The problem is that the existing engines provide a large amount of functionality to users using their language -- choosing to use C/C++ over TADS is kind of like throwing out a large number of useful, mature libraries, as there are fewer C/C++ IF libraries sitting around.
We have an English website, Slashdot. The vast majority of people reading it are going to be using English releases of their operating systems. Of the ones that don't, very few are going to be using a Hungarian release, and a minority of those use Mac OS X. Finally, of those affected, the issue is fairly minor.
It can't possibly be more than a hundreth of a percent of Slashdot readers that are affected by this. Isn't the point of Slashdot to dredge up the interesting news from other locations, so that people don't have to slog through useless junk?
I opened gedit 2.5.91, entered the text "gedit text", selected it, chose copy from the edit menu. I moved to firesomething, selected the text in the URL bar, pressed the delete button, and hit ctrl-v. The text "gedit text" appeared rather than the URL; this was the desired behavior.
I repeated the same test using kedit 1.3 in place of gedit, and again things worked properly.
I'd suggest trying firesomething.8 or so and seeing whether you run into the same problem.
The only thing that I can think of offhand that would cause this might be mozilla being built with a different configuration (perhaps the problem appears when being built with one set of libraries, but not another?) or perhaps a clipboard manager on your system.
Linux users are required to celebrate with beer and an assortment of tasty food tonight. Now. Enjoy yourself tonight, and be happy. It's a good-looking new world for Tux and the rest of us out there -- things just got a lot sunnier.:-) Whee!
I will be amazed if Darl goes to jail. He's a rich white CEO. Rich white CEOs generally don't go to jail in the US (not never -- when people get pissed a la Enron at being massively screwed over, things happen). Still, trying to prove personal criminal intent on Darl's part may be hard. I'd like to see it, but I doubt that it's feasible.
Even if they were, they've been exposed and SCO is burning up rapidly and isn't likely to be able to stick it to Linux. There's little reason for anyone, including Microsoft, to keep money in SCO at this point.
Instead of just buying the game because it's in the Fallout series (as I've seen a couple of people saying), wouldn't it be easier to just see what the reviews say?
*WHY*THE*HECK* do they overwrite the primary clipboard *EVERY*TIME* I accidently drag a bit of text.
I'm not sure what you mean.
The PRIMARY clipboard holds the contents of the currently selected text. It is pasted by middle-clicking.
The CLIPBOARD holds the contents of the Ctrl-C'ed text (this clipboard corresponds to what Windows users think of as the clipboard). It is pasted with Ctrl-V. Windows users may continue to use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V with their apps if they like to use just the familiar clipboard.
If you're selecting text, then your application is *supposed* to overwrite PRIMARY with the currently selected text. It's what gedit does; it's what Mozilla Firesomething does.
I just tested Mozilla Firesomething.8, and it works exactly as my other applications do. I select text, it goes into the PRIMARY clipboard and doesn't clobber the CLIPBOARD clipboard. If I select text and choose copy, it goes into the CLIPBOARD. This is the same thing every other application on Linux does and should do.
Can you describe exactly what you're doing, what behavior you're seeing, and what behavior you'd expect to see? Or maybe point me to a Bugzilla bug report?
I agree absolutely, and experience backs you up -- closed-source programmers are more likely to swipe code than open-source programmers (though less likely to get caught, which ultimately is what really matters).
However, that doesn't mean that people don't need code insurance in general. This could simply have been an overlooked cost of development that SCO happened to bring to light.
Okay, I'm just trying to understand the motivations here.
Perhaps the Army is getting money from Ubisoft from foreign sales? If money from foreign sales is treated as icing on the cake, as additional funding, then this makes sense.
However, ultimately America's Army was built as a recruiting tool -- it's why it got tax dollars to fund production. It's intended to make a big deal out of the glamour of the Army to convince more people to enlist to help stop the shrinking ranks. I'm not sure what having this thing sold in, say, Belgium is supposed to do for America. Perhaps it will help build up the Belgian Army ranks?
I mean, spending tax dollars to produce a video game wasn't an easy decision with Army folks -- and the game is becoming even less recruiting-tool oriented.
*I* am able to solve problems I have with Linux, but my arguments were that the average guy cannot.
Hmm. In general, I'd say that in general, most people can't really solve problems with either platform. There are probably more people more experienced with Windows ATM, which gives it an advantage. Honestly, though, I suspect that most IT support-types will attest that people need assistance with the simplest things (a common frusterated lament I've seen on Slashdot is someone's boss calling them over because an icon was moved or deleted from their desktop, and that person doesn't know what to do to repair it).
There are a couple of different sorts of people that would have ease-of-use concerns on Linux. The common case people use is "grandma". "Grandma" is currently, I think, reasonably well dealt with on Linux. The "grandma" demographic knows how to use their computer to do web browsing, email, and word processing, but nothing else. "Grandma" does not configure or set up the machine. Some not-particularly-computer-savvy office workers might be considered "grandmas". I currently think that Linux is in a state to handle that. That was one of the first ease-of-use areas that was focussed on for Linux. There have been a couple of stories about this working out fairly well.
There's then the "typical office users". Typical office users might be exemplified by, say, a secretary. Unlike "grandma", the TOU uses a broader range of applications -- maybe something business-specific. The TOU may have extensive application-specific knowledge (knowing a CAD package or Excel, as it is used daily), and generally uses the computer on a daily basis. The TOU is not interested in learning the guts of the computer inside out. The TOU *may* install a software package or two (a P2P application is a popular install, or perhaps an instant-messaging application). A lot of non-technically-oriented-but-computer-owning college students might be TOUs. I think that Linux currently can handle these reasonably well, if not perfectly -- the primary issue comes up if (particularly in the case of the P2P app) the software is not shipped with their distro, though generally it's packaged (probably on the package's home page). The users may be more than slightly peeved at not knowing how to install a software package if they don't have root on their system (not an issue for a home/college user, an issue for a business user). These users may be seriously inconvenienced by having to learn a new application (OOffice rather than Word is not a trivial move if a secretary knows how to do something to a paragraph using that particular checkbox hidden deep in a preferences box). I think that generally, TOUs can use Linux, but the transition is not flawless, as it is for "grandma"s.
The next group of folks I think I would call it the "power users". People that like to poke at their systems a bit, but don't really have a lot of expertise beyond checking checkboxes -- but they know what a number of checkboxes mean that others don't. They might be the guy in the cubicle that the other people go to when they get stuck before hassling with IT. The "power user" may have a number of utilities installed on his system, and probably has a couple things in his system tray that he's installed. He probably has his own set of themes. The "power user" has poked around and looked through the preferences dialogs of most of his applications. The "power user" is looking at a significant amount of relearning if he's familiar with Windows. He is comfortable running InstallShield installers. The utilities that provide the functionality that he uses under Windows may be much harder to use under Linux. Frequently, at this point, Linux folks expect people to have a desire to learn more about their system if they want to do things, and utilities may refer to technical concepts. Pager documentation might talk about viewports and workspaces and expect users to know the difference or be willing to learn. This user is current
Remarkably, it is not considered fraud to promote perpetual motion machines like this in the U.S.
It's fraud -- it's just not *automatically* fraud to say that you have a perpetual motion machine. I really don't think that it should be, or else there are all sorts of special-case laws that come out to deal with various types of supposedly impossible devices, and then someone *does* discover one and has to go through red tape.
If you have a general law -- false claims to get money are fradulent -- then you handle everything reasonably well. Someone just has to demonstrate that something is fradulent. People generally don't want to commit fraud, because then they pay fines and go to jail, so they avoid engaging in fradulent invention schemes.
perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro.
Yup. It has to be packed for your distro.
I don't have any problems with my Red Hat system, though. If you feel a need to be mainstream, don't use Black Cat Linux or something oddball like that.
Once you go outside the approved.deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.
It's "repositories". I have xine, mpg321, xmms and mplayer installed, and I'm using just the Big Three Redhat repositories -- Fedora, Freshrpms, and Dag. I'm using only stable from each. Oh, and transcode. There are probably more multimedia-related pieces of software on my system, but that's a pretty good example...
For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works.
True. But this same user *also* won't have any problems on Linux, especially since those 10-20 apps came on the Linux distro CD that he purchased.
So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install?
I use an ATI card in my Linux box. It's true that 3d cards are less well supported under Linux than Windows, but that's not a function of Linux in any technological respect -- it's simply how many people are on each platform, and where more of the development money goes.
They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model".
Well, there's no *term* "Linux Driver Model" because the Linux folks don't feel the need to have marketing bullet points. As for providing the same functionality found in the Windows Driver Model...it seems to me that Linux does the stuff that the WDM does. Dynamic loading and unloading? Linux does it. Hotplug support? Linux does it. What specific missing functionality are you complaining about?
They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?
I'd say it's Microsoft at fault -- Microsoft doesn't support more than one architecture, whereas Linux runs on everything under the sun.
Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate.psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No?
You can list functionality all day that Windows apps have and Linux doesn't, and I can list functionality all day that Linux apps have that Windows doesn't. It doesn't say a damn thing about whether either OS is suitable for the desktop.
Um...not true. RTFA -- it's about *having* a recording device in a theater, not *using* one to record the movie. If you want to ban actual, copyright-infringing use of the recording device, go right ahea...actually, you don't need to, because it's already illegal.
(I wanna see what happens with camera phones.)
There are plenty of reasons I can think of that people might have a camcorder in a theater and not be interested in recording the movie. It's become popular to record people doing things that you don't like or are illegal. If you're in a theater and there are four people at once talking on a cell phone, making the damn thing completely unlistenable, posting a video of them on a blog with a "cell phone use in theaters is out of hand" title seems quite reasonable to me. What about voyeurs, who like videotaping people smooching -- granted, might not be the greatest use of said camcorder, but they are hardly out to swipe the movie. You know how delighted people get when watching people's emotions being manipulated by a movie -- scared and covering their eyes, or crying at moving scenes, or the like? That's certainly a Panasonic moment. As a matter of fact, the fact that a lot of camcorders now let you disable the IR filters to get "night vision" and some even have IR emitters makes recording people in dark areas like movie theaters much more feasible.
I am a pretty big privacy nut, and I *still* don't think that the last five seconds of your driving represent a really big issue in privacy.
I think that a lot of people on Slashdot oppose anti-speeding measures because they speed and want to continue to do so. Let's even assume that you are one of these people. If you're going 100MPH and you have to slow down safely, find a spot to pull over, and actually do so, even if the recorder stops when the car is stopped, there's going to be nothing left on the recorder of you travelling 100MPH.
I can see car-based devices becoming privacy issues. I just plain can't *imagine* how people could complain about a five second black box recording.
I especially can't see how people can back this guy. He was (a) driving three times the speed limit in a crowded area, (b) made no attempt to slow down, (c) lied about both his speed and his actions during the crash, (d) his lies were already shot down by other evidence, and prosecutors just wanted more firm data, and (e) killed someone. The main argument I see from the "I want to speed" fans is still "I can handle that speed" -- this guy clearly couldn't, was going faster than any human could reasonably handle themselves (in such an environment) and *killed* someone.
Heck, he still got an awfully light sentence, IMHO. If you are going through reckless disregard for human life to this kind of extreme degree (where you were probably bound to kill someone within two or three repetitions of the behavior) *and* kill someone *and* lie about your actions, I'd say that eighteen months in jail is awfully nice.
I agree with you that this is a scam on par with Nigerian stuff.
However, in the interests of playing mind games and trying to force the program to consume CPU time:
* What would happen if you were using a 386 (or lower, if the program would run on one)?
* What if you ran a virtual machine on a virtual machine on a virtual machine...
* What if a program kept sending messages or other IPC to the spam program?
More practically, unless the spammers take steps to identify honeypots, using this system might be useful to do early automated identification of spam, feeding the output into a bogus mail server that submits the results to Vipul's Razor and similar services. It'd be even better if these people are reselling spamming services...
That would just make everything effectively BSD-licensed, which will still be a great win for Free Software. Copyleft (GPL) is a weapon against misuse of copyright. If copyright no longer exists, the existence of that weapon is no longer an issue.
I still can't agree. The reason BSD-licensing has value at all is because of intent -- because peole that BSD-license their software do so because they want to release the source. So, I don't have to distribute the source, but I do anyway.
If a closed-source vendor suddenly loses copyright protection, he clearly doesn't *want* to release his source, so he's not going to do so.
By default, if you put it under the GPL but do not specify a version number, you can use any version of the GPL you want to redistribute the software.
Right. This is the case for almost all GPL software.
The problem is that if Jim Bob gets a copy of my source released "under the GPL, sans a version number", he can then also release it "under the GPL, sans a version number". This would include GPLv3. Thus, such a change would not affect nondistributed software, since there would be no opportunity to change the license used for release -- I realize that. It does, however, affect any distributed, GPLed software.
The FSF could still use the code up to the fork with the new GPL but wouldn't be able to use the new code in the fork since that code is only available under the old GPL.
Right. Such a change could exempt companies from the source-available clause, for instance.
If you are really concerned that you will not like the next GPL version you can always license your code only to the GPL version you like, like Linus did.
Sure. The problem is that this is not the case for most software; most people do not consider the possibility that the FSF might not act in their best interests.
I'm afraid that your fears are nothing new and have already been dealt with.
I recognize that they aren't new; I am less sure that they have been (or can be, given the absence of anyone trusted by everyone in the world) dealt with.
If your goal is to build a better word processor solely for yourself, why would you care if it can read MS Word format, you think your word processor is better so you're never going to use MS Word anyway.
Because occasionally you need to, say, read content written by other people in Microsoft Word, or hand them content in an editable format.
Seriously, you might as well just hand them your hard drive and credit card number.
Okay, this is just plain wrong.
For starters, as has already been pointed out, these are the Stanford security admins. If you can't trust them, you're already quite screwed.
Second of all, if your IP and a subset of usernames on your system is equivalent to your "hard drive and credit card number", you've got major security problems aside from potential bogus security advisories.
If a Linux box is insecure...it isn't the fault of Linux. Distributions and users need to remember that nothing is secure, if it's not enabled that way.
I disagree. Making a secure system both intuitive and not a pain in the ass to set up is part of (a major part of) producing a secure system. There are a *number* of things about Linux that are not particularly intuitive to secure. There are security limitations of the *IX security model -- for example, processes cannot be run sandboxed on Linux, where they are forbidden, say, write access to the filesystem. There are issues with Linux applications -- most Linux distros do not ship with a mail client that configures GPG when it's first started, for instance.
That doesn't mean that Linux compares badly to its peers, but it does mean that Linux definitely could be improved from a security standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Consumer-class broadband generally doesn't provide the kind of bandwidth/latency guarantees that POTS provides.
It sounds obvious, but
IF:graphical games::book:movie
Each format has strong points of its own.
To say that IF can do everything a graphical game can is wrong; to say that graphical games are unilaterally better than IF is equally wrong.
The problem is that the existing engines provide a large amount of functionality to users using their language -- choosing to use C/C++ over TADS is kind of like throwing out a large number of useful, mature libraries, as there are fewer C/C++ IF libraries sitting around.
So...I don't get it.
We have an English website, Slashdot. The vast majority of people reading it are going to be using English releases of their operating systems. Of the ones that don't, very few are going to be using a Hungarian release, and a minority of those use Mac OS X. Finally, of those affected, the issue is fairly minor.
It can't possibly be more than a hundreth of a percent of Slashdot readers that are affected by this. Isn't the point of Slashdot to dredge up the interesting news from other locations, so that people don't have to slog through useless junk?
I cannot reproduce this bug.
.8.
.8 or so and seeing whether you run into the same problem.
I am using Mozilla Firesomething
I followed the following steps:
I opened gedit 2.5.91, entered the text "gedit text", selected it, chose copy from the edit menu. I moved to firesomething, selected the text in the URL bar, pressed the delete button, and hit ctrl-v. The text "gedit text" appeared rather than the URL; this was the desired behavior.
I repeated the same test using kedit 1.3 in place of gedit, and again things worked properly.
I'd suggest trying firesomething
The only thing that I can think of offhand that would cause this might be mozilla being built with a different configuration (perhaps the problem appears when being built with one set of libraries, but not another?) or perhaps a clipboard manager on your system.
Linux users are required to celebrate with beer and an assortment of tasty food tonight. Now. Enjoy yourself tonight, and be happy. It's a good-looking new world for Tux and the rest of us out there -- things just got a lot sunnier. :-) Whee!
I will be amazed if Darl goes to jail. He's a rich white CEO. Rich white CEOs generally don't go to jail in the US (not never -- when people get pissed a la Enron at being massively screwed over, things happen). Still, trying to prove personal criminal intent on Darl's part may be hard. I'd like to see it, but I doubt that it's feasible.
Even if they were, they've been exposed and SCO is burning up rapidly and isn't likely to be able to stick it to Linux. There's little reason for anyone, including Microsoft, to keep money in SCO at this point.
Instead of just buying the game because it's in the Fallout series (as I've seen a couple of people saying), wouldn't it be easier to just see what the reviews say?
*WHY*THE*HECK* do they overwrite the primary clipboard *EVERY*TIME* I accidently drag a bit of text.
.8, and it works exactly as my other applications do. I select text, it goes into the PRIMARY clipboard and doesn't clobber the CLIPBOARD clipboard. If I select text and choose copy, it goes into the CLIPBOARD. This is the same thing every other application on Linux does and should do.
I'm not sure what you mean.
The PRIMARY clipboard holds the contents of the currently selected text. It is pasted by middle-clicking.
The CLIPBOARD holds the contents of the Ctrl-C'ed text (this clipboard corresponds to what Windows users think of as the clipboard). It is pasted with Ctrl-V. Windows users may continue to use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V with their apps if they like to use just the familiar clipboard.
If you're selecting text, then your application is *supposed* to overwrite PRIMARY with the currently selected text. It's what gedit does; it's what Mozilla Firesomething does.
I just tested Mozilla Firesomething
Can you describe exactly what you're doing, what behavior you're seeing, and what behavior you'd expect to see? Or maybe point me to a Bugzilla bug report?
I agree absolutely, and experience backs you up -- closed-source programmers are more likely to swipe code than open-source programmers (though less likely to get caught, which ultimately is what really matters).
However, that doesn't mean that people don't need code insurance in general. This could simply have been an overlooked cost of development that SCO happened to bring to light.
Okay, I'm just trying to understand the motivations here.
Perhaps the Army is getting money from Ubisoft from foreign sales? If money from foreign sales is treated as icing on the cake, as additional funding, then this makes sense.
However, ultimately America's Army was built as a recruiting tool -- it's why it got tax dollars to fund production. It's intended to make a big deal out of the glamour of the Army to convince more people to enlist to help stop the shrinking ranks. I'm not sure what having this thing sold in, say, Belgium is supposed to do for America. Perhaps it will help build up the Belgian Army ranks?
I mean, spending tax dollars to produce a video game wasn't an easy decision with Army folks -- and the game is becoming even less recruiting-tool oriented.
*I* am able to solve problems I have with Linux, but my arguments were that the average guy cannot.
Hmm. In general, I'd say that in general, most people can't really solve problems with either platform. There are probably more people more experienced with Windows ATM, which gives it an advantage. Honestly, though, I suspect that most IT support-types will attest that people need assistance with the simplest things (a common frusterated lament I've seen on Slashdot is someone's boss calling them over because an icon was moved or deleted from their desktop, and that person doesn't know what to do to repair it).
There are a couple of different sorts of people that would have ease-of-use concerns on Linux. The common case people use is "grandma". "Grandma" is currently, I think, reasonably well dealt with on Linux. The "grandma" demographic knows how to use their computer to do web browsing, email, and word processing, but nothing else. "Grandma" does not configure or set up the machine. Some not-particularly-computer-savvy office workers might be considered "grandmas". I currently think that Linux is in a state to handle that. That was one of the first ease-of-use areas that was focussed on for Linux. There have been a couple of stories about this working out fairly well.
There's then the "typical office users". Typical office users might be exemplified by, say, a secretary. Unlike "grandma", the TOU uses a broader range of applications -- maybe something business-specific. The TOU may have extensive application-specific knowledge (knowing a CAD package or Excel, as it is used daily), and generally uses the computer on a daily basis. The TOU is not interested in learning the guts of the computer inside out. The TOU *may* install a software package or two (a P2P application is a popular install, or perhaps an instant-messaging application). A lot of non-technically-oriented-but-computer-owning college students might be TOUs. I think that Linux currently can handle these reasonably well, if not perfectly -- the primary issue comes up if (particularly in the case of the P2P app) the software is not shipped with their distro, though generally it's packaged (probably on the package's home page). The users may be more than slightly peeved at not knowing how to install a software package if they don't have root on their system (not an issue for a home/college user, an issue for a business user). These users may be seriously inconvenienced by having to learn a new application (OOffice rather than Word is not a trivial move if a secretary knows how to do something to a paragraph using that particular checkbox hidden deep in a preferences box). I think that generally, TOUs can use Linux, but the transition is not flawless, as it is for "grandma"s.
The next group of folks I think I would call it the "power users". People that like to poke at their systems a bit, but don't really have a lot of expertise beyond checking checkboxes -- but they know what a number of checkboxes mean that others don't. They might be the guy in the cubicle that the other people go to when they get stuck before hassling with IT. The "power user" may have a number of utilities installed on his system, and probably has a couple things in his system tray that he's installed. He probably has his own set of themes. The "power user" has poked around and looked through the preferences dialogs of most of his applications. The "power user" is looking at a significant amount of relearning if he's familiar with Windows. He is comfortable running InstallShield installers. The utilities that provide the functionality that he uses under Windows may be much harder to use under Linux. Frequently, at this point, Linux folks expect people to have a desire to learn more about their system if they want to do things, and utilities may refer to technical concepts. Pager documentation might talk about viewports and workspaces and expect users to know the difference or be willing to learn. This user is current
Remarkably, it is not considered fraud to promote perpetual motion machines like this in the U.S.
It's fraud -- it's just not *automatically* fraud to say that you have a perpetual motion machine. I really don't think that it should be, or else there are all sorts of special-case laws that come out to deal with various types of supposedly impossible devices, and then someone *does* discover one and has to go through red tape.
If you have a general law -- false claims to get money are fradulent -- then you handle everything reasonably well. Someone just has to demonstrate that something is fradulent. People generally don't want to commit fraud, because then they pay fines and go to jail, so they avoid engaging in fradulent invention schemes.
perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro.
.deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.
.psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No?
Yup. It has to be packed for your distro.
I don't have any problems with my Red Hat system, though. If you feel a need to be mainstream, don't use Black Cat Linux or something oddball like that.
Once you go outside the approved
It's "repositories". I have xine, mpg321, xmms and mplayer installed, and I'm using just the Big Three Redhat repositories -- Fedora, Freshrpms, and Dag. I'm using only stable from each. Oh, and transcode. There are probably more multimedia-related pieces of software on my system, but that's a pretty good example...
For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works.
True. But this same user *also* won't have any problems on Linux, especially since those 10-20 apps came on the Linux distro CD that he purchased.
So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install?
I use an ATI card in my Linux box. It's true that 3d cards are less well supported under Linux than Windows, but that's not a function of Linux in any technological respect -- it's simply how many people are on each platform, and where more of the development money goes.
They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model".
Well, there's no *term* "Linux Driver Model" because the Linux folks don't feel the need to have marketing bullet points. As for providing the same functionality found in the Windows Driver Model...it seems to me that Linux does the stuff that the WDM does. Dynamic loading and unloading? Linux does it. Hotplug support? Linux does it. What specific missing functionality are you complaining about?
They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?
I'd say it's Microsoft at fault -- Microsoft doesn't support more than one architecture, whereas Linux runs on everything under the sun.
Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate
You can list functionality all day that Windows apps have and Linux doesn't, and I can list functionality all day that Linux apps have that Windows doesn't. It doesn't say a damn thing about whether either OS is suitable for the desktop.
Um...not true. RTFA -- it's about *having* a recording device in a theater, not *using* one to record the movie. If you want to ban actual, copyright-infringing use of the recording device, go right ahea...actually, you don't need to, because it's already illegal.
(I wanna see what happens with camera phones.)
There are plenty of reasons I can think of that people might have a camcorder in a theater and not be interested in recording the movie. It's become popular to record people doing things that you don't like or are illegal. If you're in a theater and there are four people at once talking on a cell phone, making the damn thing completely unlistenable, posting a video of them on a blog with a "cell phone use in theaters is out of hand" title seems quite reasonable to me. What about voyeurs, who like videotaping people smooching -- granted, might not be the greatest use of said camcorder, but they are hardly out to swipe the movie. You know how delighted people get when watching people's emotions being manipulated by a movie -- scared and covering their eyes, or crying at moving scenes, or the like? That's certainly a Panasonic moment. As a matter of fact, the fact that a lot of camcorders now let you disable the IR filters to get "night vision" and some even have IR emitters makes recording people in dark areas like movie theaters much more feasible.
I am a pretty big privacy nut, and I *still* don't think that the last five seconds of your driving represent a really big issue in privacy.
I think that a lot of people on Slashdot oppose anti-speeding measures because they speed and want to continue to do so. Let's even assume that you are one of these people. If you're going 100MPH and you have to slow down safely, find a spot to pull over, and actually do so, even if the recorder stops when the car is stopped, there's going to be nothing left on the recorder of you travelling 100MPH.
I can see car-based devices becoming privacy issues. I just plain can't *imagine* how people could complain about a five second black box recording.
I especially can't see how people can back this guy. He was (a) driving three times the speed limit in a crowded area, (b) made no attempt to slow down, (c) lied about both his speed and his actions during the crash, (d) his lies were already shot down by other evidence, and prosecutors just wanted more firm data, and (e) killed someone. The main argument I see from the "I want to speed" fans is still "I can handle that speed" -- this guy clearly couldn't, was going faster than any human could reasonably handle themselves (in such an environment) and *killed* someone.
Heck, he still got an awfully light sentence, IMHO. If you are going through reckless disregard for human life to this kind of extreme degree (where you were probably bound to kill someone within two or three repetitions of the behavior) *and* kill someone *and* lie about your actions, I'd say that eighteen months in jail is awfully nice.
I agree with you that this is a scam on par with Nigerian stuff.
However, in the interests of playing mind games and trying to force the program to consume CPU time:
* What would happen if you were using a 386 (or lower, if the program would run on one)?
* What if you ran a virtual machine on a virtual machine on a virtual machine...
* What if a program kept sending messages or other IPC to the spam program?
More practically, unless the spammers take steps to identify honeypots, using this system might be useful to do early automated identification of spam, feeding the output into a bogus mail server that submits the results to Vipul's Razor and similar services. It'd be even better if these people are reselling spamming services...
That would just make everything effectively BSD-licensed, which will still be a great win for Free Software. Copyleft (GPL) is a weapon against misuse of copyright. If copyright no longer exists, the existence of that weapon is no longer an issue.
I still can't agree. The reason BSD-licensing has value at all is because of intent -- because peole that BSD-license their software do so because they want to release the source. So, I don't have to distribute the source, but I do anyway.
If a closed-source vendor suddenly loses copyright protection, he clearly doesn't *want* to release his source, so he's not going to do so.
Not really. The non-distribution of source would be an issue.
Redistribution of binaries, of course, would be quite feasible.
By default, if you put it under the GPL but do not specify a version number, you can use any version of the GPL you want to redistribute the software.
Right. This is the case for almost all GPL software.
The problem is that if Jim Bob gets a copy of my source released "under the GPL, sans a version number", he can then also release it "under the GPL, sans a version number". This would include GPLv3. Thus, such a change would not affect nondistributed software, since there would be no opportunity to change the license used for release -- I realize that. It does, however, affect any distributed, GPLed software.
The FSF could still use the code up to the fork with the new GPL but wouldn't be able to use the new code in the fork since that code is only available under the old GPL.
Right. Such a change could exempt companies from the source-available clause, for instance.
If you are really concerned that you will not like the next GPL version you can always license your code only to the GPL version you like, like Linus did.
Sure. The problem is that this is not the case for most software; most people do not consider the possibility that the FSF might not act in their best interests.
I'm afraid that your fears are nothing new and have already been dealt with.
I recognize that they aren't new; I am less sure that they have been (or can be, given the absence of anyone trusted by everyone in the world) dealt with.
If your goal is to build a better word processor solely for yourself, why would you care if it can read MS Word format, you think your word processor is better so you're never going to use MS Word anyway.
Because occasionally you need to, say, read content written by other people in Microsoft Word, or hand them content in an editable format.
Seriously, you might as well just hand them your hard drive and credit card number.
Okay, this is just plain wrong.
For starters, as has already been pointed out, these are the Stanford security admins. If you can't trust them, you're already quite screwed.
Second of all, if your IP and a subset of usernames on your system is equivalent to your "hard drive and credit card number", you've got major security problems aside from potential bogus security advisories.
It doesn't mean that attacks on password hashes are valueless.
If you compromise system A, and user Foo uses the same password on system A and system B, cracking his password on A gives you access to other boxes.
If a Linux box is insecure...it isn't the fault of Linux. Distributions and users need to remember that nothing is secure, if it's not enabled that way.
I disagree. Making a secure system both intuitive and not a pain in the ass to set up is part of (a major part of) producing a secure system. There are a *number* of things about Linux that are not particularly intuitive to secure. There are security limitations of the *IX security model -- for example, processes cannot be run sandboxed on Linux, where they are forbidden, say, write access to the filesystem. There are issues with Linux applications -- most Linux distros do not ship with a mail client that configures GPG when it's first started, for instance.
That doesn't mean that Linux compares badly to its peers, but it does mean that Linux definitely could be improved from a security standpoint.