I arrive at that figure because around here "Official" RedHat sells for U$52. People who know all about cheap bytes still walk in and buy it. Note that this is NOT north america and the telephone support available to Us residents is less than useless at U$1 per minute phone rates.
That means they are either contributing to the "RedHat Charity" or they pay the extra money for those dead trees.
PS : The unacounted dollars are shiping on the CD.
This is the second time that BE has been caught violatng the GPL "by accient". I suspect that if debian went throgh the whole BEOS and audited it with a decompiler they wold find a few more violatons. It's not that BE is evil or even particularly careless. It's just that it's damnd hard to keep track of which license governs hich pice of software. especialy when you borow so heavly from the GNU/Linux codebase.
Anything can be sold. (Re:how dyou sell a patent?)
on
eBay For Patents?
·
· Score: 1
These days the only thing that you can't readily sell is an unwilling 3rd party human.
Anything else can be aranged. A patent is no exception. Just negotiate a price. However it usualy makes more sence to just license the pattent to someone. This is what makes pattents so valuable.
In theory you invent something and can't aford a factory you shust license it to someone who can and grow fat from the royalties.
I'm not very good at judging the reletive buty of white women because I havn't seen that many who I find attractive and I don't know how much of that is just a subconsius racial bias.
I can however recognise a few that I consider very hot. The girl from "Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human" is hot. Trinity is hot. Anything below 1st rate hot, I just don't categorise.
I get antsy just having a few people peep through my window. I had a netcam and turned it off to avoid being seen so much.
Jenny on the other hand is on display 24/7 for the whole world. You can watch her eat sleep hack or just plain live. I don't think I could handle the pressure. Then again, maybe I am just not as pretty as Jenny. Not that she is particularly hot or anything. In fact the only thing unusual about her is that you get to see how she lives.
Nice article and all. I especially like the mater of fact approach. However did these goys notice the pattern in the benchmarks ? Those that are heavily dependent on the video card show the P3 killing the Celeron.
Not because it's a faster chip or anything. It just runs the bus at 100MHz to 133MHz. When they push the Celeron to the edge it has a bus speed of 106MHz. Video intensive benchmarks will be affected by what the external bus speed is at more than any other benchmark.
What I want to see is something pearly CPU intensive like a compilation benchmark. I build kdelibs in just under 2 hours on my P200 with 64 Megs. How long will it take on a Celeron@901MHz with 128 megs of RAM ?
There are two things at work here. I'll take on the original article 1st and follow up with the stuff from this feature.
"AOL is powerful and can control huge amounts of content for vast numbers of people, so they should be broken up into more manageable pieces."
It's a nice idea but that's not how this thing works. Once upon a time IBM was the big bad antitrust bully. They practically invented FUD. These days nobody calls them a danger to anyone. Nobody considers IBM as a problem to freedom or to competition. Never mind that in real earnings IBM is 10X the size of Microsoft and by other measures ( number of employees, Property owned etc.. ) is even larger than that. Anty trust is about bullying the little goys, not simply having power.
The second matter is the control of information on the Internet. Simply put "It won't happen". MS wants it. AOL/TW wants. Every major corp wants to control the internet. Each has a shot at trying, none has a chance of success.
The problem is that the internet is the place for the tiny niche. If you are into nude Hermaphrodite wrestling then you can try find the other 4 people in the world that share your obsession. This is the power of the internet and simply owning a bunch of studios and most of the good writers isn't going to help.
The problem with the net is that Location isn't so important. Time Warner got to be powerful by making sure it owned many of the channels carried by your typical cable provider. On the net every provider can carry all the "channels". AOL/TW's attraction is therefore those items that they product themselves which in the grand scheme of things isn't that much.
Sure they own the Matrix but would you join AOL if that was your only attraction ? It takes more than that. The same goes for all the other content they own. Each time they move something behind the AOL service all they will achieve is pissing off those users who like that item. Paramount was forcibly made aware of this 2 years ago when they tried to close Star Trek fan sites and put everything under paramount.com which only worked with IE at the time.
Are there any Experts on Sunology in the house ? Do any Slaashdot readers understand why Sun would choose to forcibly time limit and expire a product that it's giving away for free ?
Yep. The SO preview has a limit and will stop working in a few months. What's so bad about allowing someone to keep using a free BETA rather than the equally free final product if it works for them ?
Hewing to fill out a lengthy application form just to download this baby isn't such a good thing either.
It is worth noteing that 2600.com is the main target of these actions. The reason is quite simple. They have little in the way of public simpathy and even less in the judicery.
Remember that 2600.com is the same site that spent the last few years screaming for the releas of "The worlds most dangerus Hacker".
The last time this hapend was when Lary Filth ( AKA Lary Flint of Hustler Magazine ) was sued for slander vulgarity etc...
The Times and the Post stud byhim in there own interest. Where are VA, MSNBC and ZDNET now ? This WILL come back to haunt you all.
Transmeta has one. (Re:128 bit cpu's?)
on
1.4-1.6 GHz Alphas
·
· Score: 1
The Transmeta CPU is actualy a 128 bit chip internaly. It only emulates 32 bit x86CPUs.
The positbility exists for it to play ia64 at a latter date.
Censorware is a natural application for artificial intelligence if ever there was one. In fact you cannot have effective Censorware without employing a reasonably mature AI.
All the censorware really has to do is read through each page and look at each picture before putting it on screen to figure out whether it is porn or not. It takes some skill to know the difference between an artistic nude and a XXX pix.
Personally I like the whole human supervision thing. Let your kids know that mom or dad or the made or big sis could just walk in and see what he is viewing before s/he has a chance to react. More importantly provide that strong moral base that lets a child not really care about porn.
This reminds me of the situation with Alcohol. In the west liqueur is restricted from the kids. Mom and pop drink but they don't dare let the child near the stuff. The result is that he sneaks off to sip a little while nobody is looking and grows up into a drunk lying across the barroom door. Jewish kids on the other hand get wine at major feasts ( Passover, Wedding etc... ). The result is that they get to see this as something they can have if they want to but which has a foul taste. The result is fewer drunks.
Anybody want to take bets as to the relationship between censorship and the higher rates of all sexual dysfunction in the US? If not for America, it wouldn't have occurred to me that there is a link between sex and chains.
I know the MARQUEE tag isn't part of any HTML spec and has never been approved by the IETF.
It has been derided as part of Microsoft's embrace and extend strategy for HTML in fact. However I ask the question; Can it be implemented in other browsers ? Specifically Mozilla and KFM2 ?
I would guess that's a qualified "yes". So I ask my second question. Why not suggest adding that tag alone to the standard ? Release html-4.1 with the Marquee tag defined and explained.
The reason I pick it out is that unlike most other E&E code it actually adds something of value to the web experience. Sure I find them annoying and so do most of you. However it's a way to help novices make a new web page "look alive". They like it and will continue to use it.
BTW : The alternative to a marquee is an animated gif. Which one do *you* want people to use ?
Re:Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 2
Ohhh... I know exactly what it is.
Can you belive I actualy used to dring stuff with high concentrations of it ? The very thoght of that makes me shiver.
Fortunatly Red Stripe isn't as poluted as most other beers are so the efect of DHMO in that brew should be minimal.
Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 5
http://www.dhmo.org has got to be the most elaborate and convincing hoax of them all. In fact I think the only reason it didn't make the list is that even after being told what it's about you go back and recognize the underlining honesty.
This stuff really dose pollute sewage and is at least partially responsible for El Ninio.
I read somewhere that Linux supports Solaris Binaries on the Spark platform. How true is this and what is the quality of the support ?
Also I would really like to know where the performance status is these days. Not just under this mandrake but also with the 2.3.x kernels. I know Solaris kicks us around on really big spark boxes ( Ultra 10K etc... ) and Linux is allegedly faster on single CPU configurations but what about the lower mid range? The 2 and 4 way SMP boxen.
The only major production deployments of Linux on spark I have herd of recently have been Beowulf. I assume cost and performance have everything to do with that choice. Dose anyone have numbers ?
Finally. Mandrake 7.0 is the nicest Linux distribution I have used to date. It's also the fastest on my hardware. However with the leapfrog distros have been playing lately how do the latest RedHat and Caldera compare ?
"There's no way I can go back to MS style editors for text file work."
That is another problem with these things. I have to admin a wide varietyu of system including MS crapware. I also have to write documents in Wordperfect all the time ( I can't survive without a good spellcheck:). It took some doing but I got joe runing on the SUN and SCO boxen. That leavs me needing to use two simple interfaces for text editing.
One for joe and the other for every single other editor I used from the humble edit.com in dos to the mighty WP. Except for unix text mode editors all the software for slinging text strings around are the same.
I wonder how many slashdot readers figured out that this poster is being sarcastic? Anyway here is my take on this new embeded QT.
I read through the comments looking for someone who gets the real significance of this and came up with a blank. So here is my take on this baby.
When WinCE was 1st released oneof MSs major promises was that it would let you run the same apps and exchange files in the same format on both desktop and palmtop. Basically they promised MSWord in a pocket sized version.
It never happened and the reason is simple. MS office is over 200 megs of bloat. If they could have made it smaller they probably would but frankly that's tough to do. a 16 meg office suite and OS combination just isn't going to happen.
fast forward to the present. portable Linux has a compressed file system almost dubbing the capacity of a flash card so all you really need is a 32 meg office suite to fit in 16 megs of flash. KOffice is normally under 30 megs with the kdelibs. add on 2 megs of QT and 400 K kernel with all the drivers for that device plus frame buffer and you are running in 16 megs of cache with an OS and an OFfice suite. add another 16 or 32 megs of RAM to run everything in and you can get decent performance plus a desktop.
THAT is the significance of this thing. Linus plus Transmeta plus Troll Tech and the KDE team are about to deliver on Bill's promise.
Frankly I would hate to be a microsofty right now.
As for little issues like "dose this interface match the small size device?". They don't matter. Interfaces can be hacked and adjusted and with tidy modular code like this it doesn't really take much for good GUI designers to "fix" it.
That's what happens when your article is mentioned on http://slashdot.org a site which should have been a defendant but wasn't chosen for reasons I will soon discus. I would guess this is message number 130 or so:).
OK. Let's get down to business. 1st there is the piracy claim. There is one little thing nobody you interviewed mentioned. Right now there are pirated DVDs for sale on the street in Taiwan. Those copies were produced without the use of DeCSS ( which isn't really complete yet ). The people selling the ~$3,000 DVD copying machines have not been attacked by the DVD-CCA or the MPAA yet. Never mind that the coping will soon spread to the US.
Then we have the functionality issues. The encryption on DVDs is only used to limit playing of the movies not not copying of the disks.
Finally there is the choice of defendants. 2600.com and slashdot.org did basically the same thing. post discussions of the code and links to download sites. Slashdot is more popular than 2600 and is frequently quoted in the mainstream media. However it is also part of a publicly traded company.
2600.com by contrast has the image of a rogue site which for the last 5 years has been screaming about the injustice of Kevin Mitnic's arrest for cracking computer systems. In other words an easy target. The idea of this case is to have some court somewhere rule the DeCSS is an illegal technology. Once that is done it will prevent the likes of VA Linux and Diamond Multimedia from selling less expensive players which use that code rather than the code from the CCA.
In short they are trying to retroactively patent something which was previously protected as a trade secret. This is exactly like the case of the Playstation emulator ( look it up ) except that they get to pick a target.
PS : You will be flamed fewer times if you do more fact checking and don't appear to slant your story in favor of the bad guys ( prosecution in this case:)
[..Oh, and if you think vi is tough, type "ed" sometime.... ]
I have and it sucks. Perhaps as hard as VI or Emacs. Fortunately ed isn't a "required" part of learning Unix. Neither is Emacs. This is why VI is the most offensive.
Employers ASK if you know VI. The certification exams have VI questions. It's hard to be a Unix admin without knowing VI.
As for the whole extinction thing. Of course VI should not have lasted this long. It should have been ( get this ) EXTINCT by now.
VI is a required tool for any unix admin. I should know since that's my corrent job title. I can use vi but the fact is it's a piece of tripe. Editing text files is a very basic and simple task. If all you are using an editor for is writing simple scripts and editing the files in/etc then there is little need for the power of VI and emacs.
That wouldn't have been a problem if that power didn't come at a huge cost in usability. Unfortunately it dose and vi is simply the hardest thing to use in your typical Linux distribution. Configuring IP forwarding and firewalls is simple. VPN is trivial. Hell even slapping together a lab full of diskless workstations and an SMP server to drive them was all in a nights work.
VI however is hard. In fact I contend that it is the hardest part of any Unix or Linux system. Not just because the keystrokes mean nothing outside of VI but also because it's difficulty is unreasonable considering the simple task it must perform.
As for Mr. Joy I would NEVER contend that he is not an extremely brilliant person and programer. VI is a crappily designed product in my opinion but to the mind of it's creator it was elegant. However the design considerations pale in the face of execution. VI is rock solid, fast and reliable. Simply put every version of VI I have ever seen seems to be well written. Even Vigor works the way it was intended all the time.
I guess the only good thing about VI is that it's being so dammed hard helps to artificially limit the number of Unix admins available at any one time. This increases the earning power of those ( like me ) who have actually taken the time to learn it. Unfortunately NT Netware are more popular than any single version of Unix in large part because MCSEs are a dime a dozen and CNEs are not so hard to find.
A am probably the only one who finds this humorous but frankly I think vi is actually one of the main reasons for Unix's decline in the market vs NT and Netware.
When I took up Linux, I was able to figure out bash in short order. Most of the utilities made some kind of sense. I spent a lot of time reading up and practicing to use VI. Eventually I ditched it along with EMacs and started to use joe as my editor.
Let's get this straight. A notorious troll like OGG posts a 1st post in ALL CAPS that actually makes perfect sense. Is on topic, funny and a refreshing change from the "intellectual" babble we normally want to moderate up.
Congratulations OGG. You are now the official temporary assistant Meapt. Speaking of which where is that goy?
You named some of the more important forks in the Linux road however it is worth noteing that these are all technicaly ports. One to very small machines andother to clusterd servers etc...
The GPL prety much screws over people who want to creat an incompatible Linux. How do you fork something and add hooks to your own apps while leaving everyone else out in the cold ? You not only hide the source for that but you also don't document or obfuscate the documentation of your system.
So you have some wild new whizbang feature that won't work on anybody elses Linux ? If it's realy good then the competition will just "borow" it. Look out for how many distributions include "Automount" and RuiserFS in the 7.0 versions.
Or maybe you break something, like RedHat seams to do for KDE. No problem some smart alec will come along and post some "updated" RPMs that actualy work.
Slashdot Mirror
Printed manuals are worth $43.
I arrive at that figure because around here "Official" RedHat sells for U$52. People who know all about cheap bytes still walk in and buy it. Note that this is NOT north america and the telephone support available to Us residents is less than useless at U$1 per minute phone rates.
That means they are either contributing to the "RedHat Charity" or they pay the extra money for those dead trees.
PS : The unacounted dollars are shiping on the CD.
This is the second time that BE has been caught violatng the GPL "by accient". I suspect that if debian went throgh the whole BEOS and audited it with a decompiler they wold find a few more violatons. It's not that BE is evil or even particularly careless. It's just that it's damnd hard to keep track of which license governs hich pice of software. especialy when you borow so heavly from the GNU/Linux codebase.
These days the only thing that you can't readily sell is an unwilling 3rd party human.
Anything else can be aranged. A patent is no exception. Just negotiate a price. However it usualy makes more sence to just license the pattent to someone. This is what makes pattents so valuable.
In theory you invent something and can't aford a factory you shust license it to someone who can and grow fat from the royalties.
I'm not very good at judging the reletive buty of white women because I havn't seen that many who I find attractive and I don't know how much of that is just a subconsius racial bias.
I can however recognise a few that I consider very hot. The girl from "Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human" is hot. Trinity is hot. Anything below 1st rate hot, I just don't categorise.
I get antsy just having a few people peep through my window. I had a netcam and turned it off to avoid being seen so much.
Jenny on the other hand is on display 24/7 for the whole world. You can watch her eat sleep hack or just plain live. I don't think I could handle the pressure. Then again, maybe I am just not as pretty as Jenny. Not that she is particularly hot or anything. In fact the only thing unusual about her is that you get to see how she lives.
What a difference the cam makes.
Nice article and all. I especially like the mater of fact approach. However did these goys notice the pattern in the benchmarks ? Those that are heavily dependent on the video card show the P3 killing the Celeron.
Not because it's a faster chip or anything. It just runs the bus at 100MHz to 133MHz. When they push the Celeron to the edge it has a bus speed of 106MHz. Video intensive benchmarks will be affected by what the external bus speed is at more than any other benchmark.
What I want to see is something pearly CPU intensive like a compilation benchmark. I build kdelibs in just under 2 hours on my P200 with 64 Megs. How long will it take on a Celeron@901MHz with 128 megs of RAM ?
There are two things at work here. I'll take on the original article 1st and follow up with the stuff from this feature.
"AOL is powerful and can control huge amounts of content for vast numbers of people, so they should be broken up into more manageable pieces."
It's a nice idea but that's not how this thing works. Once upon a time IBM was the big bad antitrust bully. They practically invented FUD. These days nobody calls them a danger to anyone. Nobody considers IBM as a problem to freedom or to competition. Never mind that in real earnings IBM is 10X the size of Microsoft and by other measures ( number of employees, Property owned etc.. ) is even larger than that. Anty trust is about bullying the little goys, not simply having power.
The second matter is the control of information on the Internet. Simply put "It won't happen". MS wants it. AOL/TW wants. Every major corp wants to control the internet. Each has a shot at trying, none has a chance of success.
The problem is that the internet is the place for the tiny niche. If you are into nude Hermaphrodite wrestling then you can try find the other 4 people in the world that share your obsession. This is the power of the internet and simply owning a bunch of studios and most of the good writers isn't going to help.
The problem with the net is that Location isn't so important. Time Warner got to be powerful by making sure it owned many of the channels carried by your typical cable provider. On the net every provider can carry all the "channels". AOL/TW's attraction is therefore those items that they product themselves which in the grand scheme of things isn't that much.
Sure they own the Matrix but would you join AOL if that was your only attraction ? It takes more than that. The same goes for all the other content they own. Each time they move something behind the AOL service all they will achieve is pissing off those users who like that item. Paramount was forcibly made aware of this 2 years ago when they tried to close Star Trek fan sites and put everything under paramount.com which only worked with IE at the time.
Are there any Experts on Sunology in the house ? Do any Slaashdot readers understand why Sun would choose to forcibly time limit and expire a product that it's giving away for free ?
Yep. The SO preview has a limit and will stop working in a few months. What's so bad about allowing someone to keep using a free BETA rather than the equally free final product if it works for them ?
Hewing to fill out a lengthy application form just to download this baby isn't such a good thing either.
It is worth noteing that 2600.com is the main target of these actions. The reason is quite simple. They have little in the way of public simpathy and even less in the judicery.
Remember that 2600.com is the same site that spent the last few years screaming for the releas of "The worlds most dangerus Hacker".
The last time this hapend was when Lary Filth ( AKA Lary Flint of Hustler Magazine ) was sued for slander vulgarity etc...
The Times and the Post stud byhim in there own interest. Where are VA, MSNBC and ZDNET now ? This WILL come back to haunt you all.
The Transmeta CPU is actualy a 128 bit chip internaly. It only emulates 32 bit x86CPUs.
The positbility exists for it to play ia64 at a latter date.
Censorware is a natural application for artificial intelligence if ever there was one. In fact you cannot have effective Censorware without employing a reasonably mature AI.
All the censorware really has to do is read through each page and look at each picture before putting it on screen to figure out whether it is porn or not. It takes some skill to know the difference between an artistic nude and a XXX pix.
Personally I like the whole human supervision thing. Let your kids know that mom or dad or the made or big sis could just walk in and see what he is viewing before s/he has a chance to react. More importantly provide that strong moral base that lets a child not really care about porn.
This reminds me of the situation with Alcohol. In the west liqueur is restricted from the kids. Mom and pop drink but they don't dare let the child near the stuff. The result is that he sneaks off to sip a little while nobody is looking and grows up into a drunk lying across the barroom door. Jewish kids on the other hand get wine at major feasts ( Passover, Wedding etc... ). The result is that they get to see this as something they can have if they want to but which has a foul taste. The result is fewer drunks.
Anybody want to take bets as to the relationship between censorship and the higher rates of all sexual dysfunction in the US? If not for America, it wouldn't have occurred to me that there is a link between sex and chains.
This is a major hot sheat ( for all my felow MIBs ). You had better bilive that WWN is 100% serius with this story.
They will stand by it and are willing to lay the jurnalistic integrity of the publication on the line over this.
I know the MARQUEE tag isn't part of any HTML spec and has never been approved by the IETF.
It has been derided as part of Microsoft's embrace and extend strategy for HTML in fact. However I ask the question; Can it be implemented in other browsers ? Specifically Mozilla and KFM2 ?
I would guess that's a qualified "yes". So I ask my second question. Why not suggest adding that tag alone to the standard ? Release html-4.1 with the Marquee tag defined and explained.
The reason I pick it out is that unlike most other E&E code it actually adds something of value to the web experience. Sure I find them annoying and so do most of you. However it's a way to help novices make a new web page "look alive". They like it and will continue to use it.
BTW : The alternative to a marquee is an animated gif. Which one do *you* want people to use ?
Ohhh... I know exactly what it is.
Can you belive I actualy used to dring stuff with high concentrations of it ? The very thoght of that makes me shiver.
Fortunatly Red Stripe isn't as poluted as most other beers are so the efect of DHMO in that brew should be minimal.
This stuff really dose pollute sewage and is at least partially responsible for El Ninio.
Down with Dihydrogen Monoxide -
check out the DHMO Homepage
I read somewhere that Linux supports Solaris Binaries on the Spark platform. How true is this and what is the quality of the support ?
Also I would really like to know where the performance status is these days. Not just under this mandrake but also with the 2.3.x kernels. I know Solaris kicks us around on really big spark boxes ( Ultra 10K etc... ) and Linux is allegedly faster on single CPU configurations but what about the lower mid range? The 2 and 4 way SMP boxen.
The only major production deployments of Linux on spark I have herd of recently have been Beowulf. I assume cost and performance have everything to do with that choice. Dose anyone have numbers ?
Finally. Mandrake 7.0 is the nicest Linux distribution I have used to date. It's also the fastest on my hardware. However with the leapfrog distros have been playing lately how do the latest RedHat and Caldera compare ?
"There's no way I can go back to MS style editors for text file work."
:). It took some doing but I got joe runing on the SUN and SCO boxen. That leavs me needing to use two simple interfaces for text editing.
That is another problem with these things. I have to admin a wide varietyu of system including MS crapware. I also have to write documents in Wordperfect all the time ( I can't survive without a good spellcheck
One for joe and the other for every single other editor I used from the humble edit.com in dos to the mighty WP. Except for unix text mode editors all the software for slinging text strings around are the same.
I wonder how many slashdot readers figured out that this poster is being sarcastic? Anyway here is my take on this new embeded QT.
I read through the comments looking for someone who gets the real significance of this and came up with a blank. So here is my take on this baby.
When WinCE was 1st released oneof MSs major promises was that it would let you run the same apps and exchange files in the same format on both desktop and palmtop. Basically they promised MSWord in a pocket sized version.
It never happened and the reason is simple. MS office is over 200 megs of bloat. If they could have made it smaller they probably would but frankly that's tough to do. a 16 meg office suite and OS combination just isn't going to happen.
fast forward to the present. portable Linux has a compressed file system almost dubbing the capacity of a flash card so all you really need is a 32 meg office suite to fit in 16 megs of flash. KOffice is normally under 30 megs with the kdelibs. add on 2 megs of QT and 400 K kernel with all the drivers for that device plus frame buffer and you are running in 16 megs of cache with an OS and an OFfice suite. add another 16 or 32 megs of RAM to run everything in and you can get decent performance plus a desktop.
THAT is the significance of this thing. Linus plus Transmeta plus Troll Tech and the KDE team are about to deliver on Bill's promise.
Frankly I would hate to be a microsofty right now.
As for little issues like "dose this interface match the small size device?". They don't matter. Interfaces can be hacked and adjusted and with tidy modular code like this it doesn't really take much for good GUI designers to "fix" it.
Sorry about the "Slashdot effect"
:).
:)
That's what happens when your article is mentioned on http://slashdot.org a site which should have been a defendant but wasn't chosen for reasons I will soon discus. I would guess this is message number 130 or so
OK. Let's get down to business. 1st there is the piracy claim. There is one little thing nobody you interviewed mentioned. Right now there are pirated DVDs for sale on the street in Taiwan. Those copies were produced without the use of DeCSS ( which isn't really complete yet ). The people selling the ~$3,000 DVD copying machines have not been attacked by the DVD-CCA or the MPAA yet. Never mind that the coping will soon spread to the US.
Then we have the functionality issues. The encryption on DVDs is only used to limit playing of the movies not not copying of the disks.
Finally there is the choice of defendants. 2600.com and slashdot.org did basically the same thing. post discussions of the code and links to download sites. Slashdot is more popular than 2600 and is frequently quoted in the mainstream media. However it is also part of a publicly traded company.
2600.com by contrast has the image of a rogue site which for the last 5 years has been screaming about the injustice of Kevin Mitnic's arrest for cracking computer systems. In other words an easy target. The idea of this case is to have some court somewhere rule the DeCSS is an illegal technology. Once that is done it will prevent the likes of VA Linux and Diamond Multimedia from selling less expensive players which use that code rather than the code from the CCA.
In short they are trying to retroactively patent something which was previously protected as a trade secret. This is exactly like the case of the Playstation emulator ( look it up ) except that they get to pick a target.
PS : You will be flamed fewer times if you do more fact checking and don't appear to slant your story in favor of the bad guys ( prosecution in this case
[..Oh, and if you think vi is tough, type "ed" sometime.... ]
I have and it sucks. Perhaps as hard as VI or Emacs. Fortunately ed isn't a "required" part of learning Unix. Neither is Emacs. This is why VI is the most offensive.
Employers ASK if you know VI. The certification exams have VI questions. It's hard to be a Unix admin without knowing VI.
As for the whole extinction thing. Of course VI should not have lasted this long. It should have been ( get this ) EXTINCT by now.
That wouldn't have been a problem if that power didn't come at a huge cost in usability. Unfortunately it dose and vi is simply the hardest thing to use in your typical Linux distribution. Configuring IP forwarding and firewalls is simple. VPN is trivial. Hell even slapping together a lab full of diskless workstations and an SMP server to drive them was all in a nights work.
VI however is hard. In fact I contend that it is the hardest part of any Unix or Linux system. Not just because the keystrokes mean nothing outside of VI but also because it's difficulty is unreasonable considering the simple task it must perform.
As for Mr. Joy I would NEVER contend that he is not an extremely brilliant person and programer. VI is a crappily designed product in my opinion but to the mind of it's creator it was elegant. However the design considerations pale in the face of execution. VI is rock solid, fast and reliable. Simply put every version of VI I have ever seen seems to be well written. Even Vigor works the way it was intended all the time.
I guess the only good thing about VI is that it's being so dammed hard helps to artificially limit the number of Unix admins available at any one time. This increases the earning power of those ( like me ) who have actually taken the time to learn it. Unfortunately NT Netware are more popular than any single version of Unix in large part because MCSEs are a dime a dozen and CNEs are not so hard to find.
The creator of VI is talking about extinction ?
A am probably the only one who finds this humorous but frankly I think vi is actually one of the main reasons for Unix's decline in the market vs NT and Netware.
When I took up Linux, I was able to figure out bash in short order. Most of the utilities made some kind of sense. I spent a lot of time reading up and practicing to use VI. Eventually I ditched it along with EMacs and started to use joe as my editor.
Let's get this straight. A notorious troll like OGG posts a 1st post in ALL CAPS that actually makes perfect sense. Is on topic, funny and a refreshing change from the "intellectual" babble we normally want to moderate up.
Congratulations OGG. You are now the official temporary assistant Meapt. Speaking of which where is that goy?
It's hapend before.
:)
Or was I the only one to use Gnome-1.0 ?
Or rather fail in the attempt to use
You named some of the more important forks in the Linux road however it is worth noteing that these are all technicaly ports. One to very small machines andother to clusterd servers etc...
The GPL prety much screws over people who want to creat an incompatible Linux. How do you fork something and add hooks to your own apps while leaving everyone else out in the cold ? You not only hide the source for that but you also don't document or obfuscate the documentation of your system.
So you have some wild new whizbang feature that won't work on anybody elses Linux ? If it's realy good then the competition will just "borow" it. Look out for how many distributions include "Automount" and RuiserFS in the 7.0 versions.
Or maybe you break something, like RedHat seams to do for KDE. No problem some smart alec will come along and post some "updated" RPMs that actualy work.