Kinesis is the best keyboard I've ever used
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Ergonomic Keyboards
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· Score: 2
A friend of mine got the Kinesis Ergo Keyboard and loves it. www.kinesis-ergo.com. It does slow you down at first, and it will make it harder to type on a regular keyboard, but it is a real wrist-saver. It comes with QWERY layout but is designed to be able to switch to DVORAK and other layouts easily.
I've been using one of these at work now for a little less than two years and I LOVE THIS KEYBOARD!
I'm convinced my Kinesis keyboard has saved my career from RSI induced disability... it's so good I shelled out the $300 to buy one for home. OK, so it's a wierd layout that most folks can't deal with at first... but the hand strain you save is well worth the upfront training costs associated with the switchover.
Anyone who is experiencing hand pain associated with heavy keyboard use should try this unit out. I strongly recommend this keyboard! And no, I'm not assiciated with Kinesis in any way, nor do I own their stock -- just a satisfied customer.
Please submit your own letter TODAY! Follow their guidelines for attaching your letter in a MINE encoded email, and let them know your concerns! This is not just about free software... how do you think public libraries are going to function when all intellectual property is delivered electronically with access controls and licenses stipulating where, when, and how said material can be accessed? Newspapers? How would you like it to be illegal for a reader to allow someone else to read over his/her shoulder? How would you like GPS hardware installed in your newspaper reader which limits where you may read a story? Hell, how would you like to have to buy (or rent) special hardware just to read a newspaper? How are communities supposed to afford these new technologies for their community library? Is we gut our public libraries we'll gut the ability for citizens to join the public discourse... this is very disturbing.
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David O. Carson, General Counsel, Copyright GC/I&R, P.O. Box 70400, Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024
Mr. Carson,
I'm writing in response to the Library of Congress's request for comments regarding Section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As a citizen of the United States who earns my living through writing and maintaining software, among other types of intellectual property, this law concerns me greatly.
While not an attorney, my understanding of how this law is being interpreted currently in courts, for example in the DeCSS suit brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against many online providers and web page authors along with the authors of the original DeCSS code, in commentary by many pundits published throughout the technical press, and finally my own reading of the law, section 1201(a)(1), said law could give sweeping new powers and authority to those copyright holders who include technical provisions to prevent unauthorized copying and presentation of copyrighted materials to the detriment of "fair use" laws. This thwarts basic citizens' rights to access what they've purchased simply because it might violate a contractual requirement of the license, along with technical provisions included in the media content to enforce such a stipulation.
How will this affect the rights of citizens to use our public libraries? Will copyright owners now be allowed to contractually stipulate in their license that libraries, or their clientele, must purchase per use licenses to access copyrighted materials? Given the trend toward digital content over traditional printed publishing, this is not as crazy as it sounds. Within a few decades it's quite possible that publishing on paper, which I understand will not fall under section (1201(a)(a) and thus will continue to be available to public libraries under "fair use" guidelines simply because it lacks a technical mechanism for copy protection, may become outmoded as paper costs already far exceed the cost of distributing intellectual materials electronically. Should this take place 1201(a)(1) has the potential to essentially criminalize public libraries as we know them, forcing a dichotomy between those who can afford the per use costs charged by copyright holders against those who can't, while gutting a public infrastructure for the dissemination of new ideas.
Beyond public libraries, are we to accept the notion that copyright holders should now have a new set of rights which not only limit under what conditions a licensee may copy works, but also when a licensee may access said works, where they may access said works, with what equipment they may access those works, and even limit the copyright holder's liability simply by the licensee opening a shrinkwrap license they can't even read until after the fact?
Because if it's acceptable that Sony, for example, can legally lock the contents of a DVD video disk through encryption under force of copyright law as a mechanism of copyright protection under 1201(a)(1), then how will consumers enjoy their basic rights for legally copying a "backup archive" of content for which they've purchased a license? Is it "fair use" to prevent consumers from accessing said materials through regional locks, or stipulating which hardware or software platform is legal for the reading of said disks? If so, consumers will be forced to purchase not only the content, but also a physical locks, or stipulating which hardware or software platform is legal for the reading of said disks? If so, consumers will be forced to purchase not only the content, but also a physical device and software from the content producer, thus limiting their right to enjoy the content to which they've purchased access with onerous new responsibilities and costs never previously required of consumers simply trying to gain legal access to copyrighted materials
Does the Library of Congress wish to allow the Associated Press the right to use copyright law to stipulate when and where a reader may access an AP newspaper story? If the AP can't use 1201(a)(1) to limit what kind of paper the newspaper publisher must use to print a story, nor where a reader may read, view, or otherwise enjoy printed materials to which (s)he has legally purchased access, why should they enjoy a right to limit said access electronically? In a near future of electronic newspapers and handheld electronic readers, already possible with the popular 3Com Palm Pilot, making obsolete the traditional printed daily will it be reasonable to allow the AP to include Global Position Satellite equipment in an electronic newspaper reader to enforce the provision that a news story must only be read in a certain city, state, or country if this electronic dissemination of the published materials meets 1201(a)(1)'s copyprotection guidelines? Will 1201(a)(1) allow the AP to force readers to purchase an AP approved electronic news reader as the only legal method for accessing AP published news? And given the sweeping new powers 1201(a)(1) allows if a restriction is specified in the a copyright license, can the AP prevent researchers the right to copy small pieces of a news story within todays "fair use" guidelines to cite a source within a research paper because of a combination of a contractual stipulation in the license and copy protection distributed with the intellectual property? How different are these scenarios from allowing Sony to stipulate under what hardware a copyright licensee may view a DVD video, or which country they in which they may enjoy access to the materials they've purchased?
If enacted as written this could enforce a whole new monopoly for content producers and copyright holders, not just protecting the media content from illegal copying and bootleg sales, but also enforcing the sale of equipment which has been licensed strictly to access and view said materials. This will gut public access to copyrighted works in libraries, individual access to copyrighted works by consumers through open and public technologies, and doesn't even serve to protect the copyright holder's basic interest of preventing the illicit copying of privately owned intellectual property. It's strictly a new mechanism to force consumers to buy more equipment simply to enjoy access to materials already purchased, no different from Ford Motor Company mandating that Ford gasoline be used with a Ford car by force of law.
Copyright should not exist to enforce new restrictions beyond copying a privately owned intellectual work. If the Library of Congress, along with the legislative branch, enact new laws to expand the scope of Copyright law as defined in 1201(a)(1) the consequences for public access to information and discourse may be severe. Think carefully before enacting such laws as they may leave consumers and individuals in our society unable to join in basic public discourse. Every new financial wall enacted to prevent citizens from basic "fair use" rights to copyrighted works is potentially devastating to our public library infrastructure and thus damaging to public discourse and our very democracy.
Sincerely, J. Maynard Gelinas ---------------------- Cambridge, MA., 02139 maynard@jmg.com
Note the "." at the end of the username... Bruce did NOT write that comment, some idiot is trying to steal his identity using a very similar name to confuse readers. Just setting the record straight...
For all those out there bitching over the $50 price tag on some of these Loki games, I note that EBWorld has several Loki titles for between $25 and $29... very reasonable. The games are Heretic II, Hero's of Might and Magic, and Railroad Tycoon. They did have Myth II for $25, but it looks like they've sold this out! Good.
I've bought five games from Loki and Unreal Tournament because of the Linux support. Profit is the only real development which will prod games makers into supporting Linux over the long haul. I earn a good deal of money from my UNIX and Linux skills, so I'm in a position to use this to support those projects and companies promote those values and products I desire. If you're earning a good salery from this you should put your money where your signature is as well and go to the Loki web site and plunk some money down for that game you've always wanted under Linux.
There's one depressing problem with this... unfortunately Civ: Call To Power has kept me up to all hours destroying my daytime productivity. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!:-)
Actually, printing in Unix works great if you have a reasonable printer. If you paid less than $200 for it, good odds it's going to suck. Of course, those printers are usually just crap under any os, but that's not at issue here. A printer that speaks languages like postscript, pcl, pjl, etc. is a good choice under any Unix. In spooler-land, I find that LPRng works wonderfully, in concert with ifhp if need be. It may not be intuitive for newbies, but it works just fine, and is exceedingly powerful.
I'm well versed in setting up printing under both System V and BSD... frankly I consider both archaic, though at least BSD is simple and consistent across platforms. System V printing is an absolute mess, with considerable differences between HP-UX, Solaris, and other UNIXen flavors. I can't tell you how much of a pain it is supporting heterogeneous UNIX printing, even in a straight Postscript environment.
Regarding various consumer grade printer support: your position seems to suggest that we shouldn't bother supporting that "...crap." If you think this isn't a serious issue which compromises the potential adoption of Freenix at the consumer level, then we have nothing to discuss. I'd like to think that soon enough Linux and BSD distributions will near the level of end-user configuration friendliness that NT and MacOS share. If this isn't your goal then of course lpd and lpsched can be coaxed by a professional into providing reasonable service in a commercial setting, and that's probably enough. Otherwise, I'd argue that Christopher Browne is correct, that printing under UNIX is a complete mess, and that the Freenix community better pay attention to this issue otherwise it will bite us in the ass pretty hard. CUPS is a reasonable solution to this problem, and I'm pleased it's evolved to provide both a GPL foundation ALONG WITH support for proprietary printer drivers. I challenge you to detail how this is different from Linus allowing proprietary binary only loadable modules in Linux.
Boy, MacOS X looks pretty good from this vantagepoint, eh?:-)
Not really. No source == not for me. If I'm going to use something for which I can't get the source, I'll use IRIX. At least IRIX doesn't try not to be Unix. Doesn't try too hard, anyway. Display PostScript? Sure! OpenGL? Fast as hell! A real X server? Of course! No thanks, Apple. Now we just wait for SGI to finish open-sourcing the remaining good parts of IRIX and go to town.
Don't expect the Display Postscript extensions in Sun's OpenWindows and SGI's X environment to continue for much longer. Adobe has made it clear that Display Postscript is depreciated and that they will not support this technology any longer... this is why Apple developed their own Display PDF technology. As a former NeXT Cube and NeXTStation owner I argue that they were the most elegant computers I've ever had the pleasure to own. The damn things still work well and still hold up as excellent (if somewhat slow) workstations. If Apple can provide that kind of environment again, with modern hardware, I'm there. But this is personal taste.
That's not to say the IRIX is junk... if you prefer IRIX to MacOS X in the commercial world, well so be it. But to argue that you won't buy MacOS X for free software reasons doesn't give Apple the credit they deserve WRT keeping the OS internals open and free. They had no obligation to release their BSD code changes back to the *BSD projects, yet they have. While they've kept much of the core Apple products closed and proprietary, the fact is that this option is left open to them intentionally by the BSD coders. That's what they want, otherwise they would have chosen to release under the GPL. I respect their right to do so and consider that whatever Apple shared back to the community to be a gift we should thank them for, rather than cynically taking them to task for not releasing core Apple technology with which they expect to turn profits.
Corel was in their rights to fork off the open Wine tree at any time and not even share back. I'm certain the project heads at Corel responsible for the winelib portion of the Corel Office for Linux product certainly supported the notion of their control over the release flow and which critical bugs to squash. Corel is producing a product on a time schedule for sale in the commercial world. I'm sure this set a somewhat different agenda than the Wine project leaders might pursue; I doubt the Wine team feels the slightest wrong'd as well. Nor should they. Why choose the BSD license otherwise?
Yeah, I agree. Printing is a mess in UNIX... it's received such little attention over the years that the system now seems seriously broken. CUPS is nice, but it's just a reaction to the balkinization of printer standards from straight Postscript to proprietary protocols. Ghostscript can't keep up with the new stuff out on the market. While lpd is constantly being updates for security fixes, I don't see many new features, and certainly no thought of integration with proprietary printer drivers (nor should they). CUPS looks pretty nice in this regard.
I understant patent issues are preventing direct inclusion of TrueType support into XFree 4.0, requiring the use of a font server instead. That seems to leave some kind of Display Postscript X server extension as the best alternative. Since Adobe is never going to play ball, what about the Display Ghostscript project over at GNUStep? I understand there's a new release coming soon, and that the DGS and xdps stuff is getting close.
Boy, MacOS X looks pretty good from this vantagepoint, eh?:-)
Hey, Did anyone notice that this doesn't include a trainer to generate new statistical voice models? What's up with that??? This means it's basically useless until the voice model file format is figured out and a trainer is written. This isn't kiddy stuff either, the Free Software community might have to hire some speech scientists to get this thing usable....
On a related note, if someone can cobble together a trainer this would make an excellent distributed client project, ala SETI@HOME.
Let's be clear, Tom Sweeny's got my money for Unreal Tournament... and it plays in Linux on my cheap-ass Voodoo II card wonderfully. UT is plenty fun. But to compare even a high end AGP 3Dfx or NVIDIA card against serious SGI iron is just plain wrong. He's got a point that the newer 3D cards are good... they finally support 32 bit color (earlier 3Dfx cards like mine only support 16bit), they're reasonably fast... but they don't hardware acclerate anything but pushing pixels out to the display. Here's what Steve Baker wrote on the FlightGear Hardware Requirements page for a simple overview of the differences between high end 3D acceleration and what we're using on our PC's. I quote:
"The important thing to think about when considering the performance of 3D cards is that the present generation of consumer-level boards only speed up the pixel-pushing side of things.
When you are drawing graphics in 3D, there are generally a hierarchy of things to do:
1.Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics) 2.Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail) 3.Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate) 4.Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)
On a $1M full-scale flight simulator visual system, you do step (1) in the main CPU, and the hardware takes care of (2), (3) and (4)
On a $100k SGI workstation, you do (1) and (2) and the hardware takes care of (3) and (4)
On a $200 PC 3D card, you (or your OpenGL library software - which runs on the main CPU) do (1), (2) and (3) and the hardware takes care of (4).
On a machine without 3D hardware, the main CPU has to do everything."
Now, I'm nitpicking. It's a cool article from a cool guy, who just made a minor exaggeration. Oh, and Flightgear is one Free Software (GPL) project you want to track... if you've got even a cheap-ass 3D accelerator (like me), and are into flight simulators, this is one cool project!:-)
Redhat probably came in first in the poll because of all the slashdotters who went to read the article...
No, I read the article at six this morning, long before Slashdot posted this article. And even then, Redhat won at +40% with a significant lead over all the others.
i would not go so far as to say that the authors were anyhow biased. they chose windows for the clearly stated reason that it had the best configuration tools. they also pointed out that win2k had a very nice security feature set (which is of course not the same as having good security--we will have to wait for l0pht and others to decide that).
Of course they're biased. It's not possible to to both present opinion and avoid bias. This is OK, but it should be accepted as such. Since most people only read the first few paragraphs of an article, usually a journalist will sum up the main point of an article in the first couple of paragraphs... and we see that even though by objective measures Win2000 loses out to both Redhat Linux and Netware, they still prefer Win2000 because it "Tops the field" as the best "...general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable."[end of article] It may not be fast, it may not have well tested enterprise Directory management, it's "multithreaded IP stack" may only be useful on machines with multiple network interface cards (PCI is no Sun Enterprise crossbar backplane), it doesn't support serious clustering, and it's untested in production environments.
But it's still "Best of the bunch."
To the guy calling me a conspiracy theorist... given their previous attempts at astroturfing, why should I assume this is any different?
...with over 40% of the vote. And interestingly, many of the statements in this article are pretty subjective opinion. For example:
Microsoft's Windows 2000 edges out NetWare for the Network World Blue Ribbon Award. Windows 2000 tops the field with its management interface, server monitoring tools, storage management facilities and security measures.
Yet they admit several paragraphs down:
Windows 2000 demonstrated poor write performance across all our file tests. [...]
And even after turning off forced syncs after writes:
This second round of file testing proves that Windows 2000 is dependent on its file system cache to optimize write performance. The results of the testing with the write-through flag off were much higher - as much as 20 times faster. However, Windows 2000 still fell behind both NetWare and RedHat Linux in the file write tests when the write-through flag was off.
So, even though Win2000 is the slowest of the bunch (even slower than SCO's UNIXWare, according to this artile), it "Tops the field," but the benchmarks tell the true story. So, if you just skim the first few paragraphs of this article you'll walk away thinking Win2000 is the OS to beat. But by actually reading the article, you'll see the whole picture. Why do I think this is more of an advertisement for Win2000, than a serious article?
This post above was written by the interviewer, Dennis Kitz. Since he's the original author of the feature interview, don't you think his opionion holds more worth than a score of 1?
Folks, this was posted by Dennis Kitz himself. Moderators: TAKE NOTICE!
And I want to note that this guy was one of my heros as a kid... I even built one of his 384x192 hi-res boards (with board layout and instructions published in 80 Micro) for my Model 1 as a kid. We should all recognize that this man was responsible for significant computing advances among the hobbyist community during the late '70's and early '80's.
Lest the Slashdot community get too holier-than-thou when it comes to security, let us remember that GNU/Linux has had its share of security problems over the years.
VMS has had it's share of security problems too. So what? A more interesting metric is not whether an OS, or any underlying apps, present security holes, but how quickly they are fixed. See this Securityportal cover story for a comparison of time from announcement to vendor fix between Redhat Linux, Windows NT, and Sun Solaris (see, I can add gratuitous links as well!) I note that Redhat Linux won hands down in this competition, and that's only security updates from a vendor supplied source! I don't know about you, but when I hear about a serious security hole in lpd (for example), I don't wait around for Redhat to go recompile the fix. However, the Securityportal article makes a reasonable assumption that most small to medium sized businesses would probably rely on vendor supplied fixes rather than trying to find a hot Linux guru to compile up to the minute security fixes.
Now, of course, GNU/Linux developers are generally faster than Microsoft when it comes to fixing security holes and they don't, as a rule, engage in the same coverups and spin control as the Microsoft's PR flaks, but the question remains, why are there so many bugs in the first place?
DUH. Because C doesn't bounds check during compilation or run time. That's just ONE reason. Look, I'm no security "expert", but if you're uptight about security, and don't consider yourself competent at securing your own code, then either hire a professional to go through your C code with a fine tooth comb, or write it in some interpreted language like perl, LISP, Scheme, Python (whatever) and let the LANG developers deal with security.
Not that this will make your application any more secure, but it will pass the buck to the likes of Larry.
Other open source operating systems, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD have had security problems, but not in such numbers as the various GNU/Linux distributions.
This is bogus. And I run OpenBSD, the BSD distribution tailored for security, on my cablemodem gateway and consider it an excellent secure distribution out of the box (CD). But, so what? Can you give me ANY specific examples of userspace application security holes present in Linux that were not present in BSD? Hell, most of the networking kernel holes seemed ubiquitous across just about every OS and networking stack, BSD sockets and streams based.
On the kernel side I seem to remember that both BSD and Linux (and NT!) were vulnerable to the Ping of Death, various Tear Drop attacks and fragmented TCP attacks, and those lovely smurf DOS attacks. Don't see a significant difference here... both the BSD's and Linux kernel groups figured the problems out and posted solutions in record time, while the commercial vendors picked their butts and didn't post fixes for their products I might add.
On the userspace side of things, this is managed project by project. Since much our application software is ported between the BSDs, Linux, and most any other commercial UNIX, there's little difference. A bug in one version of lpd on Linux is almost surely the same bug on BSD
Rather than making fun of Microsoft for its own failings in the security realm, GNU/Linux users and developers could better spend their time improving the security of their OS of choice.
I'm 31 and have been voting in Presidential elections since '88. Usually I vote Democrat in federal and state elections, because I prefer most of the stated Democrat policies over Republican. But I'm just disgusted with huge soft money donations, lobbyists writing the bills that our legislators pass (along with another contribution), and the many riders and procedural tricks legislators use to subvert debate in what was supposed to be an open and public legislative forum.
I'd like to support the Reform ticket, but there's no way in hell I'll vote for Pat Buchanan. I'm actually considering joining the Republican party just so I can vote for McCain in the primary, because of his support for the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform legislation... and I think he stands a better chance against Bush than Bradley does against Gore.
Honestly I like both McCain and Bradley more than I like the entrenched Gore and Bush and if either of them wind up in the general election I'll probably vote Democrat or Republican based on this and not party politics.
I am SICK of party politics! The constant fighting between these two behemouths is affecting our democracy/republic in very dangerous ways... I honestly feel very disenfranchised from our political system -- which as a middle class computer geek if I'm the norm then our leaders better wake up. The current duality and conflict between just two parties has turned far too corrupt leaving us citizens holding the bag time and again.
What about a multi party system based on proportional representation like Germany has? I think if we could reform campaign finance and create a system with more than two parties we might gain the citizen's trust in the political system once again. Obviously, the only way for citizens to trust their government is if the government's representatives actually act in the citizen's interests, and that's clearly not happening with our current political system.
OT: Golgotha project still alive (forever)
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Quake 1 GPL'ed
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"Golgotha seems to have dies (www.golgotha.com), but maybe it was becuase it didn't come with an OGL renderer."
I'm not closely involved with the Golgotha team, but I've downloaded the source a couple of times and been impressed by what they've produced. I note that you point to the wrong URL for the primary Golgotha home page: http://golgotha.opengames.org I also note that they updated the news section of the homepage just a few days ago, Dec 16th, so the project still looks quite active. I'm sure it was just a simple mistake, but a check on freshmeat would have given you the link: here's the Freshmeat Golgotha appindex entry.
I look forward to Golgotha's release eventual 1.0 release, and soon thereafter my enjoyment of the completed game.:-)
Bruce made a mistake and put his foot in his mouth not because Slashdot popularized the post, but because suggesting a lawsuit against Corel was simply rash at this point; it may come to pass that at some future time a lawsuit against Corel, Redhat, VALinux, Pacific Hi-Tech, or whoever, may in fact be appropriate. So just because Bruce threw out this suggestion a little too soon doesn't mean that defending the GPL with the force of law won't be necessary at some future point.
That said, Bruce made a mistake. God knows, I've put my foot in my mouth often enough -- and usually when I'm pissed off -- so I feel plenty of sympathy for Bruce here. It's impossible to regularly post over the years and NOT say something stupid once in a while. Hasn't Linus overreacted in linux-kernel before? Let's not forget Eric Raymond with his Jedi Knight uniform at the Windows Refund day... I'm sure that went over well with the mass media journalists. And how about Bill Gate's video deposition... talk about tasting foot fungus.
It's normal for anyone who's in the spotlight to make the occasional mistake. Bruce recognized his error and apologized in public. Which is more than I can say for most who back themselves into an indefensible verbal corner.
Even on earth, bilateral symmetry was chosen essentially by accident - one of the huge explosions of life-forms (pre-Cambrian, I think, but could be wrong) had trilateral symmetry and other even wierder (to us) things popping up. It happened that, ON EARTH, bilateral symmetry was best, AT THAT POINT IN TIME. But what about Squids / Octopi / Starfish / other non bilaterally symmetric creatures? Or what about the majority of quadrapeds / other significantly different-looking creatures to us? I'll guarantee that if any of these creatures developed significant intelligence (I mean significant enough to develop space travel), they would NOT LOOK LIKE HUMANS!
Excellent point. However, since bilateral symmetry continues to work well in our environment, there's no reason to exclude the possibility of "it" independently evolving to a similar bipedal form, though through a totally different evolutionary path. We can only guess, by extrapolating morphological differences in closed ecological communities such as the Galapagos Islands, or Australia, against common species elsewhere, that since similar forms repeat on Earth along fairly divergent paths, such forms are possible, and desirable in many conditions, not just here but in similar ecological niches all over the universe as well. Though all evolved from a different branch of life's family tree, each evolutionary history forged an anatomy between the kangaroo, dinosaur, bird, and human whereby all walk as bipeds.
Pre-Cambrian -- yes. Stephen J. Gould wrote a nice book called "Wonderful Life" about the Pre-Cambrian explosion that presents a litany of amazingly weird fossils containing phylum which are long since extinct. Most probably died off from bad luck, the environment changing on them faster than they could biologically react, in an evolutionary sense, and BAM! -- they're gone; a view of extinction as a biological failure to change through self-replication to meet a new environmental stress -- there's a threshold for all self-replicating systems (no matter what the substrate) where evolution fails because the requisite change required for survival exceeds the time constraints of the organisms replication cycle. For example, an unfortunate volcanic eruption, meteor, or fast weather change -- no way to screw one's way out of that mess -- and it's toast for good. Some weird-ass shit in there; definitely worth a read.
Not that this explains "Little Grey Men" and their -- ahem -- invasive exams. Ouch!
And by the way, if Red Hat ever tried to make it impossible to get their operating system gratis, the two sounds you'd hear would be their ass being slammed into court by the Free Software Foundation, and their ass being slammed into a different court by Linus Torvalds.
OK, I'm nitpicking, but this is a misinterpretation of the GPL. Redhat could most certainly refuse to provide gratis binaries... and under a loophole of the GPL they could actually create derivatives of GPL'd software and not give the source away. However, you're right that this isn't likely to happen.
In the first instance, under the GPL Redhat isn't required to bundle the source with the binaries, nor are they required to distribute the binaries to all comers, they could just sell CD's containing only binaries and wait for someone to request the source. Once someone requests the source (presumably a customer of their media) they must pony up, but only after a request. In the second instance, if I decide to modify a GPL'd program (say derive a kernel device driver for an unreleased hardware prototype from some GPL'd source) as long as I don't distribute the software I don't have to release the source to anyone. Once I distribute binaries containing my modifications to a GPL'd program then I must release the source to anyone who asks.
Face it: That Redhat spends its hard earned money on a big pipe for public ftp downloads (and provides a large mirror list as well) only goes to show that they're serious about Free Software both in the "Free Speech" sense, and in the "Free Beer" sense as well. I note that Caldera didn't offer their distribution for public download for something like a year or a year and a half right after the release of CND 1.0 up to the first release of Open Linux. Redhat has always (at least since early '95) allowed for public ftp of the entire distribution sans commercial software they previously bundled.
Microsoft's revised scheme for calculating so-called client-access licenses (CALs) could mean additional costs for e-commerce businesses.
Under the Windows NT 4 licensing program, Microsoft required a CAL for every user accessing a Windows NT server for filing and printing services, but not for Web surfers inside the corporate network or those coming in from the outside. Beginning with Windows 2000 a CAL is necessary for each individual requiring authentication, such as would be necessary for a secure online transaction.
As a result, customers planning to move e-commerce applications from Windows NT to Windows 2000 could face a price increase.
"If I decide to put up mikenash.com and I want to sell T-Shirts with my picture on them, for something uninteresting like me five CALs is all I need since I probably won't have more than five people buying at one time," Nash predicted.
[...]
The five-user version of Windows 2000 Server will cost $999, or $499 as an upgrade from a previous version of Windows NT or Novell NetWare.
Windows 2000 Server with 10 user licenses will be available for $1,199, and the upgrade from Windows NT 4 or NetWare for $599. For 25 users, customers pay $1,799 or $899 if upgrading from Windows NT or NetWare.
Windows 2000 Advanced Server will cost $3,999 for 25 users or $1,999 as an upgrade from Windows NT 4 Enterprise Edition.
A customer subscribing to Microsofts volume Open Level B license, for example, deploying 10 Windows 2000 servers with 100 PCs would pay an upgrade price of $22,800; $17,500 for the desktops, $3,700 for the servers, and $1,600 for the client access licenses.
Microsoft cannot enforce this pricing model unless they move the entire web server market off of UNIX and onto Win2K. The only way they'll succeed in this strategy is to now leverage their superior IE browser market share to force a new proprietary XML based web standard down everyone's throat which would slough off HTTP/DHTTP and SSL for Office 2000/Frontpage content generation, IIS data transport, and SQL-Server for data warehousing along with the dependancy on IE for content presentation. If all these are tied into a single product line in interlocking dependencies, and this is used to present a web based front-end only available to Windows users, we will see if Microsoft can wrench Internet standards away from the standards bodies to force their monopoly from clients up to servers.
Otherwise, forget it. These prices represent a huge capital outlay for any organization, forget the whole "Total Cost of Ownership" argument, anyone in their right mind can see how expensive this will get for even a small 25 workstation office, never mind a 5000 client enterprise. At the lowest end of the "Open Level B license", for example, that represents about one quarter to one fifth the cost of an Admin... and Microsoft wants that money upfront as a capital outlay, employees take their money across the year in salery. In the face of Linux and FreeBSD competition, this just doesn't fly.
So, just how do they plan to actually make money with this pricing model, given that they're going to have to wrench the HTTP protocol out of the hands of the standards bodies, while at the same time the DOJ is breathing down their neck, and the rest of the world (see Korea and Japan) seem to be walking away from a Microsoft centric PC world?
This seems almost a desperate price raising strategy to maintain share value... yet it's ludicrus given obviously cheaper alternatives from even Sun. Let's face it, Sun charges excessive prices for hardware, not software. And they actually deliver reliability in the process... what does Microsoft have to offer in contrast?
First of all, I want to say that I think this AC's post really deserves to be moderated up. It's well written and presents a negative view of Redhat which moderators traditionally either ignore or moderate down (even if factually correct). Which is a shame, because that shows real bias. Moderators, might I implore you to consider writing style and content first, your personal opinions last?
However, this is not to say that I completely agree with your stated position. In fact, WRT Redhat I think they've done a spectacular job at riding the razor-thin line between competitive corporate self-promotion and FUD, one the one hand, and complete community sharing of code on the other. Frankly, they've been much better than SUSE or Pacific Hi-Tech (Turbo Linux HA clusters, anyone?), for example, when it comes to GPLing their internally written projects, and they have consistently funded many large projects over the years, all of which they've given away under the GPL. This is not the behavior of a corporate wolf in a sheep suit... they've done much good for the Linux community.
You may point to Debian as the pinnacle of community self-organization and development, and I think you're right that Debian is the best organized and most advanced Linux distribution out there as far as number of packages and stability of the core tree. But I note that they never did get around to resolving serious installation problems until a corporate giant -- Corel -- moved in and decided to use Debian as a base for their distribution. And it's Corel that finally written an easy to use installer for.debs... this is not an insult to the Debian project, just the truth. For the longest time installing Debian has been a complete nightmare unless you've had previous UNIX and Linux experience, compared to Redhat, Caldera, and Suse which with each generation seem to grow easier and easier to install. I'd argue that because of this a commercial Linux distribution is now about as easy to install as Windows for any competent PC tech. You can thank Redhat (and Caldera, and SUSE, etc) now.
This is not to say that we should expect perfectly gentleman like behavior from them as the Linux market heats up... especially as a service vendor. Honestly, I think Redhat realizes that funding free development projects is purely an R&D expense for them, and that their returns will have to come as service sector sales. I note that VAResearch is going down this very same route, which makes sense considering the thin margins available in the x86 hardware assembly market. The money in building "Redhat" mindshare among the general public comes back through service channels and not through direct product sales, unlike most proprietary shops. This means that Redhat has little incentive to "kill" competitive distributions as they can simply make money selling service for sites running the "other" linux distribution as well (should the market drift to another distribution).
I'd like to quickly go through your points:
Red Hat are not communitarians. Read Bob Young's chapter in Open Sources. His vision of the Linux community is Red Hat's business partners and consumers. Red Hat Linux. Heinz ketchup. The writing is on the wall, and in the hand of Red Hat's CEO.
Red Hat wants control. Developer mindshare, raw market share, control over the allocation of funds to devlopment projects, etc. Anything they can do to increase the amount of control they have, they will.
But as I wrote before, unlike a traditional proprietary shop where developer mindshare around a closed API actually counts for something, just what would such an approach buy Redhat? They're just selling a prepackaged version of all the standard tools and libraries... along with a few internally written kickers. Having a well known name does help them sell service though... and I note that the $80 cost of a boxed Redhat is really just the implied service cost of providing installation support. Nobody at Redhat shit a brick when I FTP installed my machine across a cablemodem. Welcome to the GPL.
Does Red Hat care if Mandrake dies? No.
Does Red Hat care if SuSE dies? No.
Does Red Hat care if Debian dies? No.
Does Red Hat care if the FSF dies? No.
Does Red Hat care if free software developers with any affiliation whatsoever to any other organization stop coding? No.
I'm right there with you until you hit those last two lines... "Does Red Hat care if the FSF dies?" and "Does Red Hat care if free software developers with any affiliation whatsoever to any other organization stop coding?" this is absurd. For exactly the same reason Microsoft fears the Free Software avalanche, as noted in Halloween, Redhat could never outflank the entire Free Software development community by forking off and maintaining an entire OS code base. They need the FSF, Linus/Alan Cox, Cygnus, XFree86, Eric Allman, and all the developers of smaller tools scattered around the distribution. This is a specious argument.
Regarding the other Linux distribution developers -- Why should they care??? The only distribution in this list which is community developed is Debian... and I don't fear Debian going tits up any time soon. They've done a wonderful job at self organization both politically and at software development.
If you're not promoting Red Hat's name or agenda, you're irrelevant to them at best and a threat at worst.
This is life in corporate America. This is the culture. It's not particularly Red Hat's fault. They're (probably) no worse than any other corporation.
So what? It's not like you have to buy Redhat... HELL, THEY GIVE IT AWAY! Go ahead and download it... or don't. Install Debian... actually, I suspect you may find it a more stable (if composed of slightly older components) distribution. Once you get past the installation, it rocks.
"ryanr" Wrote: You want your 8-bit smartcard to be able to comunicate with your 64-bit desktop, don't you? If they're not using the same alg. & protocol, that won't work.
Does this really make sense? While it's arguable that an 8-bit smartcard might be limited to a single low-end algorithm designed for a small memory footprint, is it reasonable to assume that on the other end a 64-bit processor couldn't support the first algorithm as well? The point isn't to make an arbitrary separation where one encryption standard is used here, while another there -- thus forcing incompatability where none need exist -- but to use the best software for a specific purpose.
All Bruce says on the matter is:
"Choosing a single algorithm (or even a pair of algorithms) for all these applications is not easy, but that's what we have to do. It might make more sense to have a family of algorithms, each tuned to a particular application, but there will be only one AES."
Which, at face value I can accept, but am still curious as to why. It looks like a political, not technical, decision... if so, is this appropriate?
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine got the Kinesis Ergo Keyboard and loves it. www.kinesis-ergo.com. It does slow you down at first, and it will make it harder to type on a regular keyboard, but it is a real wrist-saver. It comes with QWERY layout but is designed to be able to switch to DVORAK and other layouts easily.
I've been using one of these at work now for a little less than two years and I LOVE THIS KEYBOARD!
I'm convinced my Kinesis keyboard has saved my career from RSI induced disability... it's so good I shelled out the $300 to buy one for home. OK, so it's a wierd layout that most folks can't deal with at first... but the hand strain you save is well worth the upfront training costs associated with the switchover.
Anyone who is experiencing hand pain associated with heavy keyboard use should try this unit out. I strongly recommend this keyboard! And no, I'm not assiciated with Kinesis in any way, nor do I own their stock -- just a satisfied customer.
Please submit your own letter TODAY! Follow their guidelines for attaching your letter in a MINE encoded email, and let them know your concerns! This is not just about free software... how do you think public libraries are going to function when all intellectual property is delivered electronically with access controls and licenses stipulating where, when, and how said material can be accessed? Newspapers? How would you like it to be illegal for a reader to allow someone else to read over his/her shoulder? How would you like GPS hardware installed in your newspaper reader which limits where you may read a story? Hell, how would you like to have to buy (or rent) special hardware just to read a newspaper? How are communities supposed to afford these new technologies for their community library? Is we gut our public libraries we'll gut the ability for citizens to join the public discourse... this is very disturbing.
--------------------
David O. Carson,
General Counsel,
Copyright GC/I&R,
P.O. Box 70400,
Southwest Station,
Washington, DC 20024
Mr. Carson,
I'm writing in response to the Library of Congress's request
for comments regarding Section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. As a citizen of the United States who
earns my living through writing and maintaining software, among
other types of intellectual property, this law concerns me
greatly.
While not an attorney, my understanding of how this law is
being interpreted currently in courts, for example in the DeCSS
suit brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against
many online providers and web page authors along with the authors
of the original DeCSS code, in commentary by many pundits
published throughout the technical press, and finally my own
reading of the law, section 1201(a)(1), said law could give
sweeping new powers and authority to those copyright holders who
include technical provisions to prevent unauthorized copying and
presentation of copyrighted materials to the detriment of "fair
use" laws. This thwarts basic citizens' rights to access what
they've purchased simply because it might violate a contractual
requirement of the license, along with technical provisions
included in the media content to enforce such a stipulation.
How will this affect the rights of citizens to use our
public libraries? Will copyright owners now be allowed to
contractually stipulate in their license that libraries, or their
clientele, must purchase per use licenses to access copyrighted
materials? Given the trend toward digital content over
traditional printed publishing, this is not as crazy as it
sounds. Within a few decades it's quite possible that publishing
on paper, which I understand will not fall under section
(1201(a)(a) and thus will continue to be available to public
libraries under "fair use" guidelines simply because it lacks a
technical mechanism for copy protection, may become outmoded as
paper costs already far exceed the cost of distributing
intellectual materials electronically. Should this take place
1201(a)(1) has the potential to essentially criminalize public
libraries as we know them, forcing a dichotomy between those who
can afford the per use costs charged by copyright holders against
those who can't, while gutting a public infrastructure for the
dissemination of new ideas.
Beyond public libraries, are we to accept the notion that
copyright holders should now have a new set of rights which not
only limit under what conditions a licensee may copy works, but
also when a licensee may access said works, where they may access
said works, with what equipment they may access those works, and
even limit the copyright holder's liability simply by the
licensee opening a shrinkwrap license they can't even read until
after the fact?
Because if it's acceptable that Sony, for example, can
legally lock the contents of a DVD video disk through encryption
under force of copyright law as a mechanism of copyright
protection under 1201(a)(1), then how will consumers enjoy their
basic rights for legally copying a "backup archive" of content
for which they've purchased a license? Is it "fair use" to
prevent consumers from accessing said materials through regional
locks, or stipulating which hardware or software platform is
legal for the reading of said disks? If so, consumers will be
forced to purchase not only the content, but also a physical
locks, or stipulating which hardware or software platform is
legal for the reading of said disks? If so, consumers will be
forced to purchase not only the content, but also a physical
device and software from the content producer, thus limiting
their right to enjoy the content to which they've purchased
access with onerous new responsibilities and costs never
previously required of consumers simply trying to gain legal
access to copyrighted materials
Does the Library of Congress wish to allow the Associated
Press the right to use copyright law to stipulate when and where
a reader may access an AP newspaper story? If the AP can't use
1201(a)(1) to limit what kind of paper the newspaper publisher
must use to print a story, nor where a reader may read, view, or
otherwise enjoy printed materials to which (s)he has legally
purchased access, why should they enjoy a right to limit said
access electronically? In a near future of electronic newspapers
and handheld electronic readers, already possible with the
popular 3Com Palm Pilot, making obsolete the traditional printed
daily will it be reasonable to allow the AP to include Global
Position Satellite equipment in an electronic newspaper reader to
enforce the provision that a news story must only be read in a
certain city, state, or country if this electronic dissemination
of the published materials meets 1201(a)(1)'s copyprotection
guidelines? Will 1201(a)(1) allow the AP to force readers to
purchase an AP approved electronic news reader as the only legal
method for accessing AP published news? And given the sweeping
new powers 1201(a)(1) allows if a restriction is specified in the
a copyright license, can the AP prevent researchers the right to
copy small pieces of a news story within todays "fair use"
guidelines to cite a source within a research paper because of a
combination of a contractual stipulation in the license and copy
protection distributed with the intellectual property? How
different are these scenarios from allowing Sony to stipulate
under what hardware a copyright licensee may view a DVD video, or
which country they in which they may enjoy access
to the materials they've purchased?
If enacted as written this could enforce a whole new
monopoly for content producers and copyright holders, not just
protecting the media content from illegal copying and bootleg
sales, but also enforcing the sale of equipment which has been
licensed strictly to access and view said materials. This will
gut public access to copyrighted works in libraries, individual
access to copyrighted works by consumers through open and public
technologies, and doesn't even serve to protect the copyright
holder's basic interest of preventing the illicit copying of
privately owned intellectual property. It's strictly a new
mechanism to force consumers to buy more equipment simply to
enjoy access to materials already purchased, no different from
Ford Motor Company mandating that Ford gasoline be used with a
Ford car by force of law.
Copyright should not exist to enforce new restrictions
beyond copying a privately owned intellectual work. If the
Library of Congress, along with the legislative branch, enact new
laws to expand the scope of Copyright law as defined in
1201(a)(1) the consequences for public access to information and
discourse may be severe. Think carefully before enacting such
laws as they may leave consumers and individuals in our society
unable to join in basic public discourse. Every new financial
wall enacted to prevent citizens from basic "fair use" rights to
copyrighted works is potentially devastating to our public
library infrastructure and thus damaging to public discourse and
our very democracy.
Sincerely,
J. Maynard Gelinas
----------------------
Cambridge, MA., 02139
maynard@jmg.com
Note the "." at the end of the username... Bruce did NOT write that comment, some idiot is trying to steal his identity using a very similar name to confuse readers. Just setting the record straight...
For all those out there bitching over the $50 price tag on some of these Loki games, I note that EBWorld has several Loki titles for between $25 and $29... very reasonable. The games are Heretic II, Hero's of Might and Magic, and Railroad Tycoon. They did have Myth II for $25, but it looks like they've sold this out! Good.
I've bought five games from Loki and Unreal Tournament because of the Linux support. Profit is the only real development which will prod games makers into supporting Linux over the long haul. I earn a good deal of money from my UNIX and Linux skills, so I'm in a position to use this to support those projects and companies promote those values and products I desire. If you're earning a good salery from this you should put your money where your signature is as well and go to the Loki web site and plunk some money down for that game you've always wanted under Linux.
:-)
There's one depressing problem with this... unfortunately Civ: Call To Power has kept me up to all hours destroying my daytime productivity. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Regarding various consumer grade printer support: your position seems to suggest that we shouldn't bother supporting that "...crap." If you think this isn't a serious issue which compromises the potential adoption of Freenix at the consumer level, then we have nothing to discuss. I'd like to think that soon enough Linux and BSD distributions will near the level of end-user configuration friendliness that NT and MacOS share. If this isn't your goal then of course lpd and lpsched can be coaxed by a professional into providing reasonable service in a commercial setting, and that's probably enough. Otherwise, I'd argue that Christopher Browne is correct, that printing under UNIX is a complete mess, and that the Freenix community better pay attention to this issue otherwise it will bite us in the ass pretty hard. CUPS is a reasonable solution to this problem, and I'm pleased it's evolved to provide both a GPL foundation ALONG WITH support for proprietary printer drivers. I challenge you to detail how this is different from Linus allowing proprietary binary only loadable modules in Linux. Don't expect the Display Postscript extensions in Sun's OpenWindows and SGI's X environment to continue for much longer. Adobe has made it clear that Display Postscript is depreciated and that they will not support this technology any longer... this is why Apple developed their own Display PDF technology. As a former NeXT Cube and NeXTStation owner I argue that they were the most elegant computers I've ever had the pleasure to own. The damn things still work well and still hold up as excellent (if somewhat slow) workstations. If Apple can provide that kind of environment again, with modern hardware, I'm there. But this is personal taste.
That's not to say the IRIX is junk... if you prefer IRIX to MacOS X in the commercial world, well so be it. But to argue that you won't buy MacOS X for free software reasons doesn't give Apple the credit they deserve WRT keeping the OS internals open and free. They had no obligation to release their BSD code changes back to the *BSD projects, yet they have. While they've kept much of the core Apple products closed and proprietary, the fact is that this option is left open to them intentionally by the BSD coders. That's what they want, otherwise they would have chosen to release under the GPL. I respect their right to do so and consider that whatever Apple shared back to the community to be a gift we should thank them for, rather than cynically taking them to task for not releasing core Apple technology with which they expect to turn profits.
... quit your whining.
Corel was in their rights to fork off the open Wine tree at any time and not even share back. I'm certain the project heads at Corel responsible for the winelib portion of the Corel Office for Linux product certainly supported the notion of their control over the release flow and which critical bugs to squash. Corel is producing a product on a time schedule for sale in the commercial world. I'm sure this set a somewhat different agenda than the Wine project leaders might pursue; I doubt the Wine team feels the slightest wrong'd as well. Nor should they. Why choose the BSD license otherwise?
Don't bitch, they gave back.
Yeah, I agree. Printing is a mess in UNIX... it's received such little attention over the years that the system now seems seriously broken. CUPS is nice, but it's just a reaction to the balkinization of printer standards from straight Postscript to proprietary protocols. Ghostscript can't keep up with the new stuff out on the market. While lpd is constantly being updates for security fixes, I don't see many new features, and certainly no thought of integration with proprietary printer drivers (nor should they). CUPS looks pretty nice in this regard.
:-)
I understant patent issues are preventing direct inclusion of TrueType support into XFree 4.0, requiring the use of a font server instead. That seems to leave some kind of Display Postscript X server extension as the best alternative. Since Adobe is never going to play ball, what about the Display Ghostscript project over at GNUStep? I understand there's a new release coming soon, and that the DGS and xdps stuff is getting close.
Boy, MacOS X looks pretty good from this vantagepoint, eh?
Hey,
Did anyone notice that this doesn't include a trainer to generate new statistical voice models? What's up with that??? This means it's basically useless until the voice model file format is figured out and a trainer is written. This isn't kiddy stuff either, the Free Software community might have to hire some speech scientists to get this thing usable....
On a related note, if someone can cobble together a trainer this would make an excellent distributed client project, ala SETI@HOME.
I'll look into that card, thanks to all of you!
Redhat probably came in first in the poll because of all the slashdotters who went to read the article...
No, I read the article at six this morning, long before Slashdot posted this article. And even then, Redhat won at +40% with a significant lead over all the others.
But it's still "Best of the bunch."
To the guy calling me a conspiracy theorist... given their previous attempts at astroturfing, why should I assume this is any different?
This post above was written by the interviewer, Dennis Kitz. Since he's the original author of the feature interview, don't you think his opionion holds more worth than a score of 1?
Folks, this was posted by Dennis Kitz himself. Moderators: TAKE NOTICE!
And I want to note that this guy was one of my heros as a kid... I even built one of his 384x192 hi-res boards (with board layout and instructions published in 80 Micro) for my Model 1 as a kid. We should all recognize that this man was responsible for significant computing advances among the hobbyist community during the late '70's and early '80's.
Thank You Dennis!
Lest the Slashdot community get too holier-than-thou when it comes to security, let us remember that GNU/Linux has had its share of security problems over the years.
VMS has had it's share of security problems too. So what? A more interesting metric is not whether an OS, or any underlying apps, present security holes, but how quickly they are fixed. See this Securityportal cover story for a comparison of time from announcement to vendor fix between Redhat Linux, Windows NT, and Sun Solaris (see, I can add gratuitous links as well!) I note that Redhat Linux won hands down in this competition, and that's only security updates from a vendor supplied source! I don't know about you, but when I hear about a serious security hole in lpd (for example), I don't wait around for Redhat to go recompile the fix. However, the Securityportal article makes a reasonable assumption that most small to medium sized businesses would probably rely on vendor supplied fixes rather than trying to find a hot Linux guru to compile up to the minute security fixes.
Now, of course, GNU/Linux developers are generally faster than Microsoft when it comes to fixing security holes and they don't, as a rule, engage in the same coverups and spin control as the Microsoft's PR flaks, but the question remains, why are there so many bugs in the first place?
DUH. Because C doesn't bounds check during compilation or run time. That's just ONE reason. Look, I'm no security "expert", but if you're uptight about security, and don't consider yourself competent at securing your own code, then either hire a professional to go through your C code with a fine tooth comb, or write it in some interpreted language like perl, LISP, Scheme, Python (whatever) and let the LANG developers deal with security.
Not that this will make your application any more secure, but it will pass the buck to the likes of Larry.
Other open source operating systems, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD have had security problems, but not in such numbers as the various GNU/Linux distributions.
This is bogus. And I run OpenBSD, the BSD distribution tailored for security, on my cablemodem gateway and consider it an excellent secure distribution out of the box (CD). But, so what? Can you give me ANY specific examples of userspace application security holes present in Linux that were not present in BSD? Hell, most of the networking kernel holes seemed ubiquitous across just about every OS and networking stack, BSD sockets and streams based.
On the kernel side I seem to remember that both BSD and Linux (and NT!) were vulnerable to the Ping of Death, various Tear Drop attacks and fragmented TCP attacks, and those lovely smurf DOS attacks. Don't see a significant difference here... both the BSD's and Linux kernel groups figured the problems out and posted solutions in record time, while the commercial vendors picked their butts and didn't post fixes for their products I might add.
On the userspace side of things, this is managed project by project. Since much our application software is ported between the BSDs, Linux, and most any other commercial UNIX, there's little difference. A bug in one version of lpd on Linux is almost surely the same bug on BSD
Rather than making fun of Microsoft for its own failings in the security realm, GNU/Linux users and developers could better spend their time improving the security of their OS of choice.
There. Now you said something rational.
I'm 31 and have been voting in Presidential elections since '88. Usually I vote Democrat in federal and state elections, because I prefer most of the stated Democrat policies over Republican. But I'm just disgusted with huge soft money donations, lobbyists writing the bills that our legislators pass (along with another contribution), and the many riders and procedural tricks legislators use to subvert debate in what was supposed to be an open and public legislative forum.
I'd like to support the Reform ticket, but there's no way in hell I'll vote for Pat Buchanan. I'm actually considering joining the Republican party just so I can vote for McCain in the primary, because of his support for the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform legislation... and I think he stands a better chance against Bush than Bradley does against Gore.
Honestly I like both McCain and Bradley more than I like the entrenched Gore and Bush and if either of them wind up in the general election I'll probably vote Democrat or Republican based on this and not party politics.
I am SICK of party politics! The constant fighting between these two behemouths is affecting our democracy/republic in very dangerous ways... I honestly feel very disenfranchised from our political system -- which as a middle class computer geek if I'm the norm then our leaders better wake up. The current duality and conflict between just two parties has turned far too corrupt leaving us citizens holding the bag time and again.
What about a multi party system based on proportional representation like Germany has? I think if we could reform campaign finance and create a system with more than two parties we might gain the citizen's trust in the political system once again. Obviously, the only way for citizens to trust their government is if the government's representatives actually act in the citizen's interests, and that's clearly not happening with our current political system.
"Golgotha seems to have dies (www.golgotha.com), but maybe it was becuase it didn't come with an OGL renderer."
:-)
I'm not closely involved with the Golgotha team, but I've downloaded the source a couple of times and been impressed by what they've produced. I note that you point to the wrong URL for the primary Golgotha home page: http://golgotha.opengames.org I also note that they updated the news section of the homepage just a few days ago, Dec 16th, so the project still looks quite active. I'm sure it was just a simple mistake, but a check on freshmeat would have given you the link: here's the Freshmeat Golgotha appindex entry.
I look forward to Golgotha's release eventual 1.0 release, and soon thereafter my enjoyment of the completed game.
Bruce made a mistake and put his foot in his mouth not because Slashdot popularized the post, but because suggesting a lawsuit against Corel was simply rash at this point; it may come to pass that at some future time a lawsuit against Corel, Redhat, VALinux, Pacific Hi-Tech, or whoever, may in fact be appropriate. So just because Bruce threw out this suggestion a little too soon doesn't mean that defending the GPL with the force of law won't be necessary at some future point.
That said, Bruce made a mistake. God knows, I've put my foot in my mouth often enough -- and usually when I'm pissed off -- so I feel plenty of sympathy for Bruce here. It's impossible to regularly post over the years and NOT say something stupid once in a while. Hasn't Linus overreacted in linux-kernel before? Let's not forget Eric Raymond with his Jedi Knight uniform at the Windows Refund day... I'm sure that went over well with the mass media journalists. And how about Bill Gate's video deposition... talk about tasting foot fungus.
It's normal for anyone who's in the spotlight to make the occasional mistake. Bruce recognized his error and apologized in public. Which is more than I can say for most who back themselves into an indefensible verbal corner.
Pre-Cambrian -- yes. Stephen J. Gould wrote a nice book called "Wonderful Life" about the Pre-Cambrian explosion that presents a litany of amazingly weird fossils containing phylum which are long since extinct. Most probably died off from bad luck, the environment changing on them faster than they could biologically react, in an evolutionary sense, and BAM! -- they're gone; a view of extinction as a biological failure to change through self-replication to meet a new environmental stress -- there's a threshold for all self-replicating systems (no matter what the substrate) where evolution fails because the requisite change required for survival exceeds the time constraints of the organisms replication cycle. For example, an unfortunate volcanic eruption, meteor, or fast weather change -- no way to screw one's way out of that mess -- and it's toast for good. Some weird-ass shit in there; definitely worth a read.
Not that this explains "Little Grey Men" and their -- ahem -- invasive exams. Ouch!
And by the way, if Red Hat ever tried to make it impossible to get their operating system gratis, the two sounds you'd hear would be their ass being slammed into court by the Free Software Foundation, and their ass being slammed into a different court by Linus Torvalds.
OK, I'm nitpicking, but this is a misinterpretation of the GPL. Redhat could most certainly refuse to provide gratis binaries... and under a loophole of the GPL they could actually create derivatives of GPL'd software and not give the source away. However, you're right that this isn't likely to happen.
In the first instance, under the GPL Redhat isn't required to bundle the source with the binaries, nor are they required to distribute the binaries to all comers, they could just sell CD's containing only binaries and wait for someone to request the source. Once someone requests the source (presumably a customer of their media) they must pony up, but only after a request. In the second instance, if I decide to modify a GPL'd program (say derive a kernel device driver for an unreleased hardware prototype from some GPL'd source) as long as I don't distribute the software I don't have to release the source to anyone. Once I distribute binaries containing my modifications to a GPL'd program then I must release the source to anyone who asks.
Face it: That Redhat spends its hard earned money on a big pipe for public ftp downloads (and provides a large mirror list as well) only goes to show that they're serious about Free Software both in the "Free Speech" sense, and in the "Free Beer" sense as well. I note that Caldera didn't offer their distribution for public download for something like a year or a year and a half right after the release of CND 1.0 up to the first release of Open Linux. Redhat has always (at least since early '95) allowed for public ftp of the entire distribution sans commercial software they previously bundled.
Microsoft cannot enforce this pricing model unless they move the entire web server market off of UNIX and onto Win2K. The only way they'll succeed in this strategy is to now leverage their superior IE browser market share to force a new proprietary XML based web standard down everyone's throat which would slough off HTTP/DHTTP and SSL for Office 2000/Frontpage content generation, IIS data transport, and SQL-Server for data warehousing along with the dependancy on IE for content presentation. If all these are tied into a single product line in interlocking dependencies, and this is used to present a web based front-end only available to Windows users, we will see if Microsoft can wrench Internet standards away from the standards bodies to force their monopoly from clients up to servers.
Otherwise, forget it. These prices represent a huge capital outlay for any organization, forget the whole "Total Cost of Ownership" argument, anyone in their right mind can see how expensive this will get for even a small 25 workstation office, never mind a 5000 client enterprise. At the lowest end of the "Open Level B license", for example, that represents about one quarter to one fifth the cost of an Admin... and Microsoft wants that money upfront as a capital outlay, employees take their money across the year in salery. In the face of Linux and FreeBSD competition, this just doesn't fly.
So, just how do they plan to actually make money with this pricing model, given that they're going to have to wrench the HTTP protocol out of the hands of the standards bodies, while at the same time the DOJ is breathing down their neck, and the rest of the world (see Korea and Japan) seem to be walking away from a Microsoft centric PC world?
This seems almost a desperate price raising strategy to maintain share value... yet it's ludicrus given obviously cheaper alternatives from even Sun. Let's face it, Sun charges excessive prices for hardware, not software. And they actually deliver reliability in the process... what does Microsoft have to offer in contrast?
However, this is not to say that I completely agree with your stated position. In fact, WRT Redhat I think they've done a spectacular job at riding the razor-thin line between competitive corporate self-promotion and FUD, one the one hand, and complete community sharing of code on the other. Frankly, they've been much better than SUSE or Pacific Hi-Tech (Turbo Linux HA clusters, anyone?), for example, when it comes to GPLing their internally written projects, and they have consistently funded many large projects over the years, all of which they've given away under the GPL. This is not the behavior of a corporate wolf in a sheep suit... they've done much good for the Linux community.
You may point to Debian as the pinnacle of community self-organization and development, and I think you're right that Debian is the best organized and most advanced Linux distribution out there as far as number of packages and stability of the core tree. But I note that they never did get around to resolving serious installation problems until a corporate giant -- Corel -- moved in and decided to use Debian as a base for their distribution. And it's Corel that finally written an easy to use installer for
This is not to say that we should expect perfectly gentleman like behavior from them as the Linux market heats up... especially as a service vendor. Honestly, I think Redhat realizes that funding free development projects is purely an R&D expense for them, and that their returns will have to come as service sector sales. I note that VAResearch is going down this very same route, which makes sense considering the thin margins available in the x86 hardware assembly market. The money in building "Redhat" mindshare among the general public comes back through service channels and not through direct product sales, unlike most proprietary shops. This means that Redhat has little incentive to "kill" competitive distributions as they can simply make money selling service for sites running the "other" linux distribution as well (should the market drift to another distribution).
I'd like to quickly go through your points:
But as I wrote before, unlike a traditional proprietary shop where developer mindshare around a closed API actually counts for something, just what would such an approach buy Redhat? They're just selling a prepackaged version of all the standard tools and libraries... along with a few internally written kickers. Having a well known name does help them sell service though... and I note that the $80 cost of a boxed Redhat is really just the implied service cost of providing installation support. Nobody at Redhat shit a brick when I FTP installed my machine across a cablemodem. Welcome to the GPL.
I'm right there with you until you hit those last two lines... "Does Red Hat care if the FSF dies?" and "Does Red Hat care if free software developers with any affiliation whatsoever to any other organization stop coding?" this is absurd. For exactly the same reason Microsoft fears the Free Software avalanche, as noted in Halloween, Redhat could never outflank the entire Free Software development community by forking off and maintaining an entire OS code base. They need the FSF, Linus/Alan Cox, Cygnus, XFree86, Eric Allman, and all the developers of smaller tools scattered around the distribution. This is a specious argument.
Regarding the other Linux distribution developers -- Why should they care??? The only distribution in this list which is community developed is Debian... and I don't fear Debian going tits up any time soon. They've done a wonderful job at self organization both politically and at software development.
So what? It's not like you have to buy Redhat... HELL, THEY GIVE IT AWAY! Go ahead and download it... or don't. Install Debian... actually, I suspect you may find it a more stable (if composed of slightly older components) distribution. Once you get past the installation, it rocks.
You want your 8-bit smartcard to be able to comunicate with your 64-bit desktop, don't you? If they're not using the same alg. & protocol, that won't work.
Does this really make sense? While it's arguable that an 8-bit smartcard might be limited to a single low-end algorithm designed for a small memory footprint, is it reasonable to assume that on the other end a 64-bit processor couldn't support the first algorithm as well? The point isn't to make an arbitrary separation where one encryption standard is used here, while another there -- thus forcing incompatability where none need exist -- but to use the best software for a specific purpose.
All Bruce says on the matter is:
Which, at face value I can accept, but am still curious as to why. It looks like a political, not technical, decision... if so, is this appropriate?