I'm not positive American students know how to "uprise" any longer; it seems that much of the American educational machine (especially the innumerable average state liberal arts schools) are well and truly an intrinsic part of the consumption machine. Rather than teaching students at some basic level about politics, economics, sociology, etc. they instead teach obedience, football, consumerism (better cars, better PCs, better fashions, better concernts, better alcoholic beverages, more expensive insignia gear) and pop-sex.
These kids aren't likely to understand the underpinnings of any uprising, more or less start one. If there will be an uprising, it will begin at the less wealthy of America's better liberal arts schools, maybe U.C. Berkeley similar. But is one or two schools enough to start an "uprising"?
Read your history. Collective bargaining power is an essential tool to protect workers from abuse by those who can afford to win a war of "labor attrition" (the workers can't).
Every type of worker should have a union. Unionization provides the ability to leverage your labor pool as a whole, to strike, to increase publicity or awareness of certain issues, and is fundamental to determining and being treated according to your real and fair worth as a labor pool, rather than what the corporate monopolies and upper classes want you to believe you are worth (i.e. next to nothing).
One worker alone is expendable and can be manipulated, lied to and if necessary disposed of with relatively little impact on the bottom line. All workers together are a much bigger bear to strangle, and when workers get together it forces the Wealthy Powers That Be to grudginly admit that they actually do need hands to make their cars or their buildings or their documents, not just edicts from the board room sent out into the vacuum, from which goods magically emerge.
Some people argue that unions allow silly, backward workers to price the fruits of their labor out of the markets, much to the chagrin of the wise old management team who actually knows what they're worth. This is a stupid argument; workers don't set out to unionize their companies out of business. They set out to unionize the CEO's seven-figure salary down to six fixures and to unionize unnecessary layoffs which occur as a result of these salaries back into paid positions. It is the upper management who is generally shamefully willing to shut down an otherwise profitable plant, company, or location simply because they are unwilling to take a pay cut down to reasonable levels in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.
How many times have we seen companies lay of nearly their entire workforce, spending the last year or two before bankruptcy with an essentially empty workplace and sixteen VP's and their secretaries sitting around reading comic books drawing seven figures until the end? This is what Unions are trying to fight... Unions want to help companies remain viable by paying the workers in needed numbers a real and livable wage to do the best job possible, in order to ensure the well-being of the workers and the well-being of the company, which the workers need in order to work!
Of course management and shareholders are typically the short-term losers in this equation, because they are unable to passively rape and pillage entire economic sectors to the same degree that would otherwise be possible from the decks of their carribbean yachts. The desire to shamelessly suck all of the wealth from an otherwise healthy company and leave its workers and its former assets as so much junk on a barren landscape is exactly what drives many in the wealthy west and is exactly what unions want to stop.
I am aware of the unsecured/untrusted nature of email header fields. But a judge and/or jury and/or plantiff may not be, and explaining it to them may (i.e. will) be very difficult.
I am one of the masses who has been the surprise victim of bizarre legal maneuvering that came out of nowhere (as far as I was concerned) and was completely unfair and even shameful on the other party's part.
Let me tell you that I no longer care if I win a case, I don't want to ever fight a case again, even a short one, even if I win in the end. The emotional and financial stress are horrible... My tendency any longer is to worry about liability and to take such issues very seriously. Until you've been there, you can't possibly know how horrible it feels and what a toll it takes.
I suppose it was more a rhetorical point than a literal one. You are of course right... I am just trying to figure out how to strike a balance between limiting my exposure to liability in this networked world (because everyone is happy to sue these days) and still participating in society in normal ways.
This balance is an increasingly difficult one to find and maintain.
I don't have Windows anywhere and haven't for several years now. I don't run Outlook. But it turns out that at least one of the current batch of worms spoofs email addresses.
So all week I've been getting email messages from postmaster@ saying "...your message to so-and-so will not be delivered because it contained the SoBig worm, we advise you to download a security update from..." I wrote a couple of them and got two responses from mail admins saying essentially "Yes, we know it spoofs your email, sorry there's nothing we can do, please understand that we're under tons of pressure on our end, everyone is infected, this worm sucks, you have it easy, you run Linux, stop complaining!"
Anyway, people are receiving messages marked "from" my email address and are getting infected with a worm as a result. Obviously one or several people (editors, management, etc.) that have me in their Outlook address books have become infected and now the worm is spreading from their machines and spoofing my email address as the source. I totally resent this and actually worry about my liability.
Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying "This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way"?
The crap Windows security model has certainly affected me, a non-Windows user.
Why not just patent "a set of computer instructions organized in such a way as to represent one or several algorithms for performing some specific function or set of functions related to data manipulation, analysis, representation and storage."
In other words, why not just patent software? Then anything anyone did with modern technology would be yours...
It seems that US Patent office is an international joke. How can you patent a concept? In some cases, it's not even a concept, it seems that people are out there patenting their brainstorms. They provide few or no implementation details or defining characteristics for the device or process they propose to patent; instead they simply state a broad type of functionality and are granted a patent on it.
Think about it... People are essentially patenting any problem they can think of. Somebody may someday need to get water to higher ground but won't have room for any extra pipe in their installation. So we'll patent "method for distributing large amounts of low viscosity liquied to higher elevations without the use of piping or tubing." Someone else may need a heart monitor that can run while the power is out, so we'll patent "method for measuring consistent bodily function in the absence of availability of electricity" and so on and so on.
Anyone else happens to actually solve one of these problems with their hard work, and *boom*, they get sued for having actually produced something, for actually having solved the problem! Instead if them being rewarded in any way by a grateful society, the patent owner alone gets rich, because they already patented the solution to that problem in general terms, whatever it may be.
And of course who has the time and resources to file patent after patent after patent? Large companies and concerns supported by venture capitalists. The rich get richer in essence because there is a government agency through which they can pre-emptively say "All your base are belong to us!"
They may even know they are wrong, but that won't stop them from trying to use the system to get $$.
This is what so many slashdot readers and posters on other forums don't understand... It's not about the legal details. SCO is of the ilk that believes "if it's legal, it's moral" and will use that logic to extract $$$ from whomever they can using whatever components of "the system" they can. They will have no qualms about destroying anyone's livelihood, anyone's hard work or indeed half the software industry to line their own pockets.
And if all of this mass destruction does occur, in the post-mortem interview as they are lining their pockets they will happily answer press questions with "Obviously it's ethical! Everything we've done is according to the letter of the law."
Recklessly self-serving corporate logic of this type is a bigger evil than "the terrorists" who are at least fighting for something that they believe; in the long run and big picture, this type of profiteering is probably more dangerous as well. The world can sustain a lot more 9/11 attacks than it can Exxon Valdez disasters, Bhopal disasters or Papel Cataguazes disasters, all of which were about profits and nothing else.
The important detail in your link is that this person a) had trouble removing the coffee cup lid and b) held the fresh cup of coffeee between her legs to try to pry the lid off.
I wouldn't even try to hold a cup of room temperature liquid between my legs to try to get the lid off because obviously it will end up in my lap... a large part of the cup's rigidity comes from the lid; the amount of pressure required to "hold" a cup between your legs while you conjure with the lid will obviously collapse the cup if the lid is removed.
I hate large corporations as much as the next man (and probably about a hundred times more, for anyone who has seen my slashdot posts), but sometimes stupidity is just stupidity.
All of the major UNIX vendors at one time or another have looked at implementing a shared memory transport for X messages on the theory that it would reduce overehead. In benchmarking, however, it was routinely found that Unix domain sockets imposed very little or in some cases less measurable overhead than shared memory. Net effect: no speedups to justify implementation. And in case you weren't aware, we do now have DRI and XV for 3D and video, which do dump network transparency in favor of speed in these extreme high-bandwidth cases. In fact, Linux+X outperforms Windows in terms of raw frame rate in many games on the same hardware (i.e. Quake+Nvidia).
But that kind of raw data pumpking is not very useful for normal applications, which don't need heavy bandwidth at all! You seem to think that your AGP bus is a fat-pipe framebuffer and that given a simple enough toolkit, it would somehow be a speedup to blast 32-bit screen dumps onto it at full speed. But even if this were the case, the content of those dumps would have to come from somewhere. In the API of every modern windowing system (including MS Windows) you'll find heavy reliance on some sort of message passing interface to make the nuts and bolts of the user interface; in short, every windowing system is "network transparent", it's just that most of them are only flexible enough to use one transport method, unlike X, which lets you choose the transport method. And I challenge you to find me any non-motion-video non-3D desktop application that is bandwidth or latency limited even on 100Mb ethernet, much less gigabit ethernet or local transport (get netperf on your own PC and check out the unix domain bandwidth!) Most any kind of local transport is going to have negiligible overhead compared to the overhead imposed by data inefficiencies in toolkits themselves (message redundancy, uneeded refreshes, etc.), and neither of these runs up against any kind of bandwidth or latency ceiling on a modern PC either. Both KDE and GNOME have major architectural inefficiencies outside of the widget rendering path. Search google.
And as far as burden of proof goes, you're the one proposing to throw away one of the most important features of the Unix desktop. I often hear complainers say that "90% of Unix users never need network transparency!"
I don't buy that number. You're getting the Windows market confused with the Unix market mate, I'd guess that 70-80% of regular Unix users do make use of network transparency becaue the vast bulk of regular Unix/X users are doing so in an administrative capacity. I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on this point.
Post numbers showing where your overhead is taxing usability.
So far every number I've seen indicates that unix domain sockets impose negligible (i.e. almost unmeasurable) overhead on modern equipment.
Network transparency is not the cause of X being slow. Poor driver support from hardware manufacturers and having multiple very heavy toolkits on a single desktop are the cause of X being slow.
Excuse me, but G3 machines (all of them) were sold as "will be supported by the new Mac OS" when they were on the market. They're still listed as "supported" to this very day. I'm not party to this lawsuit, but I can tell you that the problems with OS X on "supported" beige G3 machines are more than just people not liking OS 9.
When I tried to upgrade from OS 9 to OS X, the system wouldn't boot the install CD. Apple told me to replace the Apple SCSI CD-ROM drive it came with with an IDE CD-ROM drive from a short list. I shelled out money and replaced the SCSI CD-ROM with the IDE one.
I was then able to get it to boot, but it would fail in the middle of install. Once it did complete install, but as soon as I booted, it punted and when I tried to reboot again, the install was corrupted and would hang without reaching the desktop. Apple told me to replace the Apple SCSI hard drive with any EIDE hard drive. So I shelled out money and bought an EIDE hard drive.
Then I was able to install and use OS X, only to find that video acceleration on beige G3 system is not supported. If you're too new to computing to have ever used unaccelerated video, you have no idea how painfully slow it is, especially on a system as graphics-heavy as OS X. Any window operation, from resizing a window to scrolling text to minimizing a window to the dock can be timed in seconds rather than the "instant" redraws users of modern computers are accustomed to. To add final insult, my external SCSI Zip doesn't work under OS X.
Apple's responses to both of these problems is a raspberry. There are no plans to add accelerated video drivers for the ATI Rage chipsets in these machines. The internal SCSI on Beige G3s "may work reliably" which basically means that it also "may not work reliably" and that was certainly my experience. They suggest I add a supported PCI SCSI controller if I want to use SCSI peripherals.
Not gonna happen, I've already shelled out enough to try and keep a foot in the Mac world, I gave up and the machine is now in storage.
when they want to do something slightly different, they wind up using a bunch of differenet tools
Ah-ha! A light bulb has gone off over your head. That is th point of the Unix philosophy.
Thanks to the Unix philosophy, when someone wants to do something slightly different, they won't need to install a new, slightly different application; they can select different arrangements of tools from their existing collection to solve almost any problem imaginable.
With the "one complete tool, one complete problem" philosophy, every I have a new problem, I must acquire an entirely new tool. If I have a problem no one else has ever had before, no tool will exist yet, and I must either create it myself or pay someone to create it for me. I must then learn and/or be trained to use it.
By attacking problems with small, specialized tools that I am very familiar with, (i.e. by splitting a problem into many smaller, more specialized sub-problems), I can use the same basic Unix toolset to solve arbitrary problems of almost arbitrary complexity.
Almost anything can be accomplished with bash, perl, awk, and the collection of shell tools and command-line networking tools on a Linux/Unix system. And if you need some functionality that the tools can't provide, you don't need to install a 100% beginning-to-end solution complete with duplicate functionality and learning curve, you install a new small, specialized tool (i.e. gphoto2 to fetch photos from a camera) to solve the 1% of the problem that needed a new tool and use the tools you already know and have for the other 99% of the problem.
Efficiency and flexibility are key in Unix.
Some people argue (as you have) that these come at the expense of ease of use, but that is only true for small (admittedly often consumer-oriented) problems. Without doubt, however, past certain threshold values of problem size and complexity, efficiency and flexibility (i.e. small and specialized teams of scriptable tools) drastically increase ease of use relative to other methods, not to mention time and expense to deployment.
Perhaps I'm in the minority among book authors... but...
I write books and have two currently in print. If people want to share them around via email, so be it. I hope they enjoy them and find them useful. I don't write purely to turn a profit, I write because I want what is in my books to be available for people to read. Any author who writes purely for profit, or any musician who plays purely for profit, or any author who paints purely for profit... should probably become a lawyer or a bounty hunter or the CEO of SCO instead.
I don't expect to get filthy rich by writing (contrary to what most people think, having book(s) published doesn't instantly make you J.K. Rowling or cause delivery of a yacht) and so long as I am able to live my life with the basics, I don't need anything more. I suppose I get annoyed when someone plagiarizes my work online (yes, it has happened twice, once with text and once with photos), but that's not a matter of revenue, it's a matter of affecting my future ability to be published and thus to continue to "add to the conversation," so to speak.
I certainly wouldn't approve if my publisher started suing everyone in sight in my name. In fact, I'd be terribly, terribly ashamed by such activity and would probably "pirate" my own books online just to make a point. Books aren't written for petty cash. The day we start to think so is the day libraries become rental agencies. It's the day education and our own history become commodites, available only to those with the resources to pay up. I'll fight such a world.
Re:Introvert vs. extrovert is a made-up distinctio
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The Introvert Advantage
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you'll forgive me, that sounds like something an extrovert would say. I'm a very strongly expressed introvert according to several typing schemes. However, I'm not shy in the least. I speak publicly on a regular basis, attend events and discuss my work with groups of people and have even been called charming from time to time.
But there is no doubt that I find any time that I do not spend alone to be exhausting to some extent or another. I can't sustain intense "people activity" for more than a few days before I start to lose the amiable charm and exchange it for very terse grumpiness or formal pedantry.
I don't care to be around other people all that much. Not that I dislike them or want to avoid them... but in general, people (apart from my significant other and perhaps one or two friends) don't contribute much to my moods.
But one of the things most introverts are familiar with are the endless stream of well-meaning people trying to get you "out and about" and "with people" and "living life" in some sort of party atmosphere because they're sure you're unhappy developing film for hours on end or hiking alone through wooded areas. I can't tell you how many times I've been told "I'd go crazy if I spent as much time alone as you!"
And then of course you try to explain that you are an introvert and you get (more or less like you just said): "Bah! It's all nonsense. You just don't know how fun life can be! Come to this dinner party tonight and you'll have a great time, I promise!"
So you go, you smile, you talk, and you gain nothing from it and feel quite exhausted by the end of the night, longing to get back to your darkroom... And of course as you leave, your well-meaning friend says "See, now, wasn't that fun!? You made quite a splash. And I hear you've been invited to..."
It's a fundamental disconnect that people don't understand unless they've felt it. When most people are having fun, my mind and indeed my heart are elsewhere. Conversely, when I'm having fun, people aren't generally around. If they are, I can rarely share my joy because they tend to think (no matter how I try to explain it) that I must be depressed if I can find such quiet, plodding, un-chatty things to be any fun.
There is something to what the original poster said.
Many, many existing Linux users have volumes of existing scripts that were written to expect certain behavior from commands.
If you fidget with commands break all of those scripts in hopes of gaining Windows users, you will severly break the working environments of the existing Linux users in ways which may take years to repair. More importantly, most of these are the same people doing most Linux application and driver development.
It's the classic "make it so that even a fool can use it and only a fool..."
You see: you "fix" a whole bunch of silly RTFM problems all over Linux, so that the "obvious" (to a Windows user) behavior occurs. You gain a whole bunch of happy Windows users who don't want to learn about "old fashioned" ways of doing things. But you break a whole bunch of older scripts, methods, and tools in the process. Congratulations, you've just lost a huge portion of the original Linux community (esp. the development community) to *BSD, where Unix is still Unix.
You're back where you started. All the interesting development is now happening on BSD because the active technical community now lives in BSDland. But BSD is still Unix-y and so you're back to whining "Why do I have to RTFM? Why can't you *BSD people make this stuff easy and do things the obvious way? How do you ever expect to get any of us Windows or Linux users?"
The answer is simple. Unix developers want Unix. Windows users considering a switch should come to Unix for Unix, not for a cheaper Windows.
My own $HOME/bin directory contains 214 scripts, some of them very long and not seen by human eyes in years. All of them use piles of shell tools. If Linux breaks them, I'm outta here. I don't have time to rewrite and/or debug all of them from beginning to end in some kind of "It's the New Linux!" audit.
NVidia stands out in my mind as having done a decent job (though they could definitely have a better installer) with this, and I'm sure there are a few others that are doing at least as much.
But... where is Canon's EOS digital software for Linux? Where is the support for my Acer parallel scanner in Linux, so that it doesn't have to sit in the closet any more? Where is the formatting software for my Panasonic DVD-RAM in Linux so that don't have to use mkudffs (since mkdosfs doesn't work on DVD-RAMs for some reason)? Where is the video capture software for my usbvision TV adapter?
I'm tired of having to dig through spec sheets and deja to find out if the general chipset-oriented driver in Linux works, and to what extent, so that I can decide whether n% is % enough for me in terms of device functionality. I want to be able to go retail and see something like what Loki used to put on their boxes:
Linux Requirements: 300MHz or faster Intel, AMD or VIA CPU Kernel 2.2 or later Loadable module support USB (EHCI or UHCI) support KDE Desktop Environment support 200MB or more available on/home filesystem
The Linux community has done an excellent job of cooking up software and drivers for some devices (gphoto2 can fetch the photos from my Canon EOS digitals, my DVD-RAM is reasonably well-supported by the sr.c driver) but the bare, general drivers are still lacking compared to the manufacturers' often full-featured software driver-applications.
It's a major peeve to me that not only will many manufacturers not develop drivers or supporting applications for Linux, but many will also not provide information to independent developers to that they can write similar tools. I've tried to contact vendors for development information for a couple of chipsets even recently, and the responses are less than helpful. It seems like peripheral manufactuers are the last great market segment that say with a straight face "Linux? What is Linux? Your PC runs either 'Windows' or 'Mac OS'. Please tell me which you have."
Of course, with all of this said, thanks to the community Linux has much better driver support than other Unixes. For me it's a choice among Unixes and not between Windows and Linux. But I'd still like to someday see an commodity-hardware Unix with real driver and applications support from manufacturers...
people who want the cities burned, enjoy weaving pants out of hemp, think a space ship will take them to the next plane, and want men eradicated from the human race
Oh come now, this is more than a little silly. Are you telling me that you really can't fathom a happy medium between "I'd like to live a little more naturally, where can I do it?" and "Kill all the humans! My spaceship is on the way! Where is my hemp spacesuit?"
I certainly can. I've spent a few weeks in places without telephone/Internet, television, paved roads, or an excessive amount of artificial lighting. After a few days in such a place, you develop a kind of relationship with now, with being awake or being alive, that you don't really feel in urban areas. It always makes me think, and it always makes me consider what it might be like to live there permanently.
But just because I am sometimes tempted does not mean that I want to be the next Hemp Hitler For The Aliens.
WordPerfect wasn't compiled against the Wine libraries, it ran using a Corel version of the "wine" binary and tree that got installed in/usr/lib/corel.
These people aren't SCO investors, they're simple race-trackers who are betting on the horse with the longest odds. There are people who are idle enough and rich enough to do such things, and unfortunately, they sometimes win.
Yes, and the link to Codeweavers is also on the/. front page under this article so anyone who reads it doesn't need my post.
But this story and the links below it aren't phrased in the most efficient way to help people that just want to know how to do it and dont' really plan on buying extra Disney stock as a thank you or anything like that.
See Crossover Office, which is based on Wine, to run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, MS Office and a number of other big-name Windows applications in Linux.
It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed.
Thank you. This is the best summary of the entire issue I've red thus far, and reflects my feelings exactly. I can't imagine a more offensive concept than "intellectual property" and can't imagine anyone who is not of the most base bourgeois sensibility feeling any differently.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not positive American students know how to "uprise" any longer; it seems that much of the American educational machine (especially the innumerable average state liberal arts schools) are well and truly an intrinsic part of the consumption machine. Rather than teaching students at some basic level about politics, economics, sociology, etc. they instead teach obedience, football, consumerism (better cars, better PCs, better fashions, better concernts, better alcoholic beverages, more expensive insignia gear) and pop-sex.
These kids aren't likely to understand the underpinnings of any uprising, more or less start one. If there will be an uprising, it will begin at the less wealthy of America's better liberal arts schools, maybe U.C. Berkeley similar. But is one or two schools enough to start an "uprising"?
America's college kids may well be beyond hope.
Read your history. Collective bargaining power is an essential tool to protect workers from abuse by those who can afford to win a war of "labor attrition" (the workers can't).
Every type of worker should have a union. Unionization provides the ability to leverage your labor pool as a whole, to strike, to increase publicity or awareness of certain issues, and is fundamental to determining and being treated according to your real and fair worth as a labor pool, rather than what the corporate monopolies and upper classes want you to believe you are worth (i.e. next to nothing).
One worker alone is expendable and can be manipulated, lied to and if necessary disposed of with relatively little impact on the bottom line. All workers together are a much bigger bear to strangle, and when workers get together it forces the Wealthy Powers That Be to grudginly admit that they actually do need hands to make their cars or their buildings or their documents, not just edicts from the board room sent out into the vacuum, from which goods magically emerge.
Some people argue that unions allow silly, backward workers to price the fruits of their labor out of the markets, much to the chagrin of the wise old management team who actually knows what they're worth. This is a stupid argument; workers don't set out to unionize their companies out of business. They set out to unionize the CEO's seven-figure salary down to six fixures and to unionize unnecessary layoffs which occur as a result of these salaries back into paid positions. It is the upper management who is generally shamefully willing to shut down an otherwise profitable plant, company, or location simply because they are unwilling to take a pay cut down to reasonable levels in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.
How many times have we seen companies lay of nearly their entire workforce, spending the last year or two before bankruptcy with an essentially empty workplace and sixteen VP's and their secretaries sitting around reading comic books drawing seven figures until the end? This is what Unions are trying to fight... Unions want to help companies remain viable by paying the workers in needed numbers a real and livable wage to do the best job possible, in order to ensure the well-being of the workers and the well-being of the company, which the workers need in order to work!
Of course management and shareholders are typically the short-term losers in this equation, because they are unable to passively rape and pillage entire economic sectors to the same degree that would otherwise be possible from the decks of their carribbean yachts. The desire to shamelessly suck all of the wealth from an otherwise healthy company and leave its workers and its former assets as so much junk on a barren landscape is exactly what drives many in the wealthy west and is exactly what unions want to stop.
Ugly, plastic music for ugly, plastic club kids. Give me Janis Joplin & Big Brother rather than Cher (and all her 2000 parts) any day of the week.
Without the "raw and loose", without the personal voice and individually flawed sound, music is just audible math and little more.
I am aware of the unsecured/untrusted nature of email header fields. But a judge and/or jury and/or plantiff may not be, and explaining it to them may (i.e. will) be very difficult.
I am one of the masses who has been the surprise victim of bizarre legal maneuvering that came out of nowhere (as far as I was concerned) and was completely unfair and even shameful on the other party's part.
Let me tell you that I no longer care if I win a case, I don't want to ever fight a case again, even a short one, even if I win in the end. The emotional and financial stress are horrible... My tendency any longer is to worry about liability and to take such issues very seriously. Until you've been there, you can't possibly know how horrible it feels and what a toll it takes.
I suppose it was more a rhetorical point than a literal one. You are of course right... I am just trying to figure out how to strike a balance between limiting my exposure to liability in this networked world (because everyone is happy to sue these days) and still participating in society in normal ways.
This balance is an increasingly difficult one to find and maintain.
Not only for that reason.
I don't have Windows anywhere and haven't for several years now. I don't run Outlook. But it turns out that at least one of the current batch of worms spoofs email addresses.
So all week I've been getting email messages from postmaster@ saying "...your message to so-and-so will not be delivered because it contained the SoBig worm, we advise you to download a security update from..." I wrote a couple of them and got two responses from mail admins saying essentially "Yes, we know it spoofs your email, sorry there's nothing we can do, please understand that we're under tons of pressure on our end, everyone is infected, this worm sucks, you have it easy, you run Linux, stop complaining!"
Anyway, people are receiving messages marked "from" my email address and are getting infected with a worm as a result. Obviously one or several people (editors, management, etc.) that have me in their Outlook address books have become infected and now the worm is spreading from their machines and spoofing my email address as the source. I totally resent this and actually worry about my liability.
Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying "This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way"?
The crap Windows security model has certainly affected me, a non-Windows user.
Why not just patent "a set of computer instructions organized in such a way as to represent one or several algorithms for performing some specific function or set of functions related to data manipulation, analysis, representation and storage."
In other words, why not just patent software? Then anything anyone did with modern technology would be yours...
It seems that US Patent office is an international joke. How can you patent a concept? In some cases, it's not even a concept, it seems that people are out there patenting their brainstorms. They provide few or no implementation details or defining characteristics for the device or process they propose to patent; instead they simply state a broad type of functionality and are granted a patent on it.
Think about it... People are essentially patenting any problem they can think of. Somebody may someday need to get water to higher ground but won't have room for any extra pipe in their installation. So we'll patent "method for distributing large amounts of low viscosity liquied to higher elevations without the use of piping or tubing." Someone else may need a heart monitor that can run while the power is out, so we'll patent "method for measuring consistent bodily function in the absence of availability of electricity" and so on and so on.
Anyone else happens to actually solve one of these problems with their hard work, and *boom*, they get sued for having actually produced something, for actually having solved the problem! Instead if them being rewarded in any way by a grateful society, the patent owner alone gets rich, because they already patented the solution to that problem in general terms, whatever it may be.
And of course who has the time and resources to file patent after patent after patent? Large companies and concerns supported by venture capitalists. The rich get richer in essence because there is a government agency through which they can pre-emptively say "All your base are belong to us!"
They may even know they are wrong, but that won't stop them from trying to use the system to get $$.
This is what so many slashdot readers and posters on other forums don't understand... It's not about the legal details. SCO is of the ilk that believes "if it's legal, it's moral" and will use that logic to extract $$$ from whomever they can using whatever components of "the system" they can. They will have no qualms about destroying anyone's livelihood, anyone's hard work or indeed half the software industry to line their own pockets.
And if all of this mass destruction does occur, in the post-mortem interview as they are lining their pockets they will happily answer press questions with "Obviously it's ethical! Everything we've done is according to the letter of the law."
Recklessly self-serving corporate logic of this type is a bigger evil than "the terrorists" who are at least fighting for something that they believe; in the long run and big picture, this type of profiteering is probably more dangerous as well. The world can sustain a lot more 9/11 attacks than it can Exxon Valdez disasters, Bhopal disasters or Papel Cataguazes disasters, all of which were about profits and nothing else.
The important detail in your link is that this person a) had trouble removing the coffee cup lid and b) held the fresh cup of coffeee between her legs to try to pry the lid off.
I wouldn't even try to hold a cup of room temperature liquid between my legs to try to get the lid off because obviously it will end up in my lap... a large part of the cup's rigidity comes from the lid; the amount of pressure required to "hold" a cup between your legs while you conjure with the lid will obviously collapse the cup if the lid is removed.
I hate large corporations as much as the next man (and probably about a hundred times more, for anyone who has seen my slashdot posts), but sometimes stupidity is just stupidity.
All of the major UNIX vendors at one time or another have looked at implementing a shared memory transport for X messages on the theory that it would reduce overehead. In benchmarking, however, it was routinely found that Unix domain sockets imposed very little or in some cases less measurable overhead than shared memory. Net effect: no speedups to justify implementation. And in case you weren't aware, we do now have DRI and XV for 3D and video, which do dump network transparency in favor of speed in these extreme high-bandwidth cases. In fact, Linux+X outperforms Windows in terms of raw frame rate in many games on the same hardware (i.e. Quake+Nvidia).
But that kind of raw data pumpking is not very useful for normal applications, which don't need heavy bandwidth at all! You seem to think that your AGP bus is a fat-pipe framebuffer and that given a simple enough toolkit, it would somehow be a speedup to blast 32-bit screen dumps onto it at full speed. But even if this were the case, the content of those dumps would have to come from somewhere. In the API of every modern windowing system (including MS Windows) you'll find heavy reliance on some sort of message passing interface to make the nuts and bolts of the user interface; in short, every windowing system is "network transparent", it's just that most of them are only flexible enough to use one transport method, unlike X, which lets you choose the transport method. And I challenge you to find me any non-motion-video non-3D desktop application that is bandwidth or latency limited even on 100Mb ethernet, much less gigabit ethernet or local transport (get netperf on your own PC and check out the unix domain bandwidth!) Most any kind of local transport is going to have negiligible overhead compared to the overhead imposed by data inefficiencies in toolkits themselves (message redundancy, uneeded refreshes, etc.), and neither of these runs up against any kind of bandwidth or latency ceiling on a modern PC either. Both KDE and GNOME have major architectural inefficiencies outside of the widget rendering path. Search google.
And as far as burden of proof goes, you're the one proposing to throw away one of the most important features of the Unix desktop. I often hear complainers say that "90% of Unix users never need network transparency!"
I don't buy that number. You're getting the Windows market confused with the Unix market mate, I'd guess that 70-80% of regular Unix users do make use of network transparency becaue the vast bulk of regular Unix/X users are doing so in an administrative capacity. I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on this point.
Well it's not because of network transparency, which imposes virtually no overhead when display and server are both local.
Post numbers showing where your overhead is taxing usability.
So far every number I've seen indicates that unix domain sockets impose negligible (i.e. almost unmeasurable) overhead on modern equipment.
Network transparency is not the cause of X being slow. Poor driver support from hardware manufacturers and having multiple very heavy toolkits on a single desktop are the cause of X being slow.
Excuse me, but G3 machines (all of them) were sold as "will be supported by the new Mac OS" when they were on the market. They're still listed as "supported" to this very day. I'm not party to this lawsuit, but I can tell you that the problems with OS X on "supported" beige G3 machines are more than just people not liking OS 9.
When I tried to upgrade from OS 9 to OS X, the system wouldn't boot the install CD. Apple told me to replace the Apple SCSI CD-ROM drive it came with with an IDE CD-ROM drive from a short list. I shelled out money and replaced the SCSI CD-ROM with the IDE one.
I was then able to get it to boot, but it would fail in the middle of install. Once it did complete install, but as soon as I booted, it punted and when I tried to reboot again, the install was corrupted and would hang without reaching the desktop. Apple told me to replace the Apple SCSI hard drive with any EIDE hard drive. So I shelled out money and bought an EIDE hard drive.
Then I was able to install and use OS X, only to find that video acceleration on beige G3 system is not supported. If you're too new to computing to have ever used unaccelerated video, you have no idea how painfully slow it is, especially on a system as graphics-heavy as OS X. Any window operation, from resizing a window to scrolling text to minimizing a window to the dock can be timed in seconds rather than the "instant" redraws users of modern computers are accustomed to. To add final insult, my external SCSI Zip doesn't work under OS X.
Apple's responses to both of these problems is a raspberry. There are no plans to add accelerated video drivers for the ATI Rage chipsets in these machines. The internal SCSI on Beige G3s "may work reliably" which basically means that it also "may not work reliably" and that was certainly my experience. They suggest I add a supported PCI SCSI controller if I want to use SCSI peripherals.
Not gonna happen, I've already shelled out enough to try and keep a foot in the Mac world, I gave up and the machine is now in storage.
when they want to do something slightly different, they wind up using a bunch of differenet tools
Ah-ha! A light bulb has gone off over your head. That is th point of the Unix philosophy.
Thanks to the Unix philosophy, when someone wants to do something slightly different, they won't need to install a new, slightly different application; they can select different arrangements of tools from their existing collection to solve almost any problem imaginable.
With the "one complete tool, one complete problem" philosophy, every I have a new problem, I must acquire an entirely new tool. If I have a problem no one else has ever had before, no tool will exist yet, and I must either create it myself or pay someone to create it for me. I must then learn and/or be trained to use it.
By attacking problems with small, specialized tools that I am very familiar with, (i.e. by splitting a problem into many smaller, more specialized sub-problems), I can use the same basic Unix toolset to solve arbitrary problems of almost arbitrary complexity.
Almost anything can be accomplished with bash, perl, awk, and the collection of shell tools and command-line networking tools on a Linux/Unix system. And if you need some functionality that the tools can't provide, you don't need to install a 100% beginning-to-end solution complete with duplicate functionality and learning curve, you install a new small, specialized tool (i.e. gphoto2 to fetch photos from a camera) to solve the 1% of the problem that needed a new tool and use the tools you already know and have for the other 99% of the problem.
Efficiency and flexibility are key in Unix.
Some people argue (as you have) that these come at the expense of ease of use, but that is only true for small (admittedly often consumer-oriented) problems. Without doubt, however, past certain threshold values of problem size and complexity, efficiency and flexibility (i.e. small and specialized teams of scriptable tools) drastically increase ease of use relative to other methods, not to mention time and expense to deployment.
Perhaps I'm in the minority among book authors... but...
I write books and have two currently in print. If people want to share them around via email, so be it. I hope they enjoy them and find them useful. I don't write purely to turn a profit, I write because I want what is in my books to be available for people to read. Any author who writes purely for profit, or any musician who plays purely for profit, or any author who paints purely for profit... should probably become a lawyer or a bounty hunter or the CEO of SCO instead.
I don't expect to get filthy rich by writing (contrary to what most people think, having book(s) published doesn't instantly make you J.K. Rowling or cause delivery of a yacht) and so long as I am able to live my life with the basics, I don't need anything more. I suppose I get annoyed when someone plagiarizes my work online (yes, it has happened twice, once with text and once with photos), but that's not a matter of revenue, it's a matter of affecting my future ability to be published and thus to continue to "add to the conversation," so to speak.
I certainly wouldn't approve if my publisher started suing everyone in sight in my name. In fact, I'd be terribly, terribly ashamed by such activity and would probably "pirate" my own books online just to make a point. Books aren't written for petty cash. The day we start to think so is the day libraries become rental agencies. It's the day education and our own history become commodites, available only to those with the resources to pay up. I'll fight such a world.
If you'll forgive me, that sounds like something an extrovert would say. I'm a very strongly expressed introvert according to several typing schemes. However, I'm not shy in the least. I speak publicly on a regular basis, attend events and discuss my work with groups of people and have even been called charming from time to time.
But there is no doubt that I find any time that I do not spend alone to be exhausting to some extent or another. I can't sustain intense "people activity" for more than a few days before I start to lose the amiable charm and exchange it for very terse grumpiness or formal pedantry.
I don't care to be around other people all that much. Not that I dislike them or want to avoid them... but in general, people (apart from my significant other and perhaps one or two friends) don't contribute much to my moods.
But one of the things most introverts are familiar with are the endless stream of well-meaning people trying to get you "out and about" and "with people" and "living life" in some sort of party atmosphere because they're sure you're unhappy developing film for hours on end or hiking alone through wooded areas. I can't tell you how many times I've been told "I'd go crazy if I spent as much time alone as you!"
And then of course you try to explain that you are an introvert and you get (more or less like you just said): "Bah! It's all nonsense. You just don't know how fun life can be! Come to this dinner party tonight and you'll have a great time, I promise!"
So you go, you smile, you talk, and you gain nothing from it and feel quite exhausted by the end of the night, longing to get back to your darkroom... And of course as you leave, your well-meaning friend says "See, now, wasn't that fun!? You made quite a splash. And I hear you've been invited to..."
It's a fundamental disconnect that people don't understand unless they've felt it. When most people are having fun, my mind and indeed my heart are elsewhere. Conversely, when I'm having fun, people aren't generally around. If they are, I can rarely share my joy because they tend to think (no matter how I try to explain it) that I must be depressed if I can find such quiet, plodding, un-chatty things to be any fun.
There is something to what the original poster said.
Many, many existing Linux users have volumes of existing scripts that were written to expect certain behavior from commands.
If you fidget with commands break all of those scripts in hopes of gaining Windows users, you will severly break the working environments of the existing Linux users in ways which may take years to repair. More importantly, most of these are the same people doing most Linux application and driver development.
It's the classic "make it so that even a fool can use it and only a fool..."
You see: you "fix" a whole bunch of silly RTFM problems all over Linux, so that the "obvious" (to a Windows user) behavior occurs. You gain a whole bunch of happy Windows users who don't want to learn about "old fashioned" ways of doing things. But you break a whole bunch of older scripts, methods, and tools in the process. Congratulations, you've just lost a huge portion of the original Linux community (esp. the development community) to *BSD, where Unix is still Unix.
You're back where you started. All the interesting development is now happening on BSD because the active technical community now lives in BSDland. But BSD is still Unix-y and so you're back to whining "Why do I have to RTFM? Why can't you *BSD people make this stuff easy and do things the obvious way? How do you ever expect to get any of us Windows or Linux users?"
The answer is simple. Unix developers want Unix. Windows users considering a switch should come to Unix for Unix, not for a cheaper Windows.
My own $HOME/bin directory contains 214 scripts, some of them very long and not seen by human eyes in years. All of them use piles of shell tools. If Linux breaks them, I'm outta here. I don't have time to rewrite and/or debug all of them from beginning to end in some kind of "It's the New Linux!" audit.
NVidia stands out in my mind as having done a decent job (though they could definitely have a better installer) with this, and I'm sure there are a few others that are doing at least as much.
/home filesystem
But... where is Canon's EOS digital software for Linux? Where is the support for my Acer parallel scanner in Linux, so that it doesn't have to sit in the closet any more? Where is the formatting software for my Panasonic DVD-RAM in Linux so that don't have to use mkudffs (since mkdosfs doesn't work on DVD-RAMs for some reason)? Where is the video capture software for my usbvision TV adapter?
I'm tired of having to dig through spec sheets and deja to find out if the general chipset-oriented driver in Linux works, and to what extent, so that I can decide whether n% is % enough for me in terms of device functionality. I want to be able to go retail and see something like what Loki used to put on their boxes:
Linux Requirements:
300MHz or faster Intel, AMD or VIA CPU
Kernel 2.2 or later
Loadable module support
USB (EHCI or UHCI) support
KDE Desktop Environment support
200MB or more available on
The Linux community has done an excellent job of cooking up software and drivers for some devices (gphoto2 can fetch the photos from my Canon EOS digitals, my DVD-RAM is reasonably well-supported by the sr.c driver) but the bare, general drivers are still lacking compared to the manufacturers' often full-featured software driver-applications.
It's a major peeve to me that not only will many manufacturers not develop drivers or supporting applications for Linux, but many will also not provide information to independent developers to that they can write similar tools. I've tried to contact vendors for development information for a couple of chipsets even recently, and the responses are less than helpful. It seems like peripheral manufactuers are the last great market segment that say with a straight face "Linux? What is Linux? Your PC runs either 'Windows' or 'Mac OS'. Please tell me which you have."
Of course, with all of this said, thanks to the community Linux has much better driver support than other Unixes. For me it's a choice among Unixes and not between Windows and Linux. But I'd still like to someday see an commodity-hardware Unix with real driver and applications support from manufacturers...
people who want the cities burned, enjoy weaving pants out of hemp, think a space ship will take them to the next plane, and want men eradicated from the human race
Oh come now, this is more than a little silly. Are you telling me that you really can't fathom a happy medium between "I'd like to live a little more naturally, where can I do it?" and "Kill all the humans! My spaceship is on the way! Where is my hemp spacesuit?"
I certainly can. I've spent a few weeks in places without telephone/Internet, television, paved roads, or an excessive amount of artificial lighting. After a few days in such a place, you develop a kind of relationship with now, with being awake or being alive, that you don't really feel in urban areas. It always makes me think, and it always makes me consider what it might be like to live there permanently.
But just because I am sometimes tempted does not mean that I want to be the next Hemp Hitler For The Aliens.
I think that their direct support of Bin Laden makes a clear case that they are culpable for terrorism.
No you have it wrong, this conversation is supposed to be about the Taleban, not the US Government.
WordPerfect wasn't compiled against the Wine libraries, it ran using a Corel version of the "wine" binary and tree that got installed in /usr/lib/corel.
These people aren't SCO investors, they're simple race-trackers who are betting on the horse with the longest odds. There are people who are idle enough and rich enough to do such things, and unfortunately, they sometimes win.
Yes, and the link to Codeweavers is also on the /. front page under this article so anyone who reads it doesn't need my post.
But this story and the links below it aren't phrased in the most efficient way to help people that just want to know how to do it and dont' really plan on buying extra Disney stock as a thank you or anything like that.
See Crossover Office, which is based on Wine, to run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, MS Office and a number of other big-name Windows applications in Linux.
It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed.
Thank you. This is the best summary of the entire issue I've red thus far, and reflects my feelings exactly. I can't imagine a more offensive concept than "intellectual property" and can't imagine anyone who is not of the most base bourgeois sensibility feeling any differently.