SO, you simply explain that you has a big DL to do. Problem solved.
SO, I'll need to explain to my ISP why I'm using a lot of bandwidth every other day or so? Doesn't that strike you as just a little bit of a pain in the arse? (Not to mention the privacy implications)
You can't even have a system whereby if someone proves themselves to be a genuine "heavy internet uesr" over some period you stop checking them, as their machine could be compromised at any time.
How does a secure OS prevent a user from installing a trojan that turns their machine into a spam zombie as well as telling them the weather forecast, or giving them a "cool" mouse cursor, or whatever?
If I can install and run software, and that software can make network connections, my machine can be zombified, and there's nothing that MS can do about it (or any Linux distro, or anyone else producing an OS).
Eliminate all the remote and local exploits, and you'll still be left with one - the user.
If they are necessary then, by definition, everyone will follow suit or die.
Environmental and especially health and safety type laws are necessary for the *workers*, not for the *copanies*. If you're trying to grow your economy, you do what it takes to make life easy for the companies. If that means that working conditions suffer, so be it.
Don't get me wrong, I think that pay will tend to equalise. However, I have no confidence that entire industries won't be destroyed in Western countries before it happens. The rich will get richer, the poor will get richer, but the middle classes will get much poorer.
If you're talking about pure ideas, that's true. If you're talking about an idea as a potential way of making money, well, the market's only so big. If you start sharing it with other people, there's less of it for you to have.
Please don't buy into the double-think that ideas are property
No, an idea isn't property, but the implementation of that idea could be thought of as such, if only because of the investment of time and effort that it took to create it.
Shopping baskets for e-commerce websites? Not property. This particular implementation of a shopping basket which I wrote? Mine. If I choose to give it away, good for me. If not, well, that's my choice too; I was the one who spent the time creating it. You're welcome to do it yourself, or use someone else's.
But that doesn't fix the problem that patents were invented to solve - that sometimes, creating something new just plain takes a lot of time, effort and money, and that if the risk of not being able to make that money back is too great, people/companies simply won't do it.
The problem isn't with patents, it's with granting them for frivolous claims.
mathematics and theoretical physics don't cost much. All you need is a pencil and a sheet of paper
Funnily enough, I remember a few years ago when I was thinking about doing a Phd in Physics. The theoretical physics group had an open day, so I went along. The head of the group gave a talk, and towards the end of it he said something like "Now, this is the point where we would show you round the group, but let's face it, there's nothing to see apart from a group of people sat at computers and scribbling on pads of paper"
Similarly, "1 "pirate" copy != 1 lost sale" is also not necessarily true.
Fact is, you can't say for definite *either* way - plenty of people will only have downloaded stuff they'd not have bought, or bought all the stuff that they downloaded and liked, but likewise, plenty of people will have downloaded stuff *instead* of buying it.
That really depends on the details of the impact; hit land hard enough with enough mass, and the ejecta is going to be a serious problem on a planetary scale.
True, but life is full of uncertainties. Maybe the next time I cross the road I'll be killed by an out of control car on the other side that plows across and into me.
All you can do is try to mitigate the risks. You have to weigh up the risk of a supplier of a preferred product going belly up (or just plain bat shit insane) against risks associated with using a less suitable but potentially safer alternative.
The whole point of Open Source is freedom. Freedom from any group being able to "lock you in"
And yet, so many Open Source/Free Software people try to convince everyone that they should only use Free/Open Source Software, thus attempting to lock everyone in to using only that type of software.
If you truly believed in *my* freedom, you would respect my choice to use whatever I believe to be the most appropriate tool for the job.
If hypothetically free software were to become the only legal form of software as of tomorrow, the vast majority of programmers would still be in a job. And those jobs would be better.
I'm a programmer; how would my job be better if free software became the only legal form of software?
If a company does that often enough, it will lose all its customers as they migrate away to a less risky company.
I have no idea why the BK people have done this, but it strikes me as being an incredibly foolish thing to do.
This whole absurb scenario is an object lesson to not choose proprietary software produced by idiots.
Re:Perhaps the SCM Solution is not the problem
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most fundementally, the reason I reject your conclusion can be best expressed as a question: "If the linux process is so poor, why is it more popular than *BSD?"
No offence, but logically-speaking an argument by appeal to popularity is pretty weak. There are a great many reasons why a thing may become popular, of which superior quality is only one.
Simply put, if you replace people with robots, you have to either accept job losses, or ramp up production and move those people into supervisory jobs. If the people aren't suitable for supervisory jobs, or production at that level is unsustainable, there will be job losses.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that that's the way it is. Just look at the car industry for an example of people losing jobs to robots.
So, you want multiple identical domains? What happens then when you type in slashdot.org and there are three of them? Does it list them, allowing you to choose one? How do you know which one is the "right" one? Just try them all, one after another?
What if instead of three, there were three hundred? What if it's not slashdot you're trying to get to, but an ecommerce site, or your bank? Do you still feel lucky?
The *existence* of gravity isn't a theory, what's a theory is our explanations for it and description of the mechanics of it - the equations, in other words.
Well, maybe *you've* never heard of the University of Durham, but it's one of the foremost universities in the UK, and the Physics group there is extremely well-respected.
This isn't "some kids doing a group project", this is proper academic research; you may have heard of that...
Here in the UK at least, the act of installing the software, and of loading the software from disk to RAM has been ruled to involve making a *copy* of teh software. Therefore, a licence is required, as copyright law prevents that.
this means you could sue Microsoft if they set an update to automatically install (SP2 anyone?)
What's that supposed to mean? There's nothing in XP that can automatically install an update (SP2 or not) without my permission. Even the automatic update feature is configured to download and prompt for installation by default (although yes, they recommend that it install by default, but then in the vast majority of cases that's excellent advice that more people should heed...)
Now, if you configure auto update to auto-install stuff, even if you have somehow managed to not accept the licence, *you* configured it to behave like that. I fail to see how MS could be liable for anything in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
SO, you simply explain that you has a big DL to do. Problem solved.
SO, I'll need to explain to my ISP why I'm using a lot of bandwidth every other day or so? Doesn't that strike you as just a little bit of a pain in the arse? (Not to mention the privacy implications)
You can't even have a system whereby if someone proves themselves to be a genuine "heavy internet uesr" over some period you stop checking them, as their machine could be compromised at any time.
How does a secure OS prevent a user from installing a trojan that turns their machine into a spam zombie as well as telling them the weather forecast, or giving them a "cool" mouse cursor, or whatever?
If I can install and run software, and that software can make network connections, my machine can be zombified, and there's nothing that MS can do about it (or any Linux distro, or anyone else producing an OS).
Eliminate all the remote and local exploits, and you'll still be left with one - the user.
"America" as a whole will continue to prosper, yes. But each time a Big Change occurs entire regions become scar tissue, forever useless.
That makes it sound as though if it happens often enough, eventually the whole of "America" will fail.
As slashdotters are so fond of saying in P2P stories - your business plan is flawed and its not up to us to sustain it for you.
Spare a thought for those of us that don't say that. We're not all looking at reaping what we sow; some of us aren't sowing it.
If they are necessary then, by definition, everyone will follow suit or die.
Environmental and especially health and safety type laws are necessary for the *workers*, not for the *copanies*. If you're trying to grow your economy, you do what it takes to make life easy for the companies. If that means that working conditions suffer, so be it.
Don't get me wrong, I think that pay will tend to equalise. However, I have no confidence that entire industries won't be destroyed in Western countries before it happens. The rich will get richer, the poor will get richer, but the middle classes will get much poorer.
whenever somebody "defers" on defending themself, it sure looks like they have something to hide
Never heard the phrase "innocent until proven guilty", huh?
If you're talking about pure ideas, that's true. If you're talking about an idea as a potential way of making money, well, the market's only so big. If you start sharing it with other people, there's less of it for you to have.
Please don't buy into the double-think that ideas are property
No, an idea isn't property, but the implementation of that idea could be thought of as such, if only because of the investment of time and effort that it took to create it.
Shopping baskets for e-commerce websites? Not property. This particular implementation of a shopping basket which I wrote? Mine. If I choose to give it away, good for me. If not, well, that's my choice too; I was the one who spent the time creating it. You're welcome to do it yourself, or use someone else's.
Eyebrows, nails and pecks intrude your keyboard
Pectoral muscles that big? C'mon, admit it, they're breasts!
But that doesn't fix the problem that patents were invented to solve - that sometimes, creating something new just plain takes a lot of time, effort and money, and that if the risk of not being able to make that money back is too great, people/companies simply won't do it.
The problem isn't with patents, it's with granting them for frivolous claims.
mathematics and theoretical physics don't cost much. All you need is a pencil and a sheet of paper
Funnily enough, I remember a few years ago when I was thinking about doing a Phd in Physics. The theoretical physics group had an open day, so I went along. The head of the group gave a talk, and towards the end of it he said something like "Now, this is the point where we would show you round the group, but let's face it, there's nothing to see apart from a group of people sat at computers and scribbling on pads of paper"
1 "pirate" copy = 1 lost sale? FALSE!
Similarly, "1 "pirate" copy != 1 lost sale" is also not necessarily true.
Fact is, you can't say for definite *either* way - plenty of people will only have downloaded stuff they'd not have bought, or bought all the stuff that they downloaded and liked, but likewise, plenty of people will have downloaded stuff *instead* of buying it.
That really depends on the details of the impact; hit land hard enough with enough mass, and the ejecta is going to be a serious problem on a planetary scale.
True, but life is full of uncertainties. Maybe the next time I cross the road I'll be killed by an out of control car on the other side that plows across and into me.
All you can do is try to mitigate the risks. You have to weigh up the risk of a supplier of a preferred product going belly up (or just plain bat shit insane) against risks associated with using a less suitable but potentially safer alternative.
The whole point of Open Source is freedom. Freedom from any group being able to "lock you in"
And yet, so many Open Source/Free Software people try to convince everyone that they should only use Free/Open Source Software, thus attempting to lock everyone in to using only that type of software.
If you truly believed in *my* freedom, you would respect my choice to use whatever I believe to be the most appropriate tool for the job.
If hypothetically free software were to become the only legal form of software as of tomorrow, the vast majority of programmers would still be in a job. And those jobs would be better.
I'm a programmer; how would my job be better if free software became the only legal form of software?
If a company does that often enough, it will lose all its customers as they migrate away to a less risky company.
I have no idea why the BK people have done this, but it strikes me as being an incredibly foolish thing to do.
This whole absurb scenario is an object lesson to not choose proprietary software produced by idiots.
Most fundementally, the reason I reject your conclusion can be best expressed as a question: "If the linux process is so poor, why is it more popular than *BSD?"
No offence, but logically-speaking an argument by appeal to popularity is pretty weak. There are a great many reasons why a thing may become popular, of which superior quality is only one.
Simply put, if you replace people with robots, you have to either accept job losses, or ramp up production and move those people into supervisory jobs. If the people aren't suitable for supervisory jobs, or production at that level is unsustainable, there will be job losses.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that that's the way it is. Just look at the car industry for an example of people losing jobs to robots.
So, you want multiple identical domains? What happens then when you type in slashdot.org and there are three of them? Does it list them, allowing you to choose one? How do you know which one is the "right" one? Just try them all, one after another?
What if instead of three, there were three hundred? What if it's not slashdot you're trying to get to, but an ecommerce site, or your bank? Do you still feel lucky?
This 5-digit uid user agrees with you both; I'm sure this place sucked a whole lot less a few years ago.
(Of course, I still keep coming back; guess I suck even more.)
The *existence* of gravity isn't a theory, what's a theory is our explanations for it and description of the mechanics of it - the equations, in other words.
You need to remove the trailing / on the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham
Well, maybe *you've* never heard of the University of Durham, but it's one of the foremost universities in the UK, and the Physics group there is extremely well-respected.
This isn't "some kids doing a group project", this is proper academic research; you may have heard of that...
Here in the UK at least, the act of installing the software, and of loading the software from disk to RAM has been ruled to involve making a *copy* of teh software. Therefore, a licence is required, as copyright law prevents that.
Insane, huh?
this means you could sue Microsoft if they set an update to automatically install (SP2 anyone?)
What's that supposed to mean? There's nothing in XP that can automatically install an update (SP2 or not) without my permission. Even the automatic update feature is configured to download and prompt for installation by default (although yes, they recommend that it install by default, but then in the vast majority of cases that's excellent advice that more people should heed...)
Now, if you configure auto update to auto-install stuff, even if you have somehow managed to not accept the licence, *you* configured it to behave like that. I fail to see how MS could be liable for anything in that case.