This is more than "a bit of a scam" -- it's immoral and undoubtedly illegal. There are ways to get defeat all their little scams and still use the Fasttrack P2P network. You can try Kazaa Lite, which is Kazaa without the spy/scumware. I'd also recommend using AdAware, a great little program that scans your registry, memory, and hard drives for spy/scum/adware components and gives you the option to delete them.
Using AdAware to delete cydoor.dll will likely leave your P2P client not working. That's where the dummy cydoor.dll comes in. It allows the client to start without providing any of the unwanted cydoor functionality.
For more info on spyware and scumware in general, check out the quite wonderful Counterexploitation site...
So this link from/. should help him out quite a bit? Hooray for everybody!
Hmm, not terribly impressed...
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I'll probably get modded into the basement for saying this but...is it me, or do those shots not look that impressive? Part of it is the JPG artifacts, which we should disregard. But even still, it doesn't look "next generation" to me.
According to Red Herring, each XBox Microsoft manufactures costs them about $325. When you buy one, they recoup about $175 on that expenditure, meaning the entire transaction cost them $150.
So -- unsold XBoxen cost MS $325 each, sold ones cost them $150.
I'm happy to run linux (and play games) on my PC and let them eat the $325...
I fail to see how the Archos isn't an iPod Competitor. Your points in the linked post all are talking about MP3CD players -- there is no comparison.
Form factor: The archos is only slightly larger than the iPod -- the iPod dimensions are 4.2" x 2.43" x 0.78" while the archos' are 4.5 x 3.2 x 1.3"; it fits in my coat pocket just fine.
Hard drive == skip resistant, you say. Umm, exactly. Both the iPod and Archos are basically portable hard drives.
You are right that the 'charge while you transfer' capability of the iPod is more convenient than the Archos' 'charge with an AC adapter', but last I checked being a competitor didn't mean having an identical feature list. And it's true that the Archos uses batteries, but I wouldn't really know it. I've used the thing daily for about 6 months now and have never had to change them. I've never even run out of juice, despite using it extensively without charging. It seems like more than 6 hours.
The current Archos models support USB2, which is more or less equivalent to firewire in terms of transfer rate.
So again, remind me how the iPod and the Archos Jukebox aren't competitors?
...as their claim is that the BnetD developers actually *copied* portions of Blizzard's code rather than reverse engineering and rewriting it. They have dropped the DMCA component of the complaint, the latest (amended) version of which is here.
IANAL, but it seems that honest to goodness reverse engineering is still legally safe, for the time being.
There is indeed a grassroots opposition...
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· Score: 5, Informative
They are currently active in fighting the DMCA and Fritz Hollings' efforts regarding the CBDTPA, and lots more worthwhile stuff. I'd recommend you check out their site and get involved in any way you can...
Seems to be slashdotted already, so here's the text (don't mod up, karma is just fine thanks):
So who the hell is that Nick Moffitt? He keeps showing up at mailing lists and in any context where the GNU might be mentioned. Moffitt is always rather militant, but never boring. I decided to pick Moffitt's brain on behalf of the Gnuheter readers.
As a general rule, Gnuheter never publishes interviews or news stories in any other language than Swedish. After all, Gnuheter is all the leading forum on open source and free software in the Nordic countries. The Americans have Slashdot, Newsforge. The British have The Register. So why publish an interview in English? Well, I thought Nick Moffitt is interesting enough to reach a wider audience. Plus - and probably more important to yours truly - most of his answers can not be easily translated, regardless of Moffitt's crazy rants about localization. Please be advised that some of the hyperlinks in the interview will crash your computer, should you use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer.
That much said, I leave the microphone to the soon to be famous Nick Moffitt. Enjoy!
# Who is Nick Moffit?
It's Moffitt, actually. The name is Scottish, and was originally "Moffat". Centuries of misspelling have created 24 different variations on the name that are recognized by clan Moffat. I've actually been to Moffat, which is also a town in the lowlands off of M74 somewhere.
I'm a big fan of urban rail, and I've been getting into photography both with the aiptek pencams (which are marketed as spycams in the UK), and with the Russian LOMO LC-A 35mm camera. I'm a Debian bigot, but I've been fiddling with Gentoo recently. I'm mostly hacking on the LNX-BBC lately, and maintaining GAR.
I've lived in San Francisco for the past seven or eight years, and have instigated a lot of nefariousness around here. I've seen the dot-coms come and go, which means I've seen a full cycle of San Francisco's life go by. Much of SF's growth has been based on gold rushes, whether it be gold, military construction during WWII, the magazine industry, or whatever. You can see a brief explanation of San Francisco's most recent craziness in the FAQ.
So right now my city is in hard times, but I plan to stick with it. It's the only real city West of the Mississippi river!
# Why?
I was a big BBS weenie in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I probably wouldn't have cared so much, but I found that the Citadel BBS software had such a neat development community in the Seattle area. It was just so cool to see development of the BBS being discussed ON the BBS network. After all, the source code was "public domain" (which is impossible under current copyright law in the US, but emulatable via the MIT X license nowadays).
So I got hooked on this whole free-for-all, where prospective developers read up the code on their own time and flung code into the discussion areas for prospective inclusion or adaptation into the BBS. It was only natural that I'd get hooked on the GNU community in the same way.
# What is Crackmonkey and why should we care?
So around about 1997 I wrote what was probably my first GPL'd program. Before then I had just been throwing code snippets out and figuring that licensing wasn't important. The program was a hideous Perl CGI that solved some problems I saw with the then-current state of Web-based BBSes and guestbooks.
But when there was a bug with the BBS, it meant that no one could discuss the problem on the BBS! So I started the crackmonkey mailing list. The original message never made it to the archives, but my brother quoted the entire thing in a mockery of novice listserv users.
Eventually the list dwarfed the BBS (since Web pages are still clumsy for holding conversations), and the phenomenon known as CrackMonkey was born. I think it was about 2000 when I implemented the "no Windows MUA" filters, making it so that you pretty much have to use Free Software to post to the list (or be clever enough to fake it).
The list was modeled largely after the discussion list that accompanies Pigdog Journal. They were a bunch of San Francisco Bay Area BBS weenies, while the original CrackMonkeys were old Seattle BBS weenies.
The crackmonkey.org Web site has always been just sort of this neglected pile of pages that lead you to the list. Even the FAQ is just a bunch of mailing list postings that I felt like including. It's also been a source of controversy, since it used to garble the kernels of folks who visited it with IE5. See the fanmail section for some love I got from IE users.
Crackmonkey's motto is "Non Sequitur arguments and Ad Hominem personal attacks".
# Seven Dollar history of Unix - is that something to send to my mother?
It's funny, but that document is three years old, and incomplete. I had always planned to write a final chapter about the San Francisco user group community and the progression of the dominant distro among hackers as SLS -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian. I was just stuck in the middle of it all, and couldn't find a smooth way to work it into what was essentially a historical document.
I am always surprised when I see reporters including my own sentences in their boilerplate descriptions of Unix and Linux. That paper is designed to help spread the meme that the Unix community always wanted Free Software, and it just took GNU, Linux, and BSD to get it to us. In that aspect, I have been incredibly pleased with its popularity.
I never expected it to be so heavily linked. It's currently the sixth real hit for "unix history" on google, after Open Sources and the official Dennis Ritchie documents.
Some day I'll add a little more to it, I suppose. I'd like to add a bit in between Unix and BSD about the Software Tools book (which was sort of the Cygwin of the 1970s), and finish the final section. The user group communities in the Bay Area have dwindled away, largely because installing and using GNU/Linux isn't as exciting or new or challenging any more. Installfests made sense in the Slackware era, but now any newbie can point-and-click through a Mandrake install. I can now safely write about the user groups in the past tense.
It's definitely something to send to your mother, though. It's a nice quick introduction to the assumptions made by free software hackers. It presents the perspective that proprietary software is this weird thing from the 1980s that really should never have caught on.
# Why should we not use GIFs? What should we do instead?
The original GIF spec was written by someone who wanted an open standard that could be implemented independently by anyone. Unfortunately, he didn't realize that the compression algorithm he had specified was patent pending.
Now, decompression algorithms are often self-explanatory, since it is the job of the file format to tell decompressors how to unpack something. But the compression algorithms are prone to all sorts of arbitrary distinctions without differences.
So if you ask 17 programmers how they would have solved the problems that LZW solved, you get 17 different (but correct) solutions. Thus, the patent is difficult to challenge in US courts.
As a result, the displaying of GIFs is not under threat by patent claims -- mozilla is likely in good shape. But the generation of GIFs is subject to the whims of UNiSYS, which is this old dinosaur company that doesn't make anything anymore (relying on old patents for revenue).
So this means that if you distribute a GIF that you made with the gimp, you're liable to be sued by UNiSYS! This is because neither the UC Berkeley XCF or the GNOME folks or the FSF licensed the LZW compression algorithm from them. So if you put up a Web site in the US that has GIFs on it, you're likely in trouble.
So what do you do if you have a bunch of GIFs on your site, and you don't want to be sued by Unisys? You pay Unisys US$5000! That's what they charge for people who distribute GIFs that were made using Free Software. If you run 72 Web sites on your machine, you'll have to pay US$360000!
PNG, however, uses the same algorithm that gzip does. It's an unencumbered format for lossless compression, and the browser support for the basic features is already there! People complain about how the PNG support in old IEs and suchforth isn't very good, but they're usually talking about the features of PNG that GIF doesn't have. PNG files tend to be smaller than their GIF counterparts, and they even support alpha channels!
# If GNU is the answer, then what was the question?
How can I use computers without being antisocial? How can I be sure that my hacking won't be sealed off from the light of day? How can I connect with other hackers via What It Is We Do?
# What should the Scandinavians do about the Windows domination?
It seems that Microsoft is now giving away software to governments that are looking to avoid them. It's tough for people to see the hidden costs in their stuff, since they usually charge you up front. They've been able to FUD about Total Cost of Ownership because people really are skeptical about things being free (as in beer).
I recall about two years ago, Iceland was having trouble convincing Microsoft that their market was big enough to warrant an Icelandic localization. They couldn't even convince Microsoft to let them do it for free. I thought this was an excellent opportunity to show how GNU could be made to work in places that no other OS could. As a bonus, they would create jobs inside Iceland instead of sending more dollars to the US economy.
The real trick is to make the localization seamless. If I were to see a Russian OS that was later localized to fit the US market, I'd probably still think of it as this strange Russian thing that was trying to break into the US market. GNOME and KDE have major development efforts in Northern and Central Europe, and the Linux Kernel was started by an ethnic Swede. Yet things are still primarily in English (just look at dmesg or syslog!).
Quite possibly my most widely-used project is GAR, which is the build system used by the LNX-BBC project and GARNOME. It's a lot like the BSD ports system, but GNU make is much cleaner to write in than pmake. I regularly see output from a localized make, but with all sorts of English compile errors and such:
| dparammanager.c:914: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type | make[5]: *** [libgstcontrol_la-dparammanager.lo] Erreur 1 | make[5]: Quitte le répertoire
If you can make it readily apparent that GNU is not specifically a US product, you may be able to stir up some nationalistic pride and anti-US sentiment about the majority of proprietary OSes. Keep the money and the jobs at home! This stuff is written by Scandinavians!
# What was refund day really about?
It was originally someone's idea of a protest. Everyone should go to their vendors and demand refunds as per the Windows license that came with bundled PCs. It said right there in black-and-white that if you didn't use Windows, you should return it for a refund.
But that lacked pressworthiness. It would be loose and there would be no visible statistical record that "wow, all these people are demanding their refunds!". So Rick Moen and Don marti and I started planning a trip down to Foster City, CA to demand our refund from Microsoft. We'd already tried the vendors; and they weren't the ones who wrote the license, so they ignored us!
Ultimately it was a way to get the message out that there were people who didn't want Windows. We were pointing out that PC does not mean Microsoft. We were challenging a lot of people's assumptions. We had to convince people that 1: no, we actually never used this stuff even once and 2: the license plainly encouraged us to get a refund.
# Will you ever give up?
No way! We hackers now have our own page in history, and the GPL lets us hack in perpetuity. We've got the leverage to fight for the rights of hobbyists and hackers everywhere. I see a lot more fighting ahead for the GNU and EFF types. It's going to be a lot of legal bickering, but free software is also just going to keep getting better!
So we'll have lots to fight for, and lots to play with. Beaujolais to our side!
Here are some things that I still want to fight for:
1: Even though Unix is 32 years old, GNU is nearly 20 years old, Linux is 11 or 12 years old, and Windows 95 is 7 years old, articles always refer to "the upstart Linux operating system".
2: Every year that goes by, RMS's "The Right to Read" seems less and less like Science Fiction and more like a realistic projection of the future. We need to defang the DMCA in the US and other laws that threaten our ability to distribute our original works as artisans and hackers.
3: Software patents are still going strong in the US, and working their way into other countries. What a horrible state of affairs!
I want to see a future where when I buy something, I own it. I don't want corporations and governments telling me how I may or may not use my own private property in my own home or among my friends. I want the ability to take apart my toaster or my alarm clock and see how they work, or combine them into something new. I don't think this future is possible without some serious effort on the part of hackers.
# Finally, I guess Bill Gates wonders why you are such a nuisance. Why is that?
Heh. I doubt I even show up on his radar. I went to a rival high school to his (I grew up in Seattle), and never really paid that much attention to Microsoft after Windows Refund Day. My attitude toward Microsoft is usually
"Oh yeah, don't they make keyboards or something?"
We live in a wonderful era, where GNU lets us more or less totally ignore these proprietary systems if we want to. It's good that some developers are playing with these systems in order to write some of their best features into GNU, but they use Windows so that I don't have to!
As it has its own output jack, it would appear the sound hardware is in the SongPro itself.
It even claims that you might want to connect it to your "home entertainment system."
Bold.
Whence the content?
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It does say there's a USB interface for file transfer, but also mentions in the "about the company" section that...
...users will have access to thousands of SongPro enhanced files on our website, partner sites, and Digital Docking Stations. Nintendo® Game Boy® users will be able to download multimedia content to their SongPro(TM) players from stations located in airports, retail stores, entertainment centers, hotels, and other locations...
Has anyone seen any of these reputed SongPro stations?
I was in the same position as you about a year ago...I had done advanced calculus stuff in high school about 12 years ago, and really enjoyed it, but somehow let it drop when I got to university. I bought a couple of calculus text books for a refresher and took off for a train ride across the country with them (!). I found it came back to me fairly well, but it was difficult without the structure of a classroom w/required assignments, etc.
If you're just interested in exploring some (fairly) current math theory and less in the mechanics of solving problems, I highly recommend a book called "mathematics: the new golden age" by Keith Devlin. It covers such topics as primes and factoring them, set theory, topology, etc. It was a little over my head, but in the good way -- it forced me to stretch and although there were things I didn't quite get, it was really enjoyable.
Okay, I'll take a karma hit for this, but am I the only one who's annoyed by the gratuitous linking in/. article blurbs? I mean, do we really need "Star Trek" linked to www.startrek.com here? If it were an isolated incident, it'd be fine, but this happens all the time. IMHO hyperlinking should either be used to provide optional contextual content, or serve as a simple, well, link to what's being talked about.
Many times on slashdot I'll click a link thinking I'm going to get some illustrative example or additional background, only to get a corporate homepage. Not good use of the medium, people.
offtopic -1 yes, but if I can do my part to stop this nefarious practice it's all worthwhile...
I don't worry so much about fingerprints, you're right. But that is because fingerprints have not been widely deployed as a "primary key" for identification. And will never be, because fingerprinting is an inherently "analog" art, and there is no way to accurately and consistently reduce a print to a sequence of bits. Definitively identifying a fingerprint match requires a highly skilled human being to scrutinize the prints, and even then there is a significant margin of error. (See the recent New Yorker article, "Do Fingerprints Lie?" Hence, they're not usuable to key data to.
And you boldly state that you can't fake an eyeball. Who knows? It's that kind of confidence in the infallability of the system that can cause fraud victims a lot of grief in the future...
Even if there is no data intrinsic to the metric, its potential to be a perfect, perpetual, and inescapable key to all the data that *is* known about an individual is rather frightening.
But even if it isn't so perfect, if, as was argued in the New Yorker a couple weeks back, fingerprints (for example) can in fact "lie", there are still some chilling possibilities. The article may be describing a failure of the method rather than the theory, but it has already ruined countless (and perhaps uncountable) lives...With newer biometric technology, especially in a mass-market implementation where the hardware might not be top quality, and operators might not be the most highly-skilled, there is plenty of room for error. With consequences that could range from the simply embarassing to the really rather awful...
Of course we should be concerned about this! You can change your phone number, your email address, your name, and even your social security number if you work hard enough. But you can't change your biometric data, so once it's in the wild marketplace or personal information, it's out there for good...
"Heed the advice that has been around for years now - Give Away the Software (that means code and binaries, in a usable form), and Sell Hardware, Support, and Maintenance."
I'm sorry, but who is this advice working for? Is there a single profitable company following that model?
FWIW, I basically agree with you, but then again I don't really see the need for "Linux Companies" anyway; seems like they mostly popped up (or repositioned) to ride the speculative bubble and are now caught with their pants down...
In time, says Microsoft, Palladium will spread out. "We don't blink at the thought of putting Palladium on your Palm... on the telephone, on your wristwatch," says software architect Brian Willman.
Notice the absence of rival desktop OSs in that list, notably open source OSs currently running on x86...
:wq
Re:The one required book for programmers
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· Score: 2, Informative
According to the book jacket, it looks like the actual quote is:
"If you think you're a really good programmer,...read [Knuth's] Art of Computer Programming....You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." -- Bill Gates
Slashdot Mirror
This is more than "a bit of a scam" -- it's immoral and undoubtedly illegal. There are ways to get defeat all their little scams and still use the Fasttrack P2P network. You can try Kazaa Lite, which is Kazaa without the spy/scumware. I'd also recommend using AdAware, a great little program that scans your registry, memory, and hard drives for spy/scum/adware components and gives you the option to delete them.
Using AdAware to delete cydoor.dll will likely leave your P2P client not working. That's where the dummy cydoor.dll comes in. It allows the client to start without providing any of the unwanted cydoor functionality.
For more info on spyware and scumware in general, check out the quite wonderful Counterexploitation site...
Hope this helps...
Wait, isn't a "honeypot" a dummy system used to trap malicious crackers? Whatis.com seems to think so too.
Does the word "honeypot" now also mean a "free wireless access point?" Nobody tells me these things...
Yes, i did try it. It works fine for me.
Strange that the linuxbios link provided above is to a commercial website. Here's the link to the proper linuxbios site, at linuxbios.org.
So this link from /. should help him out quite a bit? Hooray for everybody!
I'll probably get modded into the basement for saying this but...is it me, or do those shots not look that impressive? Part of it is the JPG artifacts, which we should disregard. But even still, it doesn't look "next generation" to me.
Am I alone in thinking this?
Simply put --
According to Red Herring, each XBox Microsoft manufactures costs them about $325. When you buy one, they recoup about $175 on that expenditure, meaning the entire transaction cost them $150.
So -- unsold XBoxen cost MS $325 each, sold ones cost them $150.
I'm happy to run linux (and play games) on my PC and let them eat the $325...
and some people even lie to make themselves look more cultured.
Ahh! This must be the reason that "Wings" was on the air for so long...
A variant on this story comes up every year or so, but there is never any evidence substantiating Dr. Podkletnov's claims...
First NASA, now Boeing. Rubbish, I'm inclined to believe.
I fail to see how the Archos isn't an iPod Competitor. Your points in the linked post all are talking about MP3CD players -- there is no comparison.
Form factor: The archos is only slightly larger than the iPod -- the iPod dimensions are 4.2" x 2.43" x 0.78" while the archos' are 4.5 x 3.2 x 1.3"; it fits in my coat pocket just fine.
Hard drive == skip resistant, you say. Umm, exactly. Both the iPod and Archos are basically portable hard drives.
You are right that the 'charge while you transfer' capability of the iPod is more convenient than the Archos' 'charge with an AC adapter', but last I checked being a competitor didn't mean having an identical feature list. And it's true that the Archos uses batteries, but I wouldn't really know it. I've used the thing daily for about 6 months now and have never had to change them. I've never even run out of juice, despite using it extensively without charging. It seems like more than 6 hours.
The current Archos models support USB2, which is more or less equivalent to firewire in terms of transfer rate.
So again, remind me how the iPod and the Archos Jukebox aren't competitors?
...as their claim is that the BnetD developers actually *copied* portions of Blizzard's code rather than reverse engineering and rewriting it. They have dropped the DMCA component of the complaint, the latest (amended) version of which is here.
IANAL, but it seems that honest to goodness reverse engineering is still legally safe, for the time being.
...and it's called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
They are currently active in fighting the DMCA and Fritz Hollings' efforts regarding the CBDTPA, and lots more worthwhile stuff. I'd recommend you check out their site and get involved in any way you can...
Seems to be slashdotted already, so here's the text (don't mod up, karma is just fine thanks):
So who the hell is that Nick Moffitt? He keeps showing up at mailing lists and in any context where the GNU might be mentioned. Moffitt is always rather militant, but never boring. I decided to pick Moffitt's brain on behalf of the Gnuheter readers.
As a general rule, Gnuheter never publishes interviews or news stories in any other language than Swedish. After all, Gnuheter is all the leading forum on open source and free software in the Nordic countries. The Americans have Slashdot, Newsforge. The British have The Register. So why publish an interview in English? Well, I thought Nick Moffitt is interesting enough to reach a wider audience. Plus - and probably more important to yours truly - most of his answers can not be easily translated, regardless of Moffitt's crazy rants about localization. Please be advised that some of the hyperlinks in the interview will crash your computer, should you use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer.
That much said, I leave the microphone to the soon to be famous Nick Moffitt. Enjoy!
# Who is Nick Moffit?
It's Moffitt, actually. The name is Scottish, and was originally "Moffat". Centuries of misspelling have created 24 different variations on the name that are recognized by clan Moffat. I've actually been to Moffat, which is also a town in the lowlands off of M74 somewhere.
I'm a big fan of urban rail, and I've been getting into photography both with the aiptek pencams (which are marketed as spycams in the UK), and with the Russian LOMO LC-A 35mm camera. I'm a Debian bigot, but I've been fiddling with Gentoo recently. I'm mostly hacking on the LNX-BBC lately, and maintaining GAR.
I've lived in San Francisco for the past seven or eight years, and have instigated a lot of nefariousness around here. I've seen the dot-coms come and go, which means I've seen a full cycle of San Francisco's life go by. Much of SF's growth has been based on gold rushes, whether it be gold, military construction during WWII, the magazine industry, or whatever. You can see a brief explanation of San Francisco's most recent craziness in the FAQ.
So right now my city is in hard times, but I plan to stick with it. It's the only real city West of the Mississippi river!
# Why?
I was a big BBS weenie in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I probably wouldn't have cared so much, but I found that the Citadel BBS software had such a neat development community in the Seattle area. It was just so cool to see development of the BBS being discussed ON the BBS network. After all, the source code was "public domain" (which is impossible under current copyright law in the US, but emulatable via the MIT X license nowadays).
So I got hooked on this whole free-for-all, where prospective developers read up the code on their own time and flung code into the discussion areas for prospective inclusion or adaptation into the BBS. It was only natural that I'd get hooked on the GNU community in the same way.
# What is Crackmonkey and why should we care?
So around about 1997 I wrote what was probably my first GPL'd program. Before then I had just been throwing code snippets out and figuring that licensing wasn't important. The program was a hideous Perl CGI that solved some problems I saw with the then-current state of Web-based BBSes and guestbooks.
But when there was a bug with the BBS, it meant that no one could discuss the problem on the BBS! So I started the crackmonkey mailing list. The original message never made it to the archives, but my brother quoted the entire thing in a mockery of novice listserv users.
Eventually the list dwarfed the BBS (since Web pages are still clumsy for holding conversations), and the phenomenon known as CrackMonkey was born. I think it was about 2000 when I implemented the "no Windows MUA" filters, making it so that you pretty much have to use Free Software to post to the list (or be clever enough to fake it).
The list was modeled largely after the discussion list that accompanies Pigdog Journal. They were a bunch of San Francisco Bay Area BBS weenies, while the original CrackMonkeys were old Seattle BBS weenies.
The crackmonkey.org Web site has always been just sort of this neglected pile of pages that lead you to the list. Even the FAQ is just a bunch of mailing list postings that I felt like including. It's also been a source of controversy, since it used to garble the kernels of folks who visited it with IE5. See the fanmail section for some love I got from IE users.
Crackmonkey's motto is "Non Sequitur arguments and Ad Hominem personal attacks".
# Seven Dollar history of Unix - is that something to send to my mother?
It's funny, but that document is three years old, and incomplete. I had always planned to write a final chapter about the San Francisco user group community and the progression of the dominant distro among hackers as SLS -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian. I was just stuck in the middle of it all, and couldn't find a smooth way to work it into what was essentially a historical document.
I am always surprised when I see reporters including my own sentences in their boilerplate descriptions of Unix and Linux. That paper is designed to help spread the meme that the Unix community always wanted Free Software, and it just took GNU, Linux, and BSD to get it to us. In that aspect, I have been incredibly pleased with its popularity.
I never expected it to be so heavily linked. It's currently the sixth real hit for "unix history" on google, after Open Sources and the official Dennis Ritchie documents.
Some day I'll add a little more to it, I suppose. I'd like to add a bit in between Unix and BSD about the Software Tools book (which was sort of the Cygwin of the 1970s), and finish the final section. The user group communities in the Bay Area have dwindled away, largely because installing and using GNU/Linux isn't as exciting or new or challenging any more. Installfests made sense in the Slackware era, but now any newbie can point-and-click through a Mandrake install. I can now safely write about the user groups in the past tense.
It's definitely something to send to your mother, though. It's a nice quick introduction to the assumptions made by free software hackers. It presents the perspective that proprietary software is this weird thing from the 1980s that really should never have caught on.
# Why should we not use GIFs? What should we do instead?
The original GIF spec was written by someone who wanted an open standard that could be implemented independently by anyone. Unfortunately, he didn't realize that the compression algorithm he had specified was patent pending.
Now, decompression algorithms are often self-explanatory, since it is the job of the file format to tell decompressors how to unpack something. But the compression algorithms are prone to all sorts of arbitrary distinctions without differences.
So if you ask 17 programmers how they would have solved the problems that LZW solved, you get 17 different (but correct) solutions. Thus, the patent is difficult to challenge in US courts.
As a result, the displaying of GIFs is not under threat by patent claims -- mozilla is likely in good shape. But the generation of GIFs is subject to the whims of UNiSYS, which is this old dinosaur company that doesn't make anything anymore (relying on old patents for revenue).
So this means that if you distribute a GIF that you made with the gimp, you're liable to be sued by UNiSYS! This is because neither the UC Berkeley XCF or the GNOME folks or the FSF licensed the LZW compression algorithm from them. So if you put up a Web site in the US that has GIFs on it, you're likely in trouble.
So what do you do if you have a bunch of GIFs on your site, and you don't want to be sued by Unisys? You pay Unisys US$5000! That's what they charge for people who distribute GIFs that were made using Free Software. If you run 72 Web sites on your machine, you'll have to pay US$360000!
PNG, however, uses the same algorithm that gzip does. It's an unencumbered format for lossless compression, and the browser support for the basic features is already there! People complain about how the PNG support in old IEs and suchforth isn't very good, but they're usually talking about the features of PNG that GIF doesn't have. PNG files tend to be smaller than their GIF counterparts, and they even support alpha channels!
# If GNU is the answer, then what was the question?
How can I use computers without being antisocial? How can I be sure that my hacking won't be sealed off from the light of day? How can I connect with other hackers via What It Is We Do?
# What should the Scandinavians do about the Windows domination?
It seems that Microsoft is now giving away software to governments that are looking to avoid them. It's tough for people to see the hidden costs in their stuff, since they usually charge you up front. They've been able to FUD about Total Cost of Ownership because people really are skeptical about things being free (as in beer).
I recall about two years ago, Iceland was having trouble convincing Microsoft that their market was big enough to warrant an Icelandic localization. They couldn't even convince Microsoft to let them do it for free. I thought this was an excellent opportunity to show how GNU could be made to work in places that no other OS could. As a bonus, they would create jobs inside Iceland instead of sending more dollars to the US economy.
The real trick is to make the localization seamless. If I were to see a Russian OS that was later localized to fit the US market, I'd probably still think of it as this strange Russian thing that was trying to break into the US market. GNOME and KDE have major development efforts in Northern and Central Europe, and the Linux Kernel was started by an ethnic Swede. Yet things are still primarily in English (just look at dmesg or syslog!).
Quite possibly my most widely-used project is GAR, which is the build system used by the LNX-BBC project and GARNOME. It's a lot like the BSD ports system, but GNU make is much cleaner to write in than pmake. I regularly see output from a localized make, but with all sorts of English compile errors and such:
| dparammanager.c:914: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
| make[5]: *** [libgstcontrol_la-dparammanager.lo] Erreur 1
| make[5]: Quitte le répertoire
If you can make it readily apparent that GNU is not specifically a US product, you may be able to stir up some nationalistic pride and anti-US sentiment about the majority of proprietary OSes. Keep the money and the jobs at home! This stuff is written by Scandinavians!
# What was refund day really about?
It was originally someone's idea of a protest. Everyone should go to their vendors and demand refunds as per the Windows license that came with bundled PCs. It said right there in black-and-white that if you didn't use Windows, you should return it for a refund.
But that lacked pressworthiness. It would be loose and there would be no visible statistical record that "wow, all these people are demanding their refunds!". So Rick Moen and Don marti and I started planning a trip down to Foster City, CA to demand our refund from Microsoft. We'd already tried the vendors; and they weren't the ones who wrote the license, so they ignored us!
Ultimately it was a way to get the message out that there were people who didn't want Windows. We were pointing out that PC does not mean Microsoft. We were challenging a lot of people's assumptions. We had to convince people that
1: no, we actually never used this stuff even once and
2: the license plainly encouraged us to get a refund.
# Will you ever give up?
No way! We hackers now have our own page in history, and the GPL lets us hack in perpetuity. We've got the leverage to fight for the rights of hobbyists and hackers everywhere. I see a lot more fighting ahead for the GNU and EFF types. It's going to be a lot of legal bickering, but free software is also just going to keep getting better!
So we'll have lots to fight for, and lots to play with. Beaujolais to our side!
Here are some things that I still want to fight for:
1: Even though Unix is 32 years old, GNU is nearly 20 years old, Linux is 11 or 12 years old, and Windows 95 is 7 years old, articles always refer to "the upstart Linux operating system".
2: Every year that goes by, RMS's "The Right to Read" seems less and less like Science Fiction and more like a realistic projection of the future. We need to defang the DMCA in the US and other laws that threaten our ability to distribute our original works as artisans and hackers.
3: Software patents are still going strong in the US, and working their way into other countries. What a horrible state of affairs!
I want to see a future where when I buy something, I own it. I don't want corporations and governments telling me how I may or may not use my own private property in my own home or among my friends. I want the ability to take apart my toaster or my alarm clock and see how they work, or combine them into something new. I don't think this future is possible without some serious effort on the part of hackers.
# Finally, I guess Bill Gates wonders why you are such a nuisance. Why is that?
Heh. I doubt I even show up on his radar. I went to a rival high school to his (I grew up in Seattle), and never really paid that much attention to Microsoft after Windows Refund Day. My attitude toward Microsoft is usually
"Oh yeah, don't they make keyboards or something?"
We live in a wonderful era, where GNU lets us more or less totally ignore these proprietary systems if we want to. It's good that some developers are playing with these systems in order to write some of their best features into GNU, but they use Windows so that I don't have to!
Yeah, thank goodness conventional gasoline tanks aren't potentially explosive...
As it has its own output jack, it would appear the sound hardware is in the SongPro itself.
It even claims that you might want to connect it to your "home entertainment system."
Bold.
Has anyone seen any of these reputed SongPro stations?
I was in the same position as you about a year ago...I had done advanced calculus stuff in high school about 12 years ago, and really enjoyed it, but somehow let it drop when I got to university. I bought a couple of calculus text books for a refresher and took off for a train ride across the country with them (!). I found it came back to me fairly well, but it was difficult without the structure of a classroom w/required assignments, etc.
If you're just interested in exploring some (fairly) current math theory and less in the mechanics of solving problems, I highly recommend a book called "mathematics: the new golden age" by Keith Devlin. It covers such topics as primes and factoring them, set theory, topology, etc. It was a little over my head, but in the good way -- it forced me to stretch and although there were things I didn't quite get, it was really enjoyable.
just my 2c, hope it's helpful...good luck!
Okay, I'll take a karma hit for this, but am I the only one who's annoyed by the gratuitous linking in
Many times on slashdot I'll click a link thinking I'm going to get some illustrative example or additional background, only to get a corporate homepage. Not good use of the medium, people.
offtopic -1 yes, but if I can do my part to stop this nefarious practice it's all worthwhile...
I don't worry so much about fingerprints, you're right. But that is because fingerprints have not been widely deployed as a "primary key" for identification. And will never be, because fingerprinting is an inherently "analog" art, and there is no way to accurately and consistently reduce a print to a sequence of bits. Definitively identifying a fingerprint match requires a highly skilled human being to scrutinize the prints, and even then there is a significant margin of error. (See the recent New Yorker article, "Do Fingerprints Lie?" Hence, they're not usuable to key data to.
And you boldly state that you can't fake an eyeball. Who knows? It's that kind of confidence in the infallability of the system that can cause fraud victims a lot of grief in the future...
Even if there is no data intrinsic to the metric, its potential to be a perfect, perpetual, and inescapable key to all the data that *is* known about an individual is rather frightening.
But even if it isn't so perfect, if, as was argued in the New Yorker a couple weeks back, fingerprints (for example) can in fact "lie", there are still some chilling possibilities. The article may be describing a failure of the method rather than the theory, but it has already ruined countless (and perhaps uncountable) lives...With newer biometric technology, especially in a mass-market implementation where the hardware might not be top quality, and operators might not be the most highly-skilled, there is plenty of room for error. With consequences that could range from the simply embarassing to the really rather awful...
Sorry -- that should be "wild marketplace of personal information..."
cheers
Of course we should be concerned about this! You can change your phone number, your email address, your name, and even your social security number if you work hard enough. But you can't change your biometric data, so once it's in the wild marketplace or personal information, it's out there for good...
photon317 sez:
"Heed the advice that has been around for years now - Give Away the Software (that means code and binaries, in a usable form), and Sell Hardware, Support, and Maintenance."
I'm sorry, but who is this advice working for? Is there a single profitable company following that model?
FWIW, I basically agree with you, but then again I don't really see the need for "Linux Companies" anyway; seems like they mostly popped up (or repositioned) to ride the speculative bubble and are now caught with their pants down...
Notice the absence of rival desktop OSs in that list, notably open source OSs currently running on x86...
:wq
According to the book jacket, it looks like the actual quote is:
"If you think you're a really good programmer,...read [Knuth's] Art of Computer Programming....You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." -- Bill Gates