Now you've insulted me, implying that my opinion is worth even less than that of a Slashdot editor. What a low blow.:-)
But I checked out your other comments, to decide whether you are worth taking seriously. You aren't, as anyone can determine for themselves by reading what you've posted.
It is free to use, but the author is requiring that any redistributor get his personal permission.
Of course, after large numbers of people write asking for permission, maybe he'll decide that it is a PITA and choose different terms.
It was entirely appropriate ...
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... to warn people who follow the link not to make plans that rely on the May 30th date. Your suggestion that expecting a further slip differs from common sense is off target. It is no insult to Debian to expect that the RC bug count won't get to zero without a hitch.
Re:4.0.0 broke backward compatibility big time
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
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· Score: 4, Informative
In the case of the KDE problem, there were two bugs, one of which was in KDE, but the other of which was in 4.0.0. So it sometimes is appropriate to blame the compiler. That bug is fixed in CVS and will be fixed in 4.0.1.
It should not surprise anyone that the first 0.0 release has some bugs. It's the first release of a compiler with a completely new optimization structure (tree-ssa). I would advise waiting for 4.0.1 for a production-quality release, or go with vendor patches (by making Fedora Core 4 with a 4.0.0 based compiler, Red Hat will probably shake out a few more bugs).
Because their funding was from DARPA, no doubt. Underdeveloped countries did not provide any grant money to the university. It's all about the money, even in universities; professors who don't want to pay find themselves with no research funds.
You think that there is something morally wrong with an "unauthorized" biography? What kind of a tool are you, anyway? This is a democracy; a free press is not some annoying thing we have to put up with, it's something we fought for. "Unauthorized" biographies are the only kind worth reading.
Apple is not refusing to sell just this book; it is refusing to sell any of the large number of Mac books put out by this publisher. The decision will cost the shareholders money, as the Apple stores profited on each book sold, and they sold quite a few.
Now, it's not horrible and evil, so I'll agree with you there. It's merely massively stupid, and the press that this move has gotten will improve the book sales.
Any European lawyers in the audience can correct me, but here's my understanding of the issue:
In the US, you can buy the copyright to an artwork, and then vandalize it in any way you like and sell the vandalized copies (the classic example is painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa). In most of Europe, this would infringe the creator's moral rights, and moral rights cannot be sold. The exploitation rights cover the rights to make money from the work in a way that does not damage the integrity of the work.
The company Tridge and Linus both work for is called Open Source Development Lab. Producing open source software is the mission of the company, and in the case of Tridge, his mission is very specifically the cloning of others' proprietary code (Samba).
Even if you're fine with proprietary software, expecting open source programmers to stop doing what they do is not reasonable. If BitKeeper had something worth cloning, it would be cloned.
In the meantime, Larry managed to bootstrap himself a company using the free advertising Linus gave him.
Somebody pokes around with the BitKeeper port, types "help", finds out there's a "clone" command, types "clone", and gets all the data out, including data that Larry didn't want made available. Larry responds by demanding that OSDL fire the guy or else Linus can't use his software anymore. It doesn't matter that no one violated any license.
Yes, person 1 (Linus) liked a tool. But person 2 (Tridge)'s actions (basically stumbling on a way of getting the data out of BitKeeper) should not have led person 1 to lose rights to the tool. It was person 3 (Larry)'s decision to demand that either OSDL fire Tridge or, Linus quit OSDL, or Linus lose the right to use BitKeeper. This ultimatum was completely unnecessary; he thought he could bully OSDL. It didn't work.
But the breakup is at a good time. Larry's managed to bootstrap BitMover into a viable company, and the world knows what BitKeeper is without a massive advertising/PR budget. He'll do OK. The Linux kernel will soon lose its dependency on a proprietary tool, and there's been a renaissance in version control systems as many groups have come up with new and promising systems. These systems aren't clones of BitKeeper; there are a variety of approaches.
Google hasn't just patented their page rank algorithm. They've patented the idea of giving weight to the links that point to a page. (The competitors seem to be infringing that claim, probably because they are confident that the claim would be tossed by a court, but who knows?).
We could probably live with patents that protect precisely what the inventor invented, but no patent lawyer would settle for that. Instead, the claims generalize to the point of trying to block any conceivable competition, even with wholly new algorithms.
... with the Minority Report user interface, all computer geeks will be as buff as Tom Cruise, and
coffee in break rooms of software companies will be replaced by Gatorade.
I wouldn't be surprised if the submitter intended to make Slashdot look bad; many regular readers are quite pissed off at the sloppiness of the Slashdot editors, so I'm not surprised that someone chose to demonstrate how little care goes into article selection at Slashdot (the editor that posted the item clearly couldn't be bothered to follow the link and read the first screen).
OpenOffice cloned Microsoft formats by reverse engineering. While the original protocol Samba implements had documentation, Samba had to reverse engineer all Microsoft's extensions to that protocol. Novell/Ximian reverse engineered Microsoft's Exchange to allow Evolution to hook in. And many device drivers in Linux required reverse engineering to develop.
Proprietary software developers also engage in reverse engineering. It's completely legal if done in a way that complies with the license (Tridge, the guy behind Samba and the free BitKeeper data extracter, uses captured traces of network traffic as his preferred method).
If you think it's unethical, then you are basically saying that you believe in monopolies, and you might as well just buy all your software from Microsoft.
Linus did indeed defend a proprietary file format, so the headline is correct. The quote is made up, but this is to show the inconsistency of Linus' position.
The proprietary file format in question is that of BitKeeper; Tridge reverse-engineered it so that people can have access to their own data when BitMover pulls the plug on the free-as-in-beer BitKeeper (which hadn't happened yet at the time he did it, but which was inevitable as Larry kept changing the license and threatening people with losing their rights to use the software). Linus sided with Larry, despite the fact that Linux, GNU, Samba, and everything else we run has had to rely on reverse engineering of proprietary formats, devices, and protocols since forever just to function.
If this judge's decision stands, it applies to all journalists. What he's saying is that if a company claims (not proves, just claims) that a trade secret has been revealed, courts will then compel journalists to reveal the corporate snitches. A drug company sits on a study that says their drug kills people, and some internal scientist leaks it to the press? Under this decision, the journalist who publishes it either must rat out the scientist or go to jail. Nothing in the judgment said anything about separate rules for bloggers; the decision would apply to any reporter.
Nice round numbers do not form a "barrier". The speed of sound was a barrier because aerodynamics is fundamentally different for an aircraft travelling faster than the speed of sound. Likewise, new mask-making techniques (phase correction, optical proximity correction) had to be invented to fabricate chips with feature sizes smaller than a wavelength of the light used to manufacture them, so a wavelength was a barrier.
But there's no "barrier" at 600 GHz or any other nice round number. It's just a number, and I wish tech writers and marketeers would quit using the "barrier" word in cases like this.
However, Linus feels free to change the API for modules with every point release, and other than NVidia, the folks putting out binary drivers don't keep up, and they don't put out updates for old devices. So if you buy a device that needs a closed source Linux driver, and it's not NVidia, it will be useless to you in a couple of years since it will only work in an old and unmaintained Linux kernel.
We usually run Linux at our house, but our daughter was given a couple of Windows games. Like a lot of software that dates back to Windows 98 days, they only run under XP if the account has administrator privilege. So, since the only reason the Windows system is there is to let her play the game, and I don't care if she screws it up, she's an admin. It's the same at a lot of other people's houses; everyone is an admin because otherwise their older software doesn't run, and they have no other reason to buy newer programs.
People seem to be assuming that Gore wants to make a liberal counterpart to Fox News, but it appears that he's trying to do something quite different, making something that is far more interactive than traditional television. I have no idea if it will work (and I suspect that it won't), but critics might want to actually pay attention to what he's trying to do before criticizing something that has nothing to do with what he is trying.
I don't like the way that Canada does press bans on court proceedings, but the thing to keep in mind is that the bans are temporary, and it all comes out after the trial is over.
Disabling Javascript will keep the tracking from working, but if you don't, the transmission is completely invisible to you. It will look like normal HTTP traffic to your firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
But I checked out your other comments, to decide whether you are worth taking seriously. You aren't, as anyone can determine for themselves by reading what you've posted.
Of course, after large numbers of people write asking for permission, maybe he'll decide that it is a PITA and choose different terms.
... to warn people who follow the link not to make plans that rely on the May 30th date. Your suggestion that expecting a further slip differs from common sense is off target. It is no insult to Debian to expect that the RC bug count won't get to zero without a hitch.
It should not surprise anyone that the first 0.0 release has some bugs. It's the first release of a compiler with a completely new optimization structure (tree-ssa). I would advise waiting for 4.0.1 for a production-quality release, or go with vendor patches (by making Fedora Core 4 with a 4.0.0 based compiler, Red Hat will probably shake out a few more bugs).
Because their funding was from DARPA, no doubt. Underdeveloped countries did not provide any grant money to the university. It's all about the money, even in universities; professors who don't want to pay find themselves with no research funds.
Apple is not refusing to sell just this book; it is refusing to sell any of the large number of Mac books put out by this publisher. The decision will cost the shareholders money, as the Apple stores profited on each book sold, and they sold quite a few.
Now, it's not horrible and evil, so I'll agree with you there. It's merely massively stupid, and the press that this move has gotten will improve the book sales.
In the US, you can buy the copyright to an artwork, and then vandalize it in any way you like and sell the vandalized copies (the classic example is painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa). In most of Europe, this would infringe the creator's moral rights, and moral rights cannot be sold. The exploitation rights cover the rights to make money from the work in a way that does not damage the integrity of the work.
Even if you're fine with proprietary software, expecting open source programmers to stop doing what they do is not reasonable. If BitKeeper had something worth cloning, it would be cloned. In the meantime, Larry managed to bootstrap himself a company using the free advertising Linus gave him.
And yet, you think RMS is the bad guy. Wow.
But the breakup is at a good time. Larry's managed to bootstrap BitMover into a viable company, and the world knows what BitKeeper is without a massive advertising/PR budget. He'll do OK. The Linux kernel will soon lose its dependency on a proprietary tool, and there's been a renaissance in version control systems as many groups have come up with new and promising systems. These systems aren't clones of BitKeeper; there are a variety of approaches.
Google hasn't just patented their page rank algorithm. They've patented the idea of giving weight to the links that point to a page. (The competitors seem to be infringing that claim, probably because they are confident that the claim would be tossed by a court, but who knows?).
We could probably live with patents that protect precisely what the inventor invented, but no patent lawyer would settle for that. Instead, the claims generalize to the point of trying to block any conceivable competition, even with wholly new algorithms.
Linux drivers can be, and normally are, modules. Just don't ship the modules you don't want to support, there is no need to re-certify anything.
... and then try to explain when countries like Brazil start passing us.
... with the Minority Report user interface, all computer geeks will be as buff as Tom Cruise, and coffee in break rooms of software companies will be replaced by Gatorade.
I wouldn't be surprised if the submitter intended to make Slashdot look bad; many regular readers are quite pissed off at the sloppiness of the Slashdot editors, so I'm not surprised that someone chose to demonstrate how little care goes into article selection at Slashdot (the editor that posted the item clearly couldn't be bothered to follow the link and read the first screen).
Proprietary software developers also engage in reverse engineering. It's completely legal if done in a way that complies with the license (Tridge, the guy behind Samba and the free BitKeeper data extracter, uses captured traces of network traffic as his preferred method). If you think it's unethical, then you are basically saying that you believe in monopolies, and you might as well just buy all your software from Microsoft.
The proprietary file format in question is that of BitKeeper; Tridge reverse-engineered it so that people can have access to their own data when BitMover pulls the plug on the free-as-in-beer BitKeeper (which hadn't happened yet at the time he did it, but which was inevitable as Larry kept changing the license and threatening people with losing their rights to use the software). Linus sided with Larry, despite the fact that Linux, GNU, Samba, and everything else we run has had to rely on reverse engineering of proprietary formats, devices, and protocols since forever just to function.
If this judge's decision stands, it applies to all journalists. What he's saying is that if a company claims (not proves, just claims) that a trade secret has been revealed, courts will then compel journalists to reveal the corporate snitches. A drug company sits on a study that says their drug kills people, and some internal scientist leaks it to the press? Under this decision, the journalist who publishes it either must rat out the scientist or go to jail. Nothing in the judgment said anything about separate rules for bloggers; the decision would apply to any reporter.
But there's no "barrier" at 600 GHz or any other nice round number. It's just a number, and I wish tech writers and marketeers would quit using the "barrier" word in cases like this.
The FSF board consists of respected people like Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig. They aren't going to allow the betrayal of the FSF.
However, Linus feels free to change the API for modules with every point release, and other than NVidia, the folks putting out binary drivers don't keep up, and they don't put out updates for old devices. So if you buy a device that needs a closed source Linux driver, and it's not NVidia, it will be useless to you in a couple of years since it will only work in an old and unmaintained Linux kernel.
We usually run Linux at our house, but our daughter was given a couple of Windows games. Like a lot of software that dates back to Windows 98 days, they only run under XP if the account has administrator privilege. So, since the only reason the Windows system is there is to let her play the game, and I don't care if she screws it up, she's an admin. It's the same at a lot of other people's houses; everyone is an admin because otherwise their older software doesn't run, and they have no other reason to buy newer programs.
People seem to be assuming that Gore wants to make a liberal counterpart to Fox News, but it appears that he's trying to do something quite different, making something that is far more interactive than traditional television. I have no idea if it will work (and I suspect that it won't), but critics might want to actually pay attention to what he's trying to do before criticizing something that has nothing to do with what he is trying.
I don't like the way that Canada does press bans on court proceedings, but the thing to keep in mind is that the bans are temporary, and it all comes out after the trial is over.
Disabling Javascript will keep the tracking from working, but if you don't, the transmission is completely invisible to you. It will look like normal HTTP traffic to your firewall.