Is there some kind of god-given law that every company must do something with Linux, and those who don't deserve to be tortured and killed in the most horrible way.
I'm guessing you are a troll, but anyways...
All I said was that for a company to succeed it must have a consistent strategy. If they say they'll never get involved with linux, and follow that, then that's fine. Or if they feel linux is inevitable and rebrand themselves as a linux company, that's fine too. But if they change their strategy every week based on the latest market forecast, then they're doomed.
My observation had nothing to do with whether Sun is good or evil, just that what they're doing doesn't make business sense.
As many have noted, Sun have never formed a coherent strategy about linux. Their statements re. linux seem to be a mix of hostility, skepticism and euphoria. Also, they have a finger in every pie without a clear vision of where they want to be in a market of ups and downs. And lately they have shown that they are not above cheap marketing gimmicks either -- witness the branding of Mad Hatter as the "Java desktop system" (its actually just another linux distro.)
I'll have to try Firebird and see what the rest of these are, but it looks like the difference is pretty small.
Try it. You'll find that its not one killer feature that separates the two, but rather several small features. For instance, nothing else handles bookmarks as intuitively as FB does.
It was missing some configuration stuff that I didn't feel I could live without
So did I, initially. But if there's configuration stuff you can't live without, I'm sure you're geeky enough to not mind editing user.js yourself or using about:config. That's what I did.
You'll also find that the stuff that isn't there in the options dialog is stuff that you change once and forget about. Then you'll find that being able to quickly find what you want in the options is a big plus.
BTW, for us who are too lazy to go find out ourselves, what makes firebird better than mozilla itself? I find mozilla to be quite satisfactory, why would I switch?
From http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/compare/:
At first I thought its a nice thing that courts and lawmakers at least partially seem to understand that the internet is different from conventional channels, with some hope that in the future they would also understand that software is different from other arts. Then I realized that all this could be merely because there aren't any uber-corporations interested brib^W lobbying politicians to tax the internet the way they do for software patents, ridiculous copyright laws etc.
Doesn't the author understand how the Linux/OSS community works, or what? Its not the devs' job to make shiny installation druids that you can click through. That's what distros are for. If you want to compile software, be prepared to do your homework. If not wait for the.deb to become available or subscribe to RedHat network etc.
I see the similarity, but there is also a difference: in the case of the SPEWS blocklist the decision of an admin to use it is voluntary, and not mandated by the government. Therefore it can be argued that blocking a whole ISP that hosts spammers is not a bad thing -- if all the customers of that ISP are affected, they will move away, and it will hit the ISP where it counts -- money. As long as they aren't made to suffer financially, there will always be ISPs willing to host spammers. I'm only saying that this sounds like a reasonable argument, not that it is unequivocally right. Tricky questions, certainly. A recent controversy about this aspect of the SPEWS blocklist produced some interesting arguments for both sides. When the blocking is required by law, of course, we must be far more circumspect, since the possibility of abuse is great.
I have written an open letter to the open source community. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to reveal its contents since that would mean compromising our trade secrets. However, I welcome you to license a copy of my open letter by signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement and payment of $699.
Yours affectionately,
Darl McBride
CEO, SCO Inc.
Please go ahead; it would be nice to have a different perspective. If, indeed, the article contains "a large number of falsehoods and half-truths", that would be surprising since the allaboutsex.org website is non-profit and run by volunteers, and its not like they have an agenda against the Mormon church or anything. But I'm certainly interested in hearing your views.
Which, I guess is, entirely different from an actual religion carrying out massive and fraudulent psychological abuse?
Your sarcasm is wasted on me - I'm an atheist myself. However, there is indeed a big difference between what the CoS is doing and, say, people who try to convince you of the creation myth. Do you understand the word "abuse"? Can't you see that it is different from "deceit"?
From Spaink's site:
Scientology urged him to get the money any which way he could. According to Fishman, they also assigned him to kill somebody, and failing that, ordered him to commit suicide.
Certainly there are other (pseudo) religions that carry out systematic psychological abuse, and I'm not condoning them: for example see this chilling article - sin and death in Mormon country; but then these are by far the exception rather than the rule.
Absolutely. If anyone reading this hasn't already read the stuff at xenu.net, please please do so now to know what the CoS is really about. In fact, it is not a religion at all, but merely uses the pretense of religion as a veil for a massive and fraudulent operation of psychological abuse. The aim, of course, is to strip you of your last penny.
OnceUponATime, I used to have a password dictionary for download, here's the thoughts on passwords I'd written on that page:
Humans are horrible at selecting and using passwords.
We have to live with passwords, however, since no other authencation
mechanism is good enough to find use outside niches. (Let's face it:
when humans interact with computers, we still have to go more than
halfway to meet them.)
We keep forgetting passwords, because
we aren't really good at remembering lexical/numerical data.
There are three things people to about this: write passwords down,
choose weak passwords and choose the same password for several unrelated
accounts. All of these are bad. Very bad.
Choosing the same password for different accounts is particularly
bad. I imagine script kiddies have well-maintained databases of
username:password pairs going around. (If they don't, at least
the NSA has one.)
I remember reading somewhere about how someone could easily
acquire a sizeable list of username:password pairs. Set up a website
offering free porn. No popups or other annoyances, but require
users to create an account before being able to access much.
Get word out about your site. Bingo. There you go.
A lot of websites store their users' passwords as plaintext.
If crackers were consceintious enough to update a centralized
list every time a website got cracked, I suppose anyone who uses
the same password everywhere can be more or less certain that the
black hats have got it.
I'm guilty of reusing passwords myself. I use one of only about 3 or 4
for accounts on random websites, but at least I use different ones
for the machines on which I have any data that matters. The
alternative of remembering all your account:password pairs is
simply too much work. Browsers that fill in your password for
you alleviate the problem somewhat, but if you browse from a
lot of different accounts its still a pain.
As a sysadmin there is nothing much
you can do about users writing down passwords or reusing them
(except perhaps lecturing), but you can ensure that they
don't choose weak passwords.
* Compared to the USA, in India trains are by far the most common means of transport between cities because road travel is too slow and air travel is too costly for most.
Trains are used even within cities.
* Trains here have a reputation for always arriving late. Most of the coaches are used long
after they should be discarded, leading to increasd accident frequency.
* Recently the Indian railways has made a lot of efforts to modernize itself, like online reservation, as the parent poster noted.
And I, for one, welcome our new crazily named space rock overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their near-earth asteroid mines.
I personally think Qt is made irrelevant by both of the others because they are not missing anything Qt offers. The tools that come with Qt may not be bundled with them, but comparable tools do exist and can be used free of charge, and most often as Free Software. Qt's biggest weaknesses are its relic called "MOC" and its business orientation. Yes, it's GPL, but not for MS Windows, so you're not really free. FOX and (especially) wxWindows offer similarly advanced sets of widgets and techniques, so you might as well throw Qt away. In terms of portability, it's the same, and wxWindows even adds OS/2 portability. Believe me, I don't want to be unfair to Trolltech or upset dedicated Qt developers. I tried to be objective, and that's my objective conclusion. Maybe we can discuss this point in the comments for this article.
There is a disturbing trend of recent articles that engage in Qt/KDE bashing. Can't help wondering whether it is really a coincidence or not. For instance, here's another freshmeat editorial from a few months back.
Maynard Hill is an American, born in Pennsylvania in 1926. He has been an avid modeler all his life. He has contributed technical advances through his 23 world records. He has contributed as President of the AMA and delegate to international model airplane meetings. Maynard has designed and contructed all the models for this project in spite of the fact that he is legally blind and nearly deaf. Apart from the goal of setting a new record for straight line distance, one of Maynard's objectives is to demonstrate that people with handicaps can overcome them.
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
Remind me, since when did companies have a legal or ethical obligation to release the source for any of their work? Apple is certainly a friend of the open source community, since they pay people to write OSS. This "all your code are belong to us" ideological BS isn't going to help anyone.
Note that "does not recommend APSL 2.0 for new software" != "APSL is bad". The FSF is against almost all licenses other than (L)GPL, including (especially?) BSD. What this means is that if you are writing OSS, then the GPL is your best chance to ensure that your work will always be Free. However, this does not mean that if someone distributes software under some other OSS license, then their intent is to screw you over.
I didn't have to spend any time thinking. I want a window manager that's worth the name. The most important thing is that it should be infinitely configurable. Sawfish is almost perfect for that. But it has several problems: its defaults are ridiculous, (which means I have to lug my.sawfish/custom around or waste time configuring it on each different machine), it has some bugs which result in no window having the focus sometimes, and there's no gtk2 version. Well there is one, but it is an utterly bastardized version written by the redhat folks for gnome2 after the original developer left which bears no resemblance to the gtk1 version.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an excellent article on K5 a while back about how they got into this unenviable position.
All I said was that for a company to succeed it must have a consistent strategy. If they say they'll never get involved with linux, and follow that, then that's fine. Or if they feel linux is inevitable and rebrand themselves as a linux company, that's fine too. But if they change their strategy every week based on the latest market forecast, then they're doomed.
My observation had nothing to do with whether Sun is good or evil, just that what they're doing doesn't make business sense.
As many have noted, Sun have never formed a coherent strategy about linux. Their statements re. linux seem to be a mix of hostility, skepticism and euphoria. Also, they have a finger in every pie without a clear vision of where they want to be in a market of ups and downs. And lately they have shown that they are not above cheap marketing gimmicks either -- witness the branding of Mad Hatter as the "Java desktop system" (its actually just another linux distro.)
Try it. You'll find that its not one killer feature that separates the two, but rather several small features. For instance, nothing else handles bookmarks as intuitively as FB does.
It was missing some configuration stuff that I didn't feel I could live without
So did I, initially. But if there's configuration stuff you can't live without, I'm sure you're geeky enough to not mind editing user.js yourself or using about:config. That's what I did.
You'll also find that the stuff that isn't there in the options dialog is stuff that you change once and forget about. Then you'll find that being able to quickly find what you want in the options is a big plus.
From http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/compare/:
At first I thought its a nice thing that courts and lawmakers at least partially seem to understand that the internet is different from conventional channels, with some hope that in the future they would also understand that software is different from other arts. Then I realized that all this could be merely because there aren't any uber-corporations interested brib^W lobbying politicians to tax the internet the way they do for software patents, ridiculous copyright laws etc.
Doesn't the author understand how the Linux/OSS community works, or what? Its not the devs' job to make shiny installation druids that you can click through. That's what distros are for. If you want to compile software, be prepared to do your homework. If not wait for the
Gimme a break.
Verisign could have made a lot of money by redirecting http://www.freeesktop.org/ and http://www.xoutert.org/ to their own ad pages
Weird Case Mod Roundup
I see the similarity, but there is also a difference: in the case of the SPEWS blocklist the decision of an admin to use it is voluntary, and not mandated by the government. Therefore it can be argued that blocking a whole ISP that hosts spammers is not a bad thing -- if all the customers of that ISP are affected, they will move away, and it will hit the ISP where it counts -- money. As long as they aren't made to suffer financially, there will always be ISPs willing to host spammers. I'm only saying that this sounds like a reasonable argument, not that it is unequivocally right. Tricky questions, certainly. A recent controversy about this aspect of the SPEWS blocklist produced some interesting arguments for both sides. When the blocking is required by law, of course, we must be far more circumspect, since the possibility of abuse is great.
I have written an open letter to the open source community. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to reveal its contents since that would mean compromising our trade secrets. However, I welcome you to license a copy of my open letter by signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement and payment of $699.
Yours affectionately,
Darl McBride
CEO, SCO Inc.
Please go ahead; it would be nice to have a different perspective. If, indeed, the article contains "a large number of falsehoods and half-truths", that would be surprising since the allaboutsex.org website is non-profit and run by volunteers, and its not like they have an agenda against the Mormon church or anything. But I'm certainly interested in hearing your views.
Which, I guess is, entirely different from an actual religion carrying out massive and fraudulent psychological abuse?
Your sarcasm is wasted on me - I'm an atheist myself. However, there is indeed a big difference between what the CoS is doing and, say, people who try to convince you of the creation myth. Do you understand the word "abuse"? Can't you see that it is different from "deceit"?
From Spaink's site:
Certainly there are other (pseudo) religions that carry out systematic psychological abuse, and I'm not condoning them: for example see this chilling article - sin and death in Mormon country; but then these are by far the exception rather than the rule.Absolutely. If anyone reading this hasn't already read the stuff at xenu.net, please please do so now to know what the CoS is really about. In fact, it is not a religion at all, but merely uses the pretense of religion as a veil for a massive and fraudulent operation of psychological abuse. The aim, of course, is to strip you of your last penny.
I thought I'd add some things:
* Compared to the USA, in India trains are by far the most common means of transport between cities because road travel is too slow and air travel is too costly for most.
Trains are used even within cities.
* Trains here have a reputation for always arriving late. Most of the coaches are used long after they should be discarded, leading to increasd accident frequency.
* Recently the Indian railways has made a lot of efforts to modernize itself, like online reservation, as the parent poster noted.
And I, for one, welcome our new crazily named space rock overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their near-earth asteroid mines.
I personally think Qt is made irrelevant by both of the others because they are not missing anything Qt offers. The tools that come with Qt may not be bundled with them, but comparable tools do exist and can be used free of charge, and most often as Free Software. Qt's biggest weaknesses are its relic called "MOC" and its business orientation. Yes, it's GPL, but not for MS Windows, so you're not really free. FOX and (especially) wxWindows offer similarly advanced sets of widgets and techniques, so you might as well throw Qt away. In terms of portability, it's the same, and wxWindows even adds OS/2 portability. Believe me, I don't want to be unfair to Trolltech or upset dedicated Qt developers. I tried to be objective, and that's my objective conclusion. Maybe we can discuss this point in the comments for this article.
There is a disturbing trend of recent articles that engage in Qt/KDE bashing. Can't help wondering whether it is really a coincidence or not. For instance, here's another freshmeat editorial from a few months back.
I hope this doesn't mean that in future polls one of the choices will be CowboyNeal!!!
Check out the FAQ (with really cool pic near bottom of page).
http://tam.plannet21.com/FAQs.htm#leader
That is far easier said than done. See, for instance, Bruce Schneier's explanation of why secure electronic voting is a hard problem.
However, if anyone tries to read your post, all your comments collapse into one.
Remind me, since when did companies have a legal or ethical obligation to release the source for any of their work? Apple is certainly a friend of the open source community, since they pay people to write OSS. This "all your code are belong to us" ideological BS isn't going to help anyone.
Note that "does not recommend APSL 2.0 for new software" != "APSL is bad". The FSF is against almost all licenses other than (L)GPL, including (especially?) BSD. What this means is that if you are writing OSS, then the GPL is your best chance to ensure that your work will always be Free. However, this does not mean that if someone distributes software under some other OSS license, then their intent is to screw you over.
I didn't have to spend any time thinking. I want a window manager that's worth the name. The most important thing is that it should be infinitely configurable. Sawfish is almost perfect for that. But it has several problems: its defaults are ridiculous, (which means I have to lug my .sawfish/custom around or waste time configuring it on each different machine), it has some bugs which result in no window having the focus sometimes, and there's no gtk2 version. Well there is one, but it is an utterly bastardized version written by the redhat folks for gnome2 after the original developer left which bears no resemblance to the gtk1 version.