Pretty soon all the whacked-out parents are going to try to genetically engineer their child.
I feel a reference to the movie Gattaca is appropriate - they describe exactly that scenario and (possible) concequences hereof. Go watch it, it is actually quite good.
Uhmm....Giga-mice are cool....I want one as a pet, do they come in white?
Warning: paranoia-rant follows, but somebody has to.....
Another implication is, that once the scientists gain sufficient control over the building-blocks of mice etc., it is only a matter of time before they do so over humans such as what the article says about "new treatments" for different diseases. Now, what exactly is a disease? being left-handed? being gay? being {communist|republican|democrat|facist|capitalist}? being anything but what Hitler thought of as the perfect human?
Interresting enough, with detailed control like that, when will it be possible to bread humans who do not only look alike but who (biologically determined) will think alike too??? (this, of course, under the assumption that such is mainly biologically determined rather than socially).
While I think that such research and results is most interresting, I am also a bit vary of the concequences - as I said: paranoia-rant...
I don't see this being a logical move, my cell phone should make and recieve calls, it should get my phone numbers using bluetooth from my PDA and it should leave playing music to my MP3 player.
I, for one, would appreciate NOT having to have big pockets. When I travel (which is waaay too frequent), I carry my laptop (for the more serious work), a mobile phone, a PDA (for occationally checking mail + organizing my life) and a MP3-player. Even leaving the laptop out of this, I have 3 rather bulky devices to carry around. Also, checking email in an inconvenient situation requires both the phone and the PDA be present at the same time.
Likewise, synchronizing information between the phone and the PDA using Bluetooth (or another such technology) is bothersome - and wastes battery on emitting and processing radio waves (which is not insignificant, btw.). I use "wastes" since that would be avoidable by integrating those devices.
No, I believe that for some areas, integration is the way to go, and I - for one - appreciate the development of making a PDA-PHONE-MP3PLAYER-in-one.
But... the bit about downloading MP3s on the phone made me wonder - the best bandwidth I've heard of over a cellphone is 14k4... what kind of MP3s can I get at that bandwidth? Would my batteries last long enough?:)
Not necessarilly: the page states that: You can download MP3 music to the phone, or you can insert a pre-recorded MultiMediaCard. (from SanDisk)
Now, an interresting question (or a matter of ignorance from my part) is: is it possible (probably, if so how?) to record such disks from - say - a PC, and transfer those to the phone? SanDisk? Now, from where I am, the SanDisk www-server http://www.sandisk.com/cons/ appears to be down, but perhaps someone can enlighten me....
I've for a long long time wanted a mobile phone, which could also replace my PalmIII and my Rio - and preferably one with a modem and an IrDA-port too - merge the Nokia Communicator with this CyON MP3-phone, and we are almost there (after reducing the size a bit).
I happen to agree with the many postings to the story of Open Source Leaders Speak About Napster, that copyrights should/must be respected - for many reasons, notably that the copyright laws also are what protects GPL et. al.
Even so, I've been worried about the fuzz of napster, where the lawyers seemed to have had a hard time comprehending what exactly napster is and what exactly napster is not (the napster guys merely provide a service - some people are abusing that service, but not the napster-guys) - and in the name of "copyrighting" and "protection of property" (be that intellectual or not, depending on taste in music...).
It's good to see, that penthouse have taken a slightly different approach, and understood what USEnet is and is not - and have attacked the "problem" in the right way: by tracking and going after the people, not the medium.....
I just PRAY that they (being penthouse or the legal systems in various countries) will keep it that way, and not trying to enforce additional requirements of either the ISP's tracking the identity of every poster, scanning the postings etc....or even worse: that eventually it makes someone going after (gasp) the servers, to where the offending material is being probagated.
But for now: credit to Penthouse. They have very good points, they have the law on their side - and they seem to be doing the right thing with it....
RHCE is a good idea in the commercial market for the simple fact that corporations love training courses. Linux won't be recognized as a valid OS in "average" (pronounced: non-tech) industries until employees can be trained. In the corporate mind, Linux can't be "equal" to Novell and Microsoft's shitty products until a tech can be Linux "certified". It gives 'em that warm, tingly feeling.
While I believe that the marketing effect of having "vendor certificates" for a product is positive (both for the holder of the certificate and for the product), there is more to the story than just that. I would like to point out two issues in the following:
Without disqualifying any certificates in particular, then there is imho a fundamental problem with such "vendor certificates" - and that is just that: they're "vendor". Most of the certification programs I've had contact with emphasize "the way of the vendor" a lot, and ignores (or assumes known) the general workings og things.
Let me give an example, which unfortunately is not just "thought up": most OS vendor certificates teach "setting up networking" and such. Some even "debugging network problems". Yet none (of those I have seen or heard of) set asside sufficient time to teach the fundamental understanding of the protocols behavior and how to utilize and interpret the output of various tools (traceroute and tcpdump comes to mind). I support this observation by experiences from working in a large organization with various OS-vendor certified personel (Novell and MS-certifications) - to whom the notion of "port numbers" under IP was completely unfamiliar (yes, the MS person in question did have the MS networking part, or so his resume said). I do believe that he could set up MS-something-server much faster than most (as could the Novel guy probably with a Novell-product), but that was not the issue (which was figuring out why some traffic didn't get through a particular router).
This leads me to the other issue, namely that with all those "vendor certificates", HR-people tend to hire more on those (the flash-value of a bunch of golden-framed certificates is known to be high in HR), than on the actual skills. The result (as was my experience) was, that the IT-department ends up with lots of people, who can (rightfully) claim to be "certified" - but who cannot really claim the understanding of what is going on...and who definitely will work less-than-good in a heterogenous setting (as most places really are: different servers, mainframes, terminals and workstations in a mess of a network with a mess of different traffic).
Anyways, the emphasis on "vendor certificates" has - in my experience - caused people to focus on "getting the certificate" (because that catches the eye of the HR-people) rather than on the actual learning the skills. And that is the real problem: very few do as the author of this very fine review of RedHat's certification process and say "hey, I know most of this stuff in general, but now I really need to know how RedHat do things". Most rather think "Uhmm...Redhat == money, I need that certificate".
Finally, a problem about vendor certificates is, that there is no real control with what they yield. Traditionally, teaching organizations (one way or another) are subject to some level of control, which should guarantee some level of quality. As the author of the review rightfully points out, then there might be big differences between what the course looks like in different sites. (not that the courses in universities and colleages do not differ either, but they are supposibly subject to some sort of quality control...)
That said, I find it encouraging that RedHat does provide what (to me) seems like rather real settings for part of their tests: "This machine is broken, fix it!" and "This machine should do XXX, make it so". I hope and wish that the training behind does provide a good background for doing this propperly.
Yet I still believe (and am trying to teach HR) that it is more important to evaluate actual skills and experience than simply to count the number of certificates....
...there is always a class of people (i.e. professionals) who will always need _real_ film.
While some may not consider photojournalists "real" professionals, that is where I see professionals going completely to digital.
For photo journalists, it makes good sense with digital cameras: short processing time is important, pictures are anyhow uses in "low quality" (i.e. rasterized grossly) and the main layout work is done electronically anyways. Hence in that field it is "speed over quality" any day.
I don't even dare to think about what the Nikon/Kodak-D1 costs (without any lenses), while The best camera in the world is well within reach of the serious amateurs and pros, as are lenses and other acessories.
Most digital cameras do a decent job as replacement for compact cameras / APS-cameras, but they do mostly aim for the auto-focus, auto-everything situations - and are ill equiped for most anything else (very few have manual focus / exposure in a way that is easy to use, very few offer spot metering etc). Yes, I am a dedicated Zuikoholic and swear to manual focus and such. However should I go out and buy a digital camera, the one which comes closest to what I expect from a camera would be Olympus C3030 zoom. I would not replace any 35mm film camera with thatone, but it is imho the "least bad" of the affordable digital cameras. It has no good manual focus facilities, but it does feature spot metering and manual as well as auto exposure.
Maybe the choise of the term "proprietary" is wrong, but GPL does restrict (from a cooporate point of view) what can be done with a piece of software. Indeed, that is the whole point og GPL (insert usual reference to the philosophy of gnu.org here...) - at least from what I see. In simple terms: if a company wish to make modifications to GPL'ed software, then these must also be GPL'ed. However as was pointed out so often before, there is nothing wrong with providing FooApp under GPL AND another license at the same time - at the authors discretion. I believe it's been done with success.
Ok, I acknowledge the point that the Linux kernel will be rather hard to issue a parallel license for. But Linus states explicitly in the COPYING file with the kernel:
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Exactly if this also goes for libc and friends, I do not know - but I would assume that they're lgpl'ed or something?
So I guess anyone can go kick up a new, proprietary OS while using the Linux kernel......and so what's the problem?
....will this guy stand up to his words? I quote from the article:
"So what constitutes fair use of a DVD in your eyes -- besides simply buying a DVD and using one of the MPAA's authorized players? Any use by which you buy it at a price. "
I guess that's what most of us want: go out and buy our DVD's to watch on whatever player we find convenient....My respect for MPAA just grow significantly:)
It could be most interresting if someone could get to talk to this guy, and ask him fair and square questions to have him elaborate on this. Questions such as "How do you suggest that we play the DVD's we've paid good money for using alternative systems such as Linux, *BSD and Solaris?"
He definitely must have a good solution to this, considering his other statement in the article:
"The principle occupation [of the MPAA] is to make sure that American movies move freely and unhobbled around the world,"
Am I just clueless, or aren't the "region codes" and the combatting of DeCSS counterproductive to the "principle occupation of the MPAA" ????
....well, damm good question, I'll say yes. Not necessarilly because they're committed by the same group of people. But because they are DUE TO the same group of people. Yes, I am of course talking about the group of people, commonly known as "system administrators", "network administrators", the "IS-department" etc.
Without casting blame on anyone, my general experience from all too many years as an independant consultant is, that most of the people in charge of managing security at various sites know next to nothing (if even that much) about what they are doing and what they are up against. I've seen horrifying examples from within the financial sector as well as the public health sector, which makes me everything but surprised when security is violated or sites taken down (sites being used in a more general term than "www-servers").
It's probably not the network administrators who are to blame either - it's their managers and organization who are often clueless as to what is required and therefore hire the first the best guy who can spell "Windows NT" without making too many mistakes. Being a bit harsh - I know - but these days people are hired on "vendor certificates" (as in MCP and CNE) rather than generic skills - for example within networking or computers in general. Having completed a "vendor certification program", one surely must know the products one has been certified for. But that's (unfortunately) no guarantee that the person has the knowledge required to manage a network.
As an example I've time and time again been surprised to see the amount of "MCP's" (and those "microsoft certified engineers" or what their title be), who had superiour skills when it came to managing their NT-boxes - but for whom solving even the simplest networking problems was impossible. Most people who've grown up with computers are very familiar with tools such as ping, traceroute, tcpdump and friends and know some of the working of the commonly used protocol stacks - and most of those new-born administrators are barely familiar enough with networks to know what an IP-address is.
I know it is difficult to find people with good qualifications. I've been looking for some for clients for the past 2 years with little luck. Most applicants put up a blank face when presented with technical questions that goes beyond "point-and-klick". Yet they still get jobs in different companies....
So yeah, I am not surprised....and yeah, those attacks are somehow related...
Who Cares? It's in the 5Ghz+ band. That is useless spectrum for anything but line of sight things like this. The more access options the better!
Well, I have a past (and to some extend present) in ham-radio (amateur radio). At a cirtain time a long long time ago the VHF and later UHF-bands were assigned exclusively for ham-usage (at least in my regions) because "those very high frequencies are an useless spectrum for anything"......now, how many services have migrated from the HF-bands and lower to VHF and higher bands?
History (also from within our own field of computers) should have tought us not to deem anything "useless for anything but " - sooner or later they will become usefull for a lot more than originally envisioned.
While I agree on "the more access options the better", I also have to agree with those who point out that it makes more sense to pull a fiber to each house and use low-power, local-area wireless lan in-house, than it does to provide a global (or at least nation-wide) wireless system.
So what sort of binary are these "Binary" filters going to be written in then? It wouldn't be i386 binary would it by any chance??? How is that going to run on my Alpha then?
It is very easy to campaign against the Microsoft monopoly whilst supporting the i386 one!!
While I agree that it would be better to device a truely "open" approach, I also believe that it's not a very realistic goal. Face it: there are companies who go great lengths keeping secrets, and who believe that their own printer language is the most significant of all secrets. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to convince them all to give up that idea? Indeed - however I also take the more pragmatic approach, and merely saying that IF we want more support for "our" operating system from hardware manufacturers (such as printer manufacturers), then we have to (at least initially) play by their rules.
Giving companies an opportunity to make binary-only drivers for their choise of Linux-platform and release alongside the binary-only versions of drivers for Windows and MacOS clearly cannot be a step in the wrong direction?
Once they're on the band-wagon, then may realize that the platform-requests (valid - such as yours - saying "Why is Alpha / PPC / Sparc / x86 / StrongArm / mk68 not supported?") and requests for features, updates and such COMBINED with the willingness from the community to put in an active effort in developing and maintaining such themself is a motivation to give away also the source code.
I believe, that most HW-manufacturers make money from MAKING HARDWARE not from writing drivers. I also believe, that most HW-manufacturers want access to as big a share of the market as possible. And I guess that the reason many haven't been supporting Linux and other unices is, that the market share is rather small and the efforts required to support that market is rather large (qua the lack of standardized, driver-based architectures).
Besides, I am not one of those, who believe that all software should be GPL'ed. I believe that it is the developers right to choose whatever license he or she wants - and the users right to decide to use it or not.
I yearn for the day when companies write drivers for Linux(/Unix) and opensource them so that all Unixes can share in the glory, and we all laugh at Windows for a decade because it's fragmented, hard to use for longer than 30 minutes, and it locks you into proprietary solutions.:)
Actually, what Linux (and Unix in general) needs is an architecture where it is straight forward for printer manufacturers to WRITE a (possibly binary-only) driver. The current solutions involving ghostscript and friends are too troublesome to write "drivers" for, requires the drivers be released under cirtain licences and does take some brains from the user to make work right.
A unified system into which an arbitrary driver could easilly be plugged would yield a lot. Using something like the input- and output-filters of lpr is one option, which all too often seems to cause troubles for people. Ohh, and by the way that has the added overhead of the driver having to be able to interpret postscript (= what most Unix programs generate per default) in addition to its own "printer language".....
That said, we also need decent libraries for interfacing the printer subsystem when writing applications - or have I been ignorant to what has been happening?
Now if there was only a way to get this kind of speed with no wires at all!
I dream of an inexpensive, wireless gigabit/sec connection!
Well, afaik some of the most high-end wireless consumer networks available at this time would be Hiperlan (23.5Mbps). Some information is available here and here.
There exists faster wireless networks, however then we're not in the "consumer end" any more.
"Dallas-based start-up Media Fusion has won a U.S. patent on a process it says can send data, video and voice over electric wires at speeds thousands of times faster than current high-speed Internet access technologies."
In other words it appears Media Fusion has patented an electronic signal on a metalic fibre called a wire. They must be so proud of their Intellectual Property:)
I guess the keywords you are missing are "at speeds thousands of times faster than current high-speed Internet access technologies". That does make a significant difference.
I only wish there was more information available on this - it sounds almost too good to be true, and the article is mostly marketing stuff. Can anyone with more EE/transmission-theory-background than mine share some information / references.
And btw, is "current high-speed Internet access technologies" the 34Mbit/s feed into this place? Then it's a darn fast thing they've come up with.
*waiting impatiently for more factual information*
Just curious, I didn't think his books were actually open source, that you could get them for free or anything like that....
Well, Knuth is the father of TeX (well-known and usefull typesetting system) which is "free" in the best sense of the word. And as for his book, publication of algorithms (in books, academic papers etc) is not only part of forming a foundation for those who write free software - but it also prevents companies like "those we all know and dislike" from doing their patent-stunts and preventing free software authors from writing their software.
So I guess that Knuth indeed does deserve to be nominated - he's doing a lot of good for free software.
To quote from the page: "We want to give this award to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see our definition of free software), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software."
I guess I'd vote for Knuth. Not just for TeX....but also for his other, widely *published* work on algorithms. While not necessarily being free "software", algorithms (and knowledge about) are important for free software....
Go Knuth (not that the other nominated aren't worthy...they definitely are...)
What we need is a central linux (or more general "Free software") legal departement to fight them in the long term...
Brilliant...I believe FSF is more than willing to do that - provided, of course, that you hand over the copyrights (or whatever the legal term is) over your SW to FSF (imho, that's a fair claim if one wants their services. Lawyers cost money, ya' kno').
Something like that is although rather difficult on projects such as Linux - no one person can hand over the "copyrights" of Linux. Both in the broader term of "Linux distributions" as well as narrowly about the kernel. Linus explicitly writes in the file "COPYING" (with the kernel):
" Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. "
But the issue is of interrest: what good is OpenSource, GPL etc. unless there is some way of defending it (and unless that it actually is defended)...?
.....how in the old days, "Big Blue" were the bad, proprietary and closed ones while Sun was the "good" alternative (someone around here has a clever signature saying something like "I remember when Sun really was about open computing").
Now, everybody is cheering at Big Blue and ranting over Sun being proprietary and closed....
One has to wonder...when will the things change again, and we will find ourselves cheering at Microsoft...? (It could happen, you know....)
First, I have a hard time seeing how broadcasting over IP is any much different than broadcasting over some other protocol (that being a physical protocol over a dedicated cable or whatever).
In fact, with the extended usage of IP-over-the-TV-cable and in the not-so-distant future when the bandwidth reaches the point where it is not going to be a limitation, it may even make sense to do just what they're doing. Imagine, all programs available to choose from at any time - and being able to cut the crap? Imagine watching Ally McBeal all day long;)
A further bonus is, that with the development of secure, electronic transactions etc, it may make pay-per-view and different viewer-statistics much easier to obtain than today. Downside is, of course, that it makes viewer-statistics much easier to obtain than today (here we go on the privacy-issue again.....)
That said......I am thinking in terms of a TV-station using this model for distributing their programs. It's completely different from unauthorized relaying of other peoples programs....IANAL, but my common sense tells me that yeah, a lawsuit is in place here. If canadian law disagrees, then - to me - canadian law contradicts common sense.....
Re:Help, one australian who gives a shit!
on
Profiling A Nation
·
· Score: 4
Here i go, i make a call to ppl to do something. I dont know what, but do something. Help us
As mentioned in a similar post a few days ago (Similar in that the Australian were being victims of something insane like government-authorized privacy violations), I believe this to be more of a global issue than what one might think right away....
Now this is happening in Australia - or rather: now we KNOW OF this happening in Australia. If it isn't going on everywhere else allready, it's sure to come.....and soon. Along with government approved and required backdoors in every system and restrictions on cryptography (and thereby - IMHO - on the feedom of speech) etc.
Let me restate my proposal from last time there was a/.-article about "something going wrong in Australia"....
It is time for slashdotters to unite and raise our voices.
And on that note...any ideas on what we CAN in fact do? I'd imagine that acting as a community would give some weight to our actions (please - decent ideas only...spamming someone, even a politician, is NOT a decent idea).
With great sympathy for "jdigital" and his fellow australians....
Rip out their "desktop" - I have a desktop. I just want to start a plain word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program - not a new desktop
Reduce the memory usage. How comes that just starting the StarOffice "desktop" takes 64MB? Even EMACS takes less memory with the usual modes loaded (GNUS, AUC-tex,....)
Make their postscript-engine work with color on Unix. Yes, I had to make slides regularly this spring for teaching. On occation, StarOffice would drop colors on parts of my slides (no, it's not a memory problem in the printer). The routine of making slides in Linux, walking to a co-workers Windows-box and use the Windows version to generate valid postscript then walk back to Linux to print quickly got tireing. Ohh, and when it's working in Linux they may be able to patch the Solaris version too...I had the same problems with Sparc/Solaris
Otherwise, I like StarOffice (well...I've mainly used their presentation-graphics proggie). It is a pretty decent program, doesn't crash and has a nice set of features. Fix the above and it's worth every $$.
Britain is proposing some really extreme anti-crypto laws (you would have to turn over the key to any encryted data you had or prove you don't know the key. Proving you don't have it is virtually impossible, so if someone sends you an email containing a bunch of gibberish then anonymously reports that you're into child porn/terrorism you could go to jail).
But on the other hand Germany is sponsoring development of GPG.
Germans sudden move to sponsor GPG has cirtanly changed my attitude towards them to the better. However I was refering to a situation some - ohh - a year ago, maybe, where Denmark (I am really Danish by nationality, allthough I live in France for the time being) signed some EU-thingie (law, bill, whatever). I have lost track of that (and a quick search didn't help me), but it was something which should be equivalent to the US-regulations on crypthography.
What was really amazing was, that signing that "thing" on behalf of Denmark was done by some administrator - not by an elected politician, and without any previous and public debate. Most people, interrested in this field (such as yours truely) didn't hear about this thing until after it had been decided.
Another astonishing example of governments pulling some law out without involving neither technical experts not informing us - the people....
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty soon all the whacked-out parents are going to try to genetically engineer their child.
I feel a reference to the movie Gattaca is appropriate - they describe exactly that scenario and (possible) concequences hereof. Go watch it, it is actually quite good.
Uhmm....Giga-mice are cool....I want one as a pet, do they come in white?
Warning: paranoia-rant follows, but somebody has to.....
Another implication is, that once the scientists gain sufficient control over the building-blocks of mice etc., it is only a matter of time before they do so over humans such as what the article says about "new treatments" for different diseases. Now, what exactly is a disease? being left-handed? being gay? being {communist|republican|democrat|facist|capitalist}? being anything but what Hitler thought of as the perfect human?
Interresting enough, with detailed control like that, when will it be possible to bread humans who do not only look alike but who (biologically determined) will think alike too??? (this, of course, under the assumption that such is mainly biologically determined rather than socially).
While I think that such research and results is most interresting, I am also a bit vary of the concequences - as I said: paranoia-rant...
I don't see this being a logical move, my cell phone should make and recieve calls, it should get my phone numbers using bluetooth from my PDA and it should leave playing music to my MP3 player.
I, for one, would appreciate NOT having to have big pockets. When I travel (which is waaay too frequent), I carry my laptop (for the more serious work), a mobile phone, a PDA (for occationally checking mail + organizing my life) and a MP3-player. Even leaving the laptop out of this, I have 3 rather bulky devices to carry around. Also, checking email in an inconvenient situation requires both the phone and the PDA be present at the same time.
Likewise, synchronizing information between the phone and the PDA using Bluetooth (or another such technology) is bothersome - and wastes battery on emitting and processing radio waves (which is not insignificant, btw.). I use "wastes" since that would be avoidable by integrating those devices.
No, I believe that for some areas, integration is the way to go, and I - for one - appreciate the development of making a PDA-PHONE-MP3PLAYER-in-one.
But... the bit about downloading MP3s on the phone made me wonder - the best bandwidth I've heard of over a cellphone is 14k4 ... what kind of MP3s can I get at that bandwidth? Would my batteries last long enough? :)
Not necessarilly: the page states that: You can download MP3 music to the phone, or you can insert a pre-recorded MultiMediaCard. (from SanDisk)
Now, an interresting question (or a matter of ignorance from my part) is: is it possible (probably, if so how?) to record such disks from - say - a PC, and transfer those to the phone? SanDisk? Now, from where I am, the SanDisk www-server http://www.sandisk.com/cons/ appears to be down, but perhaps someone can enlighten me....
I've for a long long time wanted a mobile phone, which could also replace my PalmIII and my Rio - and preferably one with a modem and an IrDA-port too - merge the Nokia Communicator with this CyON MP3-phone, and we are almost there (after reducing the size a bit).
I happen to agree with the many postings to the story of Open Source Leaders Speak About Napster, that copyrights should/must be respected - for many reasons, notably that the copyright laws also are what protects GPL et. al.
Even so, I've been worried about the fuzz of napster, where the lawyers seemed to have had a hard time comprehending what exactly napster is and what exactly napster is not (the napster guys merely provide a service - some people are abusing that service, but not the napster-guys) - and in the name of "copyrighting" and "protection of property" (be that intellectual or not, depending on taste in music...).
It's good to see, that penthouse have taken a slightly different approach, and understood what USEnet is and is not - and have attacked the "problem" in the right way: by tracking and going after the people, not the medium.....
I just PRAY that they (being penthouse or the legal systems in various countries) will keep it that way, and not trying to enforce additional requirements of either the ISP's tracking the identity of every poster, scanning the postings etc....or even worse: that eventually it makes someone going after (gasp) the servers, to where the offending material is being probagated.
But for now: credit to Penthouse. They have very good points, they have the law on their side - and they seem to be doing the right thing with it....
RHCE is a good idea in the commercial market for the simple fact that corporations love training courses. Linux won't be recognized as a valid OS in "average" (pronounced: non-tech) industries until employees can be trained. In the corporate mind, Linux can't be "equal" to Novell and Microsoft's shitty products until a tech can be Linux "certified". It gives 'em that warm, tingly feeling.
While I believe that the marketing effect of having "vendor certificates" for a product is positive (both for the holder of the certificate and for the product), there is more to the story than just that. I would like to point out two issues in the following:
Without disqualifying any certificates in particular, then there is imho a fundamental problem with such "vendor certificates" - and that is just that: they're "vendor". Most of the certification programs I've had contact with emphasize "the way of the vendor" a lot, and ignores (or assumes known) the general workings og things.
Let me give an example, which unfortunately is not just "thought up": most OS vendor certificates teach "setting up networking" and such. Some even "debugging network problems". Yet none (of those I have seen or heard of) set asside sufficient time to teach the fundamental understanding of the protocols behavior and how to utilize and interpret the output of various tools (traceroute and tcpdump comes to mind). I support this observation by experiences from working in a large organization with various OS-vendor certified personel (Novell and MS-certifications) - to whom the notion of "port numbers" under IP was completely unfamiliar (yes, the MS person in question did have the MS networking part, or so his resume said). I do believe that he could set up MS-something-server much faster than most (as could the Novel guy probably with a Novell-product), but that was not the issue (which was figuring out why some traffic didn't get through a particular router).
This leads me to the other issue, namely that with all those "vendor certificates", HR-people tend to hire more on those (the flash-value of a bunch of golden-framed certificates is known to be high in HR), than on the actual skills. The result (as was my experience) was, that the IT-department ends up with lots of people, who can (rightfully) claim to be "certified" - but who cannot really claim the understanding of what is going on...and who definitely will work less-than-good in a heterogenous setting (as most places really are: different servers, mainframes, terminals and workstations in a mess of a network with a mess of different traffic).
Anyways, the emphasis on "vendor certificates" has - in my experience - caused people to focus on "getting the certificate" (because that catches the eye of the HR-people) rather than on the actual learning the skills. And that is the real problem: very few do as the author of this very fine review of RedHat's certification process and say "hey, I know most of this stuff in general, but now I really need to know how RedHat do things". Most rather think "Uhmm...Redhat == money, I need that certificate".
Finally, a problem about vendor certificates is, that there is no real control with what they yield. Traditionally, teaching organizations (one way or another) are subject to some level of control, which should guarantee some level of quality. As the author of the review rightfully points out, then there might be big differences between what the course looks like in different sites. (not that the courses in universities and colleages do not differ either, but they are supposibly subject to some sort of quality control...)
That said, I find it encouraging that RedHat does provide what (to me) seems like rather real settings for part of their tests: "This machine is broken, fix it!" and "This machine should do XXX, make it so". I hope and wish that the training behind does provide a good background for doing this propperly.
Yet I still believe (and am trying to teach HR) that it is more important to evaluate actual skills and experience than simply to count the number of certificates....
...there is always a class of people (i.e. professionals) who will always need _real_ film.
While some may not consider photojournalists "real" professionals, that is where I see professionals going completely to digital.
For photo journalists, it makes good sense with digital cameras: short processing time is important, pictures are anyhow uses in "low quality" (i.e. rasterized grossly) and the main layout work is done electronically anyways. Hence in that field it is "speed over quality" any day.
I don't even dare to think about what the Nikon/Kodak-D1 costs (without any lenses), while The best camera in the world is well within reach of the serious amateurs and pros, as are lenses and other acessories.
Most digital cameras do a decent job as replacement for compact cameras / APS-cameras, but they do mostly aim for the auto-focus, auto-everything situations - and are ill equiped for most anything else (very few have manual focus / exposure in a way that is easy to use, very few offer spot metering etc). Yes, I am a dedicated Zuikoholic and swear to manual focus and such. However should I go out and buy a digital camera, the one which comes closest to what I expect from a camera would be Olympus C3030 zoom. I would not replace any 35mm film camera with thatone, but it is imho the "least bad" of the affordable digital cameras. It has no good manual focus facilities, but it does feature spot metering and manual as well as auto exposure.
Maybe the choise of the term "proprietary" is wrong, but GPL does restrict (from a cooporate point of view) what can be done with a piece of software. Indeed, that is the whole point og GPL (insert usual reference to the philosophy of gnu.org here...) - at least from what I see. In simple terms: if a company wish to make modifications to GPL'ed software, then these must also be GPL'ed. However as was pointed out so often before, there is nothing wrong with providing FooApp under GPL AND another license at the same time - at the authors discretion. I believe it's been done with success.
Ok, I acknowledge the point that the Linux kernel will be rather hard to issue a parallel license for. But Linus states explicitly in the COPYING file with the kernel:
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Exactly if this also goes for libc and friends, I do not know - but I would assume that they're lgpl'ed or something?
So I guess anyone can go kick up a new, proprietary OS while using the Linux kernel......and so what's the problem?
....if someone wants info on phones which (at some point) may be attached to a Linux-based computer.
Check http://www.cs.uit.no/linux-irda/ for information about this. In particular http://www.cs.uit.no/linux-irda/hardw are.html surveys phones (and other stuff) with emphasis on IrDA-capabilities and cooperation with Linux.
If everything is accessed as a file, it's probably a Unix. No special hidden "registries", no extended invisible attributes, just files.
Ethernet on
Entire physical or logical disk drives accessible under one filename (/dev/hda,
Serial ports as a file, printers as a file, etc...
That's UNIX. Accept no substitute.
If that's the case, then Linux is not an unix....the networking interfaces have - traditionally - not shown in
Just not to confuse anything....
....will this guy stand up to his words? I quote from the article:
:)
"So what constitutes fair use of a DVD in your eyes -- besides simply buying a DVD and using one of the MPAA's authorized players?
Any use by which you buy it at a price. "
I guess that's what most of us want: go out and buy our DVD's to watch on whatever player we find convenient....My respect for MPAA just grow significantly
It could be most interresting if someone could get to talk to this guy, and ask him fair and square questions to have him elaborate on this. Questions such as "How do you suggest that we play the DVD's we've paid good money for using alternative systems such as Linux, *BSD and Solaris?"
He definitely must have a good solution to this, considering his other statement in the article:
"The principle occupation [of the MPAA] is to make sure that American movies move freely and unhobbled around the world,"
Am I just clueless, or aren't the "region codes" and the combatting of DeCSS counterproductive to the "principle occupation of the MPAA" ????
Are all these attacks recently somehow related?
....well, damm good question, I'll say yes. Not necessarilly because they're committed by the same group of people. But because they are DUE TO the same group of people. Yes, I am of course talking about the group of people, commonly known as "system administrators", "network administrators", the "IS-department" etc.
Without casting blame on anyone, my general experience from all too many years as an independant consultant is, that most of the people in charge of managing security at various sites know next to nothing (if even that much) about what they are doing and what they are up against. I've seen horrifying examples from within the financial sector as well as the public health sector, which makes me everything but surprised when security is violated or sites taken down (sites being used in a more general term than "www-servers").
It's probably not the network administrators who are to blame either - it's their managers and organization who are often clueless as to what is required and therefore hire the first the best guy who can spell "Windows NT" without making too many mistakes. Being a bit harsh - I know - but these days people are hired on "vendor certificates" (as in MCP and CNE) rather than generic skills - for example within networking or computers in general. Having completed a "vendor certification program", one surely must know the products one has been certified for. But that's (unfortunately) no guarantee that the person has the knowledge required to manage a network.
As an example I've time and time again been surprised to see the amount of "MCP's" (and those "microsoft certified engineers" or what their title be), who had superiour skills when it came to managing their NT-boxes - but for whom solving even the simplest networking problems was impossible. Most people who've grown up with computers are very familiar with tools such as ping, traceroute, tcpdump and friends and know some of the working of the commonly used protocol stacks - and most of those new-born administrators are barely familiar enough with networks to know what an IP-address is.
I know it is difficult to find people with good qualifications. I've been looking for some for clients for the past 2 years with little luck. Most applicants put up a blank face when presented with technical questions that goes beyond "point-and-klick". Yet they still get jobs in different companies....
So yeah, I am not surprised....and yeah, those attacks are somehow related...
Just my $0.02
Who Cares? It's in the 5Ghz+ band. That is useless spectrum for anything but line of sight things like this. The more access options the better!
Well, I have a past (and to some extend present) in ham-radio (amateur radio). At a cirtain time a long long time ago the VHF and later UHF-bands were assigned exclusively for ham-usage (at least in my regions) because "those very high frequencies are an useless spectrum for anything"......now, how many services have migrated from the HF-bands and lower to VHF and higher bands?
History (also from within our own field of computers) should have tought us not to deem anything "useless for anything but " - sooner or later they will become usefull for a lot more than originally envisioned.
While I agree on "the more access options the better", I also have to agree with those who point out that it makes more sense to pull a fiber to each house and use low-power, local-area wireless lan in-house, than it does to provide a global (or at least nation-wide) wireless system.
So what sort of binary are these "Binary" filters going to be written in then? It wouldn't be i386 binary would it by any chance??? How is that going to run on my Alpha then?
It is very easy to campaign against the Microsoft monopoly whilst supporting the i386 one!!
While I agree that it would be better to device a truely "open" approach, I also believe that it's not a very realistic goal. Face it: there are companies who go great lengths keeping secrets, and who believe that their own printer language is the most significant of all secrets. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to convince them all to give up that idea? Indeed - however I also take the more pragmatic approach, and merely saying that IF we want more support for "our" operating system from hardware manufacturers (such as printer manufacturers), then we have to (at least initially) play by their rules.
Giving companies an opportunity to make binary-only drivers for their choise of Linux-platform and release alongside the binary-only versions of drivers for Windows and MacOS clearly cannot be a step in the wrong direction?
Once they're on the band-wagon, then may realize that the platform-requests (valid - such as yours - saying "Why is Alpha / PPC / Sparc / x86 / StrongArm / mk68 not supported?") and requests for features, updates and such COMBINED with the willingness from the community to put in an active effort in developing and maintaining such themself is a motivation to give away also the source code.
I believe, that most HW-manufacturers make money from MAKING HARDWARE not from writing drivers. I also believe, that most HW-manufacturers want access to as big a share of the market as possible. And I guess that the reason many haven't been supporting Linux and other unices is, that the market share is rather small and the efforts required to support that market is rather large (qua the lack of standardized, driver-based architectures).
Besides, I am not one of those, who believe that all software should be GPL'ed. I believe that it is the developers right to choose whatever license he or she wants - and the users right to decide to use it or not.
I yearn for the day when companies write drivers for Linux(/Unix) and opensource them so that all Unixes can
share in the glory, and we all laugh at Windows for a decade because it's fragmented, hard to use for longer
than 30 minutes, and it locks you into proprietary solutions.
Actually, what Linux (and Unix in general) needs is an architecture where it is straight forward for printer manufacturers to WRITE a (possibly binary-only) driver. The current solutions involving ghostscript and friends are too troublesome to write "drivers" for, requires the drivers be released under cirtain licences and does take some brains from the user to make work right.
A unified system into which an arbitrary driver could easilly be plugged would yield a lot. Using something like the input- and output-filters of lpr is one option, which all too often seems to cause troubles for people. Ohh, and by the way that has the added overhead of the driver having to be able to interpret postscript (= what most Unix programs generate per default) in addition to its own "printer language".....
That said, we also need decent libraries for interfacing the printer subsystem when writing applications - or have I been ignorant to what has been happening?
Now if there was only a way to get this kind of speed with no wires at all!
I dream of an inexpensive, wireless gigabit/sec connection!
Well, afaik some of the most high-end wireless consumer networks available at this time would be Hiperlan (23.5Mbps). Some information is available
here and here.
There exists faster wireless networks, however then we're not in the "consumer end" any more.
"Dallas-based start-up Media Fusion has won a U.S. patent on a process it says can send data, video and voice over electric wires at speeds thousands of times faster than current high-speed Internet access technologies."
:)
In other words it appears Media Fusion has patented an electronic signal on a metalic fibre called a wire. They must be so proud of their Intellectual Property
I guess the keywords you are missing are "at speeds thousands of times faster than current high-speed Internet access technologies". That does make a significant difference.
I only wish there was more information available on this - it sounds almost too good to be true, and the article is mostly marketing stuff. Can anyone with more EE/transmission-theory-background than mine share some information / references.
And btw, is "current high-speed Internet access technologies" the 34Mbit/s feed into this place? Then it's a darn fast thing they've come up with.
*waiting impatiently for more factual information*
Just curious, I didn't think his books were actually open source, that you could get them for free or anything like that....
Well, Knuth is the father of TeX (well-known and usefull typesetting system) which is "free" in the best sense of the word. And as for his book, publication of algorithms (in books, academic papers etc) is not only part of forming a foundation for those who write free software - but it also prevents companies like "those we all know and dislike" from doing their patent-stunts and preventing free software authors from writing their software.
So I guess that Knuth indeed does deserve to be nominated - he's doing a lot of good for free software.
Go Knuth
can be found here.
To quote from the page: "We want to give this award to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see our definition of free software), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software."
I guess I'd vote for Knuth. Not just for TeX....but also for his other, widely *published* work on algorithms. While not necessarily being free "software", algorithms (and knowledge about) are important for free software....
Go Knuth (not that the other nominated aren't worthy...they definitely are...)
What we need is a
central linux (or more general "Free software") legal departement to fight them in the long term...
Brilliant...I believe FSF is more than willing to do that - provided, of course, that you hand over the copyrights (or whatever the legal term is) over your SW to FSF (imho, that's a fair claim if one wants their services. Lawyers cost money, ya' kno').
Something like that is although rather difficult on projects such as Linux - no one person can hand over the "copyrights" of Linux. Both in the broader term of "Linux distributions" as well as narrowly about the kernel. Linus explicitly writes in the file "COPYING" (with the kernel):
" Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. "
But the issue is of interrest: what good is OpenSource, GPL etc. unless there is some way of defending it (and unless that it actually is defended)...?
.....how in the old days, "Big Blue" were the bad, proprietary and closed ones while Sun was the "good" alternative (someone around here has a clever signature saying something like "I remember when Sun really was about open computing").
Now, everybody is cheering at Big Blue and ranting over Sun being proprietary and closed....
One has to wonder...when will the things change again, and we will find ourselves cheering at Microsoft...? (It could happen, you know....)
First, I have a hard time seeing how broadcasting over IP is any much different than broadcasting over some other protocol (that being a physical protocol over a dedicated cable or whatever).
;)
In fact, with the extended usage of IP-over-the-TV-cable and in the not-so-distant future when the bandwidth reaches the point where it is not going to be a limitation, it may even make sense to do just what they're doing. Imagine, all programs available to choose from at any time - and being able to cut the crap? Imagine watching Ally McBeal all day long
A further bonus is, that with the development of secure, electronic transactions etc, it may make pay-per-view and different viewer-statistics much easier to obtain than today. Downside is, of course, that it makes viewer-statistics much easier to obtain than today (here we go on the privacy-issue again.....)
That said......I am thinking in terms of a TV-station using this model for distributing their programs. It's completely different from unauthorized relaying of other peoples programs....IANAL, but my common sense tells me that yeah, a lawsuit is in place here. If canadian law disagrees, then - to me - canadian law contradicts common sense.....
Here i go, i make a call to ppl to do something. I dont know what, but do something. Help us
/.-article about "something going wrong in Australia"....
/.-community would be a heated debate for a day - and then nothing else. Let's prove him wrong. Let's do something - anything......
As mentioned in a similar post a few days ago (Similar in that the Australian were being victims of something insane like government-authorized privacy violations), I believe this to be more of a global issue than what one might think right away....
Now this is happening in Australia - or rather: now we KNOW OF this happening in Australia. If it isn't going on everywhere else allready, it's sure to come.....and soon. Along with government approved and required backdoors in every system and restrictions on cryptography (and thereby - IMHO - on the feedom of speech) etc.
Let me restate my proposal from last time there was a
It is time for slashdotters to unite and raise our voices.
Someone mentioned somewhere in the comments following this story about another wierd act in Australia that the most likely response from the
And on that note...any ideas on what we CAN in fact do? I'd imagine that acting as a community would give some weight to our actions (please - decent ideas only...spamming someone, even a politician, is NOT a decent idea).
With great sympathy for "jdigital" and his fellow australians....
Rip out their "desktop" - I have a desktop. I just want to start a plain word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program - not a new desktop
Reduce the memory usage. How comes that just starting the StarOffice "desktop" takes 64MB? Even EMACS takes less memory with the usual modes loaded (GNUS, AUC-tex,....)
Make their postscript-engine work with color on Unix. Yes, I had to make slides regularly this spring for teaching. On occation, StarOffice would drop colors on parts of my slides (no, it's not a memory problem in the printer). The routine of making slides in Linux, walking to a co-workers Windows-box and use the Windows version to generate valid postscript then walk back to Linux to print quickly got tireing. Ohh, and when it's working in Linux they may be able to patch the Solaris version too...I had the same problems with Sparc/Solaris
Otherwise, I like StarOffice (well...I've mainly used their presentation-graphics proggie). It is a pretty decent program, doesn't crash and has a nice set of features. Fix the above and it's worth every $$.
The Europeans do it.....
Britain is proposing some really extreme anti-crypto laws (you would have to turn over the key to any encryted data you had or
prove you don't know the key. Proving you don't have it is virtually impossible, so if someone sends you an email containing a bunch
of gibberish then anonymously reports that you're into child porn/terrorism you could go to jail).
But on the other hand Germany is sponsoring development of GPG.
Germans sudden move to sponsor GPG has cirtanly changed my attitude towards them to the better. However I was refering to a situation some - ohh - a year ago, maybe, where Denmark (I am really Danish by nationality, allthough I live in France for the time being) signed some EU-thingie (law, bill, whatever). I have lost track of that (and a quick search didn't help me), but it was something which should be equivalent to the US-regulations on crypthography.
What was really amazing was, that signing that "thing" on behalf of Denmark was done by some administrator - not by an elected politician, and without any previous and public debate. Most people, interrested in this field (such as yours truely) didn't hear about this thing until after it had been decided.
Another astonishing example of governments pulling some law out without involving neither technical experts not informing us - the people....