Someone with a loud voice ought to educate the masses with some kind of analogy to cars with locked hoods being unhackable.
That reminds me of the motorcycle industry some years ago. American motorcyclists were all seen as the rough riding biker with a spiked leather jacket that seems stereotypical of bikers. Motorcycle sales were way down across the country, and nothing seemed to be able to lift them. People saw bikers as thugs, and didn't want to associate themselves with that image. That changed when Honda entered the scene and started a massive publicity campaign. You can still spot their slogan if you know what you're looking for: "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda." It went a very long way towards changing the image of motorcyclists from thug bikers to average joes. Today you see a lot of executives, doctors, and lawyers with nice, expensive motorcycles, and people no longer think of your average motorcyclist as that thug.
Everyone else seems to be giving you the usual "teach them windows and office and wwww and e-mail", so I'm going to take a different spin. People need to learn those things, but they also need to learn that the internet is built ontop of a set of established protocols. People don't know what http means, or why you even have "http://" in front of a URL (assuming they know what a URL is too). Explaining to people that web pages are actually composed of plain-text and pictures that tell your web-browser to display something in some fashion will enlighten a ton of people and possibly get several of them interested in how plain ASCII text causes a picture to appear in my web-browser. Moreover, now that they understand that HTTP is a protocol, you can teach them that they can use any program that speaks HTTP to browse the internet HTTP servers. Many people only know of IE's existance. That would be a great opportunity to explain to them about netscape, mozilla, or opera (assuming an all windows environment). You can explain the differences between each, and what each can and cannot do, and why.
Building on that, you can teach people about other internet protocols like POP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP. You can teach them that there are many different e-mail clients, mail servers, ftp servers, and ftp clients. When people start to see that there is choice and that computers are logical, well-thought out devices running well-thought out protocols, they will stop seeing computers as some magical box that they can't comprehend, and rather something composed of modular pieces. This breaks computers down into (relatively) easily digestible pieces.
Assuming that interest in these classes becomes and remains high, you'll likely have people asking more about computers. How do I protect my computer at home? How do all these computers here connect to one another? Before long, you could possibly start a class on basic netowrking and IP. How are networks sub-netted? How do firewalls work? How do bridges and switched and hubs work?
Perhaps people will start asking wuestions like "How do I setup an FTP server for my two machines at home to share files?" or "What can I do to protect both of my computers from hackers?". Then you can introduce them in how to setup Linux or BSD and run services on their own.
I really think the trick to teaching people about comptuers and getting people interested in computers is to break things down into pieces like this so they can understand one part of the puzzle before building the next piece.
1. Partition using linux installer, creating a partition for XP. Quit the installer.
2. Install Windows, which will only see the C:\ partition you left it. This will also install onto the MBR, but that's ok.
3. Install Linux. Grub or whatever will now be on the MBR, and everything is peachy.
Stupid AC. RTFA! How in the world did this get modded insightful? They are not including installation disks, they are including a DVD that contains an complete image of the hard-drive's state when you receive your computer. This image won't give a damn about partition sizes, since it just dumps the partition table, filesystem, and data, right onto the disk, over-writing all contents.
From the article I've basically gathered that some one who has no idea how to resize a partition on a hard drive is screaming bloody murder because thse Toshiba laptops do the equivilant od dd'ing a hard drive image back to disk. Personally, I prefer this to the isntallation cd, but that's just me.
While I'm no fan of Mandrake Linux, their Disk Drake software is good stuff, fully capable of resizing an ntfs partition without loosing data. If you're looking for a commercial tool, Partition Magic can do the same thing.
This isn't a case of a laptop manufacturer including a different installation medium to screw linux, it's a case of such a manufacturer including a disk that you can stick in the DVD-ROM, click OK to, and leave for an unattended re-installation of Windows XP. Big fsckin' deal.
Not sure what this reveals about my pysche, but here goes.
1) Mask and dress. 2) Fat woman stretching. 3) Zoro meets Willie Nelson. 4) Woman with panties down doing the Charleston. 5) Two green berets talking. 6) Man hiding eyes. 7) Flyman. 8) Two men shot in their heads thinking about bras. 9) Italian man twirling two pizzas. 10) I think this is a no-go for me, since I thought batman too, but I could have been influenced by the parent poster.
Hypothetically, let's assume some one has committed a crime involving the illegal aquisition or distribution of some object under copyright, how then do you determine the damage caused by these actions? Perhaps the most common IP infringement is the trading of music files through P2P. How do you determine the value of these suppossed damages if there are no logs indicating the number of times a song has been uploaded/downloaded?
It seems to me that it is awfully hard to prove how much an individual deed has hurt the IP owners.
If your Sun hardware sucks, dump it. But if you are mad at Sun for using a situation to its advantage against a competitor then you are an idiot. Sun's job is to compete and win. Simple as that. What did you expect them to do? They are not being anti-competitive, they are not breaking the law.
Let me ask you: Are you planning on dumping any and all Microsoft software?
Sun has made a strategic decision here. They have done business with SCO, and while I personally may not like that decision, there's nothing morally wrong with this. Consider that Sun bought ths license in February, before SCO started its lawsuit against IBM and caused this stir. Sun has not violated any laws, they have not attacked Linux like SCO has, they have only purchased a license to help their business. Whetheryou think they needed that license or not doesn't matter.
I'm not so certain that racism really fits, though you do make a lot of valid points. At the same time, black people don't have this tendency to dress up in strange gothic clothing, believe they are vampires, and let out bottled up emotions in a killing spree. I think it's mainly an attack on the current counter culture, since most of the people you hear about doing these things seem to be those guys that don't belong in the accepted groups in our society. They appear to be white teenage boys who are withdrawn from society and don't function well inside it. Society then picks on them, and they finally snap, or more likely don't snap (you never hear about the ones who don't).
I honestly think this is more a result of white teenage boys who don't fit into any group in society, fighting back because society wishes to put them in a group that society can classify, understand, and ultimately control.
I may be completely wrong.
Re:What would the founding fathers think?
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States
Wrong. If we had 2 different monitors that were both calibrated, we would still see different colors for the same RGB or CMYK values.
You are 100% correct, but you're forgetting something. It doesn't matter if the color green you see is different from the color green CmrTaco sees; as long as you use the same RGB, he'll see it the same as Slashdto's logo, provided he's using the same monitor to look at both.
Given that MS looses money on every sale of an X-Box when the consumer doesn't also bu a few games, they obviously don't want people to buy one and boot a free Linux OS on it and never buy any games. But what if MS releases a version of Linux on a live cd a la Knoppix, Gentoo, or Slackware? Assuming they charge around $200 for it I'm sure a few people would bite. $400 total for a great small-form factor machine with 5.1 sound and tv-out isn't too bad, especially if the "MS linux distro" includes music and video streaming software.
Because most routers I have come across have broken functionality, broken security, and don't have much scope for expandability. What if I want to use my router as a proxy web server too? Or as a DNS caching server? Or to host a website for my home network? Or as an NTP server so all my machines have their clocks in sync?
You really hit on exactly why I never buy those cheap $100 routers/firewalls from Best Buy. To begin with, they never work as good firewalls. Making a port forward to another machine with them is often impossible. They never include intrusion detection systems, nor allow me to run things like portsentry. Also, firewalls are so much more than a simple iptables, ipchains, ipfw, et al script. A firewalls is not simply a collection of packet shaping rules. A true firewall includes things like proxy services, if only to make sure your LAN isn't going to open your network up to the world, not to mention the possible performance improvements with caching. Why people think a $100 or even a $200 router from a retail outlet is capable of being a bastion for security I'll never know.
Linux needs advertising in the popular media. Sure, I can see Linux ads in computer magazines; however, when I turn my TV on, I see ads about how much money you can save by switching to.NET.
Personally I don't know what your'e talking about. I see IBM commercials that are mentioning Linux on the TV all the time, far more often than I see Microsoft commercials. Quite a few of them mention how cheaper Linux is. The most recent one is about their xservers IIRC, and states taht they are great for running Linux (no mention of Windows, again IIRC). Granted these commercials are pushing IBM products more than Linux, but that kind of advertising can only be good for Linux's general adoption.
Unfortunately, they probably just value their jobs. I'm sure the majority of people with children to feed and rent to pay would tote those signs around outside their place of employment if their boss said they were fired if they refused regaurdless of what your job description (if you have one) says.
This gives Micron carte blanche to raise their prices by 44%, which while it may save a few jobs in Idaho, will ultimately cost even more jobs at US companies that buy memory (think the likes of Dell and so forth).
Tariffs BAD! Free trade GOOD!
I'm sorry but such broad statements as your last one are almost always born of ignorance of the situation, and using non-English words doesn't make you come off any smarter. There are times for free trade and times for tariffs.
When NAFTA was passed, everyone I knew felt it would be a bad thing. I've seen 22 of 23 local sawmills that employed people I know go out of business in the middle GA area because of lumber brought down from Canada. Now whether Canadian lumber is better or cheaper or not makes no damn difference at all to myself, or to these people, because they are unemployed. Just having things cheap doesn't mean that the economy is doing good.
To take things to an extreme, it doesn't matter how cheap imported products are, if there's no on in the country who'se employed to buy them. People without jobs are not able to afford much of anything, and 100% free trade naturally makes for unemployment in the former land of the plenty, where companies tend to pay more for similar jobs. Large corporations moved their plants to Mexico and employed thousands of Mexican workers for less than they could legally employ that same number of workers in America. A government's primary reason for existance is to ensure the well-being of its citizens. Part of that is to ensure that they are employed, even if that means imposing a tariff on another country.
Honestly, most/.er's really need to think harder before they post a message. Posting some knee-jerk reaction to a turn of events that you personally don't like isn't very wise. You should be considering things across the board for all parties involved, not just your wallet.
To say "tariffs are bad and free trade is good" is like saying "Windows 2000 server is bad and RedHat Linux 9 is good". What facts have you given to back up your position? Cite what makes you think this way, and consider how it effects everyone. Don't think for a moment that NAFTA isn't partially responsible for the economic slump we're in. By the same token, I don't think tariffs are totally innocent either. Both have their places, just like Linux and Windows have their places. Free trade makes products cheaper by allowing companies to manufacture goods in the cheapest location without worrying about tariffs, but while running the risk of unemploying a large number of their consumer market. Tariffs may result in higher prices and poorer quality goods from time to time, but they help ensure that the consumer market here can buy them.
IANAL, but I play one on the Net. There's really no such thing as a perpetual contract. Contacts that are 'in perpetuity' are almost always held to be unenforceable in a court of law.
Also, SCO is claiming that IBM is in material breach, which means that under the equity doctrine, SCO is not under any obligation to hold up their end of the bargain.
Not to be picky, but if a contract includes the words "perpetual and irrevocable license" I'd believe that it was perpetual and irrevocable, unless of course some terms of the contract specify a loophole around this.
But aren't they required to prove that IBM is in material breach before dropping their obligations under the bargain? Legally, wouldn't SCO have to prove in a court that IBM has broken the terms of their license, or at least shown enough evidence to get a temporary injunction (presumably to prevent further damage to SCO) against IBM to halt distribution of AIX until the matter could be brought to court? If these steps aren't taken, isn't SCO then violating some law concerning contracts or something?
I am the biggest not a lawyer of the bunch, thus my suspicions/desires are phrasd in the form of questions.:^)
This could be done, provided we could compile Linux with exactly the same compiler, the same version, with the same options, as the SCO's system was compiled with.
I think you misunderstand the reason for compiling the code. It's fairly easy to determine when code was added to the linux kernel just by greping the lkml, but SCO code is (suppossed to be) proprietary, meaning they can say this bit of source code was dated 1973 and we'd have to say "prove it". One possible way of proving it is to compile the code, and then compare it to binaries that SCO has sold to its customers for the last 10 years. Which ever binary it matches will give you the approximate date of the source code, since we know when SCO distributed their binaries.
So 67 men in the Senate (and maybe a woman or two) can end the GPL with one vote and no judicial review.
Not entirely true. You also must have the president's approval. You see, the president makes the treaty with a foriegn country, but it isn't final until 2/3 of the Senate approaves it. See Article II of the US Constituion for details.
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That reminds me of the motorcycle industry some years ago. American motorcyclists were all seen as the rough riding biker with a spiked leather jacket that seems stereotypical of bikers. Motorcycle sales were way down across the country, and nothing seemed to be able to lift them. People saw bikers as thugs, and didn't want to associate themselves with that image. That changed when Honda entered the scene and started a massive publicity campaign. You can still spot their slogan if you know what you're looking for: "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda." It went a very long way towards changing the image of motorcyclists from thug bikers to average joes. Today you see a lot of executives, doctors, and lawyers with nice, expensive motorcycles, and people no longer think of your average motorcyclist as that thug.
Everyone else seems to be giving you the usual "teach them windows and office and wwww and e-mail", so I'm going to take a different spin. People need to learn those things, but they also need to learn that the internet is built ontop of a set of established protocols. People don't know what http means, or why you even have "http://" in front of a URL (assuming they know what a URL is too). Explaining to people that web pages are actually composed of plain-text and pictures that tell your web-browser to display something in some fashion will enlighten a ton of people and possibly get several of them interested in how plain ASCII text causes a picture to appear in my web-browser. Moreover, now that they understand that HTTP is a protocol, you can teach them that they can use any program that speaks HTTP to browse the internet HTTP servers. Many people only know of IE's existance. That would be a great opportunity to explain to them about netscape, mozilla, or opera (assuming an all windows environment). You can explain the differences between each, and what each can and cannot do, and why.
Building on that, you can teach people about other internet protocols like POP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP. You can teach them that there are many different e-mail clients, mail servers, ftp servers, and ftp clients. When people start to see that there is choice and that computers are logical, well-thought out devices running well-thought out protocols, they will stop seeing computers as some magical box that they can't comprehend, and rather something composed of modular pieces. This breaks computers down into (relatively) easily digestible pieces.
Assuming that interest in these classes becomes and remains high, you'll likely have people asking more about computers. How do I protect my computer at home? How do all these computers here connect to one another? Before long, you could possibly start a class on basic netowrking and IP. How are networks sub-netted? How do firewalls work? How do bridges and switched and hubs work?
Perhaps people will start asking wuestions like "How do I setup an FTP server for my two machines at home to share files?" or "What can I do to protect both of my computers from hackers?". Then you can introduce them in how to setup Linux or BSD and run services on their own.
I really think the trick to teaching people about comptuers and getting people interested in computers is to break things down into pieces like this so they can understand one part of the puzzle before building the next piece.
Stupid AC. RTFA! How in the world did this get modded insightful? They are not including installation disks, they are including a DVD that contains an complete image of the hard-drive's state when you receive your computer. This image won't give a damn about partition sizes, since it just dumps the partition table, filesystem, and data, right onto the disk, over-writing all contents.
From the article I've basically gathered that some one who has no idea how to resize a partition on a hard drive is screaming bloody murder because thse Toshiba laptops do the equivilant od dd'ing a hard drive image back to disk. Personally, I prefer this to the isntallation cd, but that's just me.
While I'm no fan of Mandrake Linux, their Disk Drake software is good stuff, fully capable of resizing an ntfs partition without loosing data. If you're looking for a commercial tool, Partition Magic can do the same thing.
This isn't a case of a laptop manufacturer including a different installation medium to screw linux, it's a case of such a manufacturer including a disk that you can stick in the DVD-ROM, click OK to, and leave for an unattended re-installation of Windows XP. Big fsckin' deal.
Not sure what this reveals about my pysche, but here goes.
1) Mask and dress.
2) Fat woman stretching.
3) Zoro meets Willie Nelson.
4) Woman with panties down doing the Charleston.
5) Two green berets talking.
6) Man hiding eyes.
7) Flyman.
8) Two men shot in their heads thinking about bras.
9) Italian man twirling two pizzas.
10) I think this is a no-go for me, since I thought batman too, but I could have been influenced by the parent poster.
Hypothetically, let's assume some one has committed a crime involving the illegal aquisition or distribution of some object under copyright, how then do you determine the damage caused by these actions? Perhaps the most common IP infringement is the trading of music files through P2P. How do you determine the value of these suppossed damages if there are no logs indicating the number of times a song has been uploaded/downloaded?
It seems to me that it is awfully hard to prove how much an individual deed has hurt the IP owners.
....is no one understands the economy.
You're mistaken. .07 cents isn't $0.07, it's $0.0007.
That's why it's 5.1-CURRENT and not 5.1-STABLE. That's like saying version 2.5.60 of the linux kernel lacks the stability of version 2.4.21.
I'm not so certain that racism really fits, though you do make a lot of valid points. At the same time, black people don't have this tendency to dress up in strange gothic clothing, believe they are vampires, and let out bottled up emotions in a killing spree. I think it's mainly an attack on the current counter culture, since most of the people you hear about doing these things seem to be those guys that don't belong in the accepted groups in our society. They appear to be white teenage boys who are withdrawn from society and don't function well inside it. Society then picks on them, and they finally snap, or more likely don't snap (you never hear about the ones who don't).
I honestly think this is more a result of white teenage boys who don't fit into any group in society, fighting back because society wishes to put them in a group that society can classify, understand, and ultimately control.
I may be completely wrong.
Thmoas jefferson did NOT put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution. In fact, he put nothing at all into the Constitution. Why? Thomas Jefferson wasn't at the Constitutional Convention.
You are 100% correct, but you're forgetting something. It doesn't matter if the color green you see is different from the color green CmrTaco sees; as long as you use the same RGB, he'll see it the same as Slashdto's logo, provided he's using the same monitor to look at both.
Given that MS looses money on every sale of an X-Box when the consumer doesn't also bu a few games, they obviously don't want people to buy one and boot a free Linux OS on it and never buy any games. But what if MS releases a version of Linux on a live cd a la Knoppix, Gentoo, or Slackware? Assuming they charge around $200 for it I'm sure a few people would bite. $400 total for a great small-form factor machine with 5.1 sound and tv-out isn't too bad, especially if the "MS linux distro" includes music and video streaming software.
You really hit on exactly why I never buy those cheap $100 routers/firewalls from Best Buy. To begin with, they never work as good firewalls. Making a port forward to another machine with them is often impossible. They never include intrusion detection systems, nor allow me to run things like portsentry. Also, firewalls are so much more than a simple iptables, ipchains, ipfw, et al script. A firewalls is not simply a collection of packet shaping rules. A true firewall includes things like proxy services, if only to make sure your LAN isn't going to open your network up to the world, not to mention the possible performance improvements with caching. Why people think a $100 or even a $200 router from a retail outlet is capable of being a bastion for security I'll never know.
Personally I don't know what your'e talking about. I see IBM commercials that are mentioning Linux on the TV all the time, far more often than I see Microsoft commercials. Quite a few of them mention how cheaper Linux is. The most recent one is about their xservers IIRC, and states taht they are great for running Linux (no mention of Windows, again IIRC). Granted these commercials are pushing IBM products more than Linux, but that kind of advertising can only be good for Linux's general adoption.
Unfortunately, they probably just value their jobs. I'm sure the majority of people with children to feed and rent to pay would tote those signs around outside their place of employment if their boss said they were fired if they refused regaurdless of what your job description (if you have one) says.
I'm sorry but such broad statements as your last one are almost always born of ignorance of the situation, and using non-English words doesn't make you come off any smarter. There are times for free trade and times for tariffs.
When NAFTA was passed, everyone I knew felt it would be a bad thing. I've seen 22 of 23 local sawmills that employed people I know go out of business in the middle GA area because of lumber brought down from Canada. Now whether Canadian lumber is better or cheaper or not makes no damn difference at all to myself, or to these people, because they are unemployed. Just having things cheap doesn't mean that the economy is doing good.
To take things to an extreme, it doesn't matter how cheap imported products are, if there's no on in the country who'se employed to buy them. People without jobs are not able to afford much of anything, and 100% free trade naturally makes for unemployment in the former land of the plenty, where companies tend to pay more for similar jobs. Large corporations moved their plants to Mexico and employed thousands of Mexican workers for less than they could legally employ that same number of workers in America. A government's primary reason for existance is to ensure the well-being of its citizens. Part of that is to ensure that they are employed, even if that means imposing a tariff on another country.
Honestly, most /.er's really need to think harder before they post a message. Posting some knee-jerk reaction to a turn of events that you personally don't like isn't very wise. You should be considering things across the board for all parties involved, not just your wallet.
To say "tariffs are bad and free trade is good" is like saying "Windows 2000 server is bad and RedHat Linux 9 is good". What facts have you given to back up your position? Cite what makes you think this way, and consider how it effects everyone. Don't think for a moment that NAFTA isn't partially responsible for the economic slump we're in. By the same token, I don't think tariffs are totally innocent either. Both have their places, just like Linux and Windows have their places. Free trade makes products cheaper by allowing companies to manufacture goods in the cheapest location without worrying about tariffs, but while running the risk of unemploying a large number of their consumer market. Tariffs may result in higher prices and poorer quality goods from time to time, but they help ensure that the consumer market here can buy them.
"Do you know what 'Contempt of Court' is?"
Check your facts. Slackware has always been in the black, but something tells me Pat isn't in the mood to buy out Caldera even if he can. :^)
Not to be picky, but if a contract includes the words "perpetual and irrevocable license" I'd believe that it was perpetual and irrevocable, unless of course some terms of the contract specify a loophole around this.
But aren't they required to prove that IBM is in material breach before dropping their obligations under the bargain? Legally, wouldn't SCO have to prove in a court that IBM has broken the terms of their license, or at least shown enough evidence to get a temporary injunction (presumably to prevent further damage to SCO) against IBM to halt distribution of AIX until the matter could be brought to court? If these steps aren't taken, isn't SCO then violating some law concerning contracts or something?
I am the biggest not a lawyer of the bunch, thus my suspicions/desires are phrasd in the form of questions. :^)
I think you misunderstand the reason for compiling the code. It's fairly easy to determine when code was added to the linux kernel just by greping the lkml, but SCO code is (suppossed to be) proprietary, meaning they can say this bit of source code was dated 1973 and we'd have to say "prove it". One possible way of proving it is to compile the code, and then compare it to binaries that SCO has sold to its customers for the last 10 years. Which ever binary it matches will give you the approximate date of the source code, since we know when SCO distributed their binaries.
while [ 0 = 0 ]; do wget ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/scolinux/server/4.0/updates/ SRPMS/mozilla-1.0.1-38.src.rpm -O /dev/null; done
Not entirely true. You also must have the president's approval. You see, the president makes the treaty with a foriegn country, but it isn't final until 2/3 of the Senate approaves it. See Article II of the US Constituion for details.
I can see a lot of big illegal guns coming out!