The older sheets may in fact be turned out to public domain by now...
Just as a slightly off-topic tangent, there is a fairly good source of public domain classical sheet music available here. I especially like the quote from Beethoven at the top. It sounds like he was an Open Source advocate nearly 200 years before our current movement began.
You think that the end of EULAs won't affect GPL software?...There are EULA's for the major Linux distros (RH, Mandrake, etc). They are more complex than "just the GPL, please".
You are seriously overstating this. I looked up the Redhat 8.0 EULA and it is not more complex than the GPL. It is actually quite a bit simpler. It basically states that all of Redhat's brand names and logos are not GPL'ed, they are protected by trademark. This obviously has nothing to do with the GPL software which they distribute. They then have the standard disclaimer denying responsibility for damages, etc. This sort of language is in the GPL as well. Again, no big deal.
The only related problem I can see GPL'ed software having is if the aforementioned disclaimer is thrown out in court. Leaving programmers (many of them hobbyists) open to damages in lawsuits would be disastrous to our ability to freely trade code.
I had this problem when upgrading to XFree86 4.2. I don't know if.Xdefaults has been deprecated, or what. However, you can run the following command upon starting X:
xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
I put this in my.Xclients file, though this may not start on your system either, depending on how it is configured. You may need to experiment a little to find where you need to add the command. You might try/etc/X11/xdm/Xsession as well.
Re:Make 2.6.3 usable, never install a dot-oh versi
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Wouldn't it be great if 2.6.1 was as robust as 2.2, or 2.4.17, at the beginning?
Things just don't work like this. It's difficult to say before a release whether it will be extremely robust. The only way to test stability is to get a whole lot of people to pound on the kernel and find stability problems. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen until Linus declares that the kernel is stable. But he's really just saying "As far as I can tell, the kernel is stable."
Anyway, not everyone had results as good as you with the 2.2 kernels. In fact, you may recall that 2.2.0 wasn't stable at all; 2.2.1 was release shortly thereafter to fix a major bug. When I switched from 2.0 to 2.2, I had plenty of stability problems, mostly due to buggy drivers. Things gradually improved through the 2.2 releases, until I finally stopped having problems around 2.2.14. From looking at LKML archives, I suspect this is the norm, rather than the exception.
In fact, I would say that linux kernel development has the following general pattern:
Linus maintains an unstable branch, and developers add new features, make big changes in the code, etc.
Linus declares a feature freeze, and developers fix bugs until things seem to work well.
Linus declares a stable release, and a huge number of people begin using the new kernel. All the new users expose a bunch more bugs, and the developers work to fix them.
The kernel becomes stable in fact rather than just in version number, and Linus gives up maintainership to someone else. He then opens another unstable branch, and the whole cycle begins again
For people who want to run servers at home, I hear Speakeasy is the best broadband ISP. I have also had no problems running web, ssh, mail and dns servers on my broadband connection from Linkline. Though I don't think the TOS specifically allows this, they haven't blocked any ports or hassled me about it in the two years or so I've had my server up and running.
In the past, whenever a story about the DMCA came up, by far one of the most common responses was: "Why not go after the violators instead of taking away everyone's fair use rights?"...many people here are criticizing it as some kind of evil activity. This seems pretty hypocritical.
You are making the ridiculous, but all-too-common assumption that everyone on slashdot believes exactly the same things. Don't you think it is more likely that some people think targeting individual copyright violators is the correct action, while other people think it is bad? And that people who hold either opinion are likely to post here? Sheesh.
You have several misconceptions that need to be corrected. The parent poster was stating that the GPL offers more rights to distributors than copyright law does, while the MS EULA adds additional restrictions. He was not comparing the GPL to, for instance, the BSD license, which has even fewer restrictions than the GPL.
I think the parent was stating a belief that software licenses in general are of questionable legality. If one were challenged in court, there is a good chance it would be found to be not legally binding. However, the creator's copyrights would still apply to the software. If the GPL is overturned, the software is still protected by copyright law, which is more restrictive than the GPL. It is in no licensee's interest to have it overturned, since they would actually lose privileges if the GPL were overturned. A court challenge is therefore unlikely. If the EULA were overturned, it would grant end users more freedoms. For instance, the ability to buy one copy of Windows and install it on all four of my PCs at home, which is permissible under copyright law but not under the EULA. Thus, challenging the EULA is much more likely.
Finally, the GPL is not an end user license agreement (EULA) as you state. Users are under no obligation to accept the GPL when they install or use the software. The GPL only needs to be accepted if you mean to redistribute the software. Thus it is legally more like MS's OEM License agreements, which are even more restrictive than the EULA.
And, of course, I should include the obligatory IANAL
I'll give you the same advice I'd give Robert DeNiro: Read any book by Oliver Sacks. He's a highly regarded neurologist who has been writing about various brain diseases and injuries for decades. The movie "Awakenings" (Robin Williams) was based on some work he did with his patients
And Robert De Niro would probably tell that he knows who Oliver Sacks is, and that he actually played the main character in Awakenings
Instead of TCP/IP, we could have instead seen a network architecture based on strictly one-way client-server, with absolutely no possibility of peer connections.
We have this; it's called television. The internet was built for completely different purposes, originally for military experiments with packet-switching networks, then mostly for academic communication. That we have internet connections in our homes was not something most people would have imagined in the old days. I think the main reason it has caught on with the public is email, which of course is not possible through a TV set. So, if TCP/IP had turned out to be a one-way, client-server network, it would have never caught on, because it wouldn't offer anything that already existing networks couldn't do.
I'm pretty sure the Opteron/Hammer line of chips will have an IHS a la the P4. I agree, lack of an IHS, especially in the later athlons, is a big problem.
Yeah, this is a problem that comes up from time to time. For instance in the big flame war that erupted in a Gnome mailing list a few months back that devolved into ridiculous accusations and name-calling. It makes all parties involved look a little bit petty and childish, though usually good things come out of the intense disagreement.
I don't really believe that members of our community are more childish or petty than anyone else. There are frequent and vigorous debates in most commercial software projects as well. Take for example the famous brouhaha at Microsoft regarding integrating IE into the explorer shell. There was a book written a few years ago about this, though unfortunately I can't remember the name.
The big difference is that in the Open Source/Free Software community, our laundry gets aired in public, while disagreements within a company are hidden. It's unfair but inevitable that some will compare us unfavorably to the polished marketroid-speak that we hear from big companies. Hopefully, the quality of Free Software is enough to outweigh the negative PR we get sometimes.
Then again, I may be completely wrong here. As some people say, any publicity is good publicity. Maybe the flame wars that get covered in the press actually help us in the long run by at least getting us some attention.
Why do you constantly claim that you are always getting modded down? You are posting with a +1 bonus, are you not? Most of your comments to this story in particular have been modded up or left alone. Yet you whine that people aren't treating you fairly because your beliefs are different from some stereotypical/.er who only exists as an abstraction. It seems to me that you are just trying to make people sympathize with you as some sort of persecuted minority. Pretty similar to the tactic you claim Stallman uses, which bugs you so much.
Its the animals and birds and things that get wierd.. because they are only truly visible from the air.
I've heard this bandied about before, but it seems to be only a myth. My former archaeology professor, Kathy Schreiber, says that it is fairly easy to make out the designs from the ground, mainly because the drawings are not as big as most people imagine. And I value her judgment a little more than some random website. She has studied the Nasca extensively, including the Nasca lines, and has access to them that is denied to most folks.
Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?
on
Forbes on Linux
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· Score: 1
I believe the confusion came because of the slightly different meanings of the terms "Open Source" and "Free Software". Traditionally, the Open Source Initiative has been oriented towards convincing developers that releasing the source code with few restrictions is a viable (that is, potentially profitable) development model. On the other hand the Free Software foundation has consistently sought to show the benefit to users of having the ability to use the software they have acquired as they see fit (including modifying and redistributing it).
In short, Open Source is a developer-oriented idea, while Free Software is a user-oriented idea.
The author is really reaching here. Such a deal would never make it past the regulators without selling off large portions of the network. Of course, GWB could always decide that such regulations are un-American, and tell his people to look the other way, but that is not likely considering the lack of trust that most US citizens have for corporations these days.
Additionally, Warren Buffett never buys into a company with plans to turn around and sell it; he's almost always in for the long haul. Still, Buffett has always stayed away from tech stocks in the past, so maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
I didn't mean to imply that Mozilla's CSS support is just as bad as IE's; Mozilla is far-and-away the most standards-compliant browser that I've used. FWIW, I also checked some CSS that had given me problem in Moz in the past (an issue with the width property), but it renders correctly now. Apparently it has been fixed since I last tried this. So you very well may be right, and proper CSS will not break Mozilla.
However, even if Mozilla is perfect, I still can't exclusively use standards-compliant CSS, because it will not work properly in IE. The best I can do is write a "true" style sheet for Moz, another one that takes into account IE5's broken box model, and force IE6 into quirks mode. Then use browser detection to load the proper style sheet. Hardly an ideal solution, and this is what I was complaining about in my first post.
Yes. As I said, if you keep things simple, it works well, so a "happy, simple, elegant" site should be fine. Sometimes complex content requires a complex layout, though. This can result in some bizarre browser behavior (from IE5 particularly), even if your CSS is perfect.
Actually, IE6 already has doctype sniffing. Unfortunately, it has a glitch so that if you put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> or something similar as your first line, which is standard for XHTML, IE becomes confused, even if you specify the proper doctype on the second line. The result is that this puts the browser into "quirks" mode, which is probably exactly what you don't want if you're writing XHTML.
Of course, even in its "strict" mode, IE6's CSS layout is far from perfect, so the changes in IE7 will be great. And finally being able to use PNG's properly will ROCK!
This is mostly true, but it is still possible to come up with theoretically (if not practically) excellent designs that adhere precisely to the standards, but don't render correctly. For instance, it is widely considered a good practice to use HTML only to mark up the logical structure of a page (avoiding using tables for layout, tags, etc) and use CSS to handle layout and style. This ensures a good separation between content and presentation. However, both IE and Mozilla have some quirks with their interpretation of the CSS2 box model and positioning properties. At this stage, it is impossible to design a page that:
Uses a complex CSS-based layout (though simple ones work pretty well)
Renders correctly in IE5, IE6, and Mozilla
Adheres strictly to the standards (XHTML 1.1, CSS2)
Doesn't use any browser detection tricks
Things are getting very close, but the browsers are not quite ready for well-designed, browser-agnostic pages using the latest standards.
Because of you're low ID, I assume you are not a troll, but you seem to have some misconceptions about this. This is not a linux bug, it is an apache bug. No 32-bit unixes will get rooted as a result of this, though a DoS is possible. Windows and 64-bit unixes could be vulnerable to a serious exploit, if apache is running as a privileged user, is not chroot'ed, etc. I think most 64-bit unix admins will be able to manage the problem until a good patch is available. One can only hope that there aren't too many people running apache on windows.
If you were sending you kids to college on their stock, you'd be a happy person.
Well, seeing as how their stock is now worth about half what it was a few years ago, I would definitely not be happy. Over that same period, I'd much rather have invested in IBM. Even a savings account down at the local bank would be better, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as a slightly off-topic tangent, there is a fairly good source of public domain classical sheet music available here. I especially like the quote from Beethoven at the top. It sounds like he was an Open Source advocate nearly 200 years before our current movement began.
You are seriously overstating this. I looked up the Redhat 8.0 EULA and it is not more complex than the GPL. It is actually quite a bit simpler. It basically states that all of Redhat's brand names and logos are not GPL'ed, they are protected by trademark. This obviously has nothing to do with the GPL software which they distribute. They then have the standard disclaimer denying responsibility for damages, etc. This sort of language is in the GPL as well. Again, no big deal.
The only related problem I can see GPL'ed software having is if the aforementioned disclaimer is thrown out in court. Leaving programmers (many of them hobbyists) open to damages in lawsuits would be disastrous to our ability to freely trade code.
I had this problem when upgrading to XFree86 4.2. I don't know if .Xdefaults has been deprecated, or what. However, you can run the following command upon starting X:
xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
I put this in my .Xclients file, though this may not start on your system either, depending on how it is configured. You may need to experiment a little to find where you need to add the command. You might try /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession as well.
Things just don't work like this. It's difficult to say before a release whether it will be extremely robust. The only way to test stability is to get a whole lot of people to pound on the kernel and find stability problems. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen until Linus declares that the kernel is stable. But he's really just saying "As far as I can tell, the kernel is stable."
Anyway, not everyone had results as good as you with the 2.2 kernels. In fact, you may recall that 2.2.0 wasn't stable at all; 2.2.1 was release shortly thereafter to fix a major bug. When I switched from 2.0 to 2.2, I had plenty of stability problems, mostly due to buggy drivers. Things gradually improved through the 2.2 releases, until I finally stopped having problems around 2.2.14. From looking at LKML archives, I suspect this is the norm, rather than the exception.
In fact, I would say that linux kernel development has the following general pattern:
For people who want to run servers at home, I hear Speakeasy is the best broadband ISP. I have also had no problems running web, ssh, mail and dns servers on my broadband connection from Linkline. Though I don't think the TOS specifically allows this, they haven't blocked any ports or hassled me about it in the two years or so I've had my server up and running.
You are making the ridiculous, but all-too-common assumption that everyone on slashdot believes exactly the same things. Don't you think it is more likely that some people think targeting individual copyright violators is the correct action, while other people think it is bad? And that people who hold either opinion are likely to post here? Sheesh.
You have several misconceptions that need to be corrected. The parent poster was stating that the GPL offers more rights to distributors than copyright law does, while the MS EULA adds additional restrictions. He was not comparing the GPL to, for instance, the BSD license, which has even fewer restrictions than the GPL.
I think the parent was stating a belief that software licenses in general are of questionable legality. If one were challenged in court, there is a good chance it would be found to be not legally binding. However, the creator's copyrights would still apply to the software. If the GPL is overturned, the software is still protected by copyright law, which is more restrictive than the GPL. It is in no licensee's interest to have it overturned, since they would actually lose privileges if the GPL were overturned. A court challenge is therefore unlikely. If the EULA were overturned, it would grant end users more freedoms. For instance, the ability to buy one copy of Windows and install it on all four of my PCs at home, which is permissible under copyright law but not under the EULA. Thus, challenging the EULA is much more likely.
Finally, the GPL is not an end user license agreement (EULA) as you state. Users are under no obligation to accept the GPL when they install or use the software. The GPL only needs to be accepted if you mean to redistribute the software. Thus it is legally more like MS's OEM License agreements, which are even more restrictive than the EULA.
And, of course, I should include the obligatory IANAL
We have this; it's called television. The internet was built for completely different purposes, originally for military experiments with packet-switching networks, then mostly for academic communication. That we have internet connections in our homes was not something most people would have imagined in the old days. I think the main reason it has caught on with the public is email, which of course is not possible through a TV set. So, if TCP/IP had turned out to be a one-way, client-server network, it would have never caught on, because it wouldn't offer anything that already existing networks couldn't do.
The XBox has hardware-based security to prevent running unauthorized code. Read here for an in-depth description of how the security was cracked.
Interestingly, there's an article from a libertarian viewpoint about why IP is unnecessary which uses Tolkien's works in several examples.
I'm pretty sure the Opteron/Hammer line of chips will have an IHS a la the P4. I agree, lack of an IHS, especially in the later athlons, is a big problem.
Yeah, this is a problem that comes up from time to time. For instance in the big flame war that erupted in a Gnome mailing list a few months back that devolved into ridiculous accusations and name-calling. It makes all parties involved look a little bit petty and childish, though usually good things come out of the intense disagreement.
I don't really believe that members of our community are more childish or petty than anyone else. There are frequent and vigorous debates in most commercial software projects as well. Take for example the famous brouhaha at Microsoft regarding integrating IE into the explorer shell. There was a book written a few years ago about this, though unfortunately I can't remember the name.
The big difference is that in the Open Source/Free Software community, our laundry gets aired in public, while disagreements within a company are hidden. It's unfair but inevitable that some will compare us unfavorably to the polished marketroid-speak that we hear from big companies. Hopefully, the quality of Free Software is enough to outweigh the negative PR we get sometimes.
Then again, I may be completely wrong here. As some people say, any publicity is good publicity. Maybe the flame wars that get covered in the press actually help us in the long run by at least getting us some attention.
Why do you constantly claim that you are always getting modded down? You are posting with a +1 bonus, are you not? Most of your comments to this story in particular have been modded up or left alone. Yet you whine that people aren't treating you fairly because your beliefs are different from some stereotypical /.er who only exists as an abstraction. It seems to me that you are just trying to make people sympathize with you as some sort of persecuted minority. Pretty similar to the tactic you claim Stallman uses, which bugs you so much.
I believe the confusion came because of the slightly different meanings of the terms "Open Source" and "Free Software". Traditionally, the Open Source Initiative has been oriented towards convincing developers that releasing the source code with few restrictions is a viable (that is, potentially profitable) development model. On the other hand the Free Software foundation has consistently sought to show the benefit to users of having the ability to use the software they have acquired as they see fit (including modifying and redistributing it).
In short, Open Source is a developer-oriented idea, while Free Software is a user-oriented idea.
The author is really reaching here. Such a deal would never make it past the regulators without selling off large portions of the network. Of course, GWB could always decide that such regulations are un-American, and tell his people to look the other way, but that is not likely considering the lack of trust that most US citizens have for corporations these days.
Additionally, Warren Buffett never buys into a company with plans to turn around and sell it; he's almost always in for the long haul. Still, Buffett has always stayed away from tech stocks in the past, so maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
I didn't mean to imply that Mozilla's CSS support is just as bad as IE's; Mozilla is far-and-away the most standards-compliant browser that I've used. FWIW, I also checked some CSS that had given me problem in Moz in the past (an issue with the width property), but it renders correctly now. Apparently it has been fixed since I last tried this. So you very well may be right, and proper CSS will not break Mozilla.
However, even if Mozilla is perfect, I still can't exclusively use standards-compliant CSS, because it will not work properly in IE. The best I can do is write a "true" style sheet for Moz, another one that takes into account IE5's broken box model, and force IE6 into quirks mode. Then use browser detection to load the proper style sheet. Hardly an ideal solution, and this is what I was complaining about in my first post.
Yes. As I said, if you keep things simple, it works well, so a "happy, simple, elegant" site should be fine. Sometimes complex content requires a complex layout, though. This can result in some bizarre browser behavior (from IE5 particularly), even if your CSS is perfect.
Actually, IE6 already has doctype sniffing. Unfortunately, it has a glitch so that if you put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> or something similar as your first line, which is standard for XHTML, IE becomes confused, even if you specify the proper doctype on the second line. The result is that this puts the browser into "quirks" mode, which is probably exactly what you don't want if you're writing XHTML.
Of course, even in its "strict" mode, IE6's CSS layout is far from perfect, so the changes in IE7 will be great. And finally being able to use PNG's properly will ROCK!
- Uses a complex CSS-based layout (though simple ones work pretty well)
- Renders correctly in IE5, IE6, and Mozilla
- Adheres strictly to the standards (XHTML 1.1, CSS2)
- Doesn't use any browser detection tricks
Things are getting very close, but the browsers are not quite ready for well-designed, browser-agnostic pages using the latest standards.Because of you're low ID, I assume you are not a troll, but you seem to have some misconceptions about this. This is not a linux bug, it is an apache bug. No 32-bit unixes will get rooted as a result of this, though a DoS is possible. Windows and 64-bit unixes could be vulnerable to a serious exploit, if apache is running as a privileged user, is not chroot'ed, etc. I think most 64-bit unix admins will be able to manage the problem until a good patch is available. One can only hope that there aren't too many people running apache on windows.