The US has about the highest crime rate in the world. Do you know why? Because people like you are turning it into a war zone.
We don't have any of this BS in Europe; nor do we intend to; and our crime rate is about 1/50th of yours.
Listen, your American system sucks. That's obvious to everybody except for brainwashed network ogglers like you.
Every time some serial killer shows up (another American phenomenom), we have a wild laugh here. You simply ask for it.
I don't mind that you guys want to live like that, but stop sending out your bullies around the globe and force other countries to adopt intellectual property, McDonalds, patents on software, credit rating agencies, MPAA, Microsoft, or any other of your mental sicknesses. You're asking for war with the rest of the world.
American companies have requested the right to store information on European consumers. I guess, in order to compile these profiles and credit reports and generally abuse them, like they abuse their own people.
Listen. It's very simple. All of this profiling, credit reporting, using government issued IDs and social security numbers is plainly illegal in Europe.
Better: you do that, you go to jail; and we close down your business right away.
If Americans don't stop trying to export their monkey business practices and monkey culture, dot-com, intellectual property, Coca cola, copyrights, McDonalds, patents on software, and other mental illnesses, it will end in war with the rest of the world.
Pirated proprietary software is the one, single, largest enemy to free software.
As long as people can copy Windooz for free (that is, pirate it), they won't easily consider using a free alternative... and we will continue to be forced to support the win32 crock OS and write applications for it.
This is even a larger problem in third world countries.
I'm all for stamping out pirated, proprietary software!
Believe me, if this voluntary CPRM initiative will fail, but the next initiative will work, because the deep-pocketed MPAAs will go and see Dubya and a good number of Congressmen; and pay them enough money, until they mandate CPRM for all hard-drive products on the American market.
And then they will send out their bulldogs to bully every country around the world to legislate similar laws. They'll use the WTO, the WIPO and all the other bastards they have put in place to, essentially, extort money from the third world.
The next step will be to outlaw any OS that does not honour the CPRM stuff. Exit Linux.
From my perspective, I actually don't want people to copy stuff from the copyright industries, that is, the MPAA, the RCAA, and the BSA.
If people can freely copy this stuff, this putrid cancer of proprietary crock products may very well continue to spread through society.
So, if these copyright industries want to prevent people from accessing their crocks, I'm all for it. It can only accelerate the adoption of free music, free film and free software. In my opinion, pirated content, not proprietary content, is the strongest competitor to free content; and slows the adoption of, for example, Linux, especially in the third world.
That's why I am willing to put up with copy prevention schemes. It can only shield us further from proprietary crocks.
The best way for free software to defeat proprietary software, is to make it impossible to pirate proprietary software.
I guess it could be a success in niche markets. For example, if they adapt it to cybercafé/hotel conference room settings, with a decent usage log API for billing purposes, and the price is right (below $250), I guess even I would recommend it.
There is a need for internet appliances in particular settings. Maintaining PCs in, for example, public spaces is simply too expensive and prone to breakdowns.
There are many other needs for cheap (<$250), task-oriented network connection points. Processing power, disk space, etcetera don't matter. Price does. The clue is, that these network connection points must be heavily customized to the task at hand. If Sony/Be think that they will sell anything that is closed-source, they are mistaken. Windows too, cannot be customized to the task at hand. I can see a market for Linux there.
"that Java's strong point, currently, really is its back-end enterprise-ish stuff: CORBA, EJB, RMI, Servlets/JSP, messaging"
If I like Java, it's in spite of all these continuously changing, say, exploding JDK and JDK extensions.
Especially CORBA, EJB, and RMI attempt to standardize approaches that existed long before. I don't mind standardization, but I do mind standardizing on something constituted haphazardly, without thinking it through. EJB was not even useable in its first version. It may become useable in its second; but quite a lot of damage has been done already. The way I did it before, at least worked; and I don't mind switching over; but it should work too, if you see what I mean. Suddenly, in version 2, EJB discovers the concept of foreign keys in relational databases. I guess they should have tried to figure that out, before mandating standards that fail to grasp common concepts.
Sun has a strong propensity to impose ideas, even in areas in which they sorely lack expertise. They'd better stop doing that.
There haven't been any new products that Micros~1 has been able to sell, since the advent of the internet. They have had to give it all away to stay in the game!
What will, for example,.NET bring for you, that you couldn't do before? And how will it be able to compete with the alternatives (GNU/Linux/Java) that are beer-free or even speech-free?
As a matter of fact, no proprietary software vendor has been able to create a new massive product line, selling millions of copies, like Windows, or Office, or Autocad, or Photoshop since the advent of the internet.
Whatever Micros~1 has done over the past 5 years, it was focused on defending their Windows/Office/Studio franchises against the inevitable.
Their tactics have yielded a time window, that they can use to pump up some more cash; they will not, however, be able to fend off the inevitable.
I dare to bet money on the prediction that their revenue forecasts are rather conservative and that their stock price will never recover to their December '99 level.
I'm sorry but Oracle is not GPL, regardless of whether it runs on Linux or not. It doesn't make a difference.
Java is a language; and I'm confident that the GCJ will produce all we need to do Java on Linux.
The GPL is the reason GNU and Linux were started. I'm not willing to go return to the starting point, where we will again experience the dislike for proprietary business practices, that made us walk away in the first place.
The Linux crowd will invariably prefer the GPL alternatives, even if the proprietary version has more whistles and bells. The hardcore Linux users will even refuse to use the proprietary versions.
I'm afraid IBM will be disappointed.
Sales will be moot, and criticism rather vocal.
You cannot deny the fact that Stallman has raised a number of valid issues concerning proprietary software.
If IBM wants to "sell software", that is, make software available under typical proprietary license conditions, I guess they should offer it on AIX, Solaris, SCO, HP/UX, or other proprietary Unix.
I don't think that the Linux community would or should consider the fact as a loss, that proprietary software is not available on a GPL OS.
This communism - capitalism stuff is really interesting. It regularly pops up in discussions on open source.
We can say:
(1) If communism had had no appeal whatsoever, or if none of their arguments had been even a little valid, it wouldn't have been around for such a long time.
(2) Capitalism is still not workers' paradise and probably will never be. Workers, and the general public tend to prefer capitalism to communism, however. But then again, this does not mean that the potential for conflict between workers and capital asset owners has gone.
(3) Open-source is a way in which power, that had been accumulating in to the hands of software vendors, gets recovered partially and returned to the public. To that extent, it may succeed (to some extent) where communism clearly failed.
It may very well be that in ten years time the reverse will have happened, and that the net will have excluded the olympics.
For the one or the other reason, the Olympics committee reminds me of the Open Group's Motif and how they succeeded in relegating themselves to a position of irrelevance.
It's dangerous to overestimate the power you have, and to exert it beyond the point where you alienate key individuals in your audience.
The international olympics committee draw most of their authority from the morals behind these games. As soon as the public starts perceiving them for what they really are, a bunch of corrupt money grubbers, their appeal will rapidly wane. You may find as well that a number of key individuals are very active in spreading this message.
"the base monthly residential rate rarely covers cost"
Who says? The telco's costing systems are conceived especially to prove this kind of runaway BS. This is exactly why ashtrays in military planes, billed at cost plus margin, cost $125,000 a piece.
"And that will make it harder to provide basic service in what's basically a fairly low-income country"
Listen. This government telco has a monopoly on providing basic service, meaning, no one else is allowed to provide this "basic service".
How can you say, in such circumstances, that it is "hard to provide basic service"?
It all amounts to blackmail. If this monopoly feels threatened they'll resort to cutting the service, until they get what they want.
Especially in low-income countries, this kind of behaviour must be stamped out at once, because it exactly prevents such country from developing.
There's a lot of bullshit, both in the US and in the Philippines. There's one significant difference, however: the US can afford it.
"Foreigners take our jobs". Even if they don't find a native for the job, you will find that you're not welcome. They won't like you and they'll make sure you understand that fast. By the way, they're even worse with other Africans. Therefore, I guess you will not be shot at at once; but just in case, make sure to bring bullet-proof protection.
That's what comes when you hire people who don't have some vision of what they want to do in their lives. I don't believe it's the employer who should pay for your training.
You have to figure out what you want to do and then arrange training for it by yourself.
Unfortunately, not everybody is sufficiently enterpreneurial to do something for themselves. They kind of wait until somebody else does it for them and then they are surprised that this is not necessarily happening.
As a contractor, I do it all the time, that is, dealing with the education and training stuff myself. I've been able to increase my hourly rate by 15%/year for the last 3 years.
Which is ok for me. In this way I've switched from playing in MsAccess, to writing MTS components in Visual Basic for IIS, now to some real great stuff: servlets and server applications in Java (I use my own javadoc parser and my own XML parser).
P.S. : These moderators should get their head out of their asses and be open for differing points of view.
Imagine the user has no access to a Commodore 64 and that he absolutely needs to access an old copy of The Hobbit, how else are you going to achieve this than by stealing the one or the other wallet?
The problem with most software is not lack of features. It is rather the opposite: you can't get rid of particular features that are absolutely unpleasant under particular, given circumstances.
I'm sure ACLs may be useful for some people, in some situations.
We know of the existence of the concept. We probably came across them in some other setting (e.g. NT) and not everybody is impressed.
ACLs are not generally useful. If they were, everybody and their little sister would be clamouring for them, and they obviously aren't.
Undoubtedly, there must be kernel patches available for you to have your ACLs, without forcing them on everybody.
If Linus built ACLs right into the kernel, I would be forced to put in serious effort and rip it out again. If he does too much of this kind of things, Linux would start forking.
I guess a DTD partially defines an document interface, say document object model (not fully though).
But then, it does not seem to catch on. This whole W3C XML1.0v4 thing seems to evolve into some kind of niche, in which some people want to play and many more others don't. We've all looked at it, and are not really impressed. I would dare to say: It fails to become "hot".
And then we've got those little ideosynchratic languages like XSLT and stuff, that aren't very impressive either. I'll stick with Java, if I need to convert complex data structures.
I'm rather convinced that releasing DTDs won't convince that many extra people to play the DTD game.
You could release instead some novel martian poetry in the wild and hope that people will read it...
Listen. If you want to use their software, you either release under the GPL, or else you pay money for an exemption. What's the difference with using proprietary libs? At least, in case with the GPL you have a choice.
If not, I guess restricting access to these public records would be a violation of the plaintiff's freedom of information. If yes, I guess we must balance the identified individual's right to privacy against the rights of the plaintiff. It seems to me that no one's individual rights were violated. Therefore, I fully agree with the verdict.
Note, however, that if there is no requirement for a school to maintain such records, the school should not maintain them. It is an absolutely questionable practice to maintain them without being under a particular obligation to do so.
I guarantee that it's all over! and it does nothing more or less than stopping all other threads! So everybody shuts up while this particular guy is speaking. When it's a process per user instead of a thread per user, you see mutexes acquired all over the place.
For any practical purpose a single writing table-touch practically always means a table-lock.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has about the highest crime rate in the world. Do you know why? Because people like you are turning it into a war zone.
We don't have any of this BS in Europe; nor do we intend to; and our crime rate is about 1/50th of yours.
Listen, your American system sucks. That's obvious to everybody except for brainwashed network ogglers like you.
Every time some serial killer shows up (another American phenomenom), we have a wild laugh here. You simply ask for it.
I don't mind that you guys want to live like that, but stop sending out your bullies around the globe and force other countries to adopt intellectual property, McDonalds, patents on software, credit rating agencies, MPAA, Microsoft, or any other of your mental sicknesses. You're asking for war with the rest of the world.
American companies have requested the right to store information on European consumers. I guess, in order to compile these profiles and credit reports and generally abuse them, like they abuse their own people.
Listen. It's very simple. All of this profiling, credit reporting, using government issued IDs and social security numbers is plainly illegal in Europe.
Better: you do that, you go to jail; and we close down your business right away.
If Americans don't stop trying to export their monkey business practices and monkey culture, dot-com, intellectual property, Coca cola, copyrights, McDonalds, patents on software, and other mental illnesses, it will end in war with the rest of the world.
Pirated proprietary software is the one, single, largest enemy to free software.
... and we will continue to be forced to support the win32 crock OS and write applications for it.
As long as people can copy Windooz for free (that is, pirate it), they won't easily consider using a free alternative
This is even a larger problem in third world countries.
I'm all for stamping out pirated, proprietary software!
Believe me, if this voluntary CPRM initiative will fail, but the next initiative will work, because the deep-pocketed MPAAs will go and see Dubya and a good number of Congressmen; and pay them enough money, until they mandate CPRM for all hard-drive products on the American market.
And then they will send out their bulldogs to bully every country around the world to legislate similar laws. They'll use the WTO, the WIPO and all the other bastards they have put in place to, essentially, extort money from the third world.
The next step will be to outlaw any OS that does not honour the CPRM stuff. Exit Linux.
From my perspective, I actually don't want people to copy stuff from the copyright industries, that is, the MPAA, the RCAA, and the BSA.
If people can freely copy this stuff, this putrid cancer of proprietary crock products may very well continue to spread through society.
So, if these copyright industries want to prevent people from accessing their crocks, I'm all for it. It can only accelerate the adoption of free music, free film and free software. In my opinion, pirated content, not proprietary content, is the strongest competitor to free content; and slows the adoption of, for example, Linux, especially in the third world.
That's why I am willing to put up with copy prevention schemes. It can only shield us further from proprietary crocks.
The best way for free software to defeat proprietary software, is to make it impossible to pirate proprietary software.
I guess it could be a success in niche markets. For example, if they adapt it to cybercafé/hotel conference room settings, with a decent usage log API for billing purposes, and the price is right (below $250), I guess even I would recommend it.
There is a need for internet appliances in particular settings. Maintaining PCs in, for example, public spaces is simply too expensive and prone to breakdowns.
There are many other needs for cheap (<$250), task-oriented network connection points. Processing power, disk space, etcetera don't matter. Price does. The clue is, that these network connection points must be heavily customized to the task at hand. If Sony/Be think that they will sell anything that is closed-source, they are mistaken. Windows too, cannot be customized to the task at hand. I can see a market for Linux there.
"that Java's strong point, currently, really is its back-end enterprise-ish stuff: CORBA, EJB, RMI, Servlets/JSP, messaging"
If I like Java, it's in spite of all these continuously changing, say, exploding JDK and JDK extensions.
Especially CORBA, EJB, and RMI attempt to standardize approaches that existed long before. I don't mind standardization, but I do mind standardizing on something constituted haphazardly, without thinking it through. EJB was not even useable in its first version. It may become useable in its second; but quite a lot of damage has been done already. The way I did it before, at least worked; and I don't mind switching over; but it should work too, if you see what I mean. Suddenly, in version 2, EJB discovers the concept of foreign keys in relational databases. I guess they should have tried to figure that out, before mandating standards that fail to grasp common concepts.
Sun has a strong propensity to impose ideas, even in areas in which they sorely lack expertise. They'd better stop doing that.
I fully agree. The real hard dollars come from Windows/Office/Studio. Office makes Windows sell; Windows makes Studio sell.
It's a mutually recursive relationship, that is difficult to bring down, but when it comes down, it does so with a big bang.
There haven't been any new products that Micros~1 has been able to sell, since the advent of the internet. They have had to give it all away to stay in the game!
.NET bring for you, that you couldn't do before? And how will it be able to compete with the alternatives (GNU/Linux/Java) that are beer-free or even speech-free?
What will, for example,
As a matter of fact, no proprietary software vendor has been able to create a new massive product line, selling millions of copies, like Windows, or Office, or Autocad, or Photoshop since the advent of the internet.
Whatever Micros~1 has done over the past 5 years, it was focused on defending their Windows/Office/Studio franchises against the inevitable.
Their tactics have yielded a time window, that they can use to pump up some more cash; they will not, however, be able to fend off the inevitable.
I dare to bet money on the prediction that their revenue forecasts are rather conservative and that their stock price will never recover to their December '99 level.
I'm sorry but Oracle is not GPL, regardless of whether it runs on Linux or not. It doesn't make a difference.
Java is a language; and I'm confident that the GCJ will produce all we need to do Java on Linux.
The GPL is the reason GNU and Linux were started. I'm not willing to go return to the starting point, where we will again experience the dislike for proprietary business practices, that made us walk away in the first place.
The Linux crowd will invariably prefer the GPL alternatives, even if the proprietary version has more whistles and bells. The hardcore Linux users will even refuse to use the proprietary versions.
I'm afraid IBM will be disappointed.
Sales will be moot, and criticism rather vocal.
You cannot deny the fact that Stallman has raised a number of valid issues concerning proprietary software.
If IBM wants to "sell software", that is, make software available under typical proprietary license conditions, I guess they should offer it on AIX, Solaris, SCO, HP/UX, or other proprietary Unix.
I don't think that the Linux community would or should consider the fact as a loss, that proprietary software is not available on a GPL OS.
I think it's even better that way.
This communism - capitalism stuff is really interesting. It regularly pops up in discussions on open source.
We can say:
(1) If communism had had no appeal whatsoever, or if none of their arguments had been even a little valid, it wouldn't have been around for such a long time.
(2) Capitalism is still not workers' paradise and probably will never be. Workers, and the general public tend to prefer capitalism to communism, however. But then again, this does not mean that the potential for conflict between workers and capital asset owners has gone.
(3) Open-source is a way in which power, that had been accumulating in to the hands of software vendors, gets recovered partially and returned to the public. To that extent, it may succeed (to some extent) where communism clearly failed.
It may very well be that in ten years time the reverse will have happened, and that the net will have excluded the olympics.
For the one or the other reason, the Olympics committee reminds me of the Open Group's Motif and how they succeeded in relegating themselves to a position of irrelevance.
It's dangerous to overestimate the power you have, and to exert it beyond the point where you alienate key individuals in your audience.
The international olympics committee draw most of their authority from the morals behind these games. As soon as the public starts perceiving them for what they really are, a bunch of corrupt money grubbers, their appeal will rapidly wane. You may find as well that a number of key individuals are very active in spreading this message.
"the base monthly residential rate rarely covers cost" Who says? The telco's costing systems are conceived especially to prove this kind of runaway BS. This is exactly why ashtrays in military planes, billed at cost plus margin, cost $125,000 a piece. "And that will make it harder to provide basic service in what's basically a fairly low-income country" Listen. This government telco has a monopoly on providing basic service, meaning, no one else is allowed to provide this "basic service". How can you say, in such circumstances, that it is "hard to provide basic service"? It all amounts to blackmail. If this monopoly feels threatened they'll resort to cutting the service, until they get what they want. Especially in low-income countries, this kind of behaviour must be stamped out at once, because it exactly prevents such country from developing. There's a lot of bullshit, both in the US and in the Philippines. There's one significant difference, however: the US can afford it.
"Foreigners take our jobs". Even if they don't find a native for the job, you will find that you're not welcome. They won't like you and they'll make sure you understand that fast. By the way, they're even worse with other Africans. Therefore, I guess you will not be shot at at once; but just in case, make sure to bring bullet-proof protection.
Thanks. I can read this article at last without being ripped off.
That's what comes when you hire people who don't have some vision of what they want to do in their lives. I don't believe it's the employer who should pay for your training.
You have to figure out what you want to do and then arrange training for it by yourself.
I think your point is definitely valid.
Unfortunately, not everybody is sufficiently enterpreneurial to do something for themselves. They kind of wait until somebody else does it for them and then they are surprised that this is not necessarily happening.
As a contractor, I do it all the time, that is, dealing with the education and training stuff myself. I've been able to increase my hourly rate by 15%/year for the last 3 years.
Which is ok for me. In this way I've switched from playing in MsAccess, to writing MTS components in Visual Basic for IIS, now to some real great stuff: servlets and server applications in Java (I use my own javadoc parser and my own XML parser).
P.S. : These moderators should get their head out of their asses and be open for differing points of view.
... is that you can prove anything at any time.
Imagine the user has no access to a Commodore 64 and that he absolutely needs to access an old copy of The Hobbit, how else are you going to achieve this than by stealing the one or the other wallet?
Which proves the case exhaustively.
The problem with most software is not lack of features. It is rather the opposite: you can't get rid of particular features that are absolutely unpleasant under particular, given circumstances.
I'm sure ACLs may be useful for some people, in some situations.
We know of the existence of the concept. We probably came across them in some other setting (e.g. NT) and not everybody is impressed.
ACLs are not generally useful. If they were, everybody and their little sister would be clamouring for them, and they obviously aren't.
Undoubtedly, there must be kernel patches available for you to have your ACLs, without forcing them on everybody.
If Linus built ACLs right into the kernel, I would be forced to put in serious effort and rip it out again. If he does too much of this kind of things, Linux would start forking.
I guess a DTD partially defines an document interface, say document object model (not fully though).
...
But then, it does not seem to catch on. This whole W3C XML1.0v4 thing seems to evolve into some kind of niche, in which some people want to play and many more others don't. We've all looked at it, and are not really impressed. I would dare to say: It fails to become "hot".
And then we've got those little ideosynchratic languages like XSLT and stuff, that aren't very impressive either. I'll stick with Java, if I need to convert complex data structures.
I'm rather convinced that releasing DTDs won't convince that many extra people to play the DTD game.
You could release instead some novel martian poetry in the wild and hope that people will read it
Listen. If you want to use their software, you either release under the GPL, or else you pay money for an exemption. What's the difference with using proprietary libs? At least, in case with the GPL you have a choice.
If not, I guess restricting access to these public records would be a violation of the plaintiff's freedom of information. If yes, I guess we must balance the identified individual's right to privacy against the rights of the plaintiff. It seems to me that no one's individual rights were violated. Therefore, I fully agree with the verdict.
Note, however, that if there is no requirement for a school to maintain such records, the school should not maintain them. It is an absolutely questionable practice to maintain them without being under a particular obligation to do so.
they've promoted: (1) lousy programming practices (2) hiring stupid people. Result: rapid money down the drain (RAD)
How many times do you think you will find the code:
...
EnterCriticalSection(cs);
... dosomeupdate
LeaveCriticalSection(cs);
in any database source code?
I guarantee that it's all over! and it does nothing more or less than stopping all other threads! So everybody shuts up while this particular guy is speaking. When it's a process per user instead of a thread per user, you see mutexes acquired all over the place.
For any practical purpose a single writing table-touch practically always means a table-lock.