For those of us who have not kept up with Days of our KDE Lives, can anybody please post the backstory?
What is the KDE League? What's their relationship to KDE / The Kompany / anyone else? And what's the current stink about?
The article just leads me to believe that "KDE League" publishes press releases for KDE, and they dissapeared all of a sudden. Was there money stolen/embezzled? I'm not sure I understand the broad picture.
Porn represents ~5% of the actual content (by bytes) of internet data. At least in the pre-Napster days (I don't know how that skews these stats), but porn (again, excluding mp3s) represents 95% of bandwidth transfer.
Porn is one of the few web-content industries that has been profitable from the start. The other was eBay.
As far as I can remember, they didn't disclose the bug for 48 hours, while they worked out a fix. They had a fix within two days and disseminated it then.
Thus the slogan, "1 remote exploit in 6 years."
The point of full disclosure is to light a fire under the asses of whoever should be fixing the problem. Since they were already working on it full steam, it didn't make sense to tell everyone else "hey, go root anybody with an openbsd box!"
To a company, you are worth exactly what you accept in payment
And if being a programmer is worth $5/hr, then sorry, third-world outsourcing has made software production a non-professional trade.
When these jobs are outsourced, it's not as though IBM (to pick a random example) hires ten specific people to code up a program for them. They just hire some consulting company that grabs ten free people, and may or may not replace them midway through the project, at the end of the project (leaving someone else behind to support it), etc.
They're not being treated as one would treat professionals. They're essentially to the software world what migrant labor is to farming.
My point is that IT workers living in America require "hefty" salaries. Nobody's going to want to be a programmer in America for less than $20-$25 an hour; the cost of living is simply too high.
So how are they supposed to compete with Indians who will do it for $5/hour?
Programmers in America see themselves as professionals. The ones who do it on the cheap in India, don't. If this trend continues, there won't be many (or any) programmers in America, because the work will all have been outsourced to somebody who will do it for 5 times less than s/he is worth.
If somebody living in another country is genuinely a better person for the job, then by all means, that's great. I hope that Americans get German contracts, and Germans get American contracts. And everyone pays each other a fair wage for the work.
But no German is going to work for 10 DM an hour doing programming.
If Indians were to charge the rates that are commensurate with the task, that too would be fine in my eyes. My problem is simply that it hurts everyone when workers of a certain type are undervalued.
There are a decent number of "US based" software companies in which design work or other is done here, and the programming itself is exported to places such as India where they will work for pennies on the dollar.
Lots of US citizens who are programmers are ticked off about that fact.
It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.
Hm. And here I thought you were describing bash. And since smoke doesn't pour from my machine when bash loads itself up, I have this tendency to use it, instead.;)
Now I agree tha we cannot let religious dogma interfere with potentially life-saving/enriching medicine, but until there is sufficient evidence that embryonic stem cells can actually produce what many scientists and doctors theorize they can, I will be suspicious of it.
You do realize the irony inherent in your statement, don't you?
Let me reduce it for you: "Until scientists research stem cells and prove that they're useful, I don't trust stem cell research to be a good thing."
You're setting them up for failure!
How can they prove to you that stem cell research is a good thing, if you don't let them research it ab initio?
If stem cell research yields some technology which itself is a bad thing (I don't know. Creates an army of mutant freaks.), then that Bad Thing (tm) should be banned. However, one flawed application of a technology -- and especially the hypothesis of such an application -- does not invalidate the use of the entire class of research centered around it.
If you want to view what everybody posts, just set your default viewing threshold to -1. Simple as that. I found that scanning at +4 typically lets me get a good sense of things if I'm short on time. If I've got more time to spend, then I view at a lower threshold, like +2. If there's an interesting looking thread, then I'll view that whole thread.
However, I simply don't have the time to cut through all the noise to the signals on my own. Without the moderation system, I would just not be able to read comments manageably, at all. And that's just the truth.
The mod system does do a decent job of reducing the S:N ratio, on balance.
Even if they keep the opcodes secret, legal precident is set that double-blind blackboxing is a legal method to reverse-engineer a system. The GNU project, if it wanted to, could surely reverse engineer all the opcodes for Palladium.
(FYI, double-blind blackboxing is a process of reverse engineering in which one team of engineers "poke at" an existing system to determine how it operates under certain conditions. A second team, which never actually directly interacts with the system they're trying to copy, then uses a report created by the first team to implement the cloned system.)
Take the syllogism: "All New Yorkers must be Americans."
(So are you saying that if you're not from New York, you're not from America?)
Given that the guy's an MIT student, we can safely assume with a reasonable degree of assurance that he's a smart cookie.
"All MIT students are smart enough to understand the consequences of illegal actions. He was an MIT student. Therefore, he's smart enough to understand the consequences."
The contraverse is not neccessarily true. Don't twist his logic like that. It fails.
Problem: model is not 10x better than what exists.
on
The Porn Of Napster
·
· Score: 2
We've all heard the adage on/. that a standard won't be adopted unless it's an order of magnitude improvement over the existing system.
Ever since the original Napster crashed and burned in mid-2000, several other P2P filesharing systems came up. Among college students (a fairly heavy market for porn), KaZaA is definitely the drug of choice.
Systems like KaZaA already have porn on them. *I* am certainly not one to download two programs to do what one already does well.
Napster fought the good fight, but now it's gone. It's lost all its mind-share.
This guy [michaeljackson.com] changed his race. And it certainly looks like he's changed his (to use the pronoun lightly) gender...
Re:Is there time for negative reviews?
on
ChronoSpace
·
· Score: 2
Frankly, it's refreshing to see negative reviews. Just about every other book I can remember had a rating of 7/10 or better... it made me start to wonder after a while whether the scale was getting top-heavy. (Think olympic figure skating. While it's technically on a 0-6 scale, I've yet to see anything below a 4.5 or so... so it's really a 4.5-6.0 scale.)
It's nice to know that the reviews do have a critical eye and that - yes, when they say a book is a 7/10, it means that it's pretty darn good, not at the bottom of the heap.
What are you talking about? The A-Team had a new and innovative way to construct a tank from virtually any spare automobile or airplane parts lying around and destroy some small guerilla detachment, why, every week!
The Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 specifically stipulates that you may make "mix tapes" of all the music you bought, and distribute them to your friends, family, etc, for no cost.
You pay a tariff on all recordable media which is then given to the RIAA companies to compensate them for their "losses" due to this.
Let's say that you need a letter hand-delivered to somebody 10 miles away. And there are no roads to drive on. You gotta get a guy to run there with the letter.
If I come up to you and say "Hey, I can run 20 miles an hour, let me deliver the letter for you," you would say "that's great! You're hired."
What I neglected to tell you was that I can only run twenty miles per hour for about 15 seconds. And that's if I'm running down a steep hill. For the 10 mile jog to the delivery point, I can really only average maybe 2 miles per hour.
Was it up to you to know what I meant when I said I could hit 20 mph? I wasn't lying, I was just not telling you what you wanted to know.
If I'm buying a printer and I see the words "20 pages per minute" on the box, I expect to queue up 80 pages of documents in Word, come back four minutes later, and see the 80th page spitting out. If it can't do that, then they're not living up to their claim.
I will not feed the trolls. I will not feed the trolls. I will not.. ah Hell, here goes.
Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman. You're so naive from living in a free country that you're incapable of understanding what people in other parts of the world have to go through. What the DMCA is being used for is incomparable next to the evil of communism and totalitarianism.
Guess what? Right now, we are living in a democracy. However, that's rapidly changing. Given that corporate donations to PACs have been upheld by SCOTUS to be "free speech", corporations now have the ability to "shout" really loudly at congressmen; far louder than you or I alone ever could.
There used to be a time when a congressman (or woman) voted on a bill thinking "is this good for the people in my jurisdiction?" Now, though, the real question is "is this good for the companies that donate to my campaign, which allows me to tell the people in my jurisdiction what I've 'done'?"
Laws like the DMCA are the crest of a wave which will wash forward with increasing speed and power. The government passes laws now to "protect its industries" and protect profits at the expense of the welfare of its consum^H^H^H^H^H^H citizens. In fifty years, what say do you hope to have, if such outrageous laws are allowed now?
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us who have not kept up with Days of our KDE Lives, can anybody please post the backstory?
What is the KDE League? What's their relationship to KDE / The Kompany / anyone else? And what's the current stink about?
The article just leads me to believe that "KDE League" publishes press releases for KDE, and they dissapeared all of a sudden. Was there money stolen/embezzled? I'm not sure I understand the broad picture.
Actually, if you send it certified, they put the datestamp over the envelope closure line.
Porn represents ~5% of the actual content (by bytes) of internet data. At least in the pre-Napster days (I don't know how that skews these stats), but porn (again, excluding mp3s) represents 95% of bandwidth transfer.
Porn is one of the few web-content industries that has been profitable from the start. The other was eBay.
As far as I can remember, they didn't disclose the bug for 48 hours, while they worked out a fix. They had a fix within two days and disseminated it then.
Thus the slogan, "1 remote exploit in 6 years."
The point of full disclosure is to light a fire under the asses of whoever should be fixing the problem. Since they were already working on it full steam, it didn't make sense to tell everyone else "hey, go root anybody with an openbsd box!"
I would prefer operating system vendors to treat security as part of the core functionality of their products.
Some do.
O Yea? But which one faithfully has coverage of Burning Man?
To a company, you are worth exactly what you accept in payment
And if being a programmer is worth $5/hr, then sorry, third-world outsourcing has made software production a non-professional trade.
When these jobs are outsourced, it's not as though IBM (to pick a random example) hires ten specific people to code up a program for them. They just hire some consulting company that grabs ten free people, and may or may not replace them midway through the project, at the end of the project (leaving someone else behind to support it), etc.
They're not being treated as one would treat professionals. They're essentially to the software world what migrant labor is to farming.
My point is that IT workers living in America require "hefty" salaries. Nobody's going to want to be a programmer in America for less than $20-$25 an hour; the cost of living is simply too high.
So how are they supposed to compete with Indians who will do it for $5/hour?
Programmers in America see themselves as professionals. The ones who do it on the cheap in India, don't. If this trend continues, there won't be many (or any) programmers in America, because the work will all have been outsourced to somebody who will do it for 5 times less than s/he is worth.
If somebody living in another country is genuinely a better person for the job, then by all means, that's great. I hope that Americans get German contracts, and Germans get American contracts. And everyone pays each other a fair wage for the work.
But no German is going to work for 10 DM an hour doing programming.
If Indians were to charge the rates that are commensurate with the task, that too would be fine in my eyes. My problem is simply that it hurts everyone when workers of a certain type are undervalued.
Hanno -
There are a decent number of "US based" software companies in which design work or other is done here, and the programming itself is exported to places such as India where they will work for pennies on the dollar.
Lots of US citizens who are programmers are ticked off about that fact.
if you're going to voluntarily slashdot your own site, please at least have the bandwidth to handle it! :)
Fact is, beside the lack of games...
Case rested.
It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.
;)
Hm. And here I thought you were describing bash. And since smoke doesn't pour from my machine when bash loads itself up, I have this tendency to use it, instead.
Now I agree tha we cannot let religious dogma interfere with potentially life-saving/enriching medicine, but until there is sufficient evidence that embryonic stem cells can actually produce what many scientists and doctors theorize they can, I will be suspicious of it.
You do realize the irony inherent in your statement, don't you?
Let me reduce it for you: "Until scientists research stem cells and prove that they're useful, I don't trust stem cell research to be a good thing."
You're setting them up for failure!
How can they prove to you that stem cell research is a good thing, if you don't let them research it ab initio?
If stem cell research yields some technology which itself is a bad thing (I don't know. Creates an army of mutant freaks.), then that Bad Thing (tm) should be banned. However, one flawed application of a technology -- and especially the hypothesis of such an application -- does not invalidate the use of the entire class of research centered around it.
And why wouldn't you want a mod system?
If you want to view what everybody posts, just set your default viewing threshold to -1. Simple as that. I found that scanning at +4 typically lets me get a good sense of things if I'm short on time. If I've got more time to spend, then I view at a lower threshold, like +2. If there's an interesting looking thread, then I'll view that whole thread.
However, I simply don't have the time to cut through all the noise to the signals on my own. Without the moderation system, I would just not be able to read comments manageably, at all. And that's just the truth.
The mod system does do a decent job of reducing the S:N ratio, on balance.
Even if they keep the opcodes secret, legal precident is set that double-blind blackboxing is a legal method to reverse-engineer a system. The GNU project, if it wanted to, could surely reverse engineer all the opcodes for Palladium.
/*(IANAL)*/
(FYI, double-blind blackboxing is a process of reverse engineering in which one team of engineers "poke at" an existing system to determine how it operates under certain conditions. A second team, which never actually directly interacts with the system they're trying to copy, then uses a report created by the first team to implement the cloned system.)
#include
That only hurts everyone, though.
I've heard this theorem a lot in P2P discussions; it applies here too: The network's utility is proportional to the square of the number of users.
The more, the merrier.
To create a new, separate network for "premade users"... it'd never take off. It needs a lot more critical mass than it could ever have.
I call logical fallacy on you. Shame, shame.
Take the syllogism: "All New Yorkers must be Americans."
(So are you saying that if you're not from
New York, you're not from America?)
Given that the guy's an MIT student, we can safely assume with a reasonable degree of assurance that he's a smart cookie.
"All MIT students are smart enough to understand the consequences of illegal actions. He was an MIT student. Therefore, he's smart enough to understand the consequences."
The contraverse is not neccessarily true. Don't twist his logic like that. It fails.
We've all heard the adage on /. that a standard won't be adopted unless it's an order of magnitude improvement over the existing system.
Ever since the original Napster crashed and burned in mid-2000, several other P2P filesharing systems came up. Among college students (a fairly heavy market for porn), KaZaA is definitely the drug of choice.
Systems like KaZaA already have porn on them. *I* am certainly not one to download two programs to do what one already does well.
Napster fought the good fight, but now it's gone. It's lost all its mind-share.
R.I.P., Napster...
Have to disagree with you there.
This guy [michaeljackson.com] changed his race. And it certainly looks like he's changed his (to use the pronoun lightly) gender...
Frankly, it's refreshing to see negative reviews. Just about every other book I can remember had a rating of 7/10 or better... it made me start to wonder after a while whether the scale was getting top-heavy. (Think olympic figure skating. While it's technically on a 0-6 scale, I've yet to see anything below a 4.5 or so... so it's really a 4.5-6.0 scale.)
It's nice to know that the reviews do have a critical eye and that - yes, when they say a book is a 7/10, it means that it's pretty darn good, not at the bottom of the heap.
What are you talking about? The A-Team had a new and innovative way to construct a tank from virtually any spare automobile or airplane parts lying around and destroy some small guerilla detachment, why, every week!
The Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 specifically stipulates that you may make "mix tapes" of all the music you bought, and distribute them to your friends, family, etc, for no cost.
You pay a tariff on all recordable media which is then given to the RIAA companies to compensate them for their "losses" due to this.
Frankly, that's crap.
Let's say that you need a letter hand-delivered to somebody 10 miles away. And there are no roads to drive on. You gotta get a guy to run there with the letter.
If I come up to you and say "Hey, I can run 20 miles an hour, let me deliver the letter for you," you would say "that's great! You're hired."
What I neglected to tell you was that I can only run twenty miles per hour for about 15 seconds. And that's if I'm running down a steep hill. For the 10 mile jog to the delivery point, I can really only average maybe 2 miles per hour.
Was it up to you to know what I meant when I said I could hit 20 mph? I wasn't lying, I was just not telling you what you wanted to know.
If I'm buying a printer and I see the words "20 pages per minute" on the box, I expect to queue up 80 pages of documents in Word, come back four minutes later, and see the 80th page spitting out. If it can't do that, then they're not living up to their claim.
Maybe it's just not too windy in Santa Clara.
I will not feed the trolls. I will not feed the trolls. I will not.. ah Hell, here goes.
Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman. You're so naive from living in a free country that you're incapable of understanding what people in other parts of the world have to go through. What the DMCA is being used for is incomparable next to the evil of communism and totalitarianism.
Guess what? Right now, we are living in a democracy. However, that's rapidly changing. Given that corporate donations to PACs have been upheld by SCOTUS to be "free speech", corporations now have the ability to "shout" really loudly at congressmen; far louder than you or I alone ever could.
There used to be a time when a congressman (or woman) voted on a bill thinking "is this good for the people in my jurisdiction?" Now, though, the real question is "is this good for the companies that donate to my campaign, which allows me to tell the people in my jurisdiction what I've 'done'?"
Laws like the DMCA are the crest of a wave which will wash forward with increasing speed and power. The government passes laws now to "protect its industries" and protect profits at the expense of the welfare of its consum^H^H^H^H^H^H citizens. In fifty years, what say do you hope to have, if such outrageous laws are allowed now?