First off let me say that I don't like lisp. The main thing I don't like about it is the bizarre syntax. All those parenthesis are hard to keep straight and even.
Having said that, though, I'd like to hear a lisp zealot's view of how maintainable lisp code is. Obviously there is good lisp and bad lisp, but it seems to me that it would not be easy just by looking at lisp code to determine what exactly it does for the purposes of debugging and adding features.
Whether you happen to agree with it or not, (which I don't BTW), some people happen to believe this sort of garbage. If people believe it it will be on the net. DoS one site another will spring up. There will always be a dark side of the net because there is a dark side of the human race.
Now, whether or not we should decide to spend tons and tons of energy to fight it is another story. I don't claim to have a good answer for that.
My company has been doing the phone transfers to where ever you are in the building for quite a while now using pagers. www.prioritycall.com
Now the teleporting desktops thing however, is a Really Cool Thing (tm).
Ben
I'm not saying that we're doing this because it's necessarily the most logical thing to do. I'm saying we should do it because it might keep the RIAA from harassing Napster and so on. I'm willing to pay a few extra pennies on CDR's if it gets the RIAA off our backs.
If it doesn't get the RIAA off our backs then there's no way in hell we ought to do this!
The good thing about the position that we're in with this is that the law isn't on the books. It can be written to do anything. Do you think that SW makers should get a cut too, not just the RIAA? Let's do that too. What's the big deal?
Agreed. You shouldn't have to pay royalties for that. The plan works better for tapes because music was the main if not the only thing people put on them. For CD-R, maybe the royalty should be smaller by percentage of the cost of the CDR than for the tape to account for this change in storage style. You're still paying a royalty, I know, but at least the fact that some percentage of all CDRs are used for music is still accounted for.
This plan can be made to work to keep the RIAA happy at a very small inconvience to CD-R buyers. If it makes peace with the RIAA, let's do it!
First off I agree with you. At first glance it makes zero sense. Follow me for a second though. If the RIAA can be convinced that they can recoup the "damage" done to them by MP3 and P2P sharing through a small tax on CD-R(W), then we might be able to have a world in which the RIAA and MP3/P2P coexist. Isn't that what we all want? It seems to me as the ultimate destination of MP3s at this point is most often CD-R(W) anyway, right?
Incidentally, if you've ever bought a blank tape you've subsidized the RIAA. What's so different about doing the same for CD-R(W)? Nothing.
This may be the best way to make peace with the recording industry and keep the P2P/MP3 things that we all want. Where do I sign up?
I'm kinda coming in behind the curve here, but don't people see the connection between this and the Walmart phenomenon? The general trend in most areas of the economy seemingly is to get everything from one huge place that tends to have poor service, rather than getting a few things at several smaller places that have good service. It's really hard to have a big place and good service. Eventually the pendulum will shift the other way and we'll have many many mom and pop's.
I just downloaded the latest Nightly Build for Win98. It seems at first glance at least to be much faster than IE 5. It looks much better too with the chromes. Once I was able to minimize the sidebar, I actually am pretty happy with it. It'll take a little while to get it configured to where I want it, and I probably won't use the mail/news on it (Outlook is pretty slick for someone coming from UNIX graphical mailers), but the browser seems to be pretty darn good.
Having said all that, there are still some rendering issues.. try surfing around ESPN.com. Not actually catastrophic failures or crashes, just wierdnesses. It's hard to tell if that's because the page is set up to work around weirdnesses in previous browsers, or if Mozilla is doing the wrong thing.
I don't know how things are going on the Linux side of the house, but on Windows things are going well seemingly. Good work folks!
First: The Bastille analogy is a good one. The Bastille was stormed by a large number of peasants as I recall and the defense of the structure was overwhelmed. So it is with most unguarded systems or guarded systems with under-vigilant administration. It's really pretty clever.
Second: Does anybody else think that the "Why not just use OpenBSD?" is nonsensical from the start? If you follow that sort of arguements then why do we need GNOME when we already have KDE? Why do we need any two projects that have similar goals? We need them so that they push each other to get better. Competition is good.
Third: I'm glad somebody is finally examining root permissioned daemons. If this can be fixed right, we might be able to eliminate for the most part things like buffer overflow exploits to gain root access. It's this kind of thinking that's going to increase security.
> Likewise, when I wanted to give out source to
> some utilities I wrote, I was summarily shot
> down and chastised -- "this was paid for by the
> Government!" I was told (which was exactly my
> point; they just had a different conclusion as
> to what that meant).
At the company where I work, we were able to gain access to code written by a government agency through the Freedom of Information Act. Unless there is something special about that block of code, then I would assume that nearly all government sponsored code is or could be made to be open source!
We got our regional toll slammed by MCI when we moved. My wife told them specifically that we were quite happy with our plan from Bell Atlantic and they took it anyway and we got double charged. (Bell Atl for the calling plan and MCI for all the calls) We were using MCI for long distance before and still are.
Anyway, we went thru some gyration with Bell Atl that allowed us to lock in our local service and long distance service so that it can't be changed by anyone but us.. Imagine that! That was about 4 months ago.
All telephone company executives should be beat with a stick continuously until their companies stop doing this, IMHO.
I'm not trying to flame anybody. I'm presenting a different point of view that just happens to disagree with yours. If that's your definition of flaming, then yes, I guess I am flaming people.
Admittedly, I am sick and tired of the complainers around here, but I've tried very hard to keep my cool and not flame. Perhaps I haven't succeeded completely, but this discussion is *far* from a flame war.
You know what, you're right. He did mean to be funny. Does that mean that I can't present the counterpoint to his implication? Who cares if it is a joke. I'm sick and tired of people complaining in these forums no matter what the/. staff does, so I felt the need to put forth the other side.
> It certainly has taken slashdot long enough to > put it up. This is obviously newsworthy for > nerds.
Without question this story is newsworthy. It is for that exact reason that it should *not* have been posted until the game of he-said she-said that was going was resolved to some extent. Without all the facts, the discussion is not valuable at least if not counterproductive.
> I honestly don't think starting a flame war > between kuro5hin and slashdot is ever > going to be productive.
Agreed. However, it should be pointed out that the two sites appear to have different goals, and the question of which is better is prime flame war material.
I'll probably get modded down for daring to say this but...
Get a life Signal. It's the decision of the Slashdot staff what to post and when. They've gotten burned several times for posting things without all the facts, and I, for one, applaud them for waiting on this one and posting a number of good information sources within the post.
Good job Slashdot. Don't listen to the complainers.
> If you built a car that ran on say Compressed > Natural gas you need to have places to fill the > tank. And not just one or two, you need it > everywhere. And you need a method of distrbuting > that fuel etc.
Not to mention the fact that if you made a car that ran on natural gas, you'd turn the average car into a modern day Ford Pinto.... A two car accident would probably take out about 10 cars and leave a crater the size of Nebraska!
It seems to me that the issue here is that in the past, communications were not as good, so when a person came up with a good idea, he was able in most cases to retain security of his ideas. Now that communications are being measured on a global scale and an instantaneous speed, that ability to control ideas is deteriorating. Thus, it is much more difficult to assess those exclusive rights, because just as soon as they become public, they spread instantaneously and with no control on the part of the supposed right-holder.
This problem hits right at the foundations of the line of thinking that leads to copyright and patent law. We would be well advised to do one of two things (there may be others):
A) Determine a technological solution to the problem, such as a way to distribute musiic that will allow the rights to be maintained, or
B) Throw out the whole system of copyrights/patents optionally coming up with some other way of granting the same rights to the thinker/inventor/artist etc.
This is nothing less than a paradigm shift and Society would be well advised to treat it as such, not just as a case against the RIAA for example.
Then perhaps I didn't make myself clear or rather I said something that clouded the issue.
My point was simply that in the beginning, Debian made a decision to include only software that was "free" by their definition. They decided that the incompatibility of the QPL and the GPL was enough of a reason not to include it. If that's the way they choose to run their distro, then that's their decision and no amount of money should change it.
Slashdot Mirror
First off let me say that I don't like lisp. The main thing I don't like about it is the bizarre syntax. All those parenthesis are hard to keep straight and even.
Having said that, though, I'd like to hear a lisp zealot's view of how maintainable lisp code is. Obviously there is good lisp and bad lisp, but it seems to me that it would not be easy just by looking at lisp code to determine what exactly it does for the purposes of debugging and adding features.
What do you all think?
Ben
Whether you happen to agree with it or not, (which I don't BTW), some people happen to believe this sort of garbage. If people believe it it will be on the net. DoS one site another will spring up. There will always be a dark side of the net because there is a dark side of the human race.
Now, whether or not we should decide to spend tons and tons of energy to fight it is another story. I don't claim to have a good answer for that.
Ben
My company has been doing the phone transfers to where ever you are in the building for quite a while now using pagers. www.prioritycall.com Now the teleporting desktops thing however, is a Really Cool Thing (tm). Ben
I'm not saying that we're doing this because it's necessarily the most logical thing to do. I'm saying we should do it because it might keep the RIAA from harassing Napster and so on. I'm willing to pay a few extra pennies on CDR's if it gets the RIAA off our backs.
If it doesn't get the RIAA off our backs then there's no way in hell we ought to do this!
Ben
The good thing about the position that we're in with this is that the law isn't on the books. It can be written to do anything. Do you think that SW makers should get a cut too, not just the RIAA? Let's do that too. What's the big deal?
Ben
Agreed. You shouldn't have to pay royalties for that. The plan works better for tapes because music was the main if not the only thing people put on them. For CD-R, maybe the royalty should be smaller by percentage of the cost of the CDR than for the tape to account for this change in storage style. You're still paying a royalty, I know, but at least the fact that some percentage of all CDRs are used for music is still accounted for.
This plan can be made to work to keep the RIAA happy at a very small inconvience to CD-R buyers. If it makes peace with the RIAA, let's do it!
Ben
First off I agree with you. At first glance it makes zero sense. Follow me for a second though. If the RIAA can be convinced that they can recoup the "damage" done to them by MP3 and P2P sharing through a small tax on CD-R(W), then we might be able to have a world in which the RIAA and MP3/P2P coexist. Isn't that what we all want? It seems to me as the ultimate destination of MP3s at this point is most often CD-R(W) anyway, right?
Incidentally, if you've ever bought a blank tape you've subsidized the RIAA. What's so different about doing the same for CD-R(W)? Nothing.
This may be the best way to make peace with the recording industry and keep the P2P/MP3 things that we all want. Where do I sign up?
Ben
I'm kinda coming in behind the curve here, but don't people see the connection between this and the Walmart phenomenon? The general trend in most areas of the economy seemingly is to get everything from one huge place that tends to have poor service, rather than getting a few things at several smaller places that have good service. It's really hard to have a big place and good service. Eventually the pendulum will shift the other way and we'll have many many mom and pop's.
Ben
Damn. Somebody beat me to it. :)
Ben
Did anybody else think of Daisy Duke when they read the headline?
Ben
Overheard fruit fly conversation:
"I'm not dead yet! I'm getting better!"
"No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment!
hehehe
Ben
I just downloaded the latest Nightly Build for Win98. It seems at first glance at least to be much faster than IE 5. It looks much better too with the chromes. Once I was able to minimize the sidebar, I actually am pretty happy with it. It'll take a little while to get it configured to where I want it, and I probably won't use the mail/news on it (Outlook is pretty slick for someone coming from UNIX graphical mailers), but the browser seems to be pretty darn good.
Having said all that, there are still some rendering issues.. try surfing around ESPN.com. Not actually catastrophic failures or crashes, just wierdnesses. It's hard to tell if that's because the page is set up to work around weirdnesses in previous browsers, or if Mozilla is doing the wrong thing.
I don't know how things are going on the Linux side of the house, but on Windows things are going well seemingly. Good work folks!
Ben
First: The Bastille analogy is a good one. The Bastille was stormed by a large number of peasants as I recall and the defense of the structure was overwhelmed. So it is with most unguarded systems or guarded systems with under-vigilant administration. It's really pretty clever.
Second: Does anybody else think that the "Why not just use OpenBSD?" is nonsensical from the start? If you follow that sort of arguements then why do we need GNOME when we already have KDE? Why do we need any two projects that have similar goals? We need them so that they push each other to get better. Competition is good.
Third: I'm glad somebody is finally examining root permissioned daemons. If this can be fixed right, we might be able to eliminate for the most part things like buffer overflow exploits to gain root access. It's this kind of thinking that's going to increase security.
Oops, this became a few thoughts..
Ben
> Likewise, when I wanted to give out source to
> some utilities I wrote, I was summarily shot
> down and chastised -- "this was paid for by the
> Government!" I was told (which was exactly my
> point; they just had a different conclusion as
> to what that meant).
At the company where I work, we were able to gain access to code written by a government agency through the Freedom of Information Act. Unless there is something special about that block of code, then I would assume that nearly all government sponsored code is or could be made to be open source!
Ben
We got our regional toll slammed by MCI when we moved. My wife told them specifically that we were quite happy with our plan from Bell Atlantic and they took it anyway and we got double charged. (Bell Atl for the calling plan and MCI for all the calls) We were using MCI for long distance before and still are.
Anyway, we went thru some gyration with Bell Atl that allowed us to lock in our local service and long distance service so that it can't be changed by anyone but us.. Imagine that! That was about 4 months ago.
All telephone company executives should be beat with a stick continuously until their companies stop doing this, IMHO.
Ben
It'll be twenty months from today
Till OSX sees the light of day
People wait and drool and stare
But it may still be vapourware
So let me introduce to you
The one and only Stevie Jobs!
Apple Computer's buggy OS X!!!!
hehehe
Ben
Isn't anybody going to make jokes about Whistler's mother???
Ben
Funny but most of the "problem solvers" that I've seen are really tall shot glasses for some reason...
hehe
Ben
I'm not trying to flame anybody. I'm presenting a different point of view that just happens to disagree with yours. If that's your definition of flaming, then yes, I guess I am flaming people.
Admittedly, I am sick and tired of the complainers around here, but I've tried very hard to keep my cool and not flame. Perhaps I haven't succeeded completely, but this discussion is *far* from a flame war.
Ben
You know what, you're right. He did mean to be funny. Does that mean that I can't present the counterpoint to his implication? Who cares if it is a joke. I'm sick and tired of people complaining in these forums no matter what the /. staff does, so I felt the need to put forth the other side.
Ben
> It certainly has taken slashdot long enough to
> put it up. This is obviously newsworthy for
> nerds.
Without question this story is newsworthy. It is for that exact reason that it should *not* have been posted until the game of he-said she-said that was going was resolved to some extent. Without all the facts, the discussion is not valuable at least if not counterproductive.
> I honestly don't think starting a flame war
> between kuro5hin and slashdot is ever
> going to be productive.
Agreed. However, it should be pointed out that the two sites appear to have different goals, and the question of which is better is prime flame war material.
Ben
I'll probably get modded down for daring to say this but...
Get a life Signal. It's the decision of the Slashdot staff what to post and when. They've gotten burned several times for posting things without all the facts, and I, for one, applaud them for waiting on this one and posting a number of good information sources within the post.
Good job Slashdot. Don't listen to the complainers.
Ben
> If you built a car that ran on say Compressed
> Natural gas you need to have places to fill the
> tank. And not just one or two, you need it
> everywhere. And you need a method of distrbuting
> that fuel etc.
Not to mention the fact that if you made a car that ran on natural gas, you'd turn the average car into a modern day Ford Pinto.... A two car accident would probably take out about 10 cars and leave a crater the size of Nebraska!
;-)
Ben
It seems to me that the issue here is that in the past, communications were not as good, so when a person came up with a good idea, he was able in most cases to retain security of his ideas. Now that communications are being measured on a global scale and an instantaneous speed, that ability to control ideas is deteriorating. Thus, it is much more difficult to assess those exclusive rights, because just as soon as they become public, they spread instantaneously and with no control on the part of the supposed right-holder.
This problem hits right at the foundations of the line of thinking that leads to copyright and patent law. We would be well advised to do one of two things (there may be others):
A) Determine a technological solution to the problem, such as a way to distribute musiic that will allow the rights to be maintained, or
B) Throw out the whole system of copyrights/patents optionally coming up with some other way of granting the same rights to the thinker/inventor/artist etc.
This is nothing less than a paradigm shift and Society would be well advised to treat it as such, not just as a case against the RIAA for example.
Ben
Then perhaps I didn't make myself clear or rather I said something that clouded the issue.
My point was simply that in the beginning, Debian made a decision to include only software that was "free" by their definition. They decided that the incompatibility of the QPL and the GPL was enough of a reason not to include it. If that's the way they choose to run their distro, then that's their decision and no amount of money should change it.
Ben