No, blow like the wind is what Novell has decided to do. Running would be the opposite. You may be asking yourself how it can do both. Well, the wind is a very complicated man. And no one understands him but his woman. One of the reasons this whole Novel-Microsoft-FSF issue is so complex is due to the high amount of personification involved:
Novell -> Gets Windfall
Wind -> Blows
Novell -> Blows
Wind -> Runs
Good Advice <- (Novell -> Runs)
Wind -> Complicated
Shaft -> Complicated
Microsoft -> Shafts -> Novell
Pressure <- High -> (Eben Moglen -> Novell)
Both Sides -> Hot Air
Linux Community -> Novell <- Cold Shoulder
Software Community -> Stormy
Ballmer -> Dangerous Flying Debris
Richard Stallman -> Hair Always Looks Like Caught in Hurricane
Windows -> Haphazardly Duct Taped to Prevent Immediate Shattering
Whole Issue -> Tempestuous Cyclone of Flying Nerds
To me it always stank of some sort of submarine plan to get rid of Novell using their own greed as a blindfold. Sure, you can compete directly against them, attack them in marketing, etc., but that just raises their street cred in the eyes of others in the Linux community. Flashing millions of dollars in front of the CEOs eyes until they are incapable of making any decisions with foresight is a much easier way. The company loses its respect in the community, become isolated by their cooperation with "the enemy," their source contributions are tainted with patent concerns, etc. Meanwhile they have no expectation of that because they're busy dreaming up what to do with their windfall. I'm not one of those annoying people who calls Microsoft the Hitler of computing, they're just a corporation like any other. But this story does sort of remind me of one of those old stories about Satan making a deal that seemed too good to be true, and indeed it turns out to be and the guy gets fucked over in the end despite his newfound fortune. This only goes to show, if someone offers you a dumptruck full of cash and doesn't seem to want anything of equal value in return -- Run. Run like the wind.
Normally there's an option in your POP3 retriever of choice to leave the messages on the server. It's in the RFC for POP3 that only mail which is marked for deletion during the transaction will be deleted, and even then only after an update command has been sent. So whatever program you're using to get your mail should have the option to preserve it. In fetchmail it's the -k flag. In Thunderbird it's in the account preferences dialog. Unless Yahoo is manually doing this after you've finished retrieving your mail, which I doubt, it's deleting your messages because you didn't configure it not to--because by default a lot of email clients assume you don't want to keep it on the POP server as POP was not designed for sending the same messages to the same account(s) at multiple sources--that's IMAP's purpose.
I found this in Google in about 5 seconds. It should help you, even if it's specific to Outlook Express:
To control deletion of messages from the Yahoo! Mail Server:
1. From the Tools menu, choose "Accounts."
2. Select the "Mail" tab.
3. Double-click the account labeled "pop.mail.yahoo.com."
4. Select the "Advanced" tab.
5. In the Delivery section at the bottom of the window, check "Leave a copy of messages on server" if you want to save your Yahoo! Mail messages on the Yahoo! Mail server as well as on your local computer. Do not check this box if you want your messages to be deleted from the Yahoo! Mail server once you have received them in Outlook Express.
If you want proof that it can be done, I can say safely that it does. With GMail at least. I have one computer with fetchmail and Mutt, one with Thunderbird, and in Windows I just login to the GMail account through Firefox. All of them work and all of them have identical inboxes because I don't delete any of the downloaded messages. Occasionally I will login from the web and push them into Archive when the list gets too long, but each computer's inbox still has the locally stored version.
Regarding the article, I've seen a lot of people fighting when in fact both of them have a point. 1) The user was to blame because I have an old Lycos account that I rarely use and even I know their policy. That's why I log in to it every few weeks just to keep the inbox, which contains some things from ~7 years ago (amazing I still have them considering the previous 5mb limit Lycos imposed), from being emptied. Anyone who bothers to read the ToS should know this and expect it. They are offering a free service, but not running a charity. If they kept every message from every user regardless of the last time they logged in, their storage devices would be full of crap from people who died, lost internet access, forgot about the account, don't use it anymore because there are better ones out there, or were just using it for some sinister or immature purpose. If something is really important to you you should be printing it out anyway. The second point is, this Lycos manager should either be fired or at least punished. It doesn't matter how correct Lycos' policy was and how much the customer ignored it, you don't use that kind of language. I've noticed from working in customer service myself that most of an angry, hostile customer's initial behaviour towards the representative is just frustration, and if you actually make an effort to understand them and sympathise, you can usually get them to compromise. I can't believe this guy is a manager. I don't know any manager who wouldn't have just bit the bullet, gave them a free month of the pay-for-use service, restored their e-mails, and hoped they had the sense to download them or forward them to another account and walk away from the service. They'd be happy and the company would only have lost a few dollars. Now they've got all this bad publicity over a $29.95 or whatever it was fee.
Examples of how Linux desktop adoption fails because there's no marketing department
Here's a list of counterexamples:
<counterexamples>
Linux isn't a company. There's no marketing department because Linux is a kernel of a POSIX-like operating system, not a single corporation. Microsoft is a corporation, Apple is a corporation. Hence they have marketing departments. I'm pretty sure Novell and RedHat have marketing departments as well. But Linux doesn't. Nor does it need one.
</counterexamples>
A marketing department would have put an end to the KDE vs. Gnome issue in its infancy. Two competing desktop technologies fragments the installed base and leads to duplicated efforts. They would've told product development ot knife one, adopt the other.
Duplicated efforts aren't necessarily a bad thing unless the time spent on the effort could be better used elsewhere. It doesn't take that long and isn't that complicated to install the libraries for both and run GNOME or KDE applications on either desktop. The "GNOME vs KDE issue in its infancy" was a legitimate problem because KDE used Qt, which at the time was not GPL. GNOME was an attempt at making a completely GPL desktop environment that would always be free software. I agree that now that Trolltech has put Qt (in a sense) under the GPL there is probably no need for GNOME anymore on a philosophical basis. But if people like it and use it and want to keep it going, that's their right to work on it. You seem to fail to understand that Linux is not only not a company, it's not even a single entity. GNOME and KDE aren't even part of Linux, so how your imaginary Linux marketing department would have the authority to "solve" that "problem" is beyond me. If you think this monolithic Linux corporation should have a kernel, GUI, userland, etc. in one big package: welcome to the world of distributions. Of course, you can't run it like a business the way you are suggesting, because it's all GPLed unless you rewrite it from scratch. And that violates your previous rule that Linux shouldn't reproduce unnecessary duplication of work.
Seamless 100% integration with market leading desktop products is essential, otherwise the barrier to entry is unreasonably high and the cost of Linux adoption is infeasible. This means working perfectly with Word, Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, SQL Server, MS Project, Photoshop, Illustrator, WordPerfect, Quickbooks, ACT!, etc. Yes, it also means supporting these products better than the vendors do, being able to open file formats from 1995 even though vendor's current product does not.
I totally agree. I refuse to switch to anything new until an operating system comes out that can import all of my VisiCalc files. I paid a lot of money for that software, and until I see some improvement I'm staying away from Linux, Windows for Workgroups, or any of the other new industry "buzzwords." Why should I have to be the one that changes? I don't care about open standards; these things should just be supported and I shouldn't have to figure it out! Some people tell me, "Hey, why should they have to bloat the code for everybody else being backwards compatible with proprietary formats when suitable replacements and improvements have been made since?" I'll tell you why: because I spent a lot of money on this and the vendor told me I would never need to upgrade because it's guaranteed for life. His company went out of business, but I still have that guarantee in writing and I think one of his kids is still alive so I'm worried the contract is still legally binding. Plus I fear change.
By the way, my company is thinking about switching from Irix workstations to Windows Vista. Will our data migration be "seamless?"
It also means being line-item feature equivalent. It also means should someone switch to The GIMP, they can still use all of their Photoshop plugins bought and paid for. It means that Fax driver someone bought for ACT! still works whe
Significant doesn't mean majority, it means large in scope, meaning, or size. And there is a large amount of legitimate BitTorrent traffic. FreeBSD distributes their releases through torrents, and generally when I've downloaded from there the swarm size is in the hundreds or thousands of users per ISO. Same with a lot of GNU/Linux distribution ISOs. Any time Azureus wants to update itself the download has maybe 8.000 seeders offering it. BitTorrent is actually a great way to distribute software updates and large disc images of software because you don't have to rely on one site's bandwidth or sift through a list of mirrors in a browser. I think one thing holding back legitimate use is that a lot of torrent sites (private, not the ones you find in Google) don't want people posting legal torrents to stuff they could download elsewhere over HTTP or FTP. Then again that's probably because anyone who belongs to one of these sites knows it's an easy and safe way to get their user ratio back out of the red provided there's enough leechers. But more and more open source projects are relying on torrenting to distribute their software without needing a centralised system of mirrors and fast downstreams.
It's interesting what this (and the parent) says about the changing way films are made. In many of my favorite movies, the screenplay is one of the least important and unique parts of the entire work. Think about Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now and you realize that the screenplay was very nearly unnecessary to the creation of the film. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if in Apocalypse Now, Coppola accidentally dropped the screenplay off the side of a boat two weeks before shooting started and never looked back. A screenplay is what gets studios to back your film when you go in trying to convince someone to spend millions on your idea. A screenplay is what actors learn their lines from. A screenplay in its final shooting script form is also what allows someone like Coppola to film scenes X, Y, and Z in one place with complete notes on what each camera angle will be, changes to the dialogue, etc., while his assistant director(s) are somewhere else filming scenes M, N, and O with complete notes on those scenes as well. By the way, Coppola based AN on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, so in that particular case you're right that the screenplay wasn't vital since he was basing it on a book that had been out since before he was born. But a prod. ready screenplay is more than just words, it's also a carefully planned schedule of what has to be done and in what order to maximize the amount of scenes that can be filmed in as little time as possible and for as little money.
I fail to see how promoting the screenwriter is similar to promoting an author. A book is the work of (usually) one person, so it makes sense for those who stand to make money off that work to go out and talk him/her up to the public. A film is not the work of any one person, but rather a collaborative effort by hundreds of people, all performing vital roles. Even a screenplay by one person is usually modified to the point of being something different by other writers before it ever sees the set. This seems like a terrible idea for fighting piracy. No one is going spit their coffee on the monitor, shout, "Holy shit! Lawrence Kasdan? I feel guilty, I'd better pay for this!" and stop downloading Empire immediately.
You didn't mention whether or not you've tried running any high-definition video playback on the machine. Nobody said Vista itself won't run on a computer/laptop that lacks DRM support in the display, just that HD video playback will be impossible. The quality will be automatically downgraded to quasi-DVD quality even if your non-HDCP monitor supports HD-DVD. In other words, you can probably play HD-DVDs on your laptop, but I'll bet the video looks exactly like a regular DVD.
I'm a little disappointed at the lack (currently I only see one) of "In Soviet Russia" posts under this article. Often they're lame, but once in awhile you see some that're actually funny. I was hoping when I clicked through to this discussion to find some, only to find a single one (modded down Redundant). Sure, they can be rather annoying in irrelevant conversations, but this article is practically an open invitation for people who post the same hackneyed phrases to every article to go wild. Maybe you don't care for them, but I for one welcome our Soviet Russian troll poster overlords. I'm currently checking Netcraft to verify whether or not "In Soviet Russia" posting is dying and will report confirmation later.
If Linux evangelists want people to move to a Linux OS then you don't want a MS Windows installer you really want a proper Linux installer other wise you are just saying that Linux is a poor cousin to MS Windows and I can assure you that the majority of potential users who do this will eventually go back to MS Windows and usually with a bad feeling to Linux.
I disagree and think this is good news. My father-in-law only uses his computer for his mail, his music, and for the various PCB/schematic applications he needs. I've attempted to convince him numerous times to use something other than Windows, mainly because his computer has such limited resources and the software he uses is nothing that isn't available freely and just as high-quality in the FLOSS universe. It also runs like a tortoise with XP Pro. He seems nervous about trying something he's unfamiliar with, so I finally got an Ubuntu LiveCD from Ship-It. As anyone who has tried this service knows, it can be quite awhile before it arrives. The point of the CD is for him to try it out and see how it is without actually changing anything in his hard drive. The reason I had to get a CD rather than just download/burn it is because these days I'm only burning to DVD-Rs and a) I don't feel like buying a single blank CD and b) he has no DVD drive. Had I known about this installer I would've just pointed him to it and saved myself a lot of time.
While I agree that a high-quality installer is a worthwhile goal (I remember when I first installed FreeBSD back in 1999 or so and it was so bare-bones that I had no idea what the hell I was doing for about 90% of the installation) and things are moving in that direction, there are a lot of people who lack the hardware to burn LiveCDs, aren't going to take the risk of paying for one for an OS they're just mildly curious in and have never used, and/or have no knowledge of configuring their operating system. These people also probably have an OEM copy of Windows and don't know how to use anything else. Making the act of trying something new as simple as running a program using the Windows Installer dialogs they're used to is, to me, a good idea, and rather reminiscient of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition. Whether anyone switches or not, it's a safe way for them to check it out.
In fact dual booting is not a real solution either because users will eventually fall back to MS Windows because it is too easy to backslide. It is very important if you are trying to convince friends that if they are serious they must switch to a Linux only PC although let them play with a few distros before that and they need to get educated in basic security and System Admin practices.
That's a rather harsh suggestion. Unless it's an issue of HD space, I wouldn't ever recommend to a newbie that they toss Windows overboard completely and forego dual-booting. When I first started out in the non-Windows/DOS world it was around early 1998, and one of the first problems I came across was getting PPP working. If I hadn't had the foresight to dual-boot, what would you have suggested I do to find an answer to how to set it up? I certainly couldn't go online to find help--after all going online was the problem. So how did I fix it? I booted into Windows, found some websites with example scripts, printed them out, and booted back. At the time I wasn't aware of Lynx so I had to do the same thing (reboot, print out, reboot) to get XF86 configured and running. If Windows is too easy to backslide towards, that in itself speaks volumes about the learning curve and potential for frustration of non-Windows systems to people weaned on it. I don't know too many people who buy a Mac, try it for an hour, and take it back to the store (e.g. backslide) because it's too different, their menus aren't in the same place, common system applications have different names, etc. If someone doesn't like Linux, BSD, or whatever, that's their business. There may be a stupid reason for it, and one can try and correct that misinformed
Anyway , what the f*ck have turks got to do with Jews? Please tell us....
In most of Europe the Turks and African asylum refugees are the new Jews. They are to blame for unemployment, crime, lack of housing, religious indifference and on and on. Anything bad going on in the country, the populist parties blame it on brown immigrants and asylum seekers. That's what it has to do with the Jews. It's history repeating itself. And when you allow people like David Irving to come and energize that reactionary base by claiming things like Auschwitz never happened, you are just helping to pour the concrete foundation for the next Auschwitz to be built upon. The successor of the German Nazi Party is actually starting to get legitimate support from the public now. They've been gaining in popularity in the national elections--especially in Eastern Germany where racism is on the rise.
Or is it that ANY right wing view should be suppressed?
It has nothing to do with right or left. As I said, the ÖVP was/is a conservative group, and they were the ones who passed this law. In fact, the chancellor at the time, Figl, was a rabid anti-Nazi. I think you are getting hung up here on what left and right mean. So let us use the more accurate two-dimensional terms. The ÖVP is a Catholic "people's party" that supports many of the same things as the US Republicans, except they oppose the death penalty and don't want to do away with welfare entirely. I never compared them to Nazis, just pointed out that someone earlier said that liberals passed the anti-Holocaust denial law, which is false. The real Nazis in Austria are the Freedom Party and the Orange Party. They are sort of in between the left and the right on economic issues, which is typical of populist parties trying to appeal to the working class and the elderly.
Perhaps the proper solution might be to restrict the amount of turks entering the country.
That's exactly the solution the neo-Nazis--the people who are saying Irving should come here--support. Personally I don't see why anyone can't live wherever they want as long as they aren't a criminal. But that's got nothing to do with this, so let's leave it out of the conversation.
Only an idiot would see jailing people for expressing a point of view as the solution.
As I said in my first post, the law was passed 60 years ago in an attempt to keep Nazis after the war from regaining control. It was necessary because the Allies planned to leave the occupied areas of Austria by the 1950s--which they did--and didn't want a resurgence of fascism after they left. Maybe now the law isn't necessary, ok. It's doubtful that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to squeeze into their old uniforms and start a coup. But I think the main reason it hasn't been repealed is simply because of the symbolic effect it would have if that were done and the negative message it would send to minorities. If you go to Vienna, there are Jewish neighbourhoods which still have police guarding the road with machine guns and synagogues with electronic automatic locking doors because the poison has never been completely removed. If you ask me what the "solution is," I think instead of passing a law in 1947 and hanging a few officers in Nuremberg, they should've punished the entire population. Everyone was complicit, and the majority got off light and never learned their lesson. I can't count on both hands how many 70, 80 year old Nazis there still are in this small village alone. They didn't learn a God damn thing.
The "liberals" didn't come up with the law. In Germany and Austria it was a postwar requirement of the Allied forces that among other things denying the Holocaust be a punishable offence, in order to prevent former Nazis from regaining any public support once the Allies left. If you had bothered to actually do any fact-checking before making a statement like that, you'd know that the law was passed in 1947 under the ÖVP, which is the conservative party of Austria. They held the chancellorship (under Figl) and majority in Parliament until the "Socialist revolution" under Kreisky in 1970.
Irving didn't go to jail for denying the Holocaust. He was put on trial because the Austrian government warned him not to enter the border because they knew who he was and what he would say. The Burschenschaft, a secret society of right-wing students who swordfight and wear weird costumes (I am not making this up, you can look it up if you want), invited him to speak and he was stupid enough to go and was subsequently arrested at the airport. We have a lot of problems right now, especially in Vienna, because so many Turkish people are coming and certain far-right parties are using it as the new scapegoat to gain support. The last thing Austria needs is some douche like David Irving fanning the flames.
Crack open a history book and an atlas sometime before writing flamebait about countries you know nothing about and have probably never been to.
I don't think it's anything that cynical. The GPL Violations project tends to do good work, at least here in Central/Western Europe. They've gone to quite a few companies, particularly those selling Linux-based electronics and PCs to the public, and said, "Look, you probably don't understand that you've violated the terms of this license. We just want you to provide the source code and then we'll leave you alone." And within a few weeks/months it's almost always available. End of story. My country's national health care system also had a brush with the GPL Violations group when they started rolling out ID cards for collecting benefits at the doctor's office and each doctor had a Debian-based card reading machine networked to the main server. The company the government contracted to do it was contacted, the GPLVp said you need to provide the source code, and now it's available to download off their site--all ~300mb of it. I don't think this guy is trying to get his name in the papers or score points for Apple or anything. He just wants the GPL to be taken seriously, especially by the big boys in the industry who save tons of money putting a free, already-developed operating system on their product, then don't abide by the rules of that product because they assume a free product has no usage rules attached to it. If you decide to enforce the GPL, you can't pick and choose who you're going to go after. You also have to understand that a lot of people read about open source in the newspaper and think it means public domain. I mean, if there's this much argument on Slashdot about what the clauses of the GPL signify, imagine how hard it must be for a businessman with only a superficial knowledge of programming who's managing projects to comprehend it.
As to Armijn Hemel not helping Cisco, it may be that he's just afraid Cisco will provide the source to the parts specifically mentioned by Hemel, but nothing else despite there being further violations. By intentionally not saying, "this and this are violating it," he's forcing Cisco to do its own audit of the code and establish what really is and isn't GPLed. That's not making a political point, it's being clever. It's also possible he really doesn't know. By the way, someone else earlier made a similar comment that Cisco doesn't have to release the source to its programs that it wrote, only the modifications to the operating system. The person who said that obviously has never had to do any linking to 3rd party libraries in their software. If I link to a GPLed (not LGPLed like libstdc++ and such, but GPLed like the GNU telephony libraries, which I wouldn't be shocked if I found Cisco using) library in my program then I cannot make mine closed. I don't know if there's any evidence Cisco used libraries or modules in this way, but that will come out eventually.
It doesn't say what I insinuate because you're quoting the article's interpretation of the bill (written by a guy who earns a living from lobbying on the Internet and has earned a living off special interest groups for the past 40 years) rather than the bill itself. The section says that anyone whose site receives less than 500 visitors is exempted from the regulations. It doesn't say that anyone who receives more than those 500 is not also exempted for other reasons. It's like if I said everyone under the age of 3 is immature. It doesn't mean everyone over the age of 3 is a reasonable, responsible person. All it says is exactly what it says: if you get less than 500 visitors, it doesn't matter whether someone paid you ten billion dollars to say what you wrote or if you did it for free. For anyone who is gaining attention, it does matter, because it influences the way people make decisions: and that always matters.
It's not just some Republican thing. That would be naive. It's possible that some large blogging sites with ties to the Democratic Party, the Green Party, and other groups will have to register as lobbyists as well. And they should. Just like a blogger that takes money from tobacco concerns, oil concerns, PETA, the cattle industry, a software company, or whoever else under the sun, should have to say, "Look, they paid me more than $25,000 to say this, so I said it." That doesn't mean what they said isn't true, but it shouldn't appear that the person said it out of the kindness of their heart or that they suddenly were inspired to write about it. I'm tired of reading fake news that I don't know whether to make heads or tails of just because some group of douchebags decided to get together, form a political action committee, and started handing out cheques under the guise of journalism.
Let's just think for a moment why someone who happens to stand to lose a lot of clout and large gobs of cash because he'll have to suddenly disclose where exactly the money for all his supposed concerned citizens and grassroots organisations comes from. Like I said, the fact that an organisation or political group paid someone to say something doesn't mean what was said is invalidated or false. But it's important to know who is pulling the strings behind some new "research" or a "breaking story" when it's being presented to you in an attempt to influence you before you go out and vote on that information or volunteer to do something about it or whatever it may be. This is maybe one of the most ethical Ethics Bills I've seen in a long time. With the recent passing by the HOR of the new law forbidding earmarked pork barrel projects from being slipped into appropriations bills without being posted on the Internet 48 hours prior for the public to witness, I'm honestly surprised in a good way by the Americans' legislature for once. Maybe all of this Mark Foley and Republican indictment stuff has scared the US Congress into at least giving the appearance of having learned a lesson.
The key here is "Paid attempts." Bloggers who don't receive an income in exchange for their work aren't affected. By the way, take a look at the person TFA cites as the source. It's bullshit FUD from Richard A. Viguerie, whose bread and butter is fundraising conservative causes and blogging about right-wing lobbying interests. The only people who will be affected by this legislation are BS-peddlers like him and all the fake think tanks and policy-pushing "advocacy groups" he raises money for.
MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. From an interview with the Vice President of Technology at Universal Pictures, Jerry Pierce:
Different studios have different philosophies in this area. It is our view that we have to provide customers a rich experience so they can do what they want to do within their home. We don't expect them to make copies of HD DVDs for their friends. And we don't think customers want to do that either. So, DRM needs to give them some restrictions beyond what both the customer and we believe are the proper usage rules. That's what we need to achieve. DRMs enable business models, they don't stop piracy. And we want to make sure that we have a rich one without making it so easy so that you can violate what we agreed on when you purchased a movie. The full interview is here.
Here is a quote from another interview with Fritz Attaway, an MPAA exec:
Consumers should have a choice to either own a copy of a movie for multiple viewing, or to just view it one time for a much lower price. And movie companies want to provide that choice, and many more. But without DRM, every transaction would have to be priced as a sale, not just of one copy but of many copies, in order to account for unrestrained copying...
With regard to your comment that many DRM technologies can be circumvented by commercial pirates, you are correct, but DRM is not intended to prevent commercial piracy. It is intended to insure that most consumers will keep the deal they make with movie distributors. Like the lock on your door, they are not a guarantee against theft, but they "keep honest people honest." The source of that interview is here.
The article has fewer details than the last section of the chapter you linked to, which basically explains everything.
When the ELF loader sees the Linux brand, the loader replaces a pointer in the proc structure. All system calls are indexed through this pointer (in a traditional UNIX system, this would be the sysent[] structure array, containing the system calls). In addition, the process is flagged for special handling of the trap vector for the signal trampoline code, and several other (minor) fix-ups that are handled by the Linux kernel module.
The Linux system call vector contains, among other things, a list of sysent[] entries whose addresses reside in the kernel module.
When a system call is called by the Linux binary, the trap code dereferences the system call function pointer off the proc structure, and gets the Linux, not the FreeBSD, system call entry points.
In addition, the Linux mode dynamically reroots lookups; this is, in effect, what the union option to file system mounts (not the unionfs file system type!) does. First, an attempt is made to lookup the file in the/compat/linux/original-path directory, then only if that fails, the lookup is done in the/original-path directory. This makes sure that binaries that require other binaries can run (e.g., the Linux toolchain can all run under Linux ABI support). It also means that the Linux binaries can load and execute FreeBSD binaries, if there are no corresponding Linux binaries present, and that you could place a uname(1) command in the/compat/linux directory tree to ensure that the Linux binaries could not tell they were not running on Linux.
In effect, there is a Linux kernel in the FreeBSD kernel; the various underlying functions that implement all of the services provided by the kernel are identical to both the FreeBSD system call table entries, and the Linux system call table entries: file system operations, virtual memory operations, signal delivery, System V IPC, etc... The only difference is that FreeBSD binaries get the FreeBSD glue functions, and Linux binaries get the Linux glue functions (most older OS's only had their own glue functions: addresses of functions in a static global sysent[] structure array, instead of addresses of functions dereferenced off a dynamically initialized pointer in the proc structure of the process making the call).
Which one is the native FreeBSD ABI? It does not matter. Basically the only difference is that (currently; this could easily be changed in a future release, and probably will be after this) the FreeBSD glue functions are statically linked into the kernel, and the Linux glue functions can be statically linked, or they can be accessed via a kernel module.
Yeah, but is this really emulation? No. It is an ABI implementation, not an emulation. There is no emulator (or simulator, to cut off the next question) involved.
So why is it sometimes called "Linux emulation"? To make it hard to sell FreeBSD! Really, it is because the historical implementation was done at a time when there was really no word other than that to describe what was going on; saying that FreeBSD ran Linux binaries was not true, if you did not compile the code in or load a module, and there needed to be a word to describe what was being loaded--hence "the Linux emulator".
Also there is this, which is another good explanation of the differences between but support for the two OS's in FreeBSD programming.
FreeBSD is an extremely flexible system. It offers other ways of calling the kernel. For it to work, however, the system must have Linux emulation installed.
Linux is a Unix-like system. However, its kernel uses the Microsoft system-call convention of passing parameters in registers. As with the Unix convention, the function number is placed in EAX. The parameters, however, are not passed on the stack but in EBX, ECX, EDX, ESI, EDI, EBP:
What happens when the "ink" clogs? The robot contractor tells the worker robots to go on their lunch break and then he disappears for six months and doesn't return your calls.
The move to India for some companies is not only dictated by cheaper labor.
Correct. Look at SCO's website under the job opportunities link. Only two employment openings, both for systems programmers in C/Assembly, and both in Bangalore, India. Maybe sometimes the move is dictated by hoping that the natives don't read American news and realise the employer is going down the shitter before they can quit.
He is right. My cousin works at Schladming ski resort, which is near Dachstein, and in December they sent him home for 2 weeks because there was not enough snow to make it worth being open. Here in the valley it has only snowed twice this winter, and both times for maybe 3 hours at most--and it was all melted within a few hours later. As I am writing this it is 17 degrees C (62,4 degrees F) and it has not been 0C for maybe 3 weeks--even then it was only a day or two. If anyone seriously thinks it is not warmer now than it was 30 years ago, I advise you to Google for the comparisons between the Alps today and as they were in the 1960s. Someone on Slashdot once argued that comparisons like this were tricky because maybe the photos were taken in the summer in the later year and the winter in the earlier year. Do you think it makes a difference? It used to be you could drive to the Austrian glaciers any time of year, get out of your car, and walk around on them. Now many either have running water on the surface and it's too dangerous or they've shrank so considerably that you'd have to walk down a steep slope from the highway as if you're hiking. If that's not due to massive melting, it sure is a clever trick of the eye.
More important, I think, than homework assignments is having the textbooks. And a large number of MIT's "open" courses lack the texts. It's rather useless if you're going there because you want to learn Subject X only to find that the only materials you have access to are some lecture videos and a few notes here and there. I understand that classes use books written by other people who have no intention of ever making that book free, but using MIT's OCW as a means of learning is far from a replacement for buying a book or going to a real course. Sometimes even a Wikipedia article provides more useful information about a given subject than all the materials about that subject offered for download by MIT combined. It might have changed since the last time I visited the site, but at the time it wasn't all that impressive except maybe as a refresher for stuff I already knew but hadn't used for ages.
I think it depends on which DRM system they use, but I'm pretty sure all of them can be circumvented.
I came across a CD with the CDS200 DRM mechanism on it a few days ago. I had no idea it was even copy-protected until I tried to play it in the computer and none of the tracks showed up in/dev. I mounted it and found a bunch of typical DRM software installation files for Windows, so I rebooted and loaded it in Windows, and it prompted me to "install some necessary programs" before I could play it. Now, beforehand I had no intention of ripping the CD. I just wanted to listen to it while I was working, but the sheer fact that it wasn't behaving like a regular audio CD when that's what I was led to believe I had purchased annoyed me to the point where I decided to rip all the tracks to MP3 just so I wouldn't have to put up with using the disc anymore. It took all of ten minutes to install Audiograbber and the LAME encoder, let Audiograbber figure out the actual track layout, and be done using that CD forever. I am not aware of any tools as good as Audiograbber in FreeBSD, but I normally don't need anything of the kind since all of my real CDs work anyway and I have no motivation to rip them.
So I guess you could say that at least in one recorded case, DRM protection actually caused song copying rather than prevented it. Good riddance to stupid ideas like this.
Here's a note I found in Google, but comes from the Pegasus site:
As discontent with Microsoft's "business practices" grows, we have seen unprecedented interest in alternative solutions for operating systems and applications. As a natural consequence of this, I have received numerous, or maybe even innumerable requests for a Linux version of Pegasus Mail. As a corollary to these requests, I have had a lot of people suggest that I also move to an Open Source basis for maintaining the Pegasus Mail and Mercury source code.
In the past, I have taken a cautious "wait-and-see" approach to the idea of Open Source. I am now willing to accept that it is a valid model, and that it is producing some genuinely excellent packages (such as FireFox, of which I am inordinately fond). Ideologically, I believe that Open Source and I are a good match, and I would like to consider going that way.
There are still some major problems with the idea of going Open Source though: the most important is "How do I survive in an Open Source environment"? While Pegasus Mail and Mercury do not require a huge amount of money to develop and support, the fact remains that they *do* require a level of funding, and I am not entirely sure how this would work within an Open Source model. I feel it is significant that the majority of Open Source initiatives are either funded externally (Mozilla), or basically not funded at all (OpenLDAP, OpenSSL): it seems to me that while Open Source is an excellent technical solution to the problem of large-scale development using widely-spread teams, the area of Open Source business modeling is one that still has not been completely resolved.
The other major issue with Pegasus Mail is that it uses a proprietary third-party product as its core editor, and I would not be able to take that product with me into an Open Source environment. The same problems do not exist with Mercury, because I have written every line of the package myself, but with Pegasus Mail, the problem is significant.
So, there you have it: I am now favourably disposed to the idea of moving towards Open Source, but have to overcome some important issues before I go down that track. I am actively considering the issues and hope I can find workable solutions (such as a large, friendly, wealthy sponsor) in the not-too-distant future.
Hopefully this update to my position will reduce the amount of hate-mail I have received in the last three years from Open-Source zealots. While I understand the passion and admire the zeal of these people, I would suggest that a positive approach is always going to work better than trying to rip out my liver and feed it to the dogs. After all, this *is* my baby - I have been working on these programs and providing them free of charge for over fifteen years now, and I don't believe it's too much to ask if I expect a little basic human courtesy.
If you have suggestions and are willing to present them to me in a positive, encouraging manner, I will be happy to receive them.
David Harris
Owner/Author, Pegasus Mail and Mercury Systems,
April 20th 2005.
I look forward to having advertisers put their two cents into articles. It's a community encyclopedia, right? That community presumably includes people who work in advertising. And at last I can finish my thesis on the atomic weight of Bolonium with free research tools.
Slashdot Mirror
No, blow like the wind is what Novell has decided to do. Running would be the opposite. You may be asking yourself how it can do both. Well, the wind is a very complicated man. And no one understands him but his woman. One of the reasons this whole Novel-Microsoft-FSF issue is so complex is due to the high amount of personification involved:
Novell -> Gets Windfall
Wind -> Blows
Novell -> Blows
Wind -> Runs
Good Advice <- (Novell -> Runs)
Wind -> Complicated
Shaft -> Complicated
Microsoft -> Shafts -> Novell
Pressure <- High -> (Eben Moglen -> Novell)
Both Sides -> Hot Air
Linux Community -> Novell <- Cold Shoulder
Software Community -> Stormy
Ballmer -> Dangerous Flying Debris
Richard Stallman -> Hair Always Looks Like Caught in Hurricane
Windows -> Haphazardly Duct Taped to Prevent Immediate Shattering
Whole Issue -> Tempestuous Cyclone of Flying Nerds
To me it always stank of some sort of submarine plan to get rid of Novell using their own greed as a blindfold. Sure, you can compete directly against them, attack them in marketing, etc., but that just raises their street cred in the eyes of others in the Linux community. Flashing millions of dollars in front of the CEOs eyes until they are incapable of making any decisions with foresight is a much easier way. The company loses its respect in the community, become isolated by their cooperation with "the enemy," their source contributions are tainted with patent concerns, etc. Meanwhile they have no expectation of that because they're busy dreaming up what to do with their windfall. I'm not one of those annoying people who calls Microsoft the Hitler of computing, they're just a corporation like any other. But this story does sort of remind me of one of those old stories about Satan making a deal that seemed too good to be true, and indeed it turns out to be and the guy gets fucked over in the end despite his newfound fortune. This only goes to show, if someone offers you a dumptruck full of cash and doesn't seem to want anything of equal value in return -- Run. Run like the wind.
Normally there's an option in your POP3 retriever of choice to leave the messages on the server. It's in the RFC for POP3 that only mail which is marked for deletion during the transaction will be deleted, and even then only after an update command has been sent. So whatever program you're using to get your mail should have the option to preserve it. In fetchmail it's the -k flag. In Thunderbird it's in the account preferences dialog. Unless Yahoo is manually doing this after you've finished retrieving your mail, which I doubt, it's deleting your messages because you didn't configure it not to--because by default a lot of email clients assume you don't want to keep it on the POP server as POP was not designed for sending the same messages to the same account(s) at multiple sources--that's IMAP's purpose.
I found this in Google in about 5 seconds. It should help you, even if it's specific to Outlook Express:
To control deletion of messages from the Yahoo! Mail Server: 1. From the Tools menu, choose "Accounts." 2. Select the "Mail" tab. 3. Double-click the account labeled "pop.mail.yahoo.com." 4. Select the "Advanced" tab. 5. In the Delivery section at the bottom of the window, check "Leave a copy of messages on server" if you want to save your Yahoo! Mail messages on the Yahoo! Mail server as well as on your local computer. Do not check this box if you want your messages to be deleted from the Yahoo! Mail server once you have received them in Outlook Express. If you want proof that it can be done, I can say safely that it does. With GMail at least. I have one computer with fetchmail and Mutt, one with Thunderbird, and in Windows I just login to the GMail account through Firefox. All of them work and all of them have identical inboxes because I don't delete any of the downloaded messages. Occasionally I will login from the web and push them into Archive when the list gets too long, but each computer's inbox still has the locally stored version.
Regarding the article, I've seen a lot of people fighting when in fact both of them have a point. 1) The user was to blame because I have an old Lycos account that I rarely use and even I know their policy. That's why I log in to it every few weeks just to keep the inbox, which contains some things from ~7 years ago (amazing I still have them considering the previous 5mb limit Lycos imposed), from being emptied. Anyone who bothers to read the ToS should know this and expect it. They are offering a free service, but not running a charity. If they kept every message from every user regardless of the last time they logged in, their storage devices would be full of crap from people who died, lost internet access, forgot about the account, don't use it anymore because there are better ones out there, or were just using it for some sinister or immature purpose. If something is really important to you you should be printing it out anyway. The second point is, this Lycos manager should either be fired or at least punished. It doesn't matter how correct Lycos' policy was and how much the customer ignored it, you don't use that kind of language. I've noticed from working in customer service myself that most of an angry, hostile customer's initial behaviour towards the representative is just frustration, and if you actually make an effort to understand them and sympathise, you can usually get them to compromise. I can't believe this guy is a manager. I don't know any manager who wouldn't have just bit the bullet, gave them a free month of the pay-for-use service, restored their e-mails, and hoped they had the sense to download them or forward them to another account and walk away from the service. They'd be happy and the company would only have lost a few dollars. Now they've got all this bad publicity over a $29.95 or whatever it was fee.
"The Transylvanian National Guard was sent in to defuse the situation, but they were no match for the room full of flying wooden stakes."
Examples of how Linux desktop adoption fails because there's no marketing department
Here's a list of counterexamples:
<counterexamples> Linux isn't a company. There's no marketing department because Linux is a kernel of a POSIX-like operating system, not a single corporation. Microsoft is a corporation, Apple is a corporation. Hence they have marketing departments. I'm pretty sure Novell and RedHat have marketing departments as well. But Linux doesn't. Nor does it need one. </counterexamples>
A marketing department would have put an end to the KDE vs. Gnome issue in its infancy. Two competing desktop technologies fragments the installed base and leads to duplicated efforts. They would've told product development ot knife one, adopt the other.
Duplicated efforts aren't necessarily a bad thing unless the time spent on the effort could be better used elsewhere. It doesn't take that long and isn't that complicated to install the libraries for both and run GNOME or KDE applications on either desktop. The "GNOME vs KDE issue in its infancy" was a legitimate problem because KDE used Qt, which at the time was not GPL. GNOME was an attempt at making a completely GPL desktop environment that would always be free software. I agree that now that Trolltech has put Qt (in a sense) under the GPL there is probably no need for GNOME anymore on a philosophical basis. But if people like it and use it and want to keep it going, that's their right to work on it. You seem to fail to understand that Linux is not only not a company, it's not even a single entity. GNOME and KDE aren't even part of Linux, so how your imaginary Linux marketing department would have the authority to "solve" that "problem" is beyond me. If you think this monolithic Linux corporation should have a kernel, GUI, userland, etc. in one big package: welcome to the world of distributions. Of course, you can't run it like a business the way you are suggesting, because it's all GPLed unless you rewrite it from scratch. And that violates your previous rule that Linux shouldn't reproduce unnecessary duplication of work.
Seamless 100% integration with market leading desktop products is essential, otherwise the barrier to entry is unreasonably high and the cost of Linux adoption is infeasible. This means working perfectly with Word, Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, SQL Server, MS Project, Photoshop, Illustrator, WordPerfect, Quickbooks, ACT!, etc. Yes, it also means supporting these products better than the vendors do, being able to open file formats from 1995 even though vendor's current product does not.
I totally agree. I refuse to switch to anything new until an operating system comes out that can import all of my VisiCalc files. I paid a lot of money for that software, and until I see some improvement I'm staying away from Linux, Windows for Workgroups, or any of the other new industry "buzzwords." Why should I have to be the one that changes? I don't care about open standards; these things should just be supported and I shouldn't have to figure it out! Some people tell me, "Hey, why should they have to bloat the code for everybody else being backwards compatible with proprietary formats when suitable replacements and improvements have been made since?" I'll tell you why: because I spent a lot of money on this and the vendor told me I would never need to upgrade because it's guaranteed for life. His company went out of business, but I still have that guarantee in writing and I think one of his kids is still alive so I'm worried the contract is still legally binding. Plus I fear change. By the way, my company is thinking about switching from Irix workstations to Windows Vista. Will our data migration be "seamless?"
It also means being line-item feature equivalent. It also means should someone switch to The GIMP, they can still use all of their Photoshop plugins bought and paid for. It means that Fax driver someone bought for ACT! still works whe
Significant doesn't mean majority, it means large in scope, meaning, or size. And there is a large amount of legitimate BitTorrent traffic. FreeBSD distributes their releases through torrents, and generally when I've downloaded from there the swarm size is in the hundreds or thousands of users per ISO. Same with a lot of GNU/Linux distribution ISOs. Any time Azureus wants to update itself the download has maybe 8.000 seeders offering it. BitTorrent is actually a great way to distribute software updates and large disc images of software because you don't have to rely on one site's bandwidth or sift through a list of mirrors in a browser. I think one thing holding back legitimate use is that a lot of torrent sites (private, not the ones you find in Google) don't want people posting legal torrents to stuff they could download elsewhere over HTTP or FTP. Then again that's probably because anyone who belongs to one of these sites knows it's an easy and safe way to get their user ratio back out of the red provided there's enough leechers. But more and more open source projects are relying on torrenting to distribute their software without needing a centralised system of mirrors and fast downstreams.
I fail to see how promoting the screenwriter is similar to promoting an author. A book is the work of (usually) one person, so it makes sense for those who stand to make money off that work to go out and talk him/her up to the public. A film is not the work of any one person, but rather a collaborative effort by hundreds of people, all performing vital roles. Even a screenplay by one person is usually modified to the point of being something different by other writers before it ever sees the set. This seems like a terrible idea for fighting piracy. No one is going spit their coffee on the monitor, shout, "Holy shit! Lawrence Kasdan? I feel guilty, I'd better pay for this!" and stop downloading Empire immediately.
You didn't mention whether or not you've tried running any high-definition video playback on the machine. Nobody said Vista itself won't run on a computer/laptop that lacks DRM support in the display, just that HD video playback will be impossible. The quality will be automatically downgraded to quasi-DVD quality even if your non-HDCP monitor supports HD-DVD. In other words, you can probably play HD-DVDs on your laptop, but I'll bet the video looks exactly like a regular DVD.
I'm a little disappointed at the lack (currently I only see one) of "In Soviet Russia" posts under this article. Often they're lame, but once in awhile you see some that're actually funny. I was hoping when I clicked through to this discussion to find some, only to find a single one (modded down Redundant). Sure, they can be rather annoying in irrelevant conversations, but this article is practically an open invitation for people who post the same hackneyed phrases to every article to go wild. Maybe you don't care for them, but I for one welcome our Soviet Russian troll poster overlords. I'm currently checking Netcraft to verify whether or not "In Soviet Russia" posting is dying and will report confirmation later.
If Linux evangelists want people to move to a Linux OS then you don't want a MS Windows installer you really want a proper Linux installer other wise you are just saying that Linux is a poor cousin to MS Windows and I can assure you that the majority of potential users who do this will eventually go back to MS Windows and usually with a bad feeling to Linux.
I disagree and think this is good news. My father-in-law only uses his computer for his mail, his music, and for the various PCB/schematic applications he needs. I've attempted to convince him numerous times to use something other than Windows, mainly because his computer has such limited resources and the software he uses is nothing that isn't available freely and just as high-quality in the FLOSS universe. It also runs like a tortoise with XP Pro. He seems nervous about trying something he's unfamiliar with, so I finally got an Ubuntu LiveCD from Ship-It. As anyone who has tried this service knows, it can be quite awhile before it arrives. The point of the CD is for him to try it out and see how it is without actually changing anything in his hard drive. The reason I had to get a CD rather than just download/burn it is because these days I'm only burning to DVD-Rs and a) I don't feel like buying a single blank CD and b) he has no DVD drive. Had I known about this installer I would've just pointed him to it and saved myself a lot of time.
While I agree that a high-quality installer is a worthwhile goal (I remember when I first installed FreeBSD back in 1999 or so and it was so bare-bones that I had no idea what the hell I was doing for about 90% of the installation) and things are moving in that direction, there are a lot of people who lack the hardware to burn LiveCDs, aren't going to take the risk of paying for one for an OS they're just mildly curious in and have never used, and/or have no knowledge of configuring their operating system. These people also probably have an OEM copy of Windows and don't know how to use anything else. Making the act of trying something new as simple as running a program using the Windows Installer dialogs they're used to is, to me, a good idea, and rather reminiscient of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition. Whether anyone switches or not, it's a safe way for them to check it out.
In fact dual booting is not a real solution either because users will eventually fall back to MS Windows because it is too easy to backslide. It is very important if you are trying to convince friends that if they are serious they must switch to a Linux only PC although let them play with a few distros before that and they need to get educated in basic security and System Admin practices.
That's a rather harsh suggestion. Unless it's an issue of HD space, I wouldn't ever recommend to a newbie that they toss Windows overboard completely and forego dual-booting. When I first started out in the non-Windows/DOS world it was around early 1998, and one of the first problems I came across was getting PPP working. If I hadn't had the foresight to dual-boot, what would you have suggested I do to find an answer to how to set it up? I certainly couldn't go online to find help--after all going online was the problem. So how did I fix it? I booted into Windows, found some websites with example scripts, printed them out, and booted back. At the time I wasn't aware of Lynx so I had to do the same thing (reboot, print out, reboot) to get XF86 configured and running. If Windows is too easy to backslide towards, that in itself speaks volumes about the learning curve and potential for frustration of non-Windows systems to people weaned on it. I don't know too many people who buy a Mac, try it for an hour, and take it back to the store (e.g. backslide) because it's too different, their menus aren't in the same place, common system applications have different names, etc. If someone doesn't like Linux, BSD, or whatever, that's their business. There may be a stupid reason for it, and one can try and correct that misinformed
In most of Europe the Turks and African asylum refugees are the new Jews. They are to blame for unemployment, crime, lack of housing, religious indifference and on and on. Anything bad going on in the country, the populist parties blame it on brown immigrants and asylum seekers. That's what it has to do with the Jews. It's history repeating itself. And when you allow people like David Irving to come and energize that reactionary base by claiming things like Auschwitz never happened, you are just helping to pour the concrete foundation for the next Auschwitz to be built upon. The successor of the German Nazi Party is actually starting to get legitimate support from the public now. They've been gaining in popularity in the national elections--especially in Eastern Germany where racism is on the rise.
Or is it that ANY right wing view should be suppressed?
It has nothing to do with right or left. As I said, the ÖVP was/is a conservative group, and they were the ones who passed this law. In fact, the chancellor at the time, Figl, was a rabid anti-Nazi. I think you are getting hung up here on what left and right mean. So let us use the more accurate two-dimensional terms. The ÖVP is a Catholic "people's party" that supports many of the same things as the US Republicans, except they oppose the death penalty and don't want to do away with welfare entirely. I never compared them to Nazis, just pointed out that someone earlier said that liberals passed the anti-Holocaust denial law, which is false. The real Nazis in Austria are the Freedom Party and the Orange Party. They are sort of in between the left and the right on economic issues, which is typical of populist parties trying to appeal to the working class and the elderly.
Perhaps the proper solution might be to restrict the amount of turks entering the country.
That's exactly the solution the neo-Nazis--the people who are saying Irving should come here--support. Personally I don't see why anyone can't live wherever they want as long as they aren't a criminal. But that's got nothing to do with this, so let's leave it out of the conversation.
Only an idiot would see jailing people for expressing a point of view as the solution.
As I said in my first post, the law was passed 60 years ago in an attempt to keep Nazis after the war from regaining control. It was necessary because the Allies planned to leave the occupied areas of Austria by the 1950s--which they did--and didn't want a resurgence of fascism after they left. Maybe now the law isn't necessary, ok. It's doubtful that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to squeeze into their old uniforms and start a coup. But I think the main reason it hasn't been repealed is simply because of the symbolic effect it would have if that were done and the negative message it would send to minorities. If you go to Vienna, there are Jewish neighbourhoods which still have police guarding the road with machine guns and synagogues with electronic automatic locking doors because the poison has never been completely removed. If you ask me what the "solution is," I think instead of passing a law in 1947 and hanging a few officers in Nuremberg, they should've punished the entire population. Everyone was complicit, and the majority got off light and never learned their lesson. I can't count on both hands how many 70, 80 year old Nazis there still are in this small village alone. They didn't learn a God damn thing.
The "liberals" didn't come up with the law. In Germany and Austria it was a postwar requirement of the Allied forces that among other things denying the Holocaust be a punishable offence, in order to prevent former Nazis from regaining any public support once the Allies left. If you had bothered to actually do any fact-checking before making a statement like that, you'd know that the law was passed in 1947 under the ÖVP, which is the conservative party of Austria. They held the chancellorship (under Figl) and majority in Parliament until the "Socialist revolution" under Kreisky in 1970.
Irving didn't go to jail for denying the Holocaust. He was put on trial because the Austrian government warned him not to enter the border because they knew who he was and what he would say. The Burschenschaft, a secret society of right-wing students who swordfight and wear weird costumes (I am not making this up, you can look it up if you want), invited him to speak and he was stupid enough to go and was subsequently arrested at the airport. We have a lot of problems right now, especially in Vienna, because so many Turkish people are coming and certain far-right parties are using it as the new scapegoat to gain support. The last thing Austria needs is some douche like David Irving fanning the flames.
Crack open a history book and an atlas sometime before writing flamebait about countries you know nothing about and have probably never been to.
I don't think it's anything that cynical. The GPL Violations project tends to do good work, at least here in Central/Western Europe. They've gone to quite a few companies, particularly those selling Linux-based electronics and PCs to the public, and said, "Look, you probably don't understand that you've violated the terms of this license. We just want you to provide the source code and then we'll leave you alone." And within a few weeks/months it's almost always available. End of story. My country's national health care system also had a brush with the GPL Violations group when they started rolling out ID cards for collecting benefits at the doctor's office and each doctor had a Debian-based card reading machine networked to the main server. The company the government contracted to do it was contacted, the GPLVp said you need to provide the source code, and now it's available to download off their site--all ~300mb of it. I don't think this guy is trying to get his name in the papers or score points for Apple or anything. He just wants the GPL to be taken seriously, especially by the big boys in the industry who save tons of money putting a free, already-developed operating system on their product, then don't abide by the rules of that product because they assume a free product has no usage rules attached to it. If you decide to enforce the GPL, you can't pick and choose who you're going to go after. You also have to understand that a lot of people read about open source in the newspaper and think it means public domain. I mean, if there's this much argument on Slashdot about what the clauses of the GPL signify, imagine how hard it must be for a businessman with only a superficial knowledge of programming who's managing projects to comprehend it.
As to Armijn Hemel not helping Cisco, it may be that he's just afraid Cisco will provide the source to the parts specifically mentioned by Hemel, but nothing else despite there being further violations. By intentionally not saying, "this and this are violating it," he's forcing Cisco to do its own audit of the code and establish what really is and isn't GPLed. That's not making a political point, it's being clever. It's also possible he really doesn't know. By the way, someone else earlier made a similar comment that Cisco doesn't have to release the source to its programs that it wrote, only the modifications to the operating system. The person who said that obviously has never had to do any linking to 3rd party libraries in their software. If I link to a GPLed (not LGPLed like libstdc++ and such, but GPLed like the GNU telephony libraries, which I wouldn't be shocked if I found Cisco using) library in my program then I cannot make mine closed. I don't know if there's any evidence Cisco used libraries or modules in this way, but that will come out eventually.
It doesn't say what I insinuate because you're quoting the article's interpretation of the bill (written by a guy who earns a living from lobbying on the Internet and has earned a living off special interest groups for the past 40 years) rather than the bill itself. The section says that anyone whose site receives less than 500 visitors is exempted from the regulations. It doesn't say that anyone who receives more than those 500 is not also exempted for other reasons. It's like if I said everyone under the age of 3 is immature. It doesn't mean everyone over the age of 3 is a reasonable, responsible person. All it says is exactly what it says: if you get less than 500 visitors, it doesn't matter whether someone paid you ten billion dollars to say what you wrote or if you did it for free. For anyone who is gaining attention, it does matter, because it influences the way people make decisions: and that always matters.
It's not just some Republican thing. That would be naive. It's possible that some large blogging sites with ties to the Democratic Party, the Green Party, and other groups will have to register as lobbyists as well. And they should. Just like a blogger that takes money from tobacco concerns, oil concerns, PETA, the cattle industry, a software company, or whoever else under the sun, should have to say, "Look, they paid me more than $25,000 to say this, so I said it." That doesn't mean what they said isn't true, but it shouldn't appear that the person said it out of the kindness of their heart or that they suddenly were inspired to write about it. I'm tired of reading fake news that I don't know whether to make heads or tails of just because some group of douchebags decided to get together, form a political action committee, and started handing out cheques under the guise of journalism.
Let's just think for a moment why someone who happens to stand to lose a lot of clout and large gobs of cash because he'll have to suddenly disclose where exactly the money for all his supposed concerned citizens and grassroots organisations comes from. Like I said, the fact that an organisation or political group paid someone to say something doesn't mean what was said is invalidated or false. But it's important to know who is pulling the strings behind some new "research" or a "breaking story" when it's being presented to you in an attempt to influence you before you go out and vote on that information or volunteer to do something about it or whatever it may be. This is maybe one of the most ethical Ethics Bills I've seen in a long time. With the recent passing by the HOR of the new law forbidding earmarked pork barrel projects from being slipped into appropriations bills without being posted on the Internet 48 hours prior for the public to witness, I'm honestly surprised in a good way by the Americans' legislature for once. Maybe all of this Mark Foley and Republican indictment stuff has scared the US Congress into at least giving the appearance of having learned a lesson.
The key here is "Paid attempts." Bloggers who don't receive an income in exchange for their work aren't affected. By the way, take a look at the person TFA cites as the source. It's bullshit FUD from Richard A. Viguerie, whose bread and butter is fundraising conservative causes and blogging about right-wing lobbying interests. The only people who will be affected by this legislation are BS-peddlers like him and all the fake think tanks and policy-pushing "advocacy groups" he raises money for.
Here is a quote from another interview with Fritz Attaway, an MPAA exec:
Consumers should have a choice to either own a copy of a movie for multiple viewing, or to just view it one time for a much lower price. And movie companies want to provide that choice, and many more. But without DRM, every transaction would have to be priced as a sale, not just of one copy but of many copies, in order to account for unrestrained copying...
With regard to your comment that many DRM technologies can be circumvented by commercial pirates, you are correct, but DRM is not intended to prevent commercial piracy. It is intended to insure that most consumers will keep the deal they make with movie distributors. Like the lock on your door, they are not a guarantee against theft, but they "keep honest people honest." The source of that interview is here.
I see they didn't offer too many Gender Studies classes at either university when you were there.
When the ELF loader sees the Linux brand, the loader replaces a pointer in the proc structure. All system calls are indexed through this pointer (in a traditional UNIX system, this would be the sysent[] structure array, containing the system calls). In addition, the process is flagged for special handling of the trap vector for the signal trampoline code, and several other (minor) fix-ups that are handled by the Linux kernel module.
/compat/linux/original-path directory, then only if that fails, the lookup is done in the /original-path directory. This makes sure that binaries that require other binaries can run (e.g., the Linux toolchain can all run under Linux ABI support). It also means that the Linux binaries can load and execute FreeBSD binaries, if there are no corresponding Linux binaries present, and that you could place a uname(1) command in the /compat/linux directory tree to ensure that the Linux binaries could not tell they were not running on Linux.
The Linux system call vector contains, among other things, a list of sysent[] entries whose addresses reside in the kernel module.
When a system call is called by the Linux binary, the trap code dereferences the system call function pointer off the proc structure, and gets the Linux, not the FreeBSD, system call entry points.
In addition, the Linux mode dynamically reroots lookups; this is, in effect, what the union option to file system mounts (not the unionfs file system type!) does. First, an attempt is made to lookup the file in the
In effect, there is a Linux kernel in the FreeBSD kernel; the various underlying functions that implement all of the services provided by the kernel are identical to both the FreeBSD system call table entries, and the Linux system call table entries: file system operations, virtual memory operations, signal delivery, System V IPC, etc... The only difference is that FreeBSD binaries get the FreeBSD glue functions, and Linux binaries get the Linux glue functions (most older OS's only had their own glue functions: addresses of functions in a static global sysent[] structure array, instead of addresses of functions dereferenced off a dynamically initialized pointer in the proc structure of the process making the call).
Which one is the native FreeBSD ABI? It does not matter. Basically the only difference is that (currently; this could easily be changed in a future release, and probably will be after this) the FreeBSD glue functions are statically linked into the kernel, and the Linux glue functions can be statically linked, or they can be accessed via a kernel module.
Yeah, but is this really emulation? No. It is an ABI implementation, not an emulation. There is no emulator (or simulator, to cut off the next question) involved.
So why is it sometimes called "Linux emulation"? To make it hard to sell FreeBSD! Really, it is because the historical implementation was done at a time when there was really no word other than that to describe what was going on; saying that FreeBSD ran Linux binaries was not true, if you did not compile the code in or load a module, and there needed to be a word to describe what was being loaded--hence "the Linux emulator".
Also there is this, which is another good explanation of the differences between but support for the two OS's in FreeBSD programming.
FreeBSD is an extremely flexible system. It offers other ways of calling the kernel. For it to work, however, the system must have Linux emulation installed.
Linux is a Unix-like system. However, its kernel uses the Microsoft system-call convention of passing parameters in registers. As with the Unix convention, the function number is placed in EAX. The parameters, however, are not passed on the stack but in EBX, ECX, EDX, ESI, EDI, EBP:
open: mo
Correct. Look at SCO's website under the job opportunities link. Only two employment openings, both for systems programmers in C/Assembly, and both in Bangalore, India. Maybe sometimes the move is dictated by hoping that the natives don't read American news and realise the employer is going down the shitter before they can quit.
He is right. My cousin works at Schladming ski resort, which is near Dachstein, and in December they sent him home for 2 weeks because there was not enough snow to make it worth being open. Here in the valley it has only snowed twice this winter, and both times for maybe 3 hours at most--and it was all melted within a few hours later. As I am writing this it is 17 degrees C (62,4 degrees F) and it has not been 0C for maybe 3 weeks--even then it was only a day or two. If anyone seriously thinks it is not warmer now than it was 30 years ago, I advise you to Google for the comparisons between the Alps today and as they were in the 1960s. Someone on Slashdot once argued that comparisons like this were tricky because maybe the photos were taken in the summer in the later year and the winter in the earlier year. Do you think it makes a difference? It used to be you could drive to the Austrian glaciers any time of year, get out of your car, and walk around on them. Now many either have running water on the surface and it's too dangerous or they've shrank so considerably that you'd have to walk down a steep slope from the highway as if you're hiking. If that's not due to massive melting, it sure is a clever trick of the eye.
More important, I think, than homework assignments is having the textbooks. And a large number of MIT's "open" courses lack the texts. It's rather useless if you're going there because you want to learn Subject X only to find that the only materials you have access to are some lecture videos and a few notes here and there. I understand that classes use books written by other people who have no intention of ever making that book free, but using MIT's OCW as a means of learning is far from a replacement for buying a book or going to a real course. Sometimes even a Wikipedia article provides more useful information about a given subject than all the materials about that subject offered for download by MIT combined. It might have changed since the last time I visited the site, but at the time it wasn't all that impressive except maybe as a refresher for stuff I already knew but hadn't used for ages.
I think it depends on which DRM system they use, but I'm pretty sure all of them can be circumvented.
/dev. I mounted it and found a bunch of typical DRM software installation files for Windows, so I rebooted and loaded it in Windows, and it prompted me to "install some necessary programs" before I could play it. Now, beforehand I had no intention of ripping the CD. I just wanted to listen to it while I was working, but the sheer fact that it wasn't behaving like a regular audio CD when that's what I was led to believe I had purchased annoyed me to the point where I decided to rip all the tracks to MP3 just so I wouldn't have to put up with using the disc anymore. It took all of ten minutes to install Audiograbber and the LAME encoder, let Audiograbber figure out the actual track layout, and be done using that CD forever. I am not aware of any tools as good as Audiograbber in FreeBSD, but I normally don't need anything of the kind since all of my real CDs work anyway and I have no motivation to rip them.
I came across a CD with the CDS200 DRM mechanism on it a few days ago. I had no idea it was even copy-protected until I tried to play it in the computer and none of the tracks showed up in
So I guess you could say that at least in one recorded case, DRM protection actually caused song copying rather than prevented it. Good riddance to stupid ideas like this.
In the past, I have taken a cautious "wait-and-see" approach to the idea of Open Source. I am now willing to accept that it is a valid model, and that it is producing some genuinely excellent packages (such as FireFox, of which I am inordinately fond). Ideologically, I believe that Open Source and I are a good match, and I would like to consider going that way.
There are still some major problems with the idea of going Open Source though: the most important is "How do I survive in an Open Source environment"? While Pegasus Mail and Mercury do not require a huge amount of money to develop and support, the fact remains that they *do* require a level of funding, and I am not entirely sure how this would work within an Open Source model. I feel it is significant that the majority of Open Source initiatives are either funded externally (Mozilla), or basically not funded at all (OpenLDAP, OpenSSL): it seems to me that while Open Source is an excellent technical solution to the problem of large-scale development using widely-spread teams, the area of Open Source business modeling is one that still has not been completely resolved.
The other major issue with Pegasus Mail is that it uses a proprietary third-party product as its core editor, and I would not be able to take that product with me into an Open Source environment. The same problems do not exist with Mercury, because I have written every line of the package myself, but with Pegasus Mail, the problem is significant.
So, there you have it: I am now favourably disposed to the idea of moving towards Open Source, but have to overcome some important issues before I go down that track. I am actively considering the issues and hope I can find workable solutions (such as a large, friendly, wealthy sponsor) in the not-too-distant future.
Hopefully this update to my position will reduce the amount of hate-mail I have received in the last three years from Open-Source zealots. While I understand the passion and admire the zeal of these people, I would suggest that a positive approach is always going to work better than trying to rip out my liver and feed it to the dogs. After all, this *is* my baby - I have been working on these programs and providing them free of charge for over fifteen years now, and I don't believe it's too much to ask if I expect a little basic human courtesy.
If you have suggestions and are willing to present them to me in a positive, encouraging manner, I will be happy to receive them.
David Harris
Owner/Author, Pegasus Mail and Mercury Systems,
April 20th 2005.
I look forward to having advertisers put their two cents into articles. It's a community encyclopedia, right? That community presumably includes people who work in advertising. And at last I can finish my thesis on the atomic weight of Bolonium with free research tools.