Here, try a Google search for
"Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" (in quotes). 137 search matches so far. Some of those are people linking to the various copies, others are the copies
I'll know in a few days if people are finding it independently with search engines, and what keywords they are using. I think it will work out well, though, because my article links to its original copy, and because my website is already regarded highly for google, for reasons I discuss in
this other article.
Please copy my article "Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" to your own website. I released it under a Creative Commons license. I designed the page to be very easy to copy, with only very simple, valid markup, and no external dependencies like images or stylesheets. It even looks good in lynx!
While the lawsuits being
defended by IBM and
filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
This page provides the article in the UBB code that some message boards use, with plain text coming soon. I'm also starting to post examples of letters that others have sent to their Attorney's General.
Please copy my article "Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" to your own website. I released it under a Creative Commons license. I designed the page to be very easy to copy, with only very simple, valid markup, and no external dependencies like images or stylesheets. It even looks good in lynx!
While the lawsuits being
defended by IBM and
filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
Thanks for your help.
World Domination Will Come When Copy & Paste W
on
Worst Linux Annoyances?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Here is my #1 annoyance with Linux. It's the main thing that keeps me using Windows or Mac OS X to do a lot of my day-to-day stuff like email or web browsing.
Copy and paste doesn't work consistently, and when it does, it often behaves in nonsensical ways.
I feel that world domination will come when the following "Just Works" for every Linux user:
You can copy text from any application that can supply text into any other text application that can receive text. Many Linux applications can't copy and paste between each other, or if they can at all, you can only do it in one direction.
You can copy some text from any application, close the window to get it out of the way, because you don't need it anymore, then paste the text into any other application
You can copy some text in any application, activate the window of any other application, select the text you want to replace, then paste the text you copied first, thereby deleting the second text which you had selected and replacing it.
This last thing I try to do quite a lot to paste a new URL into the URL textbox of a web browser, so I can replace the old URL with the new URL I want to visit. However, in X11, highlighting some text makes it "the selection", so a paste will just paste in the text I'd selected, which was the text I wanted to replace.
All of these things have consistently worked flawlessly in every version of Mac OS and Windows I've ever used. Note that my first Mac ran System 5 and my first Windows box ran Windows 3.1. Yes, I am an old man.
I've been using Linux since I first installed Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play and I've never been able to get this to work right.
Consider how frequently office workers in a business need to copy and paste text, and consider that this is my main frustration, even though I am an experienced Linux user. I nearly had my Windows-loving wife talked into trying out Linux, but when I explained this problem to her, she said she wasn't even willing to give Linux a chance.
And yes, I understand one reason this doesn't work in X11 is that the fact that this network-transparent GUI sometimes has to work on X terminals with limited memory, so you can't provide a dedicated memory buffer for a clipboard like on Windows or the Mac. But my friend, the PC I'm typing this on has 512 megabytes of RAM, and frankly I rarely if ever run X over a network, so I don't see this as a valid excuse anymore.
While the lawsuits being
defended by IBM and
filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for
fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's
first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after
I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either
writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company
hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to
the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula
at parties around the town.
Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed
copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that
once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work
between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's
because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property
from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I
once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The
SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa
Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm
named for a beautiful small town between
the mountains and the ocean in central California. The
Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies
as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that
SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a
look at SCO's
press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the
introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15,
the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay
$2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their
fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were
purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't
violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal
means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for
them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Even
if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for
me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement
was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux
distributions I use.
SCO's
license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the
Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone
who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to
con
While the lawsuits being
defended by IBM and
filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for
fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's
first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after
I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either
writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company
hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to
the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula
at parties around the town.
Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed
copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that
once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work
between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's
because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property
from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I
once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The
SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa
Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm
named for a beautiful small town between
the mountains and the ocean in central California. The
Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies
as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that
SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a
look at SCO's
press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the
introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15,
the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay
$2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their
fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were
purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't
violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal
means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for
them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Even
if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for
me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement
was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux
distributions I use.
SCO's
license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the
Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone
who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to
con
Understanding the economics of direct marketing
on
The Economics Of Spamming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You can begin to get an idea of the terrible challenge that spam presents us if you consider the economics of direct mail marketing - that is, sending advertisements in printed letters via snail mail.
I used to work for
a small software company where most of our sales were made through direct mail. I think our gross sales peaked at about $2 million one year while I was working there in the mid-90's.
Each direct mail piece sent to a prospect costs hard cash to send, for printing, postage, labor and mailing list rental. Yet it was our experience that a response rate of 0.5% was sufficient to yield a profit.
Once you have identified a profitable offer and a mailing list that's rich with customers who respond to direct mail, you have a license to print money. That's why you probably each of you reading this receive two or three pieces of direct mail every day.
The following two comments I posted at Kuro5hin discuss this in great detail:
Now, if you consider that the cost of sending spam is insignificant when the spammer can hijack an open relay, you will understand that spam will never stop until purchasers stop responding to spam.
Simply installing filters on your own machine won't help. The people who purchase sexual enhancement products over the Internet don't know from spam filters.
I think the end to spam will come only when every ISP and mail hosting service installs filters that are enabled by default. Only then will the response rate of spam be reduced to the point that it's no longer economical to send it.
I think it's likely the day will come when ISPs will be forced to install filters that cannot be disabled. Possibly this will be ordered by various national governments.
All of the Mac operating systems prior to Mac OS X did not have preemptive multitasking. They used cooperative multitasking, in which a task has to explicitly yield control before another task can get any CPU time.
Apple doesn't support Mac OS X on older machines like the 8600. There is a patch that enables it to run - I tried it on my 8500 - but 64 MB is not enough memory to run OS X comfortably, so you would have excessive paging.
Also, the cost of switching a task in the "classic" Mac OS is quite expensive, because there are many "low memory globals" that are different for each task but have to be located at specific memory addresses. The solution to this is to copy them all to a temporary buffer before a task is switched out, and to copy them back into place just before the task resumes.
(While classic Mac OS supports virtual memory for the purposes of using a hard disk as a backing store, it does not offer memory protection. All of the processes as well as the system software are in a single contiguous, unprotected memory space.)
All of these problems are the whole reason Apple struggled for over a decade to write a modern operating system to replace the classic Mac OS. They failed with Pink and then Copland, so they bought NeXT, which evolved to form Mac OS X.
While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for
fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's
first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after
I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends use to work for SCO either
writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company
hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time.
Before I ever used Linux, I was a happy user of a fully-licensed
copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that
once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work
between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's
because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property
from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I
once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The
SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa
Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm
named for a beautiful small town between
the mountains and the ocean in central California. The
Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies
as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that
SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a
look at SCO's
press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the
introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay
$2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their
fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were
purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't
violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal
means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for
them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Rather than paying their fee, my response will be to write a letter to
the Maine State Attorney General to ask that they prosecute SCO. I'm
going to include substantive documentation, like a hardcopy of SCO's
claim that I must pay them this fee, as well as IBM's and RedHat's
responses to SCO.
I'm also going to write to the Federal Trade Commission to ask that
SCO be investigated for illegal trade practices.
If you live in the United States, I ask you to write a similar letter to
your state Attorney General, as well as to the Federal Trade Commission.
If you live in a state where a Linux distro vendor is located, or a
company that has a lot of Linux installations - doesn't Amazon use it? -
write to your elected representatives to ask that they work with the
state and fede
I don't have a link, but I remember that sometime back during the 2.3 development, Microsoft funded a study that compared the performance of Windows 2000 with Linux 2.2 when they were run on multiple processor machines, I think enterprise class 8-cpu boxes.
Linux didn't do that well in the comparison.
So what did the kernel developers do? Did they give up? Did they all mail their resumes to Redmond? No, they improved the SMP performance of the kernel, so that by the time 2.4 shipped, it could beat Windows 2000 - and I imagine XP now too - in similar benchmarks.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is going to find lots of things that Windows does better than Linux does. That will serve as a guide, to help the Free Software community set their priorities as to which problems to focus on first.
My understanding (I may be wrong) is that the way that Microsoft's "managed code" works is that the installer creates a native compile of your application on your computer right when it installs.
I don't know how well it works but I can see the potential.
Using Microsoft's IDEs - I have VC++ both 6 and 7 - is like pounding nails with my fists.
Have you used Metrowerks Codewarrior? Now there's an IDE. It's a joy to use. Runs on Mac and Windows. I think there is a Linux version that uses gcc, but I haven't tried it.
(I admit I haven't tried Eclipse yet, but I would be very surprised if it were better than CodeWarrior.)
Everything Just Works in CodeWarrior. I've even got my wife, a web designer who prefers to hand-code her HTML, to use it to write her web pages.
CodeWarrior supports C, C++, Java and inline assembly. If you prefer makefiles, there are command line tools that provide the same compiler. Old versions of CodeWarrior also supported Pascal, but I don't think they do anymore.
The ISO compliance of CodeWarrior's C++ is far superior to Visual C++'s, and has been quite compliant for a very long time. I've been happily using the Standard Template Library in very complex ways, as well as writing my own fancy templates, for several years.
Alexei Alexandrescu used CodeWarrior to develop the heavily templated source code for Modern C++ Design. Visual C++ can't compile it because of its poor compliance to the standard.
It is also available for many embedded systems. Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola a while back, who makes the ColdFire and PowerPC processors that are important in the embedded world.
Copyright is not a right guaranteed to Americans in the way that free speech is. While the Constitution empowers Congress to create copyright "to promote the useful arts and sciences", it doesn't actually require Congress to do so.
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow if you could just get the votes in Congress required to pass a bill to repeal it. Sure, Dubya might veto it, but if you can get a two thirds majority in Congress, you can override a veto.
If you don't think this can happen, consider that more Americans are trading files today than voted for George Bush. Yes, many if not most file traders are under eighteen, but political upheavals usually take time. The sort of time that would allow most of today's youthful peer-to-peer users to come of age.
My new piece
Change the Law explains this in more detail. It recommends several specific steps you can take to repeal copyright. The recommendations I give are:
Speak Out
Vote
Write to Your Elected Representatives
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
Support Campaign Finance Reform
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Practice Civil Disobedience
If you're under eighteen, you can do all of those things but vote. And your right to vote will come in time. The RIAA is not going to go away.
Finally,
Should Copyright Even Exist? considers the question of whether the ability of computers to make faithful copies of digital data without significant cost so outweighs any benefit that copyright may have to society, that we would be better off if copyright were eliminated entirely.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry iRATE didn't work out for you. It does work for most people who try it, but iRATE is still in its infancy, and a lot of work is required before it becomes the leading application that I'm confident it is destined to be.
I'll post the URL of your comment on the irate-devel mailing list.
I'd just like to ask that you check
iRATE's website from time to time and give version 0.3 a try once it's released. We have several developers now, most of them devoting significant time to the project, so I expect it won't be too long until 0.3 is available.
One reason I have been proselytizing for iRATE is that I hoped to attract new developers. That turns out to have worked - when I asked on the list, a couple of programmers responded that they decided to help out with iRATE because of my posts.
Also, I wanted to increase the number of users to increase the sample size for the collaborative filtering analysis. The nature of statistical fluctuations is that they become less significant when you have more data samples, with the error being inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size.
When I first downloaded iRATE, there were only 46 users, most of them being metalheads. In a couple of weeks of speaking from the soapbox, iRATE's user base has grown to over 500. I expect the range of musical tastes is much broader now.
Finally, having more users helps get more feedback on quality problems. The majority of bugs most applications have each individually occur only rarely, so to discover most of the bugs at all you need to have more users. For example, you're the first of the 500 users to report that the player doesn't work, but by reporting the bug as you did you have helped to ensure that future iRATE users don't have the problem.
You can enjoy free music downloads without getting in trouble by listening to the music that many artists make available on their own websites in hopes of attracting fans. And you can tell the RIAA to kiss your ass.
But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.
This problem is solved with
iRATE radio'scollaborative filtering:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.
iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from
websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)
The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.
iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.
While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers
I'm sorry no. The reason is that there isn't yet an Open Source pure Java ogg player available.
It's not that the developers of iRATE wouldn't like to support ogg, but developing such a player would be a significant effort. Really someone else is going to have to take up the task.
You can enjoy free music downloads without getting in trouble by listening to the music that many artists make available on their own websites in hopes of attracting fans. You also won't be bothered by any of that pesky digital rights management.
But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.
This problem is solved with
iRATE radio'scollaborative filtering:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.
iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from
websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)
The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.
iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.
While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers
Sixty million Americans use peer-to-peer networks to share music. That's more Americans than voted for George Bush. If they all engaged in a little consciousness-raising and then got organized, they could vote in a government that would make filesharing legal.
Copyright is not a constitutional right, like free speech. While Congress is empowered to legalize copyright, it is not required to do so. Filesharing could be legalized tomorrow if Congress just passed a bill to repeal copyright.
Change the Law explains this in more detail, and suggests some steps to take to legalize filesharing. You can take these steps in almost any country, not just the US:
Speak Out
Vote
Write to Your Elected Representatives
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
Support Campaign Finance Reform
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Practice Civil Disobedience
If you feel as I do that what I have to say in my article is important for others to read, please link to it from your own website, your weblog, or other message boards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll know in a few days if people are finding it independently with search engines, and what keywords they are using. I think it will work out well, though, because my article links to its original copy, and because my website is already regarded highly for google, for reasons I discuss in this other article.
-
http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html
Here's the introduction: This page provides the article in the UBB code that some message boards use, with plain text coming soon. I'm also starting to post examples of letters that others have sent to their Attorney's General.Thanks for your help.
-
http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html
Here's the introduction: Thanks for your help.Copy and paste doesn't work consistently, and when it does, it often behaves in nonsensical ways.
I feel that world domination will come when the following "Just Works" for every Linux user:
- You can copy text from any application that can supply text into any other text application that can receive text. Many Linux applications can't copy and paste between each other, or if they can at all, you can only do it in one direction.
- You can copy some text from any application, close the window to get it out of the way, because you don't need it anymore, then paste the text into any other application
- You can copy some text in any application, activate the window of any other application, select the text you want to replace, then paste the text you copied first, thereby deleting the second text which you had selected and replacing it.
This last thing I try to do quite a lot to paste a new URL into the URL textbox of a web browser, so I can replace the old URL with the new URL I want to visit. However, in X11, highlighting some text makes it "the selection", so a paste will just paste in the text I'd selected, which was the text I wanted to replace.All of these things have consistently worked flawlessly in every version of Mac OS and Windows I've ever used. Note that my first Mac ran System 5 and my first Windows box ran Windows 3.1. Yes, I am an old man.
I've been using Linux since I first installed Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play and I've never been able to get this to work right.
Consider how frequently office workers in a business need to copy and paste text, and consider that this is my main frustration, even though I am an experienced Linux user. I nearly had my Windows-loving wife talked into trying out Linux, but when I explained this problem to her, she said she wasn't even willing to give Linux a chance.
And yes, I understand one reason this doesn't work in X11 is that the fact that this network-transparent GUI sometimes has to work on X terminals with limited memory, so you can't provide a dedicated memory buffer for a clipboard like on Windows or the Mac. But my friend, the PC I'm typing this on has 512 megabytes of RAM, and frankly I rarely if ever run X over a network, so I don't see this as a valid excuse anymore.
It's enough to make you chew your own foot off.
-
http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html
You may also want to grab the stylesheet. You will need to adjust the stylesheet URL in the <link> tag: Alternatively you can supply your own stylesheet. It wouldn't cause any trouble to omit the stylesheet altogether except to make the page look plain.A company with the cash to buy it, but with an interest in Free Software, could buy UNIX and place it under the GPL.
While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.
Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.
SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con
While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.
Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.
SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con
I used to work for a small software company where most of our sales were made through direct mail. I think our gross sales peaked at about $2 million one year while I was working there in the mid-90's.
Each direct mail piece sent to a prospect costs hard cash to send, for printing, postage, labor and mailing list rental. Yet it was our experience that a response rate of 0.5% was sufficient to yield a profit.
Once you have identified a profitable offer and a mailing list that's rich with customers who respond to direct mail, you have a license to print money. That's why you probably each of you reading this receive two or three pieces of direct mail every day.
The following two comments I posted at Kuro5hin discuss this in great detail:
- The Importance of Advertising to Business
- Direct mail is very scientifically targeted
Now, if you consider that the cost of sending spam is insignificant when the spammer can hijack an open relay, you will understand that spam will never stop until purchasers stop responding to spam.Simply installing filters on your own machine won't help. The people who purchase sexual enhancement products over the Internet don't know from spam filters.
I think the end to spam will come only when every ISP and mail hosting service installs filters that are enabled by default. Only then will the response rate of spam be reduced to the point that it's no longer economical to send it.
I think it's likely the day will come when ISPs will be forced to install filters that cannot be disabled. Possibly this will be ordered by various national governments.
Apple doesn't support Mac OS X on older machines like the 8600. There is a patch that enables it to run - I tried it on my 8500 - but 64 MB is not enough memory to run OS X comfortably, so you would have excessive paging.
Also, the cost of switching a task in the "classic" Mac OS is quite expensive, because there are many "low memory globals" that are different for each task but have to be located at specific memory addresses. The solution to this is to copy them all to a temporary buffer before a task is switched out, and to copy them back into place just before the task resumes.
(While classic Mac OS supports virtual memory for the purposes of using a hard disk as a backing store, it does not offer memory protection. All of the processes as well as the system software are in a single contiguous, unprotected memory space.)
All of these problems are the whole reason Apple struggled for over a decade to write a modern operating system to replace the classic Mac OS. They failed with Pink and then Copland, so they bought NeXT, which evolved to form Mac OS X.
If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.
It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends use to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time.
Before I ever used Linux, I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.
You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.
Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.
It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.
I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".
My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.
Rather than paying their fee, my response will be to write a letter to the Maine State Attorney General to ask that they prosecute SCO. I'm going to include substantive documentation, like a hardcopy of SCO's claim that I must pay them this fee, as well as IBM's and RedHat's responses to SCO.
I'm also going to write to the Federal Trade Commission to ask that SCO be investigated for illegal trade practices.
If you live in the United States, I ask you to write a similar letter to your state Attorney General, as well as to the Federal Trade Commission. If you live in a state where a Linux distro vendor is located, or a company that has a lot of Linux installations - doesn't Amazon use it? - write to your elected representatives to ask that they work with the state and fede
Linux didn't do that well in the comparison.
So what did the kernel developers do? Did they give up? Did they all mail their resumes to Redmond? No, they improved the SMP performance of the kernel, so that by the time 2.4 shipped, it could beat Windows 2000 - and I imagine XP now too - in similar benchmarks.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is going to find lots of things that Windows does better than Linux does. That will serve as a guide, to help the Free Software community set their priorities as to which problems to focus on first.
I don't know how well it works but I can see the potential.
Have you used Metrowerks Codewarrior? Now there's an IDE. It's a joy to use. Runs on Mac and Windows. I think there is a Linux version that uses gcc, but I haven't tried it.
(I admit I haven't tried Eclipse yet, but I would be very surprised if it were better than CodeWarrior.)
Everything Just Works in CodeWarrior. I've even got my wife, a web designer who prefers to hand-code her HTML, to use it to write her web pages.
CodeWarrior supports C, C++, Java and inline assembly. If you prefer makefiles, there are command line tools that provide the same compiler. Old versions of CodeWarrior also supported Pascal, but I don't think they do anymore.
The ISO compliance of CodeWarrior's C++ is far superior to Visual C++'s, and has been quite compliant for a very long time. I've been happily using the Standard Template Library in very complex ways, as well as writing my own fancy templates, for several years.
Alexei Alexandrescu used CodeWarrior to develop the heavily templated source code for Modern C++ Design. Visual C++ can't compile it because of its poor compliance to the standard.
It is also available for many embedded systems. Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola a while back, who makes the ColdFire and PowerPC processors that are important in the embedded world.
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow if you could just get the votes in Congress required to pass a bill to repeal it. Sure, Dubya might veto it, but if you can get a two thirds majority in Congress, you can override a veto.
If you don't think this can happen, consider that more Americans are trading files today than voted for George Bush. Yes, many if not most file traders are under eighteen, but political upheavals usually take time. The sort of time that would allow most of today's youthful peer-to-peer users to come of age.
My new piece Change the Law explains this in more detail. It recommends several specific steps you can take to repeal copyright. The recommendations I give are:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
If you're under eighteen, you can do all of those things but vote. And your right to vote will come in time. The RIAA is not going to go away.Finally, Should Copyright Even Exist? considers the question of whether the ability of computers to make faithful copies of digital data without significant cost so outweighs any benefit that copyright may have to society, that we would be better off if copyright were eliminated entirely.
I'll post the URL of your comment on the irate-devel mailing list.
I'd just like to ask that you check iRATE's website from time to time and give version 0.3 a try once it's released. We have several developers now, most of them devoting significant time to the project, so I expect it won't be too long until 0.3 is available.
One reason I have been proselytizing for iRATE is that I hoped to attract new developers. That turns out to have worked - when I asked on the list, a couple of programmers responded that they decided to help out with iRATE because of my posts.
Also, I wanted to increase the number of users to increase the sample size for the collaborative filtering analysis. The nature of statistical fluctuations is that they become less significant when you have more data samples, with the error being inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size.
When I first downloaded iRATE, there were only 46 users, most of them being metalheads. In a couple of weeks of speaking from the soapbox, iRATE's user base has grown to over 500. I expect the range of musical tastes is much broader now.
Finally, having more users helps get more feedback on quality problems. The majority of bugs most applications have each individually occur only rarely, so to discover most of the bugs at all you need to have more users. For example, you're the first of the 500 users to report that the player doesn't work, but by reporting the bug as you did you have helped to ensure that future iRATE users don't have the problem.
But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.
This problem is solved with iRATE radio's collaborative filtering:
iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.
iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.
Here's some screen shots.
While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers
It's not that the developers of iRATE wouldn't like to support ogg, but developing such a player would be a significant effort. Really someone else is going to have to take up the task.
But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.
This problem is solved with iRATE radio's collaborative filtering:
iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.
iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.
Here's some screen shots.
While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers
The kind of time it takes for teenage file traders to come of age.
They can still do everything in my list above except vote. I make that point in my article.
Copyright is not a constitutional right, like free speech. While Congress is empowered to legalize copyright, it is not required to do so. Filesharing could be legalized tomorrow if Congress just passed a bill to repeal copyright.
Change the Law explains this in more detail, and suggests some steps to take to legalize filesharing. You can take these steps in almost any country, not just the US:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
If you feel as I do that what I have to say in my article is important for others to read, please link to it from your own website, your weblog, or other message boards.Thank you for your attention.