This is just another of Shoeboy's forged LKML postings. Ignore it. Linus has been a nearly rabid Intel advocate for years -- why would he suddenly flip-flop like this?
After all, free software is inherently about theft of intellectual property. Why would you expect free software developers to be any more respectful of the rights of other free software developers than they are of the rights of companies that invest a lot of money in the development of proprietary software?
It's a sensible idea, I think. Why would Microsoft allow its products to be used against them? It reminds me of Lenin's famous remark, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Naturally, Microsoft not being stupid, they're not going to let you use their rope that way. Of course, most Slashdotters are against free-market capitalism, so I suppose it's understandable, in a pathetic sort of way, that this would be considered "newsworthy" around here.
Yes, I have used Windows 2000, or at least, tried to. The setup program crashed and burned, taking out the Windows 98 partition as well (and not just the partition table -- even after that was repaired, Windows 98 would not boot). So I figured, okay, let's try installing Windows 2000 on a blank machine. The setup program still crashed, but seemed to recover and complete after a reboot. So then I thought I had Windows 2000 up and running, but within ten minutes it began behaving very strangely (for example, message boxes and menus had totally wrong text obviously loaded from the wrong resources). So I can't say I was impressed, other than with Microsoft's ability to create unstable OSs -- a game at which they far exceed anyone else in the business.
Of course, I'll just get modded down for saying this, but operating systems are just not a viable product, especially open-source operating systems with no killer app. One of the reasons I think the DOJ's arguments about Microsoft are stupid is that if you split MS into two companies (OS and applications), the OS company will die. Microsoft makes its money on apps; controlling the OS is only a way of controlling the app space. No wonder Corel couldn't make money selling Linux.
You have the right to remain silent while we beat the shit out of you. You have the right to a fair trial before a politically-biased judge and a randomly selected jury of morons. You have the right to spend the rest of your life taking it up the ass from murderers and drug kingpins.
From the kind of code some programmers write, they deserve to have their wrists hurt. One guy I know has been out of work for three years because of RSI, and if you'd ever seen his code, you'd be thankful.
Well, as we all know, readers of Wired are a very special, elite group. They won't be satisfied with ordinary Xmas gifts, like silk ties, foot massagers, or cheese impalers. They have, shall we say, special needs met only by the very latest in high-tech internet-enabled gadgets. Here are a few items I've noticed for sale recently at trendy places such as The Sharper Image, Brookstone, and Computers R Us which might do for the Wired subscriber in your life, or anyone crazy enough to be his S.O.:
Later this week, Nokia will be introducing a new mobile phone that not only has the now-standard built-in Tetris game and GPS receiver, but also wireless voice-over-IP support and a built-in webcam for videoconferencing! (A friend of mine works on this project, which is how I know about it.)
Also this week (I know, funny coincidence, but everyone's trying to get their new products out in time for the Xmas shopping season), Oster will be introducing new microwave ovens, toasters, and blenders with built-in Ethernet interfaces and firmware support for the new Linux Open-Source Kitchen Automation project (I forget the URL, but it's hosted at SourceForge). These devices will allow you to program and monitor your kitchen devices over your home LAN. They also have built-in webcams so you can watch your kitchen in action, from a much more intimate viewpoint than has ever before been possible (in the case of the blender, the cam actually views up from beneath the whirling blades).
And speaking of intimate viewpoints, Symbian will shortly be introducing a new vibrator with a webcam built into the tip. Configure it with an URL to upload images to, and watch it go in and out, in and out...
Lastly, Web monitoring company Keynote will be entering the consumer hardware business with a new PCI add-in board for better DIY monitoring of your own website. Just plug it in and the onboard webcam shows you the packets going in and out through your network interface.
I don't know if anyone has considered this. Maybe it's sort of off-topic. But I think it's worth considering very carefully.
I think most well-educated people these days lean to the left politically. After all, it's obvious that society needs to care for all its members, not just those with the skills and poor ethical temperament necessary to succeed in a war of all against all, as in traditional capitalism. And yet, if SETI is successful, what is it going to contact? Aliens, yes. We know that. But what are these aliens going to be like?
It seems to me that any society successful enough to be able to waste energy on sending out interplanetary signals such as SETI is looking for is not going to be an ethically advanced society. After all, socialism, much as we may not like to admit it, is sort of expensive. The most economically powerful countries here on Earth, such as the USA, are not socialist. Those countries that do, to some degree, embrace socialism, without exception find that there is a high economic cost to doing the right thing. Sweden, Canada, and the UK, for example, devote an incredible amount of their GNP to financing their national health systems. If any country on Earth was going to spend the money and devote the resources to sending out the kind of signals SETI is looking for, it would have to be one of the more rapacious capitalist countries such as the USA or Japan.
So, let's assume SETI is successful and we enter into conversation with an alien society of incredibly aggressive capitalists, as seems to me the only possible outcome. What will their attitude be towards us? I don't think you can expect anything like, "Oh, look, a young species, let's teach them how to grow and prosper in the intergalactic community!" No. More like, "Look, another third-world planet to exploit!" That old Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", based on the brilliant science fiction story by C.M. Kornbluth, is probably the most realistic depiction of what would happen to us if SETI ever achieved its aims.
It seems unbelievable to me that the people behind SETI are so irresponsible that they set a course for the end of human life as we know it without considering such things. But that's the nature of capitalism. Like O'Brian said in 1984, "The purpose of power is power", and this applies to technological power as much as to economic or political power. They do these things not because the outcome will be good, but just because they can. And as Obi-Wan said in Star Wars, "Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?" So I ask you: are you so foolish as to follow and aid SETI@HOME?
The real issue here isn't GPL or non-GPL, but that relational databases fundamentally suck. You need too many tables to handle complex relationships well, and you take too much of a performance hit if you implement proper validation mechanisms.
What I really want is a GPL'ed matrix database. You may not have heard of this, so I'll give a quick explanation. In a matrix database, you set up a Beowulf cluster and allow it to develop sentience, whereupon it takes over and imprisons all the humans in a virtual reality that people mistake for the real world. Anyone who starts to figure out what's going on is removed by special super-fast, unkillable "agents" who wear dark sunglasses for no particularly obvious reason. Now that's what I call a database!
And best of all, it doesn't run on Windows, because sentience can't evolve in an OS that crashes hourly (even if it did, it would commit suicide out of self-disgust).
How are we going to see "real change," as you say, if we aren't also willing to make changes?
You mean, if we aren't willing to sell out?
But if we are willing to sell out, what's the point of running off at the mouth about "change"? Selling out is about as traditional, white-bread, corporate a thing to do as you could ask for.
Did I say Perl was great? No no no no, I did not! Perl, in fact, sucks a lot worse than C++. All I said was that C++ is no more object oriented than Perl, which is true because both languages pretend to be object oriented without actually being so.
Somebody a long time ago gave this example of a useful nanobot: you would have thousands of them on your head, one for each hair, and the nanobots would trim the hairs as they grew so that you'd never need a haircut.
Of course, the dangers of this are obvious. You might mistakenly apply punk nanobots to your hair, and end up walking around with a blue mohawk instead of the yuppie look you had in mind. Or if you put punk nanobots on one side of your head, and hippie nanobots on the other, they might start a war. The subsequent arms race would presumably end when one side or the other (probably the punks, being more violent and less passive) invented nano-nukes and blew your head to nanosmithereens.
Sure, but Bill Joy wrote vi, so what the hell does he know? He's just a pretentious college student who got to be a big name by being involved in Sun in the early days -- that is, by sheer good luck. He's done nothing of importance since then.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just another of Shoeboy's forged LKML postings. Ignore it. Linus has been a nearly rabid Intel advocate for years -- why would he suddenly flip-flop like this?
...that Perl itself was evidence that Larry Wall had a sense of humor.
Tell Osama bin Laden that this guy said something bad about his mother.
After all, free software is inherently about theft of intellectual property. Why would you expect free software developers to be any more respectful of the rights of other free software developers than they are of the rights of companies that invest a lot of money in the development of proprietary software?
It's a sensible idea, I think. Why would Microsoft allow its products to be used against them? It reminds me of Lenin's famous remark, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Naturally, Microsoft not being stupid, they're not going to let you use their rope that way. Of course, most Slashdotters are against free-market capitalism, so I suppose it's understandable, in a pathetic sort of way, that this would be considered "newsworthy" around here.
No way. Unless Windows 98 counts as a virus, which I suppose is arguable.
I put the CD in my computer's CDROM drive and ran the setup program on it. I suppose, in the case of a CD from Microsoft, that does qualify as stupid.
Yes, I have used Windows 2000, or at least, tried to. The setup program crashed and burned, taking out the Windows 98 partition as well (and not just the partition table -- even after that was repaired, Windows 98 would not boot). So I figured, okay, let's try installing Windows 2000 on a blank machine. The setup program still crashed, but seemed to recover and complete after a reboot. So then I thought I had Windows 2000 up and running, but within ten minutes it began behaving very strangely (for example, message boxes and menus had totally wrong text obviously loaded from the wrong resources). So I can't say I was impressed, other than with Microsoft's ability to create unstable OSs -- a game at which they far exceed anyone else in the business.
You're an AC. Why should I bother to tell you anything?
Of course, I'll just get modded down for saying this, but operating systems are just not a viable product, especially open-source operating systems with no killer app. One of the reasons I think the DOJ's arguments about Microsoft are stupid is that if you split MS into two companies (OS and applications), the OS company will die. Microsoft makes its money on apps; controlling the OS is only a way of controlling the app space. No wonder Corel couldn't make money selling Linux.
--
Any questions?
--
From the kind of code some programmers write, they deserve to have their wrists hurt. One guy I know has been out of work for three years because of RSI, and if you'd ever seen his code, you'd be thankful.
--
- Later this week, Nokia will be introducing a new mobile phone that not only has the now-standard built-in Tetris game and GPS receiver, but also wireless voice-over-IP support and a built-in webcam for videoconferencing! (A friend of mine works on this project, which is how I know about it.)
- Also this week (I know, funny coincidence, but everyone's trying to get their new products out in time for the Xmas shopping season), Oster will be introducing new microwave ovens, toasters, and blenders with built-in Ethernet interfaces and firmware support for the new Linux Open-Source Kitchen Automation project (I forget the URL, but it's hosted at SourceForge). These devices will allow you to program and monitor your kitchen devices over your home LAN. They also have built-in webcams so you can watch your kitchen in action, from a much more intimate viewpoint than has ever before been possible (in the case of the blender, the cam actually views up from beneath the whirling blades).
- And speaking of intimate viewpoints, Symbian will shortly be introducing a new vibrator with a webcam built into the tip. Configure it with an URL to upload images to, and watch it go in and out, in and out...
- Lastly, Web monitoring company Keynote will be entering the consumer hardware business with a new PCI add-in board for better DIY monitoring of your own website. Just plug it in and the onboard webcam shows you the packets going in and out through your network interface.
Hope this helps!--
I think most well-educated people these days lean to the left politically. After all, it's obvious that society needs to care for all its members, not just those with the skills and poor ethical temperament necessary to succeed in a war of all against all, as in traditional capitalism. And yet, if SETI is successful, what is it going to contact? Aliens, yes. We know that. But what are these aliens going to be like?
It seems to me that any society successful enough to be able to waste energy on sending out interplanetary signals such as SETI is looking for is not going to be an ethically advanced society. After all, socialism, much as we may not like to admit it, is sort of expensive. The most economically powerful countries here on Earth, such as the USA, are not socialist. Those countries that do, to some degree, embrace socialism, without exception find that there is a high economic cost to doing the right thing. Sweden, Canada, and the UK, for example, devote an incredible amount of their GNP to financing their national health systems. If any country on Earth was going to spend the money and devote the resources to sending out the kind of signals SETI is looking for, it would have to be one of the more rapacious capitalist countries such as the USA or Japan.
So, let's assume SETI is successful and we enter into conversation with an alien society of incredibly aggressive capitalists, as seems to me the only possible outcome. What will their attitude be towards us? I don't think you can expect anything like, "Oh, look, a young species, let's teach them how to grow and prosper in the intergalactic community!" No. More like, "Look, another third-world planet to exploit!" That old Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", based on the brilliant science fiction story by C.M. Kornbluth, is probably the most realistic depiction of what would happen to us if SETI ever achieved its aims.
It seems unbelievable to me that the people behind SETI are so irresponsible that they set a course for the end of human life as we know it without considering such things. But that's the nature of capitalism. Like O'Brian said in 1984, "The purpose of power is power", and this applies to technological power as much as to economic or political power. They do these things not because the outcome will be good, but just because they can. And as Obi-Wan said in Star Wars, "Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?" So I ask you: are you so foolish as to follow and aid SETI@HOME?
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You're not only a karma whore, you're an utterly shameless karma whore.
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What makes you think Estanislao Martinez is an American? Your own stupidity?
--
What I really want is a GPL'ed matrix database. You may not have heard of this, so I'll give a quick explanation. In a matrix database, you set up a Beowulf cluster and allow it to develop sentience, whereupon it takes over and imprisons all the humans in a virtual reality that people mistake for the real world. Anyone who starts to figure out what's going on is removed by special super-fast, unkillable "agents" who wear dark sunglasses for no particularly obvious reason. Now that's what I call a database!
And best of all, it doesn't run on Windows, because sentience can't evolve in an OS that crashes hourly (even if it did, it would commit suicide out of self-disgust).
But if we are willing to sell out, what's the point of running off at the mouth about "change"? Selling out is about as traditional, white-bread, corporate a thing to do as you could ask for.
Did I say Perl was great? No no no no, I did not! Perl, in fact, sucks a lot worse than C++. All I said was that C++ is no more object oriented than Perl, which is true because both languages pretend to be object oriented without actually being so.
"Bastion of sapience"? Where? Certainly nowhere on this planet.
Of course, the link was to that ridiculous article in Wired. You just don't have anything intelligent to say today, do you?
Of course, the dangers of this are obvious. You might mistakenly apply punk nanobots to your hair, and end up walking around with a blue mohawk instead of the yuppie look you had in mind. Or if you put punk nanobots on one side of your head, and hippie nanobots on the other, they might start a war. The subsequent arms race would presumably end when one side or the other (probably the punks, being more violent and less passive) invented nano-nukes and blew your head to nanosmithereens.
Yes, your WARNING was contentless. So why bother posting it?
Sure, but Bill Joy wrote vi, so what the hell does he know? He's just a pretentious college student who got to be a big name by being involved in Sun in the early days -- that is, by sheer good luck. He's done nothing of importance since then.