Re:They HAVE modified it
on
P2P vs. The Clones
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, this stuff may fall under the 'aggregate' clause that covers proprietary-enhanced Linux distros. That's the sort of thing a court needs to decide, but in all honesty I think that if SuSE Linux is OK (and was back when YaST was proprietary), then so is this form of bundling.
However, the point isn't whether or not you can sue them, it's whether or not you can force download.com to delist them with a DMCA takedown notice. And to do that, all you need is evidence that the scumbags aren't following every last letter of the GPL. Clause 3b. is the main one, but you can check the other clauses as well.
Of course, if they are compying with the GPL, then what's the harm? If a few people are idiots enough to only use software that is backed by fancy advertising that just screams 'malware', then it's hardly a high priority for the Free Software community to reeducate them, even if it's possible.
It's a standard technique in political comment and satire to use a distorted version of the target's name. Falwell is trying to suppress the site because he knows that his bullshit cannot stand up to reasoned argument.
The judge is quite plainly in Falwell's pocket (and probably on crack as well). Any unprejudiced court will hold that Lamparello's site is fair comment.
sh doesn't have true RE handling builtin, it only has globs through 'case'
Note that this isn't true in bash - bash scripting has extended globs feature equivalent to POSIX REs except for lacking backreferences. And you don't have to use case, you can use the [[ builtin.
Joe Desktopuser will use what he's given!
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
Joe Desktopuser wouldn't know what a desktop environment is if it bit him in the ass.
Joe Desktopuser doesn't know what an operating system is, for chrissakes.
All Gnome needs to do is persuade Joe Desktopuser's CIO that they can switch the company's desktops to Gnome-on-Linux and by doing so save money and increase productivity year-on-year, with minimal retraining needed.
And after that, persuade Dell, Gateway, whoever, that Gnome-on-their-branded-distro is a better solution to bundle on their crappy PCs.
Joe Desktopuser won't be installing Debian; he doesn't need to know what Debian is.
What Gnome needs is security and ease-of-use to impress the CIO, a short transition period to impress the CFO, and pretty buttons to impress the CEO. Joe Desktopuser doesn't enter the picture.
You have heard of gdesklets, right?
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 3, Informative
oh, and 4 should be possible with Cairo and the new X servers. 2 sounds interesting, but I don't agree with 1 and 3.
The Medieval Warm Period occurred as Europe was recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire, resulting in deforestation across Europe as farming communities expanded. The Little Ice Age began around the time the Black Death caused a 40% fall in the population of Europe, and continued as the genocide of the native North American peoples caused massive reforestation over New England.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but holding up the MWP and LIA as examples of non-anthropogenic climate change events is making an unwarranted assumption.
Our species has been altering ecosystems on a massive scale for tens of millenia; It'd be pretty amazing if the destruction of Europe's broadleaved forests over the last 10 millenia turned out to have left no trace on the climate record. The same goes for the fire management of the Australian forests, or the turning of China into one vast paddy field. I just don't understand how it is possible to believe that taking things one step further - pumping vast quantities of carbon from under the ground, massively changing the composition of the atmosphere - will magically have no effect at all on the climate.
$ genlop -t -s ".*" | grep total
merged totally 2191 ebuilds in 9 days, 14 hours, 52 minutes, and 40 seconds. $ head -n 1/var/log/emerge.log 1059351074: Started emerge on: Jul 28, 2003 00:11:14
10 days in 7 months - that's 5% of available machine time spent compiling.
Assume the power used is 250W when compiling, 50W idling: 5% of (250W-50W) is 10W: that's a maximum of 20% extra power for a Gentoo machine over a Slackware box.
Some power will be saved by optimisations, but I doubt it'll be much.
counter.li.org estimates 18m Linux users. Say 1m Gentoo users have run Gentoo an average of 2 years. As is well known, one year is \pi*10^7seconds. 1 machine/user * 1*10^6 users * 2 years * 3.14*10^7 seconds/year * 10W/machine / 3.6*10^6kWh/W/s equals 2*10^7 kWh, or 20,000MWh
In comparison, Sizewell (a medium-sized nuclear power station near London) produces 1188 MW, or 30,000 MWh/day.
Wrong: that way, Portage will want to downgrade the package to the latest stable version at your next emerge -Du world.
You should actually put a line like:
sys-kernel/gentoo-dev-sources ~x86
into/etc/portage/package.keywords (create the directory and file if they don't already exist); then emerge -Du world and Portage will select the latest unstable release of that package only.
"Business" section BBC News Broadcasting House London W1A 1AA
Dear Sir or Madam,
With reference to the website article "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3457823.stm] written by Stephen Evans, your North America Business Correspondent, of the 5th February:
As a license payer, I have always been of the opinion that the BBC, to the best of its ability, maintains a high quality, unbiased news service.
I was however appalled at the allegations made by Stephen Evans against the community of Linux users and developers.
Mr. Evans alleges that "there seems little doubt that" the motivation behind the attack against the website of the company SCO was that "it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system". He baldly states that the attack "is about malice not money" and that to blame are "the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage". The implication that it is standard practice among Internet users to attain one's objectives by means of illegal methods is deeply insulting and hurtful. The insult is compounded by Mr. Evans' own admission that there is "no proof" followed immediately by his assertion that - despite the total lack of any evidence pointing in that direction - the primary targets of an investigation should be the Linux community.
The absurdity of your correspondent's position is compounded by the following points of fact:
the writing of a virus is a work of skill (regrettably misapplied), requiring an in-depth knowledge of the workings of the target system. "Linux zealots" do not know or care how to write code for the altogether different Windows operating system, the habitat of the MyDoom virus;
security professionals have stated[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4113278/] that the targeting of the SCO website by the virus is likely to be a smokescreen designed to draw attention away from the true purpose of the virus - hijacking users' machines for the purposes of sending junk email and of obtaining bank and credit card details by monitoring keystrokes;
SCO is not in any significant sense damaged by the attack on their website; their decision to remove it from the Internet rather than contract a content distribution company to bear the load demonstrates the irrelevance of the website to SCO's commercial model. Indeed, SCO no longer uses its website for any commercial purpose, having ceased to sell software in order to devote its energies to pursuing its lawsuits against IBM and other software companies.
As a member of the community of Linux users, I want no part of any "cyberspace war" dreamed up by sensationalist reporters; similarly I am confident that the contract dispute between SCO and IBM will be resolved in IBM's favour in short order once the court case commences. The implication in your correspondent's article that Linux users are so worried about the implications of SCO's litigation that they are willing to resort to illegal forms of retaliation is not only libellous; it is absurd.
I would argue that at the current time the BBC would do well to refrain from casting aspersions on individuals or categories of people and confine itself to what it does best: the unbiased reporting of fact. The Business section of your organisation would do well to model its behaviour in this regard after the Technology section, whose coverage of the contract dispute between SCO and IBM has throughout been exemplary in sticking to the facts and refraining from base speculation about the actions and motives of participants in and spectators to the case.
I have always, and through the last week in particular, been an avid defender of the BBC's right to editorial independence and its right to report without fear of adverse consequences for mistakes made in good faith; Stephen Evans' article has sadly led me to reconsider this position. I however console myself by noting that this failure of editorial oversight appears to be confined to the Business
Don't use the `feedback form'. Don't email. Send them a proper slice-of-dead-tree letter.
Letters have to be opened; they have to be read; they can't just be deleted, they have to be at least sent out with the rubbish. Plus, sending a letter costs more in time and money than a simple email flame, so shows you to be that much more serious.
It's simple enough: paste the email you just sent into a LaTeX document or into Lyx, sign it and send it off. The address to send it to is:
Business section
BBC News
Broadcasting House
London W1A 1AA
England
Those living outside Europe are exempt, but if postage to the UK costs you less than 1 euro, you owe it to yourself to send them a letter now.
I've had great success (for my needs) with a Wacom PenPartner (well, until it broke and turned into an expensive mousepad:() and all the Gimp tools recognise tilt and pressure where appropriate.
I can say that for me, the single worst thing about the *BSDs is the way the kernel is bound into the base system.
My FreeBSD experience went roughly thus:
Install FreeBSD. Be very impressed by the handbook; be slightly puzzled by the use of slices rather than x86 partitions - but, hey, it's a valid way to do things. Get a stable 4.8-RELEASE server running, with plenty of ports installed.
Get frustrated with poor performance and out-of-date ports
Notice 5.1-RELEASE. Upgrade the system
Experience hard reboots with occasional fs corruption whenever a sizeable NFS transaction occurred
Discover this was due to a bug in the driver for my network card (a model that worked perfectly under 4.8, and works perfectly under Linux, and that I have several of)
Discover the bug wasn't about to get fixed any time soon; I'm happy hacking applications but a kernel developer I am most definitely not.
Realize that I couldn't just downgrade the kernel to the last working version; I'd have to downgrade the entire base system
Say, `sod this', and install Debian
Maybe I was unlucky. But the lesson I learned from this is that when monolithic `designed' systems go wrong, you're screwed. Modular systems, by contrast, give you the option of swapping out faulty components, even if the resulting system is slightly less slick than a monolithic system.
I now use Debian Stable for high-availability systems, and Gentoo for high-performance systems. Gentoo is, of course, the modular system par excellence, giving you total control over all aspects of the packages you use. Debian is less so, but gives you the security of knowing that your system has been thoroughly tested under all the conditions it is likely to encounter, and that with a modicum of judgement, updating whenever new packages appear will give superlative security without compromising stability.
And, of course, if the latest kernel screws up your system, you can downgrade to the previous version with absolute freedom. To me that's worth far more than whatever an integrated system can provide.
If you leave a ladder and a crowbar in your front garden/yard and a burglar uses them to break into your house, that's your fault.
If you leave a ladder and a crowbar in your front garden/yard and a burglar uses them to break into someone else's house, that's also your fault.
Alternatively, if you live in a ground floor dorm, leave your window open, and a burglar breaks into the building that way, you are morally liable to those people whose rooms get burgled.
I don't see a problem with admins requiring a basic level of security consciousness.
Yeah, I hope the pager's fixed. It seems to be a Gnome problem, cos switching workspace with a Sawfish binding works fine, and so does switching from the window list on the end of the Menu panel.
And I hope that changing window manager is at least a *little* easier than in 2.2!
Flamebait is perhaps a little harsh - it could simply be that you haven't fully considered the consequences were your suggestions to be implemented. Although I agree you have the right to hold the opinion that the burden of increased security should be lifted from the shoulders of those who enjoy privilege, and instead borne all the heavier by those who already feel unjustly treated - who would then stand accused of guilt by racial association every time they travelled - I would rather appeal to your sense of 'logic', 'common sense' and pragmatism (you seem to hold good, classic right wing views - is it not part of the conservative ideology that they are the pragmatists while the liberals are led astray by their hopeless idealism?)
I ask you then, sir, to read of the 'Carnival Booth' algorithm and its applications to terrorist methods, in particular a rather interesting paper I read recently. I can't provide the URL, but I can summarise: imagine yourself (or, if not yourself, how about that suspicious Arab looking guy you saw in the street today) the planner of a terrorist operation. You (sorry, he) knows that the authorities are not carrying out random searches but are rather targeting those they consider to pose a 'heightened security risk'. Now, over a period of time send your operatives one by one, unarmed and unequipped, through the same security systems you plan to subvert. No doubt, the authorities will have some hauled in - they won't find anything, so those unlucky operatives will be free to come back and go to work in the explosives laboratory instead. However, those of your operatives who were not targeted have just been given a white card by the security systems, allowing you to conclude that next time - when they are armed - the chances of them being searched are small to miniscule.
Congratulations, sir - your distaste for 'PC over security' (by the way - is your greed for racial profiling connected at all to the racial grouping you happen to be classified under?) has just cost a few hundred lives.
When my bags are searched, or my clothes patted down, I feel pride that I am doing my part to help provide security for all.
Mandrake Update dumps status information to stdout - just run MandrakeUpdate from a root console.
Alternatively, you can do the sensible non-GUI thing and run # urpmi --update --auto-select
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this stuff may fall under the 'aggregate' clause that covers proprietary-enhanced Linux distros. That's the sort of thing a court needs to decide, but in all honesty I think that if SuSE Linux is OK (and was back when YaST was proprietary), then so is this form of bundling.
However, the point isn't whether or not you can sue them, it's whether or not you can force download.com to delist them with a DMCA takedown notice. And to do that, all you need is evidence that the scumbags aren't following every last letter of the GPL. Clause 3b. is the main one, but you can check the other clauses as well.
Of course, if they are compying with the GPL, then what's the harm? If a few people are idiots enough to only use software that is backed by fancy advertising that just screams 'malware', then it's hardly a high priority for the Free Software community to reeducate them, even if it's possible.
It's a standard technique in political comment and satire to use a distorted version of the target's name. Falwell is trying to suppress the site because he knows that his bullshit cannot stand up to reasoned argument.
The judge is quite plainly in Falwell's pocket (and probably on crack as well). Any unprejudiced court will hold that Lamparello's site is fair comment.
that when you troll, you're supposed to do it as AC.
Or are you posting from a hacked account?
sh doesn't have true RE handling builtin, it only has globs through 'case'
Note that this isn't true in bash - bash scripting has extended globs feature equivalent to POSIX REs except for lacking backreferences. And you don't have to use case, you can use the [[ builtin.
Joe Desktopuser wouldn't know what a desktop environment is if it bit him in the ass.
Joe Desktopuser doesn't know what an operating system is, for chrissakes.
All Gnome needs to do is persuade Joe Desktopuser's CIO that they can switch the company's desktops to Gnome-on-Linux and by doing so save money and increase productivity year-on-year, with minimal retraining needed.
And after that, persuade Dell, Gateway, whoever, that Gnome-on-their-branded-distro is a better solution to bundle on their crappy PCs.
Joe Desktopuser won't be installing Debian; he doesn't need to know what Debian is.
What Gnome needs is security and ease-of-use to impress the CIO, a short transition period to impress the CFO, and pretty buttons to impress the CEO. Joe Desktopuser doesn't enter the picture.
oh, and 4 should be possible with Cairo and the new X servers. 2 sounds interesting, but I don't agree with 1 and 3.
I use Google for everything.
http://www.google.com/search?q=1%2B1
The Medieval Warm Period occurred as Europe was recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire, resulting in deforestation across Europe as farming communities expanded. The Little Ice Age began around the time the Black Death caused a 40% fall in the population of Europe, and continued as the genocide of the native North American peoples caused massive reforestation over New England.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but holding up the MWP and LIA as examples of non-anthropogenic climate change events is making an unwarranted assumption.
Our species has been altering ecosystems on a massive scale for tens of millenia; It'd be pretty amazing if the destruction of Europe's broadleaved forests over the last 10 millenia turned out to have left no trace on the climate record. The same goes for the fire management of the Australian forests, or the turning of China into one vast paddy field. I just don't understand how it is possible to believe that taking things one step further - pumping vast quantities of carbon from under the ground, massively changing the composition of the atmosphere - will magically have no effect at all on the climate.
OK, here's a quick calculation.
/var/log/emerge.log
$ genlop -t -s ".*" | grep total
merged totally 2191 ebuilds in 9 days, 14 hours, 52 minutes, and 40 seconds.
$ head -n 1
1059351074: Started emerge on: Jul 28, 2003 00:11:14
10 days in 7 months - that's 5% of available machine time spent compiling.
Assume the power used is 250W when compiling, 50W idling: 5% of (250W-50W) is 10W: that's a maximum of 20% extra power for a Gentoo machine over a Slackware box.
Some power will be saved by optimisations, but I doubt it'll be much.
counter.li.org estimates 18m Linux users. Say 1m Gentoo users have run Gentoo an average of 2 years. As is well known, one year is \pi*10^7seconds.
1 machine/user * 1*10^6 users * 2 years * 3.14*10^7 seconds/year * 10W/machine / 3.6*10^6kWh/W/s
equals 2*10^7 kWh, or 20,000MWh
In comparison, Sizewell (a medium-sized nuclear power station near London) produces 1188 MW, or 30,000 MWh/day.
Wrong: that way, Portage will want to downgrade the package to the latest stable version at your next emerge -Du world.
/etc/portage/package.keywords (create the directory and file if they don't already exist); then emerge -Du world and Portage will select the latest unstable release of that package only.
You should actually put a line like:
sys-kernel/gentoo-dev-sources ~x86
into
"Business" section
.stm] written by Stephen Evans, your North America Business Correspondent, of the 5th February:
BBC News
Broadcasting House
London W1A 1AA
Dear Sir or Madam,
With reference to the website article "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3457823
As a license payer, I have always been of the opinion that the BBC, to the best of its ability, maintains a high quality, unbiased news service.
I was however appalled at the allegations made by Stephen Evans against the community of Linux users and developers.
Mr. Evans alleges that "there seems little doubt that" the motivation behind the attack against the website of the company SCO was that "it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system". He baldly states that the attack "is about malice not money" and that to blame are "the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage". The implication that it is standard practice among Internet users to attain one's objectives by means of illegal methods is deeply insulting and hurtful. The insult is compounded by Mr. Evans' own admission that there is "no proof" followed immediately by his assertion that - despite the total lack of any evidence pointing in that direction - the primary targets of an investigation should be the Linux community.
The absurdity of your correspondent's position is compounded by the following points of fact:
the writing of a virus is a work of skill (regrettably misapplied), requiring an in-depth knowledge of the workings of the target system. "Linux zealots" do not know or care how to write code for the altogether different Windows operating system, the habitat of the MyDoom virus;
security professionals have stated[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4113278/] that the targeting of the SCO website by the virus is likely to be a smokescreen designed to draw attention away from the true purpose of the virus - hijacking users' machines for the purposes of sending junk email and of obtaining bank and credit card details by monitoring keystrokes;
SCO is not in any significant sense damaged by the attack on their website; their decision to remove it from the Internet rather than contract a content distribution company to bear the load demonstrates the irrelevance of the website to SCO's commercial model. Indeed, SCO no longer uses its website for any commercial purpose, having ceased to sell software in order to devote its energies to pursuing its lawsuits against IBM and other software companies.
As a member of the community of Linux users, I want no part of any "cyberspace war" dreamed up by sensationalist reporters; similarly I am confident that the contract dispute between SCO and IBM will be resolved in IBM's favour in short order once the court case commences. The implication in your correspondent's article that Linux users are so worried about the implications of SCO's litigation that they are willing to resort to illegal forms of retaliation is not only libellous; it is absurd.
I would argue that at the current time the BBC would do well to refrain from casting aspersions on individuals or categories of people and confine itself to what it does best: the unbiased reporting of fact. The Business section of your organisation would do well to model its behaviour in this regard after the Technology section, whose coverage of the contract dispute between SCO and IBM has throughout been exemplary in sticking to the facts and refraining from base speculation about the actions and motives of participants in and spectators to the case.
I have always, and through the last week in particular, been an avid defender of the BBC's right to editorial independence and its right to report without fear of adverse consequences for mistakes made in good faith; Stephen Evans' article has sadly led me to reconsider this position. I however console myself by noting that this failure of editorial oversight appears to be confined to the Business
Don't use the `feedback form'. Don't email. Send them a proper slice-of-dead-tree letter.
Letters have to be opened; they have to be read; they can't just be deleted, they have to be at least sent out with the rubbish. Plus, sending a letter costs more in time and money than a simple email flame, so shows you to be that much more serious.
It's simple enough: paste the email you just sent into a LaTeX document or into Lyx, sign it and send it off. The address to send it to is:
Business section
BBC News
Broadcasting House
London W1A 1AA
England
Those living outside Europe are exempt, but if postage to the UK costs you less than 1 euro, you owe it to yourself to send them a letter now.
If X supports your pad, the Gimp supports it.
I've had great success (for my needs) with a Wacom PenPartner (well, until it broke and turned into an expensive mousepad :() and all the Gimp tools recognise tilt and pressure where appropriate.
I can say that for me, the single worst thing about the *BSDs is the way the kernel is bound into the base system.
My FreeBSD experience went roughly thus:
Maybe I was unlucky. But the lesson I learned from this is that when monolithic `designed' systems go wrong, you're screwed. Modular systems, by contrast, give you the option of swapping out faulty components, even if the resulting system is slightly less slick than a monolithic system.
I now use Debian Stable for high-availability systems, and Gentoo for high-performance systems. Gentoo is, of course, the modular system par excellence, giving you total control over all aspects of the packages you use. Debian is less so, but gives you the security of knowing that your system has been thoroughly tested under all the conditions it is likely to encounter, and that with a modicum of judgement, updating whenever new packages appear will give superlative security without compromising stability.
And, of course, if the latest kernel screws up your system, you can downgrade to the previous version with absolute freedom. To me that's worth far more than whatever an integrated system can provide.
Sawfish?
If you leave a ladder and a crowbar in your front garden/yard and a burglar uses them to break into your house, that's your fault.
If you leave a ladder and a crowbar in your front garden/yard and a burglar uses them to break into someone else's house, that's also your fault.
Alternatively, if you live in a ground floor dorm, leave your window open, and a burglar breaks into the building that way, you are morally liable to those people whose rooms get burgled.
I don't see a problem with admins requiring a basic level of security consciousness.
Yeah, I hope the pager's fixed. It seems to be a Gnome problem, cos switching workspace with a Sawfish binding works fine, and so does switching from the window list on the end of the Menu panel.
And I hope that changing window manager is at least a *little* easier than in 2.2!
Flamebait is perhaps a little harsh - it could simply be that you haven't fully considered the consequences were your suggestions to be implemented. Although I agree you have the right to hold the opinion that the burden of increased security should be lifted from the shoulders of those who enjoy privilege, and instead borne all the heavier by those who already feel unjustly treated - who would then stand accused of guilt by racial association every time they travelled - I would rather appeal to your sense of 'logic', 'common sense' and pragmatism (you seem to hold good, classic right wing views - is it not part of the conservative ideology that they are the pragmatists while the liberals are led astray by their hopeless idealism?)
I ask you then, sir, to read of the 'Carnival Booth' algorithm and its applications to terrorist methods, in particular a rather interesting paper I read recently. I can't provide the URL, but I can summarise: imagine yourself (or, if not yourself, how about that suspicious Arab looking guy you saw in the street today) the planner of a terrorist operation. You (sorry, he) knows that the authorities are not carrying out random searches but are rather targeting those they consider to pose a 'heightened security risk'. Now, over a period of time send your operatives one by one, unarmed and unequipped, through the same security systems you plan to subvert. No doubt, the authorities will have some hauled in - they won't find anything, so those unlucky operatives will be free to come back and go to work in the explosives laboratory instead. However, those of your operatives who were not targeted have just been given a white card by the security systems, allowing you to conclude that next time - when they are armed - the chances of them being searched are small to miniscule.
Congratulations, sir - your distaste for 'PC over security' (by the way - is your greed for racial profiling connected at all to the racial grouping you happen to be classified under?) has just cost a few hundred lives.
When my bags are searched, or my clothes patted down, I feel pride that I am doing my part to help provide security for all.
Mandrake Update dumps status information to stdout - just run MandrakeUpdate from a root console. Alternatively, you can do the sensible non-GUI thing and run # urpmi --update --auto-select
when moving files from a filesystem on the ISO-8859-15 charset to one on the UTF-8 charset - say vfat to ext3.
I know.
Luckily there were only about 12 files (courtesy of a recent trip to Sweden) and mv-ing them wasn't too tricky.
Any more and I would have got seriously frustrated, and probably ended up writing convmv myself.