Simple, choice is good. As muck as I like Linux, I'm glad to see that there are viable, open alternative OS's.
Absolutely. One of the things I like most about Linux is that the bulk of software that I currently use on it will port and run on independent OS's, including but not limited to FreeBSD, with few if any complications. There's much less lock-in.
Much more than Linux, it's a consequence of the whole Open Source model including standardised, open API's. I use Linux right now mostly because I prefer the extra support. If its development ever goes down a road that I don't like, however, I can switch to something developed independently. It's a freedom that most proprietary products (esp. Windows) don't usually offer.
Studies like this are useless without detailed information about exactly what's being measured. For example, I'd really like any of these sources to define what they mean by "search". Searching using Google could mean the use of Google Answers, Google Directory, Google Groups, Google Images, Google Maps, Google News, Google Scholar, or..... Google Web. This doesn't even include other services such as Gmail and desktop searches, where people mostly search their own content using Google.
A few years ago, people who currently use any of those services might well have tried to do the same thing with Google Web. Google has diversified its service hugely, though, as have several other search engines. The result's usually work out very positively. Unless these market share surveys are very specific and detailed about what they're measuring and comparing, as well as why it's actually important, they're not doing either side justice and the results are meaningless.
Microsoft know this; they frame the fight so that when they say "Linux" they mean all Linux-based distributions.
Someone with a good philosophy background might identify this better than I can, but I think the accepted term for this is a Straw Man argument.
ie. Microsoft creates a caricature to their own liking and calls it "Linux", even though it isn't. Then they knock it down by highlighting all of the flaws that their invented caricature has.
That's a crippling license and there's absolutely no reason for them to go that far.
There have already been some very good suggestions. Another one I'd like to make (if it's not already hidden in the responses) is that several of those conditions may be illegal, depending on what state or country you live in -- I can't speak for Florida. If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, check if there's someone in a local government deparment -- they may be interested if your company is breaking the law by presenting illegal terms in a contract. Most importantly, it may be illegal for them to fire you if you refuse to sign it. If you can't get proper legal advice and representation, don't sign the contract as it's written. You're honestly better off leaving, and you have a perfectly good reason to explain to future employers in any job interview.
Where I am (New Zealand), I'm quite sure that a company isn't allowed to put clauses in an employment contract that will prevent an employee from seeking reasonably equivalent work if and when they leave. It may be okay to say that you can't work in a situation where you're likely to abuse your knowledge of their proprietary knowledge. eg. Having first-hand internal knowledge of Google's secret ranking techniques might be justification to prevent someone from working for another search company that competes with Google. Beyond that is far too excessive.
The clause stating that you're not allowed to use a computer for 2 years after leaving is ridiculous, because it'll prevent you from finding a job anywhere else in the broadest sense of your profession... irrespective of whether it's competing with them or not. If you're trained as a software developer or a web developer, chances are that it's illegal for them to prevent you continuing to do that general form of work for someone else.
Don't take any notice of verbal assurances that nobody will enforce the contract. Disputes happen all the time, and they're usually not expected. If someone wants to wreck your post-employed career, they'll do it. Trusting your present co-workers is irrelevant. Employees and employers change over time, and there's a good chance that when you leave your job, the company will be full of very different people to those who are in it today. The contract you signed will still be there, however, and that's what matters.
Absolutely. The written contract is all that matters if there's any dispute in the future. The primary purpose of contracts is to legally settle disputes when they arise, so having a written contract that contradicts a good faith agreement in this way is ridiculous.
If the boss says that it doesn't really matter, then he or she should arrange to have the contract re-written so it says what's actually meant. Legal writings are often complicated and long winded, but you can be sure that if it says something clearly, that's exactly what it means. If the company won't negotiate, it's time to seriously consider if it's worth working for them.
Perhaps Slashdot needs a new category for trolling/flamebait articles, which people such as Dvorak get automatically.
That way we can block them from the front page in the same way that people started to block Katz articles a while ago, and others can continue to flame and point out the flaws in what he says.
A website that is properly designed should not have to get ready for any version of a web browser, since it should already support most browsers on the maket, including, but not limited to: Safari, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, IE and Konquerer. Sounds like MS is encouraging the development of shody sites, which are IE centric, which is VERY bad.
I agree with you in principle, but I'm not sure you have it entirely correct with your last statement. Well.. not to say that Microsoft wouldn't love much of the web to continue to depend on MSIE. What they're doing now, though, is positive for everyone, even if it's not their own motivation.
Microsoft's broadcast will have all of the online banking application developers, for example, checking their code, and updating the browser strings they recognise.
Last time Microsoft made an IE release, browsers like Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Konqueror were hardly above the radar for a lot of businesses, and they weren't even considered. This time around, though, it'll make sense for a lot of providers to actually re-assess their site's compatibility with the competition just as much as MSIE --- especially if they realise that it's just a change in the browser ID strings that'll make it work. Microsoft's statement will convince a lot of PHB's to allocate the resources for someone to make these types of changes.
So it appears that the basis of the lawsuit is that the robots.txt was NOT honored. The plaintiff claims that the robots.txt is a "contract" and that the wayback machine violated the contract by still allowing archived pages to be viewed in a limited number of attempts, for reasons unknown.
There are at least a couple of things that I'm now wondering about:
Does either party still have a copy of the robots.txt file as it was on that date? It'd be interesting to see what it was actually blocking access to. If not, it sounds like a "contract" that's not in any kind of verifiable writing.
Is there any way to prove that robots.txt was actually provided every time it was requested? (Was the web server ever down at an unlucky moment?) If there's no robots.txt file available, standard behaviour is often to assume that spidering everywhere is okay.
Does this whole "Linux on the desktop" thing even matter any more? Linux is just a kernel. It'd make more sense to talk about "KDE on the desktop" or "Gnome on the desktop" or "Suse on the desktop" or "Redhat on the desktop". Then it's actually about companies, organisations and applications that are aiming to provide a "desktop experience", and they won't be as confused with each other. The "Linux on the desktop" debate somehow groups them all together, quite unfairly.
It's not even a debate about the suitability of open source software for the desktop. Windows honestly implements some horrible UI decisions which cause all sorts of problems that users have simply learned to put up with because they don't know what alternative options they have, if any. Open source apps clearly have their shortcomings, but if Windows were put up to the same sort of desktop scrutiny as open source applications, it'd have a lot of problems to answer for. Studies of Windows (especially when comparing with linux apps), however, are often biased by the issue that so many people are already entrenched into using Windows products, and putting up with all their annoyances. If more people more often moved from open source systems to Windows, problems with Windows desktops would be noticed and reported much more frequently.
Instead, this debate is actually about the ability of open source software to mimic Windows closely enough so that people, who have trained themselves for and only understand Windows, can migrate (or be migrated) and re-train themselves without complaining too much or having serious problems during the migration process. It's a meaningful debate and important, but let's be clear on what we're talking about. Linux has desktop problems, but Windows also has different desktop problems... and people tolerate them because they've decided they have to. The debate's about barriers of migration between two substantially different systems.
Personally I use WindowMaker on my desktop. For me it's great --- I can have a desktop that I like, which doesn't try to make everything work the same as Windows, which I don't like. At home I have Linux running underneath it, elsewhere I have NetBSD running underneath it. WindowMaker's certainly not ideal for everyone, though.
If Linux has anything to do with this, it's that it's based on the development model that allows me to choose the desktop I want rather than have a one-style-fits-all desktop forced on me by a gigantic corporation.
As long as we have people putting passwords on post-its attached to their screens, as long as we have people clueless enough to fall for even the most simple of social engineering, there's no real thing as a proper ID on a computer system.
I agree. I think a large part of the problem, though, is that people are being given unrealistic demands for digital security wherever they go, that simply ignore everything we know about an ordinary human's cognitive ability. Even if a user can cope with one or two severely complicated passwords, nearly every organisation they deal with is going to require yet another one, whether it's their employer, separate sub-services within the same employer, a bank, or any number of online services. It's no surprise that people write down passwords, ignoring instructions---why should they respect instructions that are crazy and unrealistic?
Several years ago I was helping to implement a card reading system around the organisation for "extra security". Many of the employees decided to simply leave the cards in the readers continuously, even though they were told they should never do this. When I returned a couple of years later, even the branch that'd dished out the cards now had a compromise of simply storing the card in an unsecured drawer overnight. It was no huge surprise, however, because everyone was already flooded with other people wanting to force them to carry identity cards. There were at least another two, I think, just for independent parts of the same company! (Entering building, opening doors, etc.) There are only so many demands from all directions that people can be expected to submit to.
Many policies are very hypocritical, especially when compared with something like credit cards. Credit cards usually don't require remembering anything at all -- the "secret" number is written down, and people are encouraged to give it to anyone. Even my cash card only requires me to remember a 4 digit number (practically criminal according to many password policies), although I need the card to activate it.
Most people probably have more stake in their credit card security than in nearly any password-protected service. One of the differences is that Credit Card companies play a role in watching carefully for things that look like fraud. They have systems to restrict how much damage can be done if it's done (eg. credit limits), and have processes to deal with it after it happens.
I think passwords have just evolved from an ancient system that used to be more meaningful. Many organisations' policies are based on common beliefs instead of actual researched facts, and they're afraid to do something against the norm. Some users of some services clearly still require effective passwords, but other services demand it from everyone unrealistically. I'm convinced that we're often required to use impossible-to-remember passwords for the same reason we have impossible-to-read EULA's. It's about organisations protecting themselves from legal action so they can blame everything on the other party if something breaks.
They are __not__ a technology company trying to sell their products. They are a __marketing__ driven company whose products __happen__ to be technological products.
You might be right. I have to admit, though, that after reading this comment (elsewhere in the story), I'm beginning to suspect that Microsoft is turning into a media company even more than a marketing company. Not exactly a revolutionary conclusion, of course.
Finally, it's looking like development on apt/dpkg is largely stalled out. At least, except for package signatures, I haven't seen a user-visible change since, oh, 2000 or so.
How is this bad? It's retaining a consistent interface for people to build other tools and scripts upon.
The one thing I'd really like to see in apt, which probably belongs more with dpkg (which apt uses) than anything else, is proper tracking of when packages are installed and removed. There have been several occasions when I've installed packages, and several days later when I notice a problem, there's no reliable log of what packages I recently changed.
If I was rating shades of badness, not warning people is worse than warning them or warning them incompetently.
I don't know - they all seem pretty similar to me. Expecting everything to be okay after detonating a bomb in a public place, just because there's a plan to phone in a warning, seems just about as deranged as not phoning in a warning.
So...the cost of ruining the 'natural balance of forces in the universe' is $300 mil US. Wonder how she arrived at that figure...could we see a breakdown?
I think that all she probably did was to decide how much she'd need to sue NASA for in order to get world press attention and mountains of free publicity.
Everyone who cares about astrology probably now knows who she is. It's a shame that slashdot decided to jump on the media band-wagon.
most likely the stars are hidden due to the brightness of the comet. i know the parent post meant to be funny, but there's a clear distinction between the moon landing and this.
I fail to see the distinction between this and the moon. Both lack an atmosphere to diffuse light.
The GP post might have gotten the words wrong. It was probably supposed to be "similarity". For the record in case anyone's wondering, it's nothing to do with atmosphere -- it's photographic exposure time. Stars are very faint compared with the brightness of the comet or Moon's surface, which is why they don't show up in either this photo or the Moon landing photos.
Free classical music downloads. Sure, the recording of the performance is still copyrighted, but aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
It probably takes a bit more coordination than the average popular music performer to make a good classical recording -- at least one that requires any significantly sized orchestra. (Conductors, venues, recording equipment, lots of performers, practicing performing together cohesively, etc etc.) I suspect that most orchestras able to pull it off simply have to be professional, because there's so much rolling infrastructure involving a lot of people and resources behind the performances that's needed to make sure that they can do it properly. Arts funding to keep these things going is never very generous, and a lot of it probably comes on the condition that the orchestra management demonstrates that it's continuing to raise money on their own by charging for what it produces.
If it helps, you might find a lot of very cheap classical CD's in certain bargain bins. I've collected a lot of Mozart, Strauss and Dvorak for about $2 per CD, which is a price I'm perfectly prepared to pay and one that I think is quite fair. In my experience, they're often left-over stock of classical performances from some years ago, but they're not low quality.
Someone who cares about details such as particular orchestras or performances might not find what they want in the bargain bins. If you're like me, however, and just wanted a general introduction before finding out more, there's a lot of very cheap classical music out there.
This is one of the technological advancement vital to the ageing population of Japan, where 1 in 5 Japanese are over 65 years old.
How does this compare with the rest of the world? (Especially reasonably well-off countries.)
If a population had an average life expectency of 81, which probably isn't too far off, and if people's ages were evenly distributed, then 1 in 5 people over 65 doesn't seem too unusual.
Well, people's ages aren't evenly distributed. Especially with the post-war baby boomers growing up, though, I would have thought that a lot of countries would either be in similar positions, perhaps even worse positions, or not far off it.
The ideals are all well and good, but I wouldn't bet that they are the prime motivation for people to switch.
I'm not sure, to be honest. Personally I think the software is often of better quality, and there's definitely more choice. This might be a direct result of the open development methods, but I don't think you need to appreciate that to care about a lot of the advantages besides the fact that it costs nothing.
A clear example of this should be web browsers -- if the only advantage of Firefox was that it cost nothing, all those people would do just as well to have stayed with MSIE. Firefox just happens to be superior to current versions of IE, in a variety of ways.
Even if Windows was free, I think I'd still prefer to use Linux, or BSD or OSX (perhaps), or some other similar system, as long as it worked was was well enough supported for me to be able to use comfortably. I like the way that all of these work much more than I like Windows. The exact OS or license doesn't concern me as much as the publication of API's, and so on.
Lock-in is a huge consideration for me -- I like retaining the choice to switch products. eg. A lot of people use KDE for their desktop, but some people choose Gnome. I don't actually like either of them, but I can use WindowMaker without having to sacrifice the use of any application that's intended for either Gnome or KDE. And if I ever decide that I want to switch, I can. There's simply less lock-in with the Open Source way of doing things, because everyone's sharing their code and API's and making them available for others.
When I used Windows, up until a couple of years ago, I was just stuck with it and couldn't easily move away. A lot of my data was stored in proprietary formats that could only be opened by proprietary applications that would only run in Windows. Breaking away from that model was very hard, but I'm glad I was able to.
The biggest problem that I have with the Microsoft way of doing things is that everyone is stuck with the Microsoft way of doing things. This is okay if Microsoft gets it right, but every time they don't, hundreds of millions of people have to suffer rather than be able to use an alternative.
Today I still see people using Windows every day, having all the same little problems that exist as a direct result of Microsoft making mistakes in the way they've designed things. Even if these people had an opportunity to realise that there's an alternative way of doing things, though, they wouldn't be able to. Microsoft has them nailed to the Windows platform -- both through Microsoft's own products, and through the development model that it encourages for other Windows product vendors.
One last thing that comes to mind is marketing. I've recently been doing a survey of off-the-shelf website search tools (for a work-related project). One thing I noticed was that the open source products were a lot more direct and honest than the commercial products about their features and what they were actually capable of. The commercial products, in absolute contrast, tended to be 90% vapour in their feature descriptions. They were non-specific, they glossed over anything that probably wasn't handled well, and mostly unhelpful for getting actual information. Many didn't even state their price clearly -- I presume these are the ones who want to know how much money the customer has before deciding a cost.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the open source were better, but they simply stated more clearly up-front about exactly what they were and what they weren't, with few if any ulterior motives. If I'd been doing more than a survey, and if I was in a hurry, it would definitely have been much more likely for me to download and actually try out the open source ones.
Seems like our priorities are screwed up somewhere (one way or the other).
You'd really need to speak with a legal expert to understand how this works, but I think it's because they're in different categories. Maximum penalties might be comparable, but someone committing child porn offences is probably likely to get a stronger penalty than someone copying DVD's. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.)
On the other hand, though, it's probably easier to make large amounts of money by selling copyright-infringing DVD's than it is in selling child porn. (The market's likely to be much bigger, for one thing.) The possible penalty needs to be higher if it's going to effectively discourage people. Otherwise people will just make lots of money illegally and buy themselves out of court with the money they've made.... kind of like certain corporations, but I won't go there in this post.
I don't think this is an ideal answer, myself, but it's probably why the large potential penalty is there. The MPAA is always going to threaten with the largest possible penalties it can get away with claiming, and I think it's a problem with the legal system that companies are allowed to get away with mis-representing things in this way. Either way, it doesn't mean a court will even come close to agreeing that a $250,000 penalty and five years in jail is necessary for punishing someone who made a few copies for friends.
I'm wondering if the US (or other countries) would allow those on death row to volunteer for such trials. I wouldn't want to see them forced into it, but allowing them to volunteer for these sorts of things could provide valuable research.
It might depend on exactly how you define the purpose of death row. In particular whether it's supposed to be entirely to do with punishment, or if some of it is related to victim's right of seeing justice done in any way.
We don't have the death penalty where I am, and personally I'm skeptical of its usefulness. I do know, however, that victims in general would complain very loudly if criminals were given an option that might let them off their sentance somehow in ways that were beyond their control.
Try GNU Stow - it solves this problem very nicely, keeping each software package in a separate directory and symlinking everything to the relevant PATH directories. Pity there isn't a linux distro that uses it, or even comes with it - it would make things *so* much easier...:-(
GoboLinux tries to do something like this, albeit not with stow. It puts each package in its own directory, and then symlinks everything back into better recognised locations... one of the GoboLinux philosophies is that the file system itself is the package manager. I presume that to uninstall a package, one would essentially delete the directory, and then do a file system sweep every so often of orphaned symlinks.
It's been mentioned on slashdot a couple of times. For whatever reason, the main reaction here seems to be rideculing the idea, claiming that package managers have already solved all those problems, and claiming that accessing everything through symlinks will slow the system down.
I don't use it, and go for Debian instead, if only because I prefer to have the much bigger support community. I do use Stow a lot with accounts on other people's systems, when I want to build my own miniature installation hierarchy and need a simple way to organise it. What Gobo's playing with doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.
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Absolutely. One of the things I like most about Linux is that the bulk of software that I currently use on it will port and run on independent OS's, including but not limited to FreeBSD, with few if any complications. There's much less lock-in.
Much more than Linux, it's a consequence of the whole Open Source model including standardised, open API's. I use Linux right now mostly because I prefer the extra support. If its development ever goes down a road that I don't like, however, I can switch to something developed independently. It's a freedom that most proprietary products (esp. Windows) don't usually offer.
Studies like this are useless without detailed information about exactly what's being measured. For example, I'd really like any of these sources to define what they mean by "search". Searching using Google could mean the use of Google Answers, Google Directory, Google Groups, Google Images, Google Maps, Google News, Google Scholar, or..... Google Web. This doesn't even include other services such as Gmail and desktop searches, where people mostly search their own content using Google.
A few years ago, people who currently use any of those services might well have tried to do the same thing with Google Web. Google has diversified its service hugely, though, as have several other search engines. The result's usually work out very positively. Unless these market share surveys are very specific and detailed about what they're measuring and comparing, as well as why it's actually important, they're not doing either side justice and the results are meaningless.
Someone with a good philosophy background might identify this better than I can, but I think the accepted term for this is a Straw Man argument.
ie. Microsoft creates a caricature to their own liking and calls it "Linux", even though it isn't. Then they knock it down by highlighting all of the flaws that their invented caricature has.
That's a crippling license and there's absolutely no reason for them to go that far.
There have already been some very good suggestions. Another one I'd like to make (if it's not already hidden in the responses) is that several of those conditions may be illegal, depending on what state or country you live in -- I can't speak for Florida. If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, check if there's someone in a local government deparment -- they may be interested if your company is breaking the law by presenting illegal terms in a contract. Most importantly, it may be illegal for them to fire you if you refuse to sign it. If you can't get proper legal advice and representation, don't sign the contract as it's written. You're honestly better off leaving, and you have a perfectly good reason to explain to future employers in any job interview.
Where I am (New Zealand), I'm quite sure that a company isn't allowed to put clauses in an employment contract that will prevent an employee from seeking reasonably equivalent work if and when they leave. It may be okay to say that you can't work in a situation where you're likely to abuse your knowledge of their proprietary knowledge. eg. Having first-hand internal knowledge of Google's secret ranking techniques might be justification to prevent someone from working for another search company that competes with Google. Beyond that is far too excessive.
The clause stating that you're not allowed to use a computer for 2 years after leaving is ridiculous, because it'll prevent you from finding a job anywhere else in the broadest sense of your profession... irrespective of whether it's competing with them or not. If you're trained as a software developer or a web developer, chances are that it's illegal for them to prevent you continuing to do that general form of work for someone else.
Don't take any notice of verbal assurances that nobody will enforce the contract. Disputes happen all the time, and they're usually not expected. If someone wants to wreck your post-employed career, they'll do it. Trusting your present co-workers is irrelevant. Employees and employers change over time, and there's a good chance that when you leave your job, the company will be full of very different people to those who are in it today. The contract you signed will still be there, however, and that's what matters.
Absolutely. The written contract is all that matters if there's any dispute in the future. The primary purpose of contracts is to legally settle disputes when they arise, so having a written contract that contradicts a good faith agreement in this way is ridiculous.
If the boss says that it doesn't really matter, then he or she should arrange to have the contract re-written so it says what's actually meant. Legal writings are often complicated and long winded, but you can be sure that if it says something clearly, that's exactly what it means. If the company won't negotiate, it's time to seriously consider if it's worth working for them.
Perhaps Slashdot needs a new category for trolling/flamebait articles, which people such as Dvorak get automatically.
That way we can block them from the front page in the same way that people started to block Katz articles a while ago, and others can continue to flame and point out the flaws in what he says.
I agree with you in principle, but I'm not sure you have it entirely correct with your last statement. Well.. not to say that Microsoft wouldn't love much of the web to continue to depend on MSIE. What they're doing now, though, is positive for everyone, even if it's not their own motivation.
Microsoft's broadcast will have all of the online banking application developers, for example, checking their code, and updating the browser strings they recognise.
Last time Microsoft made an IE release, browsers like Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Konqueror were hardly above the radar for a lot of businesses, and they weren't even considered. This time around, though, it'll make sense for a lot of providers to actually re-assess their site's compatibility with the competition just as much as MSIE --- especially if they realise that it's just a change in the browser ID strings that'll make it work. Microsoft's statement will convince a lot of PHB's to allocate the resources for someone to make these types of changes.
I don't know -- if Windows was ready for the desktop in the same way that so many linux distros are scrutinized, you'd think this was true.
Unfortunately, I think many people have problems with the whole Windows installation procedure.
There are at least a couple of things that I'm now wondering about:
Does this whole "Linux on the desktop" thing even matter any more? Linux is just a kernel. It'd make more sense to talk about "KDE on the desktop" or "Gnome on the desktop" or "Suse on the desktop" or "Redhat on the desktop". Then it's actually about companies, organisations and applications that are aiming to provide a "desktop experience", and they won't be as confused with each other. The "Linux on the desktop" debate somehow groups them all together, quite unfairly.
It's not even a debate about the suitability of open source software for the desktop. Windows honestly implements some horrible UI decisions which cause all sorts of problems that users have simply learned to put up with because they don't know what alternative options they have, if any. Open source apps clearly have their shortcomings, but if Windows were put up to the same sort of desktop scrutiny as open source applications, it'd have a lot of problems to answer for. Studies of Windows (especially when comparing with linux apps), however, are often biased by the issue that so many people are already entrenched into using Windows products, and putting up with all their annoyances. If more people more often moved from open source systems to Windows, problems with Windows desktops would be noticed and reported much more frequently.
Instead, this debate is actually about the ability of open source software to mimic Windows closely enough so that people, who have trained themselves for and only understand Windows, can migrate (or be migrated) and re-train themselves without complaining too much or having serious problems during the migration process. It's a meaningful debate and important, but let's be clear on what we're talking about. Linux has desktop problems, but Windows also has different desktop problems... and people tolerate them because they've decided they have to. The debate's about barriers of migration between two substantially different systems.
Personally I use WindowMaker on my desktop. For me it's great --- I can have a desktop that I like, which doesn't try to make everything work the same as Windows, which I don't like. At home I have Linux running underneath it, elsewhere I have NetBSD running underneath it. WindowMaker's certainly not ideal for everyone, though.
If Linux has anything to do with this, it's that it's based on the development model that allows me to choose the desktop I want rather than have a one-style-fits-all desktop forced on me by a gigantic corporation.
I agree. I think a large part of the problem, though, is that people are being given unrealistic demands for digital security wherever they go, that simply ignore everything we know about an ordinary human's cognitive ability. Even if a user can cope with one or two severely complicated passwords, nearly every organisation they deal with is going to require yet another one, whether it's their employer, separate sub-services within the same employer, a bank, or any number of online services. It's no surprise that people write down passwords, ignoring instructions---why should they respect instructions that are crazy and unrealistic?
Several years ago I was helping to implement a card reading system around the organisation for "extra security". Many of the employees decided to simply leave the cards in the readers continuously, even though they were told they should never do this. When I returned a couple of years later, even the branch that'd dished out the cards now had a compromise of simply storing the card in an unsecured drawer overnight. It was no huge surprise, however, because everyone was already flooded with other people wanting to force them to carry identity cards. There were at least another two, I think, just for independent parts of the same company! (Entering building, opening doors, etc.) There are only so many demands from all directions that people can be expected to submit to.
Many policies are very hypocritical, especially when compared with something like credit cards. Credit cards usually don't require remembering anything at all -- the "secret" number is written down, and people are encouraged to give it to anyone. Even my cash card only requires me to remember a 4 digit number (practically criminal according to many password policies), although I need the card to activate it.
Most people probably have more stake in their credit card security than in nearly any password-protected service. One of the differences is that Credit Card companies play a role in watching carefully for things that look like fraud. They have systems to restrict how much damage can be done if it's done (eg. credit limits), and have processes to deal with it after it happens.
I think passwords have just evolved from an ancient system that used to be more meaningful. Many organisations' policies are based on common beliefs instead of actual researched facts, and they're afraid to do something against the norm. Some users of some services clearly still require effective passwords, but other services demand it from everyone unrealistically. I'm convinced that we're often required to use impossible-to-remember passwords for the same reason we have impossible-to-read EULA's. It's about organisations protecting themselves from legal action so they can blame everything on the other party if something breaks.
You might be right. I have to admit, though, that after reading this comment (elsewhere in the story), I'm beginning to suspect that Microsoft is turning into a media company even more than a marketing company. Not exactly a revolutionary conclusion, of course.
How is this bad? It's retaining a consistent interface for people to build other tools and scripts upon.
The one thing I'd really like to see in apt, which probably belongs more with dpkg (which apt uses) than anything else, is proper tracking of when packages are installed and removed. There have been several occasions when I've installed packages, and several days later when I notice a problem, there's no reliable log of what packages I recently changed.
I don't know - they all seem pretty similar to me. Expecting everything to be okay after detonating a bomb in a public place, just because there's a plan to phone in a warning, seems just about as deranged as not phoning in a warning.
Shhh, don't tell them that. We want them to keep Russell Crowe.
I think that all she probably did was to decide how much she'd need to sue NASA for in order to get world press attention and mountains of free publicity.
Everyone who cares about astrology probably now knows who she is. It's a shame that slashdot decided to jump on the media band-wagon.
The GP post might have gotten the words wrong. It was probably supposed to be "similarity". For the record in case anyone's wondering, it's nothing to do with atmosphere -- it's photographic exposure time. Stars are very faint compared with the brightness of the comet or Moon's surface, which is why they don't show up in either this photo or the Moon landing photos.
It probably takes a bit more coordination than the average popular music performer to make a good classical recording -- at least one that requires any significantly sized orchestra. (Conductors, venues, recording equipment, lots of performers, practicing performing together cohesively, etc etc.) I suspect that most orchestras able to pull it off simply have to be professional, because there's so much rolling infrastructure involving a lot of people and resources behind the performances that's needed to make sure that they can do it properly. Arts funding to keep these things going is never very generous, and a lot of it probably comes on the condition that the orchestra management demonstrates that it's continuing to raise money on their own by charging for what it produces.
If it helps, you might find a lot of very cheap classical CD's in certain bargain bins. I've collected a lot of Mozart, Strauss and Dvorak for about $2 per CD, which is a price I'm perfectly prepared to pay and one that I think is quite fair. In my experience, they're often left-over stock of classical performances from some years ago, but they're not low quality.
Someone who cares about details such as particular orchestras or performances might not find what they want in the bargain bins. If you're like me, however, and just wanted a general introduction before finding out more, there's a lot of very cheap classical music out there.
How does this compare with the rest of the world? (Especially reasonably well-off countries.)
If a population had an average life expectency of 81, which probably isn't too far off, and if people's ages were evenly distributed, then 1 in 5 people over 65 doesn't seem too unusual.
Well, people's ages aren't evenly distributed. Especially with the post-war baby boomers growing up, though, I would have thought that a lot of countries would either be in similar positions, perhaps even worse positions, or not far off it.
I'm not sure, to be honest. Personally I think the software is often of better quality, and there's definitely more choice. This might be a direct result of the open development methods, but I don't think you need to appreciate that to care about a lot of the advantages besides the fact that it costs nothing.
A clear example of this should be web browsers -- if the only advantage of Firefox was that it cost nothing, all those people would do just as well to have stayed with MSIE. Firefox just happens to be superior to current versions of IE, in a variety of ways.
Even if Windows was free, I think I'd still prefer to use Linux, or BSD or OSX (perhaps), or some other similar system, as long as it worked was was well enough supported for me to be able to use comfortably. I like the way that all of these work much more than I like Windows. The exact OS or license doesn't concern me as much as the publication of API's, and so on.
Lock-in is a huge consideration for me -- I like retaining the choice to switch products. eg. A lot of people use KDE for their desktop, but some people choose Gnome. I don't actually like either of them, but I can use WindowMaker without having to sacrifice the use of any application that's intended for either Gnome or KDE. And if I ever decide that I want to switch, I can. There's simply less lock-in with the Open Source way of doing things, because everyone's sharing their code and API's and making them available for others.
When I used Windows, up until a couple of years ago, I was just stuck with it and couldn't easily move away. A lot of my data was stored in proprietary formats that could only be opened by proprietary applications that would only run in Windows. Breaking away from that model was very hard, but I'm glad I was able to.
The biggest problem that I have with the Microsoft way of doing things is that everyone is stuck with the Microsoft way of doing things. This is okay if Microsoft gets it right, but every time they don't, hundreds of millions of people have to suffer rather than be able to use an alternative.
Today I still see people using Windows every day, having all the same little problems that exist as a direct result of Microsoft making mistakes in the way they've designed things. Even if these people had an opportunity to realise that there's an alternative way of doing things, though, they wouldn't be able to. Microsoft has them nailed to the Windows platform -- both through Microsoft's own products, and through the development model that it encourages for other Windows product vendors.
One last thing that comes to mind is marketing. I've recently been doing a survey of off-the-shelf website search tools (for a work-related project). One thing I noticed was that the open source products were a lot more direct and honest than the commercial products about their features and what they were actually capable of. The commercial products, in absolute contrast, tended to be 90% vapour in their feature descriptions. They were non-specific, they glossed over anything that probably wasn't handled well, and mostly unhelpful for getting actual information. Many didn't even state their price clearly -- I presume these are the ones who want to know how much money the customer has before deciding a cost.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the open source were better, but they simply stated more clearly up-front about exactly what they were and what they weren't, with few if any ulterior motives. If I'd been doing more than a survey, and if I was in a hurry, it would definitely have been much more likely for me to download and actually try out the open source ones.
You'd really need to speak with a legal expert to understand how this works, but I think it's because they're in different categories. Maximum penalties might be comparable, but someone committing child porn offences is probably likely to get a stronger penalty than someone copying DVD's. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.)
On the other hand, though, it's probably easier to make large amounts of money by selling copyright-infringing DVD's than it is in selling child porn. (The market's likely to be much bigger, for one thing.) The possible penalty needs to be higher if it's going to effectively discourage people. Otherwise people will just make lots of money illegally and buy themselves out of court with the money they've made.... kind of like certain corporations, but I won't go there in this post.
I don't think this is an ideal answer, myself, but it's probably why the large potential penalty is there. The MPAA is always going to threaten with the largest possible penalties it can get away with claiming, and I think it's a problem with the legal system that companies are allowed to get away with mis-representing things in this way. Either way, it doesn't mean a court will even come close to agreeing that a $250,000 penalty and five years in jail is necessary for punishing someone who made a few copies for friends.
It might depend on exactly how you define the purpose of death row. In particular whether it's supposed to be entirely to do with punishment, or if some of it is related to victim's right of seeing justice done in any way.
We don't have the death penalty where I am, and personally I'm skeptical of its usefulness. I do know, however, that victims in general would complain very loudly if criminals were given an option that might let them off their sentance somehow in ways that were beyond their control.
Did you actually contact and tell them about it?
GoboLinux tries to do something like this, albeit not with stow. It puts each package in its own directory, and then symlinks everything back into better recognised locations... one of the GoboLinux philosophies is that the file system itself is the package manager. I presume that to uninstall a package, one would essentially delete the directory, and then do a file system sweep every so often of orphaned symlinks.
It's been mentioned on slashdot a couple of times. For whatever reason, the main reaction here seems to be rideculing the idea, claiming that package managers have already solved all those problems, and claiming that accessing everything through symlinks will slow the system down.
I don't use it, and go for Debian instead, if only because I prefer to have the much bigger support community. I do use Stow a lot with accounts on other people's systems, when I want to build my own miniature installation hierarchy and need a simple way to organise it. What Gobo's playing with doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.