Unfortunately, this may be the kind of thing that makes upper management kill OSS in the shop. Who wants to risk a lawsuit? Forget that they have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, I can see how that would play:
"Wait, what? This software has rules? We have to follow rules?!? And we get sued if we don't???!! Sandra, call my congressman, and take a memo: No more, uh, G-L-P software until we get this fixed!"
We don't want people embracing open source if by "embrace" they mean "take this free code, create my own product, and sell it".
No, you're dead wrong. The GPL allows exactly what you're describing.
It attaches a condition to that, though: It also says, 'Anything you distribute has to be available in source form as well.'
It's bad enough that proprietary software apologists try constantly to conflate the terms 'proprietary' and 'commercial' without GPL supporters showing equal ignorance. Proprietary software has exactly nothing to do with whether it's commercial or not. GPL has exactly nothing to do with price.
The math they present, or even the math on the Wikipedia page for Grover's algorithm, is also completely beyond me. I blame Alan Turing for all of this: if he'd cracked Nazi codes with poetry instead of with math, I'd probably be able to understand computer science.
We will see, I'm betting that the allure of of a sub-$100 netbook that can go all day on a full charge and can check email and browse the internet will be attractive to a lot of people.
Especially the next 3 billion customers who can't afford anything else.
If you ARE writing open source software, it's not a bullshit license.
As an open source software developer wishing to license my code liberally, I am forced to either give up my freedom of choosing the license for my code or re-implement functionality (thereby taking away my time from improving other parts of my open source app).
[Emphasis mine.]
You're forced? Is the GPL being implemented at gunpoint now? Nobody forced you to use GPL software. It's your choice if you want to avail yourself of the hard work of others or not. If you do, then the least you could do is to respect their wishes about how the fruits of their labour are used.
So, the GPL license IS a bullshit license even if you are writing open source software (in certain circumstances).
If by 'certain circumstances' you mean that the GPL is a bullshit license because you want to use it in ways that it wasn't intended to be used, well... you have less than my fullest sympathy.
Look, I respect software licenses - even the ones I don't agree with. I personally think that BSD is fine (though my preference is for GPL). And while I don't like a number of proprietary EULA's I've encountered over the years, I respect the right of the author to put conditions on how his work is used.
It's clear that you don't agree with the GPL, but that doesn't mean you have to go casting aspersions on the license. The only argument you've made so far is that it sucks because it's not what you want. I sympathise, but the solution couldn't be clearer: Just use a different one, and stay away from GPL-licensed code in the future.
How long before the Iranian government lays all new fiber to a central military facility and then disable the now-current fiber links? The idea being total central control to turn off the internet connection entirely or by segments from one physical location.
What makes you think they don't route everything through a central location already?
His email address is...@ovi.com. Ovi is the name of Nokia's internet services brand, so it looks like this is just astroturfing.
You couldn't be more wrong. Astroturfing is when you hide your professional affiliation, pretending to be completely objective and disinterested. This person is doing exactly the opposite. That's commonly known as advocacy, and it's perfectly all right in my books, because we can weigh what they say on its merits.
General note: I'm getting really, really tired of people who think bias has anything to do with the merits of an argument. Bias is good. It breeds enthusiasm and makes it clear which side a person is arguing. Until we all become Spock, there will be no objectivity in the world, so let's quit pretending that objective sources exist.
That said, anyone who can't change his mind in the face of a better argument is just a fool.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. I'm willing to listen. 8^)
While I can believe that.cm is a mistype for.com, what about.co,.con,.om? They don't seem to be high risk websites. I also bet that.con is a more common mistype than.cm
It hardly matters. What many of the press reports (including El Reg) seem to ignore is the second most risky TLD in the world:.com.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that, because of the size and popularity of the TLD,.com is significantly more of a threat to the average Internet user than.cm.
And while we're at it, how about a link to the actual report? (warning: PDF)
Contrary to popular culture, most livestock in the US where fairly well taken care of. It was an enormous investment to purchase and maintain livestock, and the owner wouldn't risk that lightly.
The problem wasn't the conditions in which slaves were kept; the problem is that human beings were indistinguishable from livestock in the minds of their owners.
You ought to learn about what the loss of liberty does to a human being before you trot out this useless tripe again.
(I later turned that post into a newspaper column in the country where I live. It's longer and slightly more polished, but more focused on our particular issues, which aren't necessarily germane to the larger debate.)
It never was -- there aren't good old days. Transparency and openness only became possible with mass media, mass literacy and cheap papers a century to a century and a half ago, depending on how you look at it.
Indeed. The fascinating history of the Belgian 'colonisation' (read: enslavement) of the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost, deals tangentially with a campaign in the run-up to the First World War to shed light on all the secret treaties that Britain had signed and which led it inevitably into war.
The campaigner was vilified in the press and mocked by government sources as a delusional paranoid. It was only in the years following the conflict that he was proven to have been substantially correct,
Believe it or not, the situation we have today is about as good as it's ever been. We do at least have some hope of actually exerting electoral pressure on our candidates, and governments do at some point have to bring information such as this into the open. Congrtulations to the two senators for their actions. Their efforts[*] should be supported, regardless of party affiliation.
---------------
[*] Their efforts, that is, not them. One of the great pitfalls of modern democracy is that we often confuse the person with the policy. Policies should be supported or opposed, not people.
That's the thing. Every time you see a comparison of security in Windows and Linux, the users in Windows is always assumed to be the administrator, and you get all this FUD about how insecure Windows is. The proper comparison would be to a Windows machine where the user is logged in as a limited user. In that case, it's as secure as a Linux box.
What utter bullshit.
First: Any comparison concerning security is misleading. I don't care if I'm just as secure as X; I only care whether I'm secure enough for a given use case.
Second: Any attempt to compare conceptual levels of security between two different platforms, in which one is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all malware infections and the other is widely understood to be effectively malware-free... well, such a comparison is disingenuous at best.
And lest anyone respond with how vulnerable Linux would be just as soon as X, Y or Z transpires, let me just say that Linux is safe now, today. If it proves to be unsafe in the future, I'll take appropriate action. Until then, theoretical threats are not nearly enough to make me prefer a platform that's theoretically equivalent but in practical terms is orders of magnitude worse.
Might I suggest you re-read the post. I suspect the writer's head did not 'literally' explode, either. I further suspect there might be a touch of dry humour to be inferred from the deliberate misuse of language in a tirade against the misuse of language.
One might even go so far as to call it a rather witty example of sarcasm.
All of which leads to the inescapable realisation that the proper idiom for the moment is, "Whooosh!"
Hopefully this will make people tweet a tad bit lesser.
I fear it's like hoping a large sponge will be able to lower ocean levels a foot. For some people, I'm sure they would only slack off on their Twitter use if the exploit made your computer grow a foot and kick you in the groin every time you tweeted.
Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.
Ok, stop for a second and re-read what you wrote, but this time pretend you're not someone who is knowledgeable about computers.
Yeah, you're right. Some translation is needed:
Put this CD in the server. Click here, enter your password, then tick this box. You're done.
Put this other CD in all the other computers. They'll just configure themselves.
The Linux dev model is NOT something to be proud of.
Indeed:
"The Linux dev model is the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
... Oh wait, no. That was me, actually.
Holy humour-impaired down-modding, Batman! How is the above a troll?
For those too dense to get the joke: I actually agree that the Linux development model has significant weaknesses. It's just that, despite its shortcomings, it actually has proven workable for many years now.
I'm not implying that there aren't better community-driven coding projects in existence. Nor do I want to suggest that critiquing the community is unwarranted (or even unwanted). It's just that, for all its warts, it has produced consistent results over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this may be the kind of thing that makes upper management kill OSS in the shop. Who wants to risk a lawsuit? Forget that they have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, I can see how that would play:
"Wait, what? This software has rules? We have to follow rules?!? And we get sued if we don't???!! Sandra, call my congressman, and take a memo: No more, uh, G-L-P software until we get this fixed!"
We don't want people embracing open source if by "embrace" they mean "take this free code, create my own product, and sell it".
No, you're dead wrong. The GPL allows exactly what you're describing.
It attaches a condition to that, though: It also says, 'Anything you distribute has to be available in source form as well.'
It's bad enough that proprietary software apologists try constantly to conflate the terms 'proprietary' and 'commercial' without GPL supporters showing equal ignorance. Proprietary software has exactly nothing to do with whether it's commercial or not. GPL has exactly nothing to do with price.
You have obviously never studied Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot.
Thanks for the compliment! I saw someone had posted a reply and was expecting abuse and obfuscation from the usual suspects.
Mission accomplished, then. 8^)
Amen! 8^)
I'm just posting here because it's almost certain that this superb summary of recent events is going to get buried in the deluge of blind assertion.
More of us should try to bear in mind that logic is not a 'fire and forget' proposition.
We will see, I'm betting that the allure of of a sub-$100 netbook that can go all day on a full charge and can check email and browse the internet will be attractive to a lot of people.
Especially the next 3 billion customers who can't afford anything else.
So what you are saying is that the editors should be more parsimonious in their use of the English language?
I'm proposing that promulgating such preposterous pronouncements precedes persiflage and paltry, even parsimonious praise.
If you ARE writing open source software, it's not a bullshit license.
As an open source software developer wishing to license my code liberally, I am forced to either give up my freedom of choosing the license for my code or re-implement functionality (thereby taking away my time from improving other parts of my open source app).
[Emphasis mine.]
You're forced? Is the GPL being implemented at gunpoint now? Nobody forced you to use GPL software. It's your choice if you want to avail yourself of the hard work of others or not. If you do, then the least you could do is to respect their wishes about how the fruits of their labour are used.
So, the GPL license IS a bullshit license even if you are writing open source software (in certain circumstances).
If by 'certain circumstances' you mean that the GPL is a bullshit license because you want to use it in ways that it wasn't intended to be used, well... you have less than my fullest sympathy.
Look, I respect software licenses - even the ones I don't agree with. I personally think that BSD is fine (though my preference is for GPL). And while I don't like a number of proprietary EULA's I've encountered over the years, I respect the right of the author to put conditions on how his work is used.
It's clear that you don't agree with the GPL, but that doesn't mean you have to go casting aspersions on the license. The only argument you've made so far is that it sucks because it's not what you want. I sympathise, but the solution couldn't be clearer: Just use a different one, and stay away from GPL-licensed code in the future.
How long before the Iranian government lays all new fiber to a central military facility and then disable the now-current fiber links? The idea being total central control to turn off the internet connection entirely or by segments from one physical location.
What makes you think they don't route everything through a central location already?
Here's an analysis of the outage immediately following the presidential election. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
His email address is ...@ovi.com. Ovi is the name of Nokia's internet services brand, so it looks like this is just astroturfing.
You couldn't be more wrong. Astroturfing is when you hide your professional affiliation, pretending to be completely objective and disinterested. This person is doing exactly the opposite. That's commonly known as advocacy, and it's perfectly all right in my books, because we can weigh what they say on its merits.
General note: I'm getting really, really tired of people who think bias has anything to do with the merits of an argument. Bias is good. It breeds enthusiasm and makes it clear which side a person is arguing. Until we all become Spock, there will be no objectivity in the world, so let's quit pretending that objective sources exist.
That said, anyone who can't change his mind in the face of a better argument is just a fool.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. I'm willing to listen. 8^)
While I can believe that .cm is a mistype for .com, what about .co, .con, .om? They don't seem to be high risk websites. I also bet that .con is a more common mistype than .cm
It hardly matters. What many of the press reports (including El Reg) seem to ignore is the second most risky TLD in the world: .com.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that, because of the size and popularity of the TLD, .com is significantly more of a threat to the average Internet user than .cm.
And while we're at it, how about a link to the actual report? (warning: PDF)
Allow me to re-phrase that for you:
The problem wasn't the conditions in which slaves were kept; the problem is that human beings were indistinguishable from livestock in the minds of their owners.
You ought to learn about what the loss of liberty does to a human being before you trot out this useless tripe again.
Carr has railed about this problem before, and he's still just as wrong as he ever was.
Here's his analysis of Murdoch's first pronouncements on the topic back in April. And here's why he's just as wrong now as he was then.
(I later turned that post into a newspaper column in the country where I live. It's longer and slightly more polished, but more focused on our particular issues, which aren't necessarily germane to the larger debate.)
Indeed. The fascinating history of the Belgian 'colonisation' (read: enslavement) of the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost, deals tangentially with a campaign in the run-up to the First World War to shed light on all the secret treaties that Britain had signed and which led it inevitably into war.
The campaigner was vilified in the press and mocked by government sources as a delusional paranoid. It was only in the years following the conflict that he was proven to have been substantially correct,
Believe it or not, the situation we have today is about as good as it's ever been. We do at least have some hope of actually exerting electoral pressure on our candidates, and governments do at some point have to bring information such as this into the open. Congrtulations to the two senators for their actions. Their efforts[*] should be supported, regardless of party affiliation.
---------------
[*] Their efforts, that is, not them. One of the great pitfalls of modern democracy is that we often confuse the person with the policy. Policies should be supported or opposed, not people.
I can get direct neural input from the Playboy channel.
I can't imagine this being a good thing:
YOU: browsing slashdot over coffee.
[Stunning, sultry woman walks up.]
SHE: Excuse me, can you tell me the time?
YOUR BROWSER: [displays top 10 porntube results for stunning, sultry women.]
SHE: You sick fuck!
...
JUDGE: I sentence you to 6 months at Pumpinhole State Penitentiary.
YOUR BROWSER: [displays goat.se]
The phrase 'Try to think of baseball' has never been more important.
That's the thing. Every time you see a comparison of security in Windows and Linux, the users in Windows is always assumed to be the administrator, and you get all this FUD about how insecure Windows is. The proper comparison would be to a Windows machine where the user is logged in as a limited user. In that case, it's as secure as a Linux box.
What utter bullshit.
First: Any comparison concerning security is misleading. I don't care if I'm just as secure as X; I only care whether I'm secure enough for a given use case.
Second: Any attempt to compare conceptual levels of security between two different platforms, in which one is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all malware infections and the other is widely understood to be effectively malware-free... well, such a comparison is disingenuous at best.
And lest anyone respond with how vulnerable Linux would be just as soon as X, Y or Z transpires, let me just say that Linux is safe now, today. If it proves to be unsafe in the future, I'll take appropriate action. Until then, theoretical threats are not nearly enough to make me prefer a platform that's theoretically equivalent but in practical terms is orders of magnitude worse.
HTH, HAND
No, it does not.
Might I suggest you re-read the post. I suspect the writer's head did not 'literally' explode, either. I further suspect there might be a touch of dry humour to be inferred from the deliberate misuse of language in a tirade against the misuse of language.
One might even go so far as to call it a rather witty example of sarcasm.
All of which leads to the inescapable realisation that the proper idiom for the moment is, "Whooosh!"
Hopefully this will make people tweet a tad bit lesser.
I fear it's like hoping a large sponge will be able to lower ocean levels a foot. For some people, I'm sure they would only slack off on their Twitter use if the exploit made your computer grow a foot and kick you in the groin every time you tweeted.
@me: OWIE PC keeps OW kicking OW REALLY HURTS pics here: http://bit.ly/3423dghe
Or 'Goodness, old boy, that's dashed inconvenient!' for us Brits. So two phrases. Gosh.
Or in Californian:
"Duuu-uude..."
That's two phrases as well.
Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.
Ok, stop for a second and re-read what you wrote, but this time pretend you're not someone who is knowledgeable about computers.
Yeah, you're right. Some translation is needed:
You have installed LTSP recently, haven't you?
My humor tastes are too dry for your water puns.
Agreed. Lunatics, all of them.
A free society is one where it's perfectly fine to stand on a soapbox and make a fool of yourself. I'd like Slashdot to stay as free as possible.
By that standard, slashdot is the epitome of freedom. With emphasis on the 'pit'. 8^)
Indeed:
"The Linux dev model is the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
... Oh wait, no. That was me, actually.
Holy humour-impaired down-modding, Batman! How is the above a troll?
For those too dense to get the joke: I actually agree that the Linux development model has significant weaknesses. It's just that, despite its shortcomings, it actually has proven workable for many years now.
I'm not implying that there aren't better community-driven coding projects in existence. Nor do I want to suggest that critiquing the community is unwarranted (or even unwanted). It's just that, for all its warts, it has produced consistent results over the years.
Indeed:
"The Linux dev model is the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
... Oh wait, no. That was me, actually.
Just out of curiosity, (and sorry for derailing the thread) who is spending these billions of dollars to build and repair the LHC?
The Vulcans. Duh. Keep up next time.