What makes 2.0.x better for you than a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel?
Depends on the box. A better question is "what makes 2.2 or 2.4 better for me than 2.0?"
I have a few 2.0.x boxes kicking around that "just work".. they've never been down, there are no known exploits for them, and users would be pissed if I took them down to upgrade them.. so it just makes sense to leave them as is.
If I upgrade them, it's more work, not to mention the inevitable downtime.
If I leave them be, it's less work, with no gain (there's nothing that 2.2 or 2.4 will do that I need for these boxes.)
Pretty simple decision.
If/when they break, I'll replace them with something newer.. but until then, I'll just leave them be.
come to think of it who actually ever used Corel Linux
No, this has nothing to do with Corel Linux.
If you remember, Corel was porting it's flagship applications - namely the CorelDraw suite - to Linux. Not to mention investing heavily in WINE.
At one time, CorelDraw was the only thing keeping my Windows partition around. I would have dearly loved to have a native Linux version, and I know I'm not alone.
The RIAA & co. wouldn't be interestedthey would not understad the concept. Believe me, they _never_ understand the concepts of new innovations.
On the contrary, they understand it very well.
Big-business music saw the internet for what it was almost immediately: their death-knell. Not because it makes "piracy" easy, but because it makes distribution easy.
Before the internet, musicians were beholden to the record labels, because they had no other choice - if they wanted to become "rich and famous", they needed someone to distribute their music.
The internet changed that - it's now conceivably possible for an artist to distribute their music to a worldwide audience, without relying on a music label.
The record labels see the writing on the wall. They know that the days of the "slave-labour" contracts are almost over, and they're doing everything they can to prevent it. We're just witnessing their death throes.
Since they will not understand it, they will boycott it and try to ban it.
They'll try to ban it alright, not because they don't understand it, but because they realize that it brings their demise that much closer.
I've read through "The Road to Ehvenor" (I hope I spelled that right, it's been a while since I've seen it.)
Has anyone read any of his later works?
Yup, consistantly good, as always.. "Not Exactly the Three Musketeers" and "Not Quite Scaramouche" are still in print, I don't know about his other works (I don't think "The Road Home" - the only other one you missed is currently in print, but you can probably pick it up at a used bookstore.)
Thanks for reminding of Joel Rosenberg and his excellent novels.
You're very welcome!
They are some of the best fantasy I have ever read.
Agreed. He has an amazing talent for characterization. (Not to mention storytelling.)
It's been far too long since I've read them.
You should go back and re-read them.. I did recently, and they still hold up. you can start with The Sleeping Dragon, which is available at the Baen Free Library. (The Sleeping Dragon, The Sword and the Chain, and The Silver Crown have been re-released in one volume, entitled "The Guardians of the Flame")
I think it's interesting that you didn't comment at all on any of my real arguments against this, and instead just chose one line to bitch about.
I said that DNS isn't the proper way to do this, and here's why - and you completely ignored all of the "why"..
Then what are these mx records being used to relay mail.
They're used to find the MX for a domain. - To find an IP address, just like I said.
That's not exactly application neutral.
Yes, it is. MX records don't include information on where the mail aliases to, or where to find the administrator for a domain (for example). It's used to provide a record for a Domain. (You know, the "D" in DNS.)
You can place any random text you want to in a dns record
Just because you can do something, that all of a sudden makes it a good idea to do it?
By that logic, I bet you can jump off a cliff.
Here is a list of other record types from nslookup(1)
What's your point? In every case, the records provide information about the domain, or about a host in that domain. In no case do they provide information about pathnames, mirrors, the name and address of the administrator of the domain, or anything that's handled by an application-specific protocol.
a) They would have been SCO's secrets to give away and b) there's nothing that says that whatever SCO may have given away is in fact the same parts that they claim IBM is in the process of giving away.
Who "gave it away" is not the issue. The key word is secret. You do know what a secret is, don't you?
If SCO put a trade secret in a public place, then it's no longer a secret, it's public knowledge. Ergo, by definition they can't claim the "IP" is a secret, because it ceased being a secret when SCO released it.
Same goes with patents. Just because I may give away my stuff doesn't mean that you can give away my stuff.
If you give me permission to give away "your stuff", then I most certainly can give it away. Read the GPL. (I covered this in my earlier post.)
If you go on the basic assumption that they do have some proof, perhaps SCO has decided that the Court is the venue for them to provide the proof.
Huh? So if (as you assume) they've decided that the court is proper venue, why didn't they provide it? They've filed their brief (which is where the proof would be). Where's the proof?
Perhaps they already approached IBM and IBM told them to pound sand.
Completely irrelevant. Read the brief filed by SCO. NOWHERE did they say that they have any proof, whatsoever. None. Nada. Zip. Elvis has left the building. All they said was "it's impossible for Linux to be good".
The fact that SCO went to the top of the food chain may suggest that there is some merit to the case.
And the fact that I had burritos for lunch may suggest that I'm mexican. You wanna bet on my nationality?
More likely, it suggests that SCO is just self-destructing, and hopes that IBM will just buy them out to avoid a lengthy lawsuit.
The IMDb.list files are text, but rather hard to parse. Is there really a.csv version somewhere as the AC indicated?
He also said they had indexing and relationships - which pretty much precludes CSV.
If you really wanted them, the original lists were passed around usenet as text files (IIRC, again no CSV, just plain formatted text), so you might try google groups - but they'd be pretty stale (1996 or older), even if they still exist.
If you're interested in parsing them, there are tools available to convert the IMDB's files into various formats - one of the more useful (IMHO) is "JMDB" - a Java/MySQL combo. I haven't used it, but I've heard good things about it. YMMV
I really don't think that kind of functionality belongs in a DNS
Exactly.
DNS is supposed to provide nameIP mappings, in an application-neutral fashion.
By trying to make it provide "mirror" information, you're moving into the realm of the application - which doesn't really map properly to the concept of IP address.
The question (of course) is "mirror for what?"
HTTP content? Why only HTTP? FTP sites are commonly mirrored as well. How do you distinguish between the two? If you do a lookup for the example provided - "mirrors.redhat.com" - which service is mirrored, the HTTP, or the FTP? How do you know if they have different content? How do you know if they have the same content? And what happens if you have multiple HTTP servers on the same machine? (Say, one running on port 80, and one running on port 8080.)
Which one gets mirrored? Since you can't do a DNS lookup for "www.redhat.com:8080", this makes it impossible to provide a mirror for anything that doesn't use the WK port.
Why should anyone's fair use be impacted by any "means" that copyright holders may or may not provide? In fact, this word "means" is not defined anywhere
Excellent point... and consider the rest of "B"..
copyright holder fails to make publicly available the necessary means to make such noninfringing use without additional cost or burden to such person.
So, if this passes, does that mean that I'm allowed to break the CSS on my copy of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" if Albert Broccoli doesn't give me a free DVD player?
If they do so, then any SCO IP within AIX may be transferred into the open license of the Linux kernel.
Yes, and since the source code for Linux is freely available, SCO can look to see if any of the SCO "IP" got transferred.
However, they aren't saying "here is proof of our IP being in the Linux kernel", they're saying "Linux is successful, so they must have stolen our code!"
Your usage of the term "IP" is pretty nebulous. Unless I'm mistaken the only thing this "IP" can be is copyrighted material, trade secrets, or patents. (Trademarks don't really apply here.)
If it's trade secrets, SCO themselves distributed (for free, and to the world at large) the "trade secrets" themselves, in their own Linux distribution. So they're obviously not secrets anymore.
If it's patents, SCO has given the world at large a free license to use them, by distributing a GPL'ed product that contains them.
So the only thing that the "IP" could possibly be is copyright - and if this was the case, they'd be able to provide concrete proof of infringement, by providing examples of the code.
IF THIS IS THE CASE, the SCO may very well have a valid claim here.
yes, and IF I THINK HARD ENOUGH, I might believe that monkeys flew out of my ass yesterday.
The simple fact is that if SCO's case had any merit at all, they'd provide proof of it, instead of some "we think we've been robbed because someone else is successful" BS.
What does licensing revenue have to do with open source?
I didn't mean to say open-source and commercial are mutually exclusive.
But that's exactly what you said - even in your response, you said that you can't open source your application because you'd lose licensing revenue, which implies that you believe the two are mutually exclusive.
The databases in question use SSN as a key field. They are all probably relational databases (parent/child records). You have to change the SSN on all of those old records, while making sure you don't destroy the parent/child relationships.
Why not phase in the new system over time?
Say, starting RFN, all new entries use a (random|hash|whatever) number, instead of SSN. Existing entries keep their numbers until their data is purged from the live system (I imagine that eventually the data gets deleted or moved offline.)
For the short-term, the data is still at risk, but as more of the 'new' IDs get assigned, correlating SSN:SID becomes less useful to an attacker.
I think it's good that governments consider open source. But at the same time, the government buying comercial software supports my family.
Since when did open source and commercial software become mutually exclusive?
we sell very litte software without consulting and maintenance attached to it.
So what's to stop you from providing open-source versions of your software, and getting paid for the consulting and maintenance?
even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
Again, a product being open-source doesn't preclude it from being commercial.
Those who have the money to subscribe will see the posts before the slashdot effect takes place, and thus get what they pay for, but those who don't pay will be left with pages already slashdotted by those who did pay.
I'm a little confused with your logic..
If the people who pay get to see articles before the/. effect, then they can't be the cause of the/. effect, because if they were, then they'd be subject to it just like everybody else.
So the people who are causing the/. effect must be the people who haven't paid - which contradicts your assertion that/. is taking something away from them, because they are already subject to it.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes 2.0.x better for you than a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel?
Depends on the box. A better question is "what makes 2.2 or 2.4 better for me than 2.0?"
I have a few 2.0.x boxes kicking around that "just work".. they've never been down, there are no known exploits for them, and users would be pissed if I took them down to upgrade them.. so it just makes sense to leave them as is.
If I upgrade them, it's more work, not to mention the inevitable downtime.
If I leave them be, it's less work, with no gain (there's nothing that 2.2 or 2.4 will do that I need for these boxes.)
Pretty simple decision.
If/when they break, I'll replace them with something newer.. but until then, I'll just leave them be.
If you can't patch this right away, you can easily work around the hole.
Thanks for the info Pat.. turns out that all my Slackware boxes are safe on this one, as I turn off kmod when I compile a kernel.
Thanks for a great distro!
Now, do this with Calivn and Hobbes!
already done. Except that you can view some for free.
Copyright, that's what.
Copyright has nothing to do with it.
They're using data, not copyrighted material.
The circumstances are not exactly the same
Actually, the circumstances are not remotely the same. You're talking about copyrighted material, and data.
the law is basically the same.
No, it isn't. Copyright cannot be applied to facts. Pricing is a fact, therefore it's not subject to copyright.
You can copyright the format of the data, but not the data itself. Since the screen-scaper is extracting the data, it's not subject to copyright.
Corel Draw was a workable program, but nowhere near as good as the competition.
It's been awhile since I've used any vector-graphics program, but can you tell me what the competition is?
come to think of it who actually ever used Corel Linux
No, this has nothing to do with Corel Linux.
If you remember, Corel was porting it's flagship applications - namely the CorelDraw suite - to Linux. Not to mention investing heavily in WINE.
At one time, CorelDraw was the only thing keeping my Windows partition around. I would have dearly loved to have a native Linux version, and I know I'm not alone.
It wasn't about the OS, it was about the apps.
The RIAA & co. wouldn't be interestedthey would not understad the concept. Believe me, they _never_ understand the concepts of new innovations.
On the contrary, they understand it very well.
Big-business music saw the internet for what it was almost immediately: their death-knell. Not because it makes "piracy" easy, but because it makes distribution easy.
Before the internet, musicians were beholden to the record labels, because they had no other choice - if they wanted to become "rich and famous", they needed someone to distribute their music.
The internet changed that - it's now conceivably possible for an artist to distribute their music to a worldwide audience, without relying on a music label.
The record labels see the writing on the wall. They know that the days of the "slave-labour" contracts are almost over, and they're doing everything they can to prevent it. We're just witnessing their death throes.
Since they will not understand it, they will boycott it and try to ban it.
They'll try to ban it alright, not because they don't understand it, but because they realize that it brings their demise that much closer.
I've read through "The Road to Ehvenor" (I hope I spelled that right, it's been a while since I've seen it.)
Has anyone read any of his later works?
Yup, consistantly good, as always.. "Not Exactly the Three Musketeers" and "Not Quite Scaramouche" are still in print, I don't know about his other works (I don't think "The Road Home" - the only other one you missed is currently in print, but you can probably pick it up at a used bookstore.)
Thanks for reminding of Joel Rosenberg and his excellent novels.
You're very welcome!
They are some of the best fantasy I have ever read.
Agreed. He has an amazing talent for characterization. (Not to mention storytelling.)
It's been far too long since I've read them.
You should go back and re-read them.. I did recently, and they still hold up. you can start with The Sleeping Dragon, which is available at the Baen Free Library. (The Sleeping Dragon, The Sword and the Chain, and The Silver Crown have been re-released in one volume, entitled "The Guardians of the Flame")
Joel Rosenberg put it best in "The Sleeping Dragon":
The difference between intelligence and wisdom is the difference between Edith Bunker and Richard Nixon.
Edith has high wisdom and low intelligence, and Nixon is the other way around.
I think it's interesting that you didn't comment at all on any of my real arguments against this, and instead just chose one line to bitch about.
I said that DNS isn't the proper way to do this, and here's why - and you completely ignored all of the "why"..
Then what are these mx records being used to relay mail.
They're used to find the MX for a domain. - To find an IP address, just like I said.
That's not exactly application neutral.
Yes, it is. MX records don't include information on where the mail aliases to, or where to find the administrator for a domain (for example). It's used to provide a record for a Domain. (You know, the "D" in DNS.)
You can place any random text you want to in a dns record
Just because you can do something, that all of a sudden makes it a good idea to do it?
By that logic, I bet you can jump off a cliff.
Here is a list of other record types from nslookup(1)
What's your point? In every case, the records provide information about the domain, or about a host in that domain. In no case do they provide information about pathnames, mirrors, the name and address of the administrator of the domain, or anything that's handled by an application-specific protocol.
a) They would have been SCO's secrets to give away and b) there's nothing that says that whatever SCO may have given away is in fact the same parts that they claim IBM is in the process of giving away.
Who "gave it away" is not the issue. The key word is secret. You do know what a secret is, don't you?
If SCO put a trade secret in a public place, then it's no longer a secret, it's public knowledge. Ergo, by definition they can't claim the "IP" is a secret, because it ceased being a secret when SCO released it.
Same goes with patents. Just because I may give away my stuff doesn't mean that you can give away my stuff.
If you give me permission to give away "your stuff", then I most certainly can give it away. Read the GPL. (I covered this in my earlier post.)
If you go on the basic assumption that they do have some proof, perhaps SCO has decided that the Court is the venue for them to provide the proof.
Huh? So if (as you assume) they've decided that the court is proper venue, why didn't they provide it? They've filed their brief (which is where the proof would be). Where's the proof?
Perhaps they already approached IBM and IBM told them to pound sand.
Completely irrelevant. Read the brief filed by SCO. NOWHERE did they say that they have any proof, whatsoever. None. Nada. Zip. Elvis has left the building. All they said was "it's impossible for Linux to be good".
The fact that SCO went to the top of the food chain may suggest that there is some merit to the case.
And the fact that I had burritos for lunch may suggest that I'm mexican. You wanna bet on my nationality?
More likely, it suggests that SCO is just self-destructing, and hopes that IBM will just buy them out to avoid a lengthy lawsuit.
The IMDb .list files are text, but rather hard to parse. Is there really a .csv version somewhere as the AC indicated?
He also said they had indexing and relationships - which pretty much precludes CSV.
If you really wanted them, the original lists were passed around usenet as text files (IIRC, again no CSV, just plain formatted text), so you might try google groups - but they'd be pretty stale (1996 or older), even if they still exist.
If you're interested in parsing them, there are tools available to convert the IMDB's files into various formats - one of the more useful (IMHO) is "JMDB" - a Java/MySQL combo. I haven't used it, but I've heard good things about it. YMMV
No... the second quote is "Very well, No abortions for anyone!"
And, come to think of it, wasn't it Kodos who said that (been awhile since I saw that ep, but Kang was Clinton, and Kodos was Dole)?
Now, Robi2106 had a pretty good point. Is there anything for which there isn't a relevant Simpsons quote?
I really don't think that kind of functionality belongs in a DNS
Exactly.
DNS is supposed to provide nameIP mappings, in an application-neutral fashion.
By trying to make it provide "mirror" information, you're moving into the realm of the application - which doesn't really map properly to the concept of IP address.
The question (of course) is "mirror for what?"
HTTP content? Why only HTTP? FTP sites are commonly mirrored as well. How do you distinguish between the two? If you do a lookup for the example provided - "mirrors.redhat.com" - which service is mirrored, the HTTP, or the FTP? How do you know if they have different content? How do you know if they have the same content? And what happens if you have multiple HTTP servers on the same machine? (Say, one running on port 80, and one running on port 8080.)
Which one gets mirrored? Since you can't do a DNS lookup for "www.redhat.com:8080", this makes it impossible to provide a mirror for anything that doesn't use the WK port.
is there a topic that the Simpson's hasn't covered yet? Possibly abortion since I can't recal that ever comming up in an episode
Kang: "Hmm.. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others."
Crowd: (Cheers)
Why should anyone's fair use be impacted by any "means" that copyright holders may or may not provide? In fact, this word "means" is not defined anywhere
Excellent point... and consider the rest of "B"..
copyright holder fails to make publicly available the necessary means to make such noninfringing use without additional cost or burden to such person.
So, if this passes, does that mean that I'm allowed to break the CSS on my copy of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" if Albert Broccoli doesn't give me a free DVD player?
Cool.
like lemmings, there'll be a few dozen BF1942 clones, and most will die due to too much competition.
Really? There were lots of spinoffs, but I only remember one or two clones of Lemmings.
If they do so, then any SCO IP within AIX may be transferred into the open license of the Linux kernel.
Yes, and since the source code for Linux is freely available, SCO can look to see if any of the SCO "IP" got transferred.
However, they aren't saying "here is proof of our IP being in the Linux kernel", they're saying "Linux is successful, so they must have stolen our code!"
Your usage of the term "IP" is pretty nebulous. Unless I'm mistaken the only thing this "IP" can be is copyrighted material, trade secrets, or patents. (Trademarks don't really apply here.)
If it's trade secrets, SCO themselves distributed (for free, and to the world at large) the "trade secrets" themselves, in their own Linux distribution. So they're obviously not secrets anymore.
If it's patents, SCO has given the world at large a free license to use them, by distributing a GPL'ed product that contains them.
So the only thing that the "IP" could possibly be is copyright - and if this was the case, they'd be able to provide concrete proof of infringement, by providing examples of the code.
IF THIS IS THE CASE, the SCO may very well have a valid claim here.
yes, and IF I THINK HARD ENOUGH, I might believe that monkeys flew out of my ass yesterday.
The simple fact is that if SCO's case had any merit at all, they'd provide proof of it, instead of some "we think we've been robbed because someone else is successful" BS.
Or, even better, use Z39.50 to grab everything from the Library of Congress.
The one thing I liked about IMDB was that in its early days you could download all of the data it contained.
You still can, by going to ftp://ftp.imdb.com/pub/interfaces
Last update was March 1, 2003.
Many millions of dollars in licensing revenue.
What does licensing revenue have to do with open source?
I didn't mean to say open-source and commercial are mutually exclusive.
But that's exactly what you said - even in your response, you said that you can't open source your application because you'd lose licensing revenue, which implies that you believe the two are mutually exclusive.
The databases in question use SSN as a key field. They are all probably relational databases (parent/child records). You have to change the SSN on all of those old records, while making sure you don't destroy the parent/child relationships.
Why not phase in the new system over time?
Say, starting RFN, all new entries use a (random|hash|whatever) number, instead of SSN. Existing entries keep their numbers until their data is purged from the live system (I imagine that eventually the data gets deleted or moved offline.)
For the short-term, the data is still at risk, but as more of the 'new' IDs get assigned, correlating SSN:SID becomes less useful to an attacker.
I think it's good that governments consider open source. But at the same time, the government buying comercial software supports my family.
Since when did open source and commercial software become mutually exclusive?
we sell very litte software without consulting and maintenance attached to it.
So what's to stop you from providing open-source versions of your software, and getting paid for the consulting and maintenance?
even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
Again, a product being open-source doesn't preclude it from being commercial.
Those who have the money to subscribe will see the posts before the slashdot effect takes place, and thus get what they pay for, but those who don't pay will be left with pages already slashdotted by those who did pay.
/. effect, then they can't be the cause of the /. effect, because if they were, then they'd be subject to it just like everybody else.
/. effect must be the people who haven't paid - which contradicts your assertion that /. is taking something away from them, because they are already subject to it.
I'm a little confused with your logic..
If the people who pay get to see articles before the
So the people who are causing the