In my experience, Open Source people are mostly Free Software advocates who have modified their terminology in order to make their sales pitch more effective.
That would describe Bruce Perens' motivation, but it would not describe Eric Raymond's motivation.
If someone wants a networking protocol widely adopted, the GPL isn't a wise license; the LGPL might be better to encourange users to send changes back.
There isn't any issue raised by GPLv3 that isn't already an issue on GPLv2, despite the FUD. The final GPLv3 anti-DRM language is quite weak in practice, for example.
Actually, if you believe that the Bible is literally true, you have to also believe that God created false evidence (or could it be.... Satan????). Even if you want to reject physics and astronomy, there's still the tree rings. If you have a tree that was chopped down about 100 years ago, it's an easy matter to line up the pattern of thick and thin rings (for wet and dry years) with a more recently felled tree to figure out the exact year the tree was felled. By correlating tree rings in this way, it's possible to go back more than 10,000 years. Adding up the "begats" only takes you back 6,000 years or so.
And then there's ice cores from Antarctica; you can count summer and winter by the bands in the ice. The deepest cores go back 600,000 years.
Read the article:
But at a conference last week in Cyprus, German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls, according to Anthony M. Rutkowski, vice president for regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign, a company that offers security for Internet and phone operations.
That's not surprising: proprietary software by people whose main field is not cryptography usually sucks. Governments won't have any trouble decrypting your Skype calls. This is nothing new; the NSA managed to insert back doors into Crypto AG's encryption hardware, and that's how they listened in on Libya's traffic and found out about the Libyan connection to the Lockerbie plane bombing.
It appears that this incident was not spam, but a targeted attack against one company, for the purpose of getting information. Mac and Linux boxes are better protected against attacks that attempt to own the box by getting root privilege than Windows is. But in this case, it seems that the attacker wanted to search the exploited system for information and send it to China. This can be done as an ordinary user.
Ordinary users are perfectly capable of mailing the stored account and password information from their local copy of Firefox or IE to China; if there are any exploitable buffer overflows in OpenOffice, then OpenOffice users on all platforms are vulnerable.
Howard Dean's position is head of the DNC.
Nixon went down because of Watergate, which was a breakin at DNC headquarters to tap phones. Bush doesn't need breakins to do this, as the NSA has had 34 years to improve the bugging technology.
George Bush is Richard Nixon without the brains. We've seen this all before.
RMS's tools made Linux possible, not the other way around. Linux uses the GNU C compiler, GNU C library, and GNU make, together with the GNU assembler and linker. RMS had a hand in all of those, either as a developer or as a fund-raiser or both. Linux also, of course, uses RMS's license.
True, RMS failed to produce a kernel, and the main reason he failed in my view is that instead of copying a proven design, he tried (and failed) to design something unprecedented. Linus succeeded because, unlike the GNU project, he copied a proven design (a monolithic Unix kernel). But Linus is not the only available source of kernels.
If Linus had never come along, RMS would be running GNU tools on top of a BSD kernel and telling everyone why it should be called GNU/BSD. The free BSD kernels were under a legal cloud until 1994, which is what gave Linux time to take off. Of course, Linus' impressive skills as a developer and architect allowed Linux to come from behind and dominate. But we would have gotten to where we are without him, because so many in both GNU-land and BSD-land were committed to the vision of an entirely free operating system.
Designing something completely new usually doesn't work. Other than Emacs, the rest of the GNU tools are re-implementations of designs from elsewhere, and so is the Linux kernel. That's not bad, by the way, as in both cases the copies are superior to the originals.
While RMS tells the printer driver story in all his speeches, that's not really what kicked off his crusade.
When Symbolics, Inc. hired away almost all of his colleagues at the MIT AI Lab and had them make all their extensions to the MIT code proprietary, RMS went on an incredible hacking binge, single-handedly duplicating the work of an entire small company and making all his code free. At his peak, he demonstrated that he could out-code whole teams of world-class experts (as long as we're talking about Lisp coding).
The problem is, at the time he hadn't thought of copyleft yet; the Symbolics people could use his code; he could not use their code.
He needed copyleft to be able to compete with proprietary software developers and have a chance of winning. Same deal with Linux.
.. is that future video cards might well be 3D-only, and the old 2D interfaces that X relies on won't be available. You'll have cards designed pretty tightly around the OpenGL spec and related specs, and if you don't have a way to do X with such a beast, forget using the card with Linux.
Yes, scientific work in the US is done in meters.
A yard is close to a meter; I wouldn't be surprised if either the journalist is substituting "yard" for "meter", or the scientist he interviewed is (since the difference is less than the roundoff error and the American public doesn't know what a meter is).
Every time Orlowski pisses people off, someone posts a complaint to Slashdot, and all the Slashdot folks rush off to read Orlowski's latest outrage. The Register then sends a hefty bill to the advertisers for all the page views, and management eggs old Andrew on to outrage the world yet again.
Of course they keep him on; he represents income. If you don't like it, don't read him and don't post links to him on Slashdot. You're just falling for his act.
Companies are profit-maximizing entities. They will only bother to secure their data when it costs them too much if they don't.
Notifying everyone when there is a big breach costs money. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Companies that don't want to spend the money need to secure their data better.
It's a right-wing network that's doing this, remember. They'll probably make the #2 characters be liberals, while #6 will be a crusader for the right, a follower of neoconservatism and Ayn Rand.
Creationists (especially the "young earth" kind that compute the age of the earth by counting up the "begats" in the Bible) claim that carbon dating is inaccurate, because they need it to be inaccurate. They also think, wrongly, that if they can kill carbon dating, they can kill all evidence that the world is older than they say it is.
Also, carbon dating isn't used for anything as old as dinosaur remains, so sorry, tossing out carbon dating won't let you put a younger date on dinosaur fossils.
If a bank sends a report to a credit agency falsely saying that you, mackil, are a deadbeat who doesn't pay your bills, and then you have to spend months trying to clear your name before you can buy a house, what about their responsibility? Let's face it, no amount of care on your part will keep your credit information private, as you also need perfect care on the part of everyone else who has your financial information (a recent laptop theft at UC Berkeley gave a thief enough info to get a credit card in the name of any engineering grad student from the past ten years, and that's just one example).
Similarly, if a bank gives a credit card to someone in your name, at an address where you've never lived, without attempting to contact you (and yes, they can contact you: your credit report will contain every address you've lived at for many years), why is it your problem?
You seem to think that you're safe because you're careful about your personal information. You aren't.
If you have a little one who's still in diapers, he or she leaks nitrates all over the place (in urine); my daughter's car seat used to set off explosives detectors even though we'd cleaned it.
Even at the start, the US legal system not only contained the laws passed by Congress, but all of British common law; pretty much every legal precedent back to the 1300s. All of that history could be and was considered by judges when deciding cases.
The studios are making most of their money from rentals, DVD sales, and fees from cable TV. All money that you're paying with your home theater system. You aren't hurting them any.
I drive a 2003 Prius. The EPA rating is 47 freeway and 52 city. I get an average of 45 for a mixture of the two. So I get about 10% less than the EPA rating, but your claim of 42% less is nonsense. Newer Priuses are a bit better than mine.
And I've got news for you: with most other cars, you also get less than the EPA rating. That's because the auto company gets to choose the driver who will get the rating, and that driver is trained to squeeze the maximum mileage out of the car. You can't apply the penalty only to the hybrid when you do the comparison; you have to consider that the conventional car also does worse.
The nicest thing about the Prius is that the engine turns off at red lights and the car is absolutely silent. Imagine how much quieter and less polluted cities would be if most people drove a car that did this.
Unfortunately, some of the new American hybrids never turn the gasoline engine off, and only use the electric motor as an acceleration boost, charging a big premium for only a 3-4 mpg improvement. If you want a hybrid, you want a true hybrid (one that can run on the electric motor alone).
Servers aren't for home purchasers (except maybe for us geeks). Power is critical to any institution that wants to put a lot of servers in the same room; power consumption is the critical limitation for how much CPU power you can get in one room. The limit is not how much current you can get into the room, but whether you can have enough AC to keep everything from frying. A server farm with several hundred dual-core processors puts out a lot of heat.
The competition has given Sun an opening, by sticking with Intel even in an area where AMD has better technology (though Intel will probably catch up in a year or two). Ordinarily I'd laugh at Sun for saying "we're number 6". But if they can partner with AMD well, and AMD can deliver in volume, Sun may survive, they might even do well.
But the people I know are only going to be interested in buying those boxes if they run Linux. To be specific, Red Hat Enterprise, since that's pretty much the standard for electronic design automation these days at least in the US.
That's why Sun is suddenly making nice to Red Hat.
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In my experience, Open Source people are mostly Free Software advocates who have modified their terminology in order to make their sales pitch more effective. That would describe Bruce Perens' motivation, but it would not describe Eric Raymond's motivation.
There isn't any issue raised by GPLv3 that isn't already an issue on GPLv2, despite the FUD. The final GPLv3 anti-DRM language is quite weak in practice, for example.
Also, of course the desktop BSDs now coming out put a mostly-GPL GUI environment (KDE or Gnome) on top of BSD.
And then there's ice cores from Antarctica; you can count summer and winter by the bands in the ice. The deepest cores go back 600,000 years.
This is exactly what they are implementing (converting HTML mail to plain text).
See this paper for a detailed treatment of how the family tree of the primates can be reconstructed by the retrovirus sequences in our genes.
Pretty much the only available response from the ID crowd is that God created false evidence to test our faith.
Read the article: But at a conference last week in Cyprus, German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls, according to Anthony M. Rutkowski, vice president for regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign, a company that offers security for Internet and phone operations. That's not surprising: proprietary software by people whose main field is not cryptography usually sucks. Governments won't have any trouble decrypting your Skype calls. This is nothing new; the NSA managed to insert back doors into Crypto AG's encryption hardware, and that's how they listened in on Libya's traffic and found out about the Libyan connection to the Lockerbie plane bombing.
It appears that this incident was not spam, but a targeted attack against one company, for the purpose of getting information. Mac and Linux boxes are better protected against attacks that attempt to own the box by getting root privilege than Windows is. But in this case, it seems that the attacker wanted to search the exploited system for information and send it to China. This can be done as an ordinary user. Ordinary users are perfectly capable of mailing the stored account and password information from their local copy of Firefox or IE to China; if there are any exploitable buffer overflows in OpenOffice, then OpenOffice users on all platforms are vulnerable.
Judges can issue warrants to tap phones if the prosecutor presents probable cause that a crime has been committed. This was not done.
Howard Dean's position is head of the DNC. Nixon went down because of Watergate, which was a breakin at DNC headquarters to tap phones. Bush doesn't need breakins to do this, as the NSA has had 34 years to improve the bugging technology. George Bush is Richard Nixon without the brains. We've seen this all before.
True, RMS failed to produce a kernel, and the main reason he failed in my view is that instead of copying a proven design, he tried (and failed) to design something unprecedented. Linus succeeded because, unlike the GNU project, he copied a proven design (a monolithic Unix kernel). But Linus is not the only available source of kernels.
If Linus had never come along, RMS would be running GNU tools on top of a BSD kernel and telling everyone why it should be called GNU/BSD. The free BSD kernels were under a legal cloud until 1994, which is what gave Linux time to take off. Of course, Linus' impressive skills as a developer and architect allowed Linux to come from behind and dominate. But we would have gotten to where we are without him, because so many in both GNU-land and BSD-land were committed to the vision of an entirely free operating system.
Designing something completely new usually doesn't work. Other than Emacs, the rest of the GNU tools are re-implementations of designs from elsewhere, and so is the Linux kernel. That's not bad, by the way, as in both cases the copies are superior to the originals.
When Symbolics, Inc. hired away almost all of his colleagues at the MIT AI Lab and had them make all their extensions to the MIT code proprietary, RMS went on an incredible hacking binge, single-handedly duplicating the work of an entire small company and making all his code free. At his peak, he demonstrated that he could out-code whole teams of world-class experts (as long as we're talking about Lisp coding). The problem is, at the time he hadn't thought of copyleft yet; the Symbolics people could use his code; he could not use their code.
He needed copyleft to be able to compete with proprietary software developers and have a chance of winning. Same deal with Linux.
The number of birds dying because of wind power turbines is miniscule compared to the estimated 1 billion that die crashing into glass windows.
.. is that future video cards might well be 3D-only, and the old 2D interfaces that X relies on won't be available. You'll have cards designed pretty tightly around the OpenGL spec and related specs, and if you don't have a way to do X with such a beast, forget using the card with Linux.
Yes, scientific work in the US is done in meters. A yard is close to a meter; I wouldn't be surprised if either the journalist is substituting "yard" for "meter", or the scientist he interviewed is (since the difference is less than the roundoff error and the American public doesn't know what a meter is).
Of course they keep him on; he represents income. If you don't like it, don't read him and don't post links to him on Slashdot. You're just falling for his act.
Notifying everyone when there is a big breach costs money. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Companies that don't want to spend the money need to secure their data better.
It's a right-wing network that's doing this, remember. They'll probably make the #2 characters be liberals, while #6 will be a crusader for the right, a follower of neoconservatism and Ayn Rand.
Also, carbon dating isn't used for anything as old as dinosaur remains, so sorry, tossing out carbon dating won't let you put a younger date on dinosaur fossils.
Similarly, if a bank gives a credit card to someone in your name, at an address where you've never lived, without attempting to contact you (and yes, they can contact you: your credit report will contain every address you've lived at for many years), why is it your problem?
You seem to think that you're safe because you're careful about your personal information. You aren't.
If you have a little one who's still in diapers, he or she leaks nitrates all over the place (in urine); my daughter's car seat used to set off explosives detectors even though we'd cleaned it.
Even at the start, the US legal system not only contained the laws passed by Congress, but all of British common law; pretty much every legal precedent back to the 1300s. All of that history could be and was considered by judges when deciding cases.
The studios are making most of their money from rentals, DVD sales, and fees from cable TV. All money that you're paying with your home theater system. You aren't hurting them any.
And I've got news for you: with most other cars, you also get less than the EPA rating. That's because the auto company gets to choose the driver who will get the rating, and that driver is trained to squeeze the maximum mileage out of the car. You can't apply the penalty only to the hybrid when you do the comparison; you have to consider that the conventional car also does worse.
The nicest thing about the Prius is that the engine turns off at red lights and the car is absolutely silent. Imagine how much quieter and less polluted cities would be if most people drove a car that did this.
Unfortunately, some of the new American hybrids never turn the gasoline engine off, and only use the electric motor as an acceleration boost, charging a big premium for only a 3-4 mpg improvement. If you want a hybrid, you want a true hybrid (one that can run on the electric motor alone).
The competition has given Sun an opening, by sticking with Intel even in an area where AMD has better technology (though Intel will probably catch up in a year or two). Ordinarily I'd laugh at Sun for saying "we're number 6". But if they can partner with AMD well, and AMD can deliver in volume, Sun may survive, they might even do well.
But the people I know are only going to be interested in buying those boxes if they run Linux. To be specific, Red Hat Enterprise, since that's pretty much the standard for electronic design automation these days at least in the US. That's why Sun is suddenly making nice to Red Hat.