If software is released under a license which allows a developer to use it and integrate it into their project while maintaining their OWN license, it's a good thing. Having it cost money or not cost money is not the issue.
GPL v3 appears to disallow the possibility of the developer keeping their own changes to the code private and closed source. While this may not pose any problem in a world where developers are paid by the state the way ancient philosophers were given food and shelter so they could think all day long, it's not something most businesses want to touch.
Let me say that again. It's not something most businesses want to touch. Who's your market? Do you want Linux to be adopted into the business community, or do you want it to remain the red headed stepchild hobby OS that Microsoft wants you to call it? It's already difficult to justify using it when there's ZERO support out there and thus any failure falls back to the developer/sysadmin in the local shop to fix. Now you're saying we also have to give away the code WE developed?
There's not a single employer I've ever worked for that would accept those terms. Not one. Not being able to keep modifications private (and thus harder to replicate) means all future GPL software will be black boxes which cannot be modified in the business world. How is that any better than closed source?
In some ways, it's worse than closed source. Typically, if you offer enough money, a closed source package's source code will become available (with an NDA), and then you can modify it to your heart's content. Does GPL v3 offer such an option? I didn't think so.
So, if the community is happy with GPL'd software staying in the hobby arena, then we're all good to go. If you'd like to see it used more widely in the business world, then stop trying to change how people do business and start figuring out how to coexist.
He's a writer... he should come up with something.
The sword was crafted by an Uber Death Mage, who used the blood of the last virgin to scream "first post!" on slashdot to cast a technobabble spell, which caused the entire blade to form as a single facet of diamond. Thus having no stress points, the blade would be nearly perfect, as long as the victim didn't use a Google shield to find previous postings and block it.
That took me a whole 15 seconds.... surely he's had a bit more time to ponder?
Actually, animals don't "shelter" their offspring.... they protect them. Big difference. You will never see a wolf trying to cover its pup's eyes as dinner is caught, killed, and ripped apart a few feet away. You'll also never see a badger forcing its offspring to stay in the hole because it's cold and snowy outside.
Likewise, humans should protect their offspring from harm... and harmful ideas are best protected against by sitting down and discussing them. Sticking your fingers in their ears and singing "La, la, la" isn't going to help them in any way.
Nope. The reason album sales are down is because the vast majority of bands these days are what we used to call "one hit wonders". They manage to get one or two songs that show a glimmer of talent or creativity, and promote the hell out of those so you'll rush out to buy the album and discover the other 8 or 9 songs are total garbage.
Things haven't changed all that much, except that live performances used to weed out many of these groups (no lipsyncing), and the ultra-short attention spans of both the public and the current crop of artists don't allow for concept albums, such as The Wall, Caress of Steel, or half the Yes albums.
Stop promoting bands on the T&A of the lead singer (alone!) and start looking for actual musical talent and I suspect you'll suddenly see album sales rise again. Or maybe the RIAA can just bring a class action suit against the American Public for not buying enough albums.
Perhaps the PTC should just adopt a new name and fully admit where they stand.
I suggest they call themselves Fundamentalist Victorian Americans. They seem to share the same extremist views that other fundamentalist groups share, but posture for a "value" set that seems to have only been held by the upper class of Victorian England.
Oh no! A child has been spanked somewhere!!! Quick, to the Lawmobile! We have to save them before they're scarred for life.
On the other hand... with the size of BIOS chips ever-growing... perhaps we can get WindowsXP in the BIOS. Having the machine take 5 seconds to boot would almost be worth it.
My question is... what exactly are you trying to secure? If you're talking about ensuring that sensitive corporate data isn't leaked outside the company, I hate to say it but, you really shouldn't be using unencrypted email in the first place. If you don't allow VPN's or other ways for people to access their email outside the building (I'm sure the salespeople LOVE you), then you may as well force your employees to use paper, or a custom client that only talks to other people on the LAN.
If you're worried about virus/malware/etc... web based email is no more or less safe than any other modern graphical pop3/imap client. All of them these days are HTML enabled, and unless you personally watch everyone click their messages, some will still run winbig.exe or whatever.
Personally, I'm getting a bit tired of people tossing the "security" word around as a reason to make things more difficult or expensive, without ever justifying what it is that needs the added security, and why.
"...Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day..."
Ummm, how exactly are they going to FORCE Google to pay? I suppose Belgium could force Google to close any branch offices they might have in Belgium, and they could certainly take China's approach of setting up a national firewall to try and keep traffic to Google blocked... but forcing them to pay? They can bombard the Google headquarters with legal requests, and spam the US courts to try and bring a suit against them in the US, but what else can they actually do?
One supposes the Dictator of Sealand could decide he hates Microsoft and will FORCE them to pay $1000 a day until they fix the product they sold him?
I'm sure the privacy nuts will be out in force over this, but honestly.... isn't this a good thing?
Everyone complains about how the Neilson system is outdated and doesn't accurately reflect what even that TINY segment of the viewing public watches on their televisions. If Tivo is accurately recording what we tape, what we watch, and what we're actually paying attention to instead of what we have on while we're ranting on slashdot... that seems like a pretty good indication of what kinds of things people actually WANT to see on their TV's.
So, if they infer from my "anonymous" data that I never watch commercials, I pay attention to BSG, Heroes, and pr0n.... maybe we'll get better programming along with our advertisements.
Wow, any old bit of rubbish gets a +5 insightful these days eh?
Sorry, but the cold hand of reality needs to slap you a new one a few dozen times. Unless you happen to own your own business, and don't have to interact with anyone else OR your shareholders, just using something else isn't an option.
If Linux wants to push into the business market as anything other than a back-end server, it will have to stop trying to come up with "better" ways to do things, and concentrate on doing it the way everyone else does it. Right or wrong, if I can't open, edit, and return an office document and expect the folks on the other end to do the same, while having it look the same, and function identically... it's broken. If I design a web page that looks and works perfectly in firefox, I can't just tell the customer "Use firefox, it only looks like crap because you're using IE"... that's broken and unacceptable.
I know, I worked in an all-linux shop for years. We had all kinds of problems trying to work with our customers and our associates in other branch offices. There was never a single time that ANYONE ever accepted that it was their fault for using inferior products.
The Japanese have created humanoid robots. They will create human-like robots. These robots will be made to look exactly like female humans that don't actually exist. Once that's done, it's just a matter of time before we will all welcome our Japanese Pr0n Overlords.
What's the point of porting Linux to the PS3? Anyone who can afford to buy one of these diamond-encrusted consoles has enough money to install a Microsoft OS on it...
My firewire external drives won't like that very much.
How much more complicated can firewire be, than USB 2.0? I mean, the code already exists and works for XP, they're supporting USB removable drives, how many monkeys does it take to port a few extra routines?
They could redo the CGI of one of the most beloved and proven television series of all time, so that it won't be modern enough to appeal to young people, and will now be cheesy and distrubing to older fans... OR...
They could try coming up with something ORIGINAL to revive the dead horse of the Star Trek franchise. Something that doesn't involve falling back on the same techobabble they've used for the last 20 years. Something that has a cast that can work together without being the Brady Bunch. Something that doesn't have a big red RESET button every episode or two....
D'oh! What was I THINKING!
Hooray for capitalizm! More DVD re-releases! Whoo hoo!
How hesitant users are to switch depends on the demographics. Mostly it is the older users who are stuck in the Windows cycle, alot of younger people who are comfortable around computers are much more mobile in this respect and willing to try new things.
I get the feeling that many in the Linux community seem to think that by repeating this often enough, it will become true. No, the majority of folks stuck with Windows are not older people who resist because they fear change. Some people want or need to run applications that just won't run, or won't run well, under anything but Windows. Others get tired of having to re-learn how their desktop works every time they change distros ("It's linux right? Why does the desktop look totally different?"). Still others get fed up with the little quirks that still haven't been worked out, like the multiple different cut and paste buffers that don't work consistantly between every application.
Linux isn't taking a large share of the desktop market, because the linux community can't decide on a single desktop to push. The KDE/Gnome war rages on. Upgrading varies wildly from one distro to the next (RPM vs. apt-get vs. good old tar.gz), and again... one distro decides sendmail is the way to go, but the next insists on exim. Yes, they both work. But it's yet another way to befuddle the user who just wants their computer to work.
Microsoft may be bugged to hell and back, bloated, expensive, and even to blame for holding the industry back 10 years.... but their desktop is a functional standard. I can sit down at any WindowsXP machine in the world (as long as it's in English) and know how it will respond, where the admin tools are, and generally... how to use it. I can't say the same thing for a linux desktop because there IS NO Linux desktop. There are lots of individual desktops which happen to all run under linux, but they're as different from each other as MacOS is from Windows.
Unfortunately, this isn't likely to ever change. Freedom means anyone can make their own desktop, and the size of the user base means several of them will remain popular. No central authority can mandate one, and the public isn't likely to ever decide to just stick with one and ignore the others.
I'd like to see some major PC maker offer a Linux line of Destop and Laptop PC's
Several have tried. Dell offered linux as an option for a while, they still offer it on their servers. The problem is, how do you market this? "Buy our new Linux Desktop! It doesn't run many of your favourite applications or games, and we can only support it if you don't change anything very much from how we ship it to you. Oh, and we knock $50 off the price since you didn't need to buy Windows."
I don't know why people are surprised by this. The internet has become the only effective free press that almost anyone on the planet can both read AND write to. As such, it's a constant thorn in the side of everyone who wants to control the flow of information. That means every government, every business, pretty much everyone who has soemthing to gain by focusing any segment of the public towards their own goals.
The free ride is over. It was destined to be over the moment the internet was opened to commercial activity (1992?). It just took the pointy-haired types a few years to figure out why they needed to pay attention.
I suspect this is just a test run of a future update to Windows Vista. Namely, all future copies of Vista will come with a USB Hardware Validation Tool. Every half hour of playing (err... using) your new Vista system, Clippy will pop to the front of your screen and ask you to please insert a quarter into the USB HVT to continue, or the machine will enter hibernation mode until 50 cents is inserted.
When the HVT is full, a new HVT will be sent to your home, with the cost automatically charged to your Microsoft Credit Card. The hardware cost will be refunded when the "full" HVT is shipped back to Redmond.
How can they tell if you're checking your email via the proper IE6 + "Windows Live" combination, or using fetchmail (or a perl script) to forward your mail to your gmail account? I suppose the university could force you to use your "windows" mail account (although every university typically has their own dinosaur mail system -- mine was on a VAX/VMS cluster), but they can't really force you to read it via Microsoft.
Email is SMTP... anything else is GUI fluff, and should be interchangable.
Sorry guys, your pathetic excuse for a driver has bitten me too often. When I had an old Geforce 3, I had zero problems getting good quality video in anything I tried to run. Getting a Radeon 9800... well... it does have nicer colour, when it works. But between texture flickering in one game, crashes to desktop in others, and driver versions that aren't backwards compatible with their own older drivers (by that, I mean if I upgrade to a new driver to support a new game, suddenly my older games get artifacts and texture problems that they didn't have with the older drivers)... no thanks.
I think that's the real difference. In America, the large snack companies have adjusted the market so that it's cheaper to buy junk food and frozen food than to buy fresh meats and veggies. Processed food with extra salt and sugar thrown in is cheaper than fresh food.
Not only is it cheaper, but if we constantly eat overly sweet and salty food, we develop a taste for it and actually don't like fresh food as well. That causes people to choose to buy the junk food, even when they can afford fresh.
What kind of moron would think they could get source code to ANY closed source product that sells more than 20 copies a year, for such a price?
Last I checked, getting the source code to an active data grid widget for VB5 (years ago, mind you) cost $5000 -- and you had to sign a bunch of NDA's to make sure you coudn't resell it or redistribute it in any form.
Ok, so blu-ray discs hold what, 60G, 80G? I'm betting they aren't going to use that capacity to put a whole season of a TV show on one disc, or to put a trilogy of movies on one disc.
No, instead we're going to have super-mondo-uber high-res that won't matter unless you can afford a $20,000 monitor AND have 20/20 vision.
And since blu-ray has a java interpreter, we'll have five zillion "bonus" features, menus that make you play duke-nuke'em to actually get to the movie, and probably internet-enabled copy protection that phones home every time you touch the remote.
Slashdot Mirror
If software is released under a license which allows a developer to use it and integrate it into their project while maintaining their OWN license, it's a good thing. Having it cost money or not cost money is not the issue.
GPL v3 appears to disallow the possibility of the developer keeping their own changes to the code private and closed source. While this may not pose any problem in a world where developers are paid by the state the way ancient philosophers were given food and shelter so they could think all day long, it's not something most businesses want to touch.
Let me say that again. It's not something most businesses want to touch. Who's your market? Do you want Linux to be adopted into the business community, or do you want it to remain the red headed stepchild hobby OS that Microsoft wants you to call it? It's already difficult to justify using it when there's ZERO support out there and thus any failure falls back to the developer/sysadmin in the local shop to fix. Now you're saying we also have to give away the code WE developed?
There's not a single employer I've ever worked for that would accept those terms. Not one. Not being able to keep modifications private (and thus harder to replicate) means all future GPL software will be black boxes which cannot be modified in the business world. How is that any better than closed source?
In some ways, it's worse than closed source. Typically, if you offer enough money, a closed source package's source code will become available (with an NDA), and then you can modify it to your heart's content. Does GPL v3 offer such an option? I didn't think so.
So, if the community is happy with GPL'd software staying in the hobby arena, then we're all good to go. If you'd like to see it used more widely in the business world, then stop trying to change how people do business and start figuring out how to coexist.
He's a writer... he should come up with something.
The sword was crafted by an Uber Death Mage, who used the blood of the last virgin to scream "first post!" on slashdot to cast a technobabble spell, which caused the entire blade to form as a single facet of diamond. Thus having no stress points, the blade would be nearly perfect, as long as the victim didn't use a Google shield to find previous postings and block it.
That took me a whole 15 seconds.... surely he's had a bit more time to ponder?
Actually, animals don't "shelter" their offspring.... they protect them. Big difference. You will never see a wolf trying to cover its pup's eyes as dinner is caught, killed, and ripped apart a few feet away. You'll also never see a badger forcing its offspring to stay in the hole because it's cold and snowy outside.
Likewise, humans should protect their offspring from harm... and harmful ideas are best protected against by sitting down and discussing them. Sticking your fingers in their ears and singing "La, la, la" isn't going to help them in any way.
Nope. The reason album sales are down is because the vast majority of bands these days are what we used to call "one hit wonders". They manage to get one or two songs that show a glimmer of talent or creativity, and promote the hell out of those so you'll rush out to buy the album and discover the other 8 or 9 songs are total garbage.
Things haven't changed all that much, except that live performances used to weed out many of these groups (no lipsyncing), and the ultra-short attention spans of both the public and the current crop of artists don't allow for concept albums, such as The Wall, Caress of Steel, or half the Yes albums.
Stop promoting bands on the T&A of the lead singer (alone!) and start looking for actual musical talent and I suspect you'll suddenly see album sales rise again. Or maybe the RIAA can just bring a class action suit against the American Public for not buying enough albums.
Perhaps the PTC should just adopt a new name and fully admit where they stand.
I suggest they call themselves Fundamentalist Victorian Americans. They seem to share the same extremist views that other fundamentalist groups share, but posture for a "value" set that seems to have only been held by the upper class of Victorian England.
Oh no! A child has been spanked somewhere!!! Quick, to the Lawmobile! We have to save them before they're scarred for life.
On the other hand... with the size of BIOS chips ever-growing... perhaps we can get WindowsXP in the BIOS. Having the machine take 5 seconds to boot would almost be worth it.
My question is... what exactly are you trying to secure? If you're talking about ensuring that sensitive corporate data isn't leaked outside the company, I hate to say it but, you really shouldn't be using unencrypted email in the first place. If you don't allow VPN's or other ways for people to access their email outside the building (I'm sure the salespeople LOVE you), then you may as well force your employees to use paper, or a custom client that only talks to other people on the LAN.
If you're worried about virus/malware/etc... web based email is no more or less safe than any other modern graphical pop3/imap client. All of them these days are HTML enabled, and unless you personally watch everyone click their messages, some will still run winbig.exe or whatever.
Personally, I'm getting a bit tired of people tossing the "security" word around as a reason to make things more difficult or expensive, without ever justifying what it is that needs the added security, and why.
"A court in Brussels, Belgium..."
"...Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day..."
Ummm, how exactly are they going to FORCE Google to pay? I suppose Belgium could force Google to close any branch offices they might have in Belgium, and they could certainly take China's approach of setting up a national firewall to try and keep traffic to Google blocked... but forcing them to pay? They can bombard the Google headquarters with legal requests, and spam the US courts to try and bring a suit against them in the US, but what else can they actually do?
One supposes the Dictator of Sealand could decide he hates Microsoft and will FORCE them to pay $1000 a day until they fix the product they sold him?
I'm sure the privacy nuts will be out in force over this, but honestly.... isn't this a good thing?
Everyone complains about how the Neilson system is outdated and doesn't accurately reflect what even that TINY segment of the viewing public watches on their televisions. If Tivo is accurately recording what we tape, what we watch, and what we're actually paying attention to instead of what we have on while we're ranting on slashdot... that seems like a pretty good indication of what kinds of things people actually WANT to see on their TV's.
So, if they infer from my "anonymous" data that I never watch commercials, I pay attention to BSG, Heroes, and pr0n.... maybe we'll get better programming along with our advertisements.
Wow, any old bit of rubbish gets a +5 insightful these days eh?
Sorry, but the cold hand of reality needs to slap you a new one a few dozen times. Unless you happen to own your own business, and don't have to interact with anyone else OR your shareholders, just using something else isn't an option.
If Linux wants to push into the business market as anything other than a back-end server, it will have to stop trying to come up with "better" ways to do things, and concentrate on doing it the way everyone else does it. Right or wrong, if I can't open, edit, and return an office document and expect the folks on the other end to do the same, while having it look the same, and function identically... it's broken. If I design a web page that looks and works perfectly in firefox, I can't just tell the customer "Use firefox, it only looks like crap because you're using IE"... that's broken and unacceptable.
I know, I worked in an all-linux shop for years. We had all kinds of problems trying to work with our customers and our associates in other branch offices. There was never a single time that ANYONE ever accepted that it was their fault for using inferior products.
Don't they realize at that low a speed they'll fall DECADES behind the rest of the world in pr0n downloading!
It has nothing to do with efficiency.
The Japanese have created humanoid robots. They will create human-like robots. These robots will be made to look exactly like female humans that don't actually exist. Once that's done, it's just a matter of time before we will all welcome our Japanese Pr0n Overlords.
Never to be seen again.... until our 3-eyed mutant merfolk overlords rise up from the depths to be welcomed!
They could always build one on the arctic ice sheet, then it'll help global warming along directly.
What's the point of porting Linux to the PS3? Anyone who can afford to buy one of these diamond-encrusted consoles has enough money to install a Microsoft OS on it...
*ducks*
No firewire support?
My firewire external drives won't like that very much.
How much more complicated can firewire be, than USB 2.0? I mean, the code already exists and works for XP, they're supporting USB removable drives, how many monkeys does it take to port a few extra routines?
They could redo the CGI of one of the most beloved and proven television series of all time, so that it won't be modern enough to appeal to young people, and will now be cheesy and distrubing to older fans... OR...
They could try coming up with something ORIGINAL to revive the dead horse of the Star Trek franchise. Something that doesn't involve falling back on the same techobabble they've used for the last 20 years. Something that has a cast that can work together without being the Brady Bunch. Something that doesn't have a big red RESET button every episode or two....
D'oh! What was I THINKING!
Hooray for capitalizm! More DVD re-releases! Whoo hoo!
I don't know why people are surprised by this. The internet has become the only effective free press that almost anyone on the planet can both read AND write to. As such, it's a constant thorn in the side of everyone who wants to control the flow of information. That means every government, every business, pretty much everyone who has soemthing to gain by focusing any segment of the public towards their own goals.
The free ride is over. It was destined to be over the moment the internet was opened to commercial activity (1992?). It just took the pointy-haired types a few years to figure out why they needed to pay attention.
I suspect this is just a test run of a future update to Windows Vista. Namely, all future copies of Vista will come with a USB Hardware Validation Tool. Every half hour of playing (err... using) your new Vista system, Clippy will pop to the front of your screen and ask you to please insert a quarter into the USB HVT to continue, or the machine will enter hibernation mode until 50 cents is inserted.
When the HVT is full, a new HVT will be sent to your home, with the cost automatically charged to your Microsoft Credit Card. The hardware cost will be refunded when the "full" HVT is shipped back to Redmond.
How can they tell if you're checking your email via the proper IE6 + "Windows Live" combination, or using fetchmail (or a perl script) to forward your mail to your gmail account? I suppose the university could force you to use your "windows" mail account (although every university typically has their own dinosaur mail system -- mine was on a VAX/VMS cluster), but they can't really force you to read it via Microsoft.
Email is SMTP... anything else is GUI fluff, and should be interchangable.
Ne-ver buy A-T-I.
Sorry guys, your pathetic excuse for a driver has bitten me too often. When I had an old Geforce 3, I had zero problems getting good quality video in anything I tried to run. Getting a Radeon 9800... well... it does have nicer colour, when it works. But between texture flickering in one game, crashes to desktop in others, and driver versions that aren't backwards compatible with their own older drivers (by that, I mean if I upgrade to a new driver to support a new game, suddenly my older games get artifacts and texture problems that they didn't have with the older drivers)... no thanks.
Ne-ver buy A-T-I.
I think that's the real difference. In America, the large snack companies have adjusted the market so that it's cheaper to buy junk food and frozen food than to buy fresh meats and veggies. Processed food with extra salt and sugar thrown in is cheaper than fresh food.
Not only is it cheaper, but if we constantly eat overly sweet and salty food, we develop a taste for it and actually don't like fresh food as well. That causes people to choose to buy the junk food, even when they can afford fresh.
Take that you filthy walrus!
What kind of moron would think they could get source code to ANY closed source product that sells more than 20 copies a year, for such a price?
Last I checked, getting the source code to an active data grid widget for VB5 (years ago, mind you) cost $5000 -- and you had to sign a bunch of NDA's to make sure you coudn't resell it or redistribute it in any form.
Ok, so blu-ray discs hold what, 60G, 80G? I'm betting they aren't going to use that capacity to put a whole season of a TV show on one disc, or to put a trilogy of movies on one disc.
No, instead we're going to have super-mondo-uber high-res that won't matter unless you can afford a $20,000 monitor AND have 20/20 vision.
And since blu-ray has a java interpreter, we'll have five zillion "bonus" features, menus that make you play duke-nuke'em to actually get to the movie, and probably internet-enabled copy protection that phones home every time you touch the remote.
Tell me why I'm supposed to jump for joy at this?