The original term for copyright was fair. Let a piece of work remain copyrighted for 14 years, and then let it fall into the public domain so that society can utilize what has been added to its culture.
Agreed.
It also put pressure on creative artists to not "rest on their laurels", but to actively make new and different things in their chosen field to contribute to society.
One word: Quality
Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components? Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money.
x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.
You can put the zoom control back on the toolbar by clicking Edit->Toolbar.
As far as I was aware, Gecko handles rendering (including Javascript) within itself, so javascript should functionally be no different in Mozilla or Galeon since the same lump of code is doing the job (I forget the name of the javascript engine Gecko uses). I use Galeon and I love it - I say good luck to the development team and don't give up, it's still *my* browser of choice.
...when we need clearchannel licenses to operate radios. Similar to the UK's radio/tv tax, only done by the one company that rightfully controls the entire radio band and has the right to tax it. In socialism, the government takes away freedoms. In democracy, companies take away freedoms. In a mix (the US), companies take away freedoms with government mandate.
We don't have a radio/tv tax. We have a "licence to receive radio transmissions". The money from licencing funds the BBC (I'm sure you've heard of them:).
In return, we get objective news, quality original programming and no fucking adverts. I for one think it's worth it and have no qualms about paying it. Recently, the UK government tried to take on the BBC over the whole WMD issue (our Colin Powell wannabe didn't like what they were saying about his "intelligence reports") - and the BBC won. The BBC were fair and they had evidence to support their claims.
How many mainstream media outlets in the US have had the bollocks to question the government over the whole Iraq issue? Maybe they would if they were funded by public money instead of corporations. I LOVE the BBC!:-)
Try
Dia - It's GPL and I've found it to be excellent for UML/Database Schemas and a damn site more intuitive than Visio. It's sort of like Visio meets the Gimp in terms of UI.
Ok, I don't like WebForms and I don't think.NET is upto much but come on! Web interfaces SUCK if you are wanting to create a rich environment for data input. I just spent 6 months doing a project to convert a crappy set of JSPs to Delphi because users hated the browser. GUIs offer hotkeys, popup menus, custom controls, datetime calendar controls, etc. etc. (BTW, does that make me a sharecropper? I develop free software for free platforms in my spare time, but I'm paid to write software in whatever the fuck my employer tells me to on *their* time)
Web applications generally take longer to develop as well. So what's wrong with GUIs?
Not everyone does though. My project
runs around 400 animal shelters across the US, UK and Australia. These people use it to run their organisations every day and would be lost without it (I get a lot of great feedback), yet how much have I earned to date through my donations page?
$50
From ONE user.
People are basically dishonest, and there's no point playing on conscience as I have found most people don't have one. My user base is famed for not having money (why I do it), but it's not like I haven't saved them lots is it?
Ah well, good job I'm not in it for the money. $50 is still a few (free) beers. As someone recently said, free software development is "more than a pizza, a lot less than a living".
I have a Mandrake 9.0 webserver, and as soon as I read this, I sshd into the box and just did:
urpmi --update apache
Oh, and Mandrake do not charge you for getting updates from them. They maintain a list of known FTP mirrors (which they don't run directly) for security patches/updates etc and you can just pick one from the MDK Control Center program.
I'd imagine there are plenty of other distros and platforms where it's this easy to patch your webserver (Gentoo and *BSD spring to mind).
(I also patched any programs I have sat on open ports just to make sure, including SSH, Postfix and imapd)
Please, if people are going to publish articles attempting to convert Windows users (what this is aimed at unless I've missed the point), please check your facts. I forgive the guy, he's new, but:
1. I can understand why Stallman bursts blood vessels, screaming it's GNU-LINUX dammit! The faster people are educated, the faster people will "get" the free software movement, the reasoning behind it and how it fits together.
2. Quanta+ and Screem are HTML editors - not web browsers.
3. Open Source/Free Software is licenced differently - it is *not* public domain. The author does not give up all rights to their software. You are just allowed to do more than you can with proprietary licences.
Stuff my karma, these endless "I'm rubbish with computers and I tried Linux for the first time..." articles are getting irritating now.
Don't use things because they are an "alternative" to Windows - use them because you have more control over your computer, understand what's going on and use your computer as a tool better, and more efficiently.
It's not about putting MS down (otherwise we are no better), it's about drawing attention through writing better software. The day is coming....
I personally use WineX for old Windows games, but stick to native Linux for newer ones - anything that isn't native I simply don't buy (I choose to vote with my wallet).
As for needing Windows, unfortunately, as a programmer I frequently get paid for writing software for Windows (you can only eat so much pride before you need some real food) - all I did was buy a crap low end box (P3 733, 256Mb RAM - cost me about £150), install Windows 2000 on it, run it headless with VNC and just control it remotely from Linux - perfect and all with free, open source software! (obviously excepting the Micro$oft bit but Win4Lin doesn't take away the need for that, does it?)
Win4Lin still sounds like a decent product - it just wouldn't suit me. My way, I keep the actual physical touching of a filthy Windows box to a minimum:)))
I am aware that Swing existed before 1.2, but I recall trying to get it working under Java 1.1.8 and it took eternity to start up (JVM's fault, not Swing), and it certainly ran like an absolute dog - far worse than it does since the invention of Hotspot and the 1.4 VMs/Class libraries with Swing optimisations.
Sorry if I offended you - I wasn't implying you didn't know what you were talking about, I just assumed you'd mixed AWT and Swing up.
Two words - "Java 2D", at least as far as user interfaces go. Before Java 2D, in the days of Java 1.1, the JVMs were slow, the garbage collector was slow and synchronous, the synchronization was slow - everything was slow. Drawing on the screen, however, was lightning fast because all of it was hardware accelerated. This meant that the user interface was very responsive, and that is what most users complain about (well, startup time too, which was also much smaller in 1.1). Try running Swing under JDK 1.1 - it's not even comparable to any recent JDKs - it's so responsive you can't tell it from a native UI.
What? I think you are referring to AWT, which used heavyweight peer widgets (on Linux, Motif, on Windows - good ol' Win API). Swing was not introduced until Java 1.2 - the reason you "can't tell it from a native UI" is because it WAS a native UI!
Swing uses the Window and Canvas parts of AWT to draw and manage the widgets all by itself in pure Java - hence the fact it runs slowly. This is not because Java is slow, but because it is drawing the primitives itself via Java2D (as you say) instead of taking advantage of hardware acceleration in the OS. This is also the reason Swing looks the same on any platform.
This is ALSO the reason that Swing works AWFULLY over a remote X port - because everything is sent as bitmaps instead of primitive drawing instructions to X.
I always wondered if it would be better to make Java2D draw with X primitives since there isn't much else out there in the UNIX world (that's used anyway), and include that pure Java X server implementation in the JRE for non-X users. This would make Swing superfast on *nix!
As for your other remark, I'm fairly sure that Java2D does not use any hardware acceleration whatsoever (otherwise you wouldn't have that ghastly Swing over X port problem). You need to use Java3D hooked up to OpenGL/DirectX to get that.
If it bothers you so much, you know that AWT is still there and usable in the latest JDK's, right?
The GCJ implementation of AWT seems to be nearly complete, which is pretty damn exciting - it uses GTK for the peer widgets and hopefully should be a fair bit faster than the Sun JDK!
Dunno about everyone else, but when I fire up my RTCW on Linux, I run it as a "game" user with no privileges.
Permissions are your friend! Whilst not unstoppable, it makes it a damn sight harder for untrusted code to break your system.
Windows has more sophisticated ACLs than *nix, so surely it would be possible to set up a similar game user with no access to the rest of the file system/registry. Why don't game installers do this by default on Windows to proactively try to prevent this type of hack? Why don't lazy Windows users do this themselves?
You know, I just followed my own link and discovered they aren't selling the satellite access any more (apart from the fact they've renamed) and are now doing standard wireless only.
Hey ho eh? What a plonker I feel about now:)
Here in the UK, a company called Tele2 (http://www.libertybroadband.co.uk/) provide satellite-based internet access. We use them at my office, as we have a large mill building, not quite close enough to a BT exchange to get ADSL.
We get 2Mbps synchronous access, with no contention from other customers, since each site gets their own satellite (and hence node).
I'd guess there must be someone offering something similar where you are?
The Matrix was FUN! The storyline was unoriginal, but still an appealing one (Riverworld anyone?), the effects were excellent, the dialogue ropey but quotable (important for cult films).
It was what I call a "switch your brain off and enjoy" flick.
Why do people have to over-analyse movies? The film was fun and a pleasure to watch, end of story.
This seems far too invasive. I too write free software, and I'm happy that users can see credits if they ask for them.
After all, almost all graphical applications have a "Help->About" menu crediting the authors of the software. Why not introduce a standard command line switch similar to --help/-? eg: --credit or something?
So if a user cares, they can ask for a list of everyone who worked on the software?
Every time mail is routed from one server to the next, the receiving server should 'stamp' the mail with the IP address of the sending server. That way, genuine mail has a valid sequence of IP addresses, and spam can be traced back to either the originator's IP, or the first mailserver to "lie" on the stamp.
What do you think it does right now? ALL mail servers stamp the IP address of each server in the chain, along with a date/time stamp and resolved hostname (where possible). Look at the header of any email you've ever received.
Most MTAs can be configured to disregard servers with no valid MX records (drops a lot of dial up abuse).
This is why spammers either use ephemeral dynamic IP addresses from dial up accounts, or proxy servers (the proxy does the job on behalf of the client y'see - "by proxy", so the mail's origin according to the relay is the proxy server).
Well, I was going to be the bigger man and leave this, but the rudeness of your post annoyed me somewhat.
Could I refer you to the RFC for the POP3 protocol: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt
Now, if you check the TOP command (required to retrieve the headers and a portion of the body), you'll find that it is OPTIONAL - ie. Not supported by all POP software (a quick scan of the web reveals quite a few packages without it - therefore it's POSSIBLE that some ISPs do not support it).
Do you know for certain that this is the method employed by KMail? Evolution for example offers filtering based on headers but still retrieves the entire mail before executing the filter.
I was merely pointing out that filtering mail AFTER your resources have already been wasted by the evil spammers defeats the object somewhat.
As for technologically impaired, I have worked professionally in the industry for the last 15 years, I code in every high level language there is, along with assembly for 5 chipsets and run a number of mail/web servers.
Ok, I take everyone's point here, but can I just say:
1. Cron jobs run as root anyway, so Read-Create access is academic.
2. There are a number of solutions to allowing the accounts read/write and the VPs read access. The simplest way is to use a cron job to mirror the resource and change the group to the VPs group with read only permissions for the group set.
Anyway, I think it's unfair to say categorically "You can't do that with UNIX" - you'll find there are few things you can't.
It just isn't as easy as Windows NT, and I agree - some provision should be made. I just don't think that people should go mad for ACLs without engaging brain first:)
Slashdot Mirror
The original term for copyright was fair. Let a piece of work remain copyrighted for 14 years, and then let it fall into the public domain so that society can utilize what has been added to its culture.
Agreed.
It also put pressure on creative artists to not "rest on their laurels", but to actively make new and different things in their chosen field to contribute to society.
One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components? Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.
You can put the zoom control back on the toolbar by clicking Edit->Toolbar.
As far as I was aware, Gecko handles rendering (including Javascript) within itself, so javascript should functionally be no different in Mozilla or Galeon since the same lump of code is doing the job (I forget the name of the javascript engine Gecko uses). I use Galeon and I love it - I say good luck to the development team and don't give up, it's still *my* browser of choice.
We don't have a radio/tv tax. We have a "licence to receive radio transmissions". The money from licencing funds the BBC (I'm sure you've heard of them
In return, we get objective news, quality original programming and no fucking adverts. I for one think it's worth it and have no qualms about paying it. Recently, the UK government tried to take on the BBC over the whole WMD issue (our Colin Powell wannabe didn't like what they were saying about his "intelligence reports") - and the BBC won. The BBC were fair and they had evidence to support their claims.
How many mainstream media outlets in the US have had the bollocks to question the government over the whole Iraq issue? Maybe they would if they were funded by public money instead of corporations. I LOVE the BBC!
only need a good visio-like tool to be complete.
Try Dia - It's GPL and I've found it to be excellent for UML/Database Schemas and a damn site more intuitive than Visio. It's sort of like Visio meets the Gimp in terms of UI.
Ok, I don't like WebForms and I don't think .NET is upto much but come on! Web interfaces SUCK if you are wanting to create a rich environment for data input. I just spent 6 months doing a project to convert a crappy set of JSPs to Delphi because users hated the browser. GUIs offer hotkeys, popup menus, custom controls, datetime calendar controls, etc. etc. (BTW, does that make me a sharecropper? I develop free software for free platforms in my spare time, but I'm paid to write software in whatever the fuck my employer tells me to on *their* time)
Web applications generally take longer to develop as well. So what's wrong with GUIs?
Right tool for the right job.
You've just renewed my faith in mankind.
Thank you!
Not everyone does though. My project runs around 400 animal shelters across the US, UK and Australia. These people use it to run their organisations every day and would be lost without it (I get a lot of great feedback), yet how much have I earned to date through my donations page?
$50
From ONE user.
People are basically dishonest, and there's no point playing on conscience as I have found most people don't have one. My user base is famed for not having money (why I do it), but it's not like I haven't saved them lots is it?
Ah well, good job I'm not in it for the money. $50 is still a few (free) beers. As someone recently said, free software development is "more than a pizza, a lot less than a living".
> Aquafina (bottled by the Coca-cola company) for about a dollar for 20 ounces or imported mineral water like Evian for about the same price.
:)
That joke about spelling "Evian" backwards always makes me laugh
I have a Mandrake 9.0 webserver, and as soon as I read this, I sshd into the box and just did:
urpmi --update apache
Oh, and Mandrake do not charge you for getting updates from them. They maintain a list of known FTP mirrors (which they don't run directly) for security patches/updates etc and you can just pick one from the MDK Control Center program.
I'd imagine there are plenty of other distros and platforms where it's this easy to patch your webserver (Gentoo and *BSD spring to mind).
(I also patched any programs I have sat on open ports just to make sure, including SSH, Postfix and imapd)
Please, if people are going to publish articles attempting to convert Windows users (what this is aimed at unless I've missed the point), please check your facts. I forgive the guy, he's new, but:
1. I can understand why Stallman bursts blood vessels, screaming it's GNU-LINUX dammit! The faster people are educated, the faster people will "get" the free software movement, the reasoning behind it and how it fits together.
2. Quanta+ and Screem are HTML editors - not web browsers.
3. Open Source/Free Software is licenced differently - it is *not* public domain. The author does not give up all rights to their software. You are just allowed to do more than you can with proprietary licences.
Stuff my karma, these endless "I'm rubbish with computers and I tried Linux for the first time..." articles are getting irritating now.
Don't use things because they are an "alternative" to Windows - use them because you have more control over your computer, understand what's going on and use your computer as a tool better, and more efficiently.
It's not about putting MS down (otherwise we are no better), it's about drawing attention through writing better software. The day is coming....
I personally use WineX for old Windows games, but stick to native Linux for newer ones - anything that isn't native I simply don't buy (I choose to vote with my wallet).
:)))
As for needing Windows, unfortunately, as a programmer I frequently get paid for writing software for Windows (you can only eat so much pride before you need some real food) - all I did was buy a crap low end box (P3 733, 256Mb RAM - cost me about £150), install Windows 2000 on it, run it headless with VNC and just control it remotely from Linux - perfect and all with free, open source software! (obviously excepting the Micro$oft bit but Win4Lin doesn't take away the need for that, does it?)
Win4Lin still sounds like a decent product - it just wouldn't suit me. My way, I keep the actual physical touching of a filthy Windows box to a minimum
> (why did the lameness filter try to block this?)
:)
Because your post will compress to a relative size (compared to uncompressed) below the filters threshold I'd guess.
This is because there is a lot of repetition in your post and compression is about finding and tokenising patterns.
Nice adaption though - good post
I am aware that Swing existed before 1.2, but I recall trying to get it working under Java 1.1.8 and it took eternity to start up (JVM's fault, not Swing), and it certainly ran like an absolute dog - far worse than it does since the invention of Hotspot and the 1.4 VMs/Class libraries with Swing optimisations. Sorry if I offended you - I wasn't implying you didn't know what you were talking about, I just assumed you'd mixed AWT and Swing up.
Two words - "Java 2D", at least as far as user interfaces go. Before Java 2D, in the days of Java 1.1, the JVMs were slow, the garbage collector was slow and synchronous, the synchronization was slow - everything was slow. Drawing on the screen, however, was lightning fast because all of it was hardware accelerated. This meant that the user interface was very responsive, and that is what most users complain about (well, startup time too, which was also much smaller in 1.1). Try running Swing under JDK 1.1 - it's not even comparable to any recent JDKs - it's so responsive you can't tell it from a native UI.
What? I think you are referring to AWT, which used heavyweight peer widgets (on Linux, Motif, on Windows - good ol' Win API). Swing was not introduced until Java 1.2 - the reason you "can't tell it from a native UI" is because it WAS a native UI!
Swing uses the Window and Canvas parts of AWT to draw and manage the widgets all by itself in pure Java - hence the fact it runs slowly. This is not because Java is slow, but because it is drawing the primitives itself via Java2D (as you say) instead of taking advantage of hardware acceleration in the OS. This is also the reason Swing looks the same on any platform.
This is ALSO the reason that Swing works AWFULLY over a remote X port - because everything is sent as bitmaps instead of primitive drawing instructions to X.
I always wondered if it would be better to make Java2D draw with X primitives since there isn't much else out there in the UNIX world (that's used anyway), and include that pure Java X server implementation in the JRE for non-X users. This would make Swing superfast on *nix!
As for your other remark, I'm fairly sure that Java2D does not use any hardware acceleration whatsoever (otherwise you wouldn't have that ghastly Swing over X port problem). You need to use Java3D hooked up to OpenGL/DirectX to get that.
If it bothers you so much, you know that AWT is still there and usable in the latest JDK's, right?
The GCJ implementation of AWT seems to be nearly complete, which is pretty damn exciting - it uses GTK for the peer widgets and hopefully should be a fair bit faster than the Sun JDK!
Dunno about everyone else, but when I fire up my RTCW on Linux, I run it as a "game" user with no privileges.
Permissions are your friend! Whilst not unstoppable, it makes it a damn sight harder for untrusted code to break your system.
Windows has more sophisticated ACLs than *nix, so surely it would be possible to set up a similar game user with no access to the rest of the file system/registry. Why don't game installers do this by default on Windows to proactively try to prevent this type of hack? Why don't lazy Windows users do this themselves?
Bah
You know, I just followed my own link and discovered they aren't selling the satellite access any more (apart from the fact they've renamed) and are now doing standard wireless only. Hey ho eh? What a plonker I feel about now :)
Here in the UK, a company called Tele2 (http://www.libertybroadband.co.uk/) provide satellite-based internet access. We use them at my office, as we have a large mill building, not quite close enough to a BT exchange to get ADSL.
We get 2Mbps synchronous access, with no contention from other customers, since each site gets their own satellite (and hence node).
I'd guess there must be someone offering something similar where you are?
ath.cx is a domain supplied by www.dyndns.org for DSL users with dynamic (well and static if you have it) IP addresses. Not all .cx are evil!
What a load of bunk!
The Matrix was FUN! The storyline was unoriginal, but still an appealing one (Riverworld anyone?), the effects were excellent, the dialogue ropey but quotable (important for cult films).
It was what I call a "switch your brain off and enjoy" flick.
Why do people have to over-analyse movies? The film was fun and a pleasure to watch, end of story.
This seems far too invasive. I too write free software, and I'm happy that users can see credits if they ask for them.
:)
After all, almost all graphical applications have a "Help->About" menu crediting the authors of the software. Why not introduce a standard command line switch similar to --help/-? eg: --credit or something?
So if a user cares, they can ask for a list of everyone who worked on the software?
Just my tuppence
Every time mail is routed from one server to the next, the receiving server should 'stamp' the mail with the IP address of the sending server. That way, genuine mail has a valid sequence of IP addresses, and spam can be traced back to either the originator's IP, or the first mailserver to "lie" on the stamp.
What do you think it does right now? ALL mail servers stamp the IP address of each server in the chain, along with a date/time stamp and resolved hostname (where possible). Look at the header of any email you've ever received.
Most MTAs can be configured to disregard servers with no valid MX records (drops a lot of dial up abuse).
This is why spammers either use ephemeral dynamic IP addresses from dial up accounts, or proxy servers (the proxy does the job on behalf of the client y'see - "by proxy", so the mail's origin according to the relay is the proxy server).
Well, I was going to be the bigger man and leave this, but the rudeness of your post annoyed me somewhat.
Could I refer you to the RFC for the POP3 protocol:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt
Now, if you check the TOP command (required to retrieve the headers and a portion of the body), you'll find that it is OPTIONAL - ie. Not supported by all POP software (a quick scan of the web reveals quite a few packages without it - therefore it's POSSIBLE that some ISPs do not support it).
Do you know for certain that this is the method employed by KMail? Evolution for example offers filtering based on headers but still retrieves the entire mail before executing the filter.
I was merely pointing out that filtering mail AFTER your resources have already been wasted by the evil spammers defeats the object somewhat.
As for technologically impaired, I have worked professionally in the industry for the last 15 years, I code in every high level language there is, along with assembly for 5 chipsets and run a number of mail/web servers.
Er.... you have to download the mail from the POP server to filter it :)
Ok, I take everyone's point here, but can I just say: 1. Cron jobs run as root anyway, so Read-Create access is academic. 2. There are a number of solutions to allowing the accounts read/write and the VPs read access. The simplest way is to use a cron job to mirror the resource and change the group to the VPs group with read only permissions for the group set. Anyway, I think it's unfair to say categorically "You can't do that with UNIX" - you'll find there are few things you can't. It just isn't as easy as Windows NT, and I agree - some provision should be made. I just don't think that people should go mad for ACLs without engaging brain first :)