This is the issue as I understand it -- someone will certainly come along and correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, as you may know, KDE uses a library called "Qt" to implement all of the GUI stuff that you see in KDE. Troll Tech, the company that makes Qt, has licensed it to UNIX users under the GPL. This is good for Free Software developers, but not so good for makers of proprietary software. As I understand it, in order to release a closed-source KDE app, a developer would need to buy a commercial license for the Qt libraries from Troll Tech.
GNOME uses GTK as its widget library. GTK is licensed under the LGPL, which allows a developer to write closed-source software without having to pay licensing fees. I think that, by choosing GNOME over KDE, Sun ias trying to make it more attractive for developers to write software for their platform.
"But I do think that the duplication of effort is a sad waste of effort"
Yeah -- and I think the fact that we have two competing desktop standards has done a lot more damage to the free software community than people like to admit. Say that I want to write a GUI application for Linux. Do I make it GNOME app or a KDE app? If I write a GNOME app, I alienate all the KDE users out there. If I release a KDE app, I alienate the GNOME users. The solution seems to be to ignore both APIs, which is what Mozilla and OpenOffice have done. But that defeats the whole point of having a desktop environment. It's a big mess now, but both GNOME and KDE developers have invested too much into their work to expect either project to give way to the other.
The difference is that, in the Open Source Community, all the juicy dirt gets posted on the front page of Slashdot. Basically, it's a real-life soap opera, but without all the hot women.
Banning CGI may not be good for business -- so many people these days are getting websites so they can set up weblogs with Moveable Type or Greymatter -- if CGI weren't allowed there would be no point. And since it seems that everyone and his brother is running a hosting company, the market is probably really competitive right now.
It would be cool if there were a way to run each site on a virtual OS, so that rooting one virtual server would have no effect upon the other virtual servers, or the real physical server. Could user-mode Linux be used for this? VMware?
"some really decent Lego software with unlimited pieces so that I can build stuff on my computer and share it with other Lego freaks."
This isn't an official Lego product, but MLCAD allows you to build Lego models on your computer with an unlimited parts bin. If you're a Windows user, you might want to check it out.
But do they spin round so you can see them more easily in the heat of battle ?
Yeah. We have these at work, and they hover about 10 inches off the ground and spin around. They're kind of a pain in the ass, actually. When the boss comes to inspect our futuristic underground military installation, I like to have things clean and professional-looking, but lazy employees just leave these lying around all over the place, and even though I try to clean up after them, they just respawn a little bit later. Sometimes I think technology is more trouble than its worth.
"It will prevent an operating system environment from decrypting data with the chip if it's not the OS that was used when the data was encrypted -- but that works in both (all) directions."
When I dual boot, I have a 2GB FAT32 partition that I use to share data between Win2K and Linux. If neither OS can read data written by the other, it makes dual-booting pretty unpractical (for my purposes, at least).
Sure they appear to be slow, but that's because they're so fast that time slows down as a result of general relativity. Yeah that's it. I can't believe that you mindless Pee Cee thugs didn't know that.
"Would my car perform any better if I had the precise engineering details about how every little part worked? Of course not, because I don't have a Ph.D in mechanical engineering and don't study chemistry."
What the hell are you talking about? OK, I know that most home users don't have the expertise to modify source code, but any big organization like a government or a company will have access to experts that know UNIX and C -- these people have the skill to squeeze more utility out of a piece of software by modifying the source. The only relevant issue is whether it is necessary (or cost effective) to do that. While each case is probably different, I'm sure that any sufficiently large organization is going to need at least some custom-written software. So there is no "already working package".
"Oh, and all you complaining about not having a job -- I think Microsoft and other American companies getting more business means that there'll be more jobs here on the homefront. Just a thought...I'm not economic genius, but it seems to make sense doesn't it?"
Actually, I think that India's decision won't affect the US economy either way. The fact that they are using Linux doesn't mean that they won't want to buy proprietary software to run on Linux. I've never seen a company or a government go 100% open-source. Really, the only American company that stands to lose anything is Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's profits can seriously affect the national economy -- where I live, for instance, the economy doesn't seem to be affected by the tech sector at all.
Anything involving government is inherently political. The DOJ is controlled by the Attorney General who is appointed by the President. Whenver it has the freedom to do so, the DOJ will act according to the interests of the party to which the President belongs. This is the way it's alway been.
I know that Microsoft has given money to both parties, but Microsoft has much more influence over the Bush Administration than they did Clinton Administration. I'm not implying that the Republicans are more corrupt or anything like that. The Republicans are more naturally sympathetic to issues that Microsoft cares about.
The Bush Administration doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about antitrust issues. The DOJ had already won the case against Microsoft, but the Bush Administration basically abandoned the case as quickly as possible. The Bush administration also decided that the phone companies don't have to resell DSL access to other DSL providers, in spite of the potential for monopoly abuse.
Anyway, I firmly believe that, should the merger rumor prove to be true, the DOJ will make no effort to block it.
You can visit the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama and see this museum of artifacts from the US Space Program. One of the items on display is a piece of Skylab that was recovered after it fell from orbit. Now, if pieces of Skylab survived, then you know that pieces of that Borg Sphere that the Enterprise destroyed would have survived reentry, too. The 21st-century humans would have recovered debris from the Borg ship and wondered where the hell it came from. Then they would have begun to reverse engineer the Borg technology. We're talking about some serious damage to the timeline that is never addressed by the movie.
Star Trek, in general, totally underestimates the effects of damaging the timeline. Things are much more complicated and interconnected than people seem to imagine. If the timeline had been altered even the slightest bit in First Contact, it would change the future in unpredictable ways. Even little things have serious ramifications down the line, and it's impossible to know what can and cannot be safely altered.
Which OS would the Klingons use? Klingons have long hair and beards and live in dark dirty rooms, so we know that they're UNIX users. But are they Linux users? They certainly have bad tempers, which means they'd feel right at home on the Linux kernel developers list. But take a look at Klingon ships. They're pretty simple and a little rough around the edges, but at the same time really tough and secure. With these design priorities, it's pretty safe to say that they're running OpenBSD.
Not convinced? Consider this additional evidence. On TNG, the Klingons are worried that their traditional values are dying. On Slashdot, the crapflooding trolls declare daily that BSD is dying. 'Nuff said.:-)
That reminds me of an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head in which Beavis was dreaming about being Captain Picard. Sitting on the bridge (with a bald head), he turns to Butt-Head (who is dressed up like Riker) and says:
"Number One, I order you to take a number two! heh heh hmm hmm heh..."
It's not much now, but it was hillarious when I was 13.
Where I used to work, people were in the habit of sending around Access files over e-mail. What pissed me off to no end was that these files never contained more than one table with maybe 30 records in it. You can just put that in a text file! I have quite literally never seen anyone use Access as it was intended to be used. Grrr......
Is $rtbl'ing real? I've heard enough people complaining about it that I can't believe that there isn't at least some merit to their claims, but I've never seen the editors admit to having implemented it. Has anyone confirmed that this is built into the Slashcode? Have the editors said anything about it?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the issue as I understand it -- someone will certainly come along and correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, as you may know, KDE uses a library called "Qt" to implement all of the GUI stuff that you see in KDE. Troll Tech, the company that makes Qt, has licensed it to UNIX users under the GPL. This is good for Free Software developers, but not so good for makers of proprietary software. As I understand it, in order to release a closed-source KDE app, a developer would need to buy a commercial license for the Qt libraries from Troll Tech.
GNOME uses GTK as its widget library. GTK is licensed under the LGPL, which allows a developer to write closed-source software without having to
pay licensing fees. I think that, by choosing GNOME over KDE, Sun ias trying to make it more attractive for developers to write software for their platform.
"But I do think that the duplication of effort is a sad waste of effort"
Yeah -- and I think the fact that we have two competing desktop standards has done a lot more damage to the free software community than people like to admit. Say that I want to write a GUI application for Linux. Do I make it GNOME app or a KDE app? If I write a GNOME app, I alienate all the KDE users out there. If I release a KDE app, I alienate the GNOME users. The solution seems to be to ignore both APIs, which is what Mozilla and OpenOffice have done. But that defeats the whole point of having a desktop environment. It's a big mess now, but both GNOME and KDE developers have invested too much into their work to expect either project to give way to the other.
Steve
What scene? He was in the background of the wedding party shot. If you didn't look for him, you'd never know he was there.
Wil originally had a speaking part in the film but it was cut out during editing after the film had been shot.
Steve
The difference is that, in the Open Source Community, all the juicy dirt gets posted on the front page of Slashdot. Basically, it's a real-life soap opera, but without all the hot women.
Wait...maybe that's not cool after all....
Banning CGI may not be good for business -- so many people these days are getting websites so they can set up weblogs with Moveable Type or Greymatter -- if CGI weren't allowed there would be no point. And since it seems that everyone and his brother is running a hosting company, the market is probably really competitive right now.
It would be cool if there were a way to run each site on a virtual OS, so that rooting one virtual server would have no effect upon the other virtual servers, or the real physical server. Could user-mode Linux be used for this? VMware?
Steve
"some really decent Lego software with unlimited pieces so that I can build stuff on my computer and share it with other Lego freaks."
This isn't an official Lego product, but MLCAD allows you to build Lego models on your computer with an unlimited parts bin. If you're a Windows user, you might want to check it out.
Steve
My favorite is when he's asked if he plays guitar.
"Jug jugga jug jugga jug jugga jug jugga JAH JAH!"
But Trogdor is a close second.
Steve
But do they spin round so you can see them more easily in the heat of battle ?
Yeah. We have these at work, and they hover about 10 inches off the ground and spin around. They're kind of a pain in the ass, actually. When the boss comes to inspect our futuristic underground military installation, I like to have things clean and professional-looking, but lazy employees just leave these lying around all over the place, and even though I try to clean up after them, they just respawn a little bit later. Sometimes I think technology is more trouble than its worth.
what does the * stand for anyways?
"Whatever you want."
It works for boy bands, too.
$ ls -l *NSync
-rw-r--r-- 1 scv users 0 Jan 25 02:42 Fuck_NSync
-rw-r--r-- 1 scv users 0 Jan 25 02:45 I_Hate_NSync
-rw-r--r-- 1 scv users 0 Jan 25 02:44 Kiss_My_Ass_NSync
"It will prevent an operating system environment from decrypting data with the chip if it's not the OS that was used when the data was encrypted -- but that works in both (all) directions."
When I dual boot, I have a 2GB FAT32 partition that I use to share data between Win2K and Linux. If neither OS can read data written by the other, it makes dual-booting pretty unpractical (for my purposes, at least).
At first glance, I read the headline this way:
Dave Hughes' Campaign to Connect 6 Billion Brains [in a Beowulf Cluster]
Steve
Sure they appear to be slow, but that's because they're so fast that time slows down as a result of general relativity. Yeah that's it. I can't believe that you mindless Pee Cee thugs didn't know that.
Morons.
--Steve Jobs
"Would my car perform any better if I had the precise engineering details about how every little part worked? Of course not, because I don't have a Ph.D in mechanical engineering and don't study chemistry."
What the hell are you talking about? OK, I know that most home users don't have the expertise to modify source code, but any big organization like a government or a company will have access to experts that know UNIX and C -- these people have the skill to squeeze more utility out of a piece of software by modifying the source. The only relevant issue is whether it is necessary (or cost effective) to do that. While each case is probably different, I'm sure that any sufficiently large organization is going to need at least some custom-written software. So there is no "already working package".
"Oh, and all you complaining about not having a job -- I think Microsoft and other American companies getting more business means that there'll be more jobs here on the homefront. Just a thought...I'm not economic genius, but it seems to make sense doesn't it?"
Actually, I think that India's decision won't affect the US economy either way. The fact that they are using Linux doesn't mean that they won't want to buy proprietary software to run on Linux. I've never seen a company or a government go 100% open-source. Really, the only American company that stands to lose anything is Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's profits can seriously affect the national economy -- where I live, for instance, the economy doesn't seem to be affected by the tech sector at all.
Steve
Anything involving government is inherently political. The DOJ is controlled by the Attorney General who is appointed by the President. Whenver it has the freedom to do so, the DOJ will act according to the interests of the party to which the President belongs. This is the way it's alway been.
I know that Microsoft has given money to both parties, but Microsoft has much more influence over the Bush Administration than they did Clinton Administration. I'm not implying that the Republicans are more corrupt or anything like that. The Republicans are more naturally sympathetic to issues that Microsoft cares about.
The Bush Administration doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about antitrust issues. The DOJ had already won the case against Microsoft, but the Bush Administration basically abandoned the case as quickly as possible. The Bush administration also decided that the phone companies don't have to resell DSL access to other DSL providers, in spite of the potential for monopoly abuse.
Anyway, I firmly believe that, should the merger rumor prove to be true, the DOJ will make no effort to block it.
"Remember, the DOJ blocked the Microsoft attempt to acquire Intuit. Maybe they could block this attempt."
Microsoft has given a lot of money to the Republican party, so it's safe to assume that Ashcroft won't block this acquisition....
Steve
"I am in total disbalief that an upstanding bullshit free site such as slashdot...."
Upstanding and bullshit free? You must be new here....
Just kidding,
Steve
"Imagine being able to create a creature which is basicly a living supercomputer! It will break teh limitations of current cpus"
But can it find Sarah Conner?
You can visit the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama and see this museum of artifacts from the US Space Program. One of the items on display is a piece of Skylab that was recovered after it fell from orbit. Now, if pieces of Skylab survived, then you know that pieces of that Borg Sphere that the Enterprise destroyed would have survived reentry, too. The 21st-century humans would have recovered debris from the Borg ship and wondered where the hell it came from. Then they would have begun to reverse engineer the Borg technology. We're talking about some serious damage to the timeline that is never addressed by the movie.
Star Trek, in general, totally underestimates the effects of damaging the timeline. Things are much more complicated and interconnected than people seem to imagine. If the timeline had been altered even the slightest bit in First Contact, it would change the future in unpredictable ways. Even little things have serious ramifications down the line, and it's impossible to know what can and cannot be safely altered.
Steve
Which OS would the Klingons use? Klingons have long hair and beards and live in dark dirty rooms, so we know that they're UNIX users. But are they Linux users? They certainly have bad tempers, which means they'd feel right at home on the Linux kernel developers list. But take a look at Klingon ships. They're pretty simple and a little rough around the edges, but at the same time really tough and secure. With these design priorities, it's pretty safe to say that they're running OpenBSD.
:-)
Not convinced? Consider this additional evidence. On TNG, the Klingons are worried that their traditional values are dying. On Slashdot, the crapflooding trolls declare daily that BSD is dying. 'Nuff said.
"Hello, this is Scott McNealy, and I pronounce Solaris 'Solaris.'"
It's not much now, but it was hillarious when I was 13.
Steve
These dudes beat you to it.
Steve
And Linux would be what? a trully innovative implementation of a 30 year old operating system using the same coding techniques.
But Linux developers don't usually claim to be innovative, Microsoft does.
Steve
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA ... The Navy would be raiding RIAA computer ;)."
I'd pay good money to see that.
"Knife to Variable: SEAL team 6 is in position...."
Where I used to work, people were in the habit of sending around Access files over e-mail. What pissed me off to no end was that these files never contained more than one table with maybe 30 records in it. You can just put that in a text file! I have quite literally never seen anyone use Access as it was intended to be used. Grrr......
Steve
Is $rtbl'ing real? I've heard enough people complaining about it that I can't believe that there isn't at least some merit to their claims, but I've never seen the editors admit to having implemented it. Has anyone confirmed that this is built into the Slashcode? Have the editors said anything about it?
Steve