Why is this insightful? Since when has the goal of any business been the failure of its competition?
The goal of a business is to make a profit, preferably the largest it can. In many cases, a business cannot thrive without competition, and even if it still considers competition a problem, it's goal is not to eliminate it.
You don't have to put an Application in/Applications for it to be runnable.
The only reason it's slightly harder to run an OS X app from the browser is that OS X apps tend to be whole directories rather than just a single file, and older OS 1-9 files have "forks" which the standard Web download model doesn't really support. Of course, there's always AppleScript.
"Installing" an OS X app is a matter of putting it on your disk. Anywhere. (Well, anywhere except the Trash can.) You can put it on your desk top, you can put it in your Documents folder, you can put it pretty much anywhere. You can associate a file with it, run it, move it somewhere else, and still have that file open your moved program.
It's all rather funky. But, no, there's no security provided by the/Applications folder, and indeed/Applications is writable by most users by default anyway.
I just read that thread (and a few others) and it's the most depressing thing I've seen all day. The tone, the quality of the discussion, etc, is like reading an Amiga advocacy list - and I don't mean in 1990, I mean today. The paranoia, the outdated view of the world, the extremist rhetoric.
If Dawes, Georgina, et al, represent the current direction of XFree86, then XFree86 is dead. And for what? A clause in a license that does something that could have been achieved by friendlier, more flexible, means? A failure to work within the FOSS communities to achieve it because of apparent hostility to the GPL?
What a depressing end to a great project. I hope X.org succeeds where XFree86 could have done.
Like most anti-spam proposed-solutions, this isn't a solution, it's a temporary hack that relies upon spammers not keeping up with the anti-spammers, and which causes an unnecessarily large amount of hassle for system administrators, both those sending legitimate email, and those wanting to receive it.
Like I said in my post, there is at least one solution out there that's a real solution - organization specific reply addresses. If an organization is "careless" with the only address they have to contact someone on, they'll lose the ability to contact that person. It works. I use it. I rarely get spammed (at home) and I never get spam from the same source twice and, get this, I never get a false positive. Yahoo now sells it as a service too. If everyone did it, there'd be no spam, because there'd be no incentive to pass on the email addresses.
Let's quit the crap with half-arsed proposals that are more to do with sysadmin ego than fixing the problem, and use systems that work.
Nope. Actually, the GPL requires credit be given if the program is interactive and the version you're modifying already prints a copyright message:
2c: If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement
including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
The major issue with the XFree86 license is that it is more specific about how the credit should be given. The ironic thing is that people using GPL'd forks were probably the only bunch that were required to give credit before this issue, given that XFree86 is indeed interactive, and does print a copyright message when it starts.
In fairness, he did say "Don't block them outright". I'm semi-happy to have "from a dynamic IP" as a factor in blocking, just not "the" factor (eg "Ok, comes from dynamic IP, add one point, contains "Viagra", add one point, email address is clearly invalid or generic Yahoo/Hotmail, add two points...(etc). Are there are more than five points? If so..." is okish, whereas "Comes from a dynamic IP? Block it! Contains "Viagra"? Block it! (etc)" most definitely isn't.)
If people are using statistical likelihood to drop emails, then that's kind of reasonable, as long as real efforts are made to make it statistically unlikely that legitimate email will be dropped. No one statistical element right now can be used to say "This is definitely spam". What annoys me is blanket "rules" that drop emails when you cannot reasonably say that all email (or even 99% of email) that conforms to that rule is spam.
There are still better methods of dealing with spam, such as using different email addresses for different businesses (and using expiring addresses and contact forms for "public" addresses that are published on Usenet, the Web, et al) It's a fact that if we adopted such systems, spam wouldn't exist. But system administrators, frequently the same ones that bitch and moan about how "stupid" everyone else is whenever a virus comes out, seem to be just as dumb as everyone else when it comes to adopting workable, effective, solutions, which is where over-the-top systems like SPEWS come in, and why my (unupgraded) Yahoo account is still receiving a good 50-100 spam messages per day.
Spam is a solvable problem, but the more inane blanket filters are imposed, the less easy it'll be in practice to really solve it.
When Jobs was demonstrating the new Airport Express, Walt Mossberg said that the biggest problem he saw was that users had to get up and walk to their computers to change play lists. Jobs joked that walking was good, but when pressed, he smiled a wry smile. AppleInsider correspondents took this to mean that Apple is developing in this area, and the Airport Express is just a step along the way.
Kind of sounds like something's planned. A "Remote control" (something resembling an iPod, with 802.11 instead of a hard disk) for iTunes ought to be technically easy to build. I wonder if it would be something like that?
Now, somewhat more contraverial, is you also need to recognize the contributions of the many people who's code you are selling. It would seem a responsible thing for a member of the community to acknowledge their participation by helping promote the name (Linux, GNOME, whatever).
It would be somewhat ironic if Sun felt obliged to include Linux in the name for these reasons given the hostility the OSS community has against the acknowledgement of GNU.
You see, if Apple had just based their GUI on the X Windowing System there wouldn't be a problem. You could just ssh -X to the music server and run iTunes from there...
Erm. I'll get my coat...
(Ok, more seriously, yes, I like X11, though I'd like to see Apple, et al, build X11 style network transparency into their systems rather than have everyone adopt X11 warts and all.)
No, they exist to give one, and only one competitor a disadvantage over everyone else, that competitor being the one that owns 95% of the market, having an entrenched monopoly due to factors other than simply having the best product.
Apple isn't being given a leg up over any other music vendor by the EU. If Napster had made the deal in China, or made a deal with Dell, or made a deal with anyone, or if Real had done likewise, it wouldn't be treated as any different to that of Apple.
It's a standard abbreviation. It even means that standard abbreviation - etc used to contain a bunch of miscellaneous files that didn't fit anywhere else, from configuration files (which is still the case), to system administration binaries (since moved to/sbin.)
/home is a modern development and exists because the user directory,/usr, was being overloaded with jobs above just containing user home directories.
/usr does not stand for "Unix System Resources", something I'm pretty sure was invented by a troll somewhere as a joke that's come to be believed by a few too many people. (Think about it, it has "Unix" in the name? It's so generic it could apply to almost any directory in *IX? Why would they have called it that?)
The annoying part about the unix filesystem is that you have to learn it. But you have to learn Windows, too. Sure, your temp files are under C:\documents and settings\username\local settings\temp, but there is a c:\winnt\temp and for some odd reason c:\documents and settings\default user\local settings\temp gets used by some apps (although this last one may be because of a distributed installer I use that runs as the SYSTEM user)
FWIW, *IX has the same problem with Temporary Files./tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/local/tmp, and others, seem to be common amongst the multiple places where temporary files get created. Not to mention the occasional dedicated (ie application specific, but still temporary) directories in/var. Now, in fairness, I've seen a few distros try to link some of these to the same places, but...
This problem is going to grow with both Windows and *IX in the near future. We probably need to start again from scratch;) Maybe that's what GoboLinux is doing right.
No, it isn't. usr was originally where users home directories were stored, amongst other things.
Think about it: "Unix System Resource(s)" isn't merely historically inaccurate, it would also be an absurd choice of name given that it no more applies to/usr than it does/bin,/etc,/lib,/var, or/sbin. (/etc used to contain everything now in/sbin too. Can you imagine what a PITA that was?) And why put "Unix" in the name? It's not in any of the other names, and they're all (or were all) unique to Unix!
While this particular myth is a little annoying, it isn't half as bad as the collegue I know who thinks the correct pronounciation of/etc is "Ett Sea"...
FWIW, it's not a double answer, it's a pedantic answer. The OP was writing that there was a specific law against erect peni being shown in porn in the UK (actually, FWIW, it's treated as applying to everything by default, including sex-education and medical works, which is where the fact it isn't a law comes in); however, it isn't a law. It's something a judge has used as a, erm, rule of thumb, that's become set as a precedent.
If you think parliament mulled over an "Photographs of Erect Peni Act, 1967", you'd be wrong.
The distinction is important, this is something that can be overruled just as quickly as it was created in the first place. Because it's only a rule of thumb, context can be made to matter (hence while it technically applies to medical works, a reasonable judge would probably throw out a case involving medical works.) Indeed, I believe in many cases these types of prosecution, of late, when applied to actual (consenting adult) porn, have already been thrown out.
I agree that British rules applying to (consenting adult) sex are, usually, absurd. Britain is the country that had the Spanner verdict, after all.
It wouldn't suprise me - since in the UK hardcore porn _is_ actually illegal. They have a law that stipulates (and I'm not joking here) the maximum elevation an erect penis can be in porn flicks there.
If you'll excuse the pun, the so-called "Mull of Kintyre" rule is not a hard or fast rule. It's a somewhat arbitrary thing invented by a judge, and it only takes a slightly more liberal judge to throw out such prosectutions.
In any case, hardcore porn is legal as long as you don't show certain things (like peni.)
If that happens, and anyone at BT, or any automated process at BT, claims that the site is "Child Porn", the operators of that site will win the largest libel damages in history. Remember that under British law, under which BT is governed, libel has precious few defenses.
I'm quite sure there was investigative journalism (good and crappy) before Ken Brown's book, and Brown was, at some point in his life, exposed to it (Fox News, judging from what's come out about his book.)
So I think it's absolutely absurd for Brown to argue he is the "author" of his own "book". Clearly he just copied from more original work, perhaps the Whitewater stories, or maybe he went further, back to the "journalist" who "exposed" the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
...then more fool them. As long as "Linux Today" does not allow advertisers to interfere with its content, either directly or indirectly, I don't see an issue.
I read nothing in the complaint to suggest that Linux Today's content has been compromised by these adverts. Instead, the entire complaint seems to be purely that Microsoft advertises, and the advertising itself is Linux-hostile.
That's fine. And I expect most readers will ignore what Microsoft has to say, but be delighted they're funding Linux.
Python can be compiled? Show me. I'm aware you can distribute "executables" but IIRC these are simply the Python run-time interpreter and internal byte-code representation of the program bundled together. I'm not aware of anything out there at the moment that can convert programs written in Python to ix86.
BTW, I agree Python's probably faster for the most part than Java for small apps, because of Java's somewhat heavy load, link, and set up times. But what I've heard of.NET and Mono suggests to me neither have the same issue.
I've had two such devices - PS/2 mouse and keyboard plugged into adapter plugged into Mac. Both have their limitations and quirks. The first one regularly used to send some sort of signal, pretty much at random, which, under OS X, would start scrolling a window at random (not even the one with the mouse over it or foremost one either), the other's kind of ok but does wierd things at wierd times - such as sending some characters at random whenever it's reset and the user presses a key for the first time since that reset.
The latter I got from Micro Innovations. You can find a lot of these things on Amazon.com.
Personally, I think there's a major quality control issue with these things. They're built to be cheap, and I suspect all manufacturers are coming up with "short cuts" that they shouldn't. The fact you found two that apparently use proprietary protocols (or otherwise do not appear as valid mice and keyboards) confirms this in my opinion. If you can avoid getting a PS/2 keyboard, do it!
You don't call to verify if someone received an email. You call them when it's bounced back with "Email undeliverable: An over-enthusastic idiot configured the destination server". They then contact their ISP with words to the effect of "I can't receive this perfectly valid email because your idiot admin subscribed to a blacklist which, actually, isn't a black and white way of telling spam from non-spam and which simply relies upon lazy programming. Either stop using it, or unblock the people trying to email me, or lose my business"
Then the problem gets fixed (either by the ISP, or by the end user going to a real, TCP/IP based RFC compliant, ISP, or the end user putting up with the situation and telling the sender that, unfortunately, they'll not be able to receive email from them for the time being) and there aren't any more problems that require non-email communication.
Remember, email is used because it's convenient, not because it's the only form of communication available.
Slashdot Mirror
The goal of a business is to make a profit, preferably the largest it can. In many cases, a business cannot thrive without competition, and even if it still considers competition a problem, it's goal is not to eliminate it.
The only reason it's slightly harder to run an OS X app from the browser is that OS X apps tend to be whole directories rather than just a single file, and older OS 1-9 files have "forks" which the standard Web download model doesn't really support. Of course, there's always AppleScript.
"Installing" an OS X app is a matter of putting it on your disk. Anywhere. (Well, anywhere except the Trash can.) You can put it on your desk top, you can put it in your Documents folder, you can put it pretty much anywhere. You can associate a file with it, run it, move it somewhere else, and still have that file open your moved program.
It's all rather funky. But, no, there's no security provided by the /Applications folder, and indeed /Applications is writable by most users by default anyway.
If Dawes, Georgina, et al, represent the current direction of XFree86, then XFree86 is dead. And for what? A clause in a license that does something that could have been achieved by friendlier, more flexible, means? A failure to work within the FOSS communities to achieve it because of apparent hostility to the GPL?
What a depressing end to a great project. I hope X.org succeeds where XFree86 could have done.
Like I said in my post, there is at least one solution out there that's a real solution - organization specific reply addresses. If an organization is "careless" with the only address they have to contact someone on, they'll lose the ability to contact that person. It works. I use it. I rarely get spammed (at home) and I never get spam from the same source twice and, get this, I never get a false positive. Yahoo now sells it as a service too. If everyone did it, there'd be no spam, because there'd be no incentive to pass on the email addresses.
Let's quit the crap with half-arsed proposals that are more to do with sysadmin ego than fixing the problem, and use systems that work.
Actually I just figured out what your second paragraph meant and realised I shouldn't have started my reply with "Nope". Sorry!
If people are using statistical likelihood to drop emails, then that's kind of reasonable, as long as real efforts are made to make it statistically unlikely that legitimate email will be dropped. No one statistical element right now can be used to say "This is definitely spam". What annoys me is blanket "rules" that drop emails when you cannot reasonably say that all email (or even 99% of email) that conforms to that rule is spam.
There are still better methods of dealing with spam, such as using different email addresses for different businesses (and using expiring addresses and contact forms for "public" addresses that are published on Usenet, the Web, et al) It's a fact that if we adopted such systems, spam wouldn't exist. But system administrators, frequently the same ones that bitch and moan about how "stupid" everyone else is whenever a virus comes out, seem to be just as dumb as everyone else when it comes to adopting workable, effective, solutions, which is where over-the-top systems like SPEWS come in, and why my (unupgraded) Yahoo account is still receiving a good 50-100 spam messages per day.
Spam is a solvable problem, but the more inane blanket filters are imposed, the less easy it'll be in practice to really solve it.
Erm. I'll get my coat...
(Ok, more seriously, yes, I like X11, though I'd like to see Apple, et al, build X11 style network transparency into their systems rather than have everyone adopt X11 warts and all.)
Apple isn't being given a leg up over any other music vendor by the EU. If Napster had made the deal in China, or made a deal with Dell, or made a deal with anyone, or if Real had done likewise, it wouldn't be treated as any different to that of Apple.
It's a standard abbreviation. It even means that standard abbreviation - etc used to contain a bunch of miscellaneous files that didn't fit anywhere else, from configuration files (which is still the case), to system administration binaries (since moved to /sbin.)
This problem is going to grow with both Windows and *IX in the near future. We probably need to start again from scratch ;) Maybe that's what GoboLinux is doing right.
Think about it: "Unix System Resource(s)" isn't merely historically inaccurate, it would also be an absurd choice of name given that it no more applies to /usr than it does /bin, /etc, /lib, /var, or /sbin. (/etc used to contain everything now in /sbin too. Can you imagine what a PITA that was?) And why put "Unix" in the name? It's not in any of the other names, and they're all (or were all) unique to Unix!
While this particular myth is a little annoying, it isn't half as bad as the collegue I know who thinks the correct pronounciation of /etc is "Ett Sea"...
If you think parliament mulled over an "Photographs of Erect Peni Act, 1967", you'd be wrong.
The distinction is important, this is something that can be overruled just as quickly as it was created in the first place. Because it's only a rule of thumb, context can be made to matter (hence while it technically applies to medical works, a reasonable judge would probably throw out a case involving medical works.) Indeed, I believe in many cases these types of prosecution, of late, when applied to actual (consenting adult) porn, have already been thrown out.
I agree that British rules applying to (consenting adult) sex are, usually, absurd. Britain is the country that had the Spanner verdict, after all.
In any case, hardcore porn is legal as long as you don't show certain things (like peni.)
If that happens, and anyone at BT, or any automated process at BT, claims that the site is "Child Porn", the operators of that site will win the largest libel damages in history. Remember that under British law, under which BT is governed, libel has precious few defenses.
So I think it's absolutely absurd for Brown to argue he is the "author" of his own "book". Clearly he just copied from more original work, perhaps the Whitewater stories, or maybe he went further, back to the "journalist" who "exposed" the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I read nothing in the complaint to suggest that Linux Today's content has been compromised by these adverts. Instead, the entire complaint seems to be purely that Microsoft advertises, and the advertising itself is Linux-hostile.
That's fine. And I expect most readers will ignore what Microsoft has to say, but be delighted they're funding Linux.
BTW, I agree Python's probably faster for the most part than Java for small apps, because of Java's somewhat heavy load, link, and set up times. But what I've heard of .NET and Mono suggests to me neither have the same issue.
Though not in the time frame he was refering to, which is one of the other bits of context that generally gets ripped from that quote...
The latter I got from Micro Innovations. You can find a lot of these things on Amazon.com.
Personally, I think there's a major quality control issue with these things. They're built to be cheap, and I suspect all manufacturers are coming up with "short cuts" that they shouldn't. The fact you found two that apparently use proprietary protocols (or otherwise do not appear as valid mice and keyboards) confirms this in my opinion. If you can avoid getting a PS/2 keyboard, do it!
Then the problem gets fixed (either by the ISP, or by the end user going to a real, TCP/IP based RFC compliant, ISP, or the end user putting up with the situation and telling the sender that, unfortunately, they'll not be able to receive email from them for the time being) and there aren't any more problems that require non-email communication.
Remember, email is used because it's convenient, not because it's the only form of communication available.
Like I said, there's always text messaging ;-)