Open Source and Commercial are not intrinsically mutually exclusive. The opposite of Open Source (OS) is Proprietary, while the opposite of Commercial is Zero-Cost (0$, one of the meanings of "Free", but "Zero-Cost" resolves the ambiguity).
Having said that, it is indeed difficult to make software both Open Source and Commercial, since the software recipients can then freely redistribute it. There are only two true ways I can think of:
The market is so small or specialized that it would not be practical to redistribute. For example, OS software for some specialized research might have such a scattered market that it would not be practical for a potential customer to say, "Gee, let me just find a web site and download it from someone else!"
The implementation is customized for the client in such a way that it would not be practical to grab a redistributed version. This is a special case of the above, since by customizing you are fragmenting the market into small segments, each of which will not redistribute to another.
Otherwise, you're looking at selling something else to go with the software. You could sell the hardware, as Linksys does with their Linux-based routers, or sell support services, as Red Hat does. You could offer to customize the software for a fee, which would be a specialized case of selling support.
You could also sell proprietary data that goes with your OS software. For example, you might have some GPS mapping software which is OS, but you would sell the maps themselves. I also imagine that Google might be able to sell their web-searching software as open source, but you wouldn't have the same networking hardware and the accumulated data that they have.
Still other solutions include judicious use of proprietary versus open source software. ESRaymond's web site suggests that you can sell proprietary software while keeping the source in escrow to be opened in case the company fails. The author of QCAD sells the latest version as proprietary, which become open-sourced when a newer version supercedes it. Also, you can have multi-licensing deals: you have code that is licensed under the GPL, but re-license it under a proprietary license for money because someone else wants to reuse it in a proprietary work.
Oh, yeah, there's one more. You just plain sell your OS software. Some people might buy it even though it's available for free elsewhere. I remember when I bought the latest Borland C++ compiler at the local computer store for what I thought was a cheap price (this was in late 2000 when the sun was already setting on Borland). Later, I found out that it was available as a free download. But at US$30, hey, I was happy with the value for the money. Yes, I could have gotten it cheaper, but I was willing to pay $30 for it. (Not that Borland C++ is an example of Open Source software.) Also, you make money due to brand name (which is what Red Hat is famous for protecting): people might buy from you just to get the reassurance that it's The Real Thing.
So, there are ways to do it, just not the straightforward way that the MAFIAA is drooling about, which is that people pay you big bucks just to make copies of your 1's and 0's.
He claimed that Linux was no longer threatened by SCO, not that Linux was ever doing the threatening... "Er, so SCO failed because Linux was too successful?" How did you get that from what he said?
How did I get that from what he said? Because that's exactly what he said: "That operating system has become far too successful to be dislodged."
Let me make sure you are not misinterpreting what I mean by "failed". I mean that he said SCO failed [to be successful in its lawsuit] because Linux was too big to be sued; I agree that he never said that SCO "failed" [financially as a company and ended up being bankrupt] because Linux took the initiative to bring SCO down.
If SCO had instead sued some wimpy Free Software project people had never heard of, such as ReactOS (aiming to be a Free equivalent of WinNT/Win2k) which does not have any big companies or money behind it, then ReactOS would probably have caved from legal pressure, even though SCO would still be wrong. And in his column Lyons would have mentioned about some evil riffraff hackers advancing the ridiculous suggestion that they were capable of creating an operating system by themselves, while in reality pirating source code from an honest, hardworking company like SCO.
Not often you find a journalist reporting on their failure of foresight. Daniel gained a few points in my book.
I'm not impressed. Anyone can say, "Oh. Er, oops." It's easy to couch it in terms that *sound* like you're really humble, like "I was really REALLY wrong." Big deal.
He makes it sound like it just so happened that the geeks were right and he was wrong. "Turns out those amateur sleuths were right." He refers to arguably one of the largest communities of people who do this for a living plus interested and competent hobbyists as though he were saying, "Oh, look! Those little kids turned out to be right after all."
He does not see *why* we saw that SCO had no leg to stand on. He does not realize how, next time, he can do better than the flip of a coin. He says, "... the pack of amateur sleuths who were following the case on a Web site called Groklaw and who claimed to know for sure that SCO was going to lose," and doesn't realize the painstaking review and due diligence that went on there that would put wikipedia to shame.
He says:
SCO is road kill. Its lawsuit long ago ceased to represent any threat to Linux. That operating system has become far too successful to be dislodged.
Er, so SCO failed because Linux was too successful?
No, Mr. Lyons. SCO failed because SCO was wrong, and if they had won, they still would have been wrong except there would have been a miscarriage of justice. It's not because someone threw the dice wrong or that the "pack" known as Slashdot or Groklaw happened to have a good day. It's not because you've been getting too much email pointing out that you were misinformed, Mr. Lyons, or ignorant.
You don't fool me. Your basic thinking shows through in your words, even though those words sound nice on the surface. Kinda like the press releases of this other company I know that turned out to be wrong.
----- (By the way, I expect Laura Didio and Enderle to write something like, "Well, darnit, looks like Novell owns the rights to Unix, not SCO. So we'll just wait for Novell to sue Linux for blatant copying of Unix source into Linux.")
I recall a comment given by one of our university lecturers. He was quite well-known in his field, and a Nobel Prize winner to boot, so he was asked to review various government-funded scientific research projects to see if they were on time and within budget.
"I said I would agree," he explained to us, "with one condition: if it's on time and it's within budget, then we have to shut down the project --because, whatever that project is doing, it couldn't possibly be research."
The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."
Furthermore, McBride also noted, "These alternate distributors neglect to sue their customers, a service which we provide for our own customers, and thus they are able to undercut our price of $699 per customer. Despite making a concerted effort to protect our intellectual property through the legal system, IBM has failed to buy us out, so the expected funds did not materialize which had been earmarked for expansion plans for my summer cottage --I mean, er, corporate conference facilities.
"We expect our recovery to be delayed somewhat while we initiate the appeals procedure. At that point, we anticipate a healthy rebound, as our business partner tells one of those investment firms to give us more money.
"Even though shares of our stock cost less than an order of French fries at McDonald's, we want to allay any concerns about being delisted for having a low price. Our accountants have said... er, I mean... our accountant has said that we can simply do a stock merge, to have fewer shares, each of which cost more. As the price drops further and we merge more shares, we anticipate that it will be at least one week before all the shares are merged into a single share that costs $1.30. By that time, we should have identified another customer whom we can sue. It should not take too long to identify since we don't have a very long list to look through."
I wanted to use GPG for signing everything, including Slashdot posts (my GPG key is in my journal), but I can't because the formatting will screw with the signature. In other words, my GPG signature would be for a certain line length, and if my text is reformatted with different spacing and line breaks, then the signature would be invalid.
What I'd love is a standard that strips all but alphanumeric characters (including no line breaks or whitespace) and then does a GPG signature on that. The signature would be preserved despite variations in formatting. It would be fairly simple to do, something along the lines of: sed -e 's/[^A-Za-z0-9]//g' < plaintext.txt | gpg --clearsign to sign, and sed -e 's/[^A-Za-z0-9]//g' < plaintext.txt | gpg --verify to verify. (Not exactly, since this still preserves line breaks, but you get the idea.)
The problem is, everyone has to know to do that, so that it becomes a standard. I think this would make GPG more versatile and usable under more circumstances. Granted, it would not be perfectly unambiguous, as the following two lines have the same alphanum-only GPG signature:
"Bob," said Sue, "me and you are going to the greenhouse." Bob said: "Sue me, and you are going to the 'green' house!"
Anyway, at the risk of being off-topic, I thought I'd offer my thoughts on one reason why encryption is not as ubiquitous as we hoped.
Can someone explain how I, the cell phone user, would choose a cell phone service provider myself? Suppose I get some sort of open phone that runs either OpenMoko or QtPhones-a-lot or something. Is there a C library that includes the function dial_this(int phonenum)? Do I stick a SIM card in and just do what I want, treating the open phone like a computer and the SIM card like a modem?
For reference: I bought an unlocked Treo 650 (none of the more advanced models were not available unlocked). Treos are offered by Nextel/Sprint and Verizon, but I use T-mobile, which doesn't offer Treos. So I simply phoned T-mobile and said, "I have a Treo. Do you want me to still be your customer, or do you want me to switch to a different network?" Of course they were willing to provide service, and since it was just a matter of taking my SIM card from my old phone to the Treo, everything was straightforward. I've been happily using their voice and data service since.
I hope that the new open phone would work the same way. I probably would not be able to handle a for-developers alpha-version of the phone, but if I got my hands on a beta-version with a fledgling interface to dial out, compile programs and download files, I'd probably be willing to buy it, and then just upgrade the software as more came out.
After being interrogated for hours, someone from the city of Düsseldorf's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security showed up and admitted to Janssen that they'd made a mistake. He was released shortly after.
This is an important point that needs to be brought to the attention of Slashdotters. Currently, the parent post is modded up to a maximum already, but in my sort-by-modpoints view of the Slashdot comments, this thread is still far down the list, preceded by other threads with more numerous upmodded replies. The comments on this thread should be modded up further so the thread floats to the top, at least for those users who sort by modpoints.
I volunteer to have this inane reply of mine modded up. Go ahead, don't worry about my karma overload --for the sake of the Slashdot community, I'm willing to deal with excessive karma.
Wasn't there some German article that appeared on Slashdot some years ago, about how some German judge crushed the puny SCO ant under his thumb after SCO tried to... I forget what they tried, but the German judge laughed them out of court. The German article was linked in Slashdot, and quite a few slashdotters were rather appreciative of the first three words of the article. (It began, "SCO, the company that... [whatever]", but I guess in German, even proper nouns are preceded by the article, so it literally said, "The SCO, the company that...")
If Paypal is the only option to pay, then I'm one of them people you'll never get any money from, even if we are willing to pay.
I've donated to completely free (as in speech) programs before. One particular one had a Paypal button. I finally figured, hey, what the heck, let's try Paypal. Their web site said we could make credit card payments without setting up an actual Paypal account. I tried that. Didn't work (the web page looked broken --maybe they needed to run Javascript applets from five different domains or something). I finally contacted the author and said, "Hey, look, I want to give you money. Give me an address to mail the cheque to."
So Paypal without account didn't work, and there's no way I'm going to actually set up a Paypal account. Give them some PO Box to mail a cheque to.
I was about to say that it takes even more space on Plucker,but then I realized that we were talking about different things.
I get Plucker to spider the most recent 30 articles (all the direct links from http://slashdot.org/search.pl? ). Without graphics, the first-order spidering, when harvested and compressed, becomes a 1MB file for my Palm Treo.
But you're talking about just the front page of Slashdot. Looks like that CSS is pretty hefty. If you happen to want to compress it, looks like Plucker might be an option.
"Veronica Mars" is a TV show about high school kids, of whom the titular character is a sleuth. One of the scenes from the first season (2005?) showed the nerdy hs geek and the rather cool-looking geekess arguing the merits of Ubuntu vs OS X.
That TV show is not G4TechTV, nor even a nerd show by any stretch of the imagination.
I wouldn't worry about the reputation of Ubuntu and whether people have heard of it.
People used to think that "Gaylord" was a dorky name for an athlete, too, until the athlete took home the Olympic gold in gymnastics.
When SARS struck Hong Kong, the effect in Toronto (Ontario) was considerable, as there is a significant population that travels between Hong Kong and Toronto. All the streets were dead, and you wouldn't see anyone walking the usually crowded downtown streets. (Well, there were a few, but a tiny fraction of the number.) Retail business drooped, and in fact some Chinese places (especially restaurants) went belly-up due to lack of income.
The majority of these people who stayed home weren't having symptoms. They just didn't want to start getting symptoms.
In my experience power management works far better under Kubuntu than it does under Ubuntu.
I'll second that. I actually haven't used (GNOME) Ubuntu much, even though it came pre-installed on my Dell laptop, but on the Kubuntu which I installed the day I got my laptop, power management is great. After I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-H, it takes about 20-30 seconds to go into Hibernation (zero power consumption) --but I don't care, since I just close the laptop and stick it in my bag while it's still running. If I just close the lid, it takes about 5 seconds to go into Suspended mode (minimal but non-zero power consumption), and about as long to come out of it once I reopen the lid. If hibernating, it takes about 45 seconds to get back from power-on to the previous usable state.
Given my past bad experiences trying to use ACPI with prior Linux distros, I am delighted at the power management capabilities. For once, instead of tweaking Linux, I can actually turn on the computer and *use* it. I find that I don't need to spend that much time on my computer *doing* things --and I actually have more time to do other things, like take walks outdoors, do chores, or sit back and relax with a book (on my Treo, of course). It's very liberating.
I don't know if it's GNUbuntu or just the way it's set up on your computer. You might want to think about installing Kubuntu power mgmt apps, or even installing Kubuntu and then using your GNOME apps.
If you go to torrents.to, it will search various sites for you. Even if you just visit, you can read their list of sites that they search. So, if you only know of a few sites, and your sites get shut down, now you'll know what other sites to go to.
This is, of course, for the express purpose of identifying torrents that are legal/ethical to download.
Why only closed source applications? I don't think most people read the entire sources of open source applications that they use.
Not everyone has to, just one person.
When I use Open Source apps, I do so knowing that there are many developers and hobbyists that have looked over the code
Good point, but it's not as simple as you seem to think. For large and far-reaching projects like Linux (the kernel) or Samba, yes, there are many hobbyists who have looked over the code. Not so for small projects, little novelty programs or handy-to-use utilities; there, any hobbyists would probably not go over the code with a fine-toothed comb, and just read over the gist of the code more to understand it than to make sure it's not doing something nasty. You'd be relying on the developers, but if they had malicious intent, it's not like they're going to announce that their open source program has a trojan embedded.
You know what I would do, if I wanted to do something nasty? Suppose for a moment I was strongly motivated to exploit other people's computers using open-source software --say I was paid to bring a DDOS attack against some arbitrary website as part of a protection racket, or something. I'd write an open-source program; given enough time and motivation, I might even fork off some useful but immature OSS program. I'd embed some nasty stuff in there, add features to make lots of people want it. (Example: I take the on-screen clock in KDE (or GNOME) and make it announce the time out loud --kinda "cool" but doesn't take that much development effort.) I would upload it to some reputable site, like SourceForge. I might even fabricate a "development team", complete with different email addresses for various team members.
Do you really think other people are going to read over my source code? Only those people who are interested in extending and contributing to my sources would do so. That would take at least a few months, and before that, I'd probably have recruited a sizeable botnet.
Even if someone did look over the source code, the malicious part of it might not be that easy to spot. Check out the Underhanded C contest where people write innocent-looking programs that do subtle but nasty things. I remember the inaugural contest, which was to make a simple, straightforward vote-counting program that would give George Bush more votes, but ONLY on November second, and not any other date. I thought, "How could someone possibly sneak something underhanded in there, and not have the malicious code stick out like a sore thumb? Haven't people heard of syntax highlighting?" And then, lo and behold, there were programs that did exactly as requested, looking for all the world like an innocent program, with no obvious funny-looking-code on syntax highlighting, and counted the votes correctly on November first and third, but on November second, suddenly George Bush got more votes! The winning program used a pointer overflow and took advantage of the fact that the word "second" (as in "November second") had one more letter than "first" or "third", creating a buffer overflow only when the date string was too long. Since then, there have been three more contests.
That brings me to my somewhat off-topic point: I wish we could have some mechanism for peer review, a corps of OSS programmers (probably volunteers) who would go over code and sign it as reviewed. For example, someone might say, "I've reviewed the GUI portion of GNOME Evolution, and didn't see anything malicious." He would GPG-sign the source code, and we the community could evaluate this based on how well-known the programmer is --Bruce Perens might have more credibility than Ann Onymous Coward, for example. We might establish a database of reviewed pieces of code. And someone spotting some funny behaviour might put in a request to revi
I have a somewhat Off Topic Question for people old enough to remember the Colossal Cave game on mainframe. As you know, later PC's came out (not the IBM PC yet, just generic "personal computers" like the TRS-80, Apple ][, Atari etc.) and similar games came out for them.
I saw an ad for, and later read a review of, a game that I never actually played. I'm trying to remember the name of the game. The player represented a prisoner being tortured to reveal information, and there was a certain key which would reveal the information when pressed. You were supposed to play the game making sure that you never pressed that One Key. The game was deliberately designed to frustrate the player, and the reviewer said that at one point, the computer would seem to lock up and become unresponsive, so that you might try all sorts of random key combinations, but when you hit the One Key, the computer would spring to life and tell you that you had lost the game.
Anyone remember the name of the game? It was something like "The Prisoner" or something. It was around the era when personal computers first start getting high-res graphics (Apple//e+ era?).
OSX Terminal is one of the few terminal programs I've used on any OS that dynamically re-wraps existing text in a window if you resize the window. That is very handy.
You mean some terminal programs *don't* rewrap existing text dynamically? Geez, I must have been spoiled by Konsole (KDE). I'm sure the GNOME terminal equivalent also rewraps --right, guys?
While the GP's experience may have been more negative with the airlines than with TSA, I agree with the parent that it's more the TSA. "Is it just my bad luck that I keep getting this?" I asked myself. I don't think so.
The airlines have incentive to improve their service; some do, and some don't. But for the TSA, there is no reward to providing better service. The security guy doesn't get a performance bonus for calling out "Please take out all metal objects" a greater number of times. On the within-US and international flights, I have yet to see a single instance of "How is the TSA doing? Tell us how we can improve". (I've been averaging about one flight every three weeks or so.)
At one airport (LAX), the airline counters had airline staff who were eager and ready to help check in, and short lineups. Unfortunately, that was because everyone first had to go through the big long TSA lineup, which for some reason started right inside the main entry doors. TSA had no concept that the entry hall was a place to enter and go through to get to the counter, kiosk, or boarding gate; they didn't see anything wrong with the entry hall being the destination for people entering the airport --I mean, that's why people come to the airport, right? To go line up at the TSA lineup.
By contrast, at a different overseas airport (HKG) where the need to move people along quickly is taken for granted, there was one wing of the airport dedicated to travellers to the USA. These couldn't have been actual TSA people, so perhaps they were hired to meet USA TSA requirements. Security worked hand-in-hand with the airlines to move people quickly; latecomers were given priority to get through the screening (especially because a number of travellers, who were used to travelling to other destinations, did not realize that extra screening was required for USA). There were TWENTY-FOUR security screeners in twenty-four parallel lineups checking people's luggage. This was to allow them through to a cluster of about eight boarding gates. (By contrast, I've never seen more than three security lines at a time at a US airport for, say, twenty boarding gates.) The line was long, but moved so quickly that I thought, "Oh, they must be just doing a cursory examination." But, no, they were actually opening up suitcases and going through stuff for bottles of water exceeding 3oz, etc.
I am astounded that Kip Hawley of the TSA actually realized that the TSA had a bad reputation; I thought they would have been patting themselves on the back for making the USA even safer from terrorists masquerading as a mother carrying bottles of milk for her wailing twin babies. I think that TSA should be dependent on income from flights, so that they might have some incentive for providing some semblance of normalcy in air travel.
As far as I'm concerned, the terrorists have already won.
It could be presumed that you chose that software specifically for the well-known "hidden partition" option (police departments hire geeks too, you know). As such, prove that the incriminating evidence ISN'T locked away in the hidden partition and that you're not refusing to comply with the warrent.
The point of a hidden partition is that you can't prove it either way, unless you actually unlock it with the key. So, without the key, I could say, "Yes, there's a hidden partition within this conventional TrueCrypt partition, but I'm not giving you the key!" or I could say, "No, there's no hidden partition," and you wouldn't be able to tell either way. So, then, you *could* presume that there is a hidden partition --but then that would be on the same order as just presuming that I have something to hide just because I'm using TrueCrypt in the first place. If I don't actually have a hidden partition, and you go looking for one, you're going to spend a pretty long time looking. There's nothing more frustrating than looking for something to prove that it doesn't exist (bug-checking programming sessions, anyone?). As a matter of course, I do set up TrueCrypt volumes at standard sizes that happen to be much bigger than I need --my usual is 680MB so I can burn the whole thing to a CD. I think all my financial files add up to about 100MB within the 680MB TrueCrypt volume. If you want to go looking in the remaining 580MB for some incriminating evidence --hey, knock yourself out.
Excel is really well designed such that almost all the commands are easily accessible from keyboard shortcuts.
In fact, I generally find that the MS Windows interface is better designed for the keyboard. It just seems more responsive.
In comparison, I use KDE, which is supposed to be designed for the keyboard, too. The K-Menu is navigable by typing the name of the desired entry, or I can launch Katapult with Alt-Space and then type in the name of the program to launch, and every key is configurable, so that I can bind TWO keyboard shortcuts to an action (such as Ctrl-C or Alt-Insert for copy), and those shortcuts can even be multi-key, so that my "Copy Date" shortcut is "Win+C" then "D" whereas my "Copy Time" shortcut is "Win+C" then "T".
The problem, I suspect, is not so much with KDE as with X11. It takes so frick'n LONG for it to respond to a keypress! So, if I want to quickly: 1) Summon the Katapult menu with Win+Space, 2) type "FIR" then "Enter" to call up Firefox, and 3) maximize the window with Alt-Space X, then what happens instead is:
I type Win+Space
Katapult does NOT come up, yet
I continue, typing FIR [Enter], since I'm still typing by reflex without pausing
The letters "fir" show up on whatever window I'm in, such as the terminal console. It says that there is no such command as "fir".
Katapult finally appears
I continue, typing Alt-Space X
Katapult can't understand why I'm typing Alt-Space X
The entire response of X is just so sluggish that I can't get the keyboard to respond to me, and I find myself missing very much the keyboard response of Win2k, where I would rapidly type out a stream of keystrokes that would open new programs like a text editor. By the time the text editor window appeared, I'd be halfway through my first sentence already, but that sentence would appear in a burst in the editor window; the kyestrokes would be captured and delivered to the right application, not like X/KDE where the old application catches them because the new application hasn't yet started up.
... how do most people install software on Windows? They download it and run the setup file from their desktop. That's how I do it. I don't think I have ever been able to install programs that simply on my Ubuntu box.
I want to make sure I understand you. You are saying that you cannot download a *.deb file and click on it to install? What happens when you do --what sort of error do you get?
Of course, with Ubuntu, it's probably easier to get it straight from the repository, ie. go to Synaptic and find BZFlag (or whatever program you're looking for) and just install it. That gives you more info about the program (see how big the file is, etc.). But you should be able to download and double-click, just like a Windows file.
When it comes to giving instructions about what to do on Linux, though, a script file is probably the simplest way to do it, simply because you can just cut'n'paste it onto the command line. This applies not just to installing programs but to everything in general. So, yes, people will give instructions like "sudo apt-get install bzflag", just because it's easier than "Click on Applications, click on Internet, click on Synaptic, click on search, type 'bzflag', click on Install, click on OK." (Or whatever the specific order happens to be --I use Kubuntu, which is slightly different.)
The equivalent in Windows would be a character string like: "Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Add > From CD". You never hear anyone complaining, "Boy, what a long complicated piece of text, with all these greater-than signs!"
If you are used to installing software by command-line, I can see your concern for the newbie who might feel intimidated by that method. But the newbie doesn't have to do it your way.
Apart from broadband not having penetration in all regions of the US, we're also hearing that broadband might not be broadband if they don't like your data or just don't understand your data. I don't know if it was a coincidence that my home broadband Internet connection has slowed to a crawl in the past few days, with half the DNS lookups failing. I just got my new Dellbuntu laptop (see here for my review in my Slashdot journal if you're interested), and it's taking forever to get and install the software packages over the 'net. (Are they punishing me for pirating? I'm seeding the Kubuntu 6.06 and 7.04 DVD's on BitTorrent.)
Whatever the cause for the sudden lack of bandwidth, I've wondered whether there's a way I can get around that with multiple Internet services. In addition to DSL, I have modem dialup service available (but have never used it), and can connect to my cellphone Internet service via Bluetooth. Granted, the speeds may be unimpressive compared to broadband, but they are non-zero, and should my broadband provider start getting finicky on me, I would have a backup plan.
Is there some software that would allow my computer to connect to multiple carriers and present the aggregate connection to the rest of my SOHO network? I'm envisioning my little desktop with one ethernet port plugged into the DSL modem (say 100kb/s), another plugged into the cable modem (another 100kb/s), the external serial modem dialed out over the phone line (56kb/s), and the USB Bluetooth adapter paired with my GPRS cellphone (20kb/s). Then yet another ethernet port is hooked up to the rest of the network, which sees a single connection with a bandwidth of 276kb/s. If my DSL provider says, "Hey, you're using the intrinsically evil BitTorrent!" and shuts down my service, the network sees the bandwidth drop by 100kb/s but nothing else.
Is there such a thing out there? Ideally it would be a software package that I would "sudo apt-get install aggregate-a-tron" onto my Kubuntu box, but if there is MS Windows software, I'm sure we'd like to hear about it too. Maybe I could finally put that decrepit Win2k computer in the closet to good use.
I've heard people say, "I hate ISP#1, so I'm going to switch to ISP#2" or some such, so I know there are others who have multiple ISProviders. With such a software package (if it exists), you'd be able to get the best of both worlds --pay twice as much to get twice as much total bandwidth from ISP#1 plus ISP#2, but increased reliability from the redundancy.
Heck, we could even get ten crappy decade-old computers with ten crappy Wi-Fi cards leeching off ten wireless AP's, and aggregate the connection into a usable carrier via a desktop with eleven ethernet cards installed.
Anyone know of a feasible setup? It might not exactly improve broadband penetration, but for some residents of rural towns, it might convert some small town's teensyband service into not-so-teensyband.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea! More people to use Firefox!
Having said that, it is indeed difficult to make software both Open Source and Commercial, since the software recipients can then freely redistribute it. There are only two true ways I can think of:
Otherwise, you're looking at selling something else to go with the software. You could sell the hardware, as Linksys does with their Linux-based routers, or sell support services, as Red Hat does. You could offer to customize the software for a fee, which would be a specialized case of selling support.
You could also sell proprietary data that goes with your OS software. For example, you might have some GPS mapping software which is OS, but you would sell the maps themselves. I also imagine that Google might be able to sell their web-searching software as open source, but you wouldn't have the same networking hardware and the accumulated data that they have.
Still other solutions include judicious use of proprietary versus open source software. ESRaymond's web site suggests that you can sell proprietary software while keeping the source in escrow to be opened in case the company fails. The author of QCAD sells the latest version as proprietary, which become open-sourced when a newer version supercedes it. Also, you can have multi-licensing deals: you have code that is licensed under the GPL, but re-license it under a proprietary license for money because someone else wants to reuse it in a proprietary work.
Oh, yeah, there's one more. You just plain sell your OS software. Some people might buy it even though it's available for free elsewhere. I remember when I bought the latest Borland C++ compiler at the local computer store for what I thought was a cheap price (this was in late 2000 when the sun was already setting on Borland). Later, I found out that it was available as a free download. But at US$30, hey, I was happy with the value for the money. Yes, I could have gotten it cheaper, but I was willing to pay $30 for it. (Not that Borland C++ is an example of Open Source software.) Also, you make money due to brand name (which is what Red Hat is famous for protecting): people might buy from you just to get the reassurance that it's The Real Thing.
So, there are ways to do it, just not the straightforward way that the MAFIAA is drooling about, which is that people pay you big bucks just to make copies of your 1's and 0's.
Let me make sure you are not misinterpreting what I mean by "failed". I mean that he said SCO failed [to be successful in its lawsuit] because Linux was too big to be sued; I agree that he never said that SCO "failed" [financially as a company and ended up being bankrupt] because Linux took the initiative to bring SCO down.
If SCO had instead sued some wimpy Free Software project people had never heard of, such as ReactOS (aiming to be a Free equivalent of WinNT/Win2k) which does not have any big companies or money behind it, then ReactOS would probably have caved from legal pressure, even though SCO would still be wrong. And in his column Lyons would have mentioned about some evil riffraff hackers advancing the ridiculous suggestion that they were capable of creating an operating system by themselves, while in reality pirating source code from an honest, hardworking company like SCO.
I'm not impressed. Anyone can say, "Oh. Er, oops." It's easy to couch it in terms that *sound* like you're really humble, like "I was really REALLY wrong." Big deal.
He makes it sound like it just so happened that the geeks were right and he was wrong. "Turns out those amateur sleuths were right." He refers to arguably one of the largest communities of people who do this for a living plus interested and competent hobbyists as though he were saying, "Oh, look! Those little kids turned out to be right after all."
He does not see *why* we saw that SCO had no leg to stand on. He does not realize how, next time, he can do better than the flip of a coin. He says, "... the pack of amateur sleuths who were following the case on a Web site called Groklaw and who claimed to know for sure that SCO was going to lose," and doesn't realize the painstaking review and due diligence that went on there that would put wikipedia to shame.
He says:
Er, so SCO failed because Linux was too successful?
No, Mr. Lyons. SCO failed because SCO was wrong , and if they had won, they still would have been wrong except there would have been a miscarriage of justice. It's not because someone threw the dice wrong or that the "pack" known as Slashdot or Groklaw happened to have a good day. It's not because you've been getting too much email pointing out that you were misinformed, Mr. Lyons, or ignorant.
You don't fool me. Your basic thinking shows through in your words, even though those words sound nice on the surface. Kinda like the press releases of this other company I know that turned out to be wrong.
-----
(By the way, I expect Laura Didio and Enderle to write something like, "Well, darnit, looks like Novell owns the rights to Unix, not SCO. So we'll just wait for Novell to sue Linux for blatant copying of Unix source into Linux.")
I recall a comment given by one of our university lecturers. He was quite well-known in his field, and a Nobel Prize winner to boot, so he was asked to review various government-funded scientific research projects to see if they were on time and within budget.
"I said I would agree," he explained to us, "with one condition: if it's on time and it's within budget, then we have to shut down the project --because, whatever that project is doing, it couldn't possibly be research."
He never did get to review the projects.
Furthermore, McBride also noted, "These alternate distributors neglect to sue their customers, a service which we provide for our own customers, and thus they are able to undercut our price of $699 per customer. Despite making a concerted effort to protect our intellectual property through the legal system, IBM has failed to buy us out, so the expected funds did not materialize which had been earmarked for expansion plans for my summer cottage --I mean, er, corporate conference facilities.
"We expect our recovery to be delayed somewhat while we initiate the appeals procedure. At that point, we anticipate a healthy rebound, as our business partner tells one of those investment firms to give us more money.
"Even though shares of our stock cost less than an order of French fries at McDonald's, we want to allay any concerns about being delisted for having a low price. Our accountants have said
I wanted to use GPG for signing everything, including Slashdot posts (my GPG key is in my journal), but I can't because the formatting will screw with the signature. In other words, my GPG signature would be for a certain line length, and if my text is reformatted with different spacing and line breaks, then the signature would be invalid.
What I'd love is a standard that strips all but alphanumeric characters (including no line breaks or whitespace) and then does a GPG signature on that. The signature would be preserved despite variations in formatting. It would be fairly simple to do, something along the lines of:
sed -e 's/[^A-Za-z0-9]//g' < plaintext.txt | gpg --clearsign to sign, and
sed -e 's/[^A-Za-z0-9]//g' < plaintext.txt | gpg --verify to verify.
(Not exactly, since this still preserves line breaks, but you get the idea.)
The problem is, everyone has to know to do that, so that it becomes a standard. I think this would make GPG more versatile and usable under more circumstances. Granted, it would not be perfectly unambiguous, as the following two lines have the same alphanum-only GPG signature:
"Bob," said Sue, "me and you are going to the greenhouse."
Bob said: "Sue me, and you are going to the 'green' house!"
Anyway, at the risk of being off-topic, I thought I'd offer my thoughts on one reason why encryption is not as ubiquitous as we hoped.
Can someone explain how I, the cell phone user, would choose a cell phone service provider myself? Suppose I get some sort of open phone that runs either OpenMoko or QtPhones-a-lot or something. Is there a C library that includes the function dial_this(int phonenum)? Do I stick a SIM card in and just do what I want, treating the open phone like a computer and the SIM card like a modem?
For reference: I bought an unlocked Treo 650 (none of the more advanced models were not available unlocked). Treos are offered by Nextel/Sprint and Verizon, but I use T-mobile, which doesn't offer Treos. So I simply phoned T-mobile and said, "I have a Treo. Do you want me to still be your customer, or do you want me to switch to a different network?" Of course they were willing to provide service, and since it was just a matter of taking my SIM card from my old phone to the Treo, everything was straightforward. I've been happily using their voice and data service since.
I hope that the new open phone would work the same way. I probably would not be able to handle a for-developers alpha-version of the phone, but if I got my hands on a beta-version with a fledgling interface to dial out, compile programs and download files, I'd probably be willing to buy it, and then just upgrade the software as more came out.
This is an important point that needs to be brought to the attention of Slashdotters. Currently, the parent post is modded up to a maximum already, but in my sort-by-modpoints view of the Slashdot comments, this thread is still far down the list, preceded by other threads with more numerous upmodded replies. The comments on this thread should be modded up further so the thread floats to the top, at least for those users who sort by modpoints.
I volunteer to have this inane reply of mine modded up. Go ahead, don't worry about my karma overload --for the sake of the Slashdot community, I'm willing to deal with excessive karma.
(Yes, I am trying to be funny.)
Wasn't there some German article that appeared on Slashdot some years ago, about how some German judge crushed the puny SCO ant under his thumb after SCO tried to ... I forget what they tried, but the German judge laughed them out of court. The German article was linked in Slashdot, and quite a few slashdotters were rather appreciative of the first three words of the article. (It began, "SCO, the company that ... [whatever]", but I guess in German, even proper nouns are preceded by the article, so it literally said, "The SCO, the company that ...")
If Paypal is the only option to pay, then I'm one of them people you'll never get any money from, even if we are willing to pay.
I've donated to completely free (as in speech) programs before. One particular one had a Paypal button. I finally figured, hey, what the heck, let's try Paypal. Their web site said we could make credit card payments without setting up an actual Paypal account. I tried that. Didn't work (the web page looked broken --maybe they needed to run Javascript applets from five different domains or something). I finally contacted the author and said, "Hey, look, I want to give you money. Give me an address to mail the cheque to."
So Paypal without account didn't work, and there's no way I'm going to actually set up a Paypal account. Give them some PO Box to mail a cheque to.
I was about to say that it takes even more space on Plucker,but then I realized that we were talking about different things.
I get Plucker to spider the most recent 30 articles (all the direct links from http://slashdot.org/search.pl? ). Without graphics, the first-order spidering, when harvested and compressed, becomes a 1MB file for my Palm Treo.
But you're talking about just the front page of Slashdot. Looks like that CSS is pretty hefty. If you happen to want to compress it, looks like Plucker might be an option.
Agreed.
"Veronica Mars" is a TV show about high school kids, of whom the titular character is a sleuth. One of the scenes from the first season (2005?) showed the nerdy hs geek and the rather cool-looking geekess arguing the merits of Ubuntu vs OS X.
That TV show is not G4TechTV, nor even a nerd show by any stretch of the imagination.
I wouldn't worry about the reputation of Ubuntu and whether people have heard of it.
People used to think that "Gaylord" was a dorky name for an athlete, too, until the athlete took home the Olympic gold in gymnastics.
When SARS struck Hong Kong, the effect in Toronto (Ontario) was considerable, as there is a significant population that travels between Hong Kong and Toronto. All the streets were dead, and you wouldn't see anyone walking the usually crowded downtown streets. (Well, there were a few, but a tiny fraction of the number.) Retail business drooped, and in fact some Chinese places (especially restaurants) went belly-up due to lack of income.
The majority of these people who stayed home weren't having symptoms. They just didn't want to start getting symptoms.
I'll second that. I actually haven't used (GNOME) Ubuntu much, even though it came pre-installed on my Dell laptop, but on the Kubuntu which I installed the day I got my laptop, power management is great. After I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-H, it takes about 20-30 seconds to go into Hibernation (zero power consumption) --but I don't care, since I just close the laptop and stick it in my bag while it's still running. If I just close the lid, it takes about 5 seconds to go into Suspended mode (minimal but non-zero power consumption), and about as long to come out of it once I reopen the lid. If hibernating, it takes about 45 seconds to get back from power-on to the previous usable state.
Given my past bad experiences trying to use ACPI with prior Linux distros, I am delighted at the power management capabilities. For once, instead of tweaking Linux, I can actually turn on the computer and *use* it. I find that I don't need to spend that much time on my computer *doing* things --and I actually have more time to do other things, like take walks outdoors, do chores, or sit back and relax with a book (on my Treo, of course). It's very liberating.
I don't know if it's GNUbuntu or just the way it's set up on your computer. You might want to think about installing Kubuntu power mgmt apps, or even installing Kubuntu and then using your GNOME apps.
And 1% to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Why not? Torrentreactor, btjunkie, fenopy, bushtorrents, meganova
If you go to torrents.to, it will search various sites for you. Even if you just visit, you can read their list of sites that they search. So, if you only know of a few sites, and your sites get shut down, now you'll know what other sites to go to.
This is, of course, for the express purpose of identifying torrents that are legal/ethical to download.
Good point, but it's not as simple as you seem to think. For large and far-reaching projects like Linux (the kernel) or Samba, yes, there are many hobbyists who have looked over the code. Not so for small projects, little novelty programs or handy-to-use utilities; there, any hobbyists would probably not go over the code with a fine-toothed comb, and just read over the gist of the code more to understand it than to make sure it's not doing something nasty. You'd be relying on the developers, but if they had malicious intent, it's not like they're going to announce that their open source program has a trojan embedded.
You know what I would do, if I wanted to do something nasty? Suppose for a moment I was strongly motivated to exploit other people's computers using open-source software --say I was paid to bring a DDOS attack against some arbitrary website as part of a protection racket, or something. I'd write an open-source program; given enough time and motivation, I might even fork off some useful but immature OSS program. I'd embed some nasty stuff in there, add features to make lots of people want it. (Example: I take the on-screen clock in KDE (or GNOME) and make it announce the time out loud --kinda "cool" but doesn't take that much development effort.) I would upload it to some reputable site, like SourceForge. I might even fabricate a "development team", complete with different email addresses for various team members.
Do you really think other people are going to read over my source code? Only those people who are interested in extending and contributing to my sources would do so. That would take at least a few months, and before that, I'd probably have recruited a sizeable botnet.
Even if someone did look over the source code, the malicious part of it might not be that easy to spot. Check out the Underhanded C contest where people write innocent-looking programs that do subtle but nasty things. I remember the inaugural contest, which was to make a simple, straightforward vote-counting program that would give George Bush more votes, but ONLY on November second, and not any other date. I thought, "How could someone possibly sneak something underhanded in there, and not have the malicious code stick out like a sore thumb? Haven't people heard of syntax highlighting?" And then, lo and behold, there were programs that did exactly as requested, looking for all the world like an innocent program, with no obvious funny-looking-code on syntax highlighting, and counted the votes correctly on November first and third, but on November second, suddenly George Bush got more votes! The winning program used a pointer overflow and took advantage of the fact that the word "second" (as in "November second") had one more letter than "first" or "third", creating a buffer overflow only when the date string was too long. Since then, there have been three more contests.
That brings me to my somewhat off-topic point: I wish we could have some mechanism for peer review, a corps of OSS programmers (probably volunteers) who would go over code and sign it as reviewed. For example, someone might say, "I've reviewed the GUI portion of GNOME Evolution, and didn't see anything malicious." He would GPG-sign the source code, and we the community could evaluate this based on how well-known the programmer is --Bruce Perens might have more credibility than Ann Onymous Coward, for example. We might establish a database of reviewed pieces of code. And someone spotting some funny behaviour might put in a request to revi
I have a somewhat Off Topic Question for people old enough to remember the Colossal Cave game on mainframe. As you know, later PC's came out (not the IBM PC yet, just generic "personal computers" like the TRS-80, Apple ][, Atari etc.) and similar games came out for them.
//e+ era?).
I saw an ad for, and later read a review of, a game that I never actually played. I'm trying to remember the name of the game. The player represented a prisoner being tortured to reveal information, and there was a certain key which would reveal the information when pressed. You were supposed to play the game making sure that you never pressed that One Key. The game was deliberately designed to frustrate the player, and the reviewer said that at one point, the computer would seem to lock up and become unresponsive, so that you might try all sorts of random key combinations, but when you hit the One Key, the computer would spring to life and tell you that you had lost the game.
Anyone remember the name of the game? It was something like "The Prisoner" or something. It was around the era when personal computers first start getting high-res graphics (Apple
You mean some terminal programs *don't* rewrap existing text dynamically? Geez, I must have been spoiled by Konsole (KDE). I'm sure the GNOME terminal equivalent also rewraps --right, guys?
While the GP's experience may have been more negative with the airlines than with TSA, I agree with the parent that it's more the TSA. "Is it just my bad luck that I keep getting this?" I asked myself. I don't think so.
The airlines have incentive to improve their service; some do, and some don't. But for the TSA, there is no reward to providing better service. The security guy doesn't get a performance bonus for calling out "Please take out all metal objects" a greater number of times. On the within-US and international flights, I have yet to see a single instance of "How is the TSA doing? Tell us how we can improve". (I've been averaging about one flight every three weeks or so.)
At one airport (LAX), the airline counters had airline staff who were eager and ready to help check in, and short lineups. Unfortunately, that was because everyone first had to go through the big long TSA lineup, which for some reason started right inside the main entry doors. TSA had no concept that the entry hall was a place to enter and go through to get to the counter, kiosk, or boarding gate; they didn't see anything wrong with the entry hall being the destination for people entering the airport --I mean, that's why people come to the airport, right? To go line up at the TSA lineup.
By contrast, at a different overseas airport (HKG) where the need to move people along quickly is taken for granted, there was one wing of the airport dedicated to travellers to the USA. These couldn't have been actual TSA people, so perhaps they were hired to meet USA TSA requirements. Security worked hand-in-hand with the airlines to move people quickly; latecomers were given priority to get through the screening (especially because a number of travellers, who were used to travelling to other destinations, did not realize that extra screening was required for USA). There were TWENTY-FOUR security screeners in twenty-four parallel lineups checking people's luggage. This was to allow them through to a cluster of about eight boarding gates. (By contrast, I've never seen more than three security lines at a time at a US airport for, say, twenty boarding gates.) The line was long, but moved so quickly that I thought, "Oh, they must be just doing a cursory examination." But, no, they were actually opening up suitcases and going through stuff for bottles of water exceeding 3oz, etc.
I am astounded that Kip Hawley of the TSA actually realized that the TSA had a bad reputation; I thought they would have been patting themselves on the back for making the USA even safer from terrorists masquerading as a mother carrying bottles of milk for her wailing twin babies. I think that TSA should be dependent on income from flights, so that they might have some incentive for providing some semblance of normalcy in air travel.
As far as I'm concerned, the terrorists have already won.
The point of a hidden partition is that you can't prove it either way, unless you actually unlock it with the key. So, without the key, I could say, "Yes, there's a hidden partition within this conventional TrueCrypt partition, but I'm not giving you the key!" or I could say, "No, there's no hidden partition," and you wouldn't be able to tell either way.
So, then, you *could* presume that there is a hidden partition --but then that would be on the same order as just presuming that I have something to hide just because I'm using TrueCrypt in the first place. If I don't actually have a hidden partition, and you go looking for one, you're going to spend a pretty long time looking. There's nothing more frustrating than looking for something to prove that it doesn't exist (bug-checking programming sessions, anyone?).
As a matter of course, I do set up TrueCrypt volumes at standard sizes that happen to be much bigger than I need --my usual is 680MB so I can burn the whole thing to a CD. I think all my financial files add up to about 100MB within the 680MB TrueCrypt volume. If you want to go looking in the remaining 580MB for some incriminating evidence --hey, knock yourself out.
In fact, I generally find that the MS Windows interface is better designed for the keyboard. It just seems more responsive.
In comparison, I use KDE, which is supposed to be designed for the keyboard, too. The K-Menu is navigable by typing the name of the desired entry, or I can launch Katapult with Alt-Space and then type in the name of the program to launch, and every key is configurable, so that I can bind TWO keyboard shortcuts to an action (such as Ctrl-C or Alt-Insert for copy), and those shortcuts can even be multi-key, so that my "Copy Date" shortcut is "Win+C" then "D" whereas my "Copy Time" shortcut is "Win+C" then "T".
The problem, I suspect, is not so much with KDE as with X11. It takes so frick'n LONG for it to respond to a keypress! So, if I want to quickly: 1) Summon the Katapult menu with Win+Space, 2) type "FIR" then "Enter" to call up Firefox, and 3) maximize the window with Alt-Space X, then what happens instead is:
The entire response of X is just so sluggish that I can't get the keyboard to respond to me, and I find myself missing very much the keyboard response of Win2k, where I would rapidly type out a stream of keystrokes that would open new programs like a text editor. By the time the text editor window appeared, I'd be halfway through my first sentence already, but that sentence would appear in a burst in the editor window; the kyestrokes would be captured and delivered to the right application, not like X/KDE where the old application catches them because the new application hasn't yet started up.
Extremely frustrating. Any ideas, anyone?
I want to make sure I understand you. You are saying that you cannot download a *.deb file and click on it to install? What happens when you do --what sort of error do you get?
Of course, with Ubuntu, it's probably easier to get it straight from the repository, ie. go to Synaptic and find BZFlag (or whatever program you're looking for) and just install it. That gives you more info about the program (see how big the file is, etc.). But you should be able to download and double-click, just like a Windows file.
When it comes to giving instructions about what to do on Linux, though, a script file is probably the simplest way to do it, simply because you can just cut'n'paste it onto the command line. This applies not just to installing programs but to everything in general. So, yes, people will give instructions like "sudo apt-get install bzflag", just because it's easier than "Click on Applications, click on Internet, click on Synaptic, click on search, type 'bzflag', click on Install, click on OK." (Or whatever the specific order happens to be --I use Kubuntu, which is slightly different.)
The equivalent in Windows would be a character string like: "Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Add > From CD". You never hear anyone complaining, "Boy, what a long complicated piece of text, with all these greater-than signs!"
If you are used to installing software by command-line, I can see your concern for the newbie who might feel intimidated by that method. But the newbie doesn't have to do it your way.
Apart from broadband not having penetration in all regions of the US, we're also hearing that broadband might not be broadband if they don't like your data or just don't understand your data. I don't know if it was a coincidence that my home broadband Internet connection has slowed to a crawl in the past few days, with half the DNS lookups failing. I just got my new Dellbuntu laptop (see here for my review in my Slashdot journal if you're interested), and it's taking forever to get and install the software packages over the 'net. (Are they punishing me for pirating? I'm seeding the Kubuntu 6.06 and 7.04 DVD's on BitTorrent.)
Whatever the cause for the sudden lack of bandwidth, I've wondered whether there's a way I can get around that with multiple Internet services. In addition to DSL, I have modem dialup service available (but have never used it), and can connect to my cellphone Internet service via Bluetooth. Granted, the speeds may be unimpressive compared to broadband, but they are non-zero, and should my broadband provider start getting finicky on me, I would have a backup plan.
Is there some software that would allow my computer to connect to multiple carriers and present the aggregate connection to the rest of my SOHO network? I'm envisioning my little desktop with one ethernet port plugged into the DSL modem (say 100kb/s), another plugged into the cable modem (another 100kb/s), the external serial modem dialed out over the phone line (56kb/s), and the USB Bluetooth adapter paired with my GPRS cellphone (20kb/s). Then yet another ethernet port is hooked up to the rest of the network, which sees a single connection with a bandwidth of 276kb/s. If my DSL provider says, "Hey, you're using the intrinsically evil BitTorrent!" and shuts down my service, the network sees the bandwidth drop by 100kb/s but nothing else.
Is there such a thing out there? Ideally it would be a software package that I would "sudo apt-get install aggregate-a-tron" onto my Kubuntu box, but if there is MS Windows software, I'm sure we'd like to hear about it too. Maybe I could finally put that decrepit Win2k computer in the closet to good use.
I've heard people say, "I hate ISP#1, so I'm going to switch to ISP#2" or some such, so I know there are others who have multiple ISProviders. With such a software package (if it exists), you'd be able to get the best of both worlds --pay twice as much to get twice as much total bandwidth from ISP#1 plus ISP#2, but increased reliability from the redundancy.
Heck, we could even get ten crappy decade-old computers with ten crappy Wi-Fi cards leeching off ten wireless AP's, and aggregate the connection into a usable carrier via a desktop with eleven ethernet cards installed.
Anyone know of a feasible setup? It might not exactly improve broadband penetration, but for some residents of rural towns, it might convert some small town's teensyband service into not-so-teensyband.