Mususe of the term "script kiddie"?
on
Tracking Mafiaboy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Funny how the term "script kiddie" is nowadays applied to almost any cracker. Back in the days were men were men and hackers were coders, "script kiddie" was pretty specifically a reference to individuals who used the scripts of others in the security community to bad ends, without really understanding what was going on (winnuke.exe, anyone?). On the other hand, surely this "mafiaboy" character had at least a proficient knowledge of scripting languages and programming to have put together such a massive operation as this? I'd call him a black hat hacker or cracker -- but definitely not "script kiddie".
By using words like these in the wrong context, we're linguistically painting orselves into a corner. This reminds me of something C. S. Lewis once wrote:
The word gentleman 'originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - 'Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well.
And we all know what the DMCA says about tools for circumventing copy protection.
I thought the DMCA only stipulates laws for devices designed specifically copyright violation? A marker pen clearly doesn't fall into this category. Otherwise they could have outlawed CD burners, photocopiers and who knows what else by now.
I'm surprised there are still people on Slashdot who haven't heard of the exception to patent law called Independent Discovery. I could go ahead and describe it here, or I could quote one of the more eminent legal resources on the Web. Basically, if you didn't copy the patent directly off their patent claim sheets, then they don't have a case against you (US and UK law):
1. Independent Discovery
Anyone who creates the same secret information independently -- even if it is identical to your business' trade secret -- is free to use and disclose that information. In other words, creating a trade secret, by itself, does not grant you exclusive rights to use that secret.
EXAMPLE: Dudely Company and Manly Company sell competing after-shave products. Dudely creates a database that compares different brands of after-shave advertising and resulting annual sales. Dudely uses this trade secret information to determine how to allocate its advertising budget. Manly's president independently creates a similar database and publishes it in a business book. Dudely will be unable to protect its formula under existing NDAs because its database is no longer a trade secret.
To preserve a possible claim of independent discovery, many companies will not look at materials furnished by an outsider who wants to sell something to the company. By refusing to consider unsolicited materials, the company has a better argument for its independent creation of similar products. One method of proving independent creation is to use clean room techniques (see "Clean Rooms" below)
You think the.NET standard is legally less safe to implement than, say Sun's proprietary Java (you didn't sound so ambivolous towards Java). Or do you think we should be coding desktop applications in C and Perl?
The very idea of a standard that is not freely implementable is to be laughed at. If you don't want it to be implemented, you don't call it a standard -- you call it Intellectual Property or a trade secret. Microsoft has positioned the.NET as a cross-platform runtime environment and the Mono people are realising that vision.
I'm not one of those so-called "pragmatists" who argue for Free Software whilst using Microsoft Outlook and Word, but I do recognise a good, free technology when I see one. And this time, it's from Microsoft. Otherwise, how would you explain the existance of Linux, a clone of UNIX, or the IBM PC itself, with which you're so familiar? Again and again, we've seen examples of people implementing standards in clean-room environments -- it's part of the software industry, and trying to gun down projects like Mono for doing the exact same thing is simply unfair.
Idealism is something that's too often ignored these days, but your arguments against.NET represent the inverse situation; your attitude towards.NET illustrates what can go wrong when ideals are misapplied.
Any legal objections are simply false. Eben Moglen, professor of Law and Legal History, and the Free Software foundation's top lawyer, has already given the go-ahead for the Mono , therefore I can only explain Alan's anti-.NET arguments to be either misinformed, or written to misinform. I hope he will redirect his efforts to more worthy issues in the future; he will then once again have my full support.
I was reading along happily until I got to this part of Alan's response: What are your feelings on Microsoft's.NET and any initiatives to make the technology work on Linux?
Alan:
Microsoft has publically stated that it has patents on critical parts of.NET and will enforce them. If you think that.NET is a good idea, or cloning.NET is a good idea, remember you won't have a US market unless they find you amusing enough to allow to live on. And if you think Microsoft can be trusted on this look at their recent activities against Samba.
This is FUD, plain and simple. The fact is, that the.NET CLR and C# specifications are right up there on the ECMA standards board for anyone to freely implement. Any non-standardised aspects of Free implementations of the.NET framework (for example Mono) are being develped without the use so-called 'Shared Source' code, only by observing the Microsoft environment. There are several examples of legal precendence for clean-room reverse engineering -- see here for a comprehensive exploration of this area of the law.
The system itself is mildly interesting as a technology. Its yet another virtual machine, roughly equivalent to picojava in capabilities. It has an interesting way to self generate IDL, but one which their own papers say cannot represent all programming languages.
Once again, the technology takes ideas from Perl (foreach, anyone?), Java (VM, OO style) Visual Basic (properties done right this time). Best of all, it's designed to be able to integrate with existing code -- existing Gnome/KDE/console programs will be able to call a simple C library to invoke functions from a cross-platform.NET object file. I think this is far more complicit with UNIX's component-based design than Java's 'rewrite everything in Java' mantra.
And of course it "cannot represent all programming languages." You of all people should know that Alan -- this is by design, not a flaw of the architecture. There's always a balance to be made between running code natively and running it on a Virtual Machine. What I can say is that.NET comes a damn sight closer to the goal of language unification than Java (or any other cross-platform executable platform) ever did, and I bet you know that full well. So I don't understand why you're making these empty arguments.
The more dangerous parts of
all this are not so much.NET but chunks of the model that not only the.NET product and the Java standards rely on. Things like xmlrpc, soap and the stuff on top of them are designed to "interwork through firewalls". A better phrase would be "go through the firewall like a knife through butter in a way that prevents the companies involved monitoring the activity".
When all you have is an encrypted SSL session how are you going to figure out if its a legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company or someone in your company uploading your entire company customer database?
And this is a bad thing? Point-to-point crypto, as you point out so aptly, is something that allows the decentralisation of control. Sure, this may be a bad thing for packet-Nazis ("legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company" as you say), but the fact is that the world is begging for a secure point-to-pont encryption technology that's both relatively secure and simple to set up (I am a GPG junkie but that doesn't mean I expect the rest of my family to be).
Alan's ideas are usually good and I've been involved with the formation of the AFFS in the UK as well as having donated to the EFF in the US several times, but he will not make any friends by insulting some of the smartest developers on the Linux desktop today. Like it or not,.NET is becoming a force to be reckoned with on Linux.
The Mono.NET framework implementation is more complete than many people realise, and in terms of efficiency, design, feature-completeness, and best of all, freedom, it beats the non-free Java implementations hands-down.
Debian users will be able to apt-get install a JIT virtual machine that can play cross-platform applets in their browsers for the first time ever without resorting to propriterary software, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most important thing we can ask for from a desktop OS -- a good, modern infrastructure for the development of desktop and server applications.
Any legal objections are simply false. Eben Moglen, rofessor of Law he will then once again have my full support.
Bochs and VMWare are completely different animals. Comparing their relative performances is simply nonsensical. From the bochs site:
Bochs is a highly portable free IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++,
that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86
CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS.
On the other hand, VMWare is a virtual machine implementation. Whilst Bochs can mimic an Intel processor on any platform to which it's ported, VMWare depends on being able to pass machine code directly to the native CPU without interpreting it, and therefore its performace is pretty snappy.
At least you can say appples and oranges are both round, but this 'review' takes the biscuit. Bochs will never "shape up nicely" in the way that the article expects it to because it's a fundamentally different piece of software to VMWare. Plex86 (formerly FreeMWare), founded by the lead developer of Bochs, would have been the Open Source analogy for VMWare, had its development not died off several months ago due to a terminal lack of developer interest.
VP3 is Open Source; XVID isn't. This is because the authors of VP3 are releasing their code under the LGPL license. On the other hand, XVID is made of a combination of Open Source GPL'd code and proprietary OpenDivX licensed code. Notice that the OpenDivX license has a number of restrictions which make it proprietary and non-free. The XVID codec could, for example, never be distributed with Debian, Mandrake or any other Free Software operating system, whereas VP3 could. XVID may be a great codec, but don't spread lies about its licensing, fluor2.
Anyone who's been tracking Evolution development from the early days will be aware that it used to have preliminary NNTP (news/Usenet) support that was lobotomised for the 1.0 release. At present, this is the only major feature that's holding it back from competing with the likes of Outlook Express and Outlook. Sure, GNOME already has the Pan newsreader, but it's clearly designed for computer-literate people and doesn't really integrate with any email client.
So, what's holding back NNTP support? It can't be all that difficult to do, after all Evolution provides all the infrastructure for handling large lists of messages. Only when NNTP support arrives do I think Evolution will be-feature complete.
One thing has become very clear in the Linux world over the last couple of years since the dot com bubble burst. Open Source/Free Software is here to stay, and half-way proprietary solutions won't be accepted by the wider community.
For example, Macromedia have been supplying a Linux Flash client for years, yet it has failed to validify the Flash format as an open standard. It has become a "necessary evil" for sites that feel the need to look 'interactive', but has had minimal market penetration beyond that.
I don't think that releasing a binary-only QuickTime codec would solve any real problems: Firstly, it wouldn't be distributed with some of the most popular distributions like Debian and Mandrake for philosophical reasons as well as technical reasons -- without source code, there's no way to know that the codec will still work in 2 years or that it'll be made available for new architectures, or that bugs will be promptly fixed. NVidia's proprietary graphics drivers for XFree86 have, for example, backfired in many ways. Far from soliciting support from the community, their consistent failure to release specifications for their hardware has irked and frustrated the wider Linux community (not just the Free Software zealots) to the extent that the Tainting monitor had to be added to the kernel just to track bug reports from users of buggy proprietary kernel modules.
I'd say that the future lies with open video codecs like VP3 from On2 Technologies, who've announced that they'll be working with the community to ensure that their next release is LGPL'd and their patents made available in the public domain. This is the kind of codec that should become the de-facto standard on the Web -- not some binary-only QuickTime Sorenson codec that was withheld for years and released begrudgingly. A few years ago, Linux users were quick to praise and embrace vendors of proprietary software who supported Linux, but now, I think the community is big enough to look at the bigger picture and support open standards like VP3 and Ogg that will ensure a more accessible and independent future for Web content in the future.
I was on the beta testing team of the next-generation Nokia Communicator which also uses Symbian OS v7.0. It was pretty snappy and responsive and the hardware is sleek, but I was less than impressed by the 'office software' capabilities: In their attempt to support proprietary Microsoft formats they've neglected to offer export filters for open file formats. For example, the word processor can only export Microsoft.DOC, not.RTF or even.TXT. Similarly, the spreadsheet can only export.XLS and not CSV or tab-separated data. This is a step backwards, IMO, but sadly I doubt that few mainstream users will complain. It's just a bit ironic that even the office software counterparts in Microsoft Windows CE offer file filters for 'open standard' formats -- why can't Symbian?
I thought the mp3 format couldn't be used by official GNU projects because of the patent issues. Surely it should be GNU Ogg Vorbis or something? Besides which, isn't the name a bit ambiguous? It sounds like a clean-room GNU implementation of the MP3 codec or something.
Ximian has explained that it is developing the Mono.NET runtime and C# implementations to provide a modern development environment for the GNOME / Linux desktop. Of course, a pleasant side-effect of writing future applications in C# will be that it's easy to make them Windows compatible. Do you see a future in producing cross-platform software solutions or will Ximian remain devoted to the Linux desktop? Will Ximian use Windows.Forms (in conjunction with a GTK# compatibility layer) or will GTK# be used directly by Ximian programs? After all, the two toolkits have fundamentally different philosophies behind widget packing/placement etc.
But the code is still patented? No! A post from Dan Miller, CEO of On2 Technologies on vorbis-dev: > Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
> granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
> to the code? That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes
But what about VP4? It's a better codec, and it's proprietary. VP3 is old news. This is in fact the business model taken by some of the leading self-sustaining free software projects like GhostScript, which releases a non-commercial-with-source version and a GPL'd version of GhostScript that's about a year old. Thus, the GPL'd version comes with Linux distributions, non-commercial entities can make use of the latest GhostScript, the company makes money selling licenses to perpetuate the development of the Free Software version, and everyone's happy.
VP3 is a really powerful codec. It's like a next-generation DivX -- similarly to DivX the only thing holding back from widespread use were its worrying licensing terms. Now that it's free I'm looking forward to seeing this adopted fully by the community.
This means that streaming video embedded in webpages for the Linux / Free Software clan is now a reality, but perhaps more importantly, VP3 makes it possible to eliminate adware/spyware like RealVideo and the equally obnoxious and platform-specific Windows Media. Cheers for all the great work, On2 Technologies! This is, in my opinion, one of the most important things to happen on the open source scene for quite some time.
A portrait of the Mandrake user from a collection of Linux User Caricatures: This chap (baby) is the new distro on the market(compared to the others anyway). He is always seen as a new lunix user hence the baby look, and the distro is regarded as one best for beginners to learn who might be migrating from windows to linux.
Red Hat does not own Linux, so it cannot charge for each copy it puts out in the way that Microsoft charges for Windows or Sun charges for Solaris.
"The only way we can make money in this business is in support," Mr Hoffmann told BBC News Online.
"That ranges from training down to system maintenance, deployment and integration with other applications.
"We focus on those customers who are able to pay the bill - the enterprises," he said.
Give me a company that sells support over one that sells software any day. The moment you put software in a box, its most important component -- the ability to be adapted and updated for security fixes and feature enhancements -- dies. Anyway, which is more successful, "theKompany" or RedHat?
There's also an interesting analysis on LinuxToday of theKompany's tactics and how they allegedly intentionally damage Free Software. Although I wouldn't take all the accusations at face value, there's certainly something worrying about the claims.
Assuming the premises of your joke are that you want to get rid of "John.Smith", by moving it to/dev/null you'd end up replacing your null character device with a standard file. This standard file would slowly bloat until the system became unusable or the filesystem got filled up./dev/null should only be used as a part of a stream, for example in pipes. On UNIX, one does what I presume you meant by unlinking a file, so the command would be rm John.Smith. HTH.
It seems not a single poster got what the parent post meant, so I'll give up my mod points to clarify what he means.
Although I haven't used Microsoft Windows for a few years, I remember back when ActiveX came out it was primarily a replacement for "custom controls." It was only adapted for use on Webpages later, (thankfully) with limited success. The primary idea behind implementing Gecko as an ActiveX component would be that any cretinous (or otherwise, I guess) Visual Basic "coder" could drag-and-drop a Gecko component onto a form and embed an instant browser into their program. I guess it's a good idea.
This has nothing do do with supporting ActiveX controls on a webpage within Gecko/Mozilla.
See post:
Grave licensing issue with VP3. Basically, the conclusion is that the license is "proprietary with source" and in reality amounts to something similar to Microsoft's Shared Source scheme. Modifying or distributing the VP3 codec in any form is legally dubious. I agree, it's Strange that On2 Technologies tries to pass VP3 off as "Open Source" on their site as it clearly doesn't meet the definition, except for that one can passively 'read' the code.
I'd be careful with these people and wait for a real Open Source codec like Ogg Tarkin to mature, or contact On2 to get them to fix their license or, alternatively, to remove the "Open Source" references from their site.
Maybe I've been out of the loop to long. What does a CD-ROM have to do with internet connectivity? Surely all you need is a telephone number, username and password (assuming the isp endpoint is running PPP, or perhaps SLIP)? Does AOL provide these details on CD-ROM, or just some proprietary dialler/sockets software? I remember Demon internet used to sell a connection pack that included Trumpet Winsock, a sockets implementation for Microsoft Windows, but I gather recent Windows releases have built in Internet connectivity and (of course) are bundled with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
VP3 is distributed under a proprietary, non-free license that, whilst it purports to be open, meets neither the Open Source nor Free Software definitions.
The problem lies herein: (e) Notwithstanding Sections 2.1 (a), (b), and (c) above, no license is granted to You, under any intellectual property rights including patent rights, to modify the code in such a way as to create or accept data that is incompatible with data produced or accepted by the Original Code. By way of example but not limitation, a Modification that adds support for other compression data such as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 would be permissible, but only if the resulting Larger Work continues to support playback of VP3.2 data. Modifications that provide only playback or encode support are also permissible. However, a Modification that adds support for encoding or playback of any non- VP3.2 compatible files or bitstreams without complementary support for VP3.2 encoding or playback would not be permissible, and no license is granted for such Modification(s).
Basically, this is denying users the right to modify the source code to produce binaries that produce a stream incompatible with the original software. It may sound good to some, but I urge developers to think twice before releasing modifications or compiled versions of the VP3 codec because, even if unintended, a compiler bug or error in your modifications to the software could mean that the stream your modified VP3 codec produces is unintentionally incompatible with the VP3 specification, opening you to legal procedure from On2 Technologies, the proprietors of the codec.
The VP3 codec licensing terms are not only not Open Source, they are a threat to developers, contribuors and distributers of VP3 both in source code and compiled form. Please contact On2 Technologies and try to convince them to update their license to remove this dangerous clause, and spread the word to your friends!
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By using words like these in the wrong context, we're linguistically painting orselves into a corner.
This reminds me of something C. S. Lewis once wrote:
The word gentleman 'originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - 'Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well.
And we all know what the DMCA says about tools for circumventing copy protection.
I thought the DMCA only stipulates laws for devices designed specifically copyright violation? A marker pen clearly doesn't fall into this category. Otherwise they could have outlawed CD burners, photocopiers and who knows what else by now.
1. Independent Discovery
Anyone who creates the same secret information independently -- even if it is identical to your business' trade secret -- is free to use and disclose that information. In other words, creating a trade secret, by itself, does not grant you exclusive rights to use that secret.
EXAMPLE: Dudely Company and Manly Company sell competing after-shave products. Dudely creates a database that compares different brands of after-shave advertising and resulting annual sales. Dudely uses this trade secret information to determine how to allocate its advertising budget. Manly's president independently creates a similar database and publishes it in a business book. Dudely will be unable to protect its formula under existing NDAs because its database is no longer a trade secret.
To preserve a possible claim of independent discovery, many companies will not look at materials furnished by an outsider who wants to sell something to the company. By refusing to consider unsolicited materials, the company has a better argument for its independent creation of similar products. One method of proving independent creation is to use clean room techniques (see "Clean Rooms" below)
The very idea of a standard that is not freely implementable is to be laughed at. If you don't want it to be implemented, you don't call it a standard -- you call it Intellectual Property or a trade secret. Microsoft has positioned the
I'm not one of those so-called "pragmatists" who argue for Free Software whilst using Microsoft Outlook and Word, but I do recognise a good, free technology when I see one. And this time, it's from Microsoft. Otherwise, how would you explain the existance of Linux, a clone of UNIX, or the IBM PC itself, with which you're so familiar? Again and again, we've seen examples of people implementing standards in clean-room environments -- it's part of the software industry, and trying to gun down projects like Mono for doing the exact same thing is simply unfair.
Idealism is something that's too often ignored these days, but your arguments against
Any legal objections are simply false. Eben Moglen, professor of Law and Legal History, and the Free Software foundation's top lawyer, has already given the go-ahead for the Mono , therefore I can only explain Alan's anti-.NET arguments to be either misinformed, or written to misinform. I hope he will redirect his efforts to more worthy issues in the future; he will then once again have my full support.
What are your feelings on Microsoft's
Alan:
Microsoft has publically stated that it has patents on critical parts of
This is FUD, plain and simple. The fact is, that the
The system itself is mildly interesting as a technology. Its yet another virtual machine, roughly equivalent to picojava in capabilities. It has an interesting way to self generate IDL, but one which their own papers say cannot represent all programming languages.
Once again, the technology takes ideas from Perl (foreach, anyone?), Java (VM, OO style) Visual Basic (properties done right this time). Best of all, it's designed to be able to integrate with existing code -- existing Gnome/KDE/console programs will be able to call a simple C library to invoke functions from a cross-platform
And of course it "cannot represent all programming languages." You of all people should know that Alan -- this is by design, not a flaw of the architecture. There's always a balance to be made between running code natively and running it on a Virtual Machine. What I can say is that
The more dangerous parts of
all this are not so much
When all you have is an encrypted SSL session how are you going to figure out if its a legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company or someone in your company uploading your entire company customer database?
And this is a bad thing? Point-to-point crypto, as you point out so aptly, is something that allows the decentralisation of control. Sure, this may be a bad thing for packet-Nazis ("legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company" as you say), but the fact is that the world is begging for a secure point-to-pont encryption technology that's both relatively secure and simple to set up (I am a GPG junkie but that doesn't mean I expect the rest of my family to be).
Alan's ideas are usually good and I've been involved with the formation of the AFFS in the UK as well as having donated to the EFF in the US several times, but he will not make any friends by insulting some of the smartest developers on the Linux desktop today. Like it or not,
The Mono
Debian users will be able to apt-get install a JIT virtual machine that can play cross-platform applets in their browsers for the first time ever without resorting to propriterary software, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most important thing we can ask for from a desktop OS -- a good, modern infrastructure for the development of desktop and server applications.
Any legal objections are simply false. Eben Moglen, rofessor of Law he will then once again have my full support.
Bochs and VMWare are completely different animals. Comparing their relative performances is simply nonsensical. From the bochs site:
Bochs is a highly portable free IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++,
that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86
CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS.
On the other hand, VMWare is a virtual machine implementation. Whilst Bochs can mimic an Intel processor on any platform to which it's ported, VMWare depends on being able to pass machine code directly to the native CPU without interpreting it, and therefore its performace is pretty snappy.
At least you can say appples and oranges are both round, but this 'review' takes the biscuit. Bochs will never "shape up nicely" in the way that the article expects it to because it's a fundamentally different piece of software to VMWare. Plex86 (formerly FreeMWare), founded by the lead developer of Bochs, would have been the Open Source analogy for VMWare, had its development not died off several months ago due to a terminal lack of developer interest.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me -
and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.
VP3 is Open Source; XVID isn't. This is because the authors of VP3 are releasing their code under the LGPL license. On the other hand, XVID is made of a combination of Open Source GPL'd code and proprietary OpenDivX licensed code. Notice that the OpenDivX license has a number of restrictions which make it proprietary and non-free. The XVID codec could, for example, never be distributed with Debian, Mandrake or any other Free Software operating system, whereas VP3 could. XVID may be a great codec, but don't spread lies about its licensing, fluor2.
Darwin Streaming Server isn't Open Source! It's proprietary-with-source, a bit like Microsoft's Shared Source. Get your facts straight!
Anyone who's been tracking Evolution development from the early days will be aware that it used to have preliminary NNTP (news/Usenet) support that was lobotomised for the 1.0 release. At present, this is the only major feature that's holding it back from competing with the likes of Outlook Express and Outlook. Sure, GNOME already has the Pan newsreader, but it's clearly designed for computer-literate people and doesn't really integrate with any email client.
So, what's holding back NNTP support? It can't be all that difficult to do, after all Evolution provides all the infrastructure for handling large lists of messages. Only when NNTP support arrives do I think Evolution will be-feature complete.
One thing has become very clear in the Linux world over the last couple of years since the dot com bubble burst. Open Source/Free Software is here to stay, and half-way proprietary solutions won't be accepted by the wider community.
For example, Macromedia have been supplying a Linux Flash client for years, yet it has failed to validify the Flash format as an open standard. It has become a "necessary evil" for sites that feel the need to look 'interactive', but has had minimal market penetration beyond that.
I don't think that releasing a binary-only QuickTime codec would solve any real problems: Firstly, it wouldn't be distributed with some of the most popular distributions like Debian and Mandrake for philosophical reasons as well as technical reasons -- without source code, there's no way to know that the codec will still work in 2 years or that it'll be made available for new architectures, or that bugs will be promptly fixed. NVidia's proprietary graphics drivers for XFree86 have, for example, backfired in many ways. Far from soliciting support from the community, their consistent failure to release specifications for their hardware has irked and frustrated the wider Linux community (not just the Free Software zealots) to the extent that the Tainting monitor had to be added to the kernel just to track bug reports from users of buggy proprietary kernel modules.
I'd say that the future lies with open video codecs like VP3 from On2 Technologies, who've announced that they'll be working with the community to ensure that their next release is LGPL'd and their patents made available in the public domain. This is the kind of codec that should become the de-facto standard on the Web -- not some binary-only QuickTime Sorenson codec that was withheld for years and released begrudgingly. A few years ago, Linux users were quick to praise and embrace vendors of proprietary software who supported Linux, but now, I think the community is big enough to look at the bigger picture and support open standards like VP3 and Ogg that will ensure a more accessible and independent future for Web content in the future.
I was on the beta testing team of the next-generation Nokia Communicator which also uses Symbian OS v7.0. It was pretty snappy and responsive and the hardware is sleek, but I was less than impressed by the 'office software' capabilities: In their attempt to support proprietary Microsoft formats they've neglected to offer export filters for open file formats. For example, the word processor can only export Microsoft .DOC, not .RTF or even .TXT. Similarly, the spreadsheet can only export .XLS and not CSV or tab-separated data. This is a step backwards, IMO, but sadly I doubt that few mainstream users will complain. It's just a bit ironic that even the office software counterparts in Microsoft Windows CE offer file filters for 'open standard' formats -- why can't Symbian?
The official RFC3271 page at the IETF is http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3271.txt?number=3271.
I thought the mp3 format couldn't be used by official GNU projects because of the patent issues. Surely it should be GNU Ogg Vorbis or something? Besides which, isn't the name a bit ambiguous? It sounds like a clean-room GNU implementation of the MP3 codec or something.
Ximian has explained that it is developing the Mono .NET runtime and C# implementations to provide a modern development environment for the GNOME / Linux desktop. Of course, a pleasant side-effect of writing future applications in C# will be that it's easy to make them Windows compatible. Do you see a future in producing cross-platform software solutions or will Ximian remain devoted to the Linux desktop? Will Ximian use Windows.Forms (in conjunction with a GTK# compatibility layer) or will GTK# be used directly by Ximian programs? After all, the two toolkits have fundamentally different philosophies behind widget packing/placement etc.
> Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
> granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
> to the code?
That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes
This means that streaming video embedded in webpages for the Linux / Free Software clan is now a reality, but perhaps more importantly, VP3 makes it possible to eliminate adware/spyware like RealVideo and the equally obnoxious and platform-specific Windows Media. Cheers for all the great work, On2 Technologies! This is, in my opinion, one of the most important things to happen on the open source scene for quite some time.
A portrait of the Mandrake user from a collection of Linux User Caricatures:
This chap (baby) is the new distro on the market(compared to the others anyway). He is always seen as a new lunix user hence the baby look, and the distro is regarded as one best for beginners to learn who might be migrating from windows to linux.
Red Hat does not own Linux, so it cannot charge for each copy it puts out in the way that Microsoft charges for Windows or Sun charges for Solaris.
"The only way we can make money in this business is in support," Mr Hoffmann told BBC News Online.
"That ranges from training down to system maintenance, deployment and integration with other applications.
"We focus on those customers who are able to pay the bill - the enterprises," he said.
Give me a company that sells support over one that sells software any day. The moment you put software in a box, its most important component -- the ability to be adapted and updated for security fixes and feature enhancements -- dies. Anyway, which is more successful, "theKompany" or RedHat?
There's also an interesting analysis on LinuxToday of theKompany's tactics and how they allegedly intentionally damage Free Software. Although I wouldn't take all the accusations at face value, there's certainly something worrying about the claims.
Assuming the premises of your joke are that you want to get rid of "John.Smith", by moving it to /dev/null you'd end up replacing your null character device with a standard file. This standard file would slowly bloat until the system became unusable or the filesystem got filled up. /dev/null should only be used as a part of a stream, for example in pipes. On UNIX, one does what I presume you meant by unlinking a file, so the command would be rm John.Smith. HTH.
It seems not a single poster got what the parent post meant, so I'll give up my mod points to clarify what he means.
Although I haven't used Microsoft Windows for a few years, I remember back when ActiveX came out it was primarily a replacement for "custom controls." It was only adapted for use on Webpages later, (thankfully) with limited success. The primary idea behind implementing Gecko as an ActiveX component would be that any cretinous (or otherwise, I guess) Visual Basic "coder" could drag-and-drop a Gecko component onto a form and embed an instant browser into their program. I guess it's a good idea.
This has nothing do do with supporting ActiveX controls on a webpage within Gecko/Mozilla.
Grave licensing issue with VP3. Basically, the conclusion is that the license is "proprietary with source" and in reality amounts to something similar to Microsoft's Shared Source scheme. Modifying or distributing the VP3 codec in any form is legally dubious. I agree, it's Strange that On2 Technologies tries to pass VP3 off as "Open Source" on their site as it clearly doesn't meet the definition, except for that one can passively 'read' the code.
I'd be careful with these people and wait for a real Open Source codec like Ogg Tarkin to mature, or contact On2 to get them to fix their license or, alternatively, to remove the "Open Source" references from their site.
Maybe I've been out of the loop to long. What does a CD-ROM have to do with internet connectivity? Surely all you need is a telephone number, username and password (assuming the isp endpoint is running PPP, or perhaps SLIP)? Does AOL provide these details on CD-ROM, or just some proprietary dialler/sockets software? I remember Demon internet used to sell a connection pack that included Trumpet Winsock, a sockets implementation for Microsoft Windows, but I gather recent Windows releases have built in Internet connectivity and (of course) are bundled with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The problem lies herein:
(e) Notwithstanding Sections 2.1 (a), (b), and (c) above, no license
is granted to You, under any intellectual property rights including patent
rights, to modify the code in such a way as to create or accept data that is
incompatible with data produced or accepted by the Original Code. By way of
example but not limitation, a Modification that adds support for other
compression data such as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 would be permissible, but only if the
resulting Larger Work continues to support playback of VP3.2 data.
Modifications that provide only playback or encode support are also permissible.
However, a Modification that adds support for encoding or playback of any non-
VP3.2 compatible files or bitstreams without complementary support for VP3.2
encoding or playback would not be permissible, and no license is granted for
such Modification(s).
Basically, this is denying users the right to modify the source code to produce binaries that produce a stream incompatible with the original software. It may sound good to some, but I urge developers to think twice before releasing modifications or compiled versions of the VP3 codec because, even if unintended, a compiler bug or error in your modifications to the software could mean that the stream your modified VP3 codec produces is unintentionally incompatible with the VP3 specification, opening you to legal procedure from On2 Technologies, the proprietors of the codec.
The VP3 codec licensing terms are not only not Open Source, they are a threat to developers, contribuors and distributers of VP3 both in source code and compiled form. Please contact On2 Technologies and try to convince them to update their license to remove this dangerous clause, and spread the word to your friends!