Clothing manufacturers don't "CHEAT" by having machines make their clothes.
It's just being more intelligent. I don't pry bolts off my car by hand, I use a tool that makes it easier. Gliding wouldn't be an issue if the game wasn't such a grind fest.
When you play Monopoly with your friends, do you just reach over and take all their money and declare yourself the winner, since that's obviously the "more intelligent" way to meet the winning condition of the game? The thing you left out in that statement is that when you play WoW, you're agreeing to play by a set of rules that specifically prohibit tools for unattended play. Regardless of the legal issues of click-through EULAs, process scanning anti-cheat tools and Blizzard's claim of "copyright infringement", you definitely ARE cheating.
"Not quite - releasing software under the GPL gives away some rights, while keeping others - for example, the user cannot "close up" the software (sell a derivative work without source code) or "plagerize" the software (someone else pretending he wrote your software). "Easter eggs", therefore, are also useful in free software, lying dormant in the software until one day when you want to check whether some commercial software (for example) is illegally using your code, or whatever the case may be."
You'd be 100% correct if we were talking about the GPLed source code of Aspell, however, the item under scrutiny here is one of the dictionary files packaged with Aspell, none of which are GPLed. Most of them are either public domain or public domain with an attribution clause, but we can't know which is the case here because the poster doesn't seem to want to tell us which dictionary he's the author of. He hasn't provided proof of either statement, that Google uses Aspell dictionaries, nor that he's the copyright-holding author of the dictionary in question.
'"Things like that" have been done for thousands of years in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and even maps. All of this backed by the idea that if you give something to someone, you somehow still have power over it because it's somehow your "property".'
The difference is that Aspell is under an open license that encourages people to use it with very few restrictions. There's no need to be paranoid about someone else using your work, you've EXPLICITLY ALLOWED it by releasing it under that license.
Care to release those words that prove that Google uses Aspell? I don't see any proof in your post, just claims that are impossible to verify because you give very little information. You're an author of some dictionary that's used in Aspell, you put intentionally misspelled words in your dictionary, but you don't tell us which dictionary or which words, so what do we have to go by? Why is your post any more trustworthy than any other AC post? Furthermore, it's pretty suspicious that you claim that you INTENTIONALLY put incorrect words in your dictionary to catch people using it as part of a larger project, when such use is perfectly legal. Things like that undermine Aspell's credibility as a reference tool, which, as a contributor, I would think you'd care about.
It's called being wrong. If you read the article, IBM is telling it's *employees* not to install SP2. Very large difference. Some of IBM's internal software needs to be fixed, so they aren't patching until their software is ready.
Completely wrong. I suggest you read the GPL. There's no clause even suggesting that you can't distribute non-GPL code on the same CD. In fact, a large amount of code that comes with nearly every single Linux distribution is non-GPL. Apache httpd, PHP, X11, Perl, Python, etc. Most of those are GPL-compatible, but they certainly aren't GPL. The only time that the GPL affects other code is if it's linked to the GPL code, such as a static library or module.
Stop with the FUD. Nobody can take away the freedom of BSD code. Even if I write code and a corporation uses it without any compensation, nobody's taken anything from me. My code is as free as it was, and everybody can use it just the same. A lot of us don't believe that other people should be punished for disagreeing with our ideology.
Eclipse's C Dev Tools are pathetic in comparison to it's Java tools. Java is the only language that it supports well enough to be a decent IDE. Scratch that, with Java it's a *fantastic* IDE. C/C++ support needs to catch up.
Actually, you still have to compile a kernel for a stage3. You don't have to *configure* it, because you can opt to use genkernel. You still have to compile it either way.
Also, the ability to search inside files for phrases is horribly messed. It *never* finds phrases that I know are in the files I'm searching through.
About your complaint, though... you can type a path name into "Look in" and it'll only search in that subfolder. Or, you can hit Ctrl-F in the folder that you want to search in.
So... you're claiming that any copyrightable idea which is in any way derivative should owe it's royalties to the ethnic group from which it's derived? News flash, that covers *anything* that wasn't created in a vacuum. Who do the African-Americans owe their music to? They sure didn't invent the concept.
More importantly, the people who you're giving the money to didn't have a single bit to do with the creation of that music. I'm a German-American. Should I receive a portion of the profits from every bratwurst sold? Clearly, no. There's plenty of ethnic-German music, some of which isn't performed by people of German descent. Should I demand royalties every time that occurs? No! If you think about your concept of "justice" more, you'll find that it's clearly ridiculous if you choose to apply it to everyone fairly.
You seem to have some trouble understanding the phrase you quoted. He didn't get in trouble for going there. He got in trouble for playing a chess match for money there, which violates UN sanctions.
To save everyone in this thread the trouble of actually reading the article...
Red Hat "determined it would be appropriate to stop recognizing revenue for subscription agreements on a monthly basis - a method it has consistently applied for the last five years Ð and start recognizing revenue on a daily basis over the particular contract term."
In other words, they're counting the subscription payments per day rather than per month. Hardly Enron-esque material. The way I understand it, it means that some of the revenue will be reported on different days. The amount is the same, and there's no extra money disappearing that could've tricked investors into buying Red Hat stock.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I wanted to mention something else after I hit 'Submit.'
In my Honors English class of roughly 30 kids, there were several students who had trouble reading aloud to the class. Not trouble with public speaking, trouble with basic pronounciation. If they encountered an unknown word, they would look confused until the teacher pronounced it for them. They didn't read for pleasure, and I highly doubt that they read for homework either. Even without doing the reading, they managed to squeak by with C's and D's because the teacher felt sorry for them. Maybe things are better elsewhere, but if they aren't, I feel that the public education system is a disgrace. Instead of bringing people's education up to a higher level, they've brought the whole education system down to the lowest level of inadequecy.
I went to a public high school in the US, and we read mostly *excerpts* of influential novels from a shitty text book. Please keep in mind that this was an "Honors" class for High School Seniors. Perhaps the school board thought that it was cheaper to buy a textbook that weighs more than my laptop than buy individual copies of the books. Whatever the reason, my classmates and I were bored out of our minds the entire time. Amazingly, I believe we covered no more than 7 or 8 different novels over the course of the year, although that might've been due to the inordinate amount of time wasted composing inane poetry.
I can't remember any Gentoo-specific problems, so if you've got Mandrake running succesfully, Gentoo should be quite simple. An AC mentioned the Nvidia drivers, so I'll mention that installing the ATI drivers is just as simple (emerge ati-drivers). If you run into anything, feel free to email me at trkurth at wisc dot edu, and I'll see if I can help out.
He's hit the nail right on the head. Until OEMs start shipping Linux pre-installed and pre-configured, the average distro install needs to be *much* easier. Redhat and Mandrake and SuSE have done a great job making fancy graphical installers for the mid-range user, but they still manage to fuck up the actual installation pretty often. Here are a couple of suggestions that I've accumuluated over several years of installing and using Linux:
1) If the user has to disable graphical setup, or if setup cannot *exactly* determine whether or not his video card is supported, setup must configure X to use VESA or VGA, and tell the user that they need to install drivers to make their display look better. It's *extremely* important that a setup program does not configure the system for graphical boot using an unusable graphics driver, as parent poster experienced. If the user needs to install drivers that the installer cannot include for legal reasons (Nforce, NV DRI), tell the user exactly how to install them and provide a url. Write that information to the log as specified in #4 also.
2) Don't install so much stuff by default. Prompt the user to select KDE or Gnome, and have a screenshot or 10 of each for the user to check out during setup. Maybe play a video or demonstration of each, if possible. Once this is selected, install the bare minimum of apps necessary. These apps would be things like a package manager and some slick configuration tools. Don't install things like the KDE Edutainment or Games packages. For KDE, the base system is probably sufficient. For Gnome, install Firefox and Thunderbird, or alternately Mozilla Suite. Each system should have only the basic system admin tools, browser, email, IM, media player, package manager, and a very small assortment of accessory-style tools. Emphasize to the user that they can install a large number of additional tools after basic installation. Remember, our goal is to get the user up and running with a minimum of hassle, so we don't want to overwhelm them right away.
3) The setup wizard should either configure sound during installation, or as part of a post-installation wizard. It should make it's best attempt to detect the active sound card and install drivers for it, then it should allow the user to play test sounds and music. If autodetection fails, present the user a list of models/drivers and let him choose one or choose to disable sound for the moment.
4) If at any point some hardware installation failed, make sure to notify the user *and* write a log somewhere. Tell the user where the log is, and provide a shortcut to view it. Don't make the user write down things for later, or use grep/find to look for some obscure log file. Tech support, if provided, should be able to tell the user how to fix the problem based on this log also.
5) The package manager. Please, make a package manager that's simple to use. If it looks anything like dselect, shoot the developer and start over. Subgroup by category, and make it easy to see a verbose description of what a package does. Include screenshots for anything possible. For command line apps, a sample output and browseable man pages would help. How many times have you installed some little command line app, then read the man page and saw that it wasn't what you wanted? I think it'd be extremely helpful to be able to read the documentation *before* you spend time installing. In the package description, say what needs to be done by the user post-install, so the user has an idea of how difficult something is to configure. Give the user the option to install software from the install CDs, or from the Web. Make it easy to use a third-party package repository if your method of distribution supports this.
6) Include well-authored themes. Specifically, make sure that each theme has a version for both KDE and Gnome. It'd be nice if you could hack the Gnome Theme Selector and KDE Theme Control Panel so there's an option to a
Downloading the actual songs (for me) gets about 50KB/s, but you can have multiple transfers at that rate at the same time. I got up to 16 connections when I was at college, which meant I got an album of 192 Ogg in about 3 minutes. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
"Not quite - releasing software under the GPL gives away some rights, while keeping others - for example, the user cannot "close up" the software (sell a derivative work without source code) or "plagerize" the software (someone else pretending he wrote your software). "Easter eggs", therefore, are also useful in free software, lying dormant in the software until one day when you want to check whether some commercial software (for example) is illegally using your code, or whatever the case may be."
You'd be 100% correct if we were talking about the GPLed source code of Aspell, however, the item under scrutiny here is one of the dictionary files packaged with Aspell, none of which are GPLed. Most of them are either public domain or public domain with an attribution clause, but we can't know which is the case here because the poster doesn't seem to want to tell us which dictionary he's the author of. He hasn't provided proof of either statement, that Google uses Aspell dictionaries, nor that he's the copyright-holding author of the dictionary in question.
'"Things like that" have been done for thousands of years in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and even maps. All of this backed by the idea that if you give something to someone, you somehow still have power over it because it's somehow your "property".' The difference is that Aspell is under an open license that encourages people to use it with very few restrictions. There's no need to be paranoid about someone else using your work, you've EXPLICITLY ALLOWED it by releasing it under that license.
Care to release those words that prove that Google uses Aspell? I don't see any proof in your post, just claims that are impossible to verify because you give very little information. You're an author of some dictionary that's used in Aspell, you put intentionally misspelled words in your dictionary, but you don't tell us which dictionary or which words, so what do we have to go by? Why is your post any more trustworthy than any other AC post? Furthermore, it's pretty suspicious that you claim that you INTENTIONALLY put incorrect words in your dictionary to catch people using it as part of a larger project, when such use is perfectly legal. Things like that undermine Aspell's credibility as a reference tool, which, as a contributor, I would think you'd care about.
It's called being wrong. If you read the article, IBM is telling it's *employees* not to install SP2. Very large difference. Some of IBM's internal software needs to be fixed, so they aren't patching until their software is ready.
Thank you for stating what many of us are thinking. It's good to hear a voice of sanity in this world.
Completely wrong. I suggest you read the GPL. There's no clause even suggesting that you can't distribute non-GPL code on the same CD. In fact, a large amount of code that comes with nearly every single Linux distribution is non-GPL. Apache httpd, PHP, X11, Perl, Python, etc. Most of those are GPL-compatible, but they certainly aren't GPL. The only time that the GPL affects other code is if it's linked to the GPL code, such as a static library or module.
Stop with the FUD. Nobody can take away the freedom of BSD code. Even if I write code and a corporation uses it without any compensation, nobody's taken anything from me. My code is as free as it was, and everybody can use it just the same. A lot of us don't believe that other people should be punished for disagreeing with our ideology.
Eclipse's C Dev Tools are pathetic in comparison to it's Java tools. Java is the only language that it supports well enough to be a decent IDE. Scratch that, with Java it's a *fantastic* IDE. C/C++ support needs to catch up.
Actually, you still have to compile a kernel for a stage3. You don't have to *configure* it, because you can opt to use genkernel. You still have to compile it either way.
Also, the ability to search inside files for phrases is horribly messed. It *never* finds phrases that I know are in the files I'm searching through.
About your complaint, though... you can type a path name into "Look in" and it'll only search in that subfolder. Or, you can hit Ctrl-F in the folder that you want to search in.
Invite, please?
haloman at fastmail dot fm
So... you're claiming that any copyrightable idea which is in any way derivative should owe it's royalties to the ethnic group from which it's derived? News flash, that covers *anything* that wasn't created in a vacuum. Who do the African-Americans owe their music to? They sure didn't invent the concept.
More importantly, the people who you're giving the money to didn't have a single bit to do with the creation of that music. I'm a German-American. Should I receive a portion of the profits from every bratwurst sold? Clearly, no. There's plenty of ethnic-German music, some of which isn't performed by people of German descent. Should I demand royalties every time that occurs? No! If you think about your concept of "justice" more, you'll find that it's clearly ridiculous if you choose to apply it to everyone fairly.
You seem to have some trouble understanding the phrase you quoted. He didn't get in trouble for going there. He got in trouble for playing a chess match for money there, which violates UN sanctions.
To save everyone in this thread the trouble of actually reading the article...
Red Hat "determined it would be appropriate to stop recognizing revenue for subscription agreements on a monthly basis - a method it has consistently applied for the last five years Ð and start recognizing revenue on a daily basis over the particular contract term."
In other words, they're counting the subscription payments per day rather than per month. Hardly Enron-esque material. The way I understand it, it means that some of the revenue will be reported on different days. The amount is the same, and there's no extra money disappearing that could've tricked investors into buying Red Hat stock.
Thanks.
Now I can use my term again after my "/dev/input/mice test" during install...
Most annoying slashdot poster?
Saeed al-Sahaf
Can I write myself in?Kenja
NineNine
nanogator
"no idea how to turn off the flash on their camera"
Try holding your hand over the flash. If that's too much work, try a few strips of electrical tape. Works like a charm.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I wanted to mention something else after I hit 'Submit.'
In my Honors English class of roughly 30 kids, there were several students who had trouble reading aloud to the class. Not trouble with public speaking, trouble with basic pronounciation. If they encountered an unknown word, they would look confused until the teacher pronounced it for them. They didn't read for pleasure, and I highly doubt that they read for homework either. Even without doing the reading, they managed to squeak by with C's and D's because the teacher felt sorry for them. Maybe things are better elsewhere, but if they aren't, I feel that the public education system is a disgrace. Instead of bringing people's education up to a higher level, they've brought the whole education system down to the lowest level of inadequecy.
I went to a public high school in the US, and we read mostly *excerpts* of influential novels from a shitty text book. Please keep in mind that this was an "Honors" class for High School Seniors. Perhaps the school board thought that it was cheaper to buy a textbook that weighs more than my laptop than buy individual copies of the books. Whatever the reason, my classmates and I were bored out of our minds the entire time. Amazingly, I believe we covered no more than 7 or 8 different novels over the course of the year, although that might've been due to the inordinate amount of time wasted composing inane poetry.
I can't remember any Gentoo-specific problems, so if you've got Mandrake running succesfully, Gentoo should be quite simple. An AC mentioned the Nvidia drivers, so I'll mention that installing the ATI drivers is just as simple (emerge ati-drivers). If you run into anything, feel free to email me at trkurth at wisc dot edu, and I'll see if I can help out.
Gentoo works beautifully on an 8200 ;) I won't promise lightning speed, but it's noticably faster than the other distros I've tried.
(Inspiron 8200, P4 1.8, 384mb ram)
" umm, see if they had uses Binary Encoded Decimals then there would be no floating point errors."
Maybe they did in the next version, since the "bug" only affects pre-95 versions...
Someone, please mod this man up!
He's hit the nail right on the head. Until OEMs start shipping Linux pre-installed and pre-configured, the average distro install needs to be *much* easier. Redhat and Mandrake and SuSE have done a great job making fancy graphical installers for the mid-range user, but they still manage to fuck up the actual installation pretty often. Here are a couple of suggestions that I've accumuluated over several years of installing and using Linux:
1) If the user has to disable graphical setup, or if setup cannot *exactly* determine whether or not his video card is supported, setup must configure X to use VESA or VGA, and tell the user that they need to install drivers to make their display look better. It's *extremely* important that a setup program does not configure the system for graphical boot using an unusable graphics driver, as parent poster experienced. If the user needs to install drivers that the installer cannot include for legal reasons (Nforce, NV DRI), tell the user exactly how to install them and provide a url. Write that information to the log as specified in #4 also.
2) Don't install so much stuff by default. Prompt the user to select KDE or Gnome, and have a screenshot or 10 of each for the user to check out during setup. Maybe play a video or demonstration of each, if possible. Once this is selected, install the bare minimum of apps necessary. These apps would be things like a package manager and some slick configuration tools. Don't install things like the KDE Edutainment or Games packages. For KDE, the base system is probably sufficient. For Gnome, install Firefox and Thunderbird, or alternately Mozilla Suite. Each system should have only the basic system admin tools, browser, email, IM, media player, package manager, and a very small assortment of accessory-style tools. Emphasize to the user that they can install a large number of additional tools after basic installation. Remember, our goal is to get the user up and running with a minimum of hassle, so we don't want to overwhelm them right away.
3) The setup wizard should either configure sound during installation, or as part of a post-installation wizard. It should make it's best attempt to detect the active sound card and install drivers for it, then it should allow the user to play test sounds and music. If autodetection fails, present the user a list of models/drivers and let him choose one or choose to disable sound for the moment.
4) If at any point some hardware installation failed, make sure to notify the user *and* write a log somewhere. Tell the user where the log is, and provide a shortcut to view it. Don't make the user write down things for later, or use grep/find to look for some obscure log file. Tech support, if provided, should be able to tell the user how to fix the problem based on this log also.
5) The package manager. Please, make a package manager that's simple to use. If it looks anything like dselect, shoot the developer and start over. Subgroup by category, and make it easy to see a verbose description of what a package does. Include screenshots for anything possible. For command line apps, a sample output and browseable man pages would help. How many times have you installed some little command line app, then read the man page and saw that it wasn't what you wanted? I think it'd be extremely helpful to be able to read the documentation *before* you spend time installing. In the package description, say what needs to be done by the user post-install, so the user has an idea of how difficult something is to configure. Give the user the option to install software from the install CDs, or from the Web. Make it easy to use a third-party package repository if your method of distribution supports this.
6) Include well-authored themes. Specifically, make sure that each theme has a version for both KDE and Gnome. It'd be nice if you could hack the Gnome Theme Selector and KDE Theme Control Panel so there's an option to a
Downloading the actual songs (for me) gets about 50KB/s, but you can have multiple transfers at that rate at the same time. I got up to 16 connections when I was at college, which meant I got an album of 192 Ogg in about 3 minutes. YMMV.