With the current, disturbing trends towards the invasion of privacy by companies, I think I will never ever use anything but Open Source software anymore. This is really getting too far -- OK, fine, so this software "only" transmits a log of your web surfing to Comet, under the guise of displaying a cute cursor. How do you know one day somebody won't come up with something malicious?! How do you know that the next cute-cursor software you got from somewhere doesn't start transmitting files on your hard drive to some company? This may be paranoid, but I see this as a very likely possibility, given the current trend of increasing infringement of privacy by corporate entities. Gives a totally new meaning to "trojan horse".
At least if you only use Open Source software, there is always source code for you to double-check, to make sure that this piece of code you're going to run isn't going to transmit private files from your home directory to some company out there.
But, to go one step further, I'd say that even Open Source in itself may not be sufficient to prevent such kinds of exploits. Take any typical Linux system, for example. How many of us actually read the source code for all the software that we run?? How many sources can we read before exhausting our patience, and just say "forget it, let's just run this thing."? Of course, the redeeming thing is that if the source base is polluted with some bad code, the maintainer of the code would find out about it pretty quickly. But still, when Open Source becomes more and more widely adopted, there's a possibility that such things get overlooked.
Sounds like privacy is over. Would we just sit here and allow this to happen?
IMHO this is why FSF needs to start coming out of their proverbial well and start a legal defense fund for Free Software, in particular, the GPL. So far it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that FSF only cares about defending the GPL when the software involved is owned by the FSF, like GCC, Emacs, etc.. We need a legal defense fund for free software in general, not just for FSF products! Otherwise all it takes is one piece of obscure GPL'd software (that FSF doesn't care about) being abused by some company/person, and the court overturning the GPL -- and everything will collapse.
Hmm, but isn't the whole point of Linux being Open Source so that they can add drivers for a journalling FS and do something similar to LVM under Linux? In fact, IIRC isn't a journalling FS already in the works for Linux, and should ready in Linux 2.4?
Maybe IBM & its customers aren't going to ditch AIX/AS400/etc. yet, but who's to say they aren't implementing some advanced journalling FS to be integrated with their Linux port?
Witness the beauty of Open Source. If it doesn't do what you want, do it yourself. And give back to the community in the meantime. (Except perhaps in this case, where their implementations would probably be proprietary.)
IMHO one of the best things about Debian is its openness, not just in terms of Open Source, but things like:
The Bug Tracking System is right there on Debian's page, so that every bug in Debian is apparent to whoever cares to look.
The WNPP (Work-needing and Prospective Packages) page, also readily accessible if you looked, so that volunteers can easily figure out how they can help.
It takes extra effort for someone to help a person in trouble. It's just way too easy to get turned off by someone's outwardly rebellious behaviour. But usually, if you cared enough to be friendly with that person, you'd discover that he/she is simply venting frustration that comes from deeper trouble, or just trying to keep the mind off more troubling things.
The problem is, there aren't that many people out there who cared enough to "dig deeper", so to speak. And unfortunately many people who don't care hold positions where they should care, like counsellors, and such. And because they don't really care, they may inadvertently "write off" the very kids who need their help, and as a result, the troubled kids are provoked to get worse and retaliate, which may cause them to become potential criminals, even though they wouldn't have been had somebody bothered to care for them rather than criticize or ignore them.
Re:The downfall of MS and the rise of OS
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ESR talks in Dublin
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Oops!:-P
I suppose I can give the lame excuse that the two acronyms appear in different contexts, but I think I screwed up this time.:-) I should've attached "(as in Operating System)" to the second occurrence of "OS" there.
Hello?! Who's patenting *MY* DNA?!?!?!?!?!?!
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New Patent Treaty
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<satire>This is ludicrous. I am the sole owner of my DNA, and I inherited from my ancestors the exclusive rights to duplicate it in my children. You are infringing my biological property if you try to patent my DNA. You cannot steal my biological property and make it into your intellectual property!!!</satire>
Interesting how ESR predicts that MS is going to collapse before the antitrust lawsuit gets settled. Personally I'm not that confident of that -- "bad" as MS may be, they aren't dumb, and I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive. But I agree with ESR that MS won't be quite what it is today. My prediction is that MS will just slowly pale into insignificance. It won't be a dramatic, overnight thing, it will be more of a gradual decline as MS drops from its currnet monopoly position into "just another company". But regardless, I must admit I'm happy that the oppressive monopoly, the buggy OS's, and the closed, blackbox software that tries to be "smart" when it's not (like the annoying way Word makes illogical lists and screws up your formatting, and you don't have the source code so that you can fix the stupid behaviour), will soon be all over.
Also interesting is ESR's prediction that open source will soon be globally adopted. Although I like that prospect, I'm afraid it sounds too good to be true. I've always believed that to do something well, your central goal must be focused on that thing. This is why Open Source is successful: the people who do it do it because their goal is to make good software more than anything else. But when Open Source gets into the commercial sector, the bottomline is more $$$ than anything else. If making good software is a lesser priority than making $$$, eventually software quality would be sacrificed for $$$. Perhaps ESR is right, and Open Source will be adopted by everybody. But I fear that day, lest the original quality, robustness, and just the pure fun of it all, may that day come to an end.
But of course, I may just be paranoid... perhaps there will be a "balance" between people who do Open Source for $$$ and those who do it for quality, so that on one side, you have the commercial sector publicizing and making $$$ to support Open Source, and on the other side, you have the hacker group who aren't into the $$$ but they're still adding improvements to the "less than best" code produced by the commercial sector. So there will be a kind of "equillibrium" that prevents code quality from degrading due to $$$ having higher priority, and OTOH retains Open Source in the mainstream, as opposed to just being a niche culture that it started in, by monetary contributions from the commercial sector.
This is an interesting observation... is there perhaps a way to keep track of people, which, given enough determination and resolution, you can obtain the data about them, but OTOH is "anonymous enough" that that info will not be readily available? Then we would still have practical anonymity, but if some script kiddie gets smart and tries to deface some websites, or hack into a mission-critical system, etc., there would be a way of tracking him down.
I, for one, would hate it if I need to get a license to surf, if I have the feeling that somebody is monitoring all the traffic that goes on between my computer and whatever site I go to. OTOH if somebody uses the Net to commit crimes, it must not be impossible to track them down. I guess what I'm saying is that, there should be a "sufficient barrier" to access information about someone, so that regular people can't easily and casually get to it; but if that someone start committing crimes on the Net, there should be a way, given enough effort to "surpass" that "barrier", to get to information that would help incriminate him.
Nope, I think what's happening is that the server requires clients to have an existing session before you can retrieve the article. Unfortunately that means everyone has to log in and manually search for the article, as any link would contain a session ID only for one person and won't work for anyone else.
[OT] Isn't it about time we create a slashdolt login/user for annoying sites like this, as somebody suggested a few articles back?
This is great news for Linux... unfortunately, as somebody has already pointed out, we've basically reached a state where this kind of news is expected, and to be expected to become more frequent as Linux-awareness rises.
However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market. NT never managed to be very successful in the server market anyway, though MS has been trying its best to promote it, so it's not that surprising people are beginning to switch from NT to Linux. But what about the desktop market??? It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there. Yes, we have all those nice companies going Open Source, doing neat stuff like Corel Linux, selling Linux-preinstalled machines and whatnot, but the cold hard fact is that Windows still rules the PC market. AFAIK we haven't heard that much about Linux making an impact in the PC market; most of the big news is in the server domain.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on/. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...
Has anybody actually used Konqueror? I hear a lot of good stuff about it... but how 'bout the people who have actually used it step up and comment on how good it actually is, at this time. Let's all hear the pros and cons of Konqueror, and (for this discussion) compare it with Opera.
Seems that the existing patent system is becoming more and more irrelevent (or hard to apply) in today's fast-advancing technology... However, I like it that the article pointed out the original intention of the patent system:
The patent system itself, conceived to reward human innovation with a limited monopoly, will eventually have to be modified, Dr. Pollack said.
Absolutely so. We have seen many examples of how the current patent system just fails to achieve this goal: ie. to give a limited reward to human innovation. Although it has worked before, it's starting to show signs of becoming decrepit. We've had problems with people abusing the system by patenting, eg., a well-known algorithm, and having the patent go through because of incompetence/ignorance of the people at the patent office. And now we have "inventions" made by computer algorithms, which seems to be a monkey wrench thrown into the patent system.
Rather than try to patch up the patent system and keep it going, perhaps it's time to reconsider the original goals of the patent system. The original goal was to reward the human inventor for his invention. I guess the bottom line is, of what form should this reward be? Under the existing patent system, it is to give the inventor exclusive rights to his invention for a certain period of time, and to give him the authority to allow/prohibit others' using of his invention. But is this still relevant today (and in the future)?
I'm thinking of the difference between the reward given to a patent owner and the reward given (or the gratification experienced) by an Open Source developer who is proud that he can share his ideas and have the community accept them. I don't know how applicable Open Source is to patents in general, but as far as software and software-related stuff is concerned, it seems that the "ego gratification" of developing an Open Source project does not suffer from the same shortcomings as the existing patent system.
Yet another comfirmation that the reign of MS is over (or going to be over soon). It's only a matter of time, and everybody (ie., people other than slashdotters, tech-junkies, and other members of their species;-) ) will be aware of the defiencies of MS products and the availability of better, cheaper alternatives.
However, an interesting thought is the observation that nothing lasts forever. Witness the crash of a century-old bank in England not long ago, for example. Will the age of Linux come to an end too? Computers are moving so fast that what took a century to fall may take a much shorter time (eg. MS). What will happen when the age of Linux is over? Just food for thought...:-)
Hahaha, wasn't the NSA playing a big role in restricting export of encryption software? Too bad! By enforcing silly, short-sighted, frog-in-the-well laws limiting the power of encryption software in the US, they've just shot themselves in the foot. Now the US is crippled with respect to encryption, and in the meantime, projects like GnuPG, being developed way beyond the reach of agencies like NSA, are giving everybody else, like the common everyday Joe, access to powerful encryption.
Let's see how much "intelligence" they can gather, when one day encryption is used by default on the Internet. Billions upon billions of encrypted transmissions across every Internet linkk everyday, 99% of which is irrelevent. Fine, use the most powerful computers and cracking tools and what-not against it, this is the point of diminishing returns. You spend 99% of your processing power to decode useless transmissions like letters the common Joe writes to his wife. If you ask me, this is a dead-end. A really dead end.
It's about time people start realizing that the age of the Internet necessitates a totally new, different set of rules, and totally new, different ways of doing things. Traditional methods are totally useless in this new medium. Wake up, people!:-)
The mall claims that it's expressing a "deep concern" that many other malls have, but are not showing. Doesn't this show that many people are still not ready for the evitable age of ecommerce? (Witness the parallel with so many business people that look at the success of Open Source with disbelief, not understanding why it works and looking at it more like a threat.) Human beings tend to be like the legendary ostrich... (probably more so than real ostriches, but that's beside my point).
But in spite of all the catcalls this mall and other techo-phobic businesses may be getting from techies like us, I think we should stop and consider the issue that their reaction shows. The Internet is growing so fast, and getting so much attention, that barely anyone has had time to consider it's real relevence in our lives.
Will the Net develop so much that eventually we can do virtually
anything on it: shopping, socializing, entertainment, etc., so that it causes us all to be locked up in our homes, isolated from the "real world" with the Internet connection as our sole link?
Apparently that's the picture a lot of people fear will come true. This is a rather significant question: what will the role of the Net be in our lives in the future?
IMHO I think the answer is that it is only a convenience, more than anything else. I think the picture I described above will never happen. Why? Because the idea of a living, breathing human being, being willing to vegetate in a tiny niche on this globe with an Internet connection as his/her sole link to the outside world, is simply ludicrous. Human beings will never be able to put up with such a life. Tech-junkies like myself might be able to do it for longer times than others, but regardless, a human being needs physical interaction with the outside world, esp. with other human beings. Yes we have VR and all that. But nothing compares with real, physical interaction. That said, I think physical shopping will not die out. It will be less significant, perhaps, but there will always be people who prefer to physically see and handle the goods before they purchase. The Internet only acts as a convenience for the different things in our lives, but it is not a replacement.
But of course, this is just my opinion. What do my fellow slashdotters think?:-)
Ever since I replaced my HD, Linux has been the only thing running on my machine. I've not touched Windows for more than a year now (and have no regrets about it), except on friends' machines, mostly to get them connected to our LAN.:-) However, I don't use ApplixOffice/Star Office... I use LaTeX for any serious word-processing, and a text editor for not-so-serious word-processing. However, I do experience the hassle of not being able to view Word documents people send me, and people not being able to grok LaTeX documents I send them. I suppose Star Office would solve this problem, but it hasn't caused me too much grief yet and I'm quite happy with LaTeX.
Of course, I'm probably not the normal PC user... so I don't know how relevant all of this rant is.:-)
I wonder what he means when he says the open source community is not innovative. It's certainly true that Linux developed out of Linus imitating (? or learning from history?) UNIX and all that, but surely Linux has come a long way from there? I'm not that well-versed with the kernel myself, so I can't really say with much assurance in what way Linux has "innovated".
But how about ESR's argument that open source is driven by "tickling the developer's itch"? From that standpoint, doesn't open source drive itself to be innovative, eg. when someone says, "hey, such and such a feature would be a neat thing to have!", goes and implement it, and develops a "bazaar" (to use ESR's terminology) and ultimately resulting in a high quality product that surely has innovated? What qualifies as an "innovation" anyway? Surely ESR's fetchmail is an innovative product of open source development? There certainly hasn't been anything quite like it before, although it does take its ideas from several places. After all, every innovation must start from something; something "totally creative" that you dream up without getting any ideas from anywhere else is probably not that great anyway.
I would argue that Open Source does encourage innovation. Yes, a lot of open source software in existence today are written for the sake of having a free alternative to a commercial solution, but that doesn't mean that all open source software is essentially copying existing ideas without innovation. I'd surely like to know what he meant when he said that open source people are not innovative.
I know some slashdotters don't like RedHat because of its commercialism and what-not. But let's face it, people. Even if RedHat's not the best, even if other Linux distro's are more "pure" as far as open source software is concerned, we still need a company like RedHat. Why? Because the media attention and promotion of Linux caused by companies like Redhat is causing hardware vendors to start opening up specs to allow us to write drivers for.
Imagine a fearful picture of an MS-dominated world sometime in the would-have-been future, where not only we've Winmodems, but also Win-monitors, Win-keyboards, Win-harddrives, Win-CPUs... and all of them have proprietary interfaces which we cannot legally write GPL'd code for. Remember the "decommiditization of protocols" in the Halloween documents? We won't even have computers to run Linux on if that happened.
We gotta be grateful companies like Redhat came along and took Linux into the commercial world, so that, if nothing else, Linuxers are no longer an "insignificant niche" but a significant, thriving community. Even though I personally don't like RedHat Linux (I prefer Debian), they deserve a big "congratulations" from all of us.
IMHO GNU/Hurd looks promising... it's based on a new OS technology (microkernel), which Linux has traces of (dynamically loaded modules), but probably won't have since it's an architectural/design change. I personally like the microkernel concept, because from my viewpoint an OS should be there to support what applications want to do, and not dictate what they can do. As such, the "untouchable" part of the OS (ie. the kernel) should be as small as possible. In the case of Hurd, the Mach microkernel provides almost the bare minimum an OS provides -- Hurd is simply a set of services ("interfaces" to be precise) that run on top of Mach. The good thing about this is that apps that expect a POSIX interface will find that it's implemented in Hurd; whereas if an app ever wants to do things differently, it can always implement its own interface and run off that. So, it is possible to "bypass" Hurd if you ever wanted to: it's there as a convenience (we don't want to keep reimplementing POSIX services for example) but it's not imposed on you.
However, at the moment Hurd is still in its development and it's really hard to tell whether it will be the "Next Big Thing" after Linux. This is just my take on Hurd.:-)
*sigh* it's sad, but the unfortunate truth is that most people believe marketing hype. Proof: look at the percentage of computer users out there use M$ products. I'm not saying M$ products are bad by definition, but the proportion of M$ users and other users certainly don't reflect the quality of the products involved. In a way, I've given up hope that "the masses" will ever get the "real truth" behind things. Yes, Linux is definitely a decent product that sells itself... but how many people today choose Linux because they know it's good, and how many "choose" it because it's the "hip" thing to do now, and everybody around them is switching to Linux?
Although I love Linux, I believe that one day something better would come along. The question is, when that day comes, will people stubbornly cling onto Linux the same way they are clinging to M$ now? If so, how different are they from stubborn M$ supporters of today? Or perhaps, one day something inferior to Linux comes along, but it gets super-hyped up and everyone talks about it. I suspect a majority of people will simply switch away from Linux, just because the "omniscient media" tells them so.
Or, witness the amount of media attention Y2K got. For sure, Y2K is a non-trivial problem, and things need to get fixed. But how many people really understand what Y2K all about beyond "Y2K is coming, bad, bad things are going to happen to my computer! But look! My toaster from such and such a company is Y2K-compliant! (Or so it says on the sticker!) We better replace all our toasters, refridgerators, and vacuum cleaners before the Y2K bug hits them!"
Although personally I always take (at least) several grains of salt with whatever I hear from the media/marketing people/etc., I'm afraid most people don't, and they don't really care either.
UNIX is about choice... absolutely agreed. Though IMHO I'd rather people focus on GNU/Hurd instead... If I'm not mistaken, isn't the whole point of the Mach microkernel to let you run totally different interfaces on top of the same kernel? If Debian gets Hurd to work, we could even start creating a "Linux-on-Mach" interface that would allow you to run native Linux apps, a "FreeBSD-on-Mach" interface that lets you run native FreeBSD binaries, and perhaps even (shudder) a Win32 interface that lets you run native Win32 apps (akin to WINE).
Isn't this flexibility the whole reason Mach exists at all?? This would really give you freedom of choice, and perhaps even more than that, as you can simultaneously run different interfaces, all of them natively! IMNSHO this is the ultimate embodiment of the UNIX philosphy. This is why I predicted that the next big thing after Linux would be Hurd, not necessarily because of Hurd itself, but because a microkernel design gives you so much more flexibility than the traditional monolithic design. That's why I think it would be most profitable for the Debian people to work on Debian GNU/Hurd instead, if they wanted to work on anything outside Debian GNU/Linux.
Good point, I think as more and more (esp. commercial) services get online, encryption should almost always be used by default. What with personal information, easily-misunderstood-when-out-of-context content in emails, forums, etc., plaintext transfer is just too... well, plain. And even if no hidden motives are involved, you could accidentally see something in the transmission that you shouldn't, and get into trouble just because of that, like this company here.
As we move into the age of the vast commercialization of the Internet, encryption should be somewhat like a standard thing, and plaintext used only when you actually intend the content to be read by others. Plus, unaware users should not be left with plaintext as default. They should be conscious of it when their transmissions are sent in plaintext. All email programs, sites where you sign up for something, etc., should use encryption by default. I think encryption technology is advanced enough and common enough these days for this to be feasible. As for potential performance degradation, I remember the days when I had an 8088 and said, "WoW! the 286 runs at 16 MHz??!! Who'll ever need that except to play DOOM??"
LOL Well said. But then it'd take years and LOTS of ink to transcribe the byte-sequence of a JPEG file, and hours of wrist-wrenching typing to reconstruct the file on the receiving end!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
With the current, disturbing trends towards the invasion of privacy by companies, I think I will never ever use anything but Open Source software anymore. This is really getting too far -- OK, fine, so this software "only" transmits a log of your web surfing to Comet, under the guise of displaying a cute cursor. How do you know one day somebody won't come up with something malicious?! How do you know that the next cute-cursor software you got from somewhere doesn't start transmitting files on your hard drive to some company? This may be paranoid, but I see this as a very likely possibility, given the current trend of increasing infringement of privacy by corporate entities. Gives a totally new meaning to "trojan horse".
At least if you only use Open Source software, there is always source code for you to double-check, to make sure that this piece of code you're going to run isn't going to transmit private files from your home directory to some company out there.
But, to go one step further, I'd say that even Open Source in itself may not be sufficient to prevent such kinds of exploits. Take any typical Linux system, for example. How many of us actually read the source code for all the software that we run?? How many sources can we read before exhausting our patience, and just say "forget it, let's just run this thing."? Of course, the redeeming thing is that if the source base is polluted with some bad code, the maintainer of the code would find out about it pretty quickly. But still, when Open Source becomes more and more widely adopted, there's a possibility that such things get overlooked.
Sounds like privacy is over. Would we just sit here and allow this to happen?
IMHO this is why FSF needs to start coming out of their proverbial well and start a legal defense fund for Free Software, in particular, the GPL. So far it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that FSF only cares about defending the GPL when the software involved is owned by the FSF, like GCC, Emacs, etc.. We need a legal defense fund for free software in general, not just for FSF products! Otherwise all it takes is one piece of obscure GPL'd software (that FSF doesn't care about) being abused by some company/person, and the court overturning the GPL -- and everything will collapse.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Hmm, but isn't the whole point of Linux being Open Source so that they can add drivers for a journalling FS and do something similar to LVM under Linux? In fact, IIRC isn't a journalling FS already in the works for Linux, and should ready in Linux 2.4?
Maybe IBM & its customers aren't going to ditch AIX/AS400/etc. yet, but who's to say they aren't implementing some advanced journalling FS to be integrated with their Linux port?
Witness the beauty of Open Source. If it doesn't do what you want, do it yourself. And give back to the community in the meantime. (Except perhaps in this case, where their implementations would probably be proprietary.)
Check out:
IMHO one of the best things about Debian is its openness, not just in terms of Open Source, but things like:
It takes extra effort for someone to help a person in trouble. It's just way too easy to get turned off by someone's outwardly rebellious behaviour. But usually, if you cared enough to be friendly with that person, you'd discover that he/she is simply venting frustration that comes from deeper trouble, or just trying to keep the mind off more troubling things.
The problem is, there aren't that many people out there who cared enough to "dig deeper", so to speak. And unfortunately many people who don't care hold positions where they should care, like counsellors, and such. And because they don't really care, they may inadvertently "write off" the very kids who need their help, and as a result, the troubled kids are provoked to get worse and retaliate, which may cause them to become potential criminals, even though they wouldn't have been had somebody bothered to care for them rather than criticize or ignore them.
Oops! :-P
I suppose I can give the lame excuse that the two acronyms appear in different contexts, but I think I screwed up this time. :-) I should've attached "(as in Operating System)" to the second occurrence of "OS" there.
<satire>This is ludicrous. I am the sole owner of my DNA, and I inherited from my ancestors the exclusive rights to duplicate it in my children. You are infringing my biological property if you try to patent my DNA. You cannot steal my biological property and make it into your intellectual property!!!</satire>
[OS as in "Open Source". :-)]
Interesting how ESR predicts that MS is going to collapse before the antitrust lawsuit gets settled. Personally I'm not that confident of that -- "bad" as MS may be, they aren't dumb, and I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive. But I agree with ESR that MS won't be quite what it is today. My prediction is that MS will just slowly pale into insignificance. It won't be a dramatic, overnight thing, it will be more of a gradual decline as MS drops from its currnet monopoly position into "just another company". But regardless, I must admit I'm happy that the oppressive monopoly, the buggy OS's, and the closed, blackbox software that tries to be "smart" when it's not (like the annoying way Word makes illogical lists and screws up your formatting, and you don't have the source code so that you can fix the stupid behaviour), will soon be all over.
Also interesting is ESR's prediction that open source will soon be globally adopted. Although I like that prospect, I'm afraid it sounds too good to be true. I've always believed that to do something well, your central goal must be focused on that thing. This is why Open Source is successful: the people who do it do it because their goal is to make good software more than anything else. But when Open Source gets into the commercial sector, the bottomline is more $$$ than anything else. If making good software is a lesser priority than making $$$, eventually software quality would be sacrificed for $$$. Perhaps ESR is right, and Open Source will be adopted by everybody. But I fear that day, lest the original quality, robustness, and just the pure fun of it all, may that day come to an end.
But of course, I may just be paranoid... perhaps there will be a "balance" between people who do Open Source for $$$ and those who do it for quality, so that on one side, you have the commercial sector publicizing and making $$$ to support Open Source, and on the other side, you have the hacker group who aren't into the $$$ but they're still adding improvements to the "less than best" code produced by the commercial sector. So there will be a kind of "equillibrium" that prevents code quality from degrading due to $$$ having higher priority, and OTOH retains Open Source in the mainstream, as opposed to just being a niche culture that it started in, by monetary contributions from the commercial sector.
This is an interesting observation... is there perhaps a way to keep track of people, which, given enough determination and resolution, you can obtain the data about them, but OTOH is "anonymous enough" that that info will not be readily available? Then we would still have practical anonymity, but if some script kiddie gets smart and tries to deface some websites, or hack into a mission-critical system, etc., there would be a way of tracking him down.
I, for one, would hate it if I need to get a license to surf, if I have the feeling that somebody is monitoring all the traffic that goes on between my computer and whatever site I go to. OTOH if somebody uses the Net to commit crimes, it must not be impossible to track them down. I guess what I'm saying is that, there should be a "sufficient barrier" to access information about someone, so that regular people can't easily and casually get to it; but if that someone start committing crimes on the Net, there should be a way, given enough effort to "surpass" that "barrier", to get to information that would help incriminate him.
Alright, here's my nano-HOWTO for getting to the page referenced above:
Hope this will help whoever's looking for the stuff. :-)
Nope, I think what's happening is that the server requires clients to have an existing session before you can retrieve the article. Unfortunately that means everyone has to log in and manually search for the article, as any link would contain a session ID only for one person and won't work for anyone else.
[OT] Isn't it about time we create a slashdolt login/user for annoying sites like this, as somebody suggested a few articles back?
This is great news for Linux... unfortunately, as somebody has already pointed out, we've basically reached a state where this kind of news is expected, and to be expected to become more frequent as Linux-awareness rises.
However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market. NT never managed to be very successful in the server market anyway, though MS has been trying its best to promote it, so it's not that surprising people are beginning to switch from NT to Linux. But what about the desktop market??? It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there. Yes, we have all those nice companies going Open Source, doing neat stuff like Corel Linux, selling Linux-preinstalled machines and whatnot, but the cold hard fact is that Windows still rules the PC market. AFAIK we haven't heard that much about Linux making an impact in the PC market; most of the big news is in the server domain.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...
Has anybody actually used Konqueror? I hear a lot of good stuff about it... but how 'bout the people who have actually used it step up and comment on how good it actually is, at this time. Let's all hear the pros and cons of Konqueror, and (for this discussion) compare it with Opera.
Seems that the existing patent system is becoming more and more irrelevent (or hard to apply) in today's fast-advancing technology... However, I like it that the article pointed out the original intention of the patent system:
Absolutely so. We have seen many examples of how the current patent system just fails to achieve this goal: ie. to give a limited reward to human innovation. Although it has worked before, it's starting to show signs of becoming decrepit. We've had problems with people abusing the system by patenting, eg., a well-known algorithm, and having the patent go through because of incompetence/ignorance of the people at the patent office. And now we have "inventions" made by computer algorithms, which seems to be a monkey wrench thrown into the patent system.
Rather than try to patch up the patent system and keep it going, perhaps it's time to reconsider the original goals of the patent system. The original goal was to reward the human inventor for his invention. I guess the bottom line is, of what form should this reward be? Under the existing patent system, it is to give the inventor exclusive rights to his invention for a certain period of time, and to give him the authority to allow/prohibit others' using of his invention. But is this still relevant today (and in the future)?
I'm thinking of the difference between the reward given to a patent owner and the reward given (or the gratification experienced) by an Open Source developer who is proud that he can share his ideas and have the community accept them. I don't know how applicable Open Source is to patents in general, but as far as software and software-related stuff is concerned, it seems that the "ego gratification" of developing an Open Source project does not suffer from the same shortcomings as the existing patent system.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Yet another comfirmation that the reign of MS is over (or going to be over soon). It's only a matter of time, and everybody (ie., people other than slashdotters, tech-junkies, and other members of their species ;-) ) will be aware of the defiencies of MS products and the availability of better, cheaper alternatives.
However, an interesting thought is the observation that nothing lasts forever. Witness the crash of a century-old bank in England not long ago, for example. Will the age of Linux come to an end too? Computers are moving so fast that what took a century to fall may take a much shorter time (eg. MS). What will happen when the age of Linux is over? Just food for thought... :-)
Hahaha, wasn't the NSA playing a big role in restricting export of encryption software? Too bad! By enforcing silly, short-sighted, frog-in-the-well laws limiting the power of encryption software in the US, they've just shot themselves in the foot. Now the US is crippled with respect to encryption, and in the meantime, projects like GnuPG, being developed way beyond the reach of agencies like NSA, are giving everybody else, like the common everyday Joe, access to powerful encryption.
Let's see how much "intelligence" they can gather, when one day encryption is used by default on the Internet. Billions upon billions of encrypted transmissions across every Internet linkk everyday, 99% of which is irrelevent. Fine, use the most powerful computers and cracking tools and what-not against it, this is the point of diminishing returns. You spend 99% of your processing power to decode useless transmissions like letters the common Joe writes to his wife. If you ask me, this is a dead-end. A really dead end.
It's about time people start realizing that the age of the Internet necessitates a totally new, different set of rules, and totally new, different ways of doing things. Traditional methods are totally useless in this new medium. Wake up, people! :-)
The mall claims that it's expressing a "deep concern" that many other malls have, but are not showing. Doesn't this show that many people are still not ready for the evitable age of ecommerce? (Witness the parallel with so many business people that look at the success of Open Source with disbelief, not understanding why it works and looking at it more like a threat.) Human beings tend to be like the legendary ostrich... (probably more so than real ostriches, but that's beside my point).
But in spite of all the catcalls this mall and other techo-phobic businesses may be getting from techies like us, I think we should stop and consider the issue that their reaction shows. The Internet is growing so fast, and getting so much attention, that barely anyone has had time to consider it's real relevence in our lives.
Apparently that's the picture a lot of people fear will come true. This is a rather significant question: what will the role of the Net be in our lives in the future?
IMHO I think the answer is that it is only a convenience, more than anything else. I think the picture I described above will never happen. Why? Because the idea of a living, breathing human being, being willing to vegetate in a tiny niche on this globe with an Internet connection as his/her sole link to the outside world, is simply ludicrous. Human beings will never be able to put up with such a life. Tech-junkies like myself might be able to do it for longer times than others, but regardless, a human being needs physical interaction with the outside world, esp. with other human beings. Yes we have VR and all that. But nothing compares with real, physical interaction. That said, I think physical shopping will not die out. It will be less significant, perhaps, but there will always be people who prefer to physically see and handle the goods before they purchase. The Internet only acts as a convenience for the different things in our lives, but it is not a replacement.
But of course, this is just my opinion. What do my fellow slashdotters think? :-)
Ever since I replaced my HD, Linux has been the only thing running on my machine. I've not touched Windows for more than a year now (and have no regrets about it), except on friends' machines, mostly to get them connected to our LAN. :-) However, I don't use ApplixOffice/Star Office... I use LaTeX for any serious word-processing, and a text editor for not-so-serious word-processing. However, I do experience the hassle of not being able to view Word documents people send me, and people not being able to grok LaTeX documents I send them. I suppose Star Office would solve this problem, but it hasn't caused me too much grief yet and I'm quite happy with LaTeX.
Of course, I'm probably not the normal PC user... so I don't know how relevant all of this rant is. :-)
I wonder what he means when he says the open source community is not innovative. It's certainly true that Linux developed out of Linus imitating (? or learning from history?) UNIX and all that, but surely Linux has come a long way from there? I'm not that well-versed with the kernel myself, so I can't really say with much assurance in what way Linux has "innovated".
But how about ESR's argument that open source is driven by "tickling the developer's itch"? From that standpoint, doesn't open source drive itself to be innovative, eg. when someone says, "hey, such and such a feature would be a neat thing to have!", goes and implement it, and develops a "bazaar" (to use ESR's terminology) and ultimately resulting in a high quality product that surely has innovated? What qualifies as an "innovation" anyway? Surely ESR's fetchmail is an innovative product of open source development? There certainly hasn't been anything quite like it before, although it does take its ideas from several places. After all, every innovation must start from something; something "totally creative" that you dream up without getting any ideas from anywhere else is probably not that great anyway.
I would argue that Open Source does encourage innovation. Yes, a lot of open source software in existence today are written for the sake of having a free alternative to a commercial solution, but that doesn't mean that all open source software is essentially copying existing ideas without innovation. I'd surely like to know what he meant when he said that open source people are not innovative.
I know some slashdotters don't like RedHat because of its commercialism and what-not. But let's face it, people. Even if RedHat's not the best, even if other Linux distro's are more "pure" as far as open source software is concerned, we still need a company like RedHat. Why? Because the media attention and promotion of Linux caused by companies like Redhat is causing hardware vendors to start opening up specs to allow us to write drivers for.
Imagine a fearful picture of an MS-dominated world sometime in the would-have-been future, where not only we've Winmodems, but also Win-monitors, Win-keyboards, Win-harddrives, Win-CPUs... and all of them have proprietary interfaces which we cannot legally write GPL'd code for. Remember the "decommiditization of protocols" in the Halloween documents? We won't even have computers to run Linux on if that happened.
We gotta be grateful companies like Redhat came along and took Linux into the commercial world, so that, if nothing else, Linuxers are no longer an "insignificant niche" but a significant, thriving community. Even though I personally don't like RedHat Linux (I prefer Debian), they deserve a big "congratulations" from all of us.
IMHO GNU/Hurd looks promising... it's based on a new OS technology (microkernel), which Linux has traces of (dynamically loaded modules), but probably won't have since it's an architectural/design change. I personally like the microkernel concept, because from my viewpoint an OS should be there to support what applications want to do, and not dictate what they can do. As such, the "untouchable" part of the OS (ie. the kernel) should be as small as possible. In the case of Hurd, the Mach microkernel provides almost the bare minimum an OS provides -- Hurd is simply a set of services ("interfaces" to be precise) that run on top of Mach. The good thing about this is that apps that expect a POSIX interface will find that it's implemented in Hurd; whereas if an app ever wants to do things differently, it can always implement its own interface and run off that. So, it is possible to "bypass" Hurd if you ever wanted to: it's there as a convenience (we don't want to keep reimplementing POSIX services for example) but it's not imposed on you.
However, at the moment Hurd is still in its development and it's really hard to tell whether it will be the "Next Big Thing" after Linux. This is just my take on Hurd. :-)
*sigh* it's sad, but the unfortunate truth is that most people believe marketing hype. Proof: look at the percentage of computer users out there use M$ products. I'm not saying M$ products are bad by definition, but the proportion of M$ users and other users certainly don't reflect the quality of the products involved. In a way, I've given up hope that "the masses" will ever get the "real truth" behind things. Yes, Linux is definitely a decent product that sells itself... but how many people today choose Linux because they know it's good, and how many "choose" it because it's the "hip" thing to do now, and everybody around them is switching to Linux?
Although I love Linux, I believe that one day something better would come along. The question is, when that day comes, will people stubbornly cling onto Linux the same way they are clinging to M$ now? If so, how different are they from stubborn M$ supporters of today? Or perhaps, one day something inferior to Linux comes along, but it gets super-hyped up and everyone talks about it. I suspect a majority of people will simply switch away from Linux, just because the "omniscient media" tells them so.
Or, witness the amount of media attention Y2K got. For sure, Y2K is a non-trivial problem, and things need to get fixed. But how many people really understand what Y2K all about beyond "Y2K is coming, bad, bad things are going to happen to my computer! But look! My toaster from such and such a company is Y2K-compliant! (Or so it says on the sticker!) We better replace all our toasters, refridgerators, and vacuum cleaners before the Y2K bug hits them!"
Although personally I always take (at least) several grains of salt with whatever I hear from the media/marketing people/etc., I'm afraid most people don't, and they don't really care either.
UNIX is about choice... absolutely agreed. Though IMHO I'd rather people focus on GNU/Hurd instead... If I'm not mistaken, isn't the whole point of the Mach microkernel to let you run totally different interfaces on top of the same kernel? If Debian gets Hurd to work, we could even start creating a "Linux-on-Mach" interface that would allow you to run native Linux apps, a "FreeBSD-on-Mach" interface that lets you run native FreeBSD binaries, and perhaps even (shudder) a Win32 interface that lets you run native Win32 apps (akin to WINE).
Isn't this flexibility the whole reason Mach exists at all?? This would really give you freedom of choice, and perhaps even more than that, as you can simultaneously run different interfaces, all of them natively! IMNSHO this is the ultimate embodiment of the UNIX philosphy. This is why I predicted that the next big thing after Linux would be Hurd, not necessarily because of Hurd itself, but because a microkernel design gives you so much more flexibility than the traditional monolithic design. That's why I think it would be most profitable for the Debian people to work on Debian GNU/Hurd instead, if they wanted to work on anything outside Debian GNU/Linux.
Good point, I think as more and more (esp. commercial) services get online, encryption should almost always be used by default. What with personal information, easily-misunderstood-when-out-of-context content in emails, forums, etc., plaintext transfer is just too... well, plain. And even if no hidden motives are involved, you could accidentally see something in the transmission that you shouldn't, and get into trouble just because of that, like this company here.
As we move into the age of the vast commercialization of the Internet, encryption should be somewhat like a standard thing, and plaintext used only when you actually intend the content to be read by others. Plus, unaware users should not be left with plaintext as default. They should be conscious of it when their transmissions are sent in plaintext. All email programs, sites where you sign up for something, etc., should use encryption by default. I think encryption technology is advanced enough and common enough these days for this to be feasible. As for potential performance degradation, I remember the days when I had an 8088 and said, "WoW! the 286 runs at 16 MHz??!! Who'll ever need that except to play DOOM??"
LOL Well said. But then it'd take years and LOTS of ink to transcribe the byte-sequence of a JPEG file, and hours of wrist-wrenching typing to reconstruct the file on the receiving end! :-)