Welcome to the largest and most financially powerful religious cult in the US. You think the Scientologists are kooky? Or the Southern Baptists? Well you haven't seen nothin' till you spend some time around devout mormons.
I hate to say it, but I saw this coming a long time ago. The really sad thing is that it is all for nothing. No one has ever been able to convince me that obscene material hurts anyone. People are so afraid that their kid is going to see some woman's tit or two people having sex that they are ready to try and nullify our rights. What is up with that? Where does the idea come from that seeing pictures of sex or reading about sex hurts young people? I saw plenty of these things growing up. It hasn't warped me or led me to have sex with chickens. I also read many of the self-help style sex books such as the joy of sex. If anything all this led me to have a very healthy, respectful, and realistic, attitude towards sex. Most people seem to be very uncomfortable about it, or at least somewhat so. I'm not. It's not the big issue to me that it is to some. I think that deep down that is the reason for all these attempts at censorship. People don't actually believe that seeing sex is going to hurt their kids, they are more worried that it will interfere with their careful attempts to implant the common neuroses most people have about sex. A kid who is familiar with sex isn't going to believe it is evil, or dirty, or what have you, quite so easily. It is amazing to me that knowledge of sexual matters is considered such a dangerous thing for the young to possess. Our society is pretty damned whacked out over this stuff if you ask me. I hope that the internet will change that. I'd love to see a day when our society's obsessive-compulsive relationship with sex has faded away. When erotic material is viewed the same way that action or mystery novels are viewed today. Where kids don't grow up in a world where sex is kept mysterious, but where it is seen as ordinary.
Library filters are a waste of time because the things they are meant to keep out are not dangerous enough to bother. Of course there are things like goat porn out there that are truly disturbing, but then so are things like murder or rape. Everyone is going to encounter these things to some degree, and doing so doesn't warp anyone. If someone has their wires crossed it may be something they are interested in, but for 99% of the population it won't do anything but make them want to hit the back button. Seeing it isn't going to make anyone's wires get crossed either.
I have a hard time putting all this down in words. Our society has trained us from the time we were children to want to hide certain types of material from children. That would be fine if the material itself were truly harmful. But the fact is, it isn't. Even the truly perverse stuff isn't damaging, especially when someone enough information and understanding of the issue to judge it by
So filtering software is a lose-lose proposition. The rights of everyone get damaged, and the software doesn't even keep out the material it is meant to, which isn't hurting anyone to begin with.
But unfortunately the more religious minded in our culture can't see it that way. Don't bother trying to reason with them, it isn't their strong suit.
Censorship is tyrrany. It is when those with an agenda attempt to silence differing viewpoints.
Freedom of speech means nothing without the freedom to think for oneself. The most effective means of mind control is information control. To control what information a person has access to is to control what ideas they are able to consider and thus what they believe. A person so controlled may still have freedom of speech, but does that really mean anything when their very mind is not free?
Many people believe we live in a democracy, well we don't. Public policy isn't defined by the will of the majority. It is defined by the will of those who make the most noise. Small vocal groups with an agenda are often able to dictate public policy. This case is just another example of that. Obscenity is really just an excuse to control what information the people have access too. They don't want any ideas they don't agree with available for anyone to learn and think about. All one has to do is look at some of the web pages which are censored to see that. Sure, porn sites are censored, but so are sites which discuss things like human evolution or the civil rights of homosexuals.
A few hundred years ago in western europe there was a thing called the Inquisition. The catholic church controlled people's access to information and when someone had ideas which didn't jive with what they were pushing, the inquisition was called in. Now here in America we have loose cult of people usually described as christian fundamentalists. Their influence far exceeds their numbers. They have political power because they tend to all vote the same way on any given issue.
To me they are all a bunch of idiots too stupid or too afraid to look and think for themselves. Instead they believe what they are told to, no matter how ludicrous and contradictory it may be. How else do you explain they fact that they believe life began in a garden 6000 odd years ago when overwhelming evidence shows that it has existed on earth for billions of years. Are these the people you want controlling the information you have access to?
One of our founding fathers once said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. He was right. Unless each of us stands fast against censorship and other attacks on our rights, we will one day find that we have no freedom left. A life in the abscence of liberty is not worth living.
Obscenity is a made up idea. When images or words or ideas offend enough people, or the people who are in power, such things are labeled obscene. They don't have to be sexual in nature to be so labeled. Political and philosophical ideas are attacked as being obscene just as often.
The only reliable form of mind control is information control. Control someone's access to information and you control the things they are able to think about.
The single most fundamental freedom that anyone has is the freedom to think for themself. Speech is only as free as the mind behind the words. Censorship is an attack on this freedom. It is an attempt at enslaving the mind of another. I could go on and describe in lurid terms just how evil this practice is, but you get the idea.
I've read both articles which he was supposedly viciously flamed for, and I have a hard time finding anything to flame him for.
Not that I agree with everything he said, I think the idea of porting AOL to linux is just plain wrong. AOL is... *shudders* horrid and dumbs people down while locking them into a sub-standard product. But just because I don't agree with him doesn't mean I attack him and try to get him fired from his job. When we attack those whose ideas we don't like in such a way as to prevent them from expressing those ideas, we damage our own freedom of expression. Free speech isn't just something that got put into the constitution because the founders liked the way it sounded. When all ideas are freely expressed in an open forum, the best ones will tend to rise to the top. When ideas are suppressed, bad things happen. Mobs tend to be created when extremists have silenced the moderates.
I've been a Linux user since 1995 and over the years I've become increasingly disillusioned with the Sacred Brotherhood of the Penguin. You know the guys I'm talking about, the ones who speak of Linux in religious terms or at least in such a way that there are religious undertones to what they are saying. This is quite frankly pathetic and a detriment. Linux is an operating system. It is an excellent operating system. But it is not perfect and it is not better than any and all other operating systems in every way. Open source programs and products often tend to be better than ones developed commercially. They are not always like that however. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a fool or a zealot, but I repeat myself.
When people become zealots, the lose their perspective on things. They are out of touch with the way things really are, and as such are not in any position to change things to how they want them to be. If you love Linux the way I do, the best thing to do is see it for what it is and where it is, and try to do what you can to get it to where it can be. That doesn't include attacking someone whose views don't jive with yours. Prove them wrong if you can, but don't launch ad hominem attacks, it just makes you look childish and does nothing to promote or validate your point of view with anyone.
This may not make sense to everyone. Some people just like to flame others because it gives them some kind of psychological pay off. These types are more of a threat to us than Microsoft will ever be. They discourage others from being interested in or in favor of linux. If some person from Group X with agenda Y cussed you out, you'd be less likely to favor either the group or what they stood for. Now imagine if 50 of these people cussed you out, you'd start to think that they were all a bunch of (insert favorite insult here) and who were up to no good. It is like this with anything. Some of our enemies are well known to us. Some are not. Not everyone is our enemy, but flaming someone with personal attacks is a fine way to make them our enemy.
This is exactly what happened to this guy. I'm suprised that he is responding in such a reasonable manner. It is probably because he's older than 90% of the people who come here and knows a little something about being tactful, something some of us it would seem need to learn.
It's firmware/microcode. Making it open source wouldn't benefit anyone. Transmeta makes processors, which are naturally proprietary since they are hardware. They are compatible with the x86 instruction set which is an open standard. How they acheive this compatibility is not important as long as they are successful in doing so. The changes and improvements that Transmeta has made to linux are all open source. Why? Because linux is software that transmeta wants to run on their chips. They want to sell chips and linux helps them do that. Making their microcode open source doesn't help them do that and it doesn't help anyone else either. I hate zealots, especially ones who try to apply a generally good idea to an extreme case where it doesn't fit or isn't relevant. Ragging on Linus because he works for a company that doesn't release its firmware as open source is pretty brain dead. Open source is an idea for smart people, and a religion for the stupid. Which are you?
The open source model is not the only viable model. There is nothing wrong with a company creating software using the closed source model.
The open source model works best for things like Operating systems or development tools or libraries. It doesn't work so well when the people who the product is targeted to are not the ones doing the development.
This is why the only open source end user application that performs on par with commercial offerings is Gimp. It is the only one. In any other catagory the open source products are either perpetually in development, or substandard.
Perhaps in the furure this will not be so true, but for now it is.
Also, bashing a company because they aren't willing to make their code open isn't right. This is something they worked hard on and they can do whatever the hell they want to with it.
The source code to a program isn't community property unless the person or company which created it makes it so. Opening the source may improve the quality of the product, but what happens if the company which originally wrote the program finds themselves unable to make any money anymore? Technical improvements to a program's functionality and the elimination of bugs are not the only concerns.
I'm sure I'll be moderated down by the zealots here who are too young to understand things like car payments and morgages. But that is ok, they will learn soon enough and along the way they will realize that there is no one answer to everything and that includes software development.
If I remember correctly Metcalf claimed that the internet was a fad a few years back and that it wouldn't last. He's said other dimwitted things in the past as well. I don't know how he gets anyone to pay him to write columns at all.
His claim to fame is that he was the principle creator of ethernet back when he was at Xerox PARC and later went on to found 3com.
Being a good engineer doesn't mean you understand the social or economic ends of this industry. The fact that he doesn't seem to understand the role that the Crusoe's software layer plays makes me wonder if he's even much of an engineer. This software layer isn't the kind of code that would even benefit from being open source. Saying it should be open source is about as intelligent as saying that Maxtor should make the firmware on their hard drives open source or that that AMD should release the schematics and masks to the K7. None of these things would be useful to anyone creating open source software and their being properietary does not threaten the open source status of linux or other software packages.
His entire article is poorly disguised mudslinging. I also hear a distinct whine when I read it. What gives here?
And of course the crusoe runs windows, its x86 compatible. If Metcalfe doesn't understand what that means then maybe I should have his job.
I think spam is the main problem
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Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 1
Many newsgroups are choked with spam. Maybe five to ten percent are actual real posts from real people, the rest are all bullshit. This is the reason why usenet is dying, spam from lame XXX pay sites and "Do you want to retire this year?" type scams. It really makes me upset every time I think about this. Surely the founding fathers didn't intend free speech to include talking so much and so loudly that no one else can hear or say anything. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it without running the risk of restricting speech that is supposed to be protected. Being a libertarian suck sometimes, if I weren't I'd be able to rabidly attack free speech with no thought as to the consequences, oh well...
There's nothing stopping you from creating programs for linux and releasing them under the BSD license. XFree uses the BSD license and just about everyone with a linux desktop uses that.
The license is really a moot point except when it comes to things like device drivers. You can port apps written for either to the other and you don't have to change the license to do so.
There are some people out there for whom the license is a religious issue. But to most level headed people the differences between the BSD and GPL licenses just aren't important, let alone significant enough to actually get upset and start complaining to anyone who will listen.
Well now that depends on the user. There are plenty of conventional dos/windows users who never pay for software either.
It's the personality of the user that matters, not the operating system they use.
Right now most linux users are hackers (!=cracker) and as such are less likely to pay for software. But as linux evolves and begins to penetrate the clueless market more that will change. In the end software for linux will be pirated about as often as windows and mac software is now. Software companies seem to be able to make plenty of money in those markets, so I think they'll do just fine.
"I'll accept that you truthfully didn't have a problem with it with your particular apps. And I should say that it's not all bad; it does have some good concepts and a lot of the design is correct. The problem is that they either a) didn't go far enough to make a feature useful, or b) screwed up the implementation of the feature."
Please don't make the assumption that Linux users constitute the majority of unix users out there. Linux is popular among hobbyists and those with x86 and even alpha boxes, but it is far from being the only game in town. If you've got a sun or an HP system, you're running solaris or HP-UX, not linux. Yes, I know that linux exists for suns, but is anyone using it in a commercial environment as more than an experiment at this point?
Qt and GTK may work on commercial unix variants, but they haven't been around as long as CDE/Motif and that means that the people who write the apps are going to stick with what they know and understand, rather than go with something new that may have bugs on their platform. Qt and GTK may someday replace motif, but that day isn't here yet. Intead they complement motif.
Actually neither the government, nor media should have an excessive ammount of power. Both tend to serve the interests of those who control them. Democracy is simply the form of government where as many different interests are represented as possible.
The internet is an example of the same type of idea brought to the media.
Democracy and freedom of information are a severe threat to the elites who rule china. They run the country to serve their own interests of course and more often than not this is at the expense of the population who have no power. Look up "evil" in the dictionary for more information about this.
The idea that slashdotters should pick a side suggests that everyone here should agree with each other. Sorry, but in the real world people who think for themselves rarely agree on everything. Differing opinions are a sign that slashdot is working exactly as it should.
The internet represents the most powerful tool to promote freedom of information that has ever existed. I know it is a cliche, but the truth is what sets us free. The elites in china are essentially trying to stick their fingers in a leaky dam. Sooner or later the thing is going to collapse. I think the internet represents one of our best weapons against censorship and oppression. Freedom of information leads to freedom of thought and someone who thinks for themselves can never be truly conquered because they can't be fooled. The worst you can do is kill them. The chineese people might not have the right to keep and bear arms, making them physically defenseless against tyrrany, but hopefully this new powerful force for liberty will help set them free.
Oh, are you being picked on by life? It's just not fair that some people are financially successful while others are not. Nevermind that this success usually comes about as the result of hard work and the utilization of their own talents. We have to make sure that everyone makes the same ammount of money, no matter how hard they work or how fortunate they are. Better yet, we should begin work on making sure that everyone is equally talented and able. This is one area where the human genome project will pay off. In the future no one will be smarter or stronger than anyone else. We will all be the same with the same ammount of money in our pockets and everything will just be wonderful then. Nevermind that people will have nothing to aspire to. All these aspirations don't feed the zillions of starving and underpriviliged children who have no chance whatsoever of making anything of themselves anyway because republican's won't let them. Oh, what a brave new world we will live in, I just can't wait!
I live in Arizona where I'm pursuing a degree in computer science from Arizona State. The fact that this woman thinks she has the right to come along and try to dictate to me and my fellow students essentially how to run our lives makes me see red. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If we hope to prevent people like this woman from stripping us of our freedoms, we must always fight back in any way necessary. I can't imagine who this woman is trying to please with these proposals. She certainly isn't trying to make the people they would affect, the students, happy. I only rational interpretation I can come up with for this is that its a diversionary tactic designed to draw attention away from something her party cannot get their way about otherwise, probably some funding issue. Were this woman not a state representative, people would laugh at her and she certainly wouldn't get any of her statements printed in the paper. But because she was able to sucker people into voting for her, what she says and thinks is considered newsworthy. Hopefully the voters in her district will now realize the error of their ways and remedy this situation come next election.
That's the thing about Gates, he looks like this mild mannered nerdy type when in fact he's very aggressive and confrontational, just with bad social skills. If you stand up to him, he will respect you and you may succeed at M$. If you don't, then you won't last long there.
Not all monitors are made the same. In particular the refresh rates they are capable of at various resolutions differ. Just telling your card to go to 1024x768 mode isn't enough, you've also got to specify the refresh rate. Now you might get lucky like you did with the sony and find that the rate it defaults to is one your monitor can handle. But you might also find that it won't, like in the case of your 17. Trying to run a monitor at a resolution or refresh rate it won't do is a good way to damage it. If you're not sure what refresh it is capable of, set it to 60 as all newer monitors will handle that rate at sane resolutions. Most will handle a higher refresh of 70, 75, even 85hz. Read the docs that came with the monitor or look up your model on line. Setting up X to work with your monitor isn't hard, you just have to know what you've got.
Prevent the Oklahoma Bombing with laws?
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Dumb Laws
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· Score: 1
Do you have any idea how ludicrous that sounds? Last time I checked it was illegal to blow up buildings and kill innocent women and children but that didn't stop McVeigh.
How is a law going to stop someone of evil intent who has no regard for the law?
All laws do is make and act prosecutable after the fact. They do almost nothing to prevent an evil person from committing the act to begin with. Good people don't need to have laws passed telling them they can't rob, rape or kill others. It is only the scumbags for whom these laws were created.
More laws are not the solution for crime or an increase in crime. The solution is to prosecute more consistenly on the basis of existing laws, and even that isn't a real solution, it just isn't creating a bigger problem like more laws do. Laws do little to prevent the act they prohibit and end up making life more difficult for everyone else who isn't doing anything wrong to begin with.
This page lists a law in Maricopa county Arizona that say that no more than six women may live in one house. This is a real law and it is actually enforced. The reason for it is to prevent whorehouses but all it really ends up doing is making it so that none of the sororities at ASU can have a house. Laws like this, and the fact that anyone tries to enforce them, piss me off.
Natalie Portman in addition to being talented and gorgeous, is also from Israel. Scientology isn't exactly fond of Jews even though it doesn't promote this aspect of the belief system. Truthfully they are not fond of anyone or any group that isn't tied to scientology. Anything outside of the Co$ is considered inferior or corrupt and is generally called "wog" which is a british term equivalent to "nigger."
As an ex-scientologist news like this just makes me laugh with joy. Scientology is an evil cult whose goal is to take over the world and imprison or kill anyone who doesn't agree with them. Anyone who has spent any time in it can tell you that. Just look up the Fair Game PL. Scientology claims to be a religion but in fact the religious trappings it puts on are for PR and legal protection. It's no more a religion than Amway is. It's true nature is more like the Nazi party of the 1930's. If anyone could recognize this, its the Germans.
Many scientologists as individuals are decent honest people. Its unfortunate that they have made such a poor choice in remaining in the "church." I could go on all day long about them, but many others have already covered it and more eloquently than I could.
What is the difference between Scientology and Microsoft? One is an evil cult bent on world domination and the other was begun by L. Ron Hubbard.
Obviously Microsoft is the one who is behind all this. They have their programmers and developers sit down and come up with a benchmark spec that they believe they can tweak NT into performing well on. At the same time they try to find areas where Linux is not as strong. After a few months of coding we get service packs for NT and mindcraft conducts its "independent" study. Of course NT comes out ahead, big suprise.
It's the same kind of thing that Apple does when it compares the toys they sell with PC's. What I really like are the photoshop benchmarks where the Mac is so far ahead. What they don't ever bother to tell you is that apple long ago made changes to their OS and put in system calls specifically for Adobe Photoshop. Then there are the straight CPU benchmarks where they take the few instructions from the powerpc that are significantly faster than an equivalent on x86 and say that the processor is faster overall by this factor. Some powerpc instructions are slower, but then they never tell you that. It's the same thing here. Rather than get bent out of shape we should spend our time doing an honest analysis of both platforms and outcoding the sons of bitches.
We've got a K6-233 setup with NT server and a 386-40 setup with linux as an internet gateway. I chose NT for the server mainly because linux doesn't have any support for netbeui. With NT I can turn off netbios over tcp/ip and use netbeui for the local file sharing. This way if someone were ever to actually break into our gateway from the outside, they wouldn't be able to get to any of our business information. Also one of the programs we use is dos based and has a server component. I don't have the time to play around with trying to get dosemu to run stably with networking support just for the thrill of running linux on the server. NT works and does what we need it to without any real drawbacks. Unlike many of my friends I'm not a linux or open source zealot. I prefer linux over any other operating system, but I'm not foolish enough to think its the best in every way and in ever situation. If it were NT wouldn't even be on the map. I can't comment on whether NT is faster on our fileserver than linux would be, but I can say with certainty that linux is faster on the 386-40 than NT would be, especially since its running off 8 megs of ram. Not exactly a supercomputer but it does its job of ip masquerading fast enough to deal with our 56k connection in real time which is all you can ask of any computer doing that job.
I like NT to tell the truth. As a simple fileserver it does a good job in my experience. But it has flaws in its stability and security. I wouldn't use it someplace where you had to really rely on it. I'd use something else, maybe linux, maybe not. I would of course depend on the task and which tool was the best solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the largest and most financially powerful religious cult in the US. You think the Scientologists are kooky? Or the Southern Baptists? Well you haven't seen nothin' till you spend some time around devout mormons.
I hate to say it, but I saw this coming a long time ago. The really sad thing is that it is all for nothing. No one has ever been able to convince me that obscene material hurts anyone. People are so afraid that their kid is going to see some woman's tit or two people having sex that they are ready to try and nullify our rights. What is up with that? Where does the idea come from that seeing pictures of sex or reading about sex hurts young people? I saw plenty of these things growing up. It hasn't warped me or led me to have sex with chickens. I also read many of the self-help style sex books such as the joy of sex. If anything all this led me to have a very healthy, respectful, and realistic, attitude towards sex. Most people seem to be very uncomfortable about it, or at least somewhat so. I'm not. It's not the big issue to me that it is to some. I think that deep down that is the reason for all these attempts at censorship. People don't actually believe that seeing sex is going to hurt their kids, they are more worried that it will interfere with their careful attempts to implant the common neuroses most people have about sex. A kid who is familiar with sex isn't going to believe it is evil, or dirty, or what have you, quite so easily. It is amazing to me that knowledge of sexual matters is considered such a dangerous thing for the young to possess. Our society is pretty damned whacked out over this stuff if you ask me. I hope that the internet will change that. I'd love to see a day when our society's obsessive-compulsive relationship with sex has faded away. When erotic material is viewed the same way that action or mystery novels are viewed today. Where kids don't grow up in a world where sex is kept mysterious, but where it is seen as ordinary.
Library filters are a waste of time because the things they are meant to keep out are not dangerous enough to bother. Of course there are things like goat porn out there that are truly disturbing, but then so are things like murder or rape. Everyone is going to encounter these things to some degree, and doing so doesn't warp anyone. If someone has their wires crossed it may be something they are interested in, but for 99% of the population it won't do anything but make them want to hit the back button. Seeing it isn't going to make anyone's wires get crossed either.
I have a hard time putting all this down in words. Our society has trained us from the time we were children to want to hide certain types of material from children. That would be fine if the material itself were truly harmful. But the fact is, it isn't. Even the truly perverse stuff isn't damaging, especially when someone enough information and understanding of the issue to judge it by
So filtering software is a lose-lose proposition. The rights of everyone get damaged, and the software doesn't even keep out the material it is meant to, which isn't hurting anyone to begin with.
But unfortunately the more religious minded in our culture can't see it that way. Don't bother trying to reason with them, it isn't their strong suit.
Censorship is tyrrany. It is when those with an agenda attempt to silence differing viewpoints.
Freedom of speech means nothing without the freedom to think for oneself. The most effective means of mind control is information control. To control what information a person has access to is to control what ideas they are able to consider and thus what they believe. A person so controlled may still have freedom of speech, but does that really mean anything when their very mind is not free?
Many people believe we live in a democracy, well we don't. Public policy isn't defined by the will of the majority. It is defined by the will of those who make the most noise. Small vocal groups with an agenda are often able to dictate public policy. This case is just another example of that. Obscenity is really just an excuse to control what information the people have access too. They don't want any ideas they don't agree with available for anyone to learn and think about. All one has to do is look at some of the web pages which are censored to see that. Sure, porn sites are censored, but so are sites which discuss things like human evolution or the civil rights of homosexuals.
A few hundred years ago in western europe there was a thing called the Inquisition. The catholic church controlled people's access to information and when someone had ideas which didn't jive with what they were pushing, the inquisition was called in. Now here in America we have loose cult of people usually described as christian fundamentalists. Their influence far exceeds their numbers. They have political power because they tend to all vote the same way on any given issue.
To me they are all a bunch of idiots too stupid or too afraid to look and think for themselves. Instead they believe what they are told to, no matter how ludicrous and contradictory it may be. How else do you explain they fact that they believe life began in a garden 6000 odd years ago when overwhelming evidence shows that it has existed on earth for billions of years. Are these the people you want controlling the information you have access to?
One of our founding fathers once said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. He was right. Unless each of us stands fast against censorship and other attacks on our rights, we will one day find that we have no freedom left. A life in the abscence of liberty is not worth living.
Obscenity is a made up idea. When images or words or ideas offend enough people, or the people who are in power, such things are labeled obscene. They don't have to be sexual in nature to be so labeled. Political and philosophical ideas are attacked as being obscene just as often.
The only reliable form of mind control is information control. Control someone's access to information and you control the things they are able to think about.
The single most fundamental freedom that anyone has is the freedom to think for themself. Speech is only as free as the mind behind the words. Censorship is an attack on this freedom. It is an attempt at enslaving the mind of another. I could go on and describe in lurid terms just how evil this practice is, but you get the idea.
Lee
I've read both articles which he was supposedly viciously flamed for, and I have a hard time finding anything to flame him for.
Not that I agree with everything he said, I think the idea of porting AOL to linux is just plain wrong. AOL is... *shudders* horrid and dumbs people down while locking them into a sub-standard product. But just because I don't agree with him doesn't mean I attack him and try to get him fired from his job. When we attack those whose ideas we don't like in such a way as to prevent them from expressing those ideas, we damage our own freedom of expression. Free speech isn't just something that got put into the constitution because the founders liked the way it sounded. When all ideas are freely expressed in an open forum, the best ones will tend to rise to the top. When ideas are suppressed, bad things happen. Mobs tend to be created when extremists have silenced the moderates.
I've been a Linux user since 1995 and over the years I've become increasingly disillusioned with the Sacred Brotherhood of the Penguin. You know the guys I'm talking about, the ones who speak of Linux in religious terms or at least in such a way that there are religious undertones to what they are saying. This is quite frankly pathetic and a detriment. Linux is an operating system. It is an excellent operating system. But it is not perfect and it is not better than any and all other operating systems in every way. Open source programs and products often tend to be better than ones developed commercially. They are not always like that however. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a fool or a zealot, but I repeat myself.
When people become zealots, the lose their perspective on things. They are out of touch with the way things really are, and as such are not in any position to change things to how they want them to be. If you love Linux the way I do, the best thing to do is see it for what it is and where it is, and try to do what you can to get it to where it can be. That doesn't include attacking someone whose views don't jive with yours. Prove them wrong if you can, but don't launch ad hominem attacks, it just makes you look childish and does nothing to promote or validate your point of view with anyone.
This may not make sense to everyone. Some people just like to flame others because it gives them some kind of psychological pay off. These types are more of a threat to us than Microsoft will ever be. They discourage others from being interested in or in favor of linux. If some person from Group X with agenda Y cussed you out, you'd be less likely to favor either the group or what they stood for. Now imagine if 50 of these people cussed you out, you'd start to think that they were all a bunch of (insert favorite insult here) and who were up to no good. It is like this with anything. Some of our enemies are well known to us. Some are not. Not everyone is our enemy, but flaming someone with personal attacks is a fine way to make them our enemy.
This is exactly what happened to this guy. I'm suprised that he is responding in such a reasonable manner. It is probably because he's older than 90% of the people who come here and knows a little something about being tactful, something some of us it would seem need to learn.
It's firmware/microcode. Making it open source wouldn't benefit anyone. Transmeta makes processors, which are naturally proprietary since they are hardware. They are compatible with the x86 instruction set which is an open standard. How they acheive this compatibility is not important as long as they are successful in doing so. The changes and improvements that Transmeta has made to linux are all open source. Why? Because linux is software that transmeta wants to run on their chips. They want to sell chips and linux helps them do that. Making their microcode open source doesn't help them do that and it doesn't help anyone else either. I hate zealots, especially ones who try to apply a generally good idea to an extreme case where it doesn't fit or isn't relevant. Ragging on Linus because he works for a company that doesn't release its firmware as open source is pretty brain dead. Open source is an idea for smart people, and a religion for the stupid. Which are you?
The open source model is not the only viable model. There is nothing wrong with a company creating software using the closed source model.
The open source model works best for things like Operating systems or development tools or libraries. It doesn't work so well when the people who the product is targeted to are not the ones doing the development.
This is why the only open source end user application that performs on par with commercial offerings is Gimp. It is the only one. In any other catagory the open source products are either perpetually in development, or substandard.
Perhaps in the furure this will not be so true, but for now it is.
Also, bashing a company because they aren't willing to make their code open isn't right. This is something they worked hard on and they can do whatever the hell they want to with it.
The source code to a program isn't community property unless the person or company which created it makes it so. Opening the source may improve the quality of the product, but what happens if the company which originally wrote the program finds themselves unable to make any money anymore? Technical improvements to a program's functionality and the elimination of bugs are not the only concerns.
I'm sure I'll be moderated down by the zealots here who are too young to understand things like car payments and morgages. But that is ok, they will learn soon enough and along the way they will realize that there is no one answer to everything and that includes software development.
If I remember correctly Metcalf claimed that the internet was a fad a few years back and that it wouldn't last. He's said other dimwitted things in the past as well. I don't know how he gets anyone to pay him to write columns at all.
His claim to fame is that he was the principle creator of ethernet back when he was at Xerox PARC and later went on to found 3com.
Being a good engineer doesn't mean you understand the social or economic ends of this industry. The fact that he doesn't seem to understand the role that the Crusoe's software layer plays makes me wonder if he's even much of an engineer. This software layer isn't the kind of code that would even benefit from being open source. Saying it should be open source is about as intelligent as saying that Maxtor should make the firmware on their hard drives open source or that that AMD should release the schematics and masks to the K7. None of these things would be useful to anyone creating open source software and their being properietary does not threaten the open source status of linux or other software packages.
His entire article is poorly disguised mudslinging. I also hear a distinct whine when I read it. What gives here?
And of course the crusoe runs windows, its x86 compatible. If Metcalfe doesn't understand what that means then maybe I should have his job.
Many newsgroups are choked with spam. Maybe five to ten percent are actual real posts from real people, the rest are all bullshit. This is the reason why usenet is dying, spam from lame XXX pay sites and "Do you want to retire this year?" type scams. It really makes me upset every time I think about this. Surely the founding fathers didn't intend free speech to include talking so much and so loudly that no one else can hear or say anything. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it without running the risk of restricting speech that is supposed to be protected. Being a libertarian suck sometimes, if I weren't I'd be able to rabidly attack free speech with no thought as to the consequences, oh well...
There's nothing stopping you from creating programs for linux and releasing them under the BSD license. XFree uses the BSD license and just about everyone with a linux desktop uses that.
The license is really a moot point except when it comes to things like device drivers. You can port apps written for either to the other and you don't have to change the license to do so.
There are some people out there for whom the license is a religious issue. But to most level headed people the differences between the BSD and GPL licenses just aren't important, let alone significant enough to actually get upset and start complaining to anyone who will listen.
Well now that depends on the user. There are plenty of conventional dos/windows users who never pay for software either.
It's the personality of the user that matters, not the operating system they use.
Right now most linux users are hackers (!=cracker) and as such are less likely to pay for software. But as linux evolves and begins to penetrate the clueless market more that will change. In the end software for linux will be pirated about as often as windows and mac software is now. Software companies seem to be able to make plenty of money in those markets, so I think they'll do just fine.
"I'll accept that you truthfully didn't have a problem with it with your particular apps. And I should say that it's not
;)
all bad; it does have some good concepts and a lot of the design is correct. The problem is that they either a)
didn't go far enough to make a feature useful, or b) screwed up the implementation of the feature."
Sounds a lot like Windows NT to me!
Please don't make the assumption that Linux users constitute the majority of unix users out there.
Linux is popular among hobbyists and those with x86 and even alpha boxes, but it is far from being the only game in town. If you've got a sun or an HP system, you're running solaris or HP-UX, not linux. Yes, I know that linux exists for suns, but is anyone using it in a commercial environment as more than an experiment at this point?
Qt and GTK may work on commercial unix variants, but they haven't been around as long as CDE/Motif and that means that the people who write the apps are going to stick with what they know and understand, rather than go with something new that may have bugs on their platform. Qt and GTK may someday replace motif, but that day isn't here yet. Intead they complement motif.
Actually neither the government, nor media should have an excessive ammount of power. Both tend to serve the interests of those who control them.
Democracy is simply the form of government where as many different interests are represented as possible.
The internet is an example of the same type of idea brought to the media.
Democracy and freedom of information are a severe threat to the elites who rule china. They run the country to serve their own interests of course and more often than not this is at the expense of the population who have no power. Look up "evil" in the dictionary for more information about this.
The idea that slashdotters should pick a side suggests that everyone here should agree with each other. Sorry, but in the real world people who think for themselves rarely agree on everything. Differing opinions are a sign that slashdot is working exactly as it should.
The internet represents the most powerful tool to promote freedom of information that has ever existed. I know it is a cliche, but the truth is what sets us free. The elites in china are essentially trying to stick their fingers in a leaky dam. Sooner or later the thing is going to collapse. I think the internet represents one of our best weapons against censorship and oppression. Freedom of information leads to freedom of thought and someone who thinks for themselves can never be truly conquered because they can't be fooled. The worst you can do is kill them. The chineese people might not have the right to keep and bear arms, making them physically defenseless against tyrrany, but hopefully this new powerful force for liberty will help set them free.
Oh, are you being picked on by life? It's just not fair that some people are financially successful while others are not. Nevermind that this success usually comes about as the result of hard work and the utilization of their own talents. We have to make sure that everyone makes the same ammount of money, no matter how hard they work or how fortunate they are. Better yet, we should begin work on making sure that everyone is equally talented and able. This is one area where the human genome project will pay off. In the future no one will be smarter or stronger than anyone else. We will all be the same with the same ammount of money in our pockets and everything will just be wonderful then. Nevermind that people will have nothing to aspire to. All these aspirations don't feed the zillions of starving and underpriviliged children who have no chance whatsoever of making anything of themselves anyway because republican's won't let them. Oh, what a brave new world we will live in, I just can't wait!
I live in Arizona where I'm pursuing a degree in computer science from Arizona State. The fact that this woman thinks she has the right to come along and try to dictate to me and my fellow students essentially how to run our lives makes me see red. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If we hope to prevent people like this woman from stripping us of our freedoms, we must always fight back in any way necessary. I can't imagine who this woman is trying to please with these proposals. She certainly isn't trying to make the people they would affect, the students, happy. I only rational interpretation I can come up with for this is that its a diversionary tactic designed to draw attention away from something her party cannot get their way about otherwise, probably some funding issue. Were this woman not a state representative, people would laugh at her and she certainly wouldn't get any of her statements printed in the paper. But because she was able to sucker people into voting for her, what she says and thinks is considered newsworthy. Hopefully the voters in her district will now realize the error of their ways and remedy this situation come next election.
That's the thing about Gates, he looks like this mild mannered nerdy type when in fact he's very aggressive and confrontational, just with bad social skills. If you stand up to him, he will respect you and you may succeed at M$. If you don't, then you won't last long there.
What makes you think these people are out of high school?
Not all monitors are made the same. In particular the refresh rates they are capable of at various resolutions differ. Just telling your card to go to 1024x768 mode isn't enough, you've also got to specify the refresh rate. Now you might get lucky like you did with the sony and find that the rate it defaults to is one your monitor can handle. But you might also find that it won't, like in the case of your 17. Trying to run a monitor at a resolution or refresh rate it won't do is a good way to damage it. If you're not sure what refresh it is capable of, set it to 60 as all newer monitors will handle that rate at sane resolutions. Most will handle a higher refresh of 70, 75, even 85hz. Read the docs that came with the monitor or look up your model on line. Setting up X to work with your monitor isn't hard, you just have to know what you've got.
Do you have any idea how ludicrous that sounds? Last time I checked it was illegal to blow up buildings and kill innocent women and children but that didn't stop McVeigh.
How is a law going to stop someone of evil intent who has no regard for the law?
All laws do is make and act prosecutable after the fact. They do almost nothing to prevent an evil person from committing the act to begin with.
Good people don't need to have laws passed telling them they can't rob, rape or kill others. It is only the scumbags for whom these laws were created.
More laws are not the solution for crime or an increase in crime. The solution is to prosecute more consistenly on the basis of existing laws, and even that isn't a real solution, it just isn't creating a bigger problem like more laws do. Laws do little to prevent the act they prohibit and end up making life more difficult for everyone else who isn't doing anything wrong to begin with.
This page lists a law in Maricopa county Arizona that say that no more than six women may live in one house. This is a real law and it is actually enforced. The reason for it is to prevent whorehouses but all it really ends up doing is making it so that none of the sororities at ASU can have a house. Laws like this, and the fact that anyone tries to enforce them, piss me off.
Natalie Portman in addition to being talented and gorgeous, is also from Israel. Scientology isn't exactly fond of Jews even though it doesn't promote this aspect of the belief system. Truthfully they are not fond of anyone or any group that isn't tied to scientology. Anything outside of the Co$ is considered inferior or corrupt and is generally called "wog" which is a british term equivalent to "nigger."
As an ex-scientologist news like this just makes me laugh with joy. Scientology is an evil cult whose goal is to take over the world and imprison or kill anyone who doesn't agree with them. Anyone who has spent any time in it can tell you that. Just look up the Fair Game PL. Scientology claims to be a religion but in fact the religious trappings it puts on are for PR and legal protection. It's no more a religion than Amway is. It's true nature is more like the Nazi party of the 1930's. If anyone could recognize this, its the Germans.
Many scientologists as individuals are decent honest people. Its unfortunate that they have made such a poor choice in remaining in the "church." I could go on all day long about them, but many others have already covered it and more eloquently than I could.
What is the difference between Scientology and Microsoft? One is an evil cult bent on world domination and the other was begun by L. Ron Hubbard.
Obviously Microsoft is the one who is behind all this. They have their programmers and developers sit down and come up with a benchmark spec that they believe they can tweak NT into performing well on. At the same time they try to find areas where Linux is not as strong. After a few months of coding we get service packs for NT and mindcraft conducts its "independent" study. Of course NT comes out ahead, big suprise.
It's the same kind of thing that Apple does when it compares the toys they sell with PC's. What I really like are the photoshop benchmarks where the Mac is so far ahead. What they don't ever bother to tell you is that apple long ago made changes to their OS and put in system calls specifically for Adobe Photoshop. Then there are the straight CPU benchmarks where they take the few instructions from the powerpc that are significantly faster than an equivalent on x86 and say that the processor is faster overall by this factor. Some powerpc instructions are slower, but then they never tell you that. It's the same thing here. Rather than get bent out of shape we should spend our time doing an honest analysis of both platforms and outcoding the sons of bitches.
We've got a K6-233 setup with NT server and a 386-40 setup with linux as an internet gateway. I chose NT for the server mainly because linux doesn't have any support for netbeui. With NT I can turn off netbios over tcp/ip and use netbeui for the local file sharing. This way if someone were ever to actually break into our gateway from the outside, they wouldn't be able to get to any of our business information. Also one of the programs we use is dos based and has a server component. I don't have the time to play around with trying to get dosemu to run stably with networking support just for the thrill of running linux on the server. NT works and does what we need it to without any real drawbacks. Unlike many of my friends I'm not a linux or open source zealot. I prefer linux over any other operating system, but I'm not foolish enough to think its the best in every way and in ever situation. If it were NT wouldn't even be on the map. I can't comment on whether NT is faster on our fileserver than linux would be, but I can say with certainty that linux is faster on the 386-40 than NT would be, especially since its running off 8 megs of ram. Not exactly a supercomputer but it does its job of ip masquerading fast enough to deal with our 56k connection in real time which is all you can ask of any computer doing that job.
I like NT to tell the truth. As a simple fileserver it does a good job in my experience. But it has flaws in its stability and security. I wouldn't use it someplace where you had to really rely on it. I'd use something else, maybe linux, maybe not. I would of course depend on the task and which tool was the best solution.