It could have been generated using a psuedo random number
generator.
Why pseudo random and not truly random? Using background noise or even quantummechanics, you can generate random numbers. Some hardware for doing this already exists. Actually I have been considering a different idea. Imagine I create a file with the same size as a copyrighted work, but containing all random bytes. Clearly that is legal, and I can distribute this file with random bytes. Now I do something else, I XOR the two files together and get a third file. If we look on this third file on it's own, all it contains is truly random bytes, so that cannot be copyrighted either.
Now I have two random files, neither file contains any information about the original work, yet XORing the two together will produce the original work. If those two files were available from two different servers owned by two different persons, you can't really sue anybody, because neither person is providing even parts of the copyrighted work.
Has anyone seen the video of the feather falling straight down without fluttering around at all?
I have actually seen the real thing. In connection with our faculty there is a small museum. Among other things they have two vacuum tubes that can be turned upside down. In one there is a feather in the other there is a stone. Interesting to see them fall at exactly the same speed.
As far as I remember it was not a software company. So why did he include Soft in the name? I think he just found that it sounded kind of funny. (Do we need to say, the name was Mike Rowe Soft).
Allowing only registered executables to run could be set up to prevent such things.
Mounting/home,/tmp, and/var/tmp with noexec would take you a large step in that direction. I don't know how many other places an unpriveleged user could possibly place an executable, maybe you want all of/var to be noexec.
Microsoft signs their patches and programs too, but no regular user will ever check.
Really? I wanted to do that once, when I had to upgrade the software on my brother's computer. But nobody could tell me how to verify signatures on Microsoft's patches. I even wrote an email to Microsoft, but they couldn't help me either. Of course a lot of people don't give a damn. I know people who keep installing rpm packages without checking the signatures, even though I keep explaining how to check the signatures, which is not much work.
I downloaded the tool and started looking in the files. The first file is the Makefile. Here I noticed some confusion between globing and regular expressions. The expression core.[1-9][0-9]* would make a lot of sense if it was a regular expression. But shell expansion does usually not use regular expressions but rather globing, which is slightly less powerful. That means make clean does not remove a file named core.9, but does OTOH remove a file named core.10abc. Of course he is not the first person to make that mistake, and it is easy to miss when testing.
do you actually think that anybody in the Slashdot community would use Office if it were ported over to Linux?
Too late for me. I would have liked to use Microsoft Office ten years ago, but there was no version for AmigaOS. I probably couldn't have afforded it anyway, the price was pretty high for a highschool student. At the university using LaTeX was a requirement for some of our exercises. I still use LaTeX and is satisified with it. Plaintext works well with version control systems, and you don't have to deal with corrupt files in binary formats.
KDE's performance is fine.
Really? Every time I have compared KDE and Gnome on a lowend computer (300-500MHz 128-256MB RAM) the result have been the same. Gnome was way faster than KDE.
What they need is better usability,
Maybe KDE is not perfect, but I don't know any GUI which is better than KDE.
better defaults,
I'm sure most people (including me) will agree with that. But that is all they could agree about. Because everybody want different settings, and no default will satisfy everybody. Better just let each user configure the environment as he preffers.
open konsole then open gnome-terminal and place them side by side.
No, I don't want to do that. I don't like any of them. Having both of them side by side would just be too much. I only use them to start an xterm anyway, that is until I get around to replace the launcher icon with one that will launch an xterm.
This is why many notably amazing Linux apps (GIMP, gaim, evolution, hell even firefox) reject QT in favor of GTK.
I don't think so. A lot of people rejected QT because of license issues. AFAIK the license is no longer a problem, but there is not really much point in switching from GTK to QT. Switching would require some amount of code to be rewritten, so a very good reason would be needed.
I don't think the GIMP people ever whined about it. They needed a toolkit, and apparantly none could satisfy their needs, so they wrote one: The GIMP ToolKit.
but I'd be interested in seeing them side-by-side with the same tests performed (on the same machines, of course) running Windows.
I'd like to see that comparision as well, but with Linux using open source drivers on documented hardware. (I know that would disqualify a lot of nVidia and ATI chips from the test.)
OS/2 at one point could have been direct competition for Win 3.1, but then WIN 95 came out.
AFAIK the OS/2 kernel was technical supperior to Windows 95/98/ME. I know people who bought computers with OS/2 preinstalled just to wipe it and install a pirate copy of Windows 95. I don't know why anybody would do that. I do own an original OS/2 install CD (which I got for free), but I never managed to install it eventhough I tried on multiple computers. Except from difficulties of installing it, I think it was a nice system. I don't know anybody who disliked OS/2 after actually giving it a chance. Still, people would choose Windows 95 instead of OS/2 without ever trying any of them.
Odds are good that said non-transferable license won't hold up in court, which is probably why Microsoft has never tried to enforce it through legal means.
But as long as they use technical means to enforce an invalid license, there doesn't seem to be much the customers can do.
Do preinstalled versions of XP (or any windows version) require you to click on "Yes I agree" at first boot?
Yes. At least the one that was on my Compaq did. I clicked no, and it shut down. Actually I didn't even want to boot it. But I just couldn't put the Linux install CD in the drive fast enough. I think the story is just BS. First of all their attempts to count the installations may be very inaccurate. I have four computers running Linux, three of them were bought with no software at all, and one with Windows preinstalled. I believe more computers are sold with a Windows installation which is wiped in favor of Linux than the other way around.
I find it interesting that they list the added cost of troubleshooting as a reason for switching from Linux to Windows. It doesn't surprise me that switching from Linux to Windows will add to the cost of troubleshooting, because with Windows you don't have all the tools to find the cause of a problem like you would have with Linux. What I don't understand is, how can this added cost be an advantage?
I think he were trying to add to it. You are both right. If you have a good design, then fixing implementation bugs is easy. And fixing a bug doesn't break anything, but on rare occations it might reveal other bugs. A lot of security fixes in open source software are just one-liners. That kind of bug fixes doesn't need lots of testing. I know about systematic testing, and such a fix would often require at most a handful of test cases.
Microsoft controls the secure format, the RIAA gets a secure format
There is no such thing as a secure format. If it is digital it can be copied. At the very best you might be able to attach some additional pieces of information to the music, which might not easilly be removed without causing a loss of quality. But that doesn't prevent copying. And when the copies are floating, you still have a hard time proving how they got out there. Besides the CD is already standardized (not that anyone follow it anymore).
Until the conversion needs little or no interaction from me (and is trusted)
A filesystem conversion utility needs a lot of testing before you can really trust it. IMHO it just isn't worth the effort. It will probably take less work to just use tar or cp -a than to test the conversion. And even if somebody said they had carefully tested the conversion utility, would you trust that they hadn't missed some litle bug that happens to show up on just your system?
There does exist a filesystem independend conversion utility. It relies on features in the standard kernel. It simply moves all files into a new filesystem on a sparse loopback mount, and then maps the loopback filesystem back on the original partition. The maping back is the most complicated part, and since I wouldn't trust such a utility unless I understood the code, I have never used it. Besides the script wrapping around the whole thing was a bit flawed, so I would do that part by hand if I needed to.
MSI can't run arbitrary code.. it works like an RPM in this regard
A.rpm file certainly can execute arbitrary code on installation and uninstallation. The postinstall script can call an arbitrary executable from the package you just installed. You can even have triggers, such that one package gets to execute some code when another package is installed.
Nope convertfs won't work...
Why not? AFAIK the only two requirements for convertfs to work is that the original filesystem supports sparse files and the FIBMAP ioctl. Reiser3 have both these features. You must also have enough free disk space, and there will still be a risk of data loss in case of bugs in convertfs. So I wouldn't recommend using convertfs unless you actually understand it well enough to fix the filesystem if it breaks.
From the horses mouth
Written by who? If this is written by a person with no knowledge about convertfs (but maybe knowledge about reiserfs) how could he possible say if it works. The convertfs utility is designed to work with almost arbitrary filesystems. It doesn't contain filesystem code, it simply relies on the drivers in the kernel.
This is one of the strenghs of the GPL, if your defeat it you can no longer play with the toys rather than being able to steal them.
Basically nothing would change. People using GPL software in ways not allowed by the GPL would still be doing copyright infringement, and they do not get any extra rights, even if there exist an invalid license, that does not grant them those rights. People using GPL software in compliance with the license are probably pretty safe. Theoretically they could be sued by the author. But that author will not have a very strong case. After all the author did give permissions to the use.
Not the most likely thing to happen, but still a lot more likely than Linux switching to a BSD license. Don't forget that for Linux to switch license, every single contributor must agree. One person already said he wouldn't accept it. Neither will I. The code I have contributed so far is only a few lines, but I'm sure enough people will disagree with this suggestion, that if you remove all the code we have contributed, what remains will not be a working kernel.
Besides, I don't see how the license could have any influence on patent issues. No agreement between author and end user can remove your obligation towards a third party patent owner.
I have an idea where this box might come in handy. Say I want to bring my digital camera with me on vacation, and I will take lots of pictures. I think buying 10 flash cards for the camera is too expensive, so instead I would like to bring a USB harddisk and dump the pictures onto it once a day. So what I would need for this task is a device to which I can connect two USB devices. Is NSLU2 the right choice or is there something better?
Slashdot Mirror
It could have been generated using a psuedo random number generator.
Why pseudo random and not truly random? Using background noise or even quantummechanics, you can generate random numbers. Some hardware for doing this already exists. Actually I have been considering a different idea. Imagine I create a file with the same size as a copyrighted work, but containing all random bytes. Clearly that is legal, and I can distribute this file with random bytes. Now I do something else, I XOR the two files together and get a third file. If we look on this third file on it's own, all it contains is truly random bytes, so that cannot be copyrighted either.
Now I have two random files, neither file contains any information about the original work, yet XORing the two together will produce the original work. If those two files were available from two different servers owned by two different persons, you can't really sue anybody, because neither person is providing even parts of the copyrighted work.
Has anyone seen the video of the feather falling straight down without fluttering around at all?
I have actually seen the real thing. In connection with our faculty there is a small museum. Among other things they have two vacuum tubes that can be turned upside down. In one there is a feather in the other there is a stone. Interesting to see them fall at exactly the same speed.
Mike Rowe's Software company.
As far as I remember it was not a software company. So why did he include Soft in the name? I think he just found that it sounded kind of funny. (Do we need to say, the name was Mike Rowe Soft).
Allowing only registered executables to run could be set up to prevent such things. /home, /tmp, and /var/tmp with noexec would take you a large step in that direction. I don't know how many other places an unpriveleged user could possibly place an executable, maybe you want all of /var to be noexec.
Mounting
Microsoft signs their patches and programs too, but no regular user will ever check.
Really? I wanted to do that once, when I had to upgrade the software on my brother's computer. But nobody could tell me how to verify signatures on Microsoft's patches. I even wrote an email to Microsoft, but they couldn't help me either. Of course a lot of people don't give a damn. I know people who keep installing rpm packages without checking the signatures, even though I keep explaining how to check the signatures, which is not much work.
I downloaded the tool and started looking in the files. The first file is the Makefile. Here I noticed some confusion between globing and regular expressions. The expression core.[1-9][0-9]* would make a lot of sense if it was a regular expression. But shell expansion does usually not use regular expressions but rather globing, which is slightly less powerful. That means make clean does not remove a file named core.9, but does OTOH remove a file named core.10abc. Of course he is not the first person to make that mistake, and it is easy to miss when testing.
do you actually think that anybody in the Slashdot community would use Office if it were ported over to Linux?
Too late for me. I would have liked to use Microsoft Office ten years ago, but there was no version for AmigaOS. I probably couldn't have afforded it anyway, the price was pretty high for a highschool student. At the university using LaTeX was a requirement for some of our exercises. I still use LaTeX and is satisified with it. Plaintext works well with version control systems, and you don't have to deal with corrupt files in binary formats.
KDE's performance is fine.
Really? Every time I have compared KDE and Gnome on a lowend computer (300-500MHz 128-256MB RAM) the result have been the same. Gnome was way faster than KDE.
What they need is better usability,
Maybe KDE is not perfect, but I don't know any GUI which is better than KDE.
better defaults,
I'm sure most people (including me) will agree with that. But that is all they could agree about. Because everybody want different settings, and no default will satisfy everybody. Better just let each user configure the environment as he preffers.
open konsole then open gnome-terminal and place them side by side.
No, I don't want to do that. I don't like any of them. Having both of them side by side would just be too much. I only use them to start an xterm anyway, that is until I get around to replace the launcher icon with one that will launch an xterm.
This is why many notably amazing Linux apps (GIMP, gaim, evolution, hell even firefox) reject QT in favor of GTK.
I don't think so. A lot of people rejected QT because of license issues. AFAIK the license is no longer a problem, but there is not really much point in switching from GTK to QT. Switching would require some amount of code to be rewritten, so a very good reason would be needed.
I don't think the GIMP people ever whined about it. They needed a toolkit, and apparantly none could satisfy their needs, so they wrote one: The GIMP ToolKit.
But I'd still like to know which card will give me the best performance without having to resort to closed source drivers.
That is also something I want to know, I'm just not sure where to ask about it. AskSlashdot perhaps?
but I'd be interested in seeing them side-by-side with the same tests performed (on the same machines, of course) running Windows.
I'd like to see that comparision as well, but with Linux using open source drivers on documented hardware. (I know that would disqualify a lot of nVidia and ATI chips from the test.)
Get that man on the KDE team IMMEDIATELY!
A man who cares about performance on the KDE team? Well if it works out, the result might be something good.
Don't /. the mirror that helps against /.ing!
The real funny part would be when they actually get on slashdot and start mirroring themselves.
OS/2 at one point could have been direct competition for Win 3.1, but then WIN 95 came out.
AFAIK the OS/2 kernel was technical supperior to Windows 95/98/ME. I know people who bought computers with OS/2 preinstalled just to wipe it and install a pirate copy of Windows 95. I don't know why anybody would do that. I do own an original OS/2 install CD (which I got for free), but I never managed to install it eventhough I tried on multiple computers. Except from difficulties of installing it, I think it was a nice system. I don't know anybody who disliked OS/2 after actually giving it a chance. Still, people would choose Windows 95 instead of OS/2 without ever trying any of them.
Odds are good that said non-transferable license won't hold up in court, which is probably why Microsoft has never tried to enforce it through legal means.
But as long as they use technical means to enforce an invalid license, there doesn't seem to be much the customers can do.
Do preinstalled versions of XP (or any windows version) require you to click on "Yes I agree" at first boot?
Yes. At least the one that was on my Compaq did. I clicked no, and it shut down. Actually I didn't even want to boot it. But I just couldn't put the Linux install CD in the drive fast enough. I think the story is just BS. First of all their attempts to count the installations may be very inaccurate. I have four computers running Linux, three of them were bought with no software at all, and one with Windows preinstalled. I believe more computers are sold with a Windows installation which is wiped in favor of Linux than the other way around.
Would someone who knows the deceased set up a fund
Unfortunately it is not unusual to see fake funds. Would you pay if you had no way of knowing if the fund was real?
Wait till I patent clicks 2-99, then you'll really be screwed!
You can't do that, Microsoft already have a patent on doubleclicks
I find it interesting that they list the added cost of troubleshooting as a reason for switching from Linux to Windows. It doesn't surprise me that switching from Linux to Windows will add to the cost of troubleshooting, because with Windows you don't have all the tools to find the cause of a problem like you would have with Linux. What I don't understand is, how can this added cost be an advantage?
are you trying to refute my point, or add to it?
I think he were trying to add to it. You are both right. If you have a good design, then fixing implementation bugs is easy. And fixing a bug doesn't break anything, but on rare occations it might reveal other bugs. A lot of security fixes in open source software are just one-liners. That kind of bug fixes doesn't need lots of testing. I know about systematic testing, and such a fix would often require at most a handful of test cases.
Microsoft controls the secure format, the RIAA gets a secure format
There is no such thing as a secure format. If it is digital it can be copied. At the very best you might be able to attach some additional pieces of information to the music, which might not easilly be removed without causing a loss of quality. But that doesn't prevent copying. And when the copies are floating, you still have a hard time proving how they got out there. Besides the CD is already standardized (not that anyone follow it anymore).
Until the conversion needs little or no interaction from me (and is trusted)
A filesystem conversion utility needs a lot of testing before you can really trust it. IMHO it just isn't worth the effort. It will probably take less work to just use tar or cp -a than to test the conversion. And even if somebody said they had carefully tested the conversion utility, would you trust that they hadn't missed some litle bug that happens to show up on just your system?
There does exist a filesystem independend conversion utility. It relies on features in the standard kernel. It simply moves all files into a new filesystem on a sparse loopback mount, and then maps the loopback filesystem back on the original partition. The maping back is the most complicated part, and since I wouldn't trust such a utility unless I understood the code, I have never used it. Besides the script wrapping around the whole thing was a bit flawed, so I would do that part by hand if I needed to.
MSI can't run arbitrary code.. it works like an RPM in this regard
.rpm file certainly can execute arbitrary code on installation and uninstallation. The postinstall script can call an arbitrary executable from the package you just installed. You can even have triggers, such that one package gets to execute some code when another package is installed.
A
Nope convertfs won't work...
Why not? AFAIK the only two requirements for convertfs to work is that the original filesystem supports sparse files and the FIBMAP ioctl. Reiser3 have both these features. You must also have enough free disk space, and there will still be a risk of data loss in case of bugs in convertfs. So I wouldn't recommend using convertfs unless you actually understand it well enough to fix the filesystem if it breaks.
From the horses mouth
Written by who? If this is written by a person with no knowledge about convertfs (but maybe knowledge about reiserfs) how could he possible say if it works. The convertfs utility is designed to work with almost arbitrary filesystems. It doesn't contain filesystem code, it simply relies on the drivers in the kernel.
This is one of the strenghs of the GPL, if your defeat it you can no longer play with the toys rather than being able to steal them.
Basically nothing would change. People using GPL software in ways not allowed by the GPL would still be doing copyright infringement, and they do not get any extra rights, even if there exist an invalid license, that does not grant them those rights. People using GPL software in compliance with the license are probably pretty safe. Theoretically they could be sued by the author. But that author will not have a very strong case. After all the author did give permissions to the use.
Microsoft should switch to the GPL.
Not the most likely thing to happen, but still a lot more likely than Linux switching to a BSD license. Don't forget that for Linux to switch license, every single contributor must agree. One person already said he wouldn't accept it. Neither will I. The code I have contributed so far is only a few lines, but I'm sure enough people will disagree with this suggestion, that if you remove all the code we have contributed, what remains will not be a working kernel.
Besides, I don't see how the license could have any influence on patent issues. No agreement between author and end user can remove your obligation towards a third party patent owner.
I have an idea where this box might come in handy. Say I want to bring my digital camera with me on vacation, and I will take lots of pictures. I think buying 10 flash cards for the camera is too expensive, so instead I would like to bring a USB harddisk and dump the pictures onto it once a day. So what I would need for this task is a device to which I can connect two USB devices. Is NSLU2 the right choice or is there something better?