I was about to call you on that, as I believe their stock finally took an uptick recently (with Vista finally out the door, Linux failing to take over the entire world in five years, etc). Then I checked the chart I have bookmarked and flipped it to 5 year mode. Quite revealing.
But phones are molto distracting if you're in a meeting, whereas these days at least half the participants in the meetings I attend listen with their ears whilst staring intently into their laptops. I work at one of those companies where everyone except the receptionist gets a laptop. Interesting experience. Hell, I call a buddy in another building to ask if he fancies sloping outside for a quick fag in the bikeshed in 2 mins all the time.
(Note, I'm UKish, and there's nothing remotely amusing about that last sentence.)
perl has paid my rent and bought me more of the special, special tea from high in the Himalayas that enabled me to understand it so easily in the first place. I find myself speaking it in my sleep (and yes, you do speak Perl, just as you program in C.) It's a matter of some puzzlement to me that the loathesome homunculous that is PHP supplanted Perl as the preferred language for non-ASP web programming. (And ASP..? Don't get me started!!) I wrote my first code many years before discovering Perl, but it was Perl that turned me into a programmer. To me, you cannot claim to know Unix until you can read Perl (in both directions - in and out.)
There's a related problem with biometrics -- they can't be revoked. Bit of a fatal flaw if possession of the biometric being measured is taken to be equivalent to the status of living human, as the man who had his hand chopped off so some car-jackers could steal his Merc found to his cost.
If you're a UK citizen and can see what a bad implementation of a disastrous idea this is going to turn out to be, please join no2id.org and help in a practical way, as well as moaning about it on Slashdot!:)
If you want to help remove the RIAA's power, here's a few ideas: You could - indeed, you should - also join yourlocaldigital rights organisation, and help out if you can.
Unfortunately, it remains the case that Slashdot seriously believes that the RIAA is a massive, monopolistic, music publisher as opposed to an industry group that represents publishers.
Vilenkin has published an interesting paper which suggests a problem with Smolin's "natural selection of life-friendly universes via black holes" theory; OTOH Smolin strikes back! Ahhh, I love it when cosmologists attack;)
Dupe! I thought, as I saw the headline. Or am I just remembering seeing it in Firehose? No, no that can't be it, because I remember seeing it in Firehose and marking it as a dupe... BUT WAIT! I'm sure I've seen this on the BBC, and the Register, and BoingBoing, and Reddit... but where did I see it first?
Long, superb Neal Stephenson article on laying FLAG. If you don't know what FLAG is but you're interested enough in cables to be reading this far down the comments, you really should read it. I never knew long wires were so interesting until I read this, and it's still a classic I refer people to when cables come up at work (so to speak) - fairly often, my employer's in over a dozen data centres round the world. Oh, the fun we had between Christmas and New Year's Day thanks to this earthquake (one of the DCs is in Hong Kong...)
Lame? Quite right. It was more like a leg bye running down through long leg, followed by a desperate slip fielder who ends up in a huge slide to try to stop it trickling over the rope, and failing, ending up with mud and grass stains all over his whites and getting a huge ironic cheer from the Barmy Army.
I don't think technology has changed the fact that we ought to regard the Government with suspicion. You seem to have accidentally included the word "the" in your sentence.
Instead, I'm ashamed to be British. Interestingly I'm not generally ashamed of myself, or the people around me - they don't seem to me to be particularly more or less stupid ignorant venal and corrupt than people in any other country. It's really only when I see or hear something abhorrent, which includes the assertion that as the purveyor of abhorrence is English (or British) everyone else with the same passport as them should think their words or actions a fine thing that I feel ashamed to be British. Odd, that.
I believe someone said something about patriotism being the first refuge of a scoundrel.
I think the most important part to get people to do evil things is to make sure they do not question their reasoning.
As long as you tell people what to think, and they just accept that as fact, or on blind faith, you can have them do whatever you like. Only when people start to think for themselves, and demand a certain level of proof, instead of simple acceptance of lies and fabricated facts will they become less susceptible to this kind of influence.
Then again, asking people actually use their brain might be pushing it... what's on TV tonight?
Indeed. I was thinking about the China-under-Mao example raised a couple of posts up. Of course (a) Maoism is dead (except in the far reaches of Peru, but that's a special case - like Cuba;) and (b) He had the Red Guards as enforcers. Given the choice, people seem to have dumped Mao pretty comprehensively all over the world. In one sense (a Marxist sense?:) Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Communism, Communism-with-Chinese-Characteristics, Anarcho-Syndicalism and all the other 'left' , "socialist" (or "socialistic") political philosophies were scientific theories, rather than religions. At any rate, they often couched themselves in those terms and dressed themselves up as the rational, inevitable final destiny following on from the Enlightenment. (You Americans know what the Enlightenment was, right? *ducks*;p;) And you know what, the inevitable historical dialectic has come to pass, and authoritarian statist personality-cult "socialism" has been found to fail. The difference is that that failure is arguably arbitrary, a phenomenon of the times and historical events. Did it fail because US-style capitalism is more efficient at making weapons without falling to, basically, the loss of the consent of the governed? Or because the US and Europe had a big economic and social head-start on Russia and the Soviet Union? (I don't know the answer to this, by the way, but I'm sure that in another century the history books will look rather different from today's popular consensus view of the matter.)
Arguably the Soviet Union fell because it had to industrialise and educate it's population, in order to compete militarily with the other great powers. An educated population will eventually notice that the State is lying through it's teeth to the people. Er, People. If Lenin had opposed collectivisation and industrialisation, and kept the peasants as peasants (remember they had a genuinely feudal system of serfdom - i.e., slavery - until the early 19th century) things might have been very different.
Compare and contrast with, say, the history of the Church of England (and indeed established religion everywhere in the civilised world but the USA) over the last century. This was a true mass religion until living memory, indeed I remember being taken to churches as a child (this is three or four decades back in the 20th C, mind:) that were full. Now the village church my Mum still attends has a congregation of three. There's also the rump of "happy-clappies" (Mum's words:) who are "young" and "vibrant". The reason for that most of the congregation are teenagers and 20somethings is that it's infantile; eventually, most people grow up - enough to stop wasting two hours a week, anyway.
All religion is inherently a bad thing, even when "good" things are done in it's name, because it is based on a falsehood, i.e., a superstitious belief in the supernatural[1]. It's wrong, and that makes it bad.
[1]Except possibly some advanced flavours of Buddhism; all the varieties I've come across tie up some interesting ideas with a bundle of irrelevant cultural baggage I find irritate me too much to allow me to learn enough to make a better-based decision. Dumb? *shrug* could be... but it's pretty unlikely, and anyway there are plenty of more accessible lifestyle things I could do to improve me "sense of inner calm" or "harmony with the cosmos", or whatever. When I've managed to quit smoking, come back and ask me about the ineffable;)
If you haven't realised that Linux, the kernel, has nothing to do with the FSF, and that Linux is not an "FSF product", I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about.
It should be pointed out that this is not just A.N. Random UK Software Co trying to flog product. This is David Litchfield, one of that small number of security researchers whose names and work any self-respecting infosec analyst should be familar. He's done a lot of really superb security work, including trashing several versions of SQL Server; so he knows whereof he speaks.
NGS have of course done work on SQL Server for Microsoft; I refer you to the brief and rather one-sided flamewar on Bugtraq/FD that erupted when this was pointed out... actually see for yourself... (and here's the Bugtraq thread). I predict this will deal with 75% of the "but this is nonsense, because..." posts;)
He's got a lot of credibility. This is the point I'm trying to make:)
An interesting proposition. But given how long it takes Microsoft to build software, and their track record at building *good* software, I would not worry much about this happening. What you described would take a few years to put together, and by then Novell will be long forgotten and out of date.This is Microsoft we're talking about here. The "MS/Linux" software won't have to actually/work/ (as in, improve interop between GNU/Linux systems and Windows systems) in order to work (as in, perform the function Microsoft have designed this strategy to accomplish.) That's also what I expect Microsoft to do. See the story the other day about Ballmer saying "most Linux users haven't licenses our IP properly", most posters took it to imply SCO-like legal threats against GNU and Linux distributors.
This looks to me like a short-term win for Microsoft, but a long-term lose. In the short term, it seems likely that Free Software's going to lose the contributions of Novell and SuSE engineers and programmers (modulo that a lot of the SuSE people will flee if it does indeed turn out the way it looks. SuSE have some very good, clueful people who I expect would rather walk away from stock options than work for the Beast against the FOSS community.) There will be some short-term damage to the market caps of some Linux businesses, and some paranoid PHBs will decide against some Linux deployments on the basis of the FUD stirred up. On the other hand, in the long term it's likely that GPL3 will be seen as a better bet than some early commentators have suggested...
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to call you on that, as I believe their stock finally took an uptick recently (with Vista finally out the door, Linux failing to take over the entire world in five years, etc). Then I checked the chart I have bookmarked and flipped it to 5 year mode. Quite revealing.
(Note, I'm UKish, and there's nothing remotely amusing about that last sentence.)
That is all...
There's a related problem with biometrics -- they can't be revoked. Bit of a fatal flaw if possession of the biometric being measured is taken to be equivalent to the status of living human, as the man who had his hand chopped off so some car-jackers could steal his Merc found to his cost.
If you're a UK citizen and can see what a bad implementation of a disastrous idea this is going to turn out to be, please join no2id.org and help in a practical way, as well as moaning about it on Slashdot! :)
And the difference is... what, exactly?
Now the field is full of researchers all claiming to be the first to find it... they croak at each other, "crrrrredit! crrrredit!"
or encrypt the data on the server side before sending it back to the client (via a cookie by preference. You can't bookmark a cookie ;)
Vilenkin has published an interesting paper which suggests a problem with Smolin's "natural selection of life-friendly universes via black holes" theory; OTOH Smolin strikes back! Ahhh, I love it when cosmologists attack ;)
I thought it was here...
Long, superb Neal Stephenson article on laying FLAG. If you don't know what FLAG is but you're interested enough in cables to be reading this far down the comments, you really should read it. I never knew long wires were so interesting until I read this, and it's still a classic I refer people to when cables come up at work (so to speak) - fairly often, my employer's in over a dozen data centres round the world. Oh, the fun we had between Christmas and New Year's Day thanks to this earthquake (one of the DCs is in Hong Kong...)
Lame? Quite right. It was more like a leg bye running down through long leg, followed by a desperate slip fielder who ends up in a huge slide to try to stop it trickling over the rope, and failing, ending up with mud and grass stains all over his whites and getting a huge ironic cheer from the Barmy Army.
Instead, I'm ashamed to be British. Interestingly I'm not generally ashamed of myself, or the people around me - they don't seem to me to be particularly more or less stupid ignorant venal and corrupt than people in any other country. It's really only when I see or hear something abhorrent, which includes the assertion that as the purveyor of abhorrence is English (or British) everyone else with the same passport as them should think their words or actions a fine thing that I feel ashamed to be British. Odd, that.
I believe someone said something about patriotism being the first refuge of a scoundrel.
As long as you tell people what to think, and they just accept that as fact, or on blind faith, you can have them do whatever you like. Only when people start to think for themselves, and demand a certain level of proof, instead of simple acceptance of lies and fabricated facts will they become less susceptible to this kind of influence.
Then again, asking people actually use their brain might be pushing it... what's on TV tonight?
Indeed. I was thinking about the China-under-Mao example raised a couple of posts up. Of course (a) Maoism is dead (except in the far reaches of Peru, but that's a special case - like Cuba ;) and (b) He had the Red Guards as enforcers. Given the choice, people seem to have dumped Mao pretty comprehensively all over the world. In one sense (a Marxist sense? :) Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Communism, Communism-with-Chinese-Characteristics, Anarcho-Syndicalism and all the other 'left' , "socialist" (or "socialistic") political philosophies were scientific theories, rather than religions. At any rate, they often couched themselves in those terms and dressed themselves up as the rational, inevitable final destiny following on from the Enlightenment. (You Americans know what the Enlightenment was, right? *ducks* ;p ;) And you know what, the inevitable historical dialectic has come to pass, and authoritarian statist personality-cult "socialism" has been found to fail. The difference is that that failure is arguably arbitrary, a phenomenon of the times and historical events. Did it fail because US-style capitalism is more efficient at making weapons without falling to, basically, the loss of the consent of the governed? Or because the US and Europe had a big economic and social head-start on Russia and the Soviet Union? (I don't know the answer to this, by the way, but I'm sure that in another century the history books will look rather different from today's popular consensus view of the matter.)
Arguably the Soviet Union fell because it had to industrialise and educate it's population, in order to compete militarily with the other great powers. An educated population will eventually notice that the State is lying through it's teeth to the people. Er, People. If Lenin had opposed collectivisation and industrialisation, and kept the peasants as peasants (remember they had a genuinely feudal system of serfdom - i.e., slavery - until the early 19th century) things might have been very different.
Compare and contrast with, say, the history of the Church of England (and indeed established religion everywhere in the civilised world but the USA) over the last century. This was a true mass religion until living memory, indeed I remember being taken to churches as a child (this is three or four decades back in the 20th C, mind :) that were full. Now the village church my Mum still attends has a congregation of three. There's also the rump of "happy-clappies" (Mum's words :) who are "young" and "vibrant". The reason for that most of the congregation are teenagers and 20somethings is that it's infantile; eventually, most people grow up - enough to stop wasting two hours a week, anyway.
[1]Except possibly some advanced flavours of Buddhism; all the varieties I've come across tie up some interesting ideas with a bundle of irrelevant cultural baggage I find irritate me too much to allow me to learn enough to make a better-based decision. Dumb? *shrug* could be... but it's pretty unlikely, and anyway there are plenty of more accessible lifestyle things I could do to improve me "sense of inner calm" or "harmony with the cosmos", or whatever. When I've managed to quit smoking, come back and ask me about the ineffable ;)
If you haven't realised that Linux, the kernel, has nothing to do with the FSF, and that Linux is not an "FSF product", I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about.
...probably made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
NGS have of course done work on SQL Server for Microsoft; I refer you to the brief and rather one-sided flamewar on Bugtraq/FD that erupted when this was pointed out... actually see for yourself... (and here's the Bugtraq thread). I predict this will deal with 75% of the "but this is nonsense, because..." posts ;)
He's got a lot of credibility. This is the point I'm trying to make :)
This looks to me like a short-term win for Microsoft, but a long-term lose. In the short term, it seems likely that Free Software's going to lose the contributions of Novell and SuSE engineers and programmers (modulo that a lot of the SuSE people will flee if it does indeed turn out the way it looks. SuSE have some very good, clueful people who I expect would rather walk away from stock options than work for the Beast against the FOSS community.) There will be some short-term damage to the market caps of some Linux businesses, and some paranoid PHBs will decide against some Linux deployments on the basis of the FUD stirred up. On the other hand, in the long term it's likely that GPL3 will be seen as a better bet than some early commentators have suggested...
die, die, die
Interesting; over here we call it 'PEBCAM[onitor]'. Or the "10D/0t" problem.
Right, I'm sulking now ;p