It is sort of difficult for me to picture the whole situation since I don't live in the US but I think I can make a fair statement.
FIrst of all I think people who are claiming this behavior of disallowing these services is a form of censorship have absolutely no clue what so ever of the meaning 'censorship'. If you are in some strange environment you act according to the so-called house rules. If these rules are not to your liking you should not enter the environment at all.
You can compare this with being at work. Most people are not allowed to download porn and such from the Internet during working hours. Censorship? "I don't think so Tim."
The second option which I sort off missed in the whole thread below; security. Napster, like many other programs around, is using a variable portnumber. Reason for me to ban it completely from my homenetwork. Call it whatever you want but I don't trust programs who seem to be incapable of using a fixed port adress. The reason is very simple offcourse; I'll be happy to open up a fixed port on my firewall in order to use the program. But I'm not opening a very wide range in order for one stupid program to actually do something.
Allthough the topic is all about napster I think its no more then fair to state that I feel completely the same about programs like icq and dcc transfers on irc networks.
Thats what I think this whole thing is. And I'm not referring to just this campain of Mr. Gore, but the whole campaining for president in the US. It can very well be that, being an outsider, we get to see different things then the people who are living it but I still feel the whole concept plainly sucks and this site proofs some of my points.
One of the points I dislike the most is the fact that you see the "presidents want to be" (PWTB) talking their heads off on about anything but the actual political things they intend to do. To me the whole concept looks like something where a couple of men are competing in a race in which the one and only goal is to spend as much money as you can and most important; that you are being heard and seen. The message itself doesn't really matter; as long as people look out their window or switching on their tv and they immediatly get to see you telling them to vote for you.
But why should you vote for a certain person? I've seen some reports on CNN and local news programs in which such a PWTB was asked for some opinions. For example on the relationship with Europe. "Its very important", the man said. When the reporter asked why it was so important to him the PWTB gave a very vague answer (something like it is because its very important) and hurried back to the crowd, thus avoiding any other questions.
So to proof this idea of mine 'wrong' I took a look at this 'GoreSite' and focused on 1 small randomly picked detail:
Gore Details Plans To Make College More Affordable.
Here we can read how he discussed his plan (what plan?) and he announced new details (which details?) of his proposal. Then we see can read that he's a fighter for public education (duh).
And now things get interesting... After clicking the 'more' button it first starts of with more of the same. Then we can read that, being vice president, Gore helped defeat efforts by Republicans in congress to elimintate the department of Education. Then we get to read what some of his opponents are doing wrong and what Gores plan and program can do.
Cheap talk!
Come on... Its very easy to tell the world what this fantastic plan of yours can do without telling how it works. And I really cannot believe that there are people actually believing in this cheap kind of propaganda. Here I just focused on 1 point but if you take a close look at the rest of the site you just see more of the above.
This article just focuses on Gore but I'm convinced the other candidates are just as bad. Correct me if you will but IMHO its all about the money. The only good part which I can see in campaining on the Internet is the fact that candidates with a smaller budget can also spread their ideas. This way the odds are kinda even.
Its kinda hard to split the net up like that. Even better; I think its allmost impossible. For example; the religion could very well be placed under the information section. As with others.
Nevertheless; I think you missed out on the "Hobbynet" where people just can relax and read up on things they like. Offcourse this one is also very close to being related to the 'info' topic. So I don't think its possible to split things up like that.
I mean you know that you are at risk when you shop online. The first thing my card company told me when I got mine was to never use it on the net. They were quite clear that this form of payment isn't safe (yet).
I think that one way to make it less attractive for these people to hack those sites is to try and ignore 'm a bit more. I wonder how many money they can make with the stuff in the databases they hacked and if its really worth the effort.
The best way offcourse would be to stop using cards on the net alltogether. And I just can't understand why nobody has come up with something else. The electronic wallet (chipcard) is allready very common to use. You load it up & have some amount of money on it. Want to pay online? Hookup a cardreader to your pc and when you need to pay you just insert the card.
Sure; even this system can be tampered with but I'd rather loose 100 guilders which was stored on my chipcard then the whole amount of money I may spend on my creditcard (which lies around 78.000 guilders iirc).
Hope you can understand the topic; thats how we tend to call these things in Holland;-)
Anyway; I saw on the local news that they indeed took some action; they sended a letter to MS with a list of questions they would like to get answered. That was about all of it. So I guess its kinda hard to tell what made them decide to do this.
Noone has claimed responsibility So? I know of quite some bomb terrorist attacks which were never claimed. Also done by the goverment? "I don't think so Tim".
Instead of finding replies in which people actually appreciate the fact some official instance is actually doingsomething I see a lot of unsubstantiated (hope I got the grammar right )complaints instead.
I'd say be glad that there is at least some official bureau who is actually doing something and isn't to arrogant to ask us for help. Dunno but IMHO they got it quite right with the choice of platforms too. A Linux binary? Cool. I know of goverments who would release such tools for DOS and who would also wonder why no-one is using it & laughing their heads of instead.
As for the so-called backdoor; if those people complaining were really concerned they should be aware that a nice firewall & some 1st level of clueness can fix these problems. I haven't tried the program myself (yet) but I never saw any complaints about the program needing to be suid or something in here. I would not be surprised if most of the people complaining didn't even bother to check out what program they are talking about which is, IMVHO, like showing bits off cluelessness.
What does this new OS give MS that its previous OSs didn't?
Easy; its new and it looks different. Sure, this may sound utterly stupid to you & me and a lot of other readers but this is really a very big issue. People want something 'new' to play with every now and then.
Lets translate this to Linux; why can't some people wait untill the 2.4.0 is out? Most of 'm are not troubled with any bugs which immobilize the OS but they are very curious to see all the new goodies inside. Heck; some even risk the chance of wrecking their system in order to use something even more new (2.3.x).
Sure the US goverment has filed a lawsuit and all of that but the fact still remains that if MS would have been an European company they would never got this far / big as they are now simply due to the restrictions in EU to make sure companies can't (or hardly can) turn into monopolies.
That this institute has indeed some influance was proven with the pie incident IMHO. Mr. Gates was there for a reason and it sure wasn't just a social visit as many people seem to have forgotten.
I'm quite curious to their findings; IMHO its very well posibly the outcome can be another devastating blow in the face of the MS company but we'll just have to wait and see.
Re:RH 6.1 - NS Home Page IS Set To Redhat.com!
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redhat.com Redone
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Which RH version might that be? My last full installation was 5.0 and since then I only upgraded different parts of the system. However; Netscape is something which I tend to upgrade every now and then and up untill the 4.7 my Netscape 'bootup' allways pointed to/usr/doc/HTML/index.html. If your netscape script points to the RH homepage I'd suggest using rpm -Vf/usr/bin/netscape because I think your script could very well be tampered with.
Perhaps. But if a program is focused on corporate businesses that does not mean the program doesn't have to be userfriendly. On the contrary; the more userfriendly a program is the more money a company can save. Just think about it; if I need a mta and I can choose between two programs; one program does the job but the admin needs to follow a course for one day but the other can also do the job but the admin allready stated he can handle it as is. I think I know what some managers would choose. This is an extreme example but I do not agree with your statement that programs for corporate businesses can easily lack some userfriendly-ness.
I "used" sendmail my self in the 'early' days when I had RedHat installed but wasn't ready to dive into the other parts of the system. I was sort of impressed that the default configuration seemed to do anything I wanted, I only fiddled in the aliases file from time to time, and that was the end of that.
Up untill the moment where I felt the need to learn more about the whole system and start fiddling with other options like mail, news, firewalls, etc, etc. I never had any major problems configuring programs like INN (I'm using INN stand alone to fetch & send my usenet messages, you don't need 'suck' and such if you know INN), ipfwadm/ipchains, etc. But the program which actually scared me off due to its allmost unreadeble configuration file has allways been sendmail.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not saying sendmail is a bad program because of that but I do think its a major part which could be changed in order to make it a little more userfriendly. I know there are lots of programs around which can do most of the configuration part for you but I don't like that sort of stuff. Simply due to the fact that I like to have control over my computer and thats exactly why I like Linux so much. To throw this control away (sort of) sounds kinda silly to me.
At the moment I'm using QMail myself since I found the setup and configuration a breeze compared to sendmail. Being an end user I really saw no need to use a full blown mailserver which is capable to support a company with over 2000 employees (assuming sendmail can handle this btw). But its allways nice to see that there is still development going on and I think I'll take a quick peek in the weekend. Never hurts to keep up with the facts, even if you don't like the program in question all that much.
There are so many search engines around that I sort of lost track. My favorites have allways been Yahoo and Altavista until I discovered the paralel search engines like Inference find which basicly submits your query to more then one search enginean and gives you a very nice formatted result. After discovering that I hardly use the 'single engines' anymore.
But then again... I'm not familier with this situation since I don't live in the US. But a major factor for me to respond is the simple fact that Europe (to a certain degree) tends to follow some of these ideas which originate in the US. Some can be considered as an improvement but unfortunatly I've also witnessed a perfectly working solution being replaced by something which was totally crap. To make matters worse; the country from which the idea came (US) had allready dropped it.
Back to college; after reading the article I get this feeling that going to school in the US is all about the money, that and nothing else. And this sort of scares me; if I'm not mistaken (which could very well be) this means, to a certain extend, that if you can't pay to go to a certain college you also do not have the options to follow the study which could be a very important factor for your future job. Instead you'd have to settle with something less which doesn't do much good for morale IMO.
Whether I got the facts straight or not I still prefer the 'European' (Dutch, since I'm from Holland) system. Social security; a lot of the expenses you have if your childeren goto school are paid by the goverment. First its social security; the parents receive a contribution to the costs their having in raising a child (this also contributes to the costs of education) and if the child is old enough (allways a very vague standard IMO) he/she receives the contribution, allthough things then start to work a bit different; part of the money is for the student to spend on education (which could also mean renting a room if they goto college in a different city) and the 2nd part is a loan which needs to be paid back after you're done with your education.
Like I said; its different and hard to compare offcourse. I'm sure that there are a few people allready thinking that everything comes for free over here. Well, thats not the case. Social security and all also means paying very much taxes, but IMHO its a very good way in making sure everyone has an option to study and make something of his live. I don't say this system allways works (who likes paying taxes?), but in most cases it does.
Oh my... I can imagine what will happen if init decides to attack you and you kill it in a reflex instead of running off;-)) 'Nasty' part is that only your pids seem to be listed in the game so you'd better know what you're blasting at.
I wonder if there will be a network version coming out as being the latest "game hacker tool, shoot other people's processes".
This is really too much; who said that Linux wasn't fun again?
...And thats something which I can't really judge. If Corel is a healthy organisation they should have a decent backup to replace their CEO. Lets face it; everyone can get sick and therefor it is important for a company to make sure they can go on without a certain person.
If you look at the market and the things Corel said they were setting up I think there should be no problem if they can persuede their stockholders that the company will keep going strong, even if their CEO isn't available for a period of time. Offcourse there is allways the little matter of living up to the promise.
Without knowing anything about the things that are going on in the Corel company my guess would be that they could face a rough time but in the end they'll manage.
2.2.11 was known to cause some serious lockups in some systems
Well, just like you said; it depends very much on the sort of machine you're using and the parts of the kernel. 2.2.11 never failed me on my system. Anyway; perhaps I'll notice some improvement once I give 2.2.13 a try.
Well, it seems my evening has allready been planned for me. At the moment I'm still running very happily on 2.2.11 but I'm allways curious to see what parts were changed and if there are some new developments going on.
One thing puzzles me though; may I assume that Linux users are by default not supersticious since kernel development now went to number 13 ?;-)
Relax... as usual, the "modem tax" ain't gonna happen.
Sure, but I can imagine that it will get tougher as the years pass by. Don't forget that in a whole lot of countrys the 'modem tax' has allready been 'introduced' and there is no way around it anymore. I'm not all that familier with US politics but I can't help thinking that the minute the goverment sees a potential income through phone taxes they'll be sure to consider it. And perhaps it won't be this time, or the next, but once it gets through....
Thats why I think it is a good thing to mention this if it becomes an issue. I mean; suppose it does come to the point I mentioned above and you would not be informed by magazines, like/., because everyone believes 'it will never happen'. Result could be that hardly anyone will protest against it. Like I said; I don't know how the US goverment handles stuff like that but over here in Europe they can be darn slippery from time to time.
My guess would be mostly companies who also have their contacts in the US and rely on encrypted communication. This is due to the fact that as long as you want to communicate with people from inside the US you'll have to lower the encryption bitcode to 128, which immediatly brings me to your next question;
2. Are there any import restrictions for strong crypto?
As far as I know there are, or there were to be more precise, but to a certain extend. I'm into PGP for quite some time now (started using it on FidoNet back in '93 / '94 I believe) and I can remember that we once had PGP which was "smuggled" out of the US using the book which another/. mentioned and finally there was some Fin (not 100% sure here) who actually started scanning the critter in order to compile it. That process took him several weeks (some people also have a social life;-)) but when he was done the result was pgp 2.xi (international version) which was compatible with the US to some degree. However; pgpi could also be used in a way that it wasn't compatible with the pgp in the US. Afaik this was due to keylengths
However; all the documentation clearly stated that residents of the US were legally not allowed to use pgpi since it could handle over 1024 bit keys while in the US everyone was limited to 128bits. So basicly you don't have any import restrictions but since I can't see why anyone outside the US would settle for 128bit keys I think you could label this minor restriction as a major one when it concerns importing.
Basicly I think the Aptiva computer isn't all that good, and I'll go mildly on it. Personally I think they suck. With the experiences I had with Aptiva's I think you could have expected this in a way.
The reason why I personally feel Aptiva's suck it the simple fact that I owned one for 1 weekend and that was the 1st and last time I ever owned an IBM desktop computer; it was allmost 2 years ago (end '97 / begin '98) and I was, next to Linux, pretty deep into OS/2. Heck; I mainly choose the Aptiva (could buy it from work so I got a bit cheaper) because I was very hooked on OS/2. Everything went fine in the beginning; I just bought myself Tombraider II and was looking forward to play around a bit that same friday evening.
The horror immediatly struck me; Lara turned white at a resolution of 800x600:32! The videocard was an ATI Rage 3d (pro I believe). I figured it was just the game and started partitioning. I wanted; win95, WinNT, OS/2 and a little part for Linux.
That was the beginning & the end of that first weekend in '98 for me and I'm still pissed by it. I downloaded all the OS/2 drivers I needed for the Aptiva I got but at the very beginning OS/2 refused to partition my harddisk! Wasn't supported. So I called the helpdesk and they pointed me to another driver. Didn't do it. 3 different drivers later it sorta worked; I got OS/2 finally installed. And then my sound didn't work, my video was totally crap (640x480:16), and I kept getting harddisk errors from time to time.
I'm pretty sure I spend over 2 - 4 hours in calling the helpdesk (and believe me; I'm not that demanding but I did want to see the IBM computer I bought working with IBM's OS) and finally we came to the conclusion that this computer wasn't capable in running OS/2 which still eludes the helpdesk operator (we kept in touch) and myself. Fortunatly I could get my money back and later I decided to buy all the different parts I needed & assemble the PC myself and up until now I'm very happy with it. It even ran Tomb Raider II happily in 1024x768:32.
But if this is the sort of PC IBM delivered back then (and I heard more stories from people who also share these experiences) then I feel it sucks. You pay more for the IBM brand and then I expect an IBM software product to run. Not some Win95/98 OS because allmost every PC can run that sort of thing. I refuse to spend some 1500 Dutch Guilders extra just because a PC has the IBM name on it. After reading this article I guess more people felt the same way.
However; if the Aptiva dissapears then it doesn't have to result in IBM leaving the consumers market. They can allways come up with a new line which should be far more easy for them to accomplish these days; Major contestants are Win9x, WinNT (which will surely run on an Aptiva based machine) and Linux. I'm sure those will run on some 'Aptiva-2' line.
I mean; sure its very nice to know that the Linux 'hype' is spreading and not only in major companies and/or special end-users but that a whole other 'market' is also discovering the ease and robustness of Linux. Rather; they are open for this discovery.
Still I wonder... It will take some time I think but if everything goes well it is IMHO very likely that they will come to a conclusing that Linux has indeed been the product they were looking for and that it should get the royal seal of approval. But what will get nominated? Linux as being a product, RedHat as being the shipping company, Apache as being the part which did it (if they only care about the webserver part), or perhaps Linus himself for having invented such a wonderfull product?
I personally think that some of the options I menationed could be overshadowed by some major turmoil in the "linux scene". And I wonder if it would be really a good thing for us. Just think about it; suppose they will nominate RedHat and it will get this mentioned 'royal seal of approvement'. I'm somewhat convinced that there will be major discussions coming up and it will be some time before we'll hear the end of that. Would not really matter I guess but since getting such a seal is (as far as I know) still something special you can bet it will attract some attention from yet a complete other line of media (not strictly computer based). "royal seal of approval stirrs up linux comunity" ?;-)
I guess thats a little bit to negative but still.. It can make you wonder. Anyway, it does proof that things are going the right way indeed and that the Linux fever is spreading rapidly. Hm, can't remember Windows ever getting a royal seal and I'm not really surprised indeed.;)
I consider myself being pretty non-biased at this since I hardly use X at all. Most of the time I'm using console. To put if frankly; I really don't care that much.
However, I do feel you are making some statements which aren't exactly fair. For example; if everyone does feel QT & KDE is free software, why didn't they put it on http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html ? The page is recently updated so that should not be the problem.
Next. If you read the description you can see that this free release is made so people can easily modify, rewrite, redistibute, or simply do what ever they like to it. Easy; you can do this because it is free software. Now... lets take a look at the QT license (http://www.troll.no/qpl/):
6. You may develop application programs, reusable components and other software items that link with the original or modified versions of the Software. These items, when distributed, are subject to the following requirements:
a. You must ensure that all recipients of machine-executable forms of these items are also able to receive and use the complete machine-readable source code to the items without any charge beyond the costs of data transfer.
b. You must explicitly license all recipients of your items to use and re-distribute original and modified versions of the items in both machine-executable and source code forms. The recipients must be able to do so without any charges whatsoever, and they must be able to re-distribute to anyone they choose.
c. If the items are not available to the general public, and the initial developer of the Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one.
So; whenever I make a program using the qt library the developers of this library can demand a copy of the program I made. Just considering this one little detail (I won't go into more due to the time) I think RedHat made the correct decision. I can't call this free software also.
Slashdot Mirror
FIrst of all I think people who are claiming this behavior of disallowing these services is a form of censorship have absolutely no clue what so ever of the meaning 'censorship'. If you are in some strange environment you act according to the so-called house rules. If these rules are not to your liking you should not enter the environment at all.
You can compare this with being at work. Most people are not allowed to download porn and such from the Internet during working hours. Censorship? "I don't think so Tim."
The second option which I sort off missed in the whole thread below; security. Napster, like many other programs around, is using a variable portnumber. Reason for me to ban it completely from my homenetwork. Call it whatever you want but I don't trust programs who seem to be incapable of using a fixed port adress. The reason is very simple offcourse; I'll be happy to open up a fixed port on my firewall in order to use the program. But I'm not opening a very wide range in order for one stupid program to actually do something.
Allthough the topic is all about napster I think its no more then fair to state that I feel completely the same about programs like icq and dcc transfers on irc networks.
One of the points I dislike the most is the fact that you see the "presidents want to be" (PWTB) talking their heads off on about anything but the actual political things they intend to do. To me the whole concept looks like something where a couple of men are competing in a race in which the one and only goal is to spend as much money as you can and most important; that you are being heard and seen. The message itself doesn't really matter; as long as people look out their window or switching on their tv and they immediatly get to see you telling them to vote for you.
But why should you vote for a certain person? I've seen some reports on CNN and local news programs in which such a PWTB was asked for some opinions. For example on the relationship with Europe. "Its very important", the man said. When the reporter asked why it was so important to him the PWTB gave a very vague answer (something like it is because its very important) and hurried back to the crowd, thus avoiding any other questions.
So to proof this idea of mine 'wrong' I took a look at this 'GoreSite' and focused on 1 small randomly picked detail:
Gore Details Plans To Make College More Affordable.
Here we can read how he discussed his plan (what plan?) and he announced new details (which details?) of his proposal. Then we see can read that he's a fighter for public education (duh).And now things get interesting... After clicking the 'more' button it first starts of with more of the same. Then we can read that, being vice president, Gore helped defeat efforts by Republicans in congress to elimintate the department of Education. Then we get to read what some of his opponents are doing wrong and what Gores plan and program can do.
Cheap talk!
Come on... Its very easy to tell the world what this fantastic plan of yours can do without telling how it works. And I really cannot believe that there are people actually believing in this cheap kind of propaganda. Here I just focused on 1 point but if you take a close look at the rest of the site you just see more of the above.
This article just focuses on Gore but I'm convinced the other candidates are just as bad. Correct me if you will but IMHO its all about the money. The only good part which I can see in campaining on the Internet is the fact that candidates with a smaller budget can also spread their ideas. This way the odds are kinda even.
Nevertheless; I think you missed out on the "Hobbynet" where people just can relax and read up on things they like. Offcourse this one is also very close to being related to the 'info' topic. So I don't think its possible to split things up like that.
I think that one way to make it less attractive for these people to hack those sites is to try and ignore 'm a bit more. I wonder how many money they can make with the stuff in the databases they hacked and if its really worth the effort.
The best way offcourse would be to stop using cards on the net alltogether. And I just can't understand why nobody has come up with something else. The electronic wallet (chipcard) is allready very common to use. You load it up & have some amount of money on it. Want to pay online? Hookup a cardreader to your pc and when you need to pay you just insert the card.
Sure; even this system can be tampered with but I'd rather loose 100 guilders which was stored on my chipcard then the whole amount of money I may spend on my creditcard (which lies around 78.000 guilders iirc).
Anyway; I saw on the local news that they indeed took some action; they sended a letter to MS with a list of questions they would like to get answered. That was about all of it. So I guess its kinda hard to tell what made them decide to do this.
Noone has claimed responsibility
So? I know of quite some bomb terrorist attacks which were never claimed. Also done by the goverment? "I don't think so Tim".
I'd say be glad that there is at least some official bureau who is actually doing something and isn't to arrogant to ask us for help. Dunno but IMHO they got it quite right with the choice of platforms too. A Linux binary? Cool. I know of goverments who would release such tools for DOS and who would also wonder why no-one is using it & laughing their heads of instead.
As for the so-called backdoor; if those people complaining were really concerned they should be aware that a nice firewall & some 1st level of clueness can fix these problems. I haven't tried the program myself (yet) but I never saw any complaints about the program needing to be suid or something in here. I would not be surprised if most of the people complaining didn't even bother to check out what program they are talking about which is, IMVHO, like showing bits off cluelessness.
Online documentation perhaps?
Easy; its new and it looks different. Sure, this may sound utterly stupid to you & me and a lot of other readers but this is really a very big issue. People want something 'new' to play with every now and then.
Lets translate this to Linux; why can't some people wait untill the 2.4.0 is out? Most of 'm are not troubled with any bugs which immobilize the OS but they are very curious to see all the new goodies inside. Heck; some even risk the chance of wrecking their system in order to use something even more new (2.3.x).
That this institute has indeed some influance was proven with the pie incident IMHO. Mr. Gates was there for a reason and it sure wasn't just a social visit as many people seem to have forgotten.
I'm quite curious to their findings; IMHO its very well posibly the outcome can be another devastating blow in the face of the MS company but we'll just have to wait and see.
Which RH version might that be? My last full installation was 5.0 and since then I only upgraded different parts of the system. However; Netscape is something which I tend to upgrade every now and then and up untill the 4.7 my Netscape 'bootup' allways pointed to /usr/doc/HTML/index.html. If your netscape script points to the RH homepage I'd suggest using rpm -Vf /usr/bin/netscape because I think your script could very well be tampered with.
Perhaps. But if a program is focused on corporate businesses that does not mean the program doesn't have to be userfriendly. On the contrary; the more userfriendly a program is the more money a company can save. Just think about it; if I need a mta and I can choose between two programs; one program does the job but the admin needs to follow a course for one day but the other can also do the job but the admin allready stated he can handle it as is. I think I know what some managers would choose. This is an extreme example but I do not agree with your statement that programs for corporate businesses can easily lack some userfriendly-ness.
Up untill the moment where I felt the need to learn more about the whole system and start fiddling with other options like mail, news, firewalls, etc, etc. I never had any major problems configuring programs like INN (I'm using INN stand alone to fetch & send my usenet messages, you don't need 'suck' and such if you know INN), ipfwadm/ipchains, etc. But the program which actually scared me off due to its allmost unreadeble configuration file has allways been sendmail.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not saying sendmail is a bad program because of that but I do think its a major part which could be changed in order to make it a little more userfriendly. I know there are lots of programs around which can do most of the configuration part for you but I don't like that sort of stuff. Simply due to the fact that I like to have control over my computer and thats exactly why I like Linux so much. To throw this control away (sort of) sounds kinda silly to me.
At the moment I'm using QMail myself since I found the setup and configuration a breeze compared to sendmail. Being an end user I really saw no need to use a full blown mailserver which is capable to support a company with over 2000 employees (assuming sendmail can handle this btw). But its allways nice to see that there is still development going on and I think I'll take a quick peek in the weekend. Never hurts to keep up with the facts, even if you don't like the program in question all that much.
There are so many search engines around that I sort of lost track. My favorites have allways been Yahoo and Altavista until I discovered the paralel search engines like Inference find which basicly submits your query to more then one search enginean and gives you a very nice formatted result. After discovering that I hardly use the 'single engines' anymore.
Back to college; after reading the article I get this feeling that going to school in the US is all about the money, that and nothing else. And this sort of scares me; if I'm not mistaken (which could very well be) this means, to a certain extend, that if you can't pay to go to a certain college you also do not have the options to follow the study which could be a very important factor for your future job. Instead you'd have to settle with something less which doesn't do much good for morale IMO.
Whether I got the facts straight or not I still prefer the 'European' (Dutch, since I'm from Holland) system. Social security; a lot of the expenses you have if your childeren goto school are paid by the goverment. First its social security; the parents receive a contribution to the costs their having in raising a child (this also contributes to the costs of education) and if the child is old enough (allways a very vague standard IMO) he/she receives the contribution, allthough things then start to work a bit different; part of the money is for the student to spend on education (which could also mean renting a room if they goto college in a different city) and the 2nd part is a loan which needs to be paid back after you're done with your education.
Like I said; its different and hard to compare offcourse. I'm sure that there are a few people allready thinking that everything comes for free over here. Well, thats not the case. Social security and all also means paying very much taxes, but IMHO its a very good way in making sure everyone has an option to study and make something of his live. I don't say this system allways works (who likes paying taxes?), but in most cases it does.
I think its RTFM time; you forgot to use the "" signs.
I wonder if there will be a network version coming out as being the latest "game hacker tool, shoot other people's processes".
This is really too much; who said that Linux wasn't fun again?
If you look at the market and the things Corel said they were setting up I think there should be no problem if they can persuede their stockholders that the company will keep going strong, even if their CEO isn't available for a period of time. Offcourse there is allways the little matter of living up to the promise.
Without knowing anything about the things that are going on in the Corel company my guess would be that they could face a rough time but in the end they'll manage.
Well, just like you said; it depends very much on the sort of machine you're using and the parts of the kernel. 2.2.11 never failed me on my system. Anyway; perhaps I'll notice some improvement once I give 2.2.13 a try.
One thing puzzles me though; may I assume that Linux users are by default not supersticious since kernel development now went to number 13 ? ;-)
Sure, but I can imagine that it will get tougher as the years pass by. Don't forget that in a whole lot of countrys the 'modem tax' has allready been 'introduced' and there is no way around it anymore. I'm not all that familier with US politics but I can't help thinking that the minute the goverment sees a potential income through phone taxes they'll be sure to consider it. And perhaps it won't be this time, or the next, but once it gets through....
Thats why I think it is a good thing to mention this if it becomes an issue. I mean; suppose it does come to the point I mentioned above and you would not be informed by magazines, like /., because everyone believes 'it will never happen'. Result could be that hardly anyone will protest against it. Like I said; I don't know how the US goverment handles stuff like that but over here in Europe they can be darn slippery from time to time.
My guess would be mostly companies who also have their contacts in the US and rely on encrypted communication. This is due to the fact that as long as you want to communicate with people from inside the US you'll have to lower the encryption bitcode to 128, which immediatly brings me to your next question;
2. Are there any import restrictions for strong crypto?
As far as I know there are, or there were to be more precise, but to a certain extend. I'm into PGP for quite some time now (started using it on FidoNet back in '93 / '94 I believe) and I can remember that we once had PGP which was "smuggled" out of the US using the book which another /. mentioned and finally there was some Fin (not 100% sure here) who actually started scanning the critter in order to compile it. That process took him several weeks (some people also have a social life ;-)) but when he was done the result was pgp 2.xi (international version) which was compatible with the US to some degree. However; pgpi could also be used in a way that it wasn't compatible with the pgp in the US. Afaik this was due to keylengths
However; all the documentation clearly stated that residents of the US were legally not allowed to use pgpi since it could handle over 1024 bit keys while in the US everyone was limited to 128bits. So basicly you don't have any import restrictions but since I can't see why anyone outside the US would settle for 128bit keys I think you could label this minor restriction as a major one when it concerns importing.
The reason why I personally feel Aptiva's suck it the simple fact that I owned one for 1 weekend and that was the 1st and last time I ever owned an IBM desktop computer; it was allmost 2 years ago (end '97 / begin '98) and I was, next to Linux, pretty deep into OS/2. Heck; I mainly choose the Aptiva (could buy it from work so I got a bit cheaper) because I was very hooked on OS/2. Everything went fine in the beginning; I just bought myself Tombraider II and was looking forward to play around a bit that same friday evening.
The horror immediatly struck me; Lara turned white at a resolution of 800x600:32! The videocard was an ATI Rage 3d (pro I believe). I figured it was just the game and started partitioning. I wanted; win95, WinNT, OS/2 and a little part for Linux.
That was the beginning & the end of that first weekend in '98 for me and I'm still pissed by it. I downloaded all the OS/2 drivers I needed for the Aptiva I got but at the very beginning OS/2 refused to partition my harddisk! Wasn't supported. So I called the helpdesk and they pointed me to another driver. Didn't do it. 3 different drivers later it sorta worked; I got OS/2 finally installed. And then my sound didn't work, my video was totally crap (640x480:16), and I kept getting harddisk errors from time to time.
I'm pretty sure I spend over 2 - 4 hours in calling the helpdesk (and believe me; I'm not that demanding but I did want to see the IBM computer I bought working with IBM's OS) and finally we came to the conclusion that this computer wasn't capable in running OS/2 which still eludes the helpdesk operator (we kept in touch) and myself. Fortunatly I could get my money back and later I decided to buy all the different parts I needed & assemble the PC myself and up until now I'm very happy with it. It even ran Tomb Raider II happily in 1024x768:32.
But if this is the sort of PC IBM delivered back then (and I heard more stories from people who also share these experiences) then I feel it sucks. You pay more for the IBM brand and then I expect an IBM software product to run. Not some Win95/98 OS because allmost every PC can run that sort of thing. I refuse to spend some 1500 Dutch Guilders extra just because a PC has the IBM name on it. After reading this article I guess more people felt the same way.
However; if the Aptiva dissapears then it doesn't have to result in IBM leaving the consumers market. They can allways come up with a new line which should be far more easy for them to accomplish these days; Major contestants are Win9x, WinNT (which will surely run on an Aptiva based machine) and Linux. I'm sure those will run on some 'Aptiva-2' line.
Still I wonder... It will take some time I think but if everything goes well it is IMHO very likely that they will come to a conclusing that Linux has indeed been the product they were looking for and that it should get the royal seal of approval. But what will get nominated? Linux as being a product, RedHat as being the shipping company, Apache as being the part which did it (if they only care about the webserver part), or perhaps Linus himself for having invented such a wonderfull product?
I personally think that some of the options I menationed could be overshadowed by some major turmoil in the "linux scene". And I wonder if it would be really a good thing for us. Just think about it; suppose they will nominate RedHat and it will get this mentioned 'royal seal of approvement'. I'm somewhat convinced that there will be major discussions coming up and it will be some time before we'll hear the end of that. Would not really matter I guess but since getting such a seal is (as far as I know) still something special you can bet it will attract some attention from yet a complete other line of media (not strictly computer based). "royal seal of approval stirrs up linux comunity" ? ;-)
I guess thats a little bit to negative but still.. It can make you wonder. Anyway, it does proof that things are going the right way indeed and that the Linux fever is spreading rapidly. Hm, can't remember Windows ever getting a royal seal and I'm not really surprised indeed. ;)
However, I do feel you are making some statements which aren't exactly fair. For example; if everyone does feel QT & KDE is free software, why didn't they put it on http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html ? The page is recently updated so that should not be the problem.
Next. If you read the description you can see that this free release is made so people can easily modify, rewrite, redistibute, or simply do what ever they like to it. Easy; you can do this because it is free software. Now... lets take a look at the QT license (http://www.troll.no/qpl/):
6. You may develop application programs, reusable components and other software items that link with the original or modified versions of the Software. These items, when distributed, are subject to the following requirements:
a. You must ensure that all recipients of machine-executable forms of these items are also able to receive and use the complete machine-readable source code to the items without any charge beyond the costs of data transfer.
b. You must explicitly license all recipients of your items to use and re-distribute original and modified versions of the items in both machine-executable and source code forms. The recipients must be able to do so without any charges whatsoever, and they must be able to re-distribute to anyone they choose.
c. If the items are not available to the general public, and the initial developer of the Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one.
So; whenever I make a program using the qt library the developers of this library can demand a copy of the program I made. Just considering this one little detail (I won't go into more due to the time) I think RedHat made the correct decision. I can't call this free software also.