I agree with your comments and I, also, am not sure this is a bad thing, but take your first paragraph and apply it to the company we all love to hate;)
I think the biggest problem here is that Windows is *so* widespread, when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen. When the latest NT Server bugs hit...
Yes. One of the reasons for the success of ILOVEYOU was that so many people were running the same software-- it's simpler to attack a uniform population than a heterogenous one. So also with bugs in BIND.
Perhaps the solution is not to have any One True Name Server. Maybe we need an effort to build a competitor to BIND using completely separate sources?
M
There really isn't much value in free[dom?]
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 1
And quite apart from the question of whether Linux is better value for money, Miller is introducing a fallacy into the argument here anyway: describing software as Free does not imply anything about costs. I hope Miller's merely misinformed, and not maliciously misrepresenting.
Dissention from the collective childhood warm-fuzzy remeniscence earns a "Troll" rating?
I think partly the trouble is some people, including moderators, don't know what "troll means". I can't find it defined anywhere on in the Slashdot faq, though it does appear in the faq for kuro5hin.
The Jargon File defines "troll" as "to utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself." A key part of this definition is that the poster pretends to be serious about a subject but in fact is trying to attract flames.
From references in comments, I'd guess that many people on Slashdot understand something else by the term, though I'm not sure what. The fact that Slashdot's faq describes anti-troll filters (when from the description they seem to be describing anti-spam filters) seems to imply that the confusion is occasionally present even in the minds of the administrators.
Yeah, I read that book. There's a page about it with a lot of detail-- one interesting point that I didn't realise before is that it was based on a true story. The teacher in question (Ron Jones) wanted to show the untruth in "it couldn't happen here"-- the students had opted for security and conformity at the loss of freedom and the human rights of their peers without realising they were slipping into it. Indeed, much of the impetus towards fascism seems to have come from the students themselves.
True. But I think you haven't answered the original poster's point, which was that there are, unfortunately, many people who don't see a technology as somehow safe or OK unless it has Microsoft's name on it.
The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and
have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.(my emphasis)
This doesn't often cause much of a problem for most people, since most systems are properly "liberal in what they accept, and conservative in what they send"; however, in my experience, some systems have problems with the broken names, notably some firewall software.
I suppose somebody should point this out to Tripod, really.
"...if you've ever wondered what it sounds like out there, this is it."
It's hardly "what it sounds like out there"; it doesn't sound like anything out there, since it's a vacuum. What's happened is that phenomena which humans can't experience directly (radio waves) have been converted into phenomena that we can (sound).
Now, of course, this is what's happening every time you draw a graph (where a mass of data becomes readable shapes, lines and dots) or use your watch (where the internal state representing the date becomes LED readout or angular configuration of the hands), so this kind of abstraction is a vital tool in making sense of the world. But that doesn't mean that we can take these recordings and say "So this is what it sounds like out there!" (Compare someone seeing a map of the Internet and saying "Aha! So that's what the Internet looks like!")
M
Component reuse and glib in non-graphical programs
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 3
Personally, I just wish more of the code out there would start using glib and Gnome for things like error handling, internationalization and configuration preservation. Even non-graphical programs can benefit from complying with the Gnome application standards.
Well said. Miguel de Icaza made a similar point in his paper, Let's Make Unix Not Suck: in general, component reuse in Linux just isn't happening beyond libc and xlib, whereas this is something that IE actually does right-- it's built of a collection of reusable COM components. Much kudos should be accorded to gtk and friends for having a policy of software reuse that goes beyond the merely graphical.
It'd probably be offtopic here to consider whether applications which don't share components with others (MdI lists Samba, Apache, NFSD, innd, sendmail, in.named, ftpd, ssh, Netscape, GhostView, XDVI, Acrobat, Mathematica, Maple, Purify, FrameMaker, and Star Office) could or should be redesigned or patched to make use of glib as well; but it's ontopic to agree with you about the benefits of glib's reusability, and indeed to add that the use of glib is IMO something that should be considered carefully if anyone's starting a new project in C.
When it can be integrated into a users system in a matter of seconds is when people will start checking it out more.
Unfortunately, I'd guess that most people will start using it exactly when one of the big distros adopts it as standard. Oh well; they already have a Debian theme.
(Also, you need to put a ml at the end of the Energy Star link in this story).
And in case that page is as hugely slow to load for you as it is for me, here's Google's cache of it. The process is also described at:
everyone talks about how Linux is open source and free. If Linux is so free then why do I have to pay Debain, Red Hat, LinuxPPC for a free program?
"Free" is the free as in "free speech", "free citizen" or "free country". It doesn't refer to price. (The usual way of explaining the distinction is by contrasting free speech with free beer.
However, since Red Hat, Debian and so on are free (as in "not enslaved"), you don't have to pay anyone for them. Go and find a friend who has a copy, and take a copy from them. Give it to all your other friends! Read the code so you can find the problems; improve it if you can, and pass it on! This is what the freedom of software's about.
Freetype was written not for money, but to be able to show TrueType fonts without paying Apple money to use their interpreter.
Sure? Granted, this may be a motivation for using FreeType under Windows or the Mac-- but can people who want TrueType on X11 and the Amiga really pay money to use Apple's interpreter, or are they stuck without any TrueType at all unless a free implementation comes along?
This sounds like a confusion of free-as-in-speech with free-as-in-beer to me. Though if you can get Apple-backed TrueType for X and the Amiga, please do correct me.
There's a lot of information on the subject in the Copyright FAQ that's floating around. What you said seems to tally with this: in most countries, including the UK and the US, you have copyright in programs simply by creating them. BUT there are legal advantages in the US in registering your copyright.
Are the developers of Everybuddy likely
to file a suit in India for violations of
their license agreement?
Would it have been hard to go after them just because this company's based outside the West?
The same problem's happened before, except it was a Chinese company that time; Bruce Perens commented at the time:
Not that I am holding forth any hope about suing in China, but suing a Chinese company that does business in other nations is certainly possible.
(comment #77-- I can't link to it:( )
On quite a separate point, the idea of a "GPL insurance" reminds me of RMS's idea for a "software tax", which would fund the development of free software... perhaps, in the end, it would need to be used both for attack and for defence.
>The only two which come to mind as not being
>a mess should really be the second level
>domains.mil.us and.gov.us
Just to mention, it's.gov and.mil, top level domains in their own right, not.gov.us and.mil.us-- the second-level domains under.us are state abbreviations (.mn.us, for example).
>If it wasnt for companies like Microsoft that
>pay its employees to do work, most of you
>open source freaks (except the ones that
>still get allowance from mommy) would be
>out of a job.
True, and so what? Most opensource programmers may well work as closedsource programmers during the day. That would only be a problem if you believed closedsource software was somehow evil.
Even if you did believe that closedsource software was evil, again, so what? Richard Stallman-- an opponent of closedsource-- said this in his seminal paper on the subject, The Gnu Manifesto:
>"Won't programmers starve?"
>I could answer that nobody is forced to be
>a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get
>any money for standing on the street and making
>faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to
>spend our lives standing on the street making faces,
>and starving. We do something else.
In any case, there is money to be made out of opensource-- in support, in distribution, in media. How else would RedHat and VA Linux (and so on and on) survive as commercial entities?
>especially because they say it's "20 times
>faster then gifs" -- who measures compression
>in terms of speed?
Well, what LizardTech's site says is:
>Download a 50-page color catalog in DjVu format
>in the time it takes to download a single page
>of that same catalog in PDF format.
So it looks like when they say "faster", they mean "smaller" (and thus faster to download).
BTW, I so much hope that if this goes anywhere, the format will be made open. (Fat chance:( ) Someone made a comparison on the BetaNews story with the problems with GIF; but that's not comparing like with like; we have a new format which requires a plug-in. It's more like pdf, only worse, because the viewers won't be as easily available.
>I can't help but think that Office 11 or some
>subsequent software package will do away with
>non-subscription versions entirely[...]
The Eleventh Edition? Whatever would Orwell have said?
>"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive
>edition," he said. "We're getting the
>language into its final shape -- the shape
>it's going to have when nobody speaks anything
>else. When we've finished with it, people like
>you will have to learn it all over again."
In the Americas, go to ARIN; in Europe go to RIPE; in Asia and the Pacific, go to APNIC. (Some places, such as Mexico and Brazil, have separate arrangements.)
ARIN "allocate" numbers to ISPs and "assign" numbers to end users; but be warned that it costs Big Money to be assigned numbers directly (at least US$2,500 per year).
People, IME, tend to be good at associating names with things and less good at associating numbers-- which is why we name, rather than number, files... and cities and computers and children. (The only exception is the telephone system, and even there, people advertise using names of the form 1-800-FOOBAR-7.) I think we'd be losing something valuable if we changed names to numbers:
ever worked at a site which names its machines things like mercury, phoenix, orion, or charon, as opposed to say, mac1 or pc177? and tried to remember which machine was which?
Remember FidoNet addresses and how much harder they were to remember than DNS names?
And so we rather than try to resolve the dispute, we decide they're not to be trusted with it, and lose all this? Such a move would be restricting easy access to the net to those of us who are trained to find it easy to work with and remember apparently random strings of digits.
Yes, your solution works... but it appears to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. One of the reasons for the success of ILOVEYOU was that so many people were running the same software-- it's simpler to attack a uniform population than a heterogenous one. So also with bugs in BIND.
Perhaps the solution is not to have any One True Name Server. Maybe we need an effort to build a competitor to BIND using completely separate sources?
M
And quite apart from the question of whether Linux is better value for money, Miller is introducing a fallacy into the argument here anyway: describing software as Free does not imply anything about costs. I hope Miller's merely misinformed, and not maliciously misrepresenting.
M
In lynx?
M
I think partly the trouble is some people, including moderators, don't know what "troll means". I can't find it defined anywhere on in the Slashdot faq, though it does appear in the faq for kuro5hin.
The Jargon File defines "troll" as "to utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself." A key part of this definition is that the poster pretends to be serious about a subject but in fact is trying to attract flames.
From references in comments, I'd guess that many people on Slashdot understand something else by the term, though I'm not sure what. The fact that Slashdot's faq describes anti-troll filters (when from the description they seem to be describing anti-spam filters) seems to imply that the confusion is occasionally present even in the minds of the administrators.
M
Oh? I tried it from two different sites to see. Sorry.
Not all MS sites. MSDN seems to be visible still.
M
Yeah, I read that book. There's a page about it with a lot of detail-- one interesting point that I didn't realise before is that it was based on a true story. The teacher in question (Ron Jones) wanted to show the untruth in "it couldn't happen here"-- the students had opted for security and conformity at the loss of freedom and the human rights of their peers without realising they were slipping into it. Indeed, much of the impetus towards fascism seems to have come from the students themselves.
Eerie, isn't it?
M
True. But I think you haven't answered the original poster's point, which was that there are, unfortunately, many people who don't see a technology as somehow safe or OK unless it has Microsoft's name on it.
M
Unfortunately, Tripod allows users to pick names which contain underscores, and then uses them as labels within the DNS; this is in contravention of RFC 1034 sec 3.5, which states:
This doesn't often cause much of a problem for most people, since most systems are properly "liberal in what they accept, and conservative in what they send" ; however, in my experience, some systems have problems with the broken names, notably some firewall software.
I suppose somebody should point this out to Tripod, really.
M
It's hardly "what it sounds like out there"; it doesn't sound like anything out there, since it's a vacuum. What's happened is that phenomena which humans can't experience directly (radio waves) have been converted into phenomena that we can (sound).
Now, of course, this is what's happening every time you draw a graph (where a mass of data becomes readable shapes, lines and dots) or use your watch (where the internal state representing the date becomes LED readout or angular configuration of the hands), so this kind of abstraction is a vital tool in making sense of the world. But that doesn't mean that we can take these recordings and say "So this is what it sounds like out there!" (Compare someone seeing a map of the Internet and saying "Aha! So that's what the Internet looks like!")
M
Well said. Miguel de Icaza made a similar point in his paper, Let's Make Unix Not Suck : in general, component reuse in Linux just isn't happening beyond libc and xlib, whereas this is something that IE actually does right-- it's built of a collection of reusable COM components. Much kudos should be accorded to gtk and friends for having a policy of software reuse that goes beyond the merely graphical.
It'd probably be offtopic here to consider whether applications which don't share components with others (MdI lists Samba, Apache, NFSD, innd, sendmail, in.named, ftpd, ssh, Netscape, GhostView, XDVI, Acrobat, Mathematica, Maple, Purify, FrameMaker, and Star Office) could or should be redesigned or patched to make use of glib as well; but it's ontopic to agree with you about the benefits of glib's reusability, and indeed to add that the use of glib is IMO something that should be considered carefully if anyone's starting a new project in C.
Unfortunately, I'd guess that most people will start using it exactly when one of the big distros adopts it as standard. Oh well; they already have a Debian theme.
And in case that page is as hugely slow to load for you as it is for me, here's Google's cache of it. The process is also described at:
If you look at the screenshot, the bottom of the screen says starting gdm-- so I'd guess it already does do this.
M
everyone talks about how Linux is open source and free. If Linux is so free then why do I have to pay Debain, Red Hat, LinuxPPC for a free program?
"Free" is the free as in "free speech", "free citizen" or "free country". It doesn't refer to price. (The usual way of explaining the distinction is by contrasting free speech with free beer .
However, since Red Hat, Debian and so on are free (as in "not enslaved"), you don't have to pay anyone for them. Go and find a friend who has a copy, and take a copy from them. Give it to all your other friends! Read the code so you can find the problems; improve it if you can, and pass it on! This is what the freedom of software's about.
Freetype was written not for money, but to be able to show TrueType fonts without paying Apple money to use their interpreter.
Sure? Granted, this may be a motivation for using FreeType under Windows or the Mac-- but can people who want TrueType on X11 and the Amiga really pay money to use Apple's interpreter, or are they stuck without any TrueType at all unless a free implementation comes along?
This sounds like a confusion of free-as-in-speech with free-as-in-beer to me. Though if you can get Apple-backed TrueType for X and the Amiga, please do correct me.
There's a lot of information on the subject in the Copyright FAQ that's floating around. What you said seems to tally with this: in most countries, including the UK and the US, you have copyright in programs simply by creating them. BUT there are legal advantages in the US in registering your copyright.
IANAL.
You can read the full text of the Berne Convention, if you like.
Are the developers of Everybuddy likely
to file a suit in India for violations of
their license agreement?
Would it have been hard to go after them just because this company's based outside the West? The same problem's happened before, except it was a Chinese company that time; Bruce Perens commented at the time:
On quite a separate point, the idea of a "GPL insurance" reminds me of RMS's idea for a "software tax", which would fund the development of free software... perhaps, in the end, it would need to be used both for attack and for defence.
M
>a mess should really be the second level
>domains
Just to mention, it's .gov and .mil, top level domains in their own right, not .gov.us and .mil.us-- the second-level domains under .us are state abbreviations (.mn.us, for example).
M
>pay its employees to do work, most of you
>open source freaks (except the ones that
>still get allowance from mommy) would be
>out of a job.
>"Won't programmers starve?"
>I could answer that nobody is forced to be
>a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get
>any money for standing on the street and making
>faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to
>spend our lives standing on the street making faces,
>and starving. We do something else.
>faster then gifs" -- who measures compression
>in terms of speed?
Well, what LizardTech's site says is:
>Download a 50-page color catalog in DjVu format
>in the time it takes to download a single page
>of that same catalog in PDF format.
So it looks like when they say "faster", they mean "smaller" (and thus faster to download).
BTW, I so much hope that if this goes anywhere, the format will be made open. (Fat chance :( ) Someone made a comparison on the BetaNews story with the problems with GIF; but that's not comparing like with like; we have a new format which requires a plug-in. It's more like pdf, only worse, because the viewers won't be as easily available.
>subsequent software package will do away with
>non-subscription versions entirely[...]
The Eleventh Edition? Whatever would Orwell have said?
>"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive
>edition," he said. "We're getting the
>language into its final shape -- the shape
>it's going to have when nobody speaks anything
>else. When we've finished with it, people like
>you will have to learn it all over again."
In the Americas, go to ARIN; in Europe go to RIPE; in Asia and the Pacific, go to APNIC. (Some places, such as Mexico and Brazil, have separate arrangements.)
ARIN "allocate" numbers to ISPs and "assign" numbers to end users; but be warned that it costs Big Money to be assigned numbers directly (at least US$2,500 per year).
As you might have guessed from the article, APNIC seem to be cluefully ready to give out IPv6 addresses; ARIN are apparently talking about it.
People, IME, tend to be good at associating names with things and less good at associating numbers-- which is why we name, rather than number, files... and cities and computers and children. (The only exception is the telephone system, and even there, people advertise using names of the form 1-800-FOOBAR-7.) I think we'd be losing something valuable if we changed names to numbers:
And so we rather than try to resolve the dispute, we decide they're not to be trusted with it, and lose all this? Such a move would be restricting easy access to the net to those of us who are trained to find it easy to work with and remember apparently random strings of digits. Yes, your solution works... but it appears to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.