Those put out of work by robots will go on welfare, or similar wealth redistribution systems. They will have cable TV, high speed internet, be able to afford 10 times their daily dietary needs. The drug industry will rise up to the challenge and soon each man, woman, and child will have three drug prescriptions each. And two cars per household.
And they will do better good for the economy sitting at home all day unemployed spending the redistributed wealth of the employed than they would by being in the job market.
We will have reached the apex of civilization, where capitalism will be so close to accomplishing its goal. An economy of plenty where almost no one has to work. We'll spend our days high as a kite, fucking like rabbits, and being entertained by moving images and sounds with a push of a button.
...and Windows XP Home Edition didn't see the light of day.
A KNOPPIX CD was in the laptop on its first boot, the BIOS was set to boot the CD-ROM directly. The first thing KNOPPIX was used to do was write zeroes over the entire hard disk. Then Linux was installed.
The EULA happens to be on one of the included CD-ROMs. It says if we don't agree to the Windows XP Home Edition license, Microsoft owes us money by way of Dell.
Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would lower for Linux than Windows?
Anyone can write a worm that leverages a security hole in a default service of a default Red Hat Linux install. Or Windows XP Home Edition.
However, it takes considerably more skill to be able to write a worm that can target vulnerable services across multiple distributions of Linux, multiple versions of each distribution, etc.
As long as Linux evilware continues to exploit C program unchecked boundaries, a single universal worm that can effective exploit every potentially vulnerable Linux system remains highly unlikely.
OK this is great news. One weapon that works wonders against spammers is by making them known. The closer you can get to making a spammer walk around his/her neighborhood with the word "SPAMMER" on their foreheads, the better the results.
Eventually, all of these individuals will stop after they meet the fed up people who will threaten bodily harm or worse because of spam.
The world becomes spam free. Being a spammer is just too dangerous. That is, too dangerous for anyone but the mob.
Were they too dumbfounded to realize that the snippets of code were describing a very basic way of implementing malloc(), repeated in text books, by instructors, and appears in possibly millions of different software packages with similar comments and a similar algorithm used? If I were there I would have heckled them and walked out.
The code could have easily come from a text book, and by the other comments here, it appears to have come directly from ancient UNIX. Which is no suprise, because this is one of the few algorithms that's generalized enough that it could be transplanted from ancient UNIX and still be relevant today.
As I hear though:
The code is printed in Lion's Commentary on UNIX, 6th Edition. For much of its life this book used to be illegal, until in the mid-90s it was officially blessed by SCO, the current copyright holders of ancient UNIX, to be freely distributable. If this is the class of the line-by-line copied code, their case is ZERO.
The "offending code" appears in Linux v2.4, but is gone from Linux v2.6. It's not necessarily the best algorithm in all cases (as you might learn in a compsci class), probably it was just temporary and got the job done until something better came along.
The code itself appears in an earlier incarnation of BSD, but is no longer existant today. Probably removed for similar reasons.
I'd say SCO has at best demonstrated massive incompetence, and at worse committed outright fraud.
The damage done to Linux's perception has been significant though. Every single industry talking head will also say "copyright infringement lawsuit" whenever they say Linux, now. To people considering adoption who don't know anything about the story, this is a big deal.
If it weren't for this, I doubt Red Hat would have even gotten involved.
One of the arguments I've always heard incorrectly used to promote Gentoo is that your system will BE faster because you've built everything from source with optimizations enabled.
I think this is largely BS.
In modern computing environments, the system bottleneck is not commonly the CPU. Most workstations and many servers, as they're used today, simply spend all of their time waiting for something interesting to happen. Something interesting usually means waiting for the user to push a button, waiting for the disk to send a chunk of data back, waiting for some packet to take a trip back from over the network. More MIPS and nothing else simply doesn't make a difference for the common workload.
This doesn't mean that there aren't cases where a system will spend a lot of time burning on the CPU. But these cases are often identified by their developers and are addressed accordingly, in a variety of ways. The developer may choose to employ a more complex but faster algorithm, offload it to specialized hardware, rewrite in a lower level language, etc.
If the package you're installing doesn't have compiler optimizations already set in the Makefile, there's probably a reason for it.
Therefore, blindly taking each package and running them through gcc -fomit-frame-pointer -O8 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 blah blah is basically system admin masturbation.
I like Gentoo, I'm running it right now, but I don't use the optimizations argument.
Conceptually neat, but it sounds like bullshit
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
I wanted to get excited about BTO, Inc., but the whole story reeks of bullshit.
Commoditizing the PC means lower prices and more features, but it also leads to increased complexity, long-term backwards compliance (future hinderance), and more stability issues.
I would hate to see cars take on all of these traits.
I'm no expert on cars, but I think the fact that my car has all of these custom components built specifically to achieve its unique look and performance goals are a plus, even if they do fatten the manufacturer's pockets every time I need a replacement.
And what's the deal with their CIO comparing Linux(AMP?) to Microsoft.NET? He must be some king moron if this is the kind of question he's grappling with when the article is talking about the manufacturer parts brokering system they're going to have to build. I wonder if (hope?) he's just trying to put on a show for the PHBs who keep pushing Microsoft.
The real reason I posed the original question is because I heard Bruce Perens was giving a talk once, and he had a Debian machine set up, and he ended up having to stop the talk for a good 10 minutes while he futzed around with dselect trying to get it do what he wanted it do to.
Finally he screams out of frustration. He wrote the damned thing and even he couldn't understand what was going wrong.
The entire story is hearsay and could be a lie, but I still think it's a valid question.;)
Worries about open source being profitable forget that open source lasted plenty long without profitability.
Open source and business have gone hand-in-hand from the start. What's different today is that you have a few companies trying to turn it into a shrinkwrap product.
Whether those endeavors succeed or fail is irrelevant to open source in itself.
...for as long as it's cheaper to employ human labor than machines.
In the U.S., even with unions, the bar is set pretty low. Those people will have their jobs for some time.
In European countries however, where employers may find themselves paying a worker's pension, 100% of their salary in taxes, and paying their salary even if there's no work for them (or going out of business and having the government pick up the tab), the drive to mechanize is much stronger.
You are finding entire factories in Europe that are 100% automated compared to their U.S. counterparts which are still operated by people. Ironically, socialism has become the greatest threat to employment.
And (european) governments are beginning to see this, and are responding by relaxing these so called social programs.
European companies are the ones driving information technology development in their U.S. subsidiaries. Especially ironic given that the U.S. is supposed to be the technology capital of the world.
The submitter certainly will feel proud of their achievement, and we've all been at the point where we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.
Honestly, don't people think about the things they work on? Is life just a paycheck and fuck whatever someone does with my work? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that potentially hundreds of thousands of people will die using a machine I proudly built and put into the hands of one of the most prolific users of war machinery in the world.
One popular way to rationalize the enablement of murder is by turning things into blacks and whites. This will only be used on the "bad guys", the "evil men" who want to do terrible things to us. These are word games. A vital prerequisite to committing murder is reducing issues to black and white.
Maybe you wash your hands of the moral responsibility by saying "I just built it, it's not my fault if the buyer does something horrible with it". Hey, if that's what it takes to sleep at night, I can't fault you. I'd probably say that too.
To the victims of this machine, however, all of these rationalizations are irrelevant. You worked to cause this effect, whether you supported it, cared about it, whatever. Your name is on it.
Being proud of it speaks volumes about your character.
The statistical validity of these tests has been suspect since even the first one which said the Linux TCP/IP stack was of higher quality. See the previous Slashdot article.
They would not identify which software lost in the last test, so it's hard for anyone to take a defensive position in favor of the software which open source was allegedly better quality. No one could have stepped up to call the test BS if they didn't know what it was being compared to. What makes this case different is that they criticised Apache, something we're all familar with.
The test may be more interesting if applied to Apache 1. As someone who has had to migrate a mod_perl site from Apache 1 to Apache 2, I can tell you that Apache 2 is a very new beast, and it doesn't shock me at all that there are dozens of bugs that still need to be shaken out. Fewer users are running Apache 2 in a production environment as well, since it's considered a development branch. See less eyeballs rule.
Suspects are instrumental in convicting themselves using the very information they volunteer to the police. An almost as well time honored tradition as good cop bad cop is lying. Police lie all the time to pressure suspects into convictions: "we have witnesses who saw you do it", "your partner is ratting you out right this second", "you're only making this harder by not cooperating".
Don't just take my word for it--watch NYPD Blue. These aren't the corrupt cops. These are all cops (with admittedly better makeup and prettier precincts). What they do is perfectly legal.
If the police are speaking to you, it means they do not currently have the evidence they need to convict you. Otherwise they wouldn't even waste their time. Under no circumstances should you talk to them without a lawyer by your side.
There is a reason for that, as well. Dell and HP have a CONTRACT with Microsoft, that lets them purchase the Windows licenses that they sell on their PC's for much, MUCH cheaper than you would purchase it for retail ($30-60, generally). This is the reason that you are able to go and purchase these computers, with all software, for not much more than a retail copy of Windows.
The terms of such a contract are a tightly kept secret. As is the Windows discount each OEM receives. Larger OEMs have less of an ability to negotiate the price since they depend more on Windows. Dell may pay as much as $100 per license whereas e-machines only pays $34.
Additionally, Microsoft used to force PC vendors to pay for a license for every PC they sold, whether it included Windows or not. The FTC, in part of a plan to mitigate this abuse, got Microsoft to consent to allowing end buyers to refund Windows after purchasing for the full cost (see the top of the EULA). Microsoft/OEM deny this clause has any legal force and refuse to honor it.
The Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition End User License Agreement, which came with my laptop, specifically states that I may return it for a refund, but Microsoft/Dell refuse to honor this clause.
Microsoft just gave up a big chunk of IE marketshare. With some sites, especially ones that appeal to artistic/creative types, they've basically reduced their marketshare to 50%.
Now, if 50% of your users run IE, and the other 50% run an amalgamation of Mozilla, Konqueror or Safari, Opera, and *, this will force developers to consider web standards.
Businesses may have been able to justify ignoring 5% of their market, but you can't ignore 50%.
Assuming that this isn't just a Microsoft plot to clobber Apple into accepting something, this is fantastic news indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Those put out of work by robots will go on welfare, or similar wealth redistribution systems. They will have cable TV, high speed internet, be able to afford 10 times their daily dietary needs. The drug industry will rise up to the challenge and soon each man, woman, and child will have three drug prescriptions each. And two cars per household.
And they will do better good for the economy sitting at home all day unemployed spending the redistributed wealth of the employed than they would by being in the job market.
We will have reached the apex of civilization, where capitalism will be so close to accomplishing its goal. An economy of plenty where almost no one has to work. We'll spend our days high as a kite, fucking like rabbits, and being entertained by moving images and sounds with a push of a button.
I can't wait.
...and Windows XP Home Edition didn't see the light of day.
A KNOPPIX CD was in the laptop on its first boot, the BIOS was set to boot the CD-ROM directly. The first thing KNOPPIX was used to do was write zeroes over the entire hard disk. Then Linux was installed.
The EULA happens to be on one of the included CD-ROMs. It says if we don't agree to the Windows XP Home Edition license, Microsoft owes us money by way of Dell.
Dell refuses to honor this agreement.
Some shit is going to go down.
And no, there was no paper EULA provided.
Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would lower for Linux than Windows?
Anyone can write a worm that leverages a security hole in a default service of a default Red Hat Linux install. Or Windows XP Home Edition.
However, it takes considerably more skill to be able to write a worm that can target vulnerable services across multiple distributions of Linux, multiple versions of each distribution, etc.
As long as Linux evilware continues to exploit C program unchecked boundaries, a single universal worm that can effective exploit every potentially vulnerable Linux system remains highly unlikely.
OK this is great news. One weapon that works wonders against spammers is by making them known. The closer you can get to making a spammer walk around his/her neighborhood with the word "SPAMMER" on their foreheads, the better the results.
Eventually, all of these individuals will stop after they meet the fed up people who will threaten bodily harm or worse because of spam.
The world becomes spam free. Being a spammer is just too dangerous. That is, too dangerous for anyone but the mob.
Then we'll be up shit creek.
Were they too dumbfounded to realize that the snippets of code were describing a very basic way of implementing malloc(), repeated in text books, by instructors, and appears in possibly millions of different software packages with similar comments and a similar algorithm used? If I were there I would have heckled them and walked out.
The code could have easily come from a text book, and by the other comments here, it appears to have come directly from ancient UNIX. Which is no suprise, because this is one of the few algorithms that's generalized enough that it could be transplanted from ancient UNIX and still be relevant today.
As I hear though:
The code is printed in Lion's Commentary on UNIX, 6th Edition. For much of its life this book used to be illegal, until in the mid-90s it was officially blessed by SCO, the current copyright holders of ancient UNIX, to be freely distributable. If this is the class of the line-by-line copied code, their case is ZERO.
The "offending code" appears in Linux v2.4, but is gone from Linux v2.6. It's not necessarily the best algorithm in all cases (as you might learn in a compsci class), probably it was just temporary and got the job done until something better came along.
The code itself appears in an earlier incarnation of BSD, but is no longer existant today. Probably removed for similar reasons.
I'd say SCO has at best demonstrated massive incompetence, and at worse committed outright fraud.
There's plenty of commercial support available for Debian. Why, just look at the consultants list.
WOW!
None of these claims have any merit at all.
Two identical pieces of code can have a variety of explanations:
Until they disclose more information, it can be total BS. The reviewers could even be outright lying.
These kind of claims are called "unsubstantiated claims".
The technical damage is zero.
The damage done to Linux's perception has been significant though. Every single industry talking head will also say "copyright infringement lawsuit" whenever they say Linux, now. To people considering adoption who don't know anything about the story, this is a big deal.
If it weren't for this, I doubt Red Hat would have even gotten involved.
One of the arguments I've always heard incorrectly used to promote Gentoo is that your system will BE faster because you've built everything from source with optimizations enabled.
I think this is largely BS.
In modern computing environments, the system bottleneck is not commonly the CPU. Most workstations and many servers, as they're used today, simply spend all of their time waiting for something interesting to happen. Something interesting usually means waiting for the user to push a button, waiting for the disk to send a chunk of data back, waiting for some packet to take a trip back from over the network. More MIPS and nothing else simply doesn't make a difference for the common workload.
This doesn't mean that there aren't cases where a system will spend a lot of time burning on the CPU. But these cases are often identified by their developers and are addressed accordingly, in a variety of ways. The developer may choose to employ a more complex but faster algorithm, offload it to specialized hardware, rewrite in a lower level language, etc.
If the package you're installing doesn't have compiler optimizations already set in the Makefile, there's probably a reason for it.
Therefore, blindly taking each package and running them through gcc -fomit-frame-pointer -O8 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 blah blah is basically system admin masturbation.
I like Gentoo, I'm running it right now, but I don't use the optimizations argument.
I wanted to get excited about BTO, Inc., but the whole story reeks of bullshit.
Commoditizing the PC means lower prices and more features, but it also leads to increased complexity, long-term backwards compliance (future hinderance), and more stability issues.
I would hate to see cars take on all of these traits.
I'm no expert on cars, but I think the fact that my car has all of these custom components built specifically to achieve its unique look and performance goals are a plus, even if they do fatten the manufacturer's pockets every time I need a replacement.
And what's the deal with their CIO comparing Linux(AMP?) to Microsoft.NET? He must be some king moron if this is the kind of question he's grappling with when the article is talking about the manufacturer parts brokering system they're going to have to build. I wonder if (hope?) he's just trying to put on a show for the PHBs who keep pushing Microsoft.
The real reason I posed the original question is because I heard Bruce Perens was giving a talk once, and he had a Debian machine set up, and he ended up having to stop the talk for a good 10 minutes while he futzed around with dselect trying to get it do what he wanted it do to.
Finally he screams out of frustration. He wrote the damned thing and even he couldn't understand what was going wrong.
The entire story is hearsay and could be a lie, but I still think it's a valid question. ;)
Seriously. Because we can't. That thing's demented.
Worries about open source being profitable forget that open source lasted plenty long without profitability.
Open source and business have gone hand-in-hand from the start. What's different today is that you have a few companies trying to turn it into a shrinkwrap product.
Whether those endeavors succeed or fail is irrelevant to open source in itself.
...for as long as it's cheaper to employ human labor than machines.
In the U.S., even with unions, the bar is set pretty low. Those people will have their jobs for some time.
In European countries however, where employers may find themselves paying a worker's pension, 100% of their salary in taxes, and paying their salary even if there's no work for them (or going out of business and having the government pick up the tab), the drive to mechanize is much stronger.
You are finding entire factories in Europe that are 100% automated compared to their U.S. counterparts which are still operated by people. Ironically, socialism has become the greatest threat to employment.
And (european) governments are beginning to see this, and are responding by relaxing these so called social programs.
European companies are the ones driving information technology development in their U.S. subsidiaries. Especially ironic given that the U.S. is supposed to be the technology capital of the world.
The submitter certainly will feel proud of their achievement, and we've all been at the point where we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.
Honestly, don't people think about the things they work on? Is life just a paycheck and fuck whatever someone does with my work? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that potentially hundreds of thousands of people will die using a machine I proudly built and put into the hands of one of the most prolific users of war machinery in the world.
One popular way to rationalize the enablement of murder is by turning things into blacks and whites. This will only be used on the "bad guys", the "evil men" who want to do terrible things to us. These are word games. A vital prerequisite to committing murder is reducing issues to black and white.
Maybe you wash your hands of the moral responsibility by saying "I just built it, it's not my fault if the buyer does something horrible with it". Hey, if that's what it takes to sleep at night, I can't fault you. I'd probably say that too.
To the victims of this machine, however, all of these rationalizations are irrelevant. You worked to cause this effect, whether you supported it, cared about it, whatever. Your name is on it.
Being proud of it speaks volumes about your character.
The statistical validity of these tests has been suspect since even the first one which said the Linux TCP/IP stack was of higher quality. See the previous Slashdot article.
They would not identify which software lost in the last test, so it's hard for anyone to take a defensive position in favor of the software which open source was allegedly better quality. No one could have stepped up to call the test BS if they didn't know what it was being compared to. What makes this case different is that they criticised Apache, something we're all familar with.
The test may be more interesting if applied to Apache 1. As someone who has had to migrate a mod_perl site from Apache 1 to Apache 2, I can tell you that Apache 2 is a very new beast, and it doesn't shock me at all that there are dozens of bugs that still need to be shaken out. Fewer users are running Apache 2 in a production environment as well, since it's considered a development branch. See less eyeballs rule.
Suspects are instrumental in convicting themselves using the very information they volunteer to the police. An almost as well time honored tradition as good cop bad cop is lying. Police lie all the time to pressure suspects into convictions: "we have witnesses who saw you do it", "your partner is ratting you out right this second", "you're only making this harder by not cooperating".
Don't just take my word for it--watch NYPD Blue. These aren't the corrupt cops. These are all cops (with admittedly better makeup and prettier precincts). What they do is perfectly legal.
If the police are speaking to you, it means they do not currently have the evidence they need to convict you. Otherwise they wouldn't even waste their time. Under no circumstances should you talk to them without a lawyer by your side.
There is a reason for that, as well. Dell and HP have a CONTRACT with Microsoft, that lets them purchase the Windows licenses that they sell on their PC's for much, MUCH cheaper than you would purchase it for retail ($30-60, generally). This is the reason that you are able to go and purchase these computers, with all software, for not much more than a retail copy of Windows.
The terms of such a contract are a tightly kept secret. As is the Windows discount each OEM receives. Larger OEMs have less of an ability to negotiate the price since they depend more on Windows. Dell may pay as much as $100 per license whereas e-machines only pays $34.
Additionally, Microsoft used to force PC vendors to pay for a license for every PC they sold, whether it included Windows or not. The FTC, in part of a plan to mitigate this abuse, got Microsoft to consent to allowing end buyers to refund Windows after purchasing for the full cost (see the top of the EULA). Microsoft/OEM deny this clause has any legal force and refuse to honor it.
The Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition End User License Agreement, which came with my laptop, specifically states that I may return it for a refund, but Microsoft/Dell refuse to honor this clause.
A lot must have changed at the ESRB in the last seven months since both these men wanted congressional hearings on video game ratings.
Maybe they realized that a Democrat who acts like a Republican is going to lose to a Republican.
Hopefully Microsoft will come to the table and negotiate and work things out for everyone's best interest. Otherwise, they'll get what they asked for.
Of course Microsoft's going to ignore them, but at least they can claim they tried.
Maybe I'm just dense.
Microsoft just gave up a big chunk of IE marketshare. With some sites, especially ones that appeal to artistic/creative types, they've basically reduced their marketshare to 50%.
Now, if 50% of your users run IE, and the other 50% run an amalgamation of Mozilla, Konqueror or Safari, Opera, and *, this will force developers to consider web standards.
Businesses may have been able to justify ignoring 5% of their market, but you can't ignore 50%.
Assuming that this isn't just a Microsoft plot to clobber Apple into accepting something, this is fantastic news indeed.