I am not saying that one has to have fully-functional programming languages associated with office applications.
Last time I checked, the macro language for Word was object oriented. AFAIK, Emacs is the only word processor with a functional programming language for macros.
If you have 3 desktops and a laptop, why wouldn't you make one a server, download the packages via express service to that machine, and pick it up from the other machines from there? Is this Red Carpet more than just a fancy package manager? And how many updates are there that this takes so much bandwidth to service?
I agree that this price seems a tad high. Maybe for non-security updates, CD subscriptions would be more appropriate (with diff files for the source being offered on the net for those who absolutely *must* bleed around the edges). This also helps decentralize the permanent source code record (good for Free Software).
Shut up AC-hole-- I don't give a fuck which sounds better on your $8000 stereo. It was a joke, y'know? Irony. The fact that fifteen years ago these CDs were our high-tech saviors because the signal was so pure. And now, because they aren't making money fast enough, they are going to purposefully degrade the signal?
Duh. What was the point then? If they want to make it hard to rip audio releases, why don't they just release everything on vinyl again? Ripping vinyl is a pain in the ass. Plus we have the added benefit that you audiofile dickheads can then shut the fuck up about the superior quality of analog-- but it seems to me the urge to get all you audio purists to buy all your albums again, only digitally remastered was half the reason they came out with CDs in the first place.
I don't know, but these were the same students the author is quoting as saying (as of mid-to-late 2001) that "Linux is too hard to install". I bet I could train my dog to install Red Hat 7.2 with nothing more than two floppy disks and a high speed network connection. The puppy's biggest challenge would be that she lacks opposable thumbs and can't read. I assume these college kids have the former and can do the latter. Hell, Linux was *written* by some college kid, and these kids can't *install* it?
No kidding! If you read your historical primary sources about Linux, you will find that Linux was originally designed as an alternative to Minix. See this Usenet post for example.
More importantly, in a recent kernel development mailing list discussion Linus has indicated that Linux is following an evolutionary growth. Things people want, that are coded well, and make sense from an overall perspective are put into the main tree. Other, more problematic or minority positions require forking, and usually some patching. Witness the existence of the Linux kernel for a number of different CPU architectures.
1. Well, the reason this is a slight victory is that it is mostly impossible to stop and even the average idiot can do it. None of us were complaining too much about the quality of the tapes we'd made from records, but then we weren't trying to share those with millions of people we didn't know over a worldwide network either.
2. This isn't that scary either. Like DeCSS, the algorithm for removing the protection isn't going to change from CD to CD. One smart guy with a compiler can make a tool the rest of us can use.
3. This is the crux of the issue. Especially since these CDs will be labeled as being "protected" (as in racket). And I think the software will be deemed illegal as it circumventions the "protection" racket. Playing DVDs with source-available players (as opposed to proprietary players) doesn't seem to be a violation of the DMCA either, but talking about some code like that sure has gotten 2600 in trouble. Why would this code be different?
If you had read the article, you would have known that they plan to sticker these CDs with a notice that they are "protected" (as in racket). Be thankful I don't work in a CD shop because if you tried that routine on me, I think I'd 86 you in a quick hurry.
Telling "the user" to save the file in a certain way is not the way open source software will spread. Instread, it should open as many formats as possible.
Yeah, because no one will ever ask that user to please save files so that the huge majority of users on older versions of Windows can open it as well. Early adopters who forge ahead breaking standards willy-nilly deserve to be stuck with the inconvenience of making sure they're the ones who bend over backwards if they want the rest of us to read their files. While I agree that it would be nice for various free software projects to be able to accurately import MS files, if there are version back-compatibilities with other Windows installs, it's not like us zealots are the only ones being impacted.
The whole tactic of breaking back-compatibility for document formats is something that Microsoft could have anticipated and planned for a decade ago with little real effort, but making new documents at least partially operable on older installs would provide less inducement for me to upgrade.
And why does this only work one way? I'm just a user... why if I create a document in KWord or KPresenter do I not have the right to expect MS users to just be able to open my documents? If MS users come whining about that will you be telling *them* to take it to Microsoft and defending *me*?
I think it's probably illegal for the same reason that writing a program to play DVDs on a GNU/Linux computer without a license was illegal (supposedly) even if you own a licensed playback device like a PS2 or a regular DVD player that hooks to your TV. Of course, I'm just being pessimistic. If the large business files a suit against me that isn't obviously frivolous on its face, guess who winds up losing even if he wins the court case?
Wouldn't it be great if it turned out to be audible to certain animals and act either as an irritant, repellent, or attractant?
Can you imagine dropping in the latest CD and your dog goes nuts? Or how about if all the raccoons in the neighborhood starting hanging out in your yard...
The copy restriction scheme (if I understand it correctly) involves putting noise into the data stream that normal error correction in stereo racks, boomboxes and the like correct for. So yes, it should be easy enough to lift the actual data stream from the disc and remove these anomalies in the streams. If they can error correct in hardware, we can certainly error correct in software.
Even easier math to code up would be to play the audio to an analog channel and feed that back into the sound-in plug on your computer. If you are hyper-concerned about fidelity you can copy it four or five times and blend the copies together using an averaging algorithm (the composite stream is more likely to be accurate to the original than any of the instance streams).
Of course, none of this will protect you from the low quality of the original content, and frankly I think it's ironic that in order to protect the copying of a high quality digital stream they are basically degrading the quality of the signal. If I wanted a degraded signal I'd go back to tapes and vinyl (and please, no audiofile flames about sound range and that stuff, okay?).
I suppose I've just violated the DMCA by providing fairly vague instructions on how to circumvent this so-called protection (as in racket) device.
Re:So THEY've been putting all those bugs!
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 1
According to Desler, Microsoft has rigorous processes in place during the development of Windows to ensure the security and integrity of source code.
It appears the process is already in place and works well! Too bad they concentrated on integrating security at the development phase, but forgot to think about it during the design and architecture phases.
Hmmm. Physiology and psychology are so unrelated that they invented a whole field called psychiatry to study this merger between the physical and mental arenas
The brain-- arguably the *only* place emotions and personality exists-- is itself made up of cells which are only interesting in that they constantly carry out a series of various chemical reactions.
The brain is not dropped in whole by some external force, complete with skills and knowledge. In fact, it is grown according the "blueprints" contained in the DNA of the organism. The brain does not stop growing for several years after birth, which obviously allows it emergent interactions with the world to also have an effect on its growth-- especially at the chemical level certain balances of various compounds would seem to be critical in certain developments.
Rather than being suspicious of any concept which generalizes from physiology to psychology, we should be suspicious of any psychology or sociology which does not take physiological matters into account. (And frankly, at this point sociology can do little more than describe the results of group behaviors-- maybe when psychiatry can more accurately determine how one individual achieves a state, then it can start to offer theorems as to how this works when there is a group-- I posit the two may even be intertwined and need simultaneous explanations. Or maybe I've been reading too much Asimov lately).
However, we can obviously discount the majority of something like frenology because lumps on the outside of the head do not seem remotely causal to brain development, nor is likely they result specifically from distinct brain developments.
So finally we are still left with the problem... can genetics determine careers? Well not exactly. But in a society such as that of the US, careers are highly focused activities, and access to many careers is limited through various vetting procedures (schools, unions, etc). Therefore only people with specific makeups are likely to enter those careers-- many of which *do* require a degree of specialization wherein specific aptitudes are quite indicative of future success.
If a person is *extremely* good at math, then as long as they are socially able and financially have access to tools like a college education, it seems likely that along the way they will find a career which focuses that skill (on the assumption that they probably also *like* math enough to want to do it more than occasionally)-- hence they may well end up an actuarialist, or a financial analyst, or a cryptographer, or any other discipline closely related to raw math.
This assumption can be extrapolated to many disciplines. And I think most of these underlying talents are genetically determined. So the suggestion to breed outside one's profession is not quite wide enough, perhaps. If you are heavily weighted to an "autistic" career type, you must choose another career type altogether-- unfortunately I'd say autistics are the least likely to do this.
The evidence presented in the article seems to bear this out. Even if *all* of the genes that promote autism are recessive or the environmental factors that cause a leaning that way are unlikely, those genes and/or environmental conditions seem to be prominent in programming communities.
This leads to a higher likelihood of getting double recessives in the phenotype *or* an increased likelihood that any environmental factors will not be countered by environmental variations in the homes where these children live. The fact that the families described are often double-earners with children spending plenty of time outside the home indicates to me that the determination is more genetic than environmental.
Of course, I can also think of a few counter-arguments, ranging from "there is no problem, this is simply a newfound awareness" to "so suddenly it's concentrated in SiliValley-- is it decreasing elsewhere?" to "even if the kids are out of the home a lot, the parental environment, especially prenatal, immediately post-natal, and in terms of a majority of time spent in emotionally connective activity, is still a *huge* factor-- so we need to examine the environments as well as the genetics for commonalities in families where the syndrome occurs".
Used their products without paying? How very clever. But copying stuff without paying for the right to do so isn't exactly a boycott.
How about choosing a free alternative, and letting us know about that instead? That's what I've done. I much prefer the clean, honest feeling I have at the end of the day, to some icky, "ooh I got away with copying Windows" feeling I'd have if I'd just copied Windows from a friend. Heck, just using Windows at work makes me feel icky.
You know I'm looking at the Handbook again, and either it's been changed in the last few days or (more likely) I totally missed the sentence that says you have TWO ways to install sound, listed first is kldload, then they mention recompiling the kernel. I think I'm probably biased in favor of recompiling custom kernels because they are usually smaller, faster, and that has to be better for everyone involved. Besides, having to monkey with the module load process is no more fun than putting that effort into recompiling.
Unlike Red Hat, there is nothing on FreeBSD that takes away the true hacker-only nature of the system.
The partitioning, as the article points out is mostly manual, but only if you can't dedicate your drive... if you can dedicate you press one key and it does a default partition scheme, ditto mount points. This is not a problem for any but the types who can't RTFM long enough to find out what page of the FM they're on.
The package system vs. ports is slightly confusing, especially since so much stuff appears in both places, how do you know which to use when and why? I'm sure this confusion is cleared up by reading the Handbook in depth. Ditto the fact that the ports system isn't just a system for getting and compiling tarballs-- it's a whole packaging system unto itself, just a bit more CPU intensive than rpm.
Speaking of the handbook, here's my favorite line (from memory, may not be exact) "recompiling a kernel is a rite of passage for Unix users". There, they said it, plain and simple you *will* recompile the kernel... and they're right, the generic kernel has no support for sound, so off to the config files you go. Hello make and make install! FWIW, they're 100% right, compiling a custom kernel is just too important not to learn to do it on either BSD or Linux systems.
IMHO, FreeBSD is not a suitable system for a computing newbie, unless they have a patient, available hacker friend. It might be a good introduction to x86 Unix for someone who's used a Unix mainframe at school/work (where someone else was the sysadmin). And it might be a good introduction to Unix for an advanced Windows user. And for the hacker? Of course it's a great choice, especially that ports system. I've not seen a Linux distro with that level of commitment to the offsite code base.
But best of all, no one's running around saying it should be called GNU/BSD! And with good reason, if you're used to the GNU binutils and BASH, you're in for a bit of a surprise with FreeBSD.
It reads like math because it is math! And expressing it in mathematical notation is actually more expressive than the lawyer-esque prose required to say most formulae out loud.
My question: rather than convincing judges that software is speech, wouldn't it be more efficient to convince the establishment that most of this stuff is just math? At that point, wouldn't algorithm patents (thinking mp3 here) fall away, and wouldn't it be pretty obvious that things like DeCSS are hardly less appropriate than teaching children to do long division?
Well, I had LOTR calendars several years as a boy, but frankly I find the Burger King tie-in disgusting. J.K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter, for anyone who is a little slow) refused the fast food stuff. Good for her! Only wish Tolkien's estate would have had the same level of sense.
I agree. This isn't even a decent consumer warning, this is a bunch of moralistic claptrap. What gets me is it's all about repressing the violent urges of young males. There isn't one mention on this list about the potentially huge dangers in terms of self-destructive self image issues that toys like Barbie dolls present to girls.
And for the record I don't believe playing with action figures, war toys, or Barbies have a causal relation to any mental/emotional/social state later in life. If anything, they provide no models for behavior, but allow children to role-play... a key method children use to explore the range of human experience and emotion.
No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork and background checks are required to buy firearms in the U.S.
Hmmm. That's not actually true. I bought a shotgun, and yes, I had to fill out some paperwork, but there was no background check. And yes, when I've bought handguns I've had to either get a card from the local PD or undergo NICS (old and new procedure), but a lot of that relates only to established dealers with stores. A private collecter can sell to another private collector without such hassles. If you can cite federal laws that say otherwise, please let me know.
Which article is first and second here?! And where the heck do you get this "second coming of Socialism" nonsense?
The article on firstmonday.org not once suggested that Free Software would undermine Capitalism, in fact showed why the existence of Free Software was essentially a product of traditional capitalist theory-- and sought to criticize works like ESRs C&B insomuch as C&B promoted the notion that Free Software was the result of some radical shift in culture specific to hackers.
The article at govtech.com clearly discusses why several world governments are looking at Free Software, and their primary reasons are national pride and national security-- with an emphasis on the latter. They don't want to be beholden to an American corpooration, especially when that company might either purposefully (with backdoors) or accidentally (by hiding mistakes until too late) compromise national security in those nations.
Neither of these articles puts any weight behind a single economic or political system or another. Simply because China is nominally Communist, this reflects nothing about their reasons for adopting Linux. Germany and France are both in the Linux-leaning camp and they are both solid democracies and capitalist economies.
Or perhaps he's more comfortable expressing himself in C code and Portuguese (assuming I'm not mistaken that he's from Brazil, and probably speaks English as a second language). Slashdot may be an English language forum, but clearly Linux is not just the domain of English speaking folks.
Frankly, I'd say we're lucky some of the non-native English speakers involved have decided that English is suitable as a lingua franca. It's only the relative poverty and isolationism of that very large nation known as China that keeps the rest of us from learning Chinese in order to participate in international life. Ditto Spanish-- generally the primary language of countries with less economic clout, thus less ability to force the rest of us to speak Spanish.
Look at some other pockets of the Free Software community to get an idea, KDE is heavily German, IIRC. Ruby is primarily Japanese. It does not pay to underestimate the communication barrier that language might present some of the human hackers who might be wizards in C, but not so hot on a minor foreign language like English.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not saying that one has to have fully-functional programming languages associated with office applications.
Last time I checked, the macro language for Word was object oriented. AFAIK, Emacs is the only word processor with a functional programming language for macros.
If you have 3 desktops and a laptop, why wouldn't you make one a server, download the packages via express service to that machine, and pick it up from the other machines from there? Is this Red Carpet more than just a fancy package manager? And how many updates are there that this takes so much bandwidth to service?
I agree that this price seems a tad high. Maybe for non-security updates, CD subscriptions would be more appropriate (with diff files for the source being offered on the net for those who absolutely *must* bleed around the edges). This also helps decentralize the permanent source code record (good for Free Software).
Shut up AC-hole-- I don't give a fuck which sounds better on your $8000 stereo. It was a joke, y'know? Irony. The fact that fifteen years ago these CDs were our high-tech saviors because the signal was so pure. And now, because they aren't making money fast enough, they are going to purposefully degrade the signal?
Duh. What was the point then? If they want to make it hard to rip audio releases, why don't they just release everything on vinyl again? Ripping vinyl is a pain in the ass. Plus we have the added benefit that you audiofile dickheads can then shut the fuck up about the superior quality of analog-- but it seems to me the urge to get all you audio purists to buy all your albums again, only digitally remastered was half the reason they came out with CDs in the first place.
I don't know, but these were the same students the author is quoting as saying (as of mid-to-late 2001) that "Linux is too hard to install". I bet I could train my dog to install Red Hat 7.2 with nothing more than two floppy disks and a high speed network connection. The puppy's biggest challenge would be that she lacks opposable thumbs and can't read. I assume these college kids have the former and can do the latter. Hell, Linux was *written* by some college kid, and these kids can't *install* it?
No kidding! If you read your historical primary sources about Linux, you will find that Linux was originally designed as an alternative to Minix. See this Usenet post for example.
More importantly, in a recent kernel development mailing list discussion Linus has indicated that Linux is following an evolutionary growth. Things people want, that are coded well, and make sense from an overall perspective are put into the main tree. Other, more problematic or minority positions require forking, and usually some patching. Witness the existence of the Linux kernel for a number of different CPU architectures.
Heh. So shall we consider the Perl 6 development process to be a phase not unlike puberty?
1. Well, the reason this is a slight victory is that it is mostly impossible to stop and even the average idiot can do it. None of us were complaining too much about the quality of the tapes we'd made from records, but then we weren't trying to share those with millions of people we didn't know over a worldwide network either.
2. This isn't that scary either. Like DeCSS, the algorithm for removing the protection isn't going to change from CD to CD. One smart guy with a compiler can make a tool the rest of us can use.
3. This is the crux of the issue. Especially since these CDs will be labeled as being "protected" (as in racket). And I think the software will be deemed illegal as it circumventions the "protection" racket. Playing DVDs with source-available players (as opposed to proprietary players) doesn't seem to be a violation of the DMCA either, but talking about some code like that sure has gotten 2600 in trouble. Why would this code be different?
If you had read the article, you would have known that they plan to sticker these CDs with a notice that they are "protected" (as in racket). Be thankful I don't work in a CD shop because if you tried that routine on me, I think I'd 86 you in a quick hurry.
Telling "the user" to save the file in a certain way is not the way open source software will spread. Instread, it should open as many formats as possible.
Yeah, because no one will ever ask that user to please save files so that the huge majority of users on older versions of Windows can open it as well. Early adopters who forge ahead breaking standards willy-nilly deserve to be stuck with the inconvenience of making sure they're the ones who bend over backwards if they want the rest of us to read their files. While I agree that it would be nice for various free software projects to be able to accurately import MS files, if there are version back-compatibilities with other Windows installs, it's not like us zealots are the only ones being impacted.
The whole tactic of breaking back-compatibility for document formats is something that Microsoft could have anticipated and planned for a decade ago with little real effort, but making new documents at least partially operable on older installs would provide less inducement for me to upgrade.
And why does this only work one way? I'm just a user... why if I create a document in KWord or KPresenter do I not have the right to expect MS users to just be able to open my documents? If MS users come whining about that will you be telling *them* to take it to Microsoft and defending *me*?
I think it's probably illegal for the same reason that writing a program to play DVDs on a GNU/Linux computer without a license was illegal (supposedly) even if you own a licensed playback device like a PS2 or a regular DVD player that hooks to your TV. Of course, I'm just being pessimistic. If the large business files a suit against me that isn't obviously frivolous on its face, guess who winds up losing even if he wins the court case?
(inaudible to humans, supposedly)
Wouldn't it be great if it turned out to be audible to certain animals and act either as an irritant, repellent, or attractant?
Can you imagine dropping in the latest CD and your dog goes nuts? Or how about if all the raccoons in the neighborhood starting hanging out in your yard...
The copy restriction scheme (if I understand it correctly) involves putting noise into the data stream that normal error correction in stereo racks, boomboxes and the like correct for. So yes, it should be easy enough to lift the actual data stream from the disc and remove these anomalies in the streams. If they can error correct in hardware, we can certainly error correct in software.
Even easier math to code up would be to play the audio to an analog channel and feed that back into the sound-in plug on your computer. If you are hyper-concerned about fidelity you can copy it four or five times and blend the copies together using an averaging algorithm (the composite stream is more likely to be accurate to the original than any of the instance streams).
Of course, none of this will protect you from the low quality of the original content, and frankly I think it's ironic that in order to protect the copying of a high quality digital stream they are basically degrading the quality of the signal. If I wanted a degraded signal I'd go back to tapes and vinyl (and please, no audiofile flames about sound range and that stuff, okay?).
I suppose I've just violated the DMCA by providing fairly vague instructions on how to circumvent this so-called protection (as in racket) device.
According to Desler, Microsoft has rigorous processes in place during the development of Windows to ensure the security and integrity of source code.
It appears the process is already in place and works well! Too bad they concentrated on integrating security at the development phase, but forgot to think about it during the design and architecture phases.
Yeah, because multiplying and dividing by 2.2 is a complex skill that is wholly related to spelling! *grin*
Hmmm. Physiology and psychology are so unrelated that they invented a whole field called psychiatry to study this merger between the physical and mental arenas
The brain-- arguably the *only* place emotions and personality exists-- is itself made up of cells which are only interesting in that they constantly carry out a series of various chemical reactions.
The brain is not dropped in whole by some external force, complete with skills and knowledge. In fact, it is grown according the "blueprints" contained in the DNA of the organism. The brain does not stop growing for several years after birth, which obviously allows it emergent interactions with the world to also have an effect on its growth-- especially at the chemical level certain balances of various compounds would seem to be critical in certain developments.
Rather than being suspicious of any concept which generalizes from physiology to psychology, we should be suspicious of any psychology or sociology which does not take physiological matters into account. (And frankly, at this point sociology can do little more than describe the results of group behaviors-- maybe when psychiatry can more accurately determine how one individual achieves a state, then it can start to offer theorems as to how this works when there is a group-- I posit the two may even be intertwined and need simultaneous explanations. Or maybe I've been reading too much Asimov lately).
However, we can obviously discount the majority of something like frenology because lumps on the outside of the head do not seem remotely causal to brain development, nor is likely they result specifically from distinct brain developments.
So finally we are still left with the problem... can genetics determine careers? Well not exactly. But in a society such as that of the US, careers are highly focused activities, and access to many careers is limited through various vetting procedures (schools, unions, etc). Therefore only people with specific makeups are likely to enter those careers-- many of which *do* require a degree of specialization wherein specific aptitudes are quite indicative of future success.
If a person is *extremely* good at math, then as long as they are socially able and financially have access to tools like a college education, it seems likely that along the way they will find a career which focuses that skill (on the assumption that they probably also *like* math enough to want to do it more than occasionally)-- hence they may well end up an actuarialist, or a financial analyst, or a cryptographer, or any other discipline closely related to raw math.
This assumption can be extrapolated to many disciplines. And I think most of these underlying talents are genetically determined. So the suggestion to breed outside one's profession is not quite wide enough, perhaps. If you are heavily weighted to an "autistic" career type, you must choose another career type altogether-- unfortunately I'd say autistics are the least likely to do this.
The evidence presented in the article seems to bear this out. Even if *all* of the genes that promote autism are recessive or the environmental factors that cause a leaning that way are unlikely, those genes and/or environmental conditions seem to be prominent in programming communities.
This leads to a higher likelihood of getting double recessives in the phenotype *or* an increased likelihood that any environmental factors will not be countered by environmental variations in the homes where these children live. The fact that the families described are often double-earners with children spending plenty of time outside the home indicates to me that the determination is more genetic than environmental.
Of course, I can also think of a few counter-arguments, ranging from "there is no problem, this is simply a newfound awareness" to "so suddenly it's concentrated in SiliValley-- is it decreasing elsewhere?" to "even if the kids are out of the home a lot, the parental environment, especially prenatal, immediately post-natal, and in terms of a majority of time spent in emotionally connective activity, is still a *huge* factor-- so we need to examine the environments as well as the genetics for commonalities in families where the syndrome occurs".
Used their products without paying? How very clever. But copying stuff without paying for the right to do so isn't exactly a boycott.
How about choosing a free alternative, and letting us know about that instead? That's what I've done. I much prefer the clean, honest feeling I have at the end of the day, to some icky, "ooh I got away with copying Windows" feeling I'd have if I'd just copied Windows from a friend. Heck, just using Windows at work makes me feel icky.
You know I'm looking at the Handbook again, and either it's been changed in the last few days or (more likely) I totally missed the sentence that says you have TWO ways to install sound, listed first is kldload, then they mention recompiling the kernel. I think I'm probably biased in favor of recompiling custom kernels because they are usually smaller, faster, and that has to be better for everyone involved. Besides, having to monkey with the module load process is no more fun than putting that effort into recompiling.
Unlike Red Hat, there is nothing on FreeBSD that takes away the true hacker-only nature of the system.
The partitioning, as the article points out is mostly manual, but only if you can't dedicate your drive... if you can dedicate you press one key and it does a default partition scheme, ditto mount points. This is not a problem for any but the types who can't RTFM long enough to find out what page of the FM they're on.
The package system vs. ports is slightly confusing, especially since so much stuff appears in both places, how do you know which to use when and why? I'm sure this confusion is cleared up by reading the Handbook in depth. Ditto the fact that the ports system isn't just a system for getting and compiling tarballs-- it's a whole packaging system unto itself, just a bit more CPU intensive than rpm.
Speaking of the handbook, here's my favorite line (from memory, may not be exact) "recompiling a kernel is a rite of passage for Unix users". There, they said it, plain and simple you *will* recompile the kernel... and they're right, the generic kernel has no support for sound, so off to the config files you go. Hello make and make install! FWIW, they're 100% right, compiling a custom kernel is just too important not to learn to do it on either BSD or Linux systems.
IMHO, FreeBSD is not a suitable system for a computing newbie, unless they have a patient, available hacker friend. It might be a good introduction to x86 Unix for someone who's used a Unix mainframe at school/work (where someone else was the sysadmin). And it might be a good introduction to Unix for an advanced Windows user. And for the hacker? Of course it's a great choice, especially that ports system. I've not seen a Linux distro with that level of commitment to the offsite code base.
But best of all, no one's running around saying it should be called GNU/BSD! And with good reason, if you're used to the GNU binutils and BASH, you're in for a bit of a surprise with FreeBSD.
It reads like math because it is math! And expressing it in mathematical notation is actually more expressive than the lawyer-esque prose required to say most formulae out loud.
My question: rather than convincing judges that software is speech, wouldn't it be more efficient to convince the establishment that most of this stuff is just math? At that point, wouldn't algorithm patents (thinking mp3 here) fall away, and wouldn't it be pretty obvious that things like DeCSS are hardly less appropriate than teaching children to do long division?
Well, I had LOTR calendars several years as a boy, but frankly I find the Burger King tie-in disgusting. J.K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter, for anyone who is a little slow) refused the fast food stuff. Good for her! Only wish Tolkien's estate would have had the same level of sense.
I agree. This isn't even a decent consumer warning, this is a bunch of moralistic claptrap. What gets me is it's all about repressing the violent urges of young males. There isn't one mention on this list about the potentially huge dangers in terms of self-destructive self image issues that toys like Barbie dolls present to girls.
And for the record I don't believe playing with action figures, war toys, or Barbies have a causal relation to any mental/emotional/social state later in life. If anything, they provide no models for behavior, but allow children to role-play... a key method children use to explore the range of human experience and emotion.
No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork and background checks are required to buy firearms in the U.S.
Hmmm. That's not actually true. I bought a shotgun, and yes, I had to fill out some paperwork, but there was no background check. And yes, when I've bought handguns I've had to either get a card from the local PD or undergo NICS (old and new procedure), but a lot of that relates only to established dealers with stores. A private collecter can sell to another private collector without such hassles. If you can cite federal laws that say otherwise, please let me know.
My apologies... for some reason I thought I was in the comments section for the government security and linux story!
Which article is first and second here?! And where the heck do you get this "second coming of Socialism" nonsense?
The article on firstmonday.org not once suggested that Free Software would undermine Capitalism, in fact showed why the existence of Free Software was essentially a product of traditional capitalist theory-- and sought to criticize works like ESRs C&B insomuch as C&B promoted the notion that Free Software was the result of some radical shift in culture specific to hackers.
The article at govtech.com clearly discusses why several world governments are looking at Free Software, and their primary reasons are national pride and national security-- with an emphasis on the latter. They don't want to be beholden to an American corpooration, especially when that company might either purposefully (with backdoors) or accidentally (by hiding mistakes until too late) compromise national security in those nations.
Neither of these articles puts any weight behind a single economic or political system or another. Simply because China is nominally Communist, this reflects nothing about their reasons for adopting Linux. Germany and France are both in the Linux-leaning camp and they are both solid democracies and capitalist economies.
Or perhaps he's more comfortable expressing himself in C code and Portuguese (assuming I'm not mistaken that he's from Brazil, and probably speaks English as a second language). Slashdot may be an English language forum, but clearly Linux is not just the domain of English speaking folks.
Frankly, I'd say we're lucky some of the non-native English speakers involved have decided that English is suitable as a lingua franca. It's only the relative poverty and isolationism of that very large nation known as China that keeps the rest of us from learning Chinese in order to participate in international life. Ditto Spanish-- generally the primary language of countries with less economic clout, thus less ability to force the rest of us to speak Spanish.
Look at some other pockets of the Free Software community to get an idea, KDE is heavily German, IIRC. Ruby is primarily Japanese. It does not pay to underestimate the communication barrier that language might present some of the human hackers who might be wizards in C, but not so hot on a minor foreign language like English.