However, for some of us, the whole purpose of open source licenses is as a weapon against copyright. RMS talks about the rationalization that it was okay to use copyright, which he did not agree with, as a means to fight against copyright. Hence, copyleft.
It's interesting reading, even if you don't agree.
You left out the initial sequence of events: I mentioned Gentoo only as it regards new advances in distribution building, and somebody took it as an opportunity to offer a Gentoo testimonial. Such testimonials are often overexuberant. If anything, nobody's flaming the guy who did it, but the abstract "Gentoo zealot" who really only exists as an amalgam of all these overexuberant testimonials that seem to show up at the drop of a hat.
Look, if you make fun of the caricature of a Perl advocate, I'll laugh, even though I'm a Perl programmer and think people in the Perl community are some of the smartest around. There's a caricature of Gentoo folks as always zealously pushing their operating system as the "one true solution" in any discussion, at the drop of a hat, etc. Admit that some people do that, and deal with it.
I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for).
Hmmm, actually, now I'm glad I read that. I've never seen "dependency hell," and now I know why. I've only recently started occasionally pulling rpms off of rpmfind, and I always do it for my exact version of RedHat. And I've always known you could plunk everything down on the rpm commandline and have it resolve it. (I once typed something like rpm -i *-dev.rpm so I'd quit having to install prerequisites to compile stuff.)
Heh, I love it. Especially the eMachines quote; my first Linux machine was (still running) an eMachine. In fact, I've spent the last few nights compiling Linux From Scratch on it.
Not everybody talking about Gentoo is an idiot, but there are some idiots who talk about Gentoo. We all have our idiots. I'm from the Perl community, so you know I've seen idiots.
I highly respect Gentoo. I think it's great. I feel no need to defend my Linux distributions (which number three, including Linux From Scratch, which I don't optimize). I think some Gentoo folks feel a need to defend theirs, which is cool, but only interests me insofar as they bring new material to the table.
I'll always remember the guy who started Gentoo as the guy who wrote that great series of articles about ssh on an IBM developer page. Very smart guy, very smart distro.
I would like to extend my apologies to the Linux community for setting off the Gentoo people. While I admire Gentoo for what it provides, I have never used it and am most definitely not an advocate.
Can't even mention some things without getting people started...
For another distribution that focuses on providing updates to RedHat, see KRUD, recommended by Eric Raymond. This one's not as community-oriented, however.
Sounds like RedHat is trying to achieve some of the advantages of Debian. I'll welcome this, although I won't switch any machines over right away.
It'll be nice to get new software packages and rpms. I think apt-rpm has illustrated the need and the market for this. RedHat also has several great advantages over Debian, notably the installation process and more up to date software, so this could really revitalize them.
With projects like Linux From Scratch and Gentoo, distribution-building has gone fomr being an arcane art of wizards to something the community can do, and I'm glad RedHat wants to partner with the community in doing this.
So if you're Muslim, order Kosher so that they think you're Jewish.
This won't spot terrorists; the 9-11 terrorists were out drinking, gambling, chasing women, and violating other laws of Islam the night before their atrocity.
That's why I prefer sufficient numbers. I came to the conclusion last year that there just wasn't any such thing as unbiased news. I prefer to just take everyone's point of view into account and form my own.
Given sufficient numbers of amateurs, I'd prefer that kind of reporting. Those casual amateurs are often going to be the very people involved, closest to the story.
The point is they have the possibility to selectively ignore. They could choose to ignore.com if they wanted to. Or they could install the ISC patch and choose to ignore the wildcards for.com and.net.
As for splitting, there are already several alternate roots. In addition to Alternic, there's OpenNIC and Pacific Root. People are using these only voluntarily, and the different roots cooperate to some extent. For example, most will only establish a new TLD if no other root is using that TLD, and most will peer TLDs for the other roots so you can see the entire composite alternate namespace. This is strictly voluntary, however.
It might be that some day the alternate roots cooperate less. We can get a glimpse of how this works through the issue of the.biz TLD. Pacific Root had a.biz TLD years before the official Internet.biz TLD. People had paid Pacific Root for this privilege. Pacific Root decided to maintain their own.biz TLD, such that if you are connected to them you will see their.biz, and if you are connected to the real Internet root servers, you'll see the official.biz. Meanwhile, they peer all the other official TLDs so that you see them. Other alternate roots made independent decisions. OpenNIC, for example, chose to continue peering the Pacific Root.biz and ignore the official one. Verisign et al can be viewed as a non-cooperative alternate root server, and this shows how a group of independent voluntary alternatives can coexist.
As for cost, at the moment OpenNIC is free to use (I don't know about the others). I think most alternate TLDs have free registration, though I know that Pacific Root charges (and apparently makes money) for registering in the TLDs they created. If more people started using these alternate roots and costs went up, the alternate roots could start charging more registration fees, or charge users; people could choose among alternatives based on price, quality, and access to the TLDs they want to see. Competition would be good, though some alternates might have to shut down. Think about who finances the yellow pages: the users, or the people who are registered. Also, it's possible this could be entirely financed through voluntary donations.
It's conceivable we could completely escape from Verisign just through exercising our free will to choose alternate roots.
I think that's one of the wonderful ways in which an unregulated Internet can help us. News reporting is distributed, and the barrier to entry is much lower than with traditional media.
Am I the only one who thinks that if one large organization owns all tv and radio channels and weaves their biases into every program they produce, it will tempt somebody to compete and offer unbiased (or the other bias) news? Isn't it obvious that's not a stable system (well, without government help...)?
I don't read those, and I meant confirmation for people like me who are just watching interestedly to see if they need to patch their home systems, rather than people who handle security for large systems or whatever and need genuine confirmation from sources like the ones you listed.
And I have a mild suspicion the parent poster is a troll, or just pretending to be a newbie. It seems like most new Lindows users wouldn't read slashdot, or that if they did they'd be more technically inclined, or that if his dad installed Lindows for him he'd ask his dad instead of coming here. Of course, that's just a suspicion; I hope he's a genuine newbie who got helped nicely (and will one day become a technically-competent friendly guy who offers help on message boards).
Slashdot Mirror
most american children can't even read.
Not true. I'm way into homeschooling, but I know the public school system's not that bad.
"Most" means a majority. Are you seriously expecting people to believe you that >50% of American school children can't read?
The American spirit is still alive.
Apparently America believes in taking down the good guys? Or did you read the article?
They must've been really broken up in that note ... they got midnight confused with noon.
However, for some of us, the whole purpose of open source licenses is as a weapon against copyright. RMS talks about the rationalization that it was okay to use copyright, which he did not agree with, as a means to fight against copyright. Hence, copyleft.
It's interesting reading, even if you don't agree.
You left out the initial sequence of events: I mentioned Gentoo only as it regards new advances in distribution building, and somebody took it as an opportunity to offer a Gentoo testimonial. Such testimonials are often overexuberant. If anything, nobody's flaming the guy who did it, but the abstract "Gentoo zealot" who really only exists as an amalgam of all these overexuberant testimonials that seem to show up at the drop of a hat.
Look, if you make fun of the caricature of a Perl advocate, I'll laugh, even though I'm a Perl programmer and think people in the Perl community are some of the smartest around. There's a caricature of Gentoo folks as always zealously pushing their operating system as the "one true solution" in any discussion, at the drop of a hat, etc. Admit that some people do that, and deal with it.
I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for).
Hmmm, actually, now I'm glad I read that. I've never seen "dependency hell," and now I know why. I've only recently started occasionally pulling rpms off of rpmfind, and I always do it for my exact version of RedHat. And I've always known you could plunk everything down on the rpm commandline and have it resolve it. (I once typed something like rpm -i *-dev.rpm so I'd quit having to install prerequisites to compile stuff.)
Heh, I love it. Especially the eMachines quote; my first Linux machine was (still running) an eMachine. In fact, I've spent the last few nights compiling Linux From Scratch on it.
But no Gentoo! No! ;)
Not everybody talking about Gentoo is an idiot, but there are some idiots who talk about Gentoo. We all have our idiots. I'm from the Perl community, so you know I've seen idiots.
I highly respect Gentoo. I think it's great. I feel no need to defend my Linux distributions (which number three, including Linux From Scratch, which I don't optimize). I think some Gentoo folks feel a need to defend theirs, which is cool, but only interests me insofar as they bring new material to the table.
I'll always remember the guy who started Gentoo as the guy who wrote that great series of articles about ssh on an IBM developer page. Very smart guy, very smart distro.
I would like to extend my apologies to the Linux community for setting off the Gentoo people. While I admire Gentoo for what it provides, I have never used it and am most definitely not an advocate.
Can't even mention some things without getting people started...
For another distribution that focuses on providing updates to RedHat, see KRUD, recommended by Eric Raymond. This one's not as community-oriented, however.
Sounds like RedHat is trying to achieve some of the advantages of Debian. I'll welcome this, although I won't switch any machines over right away.
It'll be nice to get new software packages and rpms. I think apt-rpm has illustrated the need and the market for this. RedHat also has several great advantages over Debian, notably the installation process and more up to date software, so this could really revitalize them.
With projects like Linux From Scratch and Gentoo, distribution-building has gone fomr being an arcane art of wizards to something the community can do, and I'm glad RedHat wants to partner with the community in doing this.
Me, too! There's only one more chance.
And, despite what people say, I think all five movies so far have been great.
So if you're Muslim, order Kosher so that they think you're Jewish.
This won't spot terrorists; the 9-11 terrorists were out drinking, gambling, chasing women, and violating other laws of Islam the night before their atrocity.
That's why I prefer sufficient numbers. I came to the conclusion last year that there just wasn't any such thing as unbiased news. I prefer to just take everyone's point of view into account and form my own.
Given sufficient numbers of amateurs, I'd prefer that kind of reporting. Those casual amateurs are often going to be the very people involved, closest to the story.
The point is they have the possibility to selectively ignore. They could choose to ignore .com if they wanted to. Or they could install the ISC patch and choose to ignore the wildcards for .com and .net.
Good questions.
As for splitting, there are already several alternate roots. In addition to Alternic, there's OpenNIC and Pacific Root. People are using these only voluntarily, and the different roots cooperate to some extent. For example, most will only establish a new TLD if no other root is using that TLD, and most will peer TLDs for the other roots so you can see the entire composite alternate namespace. This is strictly voluntary, however.
It might be that some day the alternate roots cooperate less. We can get a glimpse of how this works through the issue of the .biz TLD. Pacific Root had a .biz TLD years before the official Internet .biz TLD. People had paid Pacific Root for this privilege. Pacific Root decided to maintain their own .biz TLD, such that if you are connected to them you will see their .biz, and if you are connected to the real Internet root servers, you'll see the official .biz. Meanwhile, they peer all the other official TLDs so that you see them. Other alternate roots made independent decisions. OpenNIC, for example, chose to continue peering the Pacific Root .biz and ignore the official one. Verisign et al can be viewed as a non-cooperative alternate root server, and this shows how a group of independent voluntary alternatives can coexist.
As for cost, at the moment OpenNIC is free to use (I don't know about the others). I think most alternate TLDs have free registration, though I know that Pacific Root charges (and apparently makes money) for registering in the TLDs they created. If more people started using these alternate roots and costs went up, the alternate roots could start charging more registration fees, or charge users; people could choose among alternatives based on price, quality, and access to the TLDs they want to see. Competition would be good, though some alternates might have to shut down. Think about who finances the yellow pages: the users, or the people who are registered. Also, it's possible this could be entirely financed through voluntary donations.
It's conceivable we could completely escape from Verisign just through exercising our free will to choose alternate roots.
The Gnome Office page is useful to find application replacements. I'm surprised it wasn't linked from the article.
I think that's one of the wonderful ways in which an unregulated Internet can help us. News reporting is distributed, and the barrier to entry is much lower than with traditional media.
Am I the only one who thinks that if one large organization owns all tv and radio channels and weaves their biases into every program they produce, it will tempt somebody to compete and offer unbiased (or the other bias) news? Isn't it obvious that's not a stable system (well, without government help...)?
I don't read those, and I meant confirmation for people like me who are just watching interestedly to see if they need to patch their home systems, rather than people who handle security for large systems or whatever and need genuine confirmation from sources like the ones you listed.
Eh, who cares if it's a troll?
Oh, I just thought it was an interesting thing to consider. Doesn't really matter.
Main point is: wow, people were being helpful here.
Yeah; I was struck by the same thing.
And I have a mild suspicion the parent poster is a troll, or just pretending to be a newbie. It seems like most new Lindows users wouldn't read slashdot, or that if they did they'd be more technically inclined, or that if his dad installed Lindows for him he'd ask his dad instead of coming here. Of course, that's just a suspicion; I hope he's a genuine newbie who got helped nicely (and will one day become a technically-competent friendly guy who offers help on message boards).
Actually, I've been waiting since this morning to see if this would be confirmed on slashdot or not.
Also, if you'll look around, the exploit is understood, and patches seem to be available, at least according to posts here.
If you can train most people not to blindly open attachments, you can train them to google software with +spyware before installing it.
In other words, you can't.
It's just like training a todler not to eat certain things like rat poison, detergent, legos, or canned tomales.
In other words, this is going to be solved by Darwinian selection.