One of the problems with serialized novels is that they take too long. I can knock out a 600 page book in two/three nights. Now, I consider myself a pretty good/avid reader, but that's probably the low end of the scale.
Having to wait a month for the author to complete the next chapter would be absolute murder.
In the FAQ, it states that an organization as a whole can make a modified copy and not distribute it. So the organization is the responsible body, not the individual employee.
That would imply that an employee could NOT distribute it without the permission of the organization, if the modified product was intended for in-house use only.
It could be that they are following a standard security procedure of never allow an untrusted or unknown user more than absolute minimum necessary access. You may be the grand poobah of networking and programming where you work, but on a cruise ship, they don't know you and should not make the assumption that you know what you are doing.
Well, when you consider that PHP is primarily used as a scripting language on web servers, it makes sense to optimize for performance. You can't have processes hanging around too long, else they start to clog things up and pretty soon you have a really lovely rackmounted paperweight.
Performance is everything for web servers. Get 'em in, get 'em out, next please.
Well, if you think about it, all the record company has to do is put P2Pster on a computer somewhere and load up the spoofs. Alternate the usernames (if required) once in a while, maybe add some new content periodically.
They show up in the search just like some college student in Peoria.
You know, I think I've just hit on a money-making business: Hosting spoof songs for the record company. For, say, $500 a month plus bandwidth, I will host any and all spoofs the record companies want!
to your neighbors, I would make the atttempt to repoint the cameras. As a previous poster pointed out, they haven't taken you to court, so presumably there is no animosity yet.
Potential solutions:
1) mount the camera on the roof. This should get you better clearance.
2) Cut a silhouette and place in front of the camera. That way you can make people think you live somewhere more exciting (that was NOT intended as a cheap shot at your town).
3) Mount the cameras at your local school. Give the kids something to ooh and aah about, do something good for your community, appease your neighbors, and get that warm fuzzy feeling all in one.
Have a better one.
Re:Wow, taking on IBM mainframes...
on
'Unbreakable Linux'
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think it means that IBM is going to have wake up and smite someone.
I'm criticizing the majority of Linux users who want every piece of software to be free (I love it when people keep trying to put spin on what write - there's no spin, just opinion).
Look, it's not a rational position in today's world. Far be it from me to always adopt a rational position, but at times it get's a little shrill here.
Fact is - somebody has to get paid to produce software for the masses. Open Source (with a few notable exceptions) concentrates software development efforts on producing tools for a technical elite. This can be attributed to a lesser marketshare and thus a lower reward for producing good, universal tools (even for free), but very few people seem interested.
Widespread acceptance demands that the bulk of software written be simple to use (and no, the command line won't cut it) and designed to the expectations of an extraordinarily wide range of user capability.
For better or worse, Apple and Microsoft do produce those tools, and as faulty as their products may be, they have put extensive research into making their products as user-friendly as possible. The overall complexity of their software is a combination of legacy requirements, desire of users for new capabilities, and of a need for the company to market their products.
The common attitudes around here are: 1. MS is bad and deserves to be destroyed. 2. Commercial software is bad and deserves to be destroyed. 3. Anything not written for Linux (preferably exclusively) is bad and deserves to be destroyed. 4. Stallman is either good or bad, but should be worshipped as a god (preferably an elder god, apparently). 5. Jon Katz is bad and deserves to be destroyed (I can't figure that one out, so I just ignore him).
Does it come as so much of a shock to anyone that someone would play Devil's Advocate? And no, I may not be particularly good at it, but I'm working on it.
So that's my two cents. Mod it as a troll or whine or whatever. Personally, I prefer the term nerdality-impaired, but go figure.
Can you imagine the sheer hell involved with getting licensing payments on Quicktime out of the hardcore Linux crowd? I mean, can you really IMAGINE it?
Do you think Apple really wants to hear all the pissing and moaning that would accompany a non-free media player?
You'd have the industry on one side, suing the life out of the company, and Slashdot on the other, dissecting it down to the bits and complaining that the third bit in the eighth word would be more secure if it was open sourced.
Sheesh!
Yup. It's a troll. I've got 49 karma and nothing to do with it. Mod away!
One: They're following the mandates of the GPL, so there's no cause for beef there. The GPL doesn't say anything about a binary distribution being available.
Two: Where do you get off assuming United Linux owes you anything? And what precisely do they owe you?
If you release your software under GPL, then you have no further control other than what is explicitly stated in the license. I can take your code and mangle it, distribute it, rewrite it, tie it to a log and throw it in the river, as long as I leave the license intact. I owe you nothing.
Now, that may be a violation of the spirit of GPL, but that is, in and of itself, not an actionable cause. You can, of course, pull the source back to some proprietary license, but the source code up until that point is out there for the world to see.
As I see it, you have no one to blame but yourselves. You signed onto the GPL, with full knowledge and understanding that this sort of thing could happen.
As for the second part of my question - what does United Linux really owe you? Money - not likely. Binaries? They're giving you the source. Respect? By sticking to the rules of the license, they have maintained what they were supposed to do. Return something to the community? They have. The're helping to raise the visibility among corporations and providing a distro that corporations can understand, which helps to further the acceptance of Linux.
Eventually you are going to have to grow up and realize that even more of this is going to happen as Linux becomes more and more mainstream. Today, it's four minor corporations in very real danger of being wiped out; tomorrow it could be Microsoft, with $40 billion in pocket and lawyers that make Genghis Khan look like a Sunday school teacher.
Here's a cold brutal fact for you: not everyone has the same belief or faith in community that you do. For better or worse, you collectively built a product that has escaped from it's hacker haven and is being used by people who are less concerned with driving the state of the art than they are selling it.
This is your reality check. Mod me down as a troll or flamebait or even consign me to the Hell of Upside Down Microsoft Marketroids, but somebody needed to say this.
Re:Not a good idea.
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd say a University academic department qualifies an organization with a severely constrained budget.
Part failure? New computer parts rarely fail within the warranty period, in my experience. How much does the service contract from Sun add to the TCO of the machine? If it's even $500 a year, then that money could be better spent on a mirror drive and training.
Correction: I wouldn't buy from Sun on principle, but that is another matter.
How in the hell is this flamebait? Is there anything that is patently untrue in my statements?
The lowest capacity Netra is $995 plux tax. For about $400, one can match the speed and the storage capacity using off-the-shelf equipment. The rackmount case will add to the cost, but not significantly.
Debian, Mandrake, and even RedHat are available as downloadable ISO's, with the only cost being that of the time spent and bandwidth. Alternately, if you want to dump a few bucks back into the community, the necessary package still only costs $80 max.
The firewall can be configured using any number of utilities available on Sourceforge or other places.
For that matter, you can download or purchase one of the firewall-equipped distro's and still come in under the cost of the Sun hardware alone.
You people are way too sensitive and over the strangest things.
For less than half the cost of that Sun POS, you can build a box that will handle quite a load if you build it from generic parts.
Check out Pricewatch (or just about any smaller out-of-state supplier) and you'll find much lower prices on equipment.
Second, download one of the many distro's out there - They're free and most of them include an option for building just a webserver.
Third, firewall the living hell out of that box (except the necessary ports) and turn it loose. Should only take a weekend to put the thing together and get it running.
The security might take a bit longer, but there's about a metric ton of stuff out there to help you configure a decently working firewall.
I wouldn't waste state money on Sun equipment and warranties, since most machines don't fail inside the warranty period (personally, I would buy from Sun on principle, but that's another matter).
The part you left out was the expectation that The Company (generically speaking) will make a high profit, an onus placed upon them by the shareholders. Without that expectation, in our current society, the shareholders will take their money to another, more profitable, company. The shareholders place their money with The Company in the hopes that they will get back at least slightly more than they gave, in the long run.
So, a company must produce a return in order to satisfy the sharelholders, otherwise there'd be no point to the investment save altruistic reasons, and we're just not that far along. When the greater mass of society is interested in the welfare of humanity as a whole, rather than their own small group, then we will begin to see the radical changes that you want.
But don't hold your breath. It won't be for three or four generations at the least.
I used to think that, but now I'm not so sure. The customer knows (or should be informed) going into the deal, so there's not much argument there. Plus, if it's custom software, it has a very limited customer-base anyway. The competitors are going to be hiring some other company because of the possibility of mixing IP.
So it's probably a pretty safe bet all things considered. Certain routines are pretty universal, and there's probably only a small percentage that actually specific to the customer's application and it's extremely specific - requiring customization on a per-installation basis.
We're not talking email clients here, I'm guessing.
As for commercial software, it's necessary. Like it or not, commercial software does serve a useful purpose - it's high-visibility tends to make it more adoptable by the general public and corporations for utilitarian purposes (email, word-processing, etc.) because it seems to come from a stable source.
That's a downfall of Open Source and Free Software - the lack of apparent stability of the relationship between customer and programmer. You can say that the programmer will always be there, but unless he is paid money to always be there (as a commercial company is), there is less of a guarantee.
An Open Source programmer can move onto another project and one has only his/her/it's word that they'll support the product. Remember that people are resistant to change, so it's not always convenient to shop around for a programmer because, good, bad, or indifferent, you establish a relationship with someone, they become a known quantity.
Then again, I could be wrong. Worse things have happened.
Fine, Debian will survive. But Debian is not a company - it's an organization (or something like it).
You must understand that perception is as important as reality in the business world, sometimes more. A free Star Office goes over great with the gomers, but Sun had to put a price on to get it to move with businesses.
>> There will continue to be high-quality...
Well, sure there will be - but unless you've given up on getting rid of the Windows stranglehold, you're going to need a commercial company or two around to provide some perceived legitimacy.
Sorry to be such a cynic, but the real value of Redhat, SuSE and others is that they put a veneer of respectability on Linux. It's pretty obvious that it won't move in quantity on technical merit alone, and so those companies are necessary. Remember, big business is more interested in the bottom-line than in community (it may not be right, but like a lump of poop on the sidewalk, there it is).
It's going to take a long time to overcome the stigma of FREE=LOW QUALITY. My apologies to any big businesses that aren't like lumps of poop on the sidewalk.
If you read the article, they will be in complete compliance with the GPL - they won't make BINARIES available, but SOURCE CODE will be.
As for the proprietary software, something has to be done to ensure that they survive. Otherwise, there will be only two Linux companies, and eventually there will only be IBM.
Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a bad episode of Highlander when I observe the Linux crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the problems with serialized novels is that they take too long. I can knock out a 600 page book in two/three nights. Now, I consider myself a pretty good/avid reader, but that's probably the low end of the scale.
Having to wait a month for the author to complete the next chapter would be absolute murder.
In the FAQ, it states that an organization as a whole can make a modified copy and not distribute it. So the organization is the responsible body, not the individual employee.
That would imply that an employee could NOT distribute it without the permission of the organization, if the modified product was intended for in-house use only.
It could be that they are following a standard security procedure of never allow an untrusted or unknown user more than absolute minimum necessary access. You may be the grand poobah of networking and programming where you work, but on a cruise ship, they don't know you and should not make the assumption that you know what you are doing.
Well, when you consider that PHP is primarily used as a scripting language on web servers, it makes sense to optimize for performance. You can't have processes hanging around too long, else they start to clog things up and pretty soon you have a really lovely rackmounted paperweight.
Performance is everything for web servers. Get 'em in, get 'em out, next please.
Well, if you think about it, all the record company has to do is put P2Pster on a computer somewhere and load up the spoofs. Alternate the usernames (if required) once in a while, maybe add some new content periodically.
They show up in the search just like some college student in Peoria.
You know, I think I've just hit on a money-making business: Hosting spoof songs for the record company. For, say, $500 a month plus bandwidth, I will host any and all spoofs the record companies want!
Whaddaya think?
Thanks, mom.
to your neighbors, I would make the atttempt to repoint the cameras. As a previous poster pointed out, they haven't taken you to court, so presumably there is no animosity yet.
Potential solutions:
1) mount the camera on the roof. This should get you better clearance.
2) Cut a silhouette and place in front of the camera. That way you can make people think you live somewhere more exciting (that was NOT intended as a cheap shot at your town).
3) Mount the cameras at your local school. Give the kids something to ooh and aah about, do something good for your community, appease your neighbors, and get that warm fuzzy feeling all in one.
Have a better one.
I think it means that IBM is going to have wake up and smite someone.
What would be the advantages of reviving gopher? I can't think of any.
Hey, can anyone provide any proof besides some guy's say-so that AdTI takes money from Microsoft?
I'm looking for hard evidence here, not just "it stands to reason", and "of course they do - they support Microsoft".
I'm criticizing the majority of Linux users who want every piece of software to be free (I love it when people keep trying to put spin on what write - there's no spin, just opinion).
Look, it's not a rational position in today's world. Far be it from me to always adopt a rational position, but at times it get's a little shrill here.
Fact is - somebody has to get paid to produce software for the masses. Open Source (with a few notable exceptions) concentrates software development efforts on producing tools for a technical elite. This can be attributed to a lesser marketshare and thus a lower reward for producing good, universal tools (even for free), but very few people seem interested.
Widespread acceptance demands that the bulk of software written be simple to use (and no, the command line won't cut it) and designed to the expectations of an extraordinarily wide range of user capability.
For better or worse, Apple and Microsoft do produce those tools, and as faulty as their products may be, they have put extensive research into making their products as user-friendly as possible. The overall complexity of their software is a combination of legacy requirements, desire of users for new capabilities, and of a need for the company to market their products.
The common attitudes around here are:
1. MS is bad and deserves to be destroyed.
2. Commercial software is bad and deserves to be destroyed.
3. Anything not written for Linux (preferably exclusively) is bad and deserves to be destroyed.
4. Stallman is either good or bad, but should be worshipped as a god (preferably an elder god, apparently).
5. Jon Katz is bad and deserves to be destroyed (I can't figure that one out, so I just ignore him).
Does it come as so much of a shock to anyone that someone would play Devil's Advocate? And no, I may not be particularly good at it, but I'm working on it.
So that's my two cents. Mod it as a troll or whine or whatever. Personally, I prefer the term nerdality-impaired, but go figure.
Can you imagine the sheer hell involved with getting licensing payments on Quicktime out of the hardcore Linux crowd? I mean, can you really IMAGINE it?
Do you think Apple really wants to hear all the pissing and moaning that would accompany a non-free media player?
You'd have the industry on one side, suing the life out of the company, and Slashdot on the other, dissecting it down to the bits and complaining that the third bit in the eighth word would be more secure if it was open sourced.
Sheesh!
Yup. It's a troll. I've got 49 karma and nothing to do with it. Mod away!
So, you feel UL should ...
Nope. I think what they're doing is sufficient. I was responding the OP and to the others here who feel that UL has somehow taken advantage of them.
One: They're following the mandates of the GPL, so there's no cause for beef there. The GPL doesn't say anything about a binary distribution being available.
Two: Where do you get off assuming United Linux owes you anything? And what precisely do they owe you?
If you release your software under GPL, then you have no further control other than what is explicitly stated in the license. I can take your code and mangle it, distribute it, rewrite it, tie it to a log and throw it in the river, as long as I leave the license intact. I owe you nothing.
Now, that may be a violation of the spirit of GPL, but that is, in and of itself, not an actionable cause. You can, of course, pull the source back to some proprietary license, but the source code up until that point is out there for the world to see.
As I see it, you have no one to blame but yourselves. You signed onto the GPL, with full knowledge and understanding that this sort of thing could happen.
As for the second part of my question - what does United Linux really owe you? Money - not likely. Binaries? They're giving you the source. Respect? By sticking to the rules of the license, they have maintained what they were supposed to do. Return something to the community? They have. The're helping to raise the visibility among corporations and providing a distro that corporations can understand, which helps to further the acceptance of Linux.
Eventually you are going to have to grow up and realize that even more of this is going to happen as Linux becomes more and more mainstream. Today, it's four minor corporations in very real danger of being wiped out; tomorrow it could be Microsoft, with $40 billion in pocket and lawyers that make Genghis Khan look like a Sunday school teacher.
Here's a cold brutal fact for you: not everyone has the same belief or faith in community that you do. For better or worse, you collectively built a product that has escaped from it's hacker haven and is being used by people who are less concerned with driving the state of the art than they are selling it.
This is your reality check. Mod me down as a troll or flamebait or even consign me to the Hell of Upside Down Microsoft Marketroids, but somebody needed to say this.
I'd say a University academic department qualifies an organization with a severely constrained budget.
Part failure? New computer parts rarely fail within the warranty period, in my experience. How much does the service contract from Sun add to the TCO of the machine? If it's even $500 a year, then that money could be better spent on a mirror drive and training.
Correction: I wouldn't buy from Sun on principle, but that is another matter.
How in the hell is this flamebait? Is there anything that is patently untrue in my statements?
The lowest capacity Netra is $995 plux tax. For about $400, one can match the speed and the storage capacity using off-the-shelf equipment. The rackmount case will add to the cost, but not significantly.
Debian, Mandrake, and even RedHat are available as downloadable ISO's, with the only cost being that of the time spent and bandwidth. Alternately, if you want to dump a few bucks back into the community, the necessary package still only costs $80 max.
The firewall can be configured using any number of utilities available on Sourceforge or other places.
For that matter, you can download or purchase one of the firewall-equipped distro's and still come in under the cost of the Sun hardware alone.
You people are way too sensitive and over the strangest things.
For less than half the cost of that Sun POS, you can build a box that will handle quite a load if you build it from generic parts.
Check out Pricewatch (or just about any smaller out-of-state supplier) and you'll find much lower prices on equipment.
Second, download one of the many distro's out there - They're free and most of them include an option for building just a webserver.
Third, firewall the living hell out of that box (except the necessary ports) and turn it loose. Should only take a weekend to put the thing together and get it running.
The security might take a bit longer, but there's about a metric ton of stuff out there to help you configure a decently working firewall.
I wouldn't waste state money on Sun equipment and warranties, since most machines don't fail inside the warranty period (personally, I would buy from Sun on principle, but that's another matter).
The part you left out was the expectation that The Company (generically speaking) will make a high profit, an onus placed upon them by the shareholders. Without that expectation, in our current society, the shareholders will take their money to another, more profitable, company. The shareholders place their money with The Company in the hopes that they will get back at least slightly more than they gave, in the long run.
So, a company must produce a return in order to satisfy the sharelholders, otherwise there'd be no point to the investment save altruistic reasons, and we're just not that far along. When the greater mass of society is interested in the welfare of humanity as a whole, rather than their own small group, then we will begin to see the radical changes that you want.
But don't hold your breath. It won't be for three or four generations at the least.
I used to think that, but now I'm not so sure. The customer knows (or should be informed) going into the deal, so there's not much argument there. Plus, if it's custom software, it has a very limited customer-base anyway. The competitors are going to be hiring some other company because of the possibility of mixing IP.
So it's probably a pretty safe bet all things considered. Certain routines are pretty universal, and there's probably only a small percentage that actually specific to the customer's application and it's extremely specific - requiring customization on a per-installation basis.
We're not talking email clients here, I'm guessing.
As for commercial software, it's necessary. Like it or not, commercial software does serve a useful purpose - it's high-visibility tends to make it more adoptable by the general public and corporations for utilitarian purposes (email, word-processing, etc.) because it seems to come from a stable source.
That's a downfall of Open Source and Free Software - the lack of apparent stability of the relationship between customer and programmer. You can say that the programmer will always be there, but unless he is paid money to always be there (as a commercial company is), there is less of a guarantee.
An Open Source programmer can move onto another project and one has only his/her/it's word that they'll support the product. Remember that people are resistant to change, so it's not always convenient to shop around for a programmer because, good, bad, or indifferent, you establish a relationship with someone, they become a known quantity.
Then again, I could be wrong. Worse things have happened.
Yeah, but then we could say
"All your wireless-base belong to U.S."
OK, it was lame. Just don't throw any lutefisk.
Fine, Debian will survive. But Debian is not a company - it's an organization (or something like it).
...
You must understand that perception is as important as reality in the business world, sometimes more. A free Star Office goes over great with the gomers, but Sun had to put a price on to get it to move with businesses.
>> There will continue to be high-quality
Well, sure there will be - but unless you've given up on getting rid of the Windows stranglehold, you're going to need a commercial company or two around to provide some perceived legitimacy.
Sorry to be such a cynic, but the real value of Redhat, SuSE and others is that they put a veneer of respectability on Linux. It's pretty obvious that it won't move in quantity on technical merit alone, and so those companies are necessary. Remember, big business is more interested in the bottom-line than in community (it may not be right, but like a lump of poop on the sidewalk, there it is).
It's going to take a long time to overcome the stigma of FREE=LOW QUALITY. My apologies to any big businesses that aren't like lumps of poop on the sidewalk.
If you read the article, they will be in complete compliance with the GPL - they won't make BINARIES available, but SOURCE CODE will be.
As for the proprietary software, something has to be done to ensure that they survive. Otherwise, there will be only two Linux companies, and eventually there will only be IBM.
Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a bad episode of Highlander when I observe the Linux crowd.
Is this the same that people bitch about Microsoft doing with Explorer? This is a much more substantial product than Explorer.
I'd rather they port KDE software over to Aqua, rather than KDE itself, but you can't have everything.
And before the inevitable flames - GUI programming is not my area of expertise. By the time I learned it, we'd be on KDE 4.