My opinion is coloured by the fact I loathe that particular newspaper. Their agenda is basically whichever direction the prevailing wind in the Conservative Party blows. They were forced to return to their Conservative roots 70 years ago after the party they were backing at the time (brown uniforms) lost credibility with the start of WW2.
At the moment the Conservative party stands against the EU, so that is their main theme. They do not seem to feel obliged to tell the truth, although it often happens by default.
I think it was a journalist of one of their associated newspapers who had a run-in with the Lord Mayor of London last year. After persistent goading, the mayor accused the (jewish) journalist of behaving like a concentration camp guard for which the mayor was suspended 4 weeks. The suspension was then set aside on appeal, although it was clear the journalist was only being obnoxious and could not be considered a war criminal.
I remember the excitement when Netscape 4.x was originally ported to Linux. The mainstream browser / email client / whatever (who cared about IE?) was now available for us.
The last place I worked which used it was in 2004 - maybe they still do - 'cos somehow their management thought anything from Mozilla was too experimental (and anything from Microsoft too insecure). I suppose this is for them.
Actually, that does make sense in this particular case. The MVP award was for the functionality, the cease and desist was for allowing this functionality even for the freebie version.
Having said that, Jamie Candale has dragged a lawyer in and they think he is not in violation. Microsoft have been rather vague as to what he is supposed to be in violation of (and he asked very very specifically). Is this a matter of US law differing from EU law?
The German-language 'PC-Professionell' (they belonged to Ziff-Davis back then) used to always carry a full-page advert for 'Waibel' computers on the back cover. Inside the magazine, they would review various hardware and Waibel *always* got the editor's choice award. The way I remember it, even if they were not reviewing any other PCs they would still review the finest offering from Waibel so they could rave about it. As far as I remember, other Ziff-Davis magazines did the same but it is PC-Pro I really noticed.
Another computer magazine called C't also reviewed Waibel hardware once or twice. In the last review they gave, they indicated the hardware was ok at best (I think they were overclocking) but that the XP Licenses were illegal - something they got Microsoft to confirm. This was in late 2002. Waibel ceased trading in January 2003.
I am sure that Waibel paying for full-page back-cover adverts, and the rave-reviews inside were just a coincidence.
Quoting the DailyTech article: Once presented with the data for this article, Schnieder paused before responding. "I think if you look back even five years, you would have seen this type of thing be much more common than it is today." He concludes, "Like most things, the marketplace will eventually weed out the businesses and websites who choose to operate in this manner." Waibel closed. I occasionally look at a PC-Professionell nowadays but I can't see any obvious weighting in their reviews so hopefully the company works differently nowadays - almost 5 years later.
And this was a liberal watchdog group? Gimme a break. I thought the left at least gave lip service to freedom of speech.
So did I. He may be obnoxious but setting some attack dog on him to pick up and publicise his misdeeds does rather stink. If someone feels personally insulted and takes offence, fine. But that is not what happened here.
The difference with rapper DMX is that he is not employed by someone who will sack him for perceived outrage. His performance is measured in how many CDs he sells, not how many people he does not manage to offend.
I noticed this article via the Firehose yesterday. It seems to have been rejected initially but enough people must have voted it up that it eventually made the main page. The other story I noticed which came in after a similar delay was the one about magellan the search engine and search patterns over the day and over the years.
Why complain? Anyone here must have found the article interesting enough to take a closer look at.
If this sort of move was pulled on the basis of a retroactively changed license, the FSF would be toast. Novell's lawyers would have blown the FSF lawyers out of the water and the only winners (apart from the lawyers) would have been a large company in NE Seattle.
This would have been seriously bad news for Linux if it had been attempted. The Linux Kernel / GNU Software are not currently under GPL V3. Stopping a major Linux distribution for violating a license which was not even in force at the time of the violation would have been insane. Hell, even Caldera were never cut off *that* way.
Linus would certainly have understood the ramifications, I can't imagine the GNU foundation being stupid enough to flex muscles that way either.
This is one of those ideas that sounds semi reasonable until you actually think about it.
I remember him as George Bush the Elder's enforcer, he was the one who whipped people into line to get Bush's Supreme Court nominee confirmed. The nominee was Clarence 'Long Dong Silver' Thomas.
British keyboard. I suppose it keeps US and Russian script kiddies out. Maybe I should use something like HääkürDöödß (oops, one of those characters gets eaten by/. does that mean it is secure?).
Dead on. The passwords I use at work are pretty pathetic.
The first reason is that I have to be able to remember them which is difficult when they have to change every 6 weeks, the second reason is that only people within the company have access to the network anyway.
In order to get in from outside, I need another (strong, permanent, set by me) password and a 6-digit Tamagotchi code which changes every 60 seconds. If I did not have to change my work password so frequently, it would be a lot stronger.
The other explanation would be that Debian has done something to seriously piss the MySQL people off (my speculation).
I *know* that they went this way with the Seamonkey crew. Here is a reproduced Newsgroup response from a Seamonkey developer on the subject of Debian and Iceape (the previous thread entry is in italics and the developers response is bold:
The "SeaMonkey" trademark is held by MoFo, but AIUI, they allow the Council to grant people the right to use it.
Well, MoFo applied for the trademarks, but doesn't hold them yet, as they've not yet been granted. They applied for them representing us though, and they will leave management of the trademark in the hands of the SeaMonkey Council.
But AIUI, Debian has moved past caring about using MoFo's trademarks. And AFAICT from this thread, the level of bitterness on the SeaMonkey side seems even higher than in the Mozilla community in general.
That may very much be true, as they pre-judged us of being the same as MoCo and not even listening to what we wanted to say. Us being legally backend by MoFo was enough for them to not even really discuss this topic, i.e. not even asking what the terms for using the SeaMonkey trademarks would be.
And their choice of name for the clone they are shipping is an insult in my ears anyways, but that's just my personal opinion.
BTW, I really think their inconsistent treatment of trademarks is enough reason for not understanding them anyways. Their own trademarks are protected with one of the strictest possible policies (no use except explicitely granted by Debian) and then they accuse other of being too strict - and it seems some of their responsible people have not yet understood that trademarks and copyright are two completely different things legally.
Anyways, for me, that discussion is over and Debian itself is dead meat in this regard for me personally (note that ubuntu even departs from Debian's path for MoCo trademarks already).
Elsewhere in the thread, IceApe was described by the same person as a 'Crappy Clone'.
The Gulf Stream is partially fuelled by the temperature gradient oop north (I'll be lazy and admit I forget the details) and has apparently already declined recently. This should kill it altogether. In the past, the North Pole being ice free has triggered ice ages.
How? Once the ice is gone, the sea can evaporate more easily which increases precipitation in the far north. A lot of this is snow. Eventually the icecap reasserts itself.
Apparently there was a time in the very distant past where the oceans were almost totally iced up, something made possible by the then alignment of the continents. This can apparently not happen again the way things are now.
I thought one of the XP SP2 fixes was to start the firewall before accepting incoming connections, or if not - some fix was promptly added to do this. There was some discussion along these lines when SP2 came out but I have forgotten the details.
Did MagicM not say just that? The Windows firewall does not have any outbound protection at all, as Microsoft themselves make clear.
fwiw, my Linux firewall is set up in exactly the same way: block all incoming traffic but permit all outgoing. I am a bit hazy on the DNS firewall requirements.
The original article is just plain foolish. The place I work moved from NT4 to XP Pro (without SP2!) 18 months ago. This involved upgrading a sigificant proportion of the hardware so it was fairly big bucks, although why they bypassed SP2 is beyond me - there are a lot of pointers that suggest incompetence somewhere in the department.
They will not be moving to Vista in the next few years. Vista has higher hardware requirements and offers better security. The company has a firewall and most users do not have admin rights anyway. Who needs Vista under these circumstances?
The previous place I worked moved to Win2K from NT4 some time around 2002, although XP was available. Slow adoption is the rule and only people who have no idea expect anything else.
One side effect of any patent attack by Microsoft on Linux would be a large number of technically savvy people looking for reasons why that patent was invalid. There is a precedent for this - when SCO launched their attack, everyone started digging. Given that a large number of patents out their are dubious at best, exposing them to that level of daylight would hurt. The only problem with this is: someone has to pay the lawyers stand up in court and beat Microsoft down. Who? IBM? Red Hat? It won't be Novell.
There is another reason for Microsoft to fight clean, it is the same reason they are careful not to be too unpleasant to Samba - the Industry would take a dim view of Microsoft attempts to torpedo something essential. Linux is essential, as is Windows / Unix interoperability.
Finally, if Microsoft did pull some patent attack, there is a good chance someone would be able to rewrite the code held to be in violation.
I am a bit surprised Fox Atomic had not signed some form of contract with Emory. That would have allowed them to sue for breach of contract. I suppose all this means that Fox Atomic were not going to pay Emory.
But when you start getting fancy complicated interactive applications crammed into that model, it gets ugly and breaks. Games, document editors, all that sort of stuff belongs in an *application* framework, not a document framework. And mind you, I find a lot of these networked applications very useful, but still, they don't belong in the Web; they belong in something else, an Application Browser to go along with your Document Browser. Though honestly, I'd just do away with the whole "browser" concept entirely and treat internet documents and applications the same as you would a doc or app on the other side of your LAN, which is not much different than you treat local docs and apps, besides permissions differences).
I had never thought of it this way before, but Gates' logic must have been a bit similar when it came to using Internet Explorer for everything under Windows (leaving aside the 'smash Netscape' issue). The 'Explorer' software should allow you to go everywhere, look at anything and execute anything. So far, so good and all very user-friendly. Only one really tiny problem - security. The Explorer concept did not take account of sites hiding inimical software and forcing it to be executed, it did not even take account of CDs causing damage via AutoRun. Active X and maybe JavaScript (not from Microsoft) place too much trust in the outside world. Even adding a firewall-like trust-level (Local=Trusted, DMZ, outside=untrusted) was not enough.
Any browser replacement has to know when to stop, what not to execute. I don't think it is going to happen because far too many people and sites will not be prepared to give up the comfort a browser offers for an increase in security.
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion is coloured by the fact I loathe that particular newspaper. Their agenda is basically whichever direction the prevailing wind in the Conservative Party blows. They were forced to return to their Conservative roots 70 years ago after the party they were backing at the time (brown uniforms) lost credibility with the start of WW2.
At the moment the Conservative party stands against the EU, so that is their main theme. They do not seem to feel obliged to tell the truth, although it often happens by default.
I think it was a journalist of one of their associated newspapers who had a run-in with the Lord Mayor of London last year. After persistent goading, the mayor accused the (jewish) journalist of behaving like a concentration camp guard for which the mayor was suspended 4 weeks. The suspension was then set aside on appeal, although it was clear the journalist was only being obnoxious and could not be considered a war criminal.
Moving on-topic, that would be an idea for a Slashdot poll:
I'm a member of:
I'd take the Cowboy Neal option.
I remember the excitement when Netscape 4.x was originally ported to Linux. The mainstream browser / email client / whatever (who cared about IE?) was now available for us.
The last place I worked which used it was in 2004 - maybe they still do - 'cos somehow their management thought anything from Mozilla was too experimental (and anything from Microsoft too insecure). I suppose this is for them.
The flame has been passed on.
Actually, that does make sense in this particular case. The MVP award was for the functionality, the cease and desist was for allowing this functionality even for the freebie version.
Having said that, Jamie Candale has dragged a lawyer in and they think he is not in violation. Microsoft have been rather vague as to what he is supposed to be in violation of (and he asked very very specifically). Is this a matter of US law differing from EU law?
The perils of globalisation. . .
The German-language 'PC-Professionell' (they belonged to Ziff-Davis back then) used to always carry a full-page advert for 'Waibel' computers on the back cover. Inside the magazine, they would review various hardware and Waibel *always* got the editor's choice award. The way I remember it, even if they were not reviewing any other PCs they would still review the finest offering from Waibel so they could rave about it. As far as I remember, other Ziff-Davis magazines did the same but it is PC-Pro I really noticed.
Another computer magazine called C't also reviewed Waibel hardware once or twice. In the last review they gave, they indicated the hardware was ok at best (I think they were overclocking) but that the XP Licenses were illegal - something they got Microsoft to confirm. This was in late 2002. Waibel ceased trading in January 2003.
I am sure that Waibel paying for full-page back-cover adverts, and the rave-reviews inside were just a coincidence.
Quoting the DailyTech article: Once presented with the data for this article, Schnieder paused before responding. "I think if you look back even five years, you would have seen this type of thing be much more common than it is today." He concludes, "Like most things, the marketplace will eventually weed out the businesses and websites who choose to operate in this manner."
Waibel closed. I occasionally look at a PC-Professionell nowadays but I can't see any obvious weighting in their reviews so hopefully the company works differently nowadays - almost 5 years later.
Two different sorts of popularity contests. One has to sell CDs, the other one has to avoid upsetting too many (powerful) people.
And this was a liberal watchdog group? Gimme a break. I thought the left at least gave lip service to freedom of speech.
So did I. He may be obnoxious but setting some attack dog on him to pick up and publicise his misdeeds does rather stink. If someone feels personally insulted and takes offence, fine. But that is not what happened here.
The difference with rapper DMX is that he is not employed by someone who will sack him for perceived outrage. His performance is measured in how many CDs he sells, not how many people he does not manage to offend.
Does this school district block CreationWiki?, Conservapedia?
Discuss in less than 500 words.
I noticed this article via the Firehose yesterday. It seems to have been rejected initially but enough people must have voted it up that it eventually made the main page. The other story I noticed which came in after a similar delay was the one about magellan the search engine and search patterns over the day and over the years.
Why complain? Anyone here must have found the article interesting enough to take a closer look at.
That simplifies things.
If this sort of move was pulled on the basis of a retroactively changed license, the FSF would be toast. Novell's lawyers would have blown the FSF lawyers out of the water and the only winners (apart from the lawyers) would have been a large company in NE Seattle.
Phew
This would have been seriously bad news for Linux if it had been attempted. The Linux Kernel / GNU Software are not currently under GPL V3. Stopping a major Linux distribution for violating a license which was not even in force at the time of the violation would have been insane. Hell, even Caldera were never cut off *that* way.
Linus would certainly have understood the ramifications, I can't imagine the GNU foundation being stupid enough to flex muscles that way either.
This is one of those ideas that sounds semi reasonable until you actually think about it.
I remember him as George Bush the Elder's enforcer, he was the one who whipped people into line to get Bush's Supreme Court nominee confirmed. The nominee was Clarence 'Long Dong Silver' Thomas.
You will not be able to copyright it - Goggle shows clear evidence of prior art.
Am trying it:
-> Phishing -
What does that look like?
HEY!!!!!
British keyboard. /. does that mean it is secure?).
I suppose it keeps US and Russian script kiddies out. Maybe I should use something like HääkürDöödß (oops, one of those characters gets eaten by
Dead on.
The passwords I use at work are pretty pathetic.
The first reason is that I have to be able to remember them which is difficult when they have to change every 6 weeks, the second reason is that only people within the company have access to the network anyway.
In order to get in from outside, I need another (strong, permanent, set by me) password and a 6-digit Tamagotchi code which changes every 60 seconds. If I did not have to change my work password so frequently, it would be a lot stronger.
The other explanation would be that Debian has done something to seriously piss the MySQL people off (my speculation).
I *know* that they went this way with the Seamonkey crew. Here is a reproduced Newsgroup response from a Seamonkey developer on the subject of Debian and Iceape (the previous thread entry is in italics and the developers response is bold:
The "SeaMonkey" trademark is held by MoFo, but AIUI, they allow the Council to grant people the right to use it.
Well, MoFo applied for the trademarks, but doesn't hold them yet, as they've not yet been granted. They applied for them representing us though, and they will leave management of the trademark in the hands of the SeaMonkey Council.
But AIUI, Debian has moved past caring about using MoFo's trademarks.
And AFAICT from this thread, the level of bitterness on the SeaMonkey side seems even higher than in the Mozilla community in general.
That may very much be true, as they pre-judged us of being the same as MoCo and not even listening to what we wanted to say. Us being legally backend by MoFo was enough for them to not even really discuss this topic, i.e. not even asking what the terms for using the SeaMonkey trademarks would be.
And their choice of name for the clone they are shipping is an insult in my ears anyways, but that's just my personal opinion.
BTW, I really think their inconsistent treatment of trademarks is enough reason for not understanding them anyways. Their own trademarks are protected with one of the strictest possible policies (no use except explicitely granted by Debian) and then they accuse other of being too strict - and it seems some of their responsible people have not yet understood that trademarks and copyright are two completely different things legally.
Anyways, for me, that discussion is over and Debian itself is dead meat in this regard for me personally (note that ubuntu even departs from Debian's path for MoCo trademarks already).
Elsewhere in the thread, IceApe was described by the same person as a 'Crappy Clone'.
I can think of a counter argument.
The Gulf Stream is partially fuelled by the temperature gradient oop north (I'll be lazy and admit I forget the details) and has apparently already declined recently. This should kill it altogether. In the past, the North Pole being ice free has triggered ice ages.
How? Once the ice is gone, the sea can evaporate more easily which increases precipitation in the far north. A lot of this is snow. Eventually the icecap reasserts itself.
Apparently there was a time in the very distant past where the oceans were almost totally iced up, something made possible by the then alignment of the continents. This can apparently not happen again the way things are now.
I thought one of the XP SP2 fixes was to start the firewall before accepting incoming connections, or if not - some fix was promptly added to do this. There was some discussion along these lines when SP2 came out but I have forgotten the details.
Ummm
Did MagicM not say just that? The Windows firewall does not have any outbound protection at all, as Microsoft themselves make clear.
fwiw, my Linux firewall is set up in exactly the same way: block all incoming traffic but permit all outgoing. I am a bit hazy on the DNS firewall requirements.
Flamebait with a core of truth.
The original article is just plain foolish. The place I work moved from NT4 to XP Pro (without SP2!) 18 months ago. This involved upgrading a sigificant proportion of the hardware so it was fairly big bucks, although why they bypassed SP2 is beyond me - there are a lot of pointers that suggest incompetence somewhere in the department.
They will not be moving to Vista in the next few years. Vista has higher hardware requirements and offers better security. The company has a firewall and most users do not have admin rights anyway. Who needs Vista under these circumstances?
The previous place I worked moved to Win2K from NT4 some time around 2002, although XP was available. Slow adoption is the rule and only people who have no idea expect anything else.
One side effect of any patent attack by Microsoft on Linux would be a large number of technically savvy people looking for reasons why that patent was invalid. There is a precedent for this - when SCO launched their attack, everyone started digging. Given that a large number of patents out their are dubious at best, exposing them to that level of daylight would hurt. The only problem with this is: someone has to pay the lawyers stand up in court and beat Microsoft down. Who? IBM? Red Hat? It won't be Novell.
There is another reason for Microsoft to fight clean, it is the same reason they are careful not to be too unpleasant to Samba - the Industry would take a dim view of Microsoft attempts to torpedo something essential. Linux is essential, as is Windows / Unix interoperability.
Finally, if Microsoft did pull some patent attack, there is a good chance someone would be able to rewrite the code held to be in violation.
I am a bit surprised Fox Atomic had not signed some form of contract with Emory. That would have allowed them to sue for breach of contract. I suppose all this means that Fox Atomic were not going to pay Emory.
Looking at the (tagging beta) flags, one needs to be 'Dupe'.
But when you start getting fancy complicated interactive applications crammed into that model, it gets ugly and breaks. Games, document editors, all that sort of stuff belongs in an *application* framework, not a document framework. And mind you, I find a lot of these networked applications very useful, but still, they don't belong in the Web; they belong in something else, an Application Browser to go along with your Document Browser. Though honestly, I'd just do away with the whole "browser" concept entirely and treat internet documents and applications the same as you would a doc or app on the other side of your LAN, which is not much different than you treat local docs and apps, besides permissions differences).
I had never thought of it this way before, but Gates' logic must have been a bit similar when it came to using Internet Explorer for everything under Windows (leaving aside the 'smash Netscape' issue). The 'Explorer' software should allow you to go everywhere, look at anything and execute anything. So far, so good and all very user-friendly. Only one really tiny problem - security. The Explorer concept did not take account of sites hiding inimical software and forcing it to be executed, it did not even take account of CDs causing damage via AutoRun. Active X and maybe JavaScript (not from Microsoft) place too much trust in the outside world. Even adding a firewall-like trust-level (Local=Trusted, DMZ, outside=untrusted) was not enough.
Any browser replacement has to know when to stop, what not to execute. I don't think it is going to happen because far too many people and sites will not be prepared to give up the comfort a browser offers for an increase in security.