There's plenty of buzz on the wire about SCO going after other companies over SCO IP used in Linux (by this, I assume you mean the kernel). Can you clarify this issue any further beyond "Linux comes from Unix, SCO owns Unix, ergo Linux has SCO IP"? Where specifically is the violation? Can you even point me to location(s) in the Linux source where the violation(s) is/are taking place?
Most articles on the subject have been weak technically. I wanna hear exactly what they have to say for themselves.
First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.
Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.
Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat, [redhat.com] Ximian [ximian.com] and Sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, [gnome.org] an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
You may imagine that users got really frustrated, [osnews.com] because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, [gnome.org] more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.
If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden tha
Some of my old friends from Duquesne and I would get together, toss back a few drinks (we tended to pass a bottle of vodka, whisky, and rum in turn). Afterwards, we would engage in the dangerous sport of Dormatory Dolly Racing.
Dormatory Dolly Racing (DDR) involves standing on the thin piece of sheet metal that bears the load to be moved. You then lean forward some and try to kick yourself down the hall up to a speed where you can roll without propulsion. Then the trick is to balance it without falling forwards. Needless to say, we had many bloody knuckles after these games.
When it finally sank into our drunken heads that balance was difficult while intoxicated, we engaged in a subtly different variety: Dormatory Dolly Tobogganing. That was a killer on the knees...
In case you haven't heard the news, a recently released Netcraft study shows the Internet is DYING! The writing is already on the wall for this one folks...
I typically try very hard to avoid the hard line stance that all
software should be free, but I have to say I just don't feel very
sympathetic to Microsoft or their customers. Just a quick glance at their financials
make it abundantly clear how much they are gouging their customers.
Last quarter they made just over 8 billion in revenue with just over
2 billion in costs. The three quarters prior to that they pulled in
just over 7 billion (per quarter) in revenue with a little under 1.5 billion in
costs each quarter.
If you compare that to other companies that are in the 20ish billion
dollar per year range you will see a different story.
I honestly find the whole argument that piracy has hurt them
incredibly dubious. I read somewhere that MS-DOS was the most
pirated software of all time. Does anyone have a link to that
article? If that's true, piracy is definately a problem...I mean
look what it did to Microsoft.
Security is only as strong as the weakest part, and I seriously doubt that's with the encryption algorithm here. Remember this system is not designed to protect your computer from outside threats (like SSH, etc), it is to protect the operating system from the user. The threat model and problem being solved are entirely different.
Why attack the encryption algorithm directly? Instead reverse engineer and bypass the parts of the OS that invoke the license checks. Or fool the probes which try to determine your hardware signatures. "Borrow" a key. Or for that matter just be sure to run IIS, as it lets perfect strangers run any applications they want on your computer, it should just as easily let you use your own computer too without any security checks:-)
I do have two important observations though:
I suspect this is one of the reasons MS is pushing so hard for TCPA/Palladium or other Distrustful Restrictions Management (DRM, sic) in hardware. That would finally allow Windows to completely distrust the user with a vengeance, as well as a side effect of preventing other choices in OS (look at the X-Box as their prototype of a hardware-enforced monopoly).
This is actually bad news for Open Source advocates as it widens the distribution and exposure of this product to people who otherwise may never intend or have the $$ to buy it anyway, futhering their illegal monopolistric grip on the modern world. I for one hate it when people pirate Windows or Office or even Windows Plus, that's one more person that doesn't "feel" the heavy price for using MS software and has no desire to look for other choices. Open Source people would love for more so-called piracy of their products! Perhaps GNU/Linux should require an activation key, maybe that would accelerate its adoption (I'm joking here).
I guess this means we're going to see a flood of games that either require an NVIDIA accellerator or "highly recommend" one (read: "this game will look like shit on ATI").
Nah, it'll never happen. They'll stick to OpenGL, I'm sure of it!
This actually happens all the time in schools all over the country. Schools think that Seperation of Church and State means that Students cannot do anything remotely religious at school. Here are some cases:
Good News Club V. MILFORD CENTRAL SCHOOL No. 99-2036 [aclj.org]
This case backs up my point. First of all, the ACLU was not involved and the court made its decisions on its own. That write up states:
The District Court ultimately granted Milford summary judgment, finding the Club's subject matter to be religious in nature, not merely a discussion of secular matters from a religious perspective that Milford otherwise permits.
Because the school had not allowed other groups providing religious instruction to use its limited public forum, the court held that it could deny the Club access without engaging in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. In affirming, the Second Circuit rejected the Club's contention that Milford's restriction was unreasonable, and held that, because the Club's subject matter was quintessentially religious and its activities fell outside the bounds of pure moral and character development, [*3] Milford's policy was constitutional subject discrimination, not unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
Seems rather fair to me. As for the second citation, I really do not have time to read the whole thing. If it is anything like the first, my point stands.
I believe in due process also, but the ACLU doesn't fight for due process, they fight for the rights of the pornographers to peddle child porn. case in point:
Beneath this quote, you provide copy from a proposed law, but make absolutely no statements that demonstrate the ACLU is "The ACLU is fighting to make child pornography legal." The copy you provided does not indicate any motives on the part of ACLU.
However, if I recall, that proposal would require ISPs to violate their privacy policy in sofar as to provide an easier mechanism for law enforcement to seize logs and data regarding users (without court order). That is very unconstitutional and should not be passed.
That is actually untrue. When Christian students cannot have a Bible Study at school during free time, but all other groups can meet, I don't see our local ACLU joinging in to help protect these student's freedoms.
Care to back this up? I've witnessed several Christian groups forming at my school, without difficulty. They were simply not school sanctioned, which is good. I've never seen reports otherwise.
When someone wants to post porn of 5 year old kids on the internet, the ACLU will fight tooth and nail to defend their freedoms.
When the ACLU engages in battles like this, they are not defending the perpetrator's freedoms and they are certainly not defending the perpetrator. They are defending the person's right to due process. Law enforcement is often overzealous in dealing with particularly disgusting cases. But in a free state, even the most disgusting of crimes demands due process be follwed within the bounds of the law, and not the mind of enraged law enforcement.
The ACLU is not for freedom, they are for anything Anti-Christian.
The ACLU is too busy making sure no schoolchildren do anything to celebrate Christmas, and persecuting anyone who believes in a Christian god. They haven't said boo shit about PATRIOT, and it's doubtful they ever will.
You misunderstand the purpose of the ACLU. They defend civil liberties equally for Americans of all races and religions. If you are a member of religion X and the government does something that (likely uses your money) to endorse religion Y, you have a problem. This is where the ACLU steps in.
I assume you're Christian, so I imagine you would be offended if the government insisted that public schools engage in Buddhist meditations every morning. Now imagine how a Buddhist would feel if he had to participate in Christian prayers every morning. You get the picture yet?
The ACLU interprets the Constitution and the rights and liberties protected by it. They work to support it without bias. One of those freedoms is freedom of (and from) religion.
Seems to me that an act like this indicates one of two things:
1. The government knows damn well the "war on terrorism" is a total flop and will never achieve its goals.
or
2. The "war on terrorism" is a ploy to promote and sustain the government's move to seize more power.
All things being equal, I'd say the first is more likely, especially since I can offer no theory of motive for the second. In either case, if ever the government did something that clearly demonstrates foul intent, this is it. Imagine the impossibility of the PATRIOT Act's effects ever getting nullified by ammendments.
And don't forget what's on the horizon for the United States. It just keeps going downhill, doesn't it?
Java isn't just about applets. In fact, applets are the least used feature of Java -- they're a neat little toy useage. Java is used primarily for back-end code now. Servlets talking to databases, for instance, are where Java is most often found.
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; float y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
You seem to hate this language quite a bit -- when it is just a language. A tool.
Let me explain to you why y is zero. When performing math operations in pretty much any language, it casts to the operand of the lowest precision. Otherwise, you start dealing with arbitrary, unknown data. 1 and 2 are both integers, so they have no precision greater than what is defined. The computer cannot represent 0.5 as an integer value, so it becomes zero. Zero multiplied by any number is zero. See?:-)
What amuses me about your post is your knocking a tool you don't really understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel utterly compelled to participate in this thread, given my trollish nature.
You sir, I think are a fucking moron. You need to get a life and realize that software piracy helps software companies.
Look at Microsoft.
(Consider yourself trolled.)
Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,
First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.
Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.
Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat, [redhat.com] Ximian [ximian.com] and Sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, [gnome.org] an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
You may imagine that users got really frustrated, [osnews.com] because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, [gnome.org] more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.
If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden tha
Some of my old friends from Duquesne and I would get together, toss back a few drinks (we tended to pass a bottle of vodka, whisky, and rum in turn). Afterwards, we would engage in the dangerous sport of Dormatory Dolly Racing.
Dormatory Dolly Racing (DDR) involves standing on the thin piece of sheet metal that bears the load to be moved. You then lean forward some and try to kick yourself down the hall up to a speed where you can roll without propulsion. Then the trick is to balance it without falling forwards. Needless to say, we had many bloody knuckles after these games.
When it finally sank into our drunken heads that balance was difficult while intoxicated, we engaged in a subtly different variety: Dormatory Dolly Tobogganing. That was a killer on the knees...
Stan lee just has to "discover" a couple of "unpublished" comic strips that involve Spiderman being gay
He did turn down that really hot chick...
In case you haven't heard the news, a recently released Netcraft study shows the Internet is DYING! The writing is already on the wall for this one folks...
I typically try very hard to avoid the hard line stance that all software should be free, but I have to say I just don't feel very sympathetic to Microsoft or their customers. Just a quick glance at their financials make it abundantly clear how much they are gouging their customers. Last quarter they made just over 8 billion in revenue with just over 2 billion in costs. The three quarters prior to that they pulled in just over 7 billion (per quarter) in revenue with a little under 1.5 billion in costs each quarter.
If you compare that to other companies that are in the 20ish billion dollar per year range you will see a different story.
I honestly find the whole argument that piracy has hurt them incredibly dubious. I read somewhere that MS-DOS was the most pirated software of all time. Does anyone have a link to that article? If that's true, piracy is definately a problem...I mean look what it did to Microsoft.
Why attack the encryption algorithm directly? Instead reverse engineer and bypass the parts of the OS that invoke the license checks. Or fool the probes which try to determine your hardware signatures. "Borrow" a key. Or for that matter just be sure to run IIS, as it lets perfect strangers run any applications they want on your computer, it should just as easily let you use your own computer too without any security checks
I do have two important observations though:
HUAGHALGUAHGLAUGHALUGHAG
Do you work for Nurv then? Huh? Huh? Do ya? Do they really kill programmers then steal their source? Huh? Huh!?
Genius... *applause*
And of course, I am sure Mr. Hammond will not mind having his privacy violated. Privacy isn't worth anything, right?
Oh bloody hell, the Duke Nukem Forever people will want to start from square one again.
It's not "Duke Nukem Forever" anymore. It's been renamed to "Duke Nukem Takes Forever". Geez! Don't you check the news?
Well, I suppose you'd start by compiling the support into the kernel and then, uh, run it?
I guess this means we're going to see a flood of games that either require an NVIDIA accellerator or "highly recommend" one (read: "this game will look like shit on ATI").
Nah, it'll never happen. They'll stick to OpenGL, I'm sure of it!
Sun can rise again!
Oh goodie. A monopolistic company that is almost as bad as Microsoft and would be worse if it could be. Sounds great.
Good News Club V. MILFORD CENTRAL SCHOOL No. 99-2036 [aclj.org]
This case backs up my point. First of all, the ACLU was not involved and the court made its decisions on its own. That write up states:
Seems rather fair to me. As for the second citation, I really do not have time to read the whole thing. If it is anything like the first, my point stands.
I believe in due process also, but the ACLU doesn't fight for due process, they fight for the rights of the pornographers to peddle child porn. case in point:
Beneath this quote, you provide copy from a proposed law, but make absolutely no statements that demonstrate the ACLU is "The ACLU is fighting to make child pornography legal." The copy you provided does not indicate any motives on the part of ACLU.
However, if I recall, that proposal would require ISPs to violate their privacy policy in sofar as to provide an easier mechanism for law enforcement to seize logs and data regarding users (without court order). That is very unconstitutional and should not be passed.
That is actually untrue. When Christian students cannot have a Bible Study at school during free time, but all other groups can meet, I don't see our local ACLU joinging in to help protect these student's freedoms.
Care to back this up? I've witnessed several Christian groups forming at my school, without difficulty. They were simply not school sanctioned, which is good. I've never seen reports otherwise.
When someone wants to post porn of 5 year old kids on the internet, the ACLU will fight tooth and nail to defend their freedoms.
When the ACLU engages in battles like this, they are not defending the perpetrator's freedoms and they are certainly not defending the perpetrator. They are defending the person's right to due process. Law enforcement is often overzealous in dealing with particularly disgusting cases. But in a free state, even the most disgusting of crimes demands due process be follwed within the bounds of the law, and not the mind of enraged law enforcement.
The ACLU is not for freedom, they are for anything Anti-Christian.
Unsubstantiated.
The ACLU is too busy making sure no schoolchildren do anything to celebrate Christmas, and persecuting anyone who believes in a Christian god. They haven't said boo shit about PATRIOT, and it's doubtful they ever will.
You misunderstand the purpose of the ACLU. They defend civil liberties equally for Americans of all races and religions. If you are a member of religion X and the government does something that (likely uses your money) to endorse religion Y, you have a problem. This is where the ACLU steps in.
I assume you're Christian, so I imagine you would be offended if the government insisted that public schools engage in Buddhist meditations every morning. Now imagine how a Buddhist would feel if he had to participate in Christian prayers every morning. You get the picture yet?
The ACLU interprets the Constitution and the rights and liberties protected by it. They work to support it without bias. One of those freedoms is freedom of (and from) religion.
I just became a card carrying member. What about you guys? I am sure most of us can spare $35 dollars.
Seems to me that an act like this indicates one of two things:
1. The government knows damn well the "war on terrorism" is a total flop and will never achieve its goals.
or
2. The "war on terrorism" is a ploy to promote and sustain the government's move to seize more power.
All things being equal, I'd say the first is more likely, especially since I can offer no theory of motive for the second. In either case, if ever the government did something that clearly demonstrates foul intent, this is it. Imagine the impossibility of the PATRIOT Act's effects ever getting nullified by ammendments.
And don't forget what's on the horizon for the United States. It just keeps going downhill, doesn't it?
Java isn't just about applets. In fact, applets are the least used feature of Java -- they're a neat little toy useage. Java is used primarily for back-end code now. Servlets talking to databases, for instance, are where Java is most often found.
Microsoft's got a few webpages up that talk about Windows2003. It actually looks rather impressive.
You can sign up for a preview of the operating system.
Also, be sure to catch the launch event at a city near you!
JB88F Windows key leak threatens mass piracy
WT2Q3 By Joe Wilcox
DPXTT Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Y8GHG April 7, 2003, 6:15 PM PT
7YYQY A key code for installing Microsoft's
-
K4RBR Windows Server 2003 has leaked onto the
F3K42 Internet, a loss that could lead to
M9RXG widespread piracy of the software.
48TPR A Microsoft representative confirmed the
H6BPB leak late Monday and said Microsoft was
-
C4C24 investigating the matter. The leak comes
QDY9P more than two weeks before the software's
GQJ4F scheduled release on April 24.
2DB6G The leaked code appears to be from a
PFQ9W Microsoft corporate customer that
The government chroots YOU!
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; float y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
:-)
You seem to hate this language quite a bit -- when it is just a language. A tool.
Let me explain to you why y is zero. When performing math operations in pretty much any language, it casts to the operand of the lowest precision. Otherwise, you start dealing with arbitrary, unknown data. 1 and 2 are both integers, so they have no precision greater than what is defined. The computer cannot represent 0.5 as an integer value, so it becomes zero. Zero multiplied by any number is zero. See?
What amuses me about your post is your knocking a tool you don't really understand.