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George Carlin must be rolling in his grave at close to the speed of light. Will the pussyfication of America never end? political correctness is going to destroy the world!

Is the rc shell by Tom Duff, incredibly simple, elegant and powerful. And you don't need anymore to use obscure operating systems to enjoy its bliss.

I have used it to build a whole content management system, and has turned out to be as close to perfect as any piece of software could be.

Is the rc shell by Tom Duff, incredibly simple, elegant and powerful. And you don't need anymore to use obscure operating systems to enjoy its bliss.

I have used it to build a whole content management system, and has turned out to be as close to perfect as any piece of software could be.

Is the rc shell by Tom Duff, incredibly simple, elegant and powerful. And you don't need anymore to use obscure operating systems to enjoy its bliss.

I have used it to build a whole content management system, and has turned out to be as close to perfect as any piece of software could be.

The semantic web is another w3c scam, just like the huge XML scam. But fortunately this time nobody is really buying into it.

Will it support Google Go? ;)

Of course, if Apple allowed writing apps for the iPhone in Go, I might even going through the appstore kafkian bureaucracy. ;P

When people tries to use antitrust legislation to fix what is the result of government granted monopolies.

Why not instead get rid of the government granted monopolies instead? Yet one more example of how government loves to 'fix' the unintended consequences of its intervention in the free market with an endless spiral of further intervention.

When people tries to use antitrust legislation to fix what is the result of government granted monopolies.

Why not instead get rid of the government granted monopolies instead? Yet one more example of how government loves to 'fix' the unintended consequences of its intervention in the free market with an endless spiral of further intervention.

> Unfortunately, Slackware hasn't carried GNOME since 2005.

Not packaging GNOME is a feature, not a bug.

Why anyone would want to use such a ridiculously bloated mess is beyond me.

All patents, which are basically government granted monopolies, are extremely damaging.

Biology patents, like software patents, are just a particularly egregious example, but the same is true of patents in other fields.

All patents, which are basically government granted monopolies, are extremely damaging.

Biology patents, like software patents, are just a particularly egregious example, but the same is true of patents in other fields.

Before we recognize that the patent system harms innovation and society as a whole?

It encourages making money via artificial monopolies instead of what honest participants in a real free market need to do: competitively provide products and services that consumers want.

I really wish someone would sue the TSA for producing "child pornography" with its new scanners.

Lets see how they square the circle of the unopposable force of terrorism paranoia vs. the unmovable object of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!" hysteria.

Before we recognize that the patent system is insane?

There are some really simple CMSs, compared to those this CMS looks really complicated... but simplicity standards in software are rather low this days :(

The ever growing security circus humiliation that we are forced to perform every time we want to board a plane certainly doesn't make anyone more secure other than the police-state-industrial-complex.

They would abolish the patent system, it is a failed experiment that has been shown to be counterproductive and stifle innovation and progress by turning the process of invention and technological improvement into a bureaucratic race to the bottom.

> - OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser

And don't forget that even if/when the XML is valid, XML has no semantics and making sense of it is not necessarily any easier than making sense of any random bunch of bits, and can be harder because you need to deal with the overhead of the XML representation.

XML doesn't really add any value to the format other than bloat and complexity.

My keys are safely and conveniently stored away in my secstore!

Oh? You don't mean cryptographic keys? Then nevermind =)

My keys are safely and conveniently stored away in my secstore!

Oh? You don't mean cryptographic keys? Then nevermind =)

Is more people to speak up and point out that most software sucks.

In all projects most developers know that what they are working on is a huge mountain of garbage, but few dare to point this out to management, of course this might get you fired, but you don't want to spend your life working for a company like that, as it will suck your soul and you will end up feeling like you wasted your life.

If the problem is "Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws", maybe Apple should spend some pocket change to lobby to have such stupid 'intellectual property' laws abolished. But given how much Apple loves to abuse such laws for its own benefit I'm not holding my breath.

The best way to solve this problem is to end the system of government granted monopolies that is the patent system.

Or at the very least for the US to join the rest of the civilized world and abolish software patents.

The best way to solve this problem is to end the system of government granted monopolies that is the patent system.

Or at the very least for the US to join the rest of the civilized world and abolish software patents.

This a very good point. It is the programmers that are important, not so much the languages, but languages do bias what kinds of programmers will use them.

See also why Linus' Torvalds prefers C to C++, it has not so much to do with the language itself but with the kind of programmers that use the language.

> This is stupid, idiotic, and removes the right that you "own" a device.

Exactly!

The harder they try to crack down on copyright infringement, the more they illustrate that so called "intellectual property" is inherently incompatible with real physical property.

The US is paying an extremely heavy price for the DMCA, and instead of fixing things it now wants to pull everyone down into the same nightmare, and now Canada is willfully following down that same path :(

I'm sure that next the US will start exporting the Patriot Act and the TSA.

> This is stupid, idiotic, and removes the right that you "own" a device.

Exactly!

The harder they try to crack down on copyright infringement, the more they illustrate that so called "intellectual property" is inherently incompatible with real physical property.

The US is paying an extremely heavy price for the DMCA, and instead of fixing things it now wants to pull everyone down into the same nightmare, and now Canada is willfully following down that same path :(

I'm sure that next the US will start exporting the Patriot Act and the TSA.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

Plan 9 had a rock solid automagic snapshot backups system working twenty years ago.

And more than ten years ago the folks that created Unix and C figured out a really innovative, efficient, and reliable way to archive snapshots and do backups to other media.

It is sad to see that no other operating system has learned anything from all this great work done at Bell Labs.

And no, zfs and Apple's "time machine" have not learned anything.

> An analogy: "why have marijuana-sniffing dogs in airports since it can be grown in the US?"

Except that, as others have pointed out, this is going to be even more useless than the War on Drugs is at stopping people from taking drugs, or the airport security circus is at fighting terrorism.

How many times do we need to explain that the net treats censorship as damage and routes around it? And screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!" is not going to to make any difference.

> An analogy: "why have marijuana-sniffing dogs in airports since it can be grown in the US?"

Except that, as others have pointed out, this is going to be even more useless than the War on Drugs is at stopping people from taking drugs, or the airport security circus is at fighting terrorism.

How many times do we need to explain that the net treats censorship as damage and routes around it? And screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!" is not going to to make any difference.

> Well I'm glad the US government never granted Microsoft a monopoly then

Er, way to completely miss the point: the government did precisely that! Microsoft's whole business model is 100% based on government granted monopolies: copyright and patents.

When you allow the government to grant monopolies to private corporations.

It encourages them to try to control the market not by providing the best services to their consumers but instead by exploiting the patent systems to squash their competition and lock in consumers.

> Also: Jabber is now called XMPP, as far as I know. (I would have preferred it to be lightweight EBML instead of overhead monster XML.)

Jabber and XMPP are absolutely horrible, probably one of the most insanely byzantine protocols ever conceived, and they keep expanding it all the time (by now there are *hundreds* of extensions to the protocol).

The inept use of XML is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is not even real XML, but *streamed* XML, which means parsers need to be even more complicated (as if parsing XML was not enough of a pain already).

And all this for a functionality that after ten years still barely matches IRC (most jabber clients have trouble doing group chat and file transfer, or if they do they use different protocol extensions that are not compatible with other servers and clients).

Exactly!

People trading on patents are trading on government granted monopolies which only benefit those holding the patent and harm the rest of society as a whole.

Markets are good at allocating rivalrous goods where there is real scarcity, artificial scarcity created by the government means that people spends their resources lobbying the government to create even more scarcity.

For a more general and accessible description of the cpu command see the main Plan 9 paper. In particular the paragraph immediately preceding the "Configurability and administration" section, but the whole paper is an excellent read.

Another illustration of how the cpu command works is provided in the paper on private namespaces in Plan 9.

For a more general and accessible description of the cpu command see the main Plan 9 paper. In particular the paragraph immediately preceding the "Configurability and administration" section, but the whole paper is an excellent read.

Another illustration of how the cpu command works is provided in the paper on private namespaces in Plan 9.

For a more general and accessible description of the cpu command see the main Plan 9 paper. In particular the paragraph immediately preceding the "Configurability and administration" section, but the whole paper is an excellent read.

Another illustration of how the cpu command works is provided in the paper on private namespaces in Plan 9.

and think of the children!!!!!

This shows how the only way the world manages to deal with the insanity that is so called "intellectual property

I agree. However they include a quote by Thomas Jefferson, who started out as opposing patents. His friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress though, and Jefferson eventually took out some patents himself. Jefferson was the one who determined how long patents should last, using actuary or Life tables he calculated they should last 14 years with one 14 year extension possible.

Falcon

> This is a HUGE shift for the medical industry, and frankly, if people knew just how bad security was, they would call for heads. It's starting to change, but it will take time

Security is a joke almost everywhere, not just in the medical industry.

Although I admit there it is slightly more scary than usual, but not more than other industries we depend on all the time like utilities and transportation.

But none of this will change unless software starts to suck less and becomes simpler, and the trend has been in the opposite direction for a long time now.

And the problem is that the bad publicity of a security disaster has been nullified by how widespread they are.

> There are at least a lot of open source h.264 encoders, why not just use one of them?

Because if you are a business, you are opening yourself to getting sued all the way into bankruptcy.

Anyone can implement any patented algorithm and release the code as open source (hell, we all know it is impossible to write even "Hello World" without infringing on patents), but just because somebody wrote the code and it is out there, and maybe nobody has not been sued yet, that doesn't mean anyone using or distributing the code are not open themselves to being sued whenever the patent holders feel like it.

This shows how the only way the world manages to deal with the insanity that is so called "intellectual property" is by ignoring the law, but that is not a very good long term solution to the problem.

This is a good time to remember Perry Barlow's wonderful Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Somebody should send a copy to the Australian Christian Lobby ;)

I honestly fear that the only hope for some sanity is if the Supreme Court of the US abolishes the insanity that are software patents.

Just a thought, but why not switch to a sane OS, like OpenBSD or Plan 9? ;)

> Meanwhile, hackers will make Flash on iPhone the preferred target just for bragging rights.

In fairness OS X and the iPhone OS are not much more secure, and people have been able to easily break into the iPhone easily enough despite its lack of Flash, but I agree Flash would make things even worse.

> Flash is a CPU hog on *any* platform, it has to either go on a diet or go away.

I thought this was only true on Linux, but then I started to use Windows on a bran new Thinkpad, and I was amazed at how ridiculously broken Flash is, it makes a dual core 2Ghz with 4Gb of ram that is running little else than a web browser painfully crawl to a halt, it is beyond appalling. (And that is running Chrome because Firefox is a huge hog too.)

> PS:Can't wait for the annoying HTML5 ads to replace the annoying Flash ads. Is a HTML5-blocker add-ons in the works?

It exists, it is called NoScript, and it is the most wonderful invention the web has seen in the last fifteen years.