I disagree. This guy not only is writing some occasional gems, but his haiku responses to his criticism are effing brilliant.
Also his restraint in still posting at 1, even though my calculations show he's got to be past 20 karma by now. (Unless he's been a dick in moderating.)
They'd be able to buy/build newer, better ones, and still have some money left over due to the lower cost of living.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing Slashdot!
According to the handy-dandy salary calculator located at Homefair, a person making $100,000 a year and owning his own home moving from Redmond, WA to Vancouver, BC, would need to make $121,261 (US) to break even on cost of living.
That's 21% HIGHER, Malc; not lower.
It's much closer if you rent; $103,424. Canada still loses.
Hmm, I wonder what it looks like if you plug Bill's numbers in there.:-)
I really do not understand how the US can dictate how a non-US company can distribute it's product.
If they're selling it in the US, you don't see how the US gov could regulate that? Honestly?
I do not think MS will move, but, if they decided to do something just as drastic (like refusing to license to the US Government or even just closing up shop and going home) what could the gov do to them?
It's ridiculous to even speculate; Microsoft wouldn't bankrupt themselves by doing this, and if they didn't bankrupt themselves (maybe Gates sells all his stock first) the shareholders would sue the bejeezus out of them.
If Microsoft moved to Canada, they could sell their product to Canadians without that being regulated by the US; but it'd be regulated by Canada, whose laws are just as bizarre as ours.
And if they sell it in the US, they're subject to US law on those sales, whether they're in Canada, Russia, or Mars.
Silly and realistic at the same time; can't beat that.:-) --
How much information can you withold?
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 2
Let's say I open a store, and post a guard at the front door, with instructions not to let anybody in unless they put a blue sock on their left hand, shove an ice-cream bar up their ass, and promise to say "boogah" every six minutes while in the store.
Now you're my potential customer, standing at the door.
Is what I'm asking you unreasonable? Yep.
But if I don't make an exception for anyone based on the color of their skin, their sex, or certain other characteristics that may or may not be readily apparant by looking at them, your only legal recourse is to tell me to go eff myself and turn around and walk away.
So how much information can you withold? As much as you want.
How much service can they withold if you do? As much as they want.
Your rights don't override theirs.
If they were a monopoly, the rules would change; but "the only place I can find Captain Harlock on letterboxed DVD" doesn't qualify as a monopoly.
Bottom line; don't do business with anybody whom you feel has unreasonable requirements, and send them a polite letter detailing why you think they are unreasonable. Other than that, quit yer bitchin'.
2) there is a way to ask an NFS server for its export list: showmount -e hostname
That's a bad thing. You should never give up information; if somebody doesn't know what share they want to connect to, they shouldn't be trying to connect.
How so? Exactly what is wrong with a system that will show NFS and SMB shares in your local network requiring '0' effort from the user?
Because there's two ways to do it:
1) Implement a protocol whereby everybody broadcasts their information all the time (the Microsoft solution).
2) Perform IP-scanning discovery all the time.
Either way, you're talking about massive BS traffic on your network; which is a problem on Microsoft LANs.
We don't want to implement that problem any more than we have to.
Also, NFS doesn't have a mechanism for saying "show me all your shares". That would be a security problem, like it is on Microsoft LANs.
Network Neighborhood is a performance and security disaster, and the best thing to do if you have a network is disable it and browsing as much as possible.
It's fine for 6-station office workgroups, but it's a freakin' disaster in an Enterprise.
I disagree. I believe everyone should do what I did when they banned perfectly legal sales of firearms:
Demand that they delete your account and remove you from all mailing lists.
Do it via an email to their support address, so that if they don't delete you, you can give their support department negative feedback when they follow up (which they do).
Bill Joy does have a partial point. Most of the programs recognized as "kick ass" in our business got that reputation after being mostly written by a single person. C.F. sendmail and bind.
Most of the exceptions are rigidly controlled by a single person, and have wildly-varying parts. C.F. Linux, FreeBSD.
Are there exceptions? Of course. But look closely before you call something an exception; a lot of it started with a single-person core, and has added cruft from there.
However, all of this misses a vital point; it doesn't matter if 99.9% of the eyes looking at a given program are incompetent eyes, if that remaining.1% is the best of the best.
There are people at RSA who use PGP. Bruce Schneier uses PGP. Lots of folks who are good at writing crypto use PGP.
They see the bugs. They don't see them all; if they did, they'd have been fixed long ago.
Meanwhile, PGP is still better than most of the alternatives. That's *BECAUSE* it's open, not in spite of it being open.
Open Source benefits me even if I never look at the code, because if PGP had been written by, say, RSA, people like Bruce Schneier would never have been able to look at the code either.
The advantage of Open Source is that those few really good people can look at it, even if they work for different companies.
Unless, of course, the lawyers screw it all up by demanding employees not look at outside code.
If notification of the impending vote is posted on the back of a filing cabinet in the third sub-basement of an abandoned warehouse in Toadsuck, Arkansas, nobody "chose" not to vote.
This was a major change with vast implications to everyone in this country, and it was quietly worked out where only people already engaged in the process would even know about it.
Yes, public hearings were held; and after they'd been held, they were publicized in what amounts to "nyah nyah, missed 'em missed 'em now you gotta kiss 'em".
I'm not foreign to the political process; one U.S. Senator voted correctly on encryption issues because I patiently explained them to him while we were waiting for his plane to arrive.
I didn't hear anything about this, and I don't recall any of the geek news sites mentioning it until after the fact, much less the "real" news sites.
Mr. Dickinson is aware of the hidden nature of this discussion (his remarks in the article make that readily apparent) and his remarks also seem to indicate that he doesn't feel that's at all a bad thing, that he basically sees the fact that Open Source is a grass-roots movement and thus doesn't have unlimited funding is a failing of the movement and should rightly result in the movement having no voice in a process that he vigorously defends as being by the lawyers, of the lawyers, and for the lawyers.
His position seems to be that if you don't like the system, you should hire a lawyer to lobby for fixing it.
He states that people writing programs should always hire an attorney first to make sure they're not stepping on some obscure patent on some obvious process, directly equating the alternative with "performing surgery on yourself". That's not my impression, it's a quote. See page 4, about halfway down.
So basically, he should be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.:-)
That is, assuming pulling the trigger doesn't violate Amazon's one-click patent.
I think the point he's trying to make is, they can ALREADY pinpoint you within 25 yards, what difference does it make if they can do so within 5 yards?
Unless they're targetting you with machine guns, it doesn't make any more difference.
So why would we think advertising will increase at any greater rate? --
If exchanging a kernel is such a dang-blasted important task for any Linux user to know how to do, why is it so complicated?
I think you're operating from a faulty precept here; who says it's important for any user to know how to do this?
Any user who *DOESN'T* know how to swap a kernel should be using a distribution such as Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera etc. where it IS easy to swap a kernel.
--
Re:Linux "shooting self in foot"
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 1
Read what I said again; did I say "need", or did I say what we *DO*?
Sun Cluster certainly exists. Legato HA+ does a booming business.
There are reasons for that; but since you seem to think you're the expert, I'll leave their discovery as an exercise for your. --
It's been said before, but evidently it needs to be said again:
When you quote verbatim a massive portion of the contents of a linked page, without any meaningful commentary included, it is not "Informative", it's "Redundant".
This shouldn't be moderated to +5, it should be 0 or lower.
Fine; Yahoo, block all access to the.fr domain at your router, and be done with it.
Refuse to take any action beyond that, because it is not even theoretically possible to track.com etc. domains that are physically located in France, not to mention folks dialing long distance or using VPNs.
A friend of mine, a very very good friend blow ALL his fingertips of in an accident several years ago and he don't have any fingertips left and I don't think he is alone, so whay should he do if fingerprints become the only solution? Fingerprints IS a great and easy way to identify people if they have fingers, but do the people behind theese devices think about a solution for people who can't use fingerprint devices?
What does somebody with no hands do now in a world of signatures?
It's an inconvenience not having a part of your body. The world can't be completely stopped to meet the needs of the most-handicapped individual, however.
Accomodations will have to be made, just like they're made now.
I find it quite ironic that in the middle of a diatribe that spends a lot of time complaining about Richard Stallman going off on moral tangents, Mr. Meyer finds time to dismiss my 2nd Amendment rights as "lunatic ravings", and further manages to do so based on deliberate failure to research the historical facts; the same crime of which he accuses Stallman et. al.
Mr. Meyer, I quit reading your article at that point. I have no interest in further hearing what you have to say. Rather ironic that this occured within a few paragraphs of your complaint against Stallman having the same effect on a software executive, no?
Slashdot Mirror
However, that's also true of CDs, and DVDs for that matter.
Yet most people can't tell the difference, or think a CD sounds better than an LP.
Technology marches on, and I think we're better for it.
--
I disagree. This guy not only is writing some occasional gems, but his haiku responses to his criticism are effing brilliant.
Also his restraint in still posting at 1, even though my calculations show he's got to be past 20 karma by now. (Unless he's been a dick in moderating.)
--
And Bill Gates doesn't just call his broker and just place an order to sell 900,000 shares, right?
Right; he, in fact, has to file his intent to sell months in advance, and it makes headlines on the financial newspapers and shows when he does.
Like I said, the very idea of Microsoft voluntarily shutting their doors to "show the government" is ridiculous and not worthy of serious discussion.
'sides, the government could always nationalize the source code as a vital strategic resource.
--
They'd be able to buy/build newer, better ones, and still have some money left over due to the lower cost of living.
:-)
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing Slashdot!
According to the handy-dandy salary calculator located at Homefair, a person making $100,000 a year and owning his own home moving from Redmond, WA to Vancouver, BC, would need to make $121,261 (US) to break even on cost of living.
That's 21% HIGHER, Malc; not lower.
It's much closer if you rent; $103,424. Canada still loses.
Hmm, I wonder what it looks like if you plug Bill's numbers in there.
--
I really do not understand how the US can dictate how a non-US company can distribute it's product.
If they're selling it in the US, you don't see how the US gov could regulate that? Honestly?
I do not think MS will move, but, if they decided to do something just as drastic (like refusing to license to the US Government or even just closing up shop and going home) what could the gov do to them?
It's ridiculous to even speculate; Microsoft wouldn't bankrupt themselves by doing this, and if they didn't bankrupt themselves (maybe Gates sells all his stock first) the shareholders would sue the bejeezus out of them.
If Microsoft moved to Canada, they could sell their product to Canadians without that being regulated by the US; but it'd be regulated by Canada, whose laws are just as bizarre as ours.
And if they sell it in the US, they're subject to US law on those sales, whether they're in Canada, Russia, or Mars.
--
This won't happen. The issues would be immense.
It wouldn't get them beyond the US legal system, unless they stopped selling their products in the US.
And how many of those 20,000+ employees are on H1B Visas? They can't move to Canada.
--
If you want silly, don't forget:
:-)
Riding Bean
Silly and realistic at the same time; can't beat that.
--
Let's say I open a store, and post a guard at the front door, with instructions not to let anybody in unless they put a blue sock on their left hand, shove an ice-cream bar up their ass, and promise to say "boogah" every six minutes while in the store.
Now you're my potential customer, standing at the door.
Is what I'm asking you unreasonable? Yep.
But if I don't make an exception for anyone based on the color of their skin, their sex, or certain other characteristics that may or may not be readily apparant by looking at them, your only legal recourse is to tell me to go eff myself and turn around and walk away.
So how much information can you withold? As much as you want.
How much service can they withold if you do? As much as they want.
Your rights don't override theirs.
If they were a monopoly, the rules would change; but "the only place I can find Captain Harlock on letterboxed DVD" doesn't qualify as a monopoly.
Bottom line; don't do business with anybody whom you feel has unreasonable requirements, and send them a polite letter detailing why you think they are unreasonable. Other than that, quit yer bitchin'.
--
2) there is a way to ask an NFS server for its export list: showmount -e hostname
That's a bad thing. You should never give up information; if somebody doesn't know what share they want to connect to, they shouldn't be trying to connect.
I wonder if there's a way to shut that off.
--
How so? Exactly what is wrong with a system that will show NFS and SMB shares in your local network requiring '0' effort from the user?
Because there's two ways to do it:
1) Implement a protocol whereby everybody broadcasts their information all the time (the Microsoft solution).
2) Perform IP-scanning discovery all the time.
Either way, you're talking about massive BS traffic on your network; which is a problem on Microsoft LANs.
We don't want to implement that problem any more than we have to.
Also, NFS doesn't have a mechanism for saying "show me all your shares". That would be a security problem, like it is on Microsoft LANs.
Network Neighborhood is a performance and security disaster, and the best thing to do if you have a network is disable it and browsing as much as possible.
It's fine for 6-station office workgroups, but it's a freakin' disaster in an Enterprise.
--
1. "Network Neighborhood" : It should feel like the MS version too.
3. "Stability, Stability and Stability" : So these people have a reputation to work on.
These are probably incompatible. Network Neighborhood is IMHO one of the top 3 things wrong with Windows.
--
I disagree. I believe everyone should do what I did when they banned perfectly legal sales of firearms:
Demand that they delete your account and remove you from all mailing lists.
Do it via an email to their support address, so that if they don't delete you, you can give their support department negative feedback when they follow up (which they do).
Then find another place to do your business.
--
Bill Joy does have a partial point. Most of the programs recognized as "kick ass" in our business got that reputation after being mostly written by a single person. C.F. sendmail and bind.
.1% is the best of the best.
Most of the exceptions are rigidly controlled by a single person, and have wildly-varying parts. C.F. Linux, FreeBSD.
Are there exceptions? Of course. But look closely before you call something an exception; a lot of it started with a single-person core, and has added cruft from there.
However, all of this misses a vital point; it doesn't matter if 99.9% of the eyes looking at a given program are incompetent eyes, if that remaining
There are people at RSA who use PGP. Bruce Schneier uses PGP. Lots of folks who are good at writing crypto use PGP.
They see the bugs. They don't see them all; if they did, they'd have been fixed long ago.
Meanwhile, PGP is still better than most of the alternatives. That's *BECAUSE* it's open, not in spite of it being open.
Open Source benefits me even if I never look at the code, because if PGP had been written by, say, RSA, people like Bruce Schneier would never have been able to look at the code either.
The advantage of Open Source is that those few really good people can look at it, even if they work for different companies.
Unless, of course, the lawyers screw it all up by demanding employees not look at outside code.
--
If notification of the impending vote is posted on the back of a filing cabinet in the third sub-basement of an abandoned warehouse in Toadsuck, Arkansas, nobody "chose" not to vote.
:-)
This was a major change with vast implications to everyone in this country, and it was quietly worked out where only people already engaged in the process would even know about it.
Yes, public hearings were held; and after they'd been held, they were publicized in what amounts to "nyah nyah, missed 'em missed 'em now you gotta kiss 'em".
I'm not foreign to the political process; one U.S. Senator voted correctly on encryption issues because I patiently explained them to him while we were waiting for his plane to arrive.
I didn't hear anything about this, and I don't recall any of the geek news sites mentioning it until after the fact, much less the "real" news sites.
Mr. Dickinson is aware of the hidden nature of this discussion (his remarks in the article make that readily apparent) and his remarks also seem to indicate that he doesn't feel that's at all a bad thing, that he basically sees the fact that Open Source is a grass-roots movement and thus doesn't have unlimited funding is a failing of the movement and should rightly result in the movement having no voice in a process that he vigorously defends as being by the lawyers, of the lawyers, and for the lawyers.
His position seems to be that if you don't like the system, you should hire a lawyer to lobby for fixing it.
He states that people writing programs should always hire an attorney first to make sure they're not stepping on some obscure patent on some obvious process, directly equating the alternative with "performing surgery on yourself". That's not my impression, it's a quote. See page 4, about halfway down.
So basically, he should be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
That is, assuming pulling the trigger doesn't violate Amazon's one-click patent.
--
Mr. Dickinson's argument seems to be:
If you didn't catch it when it was being maneuvered in back rooms, I don't care if it's right or not, tough shit, you should have been richer.
Mr. Dickinson, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution, and I hope you need help with your system from a clueful hacker some day.
--
I think the point he's trying to make is, they can ALREADY pinpoint you within 25 yards, what difference does it make if they can do so within 5 yards?
Unless they're targetting you with machine guns, it doesn't make any more difference.
So why would we think advertising will increase at any greater rate?
--
If exchanging a kernel is such a dang-blasted important task for any Linux user to know how to do, why is it so complicated?
I think you're operating from a faulty precept here; who says it's important for any user to know how to do this?
Any user who *DOESN'T* know how to swap a kernel should be using a distribution such as Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera etc. where it IS easy to swap a kernel.
--
Read what I said again; did I say "need", or did I say what we *DO*?
Sun Cluster certainly exists. Legato HA+ does a booming business.
There are reasons for that; but since you seem to think you're the expert, I'll leave their discovery as an exercise for your.
--
I'd still like to see us colonize the moon by the end of this century
Yes, that's pretty unlikely, since this century ends in just over 7 months.
--
The consultant says Linux is "shooting itself in the foot" for not supporting failover?
I've got news for your consultant; Solaris folks buy a third-party product when they want failover capability, such as Legato (formerly Qualix) HA+.
Is Sun shooting themselves in the foot, too?
Third-party products are available for Linux, just like they are for Solaris etc. Buy them if you need them.
--
It's been said before, but evidently it needs to be said again:
When you quote verbatim a massive portion of the contents of a linked page, without any meaningful commentary included, it is not "Informative", it's "Redundant".
This shouldn't be moderated to +5, it should be 0 or lower.
--
Do we have to go through this again?
.fr domain at your router, and be done with it.
.com etc. domains that are physically located in France, not to mention folks dialing long distance or using VPNs.
Fine; Yahoo, block all access to the
Refuse to take any action beyond that, because it is not even theoretically possible to track
--
A friend of mine, a very very good friend blow ALL his fingertips of in an accident several years ago and he don't have any fingertips left and I don't think he is alone, so whay should he do if fingerprints become the only solution? Fingerprints IS a great and easy way to identify people if they have fingers, but do the people behind theese devices think about a solution for people who can't use fingerprint devices?
What does somebody with no hands do now in a world of signatures?
It's an inconvenience not having a part of your body. The world can't be completely stopped to meet the needs of the most-handicapped individual, however.
Accomodations will have to be made, just like they're made now.
--
I find it quite ironic that in the middle of a diatribe that spends a lot of time complaining about Richard Stallman going off on moral tangents, Mr. Meyer finds time to dismiss my 2nd Amendment rights as "lunatic ravings", and further manages to do so based on deliberate failure to research the historical facts; the same crime of which he accuses Stallman et. al.
Mr. Meyer, I quit reading your article at that point. I have no interest in further hearing what you have to say. Rather ironic that this occured within a few paragraphs of your complaint against Stallman having the same effect on a software executive, no?
--
How do you know the request is baseless under the local law?!
Because the request was to remove software that wasn't even there.
The guy posted an application to remove Cascading Style Sheets from html code. The MPAA asked them to remove an application for decoding DVDs.
--