier route in the first place?
In any case, you might want to consider getting your resume out, as soon as you can. Dealing with unethical people like that, is a major risk - chances are you'll get screwed by them some day, too.
Well, they would presumably use some sort of lossy obfuscation, i.e. naming all their variables x0, x1, x2... xn, removing all comments etc. Since that info is lost, it can't be extracted with any sort of text processing anymore.
It's possible though, that some damage of obfuscation might be removable.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and four major law school legal clinics announced the launch today of a project and website to empower Internet users with detailed information about their legal rights in response to cease-and-desist letters designed to restrict their online activities.
I'm not sure whether that point is valid. Just because I choose not to sell something doesn't mean stealing it, is ok. If I lend a book to a friend, I don't loose ownership of it - he still has to give it back. The same applies if it's not a book, but say a bicycle which I made myself, and which I lend to all my friends freely.
Courts are quite used to assign values to goods, even if they don't have a price sticker. I doubt they'd be stumped in this case.
Sorry for taking this a bit out of context, but I don't want to accept this "the company pay you, therefore they owe you". If I spent time at work composing a love poem for my girl friend, the company is perfectly entiteled to tell me off, for not doing my work. They are not entiteled to my poem.
They have every right to tell you not to print it out.
Normally yes, you will have to comply with company policy - however if the company engages in criminal behaviour, their rights have just ended. Collecting evidence about that is normally perfectly lawful, if it's not in you jurisdiction, I think it ought to be. I believe the US has "whistle-blower" laws too, though.
You're making a very good point about the proof issue, unless the email is PGP-signed (or something similar) it's not a terribly good proof. However, looking at a text it's sometimes possible to associate it with a writer anyway e.g. looking for typical spelling mistakes, a certain style of writing, etc. Basically there are signs which could be used to prove that you faked the email, so if those can't be found it increases your credibility. So it might help somewhat.
So, really things seem to look rather good for Linux.
If you are a German citizen you might want to consider writing your MdB (=representative) it seems to work. :)
Basically changes to the library are treated like with the standard GPL, but you are allowed to link to it from commercial software. IANAL.
It seems to me, that they really want Wine contributors to express their opinion, not the general public. They might be interested to hear from users, too, but it doesn't state that anywhere.
Anyway, what I found interesting is that Redhat faires so badly - about as bad as Win2k, and about twice as bad as any other Linux distribution. If SuSE has only 21 tracked bugs, and comes with a lot of software (7 CDs now, I think) is Redhat with 54 entries doing something wrong?
It's really not much of a problem (the system does boot from hda, after all) and it's quite impressive that Linux can handle the drive anyway (Windows has no way to get to it, because of the older BIOS). I'm just sorta curious why LILO has problems with it. Maybe the high partition number hdb5, is an issue? Or maybe it's plainly the fact, that LILO doesn't like it, if the BIOS says, it's boot drive isn't even there? I'm really just curious what it might be. :)
LILO can handle that only with the kernel copied on hda2, and booting from there.
If you think GRUB might let me boot this from hdb5, I'll give it a try. ;)
Obviously it might depend on what your application is, but being able to script things, and to use perl/gawk etc helps me a lot at my work.
On the other hand, the periodic virus outbreaks with Windows are rather a drain on productivity. I'm also fed up with Office continually changing it's file formats - documents I created some years ago in Excel, are almost completely unreadable with today's Excel. The embedded graphics have just disappeared onto seperate pages - great job really.
As for features - the only time I run into limitations with StarOffice (like integrating large documents), MS Office doesn't do any better either. If it comes to that I'd be better of using FrameMaker. YMMV of course.
For example I used to help paint public schools in NYC. I don't think that would give me a claim to call you unethical?
'Cause the application isn't even distributed anymore, it's just a dead entry in a start menu...
Besides the writer of the application is probably not even a commercial entity, but SuSE is.
I suspect they'd just put a "not allowed to operate a vehicle" stamp on the license. Can't imagine they'd be concerned about your privacy there...
Hmmm - looks like I better give up on this plan to post code... Here's a link instead: exe2swf.c
So if I understand this correctly, if you don't use .exe attachments and don't have the standalone player, then you should be save?
A while ago I wrote a filter, which takes a flash exe, and strips out the flash player, leaving you with the .swf part. I did that, so that I could view those movies on Linux, but it should work for Windows systems, too. Usually there is no reason to include the flash player anyway - most people have the flash plugin already, and don't need yet another copy of the flash player.
Apologies for the really bad code (I don't actually know C), and the horrible formatting (the latter I blame on the slashdot lameness filter, though). You'll have to use "View Source" to look at it. :)