Underclock the cpu and/or the bus by 30 to 50% and it will last forever. Underclocking is a wonderful thing and spped is not required for simple, big storage space. Raid is important but most times when data is lost, it's user error not hardware. Make sure you make nightly backups that the users can't write to or infect with a virus. If you can't designate another machine as a backup server, make sure the backup drive is ide when the live drives are data. That will minimise the risk of a bad controller card corrupting both sets of data. A frigin P133 (That's a Pentium 1 - 133 for you youngsters) with 32 meg ram and a 30 gig hardrive makes a wonderful backup server if it's running Linux/Samba.
And your point is what exactly? You think I'm a GPL zealot? I'm not, but by god if you decide to play the game you need to follow the rules even if they're stupid. The only time you should be allowed to change the rules is when you've been deceived before signing on the dotted line.
UnitedLinux is in effect just re-arranging free software and they expect to be able to change the terms of the various licenses just because they've re-aranged a few bits and put together some sort of installer. I expect regular non-Linux companies not to get this but I never expected companies that are/were respected members the Linux communtiy to exploit this type of loophole.
There isn't an installer/system configurator in the world that could compare to gcc, emacs or samba in complexity or value.
Now here's some food for thought... I write an installer/configurator that downloads all the various gnufree software from the net. I burn my software onto a cd all by itself. Now can I dictate what you can and cannot do with my installer? I'm pretty sure I can. But I'm also pretty sure that the second I do that others will do it better and gnufree their work. Once that happens who would buy my expensive closed version? The corps who want that support contract that's who.
At the point where the letter of the GPL fails is the point where the community must enforce the intent.
Caldera have been going with 'per-seat licensing' for a while now. I never investigated further as I don't use Caldera.
Me either... I never really thought of Caldera as a player and felt they were fairly irrelevant. Suse on the other hand was my distro of choice. I've bought about a dozen of each major version since 5.0. I've, for the most part, felt that if I'm going to setup a samba server for one of my clients that I should buy a copy. I should add, I've never used their support.
I agree with your idea, that they may be trying to charge for support on a per seat basis, however, if that's the case they're certainly not spelling that out clearly.
I'd seriously doubt they'd strangle the non-enterprise user, they'd have only small change to gain by forcing non-enterprise customers to pay non-seat and too much to loose as a lot of non-enterprise customers are the people who write most of their product
You're probably right, but to give them the freedom to do so in the future is a bad thing. I never really thought Microsoft would try to enforce the non-transferable part of their license either but they seem to be doing just that these days.
#9 "Will users be able to download free versions of UnitedLinux for non-commercial uses, similar to how Linux is freely available today?
Yes, UnitedLinux sources will be made available for free download as soon as version 1 is released. "
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions I doubt very seriously that question was EVER asked. It's a leading question which are generally bad.
I'm not thinking that the words non-commercial and the GPL go together. It's one thing for them to have a per seat license (which could be ignored as soon as a legitimate buyer re-released all the gpl'ed source), but entirely another thing for them to limit the use of the source to non-commercial use. Suse has done this with Yast since time started but Yast certainly isn't the whole distribution. If this is allowed to happen, Bill G could bundle all the GNU tools with his version of Linux windows as long as he forks over the source to the GNU parts.
There's a fine line here.... I think United Linux is crossing the line by tying up gpl'ed software in their non-free distro. Yet I see nothing wrong with a distro including non-free software as long as the distro itself remains free. Mandrake seems to be going down this same road to a limited extent.
Even if United Linux removes the "commercial use" business on the source it'd be trivial to obfuscate the configure parts of the makefiles to make it nearly impossible to figure out how to compile their distro into a useable system.
I figured the world would find and exploit holes in the GPL, I didn't figure that generally good Linux companies like Suse would. I've used Suse since 5.0 and will now have to think seriously about switching.
So you think having an inc at the end of your name means something? Nope it doesn't mean shit because a new inc has no credit, no history and no power. So the owners of a new inc have to put their homes, cars etc up for collateral until the inc becomes well enough known with a good enough credit history to stand on it's own. 99.9% of all incs never get to that point. The owners of the inc have to personally guarantee the money will be paid back to the bank or the bank will tell them to screw off. If you were a bank would you loan money to somebody who wasn't willing to risk something of his/her own?
First buy some parts and build one. Figure out exactly which parts will work with each other. Format the drive and do a fresh reload of all your software with all the service packs and Windows updates on the master machine. Remove any of the crap you don't want the end user to mess with. Setup everything on this first box to a T. I mean get their templates, addressbooks, favorites etc all lined out. if you're using roaming profiles on a PDC then it's not as important to get it right. Samba works great!
Then buy 20 more sets of the final parts and clone the drives. You don't build the systems one at a time you mass produce your 20 systems per year in one setting. Just lie Eli; you install the ram and processors, you bolt in all the motherboards, you install the cards, all the while keeping your cloning operation going. You don't need Ghost, an xcopy works just fine if you have a boot floppy with fdisk to set the partiion active. Or alternately use the find command on a linux box to build a tarbar or do a cp. Have you ever bought a new Dell or whatever? My god they're so full of crap! You've now built 21 machines... Put two of these machines on your desk one as a spare. Keep the spare updated and when a user complains about this or that, swap their PC out with the spare.
If you have roaming profiles and the users trained to save files on the server drive it's even easier to swap out workstations. You have to keep that spare computer updated!
Temporarily loose a user's files when you swap out their PC with the spare to teach them the importance of using the server's hard drives to store their files.
Buy a slighly different but high quality case next year so the users will know what model year workstation they have. This makes support easier.
400's don't seem too bad for a business environment to me though.
Picture this... depressed teen chatting with a friendly agreeable bot. DT I'm so depressed my parents hate me blah blah. Do you think I should kill myself?
BOT I'd like to see you try!
The suicide works, parent's see the session claim their teen was tricked into believing the bot was a human and dared to pull the trigger whatever and whamoo lawsuit.
He's absolutely right, Microsoft should have every right to screw us and screw us while becoming/being a Monopoly. We should also have the right to tell them to screw off when we've had enough.
The whole point to Capitalism is to win. Microsoft has won... they're it, end of story (well this chapter anyway). It's kinda screwed up to think that the US government will give new businesses tax breaks and whatnot to help them get started and then once they've won, declare them a monopoly and try to break them. I don't agree with the whole DOJ trial thing at all. These things will sort themsleves out.
I think Microsoft will continue their shit, get even greedier and will drive everyone away without the government's help. Actually they'd probably bury themselves quicker without the little slap on the wrist to slow them down and give us time to get acclimated to the ever increasing levels of pain.
"The problem with general public license advocates is that they don't understand that people need the opportunity to commercialize software,"
No the problem is two-faced capitalists who try to rewrite one of the basic laws of capitalism over and over again. I'm referring to the law of supply and demand. The law of supply and demand is pretty simple; if demand is high (or supply is low) then the price goes up. If demand is low (or supply is high) the price goes down. Trying to artificially inflate the value of an OS that's inferior in some (but not all) ways to a free OS is wrong and stupid. This is exactly what Mundie is trying to do. As the Linux/UnixX desktop becomes more polished the demand for Windows will decrease. This is a fact and it's a fact that Microslough needs to learn and move on if they want to compete in the future.
I'm all for making a buck and I'm all for commercial software. I'm not for commercial software companies who whine when they're getting their butts kicked. I've seen a number of posts from professional developers saying "yeah mundie is stupid, at the OS level it should be free, but not on the application level." Well they're just as wrong as Mundie. If a bunch of free software developers develop a Diablo 3 or 4 play-alike then should Blizzard try to compete? They're certainly free to try but I doubt they'll fare very well.
If I write a time/material/billing app and keep it closed and don't keep up with the quality of open source alternatives should I expect to get $10,000 a crack? I think not, in fact I'd be better off throwing my code and skills in the open source version and charging $500 to install it for my clients. Now if my closed version kicks the open source version's ass then I might be able to get away with it, but sooner or later I'll fall behind or both apps will achieve such a level of perfection that they'll be indistinguishable from each other. Taking this a step further: If the open source version gets the ultimate installer that even a windows user could operate, then I can't even charge the $500 for installing it. We're all literally working ourselves out of a job. I for one am happy to do that.
Surely his comment about the "alternative" was taken out of context... no one could be that stupid/arrogant could they?
It makes sense for most of the old games to be donated to the public domain or at least re-licensed as freeware. All the arguments that the publishers have against abondonware are weak:
We'll lose sales on new games. Well that's just s stupid argument. If I aquire an old copy of Duke Nuke Em and play it out do you think I'll be less likely or more likely to shell out $50 for the new one? I think more, much more. How many times are demo versons of games made?
They want to release a cheap game collection... well yeah those are the games that I buy.. Knowing they're not all that likely to even run on my new Athlon without some pain. But if that particular game that I've been missing for all these years was included I might buy their gamepack and work at getting it to run. So they get a half point for ths argument, but it is going to cost them some bucks to update the game engines to make them work on new hardware.
They want to start a comic book based on a game character. So start one... they might not have that copyright as locked up as before, but they certainly have at least as good a right as I do to use that character.
The bottom line is: they have the right to be stupid. They have the right to lock up that old code and keep us from playing their games. They don't have the right to break any warranties. We have the right not to buy their new games if we don't like how they treat us with their old games. We don't have the right to steal their old code. We don't have the right to act like we're heros for stealing their code. If you're going to steal then at the very least admit you're stealing.
Now I've got to get back to Morpheus to liberate some more music.
Wire/coax are cheap if you value your time at all. Don't bother with phone wire, use cat5e for phone lines you get more options this way. Run 2 coax and 3 cat5e to way more places than you ever think you'll want to, but you don't have to actually hook them up right away or ever. Use Panduit Mini-com jacks that can be removed from the cover without unwiring them and just terminate what seems reasonable at the present time. Put blank covers on those places that you're sure you'll never need anything and roll the wires up in the box... you will need to connect something to at least one of those ridiculous wires sometime. I put a cat5 jack out on my front porch last summer so I could sit on the porch swing with my laptop. Will run one out by the pool next summer.
I like to buy different color cat5s and hook up the blues to ethernet, the reds to phone but leave the yellows dark. Everything should be a star (including security/smoke alarms) and should terminate in a nice large closet that has a big piece of plywood on the wall.
Use cat5 e for security wiring too. Even though a lot of security systems require their circuit to be wired in series this can still be accomplished at the head and you may want change our your security system at some point. You waste a lot of wire this way but you've got more options. Run 3 cat5e and 2 coax to the detached garage, but if it's very far away run a 4 "conductor" fiber out there too and don't forget to run a string or two in that conduit. Even if it's not so far, the fiber won't pass the electrical potential difference that can occur when lighting strikes close to your garage and you'll save your hubs/switches.
I've done a lot of this and even by being anal as hell there's always some place I miss. It's not at all unreasonable to put a mile of cat5 in a small house. Also buy as many boxes of wire as your biggest run (most conductors). That way you can run all the wires simultaneously and they'll look better when you're done. Don't pull on the cat5 very hard at all.... if it's stuck get off the ladder or off the floor and gently massage it into place.
If you stub a conduit up into the attic make damn sure you insulate and seal the top of it. In a factory I wired, the electricians had graciously ran conduit from the attic down all the walls to metal boxes. They left the conduit sticking up through the insulation in the attic so I could stuff/fish my wires down them. They didn't cut them to length up in the attic some were just through the top plate and others were 18" above the insulation. The metal conduit acted like a chimney in the winter, warm air rose up the conduit, hit the cold attic, water condensed, ran back down the conduit and shorted/corroded about 150 jacks (Panuit mini-coms BTW). Ports on the on the phone system began to blow and I couldn't figure out what the hell was happening. Fortunately one of the metal boxes got crushed by a fork truck and I discovered the corroded jack. Upon replacing most of the jacks in the building water actually ran out of some of the boxes when I pulled the covers off.
In a home where romex electrical wiring is allowed, non-plenum wire should be just fine. Romex is the 12-2 14-3 etc wire that is inside a flatish molded plastic covering. if your building codes won't allow romex and you're house has conduit you better buy the plenum.
A big UPS in the head is always nice... maybe you should have your electrician run a few "home" runs of 110V to some color coded electrical jacks to get that UPS power up to some of the more deleicate and expensive electronics equipment in your house. Have your electrician put 110V recepticals and light sockets on many of the junction boxes in the attic and crawl/basement... when you have to add a phone line that you forgot you'll be grateful for the handy power and light and it's so inexpensive to do before-hand.
Run a couple of power home runs to the entertainment center area.... you won't need the amperage but you'll get cleaner power for the tivo.
Congress has also declared that locations and schedules for the following: shopping malls, highschool football schedules, church services, boyscout jamborees and tupperware parties shall not be given out to the general public in an attempt to keep us all safe. Anyone wishing to find out any of the aforementioned top secret info should register with the thought police to get clearance.
Also a number of subjects are now considered dangerous and contraban. Anyone caught teaching or even knowing about electricity, metal shop, chemistry, automechanics, water purification and/or piloting an airplane shall be lobotomizd unless proper security clearance can be obtained. That is all.
According to a reliable source "the people who run Slashdot have run off to join the circus". This reporter thinks not, but is troubled by the lamest and most totally boring lineup that he's seen in his years of reading slashdot. Let's investigate:
Book Reviews: The Monk and the Riddle (really boring)
Book Reviews: The Root of All Evil (pretty darn boring)
Book Reviews: Knights of the Limits (wow inhumanly boring)
Developers: Perl6 for Mortals (Glorified Book Ad but decent article and some conversation)
BSD: GNU-Darwin Goes Beta (For Mac fans... that's like what, 1% if the slashdot crowd?)
Developers: Carl Sassenrath Talks About REBOL
NAFPL (Not Another Friggin Programing Language)
Developers: Self-Improving Systems (Better this would be a boring story on msot days)
Developers: Advanced Filesystem Implementors Guide Continues (Actually pretty good stuff here too bad it's been up since Oct 27)
Developers: Mozilla Bug Week (Been there, done that it's coming along nicely and has been for decades it seems) No disrespect to the mozilla ppl but this has been news for nerds too many times and has been up since.... you guessed it Oct 27
So where is everyone? Is there really no news for nerds or has Slashdot gone fishin'? Inquiring minds want to know.
G
Re:If space is infinite, is matter also infinite?
on
Dark Matter Measurements
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure.... why is it that no one ever talks about an infinite number of big bangs occuring constantly? Our big bang might just be a fairly small one compared to the one that happened last night a gazillion miles away. Our little "universe" could simply be a little puddle of matter in our little side street of the real infinite universe.
I guess I hadn't thought through the repercussions of segmenting the Internet. Once this door gets opened, the "classless" Internet than we now enjoy would be destroyed. That might be the idea-killer I've been half-expecting expecting, but you've misunderstood my basic idea (my fault)
Your comment about the Boy Scouts was interesting. That's almost arguing my point... but apparently I didn't make my plan clear. There are ways around ICANN and I'm not naive enough to think ICANN would allow something like this to happen without their control. I'm not talking about the US friggin government doing this at all.
This whole idea came about when I discovered secret parts of the internet whose tlds are served on the sly by various groups running their own dns servers. See http://www.alternic.org/ for example. It occurred to me that a group with decidedly different goals (than most of the underground tlds) could bypass ICANN altogether. Once their importance caught on they could become legitimate and recognized by, but not necessarily governed by, the people at ICANN or the US gov.
There's nothing stopping me from putting a.greg domain into my dns server and serving up websites etc. I do this kind of stuff all the time on pretty much all my internal networks (you're encouraged not use a real tld) and have played around with it on my dns server on the net as well. As long as you point your machine to my dns server or copy my zone files into your dns you can see all of the (non-existant).greg domain.
If.clean could grow large enough using this underhanded method, then sites like howstuffworks.com, nasa.gov, disney.com, nickjr.com, webster.com and on and on would feel the desire to create.clean versions of their sites voluntarily and good useful content (IMO which is the crux of the problem) would be available.
At first I totally agreed that public PCs should not be censored in any way. But once we drill down through my knee jerk reaction the picture changes. The definition of censor according to Webster "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable". Obviously censorship is a bad thing, however I expect the librarian to discourage visits to goatsex.cx . Ok... so I guess I do encourage censorship on public PCs and I bet you do too in this context. Not only do I encourage censorship at the library I'm more willing to let one lowly underpaid library aid make the decisions as to what's appropriate rather than a group of people who've setup some kind of by-law/guideline/mission statement/whatever. Yes I agree, I trust that person more than I trust Uncle Sam but not much.
I'm very much opposed to censoring the Internet and am simply trying to find an alternative that will calm those who're truly concerned about it and keep myself and like-minded people happy. I thought I had found that middle ground which would satisfy both factions and am now not nearly as convinced that I am right.
It would be nice to be able to let my kids roam the net whenever they want without worry. It would also be nice to let them run around the neighborhood way past dark playing kick the can like I used to do, but that's no longer possible in my area of the country either. Now does this desire to be worry-free make me a lazy person or a bad parent? Only I can decide that for myself.
If the kids group has control over the tld and the whois for the domain they simply pull the plug on the offenders. As far as being a parent.. I am, and I'm amazed how a simple search for Barney (Thank God she's outgrown that stage) can lead one to very interesting places. There should be nothing stopping the catholic church from doing the same thing and setting up.catholic too. If you're French and want the nude pics of your beach outing then you can't post them on.clean because those nude pics don't follow the rules of.clean. Do the French watch US movies? Do they pay attention to the movie rating system or do they have their own or do they care at all? If they don't care then why bother getting a.clean site to inform/entertain the uptight American kids. They probably wouldn't be interested.
The.clean tld would be a much smaller subset of the real internet and totally optional. I wouldn't bother getting.clean versions of most of my sites nor would most people. If you don't like the rules then don't bother or start your own. The idea that we can only have a few tlds most controled by ICANN is stupid anyway.
I agree it's not possible, or even ethical to attempt to censor or rank the Internet, but to create subsets of the internet that have to follow the rules is reasonable IMO.
This be a parent thing pisses me off.... I want my daughter to be able to explore and stumble across new and interesting concepts while not worrying about her ending up on screwingcorpses.com. Her exploration should be a solitary one that doesn't involve me or my wife. If I direct her searches and surfing habits then I'm going to fall into a patern that creates a little clone of myself not an educated and interesting person who follows her own path and learns what she wants to learn.
"Any censoring body that does not derive its power from the Congress is by default illegitemate and illegal."
Oh BS... how many clubs are in the world that have rules that are unconstituional, silly and stupid. It's not illegal, it's a friggin club. If you don't want to join the.clean club then don't, no one cares.
A Non profit group, preferably some kids group, becomes the registrar for a new top level domain:.clean. If you want to register slashdot.clean you must follow the rules and you can only link to other.clean sites. Everyone builds the ability into the their browsers/OS the ability to limit visiting domains that are.clean only. Ftp downloads are not allowed. Anyone impersonating a.clean domain get's in trouble.
Uncertified ISP's could be banned from serving dns for.clean domains and the kids group could run the dns for the entire domain. Disney and all the biggies would put forth the effort to make their sites.clean compliant, others would create.clean versions of their existing sites and others could care less.
No one says I have to opt in to the.clean domain and create a.clean ver of my site and no one says you have to limit your PC to.clean only domains. ISP's could opt to only allow.clean stuff through their systems as added security.
Make it expensive for business to get a.clean site and free for non profits. This kids group has.clean cops who investigate.clean infractions and remove any violators from the.clean domain using the proceeds from the business/commercial entities that pay for the.clean privlege.
It's not censorship, no one has to do it. If I illegaly serve.clean dns, point it to a gay bondage site I get in big big trouble.
Their method is still limited to the speed of light... They're using a laser to "connect" the two hunks of matter. However they're saying they can transfer the state of trilions of hunks of matter at near light speed. That's serious bandwidth with some darn fine decent latency.
My Dad replaced all the birch doors in his house with oak... I used the old (nice birch) doors to make my desk/entertainment center in my last apartment. I attached a second door under the desktop with 2 2x4's offset to make a 6' long keyboard/mouse shelf. I cut the bi-fold doors and mad an attached bookshelf out of them. Total cost $5 for the 2X4" and a bout $2 in drywall screws.
Xwindows, Xwindows and more Xwindows. I'm amazed at the untapped potential Xwindows/Xfree has for networked applications. Why is there not a decent GPLed Xwindows server (should be client IMHO) for Microsoft Windows. Screw ASP Java/script even PHP do it with Xwindows. Build into every.NETtish Xwindows app the ability to save locally and or remotely and Microsoft/Sun and the rest could just go get screwed.
I've played around with VNC awhile in an attempt to so this but it isn't designed to do what I'm talking about. It sends a picture of the screen... no good, we need to cache stuff the desktop background, icons etc locally and just pass commands that say (use Greg's background #1 and icon set #7 and let the local PC draw that stuff. Any app that deals with text or numbers could run over a 56K modem no sweat. I know this is possible.... think of Quake... there's a helluvalot going on but only a few bytes get sent across the wire to keep everyone synched up and fraggin.
Imagine a world where you subscribe to a KDE or Gnome desktop running on the local ISP's server with X Office and a few other kickass apps.
True networked applications that would let me start writing a letter, start a quote, fillout an invoice, or whatever at work, go home and pick up right where I left off is what I want.
Microsoft really does inovate... They just twist their inovations to make them money and not help the end user. Instead of playing catchup to Microsoft's glitter, this could be the killer system that puts them in their place. Unfortunately I'm too dim to write something like this.
What a trip... my Mom used to one helluva typist. My Dad is a real inteligent, mechanically inclined guy with a bad attitiude towards computers. I built them a Pentium 233 running 98. I teach people how to use computers almost daily but wan't prepared for this! My Mom looked like someone who has very limited use of her right arm due to some accident years ago. You know someone who's arm is withered and curled up. She had her tounge stuck out, her eyes were rolling and she was leaning into the mouse. Fortunately she didn't start drooling. She just couldn't mouse! My Dad couldn't hunt and peck nearly as fast as my 4 year old, but he could operate the mouse fairly well. So they started working the computer together, my Mom typing while my Dad operated the mouse. Of course this led to a fairly serious argument right off the bat and I threw my hands up in disgust. They're 56 and 53 (years old) so it's not like they're really old or anything. Don't assume anything and don't forget those little things that we all take for granted aren't inborn. My parents have very high IQ's and are well respected.
BTW My Dad lost interest (big waste of time INO) and my Mom has become very proficient all on her own.
Slashdot Mirror
Underclock the cpu and/or the bus by 30 to 50% and it will last forever. Underclocking is a wonderful thing and spped is not required for simple, big storage space. Raid is important but most times when data is lost, it's user error not hardware. Make sure you make nightly backups that the users can't write to or infect with a virus. If you can't designate another machine as a backup server, make sure the backup drive is ide when the live drives are data. That will minimise the risk of a bad controller card corrupting both sets of data. A frigin P133 (That's a Pentium 1 - 133 for you youngsters) with 32 meg ram and a 30 gig hardrive makes a wonderful backup server if it's running Linux/Samba.
G
Yeah I hear you..... I felt someone deserved some cash and Suse made it easy. Easy != correct.
And your point is what exactly? You think I'm a GPL zealot? I'm not, but by god if you decide to play the game you need to follow the rules even if they're stupid. The only time you should be allowed to change the rules is when you've been deceived before signing on the dotted line.
UnitedLinux is in effect just re-arranging free software and they expect to be able to change the terms of the various licenses just because they've re-aranged a few bits and put together some sort of installer. I expect regular non-Linux companies not to get this but I never expected companies that are/were respected members the Linux communtiy to exploit this type of loophole.
There isn't an installer/system configurator in the world that could compare to gcc, emacs or samba in complexity or value.
Now here's some food for thought... I write an installer/configurator that downloads all the various gnufree software from the net. I burn my software onto a cd all by itself. Now can I dictate what you can and cannot do with my installer? I'm pretty sure I can. But I'm also pretty sure that the second I do that others will do it better and gnufree their work. Once that happens who would buy my expensive closed version? The corps who want that support contract that's who.
At the point where the letter of the GPL fails is the point where the community must enforce the intent.
G
Caldera have been going with 'per-seat licensing' for a while now. I never investigated further as I don't use Caldera.
Me either... I never really thought of Caldera as a player and felt they were fairly irrelevant. Suse on the other hand was my distro of choice. I've bought about a dozen of each major version since 5.0. I've, for the most part, felt that if I'm going to setup a samba server for one of my clients that I should buy a copy. I should add, I've never used their support.
I agree with your idea, that they may be trying to charge for support on a per seat basis, however, if that's the case they're certainly not spelling that out clearly.
I'd seriously doubt they'd strangle the non-enterprise user, they'd have only small change to gain by forcing non-enterprise customers to pay non-seat and too much to loose as a lot of non-enterprise customers are the people who write most of their product
You're probably right, but to give them the freedom to do so in the future is a bad thing. I never really thought Microsoft would try to enforce the non-transferable part of their license either but they seem to be doing just that these days.
G
Which slashdpot doesn't see fit to link to.
#9
"Will users be able to download free versions of UnitedLinux for non-commercial uses, similar to how Linux is freely available today?
Yes, UnitedLinux sources will be made available for free download as soon as version 1 is released. "
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions
I doubt very seriously that question was EVER asked. It's a leading question which are generally bad.
I'm not thinking that the words non-commercial and the GPL go together. It's one thing for them to have a per seat license (which could be ignored as soon as a legitimate buyer re-released all the gpl'ed source), but entirely another thing for them to limit the use of the source to non-commercial use. Suse has done this with Yast since time started but Yast certainly isn't the whole distribution. If this is allowed to happen, Bill G could bundle all the GNU tools with his version of Linux windows as long as he forks over the source to the GNU parts.
There's a fine line here.... I think United Linux is crossing the line by tying up gpl'ed software in their non-free distro. Yet I see nothing wrong with a distro including non-free software as long as the distro itself remains free. Mandrake seems to be going down this same road to a limited extent.
Even if United Linux removes the "commercial use" business on the source it'd be trivial to obfuscate the configure parts of the makefiles to make it nearly impossible to figure out how to compile their distro into a useable system.
I figured the world would find and exploit holes in the GPL, I didn't figure that generally good Linux companies like Suse would. I've used Suse since 5.0 and will now have to think seriously about switching.
G
So you think having an inc at the end of your name means something? Nope it doesn't mean shit because a new inc has no credit, no history and no power. So the owners of a new inc have to put their homes, cars etc up for collateral until the inc becomes well enough known with a good enough credit history to stand on it's own. 99.9% of all incs never get to that point. The owners of the inc have to personally guarantee the money will be paid back to the bank or the bank will tell them to screw off. If you were a bank would you loan money to somebody who wasn't willing to risk something of his/her own?
to download mozilla. That way there'd be a new version released in less thna 24 hours.
First buy some parts and build one. Figure out exactly which parts will work with each other. Format the drive and do a fresh reload of all your software with all the service packs and Windows updates on the master machine. Remove any of the crap you don't want the end user to mess with. Setup everything on this first box to a T. I mean get their templates, addressbooks, favorites etc all lined out. if you're using roaming profiles on a PDC then it's not as important to get it right. Samba works great!
Then buy 20 more sets of the final parts and clone the drives. You don't build the systems one at a time you mass produce your 20 systems per year in one setting. Just lie Eli; you install the ram and processors, you bolt in all the motherboards, you install the cards, all the while keeping your cloning operation going. You don't need Ghost, an xcopy works just fine if you have a boot floppy with fdisk to set the partiion active. Or alternately use the find command on a linux box to build a tarbar or do a cp. Have you ever bought a new Dell or whatever? My god they're so full of crap! You've now built 21 machines... Put two of these machines on your desk one as a spare. Keep the spare updated and when a user complains about this or that, swap their PC out with the spare.
If you have roaming profiles and the users trained to save files on the server drive it's even easier to swap out workstations. You have to keep that spare computer updated!
Temporarily loose a user's files when you swap out their PC with the spare to teach them the importance of using the server's hard drives to store their files.
Buy a slighly different but high quality case next year so the users will know what model year workstation they have. This makes support easier.
400's don't seem too bad for a business environment to me though.
need for an android head.
Ummmm those scenarios weren't quite was I had in mind.
Picture this... depressed teen chatting with a friendly agreeable bot.
DT I'm so depressed my parents hate me blah blah. Do you think I should kill myself?
BOT I'd like to see you try!
The suicide works, parent's see the session claim their teen was tricked into believing the bot was a human and dared to pull the trigger whatever and whamoo lawsuit.
He's absolutely right, Microsoft should have every right to screw us and screw us while becoming/being a Monopoly. We should also have the right to tell them to screw off when we've had enough.
The whole point to Capitalism is to win. Microsoft has won... they're it, end of story (well this chapter anyway). It's kinda screwed up to think that the US government will give new businesses tax breaks and whatnot to help them get started and then once they've won, declare them a monopoly and try to break them. I don't agree with the whole DOJ trial thing at all. These things will sort themsleves out.
I think Microsoft will continue their shit, get even greedier and will drive everyone away without the government's help. Actually they'd probably bury themselves quicker without the little slap on the wrist to slow them down and give us time to get acclimated to the ever increasing levels of pain.
Hit the cell owner over the head, grab phone, hold phone away from you, apply duct tape, use phone? Am I missing something here?
"The problem with general public license advocates is that they don't understand that people need the opportunity to commercialize software,"
No the problem is two-faced capitalists who try to rewrite one of the basic laws of capitalism over and over again. I'm referring to the law of supply and demand. The law of supply and demand is pretty simple; if demand is high (or supply is low) then the price goes up. If demand is low (or supply is high) the price goes down. Trying to artificially inflate the value of an OS that's inferior in some (but not all) ways to a free OS is wrong and stupid. This is exactly what Mundie is trying to do. As the Linux/UnixX desktop becomes more polished the demand for Windows will decrease. This is a fact and it's a fact that Microslough needs to learn and move on if they want to compete in the future.
I'm all for making a buck and I'm all for commercial software. I'm not for commercial software companies who whine when they're getting their butts kicked. I've seen a number of posts from professional developers saying "yeah mundie is stupid, at the OS level it should be free, but not on the application level." Well they're just as wrong as Mundie. If a bunch of free software developers develop a Diablo 3 or 4 play-alike then should Blizzard try to compete? They're certainly free to try but I doubt they'll fare very well.
If I write a time/material/billing app and keep it closed and don't keep up with the quality of open source alternatives should I expect to get $10,000 a crack? I think not, in fact I'd be better off throwing my code and skills in the open source version and charging $500 to install it for my clients. Now if my closed version kicks the open source version's ass then I might be able to get away with it, but sooner or later I'll fall behind or both apps will achieve such a level of perfection that they'll be indistinguishable from each other. Taking this a step further: If the open source version gets the ultimate installer that even a windows user could operate, then I can't even charge the $500 for installing it. We're all literally working ourselves out of a job. I for one am happy to do that.
Surely his comment about the "alternative" was taken out of context... no one could be that stupid/arrogant could they?
G
It makes sense for most of the old games to be donated to the public domain or at least re-licensed as freeware. All the arguments that the publishers have against abondonware are weak:
We'll lose sales on new games. Well that's just s stupid argument. If I aquire an old copy of Duke Nuke Em and play it out do you think I'll be less likely or more likely to shell out $50 for the new one? I think more, much more. How many times are demo versons of games made?
They want to release a cheap game collection... well yeah those are the games that I buy.. Knowing they're not all that likely to even run on my new Athlon without some pain. But if that particular game that I've been missing for all these years was included I might buy their gamepack and work at getting it to run. So they get a half point for ths argument, but it is going to cost them some bucks to update the game engines to make them work on new hardware.
They want to start a comic book based on a game character. So start one... they might not have that copyright as locked up as before, but they certainly have at least as good a right as I do to use that character.
The bottom line is: they have the right to be stupid. They have the right to lock up that old code and keep us from playing their games. They don't have the right to break any warranties. We have the right not to buy their new games if we don't like how they treat us with their old games. We don't have the right to steal their old code. We don't have the right to act like we're heros for stealing their code. If you're going to steal then at the very least admit you're stealing.
Now I've got to get back to Morpheus to liberate some more music.
Wire/coax are cheap if you value your time at all. Don't bother with phone wire, use cat5e for phone lines you get more options this way. Run 2 coax and 3 cat5e to way more places than you ever think you'll want to, but you don't have to actually hook them up right away or ever. Use Panduit Mini-com jacks that can be removed from the cover without unwiring them and just terminate what seems reasonable at the present time. Put blank covers on those places that you're sure you'll never need anything and roll the wires up in the box... you will need to connect something to at least one of those ridiculous wires sometime. I put a cat5 jack out on my front porch last summer so I could sit on the porch swing with my laptop. Will run one out by the pool next summer.
I like to buy different color cat5s and hook up the blues to ethernet, the reds to phone but leave the yellows dark. Everything should be a star (including security/smoke alarms) and should terminate in a nice large closet that has a big piece of plywood on the wall.
Use cat5 e for security wiring too. Even though a lot of security systems require their circuit to be wired in series this can still be accomplished at the head and you may want change our your security system at some point. You waste a lot of wire this way but you've got more options. Run 3 cat5e and 2 coax to the detached garage, but if it's very far away run a 4 "conductor" fiber out there too and don't forget to run a string or two in that conduit. Even if it's not so far, the fiber won't pass the electrical potential difference that can occur when lighting strikes close to your garage and you'll save your hubs/switches.
I've done a lot of this and even by being anal as hell there's always some place I miss. It's not at all unreasonable to put a mile of cat5 in a small house. Also buy as many boxes of wire as your biggest run (most conductors). That way you can run all the wires simultaneously and they'll look better when you're done. Don't pull on the cat5 very hard at all.... if it's stuck get off the ladder or off the floor and gently massage it into place.
If you stub a conduit up into the attic make damn sure you insulate and seal the top of it. In a factory I wired, the electricians had graciously ran conduit from the attic down all the walls to metal boxes. They left the conduit sticking up through the insulation in the attic so I could stuff/fish my wires down them. They didn't cut them to length up in the attic some were just through the top plate and others were 18" above the insulation. The metal conduit acted like a chimney in the winter, warm air rose up the conduit, hit the cold attic, water condensed, ran back down the conduit and shorted/corroded about 150 jacks (Panuit mini-coms BTW). Ports on the on the phone system began to blow and I couldn't figure out what the hell was happening. Fortunately one of the metal boxes got crushed by a fork truck and I discovered the corroded jack. Upon replacing most of the jacks in the building water actually ran out of some of the boxes when I pulled the covers off.
In a home where romex electrical wiring is allowed, non-plenum wire should be just fine. Romex is the 12-2 14-3 etc wire that is inside a flatish molded plastic covering. if your building codes won't allow romex and you're house has conduit you better buy the plenum.
A big UPS in the head is always nice... maybe you should have your electrician run a few "home" runs of 110V to some color coded electrical jacks to get that UPS power up to some of the more deleicate and expensive electronics equipment in your house. Have your electrician put 110V recepticals and light sockets on many of the junction boxes in the attic and crawl/basement... when you have to add a phone line that you forgot you'll be grateful for the handy power and light and it's so inexpensive to do before-hand.
Run a couple of power home runs to the entertainment center area.... you won't need the amperage but you'll get cleaner power for the tivo.
That is all.
No Really that's it.
Congress has also declared that locations and schedules for the following: shopping malls, highschool football schedules, church services, boyscout jamborees and tupperware parties shall not be given out to the general public in an attempt to keep us all safe. Anyone wishing to find out any of the aforementioned top secret info should register with the thought police to get clearance.
Also a number of subjects are now considered dangerous and contraban. Anyone caught teaching or even knowing about electricity, metal shop, chemistry, automechanics, water purification and/or piloting an airplane shall be lobotomizd unless proper security clearance can be obtained. That is all.
According to a reliable source "the people who run Slashdot have run off to join the circus". This reporter thinks not, but is troubled by the lamest and most totally boring lineup that he's seen in his years of reading slashdot. Let's investigate:
Book Reviews: The Monk and the Riddle (really boring)
Book Reviews: The Root of All Evil (pretty darn boring)
Book Reviews: Knights of the Limits (wow inhumanly boring)
Developers: Perl6 for Mortals (Glorified Book Ad but decent article and some conversation)
BSD: GNU-Darwin Goes Beta (For Mac fans... that's like what, 1% if the slashdot crowd?)
Developers: Carl Sassenrath Talks About REBOL
NAFPL (Not Another Friggin Programing Language)
Developers: Self-Improving Systems (Better this would be a boring story on msot days)
Developers: Advanced Filesystem Implementors Guide Continues (Actually pretty good stuff here too bad it's been up since Oct 27)
Developers: Mozilla Bug Week (Been there, done that it's coming along nicely and has been for decades it seems) No disrespect to the mozilla ppl but this has been news for nerds too many times and has been up since.... you guessed it Oct 27
So where is everyone? Is there really no news for nerds or has Slashdot gone fishin'? Inquiring minds want to know.
G
Sure.... why is it that no one ever talks about an infinite number of big bangs occuring constantly? Our big bang might just be a fairly small one compared to the one that happened last night a gazillion miles away. Our little "universe" could simply be a little puddle of matter in our little side street of the real infinite universe.
I guess I hadn't thought through the repercussions of segmenting the Internet. Once this door gets opened, the "classless" Internet than we now enjoy would be destroyed. That might be the idea-killer I've been half-expecting expecting, but you've misunderstood my basic idea (my fault)
.greg domain into my dns server and serving up websites etc. I do this kind of stuff all the time on pretty much all my internal networks (you're encouraged not use a real tld) and have played around with it on my dns server on the net as well. As long as you point your machine to my dns server or copy my zone files into your dns you can see all of the (non-existant) .greg domain.
.clean could grow large enough using this underhanded method, then sites like howstuffworks.com, nasa.gov, disney.com, nickjr.com, webster.com and on and on would feel the desire to create .clean versions of their sites voluntarily and good useful content (IMO which is the crux of the problem) would be available.
Your comment about the Boy Scouts was interesting. That's almost arguing my point... but apparently I didn't make my plan clear. There are ways around ICANN and I'm not naive enough to think ICANN would allow something like this to happen without their control. I'm not talking about the US friggin government doing this at all.
This whole idea came about when I discovered secret parts of the internet whose tlds are served on the sly by various groups running their own dns servers. See http://www.alternic.org/ for example. It occurred to me that a group with decidedly different goals (than most of the underground tlds) could bypass ICANN altogether. Once their importance caught on they could become legitimate and recognized by, but not necessarily governed by, the people at ICANN or the US gov.
There's nothing stopping me from putting a
If
At first I totally agreed that public PCs should not be censored in any way. But once we drill down through my knee jerk reaction the picture changes. The definition of censor according to Webster "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable". Obviously censorship is a bad thing, however I expect the librarian to discourage visits to goatsex.cx . Ok... so I guess I do encourage censorship on public PCs and I bet you do too in this context. Not only do I encourage censorship at the library I'm more willing to let one lowly underpaid library aid make the decisions as to what's appropriate rather than a group of people who've setup some kind of by-law/guideline/mission statement/whatever. Yes I agree, I trust that person more than I trust Uncle Sam but not much.
I'm very much opposed to censoring the Internet and am simply trying to find an alternative that will calm those who're truly concerned about it and keep myself and like-minded people happy. I thought I had found that middle ground which would satisfy both factions and am now not nearly as convinced that I am right.
It would be nice to be able to let my kids roam the net whenever they want without worry. It would also be nice to let them run around the neighborhood way past dark playing kick the can like I used to do, but that's no longer possible in my area of the country either. Now does this desire to be worry-free make me a lazy person or a bad parent? Only I can decide that for myself.
G
If the kids group has control over the tld and the whois for the domain they simply pull the plug on the offenders. As far as being a parent.. I am, and I'm amazed how a simple search for Barney (Thank God she's outgrown that stage) can lead one to very interesting places. There should be nothing stopping the catholic church from doing the same thing and setting up .catholic too. If you're French and want the nude pics of your beach outing then you can't post them on .clean because those nude pics don't follow the rules of .clean. Do the French watch US movies? Do they pay attention to the movie rating system or do they have their own or do they care at all? If they don't care then why bother getting a .clean site to inform/entertain the uptight American kids. They probably wouldn't be interested.
.clean tld would be a much smaller subset of the real internet and totally optional. I wouldn't bother getting .clean versions of most of my sites nor would most people. If you don't like the rules then don't bother or start your own. The idea that we can only have a few tlds most controled by ICANN is stupid anyway.
.clean club then don't, no one cares.
The
I agree it's not possible, or even ethical to attempt to censor or rank the Internet, but to create subsets of the internet that have to follow the rules is reasonable IMO.
This be a parent thing pisses me off.... I want my daughter to be able to explore and stumble across new and interesting concepts while not worrying about her ending up on screwingcorpses.com. Her exploration should be a solitary one that doesn't involve me or my wife. If I direct her searches and surfing habits then I'm going to fall into a patern that creates a little clone of myself not an educated and interesting person who follows her own path and learns what she wants to learn.
"Any censoring body that does not derive its power from the Congress is by default illegitemate and illegal."
Oh BS... how many clubs are in the world that have rules that are unconstituional, silly and stupid. It's not illegal, it's a friggin club. If you don't want to join the
A Non profit group, preferably some kids group, becomes the registrar for a new top level domain: .clean. If you want to register slashdot.clean you must follow the rules and you can only link to other .clean sites. Everyone builds the ability into the their browsers/OS the ability to limit visiting domains that are .clean only. Ftp downloads are not allowed. Anyone impersonating a .clean domain get's in trouble.
.clean domains and the kids group could run the dns for the entire domain. Disney and all the biggies would put forth the effort to make their sites .clean compliant, others would create .clean versions of their existing sites and others could care less.
.clean domain and create a .clean ver of my site and no one says you have to limit your PC to .clean only domains. ISP's could opt to only allow .clean stuff through their systems as added security.
.clean site and free for non profits. This kids group has .clean cops who investigate .clean infractions and remove any violators from the .clean domain using the proceeds from the business/commercial entities that pay for the .clean privlege.
.clean dns, point it to a gay bondage site I get in big big trouble.
.g .pg .pg13 .r
Uncertified ISP's could be banned from serving dns for
No one says I have to opt in to the
Make it expensive for business to get a
It's not censorship, no one has to do it. If I illegaly serve
you could even make it based one
And best of all..... I still get to look at porn.
G
No it's bandwidth here....
Their method is still limited to the speed of light... They're using a laser to "connect" the two hunks of matter. However they're saying they can transfer the state of trilions of hunks of matter at near light speed. That's serious bandwidth with some darn fine decent latency.
G
My Dad replaced all the birch doors in his house with oak... I used the old (nice birch) doors to make my desk/entertainment center in my last apartment. I attached a second door under the desktop with 2 2x4's offset to make a 6' long keyboard/mouse shelf. I cut the bi-fold doors and mad an attached bookshelf out of them. Total cost $5 for the 2X4" and a bout $2 in drywall screws.
Xwindows, Xwindows and more Xwindows. I'm amazed at the untapped potential Xwindows/Xfree has for networked applications. Why is there not a decent GPLed Xwindows server (should be client IMHO) for Microsoft Windows. Screw ASP Java/script even PHP do it with Xwindows. Build into every .NETtish Xwindows app the ability to save locally and or remotely and Microsoft/Sun and the rest could just go get screwed.
I've played around with VNC awhile in an attempt to so this but it isn't designed to do what I'm talking about. It sends a picture of the screen... no good, we need to cache stuff the desktop background, icons etc locally and just pass commands that say (use Greg's background #1 and icon set #7 and let the local PC draw that stuff. Any app that deals with text or numbers could run over a 56K modem no sweat. I know this is possible.... think of Quake... there's a helluvalot going on but only a few bytes get sent across the wire to keep everyone synched up and fraggin.
Imagine a world where you subscribe to a KDE or Gnome desktop running on the local ISP's server with X Office and a few other kickass apps.
True networked applications that would let me start writing a letter, start a quote, fillout an invoice, or whatever at work, go home and pick up right where I left off is what I want.
Microsoft really does inovate... They just twist their inovations to make them money and not help the end user. Instead of playing catchup to Microsoft's glitter, this could be the killer system that puts them in their place. Unfortunately I'm too dim to write something like this.
G
What a trip... my Mom used to one helluva typist. My Dad is a real inteligent, mechanically inclined guy with a bad attitiude towards computers. I built them a Pentium 233 running 98. I teach people how to use computers almost daily but wan't prepared for this! My Mom looked like someone who has very limited use of her right arm due to some accident years ago. You know someone who's arm is withered and curled up. She had her tounge stuck out, her eyes were rolling and she was leaning into the mouse. Fortunately she didn't start drooling. She just couldn't mouse! My Dad couldn't hunt and peck nearly as fast as my 4 year old, but he could operate the mouse fairly well. So they started working the computer together, my Mom typing while my Dad operated the mouse. Of course this led to a fairly serious argument right off the bat and I threw my hands up in disgust. They're 56 and 53 (years old) so it's not like they're really old or anything. Don't assume anything and don't forget those little things that we all take for granted aren't inborn. My parents have very high IQ's and are well respected.
BTW My Dad lost interest (big waste of time INO) and my Mom has become very proficient all on her own.
G