> On the other hand, this type of license reduces the pressure for real openness and shared > code. This type of license will undoubtedly be seen as an alternative to a real open-source > license, and offers an easy way out to organisations that might otherwise have opened up > their source.
Actually that sort of look but don't touch license should almost be the default. Except the 'don't touch' shouldn't be any more enforcable than any other EULA. You still couldn't redistribute it because of copyright. I don't think a compiled binary should be eligible for Copyright protection except as a derived work of the published and copyrighted source code. When you buy any software you should receieve the full buildable source and optionally a precompiled binary (or binaries) for a default target. This would not reduce the rights of proprietary software vendors in the least since the source would be just as protected by copyright as their binaries now are; pirates would still make copies and still get busted if they get too extreme. But customers would be able to examine the products they buy, reviews could be based on an audit of the actual program and patching and porting could be done by people other than the original developer. And the source wouldn't end up being lost to history when companies disappear.
The reason Best Buy and their ilk only sell the Windows only crap wireless cards and such is because they also tend to be the CHEAP CRAP that the clueful sort of folk using linux at a level to be writing device drivers avoid like the plague. So the cheapo cards don't get drivers written for them by the community and since they are CHEAP cards put out by CHEAP companies they ain't going to spring for a driver, they are doing good to compile the chip vendors (also tending to be a CHEAP outfit) reference Windows driver with their name inserted into it.
So avoid buying at Best Buy not because they sell hardware unsupported by Linux, avoid Best Buy because they sell cheap crap that usually isn't all that reliable in Windows either.
If one does their research they can get a pretty well supported desktop machine for Linux. My beef is that no distro has a hardware compatibility list anymore and few hardware vendors mention whether it works under Linux unless they are selling a preloaded box. (Rare for desktop hardware of course vs servers where most are now very happy to sell a penguin inside.)
Laptops are another story. As far as I know the number of current production laptops fully supported by any Linux distribution is zero. You always lose some functionality, the modem, wireless card, pc card slots, power management, 3d or scaled video, something won't work for at least six months, often times never. This is because the people who make laptops don't give enough of a damn to insist on Linux friendly components. Even companies who pretend to be our allies like IBM and HP pull the same stunts with laptops.
My current Thinkpad comes close to working but the USB ports on the dock are broken and the CD drive in the dock only works at 4X for some reason I haven't been able to figure out. Power management is dodgy and requires I degrade the video performance (to AGP 1X) to avoid lockups when running on battery power. By making a special order I got a Cisco wireless card that works... with a special driver and after downgrading the firmware on it from Windows. And of course on a Thinkpad you only get to pick mini-pci cards from a very short list burned into the BIOS because the bastards check during POST and hang if a non-approved card is installed.
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version. Since the grunts at the keyboards hate change, tons of political pressure will be put on the people in charge to stick with MS, this offer will be accepted. Then after a couple of years of buggy and disfunctional betas we will get to the final decision. If others also demand OpenDocument it will finally go production. Otherwise they will just pull the plug on it, the current IT team in MA will have been quietly replaced by then and the whole thing will be forgotten.... except by anyone else who is thinking of taking a similar stand.
> Three and a half players. Don't forget us Europeans.
If shooting unmanned bottle rockets into space makes you a half player there are a few more to put on the list. But it don't. The name of the game is the conquest of space and unmanned just doesn't get it done.
> governments have done many important things that private enterprise would never have done, > from major medical research, to the internet, to all spaceflight to date.
Exactly. The US went to the moon more than thirty five years ago and the net result is so close to zero it gets lost in the rounding error. A couple hundred rolls of film decomposing away in a climate controlled vault and a couple hundred pounds of rocks. Some would even argue it had a net negative effect since after going to the moon puttering about in orbit was widely seen as an anti-climax. But of course low orbit and establishing a permanent presence was what should have been the priority if the goal was a longterm presence instead of a publicity stunt.
Give it to the Reds, they at least tried to do the right thing goal wise, but still couldn't really do anything worthwhile before their whole evil empire came crashing down around their ears, leaving their rocket geeks to depend on Western handouts and a supporting role in our boondoggles.
Yes, government operations have done some fairly important ground work, collected useful information on basic biological processes in space and how to survive there, sent some good 'voyages of exploration' out ahead of the colonists to follow. But the government alone in space would be like Columbus making his voyage of discovery and not being followed up by the hundreds of voyages, mostly private ventures, that followed his path.
But governments aren't the ones who can do the heavy lifting in space, they can't make a profit and at the current tech level there isn't much of a military use for manned spaceflight. So that leaves private industry. As tech progress marches on it will eventually be practical (read profitable) to get into space and it will be the 'evil' capitalists who will get us there, looking to strip mine the moon or an asteroid probably.
But lets bring this back more on topic and allow me to burn off some excess karma. The significance of todays event is minimal. Perhaps the Chinese will eventually do something that advances the state of the art in spaceflight but today certainly didn't. A modified Soyuz capsule? Ok, they have to learn to walk before they can run but walking isn't exactly newsworthy.
Oh but is the second Chinese manned flight. Big whoop. Personally I'm a bit tired of these qualified successes in general. First woman to ___, First Black to ___, First Gay Paraplegic to ___. And this is the SECOND Chinese spaceflight, double boring. Russia got the first guy into orbit before most of the engineers who built this clone were probably born, about as much glory in that as crossing the Atlantic sitting First Class in a British Airways jumbojet. History barely remembers #2, let alone a tortise showing up at #3 when #1 would be* tottering off to the nursing home. Most people can't name the second man on the moon, and only the truly hardcore trivia buffs remember #3.
* Would be, except Yuri Gagarin died an untimely death in 1968. Everybody else is just following in his footsteps.
Ok, goody for them. Having a third player in space is probably a good thing even if they are the communist Chinese since they probably won't remain communist a lot longer. On the other hand it is just another doomed government 'prestige' program that won't actually acomplish much before being abandoned the second the cost exceeds the publicity value and that always happens long before anything longterm good can happen.
Nope, the only hope of our species getting off this rock is private enterprise.
Sorry I wasted the time on this one. Come on Slashdot, just put the Apple icon on the evangelism stories so I can skip em. This guy could care less about the crappiness of Microsoft, he just wants everyone to use Macs because they are 'cool'.
Sorry, 'cool' isn't a reason to scrap a whole infrastructure over. Avoiding Microsoft because their products are total crap and costs a boatload of cash to keep halfway secure is a much better argument, helped a great deal by virtue of being true. But this truly old school computer dork (I mean that in a nice way. This guy cut his teeth on CP/M for crissakes and he doesn't realize Microsoft produces crap?) goes out of his way to say quality isn't one of his complaints against the retards from Redmond.
> So what did you think when the SCOTUS cited "foreign laws" when stiking down > death sentences for juvenile offenders?
I don't know about the original poster but I thought it was grounds for removing the Justices who signed onto that opinion on the grounds it was a clear violation of their Oath of Office.
The Supremes don't make law, they don't decide when to import law, they follow the laws as promulgated by the Legislative branch and controlled by the Constituition of the US. Any deviation from that mandate should result in instant removal from office by Congress. On those grounds at least seven of the sitting Justices could be removed. Scalia and Thomas I have seen skating close to the line but I haven't caught em crossing it.
> Please provide one tiny shred of proof of that statement.
Because it is what governments DO. If they don't mandate something this stupid by law everyone will simply snicker at the foolish old men with their quaint nationalistic notions and continue using the perfectly functioning DNS system as it exists. But once they make it a matter of patriotic pride and national security that Europe have a DNS system it controls, the logic of government will require mandating it's usage. When people have the good sense to still ignore them by the millions the same logic will require enforcement action, i.e. the Great Firewall of Europe and fines for violators. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it consume your destiny.
> which no ISP in their right mind will direct their DNS servers at.
They will enact laws requiring it. Then the customers will start pointing their workstations and access points at open DNS servers in the Free portions of the Internet, the Great Firewall of Europe will be erected to block access to the Free DNS servers and finally people will be fined for pointing at the 'wrong' DNS servers. THEN the heads will start going up on pointy sticks. The big question is whether there remains enough of a spark of Freedom to make it the government officials heads the ones on the sticks or whether it will be the 'traitors' among the users who refuse to use the state sponsored servers.
> The message FoxNews reprinted, from "Bob Halloran of Jacksonville, Fla", in their article, is a perfect > example of how Slashdotters....
Yup, we can all take a good lesson from his example. And a lesson in how journalism SHOULD be done. You see, FoxNews.com almost certainly had a thousand frothing slashdotters sending letters that open with "You Bush lapdogs/Microsoft puppets suck." and go downhill from there. They could have as easily put together a followup featuring some of the more printable selections from THAT collection and made us look like raving loonies and the original shill look like the sane one.
For examples of press organizations less able to deal with criticism of their reporting one only needs to look at events of the last couple of years to find dozens of examples. This is one to hold up as an example of how this sort of thing should be resolved so lets give em some props on this one. Who knows, we might be able to start a trend.
Yea, they fessed up instantly that Tailwind was a work of fiction and fired the commie bastard responsible for the lie. Oh wait, they didn't. But surely they fired the idiot exec who asserted as a fact that US forces target journalists. Wait, they didn't exactly do that either.
> the New York Times,
Well after four tries over a month or so they finally got a semi-complete correction into print about Paul Krugman's 'creative use of fact' regarding the Florida recounts. But seriously, considering how many times they have been caught lying, distorting, confusing the news and editorial sections and outright printing fiction as news (Jayson Blair ring a bell anymore?) the real question is why their circulation is still over a thousand copies a day.
> or CBS news
Yup, they fired Mapes and Rather the second their treason was uncloaked. Oh, wait they are STILL trying to hide behind the "factually false but we still stand behind the gist of the story' excuse.
> print this many well-articulated reader responses to an article?
Exactly. The got skunked by a Microsoft shill, got called on it by thousands and did the right thing. They put the retraction in basically the same spot on their homepage as the original, picked very good responses to print instead of the raving lunatics and denounced the original author along with stating for the record they should have at least did the background research to spot the PR flack and include that fact in the original story. In short I suspect it will be a while before they fall for this one again.
And just how to they intend to enforce this decree? Open up local offices around the nation where they will check a photo ID before issuing a userID and password? Nah, this is just a PR stunt.
This is nothing more nor less than the Blogger Control Act of 2005. It is the last dying gasp of the 'mainstream media' to remain relevent in the face of the change we all see coming. Ten years ago the idea of government regulation of journalists would have received universal condemnation, but fear is forcing the press to do something very stupid.
Once the government gets into the business of handing out official press badges it will serve to draw a nice sharp line between the MSM and the bloggers, with one group getting to continue as things are now while the bloggers get pretty much driven out of the US IP space. Don't believe me, think I'm daft? McCain Fiengold will see to it. Once bloggers are offically outside of the 1st Amendment's protection, that it only applies to Press Guild members, political topics will be pretty much off limits. Yes this will include Slashdot within a month or so of an election.
And for awhile the Press will be happy with this new law they are buying..... but only for awhile. Then they will learn the true power of the Dark Side of Government.
> but we really should let them have a crack at it to see what happens > before we start bitching
Ya lets let em show us what they got, but lets not get all worked up either until they do actually show us the code. So far the track record on large closed source packages isn't all that good. Netscape took how long to become a stable Mozilla/Firefox? Interbase and SAP DB are both still struggling to find their place in the FS/OS world. And this one hasn't dumped a tree yet and they admit it doesn't even fully build yet.
They admit they lack the resources to complete a port so unless the prospects are good enough to interest a fair number of quality devels with both wxWindows and win32 experience it is very possible for it to be stillborn. Not dissing em, just observing facts.
Yup, nothing truly exists until Microsoft 'Innovates' it into existence. Nope, nobody ever thought of sending video over IP until today, thank God Microsoft is out there inventing the future for us.
Ok, so some old hoary ACORN codebase that got ported to Windows years ago and apparently never developed a large userbase is going GPL because they realized they were fscked and never were going to achieve a breakout in today's rapidly consolidating Windows 3rd party app marketplace. So if folks would just stop working on Inkscape long enough to help us port this crufy old code from Win32 to whatever toolkit we eventually decide on it will just rule, trust us! But please don't build a Windows binary because we want to keep on doing our shareware thing over on that platform.
Sorry, this would have been news five years ago, but we have all seen this story play out enough times now to not be interested. They could at least have held off on the press release until they had a believable start on a port, i.e. a tree that builds and at least does something on X.
> With a word processor this might be something like i18n issues. We might specify, design, build and test > the thing without considering the user might not have a us-ascii character set and then it breaks in China.
When you first specified the program, i18n should have been decided. If full Unicode was a requirement then yes you had damned well better have tested it in something other than en-US, otherwise Chinese is outside the scope and if it fails it isn't a problem. And if the problem is in an input method or font renderer it also falls outside your scope.
The problem is with OO, it turns programs into nightmares of invisible interdependencies. Simple procedural code is easy to understand at the unit level and safely abstract away into libraries that export well defined interfaces. But no large project is developed this way anymore, all we get are C++ and Java horrors that never quite work and never will. They can bang away on Mozilla/Firefox for another decade and it will never get any better than IE in the bug dept because both have the same basic design defect, C++. Java & C# are only marginally better; while neither suffer from buffer overruns and pointer arithmetic they still suffer from the problem that in any non-trivial system it is beyond human understanding exactly what is happening within the running program.
A procedure can be proven, all the inputs and outputs validated and it need never be looked at again. All of the procedures that make up a complex library can be tested individually and then as larger units until an entire librart can be verified as correct and put in the deep freeze. Although admittedly many popular libraries were not totally validated, see recent security bugs in image processing libraries..... but in theory libjpeg's behaviour COULD be mathematically proven for all possible input/output streams at which point there would be no need to ever touch the code again. Classes are often prone to new bugs appearing when they are used (subclassed/inherited) in new and unexpected ways. This ability to inherit in ways the original programmer never anticipated are the selling features of OO design, but we all know it doesn't work that way in real woprld projects.
> I buy ~250k/year of Dell PCs. We do not have the time, staffing or patience to sort through myriad component problems.
Dude! If you are spending that much annually I suspect that just from the ammount spent on the service contracts you could bring on a pimply faced youth to do depot repair and build up new boxes. Building the machines ain't rocket science and if you pick your parts right (Something YOU would have to do) you can get pretty reliable stuff that is almost as quick to fix as those plastic Dells. The big wins would be having better kit and faster turnaround on repairs for the same or less cash. And you create a local job instead of pissing a load of money to Dell and their contract manufacturers.
> Well, since your #2 already includes and goes beyond this point (because it doesn't > matter if they are free or not, they shouldn't be treated equal anyway), your point > 1 is irrelevant.
You missed the point, so apparenly I didn't explain it well enough. The UN (on paper at least) is dedicated to the basic values of Western Civilization; Individual Liberty, Representive Government, the Rule of Law instead of Men, Freedom of Speech and Thought, etc. But in practice the majority of the voting members in the General Assembly are dead set against all of those core values. Seating dictators, despots and barbarians in larger numbers than the civilized nations was a fatal flaw of a totally different order than the serious but more managable flaw of equating every nation regardless of level of development, population, natural resources, land area, etc.
> Ah yes, because, according to the USA some countries are more equal then others. > Especially those that do the bidding of the USA.
Come again? Booting out unfree nations would still leave plenty of sworn enemies of US policy (if not the US itself) such as France and Germany. But while we can (and obviously do) disagree with France, they are at least worthy of expending the effort to disagree with. On the other hand, of what possible weight are the views of Castro's Cuba in the councils of civilized nations? Their vote at the UN represents the view of exactly ONE wicked old man. And that is the problem with the UN.
> Now, who will decide which one is less?
Which IS the million dollar question. And which is why I wasn't outlining what the replacement for the UN would look like, only that the the current incarnation is so fatally flawed that it should be discarded and efforts to formulate a replacement should commence. The negotiations will doubtless be long, fractious and could lead to war. But the alternative is anarchy so it is a risk that must be borne.
The current UN reality holds something like this:
USA == France == China == Russia == Great Britian (Security Council)
India == Morocco == Cuba == Canada == Libya == Iceland
If you actually believe a billion, if almost totally unfree, Chinese are exactly equal to a few million effete Frenchmen, who are exactly equal to three hundren million Americans, etc....
Or even worse, if you belive one man, Col. Kadaffi (sp) as absolute dictator of Libya, is and should be exactly equal to almost a billion Indians with a growing economy and a flourishing representive government then I really don't think we are speaking the same language.
> That hated TPM would disappear from the market, as there's no reason to employ a lock if everyone has > a legal right to the key. But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it.
We always hear this crap, that all these just over the horizon but so wonderous digital offerings will go away. But they are all as bad or worse as Divx (the Circuit City crap that was rejected by 'Consumers', not the popular codec) so good riddance. I really don't see how my life will be worse if these wonders never come and can all too quickly see how they will be worse with everything DRMed. So if DRM that actually works is the price for Hi-Def or online content I am more than content to keep buying CDs and DVDs.
>..they already make Microsoft Office for Mac OS X,... > Unless your definition of "competing operating system" is somehow different from mine.
Apple is controlled competition. Apple appears to be bound by a secret agreement to 'compete' only in a non-competitive way, i.e. stay in their high margin niche and milk it for all it is worth, but to never again hit double digits in units sold. Basically, Apple is 'token competition' to keep the DOJ happy. (Think Token on South Park.)
Linux on the other hand can't be controlled in that way, having no central authority to negotiate such a deal with. Release Office for Linux and the results could be totally unpredictable.
> What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was > before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and > provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
I don't even see that. In the end all these calls for 'wresting control from the EVIL Americans' boil down to requests for us to screw the Internet ourselves and we don't seem inclined to do that so the Internet will rumble along as it has, mowing down all before it. And in the end THAT is what these calls are all about anyway, they want the power to slow down this jugernaught called the Internet before it sweeps away the entire notion of a nation state.
But really, if the US ignores the deranged ravings of the children, what happens? They keep right on assigning domain names under their country TLD, they keep right on assigning IP addresses from their ICANN, ARIN, RIPE, etc assigned pools and the root name servers, while under nominal US control, keep right on gluing the whole thing together. Routing and connectivity are decisions totally under each nation's control. The only potential problem is the root servers and if the US ever used them for political advantage they could be replaced fairly quickly.
Just for giggles, lets examine these 'arguments' about the wisdom of sharing control over the Internet with either the EU or the UN.
The EU is, by any rational observer, a most unfree instituition when it comes to the issues that matter to the Internet. Neither the member states or the emerging single nation state has any concept of a fundamental Right to free speech such as exists in the US under our Consitiuition of clearly defined Rights such as the 1st Amendment. An Internet with EU influence would be a much poorer place for discourse. Plus there is zero chance we could share control with the EU and have any chance of shutting up the rest of the world who would scream for their place at the table. And sorry, if you believe China deserves to say the first fucking word about how a Freedom enhancing thing like the Internet should be ran you aren't the sort of person I want to discuss serious adult subjects with.
Which brings us to the UN. The UN is a a fatally flawed instituition. The design itself was flawed and these flaws have grown over time. Flaw #1 was including unfree societies on a equal basis. Flaw #2 was the idiotic notion that all nations are equal. While the Security Council was a partial attempt to correct for this flaw, in practice it has only meant inaction due to the veto in the hands of the opponents of every principle the UN, in theory at least, professes. The only solution to the UN is to disolve it. Until that happens the serious work on a more capable replacement cannot begin.
Eh? This is major news to me, to date Nvidia kit worked great in 2D but zilch for 3D. When did this change and is it a reverse effort or has Nvidia seen the light? Of course this URL http://www.x.org/X11R6.8.2/doc/nv.4.html doesn't mention it so I'll remain a bit skeptical.
Clue time dude. Nvidia is 100% closed source. Many ATI cards can be driven directly by X.org in 3D and work is ongoing to support more. ATI can't seem to bring themselves to openly support these efforts but somebody there has to be helping under the table. Nvidia on the other hand is closed, likes it that way and has zero intentions of ever allowing an open driver to develop. Nvidia has been on my "NEVER BUY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" list for years and most Free Software supporters have a similar policy. Dell made the right call when picking a vendor for their n series as far as I'm concerned.
Still wouldn't be dumb enough to buy one though. Why pay the same or more to NOT get a Windows license or tech support? We all know support is the #1 expense for a beige box vendor these days, if they want to skip out on that they better give me a bargain big enough to put up with their sub par hardware over.
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> On the other hand, this type of license reduces the pressure for real openness and shared
> code. This type of license will undoubtedly be seen as an alternative to a real open-source
> license, and offers an easy way out to organisations that might otherwise have opened up
> their source.
Actually that sort of look but don't touch license should almost be the default. Except the 'don't touch' shouldn't be any more enforcable than any other EULA. You still couldn't redistribute it because of copyright. I don't think a compiled binary should be eligible for Copyright protection except as a derived work of the published and copyrighted source code. When you buy any software you should receieve the full buildable source and optionally a precompiled binary (or binaries) for a default target. This would not reduce the rights of proprietary software vendors in the least since the source would be just as protected by copyright as their binaries now are; pirates would still make copies and still get busted if they get too extreme. But customers would be able to examine the products they buy, reviews could be based on an audit of the actual program and patching and porting could be done by people other than the original developer. And the source wouldn't end up being lost to history when companies disappear.
The reason Best Buy and their ilk only sell the Windows only crap wireless cards and such is because they also tend to be the CHEAP CRAP that the clueful sort of folk using linux at a level to be writing device drivers avoid like the plague. So the cheapo cards don't get drivers written for them by the community and since they are CHEAP cards put out by CHEAP companies they ain't going to spring for a driver, they are doing good to compile the chip vendors (also tending to be a CHEAP outfit) reference Windows driver with their name inserted into it.
So avoid buying at Best Buy not because they sell hardware unsupported by Linux, avoid Best Buy because they sell cheap crap that usually isn't all that reliable in Windows either.
If one does their research they can get a pretty well supported desktop machine for Linux. My beef is that no distro has a hardware compatibility list anymore and few hardware vendors mention whether it works under Linux unless they are selling a preloaded box. (Rare for desktop hardware of course vs servers where most are now very happy to sell a penguin inside.)
Laptops are another story. As far as I know the number of current production laptops fully supported by any Linux distribution is zero. You always lose some functionality, the modem, wireless card, pc card slots, power management, 3d or scaled video, something won't work for at least six months, often times never. This is because the people who make laptops don't give enough of a damn to insist on Linux friendly components. Even companies who pretend to be our allies like IBM and HP pull the same stunts with laptops.
My current Thinkpad comes close to working but the USB ports on the dock are broken and the CD drive in the dock only works at 4X for some reason I haven't been able to figure out. Power management is dodgy and requires I degrade the video performance (to AGP 1X) to avoid lockups when running on battery power. By making a special order I got a Cisco wireless card that works... with a special driver and after downgrading the firmware on it from Windows. And of course on a Thinkpad you only get to pick mini-pci cards from a very short list burned into the BIOS because the bastards check during POST and hang if a non-approved card is installed.
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version. Since the grunts at the keyboards hate change, tons of political pressure will be put on the people in charge to stick with MS, this offer will be accepted. Then after a couple of years of buggy and disfunctional betas we will get to the final decision. If others also demand OpenDocument it will finally go production. Otherwise they will just pull the plug on it, the current IT team in MA will have been quietly replaced by then and the whole thing will be forgotten.... except by anyone else who is thinking of taking a similar stand.
> Three and a half players. Don't forget us Europeans.
If shooting unmanned bottle rockets into space makes you a half player there are a few more to put on the list. But it don't. The name of the game is the conquest of space and unmanned just doesn't get it done.
> governments have done many important things that private enterprise would never have done,
> from major medical research, to the internet, to all spaceflight to date.
Exactly. The US went to the moon more than thirty five years ago and the net result is so close to zero it gets lost in the rounding error. A couple hundred rolls of film decomposing away in a climate controlled vault and a couple hundred pounds of rocks. Some would even argue it had a net negative effect since after going to the moon puttering about in orbit was widely seen as an anti-climax. But of course low orbit and establishing a permanent presence was what should have been the priority if the goal was a longterm presence instead of a publicity stunt.
Give it to the Reds, they at least tried to do the right thing goal wise, but still couldn't really do anything worthwhile before their whole evil empire came crashing down around their ears, leaving their rocket geeks to depend on Western handouts and a supporting role in our boondoggles.
Yes, government operations have done some fairly important ground work, collected useful information on basic biological processes in space and how to survive there, sent some good 'voyages of exploration' out ahead of the colonists to follow. But the government alone in space would be like Columbus making his voyage of discovery and not being followed up by the hundreds of voyages, mostly private ventures, that followed his path.
But governments aren't the ones who can do the heavy lifting in space, they can't make a profit and at the current tech level there isn't much of a military use for manned spaceflight. So that leaves private industry. As tech progress marches on it will eventually be practical (read profitable) to get into space and it will be the 'evil' capitalists who will get us there, looking to strip mine the moon or an asteroid probably.
But lets bring this back more on topic and allow me to burn off some excess karma. The significance of todays event is minimal. Perhaps the Chinese will eventually do something that advances the state of the art in spaceflight but today certainly didn't. A modified Soyuz capsule? Ok, they have to learn to walk before they can run but walking isn't exactly newsworthy.
Oh but is the second Chinese manned flight. Big whoop. Personally I'm a bit tired of these qualified successes in general. First woman to ___, First Black to ___, First Gay Paraplegic to ___. And this is the SECOND Chinese spaceflight, double boring. Russia got the first guy into orbit before most of the engineers who built this clone were probably born, about as much glory in that as crossing the Atlantic sitting First Class in a British Airways jumbojet. History barely remembers #2, let alone a tortise showing up at #3 when #1 would be* tottering off to the nursing home. Most people can't name the second man on the moon, and only the truly hardcore trivia buffs remember #3.
* Would be, except Yuri Gagarin died an untimely death in 1968. Everybody else is just following in his footsteps.
Ok, goody for them. Having a third player in space is probably a good thing even if they are the communist Chinese since they probably won't remain communist a lot longer. On the other hand it is just another doomed government 'prestige' program that won't actually acomplish much before being abandoned the second the cost exceeds the publicity value and that always happens long before anything longterm good can happen.
Nope, the only hope of our species getting off this rock is private enterprise.
Sorry I wasted the time on this one. Come on Slashdot, just put the Apple icon on the evangelism stories so I can skip em. This guy could care less about the crappiness of Microsoft, he just wants everyone to use Macs because they are 'cool'.
Sorry, 'cool' isn't a reason to scrap a whole infrastructure over. Avoiding Microsoft because their products are total crap and costs a boatload of cash to keep halfway secure is a much better argument, helped a great deal by virtue of being true. But this truly old school computer dork (I mean that in a nice way. This guy cut his teeth on CP/M for crissakes and he doesn't realize Microsoft produces crap?) goes out of his way to say quality isn't one of his complaints against the retards from Redmond.
> So what did you think when the SCOTUS cited "foreign laws" when stiking down
> death sentences for juvenile offenders?
I don't know about the original poster but I thought it was grounds for removing the Justices who signed onto that opinion on the grounds it was a clear violation of their Oath of Office.
The Supremes don't make law, they don't decide when to import law, they follow the laws as promulgated by the Legislative branch and controlled by the Constituition of the US. Any deviation from that mandate should result in instant removal from office by Congress. On those grounds at least seven of the sitting Justices could be removed. Scalia and Thomas I have seen skating close to the line but I haven't caught em crossing it.
> Please provide one tiny shred of proof of that statement.
Because it is what governments DO. If they don't mandate something this stupid by law everyone will simply snicker at the foolish old men with their quaint nationalistic notions and continue using the perfectly functioning DNS system as it exists. But once they make it a matter of patriotic pride and national security that Europe have a DNS system it controls, the logic of government will require mandating it's usage. When people have the good sense to still ignore them by the millions the same logic will require enforcement action, i.e. the Great Firewall of Europe and fines for violators. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it consume your destiny.
> which no ISP in their right mind will direct their DNS servers at.
They will enact laws requiring it. Then the customers will start pointing their workstations and access points at open DNS servers in the Free portions of the Internet, the Great Firewall of Europe will be erected to block access to the Free DNS servers and finally people will be fined for pointing at the 'wrong' DNS servers. THEN the heads will start going up on pointy sticks. The big question is whether there remains enough of a spark of Freedom to make it the government officials heads the ones on the sticks or whether it will be the 'traitors' among the users who refuse to use the state sponsored servers.
> The message FoxNews reprinted, from "Bob Halloran of Jacksonville, Fla", in their article, is a perfect
> example of how Slashdotters....
Yup, we can all take a good lesson from his example. And a lesson in how journalism SHOULD be done. You see, FoxNews.com almost certainly had a thousand frothing slashdotters sending letters that open with "You Bush lapdogs/Microsoft puppets suck." and go downhill from there. They could have as easily put together a followup featuring some of the more printable selections from THAT collection and made us look like raving loonies and the original shill look like the sane one.
For examples of press organizations less able to deal with criticism of their reporting one only needs to look at events of the last couple of years to find dozens of examples. This is one to hold up as an example of how this sort of thing should be resolved so lets give em some props on this one. Who knows, we might be able to start a trend.
> When is the last time you saw CNN,
Yea, they fessed up instantly that Tailwind was a work of fiction and fired the commie bastard responsible for the lie. Oh wait, they didn't. But surely they fired the idiot exec who asserted as a fact that US forces target journalists. Wait, they didn't exactly do that either.
> the New York Times,
Well after four tries over a month or so they finally got a semi-complete correction into print about Paul Krugman's 'creative use of fact' regarding the Florida recounts. But seriously, considering how many times they have been caught lying, distorting, confusing the news and editorial sections and outright printing fiction as news (Jayson Blair ring a bell anymore?) the real question is why their circulation is still over a thousand copies a day.
> or CBS news
Yup, they fired Mapes and Rather the second their treason was uncloaked. Oh, wait they are STILL trying to hide behind the "factually false but we still stand behind the gist of the story' excuse.
> print this many well-articulated reader responses to an article?
Exactly. The got skunked by a Microsoft shill, got called on it by thousands and did the right thing. They put the retraction in basically the same spot on their homepage as the original, picked very good responses to print instead of the raving lunatics and denounced the original author along with stating for the record they should have at least did the background research to spot the PR flack and include that fact in the original story. In short I suspect it will be a while before they fall for this one again.
And just how to they intend to enforce this decree? Open up local offices around the nation where they will check a photo ID before issuing a userID and password? Nah, this is just a PR stunt.
This is nothing more nor less than the Blogger Control Act of 2005. It is the last dying gasp of the 'mainstream media' to remain relevent in the face of the change we all see coming. Ten years ago the idea of government regulation of journalists would have received universal condemnation, but fear is forcing the press to do something very stupid.
Once the government gets into the business of handing out official press badges it will serve to draw a nice sharp line between the MSM and the bloggers, with one group getting to continue as things are now while the bloggers get pretty much driven out of the US IP space. Don't believe me, think I'm daft? McCain Fiengold will see to it. Once bloggers are offically outside of the 1st Amendment's protection, that it only applies to Press Guild members, political topics will be pretty much off limits. Yes this will include Slashdot within a month or so of an election.
And for awhile the Press will be happy with this new law they are buying..... but only for awhile. Then they will learn the true power of the Dark Side of Government.
> but we really should let them have a crack at it to see what happens
> before we start bitching
Ya lets let em show us what they got, but lets not get all worked up either until they do actually show us the code. So far the track record on large closed source packages isn't all that good. Netscape took how long to become a stable Mozilla/Firefox? Interbase and SAP DB are both still struggling to find their place in the FS/OS world. And this one hasn't dumped a tree yet and they admit it doesn't even fully build yet.
They admit they lack the resources to complete a port so unless the prospects are good enough to interest a fair number of quality devels with both wxWindows and win32 experience it is very possible for it to be stillborn. Not dissing em, just observing facts.
Yup, nothing truly exists until Microsoft 'Innovates' it into existence. Nope, nobody ever thought of sending video over IP until today, thank God Microsoft is out there inventing the future for us.
Ok, so some old hoary ACORN codebase that got ported to Windows years ago and apparently never developed a large userbase is going GPL because they realized they were fscked and never were going to achieve a breakout in today's rapidly consolidating Windows 3rd party app marketplace. So if folks would just stop working on Inkscape long enough to help us port this crufy old code from Win32 to whatever toolkit we eventually decide on it will just rule, trust us! But please don't build a Windows binary because we want to keep on doing our shareware thing over on that platform.
Sorry, this would have been news five years ago, but we have all seen this story play out enough times now to not be interested. They could at least have held off on the press release until they had a believable start on a port, i.e. a tree that builds and at least does something on X.
> With a word processor this might be something like i18n issues. We might specify, design, build and test
> the thing without considering the user might not have a us-ascii character set and then it breaks in China.
When you first specified the program, i18n should have been decided. If full Unicode was a requirement then yes you had damned well better have tested it in something other than en-US, otherwise Chinese is outside the scope and if it fails it isn't a problem. And if the problem is in an input method or font renderer it also falls outside your scope.
The problem is with OO, it turns programs into nightmares of invisible interdependencies. Simple procedural code is easy to understand at the unit level and safely abstract away into libraries that export well defined interfaces. But no large project is developed this way anymore, all we get are C++ and Java horrors that never quite work and never will. They can bang away on Mozilla/Firefox for another decade and it will never get any better than IE in the bug dept because both have the same basic design defect, C++. Java & C# are only marginally better; while neither suffer from buffer overruns and pointer arithmetic they still suffer from the problem that in any non-trivial system it is beyond human understanding exactly what is happening within the running program.
A procedure can be proven, all the inputs and outputs validated and it need never be looked at again. All of the procedures that make up a complex library can be tested individually and then as larger units until an entire librart can be verified as correct and put in the deep freeze. Although admittedly many popular libraries were not totally validated, see recent security bugs in image processing libraries..... but in theory libjpeg's behaviour COULD be mathematically proven for all possible input/output streams at which point there would be no need to ever touch the code again. Classes are often prone to new bugs appearing when they are used (subclassed/inherited) in new and unexpected ways. This ability to inherit in ways the original programmer never anticipated are the selling features of OO design, but we all know it doesn't work that way in real woprld projects.
> I buy ~250k/year of Dell PCs. We do not have the time, staffing or patience to sort through myriad component problems.
Dude! If you are spending that much annually I suspect that just from the ammount spent on the service contracts you could bring on a pimply faced youth to do depot repair and build up new boxes. Building the machines ain't rocket science and if you pick your parts right (Something YOU would have to do) you can get pretty reliable stuff that is almost as quick to fix as those plastic Dells. The big wins would be having better kit and faster turnaround on repairs for the same or less cash. And you create a local job instead of pissing a load of money to Dell and their contract manufacturers.
> Well, since your #2 already includes and goes beyond this point (because it doesn't
> matter if they are free or not, they shouldn't be treated equal anyway), your point
> 1 is irrelevant.
You missed the point, so apparenly I didn't explain it well enough. The UN (on paper at least) is dedicated to the basic values of Western Civilization; Individual Liberty, Representive Government, the Rule of Law instead of Men, Freedom of Speech and Thought, etc. But in practice the majority of the voting members in the General Assembly are dead set against all of those core values. Seating dictators, despots and barbarians in larger numbers than the civilized nations was a fatal flaw of a totally different order than the serious but more managable flaw of equating every nation regardless of level of development, population, natural resources, land area, etc.
> Ah yes, because, according to the USA some countries are more equal then others.
> Especially those that do the bidding of the USA.
Come again? Booting out unfree nations would still leave plenty of sworn enemies of US policy (if not the US itself) such as France and Germany. But while we can (and obviously do) disagree with France, they are at least worthy of expending the effort to disagree with. On the other hand, of what possible weight are the views of Castro's Cuba in the councils of civilized nations? Their vote at the UN represents the view of exactly ONE wicked old man. And that is the problem with the UN.
> Now, who will decide which one is less?
Which IS the million dollar question. And which is why I wasn't outlining what the replacement for the UN would look like, only that the the current incarnation is so fatally flawed that it should be discarded and efforts to formulate a replacement should commence. The negotiations will doubtless be long, fractious and could lead to war. But the alternative is anarchy so it is a risk that must be borne.
The current UN reality holds something like this:
USA == France == China == Russia == Great Britian (Security Council)
India == Morocco == Cuba == Canada == Libya == Iceland
If you actually believe a billion, if almost totally unfree, Chinese are exactly equal to a few million effete Frenchmen, who are exactly equal to three hundren million Americans, etc....
Or even worse, if you belive one man, Col. Kadaffi (sp) as absolute dictator of Libya, is and should be exactly equal to almost a billion Indians with a growing economy and a flourishing representive government then I really don't think we are speaking the same language.
> That hated TPM would disappear from the market, as there's no reason to employ a lock if everyone has
> a legal right to the key. But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it.
We always hear this crap, that all these just over the horizon but so wonderous digital offerings will go away. But they are all as bad or worse as Divx (the Circuit City crap that was rejected by 'Consumers', not the popular codec) so good riddance. I really don't see how my life will be worse if these wonders never come and can all too quickly see how they will be worse with everything DRMed. So if DRM that actually works is the price for Hi-Def or online content I am more than content to keep buying CDs and DVDs.
> ..they already make Microsoft Office for Mac OS X,...
> Unless your definition of "competing operating system" is somehow different from mine.
Apple is controlled competition. Apple appears to be bound by a secret agreement to 'compete' only in a non-competitive way, i.e. stay in their high margin niche and milk it for all it is worth, but to never again hit double digits in units sold. Basically, Apple is 'token competition' to keep the DOJ happy. (Think Token on South Park.)
Linux on the other hand can't be controlled in that way, having no central authority to negotiate such a deal with. Release Office for Linux and the results could be totally unpredictable.
> What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was
> before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and
> provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
I don't even see that. In the end all these calls for 'wresting control from the EVIL Americans' boil down to requests for us to screw the Internet ourselves and we don't seem inclined to do that so the Internet will rumble along as it has, mowing down all before it. And in the end THAT is what these calls are all about anyway, they want the power to slow down this jugernaught called the Internet before it sweeps away the entire notion of a nation state.
But really, if the US ignores the deranged ravings of the children, what happens? They keep right on assigning domain names under their country TLD, they keep right on assigning IP addresses from their ICANN, ARIN, RIPE, etc assigned pools and the root name servers, while under nominal US control, keep right on gluing the whole thing together. Routing and connectivity are decisions totally under each nation's control. The only potential problem is the root servers and if the US ever used them for political advantage they could be replaced fairly quickly.
Just for giggles, lets examine these 'arguments' about the wisdom of sharing control over the Internet with either the EU or the UN.
The EU is, by any rational observer, a most unfree instituition when it comes to the issues that matter to the Internet. Neither the member states or the emerging single nation state has any concept of a fundamental Right to free speech such as exists in the US under our Consitiuition of clearly defined Rights such as the 1st Amendment. An Internet with EU influence would be a much poorer place for discourse. Plus there is zero chance we could share control with the EU and have any chance of shutting up the rest of the world who would scream for their place at the table. And sorry, if you believe China deserves to say the first fucking word about how a Freedom enhancing thing like the Internet should be ran you aren't the sort of person I want to discuss serious adult subjects with.
Which brings us to the UN. The UN is a a fatally flawed instituition. The design itself was flawed and these flaws have grown over time. Flaw #1 was including unfree societies on a equal basis. Flaw #2 was the idiotic notion that all nations are equal. While the Security Council was a partial attempt to correct for this flaw, in practice it has only meant inaction due to the veto in the hands of the opponents of every principle the UN, in theory at least, professes. The only solution to the UN is to disolve it. Until that happens the serious work on a more capable replacement cannot begin.
Eh? This is major news to me, to date Nvidia kit worked great in 2D but zilch for 3D. When did this change and is it a reverse effort or has Nvidia seen the light? Of course this URL http://www.x.org/X11R6.8.2/doc/nv.4.html doesn't mention it so I'll remain a bit skeptical.
Clue time dude. Nvidia is 100% closed source. Many ATI cards can be driven directly by X.org in 3D and work is ongoing to support more. ATI can't seem to bring themselves to openly support these efforts but somebody there has to be helping under the table. Nvidia on the other hand is closed, likes it that way and has zero intentions of ever allowing an open driver to develop. Nvidia has been on my "NEVER BUY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" list for years and most Free Software supporters have a similar policy. Dell made the right call when picking a vendor for their n series as far as I'm concerned.
Still wouldn't be dumb enough to buy one though. Why pay the same or more to NOT get a Windows license or tech support? We all know support is the #1 expense for a beige box vendor these days, if they want to skip out on that they better give me a bargain big enough to put up with their sub par hardware over.