that was an *excellent* troll, Mr. AC. One of those trolls that really gets the original author all riled up. You even had me going for a second there. Then I realized - classic troll, and posted by an AC at that.
Read your own post, crack smoker... "eligibility for, among other things, employment" and then stop reading there. What exactly do you think they are doing? Playing pattycake? No. They are determining that people are no longer eligible for employment, in other words, FIRING them. Thus, if you look at the fairly broadly defined law, consumer info other than strict credit information are protected, and for purposes including determining employment eligibility (and that would certainly include not only ORIGINAL but CONTINUING employment elibility, or at least, any lawyer worth a buck fifty could argue so).
How much do you think you have to drink before it occurs to you to run around the house with camera and empty soda bottles in hand making "leaked screenshots" of Quake IV?
Please moderate this up... this poster actually seems to understand that this is legitimate research and is not just bashing Dr. Pepperberg's work as conditioned-response. All these trolls are getting +4 and +5 moderations when they've clearly never even looked at the research involved and are refuting it by speculation.
If you would please see the above response with footnoted references you would realize that is not the methodology at all used in the tests of counting ability by African Greys. Rather than counting up verbally, they look for a moment and then respond verbally once with a total count, rather as a human would. At least that's how the studies I've read present it and how I've seen it done by Irene Pepperberg on various discovery channel shows.
Which is fine. However, that means that the author of ZDoom and the author of CsDoom may NOT incorporate GPLed code into their codebase. If somebody releases a patch against the GPLed DOOM codebase, then CsDoom would have to get the author of that patch to relicense it under some other license as well which is compatible with their current license (i.e. original DOOM license or BSD or something else). Incorporating GPLed code into a nonGPLable product is a violation of the GPL license, and the onus of determining that falls on the person using the GPLed code. You violate the license, you open yourself up to lawsuits, not to mention the rage of the Free Software community.
Gotta say, Harvard has been bowing to corporate interests more and more lately. Now admittedly, this isn't as bad as that Yahoo/ZDNet editorial makes it sound (I really don't think Intel had sabotage in mind, they just didn't want their displays up right in front of a bunch of iMac kiosks, which are REALLY visible, as anyone who has been in Harvard's Science Center knows). But this is the second time this year Harvard has bowed to a big tech company - at the dedication of the new CS building (donated by Gates and Ballmer) all the Linux boxen and other non-NT systems were moved out of the kiosk area so Ballmer wouldn't see them. I think this is somewhat inappropriate for a University, which is supposed to be an unbiased educational institution, with a responsibility to educate their students about the full depth and breadth of technology. Restricting viewable technology to Microsoft only just stinks of corporate asskissing.
Jim Archer, the guy who runs Processing Innovations, also works for my company and is a good friend of mine. It's a one man operation and he's a nice guy. If he has that language there it's only to protect himself (I presume at a lawyer's recommendation). He would never go around revoking domain names of registrees of his (I recommend many friends to his registration service which he doesn't really do for the money but more as a service to the community)
However you are neglecting to notice that the company accepted the GPL when they started using the software. So they are obliged to release under the GPL any of the modifications he makes while working for them ANYWAY. They will hold copyright to those modifications, but they are still GPL infected. Although they could try to force (coerce) him into allowing them to keep those patches private (i.e. relicense his original code), he would be entirely within his rights to refuse and it would probably be illegal for them to fire him on that basis (a company can't extort you outside of the realm of your employment agreement to GIVE them stuff you previously worked on and that YOU own copyright to).
Agreed one hundred percent. The applicant is listed as Pear, Inc., which is presumably an incorporated body which members of the PEAR group at Princeton have formed to pursue commercial applications of their "technology." I'll believe it when they show it to me. Frankly, I don't have the time to read their results in a sufficient amount of detail to make a reasonable assessment, so I don't want to badmouth them. Suffice it to say that ANYBODY who has ever done scientific research knows how easy it can be for inconceivable anomalies to enter your data through bad methods, bad statistics, or bad analysis. I have no idea which of these, if any, this falls under. But I definitely think it's out of left field enough to warrant mild skepticism. In any case, I see nothing to indicate IBM or any other major corporation taking an interest. Just the same researchers at PEAR and a couple of other names from out in Minnesota.
Nope, sorry. The FSF doesn't own all GPLed code in any way. Different people own different software pieces (i.e. hold copyright on them) and release them under different licenses. Proprietary has always implied the logical AND of non-Open Source and non-Free to me. Clearly, ALL code is "owned" under copyright by somebody. Even X/modified BSD licensed code is "owned" under copyright. Are you suggesting that makes it proprietary? Or that restrictions on how you use code make it proprietary? That doesn't make any sense to me, as proprietary carries much stronger connotations than "owned" in the software world, and thus trying to apply that definition here is nonsensical.
Do you have any specific examples? Find a URL, post comparative speed results between NS 4.7 and Mozilla. Mozilla, by the way, is a *whole* lot faster in the win32 builds than in the Linux builds. This is a reported, known bug, and is being worked on currently. The latest M15 nightly builds are about 2-3 times faster on some widget intensive pages (like bugzilla query form) than the M14 builds, although in general only a bit faster. Mozilla at it's best (i.e. latest builds on win32) is still slower than IE5, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and it's still in alpha. So I am quite sure win32 builds will be up to snuff. I just hope that Linux rendering is brought up to parity with win32 rendering.
That is very strange. I'm running Mandrake 7, and I have found the latest nightly builds and M14 (which I am running right now) to be pretty rock solid. Crashes are fairly rare, probably every half hour or so of solid browsing. Rendering was a bit problematic in M13, but is flawless in the latest nightlies and M14, for most pages, even pretty damn complex ones. Make sure you are using ViewManager2, and if you find specific rendering problems PLEASE post URLs to bugzilla and they will be fixed ASAP. Oh, and M14 is much faster than M13 (Linux builds). And the M15 nightlies have a speedup of about a factor of 2-3 for some complicated pages (like the bugzilla query page) over M14... they didn't put the changes into the M14 tree, because they wanted it stabilized.
Check out my site to read about how Harvard University's General Counsel's office has forced me to remove DeCSS from my archive, and has buckled to their fear of the MPAA despite the fact that no legal precedent yet supports this point and that the preliminary injunction does not apply to me, nor has such an injunction been issued in this jurisdiction.
Just to clarify, there most certainly WILL be XSLT support in Mozilla. Everyone agrees on this. It's just too late at this point to add it in to the initial Mozilla release. I am dying for it too, but if it will set back an initial Mozilla release by another 2-3 months (which it will) then I'll pass for now. If it's not being worked on by the first point release, there are plenty of us who will go write it ourselves. It's Open Source, it will get there, it's just that debugging the already built functionality has to take precedence at this point so the first release can get out the door cleanly.
Jeez, give the guy some credit. He had to really think on his feet. I sincerely doubt he really thought it would work when he typed/nick President_Clinton, much less that they'd auto +v him. He had less than 30 seconds, most of which as he describes in his explanation, he spent laughing. Were it a preplanned hack, I would certainly expect better. But for an on the spot prank, I think it just shows he found himself in a humorous situation, he was not aiming for some brilliant act of hacktivism.
But in this case there was no unauthorized access. A guy simply changed his nick to see what would happen. And he himself was clearly astonished that it worked. He didn't walk into a door. Or enter a computer system. He just changed his IRC nick. Now, if somebody had made a real attempt to impersonate the president of the United States, I'd say that was a bad thing to do. But go read the guys explanation... he made a joking comment, that nobody could think came from the president. Lighten up a bit people. Nothing illegal or immoral happened here, just a humorous gaffe caused by CNN not knowing how to run a heavily moderated IRC chat.
There are definitely ways in which this can help and be useful. First of all, a sort of informal peer review, and common-folk review of some of the arguments involved can be very useful to lawyers, to gauge general reaction to parts of the case.
If you think of it like source code, then it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It is more like a collaborative groupware type facilitation of cooperation. Ultimately, I don't think briefs will be written by groups of people, but feedback on a webboard, open discussion bringing together techies and lawyers is bound to strengthen cases.
Moreover, in cases like the DVD/CSS issues, where multiple cases are currently ongoing in different venues, and more are bound to spring up, it seems fairly clear that a centralized point for discussion about the issues could be additively useful for lawyers in all of the involved cases.
I think if you keep in mind the real useful benefits that this sort of collaboration could provide, and keep away from a strict Open Source analogy, you'll see why it is a Good Thing.
Bruce, I know there are a number of professors here at the Harvard Law School who would definitely be interested. A friend of mine was working with them against the Copyright Extension Act last year or the year before. I will be attempting to solicit interest from Jonathan Zittrain an HLS professor who is definitely interested in these issues, in helping with the DVD case.
In general I think academic lawyers would be more amenable to doing pro bono work for the Free Software community, as they Get It (TM) based on my interactions with them, whereas lawyers who do IP type stuff in the corporate communities are almost universally of the Not Getting It (TM) variety (I have filed patents before and come into contact with those sort of bozos).
Sorry if I wasn't clear... I was directing those recommendations in my post to/. readers who want to test the M14 nightly builds, which are very powerful functional _alpha_ builds from the source tree. Of course I don't think that a shipping product should have those problems, and it's pretty clear that a shipping product won't. There are a lot of really good developers working on Mozilla, and they do know how to squash bugs. They worked out an amazing number of bugs to get the M13 milestone build out the door. The M14 milestone build will be significantly more impressive, and relatively bug free. The number of showstopper/dogfood bugs is shrinking fairly rapidly now, based on my daily surveys of bugzilla, and I am quite sure the beta release will be pretty much dogfood free. I think that a Spring release of Mozilla is reasonable. As to a branded Netscape release, it seems a bit unfeasible, but I don't know anything about how the Netscape development people will work with the Mozilla product...
To add a bit more detail then the other responder gave, the idea is that since the product is now generally usable, the programmers are using it as their primary browser. Hence any major showstopping usability bugs will come across their own desktops, making them "eat their own dogfood", in a manner of speaking.
I agree wholeheartedly. The devlopers and hackers who read bugzilla are quite responsive, in general (to bug reports... quite a bit less to to feature requests at this point, since they're trying to squash the dogfood bugs right now). Voting on bugs *Does* help, it lets developers know which bugs are important to users to get fixed immediately. Performance issues in Linux have been addressed, and they are a priority of one of the developers.
My understanding of serious performance issues is that they were mostly the result of a couple of choke points that had to be tracked down, not just debug code. In any case, they are being worked on currently, and if you check out the latest builds you will notice pretty darned good speed and rendering, and general functionality (some UI issues remain, IMHO, but those will be dealt with by release).
Also make sure to look in bugzilla if you find problems, as there are sometimes workarounds posted there (for example, DON'T leave gfx widgets on in Edit->Preferences->Debug without changing to ViewManager2... in fact, I recommend turning them off for the time being, as there are some major rendering problems introduced by them, which are being debugged currently).
Dunno when the last time you tried a Mozilla build was, but for a kick, try the latest nightly Linux build, and go to Edit->Preferences->Debug and turn off gfx scrollbars (dunno why they are enabled by default, they are causing some bugginess and slowness still). Then browse around a bit. I won't claim that Mozilla is perfect yet, but it's gotten VERY usable in terms of speed -- still hogging memory a bit more than it should, but now that most of the MAJOR bugs are getting worked out, there will be more time for speed optimization and memory leak fixing and the like. I find Mozilla comparable in speed for most browsing now to Netscape 4.7 on my Celeron 300a box, and it's not slow enough to be frustrating for day-to-day browsing at all. If you are using gfx widgets, you might wanna try ViewManager2 in debug settings, too.
The same user base as Windows 2000 beta? Probably. These are bugs based on beta testers and MSDN people using the release code. The operating system *HASN'T* been put into general use yet. I'm sure more bugs will be filed when it has been. And the idea that # bugs scales in some vaguely linear way with number of users is odd indeed -- many bug reports are duplicates, etc. A numerical comparison isn't particularly meaningful.
Okay, what gives with the low-performance linux-based web-pad vs. the high-performance NT based mobile computing platform that plays DVDs, etc. (please see Phoenix and Transmeta marketing hype for references)? I want to get the high performance toys, I want them to play DVDs and I want it to run Mobile Linux. Is that too much to ask?
Oh well, I presume there will be subnotebooks/whatever we end up calling them based on the 700 mhz crusoe that will actually run Mobile Linux, and that the dichotomy is merely a marketing split to show the two "different" market sectors Transmeta is attacking with their products (handhelds vs. notebooks-of-the-future). I just am not entirely comfortable with the idea that Linux is boxed in as the embedded platform / handheld platform, at least from a marketing perspective.
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that was an *excellent* troll, Mr. AC. One of those trolls that really gets the original author all riled up. You even had me going for a second there. Then I realized - classic troll, and posted by an AC at that.
Read your own post, crack smoker... "eligibility for, among other things, employment" and then stop reading there. What exactly do you think they are doing? Playing pattycake? No. They are determining that people are no longer eligible for employment, in other words, FIRING them. Thus, if you look at the fairly broadly defined law, consumer info other than strict credit information are protected, and for purposes including determining employment eligibility (and that would certainly include not only ORIGINAL but CONTINUING employment elibility, or at least, any lawyer worth a buck fifty could argue so).
How much do you think you have to drink before it occurs to you to run around the house with camera and empty soda bottles in hand making "leaked screenshots" of Quake IV?
Please moderate this up... this poster actually seems to understand that this is legitimate research and is not just bashing Dr. Pepperberg's work as conditioned-response. All these trolls are getting +4 and +5 moderations when they've clearly never even looked at the research involved and are refuting it by speculation.
If you would please see the above response with footnoted references you would realize that is not the methodology at all used in the tests of counting ability by African Greys. Rather than counting up verbally, they look for a moment and then respond verbally once with a total count, rather as a human would. At least that's how the studies I've read present it and how I've seen it done by Irene Pepperberg on various discovery channel shows.
Which is fine. However, that means that the author of ZDoom and the author of CsDoom may NOT incorporate GPLed code into their codebase. If somebody releases a patch against the GPLed DOOM codebase, then CsDoom would have to get the author of that patch to relicense it under some other license as well which is compatible with their current license (i.e. original DOOM license or BSD or something else). Incorporating GPLed code into a nonGPLable product is a violation of the GPL license, and the onus of determining that falls on the person using the GPLed code. You violate the license, you open yourself up to lawsuits, not to mention the rage of the Free Software community.
Gotta say, Harvard has been bowing to corporate interests more and more lately. Now admittedly, this isn't as bad as that Yahoo/ZDNet editorial makes it sound (I really don't think Intel had sabotage in mind, they just didn't want their displays up right in front of a bunch of iMac kiosks, which are REALLY visible, as anyone who has been in Harvard's Science Center knows). But this is the second time this year Harvard has bowed to a big tech company - at the dedication of the new CS building (donated by Gates and Ballmer) all the Linux boxen and other non-NT systems were moved out of the kiosk area so Ballmer wouldn't see them. I think this is somewhat inappropriate for a University, which is supposed to be an unbiased educational institution, with a responsibility to educate their students about the full depth and breadth of technology. Restricting viewable technology to Microsoft only just stinks of corporate asskissing.
Jim Archer, the guy who runs Processing Innovations, also works for my company and is a good friend of mine. It's a one man operation and he's a nice guy. If he has that language there it's only to protect himself (I presume at a lawyer's recommendation). He would never go around revoking domain names of registrees of his (I recommend many friends to his registration service which he doesn't really do for the money but more as a service to the community)
However you are neglecting to notice that the company accepted the GPL when they started using the software. So they are obliged to release under the GPL any of the modifications he makes while working for them ANYWAY. They will hold copyright to those modifications, but they are still GPL infected. Although they could try to force (coerce) him into allowing them to keep those patches private (i.e. relicense his original code), he would be entirely within his rights to refuse and it would probably be illegal for them to fire him on that basis (a company can't extort you outside of the realm of your employment agreement to GIVE them stuff you previously worked on and that YOU own copyright to).
Agreed one hundred percent. The applicant is listed as Pear, Inc., which is presumably an incorporated body which members of the PEAR group at Princeton have formed to pursue commercial applications of their "technology." I'll believe it when they show it to me. Frankly, I don't have the time to read their results in a sufficient amount of detail to make a reasonable assessment, so I don't want to badmouth them. Suffice it to say that ANYBODY who has ever done scientific research knows how easy it can be for inconceivable anomalies to enter your data through bad methods, bad statistics, or bad analysis. I have no idea which of these, if any, this falls under. But I definitely think it's out of left field enough to warrant mild skepticism. In any case, I see nothing to indicate IBM or any other major corporation taking an interest. Just the same researchers at PEAR and a couple of other names from out in Minnesota.
Nope, sorry. The FSF doesn't own all GPLed code in any way. Different people own different software pieces (i.e. hold copyright on them) and release them under different licenses. Proprietary has always implied the logical AND of non-Open Source and non-Free to me. Clearly, ALL code is "owned" under copyright by somebody. Even X/modified BSD licensed code is "owned" under copyright. Are you suggesting that makes it proprietary? Or that restrictions on how you use code make it proprietary? That doesn't make any sense to me, as proprietary carries much stronger connotations than "owned" in the software world, and thus trying to apply that definition here is nonsensical.
Do you have any specific examples? Find a URL, post comparative speed results between NS 4.7 and Mozilla. Mozilla, by the way, is a *whole* lot faster in the win32 builds than in the Linux builds. This is a reported, known bug, and is being worked on currently. The latest M15 nightly builds are about 2-3 times faster on some widget intensive pages (like bugzilla query form) than the M14 builds, although in general only a bit faster. Mozilla at it's best (i.e. latest builds on win32) is still slower than IE5, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and it's still in alpha. So I am quite sure win32 builds will be up to snuff. I just hope that Linux rendering is brought up to parity with win32 rendering.
That is very strange. I'm running Mandrake 7, and I have found the latest nightly builds and M14 (which I am running right now) to be pretty rock solid. Crashes are fairly rare, probably every half hour or so of solid browsing. Rendering was a bit problematic in M13, but is flawless in the latest nightlies and M14, for most pages, even pretty damn complex ones. Make sure you are using ViewManager2, and if you find specific rendering problems PLEASE post URLs to bugzilla and they will be fixed ASAP. Oh, and M14 is much faster than M13 (Linux builds). And the M15 nightlies have a speedup of about a factor of 2-3 for some complicated pages (like the bugzilla query page) over M14... they didn't put the changes into the M14 tree, because they wanted it stabilized.
Check out my site to read about how Harvard University's General Counsel's office has forced me to remove DeCSS from my archive, and has buckled to their fear of the MPAA despite the fact that no legal precedent yet supports this point and that the preliminary injunction does not apply to me, nor has such an injunction been issued in this jurisdiction.
Just to clarify, there most certainly WILL be XSLT support in Mozilla. Everyone agrees on this. It's just too late at this point to add it in to the initial Mozilla release. I am dying for it too, but if it will set back an initial Mozilla release by another 2-3 months (which it will) then I'll pass for now. If it's not being worked on by the first point release, there are plenty of us who will go write it ourselves. It's Open Source, it will get there, it's just that debugging the already built functionality has to take precedence at this point so the first release can get out the door cleanly.
Jeez, give the guy some credit. He had to really think on his feet. I sincerely doubt he really thought it would work when he typed /nick President_Clinton, much less that they'd auto +v him. He had less than 30 seconds, most of which as he describes in his explanation, he spent laughing. Were it a preplanned hack, I would certainly expect better. But for an on the spot prank, I think it just shows he found himself in a humorous situation, he was not aiming for some brilliant act of hacktivism.
But in this case there was no unauthorized access. A guy simply changed his nick to see what would happen. And he himself was clearly astonished that it worked. He didn't walk into a door. Or enter a computer system. He just changed his IRC nick. Now, if somebody had made a real attempt to impersonate the president of the United States, I'd say that was a bad thing to do. But go read the guys explanation... he made a joking comment, that nobody could think came from the president. Lighten up a bit people. Nothing illegal or immoral happened here, just a humorous gaffe caused by CNN not knowing how to run a heavily moderated IRC chat.
If you think of it like source code, then it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It is more like a collaborative groupware type facilitation of cooperation. Ultimately, I don't think briefs will be written by groups of people, but feedback on a webboard, open discussion bringing together techies and lawyers is bound to strengthen cases.
Moreover, in cases like the DVD/CSS issues, where multiple cases are currently ongoing in different venues, and more are bound to spring up, it seems fairly clear that a centralized point for discussion about the issues could be additively useful for lawyers in all of the involved cases.
I think if you keep in mind the real useful benefits that this sort of collaboration could provide, and keep away from a strict Open Source analogy, you'll see why it is a Good Thing.
In general I think academic lawyers would be more amenable to doing pro bono work for the Free Software community, as they Get It (TM) based on my interactions with them, whereas lawyers who do IP type stuff in the corporate communities are almost universally of the Not Getting It (TM) variety (I have filed patents before and come into contact with those sort of bozos).
Sorry if I wasn't clear... I was directing those recommendations in my post to /. readers who want to test the M14 nightly builds, which are very powerful functional _alpha_ builds from the source tree. Of course I don't think that a shipping product should have those problems, and it's pretty clear that a shipping product won't. There are a lot of really good developers working on Mozilla, and they do know how to squash bugs. They worked out an amazing number of bugs to get the M13 milestone build out the door. The M14 milestone build will be significantly more impressive, and relatively bug free. The number of showstopper/dogfood bugs is shrinking fairly rapidly now, based on my daily surveys of bugzilla, and I am quite sure the beta release will be pretty much dogfood free. I think that a Spring release of Mozilla is reasonable. As to a branded Netscape release, it seems a bit unfeasible, but I don't know anything about how the Netscape development people will work with the Mozilla product...
To add a bit more detail then the other responder gave, the idea is that since the product is now generally usable, the programmers are using it as their primary browser. Hence any major showstopping usability bugs will come across their own desktops, making them "eat their own dogfood", in a manner of speaking.
My understanding of serious performance issues is that they were mostly the result of a couple of choke points that had to be tracked down, not just debug code. In any case, they are being worked on currently, and if you check out the latest builds you will notice pretty darned good speed and rendering, and general functionality (some UI issues remain, IMHO, but those will be dealt with by release).
Also make sure to look in bugzilla if you find problems, as there are sometimes workarounds posted there (for example, DON'T leave gfx widgets on in Edit->Preferences->Debug without changing to ViewManager2... in fact, I recommend turning them off for the time being, as there are some major rendering problems introduced by them, which are being debugged currently).
Dunno when the last time you tried a Mozilla build was, but for a kick, try the latest nightly Linux build, and go to Edit->Preferences->Debug and turn off gfx scrollbars (dunno why they are enabled by default, they are causing some bugginess and slowness still). Then browse around a bit. I won't claim that Mozilla is perfect yet, but it's gotten VERY usable in terms of speed -- still hogging memory a bit more than it should, but now that most of the MAJOR bugs are getting worked out, there will be more time for speed optimization and memory leak fixing and the like. I find Mozilla comparable in speed for most browsing now to Netscape 4.7 on my Celeron 300a box, and it's not slow enough to be frustrating for day-to-day browsing at all.
If you are using gfx widgets, you might wanna try ViewManager2 in debug settings, too.
The same user base as Windows 2000 beta? Probably. These are bugs based on beta testers and MSDN people using the release code. The operating system *HASN'T* been put into general use yet. I'm sure more bugs will be filed when it has been. And the idea that # bugs scales in some vaguely linear way with number of users is odd indeed -- many bug reports are duplicates, etc. A numerical comparison isn't particularly meaningful.
Oh well, I presume there will be subnotebooks/whatever we end up calling them based on the 700 mhz crusoe that will actually run Mobile Linux, and that the dichotomy is merely a marketing split to show the two "different" market sectors Transmeta is attacking with their products (handhelds vs. notebooks-of-the-future). I just am not entirely comfortable with the idea that Linux is boxed in as the embedded platform / handheld platform, at least from a marketing perspective.