These jokes are very funny, but the name of this computer is stupid. I'm waiting for the Apple iSlam, the Dell eXtianity, and the IBM Hindu. New operating systems in the works: HolyGhost, Halakhah, and Thor's Hammer (which supports RUNE8 as the default charset, but which integrates seamlessly with UTF8 with a patch).
Um, I'm no KDE zealot. I won't even touch Qt/KDE apps at this point (except on my Zaurus) because of the "drags in all these other services and processes" problem I mentioned. Thank you for the reminder of TheKompany. I forget about them because most of their non-trivial software is proprietary.
Close to no one in Linux runs as root? Do you have any proof of this? When I installed Gentoo, there was nothing that made me add a user-user, and when I did I found that user-user couldn't even shut down the machine, so instead of using user-user, I just run as root! Same for my Lindows machine. In fact, I hate typing the root password all the time. Also the UID numbers on NFS are always screwed up when you run different user-users (since each distro uses different UIDs for the first user-user), so I just run as root everywhere all the time. After all, if you have access to my machines to log in at all you must be in my house (where you could theoretically just take the machines-- or I have the chance to whack you with a basebell bat for unauthorized access attempts), so why should I set up a bunch of useless user accounts? Becuase Linux email isn't safe? Everyone knows that 1) No one writes email viruses for Linux, 2) all Linux email clients can't run viruses anyway. Now you're telling me Linux isn't secure enough to run as root? Maybe I should switch to OpenBSD.
(note: this is satire. I do not actually run as root, except when installing untrusted software from sourceforge and numerous other relatively anonymous sources.)
(note: that second bit is not satire. I'm pretty sure countless hordes of Linux users are entirely too trusting of software that hasn't been vetted and packaged by their distro-- especially that closed source crap like Flash and the Invidious drivers, where you can't check what it's doing at all. And I bet the distros themselves aren't much more careful when auditing packages for inclusion. They can't be or they'd never get anything done, they'd be too busy reviewing all that code.)
Why don't you just run software that allows you the kind of control you're looking for? You'd save a lot of bandwidth up-front surfing in text mode with a browser like Links and you'd gain a lot of control by switching to free software like Mozilla's Firebird browser. If they think they're going to "broadcast" full motion ads to me while I'm using Firebird, they are sorely mistaken. They might be able to prevent me from using their site if I don't watch the ads, but that's a whole separate issue-- and more likely to ensure that I won't use their site than that I will see their ads.
One difference is that no one seems to write Qt-only applications (expect for the Zaurus) the way people write Gtk-only applications. Which means that if you're running a non-KDE desktop and you fire up KMail or Konqueror you spawn this huge list of processes to support that one program. Not that this is a big deal, but it seems like if you want to run any K application you may as well run them all. I've never gotten that feeling from GNOME/gtk apps.
1) Money exchanges are done in secret by parties who both have an interesting in protecting the transaction.
2) When money goes from A to B, B has a greater interest in protecting the financial data after the transaction than A does.
3) Creative works exchanges are rarely done in secret. Especially not on P2P networks. Or on web sites. Even most providers of content take no measures to secure the transfer of said content (i.e. ever heard of an adult site using only HTTPS from the login page on in?)
4) When creatives works go from A to B, B almost never has any interesting in protecting that data after the transaction.
Not that your conclusion isn't possible or likely, just that it relies on assumptions which are hard to agree with (because financial transactions are fundamentally different than selling creative works).
For example: I work for a large financial company that does not allow any corporate access from non-corporate PCs because of obvious security reasons (i.e. - it would be easy to install a keystroke logger on just about any PC, Windows, Apple or otherwise). So everyone is stuck lugging their laptops around.
First of all, it's not any harder to install software on company machines than personal machines unless the machines are locked down tight-- both physically and systematically. Second, that approach sucks. You know what happens in reality? People end up storing confidential information on machines that are easily lost and stolen.
The solution is that company work is done at a company-owned secure facility on company hardware and no company information leaves the building, either as printed matter or on disks. Period. Security is the process of managing risks. Right now I'm amazed at how badly the risks are even being assessed.
And this points up the problem with centralizing the control of what is and is not considered spam. Keep the network dumb and make the clients smarter.
That you seem to think Windows and Microsoft have any clue how to make a usable interface, let alone one that is a goal worth striving for is indication that this discussion is going to go nowhere. I hate Windows. I use it every day at work and I can't fucking stand it. The Office applications are not bad, although I dare you to try using the dark/inverse display theme and then do some work in Access 2000. I tried it and eventually had to give up. Too many of the lines were hard-coded to black, so half the screen was "invisible". Now I suppose some MS-fanboy out there is going to tell me some obscure little option I should have known to check to fix all that. But the point is: that's not a "smooth" interface in the least bit. It's shit. Give me GNOME2 or a command line, please. Those are smooth user interfaces.
P2P? If there isn't some sort of device involved that monitors your eyeballs and other physiological symptoms of REM (which you couldn't share over the net), then all this really is is a timer that waits until the likely times when you would enter REM sleep and start whispering. And if that's all it is we can replace it with a very small shell script:
#!/bin/sh
sleep 120m # ha, get it? SLEEP.
#play mp3 at reduced gain, don't want to wake myself up
mpg321 -g 5 my_favorite_dream.mp3
sleep 60m #ok, the joke was funny the first time
mpg321 -g 5 my_other_favorite_dream.mp3
Done. How you record the mp3 is your own lookout, but it's not very hard. In fact, I don't see how it would hurt to simply play the mp3s over and over at low-volume anyway. You're not likely to be awakened by whispering during non-REM periods are you?
Thank you for wasting a lot of my time and then calling me utterly ignorant and intellectually bankrupt. I appreciate that.
Re:Copyright theft is a concern that many...
on
Senator Plans P2P Summit
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Those who disregard intellectual property force losses for everyone.
Bull.
Finally we have the last step, facilitating future development.
How many dead authors will be facilitating new works while rotting in their graves? Considering that copyright lasts decades after the author's death, you seem to be asserting that this is what will happen. BTW, if that was "finally" why did you continue to make points after that?
who would like to enter the free market
Free market?!? Copyright and patent are interfering with the free market! In a free market there would be no artificially constructed monopolies that prevent any producer from producing any good that said producer can figure out how to produce. As it stands this interference in the free market means that there is no incentive to patent owners to learn make their products more efficiently and pass those savings along to consumers.
The distinction.... thinking."
I've read this sentence three times and I still don't understand one word of it. It is as muddled as your understanding of copyright and patent.
Now ask your self, did you benefit by the change?
Did I? How would I know that? If I were able to perform a scientific study of life quality using patent/non-patent as a controlled variable, then I might be able to answer your question. Using less empirical methods, I conclude that no amount of patents or copyrights have made my life better. Most of the copyrightable works that I've produced have been produced as an employee of a company, so I don't even hold the copyright to my own work. Most of the important things in my life are not affected by copyright or patent at all-- although soon it may be nearly impossible to buy FOOD that isn't patented. But that brings up a good point regarding the "objective morality" of patents. If a biotech firm make a disease resistant, drought resistant tomato and I buy one and plant the seeds, I am infringing their patent (as I understand it I would be using patented "technology" without a license). I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept the validity of any moral or legal code that would prevent me from growing my own food in a manner that humans have practiced for thousands and thousands of years.
Specs are what your clients tell you they actually wanted after you finish the work they already asked you to do. The best "specs" are the ones that require touching just about every subroutine you've written. And you'd better get it done quickly. After all, you've already written the whole program, right? How much more work could it be?;)
I was just playing with an old amber Gorilla monitor (maybe a 10 incher-- small) I have last weekend. Of course, then I pulled out the old Commodore 1702 and hooked that up to the C64 instead. The 1702 had full color and sound-- although I couldn't get sound to work. Although the joystick worked and a fun game of Jumpman was had by all.
Can't throw this stuff away. Never know when I'll want to play the adventure game I wrote when I was 15. Is there a good, easy way to get the data from my old C64 disks into my current system for use with an emulator?
1) Last Lacie drive I bought was the flakiest thing ever. Not the drive so much as the enclosure. Removing the drive from it and just installing it internally it worked fine.
The Republic of Ireland is not part of the UK... he was ignoring Ireland altogether, as it isn't part of Great Britain. UK, yes, GB, no.
First you say they're not in the UK. Then you say they're part of the UK and not part of Great Britain. Which is it? And what exactly does it mean to be part of either the UK or Great Britain in the first place?
Not only that, if we were paying attention we would notice that the MCC is just the core of the system. It has no screen, no keyboard, or anything else attached to it. It's got an LED and a connector. For the moment the only things you can do with the MCC are plug one into a "rugged portable" or a desktop cradle. The portable device is decidedly larger than a Palm/Zaurus/iPaq-- but it has all kinds of computing horsepower. And when docked this device is a fully functional desktop system (keyboard, mouse, cd/floppy drives, and monitor not included).
Given the core architecture is from Transmeta and IBM I'd say it's very possible that this device will be capable of running Linux. It's a pretty cool little device, but it's not a PDA replacement.
Bah. My PDA has been capable of running a MySQL server and Apache for some time now (really-- it's a Sharp Zaurus running Linux), so I don't know what I'd want with this ultra-sub-notebook type device. Of course, the only real use I've made of the system I do have is to whip up a PHP script to help me view and manage personal schedule and contact data stored in the database.;)
Based on your example shall we assume that the best contributions would simply consist of ad hominem attacks with no references at all to the subject(s) at hand?
I get the impression from this article by Jamie Zawinski that the cut and paste problems you are having are related to issues with the X clients and not with the X servers themselves. I'm guessing a similar issue exists relative to drag-and-drop (since it seems to me I've seen this feature in action in either GNOME or KDE or both).
If you find this "patent" confusing, perhaps you could read it and then ask more specific questions based on the actual document in question? I think this will save us both some time.:)
The scope is clearly presented in the patent, it's about online marketplaces-- but the claims of the patent are many and some are very specific, so consult your lawyer, not Random J. Monkey on Slashdot if you really need to know this. Other portals and retailers would not necessarily "be forced to shut down"-- first there is the possibility of prior art, in which case it's possible that the patent is not even valid; second there is the possibility of licensing the patent. Your last question is really the most astounding: what would patenting an idea do? Well, it gives you a patent on that idea. For more information on patents, please see www.uspto.gov.
While you're at it, get rid of processed plant fiber clothing and fire too! Those are relatively new phenomena and I'm sure we can live without them.:)
Seriously, the problem with plastic isn't one of using it at all, it's of using it wisely. We're not there yet, I don't think.
That's how it would work normally. I agree with that. But there is also the contract between IBM and SCO. If the contract states that IBM surrenders the copyright to SCO for any code they add to SysV then that is a problem if they add JFS to SysV. That would mean that the copyright for JFS passes to SCO. It's also possible the contract language isn't actually clear on this matter. And it certainly can't affect Linux as a whole... at worst you remove JFS and any JFS-code that was used elsewhere within the kernel.
Doesn't the Free Software Foundation already take the view that modules that link directly into kernel space cause a derived work to be created? Isn't this why glibc is LGPL? So that non-Free programs can be written against it?
According to that logic, SCO would be right on the money-- even without a contract between them and IBM. However, the derived work would be the final OS with the new module, not the module code itself. In this case it seems to me the question is: does IBM retain ownership to rights over the original module code and wouldn't the specific module code used in AIX be a derivative of that?
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These jokes are very funny, but the name of this computer is stupid. I'm waiting for the Apple iSlam, the Dell eXtianity, and the IBM Hindu. New operating systems in the works: HolyGhost, Halakhah, and Thor's Hammer (which supports RUNE8 as the default charset, but which integrates seamlessly with UTF8 with a patch).
Um, I'm no KDE zealot. I won't even touch Qt/KDE apps at this point (except on my Zaurus) because of the "drags in all these other services and processes" problem I mentioned. Thank you for the reminder of TheKompany. I forget about them because most of their non-trivial software is proprietary.
Close to no one in Linux runs as root? Do you have any proof of this? When I installed Gentoo, there was nothing that made me add a user-user, and when I did I found that user-user couldn't even shut down the machine, so instead of using user-user, I just run as root! Same for my Lindows machine. In fact, I hate typing the root password all the time. Also the UID numbers on NFS are always screwed up when you run different user-users (since each distro uses different UIDs for the first user-user), so I just run as root everywhere all the time. After all, if you have access to my machines to log in at all you must be in my house (where you could theoretically just take the machines-- or I have the chance to whack you with a basebell bat for unauthorized access attempts), so why should I set up a bunch of useless user accounts? Becuase Linux email isn't safe? Everyone knows that 1) No one writes email viruses for Linux, 2) all Linux email clients can't run viruses anyway. Now you're telling me Linux isn't secure enough to run as root? Maybe I should switch to OpenBSD.
(note: this is satire. I do not actually run as root, except when installing untrusted software from sourceforge and numerous other relatively anonymous sources.)
(note: that second bit is not satire. I'm pretty sure countless hordes of Linux users are entirely too trusting of software that hasn't been vetted and packaged by their distro-- especially that closed source crap like Flash and the Invidious drivers, where you can't check what it's doing at all. And I bet the distros themselves aren't much more careful when auditing packages for inclusion. They can't be or they'd never get anything done, they'd be too busy reviewing all that code.)
Why don't you just run software that allows you the kind of control you're looking for? You'd save a lot of bandwidth up-front surfing in text mode with a browser like Links and you'd gain a lot of control by switching to free software like Mozilla's Firebird browser. If they think they're going to "broadcast" full motion ads to me while I'm using Firebird, they are sorely mistaken. They might be able to prevent me from using their site if I don't watch the ads, but that's a whole separate issue-- and more likely to ensure that I won't use their site than that I will see their ads.
One difference is that no one seems to write Qt-only applications (expect for the Zaurus) the way people write Gtk-only applications. Which means that if you're running a non-KDE desktop and you fire up KMail or Konqueror you spawn this huge list of processes to support that one program. Not that this is a big deal, but it seems like if you want to run any K application you may as well run them all. I've never gotten that feeling from GNOME/gtk apps.
1) Money exchanges are done in secret by parties who both have an interesting in protecting the transaction.
2) When money goes from A to B, B has a greater interest in protecting the financial data after the transaction than A does.
3) Creative works exchanges are rarely done in secret. Especially not on P2P networks. Or on web sites. Even most providers of content take no measures to secure the transfer of said content (i.e. ever heard of an adult site using only HTTPS from the login page on in?)
4) When creatives works go from A to B, B almost never has any interesting in protecting that data after the transaction.
Not that your conclusion isn't possible or likely, just that it relies on assumptions which are hard to agree with (because financial transactions are fundamentally different than selling creative works).
For example: I work for a large financial company that does not allow any corporate access from non-corporate PCs because of obvious security reasons (i.e. - it would be easy to install a keystroke logger on just about any PC, Windows, Apple or otherwise). So everyone is stuck lugging their laptops around.
First of all, it's not any harder to install software on company machines than personal machines unless the machines are locked down tight-- both physically and systematically. Second, that approach sucks. You know what happens in reality? People end up storing confidential information on machines that are easily lost and stolen.
The solution is that company work is done at a company-owned secure facility on company hardware and no company information leaves the building, either as printed matter or on disks. Period. Security is the process of managing risks. Right now I'm amazed at how badly the risks are even being assessed.
And this points up the problem with centralizing the control of what is and is not considered spam. Keep the network dumb and make the clients smarter.
That you seem to think Windows and Microsoft have any clue how to make a usable interface, let alone one that is a goal worth striving for is indication that this discussion is going to go nowhere. I hate Windows. I use it every day at work and I can't fucking stand it. The Office applications are not bad, although I dare you to try using the dark/inverse display theme and then do some work in Access 2000. I tried it and eventually had to give up. Too many of the lines were hard-coded to black, so half the screen was "invisible". Now I suppose some MS-fanboy out there is going to tell me some obscure little option I should have known to check to fix all that. But the point is: that's not a "smooth" interface in the least bit. It's shit. Give me GNOME2 or a command line, please. Those are smooth user interfaces.
P2P? If there isn't some sort of device involved that monitors your eyeballs and other physiological symptoms of REM (which you couldn't share over the net), then all this really is is a timer that waits until the likely times when you would enter REM sleep and start whispering. And if that's all it is we can replace it with a very small shell script: #!/bin/sh sleep 120m # ha, get it? SLEEP. #play mp3 at reduced gain, don't want to wake myself up mpg321 -g 5 my_favorite_dream.mp3 sleep 60m #ok, the joke was funny the first time mpg321 -g 5 my_other_favorite_dream.mp3 Done. How you record the mp3 is your own lookout, but it's not very hard. In fact, I don't see how it would hurt to simply play the mp3s over and over at low-volume anyway. You're not likely to be awakened by whispering during non-REM periods are you?
Thank you for wasting a lot of my time and then calling me utterly ignorant and intellectually bankrupt. I appreciate that.
Those who disregard intellectual property force losses for everyone.
Bull.
Finally we have the last step, facilitating future development.
How many dead authors will be facilitating new works while rotting in their graves? Considering that copyright lasts decades after the author's death, you seem to be asserting that this is what will happen. BTW, if that was "finally" why did you continue to make points after that?
who would like to enter the free market
Free market?!? Copyright and patent are interfering with the free market! In a free market there would be no artificially constructed monopolies that prevent any producer from producing any good that said producer can figure out how to produce. As it stands this interference in the free market means that there is no incentive to patent owners to learn make their products more efficiently and pass those savings along to consumers.
The distinction.... thinking."
I've read this sentence three times and I still don't understand one word of it. It is as muddled as your understanding of copyright and patent.
Now ask your self, did you benefit by the change?
Did I? How would I know that? If I were able to perform a scientific study of life quality using patent/non-patent as a controlled variable, then I might be able to answer your question. Using less empirical methods, I conclude that no amount of patents or copyrights have made my life better. Most of the copyrightable works that I've produced have been produced as an employee of a company, so I don't even hold the copyright to my own work. Most of the important things in my life are not affected by copyright or patent at all-- although soon it may be nearly impossible to buy FOOD that isn't patented. But that brings up a good point regarding the "objective morality" of patents. If a biotech firm make a disease resistant, drought resistant tomato and I buy one and plant the seeds, I am infringing their patent (as I understand it I would be using patented "technology" without a license). I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept the validity of any moral or legal code that would prevent me from growing my own food in a manner that humans have practiced for thousands and thousands of years.
Specs are what your clients tell you they actually wanted after you finish the work they already asked you to do. The best "specs" are the ones that require touching just about every subroutine you've written. And you'd better get it done quickly. After all, you've already written the whole program, right? How much more work could it be? ;)
I was just playing with an old amber Gorilla monitor (maybe a 10 incher-- small) I have last weekend. Of course, then I pulled out the old Commodore 1702 and hooked that up to the C64 instead. The 1702 had full color and sound-- although I couldn't get sound to work. Although the joystick worked and a fun game of Jumpman was had by all.
Can't throw this stuff away. Never know when I'll want to play the adventure game I wrote when I was 15. Is there a good, easy way to get the data from my old C64 disks into my current system for use with an emulator?
Thank you.
1) Last Lacie drive I bought was the flakiest thing ever. Not the drive so much as the enclosure. Removing the drive from it and just installing it internally it worked fine.
2) Wouldn't you be able to do the same with this?
The Republic of Ireland is not part of the UK... he was ignoring Ireland altogether, as it isn't part of Great Britain. UK, yes, GB, no.
First you say they're not in the UK. Then you say they're part of the UK and not part of Great Britain. Which is it? And what exactly does it mean to be part of either the UK or Great Britain in the first place?
Not only that, if we were paying attention we would notice that the MCC is just the core of the system. It has no screen, no keyboard, or anything else attached to it. It's got an LED and a connector. For the moment the only things you can do with the MCC are plug one into a "rugged portable" or a desktop cradle. The portable device is decidedly larger than a Palm/Zaurus/iPaq-- but it has all kinds of computing horsepower. And when docked this device is a fully functional desktop system (keyboard, mouse, cd/floppy drives, and monitor not included).
Given the core architecture is from Transmeta and IBM I'd say it's very possible that this device will be capable of running Linux. It's a pretty cool little device, but it's not a PDA replacement.
Bah. My PDA has been capable of running a MySQL server and Apache for some time now (really-- it's a Sharp Zaurus running Linux), so I don't know what I'd want with this ultra-sub-notebook type device. Of course, the only real use I've made of the system I do have is to whip up a PHP script to help me view and manage personal schedule and contact data stored in the database. ;)
Based on your example shall we assume that the best contributions would simply consist of ad hominem attacks with no references at all to the subject(s) at hand?
I get the impression from this article by Jamie Zawinski that the cut and paste problems you are having are related to issues with the X clients and not with the X servers themselves. I'm guessing a similar issue exists relative to drag-and-drop (since it seems to me I've seen this feature in action in either GNOME or KDE or both).
If you find this "patent" confusing, perhaps you could read it and then ask more specific questions based on the actual document in question? I think this will save us both some time. :)
The scope is clearly presented in the patent, it's about online marketplaces-- but the claims of the patent are many and some are very specific, so consult your lawyer, not Random J. Monkey on Slashdot if you really need to know this. Other portals and retailers would not necessarily "be forced to shut down"-- first there is the possibility of prior art, in which case it's possible that the patent is not even valid; second there is the possibility of licensing the patent. Your last question is really the most astounding: what would patenting an idea do? Well, it gives you a patent on that idea. For more information on patents, please see www.uspto.gov.
While you're at it, get rid of processed plant fiber clothing and fire too! Those are relatively new phenomena and I'm sure we can live without them. :)
Seriously, the problem with plastic isn't one of using it at all, it's of using it wisely. We're not there yet, I don't think.
That's how it would work normally. I agree with that. But there is also the contract between IBM and SCO. If the contract states that IBM surrenders the copyright to SCO for any code they add to SysV then that is a problem if they add JFS to SysV. That would mean that the copyright for JFS passes to SCO. It's also possible the contract language isn't actually clear on this matter. And it certainly can't affect Linux as a whole... at worst you remove JFS and any JFS-code that was used elsewhere within the kernel.
Doesn't the Free Software Foundation already take the view that modules that link directly into kernel space cause a derived work to be created? Isn't this why glibc is LGPL? So that non-Free programs can be written against it?
According to that logic, SCO would be right on the money-- even without a contract between them and IBM. However, the derived work would be the final OS with the new module, not the module code itself. In this case it seems to me the question is: does IBM retain ownership to rights over the original module code and wouldn't the specific module code used in AIX be a derivative of that?