"MySQL, for example, is open-sourced under *nix, but is shareware under Windows."
Impossible, out of date, and wrong. There never was an open-source MySQL apart from the one older GPL'd one-off, until a few days ago when the whole thing went GPL (quite sensibly). As for the dual-platform thing, I don't think it's possible (and certainly thing it *shouldn't* be possible) to call it open-source if you're discriminating against users of a particular platform.
Me, I just installed and configured aide from source over the last couple of days - can't see what tripwire would give me over and above it, and I can actually go round sticking it on whatever machinery I want (because not only do I run linux, I run linux*PPC* as well...), without having to think about it. Of course, we wish tripwire well, but it's dubious whether they can pull off a 'market coup' (!) after the delay.. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
\begin{quote} '"the more than 300 residential-network managers and student-coordinators attending the conference to stop the common practice of using unencrypted passwords to secure network-user accounts." I'm not quite sure just what passwords he's implying are stored in an unencrypted format, '... \end{quote}
The bit you quote doesn't say anything about storage of passwords. What it does pertain to, however, is usage of passwords over unencrypted media.
The rest of your comment doesn't seem to make much sense either. I don't know how much a reflection on the orignal waffle that is... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I've got a perl script, running from commandline only atm and probably going to stay that way, that inserts lines from STDIN into a database. ATM this is running against PostgreSQL and with either 6.5 or 7.0, because I'm doing 1 select plus either an update or insert depending on the select results, performance is dead slow. In fact, it only gets about 30 rows / second inserted; most of this time Postmaster is stuck in 'D' state writing to disk with fsync() calls. If I take the insert/update statements out altogether and just select for each line on STDIN, then it runs 8x faster. Perl is not the slowdown I thought it would be here! (Yes, I'm using DBI, DBD::Pg and prepared SQL statements for a *reason*.)
As for advantages of PHP over perl: I don't know of any. PHP3 doesn't have any *consistent* DB interface to match DBI - I wrote some elementary benchmark things in both PHP3 and Perl, and you can tell me how much easier it was to change DBD::Pg into DBD::ODBC and stuff, than to go round renaming *all* the function calls for the different databases. D'oh. It comes down to interpreter speed and relative apache-module sizes and how integrated the script is with your HTML for what you want it to do.
What I want to do is play with Kawa a bit more... write Scheme, compile into java.class files.. run anyplace? Could be good, could be portable, could be optimizable... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
1) Digital IDs do not prove personal identity, they make it blydi unlikely that a link between particular identities is fake. ("I" is one identity of mine; I might own two keys, I have records with assorted authorities in the UK, there is a "me" who ordered from Apple computers, you name it. I can have *different* signatures for each of the above mails, as well.)
2) Digital certificates are issuable by people for anyone for free. Try GPG for size.
3) See part (1), but you can't *guarantee* anything. You need to double-check fingerprints of keys, but even then if they used telnet to access their mail remotely and somebody sniffed the private key password then all you'd know is that they are one of the people on the planet who can unlock that key (not the best example but the point holds. It's no *guarantee*.)
4) DCs don't cost money. You accept my GPG key, you can talk to me. Nice, Free, free, open-souce, you name it. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Just my take on those points as another PostgreSQL fan...:
"For example, no cross-database joins, even on the same server!" Hmmm. I can see that as being a bit of a bummer. 'create view c as select * from fw.current; ' doesn't event work. I'd have thought that would be nice.
"Oh, and you can't even switch databases on a single connect - you have to drop the connection and reconnect." Do you mean that psql does a complete disconnect() and connect() sequence when you do \c in it? FWIW in my days with a certain commercial ODBC driver company, I noticed that you can quite easily get PostgreSQL to do bounce-point connections (ie use one set of client libraries of postgresql's to connect to a 3rd server instead of just the remote end of the ODBC connection).
What I don't see is how flipping databases and mixing databases in your joins "kills much of the usefulness of having transactions".
Oh yeah. Before I forget, on a quick benchmark test, the main problem with PostgreSQL would appear to be that inserts and updates happen synchronously causing major amounts of disk blocking (so much so, if you look in `top' then postmaster is mostly in state 'D'). In a perl script (using DBD::Pg) I wrote, I have to do one select, then either one update or insert statement. I've got prepared statements for each of the above (does MySQL have those??), it's just that removing the insert / update calls makes the whole thing run 8x faster. Oops. "I wish postgresql were a faster solution"...:)
Don't deny what things you *do* get in postgresql - transactions, triggers, stored procs, foreign keys IIRC, UDTs, nice permissions, dump/restore. That leaves lacking fail-over, cross-server transactions, and... erm... not an awful lot. IOW, it's *close*, don't knock it when it's the most featureful we've got!:)
"MySQL does such a great job of impressing those who don't know jack shit about serious database programming, i don't have much hope for it" I'd agree with that. With it you can do nothing, fast. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"They want linux to beat MS by being successful commercially; at the same time they ridicule any linux company that succeeds commercially for abandoning its free software, grass-roots principles. "
Perhaps you ought to read the Advocacy HOWTO. I'm on record as saying, several times now, that Linux' "Success" is not defined as "commercial", nor as count(bums on seats). The last thing I'd want is for an intelligent OS to become something the majority of folks don't know ***-all about; I want a decent community where everyone "in" the community knows lots, and the size of the community is enough to send a high-quality signal. From what I remember, Bob Young is also known for the same approach - none of this slagging-off stuff, just make the point that linux stays up longer and does a lot of things better; then folks will move over to using it as they realise it's better for them. Positive advocacy only, please?
What I really don't understand is the crap about "Linux, a computer operating system found on a tiny but growing minority of computers worldwide". D'oh! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Hmmm. I think I agree. Indeedie, spot the flame war (and I've caught some of it on the assorted mailing lists too)...
I think CmdrTaco's stumbled on an interesting point in: "Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free." There's a large amount of overlap between the two - Debian does what it does properly and it works well, which constitutes "better" for those things that others also do; it also has key differentiators (dpkg, apt etc) that are better (IME) than other distros' peculiarities. The trouble is in likening the two ideas of 'better' and 'free' together as if emphasis on one implied any sacrifice in the other. Personally, I think Debian is about (a) doing everything Free if possible, and (b) doing it to the best of their ability, so if non-free goes, so be it. (The question is more like "now?" rather than in a few months' time when there will be yet more debian-free packages around...) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Ah, but what's the point in writing the specs for postscript in an opaque format like PDF?
I'd agree, of adobe's attempts to take over the presentation-obsessed world, postscript is editable by hand, but on the down side there are so many varying implementations that the machine-generated stuff is always a little bit worrying as to suitability (printer drivers for windoze for an apple, canon or HP, please?;)
Anyway. We've done this to death the last week on uk.comp.os.linux over PDF. I don't want another flamefest here as well;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yup, DVD / CSS, Word, PDF and Postscript (for that matter) - all proprietary standards and opaque formats, but a lot of windoze weenies seem to like them... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Obviously you have a slight comprehension problem. What *I* read in RMS' last paragraph as quoted is the voice of common sense and reason, "no confusion". Given that you think I have an 'f*?ed up attitude', whatever one of those might be, my banishing you to the commercial world was quite an apt move.
"Eat me." No thanks, I have a sense of taste. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I think you trolleth. If you can't cope with the sentiment of his mail as expressed particular in the closing paragraph, In the Free Software Movement, we disagree with the Open Source Movement about basic philosophy and values. (For more explanation, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-fr eedom.html.) Nonetheless we can't approve of confusing the public about what their basic criteria are. The facts of the situation are complex enough; confusing the issue is not welcome. then you really should get back in your little commercial box. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I know what I think of all this. There was a show on telly in the UK here last night that even my landlord understood *why* I think domain-name 'trading' is immoral. When it comes to stealing e.g. David Beckenham's name from him to make money by selling it back - piss off. If you have no right or reasonable claim to the name, get lost.
As another corollary, if all you have to sell is your *name*, do the gene pool a favour and get off the planet - please? Be widget.co.uk by all means if you're a commercial seller of widgets in the UK, but don't be a mynamehere.com if you're not a world-wide commercial distributor of mynameheres, OK? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
That's pretty much because/opt is for stuff that tends to be non-free anyway. KDE's QT falls under this, IMHO - certainly I'd not be interested in any 'linux distribution' that stuck it under/usr/. (I also think that when you compile it from source, it should go into/opt/ rather than/usr/local/ for this reason.) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I've finally decided what I think of mp3s. They are exactly analagous to 'WaReZ' from the last decade. The proponents of "Warez" had exactly the same "the s/ware's too expensive! make it cheaper or of course we'll have to pirate it" line, which I happen to notice has been swamped by the whole open-source and GPL world. Not that software piracy doesn't happen... but it doesn't have to, anything like as much now.
Other consequences of the analogy: acceptance is a cure. (E.g., ever noticed that www.bestofwarez.com is linked from the MyNetscape portal? This does away with it being "radical new stuff breaking laws", so no-one wants to do the boring thing any more.) Second: there has to be an alternative. If the whassit record labels got off their asses and came up with an alternative, they could swamp the "illegal mp3" scene with something mututally acceptable.
In either case, merely suing over use of the mp3 format is frankly immature. Provide a reasonable alternative and we'll consider it. Otherwise, grow up!! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
This was actually one of the reasons why I didn't want to go there this year. Last year SuSE let me down badly; as a previous fan of their distribution, I got peeved with the YaST license and very very peeved with all the exponential-growth bar-charts their MD kept on showing (so much for his topic, "is linux for everyone?" or whatever it was). Just *far* too commercial. This year, they were anti-student. Not pro-suit, but anti-student. If they'd said "this event is geared towards suits" I'd have let them off (and gone as an odd-one-out along with a few others;) but instead it was the discriminatory line. Oops.
Sometimes I get the impression the corporate world is running off with our Tux kickin' and screamin' under an arm.. and I think, "face it Arthur, these bozos are not your ancestors. The human race is currently around the other side of this mountain making documentaries about themselves".
Waaaaaaaaa... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Ever since Apple went closed HW, they suck and suck more... "
I disagree. Apple hardware is good, solid stuff. I decided, more for sake of the C.V. and experience than anything else, to acquire me a powerbook about a couple of months ago, and I have to say it's the best notebook I've ever had (and I've played with more than enough from the PC arena). This is one gorgeous machine - particularly from the h/ware perspective, too. Screen, USB, external SCSI, pcmcia (as if I want *that*), DVD... I got it all and it's solid and wonderful.
And yes, I *am* running: zsh, straw 12:03AM piglet % uname -a Linux straw 2.2.15pre17 #1 Tue Apr 18 16:25:42 EDT 2000 ppc unknown zsh, straw 12:03AM piglet % cat/proc/version Linux version 2.2.15pre17 (root@drow.res.cmu.edu) (gcc version 2.95.2 20000220 (Debian GNU/Linux)) #1 Tue Apr 18 16:25:42 EDT 2000
and have a very nice iBall trackerball thing running off USB even now.
What I'm getting at is, what's all this talk I hear about Apple's hardware being "closed"? Are the linux kernel sources merely reverse-engineered rather than designed to conform with a spec because the spec is hidden, or something? If so... they do a damn good job anyway! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Perhaps one ought to stop worrying about the terms "anonymity" and "privacy" and wonder about the role of "identity" instead.
The thing is, the use of a GPG or PGP key does not say "everything signed by this key is written by PigleT"; it says "there is a creature called PigleT who's applied a signature to a document". The nature of this creature is debatable - you have to find some way of pinning it down to the same chap who pays his taxes at a given address (or in criminal cases, doesn't pay...;) and you might find that either it's an organization where more than one 'real live human' knows the secret-key password or it's been compromised...
The thing I'm driving at is that people have multiple identities: there's one of me that types this here, potentially "another me" who you get to know by verifying one signed document, potentially another for another signing key... you have to piece them together like a daisy-chain to prove "identity".
Anonymity is defined as using one identity with no chains off to other identities. Privacy is limitation of knowlege of a particular set of data to a restricted set of identites. (E.g. PigleT on his own; MyOrganization.co.uk; or "my private key and your private key, babe" or whatever.)
Anonymity is a good thing to be able to use at will. If an idea needs expressed but doesn't want to be traceable for some reason, it should be possible. Privacy is also essential. I just don't *want* the US or any other government poking its snout in my life - and I don't have anything particular to hide, either. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The 'necessary and perhaps complex lookups' stem from a two-phase process, normally: there's an MTA which takes mails and asks "is the domain in this mail accepted locally? or do I relay it? or do I tell it to get lost?" and then passes it off to a local delivery agent which does the appropriate thing (either/var/spool/mail/$USER or ~USER/Maildir/ or something totally other). Hence you're right, you can't rely on the MTA to tell you anything about the long-term fate of the email address, unless it's local (ie the domain matches), in which case you've let loose the username or other id of a valid user on your box, which is always regarded as a reduction in security. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
This is not hypocrisy (or even hipocrisy), though. PGP isn't open-source, its licensing is a pile of pants. However, the source is available so the bug has *been* found *and* located, and most importantly a world-verifyable patch has been produced. Beat that, you closed-source fanatic you...
If M$loth make a mistake they try to close it up, which is utterly stupid. If an open-source project has bugs, they get fixed. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
(As an implication): >"Unethical" software is inherently techincally flawed.
There are a couple of other options for what/.'s saying: (1) technically-flawed software is also unethical; (2) oh look, combining things has just given us the worst of both worlds => this is a complete crock of software.
I'm surprised nobody's pointed out this absolute hoot of a sales pitch..:
Gauntlet Firewalls combine the most secure method of firewall protection - application gateway- with the speed of stateful inspection packet filters via our patent-pending Adaptive Proxy technology. Adaptive Proxies protect both in-bound and out-bound services, supporting high throughput and the latest web-based technologies without sacrificing security with important features including user transparency, integrated management, strong encryption and content security.
I guess it's not meant to be an open-source product, by any chance?;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Win2k RC1 wasn't a beta, it was a release candidate. Sounds just like kernel 2.4.0-test1, to me. After all, software does not have "alpha", "beta", "release candidate" and "final" "version"s, it evolves continually - those are arbitrary wetware checkpoints. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What's really crucial here is *training*; I'm all for mixed-OS environments where instead of people producing "good LaTeX documents" per se they know their tools and principles well enough to write in something that can be read everywhere. And that requires people being told to use whatever the heck they like, as long as it works, but also is a slight shift in goals. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Slashdot Mirror
"MySQL, for example, is open-sourced under *nix, but is shareware under Windows."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Impossible, out of date, and wrong. There never was an open-source MySQL apart from the one older GPL'd one-off, until a few days ago when the whole thing went GPL (quite sensibly). As for the dual-platform thing, I don't think it's possible (and certainly thing it *shouldn't* be possible) to call it open-source if you're discriminating against users of a particular platform.
Me, I just installed and configured aide from source over the last couple of days - can't see what tripwire would give me over and above it, and I can actually go round sticking it on whatever machinery I want (because not only do I run linux, I run linux*PPC* as well...), without having to think about it.
Of course, we wish tripwire well, but it's dubious whether they can pull off a 'market coup' (!) after the delay..
~Tim
--
\begin{quote} ...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
'"the more than 300 residential-network managers and student-coordinators attending the conference to stop the common practice of using unencrypted passwords to secure network-user accounts." I'm not quite sure just what passwords he's implying are stored in an unencrypted format, '
\end{quote}
The bit you quote doesn't say anything about storage of passwords. What it does pertain to, however, is usage of passwords over unencrypted media.
The rest of your comment doesn't seem to make much sense either. I don't know how much a reflection on the orignal waffle that is...
~Tim
--
To answer two or so of your points:
.class files .. run anyplace? Could be good, could be portable, could be optimizable...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I've got a perl script, running from commandline only atm and probably going to stay that way, that inserts lines from STDIN into a database. ATM this is running against PostgreSQL and with either 6.5 or 7.0, because I'm doing 1 select plus either an update or insert depending on the select results, performance is dead slow. In fact, it only gets about 30 rows / second inserted; most of this time Postmaster is stuck in 'D' state writing to disk with fsync() calls.
If I take the insert/update statements out altogether and just select for each line on STDIN, then it runs 8x faster. Perl is not the slowdown I thought it would be here!
(Yes, I'm using DBI, DBD::Pg and prepared SQL statements for a *reason*.)
As for advantages of PHP over perl: I don't know of any. PHP3 doesn't have any *consistent* DB interface to match DBI - I wrote some elementary benchmark things in both PHP3 and Perl, and you can tell me how much easier it was to change DBD::Pg into DBD::ODBC and stuff, than to go round renaming *all* the function calls for the different databases. D'oh. It comes down to interpreter speed and relative apache-module sizes and how integrated the script is with your HTML for what you want it to do.
What I want to do is play with Kawa a bit more... write Scheme, compile into java
~Tim
--
Aha! Gotcha. Yup, that makes sense. Thanks.
:)
:(
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
("D'oh", too
Not much one can do to work around that, is there?
Still, it's the seemingly-synchronous writing stuff that's slowing me down that's worrying me most atm.
~Tim
--
Another fatal flaw, probably quite literally:
/comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"MIS! They copied my authentication! I need a new set of hands!"
Oops.
Oh yeah, by the way:
"Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of
It's been 60 seconds since your last submission!"
Yes, I *do* type that fast.......
~Tim
--
1) Digital IDs do not prove personal identity, they make it blydi unlikely that a link between particular identities is fake. ("I" is one identity of mine; I might own two keys, I have records with assorted authorities in the UK, there is a "me" who ordered from Apple computers, you name it. I can have *different* signatures for each of the above mails, as well.)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
2) Digital certificates are issuable by people for anyone for free. Try GPG for size.
3) See part (1), but you can't *guarantee* anything. You need to double-check fingerprints of keys, but even then if they used telnet to access their mail remotely and somebody sniffed the private key password then all you'd know is that they are one of the people on the planet who can unlock that key (not the best example but the point holds. It's no *guarantee*.)
4) DCs don't cost money. You accept my GPG key, you can talk to me. Nice, Free, free, open-souce, you name it.
~Tim
--
Just my take on those points as another PostgreSQL fan...:
:)
:)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"For example, no cross-database joins, even on the same server!"
Hmmm. I can see that as being a bit of a bummer.
'create view c as select * from fw.current; ' doesn't event work. I'd have thought that would be nice.
"Oh, and you can't even switch databases on a single connect - you have to drop the connection and reconnect."
Do you mean that psql does a complete disconnect() and connect() sequence when you do \c in it?
FWIW in my days with a certain commercial ODBC driver company, I noticed that you can quite easily get PostgreSQL to do bounce-point connections (ie use one set of client libraries of postgresql's to connect to a 3rd server instead of just the remote end of the ODBC connection).
What I don't see is how flipping databases and mixing databases in your joins "kills much of the usefulness of having transactions".
Oh yeah. Before I forget, on a quick benchmark test, the main problem with PostgreSQL would appear to be that inserts and updates happen synchronously causing major amounts of disk blocking (so much so, if you look in `top' then postmaster is mostly in state 'D'). In a perl script (using DBD::Pg) I wrote, I have to do one select, then either one update or insert statement. I've got prepared statements for each of the above (does MySQL have those??), it's just that removing the insert / update calls makes the whole thing run 8x faster. Oops. "I wish postgresql were a faster solution"...
Don't deny what things you *do* get in postgresql - transactions, triggers, stored procs, foreign keys IIRC, UDTs, nice permissions, dump/restore. That leaves lacking fail-over, cross-server transactions, and... erm... not an awful lot. IOW, it's *close*, don't knock it when it's the most featureful we've got!
"MySQL does such a great job of impressing those who don't know jack shit about serious database programming, i don't have much hope for it"
I'd agree with that. With it you can do nothing, fast.
~Tim
--
"They want linux to beat MS by being successful commercially; at the same time they ridicule any linux company that succeeds commercially for abandoning its free software, grass-roots principles. "
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Perhaps you ought to read the Advocacy HOWTO. I'm on record as saying, several times now, that Linux' "Success" is not defined as "commercial", nor as count(bums on seats). The last thing I'd want is for an intelligent OS to become something the majority of folks don't know ***-all about; I want a decent community where everyone "in" the community knows lots, and the size of the community is enough to send a high-quality signal.
From what I remember, Bob Young is also known for the same approach - none of this slagging-off stuff, just make the point that linux stays up longer and does a lot of things better; then folks will move over to using it as they realise it's better for them. Positive advocacy only, please?
What I really don't understand is the crap about "Linux, a computer operating system found on a tiny but growing minority of computers worldwide". D'oh!
~Tim
--
Hmmm. I think I agree. Indeedie, spot the flame war (and I've caught some of it on the assorted mailing lists too)...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I think CmdrTaco's stumbled on an interesting point in: "Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free."
There's a large amount of overlap between the two - Debian does what it does properly and it works well, which constitutes "better" for those things that others also do; it also has key differentiators (dpkg, apt etc) that are better (IME) than other distros' peculiarities. The trouble is in likening the two ideas of 'better' and 'free' together as if emphasis on one implied any sacrifice in the other. Personally, I think Debian is about (a) doing everything Free if possible, and (b) doing it to the best of their ability, so if non-free goes, so be it. (The question is more like "now?" rather than in a few months' time when there will be yet more debian-free packages around...)
~Tim
--
Ah, but what's the point in writing the specs for postscript in an opaque format like PDF?
;)
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I'd agree, of adobe's attempts to take over the presentation-obsessed world, postscript is editable by hand, but on the down side there are so many varying implementations that the machine-generated stuff is always a little bit worrying as to suitability (printer drivers for windoze for an apple, canon or HP, please?
Anyway. We've done this to death the last week on uk.comp.os.linux over PDF. I don't want another flamefest here as well
~Tim
--
Yup, DVD / CSS, Word, PDF and Postscript (for that matter) - all proprietary standards and opaque formats, but a lot of windoze weenies seem to like them...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Obviously you have a slight comprehension problem. What *I* read in RMS' last paragraph as quoted is the voice of common sense and reason, "no confusion". Given that you think I have an 'f*?ed up attitude', whatever one of those might be, my banishing you to the commercial world was quite an apt move.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Eat me."
No thanks, I have a sense of taste.
~Tim
--
I think you trolleth. If you can't cope with the sentiment of his mail as expressed particular in the closing paragraph,r eedom.html.) Nonetheless we can't approve of confusing the public about what their basic criteria are. The facts of the situation are complex enough; confusing the issue is not welcome.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
In the Free Software Movement, we disagree with the Open Source Movement about basic philosophy and values. (For more explanation, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-f
then you really should get back in your little commercial box.
~Tim
--
I think you have a point somewhere...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I know what I think of all this. There was a show on telly in the UK here last night that even my landlord understood *why* I think domain-name 'trading' is immoral. When it comes to stealing e.g. David Beckenham's name from him to make money by selling it back - piss off. If you have no right or reasonable claim to the name, get lost.
As another corollary, if all you have to sell is your *name*, do the gene pool a favour and get off the planet - please? Be widget.co.uk by all means if you're a commercial seller of widgets in the UK, but don't be a mynamehere.com if you're not a world-wide commercial distributor of mynameheres, OK?
~Tim
--
That's pretty much because /opt is for stuff that tends to be non-free anyway. KDE's QT falls under this, IMHO - certainly I'd not be interested in any 'linux distribution' that stuck it under /usr/. (I also think that when you compile it from source, it should go into /opt/ rather than /usr/local/ for this reason.)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
I've finally decided what I think of mp3s. They are exactly analagous to 'WaReZ' from the last decade. The proponents of "Warez" had exactly the same "the s/ware's too expensive! make it cheaper or of course we'll have to pirate it" line, which I happen to notice has been swamped by the whole open-source and GPL world. Not that software piracy doesn't happen... but it doesn't have to, anything like as much now.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Other consequences of the analogy: acceptance is a cure. (E.g., ever noticed that www.bestofwarez.com is linked from the MyNetscape portal? This does away with it being "radical new stuff breaking laws", so no-one wants to do the boring thing any more.)
Second: there has to be an alternative. If the whassit record labels got off their asses and came up with an alternative, they could swamp the "illegal mp3" scene with something mututally acceptable.
In either case, merely suing over use of the mp3 format is frankly immature. Provide a reasonable alternative and we'll consider it. Otherwise, grow up!!
~Tim
--
This was actually one of the reasons why I didn't want to go there this year. ;) but instead it was the discriminatory line. Oops.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Last year SuSE let me down badly; as a previous fan of their distribution, I got peeved with the YaST license and very very peeved with all the exponential-growth bar-charts their MD kept on showing (so much for his topic, "is linux for everyone?" or whatever it was). Just *far* too commercial.
This year, they were anti-student. Not pro-suit, but anti-student. If they'd said "this event is geared towards suits" I'd have let them off (and gone as an odd-one-out along with a few others
Sometimes I get the impression the corporate world is running off with our Tux kickin' and screamin' under an arm..
and I think, "face it Arthur, these bozos are not your ancestors. The human race is currently around the other side of this mountain making documentaries about themselves".
Waaaaaaaaa...
~Tim
--
"Ever since Apple went closed HW, they suck and suck more... "
/proc/version
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I disagree. Apple hardware is good, solid stuff. I decided, more for sake of the C.V. and experience than anything else, to acquire me a powerbook about a couple of months ago, and I have to say it's the best notebook I've ever had (and I've played with more than enough from the PC arena). This is one gorgeous machine - particularly from the h/ware perspective, too. Screen, USB, external SCSI, pcmcia (as if I want *that*), DVD... I got it all and it's solid and wonderful.
And yes, I *am* running:
zsh, straw 12:03AM piglet % uname -a
Linux straw 2.2.15pre17 #1 Tue Apr 18 16:25:42 EDT 2000 ppc unknown
zsh, straw 12:03AM piglet % cat
Linux version 2.2.15pre17 (root@drow.res.cmu.edu) (gcc version 2.95.2 20000220 (Debian GNU/Linux)) #1 Tue Apr 18 16:25:42 EDT 2000
and have a very nice iBall trackerball thing running off USB even now.
What I'm getting at is, what's all this talk I hear about Apple's hardware being "closed"? Are the linux kernel sources merely reverse-engineered rather than designed to conform with a spec because the spec is hidden, or something? If so... they do a damn good job anyway!
~Tim
--
Perhaps one ought to stop worrying about the terms "anonymity" and "privacy" and wonder about the role of "identity" instead.
;) and you might find that either it's an organization where more than one 'real live human' knows the secret-key password or it's been compromised...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The thing is, the use of a GPG or PGP key does not say "everything signed by this key is written by PigleT"; it says "there is a creature called PigleT who's applied a signature to a document". The nature of this creature is debatable - you have to find some way of pinning it down to the same chap who pays his taxes at a given address (or in criminal cases, doesn't pay...
The thing I'm driving at is that people have multiple identities: there's one of me that types this here, potentially "another me" who you get to know by verifying one signed document, potentially another for another signing key... you have to piece them together like a daisy-chain to prove "identity".
Anonymity is defined as using one identity with no chains off to other identities.
Privacy is limitation of knowlege of a particular set of data to a restricted set of identites. (E.g. PigleT on his own; MyOrganization.co.uk; or "my private key and your private key, babe" or whatever.)
Anonymity is a good thing to be able to use at will. If an idea needs expressed but doesn't want to be traceable for some reason, it should be possible.
Privacy is also essential. I just don't *want* the US or any other government poking its snout in my life - and I don't have anything particular to hide, either.
~Tim
--
The 'necessary and perhaps complex lookups' stem from a two-phase process, normally: there's an MTA which takes mails and asks "is the domain in this mail accepted locally? or do I relay it? or do I tell it to get lost?" and then passes it off to a local delivery agent which does the appropriate thing (either /var/spool/mail/$USER or ~USER/Maildir/ or something totally other).
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Hence you're right, you can't rely on the MTA to tell you anything about the long-term fate of the email address, unless it's local (ie the domain matches), in which case you've let loose the username or other id of a valid user on your box, which is always regarded as a reduction in security.
~Tim
--
I believe it's a Pratchett novel where the answer is given "anybody can invent *that*" .. "But the thing is, you didn't, did you?"...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Anyway.
A posthoumous thank-you to the chap for kicking the ball off, sort of thing.
~Tim
--
This is not hypocrisy (or even hipocrisy), though. PGP isn't open-source, its licensing is a pile of pants.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
However, the source is available so the bug has *been* found *and* located, and most importantly a world-verifyable patch has been produced. Beat that, you closed-source fanatic you...
If M$loth make a mistake they try to close it up, which is utterly stupid. If an open-source project has bugs, they get fixed.
~Tim
--
There are a couple of other options for what /.'s saying:
(1) technically-flawed software is also unethical;
(2) oh look, combining things has just given us the worst of both worlds => this is a complete crock of software.
I'm surprised nobody's pointed out this absolute hoot of a sales pitch..:
Gauntlet Firewalls combine the most secure method of firewall protection - application gateway- with the speed of stateful inspection packet filters via our patent-pending Adaptive Proxy technology. Adaptive Proxies protect both in-bound and out-bound services, supporting high throughput and the latest web-based technologies without sacrificing security with important features including user transparency, integrated management, strong encryption and content security.
I guess it's not meant to be an open-source product, by any chance? ;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Very good analogy.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The key question is: What is a beta?
Win2k RC1 wasn't a beta, it was a release candidate. Sounds just like kernel 2.4.0-test1, to me. After all, software does not have "alpha", "beta", "release candidate" and "final" "version"s, it evolves continually - those are arbitrary wetware checkpoints.
~Tim
--
Yup, I don't think I disagreed, did I? :)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What's really crucial here is *training*; I'm all for mixed-OS environments where instead of people producing "good LaTeX documents" per se they know their tools and principles well enough to write in something that can be read everywhere. And that requires people being told to use whatever the heck they like, as long as it works, but also is a slight shift in goals.
~Tim
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