They do host their own packages themselves. But as a lot of people always jump on the main helixcode server instead of a mirror, and the helixcode server probably always is the hardest hit, I think it was wise to post a mirror IP in the/. announcement to save the.helixcode.com server somewhat.
With an LGPL:ed library you don't have to open source your game. If on the other hand the library was GPL:ed, you'd have to.
I think this is the answer to your question. Many of the wonderful new Linux gaming APIs/libraries, for example SDL, are LGPL:ed so that they also can be used with closed-source games.
Being alone has never stopped them before, why would it now?
You're right. Just think of the idiocy with the Imperial system. The rest of the world standardizes on the metric system, but appearantly the US is perfectly happy with being all alone. I will never understand that.
But why would you want two of your systems to be Debian and one to be Red Hat?
That was explained in a comment from Kurt in the Slashdot/DDoS article. Basically, the MySQL box has a slightly different config than the other boxes and came pre-loaded with Red Hat from VA. Included were also some special tweaks for that hardware config, and so they decided that they wouldn't wipe that box and use Debian but instead use it as it was.
Oh, and thank you for showing your superiority over us with generalizations and mistruths.
I don't see anything of that sort in his comment. I just see someone from Canada explaining how it works in his country and his view on gun control. Would you like to explain what you think is generalizations and mistruths?
They work in other countries. If the police finds a weapon that has been used in a crime, they can easily trace it. What's wrong with that? Makes perfect sense to me. And, no, I've never heard of that information being mis-used in my country.
I've personally never understood that "guns as self-defense" part, so I won't argue with or against that.
But you refer to the use of guns in sport, which I think is perfectly OK. But why wouldn't gun sport licenses cover that part? Gun sports is not only a US thing, it is practiced in many countries, even those with gun control. Those who use guns in sport have a license for that. Simple.
Well lets see guns are used for entertainment. Marksmanship is even included in some olympic contests.
Yes, some olympic sports includes guns. I still don't understand why a simple sport gun license would do it. This is the situation in most other countries I know of, people who practice sports with guns have a special license for that, showing that they can handle a gun, and thus have the right to have one.
Some guns are made exclusivly for collectors and are never meant to be fired.
I believe this is a little bit harder. But gun collecting is still allowed, providing you have a license for each type of gun you have.
I still fail to see why people have to have guns and rifles without a license system. I don't live in the US but I know people personally who have guns. Most of them are hunters. They all have gun licenses though. Most people of course get gun training in the military, and thus a license (but of course you can get a license without having been in the military, you just have to have proof of having been trained).
That doesn't mean that they're allowed to carry them in public. There are strict rules of how they are to be kept at home (for reasons of keeping weapon theft, and the number of illegal weapons, low).
I don't either. To me, this whole thing about being able to fight against the government sounds like a France before the revolution. Except, of course, that France had its revolution centuries ago.
I thought that the whole point about a democracy is that it the government is elected by the people. Why the drastic need to be able to kill the government, if it's the government that you, or your friends, elected?
Besides, I believe that the definition of civil war is a situation where normal rules and laws no longer apply, since it's a situation where it's impossible to enforce them. Then why the need of legal guns in peace time, when they still would be "legal" in a sense in a civil war?
Newer ATX motherboards with newer BIOSes have a setting in the BIOS for power failure behavior. I.e., you can decide if you want the machine to automatically resume the last state (i.e. boot up when the power returns after a power failure that killed the machine, or remain off if it was already off when the power failure occured) or if you want it to always remain off when a power failure occurs, until you start the machine again manually (a setting for those who always want to monitor the boot process;)
So my advice would be that go for an ATX mobo and an ATX case. The soft-power off is really nice, and as you've found out, there aren't really many newer AT motherboards out there. I've been going for ATX all the way since 1996 (back when AT was still the standard, and an ATX system cost more) and I must say that I haven't regret it. It made switching motherboards since then much easier, since ATX is "the standard" now. And ATX is also a spec for some of the board layout on the mobo. All ATX mobos have the CPU slot on the top half, so there is no risk of having a stupid mobo where the CPU sits in the way for full-length PCI cards. Such simple things, that makes life easier... =)
Of course, before you buy the mobo, make sure that it has this "resume state on power failure" option. Ask the dealer or the manufacturer.
Uh... you're clearly confusing copyright with patents.
Microsoft clearly has a copyright on their documentation of their Kerberos implementation. Just as you have a copyright on everything you write.
This has absolutely nothing to do if their Kerberos implementation is patentable (it most probably isn't patented, because if it were so, their implementation would already be documented in the patent, and people wouldn't be forced to read Microsoft's own documentation to find out something about it).
No, they're not american TLDs. Where does it say so? Remember the name Internet..org, for example, was created mainly for non-profit organizations, but not just for the US to use. These TLDs were made generic. If they were just for the US, they would have been like.org.us or something like that.
Granted, these TLDs were used when the Internet was just a thing in the US, and before the system with two-letter country TLDs became widely used. That doesn't mean that their use still is, or should be, restricted to the US. Quite the contrary. They're country-generic.
You have the option of using your country code, whereas in the US that's a more difficult process. Of course, you don't WANT to use your country code, due to a combination of being too lazy and wanting to ride on the prestige of the US naming convention.
Whooa. Hold your horses. If this is what you believe, I'm really scared. First of all, using a country TLD is a really painful process in many countries. Companies in the UK are, for example, forced to use.co.uk. mycompany.co.uk doesn't sound as good as mycompany.com, does it?
I'll continue with the Swedish domain name system, as it is the one which I am most familiar with. In my opinion it's one of the mot brain-dead systems too.
Here are the rules:
Swedish companies and organizations are allowed to register directly under.se, but only with a domain name that is identical to the officially registered company name. Just one domain name per company, too. If you have a virtually unknown company name, but a product with a famous brand name, you're lost, as you're not allowed to register the brand name.
You're also lost if your small, private company or organization doesn't have a nation-wide registration, as you won't be able to get a domain name directly under.se. These entities must get a domain name with a one-letter code in, denoting the region. These letters are a-z. So you might have to register your sports club or local LUG under for example ourlug.z.se. Given that this still requires an official local organization registration, and that most Swedish don't even know these local one-letter region codes, this is a really bad idea. Your visitors might not know that your domain is not under.se but under a local region code, and even then, they might not know which one of a-z.
Ordinary people are only allowed to register under.pp.se. This is the only domain name registration that doesn't require an officially registrered entity with that name. You can register whateveryouwant.pp.se, but of course this.pp.se ending sucks.
Add to this that domain name registrations under.se are waaay more expensive than under.com,.net and.org. Not to speak of that you have to register a company (with your wanted domain name as company name) for ten thousands of dollars just to ensure that you can get a.se domain name with the domain name you want.
So no, it's not laziness that makes people register under.com. Only big companies in Sweden can get a proper.se domain, and in some situations even the biggest pile of money won't help with these stupid rules.
That's just one of the reasons why you shouldn't have files or directories writable by anyone else in your home directory. I hope you learned something from this.
I had the impression that most people, even novice users, often instinctively understand why files writable by anyone else in your personal home directory is a BAD IDEA from a file security perspective. Bad for you when it's files that you want to keep, or when you have a home directory limit (quota). Bad for the whole system especially when you don't have a quota, and because of the security issues. But I seem to be wrong with that impression.
You see, it's common (if not an unspoken rule) in the UNIX world that the administrator ("root") also has a normal user account. Only administrative tasks are performed as the actual "root". Reading email with a full-blown mail client is definately done as a normal user, if the administrator is worth his name.
On most server installations, the root@ address is just an alias that goes to the administrator's normal user account. So, given that the administrator is stupid enough to run an unchecked script he recieved from an email, the virus would still just run in user space, not destroying system settings but only the user's files.
On the other hand, in the NT world, it's common that the administrator has only one account - an ordinary account with administrator privilegies added on. So, the mail client runs with administrator privilegies, and all accidentally clicked on script files run with administrator rights. Great, eh?
I see a lot of people bursting arteries because we Americans actually write software in American English
No, no one is flaming (or should be flaming) people writing software in their own language. I don't know where you got that from. If you're talking about closed-source apps, I might agree that people might complain about English being the only choice. But with open source - no. The standard "do it yourself" often apply, interpreted as "translate it yourself". No need to rewrite the entire app, if the app was made cleverly. gettext will parse many c programs just fine.
No one expects you to translate your software into 11 zillion different languages. What you might do, however, is to make it easier for translators. This may be such things as not hard-coding US-ASCII everywhere. This may sound simple, but I've seen many programs not accept filenames with non-US-ASCII characters, or where such characters simply break the app.
It might also be to write the strings in your app so that they are easy understandable even out of their context. This helps translators a lot. Avoid TLAs when you can and write easy understandable sentences.
Also try to avoid assuming that all others whould like the same localization as you. Don't hard-code these settings in your application for example:
AM/PM clock
Legal paper format
Weeks begin on Sunday
Date formats and date strings
Inches
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These are things that can get people "burst their arteries" if hard-coded.
As for american programmers writing in english: Don't assume that most programmers writing applications in English are american. If you look at the contributor list of many free software projects (like the GNOME and KDE ones) you'll see that a lot of them are not from the US, maybe even the majority. English just happens to be the default language that applications are written in, and then translated into as many other languages as possible.
Disclaimer: I am a Translation Project translator, translating GNU software.
Especially since their page was broken enough to give me a Javascript error instead of taking me to the Shockwave download page
I noticed this too, so I decided that I would send them a polite email. If you have problems you might consider that too:
------------------------------------------ To : webmaster@shockwave.com Cc : Attchmnt: Subject : Javascript error ----- Message Text ----- Dear Sirs,
Your web site "http://www.shockwave.com" appears to be broken. When I visit that URL, I get automatically redirected to a "http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp" URL, only to get a "Javascript Error". The page remains blank.
I use the latest release of one of the major web browsers (Netscape 4.72 with the Macromedia Flash 4 plugin installed), so my choice of browser should normally not be a problem. Anyway, I was unable to find information on your site regarding the minimum software requirements to visit your site, as I could not access the web site in the first place.
I hope this error will be taken care of, and I look forward on being able to visit the shockwave.com web site. Thanks in advance!
Best Regards, [your name] ------------------------------------------
The Windows/MediaPlayer set-up will probably account for about 99% of people interested in downloading the movie.
Uh? I don't think so. I agree with you that there's an absolute majority that has both windows and media player and meets the requirements, but the figure is no way near 99%, even if you just count the people that really would like to see the film, and has the bandwidth.
We can start by assuming that the operating system usage among those with high bandwidth access is equal to the operating system usage among those without. Secondly, we can assume that personal interest in the movie has nothing to do with what operating system you happen to have running on your computer (obviously, we're not counting lack of interest due to knowledge of the software requirements, just "initial" interest). So let's just look at the operating system usage.
I think the latest IDC report was mentioning that Linux had 4% of the desktop operating system market share. Let's look at MacOS. Five years ago, that figure might have been 10% or so, but I think I read that a more recent figure might be closer to 8% (that figure was before the Imac boom, though). I don't know the numbers for the BSDs, BeOS or other OSes, but let's assume that all other OSes hold 2% or so.
Let's also count the people who have Windows but won't download a new web browser or the latest media player just to watch this movie. Let's say that those people account for 5% of all people who want to watch the movie, but given the software requirements, and the fact that they refuse to download the new fancy software for some reason or another, won't be able to (there are still people who use Netscape and refuse to launch IE just to view a website, you know).
What do we have? We have that 19% of all people who might be interested in the movie won't be able to, due to the software requirements.
Granted, this is just speculation, and the numbers might be highly inaccurate, but my point was that the software requirements will in no way cover 99% of those initially interested in the movie.
Another note: Personally, I love free software, but that has nothing to do with my willingness to pay for a movie. I would happily have payed for this movie, but, given the requirements, I won't be able to. And even if you ask Richard Stallman, you'll hear that he is willing to pay for art (and a movie is undoubtly a piece of art). The whole concept of his ideology is that software isn't a unique piece of art.
would you mind also displaying metric units in your future articles?
As an international reader, I have absolutely no clue how much a "pound" is. Telling, for example, that it "weighs 0.99 pounds (x.xx kg)" or so in articles would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Slashdot Mirror
But as a lot of people always jump on the main helixcode server instead of a mirror, and the helixcode server probably always is the hardest hit, I think it was wise to post a mirror IP in the
Indeed. The issue with death penalty comes to mind...
I think OpenAL might be the 3D sound device API/subsystem were waiting for.
I think this is the answer to your question. Many of the wonderful new Linux gaming APIs/libraries, for example SDL, are LGPL:ed so that they also can be used with closed-source games.
You're right. Just think of the idiocy with the Imperial system. The rest of the world standardizes on the metric system, but appearantly the US is perfectly happy with being all alone. I will never understand that.
That was explained in a comment from Kurt in the Slashdot/DDoS article.
Basically, the MySQL box has a slightly different config than the other boxes and came pre-loaded with Red Hat from VA. Included were also some special tweaks for that hardware config, and so they decided that they wouldn't wipe that box and use Debian but instead use it as it was.
Satisfied?
(Yeah, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but blatant lies or factual errors always pisses me off)
I don't see anything of that sort in his comment. I just see someone from Canada explaining how it works in his country and his view on gun control. Would you like to explain what you think is generalizations and mistruths?
They work in other countries. If the police finds a weapon that has been used in a crime, they can easily trace it. What's wrong with that?
Makes perfect sense to me. And, no, I've never heard of that information being mis-used in my country.
But you refer to the use of guns in sport, which I think is perfectly OK. But why wouldn't gun sport licenses cover that part? Gun sports is not only a US thing, it is practiced in many countries, even those with gun control. Those who use guns in sport have a license for that. Simple.
Yes, some olympic sports includes guns. I still don't understand why a simple sport gun license would do it. This is the situation in most other countries I know of, people who practice sports with guns have a special license for that, showing that they can handle a gun, and thus have the right to have one.
Some guns are made exclusivly for collectors and are never meant to be fired.
I believe this is a little bit harder. But gun collecting is still allowed, providing you have a license for each type of gun you have.
I still fail to see why people have to have guns and rifles without a license system. I don't live in the US but I know people personally who have guns. Most of them are hunters. They all have gun licenses though. Most people of course get gun training in the military, and thus a license (but of course you can get a license without having been in the military, you just have to have proof of having been trained).
That doesn't mean that they're allowed to carry them in public. There are strict rules of how they are to be kept at home (for reasons of keeping weapon theft, and the number of illegal weapons, low).
I don't either. To me, this whole thing about being able to fight against the government sounds like a France before the revolution. Except, of course, that France had its revolution centuries ago.
I thought that the whole point about a democracy is that it the government is elected by the people. Why the drastic need to be able to kill the government, if it's the government that you, or your friends, elected?
Besides, I believe that the definition of civil war is a situation where normal rules and laws no longer apply, since it's a situation where it's impossible to enforce them. Then why the need of legal guns in peace time, when they still would be "legal" in a sense in a civil war?
So my advice would be that go for an ATX mobo and an ATX case. The soft-power off is really nice, and as you've found out, there aren't really many newer AT motherboards out there.
I've been going for ATX all the way since 1996 (back when AT was still the standard, and an ATX system cost more) and I must say that I haven't regret it. It made switching motherboards since then much easier, since ATX is "the standard" now.
And ATX is also a spec for some of the board layout on the mobo. All ATX mobos have the CPU slot on the top half, so there is no risk of having a stupid mobo where the CPU sits in the way for full-length PCI cards. Such simple things, that makes life easier... =)
Of course, before you buy the mobo, make sure that it has this "resume state on power failure" option. Ask the dealer or the manufacturer.
Microsoft clearly has a copyright on their documentation of their Kerberos implementation. Just as you have a copyright on everything you write.
This has absolutely nothing to do if their Kerberos implementation is patentable (it most probably isn't patented, because if it were so, their implementation would already be documented in the patent, and people wouldn't be forced to read Microsoft's own documentation to find out something about it).
No, they're not american TLDs. Where does it say so? .org, for example, was created mainly for non-profit organizations, but not just for the US to use. These TLDs were made generic. If they were just for the US, they would have been like .org.us or something like that.
Remember the name Internet.
Granted, these TLDs were used when the Internet was just a thing in the US, and before the system with two-letter country TLDs became widely used. That doesn't mean that their use still is, or should be, restricted to the US. Quite the contrary. They're country-generic.
You have the option of using your country code, whereas in the US that's a more difficult process. Of course, you don't WANT to use your country code, due to a combination of being too lazy and wanting to ride on the prestige of the US naming convention.
Whooa. Hold your horses. If this is what you believe, I'm really scared. .co.uk. mycompany.co.uk doesn't sound as good as mycompany.com, does it?
First of all, using a country TLD is a really painful process in many countries. Companies in the UK are, for example, forced to use
I'll continue with the Swedish domain name system, as it is the one which I am most familiar with. In my opinion it's one of the mot brain-dead systems too.
Here are the rules:
- Swedish companies and organizations are allowed to register directly under
.se, but only with a domain name that is identical to the officially registered company name. Just one domain name per company, too. If you have a virtually unknown company name, but a product with a famous brand name, you're lost, as you're not allowed to register the brand name. - You're also lost if your small, private company or organization doesn't have a nation-wide registration, as you won't be able to get a domain name directly under
.se. These entities must get a domain name with a one-letter code in, denoting the region. These letters are a-z. So you might have to register your sports club or local LUG under for example ourlug.z.se. Given that this still requires an official local organization registration, and that most Swedish don't even know these local one-letter region codes, this is a really bad idea. Your visitors might not know that your domain is not under .se but under a local region code, and even then, they might not know which one of a-z. - Ordinary people are only allowed to register under
.pp.se. This is the only domain name registration that doesn't require an officially registrered entity with that name. You can register whateveryouwant.pp.se, but of course this .pp.se ending sucks.
Add to this that domain name registrations underSo no, it's not laziness that makes people register under .com. Only big companies in Sweden can get a proper .se domain, and in some situations even the biggest pile of money won't help with these stupid rules.
See why people appreciate .com?
I had the impression that most people, even novice users, often instinctively understand why files writable by anyone else in your personal home directory is a BAD IDEA from a file security perspective. Bad for you when it's files that you want to keep, or when you have a home directory limit (quota). Bad for the whole system especially when you don't have a quota, and because of the security issues. But I seem to be wrong with that impression.
You see, it's common (if not an unspoken rule) in the UNIX world that the administrator ("root") also has a normal user account. Only administrative tasks are performed as the actual "root". Reading email with a full-blown mail client is definately done as a normal user, if the administrator is worth his name.
On most server installations, the root@ address is just an alias that goes to the administrator's normal user account. So, given that the administrator is stupid enough to run an unchecked script he recieved from an email, the virus would still just run in user space, not destroying system settings but only the user's files.
On the other hand, in the NT world, it's common that the administrator has only one account - an ordinary account with administrator privilegies added on. So, the mail client runs with administrator privilegies, and all accidentally clicked on script files run with administrator rights. Great, eh?
No, no one is flaming (or should be flaming) people writing software in their own language. I don't know where you got that from. If you're talking about closed-source apps, I might agree that people might complain about English being the only choice. But with open source - no. The standard "do it yourself" often apply, interpreted as "translate it yourself". No need to rewrite the entire app, if the app was made cleverly. gettext will parse many c programs just fine.
No one expects you to translate your software into 11 zillion different languages. What you might do, however, is to make it easier for translators. This may be such things as not hard-coding US-ASCII everywhere. This may sound simple, but I've seen many programs not accept filenames with non-US-ASCII characters, or where such characters simply break the app.
It might also be to write the strings in your app so that they are easy understandable even out of their context. This helps translators a lot. Avoid TLAs when you can and write easy understandable sentences.
Also try to avoid assuming that all others whould like the same localization as you. Don't hard-code these settings in your application for example:
- AM/PM clock
- Legal paper format
- Weeks begin on Sunday
- Date formats and date strings
- Inches
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These are things that can get people "burst their arteries" if hard-coded.As for american programmers writing in english: Don't assume that most programmers writing applications in English are american. If you look at the contributor list of many free software projects (like the GNOME and KDE ones) you'll see that a lot of them are not from the US, maybe even the majority. English just happens to be the default language that applications are written in, and then translated into as many other languages as possible.
Disclaimer: I am a Translation Project translator, translating GNU software.
I noticed this too, so I decided that I would send them a polite email. If you have problems you might consider that too:
------------------------------------------
To : webmaster@shockwave.com
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject : Javascript error
----- Message Text -----
Dear Sirs,
Your web site "http://www.shockwave.com" appears to be broken. When I visit that URL, I get automatically redirected to a "http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp" URL, only to get a "Javascript Error". The page remains blank.
I use the latest release of one of the major web browsers (Netscape 4.72 with the Macromedia Flash 4 plugin installed), so my choice of browser should normally not be a problem. Anyway, I was unable to find information on your site regarding the minimum software requirements to visit your site, as I could not access the web site in the first place.
I hope this error will be taken care of, and I look forward on being able to visit the shockwave.com web site. Thanks in advance!
Best Regards,
[your name]
------------------------------------------
Who knows, maybe it helps.
Uh? I don't think so. I agree with you that there's an absolute majority that has both windows and media player and meets the requirements, but the figure is no way near 99%, even if you just count the people that really would like to see the film, and has the bandwidth.
We can start by assuming that the operating system usage among those with high bandwidth access is equal to the operating system usage among those without. Secondly, we can assume that personal interest in the movie has nothing to do with what operating system you happen to have running on your computer (obviously, we're not counting lack of interest due to knowledge of the software requirements, just "initial" interest). So let's just look at the operating system usage.
I think the latest IDC report was mentioning that Linux had 4% of the desktop operating system market share. Let's look at MacOS. Five years ago, that figure might have been 10% or so, but I think I read that a more recent figure might be closer to 8% (that figure was before the Imac boom, though). I don't know the numbers for the BSDs, BeOS or other OSes, but let's assume that all other OSes hold 2% or so.
Let's also count the people who have Windows but won't download a new web browser or the latest media player just to watch this movie. Let's say that those people account for 5% of all people who want to watch the movie, but given the software requirements, and the fact that they refuse to download the new fancy software for some reason or another, won't be able to (there are still people who use Netscape and refuse to launch IE just to view a website, you know).
What do we have? We have that 19% of all people who might be interested in the movie won't be able to, due to the software requirements.
Granted, this is just speculation, and the numbers might be highly inaccurate, but my point was that the software requirements will in no way cover 99% of those initially interested in the movie.
Another note: Personally, I love free software, but that has nothing to do with my willingness to pay for a movie. I would happily have payed for this movie, but, given the requirements, I won't be able to. And even if you ask Richard Stallman, you'll hear that he is willing to pay for art (and a movie is undoubtly a piece of art). The whole concept of his ideology is that software isn't a unique piece of art.
Cheers.
would you mind also displaying metric units in your future articles?
As an international reader, I have absolutely no clue how much a "pound" is. Telling, for example, that it "weighs 0.99 pounds (x.xx kg)" or so in articles would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!