Issues of copyright, intellectual property and monopoly are vital to developing countries. Many of the conventions and rules that govern First World trade actively discriminate against the citizens of Third World nations.
One example is the way Pharmaceutical companies send researchers to talk to local healers, isolate the active ingredients from the herbs they use, patent the result and claim it as their own. Another is the efforts of Western Agri-business to get African farming addicted to hi-tech machinery and expensive fertilisers which their own economies can't supply. It isn't a huge leap from there to issues of software copyright and - oddly enough - many Africans are capable of making it.
I work for an Overseas Development Agency. Our African partner organisations campaign extensively on issues of trade, economic and international law (which may come as a surprise to the many contributers here who seem to think they should all be too hungry to understand or care). Paying for technology is an issue they understand all too well.
Some of the posters here have their bigoted heads so far up their own arses I'm surprised they can still breathe.
Millions of people in Africa don't even have clean drinking water!
Enough of the Live-aid stereotype Africans-as-victims crap. Africans are as capable of doing things for themselves as anybody else. Yes, there is famine and war in parts of Africa but - gasp, shock, horror - there are also hospitals, universities, newspapers, and even (omigod) telecommunication networks.
This is incredibly petty
No, you are incredibly patronising. African economies face the same technical challenges as the rest of us and issues of copyright and monopoly are as least as vital for them.
In several years of e-mail admin I have to say that MS e-mail clients are both the most error-prone and the least error-tolerant that I have encountered. This means that they are more likely to have problems with each other's messages than cause problems for others.
Some examples:
The "begin " bug where any line in a message that starts "begin " is treated as the start of a uuencoded attachment, the rest of the message becoming the attachment title. Affects several versions of OE.
Outlook 97 sometimes forgets to send the final terminating full stop (period) to mark the end of a message (especially if the last line of the message ends in a full stop). Some mail systems will reject the unfinished message - and Outlook will give the sender no notification that this has happened. Others will accept the message - but if the recipient also has Outlook 97 then it will lock up trying to download the message. No other mail client will have this problem.
If the "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=" line in a message is word-wrapped then all the Outlook and OE versions I have so far seen will not be able to decode the message - even though they themselves will word-wrap this line in the messages they send.
All the *nix mail clients I have used are robust enough to ignore these errors. Its the MS clients that can't cope with the errors caused by MS clients.
... it has a friendly configuration - in that the config is flexible, elegant, logical and stable.
If you want a friendly install, get Stormix or one of the other Debian-based user-friendly distros.
Debian gets the fundamentals right. The configuration is solid and flexible, offering simple ways to tune things the way you want before and after installation - the update-alternatives options, for example, or the modular way the modules.conf file is built. This makes it possible to extend Debian in user-friendly ways (as Stormix has done) without breaking the original. Let the Stormix people worry about flashy GUI front-ends, the Debian project should continue to concentrate on turning out the most elegant and flexible configuration they can.
I used Red Hat for several years and got tired of finding work-arounds for it's clunky and clumsy configuration (the X config scripts are just a mess). When I looked Debian I discovered that many of those work-arounds were implemented (better) already. So I switched.
BTW, that's just my experience of the difference between RH and Debian having used both. Don't mark me down again just for saying that.
For a user with any decent skills the Debian install is perfectly OK as long as you RTFM. If you don't - and installing without RTFM is a perfectly valid way of trying to get a feel for something - it does throw some unanswerable questions at you.
I don't quite understand what all the hubbub about OS X is.
Biodiversity. It's another *nix implementation and one that's guaranteed a mass user base.
The fact that the *nix world is fragmented is usually held up as a weakness. I don't think that's true any more. The fact that there are so
many Unices has done a lot to enforce cross-platform compatibility in User Space even without the Open Source movement. From that point of view, the demands of making a *nix app work on as many Unices as possible forces developers to work with standards and concentrate on what works - and it discourages them from being side-tracked by low-level OS fiddling.
So now there's another way of doing *nix with a different approach to the user interface. It'll be fun, I think.
I don't know many Mac users who 'boasted' about Macs being secure servers
There's always someone looking for ammunition for a childish flame or troll - which is how I'd rate your post.
I'd guess that 90% of Mac users won't know or
care that there is a BSD layer underneath.
Which is exactly what I said, if you'd read it properly. But that doesn't change the fact that they will be running Unix and it could have implications for them all - for instance, presumably OSX will be vulnerable to format string exploits in the same way as any other Unix. Many security exploits apply across the *nix world because they are so broadly compatible.
Apple and Steve Jobs care nothing about the Linux community. The Linux community has nothing of value for Apple. Apple has a
great relationship with BSD camp and will continue to.
If that isn't a troll it's an incredibly short-sighted statement. For a start, I said "Freenix", which brings in the various free BSD's. One of the major advantages of moving to a *nix OS is the huge range of applications and the vast pool of development resources (human and electronic) that suddenly become available - on the Macslash article one self-confessed Trad-Mac user is raving about being able to run apache on a Mac. Like it or not (and you obviously don't) much *nix development is now Linux-led. The rest of the Mac user community will hopefully not be so shortsighted as to spurn that.
You mean the tiny open source Linux crowd? Why would Apple care about their opinions on Apple's OWN OS? The majority of the
Unix market is not made up of open source/Linux fanatics.
I said "*nix". Open STANDARDS are very much a priority not only in the freenix world but also in the commercial Unix environment because they can't ignore the need to inter-operate.
When I asked how Mac users might react, I was thinking there would be childish reactions just like yours. But the posts on Macslash reassure me that there are many Mac users more mature than yourself.
For a start, I was caref
I can see OSX confonting Mac users with things they've never had to deal with. Most
Mac users have never really worried about what's under the bonnet of the OS as long
as it works, so I don't suppose they'll worry too much that it's now *nix down in the
engine. BUT...
Security: some Mac users like to boast of how secure Mac OS is as a web-server.
But that security was partly because Mac OS simply doesn't do as much (in terms of
network services) as an NT or *nix box and partly because Mac OS is less used for
internet servers and so less known. OSX, though, is *nix. You can do more with *nix
- and so can the cracker. How will Mac users react to that? If Macintosh do lock
down the security, I bet it won't withstand having a load of freenix tools and services
added.
Biodiversity: the Mac way of doing things has meant great uniformity amongst Mac
machines and systems. From my *nix-geek POV that's not great but it has brought
definite advantages to Mac users in terms of stability and ease-of-use. On the
downside, IME because Macs work so well together I've found it very difficult to talk
to Mac users who want to send/share files with our staff (Linux/Windows
environment) because they have trouble with the idea that it might be difficult to get
two computers/filesystems/networks to communicate, for them it just happens.
How will Mac users (and Macintosh) react to an influx of *nix geeks who want to be
able to change everything but still have it all work with the bits they haven't changed.
How will they react to the *nix world demanding that OSX stay compatible and open?
What will Mr Jobs think?
I can see plenty of areas for friction between Macintosh (the company as opposed to
the users) and the freenix world. Steve Jobs' own dealings with the Human Interface
group show how little time he has for awkward developers. If there is friction, how
will the notoriously loyal Mac users react? Especially if adapting to the Unix
world-view means some painful changes for them (viz. my comments on security
above).
OSX definitely means that the Mac is coming in from the cold but will
some/many Mac users decide they were better off on their own?
The more flexible and easy-to-use you make an information service, the less you are able to dictate how it will be used. I never understand it when people want to put the people they hope to communicate with into straight-jackets.
Only this morning, one of our staff asked for my advice on a Powerpoint presentation. It explains the structure and purpose of her department and is intended for our regional offices. There are slides for each section of the department and an organogram showing the overall structure. I suggested putting hyperlinks into the organogram and using it as a means of navigating the document. Once she understood what I was talking about, she was absolutely horrified and demanded that I ensure that readers would be "forced" to read the slides in sequence. I did point out that, once the document was e-mailed out, she would have no way of controlling the way people read it - but she didn't like it.
Napster should not be surprised this has happened and they should actually welcome it - it means they have become a genuine means of communication between band and fan.
Microsoft doesn't really care if you pirate their software for home use. What gets them is the buisness licenses.
In fact, home piracy does them good, because it increases the user base and so raises demand. That's why they give such cheap deals to educational establishments and charities. The idea is that when people who use Windows in those places will then demand it in the workplace.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain? Many people at the time saw him as the thief, for selling what they said wasn't his in the first place.
He did the same with DOS. That started out as QDOS, an unauthorised hack of CP/M.
Many of you will be familiar with GNU Stow,
and maybe even some of you had tried it. Well, I have. It's pretty nasty.
What's nasty (or cumbersome) about it? Simple and elegant, I would have called it. The only awkward thing can be getting the makefiles to do what they are told - and it's hardly stow's fault if people write kludged makefiles.
Do you accuse anyone who disagrees with you of opposing freedom?
The GPL is also about freedom - but it requirse people who use it to respect the freedoms it represents. If Microsoft wanted to use GPL code, they would be free to do so. This would involve changing their attitude to a few things, which would be a good thing.
This article is pure fluff. There's no detail of how his new Managed security Monitoring works, how it "closes the window" when all others simply "narrow" it, he's just trying to sell his product. I thought most competent sysadmins monitored their security?
His house insurance metaphor is invalid. It's one thing to insure against the risk of burglary, knowing that you can use the insurance money to buy equivalent items. But data is different - there is no equivalent to your own data. A cracker can steal your data and do you damage without your knowledge - since the data is still there. A cracker can distort your data so that your future work will be based on incorrect information. A cracker can use your network as a base for other attacks.
For the two situations to be analogous, burglars would have to be in the habit of breaking in and reprogramming your microwave to poison you, or invisibly setting up a base in your attic to launch burglaries on your neighbours.
The integrity of data is so much more fragile than that of real-world goods that you simply can't treat it in the same (relatively casual) manner as you can house insurance.
Whatever the answer is, this salesman doesn't have it and his sales puff shouldn't have received this free publicity.
The person had a problem
that he had a fix for. He marched to the "boardroom", fix in hand, and was soundly ignored by the "CEO" and all his "VPs".
That's how he saw it. Other people pointed out, reasonably, that a) people can be busy and b) he might have been approaching the wrong people in the wrong way. Which does not have to be a CEO/Board situation, any established group can have customs that won't be obvious to the newcomer.
If you have a problem at work, you talk to your manager, who will speak with the VP, who consults the CEO. How is this any
different from emailing the 'less important people on the mailing list', who then contact the component owners, who might be able to
get a response from Linus?
For a start, if you can provide the goods you can march straight into the "boardroom" and work right
alongside the "CEO" on the kernel.
Secondly, with any GPL product, large or small, you have the right to take the whole thing, make your own modifications and push it as the way to go. Try doing that with the real-life component produced by the company of a real life CEO.
Of course, attracting support for your version, your vision, is something else. But if you have the talent and the product, it can be done.
The author has a cheek, using fetchmail as an example when most of his article reads as a poor rip-off of Eric Raymond's own writing. Here's a quote from Homesteading the Noosphere
The open-source culture has an elaborate but largely unadmitted set
of ownership customs. These customs regulate who can modify software, the circumstances under which it can be modified, and (especially) who has
the right to redistribute modified versions back to the community.
But in the same article, Raymond goes on to say that these customs have evolved in a co-operative environment in such a way as to make that environment healthier, more mutual and more efficient:
Yet a third interesting feature is that as these customs have evolved over time, they have done so in a consistent direction. That direction has been to
encourage more public accountability, more public notice, and more care about preserving the credits and change histories of projects in ways which
(among other things) establish the legitimacy of the present owners.
So in fact Open Source projects do organise themselves, according to a set of rules that has evolved naturally. Even in projects where one or two take a strong lead and others follow, they are usually unconsiously following these rules. Mr Connell shows not the slightest perception of this.
Calling Open Source methods the Cathedral is simply ridiculous. The cathedral is monolithic and it's architecture can't be changed. Bazaars involve negotiation, haggling, keeping a sharp eye out for prevailing opinion, constantly changing power relationships. Which of those two describes the Open Source community we all know.
This is one of those "They're all wrong and I'm right" articles. Only he isn't.
Re:Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no?
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
What is the most annoying thing about using a computer mouse? Having to take a hand off the keyboard, use the mouse, and then
put the hand back on the keyboard.
Precisely. It's incredibly frustrating if you're
a touch typist. This is why so many people like
Vi.
If you work in X it can be very difficult to create an environement that is all keyboard-controllable - and impossible to achieve
consistency. This is an issue for people with
arthritis, rsi, or injuries/disabilities that make
mouse use very uncomfortable.
C compilers are available on any platform you care to mention. More, the capabilities of the C compilers have become so standardised that many people mistake them for language features. This has created such a wide base that C has an unstoppable momentum.
In some ways Pascal is a superior language (YMMV) which may people find easier to learn. Borland created an excellent compiler and language implementation. The smart-linking was much superior to the everything-linked-in-statically model of Microsoft's DOS C compiler. So why didn't it win on the DOS platform? It was a one-platform product, there being no cross-platform equivalents of Borland Pascal and the advantages of Borland's product on the DOS platform were irrelevant to other architectures/OS's. So it couldn't compete with the momentum of C and all the C-coded apps being ported to DOS (and mangled in the process).
A solution doesn't have to be the best to win, it only has to be just good enough. There's a great article by Richard P. Gabriel on this point, The Rise of Worse-is-better. It's actually part of a bigger article about the failures and successes of Lisp, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big which is all very relevant to your question.
Is there any useful, mainstream purpose to this or reason for taking the time to develop it? Or was it solely a "because we/I
can" exercise?
"Because we can" exercises are often valuable. Science is largely dependent on them. You never know what will turn out to be useful.
Is this really primary Slashdot story material? Like much of what is hacked out there, it strikes me as a minor (albiet clever), nearly useless end product with an extremely limited audience that might use it.
This could represent a serious security hole, given a little thought. It's worth knowing about simply for that.
Slashdot clearly has a reader base of engineers, programmers, et. al., that is arguably part of the very top few percent of developers and professionals out there in terms of technical knowledge, talents, and abilities.
I don't think that is nearly as true as it used to be. From what I can tell, not many people look to SlashDot any more for useful technical information (I know I don't). If there were more articles like this, the slide might be halted.
I see this article suggests Carbon Nanotubes would be a good material to use. Only the findings reported in the heatsink article contradict this.
This is the scientific equivalent of vapourware. Some scientists churn out this kind of story for ever: "We can achieve A using B assuming B has property C, only we don't understand B yet, C is a theoretical phenomenon that has never been observed and we haven't bothered finding out if A is really relevant to anything".
I'd be more convinced if any of the private currency/e-money initiatives had actually gotten off the ground. As it is, they've all fallen apart. Private currencies would be a necessary part of this merchant-state future.
It's ironic that Local Exchange Trading Schemes and Micro-banks, which are community-based schemes, are flourishing and spreading but the big corporations can't do it.
If you can't find a way to dampen the field, get a cardboard pyramid and open a new business in recycled razor blades.
Re:on a related note: pgp/gpg+mutt possible?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
`The more recent mutt distributions come with example.muttrc files to use both PGP and GPG. These make the task of configuring mutt to use encryption very easy. The debian package of mutt installs these into/usr/share/doc/mutt/examples/.
If you're building from source, you should be able to find these example files in the contrib/ directory. They have intuitive names like "gpg.rc", "pgp2.rc" and "pgp5.rc"'
I don't think you need those files if you get the international version. I don't use them, I just compiled from the source rpm of 1.2i and started using GPG straight away.
Slashdot Mirror
One example is the way Pharmaceutical companies send researchers to talk to local healers, isolate the active ingredients from the herbs they use, patent the result and claim it as their own. Another is the efforts of Western Agri-business to get African farming addicted to hi-tech machinery and expensive fertilisers which their own economies can't supply. It isn't a huge leap from there to issues of software copyright and - oddly enough - many Africans are capable of making it.
I work for an Overseas Development Agency. Our African partner organisations campaign extensively on issues of trade, economic and international law (which may come as a surprise to the many contributers here who seem to think they should all be too hungry to understand or care). Paying for technology is an issue they understand all too well.
Some of the posters here have their bigoted heads so far up their own arses I'm surprised they can still breathe.
Some examples:
-
The "begin " bug where any line in a message that starts "begin " is treated as the start of a uuencoded attachment, the rest of the message becoming the attachment title. Affects several versions of OE.
-
Outlook 97 sometimes forgets to send the final terminating full stop (period) to mark the end of a message (especially if the last line of the message ends in a full stop). Some mail systems will reject the unfinished message - and Outlook will give the sender no notification that this has happened. Others will accept the message - but if the recipient also has Outlook 97 then it will lock up trying to download the message. No other mail client will have this problem.
-
If the "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=" line in a message is word-wrapped then all the Outlook and OE versions I have so far seen will not be able to decode the message - even though they themselves will word-wrap this line in the messages they send.
All the *nix mail clients I have used are robust enough to ignore these errors. Its the MS clients that can't cope with the errors caused by MS clients.Debian gets the fundamentals right. The configuration is solid and flexible, offering simple ways to tune things the way you want before and after installation - the update-alternatives options, for example, or the modular way the modules.conf file is built. This makes it possible to extend Debian in user-friendly ways (as Stormix has done) without breaking the original. Let the Stormix people worry about flashy GUI front-ends, the Debian project should continue to concentrate on turning out the most elegant and flexible configuration they can.
I used Red Hat for several years and got tired of finding work-arounds for it's clunky and clumsy configuration (the X config scripts are just a mess). When I looked Debian I discovered that many of those work-arounds were implemented (better) already. So I switched.
BTW, that's just my experience of the difference between RH and Debian having used both. Don't mark me down again just for saying that.
For a user with any decent skills the Debian install is perfectly OK as long as you RTFM. If you don't - and installing without RTFM is a perfectly valid way of trying to get a feel for something - it does throw some unanswerable questions at you.
The fact that the *nix world is fragmented is usually held up as a weakness. I don't think that's true any more. The fact that there are so many Unices has done a lot to enforce cross-platform compatibility in User Space even without the Open Source movement. From that point of view, the demands of making a *nix app work on as many Unices as possible forces developers to work with standards and concentrate on what works - and it discourages them from being side-tracked by low-level OS fiddling.
So now there's another way of doing *nix with a different approach to the user interface. It'll be fun, I think.
When I asked how Mac users might react, I was thinking there would be childish reactions just like yours. But the posts on Macslash reassure me that there are many Mac users more mature than yourself. For a start, I was caref
Security: some Mac users like to boast of how secure Mac OS is as a web-server. But that security was partly because Mac OS simply doesn't do as much (in terms of network services) as an NT or *nix box and partly because Mac OS is less used for internet servers and so less known. OSX, though, is *nix. You can do more with *nix - and so can the cracker. How will Mac users react to that? If Macintosh do lock down the security, I bet it won't withstand having a load of freenix tools and services added.
Biodiversity: the Mac way of doing things has meant great uniformity amongst Mac machines and systems. From my *nix-geek POV that's not great but it has brought definite advantages to Mac users in terms of stability and ease-of-use. On the downside, IME because Macs work so well together I've found it very difficult to talk to Mac users who want to send/share files with our staff (Linux/Windows environment) because they have trouble with the idea that it might be difficult to get two computers/filesystems/networks to communicate, for them it just happens. How will Mac users (and Macintosh) react to an influx of *nix geeks who want to be able to change everything but still have it all work with the bits they haven't changed. How will they react to the *nix world demanding that OSX stay compatible and open? What will Mr Jobs think?
I can see plenty of areas for friction between Macintosh (the company as opposed to the users) and the freenix world. Steve Jobs' own dealings with the Human Interface group show how little time he has for awkward developers. If there is friction, how will the notoriously loyal Mac users react? Especially if adapting to the Unix world-view means some painful changes for them (viz. my comments on security above).
OSX definitely means that the Mac is coming in from the cold but will some/many Mac users decide they were better off on their own?
Only this morning, one of our staff asked for my advice on a Powerpoint presentation. It explains the structure and purpose of her department and is intended for our regional offices. There are slides for each section of the department and an organogram showing the overall structure. I suggested putting hyperlinks into the organogram and using it as a means of navigating the document. Once she understood what I was talking about, she was absolutely horrified and demanded that I ensure that readers would be "forced" to read the slides in sequence. I did point out that, once the document was e-mailed out, she would have no way of controlling the way people read it - but she didn't like it.
Napster should not be surprised this has happened and they should actually welcome it - it means they have become a genuine means of communication between band and fan.
He did the same with DOS. That started out as QDOS, an unauthorised hack of CP/M.
Bill's a hypocrite, if you ask me.
What's nasty (or cumbersome) about it? Simple and elegant, I would have called it. The only awkward thing can be getting the makefiles to do what they are told - and it's hardly stow's fault if people write kludged makefiles.
Do you accuse anyone who disagrees with you of opposing freedom?
The GPL is also about freedom - but it requirse people who use it to respect the freedoms it represents. If Microsoft wanted to use GPL code, they would be free to do so. This would involve changing their attitude to a few things, which would be a good thing.
This article is pure fluff. There's no detail of how his new Managed security Monitoring works, how it "closes the window" when all others simply "narrow" it, he's just trying to sell his product. I thought most competent sysadmins monitored their security? His house insurance metaphor is invalid. It's one thing to insure against the risk of burglary, knowing that you can use the insurance money to buy equivalent items. But data is different - there is no equivalent to your own data. A cracker can steal your data and do you damage without your knowledge - since the data is still there. A cracker can distort your data so that your future work will be based on incorrect information. A cracker can use your network as a base for other attacks. For the two situations to be analogous, burglars would have to be in the habit of breaking in and reprogramming your microwave to poison you, or invisibly setting up a base in your attic to launch burglaries on your neighbours. The integrity of data is so much more fragile than that of real-world goods that you simply can't treat it in the same (relatively casual) manner as you can house insurance. Whatever the answer is, this salesman doesn't have it and his sales puff shouldn't have received this free publicity.
Secondly, with any GPL product, large or small, you have the right to take the whole thing, make your own modifications and push it as the way to go. Try doing that with the real-life component produced by the company of a real life CEO.
Of course, attracting support for your version, your vision, is something else. But if you have the talent and the product, it can be done.
Calling Open Source methods the Cathedral is simply ridiculous. The cathedral is monolithic and it's architecture can't be changed. Bazaars involve negotiation, haggling, keeping a sharp eye out for prevailing opinion, constantly changing power relationships. Which of those two describes the Open Source community we all know.
This is one of those "They're all wrong and I'm right" articles. Only he isn't.
If you work in X it can be very difficult to create an environement that is all keyboard-controllable - and impossible to achieve consistency. This is an issue for people with arthritis, rsi, or injuries/disabilities that make mouse use very uncomfortable.
In some ways Pascal is a superior language (YMMV) which may people find easier to learn. Borland created an excellent compiler and language implementation. The smart-linking was much superior to the everything-linked-in-statically model of Microsoft's DOS C compiler. So why didn't it win on the DOS platform? It was a one-platform product, there being no cross-platform equivalents of Borland Pascal and the advantages of Borland's product on the DOS platform were irrelevant to other architectures/OS's. So it couldn't compete with the momentum of C and all the C-coded apps being ported to DOS (and mangled in the process).
A solution doesn't have to be the best to win, it only has to be just good enough. There's a great article by Richard P. Gabriel on this point, The Rise of Worse-is-better. It's actually part of a bigger article about the failures and successes of Lisp, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big which is all very relevant to your question.
"Because we can" exercises are often valuable. Science is largely dependent on them. You never know what will turn out to be useful.
This could represent a serious security hole, given a little thought. It's worth knowing about simply for that.
I don't think that is nearly as true as it used to be. From what I can tell, not many people look to SlashDot any more for useful technical information (I know I don't). If there were more articles like this, the slide might be halted.
I see this article suggests Carbon Nanotubes would be a good material to use. Only the findings reported in the heatsink article contradict this. This is the scientific equivalent of vapourware. Some scientists churn out this kind of story for ever: "We can achieve A using B assuming B has property C, only we don't understand B yet, C is a theoretical phenomenon that has never been observed and we haven't bothered finding out if A is really relevant to anything".
I'd be more convinced if any of the private currency/e-money initiatives had actually gotten off the ground. As it is, they've all fallen apart. Private currencies would be a necessary part of this merchant-state future. It's ironic that Local Exchange Trading Schemes and Micro-banks, which are community-based schemes, are flourishing and spreading but the big corporations can't do it.
If you can't find a way to dampen the field, get a cardboard pyramid and open a new business in recycled razor blades.