If you are using FrameMaker simply as a word processor, then replace it with a generic word processor -- I suggest abiword, but some people might go for OpenOffice. It doesn't matter as long as you can move documents from one to the other. Since most of the word processors are getting functions to import and export html, or rtf, for simple stuff everything pretty much works nicely.
But many of the people who use FrameMaker are using it in highly sophisticated ways. The data sheets that you see for electrical components might be partly automatically generated from test results. I once worked on a project which had a command set of data structures for interfaces between people's code; the integrator had a "Data Dictionary" document with tabels for each object, with the name and type and meta-data such as use, meaning, version introduced, etc. We could just edit this document, and then the integrator would use another tool to automatically process that document into the header files for the interface library. I complained about the system at the time, but it was actually pretty cool.
If you are doing that kind of sophisticated stuff, I suggest going with LaTeX, and scripts to create and parse it. But it is not going to be cheap switch. First of all, for standard monthly reports and stuff like that, you have to make templates for people to work from, which have any funky company mastheads or logos or whatever already in there. For linking the documentation and code, I suggest going the other way, and generating the documents from the code with doxygen or something similar. Automatic generation of graphs in a electrical spec sheet, for example, is going to require setting things up a bit.
It's unlikely you can dictate the switch. The first move on your part would be to install the alternatives on all the machines, to convince people that LaTeX and emacs or abiword can work on windows/mac/unix or whatever your machines are. Then you have to start using it yourself and make template documents so the switch will be easier for everyone else. Getting them involved in testing out stuff is good.
Make a big list on a whiteboard in your office, "Stuff I can't do without Frame:" Leave it up for a few weeks without saying anything then start crossing something off every couple of days and scribling a little note about how to do it in the replacement system. It's a lot of work if Frame is embedded into the normal flow of office work.
Like switching people away from windows to Linux, it takes two years or so, and often the best you can hope for is to get a subset of people using it for a subset of tasks, and by reducing the dependancy on a single package make you less prone to being screwed by a licensing or upgrade move.
But it's easier than convincing the people whom you buy parts from to starting using html instead of pdf for their datasheets.
Because it would build into the system the knowledge about where you were coming from. Look at all the proxies you have to use, and how slow htey are, just to read the new york times from Bejing or browse Nazi paraphrenalia from Paris.
What we really need is simply alternate DNS systems. Then you could set up your France-matters-on-the-internet example by having the French ISP run it's own DNS, probably offering a couple of different DNS's for it's customers. The rest of us could continue to pretent that the whole EU was some mythical place that was invented for a movie or marketing purposes, like Gotham City or Oz.
Um, did you notice that all the other archived stories have comments ? The pages and pages of trite slashbotism at the bottom was a bit of a giveaway, y'know.
The way PGP signing is supposed to work is that if the package was signed by "Joe Smith" and "Jim White" has also signed Jor's signature, you are supposed to check the people who signed Joe's signature, and the people who signed them, etc, until you find someone whose signature YOU signed.
If you never sign someone's signature, that's like saying you never trust anyone -- so it shouldn't be surprising that you don't trust the rpm producers.
If you sign stupid people's signatures, then you may trust their signature, but not the signatures they sign.
That's probably as close as you can get to a system for verifying rpms (or any other kind of data), aside from some usability enhancements and integration into various tools. After all, if you have a chain of signed signatures to the rpm signer, then it doesn't matter that rpmfind.net was hacked, does it ? Root access on rpmfind.net doesn't mean they can forge the signatures (unless they broke the public key encryption).
That's why it's important to use GPG, and sign the signatures of people who you can meet in person, especially if you are a developer. The PGP/GPG signatures on the rpms won't mean much if you are not a user yourself.
You can keep the attention of a smart audience that way. You bring up an excellent point though, a lot of the problem comes about because the audience wants flashy stuff to keep them awake. And then they complain about it.
Still, you can't keep the smartest and best officiers or engineers or managers if they feel that their job is too supply a little cartoon to keep the boss awake for 30 minutes every couple of days.
Its an institutional problem. As long as promotion is set up the way it is, the system will train it's workers to be less efficient and chase the good ones away.
Hopefully the DoD will start using PowerPoint a lot less. Not likely, but many organizations, including the military, have found PowerPoint addicition by middle managers to be a bad thing. You have people wasting days of their lives adding bells and whistles which hinder the communication that matters.
Star Office was originally a closed source application by a German company. The German company was bought by Sun, and the product open sourced (under both the sun community license and the GPL, just to assuage fears about the SCL, I suppose), as an attack on Microsoft -- if the newly named OpenOffice was available free, there was less reason to switch to Windows.
The old Star Office sucked more than MS Office of the time, which is saying something. After Sun took over, it got worse for a while when they started javafying it. Recent builds have started up pretty snappy however -- it's starting to get to Office level usability. At least, what Office was two years ago, that's how long it's been since I used it.
I know of no one who has modified the code of Star Office. But then, I know of only one person who has modified anything in the linux kernel, and only a few who have made modifications that ended up in distribution packages.
As far as "Jimmy the Haxor" making modifications, at least the DoD can examine the modifications, unlike the modifications made by "Bill the Haxor" working on closed source tools. ( It is likely that the DoD does license the source of many closed source tools simply for auditing purposes.)
If what you want is to be able to pop up an xterm, emacs, or other app which is running on the remote machine, with out going through all the steps of starting a new xterm, sshing, and typing the app name, then what you do is put that into the one of the menus in your window manager.
It depends on which window manager you use, of course. I use fvwm2. Here's a little snippet from my ~/.fvwm2rc file:
AddToMenu xemacs
+ "Catbus %mini-bball.xpm%" Exec xon catbus xemacs &
+ "Woozle %mini-bball.xpm%" Exec xon woozle xemacs &
xon is command or script which rsh's to the machine and lauches the application. You can replace everything after the "Exec" with a differnent command to make it use ssh. You have to set up your authorized_keys to allow you ssh into the machines without typing your password, or else do some more interesting scripting to make a window pop up and ask you for it.
It's worth setting it up right even if it takes a couple of hours fiddling with scripts and manpages.
You are right that using the API of a library does not necessarily make your code a "derived work."
But sometimes it does. Otherwise, you could use ANY gpl'd code simply by repackaging it as a.so (just remove the main() function and change the link compiler command). The GPL would be almost as weak as the BSD license in that case.
If you link against a library such as glibc.so, and use the fopen() call, no one is going to claim that your code should be GPLd, because you could recompile it on windows or solaris and use their fopen() -- it's obvious that your call to fopen() is more analagous to RUNING someone elses code than it is to MAKING A NEW PROGRAM from it.
But if I include a few elisp configuration files in my package, and make a.so library out of the emacs elisp interpreter, then that should be different matter.
In the Vidori case, they are linking to a library that does some very specific decoding functions.
Also, you say "The binary they distribute requires the API, but not the original source, to work." That is completely orthoganal to the point. Lots of packages out there don't need the source to the libraries to work, in fact that's the usual case. Whether it needs the source to run or not doesn't matter. What matters is if it was developed as a derived work from that library. And since it can't be run using any other interchangable library, they have a weak case.
You can't escape the GPL requirements by packaging up any GPL code you want to use in a DLL and then defining an "API" between your code and the GPL code.
You can write code that calls fopen() and not release it under the GPL, inspite of the fact that there is a GPL'd version of fopen() in the GNU/linux system.
On the other hand, if you are calling a function that is only available in the GPLd library, then you are obviously "using" the GPLd code, not merely some standard call.
That is all I meant. I didn't mean that you could link with a GPL'd library and then duck all the GPL restrictions by just also linking with a non-GPL'd library.
Option #2 is too big. The truth is, some ways of using GPLd code are ok, and some ways are not. You need to make #2 into several little sub-options.
Using code by running it is fine (i.e., a commercial linux distrbution with applications that are not GPL'd, or an application written in Guile that uses the GPL'd interpreter.) Using code without re-distributing it is fine (i.e., MegaCorp has it's programmers do a few kernel or gcc tweaks, but it's only for in-house use and never sees the light of day).
Using code by linking it into the executable, and then distrubuting that code, invoke the viral clause of the GPL and you have to distribute source code with it (well, their might be an exception for when the functions are very generic, so generic that you can find other libraries which will link and run just fine.)
It may help to actually read the GPL and LGPL. It's not cryptic, it is very plain language.
I believe the matter hinges on how your code uses the GPL'ed tools.
If it uses them by dynamically linking them into the executable at run time (i.e., it links with a GPL'ed.so file), then the FSF's intention is that you should have to GPL your code. If you don't like it, consider that some libraries are under a separate license, the LGPL, for that reason -- the LGPL doesn't restrict dynamic load and link.
Another factor will be if there are other libraries that your code will link with just fine, other than the GPL'ed one. If there are, then you are not specifically using the GLP'ed library, but some standard interface or semi-standard. In that case you are probably ok. So if it is a library for which their exists a proprietary equivalent on Solaris, for example, then just try to set up your code so it will compile with either one without trouble.
If you are using these tools just by running them, then you are in the clear for sure. I.e., if your tool is a script and you run/bin/bash, no problem.
In summary: Linking GPL stuff means you are GPL if you distribute it, with certain exceptions; running GPL stuff means nothing.
I suggest reading the GPL and then reading some of the various discussions and FAQs on it. It is pretty clear, and short, compared to commercial licenses.
So ? This is completely off the mark. No one is claiming that because GPL'd code can execute an algorithm, the algorithm is under the GPL. They are just saying that if you distribute a binary that contains GPLd code, you also have to distribute the source. And the point of contention is when the GPLd code in question is in a library. That's it.
I don't like the idea of different prices for the same item or service, based on who the customer is. I like the idea that one person's money is as good as another's.
I realize that this practice is very common. Companies that sell software and service packages (I am thinking of SGI and IBM and some lisp vendors) often even ask for financial information from their corporate customers before they will give you a price quote. In the consumer realm, think of Intel purposely damaging some chips to sell them cheaper to lower end consumers -- it obviously cost them MORE to make the processor and then burn out the math co-processor, but the idea is to charge all the market will bear at the low end, and all the market will beat at the high end too.
They would like to further sub-divide the market, all the way down to individuals, and make the most money off of each person they can. Sometimes that works out better for the consumer, sometimes better for business, it's not always one way or the other. I think that in products for which there is a huge initial cost compared to the item or marginal cost ( the R&D and capital investment in a fab plant in Intel's case, the cost of writing the software compared to the cost of burning a CD in other cases ) this tactic is most desirable; because the business can make some profit at a very low price, but needs a higher average price to justify the investment. So they go for every penny out of each consumer.
This probably causes at least some products that would never be available to make it to the market. It also probably works out to the small consumer's advantage, because the business will make a higher profit margin off of business and big-ticket sales, essentially subsidizing the consumer sales to some extent.
But customer-specific prices are almost always a bad idea even when the economics looks good. The reason is that they hide information. When Amazon was doing it's little experiment, looking up a book on their site didn't tell you "THE" price of the book.
I see a certain freedom in the commodization of products and services. I like the idea that my dollars are just as good as anyone elses. I think that areas of business that were enthralled with the "special price for each customer" ideas are also the places that limit freedom -- like the loan officers who evaluate every applicant and sub-consciously (or consciously) deduct points for being black, the salesman who charge a higher price to the low volume folks because they can afford to loose them, etc.
Did anyone else notice that this article from a European publication about how European governments would threaten to cut off connectivity to countries that didn't protect your data tried to set no less than 4 cookies from various domains ?
What follows is mostly a re-post of a caffeine and sleep deprevation induced manifesto I posted in the article on Cult of the Dead Cow's recent product announcement.
Distributed proxies and access to the web
There is a huge benefit in an easy way to access the web from controlled and
possibly opressive environments, such as from behind company or school firewalls
where administrators check on traffic, or from
UN Human Rights Commission type countries.
If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily read anything on
the web, then China would be less likely to end up in a war with us or Taiwan.
The Chinese are not going to like America or agree with us because they can read
the propaganda and claptrap our press spews out every day, but they will have a
different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less
likely to get into a froth about the spy-boys being a little rough with
the planes. Suffice that I think that the more the people of the world
can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall
Set You Free.
Of course, if you give people in communist countries a safe, unblockable way to
access a set of http proxies which can then get the web pages, then the same
system can be used for someone in Europe to use paypal.com in spite of the best
intentions of their paternal government. It can also be used to post to
slashdot in spite of the fact that you've been modded down 5 times in the last 24
hours. If Saudis can access porn, then The WIPO Troll can post fecaljapan.
The dailynews.yahoo.com link is a good example: it is unlikely that you can
easily visit it from China. Look at these stories:
Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on attempts to
circumvent access restrictions from countries that "protect" their people from
information. (Here are the obligatory
partners and
channel links.)
www.realmapping.com, attempting to keep
a database of IP addresses and geographic position. See some technical
information here.
The links describe a tit-for-tat battle between the Communists ( and others,
conservative Islamics, for example ) on one hand, versus the people of those
nations and those who would offer them information on the other. China and
others don't firewall based on the content of the data passing through; they
just generally block connections to specific places, by DNS name and IP address.
People found they could use a proxy service such as safeweb to get to the
unfiltered Internet. Then the Communists blocked access to Safeweb. Safeweb
started mailing out a new list of sites which were running the safeweb proxy,
and the Communists would rush to block those and the safeweb folks would rush
out a new list. Eventually the safeweb people came out with a way for
individuals in the free part of the world to run a proxy that accepts
connections and redirects them to safeweb, that is the Triangle Boy system.
This doesn't even touch on the persistent and heroic efforts of employees
everywhere to read 2600.com, fuckedcompany.com, and other blocked sites while on
the clock. And numerous attempts by *_sporks everywhere to . . . nevermind, no
one sympathizes with *_sporks.
Something like realmapping system might be used by gateway machines in China to
track where offending users are inside China. A Triangle Boy running both
inside and outside the wall is needed to let everyone see the all the internet
they want (violating EU directives by sharing personal information if that's
their desire).
For a gnutella/freenet to fix the internet access problem, it has to be
undetectable by the European/Communist firewalls (because the Communists will
block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and someone in the
free part of the world must run a script to dump www.nytimes.com into the
gnutella/freenet system. It would be much better to set up Triangle Boy without
the single point to block, the central safeweb service, and doing something
to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.
This hard to do. A system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic risks the
Communists blocking all encrypted traffic or harassing users, but maybe it can
work if enough people use it. Maybe proxy and client combinations can hide
their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages,
or use other steganographic tactics, but you would have to be constantly
upgrading those modules.
Without the central safeweb proxy, cooperation from publishers on the free side
of the firewall is useless. This would have the effect of making it impossible
for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who
was from France. Yahoo and the French, the Communists and their people, Rob
Malda and the sporks will all have to realize that anything they put on the
Internet is on the Internet for anyone who wants it.
We can force the world to choose the whole Internet or none at all.
The one that had me fascinated for a while was the hack of soldering on a resistor and re-burning a BIOS to turn an ordinary Promise 66 harddrive controller into the RAID controller. Here's a link:
Hardware manufacturers often just manufacture the most featureful version of their product, and then sell purposefully damaged versions for lower prices. It's a kind of irritating practice, especially if you realize that they are using your money to damage the product they giving you. The canonical example of this is Intel; sometimes they actually damage the cheaper chips (remember back when Intel was burning out the math co-processor on one of their chips?) and other times they just mark it as having a lower clock rate. The situation arises from the fact that they can actually manufacture the device for much much less than they sell it for, so it makes sense to them to damage some allow them to optimize the amount of money they suck out of each part of each segment of the market.
And people try to get around those attempts to divide up the market, of course. If Intel can make money selling a $200 chip to me, why can't they sell it to hard-core gamers for $200 when it even costs the same amount ? I like the idea of a commodity type market, in which you cannot differentiate between any customers, one dollar is as good as another. But the high-tech industry has always dabbled in that type of artificial market stratification. Think of the way vendors dealing with items sold only to companies -- such as SGI's big servers, some software packages such as commercial Lisps and business suites, etc. Those guys often quote a special price for each customer, and want to know financial details on your company before they quote you a price, so that they can be sure to charge as much as you are willing to pay.
In their defense, one can say that this practice developed in the high-tech industry because there is a huge research cost and the actual manufacturing cost per item is a small percentage of the item's cost. The drug industry also has this feature and similar price disparities between artificial segments of the market (the companies sell the same drug for different prices to different insurance companies and in different countries). Of course the software area is the place where their is zero cost per copy and all the cost is development.
It seems from the BBC article that what the atstake people are building will be
socially useful, but not majorly different from Gnutella or Freenet. Not to
knock their hard work and this project in any way (I support it and will try it
out when it comes out), but I see the maximum social benefit coming from making
an easy way to access the web in general, not from providing an easy way
to publish documents on the web. This is because getting information out
of China (or France, or Singapore, or any of the
UN Human Rights Commission type countries) is a lot easier than publishing an
ordinary newspaper to the mass populace.
The dailynews.yahoo.com link above
is a good example, as it is likely that you couldn't easily visit it from a
computer in China. To see what I am talking about, look at these:
Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on various
attempts to circumvent access restrictions. (Here are the obligatory
partners and
channel links.)
www.realmapping.com, (changing their
name to Quova), a company attempting to keep a database of IP addresses versus
geographic position. You can look at some technical information here.
What one gathers from the above articles is an on going tit-for-tat battle
between the Communists (and other censorous governments, in conservative Islamic
nations, etc) on one hand, versus the people of those nations, and those who
would offer them information on the other. China and those other nations don't
firewall based on the content of the data passing through; they just generally
block connections to specific places, by DNS name and IP address. People found
they could use a proxy service such as safeweb to get to the unfiltered
Internet. Then the Communists found safeweb and blocked access to it. So
safeweb started daily emailing out a new list of sites which were running the
safeweb proxy, and the Communists would rush to block those and the safeweb
folks would rush out new ones. Eventually the safeweb people came out with a
way for any individual in the free part of the world to easily run a proxy that
accepts connections and redirects you to safeweb, that is the Triangle Boy
system. That's about the state of things now.
A system or service like that described in the realmapping links might be used
by gateway machines in China to broadly filter all sites outside the country,
except for perhaps a select few. This is a real threat to the safety of the
world. If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily and
regularly read anything on the web, then China is much less likely to end up in
a war with us or with Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America more or
agree with our positions because they can read the propaganda and claptrap that
our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of
perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a
froth about some spy-boys getting a little rough with airplanes. I'm not going
to get into the philosophy of it all, but suffice to say that I think that the
more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world
will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.
A system like Triangle
boy, which is a network of proxies run by volunteers to enable you to
connect to safeweb, is what we really need to
solve this Internet filtering in foreign countries. An easier to use freenet/
gnutella from l0pft will be very exciting of course, but I think it may not be
the right solution for the Communist censorship problem.
For a gnutella/freenet to have effect on the Chinese student who wants to read a
New York Times article, it has to be undetectable by the Communist Firewall
(because the Communists might decide to block all encrypted traffic, or find the
student himself) and it depends upon someone in the free part of the world
running a script to dump www.nytimes.com over into the gnutella/freenet system
every day. I believe it would be much better to set up something like Triangle
Boy but without the single point of failure of the central safeweb service, and
doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.
That's really hard to do. If you settle for a distributed system that doesn't
hide and disguise the traffic, then you run the risk that the Communists will
simply block all encrypted traffic or start trying to track down and harass
individuals inside their country. Maybe you can depend on the difficulty of
running that type of firewall on a whole country, and the fact so many people
will use it even the Communists won't be able to throw them all in jail. Maybe
you can also set up clever proxy and client combinations that hide their real
traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use
other steganographic techniques, but you would have to be constantly upgrading
them against Communist detection.
By getting rid of the central safeweb point, you also avoid any censorship due
to cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall. This would
have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to
France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. This would make the IP
ban that occurs after you modded down 5 times in 24 hours also useless. Yahoo
and the French, the Communists, and Rob Malda will all have to come to the
realization that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for
everyone, no discrimination.
That day cannot come too soon. We need to get to work.
Without a doubt we don't have the corner on the "Crazy Texan" behaviour. I think that you are right in identifyig the mountain south in particular as being our strongest competitor, possibly even beating us. The lowlander southerners definitely have a different character.
In fact, I would propose that Texas gets it from you guys -- back in the day when Texas was being settled, a large portion of white population came from the mountain south, mostly people who had lost their land to banks or otherwise hit hard times. That's one reason why the Texas Constitution prohibits the seizure of your house for non-payment of a loan, which means that you can't get a mortgage on your house here to pay for education.
A "real redneck" is usually pretty ignorant and uneducated. They are not racist as often as the stereotypes on TV and film would have you believe -- often they are surprisingly willing to take anyone they meet at face value. Rednecks occur in every US state, inspite of the stereotype of there being more of them in the South -- some of the most extreme rednecks I've ever met lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Rednecks are more likely to decide to shoot at a blimp than other people, but most of them are pretty peaceful and friendly, and like most people, not really instinctively aggressive enough for it to even occur to them to start shooting at some random blimp in the sky.
On the other hand, the "Crazy Texan" personality can be educated and quite sophisticated, but they are still Crazy Texans. There is a substantial overlap between the groups, of course. But an example of a crazy Texan would be Ross Perot, a quite educated person, who still thought nothing out of the ordinary in hiring a bunch of mercenaries to go get his people out of Iran. He understood that there were experts in the State Department and the CIA working on all those things, and that by being a loose cannon he could possibly screw up important national matters -- but the conclusion that all those people were screwing everything up and that by hiring some insane vietnam veterans he could do a better job, is a natural one for the Crazy Texan mentality. But Ross Perot is not a redneck.
For examples of Crazy Texans, think of the outfits that specialize in putting out oil well fires. Snuffing those with explosives, or plugging them while they are burning, is pretty sophisticated; rednecks can't do it, but it is a job well suited to Crazy Texans.
So what I was trying to say when I said that the people who were shooting at the Goodyear blimp were often Crazy Texans instead of rednecks, is that these people were smart, college bound, computer literate, New York Times reading people; but if they are sitting at the computer and hear that odd engine sound of the blimp, and go out and look at it, some special Texan circuit closes in their brain, and the next thing you know is they are shooting away.
Rednecks go fishing. Crazy Texans tie a meat hook with a dead rabbit on it to the trailer hitch of their truck with rope, in an attempt to catch a six foot catfish that was observed in a lake near Houston (true story). When a number of animals from an emu farm wandered into a neighboring subdivision, various rednecks attempted to rope them or shoo them into a fenced enclosure; Crazy Texans were observed chasing them on dirt bikes with roman candles pvc pipe bottle rocket bazookas.
I used to live near Spring, Texas, which in those days had a Goodyear blimp hangar right next to I-45 and near the high school. ( That facility has since been closed, and the Goodyear blimps operate out of Akron, Ohio, as far as I know. )
I knew lots of "rednecks" ( a lot of them were not real rednecks, just crazy Texans ) that had taken potshots at the blimp at various times. It always seemed stupid to me because those bullets have to come down somewhere, but it didn't occur to me that they were actually hitting their target until my Civil Air Patrol unit took a tour of the blimp facility. The folks there showed us numerous bullet holes and patches on the covering, including one on the edge of the gondola where it attaches to the bag. Some of them described the experience of flying slowly along and just watching while a tiny figure down below blazed away with a deer rifle.
They had a little collection of hunting arrows, squashed bullets, crossbow bolts, etc that had been removed from the skin.
About a year after that a bunch of the CAP folks and friends (I wasn't present) were launching model rockets near there and someone got the blimp with that big five foot long Estes "Black Cat" model -- it didn't pierce the skin, it hit a glancing blow and bounced off, and everyone dove into their cars and fled, abandoning some nice rockets.
Anyway, since we're talking about model airplanes -- the blimp folks told a long story about a powerful model airplane ripping a long gash in the bag, while they were landing somewhere in California. It nearly caused the thing to collapse, it couldn't take off at all until they got a cherry picker and patched it with a massive amount of duct tape, put all they helium they had on hand in the bag and tossed all extra weight, and managed to limp it over to a place where they could work on it better.
It's actually better than the old deja, which showed you only a list of the messages, and you had to click on each message to view the body -- you view the bodies of all the messages all at once, on one big page, kind of like slashdot in nested mode.
You should also know that gnus, the emacs newsreader, has an interface into dejanews -- it downloads the html and provides a group buffer. I would presume it will or has been updated to work with google.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what you are doing.
If you are using FrameMaker simply as a word processor, then replace it with a generic word processor -- I suggest abiword, but some people might go for OpenOffice. It doesn't matter as long as you can move documents from one to the other. Since most of the word processors are getting functions to import and export html, or rtf, for simple stuff everything pretty much works nicely.
But many of the people who use FrameMaker are using it in highly sophisticated ways. The data sheets that you see for electrical components might be partly automatically generated from test results. I once worked on a project which had a command set of data structures for interfaces between people's code; the integrator had a "Data Dictionary" document with tabels for each object, with the name and type and meta-data such as use, meaning, version introduced, etc. We could just edit this document, and then the integrator would use another tool to automatically process that document into the header files for the interface library. I complained about the system at the time, but it was actually pretty cool.
If you are doing that kind of sophisticated stuff, I suggest going with LaTeX, and scripts to create and parse it. But it is not going to be cheap switch. First of all, for standard monthly reports and stuff like that, you have to make templates for people to work from, which have any funky company mastheads or logos or whatever already in there. For linking the documentation and code, I suggest going the other way, and generating the documents from the code with doxygen or something similar. Automatic generation of graphs in a electrical spec sheet, for example, is going to require setting things up a bit.
It's unlikely you can dictate the switch. The first move on your part would be to install the alternatives on all the machines, to convince people that LaTeX and emacs or abiword can work on windows/mac/unix or whatever your machines are. Then you have to start using it yourself and make template documents so the switch will be easier for everyone else. Getting them involved in testing out stuff is good.
Make a big list on a whiteboard in your office, "Stuff I can't do without Frame:" Leave it up for a few weeks without saying anything then start crossing something off every couple of days and scribling a little note about how to do it in the replacement system. It's a lot of work if Frame is embedded into the normal flow of office work.
Like switching people away from windows to Linux, it takes two years or so, and often the best you can hope for is to get a subset of people using it for a subset of tasks, and by reducing the dependancy on a single package make you less prone to being screwed by a licensing or upgrade move.
But it's easier than convincing the people whom you buy parts from to starting using html instead of pdf for their datasheets.
Good luck.
Because it would build into the system the knowledge about where you were coming from. Look at all the proxies you have to use, and how slow htey are, just to read the new york times from Bejing or browse Nazi paraphrenalia from Paris.
What we really need is simply alternate DNS systems. Then you could set up your France-matters-on-the-internet example by having the French ISP run it's own DNS, probably offering a couple of different DNS's for it's customers. The rest of us could continue to pretent that the whole EU was some mythical place that was invented for a movie or marketing purposes, like Gotham City or Oz.
Um, did you notice that all the other archived stories have comments ? The pages and pages of trite slashbotism at the bottom was a bit of a giveaway, y'know.
http://slashdot.org/features/01/06/10/0034241.shtm l
Hint: how come no one bothered to comment in that article ?
Just for the record, I think that it's better to loose data with a GPL'd database than with a Microsoft one.
http://www.findarticles.com/m1111/n1782_v297/21281 407/p1/article.jhtml
Just a fun article . . .
The way PGP signing is supposed to work is that if the package was signed by "Joe Smith" and "Jim White" has also signed Jor's signature, you are supposed to check the people who signed Joe's signature, and the people who signed them, etc, until you find someone whose signature YOU signed.
If you never sign someone's signature, that's like saying you never trust anyone -- so it shouldn't be surprising that you don't trust the rpm producers.
If you sign stupid people's signatures, then you may trust their signature, but not the signatures they sign.
That's probably as close as you can get to a system for verifying rpms (or any other kind of data), aside from some usability enhancements and integration into various tools. After all, if you have a chain of signed signatures to the rpm signer, then it doesn't matter that rpmfind.net was hacked, does it ? Root access on rpmfind.net doesn't mean they can forge the signatures (unless they broke the public key encryption).
That's why it's important to use GPG, and sign the signatures of people who you can meet in person, especially if you are a developer. The PGP/GPG signatures on the rpms won't mean much if you are not a user yourself.
You can keep the attention of a smart audience that way. You bring up an excellent point though, a lot of the problem comes about because the audience wants flashy stuff to keep them awake. And then they complain about it.
Still, you can't keep the smartest and best officiers or engineers or managers if they feel that their job is too supply a little cartoon to keep the boss awake for 30 minutes every couple of days.
Its an institutional problem. As long as promotion is set up the way it is, the system will train it's workers to be less efficient and chase the good ones away.
You may be interested in this old zdnet article:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2555 917,00.html
There is a real art to the crisp, simple, information dense presentation. It's hard to learn, I know I never got it down.
Star Office was originally a closed source application by a German company. The German company was bought by Sun, and the product open sourced (under both the sun community license and the GPL, just to assuage fears about the SCL, I suppose), as an attack on Microsoft -- if the newly named OpenOffice was available free, there was less reason to switch to Windows.
The old Star Office sucked more than MS Office of the time, which is saying something. After Sun took over, it got worse for a while when they started javafying it. Recent builds have started up pretty snappy however -- it's starting to get to Office level usability. At least, what Office was two years ago, that's how long it's been since I used it.
I know of no one who has modified the code of Star Office. But then, I know of only one person who has modified anything in the linux kernel, and only a few who have made modifications that ended up in distribution packages.
As far as "Jimmy the Haxor" making modifications, at least the DoD can examine the modifications, unlike the modifications made by "Bill the Haxor" working on closed source tools. ( It is likely that the DoD does license the source of many closed source tools simply for auditing purposes.)
If what you want is to be able to pop up an xterm, emacs, or other app which is running on the remote machine, with out going through all the steps of starting a new xterm, sshing, and typing the app name, then what you do is put that into the one of the menus in your window manager.
It depends on which window manager you use, of course. I use fvwm2. Here's a little snippet from my ~/.fvwm2rc file:
AddToMenu xemacs
+ "Catbus %mini-bball.xpm%" Exec xon catbus xemacs &
+ "Woozle %mini-bball.xpm%" Exec xon woozle xemacs &
xon is command or script which rsh's to the machine and lauches the application. You can replace everything after the "Exec" with a differnent command to make it use ssh. You have to set up your authorized_keys to allow you ssh into the machines without typing your password, or else do some more interesting scripting to make a window pop up and ask you for it.
It's worth setting it up right even if it takes a couple of hours fiddling with scripts and manpages.
yes, fopen() was a bad example. So pick one that is under the GPL then.
You are right that using the API of a library does not necessarily make your code a "derived work."
.so (just remove the main() function and change the link compiler command). The GPL would be almost as weak as the BSD license in that case.
.so library out of the emacs elisp interpreter, then that should be different matter.
But sometimes it does. Otherwise, you could use ANY gpl'd code simply by repackaging it as a
If you link against a library such as glibc.so, and use the fopen() call, no one is going to claim that your code should be GPLd, because you could recompile it on windows or solaris and use their fopen() -- it's obvious that your call to fopen() is more analagous to RUNING someone elses code than it is to MAKING A NEW PROGRAM from it.
But if I include a few elisp configuration files in my package, and make a
In the Vidori case, they are linking to a library that does some very specific decoding functions.
Also, you say "The binary they distribute requires the API, but not the original source, to work." That is completely orthoganal to the point. Lots of packages out there don't need the source to the libraries to work, in fact that's the usual case. Whether it needs the source to run or not doesn't matter. What matters is if it was developed as a derived work from that library. And since it can't be run using any other interchangable library, they have a weak case.
You can't escape the GPL requirements by packaging up any GPL code you want to use in a DLL and then defining an "API" between your code and the GPL code.
You can write code that calls fopen() and not release it under the GPL, inspite of the fact that there is a GPL'd version of fopen() in the GNU/linux system.
On the other hand, if you are calling a function that is only available in the GPLd library, then you are obviously "using" the GPLd code, not merely some standard call.
That is all I meant. I didn't mean that you could link with a GPL'd library and then duck all the GPL restrictions by just also linking with a non-GPL'd library.
Option #2 is too big. The truth is, some ways of using GPLd code are ok, and some ways are not. You need to make #2 into several little sub-options.
Using code by running it is fine (i.e., a commercial linux distrbution with applications that are not GPL'd, or an application written in Guile that uses the GPL'd interpreter.) Using code without re-distributing it is fine (i.e., MegaCorp has it's programmers do a few kernel or gcc tweaks, but it's only for in-house use and never sees the light of day).
Using code by linking it into the executable, and then distrubuting that code, invoke the viral clause of the GPL and you have to distribute source code with it (well, their might be an exception for when the functions are very generic, so generic that you can find other libraries which will link and run just fine.)
It may help to actually read the GPL and LGPL. It's not cryptic, it is very plain language.
I believe the matter hinges on how your code uses the GPL'ed tools.
.so file), then the FSF's intention is that you should have to GPL your code. If you don't like it, consider that some libraries are under a separate license, the LGPL, for that reason -- the LGPL doesn't restrict dynamic load and link.
/bin/bash, no problem.
If it uses them by dynamically linking them into the executable at run time (i.e., it links with a GPL'ed
Another factor will be if there are other libraries that your code will link with just fine, other than the GPL'ed one. If there are, then you are not specifically using the GLP'ed library, but some standard interface or semi-standard. In that case you are probably ok. So if it is a library for which their exists a proprietary equivalent on Solaris, for example, then just try to set up your code so it will compile with either one without trouble.
If you are using these tools just by running them, then you are in the clear for sure. I.e., if your tool is a script and you run
In summary: Linking GPL stuff means you are GPL if you distribute it, with certain exceptions; running GPL stuff means nothing.
I suggest reading the GPL and then reading some of the various discussions and FAQs on it. It is pretty clear, and short, compared to commercial licenses.
So ? This is completely off the mark. No one is claiming that because GPL'd code can execute an algorithm, the algorithm is under the GPL. They are just saying that if you distribute a binary that contains GPLd code, you also have to distribute the source. And the point of contention is when the GPLd code in question is in a library. That's it.
I don't like the idea of different prices for the same item or service, based on who the customer is. I like the idea that one person's money is as good as another's.
I realize that this practice is very common. Companies that sell software and service packages (I am thinking of SGI and IBM and some lisp vendors) often even ask for financial information from their corporate customers before they will give you a price quote. In the consumer realm, think of Intel purposely damaging some chips to sell them cheaper to lower end consumers -- it obviously cost them MORE to make the processor and then burn out the math co-processor, but the idea is to charge all the market will bear at the low end, and all the market will beat at the high end too.
They would like to further sub-divide the market, all the way down to individuals, and make the most money off of each person they can. Sometimes that works out better for the consumer, sometimes better for business, it's not always one way or the other. I think that in products for which there is a huge initial cost compared to the item or marginal cost ( the R&D and capital investment in a fab plant in Intel's case, the cost of writing the software compared to the cost of burning a CD in other cases ) this tactic is most desirable; because the business can make some profit at a very low price, but needs a higher average price to justify the investment. So they go for every penny out of each consumer.
This probably causes at least some products that would never be available to make it to the market. It also probably works out to the small consumer's advantage, because the business will make a higher profit margin off of business and big-ticket sales, essentially subsidizing the consumer sales to some extent.
But customer-specific prices are almost always a bad idea even when the economics looks good. The reason is that they hide information. When Amazon was doing it's little experiment, looking up a book on their site didn't tell you "THE" price of the book.
I see a certain freedom in the commodization of products and services. I like the idea that my dollars are just as good as anyone elses. I think that areas of business that were enthralled with the "special price for each customer" ideas are also the places that limit freedom -- like the loan officers who evaluate every applicant and sub-consciously (or consciously) deduct points for being black, the salesman who charge a higher price to the low volume folks because they can afford to loose them, etc.
Same pun on the Register's slogan,
"Biting the hand that feeds IT"
What follows is mostly a re-post of a caffeine and sleep deprevation induced manifesto I posted in the article on Cult of the Dead Cow's recent product announcement.
Distributed proxies and access to the web
There is a huge benefit in an easy way to access the web from controlled and possibly opressive environments, such as from behind company or school firewalls where administrators check on traffic, or from UN Human Rights Commission type countries.
If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily read anything on the web, then China would be less likely to end up in a war with us or Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America or agree with us because they can read the propaganda and claptrap our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about the spy-boys being a little rough with the planes. Suffice that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.
Of course, if you give people in communist countries a safe, unblockable way to access a set of http proxies which can then get the web pages, then the same system can be used for someone in Europe to use paypal.com in spite of the best intentions of their paternal government. It can also be used to post to slashdot in spite of the fact that you've been modded down 5 times in the last 24 hours. If Saudis can access porn, then The WIPO Troll can post fecaljapan.
The dailynews.yahoo.com link is a good example: it is unlikely that you can easily visit it from China. Look at these stories:
-
Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on attempts to
circumvent access restrictions from countries that "protect" their people from
information. (Here are the obligatory
partners and
channel links.)
- Beijing
Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical, a New York Times article on
censored web discussion boards in China. If Chinese could safely access web
sites outside the country, they might use uncensored web boards. (Again, channel
and
partners links.)
- www.realmapping.com, attempting to keep
a database of IP addresses and geographic position. See some technical
information here.
The links describe a tit-for-tat battle between the Communists ( and others, conservative Islamics, for example ) on one hand, versus the people of those nations and those who would offer them information on the other. China and others don't firewall based on the content of the data passing through; they just generally block connections to specific places, by DNS name and IP address. People found they could use a proxy service such as safeweb to get to the unfiltered Internet. Then the Communists blocked access to Safeweb. Safeweb started mailing out a new list of sites which were running the safeweb proxy, and the Communists would rush to block those and the safeweb folks would rush out a new list. Eventually the safeweb people came out with a way for individuals in the free part of the world to run a proxy that accepts connections and redirects them to safeweb, that is the Triangle Boy system.This doesn't even touch on the persistent and heroic efforts of employees everywhere to read 2600.com, fuckedcompany.com, and other blocked sites while on the clock. And numerous attempts by *_sporks everywhere to . . . nevermind, no one sympathizes with *_sporks.
Something like realmapping system might be used by gateway machines in China to track where offending users are inside China. A Triangle Boy running both inside and outside the wall is needed to let everyone see the all the internet they want (violating EU directives by sharing personal information if that's their desire).
For a gnutella/freenet to fix the internet access problem, it has to be undetectable by the European/Communist firewalls (because the Communists will block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and someone in the free part of the world must run a script to dump www.nytimes.com into the gnutella/freenet system. It would be much better to set up Triangle Boy without the single point to block, the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.
This hard to do. A system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic risks the Communists blocking all encrypted traffic or harassing users, but maybe it can work if enough people use it. Maybe proxy and client combinations can hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic tactics, but you would have to be constantly upgrading those modules.
Without the central safeweb proxy, cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall is useless. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. Yahoo and the French, the Communists and their people, Rob Malda and the sporks will all have to realize that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for anyone who wants it.
We can force the world to choose the whole Internet or none at all.
http://www.overclockin.com/reviews/PromiseUltra66/
Hardware manufacturers often just manufacture the most featureful version of their product, and then sell purposefully damaged versions for lower prices. It's a kind of irritating practice, especially if you realize that they are using your money to damage the product they giving you. The canonical example of this is Intel; sometimes they actually damage the cheaper chips (remember back when Intel was burning out the math co-processor on one of their chips?) and other times they just mark it as having a lower clock rate. The situation arises from the fact that they can actually manufacture the device for much much less than they sell it for, so it makes sense to them to damage some allow them to optimize the amount of money they suck out of each part of each segment of the market.
And people try to get around those attempts to divide up the market, of course. If Intel can make money selling a $200 chip to me, why can't they sell it to hard-core gamers for $200 when it even costs the same amount ? I like the idea of a commodity type market, in which you cannot differentiate between any customers, one dollar is as good as another. But the high-tech industry has always dabbled in that type of artificial market stratification. Think of the way vendors dealing with items sold only to companies -- such as SGI's big servers, some software packages such as commercial Lisps and business suites, etc. Those guys often quote a special price for each customer, and want to know financial details on your company before they quote you a price, so that they can be sure to charge as much as you are willing to pay.
In their defense, one can say that this practice developed in the high-tech industry because there is a huge research cost and the actual manufacturing cost per item is a small percentage of the item's cost. The drug industry also has this feature and similar price disparities between artificial segments of the market (the companies sell the same drug for different prices to different insurance companies and in different countries). Of course the software area is the place where their is zero cost per copy and all the cost is development.
The dailynews.yahoo.com link above is a good example, as it is likely that you couldn't easily visit it from a computer in China. To see what I am talking about, look at these:
-
Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on various
attempts to circumvent access restrictions. (Here are the obligatory
partners and
channel links.)
- Beijing
Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical, a New York Times article
providing background information on web discussion boards used and censored by
people in China. (Again, channel and partners
links.)
- www.realmapping.com, (changing their
name to Quova), a company attempting to keep a database of IP addresses versus
geographic position. You can look at some technical information here.
What one gathers from the above articles is an on going tit-for-tat battle between the Communists (and other censorous governments, in conservative Islamic nations, etc) on one hand, versus the people of those nations, and those who would offer them information on the other. China and those other nations don't firewall based on the content of the data passing through; they just generally block connections to specific places, by DNS name and IP address. People found they could use a proxy service such as safeweb to get to the unfiltered Internet. Then the Communists found safeweb and blocked access to it. So safeweb started daily emailing out a new list of sites which were running the safeweb proxy, and the Communists would rush to block those and the safeweb folks would rush out new ones. Eventually the safeweb people came out with a way for any individual in the free part of the world to easily run a proxy that accepts connections and redirects you to safeweb, that is the Triangle Boy system. That's about the state of things now.A system or service like that described in the realmapping links might be used by gateway machines in China to broadly filter all sites outside the country, except for perhaps a select few. This is a real threat to the safety of the world. If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily and regularly read anything on the web, then China is much less likely to end up in a war with us or with Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America more or agree with our positions because they can read the propaganda and claptrap that our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about some spy-boys getting a little rough with airplanes. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of it all, but suffice to say that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.
A system like Triangle boy, which is a network of proxies run by volunteers to enable you to connect to safeweb, is what we really need to solve this Internet filtering in foreign countries. An easier to use freenet/ gnutella from l0pft will be very exciting of course, but I think it may not be the right solution for the Communist censorship problem.
For a gnutella/freenet to have effect on the Chinese student who wants to read a New York Times article, it has to be undetectable by the Communist Firewall (because the Communists might decide to block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and it depends upon someone in the free part of the world running a script to dump www.nytimes.com over into the gnutella/freenet system every day. I believe it would be much better to set up something like Triangle Boy but without the single point of failure of the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.
That's really hard to do. If you settle for a distributed system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic, then you run the risk that the Communists will simply block all encrypted traffic or start trying to track down and harass individuals inside their country. Maybe you can depend on the difficulty of running that type of firewall on a whole country, and the fact so many people will use it even the Communists won't be able to throw them all in jail. Maybe you can also set up clever proxy and client combinations that hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic techniques, but you would have to be constantly upgrading them against Communist detection.
By getting rid of the central safeweb point, you also avoid any censorship due to cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. This would make the IP ban that occurs after you modded down 5 times in 24 hours also useless. Yahoo and the French, the Communists, and Rob Malda will all have to come to the realization that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for everyone, no discrimination.
That day cannot come too soon. We need to get to work.
Without a doubt we don't have the corner on the "Crazy Texan" behaviour. I think that you are right in identifyig the mountain south in particular as being our strongest competitor, possibly even beating us. The lowlander southerners definitely have a different character.
In fact, I would propose that Texas gets it from you guys -- back in the day when Texas was being settled, a large portion of white population came from the mountain south, mostly people who had lost their land to banks or otherwise hit hard times. That's one reason why the Texas Constitution prohibits the seizure of your house for non-payment of a loan, which means that you can't get a mortgage on your house here to pay for education.
A "real redneck" is usually pretty ignorant and uneducated. They are not racist as often as the stereotypes on TV and film would have you believe -- often they are surprisingly willing to take anyone they meet at face value. Rednecks occur in every US state, inspite of the stereotype of there being more of them in the South -- some of the most extreme rednecks I've ever met lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Rednecks are more likely to decide to shoot at a blimp than other people, but most of them are pretty peaceful and friendly, and like most people, not really instinctively aggressive enough for it to even occur to them to start shooting at some random blimp in the sky.
On the other hand, the "Crazy Texan" personality can be educated and quite sophisticated, but they are still Crazy Texans. There is a substantial overlap between the groups, of course. But an example of a crazy Texan would be Ross Perot, a quite educated person, who still thought nothing out of the ordinary in hiring a bunch of mercenaries to go get his people out of Iran. He understood that there were experts in the State Department and the CIA working on all those things, and that by being a loose cannon he could possibly screw up important national matters -- but the conclusion that all those people were screwing everything up and that by hiring some insane vietnam veterans he could do a better job, is a natural one for the Crazy Texan mentality. But Ross Perot is not a redneck.
For examples of Crazy Texans, think of the outfits that specialize in putting out oil well fires. Snuffing those with explosives, or plugging them while they are burning, is pretty sophisticated; rednecks can't do it, but it is a job well suited to Crazy Texans.
So what I was trying to say when I said that the people who were shooting at the Goodyear blimp were often Crazy Texans instead of rednecks, is that these people were smart, college bound, computer literate, New York Times reading people; but if they are sitting at the computer and hear that odd engine sound of the blimp, and go out and look at it, some special Texan circuit closes in their brain, and the next thing you know is they are shooting away.
Rednecks go fishing. Crazy Texans tie a meat hook with a dead rabbit on it to the trailer hitch of their truck with rope, in an attempt to catch a six foot catfish that was observed in a lake near Houston (true story). When a number of animals from an emu farm wandered into a neighboring subdivision, various rednecks attempted to rope them or shoo them into a fenced enclosure; Crazy Texans were observed chasing them on dirt bikes with roman candles pvc pipe bottle rocket bazookas.
HTH.
I used to live near Spring, Texas, which in those days had a Goodyear blimp hangar right next to I-45 and near the high school. ( That facility has since been closed, and the Goodyear blimps operate out of Akron, Ohio, as far as I know. )
I knew lots of "rednecks" ( a lot of them were not real rednecks, just crazy Texans ) that had taken potshots at the blimp at various times. It always seemed stupid to me because those bullets have to come down somewhere, but it didn't occur to me that they were actually hitting their target until my Civil Air Patrol unit took a tour of the blimp facility. The folks there showed us numerous bullet holes and patches on the covering, including one on the edge of the gondola where it attaches to the bag. Some of them described the experience of flying slowly along and just watching while a tiny figure down below blazed away with a deer rifle.
They had a little collection of hunting arrows, squashed bullets, crossbow bolts, etc that had been removed from the skin.
About a year after that a bunch of the CAP folks and friends (I wasn't present) were launching model rockets near there and someone got the blimp with that big five foot long Estes "Black Cat" model -- it didn't pierce the skin, it hit a glancing blow and bounced off, and everyone dove into their cars and fled, abandoning some nice rockets.
Anyway, since we're talking about model airplanes -- the blimp folks told a long story about a powerful model airplane ripping a long gash in the bag, while they were landing somewhere in California. It nearly caused the thing to collapse, it couldn't take off at all until they got a cherry picker and patched it with a massive amount of duct tape, put all they helium they had on hand in the bag and tossed all extra weight, and managed to limp it over to a place where they could work on it better.
Just click on the "Veiw Thread" link, brilliant.
It's actually better than the old deja, which showed you only a list of the messages, and you had to click on each message to view the body -- you view the bodies of all the messages all at once, on one big page, kind of like slashdot in nested mode.
You should also know that gnus, the emacs newsreader, has an interface into dejanews -- it downloads the html and provides a group buffer. I would presume it will or has been updated to work with google.