Yes, we applauded and cheered when the US struck at those "men" in uniform who were gassing their own countrymen.
You are referring, of course, to the gassing of several kurdish cities in 1988. This was several years before the gulf war. It can hardly be considered a pretext. At the time it wasn't reported in the American press, why? Because Iraq at the time was one of our glorious allies, fighting for freedom against the hated Iranians. In fact, many of the Kurdish separatist groups in Iraq were financed by Iran, so by the same logic that we bombed Serbia recently, those Kurds were "legitimate military targets".
Of course, if you knew that, you would probably also know that Saddam Hussein was virtually installed by the CIA.
You might also note that conditions for Kurds are far worse in Turkey than either Iran or Iraq, were millions have been displaced internally and approximately 75,000 killed in the past decade. This of course was also done with the full support of the united states government. Turkey in fact is a member of NATO.
I hope swift justice comes for those who are resposible for this act of disgusting terrorism.
No. All you are hoping for is revenge. If what you are looking for is justice...the impartial application of uniform standards of conduct...then they should receive the same punishment, if not less, than Suharto, Pinochet and Henry Kissinger (all of whom were responsible for exponentially greater numbers of innocent deaths) received. That is to say, they should be allowed to live out their lives in comfort free from any consequences at all.
I don't believe they will get this, and morally they certainly deserve far worse. But don't delude yourself...it is just revenge. I blame my government for this, for with its foreign policy making the innocent people of my country targets of terrorist attack.
But if we are peaceful, then we won't invite further violence?
Ahh, so this is why there have been repeated brutal terrorist attacks against Sweden, Canada and Switzerland lately. Its time they took a more "get tough" approach to dealing with their enemies.
Oh wait, there haven't been. And they have no real enemies. Never mind.
Why don't they use VoIP, and practice what they preach. Or is the purpose of their screwed-up policy to drive people off the internet and back to the stable technology of the past?
If antagonism of microsoft was the only goal of the linux community then macintoshes would have done the job. Well until Gates got his hands in it anyway.
Ahh those silly mac zealots. Of course Gates' hand was in it all along. Microsoft was the first software company to support the Mac, and it was the birthplace of Excel and Office.
It does seem like it would be a lot cheaper to have students do all the basic software installations and setups, instead of having to pay someone to do it...
This is especially true considering the incompetence of most school IT people I have encountered.
At my school last year, every so often a moron student would set the display resolution or refresh rate to something unsupported by the monitor, which would have the effect of leaving the monitor there blinking as soon as the windows desktop came up. Fixing this, of course, is a simple matter of restarting in safe mode and changing the resolution to something supported. The school district IT morons did not seem to grasp this. Usually when it happened they did one of two things. The first was completely reinstall the operating system, somewhat excessive but basically harmless. The second was replacing the video card (!!). This was especially obscene considering they almost certainly paid the full compaq spare part price for the cards (Matrox G200 8mb). The only reason it worked at all, of course, is that when it detects a new/different video card, it restarts briefly in 640x480 an gives an opportunity to set the refresh rate again.
XFree86 is under the MIT/X-Consortium license, which is very BSD-like, not the GPL. So they would be fully within their rights to distribute it in binary-only form. So I think it is commendable that they have released the source, even though they are under no obligation to do so.
Then about half way through they lost the plot (*cough* MCA *cough*)
The MCA bus was many things. Complicated, yes. Proprietary, definately. Unpopular, for sure. But from a standpoint of design and innovation it was probably the best thing that IBM ever did. A replacement for ISA was generally agreed upon as a need at the time the 386 came out, and if Compaq and others hadn't been selling ISA-based 386 systems for 2 years at the time the PS/2 came out, it might have been a success. It was well designed...it had PnP-like functionality, and more bandwidth than EISA (which was designed later as a response to MCA), in 1987! It wasn't really until PCI came along that a generally superior alternative existed (and who knows, MCA probably could have been pushed to higher clock speeds to catch up if IBM had cared to at that point).
Other than Apple, all other competitors to commodity intel hardware have failed (and Apple, even though they are still marginally profitable, is still losing overall market share). Aside from Apple, the only successful non-Intel architecture is probably Sun SPARC (and it will possibly be the only one around in 5 years, if Intel has their way with Itanium). Sun has deliberately not targeted the low-end consumer market (because the margins are much lower...consider how much slower the Blade 100 is than a $2000 x86 box, which is what it would be competing with if it were marketed as a general-purpose PC, and what Sun would have to sell it for in order for it to be competitive in that market), believing instead that they can leverage their dominance of the high-end server space to move most users onto non-pc devices and render microsoft and intel irrelevant.
In the meantime, there are lots of people selling ARM and PPC based embedded server appliance. It would be no problem to build an ATX motherboard with similar components, for end-users to run Linux or BSD, and I would buy one (and a few other people also). But it still probably wouldn't be competive, overall, with the x86 from a price-performance standpoint. So no one is making them
And as it stands, even if you want free software and open standards, the best platform to run Linux, *BSD (even NetBSD), BeOS, QNX, OS/2, and soon even classic AmigaOS is the cruce hack that is the Intel/AMD x86.
There is only one mention of OS/2 in their entire timeline. And it looks like it is almost accidental. They don't seem to want to mention it, even now that it is safely buried.
So does this mean my old Apple Lisa (still working but upgraded to 2 meg RAM, scsi, and running System 7.1 might actually be worth something someday?
Hell, that things worth something NOW. You could probably sell it for over $100 even if it didn't work. And the upgrades certainly make it highly unique. Hold on to it. It would definately be a plus if you still had the original Lisa software sitting around somewhere, also.
(IE 6.0 is rock-solid stable, as is 5.5, really, plus IE 6.0 blocks third-party cookies by default, as well as other enhancements such as improved CSS/HTML support and little UI enhancements - Smart Tags not included.)
You mean it has almost caught up with Mozilla for standards compliance? And who cares about defaults? Anyone who installs linux is totally capable of turning off cookies manually if they choose. Or, in Konqueror (or Lynx) you can decide on a site-or-cookie specific basis whether to accept or not accept them or not, which is a far superior choice (considering that there are situations when cookies are quite helpful).
The real Windows win though is that Windows requires one partition while in Linux you can get bogged down with the boot partition and the home partition and the...
This is not required. On my desktop machine, on which I'm not too worried about reliability, I have the entire system on one partition. It is, however, a good idea, for organizational reasons, and because it helps if you choose to install a different distribution (keep you/home partition and save all your settings and personal data), or if there are hardware problems (only one of the partitions will be affected). Hell, using multiple partitions is a good idea in windows too, I know of lots of windows users who keep 5-6 partitions on their drive.
But the problem comes when my WinPrinter won't print under Linux (actually, this is a half-truth - it prints in B&W in RedHat 7.0, and in color with Mandrake 8.0 - however, in both cases, it uses "economy" mode and produces results that while acceptable for most cases are not on par with what Windows can do), but I suppose that's my fault for not having checked compatibility.
No, its not your fault. Its the fault of the printer copy, for producing a product in which most of the functionality is contained in the drivers, but they won't release the source to the drivers, or the specifications needed to re-implement the drivers. If the printer company did not provide free and complete drivers for windows, and the only driver support was provided by largely unpaid volunteers trying to construct a working driver through guesswork, you would probably have similar problems printing under windows.
NuSphere has stated in for example the posting cited that "The Gemini table handler itself is already part of MySQL and is licensed under the GPL" and that "The Gemini component itself will be released via mysql.org as GPL as previously announced". NuSphere has given zero indication that they're going to challenge the validity of any part of the GPL.
Nusphere isn't challenging the GPL at all...yet. In fact, most likely, they won't. They are going to back down, give up the domain, and GPL Gemini, as they should have anyway. However, right now, they haven't released the code, and as part of this whole mess, after keeping quiet about it (and being well aware of it) for some time, MySQL has sued nusphere for GPL violation.
What gives you the idea that if a US court rules that a software license is invalid that suddenly the code becomes vulnerable to any and all use, and what indication have you had from recent US court rulings that the courts are about to give non-copyright-holders MORE rights over source code?
If the code was released to the public, under no conditions at all, it would be considered public domain and anybody could do anything they wanted with it. Now, if the license that the current code is released under is ruled to be invalid, what happens to the code that is already out there under that license? Certainly the current code can be relicensed under some other terms, but they can't apply that retroactively to the old code that is already in circulation (this is why we have OpenSSH), and if the terms it was released under have been found to be invalid, what is there to stop it from becoming public domain?
The courts, in fact, have shown no consistency at all on this issue. But I think that, firstly, they will favor the more powerful corporation (Nusphere, which is part of Progress Software, a large RDBMS outfit), and second, they will probably be biased toward the American corporation (which is nusphere). If you doubt the power differential, read the slick PR statement from nusphere, and then that rather bitter rant from MySQL AB. One of them is right, but the other one is far more "professional" sounding, and clearly has more money behind it. Also, any judge handling this case, at present, probably knows nothing about the GPL other than perhaps having heard microsoft's comments about this. Considering that this unknown judge is a political appointee, these concerns will override any principled belief in contract rights and copyright protection.
Consider that the judge in the DeCSS case ruled that even though they have no means to copy the media that they own, an owner of a DVD is not being deprived of their (legally protected) fair use rights because they could, theoretically, go to a video rental store, rent a vhs copy, and make a copy of that. The law is not an issue...these people are trained to bend the law to serve the interests of the powerful, which definatly does not favor the GPL in the long run.
The issue is what exactly did MySQL AB and NuSphere contract for and is that set of agreements still in effect.
Au contraire. The "contract" called for, first, the right of nusphere to distribute mysql under the GPL (which they claim is pointless, because it is released under the GPL anyway, although in fact it was only very recently GPL'd whereas the contract apparently dates from sometime last year) and the use of the domain name. However, perhaps to improve their bargaining position, MySQL has sued nusphere for gpl violation regarding gemini. That is the issue that I was referring to.
This conflict might actually be good for the OpenSource community since if MySQL AB's suit goes to court it will be a good test for the validity of the GPL.
Exactly how is it a good thing if a court rules the GPL has no legal standing? The way the courts are going now, its a definite possibility (especially considering that, IIRC, MySQL AB is European, Nusphere American and the branch of a large closed-source database provider, and the suit would be in a US court). It would be the doom free software everywhere. The GPL functions as much as a social contract as a legal document, but if a court gave people, and especially corporations, free reign to break it and steal GPL'd code, I don't doubt that some would.
I switched from Linux to BSD just because the kernels took forever to download, configure and compile.
Have you ever recompiled the bsd kernel? You will need to some time. You'll find that its very like the Linux process, with some added fun all of its own. For instance, there aren't any interactive configuration tools. Rather, you copy lines out of the default config to get the settings you need. And, between releases, you have to update the kernel via CVS, if you choose to. Its arguably more elegant than the model linux uses, but the download time isn't much different.
As for speed, download the patches. They hardly take forever to download, unless you are using a 1200 baud modem.
Why would you want to use Gnome or KDE when both are just as bloated and unstable as Windows? If you want a lightweight desktop, use XFce. XFce is GTK+ based, so it works great with all the GTK+ programs out there, most designed to work with Gnome, and only takes up 4 megs of memory while having all the features of Gnome... Panel, file manager, file associations, etc.
Many longtime linux users find environments like XFce, or Windowmaker/GNUStep, or even fvwm2 to be totally adequate. However, when you start talking about replacing windows, the task becomes quite different. Does it have an embedded component architecture, does it have an integrated web browser, does it have pretty icons and lots of online help, does it have anti-aliased fonts, is it as "easy to use" as Windows? The result of their admitted bloat is that both GNOME and KDE are also approaching Windows with those sorts of functionality. People are not encouraged to switch to Linux with the knowledge that they will give up much of the "progress" that the Windows desktop environment has made over the last 10 years, and return to the "primitive" command line. But with GNOME, and especially KDE, they don't have to.
I don't think this has been working right since 2.4.5, actually. Or rather, from what I have gathered, it may work...with the various Tulip clone chips that driver mainly supports. This isn't a big deal, though, since if you have a real DEC 21x4x you can also use the de4x5 driver, which works just fine in 2.4.6.
Actually it isn't always fans. I built a PC recently in a smallish NLX enclosure. I use a large passive heatsink, so there isn't any CPU fan, and there aren't any case fans, so the only fan is in the power supply. Testing out the motherboard with out any drives attached, I noticed the power supply was very quiet. The source of most of the noise? The hard drive. That hard-drive noise reducer detailed on that site could be a very good solution. Too bad I don't have any free 5 1/4" drive bays.
Actually, that shouldn't be satire. It isn't quite as featureful as apt (or the mandrake thing which i haven't tried), but it does work. At least with the NetBSD version (I assume the OpenBSD version provides equivalent functionality), you can set the path to the tarballs (including an ftp server) in an environment variable. In addition, it will automatically look for the newest version. So once configured right, you can just type 'pkg_add ssh' and it will check both any local directories of your choice and the ftp server, download the latest version, and install it. Of course I don't think it can automatically fetch dependencies like apt can. But for that there's ports/pkgsrc, which are fun in other ways also.
Based on the evidence available, it seems that this program is indeed not in compliance with the GPL. The FSF's position on GPL'ed code linked to proprietary code is pretty clear.
But thats the problem. There is a good possibility that the GPL could be interpreted as not legally binding. Certainly quite a few companies involved in previous cases have argued this (QT, for instance) Considering the pro-corporate bent of the US legal system right now (and particularly the supreme court) I can easily see this case ending with the GPL being essentially nullified, leaving vast amounts of GPL code out there open to being incorporated into proprietary software, with no protection for the original authors.
This isn't a problem now even though the legality of the GPL is questioned. Corporations (like trolltech) observe the license because they do not want to offend the community. But if they are given explicit legal permission to plunder GPL code, what makes you think IBM, etc. wont?
I think these guys deserve a lot more credit for their business plan than they are getting. For almost a year, they succeeded in getting idiot venture capitalists to pump buckets of money into the development of a large, complex free software project with no realistic hope of ever making money. Now that its nearly in a usable state (it is NOT a fun thing to use right now on my 64mb celeron, but it shows lots of promise, and is at the very least better-looking than any other linux file file manager), they have smartly disbanded and turned development over to the gnome community. The only people really hurt by this are the eazel hackers (who doubtless will be able to find other employment) and the idiot venture capitlalists, who 1. deserved what they got, and 2. probably won't be turning up in soup kitchens or homeless shelters any time soon, rich bastards that they are. On the other hand, we, the free-software community, have gained at no cost a nearly complete, commercial quality (in slickness and in bloat) file manager.
From what has been said of it, the amigaone board is basically a relatively pc-like board with pci slots, usb, etc., except that it uses a PPC. It seems like this is exactly what is needed as a linux platform, that is, a standards-based, non-apple, ppc motherboard. If its anything like they say, this thing might very well be my next linux box.
User #764 Info) Wrong, the file manager-is-a-browser concept was in KDE since the beginning, long before there even was a packaged called "Konqueror". The original kfm was both a browser and a file manager. Granted, it wasn't a great browser yet, but the concept was already there in KDE, and predates konqueror
But did KFM exist when a package called "Internet Explorer 4.0 with Active Desktop" came out?
Of course, that doesn't really settle it. Because the web browser interface actually was copied from mosaic, which in turn dates back to the original web browser which ran under Nextstep, which was designed to look like -- the nextstep file manager. Everything that was old is new again!
Also, browser/file manager integration was originally netscape's idea, Netscape 4 was originally supposed to take over your machine and function as a desktop environment. They never did it, but microsoft was scared enough to copy it, and, oh, in the process destroy netscape.
2. apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade is a much lesser pain in the *** than the solaris way of (security) updates.
Debian is, of course superior.
Which brings the interesting question: Why was this story so important, anyway? Given that Debian should meet anyone's needs, and there is no question of the Debian/sparc port continuing to exist, what is the issue? Furthermore, the trend is toward more distros supporting sparc, and red hat's ending of their port is really an aberration. Not only has mandrake added SPARC support, but a solaris port of slackware is also available.
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You are referring, of course, to the gassing of several kurdish cities in 1988. This was several years before the gulf war. It can hardly be considered a pretext. At the time it wasn't reported in the American press, why? Because Iraq at the time was one of our glorious allies, fighting for freedom against the hated Iranians. In fact, many of the Kurdish separatist groups in Iraq were financed by Iran, so by the same logic that we bombed Serbia recently, those Kurds were "legitimate military targets".
Of course, if you knew that, you would probably also know that Saddam Hussein was virtually installed by the CIA.
You might also note that conditions for Kurds are far worse in Turkey than either Iran or Iraq, were millions have been displaced internally and approximately 75,000 killed in the past decade. This of course was also done with the full support of the united states government. Turkey in fact is a member of NATO.
No. All you are hoping for is revenge. If what you are looking for is justice...the impartial application of uniform standards of conduct...then they should receive the same punishment, if not less, than Suharto, Pinochet and Henry Kissinger (all of whom were responsible for exponentially greater numbers of innocent deaths) received. That is to say, they should be allowed to live out their lives in comfort free from any consequences at all.
I don't believe they will get this, and morally they certainly deserve far worse. But don't delude yourself...it is just revenge. I blame my government for this, for with its foreign policy making the innocent people of my country targets of terrorist attack.
Ahh, so this is why there have been repeated brutal terrorist attacks against Sweden, Canada and Switzerland lately. Its time they took a more "get tough" approach to dealing with their enemies.
Oh wait, there haven't been. And they have no real enemies. Never mind.
A special telephone line?
Why don't they use VoIP, and practice what they preach. Or is the purpose of their screwed-up policy to drive people off the internet and back to the stable technology of the past?
If antagonism of microsoft was the only goal of the linux community then macintoshes would have done the job. Well until Gates got his hands in it anyway.
Ahh those silly mac zealots. Of course Gates' hand was in it all along. Microsoft was the first software company to support the Mac, and it was the birthplace of Excel and Office.
This is especially true considering the incompetence of most school IT people I have encountered.
At my school last year, every so often a moron student would set the display resolution or refresh rate to something unsupported by the monitor, which would have the effect of leaving the monitor there blinking as soon as the windows desktop came up. Fixing this, of course, is a simple matter of restarting in safe mode and changing the resolution to something supported. The school district IT morons did not seem to grasp this. Usually when it happened they did one of two things. The first was completely reinstall the operating system, somewhat excessive but basically harmless. The second was replacing the video card (!!). This was especially obscene considering they almost certainly paid the full compaq spare part price for the cards (Matrox G200 8mb). The only reason it worked at all, of course, is that when it detects a new/different video card, it restarts briefly in 640x480 an gives an opportunity to set the refresh rate again.
XFree86 is under the MIT/X-Consortium license, which is very BSD-like, not the GPL. So they would be fully within their rights to distribute it in binary-only form. So I think it is commendable that they have released the source, even though they are under no obligation to do so.
Other than Apple, all other competitors to commodity intel hardware have failed (and Apple, even though they are still marginally profitable, is still losing overall market share). Aside from Apple, the only successful non-Intel architecture is probably Sun SPARC (and it will possibly be the only one around in 5 years, if Intel has their way with Itanium). Sun has deliberately not targeted the low-end consumer market (because the margins are much lower...consider how much slower the Blade 100 is than a $2000 x86 box, which is what it would be competing with if it were marketed as a general-purpose PC, and what Sun would have to sell it for in order for it to be competitive in that market), believing instead that they can leverage their dominance of the high-end server space to move most users onto non-pc devices and render microsoft and intel irrelevant.
In the meantime, there are lots of people selling ARM and PPC based embedded server appliance. It would be no problem to build an ATX motherboard with similar components, for end-users to run Linux or BSD, and I would buy one (and a few other people also). But it still probably wouldn't be competive, overall, with the x86 from a price-performance standpoint. So no one is making them
And as it stands, even if you want free software and open standards, the best platform to run Linux, *BSD (even NetBSD), BeOS, QNX, OS/2, and soon even classic AmigaOS is the cruce hack that is the Intel/AMD x86.
There is only one mention of OS/2 in their entire timeline. And it looks like it is almost accidental. They don't seem to want to mention it, even now that it is safely buried.
Have you ever recompiled the bsd kernel? You will need to some time. You'll find that its very like the Linux process, with some added fun all of its own. For instance, there aren't any interactive configuration tools. Rather, you copy lines out of the default config to get the settings you need. And, between releases, you have to update the kernel via CVS, if you choose to. Its arguably more elegant than the model linux uses, but the download time isn't much different.
As for speed, download the patches. They hardly take forever to download, unless you are using a 1200 baud modem.
Why would you want to use Gnome or KDE when both are just as bloated and unstable as Windows? If you want a lightweight desktop, use XFce. XFce is GTK+ based, so it works great with all the GTK+ programs out there, most designed to work with Gnome, and only takes up 4 megs of memory while having all the features of Gnome... Panel, file manager, file associations, etc. Many longtime linux users find environments like XFce, or Windowmaker/GNUStep, or even fvwm2 to be totally adequate. However, when you start talking about replacing windows, the task becomes quite different. Does it have an embedded component architecture, does it have an integrated web browser, does it have pretty icons and lots of online help, does it have anti-aliased fonts, is it as "easy to use" as Windows? The result of their admitted bloat is that both GNOME and KDE are also approaching Windows with those sorts of functionality. People are not encouraged to switch to Linux with the knowledge that they will give up much of the "progress" that the Windows desktop environment has made over the last 10 years, and return to the "primitive" command line. But with GNOME, and especially KDE, they don't have to.
I don't think this has been working right since 2.4.5, actually. Or rather, from what I have gathered, it may work...with the various Tulip clone chips that driver mainly supports. This isn't a big deal, though, since if you have a real DEC 21x4x you can also use the de4x5 driver, which works just fine in 2.4.6.
Pine originally stood for "PINE Is Not Elm". Just so you know.
Actually it isn't always fans. I built a PC recently in a smallish NLX enclosure. I use a large passive heatsink, so there isn't any CPU fan, and there aren't any case fans, so the only fan is in the power supply. Testing out the motherboard with out any drives attached, I noticed the power supply was very quiet. The source of most of the noise? The hard drive. That hard-drive noise reducer detailed on that site could be a very good solution. Too bad I don't have any free 5 1/4" drive bays.
Actually, that shouldn't be satire. It isn't quite as featureful as apt (or the mandrake thing which i haven't tried), but it does work. At least with the NetBSD version (I assume the OpenBSD version provides equivalent functionality), you can set the path to the tarballs (including an ftp server) in an environment variable. In addition, it will automatically look for the newest version. So once configured right, you can just type 'pkg_add ssh' and it will check both any local directories of your choice and the ftp server, download the latest version, and install it. Of course I don't think it can automatically fetch dependencies like apt can. But for that there's ports/pkgsrc, which are fun in other ways also.
Based on the evidence available, it seems that this program is indeed not in compliance with the GPL. The FSF's position on GPL'ed code linked to proprietary code is pretty clear.
But thats the problem. There is a good possibility that the GPL could be interpreted as not legally binding. Certainly quite a few companies involved in previous cases have argued this (QT, for instance) Considering the pro-corporate bent of the US legal system right now (and particularly the supreme court) I can easily see this case ending with the GPL being essentially nullified, leaving vast amounts of GPL code out there open to being incorporated into proprietary software, with no protection for the original authors.
This isn't a problem now even though the legality of the GPL is questioned. Corporations (like trolltech) observe the license because they do not want to offend the community. But if they are given explicit legal permission to plunder GPL code, what makes you think IBM, etc. wont?
I think these guys deserve a lot more credit for their business plan than they are getting. For almost a year, they succeeded in getting idiot venture capitalists to pump buckets of money into the development of a large, complex free software project with no realistic hope of ever making money. Now that its nearly in a usable state (it is NOT a fun thing to use right now on my 64mb celeron, but it shows lots of promise, and is at the very least better-looking than any other linux file file manager), they have smartly disbanded and turned development over to the gnome community. The only people really hurt by this are the eazel hackers (who doubtless will be able to find other employment) and the idiot venture capitlalists, who 1. deserved what they got, and 2. probably won't be turning up in soup kitchens or homeless shelters any time soon, rich bastards that they are. On the other hand, we, the free-software community, have gained at no cost a nearly complete, commercial quality (in slickness and in bloat) file manager.
From what has been said of it, the amigaone board is basically a relatively pc-like board with pci slots, usb, etc., except that it uses a PPC. It seems like this is exactly what is needed as a linux platform, that is, a standards-based, non-apple, ppc motherboard. If its anything like they say, this thing might very well be my next linux box.