It just seems better for the Gvmt to strike MS, and split the company.
There is no precedent for this, b/c no other company has ever been split in antitrust action except companies that merged (duPont and ICI and Hercules in chemical engineering, Ma Bell and Baby Bells, etc).
The appropriate action has to be close to the found infractions. The state's proposal comes closest, and you can tell by all the yelling and screaming coming from Redmond. Basically, 1) Force M$ to offer a stripped down pro-rated Windows, where the pro-rating relates to functionality lost 2) Force M$ to open all APIs used for middleware 3) Force M$ into flat rates for selling OEM licenses (bulk discounts are OK)
This basically strips M$ of any and all leverage wrt middleware on its platform, and this is the appropriate legal action. Splitting the company is only even in consideration if the monopoly abuse were used to protect the monopoly itself - it cannot be considered legally for leveraging the monopoly into new markets. For that infraction, chopping off the leverage is the appropriate response.
And when Microsoft decides that it's no longer in their interest to support Mac (say, after the trial is over) then they will drop support for Mac and your machine will become a boat anchor.
M$ won't wait that long. As part of Mac shipping IE as the default and not allowing Netscape on the first boot desktop, M$ supports Office and Outlook for Mac until August of this year. That is right - the guarantee of continued support that was discussed in the antitrust trial ends in 5 months.
Be interesting to see the response of M$. MAc is going to seriously start eating into their desktop advantage with OSx - better multimedia, and just as good (or better) for Office and IE.
Cheating on any test or homework is defined by the instructors. Certainly your homework should not use the expression of others, unless that is part of the homework assignment (and credit is given).
If the instructor released a solution set and next semester the students were too dumb to find it, they just don't know how to research.
And taking expression from that solution set would be plagiarism and a violation of the honor code. And, some teachers may catch them by merely making really odd arithmetic errors in the solution set. Then they will be REALLY screwed.
You are sort of reinforcing my point that students don't even have a decent idea of what cheating is. If you had the perspective of one of your teachers you would be absolutely disgusted.
wends \Wends\, n. pl.; sing. [14]Wend. (Ethnol.) A Slavic tribe which once occupied the northern and eastern parts of Germany, of which a small remnant exists.
What I meant was "If the school is willing to stand behind the computer, the computer MUST be able to stand up to legal challenges in court. Therefore, the computer must be highly accurate."
You can show a department chair large verbatim copied sections of tests or homework, and that still will not be enough. One year, I put some intentional really silly algebraic errors on the homework solution sets. You have no idea how many students added 2+2 and got 5 as the answer (homework was to be done on the "honor" system).
You similarly have no idea how many students complained loudly that they had not in fact cheated by obtaining and using copies of the prior year's homework solution sets. It is almost silly to have these cheaters look you in the eye and proclaim their innocence. "Come on - it was an honest mistake."
The basic fact is students are human. They will attempt to get good grades using any means available. It is up to the school to ensure those means entail the student getting an education. Think I sound cynical - try teaching undergraduates for a while. Cheating is absolutely rampant, and students who are better cheaters go on to cheat at better higher educational centers.
The history department at my highschool also uses turnitin.com. I certainly don't advocate plagerism but I have a couple of issues with it. The Cost: Its expensive... Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Let's address these. First of all, put yourself in the shoes of a teacher. Look, we all KNOW you (or bare minimum a substantial fraction of you) are cheating. Any teacher that thinks differently is absolutely blind. As a student you may have no idea of the extent of the problem. The other issue is that, as a teacher, there is nothing but trouble for you catching people. The burden of proof is quite high, and the administration is virtually never willing to back you to the hilt. By this I mean, any student caught cheating should be expelled and forced to pay for a semester of education to be re-instated.
It undermines the entire purpose of the system. As a teacher, you want to give FAIR grades. You want better students to be recognized for their achievements.
So suppose I, as a teacher, use turnitin. Now, I've dealt with one problem - the burden of proof. I suspect that turnitin has a reasonable check if a school is willing to stand behind it. Make no mistake about it no school would stand behind turnitin like this if if were not accurate to greater than 1 in a million cases. I say this because there will be lawsuits, Turnitin will be required to present matching papers, and a jury will have to weigh the evidence.
As I said, the burden for proof for the teacher is enormous.
Now, for the other issue, the cost. No educational system can fairly rank its students with widespread cheating as exists today. Catching student who cheat should be easy, and the cost is well worth it. Now, when a teacher hands out an A, he can look that student in the eye, praise him or her, and think highly of the ability of that student.
You have little idea what it is like to be a teacher and hand out grades without any knowledge of the relative competence of the students. It absolutely sucks.
> So, it is 100% possible to link to a GPL'd program and not be open source and not violate the GPL
No, not if you distribute the binary. If you are linking to MY library routines for which I hold the copyright, you have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER to redistribute my copyrighted work, unless you follow the conditions in the GPL.
Actually, the distribution pretty much hinges on whether the work I do is a copyright derivative of your GPL'd library. I am arguing that it is not, at least if we make one assumption. That assumption is that Silent Bob wrote another library that provides the exact same function as your library.
Now my program foo is closed source and proprietary, and dynamically calls your GPLd library. Is my program a copyright derivative of your library ?
If you say yes, run my program again after setting LD_PRELOAD to load Silent Bob's library instead. Now my program doesn't even dynamically link to yours. Is it still a derivative of your GPLd library in the copyright sense ?
If multiple forms of expression exist that provide the exact same functionality, then a new copyrighted work that depends on that functionality is no longer a derivative work. In copyright law this is called something like a fixed boundary (or brick wall, or something). You have multiple options for providing functionality that exist on one side of the wall - therefore things on the other side are not derivative works. Copyright law doesn't protect functionality - only expression. Once multiple expressions exist that provide the same functionality, use of that functionality doesn't make something a derivative work.
This point is not really what the case is about - I merely wanted to point out that dynamic linking to a GPL'd library doesn't make something a derivative work always.
So, basically, they wanted comments from the consumers, who the suit is supposed to protect, but they've ignored and dismissed all of the comments. They acknowledged no validity in any comment, nor attempted to seriously address any of their concerns, other than by saying, "that's not so".
And in some cases offered legal arguments as to why is would be so.
But this is expected. The Tunney act was instituted precisely to prevent large corporations from buying out the Justice Department, which is pretty much what is happening now.
It really is up to the judge (and staff) to discern that this is all a load of bull. Should be interesting to see it all sort out - but don't really expect anything revolutionary.
if you want to use the library then you have to distribute every other component of your product under the GPL. Therefore you are "forced" to distribute every other component under the GPL if you want to use the library.
I think this is clearly the point of contention. Does the use of a library make a program a derivative work ?
Remember, functionality is not copyrightable - only the specific expression in the source code is. So, for starters, if multiple libraries provide the same functionality, linking to a library does not make something a derivative work. This is a concept of a fixed boundary in copyright. The API is defined, there are multiple ways to fulfill that API, so whatever does fulfill that API does not turn the linking program into a derivative work (more specifically - it doesn't require any specific expression to work - because multiple expressions exist that allow it to work).
So, it is 100% possible to link to a GPL'd program and not be open source and not violate the GPL. There are other issues though.
If a library is unique, then it becomes a murky area as to whether a calling program is a derivative.
If a library is staticly linked, another gray area.
These are some of the things the court will sort out. However, I would not be surprised if the court finds in general that any linking to GPLd libraries does not make something a derivative.
After all, the intended purpose of a library is to have something link to it using a public API. Therefore, it seems silly to make anything that does that a derivative. However, you could argue that any program can be turned into a library, so that using the intent of making something a library may not be good either.
He additionally missed "Mouse cursor on image. Right click. Block all images from ad.soubleclick.net ?"
Galeon's ability to customize completely acceptance of cookies and images from IP addresses is incredibly useful. With mozilla you cannot get there by right-clicking on the image (yet, I suspect). With konqueror you cannot either. You have to conditionally block images, and allow the ones you want. With galeon, any image site can be blocked with a single right click.
You can also config so that pop-up windows automatically go to new tabs in the background.
However, while it does support Quicktime, almost all of the newly released QT movies are compressed with Sorenson (sp?) codec, which is closed source, and Apple licenses it from another company. Therefore, unless Apple, and Sorenson (sp?) both give permission (read: unlikely), you won't find a legal open-source player. Apple (and others) can port the app to different platforms, and others still can make a shell for the application (read: what Codeweavers did), but you still don't get the benifits of open-source programmers optimizing the heck out of the program.
I can see your argument.
However, Windows Media Video 7 and 8 codecs are patented. They are used to compress some wmv and asf files. Unless Microsoft gives you permission, you cannot decompress those files.
But Mplayer does this with impunity using Windows DLLs !
The real issue here, I think, it that Mplayer hackers don't know the APIs used by Quicktime, whereas they have reverse engineered the ones in Windows Media Player.
Really, I could CARE LESS whether Windows Media Player exists for linux. Mplayer does an INCREDIBLY good job. But it needs to get the hooks for the API Quicktime uses for its codecs, because there is an awful lot of Sorenson codec Quicktime animation out there.
GNOME is free software. If someone wants it to run.NET and can program it, GNOME will support.NET. This is a gain for GNOME users - more programs for the platform.
You can still CHOOSE not to use them, too. And then for you nothing will have changed.
One thing to remember is that Microsoft is the enemy because they are a proprietary company.
I would have ZERO problems with a proprietary company that ATTEMPTED to use well-featured standard formats for exchanging DATA. Data can be interpreted as any format that is displayable only. Like, sound, video, streaming versions, documents, text email, PDF...
I use linux. Other companies will make and sell software, and I just want to be able to interact with them reasonably.
When a proprietary company makes data available to me only in formats for which they control the displayers, I don't like it so much anymore. When they additionally make NO effort to use interchangeable formats that are well-featured, I recognize that company doesn't care if its users can interact with any users of other software. There is no excuse for that - it is plain anti-competitive for ANY software maker not to make his data displayable using anyone else's software.
This becomes really clear in Microsoft's case, because other people's formats are so widely read in the rest of the world. No one in the linux world has a horrible time reading pdfs (acroread, xpdf, ghostscript), or email, or word processing documents that are not in a Microsoft format.
However, try to read a WMV/ASF file, or a WMA file, or a DOC file, or read a web page served by IIS, and there are LOTS of problems with accurate reading.
We saw those comments from Miguel a long time ago. He's not raving about Microsoft. He just likes.NET.
Right.
And pre-GNOME, when he was grabbing the torch, he wasn't raving about Microsoft either. No, he sure wasn't. He was just caught up in how cool DCOM was, and was all fired up on how to implement it appropriately in GNOME.
AFAIKT, it is still pretty useless. But it is conceptually "the Microsoft way".
Then there was email. Miguel cloned Outlook in Evolution. Microsoft KNEW how to make a good email app, so Miguel was going to make one too, "the Microsoft way".
There is no person I can think of in Free Software development that likes "the Microsoft way" more than Miguel. No one. In fact, at this point I am beginning to wonder if he is on their payroll. First he was fired up to replicate DCOM under GNOME, then he was fired up to replicate Outlook, and now it is.NET.
GNOME should support.NET..NET apps should run by mapping function calls onto GNOME. Just like SAMBA should run on linux. But it has to end there.
Re:Mod parent up
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
That is precisely what I said. XP drops default Java support.
Secondly, the real advantage of.NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your.NET programs.
Look, this is a load of bull and you should know it. Any language that maps onto C# cleanly is the reality. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent you from writing a java bytecode compiler for just about any language, so this is no different either. But simply, java is structured a lot like C or C++ without requiring its programmer to micro-manage memory. So, it is just not that hard to program in.
Also, it won't matter much whether developers like it. Microsoft will practically pay them to write C# apps instead of Java apps, and Microsoft has the bank to do it. Default Java support is gone, which effectively kills it for recreational computer users (client end support, anyway).
No,.NET is about one and only one thing. Network enabled apps to take the place of Java. The details are different, but the motivation and niche in the marketplace is the same. All the rest is just clever marketing from Redmond, as usual.
Netflix tries real hard to get you in at $20/mo, but they offer an option at $12.50/month. You have to start at 3 movies/$20 though - and then manually downgrade.
For this price you can always rent 2 movies.
We live in SF, and probably watch 2 movies a week using netflix. Much more convenient than Blockbuster (which is only 1 mile away, but has wicked lines). The turnaround for movies is about 3 days from when we drop them in the mailbox. Netflix lists in our account when movies should arrive, and it is reasonably consistent.
So far, no hitches. Been using it 3 mo. I think in principle we could watch 15+ movies a month for this price, although we usually watch 6-8. I suspect we'll hit the wall of available and desireable content soon though.
What you say is a problem, but it will not be a dealkiller until Microsoft drops support for it's previous methods of authentication.
Yeah, but Microsoft will coerce through discontinuing support for old protocols in new software, and reliance on the upgrade cycle. Didja notice Office 2000 is already GONE and no longer supported, and only Office XP is ?
This will happen at the OS level too, until you can no longer buy new software to run a server or client using anything but the new authentication scheme. They will introduce it slowly, but eventually, every single person using some kinda SAMBA will be forced into the Microsoft way. It may even take two cycles - 5-6 years - to fully implement. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out their marketing and sales plans.
Microsoft will HAVE to publish APIs etc. for patented features. How else can they get a patent? The whole point behind a patent is that you are granted a 100% legal monopoly for your product IN EXCHANGE for your full disclosure of your product.
Unfortunately, this is the future of proprietary software. Look around at any developing area.
Microsoft has patented the second generation Windows Media Format codecs. Real had patented its codecs. Apple holds exclusive licensing for Sorenson codecs used in Quicktime. So if you want to make or decode a decent video codec, you have to license a patent.
SAMBA is now also encumbered with patents with respect to user authentication. The next generation of Windows will contain this authentication, and the SAMBA team will be unable to make a functional work-alike. Too bad, that is the law.
Unless the Microsoft settlement has something to say about open licensing of patented formats, codecs, and authentication, making software to duplicate new Windows functionality, or providing file or print servers for Windows machines, will become impossible without licensing from Microsoft. You can expect that authentication of users under.NET will use patented protocols, and that they will similarly use other patented protocols into other inter-machine communication APIs. After all, there are a lot of ways to skin a cat; this is one way to keep free software out of Microsoft-monopolized areas.
You apparently didn't check out NTBugTraq. They simply added up vulnerabilities from different linux distros to come up with a high aggregate number. This is plain wrong because
1) If a package has a security issue, usually all distros announce the security bug. Thus, the bug gets counted multiple times.
2) Windows security bugs are all remote compromises, either email attachments, or remote roots. Over 90% of the linux security problems are local security issues.
As another poster noted, this is a very poorly researched article.
Interesting press release
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This press release is kinda interesting. First, the work was presented over two months ago. Second, the work was carried out in the lab of Richard Andersen. Yet Andersen, who has spent a lot of the last decade reorganizing his lab around such efforts, was not mentioned. Instead, Meeker, a graduate student on the project was named. In addition, all this work in the Andersen lab was spearheaded by a person who is now at Stanford, Krishna Shenoy who recently left the lab. In addition, the intellectual property for the project, the patents, are co-authored by Andersen and Shenoy.
It's kinda weird when you know a bit about the work behind these press releases, and then see how it is actually presented to the "lay" public.
Personally, I think the project has a low probability of success. A neural prosthetic device should be interfaced with as peripheral part of the nervous system as possible. This group has chosen to use as abstract a part of the nervous system as possible. But maybe they'll prove me wrong.
Confirmed its presence on Usenet too. A REALLY substantial fraction of Usenetters use Outlook.
Just begin a line with the word begin followed by two spaces followed by the rest of the message body. The rest of the message is obliterated, and Outlook thinks it is a blank attachment.
Oh, and his mails don't croak Outlook Express, it just doesn't display them properly. For what it's worth, though, I just tried the "begin bug" in OE 5.5 and the mail displayed correctly, so it looks like it's been fixed.
Negative. Bug exists. Microsoft's reply is that you ought not to do this. Nevermind that their email reader doesn't conform to RFC - the solution is to make email conform to THEM !
Use
begin at the start of a line followed by two spaces and then non-space characters.
Re:Use his power for good, not evil (or less good:
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I read the english e-mail and he explains his position (I don't quite understand the hack though)
The hack is to begin the message body with
begin
Outlook interprets this as starting a uuencoded section, and turns perfectly readable text into gobbly-dy gook.
The other hack is to change the Reply-To: header as Outlook usually does when it marks the messages read. Then he adds a novel X header that seems to imply his email was actually censored somewhere along the way. So, the Outlook user sees gobblydy gook instead of a message bbdy if he sees the message at all, and if he tries to diagnose the problem will be immediately be misled by the novel X header into thinking he was censored. Whereupon he goes to his sysadmin, who will read the email in plain text, and laugh heartily. Or cry.
Slashdot Mirror
It just seems better for the Gvmt to strike MS, and split the company.
There is no precedent for this, b/c no other company has ever been split in antitrust action except companies that merged (duPont and ICI and Hercules in chemical engineering, Ma Bell and Baby Bells, etc).
The appropriate action has to be close to the found infractions. The state's proposal comes closest, and you can tell by all the yelling and screaming coming from Redmond. Basically,
1) Force M$ to offer a stripped down pro-rated Windows, where the pro-rating relates to functionality lost
2) Force M$ to open all APIs used for middleware
3) Force M$ into flat rates for selling OEM licenses (bulk discounts are OK)
This basically strips M$ of any and all leverage wrt middleware on its platform, and this is the appropriate legal action. Splitting the company is only even in consideration if the monopoly abuse were used to protect the monopoly itself - it cannot be considered legally for leveraging the monopoly into new markets. For that infraction, chopping off the leverage is the appropriate response.
And when Microsoft decides that it's no longer in their interest to support Mac (say, after the trial is over) then they will drop support for Mac and your machine will become a boat anchor.
M$ won't wait that long. As part of Mac shipping IE as the default and not allowing Netscape on the first boot desktop, M$ supports Office and Outlook for Mac until August of this year. That is right - the guarantee of continued support that was discussed in the antitrust trial ends in 5 months.
Be interesting to see the response of M$. MAc is going to seriously start eating into their desktop advantage with OSx - better multimedia, and just as good (or better) for Office and IE.
Cheating on any test or homework is defined by the instructors. Certainly your homework should not use the expression of others, unless that is part of the homework assignment (and credit is given).
If the instructor released a solution set and next semester the students were too dumb to find it, they just don't know how to research.
And taking expression from that solution set would be plagiarism and a violation of the honor code. And, some teachers may catch them by merely making really odd arithmetic errors in the solution set. Then they will be REALLY screwed.
You are sort of reinforcing my point that students don't even have a decent idea of what cheating is. If you had the perspective of one of your teachers you would be absolutely disgusted.
Really??
wends \Wends\, n. pl.; sing. [14]Wend. (Ethnol.) A Slavic tribe which once occupied the northern and eastern parts of Germany, of which a small remnant exists.
[15]Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998
"The computer said so, it must be right."
What I meant was
"If the school is willing to stand behind the computer, the computer MUST be able to stand up to legal challenges in court. Therefore, the computer must be highly accurate."
You can show a department chair large verbatim copied sections of tests or homework, and that still will not be enough. One year, I put some intentional really silly algebraic errors on the homework solution sets. You have no idea how many students added 2+2 and got 5 as the answer (homework was to be done on the "honor" system).
You similarly have no idea how many students complained loudly that they had not in fact cheated by obtaining and using copies of the prior year's homework solution sets. It is almost silly to have these cheaters look you in the eye and proclaim their innocence. "Come on - it was an honest mistake."
The basic fact is students are human. They will attempt to get good grades using any means available. It is up to the school to ensure those means entail the student getting an education. Think I sound cynical - try teaching undergraduates for a while. Cheating is absolutely rampant, and students who are better cheaters go on to cheat at better higher educational centers.
The history department at my highschool also uses turnitin.com. I certainly don't advocate plagerism but I have a couple of issues with it. The Cost: Its expensive...
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Let's address these. First of all, put yourself in the shoes of a teacher. Look, we all KNOW you (or bare minimum a substantial fraction of you) are cheating. Any teacher that thinks differently is absolutely blind. As a student you may have no idea of the extent of the problem. The other issue is that, as a teacher, there is nothing but trouble for you catching people. The burden of proof is quite high, and the administration is virtually never willing to back you to the hilt. By this I mean, any student caught cheating should be expelled and forced to pay for a semester of education to be re-instated.
It undermines the entire purpose of the system. As a teacher, you want to give FAIR grades. You want better students to be recognized for their achievements.
So suppose I, as a teacher, use turnitin. Now, I've dealt with one problem - the burden of proof. I suspect that turnitin has a reasonable check if a school is willing to stand behind it. Make no mistake about it no school would stand behind turnitin like this if if were not accurate to greater than 1 in a million cases. I say this because there will be lawsuits, Turnitin will be required to present matching papers, and a jury will have to weigh the evidence.
As I said, the burden for proof for the teacher is enormous.
Now, for the other issue, the cost. No educational system can fairly rank its students with widespread cheating as exists today. Catching student who cheat should be easy, and the cost is well worth it. Now, when a teacher hands out an A, he can look that student in the eye, praise him or her, and think highly of the ability of that student.
You have little idea what it is like to be a teacher and hand out grades without any knowledge of the relative competence of the students. It absolutely sucks.
> So, it is 100% possible to link to a GPL'd program and not be open source and not violate the GPL
No, not if you distribute the binary. If you are linking to MY library routines for which I hold the copyright, you have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER to redistribute my copyrighted work, unless you follow the conditions in the GPL.
Actually, the distribution pretty much hinges on whether the work I do is a copyright derivative of your GPL'd library. I am arguing that it is not, at least if we make one assumption. That assumption is that Silent Bob wrote another library that provides the exact same function as your library.
Now my program foo is closed source and proprietary, and dynamically calls your GPLd library. Is my program a copyright derivative of your library ?
If you say yes, run my program again after setting LD_PRELOAD to load Silent Bob's library instead. Now my program doesn't even dynamically link to yours. Is it still a derivative of your GPLd library in the copyright sense ?
If multiple forms of expression exist that provide the exact same functionality, then a new copyrighted work that depends on that functionality is no longer a derivative work. In copyright law this is called something like a fixed boundary (or brick wall, or something). You have multiple options for providing functionality that exist on one side of the wall - therefore things on the other side are not derivative works. Copyright law doesn't protect functionality - only expression. Once multiple expressions exist that provide the same functionality, use of that functionality doesn't make something a derivative work.
This point is not really what the case is about - I merely wanted to point out that dynamic linking to a GPL'd library doesn't make something a derivative work always.
So, basically, they wanted comments from the consumers, who the suit is supposed to protect, but they've ignored and dismissed all of the comments. They acknowledged no validity in any comment, nor attempted to seriously address any of their concerns, other than by saying, "that's not so".
And in some cases offered legal arguments as to why is would be so.
But this is expected. The Tunney act was instituted precisely to prevent large corporations from buying out the Justice Department, which is pretty much what is happening now.
It really is up to the judge (and staff) to discern that this is all a load of bull. Should be interesting to see it all sort out - but don't really expect anything revolutionary.
if you want to use the library then you have to distribute every other component of your product under the GPL. Therefore you are "forced" to distribute every other component under the GPL if you want to use the library.
I think this is clearly the point of contention. Does the use of a library make a program a derivative work ?
Remember, functionality is not copyrightable - only the specific expression in the source code is. So, for starters, if multiple libraries provide the same functionality, linking to a library does not make something a derivative work. This is a concept of a fixed boundary in copyright. The API is defined, there are multiple ways to fulfill that API, so whatever does fulfill that API does not turn the linking program into a derivative work (more specifically - it doesn't require any specific expression to work - because multiple expressions exist that allow it to work).
So, it is 100% possible to link to a GPL'd program and not be open source and not violate the GPL. There are other issues though.
If a library is unique, then it becomes a murky area as to whether a calling program is a derivative.
If a library is staticly linked, another gray area.
These are some of the things the court will sort out. However, I would not be surprised if the court finds in general that any linking to GPLd libraries does not make something a derivative.
After all, the intended purpose of a library is to have something link to it using a public API. Therefore, it seems silly to make anything that does that a derivative. However, you could argue that any program can be turned into a library, so that using the intent of making something a library may not be good either.
In any case, it should get interesting.
apt-get install galeon :)
Debian rules for installing a new package.
He additionally missed
"Mouse cursor on image. Right click. Block all images from ad.soubleclick.net ?"
Galeon's ability to customize completely acceptance of cookies and images from IP addresses is incredibly useful. With mozilla you cannot get there by right-clicking on the image (yet, I suspect). With konqueror you cannot either. You have to conditionally block images, and allow the ones you want. With galeon, any image site can be blocked with a single right click.
You can also config so that pop-up windows automatically go to new tabs in the background.
What an improvement in browsing !
However, while it does support Quicktime, almost all of the newly released QT movies are compressed with Sorenson (sp?) codec, which is closed source, and Apple licenses it from another company. Therefore, unless Apple, and Sorenson (sp?) both give permission (read: unlikely), you won't find a legal open-source player. Apple (and others) can port the app to different platforms, and others still can make a shell for the application (read: what Codeweavers did), but you still don't get the benifits of open-source programmers optimizing the heck out of the program.
I can see your argument.
However, Windows Media Video 7 and 8 codecs are patented. They are used to compress some wmv and asf files. Unless Microsoft gives you permission, you cannot decompress those files.
But Mplayer does this with impunity using Windows DLLs !
The real issue here, I think, it that Mplayer hackers don't know the APIs used by Quicktime, whereas they have reverse engineered the ones in Windows Media Player.
Really, I could CARE LESS whether Windows Media Player exists for linux. Mplayer does an INCREDIBLY good job. But it needs to get the hooks for the API Quicktime uses for its codecs, because there is an awful lot of Sorenson codec Quicktime animation out there.
Why should GNOME support Dotnet?
.NET and can program it, GNOME will support .NET. This is a gain for GNOME users - more programs for the platform.
GNOME is free software. If someone wants it to run
You can still CHOOSE not to use them, too. And then for you nothing will have changed.
One thing to remember is that Microsoft is the enemy because they are a proprietary company.
I would have ZERO problems with a proprietary company that ATTEMPTED to use well-featured standard formats for exchanging DATA. Data can be interpreted as any format that is displayable only. Like, sound, video, streaming versions, documents, text email, PDF...
I use linux. Other companies will make and sell software, and I just want to be able to interact with them reasonably.
When a proprietary company makes data available to me only in formats for which they control the displayers, I don't like it so much anymore. When they additionally make NO effort to use interchangeable formats that are well-featured, I recognize that company doesn't care if its users can interact with any users of other software. There is no excuse for that - it is plain anti-competitive for ANY software maker not to make his data displayable using anyone else's software.
This becomes really clear in Microsoft's case, because other people's formats are so widely read in the rest of the world. No one in the linux world has a horrible time reading pdfs (acroread, xpdf, ghostscript), or email, or word processing documents that are not in a Microsoft format.
However, try to read a WMV/ASF file, or a WMA file, or a DOC file, or read a web page served by IIS, and there are LOTS of problems with accurate reading.
We saw those comments from Miguel a long time ago. He's not raving about Microsoft. He just likes .NET.
.NET.
.NET. .NET apps should run by mapping function calls onto GNOME. Just like SAMBA should run on linux. But it has to end there.
Right.
And pre-GNOME, when he was grabbing the torch, he wasn't raving about Microsoft either. No, he sure wasn't. He was just caught up in how cool DCOM was, and was all fired up on how to implement it appropriately in GNOME.
AFAIKT, it is still pretty useless. But it is conceptually "the Microsoft way".
Then there was email. Miguel cloned Outlook in Evolution. Microsoft KNEW how to make a good email app, so Miguel was going to make one too, "the Microsoft way".
There is no person I can think of in Free Software development that likes "the Microsoft way" more than Miguel. No one. In fact, at this point I am beginning to wonder if he is on their payroll. First he was fired up to replicate DCOM under GNOME, then he was fired up to replicate Outlook, and now it is
GNOME should support
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
.NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your .NET programs.
.NET is about one and only one thing. Network enabled apps to take the place of Java. The details are different, but the motivation and niche in the marketplace is the same. All the rest is just clever marketing from Redmond, as usual.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
That is precisely what I said. XP drops default Java support.
Secondly, the real advantage of
Look, this is a load of bull and you should know it. Any language that maps onto C# cleanly is the reality. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent you from writing a java bytecode compiler for just about any language, so this is no different either. But simply, java is structured a lot like C or C++ without requiring its programmer to micro-manage memory. So, it is just not that hard to program in.
Also, it won't matter much whether developers like it. Microsoft will practically pay them to write C# apps instead of Java apps, and Microsoft has the bank to do it. Default Java support is gone, which effectively kills it for recreational computer users (client end support, anyway).
No,
The reality is, .NET is a platform to
produce NET enabled applications.
So is Java.
Microsoft is trying REAL hard not to make it seem like they are re-inventing Java, whereas in fact they are reinventing Java.
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
So, all developers get another language to learn, harder than Java, and the public gets more fragmentation of the NET than before.
Whereas the technical details between the implementations may differ, both exist for only one reason - to provide net enabled applications.
Netflix tries real hard to get you in at $20/mo, but they offer an option at $12.50/month. You have to start at 3 movies/$20 though - and then manually downgrade.
For this price you can always rent 2 movies.
We live in SF, and probably watch 2 movies a week using netflix. Much more convenient than Blockbuster (which is only 1 mile away, but has wicked lines). The turnaround for movies is about 3 days from when we drop them in the mailbox. Netflix lists in our account when movies should arrive, and it is reasonably consistent.
So far, no hitches. Been using it 3 mo. I think in principle we could watch 15+ movies a month for this price, although we usually watch 6-8. I suspect we'll hit the wall of available and desireable content soon though.
What you say is a problem, but it will not be a dealkiller until Microsoft drops support for it's previous methods of authentication.
Yeah, but Microsoft will coerce through discontinuing support for old protocols in new software, and reliance on the upgrade cycle. Didja notice Office 2000 is already GONE and no longer supported, and only Office XP is ?
This will happen at the OS level too, until you can no longer buy new software to run a server or client using anything but the new authentication scheme. They will introduce it slowly, but eventually, every single person using some kinda SAMBA will be forced into the Microsoft way. It may even take two cycles - 5-6 years - to fully implement. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out their marketing and sales plans.
Microsoft will HAVE to publish APIs etc. for patented features. How else can they get a patent? The whole point behind a patent is that you are granted a 100% legal monopoly for your product IN EXCHANGE for your full disclosure of your product.
.NET will use patented protocols, and that they will similarly use other patented protocols into other inter-machine communication APIs. After all, there are a lot of ways to skin a cat; this is one way to keep free software out of Microsoft-monopolized areas.
Unfortunately, this is the future of proprietary software. Look around at any developing area.
Microsoft has patented the second generation Windows Media Format codecs. Real had patented its codecs. Apple holds exclusive licensing for Sorenson codecs used in Quicktime. So if you want to make or decode a decent video codec, you have to license a patent.
SAMBA is now also encumbered with patents with respect to user authentication. The next generation of Windows will contain this authentication, and the SAMBA team will be unable to make a functional work-alike. Too bad, that is the law.
Unless the Microsoft settlement has something to say about open licensing of patented formats, codecs, and authentication, making software to duplicate new Windows functionality, or providing file or print servers for Windows machines, will become impossible without licensing from Microsoft. You can expect that authentication of users under
You apparently didn't check out NTBugTraq. They simply added up vulnerabilities from different linux distros to come up with a high aggregate number. This is plain wrong because
1) If a package has a security issue, usually all distros announce the security bug. Thus, the bug gets counted multiple times.
2) Windows security bugs are all remote compromises, either email attachments, or remote roots. Over 90% of the linux security problems are local security issues.
As another poster noted, this is a very poorly researched article.
This press release is kinda interesting. First, the work was presented over two months ago. Second, the work was carried out in the lab of Richard Andersen. Yet Andersen, who has spent a lot of the last decade reorganizing his lab around such efforts, was not mentioned. Instead, Meeker, a graduate student on the project was named. In addition, all this work in the Andersen lab was spearheaded by a person who is now at Stanford, Krishna Shenoy who recently left the lab. In addition, the intellectual property for the project, the patents, are co-authored by Andersen and Shenoy.
It's kinda weird when you know a bit about the work behind these press releases, and then see how it is actually presented to the "lay" public.
Personally, I think the project has a low probability of success. A neural prosthetic device should be interfaced with as peripheral part of the nervous system as possible. This group has chosen to use as abstract a part of the nervous system as possible. But maybe they'll prove me wrong.
Oh sure, it is there.
Confirmed its presence on Usenet too. A REALLY substantial fraction of Usenetters use Outlook.
Just begin a line with the word begin followed by two spaces followed by the rest of the message body. The rest of the message is obliterated, and Outlook thinks it is a blank attachment.
Oh, and his mails don't croak Outlook Express, it just doesn't display them properly. For what it's worth, though, I just tried the "begin bug" in OE 5.5 and the mail displayed correctly, so it looks like it's been fixed.
Negative. Bug exists. Microsoft's reply is that you ought not to do this. Nevermind that their email reader doesn't conform to RFC - the solution is to make email conform to THEM !
Use
begin at the start of a line followed by two spaces and then non-space characters.
I read the english e-mail and he explains his position (I don't quite understand the hack though)
The hack is to begin the message body with
begin
Outlook interprets this as starting a uuencoded section, and turns perfectly readable text into gobbly-dy gook.
The other hack is to change the Reply-To: header as Outlook usually does when it marks the messages read. Then he adds a novel X header that seems to imply his email was actually censored somewhere along the way. So, the Outlook user sees gobblydy gook instead of a message bbdy if he sees the message at all, and if he tries to diagnose the problem will be immediately be misled by the novel X header into thinking he was censored. Whereupon he goes to his sysadmin, who will read the email in plain text, and laugh heartily. Or cry.
Just read it.
For those who haven't, here is the summary.
Linuxplanet: Isn't the proposed settlement horseshit.
Bork: Yes, I'd have to say I agree with that.
Insightful - NOT !