If you want to get a degree, it will take time. A Computer Science degree is not about programming and it's not about any work that you do in the field. It's about getting a college education with is a broad knowledge base on which you can build off of.
I was in your situation about 7 years ago, and I stopped working and got a degree. It has enabled me to design a lot better, but it has mainly gotten me to think about life a lot differently. I don't think that this happens to that many people who get a college degree, but I immersed myself in the scholarly culture (the minority of what is at Universities today).
My point is that the college degree doesn't really enhance your career, except with a some employers. If you do it, do it for youself and not for any perceived career enhancement.
That's right, because they don't read/. They may take M$ seriously. I'm going to write mine. Tell them not to beleive the lies. That Linux relies on intellectual property rights to remain free. Corporations only believe in IP to protect their own rights, never the rights of the little guy. And while your at it, write in a word about McCain-Fiengold so that the corporate bribes can be reduced. If M$ can't give $100K to Senator Joe Blow, then he may be less inclined to listen to them.
I don't see the point of this at all. As someone who knows professional musicians (not signed musicians--working musicians--choir directors, Jazz musicians, pianists, composers, bands, etc.), it's hard enough for them to make a living making and playing their music. This type of license seems inappropriate. The minority of musicans that become part of the pop machine will do well (some of the time), signed bands that don't do well will lose their shirts.
Composers (people who write serious music--not pop/rock) have an open sharing of ideas. This is the basis of all musical change. It is not as important for musicans to share actual sound, words, and verbatium chord progressions (which notes and chord progressions in the abstract are not copyrightable).
Much of the initial salt water encroachment was caused when oil companies dug canals from the gulf and through the swamps (it's not just oil companies, but that was one major problem). The amount of change of salt in the water caused the vegetation to die, and the coastline to erode (with the help of Nutria rats, which were introduced to eat another type of vegetation...I digress).
The problem with New Orleans is that once the coast is gone, waves will be beating on its levees. At that point, you better have some kick-ass levees or just leave.
I guess what I mean to say, is that the salt water encroachment is a problem with above surface water, not ground water, in Louisiana. It gets to the plants through natural erosion of the coast line.
This past summer, which was the second year of a bad drought here, rice farmers were pulling salt water from their wells. I assume that is what you are referring to.
Louisiana has an perplexing predicament. It looses millions of acres of coastline every year to the Gulf of Mexico. The Port of Baton Rouge is the second largest deep-water port in the United States, as far as dollar amounts. The Mississippi river is being diverted from its natural course (actually, the course nature wants it to take). It will take billions of dollars to keep the Mississippi on it's course and not flooding. But, it is the flooding of the Mississippi that would keep the state from loosing as much coastline.
New Orleans has another problem--it is sinking under its own weight. All of the Slit from the Mississippi is being thrown off of the continental shelf and into the depths of the gulf.
Eventually, and this will wreak havoc on Louisiana, as well as the entire Mississippi delta, the Army Corps of Engineers will have to let the Mississippi follow the straight path to the Gulf now known as the Atchafalaya River. This will flood many towns and small cities and will leave New Orleans and Baton Rouge without a city--and without a port. The Atchafalaya is a treacherous river, and will be even more treacherous if it has that much more water going down it. It will probably destroy highways that cross it (Interstate 10) and levees around it. It will probably be impassable to boat travel for months if not years.
Whoever is the politician that deems it's time to do this will probably be very unpopular. It would be interesting to know how this will play out.
(BTW, Baton Rouge is 20 feet above sea level, and it's over 100 miles from the coase. Imagine what rising sea levels will do to this state.)
The only good NT host is a dead NT host! (I know, not that funny.)
Host your own and subscribe to a good NT security newsletter, if you must use NT. Personally, I find Linux+PostgreSQL 7+PHP4 to be a superior alternative in speed, coding ease, and cost (given that the web copy of SQL Server 2000 will be $20,000!)
Don't try to run Chili!Soft ASP for Linux as an alternative. It doesn't work. It tries to keep one connection to the database and when that gets lost, it never tries to reconnect (like an idiot) and you have to restart the Chili!Soft ASP daemon.
That's why I liked the Link Enchange. Your ads get displayed based on the number of hits to your site. No one gets charged. (Not sure how you make money off of this!--premimum ads?)
Of course, since Microsoft bought it, I see a lot more Microsoft, MSN, and even Link Exchange ads. They've gotten rid of the link exchange web site and hidden the directory so well that I can't find it anymore. Microsoft is their own worst enemy.
Of course that's nonsense, because I implicitly gave you the rights to make a copy of this article and read it when I posted it. But when I buy a DVD, I implicitly (should?) have the right to make a copy of it and view it too. That's what deCSS does. So why should it be illegal?
What I was referring to was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits programs that circumvent copy protection and make copies of media. That is what makes this illegal. It subverts the copy protection, in this case encryption, and makes a copy. I didn't sit down and read deCSS, so it may not do this. I read a comment on/. that said that it made a 4GB MPEG file.
Don't get me wrong, DMCA is about the worse thing that has happened in IP in years, and companies are abusing copyright left and right. That does not change the fact that subverting copy protection is now illegal, due to the DMCA.
I just don't think that it is productive to be a media cracker and to fight these big companies. It is much better to stay in an open source environment on the software end, and to not purchase items, such as DVDs, that have such restrictive licenses. It is much better to either use CDs, analog media, or MP3s legally. This way, when we're at MP10, you can copy your CD or MP3 to an MP10 (or whatever the future holds). What I am talking about is listening to artists that do not have contracts with record companies, watching movies that are not produced by major film companies, go watch your local college play football, etc. If you starve big media companies of their revenue streams, then they will either have to change or disappear.
/. has been minimizing the role of Inetlectual Property in business and in open source.
In this case, the IOC is nuts to say that atheletes cannot keep diaries. They seem like a bunch of communists for doing that, but they're avoiding the Internet because they don't have a plan to use it. But, it is their right to control the flow of media from the game. They can't stop an American olympic athelete from writing about the experience later. And if they try, they're stupid.
/. is making itself look bad by attacking IP rights. When I heard about DeCSS, I thought it was a stupid case. Then I read a description of what the program does, and that is flat illegal, no matter what you say. It makes a copy of copyrighted material. The program would not be illegal if it weren't for DMCA, which is a very bad law, but it is now illegal. This does not justify other issues with the DeCSS case, such as tramping on the rights of journalists. If it were to pipe an MPEG video player, not logically going to the hard drive (i.e. only possibly going through virtual memory) then it would not be illegal because it would not "copy" the movie!
Given that it is IP rights that protect GPL'ed code, one must respect others IP rights by not taking illegal actions because one thinks it's okay. For example, Napster sold itself by saying that you could illegally copy songs by major artists. They made statements that said that you wouldn't find no-name artists on Napster. They show a lack of respect for copyright law, and have put themselves in a sticky situation.
/. should be careful about trivializing IP or it may find itself at the butt end of a lawsuit. Not to say that it is wrong to oppose oppresive laws and systems, but/. is becoming the "no IP" site. Without any IP, people would not be able to bring their creations to fruition and invention and innovation (not the MS kind, but the real kind) would stagnate and would be limited to small hobby projects.
I am starting to see the music and film industrys' points about DeCSS and the illegal copying of music.
The problem with DeCSS is that it makes a copy of the media in a decrypted form, albiet as a big file. If DeCSS were to act as a streaming server to an MPEG3 client player through a pipe, I don't think that the film industry would be able to have leverage in court.
Given that it makes a copy of the movie in an open format, this gives broad powers to the copier to make as many copies as he/she likes. Nothing stops you from copying DVD content through analog means (except maybe a VHS scramble). You shouldn't be doing that anyway. If you need to for an acedemic project or a demonstration, you can just aim a high quality camera at your high quality TV and record. This is of course a rough method.
Just as in this hacker challenge. The music industry wants to have a way to detect illegal digital copies of their music. If you remove the watermark, then they know that the copy is illegal and the player won't play.
The problem is not just people copying NSync CDs. They're rich and they've made the record company a ton of money. If too many copy smaller bands CDs, they may have to quit music because the can't make money. The RIAA, as they see it, is acting in the interest of their members.
But, the real problem with the music and film industry is that they are not willing to try new Internet business models. This will push many artists to go directly to their fans. As a musician, I could not see selling my music any other way but over the Internet. (BTW I don't publish my music.) I would not want any record company holding the copyright to my music. Also, I would not want people to pass around my copyrighted works across the internet without paying me what I am due.
Many artists are using the internet to sell their wares, and it is paying off. One artist (who?) got $100K for a CD they haven't even recorded yet (heard this on NPR). Stephen King is selling chapters to his new book on the honor system and getting paid.
Personally, my favorite format was the Beatnik format. It includes copyright information and can be optionally encrypted. It can include General MIDI as well as digital audio and your own samples. I haven't looked at the standard in a few years, so I don't know it's status. It was pioneered by Thomas Dolby's company, Headspace. These are more useful to digital musicians than to traditional musicians because they incorporate MIDI and sampling.
Don't get me wrong. The DMCA is an idiotic law, especially when it comes to software. It probably makes the cp and ftp commands illegal. But if people want to control access to their copyright material, material that they own, then it is their right to use whatever the law and technology provides. And it's our choice not to use, view, or listen to that material.
...if NT beats Linux in a given area. I could care less. My Linux box as a workstation and my company's Linux box as a server OVERALL beats the pants off of our NT server. (Okay, so our 1GB RAM, 27GG SCSI RAID 5 NT4 SQL Server is faster than our 96MB RAM, 10GB IDE Red Hat 6.1 web server/SQL server/proxy server/etc., but we never have to reboot the web server!) I could care less if NT can do more TPS than Linux as a server to Win32 clients on some obscure client/server benchmark.
All that this tells me is that in one area, NT/2000 is faster than Linux. No one here is going to do any where near that many TPS.
This test does question the scalability of Linux vs. NT/2000. It shows that NT/2000 scales well to multiple users with their application. And it shows that Linux may have a problem scaling--but proves nothing.
If the above discussion of the TCP/IP stack of NT/2000 vs. Linux holds truth, NT/2000 should and would have an advantage in networking scalability, and thus client/server scalability, on a MISD machine (and possibly on a SISD machine).
If you Like Win2K, use it. But if you like Linux, use it. If you like Win98, then you must be smoking something (i.e. hallucinatory)!
HBS in CS 10 years professional experience (forget the 8 hobbiest years, even though that's when I learned 6502 assembler) 2 years experience developing and administering Windows 95, 98, and NT systems
I see their point exactly. They are a big corporation and they are worried about their stock price. They could give a crap about privacy, ethics, the US constitution, right, and wrong. They are mindless. They are doing this for hype to scare people, not because they're loosing their shirt.
They are also doing this because they _have_ to. They have no choice. If they stand idle while this software is propigated over the internet, shareholders will get pissed. Users will also get angry that the software that they bought is useless and the supplier is doing nothing to defend it.
I think the scare tactics work, too. If I were to do something like this and were sewed by a corporation, I could not begin to afford a lawyer or the time required to fight this. To the corporation, this is waving a fly swatter at a pest. That's why I'll stay with using software with non-restrictive copyrights (GPL, BSD, other open source, public domain) or I'll just use commercial software as it is.
I don't think that it is unethical to crack code. Is it unethical for a writer to analyze another writer's copyrighted works to get ideas? Those in English would find that idea stupid.
That whole "reverse engeneering" restriction is the stupidest thing that I ever heard of. If companies don't want you to disclose something, they should make you _SIGN_ a nondisclosure agreement _before_ you buy the product. That is what my company does when we don't want our secrets to get out. You know, something that is legally binding.
I don't think so. Visual J++ was rightfully listed as the worst Java environment on Deja.com. Now it seems they've move J++ from a Java environment to Windows development environments which is more appropriate, at it is second to last there. The Borland/Inprise environments are listed as the best. Even MS C++ is rated very low (I would agree after reading benchmarks in a recent Linux Journal). So, I doubt is MS is flooding Deja.com pools with good comments!
This problem can be aleviated by having multiple machine language files in a single file or package. Apple did this when it went from the CISC 68000 to the RISC PowerPC, plus they included a fast emulator for older 68000 programs. With the proliferation of emulators out there, cross platform binaries may be possible without recompilation to different architectures. If emulators are integrated into kernels as Apple did with MacOS 7.5, then multiple processors could be emulated so that programs can run.
and the owner of that domain sells it to a porno company in Singapore that makes it into a biker chick porno web site with kiddie porn on it. Now I have a link to a kiddie porno site. If I don't check my links for a few months, then I could be breaking a law through no actions of my own. Any law like that would be dumb.
They could change a site to have the text of a copyrighted book. Bam, I've just broken a copyright law.
Boy, that makes it easy to frame people. Let's just change a site that someone or a company is linked to to something that breaks the law to make them a criminal.
Laws like that defeat the purpose of hypertext on the internet.
...there may be more copies of BSD flavored Darwin/OS X out there than Linux.
You can still make proprietary changes to Linux, you just can't distribute or sell the binary result, which is counter to what the article states. Apple open sourced OS X (though not GPLed) except it will keep its GUI to itself--since that's what makes the Mac the Mac. If the GUI were opened up, Apple would rot. Apple could not make money without complete control over at least some of its system.
I think that Linux and BSD are suited for different tasks. It's good that we have them both.
If the security model of closed source fails, it will not fail immediately. The next security model will take time to crack next. In the end the latency of closed source security for software being cracked will have a given time, say 3-5 months average.
If software relies on closed source for security and it is made open, such as the opening of Quake, then all of the security weaknesses can in essence be exploited simultaneously. Software that is from the beginning open is inherently more secure than closed source software given the source code.
So, the question becomes what effect would opening Windows source code have on Windows security?
There have been so many back doors found in the past six months that I can only imagine that a metric ton of them would be found. Since the Justice department sees open source Windows as an option to cure the Microsoft monopoly, couldn't this be counter productive for average Windows users--ill equipped to install software, much less a patch--in the short term?
Are (potential) long term benefits of this worth the short term cost?
The best Anti-FUD book I've ever read is something called "Science on Trial: A Case for Evolution." This book details every creationist argument against Evolution and proceeds to tear it apart until there is absolutely nothing left to so-called creation science (as opposed to creationism, which is a religious belief. This book does not attack religion or religious beliefs, only creationism as science).
This would be a good model for an Anti-TCO (total co$t of owner$hip), the biggest FUD term of all time, that M$ loves to coin. They want some dream world of 0 administration, which does not exist. The real FUD is that NT is easier and less costly to administer than Linux. This is bullshit. NT administration requires you to take M$ classes that cost lots of $$$ just to get a midsized network to act appropriately. With Linux, you have to learn just as much...and editing a text file in/etc beats the heck out of searching through a sea of menus and waiting forever for the control panel to refresh its icons. In that time, you could type
cd/etc {editor of choice} whatever.conf
and do your little dance. Plus in Linux, you have much finer control over everything...and everything is usually in the same configuration file to get the same effect.
So the outline is:
1. Prove M$'s FUD to be rediculous. 2. Show how Linux can do many, many things in general purpose computing and specific application environments. 3. Show how it is much more believable that Open Source could create better software through natural selection than closed source. Link to an ESR paper. 4. Provide a FUD questions and answers section at the end to answer any cynical M$ bullshit question.
And there you have it.
The problem with this approach is that you win no converts. I read this book in a class and 4 out of 6 people dropped out...mostly Christian conservatives. (The author was an obvious athiest and sort of indirectly said that religion was stupid-just by his tone. His tone even offended me, a professed agnostic.) Oh well, who cares if stupid MSCE's* don't finish...we'll have fun writing and reading it:`P
* - I make no assumption that ALL (or any) MSCE's are stupid...this is only a joke people! (you know, like D(+)GMA.)
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Hmmm. Just TRY to sent an IFRAME to Netscape 4.7 and watch it puke (rather, not show up at all)!
Anyone for layers?
If you want to get a degree, it will take time. A Computer Science degree is not about programming and it's not about any work that you do in the field. It's about getting a college education with is a broad knowledge base on which you can build off of.
I was in your situation about 7 years ago, and I stopped working and got a degree. It has enabled me to design a lot better, but it has mainly gotten me to think about life a lot differently. I don't think that this happens to that many people who get a college degree, but I immersed myself in the scholarly culture (the minority of what is at Universities today).
My point is that the college degree doesn't really enhance your career, except with a some employers. If you do it, do it for youself and not for any perceived career enhancement.
CD audio out->PC Line in
Record,
Rip
What is the problem besides the fact that music companies want to inconvience users of their products?
Pretty soon, everyone will get their music from Gnutella (or elsewhere) and the record companies will be out of business.
That's right, because they don't read /. They may take M$ seriously. I'm going to write mine. Tell them not to beleive the lies. That Linux relies on intellectual property rights to remain free. Corporations only believe in IP to protect their own rights, never the rights of the little guy. And while your at it, write in a word about McCain-Fiengold so that the corporate bribes can be reduced. If M$ can't give $100K to Senator Joe Blow, then he may be less inclined to listen to them.
I don't see the point of this at all. As someone who knows professional musicians (not signed musicians--working musicians--choir directors, Jazz musicians, pianists, composers, bands, etc.), it's hard enough for them to make a living making and playing their music. This type of license seems inappropriate. The minority of musicans that become part of the pop machine will do well (some of the time), signed bands that don't do well will lose their shirts.
Composers (people who write serious music--not pop/rock) have an open sharing of ideas. This is the basis of all musical change. It is not as important for musicans to share actual sound, words, and verbatium chord progressions (which notes and chord progressions in the abstract are not copyrightable).
Excuse me, I am talking about another thread. I'm just lost today. Ignore that last comment.
Much of the initial salt water encroachment was caused when oil companies dug canals from the gulf and through the swamps (it's not just oil companies, but that was one major problem). The amount of change of salt in the water caused the vegetation to die, and the coastline to erode (with the help of Nutria rats, which were introduced to eat another type of vegetation...I digress).
The problem with New Orleans is that once the coast is gone, waves will be beating on its levees. At that point, you better have some kick-ass levees or just leave.
I guess what I mean to say, is that the salt water encroachment is a problem with above surface water, not ground water, in Louisiana. It gets to the plants through natural erosion of the coast line.
This past summer, which was the second year of a bad drought here, rice farmers were pulling salt water from their wells. I assume that is what you are referring to.
Louisiana has an perplexing predicament. It looses millions of acres of coastline every year to the Gulf of Mexico. The Port of Baton Rouge is the second largest deep-water port in the United States, as far as dollar amounts. The Mississippi river is being diverted from its natural course (actually, the course nature wants it to take). It will take billions of dollars to keep the Mississippi on it's course and not flooding. But, it is the flooding of the Mississippi that would keep the state from loosing as much coastline. New Orleans has another problem--it is sinking under its own weight. All of the Slit from the Mississippi is being thrown off of the continental shelf and into the depths of the gulf. Eventually, and this will wreak havoc on Louisiana, as well as the entire Mississippi delta, the Army Corps of Engineers will have to let the Mississippi follow the straight path to the Gulf now known as the Atchafalaya River. This will flood many towns and small cities and will leave New Orleans and Baton Rouge without a city--and without a port. The Atchafalaya is a treacherous river, and will be even more treacherous if it has that much more water going down it. It will probably destroy highways that cross it (Interstate 10) and levees around it. It will probably be impassable to boat travel for months if not years. Whoever is the politician that deems it's time to do this will probably be very unpopular. It would be interesting to know how this will play out. (BTW, Baton Rouge is 20 feet above sea level, and it's over 100 miles from the coase. Imagine what rising sea levels will do to this state.)
The only good NT host is a dead NT host! (I know, not that funny.)
Host your own and subscribe to a good NT security newsletter, if you must use NT. Personally, I find Linux+PostgreSQL 7+PHP4 to be a superior alternative in speed, coding ease, and cost (given that the web copy of SQL Server 2000 will be $20,000!)
Don't try to run Chili!Soft ASP for Linux as an alternative. It doesn't work. It tries to keep one connection to the database and when that gets lost, it never tries to reconnect (like an idiot) and you have to restart the Chili!Soft ASP daemon.
Of course, since Microsoft bought it, I see a lot more Microsoft, MSN, and even Link Exchange ads. They've gotten rid of the link exchange web site and hidden the directory so well that I can't find it anymore. Microsoft is their own worst enemy.
What I was referring to was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits programs that circumvent copy protection and make copies of media. That is what makes this illegal. It subverts the copy protection, in this case encryption, and makes a copy. I didn't sit down and read deCSS, so it may not do this. I read a comment on /. that said that it made a 4GB MPEG file.
Don't get me wrong, DMCA is about the worse thing that has happened in IP in years, and companies are abusing copyright left and right. That does not change the fact that subverting copy protection is now illegal, due to the DMCA.
I just don't think that it is productive to be a media cracker and to fight these big companies. It is much better to stay in an open source environment on the software end, and to not purchase items, such as DVDs, that have such restrictive licenses. It is much better to either use CDs, analog media, or MP3s legally. This way, when we're at MP10, you can copy your CD or MP3 to an MP10 (or whatever the future holds). What I am talking about is listening to artists that do not have contracts with record companies, watching movies that are not produced by major film companies, go watch your local college play football, etc. If you starve big media companies of their revenue streams, then they will either have to change or disappear.
/. has been minimizing the role of Inetlectual Property in business and in open source.
/. is becoming the "no IP" site. Without any IP, people would not be able to bring their creations to fruition and invention and innovation (not the MS kind, but the real kind) would stagnate and would be limited to small hobby projects.
In this case, the IOC is nuts to say that atheletes cannot keep diaries. They seem like a bunch of communists for doing that, but they're avoiding the Internet because they don't have a plan to use it. But, it is their right to control the flow of media from the game. They can't stop an American olympic athelete from writing about the experience later. And if they try, they're stupid.
/. is making itself look bad by attacking IP rights. When I heard about DeCSS, I thought it was a stupid case. Then I read a description of what the program does, and that is flat illegal, no matter what you say. It makes a copy of copyrighted material. The program would not be illegal if it weren't for DMCA, which is a very bad law, but it is now illegal. This does not justify other issues with the DeCSS case, such as tramping on the rights of journalists. If it were to pipe an MPEG video player, not logically going to the hard drive (i.e. only possibly going through virtual memory) then it would not be illegal because it would not "copy" the movie!
Given that it is IP rights that protect GPL'ed code, one must respect others IP rights by not taking illegal actions because one thinks it's okay. For example, Napster sold itself by saying that you could illegally copy songs by major artists. They made statements that said that you wouldn't find no-name artists on Napster. They show a lack of respect for copyright law, and have put themselves in a sticky situation.
/. should be careful about trivializing IP or it may find itself at the butt end of a lawsuit. Not to say that it is wrong to oppose oppresive laws and systems, but
I am starting to see the music and film industrys' points about DeCSS and the illegal copying of music.
The problem with DeCSS is that it makes a copy of the media in a decrypted form, albiet as a big file. If DeCSS were to act as a streaming server to an MPEG3 client player through a pipe, I don't think that the film industry would be able to have leverage in court.
Given that it makes a copy of the movie in an open format, this gives broad powers to the copier to make as many copies as he/she likes. Nothing stops you from copying DVD content through analog means (except maybe a VHS scramble). You shouldn't be doing that anyway. If you need to for an acedemic project or a demonstration, you can just aim a high quality camera at your high quality TV and record. This is of course a rough method.
Just as in this hacker challenge. The music industry wants to have a way to detect illegal digital copies of their music. If you remove the watermark, then they know that the copy is illegal and the player won't play.
The problem is not just people copying NSync CDs. They're rich and they've made the record company a ton of money. If too many copy smaller bands CDs, they may have to quit music because the can't make money. The RIAA, as they see it, is acting in the interest of their members.
But, the real problem with the music and film industry is that they are not willing to try new Internet business models. This will push many artists to go directly to their fans. As a musician, I could not see selling my music any other way but over the Internet. (BTW I don't publish my music.) I would not want any record company holding the copyright to my music. Also, I would not want people to pass around my copyrighted works across the internet without paying me what I am due.
Many artists are using the internet to sell their wares, and it is paying off. One artist (who?) got $100K for a CD they haven't even recorded yet (heard this on NPR). Stephen King is selling chapters to his new book on the honor system and getting paid.
Personally, my favorite format was the Beatnik format. It includes copyright information and can be optionally encrypted. It can include General MIDI as well as digital audio and your own samples. I haven't looked at the standard in a few years, so I don't know it's status. It was pioneered by Thomas Dolby's company, Headspace. These are more useful to digital musicians than to traditional musicians because they incorporate MIDI and sampling.
Don't get me wrong. The DMCA is an idiotic law, especially when it comes to software. It probably makes the cp and ftp commands illegal. But if people want to control access to their copyright material, material that they own, then it is their right to use whatever the law and technology provides. And it's our choice not to use, view, or listen to that material.
What we need is a lobby to represent our opinions. I'm a member of ACM, and they are active in issues like this. Check out:
http://www.acm.org/serving/cacm/outlaw.html
...if NT beats Linux in a given area. I could care less. My Linux box as a workstation and my company's Linux box as a server OVERALL beats the pants off of our NT server. (Okay, so our 1GB RAM, 27GG SCSI RAID 5 NT4 SQL Server is faster than our 96MB RAM, 10GB IDE Red Hat 6.1 web server/SQL server/proxy server/etc., but we never have to reboot the web server!) I could care less if NT can do more TPS than Linux as a server to Win32 clients on some obscure client/server benchmark.
All that this tells me is that in one area, NT/2000 is faster than Linux. No one here is going to do any where near that many TPS.
This test does question the scalability of Linux vs. NT/2000. It shows that NT/2000 scales well to multiple users with their application. And it shows that Linux may have a problem scaling--but proves nothing.
If the above discussion of the TCP/IP stack of NT/2000 vs. Linux holds truth, NT/2000 should and would have an advantage in networking scalability, and thus client/server scalability, on a MISD machine (and possibly on a SISD machine).
If you Like Win2K, use it. But if you like Linux, use it. If you like Win98, then you must be smoking something (i.e. hallucinatory)!
HBS in CS
10 years professional experience (forget the 8 hobbiest years, even though that's when I learned 6502 assembler)
2 years experience developing and administering Windows 95, 98, and NT systems
I see their point exactly. They are a big corporation and they are worried about their stock price. They could give a crap about privacy, ethics, the US constitution, right, and wrong. They are mindless. They are doing this for hype to scare people, not because they're loosing their shirt.
They are also doing this because they _have_ to. They have no choice. If they stand idle while this software is propigated over the internet, shareholders will get pissed. Users will also get angry that the software that they bought is useless and the supplier is doing nothing to defend it.
I think the scare tactics work, too. If I were to do something like this and were sewed by a corporation, I could not begin to afford a lawyer or the time required to fight this. To the corporation, this is waving a fly swatter at a pest. That's why I'll stay with using software with non-restrictive copyrights (GPL, BSD, other open source, public domain) or I'll just use commercial software as it is.
I don't think that it is unethical to crack code. Is it unethical for a writer to analyze another writer's copyrighted works to get ideas? Those in English would find that idea stupid.
That whole "reverse engeneering" restriction is the stupidest thing that I ever heard of. If companies don't want you to disclose something, they should make you _SIGN_ a nondisclosure agreement _before_ you buy the product. That is what my company does when we don't want our secrets to get out. You know, something that is legally binding.
I don't think so. Visual J++ was rightfully listed as the worst Java environment on Deja.com. Now it seems they've move J++ from a Java environment to Windows development environments which is more appropriate, at it is second to last there. The Borland/Inprise environments are listed as the best. Even MS C++ is rated very low (I would agree after reading benchmarks in a recent Linux Journal). So, I doubt is MS is flooding Deja.com pools with good comments!
This problem can be aleviated by having multiple machine language files in a single file or package. Apple did this when it went from the CISC 68000 to the RISC PowerPC, plus they included a fast emulator for older 68000 programs. With the proliferation of emulators out there, cross platform binaries may be possible without recompilation to different architectures. If emulators are integrated into kernels as Apple did with MacOS 7.5, then multiple processors could be emulated so that programs can run.
Lets say I have a link to a web site:
www.bikesrock.com
and the owner of that domain sells it to a porno company in Singapore that makes it into a biker chick porno web site with kiddie porn on it. Now I have a link to a kiddie porno site. If I don't check my links for a few months, then I could be breaking a law through no actions of my own. Any law like that would be dumb.
They could change a site to have the text of a copyrighted book. Bam, I've just broken a copyright law.
Boy, that makes it easy to frame people. Let's just change a site that someone or a company is linked to to something that breaks the law to make them a criminal.
Laws like that defeat the purpose of hypertext on the internet.
...there may be more copies of BSD flavored Darwin/OS X out there than Linux.
You can still make proprietary changes to Linux, you just can't distribute or sell the binary result, which is counter to what the article states. Apple open sourced OS X (though not GPLed) except it will keep its GUI to itself--since that's what makes the Mac the Mac. If the GUI were opened up, Apple would rot. Apple could not make money without complete control over at least some of its system.
I think that Linux and BSD are suited for different tasks. It's good that we have them both.
If the security model of closed source fails, it will not fail immediately. The next security model will take time to crack next. In the end the latency of closed source security for software being cracked will have a given time, say 3-5 months average.
If software relies on closed source for security and it is made open, such as the opening of Quake, then all of the security weaknesses can in essence be exploited simultaneously. Software that is from the beginning open is inherently more secure than closed source software given the source code.
So, the question becomes what effect would opening Windows source code have on Windows security?
There have been so many back doors found in the past six months that I can only imagine that a metric ton of them would be found. Since the Justice department sees open source Windows as an option to cure the Microsoft monopoly, couldn't this be counter productive for average Windows users--ill equipped to install software, much less a patch--in the short term?
Are (potential) long term benefits of this worth the short term cost?
The best Anti-FUD book I've ever read is something called "Science on Trial: A Case for Evolution." This book details every creationist argument against Evolution and proceeds to tear it apart until there is absolutely nothing left to so-called creation science (as opposed to creationism, which is a religious belief. This book does not attack religion or religious beliefs, only creationism as science).
/etc beats the heck out of searching through a sea of menus and waiting forever for the control panel to refresh its icons. In that time, you could type
/etc
This would be a good model for an Anti-TCO (total co$t of owner$hip), the biggest FUD term of all time, that M$ loves to coin. They want some dream world of 0 administration, which does not exist. The real FUD is that NT is easier and less costly to administer than Linux. This is bullshit. NT administration requires you to take M$ classes that cost lots of $$$ just to get a midsized network to act appropriately. With Linux, you have to learn just as much...and editing a text file in
cd
{editor of choice} whatever.conf
and do your little dance. Plus in Linux, you have much finer control over everything...and everything is usually in the same configuration file to get the same effect.
So the outline is:
1. Prove M$'s FUD to be rediculous.
2. Show how Linux can do many, many things in general purpose computing and specific application environments.
3. Show how it is much more believable that Open Source could create better software through natural selection than closed source. Link to an ESR paper.
4. Provide a FUD questions and answers section at the end to answer any cynical M$ bullshit question.
And there you have it.
The problem with this approach is that you win no converts. I read this book in a class and 4 out of 6 people dropped out...mostly Christian conservatives. (The author was an obvious athiest and sort of indirectly said that religion was stupid-just by his tone. His tone even offended me, a professed agnostic.) Oh well, who cares if stupid MSCE's* don't finish...we'll have fun writing and reading it:`P
* - I make no assumption that ALL (or any) MSCE's are stupid...this is only a joke people! (you know, like D(+)GMA.)
When Ice-T was forced to remove his song, "Cop Killer," he replaced it with:
"Freedom of Speech, Yea, just watch what you say."
- cause that's the way the cookie crumbles.