All these features and more are available in Opera Mail (M2, not the web portal).
It has a single unified Inbox for all mail, has filters ala gmail, and filters based on message body. Additionally, each folder can also be filtered out temporarily by date. Thus you can shortlist out emails that you received in a day, last 3 days, last week, etc.. (This is similar to the feature that Outlook has, but better). Its pretty fast, and with the new Opera 9.5 release, there are a lot of improvements to the mail client. And of course you don't have to pay a dime for it. I have been using for close to 2-3 years now, and use it to maintain a reasonable number of mails ~500MB worth. It does bayesian filtering for junk mails. You can create folders where the bayesian filter learns on the basis of the emails that you put into it.. And in true Opera tradition, its stable and fast!
I'm not sure why its not advertised enough, but its got all the features of thunderbird and outlook. What it lacks severely though is calendaring.
Thats a HUGE reason that I prefer using Opera over Firefox. At least I get to see what I am clicking. (I am not sure why the link hiding does not work in Opera. Maybe javascript problems, maybe, Opera consciously disables it.)
I think it is very important that the browser helps users discern as much as possible what the user is clicking on. People may argue that if I can't see where the link is pointing to then I shouldn't be stupid enough to click it. The problem with that is that almost everyone is doing it. It is rare to find a popular website that does not do it. In this age of phishing scams, users need as much help from their browser as possible.
Anyway, I imagine this service is much like Napster in its all-you-can-eat mode; all the music you can download, until you stop paying, and then all the music stops playing.
Actually the Napster service and the much better Yahoo service have more to offer than what you point out.
For 5 bucks a month Yahoo lets you listen to all the music you want, not 30 second clips, but the whole song, in 192 kbps wma. You can bookmark the songs, you can send them via Yahoo messenger to friends, you can create playlists, but you cant burn them.
However, when you decide that you want to own the music, you can buy it for 79 cents per song as opposed to the 99 cents that ITunes charges. This music is yours to _own_. It will remain with you even after you have unsubscribed from the service. Yahoo lets you burn it into audio CDs similar to what ITunes lets you do. This is definitely a competitive offering.
Yahoo, using Windows Media DRM, has another service offering. For 10 bucks a month you can copy and transfer all the music you want to your windows DRM capable music devices (mostly everything else other than IPod.) This music will indeed stop playing once you have stopped the monthly subscription. Again there are discounts when you want to actually buy the music to own.
I am a Yahoo Music subscriber and this is a good deal for me since it allows me to listen to new bands and new music before I buy them. I dont have to go with instincts on the basis of having heard one song on the radio. Urge should be somewhat similar, but the price points and discounts are what you should watch out for.
Maybe he likes it "Steve Jobs" way and keep things under wraps until it is ready... especially since a lot of their innovative ideas keep getting copied by all the other browsers in the market.
I also practice the same type of procrastination. However, the problem is that there are some problems that really are easy enough that they can be solved in 10% of the time. Just because it looks difficult you tend to procrastinate till the point that you have only 10% of the time to finish it. And then you do finish it quite easily.. But it means that you have wasted the 90% of the time doing nothing. If the procrastination can lead to an interesting solution to a problem, then thats truly being constructively lazy...
So yeah, sometimes you are constructive, but many a times you have wasted 10 times the amount the time it would have taken to solve the problem.
Just a thought on how Wikipedia can counter the problem of anonymous people editing the entries for fun/profit etc..
Have something like a unstable version and a stable version. The only difference would be that the stable version would be one that has been certified by a some majority of the editors who worked on the article (say 60-70 %). The unstable version would contain all edits, including the latest uncertified one.
There should be a disclaimer on the top that says that the page that you are viewing a is an unstable version and the last stable version is at some linked location. Or vice versa..
Wikipedia can make a policy decision as to whether to show the stable version first or the unstable version first. Finally, people can edit an uncertified/unstable version, just as they can do now, but if they want to suggest changes to a certified version of the article there should be some sort of "Report error" button on the page, which will be sent out to the rest of the editors of the page.
Wait a minute here.. You are painting an overly exaggerated picture here with your remarks.
The ethical question is similar to that of harvesting "unused" organs.
No one is asking for permission to cut up people and harvest their organs. Organ donation for science or to save another life is a routine thing that a large number of people have no ethical issues about. Similarly, people should be allowed to donate fertilized eggs for research in just the same way. (I stress on the fact that people should willingly donate it knowing full well what it will be used for. Just as it is the case with organ donation.) Why should the government have a problem with that?
Under legal definitions which were decided by U.S. courts, not the U.S. society, human life starts after the baby's head exits the mother.
Actually the courts decide that human "life" starts about 24 weeks after conception - which is about the time that the fetus becomes viable according to the doctors/scientists and as accepted by the court. After 24 weeks, aborting a baby without having a really good reason (as deemed by a doctor) is a crime.
So this definitely covers the case of if a fertilized egg is viable or not.
As someone else mentioned, this regulation from the government has no other basis other than politico-religious reasons.
The problem I have with Opera (flame me all you want, I haven't even downloaded it yet; kinda hard while at school though..), is that it seems to come with all of these features built in. All of this added functionality that one may or may not use. Firefox, on the otherhand, will let you go to a nice directory of extensions that can be sorted by type, name, date, etc. and you can pick and choose what you want.
But how does that matter? In spite of having all these features built in, Opera's binary is smaller than that of the barebones firefox (4.7 vs opera's 3.7 MB). So dont use the features that you dont want to use.
In fact one of the reasons that I dont like firefox is because a lot of the really nice stuff is only available through a plugin. This means that everytime I install firefox for someone I also have to install the plugin. And did I mention that opera also has a mail client which extremely well integrated in with the browser. And the mail client is WAAY better than thunderbird. So thats an additional install. Finally when I am upgrading firefox to the next version what about version incompatibilities with the various plugins. I have to wait until the various plugins have been ported to the new version before I can use them. No thank you....
In my opinion theres almost nothing that firefox provides that opera does not and opera has way too many more benefits than firefox.
1. I dont have to install extensions for getting all of the most important features that I want in a browser. I use 4-5 machines between work and home. I dont want to keep having to install extensions after having installed the browser on each of the machines.
2. Relatively small footprint and that includes one of the best email clients. It is waaaay better than thunderbird and is extremely well integrated in opera. I dont use the chat at all but thats another thing that people can use if they want to. I do use the "Notes" quite often.(Virtual folders in gmail? Guess who had it first?)
3. Its got a nifty text-to-speech thingy in the browser that I use sometimes. For sight impaired people I am sure it is an excellent tool.
4. Mouse gestures, very stable tabbing behaviour, quick rendering.
5. 1 button press to enable/disable proxy server, to disable/enable ads, plugins, java, javascript, sound, gifs. etc.
6. Text and image magnification...
7. I hate the default download folder thingy in firefox. The download manager sucks in firefox and way more convenient in opera. It tells me the location of each and every download and is consistent with the tabbed philosophy of opera. It works well in linux and windows with the file roller knowing what to do for every download type. (And dont tell me that it is configurable. I dont want to reconfigure all the browsers on all my machines for this one thing.)
Bottomline is that I dont want to have to hunt for plugins for a lot of the features that are important to me. I dont want to depend on the quality of a third party plugin developer code for a lot of the things that I use everyday (and which may break the next time I upgrade my browser). I have been a regular user of opera for a couple of years now and I've never looked back.
If I want to block Internet content from my children, this is my right (until they reach the age of majority of course). The same way I can block TV shows. This is MY responsibility and right, not some government appointed watch dog.
Looks like the Slashdot collective is moderating on the basis of keywords here. "Poster talks about evil micosoft (but not the equally evil Google), evil communist China and the enemies of free speech, talks about the responsible parent argument... Must be a good post." DUH!
To the parent poster:
Did you even read the blurb? The blurb clearly states that the ISPs are forced to maintain a list of sites (provided by the Attorney General's office) with content harmful to minors and forced to provide consumers a mechanism to block such sites. So you, as a parent, can block these sites if you want to and not block them if you dont. This substantially differs from the Microsoft filtering in China where the government orders what sites are blocked and what arent rather than individual people.
General Comments:
That said, I understand the ACLU's stand and agree with it. Their stand is that what if there are merchants out there, for instance book sellers, who may have content for adults as well as children. They will be blocked out because the merchant may have an erotic book also available on the website which may be considered unsafe for children, but the entire site would be placed in the registry under the law, and worse, the site might not even know about it (especially if the content provider is not based in Utah). Even if they are not blocked but placed on an adult content registry, that is bad enough to ruin their business. It is too restrictive a law and can kill trade and free speech.
Let me also point out some of the good points that I like about the law. It states that the government would provide public service information advising consumers about the dangers of the internet, provide information about the tools available to parents to regulate the use of the internet for minors. I am all for advertising and spreading information to parents about how important it is for them to take keen interest in ensuring that their children are only accessing information that the parents feel is safe and the tools that are available to meet this goal.
What I dont like about the law is some Attorney General sitting and making an adult registry (possibly on the recommendation of over zealous consumers) about what sites are good and what are bad. Instead every parent should have the capability of making this list for their own household and not base it on some public AG's list.
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
Doesn't yum do this? I am not certain, but I think dependencies for a package can be satisfied from packages hosted on another repository using yum. Isn't this what you are alluding to? Though I dont think there is a strict format around identifying packages other than the naming scheme and the rpm headers.
I havent gone dependency hunting in a long time ever since I have been using yum. I do occassionally add more repositories to my yum.repos.d if I find something interesting but thats it.
The blurb clearly says "India faces a massive shortage of workers with European language skills over the next five years which could see the country needing to recruit up to 120,000 foreigners". Its not because they lack technical skills, but because they lack foreign language skills.
If you had cared to read up a bit more you would have realized that this shortage arises because of the flurry of offshoring contracts from Non-English speaking european countries expected in the next 5 years. And not due to the shortage competetive skills that American workers seem to magically possess and Indian workers dont.
Just a couple of clarifications..
Sun doesnt like anyone, just as neither IBM nor Red Hat like anyone. They are all publicly traded companies out for profit. The only reason that Sun wants people to be interested in OpenSolaris is because they want people to build stuff around it.
Another misconception is that Sun is courting Open Source developers. The way the Sun execs have been making statements about open source and the GPL and about linux definitely does not give that impression. They are trying to court small businesses that want to set their business model modifying solaris and distributing it. I doubt if they care about individual contributors as such. Which is why CDDL, is so flexible in that modifications can be proprietary. Who else would benefit from such a thing other than small businesses.. I heard the other day that there are a large number of embedded systems companies that are violating GPL by using modifications of Linux kernels for running their hardware. They dont release the modifications that they make.. I think OpenSolaris is trying to appeal to those kind of people..
The GPL is linux's greatest strength, and the reason for it's large base.
Though in the face of it it may seem that way, I personally believe that Linux is so popular is because there are lots of high profile names behind it. Sure a select few might know who were the developers behind the various flavors of BSD are, but show me one guy who does not know (and worship) Linus but knows of Linux.. As much as you would think it is an objective thing, like almost everything else, this is also based on hype and PR albeit generated by its high profile authors.. Note: I am not casting any aspersions on Linus' character or dedication. Just wanted to point out that fan boy mentality exists everywhere even among rational and independent thinking geeks.
I wont agree/disagree that reverse engineering is good for all communities. But your arguments/examples dont do anything to prove the point though.
You know Linux is a clone of Unix because Linus couldn't run Unix on his 386 machine. He wasn't pleased that he couldn't do something and he worked around it. Why can't someone be displeased with other proprietary systems and create workarounds for them?
How was that reverse engineering? The basic principles of Unix were well documented and available. Andrew Tanenebaum had made the sources of Minix available so people could read through it. Linus in fact rengineered most if not all of it. The important thing you want to note here is that the original authors of Unix/Minix made information about their respective OSes available to people implying that people can use that information to do what they want with it. But to claim that it is reverse engineering the way that Tridge is reverse engineering the Bitkeeper client is definitely not correct.
Linux wouldn't have nearly the same capacity in the Windows world we live in if it wasn't for Samba. Yeah, there is NFS for Windows and various other file sharing protocols that could have been used but Samba makes it easy for anyone to fit their Unix clone right into their pre-existing Windows network without much trouble.
Giving an example of the positive effects of some action does not make the action a good thing. Thats like saying "Invading Iraq rids the people of the tyranny that was Saddam. So its a good thing for sure.." Now if you disagree to that statement then its a different argument on its own.. Note that I dont disagree that creating Samba did not benefit the community as a whole, but making that as the basis for a blanket statement is what I am refuting.
Plenty of companies out there have been doing it just fine by basing their business model on Linux. Why can't McVoy find the same happy existence?
Does it even matter that he does'nt want to find that happy existence? If he believes that that kind of an existence is not enough for him then its his decision entirely. Or have we forgotten the primary tenets of being a geek..I am an individual blah blah..
They are competing honestly. They are doing it in a clean lab. They aren't trying to steal your code and use it themselves but they are trying to take a great idea and make it better. Welcome to the real world. Crying doesn't do anything but piss people off. Do something to your own software that will make it stay one+ steps ahead of the reverse engineered competition.
The problem with this particular example is that its only the client that is being reverse engineered. The server that is being used either is being hosted by the company or by some other paying customer. What if sometime in future they decide to change the protocol in the client and the server. The old reverse-engineered client wrecks code repositories. (He alludes to a similar point in his previous interview.) Bottomline is he has made a conscious decision that he does not want his client code to be reverse engineered or open sourced for reasons that are better known to him than the rest of the world. Whether you decide to abide by it is your decision. Rebelling (even illegally) is an accepted way of showing dissension. But be very clear that it is rebellion (rather than euphemising it as competition). And be prepared for its consequences...
Dont make dumb analogies like that. Unlike IIS, Bitkeeper is a very complex piece of software that allows a number of interactions with the server. Bitmover hosts the project for you and instructs you to use their client to work with the server. If you use a third party client you run the risk of screwing up the entire repository and you also incur lots of expenses for the company that is hosting the server. As McVoy points out in the interview:
a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.
Free/Open software is good, but dont shove its moral superiority on the face of people who are not convinced of it. People have a right to make their choices as regards open or proprietary source code. And when you deal with them respect their views on the issue even if yours are radically different. And if you dont want to play by the rules, do not deal with them at all.
The problem with McVoys stand is that he should be dealing with this on a personal level with Tridge rather than making it a blanket move on the whole of the open source community and on the OSDL.
In the article, Schwartz is comparing GPL to the CDDL. I think the major crux of Schwartz's argument is that, a poorer country will benefit since they have the freedom to keep their modifications proprietary if they wish to. GPL does not allow for this. The assumption is that the less developed country cannot afford to give up what little intellectual property they have but at the same time have access to source code being developed from more developed countries. At the same time, a corporation from a developed country that has contributed to the CDDL code, will think twice before suing the small corporation/developing country for fear of getting its license revoked.
And last I checked, there ARE ratings on these games, like on movies.
Exactly! Kids should definitely be kept away from these games. Just as they should be not allowed access to porn (at least not until they are old enough to understand that porn is just what it is - porn.. Thats for another day tho'.)
But thats about as much regulation there should be. We dont need any more laws. What would help in a marketing-crazed-knee-jerk-reactionary-world is a lot of advertising telling parents that it is of utmost importance that they be careful with what they expose their children to in terms of video games (and other stuff). I am sure that it will help. Market it to be a social taboo for parents to allow their kids to play games that they are not old enough to play.
I work in an office on thin clients. In the past couple of years, there have been maybe 2-3 occassions at most when I have had these unexpected timeouts. And its way less headache than having your own system. Sure I dont get to install cool apps, but then as an office machine I suppose that is the right way to go.
The last thing - right from Oracle's licensing agreement:
"For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors."
I am sure that they have to say it at least in the licensing agreement about the fact that they are charging per core. Or how does Oracle intend to communicate the fact at all? But its conveniently not mentioned absolutely anywhere else on their product webpage. THAT definitely seems like they are trying to hide the fact.
The datasheets say that the UltraSparc IV is a CMT processor, yes, with each processor capble of handling two threads, but show me where that datasheet says "two execution cores".
Well show me on the datasheet for a Power 5 chip based server where it says that it is a dual core chip. I went through the pages and have not found any information anywhere.
First of all if you are planning on spending $100K on a server, it is a good idea to do some product research before you buy the product. Also recommended is to see if the software that you want to install is supported well on that hardware. Sun has always maintained that the software that runs on its chips should be licensed per chip rather than per core. The per core pricing is not a Sun pricing model and nor is it in endorsed by any Sun software product either. So why exactly should it advertise that it is a multi core chip? It is a complete non-issue from Sun's perspective.
The data sheets for Ultrasparc 4 say clearly that it is a CMT processor with each processor capable of handling 2 threads. I dont know what you are complaining about. If anything you should be complaining to Oracle about their pricing model created for fleecing their customers. And BTW I checked out the pricing information sheets on the Oracle website. It does not say in any specific terms that the pricing is per core. Pricing models seem plainly stated as per CPU or on a per user basis.
Slashdot Mirror
All these features and more are available in Opera Mail (M2, not the web portal).
It has a single unified Inbox for all mail, has filters ala gmail, and filters based on message body. Additionally, each folder can also be filtered out temporarily by date. Thus you can shortlist out emails that you received in a day, last 3 days, last week, etc.. (This is similar to the feature that Outlook has, but better). Its pretty fast, and with the new Opera 9.5 release, there are a lot of improvements to the mail client. And of course you don't have to pay a dime for it. I have been using for close to 2-3 years now, and use it to maintain a reasonable number of mails ~500MB worth. It does bayesian filtering for junk mails. You can create folders where the bayesian filter learns on the basis of the emails that you put into it.. And in true Opera tradition, its stable and fast!
I'm not sure why its not advertised enough, but its got all the features of thunderbird and outlook. What it lacks severely though is calendaring.
Thats a HUGE reason that I prefer using Opera over Firefox. At least I get to see what I am clicking. (I am not sure why the link hiding does not work in Opera. Maybe javascript problems, maybe, Opera consciously disables it.)
I think it is very important that the browser helps users discern as much as possible what the user is clicking on. People may argue that if I can't see where the link is pointing to then I shouldn't be stupid enough to click it. The problem with that is that almost everyone is doing it. It is rare to find a popular website that does not do it. In this age of phishing scams, users need as much help from their browser as possible.
Anyway, I imagine this service is much like Napster in its all-you-can-eat mode; all the music you can download, until you stop paying, and then all the music stops playing.
Actually the Napster service and the much better Yahoo service have more to offer than what you point out.
For 5 bucks a month Yahoo lets you listen to all the music you want, not 30 second clips, but the whole song, in 192 kbps wma. You can bookmark the songs, you can send them via Yahoo messenger to friends, you can create playlists, but you cant burn them.
However, when you decide that you want to own the music, you can buy it for 79 cents per song as opposed to the 99 cents that ITunes charges. This music is yours to _own_. It will remain with you even after you have unsubscribed from the service. Yahoo lets you burn it into audio CDs similar to what ITunes lets you do. This is definitely a competitive offering.
Yahoo, using Windows Media DRM, has another service offering. For 10 bucks a month you can copy and transfer all the music you want to your windows DRM capable music devices (mostly everything else other than IPod.) This music will indeed stop playing once you have stopped the monthly subscription. Again there are discounts when you want to actually buy the music to own.
I am a Yahoo Music subscriber and this is a good deal for me since it allows me to listen to new bands and new music before I buy them. I dont have to go with instincts on the basis of having heard one song on the radio. Urge should be somewhat similar, but the price points and discounts are what you should watch out for.
Maybe he likes it "Steve Jobs" way and keep things under wraps until it is ready... especially since a lot of their innovative ideas keep getting copied by all the other browsers in the market.
I also practice the same type of procrastination. However, the problem is that there are some problems that really are easy enough that they can be solved in 10% of the time. Just because it looks difficult you tend to procrastinate till the point that you have only 10% of the time to finish it. And then you do finish it quite easily.. But it means that you have wasted the 90% of the time doing nothing. If the procrastination can lead to an interesting solution to a problem, then thats truly being constructively lazy...
So yeah, sometimes you are constructive, but many a times you have wasted 10 times the amount the time it would have taken to solve the problem.
Just a thought on how Wikipedia can counter the problem of anonymous people editing the entries for fun/profit etc..
Have something like a unstable version and a stable version. The only difference would be that the stable version would be one that has been certified by a some majority of the editors who worked on the article (say 60-70 %). The unstable version would contain all edits, including the latest uncertified one.
There should be a disclaimer on the top that says that the page that you are viewing a is an unstable version and the last stable version is at some linked location. Or vice versa..
Wikipedia can make a policy decision as to whether to show the stable version first or the unstable version first. Finally, people can edit an uncertified/unstable version, just as they can do now, but if they want to suggest changes to a certified version of the article there should be some sort of "Report error" button on the page, which will be sent out to the rest of the editors of the page.
Any thoughts folls?
Wait a minute here.. You are painting an overly exaggerated picture here with your remarks.
The ethical question is similar to that of harvesting "unused" organs.
No one is asking for permission to cut up people and harvest their organs. Organ donation for science or to save another life is a routine thing that a large number of people have no ethical issues about. Similarly, people should be allowed to donate fertilized eggs for research in just the same way. (I stress on the fact that people should willingly donate it knowing full well what it will be used for. Just as it is the case with organ donation.) Why should the government have a problem with that?
Under legal definitions which were decided by U.S. courts, not the U.S. society, human life starts after the baby's head exits the mother.
Actually the courts decide that human "life" starts about 24 weeks after conception - which is about the time that the fetus becomes viable according to the doctors/scientists and as accepted by the court. After 24 weeks, aborting a baby without having a really good reason (as deemed by a doctor) is a crime. So this definitely covers the case of if a fertilized egg is viable or not.
As someone else mentioned, this regulation from the government has no other basis other than politico-religious reasons.
The problem I have with Opera (flame me all you want, I haven't even downloaded it yet; kinda hard while at school though..), is that it seems to come with all of these features built in. All of this added functionality that one may or may not use. Firefox, on the otherhand, will let you go to a nice directory of extensions that can be sorted by type, name, date, etc. and you can pick and choose what you want.
But how does that matter? In spite of having all these features built in, Opera's binary is smaller than that of the barebones firefox (4.7 vs opera's 3.7 MB). So dont use the features that you dont want to use.
In fact one of the reasons that I dont like firefox is because a lot of the really nice stuff is only available through a plugin. This means that everytime I install firefox for someone I also have to install the plugin. And did I mention that opera also has a mail client which extremely well integrated in with the browser. And the mail client is WAAY better than thunderbird. So thats an additional install. Finally when I am upgrading firefox to the next version what about version incompatibilities with the various plugins. I have to wait until the various plugins have been ported to the new version before I can use them. No thank you....
In my opinion theres almost nothing that firefox provides that opera does not and opera has way too many more benefits than firefox.
1. I dont have to install extensions for getting all of the most important features that I want in a browser. I use 4-5 machines between work and home. I dont want to keep having to install extensions after having installed the browser on each of the machines.
2. Relatively small footprint and that includes one of the best email clients. It is waaaay better than thunderbird and is extremely well integrated in opera. I dont use the chat at all but thats another thing that people can use if they want to. I do use the "Notes" quite often.(Virtual folders in gmail? Guess who had it first?)
3. Its got a nifty text-to-speech thingy in the browser that I use sometimes. For sight impaired people I am sure it is an excellent tool.
4. Mouse gestures, very stable tabbing behaviour, quick rendering.
5. 1 button press to enable/disable proxy server, to disable/enable ads, plugins, java, javascript, sound, gifs. etc.
6. Text and image magnification...
7. I hate the default download folder thingy in firefox. The download manager sucks in firefox and way more convenient in opera. It tells me the location of each and every download and is consistent with the tabbed philosophy of opera. It works well in linux and windows with the file roller knowing what to do for every download type. (And dont tell me that it is configurable. I dont want to reconfigure all the browsers on all my machines for this one thing.)
Bottomline is that I dont want to have to hunt for plugins for a lot of the features that are important to me. I dont want to depend on the quality of a third party plugin developer code for a lot of the things that I use everyday (and which may break the next time I upgrade my browser). I have been a regular user of opera for a couple of years now and I've never looked back.
Theres Enlightenment being packaged for Solaris according to one of the developers for Open solaris. http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/
Maybe then it wont be so bad for the end user either.
If I want to block Internet content from my children, this is my right (until they reach the age of majority of course). The same way I can block TV shows. This is MY responsibility and right, not some government appointed watch dog.
Looks like the Slashdot collective is moderating on the basis of keywords here. "Poster talks about evil micosoft (but not the equally evil Google), evil communist China and the enemies of free speech, talks about the responsible parent argument... Must be a good post." DUH!
To the parent poster:
Did you even read the blurb? The blurb clearly states that the ISPs are forced to maintain a list of sites (provided by the Attorney General's office) with content harmful to minors and forced to provide consumers a mechanism to block such sites. So you, as a parent, can block these sites if you want to and not block them if you dont. This substantially differs from the Microsoft filtering in China where the government orders what sites are blocked and what arent rather than individual people.
General Comments:
That said, I understand the ACLU's stand and agree with it. Their stand is that what if there are merchants out there, for instance book sellers, who may have content for adults as well as children. They will be blocked out because the merchant may have an erotic book also available on the website which may be considered unsafe for children, but the entire site would be placed in the registry under the law, and worse, the site might not even know about it (especially if the content provider is not based in Utah). Even if they are not blocked but placed on an adult content registry, that is bad enough to ruin their business. It is too restrictive a law and can kill trade and free speech.
Let me also point out some of the good points that I like about the law. It states that the government would provide public service information advising consumers about the dangers of the internet, provide information about the tools available to parents to regulate the use of the internet for minors. I am all for advertising and spreading information to parents about how important it is for them to take keen interest in ensuring that their children are only accessing information that the parents feel is safe and the tools that are available to meet this goal.
What I dont like about the law is some Attorney General sitting and making an adult registry (possibly on the recommendation of over zealous consumers) about what sites are good and what are bad. Instead every parent should have the capability of making this list for their own household and not base it on some public AG's list.
Nope.. It is irony alright.
From m-w.com:
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
Doesn't yum do this? I am not certain, but I think dependencies for a package can be satisfied from packages hosted on another repository using yum. Isn't this what you are alluding to? Though I dont think there is a strict format around identifying packages other than the naming scheme and the rpm headers.
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I havent gone dependency hunting in a long time ever since I have been using yum. I do occassionally add more repositories to my yum.repos.d if I find something interesting but thats it.
More information about yum http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/howitworks.ptm
The blurb clearly says "India faces a massive shortage of workers with European language skills over the next five years which could see the country needing to recruit up to 120,000 foreigners". Its not because they lack technical skills, but because they lack foreign language skills.
If you had cared to read up a bit more you would have realized that this shortage arises because of the flurry of offshoring contracts from Non-English speaking european countries expected in the next 5 years. And not due to the shortage competetive skills that American workers seem to magically possess and Indian workers dont.
Sure you could install Gimp on WinXP, but you'd need to compile and install GTK+ and then compile and install Gimp.
Linked from the gimp website is http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ which has binaries for windows including the gtk binaries.
50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?
For an Indian software developer thats more like 3 years salary (and that too is a VERY generous annual salary.. for guys with 2 years of experience.)
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/compare/ Here is a feature comparison link. You can surely guess what "Browser 1" and "Browser 2" are..
Just a couple of clarifications.. Sun doesnt like anyone, just as neither IBM nor Red Hat like anyone. They are all publicly traded companies out for profit. The only reason that Sun wants people to be interested in OpenSolaris is because they want people to build stuff around it.
Another misconception is that Sun is courting Open Source developers. The way the Sun execs have been making statements about open source and the GPL and about linux definitely does not give that impression. They are trying to court small businesses that want to set their business model modifying solaris and distributing it. I doubt if they care about individual contributors as such. Which is why CDDL, is so flexible in that modifications can be proprietary. Who else would benefit from such a thing other than small businesses.. I heard the other day that there are a large number of embedded systems companies that are violating GPL by using modifications of Linux kernels for running their hardware. They dont release the modifications that they make.. I think OpenSolaris is trying to appeal to those kind of people..
The GPL is linux's greatest strength, and the reason for it's large base.
Though in the face of it it may seem that way, I personally believe that Linux is so popular is because there are lots of high profile names behind it. Sure a select few might know who were the developers behind the various flavors of BSD are, but show me one guy who does not know (and worship) Linus but knows of Linux.. As much as you would think it is an objective thing, like almost everything else, this is also based on hype and PR albeit generated by its high profile authors.. Note: I am not casting any aspersions on Linus' character or dedication. Just wanted to point out that fan boy mentality exists everywhere even among rational and independent thinking geeks.
I wont agree/disagree that reverse engineering is good for all communities. But your arguments/examples dont do anything to prove the point though.
You know Linux is a clone of Unix because Linus couldn't run Unix on his 386 machine. He wasn't pleased that he couldn't do something and he worked around it. Why can't someone be displeased with other proprietary systems and create workarounds for them?
How was that reverse engineering? The basic principles of Unix were well documented and available. Andrew Tanenebaum had made the sources of Minix available so people could read through it. Linus in fact rengineered most if not all of it. The important thing you want to note here is that the original authors of Unix/Minix made information about their respective OSes available to people implying that people can use that information to do what they want with it. But to claim that it is reverse engineering the way that Tridge is reverse engineering the Bitkeeper client is definitely not correct.
Linux wouldn't have nearly the same capacity in the Windows world we live in if it wasn't for Samba. Yeah, there is NFS for Windows and various other file sharing protocols that could have been used but Samba makes it easy for anyone to fit their Unix clone right into their pre-existing Windows network without much trouble.
Giving an example of the positive effects of some action does not make the action a good thing. Thats like saying "Invading Iraq rids the people of the tyranny that was Saddam. So its a good thing for sure.." Now if you disagree to that statement then its a different argument on its own.. Note that I dont disagree that creating Samba did not benefit the community as a whole, but making that as the basis for a blanket statement is what I am refuting.
Plenty of companies out there have been doing it just fine by basing their business model on Linux. Why can't McVoy find the same happy existence?
Does it even matter that he does'nt want to find that happy existence? If he believes that that kind of an existence is not enough for him then its his decision entirely. Or have we forgotten the primary tenets of being a geek..I am an individual blah blah..
They are competing honestly. They are doing it in a clean lab. They aren't trying to steal your code and use it themselves but they are trying to take a great idea and make it better. Welcome to the real world. Crying doesn't do anything but piss people off. Do something to your own software that will make it stay one+ steps ahead of the reverse engineered competition.
The problem with this particular example is that its only the client that is being reverse engineered. The server that is being used either is being hosted by the company or by some other paying customer. What if sometime in future they decide to change the protocol in the client and the server. The old reverse-engineered client wrecks code repositories. (He alludes to a similar point in his previous interview.) Bottomline is he has made a conscious decision that he does not want his client code to be reverse engineered or open sourced for reasons that are better known to him than the rest of the world. Whether you decide to abide by it is your decision. Rebelling (even illegally) is an accepted way of showing dissension. But be very clear that it is rebellion (rather than euphemising it as competition). And be prepared for its consequences...
Dont make dumb analogies like that. Unlike IIS, Bitkeeper is a very complex piece of software that allows a number of interactions with the server. Bitmover hosts the project for you and instructs you to use their client to work with the server. If you use a third party client you run the risk of screwing up the entire repository and you also incur lots of expenses for the company that is hosting the server. As McVoy points out in the interview:
a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.
Free/Open software is good, but dont shove its moral superiority on the face of people who are not convinced of it. People have a right to make their choices as regards open or proprietary source code. And when you deal with them respect their views on the issue even if yours are radically different. And if you dont want to play by the rules, do not deal with them at all.
The problem with McVoys stand is that he should be dealing with this on a personal level with Tridge rather than making it a blanket move on the whole of the open source community and on the OSDL.
In the article, Schwartz is comparing GPL to the CDDL. I think the major crux of Schwartz's argument is that, a poorer country will benefit since they have the freedom to keep their modifications proprietary if they wish to. GPL does not allow for this. The assumption is that the less developed country cannot afford to give up what little intellectual property they have but at the same time have access to source code being developed from more developed countries. At the same time, a corporation from a developed country that has contributed to the CDDL code, will think twice before suing the small corporation/developing country for fear of getting its license revoked.
And last I checked, there ARE ratings on these games, like on movies.
Exactly! Kids should definitely be kept away from these games. Just as they should be not allowed access to porn (at least not until they are old enough to understand that porn is just what it is - porn.. Thats for another day tho'.)
But thats about as much regulation there should be. We dont need any more laws. What would help in a marketing-crazed-knee-jerk-reactionary-world is a lot of advertising telling parents that it is of utmost importance that they be careful with what they expose their children to in terms of video games (and other stuff). I am sure that it will help. Market it to be a social taboo for parents to allow their kids to play games that they are not old enough to play.
I work in an office on thin clients. In the past couple of years, there have been maybe 2-3 occassions at most when I have had these unexpected timeouts. And its way less headache than having your own system. Sure I dont get to install cool apps, but then as an office machine I suppose that is the right way to go.
The last thing - right from Oracle's licensing agreement: "For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors."
I am sure that they have to say it at least in the licensing agreement about the fact that they are charging per core. Or how does Oracle intend to communicate the fact at all? But its conveniently not mentioned absolutely anywhere else on their product webpage. THAT definitely seems like they are trying to hide the fact.
The datasheets say that the UltraSparc IV is a CMT processor, yes, with each processor capble of handling two threads, but show me where that datasheet says "two execution cores".
Well show me on the datasheet for a Power 5 chip based server where it says that it is a dual core chip. I went through the pages and have not found any information anywhere.
First of all if you are planning on spending $100K on a server, it is a good idea to do some product research before you buy the product. Also recommended is to see if the software that you want to install is supported well on that hardware. Sun has always maintained that the software that runs on its chips should be licensed per chip rather than per core. The per core pricing is not a Sun pricing model and nor is it in endorsed by any Sun software product either. So why exactly should it advertise that it is a multi core chip? It is a complete non-issue from Sun's perspective.
The data sheets for Ultrasparc 4 say clearly that it is a CMT processor with each processor capable of handling 2 threads. I dont know what you are complaining about. If anything you should be complaining to Oracle about their pricing model created for fleecing their customers. And BTW I checked out the pricing information sheets on the Oracle website. It does not say in any specific terms that the pricing is per core. Pricing models seem plainly stated as per CPU or on a per user basis.