...is clearly an asshat. And I don't use that word lightly friends. Here's two quotes that stood out for me:
"However, the open source strategy is a triple-edge sword..."
If you're going to use an analogy how about one that at least sort of makes sense. For some reason I keep thinking about those triple bladed Gillette MACH 3 razors here...and
"...most free software such as Linux, (the most popular because of its operating system capability)"
I could've shown you the many typos and bad sentence structure but this one statement shows how little this writer (or his 'writing capability') understands about Linux and/or Open Source.
They give people like this positions where they're stuff can be read by the public?! Amazing!
I suspect that this is sorta Richter's point taken the opposite way:
"Why the hell does any third party have the right to throw out my 'advertisements'?"
This is a really big deal and will be painful for many if Richter wins. All I can say is that I'm VERY grateful for ASSP (assp.sourceforge.net) here. It's a WONDERFUL piece of anti-spam software and the students and faculty here couldn't do without it.
That wouldn't happen to be a 'Wearnes' drive would it? OMG, that was the suck! Proprietary, sorta-IDE interface, slow as dog crap, burned coasters about 2:1 times.
As I remember, when I got my 2X CD-R, a couple buddies and I ended up STOMPING it to death.
Couldn't a multiple output sound card like an Audigy be used? God knows there's a lot of outputs on there - even more were you to use mono sound and split left/right.
Wow! Asking for help from a community of technically knowledgable users is now considered to be lazy. What? You never ask friends or collegues questions about your projects?
Oh right, you have ALL the answers...
How does a comment like this get modded as 'Insightful'? C'mon people - USE YOUR HEADS!
You know, it's funny. Where I live I continue to see massive construction projects. I see jobs of every type springing up. We've lost far less students due to financial hardship this year. Admissions are up. Donations are up. In short, my spider senses tell ME that things ARE looking up.
Unless you live in Kalifornia, where you can expect some real issues due to immigration, high taxes/cost of living, inflated real estate, and, thanks to NBC, fear of earthquakes - most of the country appears to be on a rebound.
Look, I realize that there are those of you who don't want to hear this kind of good news (or anything that might relect well on the current administration), but it's true from my perspective at least. I don't need the government OR Google to prove the case for me. It's seems pretty clear all on it's own.
One thing is for sure, it might not be the economy of 1998, but it's certainly NOT 2002!
I'd have to agree, with the small provisio that I think that anti-virus firms need to do a better job defining what a virus IS.. As the admin of a small school I've decided that next year I'm locking down the labs - big time. I didn't do it up until now because of program incompatabilities but I have to say that if this remains an issue, it won't matter - we'll get different programs.
It wasn't so bad before this year. Yeah, there was some spyware out there, but it wasn't like f*cking 'n-case' which replicates itself to random filenames all over your drive and then inserts startup stuff in 'startup', the local and machine registry, and even the freakin' win.ini!!!
I called Sophos on this after spending some two hours cleaning it up. I basically said, "You folks need to take some responsibility here."
The time has come to draw the line in the sand. n-case and others like it, are VIRAL. It can't be removed easily by the user - NO agreement of this nature can be legally binding.
Now for what frightened me the most: Ever have spyware that couldn't be cleaned by Spybot and/or Ad-Aware - even with the latest patches? No? Then you probably don't live in Korea. A few of our students do, and this is where this particular piece of crap came from. It defended itself by making a program that runs at startup that runs a program that insures that another program is there and running THAT, reprograms your home page to a site that ActiveX 'drivebys' your computer to load the program!!!:O
That was a bitch to clean up (although nothing compared to n-case!). You probably haven't seen this yet because it's a Korean app - but it managed to get on a few American machines here when the Koreans visited a site that installed some 'happy fun cursor' program.
I'm ranting.. But the truth is: Admins have to do their part, but the anti-virus people have got to do a better job also. They need to stop turning a blind eye to this issue.
Remember Pioneer LaserVideo? Yep. Early Laserdiscs also suffered from rot, although the reason for that was due to poor sealing between the disc halves.
I call my new DVD-based data storage solution: "6 discs away from disaster..." It works like this:
Before CD's, I had floppies - and boy DID I! Stacks and stacks of the things. When I got my first CD-R writer, I started to move all of my data from floppies to CD-R. That was almost 10 years ago.
Recently, I went through all my old CD-R's and backed up that data to DVDs. Out of a 250 or so CD's around 30 were irrelevant due to newer program versions and at least 10 had issues being read from the drive. In every one of those cases it was some cheap no-name disc with just a thin layer seperating me data from certain death. A single scratch was perhaps not enough to destroy the disc - right away - but over time, that scratch's rot grew like rust to encompass much of the disc's surface.
What discs I did salvage recently, I converted to DVD-/+R (I swing both ways).:) So now, I roughly fit 6 CD-R's on one DVD. Of course I've learned not to skimp on quality - especially now that each one of these discs represent 6 CD's and countless floppies worth of information!
So I guess the next big thing is Blu-Ray. Then I fit, what around 5 DVD's on one of those... Then what, Dual Blu - 10 DVD's on one. Then maybe... Holocube tech? Oh, to put it all on one small cube!
But beware the heartache if you were to LOSE THAT to rot!
Let's not be Polyanna here. The simple reality of today's 'music' and culture is far, far different than it was 20-30 years ago. And this is again, even more removed from the culture 20-30 years before that.
Yes, aspects of racism and injustice have been dealt with (or at least recognized as a problem), but it's been replaced increasing violence and ignorance in other areas. None of which furthers the cause of education. The music is just the reflection of a sad reality.
Anyone who thinks that Sun shouldn't have a right to exercise the same rights under the GPL as you or I or even SCO is WRONG. The whole point of the GPL is the openness of it. Unless Sun specifically abuses the GPL (as many claim SCO has), they can do what they like in regards to distribution. I say: More power to them!
As much as I respect RMS this is one area I do disagree with him. This whole branding business started with his insistence on Linux being called GNU/Linux. Honestly, who the hell cares WHAT it's called? RMS needs to have more faith in his own cause minus ego. Isn't the point more intellectual in that it's FREE?
It bothers me not in the least that 'X' company wants to add some proprietary stuff in. Huh. Look at KDE - wasn't THAT considered non-GPL for the longest time? Yes, GNOME ended up being created as a result, but then KDE was opened up as well.
Look, no matter what Sun, Microsoft, or anyone else does there is one simple fact: You Can't Fight FREE. You can modify it. You can re-brand it. You can put your own obfusications around things. But the simple fact remains that no one would even be considering Java Desktop in the first place were it not for MS's own proprietary (READ: non-free) OS. No matter what Sun does, the alternatives still exist.
If Sun's not careful, they'll end up being marginalized like MS - no worries there. If they do this right, they'll be able to have a branded, supported, standardized version of Linux that they can support and the customers will love (hopefully).
Another interesting thing I noticed is when people depend on spaces for spacing columns or otherwise lining things up.
Of course the 'right' way to do this is to use tables to begin with, but you know, not everyone is that savvy. After all, typewriters never seemed to complain much about it.
Anyway, we recently discovered this issue when a secretary was 'upgraded' here. We had no idea this is how she was doing things (mainly creating forms) and her new machine's newer copy of Office totally destroyed all that hard work. Everything ended up geting redone.
Uh.. I hate to tell you folk this but let me let you in on a little secret....DOC documents have incompatibilities with varying versions of MS OFFICE!:O The HORROR!
Geez, people treat.DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right? Well... In light of this, how can it be said that OOo is any less compatible only being 3 years old?!
You know, not every.org can afford to keep up with General Electic's IT budget. Smaller schools such as ours can't just plunk down this kind of money every two years to insure compatibility with MS's latest fashions.
With OOo's XML I do look forward to being able to see my documents 20 years from now just as they are today (hopefully on a flat screen the size of my house of course).
Seriously. When I arrived at this school we had students using different versions of Works and Office at home and in the dorms (not to mention Wordperfect and even Wordpad!) Then you had international issues with MS Office, which I understand most of these are resolved now in 2003. Still...
Open/StarOffice let us completely standardize our documentation here. It allowed me to offer a free copy of the software to every student, parent, and teacher. It's not perfect, but then neither is MS Office.
We've just started using ASSP (assp.sf.net) which not only uses bayesian filtering but also uses blacklists as weights for mail.
If a piece of incoming mail is from a known blacklist it isn't automatically thrown away - BUT, the system does take that fact into consideration while it checks other factors (origin headers, bayesian content comparison).
Oh, you mean the same rights that continued under 8 years of Bill Clinton? Yeah, that made a difference. I'm certain Kerry will too.
Do us all a favor and stop being such a tool - at least publicly. I don't mind the fact that you hate G.W. - join the crowd, but you've simply got to have better reasons to replace him than this.
Stability is a tricky thing - just like vendor relationships. Apple knows their hardware as well as their software. Whenever I hear the word, "Custom", as it relates to a large project like this, I cringe.
Does 'Custom' mean that you never have to:
- Patch it? - Update various included software? - Include new hardware support?
Of course not! Even if you're not paying for the software, you're going to have pay for the support for the software - however you figure it. Just ask IBM - that's their new business model. Think their customers are getting off any cheaper than Apple's? Don't bet on it.
I'm FAR from an Apple zealot, believe me. But I say, right tool for the right job. If these folks think they've got the right tool, then I applaud them for not just bending over and paying the MS tax as so many do.
It's a free market, people can and should use what they want. My.org uses MS Windows, but then again, we also use Open/StarOffice.
And this has been a huge problem for me at my little school here in Lancaster, PA. There's a lot of really cool Linux-type projects out there that I'd love to take advantage of, but I fear.
I fear that if something goes haywire, there is little or no support (other than some helpful folks online). In the case of Koha (which we have looked into ourselves), I think it would be a great fit. But I tremble to think what would happen if... Something happened.
I'm pretty much a Linux newb, and although I feel I've come a pretty long way in that related knowledge, I still don't feel competent enough to take on a huge project like Koha here by myself. Simple firewalls are one thing, a multiuser database holding thousands of library records is another.
BUT... That doesn't mean I won't continue to grow and learn as time goes by. I just have to 'live within my means' for the time being.
Please... Don't be a literal ass. Of course I've read and understand the GPL. What I mean by 'use' was in the commercial/binary context of the article (I'm sorry, did YOU read it?) and the company being discussed.
They 'used' the code in a commercial way that required they share the code due to their binary-only distribution. There, feel better now?
Question: Why do you waste bitspace with this sort of thing? Everyone else seemed to have grokked it, why was it hard for you? Can't you be more helpful elsewhere?
Lindows/spire should publically ask Microsoft's permission if their name change is acceptible. It should be in the form of a public ad taken out in the Times and go something like this:
"Dear Mr. Gates,
We admit it, you've won. While we were perfectly willing to follow through the legality of our name in the U.S. court system, we simply cannot financially keep up with your legal punishment in 7 different courts all over the world.
Therefore, we would humbly ask your permission to change our name from the disputed 'Lindows' to 'Linspire'. We hope that this will stop your litigation and allow for competition in the PC/operating system market.
P.S. Good luck on your E.U. investigation. We know the pain of trying to keep up with litigation overseas."
I do hope that MS gets whatever they deserve in the E.U.
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What Linux-based company has been convicted of running a monopoly?
Yeah, I know, you'll 'get back to me'.
...is clearly an asshat. And I don't use that word lightly friends. Here's two quotes that stood out for me:
..and
"However, the open source strategy is a triple-edge sword..."
If you're going to use an analogy how about one that at least sort of makes sense. For some reason I keep thinking about those triple bladed Gillette MACH 3 razors here.
"...most free software such as Linux, (the most popular because of its operating system capability)"
I could've shown you the many typos and bad sentence structure but this one statement shows how little this writer (or his 'writing capability') understands about Linux and/or Open Source.
They give people like this positions where they're stuff can be read by the public?! Amazing!
I suspect that this is sorta Richter's point taken the opposite way:
"Why the hell does any third party have the right to throw out my 'advertisements'?"
This is a really big deal and will be painful for many if Richter wins. All I can say is that I'm VERY grateful for ASSP (assp.sourceforge.net) here. It's a WONDERFUL piece of anti-spam software and the students and faculty here couldn't do without it.
That wouldn't happen to be a 'Wearnes' drive would it? OMG, that was the suck! Proprietary, sorta-IDE interface, slow as dog crap, burned coasters about 2:1 times.
As I remember, when I got my 2X CD-R, a couple buddies and I ended up STOMPING it to death.
Couldn't a multiple output sound card like an Audigy be used? God knows there's a lot of outputs on there - even more were you to use mono sound and split left/right.
Wow! Asking for help from a community of technically knowledgable users is now considered to be lazy. What? You never ask friends or collegues questions about your projects?
Oh right, you have ALL the answers...
How does a comment like this get modded as 'Insightful'? C'mon people - USE YOUR HEADS!
You know, it's funny. Where I live I continue to see massive construction projects. I see jobs of every type springing up. We've lost far less students due to financial hardship this year. Admissions are up. Donations are up. In short, my spider senses tell ME that things ARE looking up.
Unless you live in Kalifornia, where you can expect some real issues due to immigration, high taxes/cost of living, inflated real estate, and, thanks to NBC, fear of earthquakes - most of the country appears to be on a rebound.
Look, I realize that there are those of you who don't want to hear this kind of good news (or anything that might relect well on the current administration), but it's true from my perspective at least. I don't need the government OR Google to prove the case for me. It's seems pretty clear all on it's own.
One thing is for sure, it might not be the economy of 1998, but it's certainly NOT 2002!
I'd have to agree, with the small provisio that I think that anti-virus firms need to do a better job defining what a virus IS.. As the admin of a small school I've decided that next year I'm locking down the labs - big time. I didn't do it up until now because of program incompatabilities but I have to say that if this remains an issue, it won't matter - we'll get different programs.
:O
It wasn't so bad before this year. Yeah, there was some spyware out there, but it wasn't like f*cking 'n-case' which replicates itself to random filenames all over your drive and then inserts startup stuff in 'startup', the local and machine registry, and even the freakin' win.ini!!!
I called Sophos on this after spending some two hours cleaning it up. I basically said, "You folks need to take some responsibility here."
The time has come to draw the line in the sand. n-case and others like it, are VIRAL. It can't be removed easily by the user - NO agreement of this nature can be legally binding.
Now for what frightened me the most: Ever have spyware that couldn't be cleaned by Spybot and/or Ad-Aware - even with the latest patches? No? Then you probably don't live in Korea. A few of our students do, and this is where this particular piece of crap came from. It defended itself by making a program that runs at startup that runs a program that insures that another program is there and running THAT, reprograms your home page to a site that ActiveX 'drivebys' your computer to load the program!!!
That was a bitch to clean up (although nothing compared to n-case!). You probably haven't seen this yet because it's a Korean app - but it managed to get on a few American machines here when the Koreans visited a site that installed some 'happy fun cursor' program.
I'm ranting.. But the truth is: Admins have to do their part, but the anti-virus people have got to do a better job also. They need to stop turning a blind eye to this issue.
Remember Pioneer LaserVideo? Yep. Early Laserdiscs also suffered from rot, although the reason for that was due to poor sealing between the disc halves.
:) So now, I roughly fit 6 CD-R's on one DVD. Of course I've learned not to skimp on quality - especially now that each one of these discs represent 6 CD's and countless floppies worth of information!
I call my new DVD-based data storage solution: "6 discs away from disaster..." It works like this:
Before CD's, I had floppies - and boy DID I! Stacks and stacks of the things. When I got my first CD-R writer, I started to move all of my data from floppies to CD-R. That was almost 10 years ago.
Recently, I went through all my old CD-R's and backed up that data to DVDs. Out of a 250 or so CD's around 30 were irrelevant due to newer program versions and at least 10 had issues being read from the drive. In every one of those cases it was some cheap no-name disc with just a thin layer seperating me data from certain death. A single scratch was perhaps not enough to destroy the disc - right away - but over time, that scratch's rot grew like rust to encompass much of the disc's surface.
What discs I did salvage recently, I converted to DVD-/+R (I swing both ways).
So I guess the next big thing is Blu-Ray. Then I fit, what around 5 DVD's on one of those... Then what, Dual Blu - 10 DVD's on one. Then maybe... Holocube tech? Oh, to put it all on one small cube!
But beware the heartache if you were to LOSE THAT to rot!
Let's not be Polyanna here. The simple reality of today's 'music' and culture is far, far different than it was 20-30 years ago. And this is again, even more removed from the culture 20-30 years before that.
Yes, aspects of racism and injustice have been dealt with (or at least recognized as a problem), but it's been replaced increasing violence and ignorance in other areas. None of which furthers the cause of education. The music is just the reflection of a sad reality.
Anyone who thinks that Sun shouldn't have a right to exercise the same rights under the GPL as you or I or even SCO is WRONG. The whole point of the GPL is the openness of it. Unless Sun specifically abuses the GPL (as many claim SCO has), they can do what they like in regards to distribution. I say: More power to them!
As much as I respect RMS this is one area I do disagree with him. This whole branding business started with his insistence on Linux being called GNU/Linux. Honestly, who the hell cares WHAT it's called? RMS needs to have more faith in his own cause minus ego. Isn't the point more intellectual in that it's FREE?
It bothers me not in the least that 'X' company wants to add some proprietary stuff in. Huh. Look at KDE - wasn't THAT considered non-GPL for the longest time? Yes, GNOME ended up being created as a result, but then KDE was opened up as well.
Look, no matter what Sun, Microsoft, or anyone else does there is one simple fact: You Can't Fight FREE. You can modify it. You can re-brand it. You can put your own obfusications around things. But the simple fact remains that no one would even be considering Java Desktop in the first place were it not for MS's own proprietary (READ: non-free) OS. No matter what Sun does, the alternatives still exist.
If Sun's not careful, they'll end up being marginalized like MS - no worries there. If they do this right, they'll be able to have a branded, supported, standardized version of Linux that they can support and the customers will love (hopefully).
Not sure if I should go ahead and purchase the D12 CD or wait for the D13 version. I hear it's got a lot more 'kick'. :P
Another interesting thing I noticed is when people depend on spaces for spacing columns or otherwise lining things up.
Of course the 'right' way to do this is to use tables to begin with, but you know, not everyone is that savvy. After all, typewriters never seemed to complain much about it.
Anyway, we recently discovered this issue when a secretary was 'upgraded' here. We had no idea this is how she was doing things (mainly creating forms) and her new machine's newer copy of Office totally destroyed all that hard work. Everything ended up geting redone.
Uh.. I hate to tell you folk this but let me let you in on a little secret... .DOC documents have incompatibilities with varying versions of MS OFFICE! :O The HORROR!
.DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right? Well... In light of this, how can it be said that OOo is any less compatible only being 3 years old?!
.org can afford to keep up with General Electic's IT budget. Smaller schools such as ours can't just plunk down this kind of money every two years to insure compatibility with MS's latest fashions.
Geez, people treat
You know, not every
With OOo's XML I do look forward to being able to see my documents 20 years from now just as they are today (hopefully on a flat screen the size of my house of course).
Seriously. When I arrived at this school we had students using different versions of Works and Office at home and in the dorms (not to mention Wordperfect and even Wordpad!) Then you had international issues with MS Office, which I understand most of these are resolved now in 2003. Still...
Open/StarOffice let us completely standardize our documentation here. It allowed me to offer a free copy of the software to every student, parent, and teacher. It's not perfect, but then neither is MS Office.
We've just started using ASSP (assp.sf.net) which not only uses bayesian filtering but also uses blacklists as weights for mail.
If a piece of incoming mail is from a known blacklist it isn't automatically thrown away - BUT, the system does take that fact into consideration while it checks other factors (origin headers, bayesian content comparison).
"...rights back from the corporations..."
Oh, you mean the same rights that continued under 8 years of Bill Clinton? Yeah, that made a difference. I'm certain Kerry will too.
Do us all a favor and stop being such a tool - at least publicly. I don't mind the fact that you hate G.W. - join the crowd, but you've simply got to have better reasons to replace him than this.
Vanilla Ice's Greatest Hits should be on the shelves shortly. Man, I've been waiting for that one!
Ice, Ice, Baby!
"Yeah, but who's gonna FLY it, kid?"
Stability is a tricky thing - just like vendor relationships. Apple knows their hardware as well as their software. Whenever I hear the word, "Custom", as it relates to a large project like this, I cringe.
Does 'Custom' mean that you never have to:
- Patch it?
- Update various included software?
- Include new hardware support?
Of course not! Even if you're not paying for the software, you're going to have pay for the support for the software - however you figure it. Just ask IBM - that's their new business model. Think their customers are getting off any cheaper than Apple's? Don't bet on it.
I'm FAR from an Apple zealot, believe me. But I say, right tool for the right job. If these folks think they've got the right tool, then I applaud them for not just bending over and paying the MS tax as so many do.
.org uses MS Windows, but then again, we also use Open/StarOffice.
It's a free market, people can and should use what they want. My
And this has been a huge problem for me at my little school here in Lancaster, PA. There's a lot of really cool Linux-type projects out there that I'd love to take advantage of, but I fear.
I fear that if something goes haywire, there is little or no support (other than some helpful folks online). In the case of Koha (which we have looked into ourselves), I think it would be a great fit. But I tremble to think what would happen if... Something happened.
I'm pretty much a Linux newb, and although I feel I've come a pretty long way in that related knowledge, I still don't feel competent enough to take on a huge project like Koha here by myself. Simple firewalls are one thing, a multiuser database holding thousands of library records is another.
BUT... That doesn't mean I won't continue to grow and learn as time goes by. I just have to 'live within my means' for the time being.
It's been a long time since I've heard a story like this that didn't involve a university or some other education-based organization.
I think Apple can make an excellent case given the rising amount of spyware, viruses, and worms on the PC as well as selling their BSD-based OS.
Good deal and hooray for competition! It's about time (again).
Simply semantics my man! Give it a rest!
Please... Don't be a literal ass. Of course I've read and understand the GPL. What I mean by 'use' was in the commercial/binary context of the article (I'm sorry, did YOU read it?) and the company being discussed.
They 'used' the code in a commercial way that required they share the code due to their binary-only distribution. There, feel better now?
Question: Why do you waste bitspace with this sort of thing? Everyone else seemed to have grokked it, why was it hard for you? Can't you be more helpful elsewhere?
Don't use GPL code if you can't abide by the terms of the license.
END OF LINE.
Lindows/spire should publically ask Microsoft's permission if their name change is acceptible. It should be in the form of a public ad taken out in the Times and go something like this:
"Dear Mr. Gates,
We admit it, you've won. While we were perfectly willing to follow through the legality of our name in the U.S. court system, we simply cannot financially keep up with your legal punishment in 7 different courts all over the world.
Therefore, we would humbly ask your permission to change our name from the disputed 'Lindows' to 'Linspire'. We hope that this will stop your litigation and allow for competition in the PC/operating system market.
P.S. Good luck on your E.U. investigation. We know the pain of trying to keep up with litigation overseas."
I do hope that MS gets whatever they deserve in the E.U.