How can you get that worked up just because someone says that they like to use a Mac? Or Windows?
Well, we don't. It's just that the bloody bastards try to imply such an obvious stupidity that THEIR operating system may be in ANY WAY even close to great superiority of OURS. And such misconcepts obviously need to be corrected, and they are best purified in flames. /* I would put disclaimer for sarcasm-impaired here, but why bother? */
Any moron can learn HTML. So why are there products like MS Frontpage? That mangle the code into something almost unrecognizable? Because it is easy. Our whole society is based on easy. TV, movies, fast food, and even software. Apple succeeds in the face of obsolecsence because it is easy to use. Windows exists because it's users don't have to know anything to type up a letter and print it out.
If you ask me, that's one hell of a reason to be deeply worried about our society; not something to use as example of how thighs should be done...
What really matters is not the licensing model of the tools, but their availability on the platform. Businesses are used to having to decide whether or not to accept stupid licensing terms, but they like to have the right tools to choose from. Lots of developers use Delphi on Windows, and if they use it on Linux, also, that is good for Linux, whether or not their software is open source.
It would be nice if all software could be open source, but that is not the reality of our current marketplace, and so if Linux wants to continue to expand its user base, this is indeed good news.
Yes. "If Linux wants to continue to expand its user base". I don't think that link itself wants anything, as it is not intelligent being.
It is what it's users want, and there are quite a few different opinions on the subject. Not meaning to sound elitist, but personally, I do not think that it is "good for Linux to grow".
Because the more it grows, the more clueless newbies it will atract - and remember that for any number of users, system will be designed to use lowest common dominator. IOW, "Make a system that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will use it."
While reading the manuals is something we would *hope* everyone would do, time and experience has shown us that it just Won't Happen. We can't just say, "Well, dammit, you should have read the manual," over and over again. We have to build something that will work securely for those that *don't* read the manuals, because there will always be a significant percentage of users that simply won't.
How about this:
We make a default install option which only installs user stuff (nice GUIs, eye-catchers, WWW browser, mail etc.) and no daemons and restrictive input IP firewall (so nobody from outside can connect to any priviledged ports or known unpriviledged ports).
Users will select this, and be happy.
For installing additional server packages, server package would need to contain some additional fields. Like questionary.
So, when user (well, root user, actually) tries to install server package, it would be shown documentation, and then would be presented a few strategical questions. If user can't answer them, they are presented a choice wheather they want to read documentation again or quit.
Of course, there would be expert option to auto-install packages from hand-made tag files on diskettes (like in RH, for example) so serious admins could install distros without any fuss, and that would be too much hand-work for typical user.
Excellent point to remember! By releasing a Linux compiler for the Alpha platform they are "pushing" Linux. That's what's important. Linux is promoted by software, not Open Source.
That depends why you are in this. I'm pretty sure RMS for example would'd agree to this definition of 'important'.
as a data point, i write free (free, free, free) software. i want it to be of use to as many people as possible; free for *any* purpose.
That is quite all right. Developer has a right to choose. But, that is no reason to bash other people decisions. You draw a line between PD and BSD (I want other people to acknowledge that I wrote that code if they take it and use it!). Somebody other will draw a line between BSD and GPL (If other people take my free code and use it, I want the result also be free!)
That is just a matter a choice. You wrote that stuff, you got the right to choose.
using the bsd license was pretty much a no brainer. politics aside, it's the only choice if you want your code to be as free as possible, unless you want people to be able to claim they wrote it, in which case you would release it to the public domain. sorry, you can't say you wrote my software, but you can do *anything* else you want with it.
You mean new BSD license, right ? I find that advertising clause in old one can be quite a problem regarding 'free'.
The bottom line is that this whole 'BSD is more free than GPL' is pointless. I could also claim that 'GPL is more free than BSD' because I know that whatever happen to maintainers etc. the result will always be free, but with BSD someone may as easily buy a few developers and turn it into propriatory closed source and you can't say a word against it.
It depends. You are forgetting that transfer rate has only minor impact on random disk reads/writes (as swapping). Much more slower (orders of magnitude slower) is SEEK time.
So minimazing seek time (like, putting swap in the middle of the disk - but it really depends on your partition configurations and access) will yield much better speed improvements (esp. when disk is busy, as it almost always is when you start swapping)
much things affect this, as RAID stripping for example, so YMMV.
The "GPL family" is the group of projects that are GPL'ed. The GPL projects cannot share code with differently licensed projects. You see, open source projects such as the BSDs are not so stiff necked about letting commercial companies use their code but the GPL projects are. And this difference prohibits the sharing of code between GPL projects and other open source projects. That is really bad.
No, that is not bad, it simply isn't true. I can take a portion of BSD code and incorporate it into GPL program. I have to put that copyright notice, though. I can take a portion of code under artistic licence and put it in my GPL program also without any problem. And code remains free for all to use and share, and GPL enforces that it will always remain that way.
So GPL certainly can share code with other licences (you don't even have to put that part of shared code under GPL).
About not letting commercial companies take my code for free and make changes and refuse to contribute back to me, I don't have a problem with that. If they don't want to share with me, I don't want to share with them. That is why I use GPL.
Note in particular that Mr.Y never had any expectation of anonymity; he only expected that his correspondence would not be exposed to traffic analysis by third parties.
He expected wrong. His mail passed through dozens of routes, and at any one of them information could be collected and processed. Should've used anonymous E-mail service & PGP.
Also note, that boss could as easily be running WWW proxy software or traffic sniffer and see what user was browsing and what information he submitted.
1) DejaNews' logs serve no useful security function, and they are redundant with a user's own system's mail logs.
Oh ? Well. Then, let's purpose that we turn off all logging on all systems that are not original source and final destination. Especially on all routers, gateways, proxying software, mail relays etc, since all that data is redundant wih user's own system mail logs (oh, we might as well turn it off at remote end, since originating end will keep logs).
Any Sysadmin worth its name keeps logs of any data that might prove useful.
2) DejaNews does not inform its users that these logs are being kept, and logging by the referring agent is not the usual behavior for clicking on a link in a web browser.
They do need to. Any privacy-concerned user should assume by default that anything not specifically protected by HIM is open for whole world to see. Especially looking at those E-mail redirectors.
3) Unlike a sysadmin for an organization with which a user has a usage agreement DejaNews has no restrictions on how it uses the logs it keeps.
Which is exactly they say on their usage agreement, eh ? You don't like the service, don't use the service. It is as easy as that.
My conclusion is if you want privacy, YOU need to take care of that. There is no way anyone else is going to keep your privacy for you _at no cost_.
Anyway, is everybody in such privacy-frenzy that they have not noticed that such info could be usufull for anything other but creating hughe SPAM list ?
Things that cross my mind at the moment are for example scoring of articles by Dejanews and for advanced search alghoritm (like, that message was read that and that many times, followed up that times, and replied to that many times).
For Net distribution, as bandwidth increases, I see no reason why any form of Lossy sound compression will be needed. We'll GZIP (or the equivalent) our waveform IFF, WAV, whathaveyou) files. (If the network transmission medium doesn't automatically do it for us, which it does and will even more in the future)
Because GZIPing (or using simular non-lossy compression techniques) 16bit audio data achives VERY low compression ratios (3-8% size reduction at best) so it is more trouble than it is worth.
No matter how much network bandwith increases, I don't think we'll ever see transmissions of raw uncompressed data over 'net. Unless technology becomes such that we're never able to use more than 5% of bandwidth, which I don't find likely.
Reading a Newspaper is quite different
on
ShutUp Software
·
· Score: 1
Before you decide if you want to read a particular newspaper article you have the opportunity to scan the headlines, blurbs and any pictures relating to the story. These give you an idea of the stories content and let you make an informed decision of whether to read the article or skip on to the next one.
But you don't but all newspapers and then choose what you want to read, do you ? You don't buy National Geographics for example, because there is little chance that you will find something interesting there. There may be something that you may find extremely interesting from time to time, but S/N ratio is just to low for you to try it all the time just to find out if there is something interesting.
The problem is that in current society, we live in constant information overload. There is absolutely no way in which human can absorb that information and parse what is interesting and what is not for him.
So humans are forced to use filters. We do not buy newspapers we think we are not interested in (and in many case we never even bought one piece of them to find out that we don't like them - it is just that we "figured out" we won't like it). We do not watch TV channels we once found non-interesting (or we didn't but just figured out that for example there is nothing interesting on "disneyworld"). We don't visit tons on WWW sites with news unless we have acquired information that there is some thing that would most likely interest us.
I regullary browse just few newssites, (/. being one of them), but there is no way I could find enough time even to read all of stuff I find interesting on them. I read comments on/. on +2 score only, and only browse on lower scores if I find some articles extremely interesting and would like to see responses to them.
Ideally, we would be able to process information so fast that we would be able to keep up and browse all information and process that we find interesting. But that would probably requre either massive destruction of most of human race (reducing flow of information), or cybernetic implants in brain (increasing our processing abilty).
But now I feel you have ventured far afield from the definition of "freedom of speech". Despite my freedom of speech I can sell my words, I can limit your ability to modify my words (e.g. quoting me out of context or trying to pass them off as your own). Even your ability to "inspect" my words has nothing to do with freedom of speech. I have a freedom of speech -- you don't have a freedom to hear my speech, otherwise you would be infringing on my privacy.
So ? Despite my freedom (as given by GPL) I can sell the software (where did you get an idea that you can't sell GPLed software?!) I can limit your ability to modify my code and give to anybody else (and GPL does it). You can modify my code and keep it to yourself, though, as I upon hearing your words can think of them and interpret them any way any way I want (as long as I don't "distribute" them to others).
BTW, FSF never said "free software" == "free speech", they only draw the analogy. And I can see much of analogy there.
I think most of your complaints are about not being able to sell GPLed software - that is, misunderstunding GPL.
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How can you get that worked up just because someone says that they like to use a Mac? Or Windows?
Well, we don't. It's just that the bloody bastards try to imply such an obvious stupidity that THEIR operating system may be in ANY WAY even close to great superiority of OURS. And such misconcepts obviously need to be corrected, and they are best purified in flames.
/* I would put disclaimer for sarcasm-impaired here, but why bother? */
Any moron can learn HTML. So why are there products like MS Frontpage? That mangle the code into something almost unrecognizable? Because it is easy. Our whole society is based on easy. TV, movies, fast food, and even software. Apple succeeds in the face of obsolecsence because it is easy to use. Windows exists because it's users don't have to know anything to type up a letter and print it out.
If you ask me, that's one hell of a reason to be deeply worried about our society; not something to use as example of how thighs should be done...
What really matters is not the licensing model of the tools, but their availability on the platform. Businesses are used to having to decide whether or not to accept stupid licensing terms, but they like to have the right tools to choose from. Lots of developers use Delphi on Windows, and if they use it on Linux, also, that is good for Linux, whether or not their software is open source.
It would be nice if all software could be open source, but that is not the reality of our current marketplace, and so if Linux wants to continue to expand its user base, this is indeed good news.
Yes. "If Linux wants to continue to expand its user base". I don't think that link itself wants anything, as it is not intelligent being.
It is what it's users want, and there are quite a few different opinions on the subject. Not meaning to sound elitist, but personally, I do not think that it is "good for Linux to grow".
Because the more it grows, the more clueless newbies it will atract - and remember that for any number of users, system will be designed to use lowest common dominator. IOW, "Make a system that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will use it."
YMMV.
While reading the manuals is something we would *hope* everyone would do, time and experience has shown us that it just Won't Happen. We can't just say, "Well, dammit, you should have read the manual," over and over again. We have to build something that will work securely for those that *don't* read the manuals, because there will always be a significant percentage of users that simply won't.
How about this:
We make a default install option which only installs user stuff (nice GUIs, eye-catchers, WWW browser, mail etc.) and no daemons and restrictive input IP firewall (so nobody from outside can connect to any priviledged ports or known unpriviledged ports).
Users will select this, and be happy.
For installing additional server packages, server package would need to contain some additional fields. Like questionary.
So, when user (well, root user, actually) tries to install server package, it would be shown documentation, and then would be presented a few strategical questions. If user can't answer them, they are presented a choice wheather they want to read documentation again or quit.
Of course, there would be expert option to auto-install packages from hand-made tag files on diskettes (like in RH, for example) so serious admins could install distros without any fuss, and that would be too much hand-work for typical user.
The 12Vold DC power from a car battery would be readily adaptable to use by such a device, and you ould get an enclosure from Radio Crap.
You mean, like, reinventing empeg ?
See Empeg MP3 car player if you want that...
Excellent point to remember! By releasing a Linux compiler for the Alpha platform they are "pushing" Linux. That's what's important. Linux is promoted by software, not Open Source.
That depends why you are in this.
I'm pretty sure RMS for example would'd agree to this definition of 'important'.
as a data point, i write free (free, free, free) software. i want it to be of use to as many people as possible; free for *any* purpose.
That is quite all right. Developer has a right to choose. But, that is no reason to bash other people decisions. You draw a line between PD and BSD (I want other people to acknowledge that I wrote that code if they take it and use it!). Somebody other will draw a line between BSD and GPL (If other people take my free code and use it, I want the result also be free!)
That is just a matter a choice. You wrote that stuff, you got the right to choose.
using the bsd license was pretty much a no brainer. politics aside, it's the only choice if you want your code to be as free as possible, unless you want people to be able to claim they wrote it, in which case you would release it to the public domain. sorry, you can't say you wrote my software, but you can do *anything* else you want with it.
You mean new BSD license, right ? I find that advertising clause in old one can be quite a problem regarding 'free'.
The bottom line is that this whole 'BSD is more free than GPL' is pointless. I could also claim that 'GPL is more free than BSD' because I know that whatever happen to maintainers etc. the result will always be free, but with BSD someone may as easily buy a few developers and turn it into propriatory closed source and you can't say a word against it.
It depends. You are forgetting that transfer rate has only minor impact on random disk reads/writes (as swapping). Much more slower (orders of magnitude slower) is SEEK time.
So minimazing seek time (like, putting swap in the middle of the disk - but it really depends on your partition configurations and access) will yield much better speed improvements (esp. when disk is busy, as it almost always is when you start swapping)
much things affect this, as RAID stripping for example, so YMMV.
The "GPL family" is the group of projects that are GPL'ed. The GPL projects cannot share code with differently licensed projects. You see, open source projects such as the BSDs are not so stiff necked about letting commercial companies use their code but the GPL projects are. And this difference prohibits the sharing of code between GPL projects and other open source projects. That is really bad.
No, that is not bad, it simply isn't true.
I can take a portion of BSD code and incorporate it into GPL program. I have to put that copyright notice, though. I can take a portion of code under artistic licence and put it in my GPL program also without any problem. And code remains free for all to use and share, and GPL enforces that it will always remain that way.
So GPL certainly can share code with other licences (you don't even have to put that part of shared code under GPL).
About not letting commercial companies take my code for free and make changes and refuse to contribute back to me, I don't have a problem with that. If they don't want to share with me, I don't want to share with them. That is why I use GPL.
IMHO, YMMV, etc.
Note in particular that Mr.Y never had any expectation of anonymity; he only expected that his correspondence would not be exposed to traffic analysis by third parties.
He expected wrong. His mail passed through dozens of routes, and at any one of them information could be collected and processed. Should've used anonymous E-mail service & PGP.
Also note, that boss could as easily be running WWW proxy software or traffic sniffer and see what user was browsing and what information he submitted.
1) DejaNews' logs serve no useful security function, and they are redundant with a user's own system's mail logs.
Oh ? Well. Then, let's purpose that we turn off all logging on all systems that are not original source and final destination. Especially on all routers, gateways, proxying software, mail relays etc, since all that data is redundant wih user's own system mail logs (oh, we might as well turn it off at remote end, since originating end will keep logs).
Any Sysadmin worth its name keeps logs of any data that might prove useful.
2) DejaNews does not inform its users that these logs are being kept, and logging by the referring agent is not the usual behavior for clicking on a link in a web browser.
They do need to. Any privacy-concerned user should assume by default that anything not specifically protected by HIM is open for whole world to see. Especially looking at those E-mail redirectors.
3) Unlike a sysadmin for an organization with which a user has a usage agreement DejaNews has no restrictions on how it uses the logs it keeps.
Which is exactly they say on their usage agreement, eh ? You don't like the service, don't use the service. It is as easy as that.
My conclusion is if you want privacy, YOU need to take care of that. There is no way anyone else is going to keep your privacy for you _at no cost_.
Anyway, is everybody in such privacy-frenzy that they have not noticed that such info could be usufull for anything other but creating hughe SPAM list ?
Things that cross my mind at the moment are for example scoring of articles by Dejanews and for advanced search alghoritm (like, that message was read that and that many times, followed up that times, and replied to that many times).
For Net distribution, as bandwidth increases, I see no reason why any form of Lossy sound compression will be needed. We'll GZIP (or the equivalent) our waveform IFF, WAV, whathaveyou) files. (If the network transmission medium doesn't automatically do it for us, which it does and will even more in the future)
Because GZIPing (or using simular non-lossy compression techniques) 16bit audio data achives VERY low compression ratios (3-8% size reduction at best) so it is more trouble than it is worth.
No matter how much network bandwith increases, I don't think we'll ever see transmissions of raw uncompressed data over 'net. Unless technology becomes such that we're never able to use more than 5% of bandwidth, which I don't find likely.
Before you decide if you want to read a particular newspaper article you have the opportunity to scan the headlines, blurbs and any pictures relating to the story. These give you an idea of the stories content and let you make an informed decision of whether to read the article or skip on to the next one.
/. on +2 score only, and only browse on lower scores if I find some articles extremely interesting and would like to see responses to them.
But you don't but all newspapers and then choose what you want to read, do you ? You don't buy National Geographics for example, because there is little chance that you will find something interesting there. There may be something that you may find extremely interesting from time to time, but S/N ratio is just to low for you to try it all the time just to find out if there is something interesting.
The problem is that in current society, we live in constant information overload. There is absolutely no way in which human can absorb that information and parse what is interesting and what is not for him.
So humans are forced to use filters. We do not buy newspapers we think we are not interested in (and in many case we never even bought one piece of them to find out that we don't like them - it is just that we "figured out" we won't like it). We do not watch TV channels we once found non-interesting (or we didn't but just figured out that for example there is nothing interesting on "disneyworld"). We don't visit tons on WWW sites with news unless we have acquired information that there is some thing that would most likely interest us.
I regullary browse just few newssites, (/. being one of them), but there is no way I could find enough time even to read all of stuff I find interesting on them. I read comments on
Ideally, we would be able to process information so fast that we would be able to keep up and browse all information and process that we find interesting. But that would probably requre either massive destruction of most of human race (reducing flow of information), or cybernetic implants in brain (increasing our processing abilty).
But now I feel you have ventured far afield from the definition of "freedom of speech". Despite my freedom of speech I can sell my words, I can limit your ability to modify my words (e.g. quoting me out of context or trying to pass them off as your own). Even your ability to "inspect" my words has nothing to do with freedom of speech. I have a freedom of speech -- you don't have a freedom to hear my speech, otherwise you would be infringing on my privacy.
So ? Despite my freedom (as given by GPL) I can sell the software (where did you get an idea that you can't sell GPLed software?!) I can limit your ability to modify my code and give to anybody else (and GPL does it). You can modify my code and keep it to yourself, though, as I upon hearing your words can think of them and interpret them any way any way I want (as long as I don't "distribute" them to others).
BTW, FSF never said "free software" == "free speech", they only draw the analogy.
And I can see much of analogy there.
I think most of your complaints are about not being able to sell GPLed software - that is, misunderstunding GPL.