For a few months now, I've been booting into LinuxPPC or MacOS as it suits my mood, and I'm pretty happy with it. But there's no way I can format my MacOS partitions and run Linux alone. I'm going to be dual booting for a long time to come.
I have to admit that I never used Linux much until then, but I'd been working professionally on Solaris for years (so flame me to a crisp, dear Slashdotters). I was excitedly looking forward to Linux, and have found it exhilerating. I've never had so much powerful software on a single installation working with Solaris, and some programs seem to run faster on my 300 Mhz PowerMac 6500 than on many Sun machines. Linux also seems to be making better use of the hardware than MacOS does, as well.
But there is no way I could dispense with MacOS now, probably not ever. Although I recognize that support for peripheral hardware under Linux has gotten very good over the years, it's not even close to meeting my needs. I have a Sagem Spiga for networking, an ISDN TA that runs under the Geoport protocol. It's not supported under Linux, and may never be, so I have no networking under Linux (try to imagine that). Sooner or later I'll have to shell out some $$ for a new solution. I still haven't figured out how to get my Epson 600 color printer to work (the LinuxPPC Faq-o-matic allegedly has a solution, but it does nothing for me). And I don't have the first idea how to get my scanner and CD recorder working under Linux.
None of this is ever a problem with MacOS. You pop in the CD, install the driver, and you're done.
LinuxPPC is also simply lacking where some of my software needs are concerned. Just this week I formatted and printed a stack of announcements with QuarkXPress; I couldn't even consider such a project with Linux. And while word processing apps for Linux are getting better, they still can't compete with the options available for MacOS.
I can understand Slashdotters passionately supporting Linux over MacOS. Believe me, I'm on your side (despite what I've said). Linux is the future and I'm glad I'm on board. But it's far from the point where it can supplant MacOS on my machine. I need both.
I found the C API to be very well documented, and the examples I found on the web were fairly concice and illustrative.
Then could you share with us where on the web you have found useful documentation for the C API? I sure would like to find such a thing, and do not believe that it exists until someone proves otherwise. The part of the API spec in the online manual that are finished are fine; but there are very large and important areas that are not covered at all. In some places, the author evidently did not get past his outline (here's an example).
This is a gap that evidently needs to be filled in by the book.
Why anyone would want to burden their server with modules written in Perl is beyond me though.
I have written an Apache module in C and quite a few handlers in mod_perl, and the advantage of mod_perl is just as the same as any Perl programming over C -- you get a lot more done a lot more quickly. I can get a handler done in mod_perl in an hour that would probably take me all day if I wrote it in C. A C module forces you to spend too much time memory management, string twiddling and core-dumping, and Perl is a great relief from all that.
To be sure, sometimes you need to squeeze every last bit of speed out of your software, and that's when you probably need C instead of Perl. That's why I wrote the Apache module. But if you need to program to the Apache API in a hurry, mod_perl's the thing.
Can anyone think of any innovative product to come from Linux?
If you're posing this question to suggest that Linux is no better than M$, then you're missing the point. Linux doesn't have a "Freedon to Innovate" site up in which they are asking you to write your Congressman, nor is anyone involved in Linux invoking the word "innovate" in some kind of PR campaign.
There may be any number of original ideas implemented in the Linux kernel, but the whole idea of developing a Unix kernel in open source is not to create something "innovative". On the contrary, the idea is to build upon the successful concepts underlying an OS that has proven itself over the past thirty years. What you need most from a kernel is stability, and Linux provides it, by employing technologies whose reliability is well established.
In contrast we have M$, trumpeting something about "innovation". And as others have pointed out, this is outrageous dounblethink, because M$ has never innovated any significant technology. However commercially successful some of their products may have been, they were, with no exception I know of, bought, copied or "embraced and extended".
When M$ speaks of "innovation", what they really mean is the ability to bundle software, such as the Explorer, with their operating system, and to do so without any legal penalties. Their argument in court and in public has been that this bundling was "innovation". In truth, it was a violation of a standing consent decree and of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, specifically designed to drive Netscape out of the market. So now they have to color their illegal act as "innovation" and beg Congress and the public for sympathy.
For the second time now, I have attempted to submit a comment at Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" site, to tell them exactly what I think about MS, innovation and fair competition (to summarize, it makes my blood boil when they claim to support any such thing).
Every time I hit the button to submit my comment, I get an HTTP error as a response! Now that is truly symbolic of everything about Microsoft.
I wonder if they some AI at the other end, which detects whether the comment was negative, and if so generates a phony error, so they can pretend they never got it.
I have to agree with you. It's certainly not obvious that these codes are one-time pads, because you have to get the pad, securely, to your recipient somehow. Obviously, they can't easily get information to their recipients, or else they wouldn't need to broadcast to them this way.
I'm guessing that it's some kind of stream cipher. With a stream cipher, you just start with a key and go from there as long as you need to. Some good stream ciphers can be decoded with pen and paper, and I would guess that these spooks aren't able to carry around little computers or code books. And the spook agencies have been using stream ciphers for many decades now, they probably have some very good ones.
BTW, I've heard these stations on shortwave myself, ever since the seventies. With all the whirr and buzz I had on my cheap shortwave sets as a kid, it sounded real spooky. Wouldn't want to hear it any other way.
... Reagan's was the first campaign to effectively use the TV medium, primarily because he was an actor.
Not Reagan. The first presidential campaigner who made effective use of TV was Kennedy (briefly mentioned by Katz). It was around 1960 that US households had just become more or less saturated with TV sets, and Kennedy's campaign was the first to use TV advertising extensively.
It didn't hurt that Kennedy himself was fairly talented in that medium, not to mention that he was young and good-looking, especially compared to sweaty, jowly Nixon.
I hereby claim that the word "the" is a trademark, and I own it.
Now don't get all upset. I am a reasonable person and will not place excessive burdens on your use of the®. If you would like to include the® in your essays, documents, letters, program comments (and any other linguistic medium), I will make it very easy for you to obtain a license, with little red tape and at a low cost. Normally you should estimate a $100 license fee for each appearance of the®, although I will perfectly happy to negotiate bulk rates for novelists, newspaper editors and others with special needs.
Can't you see how co-operative I am willing to be? How could anyone complain?
You must understand, of course, that the® law requires me to aggressively protect my intellectual property rights. If I allow casual uses of the® to go unchallenged, I may lose my trademark claims in the® future, and we don't want that to happen. Therefore, if I see any further unlicensed uses of the® in Slashdot or other media in the® future, I am afraid my lawyers will have to get in touch with the® authors. If things get too bad, I may have file charges against CmdrTaco. But no hard feelings of course, it's nothing personal; just business. Have a nice day.
Rob, thanks for your efforts at improving Slashdot.
Here's a problem I've noticed, and I'm afraid I don't know a good solution. Moderation tends to favor the early posts. There is a tendency to over-moderate the first responses to an article, while good and bad responses a hundred items down don't get moderated up or down, as they should be. It's clear why this happens -- moderators evaluate what they see, and they usually see the earlier posts and not the later ones.
I don't know what in the world to do about it. You can hardly randomize the posts as seen by the moderators, because they could never follow threads that way. And you can't make everybody wait until all the posts or in before there's any moderation, or else moderation would be of no use at all.
Nevertheless, it's the biggest problem I see with Slashdot moderation. If anyone has a brilliant idea, post it.
Well I hate to tell you, but the experiences I am reporting here are from using LaTeX, not TeX. Yes, LaTeX is in many ways easier to use than TeX, but it still can be difficult to get something right. Especially so if you're writing a technical text and have to get the formatting of formulae, tables, equations and an index just right.
To repeat, I greatly respect LaTeX and I think that Don Knuth is near unto God. May he live forever. But I cannot agree that WYSIWYG should be wholly discarded for markup languages.
Can't say that I agree. I respect TeX a great deal, and I've used it for publication-quality technical papers. There is certainly no better tool for that task.
But the experience of learning TeX and getting a paper done on deadline with it can be intensely frustrating. Writing a paper with TeX is like programming -- you spend a great deal of your time debugging, chasing down errors that at first are mystifying and enraging. Finding out what the "invalid sequence" is (usually many lines above the place where TeX identifies the error) can be enormously time-consuming and demoralizing.
I like to program, and I like to write texts. But when I want to write texts, I just want to write a text. I don't want to be forced to write a program in order to get it done. The reason I have a computer is to let it solve most of those problems for me.
If I've understood it correctly, smart cards at terminals are intended as a medium for storing secret keys. They're not really supposed to be more secure in any cryptographic sense, but they're expected to be more easily understood by naive users. A lot of people don't know what a secret key is and how you're supposed to manage it, and they don't like long, complex passphrases and tend to choose weak ones. But everybody is familiar with a credit card, and everyone knows that you're not supposed to lose one; so the effect in the end is that people will tend to be more conscientious about key management (although they don't realize that that's what they're doing).
That's the theory, so far as I understand it. Of course, if somebody does swipe your card, they could shop up a department store on the Internet before you get a chance to report the theft. Then again, it's still pretty hard to benefit from a stolen card, because the goods have to be delivered somewhere, so it might be possible to trace the thief by finding out where the stuff gets sent.
I think that moderation is working very well on Slashdot. It isn't perfect, but it makes Slashdot much more readable than most of Usenet.
If anything, I would suggest that moderation scores be more fine-grained, say by running from -10 to +100 rather than about -1 to 2 as it is now. In the current system, you see much fewer posts when you raise your threshhold by just one unit, usually excluding far more than I would care to leave out. The effect is that I never adjust my threshhold. I would be much more likely to take advantage of it if I could set it to, say, +40 out of +100.
M$'s explanation may very well be true. I certainly wouldn't put it past M$ and the NSA to buildback doors into cryptography software, but it certainly hasn't been proven that the "NSAKEY" is anything of the kind.
If M$ just claims that there's no back door, then the public has no way of evaluating the truth of the claim. There's only one way to settle the question once and for all, and that is by releasing the source code.
I'm surprised that Katz didn't bring up open source projects, which are largely driven by ethical considerations. He seems to see matters of ethics being largely ignored, but I think it's hardly that one-sided, and open source is one of the main reasons for that.
BTW, on another topic, I am very tired of all the Katz flamers that turn up every time he contributes an essay. To be sure, no one is required to agree with him -- after all, I'm expressing a bit of disagreement myself. But the idiots who can't think of anything better to say than "Shut up" and "I hate you" are contributing less than nothing to the discussion.
Why aren't these people being moderated down to negative infinity? If they can't be moderated into oblivion, then I fail to see any usefulness of moderation at all.
Woe is me, for in my religion, not just devils, but also penguins, flying windows, half-eaten apples and big blue letters are all harbingers of EVIL! I wail and gnash my teeth! I can't use a computer at all! They've all got the devil in them!
Does this patent apply in Germany? I wouldn't think so.
Unisys evidently does think so. Look at the first paragraph of their LZW FAQ -- they assert patents in the US, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.
In Germany, at any rate (I don't know about anywhere else), the preferred method for counting hits on Web pages is an Apache module that generates a 1x1 transparent GIF on the page to be measured. This helps bypass many of the problems of miscounting hits due to caching and proxying, because browsers usually have image auto-load turned on and do not cache CGI output, so that the hit on the GIF is measured on the server side every time the page is loaded; and yet the bandwidth required is very low.
The results of this procedure are managed by an independent organization called IVW (you'll have to be able to read German). All of the major commercial Web sites in Germany participate -- you can view last month's ratings there. These statistics determine where millions of marks will go -- they are like the Nielsen ratings of the commercial Web in Germany, informing advertisers about the impact of a site and hence how much a site can charge for banner space.
Unisys' attempt at gold-digging could have staggering consequences in Germany. Are they going to demand $5000 from every major commercial Web site in the country? Or are they going after the developers of the hit-counting software? If so, I'd suspect that they would view them as one of their "case-by-case" cases and argue that they get more than $5000, say a cool million or two, or maybe ten. Since Unisys is going so far as to threaten Joe Blow for the GIFs on his personal Web page, I wouldn't put it past them to shoot for the stars if they find out that GIFs are being used this way. This could have the makings of an international incident.
If I understand this correctly, Unisys doesn't expect you to get a license just for using GIF images, but rather if you develop software that includes LZW compression technology. So if you write a software package that produces GIFs with LZW, Unisys thinks you have to have a license. For this reason, Tom Boutell was forced to remove the GIF-generating functionality from the gd library.
I hardly think that somebody is flattering himself if he says he's a "pseudo" anything. Sounds more like self-deprecation to me. What if some Slashdot contributor called himself a pseudo-geek or a pseudo-hacker? Is that a compliment? Suppose I said that your post is full of pseudo-intelligence. Wouldn't you take that as an insult?
Taco is telling us that he sees both sides of this story. On the one hand, he wants to be able to get ahold of someone like Linus. On the other hand, he wants journalists to leave him alone, particularly the clueless ones. That is entirely appropriate commentary.
one tip, malda:... at least learn to freakin' spell. ok?
And then you top it all off with a spelling flame! Sheesh!
It may have only been available on CNN International. I searched a bit and can't find any transcript or link about the Linus' appearance. The page about the Q&A program doesn't mention earlier broadcasts.
Too bad they don't post transcripts; it seems like it's the kind of show for which transcripts would be valuable. Maybe they'll send you one if you ask.
I was channel surfing the other day and was amazed to find myself looking at Linus Torvalds on CNN's Q+A program. It was the first time I heard his voice or saw a picture of him that wasn't a still.
Somebody tell the ZDNet guy that not only did he make himself available to the media, he did it in a format specifically designed for fielding as many questions as possible.
If I were Linus, I'd get the receptionist to start telling people that he'll receive messages, except for those coming from Zipf-Davies.
Slashdot Mirror
For a few months now, I've been booting into LinuxPPC or MacOS as it suits my mood, and I'm pretty happy with it. But there's no way I can format my MacOS partitions and run Linux alone. I'm going to be dual booting for a long time to come.
I have to admit that I never used Linux much until then, but I'd been working professionally on Solaris for years (so flame me to a crisp, dear Slashdotters). I was excitedly looking forward to Linux, and have found it exhilerating. I've never had so much powerful software on a single installation working with Solaris, and some programs seem to run faster on my 300 Mhz PowerMac 6500 than on many Sun machines. Linux also seems to be making better use of the hardware than MacOS does, as well.
But there is no way I could dispense with MacOS now, probably not ever. Although I recognize that support for peripheral hardware under Linux has gotten very good over the years, it's not even close to meeting my needs. I have a Sagem Spiga for networking, an ISDN TA that runs under the Geoport protocol. It's not supported under Linux, and may never be, so I have no networking under Linux (try to imagine that). Sooner or later I'll have to shell out some $$ for a new solution. I still haven't figured out how to get my Epson 600 color printer to work (the LinuxPPC Faq-o-matic allegedly has a solution, but it does nothing for me). And I don't have the first idea how to get my scanner and CD recorder working under Linux.
None of this is ever a problem with MacOS. You pop in the CD, install the driver, and you're done.
LinuxPPC is also simply lacking where some of my software needs are concerned. Just this week I formatted and printed a stack of announcements with QuarkXPress; I couldn't even consider such a project with Linux. And while word processing apps for Linux are getting better, they still can't compete with the options available for MacOS.
I can understand Slashdotters passionately supporting Linux over MacOS. Believe me, I'm on your side (despite what I've said). Linux is the future and I'm glad I'm on board. But it's far from the point where it can supplant MacOS on my machine. I need both.
I found the C API to be very well documented, and the examples I found on the web were fairly concice and illustrative.
Then could you share with us where on the web you have found useful documentation for the C API? I sure would like to find such a thing, and do not believe that it exists until someone proves otherwise. The part of the API spec in the online manual that are finished are fine; but there are very large and important areas that are not covered at all. In some places, the author evidently did not get past his outline (here's an example).
This is a gap that evidently needs to be filled in by the book.
Why anyone would want to burden their server with modules written in Perl is beyond me though.
I have written an Apache module in C and quite a few handlers in mod_perl, and the advantage of mod_perl is just as the same as any Perl programming over C -- you get a lot more done a lot more quickly. I can get a handler done in mod_perl in an hour that would probably take me all day if I wrote it in C. A C module forces you to spend too much time memory management, string twiddling and core-dumping, and Perl is a great relief from all that.
To be sure, sometimes you need to squeeze every last bit of speed out of your software, and that's when you probably need C instead of Perl. That's why I wrote the Apache module. But if you need to program to the Apache API in a hurry, mod_perl's the thing.
On the contray, CmdrTaco just posted the press release, explaining that he has to keep his trap shut about it now. Go refresh your main /. page.
So I suggest that this thread not be continued here.
Can anyone think of any innovative product to come from Linux?
If you're posing this question to suggest that Linux is no better than M$, then you're missing the point. Linux doesn't have a "Freedon to Innovate" site up in which they are asking you to write your Congressman, nor is anyone involved in Linux invoking the word "innovate" in some kind of PR campaign.
There may be any number of original ideas implemented in the Linux kernel, but the whole idea of developing a Unix kernel in open source is not to create something "innovative". On the contrary, the idea is to build upon the successful concepts underlying an OS that has proven itself over the past thirty years. What you need most from a kernel is stability, and Linux provides it, by employing technologies whose reliability is well established.
In contrast we have M$, trumpeting something about "innovation". And as others have pointed out, this is outrageous dounblethink, because M$ has never innovated any significant technology. However commercially successful some of their products may have been, they were, with no exception I know of, bought, copied or "embraced and extended".
When M$ speaks of "innovation", what they really mean is the ability to bundle software, such as the Explorer, with their operating system, and to do so without any legal penalties. Their argument in court and in public has been that this bundling was "innovation". In truth, it was a violation of a standing consent decree and of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, specifically designed to drive Netscape out of the market. So now they have to color their illegal act as "innovation" and beg Congress and the public for sympathy.
No one involved in Linux needs this ploy.
For the second time now, I have attempted to submit a comment at Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" site, to tell them exactly what I think about MS, innovation and fair competition (to summarize, it makes my blood boil when they claim to support any such thing).
Every time I hit the button to submit my comment, I get an HTTP error as a response! Now that is truly symbolic of everything about Microsoft.
I wonder if they some AI at the other end, which detects whether the comment was negative, and if so generates a phony error, so they can pretend they never got it.
I just got the mail from NSI. There is no mention of a free Email account, and in fact there is no section 3.
I have to agree with you. It's certainly not obvious that these codes are one-time pads, because you have to get the pad, securely, to your recipient somehow. Obviously, they can't easily get information to their recipients, or else they wouldn't need to broadcast to them this way.
I'm guessing that it's some kind of stream cipher. With a stream cipher, you just start with a key and go from there as long as you need to. Some good stream ciphers can be decoded with pen and paper, and I would guess that these spooks aren't able to carry around little computers or code books. And the spook agencies have been using stream ciphers for many decades now, they probably have some very good ones.
BTW, I've heard these stations on shortwave myself, ever since the seventies. With all the whirr and buzz I had on my cheap shortwave sets as a kid, it sounded real spooky. Wouldn't want to hear it any other way.
... Reagan's was the first campaign to effectively use the TV medium, primarily because he was an actor.
Not Reagan. The first presidential campaigner who made effective use of TV was Kennedy (briefly mentioned by Katz). It was around 1960 that US households had just become more or less saturated with TV sets, and Kennedy's campaign was the first to use TV advertising extensively.
It didn't hurt that Kennedy himself was fairly talented in that medium, not to mention that he was young and good-looking, especially compared to sweaty, jowly Nixon.
I hereby claim that the word "the" is a trademark, and I own it.
Now don't get all upset. I am a reasonable person and will not place excessive burdens on your use of the®. If you would like to include the® in your essays, documents, letters, program comments (and any other linguistic medium), I will make it very easy for you to obtain a license, with little red tape and at a low cost. Normally you should estimate a $100 license fee for each appearance of the®, although I will perfectly happy to negotiate bulk rates for novelists, newspaper editors and others with special needs.
Can't you see how co-operative I am willing to be? How could anyone complain?
You must understand, of course, that the® law requires me to aggressively protect my intellectual property rights. If I allow casual uses of the® to go unchallenged, I may lose my trademark claims in the® future, and we don't want that to happen. Therefore, if I see any further unlicensed uses of the® in Slashdot or other media in the® future, I am afraid my lawyers will have to get in touch with the® authors. If things get too bad, I may have file charges against CmdrTaco. But no hard feelings of course, it's nothing personal; just business. Have a nice day.
Rob, thanks for your efforts at improving Slashdot.
Here's a problem I've noticed, and I'm afraid I don't know a good solution. Moderation tends to favor the early posts. There is a tendency to over-moderate the first responses to an article, while good and bad responses a hundred items down don't get moderated up or down, as they should be. It's clear why this happens -- moderators evaluate what they see, and they usually see the earlier posts and not the later ones.
I don't know what in the world to do about it. You can hardly randomize the posts as seen by the moderators, because they could never follow threads that way. And you can't make everybody wait until all the posts or in before there's any moderation, or else moderation would be of no use at all.
Nevertheless, it's the biggest problem I see with Slashdot moderation. If anyone has a brilliant idea, post it.
Well I hate to tell you, but the experiences I am reporting here are from using LaTeX, not TeX. Yes, LaTeX is in many ways easier to use than TeX, but it still can be difficult to get something right. Especially so if you're writing a technical text and have to get the formatting of formulae, tables, equations and an index just right.
To repeat, I greatly respect LaTeX and I think that Don Knuth is near unto God. May he live forever. But I cannot agree that WYSIWYG should be wholly discarded for markup languages.
...one very good way to prevent the above would be to embed the shipping address in the card and then refuse to ship elsewhere.
Nah. What if you move?
Can't say that I agree. I respect TeX a great deal, and I've used it for publication-quality technical papers. There is certainly no better tool for that task.
But the experience of learning TeX and getting a paper done on deadline with it can be intensely frustrating. Writing a paper with TeX is like programming -- you spend a great deal of your time debugging, chasing down errors that at first are mystifying and enraging. Finding out what the "invalid sequence" is (usually many lines above the place where TeX identifies the error) can be enormously time-consuming and demoralizing.
I like to program, and I like to write texts. But when I want to write texts, I just want to write a text. I don't want to be forced to write a program in order to get it done. The reason I have a computer is to let it solve most of those problems for me.
If I've understood it correctly, smart cards at terminals are intended as a medium for storing secret keys. They're not really supposed to be more secure in any cryptographic sense, but they're expected to be more easily understood by naive users. A lot of people don't know what a secret key is and how you're supposed to manage it, and they don't like long, complex passphrases and tend to choose weak ones. But everybody is familiar with a credit card, and everyone knows that you're not supposed to lose one; so the effect in the end is that people will tend to be more conscientious about key management (although they don't realize that that's what they're doing).
That's the theory, so far as I understand it. Of course, if somebody does swipe your card, they could shop up a department store on the Internet before you get a chance to report the theft. Then again, it's still pretty hard to benefit from a stolen card, because the goods have to be delivered somewhere, so it might be possible to trace the thief by finding out where the stuff gets sent.
I think that moderation is working very well on Slashdot. It isn't perfect, but it makes Slashdot much more readable than most of Usenet.
If anything, I would suggest that moderation scores be more fine-grained, say by running from -10 to +100 rather than about -1 to 2 as it is now. In the current system, you see much fewer posts when you raise your threshhold by just one unit, usually excluding far more than I would care to leave out. The effect is that I never adjust my threshhold. I would be much more likely to take advantage of it if I could set it to, say, +40 out of +100.
M$'s explanation may very well be true. I certainly wouldn't put it past M$ and the NSA to buildback doors into cryptography software, but it certainly hasn't been proven that the "NSAKEY" is anything of the kind.
If M$ just claims that there's no back door, then the public has no way of evaluating the truth of the claim. There's only one way to settle the question once and for all, and that is by releasing the source code.
I'm surprised that Katz didn't bring up open source projects, which are largely driven by ethical considerations. He seems to see matters of ethics being largely ignored, but I think it's hardly that one-sided, and open source is one of the main reasons for that.
BTW, on another topic, I am very tired of all the Katz flamers that turn up every time he contributes an essay. To be sure, no one is required to agree with him -- after all, I'm expressing a bit of disagreement myself. But the idiots who can't think of anything better to say than "Shut up" and "I hate you" are contributing less than nothing to the discussion.
Why aren't these people being moderated down to negative infinity? If they can't be moderated into oblivion, then I fail to see any usefulness of moderation at all.
Woe is me, for in my religion, not just devils, but also penguins, flying windows, half-eaten apples and big blue letters are all harbingers of EVIL! I wail and gnash my teeth! I can't use a computer at all! They've all got the devil in them!
Does this patent apply in Germany? I wouldn't think so.
Unisys evidently does think so. Look at the first paragraph of their LZW FAQ -- they assert patents in the US, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.
Sure is embarassing when your dumb mistake is in the title of the post ...
In Germany, at any rate (I don't know about anywhere else), the preferred method for counting hits on Web pages is an Apache module that generates a 1x1 transparent GIF on the page to be measured. This helps bypass many of the problems of miscounting hits due to caching and proxying, because browsers usually have image auto-load turned on and do not cache CGI output, so that the hit on the GIF is measured on the server side every time the page is loaded; and yet the bandwidth required is very low.
The results of this procedure are managed by an independent organization called IVW (you'll have to be able to read German). All of the major commercial Web sites in Germany participate -- you can view last month's ratings there. These statistics determine where millions of marks will go -- they are like the Nielsen ratings of the commercial Web in Germany, informing advertisers about the impact of a site and hence how much a site can charge for banner space.
Unisys' attempt at gold-digging could have staggering consequences in Germany. Are they going to demand $5000 from every major commercial Web site in the country? Or are they going after the developers of the hit-counting software? If so, I'd suspect that they would view them as one of their "case-by-case" cases and argue that they get more than $5000, say a cool million or two, or maybe ten. Since Unisys is going so far as to threaten Joe Blow for the GIFs on his personal Web page, I wouldn't put it past them to shoot for the stars if they find out that GIFs are being used this way. This could have the makings of an international incident.
If I understand this correctly, Unisys doesn't expect you to get a license just for using GIF images, but rather if you develop software that includes LZW compression technology. So if you write a software package that produces GIFs with LZW, Unisys thinks you have to have a license. For this reason, Tom Boutell was forced to remove the GIF-generating functionality from the gd library.
I hardly think that somebody is flattering himself if he says he's a "pseudo" anything. Sounds more like self-deprecation to me. What if some Slashdot contributor called himself a pseudo-geek or a pseudo-hacker? Is that a compliment? Suppose I said that your post is full of pseudo-intelligence. Wouldn't you take that as an insult?
... at least learn to freakin' spell. ok?
Taco is telling us that he sees both sides of this story. On the one hand, he wants to be able to get ahold of someone like Linus. On the other hand, he wants journalists to leave him alone, particularly the clueless ones. That is entirely appropriate commentary.
one tip, malda:
And then you top it all off with a spelling flame! Sheesh!
It may have only been available on CNN International. I searched a bit and can't find any transcript or link about the Linus' appearance. The page about the Q&A program doesn't mention earlier broadcasts.
Too bad they don't post transcripts; it seems like it's the kind of show for which transcripts would be valuable. Maybe they'll send you one if you ask.
I was channel surfing the other day and was amazed to find myself looking at Linus Torvalds on CNN's Q+A program. It was the first time I heard his voice or saw a picture of him that wasn't a still.
Somebody tell the ZDNet guy that not only did he make himself available to the media, he did it in a format specifically designed for fielding as many questions as possible.
If I were Linus, I'd get the receptionist to start telling people that he'll receive messages, except for those coming from Zipf-Davies.