It doesn't have to be open source, as useful as that might be. Most people who vote don't understand computers to that depth anyway, so being open source isn't going to convince them to trust it. It does have to provide a voter-verified paper trail, which is automatically authoritative over the electronic count in case of any dispute about the result. It also has to be part of a wider administration of voting which isn't corrupt in the first place, and I think that's by far the biggest problem to overcome.
IT is great... Linux is great, but e-voting doesn't belong anywhere in major, general elections, IMHO.
Sure it does. It just shouldn't replace manual counting so much as augment it. Electronic voting (if implemented appropriately) can provide a very quick and likely result, which is what seems to be in demand these days, but can still allow for accurate and voter-verified paper trails when a manual recount is needed.
ie. Machine prints the vote, displays it to the voter, then shows the voter (from behind a screen) and lets them decide if it's printed correctly before the machine deposits it into a box. The mechanism for confirming the paper vote into the box should be a simple, physical control that's manipulated by the voter and lets them clearly see and control the passage of the paper vote into the ballot box. The box full of paper ballots is treated with as much care and security as they've always been treated, or at least should have been. In the event of disagreements, the paper trail count is declared authoritative over the electronic count, because each individual vote was verified by the person who cast it.
The problem with many electronic voting systems to date is that they've been unreliably implemeted as black boxes that provide no way for a voter to be sure that the button they pressed actually corresponds to the vote that was recorded, or to verify that the machine hasn't mysteriously deleted or added votes with no voter actually being present, and also provide no way for an independent manual re-count in case there's concern about the technology.
Off topic again slightly, John Lennon wrote a few songs that seemed to have a distinctly leftist bent, does anyone know if he was actually a socialist or anything similar?
Well if he was then so were millions of other people who would have completely changed over the next 30-40 years. John Lennon had the distinction of dying when he was really famous at a time when that was who he was.
I thought the whole point of defending people found with child pornography and such was that if you don't let the evil scum have a right, you won't have the right either.
Really? I thought it was to objectively establish beyond reasonable doubt that they actually were found with child pornography and that their posession and means of obtaining it broke the law.
There are ways of possessing child porn that aren't necessarily illegal (eg. being involved in relevant police investigations), there are ways of obtaining it that aren't necessarily illegal (eg. having someone place it with your stuff because they want you to be lynched by rednecks), and there are even images people might possess that are widely disputed as to whether they're child porn or not in the first place, or just someone's family photos from a naturist resort.
They just have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality.
I have a friend who I met through a club we were both members of. He isn't a spammer as such, but I think he falls close to this category. He's more of what another friend of my refers to as a crazy-maker. Supposedly it means someone who doesn't really have much perception of reality and what's going on around them, and they'll work really hard to do things their way without realising just how much they're intimidating people around them.
He's not in the aggressive spamming business, but his main business is marketing, including direct marketing, and he contracts to various businesses to organise their direct marketing for them.
Personally he's a really nice guy and you can tell he cares a lot about excessive amounts of voluntary participation and things that have little to do with money, but he sees everything through the eyes of his fairly aggressive marketing tactics. He frequently speaks about this thing called "presence", and no matter what he's doing, which is basically the idea of being seen.
The way he promotes things is always about presence, above everything else. A few years ago he became interested in websites, and started building his own with the goal of experimenting about how to get as many hits as possible. Many of these websites are absolutely hideous to look at. They're difficult to read, massive fonts, badly placed images, extremely long pages with little structure and largely-sized key words splattered in seemingly random places and linking to random things, but it's what he's decided boosts his ranking in the major search engines.
He took over administration of the club website after I'd been managing it for about 7 years. He wouldn't have been my first choice, but I'd been trying to shove it off to someone else for about 4 years and had no offers. (One of the problems in voluntary organisations.) Realistically I was just glad to be able to hand it to someone and I didn't really care any more, so he got it, and I was happy because I finally stopped getting nagged by people wanting me to make changes to website admin stuff.
Almost immediately the club website turned into a messed up mixture of what he considered was needed to get more attention from search engines. Although the website was being hosted by a community service that basically provided a free shell account to community groups on the assumption of people acting well, he uploaded hundreds of megabytes of high resolution photos, essentially abusing the unmetered storage space on the community service.
He didn't get on at all well with the club committee to the point that he was kicked out of the club... which he took offence to and was quick to point to the number of hits and the "presence" he'd built for the website.
I'm no longer involved in the club, but a couple of years later I heard that the community provider ended up paying several hundred dollars for a consultant to analyse some problems they were having, and found that he'd left a process running under the shell account for a very long time (kicked off by a cron job and/or emails arriving or something). It'd left behind about a 70GB log file full of errors, because for some long amount of time, it'd been trying to poll a non-existant server overseas 4 times a second. The process it was some kind of marketing/tracking software he'd installed. I don't have a clue why it needed to talk to a remote server.
The amazing thing is that this guy is a nice guy and he cares a lot about what he's doing on a community level, but he does it all through his own eyes which are different from other people's, and is definitely someone I'd consider to have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality, and I think I've survived him so long because I tend to keep my distance and stay away from what he gets involved in. He doesn't really connect what he's doing with how they n
....that.Net is the primary framework for extending a lot of Microsoft stuff, as well as a few other vendors' things that run on Windows. So if you're developing an in-house extension these days to customise something like Outlook or Word to do a few extra things appropriate for your organisation, chances are it'll be.Net code that does it. We have several customisations like this, and it's frustrating at times because it means that Office apps (or whatever else) will stall for several extra seconds either at startup or at some other time depending on how it's configured, because they're loading the framework. Being able to write the customisations in an cleaner and more coherent API tends to make it worth the tradeoff for us, though.
Our Document Management System also uses a mixture of.Net and COM to integrate with MS Office, and its primary API for us to write extensions for it is also a.Net API.
There aren't a lot of production off-the-shelf.Net apps for the reasons I mentioned (difficult to reliably distribute to random users), but I think it's still popular simply because Microsoft promotes it as the way to interact with and customise most of their stuff. That and ASP.Net, which is very popular all by itself.
How much decent Net software is there out there anyway? Is it all in-house so we never see it? I've only seen VB shareware quality stuff no matter what I've had to pay for it.
Well any website with pages that end in.aspx is written in.Net, for one thing. We certainly develop a lot of in-house apps using.Net, and we also have a lot of intranet (and some internet) stuff that's built on it.
If you just want apps that'll run in a controlled Windows environment within an organisation then it's not bad. It's definitely much cleaner to work with than the Windows API, as long as what you actually want to do is supported by the.Net framework and libraries. As soon as you hit something that isn't supported, and start having to interop direct with Windows, things get much more ugly. Unfortunately this happens as quite a lot, whenever you decide you want to do something Microsoft didn't really plan for, like writing toolbars.
I don't think I'd want to write production software to be distributed to large numbers of people using.Net. There are certain issues like having to rely on people having the framework installed (and still not everyone does, and it's a very large download), and slow startup times on systems where you don't have much control. WPF (the new XML-based forms system introduced in.Net 3) is absolutely hideous for startup time.
From the way you've expressed this you might already know, but have you asked them to change the clause? Is it there because they really want the changes kept to themselves so they can re-sell an improved product? Or is it only there because the lawyers mandated it as a standard clause. If it's the latter case, do they realise you could probably provide higher quality work if you were allowed to work in coordination with the rest of the development community?
I do not think China can give any lesson on "with as much regard for ethics as our own companies", when all level of business, government and legal (if any), are in it to get the profits in total disregard of security, justice or basic decency without any possibility of consequences. We should be very careful with them.
We should all forget the USA as the unfair capitalist system. China is the most savage capitalists of all. They where already grabbing everything they could on foreign markets and use it in total diseregard of any international aw or agreement.
It's a developing economy which has very little of its own Intellectual Property, so what's the incentive to enforce IP laws?
This is very similar to the US in its early days, is it not? I hear that a business man named Thomas Edison, although coming up with many ideas himself, also became very rich by ripping off the ideas and work of people elsewhere before they'd had an opportunity to do so themselves. (example here). Gilbert & Sullivan had similar issues getting copyrights recognised and enforced in the USA, and had to go to great lengths to stop people performing verbatim (or sometimes sub-standard) copies of their works and taking lots of money from it before they'd had a chance to cross the Atlantic and make the money from the work themselves.
Now that the USA is the source of large amounts of intellectual property that gets sent around the world, rather than the user of other people's ideas, there's a much higher incentive for it to insist on other countries' cooperation in enforcing it's citizens' IP ownership.
So, the USA and other western countries could either wait (or even try to encourage the development of IP within China), or it could stop doing business with China until China changes. China's another country, IP laws are artificial constructs anyway, and there really needs to be an incentive for Chinese people to take IP seriously. Give China its own IP as well as ability and reasons to create more, and it might actually have a reason to respect other people's.
Words have a particular meaning and this is a case of MS trying to throw its weight around to change the popular understanding of the meaning of "Open Source" to something that is favorable for them. Last time I checked, "Open Source" does NOT mean "something that is only legal to use on Windows".
Perhaps, but personally I think it's much more likely to simply be a case of a Microsoft manager or committee who are either ignorant or don't really care too much about free software philosophies, and simply think of OSS in the simplistic terms of having the source code being viewable. (That's what it sounds like from the name, after all.)
If you're in the mindset of wanting to keep control of code, but also think it's beneficial to show people the code, it's easier just to throw it onto Microsoft's existing OSS hosting platform and call it Open Source than it is to invent yet another whole new distribution framework.
I don't think it's likely there's any direct malice here. All this says to me is that Microsoft (including the Codeplex people) don't really care about upholding the traditional OSS philosophy as much as they care about getting attention by making source code available... but we already knew that.
"Plus, who are you going to replace them with? Honest people don't like government work very much."
That is one of the more profound statements I have encountered here (on slashdot) about politics for quite s while!
Well I quite enjoy government work, but maybe my situation's different since I'm working in the New Zealand government which doesn't sound as if it's very stereotypical as governments go around the world. I also know that the other people in my IT department know their stuff and are really good at what they do, which seems to contradict what I hear about other governments and also quite a few of the businesses we've dealt with who've tried to sell us stuff with all kinds of problems. (eg. Companies who don't understand or try to hide basic security issues about the software they're selling are common.)
This would be all about the design of the government and the people it attracts to work for it, as well as the environment they're put in, would it not? Introspectively I consider myself to be "honest" (at least as much as anyone considers themselves honest), and I enjoy working for the government in New Zealand. There are a few exceptions on occasion, but generally government departments here are independent from the politicians. If and when interference is discovered (and it does happen occasionally), it tends to be frowned upon from everywhere and most people who get caught don't last long. We definitely don't have politically-aligned appointments in the same way that the US Feds do.
I like working here because it's a good working environment, the people are good to work with, and the idea of doing something towards public service actually appeals to me more than just being in a business to make money (perhaps for someone else) often at the expense what I might think of as quality work.
Granted that the entire country is about the same size as a typical US State (~4.1 million people) so the structure's different and the government's probably more directly responsive to people who vote for it than in some other places. There's also some very strict legislation (notably the Official Information Act) which essentially states that anyone (or at least NZ citizens, I think) can request information about anything from a NZ Government Department and the department has to provide it unless there's a good reason not to. (Allowable reasons to withhold might include sensitivity of information, privacy of individuals who aren't very relevant, questions that aren't specific enough or would take an unreasonable amount of work to answer, not actually having the information in which case the request might be transferred to somewhere that does, etc.)
If there are disputes about how the department is interpreting the law in responding, an independent ombudsman can investigate with a lot of authority and basically force the department to release it, if they agree with the complaint. (Here's an Australian journalist raving about it.) The IT areas I work in have a lot to do with records management, and there's a huge amount of emphasis in getting everyone who works here to file their information properly so it can quickly found if and when it's ever requested. (We'd get in trouble if it were later discovered we missed something important after it was requested.)
Everyone who works in government departments here is doing so on the assumption that what they do today might be reported publicly the next day, but it's not really that bad if you're doing it as habit because people just get used to doing work with the expectation that in the future, they might have to back up what they've done. It's usually the managers who'll have to take responsibility, so they're immediately interested in making sure that what their employees do is as high quality as possible and will stand up to public
Basically I guess what I'm saying is something like a hibernate file, but one that is rarely changed and only contains the system, not the applications running in a session.
This is the sort of thing that's confused me for a while. I'm definitely not an expert on this stuff but I've wondered a lot of times now what's fundamentally changed since the 1980's, when I used to be able to switch on an Amstrad CPC 6128 or a C64 and it'd be responsive immediately, dropping the user into an interactive BASIC interpreter. The time it'd take to boot would be insignificant compared with the time for the monitor to warm up. Both of these systems (I think) just had the main system with everything loaded in ROM, and it'd be there and ready immediately. Obviously ROM wouldn't be user-configurable, but I'd have thought persistency between losing power would be the main thing, and there are plenty of types of memory that are persistent and not too slow to access.
Software is more complex these days and hardware varies much more (often meaning that software/drivers load themselves into different states), but hardware's also much faster and relevant states should be able to be cached between boots, which is what I guess you're suggesting... Have hardware and software designers just gotten lazy over the last 15-20 years by assuming that people don't mind having everything re-load itself from the beginning during booting? Even when hibernation isn't involved, I have some trouble grasping why booting shouldn't be almost instantaneous, let alone 5 seconds.
I think many people use their systems differently these days too, though, which means that reliable hibernation is probably more important than boot time in a lot of ways. Especially since multi-tasking desktops have become popular and many people have 10-20 apps open at a time, sometimes they just want to turn it off and have it all there again when they come back.
So basically, you could never apply these speed increases to a generic distro.
I've never dealt with this kind of stuff (kernel development, etc) but I'd have thought that at boot time, most modules would tend to load themselves into identical (or nearly identical) states on every boot, which might be hardware-specific but would still be repeatedly the same on a given system. Apart from maybe needing to fundamentally re-design the module loading methods for the Linux kernel, is there some technical reason why a module couldn't be cached in a way that'd allow for a straight copy from a persistent cache of the data it needs to step around whatever initialisation it usually does?
BUT, If they ever think they are going to get a dime from me for these things they are wrong. Offline and free alternatives still exist and will exist forever
Will they, though?
Email's popular at the moment, but I suspect that all you'd really need to replace email is for a service to come along that's sufficiently popular but with a closed protocol. Like Myspace or Facebook, but without the emphasis on informal and perhaps a way to supress things people hate (like spam) through being proprietary and generally obnoxious and overrulling. It'd probably have the backing of one or two major ISPs.
Throw in three or four telco mega-corps willing to pay each other equal amounts for access to each other's protocols, then on-sell access at reasonable rates to ISPs and to businesses/governments who have requirements to properly archive their communications. It might not be long before regular ISPs stop offering SMTP servers to their regular customers because most people don't use them anyway, and are sick of things like spam.
Obviously you can still use SMTP email and it'll be free, or you could use a free webmail service that doesn't have access to "the network", in the same way you can use Usenet or a Fax machine or a gramaphone, but a lot of people you want to communicate with (friends, family, prospective employers) might not support it any more.
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. That blog entry immediately links to the other blog entry that's already referenced in the Slashdot submission, using text indicating that the same person wrote both. Furthermore, the second blog entry resides on a website for a company founded by a guy called 'Glenn'.
To top it off, neither blog entry really talks about anything like this being an "example" of a "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns". The second entry is only a comment about Extreme Programming, with a loose non-descriptive reference half way down to something about Microsoft documentation. That link leads to a "WARNING: You're about to leave our website" page, which then links to the very same ars technica article that the Slashdot submission already links to directly.
It's not only leading people around in circles (via the submitters' websites), it's also failing to back up the submission's assertion that "some people see this as an example of [etc]", given that neither link really does that and they're both very likely to be from the same person anyway. (Okay, we can't tell for sure that the submitter is this 'Glenn' person, but at the very least it's someone who wants to promote his websites and blogs.)
I don't really agree with you on this. I think there are plenty of people who think it's essential to improve the end user experience of free software for the masses, and that this can be done consistently without meaning they don't have a good experience themselves.
Free software is a great concept because it lets groups of people, or even individuals, who have different ideas to take what's there and adapt it to what they think is important, and (often) merge their ideas back into an existing project if they don't conflict with what others want. I've heard people complain about the number of distros but personally I think it's fantastic that there are so many out there, because it makes it so much easier for a given person to choose what matches their own preferences, or just to go with one of the more popular ones intended for the masses if they're not sure. With closed source software, the goal of any given application (or OS) tends to be 100% under the control of a specific organisation, whose end motives frequently don't match their users any more than what's necessary to make a tidy profit.
I'm not one of the people who thinks it's essential to improve the free software desktop experience for the masses. There are plenty who are, though, and I don't have an issue with people spending their time working on that (hey, it's their time). I have other things I'd like to put my own voluntary effort into, however. What irritates me a little is when people assume that because I happen to use a linux system, I must be one of the people who wants to improve desktop linux for the masses... or I must be one of the people who wants to see Microsoft crumble into irrelevance. Most of the times I've seen people (including myself) being slotted into a group like this, it's been someone posting to Slashdot who seems to assume that everyone must think the same way they do about an issue.
Well I'm really just trying to be helpful for someone who's posting on Slashdot and so might actually be able to follow these ideas.
I agree with what I think was a sarcastic sentiment. For myself though, I really only care about me having a decent desktop and in my case, Unix-like systems work great because I'm happy to use exactly the methods I just mentioned when things go wrong. I'm still careful about who I recommend it to, but then I don't easily recommend Windows to many people either. It can be at least as much of a pain to fix when things break.
This doesn't necessarily address the problem as far as usability is concerned and wouldn't be satisfactory for a typical desktop user, but do you know if it's the Linux kernel that's crashing or is it X, or the desktop manager?
Have you tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace? (Usually resets X.) Or you could try Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a text console, and use commands like 'top' to see which process is clogging things up and kill it.... (Ctrl-Alt-F6/F7/something will switch back to X), or just try something like 'sudo/etc/init.d/gdm restart'. If you're in a position to, you could use another computer to ssh into the machine and do something similar. If you can type a command somewhere within the gui, like an xterm or a konsole, you could try running 'xkill' and then click the mouse on whatever window appears to be causing the problem. (This will kill the process in control of that window.)
This is actually one of the things I really like about Linux, and Unix-like systems in general, because when things do go down it's not generally the underlying system. At most it's probably an application, and it's usually easy to drop back to a text mode and fix the problem with that application without affecting other things.
Windows is definitely getting better at doing this (I can nearly always invoke the task manager to kill things these days without many problems), but it's taken longer for Microsoft to get there given their attachment to doing everything with a GUI as the primary method. Until relatively recently with Windows, it used to be that one thing breaking would take the whole system down.
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Why don't they have control and why shouldn't they have control? It should be in the interests of the hardware manufacturers to let Microsoft have some control, and it should be in Microsoft's interests to take advantage of it. If it was all hardware manufacturers in a particular category (like video card manufacturers), or at least most of them, it might still be that Microsoft had something to do with it. Microsoft is the common factor between Windows and any given driver, after all. Maybe they just need to review the way they work with the hardware manufacturers.
Were they bad quality because Microsoft didn't give them stable and accurate specifications? Was it because Microsoft didn't give them a useful enough testing environment or some kind of unit testing framework to make sure their drivers actually did what they should have done? Do the Windows developers just need to liaise better with the driver developers?
Stability is definitely one of the areas where open source wins out. If Windows was open sourced, the hardware manufacturers would be able to have a much more intuitive and accurate idea of what's going on inside Vista when they write their drivers. If the drivers are open sourced, the Windows team would have much more freedom to examine and fix them, and maybe re-release Microsoft-patched versions of the drivers for approved used with Microsoft operating systems. Open sourcing certainly isn't the only way to help things be more stable, though.
I think you're correct about the 'less' responsible thing. Thanks for pointing it out.
But yeah, to me it just sounded as if they were trying to say that their existing system was insecure and that I could pay $50/year to have something better. As far as I'm concerned, security of their system should be their problem more than my problem, especially when they're doing obviously insecure things like letting anyone with my credit card number (which isn't difficult to find) deduct money from my account.
Their existing system was exactly as secure as it'd always been, which is the same as any other credit card system. It's not that great but the reason people use it is because they know that banks typically have to give the customer the benefit of the doubt in case of fraud, at least until it's shown that it's largely the customer's fault... and the reason for that is because banks are offering a system sacrifices security for convenience. If they can't handle the consequences of that, they shouldn't be offering it at all.
I guess it just seemed like the bank was trying to convince customers to explicitly pay extra for something that primarily benefited the bank.
For the record, I do work for a merchant service provider (aka - a credit card processor). In the many years I have been here, we have never offered a point-of-sale system that supports contactless payment (RFID), and I have never seen a credit card that had an RFID (other than in commercials).
My bank tried to get me to use one some time ago. They claimed it was "more secure" but they also tried to charge me an extra $50/year for the privilege of having it, and I couldn't see any change to the laws that made them responsible for money mysteriously disappearing from my account. As far as I was concerned, if they wanted to run a "more secure" system (without commenting about whether it was actually more secure), they shouldn't have been offering it to consumers as an optional extra.
Wouldn't Discovery have an excellent basis for a lawsuit here? I imagine that pulling someone's merchant account just because you don't like what they said wouldn't be allowed, but then again, IANAL.
They wouldn't pull it as such, they'd just make it "harder" or "less likely" for Discovery to get certain deals that normally save them a lot of money, and they'll no longer be offered for reasons that sound unrelated.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
If the webmaster wants the ad served, should it not be up to them to make sure they send it with the content, rather than relying on a client-side browser to make a separate request for it? After all, the entire idea of the web is that it's supposed to be designed for clients to take the relevent marked-up information and then render pages as closely as possible to what's most useful for the client's user.
I can appreciate that webmasters want or need to be supported, but I don't think it's right to expect other people to tune their use of their own technology just to suit themselves. If I did request the ad and shut my eyes, would that be bad too? Otherwise, to me at least, it seems like a disturbing reminder of certain companies that try to lock down my own hardware with DRM (effectively writing their own laws and to hell with my legal rights) because they'd prefer that they had more control over my own stuff than I did.
It was displaying as +5 Insightful when I posted my reply and the tone of it was fairly consistent with the other early responses to the article. The Insightful point(s) seem to be gone now so presumably the person or people who modded it that way went and posted something in the story and had their moderations deleted.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't have to be open source, as useful as that might be. Most people who vote don't understand computers to that depth anyway, so being open source isn't going to convince them to trust it. It does have to provide a voter-verified paper trail, which is automatically authoritative over the electronic count in case of any dispute about the result. It also has to be part of a wider administration of voting which isn't corrupt in the first place, and I think that's by far the biggest problem to overcome.
Sure it does. It just shouldn't replace manual counting so much as augment it. Electronic voting (if implemented appropriately) can provide a very quick and likely result, which is what seems to be in demand these days, but can still allow for accurate and voter-verified paper trails when a manual recount is needed.
ie. Machine prints the vote, displays it to the voter, then shows the voter (from behind a screen) and lets them decide if it's printed correctly before the machine deposits it into a box. The mechanism for confirming the paper vote into the box should be a simple, physical control that's manipulated by the voter and lets them clearly see and control the passage of the paper vote into the ballot box. The box full of paper ballots is treated with as much care and security as they've always been treated, or at least should have been. In the event of disagreements, the paper trail count is declared authoritative over the electronic count, because each individual vote was verified by the person who cast it.
The problem with many electronic voting systems to date is that they've been unreliably implemeted as black boxes that provide no way for a voter to be sure that the button they pressed actually corresponds to the vote that was recorded, or to verify that the machine hasn't mysteriously deleted or added votes with no voter actually being present, and also provide no way for an independent manual re-count in case there's concern about the technology.
Well if he was then so were millions of other people who would have completely changed over the next 30-40 years. John Lennon had the distinction of dying when he was really famous at a time when that was who he was.
Really? I thought it was to objectively establish beyond reasonable doubt that they actually were found with child pornography and that their posession and means of obtaining it broke the law.
There are ways of possessing child porn that aren't necessarily illegal (eg. being involved in relevant police investigations), there are ways of obtaining it that aren't necessarily illegal (eg. having someone place it with your stuff because they want you to be lynched by rednecks), and there are even images people might possess that are widely disputed as to whether they're child porn or not in the first place, or just someone's family photos from a naturist resort.
This is why people are defended.
I have a friend who I met through a club we were both members of. He isn't a spammer as such, but I think he falls close to this category. He's more of what another friend of my refers to as a crazy-maker. Supposedly it means someone who doesn't really have much perception of reality and what's going on around them, and they'll work really hard to do things their way without realising just how much they're intimidating people around them.
He's not in the aggressive spamming business, but his main business is marketing, including direct marketing, and he contracts to various businesses to organise their direct marketing for them.
Personally he's a really nice guy and you can tell he cares a lot about excessive amounts of voluntary participation and things that have little to do with money, but he sees everything through the eyes of his fairly aggressive marketing tactics. He frequently speaks about this thing called "presence", and no matter what he's doing, which is basically the idea of being seen.
The way he promotes things is always about presence, above everything else. A few years ago he became interested in websites, and started building his own with the goal of experimenting about how to get as many hits as possible. Many of these websites are absolutely hideous to look at. They're difficult to read, massive fonts, badly placed images, extremely long pages with little structure and largely-sized key words splattered in seemingly random places and linking to random things, but it's what he's decided boosts his ranking in the major search engines.
He took over administration of the club website after I'd been managing it for about 7 years. He wouldn't have been my first choice, but I'd been trying to shove it off to someone else for about 4 years and had no offers. (One of the problems in voluntary organisations.) Realistically I was just glad to be able to hand it to someone and I didn't really care any more, so he got it, and I was happy because I finally stopped getting nagged by people wanting me to make changes to website admin stuff.
Almost immediately the club website turned into a messed up mixture of what he considered was needed to get more attention from search engines. Although the website was being hosted by a community service that basically provided a free shell account to community groups on the assumption of people acting well, he uploaded hundreds of megabytes of high resolution photos, essentially abusing the unmetered storage space on the community service.
He didn't get on at all well with the club committee to the point that he was kicked out of the club... which he took offence to and was quick to point to the number of hits and the "presence" he'd built for the website.
I'm no longer involved in the club, but a couple of years later I heard that the community provider ended up paying several hundred dollars for a consultant to analyse some problems they were having, and found that he'd left a process running under the shell account for a very long time (kicked off by a cron job and/or emails arriving or something). It'd left behind about a 70GB log file full of errors, because for some long amount of time, it'd been trying to poll a non-existant server overseas 4 times a second. The process it was some kind of marketing/tracking software he'd installed. I don't have a clue why it needed to talk to a remote server.
The amazing thing is that this guy is a nice guy and he cares a lot about what he's doing on a community level, but he does it all through his own eyes which are different from other people's, and is definitely someone I'd consider to have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality, and I think I've survived him so long because I tend to keep my distance and stay away from what he gets involved in. He doesn't really connect what he's doing with how they n
....that .Net is the primary framework for extending a lot of Microsoft stuff, as well as a few other vendors' things that run on Windows. So if you're developing an in-house extension these days to customise something like Outlook or Word to do a few extra things appropriate for your organisation, chances are it'll be .Net code that does it. We have several customisations like this, and it's frustrating at times because it means that Office apps (or whatever else) will stall for several extra seconds either at startup or at some other time depending on how it's configured, because they're loading the framework. Being able to write the customisations in an cleaner and more coherent API tends to make it worth the tradeoff for us, though.
Our Document Management System also uses a mixture of .Net and COM to integrate with MS Office, and its primary API for us to write extensions for it is also a .Net API.
There aren't a lot of production off-the-shelf .Net apps for the reasons I mentioned (difficult to reliably distribute to random users), but I think it's still popular simply because Microsoft promotes it as the way to interact with and customise most of their stuff. That and ASP.Net, which is very popular all by itself.
Well any website with pages that end in .aspx is written in .Net, for one thing. We certainly develop a lot of in-house apps using .Net, and we also have a lot of intranet (and some internet) stuff that's built on it.
If you just want apps that'll run in a controlled Windows environment within an organisation then it's not bad. It's definitely much cleaner to work with than the Windows API, as long as what you actually want to do is supported by the .Net framework and libraries. As soon as you hit something that isn't supported, and start having to interop direct with Windows, things get much more ugly. Unfortunately this happens as quite a lot, whenever you decide you want to do something Microsoft didn't really plan for, like writing toolbars.
I don't think I'd want to write production software to be distributed to large numbers of people using .Net. There are certain issues like having to rely on people having the framework installed (and still not everyone does, and it's a very large download), and slow startup times on systems where you don't have much control. WPF (the new XML-based forms system introduced in .Net 3) is absolutely hideous for startup time.
From the way you've expressed this you might already know, but have you asked them to change the clause? Is it there because they really want the changes kept to themselves so they can re-sell an improved product? Or is it only there because the lawyers mandated it as a standard clause. If it's the latter case, do they realise you could probably provide higher quality work if you were allowed to work in coordination with the rest of the development community?
It's a developing economy which has very little of its own Intellectual Property, so what's the incentive to enforce IP laws?
This is very similar to the US in its early days, is it not? I hear that a business man named Thomas Edison, although coming up with many ideas himself, also became very rich by ripping off the ideas and work of people elsewhere before they'd had an opportunity to do so themselves. (example here). Gilbert & Sullivan had similar issues getting copyrights recognised and enforced in the USA, and had to go to great lengths to stop people performing verbatim (or sometimes sub-standard) copies of their works and taking lots of money from it before they'd had a chance to cross the Atlantic and make the money from the work themselves.
Now that the USA is the source of large amounts of intellectual property that gets sent around the world, rather than the user of other people's ideas, there's a much higher incentive for it to insist on other countries' cooperation in enforcing it's citizens' IP ownership.
So, the USA and other western countries could either wait (or even try to encourage the development of IP within China), or it could stop doing business with China until China changes. China's another country, IP laws are artificial constructs anyway, and there really needs to be an incentive for Chinese people to take IP seriously. Give China its own IP as well as ability and reasons to create more, and it might actually have a reason to respect other people's.
Perhaps, but personally I think it's much more likely to simply be a case of a Microsoft manager or committee who are either ignorant or don't really care too much about free software philosophies, and simply think of OSS in the simplistic terms of having the source code being viewable. (That's what it sounds like from the name, after all.)
If you're in the mindset of wanting to keep control of code, but also think it's beneficial to show people the code, it's easier just to throw it onto Microsoft's existing OSS hosting platform and call it Open Source than it is to invent yet another whole new distribution framework.
I don't think it's likely there's any direct malice here. All this says to me is that Microsoft (including the Codeplex people) don't really care about upholding the traditional OSS philosophy as much as they care about getting attention by making source code available... but we already knew that.
Well I quite enjoy government work, but maybe my situation's different since I'm working in the New Zealand government which doesn't sound as if it's very stereotypical as governments go around the world. I also know that the other people in my IT department know their stuff and are really good at what they do, which seems to contradict what I hear about other governments and also quite a few of the businesses we've dealt with who've tried to sell us stuff with all kinds of problems. (eg. Companies who don't understand or try to hide basic security issues about the software they're selling are common.)
This would be all about the design of the government and the people it attracts to work for it, as well as the environment they're put in, would it not? Introspectively I consider myself to be "honest" (at least as much as anyone considers themselves honest), and I enjoy working for the government in New Zealand. There are a few exceptions on occasion, but generally government departments here are independent from the politicians. If and when interference is discovered (and it does happen occasionally), it tends to be frowned upon from everywhere and most people who get caught don't last long. We definitely don't have politically-aligned appointments in the same way that the US Feds do.
I like working here because it's a good working environment, the people are good to work with, and the idea of doing something towards public service actually appeals to me more than just being in a business to make money (perhaps for someone else) often at the expense what I might think of as quality work.
Granted that the entire country is about the same size as a typical US State (~4.1 million people) so the structure's different and the government's probably more directly responsive to people who vote for it than in some other places. There's also some very strict legislation (notably the Official Information Act) which essentially states that anyone (or at least NZ citizens, I think) can request information about anything from a NZ Government Department and the department has to provide it unless there's a good reason not to. (Allowable reasons to withhold might include sensitivity of information, privacy of individuals who aren't very relevant, questions that aren't specific enough or would take an unreasonable amount of work to answer, not actually having the information in which case the request might be transferred to somewhere that does, etc.)
If there are disputes about how the department is interpreting the law in responding, an independent ombudsman can investigate with a lot of authority and basically force the department to release it, if they agree with the complaint. (Here's an Australian journalist raving about it.) The IT areas I work in have a lot to do with records management, and there's a huge amount of emphasis in getting everyone who works here to file their information properly so it can quickly found if and when it's ever requested. (We'd get in trouble if it were later discovered we missed something important after it was requested.)
Everyone who works in government departments here is doing so on the assumption that what they do today might be reported publicly the next day, but it's not really that bad if you're doing it as habit because people just get used to doing work with the expectation that in the future, they might have to back up what they've done. It's usually the managers who'll have to take responsibility, so they're immediately interested in making sure that what their employees do is as high quality as possible and will stand up to public
This is the sort of thing that's confused me for a while. I'm definitely not an expert on this stuff but I've wondered a lot of times now what's fundamentally changed since the 1980's, when I used to be able to switch on an Amstrad CPC 6128 or a C64 and it'd be responsive immediately, dropping the user into an interactive BASIC interpreter. The time it'd take to boot would be insignificant compared with the time for the monitor to warm up. Both of these systems (I think) just had the main system with everything loaded in ROM, and it'd be there and ready immediately. Obviously ROM wouldn't be user-configurable, but I'd have thought persistency between losing power would be the main thing, and there are plenty of types of memory that are persistent and not too slow to access.
Software is more complex these days and hardware varies much more (often meaning that software/drivers load themselves into different states), but hardware's also much faster and relevant states should be able to be cached between boots, which is what I guess you're suggesting... Have hardware and software designers just gotten lazy over the last 15-20 years by assuming that people don't mind having everything re-load itself from the beginning during booting? Even when hibernation isn't involved, I have some trouble grasping why booting shouldn't be almost instantaneous, let alone 5 seconds.
I think many people use their systems differently these days too, though, which means that reliable hibernation is probably more important than boot time in a lot of ways. Especially since multi-tasking desktops have become popular and many people have 10-20 apps open at a time, sometimes they just want to turn it off and have it all there again when they come back.
I've never dealt with this kind of stuff (kernel development, etc) but I'd have thought that at boot time, most modules would tend to load themselves into identical (or nearly identical) states on every boot, which might be hardware-specific but would still be repeatedly the same on a given system. Apart from maybe needing to fundamentally re-design the module loading methods for the Linux kernel, is there some technical reason why a module couldn't be cached in a way that'd allow for a straight copy from a persistent cache of the data it needs to step around whatever initialisation it usually does?
Will they, though?
Email's popular at the moment, but I suspect that all you'd really need to replace email is for a service to come along that's sufficiently popular but with a closed protocol. Like Myspace or Facebook, but without the emphasis on informal and perhaps a way to supress things people hate (like spam) through being proprietary and generally obnoxious and overrulling. It'd probably have the backing of one or two major ISPs.
Throw in three or four telco mega-corps willing to pay each other equal amounts for access to each other's protocols, then on-sell access at reasonable rates to ISPs and to businesses/governments who have requirements to properly archive their communications. It might not be long before regular ISPs stop offering SMTP servers to their regular customers because most people don't use them anyway, and are sick of things like spam.
Obviously you can still use SMTP email and it'll be free, or you could use a free webmail service that doesn't have access to "the network", in the same way you can use Usenet or a Fax machine or a gramaphone, but a lot of people you want to communicate with (friends, family, prospective employers) might not support it any more.
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. That blog entry immediately links to the other blog entry that's already referenced in the Slashdot submission, using text indicating that the same person wrote both. Furthermore, the second blog entry resides on a website for a company founded by a guy called 'Glenn'.
To top it off, neither blog entry really talks about anything like this being an "example" of a "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns". The second entry is only a comment about Extreme Programming, with a loose non-descriptive reference half way down to something about Microsoft documentation. That link leads to a "WARNING: You're about to leave our website" page, which then links to the very same ars technica article that the Slashdot submission already links to directly.
It's not only leading people around in circles (via the submitters' websites), it's also failing to back up the submission's assertion that "some people see this as an example of [etc]", given that neither link really does that and they're both very likely to be from the same person anyway. (Okay, we can't tell for sure that the submitter is this 'Glenn' person, but at the very least it's someone who wants to promote his websites and blogs.)
Drinking can make things interesting but if life's boring because you don't drink, I think it says quite a bit about your life.
This is how most Linux users thinks.
I don't really agree with you on this. I think there are plenty of people who think it's essential to improve the end user experience of free software for the masses, and that this can be done consistently without meaning they don't have a good experience themselves.
Free software is a great concept because it lets groups of people, or even individuals, who have different ideas to take what's there and adapt it to what they think is important, and (often) merge their ideas back into an existing project if they don't conflict with what others want. I've heard people complain about the number of distros but personally I think it's fantastic that there are so many out there, because it makes it so much easier for a given person to choose what matches their own preferences, or just to go with one of the more popular ones intended for the masses if they're not sure. With closed source software, the goal of any given application (or OS) tends to be 100% under the control of a specific organisation, whose end motives frequently don't match their users any more than what's necessary to make a tidy profit.
I'm not one of the people who thinks it's essential to improve the free software desktop experience for the masses. There are plenty who are, though, and I don't have an issue with people spending their time working on that (hey, it's their time). I have other things I'd like to put my own voluntary effort into, however. What irritates me a little is when people assume that because I happen to use a linux system, I must be one of the people who wants to improve desktop linux for the masses... or I must be one of the people who wants to see Microsoft crumble into irrelevance. Most of the times I've seen people (including myself) being slotted into a group like this, it's been someone posting to Slashdot who seems to assume that everyone must think the same way they do about an issue.
Well I'm really just trying to be helpful for someone who's posting on Slashdot and so might actually be able to follow these ideas.
I agree with what I think was a sarcastic sentiment. For myself though, I really only care about me having a decent desktop and in my case, Unix-like systems work great because I'm happy to use exactly the methods I just mentioned when things go wrong. I'm still careful about who I recommend it to, but then I don't easily recommend Windows to many people either. It can be at least as much of a pain to fix when things break.
This doesn't necessarily address the problem as far as usability is concerned and wouldn't be satisfactory for a typical desktop user, but do you know if it's the Linux kernel that's crashing or is it X, or the desktop manager?
Have you tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace? (Usually resets X.) Or you could try Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a text console, and use commands like 'top' to see which process is clogging things up and kill it.... (Ctrl-Alt-F6/F7/something will switch back to X), or just try something like 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'. If you're in a position to, you could use another computer to ssh into the machine and do something similar. If you can type a command somewhere within the gui, like an xterm or a konsole, you could try running 'xkill' and then click the mouse on whatever window appears to be causing the problem. (This will kill the process in control of that window.)
This is actually one of the things I really like about Linux, and Unix-like systems in general, because when things do go down it's not generally the underlying system. At most it's probably an application, and it's usually easy to drop back to a text mode and fix the problem with that application without affecting other things.
Windows is definitely getting better at doing this (I can nearly always invoke the task manager to kill things these days without many problems), but it's taken longer for Microsoft to get there given their attachment to doing everything with a GUI as the primary method. Until relatively recently with Windows, it used to be that one thing breaking would take the whole system down.
Why don't they have control and why shouldn't they have control? It should be in the interests of the hardware manufacturers to let Microsoft have some control, and it should be in Microsoft's interests to take advantage of it. If it was all hardware manufacturers in a particular category (like video card manufacturers), or at least most of them, it might still be that Microsoft had something to do with it. Microsoft is the common factor between Windows and any given driver, after all. Maybe they just need to review the way they work with the hardware manufacturers.
Were they bad quality because Microsoft didn't give them stable and accurate specifications? Was it because Microsoft didn't give them a useful enough testing environment or some kind of unit testing framework to make sure their drivers actually did what they should have done? Do the Windows developers just need to liaise better with the driver developers?
Stability is definitely one of the areas where open source wins out. If Windows was open sourced, the hardware manufacturers would be able to have a much more intuitive and accurate idea of what's going on inside Vista when they write their drivers. If the drivers are open sourced, the Windows team would have much more freedom to examine and fix them, and maybe re-release Microsoft-patched versions of the drivers for approved used with Microsoft operating systems. Open sourcing certainly isn't the only way to help things be more stable, though.
I think you're correct about the 'less' responsible thing. Thanks for pointing it out.
But yeah, to me it just sounded as if they were trying to say that their existing system was insecure and that I could pay $50/year to have something better. As far as I'm concerned, security of their system should be their problem more than my problem, especially when they're doing obviously insecure things like letting anyone with my credit card number (which isn't difficult to find) deduct money from my account.
Their existing system was exactly as secure as it'd always been, which is the same as any other credit card system. It's not that great but the reason people use it is because they know that banks typically have to give the customer the benefit of the doubt in case of fraud, at least until it's shown that it's largely the customer's fault... and the reason for that is because banks are offering a system sacrifices security for convenience. If they can't handle the consequences of that, they shouldn't be offering it at all.
I guess it just seemed like the bank was trying to convince customers to explicitly pay extra for something that primarily benefited the bank.
For the record, I do work for a merchant service provider (aka - a credit card processor). In the many years I have been here, we have never offered a point-of-sale system that supports contactless payment (RFID), and I have never seen a credit card that had an RFID (other than in commercials).
My bank tried to get me to use one some time ago. They claimed it was "more secure" but they also tried to charge me an extra $50/year for the privilege of having it, and I couldn't see any change to the laws that made them responsible for money mysteriously disappearing from my account. As far as I was concerned, if they wanted to run a "more secure" system (without commenting about whether it was actually more secure), they shouldn't have been offering it to consumers as an optional extra.
They wouldn't pull it as such, they'd just make it "harder" or "less likely" for Discovery to get certain deals that normally save them a lot of money, and they'll no longer be offered for reasons that sound unrelated.
If the webmaster wants the ad served, should it not be up to them to make sure they send it with the content, rather than relying on a client-side browser to make a separate request for it? After all, the entire idea of the web is that it's supposed to be designed for clients to take the relevent marked-up information and then render pages as closely as possible to what's most useful for the client's user.
I can appreciate that webmasters want or need to be supported, but I don't think it's right to expect other people to tune their use of their own technology just to suit themselves. If I did request the ad and shut my eyes, would that be bad too? Otherwise, to me at least, it seems like a disturbing reminder of certain companies that try to lock down my own hardware with DRM (effectively writing their own laws and to hell with my legal rights) because they'd prefer that they had more control over my own stuff than I did.
It was displaying as +5 Insightful when I posted my reply and the tone of it was fairly consistent with the other early responses to the article. The Insightful point(s) seem to be gone now so presumably the person or people who modded it that way went and posted something in the story and had their moderations deleted.