I'm not saying that licenses are a necessary evil. I don't think they're necessary. I was just explaining that they are used because companies are still trying to force digital information into the old mode of Cost=Demand/Supply, which is doomed to failure eventually. With software, they use licenses. With music, they use copyright. With DVD and DeCSS, they use smoke and lawyers. (Mmmmm. An image of burning lawyers just popped into my head, but smoke and lawyers would probably be accomplished by the lawyers burning piles of money their clients had given them).
"The problem is" the equation of Cost=Demand/Supply does not apply to digital information. Instead, cost is directly linked to the value of the information. The formula would be something like
Cost consumer will pay = (Value to the end user and nobody else) + (Guilt factor of the end user about pirating)/ (ease of pirating) + (Cost/end user's budget)
That is, the end user will pay for something that is of value to them, as long as they aren't too guilty about pirating, but the cost decreases the easier it is to pirate the information and the higher the cost is in relation to the user's budget. (Budget being determined by either actual financial standing or being a tightwad).
If Microsoft does not port Office to Linux, we have every right to investigate the Office file format so that we can write our own software to read it. We have every right to write our own software for linux that accomplishes all the same functions as Office does.
If in 20 years, gasoline is no longer sold, do you have a right to convert your '59 Corvette to a fuel cell engine? You betcha.
If I've purchased something, I have a right to use it (not to redistribute or do anything illegal with it). Just because the shrink-wrap license on the inside of the box in very small print says that they own my eternal soul doesn't make it true.
Software is worthless if the traditional value system is used. Cost is determined by supply and demand. With digital information, supply is practically limitless, and therefore no matter how much demand there is, the cost becomes zero.
Software licenses are a completely artificial means of keeping the equation balanced. Since you need a license to use the software, and the producer controls the supply of licenses, there is now a non-infinite supply.
There are many problems with software licenses, however.
* Is the producer guilty of price fixing, since they are manipulating supply in order to control the price to the consumer? (Rhetorical question. There've been specific laws to allow software licenses)
* Does a mouse click on a button that says "yes", witnessed by nobody, have the same legal ramifications as a signature by that person or even handwritten initials? Furthermore, the boxes to read the license are often much too small to comfortably read anyhow. Does that invalidate them? Americans with Disabilities Act anyone?
* If you hack the binary install script to change the license before ever running the install script, and agree to a license that you wrote that says "You may do whatever you want with this software", are you still bound by the original license? It is possible to do this without even reading the license.
* Then there's the whole thing about licenses being too broad and one sided, like "You may not let anyone else ever even think about using your licensed copy of this software. This software comes with no gaurantee that it will work at all. If it doesn't even come close to doing what it's supposed to do, tough luck! We reserve the right to terminate your license at any time for any reason we deem necessary and not refund your money. By using this software, you agree that we own your eternal soul, even if you're an atheist."
* What if I use my friend's computer to reverse engineer some software he installed? I never agreed to the license agreement. What if I did it without even asking him?
* Isn't it impossible to prohibit reverse engineering? It's a natural human thought process. It's part of our survival instinct to try and figure out how things work. "Hmmm, that little rock seems to be holding that big boulder in place. I better not pull that little rock out or the big boulder will crush me."
I wish Dave Barry was technical. He could have a field day with this issue (and he's got lots of readers).
I'm sure there are many other legal quandries surrounding software patents. IANAL.
So, if you didn't use software licenses, you'd need some other way to make money from the software. The natural reason to pay for software (with coding/debugging help in the case of Open Source software) is to reward the devloper(s) and encourage them to keep up the good work.
They have stopped officially shunning the name "Borland". The Development Tools division is called Borland, the enterprise division is called Inprise, the company's official name is Inprise, the stock ticker is INPR, and that's how it's going to stay for a while because Dale Fuller isn't stupid enough to spend the umpteen million dollars it takes to change a company's name on something so silly.
We'll probably see a lot more Linux activity from the Borland part than the Inprise part -- at least at first.
A few of the people in the enterprise devision used to think that the Dev. Tools. division was obsolete, since the enterprise customers paid so much more money per sale than the puny little developers. Of course, we all know that developers are the wizards of the computer world, and an army of wizards is not to be trifled with.
Re:Milleniophobia!!! [Fun math for millenianuts!]
on
Brightest Moon Fallacy
·
· Score: 1
MilleniumNut: The world is coming to the end!
SanePerson: Why?
MilleniumNut: Because it's the millenium, dude!
SanePerson: And what does that have to do with it?
MilleniumNut: It's been 2000 years since the birth of Christ!!!!...and the Bible says quite clearly (when translated by babelfish from it's original text scanned in with a very bad OCR program and a lousy scanner) that the world is going to end 2000 years after the birth of Christ!!!!!
SanePerson: Oh, well, did you know that the monk who calculated Jesus' birthday made a mistake and it was later calculated that his real birthday was around 3 or 4 B.C. That would mean that 1996 or 1997 was 2000 years after the birth of Christ. It doesn't appear that the world ended a few years ago.
MilleniumNut: Well, there's going to be a really big Ricky Martin concert!!!!!!
SanePerson: OK, that could cause the end of the world. I'll give you that one.
Linux usability is just fine for a setting such as a government office. For one thing, Star Office tries really hard to make the user feel like they are using windows (yuck). There's even a Start menu!
Secondly, in a corporate or government setting, each individual user does not need to administer their own machine. Training someone to use linux is a lot cheaper than training someone to administer linux. On the other hand, every user does need to know how to administer their windows machine, although it's alot easier to 'admin' a 9x box than a linux box, but this also gives IT the headache and lost time of restoring someone's fubared 9x machine. I would say that it's much easier to use linux than use + administer correctly any windows.
The same goes for most uses of NT I've seen, since the first thing people do is give their normal username Administrator equivalence or just plain log in as Administrator 100% of the time.
So the company decides what software people need access to, with a suitable means of handling requests for new software. Workers are more productive without all the stupid AOL Instant Mess and Frootloops Screensaver 2000 anyhow.
I really don't mind that AMD is playing a little profit game right now by waiting to release a faster CPU until they can squeeze a little more money out of their current offering.
They haven't been profitable in a loooong time, so if they don't make money now, they could go the way of Hurcules. As we've seen many times, the better products don't always win. Competition from Intel will keep them from getting too greedy, and Intel isn't exactly in trouble just yet.
Of course, my not caring might have something to do with the fact that I'm not in the market for a faster CPU at the moment. (Although a PII 350 seems painfully slow these days).
> You don't tell diabetics that they would have more energy if they just stopped taking insulin and got some fresh air, don't insult depressives the same way.
Not a flame, just a correction.
Many, many diabetics (such as my father, grandfather, and probably myself in a few years) actually can stop taking their insulin if they can maintain a good exercise program. YMMV
My father and I both have the rather cynical view that Drug and "Medecine" companies would like nothing better than to have every single person dependant on something like insulin or Prozac for their very existance. Nice steady revenue stream and lots of real Control over people. Witness how much research money is spent on treating the symptoms of diseases vs finding a cure. In fact, most of the research being done to find a cure is provided by people with the disease themselves or their relatives, not the drug companies. They'd never get away with selling a cure for diabetes for $100,000, but they can easily milk that much money off of a diabetic over his lifetime.
When you are diagnosed with Diabetes, most likely your doctor will recommend a regular regimen of insulin to keep your Diabetes under control, even if your blood sugar is normally level. You get to live the rest of your life slowly losing your vision and circulation in your extremeties.
Correct me if I'm wrong ( I've never written in Python, so there's a good chance of that), but isn't Python an interpreted language where the source is always available?
Java is compiled into bytecode, and many tools exist to obfuscate the bytecode to the point where it cannot be usefully decompiled.
To Open Source afficianados, the fact that Python programs are automatically open source isn't a problem. Software companies and shareware authors would probably feel differently.
I like to believe that Rob *does* believe in Open Source, but he's just in the group of coders who believe that some projects should start in the cathedral, then move to the bazaar when they are a little more mature. You'll notice that "Beta is only a state of mind" or something along those lines is below every story.
...that, and the shame factor of bad coding style and/or adult language comments might be involved;o)
Please say the X-Windows configuration happens AFTER installation.
Yes, it's nice to only have to reboot once during the entire installation, but I don't know how many times I had to redo my entire installation with RedHat when I was first starting out just because the X-configuration didn't go so hot.
For new users who don't know that you can switch to a virtual terminal and telinit 3, a messed up X configuration combined with an X login means no access to the system!
>especially since it had never been done before (on this planet)...
Bzzzt. Actually, life probably started and got squished several times (according to all of my earth-science education, anyhow). We're just the lucky ones who started evolving AFTER the meteors stopped raining down so often.
So are we a clever hack by God? Let's see anyone else write a self-replicating, self-rewriting, evolving program when the only tools available to you are different flavors of mud.
> I still don't understand why people get upset about irradiated foods though.
(I'm not an expert) I understand why people might get upset about irradiated foods.
First of all, there's the irrational fear that irradiated foods will be radioactive, and therefore bad for you. This is just silly, but understandable given the magical nature of radiation to the non-educated.
Secondly, the more realistic complaint that people want their food to be living. The purpose of iradiating food is to kill certain things in it. Of course, our bodies also depend on micro-organisms that we probably get from things we eat. (We can also get very harmful micro-organsisms from things we eat). So, the same people who eat real yogurt, drink raw milk, and take acidophilus probably don't want their food irradiated either.
The GPL says that you must make your source code AVAILABLE. Putting your source code in a closed, inaccessible box does not fit the definition of "available".
Now, making it damn near impossible to modify the binary would be a better option, since this guy's main fear seems to be supporting modifcations, not that competitors will be able to see the source code.
Now, an uber-hacker using this device could still get the source code, run it on a hardware simulator (a.k.a their head), and find the bug that was making the lcd display tweak out, come up with a fix, and send it to the makers of the hardware, who would be very thankful, include the fix in the newest version of the product, and give the hacker a free product to give to all of his friends for christmas/honuka/martian new-year.
...as people around the internet stop receiving e-mail from any Hotmail accounts. After installing the spam filtering software, all mail sent from Hotmail gets deleted before it even leaves the Hotmail servers! Hurray!
Notice that the animated GIFs do not come from Slashdot's servers themselves. Most sites that have banner ads do not host the images on their own server, since they subscribe to some ad service.
What about all those people signing up for 1-year DSL service agreements (like me) and the fools siging up for 3-year 56Kb modem service agreements with their "free" pc's?
I would hope that either the ISP/Telco has to absorb the cost of the modem tax for these people or their service agreements are null and void (if there were a modem tax put instantiated).
I had the priveledge of taking cmp80D, "Introduction to Cybernetics" (no, not Dianetics, Cybernetics) directly from Huffman at UCSC.
First of all, every class he ever tought was at 8:00am in the morning. For a Santa Cruzian, that's the equivalent of 4:00am since we normally don't wake up till 12;o)
For the first two weeks of class, he was an absolute teddy bear. That was good, since the class was open to all majors (Modern Feminism and History of Conciousness included). Two weeks into the class, someone fell asleep in the front row. He wasn't a teddy bear anymore. From that point on, the entire class was in fear for their life whenever he turned around quickly.
The class was very hard. Homework was due every single class and there was a quiz almost every single class. Every class introduced brand new material. Miss a single class and you're totally screwed. Of course, after that class, most other CS theory courses were review;O)
I was lucky enough to have a class from Huffman and hear the story from him personally.
A few more details...
Nobody in the class but Huffman chose the term paper because they new it was a trap. The professors assigned Huffman a problem that many people believed was unproveable, though it could not be proved unproveable. It was a problem that they had worked on very hard and not been able to solve.
The assignment was to find a way to generate minimum spanning trees, given an arbitrary set of bytes. Now, humans could do this with brute force and then checking their results to test if the spanning tree was actually the minimum spanning tree, but it wasn't a very scientific process.
As the due date for the term paper came, Huffman still couldn't figure it out. He gave up, decided to bite the bullet and try his luck at the test he hadn't studied for. He told his wife to throw his papers away. She did, and as he was leaving he looked in the trash and saw his notes and drawings of minimum spanning trees **upside down**... and the rest is the history.
I heard somewhere that he got his Masters and PhD at the same time because of this, but I'm not sure about that one.
I know speech recognition seems cool and it will be very good for the disabled, but it's not a purely good thing.
Now, instead of requiring at least 2 people to invade your privacy and listen to everything you say, one supercomputer and a bunch of listening devices let The Man (tm) listen to thousands of people at once and scan the transcripts for keywords and sentances.
It is important to realize that Delphi is much different than Visual Basic. Delphi is pretty much identical to C++ Builder (actually CB is based on Delphi). Delphi does not use an interpreted language like most RAD tools do. It generates native code.
The major benefit to using Delphi is that you can just plop down a **very** nice gui and have it work with no bugs. That lets you focus on the guts of your project. I don't know how many times I've used a GUI app on Linux that does it's job well, but has a crash/core dump bug when you pull down the wrong menu and click in the wrong place.
Delphi being released Open Source? Never going to happen. If Borland is smart, they'll release a free (at least as in beer) command line compiler so that people can compile projects written in Delphi. If you take the open source away from linux, you have nothing. Therefore, if your development tool is too expensive to be used for open source projects, the project leads will stay away from it.
I hate to burst your optimism, but this test doesn't look to me like it is come out in favor of linux.
The very quote you cite,
All to often testing focuses on the speeds and feeds of a product. PC Week Interactive aims to change that. This first is a series of tests aim to look past the standard performance features of an application, and examine its reliability, usability, security, and total cost of ownership.
sounds to me like this is going to be result in "with our ultra-scientific testing results, we've determined that MS Windows NT is without a doubt more stable, reliable, user-friendly, and lower in total cost of ownership than Linux." I've seen it too many times before.
Also, when they mention several sites that have been recently hacked, such as ABCnews and the Drudge Report, they say that some were running NT and some were running linux, but Netcraft results indicate that they were all running some flavor of NT and IIS. Already the facts aren't completely straight.
Finally, it all comes down to how the boxes are administered. I don't know anything about the additional software they are putting on it for serving classified ads, but it could be wide open to hackers, especially if it runs as root (don't put it past them). Furthermore, Redhat is not the most secure linux distro out of the box. When Redhat makes a corporate sale with service packages, I'm sure they tweak the post-installation for security.
If you, yes you, hack www.fbi.gov and put up porn, instructions for building nuclear weapons, and your actual home address, you will win the following: Free housing for 10-30 years! Free "food" for 10-30 years! Free sex for 10-30 years! Free training in a useful trade!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that licenses are a necessary evil. I don't think they're necessary. I was just explaining that they are used because companies are still trying to force digital information into the old mode of Cost=Demand/Supply, which is doomed to failure eventually. With software, they use licenses. With music, they use copyright. With DVD and DeCSS, they use smoke and lawyers. (Mmmmm. An image of burning lawyers just popped into my head, but smoke and lawyers would probably be accomplished by the lawyers burning piles of money their clients had given them).
"The problem is" the equation of Cost=Demand/Supply does not apply to digital information. Instead, cost is directly linked to the value of the information. The formula would be something like
Cost consumer will pay = (Value to the end user and nobody else) + (Guilt factor of the end user about pirating)/ (ease of pirating) + (Cost/end user's budget)
That is, the end user will pay for something that is of value to them, as long as they aren't too guilty about pirating, but the cost decreases the easier it is to pirate the information and the higher the cost is in relation to the user's budget. (Budget being determined by either actual financial standing or being a tightwad).
If Microsoft does not port Office to Linux, we have every right to investigate the Office file format so that we can write our own software to read it. We have every right to write our own software for linux that accomplishes all the same functions as Office does.
If in 20 years, gasoline is no longer sold, do you have a right to convert your '59 Corvette to a fuel cell engine? You betcha.
If I've purchased something, I have a right to use it (not to redistribute or do anything illegal with it). Just because the shrink-wrap license on the inside of the box in very small print says that they own my eternal soul doesn't make it true.
Software is worthless if the traditional value system is used. Cost is determined by supply and demand. With digital information, supply is practically limitless, and therefore no matter how much demand there is, the cost becomes zero.
Software licenses are a completely artificial means of keeping the equation balanced. Since you need a license to use the software, and the producer controls the supply of licenses, there is now a non-infinite supply.
There are many problems with software licenses, however.
* Is the producer guilty of price fixing, since they are manipulating supply in order to control the price to the consumer? (Rhetorical question. There've been specific laws to allow software licenses)
* Does a mouse click on a button that says "yes", witnessed by nobody, have the same legal ramifications as a signature by that person or even handwritten initials? Furthermore, the boxes to read the license are often much too small to comfortably read anyhow. Does that invalidate them? Americans with Disabilities Act anyone?
* If you hack the binary install script to change the license before ever running the install script, and agree to a license that you wrote that says "You may do whatever you want with this software", are you still bound by the original license? It is possible to do this without even reading the license.
* Then there's the whole thing about licenses being too broad and one sided, like
"You may not let anyone else ever even think about using your licensed copy of this software. This software comes with no gaurantee that it will work at all. If it doesn't even come close to doing what it's supposed to do, tough luck! We reserve the right to terminate your license at any time for any reason we deem necessary and not refund your money. By using this software, you agree that we own your eternal soul, even if you're an atheist."
* What if I use my friend's computer to reverse engineer some software he installed? I never agreed to the license agreement. What if I did it without even asking him?
* Isn't it impossible to prohibit reverse engineering? It's a natural human thought process. It's part of our survival instinct to try and figure out how things work. "Hmmm, that little rock seems to be holding that big boulder in place. I better not pull that little rock out or the big boulder will crush me."
I wish Dave Barry was technical. He could have a field day with this issue (and he's got lots of readers).
I'm sure there are many other legal quandries surrounding software patents. IANAL.
So, if you didn't use software licenses, you'd need some other way to make money from the software. The natural reason to pay for software (with coding/debugging help in the case of Open Source software) is to reward the devloper(s) and encourage them to keep up the good work.
Not true,yet.
They have stopped officially shunning the name "Borland". The Development Tools division is called Borland, the enterprise division is called Inprise, the company's official name is Inprise, the stock ticker is INPR, and that's how it's going to stay for a while because Dale Fuller isn't stupid enough to spend the umpteen million dollars it takes to change a company's name on something so silly.
We'll probably see a lot more Linux activity from the Borland part than the Inprise part -- at least at first.
A few of the people in the enterprise devision used to think that the Dev. Tools. division was obsolete, since the enterprise customers paid so much more money per sale than the puny little developers. Of course, we all know that developers are the wizards of the computer world, and an army of wizards is not to be trifled with.
MilleniumNut: The world is coming to the end!
...and the Bible says quite clearly (when translated by babelfish from it's original text scanned in with a very bad OCR program and a lousy scanner) that the world is going to end 2000 years after the birth of Christ!!!!!
SanePerson: Why?
MilleniumNut: Because it's the millenium, dude!
SanePerson: And what does that have to do with it?
MilleniumNut: It's been 2000 years since the birth of Christ!!!!
SanePerson: Oh, well, did you know that the monk who calculated Jesus' birthday made a mistake and it was later calculated that his real birthday was around 3 or 4 B.C. That would mean that 1996 or 1997 was 2000 years after the birth of Christ. It doesn't appear that the world ended a few years ago.
MilleniumNut: Well, there's going to be a really big Ricky Martin concert!!!!!!
SanePerson: OK, that could cause the end of the world. I'll give you that one.
Linux usability is just fine for a setting such as a government office. For one thing, Star Office tries really hard to make the user feel like they are using windows (yuck). There's even a Start menu!
Secondly, in a corporate or government setting, each individual user does not need to administer their own machine. Training someone to use linux is a lot cheaper than training someone to administer linux. On the other hand, every user does need to know how to administer their windows machine, although it's alot easier to 'admin' a 9x box than a linux box, but this also gives IT the headache and lost time of restoring someone's fubared 9x machine. I would say that it's much easier to use linux than use + administer correctly any windows.
The same goes for most uses of NT I've seen, since the first thing people do is give their normal username Administrator equivalence or just plain log in as Administrator 100% of the time.
So the company decides what software people need access to, with a suitable means of handling requests for new software. Workers are more productive without all the stupid AOL Instant Mess and Frootloops Screensaver 2000 anyhow.
I really don't mind that AMD is playing a little profit game right now by waiting to release a faster CPU until they can squeeze a little more money out of their current offering.
They haven't been profitable in a loooong time, so if they don't make money now, they could go the way of Hurcules. As we've seen many times, the better products don't always win. Competition from Intel will keep them from getting too greedy, and Intel isn't exactly in trouble just yet.
Of course, my not caring might have something to do with the fact that I'm not in the market for a faster CPU at the moment. (Although a PII 350 seems painfully slow these days).
> You don't tell diabetics that they would have more energy if they just stopped taking insulin and got some fresh air, don't insult depressives the same way.
Not a flame, just a correction.
Many, many diabetics (such as my father, grandfather, and probably myself in a few years) actually can stop taking their insulin if they can maintain a good exercise program. YMMV
My father and I both have the rather cynical view that Drug and "Medecine" companies would like nothing better than to have every single person dependant on something like insulin or Prozac for their very existance. Nice steady revenue stream and lots of real Control over people. Witness how much research money is spent on treating the symptoms of diseases vs finding a cure. In fact, most of the research being done to find a cure is provided by people with the disease themselves or their relatives, not the drug companies. They'd never get away with selling a cure for diabetes for $100,000, but they can easily milk that much money off of a diabetic over his lifetime.
When you are diagnosed with Diabetes, most likely your doctor will recommend a regular regimen of insulin to keep your Diabetes under control, even if your blood sugar is normally level. You get to live the rest of your life slowly losing your vision and circulation in your extremeties.
Correct me if I'm wrong ( I've never written in Python, so there's a good chance of that), but isn't Python an interpreted language where the source is always available?
Java is compiled into bytecode, and many tools exist to obfuscate the bytecode to the point where it cannot be usefully decompiled.
To Open Source afficianados, the fact that Python programs are automatically open source isn't a problem. Software companies and shareware authors would probably feel differently.
Slashdot is a "news for nerds", specifically internet nerds, site. As such, "slashdot" is a pun which goes nicely with the mood of the site.
I always say Craptiva anyhow.
Seriously, whenever I hear "Ford Excursion" it makes me think of vomiting or bowel movements.
When you have an oil leek, is it an excretion from your Excursion?
I like to believe that Rob *does* believe in Open Source, but he's just in the group of coders who believe that some projects should start in the cathedral, then move to the bazaar when they are a little more mature. You'll notice that "Beta is only a state of mind" or something along those lines is below every story.
;o)
...that, and the shame factor of bad coding style and/or adult language comments might be involved
Please say the X-Windows configuration happens AFTER installation.
Yes, it's nice to only have to reboot once during the entire installation, but I don't know how many times I had to redo my entire installation with RedHat when I was first starting out just because the X-configuration didn't go so hot.
For new users who don't know that you can switch to a virtual terminal and telinit 3, a messed up X configuration combined with an X login means no access to the system!
>especially since it had never been done before (on this planet)...
Bzzzt. Actually, life probably started and got squished several times (according to all of my earth-science education, anyhow). We're just the lucky ones who started evolving AFTER the meteors stopped raining down so often.
So are we a clever hack by God? Let's see anyone else write a self-replicating, self-rewriting, evolving program when the only tools available to you are different flavors of mud.
> I still don't understand why people get upset about irradiated foods though.
(I'm not an expert)
I understand why people might get upset about irradiated foods.
First of all, there's the irrational fear that irradiated foods will be radioactive, and therefore bad for you. This is just silly, but understandable given the magical nature of radiation to the non-educated.
Secondly, the more realistic complaint that people want their food to be living. The purpose of iradiating food is to kill certain things in it. Of course, our bodies also depend on micro-organisms that we probably get from things we eat. (We can also get very harmful micro-organsisms from things we eat). So, the same people who eat real yogurt, drink raw milk, and take acidophilus probably don't want their food irradiated either.
Um... no.
The GPL says that you must make your source code AVAILABLE. Putting your source code in a closed, inaccessible box does not fit the definition of "available".
Now, making it damn near impossible to modify the binary would be a better option, since this guy's main fear seems to be supporting modifcations, not that competitors will be able to see the source code.
Now, an uber-hacker using this device could still get the source code, run it on a hardware simulator (a.k.a their head), and find the bug that was making the lcd display tweak out, come up with a fix, and send it to the makers of the hardware, who would be very thankful, include the fix in the newest version of the product, and give the hacker a free product to give to all of his friends for christmas/honuka/martian new-year.
...as people around the internet stop receiving e-mail from any Hotmail accounts. After installing the spam filtering software, all mail sent from Hotmail gets deleted before it even leaves the Hotmail servers! Hurray!
Not hardly.
Notice that the animated GIFs do not come from Slashdot's servers themselves. Most sites that have banner ads do not host the images on their own server, since they subscribe to some ad service.
What about all those people signing up for 1-year DSL service agreements (like me) and the fools siging up for 3-year 56Kb modem service agreements with their "free" pc's?
I would hope that either the ISP/Telco has to absorb the cost of the modem tax for these people or their service agreements are null and void (if there were a modem tax put instantiated).
I had the priveledge of taking cmp80D, "Introduction to Cybernetics" (no, not Dianetics, Cybernetics) directly from Huffman at UCSC.
;o)
;O)
First of all, every class he ever tought was at 8:00am in the morning. For a Santa Cruzian, that's the equivalent of 4:00am since we normally don't wake up till 12
For the first two weeks of class, he was an absolute teddy bear. That was good, since the class was open to all majors (Modern Feminism and History of Conciousness included). Two weeks into the class, someone fell asleep in the front row. He wasn't a teddy bear anymore. From that point on, the entire class was in fear for their life whenever he turned around quickly.
The class was very hard. Homework was due every single class and there was a quiz almost every single class. Every class introduced brand new material. Miss a single class and you're totally screwed. Of course, after that class, most other CS theory courses were review
The class wasn't easy, but man could he teach.
I was lucky enough to have a class from Huffman and hear the story from him personally.
A few more details...
Nobody in the class but Huffman chose the term paper because they new it was a trap. The professors assigned Huffman a problem that many people believed was unproveable, though it could not be proved unproveable. It was a problem that they had worked on very hard and not been able to solve.
The assignment was to find a way to generate minimum spanning trees, given an arbitrary set of bytes. Now, humans could do this with brute force and then checking their results to test if the spanning tree was actually the minimum spanning tree, but it wasn't a very scientific process.
As the due date for the term paper came, Huffman still couldn't figure it out. He gave up, decided to bite the bullet and try his luck at the test he hadn't studied for. He told his wife to throw his papers away. She did, and as he was leaving he looked in the trash and saw his notes and drawings of minimum spanning trees **upside down**... and the rest is the history.
I heard somewhere that he got his Masters and PhD at the same time because of this, but I'm not sure about that one.
I know speech recognition seems cool and it will be very good for the disabled, but it's not a purely good thing.
Now, instead of requiring at least 2 people to invade your privacy and listen to everything you say, one supercomputer and a bunch of listening devices let The Man (tm) listen to thousands of people at once and scan the transcripts for keywords and sentances.
It is important to realize that Delphi is much different than Visual Basic. Delphi is pretty much identical to C++ Builder (actually CB is based on Delphi). Delphi does not use an interpreted language like most RAD tools do. It generates native code.
The major benefit to using Delphi is that you can just plop down a **very** nice gui and have it work with no bugs. That lets you focus on the guts of your project. I don't know how many times I've used a GUI app on Linux that does it's job well, but has a crash/core dump bug when you pull down the wrong menu and click in the wrong place.
Delphi being released Open Source? Never going to happen. If Borland is smart, they'll release a free (at least as in beer) command line compiler so that people can compile projects written in Delphi. If you take the open source away from linux, you have nothing. Therefore, if your development tool is too expensive to be used for open source projects, the project leads will stay away from it.
The very quote you cite,
sounds to me like this is going to be result in "with our ultra-scientific testing results, we've determined that MS Windows NT is without a doubt more stable, reliable, user-friendly, and lower in total cost of ownership than Linux." I've seen it too many times before.
Also, when they mention several sites that have been recently hacked, such as ABCnews and the Drudge Report, they say that some were running NT and some were running linux, but Netcraft results indicate that they were all running some flavor of NT and IIS. Already the facts aren't completely straight.
Finally, it all comes down to how the boxes are administered. I don't know anything about the additional software they are putting on it for serving classified ads, but it could be wide open to hackers, especially if it runs as root (don't put it past them). Furthermore, Redhat is not the most secure linux distro out of the box. When Redhat makes a corporate sale with service packages, I'm sure they tweak the post-installation for security.
If you, yes you, hack www.fbi.gov and put up porn, instructions for building nuclear weapons, and your actual home address, you will win the following:
Free housing for 10-30 years!
Free "food" for 10-30 years!
Free sex for 10-30 years!
Free training in a useful trade!
Who can resist!