You know, one day I'd like to look at the web logs for that site and see just how many pages come with the referrer as/.
I mean, it's really fucking sick, but I wonder just how many people click links without checking? Of course, the parent to this post utilizes a lot of social engineering..
Hrm.. And lets think where all these not-so-rocket-scientists have gotten us.. Wander around Attrition.org and check out the defacement mirrors. Then look at the stats. These stats are the product, not of an insecure OS, but of the bootcamp MCSE's and generally undereducated people running them.
Both BSD/*nix and NT get compromised. And it's almost always the administrators fault. Unless some new cracker group has discovered a sploit and you're the guinea pig, every sploit is documented. Every one has either a solution or a workaround. It's in the administrators hands.
And we see what happens when we try to say "Oh, we don't need to spend a lot on a sysadmin, we have an easy OS with low TCO." Well, lets take a look at where it got us.
Well, the link through the link didn't work, but I'll take the quote at face value. Regardless though, this still takes us back to square one.
And actually, you have what you were whining about in your earlier posts. That was an explination by the Slashdot crew, congratulations, you have proven exactly nothing.
Anything that allows tracking is suspect in my book.
You should probably get the hell off the Internet then. Websites, FTP sites, IRC servers, NNTP servers, they almost all track IP usage. You don't want privacy, you want unaccountability. I mean, yeah, your argument would hold up if those were Doubleclick webbugs that were tracking you from site-to-site but they aren't. They're a local image being loaded on the page.
I still am yet to understand what the basis behind your argument is. You've gotten your explination from Slashdot. You know that your IP is being logged regardless of the presence of that 1x1 GIF.
If, despite all this, you still have a problem with a local GIF on a local server, then email Andover and ask for their privacy policy. You told me to find another forum, maybe you should consider taking yourself to another one as well. If you can't trust Andover and Slashdot, why the hell are you still here, whining?
Malda has admitted that those "web bugs" are there at Andover's behest. I bet the slashdot crew isn't even administering tht box. Who the hell knows what the Andover people are doing.
Link please, or I'll be forced to call bullshit on you. Besides which, do you honestly have a better explination then me? You can't call it a 'web bug' because the definition of a 'web bug' is something that is stored on a different site then the page in question.
By your logic, any webpage with a 'counter image' or any image whatsoever has 'web bugs' in it. As I said, if I was managing/., that would be the smartest way to keep a webcounter. A totally controlled variable that can be easily grepped out of the logs.
And look, I managed to make a coherent argument without resorting to name-calling. You still have yet to do that. Sod off.
Gee.. Perhaps because images.slashdot.org isn't slashdot.org? It makes analysis of the weblogs easier if you were to shut up and think. Consider the following:
The crew wants to count the page hits. How can you do that? Every time a main page is generated by the Perl? Bzzt, that doesn't work, way too expensive. This place serves more pages/min then I'd ever care to count, and I damn well wouldn't want a script counting it for me every time it's used.
The main page is dynamic too, so you can never be sure how many images will be loaded, so there goes analysis through that means.
Beyond that, just counting the number of hits against the '/' isn't accurate because of incomplete page loads, etc. If you put a small image in there, chances become that if that image is loaded, the rest of the page was too.
Bang, you can suddenly count, far more accurately, the total number of completed page loads. It's a totally controlled variable. It is appended to the logs by the web server, not by some script. What could be better?
Now, this is all speculation, but I put this together in my head after no less then 5 minutes of thinking. Maybe you should try that too. Besides which, they are images loaded from/.'s servers, so how could they possibly be malicious?? It's their page. If they want to put 1x1 images after every third word, it's their perogative to do so.
So even if they have no reason to be there, that's no reason, not a bad reason. Logically, there can't be a bad reason.
What an uninformed opinion. How would you like to define 'stable'? Do you define it as an official release or as a tried-tested-and-true distribution?
If you define it as the first, you should be more then happy running frozen or unstable. After all, look at some of what the rest of the world calls 'release' quality software.. Gnome 1.0.0 *laughs* Redhat 5.0 *laughs again*
Seriously though, Debian has the highest release standards out of any distribution on the market. They don't have shareholders to answer to, they don't worry about making money.. Instead, they focus on meeting their stated goals.
Ever since I started on Debian a year and a bit ago, I've watched the unstable branch of the package repository break about 3 times. And 2 of those times were just dependencies that I waited a week for other packages to catch up on.
Anyway, the moral of the story:
If you need a system that is a fscking ROCK for stability: Get stable. There isn't any other Linux distro on the market that is as tested. Barring that, get FreeBSD.
If you need a system that will last longer for uptime then your power company, and you want to be on the leading edge of software releases, try unstable.
Simple. Quake is the software manifestation of id software, and therefore, the child of John Carmack. John shares many of the Open Source ideals that you find around/.
He's released source code for major games. He has a hell of a legacy (Commander Keen!!!). He's an absolutely cool guy to meet in person. He helps code major Open Source projects (Utah-GLX).
Basically, it's more of a Carmack thing then a Quake thing or an id thing.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, I hate UT and Q3A. And I miss my old Half Life network code. I hope some of these new 3d shooters will bring back my love of the game.
I love it, everyone in this thread thinks I'm on the side of the Cops. I'm trying to argue that you can't just blame it on the Police, and nor can you just blame it on the protesters. I saw Seattle. Not firsthand, but my shutterbug-sister did and she had a lot of stories to tell.
I don't feel comftorable siding with the protesters or the Police in this situation.
And no, I won't just agree with some of the protesters. As long as any group, minority or majority, is abusing their rights and ignoring their responsibilities, it reflects on the rest of the group. This goes for both Policeman and protester alike. The problem with this world is that each group is one-upping the other.
Promises of violence are met with unjust crackdowns. Which leads to the ones being cracked down on to strengthen their resolve and respond with more force the next time around. It's a cycle that has made these confrontations more dangerous every time, from Seattle to Philly and beyond.
Yes, you are entirely right. This is why there is a fine line in the sand. Clearly, we are seeing protesters these days that abuse their right to protest, and we also see Police that abuse their duty to keep order.
The situation in the 2600 article is a clear example of one side of the argument, that the Police are stepping all over the rights of law-abiding people.
But for every argument, there is a counterargument. There are just as many cases of Police abuse of power as there are protesters abusing their rights.
And once again, we meet that fine line in the sand. Lets look at WTO. There were days of peaceful protest. There were also groups who showed up, promising to cause a disruption and destroy property. So how are you expected to deal with the protests as a whole?
Consider the situation in Philly. Much like the WTO, the opening days were peaceful. Very little confrontation between activist and policeman. As it should be. Then we consider the final day of protests, where the groups that advocated the destruction of public and private property came out to play. These are people, some of whom have been trained so that they can 'fight back' when the Police come to break them up.
The Police HAVE to come break them up. You can't allow people to go around destroying property. These people then say they have to "defend themselves" from the Police. Then, you get the mob mentality. Other people join the violence because they can. And some of these people have the gall to say that they are in the right.
Now, at the same time, you cannot argue whatsoever with the right to protest, the right to speak and be heard. But where do we draw the line in the sand? When it gets violent, should it be the fault of the Police? What if the Police overstep their bounds, refusing due process and basic human rights? There's a lot more here then just "Blame the Man, blame the Pigs" because some people are abusing everyone's right to protest by doing so violently.
And if we're picking nits, the Q2 network code was mostly just the QuakeWorld network code:o)
Seriously though, they didn't leave that much behind when they made Half Life. They started with the Quake code, worked on it for a while.. Eventually their license was extended to include the Q2 source code.
I don't know if that was before or after they decided it was time to just rewrite the whole thing.. But I'll say it again, HLINQ.:o)
Well, I guess it's simply because HLINQ (Half Life is not Quake). You'd figure the following:
Well, Quake runs in Linux, Half Life is based on Quake code, when will Half Life run in Linux?
Fraid not. There's maybe 1% of the original Quake code still in Half Life (the File handling mostly). And most of the Half Life developers were young developers who'd made it big working for Microsoft and then moved on to Bigger and Better things. So most of the Half Life code deeply depends on Microsoft Foundation Classes.
So, simply put, it'd be a bitch to port. MFC's don't port nicely.. Now, I can't comment on Team Fortress II. I'd like to see Valve move towards more cross-platform code, but I might just be dreaming.
Hmm.. Well, what does QT use for rendering the pixmaps? Remember, GTK+ (still) uses Imlib.. and most developers will tell you, without pause, that Imlib sucks.
I don't mean it in a flamebait way, but Imlib does pretty much suck. Rasterman made it to display graphics for early versions of Enligthenment. It was definitely not made for what GTK and Gnome currently use it for. Hence, gdk-pixbuf.
There's a pixbuf based pixmap engine in the Gnome CVS, but last time I looked, it wasn't being that actively worked on. Maybe someone should bring it up to speed with the latest gdk-pixbuf and then we can talk speed *grin*
Tone and delivery are just as important to delivering an argument as the facts and basis of the argument. Never forget that.
A rabid Linux zealot that runs into a convention of MCSE's and starts slamming everthing and everyone around him won't be treated nicely, even if every argument he uses is based in fact.
That said, the post to which you refer was just that. His post was inflammatory and arrogant. Troll, perhaps not. But worthy of the 4 positive moderations it was awarded? I think not.
On another note, I'd say an NFS vulnerability isn't as major as this Outlook one is, not by a longshot. And I can name dozens of Linux security exploits that have come out recently. They don't get this sort of press because of facts like 'MS has been sitting on this exploit since mid-June' and 'MS still has not released fixes for it's flagship product, Win2k.' And at least with the NFS vulnerability, you can choose to turn off your NFS server. Telling people they can't check their email is a lot less of an option.
Man, can we ever hear it for bad moderation? I'm usually the first to defend moderation around here, but this was just pathetic. A rambling post that was completely unrealated to the topic on hand (Open Source on the Mac) that not only was poorly argued, but factually weak.
Why do I say that? Simple. OSS has been about fun all along. And that's not going to change. The 'enterprise' can come and go, but you'll still find people who want to make a better system because they can.
Also, if the use of another person's work to advance one's career/pocketbook was a bad thing, the whole capatilist society would have gone to hell by now. Last time I checked, it's was the so-called 'haves' using the 'have-nots' to advance in life. But I digress.
Simply put, OSS is not driven by greed and it never will be. It may be used in such a fashion, but why should that become a problem now? People have been coding and using Apache for ages now, others have been making money off of it. And yet, it still gets better.
I'm done. Don't ask why I'm posting this at Score:2.
The street name analogy does *not* hold. If I decide to set up shop at 7th st and 9th ave, it does *not* give the business owner at 9th st and 7th ave the right to sue me. Especially if I have a business that is of a comic nature. This precedent worries me greatly. Just think openssh.com vs openssh.org for a domain name dispute that matters to a large number of/.ers.
On a slightly unrelated note, my friend just bought some bumper stickers yesterday. The thing that makes parody so damn funny is when the similarities make you do a double take. 'Thank you for not smoking - Canadian Cancer Society' becomes 'Thank you for pot smoking - Canadian Cannabis Society.'
Hrmph. When will I no longer be allowed to have fun on the grounds that it might piss off some interest group/corporation with lots of lawyers.
You know, this is why I miss the days of DOS. I mean, with DOS you had to *shock* use a command line! And Windows 3.x and earlier was just pathetic.
People actually had to learn to use computers. Heaven forbud that huh? We have to learn to walk, to drive, to use a fscking toilet, yet people expect to turn on a computer and *BOOM* it should work and make you 100x more productive.
Yeah, right.
Oh, and I don't believe that Win9x is intuitive at all. MacOS maybe. And this is why I'm glad that there are former Mac UI designers working with Gnome now.
Wheels of Open Source Roll onward to help Geeks work But ease is not there
And this is the big issue with Open Source. We always say 'Man, is Linux going to kick ass in a year or two,' but then we get there and we're still moving in small steps.
Nothing will perfectly import/export Word/Excel files. Especially when they embed one another. We have IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but we can't talk to Exchange systems all that well. Groupware is the Killer App that will make or break Linux's use in Big Business.
Yes, Evolution is coming. We're at version 0.1 though. The framework isn't even complete, the libraries that it uses are still in the Unstable Gnome. As we've said so many times before, it's coming. It's always coming. Always a few months away.
Evolution comes But as fast as we can run We still don't advance
I'm sorry, but are you listening to your own words? They most certainly did things that were illegal. They used strongarm tactics, backed up by their monopoly, to stop OEM's from doing what they had every right to do (bundle Netscape in this case).
I don't know what that means where you come from, but last I checked, that was covered under antitrust law. MS most certainly did not follow 'valid' business tactics. Defeating the competition is valid. Defeating the competition simply because you can push around sales outlets (OEMs in this case) and stop them from doing things you dislike isn't so valid. I'm not arguing on grounds of morality, this is the law.
Now, I do agree with your point on people needing to shut up and do something about it. Just like all the YRO stories in the world will prevent laws like UCITA because we're all too lazy to write our congressmen. People tend to get what they deserve.
The previous poster had it wrong, but the Debian crew has it right.
KDE 1.x is illegal to distribute in binary form. And this is no fault of QT 1.x, it's just that the KDE developers used a license that was not legal against the QT 1.x license and the GPL. If you want some proof, go start a flamewar on debian-legal.
KDE 2 should be on better grounds. The QT 2 license is far closer to Open Source. And with a little luck, the KDE developers won't release KDE under a license that is incompatible with that license. Of course, it's not out.
Now, Gnome on the other hand.. The libs are LGPL. The apps are GPL. No legal stew here. As for development, I'd say GTK+/Gnome is in a better position now. GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.. KDE has kdevelop (good) but I really don't understand why TrollTech would design their API in a way that requires extra programs to compile the code..
..is what the music industry needs to start doing. Realizing that the digital medium doesn't mean they can't make money. Just maybe look for new ways to make it. And per-song would be a good solution.
Lets try a little rehash. Very few words will be changed, but this should prove a point:
The MPAA said that they would block any user hosting DeCSS on their system. They just needed a list. So this is what the DVDCCA did. Hosting DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA. Get over it. If you want to do it, fine, but don't whine when you get caught or the MPAA catches you. If you can't to watch DVD's in Linux, don't buy them. Don't write a player. Argue it any way you want but it is still illegal. It's their trade secret to sell as they want for however much they want. That is a free market. If it costs too much, buy VHS.
Hmmmm.. And again:
The US Gov't said they would stop any crypto user. They just needed a list. So this is what the NSA did. Using crypto is illegal. Get over it. If you want to do it, fine, but don't whine when Big Brother cracks down on you and you spend 5 years in a federal prison without being charged. Argue it any way you want, but it is still illegal. That is 'democracy'. If it doesn't work, hope the people that DO vote don't vote stupidly. Oops, too late.
Get my drift? You can say 'illegal' all you want, but what's gonna happen when something that you don't find illegal is made to be that way? When the day comes that everything is watched by Big Brother? All this article says to me is that it doesn't even take a Big Brother, just some investigators with some spare time to invade your privacy. Wake up already, this isn't about piracy. This is about your rights. Watch them slip away.
..this makes a lot of sense. Portables really don't need a damn x86 in it, drawing enough juice to heat a small house. After all, we see very little commitment from Intel or AMD to make low-power chips. Hell, the Athlon requires you to have an extra buff power supply.
Cripes! Effeciency my foot..
Re:Short and attitude riddled...
on
Theo's Thoughts
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· Score: 2
You'd think as much.. But then you just look at the GNU project. RMS was and largely still is the spokesperson for all-things-GNU and many-things-Free-Software.
And he comes off strongly too. Very strongly. But I wouldn't say that the GNU project has suffered from it. Having someone behind it who won't take shite, and will stick to their ideals and to their guns. There's always more appealing types to talk to in these areas (like ESR over RMS), but as far as a leader goes.. Well you need someone hardcore.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, one day I'd like to look at the web logs for that site and see just how many pages come with the referrer as /.
I mean, it's really fucking sick, but I wonder just how many people click links without checking? Of course, the parent to this post utilizes a lot of social engineering..
Hrm.. And lets think where all these not-so-rocket-scientists have gotten us.. Wander around Attrition.org and check out the defacement mirrors. Then look at the stats. These stats are the product, not of an insecure OS, but of the bootcamp MCSE's and generally undereducated people running them.
Both BSD/*nix and NT get compromised. And it's almost always the administrators fault. Unless some new cracker group has discovered a sploit and you're the guinea pig, every sploit is documented. Every one has either a solution or a workaround. It's in the administrators hands.
And we see what happens when we try to say "Oh, we don't need to spend a lot on a sysadmin, we have an easy OS with low TCO." Well, lets take a look at where it got us.
Well, the link through the link didn't work, but I'll take the quote at face value. Regardless though, this still takes us back to square one.
And actually, you have what you were whining about in your earlier posts. That was an explination by the Slashdot crew, congratulations, you have proven exactly nothing.
Anything that allows tracking is suspect in my book.
You should probably get the hell off the Internet then. Websites, FTP sites, IRC servers, NNTP servers, they almost all track IP usage. You don't want privacy, you want unaccountability. I mean, yeah, your argument would hold up if those were Doubleclick webbugs that were tracking you from site-to-site but they aren't. They're a local image being loaded on the page.
I still am yet to understand what the basis behind your argument is. You've gotten your explination from Slashdot. You know that your IP is being logged regardless of the presence of that 1x1 GIF.
If, despite all this, you still have a problem with a local GIF on a local server, then email Andover and ask for their privacy policy. You told me to find another forum, maybe you should consider taking yourself to another one as well. If you can't trust Andover and Slashdot, why the hell are you still here, whining?
By your logic, any webpage with a 'counter image' or any image whatsoever has 'web bugs' in it. As I said, if I was managing
And look, I managed to make a coherent argument without resorting to name-calling. You still have yet to do that. Sod off.
Gee.. Perhaps because images.slashdot.org isn't slashdot.org? It makes analysis of the weblogs easier if you were to shut up and think . Consider the following:
/.'s servers, so how could they possibly be malicious?? It's their page. If they want to put 1x1 images after every third word, it's their perogative to do so.
The crew wants to count the page hits. How can you do that? Every time a main page is generated by the Perl? Bzzt, that doesn't work, way too expensive. This place serves more pages/min then I'd ever care to count, and I damn well wouldn't want a script counting it for me every time it's used.
The main page is dynamic too, so you can never be sure how many images will be loaded, so there goes analysis through that means.
Beyond that, just counting the number of hits against the '/' isn't accurate because of incomplete page loads, etc. If you put a small image in there, chances become that if that image is loaded, the rest of the page was too.
Bang, you can suddenly count, far more accurately, the total number of completed page loads. It's a totally controlled variable. It is appended to the logs by the web server, not by some script. What could be better?
Now, this is all speculation, but I put this together in my head after no less then 5 minutes of thinking. Maybe you should try that too. Besides which, they are images loaded from
So even if they have no reason to be there, that's no reason, not a bad reason. Logically, there can't be a bad reason.
*laughs*
What an uninformed opinion. How would you like to define 'stable'? Do you define it as an official release or as a tried-tested-and-true distribution?
If you define it as the first, you should be more then happy running frozen or unstable. After all, look at some of what the rest of the world calls 'release' quality software.. Gnome 1.0.0 *laughs* Redhat 5.0 *laughs again*
Seriously though, Debian has the highest release standards out of any distribution on the market. They don't have shareholders to answer to, they don't worry about making money.. Instead, they focus on meeting their stated goals.
Ever since I started on Debian a year and a bit ago, I've watched the unstable branch of the package repository break about 3 times. And 2 of those times were just dependencies that I waited a week for other packages to catch up on.
Anyway, the moral of the story:
If you need a system that is a fscking ROCK for stability: Get stable. There isn't any other Linux distro on the market that is as tested. Barring that, get FreeBSD.
If you need a system that will last longer for uptime then your power company, and you want to be on the leading edge of software releases, try unstable.
Simple. Quake is the software manifestation of id software, and therefore, the child of John Carmack. John shares many of the Open Source ideals that you find around /.
He's released source code for major games. He has a hell of a legacy (Commander Keen!!!). He's an absolutely cool guy to meet in person. He helps code major Open Source projects (Utah-GLX).
Basically, it's more of a Carmack thing then a Quake thing or an id thing.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, I hate UT and Q3A. And I miss my old Half Life network code. I hope some of these new 3d shooters will bring back my love of the game.
I love it, everyone in this thread thinks I'm on the side of the Cops. I'm trying to argue that you can't just blame it on the Police, and nor can you just blame it on the protesters. I saw Seattle. Not firsthand, but my shutterbug-sister did and she had a lot of stories to tell.
I don't feel comftorable siding with the protesters or the Police in this situation.
And no, I won't just agree with some of the protesters. As long as any group, minority or majority, is abusing their rights and ignoring their responsibilities, it reflects on the rest of the group. This goes for both Policeman and protester alike. The problem with this world is that each group is one-upping the other.
Promises of violence are met with unjust crackdowns. Which leads to the ones being cracked down on to strengthen their resolve and respond with more force the next time around. It's a cycle that has made these confrontations more dangerous every time, from Seattle to Philly and beyond.
Yes, you are entirely right. This is why there is a fine line in the sand. Clearly, we are seeing protesters these days that abuse their right to protest, and we also see Police that abuse their duty to keep order.
The situation in the 2600 article is a clear example of one side of the argument, that the Police are stepping all over the rights of law-abiding people.
But for every argument, there is a counterargument. There are just as many cases of Police abuse of power as there are protesters abusing their rights.
*thinks*
And once again, we meet that fine line in the sand. Lets look at WTO. There were days of peaceful protest. There were also groups who showed up, promising to cause a disruption and destroy property. So how are you expected to deal with the protests as a whole?
Consider the situation in Philly. Much like the WTO, the opening days were peaceful. Very little confrontation between activist and policeman. As it should be. Then we consider the final day of protests, where the groups that advocated the destruction of public and private property came out to play. These are people, some of whom have been trained so that they can 'fight back' when the Police come to break them up.
The Police HAVE to come break them up. You can't allow people to go around destroying property. These people then say they have to "defend themselves" from the Police. Then, you get the mob mentality. Other people join the violence because they can. And some of these people have the gall to say that they are in the right.
Now, at the same time, you cannot argue whatsoever with the right to protest, the right to speak and be heard. But where do we draw the line in the sand? When it gets violent, should it be the fault of the Police? What if the Police overstep their bounds, refusing due process and basic human rights? There's a lot more here then just "Blame the Man, blame the Pigs" because some people are abusing everyone's right to protest by doing so violently.
Anyway, that's my rant..
And if we're picking nits, the Q2 network code was mostly just the QuakeWorld network code :o)
:o)
Seriously though, they didn't leave that much behind when they made Half Life. They started with the Quake code, worked on it for a while.. Eventually their license was extended to include the Q2 source code.
I don't know if that was before or after they decided it was time to just rewrite the whole thing.. But I'll say it again, HLINQ.
Well, I guess it's simply because HLINQ (Half Life is not Quake). You'd figure the following:
Well, Quake runs in Linux, Half Life is based on Quake code, when will Half Life run in Linux?
Fraid not. There's maybe 1% of the original Quake code still in Half Life (the File handling mostly). And most of the Half Life developers were young developers who'd made it big working for Microsoft and then moved on to Bigger and Better things. So most of the Half Life code deeply depends on Microsoft Foundation Classes.
So, simply put, it'd be a bitch to port. MFC's don't port nicely.. Now, I can't comment on Team Fortress II. I'd like to see Valve move towards more cross-platform code, but I might just be dreaming.
Hmm.. Well, what does QT use for rendering the pixmaps? Remember, GTK+ (still) uses Imlib.. and most developers will tell you, without pause, that Imlib sucks.
I don't mean it in a flamebait way, but Imlib does pretty much suck. Rasterman made it to display graphics for early versions of Enligthenment. It was definitely not made for what GTK and Gnome currently use it for. Hence, gdk-pixbuf.
There's a pixbuf based pixmap engine in the Gnome CVS, but last time I looked, it wasn't being that actively worked on. Maybe someone should bring it up to speed with the latest gdk-pixbuf and then we can talk speed *grin*
Tone and delivery are just as important to delivering an argument as the facts and basis of the argument. Never forget that.
A rabid Linux zealot that runs into a convention of MCSE's and starts slamming everthing and everyone around him won't be treated nicely, even if every argument he uses is based in fact.
That said, the post to which you refer was just that. His post was inflammatory and arrogant. Troll, perhaps not. But worthy of the 4 positive moderations it was awarded? I think not.
On another note, I'd say an NFS vulnerability isn't as major as this Outlook one is, not by a longshot. And I can name dozens of Linux security exploits that have come out recently. They don't get this sort of press because of facts like 'MS has been sitting on this exploit since mid-June' and 'MS still has not released fixes for it's flagship product, Win2k.' And at least with the NFS vulnerability, you can choose to turn off your NFS server. Telling people they can't check their email is a lot less of an option.
Man, can we ever hear it for bad moderation? I'm usually the first to defend moderation around here, but this was just pathetic. A rambling post that was completely unrealated to the topic on hand (Open Source on the Mac) that not only was poorly argued, but factually weak.
Why do I say that? Simple. OSS has been about fun all along. And that's not going to change. The 'enterprise' can come and go, but you'll still find people who want to make a better system because they can.
Also, if the use of another person's work to advance one's career/pocketbook was a bad thing, the whole capatilist society would have gone to hell by now. Last time I checked, it's was the so-called 'haves' using the 'have-nots' to advance in life. But I digress.
Simply put, OSS is not driven by greed and it never will be. It may be used in such a fashion, but why should that become a problem now? People have been coding and using Apache for ages now, others have been making money off of it. And yet, it still gets better.
I'm done. Don't ask why I'm posting this at Score:2.
The street name analogy does *not* hold. If I decide to set up shop at 7th st and 9th ave, it does *not* give the business owner at 9th st and 7th ave the right to sue me. Especially if I have a business that is of a comic nature. This precedent worries me greatly. Just think openssh.com vs openssh.org for a domain name dispute that matters to a large number of /.ers.
On a slightly unrelated note, my friend just bought some bumper stickers yesterday. The thing that makes parody so damn funny is when the similarities make you do a double take. 'Thank you for not smoking - Canadian Cancer Society' becomes 'Thank you for pot smoking - Canadian Cannabis Society.'
Hrmph. When will I no longer be allowed to have fun on the grounds that it might piss off some interest group/corporation with lots of lawyers.
I use Linux exclusively at home. At work though? Groupware that talks to office suites still doesn't exist in Linux.
You know, this is why I miss the days of DOS. I mean, with DOS you had to *shock* use a command line! And Windows 3.x and earlier was just pathetic.
People actually had to learn to use computers. Heaven forbud that huh? We have to learn to walk, to drive, to use a fscking toilet, yet people expect to turn on a computer and *BOOM* it should work and make you 100x more productive.
Yeah, right.
Oh, and I don't believe that Win9x is intuitive at all. MacOS maybe. And this is why I'm glad that there are former Mac UI designers working with Gnome now.
Wheels of Open Source
Roll onward to help Geeks work
But ease is not there
And this is the big issue with Open Source. We always say 'Man, is Linux going to kick ass in a year or two,' but then we get there and we're still moving in small steps.
Nothing will perfectly import/export Word/Excel files. Especially when they embed one another. We have IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but we can't talk to Exchange systems all that well. Groupware is the Killer App that will make or break Linux's use in Big Business.
Yes, Evolution is coming. We're at version 0.1 though. The framework isn't even complete, the libraries that it uses are still in the Unstable Gnome. As we've said so many times before, it's coming. It's always coming. Always a few months away.
Evolution comes
But as fast as we can run
We still don't advance
I'm sorry, but are you listening to your own words? They most certainly did things that were illegal. They used strongarm tactics, backed up by their monopoly, to stop OEM's from doing what they had every right to do (bundle Netscape in this case).
I don't know what that means where you come from, but last I checked, that was covered under antitrust law. MS most certainly did not follow 'valid' business tactics. Defeating the competition is valid. Defeating the competition simply because you can push around sales outlets (OEMs in this case) and stop them from doing things you dislike isn't so valid. I'm not arguing on grounds of morality, this is the law.
Now, I do agree with your point on people needing to shut up and do something about it. Just like all the YRO stories in the world will prevent laws like UCITA because we're all too lazy to write our congressmen. People tend to get what they deserve.
The previous poster had it wrong, but the Debian crew has it right.
KDE 1.x is illegal to distribute in binary form. And this is no fault of QT 1.x, it's just that the KDE developers used a license that was not legal against the QT 1.x license and the GPL. If you want some proof, go start a flamewar on debian-legal.
KDE 2 should be on better grounds. The QT 2 license is far closer to Open Source. And with a little luck, the KDE developers won't release KDE under a license that is incompatible with that license. Of course, it's not out.
Now, Gnome on the other hand.. The libs are LGPL. The apps are GPL. No legal stew here. As for development, I'd say GTK+/Gnome is in a better position now. GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.. KDE has kdevelop (good) but I really don't understand why TrollTech would design their API in a way that requires extra programs to compile the code..
..is what the music industry needs to start doing. Realizing that the digital medium doesn't mean they can't make money. Just maybe look for new ways to make it. And per-song would be a good solution.
Lets try a little rehash. Very few words will be changed, but this should prove a point:
The MPAA said that they would block any user hosting DeCSS on their system. They just needed a list. So this is what the DVDCCA did. Hosting DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA. Get over it. If you want to do it, fine, but don't whine when you get caught or the MPAA catches you. If you can't to watch DVD's in Linux, don't buy them. Don't write a player. Argue it any way you want but it is still illegal. It's their trade secret to sell as they want for however much they want. That is a free market. If it costs too much, buy VHS.
Hmmmm.. And again:
The US Gov't said they would stop any crypto user. They just needed a list. So this is what the NSA did. Using crypto is illegal. Get over it. If you want to do it, fine, but don't whine when Big Brother cracks down on you and you spend 5 years in a federal prison without being charged. Argue it any way you want, but it is still illegal. That is 'democracy'. If it doesn't work, hope the people that DO vote don't vote stupidly. Oops, too late.
Get my drift? You can say 'illegal' all you want, but what's gonna happen when something that you don't find illegal is made to be that way? When the day comes that everything is watched by Big Brother? All this article says to me is that it doesn't even take a Big Brother, just some investigators with some spare time to invade your privacy. Wake up already, this isn't about piracy. This is about your rights. Watch them slip away.
..this makes a lot of sense. Portables really don't need a damn x86 in it, drawing enough juice to heat a small house. After all, we see very little commitment from Intel or AMD to make low-power chips. Hell, the Athlon requires you to have an extra buff power supply.
Cripes! Effeciency my foot..
You'd think as much.. But then you just look at the GNU project. RMS was and largely still is the spokesperson for all-things-GNU and many-things-Free-Software.
And he comes off strongly too. Very strongly. But I wouldn't say that the GNU project has suffered from it. Having someone behind it who won't take shite, and will stick to their ideals and to their guns. There's always more appealing types to talk to in these areas (like ESR over RMS), but as far as a leader goes.. Well you need someone hardcore.