Remember, Dr. Frankenstein thought his biological research would benefit the world, but instead of a medical revolution that created life... the result of his work was a monstrocity that killed people.
Remember, that despite all the uncanny parallels to real-life scientists, Victor Frankenstein was a fictional character.
The state does take upon itself absolute authority for the life and death of its citizens. (One of the many reasons I disagree with statism -- if I want to suicide, I don't see why the state should be allowed to stop me. My body, my right.) Many states are also prepared to kill murderers, spies, etc.
The state does not want to discourage killing per se. It wants to discourage killing not done on its terms. Or maybe you're forgetting those festivals of violence that we seem to hold every 10, 15 or 20 years, where a certain percentage of the world's population gets given guns and told to kill a certain other percentage of the world's population...
That's one reason I like Slashdot. There is always someone who has interesting information.
... in amongst the hundreds of hot grits, Natalie Portman petrified, goatse.cx, *BSD is dying, first post, dead penis bird ASCII art, and other fine examples of human ingenuity.
oh, and the hundreds of posts like this one complaining how bad/. is these days:)
Most virus damage is caused by half-baked, slipshod, poorly-thought-out products put out by our friends in Redmond.
I think you're taking a little bit of a logical shortcut with that one.
* Most (all?) virus damage is caused by viruses.
* Viruses are written by virus authors.
* Microsoft make the job of virus authors much easier by releasing "slipshod, poorly-thought-out products".
* Most computer viruses target Microsoft OS's.
The above facts are, I hope we would all agree, true. However, for the damage to occur, the authors need to write the viruses. Viruses can be written to target any platform, and commit arbitrary amounts of damage thereon. Without the actions of the authors, the damage would not occur. So, although Microsoft are culpable of leaving wide-open, gaping security holes, the people at fault are (in a moral and, it seems, legal sense) the authors of these viruses, and they cause the damage.
This is not a defense of Microsoft -- they're just after the money, they don't care about their customers. However, you can't blame them for causing the damage, only for failing to prevent it.
We all made fun of the Dilbertian e-commerce sites that went under because they were idiots and then blamed "the economy". And yet here we are accepting the same argument from "Progeny" and their "NOW project".
Just because an idea won't show a profit in the next quarter doesn't mean that it's idiotic.
Of course, if your entire business plan will never show a profit, even in the middle of a boom, then you deserve to perish when the going gets tough... but you can't fault companies like Prodigy for not being able to afford speculative ventures like this in the current investment climate.
In fact, I'm surprised they're still around... given the fates of some of the other companies in the Linux 'industry'.
Speaking of which... have you read the Dune series at all? I'm just not sure if they truly constitute fantasy or whether they're sci-fi.
Although they're badged as science fiction, a pretty good case could be made to have them be considered 'political fantasies'. Most (all?) of Herbert's books concentrate on the politics of the situations he describes, and the 'science' is merely an enabling factor in describing (and changing) the politics, history, etc. of those settings.
There are always these huge detectors along the entrances, anyway. Most bookstores tag their books, and if you limit the kind of packages that people can take in, you should be able to control theft pretty well.
No taking lead boxes in?:)
Seriously, I was a little peeved recently when I bought an Iain M. Banks book, and some ignoramus had stuck the security tag in halfway through the book. Tags on the inside covers I can deal with, tags obscuring text I cannot.
Hey, my path was Commodore 64 -> Amiga -> Linux. But I know how many people out there worship the Big Blue Screen of Death in Redmond...
Besides, if people don't remember v1s, all the better reason to inflate the version numbers.:)
The average user? The users whose massive support makes certain projects fundable and viable? They want version 1.0. 1.0 says, "Hey, this is stable, it won't kill, maim or cause your machine to implode."
To a generation raised on Microsoft products, v1.0 is a scary number. Windows 1.0? Windows NT 1.0? Internet Explorer 1.0? Way too immature for use. I think Mozilla should jump straight to 'Mozilla [current_year + 1]'. So, if they released 'v1.0' tomorrow, they should call it Mozilla 2002.After all, we gotta keep up with the Gates's...
Is this the new math program that Pres Bush wants to push?
Q. A simulation takes 24 hours to run. A new version of the simulation runs 2x faster. How long does it run?
A. 1 hour!
No, I think they just take veeeeery long lunches. Sounds good to me!
(Besides, the sim could have taken 12 or 14 hours to run, but they weren't there at 11pm to interpret the results. That still equates to at least a 6 hour lunch... they must be running a hell of a bar tab somewhere:)
The Mac encodes the file type as a 4 character code, 'JPEG'. So it's a JPEG file. The Be OS is no better or different as far as I know, except that it was designed after the MIME standard was introduced, so it's in sync with MIME.
Hell, even Apple's ProDOS, which ran on the//e (81? 83?) had file types (creator codes too, I think.. it's been a while since I've done a catalog:)
any solution is imperfect, unfortunately. i quite like one implemented in Directory Opus 5 (Amiga) and, I presume, 6 (Windows) -- a configurable list of different checks that could be applied, including filename matching, contents matching, byte searching, etc. The user could define their own filetypes, and what would be done to search for them. A bugger to maintain, but powerful and flexible:)
(DOpus 5 and 6 function as OS shell replacements, acting as the primary GUI, so they can be considered to be in the same arena as the 'OS' there...)
The thing that cheeses me is that the Internet is based on MIME. When I send a file "foobar" to a Windows user, and my email program tags the file as image/jpeg, the Windows email program should make the file name "foobar.jpg".
But how does your email program know that it's a JPEG?
Obviously we should adopt the approach of BeOS, and use MIME-type mapping and file attributes. Oh, except for all those people out there who use the wrong MIME types (or non-standard ones, anyway).:/
The AmigaOS (and later BeOS) had Datatypes, an OS-level solution to the JIT file-typing problem... you could install input and output filters for any type of data you had datatypes for, and any program that supported datatypes (e.g. for images, or sounds, or text) could use these modules.
Not that any of these approaches (either these I've described or any discussed so far in the responses) are the silver bullet, just my 2c worth...
It is also fairly straightforward why they are releasing the source under the GPL and not some other license. If you have a large useable codebase that is currently proprietary you would be crazy to release it under anything but the GPL. After all, the copyright owner of a GPLed work can still release closed source proprietary packages of the code (released under a different license), however the GPL guarantees that your competitors can't scoop up your code and do the same.
I'm all for the GPL -- but what does it offer Caldera in this case that a proprietary license with source released to customers on similar terms (change it in-house, but no distribution allowed) wouldn't do? Competitors would still be legally prohibited from using the code, thanks to standard copyright legislation.
(I understand the other benefits of releasing under the GPL -- especially the PR aspect:) -- but I do take issue with your contention that the GPL was the only way to go for them to prevent improper usage.)
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, Dr. Frankenstein thought his biological research would benefit the world, but instead of a medical revolution that created life... the result of his work was a monstrocity that killed people.
Remember, that despite all the uncanny parallels to real-life scientists, Victor Frankenstein was a fictional character.
The state does take upon itself absolute authority for the life and death of its citizens. (One of the many reasons I disagree with statism -- if I want to suicide, I don't see why the state should be allowed to stop me. My body, my right.) Many states are also prepared to kill murderers, spies, etc.
The state does not want to discourage killing per se. It wants to discourage killing not done on its terms. Or maybe you're forgetting those festivals of violence that we seem to hold every 10, 15 or 20 years, where a certain percentage of the world's population gets given guns and told to kill a certain other percentage of the world's population...
Pure science is the ultimate morality. Give it freedom.
So if I had a valid scientific reason to kill all ideologues like yourself, I'd be perfectly justified?
You're succumbing to the same fundamentalism that you decry in your opponents.
FWIW, I'm agnostic.
Yes, I was just about to post a message about this myself...
If that's what he calls smoothing the edges, I'd hate to see what he does when he gets angry!
(OK, I know, it's in poor taste...)
That's one reason I like Slashdot. There is always someone who has interesting information.
/. is these days :)
... in amongst the hundreds of hot grits, Natalie Portman petrified, goatse.cx, *BSD is dying, first post, dead penis bird ASCII art, and other fine examples of human ingenuity.
oh, and the hundreds of posts like this one complaining how bad
Most virus damage is caused by half-baked, slipshod, poorly-thought-out products put out by our friends in Redmond.
I think you're taking a little bit of a logical shortcut with that one.
* Most (all?) virus damage is caused by viruses.
* Viruses are written by virus authors.
* Microsoft make the job of virus authors much easier by releasing "slipshod, poorly-thought-out products".
* Most computer viruses target Microsoft OS's.
The above facts are, I hope we would all agree, true. However, for the damage to occur, the authors need to write the viruses. Viruses can be written to target any platform, and commit arbitrary amounts of damage thereon. Without the actions of the authors, the damage would not occur. So, although Microsoft are culpable of leaving wide-open, gaping security holes, the people at fault are (in a moral and, it seems, legal sense) the authors of these viruses, and they cause the damage.
This is not a defense of Microsoft -- they're just after the money, they don't care about their customers. However, you can't blame them for causing the damage, only for failing to prevent it.
What Hertz SHOULD have said is that games are the only commercial applications used by the masses that maximize CPU useage ...
...
Yes, I'm sure no one has ever maxed a CPU for hours or days on end modelling fluid dynamics, or physical optics, or encoding mpegs, or
How many of "the masses" do this?
Not enough to qualify for the term 'mass', I imagine...
They want revenue sooner than now? Wow, talk about impatient!! They want revenue Yesterday!!
I myself am not that unrealistic -- ten minutes ago will be just fine.
:)
We all made fun of the Dilbertian e-commerce sites that went under because they were idiots and then blamed "the economy". And yet here we are accepting the same argument from "Progeny" and their "NOW project".
Just because an idea won't show a profit in the next quarter doesn't mean that it's idiotic.
Of course, if your entire business plan will never show a profit, even in the middle of a boom, then you deserve to perish when the going gets tough... but you can't fault companies like Prodigy for not being able to afford speculative ventures like this in the current investment climate.
In fact, I'm surprised they're still around... given the fates of some of the other companies in the Linux 'industry'.
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
I thought that was changed to "a woman without a man is like..." in the 1970s.
Fight on, sister!
while true; do telnet www.hotmail.com 80 < /dev/urandom; done
But ain't that the universal cracking tool? Something to do with the Monkey/Shakespeare Effect.
Of course, for slightly more secure setups, 'just sit back and wait' could take you past the heat death of the universe. Hotmail? 30 seconds or so...
Speaking of which ... have you read the Dune series at all? I'm just not sure if they truly constitute fantasy or whether they're sci-fi.
Although they're badged as science fiction, a pretty good case could be made to have them be considered 'political fantasies'. Most (all?) of Herbert's books concentrate on the politics of the situations he describes, and the 'science' is merely an enabling factor in describing (and changing) the politics, history, etc. of those settings.
The One Ring in this case would represent 'marriage', a concept no LOTR fan is ever going to understand or experience?
:)
OK, OK, -1 Troll. Just getting into the spirit...
There are always these huge detectors along the entrances, anyway. Most bookstores tag their books, and if you limit the kind of packages that people can take in, you should be able to control theft pretty well.
:)
No taking lead boxes in?
Seriously, I was a little peeved recently when I bought an Iain M. Banks book, and some ignoramus had stuck the security tag in halfway through the book. Tags on the inside covers I can deal with, tags obscuring text I cannot.
BTW, has the comment submission code changed? Or is /. just dumping my preferences?
Used to be that newlines would automatically be converted to <br> for you...
Hey, my path was Commodore 64 -> Amiga -> Linux. But I know how many people out there worship the Big Blue Screen of Death in Redmond... :)
Besides, if people don't remember v1s, all the better reason to inflate the version numbers.
The average user? The users whose massive support makes certain projects fundable and viable? They want version 1.0. 1.0 says, "Hey, this is stable, it won't kill, maim or cause your machine to implode."
:)
To a generation raised on Microsoft products, v1.0 is a scary number. Windows 1.0? Windows NT 1.0? Internet Explorer 1.0? Way too immature for use. I think Mozilla should jump straight to 'Mozilla [current_year + 1]'. So, if they released 'v1.0' tomorrow, they should call it Mozilla 2002.After all, we gotta keep up with the Gates's...
(This message posted with Mozilla 0.9.3
I don't normally post spelling flames, but since you linked to a dictionary in your post, I couldn't resist.
pioneers
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger
:)
they also say 'do not ask elves for advice, for they will say both no, and yes'
They also say 'Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.'
However, it's unlikely that line will be in any of the LOTR movies...
Is this the new math program that Pres Bush wants to push?
:)
Q. A simulation takes 24 hours to run. A new version of the simulation runs 2x faster. How long does it run?
A. 1 hour!
No, I think they just take veeeeery long lunches. Sounds good to me!
(Besides, the sim could have taken 12 or 14 hours to run, but they weren't there at 11pm to interpret the results. That still equates to at least a 6 hour lunch... they must be running a hell of a bar tab somewhere
That was the whole point of the article :)
//e (81? 83?) had file types (creator codes too, I think.. it's been a while since I've done a catalog :)
:)
The Mac encodes the file type as a 4 character code, 'JPEG'. So it's a JPEG file. The Be OS is no better or different as far as I know, except that it was designed after the MIME standard was introduced, so it's in sync with MIME.
Hell, even Apple's ProDOS, which ran on the
any solution is imperfect, unfortunately. i quite like one implemented in Directory Opus 5 (Amiga) and, I presume, 6 (Windows) -- a configurable list of different checks that could be applied, including filename matching, contents matching, byte searching, etc. The user could define their own filetypes, and what would be done to search for them. A bugger to maintain, but powerful and flexible
(DOpus 5 and 6 function as OS shell replacements, acting as the primary GUI, so they can be considered to be in the same arena as the 'OS' there...)
Hello Gladys.
Here on Slashdot we use the Shift key. It produces UPPER CASE letters that you can start your sentences with!
And yes, I know, IHBT.
The thing that cheeses me is that the Internet is based on MIME. When I send a file "foobar" to a Windows user, and my email program tags the file as image/jpeg, the Windows email program should make the file name "foobar.jpg".
:/
But how does your email program know that it's a JPEG?
Obviously we should adopt the approach of BeOS, and use MIME-type mapping and file attributes. Oh, except for all those people out there who use the wrong MIME types (or non-standard ones, anyway).
The AmigaOS (and later BeOS) had Datatypes, an OS-level solution to the JIT file-typing problem... you could install input and output filters for any type of data you had datatypes for, and any program that supported datatypes (e.g. for images, or sounds, or text) could use these modules.
Not that any of these approaches (either these I've described or any discussed so far in the responses) are the silver bullet, just my 2c worth...
It is also fairly straightforward why they are releasing the source under the GPL and not some other license. If you have a large useable codebase that is currently proprietary you would be crazy to release it under anything but the GPL. After all, the copyright owner of a GPLed work can still release closed source proprietary packages of the code (released under a different license), however the GPL guarantees that your competitors can't scoop up your code and do the same.
:) -- but I do take issue with your contention that the GPL was the only way to go for them to prevent improper usage.)
I'm all for the GPL -- but what does it offer Caldera in this case that a proprietary license with source released to customers on similar terms (change it in-house, but no distribution allowed) wouldn't do? Competitors would still be legally prohibited from using the code, thanks to standard copyright legislation.
(I understand the other benefits of releasing under the GPL -- especially the PR aspect
What has it gots in its cachesssss...
:/
But wait a minute, I thought the one OS to rule them all was supposed to be Windows 95...