Slashback: Quiesence, Jazz, RAND 182
Please write your elected W3C representative. haplo21112 writes "The W3C has posted a next-steps comment on the mailing list for the Patent Policy Frame Work proposal.
It announces among other things that two Open Source People have been added to the working group as Invited experts, Eben Moglen (General Counsel, Free Software Foundation) and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative). They have also announced a home page for the Working Group at: http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/
Especially interesting is the Second Objection noted on the page from IBM, where basically they are revealed as one of the drivers of the proposal. They grumble about RF and pretty much say they would vastly prefer RAND."
You'd like to think so, eh? ColaMan writes: "Is CodeRed finally dead? I've had a counter on my webserver (yay apache!) that tracks attempts, but since the start of the month only 1 lone attempt has been logged on our permanent IP dialup connection (and that was just overnight). This compares to 2490 attempts for August and 931 for September. Nimda still seems to be plodding along though - I've had 159 unique ip's so far this month and 466 for September. Knowing that my IP address is in some bandwidth-forsaken backwater of the internet, I was wondering how things were going CodeRed-wise in the Real Internet?"
I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"? An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember this story from last Tuesday asking about audio applications on linux? Today the Jazz++ mailinglist declared jazz++ dead (find the message here). While not the perfect midi sequencer, jazz++ is robust and GPL'd. Since jazz++ only appeared twice in the postings (each moderated at +1 ...) related to the earlier story, it would seem this fine product has low visibility among the /. crowd. The only viable GNU/Linux midi solution died the same week ./ had a call for audio solutions on Linux. Gotta love irony..."
From Bundesrat to Bangkok Germany may be considering it, but Thailand is doing them one better. TheMMaster writes "According to this article on newsbytes, the Thai government will switch to open-source software, linux on the desktop, StarOffice. This is a nice example of OSS, and probably why a lot of people contribute, to help people (OK and for fun)"
As usual, the actual developers float high above the flames on their behalf. Yep, KDE is 5 years old -- and fm6 writes: "A nice contrast to the usual GNOME-versus-KDE flamage: the users of news.gnome.org wish KDE a happy 5th birthday." Remember, the flame wars you see about these two projects have little to do with the fact that both have already created killer desktops, and are continuing to do so faster than human beings should be allowed to travel.
Congrats KDE (Score:1, Insightful)
jazz++ dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's ofcourse GPL, which means that you can reuse parts of it in other software.
Happy B-Day KDE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Killer desktops? (Score:1, Insightful)
This has got to be a joke. Both of them have done a good job of creating Windows-like desktops. The Mac and OS/2 users are still laughing their asses off, though. Neither Gnome or KDE is even in the neighborhood of "killer desktops."
Re:Happy B-Day KDE! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget cooperation.
Re:die MIDI die (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Happy B-Day KDE! (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more. Working in the M$ world has gotten me accustomed to assuming that only competition can better a product. Thx for pointing out there's more to success than that...
Re:die MIDI die (Score:1, Insightful)
wiring together powerful musical equipment for 6 different vendors is pretty damn cool. Its quite likely that some songs you like involved some use of MIDI at some point in their production.
If you want to bitch, you can complain about the absolutely horrible bandwidth the MIDI wire protocol provides. 10BaseT is cheap enough now that we should just switch to MIDI over ethernet.
Thailand is a good country to begin with Open SS (Score:3, Insightful)
What should be the Response to Violence? [hevanet.com]
dead OpenSource? (Score:2, Insightful)
They just fade away.
Re:jazz++ dead? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:my nimda stats (Score:3, Insightful)
That would very definitely be illegal under UK law. You and the likely recipents of your aid being in the US means that's not something to worry about, but my personal morality is similar to UK law on this point.
Basically, the Computer Misuse Act means that you can't use a computer system without permission, even if you've logged in. If a username and password for some interesting but off-limits computer dropped into my lap, I couldn't use it without first obtaining permission. Or, if I found an open share, I couldn't connect to it and perform an action over it.
You're trying to perform a civic duty by removing an infected machine from the internet. But you're also changing the configuration of a machine in a way that you can't guarantee won't harm the machine, and which will guarantee that you can't then get back in to check if the update was successful and correct any problems.
Maybe the greater public service should override this? Maybe, but one of the first worms to do damage was an autoupdate worm which had a bug in it. Someone meant well, believed they were doing good but caused trouble and demonstrated why worms and autoupdating aren't such hot ideas. Including an 'I was only trying to help' defence makes it rather hard to prosecute many proper viruses and worms - perhaps Outlook viruses are only trying to help by demonstrating exactly what can be done with Outlook to push people onto more secure mailers, and any destructive or disruptive payload is simply a motivation tool?
If I'm getting portscanned particularly often by a certain IP address, I'll normally forward a firewall log of the events to whichever ISP the traceroute finds. If I find out the offender's e-mail address, they'll get a mail from me. In this case I'd normally mail the ISP and let them deal with informing their user - who is, after all, causing problems for the ISP so it's in their interest to do something about it. I suppose I might bend the law a little by leaving a short text file on their system explaining the problem and how to fix it. Breaking the law, yes, but with no destructive possibility at all.
But I'd never run a patch for them, and I'm very glad that it's illegal to do that in this country.