They did not decide they "don't want the profits." It's their property. They spent $140 million creating it. They aren't under any compulsion to sell it, profits or no.
How about I come over to your house, make copies of your home movies of you getting banged by your boyfriend, and then sell them on the 'net. You COULD have made a profit from them, but choose not to. And you still have the originals, so I'm not really "stealing," am I?
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far
Linux doesn't want anything -- it's an operating system, silly! Do you mean "if the programmers who write software for linux want it to be on desktops..."? Guess what: that's a diverse group including companies like Redhat, who undoubtably wants linux to be on a lot of desktops, and the people from Abiword, who just get their rocks off by writing neat software.
The authors of Abiword aren't responsible to "Linux," or Redhat, or RMS, or anyone else to maximize the user's desktop computing experience. If IT managers and John Q. Public don't want to use it, then fine. No skin of Abiword's back. They aren't after market-share.
That's the beauty of it. Nobody needs to tow the linux company line. If the author's of Abiword, first and foremost, wanted to make sure that their software was fit for all users and for corporate deployment, then they wouldn't have written their memo, and would quit their jobs and work on Abiword full-time, hire support personnel, etc., etc.,.
I don't think you should generalize about what the goals of linux programmers are.
It didn't really predict future technology, but is was/is certainly in the science fiction genre and is still, ~150 (?) years later, brought up in making arguments about genetic engineering, GM foods (FRANKENfoods!), and cloning, among other things.
I think the value of science fiction is not in predicting or suggesting technology, it's in analyzing our reaction to potential technologies. It forces us to consider the impact of certain devices or knowledges before they are directly in our faces. In fact, SF is invaluable in serving this purpose. And Frankenstein is probably the most successful science fiction book ever in this regard.
The chain of IMs and Usenet posts has to end somewhere, hopefully with someone who correctly answers the question. The point of gaining an education is to become THAT person, not the person asking the questions. And that takes practice at solving problems, not practice at asking questions.
This is the reason blind consumerism is ruining higher education.
Just because you paid your money doesn't mean that you don't owe respect to the people around you, and the teachers who are trying (in vain, apparently) to instruct you.
However, I think that professors deserve little bit more respect from their students. Students surfing the net and emailing while you're trying to teach is distracting and obnoxious.
But then, I majored in philosophy, so net-surfing wasn't a big problem in our classrooms:)
Officials at the Baltimore Museum of Art took down a Christopher Wool painting containing the word "Terrorist" (later, they promised to provide "new interpretation" for the painting when it is reinstalled).
I didn't konw that art galleries provided not just art, but interpretations of art as well. Full service! I wonder if they provide cue cards for faux-intellectual cocktail party smalltalk involving their exhibits...
Preacher. Ugh. I had that series recommended to me by someone who I thought had decent taste in comics. It is the bloody worst piece of infantile tripe I've ever had the misfortune to read. It was like reading a role-playing campaign run by 14 year old boys with ADD. Maybe it was just the series I read ("Gone to Texas"), but I wouldn't get anywhere near another series by these clowns after that experience. I feel dumber for having read it.
Avoid Preacher. But definitely read anything by Frank Miller, especially "Sin City" and "That Yellow Bastard".
I don't think mindless mass culture is anything new. Common "low-brow" culture has historically been somewhat crude and silly (not that there's anything wrong with that.). At least we don't do bear-baiting anymore.
What is new, and far more dangerous, is that parallel to this trend of dumbing-down mass culture Americans have also villified and ridiculed "high-brow" culture as pompous, stuffy, and elitist. Combine this with market forces driving the culture towards the median of intelligence, and effectively killing off any alternative. Welcome to the monoculture, gentlemen.
And the Meloi are from H.G. Well's Time Machine not Time Traveller.
Interestingly, there are actually papers in mathematics journals containing theorems proven by machines. In those cases, I was told they list the machine as a "co-author".
yeah, i know. what i meant was you would "inherit" the default list from AOL HQ (or whatever), and then modify your own PC list as you saw fit. Those self-mods would feed back into the master list and alter the settings (maybe). But whether it acutally caused a change in the master settings or not, your kids would still be able(/unable) to view sites according to the local list, not the master. the neural net should only be used for "default" settings, in my opinion. and i think that using neural nets for this is a pretty damn good idea. but not if it still removes local control from individual parents (as opposed to aggregate parents...).
my crack about being governed by "average" AOLers was meant as humour (kinda).
That's i guess a decent solution for once. Not ideal though. It means that all AOL-ers are now governed by the will of the "average" AOL member. That's a scary thought.
Ideally, instead of voting sites up or down, why not just let everybody host their own list? Instead of "voting" for the privelege of allowing your kids to view a site, just let them. And vice versa.
It seems that the New York Times has an interesting position here - while they have regularly posted rants in the editorial column against napster and what they refer to as the "looting" of other people's intellectual property, they're firmly in favor of being able to use freelance material without paying for it again.
But isn't that the right that everyone here is asserting with respect to mp3s? When we purchase a creative work, everybody here fights tooth and nail to be able to copy it, transform it and utilize it in whatever way they see fit. As they are perfectly justified in doing (insofar as it's personal use).
Isn't the NY Times justified in "publishing" a work they have purchased in multiple formats? Isn't that the whole point of everyone's venom against RIAA and MPAA? It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that they wouldn't be, or that it would automatically be piracy.
If they're ripping off artists, then so are you when you rip your CDs. I don't think either is the case.
The submitter may be overstating the bit about "open source": the proposal says "All software developed as a part of the program will be open, in the sense that program performers and other DARPA authorized users will have the right to view, use, modify, and distribute code within the program authorized community
Whew. The last thing we want is a bunch of B10-5kr1pt k1dd135 running around h4x0ring the neibourhood pets...
Oh really? How is that? I think maybe your definition of privacy is a little different from mine. I would consider privacy the right to maintain control over intimate, personal information. Nothing in the information they are sending in that header comes even close to being intimate or even personal. So they know the resolution of your monitor -- big deal, so does the company that sold it to you. So they know your connection speed -- big deal, so does your ISP.
I think people here should chill out and take some time to think about what makes privacy important. It is NOT the ability to live in absolute secrecy while obtaining free services, anonymously, from others.
In order to live in a society of other people, you have to tell people *something* about yourself. When you meet someone face-to-face, you tell them plenty about yourself. They now know all of your general physical features and personality characteristics. So what? This is the same thing, essentially. Earthlink is just requesting gross physical characteristics of your online presence.
You just need to know where to draw the line. This is well short of the line, folks.
i don't think the original comment was complaining about slow sites per se. He was trying to make suggestions as to how bandwidth costs could be reduced.
Page generation has exactly nothing to do with this.
The technology boom created a massive industry filled with people with little or no programming experience being thrown into large-scale projects. The (predictable) results are just now beginning to be discovered -- witness the recent SlashDot article about e-commerce sites that get price info on the client side.
Unfortunately for a lot of people, a maturing industry makes jobs obsolete pretty fast. HTML skills are no longer in as much demand because software is now available that does a pretty fair job of markup. The "soft" technology industry is being rendered obsolete by maturing technology (e.g., XML for markup)
Hopefully, this will act increase the standards of the programming field.
Not that it doesn't seriously suck to be unemployed, but that's capitalism for you. Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.
way to confuse technological development with revolution.
revolution is social, and happens in cycles. technological development is not cyclical, but continues in an upward direction.
the net is interesting because it is both technical and social, and JonKatz is (not surprisingly) confusing these two issues. In fact, what is happening is exactly what I would expect to happen under the circumstances:
1. Social movements, when they are successful, become the status quo. That's why it's cyclical. Albert Camus wrote about this. So, the internet has subsumed older methods of communication and cultural development, and now the 'normal' culture at large is trying to adapt to it and subsume it. No surprise here. What would be surprising is if the internet managed to, oh, i don't know, overthrough government or something (that Jon seems to be implying that it should). There is no "Internet Manifesto". That's because it's not a purely social development. duh.
2. The technology of the internet is contantly changing (which Jon mentions wrt P2P, etc.). This does not fragment the internet, it evolves it, and allows for new cultural changes. The current internet culture will be overthrown when some new system comes along.
the really interesting thing about the "internet revolution" is that it created a culture very uniquely and intimately tied to technological growth. THAT would be an interesting essay. Jon's, however, is boring, shallow and trite.
I think that getting a grocery card is a pretty clear-cut case of explicitly trading some information about you in exchange for discounts. What makes you think you are entitled to a grocery card?
Even with privacy laws in place, it is up to people to protect their own privacy. Worried about corporations misusing your information? Don't give it to them! I know it's not always that simple, but in the case of grocery cards, it certainly is.
Just because invasion of privacy is wrong, doesn't make it okay for you to volunteer faulty information in exchange for something of value. That's called cheating, lying and stealing.
Your overblown sense of entitlement is repulsive. Corporations don't owe you shit. Learn some ethics and take some bloody responsibility for your own privacy.
...because the goals are different. if you get an assignment from your CS class to write an tree optimizer or something, and you just reference a bunch of open-source stuff, you are not earning a good grade, even though this would be a perfectly legitimate (and encouraged) solution in the workplace.
CS is supposed to teach you to solve these problems, not just implement someone else's solution.
Contrary to popular belief (where i am, anyways), the point of a CS assignment is not to get a working program. It's to learn the techniques for yourself, and see what works, what doesn't, and why.
This may be contrary to what you'd do in the "real -world", but if you have a problem with it, go to college. Undergrad is for trying, not doing:)
A) Any point scored it a point allowed by the other team
that's trivially true, in the sense that if my opponent scores, then i failed to prevent him from scoring. and it doesn't make it zero-sum.
B) The result is a victory for one team and a loss for the other.
Again, that doesn't mean the game itself is zero-sum. Apparently (and surprisingly) hardly anbody on slashdot knows what the hell zero-sum means. It means there are no other resources besides those possessed by the players of the game. My gaining a resouce necessitates me taking it from you. Sports (by my reasoning) don't qualify, because both teams start at zero, and both teams gain points (and don't lose them).
I think this ask slashdot question conflates the ideas of "competition" and "zero-sum". Take, for example, common childrens games like hide-and-seek or tag. These are competitive games, but the are not zero-sum. The existence of a winner and a loser does not equal zero-sum (when the sum you're talking about is 'fun' or even 'points') Take basketball: zero-sum game? No. Points aren't scarce; your opponent getting a point doesn't take one from you. That's the definition of zero-sum. Even losing at a competition doesn't negate or take away the enjoyment you had while playing the game. A zero-sum game like this would mean that for my opponent to have more fun, i would have to have less. I've never experienced this phenomenon while playing chess or monopoly, even when I'm being beaten like a drum!
Furthermore, competition is fun and healthy, and I don't agree at all with the implication of the question that competition turns kids into win-at-all-costs sociopaths. Competition is a healthy encouragement to increase one's abilities. There is a great deal of (implicit) competition in the open-source community, and this is a great motivator to increase one's skills, and find one's "niche" in the community at large.
SlashDot is not an activist group, it is a news site. for nerds. not all nerds are into the same things; some of them even have tastes and opinions which conflict with those of other nerds. some nerds want to watch movies. some nerds want to boycott the MPAA. supporting all these diverse interests doesn't make SlashDot hypocritical, any more than your local newspaper is being hypocritical for publishing editorials of differring opinion.
so enhance your calm. Slashdot is a rich tapestry!
/bluesninja
Re:What distros include 2.4?
on
eWeek on Linux
·
· Score: 1
thats odd. i downloaded the ISO from their site and installed it a few weeks ago, and it had the 2.4 kernel.
maybe what they let you purchase and what they let you download is different? I know when you purchase you get support, so maybe they just don't want to give support to 2.4 yet?
Slashdot Mirror
What nonsense.
They did not decide they "don't want the profits." It's their property. They spent $140 million creating it. They aren't under any compulsion to sell it, profits or no.
How about I come over to your house, make copies of your home movies of you getting banged by your boyfriend, and then sell them on the 'net. You COULD have made a profit from them, but choose not to. And you still have the originals, so I'm not really "stealing," am I?
Nobody here but us rational economic actors.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far
Linux doesn't want anything -- it's an operating system, silly! Do you mean "if the programmers who write software for linux want it to be on desktops..."? Guess what: that's a diverse group including companies like Redhat, who undoubtably wants linux to be on a lot of desktops, and the people from Abiword, who just get their rocks off by writing neat software.
The authors of Abiword aren't responsible to "Linux," or Redhat, or RMS, or anyone else to maximize the user's desktop computing experience. If IT managers and John Q. Public don't want to use it, then fine. No skin of Abiword's back. They aren't after market-share.
That's the beauty of it. Nobody needs to tow the linux company line. If the author's of Abiword, first and foremost, wanted to make sure that their software was fit for all users and for corporate deployment, then they wouldn't have written their memo, and would quit their jobs and work on Abiword full-time, hire support personnel, etc., etc.,.
I don't think you should generalize about what the goals of linux programmers are.
/bluesninja
It didn't really predict future technology, but is was/is certainly in the science fiction genre and is still, ~150 (?) years later, brought up in making arguments about genetic engineering, GM foods (FRANKENfoods!), and cloning, among other things.
I think the value of science fiction is not in predicting or suggesting technology, it's in analyzing our reaction to potential technologies. It forces us to consider the impact of certain devices or knowledges before they are directly in our faces. In fact, SF is invaluable in serving this purpose. And Frankenstein is probably the most successful science fiction book ever in this regard.
/bluesninja
The chain of IMs and Usenet posts has to end somewhere, hopefully with someone who correctly answers the question. The point of gaining an education is to become THAT person, not the person asking the questions. And that takes practice at solving problems, not practice at asking questions.
That's why it's considered cheating.
/bluesninja
This is the reason blind consumerism is ruining higher education.
Just because you paid your money doesn't mean that you don't owe respect to the people around you, and the teachers who are trying (in vain, apparently) to instruct you.
Thanks for dropping out.
/bluesninja
Amen!
:)
However, I think that professors deserve little bit more respect from their students. Students surfing the net and emailing while you're trying to teach is distracting and obnoxious.
But then, I majored in philosophy, so net-surfing wasn't a big problem in our classrooms
bluesninja
I didn't konw that art galleries provided not just art, but interpretations of art as well. Full service! I wonder if they provide cue cards for faux-intellectual cocktail party smalltalk involving their exhibits...
/bluesninja
Preacher. Ugh. I had that series recommended to me by someone who I thought had decent taste in comics. It is the bloody worst piece of infantile tripe I've ever had the misfortune to read. It was like reading a role-playing campaign run by 14 year old boys with ADD. Maybe it was just the series I read ("Gone to Texas"), but I wouldn't get anywhere near another series by these clowns after that experience. I feel dumber for having read it.
Avoid Preacher. But definitely read anything by Frank Miller, especially "Sin City" and "That Yellow Bastard".
Sandman is good too.
/bluesninja
I don't think mindless mass culture is anything new. Common "low-brow" culture has historically been somewhat crude and silly (not that there's anything wrong with that.). At least we don't do bear-baiting anymore.
What is new, and far more dangerous, is that parallel to this trend of dumbing-down mass culture Americans have also villified and ridiculed "high-brow" culture as pompous, stuffy, and elitist. Combine this with market forces driving the culture towards the median of intelligence, and effectively killing off any alternative. Welcome to the monoculture, gentlemen.
And the Meloi are from H.G. Well's Time Machine not Time Traveller.
/bluesninja
Interestingly, there are actually papers in mathematics journals containing theorems proven by machines. In those cases, I was told they list the machine as a "co-author".
/blueninja
yeah, i know. what i meant was you would "inherit" the default list from AOL HQ (or whatever), and then modify your own PC list as you saw fit. Those self-mods would feed back into the master list and alter the settings (maybe). But whether it acutally caused a change in the master settings or not, your kids would still be able(/unable) to view sites according to the local list, not the master. the neural net should only be used for "default" settings, in my opinion. and i think that using neural nets for this is a pretty damn good idea. but not if it still removes local control from individual parents (as opposed to aggregate parents...).
my crack about being governed by "average" AOLers was meant as humour (kinda).
/bluesninja
That's i guess a decent solution for once. Not ideal though. It means that all AOL-ers are now governed by the will of the "average" AOL member. That's a scary thought.
Ideally, instead of voting sites up or down, why not just let everybody host their own list? Instead of "voting" for the privelege of allowing your kids to view a site, just let them. And vice versa.
/bluesninja
It seems that the New York Times has an interesting position here - while they have regularly posted rants in the editorial column against napster and what they refer to as the "looting" of other people's intellectual property, they're firmly in favor of being able to use freelance material without paying for it again.
But isn't that the right that everyone here is asserting with respect to mp3s? When we purchase a creative work, everybody here fights tooth and nail to be able to copy it, transform it and utilize it in whatever way they see fit. As they are perfectly justified in doing (insofar as it's personal use).
Isn't the NY Times justified in "publishing" a work they have purchased in multiple formats? Isn't that the whole point of everyone's venom against RIAA and MPAA? It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that they wouldn't be, or that it would automatically be piracy.
If they're ripping off artists, then so are you when you rip your CDs. I don't think either is the case.
/bluesninja
The submitter may be overstating the bit about "open source": the proposal says "All software developed as a part of the program will be open, in the sense that program performers and other DARPA authorized users will have the right to view, use, modify, and distribute code within the program authorized community
Whew. The last thing we want is a bunch of B10-5kr1pt k1dd135 running around h4x0ring the neibourhood pets...
/bluesninja
Yes, its an invasion of privacy
Oh really? How is that? I think maybe your definition of privacy is a little different from mine. I would consider privacy the right to maintain control over intimate, personal information. Nothing in the information they are sending in that header comes even close to being intimate or even personal. So they know the resolution of your monitor -- big deal, so does the company that sold it to you. So they know your connection speed -- big deal, so does your ISP.
I think people here should chill out and take some time to think about what makes privacy important. It is NOT the ability to live in absolute secrecy while obtaining free services, anonymously, from others.
In order to live in a society of other people, you have to tell people *something* about yourself. When you meet someone face-to-face, you tell them plenty about yourself. They now know all of your general physical features and personality characteristics. So what? This is the same thing, essentially. Earthlink is just requesting gross physical characteristics of your online presence.
You just need to know where to draw the line. This is well short of the line, folks.
/bluesninja
i don't think the original comment was complaining about slow sites per se. He was trying to make suggestions as to how bandwidth costs could be reduced.
Page generation has exactly nothing to do with this.
/bluesninja
...and that's a good thing.
The technology boom created a massive industry filled with people with little or no programming experience being thrown into large-scale projects. The (predictable) results are just now beginning to be discovered -- witness the recent SlashDot article about e-commerce sites that get price info on the client side.
Unfortunately for a lot of people, a maturing industry makes jobs obsolete pretty fast. HTML skills are no longer in as much demand because software is now available that does a pretty fair job of markup. The "soft" technology industry is being rendered obsolete by maturing technology (e.g., XML for markup)
Hopefully, this will act increase the standards of the programming field.
Not that it doesn't seriously suck to be unemployed, but that's capitalism for you. Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.
/spm
way to confuse technological development with revolution.
revolution is social, and happens in cycles. technological development is not cyclical, but continues in an upward direction.
the net is interesting because it is both technical and social, and JonKatz is (not surprisingly) confusing these two issues. In fact, what is happening is exactly what I would expect to happen under the circumstances:
1. Social movements, when they are successful, become the status quo. That's why it's cyclical. Albert Camus wrote about this. So, the internet has subsumed older methods of communication and cultural development, and now the 'normal' culture at large is trying to adapt to it and subsume it. No surprise here. What would be surprising is if the internet managed to, oh, i don't know, overthrough government or something (that Jon seems to be implying that it should). There is no "Internet Manifesto". That's because it's not a purely social development. duh.
2. The technology of the internet is contantly changing (which Jon mentions wrt P2P, etc.). This does not fragment the internet, it evolves it, and allows for new cultural changes. The current internet culture will be overthrown when some new system comes along.
the really interesting thing about the "internet revolution" is that it created a culture very uniquely and intimately tied to technological growth. THAT would be an interesting essay. Jon's, however, is boring, shallow and trite.
/bluesninja
I think that getting a grocery card is a pretty clear-cut case of explicitly trading some information about you in exchange for discounts. What makes you think you are entitled to a grocery card?
Even with privacy laws in place, it is up to people to protect their own privacy. Worried about corporations misusing your information? Don't give it to them! I know it's not always that simple, but in the case of grocery cards, it certainly is.
Just because invasion of privacy is wrong, doesn't make it okay for you to volunteer faulty information in exchange for something of value. That's called cheating, lying and stealing.
Your overblown sense of entitlement is repulsive. Corporations don't owe you shit. Learn some ethics and take some bloody responsibility for your own privacy.
/bluesninja
Thats easy: self-replicating. duh. /bluesninja
...because the goals are different. if you get an assignment from your CS class to write an tree optimizer or something, and you just reference a bunch of open-source stuff, you are not earning a good grade, even though this would be a perfectly legitimate (and encouraged) solution in the workplace.
CS is supposed to teach you to solve these problems, not just implement someone else's solution.
Contrary to popular belief (where i am, anyways), the point of a CS assignment is not to get a working program. It's to learn the techniques for yourself, and see what works, what doesn't, and why.
This may be contrary to what you'd do in the "real -world", but if you have a problem with it, go to college. Undergrad is for trying, not doing :)
/bluesninja
A) Any point scored it a point allowed by the other team
that's trivially true, in the sense that if my opponent scores, then i failed to prevent him from scoring. and it doesn't make it zero-sum.
B) The result is a victory for one team and a loss for the other.
Again, that doesn't mean the game itself is zero-sum. Apparently (and surprisingly) hardly anbody on slashdot knows what the hell zero-sum means. It means there are no other resources besides those possessed by the players of the game. My gaining a resouce necessitates me taking it from you. Sports (by my reasoning) don't qualify, because both teams start at zero, and both teams gain points (and don't lose them).
/bluesninja
I think this ask slashdot question conflates the ideas of "competition" and "zero-sum". Take, for example, common childrens games like hide-and-seek or tag. These are competitive games, but the are not zero-sum. The existence of a winner and a loser does not equal zero-sum (when the sum you're talking about is 'fun' or even 'points') Take basketball: zero-sum game? No. Points aren't scarce; your opponent getting a point doesn't take one from you. That's the definition of zero-sum. Even losing at a competition doesn't negate or take away the enjoyment you had while playing the game. A zero-sum game like this would mean that for my opponent to have more fun, i would have to have less. I've never experienced this phenomenon while playing chess or monopoly, even when I'm being beaten like a drum!
Furthermore, competition is fun and healthy, and I don't agree at all with the implication of the question that competition turns kids into win-at-all-costs sociopaths. Competition is a healthy encouragement to increase one's abilities. There is a great deal of (implicit) competition in the open-source community, and this is a great motivator to increase one's skills, and find one's "niche" in the community at large.
/bluesninja
ok, i'll bite.
SlashDot is not an activist group, it is a news site. for nerds. not all nerds are into the same things; some of them even have tastes and opinions which conflict with those of other nerds. some nerds want to watch movies. some nerds want to boycott the MPAA. supporting all these diverse interests doesn't make SlashDot hypocritical, any more than your local newspaper is being hypocritical for publishing editorials of differring opinion.
so enhance your calm. Slashdot is a rich tapestry!
/bluesninja
thats odd. i downloaded the ISO from their site and installed it a few weeks ago, and it had the 2.4 kernel.
maybe what they let you purchase and what they let you download is different? I know when you purchase you get support, so maybe they just don't want to give support to 2.4 yet?
didn't mean to spread misinformation.
/bluesninja