Does anyone remember a leaked internal Microsoft memo about using 'insider' to fight against Linux. [...] Can anyone find that story I mentioned earler ?
According to the study, Chinese Internet users say they rely on the medium to interact with others who share their political interests, hobbies and faith. [...] "It's more than in any other country and a significant figure for citizens of a nation in which religion is officially banned," the study said
Religion is not "officially banned" in China. OK, you're only allowed to follow one of the official state religions, whose institutions are all politically neutered, e.g. the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which has no links with the Vatican. But that's different from saying religious conversations can only be had online, however repressive it may be.
The kernel developers refuse to freeze a driver api for the kernel (like MS did with win95/98/me and win2k/xp) or make a DDK (to my knowledge) instead changing the api every major release and sometimes on point releases. They have a point -- doing so encourages the development of open source drivers instead of binary only drivers. Unfortunatley this is one area in which corporate interests might superceede the interests of the individual kernel developers. Possible.
I think open-source drivers are good for corporate linux vendors too. It's not in Red Hat's interests to ship buggy, binary-only drivers which they can't correct, and then have their customers say, "Oh, Red Hat Linux is unstable".
Everybody was stunned when I first went to a restaurant and ordered water. Even I felt odd. Now it is just the obvious choice, everything else tastes far too sweet.
When I've done that, the response from the waiter has usually been, "pardon?" I've often wondered if they're trained to do that, to "shame" diners into buying a drink which costs money. But probably it's just because it's fairly unusual.
IMHO the law should not apply to emails which are written and sent to a single recipient. For example, I think it should be legal for me to send my CV to a company, attached to a personalised email. The thing to outlaw is "bulk" spamming, whereby multiple emails are generated by a process which is primarily automatic.
Unfortunately, the law (see Google's cached version, section 22 - HMSO seems to have been down for days)
appears to make no such distinction: sending a single email without prior permission to someone you don't know is just as illegal as sending 100,000,000. [IANAL, though]
You're being taxed to subsidize mass transit. higher fuel costs make mass transit more attractive, and more people using mass transit makes mass transit affordable. If you have low priced fuel, instead of mass transit you get Amtrak.
Oh, I agree completely. Now if the buses hadn't been privatised in a way that created unnacountable local monopolies, things might even be bearable by now. As it is, other than in London, we've got the worst of both worlds here: fuel prices worthy of Antarctica, together with public transport services worthy of Antarctica.
Did I get away with being off-topic by mentioning Antarctica twice?:-)
Sell him the fuel at a VASTLY overinflated price [...] I think $10 US/Gallon would be a fair stupidity tax.
LOL - my local garage charges US$5.28 per US gallon (actually GBP 0.80 / litre). For roadside callout, it can easily be double that. So $10 doesn't sound that outrageous for Antarctica.
OK, so we're being taxed the hell out of, apparently to cover the cost of roads. I just thought it was funny that your punitive rate actually sounds like quite a bargain here in Britain:-)
The Korean Friendship Association (KFA) organizes a trip to the DPR of Korea (North Korea) and solidarity event for the reunification of the peninsula in July 2004. [...] The KFA pretends in this way to approach the reality of North Korea to the foreign friends and combine a passion for culture and tourism with a solidarity compromise.
Are you claiming that if I use UTF-8 to encode a string, I will never get a bytestring that contains a 46 (that is, a dot ".")?
That's correct - no unicode codepoint apart from [FULL STOP] will cause a \x2E to appear in a UTF-8 stream. UTF-8 encodes the first 128 code points of Unicode using the identical ASCII values (which all have the eighth bit set to 0), and then only using combinations of the other 128 byte values (which all have the eighth bit set to 1) to encode every other character. It's very cool - that's why existing software doesn't usually need much modification to support UTF-8.
You've obviously never heard of Mandarin and Cantonese.:)
There are phrases in Cantonese which don't translate literally into Mandarin - e.g. when you say what time it is by saying what number on the clock the minute hand points to (so "yat dim sei" = "1 hour + 4" = 1:20).
One of the strengths of Red Hat has always been its emphasis on Free software. Unlike, say, SuSE, which contains significant pieces of SuSE-only infrastructure (such as YaST), Red Hat has always been more careful not to "Weld The Hood Shut". This is one reason we recommend Red Hat to customers at work.
Will we continue to see this, or will Red Hat start trying to beat the competition with proprietary add-ons?
This is another example of what happens when you blindly assume that a "free market" will solve everything. For a free market to work effectively, certain axioms need to hold, such as:
Easy entry into the market
Good information available about buyers / sellers
Freely exchangable goods
etc. In this case, rule #3 broke - it's complex and error-prone transporting electricity between different sections of the grid. The fact that one of the fundamental axioms doesn't hold should be enough to stop policy makers assuming that a "market" is the best solution. This kind of analysis should be done whenever regulation of any utility is examined.
Does it exist solely because of the non-GNUness of other implementations?
When lsh was started, OpenSSH didn't exist. The original SSH was free till version 1.2.12, but was then put under a more restrictive licence. The licence on ssh version 2 was more restrictive still (I think it wasn't even free-as-in-beer). lsh was intended to be a Free, Open-Source replacement to ssh.
Then the OpenBSD people took the old, free 1.2.12 version of ssh, fixed all the known bugs which had accumulated since that release and updated it with the new features in the SSH protocol. This is OpenSSH.
Not Surprised [...] The ISO is a standards organisation that has consistently "not got it" [...] a public standard that isn't available to the public free of charge kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.
You're right, but this proposal is an order of magnitude worse. Even if the ISO C spec is non-free, it is possible to write implementations of that standard which are free (GCC, TCC etc). If this proposal were to be followed, it'd be impossible to write open-source software which used ISO 3166 / 639 codes for countries or languages. This is especially problematic since they've waited for these codes to become widespread (e.g. as vital parts of the HTML, XML and POSIX standards) before saying they might have a problem with their free use.
This suggests to me that the proponent doesn't understand about free / open-source software, which is currently contributing hugely towards the very standardisation ISO is supposed to promote.
Not quite. E.g., the following may behave differently:
printf("%d\n", sizeof('x'));
In C++ it prints sizeof(char) whereas in C it prints sizeof(int) (I think).
Re:Remote logins over very slow modem lines: use N
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 2, Informative
NX is a free client+commercial server. [...] The compression and X stuff are GPL while some parts are closed source. I don't care much, as the alternative would be MS+Citrix.
Just to clarify, do everything on the command line using the GPLed stuff, running a remote GUI session over a modem. It's only the GUI interface to this functionality which is non-free.
What is really needed is a driver for the XServer that will duplicate the current X command stream. This could then be sent to the NX proxy, and actually use it as a remote desktop.
If I'm understanding you correctly, that's exactly what "nxagent" does - it appears on your local machine as a remote desktop, either in a window or full-screen. A "rootless" option, which will run individual remote applications under your local window manager, is apparently on the way.
However, X11's network transparency is just as creaky and obsolete as the rest of the beast. [...] the bandwidth and latency is just obscene when compared to Citrix Metaframe.
See my previous comment on NX compression. I'm typing this on Galeon running at work, displaying on my home computer over a 56K modem, because it's faster web browsing like this than running the browser locally. NX has to be seen to be believed.
The interesting thing is, this level of compression is only possible because of the high-level nature of X's network transparency - Citrix / RDP / VNC doesn't run anywhere near as fast.
If they're trying to include useful third party contributions, they could do worse than include NX, a revolutionary new compression and proxying technology that makes it possible to run an X session over a 9600 modem at a useable speed. But I didn't completely understand their policy on licences (the NX infrastructure is GPLed, whereas X is under the MIT licence).
Oops - I missed a better example of the same myth ("millions of dollars 'worth' of illegal copies == millions of dollars of economic harm done, even if most downloaders would never have paid money for a legal version")
The amount of pirated material available online today is staggering. In the course of prosecuting piracy we have found servers containing over 20,000 titles of pirated software, movies, music and games. The value of the copyrighted material on servers like this is frequently in the millions of dollars. Factor in the number of times those titles are distributed over the Internet, and the damage amounts skyrocket. The sentencing structure reflects this harm.
One victim company was a small software manufacturer located in the Midwest. They had one or two viable programs that sustained their entire operation of about ten employees, many of whom were family members of the owner. The company had spent many years developing its software, so the owner, of course, was devastated to find that his product had been pirated and was available for free on the Internet. His livelihood depended on the legitimate sale of only one or two software programs. If anyone thinks that piracy does not affect everyday people trying to succeed in business, they need look no further.
This doesn't show that the business has lost out due to piracy. There has only been a loss if someone who would otherwise have paid for a legal version has instead obtained an illegal copy.
That might well have happened in this instance. But it's important not to just assume that there's been a huge financial loss, and severe adverse effects on this Midwest business, merely because, say, 100 illegal copies have been downloaded.
If only two of the downloaders would ever have paid the price for a licensed version, then all that has been lost is the price of two licences. The other 98 downloads have done no financial damage - sure, they're illegal, and you might well argue immoral too, but they haven't affected the business's income at all.
The same thing happens when someone releases a piece of free software, sees that he has 100 users, and thinks, "Hey, if only I'd made it proprietary and sold licences for $50, I could have made $5,000". In both cases, it's quite possible that 98 of the 100 would never have even considered paying a fee for the software.
This is only very tangentially related to the story, but doeS aNyBody know where to get a blank keyboard, i.e. one with nothing written on the keys? I've tried scraping/disolving the print off a normal keyboard, unsuccesfully, and I've rung a couple of manufacturers who were able to sell 500, but not 1 or 2. Anyone know? Sorry again for the slight digression.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't mean The Halloween Documents, do you?
This page goes into great detail about which word to use when you want to nark who
Religion is not "officially banned" in China. OK, you're only allowed to follow one of the official state religions, whose institutions are all politically neutered, e.g. the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which has no links with the Vatican. But that's different from saying religious conversations can only be had online, however repressive it may be.
I think open-source drivers are good for corporate linux vendors too. It's not in Red Hat's interests to ship buggy, binary-only drivers which they can't correct, and then have their customers say, "Oh, Red Hat Linux is unstable".
When I've done that, the response from the waiter has usually been, "pardon?" I've often wondered if they're trained to do that, to "shame" diners into buying a drink which costs money. But probably it's just because it's fairly unusual.
IMHO the law should not apply to emails which are written and sent to a single recipient. For example, I think it should be legal for me to send my CV to a company, attached to a personalised email. The thing to outlaw is "bulk" spamming, whereby multiple emails are generated by a process which is primarily automatic.
Unfortunately, the law (see Google's cached version, section 22 - HMSO seems to have been down for days)
appears to make no such distinction: sending a single email without prior permission to someone you don't know is just as illegal as sending 100,000,000. [IANAL, though]
Grammar up with which you cannot put?
Oh, I agree completely. Now if the buses hadn't been privatised in a way that created unnacountable local monopolies, things might even be bearable by now. As it is, other than in London, we've got the worst of both worlds here: fuel prices worthy of Antarctica, together with public transport services worthy of Antarctica.
Did I get away with being off-topic by mentioning Antarctica twice? :-)
LOL - my local garage charges US$5.28 per US gallon (actually GBP 0.80 / litre). For roadside callout, it can easily be double that. So $10 doesn't sound that outrageous for Antarctica.
OK, so we're being taxed the hell out of, apparently to cover the cost of roads. I just thought it was funny that your punitive rate actually sounds like quite a bargain here in Britain :-)
That's correct - no unicode codepoint apart from [FULL STOP] will cause a \x2E to appear in a UTF-8 stream. UTF-8 encodes the first 128 code points of Unicode using the identical ASCII values (which all have the eighth bit set to 0), and then only using combinations of the other 128 byte values (which all have the eighth bit set to 1) to encode every other character. It's very cool - that's why existing software doesn't usually need much modification to support UTF-8.
There are phrases in Cantonese which don't translate literally into Mandarin - e.g. when you say what time it is by saying what number on the clock the minute hand points to (so "yat dim sei" = "1 hour + 4" = 1:20).
One of the strengths of Red Hat has always been its emphasis on Free software. Unlike, say, SuSE, which contains significant pieces of SuSE-only infrastructure (such as YaST), Red Hat has always been more careful not to "Weld The Hood Shut". This is one reason we recommend Red Hat to customers at work.
Will we continue to see this, or will Red Hat start trying to beat the competition with proprietary add-ons?
This is just another cynical attempt to embezzle tax dollars - everyone knows there is no moon.
etc. In this case, rule #3 broke - it's complex and error-prone transporting electricity between different sections of the grid. The fact that one of the fundamental axioms doesn't hold should be enough to stop policy makers assuming that a "market" is the best solution. This kind of analysis should be done whenever regulation of any utility is examined.
When lsh was started, OpenSSH didn't exist. The original SSH was free till version 1.2.12, but was then put under a more restrictive licence. The licence on ssh version 2 was more restrictive still (I think it wasn't even free-as-in-beer). lsh was intended to be a Free, Open-Source replacement to ssh.
Then the OpenBSD people took the old, free 1.2.12 version of ssh, fixed all the known bugs which had accumulated since that release and updated it with the new features in the SSH protocol. This is OpenSSH.
You're right, but this proposal is an order of magnitude worse. Even if the ISO C spec is non-free, it is possible to write implementations of that standard which are free (GCC, TCC etc). If this proposal were to be followed, it'd be impossible to write open-source software which used ISO 3166 / 639 codes for countries or languages. This is especially problematic since they've waited for these codes to become widespread (e.g. as vital parts of the HTML, XML and POSIX standards) before saying they might have a problem with their free use.
This suggests to me that the proponent doesn't understand about free / open-source software, which is currently contributing hugely towards the very standardisation ISO is supposed to promote.
Not quite. E.g., the following may behave differently:
In C++ it prints sizeof(char) whereas in C it prints sizeof(int) (I think).
Just to clarify, do everything on the command line using the GPLed stuff, running a remote GUI session over a modem. It's only the GUI interface to this functionality which is non-free.
If I'm understanding you correctly, that's exactly what "nxagent" does - it appears on your local machine as a remote desktop, either in a window or full-screen. A "rootless" option, which will run individual remote applications under your local window manager, is apparently on the way.
See my previous comment on NX compression. I'm typing this on Galeon running at work, displaying on my home computer over a 56K modem, because it's faster web browsing like this than running the browser locally. NX has to be seen to be believed.
The interesting thing is, this level of compression is only possible because of the high-level nature of X's network transparency - Citrix / RDP / VNC doesn't run anywhere near as fast.
If they're trying to include useful third party contributions, they could do worse than include NX, a revolutionary new compression and proxying technology that makes it possible to run an X session over a 9600 modem at a useable speed. But I didn't completely understand their policy on licences (the NX infrastructure is GPLed, whereas X is under the MIT licence).
This doesn't show that the business has lost out due to piracy. There has only been a loss if someone who would otherwise have paid for a legal version has instead obtained an illegal copy.
That might well have happened in this instance. But it's important not to just assume that there's been a huge financial loss, and severe adverse effects on this Midwest business, merely because, say, 100 illegal copies have been downloaded.
If only two of the downloaders would ever have paid the price for a licensed version, then all that has been lost is the price of two licences. The other 98 downloads have done no financial damage - sure, they're illegal, and you might well argue immoral too, but they haven't affected the business's income at all.
The same thing happens when someone releases a piece of free software, sees that he has 100 users, and thinks, "Hey, if only I'd made it proprietary and sold licences for $50, I could have made $5,000". In both cases, it's quite possible that 98 of the 100 would never have even considered paying a fee for the software.
This is only very tangentially related to the story, but doeS aNyBody know where to get a blank keyboard, i.e. one with nothing written on the keys? I've tried scraping/disolving the print off a normal keyboard, unsuccesfully, and I've rung a couple of manufacturers who were able to sell 500, but not 1 or 2. Anyone know? Sorry again for the slight digression.