You're the CEO Megacorp 1. You produce SuperDooperFunTechs, a brand of computer, containing CAnCeR2 toxic waste as a flame retardant.
A state, say, one that contains the world's largest computer software company, bans CAnCeR2.
You, being a CEO, naturally hear about this on Slashdot. Naturally, your first reaction is to have a hissy fit. You then read the suggestions by dslashbot (202099) advising you to "stick it to the man" and simply refuse to sell your wares in said state.
"Har har" says you. "That'll learn 'em".
At which point the CEO of Megacorp 2, who produces SuperDooperFunTech's main rival, PowerMegaSeriousTech, says "Wow, Megacorp 1 is withdrawing from that state? Why? Because there's a ban on CAnCeR2? Hmmm, do we have CAnCeR2 in our PowerMegaSeriousTech?"
A flunky then says "Why, yes your seriousness, but wait. There's a whole host of flame retardants that are not banned, we just use CAnCeR2 because it's cheap. Remember that memo? Save every penny? If we switched to GRe3N, the lowest cost alternative, we'd have to add $2 to the price of our PowerMegaSeriousTechs. Call it $3 if you take into account that we would probably only want to do that for the state in question."
"Ha ha!" says CEO of Megacorp 2. "Profits!".
And so the story has a happy ending. Megacorp 2 sells safe, toxic waste free, PowerMegaSeriousTechs to our environmentally conscious state. The state's happy citizens have their PowerMegaSeriousTechs, they're $3 more expensive than they are in the neighbouring states, but that's ok. The CEO of Megacorp 1 is fired for being so shortsighted as to seriously believe that the choice is always between affordable fire retardants and being sued for numerous fires. Meanwhile, as more and more states ban CAnCeR2, the costs of alternatives plummet as chemical companies the world over realize there's money to be made in non-toxic flame retardants, and CAnCeR2 is a dead-end.
I don't know what he called about, but if it was something like "I can't come in today, I'm sick" then it probably was less than a minute long. If the device measuring call durations measured calls in minutes, then the two calls may well have appeared to be one minute long.
That said, given they had a record of a call being received from the "kid", it still doesn't make sense. Kid makes one call according to the records, and they assume they received two from him? At the very least, it would have merited a second glance given the stakes involved.
Of course the Virginia Tech shootings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.
Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.
Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.
Countries which I like seem to never suffer such tragedies, while countries which, for one reason or another, I dislike, suffer them all the time. The one common factor which seems to explain this has to do with my political views, and it suggests that my political views should be implemented as a matter of urgency, even though they are, as a matter of fact, not implemented in the countries which I like.
Of course the Virginia Tech shootings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.
If I understand the AC correctly, (s)he's concerned about the exploitation of the victims, hence the use of the term "death[s] of innocents" rather than "murders". Both terms are technically correct. One focuses on the victims, the other on the technical legality of their deaths.
In context, I'd say "death[s] of innocents" is the appropriate term to use.
Look at it logically: If a Mac user can buy a Mac and use virtualization to use the operating system they have to use, then switching has become a little easier.
On the other hand, if a Mac user feels compelled to only run one operating system at a time, then whatever their preferences, they're going to feel compelled to run the OS they have to use all the time. Which means, in practice, people will either pay over the odds, or they'll end up using their Mac to run Windows pretty much exclusively.
What Microsoft wants is for you to use Bootcamp and end up not running Mac OS X at all, or if at all, then rarely. They don't want you virtualizing it. In the long term, they're better off and will get more sales if you buy Windows Vista Basic and use it all the time than if you buy a virtualization-capable Vista, and use it as a migration platform to get away from Windows, by only starting it up when you absolutely have to.
just that there are a lot of articles on Slashdot trying to find excuses for Google that miss point entirely.
or for Viacom, indeed.
Google/YouTube is not deliberately putting Viacom's clips up, and they are obeying take-down notices, as per the DMCA. Their model was originally, and still is, based upon original content created by users of the site, and if their users all decided to obey basic copyright laws tomorrow, YouTube would still exist and still be very popular. Perhaps not as popular, but very popular nonetheless. A cursory glance at the front page tells you that the majority of YouTube's content is, indeed, user created.
This debate, the debate this article presents, is a side issue, and not really relevent to the discussion as to whether Viacom's claims are legitimate or not. Viacom may or may not be shooting itself in the foot, but that's not relevent to whether they're misrepresenting YouTube when they claim YouTube wouldn't exist without its content, or when they claim YouTube is violating the law. On both counts, they're wrong.
YouTube is not Napster. It has not set out to build upon the free exchange of copyright infringing material. It did not deliberately build itself into a structure that would make DMCA take-down notices impossible. It does not anonymize uploaders to quite the same degree. It is obeying the law. Regardless of whether Viacom is shooting themselves in the foot over this strategically, they're on the wrong side of the law in suing Google, and they're adding insult to injury by lying about YouTube's MO.
Well, sure it was, just like the Commodore PET (a self contained, off-the-shelf computer that had everything you needed to start with) was a product of a company focussed on user experience...
I think actually the PET has a better claim to that. The Apple-II's only "user experience" innovation was the decision by Steve Jobs to put it in a "professional" case. Otherwise it was no less complicated (indeed, in some ways it was worse) than the majority of computers developed beforehand, and it certainly didn't present a significantly better experience than those that came around the same time. Customers even had to open the thing up immediately on buying it to add a third party TV modulator just to get video.
It really wasn't until Lisa that Apple started seriously thinking about "user experience" in any way.
There seems to be a confusion of terminology in the above, but I admit I may be misreading it.
Anti-aliasing is not the same thing as sub-pixel rendering, which is orthogonal to anti-aliasing and can be (and almost always is) combined with it.
Anti-aliasing is merely the use of different shades to adjust the sharpness of object boundaries, where the shade is based upon the amount of a pixel the objects covering that pixel would intersect. While this sounds like something that would be describable by the term "sub-pixel rendering" if, for a moment, you assume you would divide the pixel into smaller virtual pixels to calculate the end result, that's not what sub-pixel rendering refers to. The term "sub-pixel" is not being used to describe these smaller "virtual pixels".
In an LCD a pixel is made up of three "sub-pixels": real, discrete, lighting elements that together illuminate one complete pixel. The sub-pixels are the three primary colours and are almost always mounted side by side as three thin strips. Sub-pixel rendering is the technique of using the separate red, green, and blue sub-pixels of an LCD "pixel" in isolation to improve the sharpness of object boundaries. When used, the screen effectively has an increased horizonal resolution of 3x the regular resolution, so a 1400x1050 screen effectively becomes 4200x1050.
It is usually, if not always, used in conjunction with regular anti-aliasing (though technically it doesn't need to be.)
Microsoft's patents, as I understand it, cover the latter, and in particular focus on preventing "colour fringing" that is otherwise a major downside of using sub-pixel rendering.
If they hadn't patented that stupid idea, someone else would have, and Amazon, as we know them, might no longer exist.
That's complete rubbish. Amazon didn't need to patent anything, they merely needed to publicly document it. The concept would have been unpatentable immediately on them doing so.
And even if they did patent it, there's no requirement for them to enforce the patent (except, perhaps, defensively.) They chose to do so anyway, against several companies, both competitors and third parties.
iTunes uses an embedded copy of Quicktime to display the dynamic content used for things like the iTMS. While I believe it uses HTTP for the network transport layer, very little of the rest has to do with the web. No HTML, no GIFs, no cookies in the web browser sense.
Re:Not the creation...the propogation...
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 1
I'm going to go with no for that one. There was plenty of cheap hardware in 1991 capable of running full, memory-protected with VM, Unix like operating systems. Some, such as the Amiga, required a (relatively low cost) CPU upgrade, others, such as the Acorn ARM-based computers, were all set up from the get-go. Whichever you chose, building a system for well under $2,000 was very much an option, and no more expensive than the equivalent Intel architecture builds.
And for the most part, the hardware of the non-Wintel systems was much more standardized (that is, there were very few differences between the different Amigas that would have required special programming, there were very few differences between the different Acorn machines that would have required special programming, say the same for the Atari ST, etc), and capable than the PC clones at that time.
I don't think it can be reasonably said that the situation with Intel clones "helped" the development of Unix-inspired operating systems. The reason these systems ended up taking the lion's share of the market was more because Amiga, Atari, et al, disappeared from the market, not because they were unsuitable or too expensive.
Well, he didn't say he's not willing to pay for content, but that he's unwilling to register and login to see it. These are slightly different, albeit the way marketeers insist on selling content right now involves the loss of privacy.
The way to solve it is to make it easier for people to pay for content. I can think of ways of doing that that do not require you give your life's story to the New York Times, Slashdot, Salon, Guardian Unlimited, the BBC, Wikipedia, Ubuntu, MacRumors, IBM, Something Awful, the Family Guy Fan site, NPR, squiggleslash, {...and so on...}. The ability is there, services like Amazon have been running tip-jar schemes for a while that could form the basis of both voluntary and required payment systems, the real question is why content providers are shunning them in favour of all-or-nothing "It's either free, or I need to know who you are and where you live, your age, gender, sexuality, shoe size, politics, etc" type BS.
Click on the "Slashdot" tab. Only accepted articles are then shown. Mysterious future ones are shown in red. Curiously enough, with the time and date on which they'll be posted (so it's better than the Subscriber's mysterious future feature.)
Ask the authors of the majority of the licences in this list that are copyleft.
The simple reality is that GPLv2 wasn't perfect. Many projects have seen the need to create their own licenses, often licenses that are incompatible with the GPL. Some of those licenses are more liberal than the GPL, others are more strict. In many cases, small changes to the GPL that would have had the support of the vast majority of people who use it, would have made the license acceptable.
You'll be surprised how significant a fork over a license change can be.
That said, I seriously doubt there will be much traction in GPLv2 forks, as most of the people who appear to oppose GPLv3 either have little respect behind the principles of GPLv2 (and argue as such), or oppose the GPL altogether (I am really not seeing heavy opposition from any group that believes in strong copyleft licenses, using arguments that are based upon the superiority of strong, copyleft, licenses.) Neither of the groups I mentioned has much incentive to hijack development of GPL'd projects to keep them on GPLv2.
IIRC, Torvalds said he's pleased with the changes, not that he's pleased with GPLv3 itself. The misunderstanding boils down to a poorly written CNET headline:
"I'm actually pretty pleased. Not because I think it's perfect, but simply because I think it's certainly a lot better than I really expected from the previous drafts," he said in an interview. "Whether it's actually a better license than the GPLv2, I'm still a bit skeptical, but at least it's now 'I'm skeptical' rather than 'Hell no!'"
As long as you don't have a patent agreement that would restrict downstream licensees, you can license under the GPL. The GPL's anti-patent language really only kicks in if you have some agreement with some third party which means that the rights granted by the GPL wouldn't apply to people you distribute the code to. It is not your job to enforce patents (or other effects of foreign laws) in the code you distribute.
Not only do you have no such agreement, but it's hard to see how you could even be party to such an agreement given software patents do not apply to you.
For someone importing your code to a country where software patents apply, the onus is on the patent holder to find them and challenge their use of the code.
Google is the #1 search engine in part because it doesn't deliberately cripple itself to make political points. It obeys the same laws that everyone else does, but beyond that it does not deliberately set out to make itself less useful than it could otherwise be.
When Google starts banning or boycotting certain search results not because they're irrelevant but in order to punish those it disagrees with, it will be punishing the users, and it will be the users who chose to go somewhere else. Google will no longer be the #1 search engine.
It just can't play the political games you and others recommend so frequently.
It's the OpenSSL license that forbids interoperability with the GPL. OpenSSH depends upon OpenSSL, so it's linked, but it wasn't a decision by the OpenBSD community to make OpenSSL so encumbered, and realistically, I suspect Theo isn't a big fan of the OpenSSL license any more than he is of the GPL.
While there will always be space for newcomers, there's a standard underneath it becomes somewhat pointless and adds needlessly to the signal to junk/noise ratio to consider adding an article. A newcomer's guide to Unix is one thing, but a brief overview of a small part of the system which will be useless to the majority of Slashdot readers, and will be too lacking in context for newcomers, fits well below that standard.
No, I didn't, because it wasn't relevent. You responded to:
ISDN (at least, the bearer channels) do not run over X.25.
with your comments about "TELENET". I assumed you thought "TELENET" had some vague relevence to my comment. If your intention was to start an entirely new thread about something completely unrelated, perhaps you could not reply to a comment of mine next time.
I have no idea what you think you're describing, but it most certainly isn't ISDN over X.25!
ISDN is a digital interface to the phone system. You get two (or more, but basic service is 2) digital bi-directional 64kbps channels called "bearer" channels that are used for the phone calls, plus a 16kbps "D" channel (which may or may not have used X.25, I can't remember, but if it did it was for the very limited purpose of communicating with the telephone exchange.) The D channel was used, essentially, to set up and tear down phone calls.
It's an alternative to POTS (that's the normal analog phone system), and has the advantage that you get two lines, and have a certain amount of metadata going over the D channel that lets you program funky things in if you want. Because it's end-to-end digital, you don't need a modem when you're transferring data, so you can get faster data transmission than you would do if you were using POTS with modems. This is especially true if you use a feature called "bonding", where both Bearer channels could be combined into a single 128kbps line.
ISDN is/was relatively popular in Europe, where both POTS and ISDN are charged by time used. In America, where POTS is usually unmetered for local calls, ISDN was usually not, and as a result never really became popular.
ISDN has nothing to do with what you're describing. You're more likely to transmit X.25 over ISDN than anyone would be likely to do the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how it works.
You're the CEO Megacorp 1. You produce SuperDooperFunTechs, a brand of computer, containing CAnCeR2 toxic waste as a flame retardant.
A state, say, one that contains the world's largest computer software company, bans CAnCeR2.
You, being a CEO, naturally hear about this on Slashdot. Naturally, your first reaction is to have a hissy fit. You then read the suggestions by dslashbot (202099) advising you to "stick it to the man" and simply refuse to sell your wares in said state.
"Har har" says you. "That'll learn 'em".
At which point the CEO of Megacorp 2, who produces SuperDooperFunTech's main rival, PowerMegaSeriousTech, says "Wow, Megacorp 1 is withdrawing from that state? Why? Because there's a ban on CAnCeR2? Hmmm, do we have CAnCeR2 in our PowerMegaSeriousTech?"
A flunky then says "Why, yes your seriousness, but wait. There's a whole host of flame retardants that are not banned, we just use CAnCeR2 because it's cheap. Remember that memo? Save every penny? If we switched to GRe3N, the lowest cost alternative, we'd have to add $2 to the price of our PowerMegaSeriousTechs. Call it $3 if you take into account that we would probably only want to do that for the state in question."
"Ha ha!" says CEO of Megacorp 2. "Profits!".
And so the story has a happy ending. Megacorp 2 sells safe, toxic waste free, PowerMegaSeriousTechs to our environmentally conscious state. The state's happy citizens have their PowerMegaSeriousTechs, they're $3 more expensive than they are in the neighbouring states, but that's ok. The CEO of Megacorp 1 is fired for being so shortsighted as to seriously believe that the choice is always between affordable fire retardants and being sued for numerous fires. Meanwhile, as more and more states ban CAnCeR2, the costs of alternatives plummet as chemical companies the world over realize there's money to be made in non-toxic flame retardants, and CAnCeR2 is a dead-end.
There are two problems with this scenario:
1. You can't sue YouTube for refusing to show your video, no matter how much or how little it violates copyright.
2. The word is "losing", not "loosing".
I don't know what he called about, but if it was something like "I can't come in today, I'm sick" then it probably was less than a minute long. If the device measuring call durations measured calls in minutes, then the two calls may well have appeared to be one minute long.
That said, given they had a record of a call being received from the "kid", it still doesn't make sense. Kid makes one call according to the records, and they assume they received two from him? At the very least, it would have merited a second glance given the stakes involved.
Well, let's update the Adequacy.com thing then:
Of course the Virginia Tech shootings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.
Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.
Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.
Countries which I like seem to never suffer such tragedies, while countries which, for one reason or another, I dislike, suffer them all the time. The one common factor which seems to explain this has to do with my political views, and it suggests that my political views should be implemented as a matter of urgency, even though they are, as a matter of fact, not implemented in the countries which I like.
Of course the Virginia Tech shootings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.
It would be a fitting memorial.
If I understand the AC correctly, (s)he's concerned about the exploitation of the victims, hence the use of the term "death[s] of innocents" rather than "murders". Both terms are technically correct. One focuses on the victims, the other on the technical legality of their deaths.
In context, I'd say "death[s] of innocents" is the appropriate term to use.
Well, the correct term is "prefer", not "want".
Look at it logically: If a Mac user can buy a Mac and use virtualization to use the operating system they have to use, then switching has become a little easier.
On the other hand, if a Mac user feels compelled to only run one operating system at a time, then whatever their preferences, they're going to feel compelled to run the OS they have to use all the time. Which means, in practice, people will either pay over the odds, or they'll end up using their Mac to run Windows pretty much exclusively.
What Microsoft wants is for you to use Bootcamp and end up not running Mac OS X at all, or if at all, then rarely. They don't want you virtualizing it. In the long term, they're better off and will get more sales if you buy Windows Vista Basic and use it all the time than if you buy a virtualization-capable Vista, and use it as a migration platform to get away from Windows, by only starting it up when you absolutely have to.
or for Viacom, indeed.
Google/YouTube is not deliberately putting Viacom's clips up, and they are obeying take-down notices, as per the DMCA. Their model was originally, and still is, based upon original content created by users of the site, and if their users all decided to obey basic copyright laws tomorrow, YouTube would still exist and still be very popular. Perhaps not as popular, but very popular nonetheless. A cursory glance at the front page tells you that the majority of YouTube's content is, indeed, user created.
This debate, the debate this article presents, is a side issue, and not really relevent to the discussion as to whether Viacom's claims are legitimate or not. Viacom may or may not be shooting itself in the foot, but that's not relevent to whether they're misrepresenting YouTube when they claim YouTube wouldn't exist without its content, or when they claim YouTube is violating the law. On both counts, they're wrong.
YouTube is not Napster. It has not set out to build upon the free exchange of copyright infringing material. It did not deliberately build itself into a structure that would make DMCA take-down notices impossible. It does not anonymize uploaders to quite the same degree. It is obeying the law. Regardless of whether Viacom is shooting themselves in the foot over this strategically, they're on the wrong side of the law in suing Google, and they're adding insult to injury by lying about YouTube's MO.
Well, sure it was, just like the Commodore PET (a self contained, off-the-shelf computer that had everything you needed to start with) was a product of a company focussed on user experience...
I think actually the PET has a better claim to that. The Apple-II's only "user experience" innovation was the decision by Steve Jobs to put it in a "professional" case. Otherwise it was no less complicated (indeed, in some ways it was worse) than the majority of computers developed beforehand, and it certainly didn't present a significantly better experience than those that came around the same time. Customers even had to open the thing up immediately on buying it to add a third party TV modulator just to get video.
It really wasn't until Lisa that Apple started seriously thinking about "user experience" in any way.
There seems to be a confusion of terminology in the above, but I admit I may be misreading it.
Anti-aliasing is not the same thing as sub-pixel rendering, which is orthogonal to anti-aliasing and can be (and almost always is) combined with it.
Anti-aliasing is merely the use of different shades to adjust the sharpness of object boundaries, where the shade is based upon the amount of a pixel the objects covering that pixel would intersect. While this sounds like something that would be describable by the term "sub-pixel rendering" if, for a moment, you assume you would divide the pixel into smaller virtual pixels to calculate the end result, that's not what sub-pixel rendering refers to. The term "sub-pixel" is not being used to describe these smaller "virtual pixels".
In an LCD a pixel is made up of three "sub-pixels": real, discrete, lighting elements that together illuminate one complete pixel. The sub-pixels are the three primary colours and are almost always mounted side by side as three thin strips. Sub-pixel rendering is the technique of using the separate red, green, and blue sub-pixels of an LCD "pixel" in isolation to improve the sharpness of object boundaries. When used, the screen effectively has an increased horizonal resolution of 3x the regular resolution, so a 1400x1050 screen effectively becomes 4200x1050.
It is usually, if not always, used in conjunction with regular anti-aliasing (though technically it doesn't need to be.)
Microsoft's patents, as I understand it, cover the latter, and in particular focus on preventing "colour fringing" that is otherwise a major downside of using sub-pixel rendering.
That's complete rubbish. Amazon didn't need to patent anything, they merely needed to publicly document it. The concept would have been unpatentable immediately on them doing so.
And even if they did patent it, there's no requirement for them to enforce the patent (except, perhaps, defensively.) They chose to do so anyway, against several companies, both competitors and third parties.
iTunes uses an embedded copy of Quicktime to display the dynamic content used for things like the iTMS. While I believe it uses HTTP for the network transport layer, very little of the rest has to do with the web. No HTML, no GIFs, no cookies in the web browser sense.
I'm going to go with no for that one. There was plenty of cheap hardware in 1991 capable of running full, memory-protected with VM, Unix like operating systems. Some, such as the Amiga, required a (relatively low cost) CPU upgrade, others, such as the Acorn ARM-based computers, were all set up from the get-go. Whichever you chose, building a system for well under $2,000 was very much an option, and no more expensive than the equivalent Intel architecture builds.
And for the most part, the hardware of the non-Wintel systems was much more standardized (that is, there were very few differences between the different Amigas that would have required special programming, there were very few differences between the different Acorn machines that would have required special programming, say the same for the Atari ST, etc), and capable than the PC clones at that time.
I don't think it can be reasonably said that the situation with Intel clones "helped" the development of Unix-inspired operating systems. The reason these systems ended up taking the lion's share of the market was more because Amiga, Atari, et al, disappeared from the market, not because they were unsuitable or too expensive.
Well, he didn't say he's not willing to pay for content, but that he's unwilling to register and login to see it. These are slightly different, albeit the way marketeers insist on selling content right now involves the loss of privacy.
The way to solve it is to make it easier for people to pay for content. I can think of ways of doing that that do not require you give your life's story to the New York Times, Slashdot, Salon, Guardian Unlimited, the BBC, Wikipedia, Ubuntu, MacRumors, IBM, Something Awful, the Family Guy Fan site, NPR, squiggleslash, {...and so on...}. The ability is there, services like Amazon have been running tip-jar schemes for a while that could form the basis of both voluntary and required payment systems, the real question is why content providers are shunning them in favour of all-or-nothing "It's either free, or I need to know who you are and where you live, your age, gender, sexuality, shoe size, politics, etc" type BS.
Click on the "Slashdot" tab. Only accepted articles are then shown. Mysterious future ones are shown in red. Curiously enough, with the time and date on which they'll be posted (so it's better than the Subscriber's mysterious future feature.)
Ask the authors of the majority of the licences in this list that are copyleft.
The simple reality is that GPLv2 wasn't perfect. Many projects have seen the need to create their own licenses, often licenses that are incompatible with the GPL. Some of those licenses are more liberal than the GPL, others are more strict. In many cases, small changes to the GPL that would have had the support of the vast majority of people who use it, would have made the license acceptable.
The big one concerns the effects of patents.
You'll be surprised how significant a fork over a license change can be.
That said, I seriously doubt there will be much traction in GPLv2 forks, as most of the people who appear to oppose GPLv3 either have little respect behind the principles of GPLv2 (and argue as such), or oppose the GPL altogether (I am really not seeing heavy opposition from any group that believes in strong copyleft licenses, using arguments that are based upon the superiority of strong, copyleft, licenses.) Neither of the groups I mentioned has much incentive to hijack development of GPL'd projects to keep them on GPLv2.
IIRC, Torvalds said he's pleased with the changes, not that he's pleased with GPLv3 itself. The misunderstanding boils down to a poorly written CNET headline:
Indeedy. Or it could be even more ironicalized, and a totally ironicalizational version of "Duke Nukem Forever" could be made using stolen components.
As long as you don't have a patent agreement that would restrict downstream licensees, you can license under the GPL. The GPL's anti-patent language really only kicks in if you have some agreement with some third party which means that the rights granted by the GPL wouldn't apply to people you distribute the code to. It is not your job to enforce patents (or other effects of foreign laws) in the code you distribute.
Not only do you have no such agreement, but it's hard to see how you could even be party to such an agreement given software patents do not apply to you.
For someone importing your code to a country where software patents apply, the onus is on the patent holder to find them and challenge their use of the code.
Google is the #1 search engine in part because it doesn't deliberately cripple itself to make political points. It obeys the same laws that everyone else does, but beyond that it does not deliberately set out to make itself less useful than it could otherwise be.
When Google starts banning or boycotting certain search results not because they're irrelevant but in order to punish those it disagrees with, it will be punishing the users, and it will be the users who chose to go somewhere else. Google will no longer be the #1 search engine.
It just can't play the political games you and others recommend so frequently.
It's the OpenSSL license that forbids interoperability with the GPL. OpenSSH depends upon OpenSSL, so it's linked, but it wasn't a decision by the OpenBSD community to make OpenSSL so encumbered, and realistically, I suspect Theo isn't a big fan of the OpenSSL license any more than he is of the GPL.
While there will always be space for newcomers, there's a standard underneath it becomes somewhat pointless and adds needlessly to the signal to junk/noise ratio to consider adding an article. A newcomer's guide to Unix is one thing, but a brief overview of a small part of the system which will be useless to the majority of Slashdot readers, and will be too lacking in context for newcomers, fits well below that standard.
For some reason, my reply has disappeared, so here it is again:
Try $500 for Mac OS X. The only legal ways of obtaining Mac OS X for Intel as of today are:
1. Buy Mac OS X Server, 10 licenses ($500) 2. Buy an Intel Mac. Remove OS, install something else (or destroy it or whatever.)
You cannot buy the Intel version of Mac OS X for $130. You hopefully will once Leopard is released, but that's not happened yet. Kind of sucks, huh?
No, I didn't, because it wasn't relevent. You responded to:
with your comments about "TELENET". I assumed you thought "TELENET" had some vague relevence to my comment. If your intention was to start an entirely new thread about something completely unrelated, perhaps you could not reply to a comment of mine next time.
Are you retarded?
I have no idea what you think you're describing, but it most certainly isn't ISDN over X.25!
ISDN is a digital interface to the phone system. You get two (or more, but basic service is 2) digital bi-directional 64kbps channels called "bearer" channels that are used for the phone calls, plus a 16kbps "D" channel (which may or may not have used X.25, I can't remember, but if it did it was for the very limited purpose of communicating with the telephone exchange.) The D channel was used, essentially, to set up and tear down phone calls.
It's an alternative to POTS (that's the normal analog phone system), and has the advantage that you get two lines, and have a certain amount of metadata going over the D channel that lets you program funky things in if you want. Because it's end-to-end digital, you don't need a modem when you're transferring data, so you can get faster data transmission than you would do if you were using POTS with modems. This is especially true if you use a feature called "bonding", where both Bearer channels could be combined into a single 128kbps line.
ISDN is/was relatively popular in Europe, where both POTS and ISDN are charged by time used. In America, where POTS is usually unmetered for local calls, ISDN was usually not, and as a result never really became popular.
ISDN has nothing to do with what you're describing. You're more likely to transmit X.25 over ISDN than anyone would be likely to do the opposite.