The GPL has a clause which provides upward compatibility with newer versions of the GPL, so that if the FSF releases a new, less restrictive version of the GPL, people can choose to use source code released under the old license under the terms of the new license without any action on the behalf of the authors. So if the FSF publishes a GPL 3.0, with BSD-like terms, all GPL code is instantly under a BSD-like license.
But that obviously defeats the purpose of the GPL, and would do serious damage to people who have published their code under the GPL, expecting it to keep its spirit. Even if the FSF decided that the GPL was too strict, it would still be immoral of them to change it in such a way that defeats its original purpose.
Individual projects can relicense under any license they want, provided they get permission from every contributing author who's code they wish to relicense. This is how projects like MySQL can have dual licensed projects under incompatible licenses, with the permission of everyone involved.
I think the GPL is a really good thing for software that needs to be customizable, or that is mission critical. At the very worst you pay the exact development costs for the features or fixes you need, without repaying for features that have already been written.
Like I need good software OpenGL performance until the stability problems with with the Intel 845GV on Linux are worked out, but the Mesa software render always prefers quality over speed, so a couple days ago I downloaded the Mesa source and sped up some parts of it, disabling smooth textures and speeding up the perspective texture mapper to be almost as fast as it is without perspective for only a slight loss of quality. Currently working on the blending, where performance is greatly sacrificed to reduce code size. But Mesa is under a BSD/MIT style license so if you need it fast too and are only a home user without a lot of money you just might have to do it yourself.
"Yeah, I recommend we spend thousands more on hardware, tens of thousands more on software, hundreds of thousands more in retraining our IT, and an unspecified amount in migration costs so that we can support the $100 billion IBM in their holy war against the $20 million SCO. Please put down that letter opener."
SQL Server Enterprise Edition: $19,999 US per processor
That's probably $5k higher than I thought I remembered it being. They're no Oracle. And any server worthy of such an expensive database is going to have more than one processor. Who ever said nobody ever gets fired for recommending Microsoft?
When you make something worthless, even free would be too expensive.
They say "we'll sell you less for less". But that's not a great offer if they can get more for less elsewhere. They need to put more value in their products. Say, make XP Home and Pro better and make XP Starter what XP Home was.
Businesses don't buy licenses from Red Hat at $3k per server because Linux is cheap.
After enough times trying to run 4 apps at once, I'm betting that Linux is going to look really attractive to anyone who shells out the $4 needed to purchase XPSE. They already spent $100 or more on the system, so they'll want to get as much out of that investment as possible, and the cost of XPSE will far exceed the $4 price. I doubt that XPSE will let you make a 4 headed system, with one cheap pc connected to 4 cheap monitors, keyboards, and mice.
There is exactly one case I can think of where someone will want XPSE, and that's to run Windows games, unless they put in something to prevent dual boot.
I had always used reiserfs for everything, but having been recently asked to set up a small bunch of inexpensive file servers, I took the time to research which filesystem is best able to survive a crash or power outage. The few recent tests I've found suggest that of XFS, JFS, reiserfs, and ext3 (ordered), ext3 had the by far best recovery rate, and reiserfs had the worst among the journaled filesystems tested. In one, where a disk intensive app was run and the system was reset several several seconds later, ext3 survived over 300 power cycles with minimal damage, while reiserfs became unbootable after 10 cycles, and the rest did better but came nowhere near ext3.
After a few days of disbelief and frantic googling, I decided to make the switch to ext3. Now if I can only get approval to purchase UPS's for the servers.
As for which distribution to use, we tested Slackware 10, Fedora Core 2, and finally chose CentOS.
All he did was change a little text in the virus. The damage he caused was no worse than if he had simply been infected himself. They just want to make an example of someone. They've spent a lot of money to put someone in jail for much longer than they deserve simply to save face in the public eye. Our legal system is supposed to be just, not popular.
I curse at any keyboard that's even slightest bit different from the "standard". Microsoft's natural keyboard. Laptop keyboards. One of IBM's keyboards. Any keyboard that moves the ins/home/pgup/pgdn/del/end group. Those keyboards that move the backslash to have a bigger enter key. Most Apple keyboards. Especially keyboards that move the left ctrl over to put in an "fn" key. Send them all to hell.
And another thing: IT deparpments have created all this paranoia just to keep themselves employed.
That's for certain. If you're an IT tech, and you do a good job, they should hardly need you at all after the first month.
With even a 4 character lowercase alphanumeric password (~1 million combinations), nobody's going to guess it through login attempts. Your primary threat becomes someone with a sniffer, who can capture password hashes and try to break them, but can also capture sensitive data without needing a password. The password only helps them change the data.
At some point, digital security gets gets strong enough that their best option is to use social engineering and/or just walk into the office and walk out with your stuff.
If someone gets a hold of a 30 day password, they still have plenty of time to do bad things with it.
There is one place where I'm required to change my password every 6 months. On one occasion I chose 123456, and that protects some pretty important stuff. But my bank password which I also chose myself is 15 characters, random alphanumeric, I only had to memorize it once, and I don't use it anywhere else.
TNEF encoded emails won't even open in Outlook Express, because Microsoft wants you to have another incentive to buy Office. Anyone sending them should immediately stop for the sake of their own reputation. They probably send out emails all the time and wonder why they don't get replies, or why people tell them all they got was garbage. Sometimes all that gets through is a blank email, with the attachments stripped. It's very easy to configure Outlook to send standard emails, and to not do so looks unprofessional to anyone recieving the email who doesn't have Outlook.
It's not a trivial "bug" to fix, as intended by Microsoft. It will at minimum require embedding a TNEF decoder and an RTF to HTML converter. But few of either exist that are considered mature or secure enough for such a widely used program like Mozilla, and are license compatible.
The Mozilla team is known for trying to avoid anything they consider to be proprietary. Any requests falling under this category are classified as "tech evangelism".
Patents are a bit of a concern. It's hard to tell what is and isn't patented nowadays, but with most standards comes the assurance that you are safe from patent claims by the submitter of the standard. Which may partly explain Mozilla's reluctance to support anything proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some of the elderly, assuming they forgot to vote.
We'll wind up accidentally discovering an interesting new way to create a really big explosion.
The GPL has a clause which provides upward compatibility with newer versions of the GPL, so that if the FSF releases a new, less restrictive version of the GPL, people can choose to use source code released under the old license under the terms of the new license without any action on the behalf of the authors. So if the FSF publishes a GPL 3.0, with BSD-like terms, all GPL code is instantly under a BSD-like license.
But that obviously defeats the purpose of the GPL, and would do serious damage to people who have published their code under the GPL, expecting it to keep its spirit. Even if the FSF decided that the GPL was too strict, it would still be immoral of them to change it in such a way that defeats its original purpose.
Individual projects can relicense under any license they want, provided they get permission from every contributing author who's code they wish to relicense. This is how projects like MySQL can have dual licensed projects under incompatible licenses, with the permission of everyone involved.
I think the GPL is a really good thing for software that needs to be customizable, or that is mission critical. At the very worst you pay the exact development costs for the features or fixes you need, without repaying for features that have already been written.
Like I need good software OpenGL performance until the stability problems with with the Intel 845GV on Linux are worked out, but the Mesa software render always prefers quality over speed, so a couple days ago I downloaded the Mesa source and sped up some parts of it, disabling smooth textures and speeding up the perspective texture mapper to be almost as fast as it is without perspective for only a slight loss of quality. Currently working on the blending, where performance is greatly sacrificed to reduce code size. But Mesa is under a BSD/MIT style license so if you need it fast too and are only a home user without a lot of money you just might have to do it yourself.
It'll be his secret weapon in the campaign. He's not gonna put down the controller until he figures out how to beat the end guy.
Just send spam on their behalf.
It'll be hard to pitch that idea to the boss.
"Yeah, I recommend we spend thousands more on hardware, tens of thousands more on software, hundreds of thousands more in retraining our IT, and an unspecified amount in migration costs so that we can support the $100 billion IBM in their holy war against the $20 million SCO. Please put down that letter opener."
And of course a typical Linux distribution has like 50x the software you find in Windows.
Some websites have turned me away for not using Internet Explorer, when the pages otherwise worked correctly.
Microsoft wins another patent lawsuit.
"adbar uses the "test" adsense mode, so advertisers don't pay Google and Google doesn't pay anyone."
SQL Server Enterprise Edition: $19,999 US per processor
That's probably $5k higher than I thought I remembered it being. They're no Oracle. And any server worthy of such an expensive database is going to have more than one processor. Who ever said nobody ever gets fired for recommending Microsoft?
When you make something worthless, even free would be too expensive.
They say "we'll sell you less for less". But that's not a great offer if they can get more for less elsewhere. They need to put more value in their products. Say, make XP Home and Pro better and make XP Starter what XP Home was.
Businesses don't buy licenses from Red Hat at $3k per server because Linux is cheap.
After enough times trying to run 4 apps at once, I'm betting that Linux is going to look really attractive to anyone who shells out the $4 needed to purchase XPSE. They already spent $100 or more on the system, so they'll want to get as much out of that investment as possible, and the cost of XPSE will far exceed the $4 price. I doubt that XPSE will let you make a 4 headed system, with one cheap pc connected to 4 cheap monitors, keyboards, and mice.
There is exactly one case I can think of where someone will want XPSE, and that's to run Windows games, unless they put in something to prevent dual boot.
0wnership!=Ownership.
I had always used reiserfs for everything, but having been recently asked to set up a small bunch of inexpensive file servers, I took the time to research which filesystem is best able to survive a crash or power outage. The few recent tests I've found suggest that of XFS, JFS, reiserfs, and ext3 (ordered), ext3 had the by far best recovery rate, and reiserfs had the worst among the journaled filesystems tested. In one, where a disk intensive app was run and the system was reset several several seconds later, ext3 survived over 300 power cycles with minimal damage, while reiserfs became unbootable after 10 cycles, and the rest did better but came nowhere near ext3.
After a few days of disbelief and frantic googling, I decided to make the switch to ext3. Now if I can only get approval to purchase UPS's for the servers.
As for which distribution to use, we tested Slackware 10, Fedora Core 2, and finally chose CentOS.
Linux is a great example of capitalism IMHO.
With the DMCA+USAPATRIOT combo, I think even antivirus companies are terrorists under US law.
All he did was change a little text in the virus. The damage he caused was no worse than if he had simply been infected himself. They just want to make an example of someone. They've spent a lot of money to put someone in jail for much longer than they deserve simply to save face in the public eye. Our legal system is supposed to be just, not popular.
raise your hand.
I curse at any keyboard that's even slightest bit different from the "standard". Microsoft's natural keyboard. Laptop keyboards. One of IBM's keyboards. Any keyboard that moves the ins/home/pgup/pgdn/del/end group. Those keyboards that move the backslash to have a bigger enter key. Most Apple keyboards. Especially keyboards that move the left ctrl over to put in an "fn" key. Send them all to hell.
And another thing: IT deparpments have created all this paranoia just to keep themselves employed.
That's for certain. If you're an IT tech, and you do a good job, they should hardly need you at all after the first month.
With even a 4 character lowercase alphanumeric password (~1 million combinations), nobody's going to guess it through login attempts. Your primary threat becomes someone with a sniffer, who can capture password hashes and try to break them, but can also capture sensitive data without needing a password. The password only helps them change the data.
At some point, digital security gets gets strong enough that their best option is to use social engineering and/or just walk into the office and walk out with your stuff.
If someone gets a hold of a 30 day password, they still have plenty of time to do bad things with it.
There is one place where I'm required to change my password every 6 months. On one occasion I chose 123456, and that protects some pretty important stuff. But my bank password which I also chose myself is 15 characters, random alphanumeric, I only had to memorize it once, and I don't use it anywhere else.
I've noticed that a lot of people like to get their posts on top by replying to the first reply of the first reply ... of the first post.
Seems like the perfect place to advertise my open source Strong Password Generator.
My apologies to any Dragon Warrior fans.
Apology accepted. Thanks.
Stupid Laws 'R Us
That's "US".
TNEF encoded emails won't even open in Outlook Express, because Microsoft wants you to have another incentive to buy Office. Anyone sending them should immediately stop for the sake of their own reputation. They probably send out emails all the time and wonder why they don't get replies, or why people tell them all they got was garbage. Sometimes all that gets through is a blank email, with the attachments stripped. It's very easy to configure Outlook to send standard emails, and to not do so looks unprofessional to anyone recieving the email who doesn't have Outlook.
It's not a trivial "bug" to fix, as intended by Microsoft. It will at minimum require embedding a TNEF decoder and an RTF to HTML converter. But few of either exist that are considered mature or secure enough for such a widely used program like Mozilla, and are license compatible.
The Mozilla team is known for trying to avoid anything they consider to be proprietary. Any requests falling under this category are classified as "tech evangelism".
Patents are a bit of a concern. It's hard to tell what is and isn't patented nowadays, but with most standards comes the assurance that you are safe from patent claims by the submitter of the standard. Which may partly explain Mozilla's reluctance to support anything proprietary.