Sometimes, rewriting from scratch is necessary to remove bugs. Not all bugs are just failure to check a buffer overflow, which can be fixed without a complete rewrite. Sometimes your basic communications architecture in the program is fundamentally flawed and insecure. At that point, by the time you've fixed that bug in the existing codebase it would have been easier to start from scratch and make everything else work "natively" on the new internal standard.
Take for example, Windows.;-) There are fundamental security issues with all GUI windows operating in the same user space. If one is compromised, they're all 0wnz3d. That's a reasonably major flaw, but to fix it would require essentially rewriting the entire GUI portion of Windows, because it's so integral to the system. To try and fix that without a rewrite would be harder and more complicated than chucking it and starting from scratch, and probably introduce a dozen other bugs in the process.
Sometimes you really do need to throw out the baby with the bath water, if the baby is that dirty. Besides, making a new one can be fun!:-)
Who'd have thunk it, a legit use
on
RFID Casino Chips
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Casino chips are not something that the casino sells to you. You borrow them as an alternate counting mechanism. Putting RFID tags on THEIR OWN PROPERTY that STAYS THEIR PROPERTY, and STAYS ON THEIR OWN PREMESIS to prevent theft is fine. I'd say the same about museums putting RFIDs on those portable audio players and headphones they give you to walk around exhbits with, or shopping carts at grocery stores. It's theirs, it stays theirs, it stays on premeisis, they have a right to protect themselves against theft.
That is NOT the case if something is being actually sold to me. Ownership is changing hands at WalMart or wherever you shop, and I don't want something that is becoming MY property to come with auto-tracking mechanisms. If I want an auto-tracking system, I'll damn well install it myself.
But at a casino, what is being sold is entertainment, not poker chips. The chips are on-premesis loaned use, and so tracking those against theft is perfectly legitimate. Ownership is not changing hands, so RFIDs are not infringing on my property or privacy rights.
I just checked on my Konqueror 3.1.5 (which is the current version out of Debian Unstable as of a few days ago, and no, KDE itself is still at 3.1.4, I don't get it either). Comparing it against my Mozilla 1.5 on Windows 2000 and your reference image, I notice the following differences:
- In Moz on Windows, there is an extra blank line at the top of the right floaty. It's just a gray area there. Neither Konqueror nor the reference image have it, so it looks like a Moz/Win bug.
- The W3C logos have link highlight boxes around them in Moz/Win and your reference image, but not in Konqueror. According to your code, it's not specified whether they should be there or not. I don't know off hand whether there's supposed to be one if not specified in the code according to the spec, but I know I far prefer it without the bloody boxes.:-)
So at least on my Konqueror 3.1.5 (not a beta, it's the current stable public release) Konqueror actually works better than Moz. yay. hth.
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Simple. Because educated people are harder to control. Those in positions of power want those who are not to be easier to control, easier to turn into mindless consumer zombies, easier to get to vote for whoever puts out the best commercials rather than has the best platform, etc.
Universal education challenges the new aristocracy, who believe that you shouldn't get anything unless you can pay through the nose for it. Of course, they can afford to, but no one else can.
And the society goes to hell for it, with them leading the way. Gotta love it.
You're missing the point. Yes, Apple iTunes is a wonderful service... except for the DRM. Yes, it is easily the loosest and least intrusive DRM system in the world right now, but it's still unduely restricting my usage of the content I have legally aquired.
Yes downloadable music is good. Yes it can celebrate good rather than manufactured music. Yes, it levels the playing field. Yes, yes, yes, that's all true, we agree, great, fine, lovely. That's NOT THE POINT.
It's very simple. Digital Rights Mangling systems are bad. They are wrong. Any system that employs them is flawed and intrusive. Any system that employs it does not get my business or my money. End of story.
"Desktop GNU/Linux", that is, Home User not Kiosk mono-function uber-toaster (like a kiosk), will not be viable until all of the following conditions have been met:
- The user can add a new PCI card and install a driver for it - The user can insert a hotplug device (USB or Firewire or even Bluetooh) and get a fixed, known location in the file system for it, the same one every time - The user can click on any audio file and it will "just play" - The user can click on any video file and it will "just play" - The user can drop a CD into the CDROM drive and play it or rip it - The user can drop a DVD into the DVD drive and it plays, including the horrible and ungodly menu - The user can drop a CDR into the CDROM drive and burn a random selection of files to it, with long file names on by default - The user can hook up a TV Tuner card and be able to play video from a cable box / antenna or a VCR.
And all of the above must be possible WITHOUT the user EVER seeing a command line, and without ever hearing or reading the word "compile."
Some of those are already available with the right distributions, and nearly all are possible in some way or another, but they require violating the two cardinal rules of the Home User: "I can't type" and "compiling is something only developers do". Fixing some of the above issues requires alterations to the kernel itself. Others just require improvements in user-side software, others are an issue of driver distribution and open vs. closed source driver availability.
Whatever, the origin of the problem doesn't matter. The why is not at question. But all of the above MUST be taken care of before GNU/Linux can be considered "ready" for Joe Home Desktop User. Until then, we're just spinning our wheels.
For all those people who were so vhemently opposed to banner ads in this previous thread, here's that other business model you were asking for!
I'll take my inline banner ads with no popups back, please. As for Belkin, fuck 'em. They make good cables, but if this is how they're going to behave they're off my list.
I can't really decide if I want this case dismissed or not. (I know my desires in the matter have nothing to do with it, but hear me out.)
On the one hand, if the judge comes back with "SCO is lying through their teeth, there's nothing here, SCO bugger off, sorry about all the trouble IBM", then it will neatly tie up the FUD machine and probably bring an end to SCO right quick. Yes, there IS such a thing as bad PR, and we don't want any more of it.:-)
On the other hand, a dismissal would not allow for a vetting of the GPL in court. Of all the possible tests of the GPL, this is perhaps the most pro-GPL case we could hope for. (Not SCO's accusations, but IBM's responses that SCO is in GPL violation.) For a judge to formally declare theat the GPL is indeed valid and legally binding would be a very good thing, but won't happen before 2005 at the earliest the way this case is going. That's a lot of FUD time.
Advertising itself is a sign that the entire model of economic scarcity upwon which our society is built is out dated and needs to be replaced. However, until that happens....;-)
Take a look at the top of this page. There is a big banner ad up there. At the moment on my screen it's showing an ad for Comdex Las Vegas. Know why it's there? Because Taco needs to make a living., and Comdex is willing to pay him to insert their ad next to otherwise unprofitable but socially beneficial content. (Ok, some might debate the social benefit of Slashdot, but bear with me here.)
Pick up a copy of your local newspaper. I'll bet you a year's subscription that there are ads in it. A lot of them. Walt Mossberg is not going to get paid to review new geek toys unless someone is paying the Wall St. Journal to pay him. And no, subscription alone isn't enough. The 50 cents you pay for your local paper is a spit in the bucket that maybe covers the cost of the drivers to deliver the paper to mail boxes. An ad-free newspaper service would cost several dollars per issue, probably over $10/each.
Yes, advertising has gone too far in a lot of areas. Popunders are evil. I've not seen one in over a year, as I never use IE anymore.:-) But inline banner ads are (generally) no more intrusive than the commercials on your TV set or the game ads in your copy of PC Gamer. They're roughtly as effective, too. That is, one out of every thousand eyeball views may result in someone thinking about it, and one of every thousand people who thinks about it may consider buying it.
"People don't want it, come up with some other business model!" Fine. How about Walt Mossberg's reviews are good only if the company pays the Journal $5,000 per product reviewed? How about if Slashdot editors deliberately reject any story that speaks well of SuSE but accept anything pro-Red Hat, because Red Hat pays them to do so? (Or vice versa, not to pick on RH here.) That's certainly a business model, and probably a very profitable one, too. Guess what, the MPAA is already there for sitcoms. Want the web to go that route, too?:-)
Limited avertising is acceptable, given modern flawed economic models. It's excessive advertising that is a problem.
And the problem with Norton is that, no, it doesn't give users a choice. As another poster said, 90% of users won't know the difference. They won't know that they can turn it off, or that it's there in the first place. If the user wants to install an ad blocker, well, I can't stop them. But for a third party to sneak one in annoys me. How about when they sneak in one that, by default, blocks any pro-Linux or pro-Microsoft or pro-SCO or pro-Democrat or pro-Republican web sites?
Come on, guys. You don't like web site blockers, why do you like partial-site blockers?
I've already submitted a reply as a letter to the editor. Don't post a reply here on Slashdot. Get your butt over to the bottom of the article (you DID, read it, didn't you?), hit the reply link, and write a brief, intellient, non-troll reply explaining why the article in question is bunk. Convince Forbes that at least a fair portion of its readers know what they are talking about and are not that stupid, and they may change their tune in time.
They certainly won't change it by coming to Slashdot to look for feedback.
1) It means that KSVG, which was stalled for a long time, is now stable enough to be considered part of the base system. That is good news for SVG adoption in general, as it means that Konqueror 3.2 will likely have native SVG-with-animation support. Finally, an out-of-the-box fully-SVG-enabled browser other than IE-with-Adobe.:-) It's also quite likely that once the KHTML integration is complete, it will end up in Safari as well, which is good for everyone.
2) SVG should not be used for the entire UI, that's overkill, but for many areas it makes life a lot easier. For instance, icons in SVG make them infinitely scalable, so that people can resize their screens or their icons to whatever they find comfortable with no loss of quality. (Think handicapped.) Also, no more need for Small and Large versions of icons. Just have one icon, and the system scales it to whatever size is needed.
3) Hopefully, this will mean better support for SVG creation. KDE's SVG editing tools are still not the best. What I really want is to be able to use SVG as an editing format natively, not have to use a program-specific format (Illustrator, Kontour, Karbon14, anything) and then export to SVG. I want to work natively in SVG. With luck, this will let us do that.
There are some potential downsides, of course. Most notably, the risk that KDE will become like Mozilla. An all-XML UI, which while flexible also makes it considerably slower than just using compiled widgets. KSVG will have to be very very fast to avoid that problem, unless things are precompiled in memory cleanly.
If you're running a Windows box, then the following is mandatory. I even have it all burned to a CD to give to friends. Some free/speech, some free/beer, some shareware.
ZoneAlarm - You MUST have a software firewall for Windows. Mozilla - I think you know this one by now OpenOffice.org - Ibid PuTTY - Not the best interface, but Free ssh/scp client WinZip - I think XP has its own unzipper, but I suggest WinZip anyway for people. Mostly because I don't deal with people who use XP. I refuse to do computer support for friends who use XP. (I'm making an exception by even talking to you. )
On the Mandrake side, I like using Konqueror. Honestly, the KDE suite, OpenOffice.org, and xmms should give you everything you need for everything.:-)
Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back? It ran a modified Red Hat, was an "Internet appliance" turn-key box, and did all the fun router/web server/email server/file server stuff with just a simple interface.
Good grief, look at the image of the packaging. It's awful. Rather than a binder-esque design, they've taken all seven of the horribly over-engineered boxes for the individual seasons that are an absolute pain to use or transport (my parents have the full set, naturally), and cramed them all into one over-sighed padded cardboard box.
Come on, people! I want the movie, not lots and lots of plastic and foam and "collector's edition" space wasting. JUST GIVE ME THE BLOODY DISK!!!
No no no! Internet sales taxes are bad, but not for the reason people think. Well, not quite. In truth ALL sales tax is inherently bad.
Sales tax is inherently regressive. A loaf of bred (or book from Amazon) costs the same regardless of whether I make 10k a year or 500k a year. Put simply, the cost of living does not scale with income.
Increasing the cost of the bread/book via sales tax increases it for everyone, but that's not equal taxation. A difference of $1 extra in taxes is a larger percentage of the disposable income of a person making 10k per year than it is for someone making 500k a year. So in fact, a sales tax hurts the poor and middle class MORE than it hurts the rich.
No wonder so many rich people like it.
Conversely, even a flat income tax scales the burden with income, so that higher income brackets also pay for increases in taxes. A progressive income tax is better still because then it scales the rate so that the burden of taxation is felt equally by everyone, but that's another discussion.
So no, don't put a sales tax on the Internet. Don't put a sales tax on traditional stores, either. STOP CUTTING MY INCOME TAXES AND CUT MY SALES TAX INSTEAD!!!
With an all-income-tax system, everyone bears the burden of taxation equally. Sales tax makes the poor bear the burden more than the rich.
(And by "burden of taxation", I mean whatever the tax rate happens to be and whatever it's used for. Those are separate issues.)
It is, however, nice to know that IBM's fire-breathing legion of IP lawyers is on the side of the GPL.
The company that is known for having more patents (hardware and software) than any other company in the world is now the poster child for and the paladin of those who believe such patents to be immoral in the first place.
OK, white hat cracking someone is still cracking their system, no matter how benevolent the intent. But this part just makes my blood boil:
French did not know what the specific allegations were, because the charging document is sealed.
Especially in light of this part of another article that people need to spend more time reading:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Excuse me, what part of cracking the NY Times is a threat to national security? Why are so many court documents sealed these days? There is NO legitimate reason for securing this sort of charge. Even if the prosecutors were to go as far as claiming he were a terrorist, there's still no nuclear weapons secrets (which we all know by now anyway, despite being classified) in the NY Times payroll database.
He should use that in his defense; because the case was sealed, it's unconstitutional and therefore he can't be found guilty.
I don't support this sort of vigilante white hat hacking, but I oppose ignoring the constitution even more.
All their asking is to share a little bit of the cost burden. What's wrong with that?
On the surface, nothing. It's a reasonable request. However, not all 3rd party IM clients charge (GAIM and Kopete come to mind, gee, both for GNU/Linux...), so not all 3rd party clients' developers have money to buy a license, even if they wanted to. That puts free (beer) IM programs at an automatic disadvantage.
Quoth Microsoft person: 'Running an (IM) network is expensive,'
Yes, I don't doubt it. That's why the monolithic IM network concept is inherently flawed. Architecturally, I FAR prefer the design of Jabber, for precisely that reason. It's distributed, the same way the email network is. No one person/company bears the burden of maintaining it, and anyone can setup their own jabber server on their own domain, just as you can setup your own SMTP server. It's far more stable (no single point of failure like Passport), far cheaper (cost is the same as for email; time of whoever runs the server, which could be yourself if you want), and doesn't suffer from the potential for abuse from the company that owns the server farm (MS, AOL, Yahoo!)
I have a few issues with Jabber's use of XML as a message encoding system (very verbose for sending to per-KB-billed handhelds and phones), but the basic architecture concept is far supeior to any of the Big Four. As soon as I manage to get a working server going, I want to try and move my company over to Jabber for our online communication. (We've been using MSM, with me on GAIM, but that won't work for much longer...)
Really, I encourage everyone to take a serious look at Jabber as what the future of IM should be.
When the kernel itself is declared "released" is irrelevant to most people. If you really want the latest and greated, you can always download whatever the current version is, whatever it's called, and use it.
What's important is when most distro companies (other than bleedinge edge Gentoo and "we don't need no steenking 2.x kernels" Debian) will start building their distributions around 2.6-final instead of 2.4. For that, it's quite obvious at this point: The spring refresh cycle. (The fall cycle may have a few optional pre-release kernels, but the real action will be the spring.) Sometime in the April timeframe we'll see Red Had, Mandrake, and SuSE releasing 2.6-based versions. Hopefully they'll also have funness like KDE 3.2 and so on by then, which are just as important to most people.
When Linus says "ok, I'm done, let's work on something else" isn't important. When Red Hat says "we'll give you a support contract on this now", THAT'S important.
I believe that when people are presented with intelligent and logical arguments, they will turn around.
You must be new here. This is the United States of America. Our people are neither intelligent nor logical, so intelligent and logical arguments don't work on them.
Honestly, I've been trying for years, and Americans (and perhaps elsewhere, not sure) would much rather say "don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up" than actually accept that they could be wrong about something. It's like admitting that you were wrong makes you weak. That's why Americans would rather a president who is wrong or an idiot than one who *gasp* "waffles".
I don't understand why it's so hard for free software to have good interfaces. The easy answer is because it's "programmers writing for programmers," but anyone who is used to Windows freeware and shareware knows that their interfaces are typically as high-quality as any other commercial application. Why are Windows programmers doing it and Linux programmers not? I'm genuinely curious. Is it the difference in easy-to-use development environments?
Not quite. "By programmers for programmers" has another factor to it: not-for-profit. If you're writing a shareware program in order to make some money on the side, you're going to pay at least some attention to the interface because you want to make money. If you're writing a program as [F|f]ree software, because you happen to like typing a lot of curly braces, then you don't care about the sellability of it, you care about how cool and 1337 you can be with it, and if it happens to be usable by someone else, more power to them.
For-profit independent software has a financial incentive to be easily learnable/usable that simply does not exist for for-fun and for-geek F/free software. And I don't see that ever changing.
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a copyright holder to allow free sharing of his work is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
Several people have already replied with very valid arguments, many of which boil down to "the needs of the many", "copyright isn't a RIGHT in the first place", and so on. I agree with those, but I'm going to throw another in here just for kicks.
What was the last original work you actually saw/heard? I mean completely original, with no basis in any pre-existing other work. Really, I can't think of one. All creative work is built upon previous creative works and the culture in which the work was created.
Assertion: Culture belongs to the people, fundamentally, and cannot be owned by any subset thereof.
Pre-existing other works, even with the current lame laws, do eventually fall into the public domain. The public domain is that body of creative works that are not owned by anyone. Or rather, they are not owned by any subset, but are at the disposal of all members of the society, just as if they were the owner of it in the first place. That is the same as saying, in another way, the public domain is owned equally by all members of the society.
Assertion: The public domain "belongs" to all members of the society equally and without bias.
Now, look where those creative works come from. They are build upon two things. (1) The culture that spawned them (which cannot be owned), and (2) the existing body of creative works in the public domain (which are owned by all equally).
Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain. Disney's "The Great Mouse Detective" is blatantly based on Holmes, combined with assorted American cultural attitudes and expectations. While the work itself is creative, it draws on that which cannot be owned, and that which I as a member of the society am an equal partner in owning.
That is, it is a derivative work of the public domain.
If this work included a portion of that which I as a member of the society own equally, then why is it I have no rights to it whatsoever except as the "copyright holder" (who is distinct from the "artist", and should never, EVER be confused with the artist) deigns to permit me to view it? If the society is partial owner of "The Great Mouse Detective", why is it Mike Eisner has complete control over how it can be viewed, distributed, duplicated, and shared? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his descendants have no such authority. Why the double standard?
I know this is not precisely the legal way in which the public domain is viewed, and I am not seeking to say "yay copyright vioation!" However, it is another viewpoint on the issue: Nothing is created in a vaccuum. All creativity is inspired by the culture around it, not strictly by the copyright holder. Restricting how our culture can flow and be shared is an abomination, one that we tollerate, partially, for a little while, because we think it will encourage people to be more creative.
When the "partially" and "for a little while" are removed from the equation, the abomination ceases to be justified.
When our culture becomes locked up, when the public domain is raided without return, when that which I own equally as a member of society is bastardized, is it possible that disregard of the abomination becomes appropriate?
The problem with the government doing online currency, at least in the US, is that by law any currency that comes from the Treasury Department MUST be accepted as legal tender in ALL transactions. So, for instance, if the government started issuing a credit card of its own, then it would be illegal for any business to NOT accept it as payment. "I don't have the equipment for a credit card transaction at this store" would not be a valid excuse. That would significantly raise the cost of entry into any market, including door to door girl scout cookies.
The same would be true of a Treasury Department PayPal. All online businesses would be required to accept it. In fact, so would all offline businesses, and I don't know how you'd make that work.:-)
The entire financial institution in this country is build as a system of complex IOUs on top of the one and only actual legal currency in the US: green slips of paper and small tin chips.
I can certainly see the advantages of having a government-sponsored ATM or online debit card or whatever, but the impact on the economy at large, especially small businesses and independents, would be very negative.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes, rewriting from scratch is necessary to remove bugs. Not all bugs are just failure to check a buffer overflow, which can be fixed without a complete rewrite. Sometimes your basic communications architecture in the program is fundamentally flawed and insecure. At that point, by the time you've fixed that bug in the existing codebase it would have been easier to start from scratch and make everything else work "natively" on the new internal standard.
;-) There are fundamental security issues with all GUI windows operating in the same user space. If one is compromised, they're all 0wnz3d. That's a reasonably major flaw, but to fix it would require essentially rewriting the entire GUI portion of Windows, because it's so integral to the system. To try and fix that without a rewrite would be harder and more complicated than chucking it and starting from scratch, and probably introduce a dozen other bugs in the process.
:-)
Take for example, Windows.
Sometimes you really do need to throw out the baby with the bath water, if the baby is that dirty. Besides, making a new one can be fun!
Casino chips are not something that the casino sells to you. You borrow them as an alternate counting mechanism. Putting RFID tags on THEIR OWN PROPERTY that STAYS THEIR PROPERTY, and STAYS ON THEIR OWN PREMESIS to prevent theft is fine. I'd say the same about museums putting RFIDs on those portable audio players and headphones they give you to walk around exhbits with, or shopping carts at grocery stores. It's theirs, it stays theirs, it stays on premeisis, they have a right to protect themselves against theft.
That is NOT the case if something is being actually sold to me. Ownership is changing hands at WalMart or wherever you shop, and I don't want something that is becoming MY property to come with auto-tracking mechanisms. If I want an auto-tracking system, I'll damn well install it myself.
But at a casino, what is being sold is entertainment, not poker chips. The chips are on-premesis loaned use, and so tracking those against theft is perfectly legitimate. Ownership is not changing hands, so RFIDs are not infringing on my property or privacy rights.
I just checked on my Konqueror 3.1.5 (which is the current version out of Debian Unstable as of a few days ago, and no, KDE itself is still at 3.1.4, I don't get it either). Comparing it against my Mozilla 1.5 on Windows 2000 and your reference image, I notice the following differences:
:-)
- In Moz on Windows, there is an extra blank line at the top of the right floaty. It's just a gray area there. Neither Konqueror nor the reference image have it, so it looks like a Moz/Win bug.
- The W3C logos have link highlight boxes around them in Moz/Win and your reference image, but not in Konqueror. According to your code, it's not specified whether they should be there or not. I don't know off hand whether there's supposed to be one if not specified in the code according to the spec, but I know I far prefer it without the bloody boxes.
So at least on my Konqueror 3.1.5 (not a beta, it's the current stable public release) Konqueror actually works better than Moz. yay. hth.
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Simple. Because educated people are harder to control. Those in positions of power want those who are not to be easier to control, easier to turn into mindless consumer zombies, easier to get to vote for whoever puts out the best commercials rather than has the best platform, etc.
Universal education challenges the new aristocracy, who believe that you shouldn't get anything unless you can pay through the nose for it. Of course, they can afford to, but no one else can.
And the society goes to hell for it, with them leading the way. Gotta love it.
You're missing the point. Yes, Apple iTunes is a wonderful service... except for the DRM. Yes, it is easily the loosest and least intrusive DRM system in the world right now, but it's still unduely restricting my usage of the content I have legally aquired.
Yes downloadable music is good. Yes it can celebrate good rather than manufactured music. Yes, it levels the playing field. Yes, yes, yes, that's all true, we agree, great, fine, lovely. That's NOT THE POINT.
It's very simple. Digital Rights Mangling systems are bad. They are wrong. Any system that employs them is flawed and intrusive. Any system that employs it does not get my business or my money. End of story.
"Desktop GNU/Linux", that is, Home User not Kiosk mono-function uber-toaster (like a kiosk), will not be viable until all of the following conditions have been met:
- The user can add a new PCI card and install a driver for it
- The user can insert a hotplug device (USB or Firewire or even Bluetooh) and get a fixed, known location in the file system for it, the same one every time
- The user can click on any audio file and it will "just play"
- The user can click on any video file and it will "just play"
- The user can drop a CD into the CDROM drive and play it or rip it
- The user can drop a DVD into the DVD drive and it plays, including the horrible and ungodly menu
- The user can drop a CDR into the CDROM drive and burn a random selection of files to it, with long file names on by default
- The user can hook up a TV Tuner card and be able to play video from a cable box / antenna or a VCR.
And all of the above must be possible WITHOUT the user EVER seeing a command line, and without ever hearing or reading the word "compile."
Some of those are already available with the right distributions, and nearly all are possible in some way or another, but they require violating the two cardinal rules of the Home User: "I can't type" and "compiling is something only developers do". Fixing some of the above issues requires alterations to the kernel itself. Others just require improvements in user-side software, others are an issue of driver distribution and open vs. closed source driver availability.
Whatever, the origin of the problem doesn't matter. The why is not at question. But all of the above MUST be taken care of before GNU/Linux can be considered "ready" for Joe Home Desktop User. Until then, we're just spinning our wheels.
For all those people who were so vhemently opposed to banner ads in this previous thread, here's that other business model you were asking for!
I'll take my inline banner ads with no popups back, please. As for Belkin, fuck 'em. They make good cables, but if this is how they're going to behave they're off my list.
I can't really decide if I want this case dismissed or not. (I know my desires in the matter have nothing to do with it, but hear me out.)
:-)
:-)
On the one hand, if the judge comes back with "SCO is lying through their teeth, there's nothing here, SCO bugger off, sorry about all the trouble IBM", then it will neatly tie up the FUD machine and probably bring an end to SCO right quick. Yes, there IS such a thing as bad PR, and we don't want any more of it.
On the other hand, a dismissal would not allow for a vetting of the GPL in court. Of all the possible tests of the GPL, this is perhaps the most pro-GPL case we could hope for. (Not SCO's accusations, but IBM's responses that SCO is in GPL violation.) For a judge to formally declare theat the GPL is indeed valid and legally binding would be a very good thing, but won't happen before 2005 at the earliest the way this case is going. That's a lot of FUD time.
I really can't decide which to root for.
Advertising itself is a sign that the entire model of economic scarcity upwon which our society is built is out dated and needs to be replaced. However, until that happens.... ;-)
:-) But inline banner ads are (generally) no more intrusive than the commercials on your TV set or the game ads in your copy of PC Gamer. They're roughtly as effective, too. That is, one out of every thousand eyeball views may result in someone thinking about it, and one of every thousand people who thinks about it may consider buying it.
:-)
Take a look at the top of this page. There is a big banner ad up there. At the moment on my screen it's showing an ad for Comdex Las Vegas. Know why it's there? Because Taco needs to make a living., and Comdex is willing to pay him to insert their ad next to otherwise unprofitable but socially beneficial content. (Ok, some might debate the social benefit of Slashdot, but bear with me here.)
Pick up a copy of your local newspaper. I'll bet you a year's subscription that there are ads in it. A lot of them. Walt Mossberg is not going to get paid to review new geek toys unless someone is paying the Wall St. Journal to pay him. And no, subscription alone isn't enough. The 50 cents you pay for your local paper is a spit in the bucket that maybe covers the cost of the drivers to deliver the paper to mail boxes. An ad-free newspaper service would cost several dollars per issue, probably over $10/each.
Yes, advertising has gone too far in a lot of areas. Popunders are evil. I've not seen one in over a year, as I never use IE anymore.
"People don't want it, come up with some other business model!" Fine. How about Walt Mossberg's reviews are good only if the company pays the Journal $5,000 per product reviewed? How about if Slashdot editors deliberately reject any story that speaks well of SuSE but accept anything pro-Red Hat, because Red Hat pays them to do so? (Or vice versa, not to pick on RH here.) That's certainly a business model, and probably a very profitable one, too. Guess what, the MPAA is already there for sitcoms. Want the web to go that route, too?
Limited avertising is acceptable, given modern flawed economic models. It's excessive advertising that is a problem.
And the problem with Norton is that, no, it doesn't give users a choice. As another poster said, 90% of users won't know the difference. They won't know that they can turn it off, or that it's there in the first place. If the user wants to install an ad blocker, well, I can't stop them. But for a third party to sneak one in annoys me. How about when they sneak in one that, by default, blocks any pro-Linux or pro-Microsoft or pro-SCO or pro-Democrat or pro-Republican web sites?
Come on, guys. You don't like web site blockers, why do you like partial-site blockers?
I've already submitted a reply as a letter to the editor. Don't post a reply here on Slashdot. Get your butt over to the bottom of the article (you DID, read it, didn't you?), hit the reply link, and write a brief, intellient, non-troll reply explaining why the article in question is bunk. Convince Forbes that at least a fair portion of its readers know what they are talking about and are not that stupid, and they may change their tune in time.
They certainly won't change it by coming to Slashdot to look for feedback.
This is extremely cool for many reasons.
:-) It's also quite likely that once the KHTML integration is complete, it will end up in Safari as well, which is good for everyone.
:-)
1) It means that KSVG, which was stalled for a long time, is now stable enough to be considered part of the base system. That is good news for SVG adoption in general, as it means that Konqueror 3.2 will likely have native SVG-with-animation support. Finally, an out-of-the-box fully-SVG-enabled browser other than IE-with-Adobe.
2) SVG should not be used for the entire UI, that's overkill, but for many areas it makes life a lot easier. For instance, icons in SVG make them infinitely scalable, so that people can resize their screens or their icons to whatever they find comfortable with no loss of quality. (Think handicapped.) Also, no more need for Small and Large versions of icons. Just have one icon, and the system scales it to whatever size is needed.
3) Hopefully, this will mean better support for SVG creation. KDE's SVG editing tools are still not the best. What I really want is to be able to use SVG as an editing format natively, not have to use a program-specific format (Illustrator, Kontour, Karbon14, anything) and then export to SVG. I want to work natively in SVG. With luck, this will let us do that.
There are some potential downsides, of course. Most notably, the risk that KDE will become like Mozilla. An all-XML UI, which while flexible also makes it considerably slower than just using compiled widgets. KSVG will have to be very very fast to avoid that problem, unless things are precompiled in memory cleanly.
Still, I can't wait.
Whoever heard of a govt telling a software company what to do.
Yeah, in this country it's the other way around.
Hm.... "In Soviet Russia..." Nah.
If you're running a Windows box, then the following is mandatory. I even have it all burned to a CD to give to friends. Some free/speech, some free/beer, some shareware.
:-)
ZoneAlarm - You MUST have a software firewall for Windows.
Mozilla - I think you know this one by now
OpenOffice.org - Ibid
PuTTY - Not the best interface, but Free ssh/scp client
WinZip - I think XP has its own unzipper, but I suggest WinZip anyway for people. Mostly because I don't deal with people who use XP. I refuse to do computer support for friends who use XP. (I'm making an exception by even talking to you. )
On the Mandrake side, I like using Konqueror. Honestly, the KDE suite, OpenOffice.org, and xmms should give you everything you need for everything.
Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back? It ran a modified Red Hat, was an "Internet appliance" turn-key box, and did all the fun router/web server/email server/file server stuff with just a simple interface.
What's old is new again, I suppose.
Good grief, look at the image of the packaging. It's awful. Rather than a binder-esque design, they've taken all seven of the horribly over-engineered boxes for the individual seasons that are an absolute pain to use or transport (my parents have the full set, naturally), and cramed them all into one over-sighed padded cardboard box.
Come on, people! I want the movie, not lots and lots of plastic and foam and "collector's edition" space wasting. JUST GIVE ME THE BLOODY DISK!!!
No no no! Internet sales taxes are bad, but not for the reason people think. Well, not quite. In truth ALL sales tax is inherently bad.
Sales tax is inherently regressive. A loaf of bred (or book from Amazon) costs the same regardless of whether I make 10k a year or 500k a year. Put simply, the cost of living does not scale with income.
Increasing the cost of the bread/book via sales tax increases it for everyone, but that's not equal taxation. A difference of $1 extra in taxes is a larger percentage of the disposable income of a person making 10k per year than it is for someone making 500k a year. So in fact, a sales tax hurts the poor and middle class MORE than it hurts the rich.
No wonder so many rich people like it.
Conversely, even a flat income tax scales the burden with income, so that higher income brackets also pay for increases in taxes. A progressive income tax is better still because then it scales the rate so that the burden of taxation is felt equally by everyone, but that's another discussion.
So no, don't put a sales tax on the Internet. Don't put a sales tax on traditional stores, either. STOP CUTTING MY INCOME TAXES AND CUT MY SALES TAX INSTEAD!!!
With an all-income-tax system, everyone bears the burden of taxation equally. Sales tax makes the poor bear the burden more than the rich.
(And by "burden of taxation", I mean whatever the tax rate happens to be and whatever it's used for. Those are separate issues.)
It is, however, nice to know that IBM's fire-breathing legion of IP lawyers is on the side of the GPL.
The company that is known for having more patents (hardware and software) than any other company in the world is now the poster child for and the paladin of those who believe such patents to be immoral in the first place.
Satire is dead! Reality is so much weirder.
OK, white hat cracking someone is still cracking their system, no matter how benevolent the intent. But this part just makes my blood boil:
French did not know what the specific allegations were, because the charging document is sealed.
Especially in light of this part of another article that people need to spend more time reading:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Excuse me, what part of cracking the NY Times is a threat to national security? Why are so many court documents sealed these days? There is NO legitimate reason for securing this sort of charge. Even if the prosecutors were to go as far as claiming he were a terrorist, there's still no nuclear weapons secrets (which we all know by now anyway, despite being classified) in the NY Times payroll database.
He should use that in his defense; because the case was sealed, it's unconstitutional and therefore he can't be found guilty.
I don't support this sort of vigilante white hat hacking, but I oppose ignoring the constitution even more.
All their asking is to share a little bit of the cost burden. What's wrong with that?
On the surface, nothing. It's a reasonable request. However, not all 3rd party IM clients charge (GAIM and Kopete come to mind, gee, both for GNU/Linux...), so not all 3rd party clients' developers have money to buy a license, even if they wanted to. That puts free (beer) IM programs at an automatic disadvantage.
Quoth Microsoft person: 'Running an (IM) network is expensive,'
Yes, I don't doubt it. That's why the monolithic IM network concept is inherently flawed. Architecturally, I FAR prefer the design of Jabber, for precisely that reason. It's distributed, the same way the email network is. No one person/company bears the burden of maintaining it, and anyone can setup their own jabber server on their own domain, just as you can setup your own SMTP server. It's far more stable (no single point of failure like Passport), far cheaper (cost is the same as for email; time of whoever runs the server, which could be yourself if you want), and doesn't suffer from the potential for abuse from the company that owns the server farm (MS, AOL, Yahoo!)
I have a few issues with Jabber's use of XML as a message encoding system (very verbose for sending to per-KB-billed handhelds and phones), but the basic architecture concept is far supeior to any of the Big Four. As soon as I manage to get a working server going, I want to try and move my company over to Jabber for our online communication. (We've been using MSM, with me on GAIM, but that won't work for much longer...)
Really, I encourage everyone to take a serious look at Jabber as what the future of IM should be.
When the kernel itself is declared "released" is irrelevant to most people. If you really want the latest and greated, you can always download whatever the current version is, whatever it's called, and use it.
What's important is when most distro companies (other than bleedinge edge Gentoo and "we don't need no steenking 2.x kernels" Debian) will start building their distributions around 2.6-final instead of 2.4. For that, it's quite obvious at this point: The spring refresh cycle. (The fall cycle may have a few optional pre-release kernels, but the real action will be the spring.) Sometime in the April timeframe we'll see Red Had, Mandrake, and SuSE releasing 2.6-based versions. Hopefully they'll also have funness like KDE 3.2 and so on by then, which are just as important to most people.
When Linus says "ok, I'm done, let's work on something else" isn't important. When Red Hat says "we'll give you a support contract on this now", THAT'S important.
I believe that when people are presented with intelligent and logical arguments, they will turn around.
You must be new here. This is the United States of America. Our people are neither intelligent nor logical, so intelligent and logical arguments don't work on them.
Honestly, I've been trying for years, and Americans (and perhaps elsewhere, not sure) would much rather say "don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up" than actually accept that they could be wrong about something. It's like admitting that you were wrong makes you weak. That's why Americans would rather a president who is wrong or an idiot than one who *gasp* "waffles".
I don't understand why it's so hard for free software to have good interfaces. The easy answer is because it's "programmers writing for programmers," but anyone who is used to Windows freeware and shareware knows that their interfaces are typically as high-quality as any other commercial application. Why are Windows programmers doing it and Linux programmers not? I'm genuinely curious. Is it the difference in easy-to-use development environments?
Not quite. "By programmers for programmers" has another factor to it: not-for-profit. If you're writing a shareware program in order to make some money on the side, you're going to pay at least some attention to the interface because you want to make money. If you're writing a program as [F|f]ree software, because you happen to like typing a lot of curly braces, then you don't care about the sellability of it, you care about how cool and 1337 you can be with it, and if it happens to be usable by someone else, more power to them.
For-profit independent software has a financial incentive to be easily learnable/usable that simply does not exist for for-fun and for-geek F/free software. And I don't see that ever changing.
Hey, if Apple gets their own section on Slashdot, why not a SCO section? There's more SCO news these days. :-)
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a copyright holder to allow free sharing of his work is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
Several people have already replied with very valid arguments, many of which boil down to "the needs of the many", "copyright isn't a RIGHT in the first place", and so on. I agree with those, but I'm going to throw another in here just for kicks.
What was the last original work you actually saw/heard? I mean completely original, with no basis in any pre-existing other work. Really, I can't think of one. All creative work is built upon previous creative works and the culture in which the work was created.
Assertion: Culture belongs to the people, fundamentally, and cannot be owned by any subset thereof.
Pre-existing other works, even with the current lame laws, do eventually fall into the public domain. The public domain is that body of creative works that are not owned by anyone. Or rather, they are not owned by any subset, but are at the disposal of all members of the society, just as if they were the owner of it in the first place. That is the same as saying, in another way, the public domain is owned equally by all members of the society.
Assertion: The public domain "belongs" to all members of the society equally and without bias.
Now, look where those creative works come from. They are build upon two things. (1) The culture that spawned them (which cannot be owned), and (2) the existing body of creative works in the public domain (which are owned by all equally).
Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain. Disney's "The Great Mouse Detective" is blatantly based on Holmes, combined with assorted American cultural attitudes and expectations. While the work itself is creative, it draws on that which cannot be owned, and that which I as a member of the society am an equal partner in owning.
That is, it is a derivative work of the public domain.
If this work included a portion of that which I as a member of the society own equally, then why is it I have no rights to it whatsoever except as the "copyright holder" (who is distinct from the "artist", and should never, EVER be confused with the artist) deigns to permit me to view it? If the society is partial owner of "The Great Mouse Detective", why is it Mike Eisner has complete control over how it can be viewed, distributed, duplicated, and shared? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his descendants have no such authority. Why the double standard?
I know this is not precisely the legal way in which the public domain is viewed, and I am not seeking to say "yay copyright vioation!" However, it is another viewpoint on the issue: Nothing is created in a vaccuum. All creativity is inspired by the culture around it, not strictly by the copyright holder. Restricting how our culture can flow and be shared is an abomination, one that we tollerate, partially, for a little while, because we think it will encourage people to be more creative.
When the "partially" and "for a little while" are removed from the equation, the abomination ceases to be justified.
When our culture becomes locked up, when the public domain is raided without return, when that which I own equally as a member of society is bastardized, is it possible that disregard of the abomination becomes appropriate?
Perhaps.
The problem with the government doing online currency, at least in the US, is that by law any currency that comes from the Treasury Department MUST be accepted as legal tender in ALL transactions. So, for instance, if the government started issuing a credit card of its own, then it would be illegal for any business to NOT accept it as payment. "I don't have the equipment for a credit card transaction at this store" would not be a valid excuse. That would significantly raise the cost of entry into any market, including door to door girl scout cookies.
:-)
The same would be true of a Treasury Department PayPal. All online businesses would be required to accept it. In fact, so would all offline businesses, and I don't know how you'd make that work.
The entire financial institution in this country is build as a system of complex IOUs on top of the one and only actual legal currency in the US: green slips of paper and small tin chips.
I can certainly see the advantages of having a government-sponsored ATM or online debit card or whatever, but the impact on the economy at large, especially small businesses and independents, would be very negative.