Eh? The original point of my post was BlackPuma saying:
"Small wonder our enemies don't trust us."... and I don't really understand what would cause someone to trust an enemy in the first place.
As regards the bigger issue: I think it's more a case of "do we as British trust America" rather than vice-versa. Frankly, no. America was partly responsible for putting Saddam in power and arming him to the teeth (though by the time Gulf War 2 came along, most of the weaponry he'd been sold was either used or looking decidedly old).
I am concerned that in 10 years time, we will no longer be allies with America yet we could have an airforce which America can remotely disable. It's all very well offering "assurances", but the technology exists to build a plane which could be remotely disabled and I think it would be foolish to be unable to see everything which went into it.
.. thee can make things "easier to buy than they are to pirate".
Way the First: You make sure that everyone can buy whatever they please in a manner that is convenient to them, at a price they consider fair, and you basically treat them like a valued customer. This has been the business model of countless organisations for many years, I tell thee.
Way the Second: You make it harder to pirate material. You concentrate your efforts on this, rather than making your products easier to buy or use. You appear on television sounding like something out of a 1950's movie about the American fear of Communism, except you use the word "Pirate". This be a difficult model to sustain, as thee are in a constant arms race with people the world over.
IANACH (a corporate historian), but how many companies back then essentially based their entire business on suing others for breach of some patent that they own without any intention to ever exploit it?
The next big thing may well be a better mousetrap. I shall build it. It shall be three feet wide and five feet long. It shall be baited with patent application forms.
I shall call it "The Lawyertrap" (patent pending).
I use Gentoo - and I even use it on production servers.
However, I don't consider performance to be a particularly big benefit. Once you've got gcc doing it's basic -O3 or whatever, anything else is marginal at best.
There are, however, two things I get out of it which are useful to me. These should not be ignored:
Choose compilation options. Most packages have a number of options available at compile time. Generally with pre-compiled packages, you either get every single option compiled in OR you get "whatever options ${VENDOR} thinks are most appropriate". Gentoo provides flags as an intrinsic part of portage which allow you to specify which options are compiled in.
A vast number of regularly updated packages. Put simply, I can emerge almost anything, whereas every other distribution I've used, sooner or later I come across a package I need which doesn't have an RPM or what have you, and I have to build my own complete with the dependency hell that can entail.
Of course, there are drawbacks:
Many commercial non-F/OSS packages aren't available as ebuilds and their installers get confused with Gentoo's creative filesystem layout, which is not entirely LSB-compliant in places (particularly/etc/rcX.d).
Gentoo packages are declared "stable" more-or-less by fiat rather than by extensive regression testing, and it's not unknown for an upgrade to completely break things without having the good grace to announce it first. This isn't necessarily a problem if you test everything before you go live and you have contingencies in place - which you should be doing anyway. But it can be annoying.
I guess it's just a case of "know the tool you're using".
I disagree - I think they are all focused on creating "excellent", but "what it's excellent at" varies (as does the definition of "excellent").
A half-decent common configuration interface is more likely to come out of a community led Linux distro which doesn't care what other people think, it just wants to solve the problem. As opposed to a business-led distro which is more interested in differentiating itself from all the others.
Most of the big community led Linux distros (cf. Debian, Gentoo) don't set much truck by producing pretty configuration tools.
It would be very nice indeed if RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake could all throw some developers at a project to make Linux more configurable and GPL the result. However, if RedHat's whole business plan is "We'll produce a better Linux than SuSE", then it somewhat flies in the face of this to work with SuSE to reduce or eliminate the differences between the distributions.
I would argue that the thing holding Linux back now isn't configuration - Ubuntu is showing that it's possible to make that reasonably foolproof, and in industry it's unlikely individual users would configure their own machines anyway - it's applications. It's all fine and dandy saying "Linux can do everything Windows can do" but if it can't run the hodge-podge of random programs or an almost-identical equivalent which a lot of people and businesses have acquired, and which have become critical to them, it's going to have a lot of trouble gaining significant acceptance outside the server room. And there's always something which doesn't have a terribly good F/OSS equivalent.
IANAL, but could someone who understands this better explain how France proposes to marry this law up with the European Copyright Directive, which AIUI provides a DMCA-like law across the EU.
The focus should be on the real day-to-day user stuff.
None of the major distributions (with the possible exception of SuSE being owned by Novell, who also own ximian and hence evolution, though that's freely available) have a unique selling point in day-to-day user stuff. They're just repackaging Gnome and/or KDE, with their own tweaks which vary from "very little" (cf. SuSE) to "loads" (cf. Bluecurve).
Fooling yourself into sacrificing usability for marketability is a fools game and after the end user gets wise or tired of playing the game everyone loses.
Rule #1 of business - have something which separates you from the competition.
Given that all the underlying software is much the same, the gloss on top is about the only thing which can be called a unique selling point. AIUI, your argument is "a configuration tool shouldn't be a gloss on top, there should be a decent, freely available one which all use": Nice idea, unfortunately it doesn't actually exist right now, and the fact that it's pretty much the biggest selling point of any commercial distributor's product means it's unlikely a distribution vendor will suddenly use someone elses tool, or what's to differentiate?
Do you think my WIFE cares that Suse developer YAST? Or does she just want to get work done like she can with OSX or Windows?
No.
But I think that someone who wants a Linux solution, faced with the various options and having no idea what to go with, may be attracted to "the one that's easiest to set up". Similarly, someone like me who's familiar with Linux is more interested in "the one that gets out of the way so I can set things up how I please".
Why all these distributions insist on focusing their efforts on rebuilding the same functionality baffles me. I mean I "get" the want to be unique thing. Don't want to copy thing.
About the only thing which distinguishes any given flavour of Linux from any other is the configuration tools. The underlying programs (X, Apache, Samba, postfix etc etc) are the same, plus or minus a couple of minor versions. I think it might be rather hard for say, Mandrake to compete with RedHat if the only selling point they had was "We've tweaked some of the background images you get in KDE slightly".
Therefore, if he has deleted ANYTHING the company wants to see he is likely in violation of the company's data policy.
Yes, but how do you prove he deleted something the company wanted to see? It's been securely deleted.
Maybe he has his own computer and did the work on that.
Maybe he's paranoid the laptop might get into the wrong hands so he securely deletes everything. I very much doubt company policy states "You mustn't use secure deletion tools" (though it may very well say "You mustn't use unauthorised software").
As long as there are companies selling software as modules to be embedded into other software, there will be proprietary software. The business model of "our software goes into yours, you pay us royalties and sign an NDA" happens a LOT in IT, and while it continues to exist it makes entire GPL'd systems from BIOS upwards unlikely.
And the rest. Eg. I believe it's the defacto compiler for VxWorks, a popular realtime OS.
Re:Sweet! Zealot B.S. for the 7,000th time
on
Linus on GPL3 In Forbes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In the case of the first, there's no point in TiVo releasing code complete with any modifications. You can't use it anyway.
There's been a similar thread discussing companies working around the GPL recently on my local LUG mailing list. In this case, discussion concerns a piece of hardware which uses GPL'd code but requires a hacked GCC to compile.
The theory is:
"The code says:
int do_something(void) { #DO_SOMETHING }
The compiler is hacked to insert the real code when it sees #DO_SOMETHING. The company which distributes the compiled source code doesn't distribute a compiler, so is not obliged to release the source code for the compiler itself, thus providing an end-run around the GPL."
How true this is, I don't know. It's speculation. Please don't mod me up just because you think this makes sense!
Essentially, GPLv3 adds a "Don't take the piss" clause. AIUI, the problem is putting this in legal parlance.
And in an enterprise, it's unlikely you'd run a commercial, paid-for product on an unsupported Linux distro. I was just doing it at home to see if it worked;)
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems.
That doesn't work if the procedures aren't there for the helpdesk in the first place.
eg. Two weeks ago I found a problem which eventually I solved myself. Now, I could ring my ISP and say "Don't know if you're aware of this, but a computer with a fluxquox network card nailed to 10Mbps will, if connected to the internet directly through the cable modem you supply, be damn slow for no apparent reason - even though the Internet connection is significantly slower than 10Mbps so you wouldn't expect it to matter".
They would say "You're having problems connecting to the Internet? Can you reset your PC for me please?"
I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them. Eventually they'd just agree to get me off the phone, but there's no knowledgebase for them to update because all they do is follow the script.
Granted, it didn't work quite out of the box. But the hacking required was so minimal I'd expect anyone with a reasonable understanding of Linux to manage it.
Turning off functionality because of security is not acceptable. It the OS offers certain features, they should be secure, otherwise, they are flawed. Stop apologizing for Apple computer and its defects.
Security is not a black-and-white thing. You can't just build a tickbox into a system saying "Do you want this system to be secure? [ ] Yes [X] No".
It's about risk assessment, deciding what risks you're prepared to take. Part of that is figuring out how to set up your systems to provide all required functionality without taking unnecessary security risks. And every extra piece of software you install, every remote service adds to those risks.
Article is already/.'ed, but I'm not sure I grasp the problem with OO.o being behind Microsoft Office.
Here in the UK, MS has been running ads with people wearing dinosaur heads making comments like:
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97. A simple PDA with Outlook integration (which has existed for... oooh, some time now) would solve the problem above, for instance. The only reason I've heard anyone in business give for upgrading for years is "we're receiving a lot of email attachments in the new format".
I would argue that, this being the case, OpenOffice doesn't need to get "on a par with Office $NEXTVERSION". It just needs Office '97 equivalence and good import/export filters.
Would you mind enlightening me? AFAICT it forces equipment manufacturers to spend extra money developing the equipment to broadcast a special flag and for radios to honour it - so they've got to spend money doing R&D which is not technically necessary.
The business it's supposed to be good for - the record business - well, it doesn't cost them any more than it costs to bribe a few US government officials. But I'm unsure as to the benefits - it sounds to me like a pre-emptive strike so they won't have to make the same "Home Taping is Killing Music" argument they did years ago. However, all the evidence suggests that home taping did nothing of the sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? The original point of my post was BlackPuma saying:
... and I don't really understand what would cause someone to trust an enemy in the first place.
"Small wonder our enemies don't trust us."
As regards the bigger issue: I think it's more a case of "do we as British trust America" rather than vice-versa. Frankly, no. America was partly responsible for putting Saddam in power and arming him to the teeth (though by the time Gulf War 2 came along, most of the weaponry he'd been sold was either used or looking decidedly old).
I am concerned that in 10 years time, we will no longer be allies with America yet we could have an airforce which America can remotely disable. It's all very well offering "assurances", but the technology exists to build a plane which could be remotely disabled and I think it would be foolish to be unable to see everything which went into it.
.. thee can make things "easier to buy than they are to pirate".
Way the First: You make sure that everyone can buy whatever they please in a manner that is convenient to them, at a price they consider fair, and you basically treat them like a valued customer. This has been the business model of countless organisations for many years, I tell thee.
Way the Second: You make it harder to pirate material. You concentrate your efforts on this, rather than making your products easier to buy or use. You appear on television sounding like something out of a 1950's movie about the American fear of Communism, except you use the word "Pirate". This be a difficult model to sustain, as thee are in a constant arms race with people the world over.
IANACH (a corporate historian), but how many companies back then essentially based their entire business on suing others for breach of some patent that they own without any intention to ever exploit it?
The next big thing may well be a better mousetrap. I shall build it. It shall be three feet wide and five feet long. It shall be baited with patent application forms.
I shall call it "The Lawyertrap" (patent pending).
Do you consider the UK to be friends? Obviously not.
Too right! Why on earth should I trust my own government?
Small wonder our enemies don't trust us.
If they trusted you they wouldn't be your enemy.
However, I don't consider performance to be a particularly big benefit. Once you've got gcc doing it's basic -O3 or whatever, anything else is marginal at best.
There are, however, two things I get out of it which are useful to me. These should not be ignored:
Of course, there are drawbacks:
I guess it's just a case of "know the tool you're using".
I disagree - I think they are all focused on creating "excellent", but "what it's excellent at" varies (as does the definition of "excellent").
A half-decent common configuration interface is more likely to come out of a community led Linux distro which doesn't care what other people think, it just wants to solve the problem. As opposed to a business-led distro which is more interested in differentiating itself from all the others.
Most of the big community led Linux distros (cf. Debian, Gentoo) don't set much truck by producing pretty configuration tools.
It would be very nice indeed if RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake could all throw some developers at a project to make Linux more configurable and GPL the result. However, if RedHat's whole business plan is "We'll produce a better Linux than SuSE", then it somewhat flies in the face of this to work with SuSE to reduce or eliminate the differences between the distributions.
I would argue that the thing holding Linux back now isn't configuration - Ubuntu is showing that it's possible to make that reasonably foolproof, and in industry it's unlikely individual users would configure their own machines anyway - it's applications. It's all fine and dandy saying "Linux can do everything Windows can do" but if it can't run the hodge-podge of random programs or an almost-identical equivalent which a lot of people and businesses have acquired, and which have become critical to them, it's going to have a lot of trouble gaining significant acceptance outside the server room. And there's always something which doesn't have a terribly good F/OSS equivalent.
IANAL, but could someone who understands this better explain how France proposes to marry this law up with the European Copyright Directive, which AIUI provides a DMCA-like law across the EU.
The focus should be on the real day-to-day user stuff.
None of the major distributions (with the possible exception of SuSE being owned by Novell, who also own ximian and hence evolution, though that's freely available) have a unique selling point in day-to-day user stuff. They're just repackaging Gnome and/or KDE, with their own tweaks which vary from "very little" (cf. SuSE) to "loads" (cf. Bluecurve).
Fooling yourself into sacrificing usability for marketability is a fools game and after the end user gets wise or tired of playing the game everyone loses.
Rule #1 of business - have something which separates you from the competition.
Given that all the underlying software is much the same, the gloss on top is about the only thing which can be called a unique selling point. AIUI, your argument is "a configuration tool shouldn't be a gloss on top, there should be a decent, freely available one which all use": Nice idea, unfortunately it doesn't actually exist right now, and the fact that it's pretty much the biggest selling point of any commercial distributor's product means it's unlikely a distribution vendor will suddenly use someone elses tool, or what's to differentiate?
Do you think my WIFE cares that Suse developer YAST? Or does she just want to get work done like she can with OSX or Windows?
No.
But I think that someone who wants a Linux solution, faced with the various options and having no idea what to go with, may be attracted to "the one that's easiest to set up". Similarly, someone like me who's familiar with Linux is more interested in "the one that gets out of the way so I can set things up how I please".
Why all these distributions insist on focusing their efforts on rebuilding the same functionality baffles me. I mean I "get" the want to be unique thing. Don't want to copy thing.
About the only thing which distinguishes any given flavour of Linux from any other is the configuration tools. The underlying programs (X, Apache, Samba, postfix etc etc) are the same, plus or minus a couple of minor versions. I think it might be rather hard for say, Mandrake to compete with RedHat if the only selling point they had was "We've tweaked some of the background images you get in KDE slightly".
Stallman's name is a big draw. He knows it's a business audience and he'll adapt to that.
Does that mean he won't show up looking like this?
Sony should allow people to claim actual damages if people can show that damage has been done.
Allow? Allow?! Surely the whole point of a lawsuit is that Sony don't get any say in what's allowed - that's down to the court.
Therefore, if he has deleted ANYTHING the company wants to see he is likely in violation of the company's data policy.
Yes, but how do you prove he deleted something the company wanted to see? It's been securely deleted.
Maybe he has his own computer and did the work on that.
Maybe he's paranoid the laptop might get into the wrong hands so he securely deletes everything. I very much doubt company policy states "You mustn't use secure deletion tools" (though it may very well say "You mustn't use unauthorised software").
The whole argument is mostly moot since they couldn't possibly get all the contributors to agree to change the license anyway.
Apparently some have now passed on to the great software house in the sky. Could be rather difficult to get their consent.
As long as there are companies selling software as modules to be embedded into other software, there will be proprietary software. The business model of "our software goes into yours, you pay us royalties and sign an NDA" happens a LOT in IT, and while it continues to exist it makes entire GPL'd systems from BIOS upwards unlikely.
And the rest. Eg. I believe it's the defacto compiler for VxWorks, a popular realtime OS.
In the case of the first, there's no point in TiVo releasing code complete with any modifications. You can't use it anyway.
There's been a similar thread discussing companies working around the GPL recently on my local LUG mailing list. In this case, discussion concerns a piece of hardware which uses GPL'd code but requires a hacked GCC to compile.
The theory is:
"The code says:
int do_something(void) {
#DO_SOMETHING
}
The compiler is hacked to insert the real code when it sees #DO_SOMETHING. The company which distributes the compiled source code doesn't distribute a compiler, so is not obliged to release the source code for the compiler itself, thus providing an end-run around the GPL."
How true this is, I don't know. It's speculation. Please don't mod me up just because you think this makes sense!
Essentially, GPLv3 adds a "Don't take the piss" clause. AIUI, the problem is putting this in legal parlance.
It's something that (according to my systematics professor) the English don't make very well.
Only if you drink instant which, sadly, has become ubiquitous in many offices, cheap cafes etc.
VMWare server has been free for a few weeks now.
;)
And in an enterprise, it's unlikely you'd run a commercial, paid-for product on an unsupported Linux distro. I was just doing it at home to see if it worked
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems.
That doesn't work if the procedures aren't there for the helpdesk in the first place.
eg. Two weeks ago I found a problem which eventually I solved myself. Now, I could ring my ISP and say "Don't know if you're aware of this, but a computer with a fluxquox network card nailed to 10Mbps will, if connected to the internet directly through the cable modem you supply, be damn slow for no apparent reason - even though the Internet connection is significantly slower than 10Mbps so you wouldn't expect it to matter".
They would say "You're having problems connecting to the Internet? Can you reset your PC for me please?"
I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them. Eventually they'd just agree to get me off the phone, but there's no knowledgebase for them to update because all they do is follow the script.
I installed VMWare on Gentoo last weekend.
Granted, it didn't work quite out of the box. But the hacking required was so minimal I'd expect anyone with a reasonable understanding of Linux to manage it.
Turning off functionality because of security is not acceptable. It the OS offers certain features, they should be secure, otherwise, they are flawed. Stop apologizing for Apple computer and its defects.
Security is not a black-and-white thing. You can't just build a tickbox into a system saying "Do you want this system to be secure? [ ] Yes [X] No".
It's about risk assessment, deciding what risks you're prepared to take. Part of that is figuring out how to set up your systems to provide all required functionality without taking unnecessary security risks. And every extra piece of software you install, every remote service adds to those risks.
Article is already /.'ed, but I'm not sure I grasp the problem with OO.o being behind Microsoft Office.
Here in the UK, MS has been running ads with people wearing dinosaur heads making comments like:
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97. A simple PDA with Outlook integration (which has existed for... oooh, some time now) would solve the problem above, for instance. The only reason I've heard anyone in business give for upgrading for years is "we're receiving a lot of email attachments in the new format".
I would argue that, this being the case, OpenOffice doesn't need to get "on a par with Office $NEXTVERSION". It just needs Office '97 equivalence and good import/export filters.
The rest of us can eat shit and die and suffer and eat the broadcaster's protected content.
Don't die yet. You've got to pay your taxes so they can use the money to buy a bunch of people set-top boxes.
I can clearly see how it is good for business.
Would you mind enlightening me? AFAICT it forces equipment manufacturers to spend extra money developing the equipment to broadcast a special flag and for radios to honour it - so they've got to spend money doing R&D which is not technically necessary.
The business it's supposed to be good for - the record business - well, it doesn't cost them any more than it costs to bribe a few US government officials. But I'm unsure as to the benefits - it sounds to me like a pre-emptive strike so they won't have to make the same "Home Taping is Killing Music" argument they did years ago. However, all the evidence suggests that home taping did nothing of the sort.