I think the answer is to make MP3s *more* legitimate rather than less no. If companies pushed them around more as a "taster" (eg low quality, or 'samplers' - I'd never advocate a pay-per-listen scheme!) then there wouldn't be that much thrill-factor in getting them "underground".
I beg to disagree. Unless I'm much mistaken there's still one kernel tree: % ls/usr/src/linux/arch alpha/ arm/ i386/ m68k/ mips/ ppc/ s390/ sparc/ sparc64/ % (from which you may deduce I'm running 2.2.14...)
Still. The question is really, "who cares?": if it's open-source then there's nothing to stop people porting, or just staying "un-forked" to make it easier. After all, we don't use #ifdef __AIX__ in our code now, do we?;^]
"Why so many versions? What value do we really get between them?"
Last time I asked what was so great about various distributions on here, it got marked down as flamebait...
After all, there IS nothing more to them than a combination of various versions of various packages, including some distro-specific things like YaST, or linuxconf in the case of RedHat, whatever - especially if you're a real developer.
Developers aren't interested in "the distro" from the PoV of coding on a platform, you're interested in how all the various functions and syscalls behave in "this" given combination of libraries, etc. It's the "home user" who's interested in the chameleon...
And speaking of proprietary non-free setup / admin toys, have SuSE open-sourced the flipping license on YaST yet?!
"but should he really be expected to donate more?"
ITYM "thanks! where do I sign up?!". If you'd read the article then you'd see that he views the $100M as "a deposit" - so (a) there's more on the way anyway and (b) there are probably more billionaires out there than this one guy. Now that could be fun...
Interesting reporting, putting this chap over Bill's similar gesture...
"If MS allows a Linux port of its technology, it could face content companies withdrawing licenses to release their content in its format, in favour of more restricted players."
Well, diddums to that..:) More to the point, if it requires running as root, or closed-source binary kernel modules, it won't be running here, and possibly in quite a few other places too...
First thoughts: Excellent stuff! I'm glad to have "the GPL of document processing" nicely laid out. I also approve muchly of "Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output purposes only." I'm not convinced about some of the layout specs ("first page", "title page", "adjacent pages" - can't we have a one-paragraph "this is GDL'd" with pointer to appendix Z?) It also needs to define "compilation copyright" - what is it? Is it Yet Another American thing? (I thought that around these parts, anything you "write" was automatically copyrighted... confusing.) If the GPL is but one open-source license for software, is there an "open-source" definition for documents? (How much is www.transparent-source.org going for?;) Roll on w3c and the DOM and any other transparent document models!
Indeed, secondary-level domains can be fun as well. I approve of something like ".co,.ac/.edu,.gov,.net" or variants on a theme; only if there's a whole category of things that are missing should it be added under the country level. Incidentally, if you're in.ca, how come there's a www.worldvisions.ca ? Maybe a ".home.uk" would be fun, though, if only to clear out all the.co.uk people who aren't companies.
"Am I the only one who notices a double standard?"
Not at all. ISTR a few years ago when ".to" came out that it caused a little stink... all this "come.to" cutesyism stuff.
Frankly I'm pretty sick of seeing things like "www.m8motorwaymaintenance.co.uk" on the backend of lorries, for two reasons. If I wanted a hostname stuck on my butt, I'd stick a hostname on my butt. If I wanted to point people at my website, I'd at least have the decency to make it a valid URL (see RFC1738). Secondly, the name itself it merely cute, not descriptive. I'm all for country + a few other TLDs and whatever-the-InterNIC-calls-itself-today enforcing it strictly. If you're not a UK-based seller of things, you don't get a.co.uk domain. If you're not a multinational company, you sure don't get.com. If you're merely American, you belong in.us. Is this really so hard to understand?
There's one problem here. Real Geeks(TM) all know that protesting for protesting's sake is no way to get something recognised compared to a polite means of dealing with it, or reported their/real/ earnings to the IRS.
Seriously though, there's very little else on the planet that annoys me more than bandwagon-ism, the idea of going out and chaining oneself to railings to "protest"; it doesn't mean anything other than "I can get a crowd of clueless morons to support me". As for trying to block lorries coming out of France... run them over, plain and simple!
If he's interested in it not being too Open-BSD instead of OpenSSH, why doesn't he give it up to those who/do/ deserve it, on request?
Domain-parking is evil. As are pathetic domain-registration "companies" such as easyspace whose MDs phone you at 2103 on a saturday to swear their heads off.
Hmmm. You're very right on the self-control things.
Me, I don't/want/ my personal mail coming through to work at all; that's why I ssh out to read it and don't let anything remotely sensitive go through, just "in case" someone happens to be listening. If it's really private then it gets GPG-encrypted, or if I think there's a clueless twerp on the other end (see "easyspace" under the domain registration article!) then it gets GPG-signed so they can't doctor it.
It would be interesting to have a "slashdot" public key floating around...:) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
"Having no filters at the library only makes my job as a parent harder."
What crap. If you think your job as a parent is to filter what your kids see, you have to do that whether there's a machine in the way or not. If you don't, you'd be irresponsible.
"I believe making smut available to the public for free infringes on my rights as a parent"
What more crap! I haven't seen you campaigning to close my local newsagents, which I gather (because my blinkers don't allow me to look up) also sells "smut". Don't you think you should be involved with them, too?
As for the last paragraph, try thinking before you post. The whole point of having computers available in libraries is that you can get at information, primarily useful and secondarily clean, information, without financial expenditure. "Filtering" that reduces the amount of the "useful and clean" info you can see is Bad, because it makes a mockery of it, as anyone looking up Scunthorpe in the UK will sooner or later find out.
But not so. Sure the effect of GPL et al is to reduce the amounts of money flying around - because someone can re-"sell" it on for free if they want. OTOH you can cover costs of CDs, which is fair enough; but the main thing is that you can make loads of dough off related services instead - eg support, contracting / configuring, whatever.
Here's an example: Last year I produced a perl script. It took 15 minutes, from 10 mins' finding someone else's modules and 1 minute editing them to do what I wanted and about 4 mins' testing. As a result a multi-megabuck deal went through that probably wouldn't have otherwise. Now how much was that script *worth*? (And secondarily, how is that amount related to what I got for it, ie absolute zip?)
Methinks "worth" is one thing that open-source deals with; something like eg Apache is worth a LOT. OTOH the idea of "what someone can be suckered into paying for it" is what the commercial scene is all about. Me, I'd prefer to produce a valuable, useful, high-quality application or utility, rather than any amount of generated code managed by a "quality" system, any day. And I have the right and the choice to do so if I want.
I suspect you might've gone and confused 'open' and 'free' and 'free' yourself, too?
Let's use "Free" for "idealogically Open", and "free" for money for the time being. Then I'd say that a specification should be Open - must be! - or Free, and it should be cheaply available. Now, if it's Open then there are no restrictions on redistribution: therefore you can sell it to my friend for $2500 and he'll give me a copy because he's nice like that. All without license breach. And more to the point, I'll take a look at it, change it in a few places, and send it back both to my friend and the original authors as diffs.
(Incidentally, I think your use of "GPL" there is unfortunate. LGPL, possibly, or something else. GPL is a bit inapplicable when it comes to specs, because if it's going to be a Spec, then it needs to be relatively fixed.)
Now, this $2500 thing: is the figure reasonable? Is the documentation for USB still Open? Is it restricting distribution or biassing itself against a particular set of users? (E.g. the GPL states there should be no division of users on such things as country/ethnic/religious grounds - can I extend that to "financially able"??)
*I*'m not "a professional developer", though. I don't see why I should have to work for A Big Linux Named-Company in order for them to afford a copy of the Spec for me. In fact, that scenario is no better than the current commercial scene. Bad.
And while I'm here;) The fact that "there are a lot of people who'll never need to know the contents" doesn't permit a financial elitism. That is a business/commercial mentality which has no place in the Open(-Source) arena.
Yup, that's always possible. I'm hardly a RedHat fan, for all I disagreed with the "slackware v RedHat" in the original comment.
"...linux will never be "professionally trusted"..."
Eeek, that argument is so bogus it's unbelievable. "Professionals" either aren't being professional, or are just being lusers if they can't cope with the occasional fix.
Me, the way I operate is at the cutting edge of Debian "unstable" - not "potato" or "frozen", the real unstable thing. I apt-get dist-upgrade every day as a matter of course; and I have to wangle things to get packages to install, such as hacking/etc/init.d/devpts.sh, or whatever. I get the impression there are folks out there who aren't suited to doing this kind of thing... RedHat's errors were (a) in targetting that kind of, er, "user" (I believe they're called) and (b) not living up to the stability thing. Either way of looking at it it could be seen to be "broken".
Wibble! Since when was snickering good? Since when was Slackware something to gloat about over and above RedHat?
Being cutting-edge is intrinsically good; if you can't put up with the occasional bug and fix coming rapidly along, go back to another OS, thou evil troll!
Mind you, the last time I said anything remotely like that I got 8 replies of which 6 were flames, but hey, what do I know?
Anyway. Anything which starts off by asserting that neither KDE nor Gnome has "a file manager" is a crock of shit. Kfm doubling-up as Konqueror is wonderful, as is gmc for gnome. In fact, as soon as you install RedHat 6.1 and log in, you get a view of your home directory in a graphical file manager. Have they not even right-clicked on a gnome-panel, added a launcher, and changed the type to 'directory'?
*Plonk* Wired will also be up against the wall when the revolution comes!;8)
Re:Look for something amazing from this project
on
New Desktop for Linux
·
· Score: 1
yes.
Now *why* should *Linux* go down the "easy" route? Who says we need it on every desktop?
Never mind 'stop whining', go back and re-read the Advocacy HOWTO. I think you'll find it a far cry from the "every desktop" and "M$loth must die" attitudes.
Re:Look for something amazing from this project
on
New Desktop for Linux
·
· Score: 2
I won't flame you for linux being already "easy to use", but I do ask: why is "easy to use" synonymous with "good" in so many folks' views? Why is it seen that it "must" appeal to the desktop luser as well as everyone else?
Isn't the idea of "winning the OS war" that (a) there is no war (b) it's the strength of quality signal that counts, not count(bums_on_seats)??
That's OK. I can cope with people thinking it's assinine... Of course, it doesn't stop you being a PHB, though.
Let's get it straight: if you can't read Perl, which is a fundamental part of this "maintain" crap, then stop trying. No amount of documentation, comments or whatever will help you. The same goes for Python, C, or any other language on the planet. If you can't read it, don't write it. Ability to spew chunks of code, even code with comments, does not make a good hacker; ability to *debug* does.
Um. But the reason you write comments is not because you couldn't have read it 6 months ago, but because you think you won't be able to in 6 months' time, or because some other chap won't be able to, surely?
Anyway. I don't believe in comments particularly. I'm firmly of the "if you can't read it and it's valid perl, that's your sad loss" mentality. Not that this allows me to go out of my way to obfuscate code, but if it's something the way I'd expect to read it, then I expect you to read it the same too. Amongst other things, if you're paying me to write perl, you're not paying me to write English. If you can't read it, that's your bad lookout. There's nothing worse than excessive real-language usage for confusion or wasteage. (C.f. SQL, COBOL,... all designed by management, more or less!)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the answer is to make MP3s *more* legitimate rather than less no. If companies pushed them around more as a "taster" (eg low quality, or 'samplers' - I'd never advocate a pay-per-listen scheme!) then there wouldn't be that much thrill-factor in getting them "underground".
Simply seconded...
:)
(although I *am* "religious", I suppose, and praying for him...
I beg to disagree. Unless I'm much mistaken there's still one kernel tree: /usr/src/linux/arch
;^]
% ls
alpha/ arm/ i386/ m68k/ mips/ ppc/ s390/ sparc/ sparc64/
%
(from which you may deduce I'm running 2.2.14...)
Still. The question is really, "who cares?": if it's open-source then there's nothing to stop people porting, or just staying "un-forked" to make it easier. After all, we don't use
#ifdef __AIX__
in our code now, do we?
"Why so many versions? What value do we really get between them?"
Last time I asked what was so great about various distributions on here, it got marked down as flamebait...
After all, there IS nothing more to them than a combination of various versions of various packages, including some distro-specific things like YaST, or linuxconf in the case of RedHat, whatever - especially if you're a real developer.
Developers aren't interested in "the distro" from the PoV of coding on a platform, you're interested in how all the various functions and syscalls behave in "this" given combination of libraries, etc.
It's the "home user" who's interested in the chameleon...
And speaking of proprietary non-free setup / admin toys, have SuSE open-sourced the flipping license on YaST yet?!
"but should he really be expected to donate more?"
ITYM "thanks! where do I sign up?!". If you'd read the article then you'd see that he views the $100M as "a deposit" - so (a) there's more on the way anyway and (b) there are probably more billionaires out there than this one guy. Now that could be fun...
Interesting reporting, putting this chap over Bill's similar gesture...
"If MS allows a Linux port of its technology, it could face content companies withdrawing licenses to release their content in its format, in favour of more restricted players."
:)
Well, diddums to that..
More to the point, if it requires running as root, or closed-source binary kernel modules, it won't be running here, and possibly in quite a few other places too...
First thoughts: Excellent stuff! I'm glad to have "the GPL of document processing" nicely laid out. ;) Roll on w3c and the DOM and any other transparent document models!
I also approve muchly of "Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output purposes only." I'm not convinced about some of the layout specs ("first page", "title page", "adjacent pages" - can't we have a one-paragraph "this is GDL'd" with pointer to appendix Z?) It also needs to define "compilation copyright" - what is it? Is it Yet Another American thing? (I thought that around these parts, anything you "write" was automatically copyrighted... confusing.) If the GPL is but one open-source license for software, is there an "open-source" definition for documents? (How much is www.transparent-source.org going for?
Indeed, secondary-level domains can be fun as well. I approve of something like ".co, .ac/.edu, .gov, .net" or variants on a theme; only if there's a whole category of things that are missing should it be added under the country level. Incidentally, if you're in .ca, how come there's a www.worldvisions.ca ? .co.uk people who aren't companies.
Maybe a ".home.uk" would be fun, though, if only to clear out all the
"Am I the only one who notices a double standard?"
.co.uk domain. If you're not a multinational company, you sure don't get .com. If you're merely American, you belong in .us. Is this really so hard to understand?
Not at all. ISTR a few years ago when ".to" came out that it caused a little stink... all this "come.to" cutesyism stuff.
Frankly I'm pretty sick of seeing things like "www.m8motorwaymaintenance.co.uk" on the backend of lorries, for two reasons. If I wanted a hostname stuck on my butt, I'd stick a hostname on my butt. If I wanted to point people at my website, I'd at least have the decency to make it a valid URL (see RFC1738). Secondly, the name itself it merely cute, not descriptive.
I'm all for country + a few other TLDs and whatever-the-InterNIC-calls-itself-today enforcing it strictly. If you're not a UK-based seller of things, you don't get a
I think you want "top-level domain".
There's one problem here. Real Geeks(TM) all know that protesting for protesting's sake is no way to get something recognised compared to a polite means of dealing with it, or reported their /real/ earnings to the IRS.
Seriously though, there's very little else on the planet that annoys me more than bandwagon-ism, the idea of going out and chaining oneself to railings to "protest"; it doesn't mean anything other than "I can get a crowd of clueless morons to support me". As for trying to block lorries coming out of France... run them over, plain and simple!
Yes but who'd want to export their crypto from the US government anyway?!
If he's interested in it not being too Open-BSD instead of OpenSSH, why doesn't he give it up to those who /do/ deserve it, on request?
Domain-parking is evil. As are pathetic domain-registration "companies" such as easyspace whose MDs phone you at 2103 on a saturday to swear their heads off.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
/want/ my personal mail coming through to work at all; that's why I ssh out to read it and don't let anything remotely sensitive go through, just "in case" someone happens to be listening. If it's really private then it gets GPG-encrypted, or if I think there's a clueless twerp on the other end (see "easyspace" under the domain registration article!) then it gets GPG-signed so they can't doctor it.
:)
F 0AJAr6gzT0L528wx
Hash: SHA1
Hmmm. You're very right on the self-control things.
Me, I don't
It would be interesting to have a "slashdot" public key floating around...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
iEYEARECAAYFAji+jB0ACgkQh3MeQyZWueSbuACeMEsZyyf
oF0AoIqi5q6xpU0p588mBPz9Yk+gvrmT
=n/x7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
"Having no filters at the library only makes my job as a parent harder."
What crap. If you think your job as a parent is to filter what your kids see, you have to do that whether there's a machine in the way or not. If you don't, you'd be irresponsible.
"I believe making smut available to the public for free infringes on my rights as a parent"
What more crap! I haven't seen you campaigning to close my local newsagents, which I gather (because my blinkers don't allow me to look up) also sells "smut". Don't you think you should be involved with them, too?
As for the last paragraph, try thinking before you post. The whole point of having computers available in libraries is that you can get at information, primarily useful and secondarily clean, information, without financial expenditure. "Filtering" that reduces the amount of the "useful and clean" info you can see is Bad, because it makes a mockery of it, as anyone looking up Scunthorpe in the UK will sooner or later find out.
Feel free to pay my phone bills, by the way.
Almost fair points :)
But not so. Sure the effect of GPL et al is to reduce the amounts of money flying around - because someone can re-"sell" it on for free if they want. OTOH you can cover costs of CDs, which is fair enough; but the main thing is that you can make loads of dough off related services instead - eg support, contracting / configuring, whatever.
Here's an example:
Last year I produced a perl script. It took 15 minutes, from 10 mins' finding someone else's modules and 1 minute editing them to do what I wanted and about 4 mins' testing. As a result a multi-megabuck deal went through that probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Now how much was that script *worth*? (And secondarily, how is that amount related to what I got for it, ie absolute zip?)
Methinks "worth" is one thing that open-source deals with; something like eg Apache is worth a LOT. OTOH the idea of "what someone can be suckered into paying for it" is what the commercial scene is all about.
Me, I'd prefer to produce a valuable, useful, high-quality application or utility, rather than any amount of generated code managed by a "quality" system, any day. And I have the right and the choice to do so if I want.
Check out http://linux berg.mirror.ac.uk</a> in Netscrape 4.x for Linux. Look for the big date in red.... doesn't happen in IE, or in Netscrape for non-Linux platforms (Windoze and AIX tested so far). Silly javascript :)
I suspect you might've gone and confused 'open' and 'free' and 'free' yourself, too?
;) The fact that "there are a lot of people who'll never need to know the contents" doesn't permit a financial elitism. That is a business/commercial mentality which has no place in the Open(-Source) arena.
Let's use "Free" for "idealogically Open", and "free" for money for the time being.
Then I'd say that a specification should be Open - must be! - or Free, and it should be cheaply available.
Now, if it's Open then there are no restrictions on redistribution: therefore you can sell it to my friend for $2500 and he'll give me a copy because he's nice like that. All without license breach. And more to the point, I'll take a look at it, change it in a few places, and send it back both to my friend and the original authors as diffs.
(Incidentally, I think your use of "GPL" there is unfortunate. LGPL, possibly, or something else. GPL is a bit inapplicable when it comes to specs, because if it's going to be a Spec, then it needs to be relatively fixed.)
Now, this $2500 thing: is the figure reasonable? Is the documentation for USB still Open? Is it restricting distribution or biassing itself against a particular set of users? (E.g. the GPL states there should be no division of users on such things as country/ethnic/religious grounds - can I extend that to "financially able"??)
*I*'m not "a professional developer", though. I don't see why I should have to work for A Big Linux Named-Company in order for them to afford a copy of the Spec for me. In fact, that scenario is no better than the current commercial scene. Bad.
And while I'm here
"RedHat just got too "cool" and jumped the gun"
/etc/init.d/devpts.sh, or whatever. I get the impression there are folks out there who aren't suited to doing this kind of thing... RedHat's errors were (a) in targetting that kind of, er, "user" (I believe they're called) and (b) not living up to the stability thing. Either way of looking at it it could be seen to be "broken".
Yup, that's always possible.
I'm hardly a RedHat fan, for all I disagreed with the "slackware v RedHat" in the original comment.
"...linux will never be "professionally trusted"..."
Eeek, that argument is so bogus it's unbelievable. "Professionals" either aren't being professional, or are just being lusers if they can't cope with the occasional fix.
Me, the way I operate is at the cutting edge of Debian "unstable" - not "potato" or "frozen", the real unstable thing. I apt-get dist-upgrade every day as a matter of course; and I have to wangle things to get packages to install, such as hacking
Wibble! Since when was snickering good? Since when was Slackware something to gloat about over and above RedHat?
Being cutting-edge is intrinsically good; if you can't put up with the occasional bug and fix coming rapidly along, go back to another OS, thou evil troll!
Hear hear!!
;8)
Mind you, the last time I said anything remotely like that I got 8 replies of which 6 were flames, but hey, what do I know?
Anyway. Anything which starts off by asserting that neither KDE nor Gnome has "a file manager" is a crock of shit. Kfm doubling-up as Konqueror is wonderful, as is gmc for gnome. In fact, as soon as you install RedHat 6.1 and log in, you get a view of your home directory in a graphical file manager.
Have they not even right-clicked on a gnome-panel, added a launcher, and changed the type to 'directory'?
*Plonk* Wired will also be up against the wall when the revolution comes!
yes.
Now *why* should *Linux* go down the "easy" route? Who says we need it on every desktop?
Never mind 'stop whining', go back and re-read the Advocacy HOWTO. I think you'll find it a far cry from the "every desktop" and "M$loth must die" attitudes.
I won't flame you for linux being already "easy to use", but I do ask: why is "easy to use" synonymous with "good" in so many folks' views? Why is it seen that it "must" appeal to the desktop luser as well as everyone else?
Isn't the idea of "winning the OS war" that (a) there is no war (b) it's the strength of quality signal that counts, not count(bums_on_seats)??
That's OK. I can cope with people thinking it's assinine...
Of course, it doesn't stop you being a PHB, though.
Let's get it straight: if you can't read Perl, which is a fundamental part of this "maintain" crap, then stop trying. No amount of documentation, comments or whatever will help you. The same goes for Python, C, or any other language on the planet. If you can't read it, don't write it. Ability to spew chunks of code, even code with comments, does not make a good hacker; ability to *debug* does.
Um. But the reason you write comments is not because you couldn't have read it 6 months ago, but because you think you won't be able to in 6 months' time, or because some other chap won't be able to, surely?
... all designed by management, more or less!)
Anyway. I don't believe in comments particularly. I'm firmly of the "if you can't read it and it's valid perl, that's your sad loss" mentality. Not that this allows me to go out of my way to obfuscate code, but if it's something the way I'd expect to read it, then I expect you to read it the same too.
Amongst other things, if you're paying me to write perl, you're not paying me to write English. If you can't read it, that's your bad lookout. There's nothing worse than excessive real-language usage for confusion or wasteage. (C.f. SQL, COBOL,