"And what about those geniuses who die young before their works become popular (e.g. Stephen Crane). Their heirs were *really* pleased. Can anyone say life plus 50?"
Heirs are not generally entitled to benefit from their ancestors' work. They may receive an inheritance from the ancestors' estate, but that depends on how the will was drawn up and what assets were left behind by the ancestor. In the case of an ancestors' premature death (esp. if the ancestor is a parent), there is this thing called life insurance. Usually, heirs can make a living on their own.
Why should there be a special exception for artists' heirs?
"Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this? I heard talk about multiple X servers, but its not out of the box simple use, of even possible."
It's easy to be worse than Crusade. Crusade was pretty good. The worst episode was the first one, though, which was a lot like a B5 movie (and B5 movies tend to range from the mediocre to the awful).
"Copyright from the beginning has had the principle of giving artists and inventors exclusive rights to their products"
The point is that those "exclusive rights" given to the artist are a means to an end, not the end itself. The rights given to authors are supposed to be a spur, an incentive, to encourage them to do what may ultimately benefit the public.
I see (and read) a lot of 'Star Trek' books. Can anyone tell me if the authors need permission from the 'Star Trek' copywrite holder to pubish their books?
Of course, the authors need some form of permission. However, Star Trek is a franchise, and there are already contracts and agreements for handling publishing rights and related issues.
I think that the 'Star Trek' series of books is a good example of what many would like to see happen to the Harry Potter books. I just want to know why the 'Star Trek' publishing environment is so different than the Harry Potter publishing environment.
Remember, Star Trek began life as a TV series, so there were already multiple writers doing Star Trek screenplays. Multiple authors of Star Trek novels is not that much different than having multiple writers writing Trek episodes.
In contrast, the Harry Potter series was a one-woman show from the start. Of course, Rowling had influences, but they were all filtered through her. The "chemistry" of Harry Potter is far more strongly tied to Rowling's style and mindset than the "chemistry" of Star Trek is to its writers.
"I find it [RHN] extremely irritating, because it requires seperate download and install steps."
I'm sorry, but the separation of download and install steps is a good idea. It means that you can do work while RHN downloads and not worry about things changing out from under you.
A "Windows Update" that doesn't update is worse than nothing, not better. Users are discouraged from further vigilance since they are fooled into thinking their systems are properly patched.
I think the fact that it's not a great sacrifice is part of the point. It seems to me that what O'Reilly is trying to do is say, "Hey, publishers don't need ridiculously long copyrights to be profitable."
"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview
Interesting... eh?:)
What's really interesting is that SCO has not alleged anything of the sort in its legal motions, only in the media. That suggests a couple devious possibilities:
McBride is telling something that is technically true, but misleading. For example, the code in question could have been contributed by SCO itself as part of its own efforts with Linux, or code that both SCO and Linux got from classic examples in the K&R C manual. This sort of spin is far easier to do in an interview than in a courtroom where the defense can point out the distortion.
McBride could simply be lying, which is also easier outside a courtroom than within.
"Red Hat has it's own issues. First, if you actually want decent update capability you have to pay for it."
I have used the free "demo" up2date service, and it works fine for me, usually. Sometimes RHN temporarily denies the "demo" users access, but this is fairly rare.
"Second, Red Hat is rather gnome centric. . . . I find that gnome is much uglier than KDE."
That is purely a matter of taste, not to mention that it is fairly trivial to change the GNOME theme if you really want to.
"Third, Red Hat only supports old releases for 1 year."
That is only for the desktop, non-enterprise versions of Red Hat. Red Hat users tend to upgrade the non-enterprise versions fairly regularly, so there isn't that much point in trying to support old releases that have relatively few users.
I've found that the text-mode (curses) interface of xf86cfg is a lot more straightforward than the X-based graphical version. Simple and step-by-step, much like X configuration on mainstream Linux distros.
Oh, yeah, I remember that from the Unix Haters' Handbook. He was trying to find all.el file without a corresponding.elc file. The thought I had was "Why didn't he just write a short shell script instead of messing around with a sequence of pipes?" Maybe a shell script like this:
for el_file in `find . -name '*.el' -print ` do
elc_file=`echo $file | sed 's/$/c/'`
if [ ! -f "$elc_file" ]
echo $el_file
fi done
My guess is that the Emacs Lisp the guy used to solve the problem probably had a loop in it or the equivalent of same.
But what flavor of creationist? There are those who, while devout, either interpret the creation stories metaphorically, or subscribe to some flavor of old-age creationism, which has its problems but doesn't try to squeeze the geological and astronomical records into a few thousand years.
It occurs to me that both can be true at the same time. If you put programmers through a "death march" schedule, or let marketing decide too many of the product specs, or have an incentive structure that discourages proper dealing with security issues, then even if your programmers are bright, they can still produce junk.
It's no different than asking a salesman, "What sucks the most about your product?"
If you phrase the question that way, the salesman might give you a dirty look. However, if you ask politely about the product's possible weaknesses, the answers that the salesman give you may be enlightening. If the salesman tap dances around the question, that tells you something, and if the salesman produces a list of potential problems, that may tell you something as well.
"However, I simply do not buy into the FUD that so many have that the US can just whisk you away in the middle of the night on secret charges, and do it legally."
You should have watched this Sunday's "60 Minutes." You can be whisked away indefinitely without even being charged at all.
"What ever happened to many eyes auditing the code?"
Open source provides the opportunity for many eyes to audit the code. It does not guarantee that it will happen.
On the bright side, if Samba weren't open source, we might never have found this problem at all, and the fix would not have come so soon after the flaw was discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
"And what about those geniuses who die young before their works become popular (e.g. Stephen Crane). Their heirs were *really* pleased. Can anyone say life plus 50?"
Heirs are not generally entitled to benefit from their ancestors' work. They may receive an inheritance from the ancestors' estate, but that depends on how the will was drawn up and what assets were left behind by the ancestor. In the case of an ancestors' premature death (esp. if the ancestor is a parent), there is this thing called life insurance. Usually, heirs can make a living on their own.
Why should there be a special exception for artists' heirs?
"Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this? I heard talk about multiple X servers, but its not out of the box simple use, of even possible."
SuSE 8.2 already does this.
"But will it be worse than Babylon 5: Crusade?"
It's easy to be worse than Crusade. Crusade was pretty good. The worst episode was the first one, though, which was a lot like a B5 movie (and B5 movies tend to range from the mediocre to the awful).
"Copyright from the beginning has had the principle of giving artists and inventors exclusive rights to their products"
The point is that those "exclusive rights" given to the artist are a means to an end, not the end itself. The rights given to authors are supposed to be a spur, an incentive, to encourage them to do what may ultimately benefit the public.
Of course, the authors need some form of permission. However, Star Trek is a franchise, and there are already contracts and agreements for handling publishing rights and related issues.
Remember, Star Trek began life as a TV series, so there were already multiple writers doing Star Trek screenplays. Multiple authors of Star Trek novels is not that much different than having multiple writers writing Trek episodes.
In contrast, the Harry Potter series was a one-woman show from the start. Of course, Rowling had influences, but they were all filtered through her. The "chemistry" of Harry Potter is far more strongly tied to Rowling's style and mindset than the "chemistry" of Star Trek is to its writers.
Or to historians, period. Popular entertainment says a lot about those who consume it.
. . . that all news will become Fair and Balanced!?
Or is that Fairly Unbalanced?
"Actually it would 4 cats among six owners . . . "
No, no, no. Four out of the six developers has at least one cat. Most of the cat-owning developers, though, own more than one cat.
"I find it [RHN] extremely irritating, because it requires seperate download and install steps."
I'm sorry, but the separation of download and install steps is a good idea. It means that you can do work while RHN downloads and not worry about things changing out from under you.
A "Windows Update" that doesn't update is worse than nothing, not better. Users are discouraged from further vigilance since they are fooled into thinking their systems are properly patched.
7154, eh?
Sigh. At least you didn't go for the obvious 666.
I think the fact that it's not a great sacrifice is part of the point. It seems to me that what O'Reilly is trying to do is say, "Hey, publishers don't need ridiculously long copyrights to be profitable."
What's really interesting is that SCO has not alleged anything of the sort in its legal motions, only in the media. That suggests a couple devious possibilities:
Just as a diagnostic, try installing another distro to see if it fails the same way SuSE did. That way, you can be sure the problem is SuSE-specific.
Not unless you want to see silliness about "pimps" and "hos". Definitely *not* about SuSE security.
"Red Hat has it's own issues. First, if you actually want decent update capability you have to pay for it."
I have used the free "demo" up2date service, and it works fine for me, usually. Sometimes RHN temporarily denies the "demo" users access, but this is fairly rare.
"Second, Red Hat is rather gnome centric. . . . I find that gnome is much uglier than KDE."
That is purely a matter of taste, not to mention that it is fairly trivial to change the GNOME theme if you really want to.
"Third, Red Hat only supports old releases for 1 year."
That is only for the desktop, non-enterprise versions of Red Hat. Red Hat users tend to upgrade the non-enterprise versions fairly regularly, so there isn't that much point in trying to support old releases that have relatively few users.
I've found that the text-mode (curses) interface of xf86cfg is a lot more straightforward than the X-based graphical version. Simple and step-by-step, much like X configuration on mainstream Linux distros.
Oh, yeah, I remember that from the Unix Haters' Handbook. He was trying to find all .el file without a corresponding .elc file. The thought I had was "Why didn't he just write a short shell script instead of messing around with a sequence of pipes?" Maybe a shell script like this:
for el_file in `find . -name '*.el' -print `
do
elc_file=`echo $file | sed 's/$/c/'`
if [ ! -f "$elc_file" ]
echo $el_file
fi
done
My guess is that the Emacs Lisp the guy used to solve the problem probably had a loop in it or the equivalent of same.
But what flavor of creationist? There are those who, while devout, either interpret the creation stories metaphorically, or subscribe to some flavor of old-age creationism, which has its problems but doesn't try to squeeze the geological and astronomical records into a few thousand years.
"Should we exclude people from becoming doctors because they believe that Jesus came back from the dead"
No, because as a miracle, the resurrection is supposed to defy what medical science would predict.
It occurs to me that both can be true at the same time. If you put programmers through a "death march" schedule, or let marketing decide too many of the product specs, or have an incentive structure that discourages proper dealing with security issues, then even if your programmers are bright, they can still produce junk.
If you phrase the question that way, the salesman might give you a dirty look. However, if you ask politely about the product's possible weaknesses, the answers that the salesman give you may be enlightening. If the salesman tap dances around the question, that tells you something, and if the salesman produces a list of potential problems, that may tell you something as well.
"However, I simply do not buy into the FUD that so many have that the US can just whisk you away in the middle of the night on secret charges, and do it legally."
You should have watched this Sunday's "60 Minutes." You can be whisked away indefinitely without even being charged at all.
Open source provides the opportunity for many eyes to audit the code. It does not guarantee that it will happen.
On the bright side, if Samba weren't open source, we might never have found this problem at all, and the fix would not have come so soon after the flaw was discovered.