Indeed. And if people shopped daily instead of once a week, they'd use far more energy out there running around shopping.
Your 'shop for food every day' fantasy might work in a few high density living settings, where people carry a quaint little basket down to market to get an onion, a loaf of bread, and some fresh fish. It doesn't work the way people really live their lives in many parts of the world.
And the sex you get from the Internet isn't like the sex you had from the BBSes...
That's for sure. Back in the day, the multiline 'chat' BBSes were all local. There wasn't all the flailing around with A/S/L that there is today- everybody on the site lived in the local dialing area. If you met somebody interesting, you could 'get it on' by taking a short drive.
These days chatrooms are big cold impersonal places, and/or severe cliques full of flakes.
I ran a WWIV 3.21d board for quite a time. It was nice, and 'open source' in that the BBS software was available only as Turbo Pascal source code. In later versions they closed the source, and you had to pay to get it (the binaries were free.)
I remember nights poking around in that pascal code. The BBS ran on an XT with a five meg hard drive, and it only used about 256K of the RAM, so I turned the rest into a disk cache that almost eliminated accesses to the hard drive.
The latest software, v4.30, combined with fossil drivers for Windows (new in v4.30), and with a virtual com port software (COM/IP)... creates an online BBS, that can be accessed like a website...
That's a whole lot of extra work to do, considering all you really have to do is configure BBS software to replace the Unix shell and let people telnet into it. Give people special Unix accounts on the box and away you go. There are plenty of BBS packages written native for Unix/Linux.
300 baud was fast. In high school we'd always have to compete to get on the fast terminals, which were 300 baud. Most of them were Teletype ASR-33 terminals, which were 110 baud (ten characters per second.)
There are 'download assistants' for HTTP and FTP that are pretty nice. The ones I am familiar with for Windows aren't freeware, though. Check out Getright.
Not to sound all gloomy and doomy, but Debian and similar efforts can only survive in a flat-fee bandwidth environment. On a net where it costs lots of money to subscribe to mailing lists, where people pay per megabyte for APT-GET, such cooperative efforts will wither.
And there are suits all over the net figuring out ways to meter and charge for this stuff. Once they've got their hooks in things Debian and similar efforts will balkanize bigtime.
But, say (and this is reaching) the init program used by this OS is proprietary, not the GPL'd version. The whole OS falls apart, and/or has reduced value, if the proprietary init binary isn't run. The publisher is certainly within their rights to require per-seat licensing of said proprietary init binary.
To say otherwise, to claim that the GNU software can ONLY be run on all-GNU platforms, would require the removal of all GNU software from any 'un-pure' OS, and that's just NOT gonna happen anytime soon.
but as derivative works, the source code must be freely available somewhere, and they are legally obligated to provide free access to it if they made any changes, even for those who did not buy the software.
Is that true? I thought they only had to provide the source code to anybody who they give/sell the binaries to.
Which would mean: if they choose their customers 'properly' they can keep the source 'closed' to all who don't pay. Once a customer has paid for the product, it dilutes his value to let everyone else get it for free- so he is provided with the source code, and he doesn't release it to anybody else.
They can't require customers from redistrubitng the source, but they can certainly make that sort of deal with them.
I guess what it comes down to is 'what are the suits paying for.'
They are likely not willing to pay for an alternative version of UnitedLinux made by someone who disagrees with the 'per-seat license' who has downloaded the code and recompiled it and is giving it away for free.
All that the UnitedLinux people have to do is spread a load of FUD, saying 'those guys are inherently anti-Business! Do you want to run binaries made out of our source code that they've screwed around with??' The suits will say 'hell no' and only allow official per-seat-licensed binaries in their organisation.
Sure, the people and companies that want to do that end-run around the UL payment will just use the free alternative build. Believe me, though, the suits will buy the sanctioned product. And they'll even hire people whose job it is to bust anybody who brings the unsanctioned version into the shop.
Labels like those are vigorously anti-popular. If they got popular ('commercial') they'd make sure they changed something about their product to get back 'on track.'
There's always an 'underground culture.' Hell, I bought into that kind of fun when I was younger too.
It doesn't matter to anybody who isn't playing around in that little world.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
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I'm not sure how tightly coupled advertising is to the actual number of listeners.
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that in the original Star Wars movie there's no mention of it being 'Episode 4'. My memory is hazy on the point, of course, as I only saw it once, in the theatre in 1977, and haven't seen a single one of the other shows since then.
Disney won't sell 'Song of the South' either- but you can get ahold of it if you try.
Binary compatability is viewed as a bad thing by many people who advocate Open source solutions, because it encourages the release of binary-only software. There's no linux ABI almost as a matter of principle.
The big red neon light may well be a stop light.
I, for one, LIKE compiling nearly everything from source.
I think you're talking about them 'shutting down and going out of business, selling their domain name to some CheapBytes style vendor.'
Not gonna happen.
The Linux vendors are not going to lump all together into some sort of borg. People who 'play nice' belong as guests on Mister Rodger's show, not in the market.
Red Hat can't 'wipe out' Slackware. When the last businessman has sold his shares and the furniture in the corporate center is on eBay being sold off, Slackware will still be a small but influencial distribution run by a core of people who use Linux because it's more like the Unix they grew up knowing.
Slack is the only Linux I'll still consider, though for anything I can, I'd rather use NetBSD. Everything else Linux has, sadly, become shiny bright stuff for kids, or grey 'easy for MSCE' drivel.
It might seem ironic or funny for me to be saying this, but I prefer X11 because it allows me to run NetBSD Mozilla here on my Windows 2000 desktop, from a seperate NetBSD machine on my home network. A framebuffer-bound environment wouldn't make that nearly as possible. I wish that eXceed wasn't as expensive as it is (I bought it bundled with Interix several years ago). I would say the network transparency of X11 apps is a major selling point. I could throw together an KVM to use instead, but it wouldn't be the same.
Most of the Yggdrasil releases had serious problems. Yggdrasil seemed to want to 'own' Linux, their first release was actually called LGX (Linux-GNU-X) so they could 'own' the name. They produced the first commercial CD-ROM release of Linux (I hope someday that 'white-cover with green ink' will be a collector's item because of it), but they've faded away.
I'm glad it was there, because I got my first taste of Linux with the old 'Plug and Play LGX' on my 486 with Sound Blaster Pro and it's proprietary 1x CDROM. The CD boot even played music at the login prompt.
Actually, Slackware is still pretty okay even for 386 boxes.
I learned most of the networking I know in the mid 90's by buying cheap 3C501 (yikes!) ethernet cards for $2.50 a pound at a surplus store and building three or four 386-SX boxes to run Slackware on.
That, and sweating through all the 'blue spine' O'Reilly books I could find.
I picked up an Electronics Illustrated magazine from 1959 at a flea market a few weeks ago. The cover story was a 'build your own computer' project. Basically the design is to build a set of cascading flip-flops using discrete transistors (they used big heat sunk TO-3 transistors for some weird reason). The input device was a few toggle switches to select 'operation' and a telephone dial to enter numbers. Basically just a simple flip-flop based binary adder. But I bet it was cool to have back in 1959.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. And if people shopped daily instead of once a week, they'd use far more energy out there running around shopping.
Your 'shop for food every day' fantasy might work in a few high density living settings, where people carry a quaint little basket down to market to get an onion, a loaf of bread, and some fresh fish. It doesn't work the way people really live their lives in many parts of the world.
or when HDs were 100-200 megs?
Hell, my first hard drive was 5 megs, and I bought it used for about $35. All the rich kids at the time had those Seagate 20 meg drives.
More than 640K was highway robbery, considering you paid like $12 apiece for 256Kx1bit DRAM chips.
And the sex you get from the Internet isn't like the sex you had from the BBSes...
That's for sure. Back in the day, the multiline 'chat' BBSes were all local. There wasn't all the flailing around with A/S/L that there is today- everybody on the site lived in the local dialing area. If you met somebody interesting, you could 'get it on' by taking a short drive.
These days chatrooms are big cold impersonal places, and/or severe cliques full of flakes.
I ran a WWIV 3.21d board for quite a time. It was nice, and 'open source' in that the BBS software was available only as Turbo Pascal source code. In later versions they closed the source, and you had to pay to get it (the binaries were free.)
I remember nights poking around in that pascal code. The BBS ran on an XT with a five meg hard drive, and it only used about 256K of the RAM, so I turned the rest into a disk cache that almost eliminated accesses to the hard drive.
The latest software, v4.30, combined with fossil drivers for Windows (new in v4.30), and with a virtual com port software (COM/IP) ... creates an online BBS, that can be accessed like a website ...
That's a whole lot of extra work to do, considering all you really have to do is configure BBS software to replace the Unix shell and let people telnet into it. Give people special Unix accounts on the box and away you go. There are plenty of BBS packages written native for Unix/Linux.
Yep.
300 baud was fast. In high school we'd always have to compete to get on the fast terminals, which were 300 baud. Most of them were Teletype ASR-33 terminals, which were 110 baud (ten characters per second.)
There are 'download assistants' for HTTP and FTP that are pretty nice. The ones I am familiar with for Windows aren't freeware, though. Check out Getright.
Not to sound all gloomy and doomy, but Debian and similar efforts can only survive in a flat-fee bandwidth environment. On a net where it costs lots of money to subscribe to mailing lists, where people pay per megabyte for APT-GET, such cooperative efforts will wither.
And there are suits all over the net figuring out ways to meter and charge for this stuff. Once they've got their hooks in things Debian and similar efforts will balkanize bigtime.
But wouldn't a collection be considered a derivative work? and likewise force the collection to be licensed as GPL?
Don't shout that TOO loud.
Ask someone at Red Hat if you can image their boxed-set CDs and share the ISOs over the net on your FTP site.
I did, in about 1997, in person at a presentation. They said 'no.'
The 'glue and packaging' that holds a Red Hat distro together is NOT GPL'd.
But, say (and this is reaching) the init program used by this OS is proprietary, not the GPL'd version. The whole OS falls apart, and/or has reduced value, if the proprietary init binary isn't run. The publisher is certainly within their rights to require per-seat licensing of said proprietary init binary.
To say otherwise, to claim that the GNU software can ONLY be run on all-GNU platforms, would require the removal of all GNU software from any 'un-pure' OS, and that's just NOT gonna happen anytime soon.
but as derivative works, the source code must be freely available somewhere, and they are legally obligated to provide free access to it if they made any changes, even for those who did not buy the software.
Is that true? I thought they only had to provide the source code to anybody who they give/sell the binaries to.
Which would mean: if they choose their customers 'properly' they can keep the source 'closed' to all who don't pay. Once a customer has paid for the product, it dilutes his value to let everyone else get it for free- so he is provided with the source code, and he doesn't release it to anybody else.
They can't require customers from redistrubitng the source, but they can certainly make that sort of deal with them.
I guess what it comes down to is 'what are the suits paying for.'
They are likely not willing to pay for an alternative version of UnitedLinux made by someone who disagrees with the 'per-seat license' who has downloaded the code and recompiled it and is giving it away for free.
All that the UnitedLinux people have to do is spread a load of FUD, saying 'those guys are inherently anti-Business! Do you want to run binaries made out of our source code that they've screwed around with??' The suits will say 'hell no' and only allow official per-seat-licensed binaries in their organisation.
Sure, the people and companies that want to do that end-run around the UL payment will just use the free alternative build. Believe me, though, the suits will buy the sanctioned product. And they'll even hire people whose job it is to bust anybody who brings the unsanctioned version into the shop.
I thought that sort of 'exclusionary licensing' with special requirements was strongly discouraged by the GNU movement.
Has the COPYING file been discreetly modified while I wasn't watching?
Using grain alcohol for fuel raises some ethical questions.
It amounts to burning food.
I don't personally have a problem with it, but people might challange the idea of burning food while there are people in our country starving.
Labels like those are vigorously anti-popular. If they got popular ('commercial') they'd make sure they changed something about their product to get back 'on track.'
There's always an 'underground culture.' Hell, I bought into that kind of fun when I was younger too.
It doesn't matter to anybody who isn't playing around in that little world.
I'm not sure how tightly coupled advertising is to the actual number of listeners.
Believe me, the ad executives are!
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that in the original Star Wars movie there's no mention of it being 'Episode 4'. My memory is hazy on the point, of course, as I only saw it once, in the theatre in 1977, and haven't seen a single one of the other shows since then.
Disney won't sell 'Song of the South' either- but you can get ahold of it if you try.
Binary compatability is viewed as a bad thing by many people who advocate Open source solutions, because it encourages the release of binary-only software. There's no linux ABI almost as a matter of principle.
The big red neon light may well be a stop light.
I, for one, LIKE compiling nearly everything from source.
I think you're talking about them 'shutting down and going out of business, selling their domain name to some CheapBytes style vendor.'
Not gonna happen.
The Linux vendors are not going to lump all together into some sort of borg. People who 'play nice' belong as guests on Mister Rodger's show, not in the market.
Red Hat can't 'wipe out' Slackware. When the last businessman has sold his shares and the furniture in the corporate center is on eBay being sold off, Slackware will still be a small but influencial distribution run by a core of people who use Linux because it's more like the Unix they grew up knowing.
Slack is the only Linux I'll still consider, though for anything I can, I'd rather use NetBSD. Everything else Linux has, sadly, become shiny bright stuff for kids, or grey 'easy for MSCE' drivel.
No, the LSB is a standard. A piece of paper.
The Linux community is notorious for thumbing their noses at standards.
The previous commenter was talking about a commonly funded core of CODE.
It might seem ironic or funny for me to be saying this, but I prefer X11 because it allows me to run NetBSD Mozilla here on my Windows 2000 desktop, from a seperate NetBSD machine on my home network. A framebuffer-bound environment wouldn't make that nearly as possible. I wish that eXceed wasn't as expensive as it is (I bought it bundled with Interix several years ago). I would say the network transparency of X11 apps is a major selling point. I could throw together an KVM to use instead, but it wouldn't be the same.
Most of the Yggdrasil releases had serious problems. Yggdrasil seemed to want to 'own' Linux, their first release was actually called LGX (Linux-GNU-X) so they could 'own' the name. They produced the first commercial CD-ROM release of Linux (I hope someday that 'white-cover with green ink' will be a collector's item because of it), but they've faded away.
I'm glad it was there, because I got my first taste of Linux with the old 'Plug and Play LGX' on my 486 with Sound Blaster Pro and it's proprietary 1x CDROM. The CD boot even played music at the login prompt.
Actually, Slackware is still pretty okay even for 386 boxes.
I learned most of the networking I know in the mid 90's by buying cheap 3C501 (yikes!) ethernet cards for $2.50 a pound at a surplus store and building three or four 386-SX boxes to run Slackware on.
That, and sweating through all the 'blue spine' O'Reilly books I could find.
I picked up an Electronics Illustrated magazine from 1959 at a flea market a few weeks ago. The cover story was a 'build your own computer' project. Basically the design is to build a set of cascading flip-flops using discrete transistors (they used big heat sunk TO-3 transistors for some weird reason). The input device was a few toggle switches to select 'operation' and a telephone dial to enter numbers. Basically just a simple flip-flop based binary adder. But I bet it was cool to have back in 1959.