I myself make a very decent living writing software which runs on non-Microsoft systems. These systems are developed for our clients, and the clients sell services based on these systems to consumers.
We as the developers were not forced to use Microsoft products, our clients were not forced to use Microsoft products, and their customers are not forced to use Microsoft products. Money changed hands many times and Microsoft's involvement in any of it is entirly incidental. A majority of the users run Windows, but a sizable chunk runs on MacOS, and an impressive (but pretty small) amount even use UNIX systems.
I feel we saved considerable time (and money) ignoring Microsoft's products. To me, Microsoft makes it fairly easy for people to use a computer, but their products are certainly not as appealing to us macho developers. In any case, what exactly is the problem here that regulating Microsoft will solve?
Someone please explain to me what monopoly Microsoft is using to force all of these poor industry hardware vendors to accept these terms?
Yes, those very same poor hardware vendors who adopted CSS.
So, you're telling me that Microsoft could fuck industry hardware vendors through restrictive licenses and cause them to go out of business?
Or, you're telling me that the entertainment industry could fuck all of their customers over, thereby angering them and effectively signing their chapter 11 filings?
If so, what's the problem? And if not, uhm.. what's the problem?
And last I checked, video entertainment still isn't an inalienable right. Write your elected officials!
I recently configured Linux on a Sony
cute Picturebook. One of the questions the owner asked me was if there was any easy way to allow the user access his Windows shares through the GUI. I just flat out said "I'm not familar with doing that. Can't help you." and left it at that.
I had heard that Corel made a tool that could do this, but zero experience with it. Or if it was even available anymore.
He writes me the next day and apparantly he had read a few pages on smbmount and just put the entries into fstab and all was well.
Duh. They wouldn't need to map shares at random. Just his personal files once. It just never dawned on me. *smack forehead*
Will some sites deploy it? Sure. But any vendor that says "We only accept payment via MS Wallet" is committing suicide. As much as they wish you'd pay by credit card, even checks are accepted by most online businesses. No one is going to turn away money.
It will only be useful if it's super convenient- and practically everyone who buys stuff over the internet has accounts at all of the places they buy from consistently, making check-out a snap.
But on the other hand...
People routinely make convenience/security tradeoffs. If we were having this discussion 20 years ago credit cards would be pure evil to us. Having your credit card number stolen nowdays is an inconvenience rather than life ruining. And most of us have come to accept the fact that law enforcement can track our iron dildo purchases from the comfort of their desks if they wanted to.
In the absolute worst case most sites will simply feature a "Use my passport account" link above the "Create an account" link.
Thank god the people that write this kind of code are completely incapable of writing evil IDE command sequences that can fry hard drive firmware.
Imagine the destruction you could cause if after every infection and replication to everyone in your address book, it wrecked your hard drive and required it to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair?
Hmm, interesting sales pitch you could offer to Maxtor, Seagate, etc if you want to make a quick buck at the expense of the global economy. (unless the 90-day warranty covers "act of hacker").
While you were trying to be cooperative, and who doesn't want to be cooperative when law enforcement is present and itching to do you in, you shouldn't have consented to a search.
There's a big misconception that a suspect who insists on a search warrant is being uncooperative.
The only thing a search warrant means is that they put their thought processes, actions, and methods in writing. You don't have to be a lawyer to know that this is important. It's as essential as getting a contract when working for a client- only in this case you have much more at stake.
IANAL: It may be a different story entirely when the Secret Service is involved.
I can't wait for the next stupid bubble-gum-and-badly-choreographed pop sensation to be 100% CG. Then I simply break into the systems used to produce him/her/them and voila, dead pop icon.
And I don't even get prosecuted for murder. What could be better?
Ahh, nothing like the bastion of hardline journalism that is ZDNet...
According to this article on ZD Net , more and more companies born from open source projects are beginning to move towards closed source products as a source of revenue. Version 5 of GFS will be closed source, and even SuSE's director of sales Holger Dyroff has a quote that seems to disparage the service model of revenue.
And plenty of companies born from closed source software are beginning to move towards open source. What a world!
Any business model that sells open source software alone is flawed. If open source companies can't manage to make money, that's their problem. Business isn't easy, people.
Why doesn't ZDNet trumpet the demise of closed source? You can find hundreds of companies that are going out of business right now that sell nothing but proprietary software.
Open source is doing better than ever. And the companies that claim to be "it" are only a small percentage of the business generated around open source in general.
Re:Not to sound like an asshole, but...
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 2
If you need to become a police state to enforce the law, then the law is unjust.
...and...
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
A few cliches aren't grounds for justifying war alone, but while we take "inalienable rights" for granted, the idea is very new and strange to undeveloped countries.
What got us into this mess was that we used Afghanistan as a tool against the Soviet Union and then abandoned it once they were defeated. I think we have a moral responsibility to fix what we broke, at the very least.
Re:Wow... CompUSA Can Really Have an X-Box Fest No
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2
That is kind of peculiar. The local Software Etc. has their PS2 demo machines turned off also.
It could very well be Microsoft demanding this. But perhaps store owners are just trying to get people to concentrate on X-Box products for the moment.
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2
It was also the government that mandated that individuals are not allowed to carry guns onto planes, or anywhere else for that matter. Isn't it kind of ridiculous that all they needed was boxcutters to crash 4 planes and cause about 5000 deaths?
If you're not interested in protecting yourself, why do you think someone paid $15/hour (such as a police officer) gives a damn?
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2
I'd rather have the option to pay a reputable consumer reporting company rather than being forced to pay an unmotivated inefficient government agency that I hope has my best interests in mind.
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2
He's not advocating zero government, he's advocating that the government stop intefering with the free market. That companies that need bailouts instead deserve to go out of business.
Also, responding to some of your claims..
Who would buy cars from a company with a reputation for producing unsafe cars? Or drugs from a company that consistently killed people dead? If you don't trust a company, you don't buy from them. And if the company does you wrong, you punish them with civil or criminal justice.
If someone drops industrial waste on your property, wouldn't you sue the pants off of them? Pollution becomes a problem only when it's public property that is being polluted. The saying goes that something that is owned by everyone is cared for by no one.
Under the system we have now, companies submit their products to government agencies that state "minimum standards". If companies meet minimum standards, they often have no incentive to do better if it means they get the stamp of approval. If it becomes cheaper to bribe the inspector rather than to improve the product, what do you think some people will do?
The only thing that regulatory bodies do is provide a false sense of security. Firestone tires still killed, for example. Drugs approved by the FDA have still caused deaths, and drugs that are sleepwalking their way through FDA approval are causing even more death and discomfort.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what an unregulated free market economy means. This site is very informative if you're interested in seeing the side of the story from its supporters (and it's not the Republicans).
Globalism is allowing an independent entity to control or influence governments. They're usually corporations, but always an entity with vast buying power. Influencing or controlling governments gives these entities two very important capabilities.
The ability to dishonor contracts, commit fraud, and otherwise violate the law without fear of repurcusion.
Control of government resources, including by not limited to their police and military, for their own ends.
Many cite globalism as a flaw in capitalism. I disagree. Destructive people exist in all walks of life, in both corporations and in government. You could blame capitalism for this, but you could also blame the government that sacrifices its principles after some key officials have been bribed. Do you blame Chiquita banana for its slave labor camps, or do you blame the governments that
direct its soldiers to force people to work for Chiquita banana in exchange for bribes?
Capitalism abhors globalism as it disrupts market forces and rewards undeserving
businesses, not to mention infringes on the essential rights of individuals. Globalism boils down to petty bribery, but it is committed on a level far above what law enforcement can address.
I live in Queens, about 8-9 miles from the crash site. As opposed to the 14-15 miles from the WTC.
I just got an Iguana, and was playing with him all morning. We turned the TV on at around noon to see the news. I soaked it in for about 20 minutes, went "meh" and turned it off. People on IRC across the country were discussing it for hours.
It's interesting that this didn't even rile me, what with all of the other things I've had happen to me the past few months. I suppose in a few weeks, I'll think about all of the people that died and start crying.
But I wouldn't expect anything less from the inferior life forms passing for human that Europe spawned. Man are those people stupid. And they smell awful. Don't they believe in baths?
I never used to realize how constrained working with the desktop metaphor felt until I played with vtwm.
The big distinguishing feature of vtwm is how it implements virtual desktops. Unlike most virtual desktops in other UNIX window managers, this one can be of arbitrary size and you can scroll through it freely, instead of one chunk at a time.
I have vtwm set up so that the top 90% of the screen or so can be the "focused" area of the desktop, and the bottom 10% represents the entire virtual desktop, with boxes that represent where your windows are.
A blue box on the virtual desktop bar represents what the screen is currently focused on. You can either slide the blue box over to other windows, or pick windows up and move them into view.
You never feel cramped, and things like iconification are obviated. Simply move to a different part of the desktop if you need space. Also comes in very handy if you're at work and looking at porn and the boss comes by. Just click on the portion of the desktop that contains all of your busywork.
Here's a screenshot [if you see nothing but pitch black, scroll to the bottom right] to better illustrate my setup. The screen is right-center, and the gimp's toolbar is off further to the right off screen which is how I took the screenshot.
It's amazing how restricted I feel sitting at a windows box now, or with a window manager that doesn't support this. It's also great if you want to show how much of a badass you are, since with no windows open, the screen is entirely black, except for a thin white horizontal line at the bottom and a blue box beneath it.
Linux will dominate the world with or without displacing existing Microsoft systems. Simply put, the potential future installed base of information systems is probably less than a percent of a percent today.
Microsoft will certainly be involved in many of the future ones, but Linux offers so many more advantages that its use will far exceed any benefits to be found in a Microsoft offering.
Won't win the desktop? Who cares! Why try to beat the McDonalds of the computing industry when there are plenty of kosher delis, sushi bars, trattorias, cafes, gyro places, hot dog stands, russian tea rooms, and so many other styles and qualities of restaurants that haven't been built yet?
Lets sell an alternative to Windows, but using open source! This will erode Windows marketshare and open source companies will make
billions!
What other possible software market is there besides that, you ask? Look up job offers for programmers. 95% of them have nothing to do with working on a commercial software product. Most programmers develop custom systems. These are seldom sold on store shelves and never exist outside of the environment they're created in.
It just so happens open source software and custom developed systems go hand-in-hand. This is the market the open source business model targets. This market alone is far larger than the commercial software market.
This is exactly what IBM's core business is involved with, and exactly why they're so behind open source.
You're either against.NET and pro SUNW, or you're with the terrorists.
Did anyone expect Sun to say anything other than "Not only is.NET technically inferior to our offering, but it's bad for US society". The only reason that they're not saying ".NET will cause the death of baby seals worldwide" is because you can prove that baby seals worldwide aren't dying.
In Linux, this does not happen. Data loaded from disk often gets flushed back out because Linux doesn't restrict the amount of RAM that write operations may use. If you have 1GB and a process suddenly writes 1GB to 4GB of data, almost everything else will get swapped out. The non-dirty pages go first because they are cheaper (just steal them).
1. I never explicitly stated Linux! (hooray for ambiguity!) I thought I was actually hinting at a BSD.
2. The behavior you're describing is considered by practically everyone to be broken and is to be fixed (which >2.4.9 supposedly fix, but I haven't tried yet since I don't feel like applying ext3 patches)
3. I myself didn't notice the problem until someone told me about it. Which describes MY typical workload.:)
Way 1 -- Use a PCI card with 4GB of RAM on it as primary storage. At the end of the day, or week, or whatever, copy all of the data to more "permanent" storage. Like hard disks. This way a power loss (or battery failure) isn't too much of a nightmare.
The drawbacks are that you need special hardware and you could lose days of work.
Way 2 -- Cram your machine with as much RAM as possible. Which probably means 4GB. Configure your OS so that it uses about 95% of RAM as a buffer-cache.
Data will be loaded from disk initially on demand (which means slow startup) but will almost always stay memory resident thereafter. The OS will also commit dirty pages back to disk from time to time ensuring that you don't lose anything important.
This may be less doable with systems that insist on synchronous writes during file operations, but you can often disable these things if you want to take the risk.
The benefit of this approach is that you don't need special hardware and you're less likely to lose data than Way 1. Which basically means you can and have been experiencing this now.
If your system grinds disk consistently after several hours of use, it's a good indication that you should get more RAM considering how cheap it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I myself make a very decent living writing software which runs on non-Microsoft systems. These systems are developed for our clients, and the clients sell services based on these systems to consumers.
We as the developers were not forced to use Microsoft products, our clients were not forced to use Microsoft products, and their customers are not forced to use Microsoft products. Money changed hands many times and Microsoft's involvement in any of it is entirly incidental. A majority of the users run Windows, but a sizable chunk runs on MacOS, and an impressive (but pretty small) amount even use UNIX systems.
I feel we saved considerable time (and money) ignoring Microsoft's products. To me, Microsoft makes it fairly easy for people to use a computer, but their products are certainly not as appealing to us macho developers. In any case, what exactly is the problem here that regulating Microsoft will solve?
Someone please explain to me what monopoly Microsoft is using to force all of these poor industry hardware vendors to accept these terms? Yes, those very same poor hardware vendors who adopted CSS.
So, you're telling me that Microsoft could fuck industry hardware vendors through restrictive licenses and cause them to go out of business?
Or, you're telling me that the entertainment industry could fuck all of their customers over, thereby angering them and effectively signing their chapter 11 filings?
If so, what's the problem? And if not, uhm.. what's the problem?
And last I checked, video entertainment still isn't an inalienable right. Write your elected officials!
I recently configured Linux on a Sony cute Picturebook. One of the questions the owner asked me was if there was any easy way to allow the user access his Windows shares through the GUI. I just flat out said "I'm not familar with doing that. Can't help you." and left it at that.
I had heard that Corel made a tool that could do this, but zero experience with it. Or if it was even available anymore.
He writes me the next day and apparantly he had read a few pages on smbmount and just put the entries into fstab and all was well.
Duh. They wouldn't need to map shares at random. Just his personal files once. It just never dawned on me. *smack forehead*
Will some sites deploy it? Sure. But any vendor that says "We only accept payment via MS Wallet" is committing suicide. As much as they wish you'd pay by credit card, even checks are accepted by most online businesses. No one is going to turn away money.
It will only be useful if it's super convenient- and practically everyone who buys stuff over the internet has accounts at all of the places they buy from consistently, making check-out a snap.
But on the other hand...
People routinely make convenience/security tradeoffs. If we were having this discussion 20 years ago credit cards would be pure evil to us. Having your credit card number stolen nowdays is an inconvenience rather than life ruining. And most of us have come to accept the fact that law enforcement can track our iron dildo purchases from the comfort of their desks if they wanted to.
In the absolute worst case most sites will simply feature a "Use my passport account" link above the "Create an account" link.
My how the world turns.
Thank god the people that write this kind of code are completely incapable of writing evil IDE command sequences that can fry hard drive firmware.
Imagine the destruction you could cause if after every infection and replication to everyone in your address book, it wrecked your hard drive and required it to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair?
Hmm, interesting sales pitch you could offer to Maxtor, Seagate, etc if you want to make a quick buck at the expense of the global economy. (unless the 90-day warranty covers "act of hacker").
While you were trying to be cooperative, and who doesn't want to be cooperative when law enforcement is present and itching to do you in, you shouldn't have consented to a search.
There's a big misconception that a suspect who insists on a search warrant is being uncooperative.
The only thing a search warrant means is that they put their thought processes, actions, and methods in writing. You don't have to be a lawyer to know that this is important. It's as essential as getting a contract when working for a client- only in this case you have much more at stake.
IANAL: It may be a different story entirely when the Secret Service is involved.
I can't wait for the next stupid bubble-gum-and-badly-choreographed pop sensation to be 100% CG. Then I simply break into the systems used to produce him/her/them and voila, dead pop icon.
And I don't even get prosecuted for murder. What could be better?
Ahh, nothing like the bastion of hardline journalism that is ZDNet...
According to this article on ZD Net , more and more companies born from open source projects are beginning to move towards closed source products as a source of revenue. Version 5 of GFS will be closed source, and even SuSE's director of sales Holger Dyroff has a quote that seems to disparage the service model of revenue.
And plenty of companies born from closed source software are beginning to move towards open source. What a world!
Any business model that sells open source software alone is flawed. If open source companies can't manage to make money, that's their problem. Business isn't easy, people.
Why doesn't ZDNet trumpet the demise of closed source? You can find hundreds of companies that are going out of business right now that sell nothing but proprietary software.
Open source is doing better than ever. And the companies that claim to be "it" are only a small percentage of the business generated around open source in general.
If you need to become a police state to enforce the law, then the law is unjust.
...and...
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
A few cliches aren't grounds for justifying war alone, but while we take "inalienable rights" for granted, the idea is very new and strange to undeveloped countries.
What got us into this mess was that we used Afghanistan as a tool against the Soviet Union and then abandoned it once they were defeated. I think we have a moral responsibility to fix what we broke, at the very least.
That is kind of peculiar. The local Software Etc. has their PS2 demo machines turned off also.
It could very well be Microsoft demanding this. But perhaps store owners are just trying to get people to concentrate on X-Box products for the moment.
It was also the government that mandated that individuals are not allowed to carry guns onto planes, or anywhere else for that matter. Isn't it kind of ridiculous that all they needed was boxcutters to crash 4 planes and cause about 5000 deaths?
If you're not interested in protecting yourself, why do you think someone paid $15/hour (such as a police officer) gives a damn?
I'd rather have the option to pay a reputable consumer reporting company rather than being forced to pay an unmotivated inefficient government agency that I hope has my best interests in mind.
He's not advocating zero government, he's advocating that the government stop intefering with the free market. That companies that need bailouts instead deserve to go out of business.
Also, responding to some of your claims..
Who would buy cars from a company with a reputation for producing unsafe cars? Or drugs from a company that consistently killed people dead? If you don't trust a company, you don't buy from them. And if the company does you wrong, you punish them with civil or criminal justice.
If someone drops industrial waste on your property, wouldn't you sue the pants off of them? Pollution becomes a problem only when it's public property that is being polluted. The saying goes that something that is owned by everyone is cared for by no one.
Under the system we have now, companies submit their products to government agencies that state "minimum standards". If companies meet minimum standards, they often have no incentive to do better if it means they get the stamp of approval. If it becomes cheaper to bribe the inspector rather than to improve the product, what do you think some people will do?
The only thing that regulatory bodies do is provide a false sense of security. Firestone tires still killed, for example. Drugs approved by the FDA have still caused deaths, and drugs that are sleepwalking their way through FDA approval are causing even more death and discomfort.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what an unregulated free market economy means. This site is very informative if you're interested in seeing the side of the story from its supporters (and it's not the Republicans).
Globalism is allowing an independent entity to control or influence governments. They're usually corporations, but always an entity with vast buying power. Influencing or controlling governments gives these entities two very important capabilities.
Many cite globalism as a flaw in capitalism. I disagree. Destructive people exist in all walks of life, in both corporations and in government. You could blame capitalism for this, but you could also blame the government that sacrifices its principles after some key officials have been bribed. Do you blame Chiquita banana for its slave labor camps, or do you blame the governments that direct its soldiers to force people to work for Chiquita banana in exchange for bribes?
Capitalism abhors globalism as it disrupts market forces and rewards undeserving businesses, not to mention infringes on the essential rights of individuals. Globalism boils down to petty bribery, but it is committed on a level far above what law enforcement can address.
How did I do?
I live in Queens, about 8-9 miles from the crash site. As opposed to the 14-15 miles from the WTC.
I just got an Iguana, and was playing with him all morning. We turned the TV on at around noon to see the news. I soaked it in for about 20 minutes, went "meh" and turned it off. People on IRC across the country were discussing it for hours.
It's interesting that this didn't even rile me, what with all of the other things I've had happen to me the past few months. I suppose in a few weeks, I'll think about all of the people that died and start crying.
Terrorists winning? Only if apathy is their goal.
But I wouldn't expect anything less from the inferior life forms passing for human that Europe spawned. Man are those people stupid. And they smell awful. Don't they believe in baths?
That's actually really interesting. I wonder why it never caught on.
I never used to realize how constrained working with the desktop metaphor felt until I played with vtwm.
The big distinguishing feature of vtwm is how it implements virtual desktops. Unlike most virtual desktops in other UNIX window managers, this one can be of arbitrary size and you can scroll through it freely, instead of one chunk at a time.
I have vtwm set up so that the top 90% of the screen or so can be the "focused" area of the desktop, and the bottom 10% represents the entire virtual desktop, with boxes that represent where your windows are.
A blue box on the virtual desktop bar represents what the screen is currently focused on. You can either slide the blue box over to other windows, or pick windows up and move them into view.
You never feel cramped, and things like iconification are obviated. Simply move to a different part of the desktop if you need space. Also comes in very handy if you're at work and looking at porn and the boss comes by. Just click on the portion of the desktop that contains all of your busywork.
Here's a screenshot [if you see nothing but pitch black, scroll to the bottom right] to better illustrate my setup. The screen is right-center, and the gimp's toolbar is off further to the right off screen which is how I took the screenshot.
It's amazing how restricted I feel sitting at a windows box now, or with a window manager that doesn't support this. It's also great if you want to show how much of a badass you are, since with no windows open, the screen is entirely black, except for a thin white horizontal line at the bottom and a blue box beneath it.
Linux will dominate the world with or without displacing existing Microsoft systems. Simply put, the potential future installed base of information systems is probably less than a percent of a percent today.
Microsoft will certainly be involved in many of the future ones, but Linux offers so many more advantages that its use will far exceed any benefits to be found in a Microsoft offering.
Won't win the desktop? Who cares! Why try to beat the McDonalds of the computing industry when there are plenty of kosher delis, sushi bars, trattorias, cafes, gyro places, hot dog stands, russian tea rooms, and so many other styles and qualities of restaurants that haven't been built yet?
Unfortunately, the title "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" sounds a lot more prestigous than it really is.
I'm just making an analogy that computer illiterate people can better understand. MCSE doesn't mean much inside the industry.
This was not meant to insult people who hold MCSEs, unless they actually believe that the title means something. Many appear to know better.
The open source business model is not:
What other possible software market is there besides that, you ask? Look up job offers for programmers. 95% of them have nothing to do with working on a commercial software product. Most programmers develop custom systems. These are seldom sold on store shelves and never exist outside of the environment they're created in.
It just so happens open source software and custom developed systems go hand-in-hand. This is the market the open source business model targets. This market alone is far larger than the commercial software market.
This is exactly what IBM's core business is involved with, and exactly why they're so behind open source.
..would be if a company were to pay to sabotage a competitor's web site.
I suppose that whole illegal thing gets in the way. Alternatively, it sure would be nice to be paid to test a company's security.
You're either against .NET and pro SUNW, or you're with the terrorists.
Did anyone expect Sun to say anything other than "Not only is .NET technically inferior to our offering, but it's bad for US society". The only reason that they're not saying ".NET will cause the death of baby seals worldwide" is because you can prove that baby seals worldwide aren't dying.
1. I never explicitly stated Linux! (hooray for ambiguity!) I thought I was actually hinting at a BSD.
2. The behavior you're describing is considered by practically everyone to be broken and is to be fixed (which >2.4.9 supposedly fix, but I haven't tried yet since I don't feel like applying ext3 patches)
3. I myself didn't notice the problem until someone told me about it. Which describes MY typical workload. :)
There are two ways you can do this.
Way 1 -- Use a PCI card with 4GB of RAM on it as primary storage. At the end of the day, or week, or whatever, copy all of the data to more "permanent" storage. Like hard disks. This way a power loss (or battery failure) isn't too much of a nightmare.
The drawbacks are that you need special hardware and you could lose days of work.
Way 2 -- Cram your machine with as much RAM as possible. Which probably means 4GB. Configure your OS so that it uses about 95% of RAM as a buffer-cache.
Data will be loaded from disk initially on demand (which means slow startup) but will almost always stay memory resident thereafter. The OS will also commit dirty pages back to disk from time to time ensuring that you don't lose anything important.
This may be less doable with systems that insist on synchronous writes during file operations, but you can often disable these things if you want to take the risk.
The benefit of this approach is that you don't need special hardware and you're less likely to lose data than Way 1. Which basically means you can and have been experiencing this now.
If your system grinds disk consistently after several hours of use, it's a good indication that you should get more RAM considering how cheap it is.