The article already answered your question: they are forbidding channels that are for the primary purpose of sharing files, whether legal or illegal.
You are in the mistaken belief that DALnet has to or should permit you to do anything on their network unless there's a law against it. It doesn't work that way.
In any case, that's a stupid way of distributing your script. Put it on a web page if you want to give it out. If the script has a well-known name that is not a common word, everyone will find it with Google.
The Web is always a more efficient way than IRC to manage the distribution of legal files.
This attempt at working around the GPL by having the user build the app has been tried before, by no less than Steve Jobs. Apple's Objective-C compiler was and is GCC-based, but originally Jobs wanted it to be proprietary. Apple came up with a scheme where the equivalent of a Makefile would take a pristine GCC tarball, plus the proprietary patch, apply it, and build a proprietary Objective-C compiler. However, the FSF lawyer (Eben Moglen) found precedents that he could use to convince Apple's lawyers that this strategy would fail. The reason is this: Apple would build and test the binary in house. They had a mechanism that would cause the bit-for-bit identical binary to appear on the user's disk. They have in effect created a mechanism for distributing a binary, and this binary is a derivative work of GCC. They can't do this without a license from the FSF. The details
of the mechanism don't matter. The "mere
aggregation" exception doesn't apply because
the pieces being distributed are not logically
separate.
Now, this gets us into a very controversial area: lots of folks object to this concept, because if taken to an extreme it would appear to prohibit people from telling other people how to do patches. Nevertheless, the Mplayer people should not assume that they have come up with a safe and legal way to mix GPL and non-GPL code. If they provide a Makefile that creates a binary, in a way that the binary the user gets is the same one they have, then they could well be sued by the owners of whatever GPL software they use.
If you want to sabotage KDE, then I suggest doing lots of postings to public forums like the following:
"Actually, I'm a die-hard KDE user (I tried GNOME but I found it toyish, lame, and frankly, suckish). I'm wondering what I can do to help SABOTAGE the GNOME project. Please give me advice on how I might engage in such activities."
Posts of that sort will reflect poorly on the people you advocate for and damage their reputation. But perhaps that's what you have in mind.
How do you think that companies like nVidia design and test their chips? Answer: by running expensive electronic design automation tools and simulators, mainly on big server farms running Linux or Solaris. Almost all of these tools, which cost thousands to tens of thousands per seat, use a flexlm-based license manager. With this kind of setup, as many machines as you like can have the tool installed, but the tool checks out a license from the networked license server in order to operate.
Your question about how long it would take people to crack such schemes isn't interesting: it is not extremely difficult for a good assembly language programmer to crack it, by, for instance,
patching the binary executable with a hex editor. However, in practice this does not matter, as the price of being caught might well be expulsion from the chip design business: you can't design chips without
tools, you need upgrades to the tools on a regulat basis thanks to Moore's Law, so you can't piss off
your suppliers. In that sense, your license manager is just a technique to monitor your compliance with your contract (e.g. that you have
250 Verilog simulator licenses).
That's just stupid. Certainly you can direct the standard error to/dev/null, but then you won't see any error messages that you really need to see.
If a program is ready to package and ship, then it's time to turn off the debug messages (or provide an option to turn them on, that is off by default).
Good commentary about usability of Linux video apps, but you're off-base
on one thing: you clearly don't understand what apt is.
apt is not the Debian packaging system, dpkg is. apt is a layer that
sits above EITHER dpkg OR RPM, the latter thanks to work done by
Connectiva. As a result, using apt on top of RPM is not the equivalent
of using two packaging systems. Rather, the apt layer just figures
out all the RPMs you need and downloads them, and then execs the rpm
command to install everything in the right order.
The Connectiva folks also produced a reasonable but not ideal GUI,
Synaptic, to sit on top of apt.
In a just world, apt would just take over; it is a better way to manage
Red Hat systems. Unfortunately this would interfere with Red Hat's
business model: they want to sell you a tool (Red Hat Network) that's
not as good and that violates your privacy (the list of packages you
have installed is stored on their end).
Using apt does not interfere with your ability to install an RPM direct
with the rpm command, just as use of apt on Debian doesn't interfere with
your ability to install a.deb with the dpkg command.
By installing apt, I was able to put the MP3 support and Ogle onto my
Red Hat 8.0 system with a couple of commands, even though this required
finding and downloading a dozen RPMs. Do you really prefer having to
collect a bunch of random RPMs on your own from various sites on the
net, only to find that the dependencies aren't quite right or that
you're missing something?
What I would want from Dell and their competitors is not necessarily pre-installation of Linux on a laptop, but rather, sufficient assurance of what is in the machine so that I can buy with confidence,
knowing that all the components are supported (or,
if not, providing some hint as to whether this situation is expected to change in the near future).
I'd prefer if the hardware manufacturer just gives enough information to allow the community to support the machine.
One way that this could work is for the company's websites to say "While we don't support Linux on the Gruntmaster 9000, here's a link to some pages run by our customers who are using it successfully". A company that does this might soon find itself with enough Linux customers that true support is economically feasible.
What's unacceptable is the common practice of changing some important component of the system without changing the model number, presenting a nasty surprise to the customer when he finds out that it doesn't work, contrary to six-month-old
reports he read on the web.
Also, I'd like to see the Linux press do more evaluations of currently popular laptop brands
for Linux compatibility. Yes, I know, if you aren't PC World the manufacturers don't send you their latest models for free. But we could be
doing better.
While I disagree with Kickstart70's comment (clearly
the new format has advantages that PNG does not have), his comment
is obviously on topic. Whatever moderator marked it offtopic should have a bite taken out of his/her karma.
If you're a geek virgin, words referring to sex indicate spam. If you're in a torrid long-distance relationship, those same words indicate a message that you do not want to miss. But that's the beauty of Bayesian spam approaches: the probabilities are based on your own preferences.
And why do you think that a decision to piss one's suppliers off, as well as a number of attendees who paid for the conference under the assumption that
it would be something else than it is, a good capitalist decision?
It's the Lindows people's conference, you say. Maybe, but that's not what they sold to the paying customers, who are in a position to ask for their money back, winding up losing the Lindows people a considerable amount of money. It's bad business.
The notion of removing all occurrences of the string "PCI" is self-defeating, as it hampers the ability of search engines to find the site. It would probably suffice to remove the logo, add "PCI is a registered trademark of so-and-so" and "this site has no relation to PCI-SIG". It is galling to have to ask an attorney about such matters. An alternative is to do what's suggested above and to move it out of the US, to a country that still allows corporations to be criticized.
Just remember, you look at the screen intently, type really fast for 20 seconds or so, then shout "I'm in!"
Or try the Russian variation: type really fast with one hand while clicking a ballpoint pen with the other, just so James Bond can give you an exploding pen later in the movie.
I hope that the governments in question insist on some evidence that the code that Microsoft shows them corresponds exactly to the executables Microsoft ships.
The article should be updated ASAP, to credit LWN for the story, and possibly to attack the anonymous coward for submitting it without credit to the source.
Google beat AltaVista even when it had a far smaller index. With AltaVista, you had to guess a combination of words that would only appear on a few sites, or you would just get a bunch of crappy sites with a lot of "meta" keywords on them. You couldn't use common words, as you'd get just a random collection of pages. People forget, now, the amazement at being able to type just "linux" as a search term and getting almost all the canonical
Linux sites on the first page. AltaVista couldn't
do that, at all. By comparison, using AltaVista was kind of like using SQL: up to the user to think about how to compose a query to get a decent result.
-j is an option for GNU make, not gcc. And there is no rule that says you must specify the number of processors you physically have; for big compiles, you'll get a somewhat better time if you say -j2 on a single-processor machine. This is because, when two gcc's run in parallel, one can take the processor while the other is waiting for disk.
There is no native support inside of gcc for SMP-based compiling. gcc itself is completely sequential. You are perhaps thinking of parallel makes.
Re:128 bit encryption internationally?
on
1KM 802.11b @ 2MB
·
· Score: 2
There's no reason why the NSA should object to 128-bit WEP being exported, since it's trivially crackable (far less secure than a decent 128-bit cipher).
Taxes don't consist of the government taking money awayand burying it in the ground. Governments spend everything they take in, and (when there is a deficit) more. Depending on how the money is spent, it can leverage significant economic growth and create entirely new industries. In some cases, higher taxes could save you money (countries with single-payer systems cover everyone for far less money than we spend covering only 80% of the people with private insurance).
On the other hand, billions of dollars can be spent funding things that don't have a hope of working in the near future, like ballistic missile defense.
US monopolies on "intellectual property" vanish
as soon as significant foreign players decide not
to go along. The UK was far ahead of the US
early in the 19th century. How did the US catch
up? By ignoring British patents and copyrights,
and smuggling manufacturing equipment out of
Britain and cloning it. The Chinese don't even
have to bother with that, as US corporations are
setting up manufacturing operations in China.
In another few years, the Chinese can just say
that they want to negotiate new terms: they'll
happily continue to sell the Americans practically
everything, as almost every manufactured good consumed by Americans is made there. But they
want to pay vastly less to American copyright and patent holders. If there's no deal, they just pay nothing at all: the US could try to forbid Chinese exports, and watch its entire economy collapse, because too many basic necessities are available from nowhere else.
Similarly, Europe is running a big trade surplus against the US: Americans buy much more from Europe than they sell to Europe. This means that American companies need access to European markets far more than vice versa, putting the EU's regulatory authorities in a position of power. The US has evidently abandoned the antitrust concept, but you'll soon see the EU insisting that American companies break up, and winning.
Slashdot Mirror
The article already answered your question: they are forbidding channels that are for the primary purpose of sharing files, whether legal or illegal.
You are in the mistaken belief that DALnet has to or should permit you to do anything on their network unless there's a law against it. It doesn't work that way.
In any case, that's a stupid way of distributing your script. Put it on a web page if you want to give it out. If the script has a well-known name that is not a common word, everyone will find it with Google.
The Web is always a more efficient way than IRC to manage the distribution of legal files.
Sorry, I goofed; yes, it was Steve Jobs, but the Objective-C compiler was a NeXT product.
This attempt at working around the GPL by having the user build the app has been tried before, by no less than Steve Jobs. Apple's Objective-C compiler was and is GCC-based, but originally Jobs wanted it to be proprietary. Apple came up with a scheme where the equivalent of a Makefile would take a pristine GCC tarball, plus the proprietary patch, apply it, and build a proprietary Objective-C compiler. However, the FSF lawyer (Eben Moglen) found precedents that he could use to convince Apple's lawyers that this strategy would fail. The reason is this: Apple would build and test the binary in house. They had a mechanism that would cause the bit-for-bit identical binary to appear on the user's disk. They have in effect created a mechanism for distributing a binary, and this binary is a derivative work of GCC. They can't do this without a license from the FSF. The details of the mechanism don't matter. The "mere aggregation" exception doesn't apply because the pieces being distributed are not logically separate.
Now, this gets us into a very controversial area: lots of folks object to this concept, because if taken to an extreme it would appear to prohibit people from telling other people how to do patches. Nevertheless, the Mplayer people should not assume that they have come up with a safe and legal way to mix GPL and non-GPL code. If they provide a Makefile that creates a binary, in a way that the binary the user gets is the same one they have, then they could well be sued by the owners of whatever GPL software they use.
If you want to sabotage KDE, then I suggest doing lots of postings to public forums like the following:
Posts of that sort will reflect poorly on the people you advocate for and damage their reputation. But perhaps that's what you have in mind.
Yes, the Swiss had a public referendum on joining the UN. It won in a squeaker: 12 cantons (like US states) for, 11 cantons against.
In Switzerland, important changes to the law must be approved by the public.
How do you think that companies like nVidia design and test their chips? Answer: by running expensive electronic design automation tools and simulators, mainly on big server farms running Linux or Solaris. Almost all of these tools, which cost thousands to tens of thousands per seat, use a flexlm-based license manager. With this kind of setup, as many machines as you like can have the tool installed, but the tool checks out a license from the networked license server in order to operate.
Your question about how long it would take people to crack such schemes isn't interesting: it is not extremely difficult for a good assembly language programmer to crack it, by, for instance, patching the binary executable with a hex editor. However, in practice this does not matter, as the price of being caught might well be expulsion from the chip design business: you can't design chips without tools, you need upgrades to the tools on a regulat basis thanks to Moore's Law, so you can't piss off your suppliers. In that sense, your license manager is just a technique to monitor your compliance with your contract (e.g. that you have 250 Verilog simulator licenses).
That's just stupid. Certainly you can direct the standard error to /dev/null, but then you won't see any error messages that you really need to see.
If a program is ready to package and ship, then it's time to turn off the debug messages (or provide an option to turn them on, that is off by default).
Here's a letter that I sent to JWZ:
Jamie,
Good commentary about usability of Linux video apps, but you're off-base on one thing: you clearly don't understand what apt is.
apt is not the Debian packaging system, dpkg is. apt is a layer that sits above EITHER dpkg OR RPM, the latter thanks to work done by Connectiva. As a result, using apt on top of RPM is not the equivalent of using two packaging systems. Rather, the apt layer just figures out all the RPMs you need and downloads them, and then execs the rpm command to install everything in the right order.
The Connectiva folks also produced a reasonable but not ideal GUI, Synaptic, to sit on top of apt.
In a just world, apt would just take over; it is a better way to manage Red Hat systems. Unfortunately this would interfere with Red Hat's business model: they want to sell you a tool (Red Hat Network) that's not as good and that violates your privacy (the list of packages you have installed is stored on their end).
Using apt does not interfere with your ability to install an RPM direct with the rpm command, just as use of apt on Debian doesn't interfere with your ability to install a .deb with the dpkg command.
By installing apt, I was able to put the MP3 support and Ogle onto my Red Hat 8.0 system with a couple of commands, even though this required finding and downloading a dozen RPMs. Do you really prefer having to collect a bunch of random RPMs on your own from various sites on the net, only to find that the dependencies aren't quite right or that you're missing something?
Joe
What I would want from Dell and their competitors is not necessarily pre-installation of Linux on a laptop, but rather, sufficient assurance of what is in the machine so that I can buy with confidence, knowing that all the components are supported (or, if not, providing some hint as to whether this situation is expected to change in the near future). I'd prefer if the hardware manufacturer just gives enough information to allow the community to support the machine.
One way that this could work is for the company's websites to say "While we don't support Linux on the Gruntmaster 9000, here's a link to some pages run by our customers who are using it successfully". A company that does this might soon find itself with enough Linux customers that true support is economically feasible.
What's unacceptable is the common practice of changing some important component of the system without changing the model number, presenting a nasty surprise to the customer when he finds out that it doesn't work, contrary to six-month-old reports he read on the web.
Also, I'd like to see the Linux press do more evaluations of currently popular laptop brands for Linux compatibility. Yes, I know, if you aren't PC World the manufacturers don't send you their latest models for free. But we could be doing better.
While I disagree with Kickstart70's comment (clearly the new format has advantages that PNG does not have), his comment is obviously on topic. Whatever moderator marked it offtopic should have a bite taken out of his/her karma.
Because almost all educated Swedes speak English and have decent Internet connectivity, while this is not the case for Japanese.
I just checked, and the error has already been corrected.
If you're a geek virgin, words referring to sex indicate spam. If you're in a torrid long-distance relationship, those same words indicate a message that you do not want to miss. But that's the beauty of Bayesian spam approaches: the probabilities are based on your own preferences.
And why do you think that a decision to piss one's suppliers off, as well as a number of attendees who paid for the conference under the assumption that it would be something else than it is, a good capitalist decision?
It's the Lindows people's conference, you say. Maybe, but that's not what they sold to the paying customers, who are in a position to ask for their money back, winding up losing the Lindows people a considerable amount of money. It's bad business.
The notion of removing all occurrences of the string "PCI" is self-defeating, as it hampers the ability of search engines to find the site. It would probably suffice to remove the logo, add "PCI is a registered trademark of so-and-so" and "this site has no relation to PCI-SIG". It is galling to have to ask an attorney about such matters. An alternative is to do what's suggested above and to move it out of the US, to a country that still allows corporations to be criticized.
Just remember, you look at the screen intently, type really fast for 20 seconds or so, then shout "I'm in!"
Or try the Russian variation: type really fast with one hand while clicking a ballpoint pen with the other, just so James Bond can give you an exploding pen later in the movie.
I hope that the governments in question insist on some evidence that the code that Microsoft shows them corresponds exactly to the executables Microsoft ships.
The article should be updated ASAP, to credit LWN for the story, and possibly to attack the anonymous coward for submitting it without credit to the source.
Google beat AltaVista even when it had a far smaller index. With AltaVista, you had to guess a combination of words that would only appear on a few sites, or you would just get a bunch of crappy sites with a lot of "meta" keywords on them. You couldn't use common words, as you'd get just a random collection of pages. People forget, now, the amazement at being able to type just "linux" as a search term and getting almost all the canonical Linux sites on the first page. AltaVista couldn't do that, at all. By comparison, using AltaVista was kind of like using SQL: up to the user to think about how to compose a query to get a decent result.
The difference is that Google is profitable.
-j is an option for GNU make, not gcc. And there is no rule that says you must specify the number of processors you physically have; for big compiles, you'll get a somewhat better time if you say -j2 on a single-processor machine. This is because, when two gcc's run in parallel, one can take the processor while the other is waiting for disk.
There is no native support inside of gcc for SMP-based compiling. gcc itself is completely sequential. You are perhaps thinking of parallel makes.
There's no reason why the NSA should object to 128-bit WEP being exported, since it's trivially crackable (far less secure than a decent 128-bit cipher).
Taxes don't consist of the government taking money awayand burying it in the ground. Governments spend everything they take in, and (when there is a deficit) more. Depending on how the money is spent, it can leverage significant economic growth and create entirely new industries. In some cases, higher taxes could save you money (countries with single-payer systems cover everyone for far less money than we spend covering only 80% of the people with private insurance). On the other hand, billions of dollars can be spent funding things that don't have a hope of working in the near future, like ballistic missile defense.
US monopolies on "intellectual property" vanish as soon as significant foreign players decide not to go along. The UK was far ahead of the US early in the 19th century. How did the US catch up? By ignoring British patents and copyrights, and smuggling manufacturing equipment out of Britain and cloning it. The Chinese don't even have to bother with that, as US corporations are setting up manufacturing operations in China.
In another few years, the Chinese can just say that they want to negotiate new terms: they'll happily continue to sell the Americans practically everything, as almost every manufactured good consumed by Americans is made there. But they want to pay vastly less to American copyright and patent holders. If there's no deal, they just pay nothing at all: the US could try to forbid Chinese exports, and watch its entire economy collapse, because too many basic necessities are available from nowhere else.
Similarly, Europe is running a big trade surplus against the US: Americans buy much more from Europe than they sell to Europe. This means that American companies need access to European markets far more than vice versa, putting the EU's regulatory authorities in a position of power. The US has evidently abandoned the antitrust concept, but you'll soon see the EU insisting that American companies break up, and winning.
Right, but you can assemble a bunch of those cheap disks into a RAID structure, and have complete reliability even in the presence of disk failures.