John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed.
It is just not even close to true. Changes FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL USE do not come close to the issues related to copyright violation (effects on the author's market for the copyrighted material, or his reputation, etc). This is NEVER a default copyright violation. To claim so reaches the heights of absurdity. Talk to a copyright lawyer sometime instead of someone with his head shoved up his ass.
Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked...
I DO prefer code open source code that can also be forked. But I do not think that is necessary for something to be FREE (as in GNU free), although the OSI would include it in their definition of "open source". There are a LOT of relevant freedoms. DJB includes all but redistributing derivatives. That is a LOT, and by no means reason to condemn his work to hell for eternity.
P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas
Not really. I am not so into performance reviews unless performance is an issue for me. My servers are not pegged to the line EVER, performance is a non-issue for ME. What I care about is security and ease-of-use (mainly because they relate to the amount of admin time I need to spend to achieve proper use for my users). And DJB software allows ME, with my very specific small server needs, the absolute minimum admin time to perform as well as I need. And that is all.
Ask most admins, and they will tell you a similar story. The best no-cost software is the one you have to spend the least time dorking with. If it is OSI open source as well, so much the better. If not, well, I'll wait until something better comes along that is OSI open source. But only if DJB's software fails or needs upgrading sometime in the next 20 years. Which is unlikely.
It is informative b/c it provides a non-standard archive for a rapidly changing package, mplayer.
However, I prefer deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main for mplayer et al (MANY MANY multimedia packages there).
You will learn, if you ever use Debian, that it rocks in a way other distros do not, and that you should start by wiping RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, or whatever off your boxen and keep it real. Install Debian across the net with a single floppy. Any aggros trolling of people using other distros is purely intentional.
The distance moved is going to be on the order of the wavelength of light - 100 nanometers or so. In fact, this slide pretty much says so - less than a micron.
But what does that say about time ? I don't think there is a real concern. As long as one of these babies can flip in less than 10 milliseconds (and it surely can), there will be no issue wrt speed. In fact, it can very likely be a LOT LOT faster than a CRT, because you merely need to change voltages on transistors, whereas a CRT has a scanning beam that has to traverse the whole screen.
The other thing I found REALLY interesting is that such a display could be run native in a HSB (hue-saturation-brightness) mode. Instead of three colors, each pixel could be ANY hue, since you only have to change a voltage to a new value to change the color. Way cool (they are planning initially for full RGB compat). But in the future it could be a new sort of color scheme entirely.
Of course, it's all vaporware until there are production models.
The biggest problem with reviews of distributions is that they are really reviews of installers. Debian's installer is quite usable, but it is not exactly pretty and streamlined.
But a Debian box only ever needs to be installed once. After that, apt-get update; apt-get upgrade will be all you need to do. Forever. Sure, there will be the occasional hiccup. But they are very very rare. With RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE you get to install de novo yearly. What fun !
So that is the largest point missed - the joy of MAINTAINING a Debian box once installed. The other thing distribution reviews always miss are the startup scripts, including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs. Here, again, Debian shines like a thoroughbred compared to the competition. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator.
I think that last sentence is probably most descriptive of Debian. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator. But a review written by someone not so qualified will miss out on many of the finer points that are the distros best attributes.
I have a feeling that the answer to this question is going to shock and dismay us all. Some individual, common, hitherto-thought-harmless pollutant? Ambient noise levels?
I have a feeling you are right.
Among the autistic research community, there is evidence for environmental causes, perhaps multiple (almost all pre-natal), and genetic linkages suggesting a genetic susceptibility coupled to some stressor during pregnancy, and you get autism.
The recent rise is unattributable to changes in genetic combination, most think, so the change is almost surely environmental. But what ?
And in the mean time, what can be done to maximize quality of life for autistic children (most of whom are not gifted in intellect, but quite quite far behind their peers) ?
I think this guy is taking it too far. If you really want to avoid all bloat, you shouldn't run X anyway. Seems to me someone who doesn't like windowmanagers etc. should just run stuff from the console (and definately not Mozilla).
It was not at all about bloat.
It was about clutter. Visual distractions, not memory usage.
Soft updates provides similar functionality as journalling with respect to data integrity. In fact, a lot of hurrahs were raised when Daniel Phillips wanted a phase-tree structured file system in linux to achieve the same goal - data integrity with ordered writes instead of journalling.
FreeBSD has also had working SMP for a LONG time, although it is not as granular as linux or other SMP OSes. FreeBSD runs some really really big server sites. Like Yahoo!'s web servers. Like Hotmail before it was sold. FreeBSD is not dying - it is not really commercial anyway, so how can it die ?
Last time I checked, everyone in the world did not have a video linkup to traffic and security cameras.
Many cameras (including the ones I refer to) are on live full-time internet feed.
Why would anyone hide a key under their car? Who is monitoring the cameras -- cops or civilians? If it's a cop monitoring the camera, what can (s)he do with that information that can't be done with a slimjim? How can you be sure that no one is in line of sight?
I live at the beach. People put their keys someplace when they go in the water, or they take the keys in the water. The cameras are on full-time internet feed. Someone can sit across town, watch a 'key-hider', and go grab the car. People in general do not see or know about the cameras.
Now, you could argue that making public information more public isn't really a change in your privacy (in fact, that pretty much sums up all your arguments), but on that point we have a fundamental disagreement. I think I can make you change your mind by placing a full-time internet feed camera focussed on every window in your house. Hey - the cameras are only seeing things that could be seen in public anyway, right?
There are some laws that govern such situations. A continuous video feed in your house would be ruled harassment, I believe. A store was forced to take down a long-range microphone that allowed them to listen to conversations of its customers. There are precedents, already. The real issue is what constitutes invading privacy in a public place, and what does not. For now there is almost no consideration of the privacy of people, and any visage/sound that is made "in public" is considered public domain, more or less.
I find that very very wrong. And continuous internet broadcasting via web-cams of public areas is the area I think must be considered carefully for the positives the community gains from having such a camera (beach cameras only benefit people who do not live there - and invade the privacy of those who do live there), against the privacy invasions they bring with them.
Guess what? The brain (lossily and selectively) records what the eyes see. Hence, there is no way to watch without recording, even if not using any sort of technological means (i.e., a camera) to do so.
This reply basically assumes that if one person watches me from a short distance away (eyesight distance), it presents the same privacy compromise as if everyone in the world watches me from a long distance away using a video linkup. Further, it is also the same as if the video feed were recorded, and could be played back, and computer analyzed for content.
It is not. Privacy is not black-and-white, either you are in your own home or you are in the public eye. My personal issue with this comes with cameras at beaches where I live. They can see someone hiding a key under their car (even if no person is in a direct line of sight). They can see your six year old daughter playing unsupervised because she slipped away. These present REAL risks, and increased exposure can have dramatic effects on the outcome.
My feeling is that you have to draw the line somewhere. The detraction from REAL privacy loss must be weighed against the community good from having the camera. In many cases, this balance weighs far too heavily on the privacy loss side.
Could it be that news.com is simply pointing out the obvious double standard given to "hacker" sites like 2600.com and "reputable news sites" like news.com?
Absolutely. The judge in the 2600 case said as much. 2600.com was not viewed as disseminating free press, or providing a link point for people interested in fair use, or providing a service for linux people who wanted to view DVDs on their computers.
Instead, the judge saw them as anarchists who thought movies should not be protectable simply because someone somewhere cracked the crypto. He then ruled accordingly.
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located. Less radically, they have raised a legitimate concern about the possible impact on traditional fair use of access control measures in the digital era.
Lewis A. Kaplan United States District Judge
Does anybody else think this sounds just a teensy bit flaky?
Absolutely.
Although, I am telling you right now, if we greased our palms with conducting paste, and gripped REALLY hard, we could get down to 100 kOhms in conductance. Then we deal with noise. Now, most of the connecting tissue is stricly low-pass (which is a bitch for high bandwidth issues), and noise is in the millivolts range. To add insult to injury, most of the signal loss will occur in the skin itself, so this application is a really tough one. I think in the lab you could probably rig it to transmit the amount of info in a business card, maybe.
OTOH, detecting a handshake and using that to trigger an IR linkup seems fairly easy.
I'm not arguing about those innovations. I'm asking for someone to show me a UI environment that doesn't look like Windows! And I'm not talking about a skinned window manager. I'm talking about something really innovative unlike all the other desktops out there.
Here is a collection of window managers. There are some for all flavors. First, notice there is one for just about every other operating system standard. One for Plan9, one for Amiga (and IceWN), one for NeXT (actually, several). I know - no innovation.
Then see Enlightenment Windowmanager, which added anti-aliasing and alpha-blending BEFORE Windows and Mac did (no alpha-blending for them), as well as non-regular shaped widgets for your windows. Then pwn and FluxBox with tabbing on all windows.
But User Interfaces HAVE NOT been innovative for much of anything for about 20 years since Mac came out looking a lot like Xerox PARC. But, see the list, there are lots to go from. My favorite are the minimal memory consumption ones, like Blackbox and pwm and twm, but there is something for everyone. Unlike Windows or Mac, where you can have any flavor you like as long as it is vanilla.
You engineer software for Transmeta, but what the hell, we'll just give you credit for creating their processors too!
You don't get Crusoe.
Crusoe uses RISC instruction sets, which allows computing with FAR fewer transistors than x86 instruction sets. The WORLD has been locked into x86 because Microsoft's support for other instruction sets has been lacking (they killed Alpha NT, and now they are slow to the mark with the new McKinley 64 bit chips which will STILL support legacy x86 instruction sets). X86 is just inefficient, and that causes CPU power consumption to go up.
The software engineering is critical - they have to take in x86 instruction sets, map them to RISC instructions, and execute them in near real time. This is the CRITICAL aspect of Crusoe. Instead of using an inefficient CPU, use an efficient one and map those inefficient instructions to efficient ones.
Without this remapping it should be possible to run linux on the NEC machines (which, BTW, ship with Windows installed), but it would not be possible to run Windows.
Many Linux users state how Microsoft isn't an innovator, yet Linux is constantly trying to imitate them! What's that trite saying about the sincerest form of flattery?
This release is simply the latest RedHat release (and note that RedHat is NOT the same as linux or GNU/linux), and it seems pretty certain they wanted the interface to be a combination of Aqua and XP for fairly obvious reasons - new users will feel comfortable. But there are LOTS of other options. The default is just a "lowest common denominator", someplace you are unlikely to find much of anything mind-blowingly innovative.
There are MANY innovative projects in linux, or free/open software. Like ghostscript, for example. Or apache. Or BIND. Or sendmail/qmail/postfix (prolly 95% of all the MTAs are free/open software). Like Slashcode. Like bash. Like the kazillion windowmanagers. But the default user interface from RedHat looks and feels a lot like XP which looks and feels a lot like Aqua which looks and feels a lot like MacOS which looks and feels a lot like Windows95.
For example, he may think he was editing/etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS,...).
Those are all great points, but utterly irrelevant. I wouldn't argue that linux doesn't have better filesystems, memory management (in 2.4), lower overhead apps, etc.
But to the laptop user, those are not so relevant. He cares about his Airport Wireless card working well out of the box. He digs a DVD playing seamlessly. He is probably happy about the lack of time he has to spend futzing with those things under OS X compared to linux.
OS X does well the most important things to a laptop user (he didn't even mention Office X or all the Adobe art apps). And that is why Moshe Bar is happy. And that is why people are switching in droves to OS X laptops.
Low battery consumption, nice screens, and nice keyboards do not hurt either.
Drop X and use w3m or lynx or links text based browsers.
Or, go into X, but keep it at 8 bit color and low resolution. If that works, bump up the resolution and/or color until you find a happy medium.
If you do run X, choose a lean window manager, like twm or pwn or blackbox or fluxbox.
libXm.so should be installed with X in/usr/X11R6/lib. Try adding a symlink from/usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so to whatever version you have installed there and running opera.
What Dubya did, was merely to attempt to please the Church more than he otherwise could (he could issue an all-out ban)
It is totally unclear to me that he has this power. He doesn't set the law wrt stem cell research. He does control some purse-strings, most of which he yanked.
Davis' move is quite good and I applaud it - but I think it is mostly about positioning himself for the presidential election in two years. He is positioning himself against Bush for energy deregulation in California, and now stem cell research.
Not enough quality digital entertainment, like movies and TV shows, are being offered over broadband connections to make them worth it to normal users.
No, it is price, plain and simple. In Japan, where broadband is typically under $20/month, it quickly became ubiquitious. And there is demand. High speed internet access is in high demand, but not at $40-50/month.
I think the out will be wireless. Consider this plan. A large web provider provides 802.11b points of access all across San Francisco, and offers to sign up people for $20/month. Like someone who really needs to expand their broadband offerings (AOL or MSN, maybe). Shower the consumer with those stupid install CDs and free 802.11b cards. That quickly becomes an easy game for whoever will play.
Because the real problem is that the phone company and cable company view themselves as monopolies, and want to make huge profits (per customer) from broadband. That will work until competition exists. And whereas landlines for high speed internet do not scale well, wireless does.
GIF files are not covered by the patent. There is no risk in distributing GIF files or in using the GIF name. According to a CompuServe spokesperson, "Recent discussions of GIF taxes and fees are totally without merit. For people who view GIF images, who keep GIF images on servers, or who are creating GIF images for distribution, the recent licensing discussions have no effect on their activities."
I think the most critical aspect of that article occurs earlier, where it says Nothing in this article should be regarded as legal counsel. If you require legal or other expert assistance, you should consult a professional advisor.
Also, the article is wrong. Unisys now claims that distributing GIFs requires making a copy of a file that requires the LZW algorithm. Thus, it is also patent protected. So far, they've done a pretty good business collecting fees from web site operators.
The LZW compression algorithm is patented. This is used in, for example, UNIX compress. In response to this, GNU wrote gzip for compression. GIF images also use the LZW algorithm.
Unisys owns licensing rights to the LZW patent. They typically go to web site operators (large ones), and ask them to pay licensing fees, or prove that all the GIFs they serve came from licensed programs. Kinda creepy. Of course, none of the enforcement came until GIFs were widely used.
In response, a group of open source hackers wrote the png spec, which uses the gzip compression technique. Also, postscript and pdf added gzip compression (flate compression) in addition to LZW compression, so that people could make pdfs without worrying about patent licensing.
The GIF patent will expire in less than a year, I think. It is still WIDELY used. However, development has continued at full speed on png formats, and has halted on GIFs. Even when they become legal, the next generation of software will use pngs instead (because the DEVELOPMENT stopped, not because it "used to be patented").
They mean faster reboots period because they never need to be checked on boot - so you don't get that annoying "Ahem, you've rebooted too many times, I'm going to check your hard drive while your client, who's looking over you shoulder, wonders why you re-assured him you'd only have his production server down for half a minute to install the new kernel, and I'm spending 5 minutes scanning his drives."
Journalling does protect against software caused inconsistencies. It does not protect against hardward probs. Periodically, it is a VERY good idea to unmount and fsck while checking for bad blocks.
1) Backup strategies. Versions of dump are available for ext2/ext3 and xfs, but not for ReiserFS (I don't know about JFS). (I don't mean to start a page cache/buffer cache debate).
2) Journalled file systems mean fast re-boots on power outages
3) Speed. This depends on your usage. A huge mail spool machine may use ReiserFS on the mail spool. For most people it is a wash.
4) Ext3 can be remounted as ext2, and really good file system checking tools exist for ext2/3.
Mostly, though, you CAN just stick with whatever the default suggests.
Slashdot Mirror
John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed.
It is just not even close to true. Changes FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL USE do not come close to the issues related to copyright violation (effects on the author's market for the copyrighted material, or his reputation, etc). This is NEVER a default copyright violation. To claim so reaches the heights of absurdity. Talk to a copyright lawyer sometime instead of someone with his head shoved up his ass.
Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked...
I DO prefer code open source code that can also be forked. But I do not think that is necessary for something to be FREE (as in GNU free), although the OSI would include it in their definition of "open source". There are a LOT of relevant freedoms. DJB includes all but redistributing derivatives. That is a LOT, and by no means reason to condemn his work to hell for eternity.
P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas
Not really. I am not so into performance reviews unless performance is an issue for me. My servers are not pegged to the line EVER, performance is a non-issue for ME. What I care about is security and ease-of-use (mainly because they relate to the amount of admin time I need to spend to achieve proper use for my users). And DJB software allows ME, with my very specific small server needs, the absolute minimum admin time to perform as well as I need. And that is all.
Ask most admins, and they will tell you a similar story. The best no-cost software is the one you have to spend the least time dorking with. If it is OSI open source as well, so much the better. If not, well, I'll wait until something better comes along that is OSI open source. But only if DJB's software fails or needs upgrading sometime in the next 20 years. Which is unlikely.
It is informative b/c it provides a non-standard archive for a rapidly changing package, mplayer.
However, I prefer
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main
for mplayer et al (MANY MANY multimedia packages there).
You will learn, if you ever use Debian, that it rocks in a way other distros do not, and that you should start by wiping RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, or whatever off your boxen and keep it real. Install Debian across the net with a single floppy. Any aggros trolling of people using other distros is purely intentional.
The distance moved is going to be on the order of the wavelength of light - 100 nanometers or so. In fact, this slide pretty much says so - less than a micron.
But what does that say about time ? I don't think there is a real concern. As long as one of these babies can flip in less than 10 milliseconds (and it surely can), there will be no issue wrt speed. In fact, it can very likely be a LOT LOT faster than a CRT, because you merely need to change voltages on transistors, whereas a CRT has a scanning beam that has to traverse the whole screen.
The other thing I found REALLY interesting is that such a display could be run native in a HSB (hue-saturation-brightness) mode. Instead of three colors, each pixel could be ANY hue, since you only have to change a voltage to a new value to change the color. Way cool (they are planning initially for full RGB compat). But in the future it could be a new sort of color scheme entirely.
Of course, it's all vaporware until there are production models.
The biggest problem with reviews of distributions is that they are really reviews of installers. Debian's installer is quite usable, but it is not exactly pretty and streamlined.
But a Debian box only ever needs to be installed once. After that, apt-get update; apt-get upgrade will be all you need to do. Forever. Sure, there will be the occasional hiccup. But they are very very rare. With RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE you get to install de novo yearly. What fun !
So that is the largest point missed - the joy of MAINTAINING a Debian box once installed. The other thing distribution reviews always miss are the startup scripts, including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs. Here, again, Debian shines like a thoroughbred compared to the competition. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator.
I think that last sentence is probably most descriptive of Debian. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator. But a review written by someone not so qualified will miss out on many of the finer points that are the distros best attributes.
I have a feeling that the answer to this question is going to shock and dismay us all. Some individual, common, hitherto-thought-harmless pollutant? Ambient noise levels?
I have a feeling you are right.
Among the autistic research community, there is evidence for environmental causes, perhaps multiple (almost all pre-natal), and genetic linkages suggesting a genetic susceptibility coupled to some stressor during pregnancy, and you get autism.
The recent rise is unattributable to changes in genetic combination, most think, so the change is almost surely environmental. But what ?
And in the mean time, what can be done to maximize quality of life for autistic children (most of whom are not gifted in intellect, but quite quite far behind their peers) ?
Easier than "net stop Messenger"?
1) It will still startup at the next boot (which is
like 20 minutes later)
2) Most users have no clue on how to get a command.com shell window.
I think this may be more useful for most users (verified for 2000 and XP).
Right Click the icon for This Computer on the desktop. Click on manage.
Doubleclick Sessions and Services.
Doubleclick Services.
Scroll down to Messenger, doubleclick it.
Click on Stop. Change pull-down menu from Automatic to Manual.
Click on Apply.
You are done.
I think this guy is taking it too far. If you really want to avoid all bloat, you shouldn't run X anyway. Seems to me someone who doesn't like windowmanagers etc. should just run stuff from the console (and definately not Mozilla).
It was not at all about bloat.
It was about clutter. Visual distractions, not memory usage.
Parent prolly should be marked troll.
Soft updates provides similar functionality as journalling with respect to data integrity. In fact, a lot of hurrahs were raised when Daniel Phillips wanted a phase-tree structured file system in linux to achieve the same goal - data integrity with ordered writes instead of journalling.
FreeBSD has also had working SMP for a LONG time, although it is not as granular as linux or other SMP OSes. FreeBSD runs some really really big server sites. Like Yahoo!'s web servers. Like Hotmail before it was sold. FreeBSD is not dying - it is not really commercial anyway, so how can it die ?
Last time I checked, everyone in the world did not have a video linkup to traffic and security cameras.
Many cameras (including the ones I refer to) are on live full-time internet feed.
Why would anyone hide a key under their car? Who is monitoring the cameras -- cops or civilians? If it's a cop monitoring the camera, what can (s)he do with that information that can't be done with a slimjim? How can you be sure that no one is in line of sight?
I live at the beach. People put their keys someplace when they go in the water, or they take the keys in the water. The cameras are on full-time internet feed. Someone can sit across town, watch a 'key-hider', and go grab the car. People in general do not see or know about the cameras.
Now, you could argue that making public information more public isn't really a change in your privacy (in fact, that pretty much sums up all your arguments), but on that point we have a fundamental disagreement. I think I can make you change your mind by placing a full-time internet feed camera focussed on every window in your house. Hey - the cameras are only seeing things that could be seen in public anyway, right?
There are some laws that govern such situations. A continuous video feed in your house would be ruled harassment, I believe. A store was forced to take down a long-range microphone that allowed them to listen to conversations of its customers. There are precedents, already. The real issue is what constitutes invading privacy in a public place, and what does not. For now there is almost no consideration of the privacy of people, and any visage/sound that is made "in public" is considered public domain, more or less.
I find that very very wrong. And continuous internet broadcasting via web-cams of public areas is the area I think must be considered carefully for the positives the community gains from having such a camera (beach cameras only benefit people who do not live there - and invade the privacy of those who do live there), against the privacy invasions they bring with them.
Guess what? The brain (lossily and selectively) records what the eyes see. Hence, there is no way to watch without recording, even if not using any sort of technological means (i.e., a camera) to do so.
This reply basically assumes that if one person watches me from a short distance away (eyesight distance), it presents the same privacy compromise as if everyone in the world watches me from a long distance away using a video linkup. Further, it is also the same as if the video feed were recorded, and could be played back, and computer analyzed for content.
It is not. Privacy is not black-and-white, either you are in your own home or you are in the public eye. My personal issue with this comes with cameras at beaches where I live. They can see someone hiding a key under their car (even if no person is in a direct line of sight). They can see your six year old daughter playing unsupervised because she slipped away. These present REAL risks, and increased exposure can have dramatic effects on the outcome.
My feeling is that you have to draw the line somewhere. The detraction from REAL privacy loss must be weighed against the community good from having the camera. In many cases, this balance weighs far too heavily on the privacy loss side.
Could it be that news.com is simply pointing out the obvious double standard given to "hacker" sites like 2600.com and "reputable news sites" like news.com?
Absolutely. The judge in the 2600 case said as much. 2600.com was not viewed as disseminating free press, or providing a link point for people interested in fair use, or providing a service for linux people who wanted to view DVDs on their computers.
Instead, the judge saw them as anarchists who thought movies should not be protectable simply because someone somewhere cracked the crypto. He then ruled accordingly.
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located. Less radically, they have raised a legitimate concern about the possible impact on traditional fair use of access control measures in the digital era.
Lewis A. Kaplan
United States District Judge
Does anybody else think this sounds just a teensy bit flaky?
Absolutely.
Although, I am telling you right now, if we greased our palms with conducting paste, and gripped REALLY hard, we could get down to 100 kOhms in conductance. Then we deal with noise. Now, most of the connecting tissue is stricly low-pass (which is a bitch for high bandwidth issues), and noise is in the millivolts range. To add insult to injury, most of the signal loss will occur in the skin itself, so this application is a really tough one. I think in the lab you could probably rig it to transmit the amount of info in a business card, maybe.
OTOH, detecting a handshake and using that to trigger an IR linkup seems fairly easy.
I'm not arguing about those innovations. I'm asking for someone to show me a UI environment that doesn't look like Windows! And I'm not talking about a skinned window manager. I'm talking about something really innovative unlike all the other desktops out there.
Here is a collection of window managers. There are some for all flavors. First, notice there is one for just about every other operating system standard. One for Plan9, one for Amiga (and IceWN), one for NeXT (actually, several). I know - no innovation.
Then see Enlightenment Windowmanager, which added anti-aliasing and alpha-blending BEFORE Windows and Mac did (no alpha-blending for them), as well as non-regular shaped widgets for your windows. Then pwn and FluxBox with tabbing on all windows.
But User Interfaces HAVE NOT been innovative for much of anything for about 20 years since Mac came out looking a lot like Xerox PARC. But, see the list, there are lots to go from. My favorite are the minimal memory consumption ones, like Blackbox and pwm and twm, but there is something for everyone. Unlike Windows or Mac, where you can have any flavor you like as long as it is vanilla.
You engineer software for Transmeta, but what the hell, we'll just give you credit for creating their processors too!
You don't get Crusoe.
Crusoe uses RISC instruction sets, which allows computing with FAR fewer transistors than x86 instruction sets. The WORLD has been locked into x86 because Microsoft's support for other instruction sets has been lacking (they killed Alpha NT, and now they are slow to the mark with the new McKinley 64 bit chips which will STILL support legacy x86 instruction sets). X86 is just inefficient, and that causes CPU power consumption to go up.
The software engineering is critical - they have to take in x86 instruction sets, map them to RISC instructions, and execute them in near real time. This is the CRITICAL aspect of Crusoe. Instead of using an inefficient CPU, use an efficient one and map those inefficient instructions to efficient ones.
Without this remapping it should be possible to run linux on the NEC machines (which, BTW, ship with Windows installed), but it would not be possible to run Windows.
Many Linux users state how Microsoft isn't an innovator, yet Linux is constantly trying to imitate them! What's that trite saying about the sincerest form of flattery?
This release is simply the latest RedHat release (and note that RedHat is NOT the same as linux or GNU/linux), and it seems pretty certain they wanted the interface to be a combination of Aqua and XP for fairly obvious reasons - new users will feel comfortable. But there are LOTS of other options. The default is just a "lowest common denominator", someplace you are unlikely to find much of anything mind-blowingly innovative.
There are MANY innovative projects in linux, or free/open software. Like ghostscript, for example. Or apache. Or BIND. Or sendmail/qmail/postfix (prolly 95% of all the MTAs are free/open software). Like Slashcode. Like bash. Like the kazillion windowmanagers. But the default user interface from RedHat looks and feels a lot like XP which looks and feels a lot like Aqua which looks and feels a lot like MacOS which looks and feels a lot like Windows95.
For example, he may think he was editing /etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, ...).
Those are all great points, but utterly irrelevant. I wouldn't argue that linux doesn't have better filesystems, memory management (in 2.4), lower overhead apps, etc.
But to the laptop user, those are not so relevant. He cares about his Airport Wireless card working well out of the box. He digs a DVD playing seamlessly. He is probably happy about the lack of time he has to spend futzing with those things under OS X compared to linux.
OS X does well the most important things to a laptop user (he didn't even mention Office X or all the Adobe art apps). And that is why Moshe Bar is happy. And that is why people are switching in droves to OS X laptops.
Low battery consumption, nice screens, and nice keyboards do not hurt either.
Drop X and use w3m or lynx or links text based browsers.
/usr/X11R6/lib. Try adding a symlink from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so to whatever version you have installed there and running opera.
Or, go into X, but keep it at 8 bit color and low resolution. If that works, bump up the resolution and/or color until you find a happy medium.
If you do run X, choose a lean window manager, like twm or pwn or blackbox or fluxbox.
libXm.so should be installed with X in
What Dubya did, was merely to attempt to please the Church more than he otherwise could (he could issue an all-out ban)
It is totally unclear to me that he has this power. He doesn't set the law wrt stem cell research. He does control some purse-strings, most of which he yanked.
Davis' move is quite good and I applaud it - but I think it is mostly about positioning himself for the presidential election in two years. He is positioning himself against Bush for energy deregulation in California, and now stem cell research.
Not enough quality digital entertainment, like movies and TV shows, are being offered over broadband connections to make them worth it to normal users.
No, it is price, plain and simple. In Japan, where broadband is typically under $20/month, it quickly became ubiquitious. And there is demand. High speed internet access is in high demand, but not at $40-50/month.
I think the out will be wireless. Consider this plan. A large web provider provides 802.11b points of access all across San Francisco, and offers to sign up people for $20/month. Like someone who really needs to expand their broadband offerings (AOL or MSN, maybe). Shower the consumer with those stupid install CDs and free 802.11b cards. That quickly becomes an easy game for whoever will play.
Because the real problem is that the phone company and cable company view themselves as monopolies, and want to make huge profits (per customer) from broadband. That will work until competition exists. And whereas landlines for high speed internet do not scale well, wireless does.
GIF files are not covered by the patent. There is no risk in distributing GIF files or in using the GIF name. According to a CompuServe spokesperson, "Recent discussions of GIF taxes and fees are totally without merit. For people who view GIF images, who keep GIF images on servers, or who are creating GIF images for distribution, the recent licensing discussions have no effect on their activities."
I think the most critical aspect of that article occurs earlier, where it says
Nothing in this article should be regarded as legal counsel. If you require legal or other expert assistance, you should consult a professional advisor.
Also, the article is wrong. Unisys now claims that distributing GIFs requires making a copy of a file that requires the LZW algorithm. Thus, it is also patent protected. So far, they've done a pretty good business collecting fees from web site operators.
The LZW compression algorithm is patented. This is used in, for example, UNIX compress. In response to this, GNU wrote gzip for compression. GIF images also use the LZW algorithm.
Unisys owns licensing rights to the LZW patent. They typically go to web site operators (large ones), and ask them to pay licensing fees, or prove that all the GIFs they serve came from licensed programs. Kinda creepy. Of course, none of the enforcement came until GIFs were widely used.
In response, a group of open source hackers wrote the png spec, which uses the gzip compression technique. Also, postscript and pdf added gzip compression (flate compression) in addition to LZW compression, so that people could make pdfs without worrying about patent licensing.
The GIF patent will expire in less than a year, I think. It is still WIDELY used. However, development has continued at full speed on png formats, and has halted on GIFs. Even when they become legal, the next generation of software will use pngs instead (because the DEVELOPMENT stopped, not because it "used to be patented").
They mean faster reboots period because they never need to be checked on boot - so you don't get that annoying "Ahem, you've rebooted too many times, I'm going to check your hard drive while your client, who's looking over you shoulder, wonders why you re-assured him you'd only have his production server down for half a minute to install the new kernel, and I'm spending 5 minutes scanning his drives."
Journalling does protect against software caused inconsistencies. It does not protect against hardward probs. Periodically, it is a VERY good idea to unmount and fsck while checking for bad blocks.
See this post to the dump mailing list
1) Backup strategies. Versions of dump are available for ext2/ext3 and xfs, but not for ReiserFS (I don't know about JFS). (I don't mean to start a page cache/buffer cache debate).
2) Journalled file systems mean fast re-boots on power outages
3) Speed. This depends on your usage. A huge mail spool machine may use ReiserFS on the mail spool. For most people it is a wash.
4) Ext3 can be remounted as ext2, and really good file system checking tools exist for ext2/3.
Mostly, though, you CAN just stick with whatever the default suggests.