It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.
Not strictly true; Debian 2.1 (slink) includes a 2.0.36 kernel patched to support MCA and large amounts of RAM, even though these weren't accepted into the official kernel until 2.1.x . I think that Red Hat and SuSE have also been known to ship customized kernels. You also have the ac series and the development kernels, where there is a higher chance of merging new features.
This Napster thing looks kinda neat, but I would be a bit worried about giving the world access to my disk.
Indeed. Given the track record of things like the Windows ICQ client and the RealPlayer, you should be cautious about downloading the latest and greatest binary-only client for some closed protocol.
You could probably run the client chroot()ed to a directory containing only MP3s, and as the user nobody. FreeBSD 4.0 (which AFAIK is a development version) has a jail() system call which might be appropriate.
And i'm just wondering when the last time you actually tried to uninstall IE4/5 from Windows 98 was.
You need Revenge of Mozilla. It completely removes IE from Win98, although you will need three files from later versions of Win95. Personally, I removed IE4 and then installed IE3. You get a good web browser, a fast and stable desktop without all the cheesy web integration, and IE3 provides the libraries needed to run Office 97. Win98 with Revenge of Mozilla is faster than Win95; without ROM it's much slower.
If you buy a license for NT Workstation instead of NT Server, then you are agreeing to pay for the workstation features, but not for the server features. Thus you get a lower rate because Microsoft agrees to ship you a more restrictive license at a discount. If they also ship you other bits on the disk, it is illegal (although maybe not unethical depending on how you view piracy) to use those bits because you didn't pay the premium for them.
That's a pretty big claim, and I don't see any facts in your post to back it up. Are you a lawyer? Which law would the user be breaking, exactly?
If you live in Europe, you should check out freepatents.org. The LPF site may be mostly news, but in Europe there is stuff happening. Software patents have not been introduced in the EU, but there is a danger that they will be. But it's not too late.
You should be able to type in URLs at the command line, eg 'cat http://slashdot.org/'. That really would be cool.
For many years now there has been a set of kernel patches called userfs which allows you to write filesystems in user space. One of the examples was an 'ftpfs', allowing you to mount FTP sites as if they were NFS servers. I don't know if it has rotted away or whether there's any prospect of it getting into the main kernel.
Also, the graphically-intensive layout sucks, and you have little choice in how it's presented, since there is no protocol here other than HTML. Also, Slashdot can't even be viewed properly unless you use non-free software like Netscape or Internet explorer.
Try turning on Minimalist Mode in your Slashdot preferences, and turning off graphics. That's how I browse Slashdot, and it makes the site into a collection of simple text pages.
This just illustrates how inappropriate patents are for software. Even if this were an original idea (and as others have pointed out, it certainly isn't), it wouldn't be worth granting a patent on it, because it would restrict competition far too much and subject developers to legal harassment. It's also merely a combination of existing ideas - filling in templates, and caching data in memory - that would be obvious to any skilled programmer.
Of course Yahoo are free to copyright the code they are using, and that makes sure that they can get a good return from their effort. But allowing companies to patent particular ideas and then sue other developers is bad news both for the software industry and for consumers.
The paper Against Software Patents is slightly old, but a good introduction to why granting patent monopolies on software techniques is a bad idea.
It's not too late to stop software patents being introduced in Europe - check out freepatents.org if you live in the EU.
It would be nice if they did as Red Hat do and offered a cheapo ($20) CD without manuals or support. I'd probably pay for that (if I were still using Windows, he he), just to save time on downloading and compiling the stuff myself.
It's just that the FSF are legally cautious and don't want to face copyright infringement lawsuits later on. When you assign copyright to them, they promise to make the code available under a free licence (there is a form somewhere, I don't know where though).
cygwin is still quite alive and well and it is quite free. gnupro is the package for sale.
Yes, Cygwin is free, but it costs $99. See the sales page if you don't believe me. The last beta (b20.1) is downloadable from Cygnus's site, but 1.0 isn't. Since it is free, though, there's nothing to stop anyone from buying it and then selling copies la Cheap Bytes, or putting it on an FTP site.
BTW GNUPro is free as well - or at least most of it, there is some proprietary graphical debugger stuff.
Oh, also, if you smoke, drink lots, or like to drive large cars, don't bother going to England.
Unless you are aged 18-21 and you live somewhere that doesn't allow under-21s to buy alcohol, tax or no tax. (Although other countries are better still of course.)
Tobacco is expensive, but I don't think the costs of running a car are much worse than elsewhere in Europe. (IIRC Germany has the most large cars of any European country, the UK is second.)
You could get the package manager to keep track of the associated source, docs, etc for each binary. For example:
% rpm --tell-me-about/usr/bin/grep GNU grep 9.99, compiled by me@somewhere on 1998-05-14 (it could give more details, eg compiler flags, what the configure script detected) Source is in grep-9.99.srpm (or in/usr/src/grep-9.99 if the SRPM is already installed) Manual page is grep(1) Docs are in/usr/doc/grep-9.99 etc...
Doesn't NT come with that useless 'Dr Watson' thing that, whenever something crashes, wastes your time with an unkillable dialogue box? Surely it must do _something_ useful - what is this 'application error log' that it keeps trying to create?
Also, Netscape license a thing called Full Circle that sends information back to Netscape HQ following a Navigator crash.
Admittedly, Tux has been a great refinement of our view of Linux, but let's not overkill it. Some way to graphically portray people from all over the world, united by free software, seems more apt to cover Linux community
You should have a hundred people standing together, wearing different coloured clothes, so that from a distance it looks like a picture of Tux. In other words, a crowd of people formed into the shape of a penguin.
You could do steganography with gzip files. There are many ways to compress a given chunk of input data into gzip deflated data, depending on how hard you try.
Trouble is, although the files would decompress to give the exact same input data, it would be obvious that people had used steganography on them, because the compressed data would be different to what gzip (or gzip -9) produces.
Is there a license that one could write which is something of a meta-GPL? In the sense of saying: "Code under this license must be redistributed under this license and under (blessed licenses 1-5)"...
Well, you can distribute perl under the GPL or the Artistic License, at your option. But for what you want, you'd be better off using the XFree86 licence, which is compatible with pretty much all the others. Or better still, just release it into the public domain, and people can relicense it under whatever terms they wish (BSD, GPL, proprietary, etc).
Bear in mind that if you allow people to distribute the code under the BSD licence, you also allow them to distribute it under a proprietary licence, since the BSDL allows this.
Yahoo says it remove what it thinks will ``break securities laws or contain libelous statements''. Good gawd, does every Web site now have to become the arbiter of what's libelous and what's not?
That is the problem with libel law, it seems to me (!= lawyer). It is effectively 'guilty until proven innocent'. If you have something which might be libellous, you have to remove it immediately, and err on the side of caution. Otherwise you could be sued, and the fact that you didn't know it was libellous doesn't seem to be a defence. All that has to happen is for somebody to write to you saying 'this posting is libellous, please remove it' and you have to remove it right away, without any hearing in court. Otherwise you risk a lot in damages, but you have no way of knowing whether the post really was libellous until the case actually goes to court.
If you steal a car, you know that what you are doing is illegal. But if somebody posts a message to your forum, you don't normally know which way the court judgment will go, you don't know whether or not the message is illegal - yet you will still be punished for what happened before the court case. Your only option is to knuckle under and meekly remove whatever material a potential litigant tells you to remove.
This is the problem with the not-quite-common-carrier status of ISPs in the UK, and the reason why Demon Internet had to start censoring newsgroups containing a particular URL.
I'm running Word and Excel 97 SR-2. Now, I do have a complete Win98 install on the old DOS partition, including IE4, so perhaps if IE is required, they're just relying on the one that's installed over there? (I might add, IE4 almost works; I can start to view simple web pages before it kicks me to the debugger.)
Technically, you are breaking the licence agreement for bgIE; it says that you may run it only on Windows. Whether this is actually illegal is another matter, especially as you actually own a Win98 licence (or I expect you do:-). There was a rather inconclusive discussion about a similar topic in an earlier story.
But I wasn't aware that Word and Excel 97 required IE (don't know about 2000). I'm sure they automatically install it given half the chance, though (like most other MS products).
Office 97 requires IE3 or later. I've recently tried running it on an IE-less Win98 system (Revenge of Mozilla is excellent), and while apps loaded after complaining about DLLs, you couldn't do anything (like open a file) without the thing breaking. Presumably the new file open dialogue box is part of IE. After I installed IE3 things worked.
I think that if a message is possibly libellous or otherwise illegal, Rob and the gang are justified in removing it. No question. It may be lousy that Slashdot could get sued for what other people post, but if that's the way it is, I don't see any other option.
But I think that any such censorship should be explicit and out in the open. Instead of quietly deleting a post, replace it with a message saying 'this post has been deleted' and giving a reason why. In some cases deleting a post would not be necessary; you might just be able to replace some of the characters with asterisks (as in Un*x) and put a message at the top explaining the reason for the censorship.
But deleting messages without telling anybody is not on. And if a message is legal but pointless, best just to let the moderation system do its work and leave it at -1. Slashdot would not make any great saving in disk space from removing such posts (they tend to be short), so best to leave them alone. Some people (eg moderators) might like to read them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Not strictly true; Debian 2.1 (slink) includes a 2.0.36 kernel patched to support MCA and large amounts of RAM, even though these weren't accepted into the official kernel until 2.1.x . I think that Red Hat and SuSE have also been known to ship customized kernels. You also have the ac series and the development kernels, where there is a higher chance of merging new features.
Indeed. Given the track record of things like the Windows ICQ client and the RealPlayer, you should be cautious about downloading the latest and greatest binary-only client for some closed protocol.
You could probably run the client chroot()ed to a directory containing only MP3s, and as the user nobody. FreeBSD 4.0 (which AFAIK is a development version) has a jail() system call which might be appropriate.
That's a pretty big claim, and I don't see any facts in your post to back it up. Are you a lawyer? Which law would the user be breaking, exactly?
If you live in Europe, you should check out freepatents.org. The LPF site may be mostly news, but in Europe there is stuff happening. Software patents have not been introduced in the EU, but there is a danger that they will be. But it's not too late.
Alternatively, you can buy Alan Cox's USPTO T-shirt at ThinkGeek.
You should be able to type in URLs at the command line, eg 'cat http://slashdot.org/'. That really would be cool.
For many years now there has been a set of kernel patches called userfs which allows you to write filesystems in user space. One of the examples was an 'ftpfs', allowing you to mount FTP sites as if they were NFS servers. I don't know if it has rotted away or whether there's any prospect of it getting into the main kernel.
Try turning on Minimalist Mode in your Slashdot preferences, and turning off graphics. That's how I browse Slashdot, and it makes the site into a collection of simple text pages.
This just illustrates how inappropriate patents are for software. Even if this were an original idea (and as others have pointed out, it certainly isn't), it wouldn't be worth granting a patent on it, because it would restrict competition far too much and subject developers to legal harassment. It's also merely a combination of existing ideas - filling in templates, and caching data in memory - that would be obvious to any skilled programmer.
Of course Yahoo are free to copyright the code they are using, and that makes sure that they can get a good return from their effort. But allowing companies to patent particular ideas and then sue other developers is bad news both for the software industry and for consumers.
The paper Against Software Patents is slightly old, but a good introduction to why granting patent monopolies on software techniques is a bad idea.It's not too late to stop software patents being introduced in Europe - check out freepatents.org if you live in the EU.
It would be nice if they did as Red Hat do and offered a cheapo ($20) CD without manuals or support. I'd probably pay for that (if I were still using Windows, he he), just to save time on downloading and compiling the stuff myself.
It's just that the FSF are legally cautious and don't want to face copyright infringement lawsuits later on. When you assign copyright to them, they promise to make the code available under a free licence (there is a form somewhere, I don't know where though).
Maintain the compilers themselves, or pay somebody else to do it!
Yes, Cygwin is free, but it costs $99. See the sales page if you don't believe me. The last beta (b20.1) is downloadable from Cygnus's site, but 1.0 isn't. Since it is free, though, there's nothing to stop anyone from buying it and then selling copies la Cheap Bytes, or putting it on an FTP site.
BTW GNUPro is free as well - or at least most of it, there is some proprietary graphical debugger stuff.
Unless you are aged 18-21 and you live somewhere that doesn't allow under-21s to buy alcohol, tax or no tax. (Although other countries are better still of course.)
Tobacco is expensive, but I don't think the costs of running a car are much worse than elsewhere in Europe. (IIRC Germany has the most large cars of any European country, the UK is second.)
You could get the package manager to keep track of the associated source, docs, etc for each binary. For example:
% rpm --tell-me-aboutGNU grep 9.99, compiled by me@somewhere on 1998-05-14 (it could give more details, eg compiler flags, what the configure script detected)
Source is in grep-9.99.srpm (or in
Manual page is grep(1)
Docs are in
etc...
And:
** Netscape 5.0 released
And after drinking the water, you can use it to douse the flames a few hours later. So you get the best of both worlds :-)
Doesn't NT come with that useless 'Dr Watson' thing that, whenever something crashes, wastes your time with an unkillable dialogue box? Surely it must do _something_ useful - what is this 'application error log' that it keeps trying to create?
Also, Netscape license a thing called Full Circle that sends information back to Netscape HQ following a Navigator crash.
You should have a hundred people standing together, wearing different coloured clothes, so that from a distance it looks like a picture of Tux. In other words, a crowd of people formed into the shape of a penguin.
You could also try using StackGuard to make your daemons more secure; it looks quite cool.
You could do steganography with gzip files. There are many ways to compress a given chunk of input data into gzip deflated data, depending on how hard you try.
Trouble is, although the files would decompress to give the exact same input data, it would be obvious that people had used steganography on them, because the compressed data would be different to what gzip (or gzip -9) produces.
What is happening with the Trove project?
Well, you can distribute perl under the GPL or the Artistic License, at your option. But for what you want, you'd be better off using the XFree86 licence, which is compatible with pretty much all the others. Or better still, just release it into the public domain, and people can relicense it under whatever terms they wish (BSD, GPL, proprietary, etc).
Bear in mind that if you allow people to distribute the code under the BSD licence, you also allow them to distribute it under a proprietary licence, since the BSDL allows this.
That is the problem with libel law, it seems to me (!= lawyer). It is effectively 'guilty until proven innocent'. If you have something which might be libellous, you have to remove it immediately, and err on the side of caution. Otherwise you could be sued, and the fact that you didn't know it was libellous doesn't seem to be a defence. All that has to happen is for somebody to write to you saying 'this posting is libellous, please remove it' and you have to remove it right away, without any hearing in court. Otherwise you risk a lot in damages, but you have no way of knowing whether the post really was libellous until the case actually goes to court.
If you steal a car, you know that what you are doing is illegal. But if somebody posts a message to your forum, you don't normally know which way the court judgment will go, you don't know whether or not the message is illegal - yet you will still be punished for what happened before the court case. Your only option is to knuckle under and meekly remove whatever material a potential litigant tells you to remove.
This is the problem with the not-quite-common-carrier status of ISPs in the UK, and the reason why Demon Internet had to start censoring newsgroups containing a particular URL.
Technically, you are breaking the licence agreement for bgIE; it says that you may run it only on Windows. Whether this is actually illegal is another matter, especially as you actually own a Win98 licence (or I expect you do :-). There was a rather inconclusive discussion about a similar topic in an earlier story.
Office 97 requires IE3 or later. I've recently tried running it on an IE-less Win98 system (Revenge of Mozilla is excellent), and while apps loaded after complaining about DLLs, you couldn't do anything (like open a file) without the thing breaking. Presumably the new file open dialogue box is part of IE. After I installed IE3 things worked.
I think that if a message is possibly libellous or otherwise illegal, Rob and the gang are justified in removing it. No question. It may be lousy that Slashdot could get sued for what other people post, but if that's the way it is, I don't see any other option.
But I think that any such censorship should be explicit and out in the open. Instead of quietly deleting a post, replace it with a message saying 'this post has been deleted' and giving a reason why. In some cases deleting a post would not be necessary; you might just be able to replace some of the characters with asterisks (as in Un*x) and put a message at the top explaining the reason for the censorship.
But deleting messages without telling anybody is not on. And if a message is legal but pointless, best just to let the moderation system do its work and leave it at -1. Slashdot would not make any great saving in disk space from removing such posts (they tend to be short), so best to leave them alone. Some people (eg moderators) might like to read them anyway.