Just to be precise : at least in France, you need a licence for firearms (a hunting licence for hunting weapons, and a certificate from the local NRA certifying you practiced at the range regularly for at least six months, plus a police inquiry for revolvers or semi-automatic weapons. Also, you need to own a safe for the latter). And of course, you cannot carry them in the street unless you get a special permit (I'm not really familiar with this, but I reckon you need to show you really have a need for that, e.g. you've received serious threats). So, it's not like it's unregulated, quite to the contrary. And the law provides that the response to an attack must be proportional to the threat, hence shooting an unarmed burglar will most probably land you in court.
As for Switzerland, their citizens do their military service in installments over twenty years, and they're indeed required to keep their automatic assault rifle in their house. Note I did say "in their house". This means : in a safe vault, and no carrying if you're not in service. Do you begin to see a pattern, here ? All these countries allow firearms ownership, sure. But they require (1) a modicum of experience using them (be it at the range or with the military) so that you're not a danger to yourself or others, and (2) that you *don't* go around with them. It's completely different than a place where you would get a pistol over the counter and carry it outside concealed. Provided it's done in a responsible way, there indeed is no problem with firearms in every house, I heartily agree with that...
> I'm sure there were alot of Jews who said the same thing when Hitler came to power......
All right. I didn't want to delve in this debate, but that near-Godwinesque allusion is just over the top. Looking at my own ID card, I see the following information:
An ID card serial number
A B&W photograph of Yours Truly
My name and surname
My sex (just in case someone didn't get it from the beard, I presume)
My birth date and place
My height (they didn't check what I told them with a ruler, BTW)
My (old) signature
An outdated address (it changed no less than four times since I got that ID in '97. Indeed, every cop that asked me for ID always followed up with "is your address still the same ?")
What I don't see:
My religion (or rather, lack of it)
My ethnicity
My credit rating
My political leanings
Or basically anything that could allow an Evil Governement[tm] to discriminate against the group(s) whom I belong to, like you apparently imply. You'll thus pardon me if I just cannot see what the big deal is. I went and read the arguments on UnrealID.Com, and I saw this:
"The Real ID Act requires that you give your permanent home address: no PO boxes; no exceptions. What about judges, police, and undercover cops? Oops!!! Hey Senators, let's endanger our police and judges!!!"
Wow ! Undercover cops won't be able to hide their real identities ? They manage to do it very well around here, despite those pesky ID cards. And how will the Bad Guys[tm] know a judge's address (assuming he doesn't walk with his ID sticked to his forehead) ? They'll steal his ID card ? Well, at that point, they would be equally served by following him to his house when he leaves the court at the end of the day... Anyway, like I said above, the address on the card can quickly be outdated, so they would probably be *better* served by some old-fashioned monitoring.
Our new IDs will have to make their data available through a "common machine-readable technology". That will make it easy for anybody in private industry to snap up the data on these IDs.
This one is only valid if the machine-readable technology (magnetic strip or else) contains all the information on the card. If it contains just the serial number, well, they could as well write it down--that's what the lady at the local mall does when I pay my groceries with a check, anyway. But it won't tell them much on me. As an aside, if anybody in the private industry wants to know I'm a male, 1.81m tall and born 25 years ago, well, I'll gladly let them know these highly secret and embarrassing facts. Now, if the card did contain really important info (like my medical history), that would be a whole other matter. But it doesn't.
Real ID requires the states to link their databases together for the mutual sharing of data from these IDs. This is, in effect, a single seamless national database, available to all the states and to the federal government.
Yikes ! I'm scared. But... about *what* ? This is exactly how things are over here, and I'm yet to witness a nefarious effect (though I'm also yet to find a positive effect, especially wrt the administration's efficiency, which is nearly nil. Maybe it's just an unavoidable bureaucracy flaw and no centralized, interconnected design can change that *sigh*)...
If Real ID passes the Senate, our nation will join the ranks of the old Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam by issuing its citizens a national ID card.
Aahhhhh, that old red flag-waving tactic ! Just imagine : you'll be like the *Soviet Union* (and also like Belgium, France, and countless other democratic, western nations. But sshhhhh ! Let's scare people with the Communist Menace straw man, okay ?).
the Department of Homeland Security, which will be crafting the regulations
> Opera and Mozilla are not file managers, thus they do not need a plugin to browse available printers etc on the LAN
But, wouldn't they benefit from a plugin for something like this (from TFWebsite) ?
"Safari, Apple's turbo-charged web browser, uses Bonjour to find any web addresses on your local network - for printer, router or webcam setup and administration, for instance."
If that is what I think it is, it seems very cool, no more remembering that the CUPS control panel is on http;//172.18.124.49:681/ for instance...
> We already have a great protocol for sending all kinds of information over VoIP lines, including the identity and location of the caller and what their problem is. It's called English.
IIRC, the last article about this issue had a 911 manager saying that, most of the time, people were just too agitated or frightened to speak coherently. He said something along the lines of "without location information, all we're going to get is an open line with a screaming person". Think dramatic situations here, someone trapped in a burning building for instance. In such cases, you need a lot of will to keep cool and give the necessary information. Not to mention that you could honestly be unsure about your location (for instance, if you're out of town, or didn't look street names).
Also, what about people who are travelling out of their country ? I can only imagine the look of the US 911 operator when a caller tells him he needs help in Oslo, Norway. Totally fun--Not!
Sorry, but I clearly think being able to locate emergency calls with precision is much more than just "nice". At the very least, VoIP users need to be educated, so they'll think about setting the right locale when travelling.
Funny, I still prefer the option where the bastard gets nabbed by the cops;-)
> Taking a persons ID wont prevent harrassment or any crime whatsoever. You can buy a SIM card with someone eleses ID in France BTW; I have personally seen it done.
Well, there's clearly a problem somewhere. As AFAIK all French IDs come with a photography, this shows a certain laxism. Still, the requirement isn't broken, the people who do not follow it correctly are.
> what is totally wrong is when the state compells a bank or other service provider to identify its customers with state issued ID.
This argument is akin to saying "the relation between an auto manufacturer and you is a private one [which is correct], therefore the state has no business telling the manufacturer to build seat belts in the car, or requiring you to wear them [which is a non-sequitur. In the end, no seat belts would cost a lot to the state in medical benefits to people injured in accidents, like identity theft would cost a lot in lawsuits. It is thus beneficial to society to require measures to avoid such mishaps]". As an aside, I would like to point out the important thing, as far as privacy is concerned, is not whether your bank asks for ID, but rather whether your bank avoids divulgating your transactions to third parties. Your point is thus moot, IMHO...
> If I have a prescription in my hands, and go to a pharmacy, there is no reason why I should not be handed my medicine without any other checks
Because you could have just grabbed someone else's prescription ? !
> Of course, idiots and retarded persons do not understand that a uniquie number recorded against your prescriptions can give access to unauthorized parties to all of you medical details.
Not so easy. You would first need to locate the pharmacists your target used in some way, and then subpoena them all to get the information (assuming they are authorized to divulgate medical secrets, I'm not quite sure about this). It's not like there is a central database of everything you buy in a pharmacy.
> We can file this part of your reply under "I dont want to have my identity stolen". IDs will not help keeep your ID out of the hands of criminals, but instead will help criminals impersonate you with consumate ease.
You're perfectly right about one thing : IDs do not prevent criminals to impersonate you, any more than a password check doesn't prevent a cracker from 0wn1ng your box. What these measures do is *raise the barrier of entry* in the marvelous world of identity fraud : if IDs are required, you need to forge IDs. Most people aren't able to do this (or will do such a shoddy job they'll get busted nearly immediately). Thus, the risk level is reduced (but not completely eliminated, that I'll gladly concede to you).
> You cannot fathom where the logic of all of this lies because you are probably under 25
I'm 25, actually. But I still do not grok why we should render the task of identity thieves easier. Oh, sure, it would generate a lot of funny lawsuits, and more work for the police, but curiously this doesn't appeal much to me...
> It was a waste, clearly, since you do not have the slightest idea of what a free life looks like.
Let's make a deal : what about you tell me what this "free life" (whatever it is you define as such) looks like, and I tell you if the perceived advantages are enough in my opinion to balance identity theft and other risks ?
True enough. It did when I started using it, but this feature has indeed been removed. I stand corrected.
> And how can you talk about displaying PDF without mentioning Ghostscript
Quite easily, in fact;-) As far as displaying goes, I'll rather use xpdf or one of its siblings like kpdf/gpdf. The Ghostscript Viewer is good but it has already crashed on me several times on documents I had no problem viewing with xpdf, so I switched. YMMV, of course...
I'm not by any means an advocate of government control, but being certain of the identity of a telephone owner isn't necessarily a bad thing. For instance, if the telephone is used to harass somebody else, or to detonate explosive devices by remote control (remember the Madrid bombings ?)
> borrow money, open a bank account
Huh... hello ? I sure would hope for banks anywhere in the world to check for positive ID before doing *any* transaction. But the reality, which I've experienced numerous times, is that you can enter your bank's local branch, and withdraw money just by telling them your account number (which is known and stored in probably insecure databases by lots of organizations. LexisNexis, here we come !). This gives me the creeps.
> buy medicine
For *prescription-only* drugs, which of course the pharmacist shouldn't hand to whoever comes in. Sure, told this way, it sounds less orwellian. D'oh !
> there are always the mentally retarded who say things like [...] "How can you control identity without it?" (said to me by a French man)
Ah ! Those wacky French. They have such weird arguments, at times ! I mean, they probably would even have the guts to be upset if someone impersonated them and did nasty things under their identities... Well, I'm known for being a mentally-retarded monkey, so I'll ask : how do you check the identity of who has done what if you've no records ? I'm sure there are extremely clever ways to do it without an ID, and I want to hear about those (this isn't just sarcasm, BTW. I would like to know if someone has devised such a system, and how it works).
> These imbeciles are the perpetual stumbling blocks to the continuation and longevity of any sort of freedom in the west.
I've got the strange feeling you're confusing "freedom" and "anonymity". These are two different and unrelated concepts. For instance, if there was a law against writing under a pseudonym, it wouldn't mean you have no freedom of speech. Just that you need to speak under your real name. Of course, it's better when you can do it anonymously, but it's not necessarily related.
Finally, I would like to ask : why is it that when programmers write software like 'rsh' which doesn't try very hard to check who its user is, it's deemed insecure, and conversely when such flaws are pointed out in real life, they are OK for the sake of privacy ? I just can't fathom where the logic of this lies...
> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive
On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with avarietyofsoftwarepackages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses;-)
> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on
Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).
> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features
It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...
> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer
Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).
> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards
What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !
[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*
> This is the reverse of the closed source world where having had good ideas once entitles you to maintain a monopoly to the detriment of the consumer.
Although I very much agree with your other points, may I remark that the closed source world isn't exactly foreign to this reverse-engineering idea ? I remember some product called DR-DOS, for instance, that was basically a reverse-engineered clone of MS-DOS. Also, nearly every word processor or spreadsheet on the market contains a bit of reverse-engineered code to read files written by competing software. Reverse-engineering is just more widespread in the FLOSS world because the proprietary houses didn't bother porting their software in the beginning, or because the conditions to get the official documentation weren't acceptable for free software (think DeCSS).
> "coming clean" after you've violated the license on GPL software is not enough, you have to ask for forgiveness too.
Funny, that's not the opinion of the only court to have decided a GPL violation case. Instead, they said this :
"Furthermore is to be considered that the effective offer does not expire upon a violation, but the violator can reacquire the rights at any time by acceptance of and compliance with the conditions. Thus, the automatic termination is not particularly severe for the violator"
So, whatever Moglen may have "intended", the judges' opinion shows it can very well be interpreted differently.
> Now, I don't know exactly where on that tiny car the tank is, but I'd assume it's under the seat someplace.
In the prototypes, it was apparently under the chassis (look at the third picture). I suppose the separation would prevent the air from entering the passengers' area.
> The volume of that car is what...two cubic meters? What happens when you instantly put 90 cubic meters of air inside it? (Or under it?)
Maybe the car will be lifted up a bit, but remember the tank is supposed to crack and let the air escape, not rupture all at once. As a side note, MDI says the technology employed for their tanks is the same as the one used for natural gas-powered buses (and while I ride one of these everyday, I've still not heard of any injuries caused by a gas tank rupture, though in all honesty those buses have their tank on the roof, so they're less likely to be broken in a crash)
> Gasoline is good in comparison because it doesn't tend to do this when the tank is ruptured.
Well, sure but it *can* take fire, and there have been casualties because of crash-induced blazes. Also, every kind of energy has its dangers : an electric car obviously carries a risk of electrocution, for instance. I think drastic safety regulations should be enough to reduce the risks to nearly nil.
(obligatory disclaimer : the inventor of that air-compressed car is a friend of a friend. Still, I'm not associated with him in any way and in fact have never met him personally. I just think his idea is pretty good)
> Yeah, but nobody has ever seen a steam-powered speeder on the Salt Flats either.
I don't know where the Salt Flats are (or what they are, a racetrack maybe ?), but I know that a steam-powered car has already broken a speed record (in 1906, admittedly, but 205 km/h is not bad for a car, even by today standards), and some British engineer has built a steamer that goes at 320 km/h. And, AFAIK, steam turbines are used to propel very heavy machines (like nuclear submarines). You do not need to use coal to make steam, you know;-)
> Shrinking the form factor tends to do things to power.
Not exactly. Sure, big electric motors have better efficiencies than the ones in your toy RC car, but overall electric engines are pretty efficient compared to internal combustion engines who lose a lot of their power in dissipated heat. What really does things to power, as another poster above insightfully remarks, is energy storage, or "batteries totally suck". Electric trains, trams and trolleybuses can just raise their pantograph or trolley pole and get really huge amounts of energy compared to what would be available with batteries. But then, they're limited to the catenary-fitted tracks or roads. I think electric (autonomous) vehicles will get a wider acceptance when more powerful storage systems, like fuel cells, are finally marketed, as people will experience the benefits of electric engines without suffering from the low ranges and long charging times which are currently the hallmarks of battery-powered cars.
> german (food) companies are somewhat known to defend their trademarks.
It works the other way around, too. A French publishing company (Les éditions Albert René, sorry no link as they doesn't seem to have a Website. editions-albert-rene.com is ironically enough owned by a cybersquatter) sued a German about the domain mobilix.org (you see, they publish the Asterix [fr] comic books, and they thought the name Mobilix was too close to the Obelix character). Despite there being huge piles of names ending in -ix (does Unix rings a bell ?), the German courts sided with the publisher, forcing the site to relocate. You can find more about this fiasco at its new address.
So, does this mean French or German courts are full of slimy judges who do not understand a thing to technology (or like big business) ? I do not think so. For instance, recently, a German court upheld the GPL against a WiFi router manufacturer, and at least one French court confirmed it was legal to download files from P2P networks (as long as there was no sharing, which kills a bit the point of P2P, but they couldn't go against the written copyright law). The problem is that trademark laws seem stronger in Europe, and the judges are simply doing their job. And sometimes, businesses are on the losing end : five years ago, Vivendi was forced to pay [fr] a huge sum to an individual who had previously registered a mark similar to their own, Vizzavi...
> However, it's probably easier to just use the white noise generator, at the expense of emergency calls.
AFAIK, this is what was done until now. I guess the title should rather be ``France to require cell phone jammers to allow emergency calls''. That being said, I'm unaware of any situation where jammers could have caused problems. After all, theaters have landlines, and I don't see any necessity for everyone in the theater calling emergency services at once (they should just alert an employee who will call them from the theater's phone). This law seems to be some preemptive attempt to avoid rather unlikely problems, or maybe to sell more sophisticated jammers:-)
With Konqueror Cut/Copy/Paste buttons are deactivated, but you can right-click and select 'Copy text' even with JavaScript on. Also, to download the image if you don't use a disk cache, just look at the URL in the source code (as said above, you need to search for the string.theimg), and then use wget. Warning : you *need* to specify a valid referrer (the search page is OK) *and* a valid user-agent string (wget and so on are banned). The following command works, remove all newlines and unwanted spaces added by/. prior to use:
$ wget --output-document=image.jpeg --user-agent='Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Yeah, sure, I m not a download manager. Honest)' --referer='http://print.google.com/print?id=ULQSG0 Zs7vcC&lpg=3&pg=3&sig=QD6xDOsosnwh8uXQuXRJL5old88' 'http://print.google.com/print?id=ULQSG0Zs7vcC&pg= 3&img=1&sig=gv2nFptEf0dj7Gzb8eZ4U8UdtUo'
I'm pretty sure you could make some script to automate this. Have fun:-)
Why is it useless ? Well, because regardless of whether people can install ChatZilla or not (BTW, I don't think there are that much people that know about Mozilla XPIs), they'll most probably settle for an easier solution : use a Web gateway to IRC or some other messaging system. Faster and easier. Of course, you can block that, too. IIRC, most of those gateways will use Java so you can just remove the Java plug-in (if you don't use it for something else), firewall everything, and just to be sure, use a transparent proxy with some filter like SquidGuard on it...
As for my opinion, since we're talking about an university setting (hence adult people), I suggest that those guys are mature enough to know not to chat during important lessons. And if they do, well, they'll fail their exams, and that's their problem. They're adults, remember ? No need to go out of your way "protecting" them from themselves. IMHO, of course.
> The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.
A possible temporary solution is this one. On the long-term, I suggest sacrificing goats until the MSIE team makes a new, improved release. They've recently resurfaced, so maybe they're alive and coding on it, who knows:-)
I'm not saying I'm a professional translator (I'm not:-) but maybe this translation by hand will make more sense than the Fish. Expect lots of typos and such, still, I wrote it in a hurry. My personal comments are in brackets. Enjoy ! Or not.
28 % of office time dedicated to Internet and e-mail, 2 % to Excel
What do employees do on their computers ? It is that thorny question that a study lead by Microcost -- in partnership with Acadys -- tries to answer. An investigation which goal isn't to monitor users but rather wishes to lay the foundations of a rethinking about rationalizing costs of managing large computer installations.
Over a month, 1 285 500 workstations were scanned in a thousand enterprises distributed in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England, Italy).
First finding, a user spends on average two hours and fifteen minutes per day on his workstation. He dedicates more than a quarter (28 %) of this time to the Internet/e-mail couple. As for the rest, office applications, business applications and Windows Explorer take respectively 17 %, 14 % and 9 % of an employee's used time. The office application's 17 % is further subdivised in 15 % for word processing and 2 % for Excel [I just can't understand why word processing was generalized while spreadsheets seems in the journalist's opinion to be Excel's exclusive domain -- Translator's note].
A business has thus an interest in modifying its software licence policy according to different use patterns, to avoid paying for a complete office suite if the main tool to be used is the word processor [Well, I suppose you could use OpenOffice.org for the rest. You could even use it for the word processor, in fact -- Translator's note]. According to the study, 10 software packages grab 67 % of uses [I'm not sure if he speaks about different uses or usage time -- Tr. note]. These numbers even go up to 89 % in the industrial sector, while they drop to 42 % in services-oriented businesses.
In addition to software usage data, the AMI software (from which the informations gathered for the study were originated) allows to obtain numbers regarding the reliance of Microsoft's Operating Systems. For instance, the average failure rate requiring a system reboot has been measured at about 8 % per session. These numbers dramatically fluctuate according to the considered Windows version. So, Windows 2000 has a 4 % failure rate and NT 4 has 3 % [This must be total BS, I've never seen such a crash-prone system than NT4 except Win9x -- Tr. note], while Windows XP is around 12 %.
Last, the study reveals employees' habits with regard to printing. The paperless office isn't poised to arrive soon, since 10 pages per user are printed on average in a day. These are distributed in 3 or 4 printing commands of which half are directed to local printers, while the other half goes to network printers. Still, if the printing cost drops to a few Eurocents when printing is done on a network printer, it's multiplied by five when it's done on a local printer, because of printer supplies' prices.
Also of note, unsurprisingly 95 % of workstations are fitted with a Windows environment, the Win2000 version being predominant in professional use. Present on 42 % of workstations, this version has largely replaced NT4, which claims now only 16 %. As to Windows XP, it struggles to find its audience, especially in industrial settings, 83 % of whom opted for Windows 2000. Only services-oriented business have 5 % of their computer installations running on Windows XP, while the total average is around 2 %.
Beyond all these numbers, the consulting company recommends several solutions to CTOs to rationalize their computer installations. Among these good practices reminders, the company successively points to thin clients, Open Source Software [I wonder if there's anyone except Microsoft who won't mention FLOSS these days -- Tr. note], licence management optimization, and longer periods between renewing the installed computers' hardware as well as their software.
> The search you linked to pulled up a pile of cool articles.
Please read the paragraph where I said I wasn't commenting on whether the article is interesting. The "coolness" of Piquepaille's spam isn't the subject.
> What "spam" are you talking about in this off-topic, flamebait troll of yours?
Please read the part where it says that the "overview", "more details" and so on in Piquepaille's submissions are always directed at his own weblog in an obvious attempt to get more traffic and hence more money from the ads that show on the aforementioned weblog. Posting disguised self-advertisements on Slashdot seems spammy enough to me, but you're of course entitled to your own opinion.
> What's self serving about any of those stories?
The fact that he always uses his submissions to drive traffic to his own site, where he uses plagiarized and/or stolen content to gain ads revenue. Note that all his submissions to Slashdot include a link to his own site. You won't find any where he would just point to the people who wrote the original content without peddling his blog. You also won't likely find anybody except himself posting links to his blog. Can you see a pattern here ? I sure can !
> Do you have anything interesting to say about this interesting looking workstation?
No, and I don't give a damn. See the aforementioned paragraph.
That's it. Posting deceptive self-advertisements to Slashdot should not be rewarded by ad traffic. But if you want to support him, you're of course free to do so. At least, you'll have been warned.
Attention, a public service announcement follows : do not read the "overview" touted by Mr. Piquepaille. This person constantly spams Slashdot, trying to get traffic to his site on Radio Userland (which I'm not linking to, for obvious reasons). Do NOT go to his overview, you're only giving traffic to a spammer. See theserecurringcomplaints, for instance. Not to mention he steals the images he puts on his blog and sometimes also spews bullshit for lack of knowing better. This must stop. In any way, do not fall for the spam, and do not provide him any more traffic. Please also warn fellow readers when you see one of his self-serving posts.
And now, a personal message (warning : verbal abuse in foreign language follows) : Roland, tu nous les brises. Va te pendre, hé Ducon !
[disclaimer : I'm not commenting on whether the subject is interesting, or not. But the kind of astroturfing the submitter engages in regularly is just wrong]
> Is having a whole distro built from source a good enough specific reason to still build from source?
Yes, of course. As is the need to have different compile-time settings than the maintainer, or merging additional/different patches. I keep building two dozens Debian packages locally for exactly these reasons. But let's not fool ourselves : by the time we get there, we're no longer the ``n00bs'' the original poster was referring to. I think most novices will just take binary packages, at least for a while.
> But hey, to each their own. Which is why I love Linux. You may love Debian, I love Gentoo...it's still Linux.
I couldn't have said it better ! It's in my opinion a very good selling point for Linux : there is no one-size-fits-all solution that's shoehorned on you like on proprietary systems. You get to choose what's best, or even create your own custom solution. I think that's why I decided to stick with Linux in the first place.
> I also wonder why people always throw out the "Linux on the desktop just isn't here yet". How "here" does it have to get?
Let's face it : this will never stop. Linux (and free software in general) faces an uphill battle on all fronts. Hardware support is hindered by manufacturers not releasing drivers or even specifications, yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not supporting their latest gizmo. Compatibility with popular software like Office is difficult to attain, primarily because Microsoft uses obscure, undocumented formats. Yet people will bitch and moan at OpenOffice.org/Gnome Office/KOffice for misaligning their twisted tables, or adding too much space (and forgetting compatibility can even be haphazard between Office releases). Educational software, encyclopedias, etc. are nearly never released on Linux (one recent exception. Warning : non-english text, you can try the Fish). Yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not running their software, not at the publishers who don't write portable code while portable toolkits already exist.
All these problems have solutions. WINE, for instance, can help people run their proprietary applications, but then, they just bitch about it being hard to configure. The latest versions work nearly out-of-the-box, but people will then bitch about imperfect emulation, or slow performance. There is no way to avoid that. Users just like to vent their frustration (sometimes I even do, too, although on a different kind of problems). All this is not important. We'll know when Linux is ready for the mythical desktop when we'll see lots of Linux boxes everywhere we go instead of the odd one here and there. Then, the endless bitching will be irrelevant.
Oh, and BTW, all this applies for the personal/SOHO desktop. I very much think the corporate desktop will be attained a lot faster, especially with big names like IBM and Sun now touting FOSS openly.
> What you wrote applies to GPL programs shipped with the distro only.
Not really. More and more proprietary vendors understand that users do not want to lose time with strange non-standard installers. For instance, Opera comes in RPM and DEB flavours.
> Commercial software (Acrobat Reader, Mathematica) installs into/usr/local/$somedir and that's it. The most you can expect is some links created in/usr/local/bin.
Well, if they come into non-packaged form (hence with no easy uninstall procedure), I would rather have them install into a well-defined place anyway (although I would prefer/opt rather than/usr/local), so I can just rm -fr/usr/local/foobar when I don't want them lying around anymore.
> I'd like to see a Mathematic.rpm package conforming to FHS, but that's just a dream.
That's a sorry situation, indeed. Did you try to voice your concerns to Wolfram ? I'm not a Mathematica user, but I seem to remember it's an expensive piece of software, hence I would expect to get good support for my money, including adequate packages for the mainstream distros. And since such a sophisticated software probably has a fair number of Linux users (at least I would think so), there's probably a good chance the publisher will do something. Just a guess...
Slashdot Mirror
> To add some: The Netherlands, Belgium, France.
Just to be precise : at least in France, you need a licence for firearms (a hunting licence for hunting weapons, and a certificate from the local NRA certifying you practiced at the range regularly for at least six months, plus a police inquiry for revolvers or semi-automatic weapons. Also, you need to own a safe for the latter). And of course, you cannot carry them in the street unless you get a special permit (I'm not really familiar with this, but I reckon you need to show you really have a need for that, e.g. you've received serious threats). So, it's not like it's unregulated, quite to the contrary. And the law provides that the response to an attack must be proportional to the threat, hence shooting an unarmed burglar will most probably land you in court.
As for Switzerland, their citizens do their military service in installments over twenty years, and they're indeed required to keep their automatic assault rifle in their house. Note I did say "in their house". This means : in a safe vault, and no carrying if you're not in service. Do you begin to see a pattern, here ? All these countries allow firearms ownership, sure. But they require (1) a modicum of experience using them (be it at the range or with the military) so that you're not a danger to yourself or others, and (2) that you *don't* go around with them. It's completely different than a place where you would get a pistol over the counter and carry it outside concealed. Provided it's done in a responsible way, there indeed is no problem with firearms in every house, I heartily agree with that...
> I'm sure there were alot of Jews who said the same thing when Hitler came to power......
All right. I didn't want to delve in this debate, but that near-Godwinesque allusion is just over the top. Looking at my own ID card, I see the following information :
What I don't see :
Or basically anything that could allow an Evil Governement[tm] to discriminate against the group(s) whom I belong to, like you apparently imply. You'll thus pardon me if I just cannot see what the big deal is. I went and read the arguments on UnrealID.Com, and I saw this :
"The Real ID Act requires that you give your permanent home address: no PO boxes; no exceptions. What about judges, police, and undercover cops? Oops!!! Hey Senators, let's endanger our police and judges!!!"
Wow ! Undercover cops won't be able to hide their real identities ? They manage to do it very well around here, despite those pesky ID cards. And how will the Bad Guys[tm] know a judge's address (assuming he doesn't walk with his ID sticked to his forehead) ? They'll steal his ID card ? Well, at that point, they would be equally served by following him to his house when he leaves the court at the end of the day... Anyway, like I said above, the address on the card can quickly be outdated, so they would probably be *better* served by some old-fashioned monitoring.
Our new IDs will have to make their data available through a "common machine-readable technology". That will make it easy for anybody in private industry to snap up the data on these IDs.
This one is only valid if the machine-readable technology (magnetic strip or else) contains all the information on the card. If it contains just the serial number, well, they could as well write it down--that's what the lady at the local mall does when I pay my groceries with a check, anyway. But it won't tell them much on me. As an aside, if anybody in the private industry wants to know I'm a male, 1.81m tall and born 25 years ago, well, I'll gladly let them know these highly secret and embarrassing facts. Now, if the card did contain really important info (like my medical history), that would be a whole other matter. But it doesn't.
Real ID requires the states to link their databases together for the mutual sharing of data from these IDs. This is, in effect, a single seamless national database, available to all the states and to the federal government.
Yikes ! I'm scared. But... about *what* ? This is exactly how things are over here, and I'm yet to witness a nefarious effect (though I'm also yet to find a positive effect, especially wrt the administration's efficiency, which is nearly nil. Maybe it's just an unavoidable bureaucracy flaw and no centralized, interconnected design can change that *sigh*)...
If Real ID passes the Senate, our nation will join the ranks of the old Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam by issuing its citizens a national ID card.
Aahhhhh, that old red flag-waving tactic ! Just imagine : you'll be like the *Soviet Union* (and also like Belgium, France, and countless other democratic, western nations. But sshhhhh ! Let's scare people with the Communist Menace straw man, okay ?).
the Department of Homeland Security, which will be crafting the regulations
> Opera and Mozilla are not file managers, thus they do not need a plugin to browse available printers etc on the LAN
But, wouldn't they benefit from a plugin for something like this (from TFWebsite) ?
If that is what I think it is, it seems very cool, no more remembering that the CUPS control panel is on http;//172.18.124.49:681/ for instance...
> We already have a great protocol for sending all kinds of information over VoIP lines, including the identity and location of the caller and what their problem is. It's called English.
IIRC, the last article about this issue had a 911 manager saying that, most of the time, people were just too agitated or frightened to speak coherently. He said something along the lines of "without location information, all we're going to get is an open line with a screaming person". Think dramatic situations here, someone trapped in a burning building for instance. In such cases, you need a lot of will to keep cool and give the necessary information. Not to mention that you could honestly be unsure about your location (for instance, if you're out of town, or didn't look street names).
Also, what about people who are travelling out of their country ? I can only imagine the look of the US 911 operator when a caller tells him he needs help in Oslo, Norway. Totally fun--Not!
Sorry, but I clearly think being able to locate emergency calls with precision is much more than just "nice". At the very least, VoIP users need to be educated, so they'll think about setting the right locale when travelling.
> Then the telephone company can kill the line.
Funny, I still prefer the option where the bastard gets nabbed by the cops ;-)
> Taking a persons ID wont prevent harrassment or any crime whatsoever. You can buy a SIM card with someone eleses ID in France BTW; I have personally seen it done.
Well, there's clearly a problem somewhere. As AFAIK all French IDs come with a photography, this shows a certain laxism. Still, the requirement isn't broken, the people who do not follow it correctly are.
> what is totally wrong is when the state compells a bank or other service provider to identify its customers with state issued ID.
This argument is akin to saying "the relation between an auto manufacturer and you is a private one [which is correct], therefore the state has no business telling the manufacturer to build seat belts in the car, or requiring you to wear them [which is a non-sequitur. In the end, no seat belts would cost a lot to the state in medical benefits to people injured in accidents, like identity theft would cost a lot in lawsuits. It is thus beneficial to society to require measures to avoid such mishaps]". As an aside, I would like to point out the important thing, as far as privacy is concerned, is not whether your bank asks for ID, but rather whether your bank avoids divulgating your transactions to third parties. Your point is thus moot, IMHO...
> If I have a prescription in my hands, and go to a pharmacy, there is no reason why I should not be handed my medicine without any other checks
Because you could have just grabbed someone else's prescription ? !
> Of course, idiots and retarded persons do not understand that a uniquie number recorded against your prescriptions can give access to unauthorized parties to all of you medical details.
Not so easy. You would first need to locate the pharmacists your target used in some way, and then subpoena them all to get the information (assuming they are authorized to divulgate medical secrets, I'm not quite sure about this). It's not like there is a central database of everything you buy in a pharmacy.
> We can file this part of your reply under "I dont want to have my identity stolen". IDs will not help keeep your ID out of the hands of criminals, but instead will help criminals impersonate you with consumate ease.
You're perfectly right about one thing : IDs do not prevent criminals to impersonate you, any more than a password check doesn't prevent a cracker from 0wn1ng your box. What these measures do is *raise the barrier of entry* in the marvelous world of identity fraud : if IDs are required, you need to forge IDs. Most people aren't able to do this (or will do such a shoddy job they'll get busted nearly immediately). Thus, the risk level is reduced (but not completely eliminated, that I'll gladly concede to you).
> You cannot fathom where the logic of all of this lies because you are probably under 25
I'm 25, actually. But I still do not grok why we should render the task of identity thieves easier. Oh, sure, it would generate a lot of funny lawsuits, and more work for the police, but curiously this doesn't appeal much to me...
> It was a waste, clearly, since you do not have the slightest idea of what a free life looks like.
Let's make a deal : what about you tell me what this "free life" (whatever it is you define as such) looks like, and I tell you if the perceived advantages are enough in my opinion to balance identity theft and other risks ?
> Well lout at least cannot generate PDF
True enough. It did when I started using it, but this feature has indeed been removed. I stand corrected.
> And how can you talk about displaying PDF without mentioning Ghostscript
Quite easily, in fact ;-) As far as displaying goes, I'll rather use xpdf or one of its siblings like kpdf/gpdf. The Ghostscript Viewer is good but it has already crashed on me several times on documents I had no problem viewing with xpdf, so I switched. YMMV, of course...
> Try and buy a SIM card in Paris without an ID.
I'm not by any means an advocate of government control, but being certain of the identity of a telephone owner isn't necessarily a bad thing. For instance, if the telephone is used to harass somebody else, or to detonate explosive devices by remote control (remember the Madrid bombings ?)
> borrow money, open a bank account
Huh... hello ? I sure would hope for banks anywhere in the world to check for positive ID before doing *any* transaction. But the reality, which I've experienced numerous times, is that you can enter your bank's local branch, and withdraw money just by telling them your account number (which is known and stored in probably insecure databases by lots of organizations. LexisNexis, here we come !). This gives me the creeps.
> buy medicine
For *prescription-only* drugs, which of course the pharmacist shouldn't hand to whoever comes in. Sure, told this way, it sounds less orwellian. D'oh !
> there are always the mentally retarded who say things like [...] "How can you control identity without it?" (said to me by a French man)
Ah ! Those wacky French. They have such weird arguments, at times ! I mean, they probably would even have the guts to be upset if someone impersonated them and did nasty things under their identities... Well, I'm known for being a mentally-retarded monkey, so I'll ask : how do you check the identity of who has done what if you've no records ? I'm sure there are extremely clever ways to do it without an ID, and I want to hear about those (this isn't just sarcasm, BTW. I would like to know if someone has devised such a system, and how it works).
> These imbeciles are the perpetual stumbling blocks to the continuation and longevity of any sort of freedom in the west.
I've got the strange feeling you're confusing "freedom" and "anonymity". These are two different and unrelated concepts. For instance, if there was a law against writing under a pseudonym, it wouldn't mean you have no freedom of speech. Just that you need to speak under your real name. Of course, it's better when you can do it anonymously, but it's not necessarily related.
Finally, I would like to ask : why is it that when programmers write software like 'rsh' which doesn't try very hard to check who its user is, it's deemed insecure, and conversely when such flaws are pointed out in real life, they are OK for the sake of privacy ? I just can't fathom where the logic of this lies...
> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive
On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a variety of software packages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)
> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on
Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).
> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features
It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...
> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer
Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).
> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards
What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !
[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*
> This is the reverse of the closed source world where having had good ideas once entitles you to maintain a monopoly to the detriment of the consumer.
Although I very much agree with your other points, may I remark that the closed source world isn't exactly foreign to this reverse-engineering idea ? I remember some product called DR-DOS, for instance, that was basically a reverse-engineered clone of MS-DOS. Also, nearly every word processor or spreadsheet on the market contains a bit of reverse-engineered code to read files written by competing software. Reverse-engineering is just more widespread in the FLOSS world because the proprietary houses didn't bother porting their software in the beginning, or because the conditions to get the official documentation weren't acceptable for free software (think DeCSS).
> "coming clean" after you've violated the license on GPL software is not enough, you have to ask for forgiveness too.
Funny, that's not the opinion of the only court to have decided a GPL violation case. Instead, they said this :
So, whatever Moglen may have "intended", the judges' opinion shows it can very well be interpreted differently.> Now, I don't know exactly where on that tiny car the tank is, but I'd assume it's under the seat someplace.
In the prototypes, it was apparently under the chassis (look at the third picture). I suppose the separation would prevent the air from entering the passengers' area.
> The volume of that car is what...two cubic meters? What happens when you instantly put 90 cubic meters of air inside it? (Or under it?)
Maybe the car will be lifted up a bit, but remember the tank is supposed to crack and let the air escape, not rupture all at once. As a side note, MDI says the technology employed for their tanks is the same as the one used for natural gas-powered buses (and while I ride one of these everyday, I've still not heard of any injuries caused by a gas tank rupture, though in all honesty those buses have their tank on the roof, so they're less likely to be broken in a crash)
> Gasoline is good in comparison because it doesn't tend to do this when the tank is ruptured.
Well, sure but it *can* take fire, and there have been casualties because of crash-induced blazes. Also, every kind of energy has its dangers : an electric car obviously carries a risk of electrocution, for instance. I think drastic safety regulations should be enough to reduce the risks to nearly nil.
(obligatory disclaimer : the inventor of that air-compressed car is a friend of a friend. Still, I'm not associated with him in any way and in fact have never met him personally. I just think his idea is pretty good)
> Yeah, but nobody has ever seen a steam-powered speeder on the Salt Flats either.
I don't know where the Salt Flats are (or what they are, a racetrack maybe ?), but I know that a steam-powered car has already broken a speed record (in 1906, admittedly, but 205 km/h is not bad for a car, even by today standards), and some British engineer has built a steamer that goes at 320 km/h. And, AFAIK, steam turbines are used to propel very heavy machines (like nuclear submarines). You do not need to use coal to make steam, you know ;-)
> Shrinking the form factor tends to do things to power.
Not exactly. Sure, big electric motors have better efficiencies than the ones in your toy RC car, but overall electric engines are pretty efficient compared to internal combustion engines who lose a lot of their power in dissipated heat. What really does things to power, as another poster above insightfully remarks, is energy storage, or "batteries totally suck". Electric trains, trams and trolleybuses can just raise their pantograph or trolley pole and get really huge amounts of energy compared to what would be available with batteries. But then, they're limited to the catenary-fitted tracks or roads. I think electric (autonomous) vehicles will get a wider acceptance when more powerful storage systems, like fuel cells, are finally marketed, as people will experience the benefits of electric engines without suffering from the low ranges and long charging times which are currently the hallmarks of battery-powered cars.
> I agree that [...] Open Source Developers should take a lot of [Visual Basic] strengths and make their own RAD language.
What about this one? Or that other one?
> german (food) companies are somewhat known to defend their trademarks.
It works the other way around, too. A French publishing company (Les éditions Albert René, sorry no link as they doesn't seem to have a Website. editions-albert-rene.com is ironically enough owned by a cybersquatter) sued a German about the domain mobilix.org (you see, they publish the Asterix [fr] comic books, and they thought the name Mobilix was too close to the Obelix character). Despite there being huge piles of names ending in -ix (does Unix rings a bell ?), the German courts sided with the publisher, forcing the site to relocate. You can find more about this fiasco at its new address.
So, does this mean French or German courts are full of slimy judges who do not understand a thing to technology (or like big business) ? I do not think so. For instance, recently, a German court upheld the GPL against a WiFi router manufacturer, and at least one French court confirmed it was legal to download files from P2P networks (as long as there was no sharing, which kills a bit the point of P2P, but they couldn't go against the written copyright law). The problem is that trademark laws seem stronger in Europe, and the judges are simply doing their job. And sometimes, businesses are on the losing end : five years ago, Vivendi was forced to pay [fr] a huge sum to an individual who had previously registered a mark similar to their own, Vizzavi...
Whenever I access google.com in another country, I'm always forwarded to that country's google site.
Try these handy URLs: French, German.
> Did anyone see that bridge that is higher than the clouds? That's worthy of a Slashdot story in itself.
Indeed :-)
> However, it's probably easier to just use the white noise generator, at the expense of emergency calls.
AFAIK, this is what was done until now. I guess the title should rather be ``France to require cell phone jammers to allow emergency calls''. That being said, I'm unaware of any situation where jammers could have caused problems. After all, theaters have landlines, and I don't see any necessity for everyone in the theater calling emergency services at once (they should just alert an employee who will call them from the theater's phone). This law seems to be some preemptive attempt to avoid rather unlikely problems, or maybe to sell more sophisticated jammers :-)
With Konqueror Cut/Copy/Paste buttons are deactivated, but you can right-click and select 'Copy text' even with JavaScript on. Also, to download the image if you don't use a disk cache, just look at the URL in the source code (as said above, you need to search for the string .theimg), and then use wget. Warning : you *need* to specify a valid referrer (the search page is OK) *and* a valid user-agent string (wget and so on are banned). The following command works, remove all newlines and unwanted spaces added by /. prior to use :
I'm pretty sure you could make some script to automate this. Have fun :-)
Why is it useless ? Well, because regardless of whether people can install ChatZilla or not (BTW, I don't think there are that much people that know about Mozilla XPIs), they'll most probably settle for an easier solution : use a Web gateway to IRC or some other messaging system. Faster and easier. Of course, you can block that, too. IIRC, most of those gateways will use Java so you can just remove the Java plug-in (if you don't use it for something else), firewall everything, and just to be sure, use a transparent proxy with some filter like SquidGuard on it...
As for my opinion, since we're talking about an university setting (hence adult people), I suggest that those guys are mature enough to know not to chat during important lessons. And if they do, well, they'll fail their exams, and that's their problem. They're adults, remember ? No need to go out of your way "protecting" them from themselves. IMHO, of course.
> The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.
A possible temporary solution is this one. On the long-term, I suggest sacrificing goats until the MSIE team makes a new, improved release. They've recently resurfaced, so maybe they're alive and coding on it, who knows :-)
I'm not saying I'm a professional translator (I'm not :-) but maybe this translation by hand will make more sense than the Fish. Expect lots of typos and such, still, I wrote it in a hurry. My personal comments are in brackets. Enjoy ! Or not.
28 % of office time dedicated to Internet and e-mail, 2 % to Excel
What do employees do on their computers ? It is that thorny question that a study lead by Microcost -- in partnership with Acadys -- tries to answer. An investigation which goal isn't to monitor users but rather wishes to lay the foundations of a rethinking about rationalizing costs of managing large computer installations.
Over a month, 1 285 500 workstations were scanned in a thousand enterprises distributed in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England, Italy).
First finding, a user spends on average two hours and fifteen minutes per day on his workstation. He dedicates more than a quarter (28 %) of this time to the Internet/e-mail couple. As for the rest, office applications, business applications and Windows Explorer take respectively 17 %, 14 % and 9 % of an employee's used time. The office application's 17 % is further subdivised in 15 % for word processing and 2 % for Excel [I just can't understand why word processing was generalized while spreadsheets seems in the journalist's opinion to be Excel's exclusive domain -- Translator's note].
A business has thus an interest in modifying its software licence policy according to different use patterns, to avoid paying for a complete office suite if the main tool to be used is the word processor [Well, I suppose you could use OpenOffice.org for the rest. You could even use it for the word processor, in fact -- Translator's note]. According to the study, 10 software packages grab 67 % of uses [I'm not sure if he speaks about different uses or usage time -- Tr. note]. These numbers even go up to 89 % in the industrial sector, while they drop to 42 % in services-oriented businesses.
In addition to software usage data, the AMI software (from which the informations gathered for the study were originated) allows to obtain numbers regarding the reliance of Microsoft's Operating Systems. For instance, the average failure rate requiring a system reboot has been measured at about 8 % per session. These numbers dramatically fluctuate according to the considered Windows version. So, Windows 2000 has a 4 % failure rate and NT 4 has 3 % [This must be total BS, I've never seen such a crash-prone system than NT4 except Win9x -- Tr. note], while Windows XP is around 12 %.
Last, the study reveals employees' habits with regard to printing. The paperless office isn't poised to arrive soon, since 10 pages per user are printed on average in a day. These are distributed in 3 or 4 printing commands of which half are directed to local printers, while the other half goes to network printers. Still, if the printing cost drops to a few Eurocents when printing is done on a network printer, it's multiplied by five when it's done on a local printer, because of printer supplies' prices.
Also of note, unsurprisingly 95 % of workstations are fitted with a Windows environment, the Win2000 version being predominant in professional use. Present on 42 % of workstations, this version has largely replaced NT4, which claims now only 16 %. As to Windows XP, it struggles to find its audience, especially in industrial settings, 83 % of whom opted for Windows 2000. Only services-oriented business have 5 % of their computer installations running on Windows XP, while the total average is around 2 %.
Beyond all these numbers, the consulting company recommends several solutions to CTOs to rationalize their computer installations. Among these good practices reminders, the company successively points to thin clients, Open Source Software [I wonder if there's anyone except Microsoft who won't mention FLOSS these days -- Tr. note], licence management optimization, and longer periods between renewing the installed computers' hardware as well as their software.
> The search you linked to pulled up a pile of cool articles.
Please read the paragraph where I said I wasn't commenting on whether the article is interesting. The "coolness" of Piquepaille's spam isn't the subject.
> What "spam" are you talking about in this off-topic, flamebait troll of yours?
Please read the part where it says that the "overview", "more details" and so on in Piquepaille's submissions are always directed at his own weblog in an obvious attempt to get more traffic and hence more money from the ads that show on the aforementioned weblog. Posting disguised self-advertisements on Slashdot seems spammy enough to me, but you're of course entitled to your own opinion.
> What's self serving about any of those stories?
The fact that he always uses his submissions to drive traffic to his own site, where he uses plagiarized and/or stolen content to gain ads revenue. Note that all his submissions to Slashdot include a link to his own site. You won't find any where he would just point to the people who wrote the original content without peddling his blog. You also won't likely find anybody except himself posting links to his blog. Can you see a pattern here ? I sure can !
> Do you have anything interesting to say about this interesting looking workstation?
No, and I don't give a damn. See the aforementioned paragraph.
That's it. Posting deceptive self-advertisements to Slashdot should not be rewarded by ad traffic. But if you want to support him, you're of course free to do so. At least, you'll have been warned.
Warning ! Warning ! Warning ! Warning ! Warning !
Attention, a public service announcement follows : do not read the "overview" touted by Mr. Piquepaille. This person constantly spams Slashdot, trying to get traffic to his site on Radio Userland (which I'm not linking to, for obvious reasons). Do NOT go to his overview, you're only giving traffic to a spammer. See these recurring complaints, for instance. Not to mention he steals the images he puts on his blog and sometimes also spews bullshit for lack of knowing better. This must stop. In any way, do not fall for the spam, and do not provide him any more traffic. Please also warn fellow readers when you see one of his self-serving posts.
And now, a personal message (warning : verbal abuse in foreign language follows) : Roland, tu nous les brises. Va te pendre, hé Ducon !
[disclaimer : I'm not commenting on whether the subject is interesting, or not. But the kind of astroturfing the submitter engages in regularly is just wrong]
Warning ! Warning ! Warning ! Warning ! Warning !
> Is having a whole distro built from source a good enough specific reason to still build from source?
Yes, of course. As is the need to have different compile-time settings than the maintainer, or merging additional/different patches. I keep building two dozens Debian packages locally for exactly these reasons. But let's not fool ourselves : by the time we get there, we're no longer the ``n00bs'' the original poster was referring to. I think most novices will just take binary packages, at least for a while.
> But hey, to each their own. Which is why I love Linux. You may love Debian, I love Gentoo...it's still Linux.
I couldn't have said it better ! It's in my opinion a very good selling point for Linux : there is no one-size-fits-all solution that's shoehorned on you like on proprietary systems. You get to choose what's best, or even create your own custom solution. I think that's why I decided to stick with Linux in the first place.
> I also wonder why people always throw out the "Linux on the desktop just isn't here yet". How "here" does it have to get?
Let's face it : this will never stop. Linux (and free software in general) faces an uphill battle on all fronts. Hardware support is hindered by manufacturers not releasing drivers or even specifications, yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not supporting their latest gizmo. Compatibility with popular software like Office is difficult to attain, primarily because Microsoft uses obscure, undocumented formats. Yet people will bitch and moan at OpenOffice.org/Gnome Office/KOffice for misaligning their twisted tables, or adding too much space (and forgetting compatibility can even be haphazard between Office releases). Educational software, encyclopedias, etc. are nearly never released on Linux (one recent exception. Warning : non-english text, you can try the Fish). Yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not running their software, not at the publishers who don't write portable code while portable toolkits already exist.
All these problems have solutions. WINE, for instance, can help people run their proprietary applications, but then, they just bitch about it being hard to configure. The latest versions work nearly out-of-the-box, but people will then bitch about imperfect emulation, or slow performance. There is no way to avoid that. Users just like to vent their frustration (sometimes I even do, too, although on a different kind of problems). All this is not important. We'll know when Linux is ready for the mythical desktop when we'll see lots of Linux boxes everywhere we go instead of the odd one here and there. Then, the endless bitching will be irrelevant.
Oh, and BTW, all this applies for the personal/SOHO desktop. I very much think the corporate desktop will be attained a lot faster, especially with big names like IBM and Sun now touting FOSS openly.
> What you wrote applies to GPL programs shipped with the distro only.
Not really. More and more proprietary vendors understand that users do not want to lose time with strange non-standard installers. For instance, Opera comes in RPM and DEB flavours.
> Commercial software (Acrobat Reader, Mathematica) installs into /usr/local/$somedir and that's it. The most you can expect is some links created in /usr/local/bin.
Well, if they come into non-packaged form (hence with no easy uninstall procedure), I would rather have them install into a well-defined place anyway (although I would prefer /opt rather than /usr/local), so I can just rm -fr /usr/local/foobar when I don't want them lying around anymore.
> I'd like to see a Mathematic .rpm package conforming to FHS, but that's just a dream.
That's a sorry situation, indeed. Did you try to voice your concerns to Wolfram ? I'm not a Mathematica user, but I seem to remember it's an expensive piece of software, hence I would expect to get good support for my money, including adequate packages for the mainstream distros. And since such a sophisticated software probably has a fair number of Linux users (at least I would think so), there's probably a good chance the publisher will do something. Just a guess...