In one recent case, for example, we prosecuted individuals for pirating a significant amount of high-end application software. There were literally hundreds of victim companies, the vast majority of which were not large corporations. One victim company was a small software manufacturer located in the Midwest. They had one or two viable programs that sustained their entire operation of about ten employees, many of whom were family members of the owner. The company had spent many years developing its software, so the owner, of course, was devastated to find that his product had been pirated and was available for free on the Internet. His livelihood depended on the legitimate sale of only one or two software programs.
If anyone thinks that piracy does not affect everyday people trying to succeed in business, they need look no further. The earnings of small operations like this are all put back into the business, to defray research and development costs and support further development. They do not have the resources to employ investigators to track pirates or lawyers to vindicate their rights civilly. They simply have an idea and a product a product which was, in this case, pirated and distributed around the world.
Am I the only one who noticed that they never presented any evidence of harm? If this company is surviving in this economy as a small proprietary software company, they're doing better than average. Sounds like piracy is their friend to me.
All right, my argument's not very good -- but theirs is non-existant. I sure hope claims like that don't get through in court.
There are two fights here. There's SCO vs IBM, fought in court over whether IBM's aid to Linux was legitemate. This one will be fought by IBM's lawyers who will point out that IBM was writing operating systems before SCO was founded and doesn't need anyone's help. That fight IBM is sure to win: they have the facts, the law, and the mountains of lawyers on their side.
The other fight is SCO vs the Open Source Community, being fought in the media. Hence "Linux was like a bicycle" and the slew of slanders to indicate we can't code anything without IBM holding our hands our copying it from SCO. It is remenicient of MS's "Unless Linux violates IP rights, t will fail to innovate" FUD, leading some to suggest SCO is acting as a proxy for MS.
Anyway, IBM isn't helping there. Maybe they think that by saying nothing they are sneering at SCO and decreasing their legitimacy. Maybe they're right. Maybe they feal that it's not their fight. It's too bad, IBM gave Linux some of the best traditional advertising it's ever had. Anyway, we seem to be in that fight alone.
I, too, used Wordperfect since version 5.0 for Dos. I followed up through 8.0 for GNU/Linux (which was far better than 9). I left looking partly for more polish, but mostly just for freedom.
Even so, Wordperfect is still the best word processor out there. From reveal codes to draggable margins (7.0+) to such simple things as justify all, Wordperfect does so much no other word processer can. When I have serious desktop publishing needs, I still seek out wordperfect, difficult though it may be to find.
But such is the way of proprietary software. It comes, it goes, and we can only mourn its passing. Why is it that Wordperfect's clearly superior ideas haven't appeared in OSS word processors? Is the OpenOffice team unfamiliar with WordPerfect?
Let us remember Wordperfect, and let us bring that memory into our own work now.
This is precisely what Lexmark
has done. AFAIK, no other inkjet company has done this yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.
IMHO, Lexmark's arguments are very strained, but resellers aren't looking for a fight, even one they can win. As a result, generic ink cartridges are hard to find.
obTopic: I think a lot of people are boycotting Lexmark over this, so don't go there, whatever you do.
I think Arthur C Clarke propsed that any leader that commits a country to war be excecuted at the end of it. If it's worth making other people die for, it should be worth dying for yourself. I sounded like a good idea to me (I do realize we'd have very few ex-presidents alive at this point, but the hope is to change presidential behavior).
The big problem is that the president currently declares when the war ended. Maybe we could have the excecution when the president leaves office, whether the war's ended yet or not. Keep the two term rule, of course.
The grandparent post said "another president", so Lincln is disqualified. The second assasinated president was Garfield, though we're still not sure why. People also shot at FDR and Ford, but missed.
The site's awfully slow already; I suspect it's going down soon, so here's the content:
Subject: Re: [Followup] RE: Possibly Include HTMLParser Jar in contribcode?
From: "Andrew C. Oliver" <acoliver <at> apache.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:12:12 -0400
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.jakarta.poi.devel
You cannot. Though the FSF has stated that the Apache interpretation was
correct and that importing classes from LGPL jar files in Java does indeed
cause the "viral clause" to apply to Java.
Please stop saying "lift the code" or other things that imply violating the
copyright.
Under no circumstances can any LGPL code be used as it would require us to
LGPL our code per section 6 of the LGPL license and the statement I received
from the Free Software Foundation's Dave Turner (the man behind
licensing <at> fsf.org):
"
Me:
Brett Smith referred me to you regarding a question regarding the Lesser Gnu
Public License (LGPL) in regards to Java. It is the interpretation of most
of the open/free software communities that the use of a "jar" file by a
piece of software linked via a Java "import" statement does not bind the
linking work under the terms of the LGPL. The Apache Software Foundation,
presently takes a more conservative view and thus projects of the ASF are
not allowed to link/distribute LGPL programs into Java projects of the
foundation.
DT:
This sort of linking falls under section 6 of the LGPL.
"
Sorry I haven't been on the list more, been traveling the last week. At any
rate, Andy, did you ever get a resolution to including the HTMLParser Jar?
Should I just submit a code change the mimics the code that I need from
HTMLParser, I mean, it is just a long list of values being populated into a
Map! That is all I really want, versus sophisticated translation of
character set logic or something...
Thanks for your efforts...
eric
--
Andrew C. Oliver
http://www.superlinksoftware.com/poi.jsp
Custom enhancements and Commercial Implementation for Jakarta POI
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi
For Java and Excel, Got POI?
Just because Microsoft stops supporting a product doesn't mean the cracker community does. IIRC, MS recently refused to patch a major vulnerability in NT4 saying that it wasn't worth the effort so close to end-of-life. Since it's closed source, no one else has patched it either. Security (especially for Microsoft, but really everywhere) is a race between the crackers ripping things apart and the patchers putting them back together again. When the patchers stop running, the software starts looking like swiss chees.
And that doesn't even get into compatibility issues....
Approval voting has problems too, along with its general tendency to produce candidates who say as little as possible as elegantly as possible. Suppose you have:
30% prefer A, tolerate B
30% prefer B, tolerate A
40% prefer C
whichever of A or B convinces his supporters to not acknowledge their acceptance of the other will win -- unless they both do so, in which case C will. That's messed up too.
Voting reforms can help but they won't solve everything. Every voting system is abusable at a mathematical level. Take the following example:
33% of voters prefer candidate A, tolerate candidate B and detest candadate C
35% of voters prefer candidate B, tolerate candidate C and detest candadate A
32% of voters prefer candidate C, tolerate candidate A and detest candadate B
Common sense says B should win
In our modern current system, B would win unless 3% worth of C voters decided that it was hopeless and they should vote A, in which case A would win
Under instant runoff voting, C would be eliminated and A would win with 65%, unless 1.5% worth of B voted C so that A would be eliminated, in which case B would win with 66.5%. Now that's even more freaky.
I think game theorists have actually proven that nothing works right regarding elections. Some improvements can be made (and I suspect IRV's flaws are less likely to become of practical importance than our current system's) but the real changes we need are an independant media and an informed public.
The idea of the $1 fee isn't to effect cost-benefit calculations. Clearly, Disney isn't going to give up Mickey for a dollar. The idea is to ensure that forgotten copyrights go away.
It's a serious problem. Books have been lost because probate forgot about the copyrights. No publisher would consider re-issuing something without a clear license, so one by one the surviving copies were lost, until the work failed to exist.
There are several famous cases where a book was down to a handful of partial copies when someone set out to save it. It can take years of work to track down a copyright holder.
One of the big dangers of perpetual copyrights is that a text can be suppressed by its 'owner', either intentionally or accidentally. The fee should cut down on accidents.
I doubt I could get away with putting my own cute mouse into cartoons and onto t-shirts. Maybe, but maybe not. And it's not good enough to be acquitted, against Disney's legal team, you need to be overwhelmingly in the clear or you'll never finish paying off your legal bills.
But, more importantly, genuine derivatives have their place. Disney is cas ein point -- all their work is derivative (well, most of it). Couldn't they have thought up their own plotlines? Well, probably (maybe not) but if they had to, they wouldn't have been able to spend their effort on animation quality. Should their work not exist?
Most of all, why is it ok for them and not for us?
Re:Money crunches create platform dependencies
on
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
·
· Score: 1
It's not really hard -- I've hardly ever seen archetechture dependant code outside of the kernel.
Assuming you're using C, the important thing is not to cast pointers, except going to and from void* when you know you're right. In other words, never do this:
int i;
char c;
i=42;
c=*(char*)(&i);
The value of c will be archetechture dependant (42 on x86, 0 on PPC).
Other than that, be careful when bitshifting, and never base anything on the assumption that you know how large something is. Also, never call malloc without the relevant sizeof.
In C++, treat the class structure logically and you'll be fine.
In higher level languages, just watch your bit manipulation (if any).
I'm not suggesting we force any theme on anyone (how coud we?) I'm suggesting we make some things available.
themes.freshmeat.net has popularities and ratings for its themes. If we take the highest, and bridge them over, and then publicize it (at least in the theme homepage, maybe we can get the freshmeat people to link it atomatically), then people who like those themes can use them everywhere.
If we can write some good automatic translation tools, then anything anyone wants should be doable quickly. Soon, anyone who wants a unified desktop will be able to have it without sacrificing aesthetics in their viewpoint
If you want to carry duct tape with you everywhere...
Take an ordinary roll of duct tape. As you will observe, it is too large and round to conviniently fit in a pocket or similar. Take a small knife and carve a ring around the inside, putting maybe half an inch outside it. Don't cut all the way around; just pry apart the adjacent layers and pull.
In order to do this, you will need to break the inner cardboard. This can be done by brute force.
Pull the outer shell off the inner. Cut the single layer of duct tape that still attatches them.
Squash the outer ring so that it is linear, with 180 degree folds.
Stick it in your pocket, or wherever
profit?
If anyone claims a patent on this, I've got witnesses that I've been doing this for years.
It is certainly possible -- I frequently do -- to run Gnome apps in KDE or vice versa or both in another environment. While basic interoperability works, they do look different. Some people have aesthetic objections to one scrollbar being blue while all the others are neon pink. (Personally, I have aesthetic objections to neon pink scrollbars, but that's irrelevant.)
Maybe somebody's already doing this, but wouldn't it be nice to have themes that made the differences go away? I realize this is what Redhat tried with Bluecurve, but Bluecurve was ugly. Perhaps the most popular themes for each hould be duplicated on the other. Maybe with matching mozilla and xmms skins too....
Of course, dialogs would still be an issue. It would take some real re-working to make Gnome and KDE share dialogs. Might still be possible....
Maybe I'll even do it, if no one else already is.
Now if we can just do something about OpenOffice....
...except that getting the code on there in the first place is still tricky. No soldering, but you have to swap around IDE cables and such. No trouble for the average/.er
Anyway, I've saved it to local storage so U can mirror it when it gets suppressed. I'm not putting it up yet so as not to/. my poor box. I urge everyone to do likewise.
It isn't that surprising. Unless MS has changed its contracts, HP is still paying them for a WinXP license on the Mandrake boxen, on the logic that it could have had WinXP installed on it. If the US had anti-trust law, they might get in trouble for this.
Of course, it's still cheaper, because Mandrake comes with office, graphics, networking, and development software that's sold seperately (and expensively) for windows.
I'm writing this/. post from a 700MHz Celeron. I put my box through *much* heavier usage than a typical business user. I frequently surf the web in mozilla while my software compiles with OpenWriter and Gimp open on other desktops. I've sometimes wanted more RAM (I have 192Mb) but I don't need a faster chip.
OTOH, I doubt much cheaper than a 2.0GHz Celeron is still made, except for the Via chips without hardware floating point.
I agree completely. Mandrake 9.1 is a really great desktop Linux. I tried RH9. Didn't detect my SB Audigy, still hate RPM, even with up2date. Mandrake 9.1 detected everything, including my crappy Epson USB printer, configured everything, DrakRPM is a wonderful tool.
It's a rather unpleasant though that the leader of User-Friendly Linux could go down. I'm glad to hear they're doing better at the moment, but who can understand corporate accounting?
But this is Free Software, and if Mandrake falls, someone else can take it up. So far,a lot of user-friendliness work has been done by for-profits. There's no reason this has to be the case. If Mandrake fails, is there anyone planning to start where they left off? Are there people ready to work on this?
I'll put in as much time I can.
Re:Anyone else read subject and think....
on
Bill Gates On Linux
·
· Score: 1
There's no use in prime factoring large numbers if you're limited to word size. You should use the GNU Multiple Precision Library (there are others, but this one will annoy BG most).
I might also suggest testing the input to make sure it's prime. The library can do that for you IIRC
Slashdot Mirror
All right, my argument's not very good -- but theirs is non-existant. I sure hope claims like that don't get through in court.
There are two fights here. There's SCO vs IBM, fought in court over whether IBM's aid to Linux was legitemate. This one will be fought by IBM's lawyers who will point out that IBM was writing operating systems before SCO was founded and doesn't need anyone's help. That fight IBM is sure to win: they have the facts, the law, and the mountains of lawyers on their side.
The other fight is SCO vs the Open Source Community, being fought in the media. Hence "Linux was like a bicycle" and the slew of slanders to indicate we can't code anything without IBM holding our hands our copying it from SCO. It is remenicient of MS's "Unless Linux violates IP rights, t will fail to innovate" FUD, leading some to suggest SCO is acting as a proxy for MS.
Anyway, IBM isn't helping there. Maybe they think that by saying nothing they are sneering at SCO and decreasing their legitimacy. Maybe they're right. Maybe they feal that it's not their fight. It's too bad, IBM gave Linux some of the best traditional advertising it's ever had. Anyway, we seem to be in that fight alone.
Well, we beat MS's FUD, we can beat SCO's!
Even so, Wordperfect is still the best word processor out there. From reveal codes to draggable margins (7.0+) to such simple things as justify all, Wordperfect does so much no other word processer can. When I have serious desktop publishing needs, I still seek out wordperfect, difficult though it may be to find.
But such is the way of proprietary software. It comes, it goes, and we can only mourn its passing. Why is it that Wordperfect's clearly superior ideas haven't appeared in OSS word processors? Is the OpenOffice team unfamiliar with WordPerfect?
Let us remember Wordperfect, and let us bring that memory into our own work now.
IMHO, Lexmark's arguments are very strained, but resellers aren't looking for a fight, even one they can win. As a result, generic ink cartridges are hard to find.
obTopic: I think a lot of people are boycotting Lexmark over this, so don't go there, whatever you do.
The big problem is that the president currently declares when the war ended. Maybe we could have the excecution when the president leaves office, whether the war's ended yet or not. Keep the two term rule, of course.
And now you know!
Subject: Re: [Followup] RE: Possibly Include HTMLParser Jar in contribcode?
From: "Andrew C. Oliver" <acoliver <at> apache.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:12:12 -0400
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.jakarta.poi.devel
You cannot. Though the FSF has stated that the Apache interpretation was correct and that importing classes from LGPL jar files in Java does indeed cause the "viral clause" to apply to Java.
Please stop saying "lift the code" or other things that imply violating the copyright.
Under no circumstances can any LGPL code be used as it would require us to LGPL our code per section 6 of the LGPL license and the statement I received from the Free Software Foundation's Dave Turner (the man behind licensing <at> fsf.org):
" Me:
DT: This sort of linking falls under section 6 of the LGPL. "In short, Sam was right, I was wrong.
-Andy
On 7/16/03 4:55 AM, "EPugh <at> upstate.com" <EPugh <at> upstate.com> wrote:
--Andrew C. Oliver
http://www.superlinksoftware.com/poi.jsp
Custom enhancements and Commercial Implementation for Jakarta POI
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi
For Java and Excel, Got POI?
And that doesn't even get into compatibility issues....
30% prefer A, tolerate B
30% prefer B, tolerate A
40% prefer C
whichever of A or B convinces his supporters to not acknowledge their acceptance of the other will win -- unless they both do so, in which case C will. That's messed up too.
Personally, I would regard group sex with three ton lizards as a bad thing but, hey, if it turns you on, it's your funeral.
33% of voters prefer candidate A, tolerate candidate B and detest candadate C
35% of voters prefer candidate B, tolerate candidate C and detest candadate A
32% of voters prefer candidate C, tolerate candidate A and detest candadate B
Common sense says B should win
In our modern current system, B would win unless 3% worth of C voters decided that it was hopeless and they should vote A, in which case A would win
Under instant runoff voting, C would be eliminated and A would win with 65%, unless 1.5% worth of B voted C so that A would be eliminated, in which case B would win with 66.5%. Now that's even more freaky.
I think game theorists have actually proven that nothing works right regarding elections. Some improvements can be made (and I suspect IRV's flaws are less likely to become of practical importance than our current system's) but the real changes we need are an independant media and an informed public.
It's a serious problem. Books have been lost because probate forgot about the copyrights. No publisher would consider re-issuing something without a clear license, so one by one the surviving copies were lost, until the work failed to exist.
There are several famous cases where a book was down to a handful of partial copies when someone set out to save it. It can take years of work to track down a copyright holder.
One of the big dangers of perpetual copyrights is that a text can be suppressed by its 'owner', either intentionally or accidentally. The fee should cut down on accidents.
But, more importantly, genuine derivatives have their place. Disney is cas ein point -- all their work is derivative (well, most of it). Couldn't they have thought up their own plotlines? Well, probably (maybe not) but if they had to, they wouldn't have been able to spend their effort on animation quality. Should their work not exist?
Most of all, why is it ok for them and not for us?
Assuming you're using C, the important thing is not to cast pointers, except going to and from void* when you know you're right. In other words, never do this:
The value of c will be archetechture dependant (42 on x86, 0 on PPC).Other than that, be careful when bitshifting, and never base anything on the assumption that you know how large something is. Also, never call malloc without the relevant sizeof.
In C++, treat the class structure logically and you'll be fine.
In higher level languages, just watch your bit manipulation (if any).
In assembly, use C. :-)
What, is it Athlon based?
Am I the only one who really wants to go out and get a VAIO just so that I can set this up? I'm sure I can find someone to call me!
I'm not suggesting we force any theme on anyone (how coud we?) I'm suggesting we make some things available.
themes.freshmeat.net has popularities and ratings for its themes. If we take the highest, and bridge them over, and then publicize it (at least in the theme homepage, maybe we can get the freshmeat people to link it atomatically), then people who like those themes can use them everywhere.
If we can write some good automatic translation tools, then anything anyone wants should be doable quickly. Soon, anyone who wants a unified desktop will be able to have it without sacrificing aesthetics in their viewpoint
If anyone claims a patent on this, I've got witnesses that I've been doing this for years.
Maybe somebody's already doing this, but wouldn't it be nice to have themes that made the differences go away? I realize this is what Redhat tried with Bluecurve, but Bluecurve was ugly. Perhaps the most popular themes for each hould be duplicated on the other. Maybe with matching mozilla and xmms skins too....
Of course, dialogs would still be an issue. It would take some real re-working to make Gnome and KDE share dialogs. Might still be possible....
Maybe I'll even do it, if no one else already is.
Now if we can just do something about OpenOffice....
And about my abuse of elipses....
Anyway, I've saved it to local storage so U can mirror it when it gets suppressed. I'm not putting it up yet so as not to /. my poor box. I urge everyone to do likewise.
Of course, it's still cheaper, because Mandrake comes with office, graphics, networking, and development software that's sold seperately (and expensively) for windows.
OTOH, I doubt much cheaper than a 2.0GHz Celeron is still made, except for the Via chips without hardware floating point.
But this is Free Software, and if Mandrake falls, someone else can take it up. So far,a lot of user-friendliness work has been done by for-profits. There's no reason this has to be the case. If Mandrake fails, is there anyone planning to start where they left off? Are there people ready to work on this?
I'll put in as much time I can.
I guess you all saw that coming
I might also suggest testing the input to make sure it's prime. The library can do that for you IIRC