never having to worry about a blue screen of death
I fault microsoft for many things and they rightly deserve the blame in many cases including my latest nit-pick the amount of baby-sitting their servers require.
But the BSOD comments have to stop. It's so windows 3.1.
This would be great if there was considerable WiFi support for Linux. Complain to the OEM's. It's their fault they haven't released docs.
The comments regarding "sven" are inflamatory and crass. AFAIK, it still takes a human being to write device drivers, some of them are probably named Sven. That Sven might/might not work for a peripherals company is makes no difference.
I ALWAYS had to give up either Wifi, decent Video, or sound. Seems you could pick any 2. This is a very inflamatory statement and very far from the current great support for Toshiba, Dell and Thinkpads.
I had exactly the same experience with Ubuntu once I got it working. And I never got it working super-well on one desktop. Unlike others I had laptop issues too.
I agree they've added some polish. I really hope can get the changes back into Debian.
Is (was? I'm not sure, it's been a while) a slackware derivative and it worked great on the first really old laptop I ever installed Linux on.
Judging by distrowatch's numbers, they are holding steady, but not as popular as some others.
Here's a distro that's been around forever and doesn't really get the buzz that some others get. It's an interesting problem and I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to why it may be that way.
They may give the reader a rough idea of the current BOM costs, but utterly fail to include many other sources of revenue.
1. Developer Fees. I'm thinking you can't develop a commercial product for free. I know you can't with a Sony console, I would be surprised to find out MS is giving that away.
2. Royalty Fees. I'm sure there's royalties per game sold back to MS. I bet it's the same for aftermarket controllers too. It's the "razor blade" market strategy.
3. Manufacturing Costs. They will chop about a third off the manufacturing costs as components become cheaper and manufacturing becomes more efficient.
4. I'm guessing their BOM costs are very well-negotiated and rock-bottom low, so I'm thinking the numbers they use are too high.
As I understand the "problem" with Evolution as described by Darwin is that it may accurately describe what we observe, but it has no predictive power.
This is the more scientific definition of theory: A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. (dictionary.com)
How has evolution been repeatedly tested? Is there a theorem, mathmatical model that can describe evolution? I may be wrong here, but it's closer to a hypothesis with a not-yet-made theorem to prove/disprove the hypothesis.
Another problem exists because the word "theory" is not used in a disciplined way. Many people use "theory" to describe something when they should probably use conjecture. But "theory" sounds so much more persuasive.
The last problem is faith. A person can believe in something with no material proof. So "faith" has somehow injected itself into what is cold hard science. I don't know how you persuade a person that takes creationism on faith that it's a good story and we humans tend to need a creation story. (Jung)
If I haven't offended enough people yet, I actually wouldn't have a problem with teaching comparing many alternative interpretations of the biological record. It's fun to see and a good way to teach the scientific method.
Besides, you can run a binary with any license. I believe this is not about running a binary. I believe the issues are related to linking and possibly distributing the binary.
Are you suggesting that if I run a GPL'd binary under Solaris, that will somehow force Sun to GPL their whole OS? I'm not suggesting anything. I'm asking if anyone has any more information regarding the CDDL and GPL imcompatibility and HOW that plays out with Sun & RedHat.
I'm not making this up. Here's an edited summary from distrowatch.com "a new, unique distribution that attempts to marry the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU and Debian software utilities. Unfortunately, the two parties are covered with different and mutually incompatible licenses: while all GNU and Debian software is released under the GPL, OpenSolaris is licensed under the CDDL. This makes the attempted marriage rather awkward - as an example, one can't link a GPL-ed utility, such as Debian's APT against a CDDL-ed library, such as the C library that ships with OpenSolaris.
In their eagerness to release a product, the developers have decided to ignore the license incompatibility."
The rationale is flawed from the start. Joel has insightful things to say, but I think he's out of his core expertise here.
-$0.99 was a great, simple marketing pitch. It made selling the idea of losing control over the music you purchase for personal consumption easy to accept.
-Recording industry pretty much soaks up every last dime in record sales. An artist manages to sue a recording label every other year or so because of the cut they *thought* they were getting has complicated renumeration schemes that reduce their per-album royalty to almost zero.
-The recording labels are mad they aren't controlling the price or distribution of the music as they have in the past with CD's. THAT is what they want. They've lost control and they want it back.
-Screw the artist. They can always find another one to replace the troublesome one. How many times has the artist who legitimately threatens their control actually stay in the industry?
-My favorite band from my younger days Fugazi maintained control over the pricing of CD's and shows. (CD's had the price ($10)pre-printed on the back, shows about $10 in L.A.! Totally frozen out of commercial radio, even public radio to *some* degree. They did it, but they didn't "change" the industry and I don't think the recording industry is going to come tumbling down real soon either. They will totally control the majority of digital content because they can.
I'm probably crazy but, I'm thinking it's kind of a "convince me" kind of post rather than a "solve my problem."
Unless someone WAY at the top of the organization drives this, advocating the move is more likely to make you look bad. The first hiccup and the brown-stuff rolls downhill to your door. Present the facts and be done.
If $65K really is an intollerably large chunk of change, then I don't really understand why there's even a question.
I think everyone knows that illustration from Mad Magazine?
I used to be certain it would be some kind of frontal assault on distros regarding a codec or something like that, but I've gotten a little older and am certain I don't know. I just know it's going to come as a surprise and be extremely effective.
This item is a great example of how not only office, but Longwait will be hailed despite the products probable weaknesses and continued wholesale theft of consumer priviledges. Sadly, millions of consumer will gladly overpay for the priveledge of having the control of their computers handed over to another corporation.
-What's the software license like? Hmm, probably more restrictive than the scary license on SP3. -How much does that feature cost? Am I authorized to use it for one year or more? Can I redistribute it? -Open document format? Hmmm me thinks it lacks interoperability. Wait, don't tell me the interop problem isn't Microsoft's right? -And it's OO.org's problem THEY aren't innovative enough. -Overpromising more features that will be fixed "the next service pack."
The good news is I'm guaranteed software maintenance employment as long as Microsoft continues to make these crappy products. Sadly though, it's sure to become the equivalent of a janitor in terms of salary, ubiquity and priviledge.
Canon still doesn't officially acknowledge Linux and I don't know what HP's status is.
Of course, if you got a printer with native postscript support, then you could run it through cups. Emulated postscript can lead to some unpleasant surprises.
As a former product manager at an imaging OEM I can confirm that everyone should completely ignore "DPI" specs.
What they also fail to mention is the paper requirements in order to produce a photo-quality image. It's got to hold a heck of a lot of ink, so there's very few papers capable of holding/controlling that much ink.
A better predictor of "photo quality" is the number of inks.
The other thing to watch out on is what the borderless performance really is. I work with a Canon that won't do borderless on plain paper, so if I have a document with tiny margins, it generally screws it up.
At this point, I don't see a reason why it's really necessary when most photo processors do it arguably better, but on real photo paper that is much less resistant to fading.
This is a favorite topic on./ and I agree, as most everyone does on the broad issues.
But, I'm personally tired of the hand-wringing, rah-rah, something-must-be-done, generally lacking in any sort of content items like this. Here are some options:
1. Slashdot makes a new category: Things most viewers agree on. You can put the Evil Empire, Linux is Great and Patents are Bad stories just like this one in this category. It will be a popular category.
2. Do something. How about learning how to avoid patent entanglement? If your method is different than the patent, then when the lawyers come knocking, can you turn them away? Not like Kryptonite to Superman, but they will have to back down. How about learning how to defeat a patent? How about a little local anti-patent advocacy?
3. How about a patent map? There are plenty of smart programmers here, come up with a way to make a patent directory. It's nowhere near easy, but I'm sure there's quite a few people smart enough to get *something* going.
The good: Old books prior to copyright laws are being scanned.
The bad: Pay is roughly $10/hr. Now, I happen to be concerned that someone being paid so little should be handling rare books. Not to mention the college graduate getting paid so little.
The ugly: The digital camera contraption costs $30,000!! There's a few scanner manufacturers left in the world and none of them have exploited this niche. Shame on them.
SELinux was originally developed by the NSA and is fully GPLed More specifically, the NSA paid Secure Computing Corp to develop something for them that turned into SELinux.
The corporation currently has 20 patents related to security in the patent db. They only mention three in their "assurance." What about the other 17?
The code is GPL, and it appears they won't drag you into court for a GPL'd hobby distro today, but what happens when you sell service on top? Do they knock on your door asking for a little protection money? What happens tomorrow?
And then this gem from the "Assurance": However, Secure Computing does not extend the Assurance to software that merely interoperates with SELinux, or is merely included with a distribution of SELinux. It's GPL heaven to have it in the kernel, but as soon as an application interacts with our IP, all "assurance" bets are off is how I read it. So, let's say I make a nice firewall script, they can drag me into court and claim my script is an application that's interacting with their IP or I pay protection money and stay out of court.
I'm no expert, so help me if I'm reading this wrong.
Re:Secure Computing Corporation
on
Hardening Linux
·
· Score: 1
Their "statement of assurance" makes it kind of scary to try and do a commercial selinux distro of your own.
You know, SELinux has some IP issues that I just became aware of this week. For many this is probably old news.
It seems some aspects of SELinux are patented and the patent holder allows distribution, but once $$ or something that competes with their product is involved, there's a license fee.
Anyway, beyond the IP issues, just because the kernel has SElinux enabled doesn't mean the applications on top of the kernel have SELinux functionality.
I think it's reasonable to say that SELinux does not solve many security problems related to implementation and definitely doesn't magically fix security holes in applications.
There's no shortage of system builders willing to sell you a no-OS system. Or even a linux-equipped laptop or desktop.
Why is it Dell *has* to sell Linux? Just go somewhere else. The whole "microsoft-evil-empire" argument doesn't work here.
There's a list of OEM's a mile long that sell product around the world, why are their products better if/when they are sold through Dell?
The same kind of discussion happens around itunes DRM. I choose not to have DRM in my life, so I make different choices. Make a different system choice. There's no lack of builders waiting for your business.
The guy probably heard a few of these lines before throwing in the towel.
1. Bring that point up at the next meeting. 2. Check with person X to okay Y. 3. Find out when person Z's subordinate has the time to do that task. 4. I know you preferred Option A but the company is doing Option B. 5. Fill out that form and give it to accounting and wait 30 days to get reimbursed. 7. The Board has decided to go a diffferent direction. 8. Let me run that by person A before doing anything. 9. Send me an email about it to remind me....
There's a bunch more probably much funnier too. Join in and add a few!
That Dennis Hope is in the right, but there are land barrons far larger than he that will simply forbid some forward-thinking guy sole possession of the next(?) land rush. Drag him into court. Make up new legislation. You name it.
Yes, I know lunar real estate sounds crazy, but that's what capitalism is about. Assigning ownership by an individual of definable chunks of land and establishing a value for that ownership.
No Starbucks or Indian casinos on the moon, but eventually something.
While I agree that there are more Mac users, (I converted my neighbor)I think this is writing for eyeballs at best. The writer has wisely weaved together hot-topics to sell his story.
Right now and until there is a release to stores on MS's Longwait, there will be plenty of extra Macs sold. In fact, it will likely BE the second-coming of the apple desktop.
Once the available for retail date gets close on Longwait it all goes quiet and MS collects on their monopoly. Cha-Ching! The the media onslaught will include/.ers cooing about it and throwing a couple of jabs at Linux and Macs as well.
Right now, Apple is getting some desktop face-time. Enjoy it while it lasts. Sad too, because the mac is superior in so many ways.
Slashdot Mirror
never having to worry about a blue screen of death
I fault microsoft for many things and they rightly deserve the blame in many cases including my latest nit-pick the amount of baby-sitting their servers require.
But the BSOD comments have to stop. It's so windows 3.1.
What's insightful about this post?
This would be great if there was considerable WiFi support for Linux.
Complain to the OEM's. It's their fault they haven't released docs.
The comments regarding "sven" are inflamatory and crass. AFAIK, it still takes a human being to write device drivers, some of them are probably named Sven. That Sven might/might not work for a peripherals company is makes no difference.
I ALWAYS had to give up either Wifi, decent Video, or sound. Seems you could pick any 2.
This is a very inflamatory statement and very far from the current great support for Toshiba, Dell and Thinkpads.
I had exactly the same experience with Ubuntu once I got it working. And I never got it working super-well on one desktop. Unlike others I had laptop issues too.
I agree they've added some polish. I really hope can get the changes back into Debian.
Is (was? I'm not sure, it's been a while) a slackware derivative and it worked great on the first really old laptop I ever installed Linux on.
Judging by distrowatch's numbers, they are holding steady, but not as popular as some others.
Here's a distro that's been around forever and doesn't really get the buzz that some others get. It's an interesting problem and I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to why it may be that way.
My employer's product uses SOAP to connect all of the features to the authentication engine.
http://www.sci-s.com/id-management.htm
I hate articles like this.
They may give the reader a rough idea of the current BOM costs, but utterly fail to include many other sources of revenue.
1. Developer Fees. I'm thinking you can't develop a commercial product for free. I know you can't with a Sony console, I would be surprised to find out MS is giving that away.
2. Royalty Fees. I'm sure there's royalties per game sold back to MS. I bet it's the same for aftermarket controllers too. It's the "razor blade" market strategy.
3. Manufacturing Costs. They will chop about a third off the manufacturing costs as components become cheaper and manufacturing becomes more efficient.
4. I'm guessing their BOM costs are very well-negotiated and rock-bottom low, so I'm thinking the numbers they use are too high.
As I understand the "problem" with Evolution as described by Darwin is that it may accurately describe what we observe, but it has no predictive power.
This is the more scientific definition of theory:
A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. (dictionary.com)
How has evolution been repeatedly tested? Is there a theorem, mathmatical model that can describe evolution? I may be wrong here, but it's closer to a hypothesis with a not-yet-made theorem to prove/disprove the hypothesis.
Another problem exists because the word "theory" is not used in a disciplined way. Many people use "theory" to describe something when they should probably use conjecture. But "theory" sounds so much more persuasive.
The last problem is faith. A person can believe in something with no material proof. So "faith" has somehow injected itself into what is cold hard science. I don't know how you persuade a person that takes creationism on faith that it's a good story and we humans tend to need a creation story. (Jung)
If I haven't offended enough people yet, I actually wouldn't have a problem with teaching comparing many alternative interpretations of the biological record. It's fun to see and a good way to teach the scientific method.
Besides, you can run a binary with any license.
I believe this is not about running a binary. I believe the issues are related to linking and possibly distributing the binary.
Are you suggesting that if I run a GPL'd binary under Solaris, that will somehow force Sun to GPL their whole OS?
I'm not suggesting anything. I'm asking if anyone has any more information regarding the CDDL and GPL imcompatibility and HOW that plays out with Sun & RedHat.
I'm not making this up. Here's an edited summary from distrowatch.com
"a new, unique distribution that attempts to marry the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU and Debian software utilities. Unfortunately, the two parties are covered with different and mutually incompatible licenses: while all GNU and Debian software is released under the GPL, OpenSolaris is licensed under the CDDL. This makes the attempted marriage rather awkward - as an example, one can't link a GPL-ed utility, such as Debian's APT against a CDDL-ed library, such as the C library that ships with OpenSolaris.
In their eagerness to release a product, the developers have decided to ignore the license incompatibility."
Well, what now?
The link for the unedited version:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20051114
I have to wonder what Sun is thinking just ignoring the conflict between their CDDL and the GPL.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
Does RedHat has some kind of magic wand that makes all of the license problems go away? Is there a way around the issue I'm not aware of?
I'm interested in knowing how this would be feasible.
The rationale is flawed from the start. Joel has insightful things to say, but I think he's out of his core expertise here.
-$0.99 was a great, simple marketing pitch. It made selling the idea of losing control over the music you purchase for personal consumption easy to accept.
-Recording industry pretty much soaks up every last dime in record sales. An artist manages to sue a recording label every other year or so because of the cut they *thought* they were getting has complicated renumeration schemes that reduce their per-album royalty to almost zero.
-The recording labels are mad they aren't controlling the price or distribution of the music as they have in the past with CD's. THAT is what they want. They've lost control and they want it back.
-Screw the artist. They can always find another one to replace the troublesome one. How many times has the artist who legitimately threatens their control actually stay in the industry?
-My favorite band from my younger days Fugazi maintained control over the pricing of CD's and shows. (CD's had the price ($10)pre-printed on the back, shows about $10 in L.A.! Totally frozen out of commercial radio, even public radio to *some* degree. They did it, but they didn't "change" the industry and I don't think the recording industry is going to come tumbling down real soon either. They will totally control the majority of digital content because they can.
I'm probably crazy but, I'm thinking it's kind of a "convince me" kind of post rather than a "solve my problem."
Unless someone WAY at the top of the organization drives this, advocating the move is more likely to make you look bad. The first hiccup and the brown-stuff rolls downhill to your door. Present the facts and be done.
If $65K really is an intollerably large chunk of change, then I don't really understand why there's even a question.
I think everyone knows that illustration from Mad Magazine?
I used to be certain it would be some kind of frontal assault on distros regarding a codec or something like that, but I've gotten a little older and am certain I don't know. I just know it's going to come as a surprise and be extremely effective.
"Chilling effect" is the phrase that sums it up.
This item is a great example of how not only office, but Longwait will be hailed despite the products probable weaknesses and continued wholesale theft of consumer priviledges. Sadly, millions of consumer will gladly overpay for the priveledge of having the control of their computers handed over to another corporation.
-What's the software license like? Hmm, probably more restrictive than the scary license on SP3.
-How much does that feature cost? Am I authorized to use it for one year or more? Can I redistribute it?
-Open document format? Hmmm me thinks it lacks interoperability. Wait, don't tell me the interop problem isn't Microsoft's right?
-And it's OO.org's problem THEY aren't innovative enough.
-Overpromising more features that will be fixed "the next service pack."
The good news is I'm guaranteed software maintenance employment as long as Microsoft continues to make these crappy products. Sadly though, it's sure to become the equivalent of a janitor in terms of salary, ubiquity and priviledge.
Epson has a site in Japan with Linux drivers for most of their non-postscript printers.
http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/index.html
Canon still doesn't officially acknowledge Linux and I don't know what HP's status is.
Of course, if you got a printer with native postscript support, then you could run it through cups. Emulated postscript can lead to some unpleasant surprises.
As a former product manager at an imaging OEM I can confirm that everyone should completely ignore "DPI" specs.
What they also fail to mention is the paper requirements in order to produce a photo-quality image. It's got to hold a heck of a lot of ink, so there's very few papers capable of holding/controlling that much ink.
A better predictor of "photo quality" is the number of inks.
The other thing to watch out on is what the borderless performance really is. I work with a Canon that won't do borderless on plain paper, so if I have a document with tiny margins, it generally screws it up.
At this point, I don't see a reason why it's really necessary when most photo processors do it arguably better, but on real photo paper that is much less resistant to fading.
This is a favorite topic on ./ and I agree, as most everyone does on the broad issues.
But, I'm personally tired of the hand-wringing, rah-rah, something-must-be-done, generally lacking in any sort of content items like this. Here are some options:
1. Slashdot makes a new category: Things most viewers agree on. You can put the Evil Empire, Linux is Great and Patents are Bad stories just like this one in this category. It will be a popular category.
2. Do something. How about learning how to avoid patent entanglement? If your method is different than the patent, then when the lawyers come knocking, can you turn them away? Not like Kryptonite to Superman, but they will have to back down. How about learning how to defeat a patent? How about a little local anti-patent advocacy?
3. How about a patent map? There are plenty of smart programmers here, come up with a way to make a patent directory. It's nowhere near easy, but I'm sure there's quite a few people smart enough to get *something* going.
C'mon people do something about it.
The good:
Old books prior to copyright laws are being scanned.
The bad:
Pay is roughly $10/hr. Now, I happen to be concerned that someone being paid so little should be handling rare books. Not to mention the college graduate getting paid so little.
The ugly:
The digital camera contraption costs $30,000!! There's a few scanner manufacturers left in the world and none of them have exploited this niche. Shame on them.
SELinux was originally developed by the NSA and is fully GPLed
More specifically, the NSA paid Secure Computing Corp to develop something for them that turned into SELinux.
The corporation currently has 20 patents related to security in the patent db. They only mention three in their "assurance." What about the other 17?
The code is GPL, and it appears they won't drag you into court for a GPL'd hobby distro today, but what happens when you sell service on top? Do they knock on your door asking for a little protection money? What happens tomorrow?
And then this gem from the "Assurance":
However, Secure Computing does not extend the Assurance
to software that merely interoperates with SELinux, or is merely included with a
distribution of SELinux.
It's GPL heaven to have it in the kernel, but as soon as an application interacts with our IP, all "assurance" bets are off is how I read it.
So, let's say I make a nice firewall script, they can drag me into court and claim my script is an application that's interacting with their IP or I pay protection money and stay out of court.
I'm no expert, so help me if I'm reading this wrong.
Their "statement of assurance" makes it kind of scary to try and do a commercial selinux distro of your own.
s surance.pdf
http://www.securecomputing.com/pdf/Statement_of_A
You know, SELinux has some IP issues that I just became aware of this week. For many this is probably old news.
It seems some aspects of SELinux are patented and the patent holder allows distribution, but once $$ or something that competes with their product is involved, there's a license fee.
Anyway, beyond the IP issues, just because the kernel has SElinux enabled doesn't mean the applications on top of the kernel have SELinux functionality.
I think it's reasonable to say that SELinux does not solve many security problems related to implementation and definitely doesn't magically fix security holes in applications.
There's no shortage of system builders willing to sell you a no-OS system. Or even a linux-equipped laptop or desktop.
Why is it Dell *has* to sell Linux? Just go somewhere else. The whole "microsoft-evil-empire" argument doesn't work here.
There's a list of OEM's a mile long that sell product around the world, why are their products better if/when they are sold through Dell?
The same kind of discussion happens around itunes DRM. I choose not to have DRM in my life, so I make different choices. Make a different system choice. There's no lack of builders waiting for your business.
Enlighten me here. Am I missing something?
You may find this useful
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/
The guy probably heard a few of these lines before throwing in the towel.
1. Bring that point up at the next meeting.
2. Check with person X to okay Y.
3. Find out when person Z's subordinate has the time to do that task.
4. I know you preferred Option A but the company is doing Option B.
5. Fill out that form and give it to accounting and wait 30 days to get reimbursed.
7. The Board has decided to go a diffferent direction.
8. Let me run that by person A before doing anything.
9. Send me an email about it to remind me....
There's a bunch more probably much funnier too. Join in and add a few!
That's so charming!
That Dennis Hope is in the right, but there are land barrons far larger than he that will simply forbid some forward-thinking guy sole possession of the next(?) land rush. Drag him into court. Make up new legislation. You name it.
Yes, I know lunar real estate sounds crazy, but that's what capitalism is about. Assigning ownership by an individual of definable chunks of land and establishing a value for that ownership.
No Starbucks or Indian casinos on the moon, but eventually something.
"Can you feel the love tonight"o ufeelthelovetonight.htm
/.ers cooing about it and throwing a couple of jabs at Linux and Macs as well.
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/classicdisney/cany
While I agree that there are more Mac users, (I converted my neighbor)I think this is writing for eyeballs at best. The writer has wisely weaved together hot-topics to sell his story.
Right now and until there is a release to stores on MS's Longwait, there will be plenty of extra Macs sold. In fact, it will likely BE the second-coming of the apple desktop.
Once the available for retail date gets close on Longwait it all goes quiet and MS collects on their monopoly. Cha-Ching! The the media onslaught will include
Right now, Apple is getting some desktop face-time. Enjoy it while it lasts. Sad too, because the mac is superior in so many ways.