Not really. The famous Girl-Scout case was years before the DMCA was passed. This was the case in which the Scouts were sued for permitting their members to sing copyrighted songs around a campfire. And note that all the negative publicity didn't work in this case. The Girl Scouts are paying an annual fee for the right to sing around their campfires.
Then there are the explanations of how it comes to be that Happy Birthday is still under copyright, although it was written in the 1880's. The current owner gets several million US dollars per year for permissions to sing the song.
Coincidentally, the College Board allows students with learning disabilities unlimited time on the SATs without being noted as such on the score.
Hmmm... That doesn't do much for people like me. I stood up and walked out of the SAT halfway through, because I was done. This got me some really funny looks from the others in the room. I got the first 800s in my school's history. I guess that explained more to me than any psych test why I was such a misfit. I well remember the embarrassment I felt in the assembly where the results were handed out, and the person calling out names announced my score. I understood pretty well that this was a public humiliation.
Now I live 3000 miles from there. I've never gone back. Maybe I will some day, but I doubt if I'll introduce myself to anyone.
Somehow, I've always had a lot of sympathy for anyone considered "abnormal" by their society. Not that the labels are always very meaningful. I to sometimes wonder what the psychological term for my abnormality would be?
I suppose there are a lot of people like this in the/. crowd.
Such a "test" can be fun, but I do wonder how meaningful they really are. Personally, I prefer the geek-code ranking (though I haven't geek-ranked myself for several years now). It's based on quantifiable answers to questions about things you've actually done. This personality test is just averages of your subjective answers to fairly transparent (but fuzzy) questions that can easily mean different things to different people.
Weren't the drug laws passed around the same time as the civil rights ammendment?
Nah; you're off by half a century.;-)
The original US anti-drug laws were passed in the 1920's. Before that, drugs like marijuana and opium were sold openly and legally.
Actually, various kinds of "civil rights" laws (and amendments) date to nearly every decade of the country's history.
The 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, dates from 1865, and was ratified. "Civil Rights Ammendment" usually refers to the 14th Amendment, was also ratified in 1868. Then there was the big Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Needless to say, these legal documents didn't always have quite the effect that was intended. Thus, some historians point out that the 13th Amendment's "involuntary servitude" phrase was included to outlaw the military draft, but it didn't have that effect at all. And how laws are enforced (or ignored) means a lot more than what the laws say.
Hemp produces more pulp per acre than timber on a sustainable basis, and can be used for every quality of paper.
A couple of years ago, there was a book written on the history of the US drug laws. I've forgotten the book's (or author's) name, but he documented an interesting "coincidence": The campaign to outlaw cannabis/marijuana/hemp was basically done by the Hearsts. They owned a large amount of land that was mostly pulpwood farms. Just before the anti-marijuana campaign started, a new hemp-to-paper process was patented that produced paper at half the cost of the cheapest wood-based process. This essentially made the Hearts' pulpwood farms useless. They responded by bankrolling the anti-drug campaign, including lobbying Congress to include the Evil Weed in the list of drugs.
It never did make sense that such a mild euphoric would cause such a wildly off-scale response, until someone dug up the above history. Then it all made sense.
Pulpwood farming is still an industry in the US. And it's almost all big corporate farms. We know the attitude of the current Congress towards corporations, of course. So we can't expect any serious change in the drug laws any time soon. Not unless some major hemp growers start making a lot of campaign contributions.
A number of articles have been published recently discussing the statistics showing that most of the increase in drug arrests in the US over the past 15 years or so has been for marijuana. Some of these articles have mentioned that hemp is potentially a serious threat to big American tree-farming interests. But the articles I've read haven't actually explained the connection.
Linux isn't going to do a better job of exposing kids to "the realities behind how things work" then Windows would, unless you believe there's a command prompt blinking inside your microprocessor.
Actually, this is a nice example where linux (or *BSD or minix or iTron) is a much better teaching tool than a MS OS.
Suppose you have a kid who gets curious about that blinking cursor. He/she realizes that, with all the competing demands on the processor, it's interesting that the cursor blinks regularly. Why doesn't it occasionally hang like a lot of programs do, and take several seconds to get back on track? How does it keep blinking when everything else is hung? It's just a few pixels on the screen, and is obviously controlled by software. How can it keep working regularly?
Answering this requires understanding how interrupt routines work. In particular, you have to understand clock interrupts, interrupt routines and their limitations, plus the low-level details of how to access a piece of the screen. You also need to understand the data structures that define a little screen object like the cursor so that it will keep working no matter which program moves its screen location.
With a MS or other proprietary OS, all you can do is talk about generalities, and do a lot of hand waving. You can't show a kid the details of how a working system blinks that cursor, because all the code is proprietary. You can't see the code at all, at least not legally.
With linux or any open-source OS, you can show the whole thing to a kid that's bright enough to understand it. It won't be easy, but we're talking bright kid here, right? The code is all available, and you can use it legally in your classes.
Note that problems with classroom access to unix source was one of the primary reasons that Linus Torvalds started linux in the first place. Before him, Prof. Tannenbaum started his students on the project that produced minix for the same reason.
If you're serious about being an educational institution, you don't want any proprietary stuff (including current commercial unix) around, because you can't use it for teaching about the innards of computers. You want OSS all the way, and you want the source code on hand for the benefit of your students.
Linux is fine for this. So are a number of other systems. (Some day, Hurd may be, too.;-)
A couple of years ago, I was in Finland with a group of people (performing at a folk festival;-). One of the group's members got a toothache, and went to a clinic. They advised a root canal, which she agreed to. Afterwards, the people at the clinic were apologetic that they had to charge her the equivalent of about US$15 because she wasn't a citizen.
Now, we are all aware that this was paid for out of the taxes of Finnish workers. But when you compare, they don't pay much more in taxes than we do here in America. They sure do get a lot more for it.
OTOH, they don't get the fun of watching their nation's troops expending large quantities of munitions in another country. But if they're into that, they can follow the news of American troops, and cheer them on. I did meet a number of Finns who rooted for the French or English or Italian soccer teams; I suppose this wouldn't be much different.
It's not really all that mind-boggling if you've read much of the press coverage of the issue in the US. (Not that many Americans have read it, but still...)
There have been any number of "investigative reports" in recent years on the issue. Almost all the reporters express dismay and shock at the shoddiness they find when they look into capital-crime cases. They report that the cases they examined were absolute horrors of blatant injustice, with incompetent lawyers (usually publicly funded because the defendants are almost always very poor), arrogant and dishonest police and prosecutors, and juries that systematically exclude anyone with the slightest doubts about the rightness of capital punishment. They get across the idea pretty clearly that, no matter what their prior beliefs, they now believe that death sentences are essentially random, and reforming the system is hopeless.
The public reaction to this? A big yawn. Well, yes; there's the half of the population that pays attention, and doesn't want the death penalty. The other half of the population doesn't care, and doesn't read such activist, liberal reports. Why not? Their attitude is simple: A crime was committed. They want someone punished. If the defendant is guilty, so much the better. But all that really matters is that someone dies for the crime.
This becomes especially clear when you look at the reactions to the recent exoneration via DNA analysis. Overwhelmingly, people react by being very upset that the criminal was set free. There is political pressure to block such DNA analysis after the case is "settled".
A couple of years back, there was an interesting situation in Texas. After several such DNA exonerations, the state went through their frozen evidence from previous convictions, and destroyed them. This got the point across about as clearly as possible: They didn't care whether those prisoners had been wrongly convicted, and they weren't about to allow any re-examination of the evidence using new forensic technology.
So it's not that this half of the population believes that the government can determine guilt accurately. The real truth is that they don't care about justice. They just want vengeance and it doesn't matter if they get the right guy. It's the Hollywood approach to justice.
We should note the surveys that show this to be only around half of the American population. The other half shouldn't be blamed for their attitude. And there is a political fight (which the media calls a "culture war";-) raging right now over this and a lot of related issues. Stay tuned to see how it turns out...
[Just doing my bit to explain the complexities of American culture to the rest of the mind-boggled world.;-]
For example, schools could hire an expert from OSS, to simplify things for the schools.
Nah. What they should do is start pushing their smarter kids to take advantage of the openness of the software, and become local experts. Teach the kids to do the support. True, you'll need outside help occasionally. But you'll find that there are people around willing to help by teaching. And there's lots of help online, something else you want the students to learn about.
What are schools for, after all? Don't they want their students learning about the computers?
This is really the main argument against MS and other proprietary stuff. The students can't look at the innards and learn how they work. Too much of it is hidden, with "No user-serviceable parts". Schools shouldn't be using such equipment. They should be using stuff that students can take apart, study, and learn from.
A school using MS equipment is ipso-facto disqualifying itself for the term "educational".
Heh. Of course, it's the *BSD systems that are perfect (though of course they're dying). Linux and OSX are just wannabes.
We can't let linux and OSX hog the religious flame fest.
Actually, linux sorta has an excuse or two relative to the BSDs. The linux crowd has emphasized getting their system running on all extant hardware. This inevitably comes with the risk of poorly-written drivers and other hardware-dependent code. The BSDs don't try to support all hardware, in part because they want to thoroughly check out all software before releasing it, and this especially applies to drivers.
OSX doesn't even have that excuse, though, since it's hardware is even more restricted.
This problem isn't hardware-related, though, and it's an example of a well-understood design flaw, so there really isn't any excuse at all. It'll be interesting to see Apple's response.
We can just hope that they thank Stephan, rather than threatening or prosecuting him. They've gotta know that a lot of us are watching. Unlike MS, Apple does have lots of credibility to lose...
last time i checked there was no c:\ on FreeBSD but maybe im wrong;)
It's easy enough to create one:
: mkdir C:\\ : ls -ltr | tail -3 drwxr-xr-x 2 jc guests 6656 May 2 11:07 m drwxr-xr-x 57 jc guests 2048 May 4 09:07 p drwxr-xr-x 2 jc guests 512 May 8 12:36 C:\ :
This was on a FreeBSD machine where I have a guest account. Note that you need to double the backslash, to protect it from the shell. But with this, the exploit should be able to write the file to your account. Of course, it will run with your permissions. And you have to allow installing software, which seems to be off by default. And.bat files don't usually run too well on FreeBSD. And...
I was also rather bemused by the characterization of the X Windows sytem as something "... that attempted to mimic the appearance of Microsoft Windows but still allow access to the power of the Unix shell underneath."
The mistake here is also explained by the introductory remark: "Just before the end of the 1980s, new GUIs started appearing on Unix workstations..."
In 1984, well before the end of the 1980s, I was working in an office at MIT just down the hall from where Jim Gettys was building the first versions of X Xindows, with the help of a lot of us guinea pigs as alpha and beta testers. This was at a time when MS Windows was in its early releases, and was rather feeble. We didn't much have DOS boxes in our offices, and it's pretty clear that MS's ideas just weren't relevant or interesting in the X effort. Nobody wanted a window system that worked like that. The Apple and Sun boxes were a lot more interesting, though the attitude at MIT was mostly "We can do a lot better than that." (Of course, so could Apple and Sun, given a bit of time.) There were also a couple of Apollo boxes around, which were brought up in many discussions.
In any case, this is a case where TFA gets the timeline and the borrowing rather wrong. And it's wrong in the usual way, attributing ideas to MS that were actually developed elsewhere, only to appear in MS's products some time later.
Indeed. I've been involved in a number of network-management projects. In all of them, we've eventually had discussions of an interesting phenomenon: When you watch network admins in action, and a problem occurs, they invariably (and instantly) abandon the fancy GUI tools on their workstations. They open up 2 or 3 text windows and start typing commands.
If you talk to them about it, you'll find that their attitude is "Oh, those fancy GUI things are for impressing suits and lusers. They don't do anything useful. To diagnose and fix problems, you have to use the tools that work, and those are all text-based."
While generally agreeing with this, I'd also have to admit that I've written a number of GUI tools that admins grab and use when they see them in action. One is a simple tcl tool whose window contains N lines, each one running a ping subprocess. You enter a hostname or IP address in one cell, the ping happens at S-second intervals, and the line shows the results. The response times are colored to show the delay, changing from green to yellow to red as the delay gets longer.
But note that this "GUI" tool shows nothing but text. It's merely a front end for N repeating ping commands, with color used to indicate problems. You could do the same thing in N text windows. The GUI is used merely to package this in a convenient (and compact) form. So it's using the GUI for the one thing that a text window isn't very good at: running a flock of background commands and summarizing their output. Also, it reduces the needed screen space, unlike most GUI tools that waste screen space. And it's nothing very special; any tcl hacker could turn it out in half an hour or so.
Someone else has pointed out that google does the same thing. Their main page is in fact a purely text-oriented interface. The GUI is used minimally, to get the text on your screen. And google works just about as well from lynx as from a GUI browser.
The real advantage of a GUI, from a "power user" viewpoint, is that it lets you run N text windows together, and resize them on the fly. This is better than N dumb terminals. But aside from this, most GUI tools don't lead to increased productivity. They're just pretty pictures, aimed at people who can't type and can only point with one or two fingers. That's fine for selling computers to such people. But it's not really great for someone with full use of all their fingers (or brain).
Oh, I dunno abut that. After all, every copyright and patent license could be considered a "price-fixing scheme". The whole point of copyright and patent law, from the viewpoint of the current corporate culture, is to allow the owner to control what can be done with their "intellectual property" so that they can make money off it.
(Granted, that wasn't the reason given in the US Constitution, or the laws of many other countries, for instituting such laws. But it's the primary function of copyright and patent these days.)
It could be interesting if this guy succeeds. The result could well be a legal precedent that wipes out much of the financial benefits of copyright. But we should expect that our corporate legal guardians will wake up and quash it before this happens.;-)
You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant.
That's a graft, not a clone.
Huh? Since when? A graft means taking the cutting and attaching it to a different plant, where it becomes a branch of that plant. A "clone" is a cutting that's grown into a separate plant. Anyone who has ever grown fruit trees knows the difference. (Of course, lots of commercial fruit trees are both clones and grafts, but that's getting a bit too detailed for this discussion, and verges on off-topic.)
Webster's agrees, the second definition of clone: "one that appears to be a copy of an original form."
Then, by that definition, linux is not a clone of unix. Linux was not in any sense a copy of any existing unix system. It was an independent implementation of the POSIX standard. This is pretty well documented, and (partly because of the SCO story) lots of people have compared the code looking for overlap. They haven't found any. So there isn't even an appearance of copying, at least not to anyone who actually takes a look.
Their surface appearance is similar, of course, but that's because they both implement the POSIX standard. If this constitutes cloning, then any company that makes a meter stick or metric tape measure can be accused of cloning another company's product. That's stretching the concept to meaninglessness.
Linus did his own implementation partly because he didn't have access to AT&T source code. The license was far too expensive for a poor grad student like him. This was essentially the same motive behind prof Tanenbaum's minix system a few years earlier, which Linus did use somewhat in the earliest versions of linux. He couldn't copy unix, because he didn't have access to the code.
A curiosity here is that nobody calls linux a clone of minix, although in the early stages there was some code borrowing. This is because, although their surface appearance is similar (POSIX), the implementations are radically different. Also, there has been a rather public discussion of the difference, which has got a fair amount of publicity in computer-geek circles. What's strange is that people will see cloning from unix to linux, although linux is much less directly derived from unix than it is from minix.
The only purpose of government is to ensure a decent butter-churn in every home.
No, no; you've gotta get your economic rhetoric right. A butter churn is a production tool, and as such should only be made available via a Market mechanism. For a government to intrude on such industrial activity is evil, socialistic, communistic, and probably satanic. Or something.
What the government should be ensuring is a decent assault rifle in every home. That's so you can defend yourself against all those people trying to hand you free butter churns, which they're doing to subvert the economic system. If you live in Florida, you could use your rifle against anyone that you suspect of delivering churns against your will.
Note that it would be proper for the government to institute a licensing system for butter churns, so that there would be only one company allowed to deliver a churn to your home. That company would sell you a churn at a price determined by discussions between its marketing department and the appropriate government committee. And you would be required to sell your butter to that company, again at a price that they determine.
So, in some ways, you could say "Linux is a UNIX clone". In the same ways, you could say "Margarine is a Butter clone". ...
That's a really nice analogy.
Actually, it's a really false analogy. Like much of the media and political noise about the cloning issue, it mostly illustrates the total lack of understanding what the term "clone" means.
For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant. To clone an animal, you take a cell (or a nucleus) and grow it into a new animal. In both cases, the clone is genetically identical to the parent because its primary material (its DNA) was taken from the parent.
Linux is not in any meaningful sense a clone of unix, because its code wasn't taken from unix. The correct biological metaphor would be convergent evolution. That's how you describe two things that are physically and functionally similar, but of independent derivation.
Of course, we could view this as yet another case where a precisely-defined technical term is misused in a vague, sloppy fashion by the media and general population. But we're supposed to be tech nerds here, right? So we shouldn't be using the sloppy, fuzzy, media meaning of "clone". We should be using the technical meaning, insofar as it's applicable to software.
At some point, governments are going to realize they can make more from taxing the use of marijuana than they receive from the pockets of the pharmaceuticals.
I suspect that most governments do realize this (in the usual institutional sense). The problem is that, while those taxes would go to the government the pharma bribes go directly to the decision makers' pockets (or campaign funds). This is a lot less money, but it's more effective because it benefits the few people who are in a position to make changes.
You're both wrong. Precedence goes to the oldest technical definition. So a "cracker" is a rural native of Florida or Georgia.
(I have some good friends who are crackers. And damn proud of it. And a couple of them are computer experts who object strongly to other nerds taking their name in vain.;-)
The war of words is (and has been) over. You lost. Get over it.
Actually, it's just another example of a word that is a technical term in a technical field, while being used with a different meaning by the general public. Technical jargon is full of such words. And the techies (at least the competent ones;-) generally understand that it's not a good idea to "give in" to the popular use of the word. This just leads to jargon that's costantly in flux, so you can't read technical docs from a few years ago, and you can't communicate coherently with others in the field.
The only practical solution is to face the fact that the word has different technical and popular meanings. When talking to others in your field, you use the technical meaning. Anyone who confuses the two is instantly discredited in tecnical settings.
A competent computer geek understands the two meanings of "hacker", and can almost always tell which meaning is intended. So there's no reason to find a better word.
One of my favorite examples is the physicists' term "quantum", which was coined to refer to the smallest change in a quantity that the universe allows. The popular meaning, of course, is a very large change. So the technical and popular meanings are antonyms. In this case, the word after "quantum" usually gives away which meaning was intended. The media and others say "quantum leap", while scientists say "quantum jump" or sometimes "quantum change". You almost never hear "quantum leap" in a technical setting, except humorously.
I recently read a news article that mentioned a "quantum leap" in an organization's income. I immediately thought that their income had increased by $0.01 (per annum?). But, of course, I knew that wasn't what the writer meant.
Others can contribute their favorite technical/popular definitions of words...
now put apache in the hands of people who know nothing about computers...
That's exactly what Apple does. When you fire up a new Mac, one of the things it asks you is whether you want a web server. If you click "Yes", it sets up an apache server on the machine. You have a "Sites" directory that is your web directory. You move files into that directory (or subdirectories). They're on the Web, at least if your machine is on the Web. If not, it's still a live web site which you can test locally to your heart's desire. When you have it like you want it, you can copy the whole thing to a machine that is on the Web.
I have a Powerbook on which I do this, though my actual Web sites are on linux and FreeBSD boxes. It works fine, and there's no history of novices' machines (or mine;-) being pwned via their web server.
(There is a serious problem with running rsync between OSX and other unixoid systems. But that's a different issue, not related to security.)
Of course, you can still endanger your machine by installing CGI programs that violate security. But your typical Joe Sixpack isn't gonna do that. Programmers will, but they're not "people who know nothing about computers".
No, apache is the poster boy for debunking the claim that being a market leader automatically makes you a hacker/cracker target. Apache has nearly 70% of the web-server market now, but it isn't a security threat. Your CGI programs may be, but apache isn't.
You'll have to find a better excuse for why IE is such a security danger. The real reason is that it's written to be insecure, and MS has no motive to fix its problems. After all, it's the market leader, so people must like it the way it is. Why change something that's so popular?
A couple of years ago, as MS was coming out with their tablet PC, I recall reading several articles about it that mentioned that it had been for sale in Asia for a year - running linux. But somehow sales of the linux version got blocked in the US.
I suppose you could have ordered the Korean or Malaysian version...
Slashdot Mirror
Everything was fine pre-DMCA.
Not really. The famous Girl-Scout case was years before the DMCA was passed. This was the case in which the Scouts were sued for permitting their members to sing copyrighted songs around a campfire. And note that all the negative publicity didn't work in this case. The Girl Scouts are paying an annual fee for the right to sing around their campfires.
Then there are the explanations of how it comes to be that Happy Birthday is still under copyright, although it was written in the 1880's. The current owner gets several million US dollars per year for permissions to sing the song.
None of this is the fault of the DMCA.
Coincidentally, the College Board allows students with learning disabilities unlimited time on the SATs without being noted as such on the score.
... That doesn't do much for people like me. I stood up and walked out of the SAT halfway through, because I was done. This got me some really funny looks from the others in the room. I got the first 800s in my school's history. I guess that explained more to me than any psych test why I was such a misfit. I well remember the embarrassment I felt in the assembly where the results were handed out, and the person calling out names announced my score. I understood pretty well that this was a public humiliation.
/. crowd.
Hmmm
Now I live 3000 miles from there. I've never gone back. Maybe I will some day, but I doubt if I'll introduce myself to anyone.
Somehow, I've always had a lot of sympathy for anyone considered "abnormal" by their society. Not that the labels are always very meaningful. I to sometimes wonder what the psychological term for
my abnormality would be?
I suppose there are a lot of people like this in the
Such a "test" can be fun, but I do wonder how meaningful they really are. Personally, I prefer the geek-code ranking (though I haven't geek-ranked myself for several years now). It's based on quantifiable answers to questions about things you've actually done. This personality test is just averages of your subjective answers to fairly transparent (but fuzzy) questions that can easily mean different things to different people.
Weren't the drug laws passed around the same time as the civil rights ammendment?
;-)
Nah; you're off by half a century.
The original US anti-drug laws were passed in the 1920's. Before that, drugs like marijuana and opium were sold openly and legally.
Actually, various kinds of "civil rights" laws (and amendments) date to nearly every decade of the country's history.
The 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, dates from 1865, and was ratified. "Civil Rights Ammendment" usually refers to the 14th Amendment, was also ratified in 1868. Then there was the big Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Needless to say, these legal documents didn't always have quite the effect that was intended. Thus, some historians point out that the 13th Amendment's "involuntary servitude" phrase was included to outlaw the military draft, but it didn't have that effect at all. And how laws are enforced (or ignored) means a lot more than what the laws say.
... was the story from the guy whose cell phone caught the cabir virus, and his phone company's solution was to throw it away and buy a new phone.
...
Now I'm going to be expecting to hear that Microsoft has adopted this approach (and PHBs are ordering their people to do it)
Hemp produces more pulp per acre than timber on a sustainable basis, and can be used for every quality of paper.
A couple of years ago, there was a book written on the history of the US drug laws. I've forgotten the book's (or author's) name, but he documented an interesting "coincidence": The campaign to outlaw cannabis/marijuana/hemp was basically done by the Hearsts. They owned a large amount of land that was mostly pulpwood farms. Just before the anti-marijuana campaign started, a new hemp-to-paper process was patented that produced paper at half the cost of the cheapest wood-based process. This essentially made the Hearts' pulpwood farms useless. They responded by bankrolling the anti-drug campaign, including lobbying Congress to include the Evil Weed in the list of drugs.
It never did make sense that such a mild euphoric would cause such a wildly off-scale response, until someone dug up the above history. Then it all made sense.
Pulpwood farming is still an industry in the US. And it's almost all big corporate farms. We know the attitude of the current Congress towards corporations, of course. So we can't expect any serious change in the drug laws any time soon. Not unless some major hemp growers start making a lot of campaign contributions.
A number of articles have been published recently discussing the statistics showing that most of the increase in drug arrests in the US over the past 15 years or so has been for marijuana. Some of these articles have mentioned that hemp is potentially a serious threat to big American tree-farming interests. But the articles I've read haven't actually explained the connection.
Linux isn't going to do a better job of exposing kids to "the realities behind how things work" then Windows would, unless you believe there's a command prompt blinking inside your microprocessor.
;-)
Actually, this is a nice example where linux (or *BSD or minix or iTron) is a much better teaching tool than a MS OS.
Suppose you have a kid who gets curious about that blinking cursor. He/she realizes that, with all the competing demands on the processor, it's interesting that the cursor blinks regularly. Why doesn't it occasionally hang like a lot of programs do, and take several seconds to get back on track? How does it keep blinking when everything else is hung? It's just a few pixels on the screen, and is obviously controlled by software. How can it keep working regularly?
Answering this requires understanding how interrupt routines work. In particular, you have to understand clock interrupts, interrupt routines and their limitations, plus the low-level details of how to access a piece of the screen. You also need to understand the data structures that define a little screen object like the cursor so that it will keep working no matter which program moves its screen location.
With a MS or other proprietary OS, all you can do is talk about generalities, and do a lot of hand waving. You can't show a kid the details of how a working system blinks that cursor, because all the code is proprietary. You can't see the code at all, at least not legally.
With linux or any open-source OS, you can show the whole thing to a kid that's bright enough to understand it. It won't be easy, but we're talking bright kid here, right? The code is all available, and you can use it legally in your classes.
Note that problems with classroom access to unix source was one of the primary reasons that Linus Torvalds started linux in the first place. Before him, Prof. Tannenbaum started his students on the project that produced minix for the same reason.
If you're serious about being an educational institution, you don't want any proprietary stuff (including current commercial unix) around, because you can't use it for teaching about the innards of computers. You want OSS all the way, and you want the source code on hand for the benefit of your students.
Linux is fine for this. So are a number of other systems. (Some day, Hurd may be, too.
And the price is right.
... is that all the news coverage has described this as a standardized driver's license.
Does this mean that states will soon be required to give driver's licenses to blind people?
Recall that one of the ringleaders of the attempted first World Trade Center bombing was blind.
A couple of years ago, I was in Finland with a group of people (performing at a folk festival ;-). One of the group's members got a toothache, and went to a clinic. They advised a root canal, which she agreed to. Afterwards, the people at the clinic were apologetic that they had to charge her the equivalent of about US$15 because she wasn't a citizen.
Now, we are all aware that this was paid for out of the taxes of Finnish workers. But when you compare, they don't pay much more in taxes than we do here in America. They sure do get a lot more for it.
OTOH, they don't get the fun of watching their nation's troops expending large quantities of munitions in another country. But if they're into that, they can follow the news of American troops, and cheer them on. I did meet a number of Finns who rooted for the French or English or Italian soccer teams; I suppose this wouldn't be much different.
It's not really all that mind-boggling if you've read much of the press coverage of the issue in the US. (Not that many Americans have read it, but still ...)
;-) raging right now over this and a lot of related issues. Stay tuned to see how it turns out ...
;-]
There have been any number of "investigative reports" in recent years on the issue. Almost all the reporters express dismay and shock at the shoddiness they find when they look into capital-crime cases. They report that the cases they examined were absolute horrors of blatant injustice, with incompetent lawyers (usually publicly funded because the defendants are almost always very poor), arrogant and dishonest police and prosecutors, and juries that systematically exclude anyone with the slightest doubts about the rightness of capital punishment. They get across the idea pretty clearly that, no matter what their prior beliefs, they now believe that death sentences are essentially random, and reforming the system is hopeless.
The public reaction to this? A big yawn. Well, yes; there's the half of the population that pays attention, and doesn't want the death penalty. The other half of the population doesn't care, and doesn't read such activist, liberal reports. Why not? Their attitude is simple: A crime was committed. They want someone punished. If the defendant is guilty, so much the better. But all that really matters is that someone dies for the crime.
This becomes especially clear when you look at the reactions to the recent exoneration via DNA analysis. Overwhelmingly, people react by being very upset that the criminal was set free. There is political pressure to block such DNA analysis after the case is "settled".
A couple of years back, there was an interesting situation in Texas. After several such DNA exonerations, the state went through their frozen evidence from previous convictions, and destroyed them. This got the point across about as clearly as possible: They didn't care whether those prisoners had been wrongly convicted, and they weren't about to allow any re-examination of the evidence using new forensic technology.
So it's not that this half of the population believes that the government can determine guilt accurately. The real truth is that they don't care about justice. They just want vengeance and it doesn't matter if they get the right guy. It's the Hollywood approach to justice.
We should note the surveys that show this to be only around half of the American population. The other half shouldn't be blamed for their attitude. And there is a political fight (which the media calls a "culture war"
[Just doing my bit to explain the complexities of American culture to the rest of the mind-boggled world.
For example, schools could hire an expert from OSS, to simplify things for the schools.
Nah. What they should do is start pushing their smarter kids to take advantage of the openness of the software, and become local experts. Teach the kids to do the support. True, you'll need outside help occasionally. But you'll find that there are people around willing to help by teaching. And there's lots of help online, something else you want the students to learn about.
What are schools for, after all? Don't they want their students learning about the computers?
This is really the main argument against MS and other proprietary stuff. The students can't look at the innards and learn how they work. Too much of it is hidden, with "No user-serviceable parts". Schools shouldn't be using such equipment. They should be using stuff that students can take apart, study, and learn from.
A school using MS equipment is ipso-facto disqualifying itself for the term "educational".
Heh. Of course, it's the *BSD systems that are perfect (though of course they're dying). Linux and OSX are just wannabes.
...
We can't let linux and OSX hog the religious flame fest.
Actually, linux sorta has an excuse or two relative to the BSDs. The linux crowd has emphasized getting their system running on all extant hardware. This inevitably comes with the risk of poorly-written drivers and other hardware-dependent code. The BSDs don't try to support all hardware, in part because they want to thoroughly check out all software before releasing it, and this especially applies to drivers.
OSX doesn't even have that excuse, though, since it's hardware is even more restricted.
This problem isn't hardware-related, though, and it's an example of a well-understood design flaw, so there really isn't any excuse at all. It'll be interesting to see Apple's response.
We can just hope that they thank Stephan, rather than threatening or prosecuting him. They've gotta know that a lot of us are watching. Unlike MS, Apple does have lots of credibility to lose
last time i checked there was no c:\ on FreeBSD but maybe im wrong ;)
.bat files don't usually run too well on FreeBSD. And ...
It's easy enough to create one:
: mkdir C:\\
: ls -ltr | tail -3
drwxr-xr-x 2 jc guests 6656 May 2 11:07 m
drwxr-xr-x 57 jc guests 2048 May 4 09:07 p
drwxr-xr-x 2 jc guests 512 May 8 12:36 C:\
:
This was on a FreeBSD machine where I have a guest account. Note that you need to double the backslash, to protect it from the shell. But with this, the exploit should be able to write the file to your account. Of course, it will run with your permissions. And you have to allow installing software, which seems to be off by default. And
I was also rather bemused by the characterization of the X Windows sytem as something "... that attempted to mimic the appearance of Microsoft Windows but still allow access to the power of the Unix shell underneath."
..."
The mistake here is also explained by the introductory remark: "Just before the end of the 1980s, new GUIs started appearing on Unix workstations
In 1984, well before the end of the 1980s, I was working in an office at MIT just down the hall from where Jim Gettys was building the first versions of X Xindows, with the help of a lot of us guinea pigs as alpha and beta testers. This was at a time when MS Windows was in its early releases, and was rather feeble. We didn't much have DOS boxes in our offices, and it's pretty clear that MS's ideas just weren't relevant or interesting in the X effort. Nobody wanted a window system that worked like that. The Apple and Sun boxes were a lot more interesting, though the attitude at MIT was mostly "We can do a lot better than that." (Of course, so could Apple and Sun, given a bit of time.) There were also a couple of Apollo boxes around, which were brought up in many discussions.
In any case, this is a case where TFA gets the timeline and the borrowing rather wrong. And it's wrong in the usual way, attributing ideas to MS that were actually developed elsewhere, only to appear in MS's products some time later.
Isn't a text config preferred by ALL admins?
Indeed. I've been involved in a number of network-management projects. In all of them, we've eventually had discussions of an interesting phenomenon: When you watch network admins in action, and a problem occurs, they invariably (and instantly) abandon the fancy GUI tools on their workstations. They open up 2 or 3 text windows and start typing commands.
If you talk to them about it, you'll find that their attitude is "Oh, those fancy GUI things are for impressing suits and lusers. They don't do anything useful. To diagnose and fix problems, you have to use the tools that work, and those are all text-based."
While generally agreeing with this, I'd also have to admit that I've written a number of GUI tools that admins grab and use when they see them in action. One is a simple tcl tool whose window contains N lines, each one running a ping subprocess. You enter a hostname or IP address in one cell, the ping happens at S-second intervals, and the line shows the results. The response times are colored to show the delay, changing from green to yellow to red as the delay gets longer.
But note that this "GUI" tool shows nothing but text. It's merely a front end for N repeating ping commands, with color used to indicate problems. You could do the same thing in N text windows. The GUI is used merely to package this in a convenient (and compact) form. So it's using the GUI for the one thing that a text window isn't very good at: running a flock of background commands and summarizing their output. Also, it reduces the needed screen space, unlike most GUI tools that waste screen space. And it's nothing very special; any tcl hacker could turn it out in half an hour or so.
Someone else has pointed out that google does the same thing. Their main page is in fact a purely text-oriented interface. The GUI is used minimally, to get the text on your screen. And google works just about as well from lynx as from a GUI browser.
The real advantage of a GUI, from a "power user" viewpoint, is that it lets you run N text windows together, and resize them on the fly. This is better than N dumb terminals. But aside from this, most GUI tools don't lead to increased productivity. They're just pretty pictures, aimed at people who can't type and can only point with one or two fingers. That's fine for selling computers to such people. But it's not really great for someone with full use of all their fingers (or brain).
The GPL isn't a price-fixing scheme
;-)
Oh, I dunno abut that. After all, every copyright and patent license could be considered a "price-fixing scheme". The whole point of copyright and patent law, from the viewpoint of the current corporate culture, is to allow the owner to control what can be done with their "intellectual property" so that they can make money off it.
(Granted, that wasn't the reason given in the US Constitution, or the laws of many other countries, for instituting such laws. But it's the primary function of copyright and patent these days.)
It could be interesting if this guy succeeds. The result could well be a legal precedent that wipes out much of the financial benefits of copyright. But we should expect that our corporate legal guardians will wake up and quash it before this happens.
You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant.
."
That's a graft, not a clone.
Huh? Since when? A graft means taking the cutting and attaching it to a different plant, where it becomes a branch of that plant. A "clone" is a cutting that's grown into a separate plant. Anyone who has ever grown fruit trees knows the difference. (Of course, lots of commercial fruit trees are both clones and grafts, but that's getting a bit too detailed for this discussion, and verges on off-topic.)
Webster's agrees, the second definition of clone: "one that appears to be a copy of an original form
Then, by that definition, linux is not a clone of unix. Linux was not in any sense a copy of any existing unix system. It was an independent implementation of the POSIX standard. This is pretty well documented, and (partly because of the SCO story) lots of people have compared the code looking for overlap. They haven't found any. So there isn't even an appearance of copying, at least not to anyone who actually takes a look.
Their surface appearance is similar, of course, but that's because they both implement the POSIX standard. If this constitutes cloning, then any company that makes a meter stick or metric tape measure can be accused of cloning another company's product. That's stretching the concept to meaninglessness.
Linus did his own implementation partly because he didn't have access to AT&T source code. The license was far too expensive for a poor grad student like him. This was essentially the same motive behind prof Tanenbaum's minix system a few years earlier, which Linus did use somewhat in the earliest versions of linux. He couldn't copy unix, because he didn't have access to the code.
A curiosity here is that nobody calls linux a clone of minix, although in the early stages there was some code borrowing. This is because, although their surface appearance is similar (POSIX), the implementations are radically different. Also, there has been a rather public discussion of the difference, which has got a fair amount of publicity in computer-geek circles. What's strange is that people will see cloning from unix to linux, although linux is much less directly derived from unix than it is from minix.
The only purpose of government is to ensure a decent butter-churn in every home.
;-)
No, no; you've gotta get your economic rhetoric right. A butter churn is a production tool, and as such should only be made available via a Market mechanism. For a government to intrude on such industrial activity is evil, socialistic, communistic, and probably satanic. Or something.
What the government should be ensuring is a decent assault rifle in every home. That's so you can defend yourself against all those people trying to hand you free butter churns, which they're doing to subvert the economic system. If you live in Florida, you could use your rifle against anyone that you suspect of delivering churns against your will.
Note that it would be proper for the government to institute a licensing system for butter churns, so that there would be only one company allowed to deliver a churn to your home. That company would sell you a churn at a price determined by discussions between its marketing department and the appropriate government committee. And you would be required to sell your butter to that company, again at a price that they determine.
(Ain't political economics fun?
So, in some ways, you could say "Linux is a UNIX clone". In the same ways, you could say "Margarine is a Butter clone".
...
... ;-)
That's a really nice analogy.
Actually, it's a really false analogy. Like much of the media and political noise about the cloning issue, it mostly illustrates the total lack of understanding what the term "clone" means.
For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant. To clone an animal, you take a cell (or a nucleus) and grow it into a new animal. In both cases, the clone is genetically identical to the parent because its primary material (its DNA) was taken from the parent.
Linux is not in any meaningful sense a clone of unix, because its code wasn't taken from unix. The correct biological metaphor would be convergent evolution. That's how you describe two things that are physically and functionally similar, but of independent derivation.
Of course, we could view this as yet another case where a precisely-defined technical term is misused in a vague, sloppy fashion by the media and general population. But we're supposed to be tech nerds here, right? So we shouldn't be using the sloppy, fuzzy, media meaning of "clone". We should be using the technical meaning, insofar as it's applicable to software.
(Yeah, I know; chide, chide, chide
At some point, governments are going to realize they can make more from taxing the use of marijuana than they receive from the pockets of the pharmaceuticals.
I suspect that most governments do realize this (in the usual institutional sense). The problem is that, while those taxes would go to the government the pharma bribes go directly to the decision makers' pockets (or campaign funds). This is a lot less money, but it's more effective because it benefits the few people who are in a position to make changes.
This is a hard one to fight effectively.
You're both wrong. Precedence goes to the oldest technical definition. So a "cracker" is a rural native of Florida or Georgia.
;-)
(I have some good friends who are crackers. And damn proud of it. And a couple of them are computer experts who object strongly to other nerds taking their name in vain.
The war of words is (and has been) over. You lost. Get over it.
;-) generally understand that it's not a good idea to "give in" to the popular use of the word. This just leads to jargon that's costantly in flux, so you can't read technical docs from a few years ago, and you can't communicate coherently with others in the field.
...
Actually, it's just another example of a word that is a technical term in a technical field, while being used with a different meaning by the general public. Technical jargon is full of such words. And the techies (at least the competent ones
The only practical solution is to face the fact that the word has different technical and popular meanings. When talking to others in your field, you use the technical meaning. Anyone who confuses the two is instantly discredited in tecnical settings.
A competent computer geek understands the two meanings of "hacker", and can almost always tell which meaning is intended. So there's no reason to find a better word.
One of my favorite examples is the physicists' term "quantum", which was coined to refer to the smallest change in a quantity that the universe allows. The popular meaning, of course, is a very large change. So the technical and popular meanings are antonyms. In this case, the word after "quantum" usually gives away which meaning was intended. The media and others say "quantum leap", while scientists say "quantum jump" or sometimes "quantum change". You almost never hear "quantum leap" in a technical setting, except humorously.
I recently read a news article that mentioned a "quantum leap" in an organization's income. I immediately thought that their income had increased by $0.01 (per annum?). But, of course, I knew that wasn't what the writer meant.
Others can contribute their favorite technical/popular definitions of words
The sad fact is that the majority of OS projects don't ever make it to version 1.0 because ...
That's funny; all of mine do.
Of course, it's because I number the first version of a program "1.0".
I don't know what's wrong with those other programmers.
now put apache in the hands of people who know nothing about computers...
;-) being pwned via their web server.
That's exactly what Apple does. When you fire up a new Mac, one of the things it asks you is whether you want a web server. If you click "Yes", it sets up an apache server on the machine. You have a "Sites" directory that is your web directory. You move files into that directory (or subdirectories). They're on the Web, at least if your machine is on the Web. If not, it's still a live web site which you can test locally to your heart's desire. When you have it like you want it, you can copy the whole thing to a machine that is on the Web.
I have a Powerbook on which I do this, though my actual Web sites are on linux and FreeBSD boxes. It works fine, and there's no history of novices' machines (or mine
(There is a serious problem with running rsync between OSX and other unixoid systems. But that's a different issue, not related to security.)
Of course, you can still endanger your machine by installing CGI programs that violate security. But your typical Joe Sixpack isn't gonna do that. Programmers will, but they're not "people who know nothing about computers".
No, apache is the poster boy for debunking the claim that being a market leader automatically makes you a hacker/cracker target. Apache has nearly 70% of the web-server market now, but it isn't a security threat. Your CGI programs may be, but apache isn't.
You'll have to find a better excuse for why IE is such a security danger. The real reason is that it's written to be insecure, and MS has no motive to fix its problems. After all, it's the market leader, so people must like it the way it is. Why change something that's so popular?
A couple of years ago, as MS was coming out with their tablet PC, I recall reading several articles about it that mentioned that it had been for sale in Asia for a year - running linux. But somehow sales of the linux version got blocked in the US.
...
I suppose you could have ordered the Korean or Malaysian version