Ummm...I've been involved with more than a few folks spending great chunks of money on software and can't recall any of them ever asking what language was used. Or, frankly, needing to ask. What they need to know is the vendor's track record, financial status, support record, etc. Companies care that problems will be fixed per their schedule, not the language used to code the stuff in the first place. Buying a $50,000 QBasic program is just fine as long as the vendor can provide QBasic coders.
Ummm...my guess is that most individual Office users are using it in the office. That means the boss paid for it and the PC it lives on. Most folks won't be incentivized to switch from one piece of "free" software to something else that mimics it.
If the boss intends to upgrade existing software, that's a window to preach about OOo. Best shot, though, is try to introduce it to people launching a new operation and staffing up, with no investment in legacy software.
Define "kid". Teen-agers? Nah. Let them futz around with adult tools.
What's missing, though, are simple tools usable by children whose age is still indicated with a single digit. These guys don't need to read about programming logic. They need to see logic manifested on screen as a result of something they typed on the keyboard. E.g. typing in a few lines of code and seeing your name printed over and over will teach someone about looping a lot faster than reading pages in a book. Ditto creating and opening files, etc. This is the kind of exploration that young kids need to begin to understand the basics of programming.
This points to interpreters, not compilers. And, frankly, since we're tryng to introduce children to programming and not trying to train legions of new professional programmers to fill even more cubicles (as most posts here seem to take as their premise), something like a nice interpretive BASIC would be just fine.
>> It's impossible to know if you'll always have the expertise to maintain all your wonderful customizations and since, if the operating system can't be made to work, everything fails, it's extremely important that your os configuration be very transparent.
Hear, Hear!!
I've had the experience of having someone else's highly customized creations dumped in my managerial lap after the customizer bolted for greener pastures. We had to bring in someone on contract to rebuild from scratch.
Running the slickest software is all well and good, but the people who pay the bills and salaries value reliability and trust more than they value squeezing out the last n'th of performance.
I continue to be amazed that people seem to be surprised and offended that other people do everything within their power to profit from their work and their creations. It was as natural for Edison to try to control the market in products he made possible as it is for someone who punches a time clock to try to control the only thing he can sell: his labor.
Get over it. No one is going to change the world or human nature just so a few people can get free music.
Easier, Better Way for NSA To Get a Linux Backdoor
on
Would You Use SELinux?
·
· Score: 1
Being a little paranoid about NSA putting sneaky code into their own little obscure distribution isn't justified. Why would NSA backdoor something almost no one will use?
If the NSA wants to get a backdoor into Linux, there are easier and more traditional ways to do it. A sufficient amount of money passed to the appropriate developers and commercial Linux vendors would do the trick quite nicely.
Good point. Much has been made about SCO's apparent release under GPL of Linux code allegedly contaminated by Unix code. The argument is often made that SCO thereby GPL'd that code, making their suit pointless.
Well, maybe. Consider: The GPL, like others, is just a bunch of words associated with some software. Like other licenses, the GPL attempts to control the behavior of those in possession of an instance of that software.
Suppose a court decides that any release by SCO of Unix cpde under the GPL doesn't alter SCO's rights regarding that code; in effect, saying the GPL cannot be enforced. What then for the GPL?
Slashdot is replete with posts arguing the shrinkwrap licenses and EULAS are "just words" that aren't binding. If they aren't binding, why is the GPL?
Wouldn't the worst result for the Linux community be one that never convincingly and impartially determines what's in the code?
This isn't a matter of trust and faith in the people who wrote that code. It's a matter of perception in the eyes of those who, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, will always wonder if SCO was right.
Sad to say, the damage SCO has already done may be worse than any fallout from proof they're right.
>>... as opposed to most people of the American persuasion (or so it would seem), I do not believe that the authorities are out to fsck and enslave me all the time.
I don't believe most Americans believe that. Opinions posted on/. are often not reflective of mainstream opinion here. The recurrent theme I've noticed in many/. posts is a bastardized and emotional mistrust of authority. Of course, given the apparent demographics (adolescent and early 20's males) of much of the/. crowd, this mistrust is neither warranted nor earned.
There are very serious provacy issues raised by this technology, as you've noted. But, I don't think it is the collection of the information that is worrisome. After all, the information exists whether or not someone records it. The issue is how that information will be used. That is not a technology issue. E.g. if we are worried about police cameras automatically imaging are license tags, why are we not concerned about human police driving/walking by our houses every day?
Much of the reaction to this specific use of cameras is, I think, fueled by the bogus assumption that traffic violations are not "real" crimes, and that drivers are justified in doing whatever they can get away with.
I lived in the UK for a few years in the mid-90's. Cameras are also used in many locations here in the U.S.
It's one thing to question the penalties handed out for a criminal violation, but that's not the point here. If someone is breaking the law, then they risk getting caught and punished. Using a camera on a highway is fundamentally equivalent to posting a live cop in the same spot. To argue otherwise is to argue that people have a right to get away with their crimes.
Ummm.. the story was posted at 3:12 and your comment went up at 3:14. That's pretty fast -- read the BBC piece, consider your thoughts, and submit a comment all in two minutes. (Well... the "consider your thoughts" portion didn't take much time, apparently.)
There are lots of ways to be a criminal driving around in a car with a perfectly good license tag without shooting someone and taking their car.
For starters: not paying your taxes, not registering your car, driving without a license, skipping bail, violating parole, a zillion different kinds of taffic violations, not paying child support, auto theft, child abuse, etc., etc.
In fact, just about any crime in which the perpetrator can be linked to a particular car, which is everyone who drives.
There's no difference between a flesh-and-blood cop running a check on your license plate and this automated system. It just maximizes the capability.
Here's the theme: NASA's human space flight efforts have been going downhill since the end of the big Apollo budget bubble (1966) and need to be replaced by an agency that concentrates on enabling private sector human space flight.
Best quote: " After wasting three decades (and a perfectly good Cold War), frustrating the dreams of a whole generation of space enthusiasts, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars, NASA's net achievement is a space station that has no definable purpose except to serve as a destination for shuttle flights.
We would not need the shuttle missions if we did not have the station, and we would not need the station if we did not need something for the shuttles to do. The entire human spaceflight program has thus become an exercise in futility."
I take this with a grain of salt: There's money to be made, maybe, doing things in LEO and on the moon, but we'll still need someone to fund and operate the necessary but unprofitable initial human explorations of the planets. An analogy might be drawn to the efforts directed by Prince Henry the Navigator.
>> ....can't help wonder what this change will do to sales of the iPod...
The impact, I suspect, will be nil.
Take the number of people who can and want to listen to only their music at work.
Subtract everyone who doesn't sit in front of a computer at work.
Subtract everyone who sits in front of a computer that can't get to the net.
Subtract everyone who doesn't own a Mac.
Subtract every Mac owner who doesn't run OS X.
Subtract every home OS X user who doesn't know how to share his iTunes collection with himself at work....Not many left.
CIA Successes Stay Classified & Out of the Me
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 1
Almost by definition, you'll only read abut the Agency's mistakes or alleged failure's to "prevent" something.
The CIA works in a classified world. If something works, news about it stays classified. If something breaks badly enough that someone else starts talking to the media, you may hear their side of the story. Odds are you won't hear the real CIA side of the story, because that remains classified.
Read carefully press reports about CIA activities, especially any that allege to have "inside" sources. Those "inside" sources usually turn out to be "retired" or "former" employees. I.e., people who no longer have access to the Agency. Real CIA insiders remain bound by their security agreements.
By the way, the CIA's job is to collect and report intelligence. It's the job of the person they report to -- that guy in the White House -- to prevent bad things happening.
I assume that IPSs care about making money. I don't assume that they have some kind of moral obligation to make life easier for their customers. If they can make more money by enhancing their customers' "experience", they will. If they can make more money by ruining customer experience, they will.
If you don't routinely do something that requires high bandwidth, my guess is that any decrease in bandwidth due to P2P won't be visible to you -- right now. If and when P2P's impact becomes visible to mainstream users -- by causing their browsing and email sessions to bog down -- they will consider paying more for ISP service that eliminates the "friction" caused by P2P users. How ISPs make that happen will not interest them.
When net congestion gets bad enough to annoy ordinary businesses and people, they will be chasing their ISP's to fix it.
Most ISP subscribers don't kow what P2P is, much less spend their day tolling the net for mp3's and movies. But, if they decide that P2P is ruining their use of the Internet, metered bandwidth will be an easy sell. P2P users will be painted, with some credibility, as "a bunch of kids" downloading "stuff" no one else cares about.
Since free software is typically, well, free, you'd think the free software "movement" would have a significant advantage in a competition to provide software to the nonprofit sector. The fact that it doesn't is evidence that free software's distributed structure and lack of hierarchical governance can work to its disavantage.
In other words, there's no one in charge, so no one can say "Do This!".
The "spectre" of IP has been alive and well for a long time. Whatever its merits, SCO's suit won't make a ripple outside the little piece of IT territory inhabitated by GPL software.
Read it again, I didn't make any judgments. I never said it was "wonderous". I just esplained that the browser turned the web into an advertising medium.
Sure, most use of USENET, ftp, WAIS, and gopher is passive, That's what they are designed for. The key thing, though, is that they can't display inline graphics like a browser does. That fact, plus the ability to navigate by clicking, created the web and made it a hot target for advertising.
No. Universal use of browsers capable of displaying graphics (not essential to the core notion of the idea of the web) turned the web into an advertising medium, attracting the interest and money of corporations interested in selling product. Once that happens, it is only natural that the more successful corporations start to eliminate less successful corporation.
I'm aware of the difference between the web and the net. One's a content platform and the other is a network. Unfortunately, the universal perception is that the internet is what you see through your browser. Assertions otherwise, however accurate, won't alter that percepton.
If the browser had not been invented, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
>>...talk to your friends...download purchased or *creatively acquired* software, music, and motion pictures...up-to-date news...
These are attributes of content and a medium, not of a network. Once the net is percieved as a content platform, not as a network of users, you've opened the gates to its eventual control by a very small number of corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm...I've been involved with more than a few folks spending great chunks of money on software and can't recall any of them ever asking what language was used. Or, frankly, needing to ask. What they need to know is the vendor's track record, financial status, support record, etc. Companies care that problems will be fixed per their schedule, not the language used to code the stuff in the first place. Buying a $50,000 QBasic program is just fine as long as the vendor can provide QBasic coders.
This kind of posturing is endemic here. If 99 of 100 people use something different than me, why, of course, that proves I'm smarter.
Ummm...my guess is that most individual Office users are using it in the office. That means the boss paid for it and the PC it lives on. Most folks won't be incentivized to switch from one piece of "free" software to something else that mimics it.
If the boss intends to upgrade existing software, that's a window to preach about OOo. Best shot, though, is try to introduce it to people launching a new operation and staffing up, with no investment in legacy software.
Define "kid". Teen-agers? Nah. Let them futz around with adult tools.
What's missing, though, are simple tools usable by children whose age is still indicated with a single digit. These guys don't need to read about programming logic. They need to see logic manifested on screen as a result of something they typed on the keyboard. E.g. typing in a few lines of code and seeing your name printed over and over will teach someone about looping a lot faster than reading pages in a book. Ditto creating and opening files, etc. This is the kind of exploration that young kids need to begin to understand the basics of programming.
This points to interpreters, not compilers. And, frankly, since we're tryng to introduce children to programming and not trying to train legions of new professional programmers to fill even more cubicles (as most posts here seem to take as their premise), something like a nice interpretive BASIC would be just fine.
>> It's impossible to know if you'll always have the expertise to maintain all your wonderful customizations and since, if the operating system can't be made to work, everything fails, it's extremely important that your os configuration be very transparent.
Hear, Hear!!
I've had the experience of having someone else's highly customized creations dumped in my managerial lap after the customizer bolted for greener pastures. We had to bring in someone on contract to rebuild from scratch.
Running the slickest software is all well and good, but the people who pay the bills and salaries value reliability and trust more than they value squeezing out the last n'th of performance.
I continue to be amazed that people seem to be surprised and offended that other people do everything within their power to profit from their work and their creations. It was as natural for Edison to try to control the market in products he made possible as it is for someone who punches a time clock to try to control the only thing he can sell: his labor.
Get over it. No one is going to change the world or human nature just so a few people can get free music.
Being a little paranoid about NSA putting sneaky code into their own little obscure distribution isn't justified. Why would NSA backdoor something almost no one will use?
If the NSA wants to get a backdoor into Linux, there are easier and more traditional ways to do it. A sufficient amount of money passed to the appropriate developers and commercial Linux vendors would do the trick quite nicely.
Good point. Much has been made about SCO's apparent release under GPL of Linux code allegedly contaminated by Unix code. The argument is often made that SCO thereby GPL'd that code, making their suit pointless.
Well, maybe. Consider: The GPL, like others, is just a bunch of words associated with some software. Like other licenses, the GPL attempts to control the behavior of those in possession of an instance of that software.
Suppose a court decides that any release by SCO of Unix cpde under the GPL doesn't alter SCO's rights regarding that code; in effect, saying the GPL cannot be enforced. What then for the GPL?
Slashdot is replete with posts arguing the shrinkwrap licenses and EULAS are "just words" that aren't binding. If they aren't binding, why is the GPL?
Wouldn't the worst result for the Linux community be one that never convincingly and impartially determines what's in the code?
This isn't a matter of trust and faith in the people who wrote that code. It's a matter of perception in the eyes of those who, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, will always wonder if SCO was right.
Sad to say, the damage SCO has already done may be worse than any fallout from proof they're right.
>> ... as opposed to most people of the American persuasion (or so it would seem), I do not believe that the authorities are out to fsck and enslave me all the time.
/. are often not reflective of mainstream opinion here. The recurrent theme I've noticed in many /. posts is a bastardized and emotional mistrust of authority. Of course, given the apparent demographics (adolescent and early 20's males) of much of the /. crowd, this mistrust is neither warranted nor earned.
I don't believe most Americans believe that. Opinions posted on
There are very serious provacy issues raised by this technology, as you've noted. But, I don't think it is the collection of the information that is worrisome. After all, the information exists whether or not someone records it. The issue is how that information will be used. That is not a technology issue. E.g. if we are worried about police cameras automatically imaging are license tags, why are we not concerned about human police driving/walking by our houses every day?
Much of the reaction to this specific use of cameras is, I think, fueled by the bogus assumption that traffic violations are not "real" crimes, and that drivers are justified in doing whatever they can get away with.
I lived in the UK for a few years in the mid-90's. Cameras are also used in many locations here in the U.S.
It's one thing to question the penalties handed out for a criminal violation, but that's not the point here. If someone is breaking the law, then they risk getting caught and punished. Using a camera on a highway is fundamentally equivalent to posting a live cop in the same spot. To argue otherwise is to argue that people have a right to get away with their crimes.
Ummm.. the story was posted at 3:12 and your comment went up at 3:14. That's pretty fast -- read the BBC piece, consider your thoughts, and submit a comment all in two minutes. (Well... the "consider your thoughts" portion didn't take much time, apparently.)
There are lots of ways to be a criminal driving around in a car with a perfectly good license tag without shooting someone and taking their car.
For starters: not paying your taxes, not registering your car, driving without a license, skipping bail, violating parole, a zillion different kinds of taffic violations, not paying child support, auto theft, child abuse, etc., etc.
In fact, just about any crime in which the perpetrator can be linked to a particular car, which is everyone who drives.
There's no difference between a flesh-and-blood cop running a check on your license plate and this automated system. It just maximizes the capability.
Along these lines, SpaceDaily carries an excellent opinion piece today: "The Failure of NASA: And A Way Out"
Here's the theme: NASA's human space flight efforts have been going downhill since the end of the big Apollo budget bubble (1966) and need to be replaced by an agency that concentrates on enabling private sector human space flight.
Best quote: " After wasting three decades (and a perfectly good Cold War), frustrating the dreams of a whole generation of space enthusiasts, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars, NASA's net achievement is a space station that has no definable purpose except to serve as a destination for shuttle flights.
We would not need the shuttle missions if we did not have the station, and we would not need the station if we did not need something for the shuttles to do. The entire human spaceflight program has thus become an exercise in futility."
I take this with a grain of salt: There's money to be made, maybe, doing things in LEO and on the moon, but we'll still need someone to fund and operate the necessary but unprofitable initial human explorations of the planets. An analogy might be drawn to the efforts directed by Prince Henry the Navigator.
>> ....can't help wonder what this change will do to sales of the iPod...
...Not many left.
The impact, I suspect, will be nil.
Take the number of people who can and want to listen to only their music at work.
Subtract everyone who doesn't sit in front of a computer at work.
Subtract everyone who sits in front of a computer that can't get to the net.
Subtract everyone who doesn't own a Mac.
Subtract every Mac owner who doesn't run OS X.
Subtract every home OS X user who doesn't know how to share his iTunes collection with himself at work.
Almost by definition, you'll only read abut the Agency's mistakes or alleged failure's to "prevent" something.
The CIA works in a classified world. If something works, news about it stays classified. If something breaks badly enough that someone else starts talking to the media, you may hear their side of the story. Odds are you won't hear the real CIA side of the story, because that remains classified.
Read carefully press reports about CIA activities, especially any that allege to have "inside" sources. Those "inside" sources usually turn out to be "retired" or "former" employees. I.e., people who no longer have access to the Agency. Real CIA insiders remain bound by their security agreements.
By the way, the CIA's job is to collect and report intelligence. It's the job of the person they report to -- that guy in the White House -- to prevent bad things happening.
That makes as much sense as "Bitorrent Blamed for Matrix2 Downloads".
The people responsible for piracy are the people who download the pirated copies.
I don't think so.
I assume that IPSs care about making money. I don't assume that they have some kind of moral obligation to make life easier for their customers. If they can make more money by enhancing their customers' "experience", they will. If they can make more money by ruining customer experience, they will.
If you don't routinely do something that requires high bandwidth, my guess is that any decrease in bandwidth due to P2P won't be visible to you -- right now. If and when P2P's impact becomes visible to mainstream users -- by causing their browsing and email sessions to bog down -- they will consider paying more for ISP service that eliminates the "friction" caused by P2P users. How ISPs make that happen will not interest them.
When net congestion gets bad enough to annoy ordinary businesses and people, they will be chasing their ISP's to fix it.
Most ISP subscribers don't kow what P2P is, much less spend their day tolling the net for mp3's and movies. But, if they decide that P2P is ruining their use of the Internet, metered bandwidth will be an easy sell. P2P users will be painted, with some credibility, as "a bunch of kids" downloading "stuff" no one else cares about.
Since free software is typically, well, free, you'd think the free software "movement" would have a significant advantage in a competition to provide software to the nonprofit sector. The fact that it doesn't is evidence that free software's distributed structure and lack of hierarchical governance can work to its disavantage.
In other words, there's no one in charge, so no one can say "Do This!".
>> ...enjoyed during work breaks.
Well, that would be the key, wouldn't it, boys and girls?
Playing games while you're supposed to be working, instead of on a break, would tend to cut into production, wouldn't it?
Of course, this only applies to lucky drones who actually get breaks.
The "spectre" of IP has been alive and well for a long time. Whatever its merits, SCO's suit won't make a ripple outside the little piece of IT territory inhabitated by GPL software.
Read it again, I didn't make any judgments. I never said it was "wonderous". I just esplained that the browser turned the web into an advertising medium.
Sure, most use of USENET, ftp, WAIS, and gopher is passive, That's what they are designed for. The key thing, though, is that they can't display inline graphics like a browser does. That fact, plus the ability to navigate by clicking, created the web and made it a hot target for advertising.
>> iow "whatever is common is of little value"?
No. Universal use of browsers capable of displaying graphics (not essential to the core notion of the idea of the web) turned the web into an advertising medium, attracting the interest and money of corporations interested in selling product. Once that happens, it is only natural that the more successful corporations start to eliminate less successful corporation.
I'm aware of the difference between the web and the net. One's a content platform and the other is a network. Unfortunately, the universal perception is that the internet is what you see through your browser. Assertions otherwise, however accurate, won't alter that percepton.
If the browser had not been invented, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
>> ...talk to your friends ...download purchased or *creatively acquired* software, music, and motion pictures...up-to-date news...
These are attributes of content and a medium, not of a network. Once the net is percieved as a content platform, not as a network of users, you've opened the gates to its eventual control by a very small number of corporations.