I know all that can be solved, but it involves doing things in a non-default way and knowing what you're doing which means IT won't do that.
Unfortunately "knowing what you're doing" and "doing things in a non-default way" are pretty much opposites when you're looking at long-term data integrity and reliablity.
If you do things differently from everyone else, you might think you know what you're doing, but you've actually created a point of difference, which is the same thing is a point of failure. Even if 'better', your system is now 'broken' to the rest of the world. That's why IT won't do it unless there's a huge payoff to counterbalance the brokenness having a special setup introduces.
Sufficiently rapid innovation is indistinguishable from breakdown.
An electronic audit trail/change control system seems to be something that can be done, but maybe the currently available systems are too complicated to use.
Yes. I wish we could somehow get to a world where all filesystems natively had versioning, so that you couldn't overwrite a file without a complete audit trail being made. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to do - just requires the political will for someone in filesystem development to do it.
At the moment filesystems still aren't quite as reliable as paper, which is a pity.
So, are you trying to say that the U.S. IS proactive?
As a New Zealander with the view from the Pacific, yes, I'd say the USA is *insanely* proactive and has been since WW2. Huge number of standing military bases all around the world, total strategic dominance of space, siphoning communications traffic with ECHELON, the CIA busy destablising the Third World with coups and assassinations, and basically playing Yankee-accented James Bond games with the whole planet. (Not just the USA of course; the whole NATO/NORAD/UKUSA gang: UK, USA, Canada, Aussie, NZ, Israel. But the USA as the ringleader and banker.)
Proactive? Heck yes. Up in everyone's business all over the place, yes. Comfortable with words like 'empire' and 'dominance', yes. There's been nothing li'l and down-homey about the USA since Hiroshima, from anyone's viewpoint who doesn't live there. You guys are top dog on the planet and take every opportunity to make sure everyone knows it.
Now, are the USA and superfriends being proactive in either a smart or ethical way? Do they notice what's right in front of their noses? Are they compassionate and merciful and enlightened or just proactively protecting their commercial interests? And is all their running around being cowboys actually preventing threats or is it causing them? Now those are completely different questions, in my opinion.
If Firefox just binds to generic facilities/libraries like ffmpeg, DirectMedia and CoreVideo, the whole discussion goes away, since everybody can choose what to use anyway.
No, they can't. Not legally. Not in the USA.
It is illegal to distribute a free H.264 player in the USA.
The code exists. It is copyright-free. But it is illegal to ship due to software patents.
If you either a) don't particularly care if Linux provides H.264 support, or b) don't particularly care about obeying the law, this is not a problem. If, however, you want both of those, you have a legal problem.
The only way to remain legal is to NOT provide illegal H.264 support. If you also want to be able to watch videos, it would be nice if they weren't in a format that requires someone to break the law to give you the ability to watch.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that this has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with obeying the law?
Yes, the law is broken and should be changed. But since it hasn't...
The point is that browser remains FOSS. If user is a FOSS purist, he doesn't install the "evil" codecs, and doesn't go to websites which only provide H.264 streams.
That's fine. Just don't consider H.264 any kind of 'standard', since it's evidently not.
And it's not an 'evil' codec - just an illegal one to redistribute. If it weren't illegal (patented) then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But it is, and because it's illegal to distribute in a free operating system, it should not be a standard.
Because stop me if this sounds strange, but generally speaking, complying with standards should not require people to break the law.
Last I checked, it was not illegal to purchase a properly licensed GStreamer H.264 codec, and use that. The cheapest bundle including H.264 from Fluendo would cost you 28 euro.
Then it would be illegal to redistribute that operating system. Game over, end of story, thank you for playing the Open Source game but you lost.
What lock-in? What exactly am I "locked-in" to when I watch H.264 HTML 5 movies on youtube? And how would those movie being encoded in theora make me less "locked-in"?
You're locked into exactly the set of platforms which provide you a legal H.264 player - a set which explicitly excludes open-source platforms because the H.264 patent is contrary to the spirit and letter of the GPL and any other Free licences. It cannot be legally distributed as part of any Free software distribution.
If you don't care about both open source or abiding by law, then you have no problem.
If you like Linux but don't mind modding your distro with illegal software, then you also have no problem - but if you're that sort of person who doesn't mind breaking the law to get free stuff, you probably also have no problem with pirating Windows or movies outright. Which is a legitimate viewpoint but not a legal one.
If the movies are encoded in Theora, however, you are legally allowed to watch them on any current or future platform, including Free ones without running the risk of you or your distribution's creators being thrown in jail.
But why should the average user be quite in some stupid ideological fight when they are never going to be paying for the H.264 royalties that Microsoft, Apple and Google will be shelling out to include H.264 support in their browser?
It's not ideology, it's law. If patents didn't make distributing H.264 illegal then it wouldn't be a problem. It's not the open-source projects who are being nitpickers; they run the risk of going to jail if they don't.
But you're right, the average user doesn't seem to care about abiding by law when it comes to software.
Second: this thread had nothing to do with (not) protecting manufacturing jobs, it had to do with protecting American technology and media. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?
If new technology directly competes with old technology for cheaper, and the new technology is primarily software (IP) based rather than hardware, and if the physical manufacturing for the new technology is done offshore... then yes, they are mutually exclusive, because the new will replace the old.
The iMac says proudly, "Designed by Apple in California... made in China". Which says it all really. If the economic strength of America is moving from manufacture to mere design, then it's turning from hardware to 'information', which is a much more fragile thing. Information can be copied. If your national economy starts to depend solely on preventing information being copied, then it seems like you're in a very dangerous place.... you risk being disintermediated as a nation, cut out of the manufacturing loop entirely. And given you also have a huge military spend, that seems like a recipe for rash trigger-finger reactions.
Is America still making stuff which isn't information which competes on the world stage? If so, what? Not cars anymore. Not oil anymore. Not garments anymore. Music, TV, games, software. Drug patents. Some high-end routers perhaps? Lots of guns. And maybe drugs. Anything else?
(New Zealand's getting into a similar bind... we sell sheep and milk and tourism, but the cows are starting to trash our environment... we're getting into high tech, but as information, that's also fragile for the same reasons.)
In New Zealand in 1984, this 'first past the post' system led to a very interesting government change (Muldoon National to Lange/Douglas Labour) where a Keynesian right-wing government switched to a hybrid Austrian School (hard-right economically) Labour (left politically) government which poured public money into indigenous land settlements, broke a major defence pact to stay nuclear-free, and massively privatised and deregulated the economy, causing a huge swing of money and power from the middle class to the very rich. This happened because the right and left factions both joined in order to defeat the incumbent - since it was the only way within the two-party system.
So I find some of the US politics - especially people like George Lakoff who pontificate about how the current US alignments are pure psychological/philosophical stances and one is good and truth and light and the other regressiev evil delusion - kind of strange. Political alignments are just alignments, they're not generally well-thought-out. Almost any given issue doesn't naturally fall into a 'left' or 'right' divide, it's just that it's been seized as such by current parties.
Witness how 'Democrats' changed from White Jim Crow to the party of affirmative action. That realignment really didn't have much to do with party principles or philosophy; it just happened.
It would be nice if all the issues could be debated separately, on their merits, instead of distorted into huge merged camps. But as long as you have a FPP system, they will, and your politics will be poorer for it.
There are, but under the current US electoral system anyone 'defecting' from the Blue/Red centrist axis to vote a minor party gets actively punished by causing their most hated major party to get in.
If you have on a scale: 1. Libertarian (hardcore principled anarcho-capitalist) 2. Republican (mixed compromise capitalist-socialist) 3. Democratic (mixed compromise socialist-capitalist) 4. Green (hardcore principled eco-socialist)
then if you vote 1, you split the vote for 2 causing 3 to get in; if you vote 4, you split the vote for 3 causing 2 to get in. So the result is, if you favour massive rapid social change in one direction, then voting your heart's desire will signal medium change in the opposite direction. So people vote 'tactically' for the follow-up 'lesser evil' of D or R, and foom, that entrenches a centrist consensus. It's a neat self-perpetuating system.
The only way to break this deadlock would be for one or other of the big two parties to massively disintegrate, or a huge social movement cause a third party to rapidly gain enough critical mass to pass the 'voting for this will vote against my cause' barrier.
Anyone who's paid attention to the UFO phenomenon can tell you that the existence of 'something' out there has been well known by the US military since the 1940s. The problem is nobody really seems to understand the first thing about just what 'they' are, so it's embarassing to talk about and best brushed under the table. Whatever 'they' are they're NOT classical little green men with antennae... and I highly doubt that any 'crash debris' was ever retrieved.. all the best incidents indicate something much weirder, transient, and more in control of the parameters of the encounters than we are.
There's a few good reviews of the classic UFO material online: Michael Swords is good, as is the Daily Kos blogger Two Roads. I also recommend the Society for Scientific Exploration. The rest of the stuff is out there for anyone with Google.
The apparent failure of radio SETI is a very interesting data point to put against the apparent reality (yet weirdness) of the UFO phenomenon. But then, we've moved so far beyond analog broadcast radio in the last 50 years, why wouldn't ET civilisations' communications move equally fast? What if there were some way of, eg, modulating gravity or quantum entanglement? Should we expect to still be detecting legacy technologies just because that's the detectors we happen to have right now?
I assume that mad scientists will be using Ruby and really mad scientists will be using Common Lisp (on vintage Symbolics machines), while run-of-the-mill evil dictators will stick with the tried-and-true deathray+Java+volcano+SOA+gorilla+XML+submarine+ESB stack.
I think it's more like saying 'I don't like that when I buy a Whopper from Burger King you first ask me for a mandatory blood sample, drug test, and retina scan, infect me with anthrax and clip an explosive collar to my neck... so instead of buying a Whopper on those terms I'm going to put on my wizard hat, wave my magic wand at your Whopper, shout 'GIGANTUS DUPLICATUS' and make me a thousand brand new magic-cloned Whoppers, without explosive collars, for free. And then give them out to all my friends right in the middle of your store.'
Which is of course way illegal, but it's what all the kids at Hogwarts are doing these days. I blame the butterbeer, and all those owls.
Azkaban Notice: You wouldn't cast the Cruciatus Curse on a Muggle... so why Duplicatus a Whopper? Think of the house elves! Magicing food is a Dementable offense.
How about because you're getting for free what other people are paying good money for? Is it fair to them?
It's neither fair nor unfair - a customer who has received a service for money still has that service even if another person now gets an identical service for free. (Unless the service consumes a shared resource, like bandwidth; but a single instance of a software package, your pirating it won't hurt my use of it.)
They lose NOTHING, not even one cent, by me pirating it, so what reason is there not to?
Because you can hurt a bad company more by ignoring a bad product than by using it and thereby increasing its installed customer base with all the social word-of-mouth promotion and lock-in effects that follow. A boycott, in other words.
You are supposed to break laws you don't agree with to move forwards and cause change.
Or perhaps more effectively, you could stop promoting the product and contributing to the user base of a company whose actions you find unethical.
Don't just pirate their software but keep using it - completely shun them and avoid all their products, substituting ones whose ethics you do agree with.
To everyone who says we owe the computer industry to NASA, you're partly right but much more so over the last 30 years to Intel and AMD.
Actually I think the ICBM program and especially the Minuteman computer had a bit more to do with it than NASA. But it's politically inconvenient to point out that the USA's so-called 'civilian' space program extensively dual-used technology whose real bread-and-butter purpose was Cold War weapons of very mass destruction. And even 'pure science' missions were about as pure as a dirty snowball.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the United States government via its many-tentacled agencies outright point-blank bare-faced lied about the true purpose of much of the space hardware launched during the Cold War, some of which is still up there. That's nice and all, times of war, Sun Tsu etc, but unfortunately now... how much do you trust your government to ever again tell you the truth?
Slashdot Mirror
That's my big worry with SSDs at the moment. How long is their useful write-cycle life compared to good old magnetic HD?
I know all that can be solved, but it involves doing things in a non-default way and knowing what you're doing which means IT won't do that.
Unfortunately "knowing what you're doing" and "doing things in a non-default way" are pretty much opposites when you're looking at long-term data integrity and reliablity.
If you do things differently from everyone else, you might think you know what you're doing, but you've actually created a point of difference, which is the same thing is a point of failure. Even if 'better', your system is now 'broken' to the rest of the world. That's why IT won't do it unless there's a huge payoff to counterbalance the brokenness having a special setup introduces.
Sufficiently rapid innovation is indistinguishable from breakdown.
An electronic audit trail/change control system seems to be something that can be done, but maybe the currently available systems are too complicated to use.
Yes. I wish we could somehow get to a world where all filesystems natively had versioning, so that you couldn't overwrite a file without a complete audit trail being made. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to do - just requires the political will for someone in filesystem development to do it.
At the moment filesystems still aren't quite as reliable as paper, which is a pity.
So, are you trying to say that the U.S. IS proactive?
As a New Zealander with the view from the Pacific, yes, I'd say the USA is *insanely* proactive and has been since WW2. Huge number of standing military bases all around the world, total strategic dominance of space, siphoning communications traffic with ECHELON, the CIA busy destablising the Third World with coups and assassinations, and basically playing Yankee-accented James Bond games with the whole planet. (Not just the USA of course; the whole NATO/NORAD/UKUSA gang: UK, USA, Canada, Aussie, NZ, Israel. But the USA as the ringleader and banker.)
Proactive? Heck yes. Up in everyone's business all over the place, yes. Comfortable with words like 'empire' and 'dominance', yes. There's been nothing li'l and down-homey about the USA since Hiroshima, from anyone's viewpoint who doesn't live there. You guys are top dog on the planet and take every opportunity to make sure everyone knows it.
Now, are the USA and superfriends being proactive in either a smart or ethical way? Do they notice what's right in front of their noses? Are they compassionate and merciful and enlightened or just proactively protecting their commercial interests? And is all their running around being cowboys actually preventing threats or is it causing them? Now those are completely different questions, in my opinion.
Jesse Schell, in his famous DICE talk, explained why the iPhone succeeded and the iPad will flop. Paraphrased:
Convergence doesn't happen. Technologies diverge, for the most part.
And yet, I'm happily using my Blackberry as a Web browser.
Perhaps Jesse Schell, famous or not, doesn't in fact know everything?
This is a country where most citizens have ready access to real militarily useful guns, and the training to use them. And they're worried about Doom?
Yes, that's probably why they're worried.
If Firefox just binds to generic facilities/libraries like ffmpeg, DirectMedia and CoreVideo, the whole discussion goes away, since everybody can choose what to use anyway.
No, they can't. Not legally. Not in the USA.
It is illegal to distribute a free H.264 player in the USA.
The code exists. It is copyright-free. But it is illegal to ship due to software patents.
If you either a) don't particularly care if Linux provides H.264 support, or b) don't particularly care about obeying the law, this is not a problem. If, however, you want both of those, you have a legal problem.
The only way to remain legal is to NOT provide illegal H.264 support. If you also want to be able to watch videos, it would be nice if they weren't in a format that requires someone to break the law to give you the ability to watch.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that this has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with obeying the law?
Yes, the law is broken and should be changed. But since it hasn't...
Are you saying that nobody in the real world cares about obeying the law in regards to software?
While that may be true, it seems a rather sad state of affairs.
No-one said that it is.
The point is that browser remains FOSS. If user is a FOSS purist, he doesn't install the "evil" codecs, and doesn't go to websites which only provide H.264 streams.
That's fine. Just don't consider H.264 any kind of 'standard', since it's evidently not.
And it's not an 'evil' codec - just an illegal one to redistribute. If it weren't illegal (patented) then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But it is, and because it's illegal to distribute in a free operating system, it should not be a standard.
Because stop me if this sounds strange, but generally speaking, complying with standards should not require people to break the law.
Last I checked, it was not illegal to purchase a properly licensed GStreamer H.264 codec, and use that. The cheapest bundle including H.264 from Fluendo would cost you 28 euro.
Then it would be illegal to redistribute that operating system. Game over, end of story, thank you for playing the Open Source game but you lost.
video codec is spit in the ocean, agreed. the libraries are out there, anyone can encode/decode.
Not legally they can't.
Or do you not care about obeying the law?
What lock-in? What exactly am I "locked-in" to when I watch H.264 HTML 5 movies on youtube? And how would those movie being encoded in theora make me less "locked-in"?
You're locked into exactly the set of platforms which provide you a legal H.264 player - a set which explicitly excludes open-source platforms because the H.264 patent is contrary to the spirit and letter of the GPL and any other Free licences. It cannot be legally distributed as part of any Free software distribution.
If you don't care about both open source or abiding by law, then you have no problem.
If you like Linux but don't mind modding your distro with illegal software, then you also have no problem - but if you're that sort of person who doesn't mind breaking the law to get free stuff, you probably also have no problem with pirating Windows or movies outright. Which is a legitimate viewpoint but not a legal one.
If the movies are encoded in Theora, however, you are legally allowed to watch them on any current or future platform, including Free ones without running the risk of you or your distribution's creators being thrown in jail.
But why should the average user be quite in some stupid ideological fight when they are never going to be paying for the H.264 royalties that Microsoft, Apple and Google will be shelling out to include H.264 support in their browser?
It's not ideology, it's law. If patents didn't make distributing H.264 illegal then it wouldn't be a problem. It's not the open-source projects who are being nitpickers; they run the risk of going to jail if they don't.
But you're right, the average user doesn't seem to care about abiding by law when it comes to software.
Second: this thread had nothing to do with (not) protecting manufacturing jobs, it had to do with protecting American technology and media. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?
If new technology directly competes with old technology for cheaper, and the new technology is primarily software (IP) based rather than hardware, and if the physical manufacturing for the new technology is done offshore... then yes, they are mutually exclusive, because the new will replace the old.
The iMac says proudly, "Designed by Apple in California... made in China". Which says it all really. If the economic strength of America is moving from manufacture to mere design, then it's turning from hardware to 'information', which is a much more fragile thing. Information can be copied. If your national economy starts to depend solely on preventing information being copied, then it seems like you're in a very dangerous place.... you risk being disintermediated as a nation, cut out of the manufacturing loop entirely. And given you also have a huge military spend, that seems like a recipe for rash trigger-finger reactions.
Is America still making stuff which isn't information which competes on the world stage? If so, what? Not cars anymore. Not oil anymore. Not garments anymore. Music, TV, games, software. Drug patents. Some high-end routers perhaps? Lots of guns. And maybe drugs. Anything else?
(New Zealand's getting into a similar bind... we sell sheep and milk and tourism, but the cows are starting to trash our environment... we're getting into high tech, but as information, that's also fragile for the same reasons.)
In New Zealand in 1984, this 'first past the post' system led to a very interesting government change (Muldoon National to Lange/Douglas Labour) where a Keynesian right-wing government switched to a hybrid Austrian School (hard-right economically) Labour (left politically) government which poured public money into indigenous land settlements, broke a major defence pact to stay nuclear-free, and massively privatised and deregulated the economy, causing a huge swing of money and power from the middle class to the very rich. This happened because the right and left factions both joined in order to defeat the incumbent - since it was the only way within the two-party system.
So I find some of the US politics - especially people like George Lakoff who pontificate about how the current US alignments are pure psychological/philosophical stances and one is good and truth and light and the other regressiev evil delusion - kind of strange. Political alignments are just alignments, they're not generally well-thought-out. Almost any given issue doesn't naturally fall into a 'left' or 'right' divide, it's just that it's been seized as such by current parties.
Witness how 'Democrats' changed from White Jim Crow to the party of affirmative action. That realignment really didn't have much to do with party principles or philosophy; it just happened.
It would be nice if all the issues could be debated separately, on their merits, instead of distorted into huge merged camps. But as long as you have a FPP system, they will, and your politics will be poorer for it.
there are more options than Blue and Red.
There are, but under the current US electoral system anyone 'defecting' from the Blue/Red centrist axis to vote a minor party gets actively punished by causing their most hated major party to get in.
If you have on a scale:
1. Libertarian (hardcore principled anarcho-capitalist)
2. Republican (mixed compromise capitalist-socialist)
3. Democratic (mixed compromise socialist-capitalist)
4. Green (hardcore principled eco-socialist)
then if you vote 1, you split the vote for 2 causing 3 to get in; if you vote 4, you split the vote for 3 causing 2 to get in. So the result is, if you favour massive rapid social change in one direction, then voting your heart's desire will signal medium change in the opposite direction. So people vote 'tactically' for the follow-up 'lesser evil' of D or R, and foom, that entrenches a centrist consensus. It's a neat self-perpetuating system.
The only way to break this deadlock would be for one or other of the big two parties to massively disintegrate, or a huge social movement cause a third party to rapidly gain enough critical mass to pass the 'voting for this will vote against my cause' barrier.
Anyone who's paid attention to the UFO phenomenon can tell you that the existence of 'something' out there has been well known by the US military since the 1940s. The problem is nobody really seems to understand the first thing about just what 'they' are, so it's embarassing to talk about and best brushed under the table. Whatever 'they' are they're NOT classical little green men with antennae... and I highly doubt that any 'crash debris' was ever retrieved.. all the best incidents indicate something much weirder, transient, and more in control of the parameters of the encounters than we are.
There's a few good reviews of the classic UFO material online: Michael Swords is good, as is the Daily Kos blogger Two Roads. I also recommend the Society for Scientific Exploration. The rest of the stuff is out there for anyone with Google.
The apparent failure of radio SETI is a very interesting data point to put against the apparent reality (yet weirdness) of the UFO phenomenon. But then, we've moved so far beyond analog broadcast radio in the last 50 years, why wouldn't ET civilisations' communications move equally fast? What if there were some way of, eg, modulating gravity or quantum entanglement? Should we expect to still be detecting legacy technologies just because that's the detectors we happen to have right now?
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
I assume that mad scientists will be using Ruby and really mad scientists will be using Common Lisp (on vintage Symbolics machines), while run-of-the-mill evil dictators will stick with the tried-and-true deathray+Java+volcano+SOA+gorilla+XML+submarine+ESB stack.
We're gonna need a smaller boat...
I think it's more like saying 'I don't like that when I buy a Whopper from Burger King you first ask me for a mandatory blood sample, drug test, and retina scan, infect me with anthrax and clip an explosive collar to my neck... so instead of buying a Whopper on those terms I'm going to put on my wizard hat, wave my magic wand at your Whopper, shout 'GIGANTUS DUPLICATUS' and make me a thousand brand new magic-cloned Whoppers, without explosive collars, for free. And then give them out to all my friends right in the middle of your store.'
Which is of course way illegal, but it's what all the kids at Hogwarts are doing these days. I blame the butterbeer, and all those owls.
Azkaban Notice: You wouldn't cast the Cruciatus Curse on a Muggle... so why Duplicatus a Whopper? Think of the house elves! Magicing food is a Dementable offense.
How about because you're getting for free what other people are paying good money for? Is it fair to them?
It's neither fair nor unfair - a customer who has received a service for money still has that service even if another person now gets an identical service for free. (Unless the service consumes a shared resource, like bandwidth; but a single instance of a software package, your pirating it won't hurt my use of it.)
They lose NOTHING, not even one cent, by me pirating it, so what reason is there not to?
Because you can hurt a bad company more by ignoring a bad product than by using it and thereby increasing its installed customer base with all the social word-of-mouth promotion and lock-in effects that follow. A boycott, in other words.
You are supposed to break laws you don't agree with to move forwards and cause change.
Or perhaps more effectively, you could stop promoting the product and contributing to the user base of a company whose actions you find unethical.
Don't just pirate their software but keep using it - completely shun them and avoid all their products, substituting ones whose ethics you do agree with.
Excuse my ignorance, but aren't closures by definition an implementation of static scoping?
To everyone who says we owe the computer industry to NASA, you're partly right but much more so over the last 30 years to Intel and AMD.
Actually I think the ICBM program and especially the Minuteman computer had a bit more to do with it than NASA. But it's politically inconvenient to point out that the USA's so-called 'civilian' space program extensively dual-used technology whose real bread-and-butter purpose was Cold War weapons of very mass destruction. And even 'pure science' missions were about as pure as a dirty snowball.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the United States government via its many-tentacled agencies outright point-blank bare-faced lied about the true purpose of much of the space hardware launched during the Cold War, some of which is still up there. That's nice and all, times of war, Sun Tsu etc, but unfortunately now... how much do you trust your government to ever again tell you the truth?