Exactly!! Either that, or cough up some money (how about $1), go to sourceforge and offer it to someone who will do it. And all of your gripers can chip in a buck or two. With that many of you out there, someone will take the pot.
But I guess these whiners would rather whine than chip in anyway they can. Maybe if Mozilla/Netscape just died and went away, they might be happier?
Plotting the downfall of civilization. First artistes get ripped of with bootleg copies of MP3. Next movies and films get ripped by DeCSS. When will it all stop?
They tell us to go make money by concerts, but no!! Even concerts can be pirated, down to the last squeaky floorboard. What's next? Smelly unshaved armpits of screaming fans? What cannot be digitized? How shall we artistes of the world make our dough now?
All this innovation for the sake of innovation is stupid. Innovations must solve problems. Go ask Ross Anderson if he how he designed the system. Did he slap code together and say - there I call it the StegFS, or did he pose a problem about the issue that of encryption does not address, and then propose a solution.
OTOH, MS coming out with "focus" control technology is just that - a hammer in search of a nail. MS, in their backwards marketing-directed software development, is causing the software inductry to go in circles - going nowhere.
In this capitalistic world, it is strange to see a company being so clueless about its customer base.
Here is a big company, Disney, trying to release a foreign film DVD into its own market. It is putting in big money in the efforts of selling a piece of work that many customers will fork over money for. But it fails to understand the basic motivations and the demographic that is buying this foreign work.
Whatever happened to market research? Whatever happened to giving your customers what they want? Is this big market giant asleep at the wheel?
It happened that this particular case, the fanatical customers were very vocal. But for your average movie, and your average audience, they are just silent. I guess in such cases, these sheep deserve to be ripped off, right?
Oh RIGHT! It's email from my wife that is important. Maybe it's not - maybe it's just that I want to receive stuff from my wife that has "NEED SEX NOW" in it the subject that I want to see, but "NEED MONEY NOW", I don't want to see.:-)
Honestly, do you people actually think these Bayesian classifiers/Neural Network/etc stuff will actually work as advertised, that it would not be a major harassment to use on autopilot? Do you understand the technology, or do you just see the marketing hype?
I mean - you are all geeks right?? Don't you understand that we already have the tools to do what I want, except that it may take some amount of mastery? (And hence more documentation or a better UI) I mean you are geeks right? Don't you understand the need to learn focus and mental discipline, that there are no software shortcuts for these things?
Let me tell you how I am running this wife/boss filter right now: I fire up pine in an xterm and let it sit on my mailbox. Pine beeps when I receive new mail. When I see it does, I use [Ctrl-Left] to switch desktops, look - not open - at the last piece of mail, and if it is not my wife, I switch back with [Ctrl-Right]. There - simple quick and expedient. If I had more mail, I would hack up a quick, easily grokkable procmail filter. Is MS-bloat necessary at all, or is it the case that MS again is selling you fluff that you can't see?? I mean you are all geeks right?
Oh yeah. So should I put my wife first, or my boss second. That's a kinda hard decision to make isn't it? The system forces me to decide when in fact, my priorities are more fluid then that.
Maybe you'd like to spend a better part of the day giving priorities to every person who might mail you. Sorry - but I need to work. Giving this kind of useless meta-data to a machine is IMHO, a distraction.
Sorry, but I can't agree with you here. This piece of software is attempting to solve some problem that people in general should have gotten over past puberty - attention and focus control. Moreover, relying on this piece of crap does not solve any problems, becuase the computer is not the world. You may rely in it all you want, but if you have ever tried to interview people "on the go" in the real world as a journalist needs to do, no computer will help you keep all the distractions of the world at bay.
Mental discipline - is that such a foreign concept that a computer has to teach it to me?
I want to know when email comes, even in the heavy midst of coding, becuase it could be email from my wife. I want IM to tell me when the boss logs on, becuase I have Important Stuff I wish to report to him.
Why is MS always thinking about "how cool this..." or "how cool that...". Don't they realize that many of this is just straitjacketing people into one set of actions or options? Perhaps a droid might like it, but I am not a droid. I am a human being with priorities that cannot be turned into a well-ordered list.
People will you all please read the license carefully before going on that knee-jerk GPL flame?
2. Software License and Restrictions. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Company grants to you a limited, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free non-transferable license to use the Software solely in connection with your use of the NIC.
Except as expressly provided herein, you shall not reproduce, make derivative works of, distribute, rent or lease the Software. You shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. You agree to indemnify and hold Company harmless from and against all liabilities, losses, damages, costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees, which Company may incur or otherwise suffer as a result of your breach of any of the provisions or restrictions of this Agreement.
Please note the phrase in bold. This means that there is no other way you can distribute the source, other than that permission given by the GPL.
This is exactly the same paragraph 4 of the GPL. Does it make this phrase redundant - maybe. IANAL.
Oh, what, and it's not already? Journalism is already a goes-to-the-highest-bidder event, and it makes me ill that it has to sacrifice an orderly society and law and order to the mere appearance that it still has any objectivity left. These people are shutting down real businesses and costing people real money all because they don't want to admit that they're just as dirty as the people they're protecting.
You can't seem to tell the difference between the ideal and the implementation. Even if all of your accusations are true, these have no bearing journalism as an ideal. First of all, journalists are not one whole entity. Journalists are individuals - maybe most have sold out, but some have not. It does no good for your arguments to tar them with the same brush.
And if this are as bad as you say, It is your duty to remind journalists of their non-adherence to their ideal. Tearing the ideal down just seems to me that you don't understand the balance of power in the American institutions.
It is one thing to criticise American institutions for not living up to their ideals, it is quite another to criticize it for not implementing your ideal, American or not that you happen to be. Let the Americans decide what they want. If you hate it so much, you are free to leave - I've never heard of the US government clamp down on its citizens leaving emigrating - I have, on the other heard of lots of people who cannot leave their own country, and have to do it illegally.
I've got news for them: if they're not rich or running the government, they can take their principles and shove 'em for all the good it's going to do anyone.
How do you know that this principle is not doing good? Without this guy's report, will anyone on the street ever understand the mind and motivations of the crackers/script kiddies? Without this info, governments are free to spread FUD like:
Hackers are everywhere and are out to kill computers.
Script Kiddies are all powerful. Fear them. Let the government handle it - we'll go after them and disable them.
They are ignenious and they hate/envy your MS Office. They will deliberately pick holes in your MS computer. It's their fault, and not MS for making insecure OSes.
Go substitute Hacker for Witch and you will get the Salem witch trials all over again.
The reporters are doing a good service by spreading information, and sticking up for them. That he is willing to sacrifice his job and livelihood lends credence to his integrity, and should not be disparaged.
You sir are sitting in your castle writing crap. Where is your credibility?
Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this. They'll have to pass on some royalty to Hollywood, and probably will be resticted in the kinds of things they can do to the data.
And what would Hollywood get out of this? If they think this is some cheap way of not hosting the Gigabytes of download, they are just going to be in for a shock. Chances are, Joe Random's harddisk is not going to have as much throughput as they expensive servers, unless Napster is going to do a different model. Then the question comes down to why Napster. I would imagine that some other company would have the relevant experience in setting up high bandwidth streaming servers.
Exactly. Same here. After being badly burned by their crap, I am never going to use MS for wordprocessing again.
We should hold up LaTeX and others to demostrate the difference between well-engineered software, compared to the MS crap. That way the MS users can pressure MS to make a better product. IMHO, nobody deserves that kind of treatment by a software company, MS luser or not.
Exactly. For example, slashdot itself is an extremely well-designed web forum. Whenever I see a badly done forum, I simply point them to slashdot. This does two things - it shows people that it is possible to do many things without those.asp stuff. Next it show them who are the reallly savvy people out there. Even if they are devout MS devotees, they ask MS for those things that hey cannot do. At least MS would more likely listen to these guys, compared Joe Unix which just surfed to the site and complained.
How about this? Some e-commerce site decides to use some MS proprietry software. The locked out customers complain loudly. The site (if it was smart enough) decides that it can't ignore this market, and thus weans itself off the proprietry MS crap.
So the solution is to complain loudly to the sites that use it. Tell them that their developers are lousy. Point them to other sites which do equally cool things using non-MS crap, and they will understand!
I see, and nowhere in that process is peer review or robustness evaluation right?
Look: standards come in two flavors: de jure standards and de facto standards. De facto standards are established by markets. While ideally, this means that customers flocked to this standard becuase of the superiority of the code, MS has demostrated time and time again that it is their market and anticompetitive behaviour that establishes this de facto standards. This means that engineering specifications are ignored.
The famed stupidity of the.doc format is exactly like that: it contains gotchas like a history, where people can reverse changes to the a document to see the changes made, the formatting specifications are nebulous enough that formats on one computer would differ in others.
De jure standards are better in this regard, because by submitting it to s standards review process, peer review ensures that the worst engineering aspects are thrown out, and a good compromise between competing goals can be ironed out openly. As an example of this, notice how MS word is totally unsuited for physics and mathematical publishing. Do you think MS deliberately ignored this market? Or do you think it is a result of them catering to their business clientele, and making them blind towards other perfectly good uses of their general purpose wordprocessor?
Speed of software development is never itself the issue. Compare the two branches of the Linux kernel. One caters to those who need stability, and the speed of upgrades is thus slower. The other is very fast, but make break between releases. Different styles to meet different demands - that is what software should be. And quite a few general users are starting to demand better engineered products - something which nobody really cared about before.
Come on! So if I patented the Universal Turing Machine, all other Turing Machines are mine, since my UTM can in principle produce the exact same output as all the rest of the TMs.
There is no way input or output can be made to be associated with the program itself.
The RIAA may be able to convince the naive that even something so innocuous as to ripping a CD and giving it to your wife to listen in her car is wrong. But not everyone is so stupid. I am glad someone in Congress has the wisdom to see through what it is that the RIAA is after. Not the copyrighted interests, but their control of the market.
One of the things that really raised my bile is when Hilary Rosen replied to Orrin Hatch's questions on whether several fair use actions like ripping a CD and using it in a care was indeed fair use.
'None of these is fair use,'' Rosen eventually replied. She argued that musicians' willingness to ''tolerate'' people making copies was an instance of ''no good deed goes unpunished.''
In comparision, Lars Ulrich seems meek when tells Hatch that ''Legislation is going to have to straighten this out.'' At least he is more respectful towards the lawmakers.
People need to be passionately involved to run distributed clients. If you paid people for their distributed time, the total would probably come up to a few pennies a month. Most people would spend more then that in their own time simply downloading and installing the program!
How would you know? Nobody has any data to indicate this it is indeed worth only a few pennies a month. You are assuming that ProcessTree would give any packet to anyone, and so everyone will want one? I am sure they keep track of who is reliable/fast and who is not and distribute their load accordingly. A load balancing scheme is definitely going to be in place.
Regarding motivation, the user is going to see that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain and just sign up. And people looking relatively cheap computing might want to consider this, as opposed to running jobs on their local supercomputer cluster (which frequently are overleaded anyway). As long as there is enough demand, they will be supply.
I admit there is problem with setting the price. But keep in mind that this is just a penalty, a fine if you like. It does not establish the worth of the data, just like a parking violation fine is not the "worth" of the parking space. This amount is in addition to whatever individual customers may do - sue them for privacy invasion or something. So the company is faced with two choices - shred the data, or if not, pay up. The choice is clear.
In other words, once a company goes out of business, it would owe each and every one of the customers it has a profile on some money. What I am suggesting is that this *is* a debit of sorts. If the company can demostrate provably that it has indeed destroyed all records, then they don't owe this money anymore.
The choices are simple - wipe the data, or pay the penalty.
Slashdot Mirror
But I guess these whiners would rather whine than chip in anyway they can. Maybe if Mozilla/Netscape just died and went away, they might be happier?
They tell us to go make money by concerts, but no!! Even concerts can be pirated, down to the last squeaky floorboard. What's next? Smelly unshaved armpits of screaming fans? What cannot be digitized? How shall we artistes of the world make our dough now?
All this innovation for the sake of innovation is stupid. Innovations must solve problems. Go ask Ross Anderson if he how he designed the system. Did he slap code together and say - there I call it the StegFS, or did he pose a problem about the issue that of encryption does not address, and then propose a solution.
OTOH, MS coming out with "focus" control technology is just that - a hammer in search of a nail. MS, in their backwards marketing-directed software development, is causing the software inductry to go in circles - going nowhere.
Here is a big company, Disney, trying to release a foreign film DVD into its own market. It is putting in big money in the efforts of selling a piece of work that many customers will fork over money for. But it fails to understand the basic motivations and the demographic that is buying this foreign work.
Whatever happened to market research? Whatever happened to giving your customers what they want? Is this big market giant asleep at the wheel?
It happened that this particular case, the fanatical customers were very vocal. But for your average movie, and your average audience, they are just silent. I guess in such cases, these sheep deserve to be ripped off, right?
Honestly, do you people actually think these Bayesian classifiers/Neural Network/etc stuff will actually work as advertised, that it would not be a major harassment to use on autopilot? Do you understand the technology, or do you just see the marketing hype?
I mean - you are all geeks right?? Don't you understand that we already have the tools to do what I want, except that it may take some amount of mastery? (And hence more documentation or a better UI) I mean you are geeks right? Don't you understand the need to learn focus and mental discipline, that there are no software shortcuts for these things?
Let me tell you how I am running this wife/boss filter right now: I fire up pine in an xterm and let it sit on my mailbox. Pine beeps when I receive new mail. When I see it does, I use [Ctrl-Left] to switch desktops, look - not open - at the last piece of mail, and if it is not my wife, I switch back with [Ctrl-Right]. There - simple quick and expedient. If I had more mail, I would hack up a quick, easily grokkable procmail filter. Is MS-bloat necessary at all, or is it the case that MS again is selling you fluff that you can't see?? I mean you are all geeks right?
Maybe you'd like to spend a better part of the day giving priorities to every person who might mail you. Sorry - but I need to work. Giving this kind of useless meta-data to a machine is IMHO, a distraction.
Mental discipline - is that such a foreign concept that a computer has to teach it to me?
Why is MS always thinking about "how cool this ..." or "how cool that ...". Don't they realize that many of this is just straitjacketing people into one set of actions or options? Perhaps a droid might like it, but I am not a droid. I am a human being with priorities that cannot be turned into a well-ordered list.
Please note the phrase in bold. This means that there is no other way you can distribute the source, other than that permission given by the GPL.
This is exactly the same paragraph 4 of the GPL. Does it make this phrase redundant - maybe. IANAL.
Think.
You can't seem to tell the difference between the ideal and the implementation. Even if all of your accusations are true, these have no bearing journalism as an ideal. First of all, journalists are not one whole entity. Journalists are individuals - maybe most have sold out, but some have not. It does no good for your arguments to tar them with the same brush.
And if this are as bad as you say, It is your duty to remind journalists of their non-adherence to their ideal. Tearing the ideal down just seems to me that you don't understand the balance of power in the American institutions.
It is one thing to criticise American institutions for not living up to their ideals, it is quite another to criticize it for not implementing your ideal, American or not that you happen to be. Let the Americans decide what they want. If you hate it so much, you are free to leave - I've never heard of the US government clamp down on its citizens leaving emigrating - I have, on the other heard of lots of people who cannot leave their own country, and have to do it illegally.
How do you know that this principle is not doing good? Without this guy's report, will anyone on the street ever understand the mind and motivations of the crackers/script kiddies? Without this info, governments are free to spread FUD like:
- Hackers are everywhere and are out to kill computers.
- Script Kiddies are all powerful. Fear them. Let the government handle it - we'll go after them and disable them.
- They are ignenious and they hate/envy your MS Office. They will deliberately pick holes in your MS computer. It's their fault, and not MS for making insecure OSes.
Go substitute Hacker for Witch and you will get the Salem witch trials all over again.The reporters are doing a good service by spreading information, and sticking up for them. That he is willing to sacrifice his job and livelihood lends credence to his integrity, and should not be disparaged.
You sir are sitting in your castle writing crap. Where is your credibility?
Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this. They'll have to pass on some royalty to Hollywood, and probably will be resticted in the kinds of things they can do to the data.
And what would Hollywood get out of this? If they think this is some cheap way of not hosting the Gigabytes of download, they are just going to be in for a shock. Chances are, Joe Random's harddisk is not going to have as much throughput as they expensive servers, unless Napster is going to do a different model. Then the question comes down to why Napster. I would imagine that some other company would have the relevant experience in setting up high bandwidth streaming servers.
Are you in business to cater to your customer needs, or are you in it to play catchup with MS?
Figure it out yourself. Software is flexible. It is the developers which are not.
We should hold up LaTeX and others to demostrate the difference between well-engineered software, compared to the MS crap. That way the MS users can pressure MS to make a better product. IMHO, nobody deserves that kind of treatment by a software company, MS luser or not.
Exactly. For example, slashdot itself is an extremely well-designed web forum. Whenever I see a badly done forum, I simply point them to slashdot. This does two things - it shows people that it is possible to do many things without those .asp stuff. Next it show them who are the reallly savvy people out there. Even if they are devout MS devotees, they ask MS for those things that hey cannot do. At least MS would more likely listen to these guys, compared Joe Unix which just surfed to the site and complained.
So the solution is to complain loudly to the sites that use it. Tell them that their developers are lousy. Point them to other sites which do equally cool things using non-MS crap, and they will understand!
Look: standards come in two flavors: de jure standards and de facto standards. De facto standards are established by markets. While ideally, this means that customers flocked to this standard becuase of the superiority of the code, MS has demostrated time and time again that it is their market and anticompetitive behaviour that establishes this de facto standards. This means that engineering specifications are ignored.
The famed stupidity of the .doc format is exactly like that: it contains gotchas like a history, where people can reverse changes to the a document to see the changes made, the formatting specifications are nebulous enough that formats on one computer would differ in others.
De jure standards are better in this regard, because by submitting it to s standards review process, peer review ensures that the worst engineering aspects are thrown out, and a good compromise between competing goals can be ironed out openly. As an example of this, notice how MS word is totally unsuited for physics and mathematical publishing. Do you think MS deliberately ignored this market? Or do you think it is a result of them catering to their business clientele, and making them blind towards other perfectly good uses of their general purpose wordprocessor?
Speed of software development is never itself the issue. Compare the two branches of the Linux kernel. One caters to those who need stability, and the speed of upgrades is thus slower. The other is very fast, but make break between releases. Different styles to meet different demands - that is what software should be. And quite a few general users are starting to demand better engineered products - something which nobody really cared about before.
There is no way input or output can be made to be associated with the program itself.
One of the things that really raised my bile is when Hilary Rosen replied to Orrin Hatch's questions on whether several fair use actions like ripping a CD and using it in a care was indeed fair use.
In comparision, Lars Ulrich seems meek when tells Hatch that ''Legislation is going to have to straighten this out.'' At least he is more respectful towards the lawmakers.
You mean like Mystique? She's no ex-man, AFAIK. :-)
Remember that stupid *.vbs script being passed around? Well it could have been running something really useful!
How would you know? Nobody has any data to indicate this it is indeed worth only a few pennies a month. You are assuming that ProcessTree would give any packet to anyone, and so everyone will want one? I am sure they keep track of who is reliable/fast and who is not and distribute their load accordingly. A load balancing scheme is definitely going to be in place.
Regarding motivation, the user is going to see that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain and just sign up. And people looking relatively cheap computing might want to consider this, as opposed to running jobs on their local supercomputer cluster (which frequently are overleaded anyway). As long as there is enough demand, they will be supply.
I admit there is problem with setting the price. But keep in mind that this is just a penalty, a fine if you like. It does not establish the worth of the data, just like a parking violation fine is not the "worth" of the parking space. This amount is in addition to whatever individual customers may do - sue them for privacy invasion or something. So the company is faced with two choices - shred the data, or if not, pay up. The choice is clear.
The choices are simple - wipe the data, or pay the penalty.