The standards also mandate that workstations have CDE/Motif installed, but I don't see many people here doing that.
Which standards? There's a large difference between the basic POSIX standards which define what a Unix-like operating system is, and any standard manding that X even exist on the system.
It's also simply true that every Un*x since Unix v1 has had case-sensitive filenames, and there's many Unix programs depending on that, whereas CDE/Motif appeared much later in the development of Unix and never gained hold on many of the Un*x systems, especially the BSDs and Linux.
So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
The article mentioned that they were getting the author's permissions.
Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books.
What's on your bookshelf? Looking at mine:
The GURPS books are all copyright Steve Jackson Games. Teach Yourself Esperanto is copyright both by the publisher (1957, 1968, 1987) and the last revisor (1987). The Languages of Middle Earth is copyright by the author. The Icon Programming Language is copyright Prentice Hall, as was Minix. The Pascal User Report is copyright Springer-Verlag. Forth: The New Model is copyright M&T publishing. Programming in Ada 95 is copyright Addison-Wesley. (This isn't new, either: Best Russian Short Stories is copyright 1917 by Boni & Liveright, Inc.)
So I see a strong, but not absolute, tendency for authors to assign their copyright to the publisher.
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this.
Torvalds isn't going to do you much good, as he doesn't hold the copyright over much of the kernel. The FSF holds all its copyrights, though; interesting question to ask RMS next time he's lecturing or coming up for an interview.
he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.
Text-only sites are like books, not like TV. If you want a large variety of bouncing, loud media forced down your throat, well, a graphic-encrusted website is great. If you actually want information, a text-only website is great. As someone who puts up text only websites, if you're looking for the other kind, okay, it's not here, nor is it my goal or responsibility to offer it here.
for UNIX-like operating systems [...] Support for Case-Insensitive File Systems
That's a contradiction. UNIX has always had case-sensitive file systems, and the POSIX standard demands it, so case-insensitive file systems aren't Unix-like.
These days with multigigabyte disks, we really should go back to the root and ditch/usr. It serves no useful purpose
It makes fscking hard drives easier, and makes the system more reliable; a 40 MB / isn't nearly as likely to get borked as a 40 GB/, and can be mounted read-only easier then if everything's on one partition.
There is a LOT of pointer arithmetic that assumes 32-bit pointers, 32-bit integers in open source software
Nonsense. Look at all the software in Debian, and realize that the vast majority of it is compiled for eight different architectures, including Alpha, with 32-bit integers and 64-bit pointers. Any even semi-major open source program has had those bugs fixed.
if I were PA I'd simply remove the cartoon and revise it such that a far better case could be made that it parodies both McGee and whatever character that best adopts to these legal requirements.
If you read the editorial at Penny Arcade, he makes the argument that the choice of an 80's female-targetted cartoon character was deliberate, and essential to making the comic work. To hit its target, it couldn't be some hundred year old public domain character; it had to be something we grew up watching.
But then why did the PA artists use the character at all? They're clearly not ignorant of copyright law.
I believe that Gabe and Tycho thought that Strawberry Shortcake was now in the public domain;
So first, you say they aren't ignorant of copyright law (this is as much trademark law as anything), and then say that they are (come on, copyright law hasn't been less then 20 years in the memory of anyone alive.)
dropping their copyright on Strawberry Shortcake and any other properties they aren't using and don't plan to use again. There's no sense in wasting money and time to protect things you won't use.
First place, they're coming out with new Strawberry Shortcake stuff right now. Secondly, what does it gain them to drop a copyright like this so that a competitor can pick it up and start coming out with Strawberry Shortcake figures to compete with whatever their new cutesy girl figures are?
While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings
It was clearly a mockery of the sweetness and light part of Strawberry Shortcake.
Spaceballs parodying Star Wars is cool...
Spaceballs didn't just parody Star Wars. I'm sure the IMDB has a complete list, but it took a swipe at Aliens (in the diner scene), as well as Rambo and the Planet of the Apes.
I also think it's funnier, but that's just me
The new one seems like it's just an attack, no humor involved.
There are no such things as "rm disasters". There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
Exactly the kind of bullshit macho attitude I was talking about.
Why don't you try doing that if you're a car company, and sell a car that can so easily be fucked up?
You do realize that a car is a half-ton chunk of steel with absolutely nothing to stop you for ramming into a tree, building or another car? In my first five years of playing with Unix, I've only done the equivelent of rm -rf / once ("rm -rf/etc/var"). In the first five years of driving, can you honestly say that you've never hit or even sidescraped something? That's damage in the meatspace world. At its worst, rm -rf / can destroy a bunch of easily backed up data; at its worst, a car kills. What exactly is it again about a car that's not easily fucked up?
Putting a price on something creates value for it.
It can't change the value of it, but it can change the presumed value of it.
How many links for free things have you skipped over because you don't have time right now.
Fewer then the pricy things that I've skipped over because I don't have time right now.
Why pay $500 for that bicycle when you could pay $400 to the company the seller bought it from. Maybe you don't know where to buy it for $400.
More likely the company isn't interested in one-on-one sells, and even if they are, they're half way around the country/planet, whereas your local bike store is in biking distance.
It astonishes me how many people on slashdot complain when they see small scale entrepreneurs try to make money off open source when at the same time they worship the likes of Red Hat.
I don't see why we should encourage fraud. There are a few simple rules to follow for you to get a privilige of copying the book. It's not a valuable service if he's not getting the simple name-recognization that he requested from the book.
This post is copyrighted. You may not store it in your memory. You may not tell its contents to others. You may not adopt these ideas as your own. You may not learn from them. Isn't intelectual property fun!
Gee, storing it in memory is fair use, and the rest - short of direct recitation - is not burdened at all by copyright law. It helps if you understand intellectual property before you rant about it.
God forbid that you, as an individual, forget to uncheck a box when you bought your last DVD or CD or book or whatever online.
God forbid you actually try to get my consent by leaving the box unchecked until I check it.
Marketing and advertising is here to stay for good, people - it's everywhere, including email.
When I see an ad on a website, it helped pay for that website. When I see an ad on TV, it helped pay for that TV show. When I see an ad in my email, I paid for it. See why I might object?
Re:Here is how it's going to go down
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
It will start innocently enough with one of the major PC manufacturers coming out with an extremely inexpensive PC. This PC will be bear three things. The first will be that this PC will have superior performance to any machine currently available. The second will be that it will have a DRM enable operating system that is much better than its predecessor (both performance and stability). The final item will be that the hardware will be DRM enabled and will be more advanced than anything currently available.
Why, because the Illumanati feel like it? Computers are being sold as cheaply as possible, and Microsoft has the best operating system it can out there, because both of them have competitors right on their heels. Any new ultra-fast system is going to cost more then the slower systems around, if only because they can sell it for that. To sell the new ultra-fast system for cheap, someone would have to be bankrolling it heavily; I'm not sure even Microsoft has that type of cash ($1000 a computer?!?), and the Justice Department, and their counterparts in other countries would happily rip Microsoft a new one for the attempt. (Trying to undercut your competition like that is not terribly legal, especially not for a convicted monopolist.)
Re:"Just an engineer", eh?
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
Perhaps what the world needs is more engineers and artists, and less flaming zealots.
The problem is the wise ones wake up after the local flaming zealot has grabbed control and realize they can't fight him, so they lie low; the foolish or unempathic ones go along with the the local flaming zealot leaving a trail of pain and misery. It takes a "flaming" zealot to stand up from the start and say, "No, what you're doing is WRONG".
What is it with/.ers hating Amazon? I shop Amazon on a daily basis, and think of them as the greatest web page ever created. Whatever you've got against them, get over it. It's getting kind of old.
So Bezos could be a demon lord trying to open a gate to hell, but you shop there and like it, so it's all good? One of the big problems with capitalism, right there; people don't really give a damn, as long as they can get cheap product.
When will I have a grid of 4,000 characters to type from? The technology exists, but bigots keep the products from market and force 1 billion people
Japan designs and produces a large chunk of our computer equipment, as does Taiwan. If the technology was there and feasable, it would get produced. I hardly see how you plan to touch type, though, and you're limited to the 4,000 keys on your keyboard, whereas an IM can be expanded to cover whatever characters get encoded.
forget that voter fraud is by and large a Democrat specialty.
Your source reads somewhat, um, biased. I find your belief that only one side in our election system conducts voter fraud to be naive, in an amusing sort of way. Do you also believe the Democrats wear black and the Republicians wear white?
Not that I'm in favor of vote-buying, but so what? It's your vote, do what you want with it.
Vote this way or you're evicted. Vote this way or you're fired. Both are common historically, and aren't choices most of us could make. Single, it would hurt like hell to say no, but I'd do it. With a wife and child to support, living on a thin budget, I'd have no other option.
If they asked for volunteers for this, I would be the first to step forward.
Why wait? Project Gutenberg already stores copies of computer-read books; if you want to read one of thier books into the computer, do it and send them a copy. (You might want to email Jim Tinsley or gutvol-d first, but don't wait for someone to ask you to volunteer.)
If the licensing on something makes it onerous to use, I won't use it. The same thing goes for documentation. I won't sit and bitch about it, or declare jihad on the infidels who dare to challenge the the gospel truth of the GPL, BSD, etc. because I quite simply DON'T GIVE A DAMN.
Then why are sitting here bitching about some other group deciding not to using something because the licenseing makes it too onerous to use?
people who are overly political are generally full of shit regardless of the slant their politics take.
Yes, just ignore politics. Anything that can't be distilled down to binary doesn't matter. Never mind that subopitmal technological decisions usually involve programmers and engineers getting overtime so they can curse at the people who made the technological decision, whereas suboptimal political decisions usually involve, if not death, misery and suffering for more people then necessary.
I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be
What happened to Greece? They were the most cultured country in the western world, the envy of every country around them. Alexander the Great conquered Afganistan, Egypt and everything in between, and installed, not his birth culture, but that of the Greeks. And then they stopped growing, and became just another appendage to various empires for the next couple thousand years.
What about Germany? In 1900, Germany was the center of the mathematical world, holding a crown that Greece made for herself so long ago. Between then and now, this crown, as well as several other scientific ones left Germany and headed for America's shores. Why? There's certainly no technical reason why; the reasons are all cultural.
Slashdot Mirror
The standards also mandate that workstations have CDE/Motif installed, but I don't see many people here doing that.
Which standards? There's a large difference between the basic POSIX standards which define what a Unix-like operating system is, and any standard manding that X even exist on the system.
It's also simply true that every Un*x since Unix v1 has had case-sensitive filenames, and there's many Unix programs depending on that, whereas CDE/Motif appeared much later in the development of Unix and never gained hold on many of the Un*x systems, especially the BSDs and Linux.
So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
The article mentioned that they were getting the author's permissions.
Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books.
What's on your bookshelf? Looking at mine:
The GURPS books are all copyright Steve Jackson Games.
Teach Yourself Esperanto is copyright both by the publisher (1957, 1968, 1987) and the last revisor (1987).
The Languages of Middle Earth is copyright by the author.
The Icon Programming Language is copyright Prentice Hall, as was Minix.
The Pascal User Report is copyright Springer-Verlag.
Forth: The New Model is copyright M&T publishing.
Programming in Ada 95 is copyright Addison-Wesley.
(This isn't new, either: Best Russian Short Stories is copyright 1917 by Boni & Liveright, Inc.)
So I see a strong, but not absolute, tendency for authors to assign their copyright to the publisher.
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this.
Torvalds isn't going to do you much good, as he doesn't hold the copyright over much of the kernel. The FSF holds all its copyrights, though; interesting question to ask RMS next time he's lecturing or coming up for an interview.
he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.
Text-only sites are like books, not like TV. If you want a large variety of bouncing, loud media forced down your throat, well, a graphic-encrusted website is great. If you actually want information, a text-only website is great. As someone who puts up text only websites, if you're looking for the other kind, okay, it's not here, nor is it my goal or responsibility to offer it here.
for UNIX-like operating systems [...] Support for Case-Insensitive File Systems
That's a contradiction. UNIX has always had case-sensitive file systems, and the POSIX standard demands it, so case-insensitive file systems aren't Unix-like.
These days with multigigabyte disks, we really should go back to the root and ditch /usr. It serves no useful purpose
/, and can be mounted read-only easier then if everything's on one partition.
It makes fscking hard drives easier, and makes the system more reliable; a 40 MB / isn't nearly as likely to get borked as a 40 GB
There is a LOT of pointer arithmetic that assumes 32-bit pointers, 32-bit integers in open source software
Nonsense. Look at all the software in Debian, and realize that the vast majority of it is compiled for eight different architectures, including Alpha, with 32-bit integers and 64-bit pointers. Any even semi-major open source program has had those bugs fixed.
if I were PA I'd simply remove the cartoon and revise it such that a far better case could be made that it parodies both McGee and whatever character that best adopts to these legal requirements.
If you read the editorial at Penny Arcade, he makes the argument that the choice of an 80's female-targetted cartoon character was deliberate, and essential to making the comic work. To hit its target, it couldn't be some hundred year old public domain character; it had to be something we grew up watching.
What a lame ass thing to take a stand on.
Yeah, the ongoing attempt for companies to silence anything in disagreement with them. That is such a lame thing to take a stand on.
But then why did the PA artists use the character at all? They're clearly not ignorant of copyright law.
I believe that Gabe and Tycho thought that Strawberry Shortcake was now in the public domain;
So first, you say they aren't ignorant of copyright law (this is as much trademark law as anything), and then say that they are (come on, copyright law hasn't been less then 20 years in the memory of anyone alive.)
dropping their copyright on Strawberry Shortcake and any other properties they aren't using and don't plan to use again. There's no sense in wasting money and time to protect things you won't use.
First place, they're coming out with new Strawberry Shortcake stuff right now. Secondly, what does it gain them to drop a copyright like this so that a competitor can pick it up and start coming out with Strawberry Shortcake figures to compete with whatever their new cutesy girl figures are?
While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings
...
It was clearly a mockery of the sweetness and light part of Strawberry Shortcake.
Spaceballs parodying Star Wars is cool
Spaceballs didn't just parody Star Wars. I'm sure the IMDB has a complete list, but it took a swipe at Aliens (in the diner scene), as well as Rambo and the Planet of the Apes.
I also think it's funnier, but that's just me
The new one seems like it's just an attack, no humor involved.
It is not feasable to make collision-detectable cars affordable for the average US citizen.
You could put big rubber bumpers around the whole thing and make sure they couldn't go above 20 miles per hour.
There are no such things as "rm disasters". There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
/etc /var"). In the first five years of driving, can you honestly say that you've never hit or even sidescraped something? That's damage in the meatspace world. At its worst, rm -rf / can destroy a bunch of easily backed up data; at its worst, a car kills. What exactly is it again about a car that's not easily fucked up?
Exactly the kind of bullshit macho attitude I was talking about.
Why don't you try doing that if you're a car company, and sell a car that can so easily be fucked up?
You do realize that a car is a half-ton chunk of steel with absolutely nothing to stop you for ramming into a tree, building or another car? In my first five years of playing with Unix, I've only done the equivelent of rm -rf / once ("rm -rf
given that Chewey is one of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars, I really think this would have gone over better as a surprise.
What are the odds that it would have been a surprise by the time that Star Wars came out?
Putting a price on something creates value for it.
It can't change the value of it, but it can change the presumed value of it.
How many links for free things have you skipped over because you don't have time right now.
Fewer then the pricy things that I've skipped over because I don't have time right now.
Why pay $500 for that bicycle when you could pay $400 to the company the seller bought it from. Maybe you don't know where to buy it for $400.
More likely the company isn't interested in one-on-one sells, and even if they are, they're half way around the country/planet, whereas your local bike store is in biking distance.
It astonishes me how many people on slashdot complain when they see small scale entrepreneurs try to make money off open source when at the same time they worship the likes of Red Hat.
I don't see why we should encourage fraud. There are a few simple rules to follow for you to get a privilige of copying the book. It's not a valuable service if he's not getting the simple name-recognization that he requested from the book.
This post is copyrighted. You may not store it in your memory. You may not tell its contents to others. You may not adopt these ideas as your own. You may not learn from them. Isn't intelectual property fun!
Gee, storing it in memory is fair use, and the rest - short of direct recitation - is not burdened at all by copyright law. It helps if you understand intellectual property before you rant about it.
God forbid that you, as an individual, forget to uncheck a box when you bought your last DVD or CD or book or whatever online.
God forbid you actually try to get my consent by leaving the box unchecked until I check it.
Marketing and advertising is here to stay for good, people - it's everywhere, including email.
When I see an ad on a website, it helped pay for that website. When I see an ad on TV, it helped pay for that TV show. When I see an ad in my email, I paid for it. See why I might object?
It will start innocently enough with one of the major PC manufacturers coming out with an extremely inexpensive PC. This PC will be bear three things. The first will be that this PC will have superior performance to any machine currently available. The second will be that it will have a DRM enable operating system that is much better than its predecessor (both performance and stability). The final item will be that the hardware will be DRM enabled and will be more advanced than anything currently available.
Why, because the Illumanati feel like it? Computers are being sold as cheaply as possible, and Microsoft has the best operating system it can out there, because both of them have competitors right on their heels. Any new ultra-fast system is going to cost more then the slower systems around, if only because they can sell it for that. To sell the new ultra-fast system for cheap, someone would have to be bankrolling it heavily; I'm not sure even Microsoft has that type of cash ($1000 a computer?!?), and the Justice Department, and their counterparts in other countries would happily rip Microsoft a new one for the attempt. (Trying to undercut your competition like that is not terribly legal, especially not for a convicted monopolist.)
Perhaps what the world needs is more engineers and artists, and less flaming zealots.
The problem is the wise ones wake up after the local flaming zealot has grabbed control and realize they can't fight him, so they lie low; the foolish or unempathic ones go along with the the local flaming zealot leaving a trail of pain and misery. It takes a "flaming" zealot to stand up from the start and say, "No, what you're doing is WRONG".
What is it with /.ers hating Amazon? I shop Amazon on a daily basis, and think of them as the greatest web page ever created. Whatever you've got against them, get over it. It's getting kind of old.
So Bezos could be a demon lord trying to open a gate to hell, but you shop there and like it, so it's all good? One of the big problems with capitalism, right there; people don't really give a damn, as long as they can get cheap product.
When will I have a grid of 4,000 characters to type from? The technology exists, but bigots keep the products from market and force 1 billion people
Japan designs and produces a large chunk of our computer equipment, as does Taiwan. If the technology was there and feasable, it would get produced. I hardly see how you plan to touch type, though, and you're limited to the 4,000 keys on your keyboard, whereas an IM can be expanded to cover whatever characters get encoded.
forget that voter fraud is by and large a Democrat specialty.
Your source reads somewhat, um, biased. I find your belief that only one side in our election system conducts voter fraud to be naive, in an amusing sort of way. Do you also believe the Democrats wear black and the Republicians wear white?
Not that I'm in favor of vote-buying, but so what? It's your vote, do what you want with it.
Vote this way or you're evicted. Vote this way or you're fired. Both are common historically, and aren't choices most of us could make. Single, it would hurt like hell to say no, but I'd do it. With a wife and child to support, living on a thin budget, I'd have no other option.
If they asked for volunteers for this, I would be the first to step forward.
Why wait? Project Gutenberg already stores copies of computer-read books; if you want to read one of thier books into the computer, do it and send them a copy. (You might want to email Jim Tinsley or gutvol-d first, but don't wait for someone to ask you to volunteer.)
If the licensing on something makes it onerous to use, I won't use it. The same thing goes for documentation. I won't sit and bitch about it, or declare jihad on the infidels who dare to challenge the the gospel truth of the GPL, BSD, etc. because I quite simply DON'T GIVE A DAMN.
Then why are sitting here bitching about some other group deciding not to using something because the licenseing makes it too onerous to use?
people who are overly political are generally full of shit regardless of the slant their politics take.
Yes, just ignore politics. Anything that can't be distilled down to binary doesn't matter. Never mind that subopitmal technological decisions usually involve programmers and engineers getting overtime so they can curse at the people who made the technological decision, whereas suboptimal political decisions usually involve, if not death, misery and suffering for more people then necessary.
I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be
What happened to Greece? They were the most cultured country in the western world, the envy of every country around them. Alexander the Great conquered Afganistan, Egypt and everything in between, and installed, not his birth culture, but that of the Greeks. And then they stopped growing, and became just another appendage to various empires for the next couple thousand years.
What about Germany? In 1900, Germany was the center of the mathematical world, holding a crown that Greece made for herself so long ago. Between then and now, this crown, as well as several other scientific ones left Germany and headed for America's shores. Why? There's certainly no technical reason why; the reasons are all cultural.