You really believe what you just wrote? Perhaps, if the computer is never networked, it will continue to function.
But as soon as new exploits are found and no patches are released, it will be exploited and will then not function just as it has for the last 5 years.
Agreed, but case law is still valid as precendent-setting. Being able to remove not only laws from the books, but court decisions as well, would be optimal.
You are definitely being pompous. Here's what we're hearing: "You should do what I tell you to do even though I'm not employing you! ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!"
You're absolutely right in the above: your replies have NOTHING to do with the article, and everything to do with your twisted world view. Open source developers write software to "scratch an itch", not to be altruistic (although releasing that scratched itch to the world helps reduce reinventing the fingernail, which is an altruistic event).
I think your confusion lies from the fact that you wrongly believe that altruism is (or should be) the only motivation for open source developers.
I read your original post, and got a warm fuzzy feeling when the developer suggested that interoperating with Microsoft was not that great a motivator, way back in 1997. This questioner was correct: why chase a moving target when we can write our own, stable, solid, non-moving target that we can build on? Obviously, you didn't understand that point. It had nothing to do with selfishness vs. selflessness; it had everything to do with efficiency. Why reinvent wheels? It's wasted effort. (Sometimes it's useful, like when teaching an advanced technique by showing the slower, less-advanced technique, but this is not one of those examples.)
In your original post you stated: "if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility." This is bullshit; what responsibility? There's only responsibility in your head; the ability to code does not give one a social responsibility, any more than the ability to breathe does.
And above, you state "we "give to charity" but we know what happens to _that_." Do we now? My experience has been that charitable organizations spend between 5 and 15% of their income on administration; 85-95% of the income goes directly to the people the charity purports to be helping.
Contrast this with over 50% of the tax dollars collected being spent in the simple act of collecting them, and I would say yes, I do know what happens to that: the money is well-spent and goes to those who deserve it. But that's obviously not your motivation, because you're trying to say "the dollars are wasted, c'mon everybody do what I tell you with your time!"
Sorry, buddy, that's not how the world works. You want people to spend their time a certain way, you either have to employ them or pass a law. And judging from your posting style, good luck with either.
Oh, and shock value to initiate a discussion sounds more like you were the oldest of more than three children: you had to learn to get your point across aggressively and destructively in order to get attention. It doesn't really help you make friends or influence people, but laughing at your wife's helpful comments shows that, again, this is probably not your motivation.
I hear this all the time, and it's just not true. It's not "just" distribution; distribution requires transport, oil prices are going up, therefore the cost of getting food to those in need is going up.
Now more than ever it's more difficult to feed everyone, because the cost of transport is at an all-time high.
Waitaminit, how many congressmen did you say were Jewish?
But seriously, we should amend the Constitution such that new laws need 90% agreement, and old laws can be removed with 50%+ agreement. We really need to clean up the legal code. I mean, for fuck's sake, our Supreme Court declared that a scientifically determined fruit was instead a vegetable, because that's "how it was used" (the real reason of course was to collect tarriffs and "protect our growers" but they should have just passed a law saying "now there are tarriffs on tomatoes" instead of declaring them to be something they're not). Now we're stuck with that stupid decision, gumming up our legal system. But I vent.
Yes, Mr. Buzzkill, and/. users can be 10x dafter than my coworkers, but I try to discuss cool work stuff here anyway.
Have you used VMware ESX Server? Please do so, then you can rejoin the conversation as a peer. Certainly, there are some problem domains for which ESX is not a viable solution, like FPS games. But for most business needs, it's a much better use of resources than having a single OS on that box, because now we can have multiple groups taking advantage of multiple OSes and apps, all from that one box. And ESX performs rings around VMware Workstation, and even VMware GSX Server (since that doesn't come with its own thin-layered Host OS; it installs on top of Windows (a Server-class OS only, so not on XP) or Linux).
I'm not so sure. I'm using VMware ESX at work, and its performance is pretty amazing. For those who don't know, it comes with its own OS (a stripped-down Linux), and thus provides very little overhead from the Host OS. The Guests run close to native speed.
If VMware can do it, then I'm sure Microsoft can. Sure, not everything is emulated in VMware; most of the instructions are run as they are. But the MS "interpreter" could save the compiled version, so it starts up slowly the first time only (or when it's updated, it starts up slowly once).
There have been efforts at writing OSes in various higher-level languages; a Perl effort comes to mind (years ago, I'm not talking about Parrot). I would venture to say that only now are computers becoming powerful enough to have a layer or two of virtualization, and still perform adequately for most uses. So if that effort gets started back up, it'll have a much better chance of succeeding today than it did 5 or so years ago.
And since those extra layers make such a negligble difference, I would counter your statement with itself: "Consider the cost/benefit ratio of the extra development effort." That is, the extra effort it would take to code the whole thing in assembler. If you can write in the highest-level language, then you stand a good chance of being able to do far more with each line of code. Compression of ideas, in a sense. So Microsoft can pay fewer developers to get the same end result; or pay more developers and get more done.
I think it makes sense. And I love Linux, and am not a shill or anything like that. I just think it's a good strategy for the game that they're playing (and I'm glad I'm not in that game).
Somewhat OT, but the 12th step is "become an AA zealot."
Seriously. I was visiting a friend who had the 12 steps in poster form. The first few seemed OK, then it got preachy about religion, and finally the last step was to move up into "management" of AA (not that they'll pay you; just that you volunteer your time to promote the organization).
So it's actually the opposite of the "profit" that others have responded with. For most senses of "profit", that is: financial, resource, and time; however, it is "profitable" in the sense that you might make new friends who (likely) won't be bad influences, you will have a sense of satisfaction from helping people, and other intangible benefits.
This started out mostly as a joke attempt, but ended up being somewhat serious and empathetic. Oh well. Enjoy!
Yes, write a letter to their CEO, cc your state's AG, the BBB, and the FTC.
And cc: Slashdot as well, so we know who not to do business with in the future.
In fact, I find it a little odd that the Slashdot Asker didn't list the company in question. It's frustrating to know there's an evil company and not be able to flood their 800 lines!;-)
And you're not even fucking listening because I said, immediately after that, "I don't have a great analogy because I'm on your side [...]"
Read the fucking post you're replying to before accusing the poster of saying something the poster most certainly absolutely was not fucking saying.
Other than that, I agree with every word you said. But it doesn't matter that we agree with each other; what matters is that they have the guns and will make us agree that 2+2=5 or our heads come loose.
In the absence of that, though, I'm going to keep right on downloading shows from the usual sources and I'm not going to feel bad about it. (Not with a $98 per month cable bill, that's for sure.)
Good luck with that. Seriously. Even if you have a $2,000/month mechanic bill, it doesn't give you the right to steal tires. Or something. I don't have a great analogy because I'm on your side, but those in control will drown out your logic with their laws, and your logic doesn't have 50 billion guns to back it up, so their laws will win.
Truly, sincerely, good luck with that. Me, I've given up on downloading. They don't want me to see/hear the time sinks that they're creating? Fine. I have better things to do with my time, and have been reading a lot lately. I find I enjoy life better, and I've also been keeping track of my vitals and my blood pressure tends to be higher when I watch TV/movies than reading, so reading is healthier for me, too.
Hmm, there's a neat one: a lawsuit against media producers because most media has strong negative health effects?
The second season of "24" started out with an advertisement-free episode.
It was sponsored by Ford, and had (if memory serves) a 5-minute commercial at the beginning and end.
That was 2 years ago. Today, they could do another advertisement-free episode to kick things off, but do product placement instead. This week's episode had Chloe mentioning how Cisco networks are 'self-repairing', for instance (not that this is a particularly intelligent way of promoting Cisco, but you get the idea).
I'm not delirious. And I am seriously proposing this add-on. And, based on your response where you presumed I was going to say "Whoosh" to whatever you said, yes, I thought perhaps that might have been trolling.
You don't need to carry your "gaming rig" everywhere. You're probably not strolling around when you're gaming. So, I don't see that it's a huge issue, for when you want to LAN party with games on a laptop, that if you want the speed of RAID-0, to have an external drive or two. (With a large enough main hard drive, you could create a second partition and RAID-0 it together with the external drive, thus only requiring a single external. But I'm not sure how Powerbooks do RAID since I've got experience with Windows/Linux, not Mac.)
I'm sorry you were so offended that you made me a Freak. In response, I've made you a Friend.
Um, no? I was being serious. You can't fit two drives in a laptop. We have external drives. It's not the best solution for gaming while on a plane, but... ok, ok, I'm being trolled.
I think if you click "Back" it sends some data to Google. If you refine your search, obviously Google hears it.
Me, I use it with Mozilla so I'm opening multiple tabs when I want to see the links; I almost never use the Back button, at all.
So my browsing habits may not be the most optimal, when it comes to Google's mining.
That said, Google may have agreements with other websites, so that when Google "refers" a user to the other website, the other website will notify Google. This would make sense if the other website were offered some sort of discount on advertising or something, to encourage them to participate.
Cheap ink-jet printers are not designed to do this task at a reasonable speed and cost.
Right, just as cheap IDE drives aren't designed to serve the Enterprise. It sounds like you need a RAIJ (Redundant Array of Ink Jets), and then you can complete your printout in minutes instead of hours.
Of course, you'll have to assemble the pages, but if your RAIJ has, say, 10 print nodes, and you're printing 800 pages, just send 80 sequential pages to each print node.
This is mostly tongue-in-cheek (the play being on RAID, and it's not an exact match because there's no provision for when a printer dies, so the "R" is somewhat incorrect, as in RAID-0). But now after having typed it, I can see writing a simple print spooler which will break jobs up into multiple pieces and send them off to separate printers.
It's probably still better to have a dedicated printing solution, but when that breaks you're down unless you bought two of them. With a RAIJ, if a print node breaks down you'd only be slowed down 1/N where N is the number of print nodes.
And I'm sure someone can come up with a nice collating algorithm, so that the user who hits "print" will end up with a stack of 800 pages to pick up at the of the job.
And, yes, what I'm describing is probably best done by a Kinkos or similar, as others have mentioned.
It was never intended to shield those who *DO* have control over the actions of the corporation.
Well, since that's the way it works now, we might as well have fun with it.
It only costs, what, $500 or so to incorporate (possibly as little as $200, depending on how you do it).
I propose a corporation which we (the shareholders) will direct to do evil things for profit. Every time we succeed in an evil deed, we will post it on our website, and send letters to all Congresspersons, stating that this is currently possible under the law, and would they like to change the law before we do it again?
I think your very existence, and the fact that you are able to continue to communicate, is the part that insults and enrages those who would be our masters.
But, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. (Hi EdJ!)
Slashdot Mirror
But as soon as new exploits are found and no patches are released, it will be exploited and will then not function just as it has for the last 5 years.
Agreed, but case law is still valid as precendent-setting. Being able to remove not only laws from the books, but court decisions as well, would be optimal.
You are definitely being pompous. Here's what we're hearing: "You should do what I tell you to do even though I'm not employing you! ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!"
You're absolutely right in the above: your replies have NOTHING to do with the article, and everything to do with your twisted world view. Open source developers write software to "scratch an itch", not to be altruistic (although releasing that scratched itch to the world helps reduce reinventing the fingernail, which is an altruistic event).
I think your confusion lies from the fact that you wrongly believe that altruism is (or should be) the only motivation for open source developers.
I read your original post, and got a warm fuzzy feeling when the developer suggested that interoperating with Microsoft was not that great a motivator, way back in 1997. This questioner was correct: why chase a moving target when we can write our own, stable, solid, non-moving target that we can build on? Obviously, you didn't understand that point. It had nothing to do with selfishness vs. selflessness; it had everything to do with efficiency. Why reinvent wheels? It's wasted effort. (Sometimes it's useful, like when teaching an advanced technique by showing the slower, less-advanced technique, but this is not one of those examples.)
In your original post you stated: "if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility." This is bullshit; what responsibility? There's only responsibility in your head; the ability to code does not give one a social responsibility, any more than the ability to breathe does.
And above, you state "we "give to charity" but we know what happens to _that_." Do we now? My experience has been that charitable organizations spend between 5 and 15% of their income on administration; 85-95% of the income goes directly to the people the charity purports to be helping.
Contrast this with over 50% of the tax dollars collected being spent in the simple act of collecting them, and I would say yes, I do know what happens to that: the money is well-spent and goes to those who deserve it. But that's obviously not your motivation, because you're trying to say "the dollars are wasted, c'mon everybody do what I tell you with your time!"
Sorry, buddy, that's not how the world works. You want people to spend their time a certain way, you either have to employ them or pass a law. And judging from your posting style, good luck with either.
Oh, and shock value to initiate a discussion sounds more like you were the oldest of more than three children: you had to learn to get your point across aggressively and destructively in order to get attention. It doesn't really help you make friends or influence people, but laughing at your wife's helpful comments shows that, again, this is probably not your motivation.
I hear this all the time, and it's just not true. It's not "just" distribution; distribution requires transport, oil prices are going up, therefore the cost of getting food to those in need is going up.
Now more than ever it's more difficult to feed everyone, because the cost of transport is at an all-time high.
Waitaminit, how many congressmen did you say were Jewish?
But seriously, we should amend the Constitution such that new laws need 90% agreement, and old laws can be removed with 50%+ agreement. We really need to clean up the legal code. I mean, for fuck's sake, our Supreme Court declared that a scientifically determined fruit was instead a vegetable, because that's "how it was used" (the real reason of course was to collect tarriffs and "protect our growers" but they should have just passed a law saying "now there are tarriffs on tomatoes" instead of declaring them to be something they're not). Now we're stuck with that stupid decision, gumming up our legal system. But I vent.
Have you used VMware ESX Server? Please do so, then you can rejoin the conversation as a peer. Certainly, there are some problem domains for which ESX is not a viable solution, like FPS games. But for most business needs, it's a much better use of resources than having a single OS on that box, because now we can have multiple groups taking advantage of multiple OSes and apps, all from that one box. And ESX performs rings around VMware Workstation, and even VMware GSX Server (since that doesn't come with its own thin-layered Host OS; it installs on top of Windows (a Server-class OS only, so not on XP) or Linux).
If VMware can do it, then I'm sure Microsoft can. Sure, not everything is emulated in VMware; most of the instructions are run as they are. But the MS "interpreter" could save the compiled version, so it starts up slowly the first time only (or when it's updated, it starts up slowly once).
There have been efforts at writing OSes in various higher-level languages; a Perl effort comes to mind (years ago, I'm not talking about Parrot). I would venture to say that only now are computers becoming powerful enough to have a layer or two of virtualization, and still perform adequately for most uses. So if that effort gets started back up, it'll have a much better chance of succeeding today than it did 5 or so years ago.
And since those extra layers make such a negligble difference, I would counter your statement with itself: "Consider the cost/benefit ratio of the extra development effort." That is, the extra effort it would take to code the whole thing in assembler. If you can write in the highest-level language, then you stand a good chance of being able to do far more with each line of code. Compression of ideas, in a sense. So Microsoft can pay fewer developers to get the same end result; or pay more developers and get more done.
I think it makes sense. And I love Linux, and am not a shill or anything like that. I just think it's a good strategy for the game that they're playing (and I'm glad I'm not in that game).
Seriously. I was visiting a friend who had the 12 steps in poster form. The first few seemed OK, then it got preachy about religion, and finally the last step was to move up into "management" of AA (not that they'll pay you; just that you volunteer your time to promote the organization).
So it's actually the opposite of the "profit" that others have responded with. For most senses of "profit", that is: financial, resource, and time; however, it is "profitable" in the sense that you might make new friends who (likely) won't be bad influences, you will have a sense of satisfaction from helping people, and other intangible benefits.
This started out mostly as a joke attempt, but ended up being somewhat serious and empathetic. Oh well. Enjoy!
What image verification?
And cc: Slashdot as well, so we know who not to do business with in the future.
In fact, I find it a little odd that the Slashdot Asker didn't list the company in question. It's frustrating to know there's an evil company and not be able to flood their 800 lines! ;-)
Read the fucking post you're replying to before accusing the poster of saying something the poster most certainly absolutely was not fucking saying.
Other than that, I agree with every word you said. But it doesn't matter that we agree with each other ; what matters is that they have the guns and will make us agree that 2+2=5 or our heads come loose.
Good luck with that. Seriously. Even if you have a $2,000/month mechanic bill, it doesn't give you the right to steal tires. Or something. I don't have a great analogy because I'm on your side, but those in control will drown out your logic with their laws, and your logic doesn't have 50 billion guns to back it up, so their laws will win.
Truly, sincerely, good luck with that. Me, I've given up on downloading. They don't want me to see/hear the time sinks that they're creating? Fine. I have better things to do with my time, and have been reading a lot lately. I find I enjoy life better, and I've also been keeping track of my vitals and my blood pressure tends to be higher when I watch TV/movies than reading, so reading is healthier for me, too.
Hmm, there's a neat one: a lawsuit against media producers because most media has strong negative health effects?
It was sponsored by Ford, and had (if memory serves) a 5-minute commercial at the beginning and end.
That was 2 years ago. Today, they could do another advertisement-free episode to kick things off, but do product placement instead. This week's episode had Chloe mentioning how Cisco networks are 'self-repairing', for instance (not that this is a particularly intelligent way of promoting Cisco, but you get the idea).
"Hey bud-dy, how can-I-get-this car ... out - of - se-cond - gear?!?!"
You don't need to carry your "gaming rig" everywhere. You're probably not strolling around when you're gaming. So, I don't see that it's a huge issue, for when you want to LAN party with games on a laptop, that if you want the speed of RAID-0, to have an external drive or two. (With a large enough main hard drive, you could create a second partition and RAID-0 it together with the external drive, thus only requiring a single external. But I'm not sure how Powerbooks do RAID since I've got experience with Windows/Linux, not Mac.)
I'm sorry you were so offended that you made me a Freak. In response, I've made you a Friend.
Um, no? I was being serious. You can't fit two drives in a laptop. We have external drives. It's not the best solution for gaming while on a plane, but ... ok, ok, I'm being trolled.
Well, someone did throw a grenade at Bush in Georgia (Russia) recently... See here.
It fell to the ground unexploded, though.
And at Slashdot, being careless will only lead to humor. "I take the bus you insensitive clod!"
Me, I use it with Mozilla so I'm opening multiple tabs when I want to see the links; I almost never use the Back button, at all.
So my browsing habits may not be the most optimal, when it comes to Google's mining.
That said, Google may have agreements with other websites, so that when Google "refers" a user to the other website, the other website will notify Google. This would make sense if the other website were offered some sort of discount on advertising or something, to encourage them to participate.
Sure it is! Just add USB/FireWire drives.
"...and when they came for the space-smokers, there was nobody to speak up for me."
Magneto picks up a library and throws it at RIM.
Right, just as cheap IDE drives aren't designed to serve the Enterprise. It sounds like you need a RAIJ (Redundant Array of Ink Jets), and then you can complete your printout in minutes instead of hours.
Of course, you'll have to assemble the pages, but if your RAIJ has, say, 10 print nodes, and you're printing 800 pages, just send 80 sequential pages to each print node.
This is mostly tongue-in-cheek (the play being on RAID, and it's not an exact match because there's no provision for when a printer dies, so the "R" is somewhat incorrect, as in RAID-0). But now after having typed it, I can see writing a simple print spooler which will break jobs up into multiple pieces and send them off to separate printers.
It's probably still better to have a dedicated printing solution, but when that breaks you're down unless you bought two of them. With a RAIJ, if a print node breaks down you'd only be slowed down 1/N where N is the number of print nodes.
And I'm sure someone can come up with a nice collating algorithm, so that the user who hits "print" will end up with a stack of 800 pages to pick up at the of the job.
And, yes, what I'm describing is probably best done by a Kinkos or similar, as others have mentioned.
Well, since that's the way it works now, we might as well have fun with it.
It only costs, what, $500 or so to incorporate (possibly as little as $200, depending on how you do it).
I propose a corporation which we (the shareholders) will direct to do evil things for profit. Every time we succeed in an evil deed, we will post it on our website, and send letters to all Congresspersons, stating that this is currently possible under the law, and would they like to change the law before we do it again?
I'm dead serious.
But, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. (Hi EdJ!)