I asked what the point was, not why they weren't up to date. Why not give download permission to mirrors before announcing it and making it available to the rest of us? It's hardly productive to have *zero* available download sites - I must have gone through about half the mirror sites before giving up.
"Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said.
I agree too - although I haven't heard of very many cases where the lorries full of CDs get hijacked on the way to the record stores. Perhaps the police should get involved. Copyright infringement, however, is a different story.
1 good example is Binary operations, all kinds of data is store like this especially in legacy or the mainframe systems i've been working with,but XSL provides no weasy way of formatting this data into somthing usefull./p>
XSL is a tool to transform XML documents. Of course it doesn't touch binary formats, that's outside it's scope.
So, what, MS is morally obligated to give their software away for free to keep the Internet secure? Please.
You don't have to pay for the service pack - it is an update to the existing software. The service pack on it's own is useless. Stopping people with unauthorised copies of Windows from installing it will not magically make them pay for the software they already have a copy of.
The problem with Code Red wasn't software pirates...
Correct.
it was (and is) ordinary users who either don't know enough to keep their bug patches up-to-date, or don't care.
Right. Now, what has changed here? A hell of a lot more people will simply not have the option of installing the updates.
So, before MS did this, the number of people using an unauthorised copy of Windows was u million. Afterwards, it's still u million. Before, the number of people with wide-open Windows was c (clueless) million + a (apathetic) million. Afterwards, it is now c million + a million + u million.
Now, where is the benefit to Microsoft? The vast majority of people who are affected by this will simply leave their software as it is, because every time a service pack comes out, they are going to look at the hundreds of pounds it costs to buy a legitimate copy, and measure the value against the updated features in the service pack, and not the features of the whole OS.
All this will do is vastly increase the effect of worms like Code Red. The only possible benefit I can see of this is that in the future, if Code Red 5 (or whatever) breaks out, Microsoft can blame pirates rather than admitting the average Windows server isn't maintained by somebody who isn't remotely qualified to do so.
Moc? Moc is simply a preprocessor to add on language support for the signal/slot methods. If you remember, C++ started out as a preprocessor for C. OK, so it might not be kosher C++, but it's much more intuitive to do things that way than with base-classes, etc, that you see with other C++ GUI techniques.
I trie dusing ASP and it made me want to stick needles in my eye with it's horrible error messages and inability to return values from functions.
I'm not vbscript's biggest fan (I assume you are talking about vbscript, since asp is language independent, and so doesn't control things like return values). However, it's trivial to return a value from a function, just assign the value to the function name, i.e.:
function foo(bar)
foo = bar * 2 end function
response.write("10 x 2 = " & foo(10))
OK, so it's not exactly the clearest syntax, but it gets the job done. Error messages, on the other hand, also drive me nuts, since half the time, it reports the line number of the error as being '?', or in a completely different file to where the problem is.
It's two years old, and hardly any progress has been made with it since the original Netscape 4, which is much older (talking bugfixes only, not features). In internet terms, that's ancient.
What newer browser would you recommend, for someone who is running SPARC Solaris on a ss10/612 ?
That's up to you. A decent website degrades gracefully when images are not available. In this particular case, this might not work, since Netscape attempts to handle it (IIRC) and fails. In this case, a designer would have to judge whether or not it's worth supporting such an old browser, when the website can be viewed in all current browsers, and all (bug-free) older browsers.
How can Microsoft stop people from sending in spoofed data? What will stop, for example, NVidia from sending in data that makes Matrox drivers look buggy as hell and getting them blocked?
You are thinking of Reflections on Trusting Trust, and it wasn't a compromise of gcc, it was just a "what if" situation that Ken Thompson talked about once.
1. What has been the hardest thing for you to deal with from a marketing perspective? The DOJ trial, or something else? What do you think the next difficult thing is that's coming up?
2. Do you view Windows as a competitor to Linux?:)
I guess usenet has outgrown the software. Time to rewrite the software, I think, instead of replacing it with something different (e.g. web forums).
From reading your post, I think you more or less fall into the category of "user", even though you are modifying the software and distributing it. I think I make this distrinction because of the fact that the changes made seem to be highly specialised, instead of a generic alteration. Whether or not this makes a difference to the argument of communist vs. capitalist, I'm not sure:). I'll settle for saying open-source is the best of both worlds:).
Ergo, a film like Billy Elliot will be rated R because someone says the word 'fuck', while a film like Nutty Professor 2, complete with a grandmother giving implied oral sex (with teeth out) gets away with a PG-13. It's why Lost World, complete with people being ripped apart by dinosaurs for our amusement, is rated PG-13, while a film like Requiem For A Dream, with it's important message, is sent to unscreenable land when it gets an NC-17.
Actually, I always assumed that Lost World got a low rating because it was a guaranteed money-maker, especially when all the kids want the dino toys. Would the movie be half as profitable without the money made on merchandise sold to kids?
I am judging open source by the only measure that makes any sense. It's all about the users plain and simple.
Yes, but the health of the industry that fills those users' needs is an important factor in the long run.
When I started using Linux there wasn't any "industry,"
There was a large software industry in 1991. Linux is not an industry, it is a piece of software.
The funny thing is that it really doesn't take too terribly many people sharing their source code to make the economics of Free Software work. And people that don't share code are at a disadvantage the second a Free Software project becomes useable. Once the project becomes self sustaining it literally sucks the air out of the room for commercial software vendors who want to charge high prices for software "licenses."
I agree completely. There is no usefulness in trying to sell something when an already free equivelant exists.
I disagree with this as well. It has overwhelmingly been in the best interest of Free Software hackers as individuals to release their source code.
Sorry, I was talking about individuals in the software industry (i.e. businesses trying to sell software). I agree that single developers trying to start a large project have a much better chance of creating what they want when they go open.
Presumably, at some point your improved GIFgraph had advantages over the free software counterpart. Whether or not it paid out in the long term is irrelevent - at some point the closed version was of greater value than the version everybody else had, and you had a monopoly on that piece of software, purely because you acted in your own interests above that of the community (not a flame, honest, just pointing out the facts).
And don't let anyone fool you, it's all about the money. Linux gets used because it is economical to do so, and it gets improved because in many cases it is cheaper to adapt Linux to a particular use than to pay for the equivalent functionality from commercial software.
And what makes these same people contribute source? In some cases, the gpl requires it, but then you are ignoring the contributions to bsd,x,etc licensed projects, and previously closed projects that are relicensed. I don't think there is a sound capitalist argument for doing this, unless you fall back on the fact you are strengthening the community you are selling to, which is beginning to sound familiar.
The good news is that Linux is also a very friendly community. We build mailing lists, and we subscribe to them. We even read the lists and answer questions. The reason that we do this is because we know that eventually we will need some help as well (and because it's fun).
And why will you get the help? Because you have made the mailing list a friendlier place with your contributions, or in some small part, you are responsible for the growth of that mailing list?
In Marxism everyone reaps equal benefits, but with Free Software the benefits reaped are equal to the ability and work that one puts into it. For example, my father couldn't even get his printer to work when he was using Linux, and yet I can use it to run my business. The difference, of course, is that I have invested more in learning how to put Linux to use than he has.
The situation you describe has nothing to do with open-vs-closed. If printing was hard to set up with Windows, then exactly the same arguments would apply.
You are judging open-source software purely on the basis on it's usefulness to the end-user. While this is an important consideration, I think the communist slant is more obvious when you apply it to the software industry. Everybody can "take" from the shared pool of knowledge & material (code), and it fails if everybody is too selfish (i.e. nobody contributes public code, and everybody goes closed-source).
Therefore, it is in the commmunity's best interests for people to contribute, yet in an individual's best interests to be selfish (go closed-source and get a head-start on the other companies in the industry). Yet, without consideration for the community as a whole, the individuals (and end-users) are much worse off, because the open code is less useful. Of course, in relation to the others in the community, they are no worse off, and this is where it counts when it comes to making money.
I believe this is why it makes sense for IBM and similar companies to contribute to open-source. Their industry (hardware, support) is directly linked to the health of the software industry, and so it makes more sense for these types of companies to contribute than for software companies to contribute.
What would be their incentive to invent if they cannot make money out of it ?
If it's a new thing that advances the state-of-the-art, then they will make money, until a clone is made. Then they will have to carry on inventing. This is good, this is innovation, this is what short-term copyrights do. On the other hand, if they are trying to make money on something that has already been invented, and a free version exists, then why should they make money? It's the equivelant of trying to sell people air.
Essentially he argues that Open Source undermines intellectual property (which is true) but that it also stifles innovation
How can people possibly take this seriously? Scientists have been relying on others' work all along, "standing on the shoulders of giants" in order to make the next innovative step. Having to reinvent the wheel to think up a car is just plain stupid. So why can he get away with claiming that the inverse is true for software?
'Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer,'' Allchin said.
This, again, is rubbish. Perhaps it takes away the ability to make money in specific areas (who would pay for a proprietary 'ls'?), but that it a really good thing for innovation. It means that software companies have to invent new things (oh the horror) if they want to remain profitable, instead of hocking the same old stuff over and over.
Microsoft provides support to change and develop products based on its operating system software that Linux companies don't, he said.
Hmmm. Sounds like the journalist got Windows and Linux confused. It's Linux that is available to modify and base products on.
On a side note, are there any arguments against Free software that are actually more specific than "stifles innovation"?
IE has little to do with standards, too -- most of pages that don't display properly in Netscape but display in IE, are complete bullshit from any set of standards' point of view.
So? The rule of thumb is "be flexible in what you accept and strict in what you produce". IE is following that well, better than Netscape. Of course, if IE was claiming to be an xhtml browser, and ignored errors from pages claiming to be xhtml, then there would be a problem with this, since xml requires valid, well-formed documents, and the standard explicitly states "no guessing what the author meant". The sgml-based html does not have this requirement.
It's possible to make standards-compliant page that doesn't work in Netscape, but in reality I have yet to see it
It takes a long time to load apps and users get impatient, so lets make a loading box to sooth them (instead of putting some work into making apps load faster).
To be fair, they can't really be expected to speed up the loading of Netscape 4.x when you have a massive mailbox or loads of bookmarks. An app can take a long time to load for lots of reasons, none of which are GNOME's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to take your word for it - I went there and got a completely blank page.
There must be a way of using in-house software by self-signing it. Can't people wanting to use GPL software just do the same?
"I firmly believe we will be shipping with bugs," says Paul England.
I asked what the point was, not why they weren't up to date. Why not give download permission to mirrors before announcing it and making it available to the rest of us? It's hardly productive to have *zero* available download sites - I must have gone through about half the mirror sites before giving up.
What's the point in mirrors if none of them are up to date for the peak demand period?
"Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said.
I agree too - although I haven't heard of very many cases where the lorries full of CDs get hijacked on the way to the record stores. Perhaps the police should get involved. Copyright infringement, however, is a different story.
1 good example is Binary operations, all kinds of data is store like this especially in legacy or the mainframe systems i've been working with ,but XSL provides no weasy way of formatting this data into somthing usefull./p>
XSL is a tool to transform XML documents. Of course it doesn't touch binary formats, that's outside it's scope.
Heh. You're telling me.
So, what, MS is morally obligated to give their software away for free to keep the Internet secure? Please.
You don't have to pay for the service pack - it is an update to the existing software. The service pack on it's own is useless. Stopping people with unauthorised copies of Windows from installing it will not magically make them pay for the software they already have a copy of.
The problem with Code Red wasn't software pirates...
Correct.
it was (and is) ordinary users who either don't know enough to keep their bug patches up-to-date, or don't care.
Right. Now, what has changed here? A hell of a lot more people will simply not have the option of installing the updates.
So, before MS did this, the number of people using an unauthorised copy of Windows was u million. Afterwards, it's still u million. Before, the number of people with wide-open Windows was c (clueless) million + a (apathetic) million. Afterwards, it is now c million + a million + u million.
Now, where is the benefit to Microsoft? The vast majority of people who are affected by this will simply leave their software as it is, because every time a service pack comes out, they are going to look at the hundreds of pounds it costs to buy a legitimate copy, and measure the value against the updated features in the service pack, and not the features of the whole OS.
All this will do is vastly increase the effect of worms like Code Red. The only possible benefit I can see of this is that in the future, if Code Red 5 (or whatever) breaks out, Microsoft can blame pirates rather than admitting the average Windows server isn't maintained by somebody who isn't remotely qualified to do so.
Moc? Moc is simply a preprocessor to add on language support for the signal/slot methods. If you remember, C++ started out as a preprocessor for C. OK, so it might not be kosher C++, but it's much more intuitive to do things that way than with base-classes, etc, that you see with other C++ GUI techniques.
I trie dusing ASP and it made me want to stick needles in my eye with it's horrible error messages and inability to return values from functions.
I'm not vbscript's biggest fan (I assume you are talking about vbscript, since asp is language independent, and so doesn't control things like return values). However, it's trivial to return a value from a function, just assign the value to the function name, i.e.:
function foo(bar)
foo = bar * 2
end function
response.write("10 x 2 = " & foo(10))
OK, so it's not exactly the clearest syntax, but it gets the job done. Error messages, on the other hand, also drive me nuts, since half the time, it reports the line number of the error as being '?', or in a completely different file to where the problem is.
How is NS 4.7 an old browser ?
It's two years old, and hardly any progress has been made with it since the original Netscape 4, which is much older (talking bugfixes only, not features). In internet terms, that's ancient.
What newer browser would you recommend, for someone who is running SPARC Solaris on a ss10/612 ?
That's up to you. A decent website degrades gracefully when images are not available. In this particular case, this might not work, since Netscape attempts to handle it (IIRC) and fails. In this case, a designer would have to judge whether or not it's worth supporting such an old browser, when the website can be viewed in all current browsers, and all (bug-free) older browsers.
How can Microsoft stop people from sending in spoofed data? What will stop, for example, NVidia from sending in data that makes Matrox drivers look buggy as hell and getting them blocked?
AFAIK, viruses are still legal. It's only the use of them which is illegal.
You are thinking of Reflections on Trusting Trust, and it wasn't a compromise of gcc, it was just a "what if" situation that Ken Thompson talked about once.
1. What has been the hardest thing for you to deal with from a marketing perspective? The DOJ trial, or something else? What do you think the next difficult thing is that's coming up?
2. Do you view Windows as a competitor to Linux? :)
I really miss useable newsgroups.
I guess usenet has outgrown the software. Time to rewrite the software, I think, instead of replacing it with something different (e.g. web forums).
From reading your post, I think you more or less fall into the category of "user", even though you are modifying the software and distributing it. I think I make this distrinction because of the fact that the changes made seem to be highly specialised, instead of a generic alteration. Whether or not this makes a difference to the argument of communist vs. capitalist, I'm not sure :). I'll settle for saying open-source is the best of both worlds :).
Ergo, a film like Billy Elliot will be rated R because someone says the word 'fuck', while a film like Nutty Professor 2, complete with a grandmother giving implied oral sex (with teeth out) gets away with a PG-13. It's why Lost World, complete with people being ripped apart by dinosaurs for our amusement, is rated PG-13, while a film like Requiem For A Dream, with it's important message, is sent to unscreenable land when it gets an NC-17.
Actually, I always assumed that Lost World got a low rating because it was a guaranteed money-maker, especially when all the kids want the dino toys. Would the movie be half as profitable without the money made on merchandise sold to kids?
I am judging open source by the only measure that makes any sense. It's all about the users plain and simple.
Yes, but the health of the industry that fills those users' needs is an important factor in the long run.
When I started using Linux there wasn't any "industry,"
There was a large software industry in 1991. Linux is not an industry, it is a piece of software.
The funny thing is that it really doesn't take too terribly many people sharing their source code to make the economics of Free Software work. And people that don't share code are at a disadvantage the second a Free Software project becomes useable. Once the project becomes self sustaining it literally sucks the air out of the room for commercial software vendors who want to charge high prices for software "licenses."
I agree completely. There is no usefulness in trying to sell something when an already free equivelant exists.
I disagree with this as well. It has overwhelmingly been in the best interest of Free Software hackers as individuals to release their source code.
Sorry, I was talking about individuals in the software industry (i.e. businesses trying to sell software). I agree that single developers trying to start a large project have a much better chance of creating what they want when they go open.
Presumably, at some point your improved GIFgraph had advantages over the free software counterpart. Whether or not it paid out in the long term is irrelevent - at some point the closed version was of greater value than the version everybody else had, and you had a monopoly on that piece of software, purely because you acted in your own interests above that of the community (not a flame, honest, just pointing out the facts).
And don't let anyone fool you, it's all about the money. Linux gets used because it is economical to do so, and it gets improved because in many cases it is cheaper to adapt Linux to a particular use than to pay for the equivalent functionality from commercial software.
And what makes these same people contribute source? In some cases, the gpl requires it, but then you are ignoring the contributions to bsd,x,etc licensed projects, and previously closed projects that are relicensed. I don't think there is a sound capitalist argument for doing this, unless you fall back on the fact you are strengthening the community you are selling to, which is beginning to sound familiar.
The good news is that Linux is also a very friendly community. We build mailing lists, and we subscribe to them. We even read the lists and answer questions. The reason that we do this is because we know that eventually we will need some help as well (and because it's fun).
And why will you get the help? Because you have made the mailing list a friendlier place with your contributions, or in some small part, you are responsible for the growth of that mailing list?
In Marxism everyone reaps equal benefits, but with Free Software the benefits reaped are equal to the ability and work that one puts into it. For example, my father couldn't even get his printer to work when he was using Linux, and yet I can use it to run my business. The difference, of course, is that I have invested more in learning how to put Linux to use than he has.
The situation you describe has nothing to do with open-vs-closed. If printing was hard to set up with Windows, then exactly the same arguments would apply.
You are judging open-source software purely on the basis on it's usefulness to the end-user. While this is an important consideration, I think the communist slant is more obvious when you apply it to the software industry. Everybody can "take" from the shared pool of knowledge & material (code), and it fails if everybody is too selfish (i.e. nobody contributes public code, and everybody goes closed-source).
Therefore, it is in the commmunity's best interests for people to contribute, yet in an individual's best interests to be selfish (go closed-source and get a head-start on the other companies in the industry). Yet, without consideration for the community as a whole, the individuals (and end-users) are much worse off, because the open code is less useful. Of course, in relation to the others in the community, they are no worse off, and this is where it counts when it comes to making money.
I believe this is why it makes sense for IBM and similar companies to contribute to open-source. Their industry (hardware, support) is directly linked to the health of the software industry, and so it makes more sense for these types of companies to contribute than for software companies to contribute.
What would be their incentive to invent if they cannot make money out of it ?
If it's a new thing that advances the state-of-the-art, then they will make money, until a clone is made. Then they will have to carry on inventing. This is good, this is innovation, this is what short-term copyrights do. On the other hand, if they are trying to make money on something that has already been invented, and a free version exists, then why should they make money? It's the equivelant of trying to sell people air.
Essentially he argues that Open Source undermines intellectual property (which is true) but that it also stifles innovation
How can people possibly take this seriously? Scientists have been relying on others' work all along, "standing on the shoulders of giants" in order to make the next innovative step. Having to reinvent the wheel to think up a car is just plain stupid. So why can he get away with claiming that the inverse is true for software?
'Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer,'' Allchin said.
This, again, is rubbish. Perhaps it takes away the ability to make money in specific areas (who would pay for a proprietary 'ls'?), but that it a really good thing for innovation. It means that software companies have to invent new things (oh the horror) if they want to remain profitable, instead of hocking the same old stuff over and over.
Microsoft provides support to change and develop products based on its operating system software that Linux companies don't, he said.
Hmmm. Sounds like the journalist got Windows and Linux confused. It's Linux that is available to modify and base products on.
On a side note, are there any arguments against Free software that are actually more specific than "stifles innovation"?
IE has little to do with standards, too -- most of pages that don't display properly in Netscape but display in IE, are complete bullshit from any set of standards' point of view.
So? The rule of thumb is "be flexible in what you accept and strict in what you produce". IE is following that well, better than Netscape. Of course, if IE was claiming to be an xhtml browser, and ignored errors from pages claiming to be xhtml, then there would be a problem with this, since xml requires valid, well-formed documents, and the standard explicitly states "no guessing what the author meant". The sgml-based html does not have this requirement.
It's possible to make standards-compliant page that doesn't work in Netscape, but in reality I have yet to see it
Does that include ns4 and the css standard?
It takes a long time to load apps and users get impatient, so lets make a loading box to sooth them (instead of putting some work into making apps load faster).
To be fair, they can't really be expected to speed up the loading of Netscape 4.x when you have a massive mailbox or loads of bookmarks. An app can take a long time to load for lots of reasons, none of which are GNOME's fault.
They own the copyright to the word DivX it looks like. Look at the terms "Open Source" and "FSF" those are copyrighted words.
No, they aren't. They are probably trademarks .