If it was 'free software', people wouldn't pay me. I probably wouldn't bother writing it in the first place.
On the contrary, most free software is written by people who are paid to write it -- Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Miguel de Icaza, other employees of Redhat, Novell, Trolltech, etc.
And how many of those Macs in academic research are using fink? Fink is really nothing but a port of Debian to the OSX kernel. Without it you would see a lot fewer Macs in at least the scientific part of academia.
Where does Linux stand in all of this?
Updates are usually still handled manually with apt-get update/upgrade.
This remark is just silly. I help maintain about 50 linux workstations and we have done automatic updates nightly for years. There are tons of tools to do this. It is all done by cron jobs in the middle of the night so it won't interfere with anyone's work. We use autorpm, but you can use apt-get or yum or even "rpm -F". We automatically download one copy of upgrades from redhat or a mirror (use autorpm or rsync) and then nightly do upgrades. No reboots necessary unless you upgrade the kernel. Often I notice the upgrade has been done before I get the email from redhat announcing a problem. Of course, if money is no object, you can pay redhat for (presumably) even better service.
BTW, can Windows upgrade in the middle of the night with no one logged on? I have been told no, but I don't use the stuff myself.
Open Source people see code signing as a way to enact DRM and are fighting it.
That's because code signing is DRM and one of its main objective is the elmination of open source. The fact that code is signed, does not mean it is any less likely to have security flaws, or that those flaws are less serious.
Yahoo customers didn't experience any problems. You must mean the 3rd-party clients and spambots leeching on Yahoo's networks, because they are the only ones affected AFAIK.
Would you be perfectly happy if you could only send email to people using Yahoo mail? Why not, Yahoo customers wouldn't experience any problems.
BTW, in reading this thread and making this post you weren't leeching on Slashdot's network were you?
If mathematicans aren't really interested in helping understand the world, why should society fund them?
Where did you get the silly idea that mathematics isn't part of the world? It is every bit as "real" as quarks or the big bang. What's more, the half life of a mathematical "truth" is much, much longer than that of "truths" in other sciences.
On the other hand, with this paradigm, there is the *risk* that the government starts displacing companies by releasing a free product. On a bigger scale, it would be like the US paying a lump sum for a technology that creates free cars for everyone--sure, this would be pretty cool, until the big 3 go out of business and the economy crashes down behind it.
OK, now suppose that the company being displaced is foreign and huge amounts of your country's wealth is being shipped overseas to pay for its products. To pursue your analogy, suppose all cars were made overseas and the U.S. balance of payments was horribly negative. (It is.) Does this change anything?
The point is that displacing Microsoft won't hurt
Germany, (or China, or... ). In fact it will help the economies of those countries.
I have done exactly this recently on three boxes with no trouble. Of course YMMV.
What I did was do a standard RH upgrade to 7.3 on a fully up-to-date ximianized system. The RH installer complained that "third party applications" might no longer function. I had the option to continue and did. The system was quite functional when I was done. I ran redcarpet and had to re-subscribe to my Ximian channels and then do a substantial number of Ximian updates at that point. If I had continued without the Ximian updates it is possible I would have had problems.
When you buy an Exchange client license you get with it an Outlook license. If I were to use Evolution I'd still have to purchase the Exchange client license PLUS the Evolution connector for Exchange. So, it's not always cheaper.
Let me get this straight. If I buy an exchange server with license and use Evolution as the client, you are saying I still need to pay Microsoft for an exchange *client* license -- even though I am not using an exchange client?
if musical instruments were designed like software, instead of violins and pianos, we'd probably only be getting those electronic children's books that play a melody when you touch different parts on the page. Kind of intuitive and easy, but not exactly very powerful or interesting.
A better example of this is the bicycle. It is not too intuitive and has a rather steep learning curve. If "pedal vehicles" were designed by a focus group we would only have Big Wheels. Sometimes a steep learning curve is worth the payoff.
Modularity is a mark of good design if your programming objective is robustness and easy maintenance. If your objective is preserving a monopoly it is a poor design.
There is no technical reason that the Apple UI could not be used with Windows. It is not possible because neither Apple nor Microsoft want it to be possible.
It is not. It is pay-per-view. It is disingenuous to say you are offering a subscription when that is not an option. I would happily subscribe at a reasonable fee (say $20-$30 per year), but I am strongly against pay-per-view.
I have wanted to support Ximian for a long time since I use there stuff regularly. So as soon as possible I signed up for a year, figuring to use it on my home machine, my laptop, and my work computer.
Wrong! Turns out my $100 subscription is good for only one computer. I carefully read the Terms of Agreement and concluded that it was limited on to one person not to one computer.
I think the T of A are very misleading and I am quite disappointed in Ximian. I would rather have given the $100 as a contribution and not been misled.
Oh, by the way, my one subscription has only worked twice out of a dozen of so attempts. I hope they are just working out the wrinkles. Otherwise, I guess I'll just trash it and consider my $100 as a contribution toward evolution (which I think is great!)
If Microsoft were to offer Office for free with a slow download and for its current price with a fast download, most people would collapse with astonishment. Then they would praise Microsoft.
There is no double standard here. Ximian gives away all of its software for free. MS doesn't. With Ximian you can pay for a faster download.
But you knew that and were trolling right?
Re:Referrer tells you who's following the links
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
Referrer tells you who's following the links not that the links actually exist.
Bzzt! The referer header tells you the URL of the document containing the link. It tells you nothing about who followed the link. A referer header can be forged, but otherwise there actually is a link and it is contained in the document whose URL is in the referer header.
Microsoft designed their web browser with the goal of doing what was best for Microsoft (evading anti-trust charges) rather than doing what was best for their users. In fact a proper "fix" of this hole probably involves de-integrating their browser and local file handling to some extent.
As far as I can tell this statement is absolutely true. What part do you disagree with? Anyone who doesn't think that Microsft has the goal of doing what is best for Microsoft (including among other things evading anti-trust law) must be living in a cave. I don't think I have heard any serious person suggest that integrating the file manager and the web browser wasn't at least partially motivated as an attempt to kill Netscape in a way that would be difficult for anti-trust law to undo.
From what I have seen on/. Michael had some sort of conflict with some vindictive people before starting as an editor. There seems to be a small group with a vendetta against him, always trashing anything he does. I assume you are one such.
I actually find Michael to be one of the best/. editors. He has thoughtful comments and at least he can spell and meet minimal standards of grammar.
"heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd.",
This is just dead wrong!
Based on my family (wife and two sons), average users -- especially kids -- are quite willing to login in exchange for having their own "space". They get their own desktop and their own background image. They get privacy -- pretty important to a teenager. They get their own mp3 collections and playlists. My wife doesn't do a lot of customization, but my kids do.
For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web.
All the journals of the American Math. Society allow you to keep the copyright to your papers, and hence do anything you want with them. Of course, if you keep copyright you have to grant the AMS the right to publish your article. I know this is unusual, but I doubt it it totally unique.
There are numerous small journals which are not owned by conglomerates. In addition to those owned by professional societies like, AMS, SIAM, MAA, there are many which are "owned" by departments, e.g. Michigan Math Journal, Illinois Math. Jour., etc.
Good online versions are often lacking, I agree but, to a large extent, this need is met by the LANL preprint server (look here). If you post your article here at the same time you submit it for publication, it will be available for free to everyone in a variety of formats. Just make sure you submit to a journal which allows this.
This allows everyone access to your work and you still get the "kudos" when the paper is formally accepted and published.
Wednesday the 19th, my place of employment had to shut down entirely between the hours of about 7pm till around 10pm. Where I work, that kind of shut down costs tens of thousands of dollars. Not to mention all of the hourly workers who were sent home at 7pm. Since their shift ended at 11, they were literally out 4 hours of pay even though they don't actually work with the systems that were effected. Lost production. Lost sales. Lost wages. One tiny, preventable worm.)
Just a small part of the TCO for Microsoft products.
We all saw hundreds/thousands of attempted Code Red attacks. We got hundreds of sircam emails. Has anyone seen a single instance of this trojan arrive in their email?
As has been repeatedly pointed out, it would take a complete idiot to save an unknown binary file, chmod it, and run it as root. But you would have to *get* the binary before you could do that. Most of the talk about Linux virii and trojans is very hypothetical. Independent of all the theoretical reasons why they don't occur widely on Linux there is the empirical fact that there has never been anything affecting the same percentage of Linux systems that Cod Red or Sircam did for MS products.
This case seems no different. All the hype is little more than a scam by an anti-virus software company.
Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over. Because that will mean they do recognize a right for developers to choose licenses as they will without being killed, jailed, or threatened for choosing the "wrong" one.
This assertion is just silly. If you ask me if being a racist should be a crime, I will say no. But that certainly does not mean "the dispute is over." The fact that I think something should not be illegal certainly doesn't mean I can't dispute it or that I don't find it morally wrong. Give me a break; no one believes that everything which is morally wrong should be illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, most free software is written by people who are paid to write it -- Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Miguel de Icaza, other employees of Redhat, Novell, Trolltech, etc.
And how many of those Macs in academic research are using fink? Fink is really nothing but a port of Debian to the OSX kernel. Without it you would see a lot fewer Macs in at least the scientific part of academia.
This remark is just silly. I help maintain about 50 linux workstations and we have done automatic updates nightly for years. There are tons of tools to do this. It is all done by cron jobs in the middle of the night so it won't interfere with anyone's work. We use autorpm, but you can use apt-get or yum or even "rpm -F". We automatically download one copy of upgrades from redhat or a mirror (use autorpm or rsync) and then nightly do upgrades. No reboots necessary unless you upgrade the kernel. Often I notice the upgrade has been done before I get the email from redhat announcing a problem. Of course, if money is no object, you can pay redhat for (presumably) even better service.
BTW, can Windows upgrade in the middle of the night with no one logged on? I have been told no, but I don't use the stuff myself.
Open Source people see code signing as a way to enact DRM and are fighting it.
That's because code signing is DRM and one of its main objective is the elmination of open source. The fact that code is signed, does not mean it is any less likely to have security flaws, or that those flaws are less serious.
Would you be perfectly happy if you could only send email to people using Yahoo mail? Why not, Yahoo customers wouldn't experience any problems.
BTW, in reading this thread and making this post you weren't leeching on Slashdot's network were you?
Yes, and who would honestly think, "I should click 'special' in order to shut down my computer?"
It helps to spell it right.
A search for "courriel" returns about 973,000 results.
Where did you get the silly idea that mathematics isn't part of the world? It is every bit as "real" as quarks or the big bang. What's more, the half life of a mathematical "truth" is much, much longer than that of "truths" in other sciences.
OK, now suppose that the company being displaced is foreign and huge amounts of your country's wealth is being shipped overseas to pay for its products. To pursue your analogy, suppose all cars were made overseas and the U.S. balance of payments was horribly negative. (It is.) Does this change anything?
The point is that displacing Microsoft won't hurt Germany, (or China, or ... ). In fact it will help the economies of those countries.
What I did was do a standard RH upgrade to 7.3 on a fully up-to-date ximianized system. The RH installer complained that "third party applications" might no longer function. I had the option to continue and did. The system was quite functional when I was done. I ran redcarpet and had to re-subscribe to my Ximian channels and then do a substantial number of Ximian updates at that point. If I had continued without the Ximian updates it is possible I would have had problems.
Actually he was employed by XYZFind Corp. Literally. And it didn't show up.
Is the StarOffice 5.2 also an error? If not, why such an old version? Why not OpenOffice 1.0?
Let me get this straight. If I buy an exchange server with license and use Evolution as the client, you are saying I still need to pay Microsoft for an exchange *client* license -- even though I am not using an exchange client?
That's incredible.
A better example of this is the bicycle. It is not too intuitive and has a rather steep learning curve. If "pedal vehicles" were designed by a focus group we would only have Big Wheels. Sometimes a steep learning curve is worth the payoff.
There is no technical reason that the Apple UI could not be used with Windows. It is not possible because neither Apple nor Microsoft want it to be possible.
It is not. It is pay-per-view. It is disingenuous to say you are offering a subscription when that is not an option. I would happily subscribe at a reasonable fee (say $20-$30 per year), but I am strongly against pay-per-view.
Wrong! Turns out my $100 subscription is good for only one computer. I carefully read the Terms of Agreement and concluded that it was limited on to one person not to one computer.
I think the T of A are very misleading and I am quite disappointed in Ximian. I would rather have given the $100 as a contribution and not been misled.
Oh, by the way, my one subscription has only worked twice out of a dozen of so attempts. I hope they are just working out the wrinkles. Otherwise, I guess I'll just trash it and consider my $100 as a contribution toward evolution (which I think is great!)
There is no double standard here. Ximian gives away all of its software for free. MS doesn't. With Ximian you can pay for a faster download.
But you knew that and were trolling right?
Bzzt! The referer header tells you the URL of the document containing the link. It tells you nothing about who followed the link. A referer header can be forged, but otherwise there actually is a link and it is contained in the document whose URL is in the referer header.
As far as I can tell this statement is absolutely true. What part do you disagree with? Anyone who doesn't think that Microsft has the goal of doing what is best for Microsoft (including among other things evading anti-trust law) must be living in a cave. I don't think I have heard any serious person suggest that integrating the file manager and the web browser wasn't at least partially motivated as an attempt to kill Netscape in a way that would be difficult for anti-trust law to undo.
From what I have seen on /. Michael had some sort of conflict with some vindictive people before starting as an editor. There seems to be a small group with a vendetta against him, always trashing anything he does. I assume you are one such.
I actually find Michael to be one of the best /. editors. He has thoughtful comments and at least he can spell and meet minimal standards of grammar.
This is just dead wrong!
Based on my family (wife and two sons), average users -- especially kids -- are quite willing to login in exchange for having their own "space". They get their own desktop and their own background image. They get privacy -- pretty important to a teenager. They get their own mp3 collections and playlists. My wife doesn't do a lot of customization, but my kids do.
1. Wide deployment of IPSec.
2. Open standards and full disclosure of vulnerabilities.
3. Client diversity in the network ecosphere. A single species (can you say 'outlook') is extremely vulnerable.
All the journals of the American Math. Society allow you to keep the copyright to your papers, and hence do anything you want with them. Of course, if you keep copyright you have to grant the AMS the right to publish your article. I know this is unusual, but I doubt it it totally unique.
There are numerous small journals which are not owned by conglomerates. In addition to those owned by professional societies like, AMS, SIAM, MAA, there are many which are "owned" by departments, e.g. Michigan Math Journal, Illinois Math. Jour., etc.
Good online versions are often lacking, I agree but, to a large extent, this need is met by the LANL preprint server (look here). If you post your article here at the same time you submit it for publication, it will be available for free to everyone in a variety of formats. Just make sure you submit to a journal which allows this.
This allows everyone access to your work and you still get the "kudos" when the paper is formally accepted and published.
Wednesday the 19th, my place of employment had to shut down entirely between the hours of about 7pm till around 10pm. Where I work, that kind of shut down costs tens of thousands of dollars. Not to mention all of the hourly workers who were sent home at 7pm. Since their shift ended at 11, they were literally out 4 hours of pay even though they don't actually work with the systems that were effected. Lost production. Lost sales. Lost wages. One tiny, preventable worm.)
Just a small part of the TCO for Microsoft products.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, it would take a complete idiot to save an unknown binary file, chmod it, and run it as root. But you would have to *get* the binary before you could do that. Most of the talk about Linux virii and trojans is very hypothetical. Independent of all the theoretical reasons why they don't occur widely on Linux there is the empirical fact that there has never been anything affecting the same percentage of Linux systems that Cod Red or Sircam did for MS products.
This case seems no different. All the hype is little more than a scam by an anti-virus software company.
Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over. Because that will mean they do recognize a right for developers to choose licenses as they will without being killed, jailed, or threatened for choosing the "wrong" one.
This assertion is just silly. If you ask me if being a racist should be a crime, I will say no. But that certainly does not mean "the dispute is over." The fact that I think something should not be illegal certainly doesn't mean I can't dispute it or that I don't find it morally wrong. Give me a break; no one believes that everything which is morally wrong should be illegal.