Hopefully the newly resigned folks will... perhaps with backing from IBM? In a sense, it could be done quickly; (1). establish new procedures that provide 100% transparency, (2). rubber-stamp all current ISO standards *except* OOXML.
The toughest part would probably be being recognised as a standards organisation. But something really needs to happen as ISO do not appear to be sorting their shit out.
Problem is, you know the way the music industry tries to impose DRM on their customers in order to prevent piracy... and you know the way it makes absolutely *no difference*, since a pirate is the person who is going to have the resources to circumvent the DRM? Well, I kinda feel the same way about this EULA!
**Apologies to Mozilla for likening them to the music industry! I know they're not evil really, but this is kind of a slippery slope.... and from my point of view, the EULA is of no use to me and merely gets in my way. Albeit, I guess it's not a *huge* hardship for me, but I still resent it!;)
But on the other hand, now having an EULA imposed on Ubuntu and thus forcing me to view the EULA (or at least the top few lines) and check an "I agree" box and click a Next button *does not* benefit me at all and *is not* a step forward.
And again, not wishing to sound like a scratched record, I understand Mozilla are doing this for legal reasons but I can see no practical benefit in making this a click-thru agreement. Apart from anything, previous Ubuntu releases have shipped with Firefox and have not required this.... so surely that would undermine any possible legal case? If I compiled and shipped my own "Firefox Evil-edition" I only need make sure I use the sources from a pre Ubuntu 9.04 release, and I'm legally covered... surely?!:D
FWIW not everyone having a kneejerk to this! *I* understand that Mozilla are doing this for legal reasons, and I understand that the EULA itself, it no biggy to agree to. However, one thing I have enjoyed using Ubuntu is that I can install software without having the click through EULAs that are without a doubt, absolutely and completely of no use to me. I don't read them. I don't care for them.
So.... would it not be better to just tuck the agreement away under the Help/About screen or something? Or is that not quite enough?
I don't know why Mozilla are imposing this but I guess it is for legal reasons... so I understand that they might *need* to do this, but it is reasonable for people to ask *why*. As an end-user, I really don't care to see EULAs; they have absolutely no real-world use to me since I don't bother read them, just like 99.9999% of people!
In fact, one this I *really* like about FOSS is that I don't have to deal with crap like EULAs. I can install software ridiculously easily, unlike software in the Windows/Mac world where I have to I have to agree to the licence, and then have the software badger me to make it the default app for whatever and drop icons all over the place like it's oh-so-important..... I'm veering off into a rant...;)
Requiring a EULA be displayed once as a requirement to benefit from all the hard work required to produce software such as Firefox is not unreasonable. Such a narrow and inflexible view of what constitutes free software really does such software a disservice.
I don't see that *not* wanting to see the EULA is doing Mozilla a disservice. I don't see why they can't just tuck the EULA away on an "about:eula" page... or perhaps add a button to the Help/About window?
You might not have seen the video clip with the article [I don't know if it's visible outside the UK] but the guy said he bought two servers, one booted and had been wiped, the other didn't boot. It didn't boot because it was missing it's ram (or the chip was unseated), so anyway, he sorted that out, booted it up and found the data.
Soooo... one wonders if the machine didn't get wiped simply because the various techs could boot it and decided it was too much effort to move the drives to another machine?
I seem to recall hearing it was something to do with Sony insisting a CD could store 70 minutes (or something) of music. I think Philips had intended slightly smaller CDs... like 60 minutes or something. Which is a shame because one thing I disliked about CD's over compact-cassettes was that CD's never really fit in pockets very well!
Apart from Perl and JavaScript, are there any languages that implement regexes without stuffing them into a string? I really hate having to deal with the addition escaping issues. I was disappointed to discover that Python goes the string too.:(
Any idea why man apt-get on my Etch box has no mention of autoremove whilst my Ubuntu 7.10 box (I haven't upgraded yet!) *does* mention autoremove? Oh, and both man pages say 29 February 2004 at the end!
apt-get --version on Etch and Ubuntu 7.10 shows, respectively:
etch$ apt-get --version
apt 0.6.46.4-0.1 for linux i386 compiled on Feb 26 2007 16:19:57
Supported modules:
*Ver: Standard.deb
*Pkg: Debian dpkg interface (Priority 30)
S.L: 'deb' Standard Debian binary tree
S.L: 'deb-src' Standard Debian source tree
Idx: Debian Source Index
Idx: Debian Package Index
Idx: Debian dpkg status file
ubuntu7.10$ apt-get --version
apt 0.7.6ubuntu14.1 for i386 compiled on Oct 22 2007 10:25:30
Supported modules:
*Ver: Standard.deb
*Pkg: Debian dpkg interface (Priority 30)
S.L: 'deb' Standard Debian binary tree
S.L: 'deb-src' Standard Debian source tree
Idx: Debian Source Index
Idx: Debian Package Index
Idx: Debian Translation Index
Idx: Debian dpkg status file
Just to be "stodgy", the reason why dumb terminals were good was because they were *really* easy to support. They were mostly stateless so could be power cycled without upsetting running applications. In the event of a terminal physically failing, they can be swapped out in a minute (unplug power cable and rs232) and the user back up and running.
The biggest PIA with switching to Windows was users having problems with loosing toolbars (MS Office), forgetting where they saved stuff, and a million and one stupid support calls.
The downside with dumb terminals was they're not so great for graphical work, so spreadsheet charts don't really work, and the server-side development tools sucked (for me anyway).
I'm out of support now (I served my time!) but if I was dealing with it now, I'd only be interested in deploying [X]HTML dumb terminals as opposed to VT100 dumb terminals just to ease support.
obviously, if I had written "planet" rather than "planted", then that would've made more sense! Honestly,/. should get a preview button or something!!;)
gFTP - okay, it kinda works except if you want to delete a large directory. I mean seriously, how difficult is it to solve this bug? And if you (YES YOU!) had coded it, wouldn't you be embarrassed at such a silly bug?
XSane - does it's job I guess, so I'll not be tooooo mean to this. But it is perhaps the ugliest GUI app ever! But hey, don't worry because Gnome scan will be ready soon. Any day now. I can feel it!
Actually, I could quite get into this being unnecessarily horrible to FOSS!:D
There is no package manager in windows, true. Once would be nice to have, but how many packages are available for Linux? How many applications are available for Windows? Yeah, YOU be the guy who has to manage the package manager.
I'm not sure if you understand what the package manager does. There is no single person who has to manage all the packages; packages are maintained by their package maintainer, so there are going to be (probably) thousands of package maintainers. The package manager knows when it installs software, what files related to which package. When removing a package, it can lookup which files are related to the package to remove and not not remove ones that are still in use by other packages.
It ain't rocket science. But MS sadly choose marketing over good design, so you get swishy graphics instead of a well thought out OS. It's *almost* as if obsolescence is a design feature..... but surely they wouldn't be that cynical?!
But then again, how many people do you know that buy a new computer because their old one was getting too old and slow?
"[the judge] ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives."
Yeah, so they place the hard-copy on top of the hard-drives. Clearly the judge specified *four* drives so that there is one for each corner; you wouldn't want them falling over and getting all mixed up!!;)
The High Court has upheld a ruling in November that Tesco was not allowed to sell cut price Levi jeans without permission from the US-based clothes giant.
Just to be a bit lame here and refer to my own post above, yep, the French have apparently upheld some dodgey bit of law, but it's not like the French are the only people who pull such stunts; US based companies pull the same shit too!
My linked comment referrers to cases where Levi Strauss and Apple have prevented sales in the UK because they were too cheap.
I think this French case is more extreme, but there have also been cases where both Levi Strauss and Apple have prevented people from selling their goods in the UK. The Levi case was (from memory) about 2 or 3 years back where Tesco (*huge* retailer like Walmart) had sourced genuine Levi jeans from somewhere but at a lower cost than going direct thru Levi Strauss and were selling them cheap to the end customer. Levi's weren't happy because obviously it was undercutting all their other UK customers. After all the legals, Levis won... which surprised me personally 'cos I was under the impression I lived in a country that was part of the free market!
Next up, Apple. Much the same deal, but it was only 2 or 3 months back, where someone had sourced genuine Apple iPods cheaply and were selling them 20 or 30 quid cheaper than anyone else in the UK.
I _believe_ both manufacturers were able to block the sales because their brand name was being used.... or something. (IANAL... very much so, and plus I didn't really pay attention to the details!)
Going back to the Levi's case (because I was particularly outraged at the time), I can't decide if Levi's were morally in the right. I mean, it's not like I can't buy jeans from anyone else; I merely can't buy ones with Levis written on them unless I pay a premium for the branding. But on the otherhand, what right does any manufacturer have to impose such rules. It's reasonable that they can choose who to sell to in the first instance, but I don't think it is right that they can dictate how, or for what price products are sold afterwards.
The installation size probably isn't an issue given that the target customer, corporates who have invested heavily in Win2K/XP, will be largely using high end hardware (as opposed to the "new" low-end hardware a-la Asus EEE).
Memory requirements might matter; but since we're looking at release two years from now, then 2GB is a reasonable requirement. If they base the "compatibility" code on XP rather than Vista, then it might be viable.
The biggest problem I see is what to tell people right now. Saying, "oh yeah, the next version of Windows will be completely different" is not likely to go down well, and is unlikely to encourage anyone to "upgrade" to Vista prior to Windows 7. But saying "Windows 7 will be based on Vista" isn't particularly inspiring either!
The marketing solution will likely be to not really give any concrete answers for as long as possible whilst telling people Windows 7 will build on their existing investment. If they don't do this, people might start looking elsewhere!!
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully the newly resigned folks will... perhaps with backing from IBM? In a sense, it could be done quickly; (1). establish new procedures that provide 100% transparency, (2). rubber-stamp all current ISO standards *except* OOXML.
The toughest part would probably be being recognised as a standards organisation. But something really needs to happen as ISO do not appear to be sorting their shit out.
You ignorant clod! As anyone from England can tell you, he's speaking in "Northern"!! :P
Problem is, you know the way the music industry tries to impose DRM on their customers in order to prevent piracy... and you know the way it makes absolutely *no difference*, since a pirate is the person who is going to have the resources to circumvent the DRM? Well, I kinda feel the same way about this EULA!
;)
**Apologies to Mozilla for likening them to the music industry! I know they're not evil really, but this is kind of a slippery slope.... and from my point of view, the EULA is of no use to me and merely gets in my way. Albeit, I guess it's not a *huge* hardship for me, but I still resent it!
True!
:D
But on the other hand, now having an EULA imposed on Ubuntu and thus forcing me to view the EULA (or at least the top few lines) and check an "I agree" box and click a Next button *does not* benefit me at all and *is not* a step forward.
And again, not wishing to sound like a scratched record, I understand Mozilla are doing this for legal reasons but I can see no practical benefit in making this a click-thru agreement. Apart from anything, previous Ubuntu releases have shipped with Firefox and have not required this.... so surely that would undermine any possible legal case? If I compiled and shipped my own "Firefox Evil-edition" I only need make sure I use the sources from a pre Ubuntu 9.04 release, and I'm legally covered... surely?!
FWIW not everyone having a kneejerk to this! *I* understand that Mozilla are doing this for legal reasons, and I understand that the EULA itself, it no biggy to agree to. However, one thing I have enjoyed using Ubuntu is that I can install software without having the click through EULAs that are without a doubt, absolutely and completely of no use to me. I don't read them. I don't care for them.
So.... would it not be better to just tuck the agreement away under the Help/About screen or something? Or is that not quite enough?
In fact, one this I *really* like about FOSS is that I don't have to deal with crap like EULAs. I can install software ridiculously easily, unlike software in the Windows/Mac world where I have to I have to agree to the licence, and then have the software badger me to make it the default app for whatever and drop icons all over the place like it's oh-so-important..... I'm veering off into a rant...
Requiring a EULA be displayed once as a requirement to benefit from all the hard work required to produce software such as Firefox is not unreasonable. Such a narrow and inflexible view of what constitutes free software really does such software a disservice.
I don't see that *not* wanting to see the EULA is doing Mozilla a disservice. I don't see why they can't just tuck the EULA away on an "about:eula" page... or perhaps add a button to the Help/About window?
Spam? wot that?
You might not have seen the video clip with the article [I don't know if it's visible outside the UK] but the guy said he bought two servers, one booted and had been wiped, the other didn't boot. It didn't boot because it was missing it's ram (or the chip was unseated), so anyway, he sorted that out, booted it up and found the data.
Soooo... one wonders if the machine didn't get wiped simply because the various techs could boot it and decided it was too much effort to move the drives to another machine?
I seem to recall hearing it was something to do with Sony insisting a CD could store 70 minutes (or something) of music. I think Philips had intended slightly smaller CDs... like 60 minutes or something. Which is a shame because one thing I disliked about CD's over compact-cassettes was that CD's never really fit in pockets very well!
Apart from Perl and JavaScript, are there any languages that implement regexes without stuffing them into a string? I really hate having to deal with the addition escaping issues. I was disappointed to discover that Python goes the string too. :(
I tried it, and I got floating point error.
:O
apt-get --version on Etch and Ubuntu 7.10 shows, respectively:
etch$ apt-get --version .deb
apt 0.6.46.4-0.1 for linux i386 compiled on Feb 26 2007 16:19:57
Supported modules:
*Ver: Standard
*Pkg: Debian dpkg interface (Priority 30)
S.L: 'deb' Standard Debian binary tree
S.L: 'deb-src' Standard Debian source tree
Idx: Debian Source Index
Idx: Debian Package Index
Idx: Debian dpkg status file
ubuntu7.10$ apt-get --version .deb
apt 0.7.6ubuntu14.1 for i386 compiled on Oct 22 2007 10:25:30
Supported modules:
*Ver: Standard
*Pkg: Debian dpkg interface (Priority 30)
S.L: 'deb' Standard Debian binary tree
S.L: 'deb-src' Standard Debian source tree
Idx: Debian Source Index
Idx: Debian Package Index
Idx: Debian Translation Index
Idx: Debian dpkg status file
They're shit. They treat their customers with complete contempt. So you really don't want to fly with them anyway.
Just to be "stodgy", the reason why dumb terminals were good was because they were *really* easy to support. They were mostly stateless so could be power cycled without upsetting running applications. In the event of a terminal physically failing, they can be swapped out in a minute (unplug power cable and rs232) and the user back up and running.
The biggest PIA with switching to Windows was users having problems with loosing toolbars (MS Office), forgetting where they saved stuff, and a million and one stupid support calls.
The downside with dumb terminals was they're not so great for graphical work, so spreadsheet charts don't really work, and the server-side development tools sucked (for me anyway).
I'm out of support now (I served my time!) but if I was dealing with it now, I'd only be interested in deploying [X]HTML dumb terminals as opposed to VT100 dumb terminals just to ease support.
obviously, if I had written "planet" rather than "planted", then that would've made more sense! Honestly, /. should get a preview button or something!! ;)
Why not land in the middle of the Superbowl finals, now THAT's revealing!
:D
It's important to note that pretty much the entire planted does not watch your Super Bowl... what it is!
gFTP - okay, it kinda works except if you want to delete a large directory. I mean seriously, how difficult is it to solve this bug? And if you (YES YOU!) had coded it, wouldn't you be embarrassed at such a silly bug?
:D
XSane - does it's job I guess, so I'll not be tooooo mean to this. But it is perhaps the ugliest GUI app ever! But hey, don't worry because Gnome scan will be ready soon. Any day now. I can feel it!
Actually, I could quite get into this being unnecessarily horrible to FOSS!
There is no package manager in windows, true. Once would be nice to have, but how many packages are available for Linux? How many applications are available for Windows? Yeah, YOU be the guy who has to manage the package manager.
I'm not sure if you understand what the package manager does. There is no single person who has to manage all the packages; packages are maintained by their package maintainer, so there are going to be (probably) thousands of package maintainers. The package manager knows when it installs software, what files related to which package. When removing a package, it can lookup which files are related to the package to remove and not not remove ones that are still in use by other packages.
It ain't rocket science. But MS sadly choose marketing over good design, so you get swishy graphics instead of a well thought out OS. It's *almost* as if obsolescence is a design feature..... but surely they wouldn't be that cynical?!
But then again, how many people do you know that buy a new computer because their old one was getting too old and slow?
RTFS FFS
"[the judge] ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives."
Yeah, so they place the hard-copy on top of the hard-drives. Clearly the judge specified *four* drives so that there is one for each corner; you wouldn't want them falling over and getting all mixed up!! ;)
Dell Blows?
**note to mods: I actually quite like Dell for price/performance and indeed I'm typing on one now... this post is purely for comedic value!
To quote:
The High Court has upheld a ruling in November that Tesco was not allowed to sell cut price Levi jeans without permission from the US-based clothes giant.
Just to be a bit lame here and refer to my own post above, yep, the French have apparently upheld some dodgey bit of law, but it's not like the French are the only people who pull such stunts; US based companies pull the same shit too!
My linked comment referrers to cases where Levi Strauss and Apple have prevented sales in the UK because they were too cheap.
I think this French case is more extreme, but there have also been cases where both Levi Strauss and Apple have prevented people from selling their goods in the UK. The Levi case was (from memory) about 2 or 3 years back where Tesco (*huge* retailer like Walmart) had sourced genuine Levi jeans from somewhere but at a lower cost than going direct thru Levi Strauss and were selling them cheap to the end customer. Levi's weren't happy because obviously it was undercutting all their other UK customers. After all the legals, Levis won... which surprised me personally 'cos I was under the impression I lived in a country that was part of the free market!
Next up, Apple. Much the same deal, but it was only 2 or 3 months back, where someone had sourced genuine Apple iPods cheaply and were selling them 20 or 30 quid cheaper than anyone else in the UK.
I _believe_ both manufacturers were able to block the sales because their brand name was being used.... or something. (IANAL... very much so, and plus I didn't really pay attention to the details!)
Going back to the Levi's case (because I was particularly outraged at the time), I can't decide if Levi's were morally in the right. I mean, it's not like I can't buy jeans from anyone else; I merely can't buy ones with Levis written on them unless I pay a premium for the branding. But on the otherhand, what right does any manufacturer have to impose such rules. It's reasonable that they can choose who to sell to in the first instance, but I don't think it is right that they can dictate how, or for what price products are sold afterwards.
I vote for a Ballmer pic, but with eyes that move like the GIMP icon!
The installation size probably isn't an issue given that the target customer, corporates who have invested heavily in Win2K/XP, will be largely using high end hardware (as opposed to the "new" low-end hardware a-la Asus EEE).
Memory requirements might matter; but since we're looking at release two years from now, then 2GB is a reasonable requirement. If they base the "compatibility" code on XP rather than Vista, then it might be viable.
The biggest problem I see is what to tell people right now. Saying, "oh yeah, the next version of Windows will be completely different" is not likely to go down well, and is unlikely to encourage anyone to "upgrade" to Vista prior to Windows 7. But saying "Windows 7 will be based on Vista" isn't particularly inspiring either!
The marketing solution will likely be to not really give any concrete answers for as long as possible whilst telling people Windows 7 will build on their existing investment. If they don't do this, people might start looking elsewhere!!