They're the Energizer Bunny of the computer world, even if they have to steal or assassinate their competition to keep going.
The reason stealing and assassination worked in the past was because Microsoft was competing with overpriced, closed source competitors: they cloned stuff from their competitors and then drove them out of business by undercutting them.
Good luck trying to do the same with Chrome OS and other open source projects. In fact, the absolute best thing Microsoft could do for their competitors is to copy Chrome OS and ship it.
So, Microsoft, please do "steal" Chrome OS. I don't even mind if you modify it a little.
Trace the connections between Christianity, genocide, dictatorships, torture, and war. Why are Christians so ready to embrace these as a package deal? What view of humanity and reality is required to resist them?
So, instead of excoriating the professor, we should invite his students onto here and "help" them with their studies.
Why not "excoriate" the professor? He is trying to defend the indefensible, his logically inconsistent and intrinsically violent and immoral religion. And he is using the tools of his trade: lies and demagoguery. It's a free country and he may do that. But because it's a free country and we may "excoriate" him for it.
What do you really expect from low level near minimum wage service personnel? No one wants these jobs so only the desperate take them. Would you want to answer the phone to complaints at a hotel at 3am?
Hotel and restaurant staff isn't supposed to be "near minimum wage". Hotel staff is supposed to be professionally trained because dealing with irate customers at 3am and sorting out prank phone calls from real emergencies in a way that makes customers want to come back is actually tough work.
There are a lot of smart and clever people, and guess what, they're smart enough to not get stuck as front line service personnel.
It can be a good job if it's at a well run hotel and for decent pay.
I'm sure that there is no area in your life that you would fall for one of these intricate scams.
This story isn't about "areas of one's life" or "intricate scams", it's about people peeing on each other and vandalizing their hotel rooms in response to a prank call.
I don't find it all that disturbing that people make these prank calls, I find it disturbing that people fall for them. It's particularly disturbing that people who my own security and well-being depends on--hotel and restaurant staff--are stupid enough to fall for these kinds of pranks. If they can be duped into peeing onto each other and drinking urine, what kinds of stupid things are they going to do with my food and my keys?
If pranknet causes these people to be more careful in the future (or to just gather a couple of Darwin awards), I'd feel safer.
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy.
I have no doubt that the people who have created Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and all that "enjoyed" doing what they were doing. But that doesn't mean that they made great contributions to IT or technology.
It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
Well, actually they kind of are: there are only so many hours in the day, and every hour you spend pursuing making money is an hour you aren't spending on developing new technology.
Siebel is absolutely right: IT's "glory days" are over. And good riddance, I say: the spectacular growth of IT has attracted all the wrong people and stifled real innovation. And "all the wrong people" includes people like Siebel himself.
If there is less of a get-rich-quick mentality, maybe people can return to focusing on innovation and long term planning again.
Are you saying that mail to the maintainer remains totally unanswered? Is there any activity on the mailing list? Or are you saying that the maintainer is simply not responding to your request to include your particular patch?
I maintain several open source projects, and there are many reasons why I might not include a patch: I may not understand it, I may not want to maintain it, it may break other features, it may conflict with future changes, it may violate the coding standards, the license may be unclear or incompatible, the patch may have been generated incorrectly, etc.
I think Launchpad actually has one of the best systems for dealing with this because it allows anybody to submit patches and new versions and the community can vote on and select patches.
How is installing a sound card driver, selecting the appropriate ASIO driver + bitrate + buffer size in your DAW software and setting the project to the appropriate sample rate "fiddling around"?
Well, whatever you call it, that's actually more work than you need to do on Linux.
Good economic models usually win in the market place. Linux has NOT won and poses no threat,
What planet are you living on? Linux has killed Microsoft's ambitions in embedded devices, compute clusters, Internet companies, mobile phones, education, and scientific computing. Microsoft wanted to dominate those areas, but they have failed miserably at that. Some of those areas, Linux dominates completely.
Remember, those are just some of my opinions,
Well, and against your "opinions", I have some facts, like the fact that I and many others have made a fine living producing open source software.
What sounds like a lot of money to the open source people probably sounds like a sneeze to Microsoft.
So what? You were implying that open source programmers work out of charity and that's wrong. We get paid well for what we do. The fact that Microsoft wastes money hand over foot on other things only means that Microsoft is an inefficient company, something that will sooner or later kill them.
However, you're fundamentally very confused and befuddled,
If you want to see "confused and befuddled", look in the mirror; you obviously don't have the slightest idea of what's going on in the real world. Microsoft is a dinosaur hanging on desperately to their desktop OS monopoly and becoming less and less relevant.
Configuring audio on Linux can be tricky, but that mostly affects casual users. If you're a professional audio user, you need to fiddle around a lot to set things up on any platform, and Linux is no harder than other platforms.
I think the point is that this kind of work has gone from "hard" to "feasible" on Linux. And in some areas, Linux actually has significant advantages of OS X, so that Linux now is a platform worth considering.
(Personally, I wouldn't dream of doing any kind of audio work on OS X anymore.)
Look at where breaches actually occur in practice: disgruntled employees, P2P, server vulnerabilities, corporate espionage, carelessness, etc. Your in-house IT staff is a much more likely source of data leaks and corporate espionage than an organization like Google or Microsoft.
Or, to look at it another way, your "in house" IT staff is really all a collection of third parties as well, and they often have much less of a track record and much less to lose than Google.
UK business are not allowed to process personal data in the USA without express customer consent because its data protection laws fall short of ours.
US and UK privacy protections differ, but to say that the US protections "fall short" of UK protections is false. They have different aims, and I prefer the aims of US privacy protection to those of the UK and Europe, thank you very much.
I think you see the kind of myth you're repeating perpetuated by the UK government; anti-American rhetoric makes a great cover for pushing through an increasingly totalitarian agenda.
Actually, this is hardly surprising. HIPAA compliance is for the geeks to worry about, not the HARDCORE ER STAFF who's job is SAVING LIVES you INSIGNIFICANT LITTLE NOBODY!
Maybe you can still "save" some people's lives temporarily in the ER, but the root causes are much earlier: stress, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, lack of protective gear, addiction, etc. Much of ER medicine is pointless and frustrating because people will continue their self-destructive behaviors and just be back in a few months... or go to the slab directly.
So, I wouldn't put up ER medicine on a pedestal as the kind of medicine that "saves lives". GPs--doctors who know and work with families and people over a long time--are probably the most important doctors in terms of saving lives, but even more important are friends, partners, and colleagues.
The problem with pretending that any Linux distro is a competitor to anything is that none of the Linux distro's have a viable economic model. Living on charity doesn't cut it for real programmers.
Will you stop spreading this kind of FUD? Linux developers are generally well-paid, by companies that know exactly why they are paying for this kind of development. There is little "charity" involved in developing open source software.
That's not possible without competition to define the true value of the software.
Open source defines it just fine: the competitive price of the Windows OS should be zero; an efficient OS development business can obviously cover all its cost from other revenue streams.
If I speed because of my sum biology + experience, then can't it be argued that I really don't have a choice in speeding?
But you do have a choice. There is nothing physically preventing you from acting differently and you logically understand the consequences of your actions, both the harm you cause others, and the punishment you will face. That's all that free will and choice means. If you're biologically inclined to make choices that are bad for you or others, well, so be it; you just have to live with the consequences, which may include incarceration or execution.
Purely from a practical point of view, people who are biologically destined to be sociopaths with a propensity to cause harm to others are exactly the kind of people we need to remove from society. Whether you call that "punishment" or "treatmnet" really doesn't make a big difference.
The problem is likely a lack of connections rather than too many connections.
A fairly plausible view is that, in normal people, emotions inform the reasoning portions of the brain that some action makes them or others (empathy) feel sad, and that stops you from doing that action. If the connection is missing, they just don't care about the suffering of their victims or even what happens to them as a consequence.
So, psychopathy is probably not the addition of something, but the lack of something, and that's probably difficult to put back with a knife.
The definition I gave is the one that has been accepted by the computing industry since around 1970. The definition you quote:
Until the 1990's, the legal status of software patents remained unsettled. Until then, an "open standard" for software was simply one that was published (as opposed to "closed standars" like Microsoft Office). When software patents became an issue, the meaning of the term "open standard" for software was up in the air for a few years, but it has been pretty much settled now: as far as software is concerned, open standards must be published and royalty free.
Organizations like the ITU historically dealt in hardware, where the issues were different, but blindly applying definitions from the hardware world to software does not make sense.
Politics, threats, aggression, cowardice, and war are as much part of what makes us human as cooperation, kindness, and empathy. It's the struggle between the two that makes us human and drives progress. Without one or the other, we'd be mindless drones or breeding rabbits.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like one of those gee-whiz attempts to capitalize on current buzzwords.
Non sequitur. You don't need to make a great contribution or invention to be a successful enterpreneur.
My point exactly.
Enterpreneurship != innovation.
My point exactly.
And that's why it's good for the industry if there is less money to be made.
They're the Energizer Bunny of the computer world, even if they have to steal or assassinate their competition to keep going.
The reason stealing and assassination worked in the past was because Microsoft was competing with overpriced, closed source competitors: they cloned stuff from their competitors and then drove them out of business by undercutting them.
Good luck trying to do the same with Chrome OS and other open source projects. In fact, the absolute best thing Microsoft could do for their competitors is to copy Chrome OS and ship it.
So, Microsoft, please do "steal" Chrome OS. I don't even mind if you modify it a little.
Here's an exam question I'd like an answer to:
So, instead of excoriating the professor, we should invite his students onto here and "help" them with their studies.
Why not "excoriate" the professor? He is trying to defend the indefensible, his logically inconsistent and intrinsically violent and immoral religion. And he is using the tools of his trade: lies and demagoguery. It's a free country and he may do that. But because it's a free country and we may "excoriate" him for it.
What do you really expect from low level near minimum wage service personnel? No one wants these jobs so only the desperate take them. Would you want to answer the phone to complaints at a hotel at 3am?
Hotel and restaurant staff isn't supposed to be "near minimum wage". Hotel staff is supposed to be professionally trained because dealing with irate customers at 3am and sorting out prank phone calls from real emergencies in a way that makes customers want to come back is actually tough work.
There are a lot of smart and clever people, and guess what, they're smart enough to not get stuck as front line service personnel.
It can be a good job if it's at a well run hotel and for decent pay.
I'm sure that there is no area in your life that you would fall for one of these intricate scams.
This story isn't about "areas of one's life" or "intricate scams", it's about people peeing on each other and vandalizing their hotel rooms in response to a prank call.
Are you genuinely surprised that there are stupid people in the world?
No, but I don't think they should be in positions where they can affect my safety.
Or that stupid people would work menial jobs?
I don't consider hotel staff to be "menial".
If your feeling of security requires normal people losing what little trust in others they still have
People shouldn't trust anonymous phone callers, period.
or stupid people being tricked into killing themselves
Killing themselves?? Where did anybody kill themselves?
I think the people who fell for these pranks should lose their jobs because they are a threat to their customers.
I don't find it all that disturbing that people make these prank calls, I find it disturbing that people fall for them. It's particularly disturbing that people who my own security and well-being depends on--hotel and restaurant staff--are stupid enough to fall for these kinds of pranks. If they can be duped into peeing onto each other and drinking urine, what kinds of stupid things are they going to do with my food and my keys?
If pranknet causes these people to be more careful in the future (or to just gather a couple of Darwin awards), I'd feel safer.
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy.
I have no doubt that the people who have created Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and all that "enjoyed" doing what they were doing. But that doesn't mean that they made great contributions to IT or technology.
It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
Well, actually they kind of are: there are only so many hours in the day, and every hour you spend pursuing making money is an hour you aren't spending on developing new technology.
Siebel is absolutely right: IT's "glory days" are over. And good riddance, I say: the spectacular growth of IT has attracted all the wrong people and stifled real innovation. And "all the wrong people" includes people like Siebel himself.
If there is less of a get-rich-quick mentality, maybe people can return to focusing on innovation and long term planning again.
I know you're wrong, but saying why just isn't worth the risk of saying too much.
Your pomposity fails to impress.
See you at the bank.
Yeah, as you're begging for a loan: Microsoft's stock price is down to mid-1990's levels and their growth is anemic.
That's still more work than on Linux.
Are you saying that mail to the maintainer remains totally unanswered? Is there any activity on the mailing list? Or are you saying that the maintainer is simply not responding to your request to include your particular patch?
I maintain several open source projects, and there are many reasons why I might not include a patch: I may not understand it, I may not want to maintain it, it may break other features, it may conflict with future changes, it may violate the coding standards, the license may be unclear or incompatible, the patch may have been generated incorrectly, etc.
I think Launchpad actually has one of the best systems for dealing with this because it allows anybody to submit patches and new versions and the community can vote on and select patches.
How is installing a sound card driver, selecting the appropriate ASIO driver + bitrate + buffer size in your DAW software and setting the project to the appropriate sample rate "fiddling around"?
Well, whatever you call it, that's actually more work than you need to do on Linux.
Good economic models usually win in the market place. Linux has NOT won and poses no threat,
What planet are you living on? Linux has killed Microsoft's ambitions in embedded devices, compute clusters, Internet companies, mobile phones, education, and scientific computing. Microsoft wanted to dominate those areas, but they have failed miserably at that. Some of those areas, Linux dominates completely.
Remember, those are just some of my opinions,
Well, and against your "opinions", I have some facts, like the fact that I and many others have made a fine living producing open source software.
What sounds like a lot of money to the open source people probably sounds like a sneeze to Microsoft.
So what? You were implying that open source programmers work out of charity and that's wrong. We get paid well for what we do. The fact that Microsoft wastes money hand over foot on other things only means that Microsoft is an inefficient company, something that will sooner or later kill them.
However, you're fundamentally very confused and befuddled,
If you want to see "confused and befuddled", look in the mirror; you obviously don't have the slightest idea of what's going on in the real world. Microsoft is a dinosaur hanging on desperately to their desktop OS monopoly and becoming less and less relevant.
Configuring audio on Linux can be tricky, but that mostly affects casual users. If you're a professional audio user, you need to fiddle around a lot to set things up on any platform, and Linux is no harder than other platforms.
I think the point is that this kind of work has gone from "hard" to "feasible" on Linux. And in some areas, Linux actually has significant advantages of OS X, so that Linux now is a platform worth considering.
(Personally, I wouldn't dream of doing any kind of audio work on OS X anymore.)
Look at where breaches actually occur in practice: disgruntled employees, P2P, server vulnerabilities, corporate espionage, carelessness, etc. Your in-house IT staff is a much more likely source of data leaks and corporate espionage than an organization like Google or Microsoft.
Or, to look at it another way, your "in house" IT staff is really all a collection of third parties as well, and they often have much less of a track record and much less to lose than Google.
UK business are not allowed to process personal data in the USA without express customer consent because its data protection laws fall short of ours.
US and UK privacy protections differ, but to say that the US protections "fall short" of UK protections is false. They have different aims, and I prefer the aims of US privacy protection to those of the UK and Europe, thank you very much.
I think you see the kind of myth you're repeating perpetuated by the UK government; anti-American rhetoric makes a great cover for pushing through an increasingly totalitarian agenda.
Actually, this is hardly surprising. HIPAA compliance is for the geeks to worry about, not the HARDCORE ER STAFF who's job is SAVING LIVES you INSIGNIFICANT LITTLE NOBODY!
Maybe you can still "save" some people's lives temporarily in the ER, but the root causes are much earlier: stress, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, lack of protective gear, addiction, etc. Much of ER medicine is pointless and frustrating because people will continue their self-destructive behaviors and just be back in a few months... or go to the slab directly.
So, I wouldn't put up ER medicine on a pedestal as the kind of medicine that "saves lives". GPs--doctors who know and work with families and people over a long time--are probably the most important doctors in terms of saving lives, but even more important are friends, partners, and colleagues.
The problem with pretending that any Linux distro is a competitor to anything is that none of the Linux distro's have a viable economic model. Living on charity doesn't cut it for real programmers.
Will you stop spreading this kind of FUD? Linux developers are generally well-paid, by companies that know exactly why they are paying for this kind of development. There is little "charity" involved in developing open source software.
That's not possible without competition to define the true value of the software.
Open source defines it just fine: the competitive price of the Windows OS should be zero; an efficient OS development business can obviously cover all its cost from other revenue streams.
If I speed because of my sum biology + experience, then can't it be argued that I really don't have a choice in speeding?
But you do have a choice. There is nothing physically preventing you from acting differently and you logically understand the consequences of your actions, both the harm you cause others, and the punishment you will face. That's all that free will and choice means. If you're biologically inclined to make choices that are bad for you or others, well, so be it; you just have to live with the consequences, which may include incarceration or execution.
Purely from a practical point of view, people who are biologically destined to be sociopaths with a propensity to cause harm to others are exactly the kind of people we need to remove from society. Whether you call that "punishment" or "treatmnet" really doesn't make a big difference.
The problem is likely a lack of connections rather than too many connections.
A fairly plausible view is that, in normal people, emotions inform the reasoning portions of the brain that some action makes them or others (empathy) feel sad, and that stops you from doing that action. If the connection is missing, they just don't care about the suffering of their victims or even what happens to them as a consequence.
So, psychopathy is probably not the addition of something, but the lack of something, and that's probably difficult to put back with a knife.
The definition I gave is the one that has been accepted by the computing industry since around 1970. The definition you quote:
Until the 1990's, the legal status of software patents remained unsettled. Until then, an "open standard" for software was simply one that was published (as opposed to "closed standars" like Microsoft Office). When software patents became an issue, the meaning of the term "open standard" for software was up in the air for a few years, but it has been pretty much settled now: as far as software is concerned, open standards must be published and royalty free.
Organizations like the ITU historically dealt in hardware, where the issues were different, but blindly applying definitions from the hardware world to software does not make sense.
Politics, threats, aggression, cowardice, and war are as much part of what makes us human as cooperation, kindness, and empathy. It's the struggle between the two that makes us human and drives progress. Without one or the other, we'd be mindless drones or breeding rabbits.