The difference is, Columbus, certain members of the Vikings, and so on were venturing out into the unknown. That's different from taking risks to do something you'd like to try, without there really being any unknown element except the risk itself.
I think the spammers have figured out that anybody who posts with a real email address on Usenet is clueful enough that s/he is probably actually kinda dangerous to spam. I know I've never posted on Usenet with anything but my real email address (not tons of that, though, to be honest) and I can't trace any spam that I currently get to my posting.
There's a law of diminishing return, and spammers know that less clueful people better marks to hit on.
If a 'killfile' function was implemented here on Slashdot it would change things radically. Probably it would improve things. Hard to completely predict, of course.
Think of the value in never, ever, having to see the messages that get spammed over, and over, and over here, and still being able to read at a setting of zero...
I'd agree, except that 'cheap' access to the Internet these days is a $10 deal if you're lucky (and some taxpayer or your tuition bill isn't paying for it). Back when I hung out on BBSes, nobody would ever IMAGINE spending $10 a month to read Usenet.
Altho I do remember for a short while paying like $12 an hour for CompuServ at 1200 baud (it was half that if you dialed into the lines limited to 300 baud!) for certain discussion groups (not Usenet ones, though).
You sign up and they send you the software periodically. Once you receive the software, it's yours.
Not hardly. The software belongs to the whole GNU universe.
Oh, and BTW, they were selling 'Subscriptions' to Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' (they called it LGX in the first release) back as early as 1993. I remember that at the time you could even order a copy of Yggdrasil Linux bundled with a Mitsumi 1x CD-ROM drive, at what was an almost attractive price at the time (a few hundred bucks).
I have a friend who ran Linux for awhile, Slackware 3.6. One night in a friendly mood after she'd just sent me an email message (she uses Earthlink) I read the header on the message to figure out what her IP was for the moment. I telnetted to that IP, but discovered that due to a reinstall that she'd recently done I no longer had an account to log on the machine and request a 'talk' session with her.
I tried 'root' at login: instead.
Yep. She had no root password at all. I quickly changed that by giving root a password, then (of course) created an account for myself. Then I logged off as root (this was a friend, remember) logged on as myself with the newly created account, and requested a 'talk' session to mention to her that her security had been, umm, a little lax.
Slackware 3.6 didn't require you to (or even mention to you that you should) establish a root password, and of course the default is a root account with no password whatever.
She'd been browsing the web rather actively for about a week in that state.
Find an agency that has upgraded beyond Winword 6. Unless you like that sorta operation**. Me, I don't have to agree with a headhunter politically to know where to point 'em.
( ** Kudos if you do. I like my TRS-80 Model 100. And my Tandy PC-8. Don't have CP/M-86 installed anywhere at the moment but the boxed set is still on the shelf, next to the WordStar 3.3 for MS-DOS boxed set)
Except for speed and size (and now noise level) there is pretty much nil difference between HDs now and 40 years ago!
Don't tell that to old timers like my father who programmed the IBM 650 in the late 1950s. Back then the only input to a machine was a card reader, the only output to a machine was a card punch, and a biggish machine had a 5000 byte drum memory (predecessor of 'disk' memory). To run jobs on such a storage starved machine one had to:
Read in the deck containing the assembler program.
Run the loaded assembler program
Read in the deck containing your source code
The Assembler would punch up a stack of 'object' cards
Read in your stack of object cards (wiping out the Assembler program that was still in memory)
Your program would punch it's output on another stack of cards
Take the stack of output cards to another machine which would print the data on each card to a line of paper
A quantitative change occured when disk/drum space became cheaper. The whole way the system is used has changed radically without the 'basic-machine physics' level of operation changing much.
A number of years back I started noticing how much noisier the new faster-spinning CD-ROM drives were getting. It seemed like some disks were noisier than other disks. Then I realized this was probably because some disks were more out of balance. I decided to start experimenting. I put little bits of tape on some disks to see how it would affect the sound of the drive. Little bits of tape made the drive a little louder, the more tape I added the drive got noisier. Then I got the bright idea to tape a small metal washer to a disk.
The drive spun up after I inserted that disk and shook the case so hard that it was impossible to eject the disk. The roar rose up over the cubicle wall and threatened to draw attention to the experiment being conducted in R&D that morning. (needless to say this isn't the sort of experiment one does with personally owned equipment!) I ended up having to kill power and use a Macintool (one of those bent paperclips Mac users keep handy) to eject the CD.
I've wondered for some time what has happened to reliability figures with the new 'rocket engine' CD drives. Surely reliability is being compromised to attain the higher performance on the faster drives. One of those tradeoffs where the '48x max' pad printed on the outside of the drive case becomes the only bullet point that matters.
I knew somebody with a big noisy Athlon would have to add a comment like this. Apple partisans used to make fun of us Intel chip users for the excessive power consumption of the original Pentium chips. It's kind of amusing that there's a new low man in the pecking order with the Athlon.
Nope. You need to learn a bit more about Godwin's Law before you're allowed to play. I have to compare somebody or something to Hitler.
Two minute penalty. Please exit the playing field.
Re:The answer is not the United States Government
on
Microsoft and the GPL
·
· Score: 1
The European Union, Brazil, Japan, China, the USSR, the Third World...those are places where Microsoft's appeal ends
Catch a clue! Those are mostly places where Microsoft has had their software ripped off illegally for years anyhow.
The third world (don't get all pissy EU people, we know you're in the Second World, not the Third World, in Charman Mao's 'Theory of Three Worlds'...) deserves to run limited function software until they can afford better. The best programmers from the third world aren't satisfied to live in poverty and hack code. They get greencards and come here to work for Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Apple, etc.
And 'Big Brother' was a metaphor for Joseph Stalin. Literally. I know you were steeped in 'anti-communism is evil' bullshit in High School, but that's just the plain truth. The teachers cram a limited interpretation of Orwell and Huxley down all our throats when we're young, and it keeps us from thinking for ourselves. It's really a shame that they've shellaced over Orwell and turned him into one of the 'bromides' he was fighting against when he wrote that book.
on every damn thing in my house that has a microprocessor and memory,
Cool. How did you get Linux to run in the embedded controller in your microwave oven?
Your garage door opener runs Linux? The Zilog chip in your remote controls run Linux? Cool!
I'm also curious to know how you're using it to run the embedded controllers in each of your hard drives, in your mouse, in your keyboard, and in all the glue layers in all your PC motherboards.
You're one tuFF rebel, and an elite hacker to boot!
Come on, now. Don't start rattling off your matchbook cover rendition of Political Economy to explain how people's freedom is reduced by closed source software. That's bullshit.
The day when I can't take NetBSD source code, change it into anything that I want, compile it, install it, screw down the lid on it and sell it without telling anybody what I did to change it is the day somebody has taken away my freedom.
Yes, you sound like a broken record. Somebody tap on his tone arm, okay?
If Outlook is just a 'mailreader program' for you it must be because you're a bottom-level employee who doesn't get invited to many meetings. Dig around in it for awhile and maybe you'll notice that it's a collaborative groupware program. Yep, all that extra stuff that annoys you because it's not in Pine is there because those important people who don't wear jeans to work use it to collaborate. Lotus Notes, Groupwise, and some of those other 'mail readers' you probably wouldn't like do stuff like that, too.
Cool, huh? Now go drink another Mountain Dew, kay?
Actually, the House Un-American Activies Committe was very successful at rooting out active Communist agents from foreign powers who were actively commiting treason within the government.
Joe McCarthy was a crank, and an opportunist who took advantage of the climate in that era to play little power games. He was essentially booted outta there after awhile.
Unfortunately there's a strong bias in the teaching of the history of that era so lots of people hold the ignorant view that McCarthy was the end all and be all of the HUAC.
Wrong. The secret archives in the Kremlin have been opened. The Rosenbergs deserved to die.
If I and everybody else pay taxes that fund the software you develop, you shouldn't be allowed to release it under a license that has a politically charged agenda loaded into it. It should be released to the public domain for anybody who wants to do anything they want with it.
I genuinely want people to start citing specific instances where software that started out public domain was 'stolen' from public domain in any fashion. If someone adds to it in a substantive way and wants to release it in object form only that should be their perogative. Just like you and me they cannot prohibit anybody from grabbing the Public Domain code just like they did and making it into whatever they want out of it.
Specific examples, people. Not just whiney 'I don't want my code making someone else profits!!! That's a bullshit arguement if you release it as public domain. It isn't your code if it was funded by means that require it to be public domain.
Release your OWN code under the GPL if you wish. Don't cram your political agenda down everybody else's throat by political fiat.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is, Columbus, certain members of the Vikings, and so on were venturing out into the unknown. That's different from taking risks to do something you'd like to try, without there really being any unknown element except the risk itself.
This is more like gambling than exploration.
Ping is one of those 'was there at the time, first to make the tool that was needed' kinds of things.
BRL-CAD is one of those 'one hell of an accomplishment even though not enough people appreciate it fully' kind of things.
Do go to Mike's page. Check out BRL-CAD if you haven't already.
There are various places where one can get free Newsfeeds, wether your ISP supplies a server or not.
Check out This as one place.
I think the spammers have figured out that anybody who posts with a real email address on Usenet is clueful enough that s/he is probably actually kinda dangerous to spam. I know I've never posted on Usenet with anything but my real email address (not tons of that, though, to be honest) and I can't trace any spam that I currently get to my posting.
There's a law of diminishing return, and spammers know that less clueful people better marks to hit on.
If a 'killfile' function was implemented here on Slashdot it would change things radically. Probably it would improve things. Hard to completely predict, of course.
Think of the value in never, ever, having to see the messages that get spammed over, and over, and over here, and still being able to read at a setting of zero...
I'd agree, except that 'cheap' access to the Internet these days is a $10 deal if you're lucky (and some taxpayer or your tuition bill isn't paying for it). Back when I hung out on BBSes, nobody would ever IMAGINE spending $10 a month to read Usenet.
Altho I do remember for a short while paying like $12 an hour for CompuServ at 1200 baud (it was half that if you dialed into the lines limited to 300 baud!) for certain discussion groups (not Usenet ones, though).
Okay. The sofware belongs to the Whole ____ Universe.
You sign up and they send you the software periodically. Once you receive the software, it's yours.
Not hardly. The software belongs to the whole GNU universe.
Oh, and BTW, they were selling 'Subscriptions' to Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' (they called it LGX in the first release) back as early as 1993. I remember that at the time you could even order a copy of Yggdrasil Linux bundled with a Mitsumi 1x CD-ROM drive, at what was an almost attractive price at the time (a few hundred bucks).
I have a friend who ran Linux for awhile, Slackware 3.6. One night in a friendly mood after she'd just sent me an email message (she uses Earthlink) I read the header on the message to figure out what her IP was for the moment. I telnetted to that IP, but discovered that due to a reinstall that she'd recently done I no longer had an account to log on the machine and request a 'talk' session with her.
I tried 'root' at login: instead.
Yep. She had no root password at all. I quickly changed that by giving root a password, then (of course) created an account for myself. Then I logged off as root (this was a friend, remember) logged on as myself with the newly created account, and requested a 'talk' session to mention to her that her security had been, umm, a little lax.
Slackware 3.6 didn't require you to (or even mention to you that you should) establish a root password, and of course the default is a root account with no password whatever.
She'd been browsing the web rather actively for about a week in that state.
Fun with Linux.
Find an agency that has upgraded beyond Winword 6. Unless you like that sorta operation**. Me, I don't have to agree with a headhunter politically to know where to point 'em.
( ** Kudos if you do. I like my TRS-80 Model 100. And my Tandy PC-8. Don't have CP/M-86 installed anywhere at the moment but the boxed set is still on the shelf, next to the WordStar 3.3 for MS-DOS boxed set)
typo in above. I meant to say a qualitative change occured.
Don't tell that to old timers like my father who programmed the IBM 650 in the late 1950s. Back then the only input to a machine was a card reader, the only output to a machine was a card punch, and a biggish machine had a 5000 byte drum memory (predecessor of 'disk' memory). To run jobs on such a storage starved machine one had to:
Read in the deck containing the assembler program.
Run the loaded assembler program
Read in the deck containing your source code
The Assembler would punch up a stack of 'object' cards
Read in your stack of object cards (wiping out the Assembler program that was still in memory)
Your program would punch it's output on another stack of cards
Take the stack of output cards to another machine which would print the data on each card to a line of paper
A quantitative change occured when disk/drum space became cheaper. The whole way the system is used has changed radically without the 'basic-machine physics' level of operation changing much.
A number of years back I started noticing how much noisier the new faster-spinning CD-ROM drives were getting. It seemed like some disks were noisier than other disks. Then I realized this was probably because some disks were more out of balance. I decided to start experimenting. I put little bits of tape on some disks to see how it would affect the sound of the drive. Little bits of tape made the drive a little louder, the more tape I added the drive got noisier. Then I got the bright idea to tape a small metal washer to a disk.
The drive spun up after I inserted that disk and shook the case so hard that it was impossible to eject the disk. The roar rose up over the cubicle wall and threatened to draw attention to the experiment being conducted in R&D that morning. (needless to say this isn't the sort of experiment one does with personally owned equipment!) I ended up having to kill power and use a Macintool (one of those bent paperclips Mac users keep handy) to eject the CD.
I've wondered for some time what has happened to reliability figures with the new 'rocket engine' CD drives. Surely reliability is being compromised to attain the higher performance on the faster drives. One of those tradeoffs where the '48x max' pad printed on the outside of the drive case becomes the only bullet point that matters.
Heh.
I knew somebody with a big noisy Athlon would have to add a comment like this. Apple partisans used to make fun of us Intel chip users for the excessive power consumption of the original Pentium chips. It's kind of amusing that there's a new low man in the pecking order with the Athlon.
Nope. You need to learn a bit more about Godwin's Law before you're allowed to play. I have to compare somebody or something to Hitler.
Two minute penalty. Please exit the playing field.
The European Union, Brazil, Japan, China, the USSR, the Third World...those are places where Microsoft's appeal ends
Catch a clue! Those are mostly places where Microsoft has had their software ripped off illegally for years anyhow.
The third world (don't get all pissy EU people, we know you're in the Second World, not the Third World, in Charman Mao's 'Theory of Three Worlds'...) deserves to run limited function software until they can afford better. The best programmers from the third world aren't satisfied to live in poverty and hack code. They get greencards and come here to work for Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Apple, etc.
And 'Big Brother' was a metaphor for Joseph Stalin. Literally. I know you were steeped in 'anti-communism is evil' bullshit in High School, but that's just the plain truth. The teachers cram a limited interpretation of Orwell and Huxley down all our throats when we're young, and it keeps us from thinking for ourselves. It's really a shame that they've shellaced over Orwell and turned him into one of the 'bromides' he was fighting against when he wrote that book.
on every damn thing in my house that has a microprocessor and memory,
Cool. How did you get Linux to run in the embedded controller in your microwave oven?
Your garage door opener runs Linux? The Zilog chip in your remote controls run Linux? Cool!
I'm also curious to know how you're using it to run the embedded controllers in each of your hard drives, in your mouse, in your keyboard, and in all the glue layers in all your PC motherboards.
You're one tuFF rebel, and an elite hacker to boot!
Limit other's freedom?
Come on, now. Don't start rattling off your matchbook cover rendition of Political Economy to explain how people's freedom is reduced by closed source software. That's bullshit.
The day when I can't take NetBSD source code, change it into anything that I want, compile it, install it, screw down the lid on it and sell it without telling anybody what I did to change it is the day somebody has taken away my freedom.
Yes, you sound like a broken record. Somebody tap on his tone arm, okay?
If Outlook is just a 'mailreader program' for you it must be because you're a bottom-level employee who doesn't get invited to many meetings. Dig around in it for awhile and maybe you'll notice that it's a collaborative groupware program. Yep, all that extra stuff that annoys you because it's not in Pine is there because those important people who don't wear jeans to work use it to collaborate. Lotus Notes, Groupwise, and some of those other 'mail readers' you probably wouldn't like do stuff like that, too.
Cool, huh? Now go drink another Mountain Dew, kay?
Actually, the House Un-American Activies Committe was very successful at rooting out active Communist agents from foreign powers who were actively commiting treason within the government.
Joe McCarthy was a crank, and an opportunist who took advantage of the climate in that era to play little power games. He was essentially booted outta there after awhile.
Unfortunately there's a strong bias in the teaching of the history of that era so lots of people hold the ignorant view that McCarthy was the end all and be all of the HUAC.
Wrong. The secret archives in the Kremlin have been opened. The Rosenbergs deserved to die.
If I and everybody else pay taxes that fund the software you develop, you shouldn't be allowed to release it under a license that has a politically charged agenda loaded into it. It should be released to the public domain for anybody who wants to do anything they want with it.
I genuinely want people to start citing specific instances where software that started out public domain was 'stolen' from public domain in any fashion. If someone adds to it in a substantive way and wants to release it in object form only that should be their perogative. Just like you and me they cannot prohibit anybody from grabbing the Public Domain code just like they did and making it into whatever they want out of it.
Specific examples, people. Not just whiney 'I don't want my code making someone else profits!!! That's a bullshit arguement if you release it as public domain. It isn't your code if it was funded by means that require it to be public domain.
Release your OWN code under the GPL if you wish. Don't cram your political agenda down everybody else's throat by political fiat.
So format your Resume in HTML and then rename it with a .DOC extension before shipping it out. Do we have to do all of your homework for you???
Oh, my goodness!
Full price????
(Hitler made people pay full price, and look what happened to him!!! Or whatever...)
Is that two words, or is it one trademark?
There have been predecessors with the word 'Open' in their name. I alluded to one in the earlier comment.
I think the system works. You apparently don't.
The police have bigger fish to cook that a law abiding citizen whose friend drops a pot seed out of his jacket pocket onto the rug.
The police really do a good job most of the time. In spite of cynics like you who throw rocks.
But maybe you're paranoid because there's more than a seed in a crack in the floor at your place.