It is obvious to any thinking being that what we have witnessed in the last 100 years is an unprecedented (in all of human history!) redefinition of what it is to "own" a "creative work."
The endless extensions to the rights and protections granted to the holders of intellectual property are, especially in their most recent incarnations, nothing short of astounding. No reasonable person can defend the actions of the few, large players in the "Intellectual Property Industry" (another thing the framers never could have conceived of) in transparently prolonging the life of the Mickey Mouse franchise. The DMCA is the current pinnacle of the efforts to coopt the creative by corporate interests; a law which is, in form and function, an anathema to artists (of any dicipline) and their audience alike.
Society is not peppered with man-as-island "artists" and "authors" and "coders," who spin out delicate and frail inventions from ivory towers, desperate for protection from marauding information pirates. We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
As a programmer, it is easy for me to follow the news, watch the lawsuits, and reach direct, immediate, and objective conclusions about the impact of intellectual property (especially software patents) on our discipline and the world that it serves. The peril to innovation of the current intellectual property law, and our interpretations of it regarding software, is so obvious that it has spurred a phenomenal and almost unexplainable social phenomenon: free software. But it goes way beyond software, and it's easy to infer how much real damage "overly strong" intellectual property law is doing to our economy among "solution-oriented" disciplines, and this doesn't stop short of harm to our more personal lives in "softer" industries like music, literature, etc.
We have now a very small group of capitalists who have grown very fat by exploiting, and then expanding, the weaknesses of our intellectual property laws. They will naturally stop at nothing to preserve their effortless wealth; they have no interest in creating a healthy society: their only interest is their own success. Of course, in a democracy, their absurdly small minority should be drowned out by the balance of the citizenry. Everyone's interests should be represented, to insure that no one's self-interest foils a fair government in presiding over a healthy society.
Of course, you can do ABC news polls out the wazoo, and you will find numbers that lead politicians pandering greedily to the IP interests. Most American's can't be bothered to think about these issues, even as the quality of their lives are silently eroded by the forces at work. But, for this, I can't do more than to simply quote a very smart man, who once observed:
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands... The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
Dude. Let me just say it again. How fucking cool is Marathon? It's fucking cool. Those guys are still the kings.
Speaking of which, my guess is (from having followed Halo like a slave, and seen their demo at E3), at least one connection between the Marathon "universe" and Halo is that, just as in Marathon, your character in Halo will be a military cyborg. But if the Bungie guys leave it at that, I'll be surprised.:)
Absolutely! Unsung heroes in the industry, Bungie has consistently kicked all kinds of ass. They are brilliant. And me, and all the people I work with, have spent WAY too much time playing the marathons.
We still play it here. And on a G4, well, let's just say... slight overkill.:)
And it was obvious to me from the Demo that DK was going to be a dog because of it. Daikatana's story was horrible, and it is compounded by bad voice acting and bad "puzzle" design.
It's simple, really: if you want to make a single-player game, you should, cursorily at least, check and make sure it's well written.
Half-life was a half-baked retread by movie standards, but it was still so much better than anything anyone else had bothered to do in terms of a story and/or gameplay that everyone (including me) was entranced.
Daikatana's creative team comes off like rank amatuers, and it's obvious from every aspect of the materials in the game. The fact that their management skills/kung fu weren't the best is just sad and/or ironic. But, we had fair warning. This is the guy, after all, who founded his company on the whiny, middle-school notion (I paraphrase) "My vision comes first. Those little technology/logistics problems are secondary."
Daikatana is just another creative embarrassment in a long line of such writing/designing disasters that are basically making the American video game industry a lot like the Japanese movie industry of days gone by. Except that Godzilla didn't look so blocky.
There's nothing remarkable about it, either. It will stay that way until the industry's fusion with the rest of the entertainment industry moves farther along, at which point we will go from the Godzilla phase to... er... the Independence Day phase? Ouch.
"The commandline is there only for those who want it. ALL administrative tasks can be handled (and indeed, are BEST handled) from the GUI."
Let's hope so.
"Apple has done a remarkable job of hiding what little is left of "Unix" under the GUI."
I would make the point that most of what is identifiably "Unix" is the problem. From the security model to the file/device paradigm to most of POSIX, it's a big mistake.
When someone can claim "BSD compatibility," thus enabling a user to compile a unix tool on the system, this implies all kinds of things - that assinine system logger, the presence of an/etc/password file, or runlevels, startup scripts,/dev,/lib and/bin, setuid bits and the list goes on, all the way down to the presumption of stdin, stdout, and stderr. All of these things represent functionality that has abstract significance, as you always need to communicate with your users, system facilities, and so forth; too bad most of it is only relevant to more esoteric aspects of large, by some measures ancient, GUI-less multi-user systems, and none of these particular methods (inexplicably enshrined in the whole body of unix code and libraries) represent anything more than decades-old klugery.
What I have been saying is that Apple needs to thoroughly and vigorously discard these quaint old artifacts of the VT100 days. If it means breaking "direct" sideways-compatibility with Unix applications, then fuck the unix applications. Now, no complaint is worth a damn without pointing out the right way to do things:
If the core of the operating system is stable and featureful, boxed emulation of a unix environment (allowing the use of legacy unix apps in MacOS X) will not seem so strange anymore. No one runs Unix in a box on Win98 or WinNT: you would get all of the new admin complexity with none of the reliability or security gains. On MacOS X, if it's done right, it would no longer seem so strange. Then Apple's server play could benefit from the Unix codebase. But unless it's properly isolated out, and MacOS X itself is kept from being tainted by any attempts at direct, API-level "Unix compatibility," you _will_ have problems. The distinct roles of the system need to be architecturally acknowledged.
"First off, the added complexity of having to log into a Mac is trivial... Second off, while under the hood a multi-user system is fundamentally different, the end user experience need not be very different."
As I said in another post in this thread, even given that Mac users as a whole are demanding multi-user functionality, which I find hard to believe (Apple's "target audience" doesn't understand that colored fruit is actually a menu, let alone its particular, constantly evolving significance), woe to those who should offer them the unix security model in return.
"Multi-user" means different things to different people. To your parents, it means having different preferences folders in the system folder. To unix users, it means something radically different. Can I access another user's files? Can they access mine? What about resources on the hard drive? Is there an "administrator account"? Is it called (chuckle) "root"? Can a non-root user install software? Will others be able to use it? Will it end up in a centralized location, or in that user's home directory? Wait... what's a "home directory?"
I have no answers to these questions yet. These issues intersect with Unix compatibility issues, of course, because the body of Unix software assumes this level of complexity. So my question is, does Apple expect to pass it off on their users, just so that it'll be a little easier for people to port Apache, or Oracle, to OSX?
I really don't know myself why I care, but for Apple's sake, I hope they haven't been foolish enough to make a trade-off that short sighted.
I know Apple needs to make a high-end/server play. I am thinking about their user base. I am thinking about one day stopping the madness. Computers can be so much better than this.
Systems can advance and use box or application layer emulation to do legacy work. It is already working for Linux, and Apple is obviously gambling on it. So I see no significant excuse for the rest of us not to have a sane, modern organizational and functional paradigm.
"While you may balk about the fact that the new system is based on Mach/BSD..."
I balk at the fact that it's being written by unix hackers - ex-NeXT or not. Be's signal failing in my mind was its cowardly inability to lose its unix compatibility to aim for something higher. Huge missed opportunity.
Yes, I know a unix kernel does not a unix make. Although it goes a long way in it's unmodified state. But this is obviously not the only part of unix Apple is including.
"but if they have an inittab file, and if they use init scripts, I bet it'd be a laughably simple exercise on their part to make an account called "dumbuser" and have the rc.M file su as dumbuser..."
Oh that's laughable, all right. The only simple part in this, though, is making Windows look like the HAL 9000.
== Actually, XFree86 4.0, and the numerous extensions to X are gradually transforming it into something pretty reasonable. ==
X will never be reasonable. Not the XFree team's fault - good work built on a bad foundation. People will sooner or later have to throw it all out. Legacy apps can work in through a box or a wine-like emulator.
== Yes. You didn't read the Ars Technica article, did you?:) ==
I did.
== You assume that backwards compatibility and the elimination of the "ugliness" of a commandline-first system are mutually exclusive. They are not. ==
Actually, I disagree with that statement specifically. I am saying that unix is broken./lib is bogus. libc is bogus./etc is bogus. password files are bogus./dev is bogus. There are huge assumptions built into the codebase about a number of fundamentally bogus things, from the bogus filesystem hierarchy to the bogus libraries to... you guessed it... the necessity of a command line and a terminal. And curses, no less!
Not that I don't love Unix anyway. Not that I don't use it every day. But if you think millions of Mac users are going to start loving it because Steve Jobs tells them to... you are going to have to give me your dealer's phone number.
== Library handling is RADICALLY different... ==
Yes, yes. This is part of what's so encouraging! I love it! It's the right thing. But... is it all good work? Or is some of it still going to leave people having fits?
These "little details" matter. It needs to be disabled by default, in acknowledgement of the fact that an overwhelming majority of users won't use it, and could in fact get bitten by it. A million little details occur to me. Multi-user computers are fundamentally more complicated than single-user computers. That's complexity no one should have to put up with unless they ask for it. And even if they demand it, woe to the person who should offer them the unix security model in return.
I would have laughed at the possibility of hearing this news five years ago. Now I am seriously confronted with it. I don't know whether to be pleased or shocked. Well yes, I do, actually.
It is obvious that mating a mature, modern kernel with a reasonable user interface is the finish line of a marathon which pretty much every systems player is hurtling desperately towards.
Linux will beat X to death until it is impossible to see through the bloody pulp on your screen. Then (one day, I pray) they will replace it with something sensible.
Microsoft will keep dumping code into the DOS/Win95/Win98/WinNT/Win2k landfill until they've made the largest functioning (?) program ever created.
And Apple... Apple is somewhere in between. Smart enough to use BSD (only Linux would have been smarter;-). Smart enough to discard X. But are they smart enough to discard ALL that which makes Unix awful?
I realize it seems easy in principle. I understand that it is in fact desperately hard. Put yourself in that systems engineer's shoes. It is painful beyond measure to take a perfectly good Unix like BSD and then toss out backwards compatibility with all your Unix apps just so that Mac users all over the world won't wake up one day and discover they need to log in as "root" and find their files buried somewhere deep inside a directory called "/usr/home/root/.msword/c|/WINDOWS/MyDocu~1/". They put up with it every day. You can almost hear them screaming here in New York. "Let those bastards eat CAKE!" So what if unix filesystem hierarchies, library handling systems, common executable namaes, and so forth seem exactly as half-assed and hair-brained as they are...
My point is simply this: Mac users do not want unix. They want a stable MacOS. They want it no matter how much all those NeXT people flatter themselves. They do not want to "log in" to their powerbook.
I have heard many things that encourage me that Apple understands this, and may therefore be the first to create a Unix-stable, xerox-style operating system. I have also seen many things that discourage me, because they indicate Apple is buying the benighted notion that BSD-compatibility is worth a damn to their business. It is not. Let me repeat: it is not. And furthermore, it will eviscerate the utility of the MacOS. Do you hear me, Tevanian? Hide that damn shell. Hide it somewhere where we will never find it.
Unix users are smart, self-reliant people. We can find plenty of ways to get our jollies without mastering our problems onto millions of MacOS CD's.
Pentium 100MHz, Redhat 6.2, and about 70 gigs of online storage. Dirt cheap, and should hold about 550+ CD's at 256-bit MP3. We wrote a web-based front-end in PHP that lets you select tracks, shuffle, play, stop, skip, and so forth... Then you just connect the sound card to the stereo, and the 10bt to the hub, and you're good to go.
It's nice in our office environment; no one has to get out of their chair to put on a CD, it would be possible to implement various voting/banning/profiling systems, and, best of all, you don't have to worry about office mates absent-mindedly using your CDs as coasters.;)
Think about this. Look at all the ingredients here. You have:
A pathetic public education system...
...based on ancient, deeply flawed victorian-era pedagogy
...where the teachers (who have to finish grad school to teach - unless it's a city school, where they'll take anyone of the street, without even getting their name down) get paid less than garbagemen - AND THAT'S NOT A JOKE OR AN EXAGGERATION...
...and which are managed bureaucratically, often by career state employees with no meaningful oversight from any elected official or the community.
A pathetic government...
...populated, out of necessity, by people who will say anything, do anything to get elected and stay elected (is it really that much fun?)... and that includes utterly destroying the single most valuable public institution of this or any country: public education - for the slightest expediency.
...and largely ignored by a society so jaded with the misadventures of their elected officials that perhaps 1 in 10 Americans still regard their executive and legislative branches of government as anything other than a cruel joke.
...and let's not even talk about their fiscal policy
A pathetic populace...
...out of which, after all, the administrators and politicians, the votes that empower them, and the media which makes it all happen smoothly has come, after all.
...in a constant state of denial about both the propserity, safety, and sanity of the nation they live in (after all, speaking of anonymous... there are now installing anonymous infant drop-off bins in Suffolk County, NY).
...and, let's face it, already suffering from the growing failures of said educational system.
Ignorant, hateful parents are the culprits of school massacres (and you could take that line of reasoning a lot further, too). And why can't we, the press, or the government, admit it?
We make people at least pass a test to determine if they can drive, so why do we let any dumb couple of assholes pump out children and send them out into the world?
The bottom line is, people are supposed to be intelligent, decent and good to their neighbors, to their friends, to strangers, and to their children for a reason. It's more than just a choice you're entitled to for being born. Everything you do has consequences.
Without a general understanding of this principle, it's hard to imagine any society working for long. But yet walk down the street, and most people you pass are so ignorant of these basic truths, so far gone... And if you actually let yourself care one way or another, you feel literally adrift in a vast, stormy sea... with not a solid thing in sight to anchor your hopes.
Damn, I wish I was still in high school. I could have reported every single classmate, teacher, janitor, and bus driver, and not even have been cheating on the criteria!
To those of you who still are, you have all my sympathy. But please, please spam the nazi hotline people!
For the most part, yes. Microsoft is obviously not going to support 1.2 in any future versions of MSIE - barring a turnaround in the browser market, which isn't going to happen unless AOL/Netscape cuts some pretty amazing licensing deals to get Mozilla/NS6 bundled into a lot of things... Perhaps if AOL picks it up in AOL6... Not to mention I'm not exactly optimistic that Mozilla or Netscape 6 will package the 1.2 JVM themselves! The thing is 6 megs for crying out loud! Mozilla itself is only 6 megs at the moment - and it needs to be small in order to succeed...
And in the meantime, back in the real world, we have a bunch of browsers whose 1.1 support ranges from mostly adequate to downright malicious.
As you point out, one can instruct users to download the 1.2 plugin - this is a fine solution for intranets and so forth. In the real world, however:
6 megs is too much to ask of a modem user (read: 90% of the world)
It confuses newbies/idiots/republicans
And, as you said, there are places and times where there's no option to download and install software.
So if you want a big potential audience, you're stuck with 1.1, and you have to be fucking crafty to make your applets work, if you plan on doing something ambitious, because there are several dozen monster gotchas on each platform, browser, and version.
Fortunately, at least, Mac users are no longer shut out of the 1.1 party, if they can handle installing the newest Apple MRJ, which has, ironically, gone from being the single worst 1.1 JVM to the single best, IMHO.
Over the past few years I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of Java code, from 1.0 to 1.2 in just about every JVM under the sun (not a pun, I swear).
Yes, my friends have been fearing for my sanity. Yes, I have reimplemented almost every part of the API at one time or another. Yes, I do still love writing things in Java, and no, I am not a masochist. The ordinary, common-sense benefits in the language and the process are just that important to me.
Until I saw 1.2, I would agree with my (ahem) colleagues in saying that Java "isn't ready for prime time" (oh, I hate that expression). Between the memory leaks and the various bugs in the foundations of the vertical APIs, and the "not-quite-thin-but-not-quite-fat" state of the APIs themselves, 1.0 was a toy, and 1.1 was interesting - it had a lot of the ingredients, but it wasn't ready.
1.2, I believe, is finally "OK," as near as I can tell. I have beaten the heck out of it, and I have these things to say:
It no longer leaks memory (!)
It is reasonably robust - crashes are now rare
The Hotspot performance gains are real and, actually, significant
Lo and behold, the Linux port is actually stable and feature-complete
Netbeans, which I have always loved, suffered terribly and unjustly under 1.1's bug load - so much so that you had to be crazy to use it. Under 1.2, Forte (Netbeans sequel) screams, kicks flaming ass, and is quite frankly the best Java IDE I've used - and coming up on the best IDE in any language.
So write it in Java 1.2. It will be a lot less painful: avoiding the pointer/allocation/array-stomping headaches alone makes it worth it, let alone the other improvements in compile time sanity and language clarity. The API is stacked, and will save you tons of time.
Distributing the VM itself is quite easy with the proper windows tools; there are several common ones on the market that all work very well, and ultimately disting the VM with your stuff is trivial. Forte itself is actually a great example of how easy this is to do.
Finally, despite words from people who I have a psychic intuition have never actually benchmarked a native vs. Hotspot VM implementations of a real application, its speed is acceptable - perhaps even good, on Win32 using the latest VM. You can also consider Java-to-native compilation options...
Notwithstanding the fact that by design, Java will be around long after the Win32 APIs have gone the way of the dodo, and you can merge native and Java object code without destroying the OO design of your system... Use Java, dude!
The only person all this good news doesn't help is me, since I'm in the business of writing applets these days, not applications... Doh!
-- Say it with me, people: "Fuck the header files."
"They were unlawfully reverse engineering my code," said the Almighty. "Goodness knows... they might have even been tempted to try and defeat my copy protection!"
I think this is shortly going to proceed into the slaughtering-chickens-on-the-front-steps-of-the-pa latial-manion-in-north-hollywood phase.
Yes, voodoo is definitely called for. Fortunately, with the wonders of modern merchandaising, we have a plethora of voodoo dolls available, in plush or plastic, generally for less than $19.95! Although chickens are more economical, especially if you steal them.
Don't try to reverse engineer the chicken, though. They'll lock you up for life, man. Actually, don't even think about reverse engineering your voodoo chicken. Because next year they'll make it against the law to even think about reverse engineering chickens. Retroactively. On pain of lobotomy. Although you might get lucky, and have Ted Turner or Michael Eisner perform the lobotomy on you themselves. Because I hear they like to come down, mingle with the rank and file, and perform a few lobotomies themselves now and again.
OK, newspapers are now suffering from a more level playing field in the media business, as are television stations and radio. As are software companies for that matter - now, at least, if a software monopoly (ahem) does such a bad job that people can write something better on their spare time, because of the internet, they are finally in danger.
Are you interested in knowing how you can compete with on-line news enterprises? A lot of this goes for TV and radio, too.
You know what I hate about newspapers? This is an election year, right? You know what would be useful to me? If someone itemized the participants in the race, and their claims, and declared positions on things, and then cross-checked that with their backgrounds, their voting records if applicable, campaign finances, former business partners, and so forth. I don't mean that glib, drop-in-the-bucket narrative you guys print now. I want charts. I want tables. Then print that every Sunday. Keep it up to date! Now, if a dozen of you did it, and you all competed in doing that - who'se more accurate, more impartial, who'se got more dirt... and so forth, then I'd race to the corner shop and buy several papers just to keep up.
I don't just idly want that information, I need it!
Newspapers have always made this claim that they're the guardians of democracy. Well, guardianship is relative, guys. Relatively speaking, compared to your (collectively) slipshod, partisan, "we're insiders and you're not" approach to informing the public about politics, there are half a dozen websites better than the best newspaper for election coverage.
This exposes a bigger issue. You guys focus group to death. Who are you, President Clinton wannabees? Do not write to the lowest common denominator! Write to a higher standard and let the public rise to it! The Lewinsky debacle couldn't have happened had the press not abbetted the sensationalism. As though journalists and editors live in a world where people are shocked by adultery? Not only does nobody care in their own lives, they assume the rich and powerful engage in it. Do you think we weren't all sick to death about hearing about Elian Gonzales within the first 48 hours? There are millions of homeless children, children with dead parents, custody battles... But someone, somewhere, assumes that we'll care about that one. Stupid.
But most of all - just cover the politics. Cover it like you're getting paid to do it. We don't want quips or anecdotes. Veiled party politics. Republican papers and democratic papers. We want to hear it every week like every candidate is a stranger to us. Most of them are!
Aren't you all sick of hearing about how 90% of Americans, when stopped on the street, don't know the first thing about John McCain, or his platform? Or Bill Bradley? Well, guess who'se fault it is, guys. There they are, the numbers screaming out at you that no one knows this stuff. That's the information people - society! - desperately needs - deliver it to our doorstep!
For a little consideration, a little less smug patronizing, and, if nothing else, thorough, systematic coverage of the election, I would gladly pay multiples of your subscription price.
Having tried several high-concept keyboards...
on
Ergonomic Keyboards
·
· Score: 1
...in desperation out of worsening repetitive stress injuries, including the incredibly novel Datahand, I found that my wrist surgeon was right. No amount of gadgetry will do you 1/10 the good that having good work habits will do.
The corrolary to this is that, if you have trouble, find a good doctor (specialist, really) who knows what he/she is doing.
My own experience was that, since I didn't have insurance when the problems started, I tried everything I could think of, including buying and borrowing every ergonomic device I could get my hands on. This is what medical professionals drily refer to as "self-medicating." Nothing worked, and fortunately, I didn't spend too much.
Months later, when I finally got good insurance, I asked around to find the best doctor I could. With a small injection, a brace, and some good advice, I was suddenly 100% back to normal. This is lucky, of course, and it may not last, but honestly, if your wrists bother you, GO TO A DOCTOR! Hesitating or procrastinating can have serious, permanent consequences. Catching it early and learning about what you need to do to stay healthy is really important.
Your article contains two grave factual errors regarding Redhat Linux. I trust that these corrections can be verified and submitted to the various parties affected, so that as few people as possible need be the victim of misinformation.
"Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring tools."
Wrong. A quick trip through the default XWindows setup on any of the recent Redhat versions will reveal a panopaly of various graphical performance monitoring tools, on a par with, and in many cases superior to, the comparable Windows offerings (the most notable example of these is gtop). So, to restate, Windows has several built in tools and few other alternatives, while Linux offers a multitude of competing monitoring programs to choose from.
"Linux has a set of command-line file system configuration tools for mounting and unmounting partitions. Samba ships with the product and provides some integration for Windows clients. You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback."
Wrong. See the Samba Web Administration Tool. It is totally functional and has been included in Samba for well over a year.
Also...
"Red Hat Linux offers no graphical RAID configuration tools, but its command line tools made RAID configuration easy."
True, it offers no _software_ RAID graphical configuration tools. A common misconception is that hardware raid vendors do not support Linux, or support it minimally. ICP-Vortex, which makes superb mid-range SCSI RAID controllers, has had full (text-menu-based) GUI support for Linux for some time.
"Red Hat offers a basic Kerberos authentication mechanism. With Red Hat Linux, as with most Unix operating systems, the network services can be individually controlled to increase security. Red Hat offers Pluggable Authentication Modules as a way of allowing you to set authentication policies across programs running on the server. Passwords are protected with a shadow file. Red Hat also bundles firewall and VPN services."
I can't find much fault what you say regarding security on its face, and I can understand not wanting to make difficult to qualify statements about the security of one operating system over another. This only makes it ironic that you do not mention that the entire Windows family is a security nightmare, the evidence of which has been exposed repeatedly, and I mean time and time again, under the light of technical and lay journalists alike.
Similarly, your comments about "Stability and fault tolerance" bear an equal lack of judgement for an article titled "King of the network operating systems." That Windows NT has significant stability problems (which make its spate of reliability "features" entirely amusing, in a cart-before-the-horse kind of way) is beyond doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
The endless extensions to the rights and protections granted to the holders of intellectual property are, especially in their most recent incarnations, nothing short of astounding. No reasonable person can defend the actions of the few, large players in the "Intellectual Property Industry" (another thing the framers never could have conceived of) in transparently prolonging the life of the Mickey Mouse franchise. The DMCA is the current pinnacle of the efforts to coopt the creative by corporate interests; a law which is, in form and function, an anathema to artists (of any dicipline) and their audience alike.
Society is not peppered with man-as-island "artists" and "authors" and "coders," who spin out delicate and frail inventions from ivory towers, desperate for protection from marauding information pirates. We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
As a programmer, it is easy for me to follow the news, watch the lawsuits, and reach direct, immediate, and objective conclusions about the impact of intellectual property (especially software patents) on our discipline and the world that it serves. The peril to innovation of the current intellectual property law, and our interpretations of it regarding software, is so obvious that it has spurred a phenomenal and almost unexplainable social phenomenon: free software. But it goes way beyond software, and it's easy to infer how much real damage "overly strong" intellectual property law is doing to our economy among "solution-oriented" disciplines, and this doesn't stop short of harm to our more personal lives in "softer" industries like music, literature, etc.
We have now a very small group of capitalists who have grown very fat by exploiting, and then expanding, the weaknesses of our intellectual property laws. They will naturally stop at nothing to preserve their effortless wealth; they have no interest in creating a healthy society: their only interest is their own success. Of course, in a democracy, their absurdly small minority should be drowned out by the balance of the citizenry. Everyone's interests should be represented, to insure that no one's self-interest foils a fair government in presiding over a healthy society.
Of course, you can do ABC news polls out the wazoo, and you will find numbers that lead politicians pandering greedily to the IP interests. Most American's can't be bothered to think about these issues, even as the quality of their lives are silently eroded by the forces at work. But, for this, I can't do more than to simply quote a very smart man, who once observed:
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands... The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
-Albert Einstein
Fucking. Awesome.
- Action Quake
- Action Half-life
- Action UT
'nuff said.Speaking of which, my guess is (from having followed Halo like a slave, and seen their demo at E3), at least one connection between the Marathon "universe" and Halo is that, just as in Marathon, your character in Halo will be a military cyborg. But if the Bungie guys leave it at that, I'll be surprised. :)
We still play it here. And on a G4, well, let's just say... slight overkill. :)
It's simple, really: if you want to make a single-player game, you should, cursorily at least, check and make sure it's well written.
Half-life was a half-baked retread by movie standards, but it was still so much better than anything anyone else had bothered to do in terms of a story and/or gameplay that everyone (including me) was entranced.
Daikatana's creative team comes off like rank amatuers, and it's obvious from every aspect of the materials in the game. The fact that their management skills/kung fu weren't the best is just sad and/or ironic. But, we had fair warning. This is the guy, after all, who founded his company on the whiny, middle-school notion (I paraphrase) "My vision comes first. Those little technology/logistics problems are secondary."
Daikatana is just another creative embarrassment in a long line of such writing/designing disasters that are basically making the American video game industry a lot like the Japanese movie industry of days gone by. Except that Godzilla didn't look so blocky.
There's nothing remarkable about it, either. It will stay that way until the industry's fusion with the rest of the entertainment industry moves farther along, at which point we will go from the Godzilla phase to... er... the Independence Day phase? Ouch.
Let's hope so.
"Apple has done a remarkable job of hiding what little is left of "Unix" under the GUI."
I would make the point that most of what is identifiably "Unix" is the problem. From the security model to the file/device paradigm to most of POSIX, it's a big mistake.
When someone can claim "BSD compatibility," thus enabling a user to compile a unix tool on the system, this implies all kinds of things - that assinine system logger, the presence of an /etc/password file, or runlevels, startup scripts, /dev, /lib and /bin, setuid bits and the list goes on, all the way down to the presumption of stdin, stdout, and stderr. All of these things represent functionality that has abstract significance, as you always need to communicate with your users, system facilities, and so forth; too bad most of it is only relevant to more esoteric aspects of large, by some measures ancient, GUI-less multi-user systems, and none of these particular methods (inexplicably enshrined in the whole body of unix code and libraries) represent anything more than decades-old klugery.
What I have been saying is that Apple needs to thoroughly and vigorously discard these quaint old artifacts of the VT100 days. If it means breaking "direct" sideways-compatibility with Unix applications, then fuck the unix applications. Now, no complaint is worth a damn without pointing out the right way to do things:
If the core of the operating system is stable and featureful, boxed emulation of a unix environment (allowing the use of legacy unix apps in MacOS X) will not seem so strange anymore. No one runs Unix in a box on Win98 or WinNT: you would get all of the new admin complexity with none of the reliability or security gains. On MacOS X, if it's done right, it would no longer seem so strange. Then Apple's server play could benefit from the Unix codebase. But unless it's properly isolated out, and MacOS X itself is kept from being tainted by any attempts at direct, API-level "Unix compatibility," you _will_ have problems. The distinct roles of the system need to be architecturally acknowledged.
"First off, the added complexity of having to log into a Mac is trivial... Second off, while under the hood a multi-user system is fundamentally different, the end user experience need not be very different."
As I said in another post in this thread, even given that Mac users as a whole are demanding multi-user functionality, which I find hard to believe (Apple's "target audience" doesn't understand that colored fruit is actually a menu, let alone its particular, constantly evolving significance), woe to those who should offer them the unix security model in return.
"Multi-user" means different things to different people. To your parents, it means having different preferences folders in the system folder. To unix users, it means something radically different. Can I access another user's files? Can they access mine? What about resources on the hard drive? Is there an "administrator account"? Is it called (chuckle) "root"? Can a non-root user install software? Will others be able to use it? Will it end up in a centralized location, or in that user's home directory? Wait... what's a "home directory?"
I have no answers to these questions yet. These issues intersect with Unix compatibility issues, of course, because the body of Unix software assumes this level of complexity. So my question is, does Apple expect to pass it off on their users, just so that it'll be a little easier for people to port Apache, or Oracle, to OSX?
I really don't know myself why I care, but for Apple's sake, I hope they haven't been foolish enough to make a trade-off that short sighted.
Systems can advance and use box or application layer emulation to do legacy work. It is already working for Linux, and Apple is obviously gambling on it. So I see no significant excuse for the rest of us not to have a sane, modern organizational and functional paradigm.
P.S. Screenshot?
I balk at the fact that it's being written by unix hackers - ex-NeXT or not. Be's signal failing in my mind was its cowardly inability to lose its unix compatibility to aim for something higher. Huge missed opportunity.
Yes, I know a unix kernel does not a unix make. Although it goes a long way in it's unmodified state. But this is obviously not the only part of unix Apple is including.
"but if they have an inittab file, and if they use init scripts, I bet it'd be a laughably simple exercise on their part to make an account called "dumbuser" and have the rc.M file su as dumbuser..."
Oh that's laughable, all right. The only simple part in this, though, is making Windows look like the HAL 9000.
But seriously, thanks for your comments.
Actually, XFree86 4.0, and the numerous extensions to X are gradually transforming it into something pretty reasonable.
==
X will never be reasonable. Not the XFree team's fault - good work built on a bad foundation. People will sooner or later have to throw it all out. Legacy apps can work in through a box or a wine-like emulator.
== :)
Yes. You didn't read the Ars Technica article, did you?
==
I did.
==
You assume that backwards compatibility and the elimination of the "ugliness" of a commandline-first system are mutually exclusive. They are not.
==
Actually, I disagree with that statement specifically. I am saying that unix is broken. /lib is bogus. libc is bogus. /etc is bogus. password files are bogus. /dev is bogus. There are huge assumptions built into the codebase about a number of fundamentally bogus things, from the bogus filesystem hierarchy to the bogus libraries to... you guessed it... the necessity of a command line and a terminal. And curses, no less!
Not that I don't love Unix anyway. Not that I don't use it every day. But if you think millions of Mac users are going to start loving it because Steve Jobs tells them to... you are going to have to give me your dealer's phone number.
==
Library handling is RADICALLY different...
==
Yes, yes. This is part of what's so encouraging! I love it! It's the right thing. But... is it all good work? Or is some of it still going to leave people having fits?
==
MacOS 9 already supports multi-user desktops.
==
These "little details" matter. It needs to be disabled by default, in acknowledgement of the fact that an overwhelming majority of users won't use it, and could in fact get bitten by it. A million little details occur to me. Multi-user computers are fundamentally more complicated than single-user computers. That's complexity no one should have to put up with unless they ask for it. And even if they demand it, woe to the person who should offer them the unix security model in return.
Your comments are good. Thanks!
It is obvious that mating a mature, modern kernel with a reasonable user interface is the finish line of a marathon which pretty much every systems player is hurtling desperately towards.
- Linux will beat X to death until it is impossible to see through the bloody pulp on your screen. Then (one day, I pray) they will replace it with something sensible.
- Microsoft will keep dumping code into the DOS/Win95/Win98/WinNT/Win2k landfill until they've made the largest functioning (?) program ever created.
- And Apple... Apple is somewhere in between. Smart enough to use BSD (only Linux would have been smarter
;-). Smart enough to discard X. But are they smart enough to discard ALL that which makes Unix awful?
I realize it seems easy in principle. I understand that it is in fact desperately hard. Put yourself in that systems engineer's shoes. It is painful beyond measure to take a perfectly good Unix like BSD and then toss out backwards compatibility with all your Unix apps just so that Mac users all over the world won't wake up one day and discover they need to log in as "root" and find their files buried somewhere deep inside a directory called "/usr/home/root/.msword/c|/WINDOWS/MyDocu~1/". They put up with it every day. You can almost hear them screaming here in New York. "Let those bastards eat CAKE!" So what if unix filesystem hierarchies, library handling systems, common executable namaes, and so forth seem exactly as half-assed and hair-brained as they are...My point is simply this: Mac users do not want unix. They want a stable MacOS. They want it no matter how much all those NeXT people flatter themselves. They do not want to "log in" to their powerbook.
I have heard many things that encourage me that Apple understands this, and may therefore be the first to create a Unix-stable, xerox-style operating system. I have also seen many things that discourage me, because they indicate Apple is buying the benighted notion that BSD-compatibility is worth a damn to their business. It is not. Let me repeat: it is not. And furthermore, it will eviscerate the utility of the MacOS. Do you hear me, Tevanian? Hide that damn shell. Hide it somewhere where we will never find it.
Unix users are smart, self-reliant people. We can find plenty of ways to get our jollies without mastering our problems onto millions of MacOS CD's.
We will definitely post everything once it's ready. Never fear.
Pentium 100MHz, Redhat 6.2, and about 70 gigs of online storage. Dirt cheap, and should hold about 550+ CD's at 256-bit MP3. We wrote a web-based front-end in PHP that lets you select tracks, shuffle, play, stop, skip, and so forth... Then you just connect the sound card to the stereo, and the 10bt to the hub, and you're good to go.
It's nice in our office environment; no one has to get out of their chair to put on a CD, it would be possible to implement various voting/banning/profiling systems, and, best of all, you don't have to worry about office mates absent-mindedly using your CDs as coasters. ;)
- A pathetic public education system...
- ...based on ancient, deeply flawed victorian-era pedagogy
- ...where the teachers (who have to finish grad school to teach - unless it's a city school, where they'll take anyone of the street, without even getting their name down) get paid less than garbagemen - AND THAT'S NOT A JOKE OR AN EXAGGERATION...
- ...and which are managed bureaucratically, often by career state employees with no meaningful oversight from any elected official or the community.
- A pathetic government...
- ...populated, out of necessity, by people who will say anything, do anything to get elected and stay elected (is it really that much fun?)... and that includes utterly destroying the single most valuable public institution of this or any country: public education - for the slightest expediency.
- ...and largely ignored by a society so jaded with the misadventures of their elected officials that perhaps 1 in 10 Americans still regard their executive and legislative branches of government as anything other than a cruel joke.
- ...and let's not even talk about their fiscal policy
- A pathetic populace...
- ...out of which, after all, the administrators and politicians, the votes that empower them, and the media which makes it all happen smoothly has come, after all.
- ...in a constant state of denial about both the propserity, safety, and sanity of the nation they live in (after all, speaking of anonymous... there are now installing anonymous infant drop-off bins in Suffolk County, NY).
- ...and, let's face it, already suffering from the growing failures of said educational system.
Ignorant, hateful parents are the culprits of school massacres (and you could take that line of reasoning a lot further, too). And why can't we, the press, or the government, admit it?We make people at least pass a test to determine if they can drive, so why do we let any dumb couple of assholes pump out children and send them out into the world?
The bottom line is, people are supposed to be intelligent, decent and good to their neighbors, to their friends, to strangers, and to their children for a reason. It's more than just a choice you're entitled to for being born. Everything you do has consequences.
Without a general understanding of this principle, it's hard to imagine any society working for long. But yet walk down the street, and most people you pass are so ignorant of these basic truths, so far gone... And if you actually let yourself care one way or another, you feel literally adrift in a vast, stormy sea... with not a solid thing in sight to anchor your hopes.
To those of you who still are, you have all my sympathy. But please, please spam the nazi hotline people!
Thanks,
David
Heinlein remains one of the sickest bastards in american literature. -D
And in the meantime, back in the real world, we have a bunch of browsers whose 1.1 support ranges from mostly adequate to downright malicious.
As you point out, one can instruct users to download the 1.2 plugin - this is a fine solution for intranets and so forth. In the real world, however:
- 6 megs is too much to ask of a modem user (read: 90% of the world)
- It confuses newbies/idiots/republicans
- And, as you said, there are places and times where there's no option to download and install software.
So if you want a big potential audience, you're stuck with 1.1, and you have to be fucking crafty to make your applets work, if you plan on doing something ambitious, because there are several dozen monster gotchas on each platform, browser, and version.Fortunately, at least, Mac users are no longer shut out of the 1.1 party, if they can handle installing the newest Apple MRJ, which has, ironically, gone from being the single worst 1.1 JVM to the single best, IMHO.
Yes, my friends have been fearing for my sanity. Yes, I have reimplemented almost every part of the API at one time or another. Yes, I do still love writing things in Java, and no, I am not a masochist. The ordinary, common-sense benefits in the language and the process are just that important to me.
Until I saw 1.2, I would agree with my (ahem) colleagues in saying that Java "isn't ready for prime time" (oh, I hate that expression). Between the memory leaks and the various bugs in the foundations of the vertical APIs, and the "not-quite-thin-but-not-quite-fat" state of the APIs themselves, 1.0 was a toy, and 1.1 was interesting - it had a lot of the ingredients, but it wasn't ready.
1.2, I believe, is finally "OK," as near as I can tell. I have beaten the heck out of it, and I have these things to say:
- It no longer leaks memory (!)
- It is reasonably robust - crashes are now rare
- The Hotspot performance gains are real and, actually, significant
- Lo and behold, the Linux port is actually stable and feature-complete
Netbeans, which I have always loved, suffered terribly and unjustly under 1.1's bug load - so much so that you had to be crazy to use it. Under 1.2, Forte (Netbeans sequel) screams, kicks flaming ass, and is quite frankly the best Java IDE I've used - and coming up on the best IDE in any language.So write it in Java 1.2. It will be a lot less painful: avoiding the pointer/allocation/array-stomping headaches alone makes it worth it, let alone the other improvements in compile time sanity and language clarity. The API is stacked, and will save you tons of time.
Distributing the VM itself is quite easy with the proper windows tools; there are several common ones on the market that all work very well, and ultimately disting the VM with your stuff is trivial. Forte itself is actually a great example of how easy this is to do.
Finally, despite words from people who I have a psychic intuition have never actually benchmarked a native vs. Hotspot VM implementations of a real application, its speed is acceptable - perhaps even good, on Win32 using the latest VM. You can also consider Java-to-native compilation options...
Notwithstanding the fact that by design, Java will be around long after the Win32 APIs have gone the way of the dodo, and you can merge native and Java object code without destroying the OO design of your system... Use Java, dude!
The only person all this good news doesn't help is me, since I'm in the business of writing applets these days, not applications... Doh!
--
Say it with me, people: "Fuck the header files."
"They were unlawfully reverse engineering my code," said the Almighty. "Goodness knows... they might have even been tempted to try and defeat my copy protection!"
Yes, voodoo is definitely called for. Fortunately, with the wonders of modern merchandaising, we have a plethora of voodoo dolls available, in plush or plastic, generally for less than $19.95! Although chickens are more economical, especially if you steal them.
Don't try to reverse engineer the chicken, though. They'll lock you up for life, man. Actually, don't even think about reverse engineering your voodoo chicken. Because next year they'll make it against the law to even think about reverse engineering chickens. Retroactively. On pain of lobotomy. Although you might get lucky, and have Ted Turner or Michael Eisner perform the lobotomy on you themselves. Because I hear they like to come down, mingle with the rank and file, and perform a few lobotomies themselves now and again.
Happy hunting,
David
Are you interested in knowing how you can compete with on-line news enterprises? A lot of this goes for TV and radio, too.
You know what I hate about newspapers? This is an election year, right? You know what would be useful to me? If someone itemized the participants in the race, and their claims, and declared positions on things, and then cross-checked that with their backgrounds, their voting records if applicable, campaign finances, former business partners, and so forth. I don't mean that glib, drop-in-the-bucket narrative you guys print now. I want charts. I want tables. Then print that every Sunday. Keep it up to date! Now, if a dozen of you did it, and you all competed in doing that - who'se more accurate, more impartial, who'se got more dirt... and so forth, then I'd race to the corner shop and buy several papers just to keep up.
I don't just idly want that information, I need it!
Newspapers have always made this claim that they're the guardians of democracy. Well, guardianship is relative, guys. Relatively speaking, compared to your (collectively) slipshod, partisan, "we're insiders and you're not" approach to informing the public about politics, there are half a dozen websites better than the best newspaper for election coverage.
This exposes a bigger issue. You guys focus group to death. Who are you, President Clinton wannabees? Do not write to the lowest common denominator! Write to a higher standard and let the public rise to it! The Lewinsky debacle couldn't have happened had the press not abbetted the sensationalism. As though journalists and editors live in a world where people are shocked by adultery? Not only does nobody care in their own lives, they assume the rich and powerful engage in it. Do you think we weren't all sick to death about hearing about Elian Gonzales within the first 48 hours? There are millions of homeless children, children with dead parents, custody battles... But someone, somewhere, assumes that we'll care about that one. Stupid.
But most of all - just cover the politics. Cover it like you're getting paid to do it. We don't want quips or anecdotes. Veiled party politics. Republican papers and democratic papers. We want to hear it every week like every candidate is a stranger to us. Most of them are!
Aren't you all sick of hearing about how 90% of Americans, when stopped on the street, don't know the first thing about John McCain, or his platform? Or Bill Bradley? Well, guess who'se fault it is, guys. There they are, the numbers screaming out at you that no one knows this stuff. That's the information people - society! - desperately needs - deliver it to our doorstep!
For a little consideration, a little less smug patronizing, and, if nothing else, thorough, systematic coverage of the election, I would gladly pay multiples of your subscription price.
The corrolary to this is that, if you have trouble, find a good doctor (specialist, really) who knows what he/she is doing.
My own experience was that, since I didn't have insurance when the problems started, I tried everything I could think of, including buying and borrowing every ergonomic device I could get my hands on. This is what medical professionals drily refer to as "self-medicating." Nothing worked, and fortunately, I didn't spend too much.
Months later, when I finally got good insurance, I asked around to find the best doctor I could. With a small injection, a brace, and some good advice, I was suddenly 100% back to normal. This is lucky, of course, and it may not last, but honestly, if your wrists bother you, GO TO A DOCTOR! Hesitating or procrastinating can have serious, permanent consequences. Catching it early and learning about what you need to do to stay healthy is really important.
To: john_bass@ncsu.edu,james_robinson@ncsu.edu
Your article contains two grave factual errors regarding Redhat Linux. I trust that these corrections can be verified and submitted to the various parties affected, so that as few people as possible need be the victim of misinformation.
"Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring tools."
Wrong. A quick trip through the default XWindows setup on any of the recent Redhat versions will reveal a panopaly of various graphical performance monitoring tools, on a par with, and in many cases superior to, the comparable Windows offerings (the most notable example of these is gtop). So, to restate, Windows has several built in tools and few other alternatives, while Linux offers a multitude of competing monitoring programs to choose from.
"Linux has a set of command-line file system configuration tools for mounting and unmounting partitions. Samba ships with the product and provides some integration for Windows clients. You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback."
Wrong. See the Samba Web Administration Tool. It is totally functional and has been included in Samba for well over a year.
Also...
"Red Hat Linux offers no graphical RAID configuration tools, but its command line tools made RAID configuration easy."
True, it offers no _software_ RAID graphical configuration tools. A common misconception is that hardware raid vendors do not support Linux, or support it minimally. ICP-Vortex, which makes superb mid-range SCSI RAID controllers, has had full (text-menu-based) GUI support for Linux for some time.
"Red Hat offers a basic Kerberos authentication mechanism. With Red Hat Linux, as with most Unix operating systems, the network services can be individually controlled to increase security. Red Hat offers Pluggable Authentication Modules as a way of allowing you to set authentication policies across programs running on the server. Passwords are protected with a shadow file. Red Hat also bundles firewall and VPN services."
I can't find much fault what you say regarding security on its face, and I can understand not wanting to make difficult to qualify statements about the security of one operating system over another. This only makes it ironic that you do not mention that the entire Windows family is a security nightmare, the evidence of which has been exposed repeatedly, and I mean time and time again, under the light of technical and lay journalists alike.
Similarly, your comments about "Stability and fault tolerance" bear an equal lack of judgement for an article titled "King of the network operating systems." That Windows NT has significant stability problems (which make its spate of reliability "features" entirely amusing, in a cart-before-the-horse kind of way) is beyond doubt.
But nitpicking aside, best of luck to you both.
Regards,
David
U H4V3 B33N 0WN3D, B1330000tCH!