While I fully support non-profit organizations seeking public money I can't help but feel a bit violated by this.
JPL is one of the last vestigates of "pure" science now that every other institute has sold out for cellular satellites, titties in space, and singings fags on the Space Center.
If JPL sells out to the highest bidder then surely Linus or the GPL is next!
The message by "mpe" had this right and I agree with him completely. In the old days people were charged for the worth of a product. The math is C is manufacturing cost, M is profit margin, and P is price. So...
P=C+M
But then someone realized that if people are willing to pay P+1 or P+5 for the same product, who cares what the cost of manufacture was? If the market will bear the cost of a $20 CD, then charge it. Regardless of whether or not they could easily make a profit at a cost of $10.
The ultimate example of this are those ridiculous "The real cost of gas" stickers they plaster on the gas pumps here in Canada. They show that 5% of the cost is profit, and 20% is tax. Well, jeez. That's 5% profit including a big, fat corporate head office with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, massive P.R. departments and LCD screens on every desk. They are conditioning us to think that their industry is poor, yet these massive bureacracies are paid for by price inflation! They could fire 1/2 of their stupid managers and cut the price by a half. All while still making their precious 5% profit.
Actually I'm Canadian too and found that in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., for a basic meal you can expect to pay about $10 CAD, $10 USD or 10 GBP respectively. Considering there are about 2.5 Canadian dollars to the British pound you see that in Britain a meal "costs" about 2.5 times as much. But this is mostly elementary since their pay cheques (not checks!) are also paid in British pounds so there's no discrepancy unless you're a tourist. It's not really a matter of price gouging, simply of exchange rates and inflation.
What's more interesting is that a CD typically costs $20 to purchase yet a cassette tape costs around $10. Yet the cassette costs much more to make! (Cassettes are recorded, CDs are pressed on a high capacity assemply line.) This means that recording companies can turn a profit at $10 with higher cost of materials, so why the $%^@ do they charge us $20? This is the price fixing.
Cool, so fifty-five years after NASA sent a monkey into space, John Carmack could set a new first: first civilian [code] monkey launched into space. While Albert the monkey sadly perished on his maiden flight, *he* didn't understand the principles of rocket-assisted jumping or in-air turning. Elementary physics to any Quake veteran...
> Without IP law, the GPL would not NEED to exist.
That's one of the most ignorant statements I've ever heard. In the world you suggest, Microsoft could rewrite Windows using GNU or Linux code and would not have to release any source (After all, since you don't own your own code, you can't dictate that derivative source code be released publicly.) In fact, they would probably just take a RH 7.3 CD and do a search & replace in all the code so that "Torvalds" now reads "Gates". (After all, without IP law it would be perfectly legal to claim someone else's work as your own.) Then they could release it as "Windows 6.0" and charge a fortune for their "innovation". None of the freedoms in the GPL could be enforced if you did not have legal ownership of your code. I will re-word since it seemed to go over your head last time:
Free software could not exist without IP law.
There are a lot of people who like to beat the free software drum but they've got no idea what it means...
> so if you value freedom, support China, I guess.
How droll. It's funny that one of the most advanced concepts in American capitalism is that it protects IP law, which seems to fly in the face of many modern freedoms. Yet China is very lax about copyright law but ignores many modern freedoms. Something to chew on, I think.
I would suggest all/. readers consider the fact that without IP law the GPL could not exist since you would have no right to dictate how your source code was used in any way whatsoever. Free software and copyright law are bedfellows, not enemies.
You start your post talking about Bookmarks, Phone Numbers, Calendar etc. This is information you want to access from anywhere. Real easy: agree standard XML formats, trusted authentication services, and security protocols. Whammo-bammo you can access your bookmarks from anywhere using pure XML and a password.
But then you start talking about banking and privacy and trusted companies. This is totally different, it's information you want others to access from anywhere; and the security model wouldn't be remotely similar. Which are you talking about?
Your GUPster idea is also fatally flawed because you're talking technology -- same thing as Microsoft and Sun and Apple. Talk standards and maybe you'll get somewhere. Anyone can come up with a technology to do this, but it's only in getting people to agree that you'll come up with anything decent.
You are missing my point. I run RH7.2 and check up2date and Ximian Red Carpet daily. Were there a patch for my system I would have run it a LONG time ago, but there isn't. I shy away from installing from tarballs as it fucks up the RPM database. I have since thrown caution to the wind (heh, a bit contradictory) and installed from tarball regardless. But my point is still valid: if Ximian and RedHat release no RPMs for my platform when I'm only a single revision behind, who's really the lazy one?
Like it or not, you have responsibility towards ALL other network peers (i.e. the whole Internet) to make your system as secure as possible.
Sorry but I'm gagging uncontrollably at the thought of your saccharine love-fest. I am not here to protect *other* people's PCs from compromise, should I hold hands with other sysadmins and pray for the health of their machines while I'm at it? No. My machine isn't as secure as some but I try my best and check Red Carpet daily.
Your argument is that as a user with a public IP address it's my responsibility to have every package on my system updated on a daily basis. Hence by your logic, if I'm not doing so then I don't have a right to be on the net. It's precisely this kind of jaded self-righteousness that people hate about a small handful of Linux geeks. When even Linux geeks are telling you to get a life, maybe you should consider it!
The systems that are getting hit are the ones with lazy admins who don't promptly follow up on security patches.
Why do topics like this always have to degenerate into a holier-than-thou diatribe by a self-righteous few? I'm running a vulnerable system and it isn't because I'm "lazy" as you so kindly put it. I run Linux on my *desktop* and use it to play Quake, surf the web, and share out some HTML pages for my family. I run RH7.2 (only one version behind, bub) and run Ximian Red Carpet and up2date regularly. But no, I don't read bugtraq for the sheer joy and I usually wait for RPMs to come out before I install a patch. The unfortunate downside to RPMs is that if you compile your own software the RPM database starts to choke on its biscuits. So maybe, just maybe it's not that people who don't upgrade same day aren't lazy. Maybe we just don't have as much time or interest as you to troll bugtraq or more so, troll/. acting all high and mighty because of the stinking version of OpenSSL they run.
"That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair."
I can never understand why the mainstream media is so fixated with meaningless comparisons when covering science and technology. Is human hair some sort of benchmark in the memory industry? Do we care how many of these would fit on the end of a human hair? It seems like anything tiny is always compared to human hair ("fifty billion nanomachines could fit on the end of a human hair") and the benchmark for big things is the football field ("the solar wing is equal to the length of 200 football fields!"). Can't we dream up something more original?
I've just gotta say that I think Galeon is the best thing to come out of the Mozilla work to date. Maybe newbs like mediocre e-mail clients and other whiz-bangs built into their browsers, me... I like a browser. One that's fast, intuitive, fast, simple, feature-rich, and fast. Galeon is all of these, and fast to boot! My biggest complaint about it is there isn't (nor likely ever will be) a Windows version I can use when surfing at work. But from home, nothing can top it!
a) I am a Canadian so nothing I say is biased, I wish WP was better.
b) EVERYONE knows that WP code and (moreso) Corel is shit. They suck ass, always have and always will. Ass, totally... Even hinting otherwise makes you look like a dork.
c) Unix, every version ever made Wow, WP came out before the 50's when Unix was invented? Your view of history is comical, keep it up...
Actually 1.1 caught me by surprise -- it seems to have more features than a number of the milestone releases. Maybe it's just me but it seems the team have kicked into overdrive to offer a feature-rich 1.1 so soon after 1.0. Yay!
Of course RedHat wants to make money, everyone does. However this is sensationalism of the highest sort. RedHat is one of the *only* publicly traded companies that even feigns support for free software. Compare RedHat to IBM, Sun, and Oracle. All support free software and I think we appreciate their contributions, but only one seems to be in it to "keep the faith". And this while being a publicly-traded company, not easy! I think the guys deserve some credit. As does the GPL which would make any attempt to screw us out of our beloved OS utterly futile. Kudos to both...
We polled over 10,000 people, interviewed industry experts, conducted focus groups, market studies, hired teams of nuclear physicists and asked all what was the best way to transport a computer or LCD without damage. We tabulated the results, input them into a terrabyte database, mined the data and examined the results with an expert system. The results:
MySQL is basically a database as powerful as Access and others with no performance hit whatsoever. It's not that MySQL is an amazing feat of programming (a good one, but not an amazing one) but it shows what a simple database can do when performance is key. Consider/. which is run on MySQL. A personal database powers one of the best sites on the web, bar none...
I think it's very important to note that as it ships, all it can do is rip the CDs you already own. Wow, be still my heart... Sure it will support audio in and "home phone line networking" (whatever that is) at some undetermined future date, but on Day 1 it will be a $399 CD player. And if you own CDs then it's safe to assume you already have one of these...
Ok, lemme try summing up my opinion succintly and see if you still disagree, I suspect this is just an argument of semantics. This is what I'm trying to say:
"Microsoft should not force OEMs to sell a copy of Windows with every PC they sell, but even though it does not hold true in all situations, there is some logic to them thinking that you should ship something with the PC since otherwise you could very well be planning to pirate a copy of Windows."
Pay special note to the fact that I say that it does not hold true in all situations but really, you have to concede this. We all know tonnes of cut-rate PC shops are selling systems without Windows licenses or that people are buying a blank hard drive then downloading a Windows ISO off of a newsgroup. Surely you're not trying to deny this! If so you must also believe that no one ever downloaded a song illegally using Napster.
Wow, that's one doozie of a message, unfortunately your poor arguments beg a response.
Saying people will automaticly pirate an M$ OS if they din't have any OS on their computer is just a lie!
I never said that nor even hinted it. You read my post and completely distorted it to your own purpose, then responded irrationally. To quote my post accurately, not fictionally: "If I was buying a PC for home use I'd be much more prone to purchase it with a blank hard drive and then install Windows from a CD to save money." Yet you quote me as saying "people will automaticly pirate an M$ OS if they din't have any OS on their computer". You're right that it's a lie, but I believe you're the one that said it, not me.
The only reason people think M$ crap is "easy to use" is because of the compulsive lies of marketing people.
It is illogical to tell people what they think and why, and a completely silly way to try to make an argument. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor and between the options that people find Microsoft software easier to use because it actually is, or that their minds are secretly under the control of marketing "lies", I'll choose the former.
The illegal M$ monopoly has to go.
Do your homework, monopolies are not illegal, only abuse of monopoly power is illegal. You may also want to note that people are less likely to listen to your anti-Microsoft rhetoric when you use phrases like "Winders", and "M$" and call their software "crap". While I know this makes you feel clever, it dilutes the message of people who have genuine concern about Microsoft's business practises.
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While I fully support non-profit organizations seeking public money I can't help but feel a bit violated by this.
JPL is one of the last vestigates of "pure" science now that every other institute has sold out for cellular satellites, titties in space, and singings fags on the Space Center.
If JPL sells out to the highest bidder then surely Linus or the GPL is next!
The message by "mpe" had this right and I agree with him completely. In the old days people were charged for the worth of a product. The math is C is manufacturing cost, M is profit margin, and P is price. So...
P=C+M
But then someone realized that if people are willing to pay P+1 or P+5 for the same product, who cares what the cost of manufacture was? If the market will bear the cost of a $20 CD, then charge it. Regardless of whether or not they could easily make a profit at a cost of $10.
The ultimate example of this are those ridiculous "The real cost of gas" stickers they plaster on the gas pumps here in Canada. They show that 5% of the cost is profit, and 20% is tax. Well, jeez. That's 5% profit including a big, fat corporate head office with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, massive P.R. departments and LCD screens on every desk. They are conditioning us to think that their industry is poor, yet these massive bureacracies are paid for by price inflation! They could fire 1/2 of their stupid managers and cut the price by a half. All while still making their precious 5% profit.
Actually I'm Canadian too and found that in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., for a basic meal you can expect to pay about $10 CAD, $10 USD or 10 GBP respectively. Considering there are about 2.5 Canadian dollars to the British pound you see that in Britain a meal "costs" about 2.5 times as much. But this is mostly elementary since their pay cheques (not checks!) are also paid in British pounds so there's no discrepancy unless you're a tourist. It's not really a matter of price gouging, simply of exchange rates and inflation.
What's more interesting is that a CD typically costs $20 to purchase yet a cassette tape costs around $10. Yet the cassette costs much more to make! (Cassettes are recorded, CDs are pressed on a high capacity assemply line.) This means that recording companies can turn a profit at $10 with higher cost of materials, so why the $%^@ do they charge us $20? This is the price fixing.
Cool, so fifty-five years after NASA sent a monkey into space, John Carmack could set a new first: first civilian [code] monkey launched into space. While Albert the monkey sadly perished on his maiden flight, *he* didn't understand the principles of rocket-assisted jumping or in-air turning. Elementary physics to any Quake veteran...
> Without IP law, the GPL would not NEED to exist.
That's one of the most ignorant statements I've ever heard. In the world you suggest, Microsoft could rewrite Windows using GNU or Linux code and would not have to release any source (After all, since you don't own your own code, you can't dictate that derivative source code be released publicly.) In fact, they would probably just take a RH 7.3 CD and do a search & replace in all the code so that "Torvalds" now reads "Gates". (After all, without IP law it would be perfectly legal to claim someone else's work as your own.) Then they could release it as "Windows 6.0" and charge a fortune for their "innovation". None of the freedoms in the GPL could be enforced if you did not have legal ownership of your code. I will re-word since it seemed to go over your head last time:
Free software could not exist without IP law.
There are a lot of people who like to beat the free software drum but they've got no idea what it means...
> so if you value freedom, support China, I guess.
How droll. It's funny that one of the most advanced concepts in American capitalism is that it protects IP law, which seems to fly in the face of many modern freedoms. Yet China is very lax about copyright law but ignores many modern freedoms. Something to chew on, I think.
I would suggest all /. readers consider the fact that without IP law the GPL could not exist since you would have no right to dictate how your source code was used in any way whatsoever. Free software and copyright law are bedfellows, not enemies.
Wireless + green energy = tumours without all the earth-mother impact. Just what we needed...
You start your post talking about Bookmarks, Phone Numbers, Calendar etc. This is information you want to access from anywhere. Real easy: agree standard XML formats, trusted authentication services, and security protocols. Whammo-bammo you can access your bookmarks from anywhere using pure XML and a password.
But then you start talking about banking and privacy and trusted companies. This is totally different, it's information you want others to access from anywhere; and the security model wouldn't be remotely similar. Which are you talking about?
Your GUPster idea is also fatally flawed because you're talking technology -- same thing as Microsoft and Sun and Apple. Talk standards and maybe you'll get somewhere. Anyone can come up with a technology to do this, but it's only in getting people to agree that you'll come up with anything decent.
If you don't care about other people, maybe you would care about the legal implications of your machine performing a DOS attack against someone else?
Good read. I don't care about that either.
You are missing my point. I run RH7.2 and check up2date and Ximian Red Carpet daily. Were there a patch for my system I would have run it a LONG time ago, but there isn't. I shy away from installing from tarballs as it fucks up the RPM database. I have since thrown caution to the wind (heh, a bit contradictory) and installed from tarball regardless. But my point is still valid: if Ximian and RedHat release no RPMs for my platform when I'm only a single revision behind, who's really the lazy one?
Like it or not, you have responsibility towards ALL other network peers (i.e. the whole Internet) to make your system as secure as possible.
Sorry but I'm gagging uncontrollably at the thought of your saccharine love-fest. I am not here to protect *other* people's PCs from compromise, should I hold hands with other sysadmins and pray for the health of their machines while I'm at it? No. My machine isn't as secure as some but I try my best and check Red Carpet daily.
Your argument is that as a user with a public IP address it's my responsibility to have every package on my system updated on a daily basis. Hence by your logic, if I'm not doing so then I don't have a right to be on the net. It's precisely this kind of jaded self-righteousness that people hate about a small handful of Linux geeks. When even Linux geeks are telling you to get a life, maybe you should consider it!
The systems that are getting hit are the ones with lazy admins who don't promptly follow up on security patches.
Why do topics like this always have to degenerate into a holier-than-thou diatribe by a self-righteous few? I'm running a vulnerable system and it isn't because I'm "lazy" as you so kindly put it. I run Linux on my *desktop* and use it to play Quake, surf the web, and share out some HTML pages for my family. I run RH7.2 (only one version behind, bub) and run Ximian Red Carpet and up2date regularly. But no, I don't read bugtraq for the sheer joy and I usually wait for RPMs to come out before I install a patch. The unfortunate downside to RPMs is that if you compile your own software the RPM database starts to choke on its biscuits. So maybe, just maybe it's not that people who don't upgrade same day aren't lazy. Maybe we just don't have as much time or interest as you to troll bugtraq or more so, troll /. acting all high and mighty because of the stinking version of OpenSSL they run.
Since when is dumb jock a "style"?
"That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair."
I can never understand why the mainstream media is so fixated with meaningless comparisons when covering science and technology. Is human hair some sort of benchmark in the memory industry? Do we care how many of these would fit on the end of a human hair? It seems like anything tiny is always compared to human hair ("fifty billion nanomachines could fit on the end of a human hair") and the benchmark for big things is the football field ("the solar wing is equal to the length of 200 football fields!"). Can't we dream up something more original?
I've run Galeon for at least a year and never seen this once. Your machine or fonts are messed up...
I've just gotta say that I think Galeon is the best thing to come out of the Mozilla work to date. Maybe newbs like mediocre e-mail clients and other whiz-bangs built into their browsers, me... I like a browser. One that's fast, intuitive, fast, simple, feature-rich, and fast. Galeon is all of these, and fast to boot! My biggest complaint about it is there isn't (nor likely ever will be) a Windows version I can use when surfing at work. But from home, nothing can top it!
a) I am a Canadian so nothing I say is biased, I wish WP was better.
b) EVERYONE knows that WP code and (moreso) Corel is shit. They suck ass, always have and always will. Ass, totally... Even hinting otherwise makes you look like a dork.
c) Unix, every version ever made Wow, WP came out before the 50's when Unix was invented? Your view of history is comical, keep it up...
Actually 1.1 caught me by surprise -- it seems to have more features than a number of the milestone releases. Maybe it's just me but it seems the team have kicked into overdrive to offer a feature-rich 1.1 so soon after 1.0. Yay!
Of course RedHat wants to make money, everyone does. However this is sensationalism of the highest sort. RedHat is one of the *only* publicly traded companies that even feigns support for free software. Compare RedHat to IBM, Sun, and Oracle. All support free software and I think we appreciate their contributions, but only one seems to be in it to "keep the faith". And this while being a publicly-traded company, not easy! I think the guys deserve some credit. As does the GPL which would make any attempt to screw us out of our beloved OS utterly futile. Kudos to both...
We polled over 10,000 people, interviewed industry experts, conducted focus groups, market studies, hired teams of nuclear physicists and asked all what was the best way to transport a computer or LCD without damage. We tabulated the results, input them into a terrabyte database, mined the data and examined the results with an expert system. The results:
Don't throw away the box it came in.
Like, duh...
MySQL is basically a database as powerful as Access and others with no performance hit whatsoever. It's not that MySQL is an amazing feat of programming (a good one, but not an amazing one) but it shows what a simple database can do when performance is key. Consider /. which is run on MySQL. A personal database powers one of the best sites on the web, bar none...
I think it's very important to note that as it ships, all it can do is rip the CDs you already own. Wow, be still my heart... Sure it will support audio in and "home phone line networking" (whatever that is) at some undetermined future date, but on Day 1 it will be a $399 CD player. And if you own CDs then it's safe to assume you already have one of these...
Ok, I think the war of semantics is over, I agree with everything you've said, now that you've been more clear. :)
Ok, lemme try summing up my opinion succintly and see if you still disagree, I suspect this is just an argument of semantics. This is what I'm trying to say:
"Microsoft should not force OEMs to sell a copy of Windows with every PC they sell, but even though it does not hold true in all situations, there is some logic to them thinking that you should ship something with the PC since otherwise you could very well be planning to pirate a copy of Windows."
Pay special note to the fact that I say that it does not hold true in all situations but really, you have to concede this. We all know tonnes of cut-rate PC shops are selling systems without Windows licenses or that people are buying a blank hard drive then downloading a Windows ISO off of a newsgroup. Surely you're not trying to deny this! If so you must also believe that no one ever downloaded a song illegally using Napster.
Wow, that's one doozie of a message, unfortunately your poor arguments beg a response.
Saying people will automaticly pirate an M$ OS if they din't have any OS on their computer is just a lie!
I never said that nor even hinted it. You read my post and completely distorted it to your own purpose, then responded irrationally. To quote my post accurately, not fictionally: "If I was buying a PC for home use I'd be much more prone to purchase it with a blank hard drive and then install Windows from a CD to save money." Yet you quote me as saying "people will automaticly pirate an M$ OS if they din't have any OS on their computer". You're right that it's a lie, but I believe you're the one that said it, not me.
The only reason people think M$ crap is "easy to use" is because of the compulsive lies of marketing people.
It is illogical to tell people what they think and why, and a completely silly way to try to make an argument. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor and between the options that people find Microsoft software easier to use because it actually is, or that their minds are secretly under the control of marketing "lies", I'll choose the former.
The illegal M$ monopoly has to go.
Do your homework, monopolies are not illegal, only abuse of monopoly power is illegal. You may also want to note that people are less likely to listen to your anti-Microsoft rhetoric when you use phrases like "Winders", and "M$" and call their software "crap". While I know this makes you feel clever, it dilutes the message of people who have genuine concern about Microsoft's business practises.