Microsoft now has onee of the largest R&D Departments in the industry and every year there products advance. Personally I don't see much difference between Linux now and Linux 1990 except for the obvious advancements that all OS have.
So what were the advances that Microsoft has had in the last 10 years that were not "obvious advancements that all OS have"? Would that be the poor security model, the difficulty of customization, or the unreliability? I think both Windows and Linux have improved immensely in that length of time, but Linux has been moving a lot faster and (barring application support, which still isn't complete) has improved more to become a better system right now IMHO.
I droped Linux in 1992 because it could not keep up with my needs as a System Administrator (and I got money to spend on Solaris).
Perhaps you should try it again - compared to 10 years ago it is easier to use, highly configurable, and offers a couple desktops that will knock your socks off. It's been my experience that Linux software advances in a matter of months or weeks, not years.
Granted, this is could only be a crime if a person actually downloads an illegal file.
Well, technically the site that publishes the illegal mp3's is in the wrong, not the person who downloads it. Copyright law applies to those who publish without permission, not those who just read or listen to the media. Of course, this means that you are still guilty of copyright law violation even if no one downloads your mp3s.
Kids throwing bricks off of overpasses aren't trying to kill people, they're just stupid and think that it's funny. Nevertheless they still do kill people sometimes, and rightly get prosecuted for it whenever they are caught whether or not there was an actual death. Just being stupid doesn't absolve you from culpability for doing the wrong things, especially when you could reasonably have been expected to know that your actions were a bad idea.
The real tragedy about the lack of security present on the Internet today (mostly due to the homogenization of most end-user software, at least in quantitative terms) is that thoughtless people can affect thousands of others around the world with their actions. To be fair, most users aren't really to blame for the poor security of the products they use, but on the other hand if there were more penalties for spreading viruses, maybe the public would be more interested in using products which are more secure. The buying public gets the security it asks for, and so far it hasn't been asking.
I think there's a difference if it's a matter of life and death, though. States have different laws on the basis of whether you can shoot to kill someone who is even robbing your house, for example. Cracking attempts like the ones in the article are really more like burglary or vandalism than attempted murder; so just attacking the attacker's machine in the same way isn't really self-defense anymore - it's just vigilante justice.
IMHO, the correct Internet-accepted way of dealing with this would combine instantaneous but temporary IP blackholing (including systems upstream of the victim) combined with quick notification of the responsible sysadmins. I haven't heard yet of a protocol that can do this, but the Internet immune system may develop it in the next year or so if DoS attacks continue to be so prevalent. This solution would follow the tradition of internet systems as separate, sovereign fiefdoms that can choose to exchange traffic or not, but aren't really governed by any laws beyond that. The article is correct that if you wait for the FBI to deal with an attack, you will be waiting a while. Better to have agreements with your upstream providers so that you and they can react quickly and effectively to an attack.
You would think they would fix that for an official legal document - since court documents are basically formatted to look as much like typewritten text as possible, why not just leave it in ASCII and move along?
I know Microsoft isn't likely to change, but I thought I'd bring up how stupid this whole '?' thing makes them look, as well as many websites that are generated by MS software.
My understanding (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong) is that the protocol is unencumbered and standard, but the standard only addresses decoding the compressed audio. Encoding is more of a black art, as there are a bunch of different techniques which can be used, some of which are patented (Fraunhofer, etc.).
So I don't think you will see any lawsuits over mp3 players, but if the specific mp3 encoding technologies that bladeenc uses were patented and the patent is valid, the author might have some legal problems.
Question: is open source a liability in this case? If you couldn't see someone's source code to see how they implemented something like this, how would you determine if it was a patent violation?
Just remember, you cannot be arrested for failing to show ID to a police officer when requested (Even if arrested!) UNLESS you are driving OR a passenger in a car.
You need a driver's license if you are a passenger? Are you sure about that?
The U.S. does have a form of jury selection, although maybe it's so dissimilar to the British system that we're really not talking about the same thing. In the U.S. prospective jurors are brought in, interviewed by counsel for the plaintiff and the defendant as well as the judge, and normally those counsels have a certain number of chances to remove someone from the jury if they think the prospective juror is too biased. The pool of prospective jurors is either all registered voters in the area, or everyone who has a driver's license in the area (I'm not sure which; maybe it's different by state). So while the jury isn't built up by selection, it is whittled down to the correct size through a process of selective elimination of some jurors.
Re:I'm in China, and I would like to say ...
on
Censorship In China
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· Score: 1
Those are all very good points. I guess my expectation is that capitalism will bring Western goods to the Chinese people, and eventually Western ideas along with it. While you can have capitalism under those different forms of government, the ideas of fair market price and prizing efficiency which are embedded in the capitalistic system ultimately lead people to a more egalitarian view of commerce, and ultimately of their entire world. When the people see what their government has done to them, I predict at least a velvet revolution, and possibly a violent one. It may depend on the harvest that year. That sounds really cold-blooded, but ultimately the citizens of a country are responsible for their government, and they bear the ultimate responsibility to change it for the better whether by working within the system, or by replacing the system.
The conditions in Russia are awful, and I blame the west (western Europe and the U.S.) for that. Maybe we should have spent more time emphasizing democratic ideals and a strong stance on individual rights and liberties, rather than just trying to bail out their economy. Their economy would probably right itself overnight if they had the proper laws against corruption and crime and those laws were policed and enforced correctly.
Let's face it -- truly free code has no copyright or licenses, and therefore truly free code can be opened or closed at will.
Agreed. But I don't see that this is a free speech issue (I'm mortified that I spelled "speech" wrong in my previous post, BTW), because anyone can read, discuss, and distribute GPL'd code. Maybe you can't distribute binaries that you make from that code without any restrictions, but that's commerce or copyright law, not freedom of speech. In fact, the main way to violate the GPL (by not distributing source along with binaries) would be anti-free speech, because now you aren't passing along the author's thoughts (embodied in code) to your users. I could make the argument that the GPL in fact encourages free speech, because anything you say in the code has to be distributed to anyone who gets the binary. No one can use your work without also passing along your writing.
So yes the code isn't free in the sense that it's public domain and anything can be done with it, but I think it's a stretch to say that RMS has anything against the free interchange of ideas. He's probably done more to encourage that than almost anyone in the last 20 years. I certainly haven't heard him call for censorship of those who have violated the GPL, for example - he usually just wants them to straighten up and fly right with respect to licensing issues.
Re:Let's plunder it for parts
on
AtheOS
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the info - I stand corrected.
Although I think my original point still stands - borrowing code is the name of the game when it's possible (allowing for licensing issues, etc.), rather than being an exception case.
So you can name an instance of Stallman acting against free speach? Let's hear it.
[OT] So how did this get a score of 1? AC's start at 0, and this doesn't have a moderation tag like "Insightful" next to it. Just "(Score:1)".
Re:I'm in China, and I would like to say ...
on
Censorship In China
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· Score: 1
you see china is doing a lot to open up, e.g. here in Hong Kong sar, we have a pretty free society.
I'm glad that freedom exists in Hong Kong, but that's more a result of the British than of the mainland government, isn't it? OK, so they haven't acted to reduce freedoms to the level of the mainland yet, but they haven't exactly been increasing the amount of freedom in Hong Kong either.
I'm in favor of free trade with China because capitalism has the potential to sidestep this "one step at a time" attitude that the Chinese government has, and go right to the people. Sure, capitalism has problems too, but the people can deal with that themselves once they can freely elect their leaders and determine their own nation's policies.
To be honest, I continue to be amazed that any government can keep 1 billion+ people living in those conditions and stave off a revolution (a real democratic one) for as long as they have. I guess it's true that you can get used to anything, once you try it for long enough.
Re:Let's plunder it for parts
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AtheOS
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· Score: 1
Where are you drawing the line between "another OS" and "Linux or *BSD"? My understanding is that Linux based its TCP/IP stack off of a BSD, so this sort of "bolting on" has happened before. That's how things are supposed to get better in the open source world.
Of course, I admit to a knee-jerk distaste for "plundering it for parts", but on the other hand if the windowing system becomes popular with the Linux crowd, that will translate into more applications that the Atheos users can enjoy. The real issue isn't other OSes reusing Atheos code, it's whether Atheos can get enough developer mindshare. I think in this case, though, that if one was an open source developer one would already know about Linux, *BSD, etc., and would have already been working on one of those if you wanted to. So Linux et al. aren't likely to steal Atheos developers, but Atheos might attract Linux developers. In that regard, making the front page of/. probably didn't hurt:)
I don't think KT was originally hosted by LinuxCare, so maybe someone else would be happy to host it. I'm sure one of the major distribution vendors would be interested.
I'd miss it if it didn't exist too, because I like to keep up on the changes and some really interesting architecture discussions, but I don't want to read 50 messages (or however many) a day. KT provides a pretty good executive summary, provided in layman's terms since the KT author isn't really a kernel hacker himself.
So Metallica should go after all hundred thousand users and slap them with a fine...
Exactly. But that's not just a good idea - it's the law too. Those who possess copyright have always had to track down and individually prosecute those that they believe have infringed on their copyrights. It's only in recent years that they've been trying to turn the tables and make service providers either censor their users, or just make the service providers liable. The reality is that if you feel that 300000 people have wronged you, then legally you will need to go after 300000 people in court to get satisfaction.
Sure, just suing Napster, or Yahoo, or Demon would be easier and cheaper for those that are defending copyrights, but that doesn't make it right and that doesn't make it legal. I'm happy to hear that Penthouse is going about this the legal and ethical way, rather than just suing the pants off of this guy's ISP.
We must help him against censors, after all, nazis are just peoples with a PR problem, not really bad guys"
I don't think there's any question that they were really bad guys. But all people have the right to think and to speak their own opinions (at least in the political arena) without government interference. It's only when people take action on such horrible ideas that government needs to stop them. If you're willing to stop some people from speaking just because you don't agree with them, maybe next you'll be interested in a nice, warm book bonfire in the town square? So went the Nazis, too.
The only way to retain any freedom is to fight for and keep every freedom that is the inalienable right of all people.
If they were so smart, how come they agreed to take stock options? Doesn't look so smart now, does it:) I guess it depends on whether you consider gambling to be a smart thing to do, or a dumb thing.
In the US, you can spew hate-speak at strangers, march in a white hood and burn a cross - and you're expressing your views. When Milosevicz goes on an 'ethnic cleansing spree', the US is up in arms, standing up for the underdog. Hypocricy, elevated to an art form.
There's a difference between speaking of hate and acting on it. In the U.S., speach is protected but your actions are answerable under the law. Anyone who actually does "ethnic cleansing" in the U.S. is punished by the law. So I'm not sure where the hypocrisy is here...
They pay for now, because they work for now. But the click-through rate is dropping every year, so eventually you will either not be able to sell advertising, or you will make so little that it will no longer be possible to support a web site on advertising. Maybe you could support a Yahoo.com on ads, but not a small community site like/., etc.
It's true that paying only for click-throughs rather than impressions puts the whole advertiser relationship on a more objective level, but the click-through rate on the web is continuing to drop. Thus as that process continues it will become more and more difficult to fund a web site through advertising. Sure, there's profit for every click, but when you only get a (relatively speaking) small number of clicks you aren't going to be able to pay for bandwidth with that. In other words, don't spend it all in the same place:)
Well, it works for you until your advertisers realize that they aren't getting any click-through, and stop providing you with revenue. If banners stop being a good advertising vehicle, nobody will be paying site operators to display them.
The issue for most people isn't that the two gunmen were right to take some sort of revenge for being persecuted in high school. Very few people here (IMHO) would agree with that or would advocate some sort of vigilante geek justice.
The issue is whether the fact that the killers wore black or played Doom is enough reason to turn against everyone who wears black or plays Doom. I don't defend the killers actions, but I do think that there was a backlash against such "abnormal" pursuits (or even against kids that were just "too quiet") on the part of mainstream society. That backlash against anything which isn't 100% Main Street USA is what most people are worked up about (well, until this whole/. copyright thing...).
Slashdot Mirror
So what were the advances that Microsoft has had in the last 10 years that were not "obvious advancements that all OS have"? Would that be the poor security model, the difficulty of customization, or the unreliability? I think both Windows and Linux have improved immensely in that length of time, but Linux has been moving a lot faster and (barring application support, which still isn't complete) has improved more to become a better system right now IMHO.
Perhaps you should try it again - compared to 10 years ago it is easier to use, highly configurable, and offers a couple desktops that will knock your socks off. It's been my experience that Linux software advances in a matter of months or weeks, not years.
I don't think any help from Linux zealots has been necessary - Windows has plenty of built-in features that undermine it on their own :)
Well, technically the site that publishes the illegal mp3's is in the wrong, not the person who downloads it. Copyright law applies to those who publish without permission, not those who just read or listen to the media. Of course, this means that you are still guilty of copyright law violation even if no one downloads your mp3s.
Kids throwing bricks off of overpasses aren't trying to kill people, they're just stupid and think that it's funny. Nevertheless they still do kill people sometimes, and rightly get prosecuted for it whenever they are caught whether or not there was an actual death. Just being stupid doesn't absolve you from culpability for doing the wrong things, especially when you could reasonably have been expected to know that your actions were a bad idea.
The real tragedy about the lack of security present on the Internet today (mostly due to the homogenization of most end-user software, at least in quantitative terms) is that thoughtless people can affect thousands of others around the world with their actions. To be fair, most users aren't really to blame for the poor security of the products they use, but on the other hand if there were more penalties for spreading viruses, maybe the public would be more interested in using products which are more secure. The buying public gets the security it asks for, and so far it hasn't been asking.
I think there's a difference if it's a matter of life and death, though. States have different laws on the basis of whether you can shoot to kill someone who is even robbing your house, for example. Cracking attempts like the ones in the article are really more like burglary or vandalism than attempted murder; so just attacking the attacker's machine in the same way isn't really self-defense anymore - it's just vigilante justice.
IMHO, the correct Internet-accepted way of dealing with this would combine instantaneous but temporary IP blackholing (including systems upstream of the victim) combined with quick notification of the responsible sysadmins. I haven't heard yet of a protocol that can do this, but the Internet immune system may develop it in the next year or so if DoS attacks continue to be so prevalent. This solution would follow the tradition of internet systems as separate, sovereign fiefdoms that can choose to exchange traffic or not, but aren't really governed by any laws beyond that. The article is correct that if you wait for the FBI to deal with an attack, you will be waiting a while. Better to have agreements with your upstream providers so that you and they can react quickly and effectively to an attack.
You would think they would fix that for an official legal document - since court documents are basically formatted to look as much like typewritten text as possible, why not just leave it in ASCII and move along?
I know Microsoft isn't likely to change, but I thought I'd bring up how stupid this whole '?' thing makes them look, as well as many websites that are generated by MS software.
My understanding (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong) is that the protocol is unencumbered and standard, but the standard only addresses decoding the compressed audio. Encoding is more of a black art, as there are a bunch of different techniques which can be used, some of which are patented (Fraunhofer, etc.).
So I don't think you will see any lawsuits over mp3 players, but if the specific mp3 encoding technologies that bladeenc uses were patented and the patent is valid, the author might have some legal problems.
Question: is open source a liability in this case? If you couldn't see someone's source code to see how they implemented something like this, how would you determine if it was a patent violation?
Very good points. I only question one:
You need a driver's license if you are a passenger? Are you sure about that?
Burns: Smithers, release the robotic Richard Simmons.
The U.S. does have a form of jury selection, although maybe it's so dissimilar to the British system that we're really not talking about the same thing. In the U.S. prospective jurors are brought in, interviewed by counsel for the plaintiff and the defendant as well as the judge, and normally those counsels have a certain number of chances to remove someone from the jury if they think the prospective juror is too biased. The pool of prospective jurors is either all registered voters in the area, or everyone who has a driver's license in the area (I'm not sure which; maybe it's different by state). So while the jury isn't built up by selection, it is whittled down to the correct size through a process of selective elimination of some jurors.
Those are all very good points. I guess my expectation is that capitalism will bring Western goods to the Chinese people, and eventually Western ideas along with it. While you can have capitalism under those different forms of government, the ideas of fair market price and prizing efficiency which are embedded in the capitalistic system ultimately lead people to a more egalitarian view of commerce, and ultimately of their entire world. When the people see what their government has done to them, I predict at least a velvet revolution, and possibly a violent one. It may depend on the harvest that year. That sounds really cold-blooded, but ultimately the citizens of a country are responsible for their government, and they bear the ultimate responsibility to change it for the better whether by working within the system, or by replacing the system.
The conditions in Russia are awful, and I blame the west (western Europe and the U.S.) for that. Maybe we should have spent more time emphasizing democratic ideals and a strong stance on individual rights and liberties, rather than just trying to bail out their economy. Their economy would probably right itself overnight if they had the proper laws against corruption and crime and those laws were policed and enforced correctly.
Agreed. But I don't see that this is a free speech issue (I'm mortified that I spelled "speech" wrong in my previous post, BTW), because anyone can read, discuss, and distribute GPL'd code. Maybe you can't distribute binaries that you make from that code without any restrictions, but that's commerce or copyright law, not freedom of speech. In fact, the main way to violate the GPL (by not distributing source along with binaries) would be anti-free speech, because now you aren't passing along the author's thoughts (embodied in code) to your users. I could make the argument that the GPL in fact encourages free speech, because anything you say in the code has to be distributed to anyone who gets the binary. No one can use your work without also passing along your writing.
So yes the code isn't free in the sense that it's public domain and anything can be done with it, but I think it's a stretch to say that RMS has anything against the free interchange of ideas. He's probably done more to encourage that than almost anyone in the last 20 years. I certainly haven't heard him call for censorship of those who have violated the GPL, for example - he usually just wants them to straighten up and fly right with respect to licensing issues.
Thanks for the info - I stand corrected.
Although I think my original point still stands - borrowing code is the name of the game when it's possible (allowing for licensing issues, etc.), rather than being an exception case.
So you can name an instance of Stallman acting against free speach? Let's hear it.
[OT] So how did this get a score of 1? AC's start at 0, and this doesn't have a moderation tag like "Insightful" next to it. Just "(Score:1)".
I'm glad that freedom exists in Hong Kong, but that's more a result of the British than of the mainland government, isn't it? OK, so they haven't acted to reduce freedoms to the level of the mainland yet, but they haven't exactly been increasing the amount of freedom in Hong Kong either.
I'm in favor of free trade with China because capitalism has the potential to sidestep this "one step at a time" attitude that the Chinese government has, and go right to the people. Sure, capitalism has problems too, but the people can deal with that themselves once they can freely elect their leaders and determine their own nation's policies.
To be honest, I continue to be amazed that any government can keep 1 billion+ people living in those conditions and stave off a revolution (a real democratic one) for as long as they have. I guess it's true that you can get used to anything, once you try it for long enough.
Where are you drawing the line between "another OS" and "Linux or *BSD"? My understanding is that Linux based its TCP/IP stack off of a BSD, so this sort of "bolting on" has happened before. That's how things are supposed to get better in the open source world.
Of course, I admit to a knee-jerk distaste for "plundering it for parts", but on the other hand if the windowing system becomes popular with the Linux crowd, that will translate into more applications that the Atheos users can enjoy. The real issue isn't other OSes reusing Atheos code, it's whether Atheos can get enough developer mindshare. I think in this case, though, that if one was an open source developer one would already know about Linux, *BSD, etc., and would have already been working on one of those if you wanted to. So Linux et al. aren't likely to steal Atheos developers, but Atheos might attract Linux developers. In that regard, making the front page of /. probably didn't hurt :)
I don't think KT was originally hosted by LinuxCare, so maybe someone else would be happy to host it. I'm sure one of the major distribution vendors would be interested.
I'd miss it if it didn't exist too, because I like to keep up on the changes and some really interesting architecture discussions, but I don't want to read 50 messages (or however many) a day. KT provides a pretty good executive summary, provided in layman's terms since the KT author isn't really a kernel hacker himself.
Exactly. But that's not just a good idea - it's the law too. Those who possess copyright have always had to track down and individually prosecute those that they believe have infringed on their copyrights. It's only in recent years that they've been trying to turn the tables and make service providers either censor their users, or just make the service providers liable. The reality is that if you feel that 300000 people have wronged you, then legally you will need to go after 300000 people in court to get satisfaction.
Sure, just suing Napster, or Yahoo, or Demon would be easier and cheaper for those that are defending copyrights, but that doesn't make it right and that doesn't make it legal. I'm happy to hear that Penthouse is going about this the legal and ethical way, rather than just suing the pants off of this guy's ISP.
I don't think there's any question that they were really bad guys. But all people have the right to think and to speak their own opinions (at least in the political arena) without government interference. It's only when people take action on such horrible ideas that government needs to stop them. If you're willing to stop some people from speaking just because you don't agree with them, maybe next you'll be interested in a nice, warm book bonfire in the town square? So went the Nazis, too.
The only way to retain any freedom is to fight for and keep every freedom that is the inalienable right of all people.
If they were so smart, how come they agreed to take stock options? Doesn't look so smart now, does it :) I guess it depends on whether you consider gambling to be a smart thing to do, or a dumb thing.
There's a difference between speaking of hate and acting on it. In the U.S., speach is protected but your actions are answerable under the law. Anyone who actually does "ethnic cleansing" in the U.S. is punished by the law. So I'm not sure where the hypocrisy is here...
They pay for now, because they work for now. But the click-through rate is dropping every year, so eventually you will either not be able to sell advertising, or you will make so little that it will no longer be possible to support a web site on advertising. Maybe you could support a Yahoo.com on ads, but not a small community site like /., etc.
It's true that paying only for click-throughs rather than impressions puts the whole advertiser relationship on a more objective level, but the click-through rate on the web is continuing to drop. Thus as that process continues it will become more and more difficult to fund a web site through advertising. Sure, there's profit for every click, but when you only get a (relatively speaking) small number of clicks you aren't going to be able to pay for bandwidth with that. In other words, don't spend it all in the same place :)
Well, it works for you until your advertisers realize that they aren't getting any click-through, and stop providing you with revenue. If banners stop being a good advertising vehicle, nobody will be paying site operators to display them.
The issue for most people isn't that the two gunmen were right to take some sort of revenge for being persecuted in high school. Very few people here (IMHO) would agree with that or would advocate some sort of vigilante geek justice.
The issue is whether the fact that the killers wore black or played Doom is enough reason to turn against everyone who wears black or plays Doom. I don't defend the killers actions, but I do think that there was a backlash against such "abnormal" pursuits (or even against kids that were just "too quiet") on the part of mainstream society. That backlash against anything which isn't 100% Main Street USA is what most people are worked up about (well, until this whole /. copyright thing...).