'Lindows' is in the same "industry" as 'Windows', and is intentionally abusing the popularity of Windows for its own benefit.
The question is, are they really abusing it, or just using it. Is it inherently wrong for me to frame my product in terms of its benefits over another product? I really don't see how. Is their a name a reference to Windows? Of course! Will it hurt Microsoft? Probably - if they have a good enough product. Should Microsoft be able to quash that type of thing in court? Probably not.
Linux and OSX are both based on the Unix security model, a fundamentally sound design refined by two decades of real-world practice
Are you kidding? Security in Unix was an afterthought, and a kludge. The user/group/all methodology is totally inflexible, even NT has a more powerful and flexible file-system security mechanism, even if its user-security mechanism sucks.
So what, the Catholic church tortured people who disagreed with it, and still hordes huge amounts of wealth as people around the world starve. The point is that in any other scenario, criticising people on the basis of their beliefs is frowned upon, so why should it be rewarded on Slashdot with a +4 moderation?
What if this guy were a member of the fucking Taliban? Would you still be saying that?
I judge people on their actions, not on their beliefs. If that person simply agreed with the Taliban, then yes - I would still be saying that, if he actually participated in any of the things that make the Taliban so unpopular, then that would be different.
All we know about this guy is what he believes, there is no evidence that he personally has done anything wrong.
Lets see if this equivolent statement gets moderated up to +4.
Seriously, I don't like Scientology any more than the next guy, but it has no worse a history than most other religons, (it has never sponsored a Spanish inquisition etc etc). I am aware of how Scientology milks the people who subscribe to it for money, and how they try to suppress those who criticise it, but still - a knee-jerk reaction of "This company is run by someone of religon xxx, so f**k them" should make people rather nervous, and certainly should not be moderated up.
It is the dictionary definition of "-1 off-topic".
Basically, it all comes down to the fact that those in government gets to spend other people's money, and if, in doing so, they can befriend a powerful corporation (who could fund their next election campaign) then all the better!
I did consider saying IP rather than TCP/IP since I do think that UDP/IP is likely to become more popular with P2P apps, but since today most P2P apps use TCP I stuck with that. As you say, this is orthogonal to my main point.
Adam Langley, a Freenet developer, wrote an interesting article for OpenP2P.com on Jxta a few months back which, from reading the article, still seems to hold true today - read it here.
Essentially the problem with Jxta is that it is built on the assumption that P2P needs a communication standard above the TCP/IP level, and I am unconvinced that it does. The range of applications that call themselves P2P are sufficiently diverse that they each have different (and often mutually-exclusive) requirements of the communication layer that sits above TCP/IP, yet this is exactly the layer that JXTA tries to mandate.
As an example, Freenet has very strict requirements about how encryption is implemented at a low level, most other P2P architectures have no such requirement (and, in fact, would fail if such a requirement was forced upon them). Freenet, Fastrack, Mojo Nation and other systems also have very different ideas about how peer discovery is achieved, yet again, JXTA tries to mandate this too (adopting a Gnutella-inspired approach).
Standards are useful in some circumstances, but for P2P, TCP/IP is probably the highest-level standard we need.
It has been noted that you criticise Slashdot in your post. You are clearly not aware that the purpose of Slashdot is to spread criticism of Microsoft, it is not intended to spread criticism of projects considered cool by the majority of readers, and it is definitely not permitted to criticise Slashdot itself.
Take note in future, any posting which expresses an opinion other than that held by the majority of Slashdot readers will be moderated down as "Flamebait" or "Troll". We don't want any debating on our website!
...that the skills required to be a "guru" in Linux or anything else, are not nescessary the skills required to explain that knowledge to others, and unfortunately, they are often mutually exclusive.
I know many people who are very smart, yet I cringe when I hear them try to explain things to non-experts in the field. It is not that they aren't trying, just that they lack the ability to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn't have their level of knowledge.
I recently purchased "Real War", a real-time strategy game which is clearly inspired by the "Command and Conquer" series, but which strives for realism in terms of military hardware available today.
In my opinion the C&C series went downhill since "Red Alert", the problem being that the game complexity kept increasing, allowing people to develop pre-cooked strategies which could only be defeated with other pre-cooked strategies, reducing the opportunity for creativity in playing the game.
While I am still getting accustomed to it, I think Real War has the potential to get back to the simplicity that made the early C&C games so much fun. Combine that with impressive graphics, and the knowledge that the US military actually uses the software upon which this was based to train people, and I think we have the makings of the best RTS game yet.
That's just not good enough, for reasons that have already been discussed in this article [platypus.ro] and elsewhere. Reinserting data is not only horribly inefficient but also unreliable. How often do you need to reinsert?
The number of times you need to reinsert is inversely proportional to the populularity of your data, and proportional to your desire to have people see your output despite its unpopularity. The same is true of life. In practice, data is available on Freenet for long enough that people can evaluate it, if this were not the case action would need to be taken, but fortunately it isn't.
Freenet is useful as a data transmission method but not as a data store
Freenet is not, nor was it ever, intended as a way to store information. Rather it is closer to radio in that it is a good way to get information to people, but not if they aren't interested in it.
I'm on freenet-tech, Ian.
Try freenet-dev, that is a more accurate source for information. Either way, it is clear that your agenda is to spread a negative opinion of Freenet regardless of reality. In practice, many are happily using Freenet RIGHT NOW. Is it perfect? No, but we are working to improve it, and it is working well enough for many even now.
You're the one who's ignorant, Ian - about what constitutes a useful system and how to provide it.
Tempting as it is, I won't take your bait, try talking to the significant number of people who are unfamilar with Freenet internals, yet are using it on a daily basis, they will provide you with the counter-argument to your claims.
Freenet is very interesting in an abstract sort of way, but certain characteristics - e.g. anonymity and most especially data loss - severely limit its usefulness in the real world.
How could the option of anonymity make Freenet any less useful? You don't have to use it if you don't want to. Also, with respect to data loss, the only data Freenet loses is that which is unrequested. If the author wants to ensure that unpopular data is available in Freenet then all they have to do is reinsert it.
Plus, it's not done and doesn't look like it ever will be. I don't think it can be considered "truly great" unless (a) the development team is functional and (b) the result is useful.
Perhaps you should educate yourself before you expose your ignorance. Freenet is under heavy development (daily snapshots are released on the website), and many people are using it, including non-techies, on a regular basis.
I suspect you haven't tried to use Freenet in quite a while. Try downloading a recent snapshot.
While Freenet still relies on Java, for most people this just requires installation of an rpm or a quick apt-get. Installation of Freenet itself is pretty easy these days. There is even a.deb in unstable for Debian users although it is somewhat old. Unpopular data does propogate, if it didn't systems like Frost wouldn't work, yet they do. As for firewalls, these are not just a problem for Freenet, but for most true P2P systems.
The current 0.4 snapshots are very impressive, and once a few final bugs are resolved 0.5 will be released.
The GPL reminds me of affirmitive action, where racial minorities are given an artificial advantage to counteract the artificial disadvantage they have experienced in the past. In other words, it discriminates against decisions made on the basis of race, not by eliminating such decisions, but by making the same decisions in the opposite direction.
This analogy makes me feel a bit strange, since I don't like the idea of affirmative action, but do like the GPL. I guess the core reason I don't like affirmative action is that it serves to justify exactly the racism ("that guy only got the job because he is black") that it is trying to counteract. I am not sure the same is true of the GPL, the GPL says "ok, we don't like copyright law, but it exists, so we may as well use it to our own ends". Unlike affirmative action, use of the GPL does not really encourage use of the thing it seeks to counteract.
Transferring the responsibility to distribution maintainers is a cop-out.
The real problem is that new functionality is being added to the stable branch.
The solution to this type of problem is simple, when a stable kernel is released, an unstable branch should be created immedately. New functionality was being added to the 2.4 branch by developers simply because there is nowhere else to put it.
New functionality should never be added to a stable branch in a piece of software as mission-critical as a kernel, that is what the unstable/development branch is for.
If the kernel maintainers want to accelorate the pace at which new functionality gets into a stable branch then they should increase the frequency with which development branches become stable.
I have been trying to figure out how the pre-release kernel patches are applied. I have tried using the patch-kernel script to no avail. Are they patches against the previous prerelease, or the previous release?
They were talking about RedHat version 7.2. RedHat is a Linux distribution, it is a collection of software including the Linux kernel that is known to work well together and all wrapped up in a nice installation process. RedHat 7.2 includes version 2.4 of the Linux kernel.
Well, I have just discovered that I have ops right now, and take personal offense that you are accusing people like me of being Nazis. As a result, and to teach you a lesson for showing such impudence, I am moderating you down as a Troll.
You are right, I misread the post to say that QTs licence procludes integration with commercial applications (which is no more true of QT than it is of the Linux kernel).
What has Windows got to do with anything? We are talking about Unix platforms here, whatever software QT does or doesn't write, or the license they release it under, is completely irrelevant to this debate.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, are they really abusing it, or just using it. Is it inherently wrong for me to frame my product in terms of its benefits over another product? I really don't see how. Is their a name a reference to Windows? Of course! Will it hurt Microsoft? Probably - if they have a good enough product. Should Microsoft be able to quash that type of thing in court? Probably not.
Easy, allow a file or directory to have different permissions for multiple different groups.
So what, the Catholic church tortured people who disagreed with it, and still hordes huge amounts of wealth as people around the world starve. The point is that in any other scenario, criticising people on the basis of their beliefs is frowned upon, so why should it be rewarded on Slashdot with a +4 moderation?
I judge people on their actions, not on their beliefs. If that person simply agreed with the Taliban, then yes - I would still be saying that, if he actually participated in any of the things that make the Taliban so unpopular, then that would be different.
All we know about this guy is what he believes, there is no evidence that he personally has done anything wrong.
Lets see if this equivolent statement gets moderated up to +4.
Seriously, I don't like Scientology any more than the next guy, but it has no worse a history than most other religons, (it has never sponsored a Spanish inquisition etc etc). I am aware of how Scientology milks the people who subscribe to it for money, and how they try to suppress those who criticise it, but still - a knee-jerk reaction of "This company is run by someone of religon xxx, so f**k them" should make people rather nervous, and certainly should not be moderated up.
It is the dictionary definition of "-1 off-topic".
Basically, it all comes down to the fact that those in government gets to spend other people's money, and if, in doing so, they can befriend a powerful corporation (who could fund their next election campaign) then all the better!
I did consider saying IP rather than TCP/IP since I do think that UDP/IP is likely to become more popular with P2P apps, but since today most P2P apps use TCP I stuck with that. As you say, this is orthogonal to my main point.
Essentially the problem with Jxta is that it is built on the assumption that P2P needs a communication standard above the TCP/IP level, and I am unconvinced that it does. The range of applications that call themselves P2P are sufficiently diverse that they each have different (and often mutually-exclusive) requirements of the communication layer that sits above TCP/IP, yet this is exactly the layer that JXTA tries to mandate.
As an example, Freenet has very strict requirements about how encryption is implemented at a low level, most other P2P architectures have no such requirement (and, in fact, would fail if such a requirement was forced upon them). Freenet, Fastrack, Mojo Nation and other systems also have very different ideas about how peer discovery is achieved, yet again, JXTA tries to mandate this too (adopting a Gnutella-inspired approach).
Standards are useful in some circumstances, but for P2P, TCP/IP is probably the highest-level standard we need.
Take note in future, any posting which expresses an opinion other than that held by the majority of Slashdot readers will be moderated down as "Flamebait" or "Troll". We don't want any debating on our website!
I know many people who are very smart, yet I cringe when I hear them try to explain things to non-experts in the field. It is not that they aren't trying, just that they lack the ability to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn't have their level of knowledge.
In my opinion the C&C series went downhill since "Red Alert", the problem being that the game complexity kept increasing, allowing people to develop pre-cooked strategies which could only be defeated with other pre-cooked strategies, reducing the opportunity for creativity in playing the game.
While I am still getting accustomed to it, I think Real War has the potential to get back to the simplicity that made the early C&C games so much fun. Combine that with impressive graphics, and the knowledge that the US military actually uses the software upon which this was based to train people, and I think we have the makings of the best RTS game yet.
The current 0.4 snapshots are very impressive, and once a few final bugs are resolved 0.5 will be released.
This analogy makes me feel a bit strange, since I don't like the idea of affirmative action, but do like the GPL. I guess the core reason I don't like affirmative action is that it serves to justify exactly the racism ("that guy only got the job because he is black") that it is trying to counteract. I am not sure the same is true of the GPL, the GPL says "ok, we don't like copyright law, but it exists, so we may as well use it to our own ends". Unlike affirmative action, use of the GPL does not really encourage use of the thing it seeks to counteract.
The real problem is that new functionality is being added to the stable branch.
The solution to this type of problem is simple, when a stable kernel is released, an unstable branch should be created immedately. New functionality was being added to the 2.4 branch by developers simply because there is nowhere else to put it.
New functionality should never be added to a stable branch in a piece of software as mission-critical as a kernel, that is what the unstable/development branch is for.
If the kernel maintainers want to accelorate the pace at which new functionality gets into a stable branch then they should increase the frequency with which development branches become stable.
I have been trying to figure out how the pre-release kernel patches are applied. I have tried using the patch-kernel script to no avail. Are they patches against the previous prerelease, or the previous release?
They were talking about RedHat version 7.2. RedHat is a Linux distribution, it is a collection of software including the Linux kernel that is known to work well together and all wrapped up in a nice installation process. RedHat 7.2 includes version 2.4 of the Linux kernel.
some people have no sense of humor...
So there.
I got the impression that this was all about the DMCA, yet it seems that they are actually using Trade Secret law to suppress DECSS, not the DMCA...
You are right, I misread the post to say that QTs licence procludes integration with commercial applications (which is no more true of QT than it is of the Linux kernel).
What has Windows got to do with anything? We are talking about Unix platforms here, whatever software QT does or doesn't write, or the license they release it under, is completely irrelevant to this debate.
I happily compiled and ran KDE on Solaris about 3 years ago.