Both at home, and at work, running various versions of the 2.2 kernel plus patches, stock Mandrake installs, 2.4 kernel, etc. we have, over time, experienced data loss using reiserfs. This has not been limited to one machine, or one configuration, or one version of the filesystem (though, admittedly, we have been unwilling to try any newer versions in the last six months or so... let someone else take the pain for a while).
I say this not to knock reiser per se (I am quite happy it made it into the kernel tree, although I won't be completely happy until ext3, jfs, and xfs are all in the kernel tree as well so that they can compete with one another on quality and features rather than merely convinience), but to point out that all is not necessarilly sunny, nor is it unequivocably the "leader" when it comes to Linux journalling filesystems. I feel it is important to counterbalance some of these overly sunny depictions of experimental filesystems being used in serious environments with a little real-world, personal experience to the contrary.
I haven't yet tried ext3 or jfs, but have used various incarnations of xfs and must say that I have developed a preference for it over the last few weeks. That having been said, I still make use of ext2 filesystems in production environments and will only use less tried linux filesystems (previously reiser, now ext3 and xfs) in development/test environments only... at least for the nonce. I concur with another poster who pointed out that SGI's XFS has been well tested and stable since 1994... any issues are porting issues, not design or internal issues, which IMHO is quite important when looking for a managable and stable alternative.
These filesystems are fun and exciting, but they are not perfect, and in the case of reiser some rather serious (hopefully now fixed, but what's next?) flaws have gotten played down a little more than they should have. Remember, back up early, back up often, and be conservative in using any of them in anything other than a test situation (you can, once its tested to your satisfaction, but be cautious).
Hehe. It's always a source of wonder for me to realize how brainwashed and ignorant good American patriots can be.
Patriots of each and every country on the planet are "brainwashed and ignorant" else they would not be putting their national "identity" above common sense, the common man, and the common good. And the French share one striking characteristic with their American cousins: an overdeveloped sense of national identity.
FYI, this whole hysteria about encryption laws in France is only due to the fact that France was 8 or 10 months late compared to the US in liberalizing its encryption rules.
Uh, no (but thank you for playing). Until the French anti-encryption laws were repealed it was illegal for anyone to use any encryption of any kind within the borders of France unless one first gave a copy of their secret key to the French government. This was far more intrustive than the anti-encryption legislation of the United States, which never said anything about domestic use of encryption (in other words, Americans were and are free to use encryption as strong as they like), but rather restricted the export of encryption technologies to other countries (like, say, France). These export restrictions were unbelievably stupid and foolish (nearly all of the encryption expertise and business went overseas as a result, and even years later the American encryption industry still hasn't recovered from that debacle), but they in no way came even remotely close to being as big brotherish as the encryption restriction in France were against their people.
The USA has a number of problems which Europe does not, the DMCA being a glaring example. But Europe also has some serious drawbacks the United States doesn't (yet) have, including some of those mentioned in the previous post. It would behoove us all to recognize the weaknesses of both ourselves and others in protecting our liberties, as you can bet that those who wish to oppress us are certainly borrowing techniques and mechanisms from their neighbors overseas and seeking to apply them at home.
When Stallman and the FSF are willing to admit that their political opinions are opinions, and demonstrate - by their actions - that they are willing to do something other than disregard and disdain individuals with opinions that differ from theirs, then you will have the moral hight ground neccesary to make the argument you just presented.
I lambast RMS and the FSF when they engage in such practices as well, but lately I haven't seen any such demagaugary coming from the FSF. I have, however, seen a lot of public airing of dirty laundry coming from the ESR/O'Reilly camp... with nary a retaliation from the FSF in response. Again, I do not agree entirely with either side... my position tends to be somewhere between the two camps... but the personal attacks and use of public fora to promote personal agendas and personal vindetta's at the expense of both the Free Software and Open Source communities goes well beyond one side criticizing the other's politics. For slashdot to promote one side vs. the other (or, for that matter, to promote both sides against each other) serves no ones interest... except possibly that of Redmond.
As for moral highground, as an observer who has engaged in no demagaugary against either side, and whose anti-Microsoft comments have been based on factual information, not ad homonem innuendo, I think I have the right to decry the use of demaguagary and ad homonem attacks like this one (and the O'Reilly/ESR Flerbiage absurdity of last weekend) without being in the least bit guilty of hypocracy.
If and when RMS engages in the same thing I shall point my flame thrower at him with just as much enthusiasm as I do now at O'Reilly, ESR, and company.
Copied != Stolen, even by IP-Shyster Definitions
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IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
(It's crucial that you understand this. While those developers can be thanked for the GNU/Linux implementation, the design and archiecture is stolen-- albeit modifed -- IP.)
While you make some good points, I take exception to this characterization of GNU/Linux's similarity to UNIX and its POSIX compliance as "stolen IP." Numerous court decisions, including Apple v. Microsoft, have consistently ruled that compatiblity, compliance to standards, and even the wholesale mimicking of a competitor's look and feel do not constitute a violation of intellectual property in any manner. The design and architecture were copied legally (actually, to be historically accurate, they were copied from a copy... namely from MINIX, which was a minimal, educational recreation of UNIX 7), not stolen in any sense of the word, not even in the "newspeak" sense that the Copyright Cartels and DMCA Apologists have redefined the word to mean.
I think you'll find yourself rather alone in academic circles in defending that statement. While Microsoft might agree with your... loose definition of what an operating system is for PR spin reasons (and so perhaps also some of those subjected to their propoganda) almost no operating system designers would agree with that.
The definition of what is and is not an OS is a little fuzzy, but not nearly as arbitrary or fuzzy as you make it out to be. Defining an operating system as "just the kernel" is no more reasonable than defining the operating system as "the kernel, the shell and other tools necessary to use it, the GUI, and, oh, by the way, the web browser and office suite). There is a reason we refer to an operating system kernel as the kernel, not the entire operating system. Because there is, in fact, more to an operating system than just the kernel.
As for your silly notion of GNU/Solaris, Sun provides all the necessary tools to use the operating system (bourne shell, c shell, basic filesystem utilities such as newfs, fsck, ls, cp, etc.), and basic c libraries said utilities require. If they used soley GNU ls, cp, clib (glib), etc. rather than providing their own then RMS would be reasonable in requesting that Sun give him credit for having written most of their "operating system." Since Sun, not the FSF, wrote the software, there would be no such obligation. If you, as a Solaris user, choose to install the GNU versions of the various utilities, then perhaps calling it GNU/Solaris isn't so unreasonable... it would certainly point out the changes you've made to the stock system in a precise, concise manner that would make the differences clear to an otherwise unsuspecting programmer or user who sits down and otherwise wonders why cp, mv, ls, and tar behave so differently than expected.
I was never really happy with RMS name change requests and found the "lignux" notion particularly obnoxious and offensive, and RMS was never much of a diplomat. However, the FSF has requested the use of the GNU prefix as a way of underscoring the freedom aspect of free software, and giving credit where credit is due. I try to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux (when I remember) not out of some misguided notion of obligation or desire to advocate the Free Software Movement ueber alles, but rather out of common courtesy to those who wrote the vast majority of the underlying system which I use everyday at work and at home.
I don't agree with everything RMS or the Free Software Foundation says, but the recent demonizing of the FSF and RMS by Tim O'Reilly, ESR, and slashdot is nothing short of despicable. Disagreements are one thing, but demonizing, demigaugary, and poisoning of the Free Software/Open Source community with this sort of one-sided propoganda is destructive and defies common sense, and I want nothing to do with it or those who support it.
The universe is something on the order of 15,000,000,000 years old.
The earth has been around about 4,000,000,000 years.
Human beings are believed to have existed for approximately 3,000,000 years.
Human civilization as we know it is estimated to have begun around 10,000 years ago.
Modern monotheistic religions, purporting to have all of life's answers, have only been around for 5,000 years or so.
Modern science, which is actively searching for many of those answers, is only about 500 years old.
500 years. 1/100th as much time as (modern) religion has had to answer those questions. 1/6000th of the age of the human race. 1/8,000,000th of the age of the planet, and 1/3,000,000,000th the age of the universe.
I think claiming that, because science hasn't yet provided all of the answers after which it searches in a mere 500 years is akin to a child claiming that, because they were unable to learn those skills necessary to life as an adult in just two days, they will never learn.
Science may never answer the most fundamental questions of life. Then again, it just might. We are really only in the first moments of trying... who knows what we'll have learned in another 500 years, or another 5,000. Indeed, already we have answered far more questions through science in the blink of a proverbial eye than religion has in 6000 years and more general folklore has in 3,000,000. I wouldn't dismiss science just yet, merely because its results, while often truly dramatic, aren't instantaneous (and are subject to revision upon the accumulation of new knowledge, which is one of science's greatest strengths).
However, even by claiming to have broken the encryption, he's placing himself at risk of being investigated, and possibly detained and questioned should he ever visit the US.
You are probably right, as the DMCA is clearly intended to be used as a club to squelch information and discussion under the (woefully thin) guise of protecting copyright holders.
However...
(If I were to publicly announce that I had commited a crime, I would expect the authorities to take interest in me.)
... even the DMCA hasn't made it illegal to figure out how to decrypt encrypted copyright material, but rather has made the trafficking in devices using that knowledge illegal. By announcing he's done it, but not sharing the methodology, he cannot in any way be said to have "trafficked" in a circumvention device. To do so he would have to publish, and this he has not done. Not that that will stop Intel or someone else affiliated with the Copyright Cartels from swearing out a false afidavit and falsely imprisoning this individual (and, interestingly, while the Sklyrov case goes forward I do not see anyone from Adobe being arrested for Perjury, which swearing out a false affidavit is... hence the term "swear").
Of course, it is only a matter of time until someone does publish, probably anonymously, and DHCP dies the death it so richly deserves.
The software world, which relies on restricted copy priveleges (copyright) far more heavilly than even the Media Moguls of Hollywood and New York, learned over a decade ago just how futil copy protection schemes were. Instead, they chose to go another route, making serial-numbered copies traceable rather than uncopiable (something which has been shown mathematically to be myth in any event). Interestingly enough, having people's names attached to serialized copies of software had a chilling effect on copyright violation that no amount of copy-protection schemes and hardware dongles was able to achieve. It didn't eliminate it, but it sure cut down on the number of people willing to share their copies of software with anyone other than, at most, their closest friends.
The Copyright Cartels and Media Conglomerates refused to learn this obvious lesson, prefering instead to believe they have purchased protection through the DMCA sufficient to allow even the most flawed "copy protection" to stand through artificial threat with a government gun in contradiction to both information theory and basic physics in the physical world.
Of course, when "casual copying" has been mostly eliminated and fair use is dead, the industrial copyright violators will still be producing illegale wares in quantity, until they in turn are shut down using methods and laws which have been around for decades. Which underscores the real motivation and target behind MPAA and RIAA purchased legislation such as the DMCA: the individual consumer, not the commercial copyright violator.
Re:What Version of the nvidia drivers are you usin
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ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 2
Empirical evidence != superstition.
You may be right and I may be wrong (I haven't dug into the makefiles to see, and I'm too busy to do so at the moment), but emperically I have had crashes when not running a make install on GLX after performing kernel upgrades and recompiling the nvidia kernel drivers, and those crashes have gone away each time I have done so.
This isn't superstition, this is emperical evidence and reasoned thinking. The conclusion may be eroneous (drawing a false corallation), but your talk of superstition is nonesense.
Re:What Version of the nvidia drivers are you usin
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ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 2
Uhm. GLX is binary only. The Makefile simply installs it.
There is more to it than that. I haven't ferreted out the details, but failure to run make on the GLX driver following a recompile of the kernel and the driver does lead to instability that is eliminated by a "make install" on the GLX driver. Running a make install on the GLX driver after installing the kernel drivers following a kernel upgrade eliminates this problem, so clearly something more is going on in addition to copying glx*.o to the X tree.
What Version of the nvidia drivers are you using?
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ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 2
I've been using NVidia's "nvidia" v 1.0 driver with various 2.4.x kernels (currently 2.4.7) and XFree86 4.0.3 very successfully on a number of different distributions (Mandrake 7.2, Suse, and now debian-3.0-testing). Hardware which I have used ranges from Guillemot Cougar TNT2 PCI analog cards to Inno3d PCI GeForce2 400MX DVI cards to AGP GeForce2 DVI AGP cards, both standalone and using xinerama with other, non-nvidia cards, and with both standard 18" 4x3 LCD screens as well as SGI 1600SW 1600x1024 LCD screens via their multi-link adapter. I haven't tried a GeForce3 card as it remains a little pricey, but would be very surprised if it didn't work just as well.
Configuration of X was fairly trivial (the nvidia driver README describes what needs to be done and is absolutely accurate, modula removing the GLX support when using xinerama), and substituting one Nvidia card in a configured machine for another works flawlessly (even with radically different NVidia chipsets) and requires no additional configuration tweaks whatsoever (compare this to changing Matrox models, which often do require changes to the XF86Config file).
In fact, where I work we have standardized on nvidia completely (we used to use Matrox) mainly because of the ease of use with respect to GNU/Linux and the excellent support Nvidia provides (we have 50+ Linux workstations and servers and are rolling out new boxes all the time), whether using the stock "nv" drivers or the accelerated "nvidia" drivers provided by NVidia. As another noted, while releasing the driver as Free Software would be nice, we are more than happy to reward NVidia's excellent GNU/Linux support with our business even if they choose, as is their right, to keep their driver proprietary. Their product works extremely well, very painlessly, and eases my workload in supporting diverse video hardware under GNU/Linux and the X Windowing System immensly.
For what it is worth it should be noted that you have to recompile both the kernel driver and the GLX driver each time you recompile/upgrade your kernel. Failure to recompile both will make the X session unstable. Not recompiling the GLX driver will work (most of the time) and thus it is easy to forget, but failure to do so will lead to the kind of instability you describe.
We all know that the truth is, linux is hard to use for novices, and a good portion of linux users are not inclined to help newbies out. Read a few usenet posts to see this. "Linux is tough to use" is not FUD, it's the ugly truth.
This simply isn't true, and my mother is a perfect case in point. Not terribly computer literate and with no desire to be, she simply wants her email, her web browser, and her word processor. Oh, she was delighted by the Bach, Beethove, and Mozart ogg's I ripped from her CD collection and made available on her hard drive... with xmms she can now listen to hours of music without changing CDs, and some of the other toys in her KDE menu she enjoys playing around with, but in truth her desires were relatively simple.
I bought her a $50 copy of applixware so she could read and write word documents, and guess what? She prefers her GNU/Linux box over her windows box at work by orders of magnitude. In fact, she has become much more zealous in advocating GNU/Linux and disparaging Windows than I ever was. Why? Because she, as a user, has found GNU/Linux to be much easier to use, much more stable, and much faster than her old windows install (to which she has never returned and which now provides additional storage for her burgeoning ogg-vorbis collection as she, herself, rips her own CDs using grip). Indeed, her discovery that it wasn't her, or her "stupidity" that was the root of nearly all of her computer mishaps, but the underlying instability of the operating system itself, has made her positively scathing when speaking of Microsoft. I guess she took Microsoft blaming the shortcomings of their products on her, and the denigration of making her feel stupid in the process, a little personally... not that any rational human being could blame her.
GNU/Linux is as easy, if not easier, to use than any version of Windows out there, and as others have pointed out, many GNU/Linux distributions are easier than Windows to set up and install as well.
Yes GNU/Linux is different, and yes, users must be willing to take an hour or two to learn those differences (ie "something new"), but new isn't the same as "difficult" or "tough to use." I spent an hour with my mother showing her the basics of navigating the KDE desktop and the differences between it and Windows, as well as the differences between Applix and MS Office. Again, this wasn't because GNU/Linux is "tough to use," this merely because it was a little different, and therefor new to her. Indeed, according to my mother, Linux is actually easier than Windows to use, so yes, saying GNU/Linux is "tough to use" is FUD in no uncertain terms. Saying "we all know it is tough to use" is adds a whole new level of dishonesty to the discussion, indeed it could be said that such as claim is FUD to the second power.
Now my mom's non-computer savvy friends are bugging me to come and set them up with GNU/Linux as well, so it looks like Microsoft's worst nightmare is in fact slowly coming true: regular, non-savvy Microsoft users are defecting to GNU/Linux in increasing numbers despite all the FUD Microsoft and its shills can possibly muster. Sometimes justice can be poetic.
Free Markets, Public Works, and Monopolies
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Rhythms Flatlines
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· Score: 5, Informative
A colleague of mine and I were discussing this just this morning (he is a Ritym's subscriber).
Many of the DSL failures are a result, at least in part, of being jerked around by the provisioner of the last mile of wire. Here in Chicago that monopolist would be Ameritech -- notorious for deliberately delaying and mucking with the installation of competitor's DSL lines, despite a plethora of FCC regulations designed to prevent this sort of unfairness. I had personal experience with this, as did my colleague, when our DSL lines (from different providors) were provisioned.
When breaking up so-called "natural" monopolies with the intent of creating competition a very obvious oversight has been made, at least here in the United States, quite probably as a result of the rather radical anti-anything-that-remotely-smells-like-it-could-m aybe-be-considered-socialistic-by-anyone-to-the-ri ght-of-Gengis-Khan political atmosphere that has imbued the country since the early Reagan days. To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly," and why shouldn't the factor, or commonality, be treated as a public works project the way we do other "natural monopolies" such as roads and highways?
Take electricity, water, and telecommunications as examples. What made the electric company a natural monopoly? Not power generation, but delivery to your home... i.e. the physical wire. What made telecommunications a natural monopoly? Once again, not the intervening network and its services so much as the last mile of wire to your house. Water? Not, in most places, the water acquisition (it can come from rivers, aquafers, lakes, even the air if you can figure out how to do that economically) but rather the physical pipe to your faucet.
Instead of even considering nationalizing the infrastructure (there's another word which has fallen victim to the anti-communism hysteria of the early 80's and has remained taboo since) we have chosen instead to impliment an absurdly byzantine set of regulations prohibiting this, requireing that, and hopefully resulting in a level playing field. An approach far more favorable to error or outright corruption, and far less conducive to a level playing field and the competition such would engender than simply treating the wire like a public road, with equal access to all, would have.
I would submit that bottlenecks which create so-called natural monopolies, such as highways, the last mile(s) of telephone wire, and perhaps even the entire power grid, should be treated the same as highways, paid for and administered by government via taxes or access fees and provided to all of the competing service providors under the same terms.
The disadvantes would be the same ones we have with highways: a certain amount of government bloat, a certain amount of corruption in contracting and subcontracting, and a certain amount of government ineffeciency.
Just as with highways the advantages would far outweigh this, however: a level playing field for all competing businesses, an elimination of byzantine FCC regulations designed (and failing) to counter the monopolistic advantages under the current, wholely private, approach, an administration that is open to public scruitiny and nominally accountable to the public via our democratic process, and quite possibly economies of scale that might well offset the added overhead inherent in government administration of any project.
Monopolies are ineffecient, whether they are government or private. Where they must exist, as with roads, it makes far more sense that they be in public hands, a part of the public commons, rather than in the hands of some private Robber Barron a la' the Rhein River of two centuries ago.
Finally, I would argue that a free, competetive market cannot exist when the underlying infrastructure for that market resides in the hands of a private monopoly. Indeed, it appears that a competetive market on top of such an infrastructure is difficult, perhaps impossible, to maintain even if it is highly regulated. However, as we've seen with the success of our transportation companies, airlines can compete very well with public airports and automobile companies as well as trucking companies compete very well on public highways.
Perhaps it is time we reevaluated our love affair with private ownership of nearly all our basic infrastructures and put aside our aversion to nationalization and consider the question from the point of view of how to we structure things to eliminate private monopolies and maximize competetive free markets while at the same time minimizing the need for intrusive government regulation.
While I am occasionally one to lambast the hypocracy of slashdot (promoting products of the MPAA despite the MPAA's thus-far-successful attack on Free Software through movie and DVD reviews... though the latter seem to have thankfully been discontinued), and while I concurr with your criticism (the link should not be to a format promoted by a company all those with conscience should be boycotting), this is, I think, reflective of lax editorial work rather than outright hypocracy. The link was submitted by a reader, not a slashdot editor.
That having been said, would the slashdot editors please change the link to point to the HTML version of the document? Boosting the clickthroughs to a proprietary format from an offensive company at the expense of clickthroughs to an open format (HTML) isn't helpful regardless... anyone analyzing the statistics of the logs will gain a false impression of people's preferences WRT the document's format, thus promoting PDF at a time we really don't want to be doing so.
Just my 2 cents, of course.
Not really that reasonable, more an act of panic
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Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 2
There are utilities which can identify what operating system and web server is listening on port 80. It would be relatively simple for a competent ISP to scan their customers and turn off access to port 80 solely on those systems running a Microsoft Operating System with IIS. It probably wouldn't be completely beyond the pale to write a little utility to test those foolish enough to be running a Microsoft operating system and IIS server, identify those who are vulnerable to Code Red, and shut those machines down, leaving those who have patched (nonforwarding) systems, as well as those wise enough to be using more secure, non-Microsoft systems, in place.
Of course, competent ISP may be an oxymoron these days.
When was the last time you heard about private individuals making major discoveries in the automobile industry? Probably quite a while ago. As industries mature, the innovations stop happening in garages, and start happening in corporate labs. That's the typical lifecycle of any industry as it matures.
This "maturity" isn't a result of everything having been discovered, or a shortage of creativity or new ideas, or of capital, or of an installed base unwilling to adopt new technologies. It is IMHO a direct result of the US Patent system and its propensity for favoring large Patent portfolio holders over small inventors, coupled with the effects of granting government sponsored monopolies and locking up ideas upon which even newer and more innovative ideas or improvements could have been based. This isn't maturity, it is stifling of innovation, of the economies, and of the wealth, which innovation creates.
Software didn't have this problem until software patents started to be granted. Even then, it takes time for a critical mass of founding ideas to be locked up before innovation is brought to a grinding crawl, and we are starting to see the beginnings of this now. Another thing that has, up until now, worked in favor of the software industry has been the fact that the rest of the world has not endorsed software patents and so has been free to continue to innovate, with things like GPG, xine, and livid being developed abroad, then imported into the US either serreptitiously or, when the patent(s) finally expire, legitimently (but with the development time already behind them). This advantage may be going away as Europe and others consider implementing software patents of their own.
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
It is more akin to the Big Boys saying "get your bitch ass back on the couch and consume what we give you. Raise your voice, innovate in any manner that might threaten our cartel, or our hold over your lives and the flow of your money into our pockets, and we'll crush you, if not ourselves, with the politicians and police we have so inexpensively rented."
We seriously need to question the basic assumptions of IP law, the notion that granting braod monopolies for extended periods of time is somehow conducive to those things a free and competetive market are supposed to encourage: innovation and improvements in the products we create. In point of fact monopolies are antithetical to a free market, quite destructive and not at all conducive to innovation. We should seriously consider dramatic restrictions on copyright priveleges and getting rid of the patent system altogether. If that is to great a course-change for people to stomach then at the very least we need to address the problem of monopolies, perhaps through manditory licensing of copyrighted works (so anyone can start a radio station for example, not just members of the recording cartel) and offering tax exemptions to inventors rather than twenty year monopolies.
Until we reexamine our basic assumptions with respect to IP and confront the contradiction that is at its very heart these sorts of problems will persist, irrespective of whatever quick and dirty patches we apply to the system.
One of my favorite stories is when on a youth retreat I was giving a short talk on "life'd dirty little secrets"... which includes one of my favorites... sometime, between the age of 25 and 30, you wake up one day.... and much to your horror, you realize... mom & dad were RIGHT!
Which, of course, is going to be true for some people and absolutely untrue for many others. As someone who is 37 and has travelled around the world twice, lived on three different continents, and has been around a fair amount I can honestly tell you that my parents, both of them, were wrong about just about everything. I won't go into excruciating detail except to say that religion and rational thought do not mix well and to add that every human being, adult or not, parent or not, is certain to be wrong about something.
No lie, when I said that, one young lady put her hands on her ears and screemed "NNOOOOOOOOOO!".
Which, since you have no idea what her parents might have said, much less whether it was "true" in any sense of the word, her reaction to your comment might have been a natural, even rational. For all you know she was being raped by her father and her mother was telling her it "get used to it baby, cause it aint never gonna stop" which would be both untrue and appalling, and coupled with your assertion would make suicide by even the most painful means appealing.
Parents are no more "right" or wrong than anyone else... just look at all of idiots who happen to be adults, and all the elderly who have, despite decades of experience, obtained precious little wisdom. The point? Some parents are right, some are wrong, just as some old people are wise and some are fools. To generalize something to a teenage like what you did is IMHO irresponsible and misleading. Indeed, getting a child (even a rebellious teenager) to think critically about what their parents are telling them is often a very difficult task... telling them carte blanche that "one day you'll realize your parents are right" without any idea what their parents are telling them not only discourages critical thought even more, it is, in most cases, simply wrong.
As to the three points you make, I couldn't agree more.
Thanks. That was very interesting (and the slashdot editors deserve to be called on the carpet for that sort of thing). My critique of your logic in your previous statement stands, but my personal opinions as to the veracity of your accusations against the slashdot editors has been modified from "yeah, right" to "hmm...there may be something to what you say."
Hopefully the/. editors will take this sort of criticism for what it is and modify their behavior in the future, rather than "bitchslapping" (is that your term, or theirs?) posts like these down. People do fuck up, and it is through being called on it, and changing one's behavior, that not only goods and services such as slashdot are improved, but so are we as people.
If Patents are leveraged to kill Free Software
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EU & US Patent "Syncing"
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Obviously 20 years is a long time in the software biz, but the point is, it's not forever, and the situation will improve over time even if the bad guys win.
You assume Free Software can survive, much less compete, in a world where the basic building blocks for software are patented and locked away for twenty years at a stretch. I am not at all certain this is true, and while a renaissance might become possible in twenty years (when many of us will be nearing retirement), it does not in any way diminish the coming dark ages such as victory for "the bad guys," as you so quaintly put it, might well entail, much less the two-decades of economic destruction such anti-competative monopolies will wreak upon the both so-called "new economoy" and the existing economy alike.
Most established companies love to see regulation in their industries, particularly when the regulations only affect their competitors.
This is an interesting, and valid, point. It would not be at all farfetched for Microsoft to be deliberately negligent in its security, then use a regulatory body and its own involvement in the regulatory process to undermine the ability of smaller upstarts to compete, perhaps even make it impossible for Free Software to become "licensed" at all.
A frightening thought. I fear, however, that simply wishing the government would stay away won't suffice, so I suspect we'll want to be very involved in whatever process does emerge, and it is IMHO almost certain something will emerge from these debacles. It would behoove us to be proactive in making sure whatever form any involvement by our government takes is conducive to the creative freedom and technical progress which Free Software makes possible, lest we all be subjected to Microsoft's notion of "freedom to innovate," which in truth has little to do with freedom or innovation.
If Europe is Foolish Enough to Follow the USA
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EU & US Patent "Syncing"
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If Europe is foolish enough to go along with the United State's efforts in "harmonizing" US and European patent law by essentially submitting to the American approach they will be handing the United States an unassailable advantage in the software marketplace.
Think about it. Which country has been bending over backwards handing out as many patents on software, business models, and the like as possible, as quickly as possible, and what percentage of those patents have been going to American firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, Dolby, and Adobe? The vast, vast majority.
Should Europe recognize American software patents virtually every European software house will find itself in violation of US software patents of one sort or another virtually overnight. If France, Germany, or the UK think they have a tough time competing against the likes of Microsoft now, just wait until the European Commission gives them this big club to whack them over the head with.
Europe currently enjoys a huge competative advantage over the US in not having its software industry tied up in litigation and government sponsored monopolies the way ours is. This has enabled Europe to rapidly advance from a relatively "backward" position with respect to the US in software to relative parity, and could be leveraged to outstrip us dramatically in the future. It would be profoundly stupid of the European governments to give such an advantage away, particularly to someone as powerful, and as self-absorbed, as the United States.
The really sad thing is of course that this is completely true, as has already been demonstrated.
ahem. Basic logic please.
It does not follow that, because moderators have moderated the parent to your post down to zero, that those moderators were slashdot editors. Far more likely that slashdot readers with moderator priveleges modded the post down as the flaimbait it certainly appeared to be (to me at least, although I do not have moderator priveleges right now).
The slashdot editors are the ones who decide which stories get posted (decisions I disagree with as often as not BTW), not those readers who happen to have moderator priveleges at a given moment.
I won't go into a long discourse on the niavite of dissaciating information with its impact on the physical world, except to rebut a couple of the more blatently silly comments you made:
The most a computer virus can do is cause loss of data or money.
Tell that to the patients who died as a result of a "bug" in the software which was controlling the radiation therepy equipment used in the treatment of their cancer that erroneously delivered a lethal dose.
Tell that to the aircraft pilots which had their passenger jet flip upside down due to a bug in their computerized autopilot (thankfully the plane was empty and they were able to recover...barely).
Computers, and information, have real-world effects which can and do affect, even destroy, real, physical lives, and viruses are as capable of destroying lives as "bugs."
Something market forces are perfectly capable of dealing with and something which government should stay far away from.
Ever heard of the SEC? FTC? Even the markets themselves, which you seem to so laude as a panacea, require rather detailed and ongoing government intervention in order to function at all.
Other holes in this argument abound, including the fact that, in the United States at least, money is required to obtain even nominal medical care, not to mention food and other basics. Destroying one's livelihood is often tantamount to destroying lives... there's that real world, physical impact again.
The argument about the loss of fissionable nuclear material is a strawman.
No, it isn't. It is a verifiable, and verified, event which resulted from extreme incompetence and negligence on Microsoft's part, exacerbated by their indefensible unwillingness to acknowledge, much less take responsiblity for, their own product's shortcomings. Furthermore, it is a perfect example of how information and its destruction can, in fact, potentially endanger millions of lives, and why government regulation requiring certain minimum standards in quality control and security are not at all unreasonable.
Indeed, you rebut your own point in the next sentence you write:
"Every piece of software has bugs in it and depending on the purpose you use it for, those bugs can have harmful consequences."
... which is why we have safety regulations for everything from medical equipment to aircraft to automobiles to elevators, because those bugs can have harmful consequences, whether they are bugs in software, firmware, or hardware. And why minimum standards for software quality and security aren't so unreasonable after all.
So you're proposing more regulation as the answer? I see a serious flaw in this reasoning. Government regulation and laws are already in place to punish those who develop virus code.
That is difficult to say (who can quantify how many potential virus writers are deterred by threat of jailtime? Greater than zero alsmost certainly. Greater than a hundred, a thousand, a million? We really don't know.) However, once again an example from the physical world makes the issue rather clear:
"So you're proposing more regulation as the answer? I see a serious flaw in this reasoning. Government regulation and laws are already in place to punish those who commit acts of arson."
Clearly fire codes were necessary to prevent disasters such as the Chicago fire (which wiped out the entire city in the 19th century and is believed to have been started not by an arsonist, but by simple accident). Laws which punish crimes are often not sufficient to protect the public from negligence on the part of product manufacturers, or even negligence on the part of consumers.
Consider the Ford Pinto, which was prone to explode (violently) when rear-ended. Ramming a Ford Pinto from behind, even by accident, is illegal. Nevertheless that was insufficient to prevent accident which resulted in numerous fiery explosions and needless deaths, nor was it sufficient to get Ford Motor Company to change a design they knew was flawed to begin with. Lawsuits and, yes, additional government regulation were necessary to bring public safety up to an acceptable level. The Free Market and outlawing actions which exacerbated the unsafe conditions which the manufacturers negligence had left in place were very obviously not enough.
So too does it appear to be with software. Some minimal level of security needs to be required. If the industry cannot police itself and the free market isn't up to the task of weeding out the negligent (and both certainly appear to be the case here), then government regulation for the common good is not at all unreasonable.
Of course, as with any act of government, such regulation has the potential to be more harmful than good, but it also has the potential to be more good than harmful (as with, for example, building codes in most cities and FAA regulations). It is incumbant on us as software engineers and Free Software advocates to be out in force, involved in creating any such regulations, such that they are helpful to the industry (and the industry must, by definition, include Free Software) and not detrimental.
I guarantee if we're not, someone else will step up to the plate. Indeed, with the FBI outages and attacks on the White House I'm surprise this process hasn't begun already.
Slashdot Mirror
Both at home, and at work, running various versions of the 2.2 kernel plus patches, stock Mandrake installs, 2.4 kernel, etc. we have, over time, experienced data loss using reiserfs. This has not been limited to one machine, or one configuration, or one version of the filesystem (though, admittedly, we have been unwilling to try any newer versions in the last six months or so ... let someone else take the pain for a while).
... at least for the nonce. I concur with another poster who pointed out that SGI's XFS has been well tested and stable since 1994 ... any issues are porting issues, not design or internal issues, which IMHO is quite important when looking for a managable and stable alternative.
I say this not to knock reiser per se (I am quite happy it made it into the kernel tree, although I won't be completely happy until ext3, jfs, and xfs are all in the kernel tree as well so that they can compete with one another on quality and features rather than merely convinience), but to point out that all is not necessarilly sunny, nor is it unequivocably the "leader" when it comes to Linux journalling filesystems. I feel it is important to counterbalance some of these overly sunny depictions of experimental filesystems being used in serious environments with a little real-world, personal experience to the contrary.
I haven't yet tried ext3 or jfs, but have used various incarnations of xfs and must say that I have developed a preference for it over the last few weeks. That having been said, I still make use of ext2 filesystems in production environments and will only use less tried linux filesystems (previously reiser, now ext3 and xfs) in development/test environments only
These filesystems are fun and exciting, but they are not perfect, and in the case of reiser some rather serious (hopefully now fixed, but what's next?) flaws have gotten played down a little more than they should have. Remember, back up early, back up often, and be conservative in using any of them in anything other than a test situation (you can, once its tested to your satisfaction, but be cautious).
Back up early and back up often.
Hehe. It's always a source of wonder for me to realize how brainwashed and ignorant good American patriots can be.
Patriots of each and every country on the planet are "brainwashed and ignorant" else they would not be putting their national "identity" above common sense, the common man, and the common good. And the French share one striking characteristic with their American cousins: an overdeveloped sense of national identity.
FYI, this whole hysteria about encryption laws in France is only due to the fact that France was 8 or 10 months late compared to the US in liberalizing its encryption rules.
Uh, no (but thank you for playing). Until the French anti-encryption laws were repealed it was illegal for anyone to use any encryption of any kind within the borders of France unless one first gave a copy of their secret key to the French government. This was far more intrustive than the anti-encryption legislation of the United States, which never said anything about domestic use of encryption (in other words, Americans were and are free to use encryption as strong as they like), but rather restricted the export of encryption technologies to other countries (like, say, France). These export restrictions were unbelievably stupid and foolish (nearly all of the encryption expertise and business went overseas as a result, and even years later the American encryption industry still hasn't recovered from that debacle), but they in no way came even remotely close to being as big brotherish as the encryption restriction in France were against their people.
The USA has a number of problems which Europe does not, the DMCA being a glaring example. But Europe also has some serious drawbacks the United States doesn't (yet) have, including some of those mentioned in the previous post. It would behoove us all to recognize the weaknesses of both ourselves and others in protecting our liberties, as you can bet that those who wish to oppress us are certainly borrowing techniques and mechanisms from their neighbors overseas and seeking to apply them at home.
When Stallman and the FSF are willing to admit that their political opinions are opinions, and demonstrate - by their actions - that they are willing to do something other than disregard and disdain individuals with opinions that differ from theirs, then you will have the moral hight ground neccesary to make the argument you just presented.
... with nary a retaliation from the FSF in response. Again, I do not agree entirely with either side ... my position tends to be somewhere between the two camps ... but the personal attacks and use of public fora to promote personal agendas and personal vindetta's at the expense of both the Free Software and Open Source communities goes well beyond one side criticizing the other's politics. For slashdot to promote one side vs. the other (or, for that matter, to promote both sides against each other) serves no ones interest ... except possibly that of Redmond.
I lambast RMS and the FSF when they engage in such practices as well, but lately I haven't seen any such demagaugary coming from the FSF. I have, however, seen a lot of public airing of dirty laundry coming from the ESR/O'Reilly camp
As for moral highground, as an observer who has engaged in no demagaugary against either side, and whose anti-Microsoft comments have been based on factual information, not ad homonem innuendo, I think I have the right to decry the use of demaguagary and ad homonem attacks like this one (and the O'Reilly/ESR Flerbiage absurdity of last weekend) without being in the least bit guilty of hypocracy.
If and when RMS engages in the same thing I shall point my flame thrower at him with just as much enthusiasm as I do now at O'Reilly, ESR, and company.
(It's crucial that you understand this. While those developers can be thanked for the GNU/Linux implementation, the design and archiecture is stolen-- albeit modifed -- IP.)
... namely from MINIX, which was a minimal, educational recreation of UNIX 7), not stolen in any sense of the word, not even in the "newspeak" sense that the Copyright Cartels and DMCA Apologists have redefined the word to mean.
While you make some good points, I take exception to this characterization of GNU/Linux's similarity to UNIX and its POSIX compliance as "stolen IP." Numerous court decisions, including Apple v. Microsoft, have consistently ruled that compatiblity, compliance to standards, and even the wholesale mimicking of a competitor's look and feel do not constitute a violation of intellectual property in any manner. The design and architecture were copied legally (actually, to be historically accurate, they were copied from a copy
Why define an OS that way? It's just dumb.
... loose definition of what an operating system is for PR spin reasons (and so perhaps also some of those subjected to their propoganda) almost no operating system designers would agree with that.
... it would certainly point out the changes you've made to the stock system in a precise, concise manner that would make the differences clear to an otherwise unsuspecting programmer or user who sits down and otherwise wonders why cp, mv, ls, and tar behave so differently than expected.
I think you'll find yourself rather alone in academic circles in defending that statement. While Microsoft might agree with your
The definition of what is and is not an OS is a little fuzzy, but not nearly as arbitrary or fuzzy as you make it out to be. Defining an operating system as "just the kernel" is no more reasonable than defining the operating system as "the kernel, the shell and other tools necessary to use it, the GUI, and, oh, by the way, the web browser and office suite). There is a reason we refer to an operating system kernel as the kernel, not the entire operating system. Because there is, in fact, more to an operating system than just the kernel.
As for your silly notion of GNU/Solaris, Sun provides all the necessary tools to use the operating system (bourne shell, c shell, basic filesystem utilities such as newfs, fsck, ls, cp, etc.), and basic c libraries said utilities require. If they used soley GNU ls, cp, clib (glib), etc. rather than providing their own then RMS would be reasonable in requesting that Sun give him credit for having written most of their "operating system." Since Sun, not the FSF, wrote the software, there would be no such obligation. If you, as a Solaris user, choose to install the GNU versions of the various utilities, then perhaps calling it GNU/Solaris isn't so unreasonable
I was never really happy with RMS name change requests and found the "lignux" notion particularly obnoxious and offensive, and RMS was never much of a diplomat. However, the FSF has requested the use of the GNU prefix as a way of underscoring the freedom aspect of free software, and giving credit where credit is due. I try to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux (when I remember) not out of some misguided notion of obligation or desire to advocate the Free Software Movement ueber alles, but rather out of common courtesy to those who wrote the vast majority of the underlying system which I use everyday at work and at home.
I don't agree with everything RMS or the Free Software Foundation says, but the recent demonizing of the FSF and RMS by Tim O'Reilly, ESR, and slashdot is nothing short of despicable. Disagreements are one thing, but demonizing, demigaugary, and poisoning of the Free Software/Open Source community with this sort of one-sided propoganda is destructive and defies common sense, and I want nothing to do with it or those who support it.
I recall a story about a state legislature (Illinois, I believe) that passed a law (unanimously) that declared pi to be equal to 3.2
It was Indiana, and the value was 3.0 (even). IIRC the govorner refused to sign the bill into law however.
Lets see:
... who knows what we'll have learned in another 500 years, or another 5,000. Indeed, already we have answered far more questions through science in the blink of a proverbial eye than religion has in 6000 years and more general folklore has in 3,000,000. I wouldn't dismiss science just yet, merely because its results, while often truly dramatic, aren't instantaneous (and are subject to revision upon the accumulation of new knowledge, which is one of science's greatest strengths).
The universe is something on the order of 15,000,000,000 years old.
The earth has been around about 4,000,000,000 years.
Human beings are believed to have existed for approximately 3,000,000 years.
Human civilization as we know it is estimated to have begun around 10,000 years ago.
Modern monotheistic religions, purporting to have all of life's answers, have only been around for 5,000 years or so.
Modern science, which is actively searching for many of those answers, is only about 500 years old.
500 years. 1/100th as much time as (modern) religion has had to answer those questions. 1/6000th of the age of the human race. 1/8,000,000th of the age of the planet, and 1/3,000,000,000th the age of the universe.
I think claiming that, because science hasn't yet provided all of the answers after which it searches in a mere 500 years is akin to a child claiming that, because they were unable to learn those skills necessary to life as an adult in just two days, they will never learn.
Science may never answer the most fundamental questions of life. Then again, it just might. We are really only in the first moments of trying
However, even by claiming to have broken the encryption, he's placing himself at risk of being investigated, and possibly detained and questioned should he ever visit the US.
...
... hence the term "swear").
You are probably right, as the DMCA is clearly intended to be used as a club to squelch information and discussion under the (woefully thin) guise of protecting copyright holders.
However
(If I were to publicly announce that I had commited a crime, I would expect the authorities to take interest in me.)
... even the DMCA hasn't made it illegal to figure out how to decrypt encrypted copyright material, but rather has made the trafficking in devices using that knowledge illegal. By announcing he's done it, but not sharing the methodology, he cannot in any way be said to have "trafficked" in a circumvention device. To do so he would have to publish, and this he has not done. Not that that will stop Intel or someone else affiliated with the Copyright Cartels from swearing out a false afidavit and falsely imprisoning this individual (and, interestingly, while the Sklyrov case goes forward I do not see anyone from Adobe being arrested for Perjury, which swearing out a false affidavit is
Of course, it is only a matter of time until someone does publish, probably anonymously, and DHCP dies the death it so richly deserves.
The software world, which relies on restricted copy priveleges (copyright) far more heavilly than even the Media Moguls of Hollywood and New York, learned over a decade ago just how futil copy protection schemes were. Instead, they chose to go another route, making serial-numbered copies traceable rather than uncopiable (something which has been shown mathematically to be myth in any event). Interestingly enough, having people's names attached to serialized copies of software had a chilling effect on copyright violation that no amount of copy-protection schemes and hardware dongles was able to achieve. It didn't eliminate it, but it sure cut down on the number of people willing to share their copies of software with anyone other than, at most, their closest friends.
The Copyright Cartels and Media Conglomerates refused to learn this obvious lesson, prefering instead to believe they have purchased protection through the DMCA sufficient to allow even the most flawed "copy protection" to stand through artificial threat with a government gun in contradiction to both information theory and basic physics in the physical world.
Of course, when "casual copying" has been mostly eliminated and fair use is dead, the industrial copyright violators will still be producing illegale wares in quantity, until they in turn are shut down using methods and laws which have been around for decades. Which underscores the real motivation and target behind MPAA and RIAA purchased legislation such as the DMCA: the individual consumer, not the commercial copyright violator.
Empirical evidence != superstition.
You may be right and I may be wrong (I haven't dug into the makefiles to see, and I'm too busy to do so at the moment), but emperically I have had crashes when not running a make install on GLX after performing kernel upgrades and recompiling the nvidia kernel drivers, and those crashes have gone away each time I have done so.
This isn't superstition, this is emperical evidence and reasoned thinking. The conclusion may be eroneous (drawing a false corallation), but your talk of superstition is nonesense.
Uhm. GLX is binary only. The Makefile simply installs it.
There is more to it than that. I haven't ferreted out the details, but failure to run make on the GLX driver following a recompile of the kernel and the driver does lead to instability that is eliminated by a "make install" on the GLX driver. Running a make install on the GLX driver after installing the kernel drivers following a kernel upgrade eliminates this problem, so clearly something more is going on in addition to copying glx*.o to the X tree.
I've been using NVidia's "nvidia" v 1.0 driver with various 2.4.x kernels (currently 2.4.7) and XFree86 4.0.3 very successfully on a number of different distributions (Mandrake 7.2, Suse, and now debian-3.0-testing). Hardware which I have used ranges from Guillemot Cougar TNT2 PCI analog cards to Inno3d PCI GeForce2 400MX DVI cards to AGP GeForce2 DVI AGP cards, both standalone and using xinerama with other, non-nvidia cards, and with both standard 18" 4x3 LCD screens as well as SGI 1600SW 1600x1024 LCD screens via their multi-link adapter. I haven't tried a GeForce3 card as it remains a little pricey, but would be very surprised if it didn't work just as well.
Configuration of X was fairly trivial (the nvidia driver README describes what needs to be done and is absolutely accurate, modula removing the GLX support when using xinerama), and substituting one Nvidia card in a configured machine for another works flawlessly (even with radically different NVidia chipsets) and requires no additional configuration tweaks whatsoever (compare this to changing Matrox models, which often do require changes to the XF86Config file).
In fact, where I work we have standardized on nvidia completely (we used to use Matrox) mainly because of the ease of use with respect to GNU/Linux and the excellent support Nvidia provides (we have 50+ Linux workstations and servers and are rolling out new boxes all the time), whether using the stock "nv" drivers or the accelerated "nvidia" drivers provided by NVidia. As another noted, while releasing the driver as Free Software would be nice, we are more than happy to reward NVidia's excellent GNU/Linux support with our business even if they choose, as is their right, to keep their driver proprietary. Their product works extremely well, very painlessly, and eases my workload in supporting diverse video hardware under GNU/Linux and the X Windowing System immensly.
For what it is worth it should be noted that you have to recompile both the kernel driver and the GLX driver each time you recompile/upgrade your kernel. Failure to recompile both will make the X session unstable. Not recompiling the GLX driver will work (most of the time) and thus it is easy to forget, but failure to do so will lead to the kind of instability you describe.
So, why is this article listed under the "patents pending" topic again?
We all know that the truth is, linux is hard to use for novices, and a good portion of linux users are not inclined to help newbies out. Read a few usenet posts to see this. "Linux is tough to use" is not FUD, it's the ugly truth.
... with xmms she can now listen to hours of music without changing CDs, and some of the other toys in her KDE menu she enjoys playing around with, but in truth her desires were relatively simple.
... not that any rational human being could blame her.
This simply isn't true, and my mother is a perfect case in point. Not terribly computer literate and with no desire to be, she simply wants her email, her web browser, and her word processor. Oh, she was delighted by the Bach, Beethove, and Mozart ogg's I ripped from her CD collection and made available on her hard drive
I bought her a $50 copy of applixware so she could read and write word documents, and guess what? She prefers her GNU/Linux box over her windows box at work by orders of magnitude. In fact, she has become much more zealous in advocating GNU/Linux and disparaging Windows than I ever was. Why? Because she, as a user, has found GNU/Linux to be much easier to use, much more stable, and much faster than her old windows install (to which she has never returned and which now provides additional storage for her burgeoning ogg-vorbis collection as she, herself, rips her own CDs using grip). Indeed, her discovery that it wasn't her, or her "stupidity" that was the root of nearly all of her computer mishaps, but the underlying instability of the operating system itself, has made her positively scathing when speaking of Microsoft. I guess she took Microsoft blaming the shortcomings of their products on her, and the denigration of making her feel stupid in the process, a little personally
GNU/Linux is as easy, if not easier, to use than any version of Windows out there, and as others have pointed out, many GNU/Linux distributions are easier than Windows to set up and install as well.
Yes GNU/Linux is different, and yes, users must be willing to take an hour or two to learn those differences (ie "something new"), but new isn't the same as "difficult" or "tough to use." I spent an hour with my mother showing her the basics of navigating the KDE desktop and the differences between it and Windows, as well as the differences between Applix and MS Office. Again, this wasn't because GNU/Linux is "tough to use," this merely because it was a little different, and therefor new to her. Indeed, according to my mother, Linux is actually easier than Windows to use, so yes, saying GNU/Linux is "tough to use" is FUD in no uncertain terms. Saying "we all know it is tough to use" is adds a whole new level of dishonesty to the discussion, indeed it could be said that such as claim is FUD to the second power.
Now my mom's non-computer savvy friends are bugging me to come and set them up with GNU/Linux as well, so it looks like Microsoft's worst nightmare is in fact slowly coming true: regular, non-savvy Microsoft users are defecting to GNU/Linux in increasing numbers despite all the FUD Microsoft and its shills can possibly muster. Sometimes justice can be poetic.
A colleague of mine and I were discussing this just this morning (he is a Ritym's subscriber).
m aybe-be-considered-socialistic-by-anyone-to-the-ri ght-of-Gengis-Khan political atmosphere that has imbued the country since the early Reagan days. To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly," and why shouldn't the factor, or commonality, be treated as a public works project the way we do other "natural monopolies" such as roads and highways?
... i.e. the physical wire. What made telecommunications a natural monopoly? Once again, not the intervening network and its services so much as the last mile of wire to your house. Water? Not, in most places, the water acquisition (it can come from rivers, aquafers, lakes, even the air if you can figure out how to do that economically) but rather the physical pipe to your faucet.
Many of the DSL failures are a result, at least in part, of being jerked around by the provisioner of the last mile of wire. Here in Chicago that monopolist would be Ameritech -- notorious for deliberately delaying and mucking with the installation of competitor's DSL lines, despite a plethora of FCC regulations designed to prevent this sort of unfairness. I had personal experience with this, as did my colleague, when our DSL lines (from different providors) were provisioned.
When breaking up so-called "natural" monopolies with the intent of creating competition a very obvious oversight has been made, at least here in the United States, quite probably as a result of the rather radical anti-anything-that-remotely-smells-like-it-could-
Take electricity, water, and telecommunications as examples. What made the electric company a natural monopoly? Not power generation, but delivery to your home
Instead of even considering nationalizing the infrastructure (there's another word which has fallen victim to the anti-communism hysteria of the early 80's and has remained taboo since) we have chosen instead to impliment an absurdly byzantine set of regulations prohibiting this, requireing that, and hopefully resulting in a level playing field. An approach far more favorable to error or outright corruption, and far less conducive to a level playing field and the competition such would engender than simply treating the wire like a public road, with equal access to all, would have.
I would submit that bottlenecks which create so-called natural monopolies, such as highways, the last mile(s) of telephone wire, and perhaps even the entire power grid, should be treated the same as highways, paid for and administered by government via taxes or access fees and provided to all of the competing service providors under the same terms.
The disadvantes would be the same ones we have with highways: a certain amount of government bloat, a certain amount of corruption in contracting and subcontracting, and a certain amount of government ineffeciency.
Just as with highways the advantages would far outweigh this, however: a level playing field for all competing businesses, an elimination of byzantine FCC regulations designed (and failing) to counter the monopolistic advantages under the current, wholely private, approach, an administration that is open to public scruitiny and nominally accountable to the public via our democratic process, and quite possibly economies of scale that might well offset the added overhead inherent in government administration of any project.
Monopolies are ineffecient, whether they are government or private. Where they must exist, as with roads, it makes far more sense that they be in public hands, a part of the public commons, rather than in the hands of some private Robber Barron a la' the Rhein River of two centuries ago.
Finally, I would argue that a free, competetive market cannot exist when the underlying infrastructure for that market resides in the hands of a private monopoly. Indeed, it appears that a competetive market on top of such an infrastructure is difficult, perhaps impossible, to maintain even if it is highly regulated. However, as we've seen with the success of our transportation companies, airlines can compete very well with public airports and automobile companies as well as trucking companies compete very well on public highways.
Perhaps it is time we reevaluated our love affair with private ownership of nearly all our basic infrastructures and put aside our aversion to nationalization and consider the question from the point of view of how to we structure things to eliminate private monopolies and maximize competetive free markets while at the same time minimizing the need for intrusive government regulation.
While I am occasionally one to lambast the hypocracy of slashdot (promoting products of the MPAA despite the MPAA's thus-far-successful attack on Free Software through movie and DVD reviews ... though the latter seem to have thankfully been discontinued), and while I concurr with your criticism (the link should not be to a format promoted by a company all those with conscience should be boycotting), this is, I think, reflective of lax editorial work rather than outright hypocracy. The link was submitted by a reader, not a slashdot editor.
... anyone analyzing the statistics of the logs will gain a false impression of people's preferences WRT the document's format, thus promoting PDF at a time we really don't want to be doing so.
That having been said, would the slashdot editors please change the link to point to the HTML version of the document? Boosting the clickthroughs to a proprietary format from an offensive company at the expense of clickthroughs to an open format (HTML) isn't helpful regardless
Just my 2 cents, of course.
There are utilities which can identify what operating system and web server is listening on port 80. It would be relatively simple for a competent ISP to scan their customers and turn off access to port 80 solely on those systems running a Microsoft Operating System with IIS. It probably wouldn't be completely beyond the pale to write a little utility to test those foolish enough to be running a Microsoft operating system and IIS server, identify those who are vulnerable to Code Red, and shut those machines down, leaving those who have patched (nonforwarding) systems, as well as those wise enough to be using more secure, non-Microsoft systems, in place.
Of course, competent ISP may be an oxymoron these days.
When was the last time you heard about private individuals making major discoveries in the automobile industry? Probably quite a while ago. As industries mature, the innovations stop happening in garages, and start happening in corporate labs. That's the typical lifecycle of any industry as it matures.
This "maturity" isn't a result of everything having been discovered, or a shortage of creativity or new ideas, or of capital, or of an installed base unwilling to adopt new technologies. It is IMHO a direct result of the US Patent system and its propensity for favoring large Patent portfolio holders over small inventors, coupled with the effects of granting government sponsored monopolies and locking up ideas upon which even newer and more innovative ideas or improvements could have been based. This isn't maturity, it is stifling of innovation, of the economies, and of the wealth, which innovation creates.
Software didn't have this problem until software patents started to be granted. Even then, it takes time for a critical mass of founding ideas to be locked up before innovation is brought to a grinding crawl, and we are starting to see the beginnings of this now. Another thing that has, up until now, worked in favor of the software industry has been the fact that the rest of the world has not endorsed software patents and so has been free to continue to innovate, with things like GPG, xine, and livid being developed abroad, then imported into the US either serreptitiously or, when the patent(s) finally expire, legitimently (but with the development time already behind them). This advantage may be going away as Europe and others consider implementing software patents of their own.
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
It is more akin to the Big Boys saying "get your bitch ass back on the couch and consume what we give you. Raise your voice, innovate in any manner that might threaten our cartel, or our hold over your lives and the flow of your money into our pockets, and we'll crush you, if not ourselves, with the politicians and police we have so inexpensively rented."
We seriously need to question the basic assumptions of IP law, the notion that granting braod monopolies for extended periods of time is somehow conducive to those things a free and competetive market are supposed to encourage: innovation and improvements in the products we create. In point of fact monopolies are antithetical to a free market, quite destructive and not at all conducive to innovation. We should seriously consider dramatic restrictions on copyright priveleges and getting rid of the patent system altogether. If that is to great a course-change for people to stomach then at the very least we need to address the problem of monopolies, perhaps through manditory licensing of copyrighted works (so anyone can start a radio station for example, not just members of the recording cartel) and offering tax exemptions to inventors rather than twenty year monopolies.
Until we reexamine our basic assumptions with respect to IP and confront the contradiction that is at its very heart these sorts of problems will persist, irrespective of whatever quick and dirty patches we apply to the system.
One of my favorite stories is when on a youth retreat I was giving a short talk on "life'd dirty little secrets" ... which includes one of my favorites ... sometime, between the age of 25 and 30, you wake up one day .... and much to your horror, you realize ... mom & dad were RIGHT!
... just look at all of idiots who happen to be adults, and all the elderly who have, despite decades of experience, obtained precious little wisdom. The point? Some parents are right, some are wrong, just as some old people are wise and some are fools. To generalize something to a teenage like what you did is IMHO irresponsible and misleading. Indeed, getting a child (even a rebellious teenager) to think critically about what their parents are telling them is often a very difficult task ... telling them carte blanche that "one day you'll realize your parents are right" without any idea what their parents are telling them not only discourages critical thought even more, it is, in most cases, simply wrong.
Which, of course, is going to be true for some people and absolutely untrue for many others. As someone who is 37 and has travelled around the world twice, lived on three different continents, and has been around a fair amount I can honestly tell you that my parents, both of them, were wrong about just about everything. I won't go into excruciating detail except to say that religion and rational thought do not mix well and to add that every human being, adult or not, parent or not, is certain to be wrong about something.
No lie, when I said that, one young lady put her hands on her ears and screemed "NNOOOOOOOOOO!".
Which, since you have no idea what her parents might have said, much less whether it was "true" in any sense of the word, her reaction to your comment might have been a natural, even rational. For all you know she was being raped by her father and her mother was telling her it "get used to it baby, cause it aint never gonna stop" which would be both untrue and appalling, and coupled with your assertion would make suicide by even the most painful means appealing.
Parents are no more "right" or wrong than anyone else
As to the three points you make, I couldn't agree more.
Thanks. That was very interesting (and the slashdot editors deserve to be called on the carpet for that sort of thing). My critique of your logic in your previous statement stands, but my personal opinions as to the veracity of your accusations against the slashdot editors has been modified from "yeah, right" to "hmm...there may be something to what you say."
/. editors will take this sort of criticism for what it is and modify their behavior in the future, rather than "bitchslapping" (is that your term, or theirs?) posts like these down. People do fuck up, and it is through being called on it, and changing one's behavior, that not only goods and services such as slashdot are improved, but so are we as people.
Hopefully the
Obviously 20 years is a long time in the software biz, but the point is, it's not forever, and the situation will improve over time even if the bad guys win.
You assume Free Software can survive, much less compete, in a world where the basic building blocks for software are patented and locked away for twenty years at a stretch. I am not at all certain this is true, and while a renaissance might become possible in twenty years (when many of us will be nearing retirement), it does not in any way diminish the coming dark ages such as victory for "the bad guys," as you so quaintly put it, might well entail, much less the two-decades of economic destruction such anti-competative monopolies will wreak upon the both so-called "new economoy" and the existing economy alike.
Most established companies love to see regulation in their industries, particularly when the regulations only affect their competitors.
This is an interesting, and valid, point. It would not be at all farfetched for Microsoft to be deliberately negligent in its security, then use a regulatory body and its own involvement in the regulatory process to undermine the ability of smaller upstarts to compete, perhaps even make it impossible for Free Software to become "licensed" at all.
A frightening thought. I fear, however, that simply wishing the government would stay away won't suffice, so I suspect we'll want to be very involved in whatever process does emerge, and it is IMHO almost certain something will emerge from these debacles. It would behoove us to be proactive in making sure whatever form any involvement by our government takes is conducive to the creative freedom and technical progress which Free Software makes possible, lest we all be subjected to Microsoft's notion of "freedom to innovate," which in truth has little to do with freedom or innovation.
If Europe is foolish enough to go along with the United State's efforts in "harmonizing" US and European patent law by essentially submitting to the American approach they will be handing the United States an unassailable advantage in the software marketplace.
Think about it. Which country has been bending over backwards handing out as many patents on software, business models, and the like as possible, as quickly as possible, and what percentage of those patents have been going to American firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, Dolby, and Adobe? The vast, vast majority.
Should Europe recognize American software patents virtually every European software house will find itself in violation of US software patents of one sort or another virtually overnight. If France, Germany, or the UK think they have a tough time competing against the likes of Microsoft now, just wait until the European Commission gives them this big club to whack them over the head with.
Europe currently enjoys a huge competative advantage over the US in not having its software industry tied up in litigation and government sponsored monopolies the way ours is. This has enabled Europe to rapidly advance from a relatively "backward" position with respect to the US in software to relative parity, and could be leveraged to outstrip us dramatically in the future. It would be profoundly stupid of the European governments to give such an advantage away, particularly to someone as powerful, and as self-absorbed, as the United States.
The really sad thing is of course that this is completely true, as has already been demonstrated.
ahem. Basic logic please.
It does not follow that, because moderators have moderated the parent to your post down to zero, that those moderators were slashdot editors. Far more likely that slashdot readers with moderator priveleges modded the post down as the flaimbait it certainly appeared to be (to me at least, although I do not have moderator priveleges right now).
The slashdot editors are the ones who decide which stories get posted (decisions I disagree with as often as not BTW), not those readers who happen to have moderator priveleges at a given moment.
I won't go into a long discourse on the niavite of dissaciating information with its impact on the physical world, except to rebut a couple of the more blatently silly comments you made:
...barely).
... there's that real world, physical impact again.
The most a computer virus can do is cause loss of data or money.
Tell that to the patients who died as a result of a "bug" in the software which was controlling the radiation therepy equipment used in the treatment of their cancer that erroneously delivered a lethal dose.
Tell that to the aircraft pilots which had their passenger jet flip upside down due to a bug in their computerized autopilot (thankfully the plane was empty and they were able to recover
Computers, and information, have real-world effects which can and do affect, even destroy, real, physical lives, and viruses are as capable of destroying lives as "bugs."
Something market forces are perfectly capable of dealing with and something which government should stay far away from.
Ever heard of the SEC? FTC? Even the markets themselves, which you seem to so laude as a panacea, require rather detailed and ongoing government intervention in order to function at all.
Other holes in this argument abound, including the fact that, in the United States at least, money is required to obtain even nominal medical care, not to mention food and other basics. Destroying one's livelihood is often tantamount to destroying lives
The argument about the loss of fissionable nuclear material is a strawman.
No, it isn't. It is a verifiable, and verified, event which resulted from extreme incompetence and negligence on Microsoft's part, exacerbated by their indefensible unwillingness to acknowledge, much less take responsiblity for, their own product's shortcomings. Furthermore, it is a perfect example of how information and its destruction can, in fact, potentially endanger millions of lives, and why government regulation requiring certain minimum standards in quality control and security are not at all unreasonable.
Indeed, you rebut your own point in the next sentence you write:
"Every piece of software has bugs in it and depending on the purpose you use it for, those bugs can have harmful consequences."
... which is why we have safety regulations for everything from medical equipment to aircraft to automobiles to elevators, because those bugs can have harmful consequences, whether they are bugs in software, firmware, or hardware. And why minimum standards for software quality and security aren't so unreasonable after all.
So you're proposing more regulation as the answer? I see a serious flaw in this reasoning. Government regulation and laws are already in place to punish those who develop virus code.
That is difficult to say (who can quantify how many potential virus writers are deterred by threat of jailtime? Greater than zero alsmost certainly. Greater than a hundred, a thousand, a million? We really don't know.) However, once again an example from the physical world makes the issue rather clear:
"So you're proposing more regulation as the answer? I see a serious flaw in this reasoning. Government regulation and laws are already in place to punish those who commit acts of arson."
Clearly fire codes were necessary to prevent disasters such as the Chicago fire (which wiped out the entire city in the 19th century and is believed to have been started not by an arsonist, but by simple accident). Laws which punish crimes are often not sufficient to protect the public from negligence on the part of product manufacturers, or even negligence on the part of consumers.
Consider the Ford Pinto, which was prone to explode (violently) when rear-ended. Ramming a Ford Pinto from behind, even by accident, is illegal. Nevertheless that was insufficient to prevent accident which resulted in numerous fiery explosions and needless deaths, nor was it sufficient to get Ford Motor Company to change a design they knew was flawed to begin with. Lawsuits and, yes, additional government regulation were necessary to bring public safety up to an acceptable level. The Free Market and outlawing actions which exacerbated the unsafe conditions which the manufacturers negligence had left in place were very obviously not enough.
So too does it appear to be with software. Some minimal level of security needs to be required. If the industry cannot police itself and the free market isn't up to the task of weeding out the negligent (and both certainly appear to be the case here), then government regulation for the common good is not at all unreasonable.
Of course, as with any act of government, such regulation has the potential to be more harmful than good, but it also has the potential to be more good than harmful (as with, for example, building codes in most cities and FAA regulations). It is incumbant on us as software engineers and Free Software advocates to be out in force, involved in creating any such regulations, such that they are helpful to the industry (and the industry must, by definition, include Free Software) and not detrimental.
I guarantee if we're not, someone else will step up to the plate. Indeed, with the FBI outages and attacks on the White House I'm surprise this process hasn't begun already.