If Linus doesn't care, why should I?
on
Linux on Jeopardy
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· Score: 1
This question came up at a Q&A with Linus (as I'm sure it does at every Q&A with Linus) a little while back. He said that in Finland he's called "lee-nus", but in English speaking circles even he refers to himself as "lie-nus". And that he didn't care what people called the OS as long as they knew it was available to them. Isn't it all about choice anyway?
So I hereby decree that although it may sound like I say "lie-nux", I am in fact saying "lee-nux" with a thick American accent.
"We're going to take a protocol that is designed here and we're going to modify it. I assure you that a very large number of [companies] will implement the one with the tap," he said.
Now most of us are not in a position to select basic infrastructure equipment for the Net. Will those who are be allowed not to choose routers that aren't wiretap-enabled? Or will official and not-so-official pressure force them to?
Isn't this amazing? How is it that every other industry has competing national chains? (OK, someone will think of a counterexample, but I can't.) Apart from Fry's - don't get me started - I can't think of another physical storefront to go to if I need a resistor.
Maybe in order to be successful in that market, you have to relentlessly collect addresses and phone numbers of your clientele.
I'm as excited as anyone by the prospect of totally new technology, but I'm also bracing myself for the possiblity of both short and long term disappointment when this mystery product debuts.
In the short term, it could turn out that the product isn't the fusion-powered anti-gravity time-travel device that all the secrecy has led me to expect.
In the long term, even a fantastic product could end up going nowhere. I'm thinking particularly of AMD's woes. Not only has Intel (allegedly) managed to convince some major motherboard manufacturers not to ship their Athlon boards, now they've gotten a major OEM (Gateway) to drop all AMD processors from their product line. And Intel's anti-trust case inexplicably disappeared into thin air.
Even if Transmeta has the coolest CPU ever, do they stand a chance against Chipzilla? Here's hoping...
Everybody who bought Microsoft products (from OEMs and partners to end users) did so by their own choice. If no one wanted microsoft products, no one is forced to buy them.
Um, what rock have you been living under? It was less than a year ago that the first guy managed not to have to buy Windows with his computer.
Isn't this sort of the whole point of the trial? That people didn't have a choice?
I can see these things being useful in the same situations where disposable cameras are useful: when you're on vacation or somewhere where you'd be afraid to lose your "real" phone.
But I don't think any regular cellphone user would want one. The high-volume customers are where all the money is at, so they practically give you the phone for free anyway. What's the advantage of having an extra-crappy disposable one that can't have any of your "personal" features? And is the inventor going to pay for the roadside-cellphone cleanup industry this will inevitably require?
Or I could be completely wrong. It's getting to be a habit with me.
I am sick to death of hearing that "well, the industry is changing and MS is less poweful now, so why bother with any of this?" The point of this trial is NOT that MS shouldn't be such a big company or have so much money. The point is that they shouldn't be able to break the law without any consequences.
If I rob a bank and get caught, but by the time I get to trial I have spent all the money on liquor and donuts, should I be set free since I no longer enjoy the benefits of the money I stole?
Or to be more realistic, if I use strongarm tactics to drive a hundred companies out of business to maintain a dominant position, and then later I find that I might not be able to maintain that position anyway, should I escape prosecution because my plan didn't quite work out the way I hoped?
It's tempting to be bitter about how rich MS is. But guess what, they did make a lot of their money by supplying a product that people wanted. There's no reason they shouldn't be filthy rich. There is a reason why they should not be allowed to do anything they want in the name of "innovation" - it's called the law.
I'm a little dismayed at how concerned people are that Bill Gates will still be rich no matter what happens. Of course he will be rich. He made a small fortune into an unspeakably huge fortune, and in the beginning he didn't have any monopoly power to abuse.
I wish the point would be driven home more often that this trial is not about Bill Gates being too rich. It's about Microsoft imperially controlling the computer industry. If the court can put a stop to that, what does it matter how much money Bill has?
In addition to Microsoft's long-standing commitment to innovation and competition, we are guided by the most basic American values: serving customers, quality, integrity, partnering and giving to our communities. We will continue to strive to live up to these values, while we focus our efforts on building great software for consumers.
MS is indeed known for their customer service. ("Hmm. Try re-installing Windows. That'll be $99. Thank you for calling Microsoft.")
For their unparalleled product quality. ("To avoid the problem, Microsoft suggests turning off JavaScript, ActiveX, Macros, and your computer.")
For integrity. ("Well your honor, the viedotape isn't so much falsified evidence as it is an artist's conception of what we wish the truth was.")
For partnering. ("We love you Intel/Apple/Compaq/Real/IBM, and as long as you do what we say, no one will get hurt.")
And most of all for giving to their community. ("Senator Gorton, another truckload of cash just pulled up. Where should we put it?")
I am sick to death of hearing that "well, the industry is changing and MS is less poweful now, so why bother with any of this?" The point of this trial is NOT that MS shouldn't be such a big company or have so much money. The point is that they shouldn't be able to break the law without any consequences.
If I rob a bank and get caught, but by the time I get to trial I have spent all the money on liquor and donuts, should I be set free since I no longer enjoy the benefits of the money I stole?
Or to be more realistic, if I use strongarm tactics to drive a hundred companies out of business to maintain a dominant position, and then later I find that I might not be able to maintain that position anyway, should I escape prosecution because my plan didn't quite work out the way I hoped?
It's tempting to be bitter about how rich MS is. But guess what, they did make a lot of their money by supplying a product that people wanted. There's no reason they shouldn't be filthy rich. There is a reason why they should not be allowed to do anything they want in the name of "innovation" - it's called the law.
People have been pirating movies for a long time on video cassette. Now granted I'm young and can't remember a time when there weren't recordable video cassettes, but I don't remember a huge uproar about people being able to copy movies from one tape to another.
Wow, you are young. Ok sonny, sit right down and you'll hear a tale of how we were one supreme court justice away from not having VCRs at all.
Universal sued Sony (inventors of the Betamax) because they thought that the ability for people to record movies off of broadcast television would violate their copyrights. By one vote, the supreme court held that even though such illegal acitivities were possible, the machines themselves could not be outlawed because they had legal uses as well. (Hope they'll take the same stance on encryption software when the time comes!)
So with legal video copying machines out there, there was a lot of concern over piracy. But the solution was not a technical one. Even though Macrovision copy-protection was and still is widely used, it is easy enough to defeat. You can buy "stabilizer" devices for $20 today, and even way back them you could buy kits or plans to build it yourself. No big deal. What brought piracy under control was the fact that they dropped the price of a movie on video tape from an average of $70-$100 down to $10-$20. Because at that price point, it's not worth it for most regular folks to pirate a movie instead of just buying it. Plus the fact that - surprise,surprise - most people don't want to break the law. Of course there are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (!) And now, in hindsight, Universal's case appears insane. The industry they were afraid would be destroyed by home video is now bigger than ever, because of home video.
As has been said often in this forum, copy machines didn't destroy print publishing. Audio tape and CD-R didn't destroy the record industry. Video tape didn't destroy the movie industry. And neither will copyable DVDs.
This whole hullaballoo is simply the product of big company suits who are so short-sightedly greedy that they've turned into paranoids with their heads up their asses.
It probably just shifts frequencies and so on to test which signals are least likely to have interference due to line static. Then it uses those. Which is a bit interesting.. Makes you wonder why the hell something like this wasn't invented years ago.
It was. Back when the highest standard speed was 9600 bps, Telebit's "PEP" modems achieved 18000 bps by splitting the line into 511 separate frequencies and not using the less reliable ones. Obviously this protocol was proprietary, so you needed PEP modems on both ends to make it work. Pretty good modems, in my experience.
Well, yeah, but what does this really mean? Has this company sold a single product yet? (Not sarcasm -- I 'm really asking.) Does high stock price == good product?
And I keep remembering that high-profile NC demo that Ellison gave a few years ago which flopped because...drumroll... the network went down. Just because it's a great idea doesn't necessarily mean it's anything more than a great idea.
Anyway, call me jaded, but I'm totally unimpressed by new companies with a huge market capitalization built on pure speculation. Just say "internet" and you're a billionaire. Doesn't hurt that you're already a billionaire to start with. Sing along with me: "And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know."
Pennsylvania is replacing all their license plates over the next few years. Instead of a state motto, the bottom of every plate will read "WWW.STATE.PA.US". Ughhh.
I suppose this is marginally better than the current plates that say "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania". And (offtopic rant) much better than the scary signs hanging all over the Philadelphia airport saying "Philadelphia - the city that loves you back." Ewwwwwwwwww!
And hey, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth too! So why not www.commonwealth.pa.us?
I don't think it's true that QC can instantly crack "every cryptographic standard today". The article about TWINKLE was just a confused mass of lies and wishes. While there are some proposed quantum algorithms for factoring and discrete logs, these are mostly a threat to today's popular public-key systems. Good symmetric systems still require brute-force key searching, and QC can only turn that O(2**n) problem into an O(2**(n/2)) problem. So the easy fix is to just double your key lengths. (I know, easier said than done.)
No, it wasn't a stupid law to begin with. It's only been a stupid law for two or three decades due to the wide public availability of crypto technology from academic sources.
Circa WW2, when crypto was almost exclusively a military tool, it made a whole lot of sense to include it in a list of technologies that would directly threaten the U.S. if they were to get overseas. The point was that enemy nations could directly harm us good guys if we were unable to crack their codes. (See any number of texts on how cryptanalysis changed the course of the war.) It had nothing to do with U.S. citizens' ability to use encryption domestically. It's only relatively recently that the U.S. government has decided that satisfying its curiosity about its own citizens' affairs is more important than protecting their liberty.
Laws take a long time to change. This is good. Because once these stupid regulations are eliminated, you don't want the next boneheaded fascist administration to be able to just put them back at their whim.
What indeed? My X server crashes occasionally on my laptop (S3 Virge/MX chip), and locks up so tight I can't Ctrl-Alt-ANYTHING -- no killing the server, no switching to a text console, not even ctrl-alt-del to do a controlled shutdown. The only thing I can do is a 0V-suspend, which is useless because when I power it up again X is still locked. I assume the OS is still running, but without a network connection or an external terminal (which are rarely available on planes and trains), what good does that do me?
My only choice is to power it down cold, and wait for fsck to clean up the mess on reboot. So it's functionally equivalent to an OS crash, and that sucks.
Does anyone know a way to kill X when it has seized the keyboard?
The article doesn't mention it, but last year Lawrence Livermore National Labs wrote about a maglev system with a passive track, saying there were plans to test it for use in rocket launches. I'm a huge fan of this "Inductrack" system, but I haven't seen any mention of it in months. Does anyone know if this is the system they're using?
The article says the concept was tested in England, so I doubt it's the same technology, but hope springs eternal.
One thing I will never understand is why so many non-commercial sites insist on a ".com" domain name. Most recently, I discovered my township has a web site - www.yourtaxdollarsatwork.COM. Jeez!
You'll never understand it? Don't be so hard on yourself. When you type "blahblahblah" into your browser (and there's no machine of that name in your local domain), where's the first place your browser looks for it? Since the world has unfortunately been conditioned that most websites use "www." and ".com" as universal quotation marks, it's natural to just put your site's distinctive name right in the middle.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever heard - "don't make the product better, condition the user". If you produce any kind of software that interfaces with a human user, go do the world a favor and dunk yourself in a well.
Nothing to do with the rest of your post, but this one point doesn't always hold water. The Newton's philosophy was to make the handwriting recognition better. The Palm Pilot's philosophy was to condition the user. Which one worked well enough for non-geeks to buy? After the Palm engineers climbed out of the well and dried off, they realized that people are more adaptable than software.
Well, I wouldn't bet on this. I mean, when NeXT first put the 600MB (?) MO drive into the NeXTcube, popular sentiment was that "there just isn't 600MB worth of data out there to put on such a huge disk." Eventually data seems to expand to fill the space it occupies.
But since you mention mass distribution, I have a question. CD's are quick to mass produce because the pits can literally be pressed mechanically from a master. This new medium is multi-layered, and sounds like the data is stored not geometrically but chemically (I could be imagining this, though). So how do you mass-prouce them?
Their web site seems to indicate that one of the disk layers is made of glass. How much abuse can one of these take? Clearly their "credit-card sized" media are intended to be carried around in your pocket, but can such high densities withstand being flexed and sat on?
But even if they can't, just seal one of these in a box and you still have a kick-ass hard drive (when R/W becomes available).
I can't believe I'm letting an AC sucker me into replying on this, but I just have to say it: how often are bystanders killed by a teenager armed with PGP?
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So I hereby decree that although it may sound like I say "lie-nux", I am in fact saying "lee-nux" with a thick American accent.
Ooops. I meant "will they be allowed not to choose routers that are wiretap-enabled." Sorry.
Now most of us are not in a position to select basic infrastructure equipment for the Net. Will those who are be allowed not to choose routers that aren't wiretap-enabled? Or will official and not-so-official pressure force them to?
Maybe in order to be successful in that market, you have to relentlessly collect addresses and phone numbers of your clientele.
In the short term, it could turn out that the product isn't the fusion-powered anti-gravity time-travel device that all the secrecy has led me to expect.
In the long term, even a fantastic product could end up going nowhere. I'm thinking particularly of AMD's woes. Not only has Intel (allegedly) managed to convince some major motherboard manufacturers not to ship their Athlon boards, now they've gotten a major OEM (Gateway) to drop all AMD processors from their product line. And Intel's anti-trust case inexplicably disappeared into thin air.
Even if Transmeta has the coolest CPU ever, do they stand a chance against Chipzilla? Here's hoping...
Um, what rock have you been living under? It was less than a year ago that the first guy managed not to have to buy Windows with his computer.
Isn't this sort of the whole point of the trial? That people didn't have a choice?
But I don't think any regular cellphone user would want one. The high-volume customers are where all the money is at, so they practically give you the phone for free anyway. What's the advantage of having an extra-crappy disposable one that can't have any of your "personal" features? And is the inventor going to pay for the roadside-cellphone cleanup industry this will inevitably require?
Or I could be completely wrong. It's getting to be a habit with me.
I am sick to death of hearing that "well, the industry is changing and MS is less poweful now, so why bother with any of this?" The point of this trial is NOT that MS shouldn't be such a big company or have so much money. The point is that they shouldn't be able to break the law without any consequences.
If I rob a bank and get caught, but by the time I get to trial I have spent all the money on liquor and donuts, should I be set free since I no longer enjoy the benefits of the money I stole?
Or to be more realistic, if I use strongarm tactics to drive a hundred companies out of business to maintain a dominant position, and then later I find that I might not be able to maintain that position anyway, should I escape prosecution because my plan didn't quite work out the way I hoped?
It's tempting to be bitter about how rich MS is. But guess what, they did make a lot of their money by supplying a product that people wanted. There's no reason they shouldn't be filthy rich. There is a reason why they should not be allowed to do anything they want in the name of "innovation" - it's called the law.
I wish the point would be driven home more often that this trial is not about Bill Gates being too rich. It's about Microsoft imperially controlling the computer industry. If the court can put a stop to that, what does it matter how much money Bill has?
For their unparalleled product quality. ("To avoid the problem, Microsoft suggests turning off JavaScript, ActiveX, Macros, and your computer.")
For integrity. ("Well your honor, the viedotape isn't so much falsified evidence as it is an artist's conception of what we wish the truth was.")
For partnering. ("We love you Intel/Apple/Compaq/Real/IBM, and as long as you do what we say, no one will get hurt.")
And most of all for giving to their community. ("Senator Gorton, another truckload of cash just pulled up. Where should we put it?")
If I rob a bank and get caught, but by the time I get to trial I have spent all the money on liquor and donuts, should I be set free since I no longer enjoy the benefits of the money I stole?
Or to be more realistic, if I use strongarm tactics to drive a hundred companies out of business to maintain a dominant position, and then later I find that I might not be able to maintain that position anyway, should I escape prosecution because my plan didn't quite work out the way I hoped?
It's tempting to be bitter about how rich MS is. But guess what, they did make a lot of their money by supplying a product that people wanted. There's no reason they shouldn't be filthy rich. There is a reason why they should not be allowed to do anything they want in the name of "innovation" - it's called the law.
Wow, you are young. Ok sonny, sit right down and you'll hear a tale of how we were one supreme court justice away from not having VCRs at all.
Universal sued Sony (inventors of the Betamax) because they thought that the ability for people to record movies off of broadcast television would violate their copyrights. By one vote, the supreme court held that even though such illegal acitivities were possible, the machines themselves could not be outlawed because they had legal uses as well. (Hope they'll take the same stance on encryption software when the time comes!)
So with legal video copying machines out there, there was a lot of concern over piracy. But the solution was not a technical one. Even though Macrovision copy-protection was and still is widely used, it is easy enough to defeat. You can buy "stabilizer" devices for $20 today, and even way back them you could buy kits or plans to build it yourself. No big deal. What brought piracy under control was the fact that they dropped the price of a movie on video tape from an average of $70-$100 down to $10-$20. Because at that price point, it's not worth it for most regular folks to pirate a movie instead of just buying it. Plus the fact that - surprise,surprise - most people don't want to break the law. Of course there are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (!) And now, in hindsight, Universal's case appears insane. The industry they were afraid would be destroyed by home video is now bigger than ever, because of home video.
As has been said often in this forum, copy machines didn't destroy print publishing. Audio tape and CD-R didn't destroy the record industry. Video tape didn't destroy the movie industry. And neither will copyable DVDs.
This whole hullaballoo is simply the product of big company suits who are so short-sightedly greedy that they've turned into paranoids with their heads up their asses.
It was. Back when the highest standard speed was 9600 bps, Telebit's "PEP" modems achieved 18000 bps by splitting the line into 511 separate frequencies and not using the less reliable ones. Obviously this protocol was proprietary, so you needed PEP modems on both ends to make it work. Pretty good modems, in my experience.
And I keep remembering that high-profile NC demo that Ellison gave a few years ago which flopped because ...drumroll... the network went down. Just because it's a great idea doesn't necessarily mean it's anything more than a great idea.
Anyway, call me jaded, but I'm totally unimpressed by new companies with a huge market capitalization built on pure speculation. Just say "internet" and you're a billionaire. Doesn't hurt that you're already a billionaire to start with. Sing along with me: "And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know."
I suppose this is marginally better than the current plates that say "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania". And (offtopic rant) much better than the scary signs hanging all over the Philadelphia airport saying "Philadelphia - the city that loves you back." Ewwwwwwwwww!
And hey, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth too! So why not www.commonwealth.pa.us?
I don't think it's true that QC can instantly crack "every cryptographic standard today". The article about TWINKLE was just a confused mass of lies and wishes. While there are some proposed quantum algorithms for factoring and discrete logs, these are mostly a threat to today's popular public-key systems. Good symmetric systems still require brute-force key searching, and QC can only turn that O(2**n) problem into an O(2**(n/2)) problem. So the easy fix is to just double your key lengths. (I know, easier said than done.)
Circa WW2, when crypto was almost exclusively a military tool, it made a whole lot of sense to include it in a list of technologies that would directly threaten the U.S. if they were to get overseas. The point was that enemy nations could directly harm us good guys if we were unable to crack their codes. (See any number of texts on how cryptanalysis changed the course of the war.) It had nothing to do with U.S. citizens' ability to use encryption domestically. It's only relatively recently that the U.S. government has decided that satisfying its curiosity about its own citizens' affairs is more important than protecting their liberty.
Laws take a long time to change. This is good. Because once these stupid regulations are eliminated, you don't want the next boneheaded fascist administration to be able to just put them back at their whim.
Thanks! The program is jslaunch.
What indeed? My X server crashes occasionally on my laptop (S3 Virge/MX chip), and locks up so tight I can't Ctrl-Alt-ANYTHING -- no killing the server, no switching to a text console, not even ctrl-alt-del to do a controlled shutdown. The only thing I can do is a 0V-suspend, which is useless because when I power it up again X is still locked. I assume the OS is still running, but without a network connection or an external terminal (which are rarely available on planes and trains), what good does that do me?
My only choice is to power it down cold, and wait for fsck to clean up the mess on reboot. So it's functionally equivalent to an OS crash, and that sucks.
Does anyone know a way to kill X when it has seized the keyboard?
The article says the concept was tested in England, so I doubt it's the same technology, but hope springs eternal.
You'll never understand it? Don't be so hard on yourself. When you type "blahblahblah" into your browser (and there's no machine of that name in your local domain), where's the first place your browser looks for it? Since the world has unfortunately been conditioned that most websites use "www." and ".com" as universal quotation marks, it's natural to just put your site's distinctive name right in the middle.
But since you mention mass distribution, I have a question. CD's are quick to mass produce because the pits can literally be pressed mechanically from a master. This new medium is multi-layered, and sounds like the data is stored not geometrically but chemically (I could be imagining this, though). So how do you mass-prouce them?
Their web site seems to indicate that one of the disk layers is made of glass. How much abuse can one of these take? Clearly their "credit-card sized" media are intended to be carried around in your pocket, but can such high densities withstand being flexed and sat on?
But even if they can't, just seal one of these in a box and you still have a kick-ass hard drive (when R/W becomes available).
I can't believe I'm letting an AC sucker me into replying on this, but I just have to say it: how often are bystanders killed by a teenager armed with PGP?