Wow - mod that up as insightful, or something...
although there are lots of adjacent channels on my cable system, it's still a relatively easy thing to remedy.
a nit with the "major point of contention"
on
The Hacker Ethic
·
· Score: 1
Your quote of Himanen didn't say creativity was absent... he said it was not prominent; not forbidden but discouraged. The relative scarcity of the Franklin-type would seem to bear that out. So would our fascination with how creatives "beat the system" in their way, evinced by the success of things like Biography. If he's guilty of anything, it's confounding cause with correlation...
This is not cruptography, it's encoding, and that's not the same.
Uh, right, they aren't the same, but rot(n) is (weak) cryptographic enciphering.
Ciphers muddle around with the writing without regard for the content; hence they can be applied to anything that can be written down. Codes muddle about with a higher level, changing the symbols for concepts. Converting between ASCII, EBCDIC, and Morse is a cipher problem. Even though french, english, german, italian, etc all use the same set of letters, converting between them is not a cipher problem but a code problem.
Uhhh... Squawk to M$, or the lame magazines that drool over M$ products? I didn't say anything about switching OSs, now, did I?
As for 400-page manuals and taking weeks out of lives... excuse me? There's plenty o' 400+-page books for M$ products, and a plenty o' week+-long training courses. There's an enormous industry in teaching people how to use M$'s allegedly trivial-to-learn stuff.
Robert Morris is a hacker, Bill Gates is a business man.
You missed the point entirely. Windows has, by design,* caused the world a lot more security grief than Morris ever thought of. Yup, there's a big difference all right; Gates has a lot more lawyers, politicians, and media organs in his pockets.
* Morris' worm wriggled through various mistakes left in the software. Many of the latest horror stories - such as ILOVEYOU - worked entirely within the intended design of Winduhs. But who gets the blame? Sure, the guy who steals your stuff is bad, but if you built your mansion in a bad neighbourhood and went away for a week with all the doors and windows open and big map of the house on the front gate showing where all the goodies were, don't come to me looking for sympathy.
Put simply, M$'s design has been directly responsible for far more losses to intrusions than Morris's worm... yet Morris is in prison and Gates is a billionaire. What a wonderful country is the USofA.
somebody's gotta be capable of coming up with a non biased benchmark to give
theoretical average operations / sec.
Hm. How about the time it takes to compile the generic NetBSD kernel? Since NetBSD runs on almost anything for which the speed is interesting, and compiling involves a nice mix of real-world operations, execpt for floating-point.
Their dominance has created a dangerous
monoculture
Thank you! I said this months ago, when ILOVEYOU came out. Under M$ the net has become an organic entity with little biodiversity and essentially no immune system... dare I carry it on to analogues about promiscuity and Sexually Transmitted Diseases?
I compared it to the Irish Potato Famine... a single pest obliterated one entity on which an entire population relied. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that lives can be threatened by the combination of domination and insecurity in M$. I just hope enough critical systems aren't M$ that the food, the fuel, and the medicine will keep moving even if the M$ technology gets wiped. Ever wonder about how many trucking companies would be reduced to chaos without Winduhs?
this doesn't really count as harm for anti-trust purposes, making bad decisions in software design isn't against the law
For some kinds of systems, it ought to be... I mean, when a sign error in a radiotherapy machine nearly cooks someone to death, there should be restitution of some kind from the people who handled the software. Of course UCITA outlaws such laws, so whaddyagonnado.
I read the FoF, cover to cover, within days of Jackson releasing it (even converting it to TeX and making nice, compact, permanent copies for myself and a few friends... I was learning TeX at the time, it was good exercise:). I remember being impressed that some dingbat Reagan appointee was not just competent but apparently conversant with the situation. For someone whom Katz claims now himself claims not to have understood the issues, I thought he understood them very well...
I prefer to think Jackson's just being decently modest in such claims.
1. Before MS came along, computers were unaffordable. Now we all reap the benefits of a computer in every home.
I could debate the real benefits of a computer in every home - even the basic truth of it, many of my neighbours get on without one - but anywho, I remember using M$ BASIC on a Pet in, what, 1977, '78? Didn't it take rather a looong time, in the digital world, for this crop you allege M$ to have sowed (sown?), to grow? I think you confused correlation with causation here, as another pointed out... how did you look at all the bazillion computer companies that have come and gone since M$ was founded and decided it deserves all the credit? Does IBM get none for making the PC? Does... whoever it was... get none for backengineering the BIOS and making competitive PC clones? Does Altair - the computer for which M$ first produced, IIRC (where's my Hackers?) - get none for seeding a p.c. market in the first place?
Or are you just another johnny-cum-lately M$ worshipper?
In ruling against Microsoft, Judge Jackson defined the "relevant market" that Microsoft controlled as operating systems
and
replacements to operating systems. He then found that Microsoft's admittedly aggressive tactics harmed Navigator.
But Microsoft's lawyers have repeatedly argued -- correctly -- that Navigator isn't an operating system, and that Netscape
had neither interest in nor means to supplant Windows.
But it seems to me there was also testimony along the lines that the OS is just a particular set of APIs, and that the compliant Java engine provided by Netscape could weaken the distinctions between Winduhs and other OSs by providing another particular set of APIs which applications could use regardless of OS. One could argue that it's difficult to formally distinguish the JVM and an OS - I believe a compscientist would argue that this follows pretty closely upon how they use the term "Virtual Machine". And that Netscape did therefore comprise a threat to the dominance of Winduhs by providing a "virtual OS." This is why M$ produced an incompatible JVM, to splinter the Java market and weaken its power... the age-old "divide & conquer" tactic.
Thus, M$'s own actions demonstrate the threat Netscape (and Sun) posed to Winduhs.
Judge Jackson also found that Microsoft had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by tying IE to Windows.
Appeals Court Justice Stephen Williams sharply challenged that view in court this week. Whatever Microsoft's conduct
was, he argued, "it's not tying." Several other justices said they were sympathetic to Microsoft's argument that it
integrated IE with Windows because there was little or no real market for computers without browsers. Isn't that so?
Yes, but it's not necessary to make the browser unremovable - there was testimony that significant segments of the market do not want a browser for security reasons, or have specific needs which M$IE does not meet, and that making M$IE essentially unremovable or unavoidable did that segment harm. The continued existence of Navigator and Opera prove that the browser need not be "integrated" into the OS or even the desktop. There's nothing wrong with merely including M$IE with Winduhs, any more than it's wrong for GM vehicles to include Philco radios; there is a lot wrong with "welding" either pair together.
The Justice Department has been struggling in the appeals testimony to respond to arguments that computer operating
systems by their very nature might have to be standardized, and that as a result a monopoly was inevitable. If Microsoft
didn't create one, its lawyers claimed, somebody else would have
It seems to me that POSIX is an OS standard which has done a lot for application portability but little thus far for the reunification of Unix... Many (all?) industries have had interop standards without reduction to monopoly; in fact I argue the opposite happens. Look at the competition in appliances, telephones, answering machines, televisions, VCRs, stereo components, dry cells; the selection in lightbulbs, the way railway rolling stock can travel the continent, screw threads, socket wrenches... just about anything you can name has one way or another thrived with competition because of interoperability standards. Why would OSs be any different, when the much-touted Web example exists only because of the predominance of interop standards?
... I guess I've said enough to chew on for awhile =)
Oh lord... is it too much to expect "the media" to learn that "media" is a fscking plural, along with agenda, bacteria, and data? I try to not gratuitously bash JK, but if he's so damn smart he'd know how to conjugate.
All these folks who keep arguing that "the net
routes around damage" live in a fantasy world
Yes. They took a technical truth - the packet routing can adapt to the loss of a node if there are redundant physical links, since it started as a military project and had to survive attack - and twisted it out of meaning; if they really want to censor the net badly enough, they can do it. It won't be "easy," because of the distributed nature of the net, but it's still possible. (For that matter, the net is likely nowhere near as "distributed," especially redundant, as we might like. Commercial interests have less stake in redundancy than the military, after all; and only a couple of the big commercial networks would have to be "brought on-board" for censoring to be practically universal if not actually so. That's what's so scary about an AOL/Time/Warner/et al merger...)
This is a bit like the twisting of Einstein's spacetime relativity into moral relativity, or of Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest ideas into eugenics, that went on in the early 20th century. Or even the twisting of Lev18:22. You can't take something that far out of context and validly make a point with it, although it doesn't stop the Gëbbleses of the world trying... and sadly, too often succeeding.:(
Well, duh.
do you guys believe that music should be for free?
If the artists are all dead, or wanted it to be free, sure. I liked that Napster provided a mass-audience route around the RIAA leeches for the artists. I grant that there was a lot of copyright violation by Napster users! But is that bypass going to remain available for those who want it, or is the RIAA going to close it down too?
shouldn't you also go to jail if you steal MP3's from
a hard-working artist?
The RIAA's been stealing from the artists for years without being jailed... why should anyone else? The RIAA's pissed that some artists now have a bypass to the listeners that's as or more lucrative to the artist than the one through the RIAA, so the RIAA wants to choke it off. And you've buying into the RIAA-backed propaganda.
I'd say, comparably stupid to those at M$ who gave the world a nearly insecurable networked filesystem, and those who use said filesystem. How many problems have to be exposed in M$'s heap of shit before people will raise the proper squawk? Robert Morris got prison, Bill Gates got rich... what a world.
Amazing M$'s TCP is such shit, then. It just goes to show how much better Amigas were; I know AmiTCP was built from the BSD code, and I know it worked a lot better than M$'s. Hell, I use NetBSD now, and I know I get at least 25% faster throughput.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow - mod that up as insightful, or something... although there are lots of adjacent channels on my cable system, it's still a relatively easy thing to remedy.
Your quote of Himanen didn't say creativity was absent... he said it was not prominent; not forbidden but discouraged. The relative scarcity of the Franklin-type would seem to bear that out. So would our fascination with how creatives "beat the system" in their way, evinced by the success of things like Biography. If he's guilty of anything, it's confounding cause with correlation...
(first post? nope, drat :p)
Uh, right, they aren't the same, but rot(n) is (weak) cryptographic enciphering. Ciphers muddle around with the writing without regard for the content; hence they can be applied to anything that can be written down. Codes muddle about with a higher level, changing the symbols for concepts. Converting between ASCII, EBCDIC, and Morse is a cipher problem. Even though french, english, german, italian, etc all use the same set of letters, converting between them is not a cipher problem but a code problem.
Make sense?
nono... algurithmium =)
Didn't Digital:Convergence argue for DMCA protection of their encoding/enciphering even though it had no key?
3. Data integrity Oracle's got more locks, rollbacks, and ability to survive power failures and such, than MySQL etc... by MySQL's own admission IIRC.
Uhhh... Squawk to M$, or the lame magazines that drool over M$ products? I didn't say anything about switching OSs, now, did I?
As for 400-page manuals and taking weeks out of lives... excuse me? There's plenty o' 400+-page books for M$ products, and a plenty o' week+-long training courses. There's an enormous industry in teaching people how to use M$'s allegedly trivial-to-learn stuff.
Robert Morris is a hacker, Bill Gates is a business man.
You missed the point entirely. Windows has, by design,* caused the world a lot more security grief than Morris ever thought of. Yup, there's a big difference all right; Gates has a lot more lawyers, politicians, and media organs in his pockets.
* Morris' worm wriggled through various mistakes left in the software. Many of the latest horror stories - such as ILOVEYOU - worked entirely within the intended design of Winduhs. But who gets the blame? Sure, the guy who steals your stuff is bad, but if you built your mansion in a bad neighbourhood and went away for a week with all the doors and windows open and big map of the house on the front gate showing where all the goodies were, don't come to me looking for sympathy.
Put simply, M$'s design has been directly responsible for far more losses to intrusions than Morris's worm... yet Morris is in prison and Gates is a billionaire. What a wonderful country is the USofA.
Hm. How about the time it takes to compile the generic NetBSD kernel? Since NetBSD runs on almost anything for which the speed is interesting, and compiling involves a nice mix of real-world operations, execpt for floating-point.
(Yeah, I'm joking... a little bit :)
Thank you! I said this months ago, when ILOVEYOU came out. Under M$ the net has become an organic entity with little biodiversity and essentially no immune system... dare I carry it on to analogues about promiscuity and Sexually Transmitted Diseases?
I compared it to the Irish Potato Famine... a single pest obliterated one entity on which an entire population relied. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that lives can be threatened by the combination of domination and insecurity in M$. I just hope enough critical systems aren't M$ that the food, the fuel, and the medicine will keep moving even if the M$ technology gets wiped. Ever wonder about how many trucking companies would be reduced to chaos without Winduhs?
this doesn't really count as harm for anti-trust purposes, making bad decisions in software design isn't against the law
For some kinds of systems, it ought to be... I mean, when a sign error in a radiotherapy machine nearly cooks someone to death, there should be restitution of some kind from the people who handled the software. Of course UCITA outlaws such laws, so whaddyagonnado.
'nuff blither out of me :)
I read the FoF, cover to cover, within days of Jackson releasing it (even converting it to TeX and making nice, compact, permanent copies for myself and a few friends... I was learning TeX at the time, it was good exercise :). I remember being impressed that some dingbat Reagan appointee was not just competent but apparently conversant with the situation. For someone whom Katz claims now himself claims not to have understood the issues, I thought he understood them very well...
I prefer to think Jackson's just being decently modest in such claims.
I could debate the real benefits of a computer in every home - even the basic truth of it, many of my neighbours get on without one - but anywho, I remember using M$ BASIC on a Pet in, what, 1977, '78? Didn't it take rather a looong time, in the digital world, for this crop you allege M$ to have sowed (sown?), to grow? I think you confused correlation with causation here, as another pointed out... how did you look at all the bazillion computer companies that have come and gone since M$ was founded and decided it deserves all the credit? Does IBM get none for making the PC? Does... whoever it was... get none for backengineering the BIOS and making competitive PC clones? Does Altair - the computer for which M$ first produced, IIRC (where's my Hackers?) - get none for seeding a p.c. market in the first place?
Or are you just another johnny-cum-lately M$ worshipper?
Am I the only one with fond memories of Creative Computing? I never liked BYTE much... :)
Thus, M$'s own actions demonstrate the threat Netscape (and Sun) posed to Winduhs.
Yes, but it's not necessary to make the browser unremovable - there was testimony that significant segments of the market do not want a browser for security reasons, or have specific needs which M$IE does not meet, and that making M$IE essentially unremovable or unavoidable did that segment harm. The continued existence of Navigator and Opera prove that the browser need not be "integrated" into the OS or even the desktop. There's nothing wrong with merely including M$IE with Winduhs, any more than it's wrong for GM vehicles to include Philco radios; there is a lot wrong with "welding" either pair together.
It seems to me that POSIX is an OS standard which has done a lot for application portability but little thus far for the reunification of Unix... Many (all?) industries have had interop standards without reduction to monopoly; in fact I argue the opposite happens. Look at the competition in appliances, telephones, answering machines, televisions, VCRs, stereo components, dry cells; the selection in lightbulbs, the way railway rolling stock can travel the continent, screw threads, socket wrenches... just about anything you can name has one way or another thrived with competition because of interoperability standards. Why would OSs be any different, when the much-touted Web example exists only because of the predominance of interop standards?... I guess I've said enough to chew on for awhile =)
...
Arrrgh! and they wonder why our kids can't speak properly any more >:(
Oh lord... is it too much to expect "the media" to learn that "media" is a fscking plural, along with agenda, bacteria, and data? I try to not gratuitously bash JK, but if he's so damn smart he'd know how to conjugate.
Yes. They took a technical truth - the packet routing can adapt to the loss of a node if there are redundant physical links, since it started as a military project and had to survive attack - and twisted it out of meaning; if they really want to censor the net badly enough, they can do it. It won't be "easy," because of the distributed nature of the net, but it's still possible. (For that matter, the net is likely nowhere near as "distributed," especially redundant, as we might like. Commercial interests have less stake in redundancy than the military, after all; and only a couple of the big commercial networks would have to be "brought on-board" for censoring to be practically universal if not actually so. That's what's so scary about an AOL/Time/Warner/et al merger...)
This is a bit like the twisting of Einstein's spacetime relativity into moral relativity, or of Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest ideas into eugenics, that went on in the early 20th century. Or even the twisting of Lev18:22. You can't take something that far out of context and validly make a point with it, although it doesn't stop the Gëbbleses of the world trying... and sadly, too often succeeding. :(
Well, duh. do you guys believe that music should be for free?
If the artists are all dead, or wanted it to be free, sure. I liked that Napster provided a mass-audience route around the RIAA leeches for the artists. I grant that there was a lot of copyright violation by Napster users! But is that bypass going to remain available for those who want it, or is the RIAA going to close it down too?
If you really mean a take-back, don't post AC :)
'fraid I've no grand advice other than to suggest you take the myth of a SW labout shortage into account.
The RIAA's been stealing from the artists for years without being jailed... why should anyone else? The RIAA's pissed that some artists now have a bypass to the listeners that's as or more lucrative to the artist than the one through the RIAA, so the RIAA wants to choke it off. And you've buying into the RIAA-backed propaganda.
I'd say, comparably stupid to those at M$ who gave the world a nearly insecurable networked filesystem, and those who use said filesystem. How many problems have to be exposed in M$'s heap of shit before people will raise the proper squawk? Robert Morris got prison, Bill Gates got rich... what a world.
feh, we whooped your asses 200 years ago; you think you're up to a rematch at last, go for it. Maybe we'll finish burning the Whitehouse this time.
Amazing M$'s TCP is such shit, then. It just goes to show how much better Amigas were; I know AmiTCP was built from the BSD code, and I know it worked a lot better than M$'s. Hell, I use NetBSD now, and I know I get at least 25% faster throughput.
In other words... I don't believe you.