Actually, I DO remember the first time I saw a Unix filesystem. It was on FreeBSD. And it DID make sense. When I switched to Debian not long later, there was this document that eventually became the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). It clearly spelled out where things lived, and in Debian non-compliance with the FHS was a bug (and once the notion of a release-critical bug was invented in Debian, it was a release-critical bug.)
Part of the problem here is that we are in a twisty little maze and every passage looks alike, and our flashlight ran out of batteries in 2013. The manpages, to the extent they exist for things like cgmanager and polkit, describe the texture of the walls in our little cavern, but don't give us a map to the cave. Therefore we are each left to piece it together little bits at a time, but there are traps that keep moving around and it is slow going.
Add to the the fact that it's a damn big cave.
I could understand the FHS in about 10 minutes. This stuff? Would probably take weeks.
The order of magnitude of complexity is entirely different. It came out in the comments on my post that Fedora finally threw up their hands, and the reason that Wifi works out of the box there is because they just expose all wifi passwords to all users of the box. Whoops. Could you have known that by looking at the permissions with ls? Nope. You'd have to read some XML file in a location that network-manager never mentions.
I didn't shut down all systemd talk. Just the stuff that was flamebait. What you didn't see is the comments that I deleted, which degenerated exceptionally quickly into namecalling and four-letter words. I am happy to tolerate many viewpoints on my personal blog as long as they are expressed with respect. I have seen sooooo many threads, whether here or elsewhere, start with statements like the one there. That post was on a technical matter, and things that are verifiably false and rehash the way a systemd decision was made were both off-topic and non-respectful.
There are a lot more systemd comments on the post, by the way. Some pro, some against.
"Systemd is a problem because..." was fine. "forced upon us" is a completely different discussion that is still highly-charged, produces nearly instant flamewars, and I didn't want to go there (yesterday).
My blog is my own little corner of the Internet where I try to raise the level of discourse just a bit. It's fighting a tidal wave, but I do try.
I remember the days as a child playing with my electronics project kit from RadioShack. It seemed that it could do everything - burglar alarms, sirens, even simple radios. Even let you accidentally wire things up in a short and cause some batteries to burst...
It's been interesting to watch RadioShack. They morphed from the good place to get connectors, resistors, and fun things into a run of the mill phone and TV shop. Or did they?
Wired ran an interesting article called The Lost Tribes of RadioShack talking about a potential revival of the maker hobbies. I blogged about it too (Once, We Were Makers). There is one local franchise RadioShack that has a huge amateur section in the back, complete with cable by the foot, antennas, hams on staff, amazing service, etc.
What I'm trying to say is: You're exactly right. I used to love to tinker. I thought I didn't anymore, outside of programming. I learned last year, when I got my ham radio license, that I was wrong. Amateur radio is just Open Source in hardware.
There is no accomplishment in being in Kansas and talking to someone in Japan via the Internet or telephone. I'm sure I do this without even realizing it frequently. How about doing the same using only a $7 antenna and no third-party infrastructure at all? No satellites, no buried cables, no telephone or cable companies -- just my rig and the one in Japan?
I realize it's not at all unique to be able to do this among the amateur radio crowd, but it still gives me a thrill. I love it.
Yes. Well, in a sense, yes. The handbook is more a reference book. Giant, and frankly, overwhelming to a newbie. You need to know where to start. Even if the License Manual is a subset of the handbook, it will help focus on where to start (with an emphasis on the things needed to get the first license), help explain WHY people care about them (which a reference work won't), and also has some sidebars on what people do with their new licenses.
Having passed the tests and been active with the hobby, I have the handbook close by and never refer to the license manual anymore. BUT - when I first got started - it was with the license manual, and the handbook wouldn't have helped me much there.
You might try the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual. It covers the why, the how, and also teaches you everything you need to know for passing that first license exam.
I've seen a lot of comments here ask "why bother, given the Internet?" That attitude kept me away from ham radio for years, too. I wrote up a bit about what changed my mind:
I also recommend some books and exam practice sites on that page.
Incidentally, another aspect of amateur radio is packet radio - AX.25, which is a networking protocol similar to, but distinct from, the TCP/IP stack. Guess which OS has the best support built into the kernel? I've had a lot of fun with packet, both in its traditional and APRS (positioning beacons) forms.
I got my tech and my general in July 2010, and my extra a few months later. I have seen NONE of this.
I've experienced the community as tremendously positive, supportive, and encouraging. Sure, I've had encouragement to learn CW -- which I'm working on -- but only as a "here are some other great things you can do if you take this step." Not a grousing, grumpy sort of thing.
I know there are that sort of people out there. Maybe the locals in Kansas are friendly. Maybe the thousands of QSOs (conversations) I've had on HF have somehow been randomly lucky. One person mentioned the grumps on 80m phone - that band has a reputation for attracting that type of people, so I simply avoid it most of the time. Problem solved.
I can think of ONCE in the last ten years where a landline hasn't been working. And that because the entire town was knocked out due to a severed cable (and cellphones were knocked out too.)
Cell phone outages are a daily occurrence.
And what problems for the maintenance guy? It's two pieces of copper. What is mysteriously failing for you all the time?
I think there is some shallow reading going on here.
eglibc has a number of features that are useful in general. It happens that embedded systems have a strong need for these features, but they are generally useful as well. I've discussed it with one of the Debian glibc maintainers, and he said that eglibc is basically a patchset atop glibc implementing new features and fixing bugs. I think of it similar to the relationship between go-oo.org and OpenOffice. Distributions have to fix these bugs anyway, because upstream won't. So why not adopt a standard patchset to do so collectively?
This has no implications for a change of focus away from the desktop or anything like that.
Get one of the 640x480 Sharp Zaurus units. No, this is not a huge screen; it's the same size as any other PDA, but the high resolution means that it is ultra-sharp. Examples of these units include the c760 (which I own), the c860, or the SL-6000. Depending on your model, it will come with either Netfront (the *good* version, not the crappy one you find on cell phones or Clies) or Opera. Most also come with Word and Excel editors, which work on untranslated files (no conversion between.doc and a proprietary handheld format).
Then, install these apps:
OpieReader (aka QTReader). Reads Palm DOC files, zTXT, Plucker, HTML, plain text (normal or gzipped), and ppms text (I don't know what that is). It's very configurable for your Zaurus's hardware buttons, and Zaurus units have native screen rotation abilities already.
qpdf2. This is a full PDF viewer that will let you open standard, untranslated PDFs. There is no need for any sort of desktop "conversion" program like you see on some other platforms. It's an awesome program and handles embedded fonts and graphics just like you'd want it to.
The device itself runs on Linux with Trolltech's QT/Embedded, and ships that way from the factory. Although there are not yet any Linux tools to sync with the newest ROM versions (MacOS X tools may exist), there are these workarounds available:
You can install a VNC server on the PDA to help you with data entry, and use rsync to back it up. (This is my preferred method.)
You can re-flash the unit with any of the numerous custom ROMs out there. Check out OpenZaurus, which is a Free Software fork of the QTopia environment that comes with it. TrollTech's free QTopia Desktop is available for Linux and can sync with that, as can several other tools like KitchenSync. Or, you can check out PDAXROM (formerly Cacko) for a true X11-based environment.
The device does use a USB port, and can do USB Ethernet to communicate with your desktop. I prefer to use a 802.11b CF card, though. Depending on your model, it comes with either the high-power or standard battery built in. Unlike many other PDAs, the battery is user-replacable if you remove the back cover (which is held in place by a lock switch). This is a nice feature; you can have spare batteries on hand if you will be away from AC for a long time.
The one requirement of yours that it will fail is price. Depending on the unit, expect to pay at least $600 (some of the higher-end ones go for that much on ebay). But this unit is much more capable than $600 units from Palm, Sony, or HP/whatever. It really does behave similarly to a laptop, given that it runs a *real* OS. A quick scan of the Zaurus Software Index will reveal all sorts of programs, and you can easily compile others (yes, you can run gcc on the Zaurus itself, too). If you look at it in that light, it's good deal.
Think it's impossible to defeat Big Brother? Maybe. But at least you can make his life more difficult. Try these tips:
Install a TLS mail server and tell it to speak TLS to everyone.
TLS is a way of sending e-mail using SSL. When
you send an e-mail from your TLS-speaking server to another TLS-speaking server, it will automatically travel encrypted. TLS also has support for certificate verification. Most popular mail servers, including sendmail and postfix, have TLS support. Debian users: apt-get install postfix-tls and follow the README.
Use SSL wherever possible.Simple enough. https for websites. Make websites use SSL even if they don't "have" to.
Use IPSec or other VPN technologies.These can help ensure that spies won't even know what protocol of information is traveling down the wire. They'll only know the two endpoints of the connection, when data is sent, and how much.
Use GnuPG for all e-mails. This protects your e-mail even if you can't use TLS -- and it protects it while it's in your ISP's spool. Spies can probably figure out who the mail is from and who it's going to, but not its contents.
Don't use Windows. The keyloggers used by the FBI apparently target that platform most.
What alternatives exist to the HP48/HP49? I've been entirely unimpressed with the TI line, and I'm wondering what to switch to when my HP48GX finally outlives its usefulness.
Comments like these make me quite sick. You should know better.
What does revenge possibly solve? Killing is wrong, period. Killing more people is not going to bring back those already fallen. Killing more people is not going to make the world a better place. We must take a stand that violence must end, that we will not take it, and that we are not going to stoop to their level.
Have you seen the situation with the Palistinians in Israel? Israelis have been targets of terrorism for decades, and have been "retaliating" for these attacks for decades as well, with bombings, missile attacks, land troops, etc. All that has happend is an increase in hostility and loss of life on both sides.
There are ways of preventing this that actually work. Let's not make the situation worse by causing yet more death and destruction. The world had enough of that yesterday. We need no more today.
Why do you jump to the conclusion that the compatibility trouble is the fault of Linux or glibc? Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the application authors were causing the problems?
There is no glibc compatibility problem. Properly-written programs have no problem whatsoever. If, however, programmers use calls that are internal to libc -- that they are told NOT to use -- then what do you expect? They have violated the rules, and it's coming around to haunt them.
I routinely run binaries from pre-2.2 versions of glibc on glibc 2.2 systems, and not only on Intel platforms. I have experienced no difficulties thus far, with either binaries shipped with Debian or otherwise. I do not use Oracle, though.
Perhaps an analogy would be useful. In the days of DOS, applications could totally bypass the operating system for basically any purpose. (Granted, because the OS stank so badly, there was often justification for it.) But when people tried to start using systems like Windows, many of these apps broke -- assuming that they had total control of the machine when they didn't, because they violated the rules before.
In this case, there is no need to violate the rules and frankly if programmers are stupid enough to go out of their way to find undocumented calls liberally sprinkled with warnings, and use them instead of their documented public interfaces, I wouldn't buy their software anyway. PostgreSQL doesn't have this problem.
Before we get too fired up about this, there are
a lot of things to think about. For one,
rail is not of uniform guage (distance between
rails) worldwide. Locomotives and cars designed to operate on one guage will not work on another, period. The best one could do with current technology would be to unload and reload all passengers and cargo at each guage change.
Secondly, standards differ significantly even within North America on things like in-cab signaling (yes, they have that), procedures, etc. While this is not as difficult a problem to deal with (locomotives and operators can be switched), it exists nonetheless.
Finally, I think a much better investment of capital would be to improve the USA's own rail system, which has been terribly ignored by the government for decades now.
People logging on to ftp.cdrom.com may see
this welcome message:
Webmasters and Web Sites may not link to files in this archive (FTP.CDROM.COM) without prior written permission by Digital River, Inc. If you are interested in linking to files in this archive, please send an e-mail to cdrom@digitalriver.com for details. Digital River, Inc. reserves the right to seek compensation for unauthorized use.
This sounds especially bad since they are
the primary archive for FreeBSD!
After having being terribly annoyed at Bank of America who literally did not know how to execute a wire transfer, and various other banks with low rates or fees for talking to a human, I discovered
First Internet Bank. Their checking account pays 5% interest and has no minimum. They've also got free online bill pay and scanned images of canceled checks. Highly recommend them to anyone.
Slashdot seems to be focusing exclusively on the Presidential elections, and Katz' assertion that people might skip the elections entirely simply because they don't like the Presidential elections is terrible!
All across the country, many other things will be on the ballot. Members of your local school board, your city council, township board, county commission, etc. Statewide offices such as state senators, governors, secretaries of state, and governors are also on the ballot many places.
Perhaps you do think that the Presidential race doesn't involve you. Maybe you're right; maybe not. Your local race does involve you. Will your roads be will paved? Will your city be kept clean? Will your children (or YOU) be well educated? Will your water be kept clean and your environment healthy? These are important questions and are decided in a large part on a local or a state level. There are also races for the US Senate all over, which are also quite important.
I am frequently annoyed that people ignore these important local races and focus solely on the Presidency. This year's Presidential race is important; but it's also important that your local drinking water is clean and local students have access to excellent education.
Slashdot and many readers are totally misinterpreting the facts of this situation. The "ban" applies to ARCADES, and works similar to the movies -- it says that children cannot play the violent games unless their parents consent.
For an accurate and more factual report, check out
this article from the Indianapolis Star. It is extremely bad form for Slashdot and its readers to continue to mislead and be misled about the facts.
Please, let's discuss the merits of what actually was proposed. Unless people are giving their kids money to go out and buy a coin-operated machine, this story is totally off-base and incorrect.
Look, this guy needs a serious reality check. There are three posibilities here. 1) he never signed any contract; 2) his contract allows them to do this; 3) his contract does not allow them to do this. If it's 1 or 2, he deserves what he's getting. If it's 3, there are specific legal remedies that he can get. In any case, let's stop this pointless finger-pointing without hard facts, shall we? We don't even know if his contract permitted them to do what they are doing. If it did, then express.com has not done anything wrong.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
Now, if they distribute a kernel module, as is in question here, this module only would be covered by this clause. The question of integrating the Linux TCP/IP stack into Solaris is a different one because then the Solaris kernel would be the work and it would have to be GPL'd. These are different things. One possible problem is that people are confusing "kernel module" with "kernel".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I DO remember the first time I saw a Unix filesystem. It was on FreeBSD. And it DID make sense. When I switched to Debian not long later, there was this document that eventually became the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). It clearly spelled out where things lived, and in Debian non-compliance with the FHS was a bug (and once the notion of a release-critical bug was invented in Debian, it was a release-critical bug.)
Part of the problem here is that we are in a twisty little maze and every passage looks alike, and our flashlight ran out of batteries in 2013. The manpages, to the extent they exist for things like cgmanager and polkit, describe the texture of the walls in our little cavern, but don't give us a map to the cave. Therefore we are each left to piece it together little bits at a time, but there are traps that keep moving around and it is slow going.
Add to the the fact that it's a damn big cave.
I could understand the FHS in about 10 minutes. This stuff? Would probably take weeks.
The order of magnitude of complexity is entirely different. It came out in the comments on my post that Fedora finally threw up their hands, and the reason that Wifi works out of the box there is because they just expose all wifi passwords to all users of the box. Whoops. Could you have known that by looking at the permissions with ls? Nope. You'd have to read some XML file in a location that network-manager never mentions.
I didn't shut down all systemd talk. Just the stuff that was flamebait. What you didn't see is the comments that I deleted, which degenerated exceptionally quickly into namecalling and four-letter words. I am happy to tolerate many viewpoints on my personal blog as long as they are expressed with respect. I have seen sooooo many threads, whether here or elsewhere, start with statements like the one there. That post was on a technical matter, and things that are verifiably false and rehash the way a systemd decision was made were both off-topic and non-respectful.
There are a lot more systemd comments on the post, by the way. Some pro, some against.
"Systemd is a problem because..." was fine. "forced upon us" is a completely different discussion that is still highly-charged, produces nearly instant flamewars, and I didn't want to go there (yesterday).
My blog is my own little corner of the Internet where I try to raise the level of discourse just a bit. It's fighting a tidal wave, but I do try.
I remember the days as a child playing with my electronics project kit from RadioShack. It seemed that it could do everything - burglar alarms, sirens, even simple radios. Even let you accidentally wire things up in a short and cause some batteries to burst...
It's been interesting to watch RadioShack. They morphed from the good place to get connectors, resistors, and fun things into a run of the mill phone and TV shop. Or did they?
Wired ran an interesting article called The Lost Tribes of RadioShack talking about a potential revival of the maker hobbies. I blogged about it too (Once, We Were Makers). There is one local franchise RadioShack that has a huge amateur section in the back, complete with cable by the foot, antennas, hams on staff, amazing service, etc.
What I'm trying to say is: You're exactly right. I used to love to tinker. I thought I didn't anymore, outside of programming. I learned last year, when I got my ham radio license, that I was wrong. Amateur radio is just Open Source in hardware.
There is no accomplishment in being in Kansas and talking to someone in Japan via the Internet or telephone. I'm sure I do this without even realizing it frequently. How about doing the same using only a $7 antenna and no third-party infrastructure at all? No satellites, no buried cables, no telephone or cable companies -- just my rig and the one in Japan?
I realize it's not at all unique to be able to do this among the amateur radio crowd, but it still gives me a thrill. I love it.
Yes. Well, in a sense, yes. The handbook is more a reference book. Giant, and frankly, overwhelming to a newbie. You need to know where to start. Even if the License Manual is a subset of the handbook, it will help focus on where to start (with an emphasis on the things needed to get the first license), help explain WHY people care about them (which a reference work won't), and also has some sidebars on what people do with their new licenses.
Having passed the tests and been active with the hobby, I have the handbook close by and never refer to the license manual anymore. BUT - when I first got started - it was with the license manual, and the handbook wouldn't have helped me much there.
You might try the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual. It covers the why, the how, and also teaches you everything you need to know for passing that first license exam.
I've seen a lot of comments here ask "why bother, given the Internet?" That attitude kept me away from ham radio for years, too. I wrote up a bit about what changed my mind:
http://wiki.complete.org/WhyAmateurRadio
And here's a page with some information on how to get started:
http://wiki.complete.org/GettingStartedWithAmateurRadio
I also recommend some books and exam practice sites on that page.
Incidentally, another aspect of amateur radio is packet radio - AX.25, which is a networking protocol similar to, but distinct from, the TCP/IP stack. Guess which OS has the best support built into the kernel? I've had a lot of fun with packet, both in its traditional and APRS (positioning beacons) forms.
http://wiki.complete.org/PacketRadio
I got my tech and my general in July 2010, and my extra a few months later. I have seen NONE of this.
I've experienced the community as tremendously positive, supportive, and encouraging. Sure, I've had encouragement to learn CW -- which I'm working on -- but only as a "here are some other great things you can do if you take this step." Not a grousing, grumpy sort of thing.
I know there are that sort of people out there. Maybe the locals in Kansas are friendly. Maybe the thousands of QSOs (conversations) I've had on HF have somehow been randomly lucky. One person mentioned the grumps on 80m phone - that band has a reputation for attracting that type of people, so I simply avoid it most of the time. Problem solved.
Where is this cell phone with less downtime?
I can think of ONCE in the last ten years where a landline hasn't been working. And that because the entire town was knocked out due to a severed cable (and cellphones were knocked out too.)
Cell phone outages are a daily occurrence.
And what problems for the maintenance guy? It's two pieces of copper. What is mysteriously failing for you all the time?
Landlines, for me, Just Work.
SHA-1 doesn't encrypt things. It makes a hash of them, to verify they haven't been modified.
There are no secrets encrypted with SHA-1 because SHA-1 doesn't encrypt things.
I think there is some shallow reading going on here.
eglibc has a number of features that are useful in general. It happens that embedded systems have a strong need for these features, but they are generally useful as well. I've discussed it with one of the Debian glibc maintainers, and he said that eglibc is basically a patchset atop glibc implementing new features and fixing bugs. I think of it similar to the relationship between go-oo.org and OpenOffice. Distributions have to fix these bugs anyway, because upstream won't. So why not adopt a standard patchset to do so collectively?
This has no implications for a change of focus away from the desktop or anything like that.
Forgot to add: Thunderbird+Lightning gives a very nice unified platform across Linux, Mac, Windows.
We currently are using Novell Groupwise and are very unhappy with it for a number of reasons. We are beginning a migration to Egroupware.
It is standards-based, speaks all sorts of protocols, syncs with everything important, and is stable, fast, and reliable.
You can sync it with Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird, Sunbird/Lightning, Palm devices, phones, other PDAs, etc.
Its documentation isn't great, but then again it's better than Groupwise, plus you have the source. We are excited about it.
Then, install these apps:
The device itself runs on Linux with Trolltech's QT/Embedded, and ships that way from the factory. Although there are not yet any Linux tools to sync with the newest ROM versions (MacOS X tools may exist), there are these workarounds available:
- You can install a VNC server on the PDA to help you with data entry, and use rsync to back it up. (This is my preferred method.)
- You can re-flash the unit with any of the numerous custom ROMs out there. Check out OpenZaurus, which is a Free Software fork of the QTopia environment that comes with it. TrollTech's free QTopia Desktop is available for Linux and can sync with that, as can several other tools like KitchenSync. Or, you can check out PDAXROM (formerly Cacko) for a true X11-based environment.
The device does use a USB port, and can do USB Ethernet to communicate with your desktop. I prefer to use a 802.11b CF card, though. Depending on your model, it comes with either the high-power or standard battery built in. Unlike many other PDAs, the battery is user-replacable if you remove the back cover (which is held in place by a lock switch). This is a nice feature; you can have spare batteries on hand if you will be away from AC for a long time.The one requirement of yours that it will fail is price. Depending on the unit, expect to pay at least $600 (some of the higher-end ones go for that much on ebay). But this unit is much more capable than $600 units from Palm, Sony, or HP/whatever. It really does behave similarly to a laptop, given that it runs a *real* OS. A quick scan of the Zaurus Software Index will reveal all sorts of programs, and you can easily compile others (yes, you can run gcc on the Zaurus itself, too). If you look at it in that light, it's good deal.
TLS is a way of sending e-mail using SSL. When you send an e-mail from your TLS-speaking server to another TLS-speaking server, it will automatically travel encrypted. TLS also has support for certificate verification. Most popular mail servers, including sendmail and postfix, have TLS support. Debian users: apt-get install postfix-tls and follow the README.
What alternatives exist to the HP48/HP49? I've been entirely unimpressed with the TI line, and I'm wondering what to switch to when my HP48GX finally outlives its usefulness.
What does revenge possibly solve? Killing is wrong, period. Killing more people is not going to bring back those already fallen. Killing more people is not going to make the world a better place. We must take a stand that violence must end, that we will not take it, and that we are not going to stoop to their level.
Have you seen the situation with the Palistinians in Israel? Israelis have been targets of terrorism for decades, and have been "retaliating" for these attacks for decades as well, with bombings, missile attacks, land troops, etc. All that has happend is an increase in hostility and loss of life on both sides.
There are ways of preventing this that actually work. Let's not make the situation worse by causing yet more death and destruction. The world had enough of that yesterday. We need no more today.
There is no glibc compatibility problem. Properly-written programs have no problem whatsoever. If, however, programmers use calls that are internal to libc -- that they are told NOT to use -- then what do you expect? They have violated the rules, and it's coming around to haunt them.
I routinely run binaries from pre-2.2 versions of glibc on glibc 2.2 systems, and not only on Intel platforms. I have experienced no difficulties thus far, with either binaries shipped with Debian or otherwise. I do not use Oracle, though.
Perhaps an analogy would be useful. In the days of DOS, applications could totally bypass the operating system for basically any purpose. (Granted, because the OS stank so badly, there was often justification for it.) But when people tried to start using systems like Windows, many of these apps broke -- assuming that they had total control of the machine when they didn't, because they violated the rules before.
In this case, there is no need to violate the rules and frankly if programmers are stupid enough to go out of their way to find undocumented calls liberally sprinkled with warnings, and use them instead of their documented public interfaces, I wouldn't buy their software anyway. PostgreSQL doesn't have this problem.
Before we get too fired up about this, there are
a lot of things to think about. For one,
rail is not of uniform guage (distance between
rails) worldwide. Locomotives and cars designed to operate on one guage will not work on another, period. The best one could do with current technology would be to unload and reload all passengers and cargo at each guage change.
Secondly, standards differ significantly even within North America on things like in-cab signaling (yes, they have that), procedures, etc. While this is not as difficult a problem to deal with (locomotives and operators can be switched), it exists nonetheless.
Finally, I think a much better investment of capital would be to improve the USA's own rail system, which has been terribly ignored by the government for decades now.
Webmasters and Web Sites may not link to files in this archive
(FTP.CDROM.COM) without prior written permission by Digital River, Inc.
If you are interested in linking to files in this archive, please send
an e-mail to cdrom@digitalriver.com for details. Digital River, Inc.
reserves the right to seek compensation for unauthorized use.
This sounds especially bad since they are the primary archive for FreeBSD!
After having being terribly annoyed at Bank of America who literally did not know how to execute a wire transfer, and various other banks with low rates or fees for talking to a human, I discovered First Internet Bank. Their checking account pays 5% interest and has no minimum. They've also got free online bill pay and scanned images of canceled checks. Highly recommend them to anyone.
All across the country, many other things will be on the ballot. Members of your local school board, your city council, township board, county commission, etc. Statewide offices such as state senators, governors, secretaries of state, and governors are also on the ballot many places.
Perhaps you do think that the Presidential race doesn't involve you. Maybe you're right; maybe not. Your local race does involve you. Will your roads be will paved? Will your city be kept clean? Will your children (or YOU) be well educated? Will your water be kept clean and your environment healthy? These are important questions and are decided in a large part on a local or a state level. There are also races for the US Senate all over, which are also quite important.
I am frequently annoyed that people ignore these important local races and focus solely on the Presidency. This year's Presidential race is important; but it's also important that your local drinking water is clean and local students have access to excellent education.
For an accurate and more factual report, check out this article from the Indianapolis Star. It is extremely bad form for Slashdot and its readers to continue to mislead and be misled about the facts.
Please, let's discuss the merits of what actually was proposed. Unless people are giving their kids money to go out and buy a coin-operated machine, this story is totally off-base and incorrect.
Look, this guy needs a serious reality check. There are three posibilities here. 1) he never signed any contract; 2) his contract allows them to do this; 3) his contract does not allow them to do this. If it's 1 or 2, he deserves what he's getting. If it's 3, there are specific legal remedies that he can get. In any case, let's stop this pointless finger-pointing without hard facts, shall we? We don't even know if his contract permitted them to do what they are doing. If it did, then express.com has not done anything wrong.
Right, I did forget that with the TCP/IP example, but it doesn't really effect the statement I made about the thrust of the story.
Now, if they distribute a kernel module, as is in question here, this module only would be covered by this clause. The question of integrating the Linux TCP/IP stack into Solaris is a different one because then the Solaris kernel would be the work and it would have to be GPL'd. These are different things. One possible problem is that people are confusing "kernel module" with "kernel".