We'd better expend our time improving free software rather than Boycotting others (if the product is overpriced, it would not make a good sell anyway)
The product is not overpriced -- at least not if you only look at the cost of purchasing it. However, the intangible costs are a little high. Let's see....
You have to register through the internet (or phone M$) to get the product working....
If your hard drive dies or Windows XP manages to corrupt itself (like all the previous flavors), you can't just re-install. Instead you get to call M$ and try to convince them that you really are trying to install on the same (albeit repaired) system.
Don't add memory, a new CD-ROM drive and a new hard drive to your computer -- your XP license will stop working and you'll have to again call M$ to try to convince them that yes, this is the same computer, just upgraded.
No, this kind of crap gives the vendor way too much control over how I use the product. Big brother can just go away. This is just one more reason why I never upgraded the only Windows machine I use at home from the Win 95 installation that was shipped with it.
Please, somebody correct me if these statements no longer correctly reflect how licensing works with Windows XP.
The problem is sharing a black list is even more of a problem then dealing with an occasional law suit. It gets into 'unfair trade practices' and turns into a federal anti-trust case against all the involved ISPs.
So don't "share" them. Just post your list (in a nice downloadable form) somewhere on your web site. If all ISPs do this, they can each download everybody elses lists.
Or, have somebody who is NOT an ISP sponsor a big blacklist that all ISPs can contribute to and get the contents of if they so wish.
The DOJ case and monopoly arguments are completely independent of why these governments are pursuing free software.
I disagree. While the article mentioned nothing about a relationship between the two, I believe their may have been. Read on to see why I feel the way I do.
Don't automatically assume that just because the word Microsoft is mentioned it has something to do with the DOJ case. Try reading the articles sometimes.
Actually, I did read the article. Don't automatically assume that just because somebody mentioned Microsoft and the DOJ case that it was because they didn't read the article. Maybe making an inflamatory comment that implies that I never read articles made you feel better. Good for you.
I fully believe that the monopoly situation played a factor, whether mentioned in the article or not. Yes, they want to pay as little as possible for software, but the inestimable costs associated with licensing software from a monopoly merely lend more reason to go after the free stuff. Remember that when somebody brings up the idea of using free software, they get all of the counter opinions about quality, support, etc. Those who oppose it will suggest that the costs of free software could be higher due to the need to seek additional support and the possibility of having to switch packages if the author of the one they are using decides to disappear or something. Whether these arguments are true or not is not important; they are the way many people in corporations and governments view the situation. To continue, if the taming of Microsoft looks hopeless enough, it suddenly puts the unknown costs of keeping their software licensed on the same par with unknown costs of supporting the free software. Therefore, free software starts looking a lot more attractive to those who were wary before. We'll see how valid my argument is if large companies start making similar decisions.
Based on the somewhat limited success (so far) of the DOJ's case against Microsoft, this is a pretty predictable happening. Maybe other countries in the world are doing this for different reasons, but I can't help but think they've factored the prospect of Microsoft getting more out of control than now and inestimable licensing costs. Unless the leverage Microsoft uses from its monopoly on desktop Operating Systems is somehow broken, many countries will have no choice but to go this route.
I wonder what true effects this will have on the quality and quantity of free software.
Would somebody care to explain this? Perhaps I don't understand how smell works, but I never thought that oxygen was a required factor. If you could overcome that fact that you'd either freeze to death or some other nasty cold-vacuum related fate if you exposed your nose in space, should you still be able to pick up the displeasure of sulfur gas?
Unlike some people, I have no problem using closed source software (I wouldn't know what to do with the source if I had it) - I'll just use whatever the best tool is, and Dreamweaver is IT.
I'll second that. Dreamweaver is absolutely the ONLY reason I'm still running a Windows box on a regular basis. I would certainly pay the same price for a Linux version.
And the right sidebar! I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Someone sign this guy up to write for Slashdot!
I absolutely agree, and I'm happy to see that somebody else has already expressed their sentiments on the issue. In all seriousness, when I first saw the link (on Mozillazine) to that article, I really believed it must have been a parody site. Subsequent research left me astounded to find out that it wasn't. I have honestly never seen such unprofessional and irreponsible journalism (if it can be called that) in all my life. And as you said, the sidebar really took the cake. It reminded me of some of the crap people in high school debate classes would dream up. In fact, better make that junior high. The high schoolers were much better at critical thinking.
This latest article just continues to prove how worthless it is to read articles on Mozillaquest -- unless you just want a good laugh. In fact, if you take a look at the current roadmap for Mozilla (that has been in place for a while), you'll see clearly that they aren't promising a 1.0 release anytime this year. They are *hoping* to have one, but the more conservative of the two numbering schemes obviously takes them into the next year. It's been that way for a while since the roadmap was revised.
My suggestion is that you use Mozillaquest to test out your new DDoS tools. We can just consider it to be the "door stop" of websites.
Every time Slashdot links to one of these silly things, his ad impressions jump through the roof.
So instead, let's all send e-mail to the companies advertising on MozillaQuest and tell them that we will *never* purchase any of their products until they quit advertising there. OK...maybe a little too aggressive.
Why do you say that's a misnomer? Broadband is technically defined as running different types of signal over one wire.
Yes, broadband is an adequate description of most of our high-speed services, but the news junkies tend to use "broadband" interchangeably with "high speed." As you already know, you can have broadband with really slow ip networking, and really high-speed ip service that isn't broadband. I suppose I should have just ignored the issue, though.
Why? It's a niche market, Linux users aren't big spenders
Actually, my comment on needing Linux was strictly a personal one -- not a statement on what they would need to do to be viable. I meant that in order for ME to use something along the lines of what I was describing, they would have to put it on Linux, as that's where I'd be doing my programming, and that's about the only place I'm likely to watch a movie on my computer.
We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.
This is what I'd really like to see. Plus, it really deals with the time factor. Give people 5 days worth of time to watch movie "X" in streaming format, and they can watch it as many times as they want. I also wonder if they could offer a service similar to pay-per-view. They stream a movie starting at a given time. Anybody that wants to watch it at that time can pay and join in. If you're late, you just miss the first few minutes. I could see doing this while I'm programming -- watch the movie in a window while programming in another. But the pricing structure would have to be good and it would have to work with Linux.
While this is truly funny, note that the article states that they really are targeting only the high-speed folks (mis-named broadband). Still, I think even the average cable-modem / DSL user isn't going to be willing to wait up to 40 minutes to download either. I can just see it:
Wait honey, don't start the popcorn yet! We're still downloading. Darn it! The Smiths next door must have posted a link to their personal web server on Slashdot again!
I sort of agree, but perhaps it would have been better if an American were arrested. I would think it would be pretty awful to be arrested in another country just because the lawmakers there were stupid enough to pass such a lame law. I asked this once before. How would you feel if you went to Russia and were arrested for something as simple as speaking at a convention. I think you might be frightened. (Note, this is not to imply that Russia does or does not have such a stupid law).
You know the BeOS trick of making a virtual 'partition' out of a 400MB file on your Windows drive? Linux can do that.
The only problem with this is that I believe it only works with FAT partitions. If you have, say Windows 2000 or NT on your machines with NTFS, this won't work. I wish it would, though. I was looking for a quick solution like this for my laptop.
How about instead just writing a program that sends e-mail to the offending system every time it makes an attempt to infect your system. That way, you're only notifying them of the problem (each and every time it occurs), and they'll be obliged to do something about it before their e-mail logs fill up.
I've often wondered what, exactly, do the words "in connection with" mean? How far into your internal LAN do the tendrils of @Home extend? If I'm behind a firewall, and I'm simply shuttling packets across the firewall to a web server, can my web server, which isn't connected directly to @Home, be considered "connected with" the service?
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
I'm actually astounded at how many people with residential service want to try to get around their contract. For those few out there who subscribed before the "no server" language was added, you should have some rights to run a web server. For the rest of us, unless you have the legal resources for a really fun battle, don't try to push the envelope. In plain English, here's what their contract language is attempting to tell you:
You cannot run any server application that is accessible to the outside world through your @Home residential connection. This would include through a firewall or any other combination of machines. In most cases, simply having the firewall can be a violation of the contract, assuming that you are only allowed to have one computer connected at a time. Now the truth of the matter is that they probably don't care if you run a web server, provided that you only use it yourself to access files from another place such as work. They probably also don't care if you have 50 machines connected to your residential connection, so long as you're only using one of them on the internet at a time. But what they want to avoid is someone bottlenecking their network through excessive use. The problem with computers is that defining excessive use is a little difficult.
Anyway, if you really want to run a web server, and you want to give the URL away to the world to use, my suggestion is that you spring for one of the commercial connections instead -- either that, or have somebody else host your site.
Until Somebody produces a Linus that is easy to install, and doesn't need a massive learning curve to actually use, Linux is still very useless to me.
Linux doesn't necessarily need the learning curve that many people attribute to it. Sure, back in the Slackware-only days, installing, configure and using Linux required some knowledge and effort. But today, it really depends on what you want to do. If you just want to run a few office apps like most people do with windows, you never need to touch source code, or bother with the tricky stuff. Just buy a good distribution (like Mandrake or Redhat or [insert favorite here]), and install it.
Now, what makes Linux difficult? First, there is partitioning your hard drive and installing file systems in preparation for the install. This makes many users really nervous. But here's the reality. If you started with a blank hard drive and installed Windows from scratch, you'd still have to set up the file system on the hard drive during the install. You might not have to *partition* the drive, but you don't have to do that with some of the Linux distributions if you are running them without a dual-boot situation. Don't want to go through the trouble of installing it yourself? Do what most people do with Windows -- buy a machine with the OS preinstalled. While rare, you can find machines with Linux preinstalled.
The second difficult thing about installing Linux is the reported problems with recognizing hardware. Note that this is getting better and better, but you'll find that there are problems with devices designed specifically for Windows (WinModems and Windows Printers), and there are also problems with proprietary hardware in which the manufacturer has not opened the specs to Open Source developers. Want to avoid this problem? Make sure your hardware is fully supported by the Linux distribution BEFORE you install. Think consumers wouldn't go for this? Surprise! They did a few years ago when Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0. It was funny how all of those machines my former employer bought from Compaq weren't certified to run Windows NT, and when we had installation and reliability problems, we were outta luck. And these were high-end machines at the time.
While I'm rambling on, let me tell you where I see *real* problems with Linux. The problem is with user interface consistency. You see, one of the great Linux strengths is also a weakness. There are lots of choices for your desktop, and each has a set of applications tailored to it. Great! Nobody is going to tell me what desktop environment I have to use. But if my favorite applications require various environments, I have a slight problem. Yes, I can run all of them under my favorite desktop environment, but they look, feel and interact differently. In many cases, you almost have to know which libraries the application was written with to fully understand how to use it. This can be very confusing for the average user -- it's bad enough that they have to learn something different from Windows, but try explaining that they have to learn two or three different styles of user interface. It can be frustrating. I hope to see this improve. Perhaps authors of good applications tailored for one environment will port them to another. For example, if your favorite web browser is Konqueror under KDE, but your favorite desktop is GNOME with Enlightenment, wouldn't it be nifty to see a port that interfaces really well with GNOME? Maybe we'll see these kinds of things in the future.
Why does nature demand local phase invarience? I dunno, because its pretty?
42
I can never think of anything clever to put here.
That's exactly my point. Once you do find an answer for that, you'll get another why. Ah, but the endless questions and answers are what make science so fun!!
then youre not suposed to do it - EVEN IF *YOU* THINK IT IS OKAY Im starting to see a weird patern in/.'s that just do what they think is right
Not to single you out (ok, so I am), but you and several others appear to be missing the point. Yes, I believe that such uses of employer's computers are just wrong. But that's not really the issue here. The issue is instead the methods by which they were being monitored. If I walked up to my boss and made some side comment about how I was using my computer to watch videos during the day, then he'd have the right to fire me. On the other hand, if my employer uses stealthy monitoring tools to "spy" on me while I work, this is an invasion of my privacy, and in my mind no different that tapping my phone without a warrant. Just wait till somebody monitors you and cans you for some pornography popover that came up while you were reading an article on *news source X* about a new deal between your company and another.
it seems to me that knowing how something behave has not the same meaning than knowing how it works, the latter implying, for me, a notion of why it behave this way.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
For myself, I surely understand how those forces behave, but not why.
(and I don't accept explanations such as: cause the equations tell us it must behave this way.
You are entirely correct. Unfortunately, this is almost always the case in the world of science, and it's a fact that many people forget. For the most part, we don't know why anything works the way it does. We perform an experiment, make an observation, and then try to come up with a model (ie, equation) that describes behavior and allows us to predict behavior in the future. Then, based on that model, we form an hypothesis, and set up another experiment to test it. If the hypothesis is correct, we assume our model to be correct (as best we can), and wait for another experiment to come along that defies our model. If our experiment proves our hypothesis to be incorrect, we adjust our model. Repeat ad infinitum.
A typical example of this process is "classical" physics vs relativity. Classical physics worked fine at relatively low speeds, but at high speeds it falls apart. Relativity applies adjustments to classical physics to compensate for the inconsistencies. Can you solve classical physics problems with relativity? Sure you can. But most people wouldn't bother with the added complexity to determine the velocity of a projectile fired from a cannon and the distance it will travel.
This is the scientific method. I'm not sure we'll ever understand why anything works like it does. We'll just be able to predict what will happen, and thus use such knowledge to manipulate these forces. If anybody doesn't believe this, take a simple physics topic, and play the children's "why" game. Believe me, you'll get tired of the game long before you finish coming up with "why" questions.
Unfortunately, this article is not completely accurate in its analysis. While many people have productivity losses due to multitasking, there is a sizeable portion of the workforce that does not. However, the division of talents seems to be largely in line with the division of multitasking ability.
For example, my wife is incredible at multitasking. She can be having a phone conversation, slip in a quick face to face conversation, and be filling out expense reports and travel arrangements at the same time. She can also answer a 40-line switchboard while sending e-mail and ordering office supplies online -- all within a multitasking environment. However, she cannot program a computer. She simply cannot concentrate long enough or hard enough to perform this task.
I, on the other hand, can summon the mental powers necessary for programming, and can spend hours upon hours without moving from my chair, solving incredibly complex problems. But, I can't talk on the phone and eat at the same time. I cannot even perform menial tasks simultaneously without really messing something up.
So, I think the writers and editors of this article need to take a closer look. Examine people who are in jobs that TYPICALLY require multitasking -- for example: secretaries, receiptionists, press managers, etc. They'll probably find that most of these people are extremely good at what they do, and that the multitasking doesn't slow them down a bit. It just uses up idle CPU cycles.
There are some fairly simple reasons why he should not be in jail.
The software that subverts Adobe's protection was written within Russia, where it was perfectly legal. In fact, it put Adobe into compliance with Russian law. Quite frankly, it's embarrassing for the US to commit such an act. How would we feel if Russia nabbed a top executive from Adobe and accused them of selling software that was illegal because backup copies couldn't made.
He did not sell the software while he was in the US. Instead, he presented a work on weaknesses in the Adobe encryption methods. If this act is truly illegal under DMCA, we have a serious problem. Such presentations are extremely beneficial, as they point out inherent weaknesses, and allow companies like Adobe to improve. Perhaps we should instead not point these things out, and just let some hacker privately crack the encryption, and start selling pirated copies?
The DMCA itself is ridiculous. It was obviously not well thought out by our Washington lawmakers, and it's obvious that they do not possess sufficient technical knowledge to be making such laws. This law is undoubtedly a direct violation of our First Amendment. Maybe our politicians don't consider computer code to be a form of speech. That doesn't mean they are right. I don't consider many forms of art to be so -- particularly paintings that look like somebody just flung paint (or other nasty stuff) at the canvas. But many other people may consider it art. There are a tremendous number of programmers out there who would consider the code they write to be a form of speech -- an art in itself. There is an elegance to every solution to a problem that can only be expressed in the form of code. This is no different than notes on a staff. If you are not reasonably competent at writing programs, you have no right to decide whether or not computer code is free speech because you literally don't understand.
I'm not so sure this is the best case to test the GPL on. This part right here bothers me.
Johnston alleges ironically that MySQL itself breaks the GPL by adding conditions, something GPL disallows. MySQL, he says, demands a commercial license be used for code distributed over a network because of linking.
If this is true, MySQL itself may be breaking other GPL licenses, or may not have a valid license. Anybody know more about this?
I agree. Actually, the way I feel it should work is this:
The Lacks family should be happy and proud that a member of their family was able to give something that has saved countless others. They should not expect compensation.
Those researchers (and their institutions) who benefited from HeLa cells should be going out of their way to financially compensate the the Lacks family.
Get it? Each has a role. Each should be willing to give and not expecting to "get." Anybody agree?
Slashdot Mirror
The product is not overpriced -- at least not if you only look at the cost of purchasing it. However, the intangible costs are a little high. Let's see....
No, this kind of crap gives the vendor way too much control over how I use the product. Big brother can just go away. This is just one more reason why I never upgraded the only Windows machine I use at home from the Win 95 installation that was shipped with it.
Please, somebody correct me if these statements no longer correctly reflect how licensing works with Windows XP.
So don't "share" them. Just post your list (in a nice downloadable form) somewhere on your web site. If all ISPs do this, they can each download everybody elses lists.
Or, have somebody who is NOT an ISP sponsor a big blacklist that all ISPs can contribute to and get the contents of if they so wish.
I disagree. While the article mentioned nothing about a relationship between the two, I believe their may have been. Read on to see why I feel the way I do.
Don't automatically assume that just because the word Microsoft is mentioned it has something to do with the DOJ case. Try reading the articles sometimes.
Actually, I did read the article. Don't automatically assume that just because somebody mentioned Microsoft and the DOJ case that it was because they didn't read the article. Maybe making an inflamatory comment that implies that I never read articles made you feel better. Good for you.
I fully believe that the monopoly situation played a factor, whether mentioned in the article or not. Yes, they want to pay as little as possible for software, but the inestimable costs associated with licensing software from a monopoly merely lend more reason to go after the free stuff. Remember that when somebody brings up the idea of using free software, they get all of the counter opinions about quality, support, etc. Those who oppose it will suggest that the costs of free software could be higher due to the need to seek additional support and the possibility of having to switch packages if the author of the one they are using decides to disappear or something. Whether these arguments are true or not is not important; they are the way many people in corporations and governments view the situation. To continue, if the taming of Microsoft looks hopeless enough, it suddenly puts the unknown costs of keeping their software licensed on the same par with unknown costs of supporting the free software. Therefore, free software starts looking a lot more attractive to those who were wary before. We'll see how valid my argument is if large companies start making similar decisions.
I wonder what true effects this will have on the quality and quantity of free software.
Would somebody care to explain this? Perhaps I don't understand how smell works, but I never thought that oxygen was a required factor. If you could overcome that fact that you'd either freeze to death or some other nasty cold-vacuum related fate if you exposed your nose in space, should you still be able to pick up the displeasure of sulfur gas?
I'll second that. Dreamweaver is absolutely the ONLY reason I'm still running a Windows box on a regular basis. I would certainly pay the same price for a Linux version.
This will certainly open up a whole new round of "Darwin Awards."
I absolutely agree, and I'm happy to see that somebody else has already expressed their sentiments on the issue. In all seriousness, when I first saw the link (on Mozillazine) to that article, I really believed it must have been a parody site. Subsequent research left me astounded to find out that it wasn't. I have honestly never seen such unprofessional and irreponsible journalism (if it can be called that) in all my life. And as you said, the sidebar really took the cake. It reminded me of some of the crap people in high school debate classes would dream up. In fact, better make that junior high. The high schoolers were much better at critical thinking.
This latest article just continues to prove how worthless it is to read articles on Mozillaquest -- unless you just want a good laugh. In fact, if you take a look at the current roadmap for Mozilla (that has been in place for a while), you'll see clearly that they aren't promising a 1.0 release anytime this year. They are *hoping* to have one, but the more conservative of the two numbering schemes obviously takes them into the next year. It's been that way for a while since the roadmap was revised.
My suggestion is that you use Mozillaquest to test out your new DDoS tools. We can just consider it to be the "door stop" of websites.
So instead, let's all send e-mail to the companies advertising on MozillaQuest and tell them that we will *never* purchase any of their products until they quit advertising there. OK...maybe a little too aggressive.
Yes, broadband is an adequate description of most of our high-speed services, but the news junkies tend to use "broadband" interchangeably with "high speed." As you already know, you can have broadband with really slow ip networking, and really high-speed ip service that isn't broadband. I suppose I should have just ignored the issue, though.
Actually, my comment on needing Linux was strictly a personal one -- not a statement on what they would need to do to be viable. I meant that in order for ME to use something along the lines of what I was describing, they would have to put it on Linux, as that's where I'd be doing my programming, and that's about the only place I'm likely to watch a movie on my computer.
This is what I'd really like to see. Plus, it really deals with the time factor. Give people 5 days worth of time to watch movie "X" in streaming format, and they can watch it as many times as they want. I also wonder if they could offer a service similar to pay-per-view. They stream a movie starting at a given time. Anybody that wants to watch it at that time can pay and join in. If you're late, you just miss the first few minutes. I could see doing this while I'm programming -- watch the movie in a window while programming in another. But the pricing structure would have to be good and it would have to work with Linux.
Wait honey, don't start the popcorn yet! We're still downloading. Darn it! The Smiths next door must have posted a link to their personal web server on Slashdot again!
I sort of agree, but perhaps it would have been better if an American were arrested. I would think it would be pretty awful to be arrested in another country just because the lawmakers there were stupid enough to pass such a lame law. I asked this once before. How would you feel if you went to Russia and were arrested for something as simple as speaking at a convention. I think you might be frightened. (Note, this is not to imply that Russia does or does not have such a stupid law).
The only problem with this is that I believe it only works with FAT partitions. If you have, say Windows 2000 or NT on your machines with NTFS, this won't work. I wish it would, though. I was looking for a quick solution like this for my laptop.
How about instead just writing a program that sends e-mail to the offending system every time it makes an attempt to infect your system. That way, you're only notifying them of the problem (each and every time it occurs), and they'll be obliged to do something about it before their e-mail logs fill up.
I'm actually astounded at how many people with residential service want to try to get around their contract. For those few out there who subscribed before the "no server" language was added, you should have some rights to run a web server. For the rest of us, unless you have the legal resources for a really fun battle, don't try to push the envelope. In plain English, here's what their contract language is attempting to tell you:
You cannot run any server application that is accessible to the outside world through your @Home residential connection. This would include through a firewall or any other combination of machines. In most cases, simply having the firewall can be a violation of the contract, assuming that you are only allowed to have one computer connected at a time. Now the truth of the matter is that they probably don't care if you run a web server, provided that you only use it yourself to access files from another place such as work. They probably also don't care if you have 50 machines connected to your residential connection, so long as you're only using one of them on the internet at a time. But what they want to avoid is someone bottlenecking their network through excessive use. The problem with computers is that defining excessive use is a little difficult.
Anyway, if you really want to run a web server, and you want to give the URL away to the world to use, my suggestion is that you spring for one of the commercial connections instead -- either that, or have somebody else host your site.
Linux doesn't necessarily need the learning curve that many people attribute to it. Sure, back in the Slackware-only days, installing, configure and using Linux required some knowledge and effort. But today, it really depends on what you want to do. If you just want to run a few office apps like most people do with windows, you never need to touch source code, or bother with the tricky stuff. Just buy a good distribution (like Mandrake or Redhat or [insert favorite here]), and install it.
Now, what makes Linux difficult? First, there is partitioning your hard drive and installing file systems in preparation for the install. This makes many users really nervous. But here's the reality. If you started with a blank hard drive and installed Windows from scratch, you'd still have to set up the file system on the hard drive during the install. You might not have to *partition* the drive, but you don't have to do that with some of the Linux distributions if you are running them without a dual-boot situation. Don't want to go through the trouble of installing it yourself? Do what most people do with Windows -- buy a machine with the OS preinstalled. While rare, you can find machines with Linux preinstalled.
The second difficult thing about installing Linux is the reported problems with recognizing hardware. Note that this is getting better and better, but you'll find that there are problems with devices designed specifically for Windows (WinModems and Windows Printers), and there are also problems with proprietary hardware in which the manufacturer has not opened the specs to Open Source developers. Want to avoid this problem? Make sure your hardware is fully supported by the Linux distribution BEFORE you install. Think consumers wouldn't go for this? Surprise! They did a few years ago when Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0. It was funny how all of those machines my former employer bought from Compaq weren't certified to run Windows NT, and when we had installation and reliability problems, we were outta luck. And these were high-end machines at the time.
While I'm rambling on, let me tell you where I see *real* problems with Linux. The problem is with user interface consistency. You see, one of the great Linux strengths is also a weakness. There are lots of choices for your desktop, and each has a set of applications tailored to it. Great! Nobody is going to tell me what desktop environment I have to use. But if my favorite applications require various environments, I have a slight problem. Yes, I can run all of them under my favorite desktop environment, but they look, feel and interact differently. In many cases, you almost have to know which libraries the application was written with to fully understand how to use it. This can be very confusing for the average user -- it's bad enough that they have to learn something different from Windows, but try explaining that they have to learn two or three different styles of user interface. It can be frustrating. I hope to see this improve. Perhaps authors of good applications tailored for one environment will port them to another. For example, if your favorite web browser is Konqueror under KDE, but your favorite desktop is GNOME with Enlightenment, wouldn't it be nifty to see a port that interfaces really well with GNOME? Maybe we'll see these kinds of things in the future.
That's exactly my point. Once you do find an answer for that, you'll get another why. Ah, but the endless questions and answers are what make science so fun!!
Not to single you out (ok, so I am), but you and several others appear to be missing the point. Yes, I believe that such uses of employer's computers are just wrong. But that's not really the issue here. The issue is instead the methods by which they were being monitored. If I walked up to my boss and made some side comment about how I was using my computer to watch videos during the day, then he'd have the right to fire me. On the other hand, if my employer uses stealthy monitoring tools to "spy" on me while I work, this is an invasion of my privacy, and in my mind no different that tapping my phone without a warrant. Just wait till somebody monitors you and cans you for some pornography popover that came up while you were reading an article on *news source X* about a new deal between your company and another.
You are entirely correct. Unfortunately, this is almost always the case in the world of science, and it's a fact that many people forget. For the most part, we don't know why anything works the way it does. We perform an experiment, make an observation, and then try to come up with a model (ie, equation) that describes behavior and allows us to predict behavior in the future. Then, based on that model, we form an hypothesis, and set up another experiment to test it. If the hypothesis is correct, we assume our model to be correct (as best we can), and wait for another experiment to come along that defies our model. If our experiment proves our hypothesis to be incorrect, we adjust our model. Repeat ad infinitum.
A typical example of this process is "classical" physics vs relativity. Classical physics worked fine at relatively low speeds, but at high speeds it falls apart. Relativity applies adjustments to classical physics to compensate for the inconsistencies. Can you solve classical physics problems with relativity? Sure you can. But most people wouldn't bother with the added complexity to determine the velocity of a projectile fired from a cannon and the distance it will travel.
This is the scientific method. I'm not sure we'll ever understand why anything works like it does. We'll just be able to predict what will happen, and thus use such knowledge to manipulate these forces. If anybody doesn't believe this, take a simple physics topic, and play the children's "why" game. Believe me, you'll get tired of the game long before you finish coming up with "why" questions.
For example, my wife is incredible at multitasking. She can be having a phone conversation, slip in a quick face to face conversation, and be filling out expense reports and travel arrangements at the same time. She can also answer a 40-line switchboard while sending e-mail and ordering office supplies online -- all within a multitasking environment. However, she cannot program a computer. She simply cannot concentrate long enough or hard enough to perform this task.
I, on the other hand, can summon the mental powers necessary for programming, and can spend hours upon hours without moving from my chair, solving incredibly complex problems. But, I can't talk on the phone and eat at the same time. I cannot even perform menial tasks simultaneously without really messing something up.
So, I think the writers and editors of this article need to take a closer look. Examine people who are in jobs that TYPICALLY require multitasking -- for example: secretaries, receiptionists, press managers, etc. They'll probably find that most of these people are extremely good at what they do, and that the multitasking doesn't slow them down a bit. It just uses up idle CPU cycles.
If this is true, MySQL itself may be breaking other GPL licenses, or may not have a valid license. Anybody know more about this?
GreyPoopon
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Get it? Each has a role. Each should be willing to give and not expecting to "get." Anybody agree?
GreyPoopon
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