Except, of course, that Microsoft is selling something it bills as a subscription. People expect certain things from a subscription, and regular, on-time releases are among them. I would go so far as to say that Microsoft is being very misleading in calling it a 'subscription' and then not adopting processes that lead to a very regular and predictable release cycle.
If they can't actually deliver the product, they shouldn't offer it. Of course, I'm sure that when people bought it, there were probably pages and pages of fine print disallowing them from holding Microsoft responsible for anything at all, so I doubt they could be sued for fraud, but that's what'd happen in a normal marketplace.
Hm. That's interesting. I think I partially understand what you mean - if a religion says "always go to church on Sunday" someone will eventually use that as an excuse to run over someone with a car to get to church.
I feel, though, that Christianity has a direct bearing on my everyday life and my everyday relationships... not sure where I'm going with this now:-)...
This isn't precisely what I mean. Always go to church on Sunday isn't a statement about the workings of the world, it's a statement about how followers of the religion should conduct themselves, which is fine.
I mean things like "The earth was created 6000 years ago in such and such a way.". Or "We were directly created by God.". Or "Light travels at infinite speed.". Stuff like that.
Making direct, statements about the workings of the world that can be tested empirically and proven false or true in the absence of faith, and requiring you to take the statements on faith is a horrible thing for a religion. This is the domain of science. Taking it out of the domain of science leads us to not being able to develop a complete picture of our physical world because we can't accept certain things in it.
It wasn't the fact that she has breasts, it was the fact that she chose to display them on primetime TV, knowing that many people would be watching who were not expecting that. So she forced her views on modesty on the viewers.
One of the first intelligent comments I've ever heard about that debacle.
Hm. I guess we'd need to get into specifics on this one. Was WWII started due to religion?
If I understand my history correctly, I believe the Nazi's used religious or quasi-religious justifications for what they were doing. It helped that the population felt horribly oppressed by the Treaty of Versailles, but it might've been hard for anybody to shove the most extreme things down people's throats without the sugarcoating of religion.
Besides, one counter-example does not invalidate that statement.
Does this apply to all religions - Hinduism, Islam, etc? Or just to Christianity?
Actually, I would apply it to any religion that attempts to make statements about the workings of the physical, tangible world an article of faith. I'm not sure if Hinduism counts, but Buddhism and Taoism mostly don't count.
Well said. Bush attempted to grasp at some sort of religious justification for the war on Iraq, but he was mostly reduced to lying and/or misleading in order to convince people that it was a good idea.
The only Dogma that science really has is that there are some laws or principles that can be discovered that govern the universe in a way that's the same for everybody. Every other idea in science is completely up for grabs. If you can convincingly disprove something, people stop believing it.
Even the first bit of dogma is actually something you would be allowed to disprove in science, though then most of the whole point and goal of science would be destroyed.
This is very unlike religion, where a little technological change like reliable and effective birth control creates decades of turmoil and upset within the ranks of the faithful and the church hierarchy.
While I believe there is a definite need for spirituality, dogmatic religions like Christianity largely just create vast and intractable social problems that wouldn't have to exist without them.
I don't rate it as less restrictive. I rate it as significantly better at ensuring that a project remain Open Source, and ensuring the work I put into a project doesn't disappear behind a proprietary wall.
"This innovation represents a milestone for Internet users, enabling quick and easy access to the world's largest collection of online information.".
This is just google doing what they are already well known for doing best. There's nothing new or 'innovative' here. While it's a fine accomplishment, and I'm please google has indexed that much stuff, it's hardly innovative for them.
fefe is right..md5 files are no security at all. You want signatures..md5 files actually make me laugh whenever I see them because some idiot thinks that somehow they make a difference. They don't. Stop fooling yourself. Start using digital signatures.
Actually, from what I've observed, platform dependencies in OSS software are quickly refactored into small sections of code so you generally never have to worry about a fix working on lots and lots of platforms.
So, that argument doesn't fly with me. Sorry. Apache runs on many more varied platforms than IIS, and they still manage to fix bugs when they're found extremely quickly, and release fixes immediately that, from what I can tell, don't break anything else.
Maybe if Microsoft management better managed the difference between a bug fix and a feature, that problem would be such an issue for them.
And, my own project, CAKE. though mine is only peripherally related actually.:-) I just like mentioning it when discussion gets near problems it will help to solve (or at least make a lot better).
There are systems by which the network cannot possibly detect whether material travelling over it is under copyright or not. Freenet is an example. Everything that goes over the network is encrypted. Nodes may not necessarily have decryption keys. There is then no way for a node to recognize a particular work.
Is secure and anonymous digital cash, not stupid gimicky features or restrictions on technology. The Chaum patents expire in 2005, so we only have a year or two to wait for someone to make a good implementation of them.
Stupid patents. Do more to stifle innovation than they do to help.
IPv6 is designed to use something like DHCP. The DHCP daemon could assign random 64 numbers for the lower 64 bits of the address when a computer requests an address. Right now, most IPv6 DHCP daemons assign the MAC address, but I think, for security reasons, they should use a random number instead.
It will be very hard for a worm running on a particular computer to make a good guess as to another computer to infect. It will have to somehow see the address to probe, not just randomly probe it. It will be much more likely that it will see addresses for local machines, but it will still have to see the address.
Yes, but the people we're most concerned about will just want to plug in a device to their network and have it magically work. The auto-assignment stuff for IPv6 right now tends to use your MAC address as part of the address. That's still not random enough, IMHO, but it's significantly more difficult to crack than the '1,2,3' like you were doing.:-)
The solution is for routers sold with IPv6 support to come configured by default to have rules that prevent any incoming connections from the 'outside', wherever that may be for the router in question. That's just as secure as NAT, and doesn't have the stupidity of non-adressable nodes that somehow still get IP traffic from the outside.
Have you ever thought that IPv6 might actually increase security? It makes address scanning completely impractical. The method by which Code Red, and several other worms have spread would no longer work at all.
Whenever I notice my intake get too high, I just quit for a week or two. Only the first 2-3 days are really hard. I deal with the headaches with aspirin and tylenol. Do _not_ take Excedrin for the headache, as Excedrin has caffeine in it.
If you know what withdrawl will be like, you can just steel yourself to deal with it. It's not like it will last forever. I usually pick a Friday to stop so I won't be useless at work for a couple of days.
Yeah, two NATed networks that have previously laboriously set up an agreement to communicate can communicate. Whee.
What about some random network out there? Are you proposing some sort of automatic tunnel creation system? If you're going to go through all that effort, why not just do IPv6?
Why doesn't adjusting the fonts size from the control panel work? That's what I do, and it works fine for me. I actually want a 3200x2400 monitor so I can use fonts with a larger number of pixels per letter and anti-aliasing, even for the tiny letters I like in my editing and terminal windows.
You don't understand the X protocol very well. It is actually quite likely that this change could be made without breaking any existing X application. The X protocol is very extensible and well designed in certain ways. This is one of them.
One of the first X protocol extensions was allowing you to have windows that were some shape other than square. It broke no existing X applications at all, and even if it had gone unimplemented until today, that would still be the case.
The X protocol has problems. It is badly designed for WAN links, especially with modern toolkits that draw complicated things for even 'simple' UI elements. Other WAN issues have to do with latency. X really needs a way for toolkits to export some of their drawing functions to the server so they can executed server side. This would fix many latency and protocol verbosity issues.
I feel sorry for any large company that publishes non-proprietary code under proprietary license because they too are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. They shouldn't be allowed to exist. I don't want their products. If you work for such a company, you are a fool.
I think NFS has yet to be replaced because nobody has come up with a really effective alternative. Almost all the replacements I've seen have semantics that make them unsuitable for the job NFS does. They do not write to a file when it is written to, but instead update the file when it is closed. These are not semantics I want, and have been a big factor in my decision to not use the tools. That, and their immaturity.
GNOME is GPLed.
I will purposely drop the use of a BSD licensed program when there is a decent GPL alternative.
Since so much good GPLed software is both widely available and widely used, your complaint about it not being widely accepted seems hollow and bitter. I would go so far as to say that none of the freely available BSD projects would be anywhere near as popular today were it not for the GPLed Linux showing the way by forcing people to adhere to the ethos.
I think the wide acceptance of TCP/IP has had more to do with clearly written specs than it has had to do with the BSD license the most widely used stack was written under.
Besides, for some technologies, like ogg Vorbis, even Stallman considers the advantages of widespread use to be more important than the enforcement of sharing provided by the GPL. He gave his blessing to making that project available under the BSD license.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, that Microsoft is selling something it bills as a subscription. People expect certain things from a subscription, and regular, on-time releases are among them. I would go so far as to say that Microsoft is being very misleading in calling it a 'subscription' and then not adopting processes that lead to a very regular and predictable release cycle.
If they can't actually deliver the product, they shouldn't offer it. Of course, I'm sure that when people bought it, there were probably pages and pages of fine print disallowing them from holding Microsoft responsible for anything at all, so I doubt they could be sued for fraud, but that's what'd happen in a normal marketplace.
If they failed to provide the document when it was covered by a request for discovery, that failure itself is a breach of the law.
This isn't precisely what I mean. Always go to church on Sunday isn't a statement about the workings of the world, it's a statement about how followers of the religion should conduct themselves, which is fine.
I mean things like "The earth was created 6000 years ago in such and such a way.". Or "We were directly created by God.". Or "Light travels at infinite speed.". Stuff like that.
Making direct, statements about the workings of the world that can be tested empirically and proven false or true in the absence of faith, and requiring you to take the statements on faith is a horrible thing for a religion. This is the domain of science. Taking it out of the domain of science leads us to not being able to develop a complete picture of our physical world because we can't accept certain things in it.
One of the first intelligent comments I've ever heard about that debacle.
If I understand my history correctly, I believe the Nazi's used religious or quasi-religious justifications for what they were doing. It helped that the population felt horribly oppressed by the Treaty of Versailles, but it might've been hard for anybody to shove the most extreme things down people's throats without the sugarcoating of religion.
Besides, one counter-example does not invalidate that statement.
Actually, I would apply it to any religion that attempts to make statements about the workings of the physical, tangible world an article of faith. I'm not sure if Hinduism counts, but Buddhism and Taoism mostly don't count.
Well said. Bush attempted to grasp at some sort of religious justification for the war on Iraq, but he was mostly reduced to lying and/or misleading in order to convince people that it was a good idea.
The only Dogma that science really has is that there are some laws or principles that can be discovered that govern the universe in a way that's the same for everybody. Every other idea in science is completely up for grabs. If you can convincingly disprove something, people stop believing it.
Even the first bit of dogma is actually something you would be allowed to disprove in science, though then most of the whole point and goal of science would be destroyed.
This is very unlike religion, where a little technological change like reliable and effective birth control creates decades of turmoil and upset within the ranks of the faithful and the church hierarchy.
While I believe there is a definite need for spirituality, dogmatic religions like Christianity largely just create vast and intractable social problems that wouldn't have to exist without them.
I don't rate it as less restrictive. I rate it as significantly better at ensuring that a project remain Open Source, and ensuring the work I put into a project doesn't disappear behind a proprietary wall.
A press release complete with corporate speak!
"This innovation represents a milestone for Internet users, enabling quick and easy access to the world's largest collection of online information.".
This is just google doing what they are already well known for doing best. There's nothing new or 'innovative' here. While it's a fine accomplishment, and I'm please google has indexed that much stuff, it's hardly innovative for them.
fefe is right. .md5 files are no security at all. You want signatures. .md5 files actually make me laugh whenever I see them because some idiot thinks that somehow they make a difference. They don't. Stop fooling yourself. Start using digital signatures.
Actually, from what I've observed, platform dependencies in OSS software are quickly refactored into small sections of code so you generally never have to worry about a fix working on lots and lots of platforms.
So, that argument doesn't fly with me. Sorry. Apache runs on many more varied platforms than IIS, and they still manage to fix bugs when they're found extremely quickly, and release fixes immediately that, from what I can tell, don't break anything else.
Maybe if Microsoft management better managed the difference between a bug fix and a feature, that problem would be such an issue for them.
And, my own project, CAKE. though mine is only peripherally related actually. :-) I just like mentioning it when discussion gets near problems it will help to solve (or at least make a lot better).
There are systems by which the network cannot possibly detect whether material travelling over it is under copyright or not. Freenet is an example. Everything that goes over the network is encrypted. Nodes may not necessarily have decryption keys. There is then no way for a node to recognize a particular work.
It's a scheme to make Daryl money through stock price manipulation. That's all. It makes perfect sense if understood from that perspective.
Is secure and anonymous digital cash, not stupid gimicky features or restrictions on technology. The Chaum patents expire in 2005, so we only have a year or two to wait for someone to make a good implementation of them.
Stupid patents. Do more to stifle innovation than they do to help.
IPv6 is designed to use something like DHCP. The DHCP daemon could assign random 64 numbers for the lower 64 bits of the address when a computer requests an address. Right now, most IPv6 DHCP daemons assign the MAC address, but I think, for security reasons, they should use a random number instead.
It will be very hard for a worm running on a particular computer to make a good guess as to another computer to infect. It will have to somehow see the address to probe, not just randomly probe it. It will be much more likely that it will see addresses for local machines, but it will still have to see the address.
Yes, but the people we're most concerned about will just want to plug in a device to their network and have it magically work. The auto-assignment stuff for IPv6 right now tends to use your MAC address as part of the address. That's still not random enough, IMHO, but it's significantly more difficult to crack than the '1,2,3' like you were doing. :-)
The solution is for routers sold with IPv6 support to come configured by default to have rules that prevent any incoming connections from the 'outside', wherever that may be for the router in question. That's just as secure as NAT, and doesn't have the stupidity of non-adressable nodes that somehow still get IP traffic from the outside.
Have you ever thought that IPv6 might actually increase security? It makes address scanning completely impractical. The method by which Code Red, and several other worms have spread would no longer work at all.
Whenever I notice my intake get too high, I just quit for a week or two. Only the first 2-3 days are really hard. I deal with the headaches with aspirin and tylenol. Do _not_ take Excedrin for the headache, as Excedrin has caffeine in it.
If you know what withdrawl will be like, you can just steel yourself to deal with it. It's not like it will last forever. I usually pick a Friday to stop so I won't be useless at work for a couple of days.
Yeah, two NATed networks that have previously laboriously set up an agreement to communicate can communicate. Whee.
What about some random network out there? Are you proposing some sort of automatic tunnel creation system? If you're going to go through all that effort, why not just do IPv6?
Why not just have the default firewall rules for IPv6 devices just not allow any incoming packets except to IPs you explicitly specify?
To me, that's a much better solution than the evil network balkanization that NAT creates.
Why doesn't adjusting the fonts size from the control panel work? That's what I do, and it works fine for me. I actually want a 3200x2400 monitor so I can use fonts with a larger number of pixels per letter and anti-aliasing, even for the tiny letters I like in my editing and terminal windows.
You don't understand the X protocol very well. It is actually quite likely that this change could be made without breaking any existing X application. The X protocol is very extensible and well designed in certain ways. This is one of them.
One of the first X protocol extensions was allowing you to have windows that were some shape other than square. It broke no existing X applications at all, and even if it had gone unimplemented until today, that would still be the case.
The X protocol has problems. It is badly designed for WAN links, especially with modern toolkits that draw complicated things for even 'simple' UI elements. Other WAN issues have to do with latency. X really needs a way for toolkits to export some of their drawing functions to the server so they can executed server side. This would fix many latency and protocol verbosity issues.
I feel sorry for any large company that publishes non-proprietary code under proprietary license because they too are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. They shouldn't be allowed to exist. I don't want their products. If you work for such a company, you are a fool.
BSD will die of its stupid licensing.
I think NFS has yet to be replaced because nobody has come up with a really effective alternative. Almost all the replacements I've seen have semantics that make them unsuitable for the job NFS does. They do not write to a file when it is written to, but instead update the file when it is closed. These are not semantics I want, and have been a big factor in my decision to not use the tools. That, and their immaturity.
GNOME is GPLed.
I will purposely drop the use of a BSD licensed program when there is a decent GPL alternative.
Since so much good GPLed software is both widely available and widely used, your complaint about it not being widely accepted seems hollow and bitter. I would go so far as to say that none of the freely available BSD projects would be anywhere near as popular today were it not for the GPLed Linux showing the way by forcing people to adhere to the ethos.
I think the wide acceptance of TCP/IP has had more to do with clearly written specs than it has had to do with the BSD license the most widely used stack was written under.
Besides, for some technologies, like ogg Vorbis, even Stallman considers the advantages of widespread use to be more important than the enforcement of sharing provided by the GPL. He gave his blessing to making that project available under the BSD license.