With Ma Bell in charge, we might have better telephone service, but the Internet as we know it wouldn't have happened.
Much as I mourn the loss of Bell Labs, on the whole, the breakup of AT&T was necessary, and it was a good thing. Now, if we could only repeat that with Microsoft...
ZFS may be more layered than a Baumkuchen inside, but that's totally irrelevant. From the point of view of the rest of the world, ZFS is just an amorphous blob of code that talks to the disk at one end and presents a file abstraction at the other, and that's what matters. Why does it matter? Because ZFS duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists elsewhere in the kernel and because its internal abstractions aren't available (or likely even suitable) for building other things on top of. All the shiny, pretty diagrams Sun draws about its internal structure don't change that.
You can even, y'know, read the source before you start making ignorant claims. I guess this wouldn't be Slashdot if people did that, though.
You can even, y'know, stop being a total fanboi before you start making ignorant claims. I guess this wouldn't be Slashdot if people did that, though.
UNIX and Linux design is quite holistic: features are often added at various levels of the system in order to make a whole work out. For example, desktop search support had both user and kernel space components, Beryl/Compiz-style interfaces have triggered changes in Gnome, X11, and the kernel, etc.
UNIX and Linux have been careful about avoiding simplistic designs. ZFS is a simple, obvious answer to a problem: just pack all the functionality into one big codeball and start hacking. Microsoft does a lot of the same thing in Windows and Apple in OS X. It gives companies great time-to-market and long, impressive feature lists. It's also creates a mess. Microsoft, Apple, and Sun each have several iterations under their belts where they start off like that, then the system bloats, and finally collapses, causing the company to start over again from scratch or just abandon the market altogether.
Thanks, we know about the kind of "holistic" that these people are implementing, and we don't want it.
(And, frankly, I think Sun isn't really a UNIX company anymore; their system may still be UNIX compatible, but they stopped following the UNIX philosophy long ago.)
the Brazilian government has decided to take a 'compulsory license' to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This compulsory license is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain.
A "compulsory license" is not the same as "taking a patent", it's a compulsory license, as the name implies.
Furthermore, the term "eminent domain" simply doesn't apply to patents because patents aren't "private property". Patents are temporary monopolies granted by the government for a specific purpose, and revoking that grant when the patent doesn't accomplish its purpose is not the same as taking away "private property". The only thing the government is ultimately obligated to observe in the granting and revocation of patents is that it is done non-discriminatorily.
Trying to equate a patent grant with private property is ideological bullshit; don't fall for it.
Of course, RIAA sales have declined. Of course, a lot of people get their music over the Internet, both legally and illegally. And those two facts are almost certainly related. So what? What's your point???
The simple fact is that the current music/movie industry has become too bloated to produce anything really good
The problem isn't bloat, it's that mediocrity sells and is low risk; mediocrity in art is a direct result of commercialization.
The problem with music/movies isn't that everyone's pirating them and so no one's paying, it's that no one's watching/listening to them and so no one's paying.
No, the problem is that people are watching and paying; they are watching and paying the mediocre crap, which is why more and more of that is getting produced and the good stuff is disappearing. It's the free market doing what it is supposed to.
But why do so many Slashdotters seem to be in favor of ripping off artists, programmers, writers, directors, and so forth?
They are not in favor of "ripping off", they are in favor of reforming copyright, because the current system is a rip-off of the public. Public domain and fair use are our rights, and they are being trampled upon.
Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same, movies are sequels or generic snoozefests, and software is the same repackaged sports game from EA or expansion pack for the B-level game you already bought last year?
So, you are saying that Hollywood makes sequels because piracy puts their profits at risk and therefore they aren't willing to invest more money in innovative and interesting productions. Well, if that were true, then the sequels would be cheap while the occasional interesting production would be hugely expensive. But we find the opposite pattern.
No, the reason we get sequels, derivative stuff, and "generic snoozefests" is because they are financially low risk. Profit has never been a good motivator for good art. There's a reason why "commercial" has a bad ring when attached to "art" or "music". So, basically, you're full of shit.
If we wanted good music and good art, the solution would be to have an extensive system of private and public sponsorship of artists and make their output freely and widely available. That's the way great art and music has been created historically. But, of course, no matter what you do, most art, movies, and music are going to be bad anyway: art isn't widgets, and you need to pay a lot of artists to get the occasional one that produces something that turns out to be good in the long run.
There is no way you can get "raped" in Second Life, not even virtually. People can't hold or imprison you against your will; you can always teleport out with no consequence to your avatar. People can't even remove your clothes; you always have to undress yourself. You don't "lose your investment in your avatar" or anything else, and you don't need to change your identity.
So, if you don't want to have sex in Second Life, just keep your clothes on. If nudity offends you, stay out of areas where people run around nude. Simple enough?
I use NeoOffice as well; it clearly is better on OSX than OpenOffice right now. But the OpenOffice people want to do direct port of OpenOffice to OSX without X11, and the question is what the best way of doing that is: should they write a new back-end for their own internal cross-platform toolkit, or wouldn't their effort be better spent on other things? If OpenOffice adopts Gtk+ as their standard backend, not only would OpenOffice development get simpler, Gtk+ would also improve more rapidly on all platforms. If OpenOffice attempts to do its own "native" port, I Gtk+ doesn't benefit, and progress on the OpenOffice port for Mac will be slow, too, if it doesn't get abandoned altogether.
The native gtk+ port to BeOS did no good either... [...] Its not pretty, just functional.
Of course, Gtk+ looks ugly and doesn't integrate well with OSX right now. That's because not a lot of work has gone into making it work on OSX. The Windows version of Gtk+ shows that it can work really well as a cross-platform toolkit if people invest the time in a port. In addition, the Gtk+ graphics architecture has evolved to the point where a high quality Mac port is much easier than it used to be.
Gtk's theming and UI is very flexible. It supports Mac-style menu bars and themes that are nearly indistinguishable from Aqua. However, fear of legal reprisals from Apple mean that they are not widely distributed, not even with the Macintosh versions of Gtk+ applications.
In any case, the problem with the GP was not that the guy was saying that Gtk+ doesn't work well on OSX, it was the typical knee-jerk reaction against anything non-Apple. As long as people aren't willing to roll up their sleeves, put up with a little ugliness, and start contributing, tools like Gtk+ will not improve much on Macintosh.
The TRS-80 100 was a great little laptop and has served journalists and writers well for a long time for word processing, calculations, and on-line access. It worked for 16h on 4 AA batteries. People use them to this day.
It's basically a keyboard, a 40x8 LCD screen, a modem, and an 8085 processor. You should easily be able to put together something like that for $10 these days, even with a more powerful processor.
May we learn your connection with Novell/MSFT/Mono or you are doing this for free without reason?
My only connection with Mono is that I think it's technically the best platform right now and I develop open source software in it. I think it would be a big loss to the open source community if inaccurate FUD like yours destroyed Mono. If people like you succeed at FUDding Mono to death, Microsoft will win because there is nothing else that comes even close competing with Microsoft.
Oh, I earn a living with Java and C++ programming on UNIX and run Debian at home, if you must know. I don't even own a Windows computer anymore, although I must admit to also owning a Mac.
So, what's your problem? Do you work for Sun and are afraid of the competition from Mono? Or do you work for Microsoft and try to kill Mono through FUD, since you already know that there is no technical or legal way that you can kill Mono?
The way I see it, only Novell has a license to be releasing a Mono/Silverlight plugin with Linux.
That's a strong claim. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that anybody even needs a license?
(For which I'm sure they have many patents and trademarks.)
Well, it's nice that you're "sure", but just because you're ignorant and prejudiced doesn't mean everybody else has to be. So, either show us the patents and explain how they affect Mono (Microsoft's trademarks are irrelevant), or stop spreading FUD.
Now, you are right about one thing: Novell taking this patent license is a big problem because it raises the possibility that they deliberately incorporate patented Microsoft technologies into Mono (the risk that they do so accidentally doesn't change). Given how many non-Novell people work on Mono and scrutinize the code, that seems like a remote risk, but it's still something that looks bad and needs to be addressed. Overall, I think Mono is still at less risk of patent infringement claims than the Linux kernel, the Linux desktop, or the GNU compilers. And, overall, I don't think patent infringement is such a serious issue for open source projects anyway: should anybody actually bring a claim, it's usually easy to work around. So take off your tinfoil hat and stop spreading FUD.
You aren't saying that OpenOffice is better than MS Office, are you?
In all the areas that matter (compatibility, price), it is. In the areas you're thinking of (functionality, user interface, performance), it's a toss-up. If you think MS Office is "better" in those areas, it's because you're used to MS Office, not because it's objectively and demonstrably superior for real-world users.
you mean... like we have had for years?
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Death of the UMPC?
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Full-face-screen cell phones with touch screens, web browsers and 802.11 have been around for years. Unlike the iPhone, they're programmable. Some come with slide-out keyboards (yeah!), others use on-screen keyboards. Many have cameras. There are a dozen different finger input methods for them. Even tilt sensors have been around. You even have a choice of several different operating systems.
The real question is why there is all this hoopla over the iPhone; as far as I can see, there is not much that's innovative about the iPhone: it's the same form factor and the same functionality as dozens of devices before it. The iPhone is a nice stylish design, but so is the Prada.
There is nothing legally wrong with the Chinese government doing this; they're a sovereign country, they get to decide how much copyright and trademark law they want to have. Now, the US government can say "poor ol' Disney is suffering, we'd like you to stop this, so let's make a deal". But arguments like "it's not right" aren't going to be very convincing.
They're particularly unconvincing given that, by all rights, Mickey Mouse ought to be in the public domain by now. Other nations can have completely reasonable copyright terms and Mickey Mouse would still be in the public domain. It's the US that's unusual and unreasonable by having protected Mickey Mouse for another couple of decades through the Sonny Bono copyright extension act.
The public domain and limited copyright terms, two basic American rights, have been under attack in the US for the past century, and they have been replaced, effectively, with unlimited ownership of intellectual property. That's the real problem we need to address because that's what's really un-American.
It's a good thing he didn't join Google since I suspect that Google values a certain degree of reading comprehension in their employees.
The NDA doesn't say at all what the article summary says or the guy implies. Google's NDA covers the information that Google discloses under the NDA, nothing else. See, among other things, Section 5.
It would certainly be nice if Google's NDA were simplified a little and got an expiration date. But as it is, it's a pretty standard NDA, and I don't see any particular problems with it.
No thank you. Gtk+ will not help make it more native on the mac. While gtk+ might look ok on linux or windows, it looks like crap on OS X.
Right now, it does. Right now, OpenOffice and NeoOffice look like crap on OS X. The question is which one has a better chance of stopping to look like crap any time soon, and that is Gtk+, not OpenOffice's built-in cross platform toolkit that nobody else uses.
As for the general style of your response, you'd apparently cut off your nose to spite your face. People like you are a disgrace to the Macintosh community: you combine not knowing what you're talking about with being obnoxious and opinionated. People like you make me ashamed to be a Macintosh user or to produce open source software for the Macintosh.
Slashdot Mirror
With Ma Bell in charge, we might have better telephone service, but the Internet as we know it wouldn't have happened.
Much as I mourn the loss of Bell Labs, on the whole, the breakup of AT&T was necessary, and it was a good thing. Now, if we could only repeat that with Microsoft...
With cable or DSL, you can choose among dozens of VOIP services. Who cares whether AT&T offers one too?
ZFS is layered.
ZFS may be more layered than a Baumkuchen inside, but that's totally irrelevant. From the point of view of the rest of the world, ZFS is just an amorphous blob of code that talks to the disk at one end and presents a file abstraction at the other, and that's what matters. Why does it matter? Because ZFS duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists elsewhere in the kernel and because its internal abstractions aren't available (or likely even suitable) for building other things on top of. All the shiny, pretty diagrams Sun draws about its internal structure don't change that.
You can even, y'know, read the source before you start making ignorant claims. I guess this wouldn't be Slashdot if people did that, though.
You can even, y'know, stop being a total fanboi before you start making ignorant claims. I guess this wouldn't be Slashdot if people did that, though.
UNIX and Linux design is quite holistic: features are often added at various levels of the system in order to make a whole work out. For example, desktop search support had both user and kernel space components, Beryl/Compiz-style interfaces have triggered changes in Gnome, X11, and the kernel, etc.
UNIX and Linux have been careful about avoiding simplistic designs. ZFS is a simple, obvious answer to a problem: just pack all the functionality into one big codeball and start hacking. Microsoft does a lot of the same thing in Windows and Apple in OS X. It gives companies great time-to-market and long, impressive feature lists. It's also creates a mess. Microsoft, Apple, and Sun each have several iterations under their belts where they start off like that, then the system bloats, and finally collapses, causing the company to start over again from scratch or just abandon the market altogether.
Thanks, we know about the kind of "holistic" that these people are implementing, and we don't want it.
(And, frankly, I think Sun isn't really a UNIX company anymore; their system may still be UNIX compatible, but they stopped following the UNIX philosophy long ago.)
the Brazilian government has decided to take a 'compulsory license' to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This compulsory license is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain.
A "compulsory license" is not the same as "taking a patent", it's a compulsory license, as the name implies.
Furthermore, the term "eminent domain" simply doesn't apply to patents because patents aren't "private property". Patents are temporary monopolies granted by the government for a specific purpose, and revoking that grant when the patent doesn't accomplish its purpose is not the same as taking away "private property". The only thing the government is ultimately obligated to observe in the granting and revocation of patents is that it is done non-discriminatorily.
Trying to equate a patent grant with private property is ideological bullshit; don't fall for it.
In the future when everyone moves to IPv6 there will be little to no restrictions imposed
That will be right around the time we all get nuclear powered flying cars, right?
The days of a third-party provider collecting, indexing, and targeting advertisements to you based on the content of your e-mail will be over.
How does it feel to be the new, proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge?
Of course, RIAA sales have declined. Of course, a lot of people get their music over the Internet, both legally and illegally. And those two facts are almost certainly related. So what? What's your point???
(1) The "electrical universe theory" is indeed crackpot.
(2) You are misuing the term "troll".
I find (2) a lot more annoying than (1).
The simple fact is that the current music/movie industry has become too bloated to produce anything really good
The problem isn't bloat, it's that mediocrity sells and is low risk; mediocrity in art is a direct result of commercialization.
The problem with music/movies isn't that everyone's pirating them and so no one's paying, it's that no one's watching/listening to them and so no one's paying.
No, the problem is that people are watching and paying; they are watching and paying the mediocre crap, which is why more and more of that is getting produced and the good stuff is disappearing. It's the free market doing what it is supposed to.
But why do so many Slashdotters seem to be in favor of ripping off artists, programmers, writers, directors, and so forth?
They are not in favor of "ripping off", they are in favor of reforming copyright, because the current system is a rip-off of the public. Public domain and fair use are our rights, and they are being trampled upon.
Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same, movies are sequels or generic snoozefests, and software is the same repackaged sports game from EA or expansion pack for the B-level game you already bought last year?
So, you are saying that Hollywood makes sequels because piracy puts their profits at risk and therefore they aren't willing to invest more money in innovative and interesting productions. Well, if that were true, then the sequels would be cheap while the occasional interesting production would be hugely expensive. But we find the opposite pattern.
No, the reason we get sequels, derivative stuff, and "generic snoozefests" is because they are financially low risk. Profit has never been a good motivator for good art. There's a reason why "commercial" has a bad ring when attached to "art" or "music". So, basically, you're full of shit.
If we wanted good music and good art, the solution would be to have an extensive system of private and public sponsorship of artists and make their output freely and widely available. That's the way great art and music has been created historically. But, of course, no matter what you do, most art, movies, and music are going to be bad anyway: art isn't widgets, and you need to pay a lot of artists to get the occasional one that produces something that turns out to be good in the long run.
Actually, you can just run it under AppArmor, which gives you more security than a separate account with less hassle.
I think a metaphor that captures the AACS's approach perfectly is... "The wombats have come home to roost."
Why should Google want to block this? What exactly is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! going to do better than Yahoo! alone?
There is no way you can get "raped" in Second Life, not even virtually. People can't hold or imprison you against your will; you can always teleport out with no consequence to your avatar. People can't even remove your clothes; you always have to undress yourself. You don't "lose your investment in your avatar" or anything else, and you don't need to change your identity.
So, if you don't want to have sex in Second Life, just keep your clothes on. If nudity offends you, stay out of areas where people run around nude. Simple enough?
I'd rather stick with NeoOffice than go gtk+,
I use NeoOffice as well; it clearly is better on OSX than OpenOffice right now. But the OpenOffice people want to do direct port of OpenOffice to OSX without X11, and the question is what the best way of doing that is: should they write a new back-end for their own internal cross-platform toolkit, or wouldn't their effort be better spent on other things? If OpenOffice adopts Gtk+ as their standard backend, not only would OpenOffice development get simpler, Gtk+ would also improve more rapidly on all platforms. If OpenOffice attempts to do its own "native" port, I Gtk+ doesn't benefit, and progress on the OpenOffice port for Mac will be slow, too, if it doesn't get abandoned altogether.
The native gtk+ port to BeOS did no good either... [...] Its not pretty, just functional.
Of course, Gtk+ looks ugly and doesn't integrate well with OSX right now. That's because not a lot of work has gone into making it work on OSX. The Windows version of Gtk+ shows that it can work really well as a cross-platform toolkit if people invest the time in a port. In addition, the Gtk+ graphics architecture has evolved to the point where a high quality Mac port is much easier than it used to be.
Gtk's theming and UI is very flexible. It supports Mac-style menu bars and themes that are nearly indistinguishable from Aqua. However, fear of legal reprisals from Apple mean that they are not widely distributed, not even with the Macintosh versions of Gtk+ applications.
In any case, the problem with the GP was not that the guy was saying that Gtk+ doesn't work well on OSX, it was the typical knee-jerk reaction against anything non-Apple. As long as people aren't willing to roll up their sleeves, put up with a little ugliness, and start contributing, tools like Gtk+ will not improve much on Macintosh.
The TRS-80 100 was a great little laptop and has served journalists and writers well for a long time for word processing, calculations, and on-line access. It worked for 16h on 4 AA batteries. People use them to this day.
It's basically a keyboard, a 40x8 LCD screen, a modem, and an 8085 processor. You should easily be able to put together something like that for $10 these days, even with a more powerful processor.
May we learn your connection with Novell/MSFT/Mono or you are doing this for free without reason?
My only connection with Mono is that I think it's technically the best platform right now and I develop open source software in it. I think it would be a big loss to the open source community if inaccurate FUD like yours destroyed Mono. If people like you succeed at FUDding Mono to death, Microsoft will win because there is nothing else that comes even close competing with Microsoft.
Oh, I earn a living with Java and C++ programming on UNIX and run Debian at home, if you must know. I don't even own a Windows computer anymore, although I must admit to also owning a Mac.
So, what's your problem? Do you work for Sun and are afraid of the competition from Mono? Or do you work for Microsoft and try to kill Mono through FUD, since you already know that there is no technical or legal way that you can kill Mono?
The way I see it, only Novell has a license to be releasing a Mono/Silverlight plugin with Linux.
That's a strong claim. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that anybody even needs a license?
(For which I'm sure they have many patents and trademarks.)
Well, it's nice that you're "sure", but just because you're ignorant and prejudiced doesn't mean everybody else has to be. So, either show us the patents and explain how they affect Mono (Microsoft's trademarks are irrelevant), or stop spreading FUD.
Now, you are right about one thing: Novell taking this patent license is a big problem because it raises the possibility that they deliberately incorporate patented Microsoft technologies into Mono (the risk that they do so accidentally doesn't change). Given how many non-Novell people work on Mono and scrutinize the code, that seems like a remote risk, but it's still something that looks bad and needs to be addressed. Overall, I think Mono is still at less risk of patent infringement claims than the Linux kernel, the Linux desktop, or the GNU compilers. And, overall, I don't think patent infringement is such a serious issue for open source projects anyway: should anybody actually bring a claim, it's usually easy to work around. So take off your tinfoil hat and stop spreading FUD.
You aren't saying that OpenOffice is better than MS Office, are you?
In all the areas that matter (compatibility, price), it is. In the areas you're thinking of (functionality, user interface, performance), it's a toss-up. If you think MS Office is "better" in those areas, it's because you're used to MS Office, not because it's objectively and demonstrably superior for real-world users.
Full-face-screen cell phones with touch screens, web browsers and 802.11 have been around for years. Unlike the iPhone, they're programmable. Some come with slide-out keyboards (yeah!), others use on-screen keyboards. Many have cameras. There are a dozen different finger input methods for them. Even tilt sensors have been around. You even have a choice of several different operating systems.
The real question is why there is all this hoopla over the iPhone; as far as I can see, there is not much that's innovative about the iPhone: it's the same form factor and the same functionality as dozens of devices before it. The iPhone is a nice stylish design, but so is the Prada.
There is nothing legally wrong with the Chinese government doing this; they're a sovereign country, they get to decide how much copyright and trademark law they want to have. Now, the US government can say "poor ol' Disney is suffering, we'd like you to stop this, so let's make a deal". But arguments like "it's not right" aren't going to be very convincing.
They're particularly unconvincing given that, by all rights, Mickey Mouse ought to be in the public domain by now. Other nations can have completely reasonable copyright terms and Mickey Mouse would still be in the public domain. It's the US that's unusual and unreasonable by having protected Mickey Mouse for another couple of decades through the Sonny Bono copyright extension act.
The public domain and limited copyright terms, two basic American rights, have been under attack in the US for the past century, and they have been replaced, effectively, with unlimited ownership of intellectual property. That's the real problem we need to address because that's what's really un-American.
It's a good thing he didn't join Google since I suspect that Google values a certain degree of reading comprehension in their employees.
The NDA doesn't say at all what the article summary says or the guy implies. Google's NDA covers the information that Google discloses under the NDA, nothing else. See, among other things, Section 5.
It would certainly be nice if Google's NDA were simplified a little and got an expiration date. But as it is, it's a pretty standard NDA, and I don't see any particular problems with it.
Yes, but that's not new either; people have been doing that since at least the early 80's.
No thank you. Gtk+ will not help make it more native on the mac. While gtk+ might look ok on linux or windows, it looks like crap on OS X.
Right now, it does. Right now, OpenOffice and NeoOffice look like crap on OS X. The question is which one has a better chance of stopping to look like crap any time soon, and that is Gtk+, not OpenOffice's built-in cross platform toolkit that nobody else uses.
As for the general style of your response, you'd apparently cut off your nose to spite your face. People like you are a disgrace to the Macintosh community: you combine not knowing what you're talking about with being obnoxious and opinionated. People like you make me ashamed to be a Macintosh user or to produce open source software for the Macintosh.
"Free patents online" is a service that lets you search for patents on-line for free; the patents themselves aren't "free".