Some other projects only have one person in charge of commits, but of course anybody can submit changes. Wine [winehq.org] is one of those: only one person has write access to the CVS repository (Alexandre Julliard), but anybody can submit changes to the wine-patches mailing list.
Gack. The biggest reason I put Hercules into CVS was so I wouldn't have to do exactly that. I produced a few releases after taking over maintenance, and boy, was it a major pain. While I'm sure it's working for Andre, I have to wonder what benefit they get from CVS over simply making snapshots available for FTP.
A vibrant developer comminuty...
on
XFree86 Politics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...is one that constantly seeks out new talent and includes their efforts in the project. One thing I've learned about managing (FSVO) an open source project is that the worst thing you can do is to ignore people's contributions. Heck, if Mike's diary entry is still the state of affairs, there are more people with commit access to the Hercules CVS repository than there are XFree86, a project that's probably two orders of magnitude bigger!
No wonder people are getting frustrated. Perhaps a fork is in the best interests of the XFree86 project.
I'd be interested to hear Keith's side of the story, especially his concerns. If they're correct, though, and he's only willing to discuss them with a handpicked developer community, I doubt we'll hear anything useful.
I use Shareaza because it doesn't bundle any adware, doesn't bundle any spyware, and doesn't do anything but file sharing. BearShare still has adware in it. Are there other clients that don't include the crap and still provide the function? (And no, I haven't touched the timeout settings, nor do I intend to.)
FWIW, BearShare's complaining seems motivated at least in part by the fact that Shareaza is out there potentially taking away its revenues...
You're not a victim of loss of connectivity through MAPS. You're a victim of the spammer that caused the MAPS listing.
And anti-spam blacklists, such as the MAPS RBL (Mail Abuse Prevention System Realtime Blackhole List, the most popular), result in a large number of Internet service providers (ISPs) surreptitiously blocking large amounts of non-spam from innocent people.
The MAPS RBL is not the most popular any more, as it lost a lot of its effectiveness when MAPS caved in to a lawsuit. Further, those people are not innocent. They support spammers by paying money to spam-supporting ISPs.
This is because they block all email from entire IP address blocks--even from entire nations.
You mean like Korea, Taiwan, China, and Brazil? I block every email that originates or passes through servers in those countries, too, as every last bit of it I've received in the past two years has been spam, and providers there just don't care about it.
This is done with no notice to the users, who do not even know that their mail is not being delivered.
Any properly configured mail server will return an explanation of why the messag was bounced, and nearly all that use blocklsits will return a message about which blocklist was used to generate the rejection, and where the user can go to find out more.
The result is that mail from smaller ISPs is blocked.
No, only those small ISPs (and those large ones, too; SPEWS lists great swaths of Verio and Cable & Wireless space, for example) that refuse to terminate spammers and spam support services. I'm a customer of a very small ISP that has no problems at all - because they vigorously terminate spammers.
It looks to me like a reasonable compromise between dealing with spammers and not destroying email in the process, so I don't know what you're on about.
The problem is that it doesn't deal with spammers at all.
for instance, SPEWS has little problem blacklisting people who have found themselves to be customers of an ISP that happens to have some customers who are spammers.
No, this is not correct. SPEWS doesn't list ISPs that have spammers. SPEWS lists ISPs that harbor spammers and refuse to terminate them in a timely fashion. All an ISP has to do to stay out of SPEWS is have an abuse address, have someone read what's sent to it on a regular and frequent basis, and give that someone the power to terminate spammers. Simple stuff that any ISP should do as a basic part of being in the ISP business, yet many ISPs don't.
If that's not destroying the medium, what is?
Allowing spammers free rein, as the EFF, and apparently you, would have us do instead.
We need sane, rational, ways of dealing with spam.
We have them. SPEWS is one such. The Spamhaus Blocklist is another. There are more, with differing policies tailored to the needs and policies of each individual system. Any method of dealing with spam must, at a minimum, make it difficult for spammers to fnid a supportive ISP, and the various blocklists all work toward that goal.
Methods of dealing with spam that are entirely about punishment, and then primarily of innocent third parties in the hope that the third parties will then punish the second parties who might, in turn, punish the actual spammers, are damaging, intrusive, disruptive, and, if the last few years are anything to go by, a complete waste of time.
They happen to work, despite your claim otherwise. SPEWS has succeeded in getting a number of previously blackhat ISPs to clean up their acts. SPEWS, in particular, forces an ISP to choose between taking spammers' money and legitimate customers', and those ISPs who choose spammers are ISPs I want no communication with.
Supporting someone's actions to cripple email because they say they're doing so in order to stop spammers is clearly wrong.
Fine. How would you give ISPs incentive not to take spammers' money? Merely blocking the spammers' IP addresses will not do it; many ISPs have explicitly asked for that, because it gives them the best of both worlds: they can take the spammers' money and the legitimate customers', too. Until ISPs learn that taking spammers' money is going to do them more harm than good, spammers will keep finding hosts.
I support the EFFs stance in not doing so, and its desire to see solutions that ensure end-users are able to send and receive email unmolested.
Any solution that does not effectively work to eliminate spam does not ensure that end users are able to send and receive mail unmolested.
And, thanks to you posting that link, and me seeing someone else saying what I've been yelling for the longest time, I'm going to contact them right now and donate $100.
You're free, of course, to waste your money any way you like. While you're at it, you might want to buy some herbal Viagra, penis enlargement pills, and mini RC cars, and make some money fast. After all, you're supporting spammers indirectly; why not directly, too?
I haven't joined the EFF, and I'm not going to until they change their stance on spam. They're so worried about freedom of speech they're ignoring the fact that the medium is being destroyed.
The problem with your approach is that it doesn't scale. If only 1% of US businesses sent one unsolicited commercial email a year, there would be over 7000 messages a day to delete and/or opt out of. I've got a lot better things to do with my time than unsubscribing from things I never subscribed to.
Electronic mail is not an advertising medium. It's a one-to-one communications medium. Allowing anyone, commercial or not, to hijack it is what will destroy it...and that's happening today.
In general, I agree with the EFF's positions, and think they're quite clueful. However, their position on spam is, to put it mildly, just flat wrong. They concentrate on free speech, while ignoring that spam itself is destroying the usefulness of electronic mail. As long as they oppose blocklists and other such anti-spam measures, I will not support them.
Right now, my road machine is a Compaq Armada M300. Its big feature is its size, 10.5x9x1 closed. This lets it fit into a standard Zero Halliburton Z5 laptop briefcase as though it's made for it, with lots of room left over.
I'd decided to get an Apple laptop the next time around, but until now, the choice was between a somewhat underpowered iBook with a scratch-prone plastic case, or a Titanium Powerbook that is a lot bigger than the Armada. The new 12-inch Powerbook is only a tiny bit larger than the Armada, and will fit the bill perfectly. I plan to order one, fully loaded, when my tax refund comes through.
the argument that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership is in itself a completely subjective interpretation of the language of the Constitution.
If so, then it's equally important to remember that every Constitutional scholar who's examined the question without being beholden to anti-gun forces has concluded that not only is the individual rights interpretation correct, but a collective rights interpretation is nonsensical. See, for example, Professor Sanford Levinson (ACLU leading legal light, and no friend of the NRA)'s paper The Embarrassing Second Amendment for a complete discussion.
If Ben had simply refused the donation, that would have been one thing. Instead, he told Larry what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was in the message turning him down.
Now, he wants Larry to grant him a favor. I have no trouble understanding why Larry told him no.
I agree with most of your posting, but I have to argue with:
That having been said, it does appear from this mail that McVoy has a personal disagreement with Ben Collins. (See the relevant text about 'netwinder') If so, a EULA is a poor forum in which to take action for his grievances. It does NOT, however, mean that he is any more wrong for doing so.
McVoy didn't take action specifically against Collins in the EULA; rather, Collins had the chutzpah to tell McVoy what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was and then ask for a favor. In McVoy's place, I'd have told him to go pound sand too.
I was in Manhattan, at the northern end of Central Park. I'd turned on the TV in my hotel room to catch a weather forecast, since I was due to visit a customer at 90 William Street - three blocks from the WTC - at 11, and wanted to know whether I'd need an umbrella.
After seeing that it would be a nice, pretty day, I left the TV on. I was watching when they broke into the Today Show to report a fire at the WTC. I stayed glued to the TV as they showed the second airplane crashing into the other tower, and the fires raging, and people jumping out of windows, and the towers collapsing, and the resulting images are forever graven into my mind.
Early on, I dialed up with my laptop. I wasn't one of the folks besieging Slashdot, but I did stay on IRC for hours, talking about what I saw. That turned out to be my only reliable communications channel. My cellphone was completely useless. I got more than a few phone calls from anxious relatives that I couldn't return because the lines were jammed. I finally asked a friend to call my parents in Houston and let them know I was fine and several miles away.
This past July 4 weekend, a friend and I visited Mount Rushmore. At the end of the day, we went to one of the Western dinner theater places out there. Most of the way through the show, they sang a song, "Where Were You When the World Changed?", about that day. I wound up having to leave in tears, as it brought back memories of that day, and how I couldn't get in touch with anyone except over the net. I don't know who wrote it (I asked, but have since forgotten the name - it was some country star), but he did a great job of capturing the feeling for the rest of us.
Actually, Jay, I was just about to post nominating YOU
Heck, go ahead. It'd make RMS either throw up or else laugh so hard he couldn't type for a couple of days, and either one would cut down on his pontificating.
Anyway, just to statisfy a curiosity of mine. Have you ever worked for a company that didn't have tens of thousands of employees and was suffocating under it's own bureacracy ?
My current employer qualifies, in spades. I've also worked for a couple of other small companies, as well as several major ones. You see, unlike RMS, I've been in the real world, and understand how it really works.
My work experience is more on the side of the large corporation, though, since my background (being largely in IBM mainframes) doesn't lend itself as easily to the small shop.
I tried reading Prince's essay, but gave up a few paragraphs in because he insists on using lamer-speak. Is there a filter somewhere that will translate it to English? He looks like he's got something to say, and articulately at that...
a public that seems pretty satisfied with traditional analog TVs.
Exactly. So far, there's been nothing on TV that I'm interested in watching that higher definition would help.
One might ask what it took so long for Slashdot to mention it - it's been on the Python home page for quite a while.
Indeed. As another poster commented, it's probably been submitted several times and rejected.
Even so, I'm glad it finally came up; I just added it to the Hercules home page, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Some other projects only have one person in charge of commits, but of course anybody can submit changes. Wine [winehq.org] is one of those: only one person has write access to the CVS repository (Alexandre Julliard), but anybody can submit changes to the wine-patches mailing list.
Gack. The biggest reason I put Hercules into CVS was so I wouldn't have to do exactly that. I produced a few releases after taking over maintenance, and boy, was it a major pain. While I'm sure it's working for Andre, I have to wonder what benefit they get from CVS over simply making snapshots available for FTP.
...is one that constantly seeks out new talent and includes their efforts in the project. One thing I've learned about managing (FSVO) an open source project is that the worst thing you can do is to ignore people's contributions. Heck, if Mike's diary entry is still the state of affairs, there are more people with commit access to the Hercules CVS repository than there are XFree86, a project that's probably two orders of magnitude bigger!
No wonder people are getting frustrated. Perhaps a fork is in the best interests of the XFree86 project.
I'd be interested to hear Keith's side of the story, especially his concerns. If they're correct, though, and he's only willing to discuss them with a handpicked developer community, I doubt we'll hear anything useful.
I use Shareaza because it doesn't bundle any adware, doesn't bundle any spyware, and doesn't do anything but file sharing. BearShare still has adware in it. Are there other clients that don't include the crap and still provide the function? (And no, I haven't touched the timeout settings, nor do I intend to.)
FWIW, BearShare's complaining seems motivated at least in part by the fact that Shareaza is out there potentially taking away its revenues...
You're not a victim of loss of connectivity through MAPS. You're a victim of the spammer that caused the MAPS listing.
And anti-spam blacklists, such as the MAPS RBL (Mail Abuse Prevention System Realtime Blackhole List, the most popular), result in a large number of Internet service providers (ISPs) surreptitiously blocking large amounts of non-spam from innocent people.
The MAPS RBL is not the most popular any more, as it lost a lot of its effectiveness when MAPS caved in to a lawsuit. Further, those people are not innocent. They support spammers by paying money to spam-supporting ISPs.
This is because they block all email from entire IP address blocks--even from entire nations.
You mean like Korea, Taiwan, China, and Brazil? I block every email that originates or passes through servers in those countries, too, as every last bit of it I've received in the past two years has been spam, and providers there just don't care about it.
This is done with no notice to the users, who do not even know that their mail is not being delivered.
Any properly configured mail server will return an explanation of why the messag was bounced, and nearly all that use blocklsits will return a message about which blocklist was used to generate the rejection, and where the user can go to find out more.
The result is that mail from smaller ISPs is blocked.
No, only those small ISPs (and those large ones, too; SPEWS lists great swaths of Verio and Cable & Wireless space, for example) that refuse to terminate spammers and spam support services. I'm a customer of a very small ISP that has no problems at all - because they vigorously terminate spammers.
The problem is that it doesn't deal with spammers at all.
for instance, SPEWS has little problem blacklisting people who have found themselves to be customers of an ISP that happens to have some customers who are spammers.
No, this is not correct. SPEWS doesn't list ISPs that have spammers. SPEWS lists ISPs that harbor spammers and refuse to terminate them in a timely fashion. All an ISP has to do to stay out of SPEWS is have an abuse address, have someone read what's sent to it on a regular and frequent basis, and give that someone the power to terminate spammers. Simple stuff that any ISP should do as a basic part of being in the ISP business, yet many ISPs don't.
If that's not destroying the medium, what is?
Allowing spammers free rein, as the EFF, and apparently you, would have us do instead.
We need sane, rational, ways of dealing with spam.
We have them. SPEWS is one such. The Spamhaus Blocklist is another. There are more, with differing policies tailored to the needs and policies of each individual system. Any method of dealing with spam must, at a minimum, make it difficult for spammers to fnid a supportive ISP, and the various blocklists all work toward that goal.
Methods of dealing with spam that are entirely about punishment, and then primarily of innocent third parties in the hope that the third parties will then punish the second parties who might, in turn, punish the actual spammers, are damaging, intrusive, disruptive, and, if the last few years are anything to go by, a complete waste of time.
They happen to work, despite your claim otherwise. SPEWS has succeeded in getting a number of previously blackhat ISPs to clean up their acts. SPEWS, in particular, forces an ISP to choose between taking spammers' money and legitimate customers', and those ISPs who choose spammers are ISPs I want no communication with.
Supporting someone's actions to cripple email because they say they're doing so in order to stop spammers is clearly wrong.
Fine. How would you give ISPs incentive not to take spammers' money? Merely blocking the spammers' IP addresses will not do it; many ISPs have explicitly asked for that, because it gives them the best of both worlds: they can take the spammers' money and the legitimate customers', too. Until ISPs learn that taking spammers' money is going to do them more harm than good, spammers will keep finding hosts.
I support the EFFs stance in not doing so, and its desire to see solutions that ensure end-users are able to send and receive email unmolested.
Any solution that does not effectively work to eliminate spam does not ensure that end users are able to send and receive mail unmolested.
And, thanks to you posting that link, and me seeing someone else saying what I've been yelling for the longest time, I'm going to contact them right now and donate $100.
You're free, of course, to waste your money any way you like. While you're at it, you might want to buy some herbal Viagra, penis enlargement pills, and mini RC cars, and make some money fast. After all, you're supporting spammers indirectly; why not directly, too?
I haven't joined the EFF, and I'm not going to until they change their stance on spam. They're so worried about freedom of speech they're ignoring the fact that the medium is being destroyed.
Electronic mail is not an advertising medium. It's a one-to-one communications medium. Allowing anyone, commercial or not, to hijack it is what will destroy it...and that's happening today.
In general, I agree with the EFF's positions, and think they're quite clueful. However, their position on spam is, to put it mildly, just flat wrong. They concentrate on free speech, while ignoring that spam itself is destroying the usefulness of electronic mail. As long as they oppose blocklists and other such anti-spam measures, I will not support them.
Right now, my road machine is a Compaq Armada M300. Its big feature is its size, 10.5x9x1 closed. This lets it fit into a standard Zero Halliburton Z5 laptop briefcase as though it's made for it, with lots of room left over.
I'd decided to get an Apple laptop the next time around, but until now, the choice was between a somewhat underpowered iBook with a scratch-prone plastic case, or a Titanium Powerbook that is a lot bigger than the Armada. The new 12-inch Powerbook is only a tiny bit larger than the Armada, and will fit the bill perfectly. I plan to order one, fully loaded, when my tax refund comes through.
the argument that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership is in itself a completely subjective interpretation of the language of the Constitution.
If so, then it's equally important to remember that every Constitutional scholar who's examined the question without being beholden to anti-gun forces has concluded that not only is the individual rights interpretation correct, but a collective rights interpretation is nonsensical. See, for example, Professor Sanford Levinson (ACLU leading legal light, and no friend of the NRA)'s paper The Embarrassing Second Amendment for a complete discussion.
For this purpose, the CDC's definition of "child" is "anyone under 25".
Why the hell can't Tom's Hardware show it all on one page instead of nine?! Or, at the very least, make it an option.
If Ben had simply refused the donation, that would have been one thing. Instead, he told Larry what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was in the message turning him down.
Now, he wants Larry to grant him a favor. I have no trouble understanding why Larry told him no.
I agree with most of your posting, but I have to argue with:
That having been said, it does appear from this mail that McVoy has a personal disagreement with Ben Collins. (See the relevant text about 'netwinder') If so, a EULA is a poor forum in which to take action for his grievances. It does NOT, however, mean that he is any more wrong for doing so.
McVoy didn't take action specifically against Collins in the EULA; rather, Collins had the chutzpah to tell McVoy what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was and then ask for a favor. In McVoy's place, I'd have told him to go pound sand too.
GO against the mob here, and you get flame moderated.
Amen. I've taken to metamoderating all Troll and Flamebait moderations as unfair in an attempt to counteract this abuse of the system.
You, too, can clobber every radio and cellphone within 20 feet!
You're correct. Thanks.
The lyrics, and a snippet of audio, can be found at Alan Jackson's web site.
No, but I plan to rectify that. I didn't know it was there.
After seeing that it would be a nice, pretty day, I left the TV on. I was watching when they broke into the Today Show to report a fire at the WTC. I stayed glued to the TV as they showed the second airplane crashing into the other tower, and the fires raging, and people jumping out of windows, and the towers collapsing, and the resulting images are forever graven into my mind.
Early on, I dialed up with my laptop. I wasn't one of the folks besieging Slashdot, but I did stay on IRC for hours, talking about what I saw. That turned out to be my only reliable communications channel. My cellphone was completely useless. I got more than a few phone calls from anxious relatives that I couldn't return because the lines were jammed. I finally asked a friend to call my parents in Houston and let them know I was fine and several miles away.
This past July 4 weekend, a friend and I visited Mount Rushmore. At the end of the day, we went to one of the Western dinner theater places out there. Most of the way through the show, they sang a song, "Where Were You When the World Changed?", about that day. I wound up having to leave in tears, as it brought back memories of that day, and how I couldn't get in touch with anyone except over the net. I don't know who wrote it (I asked, but have since forgotten the name - it was some country star), but he did a great job of capturing the feeling for the rest of us.
What hate speech? I don't particularly hate RMS, as a person. Anyone who'd go shooting with ESR can't be all bad.
His ideas and ideals, OTOH, are worth fighting, and I won't be dissuaded from doing so.
Heck, go ahead. It'd make RMS either throw up or else laugh so hard he couldn't type for a couple of days, and either one would cut down on his pontificating.
Anyway, just to statisfy a curiosity of mine. Have you ever worked for a company that didn't have tens of thousands of employees and was suffocating under it's own bureacracy ?
My current employer qualifies, in spades. I've also worked for a couple of other small companies, as well as several major ones. You see, unlike RMS, I've been in the real world, and understand how it really works.
My work experience is more on the side of the large corporation, though, since my background (being largely in IBM mainframes) doesn't lend itself as easily to the small shop.
Oh, and it's fascist, not facist.
...would be the one who shuts RMS up for good. He does more to hurt his own cause than anyone else.
I tried reading Prince's essay, but gave up a few paragraphs in because he insists on using lamer-speak. Is there a filter somewhere that will translate it to English? He looks like he's got something to say, and articulately at that...
a public that seems pretty satisfied with traditional analog TVs.
Exactly. So far, there's been nothing on TV that I'm interested in watching that higher definition would help.
Indeed. As another poster commented, it's probably been submitted several times and rejected.
Even so, I'm glad it finally came up; I just added it to the Hercules home page, as well.