Because the potential for abuse by terrorists themselves, you have to wonder what plans were in place to deal with suspicions transactions in the system. You can imagine anyone buying a lot of shares in any one event automaticaly getting investigated by the FBI... Not that it matters anymore, I just though it was interesting.
And what part of: "by any and all means and media (whether now known or existing in the future)" doesn't he understand
Umm... when he says that the clause was worded differently, maybe he is including that bit as well. I agree he probably should check his contract before making a big deal about this, but for the moment there is no reason to assume that he must be wrong.
I love the way every few months someone will announce that Linux is or is not Ready For The Desktop, everyone makes a big deal about it for a while, and then forgets again and everything progresses as normal. Just be cause it does or doesn't work for one person doesn't mean it will or won't be useful for someone else. I also get the feeling that if you were to compare a Windows system to Linux to decide if Windows was Ready For The Desktop, you would get more or less the same results, especially with the interoperability thing going both ways.
On the other hand, its also funny that everyone makes such a big deal about these articles. I admit that I only skimmed this one, but I didn't get the feeling that it ever tried to say much about the readiness of Linux as a whole, and it actually seemed quite positive in many ways.
Well, they did promise it. Then they didn't.
Oh, ok, I didn't follow the anouncments closely until right before the release.
I don't know if they ever finished the Mac port... Assuming you mean NWN here, I think the the Mac version is due out in a couple of weeks, ie more than a year after the Windows release.
The difference here is that the Linux version is apparently going to be on the same CD as the Windows one, so they will presumably come out at the same time. Another post around here somewhere indicates that there is already a Linux beta for Savage. There may have been rumors about NWN having Linux support from the regular disc, but as far as I know that was never promised by the company (correct me if I'm wrong about that).
While we're on the topic of NWN, it seems to me that that method of handing Linux porting (after release and low priority) isn't really so bad, since I can see that there isn't enough of a market for it to be a big deal to the publisher. At least there is a client eventually. The major problem with what Bioware did was the vague promises about the Linux client coming shortly after release when they obviously hadn't even started. I recall stories about two weeks or a month, and then by the time it actually got the beta it seemed like there was about that period spent on legal issues and library portability problems that should have been resolved before even announcing a port. Anyway -- I don't have any problem with companies being slow about Linux ports if they actually do make them, but I wish they would be straightforward about it.
From what I've heard, putting the "all rights reserved" bit is meaningless these days. It used to be necessary in some countries (it seems to me that there was some European country in particular), but now all the rights you mention are automatic. For that matter, you shouldn't even need to include a copyright symbol. (Of course, I could be wrong about that).
There is a bit of a difference there. For one thing, it's not the police making the single download, it's a representitive the the copyright holder, who is presumably allowed to do so -- I'm not sure how much that actually effects things any more in court, but it might make some difference. Also, persumably drug dealers get charged with a single crime rather than each individual sale they might have made (correct me if I'm wrong there), because the police are unlikly to be able to prove a number of sales. The RIAA's estimates for their losses always seem to factor in all the downloads that could have been made over the length of the the person could have had a file shared, and how many CDs the downloaders could have then not bought. Again, its hard to say if that really matters with the current state of things, but it seems like it should.
I've been wondering if there are any programs or scripts that handle that sort of thing automaticaly.
What I'm thinking of is something like:
a) On each startx, the setup would find the next unused console and start an X session for it. Presumably there would be some fairly low limit on how many sessions could exist at one time.
b) (Some) users would only be allowed a single session.
c) If possible, there would be some method of switching users from a menu in X, assuming there is a way to switch consoles from software (it seems like there must be).
d) If possible, logins from an XDM type program would handle all of the above. Presumably that meens keeping a special session open just for XDM.
It seems like at least the first part should be possible. I belive at least one of the desktopy Linux distros (Xandros?) has something like this, but I've never used it.
Are there any similar setups that can be used other distros? I admit I havn't search around for anything yet; I just thought I'd ask while its sortof on topic.
Really, how much of this can really be 'fixed', if it needs fixing?
With the example of gigabytes - what else can you say? Just saying that one drive is bigger than another might encourage a customer to get the larger one, but it doesn't tell them which one they need. For that matter, if they don't know how to measure file sizes, they probablhy won't be able to personaly decide what size of drive is needed anyway. Adding another unit is unlikly to help, since no older measurments can really be applied and a new one would just introduce another term.
The article seems to imply that MP3s should be called something like 'digital audio files', but if you want to distinguish between formats you get stuck with the name MP3. Maybe end users shouldn't have to worry about format anyway, but either you cut all audio files down to one format, killing possible improvments, or you have to let people get used to the fact that there are multiple formats.
I'm sure in somecases jargon could be simplified, but I think much of it is unavoidable.
Don't forget the other sourcebased distros as well. Note that Sourcemage and Lunar have already gone through the control issues while splitting from Sorcerer.
Yes... it's funny the way most people seem to complain in most case with a small group vs. a big company, but now think that SCO should just get squished because IBM is so large. There are definitely differences between the two, but the important one not size, but the fact that while IBM has a very long history in the business, SCO (in its current form) has essentially only contributed this law suit. That matters (at least morally; I'm not sure that it has much effect in the legal system), but the size of the companies really should not. What would happen if IBM had some sort of Linux GPL violation and a small Linux distributer took it to court?
I installed the MS IME for Japanese text entry a while back, and actually has a EULA only a few lines long! I was quite surprised. I think it should get some sort of award for shortest MS EULA (and probably one of the shortest anywhere).
The difference as I understand it is that nvidia releases its drvers seperately from the kernel, and the two are only combined by the user. If I'm right about the way that bit of the GPL works, nnvidia can't release a prebuilt kernel, and the user can't distrubute a kernel built with the driver either, unless the code is also made available. Linksys, on the other hand, may be distributing everything together as a precomiled package without the code. There is a big difference between people wanting a company to release an indepentent project (nvidia drivers), and people wanting a company to release modifications to a GPLed project (linksys). Maybe there are in fact reasons why linksys can legaly do what they did, but from the situation as stated in the origional post, they are using GPLed code and ignoring the conditions on its use.
Everyone who has contributed to the Linux kernel over the years has had their own motivations, and would have their own answer to that question. Unfortunately, we're long past the stage where we can ask each of them what their choice would be. All we do know is that they chose to submit code under the terms of the GPL. If I had contributed to a major GPL project (I haven't yet), I would be extremely annoyed if someone later told me that those terms were going to be ignored to allow a company to produce a better product and presumably profit from it -- if that was the intention, the project should have been under a different license in the first place.
Now I don't know if there is actually a violation in this case, as the post did not clarify a lot of things. But assuming that the priority must be to allow use of Linux even without satisfying the conditions of the GPL is ridiculous.
Um.. wasn't the GPL designed before MS became anything near a monopoly, more to do with the UNIX issues?
(Of course, I could be totaly wrong about that.)
There is a sorce based distro war developing, but no one ever seems to say anything about the actual advantages, disadvantages, or differences of any kind. All the discussions I see on various forums are something like this:
Newbie: can someone tell me which is better gentoo or sorcerer [/source mage/lunar linux] ?
Gentoo Fan: Sorcerer sucks, use Gentoo.
Sorcerer Fan: Gentoo sucks, use Sorcerer.
So is there anyone who has used these distros who would be interested in telling us (rationaly:-))something about how they differ from each other and what their respective advantages might be? Any links to previous discussions or reviews?
As a side note, I would also be interested in knowing about any one using source based distros on dial up connections. I'm on 56k (for the moment; I might get ADSL soon), and while I don't mind doing reasonably long downloads at night with a DL accelerator/resumer, I do mind installs taking several days of phone time. I also can get friends with real connections and CD burners to help, but I'm not sure how useful that is in this situation...
You might look at the Source Mage site and perhaps the origional Sorcerer site for more back ground. Some of the technical details should also be the same. The Gentoo site has some general information about sorce based distros.
But if you already know about the other source-baseds and just want specific information about Lunar, than yes, it does seem to be practicaly non existant.
It's back, but there is something weird about the licencing acording to the Source Mage (the other fork) site. On the other hand, I don't seen any mention of the licence on the Sorcerer site, so I'm not to sure about the details...
Re:Yet Another Pointless Linux Distribution
on
Lunar Linux 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
reasons for the existence of Lunar Linux
There were reasons for the fork of Sorcerer. See this page on the Source Mage site. But no, last I looked Lunar Linux wasn't very clear about these reasons.
People should be required to have a good reason for making a new Linux distribution.
If people were required to have a good reason to start OSS projects, we would never have got Linux in the first place.
I won't even bother responding to the rest of your argument.
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Because the potential for abuse by terrorists themselves, you have to wonder what plans were in place to deal with suspicions transactions in the system. You can imagine anyone buying a lot of shares in any one event automaticaly getting investigated by the FBI... Not that it matters anymore, I just though it was interesting.
Umm... when he says that the clause was worded differently, maybe he is including that bit as well. I agree he probably should check his contract before making a big deal about this, but for the moment there is no reason to assume that he must be wrong.
On the other hand, its also funny that everyone makes such a big deal about these articles. I admit that I only skimmed this one, but I didn't get the feeling that it ever tried to say much about the readiness of Linux as a whole, and it actually seemed quite positive in many ways.
Oh, ok, I didn't follow the anouncments closely until right before the release.
I don't know if they ever finished the Mac port...
Assuming you mean NWN here, I think the the Mac version is due out in a couple of weeks, ie more than a year after the Windows release.
The difference here is that the Linux version is apparently going to be on the same CD as the Windows one, so they will presumably come out at the same time. Another post around here somewhere indicates that there is already a Linux beta for Savage. There may have been rumors about NWN having Linux support from the regular disc, but as far as I know that was never promised by the company (correct me if I'm wrong about that). While we're on the topic of NWN, it seems to me that that method of handing Linux porting (after release and low priority) isn't really so bad, since I can see that there isn't enough of a market for it to be a big deal to the publisher. At least there is a client eventually. The major problem with what Bioware did was the vague promises about the Linux client coming shortly after release when they obviously hadn't even started. I recall stories about two weeks or a month, and then by the time it actually got the beta it seemed like there was about that period spent on legal issues and library portability problems that should have been resolved before even announcing a port. Anyway -- I don't have any problem with companies being slow about Linux ports if they actually do make them, but I wish they would be straightforward about it.
From what I've heard, putting the "all rights reserved" bit is meaningless these days. It used to be necessary in some countries (it seems to me that there was some European country in particular), but now all the rights you mention are automatic. For that matter, you shouldn't even need to include a copyright symbol. (Of course, I could be wrong about that).
There is a bit of a difference there. For one thing, it's not the police making the single download, it's a representitive the the copyright holder, who is presumably allowed to do so -- I'm not sure how much that actually effects things any more in court, but it might make some difference. Also, persumably drug dealers get charged with a single crime rather than each individual sale they might have made (correct me if I'm wrong there), because the police are unlikly to be able to prove a number of sales. The RIAA's estimates for their losses always seem to factor in all the downloads that could have been made over the length of the the person could have had a file shared, and how many CDs the downloaders could have then not bought. Again, its hard to say if that really matters with the current state of things, but it seems like it should.
What I'm thinking of is something like:
a) On each startx, the setup would find the next unused console and start an X session for it. Presumably there would be some fairly low limit on how many sessions could exist at one time.
b) (Some) users would only be allowed a single session.
c) If possible, there would be some method of switching users from a menu in X, assuming there is a way to switch consoles from software (it seems like there must be).
d) If possible, logins from an XDM type program would handle all of the above. Presumably that meens keeping a special session open just for XDM.
It seems like at least the first part should be possible. I belive at least one of the desktopy Linux distros (Xandros?) has something like this, but I've never used it.
Are there any similar setups that can be used other distros? I admit I havn't search around for anything yet; I just thought I'd ask while its sortof on topic.
With the example of gigabytes - what else can you say? Just saying that one drive is bigger than another might encourage a customer to get the larger one, but it doesn't tell them which one they need. For that matter, if they don't know how to measure file sizes, they probablhy won't be able to personaly decide what size of drive is needed anyway. Adding another unit is unlikly to help, since no older measurments can really be applied and a new one would just introduce another term.
The article seems to imply that MP3s should be called something like 'digital audio files', but if you want to distinguish between formats you get stuck with the name MP3. Maybe end users shouldn't have to worry about format anyway, but either you cut all audio files down to one format, killing possible improvments, or you have to let people get used to the fact that there are multiple formats.
I'm sure in somecases jargon could be simplified, but I think much of it is unavoidable.
Don't forget the other sourcebased distros as well. Note that Sourcemage and Lunar have already gone through the control issues while splitting from Sorcerer.
Yes... it's funny the way most people seem to complain in most case with a small group vs. a big company, but now think that SCO should just get squished because IBM is so large. There are definitely differences between the two, but the important one not size, but the fact that while IBM has a very long history in the business, SCO (in its current form) has essentially only contributed this law suit. That matters (at least morally; I'm not sure that it has much effect in the legal system), but the size of the companies really should not. What would happen if IBM had some sort of Linux GPL violation and a small Linux distributer took it to court?
I installed the MS IME for Japanese text entry a while back, and actually has a EULA only a few lines long! I was quite surprised. I think it should get some sort of award for shortest MS EULA (and probably one of the shortest anywhere).
The difference as I understand it is that nvidia releases its drvers seperately from the kernel, and the two are only combined by the user. If I'm right about the way that bit of the GPL works, nnvidia can't release a prebuilt kernel, and the user can't distrubute a kernel built with the driver either, unless the code is also made available.
Linksys, on the other hand, may be distributing everything together as a precomiled package without the code. There is a big difference between people wanting a company to release an indepentent project (nvidia drivers), and people wanting a company to release modifications to a GPLed project (linksys). Maybe there are in fact reasons why linksys can legaly do what they did, but from the situation as stated in the origional post, they are using GPLed code and ignoring the conditions on its use.
What's got the higer priority[?]
Everyone who has contributed to the Linux kernel over the years has had their own motivations, and would have their own answer to that question. Unfortunately, we're long past the stage where we can ask each of them what their choice would be. All we do know is that they chose to submit code under the terms of the GPL. If I had contributed to a major GPL project (I haven't yet), I would be extremely annoyed if someone later told me that those terms were going to be ignored to allow a company to produce a better product and presumably profit from it -- if that was the intention, the project should have been under a different license in the first place.
Now I don't know if there is actually a violation in this case, as the post did not clarify a lot of things. But assuming that the priority must be to allow use of Linux even without satisfying the conditions of the GPL is ridiculous.
Um.. wasn't the GPL designed before MS became anything near a monopoly, more to do with the UNIX issues? (Of course, I could be totaly wrong about that.)
There are quite a few websites on fun ways to respond to telemarketers. I've lost my links, but on Google: Telemarketer Responses Telemarketer Revenge
Phoenix does have it's own search bar that can be used for Google, but it doesn't have all the features of the Google Toolbar.
Thank you, that's exactly what I was after. :-)
CDs are technicaly discs, not disks. :-)
Newbie: can someone tell me which is better gentoo or sorcerer [/source mage/lunar linux] ?
Gentoo Fan: Sorcerer sucks, use Gentoo.
Sorcerer Fan: Gentoo sucks, use Sorcerer.
So is there anyone who has used these distros who would be interested in telling us (rationaly :-))something about how they differ from each other and what their respective advantages might be? Any links to previous discussions or reviews?
As a side note, I would also be interested in knowing about any one using source based distros on dial up connections. I'm on 56k (for the moment; I might get ADSL soon), and while I don't mind doing reasonably long downloads at night with a DL accelerator/resumer, I do mind installs taking several days of phone time. I also can get friends with real connections and CD burners to help, but I'm not sure how useful that is in this situation...
But if you already know about the other source-baseds and just want specific information about Lunar, than yes, it does seem to be practicaly non existant.
It's back, but there is something weird about the licencing acording to the Source Mage (the other fork) site. On the other hand, I don't seen any mention of the licence on the Sorcerer site, so I'm not to sure about the details...
reasons for the existence of Lunar Linux
There were reasons for the fork of Sorcerer. See this page on the Source Mage site. But no, last I looked Lunar Linux wasn't very clear about these reasons. People should be required to have a good reason for making a new Linux distribution.
If people were required to have a good reason to start OSS projects, we would never have got Linux in the first place. I won't even bother responding to the rest of your argument.
if sorcerer was so good, why not contribute to it? Aparently there was some problem with the Sorcerer licencing that started the fork.
Yeah, the interface isn't great, but for someone who can get around that and doesn't already have photoshop or something it would be very impressive.