Criminal justice and prosecution is not just to punish for one criminal act. By prosecuting this act, it will deter others from doing the same.
If he had carried out his intent, his actions would have been actionable under copyright law. But if we make a habit of punishing "intent" before it has been carried out, we are getting dangerously close to some kind of thought police.
Now, that leaves hacking into what appears to be a poorly protected web server and letting the sysop know about it. Throwing the book at people who do that seems dangerous to me, not because people who do that deliberately are nice, but because the book might be thrown at you or me. I have gotten Perl sources and other "secret" information sent back to me from poorly configured sites. Don't believe for a moment that a good prosecutor together with an IT manager who wants to avoid looking bad to his management can't get you convicted on bogus charges.
People who make a substantial effort to break into well-protected and important computer systems should get prosecuted. This case still seems like a waste of time and money to me.
Can you see why readers might be confused here? In the first statement you appear to be defending him and suggesting he didn't intend to commit a crime. In the second statement you are denying defending him.
You are splitting hairs. He may or may not have accessed the computer illegally, but that he did so in hope of selling some Perl script just seems unlikely to me.
You may not realize it, but Slashdot isn't just you and some other anonymous entity.
In fact, I never defended the guy or made assumptions about his guilt or innocence. I just think it's a waste of taxpayer money to prosecute these kinds of cases.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why taxpayer money should be wasted on investigating or prosecuting cases like West. This kind of activity should not be a felony or misdemeanor. If the paper wants to collect its own information and file a civil lawsuit for damages, that's fine.
Unlike "real world" theft, it is pretty easy for a company to protect itself against these kinds of problems, and it is pretty easy for it to collect and present its own evidence. And even in the real world, if you left your front door unlocked and put your cheap, fake diamond necklace out there for everybody to see (roughly the equivalent of having a Perl script on an IIS server), I think a prosecutor would see the sillyness of wasting lots of resources on your case.
As for guilty pleas in such cases, I think they are pretty meaningless. Faced with the threat of lengthy prison sentences, I suspect many people will plea guilty to minor offenses, whether they committed them or not. Do you really think West "intended" to modify someone else's messy Perl script and make a business out of it? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Even if I agreed with your argument, why should the response to "X is not secure right now" be "you don't have an expecation of privacy right now when doing X"? The contents of letters used to be easily accessible, but we adopted mechanisms and laws to protect them. With E-mail, even if it were like a postcard, we could adopt mechanisms and laws to protect their contents. The fact that most people send out E-mail in the plain through unsecure servers is a historical accident and shouldn't drive our policies in perpetuity.
For too many of us, our passions and self-confidence get in the way of being responsible members of a larger community.
Oh, come on, what is this self-flagellation? We generally do have both self-confidence and passion, and both of those are good assets. And many people in technology try to live responsibly and try to help their neighbors.
Yes, we aren't necessarily "responsible members of a larger community", in the sense of playing the usual political games. But very few people are in a position to do so. If you want to become politically active yourself, you need lots of time, money, and photogenicity. Or, you may have even more money to pay others to do that for you.
The press is in for a large amount of deserved criticism: I see very few articles on technical and scientific subjects that don't contain either serious, substantial omissions or outright blunders. Publications like the NYT, the Post, and the WSJ have a lot of very self-absorbed, self-righteous journalists that use the prestige of their publications to push whatever agenda they may have . These journalists are hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, and are themselves in an income bracket, that they pretty much have lost touch with reality.
Zimmerman has to be nice to the Post. But, really, substantially misrepresenting his position is serious stuff. Isn't accuracy the first thing we should expect from a reputable paper?
I think the NYT, Post, and WSJ are useful not for their content, which is objectively of low quality and standards, and rather biased, but only for the influence they seem to have on US society. It's worth reading an article in those papers when it is widely cited; otherwise, it's best to ignore them. Get your news elsewhere--with the Internet you can.
The iPaqs make nice Linux machines, but the business divisions of Compaq just don't support this. The installation process is a lot of work and you may end up having to send the iPaq back to the factory to be restored. And as long as people keep buying the things with WinCE preinstalled, why should they bother?
If you want Linux on a PDA, why not buy a Linux PDA? The Agenda VR is a decent, very compact Linux PDA, and there are several others. And HP has announced a Jornada based on Linux.
No, the scary thing is that it looks like it will be done in the US. The Bush administration seems to be right behind it, and they've rallied enough support to do it. [...] Don't fear that terrorists might win - fear that they have already won,
I agree with this concern: it is truly scary how easily Americans are willing to give up freedoms and constitutional guarantees for what is an uncertain protection against what for each individual amounts to a tiny risk of terrorism.
There's serious support for a national ID card.
I don't see how a national ID card is related to a police state. The US government already has several identifiers to track you and anybody else. A national ID card wouldn't give them anything more, but it could at least come with better protection against identity theft and better privacy legislation.
You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, any more than you do about where you go when you leave your house or who you send letters to.
Why wouldn't I have an expectation of privacy in my postal communications? The letters go into a locked mailbox, are picked up by employees who are required to keep postal secrets, and delivered into a private mailbox at the other end. I don't even need to give a recipient's name--an address or P.O. box is sufficient, and I don't have to put a "From" address on it either. Most countries (the US probably as well) have strong legal restrictions on what you can do with a misdelivered piece of mail, so even in the case of accidents, your privacy is supposed to be preserved.
Yet for E-mail, all of a sudden all of that is supposed to be "public"? On the same footing as a USENET posting? Even if I use an SSL connection to pick up and send my mail? Sorry, but I just don't get your logic.
I don't believe I can assert copyright on my type and interface declarations, nor do I believe that I own code that was "inspired" by looking at my code. That seems to be the situation at hand, and if that kind of action were considered "IP theft" it would be very bad for BSD and Linux and many other projects. So, in short, if you copy my interfaces, I'd appreciate an acknowledgement, but I understand that I can't insist. If you copy my code, I expect you to comply with copyright laws and the license. Clear enough?
And you seem to have been living under a rock the past couple of years; intellectual-property issues are a defining feature of this phase in the maturing of the IT industry; without getting the rights and wrongs into the population's heads, the industry will go right down the pan. Even more than now.
Extensions of IP rights to include copyrights on interface information is the single biggest threat to open source software and innovative commercial software, since any such software usually has to provide some kind of backwards compatibility to make it in the market. It is distressing and dangerous that BSD developers would cry "IP theft" in areas where not even AT&T or Microsoft have asserted IP rights.
But windows developers can compile their code against winelib, using the wine headers.
If the WINE headers don't use the same type, function, and field names as the Windows headers, then Windows developers cannot compiler their code against winelib.
"A 750MHz Pentium is probably at least as fast as a 500MHz G3."
Why do you say that?
That's what the SPECmark results suggest (including those in the PowerPC FAQ), and it agrees with my experience with PowerPC (which I was using for a few years).
So plug in a mouse.:)
On a desktop, that's fine. For a laptop, it's not a realistic choice.
For $1000, you get something that has roughly the same features as the iBook with a 13" screen. For $1500, you get something that has roughly the same features as the iBook with a 15" screen (!).
I keep wondering: the Game Boy Advance is based on a 32bit ARM, it's cheap, and it runs the Cygnus toolchain. So--has anybody ported Linux to it? Are there free development tools out for it? Where's a good place to start reading up on GBA development using standard open source tools (a brief search on Google didn't reveal much)?
It seems likely that cameras will end up being restricted in many "public" places for "security reasons". There actually is a slight argument to be made that they might help in the preparation of terrorist attacks. But more importantly, neither the government nor businesses find it particularly desirable if their operations are being recorded by citizens. Another instance of this is that in many jurisdictions, you are not permitted to record your interaction with the police, while the police is permitted to record (and presumably use as they find convenient) their interaction with you.
This isn't some grand conspiracy (if it were, it would be easy to do something about it). But look at it from the point of view of the people who get to make the rules. If they forbid picture taking, little happens. If they allow it, they are in trouble if something bad happens, or at least they risk exposing their organization to embarrassment if the pictures are used for something negative.
I think it's important to document our life in pictures for many reasons, and that's why it's important to keep cameras acceptable whereever we go. What can you do about it? Carry a camera, the unobtrusive snapshooting kind, and snap away. Don't dress up like an alien or be in-your-face or antagonistic--that only upsets people and raises valid concerns. But do use your camera: take pictures of your girlfriend picking out a new dress, pictures of your family waving good-bye at the airport, pictures of having lunch at the mall, pictures of furniture that you may want to buy (to show your family), etc.
But anyways, if Windows floats your boat, then by all means, save a few hundred bucks and stick with Windows.
I don't like either Windows or MacOS. Unfortunately, the Microsoft and Apple platforms pretty much have a monopoly on digital media and banking software, so whether one likes it or not, one has to own one or the other, or just not participate in the digital world. Mind you, this is not because software on those platforms is any better (Quicken actually sucks), it's because of the DMCA and numerous intricate business relationships.
That makes PCs more accessible financially, but it does not solve the problem of making them more accessible in terms of human interaction.
I actually don't particularly care for either MacOS or Windows. The reason for me for getting a commercial system like that is that, between them, the Apple and Microsoft platforms have pretty much monopolized the digital media markets and banking software. It doesn't matter how good alternative software is, it just can't get into that market. So, to watch DVDs, web broadcasts, and do on-line banking, I want a small, unobtrusive, cheap machine. The question is really whether I want to pay $100 to Gates's empire, or whether I want to pay a premium of a few hundred dollars for a MacOS machine that I can at least telnet into.
And it comes with firewire, ethernet and wireless antenneas?
Sony VAIO FX220K PCGFX220K | $1,569.00 |
VAIO FX220K P3-750Mhz 128MB/15GB/DVD/15" TFT/10-100BT/56K/W2K PCGFX220K (www.onlinemicro.com); it also has USB and FireWire.
Is the processor actually faster, or just a higher clock rating?
A 750MHz Pentium is probably at least as fast as a 500MHz G3.
How is the touch pad "awful?"
If you do actual experiments comparing its effectiveness with other pointing devices, it's slow and not very accurate: it takes people longer to get work done. The reason is simple to understand: a good pointing device needs fast long range motions and slow fine motions. A mouse, a pointing stick, and (to a lesser degree) a trackball give you that. A touchpad doesn't really.
"it's questionable whether the iBook is even fast enough to run reasonably complex OS X applications." Is this based on personal experience with Mac OS X 10.1 on an iBook?
It's my impression based on experimenting with a bunch of different machines at a computer store, as well as reading reviews of OS X in the Mac press. I am (still) thinking about replacing my Windows laptop with an OS X laptop. But I have no illusions about the fact that I'll be paying a premium and that I probably need to get one of the more expensive Apple laptops to do so.
By that argument, it would have been impossible to build Linux or Wine, because both needed to use structures whose fields had names compatible with UNIX and Windows.
Generally, such names are viewed as not being creative, and hence creating compatible software is possible. I very much hope your view won't start getting adopted because it would endanger almost all open source efforts.
A DVD iBook with a 12" screen costs about $1500. An Intel-based laptop gives you an equivalent or faster processor, DVD and a 14" or 15" screen for a little less than that. Or, you can get a machine like the Toshiba S203 that gives you a 13" screen and a DVD player for $999. And, with its G3 processor, it's questionable whether the iBook is even fast enough to run reasonably complex OS X applications.
Apple machines look nice and are well made, but they still cost a premium compared to Intel laptops. The other problem is that you don't get much of a choice: if you don't like Apple's choice of peripherals (like their awful touch pad), you are out of luck.
I imagine the Linux developer's reasoning was that (1) the Linux license is more restrictive than the BSD license anyway, so the BSD copyright doesn't serve a purpose, and (2) he was using bits and pieces of data structures that merely define common interfaces, so he wasn't really reusing anything clever or creative, so what was the point of acknowledging it? I would disagree with that reasoning, but it doesn't strike me as a serious infraction.
Soren could have just asked the Linux folks to add the notice, which they would probably have gladly done. BSD even gives commercial developers permission to distribute the code in binary only form, so why all this fuzz about Linux?
I suspect these serious accusations from the BSD folks are sour grapes: Linux is succeeding wildly while BSD is at best hanging on. So, even minor issues like these are used in attepts to tarnish the Linux image. My recommendation? Add a short notice to the Linux sources "portions of this file derived from...". And my recommendation to the BSD folks: resolve such issues quietly. This kind of mud slinging only backfires and tarnishes your own reputation.
I'm for a national id system because I value my privacy; the current situation is worse than any reasonable national id system could be. Rather than having legislation that clearly defines what can and cannot be done, together with a decent, rational, and secure id system, the US muddles through with social security numbers and drivers license numbers. The result? People who merely need a unique identifier get a hold of all sorts of personal information, like phone numbers, retirement information, and driving records. Insecure identifications that are easy to forge, widespread identity theft, and a lack of reliable at locations where it is in everybody's interest that people identify themselves.
The qwerty layout was designed to alternate keys between different parts of the keyboard (which reduces jamming on mechanical typewriters), not necessarily to slow typists down. Whether or not that kind of layout slows typists down is a separate question. In practice, even proponents of alternative layouts seem to have demonstrated only a very modest advantage of new layouts.
libgtk1.2 is ~615k while libglib1.2 (required by gtk) is ~61k. Plus the dev.debs, probably not much bigger.
You are comparing a minimal set of Gtk+ runtime libraries with the JRE, but that's comparing apples and oranges. The JRE isn't just a bunch of GUI libraries, its a huge set of powerful libraries, a runtime compiler and optimizer, and a lot of other stuff that you couldn't get for Gnome if you wanted to. In real life, people install "the Gnome environment" and "the JRE", and those are the sizes you need to compare.
My main gripe I guess is that no one is programming things like microsoft office or photoshop for java. Why is that? Too slow? Licensing too restrictive? Because the public (like me) wouldn't accept it as a real competitor? People see it as an additional thing to insta/run? Too big of a memory footprint? Or What?
Well, who is going to do the programming? People on the Gnome and KDE projects seem quite anti-Java because they have some belief in the superiority of C and C++. (Now the Gnome people are going off on a C# tangent, which, being a Java clone, I suppose is better than C, but it's too little too late.) And why would any commercial vendor bother?
After awhile of fighting, I figured out that I need to add the jre bin dir to my path to make limewire run.
For the Windows (and probably MacOS) version of the JDK, you just click on it to install it.
The filesizes that I posted are right for linux versions, and are correct.
Well, then the Linux packaging isn't very good.
And the speed all matters on how fast of a computer your linux box is. Some of still don't have exactly top notch hardware,
Of course, you can always aim low and try to produce software for older computers. But how is open source ever supposed to lead with that kind of attitude?
Now I'm not saying that gtk-gnutella is the perfect program, far from it.
Far from it, actually. The UI has numerous serious problems. I mean, come on, using a list box for tabs? Truncated text labels? Using list boxes for displaying statistics? A window that won't resize to anything narrower than 1027 pixels (how are people on older laptops supposed to use it)? No menu bar? Why didn't the author use the right kinds of widgets for the job and make the window resize properly? Gtk-Gnutella could be a poster child for how making programming too hard leads to serious design and implementation problems, and Gtk+ C code is intrinsically so interwoven that these kinds of problems are hard to fix.
Now, I'm not saying that Java is the perfect programming language, or that LimeWire is the perfect Gnutella client. But Java is a whole lot better than Gtk+ in terms of programmability and portability.
Something like Gtk-Gnutella should be written in Python, Tcl, or Java, not a low-level language like C. Python or Tcl are great for single programmer projects (they allow very rapid development), while Java is better for large multi-programmer (programming in Java is much slower, but it's quite a bit easier to coordinate among many programmers).
Slashdot Mirror
If he had carried out his intent, his actions would have been actionable under copyright law. But if we make a habit of punishing "intent" before it has been carried out, we are getting dangerously close to some kind of thought police.
Now, that leaves hacking into what appears to be a poorly protected web server and letting the sysop know about it. Throwing the book at people who do that seems dangerous to me, not because people who do that deliberately are nice, but because the book might be thrown at you or me. I have gotten Perl sources and other "secret" information sent back to me from poorly configured sites. Don't believe for a moment that a good prosecutor together with an IT manager who wants to avoid looking bad to his management can't get you convicted on bogus charges.
People who make a substantial effort to break into well-protected and important computer systems should get prosecuted. This case still seems like a waste of time and money to me.
You are splitting hairs. He may or may not have accessed the computer illegally, but that he did so in hope of selling some Perl script just seems unlikely to me.
In fact, I never defended the guy or made assumptions about his guilt or innocence. I just think it's a waste of taxpayer money to prosecute these kinds of cases.
Unlike "real world" theft, it is pretty easy for a company to protect itself against these kinds of problems, and it is pretty easy for it to collect and present its own evidence. And even in the real world, if you left your front door unlocked and put your cheap, fake diamond necklace out there for everybody to see (roughly the equivalent of having a Perl script on an IIS server), I think a prosecutor would see the sillyness of wasting lots of resources on your case.
As for guilty pleas in such cases, I think they are pretty meaningless. Faced with the threat of lengthy prison sentences, I suspect many people will plea guilty to minor offenses, whether they committed them or not. Do you really think West "intended" to modify someone else's messy Perl script and make a business out of it? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Even if I agreed with your argument, why should the response to "X is not secure right now" be "you don't have an expecation of privacy right now when doing X"? The contents of letters used to be easily accessible, but we adopted mechanisms and laws to protect them. With E-mail, even if it were like a postcard, we could adopt mechanisms and laws to protect their contents. The fact that most people send out E-mail in the plain through unsecure servers is a historical accident and shouldn't drive our policies in perpetuity.
Oh, come on, what is this self-flagellation? We generally do have both self-confidence and passion, and both of those are good assets. And many people in technology try to live responsibly and try to help their neighbors.
Yes, we aren't necessarily "responsible members of a larger community", in the sense of playing the usual political games. But very few people are in a position to do so. If you want to become politically active yourself, you need lots of time, money, and photogenicity. Or, you may have even more money to pay others to do that for you.
The press is in for a large amount of deserved criticism: I see very few articles on technical and scientific subjects that don't contain either serious, substantial omissions or outright blunders. Publications like the NYT, the Post, and the WSJ have a lot of very self-absorbed, self-righteous journalists that use the prestige of their publications to push whatever agenda they may have . These journalists are hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, and are themselves in an income bracket, that they pretty much have lost touch with reality.
Zimmerman has to be nice to the Post. But, really, substantially misrepresenting his position is serious stuff. Isn't accuracy the first thing we should expect from a reputable paper?
I think the NYT, Post, and WSJ are useful not for their content, which is objectively of low quality and standards, and rather biased, but only for the influence they seem to have on US society. It's worth reading an article in those papers when it is widely cited; otherwise, it's best to ignore them. Get your news elsewhere--with the Internet you can.
If you want Linux on a PDA, why not buy a Linux PDA? The Agenda VR is a decent, very compact Linux PDA, and there are several others. And HP has announced a Jornada based on Linux.
I agree with this concern: it is truly scary how easily Americans are willing to give up freedoms and constitutional guarantees for what is an uncertain protection against what for each individual amounts to a tiny risk of terrorism.
There's serious support for a national ID card.
I don't see how a national ID card is related to a police state. The US government already has several identifiers to track you and anybody else. A national ID card wouldn't give them anything more, but it could at least come with better protection against identity theft and better privacy legislation.
Why wouldn't I have an expectation of privacy in my postal communications? The letters go into a locked mailbox, are picked up by employees who are required to keep postal secrets, and delivered into a private mailbox at the other end. I don't even need to give a recipient's name--an address or P.O. box is sufficient, and I don't have to put a "From" address on it either. Most countries (the US probably as well) have strong legal restrictions on what you can do with a misdelivered piece of mail, so even in the case of accidents, your privacy is supposed to be preserved.
Yet for E-mail, all of a sudden all of that is supposed to be "public"? On the same footing as a USENET posting? Even if I use an SSL connection to pick up and send my mail? Sorry, but I just don't get your logic.
I don't believe I can assert copyright on my type and interface declarations, nor do I believe that I own code that was "inspired" by looking at my code. That seems to be the situation at hand, and if that kind of action were considered "IP theft" it would be very bad for BSD and Linux and many other projects. So, in short, if you copy my interfaces, I'd appreciate an acknowledgement, but I understand that I can't insist. If you copy my code, I expect you to comply with copyright laws and the license. Clear enough?
Extensions of IP rights to include copyrights on interface information is the single biggest threat to open source software and innovative commercial software, since any such software usually has to provide some kind of backwards compatibility to make it in the market. It is distressing and dangerous that BSD developers would cry "IP theft" in areas where not even AT&T or Microsoft have asserted IP rights.
If the WINE headers don't use the same type, function, and field names as the Windows headers, then Windows developers cannot compiler their code against winelib.
Why do you say that?
That's what the SPECmark results suggest (including those in the PowerPC FAQ), and it agrees with my experience with PowerPC (which I was using for a few years).
So plug in a mouse. :)
On a desktop, that's fine. For a laptop, it's not a realistic choice.
For $1000, you get something that has roughly the same features as the iBook with a 13" screen. For $1500, you get something that has roughly the same features as the iBook with a 15" screen (!).
I keep wondering: the Game Boy Advance is based on a 32bit ARM, it's cheap, and it runs the Cygnus toolchain. So--has anybody ported Linux to it? Are there free development tools out for it? Where's a good place to start reading up on GBA development using standard open source tools (a brief search on Google didn't reveal much)?
This isn't some grand conspiracy (if it were, it would be easy to do something about it). But look at it from the point of view of the people who get to make the rules. If they forbid picture taking, little happens. If they allow it, they are in trouble if something bad happens, or at least they risk exposing their organization to embarrassment if the pictures are used for something negative.
I think it's important to document our life in pictures for many reasons, and that's why it's important to keep cameras acceptable whereever we go. What can you do about it? Carry a camera, the unobtrusive snapshooting kind, and snap away. Don't dress up like an alien or be in-your-face or antagonistic--that only upsets people and raises valid concerns. But do use your camera: take pictures of your girlfriend picking out a new dress, pictures of your family waving good-bye at the airport, pictures of having lunch at the mall, pictures of furniture that you may want to buy (to show your family), etc.
Toshiba S203 $1079 (can get cheaper if you look around)
Sony Vaio FX150 ($1599) (can get $100 cheaper at Fry's)
But anyways, if Windows floats your boat, then by all means, save a few hundred bucks and stick with Windows.
I don't like either Windows or MacOS. Unfortunately, the Microsoft and Apple platforms pretty much have a monopoly on digital media and banking software, so whether one likes it or not, one has to own one or the other, or just not participate in the digital world. Mind you, this is not because software on those platforms is any better (Quicken actually sucks), it's because of the DMCA and numerous intricate business relationships.
I actually don't particularly care for either MacOS or Windows. The reason for me for getting a commercial system like that is that, between them, the Apple and Microsoft platforms have pretty much monopolized the digital media markets and banking software. It doesn't matter how good alternative software is, it just can't get into that market. So, to watch DVDs, web broadcasts, and do on-line banking, I want a small, unobtrusive, cheap machine. The question is really whether I want to pay $100 to Gates's empire, or whether I want to pay a premium of a few hundred dollars for a MacOS machine that I can at least telnet into.
Sony VAIO FX220K PCGFX220K | $1,569.00 | VAIO FX220K P3-750Mhz 128MB/15GB/DVD/15" TFT/10-100BT/56K/W2K PCGFX220K (www.onlinemicro.com); it also has USB and FireWire.
Is the processor actually faster, or just a higher clock rating?
A 750MHz Pentium is probably at least as fast as a 500MHz G3.
How is the touch pad "awful?"
If you do actual experiments comparing its effectiveness with other pointing devices, it's slow and not very accurate: it takes people longer to get work done. The reason is simple to understand: a good pointing device needs fast long range motions and slow fine motions. A mouse, a pointing stick, and (to a lesser degree) a trackball give you that. A touchpad doesn't really.
"it's questionable whether the iBook is even fast enough to run reasonably complex OS X applications." Is this based on personal experience with Mac OS X 10.1 on an iBook?
It's my impression based on experimenting with a bunch of different machines at a computer store, as well as reading reviews of OS X in the Mac press. I am (still) thinking about replacing my Windows laptop with an OS X laptop. But I have no illusions about the fact that I'll be paying a premium and that I probably need to get one of the more expensive Apple laptops to do so.
Generally, such names are viewed as not being creative, and hence creating compatible software is possible. I very much hope your view won't start getting adopted because it would endanger almost all open source efforts.
Apple machines look nice and are well made, but they still cost a premium compared to Intel laptops. The other problem is that you don't get much of a choice: if you don't like Apple's choice of peripherals (like their awful touch pad), you are out of luck.
Soren could have just asked the Linux folks to add the notice, which they would probably have gladly done. BSD even gives commercial developers permission to distribute the code in binary only form, so why all this fuzz about Linux?
I suspect these serious accusations from the BSD folks are sour grapes: Linux is succeeding wildly while BSD is at best hanging on. So, even minor issues like these are used in attepts to tarnish the Linux image. My recommendation? Add a short notice to the Linux sources "portions of this file derived from ...". And my recommendation to the BSD folks: resolve such issues quietly. This kind of mud slinging only backfires and tarnishes your own reputation.
I'm for a national id system because I value my privacy; the current situation is worse than any reasonable national id system could be. Rather than having legislation that clearly defines what can and cannot be done, together with a decent, rational, and secure id system, the US muddles through with social security numbers and drivers license numbers. The result? People who merely need a unique identifier get a hold of all sorts of personal information, like phone numbers, retirement information, and driving records. Insecure identifications that are easy to forge, widespread identity theft, and a lack of reliable at locations where it is in everybody's interest that people identify themselves.
The qwerty layout was designed to alternate keys between different parts of the keyboard (which reduces jamming on mechanical typewriters), not necessarily to slow typists down. Whether or not that kind of layout slows typists down is a separate question. In practice, even proponents of alternative layouts seem to have demonstrated only a very modest advantage of new layouts.
You are comparing a minimal set of Gtk+ runtime libraries with the JRE, but that's comparing apples and oranges. The JRE isn't just a bunch of GUI libraries, its a huge set of powerful libraries, a runtime compiler and optimizer, and a lot of other stuff that you couldn't get for Gnome if you wanted to. In real life, people install "the Gnome environment" and "the JRE", and those are the sizes you need to compare.
My main gripe I guess is that no one is programming things like microsoft office or photoshop for java. Why is that? Too slow? Licensing too restrictive? Because the public (like me) wouldn't accept it as a real competitor? People see it as an additional thing to insta/run? Too big of a memory footprint? Or What?
Well, who is going to do the programming? People on the Gnome and KDE projects seem quite anti-Java because they have some belief in the superiority of C and C++. (Now the Gnome people are going off on a C# tangent, which, being a Java clone, I suppose is better than C, but it's too little too late.) And why would any commercial vendor bother?
After awhile of fighting, I figured out that I need to add the jre bin dir to my path to make limewire run.
For the Windows (and probably MacOS) version of the JDK, you just click on it to install it.
The filesizes that I posted are right for linux versions, and are correct.
Well, then the Linux packaging isn't very good.
And the speed all matters on how fast of a computer your linux box is. Some of still don't have exactly top notch hardware,
Of course, you can always aim low and try to produce software for older computers. But how is open source ever supposed to lead with that kind of attitude?
Now I'm not saying that gtk-gnutella is the perfect program, far from it.
Far from it, actually. The UI has numerous serious problems. I mean, come on, using a list box for tabs? Truncated text labels? Using list boxes for displaying statistics? A window that won't resize to anything narrower than 1027 pixels (how are people on older laptops supposed to use it)? No menu bar? Why didn't the author use the right kinds of widgets for the job and make the window resize properly? Gtk-Gnutella could be a poster child for how making programming too hard leads to serious design and implementation problems, and Gtk+ C code is intrinsically so interwoven that these kinds of problems are hard to fix.
Now, I'm not saying that Java is the perfect programming language, or that LimeWire is the perfect Gnutella client. But Java is a whole lot better than Gtk+ in terms of programmability and portability.
Something like Gtk-Gnutella should be written in Python, Tcl, or Java, not a low-level language like C. Python or Tcl are great for single programmer projects (they allow very rapid development), while Java is better for large multi-programmer (programming in Java is much slower, but it's quite a bit easier to coordinate among many programmers).