Are you sure about that? I think it depends on the implementation, and I understand that some implementations have improved recently, but our (admittedly non-rigorous) testing suggested that Lua had an edge on JS. In any case, I'm not sure speed is a major factor when considering a language for teaching purposes.
- There's plenty of doc and examples
If you want to manipulate DOM, yes. If you have more general-purpose programming in mind, not quite so much.
- It's on every computer
Embedded in the browser where it's not quite so easy to use.
That said, I don't think JS is a bad suggestion. It wouldn't be my first choice, but it could easily make my top ten list. And I don't think there's any question that it's a better choice than Basic, which can leave scars that take years to heal!:)
please cite *one* case where an open standard was deliberately obstructing to MS.
Keep in mind who we're discussing here. When your goal is to leverage your monopoly -- to lock your customers in and your competitors out -- then open standards are deliberately obstructive!:)
The court seems to find no difference between torrent files and the files they point to:
That makes sense because the law considers intent when judging an action, which is why you can't just, say, distribute your proprietary blob along with instructions on how to modify and build a GPL'd app linked to it; the law considers this to be distribution of a derivative work because your intent is to deliver a derivative work to your customer, even if your actions seem to carefully avoid that. Which, in turn, is why we have a Free/Libre Objective-C compiler as part of the GCC suite.
Programmers like to try to interpret laws very, very literally, presumably because of their experiences with computers, which always do what you say, not what you mean. The Law doesn't work that way, and most of the time, that's a good thing.
What's more, since Open Source software lacks any single person you could possibly sue in case things go terribly wrong
Let's rephrase that--may lack. There's plenty of ways you can arrange to have OSS that has someone to sue. Most of those ways involve payment, however, which seems like a reasonable trade-off for the assumption of that risk.
XFCE is actually cool. This is a matter of personal preference though.
Yeah, that's what I keep hearing, and everything I hear about it makes it sound like the kind of system I'd like. It's just that every time I look at it, I can't help having a bad CDE flashback! I'm sure I'll get over it eventually.:)
I hate to tell you this, but CDE was standard on a lot of systems back in the day. If you think it was bad on Solaris, you should have tried it on HPUX!
I know what you mean though. I really really want to like Xubuntu, but every time I see Xfce, I go "GAH! CDE!" and have to go cower in the corner for a while.:)
the world would be more apt to find Victor Hugo in English than in French.
Because...Victor Hugo died more recently in France than he did in the rest of the world? Because copyright laws apply differently depending on the source language? I'm sorry, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty sure Victor Hugo's works are in the public domain in every country and language.
Or perhaps he's just not a very good writer. I got several paragraphs in, and had no idea where he was going or what point he was trying to make. He presented some interesting facts, then started to recap them, and showed no signs of drawing any conclusions, so I skimmed ahead a little, and it still didn't seem like he was adding anything more. It was interesting till it started to ramble aimlessly, at which point, I gave up. I read extensively, and polish off several books a week usually. I read Knuth for fun. I plowed my way through Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and even managed to enjoy parts of it. I don't think anyone could accuse me of having a short attention span. But I couldn't finish this--or, more precisely, I had no interest in finishing this. The topic seemed interesting, but if he had a conclusion, it was lost in the noise.
The man seems to be in love with his own words, but, unfortunately, has no idea who his audience is. If he's writing for anyone but himself, it doesn't show.
Tell me, how do you not log the data that passes through a server?
Well, duh, most obviously, you can turn off logging or write to/dev/null. But beyond that, as you say, it's nice to have logs in case something crashes. But that doesn't mean you have to log everything! If you're using Apache, you have control over what goes in the log file, as documented here, and if you, for example, omit "%h" from your log string, there will be no record of the IP that sent the request.
In practice, it gets a little more complex than that, but the bottom line is that there is no legal requirement to log everything or to keep the logs. You can omit IPs from your logs, you can delete old logs after an hour, you can do all kinds of things.
I'm not saying that I would necessarily trust anyone to not log me; I'm just saying that I can not log you if I want, on my servers. If Google wanted to, they could do it too.
The thing about privacy options offered by the system is that they're completely untrustworthy.
"The system"? Is that sort of like "the man"?:)
I would agree if you changed that to "not completely trustworthy", but I think that just offering the option, even if it's not 100% guaranteed, is a big step up from simply ignoring the whole issue and saying "Privacy? What's that?"
If MySQL was not under the GPL at the time shame on Monty,
It was, but the copyright holder is free to offer the code under other licenses. Monty's complaint is now that he sold the copyrights, he can no longer offer the code under other license terms. It was a fairly lucrative business for him, but he sold that business for a lot of money, and now he wants to have it given back to him for free. (Free as in beer, not speech.)
Your arguments apply just fine to the rest of us. Oracle owning the GPL'd MySQL is no threat to anyone except Monty's greed.
No. No they don't. If they do log it, then they may have to release it to a court or whatever, but I can say quite definitely that logging is not (yet) mandatory.
It's funny you should mention Jeeves, since the site formerly known as Ask Jeeves actually has better options for privacy (see the "AskEraser" feature in the upper right).
Yes, but it has to be done. Which means you have to persuade someone to do it.
if someone emails someone else a binary the execute bit will probably already be set.
Set where? The mime type doesn't define "executable bit" anywhere. And even if it did (which it wouldn't because it's not tied to a particular family of OSes), any unixish mail user agent which honored that instruction and set the executable bit would be blasted out of the sky by thousands, if not millions, of irate users who know what a security risk it is, and the program would never be allowed in the repositories of any reputable distribution.
And even if that weren't true, and commonly used unix MUAs did generously set the executable bit for you (which, I reiterate, they don't), that still wouldn't help, because, unlike with MSDOS or its horrid descendents, the current directory is not in the executable PATH! And no MUA will save to anywhere where a program could normally be executed, so you'd either have to persuade the user to modify their path or specify a path designation when they try to execute your malware, so we're back to social engineering, even in our contrafactual universe.
Apparently, the "weird thing" you've never heard of is UNIX (or Linux or BSD).:)
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines--including Google--do retain this information for some time
Actually, this part's not exactly true. At least one search engine offers an option to not be logged at all (the "Askeraser" link in the upper left). It may not be perfect--it's opt-in and does require you to accept one cookie--but it's better than any of the options that Google offers!
ObDisclaimer: I work for that company, so you don't have any particular reason to trust me, but then again, many of you already trust me with root on your systems, since I have write access to the Debian repositories.:)
Adding its favored repository to your package sources is still several stops short of auto-updating. A bit invasive, perhaps, but hardly what the fear-mongering suggested. I wonder what happens if you run dpkg-reconfigure on the package? If the cron job is only installed automatically when you use default priority (and running dpkg-reconfigure manually automatically switches to low), then I might even have to concede that they did it right.
If I happen to get bored enough to actually try it rather than just reading about it, I might test this, but don't hold your breath. I'm not really in the market for a new closed-source browser.:)
It's just too bad they haven't invented some way for a computer to run more than one program at a time, or his claim might have been plausible!:)
Ok, thousands is probably hyperbole in any case, but I'm certainly running dozens just on this one machine alone, and when I finish typing this and go off to get a snack, that number won't change to any appreciable degree.
Pretty damn good, thanks for asking! It's far from perfect, but then nobody but complete idiots was expecting perfection. Less evil may still be evil, but it's also still less! (And IMO, a lot less!)
An appeal that only applies to geeks and like minded people
That's probably what Apple would like people to think. I'm not so sure it's true. Android==Google, and Google is a very popular brand.
It's not "mainstream"
Google's not mainstream? What planet is that true on? I'm sure there are people who go for Android because it's not mainstream (especially here on Slashdot), but there are people who go for Apple for much the same reason.
"Microsoft has not and will not put "backdoors" into Windows"
No, no, that's "will not put 'backdoors' into Windows 7"!
The "7" is important, because chances are high that the backdoors added to WinNT3.5 are still working just fine; no need to add any new ones!:)
(A lot of people picked up on the "MS didn't add it" vs. "NSA worked on it", but I haven't seen any other comments about possible pre-existing backdoors.)
Yeah? And my NINE-YEAR-OLD NIECE regularly sits at my computer! PHYSICALLY!! And no, I DON'T WANT HER TO INSTALL RANDOM STUFF! And no, I'm NOT WORRIED ABOUT HER ROOTING THE MACHINE. But I STILL DON'T WANT HER INSTALLING RANDOM STUFF! I trust her, but only so far, and she might start to wonder what this telnetd package is.... She's nine!
Does my SHOUTING IN BOLD-FACED CAPS help get the message across, or is it as annoying and pointless as it was in your post?:)
Raise your hand if you've lent your computer to a user who [...]
Indeed, my nine year old niece has an account on my main Debian box. I trust her completely with the standard user privileges, but I really don't think I want her installing random stuff. My HD is decent-sized, but I'm not sure it would hold a pony.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's SIr Patrick, you use the last name when someone is a peer.
Really? I'm not usually that formal when that I happens. I tend to say things like "hey, buddy, quit that! That's gross! Go find a public restroom!"
- It's the fastest scripting language around.
Are you sure about that? I think it depends on the implementation, and I understand that some implementations have improved recently, but our (admittedly non-rigorous) testing suggested that Lua had an edge on JS. In any case, I'm not sure speed is a major factor when considering a language for teaching purposes.
- There's plenty of doc and examples
If you want to manipulate DOM, yes. If you have more general-purpose programming in mind, not quite so much.
- It's on every computer
Embedded in the browser where it's not quite so easy to use.
That said, I don't think JS is a bad suggestion. It wouldn't be my first choice, but it could easily make my top ten list. And I don't think there's any question that it's a better choice than Basic, which can leave scars that take years to heal! :)
please cite *one* case where an open standard was deliberately obstructing to MS.
Keep in mind who we're discussing here. When your goal is to leverage your monopoly -- to lock your customers in and your competitors out -- then open standards are deliberately obstructive! :)
The court seems to find no difference between torrent files and the files they point to:
That makes sense because the law considers intent when judging an action, which is why you can't just, say, distribute your proprietary blob along with instructions on how to modify and build a GPL'd app linked to it; the law considers this to be distribution of a derivative work because your intent is to deliver a derivative work to your customer, even if your actions seem to carefully avoid that. Which, in turn, is why we have a Free/Libre Objective-C compiler as part of the GCC suite.
Programmers like to try to interpret laws very, very literally, presumably because of their experiences with computers, which always do what you say, not what you mean. The Law doesn't work that way, and most of the time, that's a good thing.
What's more, since Open Source software lacks any single person you could possibly sue in case things go terribly wrong
Let's rephrase that--may lack. There's plenty of ways you can arrange to have OSS that has someone to sue. Most of those ways involve payment, however, which seems like a reasonable trade-off for the assumption of that risk.
XFCE is actually cool. This is a matter of personal preference though.
Yeah, that's what I keep hearing, and everything I hear about it makes it sound like the kind of system I'd like. It's just that every time I look at it, I can't help having a bad CDE flashback! I'm sure I'll get over it eventually. :)
TFA is a waste of time. It's the worse kind of drivel and doesn't have any interesting technical facts or points.
Yay! My habit of never reading TFA is paying off big time! ;)
I hate to tell you this, but CDE was standard on a lot of systems back in the day. If you think it was bad on Solaris, you should have tried it on HPUX!
I know what you mean though. I really really want to like Xubuntu, but every time I see Xfce, I go "GAH! CDE!" and have to go cower in the corner for a while. :)
the world would be more apt to find Victor Hugo in English than in French.
Because...Victor Hugo died more recently in France than he did in the rest of the world? Because copyright laws apply differently depending on the source language? I'm sorry, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty sure Victor Hugo's works are in the public domain in every country and language.
Perhaps you have a short attention span.
Or perhaps he's just not a very good writer. I got several paragraphs in, and had no idea where he was going or what point he was trying to make. He presented some interesting facts, then started to recap them, and showed no signs of drawing any conclusions, so I skimmed ahead a little, and it still didn't seem like he was adding anything more. It was interesting till it started to ramble aimlessly, at which point, I gave up. I read extensively, and polish off several books a week usually. I read Knuth for fun. I plowed my way through Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and even managed to enjoy parts of it. I don't think anyone could accuse me of having a short attention span. But I couldn't finish this--or, more precisely, I had no interest in finishing this. The topic seemed interesting, but if he had a conclusion, it was lost in the noise.
The man seems to be in love with his own words, but, unfortunately, has no idea who his audience is. If he's writing for anyone but himself, it doesn't show.
Tell me, how do you not log the data that passes through a server?
Well, duh, most obviously, you can turn off logging or write to /dev/null. But beyond that, as you say, it's nice to have logs in case something crashes. But that doesn't mean you have to log everything! If you're using Apache, you have control over what goes in the log file, as documented here, and if you, for example, omit "%h" from your log string, there will be no record of the IP that sent the request.
In practice, it gets a little more complex than that, but the bottom line is that there is no legal requirement to log everything or to keep the logs. You can omit IPs from your logs, you can delete old logs after an hour, you can do all kinds of things.
I'm not saying that I would necessarily trust anyone to not log me; I'm just saying that I can not log you if I want, on my servers. If Google wanted to, they could do it too.
The thing about privacy options offered by the system is that they're completely untrustworthy.
"The system"? Is that sort of like "the man"? :)
I would agree if you changed that to "not completely trustworthy", but I think that just offering the option, even if it's not 100% guaranteed, is a big step up from simply ignoring the whole issue and saying "Privacy? What's that?"
If MySQL was not under the GPL at the time shame on Monty,
It was, but the copyright holder is free to offer the code under other licenses. Monty's complaint is now that he sold the copyrights, he can no longer offer the code under other license terms. It was a fairly lucrative business for him, but he sold that business for a lot of money, and now he wants to have it given back to him for free. (Free as in beer, not speech.)
Your arguments apply just fine to the rest of us. Oracle owning the GPL'd MySQL is no threat to anyone except Monty's greed.
They have to log everything
No. No they don't. If they do log it, then they may have to release it to a court or whatever, but I can say quite definitely that logging is not (yet) mandatory.
It's funny you should mention Jeeves, since the site formerly known as Ask Jeeves actually has better options for privacy (see the "AskEraser" feature in the upper right).
Setting the execute bit is not difficult...
Yes, but it has to be done. Which means you have to persuade someone to do it.
if someone emails someone else a binary the execute bit will probably already be set.
Set where? The mime type doesn't define "executable bit" anywhere. And even if it did (which it wouldn't because it's not tied to a particular family of OSes), any unixish mail user agent which honored that instruction and set the executable bit would be blasted out of the sky by thousands, if not millions, of irate users who know what a security risk it is, and the program would never be allowed in the repositories of any reputable distribution.
And even if that weren't true, and commonly used unix MUAs did generously set the executable bit for you (which, I reiterate, they don't), that still wouldn't help, because, unlike with MSDOS or its horrid descendents, the current directory is not in the executable PATH! And no MUA will save to anywhere where a program could normally be executed, so you'd either have to persuade the user to modify their path or specify a path designation when they try to execute your malware, so we're back to social engineering, even in our contrafactual universe.
Apparently, the "weird thing" you've never heard of is UNIX (or Linux or BSD). :)
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines--including Google--do retain this information for some time
Actually, this part's not exactly true. At least one search engine offers an option to not be logged at all (the "Askeraser" link in the upper left). It may not be perfect--it's opt-in and does require you to accept one cookie--but it's better than any of the options that Google offers!
ObDisclaimer: I work for that company, so you don't have any particular reason to trust me, but then again, many of you already trust me with root on your systems, since I have write access to the Debian repositories. :)
Adding its favored repository to your package sources is still several stops short of auto-updating. A bit invasive, perhaps, but hardly what the fear-mongering suggested. I wonder what happens if you run dpkg-reconfigure on the package? If the cron job is only installed automatically when you use default priority (and running dpkg-reconfigure manually automatically switches to low), then I might even have to concede that they did it right.
If I happen to get bored enough to actually try it rather than just reading about it, I might test this, but don't hold your breath. I'm not really in the market for a new closed-source browser. :)
It's just too bad they haven't invented some way for a computer to run more than one program at a time, or his claim might have been plausible! :)
Ok, thousands is probably hyperbole in any case, but I'm certainly running dozens just on this one machine alone, and when I finish typing this and go off to get a snack, that number won't change to any appreciable degree.
Pretty damn good, thanks for asking! It's far from perfect, but then nobody but complete idiots was expecting perfection. Less evil may still be evil, but it's also still less! (And IMO, a lot less!)
An appeal that only applies to geeks and like minded people
That's probably what Apple would like people to think. I'm not so sure it's true. Android==Google, and Google is a very popular brand.
It's not "mainstream"
Google's not mainstream? What planet is that true on? I'm sure there are people who go for Android because it's not mainstream (especially here on Slashdot), but there are people who go for Apple for much the same reason.
"Microsoft has not and will not put "backdoors" into Windows"
No, no, that's "will not put 'backdoors' into Windows 7"!
The "7" is important, because chances are high that the backdoors added to WinNT3.5 are still working just fine; no need to add any new ones! :)
(A lot of people picked up on the "MS didn't add it" vs. "NSA worked on it", but I haven't seen any other comments about possible pre-existing backdoors.)
800 GW
This amounts to 1/4 of total U.S. electricity consumption. Utterly impractical.
For us, maybe. For for your typical Type II Civilization or better, that's barely a sneeze.
Just you wait! As soon as I get my Dyson Sphere built, I'll destroy you all using nothing but radiation pressure! Mwuah-ha-ha-ha-HA!
Yeah? And my NINE-YEAR-OLD NIECE regularly sits at my computer! PHYSICALLY!! And no, I DON'T WANT HER TO INSTALL RANDOM STUFF! And no, I'm NOT WORRIED ABOUT HER ROOTING THE MACHINE. But I STILL DON'T WANT HER INSTALLING RANDOM STUFF! I trust her, but only so far, and she might start to wonder what this telnetd package is.... She's nine!
Does my SHOUTING IN BOLD-FACED CAPS help get the message across, or is it as annoying and pointless as it was in your post? :)
Raise your hand if you've lent your computer to a user who [...]
Indeed, my nine year old niece has an account on my main Debian box. I trust her completely with the standard user privileges, but I really don't think I want her installing random stuff. My HD is decent-sized, but I'm not sure it would hold a pony. :)