Yes, but that isn't really the issue. The problem was that he was deliberately misled about the purpose of the show and would not have been.(according to the other stories linked to here) given a fair chance to defend his point of view. If someone's beliefs actually deserve being ridiculed on TV, then it should be quite possible to make them look like a fool by fair debate, without resorting to jokes about penis enlargement pills. As it is, their personality -- especially ability to work out what is going on and to keep their head -- might be tested, but their actual views hardly matter. A comedy show can make a point by demonstrating what is funny about a particular point of view, but from the sounds of it this one tries to produce humor by completely avoiding the topic -- which might not be such a problem if it didn't involve misleading guests and possibly damaging their reputations.
From everything I've heard Telus in BC doesn't care how much bandwidth you use. I'm fairly sure I go over 5 GB down sometimes, and I use less than many people.
A little off topic, but...
If you haven't tried them, the NWN expansions and some of the user made modules are worth looking at. They're not necessarily up to BG standards, but much better than the original NWN campaign.
How? Or do you mean a case other than the one in which SCO is accusing IBM of copyright violations, which do not appear to have anything to do with the GPL?
Unfortunately, with columns like this one blaming the worm on "some ticked-off Linux fan", it needs to be said.
Should we really be so sure of anything at this point? If you read both Perens' letter and the eWeek article, they say almost exactly the same thing about the Linux community. The difference is that Perens jumps to the conclusion that the worm was designed to discredit the community, while the eWeek reporter jumps to the conclusion that some zealot made it. Neither opinion is any more provable at this point.
It is certainly quite possible that the zealot idea is wrong, but no one really knows yet. If 'we', the community, make statments which turn out to be false, that also reflects badly on us.
Give me a break, nobody is going to have sympathy for SCO over this. Every quarter they spend on bandwidth is a couple letters of FUD they can't send out. No, this makes a great PR/FUD opportunity for SCO. At the first DOS attacks they got to issue "look what the linux nasty hackers did to us" type statements, and this sounds like it could be significantly worse. Hopefully the press is less supportive of them by now, but still this is by no means a good thing.
Protocol isn't really talked about
The 'web is definded as the part of the internet that uses HTTP, is it not?
Re:SVG a Huge plus
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
However, trying to coerce people to start using "a better GUI" (be it Gimp vs. Photoshop or X desktop vs. Win GUI) is wrong.
In this case, though, your parent post is merely saying that the GIMP's interface is good in its own right -- not that everyone should switch over to it.
The grandparent, on the other hand, is basically saying that the Gimp should be changed to be more familiar to Photoshop users. That may be a valid response to Everyone Should Switch Over arguments, but if trying to coerce someone into using a different GUI system is wrong, than trying to coerce someone into changing their program to a different GUI because you personally like it better is surely worse.
The other major problem with the car analogy is that driving a very heavy piece of equipment at high speeds is dangerous not only to the driver but also to any anyone else around. What you do online may be annoying or troublesome, but it is extremely unlikely to kill anyone. (And requiring licences to simply use a computer seems utterly insane -- the article seems to imply that this might be part of the idea, although it may just be that the author personally can't distinguish between using a computer and being online.)
Anyway, I think the idea of trying to control access to the general internet is ridiculous, but I do wonder about the possibility of having alternate network(s) (probably running of top of the normal internet). A system that limited use a bit (without being too restrictive) and also discouraged commercial interests would be great in many ways -- something like the early internet, I guess (although I wasn't there so I don't really know). I'm not sure if a system like that would really be practical or necessary even a good idea, but I sortof like the general concept.
The article mentions that more money has been spent in games than movies recently, and puts it down to the fact that games cost way more. Which is probably true, but really misses the point... If it comes down to a competition between the movie and gaming industries, I can't imagine companies caring that much about the audience size if they are making more. Obviously if the audience can be expanded to make even more money than that can't be a problem, but it doesn't necessarily work that way with games since satisfying everyone can be very difficult.
Exactly. What I always find funny about this sort of article is the implication that open source developers exist to produce free software for non-technical users. That's fine when the users are paying for the product, but OSS projects tend to work because the developers make what they will use themselves -- features get added by whoever will use them or finds them interesting. Since people who aren't developers can't personally modify software for their needs, that job goes to commercial interests, in general distro makers.
The sort of message the article gives is fine for commercial developers, and it's fine as a response to Linux On The Desktop zealots, but it really the point of OSS. There really should be a distinction made between the (unpaid) developer community and people who cater to end users.
Actually, the help like says that "Featured Sites are links that MSN Search editors believe are likely to be particularly relevant and useful." It then goes on to say that that includes bought adds, but it seems that the Featured Sites can be chosen by MSN people for other resons as well -- but as you say, they are fairly clear that Featured Sites aren't part of the real search results.
What I found interesting about the whole things wasn't so much the Microsoft aspect, but the potential it has to change the workings of the system it relies on.
I haven't used newsgroups much, and therefore my opinion may be inaccurate, but it seems like anyone looking an groups using software with theses new search features is going to approach things very differently than people using tradition methods. Essentially, if there if a group can be called a community, it's probably that way because everyone who spends much time there knows each other (to some extent), follows whatever have developed, and so on. Someone who comes in because their news reader told them the group was popular is not going to see any of that, and if it happened too often then it could be rather disruptive. If it happened a lot, then it could change the way people handle themselves in the group and the methods used to rate threads and authors might become useless.
It also seems like the ratings could concentrate posts too much. If people use the system to search old threads then it wouldn't be an issue, but if it gets used to find places to ask things then it could increase the number of questions that could have been answered by searching, RTFMing, etc.. If only the best resources get used, then they could grow to the point of becoming impossible to search while everything else is ignored.
Finally, I wonder about the good posters as a support resource attitude. Obviously plenty of people are willing to help others online, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want everyone coming to them for assistance. Again, it wouldn't be a problem if the system encouraged searching only resources, but if it ended up encouraging un-researched posts then it could flood good groups and authors with unnecessary questions. (Obviously some answerers are going to be fine with those questions, but in bulk they tend to get annoying.)
None of these things are necessarily an issue at all, of course -- they would only be a problem in the context of Microsoft releasing a news reader with their search features (as was implied by the last article on the topic) and getting a lot of people to using. If it remained a search tool that wasn't used all the time then it could be very useful.
Yes, I know you can charge for GPLed software (for some reason I always end up posting to slashdot when I'm too tired to actually write). I was referring to SCO's special licencing fees which presumably don't give out the code under the GPL (if they did then someone could just copy everything back to the main tree and everything would be definitively legal again). Yes, their fees can almost certainly be safely ignored, but there is still potential for lawsuits from kernel developers there.
However, the other poster's point about IP issues is probably the more important one.
Ummm... Linux kernel developers can take legal action if SCO is violating their licence, and distributing the kernel while asking for fees may be a violation. I hanvn't heard and sugestion of SCO actually violation Samba's licence yet. Just because the two licences happen to be the same doesn't meen they both get invalidated together. Immagine what would happen if any one who has ever contributed a single line of code to peice of GPLed software could suddenly decicde to revoke the licence to a particular company -- it would be a horrible mess, and against most of what the GPL is supposed to stand for.
I use Openbox with the ROX Desktop... much lighter than KDE or GNOME, and a nice balance between features and speed.
Re:"Standard language is just a dialect with an ar
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 1
kase...konsonant
I didn't know Mark Twain was a KDE developer. Interesting.
Re:I don't want to start a flamewar...
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 1
...shouldn't that be humourous?
Possibly not, actually. I once looked up a similar word for some reason, and the use of Us is not a simple as you might think - they drop out in certain forms. I remember that for a while that inconsistency was enough to convert me to the American spellings, but then I realized that English spelling in any form doesn't have to make sense, and went back to the real ones.
Anyway, I'm way too tired at the moment to properly check if this really is one of those forms, but for now I tried the spellings with Abiword set to the Canadian/British dictionary (Abiword is using aspell, I think). 'Humourous' shows up as being misspelled.
I wish there would at least be some sort of obvious disclaimer on the post -- "I work for Real", or at least something like "We at RealNetworks just made two announcements..." It's certainly clear that he does work there when he starts to use 'we', but he doesn't appear to go out of his way to say that. It also interesting that the submitter has had at least two Helix stories posted before, and neither were any more clear about his involvement.
I guess I don't especially care if articles like this get submitted, as long the information is relevant to slashdotty topics, and as long as there arn't too many of them. It seems fair as long as the writer is actually a normal member of slashdot, and didn't register just to get the story posted. I just think that any story with commercial interests should make an effort to be up front about it, even if the connections are obvious from the writing.
Why are you comparing how long it takes to get to a folder 3 submenus deep vs. one which is only one menu deep?
I was reading that as meaning that it took the times given to simply VIEW the directories, not including browsing to them from somewhere else. The place where this may be unfair is that the kde example would appear to be accessing a windows formated partition. I don't know how much performance loss there is between reading windows file systems natively and from linux, but I would say there is at least a little difference with my winme partition.
"... this is probably the reason for all the Mars probes launched over the last few months." Umm... yes, exactly as has been mentioned in most articles mentioning those probes. Seriously, it's not a matter of speculation. Its been quite obvious for some time that several probes have been launched in response to this event.
Well, there is sort of a difference between real damages and real loss. Real loss would seem to be equal to real world theft or intentional destruction of property. Real damages could just mean responsibility for wasting the time and effort people put into the game, maybe something like real world vandalism (there is probably a better analogy). At least that was the way I interpreted it... It does get more complicated when people pay real money for virtual items, of course.
Do they though? At one place that was indicated, but then in the referenced link that information seems to be based a single diagram found on the ftp. Later on that linked page, there are descriptions from people who worked with the system of how the voting machines store data on flash cards and the contents are then transfered by a modem connection from a single machine. That connenction would only be hooked up after the actual voting. I'm not saying the wireless thing is definitly wrong, but I would be interested to find out how it's known. Obviouly some people have actually seen these things, and must have some idea how the system works...
Slashdot Mirror
Instructions on fixing that are here. Basicly set CHOICESPATH to whatever you want.
Yes, but that isn't really the issue. The problem was that he was deliberately misled about the purpose of the show and would not have been.(according to the other stories linked to here) given a fair chance to defend his point of view. If someone's beliefs actually deserve being ridiculed on TV, then it should be quite possible to make them look like a fool by fair debate, without resorting to jokes about penis enlargement pills. As it is, their personality -- especially ability to work out what is going on and to keep their head -- might be tested, but their actual views hardly matter. A comedy show can make a point by demonstrating what is funny about a particular point of view, but from the sounds of it this one tries to produce humor by completely avoiding the topic -- which might not be such a problem if it didn't involve misleading guests and possibly damaging their reputations.
From everything I've heard Telus in BC doesn't care how much bandwidth you use. I'm fairly sure I go over 5 GB down sometimes, and I use less than many people.
A little off topic, but... If you haven't tried them, the NWN expansions and some of the user made modules are worth looking at. They're not necessarily up to BG standards, but much better than the original NWN campaign.
How? Or do you mean a case other than the one in which SCO is accusing IBM of copyright violations, which do not appear to have anything to do with the GPL?
And all the user made modules, some of which are quite good...
Should we really be so sure of anything at this point? If you read both Perens' letter and the eWeek article, they say almost exactly the same thing about the Linux community. The difference is that Perens jumps to the conclusion that the worm was designed to discredit the community, while the eWeek reporter jumps to the conclusion that some zealot made it. Neither opinion is any more provable at this point.
It is certainly quite possible that the zealot idea is wrong, but no one really knows yet. If 'we', the community, make statments which turn out to be false, that also reflects badly on us.
Give me a break, nobody is going to have sympathy for SCO over this. Every quarter they spend on bandwidth is a couple letters of FUD they can't send out.
No, this makes a great PR/FUD opportunity for SCO. At the first DOS attacks they got to issue "look what the linux nasty hackers did to us" type statements, and this sounds like it could be significantly worse. Hopefully the press is less supportive of them by now, but still this is by no means a good thing.
Protocol isn't really talked about The 'web is definded as the part of the internet that uses HTTP, is it not?
In this case, though, your parent post is merely saying that the GIMP's interface is good in its own right -- not that everyone should switch over to it.
The grandparent, on the other hand, is basically saying that the Gimp should be changed to be more familiar to Photoshop users. That may be a valid response to Everyone Should Switch Over arguments, but if trying to coerce someone into using a different GUI system is wrong, than trying to coerce someone into changing their program to a different GUI because you personally like it better is surely worse.
Anyway, I think the idea of trying to control access to the general internet is ridiculous, but I do wonder about the possibility of having alternate network(s) (probably running of top of the normal internet). A system that limited use a bit (without being too restrictive) and also discouraged commercial interests would be great in many ways -- something like the early internet, I guess (although I wasn't there so I don't really know). I'm not sure if a system like that would really be practical or necessary even a good idea, but I sortof like the general concept.
The article mentions that more money has been spent in games than movies recently, and puts it down to the fact that games cost way more. Which is probably true, but really misses the point... If it comes down to a competition between the movie and gaming industries, I can't imagine companies caring that much about the audience size if they are making more. Obviously if the audience can be expanded to make even more money than that can't be a problem, but it doesn't necessarily work that way with games since satisfying everyone can be very difficult.
The sort of message the article gives is fine for commercial developers, and it's fine as a response to Linux On The Desktop zealots, but it really the point of OSS. There really should be a distinction made between the (unpaid) developer community and people who cater to end users.
Actually, the help like says that "Featured Sites are links that MSN Search editors believe are likely to be particularly relevant and useful." It then goes on to say that that includes bought adds, but it seems that the Featured Sites can be chosen by MSN people for other resons as well -- but as you say, they are fairly clear that Featured Sites aren't part of the real search results.
I haven't used newsgroups much, and therefore my opinion may be inaccurate, but it seems like anyone looking an groups using software with theses new search features is going to approach things very differently than people using tradition methods. Essentially, if there if a group can be called a community, it's probably that way because everyone who spends much time there knows each other (to some extent), follows whatever have developed, and so on. Someone who comes in because their news reader told them the group was popular is not going to see any of that, and if it happened too often then it could be rather disruptive. If it happened a lot, then it could change the way people handle themselves in the group and the methods used to rate threads and authors might become useless.
It also seems like the ratings could concentrate posts too much. If people use the system to search old threads then it wouldn't be an issue, but if it gets used to find places to ask things then it could increase the number of questions that could have been answered by searching, RTFMing, etc.. If only the best resources get used, then they could grow to the point of becoming impossible to search while everything else is ignored.
Finally, I wonder about the good posters as a support resource attitude. Obviously plenty of people are willing to help others online, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want everyone coming to them for assistance. Again, it wouldn't be a problem if the system encouraged searching only resources, but if it ended up encouraging un-researched posts then it could flood good groups and authors with unnecessary questions. (Obviously some answerers are going to be fine with those questions, but in bulk they tend to get annoying.)
None of these things are necessarily an issue at all, of course -- they would only be a problem in the context of Microsoft releasing a news reader with their search features (as was implied by the last article on the topic) and getting a lot of people to using. If it remained a search tool that wasn't used all the time then it could be very useful.
Yes, I know you can charge for GPLed software (for some reason I always end up posting to slashdot when I'm too tired to actually write). I was referring to SCO's special licencing fees which presumably don't give out the code under the GPL (if they did then someone could just copy everything back to the main tree and everything would be definitively legal again). Yes, their fees can almost certainly be safely ignored, but there is still potential for lawsuits from kernel developers there.
However, the other poster's point about IP issues is probably the more important one.
Ummm... Linux kernel developers can take legal action if SCO is violating their licence, and distributing the kernel while asking for fees may be a violation. I hanvn't heard and sugestion of SCO actually violation Samba's licence yet. Just because the two licences happen to be the same doesn't meen they both get invalidated together. Immagine what would happen if any one who has ever contributed a single line of code to peice of GPLed software could suddenly decicde to revoke the licence to a particular company -- it would be a horrible mess, and against most of what the GPL is supposed to stand for.
I use Openbox with the ROX Desktop... much lighter than KDE or GNOME, and a nice balance between features and speed.
I didn't know Mark Twain was a KDE developer. Interesting.
Possibly not, actually. I once looked up a similar word for some reason, and the use of Us is not a simple as you might think - they drop out in certain forms. I remember that for a while that inconsistency was enough to convert me to the American spellings, but then I realized that English spelling in any form doesn't have to make sense, and went back to the real ones.
Anyway, I'm way too tired at the moment to properly check if this really is one of those forms, but for now I tried the spellings with Abiword set to the Canadian/British dictionary (Abiword is using aspell, I think). 'Humourous' shows up as being misspelled.
I guess I don't especially care if articles like this get submitted, as long the information is relevant to slashdotty topics, and as long as there arn't too many of them. It seems fair as long as the writer is actually a normal member of slashdot, and didn't register just to get the story posted. I just think that any story with commercial interests should make an effort to be up front about it, even if the connections are obvious from the writing.
Why are you comparing how long it takes to get to a folder 3 submenus deep vs. one which is only one menu deep?
I was reading that as meaning that it took the times given to simply VIEW the directories, not including browsing to them from somewhere else. The place where this may be unfair is that the kde example would appear to be accessing a windows formated partition. I don't know how much performance loss there is between reading windows file systems natively and from linux, but I would say there is at least a little difference with my winme partition.
"... this is probably the reason for all the Mars probes launched over the last few months."
Umm... yes, exactly as has been mentioned in most articles mentioning those probes. Seriously, it's not a matter of speculation. Its been quite obvious for some time that several probes have been launched in response to this event.
Well, there is sort of a difference between real damages and real loss. Real loss would seem to be equal to real world theft or intentional destruction of property. Real damages could just mean responsibility for wasting the time and effort people put into the game, maybe something like real world vandalism (there is probably a better analogy). At least that was the way I interpreted it... It does get more complicated when people pay real money for virtual items, of course.
Do they though? At one place that was indicated, but then in the referenced link that information seems to be based a single diagram found on the ftp. Later on that linked page, there are descriptions from people who worked with the system of how the voting machines store data on flash cards and the contents are then transfered by a modem connection from a single machine. That connenction would only be hooked up after the actual voting. I'm not saying the wireless thing is definitly wrong, but I would be interested to find out how it's known. Obviouly some people have actually seen these things, and must have some idea how the system works...