Interesting...
I have an overused copy of the "C/C++ Programmer's Reference" that I find fairly indespensible. Not quite a "Perl in a Nutshell" for C and C++, but easy to use as a desktop reference.
You have suggestions for a better Nutshell type book (function listings with a little commentary) for C AND C++?
I get concerned when I see clauses such as those above when there is no corresponding clause for justifying Open source choice over proprietary.
The justification for open source over proprietary is mentioned right above this requirement, namely unrestricted use, right to modify, right to distribute, and low up front costs. It doesn't bar any agency from choosing Word over OpenOffice. It just says that you can't pick MS Word without bothering to look at the alternatives and compare the total cost. You need to have a decent reason for picking proprietary software over free alternatives. Considering that it's my dime they're spending I don't think that's much to ask.
So it's a crime for RedHat to charge money for premium services and support now?
Bullshit. That's not what I said. I said that if you're not willing to pay for it, use a god damn free as in $$ distro. Suggesting that people who don't want to pay should do all the updates on their own is utter stupidity. There are plenty of distros with update tools that don't ask for money. If you don't want to pay, use one of those distros.
I really don't think that $60/year/server is "out the ass."
Yes, I worded it strongly...but then again 25 servers * $60 = $1500/year. I'd still call that "out the ass" for using what amounts to a dollar or so in bandwidth and getting the same services that cost nothing with the "Free" distros.
My point isn't that RedHat is gouging its customers though... That's a decision you have to come to based on what you expect for the money you're paying. My point was that if you're not going to pay the money there are plenty of folks willing to help you move to a distro that isn't expecting you to pay anything at all.
Support:
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of moneybr>
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
I think you meant...
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you install Debian, BSD, Gentoo, Mandrake or some other distro that won't charge you out the ass for Eratta support.
I don't think the quality of their index is really the issue. Sure, Inktomi has sucked for a long time and as a result MSN has sucked right along with it... MSN's popularity is completely based on changing the users homepage to MSN with each update and stealing 404 traffic. Since updates are automatic for WinXP, the number of folks using MSN as their homepage will explode as folks retire their Win95/98/ME boxes.
The interesting variables in this equation have nothing to do with the quality of MSN's search engine. (Who really cares about that? MSN is ugly as hell.) The interesting items in the future of MSN are: (1) Who will be the first to sue Microsoft for changing the users homepage with each IE upgrade? (2) What happens to Overture when MSN decides to cut it out? (3) How long until MSN tries to compete with Ebay/Ubid?
The folks who are hoping this will be the end of pop-ups are overlooking the obvious. This guy isn't going to sue anyone with the finances to kill his patent, he's going to chase after the little guys trying to scrape a living off the internet so he can cash in without getting his patent invalidated.
And as the history of the Therac-25 points out, people do die and companies are sued for flaws in software design. In the case of the Therac, the company tried to keep the individual programmer from being tagged with the blame for the deaths his bugs caused.
We know that the software for the Therac-25 was developed by a single person, using PDP 11 assembly language, over a period of several years. The software "evolved" from the Therac-6 software, which was started in 1972....
The programmer left AECL in 1986. In a lawsuit connected with one of the accidents, the lawyers were unable to obtain information about the programmer from AECL. In the depositions connected with that case, none of the AECL employees questioned could provide any information about his educational background or experience. Although an attempt was made to obtain a deposition from the programmer, the lawsuit was settled before this was accomplished. We have been unable to learn anything about his background.
I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing if the lawsuit doesn't go their way. I find it difficult to imagine that MS would lose though.
Re:Good to see some progress here!
on
Microsoft's Athens PC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps the most damning thing about Linux is the hugely conservative community surrounding it. Cries of "If you want change then _you_ do it"...
Come on now. You've been give at least 4 quality free Windowing toolkits (GTK, QT, TK, and wxWindows) all well documented with full source code. You've been given every possible language to program in and nearly every library has a binding to every goofy language imaginable. You've been given at least 3 IDE's for C/C++ that are comparable with Visual C++, a whole slew of editors to program the scripting flavor of the month, boatloads of documentation including free commercial quality books on programming. You've got at least a dozen apps to mimic each and every commonly used windows app (FTP clients, WinZip clones, Media Players, Office Suites, Image Editors, etc etc) And to top it all off 1/3 of this stuff has been ported to Windows so you don't have to even deal with GNU/Linux itself.
If it's conservative given all of this to expect the endless stream of people with ideas to get off their asses and write something to show how perfect their idea is, then yes, the Free software community is quite conservative.
You should take a look at the forums on HappyPenguin. At least once a week someone shows up with an "idea" for a game that they want someone else to write for them, for free. Get a grip, ideas are a dime a dozen. I want to see it working before I contribute my free time to helping impliment someone else's ideas.
What I'm saying is that Reiser wants people to believe you can require that advertising isn't removed from your GPL code. If that view is accepted, then anytime someone does a patch with advertising you either put the advertising into your version or refuse their patch entirely. He wants advertising in GPL software to be the same as GFDL's invariant sections. If someone submits additions to your GFDL text with a new invariant section, either you accept their invariant text or you're barred from using EVERYTHING they've added.
Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.
More importantly, imagine if Reiser's view of the GPL was the norm. You write a good piece of software, someone else extends it a bit and slaps adds all over the place. You're now locked out from using their improvements unless you add in all their advertising.
This is the same nonsence that PHP-Nuke argues. And in both cases, ReiserFS and PHP-Nuke, they complain about their advertising being removed because they're trying to sell commercal versions of their software.
I agree, but I don't think Epic looks at it that way. It's easy to say they sabotaged the Linux client in several ways, but you have to give them kudos for at least trying.
Hopefully icculus will save the day again though. They seem to be doing that quite a bit lately.
So this still seems wrong to me, as contributory infringement.
This sounds very reasonable until you look at the facts and admit that these same issues exist with every search engine on the internet. Go to Google and search for "decss.c" and you'll see that Google has it cached in addition to simply having it indexed. Go to Altavista, search for any band name then click on the MP3/Audio tab. Every search engine out there is indexing illegal content of one form or another. Why is indexing SMB shares more illegal than indexing the Web or FTP? These folks are getting screwed because they're easy targets. They don't have the resources to make the case that indexing content isn't a crime. The only possible crime that makes any sense is providing illegal content. Downloading content doesn't make any sense as a crime. I have no way of verifying that Tucows has a legal right to distribute Winzip...how can I possibly know whether or not you have permission from the artist to distribute a piece of music on Kazaa? The same holds true for indexing. The only person in the loop, downloader->search engine->content provider, that has any chance of knowing that the content is legal or illegal is the content provider.
I believe Epic made the case against another Linux release when they revealed the server connection stats a while back. See the post here. Sure, there are quite a few good reasons that the numbers may be artificially low, but that's a completely different subject.
Hopefully the folks at icculus.org can come up with a way to play Unreal II using Unreal 2003 as they did with Unreal,Unreal Gold, and Return to Na Pali
You're perfectly right. The zoning laws only matter if you have customers coming to your home or workers coming to your home. The IRS doesn't give a damn whether your home office is allowed under your neighborhood zoning laws. The only problem comes when you sell your home later. The home office portion of the sale is taxed. So...if you own your home and plan on selling it any time soon, don't write-off your home office.
The GFDL's Preamble states: We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the
software does.
But the reality seems to be that Freedom to the FSF only really matters when it comes to software. A quick look at the FSF's audio section shows that their interpretation of Freedom doesn't extend very far in other areas. Would software released under a license that allows "verbatim copying and distribution" be considered FSF free?
Debian takes a broader view that everything in the distro should be "Free". It may sound a bit anal to expect that manuals, audio and graphics should be covered by the same rights to modification, but the sad fact is that it's not just an academic point. Quake2 may be GPL software, but the graphics, music, etc are not covered by the GPL. Since Debian groups software into Free and Non-Free sections, it's important that the distinction is pointed out...regardless of whether it's Quake 2 or GCC.
I realize that. Audio DRM will not work either in the long run. The point is if Joe Average thinks it works and faces either paying for a commercial product or using a free product.
As bad as DRM sounds, maybee it's a blessing in disguise. No one like the product activation in Windows XP or Office XP, but at the same time product activation makes piracy less workable and forces users to face the high price tag Microsoft has placed on these products. When it's a choice between $200 for Office XP or $0 for OpenOffice rather than $0 for pirated Office 2K or $0 OpenOffice...if nothing else, the pricetag drives home the point that you need to at least TRY the alternatives.
Maybee the same will be true for music...that once every commercial song comes with a pricetag, listeners will finally begin to see Creative Commons/Open Audio License/Public Domain music as a better value. Once the audience is there, musicians will surely follow.
I don't trust either Sun or Microsoft to refrain from jerking me around for a few $$$, standards or not. Give me a FAST Parrot VM with GTK for Lin/Win/Mac and I'll never touch C++ again.
The FSF should set up a program to take advantage of this... Donate your stupid patent to them for a juicy tax write-off. There's no "real" value to these things anyway, so screw it and give a $100 million tax write-off for each donated patent. It's like printing your own money. Why bother paying taxes?
Are you sure about that? The terms are a bit confusing, but I was under the impression that the license for RedHat ES was being quoted at an annual per server rate. Where did you read that a $60/year RHN subscription will entitle you to erratta for AS/ES/WS and eliminate the need for the more costly enterprise service agreements?
RedHat's terms of service states "Red Hat will provide Support Services for Supported Hardware and Platforms only."
They're not going to backport drivers for you. I don't see that card listed on their HCL, so they're not even required to help you set it up. How exactly is RedHat Advanced Server any help at all to you?
They're full versions. OEM and Academic versions are cheaper. Take a look if you don't believe me. Pricewatch tends to be a bit expensive these days though.
I think the big problem with the support RedHat is giving is that it's all or nothing. If you had 500 boxes and a tech staff to run them you don't need support on each machine, but RedHat requires you to buy support for all of them if you want any support at all. By comparison, $245 per incident works out to only $0.50 per machine. You could have an incident every day and still come out ahead using Microsoft. Not that I'm saying Windows is the way to go. Linux is easier to configure and maintain, at least as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see how these prices provide value to either end of the spectrum. If you have only one or two machines and no tech staff, you probably don't have the time to be dealing with Linux in the first place. If you have many machines and a tech staff to go with it, why don't you save money and hire folks to support a free distro in house?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting...
I have an overused copy of the "C/C++ Programmer's Reference" that I find fairly indespensible. Not quite a "Perl in a Nutshell" for C and C++, but easy to use as a desktop reference.
You have suggestions for a better Nutshell type book (function listings with a little commentary) for C AND C++?
I get concerned when I see clauses such as those above when there is no corresponding clause for justifying Open source choice over proprietary.
The justification for open source over proprietary is mentioned right above this requirement, namely unrestricted use, right to modify, right to distribute, and low up front costs. It doesn't bar any agency from choosing Word over OpenOffice. It just says that you can't pick MS Word without bothering to look at the alternatives and compare the total cost. You need to have a decent reason for picking proprietary software over free alternatives. Considering that it's my dime they're spending I don't think that's much to ask.
So it's a crime for RedHat to charge money for premium services and support now?
Bullshit. That's not what I said. I said that if you're not willing to pay for it, use a god damn free as in $$ distro. Suggesting that people who don't want to pay should do all the updates on their own is utter stupidity. There are plenty of distros with update tools that don't ask for money. If you don't want to pay, use one of those distros.
I really don't think that $60/year/server is "out the ass."
Yes, I worded it strongly...but then again 25 servers * $60 = $1500/year. I'd still call that "out the ass" for using what amounts to a dollar or so in bandwidth and getting the same services that cost nothing with the "Free" distros.
My point isn't that RedHat is gouging its customers though... That's a decision you have to come to based on what you expect for the money you're paying. My point was that if you're not going to pay the money there are plenty of folks willing to help you move to a distro that isn't expecting you to pay anything at all.
Support:
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of moneybr> RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
I think you meant...
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you install Debian, BSD, Gentoo, Mandrake or some other distro that won't charge you out the ass for Eratta support.
I don't think the quality of their index is really the issue. Sure, Inktomi has sucked for a long time and as a result MSN has sucked right along with it... MSN's popularity is completely based on changing the users homepage to MSN with each update and stealing 404 traffic. Since updates are automatic for WinXP, the number of folks using MSN as their homepage will explode as folks retire their Win95/98/ME boxes.
The interesting variables in this equation have nothing to do with the quality of MSN's search engine. (Who really cares about that? MSN is ugly as hell.) The interesting items in the future of MSN are: (1) Who will be the first to sue Microsoft for changing the users homepage with each IE upgrade? (2) What happens to Overture when MSN decides to cut it out? (3) How long until MSN tries to compete with Ebay/Ubid?
The folks who are hoping this will be the end of pop-ups are overlooking the obvious. This guy isn't going to sue anyone with the finances to kill his patent, he's going to chase after the little guys trying to scrape a living off the internet so he can cash in without getting his patent invalidated.
And as the history of the Therac-25 points out, people do die and companies are sued for flaws in software design. In the case of the Therac, the company tried to keep the individual programmer from being tagged with the blame for the deaths his bugs caused.
We know that the software for the Therac-25 was developed by a single person, using PDP 11 assembly language, over a period of several years. The software "evolved" from the Therac-6 software, which was started in 1972....
The programmer left AECL in 1986. In a lawsuit connected with one of the accidents, the lawyers were unable to obtain information about the programmer from AECL. In the depositions connected with that case, none of the AECL employees questioned could provide any information about his educational background or experience. Although an attempt was made to obtain a deposition from the programmer, the lawsuit was settled before this was accomplished. We have been unable to learn anything about his background.
I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing if the lawsuit doesn't go their way. I find it difficult to imagine that MS would lose though.
Perhaps the most damning thing about Linux is the hugely conservative community surrounding it. Cries of "If you want change then _you_ do it"...
Come on now. You've been give at least 4 quality free Windowing toolkits (GTK, QT, TK, and wxWindows) all well documented with full source code. You've been given every possible language to program in and nearly every library has a binding to every goofy language imaginable. You've been given at least 3 IDE's for C/C++ that are comparable with Visual C++, a whole slew of editors to program the scripting flavor of the month, boatloads of documentation including free commercial quality books on programming. You've got at least a dozen apps to mimic each and every commonly used windows app (FTP clients, WinZip clones, Media Players, Office Suites, Image Editors, etc etc) And to top it all off 1/3 of this stuff has been ported to Windows so you don't have to even deal with GNU/Linux itself.
If it's conservative given all of this to expect the endless stream of people with ideas to get off their asses and write something to show how perfect their idea is, then yes, the Free software community is quite conservative.
You should take a look at the forums on HappyPenguin. At least once a week someone shows up with an "idea" for a game that they want someone else to write for them, for free. Get a grip, ideas are a dime a dozen. I want to see it working before I contribute my free time to helping impliment someone else's ideas.
What I'm saying is that Reiser wants people to believe you can require that advertising isn't removed from your GPL code. If that view is accepted, then anytime someone does a patch with advertising you either put the advertising into your version or refuse their patch entirely. He wants advertising in GPL software to be the same as GFDL's invariant sections. If someone submits additions to your GFDL text with a new invariant section, either you accept their invariant text or you're barred from using EVERYTHING they've added.
Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.
More importantly, imagine if Reiser's view of the GPL was the norm. You write a good piece of software, someone else extends it a bit and slaps adds all over the place. You're now locked out from using their improvements unless you add in all their advertising.
This is the same nonsence that PHP-Nuke argues. And in both cases, ReiserFS and PHP-Nuke, they complain about their advertising being removed because they're trying to sell commercal versions of their software.
These guys (SCO) sound like they hired the old Information Minister from Iraq
It sounds a bit more like the statements from the US government.
1: Claim you have proof of IP theft
2: Refuse to show proof
3: Sue
4: ??buyout offer??
5: Pretend IP theft was a non-issue all along.
I agree, but I don't think Epic looks at it that way. It's easy to say they sabotaged the Linux client in several ways, but you have to give them kudos for at least trying.
Hopefully icculus will save the day again though. They seem to be doing that quite a bit lately.
So this still seems wrong to me, as contributory infringement.
This sounds very reasonable until you look at the facts and admit that these same issues exist with every search engine on the internet. Go to Google and search for "decss.c" and you'll see that Google has it cached in addition to simply having it indexed. Go to Altavista, search for any band name then click on the MP3/Audio tab. Every search engine out there is indexing illegal content of one form or another. Why is indexing SMB shares more illegal than indexing the Web or FTP? These folks are getting screwed because they're easy targets. They don't have the resources to make the case that indexing content isn't a crime. The only possible crime that makes any sense is providing illegal content. Downloading content doesn't make any sense as a crime. I have no way of verifying that Tucows has a legal right to distribute Winzip...how can I possibly know whether or not you have permission from the artist to distribute a piece of music on Kazaa? The same holds true for indexing. The only person in the loop, downloader->search engine->content provider, that has any chance of knowing that the content is legal or illegal is the content provider.
I believe Epic made the case against another Linux release when they revealed the server connection stats a while back. See the post here. Sure, there are quite a few good reasons that the numbers may be artificially low, but that's a completely different subject.
Hopefully the folks at icculus.org can come up with a way to play Unreal II using Unreal 2003 as they did with Unreal, Unreal Gold, and Return to Na Pali
You're perfectly right. The zoning laws only matter if you have customers coming to your home or workers coming to your home. The IRS doesn't give a damn whether your home office is allowed under your neighborhood zoning laws. The only problem comes when you sell your home later. The home office portion of the sale is taxed. So...if you own your home and plan on selling it any time soon, don't write-off your home office.
If Linux was just a sub-par windows clone, why would anyone want to use it?
Heh.. If Linux was a free Windows clone Microsoft would cease to exist rather rapidly and the sub-par clone would become the standard.
The GFDL's Preamble states: We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does.
But the reality seems to be that Freedom to the FSF only really matters when it comes to software. A quick look at the FSF's audio section shows that their interpretation of Freedom doesn't extend very far in other areas. Would software released under a license that allows "verbatim copying and distribution" be considered FSF free?
Debian takes a broader view that everything in the distro should be "Free". It may sound a bit anal to expect that manuals, audio and graphics should be covered by the same rights to modification, but the sad fact is that it's not just an academic point. Quake2 may be GPL software, but the graphics, music, etc are not covered by the GPL. Since Debian groups software into Free and Non-Free sections, it's important that the distinction is pointed out...regardless of whether it's Quake 2 or GCC.
I realize that. Audio DRM will not work either in the long run. The point is if Joe Average thinks it works and faces either paying for a commercial product or using a free product.
As bad as DRM sounds, maybee it's a blessing in disguise. No one like the product activation in Windows XP or Office XP, but at the same time product activation makes piracy less workable and forces users to face the high price tag Microsoft has placed on these products. When it's a choice between $200 for Office XP or $0 for OpenOffice rather than $0 for pirated Office 2K or $0 OpenOffice...if nothing else, the pricetag drives home the point that you need to at least TRY the alternatives.
Maybee the same will be true for music...that once every commercial song comes with a pricetag, listeners will finally begin to see Creative Commons/Open Audio License/Public Domain music as a better value. Once the audience is there, musicians will surely follow.
I don't trust either Sun or Microsoft to refrain from jerking me around for a few $$$, standards or not.
Give me a FAST Parrot VM with GTK for Lin/Win/Mac and I'll never touch C++ again.
The FSF should set up a program to take advantage of this... Donate your stupid patent to them for a juicy tax write-off. There's no "real" value to these things anyway, so screw it and give a $100 million tax write-off for each donated patent. It's like printing your own money. Why bother paying taxes?
Are you sure about that? The terms are a bit confusing, but I was under the impression that the license for RedHat ES was being quoted at an annual per server rate. Where did you read that a $60/year RHN subscription will entitle you to erratta for AS/ES/WS and eliminate the need for the more costly enterprise service agreements?
RedHat's terms of service states "Red Hat will provide Support Services for Supported Hardware and Platforms only."
They're not going to backport drivers for you. I don't see that card listed on their HCL, so they're not even required to help you set it up. How exactly is RedHat Advanced Server any help at all to you?
They're full versions. OEM and Academic versions are cheaper. Take a look if you don't believe me. Pricewatch tends to be a bit expensive these days though.
I think the big problem with the support RedHat is giving is that it's all or nothing. If you had 500 boxes and a tech staff to run them you don't need support on each machine, but RedHat requires you to buy support for all of them if you want any support at all. By comparison, $245 per incident works out to only $0.50 per machine. You could have an incident every day and still come out ahead using Microsoft. Not that I'm saying Windows is the way to go. Linux is easier to configure and maintain, at least as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see how these prices provide value to either end of the spectrum. If you have only one or two machines and no tech staff, you probably don't have the time to be dealing with Linux in the first place. If you have many machines and a tech staff to go with it, why don't you save money and hire folks to support a free distro in house?