No, nowhere near 90% of Canadians work for the government. As for taxes, they are certainly higher in Canada, but not by all that much, as far as I can tell. (I'm not paying significantly less in taxes in the US than I was in Canada.) Not having a massive military to maintain probably helps.:-)
I'd really suggest you do some real research on the system before dismissing it out of hand.
I find it quite amusing that one of the statements in the licence there was some objection to was:
If you modify the...software itself...you must grant RSA Data Security the right to use, modify, and distribute your modifications....
Now, if we replace `RSA Data Security' with `everyone else,' we get a statement that's darn close to the key tenet of a popular open source licence....
There was a lot of that going around on both sides. For a long time, OpenBSD was fixing security flaws, but putting just `RCS ID Police' in the commit message, to make it hard for NetBSD developers following the commits to see what bugs they'd fixed.
As for the change in NetBSD that, when imported into OpenBSD sources, made OpenBSD fail to compile on Alphas, it was sort of dumb thing to do, yes, but it was quite obvious and simple to fix. What got the OpenBSD users so angry about it was it sat in their code for almost two months without them noticing it, proving that they didn't do any maintenance on the Alpha port.
Next session of congress, I assure you that we'll see a host of idiots citing Australia as a role-model for net-censorship the way they idolized the Canadian health-care system a few years ago.
Well, and we know how far the implementation of a decent medical system in the US got, right?
For what it's worth, the Canadian system is a lot nicer than the US system. I spent most of my life in Canada, and that's one of the things I miss most.
What, and you didn't think that the US has an amazing number of cameras on the streets? I saw a fascinating page from Harper's Magazine that showed all of the cameras (public and private) in four square blocks of New York. There were hundreds.
As far as government invasiveness is concerned, I don't think the US is much, if any, worse than the UK. The same is true for Canada. It's the unparalleled liberties that the US gives corportations to collect, retain and disseminate information, and the degree to which corporations take advantage of it, that really worries me. (Levis, the brand of jeans, is now even collecting fingerprints from its customers dumb enough to give them to them!)
Look, I run networks with hundreds of Unix workstations. Linux is a lot easier to manage than Windows, but the software on the local host still get screwed up, upgrades are still somewhat painful (especially since users have a tendency to turn off their PCs), and it still takes a lot longer to rebuild a Linux system than to power-cycle an NC.
I'm not saying that NCs are perfect for all applications, but for the simpler stuff (e-mail, web, word processing, spreadsheets, database clients) that has low bandwidth requirements, and where you have a lot of seats, they're great.
You're assuming that you can use a rescue disk on the system. My Sun 3/60s have no floppy drives, and likely never will. (In fact, a lot of workstations have no floppy drives.) It's a lot faster and easier just to have the root partition statically linked than to set up a netboot under many circumstances.
Worse yet, what if the machine does have a floppy drive, but is remote? With console access to many workstations I can change almost anything, but I can't put a floppy into a drive or take one out.
I think Linux in this respect is just showing it's PC biases (you're physically present with the machine, and it's got a floppy drive).
As for `old machines,' with `less disk space available,' well, cry on my shoulder, buddy. I'm running NetBSD on a MicroVAX 2000 with less than 100 MB of disk space. Is your machine any smaller than that? With only/bin and/sbin statically linked, there's not that much extra space taken up.
Recording of phone calls is quite typical at many companies. At the investment bank where I work, for example, all calls into or out of the trading floor are recorded, and random calls to or from other phones are recorded.
But effectively, you're right; a Solaris system is often not usable/recoverable if you separate / and/usr. I find this rather annoying, myself, since in my experience/usr gets trashed a lot more than root. (And also, it's a lot `cheaper' in terms of disk space and time to keep a bootable backup (/altroot) on another disk if it's 64 MB right than a gig or more.)
Because the Microsoft partitioning scheme is both far more common in the world and far more useful.
It's certainly not far more common among Unix systems.
It's also a lot easier to set up multi-boot systems with the Linux scheme on one disk and brain-dead hardware--only the boot partitions have to be under 1024 cylinders, and not the whole partition like for *BSD.
This is not the case. On BSD systems, only the a partition needs to be below 1024 cylinders, not the entire DOS partition holding the BSD partitions.
Do people here not realize that/bin and/sbin dynamically linked to shared libraries that are also in the root partition accomplishes the same thing as statically linking them (and makes updates easier)?
No, I don't realise that. So you're saying that with your method, if your ld.so or a shared library gets corrupted, these dynamically linked binaries will work well enough for you to recover from this?:-)
Ok, so someone screws up the software on the hard drive of the PC. How long does it take to fix? How long does it take to do the equivalant fix on a thin client (i.e., reboot it)?
Or say a machine breaks? You just plop in another one, and you know the user won't come back to you saying `I needed stuff I left on my hard drive.'
The only real purpose of having a subnet number is for multicasting to all machines in a subnet.
Err...no. The purpose of the subnet mask is to let you determine, given an arbitrary IP address, whether the host is on a local network (and thus you send the packet to it directly) or not (in which case you send the packet to a router or gateway that will forward it for you).
This is a really good point. Another thing to note is that the UK is one of the few European countries (well, it's not really European--I guess that's part of the point:-)) that has managed to avoid a national ID system, and this is a achievement that they're proud of. The US, on the other hand, practically has one right now due to the number of institutions that demand your social security number, despite having nothing to do with your taxes at all.
I've spent most of my life in Canada, and I was pretty shocked to come down to the US and find out how much harder it is to protect privacy here than in Canada. So much for the `land of the free'; I find I prefer `socialist' Canada.
Well, I suppose Katz didn't read the comments on his last article, because he still doesn't seem to have noticed that there are hundreds of `low-budget,' `out-of-left-field' films made every year, and this has been the case for a long time. Katz appears to be claiming that BWP is significantly better, as a film, than what Hollywood puts out or the other independent stuff released recently, but he provides no support whatsoever for this argument. Also, he doesn't address the points made in the Salon article ``Did "The Blair Witch Project" fake its online fan base?''; has he even read it? I agree with the Salon article take on things; I think that the whole advertising campaign was a very sophisticated and effective version of the ``trolls'' you used to see in usenet groups that would start a massive series of postings and get everybody involved.
What makes BWP different is that its promoters were not part of the huge corporate marketing machine, yet they managed to do a sophisticated, professional job of promoting the film, a job that Madison Avenue marketing types would be proud of. But individuals being able to market shlock just as well as Madison Avenue can market shlock doesn't seem to me to be a cause for celebration. The customers fitting the particular demographic profile this film was marketed to are getting the same thing, they're just getting it from some people who aren't yet part of Hollywood, rather than Hollywood itself. The folks who really are interested in good independent film are still seeing it, as they have been for years, and BWP didn't register any more than Titanic.
No, it's not technically free; it it's a noticable (and sometimes significant) part of the cost of a machine you buy. From what I've heard, you're paying anywhere from $35 to $75 for Windows. It's claimed to be the second most expensive component in low-end machines, after the hard drive.
It's certainly a lot more noticable if you buy clone PCs from local manufacturers, rather than brand-name PCs, because the cost of Windows is often a separate item on the invoice.
As for `You can't take your Excel spreadsheet home with you' being FUD, how is this? As far as I can tell, there is no way of running a reasonably sophisticated Excel spreadsheet on Linux. I think this FUD thing has gone too far; Linux advocates are now claiming that the pointing out of any deficiency in Linux is FUD.
America is a country, not a genetic line. What more can I say?
If you point out any individual American to me, I can't tell you whether or not he might be greedy and stupid. However, the country as a whole appears to me to be an environment that encourages greed and stupidity, and a fair number of my fellow Americans appear to agree with me. Personally, I find being here somewhat frightening; it's a lot closer to being a fascist state than Canada, where I've spent most of my life. (It seems odd that an essentially socialist country did a much better job of protecting my privacy than what some see as `the land of the free.') The major redeeming quality (and what keeps the US from going right over the edge) is the toleration of vocal dissent. But even free speech is under continual fire here.
Perhaps if I felt more American, I'd be working harder to fight these things. As it is, I just feel like fleeing.
Right. So let me give you some quotes from those exact same articles, and then you see what you think of Berst.
'Linux is not just for geeks anymore. As many as five million computers now run the operating system.... [Linux has] a low, low cost. And many technical merits.' (Feb. 16th)
The June 23rd article is entitled How Linux Could Kill Windows NT. What more need be said?
'Linux...will have a powerful influence...' (Sept. 9th)
It's a lovely set of quotes, and also taken completely out of context. I'd not heard of Jessie Berst before I saw those, and I got quite a different impression of what he was saying when I went and actually read the articles.
Berst attracts all this noteriety on Slashdot not because he's anti-Linux (he never has been, as far as I can tell), but because he's concerned about how businesses get their IT work done, and couldn't give a damn which OS is running. For him, he's perfectly happy with an MS product if it's doing a good job. And that's an unforgivable sin here.
This looks to me like a typical American combination of personal greed and stupidity.
And this looks to me life a typical American example of racism.
And what race, exactly, am I maligning?
Except you're not American, are you?
I was born in the US, I've spent a moderate amount of time living in and visiting the US, and I have a US passport. You be the judge.
cjs
Yes, Virginia, There Is Film Outside Hollywood
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
·
· Score: 1
While it's always nice to see someone realise that there are wonderful films being made outside Hollywood, to say that BWP is the start of some sort of new renaissance in non-Hollywood filmmaking is to dismiss decades of filmmakers. Sure, I had a similar `ah ha!' experience more then ten years ago when seeing Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing (which was made for a similar cost) for the first time, but I didn't jump to the conclusion that this was the start of a new trend, rather than the continuation of one I'd fallen into the middle of.
Sure, low-budget, non-Hollywood filmmaking is new to this corner of the Internet, and sure, this is the first film that's become a massive success based on Internet interest and hype (forged or otherwise: see Salon's Did "The Blair Witch Project" fake its online fan base?), but that's no excuse not to do one's background research before writing an article like this, and making a realistic assessment of where this film fits in the recent history of filmmaking.
No, clearly from context, one knows that comedians in a club or on TV are telling jokes and are not to be taken seriously.
And this wasn't clear from context? I mean, did you honestly think that a Harrier Jumpjet is a reasonable promotional prize for buying Pepsi in the same way that a baseball cap or T-shirt is?
This looks to me like a typical American combination of personal greed and stupidity.
Yes, but `Linux' isn't any better. You can't run BackOffice on under WinCE, sure, but try to compile and run Apache on the PalmPilot version of `Linux.'
USB? If you're lucky your mouse will work. PNP? Linux makes this more difficult than non-PNP ... That illustrates what tends to be the problem with the Open Source community, they'll produce the stuff that they personally want, but other things tend to be ignored.
Excellent USB support and good P&P support have both been produced by the open source community. (They're in NetBSD.) I guess this is the `if it's not in Linux, it doesn't exist' thing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, nowhere near 90% of Canadians work for the government. As for taxes, they are certainly higher in Canada, but not by all that much, as far as I can tell. (I'm not paying significantly less in taxes in the US than I was in Canada.) Not having a massive military to maintain probably helps. :-)
I'd really suggest you do some real research on the system before dismissing it out of hand.
cjs
cjs
I find it quite amusing that one of the statements in the licence there was some objection to was:
Now, if we replace `RSA Data Security' with `everyone else,' we get a statement that's darn close to the key tenet of a popular open source licence....cjs
There was a lot of that going around on both sides. For a long time, OpenBSD was fixing security flaws, but putting just `RCS ID Police' in the commit message, to make it hard for NetBSD developers following the commits to see what bugs they'd fixed.
As for the change in NetBSD that, when imported into OpenBSD sources, made OpenBSD fail to compile on Alphas, it was sort of dumb thing to do, yes, but it was quite obvious and simple to fix. What got the OpenBSD users so angry about it was it sat in their code for almost two months without them noticing it, proving that they didn't do any maintenance on the Alpha port.
cjs
For what it's worth, the Canadian system is a lot nicer than the US system. I spent most of my life in Canada, and that's one of the things I miss most.
cjs
What, and you didn't think that the US has an amazing number of cameras on the streets? I saw a fascinating page from Harper's Magazine that showed all of the cameras (public and private) in four square blocks of New York. There were hundreds.
As far as government invasiveness is concerned, I don't think the US is much, if any, worse than the UK. The same is true for Canada. It's the unparalleled liberties that the US gives corportations to collect, retain and disseminate information, and the degree to which corporations take advantage of it, that really worries me. (Levis, the brand of jeans, is now even collecting fingerprints from its customers dumb enough to give them to them!)
cjs
Look, I run networks with hundreds of Unix workstations. Linux is a lot easier to manage than Windows, but the software on the local host still get screwed up, upgrades are still somewhat painful (especially since users have a tendency to turn off their PCs), and it still takes a lot longer to rebuild a Linux system than to power-cycle an NC.
I'm not saying that NCs are perfect for all applications, but for the simpler stuff (e-mail, web, word processing, spreadsheets, database clients) that has low bandwidth requirements, and where you have a lot of seats, they're great.
cjs
You're assuming that you can use a rescue disk on the system. My Sun 3/60s have no floppy drives, and likely never will. (In fact, a lot of workstations have no floppy drives.) It's a lot faster and easier just to have the root partition statically linked than to set up a netboot under many circumstances.
Worse yet, what if the machine does have a floppy drive, but is remote? With console access to many workstations I can change almost anything, but I can't put a floppy into a drive or take one out.
I think Linux in this respect is just showing it's PC biases (you're physically present with the machine, and it's got a floppy drive).
As for `old machines,' with `less disk space available,' well, cry on my shoulder, buddy. I'm running NetBSD on a MicroVAX 2000 with less than 100 MB of disk space. Is your machine any smaller than that? With only /bin and /sbin statically linked, there's not that much extra space taken up.
cjs
Recording of phone calls is quite typical at many companies. At the investment bank where I work, for example, all calls into or out of the trading floor are recorded, and random calls to or from other phones are recorded.
cjs
titanic $ cd /sbin
titanic $ file * | grep 'statically linked' | wc -l
9
But effectively, you're right; a Solaris system is often not usable/recoverable if you separate / and /usr. I find this rather annoying, myself, since in my experience /usr gets trashed a lot more than root. (And also, it's a lot `cheaper' in terms of disk space and time to keep a bootable backup (/altroot) on another disk if it's 64 MB right than a gig or more.)
It's certainly not far more common among Unix systems. This is not the case. On BSD systems, only the a partition needs to be below 1024 cylinders, not the entire DOS partition holding the BSD partitions.cjs
cjs
Ok, so someone screws up the software on the hard drive of the PC. How long does it take to fix? How long does it take to do the equivalant fix on a thin client (i.e., reboot it)?
Or say a machine breaks? You just plop in another one, and you know the user won't come back to you saying `I needed stuff I left on my hard drive.'
cjs
cjs
This is a really good point. Another thing to note is that the UK is one of the few European countries (well, it's not really European--I guess that's part of the point :-)) that has managed to avoid a national ID system, and this is a achievement that they're proud of. The US, on the other hand, practically has one right now due to the number of institutions that demand your social security number, despite having nothing to do with your taxes at all.
cjs
I've spent most of my life in Canada, and I was pretty shocked to come down to the US and find out how much harder it is to protect privacy here than in Canada. So much for the `land of the free'; I find I prefer `socialist' Canada.
cjs
What makes BWP different is that its promoters were not part of the huge corporate marketing machine, yet they managed to do a sophisticated, professional job of promoting the film, a job that Madison Avenue marketing types would be proud of. But individuals being able to market shlock just as well as Madison Avenue can market shlock doesn't seem to me to be a cause for celebration. The customers fitting the particular demographic profile this film was marketed to are getting the same thing, they're just getting it from some people who aren't yet part of Hollywood, rather than Hollywood itself. The folks who really are interested in good independent film are still seeing it, as they have been for years, and BWP didn't register any more than Titanic.
cjs
No, it's not technically free; it it's a noticable (and sometimes significant) part of the cost of a machine you buy. From what I've heard, you're paying anywhere from $35 to $75 for Windows. It's claimed to be the second most expensive component in low-end machines, after the hard drive.
It's certainly a lot more noticable if you buy clone PCs from local manufacturers, rather than brand-name PCs, because the cost of Windows is often a separate item on the invoice.
As for `You can't take your Excel spreadsheet home with you' being FUD, how is this? As far as I can tell, there is no way of running a reasonably sophisticated Excel spreadsheet on Linux. I think this FUD thing has gone too far; Linux advocates are now claiming that the pointing out of any deficiency in Linux is FUD.
cjs
cjs
If you point out any individual American to me, I can't tell you whether or not he might be greedy and stupid. However, the country as a whole appears to me to be an environment that encourages greed and stupidity, and a fair number of my fellow Americans appear to agree with me. Personally, I find being here somewhat frightening; it's a lot closer to being a fascist state than Canada, where I've spent most of my life. (It seems odd that an essentially socialist country did a much better job of protecting my privacy than what some see as `the land of the free.') The major redeeming quality (and what keeps the US from going right over the edge) is the toleration of vocal dissent. But even free speech is under continual fire here.
Perhaps if I felt more American, I'd be working harder to fight these things. As it is, I just feel like fleeing.
cjs
Right. So let me give you some quotes from those exact same articles, and then you see what you think of Berst.
cjs
It's a lovely set of quotes, and also taken completely out of context. I'd not heard of Jessie Berst before I saw those, and I got quite a different impression of what he was saying when I went and actually read the articles.
Berst attracts all this noteriety on Slashdot not because he's anti-Linux (he never has been, as far as I can tell), but because he's concerned about how businesses get their IT work done, and couldn't give a damn which OS is running. For him, he's perfectly happy with an MS product if it's doing a good job. And that's an unforgivable sin here.
cjs
cjs
While it's always nice to see someone realise that there are wonderful films being made outside Hollywood, to say that BWP is the start of some sort of new renaissance in non-Hollywood filmmaking is to dismiss decades of filmmakers. Sure, I had a similar `ah ha!' experience more then ten years ago when seeing Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing (which was made for a similar cost) for the first time, but I didn't jump to the conclusion that this was the start of a new trend, rather than the continuation of one I'd fallen into the middle of.
Sure, low-budget, non-Hollywood filmmaking is new to this corner of the Internet, and sure, this is the first film that's become a massive success based on Internet interest and hype (forged or otherwise: see Salon's Did "The Blair Witch Project" fake its online fan base?), but that's no excuse not to do one's background research before writing an article like this, and making a realistic assessment of where this film fits in the recent history of filmmaking.
cjs
This looks to me like a typical American combination of personal greed and stupidity.
cjs
Yes, but `Linux' isn't any better. You can't run BackOffice on under WinCE, sure, but try to compile and run Apache on the PalmPilot version of `Linux.'
cjs
cjs