What a load of old bollocks. The GPL *is* the reason that Linux has been so successful. As an operating system it's not particularly well crafted or revolutionary in some ways - certainly in comparison with the BSD's, and even less so in the early days.
People started using Linux, and then adding to Linux, because the source was theirs and the GPL meant it would always remain so. They would always have the benefit of their contributions plus the added benefit of everybody else's contributions.
Just because the GPL isn't a perfect for every business model that could use a nice cheap OS like Linux, doesn't mean it isn't a very good model in itself.
I challenge anyone to give me one other good reason why Linux is more widespread now than any of the BSD's.
It's not that hard to see how it would evolve. First you have a fungal parasite that preys on ants. It is succesful because ants naturally travel large distances (at that scale) so the fungus' spores get spread further. A variant of the fungus develops that causes ant to behave erratically some times. This might be successful because an erratic ant might spread the spores to places the spores wouldn't normally get. Then you get variants that can cause the ant to develop different behaviour, but the behavioural change is predictable. After that it's pure Darwin, an ant that climbs up a blade of grass will spread spores further than an ant that goes round and round in circles for example.
In my first job we had 132 developers working on a 128-bead abacus. If you had to leave the room, you gobbed on the abacus first so that noone else would touch it.
In the evening we used to sit round and play frogger with real frogs.
I'm not sure how you work this out. The library at Alexandria was destroyed by fire, which would certainly destroy your DVD's as well. Even without such catastrophes CD's and DVD's have been known to oxidise and become unreadable in less than 10 years (in my own experience) can be destroyed by fairly light scratching. They certainly haven't proven to last for hundreds of years, as a great deal of paper has, let alone the thousands of years that some clay and stone tablets have survived.
What I think is interesting is the fact that these (alleged) extortionists have been targeting online gambling businesses. Why these businesses particularly?
I'm going to put forward a theory based on some completely unsubstantiated rumours I have heard. A mate of a mate of some bloke in the pub tells me that a lot of online gambling sites do at least a sideline in money laundering. That is, two people log onto the site, one 'loses' a large amount of money, the other 'wins' a similar amount of money at the same time.
It might be that they were picking on businesses they thought wouldn't be too keen to talk to police.
Also from the Register; Some guy gets picked up by Special Branch for sharing Clash lyrics by SMS.
I imagine this happens to most SMS messages in Europe. (Echelon conspiracies, yada yada) The US may have a less joined-up Big Brother, but that will probably have more to do with the general lack of integration of their mobile network.
I don't know many schizophrenics very well, but I have a couple of friends who suffer from it's poorer cousin, manic depression. (My understanding is that the latter can sometimes develop into the former.)
I would generally agree that Slashdot is not the best place to seek advice, except that these same people are often otherwise intelligent and talented people, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a larger percentage of such people in IT than in the general population.
From what my friends have told me it is an *emotional* disorder; i.e. often aggravated by stress etc. but also can be brought on by emotional highs as well. Manic depressives and schizophrenics have to learn to watch out for highs as well as the lows and control both.
The other thing is, talk to other mental illness sufferers as well as doctors. These people have to take a lifelong interest in the way their illnesses work, are often quite intelligent people (as I said earlier) and can in some respects provide as useful information as your doctor.
They will frequently make very supportive friends as well, simply because they know how important that can be.
Of course I am neither a doctor nor a schizophrenic myself.
He is railing against one of the core assumptions of capitalism. Producers will become more efficient and reduce production costs in order to produce goods at a lower price and gain a larger market share. Free software is the logical endpoint of this. Once software is written it costs effectively zero dollars to reproduce, so it is "sold" at the price also. It works because people use it to sell other goods and services on the back-end (hardware, consultancy...) He is simply advocating protectionism to control the means of production - and that's the big red button that breaks the free market philosophy.
I'm sorry, H.323 is a complete pile of horse nuggets, and I say that as someone who uses it. I have to accept connections on 12 different tcp ports on my firewall, and open up 12 different udp ports at the same time. And support about 10 different audio codecs and probably a similar number of video codecs.
I can only do this on one PC on my home network because I haven't got a special h.323-friendly firewall.
I have to know how to set my firewall up in the first place, if it comes to that.
If you want to see voip done right, look at Skype. Now if gaim were to become interoperable with Skype that would be pretty cool...
The ex-presidents are a team of bank robbers. Not only that but they're really good bank robbers. They can get in and out of a bank with the moeny in under 60 seconds and be gone before the cops even find out a robbery has taken place. Yet in spite of that the cops and justice system keep trying to punish them for being "really good" at something.
I'm not trying to imply that Microsoft are just criminals (although they are that as well of course) but I want to point out that it is possible to become extremely competent at an activity that is not socially beneficial.
And society will, quite rightly, attempt to prevent you from carrying on that activity.
Microsoft are going to spend money and timedevaluing their product to sell it to people who can't afford it at their current price. This from a company that makes a profit of over $1 billion a quarter.
I'm going to take this opportunity to plug Haccess, A set of fast, cross-platform, thread-safe C++ libraries for accessing Microsoft Access database files. So far written entirely by my friend Oliver, it badly needs some dedicated C++ programmers to help out. I believe it has already made its way into OpenOffice as a filter.
Hmm... I hate to admit it but this probably a fair comment. Failure rates on RTOS's is a known metric. If they used commercial hardware and commercially used software, did they check out the numbers? I would be surprised if Linux beat out QNX as the most reliable embedded operating system.
From the website: For private use only, but you can purchase additional rights, I don't know what the terms would be. Follow a link to a particular image and see shopping basket buttons and an email address archive.sales@itn.co.uk
Slashdot Mirror
What a load of old bollocks. The GPL *is* the reason that Linux has been so successful. As an operating system it's not particularly well crafted or revolutionary in some ways - certainly in comparison with the BSD's, and even less so in the early days.
People started using Linux, and then adding to Linux, because the source was theirs and the GPL meant it would always remain so. They would always have the benefit of their contributions plus the added benefit of everybody else's contributions.
Just because the GPL isn't a perfect for every business model that could use a nice cheap OS like Linux, doesn't mean it isn't a very good model in itself.
I challenge anyone to give me one other good reason why Linux is more widespread now than any of the BSD's.
It's not that hard to see how it would evolve. First you have a fungal parasite that preys on ants. It is succesful because ants naturally travel large distances (at that scale) so the fungus' spores get spread further. A variant of the fungus develops that causes ant to behave erratically some times. This might be successful because an erratic ant might spread the spores to places the spores wouldn't normally get. Then you get variants that can cause the ant to develop different behaviour, but the behavioural change is predictable. After that it's pure Darwin, an ant that climbs up a blade of grass will spread spores further than an ant that goes round and round in circles for example.
In my first job we had 132 developers working on a 128-bead abacus. If you had to leave the room, you gobbed on the abacus first so that noone else would touch it.
In the evening we used to sit round and play frogger with real frogs.
One day the oil will run out.
Oil is a finite resource. The large car companies know this and are looking at the future with an eye to their own survival.
If they want to b around when runs out they'll need a new raison d'etre.
Why are you so quick to assume that Cuban people aren't capable of appreciating higher ideals of freedom?
I'm not sure how you work this out. The library at Alexandria was destroyed by fire, which would certainly destroy your DVD's as well. Even without such catastrophes CD's and DVD's have been known to oxidise and become unreadable in less than 10 years (in my own experience) can be destroyed by fairly light scratching. They certainly haven't proven to last for hundreds of years, as a great deal of paper has, let alone the thousands of years that some clay and stone tablets have survived.
ilovebees.com consistently crashes Mozilla 1.6 on Gentoo Linux (kde) for me.
I don't like it. No sir, I don't like it at all.
What I think is interesting is the fact that these (alleged) extortionists have been targeting online gambling businesses. Why these businesses particularly?
I'm going to put forward a theory based on some completely unsubstantiated rumours I have heard. A mate of a mate of some bloke in the pub tells me that a lot of online gambling sites do at least a sideline in money laundering. That is, two people log onto the site, one 'loses' a large amount of money, the other 'wins' a similar amount of money at the same time.
It might be that they were picking on businesses they thought wouldn't be too keen to talk to police.
Some guy gets picked up by Special Branch for sharing Clash lyrics by SMS.
I imagine this happens to most SMS messages in Europe. (Echelon conspiracies, yada yada) The US may have a less joined-up Big Brother, but that will probably have more to do with the general lack of integration of their mobile network.
Rich capitalist pigs are trying to steal the internet off the people who make it actually work for them.
;)
I say turn the internet off for a couple of days, see how they like that
None of us have ever heard of that movie
I don't know many schizophrenics very well, but I have a couple of friends who suffer from it's poorer cousin, manic depression. (My understanding is that the latter can sometimes develop into the former.)
I would generally agree that Slashdot is not the best place to seek advice, except that these same people are often otherwise intelligent and talented people, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a larger percentage of such people in IT than in the general population.
From what my friends have told me it is an *emotional* disorder; i.e. often aggravated by stress etc. but also can be brought on by emotional highs as well. Manic depressives and schizophrenics have to learn to watch out for highs as well as the lows and control both.
The other thing is, talk to other mental illness sufferers as well as doctors. These people have to take a lifelong interest in the way their illnesses work, are often quite intelligent people (as I said earlier) and can in some respects provide as useful information as your doctor.
They will frequently make very supportive friends as well, simply because they know how important that can be.
Of course I am neither a doctor nor a schizophrenic myself.
He is railing against one of the core assumptions of capitalism. Producers will become more efficient and reduce production costs in order to produce goods at a lower price and gain a larger market share.
Free software is the logical endpoint of this. Once software is written it costs effectively zero dollars to reproduce, so it is "sold" at the price also.
It works because people use it to sell other goods and services on the back-end (hardware, consultancy...)
He is simply advocating protectionism to control the means of production - and that's the big red button that breaks the free market philosophy.
I'm sorry, H.323 is a complete pile of horse nuggets, and I say that as someone who uses it. I have to accept connections on 12 different tcp ports on my firewall, and open up 12 different udp ports at the same time. And support about 10 different audio codecs and probably a similar number of video codecs.
I can only do this on one PC on my home network because I haven't got a special h.323-friendly firewall.
I have to know how to set my firewall up in the first place, if it comes to that.
If you want to see voip done right, look at Skype. Now if gaim were to become interoperable with Skype that would be pretty cool...
I'm not trying to imply that Microsoft are just criminals (although they are that as well of course) but I want to point out that it is possible to become extremely competent at an activity that is not socially beneficial.
And society will, quite rightly, attempt to prevent you from carrying on that activity.
Seriously, but what OS does it run? Can I write apps for it? Any phone that isn't a computer is already outdated.
Think I'll check out Zultys...
The only thing this guy is guilty of is making a large number of prank calls to 911. Does this really count as cyberterrorism?
Microsoft are going to spend money and time devaluing their product to sell it to people who can't afford it at their current price. This from a company that makes a profit of over $1 billion a quarter.
I'm going to take this opportunity to plug Haccess, A set of fast, cross-platform, thread-safe C++ libraries for accessing Microsoft Access database files.
So far written entirely by my friend Oliver, it badly needs some dedicated C++ programmers to help out. I believe it has already made its way into OpenOffice as a filter.
Hmm... I hate to admit it but this probably a fair comment.
Failure rates on RTOS's is a known metric. If they used commercial hardware and commercially used software, did they check out the numbers? I would be surprised if Linux beat out QNX as the most reliable embedded operating system.
I, for one, welcome our new small-to-medium enterprise overlords...
From the website:
For private use only, but you can purchase additional rights, I don't know what the terms would be. Follow a link to a particular image and see shopping basket buttons and an email address archive.sales@itn.co.uk
And somehow it seems strangely appropriate that today is international Talk Like A Pirate Day.
See also
The operating system should be the little man's firewall. ISP's shouldn't be patching holes in Micro$oft's OSes.