Re:You really cannot do this with the current TCP/
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Geographic Screening
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my route could easily go Toronto ISP - Toronto telco hub - Chicago telco hub - Minneapolis - Winnipeg.
...which is why each hop on the traceroute would be looked up. It sees "Okay; there's a Canada->US hop" and then later on, "Okay; there's a US->Canada hop"... and so on and so on. At the end of its analysis, no matter how many borders it crosses, it will know the start and end points.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:You really cannot do this with the current TCP/
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Geographic Screening
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Incorrect. Think of it this way...
The main routers and backbones and pipes that connect one country to another are very controlled (like China's incoming connections). This allows them to block/filter net access at its weakest point -- the few incoming connections. But anyway, all one would have to do to figure out what country you're in is do a traceroute from you to them. If it gets routed through one of these well-known and well-controlled (sprint, mci, bbn, uunet, etc) routers, then you know what country the other end is in. Some of these main routers even have LOC records in their DNS, meaning the exact latitude and longitude of the machine is available to anyone. But remember; it isn't the geographic location of the client machine that concerns them; it's what country it's in... and while an exact location would be almost impossible to determine, a route to that machine is always available. Unless it was spoofed, of course.:-)
So TCP/IP isn't really the issue; DNS is.
Hey; maybe I could patent this method of... nah. I'd sooner die than become One Of THEM...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
You know, I was going to make a very interesting observation about all this, but I just realized "What's the point?" Every one of you already has his or her own opinion utterly ingrained into your very being, and nothing anyone says will change that. It's just like the Middle East; everyone whose parents belong to Religion A will always hate/make war against everyone whose parents belong(ed) to Religion B just because they are so utterly, irresolutely convinced that "We are right, They are wrong, We must kill them all" that there is no other option than to do their damndest to kill them. And why? Because they had no choice in the matter. If you're born into an Islamic family, you stay Islamic forever and pledge a blood feud against all who believe in an even slightly different view of theology. It's no different with any ideas. We are all born into the "reality" of Economics. We are all raised believing that you either go to college and get a good job so you can buy things, or you perish utterly. In the middle east, it's the very existence of religion that perpetuates its idiocy. Here, it's the very existence of money that perpetuates ITS idiocy.
Okay, screw it; I'll make the observation anyway, because I think it's a good one.
Now, yes, I know the difference between reality and fiction. I realize that Star Trek (TM) is fiction. It's a fictional idea, in fact. An idea that Paramount goes WAY out of its way to protect, so as to maximize its profits (what else does it have going for it? heh.) And therein is its hypocrisy. For on the Earth of Star Trek's 24th century, material wants do not exist. Money, as such, does not exist. There are no homeless, or poverty-stricken, or hungry people. Everyone has what they want. Why is that? Because the very *idea* that material things have some intrinsic *value* was abolished along with money... as soon as they had replication technology perfected.
Let's suppose that this afternoon, IBM or someone announces that their Replico-Matic 2000 will be available, allowing anyone and everyone to make any material object they need or want or even have a vague desire for. By this time next month, almost everyone who works at every department, grocery, computer, and manufacturing store, plant, factory, and distributor will be out of a job. But it's okay, because they no longer need money; they just replicate whatever they need. They have ceased to be slaves to the economy. It would almost be like a social evolution, wouldn't it? This would mean that if you want, for example, a 20-carat diamond ring for your fiancee, you could *download* it and have it within seconds. Want a 5-course meal to impress your parents, who are coming to visit? Download it. Need the latest CPU upgrade for your computer? Download it. So. Now that you no longer have to go slave 12 hours a day in the factory just to feed yourself and your five kids, what do you do with your time? Self-Improvement. You take up a hobby. You write that novel you always wanted to write. You practice your scales on that nice new Kurzweil K2600 synthesizer you just downloaded. And you are free. Free! Can any of you even imagine what that would feel like? Now hold on; here's where it gets interesting.
Obviously, this new technology (replication) would put a LOT of companies out of business. Therefore, it would be very bad for business. BUT, it is very very very very beneficial for humanity as a whole... therefore, when you balance out the "damage" to Big Business and the "benefits" to Humanity, which is the greater good? The greater evil? Is it worth destroying the housing construction industry if it means that everyone can have whatever housing they want? Damn right it is. The needs of the People outweigh the needs of the Elite Few Who Have Us All By The Balls. Always. Period.
So is it worth destroying the mega-conglomerates who have just about all musicians, artists, actors, and We the Consumers by the balls now that we actually have the technology to do so? What would be the benefits? Music, movies, books, ideas, all now have the potential to be freely available to everyone, enriching billions of lives. Is it better to ensure Mr. Executive will always get his cut no matter what, or is it better to enrich the minds of as many people as possible through the universal cost-free distribution of music, information, how-to's, books, movies, etc? I think we all know the answer to that. What would be the cons? Yes, a lot of people other than the artists themselves will have to get other jobs, but how is that different than any other major evolutionary step in the history of business? Talking movies put a lot of theater organ players out of work. Injection molding put a lot of hand-crafters out of work. Robotic assembly lines put a lot of factory workers out of work. And each of these "innovations" (does MS have a TM on that word yet? I forget...) was touted as "good for business" when it was introduced, to justify the laying off of everyone whose job suddenly became obsolete. Isn't it about damn time that something was done that's "good for humanity" instead???
The Internet is going to put a lot of fat-cat executive leeches out of work, too. It's just evolution.
P.S.... I salute you, Mr. Katz. You have the guts to recognize the things that are more important than profits. Keep up the good work.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Years now, YEARS, I've been using it, and every new release brings (a) no bug fixes that I can see and (b) nothing else. Every time you open a new window it allocates a few more megs of RAM, but for some reason the programmers didn't see fit to DEallocate that memory when you CLOSE the window. I've seen the netscape process take up 250 meg of memory, real and virtual, after just a few window opens and closes. It still remains to this day the only application that has managed to completely crash my system just because it sucks up ALL available memory if you let it run long enough. But it doesn't end there... oh, no...
Javascript. I know of at least one glaring nasty bug in its Javascript implementation, one that should have jumped right out at them when they were building it: the click() method for the checkbox object does NOTHING. Nothing. I mean, it doesn't even generate an error. Works perfectly in every version of netscape except Linux. Pretty suspicious, eh?
Java. Ever since about version 4.0, Java has not worked. At all. Period. All I get are two little windows that say "jit interpreter not found" and "security classes not signed" and that's it. And no, I can't count the number of times I've wiped all trace of both the JDK and netscape off my system and then reinstalled to no avail. No Java for me.
Personal Toolbar Folder. Why the HELL doesn't it have any kind of scroll function when the toolbar is wider than your screen?? This applies to ALL versions of netscape for ALL platforms, by the way. And in Windows, no matter how many links are in your PTF, it will only display a certain number of them, leaving acres of toolbar space totally blank.
Shop button. My undying thanks to Joseph O'Connor, who detailed how to get rid of that god-forsaken blight of a waste of space. (I didn't want to redefine what it did, I just wanted it out of my sky.) That button's existence just smacks of a Microsoftian abuse-of-power scam to make Netscape's own little store the one more people go to. I don't put up with that crap from M$, and I'm not going to put up with it from NS either.
Source View Frame. Jesus christ, is it bad. If you scroll around using the scrollbar arrows, or your four arrow keys, the fonts just disintegrate. I can't count the number of times I've thought a " was a ', or missed a | completely, or wondered why that comma looks like a period, or etc. The "find" function does nothing in this window either, although it (of course) works perfectly in Windows.
History "tool." No find function in this, either. For the love of God, why not?? "Yes, I would like to spend 57 minutes scrolling through miles and miles of links to find the one I want instead of just using the 'Find' feature, please; can you arrange that for me? Please?"
Address Book. I've had this destroyed on me about half the times I've "upgraded." How hard is it for them to import the old one into the "upgraded" version?
PNGs. Why, oh WHY, will Netscape display PNGs that are embedded on a page perfectly, yet you cannot set "Handled by" to "Navigator" in the preferences and thus any LINK to a PNG you click on will have to be handled by some external app like XV? WHY???
Find tool. Why is there no button on the main toolbar for "Find"? There's a "Search," but that just takes you to Netscape's own little lame-ass search engine. Why?? If I want a link to a search engine (of my choice), I'll put it in the personal toolbar.
Fonts. They suck. Enough said.
Forms. Pages with form fields do very odd things. Sometimes, at random, after clicking on one or two select boxes or text fields, one or both of these things happen: all the Xwindows meta keys just stop working, and/or when you click on a text field and start typing, nothing happens and your cursor doesn't blink. To fix either of these occurrences, you have to click on the window's title bar for a brief reprieve from it.
Tech support. There isn't any. Period. I've sent countless letters to them (with decreasing politeness) and have to date received, let me count them..... ummmm, 0 replies. Is there anybody in there??
"What's Related" button. What is it? Why is it there? It's basically just another version of the "Search" button, because the links in it all go to (something).netscape.com. Totally useless.
More about forms. Oddly enough, this bug only happens in Windows, not Linux. If you use the scrollbar to drag a window down, all form elements on that page usually just vanish completely. You have to "pageup/pagedown" real quick to get them to reappear, assuming of course that there is enough page above or below your current view to scroll enough to hide everything that vanished; otherwise you have to reload the page.
I could go on... but what's the point? They're obviously never going to fix any of this stuff; they've had years to do it and haven't. God only knows what if anything changes between versions other than adding a button or two to the toolbar and changing the version number. But there really are no alternatives, are there? Once again, the lack of choices screws the consumer. How long will we go on paying for their apathy? It's not just Netscape, it's damn near every software manufacturer. And not just M$ stuff, either. Am I the only one who's very very very disappointed with the latest Samba implementation? No longer can you set what user.group to mount a share as. No longer will it automatically reconnect a share that's timed out. Software whose version number has increased should, IMHO, be BETTER than the earlier versions, but more and more these days I'm seeing new versions that are far worse than the previous version. What gives, O great developers? Why hast thou forsaken us?? Won't somebody please think of the children???
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
The mention of Joe Firmage totally makes me not take anything you say seriously.
Any time a man can put his personal fortune (worth some 2 billion dollars) on the line to stand up for what he believes in, no matter what he believes in, in the interest of bettering mankind, whether what he believes is true or not, ya gotta respect him for it. Joe is to me an infinitely better person than Bill Gates, Ted Turner, George W. Bush Jr, William Randolph Hearst, and John D. Rockefeller all put together, because he is that rarest of humans - a very very rich man who isn't also a very very greedy man, and is willing to spend whatever it takes to bring what he believes to be the truth to the world *without asking for anything in return*... and it has nothing to do with religion. Well, the religion of science and philosophy, if you wanna get technical. He's my hero. Whether I believe as he does (which I do) doesn't matter; he gave up a hell of a lot to preach his message, and asks for nothing more than listening to him in return. And if your only knowledge of him comes from the two or three media-blitz stories about how he's a UFO hunter now, you don't have a clue as to what he's really all about. Once you find out what KIND of person he is, you know the media is (as usual) completely unfair in its portrayal of him as a UFO conspiracy nut.
And by the way; are you saying that because I say I like Joe Firmage, you cannot agree with anything else I said in that post? What if "The sun is very big and very hot" had been part of it? Would you deny that factual assertion simply because I'm, in your mind, "one of those people"? Judge my words based solely on their merit, one word at a time; pigeonholing them all because of a few of them is no more fair than me calling you an asshole because you're disagreeing with me (which I'm not).
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
What's sad about this? Is it wrong for an oil company to want to be profitable?
What's sad about it is that it typifies the attitude of just about every corporation on earth; not simply "Can I make money off of this?" but rather "How can I make the most possible money, no matter whose rights I have to step on, as long as I can legally get away with it?" Corporations have no morals. Their only motivation is greed. This leads to Microsofts and Exxons and Ted Turners. Big business, big banks, politicians, and all their combined greed is going to destroy this planet (if it hasn't already). They're so afraid of losing a little market share, power, prestige, or profit that they're willing to keep poisoning our air, water, land, and space just to keep the money rolling in. They're willing to keep selling the crappiest software ever seen by Mankind to keep the money rolling in. The money must roll; that is their only concern. This is to me unconscionable.
So what can be done? How do we save ourselves from these self-serving greedy capitalist bastards? Beats me. To have any control over them requires power; to have power requires money; and the process one must go through to get enough money to matter usually turns one into One Of Them anyway, so the point is moot. Oh, there are some exceptions, most notably Joe Firmage (my personal pick for Man Of The Millennium), but for the most part, all the rich people care about is staying rich no matter what it takes. Is there an unfortunate paragraph in the US Code that keeps you from increasing your profits 1.09% because it prohibits toxic waste dumps next to elementary schools? Just buy a lobbyist and send him to Congress and have him whine and pass out gifts and do everything possible to get that paragraph deleted from the law. Money buys power, power supports money, and both power and money corrupt absolutely.
Greed is the root of all evil, and it is a basic part of human nature... and to me, that is the saddest thing of all.
"This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
-- Chief Seattle
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Here's my opinion about all kinds of pirating, whether it be software, music, or movies. Why does pirating occur? It's because the people who can't afford to go out and buy their favorite music/movie/software can't afford to do it. And what does this mean? It means that the people who actively seek out pirated music/movies/software will never, ever, ever go out and pay for it because they can't afford it. Downloading MP3's, ASF's, etc off of IRC or a warez site is the only way these people have to get what they want. What does all this mean?
It means, boys and girls, that the music/movie/software industries would never have received any money from these poor downtrodden victims of the American Way anyway; therefore, piracy costs them almost nothing in lost revenue. If piracy didn't exist, these people would simply do without it because they'd have no other choice; there would be no difference in the monetary intake of Virgin Records, Paramount Studios, or Microsoft.
Think about it.
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Derek mentions in his letters to LinuxOne et al that telneting to www.linuxone.net resulted in a "welcome to Red Hat" type message. They've fixed that now (it claims "LinuxOne release 1.2" now) but they apparently don't even know how to hack the Apache code so that it too doesn't claim "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)". Try it yourself...
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
.....who's springing for the champagne? "All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
...just how long it will be before all these idiotic high school kids stop picking on people who are different just because they're different because they realize that any one of their victims could at any time bring a gun to school and start blowing people's heads off in retaliation... I mean, what the hell has happened to the self-preservation instinct? The two Littleton boys apparently talked about guns, bombs, etc for a very long time -- it was one of the reasons they got picked on -- but in this day & age, picking on someone like that is almost guaranteed to get you killed. Picker picks on pickee; pickee gets pissed; pickee has one or no friends; pickee has other problems (abusive parents, etc); pickee sees nothing to live for and no hope of ever being liked; pickee exacts his vengeance with hand guns, rifles, and pipe bombs. It's almost a form of natural selection; the meanest, nastiest people, who do the most picking-on, are the ones who get hunted down and shot. Of course, innocent non-nasty people, who've never picked on anyone before, get caught in the crossfire... but sometimes, in the pickee's mind, *everyone* is guilty and deserving of death because *nobody* has ever given them the time of day, much less stood up for them during the daily picking session. The moral of all this? It's very simple. If you want to survive your educational years, don't pick on people. I go out of my way to be as nice to everyone around me as possible... not out of fear of being filled with 38-caliber holes, but out of genuine compassion and love for my fellow humans (except Bill Gates, of course.) We're all just visiting this rock, you know... 80 years with luck, or even less... the twinkling of an eye. Life is too short to waste your time trying to find new, more exciting ways of belittling those who are different and thus pushing them over the edge of insanity into feeling that blowing away all their enemies and then themselves makes a lot of sense. Of course, barring trenchcoats and offering counseling for Doom players (does anyone still play that game anymore?:) is going to do precisely squat to alleviate this problem, but somewhere out there, there's a sad, lonely, friendless someone who is nearing the breaking point. These kids could definitely benefit from counseling, but how to find out which ones need it? Making counseling mandatory for every child in America might have some effect, but it would also piss off every child in America... and there's no way in hell insurance companies would pay for it (money is always the top priority in any and all situations, you see) so it would have to be volunteers and that means you wouldn't get the best-quality counselors and the treatment as a whole would suffer and there'd be no point so why bother trying. The ones who have the greatest chance of keeping these children from activating their self-destruct sequences are, ironically, the ones CAUSING the entire problem in the first place. It's cliques of close friends who delight in the torment of others who cause all of this; and it's them and them alone who can stop it by.. well, by just stopping it. So the next time, kiddies, that you go out of your way to be mean to people just because they're black, or gay, or in the band, or really skinny, or really fat, or always wear black trenchcoats, or have an odd accent, or just look funny, remember... you could be next. "All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Steven Pritchard, a contract HP-UX system administrator at a Peoria, Ill., manufacturer, sees a lot of interest in Linux across the organization -- especially since major vendors began to support it -- but no actual applications.
Yet.
"The demand for just Linux skills isn't all that high yet," Pritchard says. "Most of the Linux people I know don't have Linux-specific jobs."
Yet.
Those who ignore the future are doomed to regret it. Linux is the future, there's no denying it (flame all you want, but it's the truth and you all know it). The article mentions it being "barely 8 years old;" how old is Microsoft now? Twice that? Compare how far Microsoft's "advances" have been in that amount of time to how far Linux has come in half that time. Now think how far it's going to go in the future with more and more supporters and programmers hacking at it with each passing day compared to how far Windows 2000 (tm)(r)(s)(c) supporters and programmers will be able to take it in the same amount of time. Clearly, since Linux has already surpassed it in speed, reliability, stability and the ability to be almost instantaneously patched against things like bugs and security flaws (how long does it take MS to come out with a service pack for bugs they knew were there before they even released it?), it will always be ahead of MS in those areas. Combine that with the fact that it is free and runs on damn near any hardware and most everything on it is written in C, which can be ported to any other platform or OS, and that it can do most anything Solaris or Irix or AIX or HPUX or VMS can do for a slightly monumental price, there is literally no stopping it; it will eventually dominate.
Now, taking all that into consideration, does it make sense for any company or sysadmin/programmer to just ignore it now? Perhaps it doesn't have all the 3rd-party applications that Windows has... but it will. Perhaps support for a few peripheral hardware devices and interfaces doesn't exist or needs to improve... but it will. And some bright, sunny, shiny, happy day in the very near future, when Linux... or even just *nix... rules all, those of us who have believed in it all along will be so far ahead of those who have ignored it all along that they won't have a chance of learning all they need to know to <buzzword> compete </buzzword> with us. (By "us" I mean companies and individuals...)
Prognostication is the key to future success. A lot of us already know the future and are well prepared for it; a lot of people don't have the vision or imagination to see it, or are so comfortable with the status quo that change frightens them. They will be left behind. Oh, eventually they'll catch up; but for a good year or two, we'll be the hottest commodities on earth.
I for one can't wait... "All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Precisely. The site www.fud.net exists, apparently, only for the purpose of redirecting to www.microsoft.com. This happens a lot to them. People with some humorous domain name will make their entire site a redirect to Microsoft; thus, visiting fud.net is identical to visiting microsoft.com. Isn't that funny? haha? <sigh> --------------------------------------
Just out of curiosity (and since I wanted to see if any "fud.*" domains were available), I tried FUDNet. You might find the site.... amusing.... and it's too close to WUGNet to not be funny:) Oh, by the way; death to M$... heh. --------------------------------------
Sick of it all? Check out the solution...and don't forget where you heard it first; SlashDot, the most important web site in the world!:') --------------------------------------
Four months ago, when I first got my cable modem here in lovely Austin TX, I was getting transfer rates in excess of 200 KBps (that's B as in Bytes). The service was brand-new at that point. And then, everyone else got theirs. I'm lucky to get 20 KBps now, and the LAG... my god, the lag... I average about 400 ms pings to just about anywhere on the planet; it should be like 20-30 ms. You would think, as much money as Time Warner (the owner of Road Runner) has, that they could upgrade a few of their servers (even though they allied themselves with The Beast and put the entire damn thing on NT, which probably explains a great deal about why it didn't scale like they may have thought it would) and get the service back up to speed now that it's actually popular. It's almost like they said "Hey, we can trick everyone into using this thing now while it's fast, charge a buttload of money for it, make billions of dollars, and then never upgrade anything ever again, thus maximizing our profits! Woohoo!" and then threw themselves a congratulatory party in honor of the occasion. I just love bureaucracy... not...
And yet... and yet... it's twice as much as an ISP charges for those ludicrous 56K modem connections (I say ludicrous because with our present no-digital-switch-having idiotic monopolistic local phone company, you can NOT connect at any rate above 26,400 baud) and you get 20 KBps, which is better than ISDN by far at a tenth the price, and it's still better than any ISP on earth so I'm not bitching too much; I just wish Time Warner would get off its corporate butt and do something to restore it to its original glory. I mean, for months the reverse DNS didn't work at ALL for any austin.rr.com hostname; how long would it take YOU to fix that? A few hours?
The moral of the story is, do not ever believe for an instant that anything done by a corporation is done for We, the People... it's done to fatten their bank accounts and nothing more, and as long as greed is such an ingrained part of our Glorious Society and human nature, it's not about to change.</bitchmode> ----------------------------- ---------
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my route could easily go Toronto ISP - Toronto telco hub - Chicago telco hub - Minneapolis - Winnipeg.
...which is why each hop on the traceroute would be looked up. It sees "Okay; there's a Canada->US hop" and then later on, "Okay; there's a US->Canada hop"... and so on and so on. At the end of its analysis, no matter how many borders it crosses, it will know the start and end points.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Incorrect. Think of it this way...
The main routers and backbones and pipes that connect one country to another are very controlled (like China's incoming connections). This allows them to block/filter net access at its weakest point -- the few incoming connections. But anyway, all one would have to do to figure out what country you're in is do a traceroute from you to them. If it gets routed through one of these well-known and well-controlled (sprint, mci, bbn, uunet, etc) routers, then you know what country the other end is in. Some of these main routers even have LOC records in their DNS, meaning the exact latitude and longitude of the machine is available to anyone. But remember; it isn't the geographic location of the client machine that concerns them; it's what country it's in... and while an exact location would be almost impossible to determine, a route to that machine is always available. Unless it was spoofed, of course. :-)
So TCP/IP isn't really the issue; DNS is.
Hey; maybe I could patent this method of... nah. I'd sooner die than become One Of THEM...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
You know, I was going to make a very interesting observation about all this, but I just realized "What's the point?" Every one of you already has his or her own opinion utterly ingrained into your very being, and nothing anyone says will change that. It's just like the Middle East; everyone whose parents belong to Religion A will always hate/make war against everyone whose parents belong(ed) to Religion B just because they are so utterly, irresolutely convinced that "We are right, They are wrong, We must kill them all" that there is no other option than to do their damndest to kill them. And why? Because they had no choice in the matter. If you're born into an Islamic family, you stay Islamic forever and pledge a blood feud against all who believe in an even slightly different view of theology. It's no different with any ideas. We are all born into the "reality" of Economics. We are all raised believing that you either go to college and get a good job so you can buy things, or you perish utterly. In the middle east, it's the very existence of religion that perpetuates its idiocy. Here, it's the very existence of money that perpetuates ITS idiocy.
Okay, screw it; I'll make the observation anyway, because I think it's a good one.
Now, yes, I know the difference between reality and fiction. I realize that Star Trek (TM) is fiction. It's a fictional idea, in fact. An idea that Paramount goes WAY out of its way to protect, so as to maximize its profits (what else does it have going for it? heh.) And therein is its hypocrisy. For on the Earth of Star Trek's 24th century, material wants do not exist. Money, as such, does not exist. There are no homeless, or poverty-stricken, or hungry people. Everyone has what they want. Why is that? Because the very *idea* that material things have some intrinsic *value* was abolished along with money... as soon as they had replication technology perfected.
Let's suppose that this afternoon, IBM or someone announces that their Replico-Matic 2000 will be available, allowing anyone and everyone to make any material object they need or want or even have a vague desire for. By this time next month, almost everyone who works at every department, grocery, computer, and manufacturing store, plant, factory, and distributor will be out of a job. But it's okay, because they no longer need money; they just replicate whatever they need. They have ceased to be slaves to the economy. It would almost be like a social evolution, wouldn't it? This would mean that if you want, for example, a 20-carat diamond ring for your fiancee, you could *download* it and have it within seconds. Want a 5-course meal to impress your parents, who are coming to visit? Download it. Need the latest CPU upgrade for your computer? Download it. So. Now that you no longer have to go slave 12 hours a day in the factory just to feed yourself and your five kids, what do you do with your time? Self-Improvement. You take up a hobby. You write that novel you always wanted to write. You practice your scales on that nice new Kurzweil K2600 synthesizer you just downloaded. And you are free. Free! Can any of you even imagine what that would feel like? Now hold on; here's where it gets interesting.
Obviously, this new technology (replication) would put a LOT of companies out of business. Therefore, it would be very bad for business. BUT, it is very very very very beneficial for humanity as a whole... therefore, when you balance out the "damage" to Big Business and the "benefits" to Humanity, which is the greater good? The greater evil? Is it worth destroying the housing construction industry if it means that everyone can have whatever housing they want? Damn right it is. The needs of the People outweigh the needs of the Elite Few Who Have Us All By The Balls. Always. Period.
So is it worth destroying the mega-conglomerates who have just about all musicians, artists, actors, and We the Consumers by the balls now that we actually have the technology to do so? What would be the benefits? Music, movies, books, ideas, all now have the potential to be freely available to everyone, enriching billions of lives. Is it better to ensure Mr. Executive will always get his cut no matter what, or is it better to enrich the minds of as many people as possible through the universal cost-free distribution of music, information, how-to's, books, movies, etc? I think we all know the answer to that. What would be the cons? Yes, a lot of people other than the artists themselves will have to get other jobs, but how is that different than any other major evolutionary step in the history of business? Talking movies put a lot of theater organ players out of work. Injection molding put a lot of hand-crafters out of work. Robotic assembly lines put a lot of factory workers out of work. And each of these "innovations" (does MS have a TM on that word yet? I forget...) was touted as "good for business" when it was introduced, to justify the laying off of everyone whose job suddenly became obsolete. Isn't it about damn time that something was done that's "good for humanity" instead???
The Internet is going to put a lot of fat-cat executive leeches out of work, too. It's just evolution.
P.S.... I salute you, Mr. Katz. You have the guts to recognize the things that are more important than profits. Keep up the good work.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Years now, YEARS, I've been using it, and every new release brings (a) no bug fixes that I can see and (b) nothing else. Every time you open a new window it allocates a few more megs of RAM, but for some reason the programmers didn't see fit to DEallocate that memory when you CLOSE the window. I've seen the netscape process take up 250 meg of memory, real and virtual, after just a few window opens and closes. It still remains to this day the only application that has managed to completely crash my system just because it sucks up ALL available memory if you let it run long enough. But it doesn't end there... oh, no...
I could go on... but what's the point? They're obviously never going to fix any of this stuff; they've had years to do it and haven't. God only knows what if anything changes between versions other than adding a button or two to the toolbar and changing the version number. But there really are no alternatives, are there? Once again, the lack of choices screws the consumer. How long will we go on paying for their apathy? It's not just Netscape, it's damn near every software manufacturer. And not just M$ stuff, either. Am I the only one who's very very very disappointed with the latest Samba implementation? No longer can you set what user.group to mount a share as. No longer will it automatically reconnect a share that's timed out. Software whose version number has increased should, IMHO, be BETTER than the earlier versions, but more and more these days I'm seeing new versions that are far worse than the previous version. What gives, O great developers? Why hast thou forsaken us?? Won't somebody please think of the children???
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
The mention of Joe Firmage totally makes me not take anything you say seriously.
Any time a man can put his personal fortune (worth some 2 billion dollars) on the line to stand up for what he believes in, no matter what he believes in, in the interest of bettering mankind, whether what he believes is true or not, ya gotta respect him for it. Joe is to me an infinitely better person than Bill Gates, Ted Turner, George W. Bush Jr, William Randolph Hearst, and John D. Rockefeller all put together, because he is that rarest of humans - a very very rich man who isn't also a very very greedy man, and is willing to spend whatever it takes to bring what he believes to be the truth to the world *without asking for anything in return*... and it has nothing to do with religion. Well, the religion of science and philosophy, if you wanna get technical. He's my hero. Whether I believe as he does (which I do) doesn't matter; he gave up a hell of a lot to preach his message, and asks for nothing more than listening to him in return. And if your only knowledge of him comes from the two or three media-blitz stories about how he's a UFO hunter now, you don't have a clue as to what he's really all about. Once you find out what KIND of person he is, you know the media is (as usual) completely unfair in its portrayal of him as a UFO conspiracy nut.
And by the way; are you saying that because I say I like Joe Firmage, you cannot agree with anything else I said in that post? What if "The sun is very big and very hot" had been part of it? Would you deny that factual assertion simply because I'm, in your mind, "one of those people"? Judge my words based solely on their merit, one word at a time; pigeonholing them all because of a few of them is no more fair than me calling you an asshole because you're disagreeing with me (which I'm not).
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
What's sad about this? Is it wrong for an oil company to want to be profitable?
What's sad about it is that it typifies the attitude of just about every corporation on earth; not simply "Can I make money off of this?" but rather "How can I make the most possible money, no matter whose rights I have to step on, as long as I can legally get away with it?" Corporations have no morals. Their only motivation is greed. This leads to Microsofts and Exxons and Ted Turners. Big business, big banks, politicians, and all their combined greed is going to destroy this planet (if it hasn't already). They're so afraid of losing a little market share, power, prestige, or profit that they're willing to keep poisoning our air, water, land, and space just to keep the money rolling in. They're willing to keep selling the crappiest software ever seen by Mankind to keep the money rolling in. The money must roll; that is their only concern. This is to me unconscionable.
So what can be done? How do we save ourselves from these self-serving greedy capitalist bastards? Beats me. To have any control over them requires power; to have power requires money; and the process one must go through to get enough money to matter usually turns one into One Of Them anyway, so the point is moot. Oh, there are some exceptions, most notably Joe Firmage (my personal pick for Man Of The Millennium), but for the most part, all the rich people care about is staying rich no matter what it takes. Is there an unfortunate paragraph in the US Code that keeps you from increasing your profits 1.09% because it prohibits toxic waste dumps next to elementary schools? Just buy a lobbyist and send him to Congress and have him whine and pass out gifts and do everything possible to get that paragraph deleted from the law. Money buys power, power supports money, and both power and money corrupt absolutely.
Greed is the root of all evil, and it is a basic part of human nature... and to me, that is the saddest thing of all.
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Here's my opinion about all kinds of pirating, whether it be software, music, or movies. Why does pirating occur? It's because the people who can't afford to go out and buy their favorite music/movie/software can't afford to do it. And what does this mean? It means that the people who actively seek out pirated music/movies/software will never, ever, ever go out and pay for it because they can't afford it. Downloading MP3's, ASF's, etc off of IRC or a warez site is the only way these people have to get what they want. What does all this mean?
It means, boys and girls, that the music/movie/software industries would never have received any money from these poor downtrodden victims of the American Way anyway; therefore, piracy costs them almost nothing in lost revenue. If piracy didn't exist, these people would simply do without it because they'd have no other choice; there would be no difference in the monetary intake of Virgin Records, Paramount Studios, or Microsoft.
Think about it.
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Derek mentions in his letters to LinuxOne et al that telneting to www.linuxone.net resulted in a "welcome to Red Hat" type message. They've fixed that now (it claims "LinuxOne release 1.2" now) but they apparently don't even know how to hack the Apache code so that it too doesn't claim "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)".
Try it yourself...
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
.....who's springing for the champagne?
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
...just how long it will be before all these idiotic high school kids stop picking on people who are different just because they're different because they realize that any one of their victims could at any time bring a gun to school and start blowing people's heads off in retaliation... I mean, what the hell has happened to the self-preservation instinct? The two Littleton boys apparently talked about guns, bombs, etc for a very long time -- it was one of the reasons they got picked on -- but in this day & age, picking on someone like that is almost guaranteed to get you killed. Picker picks on pickee; pickee gets pissed; pickee has one or no friends; pickee has other problems (abusive parents, etc); pickee sees nothing to live for and no hope of ever being liked; pickee exacts his vengeance with hand guns, rifles, and pipe bombs. It's almost a form of natural selection; the meanest, nastiest people, who do the most picking-on, are the ones who get hunted down and shot. Of course, innocent non-nasty people, who've never picked on anyone before, get caught in the crossfire... but sometimes, in the pickee's mind, *everyone* is guilty and deserving of death because *nobody* has ever given them the time of day, much less stood up for them during the daily picking session. The moral of all this? It's very simple. If you want to survive your educational years, don't pick on people. I go out of my way to be as nice to everyone around me as possible... not out of fear of being filled with 38-caliber holes, but out of genuine compassion and love for my fellow humans (except Bill Gates, of course.) We're all just visiting this rock, you know... 80 years with luck, or even less... the twinkling of an eye. Life is too short to waste your time trying to find new, more exciting ways of belittling those who are different and thus pushing them over the edge of insanity into feeling that blowing away all their enemies and then themselves makes a lot of sense. Of course, barring trenchcoats and offering counseling for Doom players (does anyone still play that game anymore? :) is going to do precisely squat to alleviate this problem, but somewhere out there, there's a sad, lonely, friendless someone who is nearing the breaking point. These kids could definitely benefit from counseling, but how to find out which ones need it? Making counseling mandatory for every child in America might have some effect, but it would also piss off every child in America... and there's no way in hell insurance companies would pay for it (money is always the top priority in any and all situations, you see) so it would have to be volunteers and that means you wouldn't get the best-quality counselors and the treatment as a whole would suffer and there'd be no point so why bother trying. The ones who have the greatest chance of keeping these children from activating their self-destruct sequences are, ironically, the ones CAUSING the entire problem in the first place. It's cliques of close friends who delight in the torment of others who cause all of this; and it's them and them alone who can stop it by.. well, by just stopping it. So the next time, kiddies, that you go out of your way to be mean to people just because they're black, or gay, or in the band, or really skinny, or really fat, or always wear black trenchcoats, or have an odd accent, or just look funny, remember... you could be next.
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Steven Pritchard, a contract HP-UX system administrator at a Peoria, Ill., manufacturer, sees a lot of interest in Linux across the organization -- especially since major vendors began to support it -- but no actual applications.
Yet.
"The demand for just Linux skills isn't all that high yet," Pritchard says. "Most of the Linux people I know don't have Linux-specific jobs."
Yet.
Those who ignore the future are doomed to regret it. Linux is the future, there's no denying it (flame all you want, but it's the truth and you all know it). The article mentions it being "barely 8 years old;" how old is Microsoft now? Twice that? Compare how far Microsoft's "advances" have been in that amount of time to how far Linux has come in half that time. Now think how far it's going to go in the future with more and more supporters and programmers hacking at it with each passing day compared to how far Windows 2000 (tm)(r)(s)(c) supporters and programmers will be able to take it in the same amount of time. Clearly, since Linux has already surpassed it in speed, reliability, stability and the ability to be almost instantaneously patched against things like bugs and security flaws (how long does it take MS to come out with a service pack for bugs they knew were there before they even released it?), it will always be ahead of MS in those areas. Combine that with the fact that it is free and runs on damn near any hardware and most everything on it is written in C, which can be ported to any other platform or OS, and that it can do most anything Solaris or Irix or AIX or HPUX or VMS can do for a slightly monumental price, there is literally no stopping it; it will eventually dominate.
Now, taking all that into consideration, does it make sense for any company or sysadmin/programmer to just ignore it now? Perhaps it doesn't have all the 3rd-party applications that Windows has... but it will. Perhaps support for a few peripheral hardware devices and interfaces doesn't exist or needs to improve... but it will. And some bright, sunny, shiny, happy day in the very near future, when Linux... or even just *nix... rules all, those of us who have believed in it all along will be so far ahead of those who have ignored it all along that they won't have a chance of learning all they need to know to <buzzword> compete </buzzword> with us. (By "us" I mean companies and individuals...)
Prognostication is the key to future success. A lot of us already know the future and are well prepared for it; a lot of people don't have the vision or imagination to see it, or are so comfortable with the status quo that change frightens them. They will be left behind. Oh, eventually they'll catch up; but for a good year or two, we'll be the hottest commodities on earth.
I for one can't wait...
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Precisely. The site www.fud.net exists, apparently, only for the purpose of redirecting to www.microsoft.com. This happens a lot to them. People with some humorous domain name will make their entire site a redirect to Microsoft; thus, visiting fud.net is identical to visiting microsoft.com. Isn't that funny? haha? <sigh>
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Just out of curiosity (and since I wanted to see if any "fud.*" domains were available), I tried FUDNet. You might find the site.... amusing.... and it's too close to WUGNet to not be funny :) Oh, by the way; death to M$... heh.
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Sick of it all? Check out the solution ...and don't forget where you heard it first; SlashDot, the most important web site in the world! :')
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And yet... and yet... it's twice as much as an ISP charges for those ludicrous 56K modem connections (I say ludicrous because with our present no-digital-switch-having idiotic monopolistic local phone company, you can NOT connect at any rate above 26,400 baud) and you get 20 KBps, which is better than ISDN by far at a tenth the price, and it's still better than any ISP on earth so I'm not bitching too much; I just wish Time Warner would get off its corporate butt and do something to restore it to its original glory. I mean, for months the reverse DNS didn't work at ALL for any austin.rr.com hostname; how long would it take YOU to fix that? A few hours?
The moral of the story is, do not ever believe for an instant that anything done by a corporation is done for We, the People... it's done to fatten their bank accounts and nothing more, and as long as greed is such an ingrained part of our Glorious Society and human nature, it's not about to change.</bitchmode>- ---------
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