Maybe it's just my personal opinion, but we aren't ready to go underground yet, are we?
Maybe you aren't, but I sure am. After watching what's happened to Napster, Streambox, ReplayTV, Jon Johansen, etc., there's no way in hell I'm releasing any software that might potentially piss off any corporate entity under my own name.
Maybe if anonymous distribution becomes the rule rather than the exception, they'll finally see what a masive whack-a-mole game they've gotten themselves into and give up.
I'm sure you all think I'm naive, and I'm underestimating the damage that a lawsuit can do, but it strikes me as incredibly cowardly to do otherwise.
You may be right, but I side with that old saying: better a live coward than a dead hero. I have a life to live, thanks much, and I'm not going to get myself into decades of debt and maybe even some prison time over software. It just isn't worth it.
It doesn't matter whether the lawyers can prove it. They don't need to prove it. All they need to do is assert it with sufficient bluster that a judge will believe them and issue an order shutting you down. At that point, you're dead, unless you happen to have deep pockets and good lawyers.
It's no good being right if you can't put up the money required to prove it.
The only way to fight lawyers is never to let them know who you are.
In order to run the emulator you have to own the game so the emulator can rip all the artwork and music out of the game. I'm sorry but this is just plain illegal and unethical.
Aside from the fact that you're wrong, you're wrong. This is a server emulator, not a client emulator, so there's no "ripping" of anything out of anything else. You play with your same old client. Even if this were a client emulator, loading graphics from your original CD would be both legal and ethical. There's no difference in pulling bits off the CD with a resource editor and pulling bits off the CD with a clone of the game. In neither situation are you using the software the graphics creator intended to be used to view the graphics, but in neither situation are you making unauthorized copies of the data. Courts have held for years that loading data from disk into temporary memory does not constitute copying.
Individual citizens do not govern, they elect representatives who reflect their views, values, etc. to govern.
In any given election for a single position (excluding city councils and the like), there are typically either one or two viable choices.
One, or two.
Are you seriously suggesting that two options are enough to meaningfully represent the range of "views and values" present in even a tiny group of voters? Or are you demanding that we choose candidates who "reflect our views" in such an incredibly approximate fashion that the term becomes nearly meaningless?
Maybe we ought to suspend voting for a few years, and see how people react to having no voice in government by force, instead of by choice. Maybe contraryness can give a boost to the democratic process. . .
I think that would be an excellent idea. The only thing that would change is that the politicians would stop pretending not to be for sale, and at least then it would be an honest picture of what's really going on.
I always thought I'd tear the logos off any car I bought. Paying for the privilege of advertising somebody else's product does not make any sense to me.
But a funny thing happened after I bought my Suzuki Samurai: I acquired a perverse sense of pride in owning a cheap little 15-year-old tin-plate 4x4 that delivers the goods better than a brand new Jeep. When I go rocketing past some sucker in a $40,000 Grand Cherokee, I want him to SEE that big old Suzuki logo and know just how much money he wasted. Childish, yes, but the still-common "it's a jeep thing, you wouldn't understand" attitude ticks me off.
Perhaps the fact that Samurais were discontinued in the US a decade ago has something to do with it - it's hard to see the harm in advertising a long-dead product.
But I still won't wear clothes with a visible logo.
It is a scam, but the only people who will fall for it are people who deserve to be bled of their excess cash anyway.
I mean, really, it's brilliant - NSI can ring a bell, and overnight charges in the millions will ring up on every domain squatter's balance sheet. If they keep it up, after another year or two all the domain squatters will be broke, their domains will expire, and we'll all be *much* happier.
-Mars
Re:Is it just me.. or is this incredibly silly?
on
Pay Lars
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· Score: 1
Is it possible to get "filthy rich" without in any way stomping on other people's rights?
"Getting fucked out of some money that I worked damn hard for" is an understandably repugnant idea, but there is a big difference between the act of dropping cash in your savings account every month and amassing millions by legal fiat.
We don't respect wealth gained at gunpoint; why should we unquestioningly accept wealth gained via means of coercion only slightly less blatant? Don't kid yourself that there's no coercion involved - without the threat of police raids, copyrights would be just another blue law.
at any rate this is probably the most important legal decision that will be made in the next decade and i shouldn't be making jokes about it..
The fact that this is one of the more important legal decisions of the next decade is exactly WHY you should be making jokes about it. Refusing to take the old crap seriously is the first step toward eliminating it.
There's a third option: we can leave the sandbox to them and go find ourselves a new one. Then they can pour all the mud they want in it, and it won't be our problem.
While I'm sure China's government is willing to put lots more money and effort into this censorship scheme in order to preserve their all-precious media control, they have set themself a remarkably difficult task. Not only do they have to outmuscle all their net users, they have to continually outsmart them, too. As the number of 'net users grows this will be increasingly difficult. They simply can't keep it up forever: eventually the sheer weight of numbers will overwhelm the censors, and the whole thing will become a joke.
They probably feel they've pulled a smart one: by refusing to acknowledge the censorship publicly, when it fails, they can withdraw it without acknowledging that they ever had it running. Unfortunately this too will come back to haunt them, since anyone who cares will probably notice the change whether they publicize it or not.
2."Pragmatism" is sometimes a code word for "I have no values, morals or ethics ". I just do "whatever works" and I don't worry about any kind of idealistic consistency. People like this do well in the short term, but really they're just blowing in the wind, and in the long run they don't matter much. They end up dancing to the strings of "impractical idealists" who refuse to compromise and because of that often end up shaping the world.
Seems to me what you're criticizing is an excessively short-term view of the world, not pragmatism itself. Looking only at the short term is a killer no matter what your philosophy of life.
I ask again, who says differently? A lot of people were actually alive then (it may surprise you to konw) and they remember these events pretty clearly. Again, who ever said Windows came first? Yeesh. The flammage is bad enough without making up nonexistent arguments.
Oddly enough, there are in fact people who claim Windows came first and Apple ripped off Microsoft's ideas. I've actually encountered a couple of them. The remarkable thing about this particular species of stupidity is how completely unshakable it is; the idea that Windows-came-first seems to derive more from an adolescent worship of His Billness than from any remote link to the real world.
Even many of the Windowphiles who do acknowledge that the MacOS came first try to minimize Apple's contribution to the Windows UI. These also tend to be the same sort of folks who think that sticky menus icons are a user interface revolution, so my guess is that they simply don't realize what a big change the Mac UI was from everything else people could buy at the time.
This is an email wrote to someone who doesn't read Slashdot in response to this report. Opinions and punditry abound. Flame me if you must, but I'd like to hear what you think of my predictions.
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Well this is interesting. Linux has passed Novell Netware and all commercial Unices to rank as the #2 best selling server OS in 1999, with 25% of the market. Only Windows NT beats it, with 38% share (same as last year). This is significant because analysts were predicting it would take Linux until 2002 or 2003 to reach the #2 slot.
Analysts expect that, if anything, Linux' numbers are skewed low. Linux sales increased 92% from 1998 to 1999, while average growth was 23%. Furthermore, IDC counts only box sales, not free downloads, and there's no way they can measure situations where a company buys one CD and installs it on dozens of machines.
What makes this even more interesting, however, is the fact that Linux accounts for only $32 million of the $5.7 billion spent on server operating systems in 1999. Windows NT accounts for $1.7 billion. This makes a lot of sense: open source systems destroy licensing revenue opportunities everywhere they go, replacing them with consulting and support revenue opportunities. Marc Ewing has said repeatedly that he doesn't want Red Hat to become a $5 billion/year company; he wants to turn Microsoft into a $50 million/year company. This year's numbers seem to bear that trend out.
It's also interesting that Linux has mainly cannibalized Netware and other Unix sales, all of which dropped from 1998 to 1999, but has not touched Windows NT sales. The only reason NT got a foothold in serverland in the first place was that the commercial Unix vendors were so busy fighting each other (by making their products increasingly incompatible) that the market splintered, thereby eliminating the competitive advantage of the root from which all the unixes were derived.
With Linux, we're seeing the splinters come back together again. Linux can already run on pretty much all the strange RISC boxes that had custom Unices written for them, and in some cases it even runs better than the manufacturer's own Unix did. That's where a lot of the development work on Linux has focused in the last year, too: the big iron multiprocessor tons-of-RAM servers that have to have uptimes measured in years. Linux is actively moving into the high-end Unix space that NT so far hasn't been able to touch.
This is actually a good thing. If Linux can kill of AIX, Irix, HPUX, Tru64, and SCO (all likely possibilities) and forge alliances with Solaris and BSD, the resulting Unix-centred-on-Linux power bloc will account for 40% of the market. Suddenly NT has real competition again. I think that this is, in fact, inevitable, and for simple economic reasons.
A case study: SGI has almost gone under (and still appears likely to) trying to develop its high-end workstations, IRIX operating system, and custom hardware for its custom workstations all at the same time. SGI has made repeated efforts to shed some of these businesses - their 1998/1999 attempt was the "Visual Workstation" line, a series of high-end PCs using SGI buses and graphics hardware on ordinary Intel x86 CPUs. They ran a custom version of WinNT, rather than Irix.
This didn't work for two reasons. NT's not Irix: it can't do what Irix can do, and it can't do it as well. Furthermore, SGI had to hack on NT just to get it to work on their custom boxes. This means they had to get cooperation from Microsoft - always a dangerous situation. Eventually, of course, the venture failed. Microsoft didn't cooperate sufficiently for SGI to make their version of NT work well enough for SGI to be able to sell enough of the boxes to make a profit. And the customers hated it - they were used to Irix, they liked Irix, and they didn't want this "ugly Windows crap" cluttering up their monitor.
SGI has seen the light, albeit belatedly. Instead of depending on Microsoft for NT, and instead of spending millions of their own dollars on Irix (it takes dozens of engineers to maintain a commercial Unix), they are breaking the best features of Irix out into modules and working on integrating them into Linux. They win, because their (very well-designed) workstations will look as great running Linux as they did running Irix, their customers will continue to get all the features they're used to, and they no longer have to bear the strain of developing an OS *and* a line of hardware. Further, they benefit from the development work everyone else is already doing on Linux.
Whether this will rescue them from financial oblivion is another story, but at least they have a chance now. Had they adopted this approach two years ago, they might have been able to save the inertia they built up in the late 80s and early 90s.
The same situation goes for all of the workstation manufacturers. Intel has been developing its x86 line so aggressively that it's hard to economically maintain a speed advantage with a custom RISC chip. This puts the squeeze on non-revenue-generating parts of the business, like the UNIX division. A workstation manufacturer simply can't continue to play the same game and maintain profitability.
Rather than submit to a "partnership of death" with Microsoft, it makes much more sense for them to take the unique features of their Unix they spent so much money developing, merge them into Linux, and continue shipping their hardware - running Linux instead. The simple fact is that operating systems are no longer profitable unless you are Microsoft (and even that is debatable). Everyone who isn't Microsoft benefits much more by de-splintering their Unix effort and standardizing on Linux than they gain by pouring money into a private-label Unix.
Now consider the case of Sun. Their Solaris is the most powerful version of Unix around, and also the only one of the commercial Unices that doesn't look like it's about to die - mainly because NT is a joke in the world Solaris lives in. They seem least likely of all to ally themselves with Linux. Scott McNealy has lambasted Linux as a toy - not without justification, as Solaris handles humongous servers with hundreds of hot-swappable processors, terabytes of RAID storage, and uptime needs measured in years. None of which Linux is particularly good at right now.
Yet I think even Sun will find that they need to ally with Linux or die. That Linux doesn't support Sun's top-end machines is a result of the fact that most of the people hacking on Linux don't own them. Linux performs quite nicely on Sun's lower-end machines - notably their SPARCstations. Furthermore, Linux has been steadily working its way up the line. It's only a matter of time and interest before Linux performs quite as satisfactorily on Sun's massive servers as it does on their little workstations.
While Sun may be able to take on Linus Torvalds and a loose gang of random hackers, that was the battle two years ago. If Sun wants to fight Linux now, they have to add IBM, SGI, Corel, Caldera, and a couple dozen others to the ever-growing mix. Sun can't keep up this fight forever, especially while Microsoft continues nipping at their heels in the workstation market.
Sun, too, will face SGI's crunch. If they're smart, they'll let go of their ego, adopt Linux as an ally, and take on Microsoft together before Solaris suffers the same fate Irix has. There's no reason Solaris and Linux can't coexist, but Sun needs to learn the lessons SGI and IBM have: there is only one enemy in Unix-land, and that's Microsoft.
Now what about the other free Unices, the trio of BSDs? I don't think they face a great threat. They'll continue to be niche OSes focusing on (and excelling in) certain targeted environments. NetBSD will continue to run on every piece of hardware ever built, FreeBSD will continue to kick everyone's butt in PC servers, and OpenBSD will continue to be the #1 choice for security conscious administrators. Meanwhile, Linux will continue its path to world (or at least server) domination. Linux and the BSDs are allies.
This is a path Sun could take, if they wanted to. I believe maintaining Solaris is ultimately a money-losing proposition for Sun, but if they want to try it, they could still reap some of the benefits of a reunified Unix market by writing compatibility wrappers for Solaris and Linux that allow them to run each other's apps, filesystem plugins to crossmount each other's disks, and so on. There's a lot to be gained by encouraging communication between the Unices.
Ultimately, I think the reconsolidation of Unix into a power bloc centred on Linux is somewhat inevitable. Microsoft and Intel have made the traditional workstation company obsolete. The choices are simple: join the Linux revolution, or watch Microsoft steal your customers.
Once that happens, the question becomes significantly different. If we assume current trends continue, within one or two years Linux will represent a share of the server market equal to Microsoft's. In the face of such opposition, we have to ask - can *Microsoft* survive?
It'll be an interesting fight to watch. The desktop market is, of course, quite huge, and Linux hasn't come close to challenging Microsoft's dominance there. But the server market is much more demanding than desktop market, and Unix unquestionably has the edge over NT there. So will Microsoft's deep pockets and consumer-desktop backing be enough to support its fight for acceptance in server-space, or is it as vulnerable to the Linux juggernaut as everything else? And if Unix wins back the servers, will that put Microsoft on the defensive for the desktops?
Ultimately, I think this will be the battle that determines the future of computing for the next decade. Open systems or closed? Profit or freedom? Corporate unification or creative anarchy? It'll be fun to watch.
You're describing something that's commonly explained by splitting atheism into "strong" and "weak" varieties.
So-called "strong atheism" describes people who are certain there are no gods. "Weak atheism" describes people who have no belief in gods.
Some people, including apparently you, call the latter category "agnostic". This is incorrect according to the original meaning of agnostic, which is something like "a person who believes it is impossible to know whether there are gods". A "weak atheist" might believe it is possible to know whether there are gods, and simply have never seen any evidence to suggest them.
Time changes the meaning of words, however, and the original sense of "agnostic" has nearly been lost.
I just figure that people choose the labels that they think best describe them, and whether they want to be called "atheist", "agnostic", or "sofulistepedarian", that's up to them.
-Mars
p.s. I just made up the word "sofulistepedarian", but if you think it describes you, please feel free to use it.
There's a good reason Christians in tech are a minority. There's also a good reason techies tend to look down on Christianity.
Christianity is based on a concept called "faith", which is defined in one or another of St. Paul's books as belief without reason. One must have faith that a being variously called "God", "Lord", "Jehovah", and other things actually exists, that he behaves in ways described in the Bible, and that the whole sin-redemption cycle actually works as advertised. All this one must take on faith, as there's no other reasonable way to arrive at it. (If there were, there'd be no need for a Bible to exist.)
Faith is a really awful way to deal with technology. All the faith in the world, applied to believing that your program works, isn't going to stop it from core dumping when you forget to initialise some pointer. All the praying in the world isn't going to resurrect your TCP link when you hose the routing table. The only thing that solves problems is plain old rational thought and engineering. The people who can't master these skills don't stay in high tech, because solving problems is most of what a techie does.
So if you're a practicing Christian, the deck is stacked against you. To master technology, you have to train yourself to reason effectively; to remain religious, you have to refrain from applying this reason to matters of faith. You have to build a firewall in your head beyond which untrammeled inquiry cannot pass.
This is a hard trick to master. Some people solve it by shrinking the firewall to the point that it has almost no effect on their real life. Others undergo a sort of multiple-personality split, where they think one way at work and a different way in church. And then there are those of us who take a good, hard look at faith, decide it's not getting us anywhere, and dump it.
Faith is never an asset in geekdom. It's kind of like backpacking in tennis shoes. You can get there, but it hurts more and takes longer, and the other backpackers are going to shoot you funny looks when you refuse to buy a good pair of hiking boots instead.
I think that garbage collection is like many other easy-features. It usually makes life easier, but there are always going to be cases where it makes life impossible. The classic example of such an easy-feature is, of course, the concept of an HLL itself. I'd much rather spend my time working in C than assembler, but when trying to write a kernel, a fast blitter, certain drivers, and that sort of thing, there's really no choice - one must use assembly.
I think automatic garbage collection is a bit like that. Most of the time, it does make life easier - it's one less thing to worry about and one less thing to get wrong, leaving that much more time to focus on whatever it is that makes the program worthwhile. But there are, and will always be, situations in which you just can't get there from here without manual allocation and deallocation with no interference.
Which side am I on? Both, naturally.:-) If I were writing (say) a RAID driver, I sure wouldn't want to worry about a memory manager kicking in and destroying my realtime video stream. Same for just about anything where speed is critical. But if I were writing a web browser, a word processor, a graphic editor - garbage collection would be a godsend. So I want a hybrid system where I can allocate and deallocate at will, or let the memory manager clean up for me, or perhaps both at once. And nothing says it all has to be done in one language.
I find Linux geeks' bias towards operating systems with preemptive multitasking a little annoying. For some projects it's appropriate to use an operating system with preemptive multitasking (trivial GUI wrappers), and sometimes it's not (realtime IO). While linux geeks may be "amused" by the need to explicitly hand off control to other threads, they should understand that it's generally far more efficient.
Unfortunately, I think many Linux geeks don't have much experience with realtime IO programming to understand these trade-offs. Until they do, they should resist making judgements.
P.S. This is not to defend MacOS as an operating system...
While you do this, and I do this, and perhaps even some of our friends do it, most people don't.
To most people, privacy beyond simple things like "not peeking in my curtains at night" is just not that important. They'd rather have the savings and the convenience. And "they" outnumber "us" to such a degree that "our" activities are basically lost in the noise. We have no effect on marketing and data collection at all.
How do I know this? Simple - if there were enough of us to make a difference, the marketers wouldn't be relying on it.
We can protect ourselves, but we can't protect the culture we live in. The culture we live in tomorrow is going to be irrevocably shaped by the presence a clicktrail through one's entire life. Yes, I can turn off cookies, fake up web identities, lie on surveys, and publicly mock advertisements. But that's not enough. For example: the Discovery Channel has six or eight splinter channels available only on digital cable. They are, in my opinion, the only channels worth owning a TV for. But here's the rub - the digital cable box sends a report on everything I do back to AT&T/TCI. They know what shows I watch, how late I stay up at night, probably even what ads cause me to change the channel. The only way I can keep them from knowing is to cancel my digital subscription and go back to analog, in which case I lose those channels. So my choice is this: submit to being monitored, or don't get the spiffy channels. And no amount of arguing or making up of false identities can change that.
How many more of those decisions will we have to make in the next twenty years?
The simple fact is that it doesn't matter whether we can come up with technical workarounds to tracking technology. Most people can't, and wouldn't care enough to try even if we were to show them how. And as far as the people who are doing the tracking are concerned, "most people" are all the people that matter.
>Windows did not win because it was supperior, >anymore than homosapiens are supperior to the >dinosaurs > >Huh? I'd bet on the homospiens over the dinosaur >any day of the week.
That depends a great deal on what you mean by "superior", now doesn't it?
Nor is there an "automatic ATM teller machine", a "PIN number", a "PIN ID", a "CPU processor", "RAM memory", a "DSL line", or any other such redundancy (all but the first of which phrases I have actually heard in conversation).
These hypothetical skinheads can exercise their "rights to free speech" all they want; I'm under no obligation to spend time and money (in the form of bandwidth and disk space) helping propagate their drivel to the rest of the world. If I choose to stop forwarding their messages, there's nothing they can do about it.
A UDP does not silence anyone. It's merely an organized boycott. By organizing, responsible netadmins can simultaneously ignore a rogue and thus bring political pressure to bear. The rogue can keep talking, and anyone who wants can keep listening, but anyone uninterested in spam gets help avoiding it.
Slashdot Mirror
Furtermore, these people are hired because of their resumé, not their qualifications.
The irony implied in this statement is beautiful.
-Mars
Maybe you aren't, but I sure am. After watching what's happened to Napster, Streambox, ReplayTV, Jon Johansen, etc., there's no way in hell I'm releasing any software that might potentially piss off any corporate entity under my own name.
Maybe if anonymous distribution becomes the rule rather than the exception, they'll finally see what a masive whack-a-mole game they've gotten themselves into and give up.
You may be right, but I side with that old saying: better a live coward than a dead hero. I have a life to live, thanks much, and I'm not going to get myself into decades of debt and maybe even some prison time over software. It just isn't worth it.
-Mars
It doesn't matter whether the lawyers can prove it. They don't need to prove it. All they need to do is assert it with sufficient bluster that a judge will believe them and issue an order shutting you down. At that point, you're dead, unless you happen to have deep pockets and good lawyers.
It's no good being right if you can't put up the money required to prove it.
The only way to fight lawyers is never to let them know who you are.
-Mars
Aside from the fact that you're wrong, you're wrong. This is a server emulator, not a client emulator, so there's no "ripping" of anything out of anything else. You play with your same old client. Even if this were a client emulator, loading graphics from your original CD would be both legal and ethical. There's no difference in pulling bits off the CD with a resource editor and pulling bits off the CD with a clone of the game. In neither situation are you using the software the graphics creator intended to be used to view the graphics, but in neither situation are you making unauthorized copies of the data. Courts have held for years that loading data from disk into temporary memory does not constitute copying.
-Mars
In any given election for a single position (excluding city councils and the like), there are typically either one or two viable choices.
One, or two.
Are you seriously suggesting that two options are enough to meaningfully represent the range of "views and values" present in even a tiny group of voters? Or are you demanding that we choose candidates who "reflect our views" in such an incredibly approximate fashion that the term becomes nearly meaningless?
-Mars
I think that would be an excellent idea. The only thing that would change is that the politicians would stop pretending not to be for sale, and at least then it would be an honest picture of what's really going on.
-Mars
I always thought I'd tear the logos off any car I bought. Paying for the privilege of advertising somebody else's product does not make any sense to me.
But a funny thing happened after I bought my Suzuki Samurai: I acquired a perverse sense of pride in owning a cheap little 15-year-old tin-plate 4x4 that delivers the goods better than a brand new Jeep. When I go rocketing past some sucker in a $40,000 Grand Cherokee, I want him to SEE that big old Suzuki logo and know just how much money he wasted. Childish, yes, but the still-common "it's a jeep thing, you wouldn't understand" attitude ticks me off.
Perhaps the fact that Samurais were discontinued in the US a decade ago has something to do with it - it's hard to see the harm in advertising a long-dead product.
But I still won't wear clothes with a visible logo.
-Mars
It is a scam, but the only people who will fall for it are people who deserve to be bled of their excess cash anyway.
I mean, really, it's brilliant - NSI can ring a bell, and overnight charges in the millions will ring up on every domain squatter's balance sheet. If they keep it up, after another year or two all the domain squatters will be broke, their domains will expire, and we'll all be *much* happier.
-Mars
Is it possible to get "filthy rich" without in any way stomping on other people's rights?
"Getting fucked out of some money that I worked damn hard for" is an understandably repugnant idea, but there is a big difference between the act of dropping cash in your savings account every month and amassing millions by legal fiat.
We don't respect wealth gained at gunpoint; why should we unquestioningly accept wealth gained via means of coercion only slightly less blatant? Don't kid yourself that there's no coercion involved - without the threat of police raids, copyrights would be just another blue law.
-Mars
The fact that this is one of the more important legal decisions of the next decade is exactly WHY you should be making jokes about it. Refusing to take the old crap seriously is the first step toward eliminating it.
-Mars
There's a third option: we can leave the sandbox to them and go find ourselves a new one. Then they can pour all the mud they want in it, and it won't be our problem.
Ahh, wishful thinking, I suppose.
-Mars
While I'm sure China's government is willing to put lots more money and effort into this censorship scheme in order to preserve their all-precious media control, they have set themself a remarkably difficult task. Not only do they have to outmuscle all their net users, they have to continually outsmart them, too. As the number of 'net users grows this will be increasingly difficult. They simply can't keep it up forever: eventually the sheer weight of numbers will overwhelm the censors, and the whole thing will become a joke.
They probably feel they've pulled a smart one: by refusing to acknowledge the censorship publicly, when it fails, they can withdraw it without acknowledging that they ever had it running. Unfortunately this too will come back to haunt them, since anyone who cares will probably notice the change whether they publicize it or not.
-Mars
2."Pragmatism" is sometimes a code word for "I have no values, morals or ethics ". I just do "whatever works" and I don't worry about any kind of idealistic consistency. People like this do well in the short term, but really they're just blowing in the wind, and in the long run they don't matter much. They end up dancing to the strings of "impractical idealists" who refuse to compromise and because of that often end up shaping the world.
Seems to me what you're criticizing is an excessively short-term view of the world, not pragmatism itself. Looking only at the short term is a killer no matter what your philosophy of life.
-Mars
I ask again, who says differently? A lot of people were actually alive then (it may surprise you to konw) and they remember these events pretty clearly. Again, who ever said Windows came first? Yeesh. The flammage is bad enough without making up nonexistent arguments.
Oddly enough, there are in fact people who claim Windows came first and Apple ripped off Microsoft's ideas. I've actually encountered a couple of them. The remarkable thing about this particular species of stupidity is how completely unshakable it is; the idea that Windows-came-first seems to derive more from an adolescent worship of His Billness than from any remote link to the real world.
Even many of the Windowphiles who do acknowledge that the MacOS came first try to minimize Apple's contribution to the Windows UI. These also tend to be the same sort of folks who think that sticky menus icons are a user interface revolution, so my guess is that they simply don't realize what a big change the Mac UI was from everything else people could buy at the time.
-Mars
This is an email wrote to someone who doesn't read Slashdot in response to this report. Opinions and punditry abound. Flame me if you must, but I'd like to hear what you think of my predictions.
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Well this is interesting. Linux has passed Novell Netware and all commercial Unices to rank as the #2 best selling server OS in 1999, with 25% of the market. Only Windows NT beats it, with 38% share (same as last year). This is significant because analysts were predicting it would take Linux until 2002 or 2003 to reach the #2 slot.
Analysts expect that, if anything, Linux' numbers are skewed low. Linux sales increased 92% from 1998 to 1999, while average growth was 23%. Furthermore, IDC counts only box sales, not free downloads, and there's no way they can measure situations where a company buys one CD and installs it on dozens of machines.
What makes this even more interesting, however, is the fact that Linux accounts for only $32 million of the $5.7 billion spent on server operating systems in 1999. Windows NT accounts for $1.7 billion. This makes a lot of sense: open source systems destroy licensing revenue opportunities everywhere they go, replacing them with consulting and support revenue opportunities. Marc Ewing has said repeatedly that he doesn't want Red Hat to become a $5 billion/year company; he wants to turn Microsoft into a $50 million/year company. This year's numbers seem to bear that trend out.
It's also interesting that Linux has mainly cannibalized Netware and other Unix sales, all of which dropped from 1998 to 1999, but has not touched Windows NT sales. The only reason NT got a foothold in serverland in the first place was that the commercial Unix vendors were so busy fighting each other (by making their products increasingly incompatible) that the market splintered, thereby eliminating the competitive advantage of the root from which all the unixes were derived.
With Linux, we're seeing the splinters come back together again. Linux can already run on pretty much all the strange RISC boxes that had custom Unices written for them, and in some cases it even runs better than the manufacturer's own Unix did. That's where a lot of the development work on Linux has focused in the last year, too: the big iron multiprocessor tons-of-RAM servers that have to have uptimes measured in years. Linux is actively moving into the high-end Unix space that NT so far hasn't been able to touch.
This is actually a good thing. If Linux can kill of AIX, Irix, HPUX, Tru64, and SCO (all likely possibilities) and forge alliances with Solaris and BSD, the resulting Unix-centred-on-Linux power bloc will account for 40% of the market. Suddenly NT has real competition again. I think that this is, in fact, inevitable, and for simple economic reasons.
A case study: SGI has almost gone under (and still appears likely to) trying to develop its high-end workstations, IRIX operating system, and custom hardware for its custom workstations all at the same time. SGI has made repeated efforts to shed some of these businesses - their 1998/1999 attempt was the "Visual Workstation" line, a series of high-end PCs using SGI buses and graphics hardware on ordinary Intel x86 CPUs. They ran a custom version of WinNT, rather than Irix.
This didn't work for two reasons. NT's not Irix: it can't do what Irix can do, and it can't do it as well. Furthermore, SGI had to hack on NT just to get it to work on their custom boxes. This means they had to get cooperation from Microsoft - always a dangerous situation. Eventually, of course, the venture failed. Microsoft didn't cooperate sufficiently for SGI to make their version of NT work well enough for SGI to be able to sell enough of the boxes to make a profit. And the customers hated it - they were used to Irix, they liked Irix, and they didn't want this "ugly Windows crap" cluttering up their monitor.
SGI has seen the light, albeit belatedly. Instead of depending on Microsoft for NT, and instead of spending millions of their own dollars on Irix (it takes dozens of engineers to maintain a commercial Unix), they are breaking the best features of Irix out into modules and working on integrating them into Linux. They win, because their (very well-designed) workstations will look as great running Linux as they did running Irix, their customers will continue to get all the features they're used to, and they no longer have to bear the strain of developing an OS *and* a line of hardware. Further, they benefit from the development work everyone else is already doing on Linux.
Whether this will rescue them from financial oblivion is another story, but at least they have a chance now. Had they adopted this approach two years ago, they might have been able to save the inertia they built up in the late 80s and early 90s.
The same situation goes for all of the workstation manufacturers. Intel has been developing its x86 line so aggressively that it's hard to economically maintain a speed advantage with a custom RISC chip. This puts the squeeze on non-revenue-generating parts of the business, like the UNIX division. A workstation manufacturer simply can't continue to play the same game and maintain profitability.
Rather than submit to a "partnership of death" with Microsoft, it makes much more sense for them to take the unique features of their Unix they spent so much money developing, merge them into Linux, and continue shipping their hardware - running Linux instead. The simple fact is that operating systems are no longer profitable unless you are Microsoft (and even that is debatable). Everyone who isn't Microsoft benefits much more by de-splintering their Unix effort and standardizing on Linux than they gain by pouring money into a private-label Unix.
Now consider the case of Sun. Their Solaris is the most powerful version of Unix around, and also the only one of the commercial Unices that doesn't look like it's about to die - mainly because NT is a joke in the world Solaris lives in. They seem least likely of all to ally themselves with Linux. Scott McNealy has lambasted Linux as a toy - not without justification, as Solaris handles humongous servers with hundreds of hot-swappable processors, terabytes of RAID storage, and uptime needs measured in years. None of which Linux is particularly good at right now.
Yet I think even Sun will find that they need to ally with Linux or die. That Linux doesn't support Sun's top-end machines is a result of the fact that most of the people hacking on Linux don't own them. Linux performs quite nicely on Sun's lower-end machines - notably their SPARCstations. Furthermore, Linux has been steadily working its way up the line. It's only a matter of time and interest before Linux performs quite as satisfactorily on Sun's massive servers as it does on their little workstations.
While Sun may be able to take on Linus Torvalds and a loose gang of random hackers, that was the battle two years ago. If Sun wants to fight Linux now, they have to add IBM, SGI, Corel, Caldera, and a couple dozen others to the ever-growing mix. Sun can't keep up this fight forever, especially while Microsoft continues nipping at their heels in the workstation market.
Sun, too, will face SGI's crunch. If they're smart, they'll let go of their ego, adopt Linux as an ally, and take on Microsoft together before Solaris suffers the same fate Irix has. There's no reason Solaris and Linux can't coexist, but Sun needs to learn the lessons SGI and IBM have: there is only one enemy in Unix-land, and that's Microsoft.
Now what about the other free Unices, the trio of BSDs? I don't think they face a great threat. They'll continue to be niche OSes focusing on (and excelling in) certain targeted environments. NetBSD will continue to run on every piece of hardware ever built, FreeBSD will continue to kick everyone's butt in PC servers, and OpenBSD will continue to be the #1 choice for security conscious administrators. Meanwhile, Linux will continue its path to world (or at least server) domination. Linux and the BSDs are allies.
This is a path Sun could take, if they wanted to. I believe maintaining Solaris is ultimately a money-losing proposition for Sun, but if they want to try it, they could still reap some of the benefits of a reunified Unix market by writing compatibility wrappers for Solaris and Linux that allow them to run each other's apps, filesystem plugins to crossmount each other's disks, and so on. There's a lot to be gained by encouraging communication between the Unices.
Ultimately, I think the reconsolidation of Unix into a power bloc centred on Linux is somewhat inevitable. Microsoft and Intel have made the traditional workstation company obsolete. The choices are simple: join the Linux revolution, or watch Microsoft steal your customers.
Once that happens, the question becomes significantly different. If we assume current trends continue, within one or two years Linux will represent a share of the server market equal to Microsoft's. In the face of such opposition, we have to ask - can *Microsoft* survive?
It'll be an interesting fight to watch. The desktop market is, of course, quite huge, and Linux hasn't come close to challenging Microsoft's dominance there. But the server market is much more demanding than desktop market, and Unix unquestionably has the edge over NT there. So will Microsoft's deep pockets and consumer-desktop backing be enough to support its fight for acceptance in server-space, or is it as vulnerable to the Linux juggernaut as everything else? And if Unix wins back the servers, will that put Microsoft on the defensive for the desktops?
Ultimately, I think this will be the battle that determines the future of computing for the next decade. Open systems or closed? Profit or freedom? Corporate unification or creative anarchy? It'll be fun to watch.
-Mars
You're describing something that's commonly explained by splitting atheism into "strong" and "weak" varieties.
So-called "strong atheism" describes people who are certain there are no gods. "Weak atheism" describes people who have no belief in gods.
Some people, including apparently you, call the latter category "agnostic". This is incorrect according to the original meaning of agnostic, which is something like "a person who believes it is impossible to know whether there are gods". A "weak atheist" might believe it is possible to know whether there are gods, and simply have never seen any evidence to suggest them.
Time changes the meaning of words, however, and the original sense of "agnostic" has nearly been lost.
I just figure that people choose the labels that they think best describe them, and whether they want to be called "atheist", "agnostic", or "sofulistepedarian", that's up to them.
-Mars
p.s. I just made up the word "sofulistepedarian", but if you think it describes you, please feel free to use it.
There's a good reason Christians in tech are a minority. There's also a good reason techies tend to look down on Christianity.
Christianity is based on a concept called "faith", which is defined in one or another of St. Paul's books as belief without reason. One must have faith that a being variously called "God", "Lord", "Jehovah", and other things actually exists, that he behaves in ways described in the Bible, and that the whole sin-redemption cycle actually works as advertised. All this one must take on faith, as there's no other reasonable way to arrive at it. (If there were, there'd be no need for a Bible to exist.)
Faith is a really awful way to deal with technology. All the faith in the world, applied to believing that your program works, isn't going to stop it from core dumping when you forget to initialise some pointer. All the praying in the world isn't going to resurrect your TCP link when you hose the routing table. The only thing that solves problems is plain old rational thought and engineering. The people who can't master these skills don't stay in high tech, because solving problems is most of what a techie does.
So if you're a practicing Christian, the deck is stacked against you. To master technology, you have to train yourself to reason effectively; to remain religious, you have to refrain from applying this reason to matters of faith. You have to build a firewall in your head beyond which untrammeled inquiry cannot pass.
This is a hard trick to master. Some people solve it by shrinking the firewall to the point that it has almost no effect on their real life. Others undergo a sort of multiple-personality split, where they think one way at work and a different way in church. And then there are those of us who take a good, hard look at faith, decide it's not getting us anywhere, and dump it.
Faith is never an asset in geekdom. It's kind of like backpacking in tennis shoes. You can get there, but it hurts more and takes longer, and the other backpackers are going to shoot you funny looks when you refuse to buy a good pair of hiking boots instead.
-Mars
Depends on the situation, naturally. :-)
:-) If I were writing (say) a RAID driver, I sure wouldn't want to worry about a memory manager kicking in and destroying my realtime video stream. Same for just about anything where speed is critical. But if I were writing a web browser, a word processor, a graphic editor - garbage collection would be a godsend. So I want a hybrid system where I can allocate and deallocate at will, or let the memory manager clean up for me, or perhaps both at once. And nothing says it all has to be done in one language.
I think that garbage collection is like many other easy-features. It usually makes life easier, but there are always going to be cases where it makes life impossible. The classic example of such an easy-feature is, of course, the concept of an HLL itself. I'd much rather spend my time working in C than assembler, but when trying to write a kernel, a fast blitter, certain drivers, and that sort of thing, there's really no choice - one must use assembly.
I think automatic garbage collection is a bit like that. Most of the time, it does make life easier - it's one less thing to worry about and one less thing to get wrong, leaving that much more time to focus on whatever it is that makes the program worthwhile. But there are, and will always be, situations in which you just can't get there from here without manual allocation and deallocation with no interference.
Which side am I on? Both, naturally.
-Mars
I find Linux geeks' bias towards operating systems with preemptive multitasking a little annoying. For some projects it's appropriate to use an operating system with preemptive multitasking (trivial GUI wrappers), and sometimes it's not (realtime IO). While linux geeks may be "amused" by the need to explicitly hand off control to other threads, they should understand that it's generally far more efficient.
Unfortunately, I think many Linux geeks don't have much experience with realtime IO programming to understand these trade-offs. Until they do, they should resist making judgements.
P.S. This is not to defend MacOS as an operating system...
Every TV show I watch is recorded and sent back to AT&T.
The company I work for knows when I come in and when I leave.
My bank knows where I go when I leave town.
The phone company knows who my friends are and where they live.
If I had a cellphone, like everyone else in this city seems to, the phone company would know where I was at all times.
If I used a cable-modem, they would know which websites I visited and when.
Privacy isn't dead?
-Mars
While you do this, and I do this, and perhaps even some of our friends do it, most people don't.
To most people, privacy beyond simple things like "not peeking in my curtains at night" is just not that important. They'd rather have the savings and the convenience. And "they" outnumber "us" to such a degree that "our" activities are basically lost in the noise. We have no effect on marketing and data collection at all.
How do I know this? Simple - if there were enough of us to make a difference, the marketers wouldn't be relying on it.
We can protect ourselves, but we can't protect the culture we live in. The culture we live in tomorrow is going to be irrevocably shaped by the presence a clicktrail through one's entire life. Yes, I can turn off cookies, fake up web identities, lie on surveys, and publicly mock advertisements. But that's not enough. For example: the Discovery Channel has six or eight splinter channels available only on digital cable. They are, in my opinion, the only channels worth owning a TV for. But here's the rub - the digital cable box sends a report on everything I do back to AT&T/TCI. They know what shows I watch, how late I stay up at night, probably even what ads cause me to change the channel. The only way I can keep them from knowing is to cancel my digital subscription and go back to analog, in which case I lose those channels. So my choice is this: submit to being monitored, or don't get the spiffy channels. And no amount of arguing or making up of false identities can change that.
How many more of those decisions will we have to make in the next twenty years?
The simple fact is that it doesn't matter whether we can come up with technical workarounds to tracking technology. Most people can't, and wouldn't care enough to try even if we were to show them how. And as far as the people who are doing the tracking are concerned, "most people" are all the people that matter.
-Mars
>Windows did not win because it was supperior,
>anymore than homosapiens are supperior to the
>dinosaurs
>
>Huh? I'd bet on the homospiens over the dinosaur
>any day of the week.
That depends a great deal on what you mean by "superior", now doesn't it?
-Mars
> It's just the editors using Slashdot as a personal homepage
Um, dude...
You seem to be under the impression that slashdot *is* something other than a personal homepage grown past all reasonable size.
It isn't. Chill out.
-Mars
If you'll pardon my pedantry for a moment -
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS AN "ATM MACHINE."
Nor is there an "automatic ATM teller machine", a "PIN number", a "PIN ID", a "CPU processor", "RAM memory", a "DSL line", or any other such redundancy (all but the first of which phrases I have actually heard in conversation).
Whew, got that out of my system for the day.
-Mars
These hypothetical skinheads can exercise their "rights to free speech" all they want; I'm under no obligation to spend time and money (in the form of bandwidth and disk space) helping propagate their drivel to the rest of the world. If I choose to stop forwarding their messages, there's nothing they can do about it.
A UDP does not silence anyone. It's merely an organized boycott. By organizing, responsible netadmins can simultaneously ignore a rogue and thus bring political pressure to bear. The rogue can keep talking, and anyone who wants can keep listening, but anyone uninterested in spam gets help avoiding it.
-Mars