I fear that greed is a feeling as natural as hunger or love. Our human mind is a complex weave of many different aspects, some being good, some bad.
Ethics teach that a selfish attitude does not help anyone, the last being one self, in the long run. But that idea is as old as human culture and religion, and we seemingly didn't learn much from that time until today.
You can always try better as individual person, but don't expect the same from society as a whole...
This is just the first step in limiting people's free speech rights on the 'net and turning it into a bland, corporate organ, similar to today's TV.
Nonsense... the internet is a massive network of interconnected nodes with a two-way information flow. TV is a small network of providers pushing the information to all the nodes. That is a big difference.
The size, complexity and geographic distribution makes it near impossible to control all aspects of communication of the internet. Think of China, trying hard to do just that - their success being limited to the non-techie population (sadly still a very big part of it).
The availability of high-grade crypto and of cheap computing power for the masses will eventually empower us (the people, contrary to the government) to circumvent any means of control over information flow. This will change the relationship between the people and the governments.
I know that today negativism is the only viable attitude for many things, but regarding our freedom of speech the internet has changed so much to the better in the last 15 years. With this technology being still in it's infancy I see this positive trend to continue...
...at home. Seriously, recommending C++ or Java as introductory languages is IMHO a really bad idea. Both languages suffer from design problems that will take a lot of fun from the learning experience.
C++ is probably the worst choice besides C or Assembler (not talking about Braindead et al:) for learning a new language. With manual memory management, heavy generic programming (templates) and mostly speed-optimized libraries (easy interfaces vs. performance) C++ is the heavy machine gun of languages that can be very difficuly to handle...
Java does sufficently abstract low-level aspects of programming and thus is often used as introductory language, but in my experience teaching it at my university I noticed one huge problem that's very difficult to get over: the massive SDK, with it's miles deep object hierarchies, doesn't make sense for people not yet thinking in object oriented terms (arguably it does for the rest;). It's too strict in this sense, at least for learning purposes. Take a look at the Java version of Hello world, does this look intuitive?
Lua might not be a good choice either, as it is very lightweight (missing some nice functionality you might better get a grip of early on).
Personally I would recommend Ruby (the cleanest language around) or Python (also very clean, with more mature community support) for a start. Both offer everything necessary to develop computer games...
Netscape is an original example of the outstanding possibilities for open source development models.
Over the course of a few years in the 90s Microsoft managed to push Netscape out of the market, and somehow Netscape managed to fuck up the original Netscape source base. The didn't stand a chance to compete back then.
Netscape went opensource '98. and now, 6 years later, their product has developed into the most evolved, innovative browser available in a massive community project that went more than successful.
Open source models draw lots of manpower, practically for free, if the incentive for contributors is good enough... more and more companies are realizing this, which is a good thing. In the end everyone is profiting from such successful cross commercial/open source endeavours.
I was specifically referencing the technology that the parent poster seemed to be missing innovation in the last years. No mean to ignore the long history of modern electronic music, but current equipment allows to create artificial music on a different scale than back before the 90s, and I think that the innovations of that decade just start to get into the minds of musicians.
In electronic music alot of development occured in the last few years. The 2000's bore a lot of very talented, and often also very young producers that grew up with the technology of the 80s and 90s around them.
These artists are IMHO the first generation that completely manage to bridge the huge gap between a musical background and the technical side of digital music, producing with unheard quality and innovation. The genre is still in it's infancy and evolving rapidely.
As a matter of fact, QT open source licensing only applies to Linux, UNIX and MacOS X. The Windows version of QT is not available under a free license.
That may be sufficient for RMS as he is only targeting GPLed platforms anyways, for Windows or cross platform developers this is an altogether different thing.
The temptation is big: current technology will soon allow us to do any ID recognition by biometrics data with very cheap methods. This special application is just one of many examples where applying this technology would make sense.
The thing I dislike about any biometrics solutions is that in order for them to work, they need a method of identifying you as a person, Being that fingerprint, iris recognition or facial properties.
Thus every access to biometrically controlled systems allow a unique connection between your ID data and your person. This may be wanted in many situations, but with biometrics there just is no alternative to anonymity anymore.
The widespread use of biometrics will inevitably lead to the "transparent citizen" as the option of anonymity will just fade away with the disappearance of alternative identification methods.
Yes, it is unfair to compare with an old version of VMware. (Probably this is only a license issue, or would you invest 200 bucks for a new VMware version to be able to do up-to-date benchmarks?)
Still I suspect that the performance gain not to be that huge. VMware is another class of virtualization software that does not only allow you to run different host and target OSs but also to emulate hardware not installed in the system at all.
As I understand Xen it only does virtualization of the existing hardware to allow to concurrently run multiple instances of the installed OS. This is a different goal, and IMO explains the big performance gap between those two.
GPLed virtualization software that according to the benchmarks achieves performance unseen in current approaches - sounds like a dream come true.
It would be astonishing if those benchmark numbers hold true in a production environment, which might well be as the selected benchmarks (SPECint, Postgres, Apache,..) should give a fair picture of the overall performance hit for the virtualized systems.
Being able to partition your OS without serious performance implication would open a whole lot of new possibilities for developers that previously where only possible with huge investments in high-end hardware and expensive virtualization software licenses.
I've already decided: My price for the most useful opensourced application in 2004 goes to..... Xen:)
If you read the original report you can see hard facts against Ruslan Ibragimov.
The binary comparison in the report shows evidence for a correlation between Send-Safe and Sobig-F which could be proved if Ibragimov would be forced to open the Send-Safe source.
No, he created a kernel, he created a GPL licensed, monolithic and modular kernel. Linux is _just_ a kernel
By definition of the word Operating system, you're right. Still, though free kernels and user land utilities existed well before Linux, it was his project that kicked off a lot of development around open source operating systems.
Without Linus there would be no Linux, and that's the simple truth.
As FreeBSD user I am well aware of the diversity of ongoing efforts delivering us the final product of a free operating system. Still all the lot would not be possible without the people fighting at thefront.
I'll have to stick by Theo on this one, there is a lot of whining about Nvidia binary drivers for their video cards, but that seems to be all it is, whining.
That's just a statement of your personal opinion, not being backed up at all. Just like Theo's. Insulting on the basis of such arguments is unprofessional and does no one any good. Why not try to get together in a proper forum that actually allows bidirectional communication?
How many programs you know allocates block memory with a raw malloc() ?...
Low level system apps might always do... you don't want your init or terminal session fail because of such problems, if avoidable. You should actually be able to safely delete/dev, which would not break your basic session. You can still access an already opened shell and run necessary scripts to rebuild the files.
Or will my gpm work without access to/dev/mouse ?.
Actually, yes. I'd wager that gpm opens/dev/mouse once at startup and as subsequent file accesses happen underneath the filesystem inode tree, gpm would still be able to read the device data while the actual filesystem entry of/dev/mouse is already removed.
[Theo de Raadt] said he found it sad that the Linux crowd did not help in the activism at all. "(They) always seem to talk about freedom but are not helping in this activism. It's basically BSD people doing it. That is curious. For instance, do you think Linus (Torvalds) would send a mail to TI? No, I would bet money that he did not. Yet he is aware of what is going on. That's very odd to me."
I honor the efforts of the OpenBSD projects and Theo de Raadt, but this is childish behaviour. I don't think one could deny that Linus does propagate the idea of free software. He created the currently most distributed free operating system, did he?
Speaking like that of the Linux crowd at whole is ignorant. I'd wager that most closed source hardware components where opened by previous Linux efforts, the project that actually initialized the wider acceptance of UNIX like operating systems we enjoy today by (unfortunately still limited) vendor support.
If Theo didn't split camps he might actually find cooperation with Linux developers.
Actually the situation is different than you describe it, as "everything is a file" would generally also hold true for Windows from the file system perspective. Both Linux and Windows load data from a file to memory and keep it there while being in use. Swapping may apply but you can think of the file being wholly in memory.
The difference lies in the ownership design, wherein Windows locks a file when it is opened and leaves it at that until closed. Linux, on the other hand, works with the current snapshot of the file.
File locking is a good thing in the demonstrated situation, as graceful error recovery is important. IMO this case shows the very reason for it being implemented in Windows. Most Windows users have administrator privileges which allow them to delete files they shouldn't be able to, while Linux uses a more strictly separated user concept where regular users are not able to delete crucial system files.
While sometimes file locking is necessary (and in the UNIX case has to be done manually), general file locking is not a good thing because it prevents live system updates. This is why you can update your whole Linux system (besides the running kernel) without rebooting, a thing impossible for Windows installations.
The anonymous authors have done really interesting technical forensics.
The executable comparison charts between Send-Safe and Sobig-F in the appendix show a large correlation in both binaries. A different code base seems to be a pretty unrealistic thing there.
If the given facts hold true, I bet that Ruslan Ibragimov will not sleep very well in the next time.
Have a look at Synchronizing Your Source and the next chapter, Rebuilding world in the FreeBSD handbook. The whole procedure of a source upgrade is explained there.
You should settle to this method as it is the preferred way of keeping your system up-to-date, wether on updating between releases or incooperating security or maintainance updates from the respective RELEASE branches.
Basically after having your source updated to the latest RELENG_5_3 branch, typically via cvsup(1), it consists of the following steps:
# make buildworld # make buildkernel # make installkernel # reboot
single mode:
# mergemaster -p # make installworld # mergemaster # reboot
It is very straight-forward, still be sure to read about the details in the handbook.
I always had the impression that FreeBSD has gathered one of the most professional teams around an open source project of this scale. They focus on delivering a high quality operating system, and that's seemingly the only rationale behind engineering decisions. I like that attitude.
You're correct that the US would have to reduce the highest amount of greenhouse gases of all Kyoto Protocol participants.
Have you ever asked yourself if that might be because the US is the worlds largest greenhouse gas producer, therefor also earning the most money on cost of natural resources?
Or if ecological politics might be bad for people having to feed their family everywhere in the world, because there always has to be an economic price for ecological measures?
We are all sitting in the same boat... Thinking of current economics being more important than a stable environment is both shortsighted and stupid. No offense, but wether the current global warming has natural or human causes, working towards destroying our environment will have serious long term effects.
...people will soon start to realize the potential harm these issues can do to our society as a whole. I cannot understand how any sane person is able to ignore the simple fact of environmental problems getting worse over time.
The US government still manages to deny cooperation on the Kyoto Protocol with most stupid arguments, a treaty already ratified by 125 countries all over the world.
"The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere." -- George W. Bush
???
The greenhouse gas problem will grow at a steady level for decades after we have started countermeasures, I hope then there's enough time left afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
I fear that greed is a feeling as natural as hunger or love. Our human mind is a complex weave of many different aspects, some being good, some bad.
Ethics teach that a selfish attitude does not help anyone, the last being one self, in the long run. But that idea is as old as human culture and religion, and we seemingly didn't learn much from that time until today.
You can always try better as individual person, but don't expect the same from society as a whole...
This is just the first step in limiting people's free speech rights on the 'net and turning it into a bland, corporate organ, similar to today's TV.
Nonsense... the internet is a massive network of interconnected nodes with a two-way information flow. TV is a small network of providers pushing the information to all the nodes. That is a big difference.
The size, complexity and geographic distribution makes it near impossible to control all aspects of communication of the internet. Think of China, trying hard to do just that - their success being limited to the non-techie population (sadly still a very big part of it).
The availability of high-grade crypto and of cheap computing power for the masses will eventually empower us (the people, contrary to the government) to circumvent any means of control over information flow. This will change the relationship between the people and the governments.
I know that today negativism is the only viable attitude for many things, but regarding our freedom of speech the internet has changed so much to the better in the last 15 years. With this technology being still in it's infancy I see this positive trend to continue...
...at home. Seriously, recommending C++ or Java as introductory languages is IMHO a really bad idea. Both languages suffer from design problems that will take a lot of fun from the learning experience.
:) for learning a new language. With manual memory management, heavy generic programming (templates) and mostly speed-optimized libraries (easy interfaces vs. performance) C++ is the heavy machine gun of languages that can be very difficuly to handle...
;). It's too strict in this sense, at least for learning purposes. Take a look at the Java version of Hello world, does this look intuitive?
C++ is probably the worst choice besides C or Assembler (not talking about Braindead et al
Java does sufficently abstract low-level aspects of programming and thus is often used as introductory language, but in my experience teaching it at my university I noticed one huge problem that's very difficult to get over: the massive SDK, with it's miles deep object hierarchies, doesn't make sense for people not yet thinking in object oriented terms (arguably it does for the rest
Lua might not be a good choice either, as it is very lightweight (missing some nice functionality you might better get a grip of early on).
Personally I would recommend Ruby (the cleanest language around) or Python (also very clean, with more mature community support) for a start. Both offer everything necessary to develop computer games...
Netscape is an original example of the outstanding possibilities for open source development models.
Over the course of a few years in the 90s Microsoft managed to push Netscape out of the market, and somehow Netscape managed to fuck up the original Netscape source base. The didn't stand a chance to compete back then.
Netscape went opensource '98. and now, 6 years later, their product has developed into the most evolved, innovative browser available in a massive community project that went more than successful.
Open source models draw lots of manpower, practically for free, if the incentive for contributors is good enough... more and more companies are realizing this, which is a good thing. In the end everyone is profiting from such successful cross commercial/open source endeavours.
I was specifically referencing the technology that the parent poster seemed to be missing innovation in the last years. No mean to ignore the long history of modern electronic music, but current equipment allows to create artificial music on a different scale than back before the 90s, and I think that the innovations of that decade just start to get into the minds of musicians.
...when the Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, back then chaired by Mr. Rumsfeld, has been released.
In electronic music alot of development occured in the last few years. The 2000's bore a lot of very talented, and often also very young producers that grew up with the technology of the 80s and 90s around them.
These artists are IMHO the first generation that completely manage to bridge the huge gap between a musical background and the technical side of digital music, producing with unheard quality and innovation. The genre is still in it's infancy and evolving rapidely.
As a matter of fact, QT open source licensing only applies to Linux, UNIX and MacOS X. The Windows version of QT is not available under a free license.
That may be sufficient for RMS as he is only targeting GPLed platforms anyways, for Windows or cross platform developers this is an altogether different thing.
QT is not free software.
The temptation is big: current technology will soon allow us to do any ID recognition by biometrics data with very cheap methods. This special application is just one of many examples where applying this technology would make sense.
The thing I dislike about any biometrics solutions is that in order for them to work, they need a method of identifying you as a person, Being that fingerprint, iris recognition or facial properties.
Thus every access to biometrically controlled systems allow a unique connection between your ID data and your person. This may be wanted in many situations, but with biometrics there just is no alternative to anonymity anymore.
The widespread use of biometrics will inevitably lead to the "transparent citizen" as the option of anonymity will just fade away with the disappearance of alternative identification methods.
Yes, it is unfair to compare with an old version of VMware. (Probably this is only a license issue, or would you invest 200 bucks for a new VMware version to be able to do up-to-date benchmarks?)
Still I suspect that the performance gain not to be that huge. VMware is another class of virtualization software that does not only allow you to run different host and target OSs but also to emulate hardware not installed in the system at all.
As I understand Xen it only does virtualization of the existing hardware to allow to concurrently run multiple instances of the installed OS. This is a different goal, and IMO explains the big performance gap between those two.
GPLed virtualization software that according to the benchmarks achieves performance unseen in current approaches - sounds like a dream come true.
..) should give a fair picture of the overall performance hit for the virtualized systems.
:)
It would be astonishing if those benchmark numbers hold true in a production environment, which might well be as the selected benchmarks (SPECint, Postgres, Apache,
Being able to partition your OS without serious performance implication would open a whole lot of new possibilities for developers that previously where only possible with huge investments in high-end hardware and expensive virtualization software licenses.
I've already decided: My price for the most useful opensourced application in 2004 goes to..... Xen
If you read the original report you can see hard facts against Ruslan Ibragimov.
The binary comparison in the report shows evidence for a correlation between Send-Safe and Sobig-F which could be proved if Ibragimov would be forced to open the Send-Safe source.
Go on patting your own shoulder for handling democratic elections well.
It is for sure great to be an American. Something to be proud of.
No, he created a kernel, he created a GPL licensed, monolithic and modular kernel.
Linux is _just_ a kernel
By definition of the word Operating system, you're right. Still, though free kernels and user land utilities existed well before Linux, it was his project that kicked off a lot of development around open source operating systems.
Without Linus there would be no Linux, and that's the simple truth.
As FreeBSD user I am well aware of the diversity of ongoing efforts delivering us the final product of a free operating system. Still all the lot would not be possible without the people fighting at the front.
I'll have to stick by Theo on this one, there is a lot of whining about Nvidia binary drivers for their video cards, but that seems to be all it is, whining.
That's just a statement of your personal opinion, not being backed up at all. Just like Theo's. Insulting on the basis of such arguments is unprofessional and does no one any good. Why not try to get together in a proper forum that actually allows bidirectional communication?
How many programs you know allocates block memory with a raw malloc() ?...
/dev, which would not break your basic session. You can still access an already opened shell and run necessary scripts to rebuild the files.
/dev/mouse ?.
/dev/mouse once at startup and as subsequent file accesses happen underneath the filesystem inode tree, gpm would still be able to read the device data while the actual filesystem entry of /dev/mouse is already removed.
Low level system apps might always do... you don't want your init or terminal session fail because of such problems, if avoidable. You should actually be able to safely delete
Or will my gpm work without access to
Actually, yes. I'd wager that gpm opens
From a story linked in the article:
[Theo de Raadt] said he found it sad that the Linux crowd did not help in the activism at all. "(They) always seem to talk about freedom but are not helping in this activism. It's basically BSD people doing it. That is curious. For instance, do you think Linus (Torvalds) would send a mail to TI? No, I would bet money that he did not. Yet he is aware of what is going on. That's very odd to me."
I honor the efforts of the OpenBSD projects and Theo de Raadt, but this is childish behaviour. I don't think one could deny that Linus does propagate the idea of free software. He created the currently most distributed free operating system, did he?
Speaking like that of the Linux crowd at whole is ignorant. I'd wager that most closed source hardware components where opened by previous Linux efforts, the project that actually initialized the wider acceptance of UNIX like operating systems we enjoy today by (unfortunately still limited) vendor support.
If Theo didn't split camps he might actually find cooperation with Linux developers.
Actually the situation is different than you describe it, as "everything is a file" would generally also hold true for Windows from the file system perspective. Both Linux and Windows load data from a file to memory and keep it there while being in use. Swapping may apply but you can think of the file being wholly in memory.
The difference lies in the ownership design, wherein Windows locks a file when it is opened and leaves it at that until closed. Linux, on the other hand, works with the current snapshot of the file.
File locking is a good thing in the demonstrated situation, as graceful error recovery is important. IMO this case shows the very reason for it being implemented in Windows. Most Windows users have administrator privileges which allow them to delete files they shouldn't be able to, while Linux uses a more strictly separated user concept where regular users are not able to delete crucial system files.
While sometimes file locking is necessary (and in the UNIX case has to be done manually), general file locking is not a good thing because it prevents live system updates. This is why you can update your whole Linux system (besides the running kernel) without rebooting, a thing impossible for Windows installations.
...sick. How ignorant do you have to be to ignore this , or that ?
Innocent people die everyday and it is the US government that kills them. For nothing.
Osama and other threats are still for real while your country is fucking with Iraqi, people that never attacked you in the first place.
Shame on you...
The anonymous authors have done really interesting technical forensics.
The executable comparison charts between Send-Safe and Sobig-F in the appendix show a large correlation in both binaries. A different code base seems to be a pretty unrealistic thing there.
If the given facts hold true, I bet that Ruslan Ibragimov will not sleep very well in the next time.
You should settle to this method as it is the preferred way of keeping your system up-to-date, wether on updating between releases or incooperating security or maintainance updates from the respective RELEASE branches.
Basically after having your source updated to the latest RELENG_5_3 branch, typically via cvsup(1), it consists of the following steps:
# make buildworld
# make buildkernel
# make installkernel
# reboot
single mode:
# mergemaster -p
# make installworld
# mergemaster
# reboot
It is very straight-forward, still be sure to read about the details in the handbook.
Maybe that is why it works out so well ?
The article states that 1.8 million internet bars have been inspected between February and August, of which 1600 where shut down.
That's a quite staggering number of inspections, and it leaves me wondering about the vast resources at hand for governmental control in China.
On topic, I don't think such measures to be effective. Restrictive law cannot replace proper education, as people can always work around law.
Installing and administering the various open source tools can be tedious work, especially without documentation of how to put things together.
A quick Google search though reveals a lot of free papers and manuals on this very topic.
You're correct that the US would have to reduce the highest amount of greenhouse gases of all Kyoto Protocol participants.
Have you ever asked yourself if that might be because the US is the worlds largest greenhouse gas producer, therefor also earning the most money on cost of natural resources?
Or if ecological politics might be bad for people having to feed their family everywhere in the world, because there always has to be an economic price for ecological measures?
We are all sitting in the same boat...
Thinking of current economics being more important than a stable environment is both shortsighted and stupid. No offense, but wether the current global warming has natural or human causes, working towards destroying our environment will have serious long term effects.
Disclaimer: I am European.
...people will soon start to realize the potential harm these issues can do to our society as a whole. I cannot understand how any sane person is able to ignore the simple fact of environmental problems getting worse over time.
The US government still manages to deny cooperation on the Kyoto Protocol with most stupid arguments, a treaty already ratified by 125 countries all over the world.
"The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere." -- George W. Bush
???
The greenhouse gas problem will grow at a steady level for decades after we have started countermeasures, I hope then there's enough time left afterwards.