But I do know that Eisner is a pirate. His company has been stealing from the public domain and denying people their legal fair use rights.
Disney's Michael Eisner and others say Hollywood will defend its intellectual property at all costs
It's obvious that he will do whatever it takes: he is already going as far as bribing our politicians, giving free speech rights only to the wealthiest, and destroying our democracy.
What Eisner & Co. understand very well and what their opponents haven't been able to capitalize on is that you have to define the language of the debate in order to win it. That's why we're all talking about pirates and thieves, and not about a balancing of rights.
Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that this is so, since what we now call the "content industry" has always been a major source of propaganda for the state. Those of us who want to effectively oppose the continuous extension of copyright need to start using the tools of the content industry. Calling Sen Hollings the Senator from Disney sounds like a good start.
Here's a proposal. I think we should start describing the DMCA as, "The Dirty Money Copyright Act". The phrase hasn't shown up on Google yet, and I think it should.
The Hiermenus are not "simple DHTML menus". They are extremely capable menus that work with an unprecedented set of browsers and capabilities, with good ease of use.
And if you want more than just capable menus, check out Tibet, a full client-server architecture for the web. These guys started by using JavaScript to fix the bugs in various browser JavaScript implementations, and then proceeded to build class libraries, debugging tools, client-side page templates, and a full IDE. All in JavaScript. And I'm not making an April Fools joke.
Also, the code is dual-licensed, commercial and open source.
The code is beta at the moment, and there is much work to do, but this is a seriously ambitious undertaking.
And no, I don't work for them or otherwise benefit from this heading-towards-off-topic post.
I hate to date myself like this, but here it goes:
Gates gave a little 'get to know you' talk the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1988 or 1989. It was basically a recruiting effort, from what I could see. Anyway, I distinctly remember him making a self-deprecating joke about that 640k 'ought to be enough for anyone' business.
I went back and read the mailing list on both IPF and OpenBSD. There are some elements that are childish, one guy suddenly change his mind about his work and then another keep bashing and won't let IPF re-unit with OpenBSD even after some modification to the license.
Yes, there were lots of childish comments. However, doing a code-weighted-average in my head, it seemed like the OpenBSD group was pretty calm and considered about the whole thing. Not that I'm completely unbiased, I guess.
A more important point is that aside from the fact that pf was pretty much a fait acompli when Darren changed his license, Theo had a very good reason for not going back to ipf - the license change is still not open enough for OpenBSD to include ipf in the kernel.
Theo et al want OpenBSD to be usable by anyone for anything, which means that Darren's, "you can't change the license terms," clause is still a problem. (See item #2 on OpenBSD's goals page.) As far as Theo is concerned you are fully welcome to fork OpenBSD (along with pf) and license your version under the GPL, if that is your desire.
If you don't share or value that goal, fine. But criticising Theo and/or OpenBSD for maintaining these goals is a little harsh.
I'm torn. The OED is an extremely important resource for the English language, and having more people contribute can only be a good thing. Actually, the Oxford has a history of community contributions so the concept is not entirely new. Just the medium.
On the other hand, online access costs something like US$550/year for a private individual, which just seems a little excessive. It seems a little like getting open source coders to work on your closed source commercial project.
Yes, it is expensive to build and maintain something like the OED and they claim that they're not actually trying to make money, just cover their costs. Here's some numbers in an old Salon article:
http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/09/08/oed/
I guess it just saddens me that access is so unaffordable, when the resource itself is so rich. Am I being unreasonable?
right now I receive 20 mails a day of spam in my hotmail inbox and the hotmail filter killed *VALID* messages!
Hotmail and Yahoo accounts accept WAY too much spam. Which is too bad, because I really like Yahoo's interface, and their reliability is second to none in the two or three years I've used them. I want them to succeed. Hotmail, well, I never got into that system, so I can't say much there.
What I have found that is very interesting is eiomail.com. US$20/year, so they may never hit a high volume in a world of free email accounts, but no advertising and excellent spam control. They do two things to prevent spam. Firstly, they give you a list of 6 or 8 different spam lists (RBL, MAPS, etc.) that you can choose individually to filter your mail with. Secondly, they use a "target revokable" email scheme, where you create different email aliases for use in different contexts. If you start getting spam to "you-amazon@you.eiomail.com", you know who sold your name on a list.
Ugh. Sounds like an ad, but no, I don't work there.
One saving grace about Yahoo; once you have filtered your legit mailing list sources into folders, you can filter all the remaining BCC'd mail into the trash directly. That removes at least 80% of the spam I get there. Now if they would just not raise the 'new mail' flag on my yahoo homepage when the only new mail is in the trash, life would be great.
I agree, it seems to me also that the broadband picture looks good in Canada. Monopoly telcos are happy to offer DSL everywhere I've heard about, and their competition are the monopoly cable companies. It seems to be enough competition to keep everyone honest.
DSL access is generally a matter of walking into a telco store, checking your phone number in a database for probable line quality issues, ensuring port availability at your CO, buying a modem/filter package and DIY installing. Rates are typically $35-40CAN/mo for 1.5 down, 640 up.
Third party DSL providers are active, and don't seem to be fighting too much with the telcos either. However, residential margins are slim for them, so the only place where third party DSL companies seem to be really active is in the business market. Static IPs, knowledgeable tech support, higher prices. In the small building where I work, every single company has third party DSL access of this type, and we have some of the most crusty old phone lines I've seen in Vancouver.
I know some rural areas aren't well served, but I would be interested in hearing if any Canadians are having trouble with broadband access in urban settings. Is my experience only representative of major centres? Vancouver and Toronto and their surrounding regions are where most of my information comes from. How are things in Moose Jaw and Thunder Bay?
And remember, this is another stock listed on the famed Vancouver exchange. This is the
same exchange where that company traded for 2 years before the founders realized that
the company had no product and the demo was smoke-and-mirrors.;)
You mean this Ballard, right? Which has been traded in Toronto for the last 5+ years? And on the NASDAQ, too?
Ballard is not a smoke-and-mirrors company. Or if they are, they should sell their smoke-and-mirror tech; it has fooled major auto makers into making investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Right now, you have all of your information replicated all over the place, meaning that
you trust that many people with your data. All you need is one of them not patching an
exploit, and bam, your data is gone. Why have multiple points of potential failure when
you can just have one?
Nice theory. They can't seem to keep Hotmail accounts secure, and they can't even keep their own IIS installations patched. With a track record like that, do you want Microsoft to be the single point of failure?
It isn't like they would consider using someone else's software even if it had a better security history.
I applaud Theo's decision, even if it does
happen to piss a few people off;
maybe now DJB will realize how much his
licensing ideas suck, and change them.
That's a good one. Just about knocked me off my chair. No, DJB has some
strong opinions regarding copyrights and licenses, and I doubt he is going to change them anytime soon. Maybe a US Supreme Court decision on the validity of software licenses would make an impact. And maybe the world would be a better place if the Supremes agree with him.
However, as an OpenBSD and qmail user, I'm distressed about all of this politics. And frankly, I've never liked having things like/var/qmail/bin kicking around, just because DJB is concerned about servicing installations that NFS mount/usr. Why is that my problem?
I'm wondering if it is possible to create free software versions of DJB's projects, so people can benefit from his excellent design decisions without having to deal with his whacked-out directory policies.
I suspect the correct way to go about this is to perform a clean-room copy of his work, where one person (or team) documents the way his software works, and someone else implements what was documented. Isn't that a valid copyright circumvention technique occasionally used in the hardware world? I can't find anything at google.
How does flamebait like this end up as +4 insightful?
I don't know you, Baki, and you may be the nicest guy in the world, but I would bet a lot of money that Theo has given 10 times more free software to the world than you ever will, and he's still at it. Sure, you can dismiss OpenBSD as a personality-driven 'splitoff', but many people see it as an important product that fills a niche nobody else has really been willing to address.
He is a difficult, undiplomatic person.
The list of significant free software contributors this sentence could apply to is long and distinguished.
Therefore, OpenBSD always generates a lot of news (just look at the overreaction w.r.t. ipfilter a week ago)
Here we go again. ipf is not free software. Theo et al should have clarified that long ago, and I'm sure they are quite upset with themselves that they didn't. However, OpenBSD has clear goals which ipf plainly violates, and even if Darren had wanted to come to an understanding with Theo like he apparently has with the FreeBSD and NetBSD maintainers, OpenBSD's goals gave Theo no choice but to pull ipf out of the kernel. Sticking to your principles is not an overreaction. And I'm not flaming Darren here either as he is welcome to do whatever he wants with his copyrights.
The other free BSD's, the two main ones, FreeBSD and NetBSD, are free for download, also in ISO form.
From my perspective, the 'two main ones' are OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but my criteria don't include frequency of use. And I think it is great that FreeBSD and NetBSD have downloadable ISO's. That way, if you can't afford to buy the official OpenBSD CD, you don't have a friend to borrow the official CD from, you can't download a boot-floppy and install over the net, and you don't trust the unofficial ISO's, you can always choose one of these other excellent operating systems. Why not try Linux while you are at it? It isn't like OpenBSD's ISO policy is damaging the free software movement.
You only need to get a CD one time, and for years and years you can track the whole project with minimum bandwidth requirements.
That sounds exactly like OpenBSD. If you ignore the net-install method, which allows a 0 CD installation.
Even so, the FreeBSD project would like support in the form of sold CD's. But if you don't want to, there is absolutely nothing to make your life as a "freeloader" harder, on the contrary.
Very true, and very commendable of them. And if OpenBSD or NetBSD meet your needs the best, find a way to install them instead; you aren't going to save any time or money trying to recreate all that work by yourself.
It's not the speed of broadband that is its greatest asset, it's the always-on quality. The ability to leave a large file transfer overnight without the need to get up and disconnect, no tying up of a phone line, be notified of mail as soon as it arrives, being available over ICQ whenever you want.
Hey! Don't forget to mention the ability to be a part of that latest hot Intenet trend, the DDOS!
All together now, "IPF is not free software." Full stop, end of story. OpenBSD can't use it, given the project's goals.
I can understand the key players in all this having strong reactions to what's been happening, but I wish all of us spectators would calm down a bit. (This isn't directed specifically at the poster I'm following up to, btw.)
Yes, this issue will affect me (as a sysadmin), and yes, I have opinions as to who made what mistake when, but I don't have a lot of patience anymore for all the people proclaiming undying support for one side or the other and flaming everyone else within reach of Slashdot or IPF's and OpenBSD's mailing lists.
Both Darren and Theo have done a lot of good work, and I believe few of the critics really have the right to criticize. I mean, is it helping?
The OmniWeb browser on Mac OSX (I don't know if they make it for other platforms) has an option that says "Scripts are allowed to open new windows only in response to being clicked."
Once this browser gets a little more stable it may become my main OSX browser because of this one feature. It is such an elegant solution I'm almost worried the Omni Group are going to patent it. Hmm... if they do, maybe they can take a serious run at IE's market share?
Haven't we learned not to feed trolls? I hope that the Free Software luminaries give this guy the response he deserves this time: none at all.
By stooping to his level, we're playing their game.
If nobody responds to Microsoft's PR, then Microsoft's PR will define the terms of engagement. No, you don't want Free Software luminaries frothing at the mouth, but I think it is perfectly fair to say that the term, "cancerous" is probably more correctly applied to Microsoft's acknowledged policy of, "embrace and extend." Just say it calmly, rationally, and with decent grammar.
There is a general aura of pissiness from the community. You're expected to thoroughly research every problem before asking for their help. Like I said, the documentation is your best friend, not fellow OpenBSDers. This certainly encouraged me to be very self-sufficient, but I spent many an hour scouring documentation looking for help with undocumented problems.
You don't want to be asking AOL questions on the tech mailing list, thats for sure. On the other hand, if you can hire an OpenBSD contributor for a little consulting to help you get oriented, you'll do well. More useful advice for companies than home users, I guess.
All he says is WE should be able to give up some privacy for convience.
Very good one line summary. Except for the short argument in paragraph 2 about medical records, he spends the whole time talking about how convenient it will be to give up our personal information to the great digital void. Which makes me wonder; why is the article titled, "The Case Against Absolute Privacy?" I would expect that title to appear over an article on terrorists and kiddie porn, not convenient services. Are we supposed to agree with him that convenience is, um, convenient, and then conclude that privacy isn't such an important right after all?
First give me back my right to privacy, and then let me choose how to disclose my information.
Mozilla crashes within 15 minutes? Are you running release version 0.8? Switch to 0.8.1 immediately! (Most of the versions between 0.8 and 0.8.1 were pretty bad...I went back to 0.7 for awhile, but 0.8.1 was reasonably good again. 2001032804 hasn't given me any trouble yet (I think the scrambled graphics were a problem at the User Friendly site), but the day is young.
Now this here is a textbook-quality example of why it is so hard to tell from written messages whether someone is trying to be funny or not. Taken seriously, this person seems to be suggesting that normal people, or at least normal slashdot people, should be willing to evaluate the relative advantages of 0.7, 0.8, 0.8.0.x, and 0.8.1 builds of a web browser over the course of a month or so. Taken as a joke, HiThere is pointing out how some of us have jobs or go to school.
I want. Unfortunately, to get it today, you have to move to Japan, where most cool tech hits the consumer world first.
Oops; memory fault. I should have reviewed that bookmark before I posted it; the 'today' part is false advertising. However, it is still good English coverage of the Japanese phone displays that are mentioned briefly in the techreview article.
Me: But if being just a web directory is a good thing, they still have that option, don't they?
Not without significantly damaging their image/brand value, I don't think.
Hmm. They can toss anything they want, just as long as it isn't stuff I use.
And as far as I remember Yahoo became quite a name on the net before they got into all their side ventures, so you can't say that they would have lacked brand power without them.
Perhaps. I would counter that without the appearance of growth, their early position would have faded over time. There were certainly a lot of Excite's out there gunning for Yahoo's place. Maybe they overextended, but I certainly couldn't have done as well as they did and I have a hard time believing that all the critics in this discussion could have done so either. Especially the, "Yahoo should be 4 or 5 coders and a web host" types.
Consider Yahoo's current staff size and the amount of people it would take to run a Directory only site. I think that the cost would be much greater than the decrease in revenue.
Interesting conjecture. What I would like to know is how many people use www.yahoo.com (i.e. Yahoo the Directory) as their homepage vs. the number who use my.yahoo.com (i.e. Yahoo the Customizable Portal).
Anyway, Yahoo certainly has all the numbers they need to figure out what to keep and what to toss, and I think they still have maneuvering room.
If they stayed in the web directory business which started them off (and which is something they are good at) they may not have needed to hire 10,000 people or have huge overhead operating costs, while they would still get much of the traffic and advertisement revenue they do now.
Nice theory. Certainly many of their bets haven't paid off and could be cut back, but if they had stayed as just a web directory they wouldn't have the name, infrastructure, or $1.7B cash that they have now. Yes, they need to do some serious strategic planning. Yes, things may get worse for Yahoo before they get better. But if being just a web directory is a good thing, they still have that option, don't they? I'd love to have their problems.
I think it's their greed that got them into the current mess. Low overhead high traffic sites
is the way it should to go. How long would "Slashdot free internet" service last i wonder?
Woah, buddy. That's pretty harsh criticism of a company that has developed a profitable, well liked global brand though all the turmoil of the net's early growth period. If it is high traffic you want, Yahoo pretty much defines it, and I really doubt their overhead is that high, relatively speaking. And much of the problem right now is that high traffic can be a liability if nobody is paying for advertising.
Since people are granted the "flimsy" protection of an envelope, without really having to worry about their privacy being invaded, would it
be far-fetched if we were granted "flimsy" encryption as well?
The best analogy I can think of for the "flimsy" encryption of an envelope is ROT13. We don't worry about postal mail privacy because the system has been around forever, but a postal employee with a light bulb can capture credit card numbers more easily than a script kiddie with an NT/IIS hack kit can.
Sure, digital information is easier to inspect in large quantities, but I bet that somewhere in the world, in some despotic little country, there is a 'postal code reader' in a mail room that includes a backlight and an OCR system. Posties on the line wouldn't even have to know about it.
PS, for those of you who are so concerned about email encryption; you do shred your bills etcetera when you discard them, right?
Yes, people use it, in an embedded environment. It can do hard realtime processing.
A point worth noting is that QNX's ability to do hard realtime processing makes it handy in other applications as well. I worked with it for years, almost always in a 'soft' realtime capacity. It was beautifully efficient and robust.
When my company was marketing-department-strong-armed into supporting Windows NT, the sorry developers who moved to that platform spent half their time trying to work around the fact that pressing and holding the mouse button causes the CPU meter to jump to 100%. I kid you not.
The other half the time seemed to be spent trying to get device drivers to work, which was particularly laughable because 'better 3rd party device support' was one of the major reasons we made the switch.
So with both halves of their time used trying to do things QNX gave them for free, when did they get to advance the actual applications? Well, that was in the time known as 'overtime'.
It stressed me out too much to watch. I quit instead.
Slashdot Mirror
What Eisner & Co. understand very well and what their opponents haven't been able to capitalize on is that you have to define the language of the debate in order to win it. That's why we're all talking about pirates and thieves, and not about a balancing of rights.
Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that this is so, since what we now call the "content industry" has always been a major source of propaganda for the state. Those of us who want to effectively oppose the continuous extension of copyright need to start using the tools of the content industry. Calling Sen Hollings the Senator from Disney sounds like a good start.
Here's a proposal. I think we should start describing the DMCA as, "The Dirty Money Copyright Act". The phrase hasn't shown up on Google yet, and I think it should.
How does that sound? Any other suggestions?
The Hiermenus are not "simple DHTML menus". They are extremely capable menus that work with an unprecedented set of browsers and capabilities, with good ease of use.
And if you want more than just capable menus, check out Tibet, a full client-server architecture for the web. These guys started by using JavaScript to fix the bugs in various browser JavaScript implementations, and then proceeded to build class libraries, debugging tools, client-side page templates, and a full IDE. All in JavaScript. And I'm not making an April Fools joke.
Also, the code is dual-licensed, commercial and open source.
The code is beta at the moment, and there is much work to do, but this is a seriously ambitious undertaking.
And no, I don't work for them or otherwise benefit from this heading-towards-off-topic post.
I hate to date myself like this, but here it goes:
Gates gave a little 'get to know you' talk the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1988 or 1989. It was basically a recruiting effort, from what I could see. Anyway, I distinctly remember him making a self-deprecating joke about that 640k 'ought to be enough for anyone' business.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't think so.
I went back and read the mailing list on both IPF and OpenBSD. There are some elements that are childish, one guy suddenly change his mind about his work and then another keep bashing and won't let IPF re-unit with OpenBSD even after some modification to the license.
Yes, there were lots of childish comments. However, doing a code-weighted-average in my head, it seemed like the OpenBSD group was pretty calm and considered about the whole thing. Not that I'm completely unbiased, I guess.
A more important point is that aside from the fact that pf was pretty much a fait acompli when Darren changed his license, Theo had a very good reason for not going back to ipf - the license change is still not open enough for OpenBSD to include ipf in the kernel.
Theo et al want OpenBSD to be usable by anyone for anything, which means that Darren's, "you can't change the license terms," clause is still a problem. (See item #2 on OpenBSD's goals page.) As far as Theo is concerned you are fully welcome to fork OpenBSD (along with pf) and license your version under the GPL, if that is your desire.
If you don't share or value that goal, fine. But criticising Theo and/or OpenBSD for maintaining these goals is a little harsh.
I'm torn. The OED is an extremely important resource for the English language, and having more people contribute can only be a good thing. Actually, the Oxford has a history of community contributions so the concept is not entirely new. Just the medium.
On the other hand, online access costs something like US$550/year for a private individual, which just seems a little excessive. It seems a little like getting open source coders to work on your closed source commercial project.
Yes, it is expensive to build and maintain something like the OED and they claim that they're not actually trying to make money, just cover their costs. Here's some numbers in an old Salon article:
http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/09/08/oed/
I guess it just saddens me that access is so unaffordable, when the resource itself is so rich. Am I being unreasonable?
right now I receive 20 mails a day of spam in my hotmail inbox and the hotmail filter killed *VALID* messages!
Hotmail and Yahoo accounts accept WAY too much spam. Which is too bad, because I really like Yahoo's interface, and their reliability is second to none in the two or three years I've used them. I want them to succeed. Hotmail, well, I never got into that system, so I can't say much there.
What I have found that is very interesting is eiomail.com. US$20/year, so they may never hit a high volume in a world of free email accounts, but no advertising and excellent spam control. They do two things to prevent spam. Firstly, they give you a list of 6 or 8 different spam lists (RBL, MAPS, etc.) that you can choose individually to filter your mail with. Secondly, they use a "target revokable" email scheme, where you create different email aliases for use in different contexts. If you start getting spam to "you-amazon@you.eiomail.com", you know who sold your name on a list.
Ugh. Sounds like an ad, but no, I don't work there.
One saving grace about Yahoo; once you have filtered your legit mailing list sources into folders, you can filter all the remaining BCC'd mail into the trash directly. That removes at least 80% of the spam I get there. Now if they would just not raise the 'new mail' flag on my yahoo homepage when the only new mail is in the trash, life would be great.
I agree, it seems to me also that the broadband picture looks good in Canada. Monopoly telcos are happy to offer DSL everywhere I've heard about, and their competition are the monopoly cable companies. It seems to be enough competition to keep everyone honest.
DSL access is generally a matter of walking into a telco store, checking your phone number in a database for probable line quality issues, ensuring port availability at your CO, buying a modem/filter package and DIY installing. Rates are typically $35-40CAN/mo for 1.5 down, 640 up.
Third party DSL providers are active, and don't seem to be fighting too much with the telcos either. However, residential margins are slim for them, so the only place where third party DSL companies seem to be really active is in the business market. Static IPs, knowledgeable tech support, higher prices. In the small building where I work, every single company has third party DSL access of this type, and we have some of the most crusty old phone lines I've seen in Vancouver.
I know some rural areas aren't well served, but I would be interested in hearing if any Canadians are having trouble with broadband access in urban settings. Is my experience only representative of major centres? Vancouver and Toronto and their surrounding regions are where most of my information comes from. How are things in Moose Jaw and Thunder Bay?
And remember, this is another stock listed on the famed Vancouver exchange. This is the same exchange where that company traded for 2 years before the founders realized that the company had no product and the demo was smoke-and-mirrors. ;)
You mean this Ballard, right? Which has been traded in Toronto for the last 5+ years? And on the NASDAQ, too?
Ballard is not a smoke-and-mirrors company. Or if they are, they should sell their smoke-and-mirror tech; it has fooled major auto makers into making investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
And they just managed to sell Ford $22 million worth of smoke last week, too.
Right now, you have all of your information replicated all over the place, meaning that you trust that many people with your data. All you need is one of them not patching an exploit, and bam, your data is gone. Why have multiple points of potential failure when you can just have one?
Nice theory. They can't seem to keep Hotmail accounts secure, and they can't even keep their own IIS installations patched. With a track record like that, do you want Microsoft to be the single point of failure?
It isn't like they would consider using someone else's software even if it had a better security history.
I applaud Theo's decision, even if it does happen to piss a few people off; maybe now DJB will realize how much his licensing ideas suck, and change them.
That's a good one. Just about knocked me off my chair. No, DJB has some strong opinions regarding copyrights and licenses, and I doubt he is going to change them anytime soon. Maybe a US Supreme Court decision on the validity of software licenses would make an impact. And maybe the world would be a better place if the Supremes agree with him.
However, as an OpenBSD and qmail user, I'm distressed about all of this politics. And frankly, I've never liked having things like /var/qmail/bin kicking around, just because DJB is concerned about servicing installations that NFS mount /usr. Why is that my problem?
I'm wondering if it is possible to create free software versions of DJB's projects, so people can benefit from his excellent design decisions without having to deal with his whacked-out directory policies.
I suspect the correct way to go about this is to perform a clean-room copy of his work, where one person (or team) documents the way his software works, and someone else implements what was documented. Isn't that a valid copyright circumvention technique occasionally used in the hardware world? I can't find anything at google.
How does flamebait like this end up as +4 insightful?
I don't know you, Baki, and you may be the nicest guy in the world, but I would bet a lot of money that Theo has given 10 times more free software to the world than you ever will, and he's still at it. Sure, you can dismiss OpenBSD as a personality-driven 'splitoff', but many people see it as an important product that fills a niche nobody else has really been willing to address.
He is a difficult, undiplomatic person.
The list of significant free software contributors this sentence could apply to is long and distinguished.
Therefore, OpenBSD always generates a lot of news (just look at the overreaction w.r.t. ipfilter a week ago)
Here we go again. ipf is not free software. Theo et al should have clarified that long ago, and I'm sure they are quite upset with themselves that they didn't. However, OpenBSD has clear goals which ipf plainly violates, and even if Darren had wanted to come to an understanding with Theo like he apparently has with the FreeBSD and NetBSD maintainers, OpenBSD's goals gave Theo no choice but to pull ipf out of the kernel. Sticking to your principles is not an overreaction. And I'm not flaming Darren here either as he is welcome to do whatever he wants with his copyrights.
The other free BSD's, the two main ones, FreeBSD and NetBSD, are free for download, also in ISO form.
From my perspective, the 'two main ones' are OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but my criteria don't include frequency of use. And I think it is great that FreeBSD and NetBSD have downloadable ISO's. That way, if you can't afford to buy the official OpenBSD CD, you don't have a friend to borrow the official CD from, you can't download a boot-floppy and install over the net, and you don't trust the unofficial ISO's, you can always choose one of these other excellent operating systems. Why not try Linux while you are at it? It isn't like OpenBSD's ISO policy is damaging the free software movement.
You only need to get a CD one time, and for years and years you can track the whole project with minimum bandwidth requirements.
That sounds exactly like OpenBSD. If you ignore the net-install method, which allows a 0 CD installation.
Even so, the FreeBSD project would like support in the form of sold CD's. But if you don't want to, there is absolutely nothing to make your life as a "freeloader" harder, on the contrary.
Very true, and very commendable of them. And if OpenBSD or NetBSD meet your needs the best, find a way to install them instead; you aren't going to save any time or money trying to recreate all that work by yourself.
It's not the speed of broadband that is its greatest asset, it's the always-on quality. The ability to leave a large file transfer overnight without the need to get up and disconnect, no tying up of a phone line, be notified of mail as soon as it arrives, being available over ICQ whenever you want.
Hey! Don't forget to mention the ability to be a part of that latest hot Intenet trend, the DDOS!
All together now, "IPF is not free software." Full stop, end of story. OpenBSD can't use it, given the project's goals.
I can understand the key players in all this having strong reactions to what's been happening, but I wish all of us spectators would calm down a bit. (This isn't directed specifically at the poster I'm following up to, btw.)
Yes, this issue will affect me (as a sysadmin), and yes, I have opinions as to who made what mistake when, but I don't have a lot of patience anymore for all the people proclaiming undying support for one side or the other and flaming everyone else within reach of Slashdot or IPF's and OpenBSD's mailing lists.
Both Darren and Theo have done a lot of good work, and I believe few of the critics really have the right to criticize. I mean, is it helping?
The OmniWeb browser on Mac OSX (I don't know if they make it for other platforms) has an option that says "Scripts are allowed to open new windows only in response to being clicked."
Once this browser gets a little more stable it may become my main OSX browser because of this one feature. It is such an elegant solution I'm almost worried the Omni Group are going to patent it. Hmm... if they do, maybe they can take a serious run at IE's market share?
Haven't we learned not to feed trolls? I hope that the Free Software luminaries give this guy the response he deserves this time: none at all.
By stooping to his level, we're playing their game.
If nobody responds to Microsoft's PR, then Microsoft's PR will define the terms of engagement. No, you don't want Free Software luminaries frothing at the mouth, but I think it is perfectly fair to say that the term, "cancerous" is probably more correctly applied to Microsoft's acknowledged policy of, "embrace and extend." Just say it calmly, rationally, and with decent grammar.
There is a general aura of pissiness from the community. You're expected to thoroughly research every problem before asking for their help. Like I said, the documentation is your best friend, not fellow OpenBSDers. This certainly encouraged me to be very self-sufficient, but I spent many an hour scouring documentation looking for help with undocumented problems.
You don't want to be asking AOL questions on the tech mailing list, thats for sure. On the other hand, if you can hire an OpenBSD contributor for a little consulting to help you get oriented, you'll do well. More useful advice for companies than home users, I guess.
All he says is WE should be able to give up some privacy for convience.
Very good one line summary. Except for the short argument in paragraph 2 about medical records, he spends the whole time talking about how convenient it will be to give up our personal information to the great digital void. Which makes me wonder; why is the article titled, "The Case Against Absolute Privacy?" I would expect that title to appear over an article on terrorists and kiddie porn, not convenient services. Are we supposed to agree with him that convenience is, um, convenient, and then conclude that privacy isn't such an important right after all?
First give me back my right to privacy, and then let me choose how to disclose my information.
Now this here is a textbook-quality example of why it is so hard to tell from written messages whether someone is trying to be funny or not. Taken seriously, this person seems to be suggesting that normal people, or at least normal slashdot people, should be willing to evaluate the relative advantages of 0.7, 0.8, 0.8.0.x, and 0.8.1 builds of a web browser over the course of a month or so. Taken as a joke, HiThere is pointing out how some of us have jobs or go to school.
Somebody want to help me out here?
Oops; memory fault. I should have reviewed that bookmark before I posted it; the 'today' part is false advertising. However, it is still good English coverage of the Japanese phone displays that are mentioned briefly in the techreview article.
I want. Unfortunately, to get it today, you have to move to Japan, where most cool tech hits the consumer world first.
Me: But if being just a web directory is a good thing, they still have that option, don't they?
Not without significantly damaging their image/brand value, I don't think.
Hmm. They can toss anything they want, just as long as it isn't stuff I use.
And as far as I remember Yahoo became quite a name on the net before they got into all their side ventures, so you can't say that they would have lacked brand power without them.
Perhaps. I would counter that without the appearance of growth, their early position would have faded over time. There were certainly a lot of Excite's out there gunning for Yahoo's place. Maybe they overextended, but I certainly couldn't have done as well as they did and I have a hard time believing that all the critics in this discussion could have done so either. Especially the, "Yahoo should be 4 or 5 coders and a web host" types.
Consider Yahoo's current staff size and the amount of people it would take to run a Directory only site. I think that the cost would be much greater than the decrease in revenue.
Interesting conjecture. What I would like to know is how many people use www.yahoo.com (i.e. Yahoo the Directory) as their homepage vs. the number who use my.yahoo.com (i.e. Yahoo the Customizable Portal).
Anyway, Yahoo certainly has all the numbers they need to figure out what to keep and what to toss, and I think they still have maneuvering room.
If they stayed in the web directory business which started them off (and which is something they are good at) they may not have needed to hire 10,000 people or have huge overhead operating costs, while they would still get much of the traffic and advertisement revenue they do now.
Nice theory. Certainly many of their bets haven't paid off and could be cut back, but if they had stayed as just a web directory they wouldn't have the name, infrastructure, or $1.7B cash that they have now. Yes, they need to do some serious strategic planning. Yes, things may get worse for Yahoo before they get better. But if being just a web directory is a good thing, they still have that option, don't they? I'd love to have their problems.
I think it's their greed that got them into the current mess. Low overhead high traffic sites is the way it should to go. How long would "Slashdot free internet" service last i wonder?
Woah, buddy. That's pretty harsh criticism of a company that has developed a profitable, well liked global brand though all the turmoil of the net's early growth period. If it is high traffic you want, Yahoo pretty much defines it, and I really doubt their overhead is that high, relatively speaking. And much of the problem right now is that high traffic can be a liability if nobody is paying for advertising.
Stick to what you know.
Umm, yeah.
Since people are granted the "flimsy" protection of an envelope, without really having to worry about their privacy being invaded, would it be far-fetched if we were granted "flimsy" encryption as well?
The best analogy I can think of for the "flimsy" encryption of an envelope is ROT13. We don't worry about postal mail privacy because the system has been around forever, but a postal employee with a light bulb can capture credit card numbers more easily than a script kiddie with an NT/IIS hack kit can.
Sure, digital information is easier to inspect in large quantities, but I bet that somewhere in the world, in some despotic little country, there is a 'postal code reader' in a mail room that includes a backlight and an OCR system. Posties on the line wouldn't even have to know about it.
PS, for those of you who are so concerned about email encryption; you do shred your bills etcetera when you discard them, right?
I don't mean to Microsoft bash, but...
/' or
We already know that they don't know how to
set up DNS. (ie primary/secondary DNS on the
same box until about a month ago)
They also don't seem to be able to configure
a web server. Try:
telnet www.microsoft.com 80
(Connecting, etc...)
GET / HTTP/1.0
You get something like:
No site configured at this address
Seriously. Try it. Variations like 'GET
'GET / HTTP/1.1' are equally entertaining.
If they can't make these basic sort of web
standards go, what are the odds they can
create one of their own and get it right?
I am interested in XML-RPC, though. Dave can
do 'simple but effective'.
A point worth noting is that QNX's ability to do hard realtime processing makes it handy in other applications as well. I worked with it for years, almost always in a 'soft' realtime capacity. It was beautifully efficient and robust.
When my company was marketing-department-strong-armed into supporting Windows NT, the sorry developers who moved to that platform spent half their time trying to work around the fact that pressing and holding the mouse button causes the CPU meter to jump to 100%. I kid you not.
The other half the time seemed to be spent trying to get device drivers to work, which was particularly laughable because 'better 3rd party device support' was one of the major reasons we made the switch.
So with both halves of their time used trying to do things QNX gave them for free, when did they get to advance the actual applications? Well, that was in the time known as 'overtime'.
It stressed me out too much to watch. I quit instead.