I have heard similarly from other people. It seems like the kind of system that needs all the help it can get from good drivers and an optimized compiler.
You can take a GPL'd project, display the code in one window, and type in your own code, using it as the example, in another window, and as long as it is a different work, you have full copyright to the separate, non-derived work you just wrote. One way to try to make sure everything is different is to translate it into a completely different language. The important thing is to make sure you are not creating what would be a "derived work" under Title 17. An automated translation by a program would probably be considered a derived work, no matter what new language it was translated to.
Issues of trade secrets sometimes involve trying to find a "virgin programmer" and have them write a "clean room implementation" that can be proved to have resulted without examining someone else's code. Perhaps this is what you and the original poster were worried about. It is difficult to see how a trade secret could be in a GPL'd work because a trade secret looses it's status as a "secret" once it is published.
However, you should not confuse issues of copyright and tradesecrets. The belief that merely looking at GPL'd work can endanger other work you write is a product of the sloppy use of catch all phrases like "intellectual property."
Well, I can see myself buying 2 to 5 EPIA's over the next two years if they work well, are documented, and are actually fast enough to decode video on the fly. Why don't we start a list of petitioners who will sign a "I'll buy X units if . .." statement ?
I would like to be able to use linux to emulate a printer. That is, I would like to be able to take another computer, hook it to my parallel port, and then have that computer think for all practicle purposes that it had a printer on the other end. My computer could simply log what was being printed, or forward it to a different printer, or whatever.
Has anyone here ever done this ?
The purpose is to make a linux box that can emulate an older printer to a legacy computer, take the files to be printed and possibly modify them and send them to a modern printer (such as a network or USB interface).
I think in a standard linux distribution, the development tools will all be scattered around the filesystem in the usual places. So to use the additional harddrive aspect, you might need to make your own bin / lib / include directories in there, and a shell script to appropriately adjust the paths when the drive is inserted.
If you do this and get it working, send me an email because I'd be interested to hear how it worked out. Perhaps when your development drive is stable, you might just put it on a cdrom for the same effect -- pop in a CD, mount and set paths, and then work away.
Compile your own kernel, and make the ram disk by copying libraries from your system as much as possible; this will make it easy to maintain. If you are willing to go the route of a bootable CD, you have a lot more room, and don't have to recompile every single thing just to get it smaller.
You can look at some of the stuff I did here: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/ Feel free to send me email if you have questions.
BTW, there is no reason not to have the developement environment on the system. In fact, I don't see a reason not to make your main desktop system the same as the firewall machine.
The martian does not offer the service this one does, by which the devices pings out through the firewall to a central server so that the user can connect to their NAT'd box and get files remotely.
I second this post, after all I have done it. The hardest part about the 10 minute deadline would be compiling the kernel, but that takes about 2 minutes on the fastest machines these days.
Keep in mind that most cable modem head-ends and the cable modems themselves have REALLY long packet queues. This is why upstream saturation is such a problem for cable modems.
You are right in general that bursts get spread out, and that a cable modem or any other store-and-forward node on the path will help. However, this has nothing to do with upstream versus downstream on the cable system. Cable modems are essentially symmetric devices. The asymmetry of the service offered has to do with social factors -- big companies like to damage their product in hope of charging more for an undammaged version, they sell their upstream separately through hosting services, etc.
I think WP 6 would be ok, but the people I know who use WP the most all prefer 5.1, and they say it is faster. I don't care so much, except that I think you should be able to operate it from a linux console. 5.1 is, according to rumour, the last version written in assembler.
Some people use WP 5.1 because they like the fact that they can fit and several printer drivers on a single bootable dos diskette and take their entire system with them to school, for last minute editing and then printing. This may also be true of 6, I don't know.
If we decide to re-write, we would keep WP's interface, and probably the wp file format. Writing in C would be fine but you have to realize these people have very high expectations with regard to speed and the size of the executable. I think bugs and such would be tolerated as long as there was clear progress being made. If there were a one to five programmer company out there, working on this, I would be willing to through quite a bit of money on buying successive editions in hopes of funding the end result.
You have to have a copy of SCO/Unix to get the.so files you need out of there and copy them to the linux.
I searched for the instructions I remembered seeing, and I found this, which has instructions to do the same thing but isn't the page I was thinking off.
As you observe, the old copies still sell for a good price. The real solution is to get corel to re-assemble and re-link the binary for unix and sell it for a reasonable price.
The alternitive is to start writing a replacement from scratch.
Word Perfect 5.1 for linux
on
Corel Goes Private
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would consider between $20 and $50 a fair price to pay for a one-person license to a linux version of Word Perfect 5.1. It should work just like the DOS version, including a graphical print-preview option, that could use SVGAlib.
I would give a lot more than that to a fund that would buy the source (well documented assembly, from what I understand) and put it under the GPL.
It can't be that much work; there was a version of this for the SCO unix, and there are even directions on how to get that binary to run on linux.
That no mention of the reactions of Otzi's relatives were included in the story. Please, slashdot editors, I know this is a tech web site but there's no need to lose track of the human side of this.
Also, note that his name wasn't Otzi, and that the introduction of the knife aspect causes us to re-examine previously ruled out suspects.
I wonder if Microsoft is going to pony up for all the linux machines they have in that lab and elsewhere ?
They likely will, to increase the FUD and fund SCO. But as a side benefit, we will find out about a lot more linux use in Microsoft than we now know of.
Why can't he start archiving now, and then work on his project testing it on his data as he goes ? He might have enough by the time he is done.
Also, why does it have to be usenet specifically ? If he needs a long time period but not a great breadth of groups, he may be able to find mailing list archives that are sufficient. The 9fans and lkml both go back quite a ways, just to mention a few off the top of my head. If you go down to your universities sys admin department, and ask them what's the oldest continuously active mailing list they have archives for, you may strike gold.
In fact, your university's sys admins may have usenet archives also.
You may find this helpful in scraping web-served mailing list archives into a form you can use:
http://www.linpro.no/lwp/
Also there is a perl script out there that will download the archives a yahoo group into an mbox.
The Historical Electronics Museum is one of the best museums I have ever visited. It is located in Lincithium Maryland, a short drive from the NSA museum, should you happen to visit that also. However the HEM is worth a two day trip in it's own right.
The primary focus is on aircraft radar, of which they have a large number of physical examples. The Museum's library is formidable. I wrote down several pages of book titles while I was there, but most of them are simply unavailable elsewhere.
I advise spending on day in there for the exhibits, and another day on the library. The person manning the door was a veteran who had worked with many of the systems in there, I talked to him for about three hours.
If you go, consider bringing a very good digital camera and photographing everything and making a large web page. That is my only regret, that I had no camera when I went there.
It seems to me that Freenet has some of the properties (distributed serving of files) as an incidental result of achiving it's other goals.
Bittorrent goes right for a single goal -- allowing a group of interested people to distribute big files when none of them has a lot of bandwidth -- and doesn't bother with the other goals of Freenet.
I have looked into Bittorrent as a method of distributing updates to a software package. You would be able to buy or choose to allow your software to do a live update; the software in question runs as a cronjob every night; it would check a website for updates, and download them if necessary; to allow me to provide this on a limited budget, a bittorrent client would be built into the package and it would keep itself open for a period of time. (None of this happens without the knowledge of the user, of course, in fact they have to specifically and carefully configure all of it.)
I see these current developments as threatening because automated lawyer-engines will scan my site, see the torrent links, and spew c-and-d letter at me, possibly causing my provider to shut the thing down and stop needed updates. It will also cause the more sheeplike and bureaucratic elements in a company to simply not offer such services.
Isn't a freenet key not much bigger than the size of a link ? Wouldn't that just shift the problem into Freenet, so that we would just slashdot Freenet when there was a suddenly popular file, and there would be this painful lag until Freenet cached stuff at enough nodes ?
He certainly didn't make his point, whatever it was.
One could point out that on controlled platforms one always faces the threat of competetion from the platform itself, and you can't fight back because the competeting app is shipped with the platform and has access to interfaces you don't know about. While on Free Software platforms at least everyone competes equally.
But that didn't make sense with his remarks about Sherlock and so on. If he wrote Sherlock for Linux he would discover that a crappy but no-cost copy would spring up, and quickly get better and better until it was just good enough that no one bothered to buy his stuff.
His analogies don't work very well because *usually* one doesn't sell software on Free platforms. Usually one creates additional Free Software in an attempt to create a new market for your skills. (I say usually because I think there are things you could sell, and I think we will eventually see more software products for sale, both Free and proprietary.)
Go down to the section of photographs of shuttle foam tests.
Now, the press release contains the lines "The experiment was part of an effort to determine why small particles of spray-on foam insulation flaked off of the inter-tank section of the external fuel tank on Space Shuttle mission STS-87 as the Shuttle ascended. The new lightweight insulation material was developed to comply with an EPA mandate to reduce ozone-depleting chemicals released into the atmosphere."
However, that is contradicted by a quote from an EPA official that appeared in the Houston Chronicle within a few days of the disaster -- he claimed that NASA and in particular craft carrying humans were exempted, but that NASA wanted to comply anyway.
We will never know whether it was mandated or not. The issue will simply not be investigated or talked about. However the larger picture is clear: you cannot trust human safety to an organization that is essentially an endless publicity stunt factory. If we want to do things in space we have to toss NASA and setup an organization that will rationally attack the problem, and not be a press release mill.
You should only get your CD key blocked if a trial by an elected game member judge and 12 randomly choosen game keys finds you guilty. You have the right to confront your accuser and cross examine in online chat.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard similarly from other people. It seems like the kind of system that needs all the help it can get from good drivers and an optimized compiler.
You can take a GPL'd project, display the code in one window, and type in your own code, using it as the example, in another window, and as long as it is a different work, you have full copyright to the separate, non-derived work you just wrote. One way to try to make sure everything is different is to translate it into a completely different language. The important thing is to make sure you are not creating what would be a "derived work" under Title 17. An automated translation by a program would probably be considered a derived work, no matter what new language it was translated to.
Issues of trade secrets sometimes involve trying to find a "virgin programmer" and have them write a "clean room implementation" that can be proved to have resulted without examining someone else's code. Perhaps this is what you and the original poster were worried about. It is difficult to see how a trade secret could be in a GPL'd work because a trade secret looses it's status as a "secret" once it is published.
However, you should not confuse issues of copyright and tradesecrets. The belief that merely looking at GPL'd work can endanger other work you write is a product of the sloppy use of catch all phrases like "intellectual property."
Well, I can see myself buying 2 to 5 EPIA's over the next two years if they work well, are documented, and are actually fast enough to decode video on the fly. Why don't we start a list of petitioners who will sign a "I'll buy X units if . . ." statement ?
I would like to be able to use linux to emulate a printer. That is, I would like to be able to take another computer, hook it to my parallel port, and then have that computer think for all practicle purposes that it had a printer on the other end. My computer could simply log what was being printed, or forward it to a different printer, or whatever.
Has anyone here ever done this ?
The purpose is to make a linux box that can emulate an older printer to a legacy computer, take the files to be printed and possibly modify them and send them to a modern printer (such as a network or USB interface).
I think in a standard linux distribution, the development tools will all be scattered around the filesystem in the usual places. So to use the additional harddrive aspect, you might need to make your own bin / lib / include directories in there, and a shell script to appropriately adjust the paths when the drive is inserted.
If you do this and get it working, send me an email because I'd be interested to hear how it worked out. Perhaps when your development drive is stable, you might just put it on a cdrom for the same effect -- pop in a CD, mount and set paths, and then work away.
What's the size of the resulting system ?
Build it on whatever you use for your desktop.
Compile your own kernel, and make the ram disk by copying libraries from your system as much as possible; this will make it easy to maintain. If you are willing to go the route of a bootable CD, you have a lot more room, and don't have to recompile every single thing just to get it smaller.
You can look at some of the stuff I did here: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/ Feel free to send me email if you have questions.
BTW, there is no reason not to have the developement environment on the system. In fact, I don't see a reason not to make your main desktop system the same as the firewall machine.
The martian does not offer the service this one does, by which the devices pings out through the firewall to a central server so that the user can connect to their NAT'd box and get files remotely.
I second this post, after all I have done it. The hardest part about the 10 minute deadline would be compiling the kernel, but that takes about 2 minutes on the fastest machines these days.
You are right in general that bursts get spread out, and that a cable modem or any other store-and-forward node on the path will help. However, this has nothing to do with upstream versus downstream on the cable system. Cable modems are essentially symmetric devices. The asymmetry of the service offered has to do with social factors -- big companies like to damage their product in hope of charging more for an undammaged version, they sell their upstream separately through hosting services, etc.
I think WP 6 would be ok, but the people I know who use WP the most all prefer 5.1, and they say it is faster. I don't care so much, except that I think you should be able to operate it from a linux console. 5.1 is, according to rumour, the last version written in assembler.
Some people use WP 5.1 because they like the fact that they can fit and several printer drivers on a single bootable dos diskette and take their entire system with them to school, for last minute editing and then printing. This may also be true of 6, I don't know.
If we decide to re-write, we would keep WP's interface, and probably the wp file format. Writing in C would be fine but you have to realize these people have very high expectations with regard to speed and the size of the executable. I think bugs and such would be tolerated as long as there was clear progress being made. If there were a one to five programmer company out there, working on this, I would be willing to through quite a bit of money on buying successive editions in hopes of funding the end result.
I searched for the instructions I remembered seeing, and I found this, which has instructions to do the same thing but isn't the page I was thinking off.
As you observe, the old copies still sell for a good price. The real solution is to get corel to re-assemble and re-link the binary for unix and sell it for a reasonable price.
The alternitive is to start writing a replacement from scratch.
I would consider between $20 and $50 a fair price to pay for a one-person license to a linux version of Word Perfect 5.1. It should work just like the DOS version, including a graphical print-preview option, that could use SVGAlib.
I would give a lot more than that to a fund that would buy the source (well documented assembly, from what I understand) and put it under the GPL.
It can't be that much work; there was a version of this for the SCO unix, and there are even directions on how to get that binary to run on linux.
Also, note that his name wasn't Otzi, and that the introduction of the knife aspect causes us to re-examine previously ruled out suspects.
I wonder if Microsoft is going to pony up for all the linux machines they have in that lab and elsewhere ?
They likely will, to increase the FUD and fund SCO. But as a side benefit, we will find out about a lot more linux use in Microsoft than we now know of.
It sounds very interesting. At one time I intended to do a thesis on statistical authorship identification using usenet as a test body.
However, what would word frequency and etc have to do with the nature of development of protocols and computing ?
Why can't he start archiving now, and then work on his project testing it on his data as he goes ? He might have enough by the time he is done.
Also, why does it have to be usenet specifically ? If he needs a long time period but not a great breadth of groups, he may be able to find mailing list archives that are sufficient. The 9fans and lkml both go back quite a ways, just to mention a few off the top of my head. If you go down to your universities sys admin department, and ask them what's the oldest continuously active mailing list they have archives for, you may strike gold.
In fact, your university's sys admins may have usenet archives also.
You may find this helpful in scraping web-served mailing list archives into a form you can use:
http://www.linpro.no/lwp/
Also there is a perl script out there that will download the archives a yahoo group into an mbox.
The primary focus is on aircraft radar, of which they have a large number of physical examples. The Museum's library is formidable. I wrote down several pages of book titles while I was there, but most of them are simply unavailable elsewhere.
I advise spending on day in there for the exhibits, and another day on the library. The person manning the door was a veteran who had worked with many of the systems in there, I talked to him for about three hours.
If you go, consider bringing a very good digital camera and photographing everything and making a large web page. That is my only regret, that I had no camera when I went there.
What trialware or shareware programs were good enough that you "registered" or paid for them ?
Were you coerced into it by nag screens and lack of functionality, or was it primarily good will and the desire to do the right thing ?
It seems to me that Freenet has some of the properties (distributed serving of files) as an incidental result of achiving it's other goals.
Bittorrent goes right for a single goal -- allowing a group of interested people to distribute big files when none of them has a lot of bandwidth -- and doesn't bother with the other goals of Freenet.
I have looked into Bittorrent as a method of distributing updates to a software package. You would be able to buy or choose to allow your software to do a live update; the software in question runs as a cronjob every night; it would check a website for updates, and download them if necessary; to allow me to provide this on a limited budget, a bittorrent client would be built into the package and it would keep itself open for a period of time. (None of this happens without the knowledge of the user, of course, in fact they have to specifically and carefully configure all of it.)
I see these current developments as threatening because automated lawyer-engines will scan my site, see the torrent links, and spew c-and-d letter at me, possibly causing my provider to shut the thing down and stop needed updates. It will also cause the more sheeplike and bureaucratic elements in a company to simply not offer such services.
Isn't a freenet key not much bigger than the size of a link ? Wouldn't that just shift the problem into Freenet, so that we would just slashdot Freenet when there was a suddenly popular file, and there would be this painful lag until Freenet cached stuff at enough nodes ?
He certainly didn't make his point, whatever it was.
One could point out that on controlled platforms one always faces the threat of competetion from the platform itself, and you can't fight back because the competeting app is shipped with the platform and has access to interfaces you don't know about. While on Free Software platforms at least everyone competes equally.
But that didn't make sense with his remarks about Sherlock and so on. If he wrote Sherlock for Linux he would discover that a crappy but no-cost copy would spring up, and quickly get better and better until it was just good enough that no one bothered to buy his stuff.
His analogies don't work very well because *usually* one doesn't sell software on Free platforms. Usually one creates additional Free Software in an attempt to create a new market for your skills. (I say usually because I think there are things you could sell, and I think we will eventually see more software products for sale, both Free and proprietary.)
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/F-15B/
Go down to the section of photographs of shuttle foam tests.
Now, the press release contains the lines "The experiment was part of an effort to determine why small particles of spray-on foam insulation flaked off of the inter-tank section of the external fuel tank on Space Shuttle mission STS-87 as the Shuttle ascended. The new lightweight insulation material was developed to comply with an EPA mandate to reduce ozone-depleting chemicals released into the atmosphere."
However, that is contradicted by a quote from an EPA official that appeared in the Houston Chronicle within a few days of the disaster -- he claimed that NASA and in particular craft carrying humans were exempted, but that NASA wanted to comply anyway.
We will never know whether it was mandated or not. The issue will simply not be investigated or talked about. However the larger picture is clear: you cannot trust human safety to an organization that is essentially an endless publicity stunt factory. If we want to do things in space we have to toss NASA and setup an organization that will rationally attack the problem, and not be a press release mill.
What makes you think the real thing is a cake walk ?
Anyway, you have the 12 + judge watching you. It may be annoying, but they are not likely to be suaded by "j00 R ghey" type logic.
Just try not to spend all your accumulated game money on legal fees !
You should only get your CD key blocked if a trial by an elected game member judge and 12 randomly choosen game keys finds you guilty. You have the right to confront your accuser and cross examine in online chat.