"What is the single biggest issue that bothers open source advocates about proprietary software? It is probably the ability of the vendor to pull stunts like Microsoft's recent stealth software update and subsequent downplaying of any concerns. Nope, not even on the radar.
My biggest gripe is getting stuck with a bug (like the strip(1) which deleted already stripped binaries on the end-of-life'd AT&T 3B1) that I cannot get fixed or fix myself.
I wonder if Ray Beckerman (NYCL) would be able to use this? I doubt it, but I'm not a lawyer and he is, so I'd expect him to Do The Right Thing.
Actually, I'm in awe of him. I read the deposition he conducted earlier in the year against an RIAA "expert" witness yesterday (yeah, yeah mod me down for violating/. etiquette in not only reading TFA but also the attached links). Reading the transcript was even more fun than reading about SCO's chapter 11 filing. Brilliant man.
Creationists are inherently dumb being that they believe the word of what amounts to little more than a 2500 year old fairy tale rather than educated science. In college all I had to do bait a physicist roommate into total frustration was to mention Aristotle. Aristotle's (decidedly incorrect) view of the elements was accepted as absolute truth for about that long.
Science and scientists can be wrong. The difference between science and (organized) religion is that eventually science gets corrected as more facts are discovered.
The only "inherently dumb" people are those who refuse to learn.
Ah, I knew that law had been relaxed but that article makes it sound much more restrictive than I remember it (I was last in Singapore in late 2005).
A reasonable compromise between civil liberty and cleanliness would be requiring something along the lines of the pocket portable ashtrays you can get in Japan.
people aren't going to switch from Wrigley's to some unknown brand because it's non-stick. Sure they will, once it's mandated by law. It used to be worth a ticket in Singapore to be caught chewing gum outside (why they repealed that law, I do not know). But hey, if it's OK to ticket people for smoking outdoors, why not also ticket (or ban) use of sticky chewing gum outdoors too?
I didn't know that had its own Wiki entry. Ewww. Singapore was right, ban the stuff outright, I wish they had stuck to their guns.
You can wash cigarette smoke out of your clothes, but a wad of chewing gum attached to your shoe is forever. I guess this is a step in the right direction.
At least I never heard of Unix for Lisa. We had a Lisa running Unix in the lab I worked in at JPL in 1982 +/- 1 year. I saw it running (the Lisa came in as I was going out, so I didn't get much hands-on); I know it existed and I'm definitely not referring to A/UX which came much later.
The world would be a much different and much better (IMO) place if Apple had followed through on the Lisa (and priced it better). OS X in the early 80's could have been truly revolutionary and maybe spared the industry all the pain Microsoft has since inflicted.
For GUI consistency, I don't think there's anything in current use (even OS X) OS X isn't bad, but I'll concede your point on earlier versions as I had plenty of conversations about GUI with a Mac fanboi colleague that were convincing to me that Apple had and enforced a standardized interface (I haven't spent much time with single user systems since the early 80's - they don't interest me). OS X, while not completely consistent is still better than Microsoft Windows XP for consistency.
I don't mind inconsistency so long as I can figure out how to get things done (and/or customize things to have the program do it my way), but it bothers my wife and she prefers OS X to Microsoft Windows - "The Apple is easier to use".
I did follow the scheduler discussion, including Linus' announcement deciding for CFS, but obviously missed a bit. I read lkml in gmail which does threading very badly and exact chronology can be quite difficult to figure out at times. The first Linus post after Andrew removed SD from -mm was one flaming Con & SD and showing strong support for Ingo & CFS - i.e. he had already made up his mind. CFS wasn't in -mm at this time.
It is indeed a pity that Con's health deteriorated when it did. Also, to be fair, I don't think Ingo gets any particular special treatment. He appears to be sitting on a mountain of unmerged patches that probably will never make it into mainline and Linus did flame him pretty hard over the state of the high resolution timer patches that caused so much trouble a couple of releases ago.
Of all the people who have the right to feel slighted, I think Andrew Morton is right at the top of the list. He has a hateful and largely thankless role in kernel development (merging lightly or untested patches is never fun), but still manages to track all kinds of bugs, deliver insightful and sometimes frighteningly humorous code reviews and keep a mind-blowing amount of patches flowing towards Linus. I don't know how he does it, but I'm glad he does it.
what's sad about it is the Santa Cruz Operation was originally a pretty cool company that made a pretty cool UNIX -- one of the first that ran and ran really well on a PC with a lot of feature 'firsts'. My experience with SCO came in 1995/1996 and cool isn't exactly how I would describe it. Bunker buster resisting rock solid kernel (in a sense that people who have only experienced Microsoft Windows cannot begin to imagine), oh yes[*]. Worthy X11 and userland? Nope.
[*] We hosted a process control system on SCO Unix which was capable of killing people if the O/S ever crashed. I slept at night. I take back the above. I guess it was pretty cool that we could do that safely.
Even if they did, part of their whole problem is that SVR4 is a mess copyrights-wise with lots of Intel, Microsoft and even unattributed BSD code in there. Even if they did, part of their whole problem is that SVR4 is a mess.
There, fixed that for you. The only thing in System V/R4 that's not in modern Unix derivatives is STREAMS and there's a reason for that.
One can only wonder how things would be now if they hadn't decided to go quick-and-cheap. DOA, just like the Lisa. It's not that interesting and it's not as if vastly superior alternatives didn't already exist at the time. Unfortunately (IMO), the Unix-based solutions at the time were poorly priced (no way was anyone going to buy a Sun workstation for home no matter how nice it was to use) and X11 didn't become usable until X11R4 (1989).
They beat Apple, an equally well-established company with a huge userbase, by nearly a decade. Not true. Apple released the Lisa (which could run Unix) in the early 80's.
3. The IBM PC itself, again, was nothing fundamentally special. There were _plenty_ of other computers competing for the market at the time. Another one would have filled the void. Actually, I think it was special. It had 20 bit addressing (as badly as it was implemented by Intel) and 640k was a vast amount of memory at the time. They also copied all of the best features that made the Apple ][ so special. Through PC DOS 2.0 ("fixed" in 2.1), a programming manual was included with the O/S. There were expansion slots and wiring diagrams so that addon cards could be easily made and they even included annotated listings of the BIOS.
Basically, like the Apple ][ before it, it was an open system at a time when hobbyists were the most important part of the market. It was indeed somewhat expensive, but it was much more reasonably priced than the vastly superior Lisa, for example.
4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. Fully agree. If anything, Microsoft was holding them back as even in the earliest days, PC DOS had a well-founded reputation for bugginess.
Who made DOS and Windows a large part of the market? I would argue that it was vendors. In the time period that PC DOS was gaining mind share, you could buy the (same) average application for $300 on PC DOS, or $3000 on (pick your favorite Unix at the time). Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Through a combination of underhandedness, blind luck, and opportunism, Microsoft got the contract for the OS that IBM would put on their PC That certainly helped. IBM announced 3 O/Ss for the PC, PC DOS, UCSD P-System and CPM/86. However, it didn't release the latter two until almost a year after PCs were shipping. That delay guaranteed a lock-in for PC DOS.
Apple screwed up too, by delaying the release of the first (ridiculously underpowered and expansion card slotless Macintosh) while they rewrote the Lisa graphics in M68k assembly, so the IBM PC came to market first.
When it came time to pick one, Linus saw the CFS doing pretty well, still under heavy and active development. No, that's not really what happened. Based on my reading of the list at time, Linus had already decided to use CFS from the time it first was published.
Two things happened that were very misleading. The first was the initial CFS announcement. It appeared at the time, that at the same time that Ingo was being highly critical of SD, he was implementing a variant behind everyone's back. This wasn't true; I have no reason to doubt his words that he did throw together the first version in a day or so of hacking. The second was the manner in which SD was pulled out of the -mm tree. It was in a thread relating to an IDE bug that appeared to be scheduler-related and Andrew posted something to the effect "I guess this is where the experiment stops, I've pulled SD out of -mm". A few days later they did track down the root cause of this bug and it was something in the block layer, I believe - nothing to do with the scheduler.
Of course, what really happened is that Linus wasn't satisfied with how Con was handling bug reports and had a lot more confidence in Ingo as a long-term maintainer. I cannot fault that logic either.
Unfortunately Con Kolivas felt slighted in the process, and left. IIRC, he may have been absent during the decision window, and his fanbois did him in. True, true and true. His fanbois did him no favors using Microsoft Windows XP as the ideal of process scheduling. Besides the long slow automatic Alt-TAB of death, there's the Leeroy Jenkins "I can't move! I can't move!" lockup whenever a battle gets "interesting" (neither of which scheduling artifacts appear in OS X, btw). Yes, this is important because improving the gaming experience was one of the rationales behind changing the process scheduler.
The only way this will work, is opening up everything. The spectrum, especially will have to be unencumbered (not owned). The carriers will have to act like carriers, accepting these all purpose devices, without a monopoly. That would be too logical. Sure would be nice though.
I'll say this, I'm disgusted with everything about the US cellphone market. From its backwardness in technology to vendor lock in and thoroughly crappy service. Recent phones are almost caught up to where Japanese domestic cellphones were four years ago and my Cingular sim works better in my wife's phone (a Nokia purchased in a random store in Manila) than on the phone I purchased when I started the account (I've only paid one of the two fines needed to "unlock" it).
Me (in four[*] phone calls to T-Mobile customer service prior to an international flight): I'll be able to use my phone overseas, right? That's why I bought T-Mobile in the first place. T-Mobile Customer Rep: Yes, sir.
after returning Me: Why didn't my phone work overseas? T-Mobile Customer Rep: That's because you needed to call us and have your account enabled for international roaming... and I see that you did that before you left. Sorry.
[*] It took four phone calls because I was trying to have the handset unlocked at the same time, only to learn hours before my flight that it wasn't supported on that specific model subversion. Sigh.
I am curious about how much of an fishing expedition they could go on if they got someone on the stand? They already tried this against the disabled mother who is now in the class action suit. They tried to get the woman's daughter to testify against her and the courts slapped them down pretty hard.
It helped of course, that she could prove she was innocent to the same extent that the RIAA could "prove" she was guilty.
Sorry for being so argumentative but seeing someone call America a 'small country' just pisses me off for some reason.. seems that Americans just have no concept of how things are outside the US.. Maybe because that's how most of us see it? Anyway, you're flaming the wrong person. There's soooo much of the world outside of the US and I know that, but most of my countrymen do not.
Speaking as someone who has done international travel in the last week, I absolutely agree. And worse (or better as your case may be) it seems much freer outside of the US than in.
So long as a small country like the US continues to confuse me with someone who lives (or used to live, they won't tell me but they ask me every time through) in Oakland, I can believe that a large country like China cannot possibly control all their citizens.
I believe in open borders, but only to those who pay their own way and pay more taxes than benefits they receive. I wish the US had the same standards as Japan. My wife would be with me now, instead of in a long, long immigration queue...
I can't believe that at a minimum, the MPAA executives didn't violate a state law. They weren't charged with breaking any old state law. TFA says they were charged with violating the Federal Wiretap Act. The judge felt that they had not. The judge also felt that they failed to prove that any trade secrets were lost. It doesn't sound like they were guilty of anything. Sleazy maybe, but not guilty of a crime. I have a feeling that TorrentSpy might have had more success going after the guy who broke into their mail system.
Yeah, that's a good point. Sometimes a valuable reference disappears too.
One time when I was really bored, I went through the Wikipedia checking all the entries I could find on baseball players who had played professional baseball in Japan. In general they were pretty bad, often times not even mentioning specific teams let alone any statistics.
There used to be a really excellent site that had rosters and statistics going back at least into the 90's. It was even translated into English and unfortunately, it no longer exists.
Also, kiddy porn is probably the easiest thing to refute if planted. File timestamps are just numbers on a writable disk. These're probably the hardest to refute given an anonymous phone call to the police to set up the early morning SWAT raid.
$ man 2 utimes
Without an audit trail, timestamps on a writable disk are meaningless. (And the audit trail must include writes to the raw device or they always meaningless).
No one is innocent. Also, no one knows what all they are guilty of. This is the real problem. Not terrorists, not child pr0n collectors on the internet. The leading cause of death in the 20th century was government and they're off to reclaim the title for the 21st century as well:(.
Only defending against a tactic after the enemy uses it is a good way to lose. Preemptive tactics that leaves more enemies standing than existed before the action is lunacy. Blowback is a bitch. That should be common sense, but sadly isn't. Using WMDs (all the evidence we've accumulated so far indicates that DU-based weapons are WMDs of the worst kind - they kill everyone slowly) is the worst thing the US could have done in a payback war against an innocent country. All of the facts that the US government has provided indicate that 911 was perpetrated by Saudis. Osama Bin Laden is Saudi. Oops. Hit the wrong target there guys.
Make no mistake, the so-called War On Terrorism has created a lot more enemies than existed before it started. It is nothing short of a(n extremely expensive) total disaster.
It's interesting in a sad sort of way, that the Democratic Party of the USA believes in ruining lives by creating dependency (the welfare state, but only for people who vote for them) and sometimes killing people when it's expedient and the Republican Party of the USA believes in ruining lives by killing people and sometimes creating dependency (the welfare state but only for people who vote for them). What a choice we have in the coming election...
Time and again people who have passed extensive background checks have betrayed the trust given to them. They do not work and there's a term for people who keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.
Same as the original poster in this thread, I've been through the security clearance thing up to the highest levels. It's nonsense and has been proven not to work in practice.
Steve's background check: You will be given access to sensitive information that will be appropriately labeled. If you relate this information to anyone that we have not approved of, including your wife/husband, you will be sentenced to death. In addition, you waive all constitutional rights when sensitive material is concerned.
Under penalty of perjury and treason, do you agree [ ], disagree [ ] Name: <Your name goes here> Signature:
The waiving of constitutional rights and talking to your spouse were already there when I had to sign the forms, but the rest of it is Microsoft Windows Vista and can be replaced by the immediate death sentence clause. Which was basically already there, because you are also acknowledging that said action was treason, for which the penalty is death anyway.
Let's call a spade a spade and I would have been a lot more comfortable with an agreement like that than the EBI forms I actually had to fill out. It's still not secure, but it's more honest than what I experienced in the past as well as being safer, for both parties.
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My biggest gripe is getting stuck with a bug (like the strip(1) which deleted already stripped binaries on the end-of-life'd AT&T 3B1) that I cannot get fixed or fix myself.
Actually, I'm in awe of him. I read the deposition he conducted earlier in the year against an RIAA "expert" witness yesterday (yeah, yeah mod me down for violating
Science and scientists can be wrong. The difference between science and (organized) religion is that eventually science gets corrected as more facts are discovered.
The only "inherently dumb" people are those who refuse to learn.
Ah, I knew that law had been relaxed but that article makes it sound much more restrictive than I remember it (I was last in Singapore in late 2005).
A reasonable compromise between civil liberty and cleanliness would be requiring something along the lines of the pocket portable ashtrays you can get in Japan.
I didn't know that had its own Wiki entry. Ewww. Singapore was right, ban the stuff outright, I wish they had stuck to their guns.
You can wash cigarette smoke out of your clothes, but a wad of chewing gum attached to your shoe is forever. I guess this is a step in the right direction.
The world would be a much different and much better (IMO) place if Apple had followed through on the Lisa (and priced it better). OS X in the early 80's could have been truly revolutionary and maybe spared the industry all the pain Microsoft has since inflicted. For GUI consistency, I don't think there's anything in current use (even OS X) OS X isn't bad, but I'll concede your point on earlier versions as I had plenty of conversations about GUI with a Mac fanboi colleague that were convincing to me that Apple had and enforced a standardized interface (I haven't spent much time with single user systems since the early 80's - they don't interest me). OS X, while not completely consistent is still better than Microsoft Windows XP for consistency.
I don't mind inconsistency so long as I can figure out how to get things done (and/or customize things to have the program do it my way), but it bothers my wife and she prefers OS X to Microsoft Windows - "The Apple is easier to use".
It is indeed a pity that Con's health deteriorated when it did. Also, to be fair, I don't think Ingo gets any particular special treatment. He appears to be sitting on a mountain of unmerged patches that probably will never make it into mainline and Linus did flame him pretty hard over the state of the high resolution timer patches that caused so much trouble a couple of releases ago.
Of all the people who have the right to feel slighted, I think Andrew Morton is right at the top of the list. He has a hateful and largely thankless role in kernel development (merging lightly or untested patches is never fun), but still manages to track all kinds of bugs, deliver insightful and sometimes frighteningly humorous code reviews and keep a mind-blowing amount of patches flowing towards Linus. I don't know how he does it, but I'm glad he does it.
[*] We hosted a process control system on SCO Unix which was capable of killing people if the O/S ever crashed. I slept at night. I take back the above. I guess it was pretty cool that we could do that safely.
There, fixed that for you. The only thing in System V/R4 that's not in modern Unix derivatives is STREAMS and there's a reason for that.
Basically, like the Apple ][ before it, it was an open system at a time when hobbyists were the most important part of the market. It was indeed somewhat expensive, but it was much more reasonably priced than the vastly superior Lisa, for example. 4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. Fully agree. If anything, Microsoft was holding them back as even in the earliest days, PC DOS had a well-founded reputation for bugginess.
Apple screwed up too, by delaying the release of the first (ridiculously underpowered and expansion card slotless Macintosh) while they rewrote the Lisa graphics in M68k assembly, so the IBM PC came to market first.
Two things happened that were very misleading. The first was the initial CFS announcement. It appeared at the time, that at the same time that Ingo was being highly critical of SD, he was implementing a variant behind everyone's back. This wasn't true; I have no reason to doubt his words that he did throw together the first version in a day or so of hacking. The second was the manner in which SD was pulled out of the -mm tree. It was in a thread relating to an IDE bug that appeared to be scheduler-related and Andrew posted something to the effect "I guess this is where the experiment stops, I've pulled SD out of -mm". A few days later they did track down the root cause of this bug and it was something in the block layer, I believe - nothing to do with the scheduler.
Of course, what really happened is that Linus wasn't satisfied with how Con was handling bug reports and had a lot more confidence in Ingo as a long-term maintainer. I cannot fault that logic either. Unfortunately Con Kolivas felt slighted in the process, and left. IIRC, he may have been absent during the decision window, and his fanbois did him in. True, true and true. His fanbois did him no favors using Microsoft Windows XP as the ideal of process scheduling. Besides the long slow automatic Alt-TAB of death, there's the Leeroy Jenkins "I can't move! I can't move!" lockup whenever a battle gets "interesting" (neither of which scheduling artifacts appear in OS X, btw). Yes, this is important because improving the gaming experience was one of the rationales behind changing the process scheduler.
I'll say this, I'm disgusted with everything about the US cellphone market. From its backwardness in technology to vendor lock in and thoroughly crappy service. Recent phones are almost caught up to where Japanese domestic cellphones were four years ago and my Cingular sim works better in my wife's phone (a Nokia purchased in a random store in Manila) than on the phone I purchased when I started the account (I've only paid one of the two fines needed to "unlock" it).
Me (in four[*] phone calls to T-Mobile customer service prior to an international flight): I'll be able to use my phone overseas, right? That's why I bought T-Mobile in the first place.
T-Mobile Customer Rep: Yes, sir.
after returning
Me: Why didn't my phone work overseas?
T-Mobile Customer Rep: That's because you needed to call us and have your account enabled for international roaming
[*] It took four phone calls because I was trying to have the handset unlocked at the same time, only to learn hours before my flight that it wasn't supported on that specific model subversion. Sigh.
It helped of course, that she could prove she was innocent to the same extent that the RIAA could "prove" she was guilty.
This isn't flame bait either!
He never forgave me for releasing an XEmacs with internationalization first even though he had the patches years earlier. The truth isn't flame bait!
Speaking as someone who has done international travel in the last week, I absolutely agree. And worse (or better as your case may be) it seems much freer outside of the US than in.
...
So long as a small country like the US continues to confuse me with someone who lives (or used to live, they won't tell me but they ask me every time through) in Oakland, I can believe that a large country like China cannot possibly control all their citizens.
I believe in open borders, but only to those who pay their own way and pay more taxes than benefits they receive. I wish the US had the same standards as Japan. My wife would be with me now, instead of in a long, long immigration queue
What he did is technically international espionage. That's a bird of a very different feather.
Yeah, that's a good point. Sometimes a valuable reference disappears too.
One time when I was really bored, I went through the Wikipedia checking all the entries I could find on baseball players who had played professional baseball in Japan. In general they were pretty bad, often times not even mentioning specific teams let alone any statistics.
There used to be a really excellent site that had rosters and statistics going back at least into the 90's. It was even translated into English and unfortunately, it no longer exists.
$ man 2 utimes
Without an audit trail, timestamps on a writable disk are meaningless. (And the audit trail must include writes to the raw device or they always meaningless). No one is innocent. Also, no one knows what all they are guilty of. This is the real problem. Not terrorists, not child pr0n collectors on the internet. The leading cause of death in the 20th century was government and they're off to reclaim the title for the 21st century as well
Make no mistake, the so-called War On Terrorism has created a lot more enemies than existed before it started. It is nothing short of a(n extremely expensive) total disaster.
It's interesting in a sad sort of way, that the Democratic Party of the USA believes in ruining lives by creating dependency (the welfare state, but only for people who vote for them) and sometimes killing people when it's expedient and the Republican Party of the USA believes in ruining lives by killing people and sometimes creating dependency (the welfare state but only for people who vote for them). What a choice we have in the coming election
Time and again people who have passed extensive background checks have betrayed the trust given to them. They do not work and there's a term for people who keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.
Same as the original poster in this thread, I've been through the security clearance thing up to the highest levels. It's nonsense and has been proven not to work in practice.
Steve's background check:
You will be given access to sensitive information that will be appropriately labeled. If you relate this information to anyone that we have not approved of, including your wife/husband, you will be sentenced to death. In addition, you waive all constitutional rights when sensitive material is concerned.
Under penalty of perjury and treason, do you agree [ ], disagree [ ]
Name: <Your name goes here>
Signature:
Authorized Witness Name:
Authorized Witness Signature:
The waiving of constitutional rights and talking to your spouse were already there when I had to sign the forms, but the rest of it is Microsoft Windows Vista and can be replaced by the immediate death sentence clause. Which was basically already there, because you are also acknowledging that said action was treason, for which the penalty is death anyway.
Let's call a spade a spade and I would have been a lot more comfortable with an agreement like that than the EBI forms I actually had to fill out. It's still not secure, but it's more honest than what I experienced in the past as well as being safer, for both parties.