How do you stop Crazy Person A from locking up Person B for "safety" until the end of the election? Or threatening some kind of violence against Person B simply because they might have gone to a polling booth when Crazy Person A's attention was diverted?
If you wanted to make an insecure system that was easy to hack and manipulate, didn't have basic security features, data integrity, and no audit trail, and thus no record of how data was altered outside of specifications, you might use such a deprecated application.
Is Jet a closed specification? Because if it's closed, there's no easy way to know for sure that there's no record of how data was altered... unless you're Microsoft. Obviously this doesn't mean that it's all good because there is a record, but it'd be very difficult for someone to corrupt the system in complete knowledge that they couldn't be traced. An open spec system might be easier to corrupt in many ways, assuming there was a fault in the spec (which would probably be unlikely), if only because it'd be possible to know for sure whether the traces had been removed.
That said, I'd easily believe that there was incompetence in an attempt to be corrupt.
Requiring administrative/root privileges to install software is the whole point. You are installing programs that are to be used system-wide. You need root privileges (granted to you via sudo) to do that.
Why, other than to support a legacy OS? (Which might be perfectly reasonable for all sorts of reasons, of course.)
I've always accepted this, but it seems to me it'd be possible to install programs in places other than root-controlled system directories and still have them work perfectly well. I've done this in my home directory quite often. All it takes is some careful engineering of the permissions, and anyone can run them -- all that needs to be kept up to date is other people's system path. If it's too complicated to manage a system with different permissions and owners for the various executables and paths, then perhaps the security architecture of the underlying OS needs to be tweaked to make it easier.
I'd love to (easily) be able to tell a package manager to install programs in somewhere other than/usr/bin, and still have it work.
Thanks for the comment, but to be fair, NZ only has about the same population as a small US state and it's geographically isolated, so it's not really realistic to compare on those grounds. We do have our own problems here too, and they're mostly around things like irresponsible drinking and family violence and probably a few other things, but that's a social problem more than anything.
What I have difficulty with is the concept of expecting the world to be a safer place, simply because everyone has guns and can defend themselves. I don't know if guns should be restricted or not. They're restricted here, but they're popular for hunting and can be seen frequently when hiking around the back-country, and people can still get them on the black market if they really want them. We've had the occasional gun-waving depressed lunetic, too. But if I were in a place where I needed to have an accessible weapon in day-to-day life to feel safe, I'd be asking a lot of questions about why, because it would seem as if there are much deeper problems. Encouraging a culture where it's okay to kill people to stop them killing other people is probably going sidestep the issue much more than fix it.
Well I'm sorry to hear you live in such a violent society, and I feel fortunate that I don't.
I honestly don't know if any kind of weapon control is the way to solve this kind of problem, and for you it sounds like it probably isn't. But the concept of expecting people to have to defend themselves like that and (more importantly) having people have to enact their rights as often as you seem to imply, is something I really have trouble comprehending. It's not a society I'd ever want to live in.
You're playing with hypotheticals here. It is certainly conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons that, when the shooting broke out, someone would have shot the nutcase. On the other hand it is conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons, there may have been a number of accidental or mistaken shootings at the same time.
For myself, I'm just concerned at the thought that large numbers of students at a college might actually choose to carry concealed weapons even if they were allowed to. I honestly can't imagine doing that at home. I've never been at risk of being shot in a shooting spree or any other situation. Why would I want the inconvenience of carrying a gun with me, let alone figuring out how to use it, on the off-chance that this might happen? If that were the culture of students at such a place and if people felt they somehow needed to carry guns everywhere, I'd rather take my chances elsewhere.
To put my views in context though, I'm not from the USA. I live in New Zealand, where it's necessary to have a firearms licence to own a gun (for as much as that doesn't stop everyone), so maybe my perspective is a little skewed.
This is old news, and not Mac-specific, but since it was re-posted anyway: What extra features does the $299 Business version offer to protect Windows against security issues with virtualization technology, and why aren't these features in the Basic and Premium versions?
If it does offer something extra then I'm interested to know, but the linked article basically states that Microsoft has "restricted the use of Vista to versions that it assumes are likely to be run either by corporations or by sophisticated users."
So in other words, assuming this is correct, they're openly using higher pricing as a security defence? (ie. "Let's make our product more secure by charging more money for it!") If so, then that's a new one and it seems kind of backwards.
Vista seems to be designed to protect the flashy useless crap at the expense of core tasks (like, you know, explorer). If a task like explorer is having trouble, then resources should be diverted from other resources to help.
I haven't used Vista yet, but what people are claiming about Vista seems to be very similar to my experiences with XP, and I'm now interested how it could have become worse. I frequently find that XP chokes around Explorer, takes confusingly lengthy periods of time to copy files, takes very confusingly lengthy periods of time to delete files, and often stops responding when it's doing any of this. Jumping to a command prompt and using the various non-GUI copy commands seems to improve performance massively.
Some research suggested that I could improve response times by clearing the recycling bin, but in all honesty I'm not sure that it's made much difference.
Here in New Zealand, we have just had a very cool summer, following on from a very cool winter. Where's some of that global warming stuff? Could have used it at the beach!
It's completely true that there's a shortage of data for meteorological events prior to about the last 100 years or so, and this makes it difficult to gauge how things are changing, but it's very misleading to suggest that Global Warming could be a myth just because it's not warm in New Zealand. Note that this doesn't mean that there isn't data about climatic events since before people started formally measuring it, but it's a bit harder to pin down the accuracy.
I live in NZ too, and although I'm not a meteorologist, I have several friends who are and I've learned a bit from them. Most importantly, the name "Global Warming" is misleading and it's frequently mis-used by people who assume that if they're not getting a warm day, it can't possibly be happening. It refers to an average overall warming, which might or might not be localised. There's a lot of hype, misleading journalism, and shoddy science on both sides. But there is a lot of evidence that this is happening. What's not so certain is exactly how it'll affect things, and just how severe it'll be, because the Earth is such a complex beast to try and model.
In New Zealand, the primary problems likely to arise aren't hotter days. The biggest problems New Zealand are likely to have come from an increase in severe weather events as a result of changing global weather patterns -- some would argue that this has already started happening. It could be more events of extreme drought, or extreme rainfall, or very large storms coming through much more frequently, or whatever. (I doubt this will give you warmer days.) The extra extreme events are more difficult to live in, and they tend to cause higher damage, which can be very problematic in a country where people have been allowed and given incentives to develop expensive properties on river banks, for instance. eg. How many more small towns will have to be flooded and re-built with huge government subsidies before someone realises that it might be a bad idea?
This isn't even starting to address potential problems such as mass migration to New Zealand by people trying to escape increased problems in their own countries, but that didn't sound like what you were getting at.
Being someone who works with an organization that promotes mass participation physical activities for children I can say that you have touched on a key issue. Physical activity with the pairing of the benefits of a healthy diet should be promoted and not the concept of sport that pits child against child and team against team.
I can only speak introspectively on this issue, but I agree with you a lot. I've always been relatively geeky, but I played quite a lot of sport before I started High School in the early 1990s. (Particularly cricket and soccer, which are pretty common in New Zealand.) Since I left, I took up more sports, including Ultimate Frisbee and a lot of hiking and backpacking every weekend, plus walking for an hour or two every day irrespective of weather.)
The school itself has a good academic record, and even has a couple of token celebrations each year to congratulate students for academic achievement. On the other hand, it also has a huge sporting tradition, and congratulates sports-people as one of the main events every week.
What stopped me getting involved in sports, or any extra-curricular activity at school, had nothing to do with the physical activity itself, or wanting to spend time being a computer geek. It was entirely because of the types of people at the school who promoted and also engaged in sport. I did try to sign up for a sports team in my first year, and I hated it. The other people involved were all the sorts of people who I could I could never get on with, and at about 13 years old they were at the height of their immaturity.
It wasn't just the other students, either; a lot of the teachers were deeply involved, saw the whole competition thing as very important. Some teachers, who should have known better, even mocked and derided students who weren't involved in extra-curricular activities. It just made me want to get involved even less. (The irony was that I was doing plenty of other things completely outside of school at the time -- I just didn't want to spend any more time associated with the school than I needed to.)
Overall, I think the whole culture of trying to push competition and a need for achievement down people's throats can have quite a negative effect on at least some people.
Nothing in the GPL forbids Dell or anyone else for charging money for the software, so Dell wouldn't just "take a cut", they can set the price they like and take 100% of it rather than having to give some of it to Microsoft.
Not to mention, they can add value to OpenOffice so that the Dell version is worth paying extra for, particularly by embedding all kinds of fancy widgets to direct Dell customers to Dell's certified business partners.
As a windows System Admin (although I run Ubuntu personally), I can finally say that Linux is starting to get there, albeit slowly. I would definately say that linux is ready for a corporate IT envrionment.
I don't disagree, but I've also recently noticed that at least some of my Windows-using IT work friends still think that Linux is a command-line-happy OS with no graphical interface.
The real problem is that even with (X)HTML/CSS it is not currently possible to take two different implementations and produce the same printed output from the same source material.
Given that (X)HTML/CSS was never designed with a goal of producing identical output between different implementations, this is no surprise. HTML/CSS was designed with the intention of producing output that's most useful for the person reading the content, while still communicating the important information.
Does the Free Software Foundation or Sourceforge have any kind of policy or resource to help poor saps like me? And in the end, what does it all mean?
I'm not an expert on such things, but I believe the FSF will often negotiate (or fight) on behalf of software authors when one of their licences is concerned. See this page for details.
If you wanted to run a Slashdot style mod system and invite both Reps and Dems to your site, you should have moderation based on their political styles instead of an additive approach. For example: Dems mod an article up 77 points, while Reps mod it down 20. For Democrats, it will be a prime article to read. For Republicans it won't even show up. I think this may be the future of moderation on websites. It doesn't have to stop with just Democrats and Republicans, there are tons of groups that are at odds, or simply different than mainstream.
This is why I'm glad the country I live in has a democratic system that doesn't automatically dismiss anyone who doesn't fit into one of two main categories, but actually fosters a government that's formed by people with all kinds of different views, in a structure that actually encourages them to negotiate and work together.
I don't mean to criticise you personally, but I think the fact that you leapt straight to the democrat/republican divide, just as everyone else does when referring to the US federal political system, exemplifies one of the biggest problems with the US Federal democracy. Most people seem to be so accepting of the status quo that there's little or zero opportunity for anyone different to have a chance. This results in large amounts of inefficiency and corruption, and a system where it's not possible to get anywhere in politics without aligning oneself with one side or the other.
If that isn't enough, people's alignments are thrown around to score political points. For instance, it shouldn't be an issue that Bush's Science Advisor is a democrat, but it's been a fallacy used over and over again to justify that Bush's science policies must somehow be "scientifically neutral" and fair to all. Everyone who's analysed by the media is thrown into one of the two sides, and the have to be on one side or the other or they get dismissed and ignored as irrelevant.
No remote access allowed unless the pilot flips a switch in the plane.
No remote access allowed to a computer without the administrator password, either.
But a switch isn't exactly the same as an administrator password, if it's designed appropriately. A well designed switch (for this purpose) requires physical access, and will make sure that it's physically disconnected from anything important until the switch is flipped. For a comparison, try pulling out the power and network cables from your desktop PC, then try to compromise it remotely over a network.
It's not as if this system needs to be active when not in use, or even powered on, unlike a typical server system with an admin password that's usually trying to do something else. Surely the safest way to do it would be to ensure that it's impossible to access remotely at all until the pilot physically enables it.
That said, who's to say that this system is designed in such a way?
Hell, what has Linux innovated lately? Desktops on spinning cubes?
Presumably you mean Linux-based distributions rather than Linux the Kernel.
There are a lots of opinions about this and different distros have their own innovations here and there, but personally I don't think Linux distro's need to innovate much at all. Open Source represents the commodity base of what's available for free and without restriction, unless you want to redistribute it in which case there's still less restriction than most software. In a real free market, it'd be what commercial software had to stand out from through innovations to be useful for customers. Sometimes commercial closed source software does stand out from Open Source, but sometimes it just gets popular through commercial manipulation over which the end user has little say.
Microsoft used to be perfectly happy to tell people that they could install applications in multiple places, as long as they were only using it in one place at a time. This makes complete sense from the perspective that licensing software is a matter of licensing information to be used by a particular person, without forcing them to pay for it multiple times to use the same information in several places.
More recently it's completely changed, and Microsoft's been adding its own technically enforced measures to enforce what the recent management believes copyright law should be.
One would think Raymond is among the few people who have earned the right to say "wow, this sucks and needs to change". The recent back-and-forth between Torvalds and GNOME is another good example.
I'd be lying if I said that I thought this whole exchange looked at all mature. My first reaction to seeing the Slashdot headline was along the lines of Why the hell should I care what ESR thinks? And I still don't care what he thinks... if he wants to move from Fedora then good for him. But a few Fedora users probably care.
Having said this, though, I definitely prefer it that the Open Source community of developers and users at least communicate with each other. There are exceptions, but with most closed source alternatives, you could complain to a company about their product and the words disappear into a black hole. Perhaps you just get a customer service rep who does nothing, and there's no indication if anything's propagated to people who matter.
When this type of thing happens in the Open Source community, the communication ends up being much more open. As irritating as it is at times, I think it's a good thing that simple users can speak out about something and be heard. If nobody reads their weblog, they can go and rant on the developers' mailing list (until they get banned), and at the very least they're had a decent chance to get their point across, and to the people who actually have power to change things.
I once saw a really good collation of many time boundaries that were expected to cause potential problems based on different ways of storing and interpreting time data. Y2K was one of them, the 2037 bug was another, but there were probably about another 20 or so dates in between that were listed as potential problems.
Unfortunately I lost the link. Does anyone have a link to a list like this?
So don't complain that most people don't use a CLI, most people don't use calculus either.
Most people do use a command line interface, just not to administer their computers. After all, Google uses a very well designed command line interface as its primary interface. (User types what they want, Google gives it to them.)
A command line interpreter for system administration that let the user type what they wanted, then helped the user narrow it down, could be very interesting. It might work much more nicely than a horrible hierarchy of menus to click and search through.
The BBC should be providing licence fee payers like myself with unrestricted digital content. If we end up building up massive libraries of free classical music, then so much the better!
I'm really interested in what their reasoning could be for this, and what's meant by "classical music"? Is it orchestras performing symphonies that have been out of copyright and commoditised for a long time, or does it include individual artists performing their own individual pieces that nobody else performs?
If it's the latter, I can understand why there might be concern, even though I don't really agree with it. If it's just about orchestras performing well known pieces of music, though, I'm confused. Sometimes certain orchestras or certain performances stand out, but I'd have thought that orchestras would have everything to gain by helping classical music recordings to be distributed unrestricted as much as possible, especially if it means more people are willing to turn up at concerts from time to time.
It was probably tossed on the desk of some rookie rerporter at five minutes to quitting time.
I think you're probably right; there's nothing new or particularly interesting here. Both Windows guys have only ever used Windows, and they compare it with previous versions of Windows with no reference to the outside world. The Linux guy compares Linux with Windows (with a brief side reference to Macs), and the Mac guy compares OS X with Windows. Even the past experience of these people seems completely stereotypical, but if you spend all your time working in your favourite OS, it shouldn't be a big surprise that comparative knowledge of other OS's is limited.
It would have been a lot more useful to have genuine reviewers write something from a perspective of having used all three systems a lot, without bias, and fully understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each... but I presume there are already a few of them around.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you stop Crazy Person A from locking up Person B for "safety" until the end of the election? Or threatening some kind of violence against Person B simply because they might have gone to a polling booth when Crazy Person A's attention was diverted?
Is Jet a closed specification? Because if it's closed, there's no easy way to know for sure that there's no record of how data was altered... unless you're Microsoft. Obviously this doesn't mean that it's all good because there is a record, but it'd be very difficult for someone to corrupt the system in complete knowledge that they couldn't be traced. An open spec system might be easier to corrupt in many ways, assuming there was a fault in the spec (which would probably be unlikely), if only because it'd be possible to know for sure whether the traces had been removed.
That said, I'd easily believe that there was incompetence in an attempt to be corrupt.
Why, other than to support a legacy OS? (Which might be perfectly reasonable for all sorts of reasons, of course.)
I've always accepted this, but it seems to me it'd be possible to install programs in places other than root-controlled system directories and still have them work perfectly well. I've done this in my home directory quite often. All it takes is some careful engineering of the permissions, and anyone can run them -- all that needs to be kept up to date is other people's system path. If it's too complicated to manage a system with different permissions and owners for the various executables and paths, then perhaps the security architecture of the underlying OS needs to be tweaked to make it easier.
I'd love to (easily) be able to tell a package manager to install programs in somewhere other than /usr/bin, and still have it work.
Thanks for the comment, but to be fair, NZ only has about the same population as a small US state and it's geographically isolated, so it's not really realistic to compare on those grounds. We do have our own problems here too, and they're mostly around things like irresponsible drinking and family violence and probably a few other things, but that's a social problem more than anything.
What I have difficulty with is the concept of expecting the world to be a safer place, simply because everyone has guns and can defend themselves. I don't know if guns should be restricted or not. They're restricted here, but they're popular for hunting and can be seen frequently when hiking around the back-country, and people can still get them on the black market if they really want them. We've had the occasional gun-waving depressed lunetic, too. But if I were in a place where I needed to have an accessible weapon in day-to-day life to feel safe, I'd be asking a lot of questions about why, because it would seem as if there are much deeper problems. Encouraging a culture where it's okay to kill people to stop them killing other people is probably going sidestep the issue much more than fix it.
Well I'm sorry to hear you live in such a violent society, and I feel fortunate that I don't.
I honestly don't know if any kind of weapon control is the way to solve this kind of problem, and for you it sounds like it probably isn't. But the concept of expecting people to have to defend themselves like that and (more importantly) having people have to enact their rights as often as you seem to imply, is something I really have trouble comprehending. It's not a society I'd ever want to live in.
For myself, I'm just concerned at the thought that large numbers of students at a college might actually choose to carry concealed weapons even if they were allowed to. I honestly can't imagine doing that at home. I've never been at risk of being shot in a shooting spree or any other situation. Why would I want the inconvenience of carrying a gun with me, let alone figuring out how to use it, on the off-chance that this might happen? If that were the culture of students at such a place and if people felt they somehow needed to carry guns everywhere, I'd rather take my chances elsewhere.
To put my views in context though, I'm not from the USA. I live in New Zealand, where it's necessary to have a firearms licence to own a gun (for as much as that doesn't stop everyone), so maybe my perspective is a little skewed.
This is old news, and not Mac-specific, but since it was re-posted anyway: What extra features does the $299 Business version offer to protect Windows against security issues with virtualization technology, and why aren't these features in the Basic and Premium versions?
If it does offer something extra then I'm interested to know, but the linked article basically states that Microsoft has "restricted the use of Vista to versions that it assumes are likely to be run either by corporations or by sophisticated users."
So in other words, assuming this is correct, they're openly using higher pricing as a security defence? (ie. "Let's make our product more secure by charging more money for it!") If so, then that's a new one and it seems kind of backwards.
I haven't used Vista yet, but what people are claiming about Vista seems to be very similar to my experiences with XP, and I'm now interested how it could have become worse. I frequently find that XP chokes around Explorer, takes confusingly lengthy periods of time to copy files, takes very confusingly lengthy periods of time to delete files, and often stops responding when it's doing any of this. Jumping to a command prompt and using the various non-GUI copy commands seems to improve performance massively.
Some research suggested that I could improve response times by clearing the recycling bin, but in all honesty I'm not sure that it's made much difference.
It's completely true that there's a shortage of data for meteorological events prior to about the last 100 years or so, and this makes it difficult to gauge how things are changing, but it's very misleading to suggest that Global Warming could be a myth just because it's not warm in New Zealand. Note that this doesn't mean that there isn't data about climatic events since before people started formally measuring it, but it's a bit harder to pin down the accuracy.
I live in NZ too, and although I'm not a meteorologist, I have several friends who are and I've learned a bit from them. Most importantly, the name "Global Warming" is misleading and it's frequently mis-used by people who assume that if they're not getting a warm day, it can't possibly be happening. It refers to an average overall warming, which might or might not be localised. There's a lot of hype, misleading journalism, and shoddy science on both sides. But there is a lot of evidence that this is happening. What's not so certain is exactly how it'll affect things, and just how severe it'll be, because the Earth is such a complex beast to try and model.
In New Zealand, the primary problems likely to arise aren't hotter days. The biggest problems New Zealand are likely to have come from an increase in severe weather events as a result of changing global weather patterns -- some would argue that this has already started happening. It could be more events of extreme drought, or extreme rainfall, or very large storms coming through much more frequently, or whatever. (I doubt this will give you warmer days.) The extra extreme events are more difficult to live in, and they tend to cause higher damage, which can be very problematic in a country where people have been allowed and given incentives to develop expensive properties on river banks, for instance. eg. How many more small towns will have to be flooded and re-built with huge government subsidies before someone realises that it might be a bad idea?
This isn't even starting to address potential problems such as mass migration to New Zealand by people trying to escape increased problems in their own countries, but that didn't sound like what you were getting at.
I can only speak introspectively on this issue, but I agree with you a lot. I've always been relatively geeky, but I played quite a lot of sport before I started High School in the early 1990s. (Particularly cricket and soccer, which are pretty common in New Zealand.) Since I left, I took up more sports, including Ultimate Frisbee and a lot of hiking and backpacking every weekend, plus walking for an hour or two every day irrespective of weather.)
The school itself has a good academic record, and even has a couple of token celebrations each year to congratulate students for academic achievement. On the other hand, it also has a huge sporting tradition, and congratulates sports-people as one of the main events every week.
What stopped me getting involved in sports, or any extra-curricular activity at school, had nothing to do with the physical activity itself, or wanting to spend time being a computer geek. It was entirely because of the types of people at the school who promoted and also engaged in sport. I did try to sign up for a sports team in my first year, and I hated it. The other people involved were all the sorts of people who I could I could never get on with, and at about 13 years old they were at the height of their immaturity.
It wasn't just the other students, either; a lot of the teachers were deeply involved, saw the whole competition thing as very important. Some teachers, who should have known better, even mocked and derided students who weren't involved in extra-curricular activities. It just made me want to get involved even less. (The irony was that I was doing plenty of other things completely outside of school at the time -- I just didn't want to spend any more time associated with the school than I needed to.)
Overall, I think the whole culture of trying to push competition and a need for achievement down people's throats can have quite a negative effect on at least some people.
Not to mention, they can add value to OpenOffice so that the Dell version is worth paying extra for, particularly by embedding all kinds of fancy widgets to direct Dell customers to Dell's certified business partners.
I don't disagree, but I've also recently noticed that at least some of my Windows-using IT work friends still think that Linux is a command-line-happy OS with no graphical interface.
Given that (X)HTML/CSS was never designed with a goal of producing identical output between different implementations, this is no surprise. HTML/CSS was designed with the intention of producing output that's most useful for the person reading the content, while still communicating the important information.
I'm not an expert on such things, but I believe the FSF will often negotiate (or fight) on behalf of software authors when one of their licences is concerned. See this page for details.
This is why I'm glad the country I live in has a democratic system that doesn't automatically dismiss anyone who doesn't fit into one of two main categories, but actually fosters a government that's formed by people with all kinds of different views, in a structure that actually encourages them to negotiate and work together.
I don't mean to criticise you personally, but I think the fact that you leapt straight to the democrat/republican divide, just as everyone else does when referring to the US federal political system, exemplifies one of the biggest problems with the US Federal democracy. Most people seem to be so accepting of the status quo that there's little or zero opportunity for anyone different to have a chance. This results in large amounts of inefficiency and corruption, and a system where it's not possible to get anywhere in politics without aligning oneself with one side or the other.
If that isn't enough, people's alignments are thrown around to score political points. For instance, it shouldn't be an issue that Bush's Science Advisor is a democrat, but it's been a fallacy used over and over again to justify that Bush's science policies must somehow be "scientifically neutral" and fair to all. Everyone who's analysed by the media is thrown into one of the two sides, and the have to be on one side or the other or they get dismissed and ignored as irrelevant.
Such as into the side of a densely populated building? This system doesn't sound as if it's designed to save a couple of hundred passengers.
But a switch isn't exactly the same as an administrator password, if it's designed appropriately. A well designed switch (for this purpose) requires physical access, and will make sure that it's physically disconnected from anything important until the switch is flipped. For a comparison, try pulling out the power and network cables from your desktop PC, then try to compromise it remotely over a network.
It's not as if this system needs to be active when not in use, or even powered on, unlike a typical server system with an admin password that's usually trying to do something else. Surely the safest way to do it would be to ensure that it's impossible to access remotely at all until the pilot physically enables it.
That said, who's to say that this system is designed in such a way?
Presumably you mean Linux-based distributions rather than Linux the Kernel.
There are a lots of opinions about this and different distros have their own innovations here and there, but personally I don't think Linux distro's need to innovate much at all. Open Source represents the commodity base of what's available for free and without restriction, unless you want to redistribute it in which case there's still less restriction than most software. In a real free market, it'd be what commercial software had to stand out from through innovations to be useful for customers. Sometimes commercial closed source software does stand out from Open Source, but sometimes it just gets popular through commercial manipulation over which the end user has little say.
Microsoft used to be perfectly happy to tell people that they could install applications in multiple places, as long as they were only using it in one place at a time. This makes complete sense from the perspective that licensing software is a matter of licensing information to be used by a particular person, without forcing them to pay for it multiple times to use the same information in several places.
More recently it's completely changed, and Microsoft's been adding its own technically enforced measures to enforce what the recent management believes copyright law should be.
Windows on the desktop also sucks. What's your point?
I'd be lying if I said that I thought this whole exchange looked at all mature. My first reaction to seeing the Slashdot headline was along the lines of Why the hell should I care what ESR thinks? And I still don't care what he thinks... if he wants to move from Fedora then good for him. But a few Fedora users probably care.
Having said this, though, I definitely prefer it that the Open Source community of developers and users at least communicate with each other. There are exceptions, but with most closed source alternatives, you could complain to a company about their product and the words disappear into a black hole. Perhaps you just get a customer service rep who does nothing, and there's no indication if anything's propagated to people who matter.
When this type of thing happens in the Open Source community, the communication ends up being much more open. As irritating as it is at times, I think it's a good thing that simple users can speak out about something and be heard. If nobody reads their weblog, they can go and rant on the developers' mailing list (until they get banned), and at the very least they're had a decent chance to get their point across, and to the people who actually have power to change things.
I once saw a really good collation of many time boundaries that were expected to cause potential problems based on different ways of storing and interpreting time data. Y2K was one of them, the 2037 bug was another, but there were probably about another 20 or so dates in between that were listed as potential problems.
Unfortunately I lost the link. Does anyone have a link to a list like this?
Most people do use a command line interface, just not to administer their computers. After all, Google uses a very well designed command line interface as its primary interface. (User types what they want, Google gives it to them.)
A command line interpreter for system administration that let the user type what they wanted, then helped the user narrow it down, could be very interesting. It might work much more nicely than a horrible hierarchy of menus to click and search through.
I'm really interested in what their reasoning could be for this, and what's meant by "classical music"? Is it orchestras performing symphonies that have been out of copyright and commoditised for a long time, or does it include individual artists performing their own individual pieces that nobody else performs?
If it's the latter, I can understand why there might be concern, even though I don't really agree with it. If it's just about orchestras performing well known pieces of music, though, I'm confused. Sometimes certain orchestras or certain performances stand out, but I'd have thought that orchestras would have everything to gain by helping classical music recordings to be distributed unrestricted as much as possible, especially if it means more people are willing to turn up at concerts from time to time.
I think you're probably right; there's nothing new or particularly interesting here. Both Windows guys have only ever used Windows, and they compare it with previous versions of Windows with no reference to the outside world. The Linux guy compares Linux with Windows (with a brief side reference to Macs), and the Mac guy compares OS X with Windows. Even the past experience of these people seems completely stereotypical, but if you spend all your time working in your favourite OS, it shouldn't be a big surprise that comparative knowledge of other OS's is limited.
It would have been a lot more useful to have genuine reviewers write something from a perspective of having used all three systems a lot, without bias, and fully understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each... but I presume there are already a few of them around.