OK, I'll take you up on that. I have a SERIOUS problem with how the judicial system treats violent criminals. They let them live.
Hmm? I have a problem with judicial systems (or people for that matter) not realizing that killing is killing and really won't be anything other than a murder, no matter the side of the law and the circumstances.
up2date is a GPL:d free software program, and can be used freely against Red Hats servers, and anonymously. So no, you don't have to pay for using up2date unless you want to (and want to get access to Red Hat Network, RHN).
Hmmm... If I remember correctly, the GPS rollover caused some things to happen. But, if I remember correctly, it was no worse than the navigation systems of some cars in japanese rush hour traffic getting a bit paralyzed.
Will it? Somehow the Quicktime for Java site assumes that you're running Windows or MacOS (like every Apple site does). Quote:
Install QuickTime 4.0 In order to install QuickTime for Java, developers will need to select 'QuickTime for Java' in the 'Custom' install option. The installers can be found at the following location: MacOS & Windows QuickTime 4 Installer
So it seems to me that, in order to download Quicktime for Java and install and run it on Linux, I have to download the Windows or MacOS installer and run it on Linux and select that I want to install "Quicktime for Java". Duh.
In Hungary you can actually buy a _book_ with all the zip codes and city/village names and streets listed in alphabetic order.
Well, so you could in Sweden. It was very cheap (don't remember if it was actually free). Then they made it availiable on diskettes for free. You could easily walk down to your nearest postoffice and fetch it. It was a simple database, and a small DOS utility for searching. Type in the street address, the city, and up pops the zip code ("postnummer"). Or vice versa.
Then came the Internet era, and they made it searchable through the web. Note that you can still download the whole thing for free if you want to. There's a Win95 version and a Mac version (maybe I should ask for a Linux version?;).
So they have always treated it as free information. The Swedish Postal Service ("Posten") is still the only authority that issues zip codes, but the zip code index is public information. Maybe this is how it should be in the US?
If you're driving a pickup truck, and they're driving a civic, you'll fair much better. In a head-on collision, the smaller car gets it worst.
Yup, I made the assumption that it was two somewhat equally sized cars. But of course, the heavier/bigger car always "wins". It's simple, it's just the rule of motion, mass, and impact.
So if we want to make it really safe, everybody ought to drive pickup trucks...uh... I guess it's that screwed up logic that makes the use of pickup trucks in the US so high.
Well no airbag in the world will save you from a head-on car crash in speeds above 50 km/h or so, because there won't be much left of your car. If the other car has the same speed as yours, the impact will be tremendous, and no car, however secure it is built, is built for that. Hence, head-on car crashes are also the most fatal car crashes. Sadly.
Well I just did it. I used to have a Linux box and a Windows box, now there's just two Linux boxes. And I can count at least two other friends that completely left Windows for Linux on their home systems. So, I would say that there is definately people switching from Windows to Linux.
I think that there's no "conflict between licenses" in the first hand. The BSD-stylish licenses and copyleft licenses (à la GPL) can coexist gracefully. Each of them has their own purposes, goals, and it's up to each developer to choose a license that fits them. You say too that they can, and should, coexist gracefully. But in the next sentence you want to "eliminate" all copyleft licenses??
Let me ask why copyleft discriminates open source? Copyleft is just "hey, here's the code, do what you want, but let it be free, just like it were to you". I don't think that's discriminating. If you find a piece of code that you want to use, you have to accept the rules before you use it. In this game, the rule is the license. If you don't accept it, don't use it. Write your own code, or find another one. But don't complain about what's given to you.
What you fail to see is also that many developers prefer GPL style licenses over BSD style licenses. This is because they want to be sure that their code never gets hidden away in a closed source commercial package. I think you should respect these developer's desiscions. Many others prefer BSD style licenses, because it insures them that their code will get used and wide-spread now and forever. Each of them have their own philosophy, and uses.
You think that there's a war going on. I see no war. I don't think there's a war, nor will there be, unless people like you, ranting and shouting that the GPL is evil and only BSD is the truly Open Source license, get too noisy. Grow up.
I find it very interesting that Redhat hasn't entered the PPC arena yet. I mean it wouldn't hurt them from the company standpoint. They could do it by either by bying LinuxPPC or another similar company, or starting to port Redhat themselves. It would make them more revenues than the Alpha port. I'm not saying that they should drop Alpha (to make it clearer, I would never want the Alpha version to be dropped) but it would be a bigger market. Imagine many people who have a spare Mac at home suddenly trying Linux because there is this big Linux distro that's told about in the press and the news.
I'm not criticising LinuxPPC or the other existing powerpc linux distributions either, I'm merely just saying that it would be really nice if Redhat would support that platform too. It wouldn't hurt the Linux community, but it would definately help "pushing" Linux on Macs. I find it sad that the whole Linux thingie in the press is focusing on x86, and something like this could change that for the better.
I think this is already happening - I think there was a Slashdot article this summer (URL) that reported that the initial Palm developers had left the company and starting their own, trying to market a Palm clone that was better, and cheaper.
This may be just PR babble helping their startup, but I think that it still indicates that the Palm may be more expensive than it would have to be, IMHO.
Domain name squatting was once regarded as completely appropriate, but this was more than four to five years ago or something like that, when big companies only had started looking at the internet and there was no such thing as the web boom. In those days, you could register for example compaqsux.com and no one would seem to bother. This is not the case anymore. If you own compaqsux.com, you shouldn't be surprised if you had recieved a letter from Compaq's lawyers by now. You should be surprised if you hadn't.
Why is this? Because almost all companies nowadays treat the Web as one of their official marketing channels, and a damn' important one. They're keen to protect it. Besides, something about trademark law says that if you don't protect your trademark, you lose the right to it, i.e. you can't successfully sue people later on that use it. If Compaq was aware that compaqsux.com existed and didn't act, they would have a hard time later on stopping other domain names like that.
So the sad thing is that domain names fall under trademark laws. They can sue you even if you registered it "first", because it was illegal of you to register and use their name in the first place.
Street addresses are different. They often consist of people's names (but not trademarks) and these people are often dead, and the streets are given these names in honour. I think that if it was a person that recently (in less than 40 years or so) passed away, they would even have to ask the relatives or something, but I'm not sure about that.
Disclaimer: The name Compaq and all deratives of it above was only used as examples.
I worked at the IT department of a (swedish) hospital this summer. The IT department on this hospital does code development and server and network maintenance for the hospital, and acts as a central helpdesk for the IT representatives of all the other departments. Their business is just software, network and servers, not medical equipment, that's the Equipment Department's business.
The software was both in-house development, and analysis and ordering of external solutions for information exchange software (secure mail system for the hospital) and software such as electronic medical-records, care planning tools and even intranet solutions. The one thing that struck me most was that commercial or closed-source software was always the only thing thought of, even if most of the developer's headaches seemed to be chasing external software consulting companies who had failed to deliver the product wanted or failed to deliver it on time, and even more often with a significantly larger price than expected. There were also external contracted companies who had, without warning, stopped developing products entirely that were essential to the hospital. All these problems ended up at the IT department. I'm not an software development expert but I can tell you that there was easily more people involved in keeping track of external vendors and external projects and patching this software up so that it would work as expected than would have been needed developing all this software themselves.
(As a side-note, add to this the fact that the hospital had an ancient policy not just to focus on commercial software, but only Microsoft software everywhere, i.e. Windows9x, NT, IIS, SQL Server, ASP, MS Exchange, MS Proxy, Internet Explorer, MS Office, and the various MS development tools... Such a single-minded policy isn't helping productivity in my opinion)
Due to the problems with external vendors it seemed that doing more stuff on their own in the future was the new policy. Therefore the IT department had doubled the number of employees the last year. And the policy seemed to be that almost all of the development should be made in-house, with as little input from the outside as possible. And from what I heard this was also the situation at most other hospitals that could afford a large IT department. And therefore cooperation between hospitals or even the thought of sharing software between hospitals seemed to be out of the question. I spoke to a lot of the developers there during my work, and even if the historical explaination of the situation varied, this seemed to be the situation right now.
So from what I've learned, hospital IT departments have a lot to learn from open source, co-development and code-sharing. I was truly happy when I saw this article.
I don't understand why AOL bought Netscape in the first hand. Okay, Netscape indeed had a great brand before AOL took over, but AOL and Netscape always have been different types of companies. AOL is service-oriented and Netscape was technical-oriented. The deal didn't, and still doesn't make any sense, because a service company can never run a technical company that always needs to be at the bleeding edge (browser development). A brand isn't everything, by buying for the brand only and don't understanding the other company, you can easily just end up ruining the brand. I think this is what has already happened.
If I and a couple of friends start a sort of music-sharing club, i.e. we collect a fee and then go out and buy CDs, just to rip them and make mp3s of them, and then give each of the club's members access to the mp3s, would it be legal?
The CDs and the music would be the club's property, wouldn't it? Or does it fall under the clause that multiple members could listen to exactly the same music at the same time, thus making it a copyright infringement, because we only bought one CD?
Don't forget that there is a lot of technical-minded people out there that don't share most of the opinions expressed on Slashdot (i.e. preferring Microsoft software/solutions, thinking that Microsoft is going the right way etc.) and therefore don't read/. They may be biased in their views just as much as we are. It has nothing to do with technical-mindedness. They might just think what they think for other technical reasons than we do.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm? I have a problem with judicial systems (or people for that matter) not realizing that killing is killing and really won't be anything other than a murder, no matter the side of the law and the circumstances.
Anybody following Netcraft's Web Server Survey already knew this. But it's still nice to get it confirmed from additional sources.
up2date is a GPL:d free software program, and can be used freely against Red Hats servers, and anonymously. So no, you don't have to pay for using up2date unless you want to (and want to get access to Red Hat Network, RHN).
Unless the source is already out, it does not even begin to fulfill the criteria for free software.
up2date is GPL and fully free.
No, up2date does not share a single piece of code with apt-get.
up2date is free (as in speach).
Install QuickTime 4.0
In order to install QuickTime for Java, developers will need to select 'QuickTime for Java' in the 'Custom' install option. The installers can be found at the following location:
MacOS & Windows
QuickTime 4 Installer
So it seems to me that, in order to download Quicktime for Java and install and run it on Linux, I have to download the Windows or MacOS installer and run it on Linux and select that I want to install "Quicktime for Java". Duh.
Well, so you could in Sweden. It was very cheap (don't remember if it was actually free).
Then they made it availiable on diskettes for free. You could easily walk down to your nearest postoffice and fetch it. It was a simple database, and a small DOS utility for searching. Type in the street address, the city, and up pops the zip code ("postnummer"). Or vice versa.
Then came the Internet era, and they made it searchable through the web. Note that you can still download the whole thing for free if you want to. There's a Win95 version and a Mac version (maybe I should ask for a Linux version? ;).
So they have always treated it as free information. The Swedish Postal Service ("Posten") is still the only authority that issues zip codes, but the zip code index is public information.
Maybe this is how it should be in the US?
Yup, I made the assumption that it was two somewhat equally sized cars. But of course, the heavier/bigger car always "wins". It's simple, it's just the rule of motion, mass, and impact.
So if we want to make it really safe, everybody ought to drive pickup trucks...uh... I guess it's that screwed up logic that makes the use of pickup trucks in the US so high.
Hence, head-on car crashes are also the most fatal car crashes. Sadly.
And I can count at least two other friends that completely left Windows for Linux on their home systems.
So, I would say that there is definately people switching from Windows to Linux.
I think that there's no "conflict between licenses" in the first hand. The BSD-stylish licenses and copyleft licenses (à la GPL) can coexist gracefully. Each of them has their own purposes, goals, and it's up to each developer to choose a license that fits them.
You say too that they can, and should, coexist gracefully. But in the next sentence you want to "eliminate" all copyleft licenses??
Let me ask why copyleft discriminates open source? Copyleft is just "hey, here's the code, do what you want, but let it be free, just like it were to you". I don't think that's discriminating. If you find a piece of code that you want to use, you have to accept the rules before you use it. In this game, the rule is the license. If you don't accept it, don't use it. Write your own code, or find another one. But don't complain about what's given to you.
What you fail to see is also that many developers prefer GPL style licenses over BSD style licenses. This is because they want to be sure that their code never gets hidden away in a closed source commercial package. I think you should respect these developer's desiscions.
Many others prefer BSD style licenses, because it insures them that their code will get used and wide-spread now and forever. Each of them have their own philosophy, and uses.
You think that there's a war going on. I see no war. I don't think there's a war, nor will there be, unless people like you, ranting and shouting that the GPL is evil and only BSD is the truly Open Source license, get too noisy. Grow up.
You can read ESR's announcement on the trademark issue.
Seriously, I didn't know that about Visor. Now I know that. After all, I think that's what Slashdot is for - learning by discussion.
I find it very interesting that Redhat hasn't entered the PPC arena yet. I mean it wouldn't hurt them from the company standpoint. They could do it by either by bying LinuxPPC or another similar company, or starting to port Redhat themselves.
It would make them more revenues than the Alpha port. I'm not saying that they should drop Alpha (to make it clearer, I would never want the Alpha version to be dropped) but it would be a bigger market. Imagine many people who have a spare Mac at home suddenly trying Linux because there is this big Linux distro that's told about in the press and the news.
I'm not criticising LinuxPPC or the other existing powerpc linux distributions either, I'm merely just saying that it would be really nice if Redhat would support that platform too. It wouldn't hurt the Linux community, but it would definately help "pushing" Linux on Macs. I find it sad that the whole Linux thingie in the press is focusing on x86, and something like this could change that for the better.
This may be just PR babble helping their startup, but I think that it still indicates that the Palm may be more expensive than it would have to be, IMHO.
Domain name squatting was once regarded as completely appropriate, but this was more than four to five years ago or something like that, when big companies only had started looking at the internet and there was no such thing as the web boom. In those days, you could register for example compaqsux.com and no one would seem to bother. This is not the case anymore. If you own compaqsux.com, you shouldn't be surprised if you had recieved a letter from Compaq's lawyers by now. You should be surprised if you hadn't.
Why is this? Because almost all companies nowadays treat the Web as one of their official marketing channels, and a damn' important one. They're keen to protect it. Besides, something about trademark law says that if you don't protect your trademark, you lose the right to it, i.e. you can't successfully sue people later on that use it. If Compaq was aware that compaqsux.com existed and didn't act, they would have a hard time later on stopping other domain names like that.
So the sad thing is that domain names fall under trademark laws. They can sue you even if you registered it "first", because it was illegal of you to register and use their name in the first place.
Street addresses are different. They often consist of people's names (but not trademarks) and these people are often dead, and the streets are given these names in honour. I think that if it was a person that recently (in less than 40 years or so) passed away, they would even have to ask the relatives or something, but I'm not sure about that.
Disclaimer: The name Compaq and all deratives of it above was only used as examples.
Their business is just software, network and servers, not medical equipment, that's the Equipment Department's business.
The software was both in-house development, and analysis and ordering of external solutions for information exchange software (secure mail system for the hospital) and software such as electronic medical-records, care planning tools and even intranet solutions.
The one thing that struck me most was that commercial or closed-source software was always the only thing thought of, even if most of the developer's headaches seemed to be chasing external software consulting companies who had failed to deliver the product wanted or failed to deliver it on time, and even more often with a significantly larger price than expected. There were also external contracted companies who had, without warning, stopped developing products entirely that were essential to the hospital. All these problems ended up at the IT department. I'm not an software development expert but I can tell you that there was easily more people involved in keeping track of external vendors and external projects and patching this software up so that it would work as expected than would have been needed developing all this software themselves.
(As a side-note, add to this the fact that the hospital had an ancient policy not just to focus on commercial software, but only Microsoft software everywhere, i.e. Windows9x, NT, IIS, SQL Server, ASP, MS Exchange, MS Proxy, Internet Explorer, MS Office, and the various MS development tools... Such a single-minded policy isn't helping productivity in my opinion)
Due to the problems with external vendors it seemed that doing more stuff on their own in the future was the new policy. Therefore the IT department had doubled the number of employees the last year. And the policy seemed to be that almost all of the development should be made in-house, with as little input from the outside as possible. And from what I heard this was also the situation at most other hospitals that could afford a large IT department. And therefore cooperation between hospitals or even the thought of sharing software between hospitals seemed to be out of the question. I spoke to a lot of the developers there during my work, and even if the historical explaination of the situation varied, this seemed to be the situation right now.
So from what I've learned, hospital IT departments have a lot to learn from open source, co-development and code-sharing. I was truly happy when I saw this article.
The CDs and the music would be the club's property, wouldn't it? Or does it fall under the clause that multiple members could listen to exactly the same music at the same time, thus making it a copyright infringement, because we only bought one CD?
Don't forget that there is a lot of technical-minded people out there that don't share most of the opinions expressed on Slashdot (i.e. preferring Microsoft software/solutions, thinking that Microsoft is going the right way etc.) and therefore don't read /.
They may be biased in their views just as much as we are. It has nothing to do with technical-mindedness.
They might just think what they think for other technical reasons than we do.