> Let's live as cavemen did, and starve ourselves of certain nutrients for long periods of
> time, regardless of how bad that's been shown to be for us, and how well
> primitive agriculture-based societies do (ie: food stores readily available) versus
> primitive hunter-gatherer societies.
Um no, archeology shows no such thing. In fact it shows the exact opposite. The switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer was pretty brutal. The mean height of humans dropped, the disease rate sky rocketed, and the mean life expectancy dropped.
Why?
The big problem was that early farming societies were primarily mono-cultures and while they tended to get enough caoloric intake they actually failed at getting a varied diet.
It is only in modern times that we have surpassed the hunter gatherers health wise.
Let's imagine a world where the courts throw out the FTC do not call list based on the idea that the FTC has overstepped it's authority.
In such a world there are 50 million plus voters who all support an issue during a time of a very divided government. It's a legislator's wet dream. An easy issue with bi-partisan approval that constituents love. Just the thing to go into re-election trumpeting. Oh and cheap too. When congress gets done with it the DMA may be facing all kinds of restrictions beyond a simple do not call list.
Interix and the native NT4 posix layer are completely different things.
Interix is indeed fully posix compliant and you are actually more likely to get a posix program to compile under it than under cygwin. For more information including a free 120 day trial version go to...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
obDisclaimer:
Why yes I do work for Microsoft, and yes I even work in that part of Microsoft.
and of course there is one more good reason to sign Linux for X-box.
by and large the sort of people that run linux are the target demographic of the x-box. and they play games. Once you have an X-box in your house it is much easier to give into temptation and just buy the nifty new game you see at Best Buy...
anything that makes the x-box more desireable to the target market than say a playstation is IMHO probably a win
ob disclaimer...
yes I work for Microsoft
no I don't work for that part of Microsoft
and of course the opinions and views expressed by me are my own and in no way reflect those of my employer, my cat, or any other carbon based form of life. I'm just some chick that likes to hack and play games
I haven't used an analog modem in five or six years. In fact I intend to never again use an analog modem and make sure I plan my travels such that I say only in business hotels that offer proper broad band.
I am appalled that all laptops on the market come with built in modems. Why should I have to pay a tax to modem manufactures just to buy a laptop.
Boycott manufactures that force us to pay the modem tax!!@
The end result is that more people will have superior power management abilities... and those people probably won't care how they got them.
But isn't that the point? If all that was important was having the niftiest and greatest thing why not just use windows?
The entire point of the GPL was that it does matter how a goal was achieved. This is just one more step down the path of reducing Linux to just another corporate OS.
The thing everyone is missing who asks, "why not go out and inspect it?" Is that...
It's very dangerous: if there is damage everyone is dead but damage is VERY unlikely in everyone's experience before now. Given that from NASA's point of view it was almost a certainty that the ship is perfectly fine why risk someone's life?
Other methods of inspection, satalites, telescopes have in the past proven to be useless. in addition they cost money. Given that from NASA's point of view they were almost certainly safe why waste money on blurry pictures that won't tell you anything.
The real reason though is the same thing that caused the Apollo 1 deaths. A lack of imagination. We had alot of experience doing plugs out tests with pressurized oxygen just like we had alot of experience landing shuttles that had a few damaged tiles. No one making these decisions imagined for a moment that this was a real danger.
Have they fixed the problem yet that the only way to get three in a soyuz capsule is if no one wears a space suit? If they haven't then the Soyuz only holds two, since you would need to open the hatch to space to let someone in via EVA. Those things are VERY cramped.
We say, "skip the safety checks", but the reality is more like, skip fixing all the problems the shuttle develops prior to launch. Given how many holds for problems there are in a normal countdown. Trying a fast launch is pretty close to certainty for disaster.
It takes a great many people, including the astronauts, to launch a shuttle. I know I personally would not want to work launch crew, mission control etc etc if I thought there was a 99% chance that the people in the ship would be incinerated on the launch pad.
Just as you would hold someone in street clothes back from running into a burnng building so you would not launch a shuttle on a moments notice.
the point is to make your life and job easier and better by having lots of free software available.
The point I was trying to make was that the original goal of the Free Software movement wasn't, "to make your life and job easier", but was instead to endeavor to recreate a social space that was destroyed when industry co-opted the hackers of the media lab.
The point being that by changing the goal to making your life and job easier inherently results in being co-opted by business interests and in the end produces the same effect on the hacker culture.
If the recent Linux World Expo in new York is any example then the revolution is over and the Stallman's of the world have long since lost.
Reading
Stallman's writings
I come away with a sense that the ultimate over riding goal of the free software movement wasn't to see the code, or even to be able to share it with one another. It was to create a space in the software world where community could exist. Or to paraphrase Babylon 5...
The Gnu project was our last best hope for not being co-opted by business...
It failed.
Wandering the booths at expo it was astonishing to see a nearly endless series of suits all groping for the flavor of the week to sell to. The actual, "community", relegated to a small corner of the show floor off the beaten paths where they wouldn't scare financial analysts.
.
I work for Microsoft. I have no problem with there being proprietary software, OSes, Apps, services etc etc. What does bother me is the wholesale co-option of our public spaces into corporate agendas. Such is the fate of Linux. Go to work for Redhat, or any other "open source company", and you will find you have to sign the same non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements as anywhere else in the industry. You will find you must censor yourself on public forums and avoid giving away the trade secrets of the new product.
It's not so much that I question the goal of making a buck, or even the observation that open source produces better software. What I question is the end result. Once again the best and brightest of the hacker community are locked up in the same corporate structures and goals that destroyed the AI lab community and Linux's agenda is being set in corporate boardrooms.
I have always thought of free software as being analogous to the Boston Commons. A small refuge away from the bottom line values of the rest of America. With the change of goals that open source represents it's as if we have invited the land developers into the commons. Sure a multiplex and a Starbucks are nice. But I miss the park.
Actually I think it is a good use of language. His overarching goal for the text is to get you to think outside your normal conceptualizations about programmers. In this case by simply using the female pronoun he causes you to think about a) the stereo type of programmers as nerdy males and b) the way the language we use inherently supports a.
Thinking about how language choice effects function IS something programmers should consider and he elegantly brings this out in the text.
Well there is a lot more to the product than just the posix layer. In addition to a complete posix layer SFU comes with...
1) NFS server
2) NFS client
3) NFS->CIFS gateway
4) User name mapping server (for mapping unix users to windows users and vice versa)
5) NIS server for Active Directory (Make your domain controllers serve NIS)
6) Passwd synchronization utilities
OK so it does a lot of cool schtuff but why not just throw bodies at cygwin?
We had a few reasons.
1) Different goals: From the above you can see get that our big focus is servers. Primarily enabling Windows servers to play well with Unix servers and clients.. Cygwin32's main goal is to provide an alternate desktop environment on desktop machines.
2) By starting over from scratch we could integrate the posix layer with windows at a much deeper level than cygwin32 is. For instance in SFU you can see win32 process in ps and even send them signals via kill.
3) Our primary goal was to be fully posix compliant. Cygwin32 doesn't offer full posix completeness or compliance. Doing so without effecting legacy cygwin32 apps would be a nightmare. Essentially to get cygwin32 where we wanted to go would practically involve starting over from scratch anyway.
4) Expandibility: Our next release, SFU 4.0 will include full posix threads. Getting something this intense into cygwin32's current architecture would be very difficult.
Sure it's a cool geeky project and the pics and all are wonderful.
The impressive thing though is the way he has written it up and presented it in a clear concise readable style. An example to geeks everywhere that there is more to a project than just the tech. Equally important is being able to present the results of your creativity to others, both geek and mundane, in such a way that captures their imaginations and allows you to bring them into the excitement of your world.
I played with one of these when I was a girl. Later as an adult I heard a Steven Hawking lecture and my first thought was, "Oh My God, it's my first spelling teacher."
I keep waiting for him to in the middle of some physics lecture or interview say, "spell Schwarzschild radius."
> So I'm wondering about all those/. readers who complained about how terrible patents > are because they allowed BT to make this claim... doesn't the fact that BT lost the suit > prove that the law isn't as broken as you thought?
No.
The problem is that a corporation with deep pockets is fully capable of forcing an issue like this, one that clearly had no merit, to court thus costing money. The ability to tie your adversary up in legal nonsense simply because you had a patent, no matter how worthless, is the problem.
> Same with the case with HP and the DMCA. The fact that HP can file the lawsuit > doesn't prove that the law is broken; it's only broken if they would have won.
The brokenness is that such suits must be defended at all. A legal defense costs money and time and throws fear uncertainty and doubt before it.
Slashdot Mirror
> I've often wondered who the guys in the cubes are
;)
Actually we don't have cubes at Microsoft, just offices. Oh and some of us aren't guys either
> time, regardless of how bad that's been shown to be for us, and how well
> primitive agriculture-based societies do (ie: food stores readily available) versus
> primitive hunter-gatherer societies.
Um no, archeology shows no such thing. In fact it shows the exact opposite. The switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer was pretty brutal. The mean height of humans dropped, the disease rate sky rocketed, and the mean life expectancy dropped.
Why?
The big problem was that early farming societies were primarily mono-cultures and while they tended to get enough caoloric intake they actually failed at getting a varied diet.
It is only in modern times that we have surpassed the hunter gatherers health wise.
that would be telling
Let's imagine a world where the courts throw out the FTC do not call list based on the idea that the FTC has overstepped it's authority.
In such a world there are 50 million plus voters who all support an issue during a time of a very divided government. It's a legislator's wet dream. An easy issue with bi-partisan approval that constituents love. Just the thing to go into re-election trumpeting. Oh and cheap too. When congress gets done with it the DMA may be facing all kinds of restrictions beyond a simple do not call list.
When publishing word for word a press release could they please be marked, "propaganda", or something similar?
All governments invade privacy.
The only difference is degree and consequences.
>
> How a person may fork and how they cope seems ripe for novel exploration
>
Been done and incredibly well. Try, "The Ophiuchi Hotline", by John Varley
obAmazon
The Ophiuchi Hotline
Interix and the native NT4 posix layer are completely different things.
Interix is indeed fully posix compliant and you are actually more likely to get a posix program to compile under it than under cygwin. For more information including a free 120 day trial version go to...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
obDisclaimer:
Why yes I do work for Microsoft, and yes I even work in that part of Microsoft.
Because Bush ain't no JFK.
Heck, he's not even a KFC.
and of course there is one more good reason to sign Linux for X-box.
by and large the sort of people that run linux are the target demographic of the x-box. and they play games. Once you have an X-box in your house it is much easier to give into temptation and just buy the nifty new game you see at Best Buy...
anything that makes the x-box more desireable to the target market than say a playstation is IMHO probably a win
ob disclaimer...
yes I work for Microsoft
no I don't work for that part of Microsoft
and of course the opinions and views expressed by me are my own and in no way reflect those of my employer, my cat, or any other carbon based form of life. I'm just some chick that likes to hack and play games
I haven't used an analog modem in five or six years. In fact I intend to never again use an analog modem and make sure I plan my travels such that I say only in business hotels that offer proper broad band.
I am appalled that all laptops on the market come with built in modems. Why should I have to pay a tax to modem manufactures just to buy a laptop.
Boycott manufactures that force us to pay the modem tax!!@
The end result is that more people will have superior power management abilities... and those people probably won't care how they got them.
But isn't that the point? If all that was important was having the niftiest and greatest thing why not just use windows?
The entire point of the GPL was that it does matter how a goal was achieved. This is just one more step down the path of reducing Linux to just another corporate OS.
The thing everyone is missing who asks, "why not go out and inspect it?" Is that...
It's very dangerous: if there is damage everyone is dead but damage is VERY unlikely in everyone's experience before now. Given that from NASA's point of view it was almost a certainty that the ship is perfectly fine why risk someone's life?
Other methods of inspection, satalites, telescopes have in the past proven to be useless. in addition they cost money. Given that from NASA's point of view they were almost certainly safe why waste money on blurry pictures that won't tell you anything.
The real reason though is the same thing that caused the Apollo 1 deaths. A lack of imagination. We had alot of experience doing plugs out tests with pressurized oxygen just like we had alot of experience landing shuttles that had a few damaged tiles. No one making these decisions imagined for a moment that this was a real danger.
Have they fixed the problem yet that the only way to get three in a soyuz capsule is if no one wears a space suit? If they haven't then the Soyuz only holds two, since you would need to open the hatch to space to let someone in via EVA. Those things are VERY cramped.
We say, "skip the safety checks", but the reality is more like, skip fixing all the problems the shuttle develops prior to launch. Given how many holds for problems there are in a normal countdown. Trying a fast launch is pretty close to certainty for disaster.
It takes a great many people, including the astronauts, to launch a shuttle. I know I personally would not want to work launch crew, mission control etc etc if I thought there was a 99% chance that the people in the ship would be incinerated on the launch pad.
Just as you would hold someone in street clothes back from running into a burnng building so you would not launch a shuttle on a moments notice.
the point is to make your life and job easier and better by having lots of free software available.
The point I was trying to make was that the original goal of the Free Software movement wasn't, "to make your life and job easier", but was instead to endeavor to recreate a social space that was destroyed when industry co-opted the hackers of the media lab.
The point being that by changing the goal to making your life and job easier inherently results in being co-opted by business interests and in the end produces the same effect on the hacker culture.
If the recent Linux World Expo in new York is any example then the revolution is over and the Stallman's of the world have long since lost.
Reading Stallman's writings I come away with a sense that the ultimate over riding goal of the free software movement wasn't to see the code, or even to be able to share it with one another. It was to create a space in the software world where community could exist. Or to paraphrase Babylon 5...
The Gnu project was our last best hope for not being co-opted by business...
It failed.
Wandering the booths at expo it was astonishing to see a nearly endless series of suits all groping for the flavor of the week to sell to. The actual, "community", relegated to a small corner of the show floor off the beaten paths where they wouldn't scare financial analysts.
.I work for Microsoft. I have no problem with there being proprietary software, OSes, Apps, services etc etc. What does bother me is the wholesale co-option of our public spaces into corporate agendas. Such is the fate of Linux. Go to work for Redhat, or any other "open source company", and you will find you have to sign the same non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements as anywhere else in the industry. You will find you must censor yourself on public forums and avoid giving away the trade secrets of the new product.
It's not so much that I question the goal of making a buck, or even the observation that open source produces better software. What I question is the end result. Once again the best and brightest of the hacker community are locked up in the same corporate structures and goals that destroyed the AI lab community and Linux's agenda is being set in corporate boardrooms.
I have always thought of free software as being analogous to the Boston Commons. A small refuge away from the bottom line values of the rest of America. With the change of goals that open source represents it's as if we have invited the land developers into the commons. Sure a multiplex and a Starbucks are nice. But I miss the park.
Actually I think it is a good use of language. His overarching goal for the text is to get you to think outside your normal conceptualizations about programmers. In this case by simply using the female pronoun he causes you to think about a) the stereo type of programmers as nerdy males and b) the way the language we use inherently supports a.
Thinking about how language choice effects function IS something programmers should consider and he elegantly brings this out in the text.
I'm female and I'm impressed :)
Well there is a lot more to the product than just the posix layer. In addition to a complete posix layer SFU comes with...
1) NFS server
2) NFS client
3) NFS->CIFS gateway
4) User name mapping server (for mapping unix users to windows users and vice versa)
5) NIS server for Active Directory (Make your domain controllers serve NIS)
6) Passwd synchronization utilities
OK so it does a lot of cool schtuff but why not just throw bodies at cygwin?
We had a few reasons.
1) Different goals: From the above you can see get that our big focus is servers. Primarily enabling Windows servers to play well with Unix servers and clients.. Cygwin32's main goal is to provide an alternate desktop environment on desktop machines.
2) By starting over from scratch we could integrate the posix layer with windows at a much deeper level than cygwin32 is. For instance in SFU you can see win32 process in ps and even send them signals via kill.
3) Our primary goal was to be fully posix compliant. Cygwin32 doesn't offer full posix completeness or compliance. Doing so without effecting legacy cygwin32 apps would be a nightmare. Essentially to get cygwin32 where we wanted to go would practically involve starting over from scratch anyway.
4) Expandibility: Our next release, SFU 4.0 will include full posix threads. Getting something this intense into cygwin32's current architecture would be very difficult.
We were.
Oddly we didn't get much abuse at all. Instead we got awarded best interoperability solution for our Services For Unix product.
SFU's home page at Microsoft.
Sure it's a cool geeky project and the pics and all are wonderful.
The impressive thing though is the way he has written it up and presented it in a clear concise readable style. An example to geeks everywhere that there is more to a project than just the tech. Equally important is being able to present the results of your creativity to others, both geek and mundane, in such a way that captures their imaginations and allows you to bring them into the excitement of your world.
I played with one of these when I was a girl. Later as an adult I heard a Steven Hawking lecture and my first thought was, "Oh My God, it's my first spelling teacher."
I keep waiting for him to in the middle of some physics lecture or interview say, "spell Schwarzschild radius."
Who exactly got rich?
> So I'm wondering about all those /. readers who complained about how terrible patents
> are because they allowed BT to make this claim... doesn't the fact that BT lost the suit
> prove that the law isn't as broken as you thought?
No.
The problem is that a corporation with deep pockets is fully capable of forcing an issue like this, one that clearly had no merit, to court thus costing money. The ability to tie your adversary up in legal nonsense simply because you had a patent, no matter how worthless, is the problem.
> Same with the case with HP and the DMCA. The fact that HP can file the lawsuit
> doesn't prove that the law is broken; it's only broken if they would have won.
The brokenness is that such suits must be defended at all. A legal defense costs money and time and throws fear uncertainty and doubt before it.