No.. it wouldn't be possible to stop suddenly, even though you are in the ball.
THe sensations of motion would be the same.. your feet are moving, and the world is moving beneath you. IN most ways, this will seem very similar to real life.
If you just 'stop' the ground will fly out behind you, and you will fall falt on your face, just as if you tried it while running down the street.
It's just that, rather than the inertia being contained in you, it's in the ground beneath you.
And I can't help but think some of this is just to 'cash in' on the big p2p frenzy these days.
Gimme a break. p2p is *old* technology, not new. It's using p2p in a large, distributed fashion that is new.
As a distribution model, this might seem neat. It also could be considered distributed caching, or something like freenet.
Really, as an organization, I have no problems haveing my few hundred or thousand users grab virus updates off a central server; how is having them fetch it off their neighbors somehow better? In certain network architectures, this may work better.... but really.
Instant messaging? You mean like... talk in unix?
Certainly, there is an application for instant messaging. Part of the centralized nature of instant messaging is so peopel can find each other; with a slight bit more effor,t ICQ woudl not NEED a server.. but that's too much work for joe average to do. Heck.. most of the reason for the central server is due to dynamic IP addressing anyway..
Re:As someone who was a beta tester for Groove...
on
Peer-to-Peer Goodness
·
· Score: 2
I can't help but wonder..
Woudl this work much better if it was in a LAN environment? That is where much of this really appeals...
Recorded music/media/whatever, the issue is all about copyright, NOT about privacy at all. They may have a sense of ownership, but that's a completely different beast.
Traditionally, laws regarding mail (and other communications, such as cellular phones) were based around whether or not the parties involved had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
ie: Conversations and eavesdropping. If I'm in the middle of a field whispering to my friend, and you use some sort of listening device to amplify my conversation so you can hear it, you would be doing an illegal act.
If I am in the middle of a field yelling at my friend, loud enough that you can hear it with your plain ears, and you use some sort of device to amplify it a bit and record it.. you are NOT breaking the law. I had no reasonable expectation of privacy if I was yelling.
Same used to be (and still is in Canada) with cellular phones. It's not whether you had an expectation of privacy, but whether you had a *reasonable* expectation of privacy. Yelling loudly and saying 'I thought nobody was around' is not reasonable. Taking steps to make yourself not heard IS reasonable'. As with cellphones.. transmitting over public airwaves in the clear (the airwaves are *all* public), even though you may be ignorant to the physics of it, does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy (under canadian courts, anyway). You are broadcasting something that can be picked up by any capable radio receiver.
Copyright has nothing to do with privacy. The DMCA (not that I'm defending it) is about copyright. Making it illegal to break a copy protection mechanism is NOT equal to the act of violating a privacy protection mechanism, though both MAY use encryption.
After reading some of the posts.. here's a thought.
Someone brought up the point about personal snail-mail at work. Your employer does not have the right to open your mail, so why should they open your email? Well.. here's why, although a bit abstract.
There is, due to long-standing law, as well as the fact that something is in a sealed envelope, a reasonable expectation of privacy when you send mail in the post office. (Recall, if you sendt a post card, with no envelope, there is NO expectation of privacy; anyone can legally read it.)
The internet at-large is basically a *public* network. Yes, it's 'public' in a different sense than we usually use, but the fact that you have no real contorl of where your data goes after it leaves whatever you DO control.... that makes it public. THat, coupled by the fact that you don't know the policies of every network your message will pass through. Sending unencrypted mail ils as good as sending a bloody postcard! Yes, you can be reasonably sure the whole world cant' read it, but anyone who happens upon it legally CAN (the postman, your boss, the guy in the mailroom). This equates to things like: The IT staff, your boss, etc...).
Think about it.
If your boss wanted, he could say 'I want to see ALL snailmail coming into the building. Now.. he *CAN*, I believe, do this. He cannot make you open your mail, but he can see the volume/where the stuff came from. After all, the mail was addressed TO HIS BUSINESS.
Use encryption. Seriously. Otherwise, it's like complaining about people using scanners on your cellphone calls (well, the US *DID* legislate against that, funny enough> Canada didn't.). Canada said 'well.. it's going with standard modulation over public airwaves... what did you expect? No expectation of privacy'. Of course, if it was *encrypted*, there is an expectation of privacy, and a scanner that could decrypt it may be illegal.
*ahem*
NT slams linux at SMP. Believe it. Though I'm sure that won't be the case forever.
Seriously.. I'd like to see the NT kernel open sourced.. as well as NTFS. They *are* good, and have *great* potential. Microsoft just keeps making these godawful operating systems with them!
I mean, originaly, when NT was called the 'unix killer'... from a kernel perspective, it was quite true. NT is superior.. but MS keeps building these shit OS things with it.
I have to disagree with you there...
If you need some expensive CAD software to do your drawing, you should pay them.
If you could do the drawing with something cheaper.. then you should. I would bet that, unless you are an architect or engineer, you don't need the features of AutoCAD or Minicad or whatever you use..
lgpl is not 'closed-source'.. it merely means that someone can develop against glibc without their software becoming 'infected' by the GPL.
This was necessary, as he put it, because if it was *NOT* this way, nobody would USE it.
What he sais about a console is the complete opposite. The back-end would be closed, the front end, open. Period.
Procedure aside.. this is one reason that linux installations sneak (unintentionally usually) past IT: The lack of licensing.
The chief reason that IT departments (well, mine, anyway) wants to approve all software (well, the first reason.. there are two), is because of licencing. We must not open the company up to liability. With linux, the common user thinks (rightly so) there is no licensing, so doesn't need to tell us.
The second reason is, of course, support. Support, as in making sure all our infrastrucutre works as well as possible.
The key thing people are blowing out of proportion here....
When Mr. Schapiro-whatever is asked 'what would you do' he responds with what he woudl do if *anything* outside of what people are *clearly informed* is allowed is installed. He does not say 'oh, well normally we wouldn't care, but if it was linux, we'd fire them'. Sheesh.
Communication is absolutely the key. I expect that if the developers need to hook a bunch of linux boxes up to my network, they come to me and say 'Hey, we need to get access to the file server and shit from these LInux boxes, because that's what we're doing our code on now'. As the IT manager, it's my *JOB* to accommodate this (preferably, they tell me BEFORE they make this decision to switch platforms, so I don't have to make a bit of a fuss. The fuss is because the cost of me supporting it must be factored in to the cost of switching over, and may reflect badly on my own budget otherwise.)
In my world, it is IT's job to make technology work for the company. Period. If it has to do with Information, and Technology, then it's IT's responsibility to provide expertise.
That said, if someone just ignores policy and installs something over their workstation, of *course* something needs to be done; but not because they installed 'linux'.. simply because they trashed their workstation!
On the flip side.. the guy who says, in the article, 'we allowed our Finnish group to continue to use Linux as long as we could manage it with NDS' is bunk. If you purchase a company that does all their work on linux, you evaluate the total cost of switching them to a different (preferred) system, or supporting their current one. EITHER is a viable option; as the IT manager, it is up to you to provide that support.
SImply saying 'fuck you, install NT' is *NOT* providing support. Showing the boss how the cost of switching to NT & making this fit with your current support structure, and the rest of the organization's devleopment -vs- the downsides of changing the office over, THAT is the way to show it.
But that's the problem. THere is a missing step in the feedback loop here.
You buy software, most people do anyway, thinking it's like 'buying' anything else.
Then, there is this 'eula', which most people just click on. THey have not got a choice! if they opened the software and installed it, they already know they can't take it back and return it to the store; it's opened. THe courts say you can't use it without agreeing to the license...
It's not that it's not logical, or doesn't make sense.. because it DOES.. the problem is it's not in the interests of the consumers to have things continue this way.
At a certain level, in any economy, there is a point where a society as a whole (government) must step in and say 'look , this is how things are going to be, because this is unfair to the consumer on a grand scale'.
As an example.. in the 60s and 70s, the consumer-rights stuff in Canada (yeah, nag all you want about socialisim). High-ranking members of even supermarkets were investigated and charged (just one example, it covered many busiensses) for something we see as normal today. Accepting schwag. Like 'Sure, I'll have my company pay a bit extra for 10,000 cases of Coke if you buy me a porsche'. It seems fair, right? BUT.... here's the thing.
IN a smaller town, the people inherently assume that the cost they pay reflects the costs to get the product on the shelves, and to run the business (and to make a profit, of course). In this situation, the cost actually reflects the owner buying a porsche, and, in effect, as these are *necessary* goods, the public *IS* being ripped off. I'm not saying I agree with this, or that it should be done today.. things are different now.. but..
Software is similar. There is an assumed 'contract' if you will, when you buy something in a store. You are exchanging ownership for cash. We also know this has nothign to do wiht 'intellectual property' rights of the product bing purchased; if I buy a car, ai *OWN* that car and can do what I want with it. I may still not be allowed to steal the design and start a car company.
Software is the same thing.. Joe Farmer thinks he is BUYING something, when really he is LICENSING it.
Hey... I can even show the RECEIPT, on the same receipt with all the stuff I bought, and it says *nothing* about licensing windows... it says I bought these goods at the store.
Regardless of how frustrating it is, and how much we hate spam..
Your email *account* is an endpoint for smtp mail. Unless your ISP offers you filters, that is *ALL* you are paying for, and, state-based legislation aside, you do not have a 'right' to prevent others from sending you mail. (Note I said prevent them from sending.... you *absolutely* have the right not to receive it.
That's the whole problem with mail. YOu have no control over acceptance.
Uhh.. but that's just it. Systems administrator gets to CHOOSE what they use.
Office workers are TOLD what they will use. If they decide they don't 'like' it, and want to do it their own way.. then they *could* get fired, just as if they hauled their desk outside and brought in their own vibrating chair, and worked on the floor from a cushion.
The PC (and software) , in many cases, is a tool provided by the company to do your job.
Well...
1) The entire corporate network is properly firewalled; this is a key point. They don't open up a 'security risk' by using linux on their workstation.
2) I won't support it, unless they ask appropriate questions.
3) I won't freak out.
4) I ask why they did it. Usually it's because they actually need it to do their work (programmers). I am not there to tell them what tools they need to do their job; I am there to assist with making those tools work for them.
Really. The only reasons IT should get pissed are:
1) License violation
2) Security violation
Period.
I make it clear that I can't support it to the same degree as the 'official' software, that they better be able to deal with it on their own. THis is never a problem.
The guy *asked* Stallman what he thought. Why are we making him out to be the free software nazi? 99% of the time he only says stuff like this when you ASK him his opinion.
HOw low. I *HATE* it when the media does that... ask for an honest opinion then rip it to shreds.
Slashdot Mirror
HavenCo is a colo facility... not a service provider.
Why not consider starting one at HavenCo? now there is an idea.
Who's the colo provider in Toronto?
You mean flat, like the earth?
No.. it wouldn't be possible to stop suddenly, even though you are in the ball.
THe sensations of motion would be the same.. your feet are moving, and the world is moving beneath you. IN most ways, this will seem very similar to real life.
If you just 'stop' the ground will fly out behind you, and you will fall falt on your face, just as if you tried it while running down the street.
It's just that, rather than the inertia being contained in you, it's in the ground beneath you.
What work did Tesla pass off as his own, hmm?
And I can't help but think some of this is just to 'cash in' on the big p2p frenzy these days.
Gimme a break. p2p is *old* technology, not new. It's using p2p in a large, distributed fashion that is new.
As a distribution model, this might seem neat. It also could be considered distributed caching, or something like freenet.
Really, as an organization, I have no problems haveing my few hundred or thousand users grab virus updates off a central server; how is having them fetch it off their neighbors somehow better? In certain network architectures, this may work better.... but really.
Instant messaging? You mean like... talk in unix?
Certainly, there is an application for instant messaging. Part of the centralized nature of instant messaging is so peopel can find each other; with a slight bit more effor,t ICQ woudl not NEED a server.. but that's too much work for joe average to do. Heck.. most of the reason for the central server is due to dynamic IP addressing anyway..
I can't help but wonder..
Woudl this work much better if it was in a LAN environment? That is where much of this really appeals...
No.. not the same thing at all.
Recorded music/media/whatever, the issue is all about copyright, NOT about privacy at all. They may have a sense of ownership, but that's a completely different beast.
Traditionally, laws regarding mail (and other communications, such as cellular phones) were based around whether or not the parties involved had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
ie: Conversations and eavesdropping. If I'm in the middle of a field whispering to my friend, and you use some sort of listening device to amplify my conversation so you can hear it, you would be doing an illegal act.
If I am in the middle of a field yelling at my friend, loud enough that you can hear it with your plain ears, and you use some sort of device to amplify it a bit and record it.. you are NOT breaking the law. I had no reasonable expectation of privacy if I was yelling.
Same used to be (and still is in Canada) with cellular phones. It's not whether you had an expectation of privacy, but whether you had a *reasonable* expectation of privacy. Yelling loudly and saying 'I thought nobody was around' is not reasonable. Taking steps to make yourself not heard IS reasonable'. As with cellphones.. transmitting over public airwaves in the clear (the airwaves are *all* public), even though you may be ignorant to the physics of it, does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy (under canadian courts, anyway). You are broadcasting something that can be picked up by any capable radio receiver.
Copyright has nothing to do with privacy. The DMCA (not that I'm defending it) is about copyright. Making it illegal to break a copy protection mechanism is NOT equal to the act of violating a privacy protection mechanism, though both MAY use encryption.
After reading some of the posts.. here's a thought.
Someone brought up the point about personal snail-mail at work. Your employer does not have the right to open your mail, so why should they open your email? Well.. here's why, although a bit abstract.
There is, due to long-standing law, as well as the fact that something is in a sealed envelope, a reasonable expectation of privacy when you send mail in the post office. (Recall, if you sendt a post card, with no envelope, there is NO expectation of privacy; anyone can legally read it.)
The internet at-large is basically a *public* network. Yes, it's 'public' in a different sense than we usually use, but the fact that you have no real contorl of where your data goes after it leaves whatever you DO control.... that makes it public. THat, coupled by the fact that you don't know the policies of every network your message will pass through. Sending unencrypted mail ils as good as sending a bloody postcard! Yes, you can be reasonably sure the whole world cant' read it, but anyone who happens upon it legally CAN (the postman, your boss, the guy in the mailroom). This equates to things like: The IT staff, your boss, etc...).
Think about it.
If your boss wanted, he could say 'I want to see ALL snailmail coming into the building. Now.. he *CAN*, I believe, do this. He cannot make you open your mail, but he can see the volume/where the stuff came from. After all, the mail was addressed TO HIS BUSINESS.
Use encryption. Seriously. Otherwise, it's like complaining about people using scanners on your cellphone calls (well, the US *DID* legislate against that, funny enough> Canada didn't.). Canada said 'well.. it's going with standard modulation over public airwaves... what did you expect? No expectation of privacy'. Of course, if it was *encrypted*, there is an expectation of privacy, and a scanner that could decrypt it may be illegal.
And they won't.. as long as you aren't using THEIR equipment and THEIR bandwidth to do stuff.
*ahem*
NT slams linux at SMP. Believe it. Though I'm sure that won't be the case forever.
Seriously.. I'd like to see the NT kernel open sourced.. as well as NTFS. They *are* good, and have *great* potential. Microsoft just keeps making these godawful operating systems with them!
I mean, originaly, when NT was called the 'unix killer'... from a kernel perspective, it was quite true. NT is superior.. but MS keeps building these shit OS things with it.
I have to disagree with you there...
If you need some expensive CAD software to do your drawing, you should pay them.
If you could do the drawing with something cheaper.. then you should. I would bet that, unless you are an architect or engineer, you don't need the features of AutoCAD or Minicad or whatever you use..
Right. I am.
But it's *too close*. How many accidents do I see on a daily bassis? what about the other drivers?
I agree with you completely. Just wasn't sure what you were saying.
- The art of letting other people do what you want.
But see, he's probably RIGHT.
Lots of people worship RMS.
Please correct me if I misunderstand here..
lgpl is not 'closed-source'.. it merely means that someone can develop against glibc without their software becoming 'infected' by the GPL.
This was necessary, as he put it, because if it was *NOT* this way, nobody would USE it.
What he sais about a console is the complete opposite. The back-end would be closed, the front end, open. Period.
Procedure aside.. this is one reason that linux installations sneak (unintentionally usually) past IT: The lack of licensing.
The chief reason that IT departments (well, mine, anyway) wants to approve all software (well, the first reason.. there are two), is because of licencing. We must not open the company up to liability. With linux, the common user thinks (rightly so) there is no licensing, so doesn't need to tell us.
The second reason is, of course, support. Support, as in making sure all our infrastrucutre works as well as possible.
The key thing people are blowing out of proportion here....
When Mr. Schapiro-whatever is asked 'what would you do' he responds with what he woudl do if *anything* outside of what people are *clearly informed* is allowed is installed. He does not say 'oh, well normally we wouldn't care, but if it was linux, we'd fire them'. Sheesh.
Communication is absolutely the key. I expect that if the developers need to hook a bunch of linux boxes up to my network, they come to me and say 'Hey, we need to get access to the file server and shit from these LInux boxes, because that's what we're doing our code on now'. As the IT manager, it's my *JOB* to accommodate this (preferably, they tell me BEFORE they make this decision to switch platforms, so I don't have to make a bit of a fuss. The fuss is because the cost of me supporting it must be factored in to the cost of switching over, and may reflect badly on my own budget otherwise.)
In my world, it is IT's job to make technology work for the company. Period. If it has to do with Information, and Technology, then it's IT's responsibility to provide expertise.
That said, if someone just ignores policy and installs something over their workstation, of *course* something needs to be done; but not because they installed 'linux'.. simply because they trashed their workstation!
On the flip side.. the guy who says, in the article, 'we allowed our Finnish group to continue to use Linux as long as we could manage it with NDS' is bunk. If you purchase a company that does all their work on linux, you evaluate the total cost of switching them to a different (preferred) system, or supporting their current one. EITHER is a viable option; as the IT manager, it is up to you to provide that support.
SImply saying 'fuck you, install NT' is *NOT* providing support. Showing the boss how the cost of switching to NT & making this fit with your current support structure, and the rest of the organization's devleopment -vs- the downsides of changing the office over, THAT is the way to show it.
But that's the problem. THere is a missing step in the feedback loop here.
You buy software, most people do anyway, thinking it's like 'buying' anything else.
Then, there is this 'eula', which most people just click on. THey have not got a choice! if they opened the software and installed it, they already know they can't take it back and return it to the store; it's opened. THe courts say you can't use it without agreeing to the license...
It's not that it's not logical, or doesn't make sense.. because it DOES.. the problem is it's not in the interests of the consumers to have things continue this way.
At a certain level, in any economy, there is a point where a society as a whole (government) must step in and say 'look , this is how things are going to be, because this is unfair to the consumer on a grand scale'.
As an example.. in the 60s and 70s, the consumer-rights stuff in Canada (yeah, nag all you want about socialisim). High-ranking members of even supermarkets were investigated and charged (just one example, it covered many busiensses) for something we see as normal today. Accepting schwag. Like 'Sure, I'll have my company pay a bit extra for 10,000 cases of Coke if you buy me a porsche'. It seems fair, right? BUT.... here's the thing.
IN a smaller town, the people inherently assume that the cost they pay reflects the costs to get the product on the shelves, and to run the business (and to make a profit, of course). In this situation, the cost actually reflects the owner buying a porsche, and, in effect, as these are *necessary* goods, the public *IS* being ripped off. I'm not saying I agree with this, or that it should be done today.. things are different now.. but..
Software is similar. There is an assumed 'contract' if you will, when you buy something in a store. You are exchanging ownership for cash. We also know this has nothign to do wiht 'intellectual property' rights of the product bing purchased; if I buy a car, ai *OWN* that car and can do what I want with it. I may still not be allowed to steal the design and start a car company.
Software is the same thing.. Joe Farmer thinks he is BUYING something, when really he is LICENSING it.
Hey... I can even show the RECEIPT, on the same receipt with all the stuff I bought, and it says *nothing* about licensing windows... it says I bought these goods at the store.
So what's with the eula?
Regardless of how frustrating it is, and how much we hate spam..
Your email *account* is an endpoint for smtp mail. Unless your ISP offers you filters, that is *ALL* you are paying for, and, state-based legislation aside, you do not have a 'right' to prevent others from sending you mail. (Note I said prevent them from sending.... you *absolutely* have the right not to receive it.
That's the whole problem with mail. YOu have no control over acceptance.
Uhh.. but that's just it. Systems administrator gets to CHOOSE what they use.
Office workers are TOLD what they will use. If they decide they don't 'like' it, and want to do it their own way.. then they *could* get fired, just as if they hauled their desk outside and brought in their own vibrating chair, and worked on the floor from a cushion.
The PC (and software) , in many cases, is a tool provided by the company to do your job.
Well...
1) The entire corporate network is properly firewalled; this is a key point. They don't open up a 'security risk' by using linux on their workstation.
2) I won't support it, unless they ask appropriate questions.
3) I won't freak out.
4) I ask why they did it. Usually it's because they actually need it to do their work (programmers). I am not there to tell them what tools they need to do their job; I am there to assist with making those tools work for them.
Really. The only reasons IT should get pissed are:
1) License violation
2) Security violation
Period.
I make it clear that I can't support it to the same degree as the 'official' software, that they better be able to deal with it on their own. THis is never a problem.
The guy *asked* Stallman what he thought. Why are we making him out to be the free software nazi? 99% of the time he only says stuff like this when you ASK him his opinion.
HOw low. I *HATE* it when the media does that... ask for an honest opinion then rip it to shreds.