1) It takes money to develop open source software. Even if it is not money from licensing, the money does come from somewhere. Most open source developers are developing on the dime of their companies. There is a cost to doing this.
2) Open source is genuinely not as polished as a commercial product, and products that do add that polish tend to drive up the cost of open source stuff. For example, Oracle on Linux is still more expensive than SQL Server on Windows Server, by about 5k per server.
3) Open source has yet to produce developmental tools as effective as.NET. Java is close and good in some ways, but that's a commercial product too. NO open source language initiative, with the possible exception of Perl 5, has the vision or the reach of.NET framework and the CLR.
4) The Language Wars are on again, and C# is the opening salvo. I hate to admit it, because I really do love C++, but the latest specs for the next major version of C# are absolutely wonderful. C# developers are getting really good generics to go with a surprisingly well thought out framework.
It's a tall, tall order for open source to match MS in the IDE development. When it was just an editor that was one thing, but an editor that now knows about your class hierarchy as you key it in, real two way tools ala Delphi (by the guy that invented Delphi), and MS is putting together one remarkably coherent and solid offering in.NET.
If the weight of the language wars continues to favor MS, then Linux application development will become more costly than the equivalent of MS, source code, or no source code.
Ok, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but, not allowing the use of trademarks by competitors is really a bad idea. The US is wrong about USA PATRIOT and wrong to flaunt the UN, but, France is really wrong about this.
Well, seeing that we've dropped 200 billion on Iraq II and have yet to recover any of the investment, the notion of Iraq II as part of a larger religious war to contain Islam does make sense.
Funny thing is, I agree with it. I guess it comes down to their way, way out there fanatics against our merely out there fanatics. Better they blow up stuff in Iraq then the USA.
Romans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Hittites, etc, all conquered in the name of economics. Somebody had gold, they took it. It was only the novel Israeli uprising of AD79, sparked by a refusal to pay taxes to the Roman god, that the notion of fighting for one's god was invented.
Even after that, the most successful empires were economically based. The Spanish were religious, yes, but, it was gold that sent them to the New World. Likely too the British had their notion of saving the world, but it was the lure of riches that sent them to India and Africa.
World War I was also an economic war. It was about access to trade for the then rising German empire. World War II was mixed. It was religious for the Nazis (in their pursuit of state as god), and economic for the Japanese.
Most US interventions have been about money. Let's see: 1898, money. World War I, money, World War II - the opportunity for an American dynasty was definately a factor in Roosevelt's decision making. Korea, Viet Nam - money (capitalism vs communism), Iraq I - money, Iraq II - money (we hope, although, it could actually be a religious war).
So... as far as the bloodiest wars being religious, that's just not true.
I don't like the way RIAA is doing things, I really do not.
But...
I get 10 emails a day with virus attachments. Last night I had someone try and buy my product with a stolen credit card and about once a week my bank calls me to check and see if someone stole mine. Every web site has to take unusual coding practices to protect against "Anonymous Cowards"...
I think that enough is enough. I think the disadvantages of anonymity have proven themselves to outweigh the advantages. We have to eliminate anonymous activity on the internet in order to save it.
Let's see, a central server, users connect to exchange addresses, they talk peer to peer.
Trusted Computer Means More Freedom?
on
Trusted Computing
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· Score: 1
Right now, the Internet stifles artists because writers have a medium that does not allow them to collect money for their content. Anyone can copy a web page or even an ebook.
But, if there was a mechanism for safely charging for web content, then, suddenly a real independent publishing would emerge. The makers of the trusted software would want everyone to buy it, so, everyone would become or could become a trusted document author.
I used to be in favor of anonymity on the Internet. Now, I'm dead against, so long as everyone's identity is always known. That is, the government might know my messages, but I, or actually -we-, would know the identities of every person working in the government.
History has shown, time and time again, where institutions and cultures are more transparent, society is better off. I think people need to learn for themselves to rise above their perceptions of what they need to be. You have to stand for something.
Already you see in corporate America the trend to put the "identity" genie back into the bottle. You routinely get corporations trying to cut back on email, cut back on archiving of email. These are not initiatives to save disk space. These are initiatives to subvert the truth and hide things.
Let them make an Internet that audits all communication. Let them make it so that it is technologically impossible to impersonate anyone and that no man may hide. Governments will fall, before the citizenry is oppressed.
Mono can't succeed because it requires that Linux make their O/S look and act like Windows. Linux is doing fine as long as it is operating under its own agenda, but, as soon as it tries to out-Microsoft, they will be chasing a moving target with 45 billion dollars in the bank.
There's much ado about the power of open source to produce good quality software. And, maybe it's true. But even if open source were decidedly superior from a features and reliability perspective than closed source projects, there's no reason that a large company like MS could not use open source techniques for its own projects. They have email and version control and group software just as much as the free software community does.
In a game where Microsoft is setting the developmental agenda for an API, is driving the actual form factor of computers themselves, then, Linux's only real shot, and, the shot of every MS competitor, is to, dare I say, "innovate", in that, one should not try and beat MS to where MS is trying to go. Rather, one should do something completely different.
Putting.NET on Linux defeats all of that. It makes Linux another Windows platform and frankly there's a lot in.NET framework that you may -not- want Linux to do. Do you want to mandate that all real file systems support file change notification? Do you want MS style processes? Do you want MS style graphics model? Are you ready to give up on Open G/L and go with Direct3D.NET? What of joysticks and mice and cards? Do you want Linux to have to be compatible with.NET's initiatives? Or do you want Linux to be Linux?
WHY DO YOU EVEN WANT LINUX TO BE A CORPORATE OPERATING SYSTEM.
Where's the RESEARCH in your open source RESEARCH O/S?
WHY DESTROY AN ACADEMIA CULTURE SOLELY TO SPITE MICROSOFT?
Have the imagination to do something different and something new. Copying the Windows U/I to Linux seems such a waste of time? Is the desktop GUI MS makes really that invincibile that it should be cloned? Now you are trying to clone.NET? And here I thought Larry Wall was a more interesting fellow than Anders Heidelberg (sp?).
Stop personifying the planet. It does not "waste its resources" on anyone. There is no such thing as mother earth. The earth is a giant rock that settled out of a bunch of dust some 4.5 billion years ago. It does not care if you exist and the only thing, really, that mankind could do to really end the existence of the earth would be either enlarge the sun or smash the moon into it. Neither is going to happen any time soon.
There is no contract with the earth. The earth does not have any agreement with or understanding with humanity. Whether you spray DDT in your backyard and say mother nature is a bitch, or, build a lovely shrine in concert with the inner cycles of kazat, will not change the probability that a meteorite could hit you, that there might be an earth quake, that the crust could fracture or the yellowstone supervolcano might erupt. The earth doesn't care. If you think it does, you might as well take one on the chin and throw a virgin into the volcano. Or, better still, throw yourself in and let some SUV driving slob have the virgin instead!
You just know that in the Matrix they will be saved by some cute and furry creatures at the end that will immediately go on sale in stores everywhere on November 6.
Watch Star Wars Episode III come out a winner and the Matrix Revolution turn out to be a dud.:-)
People have invested a lot of money in this company, and for doing so, they have the right to expect it will succeed no matter what secondary concerns there are about competition.
Ideally, the corporate system should produce stable companies with guaranteed returns. Thus, old ideas of competition and free enterprise and in some cases even speech should give way for the greater good of social stability.
In that light, DMCA busting students and other corporate critics are dangerous revolutionaries, and we should shoot them all.
Oh, don't play too close to the EM interference. It's probably the jews trying to pervert you away from the true message of jesus christ, which is, to vote for bush and stomp the ignorant moor.
It is totally bogus that a corporation should even be allowed to sue over speech. The issue here is not the DMCA, the issue is that a corporation is allowed to sue someone because of their opinion about that product.
Allowing corporations to silence critics effectively reduces competition. If there is no competition, there is no free enterprise. Ergo, the corporate system is as equally distorting of market realities as any socialist system.
Business owners and their Republican lackeys that allow companies to sue over speech are no different than the socialist blowhards they claim to oppose.
Thieves all, up against the wall with them when the revolution comes. Since we cannot criticize one CEO or one corporate lawyer, I propose we kill them all.
Really the whole issue has nothing to do with capitalism vs socialism as much as it has to do with putting one's hands in the cookie jar to the detriment of the entire business community.
Verisign, by stealing DNS, has done three things:
a) made dns a problem on people's minds where it wasn't before.
b) shown that anyone with the power to police dns has the power to abuse it.
c) opened the doors to other dns's and ultimately the fracture of the global internet.
The decisions to use DNS or any other naming technology is always one that is based on commercial practicality. If companies such as Verisign try and use the DNS to leverage their own services, then, why use DNS?
XML is a fad because the whole concept of universal interchange of data is getting locked down by the big vendors. Theoretically, yes, data in XML is portable, but, so are well documented binary structures and CSV.
To have real interoperability, you have to know how the software uses the data. To get that, you must have open source. Microsoft knows this, and that's why they are pushing XML as the "nirvana" of interoperability.
I'd invite anyone who argues against the above to look at an XMLized Word document...
Theoretically my software would be an improvement over a normal RDBMS because it is simpler to use. In an RDBMS, the fundamental construct of storage is a table. In mine, it's a time series. So I get some simplicity out of it. Instead of inserting and deleting rows, you set a particular time range to a value, or, you cut it out. You don't have to have a fixed interval width with each series, although the system does have a facility for bulk updates using a fixed interval width.
You can also associate meta information with each series as a time series. This meta information allows profiles to be queried in aggregrates. So, you can do things create some set of profiles, tag each with a set of attributes, and grab a total profile of all of those attributes. I throw in some sugar for doing time zone conversions.
My radical claim is that the convenience of the syntax and goodies for time series this outweighs a more general purpose RDBMS. I've gone to three jobs in a row where people are creating time series stuff, then aggregating by it, and so, the thought occurred to me that it might be useful to have something that, out of the box, does a bunch of time series stuff, and, eventually, also has graphing and alarming stuff with it too (next major release).
Am I correct? Is this a nutty idea? Maybe not and probably so, but, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!:-)
Overall I think the getting away from full blown rdbms is an idea worth exploring. The whole point of all this middle tier stuff and services a lot of us do is to hide the underlying database implementation from the rest of the system. SO, why can't there be a market for other domain specific databases? Yeah, mine's for better or for worse a closed source system running on the evil o/s, but, the idea of a domain specific database to jump start certain kinds of services is an -idea- that could certainly give Linux more room to grow, and more fronts to attack the organization on.
Doesn't the problem go away if we authenticate reply-to on all email from the server, and, isn't there already an unimplemented proposal to do this already?
Like, this is a problem that is already solved at least on paper, we just need major mail makers to do it...
Finally, doesn't IPV6 also solve this problem because you have MAC address buried in the IP?
PLUG: My shareware database is designed for this
on
The Smart Sensor Web
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Shameless plug:
My shareware database server is designed to capture loads of time series readings and serve them up. It's only $50 to license, and you can use a full blown version before you even do that.
The non-digital art world is amazing. The line of products that come out now are awesome. You have every possible pen, every possible paint, every possible medium. They even have photographic emulsion in a spray can so that you can expose images on 3d objects. It's way cool.
If you are in Philadelphia, do go to PEARLs (do you really need a better name than that!). They have a great selection of paper, ink, and other products.
Slashdot Mirror
1) It takes money to develop open source software. Even if it is not money from licensing, the money does come from somewhere. Most open source developers are developing on the dime of their companies. There is a cost to doing this.
2) Open source is genuinely not as polished as a commercial product, and products that do add that polish tend to drive up the cost of open source stuff. For example, Oracle on Linux is still more expensive than SQL Server on Windows Server, by about 5k per server.
3) Open source has yet to produce developmental tools as effective as
4) The Language Wars are on again, and C# is the opening salvo. I hate to admit it, because I really do love C++, but the latest specs for the next major version of C# are absolutely wonderful. C# developers are getting really good generics to go with a surprisingly well thought out framework.
It's a tall, tall order for open source to match MS in the IDE development. When it was just an editor that was one thing, but an editor that now knows about your class hierarchy as you key it in, real two way tools ala Delphi (by the guy that invented Delphi), and MS is putting together one remarkably coherent and solid offering in
If the weight of the language wars continues to favor MS, then Linux application development will become more costly than the equivalent of MS, source code, or no source code.
Ok, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but, not allowing the use of trademarks by competitors is really a bad idea. The US is wrong about USA PATRIOT and wrong to flaunt the UN, but, France is really wrong about this.
So there. Now we have two sets of stupid leaders.
and building space stations...
Ideally, we would just get even drunker and put a man on a mars, but, we have this stupid war on terrorism...
I agree. I think my country needs to go through a serious withdrawal from around the world and focus on making money.
Well, seeing that we've dropped 200 billion on Iraq II and have yet to recover any of the investment, the notion of Iraq II as part of a larger religious war to contain Islam does make sense.
Funny thing is, I agree with it. I guess it comes down to their way, way out there fanatics against our merely out there fanatics. Better they blow up stuff in Iraq then the USA.
Romans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Hittites, etc, all conquered in the name of economics. Somebody had gold, they took it. It was only the novel Israeli uprising of AD79, sparked by a refusal to pay taxes to the Roman god, that the notion of fighting for one's god was invented.
Even after that, the most successful empires were economically based. The Spanish were religious, yes, but, it was gold that sent them to the New World. Likely too the British had their notion of saving the world, but it was the lure of riches that sent them to India and Africa.
World War I was also an economic war. It was about access to trade for the then rising German empire. World War II was mixed. It was religious for the Nazis (in their pursuit of state as god), and economic for the Japanese.
Most US interventions have been about money. Let's see: 1898, money. World War I, money, World War II - the opportunity for an American dynasty was definately a factor in Roosevelt's decision making. Korea, Viet Nam - money (capitalism vs communism), Iraq I - money, Iraq II - money (we hope, although, it could actually be a religious war).
So... as far as the bloodiest wars being religious, that's just not true.
I don't like the way RIAA is doing things, I really do not.
But...
I get 10 emails a day with virus attachments. Last night I had someone try and buy my product with a stolen credit card and about once a week my bank calls me to check and see if someone stole mine. Every web site has to take unusual coding practices to protect against "Anonymous Cowards"...
I think that enough is enough. I think the disadvantages of anonymity have proven themselves to outweigh the advantages. We have to eliminate anonymous activity on the internet in order to save it.
Let's see, a central server, users connect to exchange addresses, they talk peer to peer.
Right now, the Internet stifles artists because writers have a medium that does not allow them to collect money for their content. Anyone can copy a web page or even an ebook.
But, if there was a mechanism for safely charging for web content, then, suddenly a real independent publishing would emerge. The makers of the trusted software would want everyone to buy it, so, everyone would become or could become a trusted document author.
I used to be in favor of anonymity on the Internet. Now, I'm dead against, so long as everyone's identity is always known. That is, the government might know my messages, but I, or actually -we-, would know the identities of every person working in the government.
History has shown, time and time again, where institutions and cultures are more transparent, society is better off. I think people need to learn for themselves to rise above their perceptions of what they need to be. You have to stand for something.
Already you see in corporate America the trend to put the "identity" genie back into the bottle. You routinely get corporations trying to cut back on email, cut back on archiving of email. These are not initiatives to save disk space. These are initiatives to subvert the truth and hide things.
Let them make an Internet that audits all communication. Let them make it so that it is technologically impossible to impersonate anyone and that no man may hide. Governments will fall, before the citizenry is oppressed.
You cannot have a dictatorship without lies.
Mono can't succeed because it requires that Linux make their O/S look and act like Windows. Linux is doing fine as long as it is operating under its own agenda, but, as soon as it tries to out-Microsoft, they will be chasing a moving target with 45 billion dollars in the bank.
There's much ado about the power of open source to produce good quality software. And, maybe it's true. But even if open source were decidedly superior from a features and reliability perspective than closed source projects, there's no reason that a large company like MS could not use open source techniques for its own projects. They have email and version control and group software just as much as the free software community does.
In a game where Microsoft is setting the developmental agenda for an API, is driving the actual form factor of computers themselves, then, Linux's only real shot, and, the shot of every MS competitor, is to, dare I say, "innovate", in that, one should not try and beat MS to where MS is trying to go. Rather, one should do something completely different.
Putting
WHY DO YOU EVEN WANT LINUX TO BE A CORPORATE OPERATING SYSTEM.
Where's the RESEARCH in your open source RESEARCH O/S?
WHY DESTROY AN ACADEMIA CULTURE SOLELY TO SPITE MICROSOFT?
Have the imagination to do something different and something new. Copying the Windows U/I to Linux seems such a waste of time? Is the desktop GUI MS makes really that invincibile that it should be cloned? Now you are trying to clone
Stop personifying the planet. It does not "waste its resources" on anyone. There is no such thing as mother earth. The earth is a giant rock that settled out of a bunch of dust some 4.5 billion years ago. It does not care if you exist and the only thing, really, that mankind could do to really end the existence of the earth would be either enlarge the sun or smash the moon into it. Neither is going to happen any time soon.
There is no contract with the earth. The earth does not have any agreement with or understanding with humanity. Whether you spray DDT in your backyard and say mother nature is a bitch, or, build a lovely shrine in concert with the inner cycles of kazat, will not change the probability that a meteorite could hit you, that there might be an earth quake, that the crust could fracture or the yellowstone supervolcano might erupt. The earth doesn't care. If you think it does, you might as well take one on the chin and throw a virgin into the volcano. Or, better still, throw yourself in and let some SUV driving slob have the virgin instead!
You just know that in the Matrix they will be saved by some cute and furry creatures at the end that will immediately go on sale in stores everywhere on November 6.
Watch Star Wars Episode III come out a winner and the Matrix Revolution turn out to be a dud.
I have a troll in favor, a troll against, what happens to my Karma, I do not know.
People have invested a lot of money in this company, and for doing so, they have the right to expect it will succeed no matter what secondary concerns there are about competition.
Ideally, the corporate system should produce stable companies with guaranteed returns. Thus, old ideas of competition and free enterprise and in some cases even speech should give way for the greater good of social stability.
In that light, DMCA busting students and other corporate critics are dangerous revolutionaries, and we should shoot them all.
Oh, don't play too close to the EM interference. It's probably the jews trying to pervert you away from the true message of jesus christ, which is, to vote for bush and stomp the ignorant moor.
It is totally bogus that a corporation should even be allowed to sue over speech. The issue here is not the DMCA, the issue is that a corporation is allowed to sue someone because of their opinion about that product.
Allowing corporations to silence critics effectively reduces competition. If there is no competition, there is no free enterprise. Ergo, the corporate system is as equally distorting of market realities as any socialist system.
Business owners and their Republican lackeys that allow companies to sue over speech are no different than the socialist blowhards they claim to oppose.
Thieves all, up against the wall with them when the revolution comes. Since we cannot criticize one CEO or one corporate lawyer, I propose we kill them all.
Really the whole issue has nothing to do with capitalism vs socialism as much as it has to do with putting one's hands in the cookie jar to the detriment of the entire business community.
Verisign, by stealing DNS, has done three things:
a) made dns a problem on people's minds where it wasn't before.
b) shown that anyone with the power to police dns has the power to abuse it.
c) opened the doors to other dns's and ultimately the fracture of the global internet.
The decisions to use DNS or any other naming technology is always one that is based on commercial practicality. If companies such as Verisign try and use the DNS to leverage their own services, then, why use DNS?
I need to have my 1000hp car to get home quickly to my 200fps game and I can't do well at that unless I have a 400m/bit mouse.
If someone made a USB2 mouse that sampled at the above resolution and sold it for $200 bucks, there would be plenty of people to buy it!
XML is a fad because the whole concept of universal interchange of data is getting locked down by the big vendors. Theoretically, yes, data in XML is portable, but, so are well documented binary structures and CSV.
To have real interoperability, you have to know how the software uses the data. To get that, you must have open source. Microsoft knows this, and that's why they are pushing XML as the "nirvana" of interoperability.
I'd invite anyone who argues against the above to look at an XMLized Word document...
Theoretically my software would be an improvement over a normal RDBMS because it is simpler to use. In an RDBMS, the fundamental construct of storage is a table. In mine, it's a time series. So I get some simplicity out of it. Instead of inserting and deleting rows, you set a particular time range to a value, or, you cut it out. You don't have to have a fixed interval width with each series, although the system does have a facility for bulk updates using a fixed interval width.
You can also associate meta information with each series as a time series. This meta information allows profiles to be queried in aggregrates. So, you can do things create some set of profiles, tag each with a set of attributes, and grab a total profile of all of those attributes. I throw in some sugar for doing time zone conversions.
My radical claim is that the convenience of the syntax and goodies for time series this outweighs a more general purpose RDBMS. I've gone to three jobs in a row where people are creating time series stuff, then aggregating by it, and so, the thought occurred to me that it might be useful to have something that, out of the box, does a bunch of time series stuff, and, eventually, also has graphing and alarming stuff with it too (next major release).
Am I correct? Is this a nutty idea? Maybe not and probably so, but, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Overall I think the getting away from full blown rdbms is an idea worth exploring. The whole point of all this middle tier stuff and services a lot of us do is to hide the underlying database implementation from the rest of the system. SO, why can't there be a market for other domain specific databases? Yeah, mine's for better or for worse a closed source system running on the evil o/s, but, the idea of a domain specific database to jump start certain kinds of services is an -idea- that could certainly give Linux more room to grow, and more fronts to attack the organization on.
I apologize.
Doesn't the problem go away if we authenticate reply-to on all email from the server, and, isn't there already an unimplemented proposal to do this already?
Like, this is a problem that is already solved at least on paper, we just need major mail makers to do it...
Finally, doesn't IPV6 also solve this problem because you have MAC address buried in the IP?
Shameless plug:
My shareware database server is designed to capture loads of time series readings and serve them up. It's only $50 to license, and you can use a full blown version before you even do that.
My wife is an artist of the old school.
The non-digital art world is amazing. The line of products that come out now are awesome. You have every possible pen, every possible paint, every possible medium. They even have photographic emulsion in a spray can so that you can expose images on 3d objects. It's way cool.
If you are in Philadelphia, do go to PEARLs (do you really need a better name than that!). They have a great selection of paper, ink, and other products.
All about things like cheap ways to get your business noticed: matchbook advertising, etc. always made think about your message.