daveo, use your threshold, it will allow you to ignore "First Posts" and similiar annoying content. After all, that is what it's for. I usually set mine to 1, but on occasion I like to see what all the fuss is about and will set it lower.
OK-I can see your point about over-seas/outer country conflicts with this law-but to get back on track, this law is apparently only within states in the US-and like I said before, if it was against the law to post certain opinions on a usenet server in Moronia, then I believe it would be the admins responsibility to moderate what is going on-In the US, these "deformation of character" lawsuits have just begun with online content, therefore it has not gotten out of hand-and we have freedom of speech (somewhat). An admin of a usenet server would not have to keep strict moderation on a list here in the US (yet).
I beleive that this is an excellent law. If you went on a crime spree across the United States, and ended up in California-you will be sent back to each state and tried for those crimes. It does not matter where you end up-you 'physically' committed the crime elsewhere. There is no difference here-the data is 'physically' on the server in that state. It does not matter where you are now-you had to be on that server, in that state somehow-whether it was by FTP, Telnet, etc.. And that is when and where the crime was committed.
As for your Swizerland scenario-the same would apply, except past examples have shown us that you would probably hold the owner of the usenet server accountable, and not the person who actually posted it (I'm not agreeing with this)-but yes, if the crime was commited on a server in Swizerland, I think that you should be tried under Swiss jurisdiction. BUT, I also think that it could go one way or the other-they had a decision, the state that the person was in at the time the crime was committed, or the actual state that the crime was committed in-they made a decision and either one would probably have the same effect. It could be worse, you could be tried for the same crime twice under two juridictions-but they took care of that a long time ago;)
I think the project looks great, and it should be a lot of fun for all of us. Lately everything has been monopoly this, sue him for that, they said this... Now here's something to let off a little steam. And yeah, while the slogan needs a little work, the site looks great and they seem to have everything organized and in place. It will be interesting to see how the games turns out,and even more interesting to play it.
Of course, Microsoft and AOL can do whatever they want, it's a free country. But I have to ask myself it this is legitimately for knowledge we are better off knowing, or market analysis. Just the fact that AOL is teaming up with Microsoft on this deal is suspicious by itself. I really doubt if the results of the study will ever be fully released to the public, but unfortunately the article is lacking in details on that area...
Yeah, there are a lot of CEO's on the board. But some of them do have credibility: Ransom Love and Larry Augustin to name a couple. With the others, I agree with you that we can't be certain exactly what their motives are. But you hope that since they have Torvalds and Hall, they will be cautious about what they say and how they say it. What sounds good to corporate ears could enrage us "Little People (speaking humorously)". But that's a whole other problem and discussion within itself.
"We" meaning: Supposedly we have an Open Source Community. Whether you like it or not-you are part of it as well. If you call someplace "Your home town", it's not neccessarily yours-just like when leaders within our community step up to bat, "WE" now have a voice within the commercial community.
>In addition, the forum will provide a central voice for the open source community
You may be right, they do state in the article that they are concerned with commercial aspects, but not specifically. And the above statement would mean not specifically Linux either.
I also had problems understanding exactly what they are trying to do here... If you go to the fact sheet it just lists the names of the advisory council members (again). Sure, they have a nice mixture of companies and influences, but most of the members are CEO's. I guess we just have to have faith in the members that we know we can trust, Torvalds, Hall, etc.. that they will keep this thing on the right track.
But if he had-there may not be as much concern about the authenticity of his posting on the GNOME mailing list.
>Why 20K? Because they are absolutely sure that people will donate that much
Sounds reasonable, but his offer is not very clear-are they offering a position at FSF or just a $20K lump for this one manual? I would assume they are offering a position. RMS does mention that he has room for an additional author. For them to just have people submit their work at random would mean a full time job for themselves... But I have a pretty good idea that they're smarter than that.
There are some flaky details concerning this as well... First of all, I don't understand why RMS did not use PGP or some similiar form of verification when making an announcement of such magnitude, and on a mailing list of all places. Next, why should FSF crank out $20K for documentation in the first place? I am very outclassed here when it comes to the discussion of Open Source, but the way I am viewing this is that FSF wants the rights to the first (and possibly only)GNOME programming manual, but why would they do this? They have their own authors and surely enough talent to do this without posting it up like some sort of contest. I guess the only way we'll really know is to ask RMS himself. Has anyone done/attempted this yet?
But it really is an exploit, actually when I hear exploit lately, I think more along the lines of teardrop or land. I also think that the coporate news people (ZD, CNET, etc..) have it backwards as well (besides the hacker/cracker miswordings)because if some group of kids bring down a webserver using a synflood it automatically means it has been "Hacked(Cracked)". Exploits are simply something that EXPLIOTS (sorry to be redundant) a bug or error in a piece of code.
It was a movie dude, get over it... If you had paid attention, you would have caught the fact that the reason they were using humans for batteries was because they RAN OUT of natural fuels, and without the sun they could not harness solar power either. (and no-I've only seen it once) You like JM but you don't like the Matrix? "Plastic Boy" isn't exactly a favorite actor of mine, but I somehow manage to choke down his flat personality, because I did enjoy The Matrix.
My opinion is that the movie was over-anticipated, way too much hype. However, it was a great movie, and the annoying things like Jar Jar just make it that much better. Mark Hammil annoys the hell out of me-but I will end up watching the original trilogy over and over, just like I always do. And for everyone who didn't like TPM-guess what? Not everyone liked New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and since Return of the Jedi is the only one I am old enough to remember seeing in a theater-I know for a fact that there was plenty of bitching about that one (damn Ewoks!) And as far as the complaining about all the hype going on outside of the theater-I seem to remember seeing nothing but Ewoks for about two years after ROTJ-I can even remember getting up on Saturday mornings and watching the cartoon.
I'm sure that we would have had just as much nit-picking back then as we do now-unfortunately the most powerful PC was a Commodore 64-so there were no inside scoops (and gossip), no Quicktime video clips, no online discussions-Lucas just did it, and everyone left him alone-and we are all thankful of it now.
So if the rumor is true-it won't really matter how we feel about it right now. Lucas will do what he thinks is best, and fifteen years from now it will become an obession for OUR children....
That could be true, but I have an idea that they did not set up SMP properly, or have it running at all. Even if I felt that NT could beat the Linux configuration they had (set up properly)-there is no way it would beat it by such huge standings. If NT was utilizing all four processors, and Linux only 2 this would be feasible. Now all they need to do is have a benchmark with a constant load, just to see who goes down first;-)-by the way, I didn't see any mention of how many times the NT server crashed when it reached it's peak performance all those times, did you?
I agree, while I like a good joke-there is just way to much tension in that area right now to be doing something like that. I'm going to choose to be good natured about it-but I definately think they need to heed to your warning. They should have at least let Rob know about it ahead of time-
Well looks like User Friendly pulled a good one today. Good one guys-and don't blame/. for not knowing, we were all fooled. At least I got out one good rant before I found out:
This mornings closing of Segfault, User Friendly and Be Dope was announced to me today from an article by JonKatz posted on Slashdot . It definitely explains the realism that goes into what seems like some"insignificant" changes. What I want to know is-where are all of the new Open Source "heros" when you need them? I don't see IBM, Dell, Novell nor Redhat running to anyone's rescue. These are the BIG companies that were supposed to launch Open Source into the next millenium, right? That is where the insignificant part comes in now. Why should they care if a couple of humor sites loose face?-because it's a part of our culture, that's why. If at first it seemed like all of the great things going on with Open Source were too good to be true-it's because they were. We can make our own conclusions on operating systems and software, but it's out of our hands now. The Open Source culture is being forced to change, drastically. Don't think they don't know what they are doing either-these are companies that have been around and back again, and if you ever ONCE thought that it had to do with anything other than money, you are wrong. The Open Source culture has always been one made up of different opinions, and sometimes those opinions are expressed to the public in the form of humor-actually, most of the time. That is Open Source's biggest downfall in the business community, the fact that like the software, we are open about everything. Don't get me wrong, I don't like this at all, but we did ask for it. We placed ourselves right into their hands thinking that things could only get better now that we have "corporate backing". In my opinion, this is a case of prevention by example, people are going to start to think before they post-hopefully a lesson learned. I'm sure Segfault, Be Dope and User Friendly did not have this on their minds, I am just trying to point out the fact that this is not the end. And as Eric Raymond recently pointed out, the last thing we need to do right now is start acting childish about it and sending out flames to everyone.
I don't really remember what section I read it in-but I believe Rob was talking about randomizing the first few posts-very good idea-make the first 5-10 posts randomized, that way you won't get any IFPO's. I think it may have been the/. FAQ that was talking about that...
I have also had personal experiences with NT, none have been good so far. I reboot several times a day on my NT Workstation (at work of course, I couldn't imagine having to put up with it at home)-as a matter of fact, the MS Proxy service causes my PC to lock up every time I try to read Slashdot (but serves me right for goofing off at work),/. is not the only one however-it locks up on other sites as well-that's another story though. One thing about Linux is the fact that it is NOT taking the path that Microsoft has taken-it is where it is today because of that fact. If Linux had a "roadmap" and confirmed everything twice before it actually did it (without an option NOT to, I might add) and gave your the configuration for your hardware that it thought was appropriate-we might as well call it Linux NT. That's the whole point-it does what YOU tell it to do, it is 100% user configurable, and you have every option in the world at your fingertips. I have experienced NT and Linux both on a 400+ user network-guess which outperformed? (expecially print services)-By the way-I don't know which distribution you installed, but I have never installed Linux without a graphical menu interface, without any type of help file available for each option. There are always updated video, sound, nic, etc.. drivers available on the web-did you happen to even look before you made your judgement? I will have to admit-a server configuration can be much more complicated than a workstation/home config, but I believe it is well worth it. I'm glad that the only thing that article has done is spark some laughter and piss a few people off. Looks like the desperate attempt of a sore loser to me.
>if the OpenGL and DirectX driver authors decide to write KNI-optimized drivers
That's the problem though, when MMX first came out it was the same old thing-it was going to be real useful whenever the authors decide to use it-Now they are going to KNI-and again, we will have to wait and see if our money will be well spent. Although this time around I think it is slightly different than MMX in the way that people have their eyes open, and hopefully realize that it will be some time before there is software available to use KNI to it's max potential. Most people don't realize that KNI and MMX won't enhance their current apps.
A lot of that coding is well over my head-But one thing I do agree with is that MMX is a lot of hype, There is only one game I can think of that you can tell a difference between MMX and non and that is Rainbow 6-if you can ever get it to work in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
daveo, use your threshold, it will allow you to ignore "First Posts" and similiar annoying content. After all, that is what it's for. I usually set mine to 1, but on occasion I like to see what all the fuss is about and will set it lower.
OK-I can see your point about over-seas/outer country conflicts with this law-but to get back on track, this law is apparently only within states in the US-and like I said before, if it was against the law to post certain opinions on a usenet server in Moronia, then I believe it would be the admins responsibility to moderate what is going on-In the US, these "deformation of character" lawsuits have just begun with online content, therefore it has not gotten out of hand-and we have freedom of speech (somewhat). An admin of a usenet server would not have to keep strict moderation on a list here in the US (yet).
I beleive that this is an excellent law. If you went on a crime spree across the United States, and ended up in California-you will be sent back to each state and tried for those crimes. It does not matter where you end up-you 'physically' committed the crime elsewhere. There is no difference here-the data is 'physically' on the server in that state. It does not matter where you are now-you had to be on that server, in that state somehow-whether it was by FTP, Telnet, etc.. And that is when and where the crime was committed.
;)
As for your Swizerland scenario-the same would apply, except past examples have shown us that you would probably hold the owner of the usenet server accountable, and not the person who actually posted it (I'm not agreeing with this)-but yes, if the crime was commited on a server in Swizerland, I think that you should be tried under Swiss jurisdiction. BUT, I also think that it could go one way or the other-they had a decision, the state that the person was in at the time the crime was committed, or the actual state that the crime was committed in-they made a decision and either one would probably have the same effect. It could be worse, you could be tried for the same crime twice under two juridictions-but they took care of that a long time ago
I think the project looks great, and it should be a lot of fun for all of us. Lately everything has been monopoly this, sue him for that, they said this... Now here's something to let off a little steam. And yeah, while the slogan needs a little work, the site looks great and they seem to have everything organized and in place. It will be interesting to see how the games turns out,and even more interesting to play it.
Of course, Microsoft and AOL can do whatever they want, it's a free country. But I have to ask myself it this is legitimately for knowledge we are better off knowing, or market analysis. Just the fact that AOL is teaming up with Microsoft on this deal is suspicious by itself. I really doubt if the results of the study will ever be fully released to the public, but unfortunately the article is lacking in details on that area...
>corporate "thems"
Yeah, there are a lot of CEO's on the board. But some of them do have credibility: Ransom Love and Larry Augustin to name a couple. With the others, I agree with you that we can't be certain exactly what their motives are. But you hope that since they have Torvalds and Hall, they will be cautious about what they say and how they say it. What sounds good to corporate ears could enrage us "Little People (speaking humorously)". But that's a whole other problem and discussion within itself.
"We" meaning: Supposedly we have an Open Source Community. Whether you like it or not-you are part of it as well. If you call someplace "Your home town", it's not neccessarily yours-just like when leaders within our community step up to bat, "WE" now have a voice within the commercial community.
>In addition, the forum will provide a central voice for the open source community
You may be right, they do state in the article that they are concerned with commercial aspects, but not specifically. And the above statement would mean not specifically Linux either.
I also had problems understanding exactly what they are trying to do here... If you go to the fact sheet it just lists the names of the advisory council members (again). Sure, they have a nice mixture of companies and influences, but most of the members are CEO's. I guess we just have to have faith in the members that we know we can trust, Torvalds, Hall, etc.. that they will keep this thing on the right track.
>RMS would not be against digital signature
Sorry if that didn't come out right-that's what I meant also...
>I don't think RMS would use PGP
But if he had-there may not be as much concern about the authenticity of his posting on the GNOME mailing list.
>Why 20K? Because they are absolutely sure that people will donate that much
Sounds reasonable, but his offer is not very clear-are they offering a position at FSF or just a $20K lump for this one manual? I would assume they are offering a position. RMS does mention that he has room for an additional author. For them to just have people submit their work at random would mean a full time job for themselves... But I have a pretty good idea that they're smarter than that.
There are some flaky details concerning this as well... First of all, I don't understand why RMS did not use PGP or some similiar form of verification when making an announcement of such magnitude, and on a mailing list of all places. Next, why should FSF crank out $20K for documentation in the first place? I am very outclassed here when it comes to the discussion of Open Source, but the way I am viewing this is that FSF wants the rights to the first (and possibly only)GNOME programming manual, but why would they do this? They have their own authors and surely enough talent to do this without posting it up like some sort of contest. I guess the only way we'll really know is to ask RMS himself. Has anyone done/attempted this yet?
But it really is an exploit, actually when I hear exploit lately, I think more along the lines of teardrop or land. I also think that the coporate news people (ZD, CNET, etc..) have it backwards as well (besides the hacker/cracker miswordings)because if some group of kids bring down a webserver using a synflood it automatically means it has been "Hacked(Cracked)". Exploits are simply something that EXPLIOTS (sorry to be redundant) a bug or error in a piece of code.
It was a movie dude, get over it... If you had paid attention, you would have caught the fact that the reason they were using humans for batteries was because they RAN OUT of natural fuels, and without the sun they could not harness solar power either. (and no-I've only seen it once) You like JM but you don't like the Matrix? "Plastic Boy" isn't exactly a favorite actor of mine, but I somehow manage to choke down his flat personality, because I did enjoy The Matrix.
My opinion is that the movie was over-anticipated, way too much hype. However, it was a great movie, and the annoying things like Jar Jar just make it that much better. Mark Hammil annoys the hell out of me-but I will end up watching the original trilogy over and over, just like I always do. And for everyone who didn't like TPM-guess what? Not everyone liked New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and since Return of the Jedi is the only one I am old enough to remember seeing in a theater-I know for a fact that there was plenty of bitching about that one (damn Ewoks!) And as far as the complaining about all the hype going on outside of the theater-I seem to remember seeing nothing but Ewoks for about two years after ROTJ-I can even remember getting up on Saturday mornings and watching the cartoon.
I'm sure that we would have had just as much nit-picking back then as we do now-unfortunately the most powerful PC was a Commodore 64-so there were no inside scoops (and gossip), no Quicktime video clips, no online discussions-Lucas just did it, and everyone left him alone-and we are all thankful of it now.
So if the rumor is true-it won't really matter how we feel about it right now. Lucas will do what he thinks is best, and fifteen years from now it will become an obession for OUR children....
I believe its only a little after 5:00 p.m. there
now-they in the Pacific Time zone...
That could be true, but I have an idea that they did not set up SMP properly, or have it running at all. Even if I felt that NT could beat the Linux configuration they had (set up properly)-there is no way it would beat it by such huge standings. If NT was utilizing all four processors, and Linux only 2 this would be feasible. Now all they need to do is have a benchmark with a constant load, just to see who goes down first ;-)-by the way, I didn't see any mention of how many times the NT server crashed when it reached it's peak performance all those times, did you?
I agree, while I like a good joke-there is just way to much tension in that area right now to be doing something like that. I'm going to choose to be good natured about it-but I definately think they need to heed to your warning. They should have at least let Rob know about it ahead of time-
Well looks like User Friendly pulled a good one today. Good one guys-and don't blame /. for not knowing, we were all fooled. At least I got out one good rant before I found out:
This mornings closing of Segfault, User Friendly and Be Dope was announced to me today from an article by JonKatz posted on Slashdot . It definitely explains the realism that goes into what seems like some"insignificant" changes. What I want to know is-where are all of the new Open Source "heros" when you need them? I don't see IBM, Dell, Novell nor Redhat running to anyone's rescue. These are the BIG companies that were supposed to launch Open Source into the next millenium, right? That is where the insignificant part comes in now. Why should they care if a couple of humor sites loose face?-because it's a
part of our culture, that's why. If at first it seemed like all of the great things going on with Open Source were too good to be true-it's because they were. We can make our own conclusions on operating systems and software, but it's out of our hands now. The Open Source culture is being forced to change, drastically. Don't think they don't know what they are doing either-these are companies that have been around and back again, and if you ever ONCE thought that it had to do with anything other than money, you are wrong.
The Open Source culture has always been one made up of different opinions, and sometimes those opinions are expressed to the public in the form of humor-actually, most of the time. That is Open Source's biggest downfall in the business community, the fact that like the software, we are open about everything. Don't get me wrong, I don't like this at all, but we did ask for it. We placed ourselves right into their hands thinking that things could only get better now that we have "corporate backing". In my opinion, this is a case of prevention by example, people are going to start to think before they post-hopefully a lesson learned. I'm sure Segfault, Be Dope and User Friendly did not have this on their minds, I am just trying to point out the fact that this is not the end. And as Eric Raymond recently pointed out, the last thing we need to do right now is start acting childish about it and sending out flames to everyone.
Hey Rob-maybe you should name them: by Anonymous POS-you figure it out.
I don't really remember what section I read it in-but I believe Rob was talking about randomizing the first few posts-very good idea-make the first 5-10 posts randomized, that way you won't get any IFPO's. I think it may have been the /. FAQ that was talking about that...
Couldn't agree with you more....
I have also had personal experiences with NT, none have been good so far. I reboot several times a day on my NT Workstation (at work of course, I couldn't imagine having to put up with it at home)-as a matter of fact, the MS Proxy service causes my PC to lock up every time I try to read Slashdot (but serves me right for goofing off at work), /. is not the only one however-it locks up on other sites as well-that's another story though. One thing about Linux is the fact that it is NOT taking the path that Microsoft has taken-it is where it is today because of that fact. If Linux had a "roadmap" and confirmed everything twice before it actually did it (without an option NOT to, I might add) and gave your the configuration for your hardware that it thought was appropriate-we might as well call it Linux NT. That's the whole point-it does what YOU tell it to do, it is 100% user configurable, and you have every option in the world at your fingertips. I have experienced NT and Linux both on a 400+ user network-guess which outperformed? (expecially print services)-By the way-I don't know which distribution you installed, but I have never installed Linux without a graphical menu interface, without any type of help file available for each option. There are always updated video, sound, nic, etc.. drivers available on the web-did you happen to even look before you made your judgement? I will have to admit-a server configuration can be much more complicated than a workstation/home config, but I believe it is well worth it. I'm glad that the only thing that article has done is spark some laughter and piss a few people off. Looks like the desperate attempt of a sore loser to me.
>if the OpenGL and DirectX driver authors decide to write KNI-optimized drivers
That's the problem though, when MMX first came out it was the same old thing-it was going to be real useful whenever the authors decide to use it-Now they are going to KNI-and again, we will have to wait and see if our money will be well spent. Although this time around I think it is slightly different than MMX in the way that people have their eyes open, and hopefully realize that it will be some time before there is software available to use KNI to it's max potential. Most people don't realize that KNI and MMX won't enhance their current apps.
A lot of that coding is well over my head-But one thing I do agree with is that MMX is a lot of hype, There is only one game I can think of that you can tell a difference between MMX and non and that is Rainbow 6-if you can ever get it to work in the first place.