This is a company (or group of companies, it's not entirely clear) who is saying "this is illegal and we could wreck your life for it in court... but we've decided to let you do it. For now."
Aside from being arrogant and pretentious, it's selective enforcement and shouldn't be allowed. Companies should not be the authority on what actions you may or may not do with the things they produce. They should not have laws that allow them to sue anybody when they feel they have a reason, because a company will always abuse this power, sooner or later - they are ruled by the bottom line.
We don't want their permission. We want the laws changed so that we don't need their permission.
The fact is that the success of big business depends on people working together.
Not quite.
The success of big business mostly runs on people trying to work together. I'm talking about when they think: I know this could be done better, but I don't want to rock the boat. People striving for some notion of 'working together' in preference to 'doing things as best they can be done'. It's about overlooking failures and not stopping 'business' from being done even when the practical result is lousy. This is 'success' because the result doesn't really matter: so long as business is being done, people are making money, and that's what big business is all about. So, fitting in, not being disruptive, these things are 'good' for the business. The products don't matter much because big business sells to the ignorant masses, who really can't tell the difference.
Small businesses are very different. They can't run on inertia and marketing like that; they survive based on luck and the quality of their products. So, while big business is about making money, small business is about making products. That creates a radically different environment, often to the point of being completely the opposite. It also means that people who care more about money will find they fit better into big businesses, and people who care more about the quality of their work will find they prefer small businesses. Unfortunately a lot of people don't realise this and end up doing a job that doesn't really suit them. Obviously there are exceptions to all of the above, but not that many.
It's true that big businesses need to get some things done well too, but most of the time, they contract the work out to small businesses. They're probably both necessary - small businesses get the work done, and big businesses acquire the funding to pay them. The important thing is to realise the difference between the two. Although they look similar, they actually have very little in common - except that they can both change into the other. When a business changes type, it typically needs new management (since people who are good at running one type are likely to be bad at running the other) and probably to replace large parts of its workforce. Failure to adapt to the change tends to kill off the business. It's also important to realise that just because you liked a company when it was small doesn't mean you're going to like it once it has grown big, since it probably has little in common with what it used to be.
Do this and you may be very happy at a big business
My main point is that this is the wrong attitude. Think about the differences between big and small businesses that I've been talking about. Don't try to fit into a business just because you're there. If you're the sort of person who likes to make deals, fit in, not worry too much about the effects of your actions on the customers and make a lot of money, then you're likely to be very happy in a big business. If you're the sort of person who likes to do the best job they can, be themselves, make other people's lives better, or work in your own manner, you're likely to be very happy in a small business. If you're some other kind of person (and you probably are) then you need to work out for yourself which style suits you better.
Define maximum aphelion and maximum elliptic and minimum volume. What else is there?
Define artificial nature. The religious right would claim that all planets were created by an intelligent entity.
What about planets that formed on their own due to the creation of an artificial star?
What about planets that formed because the intelligent entity was so fricking huge that it accreted layers of debris via gravity, which compressed into rock from their own weight, reaching the required volume, but never intending to do so?
What about discarded shells of giant space whelks?
(Unlikely? I'm not the one who suggested artificial planets)
I always wanted to have the ability to "hash" songs, and come up with an algorithm that would be robust enough to work across multiple codecs and encoding options, different (relative) normalizations, and maybe even be able to handle empty space at the beginning and/or end of the song.
It's been done. Here's a system where you can hum a tune and it tells you the song: http://www.musipedia.org/
Current systems are mostly based on pitch changes, so they aren't perfect (especially with the recycled slush turned out by low-grade high-visibility pop acts), and largely useless for rap, but they mostly work. There are numerous variations on the system, this is just one of the more significant ones that is publically availabel on the web.
I would think by making a hash based on values relative to sound signatures within the clip this might be possible, but I don't really know how this stuff works
What google is doing may or may not be related. They might instead be using a form of speech recognition technology, or a combination of both, or something else entirely.
Are those the same mac users who have in the past done themselves injuries by trying to cram a graphite powermac into their mouth and suck on it, believing it to be a throat lozenge?
I'm not sure where you get the idea that there are "bugs" in the system. Windows was just easier to use and\or more powerful.
You are claiming that Windows does not have bugs? Then we know that your study was not very careful. If a professional software tester is testing a piece of software and reports that it doesn't have any bugs, they get fired for not doing their job. Why? Because all software has bugs.
For instance, the built-in integration of Active Directory and Kerberos made secure user authentication a trivial task in Windows, but configuring Kerberos with ANYTHING in the tested linux flavours was a friggin nightmare. The linux guy had to write all kinds of custom scripts and workarounds to get 10% of Windows' functionality
So your 'expert' had never done this before (anybody who had would either have suitable code already written, or would be familiar with at least one of the several dozen publically available projects providing suitable code). That's a pretty interesting definition of an expert. Normally, we use the term 'expert' to refer to somebody who already knows what they are doing, not somebody who has to learn it as they go along.
Also, why are you using "Windows' functionality" as the benchmark? Why are you not examining all the functionality that Linux has but Windows does not offer? Are you saying that your study was not based on an impartial set of criteria, but instead you started with the list of Windows features and tested the systems against that?
and that simply isn't a viable option when you're administering a 10,000 seat enterprise
Excuse me? When you're administering a 10,000 seat enterprise, it is simply not a viable option to use the shipped software unmodified. Anything on that scale absolutely must use at least some custom software to manage it because the costs of failing to do so can run into the millions. What was a minor annoyance with 10 seats becomes a major budget line item with thousands of seats. Customised management software and administration tools are the norm. Any company on that size is expected to be employing a few developers full time just to work on improving the efficiency of their administration mechanisms. They might be doing that with Java or.NET or perl or shell scripts or whatever, but they are definitely doing it.
In the end we all agreed that linux is a fantastic server in small to medium-sized implementations but it's simply too much work from a top-down enterprise perspective.
From your comments it is now clear what happened. You picked up a linux sysadmin who is familiar with only "small to medium-sized" implementations and has never been a senior admin in a large enterprise. Unsurprisingly you found that they couldn't do their job very well. Your conclusion is largely based on this, blaming the software instead of the admin. Given the number of large 'top-down' enterprises using the same software, your conclusion does not fit with observed practice, so it's not very valid.
Long story short, Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything. In fact, the only topic where Linux came even close to Windows was in community support, and even that was only 50% of Windows' score.
If your so-called linux 'expert' did not find and fix any bugs in the system during this study, then they were not a real expert. If they did fix bugs but your study mysteriously failed to account for the effects of system bugs on administration then it was not an impartial study. If you try to tell me that windows was better than linux at getting bugs fixed then we'll know you're lying.
I don't know which of the above is true but I'm pretty sure that at least one of them is. My bet is that your expert wasn't very expert. This is common; when working at that level, linux admins can get by with less knowledge than windows admins, because windows admins have to spend every day fighting the system to make it work. Linux admins *can* spend their time improving the system to reduce their workload, but they can also get away with just cruising. (If your linux admin was fighting his system, he wasn't very expert; the whole point of free software is that people with sufficient expertise can take all the fight out of the system).
Your devs probably ought to get subversion because the continuing cost of using a sub-optimal source management system adds up to staggering amounts pretty fast.
Surely that's a good argument for not using subversion. As revision control goes, it's far from optimal.
The life is over developer-wise at 30 mentality makes no sense to me. It's about that time that you *really* start to actually know what you're doing and stop making so many stupid mistakes.
More precisely, it's at about ten years after you start - that's about 30 if you started when you went to university. Could go lower or higher if you started some other time. It takes roughly ten years to gain expertise in any field.
I just don't understand why so many places want to start back at square one every 9 years (if that long) and make themselves completely out of people that are fairly new to the game and make the same mistakes as the people who came in before them when they were their age.
This also happens in many industries. I've observed it enough times to know why they do it. What happens is that when you have experienced employees, they know enough to tell the management when the instructions are stupid and are going to cause the project to fail. Management decides that this is the engineers' fault for being uncooperative, and replaces them with younger, less experienced people who will do it the way they want it done.
Replacing the developers like this is usually a good sign of management incompetence. That's all.
That would be the 'roughly' part. It's similar in that the goal is to force the hand of the opposing party. With regular civil disobedience, the goal is to force the government to put people in jail for things which are obviously stupid. Here, it's to force the MPAA to take them to court. In both cases the objective is to put an end to rhetoric and vague threats. TPB's position is that they are going to win in court, and then the MPAA will be screwed.
they were just sayin g NA NA NA NA NA NA: you cant catch us!
Yes, that is exactly what they were doing. It's roughly similar to civil disobedience.
They were saying: We are the people, we want things this way. A democratic government is obliged to respect our wishes because we are a majority of the population. Foreign corporations cannot make up ethics and laws to suit their business plan, they require our consent.
They have always been treating this as a political battle, not a legal one. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Sweden is unusual in that a large portion of the populace is informed about this issue and supports TPB rather than the MPAA. I don't think this is over yet.
I used to be fairly moderate in all this. I thought Lessig's book made some really good points, and I thought "there's a nice middle ground, it's only fair that the artists protect their rights,
You have to realise that, by and large, artists are not interested in "protecting their rights" - or rather, they are, but they want to protect their rights from the media cartels, they aren't very concerned about end-users. Most artists are more interested in having people appreciate their work. The media cartels are screwing them anyway, so they have no expectation of getting 'fair' payment for it.
So the DRM battle isn't about artists, it's about the bottom line of a few megacorporations that are already making massive profits every year. I find that "making some megacorp's profit margins increase more rapidly" is a pretty weak ethical argument. If they weren't screwing the artists already, so that artists would actually see the payoff for DRM, I might find it more convincing. But the sad reality is that they'll probably use it as a reason to pay the artists *less*, by deducting the cost of DRM management from their paycheck.
(You think that's sarcasm? It's standard practice to charge production costs to the artists - I did say they were getting screwed)
How is paying OpenOffice.org to fix a few issues with their products any different to paying MS to fix a few issues you have with MS Office?
The difference is that you can. When was the last time you found a bug in MS Office and actually managed to pay MS to fix it? Unless you are buying millions of units, they won't even listen to you.
In the US, we'd rather give our personal information to 1000 companies individually than give it once to the government.. because we don't trust our government.
To point out the obvious, that's because your government is untrustworthy and just steals the data anyway... not that it's relevant here.
As an American, it's incredible, to me, what the UK will not allow private companies to do, but will allow the government to do.
This may be true in general, but in the context of data protection it is not. You have exactly the same rights regarding data stored by the government that you do for data stored by private corporations. If a company or the government has some data stored on me, then I have a legal right to:
Know what data they have stored
Supply them with updated data and require them to update their records to reflect this
Demand to see their policies for how the data is stored and updated
Prohibit them from using data for purposes other than those it was collected for (so if they collect my name and address for the purpose of sending me something I bought, they can't sell that information to choicepoint or other marketers)
(and some other less interesting things)
That's what this is all about. UK companies are legally required to guarantee me that these rights will be upheld on any personal data they have about me. That means they may not give my data to foreign entities who don't guarantee these things - even if I didn't prohibit them from using my data for marketing purposes, they still can't give my data to a foreign company unless that company is legally required to let me see and update what they have.
US companies aren't required to do these things (and by and large, most of them are either very hard or impossible to do in the US), so UK companies can't give them any personal data about me. It's got nothing to do with trusting governments or companies.
National security does not excuse these requirements. 'Personal data' is a limited subset of information. I am entitled to demand that MI5 tell me what they think my current address and credit history are, and that they update these records if they are wrong. If the US cannot manage to get these very simple things right, then they may not have my data, regardless of the security implications.
The CAPPS program is a good example. You'd go to the airport, and a few people would be turned away for no apparent reason. If you are on their blacklist, getting off it again is extremely hard. This mess would be completely illegal in the UK; here they would be required to help you sort out the problem. Also, a system that makes purely automated decisions about you in this manner is explicitly illegal here (section 12 of the Data Protection Act 1998). Until the US passes laws to stop this sort of thing from happening, we are not going to trust them with our data.
(The ruling is specifically about the unelected bureaucrats on the EU council trying to waive these requirements, and the EU court overturning the council's most recent attempt, at the request of the elected parliament, on the basis that the council had no right to do that).
I know plenty of people will say, "program carefully", but that's like saying, "seatbelts are stupid. If we all just drove safely we wouldn't need seatbelts or airbags or bumpers."
No, it's like saying "making cars travel at no more than 5mph and have a man with a red flag walk in front is stupid, it significantly reduces the value of travelling by car". 'Safe' languages come at a large cost to efficiency, because they involve extra checking at runtime. Safer is not always better: you reach a point where the cost of the added safety (because you have to buy more powerful hardware) outweighs the cost of the system being less safe (because you have to occasionally clean up a virus infestation). You can slap a monetary figure on both those things and compare them. If the program was already pretty safe (one break in N years), and the cost of cleanup is low (restore infected hosts from disk image), then adding more 'safety' may be a bad thing. Especially in a corporate environment where the bottom line rules.
Scanning files efficiently is actually quite hard. You can write a naive scanner in a few thousand lines, but to make it competitively efficient you're going to need to do a lot more work (scheduling, sequencing, caching results, skipping safe data, etc).
The reality is that the phones will continue to become more powerful. Your phone WILL be able to play mp3 files and read emails. It probably already is able to do these things.
My phone was new last year and cannot do these things (Nokia 1100). This is a very good thing. Why? Because the battery life of my phone is over five times what you get from the more expensive 'do everything' phones. All those extra features require more powerful processors, which in turn suck power and make your phone need to be recharged every day. I charge my phone once a week, or less often, and it never runs flat.
If a kid on myspace -- aka the backwater of the web where HTML from 1995 is still popular -- is talking about plans to take out a group of students, or running drugs onto campus to sell during lunch, then I think the district not only has a duty, but an obligation, to try and make sure neither happens.
That's because you're a fascist conservative moonbat.
The district has no business interfering with anything which is merely an idea being kicked around for laughs. The point at which they should intervene is when the kid starts preparing to actually carry it out - buying guns, or drugs, or whatever. Nobody has any right to place restrictions on a person merely thinking about committing a crime. Only when they move from fantasy to reality should anything be done. Nothing else makes any sense; if you outlaw thoughtcrime, then you must convert every school into a prison facility, because every single one of the students has at some point considered some kind of criminal action. Everybody does it, it's a perfectly normal thing to do, especially when you're growing up.
It is also vital for security: people need to think up ways these things can be done, or else it will be impossible to defend against them. For people to be effective security researchers, or detectives, or sysadmins, they need to spend years contemplating this sort of thing. Prohibiting kids from discussing it is merely going to ensure that the next generation will not include anybody who is suitable to work in that sort of industry.
As for why RMS won't give up the whole "anti-'open source' label" thing--I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that ESR is a major jackass, but I'm not completely sure.
It's because open source doesn't give you what free software gives you.
Open source means that the corporation invites you to contribute to their products - you can look at the source, fix bugs, and submit patches. Free software means that you are free to do whatever you like with their products, including compete with them. Open source does not require this. Open source is approximately a subset of free software - it gives you some of the same things, but not all of them.
RMS is not interested in getting things which are open source but not free software. His goal is for each individual to have full control over their computer systems. Partial control does not satisfy him - and he's got a point there. He's "anti" open-source because he does not want corporations to wiggle into the gap between the two and then kill off free software (which some corporations would like to do).
It's basically the same as 'shared source' (from Microsoft, look-but-don't-touch) vs 'open source'. One is a subset of the other, and the corporations could try to give you one and then tell you that you don't want the other - like Microsoft is doing with shared source. RMS is telling you that you do actually want free software, not just open source. That's what it's all about.
In practice, most corporations don't try to play those games, but it does happen from time to time. Often it's caused by over-zealous lawyers writing licenses that are just a little bit too restrictive.
Java classes get compiled to native code with machine-specific optimizations at runtime.
That is quite irrelevant. Java as a language is slower than C (and both are slower than Fortran) because the language imposes constraints upon expression. Java's object-heavy type system and required garbage collection impose performance penalties which are not present in C. Java's lack of native pointers imposes performance penalties in some specific circumstances - mostly those where C can use pointer arithmatic for manipulating data. A maximally optimal implementation of both Java and C will show C having a significant (but not dominating) performance advantage.
All of these things are well-known in the field of language design. High-level languages don't have to be slower than low-level ones... but they usually are. Not because of some details of the implementation, but because of the nature of the language and the things it can express. All of those things that make Java 'safe' also make it slower. That's one of the tradeoffs involved in designing languages. (Java also has a number of design flaws in its type system, making it slower than it needs to be, but that isn't relevant here).
The 'benchmarks' that you improperly cite are meaningless. You can't just pick two random pieces of code that do roughly the same thing and compare them. The details of the algorithms used are important. For any given piece of Java code that appears to be running faster than the C version, I can show you how to make the C version run at least as fast.
This may indicate a market for such a device. Not a PDA, not a full-on "outfitted for war" laptop, not a (god damned useless) e-reader, not a handheld gaming rig, but the space between.
MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete! Why have none of us embraced this yet?
Because it's the space in between. Anybody experienced in business will tell you one thing for free:
Never attempt to sell to the middle of a market.
It just doesn't work. Your product will be the very definition of mediocre. Some people will buy it, but most people will migrate towards one of the ends instead. In business, it is necessary for you to differentiate your product by being the best at something - basically either price or quality, although there are variations in specific forms of both.
This is normal for class actions. You get 'actual damages' for anything that can be proved to apply to everybody in the class. Not everybody who bought their crappy CD had to clean up the mess at considerable expense.
I really want to see someone go after Sony for a real settlement.
And that is exactly what you're supposed to do. If you were one of the smaller group who were severely impaired by Sony's reprehensible actions, you're supposed to take them to court and hit them for the whole thing. You just can't do that in a class action suit. Unfortunately this is less likely to happen, because Sony would fight a real lawsuit with everything they've got. They kinda surrendered for this class action because they knew it was just a slap on the wrist, but they really don't want to lose a case where they have to pay for the cleanup, because then everybody will sue them (after losing the case once, you tend to lose all the others quite quickly). So the first person to take them to court has an expensive battle to fight... so there probably won't be a first person.
They should really be hit with a criminal case too, but that's a political matter, and current US politics is heavily pro-corporation, so it probably won't happen.
The legal system is a nice idea but it costs too much for small players to be able to take on big ones. Big players like Sony get a free ride when it comes to treading on small ones.
Give me a break, are you telling me you have a hard time clicking the next button??!!?
No. I'm telling you that my mother has a hard time clicking on the next button. Present her with a choice between 'back' and 'next' and she will ask for help. This is normal for Windows users; the only distinction is between whether they call you and ask, or whether they choose randomly.
I don't know about other people, but I can tell you why neither I nor the company I work for pays money for AV software.
It's because all the commercial AV software is invasive, box-crashing junk. Some of them (Norton) are actually worse than viruses - since nobody around here uses IE or Outlook, the virus infestations are sufficiently rare that it is cheaper (less maintainance and recovery cost) to let the boxes get infected and clean up, than it is to install the AV package and then deal with all the problems it causes.
We scan mail with clamav on the mail server, and run it over the files stored on the servers. Beyond that we just keep an eye on the desktops for suspicious behaviour. I'd love to have something more effective, but it would have to be non-invasive and above all, not cause new support issues. Once you shoot down the main transmission vectors (IE, Outlook, please-run-me mail worms) the virus hits just don't come often enough to justify the pain.
What the world needs is a really solid free software AV system. clamwin is an okay start, but it could be a lot better. We'd be quite happy to pay for signature database updates, if the actual scanner was solid (and preferably free software, although for windows boxes, who cares?).
Slashdot Mirror
This is a company (or group of companies, it's not entirely clear) who is saying "this is illegal and we could wreck your life for it in court... but we've decided to let you do it. For now."
Aside from being arrogant and pretentious, it's selective enforcement and shouldn't be allowed. Companies should not be the authority on what actions you may or may not do with the things they produce. They should not have laws that allow them to sue anybody when they feel they have a reason, because a company will always abuse this power, sooner or later - they are ruled by the bottom line.
We don't want their permission. We want the laws changed so that we don't need their permission.
The fact is that the success of big business depends on people working together.
Not quite.
The success of big business mostly runs on people trying to work together. I'm talking about when they think: I know this could be done better, but I don't want to rock the boat. People striving for some notion of 'working together' in preference to 'doing things as best they can be done'. It's about overlooking failures and not stopping 'business' from being done even when the practical result is lousy. This is 'success' because the result doesn't really matter: so long as business is being done, people are making money, and that's what big business is all about. So, fitting in, not being disruptive, these things are 'good' for the business. The products don't matter much because big business sells to the ignorant masses, who really can't tell the difference.
Small businesses are very different. They can't run on inertia and marketing like that; they survive based on luck and the quality of their products. So, while big business is about making money, small business is about making products. That creates a radically different environment, often to the point of being completely the opposite. It also means that people who care more about money will find they fit better into big businesses, and people who care more about the quality of their work will find they prefer small businesses. Unfortunately a lot of people don't realise this and end up doing a job that doesn't really suit them. Obviously there are exceptions to all of the above, but not that many.
It's true that big businesses need to get some things done well too, but most of the time, they contract the work out to small businesses. They're probably both necessary - small businesses get the work done, and big businesses acquire the funding to pay them. The important thing is to realise the difference between the two. Although they look similar, they actually have very little in common - except that they can both change into the other. When a business changes type, it typically needs new management (since people who are good at running one type are likely to be bad at running the other) and probably to replace large parts of its workforce. Failure to adapt to the change tends to kill off the business. It's also important to realise that just because you liked a company when it was small doesn't mean you're going to like it once it has grown big, since it probably has little in common with what it used to be.
Do this and you may be very happy at a big business
My main point is that this is the wrong attitude. Think about the differences between big and small businesses that I've been talking about. Don't try to fit into a business just because you're there. If you're the sort of person who likes to make deals, fit in, not worry too much about the effects of your actions on the customers and make a lot of money, then you're likely to be very happy in a big business. If you're the sort of person who likes to do the best job they can, be themselves, make other people's lives better, or work in your own manner, you're likely to be very happy in a small business. If you're some other kind of person (and you probably are) then you need to work out for yourself which style suits you better.
Define maximum aphelion and maximum elliptic and minimum volume. What else is there?
Define artificial nature. The religious right would claim that all planets were created by an intelligent entity.
What about planets that formed on their own due to the creation of an artificial star?
What about planets that formed because the intelligent entity was so fricking huge that it accreted layers of debris via gravity, which compressed into rock from their own weight, reaching the required volume, but never intending to do so?
What about discarded shells of giant space whelks?
(Unlikely? I'm not the one who suggested artificial planets)
I always wanted to have the ability to "hash" songs, and come up with an algorithm that would be robust enough to work across multiple codecs and encoding options, different (relative) normalizations, and maybe even be able to handle empty space at the beginning and/or end of the song.
It's been done. Here's a system where you can hum a tune and it tells you the song: http://www.musipedia.org/
Current systems are mostly based on pitch changes, so they aren't perfect (especially with the recycled slush turned out by low-grade high-visibility pop acts), and largely useless for rap, but they mostly work. There are numerous variations on the system, this is just one of the more significant ones that is publically availabel on the web.
I would think by making a hash based on values relative to sound signatures within the clip this might be possible, but I don't really know how this stuff works
What google is doing may or may not be related. They might instead be using a form of speech recognition technology, or a combination of both, or something else entirely.
mac users are too smart to take the bait
Are those the same mac users who have in the past done themselves injuries by trying to cram a graphite powermac into their mouth and suck on it, believing it to be a throat lozenge?
I'm not sure where you get the idea that there are "bugs" in the system. Windows was just easier to use and\or more powerful.
.NET or perl or shell scripts or whatever, but they are definitely doing it.
You are claiming that Windows does not have bugs? Then we know that your study was not very careful. If a professional software tester is testing a piece of software and reports that it doesn't have any bugs, they get fired for not doing their job. Why? Because all software has bugs.
For instance, the built-in integration of Active Directory and Kerberos made secure user authentication a trivial task in Windows, but configuring Kerberos with ANYTHING in the tested linux flavours was a friggin nightmare. The linux guy had to write all kinds of custom scripts and workarounds to get 10% of Windows' functionality
So your 'expert' had never done this before (anybody who had would either have suitable code already written, or would be familiar with at least one of the several dozen publically available projects providing suitable code). That's a pretty interesting definition of an expert. Normally, we use the term 'expert' to refer to somebody who already knows what they are doing, not somebody who has to learn it as they go along.
Also, why are you using "Windows' functionality" as the benchmark? Why are you not examining all the functionality that Linux has but Windows does not offer? Are you saying that your study was not based on an impartial set of criteria, but instead you started with the list of Windows features and tested the systems against that?
and that simply isn't a viable option when you're administering a 10,000 seat enterprise
Excuse me? When you're administering a 10,000 seat enterprise, it is simply not a viable option to use the shipped software unmodified. Anything on that scale absolutely must use at least some custom software to manage it because the costs of failing to do so can run into the millions. What was a minor annoyance with 10 seats becomes a major budget line item with thousands of seats. Customised management software and administration tools are the norm. Any company on that size is expected to be employing a few developers full time just to work on improving the efficiency of their administration mechanisms. They might be doing that with Java or
In the end we all agreed that linux is a fantastic server in small to medium-sized implementations but it's simply too much work from a top-down enterprise perspective.
From your comments it is now clear what happened. You picked up a linux sysadmin who is familiar with only "small to medium-sized" implementations and has never been a senior admin in a large enterprise. Unsurprisingly you found that they couldn't do their job very well. Your conclusion is largely based on this, blaming the software instead of the admin. Given the number of large 'top-down' enterprises using the same software, your conclusion does not fit with observed practice, so it's not very valid.
Long story short, Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything. In fact, the only topic where Linux came even close to Windows was in community support, and even that was only 50% of Windows' score.
If your so-called linux 'expert' did not find and fix any bugs in the system during this study, then they were not a real expert. If they did fix bugs but your study mysteriously failed to account for the effects of system bugs on administration then it was not an impartial study. If you try to tell me that windows was better than linux at getting bugs fixed then we'll know you're lying.
I don't know which of the above is true but I'm pretty sure that at least one of them is. My bet is that your expert wasn't very expert. This is common; when working at that level, linux admins can get by with less knowledge than windows admins, because windows admins have to spend every day fighting the system to make it work. Linux admins *can* spend their time improving the system to reduce their workload, but they can also get away with just cruising. (If your linux admin was fighting his system, he wasn't very expert; the whole point of free software is that people with sufficient expertise can take all the fight out of the system).
Your devs probably ought to get subversion because the continuing cost of using a sub-optimal source management system adds up to staggering amounts pretty fast.
Surely that's a good argument for not using subversion. As revision control goes, it's far from optimal.
The life is over developer-wise at 30 mentality makes no sense to me. It's about that time that you *really* start to actually know what you're doing and stop making so many stupid mistakes.
More precisely, it's at about ten years after you start - that's about 30 if you started when you went to university. Could go lower or higher if you started some other time. It takes roughly ten years to gain expertise in any field.
I just don't understand why so many places want to start back at square one every 9 years (if that long) and make themselves completely out of people that are fairly new to the game and make the same mistakes as the people who came in before them when they were their age.
This also happens in many industries. I've observed it enough times to know why they do it. What happens is that when you have experienced employees, they know enough to tell the management when the instructions are stupid and are going to cause the project to fail. Management decides that this is the engineers' fault for being uncooperative, and replaces them with younger, less experienced people who will do it the way they want it done.
Replacing the developers like this is usually a good sign of management incompetence. That's all.
That would be the 'roughly' part. It's similar in that the goal is to force the hand of the opposing party. With regular civil disobedience, the goal is to force the government to put people in jail for things which are obviously stupid. Here, it's to force the MPAA to take them to court. In both cases the objective is to put an end to rhetoric and vague threats. TPB's position is that they are going to win in court, and then the MPAA will be screwed.
Come on, the PIRATES bay?!?!?!?!?
they were just sayin g NA NA NA NA NA NA: you cant catch us!
Yes, that is exactly what they were doing. It's roughly similar to civil disobedience.
They were saying: We are the people, we want things this way. A democratic government is obliged to respect our wishes because we are a majority of the population. Foreign corporations cannot make up ethics and laws to suit their business plan, they require our consent.
They have always been treating this as a political battle, not a legal one. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Sweden is unusual in that a large portion of the populace is informed about this issue and supports TPB rather than the MPAA. I don't think this is over yet.
This is the stuff that brings down governments.
I used to be fairly moderate in all this. I thought Lessig's book made some really good points, and I thought "there's a nice middle ground, it's only fair that the artists protect their rights,
You have to realise that, by and large, artists are not interested in "protecting their rights" - or rather, they are, but they want to protect their rights from the media cartels, they aren't very concerned about end-users. Most artists are more interested in having people appreciate their work. The media cartels are screwing them anyway, so they have no expectation of getting 'fair' payment for it.
So the DRM battle isn't about artists, it's about the bottom line of a few megacorporations that are already making massive profits every year. I find that "making some megacorp's profit margins increase more rapidly" is a pretty weak ethical argument. If they weren't screwing the artists already, so that artists would actually see the payoff for DRM, I might find it more convincing. But the sad reality is that they'll probably use it as a reason to pay the artists *less*, by deducting the cost of DRM management from their paycheck.
(You think that's sarcasm? It's standard practice to charge production costs to the artists - I did say they were getting screwed)
How is paying OpenOffice.org to fix a few issues with their products any different to paying MS to fix a few issues you have with MS Office?
The difference is that you can. When was the last time you found a bug in MS Office and actually managed to pay MS to fix it? Unless you are buying millions of units, they won't even listen to you.
To point out the obvious, that's because your government is untrustworthy and just steals the data anyway... not that it's relevant here.
As an American, it's incredible, to me, what the UK will not allow private companies to do, but will allow the government to do.
This may be true in general, but in the context of data protection it is not. You have exactly the same rights regarding data stored by the government that you do for data stored by private corporations. If a company or the government has some data stored on me, then I have a legal right to:
That's what this is all about. UK companies are legally required to guarantee me that these rights will be upheld on any personal data they have about me. That means they may not give my data to foreign entities who don't guarantee these things - even if I didn't prohibit them from using my data for marketing purposes, they still can't give my data to a foreign company unless that company is legally required to let me see and update what they have.
US companies aren't required to do these things (and by and large, most of them are either very hard or impossible to do in the US), so UK companies can't give them any personal data about me. It's got nothing to do with trusting governments or companies.
National security does not excuse these requirements. 'Personal data' is a limited subset of information. I am entitled to demand that MI5 tell me what they think my current address and credit history are, and that they update these records if they are wrong. If the US cannot manage to get these very simple things right, then they may not have my data, regardless of the security implications.
The CAPPS program is a good example. You'd go to the airport, and a few people would be turned away for no apparent reason. If you are on their blacklist, getting off it again is extremely hard. This mess would be completely illegal in the UK; here they would be required to help you sort out the problem. Also, a system that makes purely automated decisions about you in this manner is explicitly illegal here (section 12 of the Data Protection Act 1998). Until the US passes laws to stop this sort of thing from happening, we are not going to trust them with our data.
(The ruling is specifically about the unelected bureaucrats on the EU council trying to waive these requirements, and the EU court overturning the council's most recent attempt, at the request of the elected parliament, on the basis that the council had no right to do that).
I know plenty of people will say, "program carefully", but that's like saying, "seatbelts are stupid. If we all just drove safely we wouldn't need seatbelts or airbags or bumpers."
No, it's like saying "making cars travel at no more than 5mph and have a man with a red flag walk in front is stupid, it significantly reduces the value of travelling by car". 'Safe' languages come at a large cost to efficiency, because they involve extra checking at runtime. Safer is not always better: you reach a point where the cost of the added safety (because you have to buy more powerful hardware) outweighs the cost of the system being less safe (because you have to occasionally clean up a virus infestation). You can slap a monetary figure on both those things and compare them. If the program was already pretty safe (one break in N years), and the cost of cleanup is low (restore infected hosts from disk image), then adding more 'safety' may be a bad thing. Especially in a corporate environment where the bottom line rules.
Scanning files efficiently is actually quite hard. You can write a naive scanner in a few thousand lines, but to make it competitively efficient you're going to need to do a lot more work (scheduling, sequencing, caching results, skipping safe data, etc).
The reality is that the phones will continue to become more powerful. Your phone WILL be able to play mp3 files and read emails. It probably already is able to do these things.
My phone was new last year and cannot do these things (Nokia 1100). This is a very good thing. Why? Because the battery life of my phone is over five times what you get from the more expensive 'do everything' phones. All those extra features require more powerful processors, which in turn suck power and make your phone need to be recharged every day. I charge my phone once a week, or less often, and it never runs flat.
If a kid on myspace -- aka the backwater of the web where HTML from 1995 is still popular -- is talking about plans to take out a group of students, or running drugs onto campus to sell during lunch, then I think the district not only has a duty, but an obligation, to try and make sure neither happens.
That's because you're a fascist conservative moonbat.
The district has no business interfering with anything which is merely an idea being kicked around for laughs. The point at which they should intervene is when the kid starts preparing to actually carry it out - buying guns, or drugs, or whatever. Nobody has any right to place restrictions on a person merely thinking about committing a crime. Only when they move from fantasy to reality should anything be done. Nothing else makes any sense; if you outlaw thoughtcrime, then you must convert every school into a prison facility, because every single one of the students has at some point considered some kind of criminal action. Everybody does it, it's a perfectly normal thing to do, especially when you're growing up.
It is also vital for security: people need to think up ways these things can be done, or else it will be impossible to defend against them. For people to be effective security researchers, or detectives, or sysadmins, they need to spend years contemplating this sort of thing. Prohibiting kids from discussing it is merely going to ensure that the next generation will not include anybody who is suitable to work in that sort of industry.
It depends on where the lawsuit happens. Different places have different rules about this.
As for why RMS won't give up the whole "anti-'open source' label" thing--I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that ESR is a major jackass, but I'm not completely sure.
It's because open source doesn't give you what free software gives you.
Open source means that the corporation invites you to contribute to their products - you can look at the source, fix bugs, and submit patches. Free software means that you are free to do whatever you like with their products, including compete with them. Open source does not require this. Open source is approximately a subset of free software - it gives you some of the same things, but not all of them.
RMS is not interested in getting things which are open source but not free software. His goal is for each individual to have full control over their computer systems. Partial control does not satisfy him - and he's got a point there. He's "anti" open-source because he does not want corporations to wiggle into the gap between the two and then kill off free software (which some corporations would like to do).
It's basically the same as 'shared source' (from Microsoft, look-but-don't-touch) vs 'open source'. One is a subset of the other, and the corporations could try to give you one and then tell you that you don't want the other - like Microsoft is doing with shared source. RMS is telling you that you do actually want free software, not just open source. That's what it's all about.
In practice, most corporations don't try to play those games, but it does happen from time to time. Often it's caused by over-zealous lawyers writing licenses that are just a little bit too restrictive.
Java classes get compiled to native code with machine-specific optimizations at runtime.
That is quite irrelevant. Java as a language is slower than C (and both are slower than Fortran) because the language imposes constraints upon expression. Java's object-heavy type system and required garbage collection impose performance penalties which are not present in C. Java's lack of native pointers imposes performance penalties in some specific circumstances - mostly those where C can use pointer arithmatic for manipulating data. A maximally optimal implementation of both Java and C will show C having a significant (but not dominating) performance advantage.
All of these things are well-known in the field of language design. High-level languages don't have to be slower than low-level ones... but they usually are. Not because of some details of the implementation, but because of the nature of the language and the things it can express. All of those things that make Java 'safe' also make it slower. That's one of the tradeoffs involved in designing languages. (Java also has a number of design flaws in its type system, making it slower than it needs to be, but that isn't relevant here).
The 'benchmarks' that you improperly cite are meaningless. You can't just pick two random pieces of code that do roughly the same thing and compare them. The details of the algorithms used are important. For any given piece of Java code that appears to be running faster than the C version, I can show you how to make the C version run at least as fast.
This may indicate a market for such a device. Not a PDA, not a full-on "outfitted for war" laptop, not a (god damned useless) e-reader, not a handheld gaming rig, but the space between.
MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete! Why have none of us embraced this yet?
Because it's the space in between. Anybody experienced in business will tell you one thing for free:
Never attempt to sell to the middle of a market.
It just doesn't work. Your product will be the very definition of mediocre. Some people will buy it, but most people will migrate towards one of the ends instead. In business, it is necessary for you to differentiate your product by being the best at something - basically either price or quality, although there are variations in specific forms of both.
Yes, but...
This is normal for class actions. You get 'actual damages' for anything that can be proved to apply to everybody in the class. Not everybody who bought their crappy CD had to clean up the mess at considerable expense.
I really want to see someone go after Sony for a real settlement.
And that is exactly what you're supposed to do. If you were one of the smaller group who were severely impaired by Sony's reprehensible actions, you're supposed to take them to court and hit them for the whole thing. You just can't do that in a class action suit. Unfortunately this is less likely to happen, because Sony would fight a real lawsuit with everything they've got. They kinda surrendered for this class action because they knew it was just a slap on the wrist, but they really don't want to lose a case where they have to pay for the cleanup, because then everybody will sue them (after losing the case once, you tend to lose all the others quite quickly). So the first person to take them to court has an expensive battle to fight... so there probably won't be a first person.
They should really be hit with a criminal case too, but that's a political matter, and current US politics is heavily pro-corporation, so it probably won't happen.
The legal system is a nice idea but it costs too much for small players to be able to take on big ones. Big players like Sony get a free ride when it comes to treading on small ones.
Give me a break, are you telling me you have a hard time clicking the next button??!!?
No. I'm telling you that my mother has a hard time clicking on the next button. Present her with a choice between 'back' and 'next' and she will ask for help. This is normal for Windows users; the only distinction is between whether they call you and ask, or whether they choose randomly.
I don't know about other people, but I can tell you why neither I nor the company I work for pays money for AV software.
It's because all the commercial AV software is invasive, box-crashing junk. Some of them (Norton) are actually worse than viruses - since nobody around here uses IE or Outlook, the virus infestations are sufficiently rare that it is cheaper (less maintainance and recovery cost) to let the boxes get infected and clean up, than it is to install the AV package and then deal with all the problems it causes.
We scan mail with clamav on the mail server, and run it over the files stored on the servers. Beyond that we just keep an eye on the desktops for suspicious behaviour. I'd love to have something more effective, but it would have to be non-invasive and above all, not cause new support issues. Once you shoot down the main transmission vectors (IE, Outlook, please-run-me mail worms) the virus hits just don't come often enough to justify the pain.
What the world needs is a really solid free software AV system. clamwin is an okay start, but it could be a lot better. We'd be quite happy to pay for signature database updates, if the actual scanner was solid (and preferably free software, although for windows boxes, who cares?).