Actually, *BSD and GNU/Linux are pretty near interchangeable at this point. I think Linux has better peripheral hardware support, but they're both near 100% on ethernet and SCSI, so it doesn't really matter for servers.
In user-space, I suspect *BSD and GNU+ are virtually identical, probaly more than half of the actual installed software on a GNU/Linux or *BSD server is the same.
Not that this is nessesarily a bad thing. Having a little redundancy is helpful. If any major bug shows up in the Linux or BSD kernels, we'll be glad to have a near-drop-in replacement!
There's only one small step from a book where Harry meets Gandalf to one where Gandalf sexually abuses Harry, and while the libertarians here will doubtless fight to the death for peoples' rights to produce books like that, I can't help
feeling that an author deserves some (limited, temporary) right to protect what happens to her characters.
If that's really a concern, then it's somewhat different concern and blocking all derivatives is massive overkill. Perhaps there could be slander laws for major characters under copyright? (it would be Tolkien's estate that could sue, in this case).
If some group dedicated to rehabilitating sexually abused children wrote a fanfic in which Harry is abused and recovers from it, would you have the same objections? (Objections about credibility or whether this would be effective don't count)
PS: I was amazed to check ASSTR and find no Harry Potter/Gandalf crossovers. Both featured in numerous erotic fanfics, but none together. Rest assured our posts have inspired someone....
This actually makes the situation stranger. Having such a faster FSB is a bigger advantage over Intel than any chip-design advantages they may have -- they should have chosen benchmarks that point it out. These systems will make truly excellent heavy-duty graphics/video workstations or mid-weight database servers.
Now if the price would only come down into my range....
But then you die on bus speed. If you need more than 4Gb of RAM, then you need to be able to access it quickly. The G5s ship with 167MHz busses! P4 or Xeon use 533; Athlon uses 400, IIRC, UltraSparc (the other 64-bit Unix workstation) uses 733. I guess if you really need 64-bit addressing, your stuck with G5 until Sparc or Alpha becomes affordable, Itanium becomes effective, or x86-64 becomes available, but it's not going to perform well.
Holy crap:
The "My Utah Search" graphic here links to a porn site. This is beautiful.
(I have no mod points, but I'll repost with my karma bonus)
The graphic is in the right column. Wow.
Sadly, the diagnosis is in the medication. Amphetamines are stimulants to most people, but they calm down people with ADHD. This is a 180 degree reversal of the same chemical, fully replicable. There clearly is a qualitative difference.
Hopefully we'll develope a non-invasive (well slightly-invasive) chemical test for it. For now, the only way to tell ADHD from simple lack of internal discipline is to administer the medication and see what happens.
In the mean time, the misdiagnoses rate is undeniably massive. If you don't have a clear and consistant responce to the medication, it's probably best to drop it (especially considering the side effects).
As the grandparent stated, hat you create is not automatically a derived work of everything you've seen. If it were, Disney would own the entire creative output of humanity (who didn't watch their IP as a child?)
What can be automatic is trade secrets. Here, there is precident (though I'm not sure how much) for presumption of automatic disclosure. Those who have seen MS code are forbidden to work on similar code elsewhere not because it would be a derived work but because it would reveal to the world some mystical MS essence.
We're safe from all that here. Nothing that can be publicly downloaded from the web can be a trade secret.
Firstly, RMS holds no position of legal authority. He's an expert on licensing issues by now, and I'd be interested in his opinion, but that's all -- we don't need to wait for him.
Since if meets the OSD, it surely also meets the FSD (they're virtually identical) and the FSF will probably acknowledge it soon.
GPL code clearly can not be included into plan9 (except by dual-license, of course)
Plan9 code (I think) can be included into a GPLed word (such as linux). The relevant provision is "Distributor may choose to distribute the Program in any form under this Agreement or under its own license agreement, provided that... it complies with the terms and conditions of this Agreement." AFAICT, the GPL does, but IANAL and the term isn't clear to me.
In any case, though, this means that free software purists can download it, play with it, understand it, and then re-implement it in linux/bsd/whatever, and that is very good news indeed.
obOSS: if you play Freeciv, you can edit a few text files and give your units whatever powers you like -- phalanxes could indeed defeat a tank (not that it would improve gameplay to do that).
But can it still be used as a floatation device
on
The Buttocks Have It
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
in the event of a water landing?
I'd hate to have my plane land gracefully in the Atlantic Ocean, the passengers exit the plane in an orderly manner via the designated exit rows, and then be pulled to the bottom by the electronics in my seat cushen.
Suppose you were looking for bread, and you visited two bakers, one of whom took you on a tour of his kitchens, boasting about how his flour was the best in the world, and his butter came from a bloodline of cows with two thousand years of documented history, and the other refused to let you in his kitchens, and seperated them from his storefront with opaque double-doors with "Do Not Enter" signs? Even if you know nothing about baking, the difference should be significant.
Furthermore, the first baker has shown many other expert bakers on similar tours, and they were all impressed. You have no particular reason to trust any of them, but a conspiracy on that scale is quite hard to believe. Also, the tours are open to anyone -- with no check on how much baking the guest knows or how he may be disposed toward the baker.
Now if you add in (special to Brazil's case) that the second baker is a member of a rival clan (USA) which has a history of underhanded dealings (Chile, Nicaragua, Columbia), you might not be willing to eat the second bakers bread after all!
In summary, the fact that you have checked something is best, but the fact that you can check it counts for a lot.
Suppose the mystery common code was taken from Linux into UnixWare, and is significant enough to make UnixWare a "derivitive work" of Linux. In that case, SCO has engaged in simple large-scale software piracy. They have the option of complying with the license agreement, or they have the option of pulling the product (until they can clean it) and paying monetary damages to the original authors (who may be a bit bloodthirsty).
Also, if UnixWare has Linux code, and AIX has UnixWare code, that doesn't nessesarily mean AIX has Linux code. IIRC, most of the UnixWare->AIX copying happened before Linux became significant.
The only way something might be forced GPL here is if someone explicitely released it as such -- as SCO did with Caldera Linux. I'm not sure on the law there, since they presumably acted in ignorance, but SCO/Caldera did distribute Linux (and all its components) under the GPL, which indicates that they claim no limitations on any of those components.
RMSy Note: this is an appropriate use of the term "Linux", as I am speaking of the kernal.
It's no surprise they're procrastinating and blustering -- the AIX royalties are probably their only revenue source. I mean, Sun has a perpetual (pay-once) license, and it's not that SCO has any customers of their own.
If they pull the plug on IBM, they won't be able to pay their own lawyers!
SCO has (or claims to have) evidence that there exists duplicate code between UnixWare and Linux. They claim it appeared in UnixWare first, but have not indicated any evidence of that (except for the general thought that if they knew they'd pirated it, they wouldn't be stupid enough to bring it to everyone's attention). Furthermore, while SCO must concoct a hard-to-believe story about IBM to explain how we set eyes on their code, everyone knows that they've seen ours.
So there isn't much evidence either way (though, as soon as which lines they are leak, we'll check logs to see who contributed them), but there's a whole lot of speculation going against SCO.
If you're looking to pick up the classics of hacker fiction, you've got to include Vinge. I'd recommend either True Names and Other Dangers (short stories) or A Fire Upon the Deeps.
True Names is an especially important story for hackerdom. IIRC, it's the first to explore virtual-reality networking and it does a better job of it than Nueromancer or Snow Crash. Incidentally, it's available on-line, though I'm not sure about the legality of it.
I'm speaking from both experience and benchmarks. It's startup time is hideous, far worse than perl/python/bash/clisp, which are all interpretted languages (well, perl and python convert to bytecode internally, but they have to do it every time they run). It's overall performance is painful. The Great Computer Language Shootout places it between common lisp and python in overall performance (though dead last by a wide margin in startup cost). These are interpretted languages, so the bytecode excuse doesn't fly. One thing the shootout doesn't mention is GUIs. Java GUIs (whether AWT or SWING) are too slow for practical use (from my personal experience at least).
I suspect that Java's problem is that it uses itself too much. When I run a graphical app in python, the routines that actually paint individual widgets are written in C. When I use Java, they're written in Java. This gets it some improved portability, but at a serious performance cost. Considering that there are probably no more than a few dozen operating systems currently in significant use (and fewer than ten if all UNIXen are counted together), this was a bad move.
I maintain that C does enumerated types the right way. They are ints, but you don't have to specify their values. This lets you use as indecies them in arrays, iterate over them, and categorize them with standard comparison operators. No object-oriented trickery can match the flexibility of a simple C enum.
Just because there's no 'vendor' to offer 24/7 support doesn't mean someone else won't. Often it's one of the authors (think Cygnus). There are lots of companies offering 24/7 support for F/OS S and they're generally very well reputed.
Make everyone's PGP (or GPG, whatever) key available by some variant of the finger protocol. Now make all e-mail encrypted.
Now you'll need some CPU time for every e-mail sent, and you'll need to use your own bandwidth (can't have open relays replicate your single message to a million recipients if they each need a seperate signature).
It should also make it a lot easier to block spammers by sender, though I suppose they can change keys every five minutes.
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. [emphasis altered]
GPL software is copyright its author[s], unless they chose to give it to the FSF (which is rare). A legally correct copyright notice must indicate (accurately) by whom it is copyrighted. This means that you can't quite claim authorship of a GPLed program somebody else wrote.
It still doesn't work
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
All right, suppose I have the latest DRM-enabled Linux, properly signed by the grand commision on DRM. And suppose I have some audio file DRMed to only play on alternate thursdays (and a player that supports it).
On one particular thursday (no Vogons, though), I replace my/dev/dsp with an ordinary file and play the song. I don't hear anything, but I now have/dev/dsp as a decrypted copy of the song (in dsp format, which something-or-other can convert to ogg). If I need any ioctl statements, I can use strace.
I now play this song (in its ogg form) on wednesdays, oh the horror.
Ah, you say, but the sound driver will take input in an encrypted form, and the new dsp format will be useless! Not so. The decryption code for this new format must be available under the GPL! I just read through this code (which probably includes private RSA keys) and build my converter.
Now, this all takes technical skill, but it's potentially scriptable. And considering the number of highly talented hackers highly opposed to DRM, I bet it'll be scripted within 24 hours.
Free software can't do DRM, no matter who trusts it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, *BSD and GNU/Linux are pretty near interchangeable at this point. I think Linux has better peripheral hardware support, but they're both near 100% on ethernet and SCSI, so it doesn't really matter for servers.
In user-space, I suspect *BSD and GNU+ are virtually identical, probaly more than half of the actual installed software on a GNU/Linux or *BSD server is the same.
Not that this is nessesarily a bad thing. Having a little redundancy is helpful. If any major bug shows up in the Linux or BSD kernels, we'll be glad to have a near-drop-in replacement!
If some group dedicated to rehabilitating sexually abused children wrote a fanfic in which Harry is abused and recovers from it, would you have the same objections? (Objections about credibility or whether this would be effective don't count)
PS: I was amazed to check ASSTR and find no Harry Potter/Gandalf crossovers. Both featured in numerous erotic fanfics, but none together. Rest assured our posts have inspired someone....
This actually makes the situation stranger. Having such a faster FSB is a bigger advantage over Intel than any chip-design advantages they may have -- they should have chosen benchmarks that point it out. These systems will make truly excellent heavy-duty graphics/video workstations or mid-weight database servers.
Now if the price would only come down into my range....
But then you die on bus speed. If you need more than 4Gb of RAM, then you need to be able to access it quickly. The G5s ship with 167MHz busses! P4 or Xeon use 533; Athlon uses 400, IIRC, UltraSparc (the other 64-bit Unix workstation) uses 733. I guess if you really need 64-bit addressing, your stuck with G5 until Sparc or Alpha becomes affordable, Itanium becomes effective, or x86-64 becomes available, but it's not going to perform well.
Holy crap: The "My Utah Search" graphic here links to a porn site. This is beautiful. (I have no mod points, but I'll repost with my karma bonus) The graphic is in the right column. Wow.
The real link is this one which doesn't ask for any licence agreement, it just offers it fo rfree to the world.
Sadly, the diagnosis is in the medication. Amphetamines are stimulants to most people, but they calm down people with ADHD. This is a 180 degree reversal of the same chemical, fully replicable. There clearly is a qualitative difference.
Hopefully we'll develope a non-invasive (well slightly-invasive) chemical test for it. For now, the only way to tell ADHD from simple lack of internal discipline is to administer the medication and see what happens.
In the mean time, the misdiagnoses rate is undeniably massive. If you don't have a clear and consistant responce to the medication, it's probably best to drop it (especially considering the side effects).
As the grandparent stated, hat you create is not automatically a derived work of everything you've seen. If it were, Disney would own the entire creative output of humanity (who didn't watch their IP as a child?)
What can be automatic is trade secrets. Here, there is precident (though I'm not sure how much) for presumption of automatic disclosure. Those who have seen MS code are forbidden to work on similar code elsewhere not because it would be a derived work but because it would reveal to the world some mystical MS essence.
We're safe from all that here. Nothing that can be publicly downloaded from the web can be a trade secret.
Since if meets the OSD, it surely also meets the FSD (they're virtually identical) and the FSF will probably acknowledge it soon.
GPL code clearly can not be included into plan9 (except by dual-license, of course)
Plan9 code (I think) can be included into a GPLed word (such as linux). The relevant provision is "Distributor may choose to distribute the Program in any form under this Agreement or under its own license agreement, provided that ... it complies with the terms and conditions of this Agreement." AFAICT, the GPL does, but IANAL and the term isn't clear to me.
In any case, though, this means that free software purists can download it, play with it, understand it, and then re-implement it in linux/bsd/whatever, and that is very good news indeed.
'Cause civilization should be free!
Hey, is sluggy ob around here or not?
I'd hate to have my plane land gracefully in the Atlantic Ocean, the passengers exit the plane in an orderly manner via the designated exit rows, and then be pulled to the bottom by the electronics in my seat cushen.
Wouldn't you hate that?
Furthermore, the first baker has shown many other expert bakers on similar tours, and they were all impressed. You have no particular reason to trust any of them, but a conspiracy on that scale is quite hard to believe. Also, the tours are open to anyone -- with no check on how much baking the guest knows or how he may be disposed toward the baker.
Now if you add in (special to Brazil's case) that the second baker is a member of a rival clan (USA) which has a history of underhanded dealings (Chile, Nicaragua, Columbia), you might not be willing to eat the second bakers bread after all!
In summary, the fact that you have checked something is best, but the fact that you can check it counts for a lot.
Suppose the mystery common code was taken from Linux into UnixWare, and is significant enough to make UnixWare a "derivitive work" of Linux. In that case, SCO has engaged in simple large-scale software piracy. They have the option of complying with the license agreement, or they have the option of pulling the product (until they can clean it) and paying monetary damages to the original authors (who may be a bit bloodthirsty).
Also, if UnixWare has Linux code, and AIX has UnixWare code, that doesn't nessesarily mean AIX has Linux code. IIRC, most of the UnixWare->AIX copying happened before Linux became significant.
The only way something might be forced GPL here is if someone explicitely released it as such -- as SCO did with Caldera Linux. I'm not sure on the law there, since they presumably acted in ignorance, but SCO/Caldera did distribute Linux (and all its components) under the GPL, which indicates that they claim no limitations on any of those components.
RMSy Note: this is an appropriate use of the term "Linux", as I am speaking of the kernal.
If they pull the plug on IBM, they won't be able to pay their own lawyers!
So there isn't much evidence either way (though, as soon as which lines they are leak, we'll check logs to see who contributed them), but there's a whole lot of speculation going against SCO.
No, it's just the /. effect taking out a memory-hungry VM. You didn't expect it to hold up, did you?
True Names is an especially important story for hackerdom. IIRC, it's the first to explore virtual-reality networking and it does a better job of it than Nueromancer or Snow Crash. Incidentally, it's available on-line, though I'm not sure about the legality of it.
I'm speaking from both experience and benchmarks. It's startup time is hideous, far worse than perl/python/bash/clisp, which are all interpretted languages (well, perl and python convert to bytecode internally, but they have to do it every time they run). It's overall performance is painful. The Great Computer Language Shootout places it between common lisp and python in overall performance (though dead last by a wide margin in startup cost). These are interpretted languages, so the bytecode excuse doesn't fly. One thing the shootout doesn't mention is GUIs. Java GUIs (whether AWT or SWING) are too slow for practical use (from my personal experience at least).
I suspect that Java's problem is that it uses itself too much. When I run a graphical app in python, the routines that actually paint individual widgets are written in C. When I use Java, they're written in Java. This gets it some improved portability, but at a serious performance cost. Considering that there are probably no more than a few dozen operating systems currently in significant use (and fewer than ten if all UNIXen are counted together), this was a bad move.
I maintain that C does enumerated types the right way. They are ints, but you don't have to specify their values. This lets you use as indecies them in arrays, iterate over them, and categorize them with standard comparison operators. No object-oriented trickery can match the flexibility of a simple C enum.
So meet requirenments!
Put it on both sides and you've got it.
Make everyone's PGP (or GPG, whatever) key available by some variant of the finger protocol. Now make all e-mail encrypted.
Now you'll need some CPU time for every e-mail sent, and you'll need to use your own bandwidth (can't have open relays replicate your single message to a million recipients if they each need a seperate signature).
It should also make it a lot easier to block spammers by sender, though I suppose they can change keys every five minutes.
GPL software is copyright its author[s], unless they chose to give it to the FSF (which is rare). A legally correct copyright notice must indicate (accurately) by whom it is copyrighted. This means that you can't quite claim authorship of a GPLed program somebody else wrote.
On one particular thursday (no Vogons, though), I replace my /dev/dsp with an ordinary file and play the song. I don't hear anything, but I now have /dev/dsp as a decrypted copy of the song (in dsp format, which something-or-other can convert to ogg). If I need any ioctl statements, I can use strace.
I now play this song (in its ogg form) on wednesdays, oh the horror.
Ah, you say, but the sound driver will take input in an encrypted form, and the new dsp format will be useless! Not so. The decryption code for this new format must be available under the GPL! I just read through this code (which probably includes private RSA keys) and build my converter.
Now, this all takes technical skill, but it's potentially scriptable. And considering the number of highly talented hackers highly opposed to DRM, I bet it'll be scripted within 24 hours.
Free software can't do DRM, no matter who trusts it.