I agree to a point. IBM does not fully embrace open source, however. They sell plenty of products that do not include access to the source code. If you run one of their mainframe OSes like VM or MVS or zOS (or whatever they're calling them these days) you pay dearly for the privilege of having access to the source code. About 10 years ago - granted, a long time - the company I was working for was paying upwards of $50,000 per year just to get access to the source code. This was above and beyond the normal charges just to license and run the things.
More recently - well, same time frame actually - OS/2 had a killer desktop: the Workplace Shell. It was totally object-oriented. AFAICT Windows 2000, NT, XP, Longhorn, etc. use completely object-oriented desktop models. People have been pleading with IBM for years to Open Source the WPS. 10 years later it would still be an improvement over the Windows offerings. IBM refuses.
I call BS. There's nothing in the GPL that says you have to turn over your copyrights to the FSF. Some people do this, some don't. Works created and distributed under the GPL do not have to be turned over to the FSF. I sincerely hope you are just misinformed and not spreading Gatesian FUD.
The Tribune also owns the Cubs baseball team. They've been failing for years and nobody seems to get any blame. The same Tribune owns the Cubs broadcast outlets, TV and radio, and have had some of the worst announcers ever working for them. Nobody seems to care about that either. What makes you think they're going to even consider holding someone accountable?
My use has been more for testing their RSS/Atom feed to track recent posts to the Usenet newsgroups I follow. As for the rest of it, I think it looks like crap. It's slow and lacks a lot of features that would really separate it from the existing non-beta Google groups archive. The threaded-messages view is particularly bad. Hopefully it will improve a lot before it goes non-beta.
No no no no no. You misunderstand me. Or maybe I explained it badly. I'm not talking about advertisements. Most onlne adverts that are un-asked for I think are spammish. I was talking about web-based message boards. Not usenet newsgroups. A lot of times you will see messages that are part of a flame war, someone's attempt to increase their message count, or something else not totally on-topic for the board.
What you see is people start calling those messages spam. First and foremost the messages aren't advertising anything. They're usually just trvial nonsense someone felt compelled to post. Calling those messages "spam" is not correct usage of the term. Many of us wish spammers would die a slow and painful death. False-spammers don't deserve the same fate. By "false spammers" I mean anyone obviously not trying to sell anything.
Countless messages posted to web-based message boards, no matter how trivial, off-topic or obtuse IS NOT SPAM
Spam is UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL BULK EMAIL
There is a disturbing trend among unknowledgable internet users these days to re-define spam as anyone or anything that appears off-topic or designed to simply waste time. You can find endless examples of this on most web boards. "Stop spamming this thread," is a common response to trolls or a string of off-topic messages. Such messages do waste your time and they are annoying but they are not spam. A stream of off-topic messages completely fails to meet any test of real "spam". It's not commercial. It's not bulk. And it's not email. Unless people speak out against this wrong usage of the term, the seriousness of the real spam problem will be masked. Spam is the scourge of the internet. It's frightening to think that a large number of people who hear the term "spam" really have no idea what it means.
The next time there's a debate in the government (at any level) as regards Microsoft or their products I'm going to drag this article out and quickly follow with a list of security holes and patches that have cost businesses and consumers untold millions and billions of dollars in lost time and productivity. The syllogism here is that if sloppy code is to blame for bad security, and Microsoft has bad security then Microsoft must have sloppy coders.
To be fair I've seen some truly horrendous code from other places, including OSS and Free Software, but there's something to be said for MS software as a result of the sloppy-code bad-security angle because they charge so much for it. So much for the old adage You Get What You Pay For. With most Microsoft products you actually get considerably less.
If they really wanted to get serious they go as far as actually taking the airwaves away from the big corporations and giving them back to the people. We want something in return for the use of those airwaves and it ain't a one-time bargain sale.
We used to get Real News. Now we get attractive people spewing corporate and government propaganda ant us all day. Why doesn't the FCC do anything about that? (thanks to Juan Cole for some of this stuff)
This gets to the crux of the problem. The record labels and movie studios and their distributors don't think Copyright protection is enough. They are trying to persuade (read: bribe) Congress that they deserve all the same protections afforded to real "property".
Their arguments say that billions of dolars in economic activity, both here and internationally, tens of thousands of jobs, millions in tax revenues and a fair chunk of "consumer spending" - all traditional indicators of economic "health" - are at stake. They want the Congress to agree with them that what's good for the entertainment industry is good for the United States. They want copyright law as we know it either destroyed or re-written to suit their purposes.
Does this have anything even remotely to do with News for Nerds or technology or computers or programing or software or hardware or anthing electonic whatsoever?
There's nothing that matters for nerds in this book or its review.
What a bunch of unintelligible nonsense. I'm sure David Deutsch would explain this differently. Whatever he told the author of the article has been lost somewhere. Probably in the vacuous head of the author. He doesn't mention how light behaves as particles AND waves at the same time. He talks about "shadows" going dark. In fact, when I was done reading the article I wasn't sure what he meant by his use of the word "shadow" at all. The writer did a terrible job of explaining what's going on in this experiment and what it's supposed to represent.
Call me curmudgeonly or whatever, but I have my/. preferences set to apply a -3 modifier to posts scored "Funny". Maybe it's just me, but what others seem to find positively hilarious I only find mildly amusing at best. Most annoying:
3. Profit! In Soviet Russia... All your base... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... 5. Profit! Cowboy Neal Geek sex and the lack thereof
OK, I know 99% of the world finds it too cumbersone to use. But I hope they provide some mechanism to upload a public key and somehow let you have a private key locally to encrypt email. One of the big minuses in getting wide acceptance of encrypted email has been lack of a good, trustworthy central key repository.
Google will have an almost immediate user base of millions. They can raise awareness of secure email and promote its use easily. Google shouldn't overlook this. People TRUST Google! If Gmail enables reasonably easy-to-use encryption, the widespread use of really private email might finally become a reality.
One more thing: Do they plan to support SSL connections? Even if you don't need or want the security of end-to-end communication, being able to send and receive email from the Gmail servers without worrying about whether or not your ISP or other network sniffer is looking at your mail. Hey, I may be paranoid (actually there's no such thing as paranoia) but there's a reason why snail-mail envelopes have that "security" pattern printed inside them, you know? I've yet to see anyone who sends their correspondence in transparent envelopes.
Despite all their service packs and hot fixes, they never really seem to FIX anything. Besides 'Doze itself there are a bunch of MS products I've used over the years that had serious problems. Not necessarily "bugs" per se, but features that didn't work as advertised or missing functionality in general.
Case in point: VS.NET 2003 has several annoying bugs and problems that have been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of complaints. It's been out a while now and there's no service pack in sight. Maybe half a dozen features from VS6 were "removed". Sure, they added a hundred, but those 6 were commonly used and their disappearance causes angst and frustration on a daily basis. What's the MS response to all this? "Wait for Whidbey."
Right. That's just been delayed again. And they want you to pay for it, of course. Why can't they just friggin' fix the garbage they've put out already? There are countless similar examples over the years. Access, Word, SQL Server... you name it and it has had bugs at some point that MS refused to fix. They say to wait for the next version, but that doesn't address the core issue that you have a piece of expensive software you already paid good money for and they refuse to fix it. They refuse responsibility to make it work right. Perhaps, at some point, software should have warranties if it costs beyond $X. I'm sick and tired of paying for MS software that they essentially sell "as is".
This doesn't even begin to address the notorious problems they have with security. I think they're related. It goes to their culture of never having to fix anything. The recent years of being forced to patch holes and vulnerabilities goes against everything in their culture. That's why they can never get the security fixes "right".
Ahhhhh..... Yours is in better shape than mine! All the rubber feet are missing and the HP logo is missing from the upper right corner. The logo came off the day it got run over by a car in the driveway. There was a lot of snow that day so it wasn't a real smash-job thank goodness. Last time I replaced the batteries was September 1997.
Too bad the geniuses running HP don't see an obvious plan... Re-release the 11 series to manufacturing. They're making them in China now so the fact that they're not exactly state-of-the-art shouldn't be a big problem. Minimal cost to them and the damn things would sell.
Looks kinda funky. If you want to hit 4-5-6 without looking at the keyboard it seems like it would be kind of hard on this thing. It won't be replacing my old HP-11C anytime soon. The prices on ebay for the older models just got a boost! The market for these things is nichey at best, and when us old-school folks fail to buy them in droves to replace our older models it doesn't seem likely that they'll rush to design another one.
*sigh*... If they had only done a traditional keyboard layout...
The real SOBs ARE the little tykes who are allowed to run around and cause havoc. God bless those parents who realize the need for a leash and are willing to use them. Not for all kids, but there are some who are without discipline. They are the worst kind. Without a leash they would be like so many dogs who run away. Or run around the mall pulling things off shelves, or the retaurant bothering other diners, or out into traffic where they could get seriously hurt. Face it dude, some kids NEED leashes.
It has to be said... I've been here on/. for a few years now and my karma's not bad. But when it comes to legal issues Groklaw has out-slashdotted/.
I simply don't read articles here anymore that are covered better on Groklaw, such as SCO legal wranglings. Mod me as you wish but it's just a fact --- I'm off to Groklaw now to read up on the IBM subpoenas.
(lol) ========== So we were singing Bye, bye, Mr. Darl McBride... You fooled Wall Street pundits But we know you lied Them BayStar boys gonna see you hang high Singin' this'll be the day that you fry... This'll be the day that you fry
Just last night I was rummaging around the MS Windows XP security newsgoup. The new SP2 ICF firewall will NOT challenge outgoing communications. The rules you can set up with it generally apply only to incoming connections. If an application tries to establish a listening port ICF will challenge that, but outgoing connections aren't controlled.
Employees in the U.S. have so few rights. There's no other way, I know, but when employers stoop this low then something needs to be done. If I hire you and am paying you then I want every last minute of work out of you. There's nothing immoral about that. When I hire you and decide to secretly not pay you for some of the work you've done then I am guilty of something akin to slavery.
What's the punishment when an employee steals from his employer? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I say it's time we start holding companies responsible for their actions. In particular, it should be easier to pierce the corporate veil than it is today. It would be nice if they paid taxes, too.too.
That's pretty cool. I wonder how the mag blips work in the cold weather. I never knew the Botts Dots were called that. I do know the reason they're not used in the Northeast is because the snowplows would wreak havoc on them. Whenever I'm out west or down south I always note to myself how great they are, especially when it's raining at night. In the northeast when it's raining at night it seems like maintaining your lane is optional since nobody can be expected to really see where the lanes are.
This has been a vision for at least 40 years. They had "prototypes" or "models" or what-have-you -- mock-ups, yeah, that's the ticket -- at the NY World's Fair in 1964. IMO there's another 40 years to wait for this. Artificial intelligence has advanced in fits and starts over the decades, but has a long way to go. Safety concerns are real and no insurance company is going to write policies unless and until thay are at least as safe as what's on the roads today. Infrastructure is another hurdle. In the U.S. there's a huge highway spending bill -- $250 Billion U.S. over 5 years -- pending that represents a hige investment in getting current roads up to snuff. How much would it cost to equip the highways for self-driving cars? A trillion $ U.S.? And that's not going to happen until there's a standard to follow. Even adter the technology has been perfected it will take another decade for pilot programs of competing standards to decide a "winner".
To get really tin-foil-hattish about it, I imagine once self-driving automobile technology is perfected it will be really, really safe. Really safe. To the point where there will be so few accidents that it will result in insurance companies having to lower premiums drastically. To the point where they won't be able to rake in the dough like they do now on auto insurance. My hat is telling me these companies will work behind the scenes to prevent this technology from maturing any time "soon". Once it gets to the point of being usable and practical they will attempt to buy legistlation that outlaws it. In the U.S. anyway. Like I said, I don't expect any of this for another 40 years or so, and by then the techniques of hyper-lobbying (read: legal bribery) will have advanced to the point where today's legislation purchasers (MS, Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, etc.) will look like pikers by comparison.
What pisses me off (sometimes) is all this stuff we were promised as kids. Well, where is it? I don't see any of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree to a point. IBM does not fully embrace open source, however. They sell plenty of products that do not include access to the source code. If you run one of their mainframe OSes like VM or MVS or zOS (or whatever they're calling them these days) you pay dearly for the privilege of having access to the source code. About 10 years ago - granted, a long time - the company I was working for was paying upwards of $50,000 per year just to get access to the source code. This was above and beyond the normal charges just to license and run the things.
More recently - well, same time frame actually - OS/2 had a killer desktop: the Workplace Shell. It was totally object-oriented. AFAICT Windows 2000, NT, XP, Longhorn, etc. use completely object-oriented desktop models. People have been pleading with IBM for years to Open Source the WPS. 10 years later it would still be an improvement over the Windows offerings. IBM refuses.
I call BS. There's nothing in the GPL that says you have to turn over your copyrights to the FSF. Some people do this, some don't. Works created and distributed under the GPL do not have to be turned over to the FSF. I sincerely hope you are just misinformed and not spreading Gatesian FUD.
(OT aside: "4 Interesting" is way overrated IMO)
The Tribune also owns the Cubs baseball team. They've been failing for years and nobody seems to get any blame. The same Tribune owns the Cubs broadcast outlets, TV and radio, and have had some of the worst announcers ever working for them. Nobody seems to care about that either. What makes you think they're going to even consider holding someone accountable?
Yep. I've been using it for several weeks now.
My use has been more for testing their RSS/Atom feed to track recent posts to the Usenet newsgroups I follow. As for the rest of it, I think it looks like crap. It's slow and lacks a lot of features that would really separate it from the existing non-beta Google groups archive. The threaded-messages view is particularly bad. Hopefully it will improve a lot before it goes non-beta.
No no no no no. You misunderstand me. Or maybe I explained it badly. I'm not talking about advertisements. Most onlne adverts that are un-asked for I think are spammish. I was talking about web-based message boards. Not usenet newsgroups. A lot of times you will see messages that are part of a flame war, someone's attempt to increase their message count, or something else not totally on-topic for the board.
What you see is people start calling those messages spam. First and foremost the messages aren't advertising anything. They're usually just trvial nonsense someone felt compelled to post. Calling those messages "spam" is not correct usage of the term. Many of us wish spammers would die a slow and painful death. False-spammers don't deserve the same fate. By "false spammers" I mean anyone obviously not trying to sell anything.
No.
Countless messages posted to web-based message boards, no matter how trivial, off-topic or obtuse IS NOT SPAM
Spam is UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL BULK EMAIL
There is a disturbing trend among unknowledgable internet users these days to re-define spam as anyone or anything that appears off-topic or designed to simply waste time. You can find endless examples of this on most web boards. "Stop spamming this thread," is a common response to trolls or a string of off-topic messages. Such messages do waste your time and they are annoying but they are not spam. A stream of off-topic messages completely fails to meet any test of real "spam". It's not commercial. It's not bulk. And it's not email. Unless people speak out against this wrong usage of the term, the seriousness of the real spam problem will be masked. Spam is the scourge of the internet. It's frightening to think that a large number of people who hear the term "spam" really have no idea what it means.
The next time there's a debate in the government (at any level) as regards Microsoft or their products I'm going to drag this article out and quickly follow with a list of security holes and patches that have cost businesses and consumers untold millions and billions of dollars in lost time and productivity. The syllogism here is that if sloppy code is to blame for bad security, and Microsoft has bad security then Microsoft must have sloppy coders.
To be fair I've seen some truly horrendous code from other places, including OSS and Free Software, but there's something to be said for MS software as a result of the sloppy-code bad-security angle because they charge so much for it. So much for the old adage You Get What You Pay For. With most Microsoft products you actually get considerably less.
If they really wanted to get serious they go as far as actually taking the airwaves away from the big corporations and giving them back to the people. We want something in return for the use of those airwaves and it ain't a one-time bargain sale.
We used to get Real News. Now we get attractive people spewing corporate and government propaganda ant us all day. Why doesn't the FCC do anything about that? (thanks to Juan Cole for some of this stuff)
This gets to the crux of the problem. The record labels and movie studios and their distributors don't think Copyright protection is enough. They are trying to persuade (read: bribe) Congress that they deserve all the same protections afforded to real "property".
Their arguments say that billions of dolars in economic activity, both here and internationally, tens of thousands of jobs, millions in tax revenues and a fair chunk of "consumer spending" - all traditional indicators of economic "health" - are at stake. They want the Congress to agree with them that what's good for the entertainment industry is good for the United States. They want copyright law as we know it either destroyed or re-written to suit their purposes.
Does this have anything even remotely to do with News for Nerds or technology or computers or programing or software or hardware or anthing electonic whatsoever?
There's nothing that matters for nerds in this book or its review.
What a bunch of unintelligible nonsense. I'm sure David Deutsch would explain this differently. Whatever he told the author of the article has been lost somewhere. Probably in the vacuous head of the author. He doesn't mention how light behaves as particles AND waves at the same time. He talks about "shadows" going dark. In fact, when I was done reading the article I wasn't sure what he meant by his use of the word "shadow" at all. The writer did a terrible job of explaining what's going on in this experiment and what it's supposed to represent.
Time, I guess, to DTFE.
Call me curmudgeonly or whatever, but I have my /. preferences set to apply a -3 modifier to posts scored "Funny". Maybe it's just me, but what others seem to find positively hilarious I only find mildly amusing at best. Most annoying:
3. Profit!
In Soviet Russia...
All your base...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
5. Profit!
Cowboy Neal
Geek sex and the lack thereof
Easy. Ads for things like:
Spies-R-Us
Humm Vee Dealers
Firearms Dealers
Locksmiths
OnStar
Private Detecive Agencies
Divorce Lawyers
Employment Counselors
Tin Foil Hats
Tasers and Stun Guns
Lawyers
Lots of things appeal to the paranoid crowd!
OK, I know 99% of the world finds it too cumbersone to use. But I hope they provide some mechanism to upload a public key and somehow let you have a private key locally to encrypt email. One of the big minuses in getting wide acceptance of encrypted email has been lack of a good, trustworthy central key repository.
Google will have an almost immediate user base of millions. They can raise awareness of secure email and promote its use easily. Google shouldn't overlook this. People TRUST Google! If Gmail enables reasonably easy-to-use encryption, the widespread use of really private email might finally become a reality.
One more thing: Do they plan to support SSL connections? Even if you don't need or want the security of end-to-end communication, being able to send and receive email from the Gmail servers without worrying about whether or not your ISP or other network sniffer is looking at your mail. Hey, I may be paranoid (actually there's no such thing as paranoia) but there's a reason why snail-mail envelopes have that "security" pattern printed inside them, you know? I've yet to see anyone who sends their correspondence in transparent envelopes.
Wow what a time saver! Yeah, clicking on my browser (set at the Google home page of course) is just way too much trouble.
Despite all their service packs and hot fixes, they never really seem to FIX anything. Besides 'Doze itself there are a bunch of MS products I've used over the years that had serious problems. Not necessarily "bugs" per se, but features that didn't work as advertised or missing functionality in general.
Case in point: VS.NET 2003 has several annoying bugs and problems that have been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of complaints. It's been out a while now and there's no service pack in sight. Maybe half a dozen features from VS6 were "removed". Sure, they added a hundred, but those 6 were commonly used and their disappearance causes angst and frustration on a daily basis. What's the MS response to all this? "Wait for Whidbey."
Right. That's just been delayed again. And they want you to pay for it, of course. Why can't they just friggin' fix the garbage they've put out already? There are countless similar examples over the years. Access, Word, SQL Server... you name it and it has had bugs at some point that MS refused to fix. They say to wait for the next version, but that doesn't address the core issue that you have a piece of expensive software you already paid good money for and they refuse to fix it. They refuse responsibility to make it work right. Perhaps, at some point, software should have warranties if it costs beyond $X. I'm sick and tired of paying for MS software that they essentially sell "as is".
This doesn't even begin to address the notorious problems they have with security. I think they're related. It goes to their culture of never having to fix anything. The recent years of being forced to patch holes and vulnerabilities goes against everything in their culture. That's why they can never get the security fixes "right".
Ahhhhh..... Yours is in better shape than mine! All the rubber feet are missing and the HP logo is missing from the upper right corner. The logo came off the day it got run over by a car in the driveway. There was a lot of snow that day so it wasn't a real smash-job thank goodness. Last time I replaced the batteries was September 1997.
Too bad the geniuses running HP don't see an obvious plan... Re-release the 11 series to manufacturing. They're making them in China now so the fact that they're not exactly state-of-the-art shouldn't be a big problem. Minimal cost to them and the damn things would sell.
Looks kinda funky. If you want to hit 4-5-6 without looking at the keyboard it seems like it would be kind of hard on this thing. It won't be replacing my old HP-11C anytime soon. The prices on ebay for the older models just got a boost! The market for these things is nichey at best, and when us old-school folks fail to buy them in droves to replace our older models it doesn't seem likely that they'll rush to design another one.
... If they had only done a traditional keyboard layout...
*sigh*
The real SOBs ARE the little tykes who are allowed to run around and cause havoc. God bless those parents who realize the need for a leash and are willing to use them. Not for all kids, but there are some who are without discipline. They are the worst kind. Without a leash they would be like so many dogs who run away. Or run around the mall pulling things off shelves, or the retaurant bothering other diners, or out into traffic where they could get seriously hurt. Face it dude, some kids NEED leashes.
It has to be said... I've been here on /. for a few years now and my karma's not bad. But when it comes to legal issues Groklaw has out-slashdotted /.
I simply don't read articles here anymore that are covered better on Groklaw, such as SCO legal wranglings. Mod me as you wish but it's just a fact --- I'm off to Groklaw now to read up on the IBM subpoenas.
(lol)
==========
So we were singing
Bye, bye, Mr. Darl McBride...
You fooled Wall Street pundits
But we know you lied
Them BayStar boys gonna see you hang high
Singin' this'll be the day that you fry...
This'll be the day that you fry
Just last night I was rummaging around the MS Windows XP security newsgoup. The new SP2 ICF firewall will NOT challenge outgoing communications. The rules you can set up with it generally apply only to incoming connections. If an application tries to establish a listening port ICF will challenge that, but outgoing connections aren't controlled.
Employees in the U.S. have so few rights. There's no other way, I know, but when employers stoop this low then something needs to be done. If I hire you and am paying you then I want every last minute of work out of you. There's nothing immoral about that. When I hire you and decide to secretly not pay you for some of the work you've done then I am guilty of something akin to slavery.
What's the punishment when an employee steals from his employer? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I say it's time we start holding companies responsible for their actions. In particular, it should be easier to pierce the corporate veil than it is today. It would be nice if they paid taxes, too.too.
That's pretty cool. I wonder how the mag blips work in the cold weather. I never knew the Botts Dots were called that. I do know the reason they're not used in the Northeast is because the snowplows would wreak havoc on them. Whenever I'm out west or down south I always note to myself how great they are, especially when it's raining at night. In the northeast when it's raining at night it seems like maintaining your lane is optional since nobody can be expected to really see where the lanes are.
This has been a vision for at least 40 years. They had "prototypes" or "models" or what-have-you -- mock-ups, yeah, that's the ticket -- at the NY World's Fair in 1964. IMO there's another 40 years to wait for this. Artificial intelligence has advanced in fits and starts over the decades, but has a long way to go. Safety concerns are real and no insurance company is going to write policies unless and until thay are at least as safe as what's on the roads today. Infrastructure is another hurdle. In the U.S. there's a huge highway spending bill -- $250 Billion U.S. over 5 years -- pending that represents a hige investment in getting current roads up to snuff. How much would it cost to equip the highways for self-driving cars? A trillion $ U.S.? And that's not going to happen until there's a standard to follow. Even adter the technology has been perfected it will take another decade for pilot programs of competing standards to decide a "winner".
To get really tin-foil-hattish about it, I imagine once self-driving automobile technology is perfected it will be really, really safe. Really safe. To the point where there will be so few accidents that it will result in insurance companies having to lower premiums drastically. To the point where they won't be able to rake in the dough like they do now on auto insurance. My hat is telling me these companies will work behind the scenes to prevent this technology from maturing any time "soon". Once it gets to the point of being usable and practical they will attempt to buy legistlation that outlaws it. In the U.S. anyway. Like I said, I don't expect any of this for another 40 years or so, and by then the techniques of hyper-lobbying (read: legal bribery) will have advanced to the point where today's legislation purchasers (MS, Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, etc.) will look like pikers by comparison.
What pisses me off (sometimes) is all this stuff we were promised as kids. Well, where is it? I don't see any of it.