You raise some good points, some that I haven't considered. I'm actually not sure if DOSsing an ISP should be illegal. On one hand, you're causing the company to lose money via sabatoge. Usually that type of thing would be best handled in the courts (civil matter) rather than specific laws. As this type of thing would get more common, people would likely take better security precautions in the first place to prevent it.
Comparing this to SPAM is hard for me to envision. What types of costs are associated with SPAM? Who specifically is the cause of these costs? Who pays for them? I've seen some statistics that say SPAM costs X million dollars per year, but I'm not aware of the details.
The point is, these laws are NOT about content-based filtering. Spam is simply about whether the sender had permission to send his shit or not. Would-be (would-have-been?) anti-spam laws are about the same thing: Did the sender have MY prior permission to use MY resources?
Why should he need your permission? The only concept of "private property" on the Internet is through implementing security measures. If you want only those who have your permission to e-mail you, then you can configure your SMTP server or mail client to do that. Problem solved, and I guarantee it'll be much more effective than anything a government can do.
Nearly everyone here seems to have defaulted to the view that anti-spam laws are a great thing. Why is this? What if it were a law related to content filtering? What if it were something like the DMCA?
Face it, government intervention and legislation on the internet is bad. Very bad. You can't have it both ways. If you allow the government to say what's okay and what's not okay to e-mail, then you give up freedom. Just because spam is annoying and everybody hates it doesn't change this. We need to handle these matters our own ways, and many are already doing that (spam filters, organizations that provide black list services, etc.).
Don't fall into the trap thinking that the government is the solution. I'm sure most of you can imagine what a nightmare enforcing something like this is anyway (forged spam to get someone else fined, whatever).
> and yes, there's a "linux port", Gecko, for the uninformed.
Gecko is the Mozilla rendering engine period. It's not platform specific.
>Actually, Kmeleon was ported from Galeon's Gecko engine
No, Galeon uses Mozilla's gecko engine via the GTK+ mozilla embedding widget (gtkmozembed). K-Meleon uses an analogously similar embedding widget for Windows.
How can you say there aren't any gaming sites left except for GameSpot? Jeff K. is the leading provider in game content and news. It isn't unusual for him to scoop bluesnews, and his comics are much better than Penny Arcade's. He interviews big gaming celebrities like Cliffy B and John Carmack.
He also reviews the PC games that matter, and wrote a brilliant editorial on the upcoming console wars.
I don't think that's feasible due to the runtime nature of Python. It would almost certainly require a type of "engine" to handle these features (think about all the cool things you can do with classes that aren't possible in C++), which isn't much better than byte code.
As cold and "elitist" as this sounds, I don't think slashdot should have to explain this stuff.
The issue that arises is "where do you draw the line?". Should slashdot post an explanation everytime the Gimp is mentioned? Or Gnome/KDE? I would hope that the average slashdot reader already knows what Nautilus is -- and if he/she doesn't, that they take the time to figure it out on their own.
Personally, if Slashdot explained what Nautilus is I'd feel turned off. Seeing "Nautilus, the next-generation desktop shell for the Gnome environment" has a real ZDnet feel to it (ever notice how so many Linux articles from other sources give the 1 paragraph explanation about Linux and how Linus Torvalds started it in 1992 blah blah blah). It's not like this is the first article on Nautilus at slashdot. You have no excuse for not taking 5 seconds to research, sorry.
Perhaps a better solution is for Slashdot to automatically append one of those Everything2 links to these words. This way it doesn't insult regulars with the ZDnet feel to it, and it makes explanations simple for others.
Oh, I see... I thought he was saying that it was ranked 10-20 at its given time slot. Usually when you hear about shows competing, it's assumed to be shows at the same time slot.
"Probably nobody was more surprised than the network when the show took off, usually ranking each week up in the top ten or twenty. "
How is top 20 good? I admit I don't know much about TV ratings, but considering CBS is one of the 'big' networks you'd think top ten or twenty is very poor.
I like the general concept of your idea because it has a set limit on how much you pay for content. Spending more time in one place only means a larger percentage for that site.
However, relying on client data for this is faulty (pain in the ass, probably proprietary, probably not multiplatform, hacked clients, etc), and relying on the server is also inacurrate (people using proxies). Practically, if this was implemented on the server, who cares if they get around it using a proxy? If they're doing that, they probably don't want their money going to whatever site they're at (microsoft.com comes to mind).
What is the incentive for the ISP to do this, though? If ISP X charges $8 extra per month and pays it to sites that get the most hits, and ISP Y doesn't -- which one are you (the consumer) going to choose? The ISP isn't going to want to lose its userbase just to fund content providers. Maybe the ISP would get benefits somehow in turn from the sites. I dunno.. it's your idea:)
You should probably ignore this guy -- I doubt he was a Kylix Beta tester.
"Borland has new components called Cl/x or what ever, clix. All programs written with Kylix are compiled against clix libs but at the time being"
Err.. anyone who's even remotely followed the Kylix project would know that it's CLX. You're either a troll, or didn't have enough care for Kylix in the first place to warrant beta testing it.
Well, I'm not sure who you're preaching too since several people have already pointed out that it will be a free download (or $99 for cd+manual).
Furthermore, no one has complained yet about wine here. I only mentioned that there are rumors that the Kylix IDE will (in this version at least) use winelib. You said "Kylix does not use Wine in any shape or form. Period". Have you any proof to back up this claim? Yes, we all know the generated applications won't use wine or winelib.
"Can anybody give me reasons why they won't use it? Do people have a prejudice against IDEs or RADs?
Borland is doing a good thing, and paying attention to what people in the linux community are asking for."
I love Delphi personally, so I'll surely use this for something. However, I probably won't use it for primary development for awhile due to the lack of Gnome support. This will come in time I'm sure, and I have no doubt dozens of people will begin work (without waiting on Borland) as soon as it's released.
Some random Kylix related info not mentioned in the summary or directly in the article:
- There will be a version called Open Kylix (or Kylix Open Edition) that will be a free download, or $99 for CD+manuals. This will be intended for use for developing Free/Open Source Software. This won't be available until mid-year though.
- On Borland's Kylix newsgroup, there are rumors that Kylix's IDE uses winelib. This was qualified by saying that the generated applications themselves won't rely on winelib (only the IDE itself will). This kinda scares me a little, but not too much without giving it a chance.
- As mentioned several months ago, CLX will be licensed under the GPL (and probably dual-licensed with another for commercial development). Borland also said that CLX widgets are not real/default Qt widgets, and that they basically are all custom (so a Kylix TButton is NOT a Qt+ button). This is actually good news, since it will make a Gtk+ layer more feasible.
It's not "plain Pascal" by any means -- it's Delphi (often called Object Pascal).
Even Turbo Pascal had many Borland extensions to the original language. Today, Delphi's Pascal supports nearly everything you'd need (obviously it doesn't support every last C++ feature, but most C++ coders don't use nearly the entire language).
It's very suitable for a RAD environment as well -- the unit approach (as opposed to includes) yields much faster compiles.
Don't take the acronym too seriously -- I think of it (GNU's not UNIX) more as the "anti-commercial" feel that UNIX once had (still does?), rather than a technical objection.
I have an egghead account, and there were more than 5 unauthorized transactions on my credit card statement this last month. Maybe it's coincidental, but this has never happened before so it's probably a result of this.
I'm not blaming egghead for being cracked, I'm blaming them for storing my credit card in their database. I should be given an option as to whether or not I want to use their "one-click" shopping. Granted, it was my choice to signup with them, but I generally do not deal with sites with those policies (made an exception for Egghead because of the free shipping -- shame on me).
I don't want to trust or depend on THEIR security. Just say no to one-click shopping.
It's pretty bad when no one "gets it" until comment #37... before this post I see people getting moderated up to +4 Insightful for completely idiotic pseudo-technical posts about making it faster.
The startup time for Netscape 6 is ridiculously more than that of the Mozilla nightly he used. This doesn't suprise me because Netscape 6 uses the Java plugin. This plugin is loaded at startup and would probably add 10 seconds (yes, it's that substantial) to the startup time on that test machine.
Sigh, good point of course -- but I never claimed the statistics to be meaningful, which is why I said they were useless. What I DID take from it was that neither was overwhelmingly more popular than the other.
I hate having to defend myself when I was careful in how I said things in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise some good points, some that I haven't considered. I'm actually not sure if DOSsing an ISP should be illegal. On one hand, you're causing the company to lose money via sabatoge. Usually that type of thing would be best handled in the courts (civil matter) rather than specific laws. As this type of thing would get more common, people would likely take better security precautions in the first place to prevent it.
Comparing this to SPAM is hard for me to envision. What types of costs are associated with SPAM? Who specifically is the cause of these costs? Who pays for them? I've seen some statistics that say SPAM costs X million dollars per year, but I'm not aware of the details.
The point is, these laws are NOT about content-based filtering. Spam is simply about whether the sender had permission to send his shit or not. Would-be (would-have-been?) anti-spam laws are about the same thing: Did the sender have MY prior permission to use MY resources?
Why should he need your permission? The only concept of "private property" on the Internet is through implementing security measures. If you want only those who have your permission to e-mail you, then you can configure your SMTP server or mail client to do that. Problem solved, and I guarantee it'll be much more effective than anything a government can do.
> People pass laws that restrict freedoms in order to reduce behaviors that they find objectionable. It's a fact of life, and not always a bad thing.
Except sidewalks are usually government owned. The internet shouldn't be this way. I stand by my belief that laws like this are a very slippery slope.
Nearly everyone here seems to have defaulted to the view that anti-spam laws are a great thing. Why is this? What if it were a law related to content filtering? What if it were something like the DMCA?
Face it, government intervention and legislation on the internet is bad. Very bad. You can't have it both ways. If you allow the government to say what's okay and what's not okay to e-mail, then you give up freedom. Just because spam is annoying and everybody hates it doesn't change this. We need to handle these matters our own ways, and many are already doing that (spam filters, organizations that provide black list services, etc.).
Don't fall into the trap thinking that the government is the solution. I'm sure most of you can imagine what a nightmare enforcing something like this is anyway (forged spam to get someone else fined, whatever).
Sorry, but you're a little clueless.
> and yes, there's a "linux port", Gecko, for the uninformed.
Gecko is the Mozilla rendering engine period. It's not platform specific.
>Actually, Kmeleon was ported from Galeon's Gecko engine
No, Galeon uses Mozilla's gecko engine via the GTK+ mozilla embedding widget (gtkmozembed). K-Meleon uses an analogously similar embedding widget for Windows.
How can you say there aren't any gaming sites left except for GameSpot? Jeff K. is the leading provider in game content and news. It isn't unusual for him to scoop bluesnews, and his comics are much better than Penny Arcade's. He interviews big gaming celebrities like Cliffy B and John Carmack.
He also reviews the PC games that matter, and wrote a brilliant editorial on the upcoming console wars.
I don't think that's feasible due to the runtime nature of Python. It would almost certainly require a type of "engine" to handle these features (think about all the cool things you can do with classes that aren't possible in C++), which isn't much better than byte code.
As cold and "elitist" as this sounds, I don't think slashdot should have to explain this stuff.
The issue that arises is "where do you draw the line?". Should slashdot post an explanation everytime the Gimp is mentioned? Or Gnome/KDE? I would hope that the average slashdot reader already knows what Nautilus is -- and if he/she doesn't, that they take the time to figure it out on their own.
Personally, if Slashdot explained what Nautilus is I'd feel turned off. Seeing "Nautilus, the next-generation desktop shell for the Gnome environment" has a real ZDnet feel to it (ever notice how so many Linux articles from other sources give the 1 paragraph explanation about Linux and how Linus Torvalds started it in 1992 blah blah blah). It's not like this is the first article on Nautilus at slashdot. You have no excuse for not taking 5 seconds to research, sorry.
Perhaps a better solution is for Slashdot to automatically append one of those Everything2 links to these words. This way it doesn't insult regulars with the ZDnet feel to it, and it makes explanations simple for others.
Oh, I see... I thought he was saying that it was ranked 10-20 at its given time slot. Usually when you hear about shows competing, it's assumed to be shows at the same time slot.
"Probably nobody was more surprised than the network when the show took off, usually ranking each week up in the top ten or twenty. "
How is top 20 good? I admit I don't know much about TV ratings, but considering CBS is one of the 'big' networks you'd think top ten or twenty is very poor.
It's very difficult.
I like the general concept of your idea because it has a set limit on how much you pay for content. Spending more time in one place only means a larger percentage for that site.
:)
However, relying on client data for this is faulty (pain in the ass, probably proprietary, probably not multiplatform, hacked clients, etc), and relying on the server is also inacurrate (people using proxies). Practically, if this was implemented on the server, who cares if they get around it using a proxy? If they're doing that, they probably don't want their money going to whatever site they're at (microsoft.com comes to mind).
What is the incentive for the ISP to do this, though? If ISP X charges $8 extra per month and pays it to sites that get the most hits, and ISP Y doesn't -- which one are you (the consumer) going to choose? The ISP isn't going to want to lose its userbase just to fund content providers. Maybe the ISP would get benefits somehow in turn from the sites. I dunno.. it's your idea
You should probably ignore this guy -- I doubt he was a Kylix Beta tester.
"Borland has new components called Cl/x or what ever, clix. All programs written with Kylix are compiled against clix libs but at the time being"
Err.. anyone who's even remotely followed the Kylix project would know that it's CLX. You're either a troll, or didn't have enough care for Kylix in the first place to warrant beta testing it.
Well, I'm not sure who you're preaching too since several people have already pointed out that it will be a free download (or $99 for cd+manual).
Furthermore, no one has complained yet about wine here. I only mentioned that there are rumors that the Kylix IDE will (in this version at least) use winelib. You said "Kylix does not use Wine in any shape or form. Period". Have you any proof to back up this claim? Yes, we all know the generated applications won't use wine or winelib.
"Can anybody give me reasons why they won't use it? Do people have a prejudice against IDEs or RADs?
Borland is doing a good thing, and paying attention to what people in the linux community are asking for."
I love Delphi personally, so I'll surely use this for something. However, I probably won't use it for primary development for awhile due to the lack of Gnome support. This will come in time I'm sure, and I have no doubt dozens of people will begin work (without waiting on Borland) as soon as it's released.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that people speculated that over time Borland would re-write the IDE in Kylix itself.
Some random Kylix related info not mentioned in the summary or directly in the article:
- There will be a version called Open Kylix (or Kylix Open Edition) that will be a free download, or $99 for CD+manuals. This will be intended for use for developing Free/Open Source Software. This won't be available until mid-year though.
- On Borland's Kylix newsgroup, there are rumors that Kylix's IDE uses winelib. This was qualified by saying that the generated applications themselves won't rely on winelib (only the IDE itself will). This kinda scares me a little, but not too much without giving it a chance.
- As mentioned several months ago, CLX will be licensed under the GPL (and probably dual-licensed with another for commercial development). Borland also said that CLX widgets are not real/default Qt widgets, and that they basically are all custom (so a Kylix TButton is NOT a Qt+ button). This is actually good news, since it will make a Gtk+ layer more feasible.
It's not "plain Pascal" by any means -- it's Delphi (often called Object Pascal).
Even Turbo Pascal had many Borland extensions to the original language. Today, Delphi's Pascal supports nearly everything you'd need (obviously it doesn't support every last C++ feature, but most C++ coders don't use nearly the entire language).
It's very suitable for a RAD environment as well -- the unit approach (as opposed to includes) yields much faster compiles.
Don't take the acronym too seriously -- I think of it (GNU's not UNIX) more as the "anti-commercial" feel that UNIX once had (still does?), rather than a technical objection.
This is all well and good - but honestly there's not much new here except for the fact that MS is being more open in acknowledging Linux.
We've really known this since the Halloween documents.
Everyone wants to believe that they're different/special/smarter/victimized.
I have an egghead account, and there were more than 5 unauthorized transactions on my credit card statement this last month. Maybe it's coincidental, but this has never happened before so it's probably a result of this.
I'm not blaming egghead for being cracked, I'm blaming them for storing my credit card in their database. I should be given an option as to whether or not I want to use their "one-click" shopping. Granted, it was my choice to signup with them, but I generally do not deal with sites with those policies (made an exception for Egghead because of the free shipping -- shame on me).
I don't want to trust or depend on THEIR security. Just say no to one-click shopping.
It's pretty bad when no one "gets it" until comment #37... before this post I see people getting moderated up to +4 Insightful for completely idiotic pseudo-technical posts about making it faster.
You don't have to keep your private key on the hard drive. Someone who gets your passphrase shouldn't necessarily be able to decrypt your stuff.
The startup time for Netscape 6 is ridiculously more than that of the Mozilla nightly he used. This doesn't suprise me because Netscape 6 uses the Java plugin. This plugin is loaded at startup and would probably add 10 seconds (yes, it's that substantial) to the startup time on that test machine.
Mozilla nightlies don't include the Java plugin.
Sigh, good point of course -- but I never claimed the statistics to be meaningful, which is why I said they were useless. What I DID take from it was that neither was overwhelmingly more popular than the other.
I hate having to defend myself when I was careful in how I said things in the first place.