Re your disclaimer: Yes I sometimes feel the same thing. Not only with RH, also with SuSE (although not to that extent). While I appreciate the efforts RH makes (while not completely un-selfishly) to push'n'promote Linux, I get angry when I hear things like '...is running under the RedHat Operating System' (this was not an official RH advertising statement, though, but some quote off an executive summary about some hardware thingie).
Generally I mistrust every Linux company that goes public. Which means they work more for the shareholder than for the customer...
...better an Operating System that sez 'before you proceed, read the READMEs' (and you'd better do that, else you won't get nowhere) that one that lets me point, click and drop something onto something other (none of which I understand) and then after a month or so a friend/enemy/phone supporter/technician/... tells me 'well, you shouldn't have done this and that in the first place because you've shot yourself into the foot.'.
In a nutshell: Administrating an O/S is not for the faint of heart. And I encourage to lawmakers worldwide to issue an operator's license, prerequisite to buying a server operating system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilisation.
No, to be honest: That company behaves as if they'd invented gravity and sliced bread in the same week. To build a BIOS-Boot Manager all you need is an EPROM and a ROM card plus some code that can be stolen off a number of websites. Remember those Y2K clocks they (not that company, though) tried to sell us? The LBA enhancers? Dang, with a good OS you don't need zilch of that stuff!
Seems to be that kind of vapour targeted towards the decision making high brass. ('See? Our PC does not have a reset button. That's because it never crases. Enhanced Security at no cost!')
And that virtualizing stuff: Remember good old OS/2 where you could have a dozen of different (native!) DOS versions running, each in its separate cage?
Hmm. Dr. Zook is still selling his miracle syrup in the wild wild west....
The following might be mis-interpreted as troll or offtopic (which it isn't meant to be, as I don't specifically mean you with your specific book), but what the heck:
You mention that one of the largest complaints about Linux is that there is a lack of high-profile documentation. Well, I think you have to differentiate here: He/she who is really after the innards of the revamped IP stack will devour anything that is close to a documentation such as source comments, HOWTOs, READMEs and so forth.
On the other side, the 'decision makers' (who not necessarily are identical to the most technically educated/interested people) might prefer an abstract such as 'how to leverage the success of your e-commerce using a new IP stack' or 'IP for decision makers' or 'Huh? they can do dat with l33nux?'.
I have an elderly version of 'Linux the complete reference' by LSL which contains many (Mini-)HWOTOs and other stuff. Much of these documents deal with Linux 1.x versions and were refreshed with 2.x delta stuff. These readings still hold true for the 2.2.x kernels and probably will not be 'wrong' or 'untrue' for the 2.4 kernel.
My advice: Keep your book as it is and add the delta work as a smaller manual. That way the insider only needs to have the addendum with him/her and can leave the bulky Part I at home/office. Make these addendums subscribable, in both preprinted form as well as.PDF (no affiliation whatsoever) documents to download-after-pay. Or try to have one of the larger distros distribute your book. ('That manual deals with the TCP/IP kernel of Bonzo Linux in special but may also provide important informations for other distributions.', just like we see that in every second samba or firewalling book). You may even add a CD-ROM with a GPLed version of Dah One That Sponsored Thy Book.
Duh. My ISP charges me 5 cts. for each time I click that 'view source' button/menu.(*)
To get 'even' after an evening of 'source peeking' I have to click on advertising banners for the rest of the night. I really should use the frontpage wizards as an inspiration...
(*) At least in Switzerland you pay some surcharge on audio cassettes, audio cd-r's, video tapes, photocopiers/scanners. That money goes to some organization that pretends to maintain the interests of artists such as writers, composers, (decomposers too?) etc. Dunno whether they see some of that cash, though.
(re the view-source-surcharge: NO! THIS IDEA CANNOT BE PATENTED. I DECLARE THIS IDEA PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (HEREWITH REFERRED TO AS "OPEN IDEA"). SUERS AND PATENT LAWYERS GET OFF MY GRASS^H^H^H^H^HLAWN!)
It's like when you order that big hairy steak over at the steakhouse, eat 95% of it, then get the waiter, show him/her that remaining bit of your dinner and complain the meat wasn't tender enough and claim a refund.
In most parts of this planet, people are expected to think or ponder before they act. This may or may not be true for CA.
Not that I'm one of Bill's Buddies nor do I get regularly invited at Windows Parties, but this is not about M$, it's about common sense. Or lack thereof.
I am under serious distress when I get my phone bill. Mom, can I sue the phone company, please?
Yuck! USB! And Ethernet over USB! (Why not FireWire over USB?)
I guess the reason is simple: The modem is minimum standard, and an ethernet I/F costs three bucks more (plus some brains to implement DHCP).
And any buck less spent means an advantage in the market place (unfortunately they don't realize that a salesman has to talk three times more to explain the 'missing' features...)
Then again, CMG (whom I decided never to buy a product from) operates in the very narrow banking-internal market which is vastly different from an open source target market.
If they had even the faintest bit of common sense, they'd asked the sambahq.de webmaster to put a line on the welcome page like if you're lookin' for the banking stuff, go there. Well, another missed opportunity to demonstrate their friendliness.
...and 'surface' means someone brought it back (and maybe knocked down the thief in order to do that) And 'stolen' - what a harsh word. 'the... book was subject to property transfer' would be better. That's like I use a wire cable lock to prevent my motorbike helmet from 'walking away'... Newspeak improves your language - you'd never guess how many synonymes there are until you tried...
I develop some code, say some administrative utility. It does not base on GPLed stuff. (ie completely homebrewn). I want to share it with the community with the exception of companies in the banking business, because I plan to sell it to them and make a fortune. The Banks presumably would only use that code for internal projects so they'd never sell it and possibly break any GPL terms. Unless these company support Open Source stuff in some way or the other, I want them to pay for it.
I was pondering over a similar question as well and I was even inclined to ask/. about this:
I was thinking of something like "GPL for Friends", i.e. make the code publicly available for a) personal use, b) for companies that made significant ('hello world' won't count) contributions (either in code or financial) to the Open Source Community, c) for organizations that are commonly known as to be of non-profit nature (no, COS doesn't fall in that category). All others are required to pay if they intend to use that code.
Another possibility would be to require the user to register the code (which then could be downloaded without further charge). That way you'd at least know who your 'customers' are.
Well Nike (and a bunch of others in this or similar businesses) is known to employ 6-year-old in a 10-hour day. They pay about 2US$ per pair o' shoes. (Now that's a profit margin, right?) But as it all is somewhere far away in Yehudistan, nobody really cares, except maybe some nosey journalists... ("All commies! Go to Moscow!")
<Offtopic> Caller: Is this MS Hotline? MS Hotline: Yes. What is your second question? </Offtopic>
I think that whole Licensing/Condition Of Use business is a heuristic approach to find out how much a customer is willing to pay/endure before switching to something friendlier. (B.G: "seems the lethal-50% price for a Win2000 CD is 6K$. How many will survive if we went up to 8K?")
It seems that this limit is quite high, just like most car drivers are willing to pay 10 dollars a gallon before they think of switching to a bike or public transportation or buy their gas somewhere else.
The more the BSA and their fellow thugs are forcing the shit out of us, the more attractive Open Source becomes. -- OTOH, I sometimes wonder how many of the MS shareholders did *not* copy MS software products;-)
Ugh. Can you suggest in the next lawyer's congregation (is there such a thing? And yes, what coliseum is needed to seat all these people?) that everyone filing a patent is required to use brackes, braces and indentations in their code? A programmer would be beaten to death (or sentenced to no less than 10 years of GW-Basic) if he/she delivered code like that.
The service consists of a {human interface component comprising {starter utility object consisting of the {utility server resulting in the {database service {consisting of a utility network {$EMBED some Cicero Roman Right} } } } } }
Hmmm. Doesn't work either. We'd need 3-foot-wide paper to host such a beast. Not to mention of the laster printer required. Well, using a banner program maybe... You positive the patent office got the idea what that man tried to say?
Hmmm. Now how could one precisely define the 'smell of freshly mown grass'? I mean if I come out with Tennis Balls (no, this is not a sports injury!) with a smell that five people are inclined to call 'grassy' and other five people call 'soily' or 'herby' or... Would I have to hire a professional smeller if I were dragged before court?
What if someone comes and gets a trademark for 'Toast bread that tastes just like freshly toasted bread?' Would that stand a trial?
I envision the players at the next Wimbledon sniffin' at each other's balls.:)
1. You may distribute the source code you wrote yourself no matter what.
2. You may distribute the executables you produced using (your source plus the compiler plus all necessary libraries).
3. You may *not* distribute the VCL (visual component library) source that comes with the compiler. The source is for your reference only and is copyright by Borland/Inprise/Corel/whoelseiscurrentlyowningwhat oncewasBorland.
4. Then, as the compiler (a backlevel version) came with a magazine (as I understood), different Licensing Conditions may apply compared to what's on the box of a commercally bought product. C++Builder 5 is the actual version, and a stripped down version (no IDE, Compiler only) can be downloaded free of charge (again: different licensing stuff) off the Borland Website.
I can only second this opinion. Perl is very 'C-like' where REXX is more for the 'Pascal' type. So if you weren't not raised with C++ in your milk bottle, REXX may indeed the language of choice for a quick&clean cgi hack. (I frequently use it to generate SQL Scripts to fill tables from plain text data - where sed or awk are too awkward. Apart from that, I have it on Linux as a WWW interface to PostgreSQL.)
If not the language is crisp and clear and easy to understand (whatever that means), then certainly comments have to be. Is there a [computer] language on earth that does not allow comments?
VB is certainly not my language of choice, but *if* the code is well-written, it could even be somewhat stable. IMHO, Delphi is better, but that's my own HO.
BTW: Why not put up 'Justice vending machines' with a help-yourself application? "I want to turn myself in, I've robbed the bank" -- "That's three prayers, an MS License Agreement and three weeks in the slammer. Would you like to have whip blows with that?"
Upgrades/Patches/Convenience Packs (underline your favourite here) to an operating system are one thing. I've worked with OS/2 in the past and (apart from trapping at me because of downlevel drivers here and there) I've seen it as fast and stable. (With a superb TCP/IP implementation, to pick out one of the pearls)
Unfortunately, man¦woman does not live on bread alone. Lack of (or age of) application software did their thing to impose severe pressure on this operating system. IMHO, IBM should've given away a SDK for free, for everyone and not just some handpicked 'key developers'. Imagine what a bunch of enthusiasts together with gcc and a suitable GUI development kit could have done. sigh...
And, of course, their main competitor (don't recall the name, but I faintly remember something some quarrel before court) has its own way of making the competition's life pretty damn hard...
Would love to see the OS/2 Workplace Shell (WPS) being released under the GPL and OS/2 itself containing txtutils like sed, awk & co. Plus, of course, an up-to-date (not-only-limited-to internet-) app suite.
> they were using false email addresses and there was no point trying to get the providers to disbar them
Well, they started to send me spam using my own address as the sender. Of course, this is bullshit, but if I bought those 50000 email addresses for just 49.99, then I surely wrote (na, too stupid) - bought a script that manipulates the sender address.
Sure, you can trace back to the sending domain, but that one is bogus too since it's either the recipient's own domain or something like foobar.org or msn.com where spam filters usually don't suspect anything.
So, the only working spam filtering method would be to trace the sender domain's IP address and ask DNS if that address really shows up in the sending domain's MX records. This would, of course, exclude all well-meaning but nonetheless non-registered MTAs...sigh.
So we'd better ameliorate that poor soil and other averse conditions. (Or develop plants that can grow there). But nooo, it seems far more promising to get yet-another-hand-in-their-pocket to grab their money. We still haven't got rid of our colonialist attitude. We still ship medicine at exorbitant prices over there to cure the wounds made by weapons we sold them before.
Unless we start seeing all as peers vs. 'the poor sods who need our parental help' things will never really change.
>... Looking through the chain, you've got some file (FOO.BAR) which you compressed using PKZip (FOO.ZIP). You ran it through uuencode and uudecode (net result, no change), leaving it as FOO.ZIP. Then you just compressed-it-with-password again and renamed it BAYWATCH.JPG.
No. I pw-zip FOO.BAR to FOO.ZIP I reverse FOO.ZIP to PIZ.OOF I uuencode PIZ.OOF to PIZOOF.UU I pw-ZIP PIZOOF.UU as PIZOOF.ZIP I reverse PIZOOF.ZIP to PIZ.FOOZIP I rename PIZ.FOOZIP to BAYWATCH.JPG
Well, maybe not.JPG but, like,.LOG or.CmdrTaco
But you are right - in the long run it won't be secure enough. If OTOH I replace ZIP with PGP and/or some scrambler that uses Abe's speech as the key... And then, the cracker still must have a clue what the heck is that interesting with a file like MSG.LOG...
>selling advertising space You mean they put a brzzzing neon sign up there that sez 'Jury's all-you-can-eat Diner' (featuring the pan-galactic gargle blaster) or have the guests watch anti-gas commercials while we dimwits down here are obscured by clouds? Jeez...
How about making it the next peace talk hotel (where contrahents are only released after signing on that dotted line) or the next Big Brother show environment?
This leads me to a question: Do the crackers know about the algorithm used for a specific document? I remember coming across that.zoo file that refused to unpack until we found out it was a scrambled-with-password.zip file...
So, if I just went and pw-zipped a file, uuencoded it, reversed it, re-zipped again with password and called the whole thing BAYWATCH.JPG, what time would it take to decrypt it?
What I want to say is: if you are smart enough to leave no traces (or better yet, lure the crackers to a wrong trail), could even a 'mediocre' encryption algorithm (or combos thereof) be 'secure enough'? (that's that stegano thing, right?)
Slashdot Mirror
Generally I mistrust every Linux company that goes public. Which means they work more for the shareholder than for the customer...
In a nutshell: Administrating an O/S is not for the faint of heart. And I encourage to lawmakers worldwide to issue an operator's license, prerequisite to buying a server operating system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilisation.
No, to be honest: That company behaves as if they'd invented gravity and sliced bread in the same week. To build a BIOS-Boot Manager all you need is an EPROM and a ROM card plus some code that can be stolen off a number of websites. Remember those Y2K clocks they (not that company, though) tried to sell us? The LBA enhancers? Dang, with a good OS you don't need zilch of that stuff!
Seems to be that kind of vapour targeted towards the decision making high brass. ('See? Our PC does not have a reset button. That's because it never crases. Enhanced Security at no cost!')
And that virtualizing stuff: Remember good old OS/2 where you could have a dozen of different (native!) DOS versions running, each in its separate cage?
Hmm. Dr. Zook is still selling his miracle syrup in the wild wild west....
You mention that one of the largest complaints about Linux is that there is a lack of high-profile documentation. Well, I think you have to differentiate here: He/she who is really after the innards of the revamped IP stack will devour anything that is close to a documentation such as source comments, HOWTOs, READMEs and so forth.
On the other side, the 'decision makers' (who not necessarily are identical to the most technically educated/interested people) might prefer an abstract such as 'how to leverage the success of your e-commerce using a new IP stack' or 'IP for decision makers' or 'Huh? they can do dat with l33nux?'.
I have an elderly version of 'Linux the complete reference' by LSL which contains many (Mini-)HWOTOs and other stuff. Much of these documents deal with Linux 1.x versions and were refreshed with 2.x delta stuff. These readings still hold true for the 2.2.x kernels and probably will not be 'wrong' or 'untrue' for the 2.4 kernel.
My advice: Keep your book as it is and add the delta work as a smaller manual. That way the insider only needs to have the addendum with him/her and can leave the bulky Part I at home/office. Make these addendums subscribable, in both preprinted form as well as .PDF (no affiliation whatsoever) documents to download-after-pay. Or try to have one of the larger distros distribute your book. ('That manual deals with the TCP/IP kernel of Bonzo Linux in special but may also provide important informations for other distributions.', just like we see that in every second samba or firewalling book). You may even add a CD-ROM with a GPLed version of Dah One That Sponsored Thy Book.
To get 'even' after an evening of 'source peeking' I have to click on advertising banners for the rest of the night. I really should use the frontpage wizards as an inspiration...
(*) At least in Switzerland you pay some surcharge on audio cassettes, audio cd-r's, video tapes, photocopiers/scanners. That money goes to some organization that pretends to maintain the interests of artists such as writers, composers, (decomposers too?) etc. Dunno whether they see some of that cash, though.
(re the view-source-surcharge: NO! THIS IDEA CANNOT BE PATENTED. I DECLARE THIS IDEA PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (HEREWITH REFERRED TO AS "OPEN IDEA"). SUERS AND PATENT LAWYERS GET OFF MY GRASS^H^H^H^H^HLAWN!)
In most parts of this planet, people are expected to think or ponder before they act. This may or may not be true for CA.
Not that I'm one of Bill's Buddies nor do I get regularly invited at Windows Parties, but this is not about M$, it's about common sense. Or lack thereof.
I am under serious distress when I get my phone bill. Mom, can I sue the phone company, please?
I guess the reason is simple: The modem is minimum standard, and an ethernet I/F costs three bucks more (plus some brains to implement DHCP).
And any buck less spent means an advantage in the market place (unfortunately they don't realize that a salesman has to talk three times more to explain the 'missing' features...)
If they had even the faintest bit of common sense, they'd asked the sambahq.de webmaster to put a line on the welcome page like if you're lookin' for the banking stuff, go there . Well, another missed opportunity to demonstrate their friendliness.
PS: good luck to www.samba.de
...and 'surface' means someone brought it back (and maybe knocked down the thief in order to do that)
And 'stolen' - what a harsh word. 'the
That's like I use a wire cable lock to prevent my motorbike helmet from 'walking away'...
Newspeak improves your language - you'd never guess how many synonymes there are until you tried...
I develop some code, say some administrative utility. It does not base on GPLed stuff. (ie completely homebrewn). I want to share it with the community with the exception of companies in the banking business, because I plan to sell it to them and make a fortune. The Banks presumably would only use that code for internal projects so they'd never sell it and possibly break any GPL terms. Unless these company support Open Source stuff in some way or the other, I want them to pay for it.
That's it about the GPL4F. Zat so stupid?
I was thinking of something like "GPL for Friends", i.e. make the code publicly available for a) personal use, b) for companies that made significant ('hello world' won't count) contributions (either in code or financial) to the Open Source Community, c) for organizations that are commonly known as to be of non-profit nature (no, COS doesn't fall in that category).
All others are required to pay if they intend to use that code.
Another possibility would be to require the user to register the code (which then could be downloaded without further charge). That way you'd at least know who your 'customers' are.
But as it all is somewhere far away in Yehudistan, nobody really cares, except maybe some nosey journalists... ("All commies! Go to Moscow!")
Caller: Is this MS Hotline?
MS Hotline: Yes. What is your second question?
</Offtopic>
I think that whole Licensing/Condition Of Use business is a heuristic approach to find out how much a customer is willing to pay/endure before switching to something friendlier. (B.G: "seems the lethal-50% price for a Win2000 CD is 6K$. How many will survive if we went up to 8K?")
It seems that this limit is quite high, just like most car drivers are willing to pay 10 dollars a gallon before they think of switching to a bike or public transportation or buy their gas somewhere else.
The more the BSA and their fellow thugs are forcing the shit out of us, the more attractive Open Source becomes. -- OTOH, I sometimes wonder how many of the MS shareholders did *not* copy MS software products ;-)
A programmer would be beaten to death (or sentenced to no less than 10 years of GW-Basic) if he/she delivered code like that. Hmmm. Doesn't work either. We'd need 3-foot-wide paper to host such a beast. Not to mention of the laster printer required. Well, using a banner program maybe...
You positive the patent office got the idea what that man tried to say?
Would I have to hire a professional smeller if I were dragged before court?
What if someone comes and gets a trademark for 'Toast bread that tastes just like freshly toasted bread?' Would that stand a trial?
I envision the players at the next Wimbledon sniffin' at each other's balls. :)
1. You may distribute the source code you wrote yourself no matter what.
2. You may distribute the executables you produced using (your source plus the compiler plus all necessary libraries).
3. You may *not* distribute the VCL (visual component library) source that comes with the compiler. The source is for your reference only and is copyright by Borland/Inprise/Corel/whoelseiscurrentlyowningwhat oncewasBorland.
4. Then, as the compiler (a backlevel version) came with a magazine (as I understood), different Licensing Conditions may apply compared to what's on the box of a commercally bought product.
C++Builder 5 is the actual version, and a stripped down version (no IDE, Compiler only) can be downloaded free of charge (again: different licensing stuff) off the Borland Website.
Is there a [computer] language on earth that does not allow comments?
VB is certainly not my language of choice, but *if* the code is well-written, it could even be somewhat stable. IMHO, Delphi is better, but that's my own HO.
BTW: Why not put up 'Justice vending machines' with a help-yourself application? "I want to turn myself in, I've robbed the bank" -- "That's three prayers, an MS License Agreement and three weeks in the slammer. Would you like to have whip blows with that?"
Unfortunately, man¦woman does not live on bread alone. Lack of (or age of) application software did their thing to impose severe pressure on this operating system. IMHO, IBM should've given away a SDK for free, for everyone and not just some handpicked 'key developers'. Imagine what a bunch of enthusiasts together with gcc and a suitable GUI development kit could have done. sigh...
And, of course, their main competitor (don't recall the name, but I faintly remember something some quarrel before court) has its own way of making the competition's life pretty damn hard...
Would love to see the OS/2 Workplace Shell (WPS) being released under the GPL and OS/2 itself containing txtutils like sed, awk & co. Plus, of course, an up-to-date (not-only-limited-to internet-) app suite.
Well, they started to send me spam using my own address as the sender. Of course, this is bullshit, but if I bought those 50000 email addresses for just 49.99, then I surely wrote (na, too stupid) - bought a script that manipulates the sender address.
Sure, you can trace back to the sending domain, but that one is bogus too since it's either the recipient's own domain or something like foobar.org or msn.com where spam filters usually don't suspect anything.
So, the only working spam filtering method would be to trace the sender domain's IP address and ask DNS if that address really shows up in the sending domain's MX records. This would, of course, exclude all well-meaning but nonetheless non-registered MTAs...sigh.
We still haven't got rid of our colonialist attitude. We still ship medicine at exorbitant prices over there to cure the wounds made by weapons we sold them before.
Unless we start seeing all as peers vs. 'the poor sods who need our parental help' things will never really change.
No.
I pw-zip FOO.BAR to FOO.ZIP
I reverse FOO.ZIP to PIZ.OOF
I uuencode PIZ.OOF to PIZOOF.UU
I pw-ZIP PIZOOF.UU as PIZOOF.ZIP
I reverse PIZOOF.ZIP to PIZ.FOOZIP
I rename PIZ.FOOZIP to BAYWATCH.JPG
Well, maybe not .JPG but, like, .LOG or .CmdrTaco
But you are right - in the long run it won't be secure enough. If OTOH I replace ZIP with PGP and/or some scrambler that uses Abe's speech as the key... And then, the cracker still must have a clue what the heck is that interesting with a file like MSG.LOG...
You mean they put a brzzzing neon sign up there that sez 'Jury's all-you-can-eat Diner' (featuring the pan-galactic gargle blaster) or have the guests watch anti-gas commercials while we dimwits down here are obscured by clouds? Jeez...
How about making it the next peace talk hotel (where contrahents are only released after signing on that dotted line) or the next Big Brother show environment?
So, if I just went and pw-zipped a file, uuencoded it, reversed it, re-zipped again with password and called the whole thing BAYWATCH.JPG, what time would it take to decrypt it?
What I want to say is: if you are smart enough to leave no traces (or better yet, lure the crackers to a wrong trail), could even a 'mediocre' encryption algorithm (or combos thereof) be 'secure enough'? (that's that stegano thing, right?)