If only there were a single, well defined and completely open document format that could be used by anyone, with any office suite. That would be just great.
Yes, Ubuntu gets full bonus points; the add-new-printer dialog is in a very logical place, and quite easy to follow. All the printers I've set up have been detected in advance. And under "removeable drives and media" I can have the system bring up the appropriate dialog automagically when a new printer is plugged in.
Browsing to http://localhost:631/ in firefox to configure your printer is one of the totally counter-intuitive things ESR was complaining about. Browsing to some random port on localhost is like having to tweak a registry key in XP, and it should not be necessary or tolerated for anything a 'normal user' is likely to do.
If you want to add a new printer there should be an "add new printer" tool somewhere obvious, like under the System menu. Bonus points if it already detects the attached printer for you, and if the system can be configured to pop up the add-printer dialog any time you plug in a new printer.
The Free Software Foundation's position (I mailed them and asked) is that once you have a copy of the software you OWN it, the way you own a book or a TV or a car, copyright (and thus the GPL) only applies when you make a copy to give to someone else.
I don't have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software.
I just googled "securing windows" and got 6,920,000 results.
I'd expect you don't have to dig too far through that list before you get to software that claims to make your computer more secure but actually installs malware. The first ten results seem to be OK though.
like http://www.new.net/ ? (No link, because the 'plug-in' is aggressive spyware and likely to self-install just by viewing that website. Visit at your own risk.)
It's a very large source of high quality plaintext in one consistently-layed-out website. No need to defeat ebook drm, extract text from pdf or even strip out html markup. I'm not sure but I imagine the zombie PC's grab this text directly for themselves.
The spammers are already way ahead of you. A ton of spam these days uses a random chunk of text from Project Gutenburg or similar free sources, and an image with the actual message in it. They're even adding random noise to the images to defeat OCR-based filtering.
"isn't patent licensing part of the reason nVidia and Ati won't release fully OSS drivers?"
One of the possible issues is _lack_ of patent licensing. Nobody really knows what trivial and obvious techniques have been patented by some patent-troll, but as long as the patent troll can't prove nvidia are doing something the troll's patent potentially covers, they have no reason to sue or shake nvidia down for license fees. Open source drivers would feed the trolls.
No doubt I'll get some extremely witty and informative reply to this comment about how someone managed to bork their Grub and Ubuntu installation into not booting. Oh, I see we've already had one;-).
Installed Edgy or Dapper onto a Proliant DL380 lately? I have... You basically have to reimage the install CD yourself because someone didn't notice that loading the symbios module screws up cpqarray and you have to load them the other way around.
Breezy has a similar but less difficult problem, the installer runs fine but you have to switch to console and tweak stuff during the install or it won't put the cpqarray module in initrd.
Ubuntu is generally a breeze to install, but when it goes wrong it can be a _real_ pain to figure out why, and how to fix it.
There are several different versions of Windows XP, with different capabilities, but I'm guessing his problem is not OEM vs. retail, it's XP-Home vs. XP-Professional.
I've reinstalled a few machines using a retail XP-home disk with the machine's OEM XP-home key, and never had a problem with it. Even WGA is happy.
OTOH trying to install XPpro (OEM or retail or vlk) using an XPhome key won't work. Neither will trying to install XPhome with a Win98 key. If you try to install more than you paid for, don't expect any help from MSFT...
Sure. You have the right to remain silent... and the court has the right to throw you in jail for the rest of your life for contempt of court, and it has done so. The court has shown itself perfectly willing to impose a rolling punishment for contempt- i.e., they throw you in jail, and every year they bring you out and ask you if you're willing to comply. If you're not, they throw you back in.
Just in case anyone doubts the truth of this, Kay Skelton is locked away as I post on a contempt of court charge. Six weeks so far, and will probably be spending Christmas in a cell.
My understanding, Linux cannot progress from GPL2 to GPL3 _because_ contributors retain their own copyrights. If they were assigning them all to Linus there would be no problem (other than Linus) in moving to the newer GPL.
By the same token, there only needs to be one kernel contributor assigns their copyright to the FSF and the FSF can start asserting those rights.
I still don't get the whole 'derivitave work' thing though. Is the Windows NVIDIA driver a derivitave work of Windows? Do they need Microsoft's permission to distribute those drivers? I think not. (Although perhaps in future they'll need Microsoft's signature to have them work!)
Precompiled drivers for a particular kernel version, as distributed by Ubuntu? I would consider that 'mere aggregation' which is also allowed, but I'll admit it's a bit of a gray area.
I had hoped the same thing. Microsoft was _finally_ going to release an operating system that was at least a little difficult to pirate. Places like Russia, China and India might have to take a serious look at genuinely free software rather than pseudo-free pirated software.
This was always a fairly thin chance to begin with; those countries can continue using their pirated WindowsXP for many years until it becomes difficult to find software and drivers still compatible with it. And by then there will be a readily available crack for Vista.
But no. Within a week of RTM and well before it was available to anyone legitimately, the ISO and everything required to install and activate it were available on p2p. It seems vista will be every bit as easy to pirate as XP ever was, and one way or another anyone who wants Vista can easily have it.
I'm not sure if Vista's anti-piracy features are intentionally weak because Microsoft knew they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, or if Microsoft really did attempt to shoot themselves in the foot and simply missed.
anyhow; yes I do have a clue how patents are supposed to work. They're supposed to be non-obvious. They're supposed to protect inventions, not ideas and concepts.
And they're supposed to exclude "software, as such" which I've always interpreted as meaning you can patent an invention that happens to use software in part, but not patent software (either a single method of doing something, or an entire program) by itself. And they're supposed to be limited to 20 years, not be extensible by making minor incremental changes to the patent.
This has always bugged me; I personally think the patent office is the one who doesn't have a clue about patents. They seem to have forgotten that the purpose of patents is to "promote the sciences and useful arts", not to retard them with the sole aim of making patentees insanely rich.
And I don't think the Romans would have given a flying fuck about any patents held by the Greeks, no matter how old or new the invention. Assuming that the 'idea' of concrete would even be patentable.
As such, it seems extraordinarily likely that something as imaginative as exploiting chemistry to develop high-grade concrete was not Roman in origin but was extracted from elsewhere.
Good thing they didn't have patents back then, the Roman empire would have been completely fucked.
Sounds perfectly acceptable to me. If Microsoft really thinks they can do anything useful based on linux-1.1.14 (or whatever version was available 10 to 14 years ago) I say good luck to them!!
As someone with a fairly limited understanding of digital spread-spectrum radio, I call bullshit.
The carrier is spread by multiplying the data signal against a pseudorandom spreading sequence and the resulting signal is constant amplitude, phase modulated. So unless your radio just happens to be regenerating the same pseudorandom sequence in precise synchronization there is no recognisable correlation between bits in the datastream and signal amplitude.
And that's not counting compression and various other tcp/ip stuff that makes even the underlying bitstream effectively random to any unintelligent, passive device
Here's a test for you. Turn off the wireless and any source of audio. Delete your mp3 collection off the computer just to be sure.
Now tune your radio to some noise coming from the computer, inform your cow-orkers that you're sending [insert track title here] over the wifi network, and see if they still think they can hear it. I bet most of them will still think they can.
Slashdot Mirror
If only there were a single, well defined and completely open document format that could be used by anyone, with any office suite. That would be just great.
Yes, Ubuntu gets full bonus points; the add-new-printer dialog is in a very logical place, and quite easy to follow. All the printers I've set up have been detected in advance. And under "removeable drives and media" I can have the system bring up the appropriate dialog automagically when a new printer is plugged in.
Browsing to http://localhost:631/ in firefox to configure your printer is one of the totally counter-intuitive things ESR was complaining about. Browsing to some random port on localhost is like having to tweak a registry key in XP, and it should not be necessary or tolerated for anything a 'normal user' is likely to do.
If you want to add a new printer there should be an "add new printer" tool somewhere obvious, like under the System menu. Bonus points if it already detects the attached printer for you, and if the system can be configured to pop up the add-printer dialog any time you plug in a new printer.
BTW; I never found out how high the building actually was. You don't happen to know do you?
The Free Software Foundation's position (I mailed them and asked) is that once you have a copy of the software you OWN it, the way you own a book or a TV or a car, copyright (and thus the GPL) only applies when you make a copy to give to someone else.
I don't have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software.
I just googled "securing windows" and got 6,920,000 results.
I'd expect you don't have to dig too far through that list before you get to software that claims to make your computer more secure but actually installs malware. The first ten results seem to be OK though.
Dammit, slashdot added the link automatically. Guess I should've previewed.
like http://www.new.net/ ? (No link, because the 'plug-in' is aggressive spyware and likely to self-install just by viewing that website. Visit at your own risk.)
It's a very large source of high quality plaintext in one consistently-layed-out website. No need to defeat ebook drm, extract text from pdf or even strip out html markup. I'm not sure but I imagine the zombie PC's grab this text directly for themselves.
The spammers are already way ahead of you. A ton of spam these days uses a random chunk of text from Project Gutenburg or similar free sources, and an image with the actual message in it. They're even adding random noise to the images to defeat OCR-based filtering.
"isn't patent licensing part of the reason nVidia and Ati won't release fully OSS drivers?"
One of the possible issues is _lack_ of patent licensing. Nobody really knows what trivial and obvious techniques have been patented by some patent-troll, but as long as the patent troll can't prove nvidia are doing something the troll's patent potentially covers, they have no reason to sue or shake nvidia down for license fees. Open source drivers would feed the trolls.
No doubt I'll get some extremely witty and informative reply to this comment about how someone managed to bork their Grub and Ubuntu installation into not booting. Oh, I see we've already had one ;-).
Installed Edgy or Dapper onto a Proliant DL380 lately? I have... You basically have to reimage the install CD yourself because someone didn't notice that loading the symbios module screws up cpqarray and you have to load them the other way around.
Breezy has a similar but less difficult problem, the installer runs fine but you have to switch to console and tweak stuff during the install or it won't put the cpqarray module in initrd.
Ubuntu is generally a breeze to install, but when it goes wrong it can be a _real_ pain to figure out why, and how to fix it.
There are several different versions of Windows XP, with different capabilities, but I'm guessing his problem is not OEM vs. retail, it's XP-Home vs. XP-Professional.
I've reinstalled a few machines using a retail XP-home disk with the machine's OEM XP-home key, and never had a problem with it. Even WGA is happy.
OTOH trying to install XPpro (OEM or retail or vlk) using an XPhome key won't work. Neither will trying to install XPhome with a Win98 key. If you try to install more than you paid for, don't expect any help from MSFT...
Sure. You have the right to remain silent... and the court has the right to throw you in jail for the rest of your life for contempt of court, and it has done so. The court has shown itself perfectly willing to impose a rolling punishment for contempt- i.e., they throw you in jail, and every year they bring you out and ask you if you're willing to comply. If you're not, they throw you back in.
Just in case anyone doubts the truth of this, Kay Skelton is locked away as I post on a contempt of court charge. Six weeks so far, and will probably be spending Christmas in a cell.
jfgi.
Wish we could get some of that in the SCO lawsuit..
My understanding, Linux cannot progress from GPL2 to GPL3 _because_ contributors retain their own copyrights. If they were assigning them all to Linus there would be no problem (other than Linus) in moving to the newer GPL.
By the same token, there only needs to be one kernel contributor assigns their copyright to the FSF and the FSF can start asserting those rights.
I still don't get the whole 'derivitave work' thing though. Is the Windows NVIDIA driver a derivitave work of Windows? Do they need Microsoft's permission to distribute those drivers? I think not. (Although perhaps in future they'll need Microsoft's signature to have them work!)
Precompiled drivers for a particular kernel version, as distributed by Ubuntu? I would consider that 'mere aggregation' which is also allowed, but I'll admit it's a bit of a gray area.
I had hoped the same thing. Microsoft was _finally_ going to release an operating system that was at least a little difficult to pirate. Places like Russia, China and India might have to take a serious look at genuinely free software rather than pseudo-free pirated software.
This was always a fairly thin chance to begin with; those countries can continue using their pirated WindowsXP for many years until it becomes difficult to find software and drivers still compatible with it. And by then there will be a readily available crack for Vista.
But no. Within a week of RTM and well before it was available to anyone legitimately, the ISO and everything required to install and activate it were available on p2p. It seems vista will be every bit as easy to pirate as XP ever was, and one way or another anyone who wants Vista can easily have it.
I'm not sure if Vista's anti-piracy features are intentionally weak because Microsoft knew they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, or if Microsoft really did attempt to shoot themselves in the foot and simply missed.
You think Peter Jackson should get a patent on some of those great battle scenes? They were original. They were innovative. They were art. It doesn't make them patentable.
anyhow; yes I do have a clue how patents are supposed to work. They're supposed to be non-obvious. They're supposed to protect inventions, not ideas and concepts.
And they're supposed to exclude "software, as such" which I've always interpreted as meaning you can patent an invention that happens to use software in part, but not patent software (either a single method of doing something, or an entire program) by itself. And they're supposed to be limited to 20 years, not be extensible by making minor incremental changes to the patent.
This has always bugged me; I personally think the patent office is the one who doesn't have a clue about patents. They seem to have forgotten that the purpose of patents is to "promote the sciences and useful arts", not to retard them with the sole aim of making patentees insanely rich.
And I don't think the Romans would have given a flying fuck about any patents held by the Greeks, no matter how old or new the invention. Assuming that the 'idea' of concrete would even be patentable.
20 years? Only because Disney don't have any patents that apply to Mickey Mouse...
As such, it seems extraordinarily likely that something as imaginative as exploiting chemistry to develop high-grade concrete was not Roman in origin but was extracted from elsewhere.
Good thing they didn't have patents back then, the Roman empire would have been completely fucked.
Sounds perfectly acceptable to me. If Microsoft really thinks they can do anything useful based on linux-1.1.14 (or whatever version was available 10 to 14 years ago) I say good luck to them!!
It' not black and white, there's a spectrum...
Always evil - Microsoft, SCO
Mostly evil - Novell, most MAFIAA member companies (which includes Sony Music)
(most other companies fit in here somewhere)
Mostly good - Google, IBM,
Always good - Canonical
As someone with a fairly limited understanding of digital spread-spectrum radio, I call bullshit.
The carrier is spread by multiplying the data signal against a pseudorandom spreading sequence and the resulting signal is constant amplitude, phase modulated. So unless your radio just happens to be regenerating the same pseudorandom sequence in precise synchronization there is no recognisable correlation between bits in the datastream and signal amplitude.
And that's not counting compression and various other tcp/ip stuff that makes even the underlying bitstream effectively random to any unintelligent, passive device
Here's a test for you. Turn off the wireless and any source of audio. Delete your mp3 collection off the computer just to be sure.
Now tune your radio to some noise coming from the computer, inform your cow-orkers that you're sending [insert track title here] over the wifi network, and see if they still think they can hear it. I bet most of them will still think they can.
That depends who you ask....
This artwork