The Apple monitors are *not* incompatable with the rest of the PC world. The connector is based on a basic DVI connection and adds power and USB. You can get an adaptor from Apple themselves [apple.com]. And if you are considering spending $3500 certainly $150 is hardly a problem, as the entire package is still cheaper than most other LCD monitors.
The 23" HD monitors as they stand are incompatible with standard DVI cards (not to be confused with the 22" monitors, which are often, but not always, compatible, using standard DVI interfaces), requiring an external and troublesome adapter dongle to work at all. Even then, they do not function trouble-free. Interference occurs even on the digital signal through that irritating dongle as a result of the way Apple has coupled the power into the same interface. Apple would not guarantee that their $3500 monitor would work at all, and had it not worked I would have been unable to return it. Worse, the dongle, while it does convert Apple's proprietary interface to a standard DVI interface, doesn't work flawlessly, and any syncing issues which arise means you have three pieces of hardware (and one or more pieces of software, depending on the OS/Windowing system you are running) which you have to troubleshoot, rather than just the card and monitor. My experience with SGI screens and their proprietary interface to DVI conversion dongles suggests that the complexity of such situations goes up dramatically when a third entity (the converter dongle) enters the picture.
The Apple 23" screen is a bad choice for PC users, and Apple's belated regret at their marketing strategy is by no means mitigated by the converter dongle they offer. You are far better off paying an extra few hundred for the Samsung 24" monitor, which gives you an extra full inch of space, the same 1920x1200 resolution, Analog as well as digital DVI interfaces, and a couple of video interfaces as well in addition. Fully standards compliant, literally plug and play, without any need for troublesome dongles hanging between the card and the monitor, dongles which, I cannot stress enough, are as often as not responsible for syncing and other issues that can arise.
There are lots of good things about Apple, and my next laptop will likely be a powerbook of some kind running OS X and dual booting GNU/Linux, assuming Apple ever gets around to offering one with a DVD burner, but their decision to create Yet Another Proprietary Video Interface Which Must Be Converted To Standard DVI Via An External Device is really indefensible, particularly considering the fact that they should have learned the errors of such behavior from their own costly, past mistakes (repeatedly).
While I respectfully disagree with your defense of their proprietary monitor interface, I agree credit is due with respect to their standardizing on a FreeBSD-esque operating system (i.e. standard UNIX, making porting with other UNICES and GNU/Linux very easy) and their increasing use of standard components in other ways, including those you correctly cite, and for that they should be lauded. But in those cases where they revert to previous, very self-defeating (and to their customers or would-be customers profoundly irritating) behavior they should be equally harshly criticized.
Bullshit. You have the expectation of privacy in in your own underclothes, even in public.
Clearly you are either overly emotional, feeble minded, or both.
1) The photographs taken were not taken within the underclothes in question, they were taken of the exterior of the underclothes in question, so your point even as stated is erroneous and fallacious.
What is more,
2) The law states that "the person being viewed, photographed, or filmed is in a place where he or she would have a reasonable expectation of privacy." The legal definition of "place" does not include 'inside a person's clothing' or even 'inside a person's body' (indeed, it doesn't even cover 'inside a person's automobile'). The judge had no recourse, and had they ruled otherwise they would have been (very correctly) overruled on appeal, and the necessary changes to the law needed to make that sort of reprehensible behavior illegal would have been unnecessarilly, and foolishly, delayed.
I suspect you will find that, by losing this case, the complaintants will have actually had more impact on public policy, and getting the laws fixed, than they would have if they had won the case. So calm down, get a grip, and start thinking rationally, rather than screaming insults at the female judge simply because she did what she had to, constrained as she was by the law.
Never-the-less, aside from being a violation of privacy, this is clearly sexual harassment / assault. Clearly, these men should be in jail.
That is utter nonsense. And I suppose you're the type of person that considers suggestive eye contact or visual examination of a person's body from a distance tantamount to physical assault or emotional duress, or that equates the illegal sharing of music with theft, or some other feeble-minded, nonsensical equivelence of mismatched notions. Feh, feeble minded indeed.
Antisocial behavior it most certainly was, but in no way are these people being assaulted or sexually harassed (both have specific definitions which this activity falls well outside of). The jerks taking these photographs have not violated any laws and thus, by any rational definition, do not belong in jail (though their parents certainly should have disciplined them much more severely during their youth). However, the law needs to be fixed so that, if these assholes continue in this behavior, they will be jailed, at which point I suspect you'll discover that the behavior stops.
Which is really the point now, all emotionalism and angry sensationalism aside, isn't it?
I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.
I too know a lot of artists, and am related to several. My experience does not mirror yours at all. My cousin tweaks the hell out of her Apple (she even installed Red Hat GNU/Linux on it at one time, even though her computer savviness, such as it is, comes strictly from using it as a tool for doing her graphic design work, creating websites, etc.). Come to think of it, so does my other cousin (who is not an artist, but rather a medical doctor), as do several other artists I know. In fact, I can't think of one artist I know who hasn't tweaked the hell out of how their computer, be it an Apple or a Wintel PC, looks.
I should point out (and anyone reading my posting history here and elsewhere will confirm) that I am quite often very critical of Apple, their approach, their marketing, and their often "shoot myself in the foot and ask questions later" attitude, be it closing the source to parts of their derivative FreeBSDesque operating system, or deliberately making the hardware they are trying to sell as incompatible with PCs as possible (23" LCD monitor anyone? Thanks to Apple's idiocy I ended up buying a Samsung 24" instead. That's about $4,000 that would have gone to Apple, were it not for their inability to resist making everything they can proprietary, non-standard, and incompatible, but I digress), thereby losing a potential market orders of magnitude larger than the one they are trying to target. I make no apology, nor bones about criticizing the hell out of Apple for such stupidity when I see it, so I think it is clear I am not an Apple apologist by any measure.
All that having been said, Apple is not trying to close off the operating system, they are trying to prevent application developers and third parties from modifying how their core API and widgets work, in order to insure their "consistent" interface remains consistent. Unlike many here I find nothing of value in a consistent interface vs. a collection of choices, but neither do I find anything wrong with Apple persuing such a policy, so long as they do not extend it beyond their core GUI objects and leave the remainder of the operating system and its libraries open to those who wish to tweak.
Which is exactly what it appears they are doing, misleading WiReD articles notwithstanding.
What reason can you offer to distinguish methods that can be moved to the computer from those that cannot be moved to the computer?
The original poster can't, and shouldn't. He could have spared some verbiage and made the much more accurate statement:
"Dammit, BUSINESS METHODS SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE. " Period. The same goes for mathematical algorithms, conceptual ideas (which are supposed to be unpatentable in theory but for which patents are regularly granted), or even any specific idea or design which the patenting party has not built themselves first. No more patenting a matter-antimatter motor unless you've built and operated the damn thing first.
Not True. Stop Spreading Microsoft Hype.
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"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Except that the virus, by definition, cannot run on a DRM machine, so fat chance getting it propagated.
You are echoing Microsoft marketing hype which is simply untrue. Palladium will only allow "signed" or authorized software to run, which sounds good until you realize that many worms and viruses run as a subprocess of an authorized process. That is one of the reasons wbhy ActiveX was such a dismal failure at preventing malicious code from being executed.
Palladium will do nothing to stop viruses or worms from spreading or running on systems, as the worms and viruses will simply insinuate themselves into authorized code and run anyway. Microsoft's claim to the contrary is simply untrue and deceitful (what else is new?), designed to leverage their incompetently designed systems and their notorious reputation for being unable to design a secure system into a selling point for a new product designed to kill the commercial viability of free software, not viruses.
DRM isn't the same thing as Palladium, though the two are certainly akin to one another in some respects, and doesn't address authorization of software at all, merely of access to data, something that is also orthogonal to virus and worm prevention.
Some students got mad, but the moral of the story is, better to have someone trustworthy find your weakness rather than someone who's going to exploit it.
Sometime in the next week or so, I am going to stop by your home and probe for any security problems that a burglar might exploit.
You sir, are of subhuman intelligence.
There is a distinct difference between a University testing the security of systems directly connected to its own network and jackasses like yourself equating it to random strangers "testing" a systems security.
To clarify in terms of the flawed analogy you provide, no one should have trouble with their landlord testing their home's security, as the landlord is the one who is responsible, and who fixes it when it is broken. That is not the same as inviting any random stranger off the street to do likewise.
OK, so don't ever watch any specials about Hiroshima or the Bombing of Dresden either (which both had a LOT more casualties, almost all civilian). Oh, but these were Americans that were killed, so this is different...
Yes it is different, but not for the asinine racist or bigoted reasons you so disingenuously imply.
First, the insinuation that it is somehow common for Americans to value American lives over other lives is false and disingenuous. Media coverage does not equal people's attitudes. When I lived in Germany, the national news emphesized which Germans had been killed in such and such an event, just as American media emphesizes which Americans are killed in such and such an event. Ditto for the time I spent in Japan, in the UK, in Hong Kong, and in France. The Media always emphesizes the number of 'locals' killed in dramatic events, irrespective of whether those 'locals' are Americans, French, Germans, Chinese, or Japanese.
However, none of the Germans I knew were any less horrified at the loss of non-German lives than they were with the German lives lost (remember the Concord?). Ditto for the UK, France, etc., and ditto for the United States
Secondly, you are equating battles which took place against already belligerent enemies engaged in all out, no-holds barred world war, versus unprovoked attacks (by any reasonable definition, all "blame the victim" nonsense aside) during peacetime, such as Pearl Harbor and most especially the events of 9/11. This doesn't make the destruction of Heroshima, Nagasaki (forgot about them, didn't you?), and Dresden any less tragic or terrible, but it does mean they were fudamentally different in their nature and their context than the events of 9/11.
So, while the civilian deaths of Heroshima and Dresden were terrible, that was war, waged against countries which were engaged in active hostilities against us and who, by the way, started the fucking thing to begin with. The World Trade Center, in contrast, was not. Equating the two, and drawing asinine conclusions like "Americans are bigots who care only for themselves" is fallicious both logically and ethically, and frankly you should be ashamed.
The vast majority of us (aside from some fringe elements, of which every country has its fair share I might add) are horrified whenever we see death, be it American or otherwise. Why do you think we give so much of our money to try and alleviate famine, pestilence, and the ravages of wars we aren't even involved in in so many distant lands. Because, irrespective of our media or our government's behavior, we as a people do care about human life and are saddened by human suffering, irrespective of whether the people affected are American or not.
Anyone else feel that it is wrong for the media to cover this story so in depth, and ultimately make money on those that died and their families. I have decided not to watch any coverage. I remember very well what happened.
I've been watching less and less television as they day approaches, but have caught some of the coverage despite that. Partly because I know someone who died, and partly because I am sick to death of our wallowing in self pity. Some of the coverage has been quite tasteful (though distasteful to me personally simply because the quantity of coverage is too much), while other coverage (Fox, for example) has been positively disgusting. Then there was the "let's relive the moment" crap (I don't recall the channel, as I switched rather quickly), a blow by blow retelling of events, as if going through the trauma wasn't bad enough the first time.
PBS (Frontline, McNeal-Lehrer, etc.) in contrast has been very tasteful (though it is all still too goddamn much, which makes even the most tasteful coverage distasteful. A week lead in for crying out loud!?! Give me a f*cking break).
That having been said, I think it should be pointed out that over 50,000 people have died in car accidents in the United States in the last year. The damage done by the subhuman Al Q'aida vermin, in terms of human losses, was relatively modest (though no less tragic for that). Most of the impact was architectural (a few missing buildings) and pyschological (the horror). The latter we have in no small part the media to thank for (the events were bad enough, but that didn't seem to slow them down any in hyping even that, something they haven't stopped doing over the last year), which I think is one of the most despicable aspects, outside of the despicable act itself, to this whole affair.
Then there is Ashcroft's and the FBI's blatent power grab in the wake of the tragedy, which was almost inhuman (subhuman? certainly inhumane) in its cynical manipulation of the events.
So while the coverage is annoying, the lack of perspective (3k dead v. 50k dead on our highways, etc.) and its resulting fear (you're not afraid of your car, are you?), the ongoing media hype, the unprecedented power grab by the executive branch of the federal government and resultant shredding of most of our constitution are far more disgusting, and the consiquences of that particular form of collective stupidity is something we are likely to live with for a generation or more.
Who really cares if they've made chips a thousand times smaller than current chips, with a thousand times the capicty? With palladiumcoming its not like you're going to be free to do anything worthwhile with them.
I think your paranoia is a little over the top, friend.
I live in Chicago. It isn't paranoia, it is experience. Election fraud is an ugly, real part of life, and any system that is open to abuse will be abused by one party or the other.
Closed source, proprietary systems whose inner workings are not open to public review and peer review are vastly more susceptable to this sort of thing than open, easilly examined and proofed source code are.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Yes, yes, and yes, it is telling.
Openness is absolutely critical to fair and free elections, and that applies to the technology as much as it does the people. Who knows what is being done with the data being collected, or how it is being massaged. Is every electronic vote counted? Do we know that the results being reported are accurate, or whether or not a systemic flaw (or deliberate alteration) in the software is causing every Nth republican or democratic vote to be dropped? No, we don't know this, because the software's source code is unavailable for public review, much less peer review.
There are all kinds of Microsoft apologists (not saying you are one, but the vast majority of posts taking a tone similiar to yours are, as evidenced by their posting histories) quick to point out that having untrained election officials has nothing to do with the closed source nature of the software, yet eagerly glossing over the profoundly obvious fact that if the election software is closed source, no amount of training can insure that the software is unbiased and the election results fair.
So the point is relevant, even if it does rub the closed source advocates and Microsoft zealots the wrong way.
Do we really need more space? Why not a 20,000 rpm spindle? We need SPEED.
Then why are you buying IDE and not SCSI? 15K RPM is old-hat in the SCSI world.
If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
Again, an area where SCSI shines. It's tough to put 48 IDE drives in a PC-clone case!
I agree. If those are the criteria one has, one can get SCSI RAID devices, or just plane SCSI host adapters, and achieve those results. The rest of us, who need speed but not blinding speed, get by just fine with much more affordable ATA100 or ATA133 IDE drives, or hybrid approaches like 3ware which allows an array of such drives to appear like one very large, very fast SCSI drive.
What we do need is space that is reasonably fast, and reasonably affordable. I do plenty of video editing (home videos, shows I record and delete the commercials from [no, I won't trade them with you, sorry. I stay within the law and build my own video library from public, legal sources], etc.) and, more importantly, I like creating 3-D animation sequences in 1080p HDTV format using blender and povray. The RAID 5 array of 120 MB disks I have is very nice, yielding a sweet 0.6 TByte of data, but frankly I've been finding that a bit constraining, and have had to delete some video 'source' material (rendered high-def PNG files from wich some HDTV avi's were generated) to make room for other projects.
I'd love to replace them with 320 GB drives, for a cool 1.5 TB or so of space, and, frankly, the 3ware RAID controller and the ATA100/133 drives attached to it are more than fast enough for all of my video capture, editing, and rendering needs. 20,000 RPM wouldn't just be superfulous, it would probably be detrimental in terms of the expected disk life and heating issues within the case.
That's still better than most linux software, just go to www.sourceforge.net and see how mony projects ever gets past alpha-stage.
I'm sure there are any number of pro-Microsoft(tm) zealots and astroturfers who will take exception to this, but my (and, I think, most people's) experience suggests that most alpha-stage GNU, Linux, and BSD projects are far and away more stable and reliable than their Windows(tm) equivelents, if perhaps less polished on the install and user-interface side.
In other words, those pre-alpha and alpha projects are often already far and away better than many of their Microsoft(tm) counterparts (if such even exist, which is often NOT the case), and are certainly very useful to GNU/Linux users long before they reach beta or final release status, in contrast to many offerings from Redmond, which remain unstable and marginally useful long after people have begun paying good money for them.
Free software developers, being subject to public peer review, are generally much more conservative in how they label their projects than Microsoft(tm) and some other commercial enterprises are, as anyone who has used both can readilly attest. It is particularly deceptive of disingenous for pro-Microsoft(tm) zealots to be using that conservatism in nomenclature to imply an inferiority in the software being released that, emperically, simply doesn't exist in most cases.
okay, this just proves your ignorance of what Mono is all about. Mono !=.Net.
I never said that it was. It is, however, chasing the.Net standard, with a stated goal of compatability. My point remains.
Secondly, what security/privacy perspective? C# is a friggin' programming langauge!!
C# is not equal to.Net. Now your ignorance is showing, as well as your inability or unwillingness to comprehend my post. The point you so stunningly fail to rebutt discusses Mono's.Net efforts, not their C# implimentation. Hint: I did not mention or discuss C# anywhere, except to point out that I had neither ire nor adoration for gtk#.
while it *is* possible that Microsoft might try to leverage their patents...it is extremely unlikely that it would hold water in court - seeing as how they have submitted their language to the ECMA.
Here you display an apalling ignorance of patent law. Courts will not nullify a patent merely because it has been submitted as part of a public standard, nor will they rule it unenforcable. You are probably misremembering the people who got slapped down for fraud and contract breach when they tried to enforce patents they had publicly stated, in writing were not a part of the standard they had helped to define.
Microsoft has made no such claim, signed no such agreement, and their patents will remain perfectly enforcable regardless of how many standards incorporate them. If they are somehow overturned it will be because of traditional prior art, something no one can count on and something that has absolutely no bearing on how far and widely the technique may have been implimented or be in use.
Also, Mono is being very careful about not looking at Microsoft's implementations so that they may stay "pure".
Which, once again, means nothing with respect to patent law. Good Lord, learn something about patent law before making such gradiose, and incorrect, assertions.
Fourthly, it is stated in the FAQ that Mono wants to avoid straying from the ECMA standard, but that does not mean that it will necessarily try to match Microsoft's implementation class-for-class. It doesn't need to in order to be useful.
They are striving for compatability. Your assumption that they may settle for less may be true, but it is just as likely false, moreso given the project's public statements on the matter. Do you really know anything about anything you're discussing here?
Does g++ contain all the classes that MSVC++ has? No. Does it make g++ any less useful? No.
GCC does adhere to K&R C and various ANSI C and C++ standards. GCC is not, and makes no pretense about, trying to maintain MSVC++ compatability. Mono is trying to achieve.NET compatability. That makes any comparisons between the two in the context of this thread completely absurd and irrelevant.
Frankly I didn't think anyone, not even an anonymous coward or a deliberate troll, could be as ignorant about as many points in a discussion as you have proven to be.
Yet another thing to add to my list of "and people wounder why linux is not being readily accepted by everyone" items. I mean, come on, the guy just wanted to help make things better! Getting booed off the stage hurts!
First, GNU/Linux will never be accepted "by everyone." Nor will FreeBSD, nor will BeOS, nor will Apple's OS X.
Nor will Microsoft Windows, unless Palladium and DRM is legislated into law by the likes of "Disney" Hollings, and even then Apple is likely to be kept around as a token "competitor," paying hefty patent fees to Microsoft for the privelege of being allowed to manufacture "legal" hardware in the US. Unless, of course, you get off your butt and do something about it, but I digress.
The problem is a simple and obvious one, and the solution as elusive today as it was the first time humans came to live together (and likely predates our ability to speak): Politics is ugly and banal, and people are fallible. This includes the Linux kernel developers and Linus Torvalds himself.
Example: The ggi project wanted to provide a kernel abstraction layer for video hardware in the same manner such abstractions are presented for everything else, from your ethernet adapter to your system's RAM and hard drive. Linus thought the idea sucked, then ended up doing a "poor man's" version of frame buffer support instead. How much better things would have been if the original vision of the GGI folks had been realized and supported we'll never know.
Example: PCMCIA. It is still a mess. The more capable userspace version got sidelined in favor of a broken and less capable rewrite... I can only ascribe that to politics and personal pull, which every group, no matter how altruistic and well meaning, falls prey to now and then.
There are other examples, and perhaps Eric S. Raymond's effort is one (though I hesitate to make that assumption), but the purpose of this post is not to catalogue the mistakes Linus and others have made, or to air my own disagreements with them (but what the hell: when will we get XFS into the main kernel tree damn it!:-)), but rather to point out their humanity and fallability, a trait they share with everyone reading this comment, the guy posting it, and probably with every sapient being, everywhere.
Mistakes happen, everywhere, by everyone. The measure of a group or project's success isn't their perfection (as is so often implied in political discussions), it is by how much their mistaken decisions are outweighed by their correct decisions.
And using that metric, the Kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, have done very well indeed.
It's like "fair abd balanced story" about, say, KKK. Some things just should be never encouraged.
You seem to suffer from the mistaken notion that 'fair and balanced' must yield an appearance of equal legitimacy, or must include equal promotion of both sides of an issue.
While that is often the case for issues that are complex, or where one side is about as correct as the other, or both sides have good points on some issues, it is just as often not the case for issues where one side is clearly out of social or ethical bounds.
A fair and biased report will allow both sides to express their opinions, with best results achieved when those opinions are set against undisputed facts, or disputed facts with the disputes (and evidence pro and con) clearly presented. Scientific programs on Discovery and PBS often do this quite well.
To use your example of the KKK, a fair and unbiased report would allow the KKK to express their philosophy and opinion, a counter group (the NAACP, the ACLU, or others... the list I think could include just about everyone not a part of that particular fringe) would express their opinion, all against a factual context of what is being discussed.
Unless the factual data are deliberately manipulated (in which case the reporting is no longer fair and unbiased), in the KKK case they are almost certain to come off looking like the rascist dolts that they are, while whoever is arguing against them is likely to appear to be a saint. Why? Because all of the factual information about humanity, all of the historical information we have, in short, just about anything and everything that could be cited in providing a factual context for the discussion, will almost certainly tend to repudiate the KKK perspective and underscore the opposing perspective.
So, as you can no doubt see, providing fair and unbiased coverage of the KKK is probably the last thing a proponent of the KKK would want to see. Such vermin are certainly no excuse for making an exception in a critical aspect of journalistic ethics, one that already is all too often ignored.
Indeed (disclosure: I am speaking as an athiest) I suspect one of the prominent reasons for the erosion of "fair and unbiased" reporting is that, whenever it is done in a scientific or religious context, some very powerful organizations, and their followers, have their world views challenged and perhaps even debunked when presented in a fair and unbiased manner. Whether it is war time politics, the exposure of monsanto's latest poison in our food chain, or simple religious ferver, I think the political price for fair and unbiased reporting has become the primary cause of journalistic decay, moreso even than the inherent 'decline' of journalistic ethics, if indeed the latter is the case. Of course, something like this is purely supposition, and quickly decays into a chicken and egg argument, but it is a point worth pondering nonetheless.
Until the Supreme Court restores the balance it destroyed with its 1978 decision to equate corporate dollars and legalized bribery with freedom of speech, we can only expect this sort of thing to continue.
Even insurrection in the streets is unlikely to do much, as the corporate rhetoric will simply change to "don't give in to mass terrorism, and by the way, here's another two hundred grand for next years campaign." The sole method by which this can be stopped is for the voters to turn these fuckers out for good and put them in the unemployment line, but alas, the latter is prevented by corporate favors granting these useless ex-politicos positions as "consultants," with most of their "consulting" done on the golf course or the beach, while the former is prevented by the Media Cartel's monopoly on widespeard information dissemination which effectively locks everyone out of politics at the federal level who doesn't have millions to spend, thus closing the circle on effective citizen participation in govrenment at the federal level completely.
The Internet may play a role is offsetting this... but as we all know, there are potent efforts underway to take that particular voice out of our hands in order to protect the cartels of Hollywood and Nashville, efforts designed to put us back in our place, on the couch, accepting whatever they wish to spoonfeed us.
So, what have any of you done about it, beyond a moment's expression of outrage?
And to most people, it makes total sense then to ban those anonymous, crime-friendly pc's. I suppose the silver lining is, we could at least free ourselves of spammers. So it's a tough call;-)
It isn't a tough call at all, as there are already ways of freeing yourself from SPAMMERs that don't require you to give up your basic freedoms.
Besides, do you really think Palladium is going to 'free' you from SPAM. Given the track record of Microsoft's email services (hotmail, etc) I think it is more likely you are going to be receiving SPAM adverts from Microsoft "strategic" partners, and perhaps anyone who pays the piper appropriately, and with 'trusted' computing, maybe what won't be trusted won't be the SPAM, it will be the SPAM assissin software that otherwise would have let you filter the crap out of your inbox.
One thing is absolutely certain. Whichever way that particular battle on your Palladium Trusted Computer goes, it won't be your choice. It will be Microsoft's choice.
At the end of the day, Mono hackers hack Mono because they love the technology..NET really grows on you -- please don't try to tear it apart without at least giving Mono a go. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Mono and gtk# have neither my ire nor my adoration. What annoyed me was the very real "marketdroid" sound of your post. Apologies if my reaction was scathing, but I have a low tolerance for such things even when they come out in support of something I like (e.g. GNU/Linux). When it comes out in support of something I'm skeptical of to begin with my tolerance is even lower.
I think the.net approach to things in general is not a very good idea, from both a security and a privacy perspective. Add to that the very real liklihood of Microsoft using it to entrap people using it onto their platform, the liklihood of their leveraging patents, copyright (and undocumented "features"), and making ad-hoc modifactions to the standard itself (something they as the owner of the standard can do at will), and I think Mono stands a good chance of discovering Microsoft's "open standard" to be little more than a Tar Baby.
That having been said, no one would be happier than I to eat crow and be proven wrong, so while I am profoundly skeptical of Mono (and certainly don't think it warrents consideration for the FSF award, at least not yet), I wish the project both luck and success.
This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.
You are absolutely correct.
The beauty of religion, and why it can persist in the face of reason, and even seduce intelligent people like Larry Wall, is that the parameters of every definition are endlessly malleable.
Remember that mustard-seed sized bit of "faith?" That provides all the wiggle room required for any religious premise, no matter how prima facia absurd, to withstand argument, provided you argue on their terms (which is almost always what is expected and demanded). "Faith" means acccepting something which defies logic, so the theologens are correct when they say a tiny bit of faith is all that is required. A tiny bit of willingness to defy logic and accept the absurd is all that is required to promote, and buy into, any belief system at all, no matter how absurd, how self-destructive (remember the now-extinct Shakers? How about the People's Temple?), or how simply plain wrong it is when illuminated by the cold light of reality.
In this particular case, the non-religious people end up being burned 'alive' for all time, while the religious people enjoy a profoundly boring existence playing harps in the presence of the universes most stodgy old man (which of course, makes one wonder what happens to those whose harp-playing skills aren't up to snuff).
Or some variation thereupon, the key ingredients being "the faithful" (there's that word again) get to live well, while the "non-believes" (that would be you and I) are tormented forever.
Given that, god really is good to those who look for him, at least in comparison to his treatment of those who do not.
The Mono project [go-mono.com] has made great strides towards producing a free (GPL and BSD licensed) implementation of the.NET framework that's poised to replace the proprietary Sun/IBM Java installations, which represent one of the final major pieces of non-free software routinely distributed with GNU/Linux.
Funny, no one at my enterpise misses.net functionality. Indeed, not one of a dozen companies I know who are using free software, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux have any, even remote, desire for.net, or a free "chase the ever moving Microsoft target, oops, stepped on a patent mine!" alternative implimentation of a standard dictated by a convicted monopolist.
As Gtk# [sf.net] continues to mature, it looks like the Mono project will soon be able to provide a powerful cross-platform Java-like envoronment complete with a modern object-oriented language, C#, that has proved so popular in business and enthusiast circles alike, without any of the vendor tie-in associated with Java.
gtk# and mono may be worthwhile projects (much as samba is), but regardless, I can't believe even a slashdot moderator could be so stupid as to mod up such obvious and blatent marketdroid speak. Baseless (and to all appearances inaccurate) claims of C#'s popularity "in business" and "enthusiast circles alike" are only exceeded by the incredibly silly "without any of the vendor tie-in associated with java" comment. As if though.net's "standard" as dictated by Microsoft isn't about as 'vendor tied in' as it gets.
I'm no fan of java (in fact, I loathe it for a number of reasons, not least of which is its byzantine, brain-dead time and date class), but compared to.net it is a godsend..Net in comparison is a trojan of epic proportions, and Mono is likely just another of its victims.
Yes, it would terrible if a single organization controlled the construction, maintenance, and regulation of all the roads in a locality. They might impose draconian corporate policies about helmets and seat belts [...yada yada yada usual anti-government free market ueber alles dogma yada yada...]
Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you simply prefer feudalism to democracy?
I dislike much about our government and am as scathingly critical of them (particularly the current administration) as anyone, but your sarcastic diatribe simply reeks of stupidity.
Hint: local governments are elected, are directly accountable to the people, and more often than not regulate across the board equally. UPS, Federal Express, and the US Post Office all have equal access to the highway system and local roads.
Do you really think that would be the case if UPS, a non-democractic, non-elected, feudalistically organized entity (as are all private companies BTW) owned the highway instead? Recent experience in the telco industry, and the resulting disappearance of DSL providors in the united states as a result of local baby bell abuses of their last mile of copper monopolies, suggests otherwise.
Frankly, I cannot believe anyone over the age of eight would be so stupid as to advocate what you just did. Amazing.
Cartels are antithetical to freedom & capitali
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Adobe Gets Hit By DMCA
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What I'd like to see is that anarchistic utopia of free software developers squash software corporations like Adobe into the ground. There's only one way capitalists will learn and that's for them to watch the very markets that make them rich disappear from right under their nose. Not only software, but media, TV, music, etc. will all experience the effects of the mythical anarchistic utopia you've mentioned. Or maybe they won't... but it sure looks to me like free software is giving Microsoft a run for its money. Who do you think will be next?
I like capitalism. I'm quite good at it (and make a very good living at it). Capitalism, in the form of competative free markets is generally good for dealing with most naturally scarce things (not all mind you, as sometimes other pressures can cause the free market to break down. Natural monopolies, such as the road to your home and your drinking water are one type of example. Medical services, where the pressure of having an alternative of dying if you chose not to be a customer, is arguably another area that lends itself only very imperfectly to a competative, free market.)
However, in the realm of ideas, invention, software, and infinitly copiable content, there is no natural scarcity, and capitalism breaks down. So much so that the government feels compelled to create monopolies, with no pretense of a competative, free market.
And you are right, a thriving, cooperative commons, with its own internal (mostly friendly, though sometimes not) competition will outcompete a monopoly cartel every time... unless the cartel in question buys legislation from a corrupt government to kill individual innovation.
Which is exactly what Microsoft is all about with Palladium, and the RIAA and the MPAA are all about with so-called DRM (digital rights revocation). They know they can't compete. Microsoft can't compete with free software and, in the long run, the recording industry and movie studios will not be able to compete with a vibrant community of artists creating free (or very inexpensive) music and movies (the latter quite possibly with blender, as I am doing). Online copyright violators and file sharers aren't any more of a threat than VHS and cassette tape users were fifteen years ago, and they know that. It isn't about preventing file sharing, its about preventing competition, something a corporation with a cartel mindset simply cannot abide.
Houston wasn't bad, despite amusement park traces
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I made the mistake once of driving 3 hours across Florida to go to Kennedy Space Center. What a disappointment! Anything the public gets access to is run by a lame amusement park company and the whole thing is set up more for 8-year-old boys obsessed with rockets than geeks. The only particularly cool aspect of the place was the actual Saturn V rocket hanging, disassembled, in an enormous hangar-like building. Other than that, though, it pretty much sucked.
When I went to Houston it wasn't bad, though I would have liked a little more technical detail on what was going on in the control room at the time (they were running a simulation of an aborted shuttle takeoff, where the shuttle makes a big u-turn in the sky and lands) would have been nice. There was the whole visitor-centor nonsense that seems to plauge more and more landmarks these days, but overall the experience was interesting, if only for about an hour or so.
Now, touring an aircraft production facility (for general aviation aircraft)... that can be really interesting, if you like aviation. More meat, less fluff in my experience (since, in a real sense, they are generally trying to sell you on an airplane, or at least an airplane's concept, and assume you're knowledgable enough about aviation to be worth selling to).
The term Free Market means a market Free of Government. If the government CAN legislate an aspect of a market, then that market is NO LONGER free.
That may be a free market, by its strictest definition, but such a market, while it may start out competatively, will ultimately devolve into a marketplace of oligarchies and outright monopolies, ultimately indistinguishable from the planned economies founded upon completely antithetical philosophies.
In other words, a purely free market (as you've defined it) is as entanable and unstable as a purely planned economy, be it communist or faschist.
This does not that ALL goverment power is "bad", it just needs to be carefully monitored.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple monitors are *not* incompatable with the rest of the PC world. The connector is based on a basic DVI connection and adds power and USB. You can get an adaptor from Apple themselves [apple.com]. And if you are considering spending $3500 certainly $150 is hardly a problem, as the entire package is still cheaper than most other LCD monitors.
The 23" HD monitors as they stand are incompatible with standard DVI cards (not to be confused with the 22" monitors, which are often, but not always, compatible, using standard DVI interfaces), requiring an external and troublesome adapter dongle to work at all. Even then, they do not function trouble-free. Interference occurs even on the digital signal through that irritating dongle as a result of the way Apple has coupled the power into the same interface. Apple would not guarantee that their $3500 monitor would work at all, and had it not worked I would have been unable to return it. Worse, the dongle, while it does convert Apple's proprietary interface to a standard DVI interface, doesn't work flawlessly, and any syncing issues which arise means you have three pieces of hardware (and one or more pieces of software, depending on the OS/Windowing system you are running) which you have to troubleshoot, rather than just the card and monitor. My experience with SGI screens and their proprietary interface to DVI conversion dongles suggests that the complexity of such situations goes up dramatically when a third entity (the converter dongle) enters the picture.
The Apple 23" screen is a bad choice for PC users, and Apple's belated regret at their marketing strategy is by no means mitigated by the converter dongle they offer. You are far better off paying an extra few hundred for the Samsung 24" monitor, which gives you an extra full inch of space, the same 1920x1200 resolution, Analog as well as digital DVI interfaces, and a couple of video interfaces as well in addition. Fully standards compliant, literally plug and play, without any need for troublesome dongles hanging between the card and the monitor, dongles which, I cannot stress enough, are as often as not responsible for syncing and other issues that can arise.
There are lots of good things about Apple, and my next laptop will likely be a powerbook of some kind running OS X and dual booting GNU/Linux, assuming Apple ever gets around to offering one with a DVD burner, but their decision to create Yet Another Proprietary Video Interface Which Must Be Converted To Standard DVI Via An External Device is really indefensible, particularly considering the fact that they should have learned the errors of such behavior from their own costly, past mistakes (repeatedly).
While I respectfully disagree with your defense of their proprietary monitor interface, I agree credit is due with respect to their standardizing on a FreeBSD-esque operating system (i.e. standard UNIX, making porting with other UNICES and GNU/Linux very easy) and their increasing use of standard components in other ways, including those you correctly cite, and for that they should be lauded. But in those cases where they revert to previous, very self-defeating (and to their customers or would-be customers profoundly irritating) behavior they should be equally harshly criticized.
Bullshit. You have the expectation of privacy in in your own underclothes, even in public.
Clearly you are either overly emotional, feeble minded, or both.
1) The photographs taken were not taken within the underclothes in question, they were taken of the exterior of the underclothes in question, so your point even as stated is erroneous and fallacious.
What is more,
2) The law states that "the person being viewed, photographed, or filmed is in a place where he or she would have a reasonable expectation of privacy." The legal definition of "place" does not include 'inside a person's clothing' or even 'inside a person's body' (indeed, it doesn't even cover 'inside a person's automobile'). The judge had no recourse, and had they ruled otherwise they would have been (very correctly) overruled on appeal, and the necessary changes to the law needed to make that sort of reprehensible behavior illegal would have been unnecessarilly, and foolishly, delayed.
I suspect you will find that, by losing this case, the complaintants will have actually had more impact on public policy, and getting the laws fixed, than they would have if they had won the case. So calm down, get a grip, and start thinking rationally, rather than screaming insults at the female judge simply because she did what she had to, constrained as she was by the law.
Never-the-less, aside from being a violation of privacy, this is clearly sexual harassment / assault. Clearly, these men should be in jail.
That is utter nonsense. And I suppose you're the type of person that considers suggestive eye contact or visual examination of a person's body from a distance tantamount to physical assault or emotional duress, or that equates the illegal sharing of music with theft, or some other feeble-minded, nonsensical equivelence of mismatched notions. Feh, feeble minded indeed.
Antisocial behavior it most certainly was, but in no way are these people being assaulted or sexually harassed (both have specific definitions which this activity falls well outside of). The jerks taking these photographs have not violated any laws and thus, by any rational definition, do not belong in jail (though their parents certainly should have disciplined them much more severely during their youth). However, the law needs to be fixed so that, if these assholes continue in this behavior, they will be jailed, at which point I suspect you'll discover that the behavior stops.
Which is really the point now, all emotionalism and angry sensationalism aside, isn't it?
I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.
I too know a lot of artists, and am related to several. My experience does not mirror yours at all. My cousin tweaks the hell out of her Apple (she even installed Red Hat GNU/Linux on it at one time, even though her computer savviness, such as it is, comes strictly from using it as a tool for doing her graphic design work, creating websites, etc.). Come to think of it, so does my other cousin (who is not an artist, but rather a medical doctor), as do several other artists I know. In fact, I can't think of one artist I know who hasn't tweaked the hell out of how their computer, be it an Apple or a Wintel PC, looks.
I should point out (and anyone reading my posting history here and elsewhere will confirm) that I am quite often very critical of Apple, their approach, their marketing, and their often "shoot myself in the foot and ask questions later" attitude, be it closing the source to parts of their derivative FreeBSDesque operating system, or deliberately making the hardware they are trying to sell as incompatible with PCs as possible (23" LCD monitor anyone? Thanks to Apple's idiocy I ended up buying a Samsung 24" instead. That's about $4,000 that would have gone to Apple, were it not for their inability to resist making everything they can proprietary, non-standard, and incompatible, but I digress), thereby losing a potential market orders of magnitude larger than the one they are trying to target. I make no apology, nor bones about criticizing the hell out of Apple for such stupidity when I see it, so I think it is clear I am not an Apple apologist by any measure.
All that having been said, Apple is not trying to close off the operating system, they are trying to prevent application developers and third parties from modifying how their core API and widgets work, in order to insure their "consistent" interface remains consistent. Unlike many here I find nothing of value in a consistent interface vs. a collection of choices, but neither do I find anything wrong with Apple persuing such a policy, so long as they do not extend it beyond their core GUI objects and leave the remainder of the operating system and its libraries open to those who wish to tweak.
Which is exactly what it appears they are doing, misleading WiReD articles notwithstanding.
What reason can you offer to distinguish methods that can be moved to the computer from those that cannot be moved to the computer?
The original poster can't, and shouldn't. He could have spared some verbiage and made the much more accurate statement:
"Dammit, BUSINESS METHODS SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE. " Period. The same goes for mathematical algorithms, conceptual ideas (which are supposed to be unpatentable in theory but for which patents are regularly granted), or even any specific idea or design which the patenting party has not built themselves first. No more patenting a matter-antimatter motor unless you've built and operated the damn thing first.
Except that the virus, by definition, cannot run on a DRM machine, so fat chance getting it propagated.
You are echoing Microsoft marketing hype which is simply untrue. Palladium will only allow "signed" or authorized software to run, which sounds good until you realize that many worms and viruses run as a subprocess of an authorized process. That is one of the reasons wbhy ActiveX was such a dismal failure at preventing malicious code from being executed.
Palladium will do nothing to stop viruses or worms from spreading or running on systems, as the worms and viruses will simply insinuate themselves into authorized code and run anyway. Microsoft's claim to the contrary is simply untrue and deceitful (what else is new?), designed to leverage their incompetently designed systems and their notorious reputation for being unable to design a secure system into a selling point for a new product designed to kill the commercial viability of free software, not viruses.
DRM isn't the same thing as Palladium, though the two are certainly akin to one another in some respects, and doesn't address authorization of software at all, merely of access to data, something that is also orthogonal to virus and worm prevention.
Some students got mad, but the moral of the story is, better to have someone trustworthy find your weakness rather than someone who's going to exploit it.
Sometime in the next week or so, I am going to stop by your home and probe for any security problems that a burglar might exploit.
You sir, are of subhuman intelligence.
There is a distinct difference between a University testing the security of systems directly connected to its own network and jackasses like yourself equating it to random strangers "testing" a systems security.
To clarify in terms of the flawed analogy you provide, no one should have trouble with their landlord testing their home's security, as the landlord is the one who is responsible, and who fixes it when it is broken. That is not the same as inviting any random stranger off the street to do likewise.
OK, so don't ever watch any specials about Hiroshima or the Bombing of Dresden either (which both had a LOT more casualties, almost all civilian). Oh, but these were Americans that were killed, so this is different...
Yes it is different, but not for the asinine racist or bigoted reasons you so disingenuously imply.
First, the insinuation that it is somehow common for Americans to value American lives over other lives is false and disingenuous. Media coverage does not equal people's attitudes. When I lived in Germany, the national news emphesized which Germans had been killed in such and such an event, just as American media emphesizes which Americans are killed in such and such an event. Ditto for the time I spent in Japan, in the UK, in Hong Kong, and in France. The Media always emphesizes the number of 'locals' killed in dramatic events, irrespective of whether those 'locals' are Americans, French, Germans, Chinese, or Japanese.
However, none of the Germans I knew were any less horrified at the loss of non-German lives than they were with the German lives lost (remember the Concord?). Ditto for the UK, France, etc., and ditto for the United States
Secondly, you are equating battles which took place against already belligerent enemies engaged in all out, no-holds barred world war, versus unprovoked attacks (by any reasonable definition, all "blame the victim" nonsense aside) during peacetime, such as Pearl Harbor and most especially the events of 9/11. This doesn't make the destruction of Heroshima, Nagasaki (forgot about them, didn't you?), and Dresden any less tragic or terrible, but it does mean they were fudamentally different in their nature and their context than the events of 9/11.
So, while the civilian deaths of Heroshima and Dresden were terrible, that was war, waged against countries which were engaged in active hostilities against us and who, by the way, started the fucking thing to begin with. The World Trade Center, in contrast, was not. Equating the two, and drawing asinine conclusions like "Americans are bigots who care only for themselves" is fallicious both logically and ethically, and frankly you should be ashamed.
The vast majority of us (aside from some fringe elements, of which every country has its fair share I might add) are horrified whenever we see death, be it American or otherwise. Why do you think we give so much of our money to try and alleviate famine, pestilence, and the ravages of wars we aren't even involved in in so many distant lands. Because, irrespective of our media or our government's behavior, we as a people do care about human life and are saddened by human suffering, irrespective of whether the people affected are American or not.
Anyone else feel that it is wrong for the media to cover this story so in depth, and ultimately make money on those that died and their families. I have decided not to watch any coverage. I remember very well what happened.
I've been watching less and less television as they day approaches, but have caught some of the coverage despite that. Partly because I know someone who died, and partly because I am sick to death of our wallowing in self pity. Some of the coverage has been quite tasteful (though distasteful to me personally simply because the quantity of coverage is too much), while other coverage (Fox, for example) has been positively disgusting. Then there was the "let's relive the moment" crap (I don't recall the channel, as I switched rather quickly), a blow by blow retelling of events, as if going through the trauma wasn't bad enough the first time.
PBS (Frontline, McNeal-Lehrer, etc.) in contrast has been very tasteful (though it is all still too goddamn much, which makes even the most tasteful coverage distasteful. A week lead in for crying out loud!?! Give me a f*cking break).
That having been said, I think it should be pointed out that over 50,000 people have died in car accidents in the United States in the last year. The damage done by the subhuman Al Q'aida vermin, in terms of human losses, was relatively modest (though no less tragic for that). Most of the impact was architectural (a few missing buildings) and pyschological (the horror). The latter we have in no small part the media to thank for (the events were bad enough, but that didn't seem to slow them down any in hyping even that, something they haven't stopped doing over the last year), which I think is one of the most despicable aspects, outside of the despicable act itself, to this whole affair.
Then there is Ashcroft's and the FBI's blatent power grab in the wake of the tragedy, which was almost inhuman (subhuman? certainly inhumane) in its cynical manipulation of the events.
So while the coverage is annoying, the lack of perspective (3k dead v. 50k dead on our highways, etc.) and its resulting fear (you're not afraid of your car, are you?), the ongoing media hype, the unprecedented power grab by the executive branch of the federal government and resultant shredding of most of our constitution are far more disgusting, and the consiquences of that particular form of collective stupidity is something we are likely to live with for a generation or more.
Who really cares if they've made chips a thousand times smaller than current chips, with a thousand times the capicty? With palladium coming its not like you're going to be free to do anything worthwhile with them.
I think your paranoia is a little over the top, friend.
I live in Chicago. It isn't paranoia, it is experience. Election fraud is an ugly, real part of life, and any system that is open to abuse will be abused by one party or the other.
Closed source, proprietary systems whose inner workings are not open to public review and peer review are vastly more susceptable to this sort of thing than open, easilly examined and proofed source code are.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Yes, yes, and yes, it is telling.
Openness is absolutely critical to fair and free elections, and that applies to the technology as much as it does the people. Who knows what is being done with the data being collected, or how it is being massaged. Is every electronic vote counted? Do we know that the results being reported are accurate, or whether or not a systemic flaw (or deliberate alteration) in the software is causing every Nth republican or democratic vote to be dropped? No, we don't know this, because the software's source code is unavailable for public review, much less peer review.
There are all kinds of Microsoft apologists (not saying you are one, but the vast majority of posts taking a tone similiar to yours are, as evidenced by their posting histories) quick to point out that having untrained election officials has nothing to do with the closed source nature of the software, yet eagerly glossing over the profoundly obvious fact that if the election software is closed source, no amount of training can insure that the software is unbiased and the election results fair.
So the point is relevant, even if it does rub the closed source advocates and Microsoft zealots the wrong way.
Do we really need more space? Why not a 20,000 rpm spindle? We need SPEED.
Then why are you buying IDE and not SCSI? 15K RPM is old-hat in the SCSI world.
If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
Again, an area where SCSI shines. It's tough to put 48 IDE drives in a PC-clone case!
I agree. If those are the criteria one has, one can get SCSI RAID devices, or just plane SCSI host adapters, and achieve those results. The rest of us, who need speed but not blinding speed, get by just fine with much more affordable ATA100 or ATA133 IDE drives, or hybrid approaches like 3ware which allows an array of such drives to appear like one very large, very fast SCSI drive.
What we do need is space that is reasonably fast, and reasonably affordable. I do plenty of video editing (home videos, shows I record and delete the commercials from [no, I won't trade them with you, sorry. I stay within the law and build my own video library from public, legal sources], etc.) and, more importantly, I like creating 3-D animation sequences in 1080p HDTV format using blender and povray. The RAID 5 array of 120 MB disks I have is very nice, yielding a sweet 0.6 TByte of data, but frankly I've been finding that a bit constraining, and have had to delete some video 'source' material (rendered high-def PNG files from wich some HDTV avi's were generated) to make room for other projects.
I'd love to replace them with 320 GB drives, for a cool 1.5 TB or so of space, and, frankly, the 3ware RAID controller and the ATA100/133 drives attached to it are more than fast enough for all of my video capture, editing, and rendering needs. 20,000 RPM wouldn't just be superfulous, it would probably be detrimental in terms of the expected disk life and heating issues within the case.
That's still better than most linux software, just go to www.sourceforge.net and see how mony projects ever gets past alpha-stage.
I'm sure there are any number of pro-Microsoft(tm) zealots and astroturfers who will take exception to this, but my (and, I think, most people's) experience suggests that most alpha-stage GNU, Linux, and BSD projects are far and away more stable and reliable than their Windows(tm) equivelents, if perhaps less polished on the install and user-interface side.
In other words, those pre-alpha and alpha projects are often already far and away better than many of their Microsoft(tm) counterparts (if such even exist, which is often NOT the case), and are certainly very useful to GNU/Linux users long before they reach beta or final release status, in contrast to many offerings from Redmond, which remain unstable and marginally useful long after people have begun paying good money for them.
Free software developers, being subject to public peer review, are generally much more conservative in how they label their projects than Microsoft(tm) and some other commercial enterprises are, as anyone who has used both can readilly attest. It is particularly deceptive of disingenous for pro-Microsoft(tm) zealots to be using that conservatism in nomenclature to imply an inferiority in the software being released that, emperically, simply doesn't exist in most cases.
okay, this just proves your ignorance of what Mono is all about. Mono != .Net.
.Net standard, with a stated goal of compatability. My point remains.
.Net. Now your ignorance is showing, as well as your inability or unwillingness to comprehend my post. The point you so stunningly fail to rebutt discusses Mono's .Net efforts, not their C# implimentation. Hint: I did not mention or discuss C# anywhere, except to point out that I had neither ire nor adoration for gtk#.
.NET compatability. That makes any comparisons between the two in the context of this thread completely absurd and irrelevant.
I never said that it was. It is, however, chasing the
Secondly, what security/privacy perspective? C# is a friggin' programming langauge!!
C# is not equal to
while it *is* possible that Microsoft might try to leverage their patents...it is extremely unlikely that it would hold water in court - seeing as how they have submitted their language to the ECMA.
Here you display an apalling ignorance of patent law. Courts will not nullify a patent merely because it has been submitted as part of a public standard, nor will they rule it unenforcable. You are probably misremembering the people who got slapped down for fraud and contract breach when they tried to enforce patents they had publicly stated, in writing were not a part of the standard they had helped to define.
Microsoft has made no such claim, signed no such agreement, and their patents will remain perfectly enforcable regardless of how many standards incorporate them. If they are somehow overturned it will be because of traditional prior art, something no one can count on and something that has absolutely no bearing on how far and widely the technique may have been implimented or be in use.
Also, Mono is being very careful about not looking at Microsoft's implementations so that they may stay "pure".
Which, once again, means nothing with respect to patent law. Good Lord, learn something about patent law before making such gradiose, and incorrect, assertions.
Fourthly, it is stated in the FAQ that Mono wants to avoid straying from the ECMA standard, but that does not mean that it will necessarily try to match Microsoft's implementation class-for-class. It doesn't need to in order to be useful.
They are striving for compatability. Your assumption that they may settle for less may be true, but it is just as likely false, moreso given the project's public statements on the matter. Do you really know anything about anything you're discussing here?
Does g++ contain all the classes that MSVC++ has? No. Does it make g++ any less useful? No.
GCC does adhere to K&R C and various ANSI C and C++ standards. GCC is not, and makes no pretense about, trying to maintain MSVC++ compatability. Mono is trying to achieve
Frankly I didn't think anyone, not even an anonymous coward or a deliberate troll, could be as ignorant about as many points in a discussion as you have proven to be.
Yet another thing to add to my list of "and people wounder why linux is not being readily accepted by everyone" items. I mean, come on, the guy just wanted to help make things better! Getting booed off the stage hurts!
... I can only ascribe that to politics and personal pull, which every group, no matter how altruistic and well meaning, falls prey to now and then.
:-)), but rather to point out their humanity and fallability, a trait they share with everyone reading this comment, the guy posting it, and probably with every sapient being, everywhere.
First, GNU/Linux will never be accepted "by everyone." Nor will FreeBSD, nor will BeOS, nor will Apple's OS X.
Nor will Microsoft Windows, unless Palladium and DRM is legislated into law by the likes of "Disney" Hollings, and even then Apple is likely to be kept around as a token "competitor," paying hefty patent fees to Microsoft for the privelege of being allowed to manufacture "legal" hardware in the US. Unless, of course, you get off your butt and do something about it, but I digress.
The problem is a simple and obvious one, and the solution as elusive today as it was the first time humans came to live together (and likely predates our ability to speak): Politics is ugly and banal, and people are fallible. This includes the Linux kernel developers and Linus Torvalds himself.
Example: The ggi project wanted to provide a kernel abstraction layer for video hardware in the same manner such abstractions are presented for everything else, from your ethernet adapter to your system's RAM and hard drive. Linus thought the idea sucked, then ended up doing a "poor man's" version of frame buffer support instead. How much better things would have been if the original vision of the GGI folks had been realized and supported we'll never know.
Example: PCMCIA. It is still a mess. The more capable userspace version got sidelined in favor of a broken and less capable rewrite
There are other examples, and perhaps Eric S. Raymond's effort is one (though I hesitate to make that assumption), but the purpose of this post is not to catalogue the mistakes Linus and others have made, or to air my own disagreements with them (but what the hell: when will we get XFS into the main kernel tree damn it!
Mistakes happen, everywhere, by everyone. The measure of a group or project's success isn't their perfection (as is so often implied in political discussions), it is by how much their mistaken decisions are outweighed by their correct decisions.
And using that metric, the Kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, have done very well indeed.
It's like "fair abd balanced story" about, say, KKK. Some things just should be never encouraged.
... the list I think could include just about everyone not a part of that particular fringe) would express their opinion, all against a factual context of what is being discussed.
You seem to suffer from the mistaken notion that 'fair and balanced' must yield an appearance of equal legitimacy, or must include equal promotion of both sides of an issue.
While that is often the case for issues that are complex, or where one side is about as correct as the other, or both sides have good points on some issues, it is just as often not the case for issues where one side is clearly out of social or ethical bounds.
A fair and biased report will allow both sides to express their opinions, with best results achieved when those opinions are set against undisputed facts, or disputed facts with the disputes (and evidence pro and con) clearly presented. Scientific programs on Discovery and PBS often do this quite well.
To use your example of the KKK, a fair and unbiased report would allow the KKK to express their philosophy and opinion, a counter group (the NAACP, the ACLU, or others
Unless the factual data are deliberately manipulated (in which case the reporting is no longer fair and unbiased), in the KKK case they are almost certain to come off looking like the rascist dolts that they are, while whoever is arguing against them is likely to appear to be a saint. Why? Because all of the factual information about humanity, all of the historical information we have, in short, just about anything and everything that could be cited in providing a factual context for the discussion, will almost certainly tend to repudiate the KKK perspective and underscore the opposing perspective.
So, as you can no doubt see, providing fair and unbiased coverage of the KKK is probably the last thing a proponent of the KKK would want to see. Such vermin are certainly no excuse for making an exception in a critical aspect of journalistic ethics, one that already is all too often ignored.
Indeed (disclosure: I am speaking as an athiest) I suspect one of the prominent reasons for the erosion of "fair and unbiased" reporting is that, whenever it is done in a scientific or religious context, some very powerful organizations, and their followers, have their world views challenged and perhaps even debunked when presented in a fair and unbiased manner. Whether it is war time politics, the exposure of monsanto's latest poison in our food chain, or simple religious ferver, I think the political price for fair and unbiased reporting has become the primary cause of journalistic decay, moreso even than the inherent 'decline' of journalistic ethics, if indeed the latter is the case. Of course, something like this is purely supposition, and quickly decays into a chicken and egg argument, but it is a point worth pondering nonetheless.
Until the Supreme Court restores the balance it destroyed with its 1978 decision to equate corporate dollars and legalized bribery with freedom of speech, we can only expect this sort of thing to continue.
... but as we all know, there are potent efforts underway to take that particular voice out of our hands in order to protect the cartels of Hollywood and Nashville, efforts designed to put us back in our place, on the couch, accepting whatever they wish to spoonfeed us.
Even insurrection in the streets is unlikely to do much, as the corporate rhetoric will simply change to "don't give in to mass terrorism, and by the way, here's another two hundred grand for next years campaign." The sole method by which this can be stopped is for the voters to turn these fuckers out for good and put them in the unemployment line, but alas, the latter is prevented by corporate favors granting these useless ex-politicos positions as "consultants," with most of their "consulting" done on the golf course or the beach, while the former is prevented by the Media Cartel's monopoly on widespeard information dissemination which effectively locks everyone out of politics at the federal level who doesn't have millions to spend, thus closing the circle on effective citizen participation in govrenment at the federal level completely.
The Internet may play a role is offsetting this
So, what have any of you done about it, beyond a moment's expression of outrage?
And to most people, it makes total sense then to ban those anonymous, crime-friendly pc's. I suppose the silver lining is, we could at least free ourselves of spammers. So it's a tough call ;-)
It isn't a tough call at all, as there are already ways of freeing yourself from SPAMMERs that don't require you to give up your basic freedoms.
Besides, do you really think Palladium is going to 'free' you from SPAM. Given the track record of Microsoft's email services (hotmail, etc) I think it is more likely you are going to be receiving SPAM adverts from Microsoft "strategic" partners, and perhaps anyone who pays the piper appropriately, and with 'trusted' computing, maybe what won't be trusted won't be the SPAM, it will be the SPAM assissin software that otherwise would have let you filter the crap out of your inbox.
One thing is absolutely certain. Whichever way that particular battle on your Palladium Trusted Computer goes, it won't be your choice. It will be Microsoft's choice.
At the end of the day, Mono hackers hack Mono because they love the technology. .NET really grows on you -- please don't try to tear it apart without at least giving Mono a go. You may be pleasantly surprised.
.net approach to things in general is not a very good idea, from both a security and a privacy perspective. Add to that the very real liklihood of Microsoft using it to entrap people using it onto their platform, the liklihood of their leveraging patents, copyright (and undocumented "features"), and making ad-hoc modifactions to the standard itself (something they as the owner of the standard can do at will), and I think Mono stands a good chance of discovering Microsoft's "open standard" to be little more than a Tar Baby.
Mono and gtk# have neither my ire nor my adoration. What annoyed me was the very real "marketdroid" sound of your post. Apologies if my reaction was scathing, but I have a low tolerance for such things even when they come out in support of something I like (e.g. GNU/Linux). When it comes out in support of something I'm skeptical of to begin with my tolerance is even lower.
I think the
That having been said, no one would be happier than I to eat crow and be proven wrong, so while I am profoundly skeptical of Mono (and certainly don't think it warrents consideration for the FSF award, at least not yet), I wish the project both luck and success.
God is good to people who really look for him.
This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.
You are absolutely correct.
The beauty of religion, and why it can persist in the face of reason, and even seduce intelligent people like Larry Wall, is that the parameters of every definition are endlessly malleable.
Remember that mustard-seed sized bit of "faith?" That provides all the wiggle room required for any religious premise, no matter how prima facia absurd, to withstand argument, provided you argue on their terms (which is almost always what is expected and demanded). "Faith" means acccepting something which defies logic, so the theologens are correct when they say a tiny bit of faith is all that is required. A tiny bit of willingness to defy logic and accept the absurd is all that is required to promote, and buy into, any belief system at all, no matter how absurd, how self-destructive (remember the now-extinct Shakers? How about the People's Temple?), or how simply plain wrong it is when illuminated by the cold light of reality.
In this particular case, the non-religious people end up being burned 'alive' for all time, while the religious people enjoy a profoundly boring existence playing harps in the presence of the universes most stodgy old man (which of course, makes one wonder what happens to those whose harp-playing skills aren't up to snuff).
Or some variation thereupon, the key ingredients being "the faithful" (there's that word again) get to live well, while the "non-believes" (that would be you and I) are tormented forever.
Given that, god really is good to those who look for him, at least in comparison to his treatment of those who do not.
The Mono project [go-mono.com] has made great strides towards producing a free (GPL and BSD licensed) implementation of the .NET framework that's poised to replace the proprietary Sun/IBM Java installations, which represent one of the final major pieces of non-free software routinely distributed with GNU/Linux.
.net functionality. Indeed, not one of a dozen companies I know who are using free software, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux have any, even remote, desire for .net, or a free "chase the ever moving Microsoft target, oops, stepped on a patent mine!" alternative implimentation of a standard dictated by a convicted monopolist.
.net's "standard" as dictated by Microsoft isn't about as 'vendor tied in' as it gets.
.net it is a godsend. .Net in comparison is a trojan of epic proportions, and Mono is likely just another of its victims.
Funny, no one at my enterpise misses
As Gtk# [sf.net] continues to mature, it looks like the Mono project will soon be able to provide a powerful cross-platform Java-like envoronment complete with a modern object-oriented language, C#, that has proved so popular in business and enthusiast circles alike, without any of the vendor tie-in associated with Java.
gtk# and mono may be worthwhile projects (much as samba is), but regardless, I can't believe even a slashdot moderator could be so stupid as to mod up such obvious and blatent marketdroid speak. Baseless (and to all appearances inaccurate) claims of C#'s popularity "in business" and "enthusiast circles alike" are only exceeded by the incredibly silly "without any of the vendor tie-in associated with java" comment. As if though
I'm no fan of java (in fact, I loathe it for a number of reasons, not least of which is its byzantine, brain-dead time and date class), but compared to
Yes, it would terrible if a single organization controlled the construction, maintenance, and regulation of all the roads in a locality. They might impose draconian corporate policies about helmets and seat belts [...yada yada yada usual anti-government free market ueber alles dogma yada yada...]
Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you simply prefer feudalism to democracy?
I dislike much about our government and am as scathingly critical of them (particularly the current administration) as anyone, but your sarcastic diatribe simply reeks of stupidity.
Hint: local governments are elected, are directly accountable to the people, and more often than not regulate across the board equally. UPS, Federal Express, and the US Post Office all have equal access to the highway system and local roads.
Do you really think that would be the case if UPS, a non-democractic, non-elected, feudalistically organized entity (as are all private companies BTW) owned the highway instead? Recent experience in the telco industry, and the resulting disappearance of DSL providors in the united states as a result of local baby bell abuses of their last mile of copper monopolies, suggests otherwise.
Frankly, I cannot believe anyone over the age of eight would be so stupid as to advocate what you just did. Amazing.
What I'd like to see is that anarchistic utopia of free software developers squash software corporations like Adobe into the ground. There's only one way capitalists will learn and that's for them to watch the very markets that make them rich disappear from right under their nose. Not only software, but media, TV, music, etc. will all experience the effects of the mythical anarchistic utopia you've mentioned. Or maybe they won't... but it sure looks to me like free software is giving Microsoft a run for its money. Who do you think will be next?
... unless the cartel in question buys legislation from a corrupt government to kill individual innovation.
I like capitalism. I'm quite good at it (and make a very good living at it). Capitalism, in the form of competative free markets is generally good for dealing with most naturally scarce things (not all mind you, as sometimes other pressures can cause the free market to break down. Natural monopolies, such as the road to your home and your drinking water are one type of example. Medical services, where the pressure of having an alternative of dying if you chose not to be a customer, is arguably another area that lends itself only very imperfectly to a competative, free market.)
However, in the realm of ideas, invention, software, and infinitly copiable content, there is no natural scarcity, and capitalism breaks down. So much so that the government feels compelled to create monopolies, with no pretense of a competative, free market.
And you are right, a thriving, cooperative commons, with its own internal (mostly friendly, though sometimes not) competition will outcompete a monopoly cartel every time
Which is exactly what Microsoft is all about with Palladium, and the RIAA and the MPAA are all about with so-called DRM (digital rights revocation). They know they can't compete. Microsoft can't compete with free software and, in the long run, the recording industry and movie studios will not be able to compete with a vibrant community of artists creating free (or very inexpensive) music and movies (the latter quite possibly with blender, as I am doing). Online copyright violators and file sharers aren't any more of a threat than VHS and cassette tape users were fifteen years ago, and they know that. It isn't about preventing file sharing, its about preventing competition, something a corporation with a cartel mindset simply cannot abide.
I made the mistake once of driving 3 hours across Florida to go to Kennedy Space Center. What a disappointment! Anything the public gets access to is run by a lame amusement park company and the whole thing is set up more for 8-year-old boys obsessed with rockets than geeks. The only particularly cool aspect of the place was the actual Saturn V rocket hanging, disassembled, in an enormous hangar-like building. Other than that, though, it pretty much sucked.
... that can be really interesting, if you like aviation. More meat, less fluff in my experience (since, in a real sense, they are generally trying to sell you on an airplane, or at least an airplane's concept, and assume you're knowledgable enough about aviation to be worth selling to).
When I went to Houston it wasn't bad, though I would have liked a little more technical detail on what was going on in the control room at the time (they were running a simulation of an aborted shuttle takeoff, where the shuttle makes a big u-turn in the sky and lands) would have been nice. There was the whole visitor-centor nonsense that seems to plauge more and more landmarks these days, but overall the experience was interesting, if only for about an hour or so.
Now, touring an aircraft production facility (for general aviation aircraft)
The term Free Market means a market Free of Government. If the government CAN legislate an aspect of a market, then that market is NO LONGER free.
That may be a free market, by its strictest definition, but such a market, while it may start out competatively, will ultimately devolve into a marketplace of oligarchies and outright monopolies, ultimately indistinguishable from the planned economies founded upon completely antithetical philosophies.
In other words, a purely free market (as you've defined it) is as entanable and unstable as a purely planned economy, be it communist or faschist.
This does not that ALL goverment power is "bad", it just needs to be carefully monitored.
On that point I couldn't agree with you more.