Freeware can apply to any free of charge software including binary only software. Internet Explorer is freeware but it's not free software (free in both senses) or open source. --
It's a slightly different message as far as I can gather. The FSF don't believe money is the be all and end all of rewards but they realise that people need money to live. The amount of money they are prepared is small for the amount of work they will be doing so I wouldn't really call it a reward - it's basically just enough to live off.
If the author wanted financial rewards they'd go with a company not willing to make the book free as they'd get paid more by most publishers if they write the book for the FSF they are mainly writing it as a service to the free software community --
This is what I think the scores should be: -1: Totally inappropriate flamebait and useless crap. If it may be useful to someone give it a 0 0: Comments may be useful to some people but aren't exactly groundbreaking and relavant. 1: The vast majority of comments 2+: Comments that stand out from the crowd.
What I think has happened with the new system. Moderators now get a pull down menu and they then rate comments based on their view of them (flamebait, troll, insightful, etc) meaning that minor flamebait may quickly be moved down to -1 while only a slightly interesting article may make it up to 5 quickly when it deserved a 2.
TAKE NOTE: moderators please check the current score before moderating a post. If you agree the score is correct then *don't* select a moderation option as this will then alter the score either up or down depending on what you slect. I preferred the old method as it was clear that you were adding or deducting points from people this method just looks like a rating system by the people who don't check up on it. --
Re:VA and "professionalism"
on
VA on Upside
·
· Score: 1
I don't know why people make so much fuss over these words. They are commonly used words these days so I don't know why people are still offended by them. The english language changes and these words are now commonplace I don't see why people should have to watch what they're saying. --
SuSE is not RedHat done anything. It's their own distribution not a hack of another. They use the RPM (RedHat) Package manager as does Caldera, etc. The way they organise packages on the CD is similar to the slackware method (have separate directories for different categories of apps).
When designing SuSE they seemed to take the best ideas from other distributions (as a Slackware user this is the other distribution that I'm most comfortable with - although there's a lot of things different to slackware) and combine them into their own as well as adding their own ideas.
Each to their own, however, I've never really liked RedHat but it's getting better all the time. It's just the little things with it that really piss me off. One of the most irritating is aliasing the rm command to rm -i so it keeps asking if you're sure every time. This should be an install time option or not included at all. When I was a new user I couldn't work out how to get rid of this irritating setting and as this 'safety net' is only in RedHat and rip-offs people moving over to another distro may then feel confident that they were going to be asked what they wanted to delete than type rm * expecting to be asked what to delete when everything gets deleted without even saying. --
You're right the UKUUG Linux conference was held in Manchester last year, what the poster was probably talking about is the other (non-UKUUG) Linux events which have been held this year. --
Just an example... The point is it's so easy to register for these services they are guaranteed to get misused by a lot of people.
Anyway onto what you say - you can't keep an eye on someone 24 hours a day and even so what about freedom? Unless you keep your computer under lock and key and know everything about your childrens friends, which is very unlikely. Anyway this is far too much off topic. --
Read the article it says WordPerfec/Linux downloads. As you download binaries and not source code it's safe to assume that (most) of these would be used on Linux systems.
The windows versions downloaded will be counted separately. --
I think they should find a better way of doing this because it's not exactly the best way of obtaining someones identity. Someone could get into a lot of trouble if they left their machine accessible and then some of their childrens friends with a weird sense of humour wanted to send a lot of offendsive email, for example, by registering with a free provider online.
The online registration process is too easy you can just type any crap in the form and it'll accept it (this is the case for most is not all ISPs). There should be some checking of the address and then a form that has to be signed and returned (so people can't say they don't know what they are letting themselves in for with regard to the AUP, etc). Only when the form is feceived should the application be processed. Then the user of the system can be responsible for their own security and someone can't just subscribe to a free ISP without the knowledge of the machines owners.
I agree with this. Now that 'free' (although they don't fit into any definition of free I know) ISPs are taking hold in the UK it means that it is going to be exceedeingly difficult to go the way of the US and offer free calls and paid subscriptions (although the phone network may not have the capacity to cope with people being online all day). Personally I'd prefer to pay £30 per month for free calls (are you listening Telewest?) to ISPs rather than go with one of these so called free ISPs.
DID YOU KNOW....? In the UK we have a caller ID system where your phone number is transmitted to the receiving phone unless you explicitly block it with 141 before dialing the number or ask for it to be permanently blocked by the telco.
However some free ISPs insist that you have caller ID disabled and won't let you log in unless you disclose your phone number to them. They say it's for security but perhaps it could be telemarketing or whatever. I'm not really worried but I know some people who will be so I thought I'd let you know. --
AFAIK these free ISP's are not in any deals with telcos instead they have registered to become a telco themselves so what happens is the person who calls their free ISP is on their telephone network (say BT) and they then call their ISP which is their own Telco. Therefore the customers telco has to split the charge with the ISP for connecting to their network.
Think of this another way. In the UK Cable companies can compete with BT and offer a phone service (and so can anyone else) people on a Cable network can still phone BT and other phone networks but if you're making a call cross network then the two telcos have to split the charge.
So although the ISP's don't offer a telephone service as such they've paid their registration fees and therefore get their cut of the money without charging any more than a local rate call.
Of course support is another matter, most of these free ISPs have terrible support and charge a fortune for it in expensive phone calls. But then not many people need support. --
One thing about Miguel is that he is not afraid to speak his mind. He'll always say what he believes for example at the Netproject conference in London he was quoted as saying 'TCL was a mistake which shouldn't have happened'. Some people will disagree strongly with this statement but others won't.
Being able to speak you mind is a good thing so he shouldn't be criticised for it. He also makes an interesting speaker as I found out when he went to London. --
Well it appears that they may be looking for more people to work on linux.com see towards the bottom of this page: http://www.linux.com/version/ It doesn't say anything about pay but as it's a commercial website and they want a CV then it's a fair bet that you should be getting paid for it. --
If Microsoft released anything worth releasing under a proper Open Source (by definition) licence (preferably GNU so the source can be used in other GNU projects - if there's anything worth having) Microsoft would be in the situation where there would be many companies (and individuals) package Windows up and offer their own distributions of Windows. They could start to offer better support packages than MS would offer and MS would lose out severely.
Netscape elearsed their source as an effort to save their declining market share. Microsoft is still going from strength to strength and although their product quality would surely improve if they open sourcsd it they would lose millions of dollars (and what do you think MS is concerned with quality or making money).
So if they're going to make anything open source it is going to be under their terms and certainly not under an existing open source licence. There would be no freedom (in the sense of free speech, and probably not even free beer!), MS may even charge a fee to access the source and even if not they'll limit the freedom to redistribute binaries / modifications.
Perhaps they'll only open source components of the OS that Microsoft developers are having difficulty with in the hope that the OSS community will solve all their problems. Well that will be unlikely unless they can then incorporate the code into their own projects.
Basically no reasonbto get excited over. --
Jon 'maddog' Hall to speak in London
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 1
http://www.ukuug.org/events/non-ukuug.may1999.shtm l
While on the topic of Jon 'maddog' Hall you may be interested to know that he is speaking in a seminar in the UK in the near future. It will be interesting to here what he has to say.
Well personally I don't think this would make much difference as people who know what GNU is know that Linux and some other free OSes (Hurd) contain GNU code. On boxes that promote they contain GNU software there should either be a paragraph on the back of the box explaining about the GNU project or a link th their website. --
What's all this Window~1 stuff about. In case you didn't realise windows is less than 8 characters so doesn't get cut down like that window~1 is actually longer than windows!
Micros~1 perhaps but window~1 is just taking it too far. --
For those who want to buy the product before 14 July 1999 they've got a special price of $75.00 instead of $99 for non-commercial use. Download the evaluation license, try it out for 30 days and if you're happy order the product and if it's a huge success at this discounted price then they masy make that the permanent price. --
Re:Mozilla At One and what it says ...
on
Netscape 4.6
·
· Score: 1
It wasn't my intention to misrepresent what he had said. I just agree with that particular argument and that is how I interpreted what he had written. The bit about him being a developer was just an assumption. --
How can you patent an idea that has existed for years? OK it's the first time we've seen this on a PC but the world doesn't revolve around Intel.
Software patents are a bad idea and if VMware get this patent then there is something seriously wrong (but then most people would say there's definitely something wrong with the patents office!).
Freemware will serve as an education tool. With the source code available people can learn more about virtualisation. It's not a matter of someone wanting to go out and drive every commercial project out of business people enjoy writing code and VMware is good and writing it will be an interesting experience for those involved and would look great on a CV;) Also it will have these advantages: 1) If someone wants to port it to an unsupported OS (e.g. FreeBSD) they can as they have the code. With VMware you need to use Linux or NT (well NT is going to be supported) as the host OS. No code means you can't change that.
2) As with all open source projects bugs tend to get fixed faster.
3) It is competition for VMware. VMware will have to continue to deliver a cutting edge quality product as Freemware improves. If no competition then VMware may never improve (it's good now but not perfect).
I support VMware and Freemware. I believe it's the right of any company to charge for their product. I'll probably buy it. I'm not against proprietry software and I encourage it on the Linux paltform. However having an open source solution will help a lot of people. --
Slashdot Mirror
> You mean freeware
No, free software or open source.
Freeware can apply to any free of charge software including binary only software. Internet Explorer is freeware but it's not free software (free in both senses) or open source.
--
Was there a version 1.0?
--
It's a slightly different message as far as I can gather. The FSF don't believe money is the be all and end all of rewards but they realise that people need money to live. The amount of money they are prepared is small for the amount of work they will be doing so I wouldn't really call it a reward - it's basically just enough to live off.
If the author wanted financial rewards they'd go with a company not willing to make the book free as they'd get paid more by most publishers if they write the book for the FSF they are mainly writing it as a service to the free software community
--
> I don't know about the rest of the UK/Europe though.
Yeah, most of the UK uses buried power lines and so does many european countries.
--
This is what I think the scores should be:
-1: Totally inappropriate flamebait and useless crap. If it may be useful to someone give it a 0
0: Comments may be useful to some people but aren't exactly groundbreaking and relavant.
1: The vast majority of comments
2+: Comments that stand out from the crowd.
What I think has happened with the new system. Moderators now get a pull down menu and they then rate comments based on their view of them (flamebait, troll, insightful, etc) meaning that minor flamebait may quickly be moved down to -1 while only a slightly interesting article may make it up to 5 quickly when it deserved a 2.
TAKE NOTE: moderators please check the current score before moderating a post. If you agree the score is correct then *don't* select a moderation option as this will then alter the score either up or down depending on what you slect. I preferred the old method as it was clear that you were adding or deducting points from people this method just looks like a rating system by the people who don't check up on it.
--
I don't know why people make so much fuss over these words. They are commonly used words these days so I don't know why people are still offended by them. The english language changes and these words are now commonplace I don't see why people should have to watch what they're saying.
--
SuSE is not RedHat done anything. It's their own distribution not a hack of another. They use the RPM (RedHat) Package manager as does Caldera, etc. The way they organise packages on the CD is similar to the slackware method (have separate directories for different categories of apps).
When designing SuSE they seemed to take the best ideas from other distributions (as a Slackware user this is the other distribution that I'm most comfortable with - although there's a lot of things different to slackware) and combine them into their own as well as adding their own ideas.
Each to their own, however, I've never really liked RedHat but it's getting better all the time. It's just the little things with it that really piss me off. One of the most irritating is aliasing the rm command to rm -i so it keeps asking if you're sure every time. This should be an install time option or not included at all. When I was a new user I couldn't work out how to get rid of this irritating setting and as this 'safety net' is only in RedHat and rip-offs people moving over to another distro may then feel confident that they were going to be asked what they wanted to delete than type rm * expecting to be asked what to delete when everything gets deleted without even saying.
--
The answer to your question is, yes they will be selling stuff at the conference.
--
You're right the UKUUG Linux conference was held in Manchester last year, what the poster was probably talking about is the other (non-UKUUG) Linux events which have been held this year.
--
Just an example...
The point is it's so easy to register for these services they are guaranteed to get misused by a lot of people.
Anyway onto what you say - you can't keep an eye on someone 24 hours a day and even so what about freedom? Unless you keep your computer under lock and key and know everything about your childrens friends, which is very unlikely. Anyway this is far too much off topic.
--
Read the article it says WordPerfec/Linux downloads. As you download binaries and not source code it's safe to assume that (most) of these would be used on Linux systems.
The windows versions downloaded will be counted separately.
--
I think Barclays is the bank you're thinking of for offering the free ISP service. I'm sure many more will join them in the future.
--
I think they should find a better way of doing this because it's not exactly the best way of obtaining someones identity. Someone could get into a lot of trouble if they left their machine accessible and then some of their childrens friends with a weird sense of humour wanted to send a lot of offendsive email, for example, by registering with a free provider online.
The online registration process is too easy you can just type any crap in the form and it'll accept it (this is the case for most is not all ISPs). There should be some checking of the address and then a form that has to be signed and returned (so people can't say they don't know what they are letting themselves in for with regard to the AUP, etc). Only when the form is feceived should the application be processed. Then the user of the system can be responsible for their own security and someone can't just subscribe to a free ISP without the knowledge of the machines owners.
Did that make sense?
--
I agree with this. Now that 'free' (although they don't fit into any definition of free I know) ISPs are taking hold in the UK it means that it is going to be exceedeingly difficult to go the way of the US and offer free calls and paid subscriptions (although the phone network may not have the capacity to cope with people being online all day). Personally I'd prefer to pay £30 per month for free calls (are you listening Telewest?) to ISPs rather than go with one of these so called free ISPs.
DID YOU KNOW....?
In the UK we have a caller ID system where your phone number is transmitted to the receiving phone unless you explicitly block it with 141 before dialing the number or ask for it to be permanently blocked by the telco.
However some free ISPs insist that you have caller ID disabled and won't let you log in unless you disclose your phone number to them. They say it's for security but perhaps it could be telemarketing or whatever. I'm not really worried but I know some people who will be so I thought I'd let you know.
--
AFAIK these free ISP's are not in any deals with telcos instead they have registered to become a telco themselves so what happens is the person who calls their free ISP is on their telephone network (say BT) and they then call their ISP which is their own Telco. Therefore the customers telco has to split the charge with the ISP for connecting to their network.
Think of this another way. In the UK Cable companies can compete with BT and offer a phone service (and so can anyone else) people on a Cable network can still phone BT and other phone networks but if you're making a call cross network then the two telcos have to split the charge.
So although the ISP's don't offer a telephone service as such they've paid their registration fees and therefore get their cut of the money without charging any more than a local rate call.
Of course support is another matter, most of these free ISPs have terrible support and charge a fortune for it in expensive phone calls. But then not many people need support.
--
Yes, you can install and run applications from them both at the same time.
--
One thing about Miguel is that he is not afraid to speak his mind. He'll always say what he believes for example at the Netproject conference in London he was quoted as saying 'TCL was a mistake which shouldn't have happened'. Some people will disagree strongly with this statement but others won't.
Being able to speak you mind is a good thing so he shouldn't be criticised for it. He also makes an interesting speaker as I found out when he went to London.
--
Well it appears that they may be looking for more people to work on linux.com see towards the bottom of this page:
http://www.linux.com/version/
It doesn't say anything about pay but as it's a commercial website and they want a CV then it's a fair bet that you should be getting paid for it.
--
If Microsoft released anything worth releasing under a proper Open Source (by definition) licence (preferably GNU so the source can be used in other GNU projects - if there's anything worth having) Microsoft would be in the situation where there would be many companies (and individuals) package Windows up and offer their own distributions of Windows. They could start to offer better support packages than MS would offer and MS would lose out severely.
Netscape elearsed their source as an effort to save their declining market share. Microsoft is still going from strength to strength and although their product quality would surely improve if they open sourcsd it they would lose millions of dollars (and what do you think MS is concerned with quality or making money).
So if they're going to make anything open source it is going to be under their terms and certainly not under an existing open source licence. There would be no freedom (in the sense of free speech, and probably not even free beer!), MS may even charge a fee to access the source and even if not they'll limit the freedom to redistribute binaries / modifications.
Perhaps they'll only open source components of the OS that Microsoft developers are having difficulty with in the hope that the OSS community will solve all their problems. Well that will be unlikely unless they can then incorporate the code into their own projects.
Basically no reasonbto get excited over.
--
http://www.ukuug.org/events/non-ukuug.may1999.shtm l
While on the topic of Jon 'maddog' Hall you may be interested to know that he is speaking in a seminar in the UK in the near future. It will be interesting to here what he has to say.
Well personally I don't think this would make much difference as people who know what GNU is know that Linux and some other free OSes (Hurd) contain GNU code. On boxes that promote they contain GNU software there should either be a paragraph on the back of the box explaining about the GNU project or a link th their website.
--
What's all this Window~1 stuff about. In case you didn't realise windows is less than 8 characters so doesn't get cut down like that window~1 is actually longer than windows!
Micros~1 perhaps but window~1 is just taking it too far.
--
http://www.vmware.com/products/linuxpricing.html
For those who want to buy the product before 14 July 1999 they've got a special price of $75.00 instead of $99 for non-commercial use. Download the evaluation license, try it out for 30 days and if you're happy order the product and if it's a huge success at this discounted price then they masy make that the permanent price.
--
It wasn't my intention to misrepresent what he had said. I just agree with that particular argument and that is how I interpreted what he had written. The bit about him being a developer was just an assumption.
--
How can you patent an idea that has existed for years? OK it's the first time we've seen this on a PC but the world doesn't revolve around Intel.
Software patents are a bad idea and if VMware get this patent then there is something seriously wrong (but then most people would say there's definitely something wrong with the patents office!).
--
Freemware will serve as an education tool. With the source code available people can learn more about virtualisation. It's not a matter of someone wanting to go out and drive every commercial project out of business people enjoy writing code and VMware is good and writing it will be an interesting experience for those involved and would look great on a CV ;)
Also it will have these advantages:
1) If someone wants to port it to an unsupported OS (e.g. FreeBSD) they can as they have the code. With VMware you need to use Linux or NT (well NT is going to be supported) as the host OS. No code means you can't change that.
2) As with all open source projects bugs tend to get fixed faster.
3) It is competition for VMware. VMware will have to continue to deliver a cutting edge quality product as Freemware improves. If no competition then VMware may never improve (it's good now but not perfect).
I support VMware and Freemware. I believe it's the right of any company to charge for their product. I'll probably buy it. I'm not against proprietry software and I encourage it on the Linux paltform. However having an open source solution will help a lot of people.
--