As an internet businessman, and entrepeneur, I frequently use bulk e-mail as a way of informing my customers about new products and specials. There is nothing immoral or dishonest about this practice, and I am in full compliance with US Congress e-mail regulations.
Nothing wrong with it as long as everyone on your bulk email list agreed to receive your notices. Somehow I doubt that's what you meant, and anyway you already confessed further down the thread so we know this is not what you are talking about.
About those 'regulations' - what on earth are you referring to? You mean one or more of the bills that didn't ever make it into law? Those aren't regulations, or laws, or anything except bills that were not made law...
I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers, and have been (unfairly) given a bad reputation. I run a legitimate multi-level internet business, and use bulk mailings as my primary method of solicitation.
Wow, talk about self-contradiction.
I would be unable to support my wife and kids if it weren't for the business I gain through e-mail.
So you're saying you are incapable of feeding your family by legitimate means? Are you looking for sympathy? You're more likely to get spit on, honestly. If you can't support your children without stealing you probably should have worn a rubber, and/or tried to learn some job skills growing up. At any rate, your failure does not obligate me in any way to excuse your theft.
It is unfair to label all e-mail marketers as criminals just because of a few persons who have no respect for users privacy and bandwidth limitations. Some of us are honest businessmen who are just trying to make a living, and have been branded as low-lifes because of a few rogue SPAMmers.
Umm and just what is the difference between a legitimate businessman and a lowlife spammer? I'll give you a hint - legitimate businessmen don't go around subscribing strangers to bulk email lists without their permission!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I do not buy e-mail addresses from so called "online marketing organizations". I harvest potential contacts from public forums. Mainly chat rooms, usenet posts, and forums like Slashdot and Kuro5hin. I am well within my legal right in doing so, since you have chosen to make your e-mail address publicly available. As I have previously said, I always include an option to unsubscribe.
How incredibly generous of you! You provide an option to unsubscribe!
I don't give a flying fsck. You have no right to subscribe me against my will in the first place. I therefore have absolutely no obligation to waste my time reading your spew and figuring out how to unsubscribe from something I didn't subscribe to in the first place.
Posting my email is not a solicitation for junk mail, and in no way excuses your theft (by chattel) of my resources.
All talk of "legal rights" and complying with US "law" (actually not law at all, but bills that failed to become law) is total nonsense. You have NO legal right to my mailbox. And if I'm going to have to waste my time dealing with your spew, you can bet using your "unsubscribe" (which you may or may not interpret as "sell the address to all the other sleazebags, it's good!" but certainly most of your peers do) will not be my choice of action. I'll be tracing your crimes and notifying some service providers instead.
Want to send random people junk mail? Fine, use snailmail. That way you pay for it. Try to steal resources I pay for to facilitate your junkmail? Expect war. Don't whine. What other reaction could you possibly expect from your victims, thief?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You're ignoring or forgetting one crucial difference.
If I install an untrusted binary rpm, there are scripts that get run as root. Not a lot of people understand them, look at them, even know how to look at them.
If you install from source, what gets run as root../configure, make, and a couple of shell commands to copy the binaries and documentation into their proper place. If the source is trojaned, it's still going to be inside a user sandbox. If./configure is trojaned, at least it's a lot more likely someone will notice that. I've never once looked at the install scripts in an rpm, but I've more configure plenty of times... *shrug* so I do think installing from source is more secure.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
They'll most likely come from www.grid.com - who already supply the military laptops. I had one of these to play with a few years ago, a 386, but for the time it was decent performancewise, and you could drive a truck over it, pick it up, open it, and go right back to work.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
It's not like gasoline isn't much more horrible, and most slashdot readers probably drive around in machines containing over a hundred pounds of highly volatile liquid fuel that will burn or explode violently at the slightest spark.
Gasoline won't explode "at the slightest spark." Only in the movies.
It will, of course, burn, quite well under most circumstances. But those hollywood explosions are done with dynamite.
Gasoline, you see, burns quite slowly. Explosives burn very quickly.
Hydrogen is explosive, however the cell doesn't run on hydrogen, and it's not a particularly efficient explosive anyhow. It's main potential is for fusion.
Anyhow, the cell in the article uses methyl, poisonous alcohol. Hardly an explosive risk.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Linux is not a microkernel. It is a well designed monolithic kernel that manages to use microkernelish code when it's efficient to do so.
Microsoft is very unlikely to build an OS around GPL code. They are adamant in their hatred of the GPL and their belief they have a god given right to make money off anything they release, even if it uses other peoples code. They would want to code support for their API into the kernel, and they wouldn't want to send you source for their forked kernel, bottom line.
What they do instead is use BSD code to try and get NT to work.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
No trick at all. The following verses don't disagree.
If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life.
What you are implying is that the second clause occurs if mischief happens to the fetus and a moments reflection will make it clear that is incorrect. "...So that her fruit depart her" covers that case already, the mischief that may or may not follow is to the woman.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
There are numerous problems with this approach. Others have already posted several. It probably should be legal, but it's also probably going to be more hassle than it's worth to do... there's way too much slack for the landsharks in that scenario - maybe they couldn't beat you, but they could damn sure bankrupt you, assuming you aren't Billy G's kid or something...
A better method, imhop (IANAL et cetera) - include a generic utility to implement a Free and Open security method, with an option to request a checksum on a file as an option alongside password and MAC authentication. That way any use made of it is going to be very clearly not your responsibility, and if someone with deep pockets does decide to set their landsharks to the task of driving you to suicide, their case will suck bad enough that folks like the ACLU will pay for your defense.
There might even be a movie deal afterwards, who knows?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Both are murder, if I have read the bible correctly.
Actually, the only mention of abortion in the entire bible the best I remember is in Exodus 21, and it quite clearly does not consider it murder or even near.
Exodus 21:22 (KJV)
If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
Exodus 21:22(YLT) And when men strive, and have smitten a pregnant woman, and her children have come out, and there is no mischief, he is certainly fined, as the husband of the woman doth lay upon him, and he hath given through the judges
This was the punishment for destruction of property.
Though the new testament doesn't seem to mention abortion at all, that very silence is quite telling, considering that it was a hot topic of the day. If the authors of the new testament had thought it was murder, it's rather inexplicable why they wouldn't have said so, many pagans at the time did. So it seems only reasonable to think they must have agreed with the old testament on that subject.
The irony of the present abortion debate, then, is that the driving force behind the anti-choice lobby is clearly fundamentalist christianity - and not only does the bible they claim as ultimate authority not agree with them, it clearly disagrees with their position.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Here's one of my BIG complaints about Apple. Can I get the same iMac 600MHz, let's see, I don't need the 56k internal modem, I have DSL, I don't need VGA video mirroring, don't need the fancy speakers, dont need their crappy 1 button mouse, I'd like to have a 4 button model Kensington instead. Don't need the CD-RW, I'd like to use the external SCSI one I already have. hm. let's see, that's roughly what, like $500? minus the cost of the 4 button, $450. So can I get this model for $1050? fuck no. I have to buy all this useless garbage I don't need. I couldn't even leverage the SCSI CD-RW anyway, because of the extreme irony of a Mac without external SCSI connectors.
I agree. The PPC architecture is nice, I'd love to have one, but there are so many disadvantages to a single source market.
If Apple opened up their specs so that all those dinkum ROC chaps could start producing compatible parts, and somebody like Dell or IBM could start assembling licensed clones for a small cut... then Apple could get the costs down and the sales back up. It would cut their profit margin, but what's the point in big margins when your volume is dying?
The alternative, for Apple, would be porting OSX (NOT just Darwin) to x86. But opening the hardware would be a lot better, imhop. I'd rather have cheap compatible ppc components than Apple on x86... *shudder* ever use Solaris/x86?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Oh no... someone said Money in the same paragraph as Linux, someone better prepare for the onslaught of free software fanatics from Slashdot...
...who are also going to try and mod this down.
Yikes, wake up guy. Free Software is about Freedom, not money. Lots of "Free Software fanatics" posted before you did, and we're saying that this was exactly the sort of thing Redhat is supposed to do to make money and keep working.
How well it will work remains to be seen, but I wish em the best.
Cmdr Taco is trolling again... *yawn*
Taco:
I want RH to make a buck too, but this seems like a pretty crappy way to do it.
Just why is this a crappy way to do it, Taco? Huh? What the hell is wrong with selling optional services to support the company? What better ideas do you have for a business model?
With Editors like this who needs trolls?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
They actually had better tanks, the T-34s, than the Germans.
Heh. Better by what measure?
The T-34 was a good tank for the time, without a doubt. It was a lot better than the Germans expected them to be able to field, but saying it was better than the German tanks is a bit odd. The Tiger was far more powerful, the Panzer III was comparable and intended for infantry-support rather than tank to tank battles anyhow.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You can copyright your post. In most countries this is automatic. That does not stop me from quoting it within fair use, and it does not stop me from using the formula contained within the post. A patent would stop me from using that formula even if I invented it independently and could prove I never even read your post!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Denmark is a member of the EU and has been for some time.
Technically true. However, the EU uses the "frog-boiling" method of recruitment, there are various stages of "integration," and while the Danes enjoy the trade benefits of the union, they have consistently voted down increased integration.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I'm told the SlackWare folks have a port in progress, but it's not ready yet. If it were here, I'd say it's exactly what you want, but as it's not... why not give NetBSD a try?
If you are really adventurous, though, you could also try Slackintosh - it's an unofficial port from the slackware source tree. It has no installer - you will have to set up another linux/ppc distro to install it, but a very minimal install should work fine.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
And since GPLed code is at the same time insidiously undercutting you and destroying your markets, having to reimplement what the GPLed code does is likewise a losing proposition.
So you are blaming Stallman for your lack of programming and/or business savvy?
Stallman didn't like it when the commercial software houses changed the way they did business. You know, in the old days, nearly everything was open source (not Free Software or even Open Source, but still something.) The programmers were paid by hardware companies, who wrote it off as a cost of selling the hardware. Then some real smart suits came up with a new business model. Enter the world of binary-only distributions and EULAs and NDAs that MicroSoft is so good at making money off of.
Stallman set out to destroy that business model, not business in general. You seem quite convinced he'll succeed. I quite hope you are right on that at least.
That business model is neither the first under which programmers have been paid, nor will it be the last. It's just the one most destructive to the user community. Good programmers are a scarce and necessary commodity, and they will continue to make money, one way or another. The ones that embrace the future and take advantage of changes as they occur will make more than the ones that whine and complain and hold onto the past kicking and screaming at first, of course. But that's life.
Your lament is like that of the record companies suing napster. You want to punish someone for making your life uncomfortable, for destroying the business model that feeds you - rather than showing some entrepenurial spirit and figuring out a new business model, or even rediscovering an old one. Keep misplacing your energies so and it will be no ones fault but your own if your career does go downhill.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Ack! Looks like you are right, the Mac version is way behind and no longer linked. This post explains it, sort of. Looks like Dave ran into some problems doing the port quite awhile back, since he relies on Novell libraries, and Novell quit supporting Macs. From the date of the post one might deduce that the problems proved insurmountable, or at least more trouble than he thought it was worth.
Not being a Mac user I remained blissfully ignorant of this till now. Sorry:(
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Geez, read the link before you post, people. This isn't a lightweight desktop, it's a module for compression X protocol traffic. That's the big problem with running remote X sessions - they eat bandwidth like nothing else.
Fortunately it's also quite compressible. By optimising compression for the protocol, they're claiming to average 60:1 compression, making it possible to run a full-on X session on a 64k link... yummy.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The problem is, encrypting email is a lot less automatic than when encryption is used for secure web transactions. When I visit and want to buy something I don't have to manually get their key, click the encrypt button, enter keys, send. No all you have to do is check that you've entered a secure zone. If in email programs all you had to do was click the "use encryption" tickbox and have the program sort all the details out then a lot more people would use encryption.
Pegasus Mail does this. By default it uses the built-in encryptor, a variant of the old crypt program, to encrypt the message with the passphrase you give it, but it also has a documented interface for third parties to add decryption modules. The QDPGP plugin handles PGP. It's pretty damn slick.
Pegasus has been around a long time, it's free-beer, and it's by far the best email program around IMHOP. Very regularly I hear or read someone wanting their email program to do this or that, and almost always pmail does it already. The only good reason not to use it is it doesn't run on linux. If you use windows, dos, or mac, I really can't see why anyone would use anything else. And the Linux port might materialise soon.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Unfortunately, the message above pretty much regurgitates Richard Stallman's propaganda uncritically.
Translation, because I agree with RMS I must be mentally deficient or "uncritical." Right?
The fact is, again, that the GPL does preclude authors from reaping any financial reward from their work.
The fact is that you can repeat that like a mantra all you want, but repetition won't make it true.
No company whose business strategy has been based on the sale of GPLed software has ever been profitable.
First, such companies are very new on the scene - and most tech companies take a while to become profitable (and many never do) whether their software is Free or not. Redhat for instance is making millions off software sales every month - they're just spending it faster than they make it, currently, operating at a loss to maximise their future returns, just as any other software company in their position would - GPL or no. Second, you started off by talking about authors reaping financial rewards from their work, now you are talking about companies reaping financial rewards from the authors work. These are totally different issues, which you are (deliberately?) confusing. The companies are not the copyright holders, they must make money within the terms of the license - the authors do not.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The purpose of the GPL is to eliminate any chance that a programmer might use the code in a way which would provide him with a financial reward for his hard work. This is, again, blatant discrimination.
Nonsense. The purpose of the GPL is to keep software licensed under it Free. It's obviously more difficult to make money selling software when that software is Free, but it is far from impossible. See Selling Free Software. In fact, the FSF considers the ability to sell the software for a fee an essential component of Free Software - the Yast license, for one, is classified as non-free because it forbids this.
Even Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL, says that "Free Software [note the caps; Stallman considers this to mean "GPLed software"
Whoah, slow down there troll-boy. Free Software is most definately NOT the same thing as GPL'd software. See this list of licenses on the GNU site - particularly the ones listed under headings "GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses" and
"GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses."
15 licenses are listed as GPL compatible, and an additional 21 are listed as not GPL compatible but still Free Software!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I can see this question applying mainly to Perl applications, because of Perl's tendancy to tolerate shitty coders who don't know where to hit the carraige return when they are coding.
As long as the problem is poor formatting/indention and the like, you can clean this code up very quickly with emacs (GNU or X.) Just set a mark at the beginning of the file, move to the end of the file ("ESC->") and indent region ("ESC CTRL-\" or "META-x indent-region" if you have trouble remembering the shortcut.) This works in any language that emacs has a mode for - which is pretty much every language around.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing wrong with it as long as everyone on your bulk email list agreed to receive your notices. Somehow I doubt that's what you meant, and anyway you already confessed further down the thread so we know this is not what you are talking about.
About those 'regulations' - what on earth are you referring to? You mean one or more of the bills that didn't ever make it into law? Those aren't regulations, or laws, or anything except bills that were not made law...
Wow, talk about self-contradiction.
So you're saying you are incapable of feeding your family by legitimate means? Are you looking for sympathy? You're more likely to get spit on, honestly. If you can't support your children without stealing you probably should have worn a rubber, and/or tried to learn some job skills growing up. At any rate, your failure does not obligate me in any way to excuse your theft.
Umm and just what is the difference between a legitimate businessman and a lowlife spammer? I'll give you a hint - legitimate businessmen don't go around subscribing strangers to bulk email lists without their permission!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
How incredibly generous of you! You provide an option to unsubscribe!
I don't give a flying fsck. You have no right to subscribe me against my will in the first place. I therefore have absolutely no obligation to waste my time reading your spew and figuring out how to unsubscribe from something I didn't subscribe to in the first place.
Posting my email is not a solicitation for junk mail, and in no way excuses your theft (by chattel) of my resources.
All talk of "legal rights" and complying with US "law" (actually not law at all, but bills that failed to become law) is total nonsense. You have NO legal right to my mailbox. And if I'm going to have to waste my time dealing with your spew, you can bet using your "unsubscribe" (which you may or may not interpret as "sell the address to all the other sleazebags, it's good!" but certainly most of your peers do) will not be my choice of action. I'll be tracing your crimes and notifying some service providers instead.
Want to send random people junk mail? Fine, use snailmail. That way you pay for it. Try to steal resources I pay for to facilitate your junkmail? Expect war. Don't whine. What other reaction could you possibly expect from your victims, thief?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You're ignoring or forgetting one crucial difference.
If I install an untrusted binary rpm, there are scripts that get run as root. Not a lot of people understand them, look at them, even know how to look at them.
If you install from source, what gets run as root. ./configure, make, and a couple of shell commands to copy the binaries and documentation into their proper place. If the source is trojaned, it's still going to be inside a user sandbox. If ./configure is trojaned, at least it's a lot more likely someone will notice that. I've never once looked at the install scripts in an rpm, but I've more configure plenty of times... *shrug* so I do think installing from source is more secure.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
They'll most likely come from www.grid.com - who already supply the military laptops. I had one of these to play with a few years ago, a 386, but for the time it was decent performancewise, and you could drive a truck over it, pick it up, open it, and go right back to work.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Gasoline won't explode "at the slightest spark." Only in the movies.
It will, of course, burn, quite well under most circumstances. But those hollywood explosions are done with dynamite.
Gasoline, you see, burns quite slowly. Explosives burn very quickly.
Hydrogen is explosive, however the cell doesn't run on hydrogen, and it's not a particularly efficient explosive anyhow. It's main potential is for fusion.
Anyhow, the cell in the article uses methyl, poisonous alcohol. Hardly an explosive risk.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Linux is not a microkernel. It is a well designed monolithic kernel that manages to use microkernelish code when it's efficient to do so.
Microsoft is very unlikely to build an OS around GPL code. They are adamant in their hatred of the GPL and their belief they have a god given right to make money off anything they release, even if it uses other peoples code. They would want to code support for their API into the kernel, and they wouldn't want to send you source for their forked kernel, bottom line.
What they do instead is use BSD code to try and get NT to work.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
No trick at all. The following verses don't disagree.
What you are implying is that the second clause occurs if mischief happens to the fetus and a moments reflection will make it clear that is incorrect. "...So that her fruit depart her" covers that case already, the mischief that may or may not follow is to the woman.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
There are numerous problems with this approach. Others have already posted several. It probably should be legal, but it's also probably going to be more hassle than it's worth to do... there's way too much slack for the landsharks in that scenario - maybe they couldn't beat you, but they could damn sure bankrupt you, assuming you aren't Billy G's kid or something...
A better method, imhop (IANAL et cetera) - include a generic utility to implement a Free and Open security method, with an option to request a checksum on a file as an option alongside password and MAC authentication. That way any use made of it is going to be very clearly not your responsibility, and if someone with deep pockets does decide to set their landsharks to the task of driving you to suicide, their case will suck bad enough that folks like the ACLU will pay for your defense.
There might even be a movie deal afterwards, who knows?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Actually, the only mention of abortion in the entire bible the best I remember is in Exodus 21, and it quite clearly does not consider it murder or even near.
This was the punishment for destruction of property.
Though the new testament doesn't seem to mention abortion at all, that very silence is quite telling, considering that it was a hot topic of the day. If the authors of the new testament had thought it was murder, it's rather inexplicable why they wouldn't have said so, many pagans at the time did. So it seems only reasonable to think they must have agreed with the old testament on that subject.
The irony of the present abortion debate, then, is that the driving force behind the anti-choice lobby is clearly fundamentalist christianity - and not only does the bible they claim as ultimate authority not agree with them, it clearly disagrees with their position.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Uh... huh?
You must have been thinking 'Slackware' and somehow typed 'Debian' instead by accident, right?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The unspoken assumption in your post is that having more commercial applications available is a huge benefit that should be chased. Why?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I agree. The PPC architecture is nice, I'd love to have one, but there are so many disadvantages to a single source market.
If Apple opened up their specs so that all those dinkum ROC chaps could start producing compatible parts, and somebody like Dell or IBM could start assembling licensed clones for a small cut... then Apple could get the costs down and the sales back up. It would cut their profit margin, but what's the point in big margins when your volume is dying?
The alternative, for Apple, would be porting OSX (NOT just Darwin) to x86. But opening the hardware would be a lot better, imhop. I'd rather have cheap compatible ppc components than Apple on x86... *shudder* ever use Solaris/x86?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Yikes, wake up guy. Free Software is about Freedom, not money. Lots of "Free Software fanatics" posted before you did, and we're saying that this was exactly the sort of thing Redhat is supposed to do to make money and keep working.
How well it will work remains to be seen, but I wish em the best.
Cmdr Taco is trolling again... *yawn*
Taco:
Just why is this a crappy way to do it, Taco? Huh? What the hell is wrong with selling optional services to support the company? What better ideas do you have for a business model?
With Editors like this who needs trolls?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Heh. Better by what measure?
The T-34 was a good tank for the time, without a doubt. It was a lot better than the Germans expected them to be able to field, but saying it was better than the German tanks is a bit odd. The Tiger was far more powerful, the Panzer III was comparable and intended for infantry-support rather than tank to tank battles anyhow.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You can copyright your post. In most countries this is automatic. That does not stop me from quoting it within fair use, and it does not stop me from using the formula contained within the post. A patent would stop me from using that formula even if I invented it independently and could prove I never even read your post!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Technically true. However, the EU uses the "frog-boiling" method of recruitment, there are various stages of "integration," and while the Danes enjoy the trade benefits of the union, they have consistently voted down increased integration.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I'm told the SlackWare folks have a port in progress, but it's not ready yet. If it were here, I'd say it's exactly what you want, but as it's not... why not give NetBSD a try?
If you are really adventurous, though, you could also try Slackintosh - it's an unofficial port from the slackware source tree. It has no installer - you will have to set up another linux/ppc distro to install it, but a very minimal install should work fine.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
So you are blaming Stallman for your lack of programming and/or business savvy?
Stallman didn't like it when the commercial software houses changed the way they did business. You know, in the old days, nearly everything was open source (not Free Software or even Open Source, but still something.) The programmers were paid by hardware companies, who wrote it off as a cost of selling the hardware. Then some real smart suits came up with a new business model. Enter the world of binary-only distributions and EULAs and NDAs that MicroSoft is so good at making money off of.
Stallman set out to destroy that business model, not business in general. You seem quite convinced he'll succeed. I quite hope you are right on that at least.
That business model is neither the first under which programmers have been paid, nor will it be the last. It's just the one most destructive to the user community. Good programmers are a scarce and necessary commodity, and they will continue to make money, one way or another. The ones that embrace the future and take advantage of changes as they occur will make more than the ones that whine and complain and hold onto the past kicking and screaming at first, of course. But that's life.
Your lament is like that of the record companies suing napster. You want to punish someone for making your life uncomfortable, for destroying the business model that feeds you - rather than showing some entrepenurial spirit and figuring out a new business model, or even rediscovering an old one. Keep misplacing your energies so and it will be no ones fault but your own if your career does go downhill.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Ack! Looks like you are right, the Mac version is way behind and no longer linked. This post explains it, sort of. Looks like Dave ran into some problems doing the port quite awhile back, since he relies on Novell libraries, and Novell quit supporting Macs. From the date of the post one might deduce that the problems proved insurmountable, or at least more trouble than he thought it was worth.
Not being a Mac user I remained blissfully ignorant of this till now. Sorry :(
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Geez, read the link before you post, people. This isn't a lightweight desktop, it's a module for compression X protocol traffic. That's the big problem with running remote X sessions - they eat bandwidth like nothing else.
Fortunately it's also quite compressible. By optimising compression for the protocol, they're claiming to average 60:1 compression, making it possible to run a full-on X session on a 64k link... yummy.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Pegasus Mail does this. By default it uses the built-in encryptor, a variant of the old crypt program, to encrypt the message with the passphrase you give it, but it also has a documented interface for third parties to add decryption modules. The QDPGP plugin handles PGP. It's pretty damn slick.
Pegasus has been around a long time, it's free-beer, and it's by far the best email program around IMHOP. Very regularly I hear or read someone wanting their email program to do this or that, and almost always pmail does it already. The only good reason not to use it is it doesn't run on linux. If you use windows, dos, or mac, I really can't see why anyone would use anything else. And the Linux port might materialise soon.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Translation, because I agree with RMS I must be mentally deficient or "uncritical." Right?
The fact is that you can repeat that like a mantra all you want, but repetition won't make it true.
First, such companies are very new on the scene - and most tech companies take a while to become profitable (and many never do) whether their software is Free or not. Redhat for instance is making millions off software sales every month - they're just spending it faster than they make it, currently, operating at a loss to maximise their future returns, just as any other software company in their position would - GPL or no. Second, you started off by talking about authors reaping financial rewards from their work, now you are talking about companies reaping financial rewards from the authors work. These are totally different issues, which you are (deliberately?) confusing. The companies are not the copyright holders, they must make money within the terms of the license - the authors do not.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Nonsense. The purpose of the GPL is to keep software licensed under it Free. It's obviously more difficult to make money selling software when that software is Free, but it is far from impossible. See Selling Free Software. In fact, the FSF considers the ability to sell the software for a fee an essential component of Free Software - the Yast license, for one, is classified as non-free because it forbids this.
Whoah, slow down there troll-boy. Free Software is most definately NOT the same thing as GPL'd software. See this list of licenses on the GNU site - particularly the ones listed under headings "GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses" and "GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses."
15 licenses are listed as GPL compatible, and an additional 21 are listed as not GPL compatible but still Free Software!
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
As long as the problem is poor formatting/indention and the like, you can clean this code up very quickly with emacs (GNU or X.) Just set a mark at the beginning of the file, move to the end of the file ("ESC->") and indent region ("ESC CTRL-\" or "META-x indent-region" if you have trouble remembering the shortcut.) This works in any language that emacs has a mode for - which is pretty much every language around.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Only a little, assuming their lawyers and accountants don't really suck. These are the sort of people that really catch the brunt of it.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."