If you feel you're worth it, you can get listed as a person.organising to donate to. Then people can give *you* money if they appreciate your work.
So it's particularly useful for projects that need a small cash stream to keep going, and for developers that would like to do more Free Software work, but don't have the money/time to do so.
Well fair enough:) But there are other reasons to want to use GNU/Linux as a desktop OS... the three reasons I use it are:
1 - I can't afford Windows
2 - I largely agree with the Free Software philosophy, and so prefer using software that has been built by and for a community
3 - I boycott all Microsoft goods because of Microsoft's lazy security policies and their domineering monopoly-grabbing ways, not to mention Paladium and their adoption of anything that will give them the lead in the market (usually at great cost to everyone else)
For those that feel these reasons, plus perhaps others like curiosity, are sufficient, then this book, I should imagine from the review, is a good buy. And let me tell you, my girlfriend and parents both use GNU/Linux, and they don't have any problems at all (and my parents took months to get the hang of MS Word!)
You might also want to check our NewToLinux, which has a whole set of tutorials, many of them based around the command line, aimed at the beginner who wants to know a little more about GNU/Linux than how to point and click in KDE. They're also, unlike linuxnewbie.org (which is great at what it does - random tutorials), ordered and so can be read like a book.
I wish! Unfortunately, their use of the term metaphysics is in fact an abuse. The properties aren't metaphysical, because they can be explained in terms of electromagnetics. What they mean is that they are extra-metarial, as the effects aren't created by the curvature of the material.
Or you could try some free web resources aimed at the beginner (without a single RTFM or newbie insult in sight):
NewToLinux - with excellent tutorials that guide you through the basics step by step JustLinux - with forums to ask all those annoying questions, and again not get insulted
Though buying a book is usually also a good idea, especially for when you can't access the web;)
You miss the point. Mozilla isn't meant to be an end-user browser, at least not in the long term. It's a platform from which people can develop their own Internet applications (web primarily, also email, IRC, web design). Mozilla provides a really nice HTML renderer (Gecko), a really nice GUI standard (XUL), and lots of other code, to let people go out and make their own applications.
If you try out Phoenix/Galeon/etc. you'll notice they all have many features that Mozilla doesn't, and have all chosen to specialise in oe particular area. GNOME users will love Galeon, users of slow machines will love Phoenix, and so on.
That there is now a fork in the mail project is a testament to the great success of Mozilla. It will have really suceeded when we have several different mail clients, web browsers, chat clients and web designers all branched from Mozilla, all filling a different niche, all compatable with one another, and all sharing excellent new features and ideas.
It's a shame the parent to this post was modded down as a flamebait, because he made an interesting point. For those who haven't noticed, YDL have borrowed the artwork from RedHat 8.0 and unified KDE and GNOME with the same window decorations, widget styles and icons. In fact, if it weren't for the YDL logos, you'd be mistaken for thinking the screenshots were of RedHat.
IMO this just shows how great it was that RedHat went out and did something daring creating Bluecurve, even if they didn't do it was nicely as they might have done. Released under the GPL (I assume, or at least some other Free license), other distributors are now free to take advantage of their hard work, and everybody using YDL now benefits from RedHat's hard work.
I believe the preferred pronunciation is "Guh-Noo", rather than "Gee-Noo", which sounds much better. "Guh-Noo Lin-ux" sounds quite nice to me. Much better than "Lie-nux";)
RMS isn't your average person. If you think for a moment of all the things that wouldn't have happened were it not for him and his principled opinions, I think it's fair enough to congratulate him on his 50th birthday. It's also quite apt writing this on a system that is largely defended by licenses he co-wrote and dreamt up, on a web site that runs with similar licenses on many of his programs.
It's not important, but then what news on Slashdot ever is?;)
It won't at all. You're quite right. Access and laziness simply cannot be the reasons for low voter turnout, otherwise every country in the world would have the problem to the same degree as the USA. The problem is collossal, but one element of it can be drawn out with interesting comparisons to the Internet:
In the early days of the US, civil participation was an important aspect of political life, and everybody was meant to be actively following and participating in political life. The same occurs o nthe 'Net now, which promotes participation by several mechanisms, mostly social but also some technological The very idea of getting onto the 'Net and not getting involved in some project or discussion is absurd (and I'm talking about the 'Net, not AOL or some similarly media-blinkered version too many people use).
Politics in the US, and increasingly in European countries (i.e. the "old" democracies) involves less and less participation. Politicians actively *discourage* it - whenever citizens try to participate, they're damned. Participation is anethma to politics today. We exercise no real power over our governments because we only get the opportunity of one legitimate vote every two/four/five years (unless your government doesn't like you, like ethnic minorities in Florida). We exercise no real power over how they carry out their duties, nor over thier agenda, nor over how the agenda and results are published and perceived.
In a system where citizens have no power, and no part to play, it's no wonder they don't vote.
That's the whole reason for the program -- you shouldn't have to remember long, detailed folder structures and filenames in order to retrieve a file you were looking for.
But it isn't difficult ot find files when you're organised. You then don't need to remember long, detailed folder structures. I simply think: it's a picture, its a photo, its a photo of a friend, it's a photo of a friend on holiday in Germany, ah yes, it'll be in/home/tom/pics/photos/friends/germany-holiday
How easy is that? It's much easier in my mind than remembering the filetype, the keywords, and so on. I dunno, I can see it making saving a file quicker, but only if it meant I coul still browse my work in a HFS. I like knowing where all my files are, which is a feeling you get with a well-organised HFS. That's especially important to me with servers, where I really like feeling like everything is carefully organised.
OK, so you keep up to date with patches, and don't get attacked. That's a bit like installing reinforced windows, and not having them broken when people do try to attack them. An analogy for bars (which decrease the value of the windows) would be taking off a lot of the insecure software that you want, e.g. P2P clients.
The fact is that it is not that difficult to increase system security by default without decreasing the value of the software/system in many cases. In such cases, there is no excuse for companies/groups/individuals not increasing the security of their products.
Your point is like saying: we make windows, and we put crappy locks on, but it doesn't matter because we can always say there should be more policemen on the streets to stop those that would brek our crappy locks. We don't care if it would be little or no bother to make better locks, and that doing so wouldn't decrease the value of the windows at all, because it's not *our* fault our locks are broken, it's the fault of the criminals who break them.
What I immediately thought was: cool, people can make fairly decent TV programmes on a tiny budget using the latest digital technologies. It's great seeing people who don't have the backing of the media mega-industry creating their own works. This is just one shred of evidence to add to the list to show that the Internet and open technology is about so much more than centralised shopping and news.
But the word "derivative" is fairly unambiguous, and can be clearly understood by a dictionary definition. Almost all the dictionaries I've checked suggest that to be a derivative work means simply to have obtained something from another work.
In your example, your module, standalone (i.e. without the CGI module) does not obtain anything from the CGI module, and is therefore not derivative. If you were to copy verbatim bits of the CGI module into yours, and maybe then modify those bits, then your module would be derivative.
I also don't see how there can be a legal distinction between verbatim and modified that affects the issue derivation, as both entail obtaining material.
Your comparison is invalid, because in the case of Windows, they are desirable despite the risk, and there is usually no viable way of having them there without the risk.
In the case of a dark alley, you can put a street light in, which goes a long way towards solving the problem without doing anything to damage the "values" of the alleyway. Ignoring a bad situation when it is easily solved is just wrong.
And please, I blame both the dark alleys and the criminal. Why is it that so many people cannot understand a world with problems more complex than one evil entity?
Well, yes, I'd agree with what you're saying, but you miss something here, which becomes more significant when you mention Linus' ambivalence towards Microsoft and politics. There is more to Free Software than just developing some software for a small community. The idea is to:
a) promote Free Software to the world, both to help them (if you believe in FS you'll believe in this), and to help ourselves, as it means more people will provide commercial services for us and more people will get into developing Free Software
b) ensure that we can always use Free Software, i.e. that the hardware vendors don't lock us out (as many already do to some extent, but nowehere near Palladium levels), and that we can inteoperate with others
Now b) becomes more significant with Mozilla, because unless IE sees some serious competition, and lazy web designers start recognising web starndards, web standards problems can only get worse. There's no point in having a great browser if it can't display most web pages properly.
So whilst it's not important that Mozilla "dominates", it's important that it remains high-profile enough to promote free software, and the rights of free software users.
Sure, many "security holes" might be features which cannot be coded in any way to make them more secure. Assuming it was the feature, and not the implemtation of the feature, that was the hole in your example of task shortcuts, that's an desirable security risk. Opening your port 80 to HTTP traffic is also a security risk, and in this case almost unavoidable.
But when security risks are unecessary, and especially when they are also undesirable, they are wholly unjustified and should be fixed. That Microsoft, and many others, do not do this is extremely irresponsible. As is suggesting that because total security is a pipedream, we should not pressure programmers to aim towards total security in so far as they close unecessary holes. Until home users are tech-savvy enough to know how to take suitable precuations to secure an unecessarily insecure system, providers of such systems should do all they can to close unecessary holes, and reduce the risks associated with necessary and/or desirable holes.
The fact that the bugs go unexploited is a good thing, but it does not excuse the bugs. People are unlikely to want to switch from Windows to another OS simply because there are lots of security holes, because they rarely encounter them. From your average user's point of view, they're no big deal. But that doesn't excuse Microsoft from allowing them to exist, just as the low number of rapes doesn't excuse governmental organisations from allowing dark alleys to exist. Every rape is tragic. Every bug exploited is of course not as tragic, but certainly an inconvenience for the victim, and at times a rather large financial problem for companies.
But web licenses have different problems and agendas to software licenses. The web depends on open standards being used across the board to fully work. As soon as some parties go off and create their own proprietary extensions, and then build a considerable presence on the web, the freedom of users who don't wish to use this extension, or who cannot, is severely limited. This has been one of the problems with technologies like Flash, though happily the problems are being ironed out by Macromedia and web designers.
So you've got to ensure that commercial entities can incorporate the standards in their software, yes (I don't think anyone was suggesting the contrary; perhaps the LGPL, designed for libraries with just the sort of get-out clauses you seem to suggets by implication). But you also have to provide a strong incentive for people who extend the protocls to ensure compatability, and where it becomes necessary, to open the new standards they are creating.
Slashdot Mirror
If you feel you're worth it, you can get listed as a person.organising to donate to. Then people can give *you* money if they appreciate your work.
So it's particularly useful for projects that need a small cash stream to keep going, and for developers that would like to do more Free Software work, but don't have the money/time to do so.
Well it's a fact that many do get put off by people blowing them off with "RTFM" and other insults. I suppose it's a matter of motivation.
Well fair enough :) But there are other reasons to want to use GNU/Linux as a desktop OS... the three reasons I use it are:
1 - I can't afford Windows
2 - I largely agree with the Free Software philosophy, and so prefer using software that has been built by and for a community
3 - I boycott all Microsoft goods because of Microsoft's lazy security policies and their domineering monopoly-grabbing ways, not to mention Paladium and their adoption of anything that will give them the lead in the market (usually at great cost to everyone else)
For those that feel these reasons, plus perhaps others like curiosity, are sufficient, then this book, I should imagine from the review, is a good buy. And let me tell you, my girlfriend and parents both use GNU/Linux, and they don't have any problems at all (and my parents took months to get the hang of MS Word!)
You might also want to check our NewToLinux, which has a whole set of tutorials, many of them based around the command line, aimed at the beginner who wants to know a little more about GNU/Linux than how to point and click in KDE. They're also, unlike linuxnewbie.org (which is great at what it does - random tutorials), ordered and so can be read like a book.
I wish! Unfortunately, their use of the term metaphysics is in fact an abuse. The properties aren't metaphysical, because they can be explained in terms of electromagnetics. What they mean is that they are extra-metarial, as the effects aren't created by the curvature of the material.
NewToLinux - with excellent tutorials that guide you through the basics step by step
JustLinux - with forums to ask all those annoying questions, and again not get insulted
Though buying a book is usually also a good idea, especially for when you can't access the web ;)
You miss the point. Mozilla isn't meant to be an end-user browser, at least not in the long term. It's a platform from which people can develop their own Internet applications (web primarily, also email, IRC, web design). Mozilla provides a really nice HTML renderer (Gecko), a really nice GUI standard (XUL), and lots of other code, to let people go out and make their own applications.
If you try out Phoenix/Galeon/etc. you'll notice they all have many features that Mozilla doesn't, and have all chosen to specialise in oe particular area. GNOME users will love Galeon, users of slow machines will love Phoenix, and so on.
That there is now a fork in the mail project is a testament to the great success of Mozilla. It will have really suceeded when we have several different mail clients, web browsers, chat clients and web designers all branched from Mozilla, all filling a different niche, all compatable with one another, and all sharing excellent new features and ideas.
A disturbing thought:
If MenuDrake mamages your menus, DiskDrake mamages your disks, and so on, what does ManDrake manage?
Great! Golum's part was really funny - in fact it had me rofl (roleing on the floor laughing)!
IMO this just shows how great it was that RedHat went out and did something daring creating Bluecurve, even if they didn't do it was nicely as they might have done. Released under the GPL (I assume, or at least some other Free license), other distributors are now free to take advantage of their hard work, and everybody using YDL now benefits from RedHat's hard work.
It's brilliant to see this happening :)
I believe the preferred pronunciation is "Guh-Noo", rather than "Gee-Noo", which sounds much better. "Guh-Noo Lin-ux" sounds quite nice to me. Much better than "Lie-nux" ;)
RMS isn't your average person. If you think for a moment of all the things that wouldn't have happened were it not for him and his principled opinions, I think it's fair enough to congratulate him on his 50th birthday. It's also quite apt writing this on a system that is largely defended by licenses he co-wrote and dreamt up, on a web site that runs with similar licenses on many of his programs.
;)
It's not important, but then what news on Slashdot ever is?
Happy GNU/Birthday you smelly hippie.
:)
Is that meant to be an insult?
Of course, the reason Linux users actually want this feature is so that they can play their pirated MP3s in the background while using X-windows.
;-)
Personally, I play legal OGGs on my GN/Linux box, but no matter
It won't at all. You're quite right. Access and laziness simply cannot be the reasons for low voter turnout, otherwise every country in the world would have the problem to the same degree as the USA. The problem is collossal, but one element of it can be drawn out with interesting comparisons to the Internet:
In the early days of the US, civil participation was an important aspect of political life, and everybody was meant to be actively following and participating in political life. The same occurs o nthe 'Net now, which promotes participation by several mechanisms, mostly social but also some technological The very idea of getting onto the 'Net and not getting involved in some project or discussion is absurd (and I'm talking about the 'Net, not AOL or some similarly media-blinkered version too many people use).
Politics in the US, and increasingly in European countries (i.e. the "old" democracies) involves less and less participation. Politicians actively *discourage* it - whenever citizens try to participate, they're damned. Participation is anethma to politics today. We exercise no real power over our governments because we only get the opportunity of one legitimate vote every two/four/five years (unless your government doesn't like you, like ethnic minorities in Florida). We exercise no real power over how they carry out their duties, nor over thier agenda, nor over how the agenda and results are published and perceived.
In a system where citizens have no power, and no part to play, it's no wonder they don't vote.
That's the whole reason for the program -- you shouldn't have to remember long, detailed folder structures and filenames in order to retrieve a file you were looking for.
/home/tom/pics/photos/friends/germany-holiday
But it isn't difficult ot find files when you're organised. You then don't need to remember long, detailed folder structures. I simply think: it's a picture, its a photo, its a photo of a friend, it's a photo of a friend on holiday in Germany, ah yes, it'll be in
How easy is that? It's much easier in my mind than remembering the filetype, the keywords, and so on. I dunno, I can see it making saving a file quicker, but only if it meant I coul still browse my work in a HFS. I like knowing where all my files are, which is a feeling you get with a well-organised HFS. That's especially important to me with servers, where I really like feeling like everything is carefully organised.
OK, so you keep up to date with patches, and don't get attacked. That's a bit like installing reinforced windows, and not having them broken when people do try to attack them. An analogy for bars (which decrease the value of the windows) would be taking off a lot of the insecure software that you want, e.g. P2P clients.
The fact is that it is not that difficult to increase system security by default without decreasing the value of the software/system in many cases. In such cases, there is no excuse for companies/groups/individuals not increasing the security of their products.
Your point is like saying: we make windows, and we put crappy locks on, but it doesn't matter because we can always say there should be more policemen on the streets to stop those that would brek our crappy locks. We don't care if it would be little or no bother to make better locks, and that doing so wouldn't decrease the value of the windows at all, because it's not *our* fault our locks are broken, it's the fault of the criminals who break them.
Nonense, its yours and the criminals fault.
What I immediately thought was: cool, people can make fairly decent TV programmes on a tiny budget using the latest digital technologies. It's great seeing people who don't have the backing of the media mega-industry creating their own works. This is just one shred of evidence to add to the list to show that the Internet and open technology is about so much more than centralised shopping and news.
:-)
Then I noticed how long it took them to do it
But the word "derivative" is fairly unambiguous, and can be clearly understood by a dictionary definition. Almost all the dictionaries I've checked suggest that to be a derivative work means simply to have obtained something from another work.
In your example, your module, standalone (i.e. without the CGI module) does not obtain anything from the CGI module, and is therefore not derivative. If you were to copy verbatim bits of the CGI module into yours, and maybe then modify those bits, then your module would be derivative.
I also don't see how there can be a legal distinction between verbatim and modified that affects the issue derivation, as both entail obtaining material.
Your comparison is invalid, because in the case of Windows, they are desirable despite the risk, and there is usually no viable way of having them there without the risk.
In the case of a dark alley, you can put a street light in, which goes a long way towards solving the problem without doing anything to damage the "values" of the alleyway. Ignoring a bad situation when it is easily solved is just wrong.
And please, I blame both the dark alleys and the criminal. Why is it that so many people cannot understand a world with problems more complex than one evil entity?
Well, yes, I'd agree with what you're saying, but you miss something here, which becomes more significant when you mention Linus' ambivalence towards Microsoft and politics. There is more to Free Software than just developing some software for a small community. The idea is to:
a) promote Free Software to the world, both to help them (if you believe in FS you'll believe in this), and to help ourselves, as it means more people will provide commercial services for us and more people will get into developing Free Software
b) ensure that we can always use Free Software, i.e. that the hardware vendors don't lock us out (as many already do to some extent, but nowehere near Palladium levels), and that we can inteoperate with others
Now b) becomes more significant with Mozilla, because unless IE sees some serious competition, and lazy web designers start recognising web starndards, web standards problems can only get worse. There's no point in having a great browser if it can't display most web pages properly.
So whilst it's not important that Mozilla "dominates", it's important that it remains high-profile enough to promote free software, and the rights of free software users.
Sure, many "security holes" might be features which cannot be coded in any way to make them more secure. Assuming it was the feature, and not the implemtation of the feature, that was the hole in your example of task shortcuts, that's an desirable security risk. Opening your port 80 to HTTP traffic is also a security risk, and in this case almost unavoidable.
But when security risks are unecessary, and especially when they are also undesirable, they are wholly unjustified and should be fixed. That Microsoft, and many others, do not do this is extremely irresponsible. As is suggesting that because total security is a pipedream, we should not pressure programmers to aim towards total security in so far as they close unecessary holes. Until home users are tech-savvy enough to know how to take suitable precuations to secure an unecessarily insecure system, providers of such systems should do all they can to close unecessary holes, and reduce the risks associated with necessary and/or desirable holes.
Well put :)
The fact that the bugs go unexploited is a good thing, but it does not excuse the bugs. People are unlikely to want to switch from Windows to another OS simply because there are lots of security holes, because they rarely encounter them. From your average user's point of view, they're no big deal. But that doesn't excuse Microsoft from allowing them to exist, just as the low number of rapes doesn't excuse governmental organisations from allowing dark alleys to exist. Every rape is tragic. Every bug exploited is of course not as tragic, but certainly an inconvenience for the victim, and at times a rather large financial problem for companies.
But web licenses have different problems and agendas to software licenses. The web depends on open standards being used across the board to fully work. As soon as some parties go off and create their own proprietary extensions, and then build a considerable presence on the web, the freedom of users who don't wish to use this extension, or who cannot, is severely limited. This has been one of the problems with technologies like Flash, though happily the problems are being ironed out by Macromedia and web designers.
So you've got to ensure that commercial entities can incorporate the standards in their software, yes (I don't think anyone was suggesting the contrary; perhaps the LGPL, designed for libraries with just the sort of get-out clauses you seem to suggets by implication). But you also have to provide a strong incentive for people who extend the protocls to ensure compatability, and where it becomes necessary, to open the new standards they are creating.
A more useful maxim is "you may not cause harm to somebody that is disproportionate to the harm that person caused you".