At one point I got the flash plugin and installed it in Konqueror. It worked perfectly. I was quite impressed that I was getting flash on Linux with a relatively obscure browser. Then I removed it, because it was just too annoying to have flash work. Since then, I've been quite happy about flash ads. Hey, look, it's another web page with a blank banner ad. Someday, I'll try to set it up so I can click on the blank spot and view flash things, but I haven't felt the need yet.
Now, if only I didn't have support for animated images...
There are two situations where the name "web browser" is useful.
When you have one preferred web browser set up, you should be able to call it "Web Browser" instead of the name of the program, because "Web Browser" is descriptive and unambiguous. And if the user decides to switch to Phoenix or Opera or something, the method of invoking it stays the same. Furthermore, applications doesn't have to be configured to know about the user's choice of browser, even when they aren't part of a desktop environment (like, for example, gaim, which has its own dialog).
At install time, the user should be able to skip the choice of a particular web browser (if the user doesn't care or doesn't know about any available browsers or doesn't know which browser has a nice current version) and get a web browser by selecting "Install Some Web Browser". The user should get a choice of web browsers, but shouldn't be forced to pick one if the user doesn't have a preference.
The second is possibly more applicable to other applications; for example, clocks or mp3 players. When I'm installing a distribution, I want the nicest mp3 player the distribution offers. There are tons of mp3 players and different versions of each. Any of them will play an mp3. Some people will want a particular one, but most people just don't care.
We do have to realize that it is the recording industry that signs artists, produces and records their work, and markets them to a vast audience.
But it's the indie labels who actually do this honestly, not the RIAA. And the indie labels are doing better than they ever have, despite frequently giving away free samples online, despite the economy being bad, and despite the problems the RIAA is having.
Like it or not, content distribution depends on the good will of the consumer for profit. You won't make any money on something, regardless of whether it's good or popular, if people don't think they should pay you for it. The RIAA's legal tactics have made people not want to pay them, and this means that they don't make money.
It doesn't even have to be illegal to not pay RIAA companies: if you just listen to the radio, buy used CDs, buy from indie labels, and listen to the music you already have, they don't make any money. Someday, perhaps, they'll realize that P2P is like radio, except that they don't have to pay huge amounts of money to get their music on it.
For programs using web-browsers, you just configure "web-browser" as your web browser, and it should work as well as configuring the programs to use any other particular browser (setting gaim to use "web-browser %s" works for me...).
Does Mandrake have a way of finding the packages that provide the features that the package you're installing depends on? That's the issue I always have with Red Hat; I'm left trying to figure out what the heck "/usr/sbin/update-alternatives" is and where it might come from.
Its weird that desktop environments don't have "~" in the file dialog. It's not like shells haven't had it for a decade. At least the file pickers I've seen start in "/home/uname", even if they waste the space on the actual path.
His comments on the filesystem miss the point, though. Users shouldn't have to know either his names or the FHS names for those directories. All my programs are installed in $PATH, and I don't know or care exactly which directory a program is in (unless, for some reason, it isn't in $PATH, in which case I'm annoyed). Things in/etc are a bit different, but anyone who doesn't know to look in/etc for them should be provided with some tool to edit the file (without asking the location), and the tool should be in $PATH. And why do people insist that your web server configuration be in a location as dissimilar as possible from that of your web pages? What possible use does an end user have for anything in/dev?
Directories are great inside my home directory. They're great on CDs. Other than that, something else should just deal (unless, of course, I know exactly what I'm doing; but I should never need to).
Debian is also good for the user who doesn't want to deal with installers. My experience with Debian has been that "sudo apt-get install " will reliably install just about all of the programs I've tried (the main exception being valgrind on stable). RPM is a nice idea, but you have to actually find RPMs, which is a pain.
It could really use a nice index (not a list; an index, where you could look up "Web Browsers, m-something") of available packages. It could also use a nice index of the packages you have installed.
For that matter, it would be nice to be able to type "apt-get install some clock" and get a nice clock. Not a particular clock, since the user obviously doesn't care, but one that some maintainer likes. And it should appear in menus as "clock", not as whatever the clock package is actually called, because the user doesn't want to know. If somebody wants "xclock", that's available to, as "xclock".
When an application wants a web browser, it should run "web-browser [url]". That's a symlink in ~/bin to the user's current favorite web browser, or a symlink in/usr/bin to the system's favorite (or only) web browser. Maybe it should be possible to configure the application to do something different, but people probably wouldn't. We've had $PAGER for ages, and symlinks are even cooler than environment variables. My editor of choice is $EDITOR filename (actually a small shell script which does this).
Usenet used to be social, where people would chat about various stuff, discuss life, keep in touch, etc. It then turned out to be too public a forum for that, and there got to be too much spam and junk.
There are still a number of active and useful newsgroups, though; they're just focused on relatively narrow and relatively obscure (to the point that a moderate number of people are interested in the topic and contribute). Interactive Fiction and roguelike games are both developed and discussed in such newsgroups. There are also moderated groups which are still worthwhile.
It is true that there aren't new good newgroups. NNTP is a lousy protocol for today's internet, and can be replaced with mailing lists with approximately the same functionality. However, newsgroups which started when NNTP was a good idea still exist, and sometimes have new newsgroup offshoots.
Of course, there isn't really a direct replacement for NNTP; I suppose the closest thing is IMAP, if you had a public read-only mailbox which could receive messages as if it were a mailing list.
It seems to me that this change essentially says that any network which isn't secured in any way is to be considered a public network; that is, if you find a network not using WEP or anything, you should assume that it was intentionally left open as a public resource (like people have started doing). I doubt that the defense provided for this behavior would apply to a network using even a small WEP key, though. Even if you sniff the key, it seems unlikely that you could then claim that the network's owner meant you to have the key. So, while people do have to secure their networks, they don't have to secure them particularly effectively; just well enough to block your defense.
What this law means is that, if you don't want people to use your wireless network, you have to use some sort of technological measure to let them know to stay out. This makes a lot of sense, because there's no way to find out that someone does want you to use their network.
You can legally use bandwidth other people have kindly provided to the general public. It's up to people who don't want you to use their bandwidth to do something to make it clear that they don't want you to use their bandwidth. This might actually make WEP somewhat useful; it's pretty easy to break, but not automatic, so it serves to signal that you shouldn't just use the network.
Simson, after the Unix-Haters Handbook, co-wrote Practical UNIX and Internet Security. Recently, he's worked on a network monitoring appliance using FreeBSD. This may (or may not) give some insight into the attitude the Unix Haters had towards Unix.
You were clearly not in a movie at the time. Nor was your fuel tank significantly damaged by impact, which would cause the gasoline to be mixed with air and much more explosive.
Compressed gasses have to be kept compressed to be dangerous, which means that it's a lot easier to fail safely. On the other hand, hydrocarbons are dangerous when combined with air. There's a trade-off: hydrogen is dangerous as stored, but not when released, while hydrocarbons are not dangerous as stored, but dangerous when released.
Realistically, nobody's going to build a vehicle which contains enough fuel to cause a significant amount of damage, unless the vehicle is designed to go cross-country without refueling or is for transporting fuel.
In many years of research, a NASA scientist at Cape Canaveral has found proof that neither the hydrogen in the hull nor a bomb was to blame, but the fabric of the Hindenburg's outer skin and a new protective coating.
(from your link...)
Vehicles containing hydrocarbon fuels, on the other hand are extremely hazardous in collisions and make deadly terrorist weapons. Also, fabric coated in explosives is bad, whether you make a tent out of it or a blimp.
Microsoft is actually great at innovations; every release worth the name has totally changed the user experience, and they've put in tons of features that nobody had seen before. Unfortunately, all of those innovations have then turned out to be bad ideas, and people turn them off if possible, or they go away in the next version, replaced by new bad innovations. Linux is based on ideas which have lasted 30 years without anybody managing to come up with anything better, while Windows is based on all of the ideas that people (Microsoft and otherwise) have come up with in those 30 years that were worse. There have been refinements in the Linux world (that don't really show up on the radar), but the fact is that the UNIX design was sound and significant differences from it over the years have proved to be flaws.
Hmm... the first innovation that comes to mind as being Microsoft's own is "Bob". And that damn paperclip. The most recent useful thing I've seen to come out of Microsoft is the DOS mouse driver.
They come up with a solution for the problem a few months ago. It turned out that they were getting shorts due to
Anyway, Teddy didn't have any problems with it, so Panasonic decided
Re:It's more complicated than that.
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's possible that the second situation might be construed as linking the kernel and the BIOS into a single derived work, since the kernel is now essentially an irreplacable part of the BIOS. That would require the BIOS to be GPL.
On the other hand, it's easily possible to build a device which includes a Linux kernel which can't be replaced by the end user: just put it in ROM. The way to install a replacement would be with a soldering iron and a ROM fab, which would be beyond the means of most users, but there's no requirement in the GPL to only use techniques which everyone could replicate.
This isn't really that different from the Red Hat release process where the final steps include "send the ISO to the CD plant" and "shrink-wrap the box". The end user will have an extremely hard time producing a labelled, pressed Red Hat CD that boots a different kernel, but that's not Red Hat's fault, nor does it prevent them from selling such a thing. Red Hat can even sell to people who don't have a CD burner, although these people couldn't produce a CD from source.
The GPL only requires that I give you all of the information required to rebuild from source, not that I give you all of the other resources required to produce exactly what I am distributing, when the other resources are not information.
It's a number of European websites. One might think that they would do this in the US, since there are some people here who might want to get music online, but no. My guess is that they're trying to soften their stance in order to make DMCA-equivalents seem less bad in places that are considering them. Their position in backing copyright laws in the EU is currently sort of, "We have some music, which we don't bother to try to sell, and we try to make money by suing people. We need new laws to make this model viable." Actually selling something might make them look better.
Well, it was common for something to hit some part of the shuttle during launch. There was more work needed to determine exactly what failed due to being hit by the debris, since the shuttle is supposed to survive a bit of an impact. They also needed to know what to check in the future in case they don't see an impact that could endanger the shuttle. And they want to know what they need to check, fix, and recheck if they see an impact. It's not like they could just leave the shuttle in orbit forever.
The QWERTY keyboard you're using is very different from the mechanical typewriter keyboard that first used that layout, in much the same way the wheels have changed over time. All of the new tires share the feature that the center is the same distance from the point that supports the edge in all orientations, which corresponds to your keybaord being QWERTY.
You can tell you have a successful open source project when you start getting useful patches from other people. This is the main point to releasing your code as source. There are other measures of success, but they don't measure success as an open source project: if you're having fun, you have a successful hobby; if your itch is scratched, you have a successful project; if you got fan mail, you've got a successful published software project. To demonstrate success as a open source project, you need to get the expected benefit of releasing the source (as opposed to writing it, or releasing binaries).
I'm thinking of FPSes, where you're frequently trying to navigate a novel space (often while you have a time limit and stuff shooting at you).
Using a compressed frustrum is certainly bad, but there are other possibilities. A cylindrical camera, for example, shows good detail everywhere (except the top and the bottom, which are no worse than the usual top and bottom) and is remarkably easy to interpret (the visual area of the brain probably constructs a similar image out of multiple head and eye positions, so the brain has experience with this sort of thing; also, the whole image looks like the center of a normal perspective image). Here's an image if you want to see what it looks like. 90 degrees (which is shown here) is about where it starts to look funny, but this image is a lot less than 90 degrees of your FOV.
That's probably true in the business world, but home users will prefer to use software whose design lets home users use it than do nothing. The point of this design is to allow people to do groupware-type things even without a group that has a server. I know many extended families now have mailing lists they use to keep in touch and plan things, but I don't know of any with an exchange server.
This is designed to be a P2P, client-oriented system. You don't actually need to have a special server with this. From my very limited exposure (the web mail built into exchange), I've found having a server with all the data to be more of a liability, because I don't know what addresses I know.
This project is also specifically not trying to take over existing exchange/notes/outlook installations; they want to do an unrelated design so that people who aren't already tied in can start with software that's actually nicer than the non-free versions. The also want to let home users use these features without having an exchange-equivalent server in common with the users they communicate.
Slashdot Mirror
At one point I got the flash plugin and installed it in Konqueror. It worked perfectly. I was quite impressed that I was getting flash on Linux with a relatively obscure browser. Then I removed it, because it was just too annoying to have flash work. Since then, I've been quite happy about flash ads. Hey, look, it's another web page with a blank banner ad. Someday, I'll try to set it up so I can click on the blank spot and view flash things, but I haven't felt the need yet.
Now, if only I didn't have support for animated images...
There are two situations where the name "web browser" is useful.
When you have one preferred web browser set up, you should be able to call it "Web Browser" instead of the name of the program, because "Web Browser" is descriptive and unambiguous. And if the user decides to switch to Phoenix or Opera or something, the method of invoking it stays the same. Furthermore, applications doesn't have to be configured to know about the user's choice of browser, even when they aren't part of a desktop environment (like, for example, gaim, which has its own dialog).
At install time, the user should be able to skip the choice of a particular web browser (if the user doesn't care or doesn't know about any available browsers or doesn't know which browser has a nice current version) and get a web browser by selecting "Install Some Web Browser". The user should get a choice of web browsers, but shouldn't be forced to pick one if the user doesn't have a preference.
The second is possibly more applicable to other applications; for example, clocks or mp3 players. When I'm installing a distribution, I want the nicest mp3 player the distribution offers. There are tons of mp3 players and different versions of each. Any of them will play an mp3. Some people will want a particular one, but most people just don't care.
We do have to realize that it is the recording industry that signs artists, produces and records their work, and markets them to a vast audience.
But it's the indie labels who actually do this honestly, not the RIAA. And the indie labels are doing better than they ever have, despite frequently giving away free samples online, despite the economy being bad, and despite the problems the RIAA is having.
Like it or not, content distribution depends on the good will of the consumer for profit. You won't make any money on something, regardless of whether it's good or popular, if people don't think they should pay you for it. The RIAA's legal tactics have made people not want to pay them, and this means that they don't make money.
It doesn't even have to be illegal to not pay RIAA companies: if you just listen to the radio, buy used CDs, buy from indie labels, and listen to the music you already have, they don't make any money. Someday, perhaps, they'll realize that P2P is like radio, except that they don't have to pay huge amounts of money to get their music on it.
Which things do you have to patch? The web browsers I've used work perfectly well if you have
/usr/bin/web-browser
ln -s `which mozilla` ~/bin/web-browser
web-browser lwn.net
For programs using web-browsers, you just configure "web-browser" as your web browser, and it should work as well as configuring the programs to use any other particular browser (setting gaim to use "web-browser %s" works for me...).
Of course, you could do
cat >
#!/bin/sh
exec $WEBBROWSER $*
if you really want to do it with an environment variable. But how often does somebody want to change such a thing for a single session only?
Does Mandrake have a way of finding the packages that provide the features that the package you're installing depends on? That's the issue I always have with Red Hat; I'm left trying to figure out what the heck "/usr/sbin/update-alternatives" is and where it might come from.
Its weird that desktop environments don't have "~" in the file dialog. It's not like shells haven't had it for a decade. At least the file pickers I've seen start in "/home/uname", even if they waste the space on the actual path.
/etc are a bit different, but anyone who doesn't know to look in /etc for them should be provided with some tool to edit the file (without asking the location), and the tool should be in $PATH. And why do people insist that your web server configuration be in a location as dissimilar as possible from that of your web pages? What possible use does an end user have for anything in /dev?
His comments on the filesystem miss the point, though. Users shouldn't have to know either his names or the FHS names for those directories. All my programs are installed in $PATH, and I don't know or care exactly which directory a program is in (unless, for some reason, it isn't in $PATH, in which case I'm annoyed). Things in
Directories are great inside my home directory. They're great on CDs. Other than that, something else should just deal (unless, of course, I know exactly what I'm doing; but I should never need to).
Debian is also good for the user who doesn't want to deal with installers. My experience with Debian has been that "sudo apt-get install " will reliably install just about all of the programs I've tried (the main exception being valgrind on stable). RPM is a nice idea, but you have to actually find RPMs, which is a pain.
/usr/bin to the system's favorite (or only) web browser. Maybe it should be possible to configure the application to do something different, but people probably wouldn't. We've had $PAGER for ages, and symlinks are even cooler than environment variables. My editor of choice is $EDITOR filename (actually a small shell script which does this).
It could really use a nice index (not a list; an index, where you could look up "Web Browsers, m-something") of available packages. It could also use a nice index of the packages you have installed.
For that matter, it would be nice to be able to type "apt-get install some clock" and get a nice clock. Not a particular clock, since the user obviously doesn't care, but one that some maintainer likes. And it should appear in menus as "clock", not as whatever the clock package is actually called, because the user doesn't want to know. If somebody wants "xclock", that's available to, as "xclock".
When an application wants a web browser, it should run "web-browser [url]". That's a symlink in ~/bin to the user's current favorite web browser, or a symlink in
Usenet used to be social, where people would chat about various stuff, discuss life, keep in touch, etc. It then turned out to be too public a forum for that, and there got to be too much spam and junk.
There are still a number of active and useful newsgroups, though; they're just focused on relatively narrow and relatively obscure (to the point that a moderate number of people are interested in the topic and contribute). Interactive Fiction and roguelike games are both developed and discussed in such newsgroups. There are also moderated groups which are still worthwhile.
It is true that there aren't new good newgroups. NNTP is a lousy protocol for today's internet, and can be replaced with mailing lists with approximately the same functionality. However, newsgroups which started when NNTP was a good idea still exist, and sometimes have new newsgroup offshoots.
Of course, there isn't really a direct replacement for NNTP; I suppose the closest thing is IMAP, if you had a public read-only mailbox which could receive messages as if it were a mailing list.
"Forget rushing the cabin, we'll all talk on our cell phones at the same time! Let's see them try to stop that!"
Ah, you fools who don't use "lite" mode...
It seems to me that this change essentially says that any network which isn't secured in any way is to be considered a public network; that is, if you find a network not using WEP or anything, you should assume that it was intentionally left open as a public resource (like people have started doing). I doubt that the defense provided for this behavior would apply to a network using even a small WEP key, though. Even if you sniff the key, it seems unlikely that you could then claim that the network's owner meant you to have the key. So, while people do have to secure their networks, they don't have to secure them particularly effectively; just well enough to block your defense.
What this law means is that, if you don't want people to use your wireless network, you have to use some sort of technological measure to let them know to stay out. This makes a lot of sense, because there's no way to find out that someone does want you to use their network.
You can legally use bandwidth other people have kindly provided to the general public. It's up to people who don't want you to use their bandwidth to do something to make it clear that they don't want you to use their bandwidth. This might actually make WEP somewhat useful; it's pretty easy to break, but not automatic, so it serves to signal that you shouldn't just use the network.
Simson, after the Unix-Haters Handbook, co-wrote Practical UNIX and Internet Security. Recently, he's worked on a network monitoring appliance using FreeBSD. This may (or may not) give some insight into the attitude the Unix Haters had towards Unix.
You were clearly not in a movie at the time. Nor was your fuel tank significantly damaged by impact, which would cause the gasoline to be mixed with air and much more explosive.
Compressed gasses have to be kept compressed to be dangerous, which means that it's a lot easier to fail safely. On the other hand, hydrocarbons are dangerous when combined with air. There's a trade-off: hydrogen is dangerous as stored, but not when released, while hydrocarbons are not dangerous as stored, but dangerous when released.
Realistically, nobody's going to build a vehicle which contains enough fuel to cause a significant amount of damage, unless the vehicle is designed to go cross-country without refueling or is for transporting fuel.
(from your link...)
Vehicles containing hydrocarbon fuels, on the other hand are extremely hazardous in collisions and make deadly terrorist weapons. Also, fabric coated in explosives is bad, whether you make a tent out of it or a blimp.
Microsoft is actually great at innovations; every release worth the name has totally changed the user experience, and they've put in tons of features that nobody had seen before. Unfortunately, all of those innovations have then turned out to be bad ideas, and people turn them off if possible, or they go away in the next version, replaced by new bad innovations. Linux is based on ideas which have lasted 30 years without anybody managing to come up with anything better, while Windows is based on all of the ideas that people (Microsoft and otherwise) have come up with in those 30 years that were worse. There have been refinements in the Linux world (that don't really show up on the radar), but the fact is that the UNIX design was sound and significant differences from it over the years have proved to be flaws.
Hmm... the first innovation that comes to mind as being Microsoft's own is "Bob". And that damn paperclip. The most recent useful thing I've seen to come out of Microsoft is the DOS mouse driver.
They come up with a solution for the problem a few months ago. It turned out that they were getting shorts due to
Anyway, Teddy didn't have any problems with it, so Panasonic decided
It's possible that the second situation might be construed as linking the kernel and the BIOS into a single derived work, since the kernel is now essentially an irreplacable part of the BIOS. That would require the BIOS to be GPL.
On the other hand, it's easily possible to build a device which includes a Linux kernel which can't be replaced by the end user: just put it in ROM. The way to install a replacement would be with a soldering iron and a ROM fab, which would be beyond the means of most users, but there's no requirement in the GPL to only use techniques which everyone could replicate.
This isn't really that different from the Red Hat release process where the final steps include "send the ISO to the CD plant" and "shrink-wrap the box". The end user will have an extremely hard time producing a labelled, pressed Red Hat CD that boots a different kernel, but that's not Red Hat's fault, nor does it prevent them from selling such a thing. Red Hat can even sell to people who don't have a CD burner, although these people couldn't produce a CD from source.
The GPL only requires that I give you all of the information required to rebuild from source, not that I give you all of the other resources required to produce exactly what I am distributing, when the other resources are not information.
It's a number of European websites. One might think that they would do this in the US, since there are some people here who might want to get music online, but no. My guess is that they're trying to soften their stance in order to make DMCA-equivalents seem less bad in places that are considering them. Their position in backing copyright laws in the EU is currently sort of, "We have some music, which we don't bother to try to sell, and we try to make money by suing people. We need new laws to make this model viable." Actually selling something might make them look better.
Well, it was common for something to hit some part of the shuttle during launch. There was more work needed to determine exactly what failed due to being hit by the debris, since the shuttle is supposed to survive a bit of an impact. They also needed to know what to check in the future in case they don't see an impact that could endanger the shuttle. And they want to know what they need to check, fix, and recheck if they see an impact. It's not like they could just leave the shuttle in orbit forever.
The QWERTY keyboard you're using is very different from the mechanical typewriter keyboard that first used that layout, in much the same way the wheels have changed over time. All of the new tires share the feature that the center is the same distance from the point that supports the edge in all orientations, which corresponds to your keybaord being QWERTY.
You can tell you have a successful open source project when you start getting useful patches from other people. This is the main point to releasing your code as source. There are other measures of success, but they don't measure success as an open source project: if you're having fun, you have a successful hobby; if your itch is scratched, you have a successful project; if you got fan mail, you've got a successful published software project. To demonstrate success as a open source project, you need to get the expected benefit of releasing the source (as opposed to writing it, or releasing binaries).
I'm thinking of FPSes, where you're frequently trying to navigate a novel space (often while you have a time limit and stuff shooting at you).
Using a compressed frustrum is certainly bad, but there are other possibilities. A cylindrical camera, for example, shows good detail everywhere (except the top and the bottom, which are no worse than the usual top and bottom) and is remarkably easy to interpret (the visual area of the brain probably constructs a similar image out of multiple head and eye positions, so the brain has experience with this sort of thing; also, the whole image looks like the center of a normal perspective image). Here's an image if you want to see what it looks like. 90 degrees (which is shown here) is about where it starts to look funny, but this image is a lot less than 90 degrees of your FOV.
That's probably true in the business world, but home users will prefer to use software whose design lets home users use it than do nothing. The point of this design is to allow people to do groupware-type things even without a group that has a server. I know many extended families now have mailing lists they use to keep in touch and plan things, but I don't know of any with an exchange server.
This is designed to be a P2P, client-oriented system. You don't actually need to have a special server with this. From my very limited exposure (the web mail built into exchange), I've found having a server with all the data to be more of a liability, because I don't know what addresses I know.
This project is also specifically not trying to take over existing exchange/notes/outlook installations; they want to do an unrelated design so that people who aren't already tied in can start with software that's actually nicer than the non-free versions. The also want to let home users use these features without having an exchange-equivalent server in common with the users they communicate.