While Japaneese is a quite different culture than my own there are many more things that are the same than different. For instance some Japaneese wear hats and so do I, they have 2 arms, 2 leg etc and so do I. It would be infinetly more difficult to translate a language from a race of beings whom we've never seen on a planet we've never seen.
I may not have been insightful but I certainly wasn't promoting FUD either. My point is this: Copyright law is what you'll use to hurt someone who is breaking the GPL, not the other way around.
The GPL is absolutely fabulous! but it has no teeth of it's own. Yes I agree that it is indeed a license to distribute a work and am admitting that my previous post wasn't worded well at all. But it has no stipulation for damages or whatever all by itself. It sits on top of the copyright and allows the copyright to do all the nasty work.
I still fail to see why this GPL needs to be tested in court...it's very cut and dried for most applications. Sure it can get grey when it comes to embedded stuff and when dealing with libraries and linking and am sure it will see the courts over some of this kind of stuff in the future.
The GPL isn't really a license... it's mostly just an exception to copyright law and copyright has been tested in court countless times. The name is bad... it should be called the GNU Copyright Exception or something simliar but way more clever. If I ask PJ to make a copy of one of her posts she has the option to say yes, no, or only if you write it out with a quill pen using chicken blood. If I choose to use cat blood then the deal's off and she can sue me for copyright infringment.
I fail to understand why so many people don't understand this. I really didn't and still don't understand why SCO's lawyers would try to invalidate the GPL since it was their only defense for blatant and willfull copyright violations. IBM's lawyers obviously got this though. If something happens and SCO doesn't get kicked down hard it'll be the greatest travesty of justice ever.
No, but I don't want stuff like that installed out of the box either. I realize that the more crap (plugins) I load into my browser the less secure it is. shell should have 100% been disabled by default and when you turn it on there should be an explanation of wtf it does and maybe even a warning about possible security probs. Or maybe it should require a plugin that you have to download and install. So Moz says sorry I dunno what shell: is unless the plugin is installed that hands the shell request off to winblows.
Mircrosoft should have fixed this the right way and they are certainly partly responsible but moz is responsible too. The line that bothered me was the one that said something like if Mozilla doesn't know what to do it hands the request off to the OS. At least that's what is supposed to happen with shell:. Allowing the OS to collect the trash is fundamentally wrong.
What does patching their OS slowly have to do with adding virus definitions? Nothing.... that's what. That's just stupid FUD that makes us look back.
Having said that, I think it's a serious confilict of interest for the makers of OutlookX, IE and Windows etc to sell software that feeds off the vulnerabilities they've created or have allowed to happen. I see too many oportunites for them to purposly put in vunerabilites or at the very least leave known vulns in and conviently have the "fix" ready before anyone else.
Microsoft should be banned from making anit-virus software and further; they forced to pay a percentage of each third-party anti-virus license purchased and we'd see just how quickly the above-mentioned programs would get fixed.
Tons of apps require writes to the registry to function... All versions of Quickbooks as a quick off the top example. It's stupid stupid stupid. I'm not a MS fan but they're security problems aren't completely their own fault. If they were smart they'd use that monoplistic power for good rather than evil and force third party software vendors to write more secure stuff. I do IT work for an accounting office and they'd like to lock things down and can't because of stupid shit like this.
Ahhh yeah.... We can do whatever we want and it is "natural" just like a pack of wolves can gorge themselves on all their wolf food and wipe out whatever they're eating and then die because they're out of food. It was natural but not too bright on their part. Same thing applies to us.
I've often thought about installing/hacking together something like slash and posting each of the howtos as "articles" or maybe each section of each howto as a sub-article. Then the howto could be discussed and kept live and up to date. After some period of time take the highest moderated posts and rewrite the howto and start over.
Slashdot's moderation system seems to mostly work and that would be the key to success for something like this. I could never think of a good name for it and wasn't good enough to pull it off so I never got around to it. Now I could probably pull it off but don't have the time and still don't have a good name.
Spamming is not justifiable behavior period. It's nor morally or ethically correct to force someone to do something in order to live in the world. Time_life used to send me books for a free 30 day trial. If I didn't want them I had to send them back... well no, I don't have to send them back. Time_life is not the boss of me and cannot force me to return something they sent to me that I never requested. Sure they can try like hell but they have no right to. I got them to stop, by keeping the books and finally one day answering the phone when they called. They wanted to know if I still lived at (my address) so they could send me a book to try out. I said "why yes i do still live there and I'd be happy to receive their book, however I'm not going to return it nor am I going to pay for it."
Spammers shouldn't be the boss of me either but they are. They force me to delete their email, dick with procmail and pay for the bandwidth that their advertising costs me. Currently my only choice is to not play the email game. But given my occupation that would be virtually impossible.
I used to think the only way to combat spam was to raise the public's awareness of it's evils and get the public to protest by boycotting the companies who's products are being marketed by spam. Of course given the mindless do'h mentality that most American's (at least) enjoy that will never happen. If it ever were to happen, we'd see rival companies sending out spam, advertising their competitor's products. So I guess that's not going to work either.
People like Eric Allman who try to justify a spammer's behavior make me sick. Gullt is the only weapon we currently have and he's even minimising it with Timothy's help. Now 1000's of slashdot readers who were just considering becoming spammers are going to go on over to the dark side because it makes economic sense. Thanks guys.
It's more like someone (SCO) takes a box of stuff to the Goodwill. (Goodwill is a charitable organization that sells donated stuff) Then they wait 6 months and say "Goodwill stole our stuff and we want a cut from everything Goodwill has sold from the time we made our donation for all eternity."
Once the truth comes out they did they did indeed make a donation they backpedal and say "well we didn't mean to donate all that stuff but we're not going to tell you which items we want back and we still want a cut of Goodwill's sales for all time."
Actually if you google for solar concentrator you'll see that some of the fringe elements here on earth do. Of course there are a few problems with earthborn solar concentrators... 1 the atmosphere blocks some of the energy, 2 they must be able to stand up to wind, 3 they must be strong enough to support their own weight in earth's gravity, 4 they must be reasonably attractive, 5 they must be safe enough that little kids and birds won't get fried by them
It costs just a bit less to dig up fossil fuels here on earth to melt the ore that it would to ship them up to the moon so that particualr argument is moot.
I was not arguing for or against the feasability of mining the moon for h3 or whatever. I was simply stating my opinion that if the goal is to melt things, it's less stupid to use a solar concentrator than it is to use solar cells, no matter where you're at.
That would be like changing the name of a food that that has the name of a country in it that you're not happy with because they chose not to support your plan to start an illegal war. Oh wait.... Nevermind
I've been in the IT business since well before "IT" was a term. In fact I took a real job some years back and they put "IT Specialist" on my business card and I didn't even know what that meant. I was always just a computer guy and a computer consultant when I was talking to fancy people.
Anyway I can't begin to tell you how many times I've tried to talk clients of out giving me money to "upgrade" their old dos based package to the new modern windows version. Their productity drops off in a big way at first and overall somewhat. The people who used that old software knew it's flaws and keyboard shortcuts and could wiz right through it. Sure the reports looked pretty crude by today's true-type font standards and the learning curve for new people was pretty damn steep, but it was quick and reliable and you didn;t ahve to move your hands off the keyboard to fumble for that highly overated mouse thing.
They never listen to me and always do the "upgrade" because they believe their lives will be richer and more productive but it seldom works out that way. If software vendors would/could do their jobs correctly then my client's would be correct. But no one seems to be able to write the perfect software in today's environment.
Show me an accounting package and I'll show you some software that needs at least two other programs to actually do real-life business accounting. Plus you'll have to have some humans around to re-type the same data into those 2 other required programs and introduce just enough flaws in the data to make things interesting.
Show me an operating system/windows environment and it's either easy to use and setup and buggy as hell or a real bitch to setup, fairly stable but not real easy to use. It's like the old saying I can do it fast, do it cheap or do it well.... pick any 2.
There should be a business operating system (not an OS)... it should keep track of your time, schedule your appointments, do POS and invoicing, do payroll, track employee vacations, print Christmas cards, do the accounting, handle shipping, keep inventory , print newsletters, accept credit cards, order on demand, fill out your tax returns, be your phone system and voicemail, and just generally tell you how well your business did today. It should accessable from the the internet and secure. All of this data is related and needs to be in one central location and manipulated by one app that can detect and display trends in an inteligent manner. People like Walmart and Mcdonald's get it and have the budget to almost pull it off, but the small to medium size businesses are in dire need of this type of package.
We've got all of the pieces to pull this off but no one has been able to tie them all together and maybe no one ever will. If we could do that we would contribute greatly, of course many middle managers and data entry people will be out of a job along with comput...er IT Specialists like myself.
Oh bullshit.... Imagine a virus that shutdown every linux box attached to the net. I'm talking routers firewalls, web and email servers, etc, etc. That would be a big deal and a big feather in the cap of a virus writer. Google would go down! oh just thinking about it scares me.
I've done this numerous times and it even worked a couple of times. I once completely disassembled a WD 540 meg ide and changed out the stepper motor. Rather than put it all back together I fired it up without the cover on my bench in the basement and it lasted for about 6 hours. Plenty of time to get my non-backed up files off before some dust or smoke (yes I was smoking while doing it) killed it.
"Under the new provision, which took effect March 1"
March 1? WTF... I'm really starting to think than Microsoft has masterminded this whole SCO attack. If it was implemented March 1 when was the idea thought of?
Let's see... Microsoft changes their license on March 1, Sco sues IBM a few days later. May 14 SCO sends out 1500 letters, a few days later Microsoft buys a license. Sco threatens to sue about a billion lowly users for copyright infringement, a few weeks later Cnet writes an article outlining the new Microsoft license.
Microsoft is too big to make these kinds of reactive decisions so quickly. They had to at least have inside knowledge of what SCO was up to in order to be so well prepared or be damned lucky.
No normal company would have the audacity to make the bizarre kinds of claims SCO is making. Microsoft who pretty much owns the US court system and can buy the verdict of their choice, has the power to at least have a chance of making a suit like this actually work.
Even if everything SCO has said is right... it's absurd to think they can sue little old me for buying a few copies of Slack and SuSE. Now if I distributed copies of those, then it might be possible. And what about the GPL?
If SCO is just taking a final potshot to raise some money so they can inflate their stock prices, those in charge will almost certainly get popped for insider trading if they dump that inflated stock. SCO isn't an Enron, they're a piss-ant little company. If they wanted to get bought out then they would have limited the scope of their lawsuit to IBM not the whole friggin Linux community. Almost no Linux users would ever do business with SCO or anyone who bought out SCO. If SCO were to win most of us would switch back to FreeBSD, in order to not do business with SCO.
The only logical conclusion is some company who has a competing product (to Linux) is behind this attack.
I'm 38 and have been hacking/coding since I got my first C64 and Timex Sinclair. I now write smallish business/accounting apps and even though I may have slowed down a bit, I'm still way more productive than any of the wiz kids around me. Yes they code faster and yes they catch on to new things quicker, but they haven't got a clue how the world works. They can't write stuff that is user-friendly, they can't present their ideas in a resonably inteligent manner and they can't deal with the general office worker. They can't anticipate how a less-informed office person will mis-interpert their terminology and layouts. They can't imagine that a general office person doesn't know when to single click and when to double click. They can't create a consistant interface without serious bitching.
If you want a game engine, a kernel, a driver or anything that doesn't require the code to interact with a human directly, then hire a kid. If you're writing software for humans to use then get someone old and crusty.
Usually IANAL means I Am Not A Lawyer however it must be taken in the context of the discussion. If you're discussing mowing lawns it might mean I am not a lawnmower. Various perversions of the original crop up all the time.
Fragging refers to killing one's opponent in the first person shooter doom. It might have come out before that or might be an old military term but Doom was where I was exposed to that term.
G
Re:This Should Clear Things Up
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"But the courts have a way (albeit lengthy) of asserting common sense when the horse is already out of the barn."
You mean like in Microsoft's antitrust trial or how about OJ? Anything can happen in court.
Slashdot Mirror
While Japaneese is a quite different culture than my own there are many more things that are the same than different. For instance some Japaneese wear hats and so do I, they have 2 arms, 2 leg etc and so do I. It would be infinetly more difficult to translate a language from a race of beings whom we've never seen on a planet we've never seen.
I may not have been insightful but I certainly wasn't promoting FUD either. My point is this: Copyright law is what you'll use to hurt someone who is breaking the GPL, not the other way around.
The GPL is absolutely fabulous! but it has no teeth of it's own. Yes I agree that it is indeed a license to distribute a work and am admitting that my previous post wasn't worded well at all. But it has no stipulation for damages or whatever all by itself. It sits on top of the copyright and allows the copyright to do all the nasty work.
I still fail to see why this GPL needs to be tested in court...it's very cut and dried for most applications. Sure it can get grey when it comes to embedded stuff and when dealing with libraries and linking and am sure it will see the courts over some of this kind of stuff in the future.
G
The GPL isn't really a license... it's mostly just an exception to copyright law
and copyright has been tested in court countless times. The name is bad... it
should be called the GNU Copyright Exception or something simliar but way more
clever. If I ask PJ to make a copy of one of her posts she has the option to say
yes, no, or only if you write it out with a quill pen using chicken blood. If I
choose to use cat blood then the deal's off and she can sue me for copyright
infringment.
I fail to understand why so many people don't understand this. I really didn't
and still don't understand why SCO's lawyers would try to invalidate the GPL
since it was their only defense for blatant and willfull copyright violations.
IBM's lawyers obviously got this though. If something happens and SCO doesn't
get kicked down hard it'll be the greatest travesty of justice ever.
more or less
Ok... then what's an overdrive for? I thought it was to get better mileage.
G
No, but I don't want stuff like that installed out of the box either. I realize that the more crap (plugins) I load into my browser the less secure it is. shell should have 100% been disabled by default and when you turn it on there should be an explanation of wtf it does and maybe even a warning about possible security probs. Or maybe it should require a plugin that you have to download and install. So Moz says sorry I dunno what shell: is unless the plugin is installed that hands the shell request off to winblows.
Mircrosoft should have fixed this the right way and they are certainly partly responsible but moz is responsible too. The line that bothered me was the one that said something like if Mozilla doesn't know what to do it hands the request off to the OS. At least that's what is supposed to happen with shell:. Allowing the OS to collect the trash is fundamentally wrong.
What does patching their OS slowly have to do with adding virus definitions? Nothing.... that's what. That's just stupid FUD that makes us look back.
Having said that, I think it's a serious confilict of interest for the makers of OutlookX, IE and Windows etc to sell software that feeds off the vulnerabilities they've created or have allowed to happen. I see too many oportunites for them to purposly put in vunerabilites or at the very least leave known vulns in and conviently have the "fix" ready before anyone else.
Microsoft should be banned from making anit-virus software and further; they forced to pay a percentage of each third-party anti-virus license purchased and we'd see just how quickly the above-mentioned programs would get fixed.
G
Tons of apps require writes to the registry to function... All versions of Quickbooks as a quick off the top example. It's stupid stupid stupid. I'm not a MS fan but they're security problems aren't completely their own fault. If they were smart they'd use that monoplistic power for good rather than evil and force third party software vendors to write more secure stuff. I do IT work for an accounting office and they'd like to lock things down and can't because of stupid shit like this.
Ahhh yeah.... We can do whatever we want and it is "natural" just like a pack of wolves can gorge themselves on all their wolf food and wipe out whatever they're eating and then die because they're out of food. It was natural but not too bright on their part. Same thing applies to us.
I've often thought about installing/hacking together something like slash and posting each of the howtos as "articles" or maybe each section of each howto as a sub-article. Then the howto could be discussed and kept live and up to date. After some period of time take the highest moderated posts and rewrite the howto and start over.
Slashdot's moderation system seems to mostly work and that would be the key to success for something like this. I could never think of a good name for it and wasn't good enough to pull it off so I never got around to it. Now I could probably pull it off but don't have the time and still don't have a good name.
G
Spamming is not justifiable behavior period. It's nor morally or ethically correct to force someone to do something in order to live in the world. Time_life used to send me books for a free 30 day trial. If I didn't want them I had to send them back... well no, I don't have to send them back. Time_life is not the boss of me and cannot force me to return something they sent to me that I never requested. Sure they can try like hell but they have no right to. I got them to stop, by keeping the books and finally one day answering the phone when they called. They wanted to know if I still lived at (my address) so they could send me a book to try out. I said "why yes i do still live there and I'd be happy to receive their book, however I'm not going to return it nor am I going to pay for it."
Spammers shouldn't be the boss of me either but they are. They force me to delete their email, dick with procmail and pay for the bandwidth that their advertising costs me. Currently my only choice is to not play the email game. But given my occupation that would be virtually impossible.
I used to think the only way to combat spam was to raise the public's awareness of it's evils and get the public to protest by boycotting the companies who's products are being marketed by spam. Of course given the mindless do'h mentality that most American's (at least) enjoy that will never happen. If it ever were to happen, we'd see rival companies sending out spam, advertising their competitor's products. So I guess that's not going to work either.
People like Eric Allman who try to justify a spammer's behavior make me sick. Gullt is the only weapon we currently have and he's even minimising it with Timothy's help. Now 1000's of slashdot readers who were just considering becoming spammers are going to go on over to the dark side because it makes economic sense. Thanks guys.
G
No..
It's more like someone (SCO) takes a box of stuff to the Goodwill. (Goodwill is a charitable organization that sells donated stuff) Then they wait 6 months and say "Goodwill stole our stuff and we want a cut from everything Goodwill has sold from the time we made our donation for all eternity."
Once the truth comes out they did they did indeed make a donation they backpedal and say "well we didn't mean to donate all that stuff but we're not going to tell you which items we want back and we still want a cut of Goodwill's sales for all time."
I keep trying to click on "links" that are underlined for no real reason.
Actually if you google for solar concentrator you'll see that some of the fringe elements here on earth do. Of course there are a few problems with earthborn solar concentrators... 1 the atmosphere blocks some of the energy, 2 they must be able to stand up to wind, 3 they must be strong enough to support their own weight in earth's gravity, 4 they must be reasonably attractive, 5 they must be safe enough that little kids and birds won't get fried by them
It costs just a bit less to dig up fossil fuels here on earth to melt the ore that it would to ship them up to the moon so that particualr argument is moot.
I was not arguing for or against the feasability of mining the moon for h3 or whatever. I was simply stating my opinion that if the goal is to melt things, it's less stupid to use a solar concentrator than it is to use solar cells, no matter where you're at.
Why use solar cells? Why convert heat into electricity just to convert back into heat? Why not a solar concentrator made from mylar?
That would be like changing the name of a food that that has the name of a country in it that you're not happy with because they chose not to support your plan to start an illegal war. Oh wait.... Nevermind
I've been in the IT business since well before "IT" was a term. In fact I took a real job some years back and they put "IT Specialist" on my business card and I didn't even know what that meant. I was always just a computer guy and a computer consultant when I was talking to fancy people.
Anyway I can't begin to tell you how many times I've tried to talk clients of out giving me money to "upgrade" their old dos based package to the new modern windows version. Their productity drops off in a big way at first and overall somewhat. The people who used that old software knew it's flaws and keyboard shortcuts and could wiz right through it. Sure the reports looked pretty crude by today's true-type font standards and the learning curve for new people was pretty damn steep, but it was quick and reliable and you didn;t ahve to move your hands off the keyboard to fumble for that highly overated mouse thing.
They never listen to me and always do the "upgrade" because they believe their lives will be richer and more productive but it seldom works out that way. If software vendors would/could do their jobs correctly then my client's would be correct. But no one seems to be able to write the perfect software in today's environment.
Show me an accounting package and I'll show you some software that needs at least two other programs to actually do real-life business accounting. Plus you'll have to have some humans around to re-type the same data into those 2 other required programs and introduce just enough flaws in the data to make things interesting.
Show me an operating system/windows environment and it's either easy to use and setup and buggy as hell or a real bitch to setup, fairly stable but not real easy to use. It's like the old saying I can do it fast, do it cheap or do it well.... pick any 2.
There should be a business operating system (not an OS)... it should keep track of your time, schedule your appointments, do POS and invoicing, do payroll, track employee vacations, print Christmas cards, do the accounting, handle shipping, keep inventory , print newsletters, accept credit cards, order on demand, fill out your tax returns, be your phone system and voicemail, and just generally tell you how well your business did today. It should accessable from the the internet and secure. All of this data is related and needs to be in one central location and manipulated by one app that can detect and display trends in an inteligent manner. People like Walmart and Mcdonald's get it and have the budget to almost pull it off, but the small to medium size businesses are in dire need of this type of package.
We've got all of the pieces to pull this off but no one has been able to tie them all together and maybe no one ever will. If we could do that we would contribute greatly, of course many middle managers and data entry people will be out of a job along with comput...er IT Specialists like myself.
G
Oh bullshit.... Imagine a virus that shutdown every linux box attached to the net. I'm talking routers firewalls, web and email servers, etc, etc. That would be a big deal and a big feather in the cap of a virus writer. Google would go down! oh just thinking about it scares me.
G
Why couldn't you just redirect windows.com to one of the ips they choode for their new service,using your hosts file or with your dns server?
I've done this numerous times and it even worked a couple of times. I once completely disassembled a WD 540 meg ide and changed out the stepper motor. Rather than put it all back together I fired it up without the cover on my bench in the basement and it lasted for about 6 hours. Plenty of time to get my non-backed up files off before some dust or smoke (yes I was smoking while doing it) killed it.
"Under the new provision, which took effect March 1"
March 1? WTF... I'm really starting to think than Microsoft has masterminded this whole SCO attack. If it was implemented March 1 when was the idea thought of?
Let's see... Microsoft changes their license on March 1, Sco sues IBM a few days later. May 14 SCO sends out 1500 letters, a few days later Microsoft buys a license. Sco threatens to sue about a billion lowly users for copyright infringement, a few weeks later Cnet writes an article outlining the new Microsoft license.
Microsoft is too big to make these kinds of reactive decisions so quickly. They had to at least have inside knowledge of what SCO was up to in order to be so well prepared or be damned lucky.
No normal company would have the audacity to make the bizarre kinds of claims SCO is making. Microsoft who pretty much owns the US court system and can buy the verdict of their choice, has the power to at least have a chance of making a suit like this actually work.
Even if everything SCO has said is right... it's absurd to think they can sue little old me for buying a few copies of Slack and SuSE. Now if I distributed copies of those, then it might be possible. And what about the GPL?
If SCO is just taking a final potshot to raise some money so they can inflate their stock prices, those in charge will almost certainly get popped for insider trading if they dump that inflated stock. SCO isn't an Enron, they're a piss-ant little company. If they wanted to get bought out then they would have limited the scope of their lawsuit to IBM not the whole friggin Linux community. Almost no Linux users would ever do business with SCO or anyone who bought out SCO. If SCO were to win most of us would switch back to FreeBSD, in order to not do business with SCO.
The only logical conclusion is some company who has a competing product (to Linux) is behind this attack.
In High school we formed ice by putting water into a vacumm..... I don't think pressurizing it will turn it to ice... it'll make it boil right?
I'm 38 and have been hacking/coding since I got my first C64 and Timex Sinclair. I now write smallish business/accounting apps and even though I may have slowed down a bit, I'm still way more productive than any of the wiz kids around me. Yes they code faster and yes they catch on to new things quicker, but they haven't got a clue how the world works. They can't write stuff that is user-friendly, they can't present their ideas in a resonably inteligent manner and they can't deal with the general office worker. They can't anticipate how a less-informed office person will mis-interpert their terminology and layouts. They can't imagine that a general office person doesn't know when to single click and when to double click. They can't create a consistant interface without serious bitching.
If you want a game engine, a kernel, a driver or anything that doesn't require the code to interact with a human directly, then hire a kid. If you're writing software for humans to use then get someone old and crusty.
G
Usually IANAL means I Am Not A Lawyer however it must be taken in the context of the discussion. If you're discussing mowing lawns it might mean I am not a lawnmower. Various perversions of the original crop up all the time.
Fragging refers to killing one's opponent in the first person shooter doom. It might have come out before that or might be an old military term but Doom was where I was exposed to that term.
G
"But the courts have a way (albeit lengthy) of asserting common sense when the horse is already out of the barn."
You mean like in Microsoft's antitrust trial or how about OJ? Anything can happen in court.