One error must be corrected:the tern "open source" was *not* invented for differentiation from the free software movement. The term "open source" has always been meant to have exactly the same meaning as "free software"; it's just a rebadging for marketing reasons, because when suits hear "free software", they think "free beer" rather than "free speech".
And for my part I think it's a laudable goal. I think we should continue to emphasise the importance of software freedom - and I'd recommend French speakers to stick to the term "software libre" - but in English, the term "free software" creates a misunderstanding in the mind of the listener that the term "open source" avoids. --
The Mindcraft benchmarks *were* FUD. Mindcraft *did* tell outright, bare-faced lies in their reports about it (at least one lie). The tests *were* unrealistic, and Linux did always perform better than NT for realistic loads. The fact that Linux's networking stack was improved even further as a result of some hugely unrealistic tests that exposed a particular bottleneck that NT didn't have, that was later fixed, shouldn't tempt us into thinking that Mindcraft did right. They didn't, and they deserved the "pay for the benchmark results you want" pillory that they got.
Ever since Linux fixed the problem, lots of people have gone around talking as if it's been shown that Mindcraft were right all along. They weren't - they're outright liars and makers of biased tests to order. --
The name "Linus Torvalds" is taken, and presumably has been for some time (I would have given it to Linus if I'd found otherwise, I swear!). So if he wanted to post as himself, he'd have to write to Rob asking that his name be assigned to him.
If I were Rob, I'd mail those free software luminaries that haven't already posted here with/. passwords reserved for them... --
Yes, I know these are proposed findings of law, not of fact. The point is that if Microsoft want to have a serious go at proposing findings of law, they have to propose findings that don't contradict the findings of fact, and they can't do that. Until they learn to admit they're a monopoly, their legal submissions basically go in the round file, giving the DoJ carte blanche. --
Wow. It's like one of those old science fiction movies where you tell the computer "The next sentence is false. The previous sentence was true" and it blows up, fireworks shooting from the front panel as it desperately spins its tapes trying to figure out the paradox.
The findings of fact game is over. Jackson's findings are pretty much set in stone now; they couldn't be much more irreversible if they were a constitutional amendment. But Microsoft just can't adjust to the new game, where they try to limit the damage done to them by the findings of law and the judgement, because that means working in the framework the findings of fact create. In other words, it means admitting they're at fault. And that just does not compute for them; they don't know how to do it. They'll sooner thrash about in useless, irrelevant legal nonsense, because they simply don't know how to play this new game.
Mind you, they barely knew how to play the old one. Their Achilles Heel all along has been that the court was just another trade show, and you can baffle 'em with bullshit and wow 'em with a rigged demo. They really can't adjust to what's happening to them, and now it will be their downfall.
I just hope that the sentencing is chosen to do the rest of us some good. --
...because I wouldn't be sitting there trying to get as much done online as possible during the time I was dialled out; I'd just stop and start as I pleased.
Of course, that's because they charge us for local calls over here... --
No, not the operating system, the version number. Sure, to some extent it's a cynical attempt to make it sound modern at launch time but out-of-date when the next version rolls around. But:
* unlike most version numbers, it means something * it can't suffer from version inflation * it means you don't forget when it was launched.
I think it would have caught on if it hadn't been the Evil Empire behind it... --
I don't plan to answer the rather pointless barbs thrown at the communities formed around sexual alternatives, which seem to be there only so that he can draw clever but wholly bogus analogies between sex and coding. But it's certainly my experience that these communities provide valuable space where you can be clear and honest about desire without the usual embarrasment and coded messages that often end up meaning that no messages are sent at all, and this can certainly make it easier for those of us who don't find being suave and subtle comes naturally to get laid.
But the secret is that you don't have to be a sadomasochist, or polyamourous, or queer to join. All you need is a few brain cells to rub together, and a positive and open attitude about sex and sexuality. There are organisations that campaign around all issues of sexual freedom and fight negative attitudes that apply even to the very desire to have sex at all, and you can get involved even if you're monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual. You'll meet lots of interesting and smart people and hear a lot of new ideas on the subject, and you'll certainly hear about new ways to combat the fucked-up memes about sex that this society promotes - and which, if you ask me, are the real barriers that stand in the way of more geeks finding the special pleasures of getting laid.
If you are a pervert, of course, what are you doing? Get in touch with the e-pervs in your area straight away - it's a great opportunity.
Remember, this is important - it's about the serious business of having fun. --
They mean evil DeCSS "pirates" and reverse engineers, shrinkwrap license breakers, and crypto exporters. They mean those who provide security information that they'd rather was kept obscure. They mean software patent violators, Napster providers, Xenu $cientology mirrors, anonymous proxies and mail systems, and people who provide ways around filtering proxies. Basically, they mean to act to bolster their power against most everything that Slashdot holds dear.
I'd like to believe I'm being paranoid about this, but they've never given me a reason to feel otherwise. If they'd prefer that I was less paranoid, perhaps they should hold off legislation (eg UCITA) making things like the above more illegal. It would also help if they didn't pass legislation legitimising genuinely odious practices like spam.
I'd be happier, I think, if I could believe they were doing this to make us all safer, but I'm afraid that possibility doesn't move the meter from 0 on the credibilityometer. --
Progress can happen now Papows has left.
on
IBM banks on Linux
·
· Score: 2
Jeff Papows resigned from head of the Lotus division in December. His behaviour was so strongly pro-Microsoft that conspiracy theorists thought he must be in their pay. Now he's left, we might actually get somewhere. --
They hope to release Version 4.0 as Open Source by mid-Feb, but until then they're still charging for Version 3 just as before.
Who's going to buy it? Of those who really have to have it right now, who's going to buy it and not throughly resent it? When Netscape announced the open sourcing of Netscape 5, they had the sense to make Version 4 gratis at the same time.
I'm not in the audience for this software anyway, it just seems a curious decision... --
I'm a user space developer. I'd be pretty wary of getting into the mad world of kernel development, and one of the things that would put me off is the difficulty of running a debugger against my code. So one of the attractive things about the HURD is that I could do stuff that would normally require me to be a kernel hacker in user space, making the whole development process easier.
Except that it isn't. Not according to Stallman and the HURD developers, anyway. The received wisdom, confirmed by RMS and others, is that one of the things that allowed Linux to streak ahead of the HURD in completeness and useability was the relative ease of debugging on a monolithic kernel, compared to the microkernel.
Clearly, I'm not getting something important: can someone lay it out for me? I'd be dead grateful... --
This algorithm was published quite a while ago: I've implemented it myself. It's best use is to look for "NSA key" type backdoors in closed source software, like Lotus Notes. The only "news" is that nCipher have worked out a way to turn it into publicity for their product. As everyone is saying, it's not very contentful.
By the way, Adi Shamir (and Ron Rivest, for that matter) have done a *lot* more crypto work than just RSA. Shamir is one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis (along with Eli Biham). --
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Mostly, the bad guys online give themselves away with everything they do. They try and hide it, but... you can just smell it. The lack of feeling for what a community is. The money-oriented thinking. The Microsoftisms in their HTML. Look at the Linux One pages for an example: the stench of ignorant corporate greed and personal small mindedness is hard to ignore.
Well, LinuxTECH Uruguay may be evil for all I know, but... they sure don't smell bad. They come across like one of us. Their site design is nice and clean and quick. The biggest giveaway is their huge collection of links - the bad guys don't link outside their own site in case you might reach another side of the story. Their news page even includes a link to a Slashdot story - and often refers to GNU/Linux.
I'm just convinced that these people are on our side. I hope this can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction soon. --
Not all issues revolve around money. Issues of ideals, of hypocrisy, and of betrayal of trust can arise entirely outside the context of money. If you have to see all of life in pounds sterling and pence, though, remember that Rob is selling our eyeballs to make a living now. --
The comment you quote reads to me exactly the way it reads to you. I agree that it's better to release software when it's ready, but, well, none of the (small) bits of open source software on my Web pages are ready; I realised in the end that I'd never get around to making them so. If someone else wants to, they're welcome. If the Slash source were to be released, a project aimed at making it more generally useble would certainly spring up around it.
But why am I writing this? Just by trying to reason about the issue further, I've delayed the release by another day.
I don't despise you, Taco and Hemos, but I certainly despise that kind of sentiment. You must really think that we're all children - worse, that we're all *your* children. But Slashdot is much more a creation of its community than of its editors, and the community deserves better. I can't say how much this saddens me. --
How do you take apart requests without ::Registry?
on
Mod Perl or Servlets?
·
· Score: 2
The first book you name seems to imply that you have to use CGI.pm to do things like take apart POST requests, and therefore you couldn't avoid::Registry altogether. There's a::RegistryLite (or somesuch) that does the same with slightly less emphasis on strict CGI compatibility, and there's a module designed to do away with the need for::Registry but that hasn't been released to CPAN yet because it's barely ready.
Some of our best advocates have managed never to put a foot wrong; I think the LWN writers are always bang on, for example. But hell, some of the best deserve to be forgiven their mistakes, they've made a lot happen and talked a lot of sense. I'll nominate Bruce Perens for this category; I think it's well deserved, and besides, ESR or Chris DiBona would lose $10,000 behind the sofa:-) --
Slashdot Mirror
One error must be corrected:the tern "open source" was *not* invented for differentiation from the free software movement. The term "open source" has always been meant to have exactly the same meaning as "free software"; it's just a rebadging for marketing reasons, because when suits hear "free software", they think "free beer" rather than "free speech".
And for my part I think it's a laudable goal. I think we should continue to emphasise the importance of software freedom - and I'd recommend French speakers to stick to the term "software libre" - but in English, the term "free software" creates a misunderstanding in the mind of the listener that the term "open source" avoids.
--
The Mindcraft benchmarks *were* FUD. Mindcraft *did* tell outright, bare-faced lies in their reports about it (at least one lie). The tests *were* unrealistic, and Linux did always perform better than NT for realistic loads. The fact that Linux's networking stack was improved even further as a result of some hugely unrealistic tests that exposed a particular bottleneck that NT didn't have, that was later fixed, shouldn't tempt us into thinking that Mindcraft did right. They didn't, and they deserved the "pay for the benchmark results you want" pillory that they got.
Ever since Linux fixed the problem, lots of people have gone around talking as if it's been shown that Mindcraft were right all along. They weren't - they're outright liars and makers of biased tests to order.
--
"unzip" under Linux will allow you to read the contents of this file.
--
The name "Linus Torvalds" is taken, and presumably has been for some time (I would have given it to Linus if I'd found otherwise, I swear!). So if he wanted to post as himself, he'd have to write to Rob asking that his name be assigned to him.
/. passwords reserved for them...
If I were Rob, I'd mail those free software luminaries that haven't already posted here with
--
Yes, I know these are proposed findings of law, not of fact. The point is that if Microsoft want to have a serious go at proposing findings of law, they have to propose findings that don't contradict the findings of fact, and they can't do that. Until they learn to admit they're a monopoly, their legal submissions basically go in the round file, giving the DoJ carte blanche.
--
Wow. It's like one of those old science fiction movies where you tell the computer "The next sentence is false. The previous sentence was true" and it blows up, fireworks shooting from the front panel as it desperately spins its tapes trying to figure out the paradox.
The findings of fact game is over. Jackson's findings are pretty much set in stone now; they couldn't be much more irreversible if they were a constitutional amendment. But Microsoft just can't adjust to the new game, where they try to limit the damage done to them by the findings of law and the judgement, because that means working in the framework the findings of fact create. In other words, it means admitting they're at fault. And that just does not compute for them; they don't know how to do it. They'll sooner thrash about in useless, irrelevant legal nonsense, because they simply don't know how to play this new game.
Mind you, they barely knew how to play the old one. Their Achilles Heel all along has been that the court was just another trade show, and you can baffle 'em with bullshit and wow 'em with a rigged demo. They really can't adjust to what's happening to them, and now it will be their downfall.
I just hope that the sentencing is chosen to do the rest of us some good.
--
...because I wouldn't be sitting there trying to get as much done online as possible during the time I was dialled out; I'd just stop and start as I pleased.
Of course, that's because they charge us for local calls over here...
--
Windows 95.
No, not the operating system, the version number. Sure, to some extent it's a cynical attempt to make it sound modern at launch time but out-of-date when the next version rolls around. But:
* unlike most version numbers, it means something
* it can't suffer from version inflation
* it means you don't forget when it was launched.
I think it would have caught on if it hadn't been the Evil Empire behind it...
--
I can't hold a conversation with an AC; anyone nameful care to raise the issue?
--
I don't plan to answer the rather pointless barbs thrown at the communities formed around sexual alternatives, which seem to be there only so that he can draw clever but wholly bogus analogies between sex and coding. But it's certainly my experience that these communities provide valuable space where you can be clear and honest about desire without the usual embarrasment and coded messages that often end up meaning that no messages are sent at all, and this can certainly make it easier for those of us who don't find being suave and subtle comes naturally to get laid.
But the secret is that you don't have to be a sadomasochist, or polyamourous, or queer to join. All you need is a few brain cells to rub together, and a positive and open attitude about sex and sexuality. There are organisations that campaign around all issues of sexual freedom and fight negative attitudes that apply even to the very desire to have sex at all, and you can get involved even if you're monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual. You'll meet lots of interesting and smart people and hear a lot of new ideas on the subject, and you'll certainly hear about new ways to combat the fucked-up memes about sex that this society promotes - and which, if you ask me, are the real barriers that stand in the way of more geeks finding the special pleasures of getting laid.
If you are a pervert, of course, what are you doing? Get in touch with the e-pervs in your area straight away - it's a great opportunity.
Remember, this is important - it's about the serious business of having fun.
--
They mean evil DeCSS "pirates" and reverse engineers, shrinkwrap license breakers, and crypto exporters. They mean those who provide security information that they'd rather was kept obscure. They mean software patent violators, Napster providers, Xenu $cientology mirrors, anonymous proxies and mail systems, and people who provide ways around filtering proxies. Basically, they mean to act to bolster their power against most everything that Slashdot holds dear.
I'd like to believe I'm being paranoid about this, but they've never given me a reason to feel otherwise. If they'd prefer that I was less paranoid, perhaps they should hold off legislation (eg UCITA) making things like the above more illegal. It would also help if they didn't pass legislation legitimising genuinely odious practices like spam.
I'd be happier, I think, if I could believe they were doing this to make us all safer, but I'm afraid that possibility doesn't move the meter from 0 on the credibilityometer.
--
Jeff Papows resigned from head of the Lotus division in December. His behaviour was so strongly pro-Microsoft that conspiracy theorists thought he must be in their pay. Now he's left, we might actually get somewhere.
--
They hope to release Version 4.0 as Open Source by mid-Feb, but until then they're still charging for Version 3 just as before.
Who's going to buy it? Of those who really have to have it right now, who's going to buy it and not throughly resent it? When Netscape announced the open sourcing of Netscape 5, they had the sense to make Version 4 gratis at the same time.
I'm not in the audience for this software anyway, it just seems a curious decision...
--
That's what it says to me, anyway...
--
I'm a user space developer. I'd be pretty wary of getting into the mad world of kernel development, and one of the things that would put me off is the difficulty of running a debugger against my code. So one of the attractive things about the HURD is that I could do stuff that would normally require me to be a kernel hacker in user space, making the whole development process easier.
Except that it isn't. Not according to Stallman and the HURD developers, anyway. The received wisdom, confirmed by RMS and others, is that one of the things that allowed Linux to streak ahead of the HURD in completeness and useability was the relative ease of debugging on a monolithic kernel, compared to the microkernel.
Clearly, I'm not getting something important: can someone lay it out for me? I'd be dead grateful...
--
And Microsoft have still given us no good answer as to what their NSA key is for.
I have been paying close attention.
--
This algorithm was published quite a while ago: I've implemented it myself. It's best use is to look for "NSA key" type backdoors in closed source software, like Lotus Notes. The only "news" is that nCipher have worked out a way to turn it into publicity for their product. As everyone is saying, it's not very contentful.
By the way, Adi Shamir (and Ron Rivest, for that matter) have done a *lot* more crypto work than just RSA. Shamir is one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis (along with Eli Biham).
--
--
Mostly, the bad guys online give themselves away with everything they do. They try and hide it, but... you can just smell it. The lack of feeling for what a community is. The money-oriented thinking. The Microsoftisms in their HTML. Look at the Linux One pages for an example: the stench of ignorant corporate greed and personal small mindedness is hard to ignore.
Well, LinuxTECH Uruguay may be evil for all I know, but... they sure don't smell bad. They come across like one of us. Their site design is nice and clean and quick. The biggest giveaway is their huge collection of links - the bad guys don't link outside their own site in case you might reach another side of the story. Their news page even includes a link to a Slashdot story - and often refers to GNU/Linux.
I'm just convinced that these people are on our side. I hope this can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction soon.
--
Not all issues revolve around money. Issues of ideals, of hypocrisy, and of betrayal of trust can arise entirely outside the context of money. If you have to see all of life in pounds sterling and pence, though, remember that Rob is selling our eyeballs to make a living now.
--
The comment you quote reads to me exactly the way it reads to you. I agree that it's better to release software when it's ready, but, well, none of the (small) bits of open source software on my Web pages are ready; I realised in the end that I'd never get around to making them so. If someone else wants to, they're welcome. If the Slash source were to be released, a project aimed at making it more generally useble would certainly spring up around it.
But why am I writing this? Just by trying to reason about the issue further, I've delayed the release by another day.
I don't despise you, Taco and Hemos, but I certainly despise that kind of sentiment. You must really think that we're all children - worse, that we're all *your* children. But Slashdot is much more a creation of its community than of its editors, and the community deserves better. I can't say how much this saddens me.
--
...anyone care to finish this one off?
--
The first book you name seems to imply that you have to use CGI.pm to do things like take apart POST requests, and therefore you couldn't avoid ::Registry altogether. There's a ::RegistryLite (or somesuch) that does the same with slightly less emphasis on strict CGI compatibility, and there's a module designed to do away with the need for ::Registry but that hasn't been released to CPAN yet because it's barely ready.
So what am I missing?
--
Some of our best advocates have managed never to put a foot wrong; I think the LWN writers are always bang on, for example. But hell, some of the best deserve to be forgiven their mistakes, they've made a lot happen and talked a lot of sense. I'll nominate Bruce Perens for this category; I think it's well deserved, and besides, ESR or Chris DiBona would lose $10,000 behind the sofa :-)
--
The EFF struck me as good nominees. I'd like to see what you're saying documented better first.
Isn't it worrying how quickly this category has gained two "anyone but these people" nominations? It doesn't say good things about our community.
--