He was commenting about the legislation, not about the realities of how the legislation will be enforced/not enforced.
And the legislation/is/ important, even if most people ignore it - at some point or other it/will/ be enforced, even if only as a tool for putting some serious criminal in gaol. Just saying that a law will be ignored doesn't stop it from being potentially damaging.
Go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and find the/real/ crime statistics. Then come back and tell me what you think of the NRA's bullshit. Because that's what those statistics are - bullshit.
You say you don't know much about Australia's style of government? Then why the fuck do you feel qualified to comment on something like this?
You talk about Australia respecting it's citizen's rights? Well, how about the right to go about our daily life without dealing with a firearms murder rate like the US's? The US has a firearms homicide rate that's/15/ times as high as that in Canada, and almost that much higher than it is in Australia. Personally, I'd rather live without/that/ piece of crap than worry about some stupid idea like/your/ precious 2nd amendmant.
The US is the only place in the world where the majority seriously believe that/everyone/ has a god-given right to own machines that are specifically designed for killing. The rest of the world sees gun ownership as a priveledge, and a priveledge that carries with it heavy responsibilities. Australians are/happy/ to have laws that ban most guns. Canadians are happy to have similar laws. Likewise the population of the UK, and most of Europe.
And if you think I'm any less 'free' than you are,/you/ need to get your head out of your arse. Take a look around your wonderful home of the free, and tell me if you really/are/ as free as you'd like to think. And then come/here/, and look around for a bit, and tell me if I'm living under the thumb of an oppressive government that wants to make a puppet of me.
Yes, our government has made mistakes, and yes some of them are really bloody stupid. But so has your government. The difference is, the Australian government presides over a country where the firearms murder rate is a small fraction of what it is in the US. I'm proud of that fact, and you can go fuck yourself if you think regulating gun ownership is too high a price to pay for this.
It's normal in many parts of the world to pay for the traffic actually used - I live in Australia, where the normal charge is on the order of 5-10 cents per megabyte. That gigabyte suddenly costs on the order of $100-$200 . . .
Sure, that's not much if you're talking about a company, but I live in a residential college, and/I/ pay12c/MB for incoming traffic. A couple of hundred a month is real money for me.
And what if you have a bandwidth cap? You find yourself on some worm's hitlist, and suddenly it's gone, and you have to pay excess to stay online.
What's more, you're completely ignoring the cost to the infrastructure providers (hint:/they/ have to pay for bandwidth - ISPs do, too, they just incorporate the costs into their pricing structures). It might seem like bandwidth is essentially free, particularly if you're in the US, but it's/not/. That kind of thinking is part of why so many cheap ISPs go under.
The kind of calculation you made is really naive. Which isn't to say that the kind of stupid calculations companies and law enforcement people throw about are accurate, of course - the reality probably lies somewhere in between. But bandwidth/does/ cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Worms like SirCam are more than just minor annoyances consuming negligible capacity on the network.
That runs almost instaneously on an arbitrary sized file - I'd like to see someone with a mouse do/that/.
Saying that using a CLI is slower than using a GUI is stupid - it's not that one is better/faster than the other, it's which is better suited to the task at hand. The major difference is that the GUI requires less remembering and more recognising in order to use - this makes it easier to start with, and superior for some tasks, but it/doesn't/ make it faster in general.
I've devoted many hours over the last few years to learning to use emacs (my choice of programming environment). I can remember most of the commands I use regularly, and I can type them in without having to actively think of the commands - I just think/what/ I want to do, and let my muscle memory do the work.
You might think a modern GUI is the be all and end all of interfaces, but I'm afraid that's a very blinkered view. Personally, I'll stick to using the interface that I find best for my needs - whether that's mousing around happily in mozilla, or chording away madly in emacs.
At no point when using free software do you agree to a contract controlling your/use/ of the software. You get a chunk of code, and the right to do whatever you damn well want with it, within the bounds of copyright law. It's only when you redistribute that code that you run up against the license.
When you buy a piece of software from MS, you agree to a contract specifying what you can/do/ with that software, as well as various stuff about redistribution. That's the difference between the two cases.
He was using his example to illustrate his point, not to suggest using Linux to the guy who asked the question. What's more, he explained this to you in plain english. So please stop being a fuckwit.
Oh, and I'd advise you to either remove that Mensa link from your.sig, fix the spelling, or fix your severe lack of intelligence.
The -2 for funny moderations won't be site-wide, it'll be user specific./You/ get to choose whether or not to do it, it's not forced on you.
Go back and reread his post before you start coming up with crap like this.
Post this on their discussion list.
on
LWN in Trouble
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· Score: 2
Oh, and the security page/is/ core - it's one of the main reasons a lot of people read LWN.
himi
It's the quality that's the thing
on
LWN in Trouble
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· Score: 2
Producing LWN every week might not seem like much, but it's not the word count that's the problem, it's the amount of stuff that has to be filtered through to get the information in that word count.
Take their kernel page: lkml gets something on the order of 1500 posts a week. Most of that is just bug reports, people sounding off, that kind of crap. But there's a lot of serious discussion, and it's not always in the obvious places. I try and keep up with lkml on my own, and I have a bit of success - I generally know what's going on in the areas I'm interested in. Jon does a weekly report on/all/ the important stuff - he filters through all 1500 of those posts, finds the stuff that's important, relevant, interesting, and then he writes a report on it. And it's not just lots of little headlines pointing at the posts, he actually explains it all. I read quite a few of the posts Jon reports on, but I generally end up understanding it better after reading his explanations.
/That's/ the thing that's so valuable about LWN, and it's why four or five full time professionals are/needed/ to produce it. Jon could be off working somewhere writing device drivers or cutting kernel code for someone else - instead, he works full time on LWN. If he/was/ working elsewhere, he couldn't do the job he does at LWN, not as well as it should be done.
I read/. every day, but I have yet to see any regular, weekly posting of news on/. of the quality that LWN manages. Likewise for LT. In fact, the only similar quality tech news source I know of is Arstechnica, and they're in much the same boat as LWN, except that they have their article archives to bargain with. LWN is a/news/ site, so their archives are far less valuable than Ars'.
Don't underestimate the work involved in producing really good quality news. That way lies the kind of crap that most newspapers and television news services produce these days.
That's one reason they're as good as they are - they're run by skilled and experienced full-time professionals. Take that away and you lose a big chunk of their value.
I can get a lot of the stuff that LWN covers from LT,/., whatever. What I/can't/ get is the filtering that LWN does, and the perspective they give. I can (and do) read bugtraq and lkml, but I end up getting most of my important security news from LWN, and I learn more from reading LWN's kernel page than I do from reading lkml. That's what's so valuable about it.
rsync does a block by block checksum of a file, then searches another file for matching blocks, thus making it a generalisation of this idea to/any/ file. It's been around for a/long/ time - the mailing list archives go back to 1991.
rproxy applies the rsync protocol to http caching. I first heard about it at CALU in July 1999, and checked out some cvs code that worked at that time.
The general idea has been floating around for ages, though - look on the rproxy site for links to other people's ideas about this kind of thing.
This/is/ yet another case of a really dumb patent.
Disclaimer: I'm from Australia, and I'm seriously pro gun control. Make of that what you will.
I'd like to see some statistics showing that the "crime rate shot through the roof" after gun control laws were tightened considerably here. Until then, I'm going to continue to ignore anyone who uses that as an argument in favour of resisting gun control.
But before I wander off to ignore you completely, I'll point you at an interesting little piece of data: the rates of death due to firearms in various countries show a strong correlation between the strength of gun control laws in a country. The UK, for example, has some of the strongest gun control laws around, and they also have one of the lowest rates of death from firearms. Australia (prior to the Port Arthur massacre that prompted the strengthening of gun control laws) had significantly weaker laws than the UK, and had, suprisingly enough, a higher rate of firearms deaths. As far as I know (I can't say for certain, because I haven't seen any hard statistics) since the laws were tightened here, we've seen less firearms related deaths. The same correlation is seen throughout Europe, and in Canada.
And take a little guess at which country has the _highest_ rates of firearms related deaths? Yup, it's the good ol' U.S of A . . .
Personally, I don't really care if you think gun ownership is a right: I _know_ that I have a right to _not_ be at risk of getting shot, and that's what gun control laws are aimed at. I don't want to have to own a gun to stop people from shooting me.
One of the things that a lot of people fail to realise about the whole "X Sucks" thing is that there's just no practical way to get rid of it. There are alternatives (Berlin, for example), but none of them are good enough at present to compete, and ultimately they're all trapped by the enormous amount of legacy code - people _have_ to be able to run their old X apps, simply because there aren't any alternatives.
This reminds me of a piece of wisdom that Hannibal of Arstechnica produced when discussing the future of the x86 ISA: What was once part of the solution to a set of problems has become a part of the problem space that any new solutions have to work in. Dealing with X's legacy is something that any new solutions have to handle, in the same way that any serious alternative to x86 has to enable people to use their legacy x86 apps. We _can't_ just start from scratch, unless we do something like what Apple has done (which isn't possible for something as uncoordinated as the free software world) - we have to work with what we've got.
As for the various problems of X, I think a large part of them are due to the implementations, particularly in the design of extensions. Good implementations make a vast difference to how X behaves - I'm using XFree86 4.0.1b with DRI at the moment, and it's incredibly fast compared to 3.3.6. It also handles modelines infinitely better - I don't have to hand-hack modelines to get reasonable performance out of my monitor now. It's just all round better, but not because of any underlying changes to X (aside from DRI for 3D stuff), merely because of a better, cleaner implementation.
Fixing X isn't a matter of throwing it away and starting from scratch anymore: you've got to make the thing work properly within the bounds of the system itself. Nothing else will work in the real world.
Assuming this is true, it makes you wonder what the hell they think they're doing with their chips. A heatsink that's too big to fit in current standard cases? Sounds like a standard overclocker's nightmare . . . and kinda suggests that's what Intel's doing . . .
The scariest thing is that these P4 chips aren't going to be any faster, clock for clock, than Athlons (again, assuming that articles I've seen around are reasonably reliable). Why can't Intel manage to come up with something like that? Why do they have to keep on using a brute force solution (More clock speed! And damn the torpedoes(sp?)) to something that AMD seems to have found a relatively elegant solution to?
Argh . . . Just one more reason to lose respect for those suckas . . .
Unfortunately, I think it might have become illegal recently. We've passed our own version of that damned DMCA thing recently, so you might be helping me out on my way to gaol . . .
The two marketplace triumphs of open source, after all, are derivative rather than truly innovative.
A classic piece of FUD the author unfortunately hasn't managed to avoid. The standard reply would be to point to sendmail, for example.
My guess is that percentage-wise, free and non-free software have about the same amounts of truly innovative stuff.
Actually, I suspect that percentage wise free software is way out in front . . . In part because innovation in the free software world gets built on very quickly, and also because I think the people working on free software are rather more often the `lone genius' types that _are_ truly innovative.
Also, I think it's easier to be innovative in the free software world than in the proprietary world - you're scratching an itch, rather than trying to appeal to people, and if you've got an innovative itch you'll probably come up with an innovative solution . . .
I think BSD is a good example of that: the BSD hackers were scratching their various operating system itches, and came up with something really innovative and amazing. Apache is also a good example - it may have originally been drived from the NCSA webserver, but it's evolved into something vastly different, and vastly more powerful than the NCSA developers would have dreamed of.
And the way that people like to point at Linux and say "It's just another Unix" is pretty damned silly - Linux _is_ just another Unix, but it's also a platform for doing all sorts of wierd and wonderful things . . . If you want to work on something innovative and different in operating systems these days, you're almost certainly going to start hacking on the Linux kernel, because it's already there, and lets you work on what you want to work on, rather than having to write a whole OS before getting to the interesting stuff . . . So Linus' tree isn't the place to look for the Linux innovation - in fact, you probably won't even see the innovation until it hits you over the head from behind . . .
Hmmmm . . . I think I've over used `innovation' here . . .;-)
This is one of the few articles I've seen in the `mainstream press' that actually covers almost the whole gamut of the open source movement and it's effects. It's well researched, and well balanced. It even manages to put mozilla in the light it deserves - a project that started slowly, made mistakes, learnt from them, and is now going strongly (I'm posting this from a three-day old nightly - it's very nice).
One or two things that I found rather interesting: The quote from Jim Gray at MS - he views open source as a "challenge" . . . I may be over-analysing a throwaway line, but that sound like MS looking at open source as a challenge to their position (which it is), rather than as a potential opportunity for them and the rest of the industry (which it also is).
Also, the comment from Brian Behlendorf: 5e+6 software engineers, maybe 5e+4 working on open source projects. Those numbers sound pretty reasonable - I mean, there are something like 20,000 people on lkml, supposedly, and I'd bet that list would include a fair portion of OS developers.
And by an odd coincidence, the top percentile of programmers are supposedly something like an order of magnitude or two more productive/effective than the remainder . . .
I suspect that the OS world overlaps far more than statistics would suggest with that top percentile, and that a fair portion of it's success has been due to that.
How's this for an idea? Rather than try and get more and more people working on OS projects, we aim more for getting the OS methodology accepted, and possibly even taught, so that rather than going into proprietary software houses, any new top-percentile programmers go straight int OS . . .
That might sound elitist, but I think it's fairly reasonable - there really is that kind of productivity difference, so we might as well try and make the most of it . . .
This would be unbelievable if we hadn't already seen just how mindless the MPAA and CCA have been in the past.
I just skimmed the brief, and it could probably be considered defamation on the FSF, lots of people like Linus, ESR, various people like Bob Young, even Tim O'Reilly . . . Basically, it accuses anyone who claims to be involved with the `open source' movement of supporting theft of intellectual property. This might be my non-legal mind misunderstanding what they were saying, but it's pretty damned blatant, as far as I'm concerned.
I really think some high profile people should sue the MPAA over this particular piece of fiction. It's incredibly insulting.
On another note, if they really do think this about the open source world, it would explain why they're being so paranoid about us - they seem to think we really are out to get them, however we can.
Personally I'm not, and I don't think you could say that this particular group of people really agrees on anything enough to say that we're out to get someone . . .
In any case, this is an incredibly dumb document, put out by a group that, it is becoming increasingly clear, is completely disconnected from anythin that remotely resembles the real world. I think the MPAA should be taken out the back and shot (metaphorically speaking, of course . . .;-) They're becoming more dangerous than useful, IMHO.
himi --
Unix _isn't_ an operating system . . .
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 5
But not for any of the rather dumb reasons suggested in the article . . .
Unix isn't a single piece of software, or single set of software components - it's a culture, and an ideology. That's why there are so many different versions of Unix - because it _isn't_ a single chunk of code, anyone who wants to can reimpliment their own version, and do things a little differently, or whatever.
Linux is part of the Unix culture. FreeBSD is part of the Unix culture. Solaris is part of the Unix culture. Irix, HP-UX, AIX, even A/UX, they're all part of this culture.
So yes, Unix isn't an Operating System. Any particular instantiaion of the Unix Ideal _is_ an operating system, even in the rather pointless sense that's used by this article, but that instantiation _is not Unix_ - it's merely one possible version.
And I'd hate to say it, but I suspect that Apple will become part of the Unix culture, too - Unix seems to be rather . . . contagious . . . Once you know it, once you become acculturated(sp?), it tends to subsume just about everything else . . .
Unless I downgrade from the 2.3 kernel I'm using at the moment, I can't use these drivers, because they don't support 2.3. That stinks. That's why people are pissed off. That's why I plan on buying _anything_ but nvidia in the future.
Yes, the fact that they've released drivers is good, but you have to understand that Linux isn't just another operating system, that you can release binary drivers for and have them work - it's not like windows in this sense. There is no ABI for Linux, so there's no way that you can write a driver that will be guaranteed to work on more than one version of the kernel. It could easily break between minor versions (even of the stable kernel), and there's no way that it would work between major revisions. Now, if they'd released source for the kernel module at least, then that problem would go away, because people who wanted to use their nvidia cards under 2.3 would port the driver themselves, but with binary only, that can't happen.
It's pretty much the same with the X side of things, though the X developers go to more trouble to maintain binary compatibility. But even with that, there's a very good chance that things will fail at some point, and people will have to wait on nvidia for fixes. That's not good enough, not for an open source world.
And the final nail in the coffin of these drivers is the fact that they're ia32 only - there are a lot of PowerPC users out there, and the numbers are growing. They can't use these drivers, and they probably have absolutely no chance of getting working drivers for their platform. Again, if this was a source release, the problem would dissappear almost overnight.
Ultimately, the problem is that you can't treat Linux or any open source system the same way that you'd treat a binary-only OS. You can't treat the code the same way, because it behaves very differently, and you can't treat the users the same way, because they behave differently as well, and they expect different treatment. Nvidia might have produced some quite nice drivers for their cards here (and they do seem pretty fast, certainly compared to the original release), but they've screwed up in the long run by caring more about their paranoia than their customers. I don't know whether nvidia will lose out in the market in the long run, but I know they've lost out in the open source market because of this.
"I'm also not yet convinced that the urge to commit suicide is an indication of an illness. A man who loses everything in the stock market and slits his wrist is not insane or sick. And if someone's entire family were murdered and they suddenly felt so depressed that they were near suicide, I would be hesitant to call that a disease or sickness. The compelling need in some situations to end your grief is obviously serving some underlying human function, just like blocking bad memories."
Yes, that kind of thing isn't necessarily an indication of illness. But that _isn't_ what people mean when they talk about depression. What if I re-wrote your example so that instead of being a man who lost everything, it was a twenty year old student who had a high distinction average, good friends, loving family, and an incredibly bright future? Would that person be genuinely ill if they contemplated suicide? What about someone like Winston Churchill? Or Alan Turing? Or any of the other seriously depressed people who didn't have any reason to be depressed?
Depression is _not_ where you're low because your girlfriend left you, or where you want to end it all because your whole family got murdered. Depression is where you have those mood swings, but without any apparent cause, and where you don't recover in due course.
If you've never suffered from depression I don't think you can really understand it - it seems to me like you need to have been through it, or to be sucseptible to it to be able to grasp it's meaning. But just because _you_ can't grasp it properly doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
The biggest problem with mental illness is that it's very hard to analyse definitively. By it's very nature it's vague and extremely variable. But, if over years of analysis and many thousands of cases there are a large number of similarities, and large numbers of those cases respond similarly to treatment (particularly if it's drug treatment, and where drugs that have similar biochemical effects result in similar responses), then you can't really argue that there isn't something `real' there. If you treat someone with uni-polar depression with one type of serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and then with another that's a completely different type of drug, but with the same effects on serotonin, and the clinical results are very similar, don't you think there's most likely a link between the serotonin levels and the depression? And if the same treatment helps someone with extreme, terrible, suicidal depression and also someone with relatively minor depression, don't you think the relatively minor depression might have a similar cause to the extreme depression? And if that's the case, how can you argue that only the extreme case is genuine, while the relatively minor case is just someone trying to glorify their emotional difficulties?
Sorry for the rant - this is something that matters a lot to me, because I've gone through depression, and I know it _is_ a genuine illness. Your kind of argument is one that's used by a lot of depressed people, including myself - it took me years to accept that I had a genuine problem and to seek treatment for it. If I hadn't thought the way you do, my life might easily have been vastly different, and far less painful. And I would fit quite neatly into your classification of "non-clinical instanity" . . .
The problem with your argument is, where do you draw the line between "honestly sick" and "perceived illness"? You seem to be requiring a very high level of abnormality before you would classify someone as honestly sick, where most of the other people in this discussion are drawing the line much earlier - that's why people are seeing your coments as some form of an attack: your classification scheme would put a lot of people with serious problems into the "perceived illness" bin, where it becomes _their_ fault that they've got problems, rather than a result of a genuine illness.
As for paranoia, yes, if you have gone through depression you tend to become a little bit paranoid about this sort of thing - when just about everyone around you thinks that you're being weak and pathetic, but you actually have a real, physical illness that is causing your problems, it's natural to get defensive. "I have an illness", rather than "I'm weak willed and pathetic" - it's an important distinction, and one that you're refuting. I react badly to that, and I imagine just about anyone who has actually suffered from depression would, too.
Depression, in all it's forms, is not a normal part of life - occasional periods of sadness resulting from life experiences is, but not the ceaseless, causeless and debilitating depression that we're talking about here. You're effectively belittleling(sp?) a very serious problem - of course people won't react well.
I didn't actually download the software, so I can't say for sure, but the original article said that the cphack program simply decoded the blocklists, not the passwords. So, assuming the article was correct (and there doesn't seem much reason to disbelieve it), your assertion is incorrect . . . Which would kind of screw up the case, don't you think?
They did post some code to demonstrate the hash used for the passwords, but I don't think there was anything to crack them - of course, anyone with more than about a third of a brain could probably work out a crack themselves, if the article's analysis was good . . .
Slashdot Mirror
He was commenting about the legislation, not about the realities of how the legislation will be enforced/not enforced.
/is/ important, even if most people ignore it - at some point or other it /will/ be enforced, even if only as a tool for putting some serious criminal in gaol. Just saying that a law will be ignored doesn't stop it from being potentially damaging.
And the legislation
himi
Go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and find the /real/ crime statistics. Then come back and tell me what you think of the NRA's bullshit. Because that's what those statistics are - bullshit.
You say you don't know much about Australia's style of government? Then why the fuck do you feel qualified to comment on something like this?
You talk about Australia respecting it's citizen's rights? Well, how about the right to go about our daily life without dealing with a firearms murder rate like the US's? The US has a firearms homicide rate that's /15/ times as high as that in Canada, and almost that much higher than it is in Australia. Personally, I'd rather live without /that/ piece of crap than worry about some stupid idea like /your/ precious 2nd amendmant.
The US is the only place in the world where the majority seriously believe that /everyone/ has a god-given right to own machines that are specifically designed for killing. The rest of the world sees gun ownership as a priveledge, and a priveledge that carries with it heavy responsibilities. Australians are /happy/ to have laws that ban most guns. Canadians are happy to have similar laws. Likewise the population of the UK, and most of Europe.
And if you think I'm any less 'free' than you are, /you/ need to get your head out of your arse. Take a look around your wonderful home of the free, and tell me if you really /are/ as free as you'd like to think. And then come /here/, and look around for a bit, and tell me if I'm living under the thumb of an oppressive government that wants to make a puppet of me.
Yes, our government has made mistakes, and yes some of them are really bloody stupid. But so has your government. The difference is, the Australian government presides over a country where the firearms murder rate is a small fraction of what it is in the US. I'm proud of that fact, and you can go fuck yourself if you think regulating gun ownership is too high a price to pay for this.
himi
It's normal in many parts of the world to pay for the traffic actually used - I live in Australia, where the normal charge is on the order of 5-10 cents per megabyte. That gigabyte suddenly costs on the order of $100-$200 . . .
/I/ pay12c/MB for incoming traffic. A couple of hundred a month is real money for me.
/they/ have to pay for bandwidth - ISPs do, too, they just incorporate the costs into their pricing structures). It might seem like bandwidth is essentially free, particularly if you're in the US, but it's /not/. That kind of thinking is part of why so many cheap ISPs go under.
/does/ cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Worms like SirCam are more than just minor annoyances consuming negligible capacity on the network.
Sure, that's not much if you're talking about a company, but I live in a residential college, and
And what if you have a bandwidth cap? You find yourself on some worm's hitlist, and suddenly it's gone, and you have to pay excess to stay online.
What's more, you're completely ignoring the cost to the infrastructure providers (hint:
The kind of calculation you made is really naive. Which isn't to say that the kind of stupid calculations companies and law enforcement people throw about are accurate, of course - the reality probably lies somewhere in between. But bandwidth
himi
In vi:
/that/.
/doesn't/ make it faster in general.
/what/ I want to do, and let my muscle memory do the work.
:%s/e/|/g
:%s/|/e/g
That runs almost instaneously on an arbitrary sized file - I'd like to see someone with a mouse do
Saying that using a CLI is slower than using a GUI is stupid - it's not that one is better/faster than the other, it's which is better suited to the task at hand. The major difference is that the GUI requires less remembering and more recognising in order to use - this makes it easier to start with, and superior for some tasks, but it
I've devoted many hours over the last few years to learning to use emacs (my choice of programming environment). I can remember most of the commands I use regularly, and I can type them in without having to actively think of the commands - I just think
You might think a modern GUI is the be all and end all of interfaces, but I'm afraid that's a very blinkered view. Personally, I'll stick to using the interface that I find best for my needs - whether that's mousing around happily in mozilla, or chording away madly in emacs.
himi
At no point when using free software do you agree to a contract controlling your /use/ of the software. You get a chunk of code, and the right to do whatever you damn well want with it, within the bounds of copyright law. It's only when you redistribute that code that you run up against the license.
/do/ with that software, as well as various stuff about redistribution. That's the difference between the two cases.
When you buy a piece of software from MS, you agree to a contract specifying what you can
himi
He was using his example to illustrate his point, not to suggest using Linux to the guy who asked the question. What's more, he explained this to you in plain english. So please stop being a fuckwit.
.sig, fix the spelling, or fix your severe lack of intelligence.
Oh, and I'd advise you to either remove that Mensa link from your
himi
The -2 for funny moderations won't be site-wide, it'll be user specific. /You/ get to choose whether or not to do it, it's not forced on you.
Go back and reread his post before you start coming up with crap like this.
Oh, and the security page /is/ core - it's one of the main reasons a lot of people read LWN.
himi
Producing LWN every week might not seem like much, but it's not the word count that's the problem, it's the amount of stuff that has to be filtered through to get the information in that word count.
/all/ the important stuff - he filters through all 1500 of those posts, finds the stuff that's important, relevant, interesting, and then he writes a report on it. And it's not just lots of little headlines pointing at the posts, he actually explains it all. I read quite a few of the posts Jon reports on, but I generally end up understanding it better after reading his explanations.
/needed/ to produce it. Jon could be off working somewhere writing device drivers or cutting kernel code for someone else - instead, he works full time on LWN. If he /was/ working elsewhere, he couldn't do the job he does at LWN, not as well as it should be done.
/. every day, but I have yet to see any regular, weekly posting of news on /. of the quality that LWN manages. Likewise for LT. In fact, the only similar quality tech news source I know of is Arstechnica, and they're in much the same boat as LWN, except that they have their article archives to bargain with. LWN is a /news/ site, so their archives are far less valuable than Ars'.
Take their kernel page: lkml gets something on the order of 1500 posts a week. Most of that is just bug reports, people sounding off, that kind of crap. But there's a lot of serious discussion, and it's not always in the obvious places. I try and keep up with lkml on my own, and I have a bit of success - I generally know what's going on in the areas I'm interested in. Jon does a weekly report on
/That's/ the thing that's so valuable about LWN, and it's why four or five full time professionals are
I read
Don't underestimate the work involved in producing really good quality news. That way lies the kind of crap that most newspapers and television news services produce these days.
himi
That's one reason they're as good as they are - they're run by skilled and experienced full-time professionals. Take that away and you lose a big chunk of their value.
/., whatever. What I /can't/ get is the filtering that LWN does, and the perspective they give. I can (and do) read bugtraq and lkml, but I end up getting most of my important security news from LWN, and I learn more from reading LWN's kernel page than I do from reading lkml. That's what's so valuable about it.
I can get a lot of the stuff that LWN covers from LT,
himi
rsync does a block by block checksum of a file, then searches another file for matching blocks, thus making it a generalisation of this idea to /any/ file. It's been around for a /long/ time - the mailing list archives go back to 1991.
rproxy applies the rsync protocol to http caching. I first heard about it at CALU in July 1999, and checked out some cvs code that worked at that time.
The general idea has been floating around for ages, though - look on the rproxy site for links to other people's ideas about this kind of thing.
This /is/ yet another case of a really dumb patent.
himi
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Disclaimer: I'm from Australia, and I'm seriously pro gun control. Make of that what you will.
I'd like to see some statistics showing that the "crime rate shot through the roof" after gun control laws were tightened considerably here. Until then, I'm going to continue to ignore anyone who uses that as an argument in favour of resisting gun control.
But before I wander off to ignore you completely, I'll point you at an interesting little piece of data: the rates of death due to firearms in various countries show a strong correlation between the strength of gun control laws in a country. The UK, for example, has some of the strongest gun control laws around, and they also have one of the lowest rates of death from firearms. Australia (prior to the Port Arthur massacre that prompted the strengthening of gun control laws) had significantly weaker laws than the UK, and had, suprisingly enough, a higher rate of firearms deaths. As far as I know (I can't say for certain, because I haven't seen any hard statistics) since the laws were tightened here, we've seen less firearms related deaths. The same correlation is seen throughout Europe, and in Canada.
And take a little guess at which country has the _highest_ rates of firearms related deaths? Yup, it's the good ol' U.S of A . . .
Personally, I don't really care if you think gun ownership is a right: I _know_ that I have a right to _not_ be at risk of getting shot, and that's what gun control laws are aimed at. I don't want to have to own a gun to stop people from shooting me.
himi
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One of the things that a lot of people fail to realise about the whole "X Sucks" thing is that there's just no practical way to get rid of it. There are alternatives (Berlin, for example), but none of them are good enough at present to compete, and ultimately they're all trapped by the enormous amount of legacy code - people _have_ to be able to run their old X apps, simply because there aren't any alternatives.
This reminds me of a piece of wisdom that Hannibal of Arstechnica produced when discussing the future of the x86 ISA: What was once part of the solution to a set of problems has become a part of the problem space that any new solutions have to work in. Dealing with X's legacy is something that any new solutions have to handle, in the same way that any serious alternative to x86 has to enable people to use their legacy x86 apps. We _can't_ just start from scratch, unless we do something like what Apple has done (which isn't possible for something as uncoordinated as the free software world) - we have to work with what we've got.
As for the various problems of X, I think a large part of them are due to the implementations, particularly in the design of extensions. Good implementations make a vast difference to how X behaves - I'm using XFree86 4.0.1b with DRI at the moment, and it's incredibly fast compared to 3.3.6. It also handles modelines infinitely better - I don't have to hand-hack modelines to get reasonable performance out of my monitor now. It's just all round better, but not because of any underlying changes to X (aside from DRI for 3D stuff), merely because of a better, cleaner implementation.
Fixing X isn't a matter of throwing it away and starting from scratch anymore: you've got to make the thing work properly within the bounds of the system itself. Nothing else will work in the real world.
himi
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Assuming this is true, it makes you wonder what the hell they think they're doing with their chips. A heatsink that's too big to fit in current standard cases? Sounds like a standard overclocker's nightmare . . . and kinda suggests that's what Intel's doing . . .
The scariest thing is that these P4 chips aren't going to be any faster, clock for clock, than Athlons (again, assuming that articles I've seen around are reasonably reliable). Why can't Intel manage to come up with something like that? Why do they have to keep on using a brute force solution (More clock speed! And damn the torpedoes(sp?)) to something that AMD seems to have found a relatively elegant solution to?
Argh . . . Just one more reason to lose respect for those suckas . . .
himi
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Sigh . . .
Unfortunately, I think it might have become illegal recently. We've passed our own version of that damned DMCA thing recently, so you might be helping me out on my way to gaol . . .
himi
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Actually, I suspect that percentage wise free software is way out in front . . . In part because innovation in the free software world gets built on very quickly, and also because I think the people working on free software are rather more often the `lone genius' types that _are_ truly innovative.
Also, I think it's easier to be innovative in the free software world than in the proprietary world - you're scratching an itch, rather than trying to appeal to people, and if you've got an innovative itch you'll probably come up with an innovative solution . . .
I think BSD is a good example of that: the BSD hackers were scratching their various operating system itches, and came up with something really innovative and amazing. Apache is also a good example - it may have originally been drived from the NCSA webserver, but it's evolved into something vastly different, and vastly more powerful than the NCSA developers would have dreamed of.
And the way that people like to point at Linux and say "It's just another Unix" is pretty damned silly - Linux _is_ just another Unix, but it's also a platform for doing all sorts of wierd and wonderful things . . . If you want to work on something innovative and different in operating systems these days, you're almost certainly going to start hacking on the Linux kernel, because it's already there, and lets you work on what you want to work on, rather than having to write a whole OS before getting to the interesting stuff . . . So Linus' tree isn't the place to look for the Linux innovation - in fact, you probably won't even see the innovation until it hits you over the head from behind . . .
Hmmmm . . . I think I've over used `innovation' here . . . ;-)
himi
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This is one of the few articles I've seen in the `mainstream press' that actually covers almost the whole gamut of the open source movement and it's effects. It's well researched, and well balanced. It even manages to put mozilla in the light it deserves - a project that started slowly, made mistakes, learnt from them, and is now going strongly (I'm posting this from a three-day old nightly - it's very nice).
One or two things that I found rather interesting: The quote from Jim Gray at MS - he views open source as a "challenge" . . . I may be over-analysing a throwaway line, but that sound like MS looking at open source as a challenge to their position (which it is), rather than as a potential opportunity for them and the rest of the industry (which it also is).
Also, the comment from Brian Behlendorf: 5e+6 software engineers, maybe 5e+4 working on open source projects. Those numbers sound pretty reasonable - I mean, there are something like 20,000 people on lkml, supposedly, and I'd bet that list would include a fair portion of OS developers.
And by an odd coincidence, the top percentile of programmers are supposedly something like an order of magnitude or two more productive/effective than the remainder . . .
I suspect that the OS world overlaps far more than statistics would suggest with that top percentile, and that a fair portion of it's success has been due to that.
How's this for an idea? Rather than try and get more and more people working on OS projects, we aim more for getting the OS methodology accepted, and possibly even taught, so that rather than going into proprietary software houses, any new top-percentile programmers go straight int OS . . .
That might sound elitist, but I think it's fairly reasonable - there really is that kind of productivity difference, so we might as well try and make the most of it . . .
himi
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This would be unbelievable if we hadn't already seen just how mindless the MPAA and CCA have been in the past.
I just skimmed the brief, and it could probably be considered defamation on the FSF, lots of people like Linus, ESR, various people like Bob Young, even Tim O'Reilly . . . Basically, it accuses anyone who claims to be involved with the `open source' movement of supporting theft of intellectual property. This might be my non-legal mind misunderstanding what they were saying, but it's pretty damned blatant, as far as I'm concerned.
I really think some high profile people should sue the MPAA over this particular piece of fiction. It's incredibly insulting.
On another note, if they really do think this about the open source world, it would explain why they're being so paranoid about us - they seem to think we really are out to get them, however we can.
Personally I'm not, and I don't think you could say that this particular group of people really agrees on anything enough to say that we're out to get someone . . .
In any case, this is an incredibly dumb document, put out by a group that, it is becoming increasingly clear, is completely disconnected from anythin that remotely resembles the real world. I think the MPAA should be taken out the back and shot (metaphorically speaking, of course . . . ;-) They're becoming more dangerous than useful, IMHO.
himi
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But not for any of the rather dumb reasons suggested in the article . . .
Unix isn't a single piece of software, or single set of software components - it's a culture, and an ideology. That's why there are so many different versions of Unix - because it _isn't_ a single chunk of code, anyone who wants to can reimpliment their own version, and do things a little differently, or whatever.
Linux is part of the Unix culture. FreeBSD is part of the Unix culture. Solaris is part of the Unix culture. Irix, HP-UX, AIX, even A/UX, they're all part of this culture.
So yes, Unix isn't an Operating System. Any particular instantiaion of the Unix Ideal _is_ an operating system, even in the rather pointless sense that's used by this article, but that instantiation _is not Unix_ - it's merely one possible version.
And I'd hate to say it, but I suspect that Apple will become part of the Unix culture, too - Unix seems to be rather . . . contagious . . . Once you know it, once you become acculturated(sp?), it tends to subsume just about everything else . . .
himi
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Unless I downgrade from the 2.3 kernel I'm using at the moment, I can't use these drivers, because they don't support 2.3. That stinks. That's why people are pissed off. That's why I plan on buying _anything_ but nvidia in the future.
:-(
Yes, the fact that they've released drivers is good, but you have to understand that Linux isn't just another operating system, that you can release binary drivers for and have them work - it's not like windows in this sense. There is no ABI for Linux, so there's no way that you can write a driver that will be guaranteed to work on more than one version of the kernel. It could easily break between minor versions (even of the stable kernel), and there's no way that it would work between major revisions. Now, if they'd released source for the kernel module at least, then that problem would go away, because people who wanted to use their nvidia cards under 2.3 would port the driver themselves, but with binary only, that can't happen.
It's pretty much the same with the X side of things, though the X developers go to more trouble to maintain binary compatibility. But even with that, there's a very good chance that things will fail at some point, and people will have to wait on nvidia for fixes. That's not good enough, not for an open source world.
And the final nail in the coffin of these drivers is the fact that they're ia32 only - there are a lot of PowerPC users out there, and the numbers are growing. They can't use these drivers, and they probably have absolutely no chance of getting working drivers for their platform. Again, if this was a source release, the problem would dissappear almost overnight.
Ultimately, the problem is that you can't treat Linux or any open source system the same way that you'd treat a binary-only OS. You can't treat the code the same way, because it behaves very differently, and you can't treat the users the same way, because they behave differently as well, and they expect different treatment. Nvidia might have produced some quite nice drivers for their cards here (and they do seem pretty fast, certainly compared to the original release), but they've screwed up in the long run by caring more about their paranoia than their customers. I don't know whether nvidia will lose out in the market in the long run, but I know they've lost out in the open source market because of this.
himi
Still pissed off . . .
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"I'm also not yet convinced that the urge to commit suicide is an indication of an illness. A man who loses everything in the stock market and slits his wrist is not insane or sick. And if someone's entire family were murdered and they suddenly felt so depressed that they were near suicide, I would be hesitant to call that a disease or sickness. The compelling need in some situations to end your grief is obviously serving some underlying human function, just like blocking bad memories."
Yes, that kind of thing isn't necessarily an indication of illness. But that _isn't_ what people mean when they talk about depression.
What if I re-wrote your example so that instead of being a man who lost everything, it was a twenty year old student who had a high distinction average, good friends, loving family, and an incredibly bright future? Would that person be genuinely ill if they contemplated suicide? What about someone like Winston Churchill? Or Alan Turing? Or any of the other seriously depressed people who didn't have any reason to be depressed?
Depression is _not_ where you're low because your girlfriend left you, or where you want to end it all because your whole family got murdered. Depression is where you have those mood swings, but without any apparent cause, and where you don't recover in due course.
If you've never suffered from depression I don't think you can really understand it - it seems to me like you need to have been through it, or to be sucseptible to it to be able to grasp it's meaning. But just because _you_ can't grasp it properly doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
The biggest problem with mental illness is that it's very hard to analyse definitively. By it's very nature it's vague and extremely variable. But, if over years of analysis and many thousands of cases there are a large number of similarities, and large numbers of those cases respond similarly to treatment (particularly if it's drug treatment, and where drugs that have similar biochemical effects result in similar responses), then you can't really argue that there isn't something `real' there. If you treat someone with uni-polar depression with one type of serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and then with another that's a completely different type of drug, but with the same effects on serotonin, and the clinical results are very similar, don't you think there's most likely a link between the serotonin levels and the depression? And if the same treatment helps someone with extreme, terrible, suicidal depression and also someone with relatively minor depression, don't you think the relatively minor depression might have a similar cause to the extreme depression? And if that's the case, how can you argue that only the extreme case is genuine, while the relatively minor case is just someone trying to glorify their emotional difficulties?
Sorry for the rant - this is something that matters a lot to me, because I've gone through depression, and I know it _is_ a genuine illness. Your kind of argument is one that's used by a lot of depressed people, including myself - it took me years to accept that I had a genuine problem and to seek treatment for it. If I hadn't thought the way you do, my life might easily have been vastly different, and far less painful. And I would fit quite neatly into your classification of "non-clinical instanity" . . .
himi
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The problem with your argument is, where do you draw the line between "honestly sick" and "perceived illness"? You seem to be requiring a very high level of abnormality before you would classify someone as honestly sick, where most of the other people in this discussion are drawing the line much earlier - that's why people are seeing your coments as some form of an attack: your classification scheme would put a lot of people with serious problems into the "perceived illness" bin, where it becomes _their_ fault that they've got problems, rather than a result of a genuine illness.
As for paranoia, yes, if you have gone through depression you tend to become a little bit paranoid about this sort of thing - when just about everyone around you thinks that you're being weak and pathetic, but you actually have a real, physical illness that is causing your problems, it's natural to get defensive. "I have an illness", rather than "I'm weak willed and pathetic" - it's an important distinction, and one that you're refuting. I react badly to that, and I imagine just about anyone who has actually suffered from depression would, too.
Depression, in all it's forms, is not a normal part of life - occasional periods of sadness resulting from life experiences is, but not the ceaseless, causeless and debilitating depression that we're talking about here. You're effectively belittleling(sp?) a very serious problem - of course people won't react well.
himi
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Please . . .
After all, he wrote the damned story . . . .
himi
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If you're not mirroring this stuff, then you damn well should be!
himi
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I didn't actually download the software, so I can't say for sure, but the original article said that the cphack program simply decoded the blocklists, not the passwords. So, assuming the article was correct (and there doesn't seem much reason to disbelieve it), your assertion is incorrect . . .
Which would kind of screw up the case, don't you think?
They did post some code to demonstrate the hash used for the passwords, but I don't think there was anything to crack them - of course, anyone with more than about a third of a brain could probably work out a crack themselves, if the article's analysis was good . . .
himi
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