I have recently gotten into listening to books on tape. They are very convenient and you can "read" a book while driving or performing tasks that don't require full concentration (like painting my house).
Now that I have an iPod, I can fit a whole bunch of books on one little device and take it wherever I go without having to change tapes/CDs and such. When I'm on long car trips, I hook the iPod up to the car stereo and can either listen to music or one of the books I've downloaded/ripped.
I would *love* to see the next Harry Potter book (or any interesting book for that matter) to be released on a single CD with mp3 files that I could listen to anywhere. I think that is much a more reasonable way to distribute the book because it doesn't require that I purchase yet another single-purpose gadget like a eBook reader (that is bound to be obsolete in a matter of months anyway). It also doesn't require that I strain my eyes to read tiny print on a PDA that is much less comfortable than an actual paper book, and only mildly more portable/flexible.
I have also just found a site that has a bunch of books available for download in the mp3 format. You can pay to get the books without ads, but you can also get the books for free with little ads inserted into them. There aren't many good books there, but I've found a few: audiobooksforfree.com. I really hope that more publishers start providing books through sites like this.
Had Apple realised they were actually in the software business...
Guess what? Apple isn't in the hardware or software business. They are in the business of making computers, which means the whole deal: CPU, cases, operating system, applications, etc. In order to make all of the parts work nicely together, you have to have a very strict interface between all of the components. The PC world has a fairly loose interface between all components and look at all the problems that arise... buggy drivers, operating systems that don't take advantage of new hardware features, etc. If Apple were to open up their specs to the clone makers you would get the same types of problems: crappy hardware or buggy drivers bring down the rest of the system, sleep mode doesn't work half the time. If Apple's hardware was more "open" then we would still be using serial ports and configuring COM/IRQ settings for every device (but not more than two!) that we hooked up to it. Thanks to the Apple and their "whole computer" philosophy, we now have USB and tons of USB devices which are truly plug-and-play.
One of the biggest benefits of Apple computers is that everything fits together perfectly and provides a very functional computer. All system configuration is in one place, sleep mode works perfectly, wireless ethernet is built-in, etc.
Using a Mac (at least one of the more recent ones) is like owning a BMW rather than a home-made frankenstein car. With the frankenstein car the engine(CPU), body(computer), and dashboard(OS) are all created by different companies and none of them fit very well with the other. The engine has extra features that aren't used or enabled by the rest of the car. The dashboard has buttons that don't do anything because that feature isn't supported by the engine yet. Meanwhile, the whole frankenstein car looks like crap compared to the BMW because everything is cobbled together with whatever parts they had lying around.
As I understood his comments, he was only pointing it out that Apple is all to happy to take input from the community, but doesn't allow the same community the freedom of artistic expression.
So, exactly when did making an exact duplicate of a desktop look and feel become "artistic expression" ?
Those are the support costs for the business software, not Moneydance. Moneydance comes with free support, currently straight from the developers (including myself). Moneydance also has support for OFX online banking, scheduled transactions, budgeting, check printing, and soon online bill payment.
Compare that to GnuCash which can do none of these things but still takes several hours to download, resolve library conflicts/dependencies, and install. How much is your time worth?:)
I think one of the most useful implementations of CLI-GUI integration is how under Mac OS X (or NeXTStep) you can just run open somefile from a terminal and the correct application will open somefile in the GUI. Very simple, and probably easy to implement, but I don't think Linux has the infrastructure to support something like this yet.
After using Linux and FreeBSD exclusively since 1994 I have moved over to OS X. Since the public beta came out I have been using it on a G3 Powerbook, and I have to say that is is incredibly well done. Last week I had to install Linux on a new laptop and was amazed at how clunky and hard to manage linux is. The difference is that Mac OS X "just works". I know I probably sound like an Apple commercial or a plant, but it's true. From the.app application bundles to the XML config files to the nice, simple, GUI configuration tools for everything, I am very impressed with the quality of software. And the fact that it comes out of the box with ssh, emacs, vi and friends just makes me love it even more. OS X does something that I previously thought impossible - to please both the hard-core power users as well as the GUI-loving end users. The smooth dock magnification, transparency, and liquid UI are nice eye-candy, but the design that went into the underlying system is the most beautiful of all.
They've also made my life easier with very nice Java2 integration, and the Terminal app is better than almost anything you can get under X (although I do wish I could get the old NeXT-type scrollbar back).
If OS X ran on x86 then I would predict doom for Linux (on the desktop at least). Since I doubt Apple will release OS X for x86 then both will probably live on for quite a while, but I hope OS X takes lots of desktop market share away from Windows.
Hopefully the linux distributions will take a lesson from Apple on how to build a nice GUI on top of a unix-ish kernel.
Has anyone criticizing Apple actually looked at the theme they are complaining about? Here's a link to a screenshot. See it for yourself. Notice the blue apple and the Mac smiley-face icon on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Those are Apple trademarks and if they don't defend them against every infringement then they lose those trademarks.
Not to mention the fact that the casual onlooker might see a computer running this theme and think it is actuall running Mac OS X (not so far fetched since it has the official Apple logo on it and everything). That user will also see the crappy icons at the bottom that don't look half as cool as the real OS X dock, the non-translucent menus/windows, and the windows that don't "slurp" into the dock when iconized and will come away thinking that Aqua sucks when of course they were never looking at the real Aqua in the first place.
Apple clearly doesn't want people mistaking these half-assed themes with the real Aqua which took a lot of effort, design and engineering to build (unlike these cheap rip-offs).
Any service you use has to go through Bell Atlantic because they own the physical lines, but it's best to minimize their part in the matter any way that you can. Flashcom is also a horrendous company to go through. I wouldn't wish their service on my worst enemy. I signed up for Flashcom DSL in March 1999, and finally got their service installed in late October. Their sales people had told me (in March) that I get 8 static IP addresses with the service. Upon installation I found that they only gave me *one* static IP address. I complained and they said to "use NAT". I immediately cancelled the service, but they kept billing me $100 a month on and off on and off for a full year! They were taking the money directly out of my checking account (I remember enabling direct deposit!) and I had to wait on the phone for *hours* to talk to someone who knew absolutely nothing. Flashcom is a scam of huge proportions. You call their sales number... you get a human on the phone within 10 seconds. You call their tech support or customer service number... you wait for *hours* if you get anyone at all!!
Sorry for the rant. the moral of the story is stay the hell away from Flashcom!!!!.
You can't necessarily close down a pizza parlor if an employee might be running an illegal side business on the bosses' time.
If the pizza parlor was created with the specific intent of helping employees/customers launder money, shouldn't they be shut down?
Rather than beat a bad analogy to death, let's just look at what is the right thing to do. Napster was created with the express purpose of making it brain-dead simple and efficient to widely distribute copyrighted music for free. The Napster people knew exactly what they were doing and they have expressed that their intent is to destroy the music industry as we know it.
I have no problems with the record companies going out of business, but this is doing a lot more damage than that. Not only do record companies not get paid for music traded through napster, but the original artist gets screwed too.
Face it, Napster is nothing more than a source for free music for college kids with high bandwidth net connections. There's no higher principle to the thing... it's just free (as in beer) music.
And another thing, those who claim that "all music should be free" should start their own band and try to make a living by touring non-stop.
Musicians provide their music to the world with an understanding that they will get paid for it (based on copyright). If they can't get paid for it then the majority of them won't be able to keep making it. Do you want to live in a world where musicians can't make a living? I sure as hell don't.
Napster may not be doing the stealing directly, but they are making it amazingly simple for everyone in the world to steal other people's stuff. I won't confuse the situation with another bad analogy, but anyone (other than the participants) can plainly see that what Napster is doing is wrong. They are building a business based purely on promoting and facilitating theft from their competitors (the record labels).
You need to pipe your lpd jobs through ghostscript
in order to print page oriented, graphical stuff.
Check out a printing HOWTO or the FreeBSD manual
for instructions on how to do this. It is more
difficult than it should be, but once you learn
how it is easy.
"Currently there are over forty distributions of Linux... and as a result there is no single standard. Potentially, this means that software written for one system will not work on another."
Statements like these damaged SCO's credibility among the community that it now appears to be trying to embrace.
But that last statement is true! There is plenty of software that will run on one Linux system but not another. Why do you think there are separate java binaries for glibc and libc5 systems?
Just because a statement is not pro-linux doesn't mean it's FUD. I wish people would start acknowledging some of the more serious problems with Linux instead of crying "FUD" all the time. The first step to fixing the problems is acknowledging that they exist.
URN's have apparently bitten the dust and as far as I know there is no decent implementation of a URN resolver.
For the past couple of years I have worked on something called the Handle System that is a distributed, (mostly) non-centralized name system. Check it out, it might be what you want. The Handle System is a flexible, distributed, and *secure* (unlike DNS) name system for digital objects and wasn't really intended to replace DNS, but it conceivably could. I have written a name server that responds to BIND requests for a DNS name by looking up the name as a handle and then returning the results in a BIND response. It works well and allows administrators to update/create/delete names using the distributed, secure handle protocol.
The Handle System was designed to have more of a flat, non-hierarchical namespace than DNS. We are releasing the next version of the system (5.0) on Monday.
I have a checking account at First Union and I'm also the author of Moneydance (a competitor to GnuCash). I've gotten online banking mostly working in my development version - downloading transactions and synchronization works, but I'm still working on bill-payment.
It should only be another couple of months before I release a beta version of Moneydance 3.0 which will include online banking as well as a bunch of other features.
If junkbuster can get between your browser and your bank on an SSL connection then I think there you've got some pretty big security problems. If junkbuster can change your user-agent then it can also sniff your password/pin for the online banking site.
Don't worry about the lack of Moneydance support. If I ever get sick of it, I'll just open source it myself (I'm the author). Also, don't worry about being "locked in" to using Moneydance - I will give the file read/write source code to anyone who asks.
It's not open source right now because I would like it to become something that can support me full time and there just doesn't seem to be any way to do that in the true open source model.
In the future I plan on providing the source code to registered users, but under a license that is less "free" than the GPL or BSD licenses.
FYI: Online banking and investment tracking are now working in the development version. I just have to clear up some crypto issues (and RSA licensing fees) before I can release it.
Wrong. Be (BEOS) IPO'd somewhere around $6 or $7 USD. Now that they're up to $20 thats something like a 300% increase. That's all without having the buzzword-of-the-week (Linux) behind it.
When OpenLinux 2.3 boots up and goes to the kdm login screen, that is the logo that is displayed. Maybe the two companies became separate after 2.3 was released, but even so, the icon seems appropriate enough.
Amen brother. I have to say that I have found someone who is completely fantastic, and I envision myself staying with them forever. But I live right in the heart of suburbia and the types of families that I see every day just sickens me. It seems as if most people get married just because they think it's what they should do. Then when they have kids, their life becomes miserable. They then proceed to make their kids' lives miserable by yelling at them constantly. If they didn't want to deal with children, they shouldn't have had them in the first place! The family who lives across the street from me fits this description exactly. They never should have gotten married, and they absolutely *never* should have had children.
On the other hand, I know people who are incredibly happily married, and who have children that they love and cherish. They would rather spend their time playing with their children than working late at the office. These people got married and had children for the right reasons.
My point is, if you get married and have kids, you damn well better be sure that it's for the right reasons, not because "that's what you're supposed to do." There is absolutely nothing wrong with never getting married, and living the life of a bachelor(ette) forever. I think most people would even be happier that way. If I hadn't found my current girlfriend (of 5 years now), I would have no problem at all being single forever.
Under the GPL, if source code is not distributed with the product, the distributor of the binary code must give source code to anyone who requests it, not just people who have received the binary code.
I think you're wrong here. Based on my reading of the GPL, you only need to give the source to the people who are given the binary. If what you say is true, then Cygnus would be required to supply everyone with the source code that they wrote under contract for processor companies. What you describe would enforce "free beer for everyone" - definitely not what the GPL calls for.
You obviously didn't read the description of the hack or you would know that the web server wasn't running as root - it was running as nobody. He got root by exploiting a bug in crontab that allowed user nobody to get root access. Granted, he shouldn't have been had permission to overwrite the other CGI script in order to get a shell, but the crontab is what allowed him to eventually get root.
And to those who claim that the reason he got in was because it was a closed-source CGI script - give me a break! The cracker had the source to the script, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten in. Don't be so naive as to believe that all open-source cgi scripts are secure.
Can you really stand up and claim that the companies that sell intellectual property are making too little money today???
Microsoft? The record companies? Book publishers? These are the most bloated and rich companies in the world. Why? Becase we are giving them ridiculously much power through current IP laws.
Yes, I can stand up and say that companies that sell software are making too little money. Microsoft is really the exception when it comes to making gobs of money in the software industry. There are a lot of great companies putting out great products ( Be, for example) that would be out of business immediately if it weren't for copyright laws that allow them to keep people from giving away their stuff for free. Sure, microsoft may be "the big bad evil company" but we as a society shouldn't just throw out all of the laws that allow programmers to get paid just because one "evil" company depends on those laws. Microsoft isn't the only company you're hurting by illegally copying software. You're also hurting a lot of companies that really busted their asses to write good software. If you don't think that's fair, then don't use their software. It's very simple.
Slashdot Mirror
either that or nobody can read it. From where I am freehackers.org seems to be unreachable or overloaded.
I have recently gotten into listening to books on tape. They are very convenient and you can "read" a book while driving or performing tasks that don't require full concentration (like painting my house).
Now that I have an iPod, I can fit a whole bunch of books on one little device and take it wherever I go without having to change tapes/CDs and such. When I'm on long car trips, I hook the iPod up to the car stereo and can either listen to music or one of the books I've downloaded/ripped.
I would *love* to see the next Harry Potter book (or any interesting book for that matter) to be released on a single CD with mp3 files that I could listen to anywhere. I think that is much a more reasonable way to distribute the book because it doesn't require that I purchase yet another single-purpose gadget like a eBook reader (that is bound to be obsolete in a matter of months anyway). It also doesn't require that I strain my eyes to read tiny print on a PDA that is much less comfortable than an actual paper book, and only mildly more portable/flexible.
I have also just found a site that has a bunch of books available for download in the mp3 format. You can pay to get the books without ads, but you can also get the books for free with little ads inserted into them. There aren't many good books there, but I've found a few: audiobooksforfree.com. I really hope that more publishers start providing books through sites like this.
Had Apple realised they were actually in the software business...
Guess what? Apple isn't in the hardware or software business. They are in the business of making computers, which means the whole deal: CPU, cases, operating system, applications, etc. In order to make all of the parts work nicely together, you have to have a very strict interface between all of the components. The PC world has a fairly loose interface between all components and look at all the problems that arise... buggy drivers, operating systems that don't take advantage of new hardware features, etc. If Apple were to open up their specs to the clone makers you would get the same types of problems: crappy hardware or buggy drivers bring down the rest of the system, sleep mode doesn't work half the time. If Apple's hardware was more "open" then we would still be using serial ports and configuring COM/IRQ settings for every device (but not more than two!) that we hooked up to it. Thanks to the Apple and their "whole computer" philosophy, we now have USB and tons of USB devices which are truly plug-and-play.
One of the biggest benefits of Apple computers is that everything fits together perfectly and provides a very functional computer. All system configuration is in one place, sleep mode works perfectly, wireless ethernet is built-in, etc.
Using a Mac (at least one of the more recent ones) is like owning a BMW rather than a home-made frankenstein car. With the frankenstein car the engine(CPU), body(computer), and dashboard(OS) are all created by different companies and none of them fit very well with the other. The engine has extra features that aren't used or enabled by the rest of the car. The dashboard has buttons that don't do anything because that feature isn't supported by the engine yet. Meanwhile, the whole frankenstein car looks like crap compared to the BMW because everything is cobbled together with whatever parts they had lying around.
As I understood his comments, he was only pointing it out that Apple is all to happy to take input from the community, but doesn't allow the same community the freedom of artistic expression.
So, exactly when did making an exact duplicate of a desktop look and feel become "artistic expression" ?
Those are the support costs for the business software, not Moneydance. Moneydance comes with free support, currently straight from the developers (including myself). Moneydance also has support for OFX online banking, scheduled transactions, budgeting, check printing, and soon online bill payment.
:)
Compare that to GnuCash which can do none of these things but still takes several hours to download, resolve library conflicts/dependencies, and install. How much is your time worth?
...whatever happened to the days when the std in stdlib actually stood for standard? I wonder what it stands for now...
I think one of the most useful implementations of CLI-GUI integration is how under Mac OS X (or NeXTStep) you can just run open somefile from a terminal and the correct application will open somefile in the GUI. Very simple, and probably easy to implement, but I don't think Linux has the infrastructure to support something like this yet.
After using Linux and FreeBSD exclusively since 1994 I have moved over to OS X. Since the public beta came out I have been using it on a G3 Powerbook, and I have to say that is is incredibly well done. Last week I had to install Linux on a new laptop and was amazed at how clunky and hard to manage linux is. The difference is that Mac OS X "just works". I know I probably sound like an Apple commercial or a plant, but it's true. From the .app application bundles to the XML config files to the nice, simple, GUI configuration tools for everything, I am very impressed with the quality of software. And the fact that it comes out of the box with ssh, emacs, vi and friends just makes me love it even more. OS X does something that I previously thought impossible - to please both the hard-core power users as well as the GUI-loving end users. The smooth dock magnification, transparency, and liquid UI are nice eye-candy, but the design that went into the underlying system is the most beautiful of all.
They've also made my life easier with very nice Java2 integration, and the Terminal app is better than almost anything you can get under X (although I do wish I could get the old NeXT-type scrollbar back).
If OS X ran on x86 then I would predict doom for Linux (on the desktop at least). Since I doubt Apple will release OS X for x86 then both will probably live on for quite a while, but I hope OS X takes lots of desktop market share away from Windows.
Hopefully the linux distributions will take a lesson from Apple on how to build a nice GUI on top of a unix-ish kernel.
Has anyone criticizing Apple actually looked at the theme they are complaining about? Here's a link to a screenshot. See it for yourself. Notice the blue apple and the Mac smiley-face icon on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Those are Apple trademarks and if they don't defend them against every infringement then they lose those trademarks.
Not to mention the fact that the casual onlooker might see a computer running this theme and think it is actuall running Mac OS X (not so far fetched since it has the official Apple logo on it and everything). That user will also see the crappy icons at the bottom that don't look half as cool as the real OS X dock, the non-translucent menus/windows, and the windows that don't "slurp" into the dock when iconized and will come away thinking that Aqua sucks when of course they were never looking at the real Aqua in the first place.
Apple clearly doesn't want people mistaking these half-assed themes with the real Aqua which took a lot of effort, design and engineering to build (unlike these cheap rip-offs).
Any service you use has to go through Bell Atlantic because they own the physical lines, but it's best to minimize their part in the matter any way that you can. Flashcom is also a horrendous company to go through. I wouldn't wish their service on my worst enemy. I signed up for Flashcom DSL in March 1999, and finally got their service installed in late October. Their sales people had told me (in March) that I get 8 static IP addresses with the service. Upon installation I found that they only gave me *one* static IP address. I complained and they said to "use NAT". I immediately cancelled the service, but they kept billing me $100 a month on and off on and off for a full year! They were taking the money directly out of my checking account (I remember enabling direct deposit!) and I had to wait on the phone for *hours* to talk to someone who knew absolutely nothing. Flashcom is a scam of huge proportions. You call their sales number... you get a human on the phone within 10 seconds. You call their tech support or customer service number... you wait for *hours* if you get anyone at all!!
Sorry for the rant. the moral of the story is stay the hell away from Flashcom!!!!.
You can't necessarily close down a pizza parlor if an employee might be running an illegal side business on the bosses' time.
If the pizza parlor was created with the specific intent of helping employees/customers launder money, shouldn't they be shut down?
Rather than beat a bad analogy to death, let's just look at what is the right thing to do. Napster was created with the express purpose of making it brain-dead simple and efficient to widely distribute copyrighted music for free. The Napster people knew exactly what they were doing and they have expressed that their intent is to destroy the music industry as we know it.
I have no problems with the record companies going out of business, but this is doing a lot more damage than that. Not only do record companies not get paid for music traded through napster, but the original artist gets screwed too.
Face it, Napster is nothing more than a source for free music for college kids with high bandwidth net connections. There's no higher principle to the thing... it's just free (as in beer) music.
And another thing, those who claim that "all music should be free" should start their own band and try to make a living by touring non-stop.
Musicians provide their music to the world with an understanding that they will get paid for it (based on copyright). If they can't get paid for it then the majority of them won't be able to keep making it. Do you want to live in a world where musicians can't make a living? I sure as hell don't.
Napster may not be doing the stealing directly, but they are making it amazingly simple for everyone in the world to steal other people's stuff. I won't confuse the situation with another bad analogy, but anyone (other than the participants) can plainly see that what Napster is doing is wrong. They are building a business based purely on promoting and facilitating theft from their competitors (the record labels).
You need to pipe your lpd jobs through ghostscript
in order to print page oriented, graphical stuff.
Check out a printing HOWTO or the FreeBSD manual
for instructions on how to do this. It is more
difficult than it should be, but once you learn
how it is easy.
"Currently there are over forty distributions of Linux... and as a result there is no single standard. Potentially, this means that software written for one system will not work on another."
Statements like these damaged SCO's credibility among the community that it now appears to be trying to embrace.
But that last statement is true! There is plenty of software that will run on one Linux system but not another. Why do you think there are separate java binaries for glibc and libc5 systems?
Just because a statement is not pro-linux doesn't mean it's FUD. I wish people would start acknowledging some of the more serious problems with Linux instead of crying "FUD" all the time. The first step to fixing the problems is acknowledging that they exist.
URN's have apparently bitten the dust and as far as I know there is no decent implementation of a URN resolver.
For the past couple of years I have worked on something called the Handle System that is a distributed, (mostly) non-centralized name system. Check it out, it might be what you want. The Handle System is a flexible, distributed, and *secure* (unlike DNS) name system for digital objects and wasn't really intended to replace DNS, but it conceivably could. I have written a name server that responds to BIND requests for a DNS name by looking up the name as a handle and then returning the results in a BIND response. It works well and allows administrators to update/create/delete names using the distributed, secure handle protocol.
The Handle System was designed to have more of a flat, non-hierarchical namespace than DNS. We are releasing the next version of the system (5.0) on Monday.
I have a checking account at First Union and I'm also the author of Moneydance (a competitor to GnuCash). I've gotten online banking mostly working in my development version - downloading transactions and synchronization works, but I'm still working on bill-payment.
It should only be another couple of months before I release a beta version of Moneydance 3.0 which will include online banking as well as a bunch of other features.
If junkbuster can get between your browser and
your bank on an SSL connection then I think there
you've got some pretty big security problems. If
junkbuster can change your user-agent then it can
also sniff your password/pin for the online banking site.
Don't worry about the lack of Moneydance support. If I ever get sick of it, I'll just open source it myself (I'm the author). Also, don't worry about being "locked in" to using Moneydance - I will give the file read/write source code to anyone who asks.
It's not open source right now because I would like it to become something that can support me full time and there just doesn't seem to be any way to do that in the true open source model.
In the future I plan on providing the source code to registered users, but under a license that is less "free" than the GPL or BSD licenses.
FYI: Online banking and investment tracking are now working in the development version. I just have to clear up some crypto issues (and RSA licensing fees) before I can release it.
Wrong. Be (BEOS) IPO'd somewhere around $6 or $7 USD. Now that they're up to $20 thats something like a 300% increase. That's all without having the buzzword-of-the-week (Linux) behind it.
When OpenLinux 2.3 boots up and goes to the kdm login screen, that is the logo that is displayed. Maybe the two companies became separate after 2.3 was released, but even so, the icon seems appropriate enough.
Amen brother. I have to say that I have found someone who is completely fantastic, and I envision myself staying with them forever. But I live right in the heart of suburbia and the types of families that I see every day just sickens me. It seems as if most people get married just because they think it's what they should do. Then when they have kids, their life becomes miserable. They then proceed to make their kids' lives miserable by yelling at them constantly. If they didn't want to deal with children, they shouldn't have had them in the first place! The family who lives across the street from me fits this description exactly. They never should have gotten married, and they absolutely *never* should have had children.
On the other hand, I know people who are incredibly happily married, and who have children that they love and cherish. They would rather spend their time playing with their children than working late at the office. These people got married and had children for the right reasons.
My point is, if you get married and have kids, you damn well better be sure that it's for the right reasons, not because "that's what you're supposed to do." There is absolutely nothing wrong with never getting married, and living the life of a bachelor(ette) forever. I think most people would even be happier that way. If I hadn't found my current girlfriend (of 5 years now), I would have no problem at all being single forever.
I guess I don't know as much about the GPL as I thought I did
Under the GPL, if source code is not distributed with the product, the distributor of the binary code must give source code to anyone who requests it, not just people who have received the binary code.
I think you're wrong here. Based on my reading of the GPL, you only need to give the source to the people who are given the binary. If what you say is true, then Cygnus would be required to supply everyone with the source code that they wrote under contract for processor companies. What you describe would enforce "free beer for everyone" - definitely not what the GPL calls for.
You obviously didn't read the description of the hack or you would know that the web server wasn't running as root - it was running as nobody. He
got root by exploiting a bug in crontab that allowed user nobody to get root access. Granted, he shouldn't have been had permission to overwrite the other CGI script in order to get a shell, but the crontab is what allowed him to eventually get root.
And to those who claim that the reason he got in was because it was a closed-source CGI script - give me a break! The cracker had the source to the script, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten in. Don't be so naive as to believe that all open-source cgi scripts are secure.
Can you really stand up and claim that the companies that sell intellectual property are making too little money
today???
Microsoft? The record companies? Book publishers? These are the most bloated and rich companies in the world.
Why? Becase we are giving them ridiculously much power through current IP laws.
Yes, I can stand up and say that companies that sell software are making too little money. Microsoft is really the exception when it comes to making gobs of money in the software industry. There are a lot of great companies putting out great products ( Be, for example) that would be out of business immediately if it weren't for copyright laws that allow them to keep people from giving away their stuff for free. Sure, microsoft may be "the big bad evil company" but we as a society shouldn't just throw out all of the laws that allow programmers to get paid just because one "evil" company depends on those laws. Microsoft isn't the only company you're hurting by illegally copying software. You're also hurting a lot of companies that really busted their asses to write good software. If you don't think that's fair, then don't use their software. It's very simple.
some people at ECMA wouldn't