I am a user of Slackware and I have paid for the 4-CD set of Slackware 10.0 although I could download it - it is a very good distro and I reccomend it for *nix veterans and servers. I paid for it because I wanted to support the project and thank Patrick for this great software. Now I learn that Patrick is ill and I feel too nervous. If I was a doctor I would be willing to treat him for free but unfortunately I am just a Computer Science student. I am sure that the libre software community appreciates Slackware and, together with me, we all wish the best for Patrick.
It's just another example of how much control software companies have over you when you use their closed-source software (and drivers): You have no idea what the software really does!
Metadata (data that describe data) can really give you a nightmare for your privacy. If this SoundForge/M$ incident is true, it is another one example which should be taken into consideration by software engineers when designing the next version of their application. There must be some way to delete metadata when the data are given to the consumer, or some way to access metadata only with a password.
I have a site which contains some interesting RSS feeds. Here I give you a list of the most interesting feeds of my site together with direct links to the RSS file (note some of them are dynamically generated via php but probably will work on any rss reader):
JnanaBase What's New RSS feed: This is a general knowledge base wiki, a website where everyone can write anything they want. The feed contains links to the newest articles, that may be about anything, such as music, computers, etc. A section of the wiki, called IntelliWiki, is about Artificial Intelligence and builds a database of known facts that can be read by knowledge management software. Be warned, however, that the contents of this feed are not systematically reviewed. New articles are added several times every day.
NerdyPC What's New RSS feed: This is a wiki knowledge base about Information Technology and computers. It contains quality articles that are passed through a review process. Contents are open source news, hardware information and very soon hardware reviews. New articles are added every day or two.
Wikinerds Portal RSS feed: This is a portal website which publishes a variety of articles on computers, science, social issues etc. New articles, which usually contain many links to external websites (and Slashdot discussions!) are added usually every 1-2 days. However, some of the posted articles are just announcements about new content in the wikis described above (as well as other wikis that I host).
Just to clarify that these are not the only RSS feeds I offer, but just the most interesting ones that have useful content. I post this message not as an advertisement, but only because I truly believe that these feeds will be interesting to you (and you asked to be informed about interesting feeds).
Note: Please do not read the RSS feeds more than 4-6 times per day because I want to keep the server utilisation low.
I wonder why they needed 3 years to understand that private information is not safe anymore in USA.
Obviously something needs to change. All this terror-paranoia is not normal. We, the Europeans, also suffered attacks in Madrid but we didn't pass laws like that. We didn't get mad. We do fight terror, but we do not destroy our civilisation of democracy and freedom just to catch some crazy terrorists.
I hope the USA legislators will understand that they can fight their enemies without undermining the privacy and freedom of Americans (and the world!). I believe that laws like PATRIOT aren't needed.
BTW I wrote a story with some more information here. As you can read, the probe started in May and produced a report consisted of more than 100 pages. The report was written by OIPC, a Canadian authority on privacy issues in British Columbia.
How will you approach the issue of non-Free/non-Libre hardware drivers that plaque the GNU/Linux community? Will you take any initiatives to encourage hardware manufacturers open their device specifications or provide OSI-approved/GPL-compatible drivers to the community?
"VIA EMAIL ONLY" - http://suicidegirls.com/boards/The+Site/55715/ (link potentially sexually explicit - don't go there if I wonder what would happen if you receive legal communication via email only and you never check your email.
I checked the HURD mailing lists and talked with some people on irc.gnu.org #hurd
someone said to me there are 2 developers maintaining the cvs repository of hurd.
A person who tried Debian GNU/HURD said it was usable, but with some unsupported hardware.
There are three distributions of GNU/Hurd: Debian GNU/Hurd, Bee GNU/Hurd and Gentoo GNU/Hurd, together with gnu.org
HURD isn't exactly dead, but I doubt it could replace Linux right now. However, I am excited by the idea of microkernels and I really want to see HURD becoming successful and usable by the general public.
I can buy used computers for 50 Euro in the local market. If I give 100-150 Euro I can even buy an old laptop. A 17" XGA monitor can be found for 40 Euro.
You can try Konqueror which I use and seems to be able to handle the iKobo site without major problems. Unfortunately for M$ users, Konqueror is bundled only with KDE which runs on FreeBSD or GNU/Linux. If you are on M$ you can try Opera but it is commercial and I haven't tested it with iKobo.
I forgot to add this: Consider that in the future humans may live in space or other planets and they will definitely need some sort of device for the survival in an environment without oxygen. The oxygen-generator/provider/whatever will probably be a device controlled by a computer so it will need some sort of software. Would you accept exclusive copyright rights, possibly revocable, over a piece of software that is of extreme importance to your life? I hope not. Election/voting software is not very different: It is of extreme importance to the quality of life of millions of people and granting exclusive control of this code to some proprietors is a Bad Idea (tm). In my opinion any software code that is a public utility, like voting software, nuclear reactor control software, and life support software (example: in hospitals), need to be available in the public domain and stored in the Library of Congress, after the code developers have been paid by a federal agency or their employer.
I am afraid that even if the public pushes the opensourcing of the voting code, they will make it available under a "shared source" license a-la M$. That's better than closed source, but definitely is not enough. The general public might think it's enough, but it isn't since the code creators will continue to have exclusive rights over a piece of software that is of extreme importance to the society. The voting code must be available in the public domain or under a mini-license that could be compatible with all other common licenses like GPL, BSD, CC, CPL, et cetera. The Federal Government publishes its information in the public domain for the common good, why the voting code should be any different since it is intended to benefit the whole society? (whether this happens in practice or not is another story). The Federal Government should pay the code creators not just for the right to use the code but also for the transfer of copyright and then the code should become public domain (since everything coming out of federal agencies is publicdomain).
I mean if I want to accept donations for my site I need an easy service that lets anyone to transfer money quickly. If the service asks them to open an account, they will be lazy to do that, but if they can just write their credit card number and give $5 then they might do that since it isn't too difficult.
A name, address, credit card number, et cetera, are enough for accountability. There is no reason for these services to require username and passwords for sending money.
My problem is that it is difficult to receive donations from services that require the donor to have an account. It just sucks.
PayPal does not support many countries. My country, which is a member of EU, is not accepted by PayPal for money withdrawal. That's not good and PayPal should consider providing more support in EU, since most of their competitors do support my country.
http://www.ikobo.com/ allows online money wordwide transfer and gives you an ATM card to withdraw monies from ATMs all over the world. In contrast with PayPal, iKobo supports much more countries in EU and the rest of the world.
In addition, there is http://www.moneybookers.com/ that also allows online money transfer and is based in UK and supports more countries than PayPal
What sucks is that both services want you to have a user ID before using them.
There is also Western Union that does online transfers but it is only for USA I think and their charges are high IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a user of Slackware and I have paid for the 4-CD set of Slackware 10.0 although I could download it - it is a very good distro and I reccomend it for *nix veterans and servers. I paid for it because I wanted to support the project and thank Patrick for this great software. Now I learn that Patrick is ill and I feel too nervous. If I was a doctor I would be willing to treat him for free but unfortunately I am just a Computer Science student. I am sure that the libre software community appreciates Slackware and, together with me, we all wish the best for Patrick.
Not everyone is happy with Firefox... See this and this.
It's just another example of how much control software companies have over you when you use their closed-source software (and drivers): You have no idea what the software really does!
Metadata (data that describe data) can really give you a nightmare for your privacy. If this SoundForge/M$ incident is true, it is another one example which should be taken into consideration by software engineers when designing the next version of their application. There must be some way to delete metadata when the data are given to the consumer, or some way to access metadata only with a password.
The logo was designed by Grant Bissett, an Australian designer.
Just to clarify that these are not the only RSS feeds I offer, but just the most interesting ones that have useful content. I post this message not as an advertisement, but only because I truly believe that these feeds will be interesting to you (and you asked to be informed about interesting feeds).
Note: Please do not read the RSS feeds more than 4-6 times per day because I want to keep the server utilisation low.
Obviously something needs to change. All this terror-paranoia is not normal. We, the Europeans, also suffered attacks in Madrid but we didn't pass laws like that. We didn't get mad. We do fight terror, but we do not destroy our civilisation of democracy and freedom just to catch some crazy terrorists.
I hope the USA legislators will understand that they can fight their enemies without undermining the privacy and freedom of Americans (and the world!). I believe that laws like PATRIOT aren't needed.
BTW I wrote a story with some more information here. As you can read, the probe started in May and produced a report consisted of more than 100 pages. The report was written by OIPC, a Canadian authority on privacy issues in British Columbia.
How will you approach the issue of non-Free/non-Libre hardware drivers that plaque the GNU/Linux community? Will you take any initiatives to encourage hardware manufacturers open their device specifications or provide OSI-approved/GPL-compatible drivers to the community?
The correct text is:
"VIA EMAIL ONLY" - http://suicidegirls.com/boards/The+Site/55715/ (link potentially sexually explicit - don't go there if 18 or at work/college).
I wonder what would happen if you receive legal communication via email only and you never check your email.
"VIA EMAIL ONLY" - http://suicidegirls.com/boards/The+Site/55715/ (link potentially sexually explicit - don't go there if I wonder what would happen if you receive legal communication via email only and you never check your email.
"Named one of Fortune(R) magazine's '100 best companies to work for' 2004" - http://perkinscoie.com/
someone said to me there are 2 developers maintaining the cvs repository of hurd.
A person who tried Debian GNU/HURD said it was usable, but with some unsupported hardware.
There are three distributions of GNU/Hurd: Debian GNU/Hurd, Bee GNU/Hurd and Gentoo GNU/Hurd, together with gnu.org
HURD isn't exactly dead, but I doubt it could replace Linux right now. However, I am excited by the idea of microkernels and I really want to see HURD becoming successful and usable by the general public.
http://hurd.gnu.org/I can buy used computers for 50 Euro in the local market. If I give 100-150 Euro I can even buy an old laptop. A 17" XGA monitor can be found for 40 Euro.
You can try Konqueror which I use and seems to be able to handle the iKobo site without major problems. Unfortunately for M$ users, Konqueror is bundled only with KDE which runs on FreeBSD or GNU/Linux. If you are on M$ you can try Opera but it is commercial and I haven't tested it with iKobo.
I forgot to add this: Consider that in the future humans may live in space or other planets and they will definitely need some sort of device for the survival in an environment without oxygen. The oxygen-generator/provider/whatever will probably be a device controlled by a computer so it will need some sort of software. Would you accept exclusive copyright rights, possibly revocable, over a piece of software that is of extreme importance to your life? I hope not. Election/voting software is not very different: It is of extreme importance to the quality of life of millions of people and granting exclusive control of this code to some proprietors is a Bad Idea (tm). In my opinion any software code that is a public utility, like voting software, nuclear reactor control software, and life support software (example: in hospitals), need to be available in the public domain and stored in the Library of Congress, after the code developers have been paid by a federal agency or their employer.
I am afraid that even if the public pushes the opensourcing of the voting code, they will make it available under a "shared source" license a-la M$. That's better than closed source, but definitely is not enough. The general public might think it's enough, but it isn't since the code creators will continue to have exclusive rights over a piece of software that is of extreme importance to the society. The voting code must be available in the public domain or under a mini-license that could be compatible with all other common licenses like GPL, BSD, CC, CPL, et cetera. The Federal Government publishes its information in the public domain for the common good, why the voting code should be any different since it is intended to benefit the whole society? (whether this happens in practice or not is another story). The Federal Government should pay the code creators not just for the right to use the code but also for the transfer of copyright and then the code should become public domain (since everything coming out of federal agencies is publicdomain).
I mean if I want to accept donations for my site I need an easy service that lets anyone to transfer money quickly. If the service asks them to open an account, they will be lazy to do that, but if they can just write their credit card number and give $5 then they might do that since it isn't too difficult.
Another alternative is http://www.egold.com/
Search daniweb and you will find some interesting comments about yowcow.
It's not a monopoly because we have http://www.ikobo.com/ and http://www.moneybookers.com/
Moderation makes me wonder: what's wrong?
My problem is that it is difficult to receive donations from services that require the donor to have an account. It just sucks.
PayPal does not support many countries. My country, which is a member of EU, is not accepted by PayPal for money withdrawal. That's not good and PayPal should consider providing more support in EU, since most of their competitors do support my country.
In addition, there is http://www.moneybookers.com/ that also allows online money transfer and is based in UK and supports more countries than PayPal
What sucks is that both services want you to have a user ID before using them.
There is also Western Union that does online transfers but it is only for USA I think and their charges are high IMO.