Two things come to mind. One is, what a very fine allegory for the entire net boom it is, to have "bigplans.com" and to see its value drop so far and so fast; and two, you probably should have taken the $350.
I'm completely in favor of an examination of the whole beast, but how can a judge use one case to open up another entirely separate ball of wax? Without something like a class action suit against MusicNet or maybe Commerce or someone in enforcement beinging an action, isn't she pretty much hogtied to only rule on what Napster is doing?
I thought this is what they do with shoplifters and check bouncers.
I worked for a small family-owned chain - in an IT department that shared office space with security. They took Polaroids of shoplifters. I saw them. There is no way they'd post these shots to look at casually - because every single shoplifter has the exact same sad look about them. It's a weird mixture of shame, resignation, and sadness. The statement each shot made was, "My pathetic life has come to this: being photographed sitting in a supermarket manager's office after being nabbed for this minor crime."
There were people who would steal vanilla extract for the alcohol in it. Or men who would steal Monistat 7 (to return for cash, since it's the most expensive small item on the shelves). Just pathetic.
After looking at a few handfuls of these pics, I never wanted to look at them ever again.
I'm just about at the end of my wick over certain mozilla bugs, such as the myriad problems with cursor management in textareas. Over the last six months to a year, I swear Moz has moved backwards in getting rid of these kinds of piddling little problems - problems which, in my opinion, absolutely prevent its wider acceptance.
The usual reply is that you can't prevent people from working on what they want to work on. Well guess what, if the piddling little bugs aren't fixed, there won't BE an open source browser for you to add your favorite little quirks to.
I'm composing this in Moz and if I hit the right arrow button at the end of a line, the cursor will go to the top of the text area. If I hit the down arrow key, it will create a hidden EOL. Sometimes entire lines of text just disappear and then re-appear. Sometimes unhighlighted text remains highlighted. Once in a while it even crashes, which I like because then at least something has a chance of getting attention.
It's so bush, too, that's the problem with it. Looks like Moz can manage to claim compatibility with important WWW standards but CAN'T MANAGE STANDARD TEXT EDITING.
You can complain about me complaining, but my contribution is not coding, and all my words are out of frustration for seeing these stupid little bugs live on for month after month. To live to make it into milestone after milestone. And the worst part is, IT USED TO WORK PERFECTLY. At some point, probably last spring, text editing was BROKEN. WTF, people?
And I won't even mention how many times the window focus problems have changed but not improved in the last six months. And to think that, a year ago, I though Moz was three months away from "ready".
If there's anyone reading this who's in charge of "decision-making" at the "enterprise level" --
The question you should be asking yourself is not "Should I be replacing my IIS systems with Linux+Apache?" but, rather, "If I am relying on Gartner for recommendations on conditions in the future, why didn't they see this coming a year ago?"
Well more than a year ago, the security benefits of open source were explored not only by/. but by almost every pundit on the web. Where was Gartner? Wouldn't it have saved you a ton of money if they had pointed out the probability of problems with security and patching in 1999 instead of late 2001? Isn't it amazing that they were near last to the table with this finding?
Why does Gartner put probabilities on their expectations without showing their work? Does anyone go back in history and look at these probabilities?
Doesn't Gartner have an interest in pressing the solutions that people expect them to press? And here's a HUGE question... if you're using the exact same solutions as every one of your competitors, are you prepared to give up the idea that IT could give your company a competitive advantage? Do your bosses agree with this?
I don't think that is the intent. I think their intent is to provide a more secure provision for digital content such as music and movies, etc. A system whereby if DeCSS happens on digital content, it can be directly replaced with something else.
You therefore agree that, if you elect to download a license from the Internet which enables your use of Secure Content, Microsoft may, in conjunction with such license, also download onto your computer such Security Updates that a Secure Content Owner has requested that Microsoft distribute.
This is the only weirdness I found. "If you get a key from us, we are permitted to install additional locks."
Don't worry about that one bit. The SC is affected by the same politics that affects all judges everywhere; if the judgement is not in the interests of the US, they will not issue it.
Whether that in itself should be a worry is left as an exercise for the reader (it's far too big a question for me to consider).
Well, while we are all geeks and not finance people, the people who ARE finance people have made Red Hat one of the stocks that moved UP over the last three days.
Certain rights -- equality, liberty -- are considered inviolate. But almost all rights are subject to a series of checks and balances, always subject to circumstance, never absolutes granted without reservation, in perpetuity, regardless of external circumstance.
So you say. I say that we hold certain rights to be self-evident and unalienable, creator-granted. While you can pretend to take these rights away from me, you can't actually do that. Even if a majority believes in violating those rights, the rights themselves do not change. They are inviolate. What you are in effect doing is demanding to violate these rights.
You can make yourself feel better by saying that it was necessary. You can come up with catch-phrases, nightly news encouragement, pop culture peer pressure, even the words of elected officials, and you can make yourself feel better. But understand this: it does not diminish these rights, not one bit.
Is it really our position that Wal-Mart can own the details of our lives, but that government agents tracking those people who murdered 5,000 of our fellow citizens can't?
Unless I give my consent, that is exactly my position. As far as I can see, and I have been paying attention, nobody has ASKED for my consent yet.
We might want to ponder what rights we owe the living and owed the dead -- the right to live, to be and have parents, to work or fly without being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno.
If our rights are collapsed, it will be a bigger collapse than if all the towers in every city were downed.
And when you think about such matters, think about this. Every patriotic song, every homily memorized by school children, every wartime slogan in US history basically says the same thing: we fight to protect the rights that we enjoy.
If we end up protecting the country the "easy" way - the way that doesn't work, if you take a look at what other countries have experienced terrorism - we will be defending it from a principle that no longer exists. When we sing "the land of the free" as the second-to-last phrase in the song that defines our patriotism, we will be hypocrites.
What rights do we owe the living and the dead? The very rights the country was founded upon, of course. If you believe that you are "safe" in a country that ignores not only its founding principles and the words of the document that describes exactly what the country is, what it can do and what it can't, you aren't paying attention.
6000 dead? Danger of 100,000 dead? It's a drop in the bucket -- and please, I am NOT being heartless here -- compared to the numbers of people killed by their own governments during the last century. We're talking into the hundreds of millions.
And if you want defended, let me tell you this. I personally am VERY willing to die to defend FREEDOM and LIBERTY. I would do anything to defend those principles. I am, however, completely UNWILLING to die to defend "the American way of life" where freedom and liberty are so easily given up as a part of that life.
There are a whole slew of bugs in textarea handling that make it very difficult and painful to compose posts in textareas. This is not so critical for people who don't, uh, participate in large discussion groups such as this one. But if you DO post to Slashdot etc., you may want to hold off -- until 1.0, which is the target for just too many of these bugs, IMO.
I won't link in the bugs since the Moz folks don't like us to/. their bugzilla, but I'm talking specifically about such bugs as 83650, 82151, 88024, 68331, 75629, and 74383. And, for example, as I compose this in Moz, I know that if I accidentally hit the right arrow button at the end of the post, the cursor will move to the top of the post. It's painful.
That's not enough of a translation yet. Here is the final version:
Greetings to those for whom I hold some degree of low regard.
I am a young computing/networking enthusiast who is disappointed with the punishment assigned to a fellow enthusiast. I have come into knowledge that is not universal; and because I have few other avenues through which I can gather respect, I intend to use this knowledge to randomly punish others. To accomplish this, I intend to display my knowledge through both gaming and non-gaming-oriented activities. I am also assigning myself a title to indicate my status. My long-term goals include assuming ownership of all facilities where personnel and equipment are centrally gathered.
I shall now attempt to determine the correct usage of the program with which I am composing this message.
Imagine if the things were spyware. Put one in every home, give them wireless networking and GPS, and you've have the perfect setup to be watched 24x7. Now THERE'S the stuff of sci-fi stories.
That's a great answer to the question, and you could extend it like this:
"You know how some people just enjoy building model trains in their basement? Imagine what they would do if they could share their models... or link their tracks to others' tracks, in other basements. Imagine the excitement they'd have and how perfect they'd want their model to be. You'd almost certainly have configurations that would rival the original engineering decisions that go into building actual train yards, wouldn't you? Just like that, the net enabled a lot of model builders - i.e., people who enjoy programming - to share their models with every other model builder in the WORLD. So it's not surprising they built some amazing things, including the most stable large-scale operating system and the world's most-used web server."
I think people would instinctively understand an analogy like that, and it makes for great advocacy.
"Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity?"
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
I think I agree with all of that. But Stallman does not. He demands that the naming rights tag along with the work - a stupid, tragic restriction on the use of those programs, one that has nothing to do with coding, and one that will in effect prevent GNU software's use by endlessly confusing possible users.
Having created, Stallman is using all his efforts to control his creation.
So, by his own thinking, Stallman deserves punishment. Q.E.D.
I figure I might as well put my "me too" under someone else's post, but all these "it couldn't possibly happen!" posts are damn irritating when it happened to me. Put the Palm in its cradle, hear a tiny pop from the speakers, system freeze, no boot, mobo dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things come to mind. One is, what a very fine allegory for the entire net boom it is, to have "bigplans.com" and to see its value drop so far and so fast; and two, you probably should have taken the $350.
So the choice is between applying a few timely patches and building a whole 'nother Internet, and the latter is chosen as the cost-effective route??
All I can ask is... did Cisco have lobbyists at the hearing for it?
I'm completely in favor of an examination of the whole beast, but how can a judge use one case to open up another entirely separate ball of wax? Without something like a class action suit against MusicNet or maybe Commerce or someone in enforcement beinging an action, isn't she pretty much hogtied to only rule on what Napster is doing?
I worked for a small family-owned chain - in an IT department that shared office space with security. They took Polaroids of shoplifters. I saw them. There is no way they'd post these shots to look at casually - because every single shoplifter has the exact same sad look about them. It's a weird mixture of shame, resignation, and sadness. The statement each shot made was, "My pathetic life has come to this: being photographed sitting in a supermarket manager's office after being nabbed for this minor crime."
There were people who would steal vanilla extract for the alcohol in it. Or men who would steal Monistat 7 (to return for cash, since it's the most expensive small item on the shelves). Just pathetic.
After looking at a few handfuls of these pics, I never wanted to look at them ever again.
Yup, I've been up and down Bugzilla making sure that all the complaints that I can verify are already noted accurately.
There are the bugs that I've been tracking:
83650: textarea control has problems with caret positioning at end
82151: Right arrow key at end of a TEXTAREA goes to the beginning
68331: Moving caret in TEXTAREA to start of line can cause page to scroll horizontally
75629: Need better support for setting selection in text inputs and textareas
88024: Down arrow key creates fake line break at the end of a TEXTAREA
74383: textarea input form crashed during complex edit session
During the composition of this reply, I encountered and had to work around several of these.
I have voted for all the relevant bugs.
I'm just about at the end of my wick over certain mozilla bugs, such as the myriad problems with cursor management in textareas. Over the last six months to a year, I swear Moz has moved backwards in getting rid of these kinds of piddling little problems - problems which, in my opinion, absolutely prevent its wider acceptance.
The usual reply is that you can't prevent people from working on what they want to work on. Well guess what, if the piddling little bugs aren't fixed, there won't BE an open source browser for you to add your favorite little quirks to.
I'm composing this in Moz and if I hit the right arrow button at the end of a line, the cursor will go to the top of the text area. If I hit the down arrow key, it will create a hidden EOL. Sometimes entire lines of text just disappear and then re-appear. Sometimes unhighlighted text remains highlighted. Once in a while it even crashes, which I like because then at least something has a chance of getting attention.
It's so bush, too, that's the problem with it. Looks like Moz can manage to claim compatibility with important WWW standards but CAN'T MANAGE STANDARD TEXT EDITING.
You can complain about me complaining, but my contribution is not coding, and all my words are out of frustration for seeing these stupid little bugs live on for month after month. To live to make it into milestone after milestone. And the worst part is, IT USED TO WORK PERFECTLY. At some point, probably last spring, text editing was BROKEN. WTF, people?
And I won't even mention how many times the window focus problems have changed but not improved in the last six months. And to think that, a year ago, I though Moz was three months away from "ready".
The RE agent isn't ALLOWED to mention that, because it's redlining.
I don't regret having taken any of the comp sci courses I took in college, and I took more than any or my classmates.
But here is a list of the courses that I now WISH I had taken, with the benefit of hindsight.
If there's anyone reading this who's in charge of "decision-making" at the "enterprise level" --
/. but by almost every pundit on the web. Where was Gartner? Wouldn't it have saved you a ton of money if they had pointed out the probability of problems with security and patching in 1999 instead of late 2001? Isn't it amazing that they were near last to the table with this finding?
The question you should be asking yourself is not "Should I be replacing my IIS systems with Linux+Apache?" but, rather, "If I am relying on Gartner for recommendations on conditions in the future, why didn't they see this coming a year ago?"
Well more than a year ago, the security benefits of open source were explored not only by
Why does Gartner put probabilities on their expectations without showing their work? Does anyone go back in history and look at these probabilities?
Doesn't Gartner have an interest in pressing the solutions that people expect them to press? And here's a HUGE question... if you're using the exact same solutions as every one of your competitors, are you prepared to give up the idea that IT could give your company a competitive advantage? Do your bosses agree with this?
Right now, 50% of jobs are for Java and its variants, 40% Microsoft, and 10% Perl/PHP.
Where you are. Where I am, the ratio is more like 30-70-0.
(And I'm part of that last number.)
I don't think that is the intent. I think their intent is to provide a more secure provision for digital content such as music and movies, etc. A system whereby if DeCSS happens on digital content, it can be directly replaced with something else.
But that's just a guess and I could be wrong.
This is the only weirdness I found. "If you get a key from us, we are permitted to install additional locks."
Don't worry about that one bit. The SC is affected by the same politics that affects all judges everywhere; if the judgement is not in the interests of the US, they will not issue it.
Whether that in itself should be a worry is left as an exercise for the reader (it's far too big a question for me to consider).
Well, while we are all geeks and not finance people, the people who ARE finance people have made Red Hat one of the stocks that moved UP over the last three days.
So you say. I say that we hold certain rights to be self-evident and unalienable, creator-granted. While you can pretend to take these rights away from me, you can't actually do that. Even if a majority believes in violating those rights, the rights themselves do not change. They are inviolate. What you are in effect doing is demanding to violate these rights.
You can make yourself feel better by saying that it was necessary. You can come up with catch-phrases, nightly news encouragement, pop culture peer pressure, even the words of elected officials, and you can make yourself feel better. But understand this: it does not diminish these rights, not one bit.
Is it really our position that Wal-Mart can own the details of our lives, but that government agents tracking those people who murdered 5,000 of our fellow citizens can't?
Unless I give my consent, that is exactly my position. As far as I can see, and I have been paying attention, nobody has ASKED for my consent yet.
We might want to ponder what rights we owe the living and owed the dead -- the right to live, to be and have parents, to work or fly without being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno.
If our rights are collapsed, it will be a bigger collapse than if all the towers in every city were downed.
And when you think about such matters, think about this. Every patriotic song, every homily memorized by school children, every wartime slogan in US history basically says the same thing: we fight to protect the rights that we enjoy.
If we end up protecting the country the "easy" way - the way that doesn't work, if you take a look at what other countries have experienced terrorism - we will be defending it from a principle that no longer exists. When we sing "the land of the free" as the second-to-last phrase in the song that defines our patriotism, we will be hypocrites.
What rights do we owe the living and the dead? The very rights the country was founded upon, of course. If you believe that you are "safe" in a country that ignores not only its founding principles and the words of the document that describes exactly what the country is, what it can do and what it can't, you aren't paying attention.
6000 dead? Danger of 100,000 dead? It's a drop in the bucket -- and please, I am NOT being heartless here -- compared to the numbers of people killed by their own governments during the last century. We're talking into the hundreds of millions.
And if you want defended, let me tell you this. I personally am VERY willing to die to defend FREEDOM and LIBERTY. I would do anything to defend those principles. I am, however, completely UNWILLING to die to defend "the American way of life" where freedom and liberty are so easily given up as a part of that life.
There are a whole slew of bugs in textarea handling that make it very difficult and painful to compose posts in textareas. This is not so critical for people who don't, uh, participate in large discussion groups such as this one. But if you DO post to Slashdot etc., you may want to hold off -- until 1.0, which is the target for just too many of these bugs, IMO.
/. their bugzilla, but I'm talking specifically about such bugs as 83650, 82151, 88024, 68331, 75629, and 74383. And, for example, as I compose this in Moz, I know that if I accidentally hit the right arrow button at the end of the post, the cursor will move to the top of the post. It's painful.
I won't link in the bugs since the Moz folks don't like us to
That's not enough of a translation yet. Here is the final version:
Greetings to those for whom I hold some degree of low regard.
I am a young computing/networking enthusiast who is disappointed with the punishment assigned to a fellow enthusiast. I have come into knowledge that is not universal; and because I have few other avenues through which I can gather respect, I intend to use this knowledge to randomly punish others. To accomplish this, I intend to display my knowledge through both gaming and non-gaming-oriented activities. I am also assigning myself a title to indicate my status. My long-term goals include assuming ownership of all facilities where personnel and equipment are centrally gathered.
I shall now attempt to determine the correct usage of the program with which I am composing this message.
Imagine if the things were spyware. Put one in every home, give them wireless networking and GPS, and you've have the perfect setup to be watched 24x7. Now THERE'S the stuff of sci-fi stories.
That's a great answer to the question, and you could extend it like this:
"You know how some people just enjoy building model trains in their basement? Imagine what they would do if they could share their models... or link their tracks to others' tracks, in other basements. Imagine the excitement they'd have and how perfect they'd want their model to be. You'd almost certainly have configurations that would rival the original engineering decisions that go into building actual train yards, wouldn't you? Just like that, the net enabled a lot of model builders - i.e., people who enjoy programming - to share their models with every other model builder in the WORLD. So it's not surprising they built some amazing things, including the most stable large-scale operating system and the world's most-used web server."
I think people would instinctively understand an analogy like that, and it makes for great advocacy.
"If we don't switch to ipv6 by late 1997, the net will run out of addresses."
-- many many pundits
"Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity?"
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
I think I agree with all of that. But Stallman does not. He demands that the naming rights tag along with the work - a stupid, tragic restriction on the use of those programs, one that has nothing to do with coding, and one that will in effect prevent GNU software's use by endlessly confusing possible users.
Having created, Stallman is using all his efforts to control his creation. So, by his own thinking, Stallman deserves punishment. Q.E.D.
Search for IIS: over a thousand jobs. Search for Apache: 130 jobs.
130 jobs at the biggest job website on the web.
I give up.
I figure I might as well put my "me too" under someone else's post, but all these "it couldn't possibly happen!" posts are damn irritating when it happened to me. Put the Palm in its cradle, hear a tiny pop from the speakers, system freeze, no boot, mobo dead.
If you really want to worry about it, Tom Clancy has written "Executive Orders" for you, which starts with the scenario as described.