We can't all be web designers. Besides, I thought one of Web's strongest points was freedom of expression. Gotta lower the technical bar if you really want anybody to be able to express themselves on the Web.
This means that either the BSD projects will have to fork GPLv2 versions of affected software or (hopefully) re-implement said software.
Why on Earth would they? What's so offensive in GPL v3 all of a sudden, as compared to v2? It simply closes some loopholes that were abused by evil corporations. It has nothing to do with the BSD side of things. Why should the BSD crowd care about that anymore than they did about v2?
[..] if the Linux license becomes too restrictive [..]
"Too restrictive"? What the hell are you on? GPL v3 simply makes explicit some things that GPL v2 already mentioned implicitly. It's an attempt to stop assholes from exploiting several loopholes in v2. The rest of the thing keeps the same spirit as v2, and it's not more restrictive than it. Well, now, if you feel that v2 was restrictive as well, tough on you.
Exactly how does the BSD license allow you to take away someone else's freedom? [...] In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom.
Microsoft+Novell, Tivo, DRM, software patents... ring a bell? Feel pretty free, do you, around them? Enjoy seeing free software made proprietary? Enjoy seeing stuff that hasn't been written yet claimed by an asshole who got enough money to buy himself a patent?
Do you need to be drawn a picture to understand that pure freedom, without anything to enforce it, is anarchy and soon devolves into the law of the strongest? Public domain or the BSD license will never get you freedom. They will simply dump stuff by the curve for whoever's strongest to pick up and to keep for himself.
And on your definition of "conducive", and of "community", and of "creating", heck, and of "definition" and so on. Come on, it's ridiculous. RMS has been spending decades explaining "free". Let's not split hairs.
It still suffers from the shortcomings of desktop software. Two of which spring to mind:
(a) They are dependent on _some_ platform specific code, which needs to be maintained, upgraded, will never be ported to every platform, and so on.
(b) When the application is on just one server and all the clients are generic Web browsers, updates are extremely simple. Once the application spreads around to millions of computers you start having issues with outdated versions, backwards compatibility and so on.
I think it's just an attempt at accomplishing that (in)famous goal: "write once, run everywhere". Many have tried it before. XAML, GTK+Glade, Java, Flash, XUL are just some examples.
I frankly don't know what Google is trying to accomplish, unless it's just a random jab at Microsoft's Office suite, meant purely to keep Microsoft on its toes (Office being their bread and butter).
Other than that... I honestly don't get it. The Web is the closest anyone has ever got to a universal platform so far, and here they come and try to revert to the desktop again. I thought it was agreed that the next evolutionary step is a Web API that will rid us of the terrible patchwork that is HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript. But this...
Bloatware and spyware on a Linux system is something I had hoped I'd never get to see. The same goes for anti-spyware. If Dell includes them it will trigger a dirty vicious cycle.
I'd love to see a few completely clueless oldsters accidentally get one of these Ubuntu Dell machines for their first and only computer. Then we'd have converts who simply didn't know any other way.
Some of them may be curious enough to give it 5 minutes, but I doubt it. They'll just get whatever OS they really want on it and take it from there.
it probably wouldnt hurt ubuntu to put it on the dell pcs- look what it did for windows
Dell is a by-product of Windows' glory days. As Windows starts to wane, Dell is doing the sensible thing: diversifies its offer. It's something that most IT businesses have done ages ago. You cannot ignore Linux anymore, and you cannot ignore the fact Windows is a crappy product, sold through shoddy business practices, on a market that just got wiser. You just can't base your business on Windows anymore, not if you expect to still have it a decade from now.
You're not being paranoid enough, at Slashdot accepted levels. Your Knoppix CD is already rootkit'ed. Hell, {insert IT megacorporation here} would argue that Linux itself is a rootkit.
Not much, according to the copyright law. As long as a developer gets his hands on the specs and develops software that implements them from scratch, there's nothing they can do. Licensing only covers specific, already-written, code. Reverse engineering is limited in the USA by the DMCA, but there's no such thing in the EU. Providing the same functionality is limited in the USA by software patents, but again, there's no such thing in the EU (even though there's a lot of push for them). So all you can do is tie the people involved with NDA's and liability claims, but once someone gets around that, there's nothing stopping them from implementing the specs. Again, this only works in EU.
Of course, I'd venture that Microsoft already thought as much. If they're opening up their specs it may mean that (a) they're desperate to sell to the EU no matter what the possible consequences; (b) they're going to take whatever measures to stop the specs finding their way to free software. NDA's, liability and exorbitant licensing costs are pretty good methods, albeit not infallible. Another trick would be to offer the specs hopelessly obfuscated, but that won't work if they charge an arm and a leg for it -- those who pay want to know what they payed for.
This very much could be a step in the direction they already took.
Doesn't have to be. Actually, this idea has already been done, and done beautifully. It was called OEOne Homebase Desktop. It was a complete desktop environment built on XUL, and incidentally "XUL desktop environment" is the appropriate name for something like this. "Mozilla" is either the foundation or the former browser suite built on XUL. XUL is the platform.
So, you can see what the OEOne desktop looked like if you search Google images for oeone or oeone homebase. It was a fully integrated environment, which means mail, calendar, contacts, browser, text processor, image album, music and video player, basically everything you'd need for your basic office/home desktop.
OEOne still appears in the Mozilla Hall of Fame as such, even though they renamed themselves Axentra.com at some point. The Homebase desktop still appears in their press releases up to 2002, then it was released as open source as the Penzilla Desktop and abandoned as far as OEOne was concerned. But while it ran it also sponsored a few other developments, such as AbiMoz, which integrates AbiWord inside Mozilla.
Homebase wasn't a "traditional", "generic" desktop, but more of a specialized environment, aimed specifically at office productivity and entertainment. It had a "home page" which aggregated news, weather, contacts, new mail and whatnot. It would have been ideal for PDA's. I never understood why it was so poorly publicized and why it seems to have missed so many trains.
The stuff about "all copyrightists(sic!) are scum" is silly, but he may have stumbled across something. How come this "call to law and order" comes just as Putin puts together a national body to "oversee" all media, a body which is just ripe for censorship and abuse of human rights? I smell a big two-faced rat here.
All I can say, after seeing this sort of effort to block minority points of view is that America really is freer than these countries.
I think it's scary to think there are still Americans who think the US of today allows them more liberties than your average European country. I mean, I knew that there must be some, statistically, since there's so many American citizens to begin with, but it's still troubling to see one in action.
Here's something for your consideration: the European peoples have, for the last few centuries, experienced pretty much everything in the way of censorship. I would submit they are much better trained, on the whole, than the Americans, to resist and fight it, or at the very least recognize censorship when they see it. The very self-assumed liberties of the Americans are what weakens their reactions.
Granted, the old saying about 'those who don't learn history are condemned to repeat it' still applies. But perhaps it applies more to politicians and less and less to the ordinary folk these days.
Therein lies the cruft of the issue. XSS is the culprit, not Ajax, not prototyping, not JavaScript itself. It all comes down to incompetent developers allowing visitors to inject JavaScript that other visitors will execute. Period. Once custom JS is executed all bets are off, assume the worst.
This is an extremely basic point in security of any kind: once the attacker is executing code inside your system, that's bad. Nevermind that fact that other limiting factors will mitigate the range of the attack (browser-only for JavaScript, account-permissions-only for other attacks). Most efforts should be made to prevent intrusion, not to limit damage after the attacker is "in".
Re:Recommended for new *nix users?
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 1
vi is worth knowing at least the basics of, simply because it's installed by default on 99% of Unix & linux systems.
That is a rather poor excuse for using it. What happened, didn't your Unix or Linux system come with a package selector in the install interface? Didn't include anything but vi on the install media?
For an already installed system, all bets are off, the current or former admin must have tweaked the installed packages to suit his own fancy. If they don't use vi it may not be installed. It comes down to what they use.
As for the off-chance you may end up on an unknown system with nothing but vi at hand and absolutely no means to install another text editor... that's as plausible as anything. How often does that happen? And if it happens, OK, chances are good there's going to be a vi around rather than something else, but the point is, vi is not some God-handed down absolute must for a Unix/Linux system. Its presence and usage depends on people's preferences. If I don't like vi I don't have to learn anything any more than I have to learn pico, nano, joe, emacs or mcedit.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Someone want to add a Chuck Norris variant?
Yes, but all I could come up with was "Chuck Norris could beat up Richard Stallman and Bill Joy at the same time, with both hands tied behind his back".
I don't see why you'd want JavaScript replaced by Python or Ruby. As a programming language, it is more powerful than both. By powerful I mean simplicity and power of the language itself, not comparing sets of features.
For proof, [re]read Revenge of the Nerds. Search for "Appendix: Power" on the page, look at the problem. Try doing that in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C of any kind.
Yes they can. I can take the GPL, I can slap "you have to wear pajamas at all times or else you can't do anything with this product" and it would be valid. Not GPL, not sane, but valid nonetheless.
It's up to the original developer to license his original product in any way he sees fit. He can use any existing license as a starting point. There's nothing in the GPL that says "don't use GPL as a base for modified licenses".
Trust me, you DON'T want a popup dialogue for every cookie. There are Firefox extensions (such as Cookie Button) which let you customize cookie setting per-site. Together with a default of "enforce session expiration for this site", all is well.
You can't really browse the web with cookies completely disabled. I have extensions that can block both cookies and JavaScript completely. I can live without JS, but I've discovered I can't with blocking all cookies by default. So now the default is session. It's ok, really -- I get the functionality and the likes of doubleclick.net don't get to match my id from one session to another.
The "problem" stems from the fact that HTTP was specifically designed to not allow servers to collect any meaningful information about you, the Web surfer, if you don't wish to cooperate. HTTP and any decent browser will allow you to completely turn off cookies, JavaScript, referring URL, browser identification, even mask your IP by using proxies.
There's simply no 100% reliable method for a server to even tell that two "hits" in a row were from the same live person, let alone construct meaningful demographics. And it's exactly the way I like it. HTTP puts the control in my hands, the user, whenever I wish to exercit it.
Advertising on the Web doesn't work. Nielsen has been saying that for a decade, for more reasons than just privacy concerns. But as long as SOME money trickle in and users are dumbed down by browser who don't let them use the control they should have, advertisers still choose to ignore reality.
Let them be. I have Firefox, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, Cookie Button and a bunch of other extensions and I'm not afraid to use them. Anybody who has the nerve to tell me that I have to watch ads on the Web can go suck on a turnip right now because they clearly don't know what the hell they're talking about. I DO NOT.
I don't care if you're a megacorporation or a 2-dime personal website. If you want me to watch ads you should ask me nicely and pretty please would I care to perhaps watch some ads. Because any ad that pisses me off in any way meets oblivion in just a couple of short clicks. I'm entirely sick of being peddled ANYTHING.
If you insist on only seeing a small part of the DRM picture, specifically the one that doesn't affect you and your files now, you will be all the more surprised when the ugly side of DRM hits you at some point in the future. Except by then it will be too late to do anything about it.
I speak as a person who has been hit by it several times already. And you are affected too, if you'd be willing to open your eyes. What if you want to listen to the CD on the computer and you're told you may not do that? How is that fair?
Slashdot Mirror
We can't all be web designers. Besides, I thought one of Web's strongest points was freedom of expression. Gotta lower the technical bar if you really want anybody to be able to express themselves on the Web.
This means that either the BSD projects will have to fork GPLv2 versions of affected software or (hopefully) re-implement said software.
Why on Earth would they? What's so offensive in GPL v3 all of a sudden, as compared to v2? It simply closes some loopholes that were abused by evil corporations. It has nothing to do with the BSD side of things. Why should the BSD crowd care about that anymore than they did about v2?
[..] if the Linux license becomes too restrictive [..]
"Too restrictive"? What the hell are you on? GPL v3 simply makes explicit some things that GPL v2 already mentioned implicitly. It's an attempt to stop assholes from exploiting several loopholes in v2. The rest of the thing keeps the same spirit as v2, and it's not more restrictive than it. Well, now, if you feel that v2 was restrictive as well, tough on you.
Exactly how does the BSD license allow you to take away someone else's freedom? [...] In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom.
Microsoft+Novell, Tivo, DRM, software patents... ring a bell? Feel pretty free, do you, around them? Enjoy seeing free software made proprietary? Enjoy seeing stuff that hasn't been written yet claimed by an asshole who got enough money to buy himself a patent?
Do you need to be drawn a picture to understand that pure freedom, without anything to enforce it, is anarchy and soon devolves into the law of the strongest? Public domain or the BSD license will never get you freedom. They will simply dump stuff by the curve for whoever's strongest to pick up and to keep for himself.
And on your definition of "conducive", and of "community", and of "creating", heck, and of "definition" and so on. Come on, it's ridiculous. RMS has been spending decades explaining "free". Let's not split hairs.
It still suffers from the shortcomings of desktop software. Two of which spring to mind:
(a) They are dependent on _some_ platform specific code, which needs to be maintained, upgraded, will never be ported to every platform, and so on.
(b) When the application is on just one server and all the clients are generic Web browsers, updates are extremely simple. Once the application spreads around to millions of computers you start having issues with outdated versions, backwards compatibility and so on.
The Web doesn't suffer from these problems.
I think it's just an attempt at accomplishing that (in)famous goal: "write once, run everywhere". Many have tried it before. XAML, GTK+Glade, Java, Flash, XUL are just some examples.
I frankly don't know what Google is trying to accomplish, unless it's just a random jab at Microsoft's Office suite, meant purely to keep Microsoft on its toes (Office being their bread and butter).
Other than that... I honestly don't get it. The Web is the closest anyone has ever got to a universal platform so far, and here they come and try to revert to the desktop again. I thought it was agreed that the next evolutionary step is a Web API that will rid us of the terrible patchwork that is HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript. But this...
I don't really see the downside.
Bloatware and spyware on a Linux system is something I had hoped I'd never get to see. The same goes for anti-spyware. If Dell includes them it will trigger a dirty vicious cycle.
I'd love to see a few completely clueless oldsters accidentally get one of these Ubuntu Dell machines for their first and only computer. Then we'd have converts who simply didn't know any other way.
Some of them may be curious enough to give it 5 minutes, but I doubt it. They'll just get whatever OS they really want on it and take it from there.
it probably wouldnt hurt ubuntu to put it on the dell pcs- look what it did for windows
Dell is a by-product of Windows' glory days. As Windows starts to wane, Dell is doing the sensible thing: diversifies its offer. It's something that most IT businesses have done ages ago. You cannot ignore Linux anymore, and you cannot ignore the fact Windows is a crappy product, sold through shoddy business practices, on a market that just got wiser. You just can't base your business on Windows anymore, not if you expect to still have it a decade from now.
You're not being paranoid enough, at Slashdot accepted levels. Your Knoppix CD is already rootkit'ed. Hell, {insert IT megacorporation here} would argue that Linux itself is a rootkit.
Not much, according to the copyright law. As long as a developer gets his hands on the specs and develops software that implements them from scratch, there's nothing they can do. Licensing only covers specific, already-written, code. Reverse engineering is limited in the USA by the DMCA, but there's no such thing in the EU. Providing the same functionality is limited in the USA by software patents, but again, there's no such thing in the EU (even though there's a lot of push for them). So all you can do is tie the people involved with NDA's and liability claims, but once someone gets around that, there's nothing stopping them from implementing the specs. Again, this only works in EU.
Of course, I'd venture that Microsoft already thought as much. If they're opening up their specs it may mean that (a) they're desperate to sell to the EU no matter what the possible consequences; (b) they're going to take whatever measures to stop the specs finding their way to free software. NDA's, liability and exorbitant licensing costs are pretty good methods, albeit not infallible. Another trick would be to offer the specs hopelessly obfuscated, but that won't work if they charge an arm and a leg for it -- those who pay want to know what they payed for.
This very much could be a step in the direction they already took.
Doesn't have to be. Actually, this idea has already been done, and done beautifully. It was called OEOne Homebase Desktop. It was a complete desktop environment built on XUL, and incidentally "XUL desktop environment" is the appropriate name for something like this. "Mozilla" is either the foundation or the former browser suite built on XUL. XUL is the platform.
So, you can see what the OEOne desktop looked like if you search Google images for oeone or oeone homebase. It was a fully integrated environment, which means mail, calendar, contacts, browser, text processor, image album, music and video player, basically everything you'd need for your basic office/home desktop.
OEOne still appears in the Mozilla Hall of Fame as such, even though they renamed themselves Axentra.com at some point. The Homebase desktop still appears in their press releases up to 2002, then it was released as open source as the Penzilla Desktop and abandoned as far as OEOne was concerned. But while it ran it also sponsored a few other developments, such as AbiMoz, which integrates AbiWord inside Mozilla.
Homebase wasn't a "traditional", "generic" desktop, but more of a specialized environment, aimed specifically at office productivity and entertainment. It had a "home page" which aggregated news, weather, contacts, new mail and whatnot. It would have been ideal for PDA's. I never understood why it was so poorly publicized and why it seems to have missed so many trains.
The stuff about "all copyrightists(sic!) are scum" is silly, but he may have stumbled across something. How come this "call to law and order" comes just as Putin puts together a national body to "oversee" all media, a body which is just ripe for censorship and abuse of human rights? I smell a big two-faced rat here.
Here's something for your consideration: the European peoples have, for the last few centuries, experienced pretty much everything in the way of censorship. I would submit they are much better trained, on the whole, than the Americans, to resist and fight it, or at the very least recognize censorship when they see it. The very self-assumed liberties of the Americans are what weakens their reactions.
Granted, the old saying about 'those who don't learn history are condemned to repeat it' still applies. But perhaps it applies more to politicians and less and less to the ordinary folk these days.
This is an extremely basic point in security of any kind: once the attacker is executing code inside your system, that's bad. Nevermind that fact that other limiting factors will mitigate the range of the attack (browser-only for JavaScript, account-permissions-only for other attacks). Most efforts should be made to prevent intrusion, not to limit damage after the attacker is "in".
For an already installed system, all bets are off, the current or former admin must have tweaked the installed packages to suit his own fancy. If they don't use vi it may not be installed. It comes down to what they use.
As for the off-chance you may end up on an unknown system with nothing but vi at hand and absolutely no means to install another text editor... that's as plausible as anything. How often does that happen? And if it happens, OK, chances are good there's going to be a vi around rather than something else, but the point is, vi is not some God-handed down absolute must for a Unix/Linux system. Its presence and usage depends on people's preferences. If I don't like vi I don't have to learn anything any more than I have to learn pico, nano, joe, emacs or mcedit.
I don't see why you'd want JavaScript replaced by Python or Ruby. As a programming language, it is more powerful than both. By powerful I mean simplicity and power of the language itself, not comparing sets of features.
For proof, [re]read Revenge of the Nerds. Search for "Appendix: Power" on the page, look at the problem. Try doing that in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C of any kind.
Yes they can. I can take the GPL, I can slap "you have to wear pajamas at all times or else you can't do anything with this product" and it would be valid. Not GPL, not sane, but valid nonetheless.
It's up to the original developer to license his original product in any way he sees fit. He can use any existing license as a starting point. There's nothing in the GPL that says "don't use GPL as a base for modified licenses".
If it's a modified GPL it may not be allowed to call itself GPL, but most of it is still there. Including the parts about defining "derivative work".
Trust me, you DON'T want a popup dialogue for every cookie. There are Firefox extensions (such as Cookie Button) which let you customize cookie setting per-site. Together with a default of "enforce session expiration for this site", all is well.
You can't really browse the web with cookies completely disabled. I have extensions that can block both cookies and JavaScript completely. I can live without JS, but I've discovered I can't with blocking all cookies by default. So now the default is session. It's ok, really -- I get the functionality and the likes of doubleclick.net don't get to match my id from one session to another.
The "problem" stems from the fact that HTTP was specifically designed to not allow servers to collect any meaningful information about you, the Web surfer, if you don't wish to cooperate. HTTP and any decent browser will allow you to completely turn off cookies, JavaScript, referring URL, browser identification, even mask your IP by using proxies.
There's simply no 100% reliable method for a server to even tell that two "hits" in a row were from the same live person, let alone construct meaningful demographics. And it's exactly the way I like it. HTTP puts the control in my hands, the user, whenever I wish to exercit it.
Advertising on the Web doesn't work. Nielsen has been saying that for a decade, for more reasons than just privacy concerns. But as long as SOME money trickle in and users are dumbed down by browser who don't let them use the control they should have, advertisers still choose to ignore reality.
Let them be. I have Firefox, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, Cookie Button and a bunch of other extensions and I'm not afraid to use them. Anybody who has the nerve to tell me that I have to watch ads on the Web can go suck on a turnip right now because they clearly don't know what the hell they're talking about. I DO NOT.
I don't care if you're a megacorporation or a 2-dime personal website. If you want me to watch ads you should ask me nicely and pretty please would I care to perhaps watch some ads. Because any ad that pisses me off in any way meets oblivion in just a couple of short clicks. I'm entirely sick of being peddled ANYTHING.
If you insist on only seeing a small part of the DRM picture, specifically the one that doesn't affect you and your files now, you will be all the more surprised when the ugly side of DRM hits you at some point in the future. Except by then it will be too late to do anything about it.
I speak as a person who has been hit by it several times already. And you are affected too, if you'd be willing to open your eyes. What if you want to listen to the CD on the computer and you're told you may not do that? How is that fair?