The point about GUI toolkits is well taken. I don't do that kind of programming. But it sure would be nice to have a good awt-less Java engine for our servers.
But maybe this prospect does not appeal to Sun.;-)
As for glibc versions, they are essentially the same as new OS releases. All your favorite OSes have new releases that break something or other.
The inter-operability problems with Linux are just horrible. You have to be excruciatingly careful because all the different flavours of Linux are all slightly different.
What problems can possibly be so bad? Have they heard of GNU Autoconf? And what's wrong with just concentrating on one distribution? I bet RH would cooperate. And us Debian users would find a way to make it work on our systems too.
Okay how about this. Write a program that takes an input image and then generates all possible output files until it comes across one that, when run through a GIF decoder, looks just like your input file. Certainly that doesn't violate Unisys' patents! How can they possibly require anyone to pay for a file generated in that manner?
I don't think Unisys would care too much about that program (except perhaps the decoder part) since it would take on the order of 10^(10^10) cycles per image.
I'll be perfectly happy if I never see another animated gif in my life. They are so distracting on web sites!!! Does Netscape/Mozilla have a way to disable them completely?
Procedure for browsing the Web: click on link. wait for page to show. wait for "Stop Animations" to become enabled. click "Stop Animations". read page.
Usage, not standards or flamewars, will decide which words survive. Use the best word for the job. Is your goal to communicate or to obfuscate? Are you talking to nerds or avrage joes?
megabyte
precise? no (useful for obfuscation/marketing)
pronounceable? yes
recognized by masses? 60%
understood by masses? 30%
understood by/. readers? 100%
million bytes
precise? yes
pronounceable? yes
recognized by masses? 100%
understood by masses? 50%
understood by/. readers? 100%
mebibyte
precise? yes
pronounceable? mebi
recognized by masses? 0%
understood by masses? 0%
understood by/. readers? 80% (now)
zorkybyte, prollybyte, mephthobyte, and others invented here
When I'm in hack mode, the urge to masturbate goes to zero. Only when I run out of coding ideas do I feel drawn to the jpg directory. The same thing happened when I began a physical relationship with my girlfriend, but it only lasted a week. Coding binges can last two weeks or more.
Get away from Harvard and you'll find some non-messed-up babes who'll float your boat. But the ones at Hvd are really not brainless, they are just confused about life.
you know you all outta get out a whole lot more. you wankers spend all you time in front of a computer when there is a whole nother world out there. get off your asses, go talk to someone, you'll see how much more there is out there and how little influence the internet has on every day life.
you guys need to step outside your own brains, talk to other people, those who have no inkling about the net other than that it's like one huge computer. they think differnt, they live differnt, they are so far from what you may originally have thought that it boggles the mind. you can start your little two pence revolution, but you don't get it.
Thank you for the suggestion, Anonymous, but many of us have tried that and failed. Nobody's perfect. We happen to be socially inept, so we redirect our sexual energy into code and such. Don't deny us what sparse joy is to be had from the 'Net.
What we do may not cure loneliness, but it sure qualifies as human progress. Ask any captain of industry.
It is not redundant, it is insightful. It cannot possibly matter if an experiment annihilates all humanity in an instant, because no one will care, because there will be no one to care.
I have a hard time believing the average IP packet is so small. Can you back that up?
Anyway, a text header wouldn't have to be much bigger than what we use now. If you really want to scrunch it, we could leave all fields the same except replace the host addrs with (variable length) host names. "slashdot.org\0" is actually shorter than the 16-byte IPv6 address that's to come. Plus you'd save out on all that DNS traffic.
No, the only technical reason I think people really wouldn't go for this is the novelty of variable-length stuff at such a low level. Maybe Cisco routers would cost more, or maybe some hardware-level optimizations would become impossible. But we're going to get HTTP request parsing in the kernel before too long, so I don't consider it an unreasonable idea.
Of course, there are non-technical reasons to oppose such a change, such as costs of transition and NSI's fudmaking ability.
I looked into getting something under.us, but information was relatively hard to come by, compared to InterNIC. What's more, they seemed to want to tie names to a geographic location. I am not tied to a location; I will probably move and would feel silly with a domain named after a place I used to live. Besides, my server is hundreds of miles away from my residence.
Actually, though, it is rather silly that I got a.org for a single individual..pers would be more appropriate, if it existed. I guess back in the days when reason was in charge, nobody imagined that people would live in ``houses'' with their own ``addresses'' as opposed to high-rise apartments like mediaone.net and skyscrapers like ibm.com.
I sure hope the world finds a reasonable solution to the DNS squabbles. Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.
Is NSI unbeatable under the current set of assumptions? How many people outside of NSI really understand the whole situation? I know some stuff about DNS and the other Internet protocols, and I have registered a.org domain, but when I read these articles, I don't grasp the problem enough to begin thinking of a solution. Surely the majority of lawmakers and business leaders lack even my hazy understanding of the politics involved, let alone the technical issues.
Will anyone write a thorough description of the real power structure behind NSI, why (or if) it is a Bad Thing, and what might be done about it? Is NSI evil? Can one boycott it? How many of the world's nameservers give access to funky TLDs such as AlterNIC's.ltd? Are there any databases of.com/.org/.net other than NSI's? Would it be possible/feasible to create one and let people use it as their DNS server? How much effort would this involve? Could the new database's contents be made non-proprietary? Would such a project amount to any more than a mute protest of NSI's monopoly?
What about government involvement? The CNN article claims, ``it will be unpopular among Internet users for ICANN to accept government money.'' Is this true? Although no one would have believed it 10 years ago (or whenever NSI got its contract), the DNS is one of the most vital pieces of world infrastructure today. Should any independent company or organization be in control? If not, who should control it? Governments? Treaties? International law?
I've got a lot more questions than answers, I'm afraid.
Re:get an education about NT before talking...
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Note that if Linux ever starts getting used on the desktop, I wouldn't be suprised to see people give the users root authority too.
True, but at least in Linux you can have a root window open for the occasional admin task and do the rest of your work as non-root. NT required you to "log off and log back in as another user" last time I checked. The quick workaround is, of course, to stay logged in as admin.
Re:get an education about NT before talking...
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
NT is memory protected, agreed. But I am talking about typical use.
User: Help! It says I need administrator privilege to install foo/uninstall foo/do something useful.
Admin: Hmm, that's funny. You're supposed to be able to do that.
User: But I can't! Come and look at it.
(user repeats steps with admin watching)
Admin: Well, I guess I'll give you administrator rights to your own machine...
Howler from Micros~1...
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Does BO2K exploit any security vulnerabilities in Windows or Windows NT?
No. Programs like BO2K could be written for any operating system; this one just happens to have been written to run on Windows and Windows NT. On any operating system, if you choose to run a program, it can do whatever you can do.
This is, IMO, the one lie that more than any other keeps Windows in control of the OS market. People's only exposure is to an OS that runs everything as root and requires users to buy new anti-virus software every month, so they imagine that's the way things have to be.
Not so. Linux and *nix are fundamentally more secure than Windows, because they make adequate use of the hardware security feature known as memory protection. When a Linux user runs a program downloaded from who-knows-where, s/he runs it as non-root. (except maybe "make install", which is a weak point, IMHO) In contrast, W98 doesn't even try to be secure, and even under NT, users typically run every process with administrator privilege.
You are right that BSD-licensed code can be released and re-released under different free and proprietary licenses, whereas GPL'd code cannot except by the copyright holder.
Bruce is saying that from his point of view as a hacker interested in writing free software that many people will use and improve, the idea of using a BSD license is bothersome. If his code is used in a proprietary product that is more popular than the original BSD-licensed program, its usefulness to him as a force for good in the world is diminished. By a stretch of metaphor, he calls this capacity for diminishment "viral".
On the other hand, from the point of view of someone who wants to use other people's software in a proprietary or unrestricted (e.g., BSD) licensed product, BSD-licensed code is a boon. When such people find a bit of code on the net that might aid their enterprise, they look at the license (if they are scrupulous) hoping to see the "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted" line of the BSD license and dreading the words "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License". Such people tend to call the GPL's self-propagating quality "viral".
In other words, it's all in how you look at it.
[Just a side note, this thread is off topic, but the original question has been answered quite thoroughly (use a special exception to the GPL), and we all like discussing license politics.]
No, Apache isn't, but aolserver has the option to be used under the GPL. Due to the GPL's viral nature, the Apache group would probably not accept patches containing GPLed code, but the Apache license permits you to do what you want as long as you give due credit. So aolserver can steal from Apache, but not vice versa.
If AOLServer is half as good as Greenspun says, it will be serious competition indeed for Apache. With its GPL, people can rip out chunks of Apache wholesale and stick them in aolserver. A mod_perl interface would be my first suggestion.
No, you are confusing use with distribution. That is where the GNU GPL differs from Tom's GoodPL and Microsoft's EULAs. Without a license for Word, you are not allowed to run, install, or make any use of it whatsoever. Similarly, you cannot incorporate GoodPL'd software in a screensaver, even for private use. GPL'd software, on the other hand, may be linked, combined, and used in any way imaginable, as long as you don't distribute it as part of a non-free program.
Free Software Foundation => Good Software Group FSF => GSG Richard Stallman => Gilbert Oram Dawson Wired => Hired Free Software => Good Software "free" as in free speech => "good" as in goods and services General Public License => Good-Software Permanent License GPL restrictions on distribution => restrictions on use GNU/Linux => Good/E-Commerce
I gotta give Tom credit, but the "real" GPL does not restrict the use of software the way the Good-Software Permanent License does. That's a weak point in the analogy, at least if you assume that a near-100% Free Software world is possible. Which is not as outrageous, IMO, as a 100% "Good" Software world.
Slashdot Mirror
The point about GUI toolkits is well taken. I don't do that kind of programming. But it sure would be nice to have a good awt-less Java engine for our servers.
But maybe this prospect does not appeal to Sun. ;-)
As for glibc versions, they are essentially the same as new OS releases. All your favorite OSes have new releases that break something or other.
What problems can possibly be so bad? Have they heard of GNU Autoconf? And what's wrong with just concentrating on one distribution? I bet RH would cooperate. And us Debian users would find a way to make it work on our systems too.
I don't think Unisys would care too much about that program (except perhaps the decoder part) since it would take on the order of 10^(10^10) cycles per image.
I'll be perfectly happy if I never see another animated gif in my life. They are so distracting on web sites!!! Does Netscape/Mozilla have a way to disable them completely?
Procedure for browsing the Web: click on link. wait for page to show. wait for "Stop Animations" to become enabled. click "Stop Animations". read page.
That's when I say to hell w/ it, I'm packing my parka and heading for Sweden..
Usage, not standards or flamewars, will decide which words survive. Use the best word for the job. Is your goal to communicate or to obfuscate? Are you talking to nerds or avrage joes?
When I'm in hack mode, the urge to masturbate goes to zero. Only when I run out of coding ideas do I feel drawn to the jpg directory. The same thing happened when I began a physical relationship with my girlfriend, but it only lasted a week. Coding binges can last two weeks or more.
Get away from Harvard and you'll find some non-messed-up babes who'll float your boat. But the ones at Hvd are really not brainless, they are just confused about life.
Thank you for the suggestion, Anonymous, but many of us have tried that and failed. Nobody's perfect. We happen to be socially inept, so we redirect our sexual energy into code and such. Don't deny us what sparse joy is to be had from the 'Net.
What we do may not cure loneliness, but it sure qualifies as human progress. Ask any captain of industry.
Your GNU-less distro needs a C Library to run Perl. libc6 is GNU Libc. libc5 is unsupported.
:-P
Why didn't you tell me about this a month ago? ;-) You would have saved me a lot of trouble researching, finding, and installing Debian on a laptop.
The moderators have missed this post's irony.
It is not redundant, it is insightful. It cannot possibly matter if an experiment annihilates all humanity in an instant, because no one will care, because there will be no one to care.
I have a hard time believing the average IP packet is so small. Can you back that up?
Anyway, a text header wouldn't have to be much bigger than what we use now. If you really want to scrunch it, we could leave all fields the same except replace the host addrs with (variable length) host names. "slashdot.org\0" is actually shorter than the 16-byte IPv6 address that's to come. Plus you'd save out on all that DNS traffic.
No, the only technical reason I think people really wouldn't go for this is the novelty of variable-length stuff at such a low level. Maybe Cisco routers would cost more, or maybe some hardware-level optimizations would become impossible. But we're going to get HTTP request parsing in the kernel before too long, so I don't consider it an unreasonable idea.
Of course, there are non-technical reasons to oppose such a change, such as costs of transition and NSI's fudmaking ability.
I looked into getting something under .us, but information was relatively hard to come by, compared to InterNIC. What's more, they seemed to want to tie names to a geographic location. I am not tied to a location; I will probably move and would feel silly with a domain named after a place I used to live. Besides, my server is hundreds of miles away from my residence.
Actually, though, it is rather silly that I got a .org for a single individual. .pers would be more appropriate, if it existed. I guess back in the days when reason was in charge, nobody imagined that people would live in ``houses'' with their own ``addresses'' as opposed to high-rise apartments like mediaone.net and skyscrapers like ibm.com.
I sure hope the world finds a reasonable solution to the DNS squabbles. Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.
Is NSI unbeatable under the current set of assumptions? How many people outside of NSI really understand the whole situation? I know some stuff about DNS and the other Internet protocols, and I have registered a .org domain, but when I read these articles, I don't grasp the problem enough to begin thinking of a solution. Surely the majority of lawmakers and business leaders lack even my hazy understanding of the politics involved, let alone the technical issues.
Will anyone write a thorough description of the real power structure behind NSI, why (or if) it is a Bad Thing, and what might be done about it? Is NSI evil? Can one boycott it? How many of the world's nameservers give access to funky TLDs such as AlterNIC's .ltd? Are there any databases of .com/.org/.net other than NSI's? Would it be possible/feasible to create one and let people use it as their DNS server? How much effort would this involve? Could the new database's contents be made non-proprietary? Would such a project amount to any more than a mute protest of NSI's monopoly?
What about government involvement? The CNN article claims, ``it will be unpopular among Internet users for ICANN to accept government money.'' Is this true? Although no one would have believed it 10 years ago (or whenever NSI got its contract), the DNS is one of the most vital pieces of world infrastructure today. Should any independent company or organization be in control? If not, who should control it? Governments? Treaties? International law?
I've got a lot more questions than answers, I'm afraid.
True, but at least in Linux you can have a root window open for the occasional admin task and do the rest of your work as non-root. NT required you to "log off and log back in as another user" last time I checked. The quick workaround is, of course, to stay logged in as admin.
NT is memory protected, agreed. But I am talking about typical use.
This is, IMO, the one lie that more than any other keeps Windows in control of the OS market. People's only exposure is to an OS that runs everything as root and requires users to buy new anti-virus software every month, so they imagine that's the way things have to be.
Not so. Linux and *nix are fundamentally more secure than Windows, because they make adequate use of the hardware security feature known as memory protection. When a Linux user runs a program downloaded from who-knows-where, s/he runs it as non-root. (except maybe "make install", which is a weak point, IMHO) In contrast, W98 doesn't even try to be secure, and even under NT, users typically run every process with administrator privilege.
You are right that BSD-licensed code can be released and re-released under different free and proprietary licenses, whereas GPL'd code cannot except by the copyright holder.
Bruce is saying that from his point of view as a hacker interested in writing free software that many people will use and improve, the idea of using a BSD license is bothersome. If his code is used in a proprietary product that is more popular than the original BSD-licensed program, its usefulness to him as a force for good in the world is diminished. By a stretch of metaphor, he calls this capacity for diminishment "viral".
On the other hand, from the point of view of someone who wants to use other people's software in a proprietary or unrestricted (e.g., BSD) licensed product, BSD-licensed code is a boon. When such people find a bit of code on the net that might aid their enterprise, they look at the license (if they are scrupulous) hoping to see the "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted" line of the BSD license and dreading the words "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License". Such people tend to call the GPL's self-propagating quality "viral".
In other words, it's all in how you look at it.
[Just a side note, this thread is off topic, but the original question has been answered quite thoroughly (use a special exception to the GPL), and we all like discussing license politics.]
No, Apache isn't, but aolserver has the option to be used under the GPL. Due to the GPL's viral nature, the Apache group would probably not accept patches containing GPLed code, but the Apache license permits you to do what you want as long as you give due credit. So aolserver can steal from Apache, but not vice versa.
I built it on Debian and it works!
If AOLServer is half as good as Greenspun says, it will be serious competition indeed for Apache. With its GPL, people can rip out chunks of Apache wholesale and stick them in aolserver. A mod_perl interface would be my first suggestion.
No, you are confusing use with distribution. That is where the GNU GPL differs from Tom's GoodPL and Microsoft's EULAs. Without a license for Word, you are not allowed to run, install, or make any use of it whatsoever. Similarly, you cannot incorporate GoodPL'd software in a screensaver, even for private use. GPL'd software, on the other hand, may be linked, combined, and used in any way imaginable, as long as you don't distribute it as part of a non-free program.
Free Software Foundation => Good Software Group
FSF => GSG
Richard Stallman => Gilbert Oram Dawson
Wired => Hired
Free Software => Good Software
"free" as in free speech => "good" as in goods and services
General Public License => Good-Software Permanent License
GPL restrictions on distribution => restrictions on use
GNU/Linux => Good/E-Commerce
I gotta give Tom credit, but the "real" GPL does not restrict the use of software the way the Good-Software Permanent License does. That's a weak point in the analogy, at least if you assume that a near-100% Free Software world is possible. Which is not as outrageous, IMO, as a 100% "Good" Software world.