No....it's the arrogance and utter contempt these companies exhibit by assuming they have some kind of right to this information
Wow. You think they don't? Did you not sign some form of contract with them? Are you certain you did not give up certain rights with regard to the bi-directional properties of modern boxes? Naivete seems to abound. They have the rights, they own the equipemnt, and you RENT it. They can do whatever they want.
What makes you think people don't watch that tripe? The networks aren't stupid -- they show what people watch, even if it is mindless
I dislike parsing my own words for others. I said "not everyone", not "nobody". Please pay attention. However, I do agree with the mindset that most people will swallow these things whole without thinking. There are very few dramas around. Buffy and Ally come to mind as bad examples of TV 1 hour drama. They are essentially hour long versions of 1/2 hour sitcoms. A lot of TV falls into the "braindead" category.
If the Neilsen rating system has any inaccuracies, they aren't from the size of the sample. A large sample isn't needed as long as the people participating are representative of the population at large.
Luckily, Neilsen picks people at random. Our family was once chosen (they were surprised to see all we watched was sci-fi, and mostly bablyon 5) and we decided not to watch sitcoms for that week. I hope it skewed results back to the norm. Some people are even pickier than that.
They would probably be able to FORCE you to use this system. If you read the article, you'd notice they are talking about DIGITAL cable boxes. You have no choice, either you get one of these boxes or bye-bye digital cable.
Are computers not just blinking screens? Or are you referring to tv's as "blinking" in a British sense?
All I watch is SCI-FI shows and DiscoveryTLCQEDetc. I like to be impressed, not bored to death by sitcoms. This is where the rot is.
I'm not even complaining about the pointless violence to get ratings. It has a right to be on TV. But if you guarantee that right to producers, let them put sex and language online too. 1st amendment goes a lot further than wrestling thank you...
This way we can show TV networks that not evryone watches "friends" or any of the other tripe that comes down the pike. This is inevitable. Did you expect during their inception that hit counters were an invasion of privacy? Hopefully they will just take the signals without marking demograhpics. This would be important. At least this would remove the statistical inaccuracy of Neilsen ratings (polling a small % of a populace) and it may push some channels in the right direction *coughtntcough* as far as programming is concerned.
- just slightly mad that "ratings" rule tnt in light of Crusade
1) 4 physical gigs of ram when linux can support 2 gigs. 2) "Red Hat did not ship or support a product based on the Linux 2.2.x kernel." pardon me, but (all holy wars aside) RedHat is NOT linux per se, just a distribution. This always bothers me. The mentality of "since we couldn't buy it right off the shelf, it doesn't exist" but they are quick to use IE5 (when it was beta) and betas of office and windows 2000 when it suits them. Our kernels may be "beta" but they are actually out there. 3)"we found the following kernel update history:" Turning a strength (frequent updates) into a weakness (oh, Linux has soo many bugs they have to constantly releas) is a typical FUD tactic. It's so popular it's even in the big document defining the concept of fud. When was the last time Microsoft released a kernel? 4) "Linux performance tuning tips and tricks must be learned from documentation on the Net, newsgroups, and trial-and-error." and I wouldn't have it any other way. At least through this method they are *free*. There is a big difference between MCSE courses and common knowledge. 5) "For people not familiar with UNIX/Linux systems, it may take longer to do the installation." And the same is true for NT admins. You are hired because you know how to do something. That's the point of business. Why would you hire somebody for a Linux position if they don't know Linux?
Anyways, this entire document is sketchy at best. I submit the following configuration for test:
Quad processor Machine with 2 gb of ram (let's be honest, linux does not yet go above this afaik), Properly formatted hdds, NT4.0, Linux 2.2.5, Raid 0, HDDS formatted for NTFS and ext2fs respectively (not nfs -- maybe coda), Apache should have mod_cgi compiled in (the benchmarks had a section for this, I believe), and configure linux right this time!
btw: why is it that when I swap windows in my barely accellerated X-Windows system in rapid succession it can keep up with redraws, and with the same system in win95 it won't?
/*AIX: Logging Sucks. Linux: Logging Rules. NT: NT does logging? */ I agree with the AIX part:) Nothing like using the "errpt" tool to ruin your day. or SMIT, ick.
The whole "I plugged the new processor into my PII slot, and set my bios to a pentium II at 900,000 mhz" part is the thing that made me say "f#$@"
I was, needless to say, perturbed. What a respectable magazine is doing wasting 5 pages of documentation and $$$ (magazines are not cheap to publisth!) is beyond me.
The reason linux has become so popular is not because it is free, but because it is open. There is a significant importance to Linux being open that you cannot see with your closed-source blinders on. You cannot see that if your software were open to peer review instead of exploits it would have greater stability. The easiest way to find vulnerablities is to look at the code. Unfortunately, when your programmers look at the same code every day, bugs easily slip through. They need open minds to parse the code for errors. The closed source model cannot go very far from its own campus before the code becomes un-readable. This is another failing of the closed corporate culture. While standard coding processes may be in place in an office such as yours, outside the office they are meanningless. For all you know, somebody out there may have better ideas than the "best and brightest" of Microsoft; they may be able to pull some things out of their collective hat that you could not.
Stability of your os is also at issue. We recently had our mail server go down due to a lack of swap space at our local office. While we were able to reboot the NT server, this should not have been necessary as the server had 2 gigs of RAM installed. This was due to a bug we could not see or diagnose or work around. Reboot was our only option. This is another strong feature of our beloved Linux. Heck, it's even a strong feature of UNIX in general.
Your OS (NT) is not scalable. Wolfpack (or whatever they are called this week) servers have not made any progress. If programs want to collaborate between machines, the authors of those programs must come up with their own solution, such as the Ligtwave or 3DS MAX renderfarms. They go about this by using their own drivers and support software. The OS really isn't involved in the process. On the other hand, Beowulf servers have been proven to scale very well (as was evidenced by IBM's $150,000 supercomputer built from Netfinitys running Extreme Linux) matching speeds approaching a T3E!
Now I will quot you directly, sir:
"The main thing that has held that [free software] back is that because it's free software there's no central point of control. So what you see with Linux, and other things, is you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does."
The Linux kernel, I will have you know, does have a central point of control. Their names are Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox. They are the core of the kernel development. When somebody submits an idea for the kernel, or perhaps a patch, Linux and Alan decide if the patch or idea would work out with the overall design. This model allows steps to be taken for the inclusion of new features in an official capacity. Can somebody just modify their kernel for their own purposes (say for an embedded project)? Of course! They don't even need to sign a NDA to get the code to the OS! This everybody to which you refer is not actually the case, however. I personally do not delve into the kernel internals too often, as I would expect all but the seriously interested or curious would. But it is there if I need it, and I really don't have to give it back and "pollute", as you would put it, the original source.
Another Quote:
"We put things into our system like systems management that's not that much fun for university developers,"
System management tools abound for Linux! there's LiSA, sysconfig, programs that make life easier like ezppp or kppp et cetera. They may not all share the same global UI and they may require some test file tweaking, but they are system management. There is no reason to dumb-down system management tools; they are meant for people who know what they are doing. UIs mask the real facts of your.ini files and now the registry. Where does it end? They limit features that we have to pay extra money for in windows (like hacking the registry to change icons, something you'd have to buy plus! to do.)
"It[Linux] doesn't have the graphics interface."
Linux does not have a built-in graphics interface. It does, however have many OPTIONAL graphics interfaces. We have X-Windows (xfree86) with the choice of at least two desktops (gnome & kde) plus the look and feel of: twm, fvwm, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Icewm, kwm, fvwm95 and dozens of others. We have the choice of our favorite web browsers, thank you very much.
"But I really don't think in the commercial market, we'll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way."
In case you haven't noticed, Mr. Gates, Linux is competing, with a 17% gain in the server market (a commercial market one would agree) with Apache (a free, open web server) leading the world for httpd servers. the basic Email transports are open source, as is every version of tcp and ip.
When given a choice, the market will choose freedom.
People don't stop cracking and stealing 3ds and Lightwave do they? The windows platform is rife with pirates. Windows software, with a few possible exceptions (i can think of : sPatch, PovRay, and PFE) are all for $. Everything costs money, and the windows mentality is unfortunately:"If it's free, it's no good"
3ds 2.0 was a dog on my system compared to blender. Maybe you should try the dynamic version of blender with Mesa specifically compiled to your system. I have a PII 450 with 128 MB ram and an AGP card.
Having used 3dsR2, R4 and MAX and Lightwave 5.6, I have to say blender is a lot cleaner, not as bloated and about as full featured. It is quite obfuscated in places, however. But the UI as well as its rendering ability is improving. And it is sooo solid against any windows 3d program (which cannot handle GL properly anyways)
But English is at least a semi-official second language in most contries, making it "international" The reason English isn't the biggest language is China. and only china and chinese territories speak it.
Seems they have KDE stacked in there. Interesting...
heh. Yeah, I guess they are giving the ppl what they want or something. It's good to distribute your desktop along with the other desktop. At least that fosters some co-operation.
--- hoping one day they will both merge into one..
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
You're forgetting the "invisible hand" of the market economy. People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum. I minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Now I don't know what you mean by "labor laws" -- If you are talking about kids in factories, all get paid less because there are more workers in general. But keep in mind that minimum wage is just a price floor by which the government people "happy"
I think the previous poster meant libertarian socialism as more in civil libertarian, not economic libertarian as in the american libertarian (wacko nutcase) party. there are still other definitions of libertarianism. ask a european what libertarian means to him and you'll get a completely different response from what it means to an american, or african, or asian, etc. get the picture?
Actually someone right here on/. put it right:
~"The right thinks the Libertarians are too leftwing, The left thinks the Libertarians are too right wing"~
well that's approximate..
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law...
Slashdot Mirror
No....it's the arrogance and utter contempt these companies exhibit by assuming they have some kind of right to this information
Wow. You think they don't? Did you not sign some form of contract with them? Are you certain you did not give up certain rights with regard to the bi-directional properties of modern boxes? Naivete seems to abound. They have the rights, they own the equipemnt, and you RENT it. They can do whatever they want.
What makes you think people don't watch that tripe? The networks aren't stupid -- they show what people watch, even if it is mindless
I dislike parsing my own words for others. I said "not everyone", not "nobody". Please pay attention. However, I do agree with the mindset that most people will swallow these things whole without thinking. There are very few dramas around. Buffy and Ally come to mind as bad examples of TV 1 hour drama. They are essentially hour long versions of 1/2 hour sitcoms. A lot of TV falls into the "braindead" category.
If the Neilsen rating system has any inaccuracies, they aren't from the size of the sample. A large sample isn't needed as long as the people participating are representative of the population at large.
Luckily, Neilsen picks people at random. Our family was once chosen (they were surprised to see all we watched was sci-fi, and mostly bablyon 5) and we decided not to watch sitcoms for that week. I hope it skewed results back to the norm. Some people are even pickier than that.
They would probably be able to FORCE you to use this system. If you read the article, you'd notice they are talking about DIGITAL cable boxes. You have no choice, either you get one of these boxes or bye-bye digital cable.
Are computers not just blinking screens? Or are you referring to tv's as "blinking" in a British sense?
All I watch is SCI-FI shows and DiscoveryTLCQEDetc. I like to be impressed, not bored to death by sitcoms. This is where the rot is.
I'm not even complaining about the pointless violence to get ratings. It has a right to be on TV. But if you guarantee that right to producers, let them put sex and language online too. 1st amendment goes a lot further than wrestling thank you...
This way we can show TV networks that not evryone watches "friends" or any of the other tripe that comes down the pike. This is inevitable. Did you expect during their inception that hit counters were an invasion of privacy? Hopefully they will just take the signals without marking demograhpics. This would be important. At least this would remove the statistical inaccuracy of Neilsen ratings (polling a small % of a populace) and it may push some channels in the right direction *coughtntcough* as far as programming is concerned.
- just slightly mad that "ratings" rule tnt in light of Crusade
"dilute the distinctiveness of our client's marks"
:)
--- only lawyers talk like this.
Infringer: "what happens if we mix dilbert with water?"
oh my god. they diluted dilbert!!
say that 3 times fast
>What are the five windowing systems?
Macos, X, Windows, BeOs, Wince(?)
>Oh, and who is charging for their browser now?
Opera
1) 4 physical gigs of ram when linux can support 2 gigs.
2) "Red Hat did not ship or support a product based on the Linux 2.2.x kernel." pardon me, but (all holy wars aside) RedHat is NOT linux per se, just a distribution. This always bothers me. The mentality of "since we couldn't buy it right off the shelf, it doesn't exist" but they are quick to use IE5 (when it was beta) and betas of office and windows 2000 when it suits them. Our kernels may be "beta" but they are actually out there.
3)"we found the following kernel update history:" Turning a strength (frequent updates) into a weakness (oh, Linux has soo many bugs they have to constantly releas) is a typical FUD tactic. It's so popular it's even in the big document defining the concept of fud. When was the last time Microsoft released a kernel?
4) "Linux performance tuning tips and tricks must be learned from documentation on the Net, newsgroups, and trial-and-error." and I wouldn't have it any other way. At least through this method they are *free*. There is a big difference between MCSE courses and common knowledge.
5) "For people not familiar with UNIX/Linux systems, it may take longer to do the installation." And the same is true for NT admins. You are hired because you know how to do something. That's the point of business. Why would you hire somebody for a Linux position if they don't know Linux?
Anyways, this entire document is sketchy at best. I submit the following configuration for test:
Quad processor Machine with 2 gb of ram (let's be honest, linux does not yet go above this afaik), Properly formatted hdds, NT4.0, Linux 2.2.5, Raid 0, HDDS formatted for NTFS and ext2fs respectively (not nfs -- maybe coda), Apache should have mod_cgi compiled in (the benchmarks had a section for this, I believe), and configure linux right this time!
btw: why is it that when I swap windows in my barely accellerated X-Windows system in rapid succession it can keep up with redraws, and with the same system in win95 it won't?
Look for the hardware store called "Ace" to sue this guy in the near future. Just like Toys -r- Russ...
/*AIX: Logging Sucks. :)
Linux: Logging Rules.
NT: NT does logging?
*/
I agree with the AIX part
Nothing like using the "errpt" tool to ruin your day. or SMIT, ick.
The whole "I plugged the new processor into my PII slot, and set my bios to a pentium II at 900,000 mhz" part is the thing that made me say "f#$@"
I was, needless to say, perturbed. What a respectable magazine is doing wasting 5 pages of documentation and $$$ (magazines are not cheap to publisth!) is beyond me.
Mr. Gates:
.ini files and now the registry. Where does it end? They limit features that we have to pay extra money for in windows (like hacking the registry to change icons, something you'd have to buy plus! to do.)
The reason linux has become so popular is not because it is free, but because it is open. There is a significant importance to Linux being open that you cannot see with your closed-source blinders on. You cannot see that if your software were open to peer review instead of exploits it would have greater stability. The easiest way to find vulnerablities is to look at the code. Unfortunately, when your programmers look at the same code every day, bugs easily slip through. They need open minds to parse the code for errors. The closed source model cannot go very far from its own campus before the code becomes un-readable. This is another failing of the closed corporate culture. While standard coding processes may be in place in an office such as yours, outside the office they are meanningless. For all you know, somebody out there may have better ideas than the "best and brightest" of Microsoft; they may be able to pull some things out of their collective hat that you could not.
Stability of your os is also at issue. We recently had our mail server go down due to a lack of swap space at our local office. While we were able to reboot the NT server, this should not have been necessary as the server had 2 gigs of RAM installed. This was due to a bug we could not see or diagnose or work around. Reboot was our only option. This is another strong feature of our beloved Linux. Heck, it's even a strong feature of UNIX in general.
Your OS (NT) is not scalable. Wolfpack (or whatever they are called this week) servers have not made any progress. If programs want to collaborate between machines, the authors of those programs must come up with their own solution, such as the Ligtwave or 3DS MAX renderfarms. They go about this by using their own drivers and support software. The OS really isn't involved in the process. On the other hand, Beowulf servers have been proven to scale very well (as was evidenced by IBM's $150,000 supercomputer built from Netfinitys running Extreme Linux) matching speeds approaching a T3E!
Now I will quot you directly, sir:
"The main thing that has held that [free software] back is that because it's free software there's no central point of control. So what you see with Linux, and other things, is you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does."
The Linux kernel, I will have you know, does have a central point of control. Their names are Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox. They are the core of the kernel development. When somebody submits an idea for the kernel, or perhaps a patch, Linux and Alan decide if the patch or idea would work out with the overall design. This model allows steps to be taken for the inclusion of new features in an official capacity. Can somebody just modify their kernel for their own purposes (say for an embedded project)? Of course! They don't even need to sign a NDA to get the code to the OS! This everybody to which you refer is not actually the case, however. I personally do not delve into the kernel internals too often, as I would expect all but the seriously interested or curious would. But it is there if I need it, and I really don't have to give it back and "pollute", as you would put it, the original source.
Another Quote:
"We put things into our system like systems management that's not that much fun for university developers,"
System management tools abound for Linux! there's LiSA, sysconfig, programs that make life easier like ezppp or kppp et cetera. They may not all share the same global UI and they may require some test file tweaking, but they are system management. There is no reason to dumb-down system management tools; they are meant for people who know what they are doing. UIs mask the real facts of your
"It[Linux] doesn't have the graphics interface."
Linux does not have a built-in graphics interface. It does, however have many OPTIONAL graphics interfaces. We have X-Windows (xfree86) with the choice of at least two desktops (gnome & kde) plus the look and feel of: twm, fvwm, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Icewm, kwm, fvwm95 and dozens of others. We have the choice of our favorite web browsers, thank you very much.
"But I really don't think in the commercial market, we'll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way."
In case you haven't noticed, Mr. Gates, Linux is competing, with a 17% gain in the server market (a commercial market one would agree) with Apache (a free, open web server) leading the world for httpd servers. the basic Email transports are open source, as is every version of tcp and ip.
When given a choice, the market will choose freedom.
angelo (anrkngl@lm.com)
sorry had to be said...
"Telemachus Sneezed"
Fnordling -
I saw your website out there with your blender stuff up. You should add that information to your user account and get some hits!
Actually Ton has not stated that 1.8 will not be GPL'd according to his website... so let's wait and see
At least you actually read it sengan. Everybody is interpreting it. Why don't they go on the msg board at www.bender.nl and ask Ton directly...
People don't stop cracking and stealing 3ds and Lightwave do they? The windows platform is rife with pirates. Windows software, with a few possible exceptions (i can think of : sPatch, PovRay, and PFE) are all for $. Everything costs money, and the windows mentality is unfortunately :"If it's free, it's no good"
3ds 2.0 was a dog on my system compared to blender. Maybe you should try the dynamic version of blender with Mesa specifically compiled to your system. I have a PII 450 with 128 MB ram and an AGP card.
Having used 3dsR2, R4 and MAX and Lightwave 5.6, I have to say blender is a lot cleaner, not as bloated and about as full featured. It is quite obfuscated in places, however. But the UI as well as its rendering ability is improving. And it is sooo solid against any windows 3d program (which cannot handle GL properly anyways)
I love it.
That's funny. I install everything in the /usr/local tree if it is secondary to the os anyways...
/usr/local/lib.
even the libs i compile myself go under
But English is at least a semi-official second language in most contries, making it "international" The reason English isn't the biggest language is China. and only china and chinese territories speak it.
Seems they have KDE stacked in there. Interesting...
heh. Yeah, I guess they are giving the ppl what they want or something. It's good to distribute your desktop along with the other desktop. At least that fosters some co-operation.
--- hoping one day they will both merge into one..
Whils't Crowley repeats that phrase, it's older than he was...
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
You're forgetting the "invisible hand" of the market economy. People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum. I minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Now I don't know what you mean by "labor laws" -- If you are talking about kids in factories, all get paid less because there are more workers in general. But keep in mind that minimum wage is just a price floor by which the government people "happy"
I think the previous poster meant libertarian socialism as more in civil libertarian, not economic libertarian as in the american libertarian (wacko nutcase) party. there are still other definitions of libertarianism. ask a european what libertarian means to him and you'll get a completely different response from what it means to an american, or african, or asian, etc. get the picture?
/. put it right:
Actually someone right here on
~"The right thinks the Libertarians are too leftwing,
The left thinks the Libertarians are too right wing"~
well that's approximate..
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law...
You are small - you will be assimilated into the socialist collective.
Why else? I can find fault with both the left and the right since they are both extremes.
Left : Look! Gnome is great! it throws it back at the da man's face! It's socialist.
Right : Look! Gnome is great! I can package this into my own distribution and ship it all over for money!
Left : You Fascist Whore! You can't control our movement!
Right : Well, there's this loophole in the GPL...
Me, well i'm discordian and I just take the best of both worlds. Vegetarianism + Hatred of gov't comes from both sides, ya know.