Youre entire argument is based upon a technicality and does not hold true for real-world users. While code compiled using GCC does not include any derivative code from the GCC compiler itself, it will almost certainly include code from one of the many libraries which are distributed with GCC.
Any software project larger than "Hello World!" is going to be dependant upon libraries which are liscensed under the GPL. While the LGPL was created to address some of these issues, not every library is liscensed under the LGPL, so the problem still exists. This includes the very prevalant C++ library which includes the cin and cout operators which I'm sure every programmer has used at some point in his or her career.
Please see here, here, or here for documentation supporting my claims. The last link goes to an article written by Stallman himself addressing this problem, so please don't try and tell my that my information is based on Microsoft FUD.
I certainly hope Apple isn't using GCC to compile their production software. GCC is a fine compiler, however it is inherently flawed due to the fact that it is released under the GPL liscense.
Due to the viral nature of the GPL, any software compiled using GCC could be considered a "derivative work" of the GCC, thus forcing that software to be open-source under the terms of the GPL. I doubt Apple wants the source code to their highly-prized OSX to be available to any Joe User who wants to copy it.
This is also the primary reason why Apple chose FreeBSD as the core of OSX instead of Linux. The BSD liscense is much freer (speech) than the GPL.
Why try and recreate a bad idea
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It seems to me that Microsoft's Passport authentication is a bad idea in the first place, and the free software community should look toward more intelligent alternatives rather than try and emulate Passport's functionality.
Not only does Passport go against the KISS philosophy embraced by many Unix and Linux developers, but the potential for security breaches is only magnified when a single universal authentication system is developed. It seems to me we'd be better off leaving authentication procedures up to the individual site owner rather than having a universal authentication protocol built-into Apache. This would also be a more practical solution as a single authentication system cannot be tailored to fit all sites. I sure don't want to trust all of my on-line bank transactions to something like Passport, so the need exists for highly encrypted ultra-secure authentication on some sites, while other less secure sites like Slashdot which transmit passwords across the 'net in plain text could probably get by with using a much more basic authentication system.
Billy Boy has a large lemonade stand which sells lemonade for five dollars a glass. He makes a lot of money and has a lot of customers despite his competition, which includes:
Steve Jobs: Sells lemonade for fifty cents a glass, but in order to buy his lemonade, you also have to buy a glass and straw from him for nine fifty. The glasses are available in lots of trendy colors, but they're smaller and more inefficient than standard glasses, so Stevey doesn't have very many customers.
Tux: Doesn't have a stand, but he has a lemon tree, some sugar cane and and old-fashioned pump well. You can make your own lemonade if you'd like, and its free, but it takes a couple of hours to pick and squeeze lemons, pump water and extract sugar from the cane in order to make the lemonade, and you're not always guaranteed of its quality. There are thirty or forty lemon trees, and some taste good, while others do not. A few enthusiasts drink Tux's lemonade and rave about how great it is, but most mainstream customers are willing to just pay the five bucks.
While computerized voting certainly sounds good to most Slashdoters, we have to realize that the majority of the populace is not as technically oriented is the average Slashdoter. Many older citizens and citizens without any computer training and experience will likely become confused by the new computerized voting devices.
I don't mean to sound like a Luddite, but I'm not sure technology is the best solution in a situation like this. Technology is great for many uses, but for a task as simple as voting, it is much easier and more practical to simply use existing methods which have been proven by their use in the past hundreds if not thousands of years. Voters who are not computer savvy will likely become confused by the unnecessary complication of the new voting machines and many are likely to cast their ballots in error, possibly voting for a candidate they had no intention of supporting. Clearly, in a situation such as this, current paper voting mechanisims are much more accurate and reliable.
Furthermore, if voting is to be computerized, we're leaving ourselves vulnerable to all sorts of hacking and digital manipulation of the ballots which otherwise would not exist. It's been said many times here before that no computer system is 100% secure, and I, for one, do not want to trust my country's elections to the likes of Microsoft of Red Hat. Paper elections are much harder, if not impossible, to tamper with.
I'm starting to get sick of playing all those flashy professionally-made games on my high end gaming machine. Now I can finally play classic games like Tuxracer, Freeciv, fortune, and hangman and leave all those crappy multi-million-dollar Xbox games on the shelf. Thank you, hackers, for bringing Linux' superior game selection to the Xbox!
I'm dislike spam as much as the next guy, but I don't think that laws prohibiting spam is a desirable solution. We have many spam blocking software applications and other technological methods already which are quite effective in discouraging spammers. Our society is already far too full of bureaucratic red tape and unnecessary or unenforcable laws. Furthermore, anti-spam legislation has the potential to curb one's right to free speech, and would violate the Constitution.
Many of the personal e-mails which I send are unsolicited and, while I am certainly not a spammer, could violate anti-spam laws because the recipient did not specifically request to be sent e-mail. I don't generally send mailing list removal instructions with my personal correspondance either. Does this mean that I am in violation of anti-spam laws?
Legislating one's right to communicate freely goes against everything this country was founded upon, and anti-spam legislation is just another example of an overly powerful government taking away the rights of its citizens. I, for one will not support any such law, or any lawmaker who supports such a law.
I value my privacy as much as the next guy, but I don't think the DOJ's request is at all unreasonable. In fact, most ISP's already do log their user's traffic. In fact, if you're using a major ISP such as AT&T or Earthlink to read this, your traffic is almost certainly being logged right at this moment. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, logging user's activities on-line allows law enforcement to catch spammers (I'm sure most Slashdotters hate spammers), virus writers and distributers, software pirates, pedophiles, and all sorts of other cyber-miscreants. This is a Good Thing. I sure as hell don't want to be on-line with those types of people, and I'm sure most other readers will agree with me here.
It seems that the issue at hand isn't the act of logging activities themselves, but how willing your ISP is to distribute those logs. In all previous cases I am aware of, ISP's do not give out personal information about a user without first being served with a subpoena. This is no worse than the restrictions we have had on wiretapping and eavesdropping for the past 50 or so years, so I don't see any reason for anyone to get upset about this. If you aren't breaking the law, then you have nothing to worry about, and your information will remain private in the hands of your service provider, however if you're doing something illegal, then there is no reason that the FBI or such should not be able to serve your ISP with a subpoena to obtain your usage logs. Its perfectly within our Constitutional rights for the government to do this, and anyone who is made nervous because of this probably has something to hide.
The articles are split into multiple pages so good ol' Tom can get more banner impressions. And yes, it is annoying.
Re:I live in Alberta
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Your Premiere is a very smart man, then. The Kyoto treaty was a notoriously bad idea, and I applaud those few nations who had the gumption to stand up for themselves and abstain from signing into the treaty. Many Asian and European countries who signed Kyoto are now regretting their decision.
Now, I'm not implying that cutting pollution is a Bad Thing(tm), but merely that Kyoto is a restrictive and impractical way to cut pollution output. Air and water quality in most first-world nations is far cleaner today than it was 30 years ago, and we're improving upon this yearly. Cars burn less fuel, and the fuel they do burn is burned much more efficiently, than older cars. Factories have installed pollution scrubbers on their smokestacks, and have ceased dumping waste into the water supply. People are also more aware of the environment these days, and community recycling programs are reducing waste going into landfills. Capitalism has done its job and continues to do so in improving environmental quality every day. There is no need for government mandated pollution reduction, and to attempt to legislate such a reduction plan would waste billions of dollars. The Democrats can whine and moan all they want, but the Capitalist system WORKS. Big Business is policing itself and the quality of our environment is improving constantly.
I work in a large datacenter with some very powerful machines, and I just don't see Linux having much of a future on mainframes, at least not without some serious kernel improvements. It is an excellent OS, and would be a good choice for a workstation or a low-end server, but would be a very poor choice for a high-end mainframe machine. The linux kernel is highly configurable and it would certainly be possible to get a Linux kernel running on a massively parallel machine, but this was not what Linux was designed for, and performance would not be on par with other more robust Unices. Linux' inferior TCP/IP stack as well as its inferior handling of multi-threading on a large scale is its major weakness in this area. Until these weaknesses are addressed, I would prefer Solaris, Irix, or HP/UX instead, as they were designed from the ground up with mainframe usage in mind.
While they might have cheap, Linux-friendly PCs, I would urge everyone to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart at all costs. Wal-Mart is well known for their globalization tactics, their use of third-world labor, and their opression of competition in small-towns.
A large portion of Wal-Mart's merchandise is produced in third-world countries under sweatshop conditions. This immoral and unethical business practice may save you a few pennies at the checkout but it exploits children and exaggerates the distance between socioeconomic classes. Even the processor in the "linux-friendly PC" sold at Wal-Mart is manufactured from child labor in third-world countries. It is a well known fact that AMD Duron processors are made in a sweatshop in Maylasia. I would urge everyone concerned with the exploitation of the poor children to purchase only American-made genuine Intel processors. Furthermore, using third-world labor for manufacturing causes significant harm to the American economy because of the tens of thousands of blue collar manufacturing jobs which have been moved overseas. Wal-Mart portrays a patriotic image in its advertising campaigns, but in reality is an evil corporate monster who exploits children for the sake of its own bottom line. The best way to fight this is with our dollars. Don't spend any money at Wal-Mart and support their evil globalised empire. If we all band together, we can stop this evil menace.
Most business desktops are built around Intel processors. AMD does not have much of a market outside of the enthusiast croud. Many businesses are hesitant to use AMD processors, and you may want to consider some of the reasons behind that decision. AMD processors generally run hotter and require more power than their Intel counterparts. This isn't a big deal for most home users, but in a business with a large number of computers in a relatively small amount of space, the additional heat output and power requirements could become a significant issue. Also, AMD CPUs are not considered to be nearly as reliable for mission critical applications. They may work out fine in the average desktop, but in a server environment where uptime is more crucial, AMD chips simply have not proven their reliability, whereas Intel chips have built their reputation upon years and years of usage in a real-world environment. There is also the issue of application compatibility. You never know what kind of weird bugs might crop up when you're using a CPU that is not 100% x86 compatible such as the Athlon. Intel DEVELOPED the x68 standard, and their processors are guaranteed to be fully standards-compliant. I'm not saying that AMD's are useless. They are certainly cheaper than Intel processors, but like the old adage goes, you get what you pay for!
The inherent flaw in the grassroots community wireless scheme is that current technology provides no way of identifying individual users and holding an individual liable for the bandwidth he or she consumes. A wireless access point is a one-time investment, and is relatively inexpensive, however bandwidth is not free. The lowest rates I've seen are in the range of 1-2 dollars per gigabyte, and these prices are usually only available in bulk to major datacenters and ISPs. These prices have remained stable for the past several years and show no indications of dropping any time soon. The average user is going to pay quite a bit more for bandwidth, and simply cannot afford to give this valuable commodity away without compensation.
Existing wireless networking protocols are inherently weak in that they do not have any built-in features which would support personal identification and authentication. This design flaw makes it hard, if not impossible for a hobbiest interested in providing a wireless access point to be compensated for the valuable services provided. I feel that it would be an invaluable service for the IEEE to imbed universally identifiable ID tags which could be tied to hardware similar to MAC addressing in ethernet networking products. This would allow do-it-yourself access providers as well as ISPs to track users and provide billing capability for wireless usage. Until this happens, free wireless networking simply cannot thrive in a Capitalist environment.
I, for one, welcome the oncoming of Microsoft's C# language. A little bit of competition can only help the market. When I first started programming in Java eight years ago, the industry was far different than today. Java was, for the most part, an open standard, and one was free to do with it as one pleased. Now that Java is the biggest player in the industry, it seems Sun has gotten a bit greedy, and is trying to cash in on Java's popularity.
Microsoft's C# entry will only cause more competition in the market, and the consumers and programmers are the ones who will benefit. I'd love to see Sun loosen some of their restrictive Java liscensing practices in response to C#, and I think that is just what will happen. Open source wins the day yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
He drowned while attempting to sodomize a dolphin.
R.I.P Juan Epstein
In a story that's sure to get a lot of replies.
Linux is only free if your time has no value.
Any software project larger than "Hello World!" is going to be dependant upon libraries which are liscensed under the GPL. While the LGPL was created to address some of these issues, not every library is liscensed under the LGPL, so the problem still exists. This includes the very prevalant C++ library which includes the cin and cout operators which I'm sure every programmer has used at some point in his or her career.
Please see here, here, or here for documentation supporting my claims. The last link goes to an article written by Stallman himself addressing this problem, so please don't try and tell my that my information is based on Microsoft FUD.
I certainly hope Apple isn't using GCC to compile their production software. GCC is a fine compiler, however it is inherently flawed due to the fact that it is released under the GPL liscense.
Due to the viral nature of the GPL, any software compiled using GCC could be considered a "derivative work" of the GCC, thus forcing that software to be open-source under the terms of the GPL. I doubt Apple wants the source code to their highly-prized OSX to be available to any Joe User who wants to copy it.
This is also the primary reason why Apple chose FreeBSD as the core of OSX instead of Linux. The BSD liscense is much freer (speech) than the GPL.
Not only does Passport go against the KISS philosophy embraced by many Unix and Linux developers, but the potential for security breaches is only magnified when a single universal authentication system is developed. It seems to me we'd be better off leaving authentication procedures up to the individual site owner rather than having a universal authentication protocol built-into Apache. This would also be a more practical solution as a single authentication system cannot be tailored to fit all sites. I sure don't want to trust all of my on-line bank transactions to something like Passport, so the need exists for highly encrypted ultra-secure authentication on some sites, while other less secure sites like Slashdot which transmit passwords across the 'net in plain text could probably get by with using a much more basic authentication system.
By mentioning Hitler, you have invoked Godwin's Law and subsequently lost the flamewar by default. YHL. HAND.
Here's a more accurate analogy:
Billy Boy has a large lemonade stand which sells lemonade for five dollars a glass. He makes a lot of money and has a lot of customers despite his competition, which includes:
Steve Jobs: Sells lemonade for fifty cents a glass, but in order to buy his lemonade, you also have to buy a glass and straw from him for nine fifty. The glasses are available in lots of trendy colors, but they're smaller and more inefficient than standard glasses, so Stevey doesn't have very many customers.
Tux: Doesn't have a stand, but he has a lemon tree, some sugar cane and and old-fashioned pump well. You can make your own lemonade if you'd like, and its free, but it takes a couple of hours to pick and squeeze lemons, pump water and extract sugar from the cane in order to make the lemonade, and you're not always guaranteed of its quality. There are thirty or forty lemon trees, and some taste good, while others do not. A few enthusiasts drink Tux's lemonade and rave about how great it is, but most mainstream customers are willing to just pay the five bucks.
I don't mean to sound like a Luddite, but I'm not sure technology is the best solution in a situation like this. Technology is great for many uses, but for a task as simple as voting, it is much easier and more practical to simply use existing methods which have been proven by their use in the past hundreds if not thousands of years. Voters who are not computer savvy will likely become confused by the unnecessary complication of the new voting machines and many are likely to cast their ballots in error, possibly voting for a candidate they had no intention of supporting. Clearly, in a situation such as this, current paper voting mechanisims are much more accurate and reliable. Furthermore, if voting is to be computerized, we're leaving ourselves vulnerable to all sorts of hacking and digital manipulation of the ballots which otherwise would not exist. It's been said many times here before that no computer system is 100% secure, and I, for one, do not want to trust my country's elections to the likes of Microsoft of Red Hat. Paper elections are much harder, if not impossible, to tamper with.
I'm starting to get sick of playing all those flashy professionally-made games on my high end gaming machine. Now I can finally play classic games like Tuxracer, Freeciv, fortune, and hangman and leave all those crappy multi-million-dollar Xbox games on the shelf. Thank you, hackers, for bringing Linux' superior game selection to the Xbox!
Many of the personal e-mails which I send are unsolicited and, while I am certainly not a spammer, could violate anti-spam laws because the recipient did not specifically request to be sent e-mail. I don't generally send mailing list removal instructions with my personal correspondance either. Does this mean that I am in violation of anti-spam laws?
Legislating one's right to communicate freely goes against everything this country was founded upon, and anti-spam legislation is just another example of an overly powerful government taking away the rights of its citizens. I, for one will not support any such law, or any lawmaker who supports such a law.
It seems that the issue at hand isn't the act of logging activities themselves, but how willing your ISP is to distribute those logs. In all previous cases I am aware of, ISP's do not give out personal information about a user without first being served with a subpoena. This is no worse than the restrictions we have had on wiretapping and eavesdropping for the past 50 or so years, so I don't see any reason for anyone to get upset about this. If you aren't breaking the law, then you have nothing to worry about, and your information will remain private in the hands of your service provider, however if you're doing something illegal, then there is no reason that the FBI or such should not be able to serve your ISP with a subpoena to obtain your usage logs. Its perfectly within our Constitutional rights for the government to do this, and anyone who is made nervous because of this probably has something to hide.
The articles are split into multiple pages so good ol' Tom can get more banner impressions. And yes, it is annoying.
Now, I'm not implying that cutting pollution is a Bad Thing(tm), but merely that Kyoto is a restrictive and impractical way to cut pollution output. Air and water quality in most first-world nations is far cleaner today than it was 30 years ago, and we're improving upon this yearly. Cars burn less fuel, and the fuel they do burn is burned much more efficiently, than older cars. Factories have installed pollution scrubbers on their smokestacks, and have ceased dumping waste into the water supply. People are also more aware of the environment these days, and community recycling programs are reducing waste going into landfills. Capitalism has done its job and continues to do so in improving environmental quality every day. There is no need for government mandated pollution reduction, and to attempt to legislate such a reduction plan would waste billions of dollars. The Democrats can whine and moan all they want, but the Capitalist system WORKS. Big Business is policing itself and the quality of our environment is improving constantly.
Have you been reading his sex tips for geeks again?
So are most Linux users.
Check their palms. This IS Slashdot we're talking about.
Wait, you paid $7 for a silver dollar coin? If you want even more efficient cooling, I'll sell you 100 pennies for only $9.99.
I work in a large datacenter with some very powerful machines, and I just don't see Linux having much of a future on mainframes, at least not without some serious kernel improvements. It is an excellent OS, and would be a good choice for a workstation or a low-end server, but would be a very poor choice for a high-end mainframe machine. The linux kernel is highly configurable and it would certainly be possible to get a Linux kernel running on a massively parallel machine, but this was not what Linux was designed for, and performance would not be on par with other more robust Unices. Linux' inferior TCP/IP stack as well as its inferior handling of multi-threading on a large scale is its major weakness in this area. Until these weaknesses are addressed, I would prefer Solaris, Irix, or HP/UX instead, as they were designed from the ground up with mainframe usage in mind.
While they might have cheap, Linux-friendly PCs, I would urge everyone to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart at all costs. Wal-Mart is well known for their globalization tactics, their use of third-world labor, and their opression of competition in small-towns.
A large portion of Wal-Mart's merchandise is produced in third-world countries under sweatshop conditions. This immoral and unethical business practice may save you a few pennies at the checkout but it exploits children and exaggerates the distance between socioeconomic classes. Even the processor in the "linux-friendly PC" sold at Wal-Mart is manufactured from child labor in third-world countries. It is a well known fact that AMD Duron processors are made in a sweatshop in Maylasia. I would urge everyone concerned with the exploitation of the poor children to purchase only American-made genuine Intel processors. Furthermore, using third-world labor for manufacturing causes significant harm to the American economy because of the tens of thousands of blue collar manufacturing jobs which have been moved overseas. Wal-Mart portrays a patriotic image in its advertising campaigns, but in reality is an evil corporate monster who exploits children for the sake of its own bottom line. The best way to fight this is with our dollars. Don't spend any money at Wal-Mart and support their evil globalised empire. If we all band together, we can stop this evil menace.
Most business desktops are built around Intel processors. AMD does not have much of a market outside of the enthusiast croud. Many businesses are hesitant to use AMD processors, and you may want to consider some of the reasons behind that decision. AMD processors generally run hotter and require more power than their Intel counterparts. This isn't a big deal for most home users, but in a business with a large number of computers in a relatively small amount of space, the additional heat output and power requirements could become a significant issue. Also, AMD CPUs are not considered to be nearly as reliable for mission critical applications. They may work out fine in the average desktop, but in a server environment where uptime is more crucial, AMD chips simply have not proven their reliability, whereas Intel chips have built their reputation upon years and years of usage in a real-world environment. There is also the issue of application compatibility. You never know what kind of weird bugs might crop up when you're using a CPU that is not 100% x86 compatible such as the Athlon. Intel DEVELOPED the x68 standard, and their processors are guaranteed to be fully standards-compliant. I'm not saying that AMD's are useless. They are certainly cheaper than Intel processors, but like the old adage goes, you get what you pay for!
Only if you take their staplers away from them.
Existing wireless networking protocols are inherently weak in that they do not have any built-in features which would support personal identification and authentication. This design flaw makes it hard, if not impossible for a hobbiest interested in providing a wireless access point to be compensated for the valuable services provided. I feel that it would be an invaluable service for the IEEE to imbed universally identifiable ID tags which could be tied to hardware similar to MAC addressing in ethernet networking products. This would allow do-it-yourself access providers as well as ISPs to track users and provide billing capability for wireless usage. Until this happens, free wireless networking simply cannot thrive in a Capitalist environment.
Microsoft's C# entry will only cause more competition in the market, and the consumers and programmers are the ones who will benefit. I'd love to see Sun loosen some of their restrictive Java liscensing practices in response to C#, and I think that is just what will happen. Open source wins the day yet again.