I could give a flying rat's ass if the support guy hates me or not. If any commercial support guy ever told me to RTFM, I would fly to his office and kick his fscking teeth in.
Good to know that you can handle these things maturely.
We can do "jack about" it. We can start by not calling those people names and acting superior. We have two very successful approaches we can use:
1) the value add: we need to show that Free Software runs faster, better, more reliably, etc. We need to demonstrate that penny for penny Free Software is a better deal. The opportunity to save tens, hundreds, and thousands of dollars in licensing fees is a great win, but only if none of the *perceived* convenience, ease-of-use, etc, are considered to be lost.
2) the freedom angle: we need to be showing that freedom is important, and not just because it allows us to get software without paying for it. Most people understand that someone has got to pay developers to write software, whether it's Microsoft or Red Hat or the Free Software Foundation or just users donating to their favorite developer's project. So there has to be more to Free Software than saving money. It has to be about trust between developers and users. It has to be about customer-control over development and stuff like that.
There are some problems with existing capitalist systems, especially in the U.S. where the "free" market is tinkered with almost more than certain "communist" economies. But thank you for the excellent description of capitalism. I've been saying for a while now that capitalism, used correctly could seriously increase the amount of democracy in the world... after all, public ownership of corporations gives investors exactly what we all think we are lacking: control over corporations.
If more people would buy stock in companies (not mutual funds), they would actually get a vote in matters of import to the company that is exactly the same as the way they get a vote on the President or their Senators or whatever. And as a shareholder, there is *nothing* that can be done to prevent them from attending annual meetings and proposing wacky stuff like "maximum wages" for the CEO to be put on the proxy for a general shareholder vote.
And now on-topic: I know when my cable guys came out to install TimeWarner (ick, but I had no other broadband choice), TW was encouraging self-installs at the time... probably to increase number of possible installs in a day. Fine with me, since all they really need to do is plug the cable "modem" into the cable wire, authorize the MAC address of the cable "modem" with HQ, and then it's up to me to get DHCP working, etc. Which was a breeze using Debian GNU/Linux. Had they insisted on mucking with my software I had a Mac set up for that.
Silly me, I forgot that a proxy might do this automatically.
Very interesting to modify each outgoing URL to contain a time-stamp. Even better to add some authentication code to it. But very computationally expensive, no?
I guess if I had content that was that popular, where I suspected a lot of deep linking, I would probably go for a required registration or cookie-based scheme (as even requests for graphics return cookies, right?) before looking for more complicated solutions.
Sure it's possible for a client or proxy to put whatever it wants in a referer string, that's the point of the article, but... Can someone use JavaScript on a web page to somehow convince the browser to fake the referer string? If not, checking the referer is pretty much guaranteed to prevent deep linking because no one is going to go around forging referer strings just in case they go to a site that does deep links.
This is an interesting question. One has to wonder why a bank would be held liable for security problems in the browser, unless they actually provided the browser to the customer on CD or something. Isn't it about time that people who advertise their software as secure are held liable when it turns out to be a piece of Swiss cheese? And why should a bank be liable for browser security when no other online business is?
Your research brings us both rewards. Thank you for doing it. I agree that, in spite of the world of good a positive precendent would have done in helping other companies "see the light" on web accessibility, the Plaintiffs probably should have-- as a formality-- tried to get SW to change on their own. Sadly, now it will be even worse for accessibility advocates as their won't be any possibility to threaten legal action.
Thanks for venturing your guess. My guess is you're wrong, and that the plaintiffs here are in the habit of encouraging large companies to use more accessible technologies before suing them-- do a Google search on "Gumson accessibility" if you need more source material.
However, even if they did move directly to the "sue" phase of this operation, I believe the whole idea would have been to get precedents established so that in the future it would be easier to convince those having inaccessible web sites to fix them. Now they are looking at a very uphill battle in that regard. Since the judge ruled the ADA didn't even apply, they'll need a whole additional law to close this loophole.
A PDF can print differently depending on OS, installed fonts, etc. Neither does it truly protect against alterations in and of itself (no more than simply PGP-signing an HTML file would protect against it).
Generally PDF is a good solution to the "when users print this I want it to look about the same" problem, though. What it's terrible for is information exchange. While there are plenty of Free tools to decode, mangle, and de-PDF-ify PDF files, the semantics are all but lost in the process. In this HTML is much better, but XML is the hands-down winner.
I am a Gentoo and Debian user (I even have t-shirts for both of them), and I think Gentoo is not more customizable than Debian. They are both equally customizable. In fact, Debian is perhaps more customizable because it relies only on Free Software. Gentoo includes a very small number of binary-only packages, which means that those packages are, for all intents and purposes, not at all customizable.
And while Gentoo may have more up-to-date packages available, but the range of packages that it does have is paltry when compared against Debian. So that's a real trade-off. Maybe as Gentoo gains traction this will change, but until then, the Debian package system has one and only one flaw, it has a longer lag time than most distrubutions. But if you ask me it's worth it considering what that brings in terms of choice, stability, and extremely solid, easy security updates.
You could, if you wanted, download the source for your Debian packages and recompile them using your own custom flags. You can also, if you want, build custom packages from newer sources and insert them into a Debian system using the Debian package manager. In fact, that reminds me that I had been meaning to learn to do just that...
While I would gladly stipulate that Unix did not have this as a design requirement, I think a similarly functioning system could be built by simply not using the root account for very many activities. It is also possible to log any and all logins, prevent root from logging in without first logging in as a normal user (this way you can see who logged in as root), etc. I also think that corporations where this is an issue should build a login prompt for root that requires two independent passwords to authenticate (and no, I'm not aware of existing software to do this). Then you could set up a group of people who can all log in as root, but only if there are two of them doing so.
Finally, as a user (or as the user's process), there are plenty of encryption tools that would prevent the sysadmin from being able to get at data, even if it were world-readable.
Yes. Of course I blame the women of Afghanistan for the Taliban. I'm certain most of them were just aching to be taken into public arenas and shot to death for appearing outside of the house half-naked (okay, maybe not half-naked, but with their noses showing). I'm certain that the Kurds ("Saddam's own people" according to numerous U.S. news reports) are incredibly happy to be living under Iraqi rule. And those darn Tibetans and Taiwanese, I'm certain they asked to be Chinese citizens. Native Americans certainly invited the white man to "come on in, take all the gold you want! we don't mind these reservations, we weren't using that other land anyway". The Jews of pre-1930's Europe had a lot of control over the changes in government that lead to the death of 6 million of them. I have no doubts that Muslims in India are co-responsible with the Indian government for anti-Muslim massacres that have occurred in India and for the ongoing disputes with Pakistan.
I guess those folks just aren't putting in enough effort, and from my comfortable seat here in this armchair I have every right to castigate those citizens of other nations who, if they would only try, could easily throw off the effects of gang rule, government corruption, systematic racism and sexism, and the like. Hell, just yesterday I defeated four military dictatorships with just some bailing twine and used chewing gum. If only those lazy third-worlders would get with the program!
Most open source software is indeed completely lacking in innovation.
There is absolutely no correlation between the proprietary-ness or Free-ness of a piece of software and the amount of "innovation" it provides. Lack of originality is not the sole domain of Free Software, much of which is very original. But to be more accurate, the ideas in most software aren't all that novel to begin with-- they are either adaptations of real world processes or workalikes for existing software. What I find interesting is that the more the ideas are shared, along with the code, the more rapid the progress seems to be in moving the project from a kernel of an idea to a mature application.
I think your real complaint would be that most Free Software isn't very mature yet. And this is true. With the exception of a very few projects (like emacs) the Free Software world is full of stuff that is less than 10 years old. Projects like MS Word have been around for closer to 20 years... this is a significant headstart. Once a program like AbiWord is up to speed on the basic functions of a word processor, then I'd fully expect it to take off at full speed with some stuff you'd find very original. But first they'll have to have a grammar checker and an outline tool. Otherwise everyone will complain that AbiWord may have some great new feature but it can't do half of what Word does. It's a bit of a Catch-22. New features or catch-up features. Listen to complaints about missing functions or listen to complaints about being unoriginal.
Personally, I'm anxious for the day it uses gtk-2.0 instead of gtk-1.4. I tried it with gtk2 and couldn't do any cutting/pasting (known bug, already in Bugzilla, I believe). Other than that it was great-- they're very close. Even better: once it is stable on gtk2, then Galeon 2 is ready to go. Either way, hats off to all Mozilla coders, Mozilla is a great browser and gets better all the time.
Which is a problem since most of us investing in mutual funds and 401-Ks don't have the ability to separate our investments in those funds into "companies I want to support" and "companies I don't want to support". Fund managers tend to pick companies that either have proven track records or play well with the analysts. These mass investment vehicles then damage the notion of public ownership of corporations because they erode investor involvement in those companies (because fund managers, not investors, are the ones who vote the proxies).
Now I like to consider myself moderately intelligent, well-read, and decently informed, but what, exactly, is a free "blah di blah"? And is that free as in speech or free as in beer?
That's great. Now if you can tell me where to download the source code for that, I'll be quite grateful, as I'm pretty sure the supplied binaries won't run on all the x86 machines in my house. Then, once I do get it compiled on my application server, what are the odds that I can run it as a display server on my thin-clients?
Where will we be? Same place? I dunno. You tell me.
For my part I will continue to write to my representatives, the President, cabinet members, agency heads, and even judges, should I feel I have something to say that I think they ought to hear. This is the only way it is even possible for them to represent me, by me telling them what positions are important to me. If I don't tell them that, they'd have to guess. Then where will we be?
Yes. CVS trees can contain binaries, but they don't really support any sort of diffing them. Of course, the only reason I can think of why you might want to diff a binary is to keep the size of the repository to a minimum, rather than storing a full copy of each version of the binary. I don't think this is much of a concern unless you have just oodles of large binaries under CVS.
Yes. CVS allows for renaming via the mechanism you mention. But when you do that you lose all of the history associated with the file. Yes, the history may stay there associated with the old filename, but to the casual observer the file (under the new name) will appear to have sprung into being fully formed at revision 1.1.1.1 or whatever. In a version system, a filename should be just another piece of data about a file (and therefore version-controlled itself), not the primary key for that file.
CVS is not a bad tool. But it's just not perfect. What I'm curious to know is, besides CVS, what is best? I've seen links to OpenCM, Aeigs, subversion, and probably two or three other Free RCSes in this discussion. Which one is the one to use?
Slashdot Mirror
I could give a flying rat's ass if the support guy hates me or not. If any commercial support guy ever told me to RTFM, I would fly to his office and kick his fscking teeth in.
Good to know that you can handle these things maturely.
Um, VHS/DVD? :)
We can do "jack about" it. We can start by not calling those people names and acting superior. We have two very successful approaches we can use:
1) the value add: we need to show that Free Software runs faster, better, more reliably, etc. We need to demonstrate that penny for penny Free Software is a better deal. The opportunity to save tens, hundreds, and thousands of dollars in licensing fees is a great win, but only if none of the *perceived* convenience, ease-of-use, etc, are considered to be lost.
2) the freedom angle: we need to be showing that freedom is important, and not just because it allows us to get software without paying for it. Most people understand that someone has got to pay developers to write software, whether it's Microsoft or Red Hat or the Free Software Foundation or just users donating to their favorite developer's project. So there has to be more to Free Software than saving money. It has to be about trust between developers and users. It has to be about customer-control over development and stuff like that.
A real geek would write better looking Perl. :)
lick() for (0..10000);
Or use a language with an even more sensible syntax, like Ruby...
10000.times{lick}
Hmmmm. No wonder I'm not married.
There are some problems with existing capitalist systems, especially in the U.S. where the "free" market is tinkered with almost more than certain "communist" economies. But thank you for the excellent description of capitalism. I've been saying for a while now that capitalism, used correctly could seriously increase the amount of democracy in the world... after all, public ownership of corporations gives investors exactly what we all think we are lacking: control over corporations.
If more people would buy stock in companies (not mutual funds), they would actually get a vote in matters of import to the company that is exactly the same as the way they get a vote on the President or their Senators or whatever. And as a shareholder, there is *nothing* that can be done to prevent them from attending annual meetings and proposing wacky stuff like "maximum wages" for the CEO to be put on the proxy for a general shareholder vote.
And now on-topic: I know when my cable guys came out to install TimeWarner (ick, but I had no other broadband choice), TW was encouraging self-installs at the time... probably to increase number of possible installs in a day. Fine with me, since all they really need to do is plug the cable "modem" into the cable wire, authorize the MAC address of the cable "modem" with HQ, and then it's up to me to get DHCP working, etc. Which was a breeze using Debian GNU/Linux. Had they insisted on mucking with my software I had a Mac set up for that.
Silly me, I forgot that a proxy might do this automatically.
Very interesting to modify each outgoing URL to contain a time-stamp. Even better to add some authentication code to it. But very computationally expensive, no?
I guess if I had content that was that popular, where I suspected a lot of deep linking, I would probably go for a required registration or cookie-based scheme (as even requests for graphics return cookies, right?) before looking for more complicated solutions.
Sure it's possible for a client or proxy to put whatever it wants in a referer string, that's the point of the article, but... Can someone use JavaScript on a web page to somehow convince the browser to fake the referer string? If not, checking the referer is pretty much guaranteed to prevent deep linking because no one is going to go around forging referer strings just in case they go to a site that does deep links.
This is an interesting question. One has to wonder why a bank would be held liable for security problems in the browser, unless they actually provided the browser to the customer on CD or something. Isn't it about time that people who advertise their software as secure are held liable when it turns out to be a piece of Swiss cheese? And why should a bank be liable for browser security when no other online business is?
Your research brings us both rewards. Thank you for doing it. I agree that, in spite of the world of good a positive precendent would have done in helping other companies "see the light" on web accessibility, the Plaintiffs probably should have-- as a formality-- tried to get SW to change on their own. Sadly, now it will be even worse for accessibility advocates as their won't be any possibility to threaten legal action.
A sign you have been reading Slashdot too long: the urge to add (n+1). Profit!!! to every numbered list you see.
Thanks for venturing your guess. My guess is you're wrong, and that the plaintiffs here are in the habit of encouraging large companies to use more accessible technologies before suing them-- do a Google search on "Gumson accessibility" if you need more source material.
However, even if they did move directly to the "sue" phase of this operation, I believe the whole idea would have been to get precedents established so that in the future it would be easier to convince those having inaccessible web sites to fix them. Now they are looking at a very uphill battle in that regard. Since the judge ruled the ADA didn't even apply, they'll need a whole additional law to close this loophole.
A PDF can print differently depending on OS, installed fonts, etc. Neither does it truly protect against alterations in and of itself (no more than simply PGP-signing an HTML file would protect against it).
Generally PDF is a good solution to the "when users print this I want it to look about the same" problem, though. What it's terrible for is information exchange. While there are plenty of Free tools to decode, mangle, and de-PDF-ify PDF files, the semantics are all but lost in the process. In this HTML is much better, but XML is the hands-down winner.
I am a Gentoo and Debian user (I even have t-shirts for both of them), and I think Gentoo is not more customizable than Debian. They are both equally customizable. In fact, Debian is perhaps more customizable because it relies only on Free Software. Gentoo includes a very small number of binary-only packages, which means that those packages are, for all intents and purposes, not at all customizable.
And while Gentoo may have more up-to-date packages available, but the range of packages that it does have is paltry when compared against Debian. So that's a real trade-off. Maybe as Gentoo gains traction this will change, but until then, the Debian package system has one and only one flaw, it has a longer lag time than most distrubutions. But if you ask me it's worth it considering what that brings in terms of choice, stability, and extremely solid, easy security updates.
You could, if you wanted, download the source for your Debian packages and recompile them using your own custom flags. You can also, if you want, build custom packages from newer sources and insert them into a Debian system using the Debian package manager. In fact, that reminds me that I had been meaning to learn to do just that...
While I would gladly stipulate that Unix did not have this as a design requirement, I think a similarly functioning system could be built by simply not using the root account for very many activities. It is also possible to log any and all logins, prevent root from logging in without first logging in as a normal user (this way you can see who logged in as root), etc. I also think that corporations where this is an issue should build a login prompt for root that requires two independent passwords to authenticate (and no, I'm not aware of existing software to do this). Then you could set up a group of people who can all log in as root, but only if there are two of them doing so.
Finally, as a user (or as the user's process), there are plenty of encryption tools that would prevent the sysadmin from being able to get at data, even if it were world-readable.
Yes. Of course I blame the women of Afghanistan for the Taliban. I'm certain most of them were just aching to be taken into public arenas and shot to death for appearing outside of the house half-naked (okay, maybe not half-naked, but with their noses showing). I'm certain that the Kurds ("Saddam's own people" according to numerous U.S. news reports) are incredibly happy to be living under Iraqi rule. And those darn Tibetans and Taiwanese, I'm certain they asked to be Chinese citizens. Native Americans certainly invited the white man to "come on in, take all the gold you want! we don't mind these reservations, we weren't using that other land anyway". The Jews of pre-1930's Europe had a lot of control over the changes in government that lead to the death of 6 million of them. I have no doubts that Muslims in India are co-responsible with the Indian government for anti-Muslim massacres that have occurred in India and for the ongoing disputes with Pakistan.
I guess those folks just aren't putting in enough effort, and from my comfortable seat here in this armchair I have every right to castigate those citizens of other nations who, if they would only try, could easily throw off the effects of gang rule, government corruption, systematic racism and sexism, and the like. Hell, just yesterday I defeated four military dictatorships with just some bailing twine and used chewing gum. If only those lazy third-worlders would get with the program!
Most open source software is indeed completely lacking in innovation.
There is absolutely no correlation between the proprietary-ness or Free-ness of a piece of software and the amount of "innovation" it provides. Lack of originality is not the sole domain of Free Software, much of which is very original. But to be more accurate, the ideas in most software aren't all that novel to begin with-- they are either adaptations of real world processes or workalikes for existing software. What I find interesting is that the more the ideas are shared, along with the code, the more rapid the progress seems to be in moving the project from a kernel of an idea to a mature application.
I think your real complaint would be that most Free Software isn't very mature yet. And this is true. With the exception of a very few projects (like emacs) the Free Software world is full of stuff that is less than 10 years old. Projects like MS Word have been around for closer to 20 years... this is a significant headstart. Once a program like AbiWord is up to speed on the basic functions of a word processor, then I'd fully expect it to take off at full speed with some stuff you'd find very original. But first they'll have to have a grammar checker and an outline tool. Otherwise everyone will complain that AbiWord may have some great new feature but it can't do half of what Word does. It's a bit of a Catch-22. New features or catch-up features. Listen to complaints about missing functions or listen to complaints about being unoriginal.
Personally, I'm anxious for the day it uses gtk-2.0 instead of gtk-1.4. I tried it with gtk2 and couldn't do any cutting/pasting (known bug, already in Bugzilla, I believe). Other than that it was great-- they're very close. Even better: once it is stable on gtk2, then Galeon 2 is ready to go. Either way, hats off to all Mozilla coders, Mozilla is a great browser and gets better all the time.
Which is a problem since most of us investing in mutual funds and 401-Ks don't have the ability to separate our investments in those funds into "companies I want to support" and "companies I don't want to support". Fund managers tend to pick companies that either have proven track records or play well with the analysts. These mass investment vehicles then damage the notion of public ownership of corporations because they erode investor involvement in those companies (because fund managers, not investors, are the ones who vote the proxies).
Now I like to consider myself moderately intelligent, well-read, and decently informed, but what, exactly, is a free "blah di blah"? And is that free as in speech or free as in beer?
No, thank you!
Thanks for trolling.
That's great. Now if you can tell me where to download the source code for that, I'll be quite grateful, as I'm pretty sure the supplied binaries won't run on all the x86 machines in my house. Then, once I do get it compiled on my application server, what are the odds that I can run it as a display server on my thin-clients?
Woosh.
Where will we be? Same place? I dunno. You tell me.
For my part I will continue to write to my representatives, the President, cabinet members, agency heads, and even judges, should I feel I have something to say that I think they ought to hear. This is the only way it is even possible for them to represent me, by me telling them what positions are important to me. If I don't tell them that, they'd have to guess. Then where will we be?
Yes. CVS trees can contain binaries, but they don't really support any sort of diffing them. Of course, the only reason I can think of why you might want to diff a binary is to keep the size of the repository to a minimum, rather than storing a full copy of each version of the binary. I don't think this is much of a concern unless you have just oodles of large binaries under CVS.
Yes. CVS allows for renaming via the mechanism you mention. But when you do that you lose all of the history associated with the file. Yes, the history may stay there associated with the old filename, but to the casual observer the file (under the new name) will appear to have sprung into being fully formed at revision 1.1.1.1 or whatever. In a version system, a filename should be just another piece of data about a file (and therefore version-controlled itself), not the primary key for that file.
CVS is not a bad tool. But it's just not perfect. What I'm curious to know is, besides CVS, what is best? I've seen links to OpenCM, Aeigs, subversion, and probably two or three other Free RCSes in this discussion. Which one is the one to use?