Fair enough, it would have been nice if it had addressed them. The history though in addressing the privacy issue has been sensationalism so far.
I've actually got a gmail account and the ads are like the ads on their search, so separate you can forget they are there if you want, and thank GOD they don't jump around in your face.
Coolest is that they've got a set of keyboard shortcuts you can use. The old timers who love the CLI are going to love it.
My folks aren't interest in backing up to a CD (in what format / compatabile with what), installing a piece of software on every machine they want to use email from. Frankly, I'm not either.
They want a company they can trust, who will provide a nice clean email service with good space, and without tons of ads and menu bars and junk. That is google.
Volunteer at an old folks home and try to get them to login even to their yahoo email account. The logins and home page are so damn busy that for an older person it is a very real challenge to get to the page they need.
Ccheck out hotmail, you have to agree to four TOS, sign up for a passport account, check it every 30 days, pay $ for a tiny amount of space etc, they force you to accept members newsletter with product announcements etc etc... and a 140 million folks have accounts with them.
And you say no one would want Gmail. You are out to lunch. Google is offering a TON more space, a clean interface, from a company folks like.
Your emails are evaluated by a computer ALREADY as part of almost every single virus and spam filtering process on the market. Most of these processes include word by word scanning to develop effective spam filters.
Folks have raised a number of interesting privacy issues. However, I think the EFF has done a MUCH better job then many of the other groups who are literally out to lunch on this.
If you don't trust google with your email, you can always trust it to hotmail, who will do their level best to lock you into their service, cancel your account, including advertising tags in your messages etc etc.
Intel was the company with the existing market clout that tried to force Rambus and their IP down everyone's throats.
I realize that in business these days it is not normal to consider how much of a scum your business partners may or may not be.
But for long term business I think it is worth review. We have to ask, in the end is the world going to be a better place because Intel and Rambus tried lock up a standards process in patents.
Folks need a longer memory then they get from playing XBOX games. These companies have histories.
No question, they have a strong engineering history, so could probably nuke a fair variety of things, and could especially leverage their IP in the Java space, to the deteriment of everyone else in the space including folks using Java who had no clue they could be subject to IP issues.
The real risk is that Sun's stock has dropped from $60 to $4. A dying company risks lashing out every which way.
If they ever get really right for profit watch out for their patent plays. Despite the historic connections that some linux luminaries like to point out, I don't think they have enough of a culture to avoid becoming a bane on the world.
The comments of their CTO are ludicrous, and we should be careful to be sensitive to these types of signals.
Sun is the company that missed a great chance to open source Java to create a ubiquitous language, breaking a number of pretty high profile splashy promises along the way.
Very few vendors ship a TOTALLY plain kernel. I'm not sure why Suse makes such a big deal of theirs (if they even do ship a clean one, hard to beleive).
The power of the GPL is that you can never truly fork the way Unix was forked. If Suse wanted to be compatible with redhats kernel, they can easily cherry pick the changes necessary, and redistribute them themselves.
All very intresting coming from a company that had a propriatary installer. As far as I know RedHat has shipped everything open source for a very long time now.
AT&T spokesman Cruz says his company can block scam calls but would not reveal whether AT&T had ever blocked IP addresses, or for how long. He emphasized that such addresses are not tied to geography.
Wow, the AT&T folks are technically clueless it seems. Deteriming which country an ip is from is reasonably possible given the fact that IP blocks and other tools (traceroute, rdns) exist. Either they don't know what they are doing or they are in it for the money. Remember we are not talking specific geography, but country level location.
http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ for example.
Am I missing something. Does ni not have any IP blocks or providers or standard routes? When I ran a site it was pretty trivial to work out what country someone came from even if the block wasn't clear, have things changed?
Given that the standard was developed over a significant period of time by a company with a rediculous R&D budget, and forms the foundation of their future products, I'm not sure where you get the "hacked on five minutes before release" bit.
Mono is an implementation of the CLR, and mono's C# is an implementation of the standardized / MS C#.
For those who havn't gotten it, ivern hasn't really learned C# yet. Seriously dude, rather than flaming, take some time to learn it and then come back with the a more realistic set of gripes.
The developers of C# unfortunatly had the luxury of looking at Java and taking what they wanted, along with doing some other things differently. Java isn't open source, and MS had the sense to open source / standardize the basic bits of C#.
Why wouldn't offline planning help in the real world? The military is ALWAYS doing offline planing for their targeting etc. One would expect that they would take some time to map out the country/location/objective they were trying to get logistics too, etc etc...
Given that we have sat's in the air, it would be INSANE not to integrate this or arial imagary in the real world, even I have a map in my car that shows roads etc (offline planning).
The "loophole" that CMU is "exploiting" seems like something that should be encouraged. By the time these vehicles are real, I would expect that it will be even easier to flyover/map terrain.
Given that SCO has yet to prove anything at all in court, their current efforts are about legal extortion.
It is important to remember that extortion succeeds because it often makes good business sense to pay the fee, rather than fighting a huge fight at some risk against the person extorting the money.
This means a company might make what it perceives as a good "business decision" which involves paying the extortionists rather than fighting them. You see this with all these types of rackets (DDOS, old fashioned thugs on the street, kidnappers, SCO etc).
It is important to stop the payments to these guys. If no one paid kidnappers, they would stop finding it lucrative to kidnap. Paying SCO just funds their business model, just as paying a kidnapper funds the kidnappers (in some contries kidnappers dive the fancy cars and have full out well oiled operations based on the revanue they realize).
There should be a two prong attack on these SCO extortionsts.
One is to insure that their claims are shot down clearly in a court of law. This IBM is well suited to accomplish, with armies of lawyers who can slowly grind through the millions of pages of documents a $5 billion case can generate.
The second is to make extortion payments a bad business decision for the companies that make them. That is where the vast majority of users come in.
When a company partners with SCO, and SCO starts issuing their press releases, users MUST indicate to the company (EV1) that the partners they do business with say a lot about the company, and MOVE THEIR BUSINESS elsewhere.
It is as simple as that. These companies have often built an entire business on open source, and are now paying cash money to groups who are claiming the GPL is invalid and that the software is like a toy car.
Once folks are using Firebird/Thunderbird on Windows, and going, hey, this isn't so bad, they are going to be much more likely to switch what is underneath.
If evolution was available for Windows I'd run it in a heartbeat (even pay for the connector), and if enough time passed, and I found I was mostly using Open Source apps, that would make the pitch to switch to a linux OS much easier.
Asking people to rip out windows and make wholesale changes to their apps all at once tough to ask. Get the hooked on the open apps, then give them the open source OS.
What I don't understand is why they blew up their RHL line without having really throught through the structure of the Fedora project a bit better. I headed over their all excited, but ended up not liking the contribution model much.
As it is, it's still awkward to contribute to the distro, they may are may not be using these giant queues, etc etc. I actually think that the fact that RH engineers are still involved means it could have really rocked, but the at the moment I don't have the greatest of feelings about things.
It appears from a quick read that the guy behind this has patented about every form of limited traceability and other feature one could think of. If any of this proposal is patented it should be ruled out instantly.
If all the "trustees" co-operated, it seems information could leak. In todays age of FBI power, one must assume that all "trustees" are breakable.
I'm also a fan of simpler systems that are slightly more user understandable.
Slony-1 looks very interesting, I browsed the CVS doc description of it all (checked in 4 hours ago). Hadn't seen it before!
Not a lot of code yet but the document was very thoughtfully worked through. Be curious how quickly helper utilities could fail over to a slave given the configuration changes needed. Good stuff though, look forward to the evolution of the project. I think this may convince me to prototype the next app in pgsql. It's the load balancing portion of things that interests me the most by far, it is SO nice when you can scale somewhat horizontally.
If pgsql gets failover, some load balancing, and the backup aspects, I think that will carry most folks. PostgreSQL features plus the scalability this all brings is fantastic.
eRServer 1.2 looks like it has a somewhat more fleshed out feature set and ease of configuration (whew) as well, so development continues.
Do you know how well the auto vacuum stuff works? This was the "most annoying thing ever" with the earlier versions, you had to vacuum to stay sane and it was disruptive to a clean running setup.
For some applications with a chance of growth I've had two issues with Postgresql. One is that despite the fact that they have talked about being an "enterprise level" database for ages, we found that in any kind of swift moving transaction enviroment we had to VACUUM pretty regularly. How they expected folks to leave pgsql running over extended periods of time (months -> years) is beyond me. Looks like they may have solved it. It will be interesting to see if the systems can take a pounding and stay up 24/7 for a while without slowing to a crawl.
The other issue has been replication. With mysql this has saved our bacon more then once. Nead to do intensive analysis on live data and don't want to disturb active system? Set up a nice slave and query away.
Want basic fault tolerance? Set up a slave, you have a live mirror of the data.
Have lots of queries coming in (load balance the reads at least).
PostgreSQL now has some type of replication available from PostgreSQL Inc, but it looked to me like somewhat of a hodge podge of perl, triggers and who knows what else.
I think I'll try it out, and if I can get the same replication speed as I do with a mysql array I'd switch over, but first glance it didn't look like I would. Anyone compared the replication performance yet (and ease of setup, I was very impressed with mysql in this regard).
Fun to see another low number slashdot user sharing my feelings. Were people not around before the.com bubble?
The internet is not going to end if skyscrapers ad boxes go away, just as the music world won't end if the RIAA can't sell as many CD's.
Thank god however folks like cliff aren't in charge, or we'd all be locked into our chairs watching flash intro's to help preserve the internet (while killing the things that made it useful).
Trust a slashdot editor to expound their own (silly) views.
If people are willing to PAY money for a product that runs on THEIR computer, then it is FINE if users GET an on/off switch. Some people actually like on/off switches rather than POSIX regex libraries.
If the on/off is too clunky, and indeed breaks every image and link to other sites as the submitter claims, then people will get sick of it and turn it off. If it works as well as some of the banner and pop-up things folks pay for they will leave it on.
If we follow this system we don't have to submit to the judgment of a slashdot editor, or any other single person.
Valve spends years developing Half-Life 2. What seem at least like countless delays.
Finally, they demo it. After hearing the critics rave, Valve decides to DELAY the game again and REWRITE portions of it. They cite the release of a small portion of the source code, rather than any bugs or incompleteness in the game itself.
While some companies would keep or accelerate a release if they were worried about piracy, valve has deceided to take the opposite approach. Delay yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, it would have been nice if it had addressed them. The history though in addressing the privacy issue has been sensationalism so far.
I've actually got a gmail account and the ads are like the ads on their search, so separate you can forget they are there if you want, and thank GOD they don't jump around in your face.
Coolest is that they've got a set of keyboard shortcuts you can use. The old timers who love the CLI are going to love it.
Seeing at it's mothers day a perfect story.
My folks aren't interest in backing up to a CD (in what format / compatabile with what), installing a piece of software on every machine they want to use email from. Frankly, I'm not either.
They want a company they can trust, who will provide a nice clean email service with good space, and without tons of ads and menu bars and junk. That is google.
Volunteer at an old folks home and try to get them to login even to their yahoo email account. The logins and home page are so damn busy that for an older person it is a very real challenge to get to the page they need.
Ccheck out hotmail, you have to agree to four TOS, sign up for a passport account, check it every 30 days, pay $ for a tiny amount of space etc, they force you to accept members newsletter with product announcements etc etc... and a 140 million folks have accounts with them.
And you say no one would want Gmail. You are out to lunch. Google is offering a TON more space, a clean interface, from a company folks like.
They will clean up.
Your emails are evaluated by a computer ALREADY as part of almost every single virus and spam filtering process on the market. Most of these processes include word by word scanning to develop effective spam filters.
Folks have raised a number of interesting privacy issues. However, I think the EFF has done a MUCH better job then many of the other groups who are literally out to lunch on this.
If you don't trust google with your email, you can always trust it to hotmail, who will do their level best to lock you into their service, cancel your account, including advertising tags in your messages etc etc.
Intel was the company with the existing market clout that tried to force Rambus and their IP down everyone's throats.
I realize that in business these days it is not normal to consider how much of a scum your business partners may or may not be.
But for long term business I think it is worth review. We have to ask, in the end is the world going to be a better place because Intel and Rambus tried lock up a standards process in patents.
Folks need a longer memory then they get from playing XBOX games. These companies have histories.
Never saw a bottle either (San Francisco). After the super bowl went looking and didn't see anything. Forgot about it after that.
No question, they have a strong engineering history, so could probably nuke a fair variety of things, and could especially leverage their IP in the Java space, to the deteriment of everyone else in the space including folks using Java who had no clue they could be subject to IP issues.
The real risk is that Sun's stock has dropped from $60 to $4. A dying company risks lashing out every which way.
If they ever get really right for profit watch out for their patent plays. Despite the historic connections that some linux luminaries like to point out, I don't think they have enough of a culture to avoid becoming a bane on the world.
The comments of their CTO are ludicrous, and we should be careful to be sensitive to these types of signals.
Sun is the company that missed a great chance to open source Java to create a ubiquitous language, breaking a number of pretty high profile splashy promises along the way.
I'm hoping this won't turn into an I told you so.
Very few vendors ship a TOTALLY plain kernel. I'm not sure why Suse makes such a big deal of theirs (if they even do ship a clean one, hard to beleive).
The power of the GPL is that you can never truly fork the way Unix was forked. If Suse wanted to be compatible with redhats kernel, they can easily cherry pick the changes necessary, and redistribute them themselves.
All very intresting coming from a company that had a propriatary installer. As far as I know RedHat has shipped everything open source for a very long time now.
AT&T spokesman Cruz says his company can block scam calls but would not reveal whether AT&T had ever blocked IP addresses, or for how long. He emphasized that such addresses are not tied to geography.
Wow, the AT&T folks are technically clueless it seems. Deteriming which country an ip is from is reasonably possible given the fact that IP blocks and other tools (traceroute, rdns) exist. Either they don't know what they are doing or they are in it for the money. Remember we are not talking specific geography, but country level location.
http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ for example.
Am I missing something. Does ni not have any IP blocks or providers or standard routes? When I ran a site it was pretty trivial to work out what country someone came from even if the block wasn't clear, have things changed?
Given that the standard was developed over a significant period of time by a company with a rediculous R&D budget, and forms the foundation of their future products, I'm not sure where you get the "hacked on five minutes before release" bit.
Mono is an implementation of the CLR, and mono's C# is an implementation of the standardized / MS C#.
For those who havn't gotten it, ivern hasn't really learned C# yet. Seriously dude, rather than flaming, take some time to learn it and then come back with the a more realistic set of gripes.
The developers of C# unfortunatly had the luxury of looking at Java and taking what they wanted, along with doing some other things differently. Java isn't open source, and MS had the sense to open source / standardize the basic bits of C#.
Why wouldn't offline planning help in the real world? The military is ALWAYS doing offline planing for their targeting etc. One would expect that they would take some time to map out the country/location/objective they were trying to get logistics too, etc etc...
Given that we have sat's in the air, it would be INSANE not to integrate this or arial imagary in the real world, even I have a map in my car that shows roads etc (offline planning).
The "loophole" that CMU is "exploiting" seems like something that should be encouraged. By the time these vehicles are real, I would expect that it will be even easier to flyover/map terrain.
You realize that if history is any guide they are significantly INCREASED risk of litigation due to this contract?
EV1 is already complaining that SCO broke the confidentiality portion of the deal by announcing they had received "seven figures" for it.
I feel bad for EV1. They had developed a good reputation in the linux space through a lot of good hard work.
I don't know what possessed them to sign up for the SCO licensing and fund the destruction of a software product they built their business on.
Or sign an agreement with a company that has a history of suing its customers.
Strange times indeed.
Company A builds a business based on linux.
Company A then pays money to another company sueing to destroy business based on linux.
???
Given that SCO has yet to prove anything at all in court, their current efforts are about legal extortion.
It is important to remember that extortion succeeds because it often makes good business sense to pay the fee, rather than fighting a huge fight at some risk against the person extorting the money.
This means a company might make what it perceives as a good "business decision" which involves paying the extortionists rather than fighting them. You see this with all these types of rackets (DDOS, old fashioned thugs on the street, kidnappers, SCO etc).
It is important to stop the payments to these guys. If no one paid kidnappers, they would stop finding it lucrative to kidnap. Paying SCO just funds their business model, just as paying a kidnapper funds the kidnappers (in some contries kidnappers dive the fancy cars and have full out well oiled operations based on the revanue they realize).
There should be a two prong attack on these SCO extortionsts.
One is to insure that their claims are shot down clearly in a court of law. This IBM is well suited to accomplish, with armies of lawyers who can slowly grind through the millions of pages of documents a $5 billion case can generate.
The second is to make extortion payments a bad business decision for the companies that make them. That is where the vast majority of users come in.
When a company partners with SCO, and SCO starts issuing their press releases, users MUST indicate to the company (EV1) that the partners they do business with say a lot about the company, and MOVE THEIR BUSINESS elsewhere.
It is as simple as that. These companies have often built an entire business on open source, and are now paying cash money to groups who are claiming the GPL is invalid and that the software is like a toy car.
Let's see business move from EV1.
Give folks who actually admin linux boxes some credit.
Some of us like the ability to easily setup a dedicated server using a server at a colo or other high bandwidth facility...
Thanks epic for providing one rather than requiring us to purchase windows machines.
I agree totally.
Once folks are using Firebird/Thunderbird on Windows, and going, hey, this isn't so bad, they are going to be much more likely to switch what is underneath.
If evolution was available for Windows I'd run it in a heartbeat (even pay for the connector), and if enough time passed, and I found I was mostly using Open Source apps, that would make the pitch to switch to a linux OS much easier.
Asking people to rip out windows and make wholesale changes to their apps all at once tough to ask. Get the hooked on the open apps, then give them the open source OS.
What I don't understand is why they blew up their RHL line without having really throught through the structure of the Fedora project a bit better. I headed over their all excited, but ended up not liking the contribution model much.
As it is, it's still awkward to contribute to the distro, they may are may not be using these giant queues, etc etc. I actually think that the fact that RH engineers are still involved means it could have really rocked, but the at the moment I don't have the greatest of feelings about things.
It appears from a quick read that the guy behind this has patented about every form of limited traceability and other feature one could think of. If any of this proposal is patented it should be ruled out instantly.
If all the "trustees" co-operated, it seems information could leak. In todays age of FBI power, one must assume that all "trustees" are breakable.
I'm also a fan of simpler systems that are slightly more user understandable.
Yeah, it's the autovacumn deamon that I'm interested in trying out.
Slony-1 looks very interesting, I browsed the CVS doc description of it all (checked in 4 hours ago). Hadn't seen it before!
Not a lot of code yet but the document was very thoughtfully worked through. Be curious how quickly helper utilities could fail over to a slave given the configuration changes needed. Good stuff though, look forward to the evolution of the project. I think this may convince me to prototype the next app in pgsql. It's the load balancing portion of things that interests me the most by far, it is SO nice when you can scale somewhat horizontally.
If pgsql gets failover, some load balancing, and the backup aspects, I think that will carry most folks. PostgreSQL features plus the scalability this all brings is fantastic.
eRServer 1.2 looks like it has a somewhat more fleshed out feature set and ease of configuration (whew) as well, so development continues.
Do you know how well the auto vacuum stuff works? This was the "most annoying thing ever" with the earlier versions, you had to vacuum to stay sane and it was disruptive to a clean running setup.
For some applications with a chance of growth I've had two issues with Postgresql. One is that despite the fact that they have talked about being an "enterprise level" database for ages, we found that in any kind of swift moving transaction enviroment we had to VACUUM pretty regularly. How they expected folks to leave pgsql running over extended periods of time (months -> years) is beyond me. Looks like they may have solved it. It will be interesting to see if the systems can take a pounding and stay up 24/7 for a while without slowing to a crawl.
The other issue has been replication. With mysql this has saved our bacon more then once. Nead to do intensive analysis on live data and don't want to disturb active system? Set up a nice slave and query away.
Want basic fault tolerance? Set up a slave, you have a live mirror of the data.
Have lots of queries coming in (load balance the reads at least).
PostgreSQL now has some type of replication available from PostgreSQL Inc, but it looked to me like somewhat of a hodge podge of perl, triggers and who knows what else.
I think I'll try it out, and if I can get the same replication speed as I do with a mysql array I'd switch over, but first glance it didn't look like I would. Anyone compared the replication performance yet (and ease of setup, I was very impressed with mysql in this regard).
Fun to see another low number slashdot user sharing my feelings. Were people not around before the .com bubble?
The internet is not going to end if skyscrapers ad boxes go away, just as the music world won't end if the RIAA can't sell as many CD's.
Thank god however folks like cliff aren't in charge, or we'd all be locked into our chairs watching flash intro's to help preserve the internet (while killing the things that made it useful).
Trust a slashdot editor to expound their own (silly) views.
If people are willing to PAY money for a product that runs on THEIR computer, then it is FINE if users GET an on/off switch. Some people actually like on/off switches rather than POSIX regex libraries.
If the on/off is too clunky, and indeed breaks every image and link to other sites as the submitter claims, then people will get sick of it and turn it off. If it works as well as some of the banner and pop-up things folks pay for they will leave it on.
If we follow this system we don't have to submit to the judgment of a slashdot editor, or any other single person.
Valve spends years developing Half-Life 2. What seem at least like countless delays.
Finally, they demo it. After hearing the critics rave, Valve decides to DELAY the game again and REWRITE portions of it. They cite the release of a small portion of the source code, rather than any bugs or incompleteness in the game itself.
While some companies would keep or accelerate a release if they were worried about piracy, valve has deceided to take the opposite approach. Delay yet again.
And the story continues...