Our economy is Capitalist like the Soviet Union was Communist-- that is, in name only
Yes! I had to wait couple of years to read some American saying on Slashdot that neither America is capitalist, nor Russia was communist country;)
Indeed, American economy contains some elements of central, government planning and wide range of state interventionism, since pure capitalism tends to degenerate into monopoly/oligopoly extorting consumers forced to buy products they don't need or want.
And Russian, Chinese or (before 1989) Polish economies contained some elements of competetiveness, some more than others. It never was free market all the way, but all those countries could never exist more than couple of years without suplementing central planning with some forms of free market (oftentimes officaly prosecuted, but depended upon by governments).
There is no, and there never was any pure capitalism, communism, right, left etc. It is so, because there's no such animal as ``metric human''.
Taking your copyright away from you for a problem with your license?
IAANAL, but I disctinctly remember that court can declare ``the next best thing'', when someone's will is imposible to execute.
I know that this is American ``invention'', there's no such thing in Polish codified law, hence I have no idea if this can be done to copyrights too.
But I know that in such cases author's intentions, the real intentions are taken into consideration and if the original will is impossible to execute, court can find a way that will preserve most of intentions. And these are intentions as declared by the court, which (as we know) don't have to have anything to do with the actual spirit of the law or ``spirit of intentions''.
I know that at least on one occasion SCO expressed the will to pursue this path (there was something about it on Groklaw). And I know that there are enough people (including judges) in the US that hate anything they consider ``unamerican'' or ``uncapitalistic'' so much, that they could bend the letter of the law to destroy it.
One of SCO's legal arguments AFAIR is that some court, after finding GPL illegal (however they want to achieve it) could use the ``next best thing'' doctrine (I don't remember the exact latin term).
Their reasoning is that court could declare all GPL programs Public Domain following the intention of author to distribute software free of charge, free to use, free to modify.
I know that it is very streched, very dificult and stupid. Anything new?
In some ways, this is an honest question. Aside from saying "we use X plugin from RSA" or "the university of wisconsin has verified us," how can one person ensure the security of what they work with?
This same question applies to other parts of our everyday life. For example, who can really verify books of state owned company, or the real flow of money in publicly paid projects?
The only answer we've found so far is transparency. It's true, that not everyone can check it by himself, but on the other hand, when there's no transparency (in public finances or software programs) no one can check it.
Security: Password/Credit Card/PIN Mangement - SafeDee [...] Price: $14.95, a small price to pay in the interest of keeping sensitive data safe
I always wonder who actually pays for pin/passwd managment shareware software, if they can't verify the storage method? I mean, those pins/passwords can lay there unencrypted, or base64 encoded for all you know.
Do we really want another Germany or Japan giving us a run for our money?
Did it ever occur to you, that US might be ``another Germany or Japan''? The militaristic police state ruled by oligarchies. With huge army and economy programmed for unconditional expansion.
Just take a brake from yourself, stand aside and look at the Iraq War and its consequences from all the angles.
It is voluntary, you have to wave your right by signing some paper. But didn't anyone wonder, what's gonna happen, when you won't sing it? Does it mean automatic strip-tease in front of some guard? Will they let you onboard?
I mean, for me it looks just as a trick: they can't force you to undergo the iris scan under current EU privacy laws, so they force you to sign some paper to wave those rights, and deny you the service if you won't.
Yes it does. Of course it does. Intel is the 800 lb. gorialla, and everyone watches intently to see where it will sit.
Yes, and the perfect example of this is Intel's decision to EOL x86/ia32 line by introduction of ia64 line. After Intel gave up on trying to introduce x86 64bit processors no one dared to try it, and so the line died.
Only thing that's getting people in a knot is that it is incompatible with the GPL's 6th clause (funny how people actually rate a 3 clause license with the only requirement proper attribution to be more restrictive than the god knows how many clauses GPL, but that's another discussion).
Simple doesn't have to make it better. And the problem with advertising clauses was discusses over and over, to the effect that some BSD projects changed their licences to avoid it.
``More restrictive'' or ``more free'' is stupid criteria if you ask me. Most important, it's not true.
BSD and GPL licensing have their purpose.
If you can live with the fact that businesses can use your gratis work without even giving back their contribution, bugfixes etc, that's fine, use BSD licence.
But if you want your contribution to the society to stay open, with all the enhancements, use GPL.
That's author's decision, his view of the world. It has nothing to do with more free, or more restrictive. I mean, if it really was about ``more free'', and not some religious debate about a pet project, than all BSD OSes would be published as public domain, wouldn't they?
No, the code in question was sumbitted by its authors to XFree86 under the XFree licence. Remember, the author owns the code and he can licence it as many times as he wishes, every time with different licence.
So it doesn't make XFree86 ``gpl derivative''.
But those people who sumbitted those patches oppose changing the XFree licence on their code to something GPL incompatible. At least I've heard that Alan opposes, but I don't believe they asked all contributors if they agree to licence change.
1. I don't drink coffee -- I don't like the taste. 2. I'm from Europe. Poland to be exact.
I just got back from Starbucks and instead of tasty coffee, I had the college kid behind the counter take a big fucking shit in my cup because that is what I'd rather have.
My European friends who were in the US claim it's almost exactly what they got into their cups in Startbucks. The actual term was ``pees''.
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
On the contrary, it's great example of capitalism in action. The purpose of capitalism isn't to produce great, working, innovative products. The purpose of capitalism is to generate (suprise!) capital. Coincidentally sometimes this also means producing great, working, innovative products, but that's just a byproduct.
Most of the time on stagnant market w/o any scientific/technological breakthroughs on the horizon, entrenched monopolies/oligopolies extort huge money for crappy products, paying politicians/rulers/kings/whatever to mandate their products and seeking other ways to change their business model to de facto or de jure taxes. Why work to get the money when you can pay someone to order people to pay you for nothing.
As the gaming industry, more and more consolidated with games written on the outside by talented programmers/artists and subsequently distributed by ``big houses'' starts to look more and more like recording industry, I've got only one advice to Independent Game Studios: DON'T GO THERE!
It will take you another century to free yourself from allpowerful Games Publishing Industry and countless fights against soon-to-be-created GPAA.
Save yourself and your customers trouble and think about some more direct way to distribute your games, before all your work, copyrights, money etc starts to flow one way, to pockets of ``games labels''.
Read some horror stories by golden and platinum record bands that didn't make a dime on it. Well actually, in some of these cases record labels claim that said artists still owe them money.
As previously discussed on/. Jones' comments are too controversial to ignore.
On the contrary, this type of comments are the ones you have to ignore. It is simply mindless, fact defying -1 troll.
I mean, when you see after a quick glance that author obviously did the research and ignored all the facts that didn't support his thesis, there's nothing you can tell him that will make him apologise, admit to mistake or sth like this.
When you see additional rhetorical manipulations (e.g. things that are insinuated but not stated straight, guilt by assosiation, or proof by analogy) you already know, that the point of the article was purposeful manipulation.
For some people operating systems, computer vendors, open vs close source, GPL vs BSD are religious matters and you don't want to get into discussing beliefs with religious fanatic.
IIRC, Autoplay has been shipped in MS operating systems since 1996. TVI has been sitting on this for eight years.
It's even worse. Mac had floppy change detection since 1984, Amiga had it since 1985 afair. So the patent was granted more than decade after the method was widely used...
Why? Because on your first (and second, and third, and forth...) you're not going to want to learn all about the inner workings of the Intel architecture. Segmented memory. *shudder*
Where have you been hiding for the last decade? Segmented memory is the thing of the past, deeply hidden inside real mode. since the times of 386 x86 architecture can use flat memory model (up to 4GB of course) if programmer chooses to. The memory mapping, pages are used for memory virtualization, they are not mandatory.
Programming in asm for x86 is still PITA (unlike georgous m68k) due to limited number of (non)General Purpose registers, but you only write a handful of routines in asm, the rest is usually C or other higher (than asm) language.
If I were to write OS from scratch, I would love to do it on m68k, or PPC. If only x86 weren't so indecently fast and cheap...
Once you get your head around that, then try the 6510 - same instruction set, but up to 16MB of memory.
Don't you mean 65816? 6510 is just 6502 with additional i/o register for memory banking etc. In c64 it was also used for driving tape i/o.
But I admit, 6502 is cute little processor for fun programming. Only it doesn't give you any useful skills for _real_ OS design: no MMU, memory protection etc, things that are mandatory today even in embedded architectures.
Robert
PS You could even buy 65816 computer today in lovely ATX form factor, IDE disk interfaces and lots of other goodies, if you wanted to write os for this.
It's almost as bad as the methods of the most hated government body in Poland -- our version of IRS. When dealing with VAT deduction the law states, that you can deduct VAT only if the person that sold you goods really paid it.
The idea is that people will do IRS's job, checking if someone paid their VAT, so they would stay clean. In practice no one can really check and if someone cheats on his taxes, his customers are held liable and fined.
Now do the math and find out how this relates to this story. Only this time ``fining body'' won't be government, so there won't be any simple way to protest those bills.
You just gonna have to ``prove that you're not a horse''. In court.
Robert
Key to search engine success
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I always thought that the key to Google's success was: honesty, objectivity, staying uninvolved. And of course accuracy.
The will to stay away from (at first glance) very lucrative ``search result position'' market, and clear distinction between search result and sponsored (unintrusive) links also helped Google entrench in its position.
Now take any word from the above paragraphs and try to put it in one sentence with Microsoft.
If you don't know what I mean, go to search.msn.com and type linux.
(What's noteworthy is that (in contrary to results from couple of months ago) it no longer returns any ``get rid of linux, install windows'' links to MSDN)
In short, MS would have to do something very unmicrosoftish -- actually give users good value for their money, and behave in a very honest, civilized way.
Yes, use the frelling BitTorrent, that's exactly what it was written for!
Add to this some way of limiting bandwith per connection (so people are mainly downloading from other bt clients, not from you) and you have perfect distribution means.
Leave the possibility to download via http, but limit it with QoS or some other way to tiny little stream, plus advertise all over the site that people can achieve unlimited dl speeds using BT.
Publishing documents only to limit in every possible way access to them (like all the game files servers do) is unwise, to say the least. Especially if you don't have to.
Why has DVI been a relative failure in the market?
I was under the impression that specs for the digital part of DVI interface didn't let it show eg 1600x1200 resolution in any sensible refresh rate. I distantly recall reading some years ago about plans of some sort of HR-DVI that would address this isue, but never heard about it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Our economy is Capitalist like the Soviet Union was Communist-- that is, in name only
;)
Yes! I had to wait couple of years to read some American saying on Slashdot that neither America is capitalist, nor Russia was communist country
Indeed, American economy contains some elements of central, government planning and wide range of state interventionism, since pure capitalism tends to degenerate into monopoly/oligopoly extorting consumers forced to buy products they don't need or want.
And Russian, Chinese or (before 1989) Polish economies contained some elements of competetiveness, some more than others. It never was free market all the way, but all those countries could never exist more than couple of years without suplementing central planning with some forms of free market (oftentimes officaly prosecuted, but depended upon by governments).
There is no, and there never was any pure capitalism, communism, right, left etc. It is so, because there's no such animal as ``metric human''.
Robert
Taking your copyright away from you for a problem with your license?
IAANAL, but I disctinctly remember that court can declare ``the next best thing'', when someone's will is imposible to execute.
I know that this is American ``invention'', there's no such thing in Polish codified law, hence I have no idea if this can be done to copyrights too.
But I know that in such cases author's intentions, the real intentions are taken into consideration and if the original will is impossible to execute, court can find a way that will preserve most of intentions. And these are intentions as declared by the court, which (as we know) don't have to have anything to do with the actual spirit of the law or ``spirit of intentions''.
I know that at least on one occasion SCO expressed the will to pursue this path (there was something about it on Groklaw). And I know that there are enough people (including judges) in the US that hate anything they consider ``unamerican'' or ``uncapitalistic'' so much, that they could bend the letter of the law to destroy it.
Whether they will succeed is another story.
Robert
One of SCO's legal arguments AFAIR is that some court, after finding GPL illegal (however they want to achieve it) could use the ``next best thing'' doctrine (I don't remember the exact latin term).
Their reasoning is that court could declare all GPL programs Public Domain following the intention of author to distribute software free of charge, free to use, free to modify.
I know that it is very streched, very dificult and stupid. Anything new?
Robert
In some ways, this is an honest question. Aside from saying "we use X plugin from RSA" or "the university of wisconsin has verified us," how can one person ensure the security of what they work with?
This same question applies to other parts of our everyday life. For example, who can really verify books of state owned company, or the real flow of money in publicly paid projects?
The only answer we've found so far is transparency. It's true, that not everyone can check it by himself, but on the other hand, when there's no transparency (in public finances or software programs) no one can check it.
Robert
Security: Password/Credit Card/PIN Mangement - SafeDee [...] Price: $14.95, a small price to pay in the interest of keeping sensitive data safe
I always wonder who actually pays for pin/passwd managment shareware software, if they can't verify the storage method? I mean, those pins/passwords can lay there unencrypted, or base64 encoded for all you know.
Robert
(using GPL keyring on Palm OS)
Do we really want another Germany or Japan giving us a run for our money?
Did it ever occur to you, that US might be ``another Germany or Japan''? The militaristic police state ruled by oligarchies. With huge army and economy programmed for unconditional expansion.
Just take a brake from yourself, stand aside and look at the Iraq War and its consequences from all the angles.
Robert
I've got one question:
It is voluntary, you have to wave your right by signing some paper. But didn't anyone wonder, what's gonna happen, when you won't sing it? Does it mean automatic strip-tease in front of some guard? Will they let you onboard?
I mean, for me it looks just as a trick: they can't force you to undergo the iris scan under current EU privacy laws, so they force you to sign some paper to wave those rights, and deny you the service if you won't.
In my vocabulary this if fscking blackmail.
Robert
Yes it does. Of course it does. Intel is the 800 lb. gorialla, and everyone watches intently to see where it will sit.
Yes, and the perfect example of this is Intel's decision to EOL x86/ia32 line by introduction of ia64 line. After Intel gave up on trying to introduce x86 64bit processors no one dared to try it, and so the line died.
Oh, wait...
Robert
Now, if only there was a chance for KDE 3.2 in unstable in 2004, this would be a Year of Debian.
I wonder why Pepsi didn't use a better solution.
Did you check USPTO site for "coke, promotion, cap"?
Robert
And the solution is not to take away the capitalism, its to take away the kings.
Was it in Heinlein, ``The day the lawyers hanged''?
Only thing that's getting people in a knot is that it is incompatible with the GPL's 6th clause (funny how people actually rate a 3 clause license with the only requirement proper attribution to be more restrictive than the god knows how many clauses GPL, but that's another discussion).
Simple doesn't have to make it better. And the problem with advertising clauses was discusses over and over, to the effect that some BSD projects changed their licences to avoid it.
``More restrictive'' or ``more free'' is stupid criteria if you ask me. Most important, it's not true.
BSD and GPL licensing have their purpose.
If you can live with the fact that businesses can use your gratis work without even giving back their contribution, bugfixes etc, that's fine, use BSD licence.
But if you want your contribution to the society to stay open, with all the enhancements, use GPL.
That's author's decision, his view of the world. It has nothing to do with more free, or more restrictive. I mean, if it really was about ``more free'', and not some religious debate about a pet project, than all BSD OSes would be published as public domain, wouldn't they?
Robert
And that's exacly what he wrote about: it's up to lie^H^Hawyers to decide.
No, the code in question was sumbitted by its authors to XFree86 under the XFree licence. Remember, the author owns the code and he can licence it as many times as he wishes, every time with different licence.
So it doesn't make XFree86 ``gpl derivative''.
But those people who sumbitted those patches oppose changing the XFree licence on their code to something GPL incompatible. At least I've heard that Alan opposes, but I don't believe they asked all contributors if they agree to licence change.
Robert
1. I don't drink coffee -- I don't like the taste.
2. I'm from Europe. Poland to be exact.
I just got back from Starbucks and instead of tasty coffee, I had the college kid behind the counter take a big fucking shit in my cup because that is what I'd rather have.
My European friends who were in the US claim it's almost exactly what they got into their cups in Startbucks. The actual term was ``pees''.
Robert
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
On the contrary, it's great example of capitalism in action. The purpose of capitalism isn't to produce great, working, innovative products. The purpose of capitalism is to generate (suprise!) capital. Coincidentally sometimes this also means producing great, working, innovative products, but that's just a byproduct.
Most of the time on stagnant market w/o any scientific/technological breakthroughs on the horizon, entrenched monopolies/oligopolies extort huge money for crappy products, paying politicians/rulers/kings/whatever to mandate their products and seeking other ways to change their business model to de facto or de jure taxes. Why work to get the money when you can pay someone to order people to pay you for nothing.
Robert
As the gaming industry, more and more consolidated with games written on the outside by talented programmers/artists and subsequently distributed by ``big houses'' starts to look more and more like recording industry, I've got only one advice to Independent Game Studios: DON'T GO THERE!
It will take you another century to free yourself from allpowerful Games Publishing Industry and countless fights against soon-to-be-created GPAA.
Save yourself and your customers trouble and think about some more direct way to distribute your games, before all your work, copyrights, money etc starts to flow one way, to pockets of ``games labels''.
Read some horror stories by golden and platinum record bands that didn't make a dime on it. Well actually, in some of these cases record labels claim that said artists still owe them money.
AND DON'T FSCKING GO THERE!
Robert
As previously discussed on /. Jones' comments are too controversial to ignore.
On the contrary, this type of comments are the ones you have to ignore. It is simply mindless, fact defying -1 troll.
I mean, when you see after a quick glance that author obviously did the research and ignored all the facts that didn't support his thesis, there's nothing you can tell him that will make him apologise, admit to mistake or sth like this.
When you see additional rhetorical manipulations (e.g. things that are insinuated but not stated straight, guilt by assosiation, or proof by analogy) you already know, that the point of the article was purposeful manipulation.
For some people operating systems, computer vendors, open vs close source, GPL vs BSD are religious matters and you don't want to get into discussing beliefs with religious fanatic.
Robert
IIRC, Autoplay has been shipped in MS operating systems since 1996. TVI has been sitting on this for eight years.
It's even worse. Mac had floppy change detection since 1984, Amiga had it since 1985 afair. So the patent was granted more than decade after the method was widely used...
Robert
Did any of you bitching and moaning guys even tried to google for "boot from usb" linuxInstalling Debian from USB key.
Robert
Why? Because on your first (and second, and third, and forth...) you're not going to want to learn all about the inner workings of the Intel architecture. Segmented memory. *shudder*
Where have you been hiding for the last decade?
Segmented memory is the thing of the past, deeply hidden inside real mode. since the times of 386 x86 architecture can use flat memory model (up to 4GB of course) if programmer chooses to. The memory mapping, pages are used for memory virtualization, they are not mandatory.
Programming in asm for x86 is still PITA (unlike georgous m68k) due to limited number of (non)General Purpose registers, but you only write a handful of routines in asm, the rest is usually C or other higher (than asm) language.
If I were to write OS from scratch, I would love to do it on m68k, or PPC. If only x86 weren't so indecently fast and cheap...
Once you get your head around that, then try the 6510 - same instruction set, but up to 16MB of memory.
Don't you mean 65816? 6510 is just 6502 with additional i/o register for memory banking etc. In c64 it was also used for driving tape i/o.
But I admit, 6502 is cute little processor for fun programming. Only it doesn't give you any useful skills for _real_ OS design: no MMU, memory protection etc, things that are mandatory today even in embedded architectures.
Robert
PS You could even buy 65816 computer today in lovely ATX form factor, IDE disk interfaces and lots of other goodies, if you wanted to write os for this.
It's the worst idea to fight spam ever.
It's almost as bad as the methods of the most hated government body in Poland -- our version of IRS. When dealing with VAT deduction the law states, that you can deduct VAT only if the person that sold you goods really paid it.
The idea is that people will do IRS's job, checking if someone paid their VAT, so they would stay clean. In practice no one can really check and if someone cheats on his taxes, his customers are held liable and fined.
Now do the math and find out how this relates to this story. Only this time ``fining body'' won't be government, so there won't be any simple way to protest those bills.
You just gonna have to ``prove that you're not a horse''. In court.
Robert
I always thought that the key to Google's success was: honesty, objectivity, staying uninvolved. And of course accuracy.
;)
The will to stay away from (at first glance) very lucrative ``search result position'' market, and clear distinction between search result and sponsored (unintrusive) links also helped Google entrench in its position.
Now take any word from the above paragraphs and try to put it in one sentence with Microsoft.
If you don't know what I mean, go to search.msn.com and type linux.
(What's noteworthy is that (in contrary to results from couple of months ago) it no longer returns any ``get rid of linux, install windows'' links to MSDN)
In short, MS would have to do something very unmicrosoftish -- actually give users good value for their money, and behave in a very honest, civilized way.
Where's the money in that?
Robert
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Yes, use the frelling BitTorrent, that's exactly what it was written for!
Add to this some way of limiting bandwith per connection (so people are mainly downloading from other bt clients, not from you) and you have perfect distribution means.
Leave the possibility to download via http, but limit it with QoS or some other way to tiny little stream, plus advertise all over the site that people can achieve unlimited dl speeds using BT.
Publishing documents only to limit in every possible way access to them (like all the game files servers do) is unwise, to say the least. Especially if you don't have to.
Robert
Why has DVI been a relative failure in the market?
I was under the impression that specs for the digital part of DVI interface didn't let it show eg 1600x1200 resolution in any sensible refresh rate. I distantly recall reading some years ago about plans of some sort of HR-DVI that would address this isue, but never heard about it again.
Could someone knowing exact specs correct me?
Robert