It shouldn't be "fine". However, there is a difference. One is done out of plain malice, the other one most likely out of ignorance. The parent might not MEAN any harm, so IMO they should be educated, informed or given a warning, before someone takes direct action against them.
Which is exactly what the cited article complains has been done.
At the same time, UK Social Services is committing acts of terrorism (yes, kidnapping threats are acts of terrorism) against a family with fat children.
Hypocritical much?
Two things about that:
Which is worse, overfeeding children to the extent of ruining their childhood and depriving them of the possibility of a healthy life, or rescuing them from that situation?
Terrorism is the act of attempting to achieve political ends by terrorising people. Who is being terrorised? What political ends are being promoted?
Mind you, anyone stupid enough to pay attention to the Daily Wail is probably incapable of taking part in rational debate.
I remember when IBM was the evil empire. I was in this industry then. But no-one ever loved 'the scrappy underdog Microsoft' because Microsoft never was a scrappy underdog. By the time it had come onto anyone's radar Microsoft had developed a reputation for poor business ethics and sharp practice. It always was a company of wide boys; if not certainly an evil empire in the making, at least a SCO in the making.
If you honestly think that the experience you get with Windows is on par with the experience you get with Linux, then your experience with Linux obviously doesn't include providing technical support for 100 office workers who use it on their office machines and laptops.
If you think Ubuntu would be harder than Windows to provide support for in a heterogenous office environment then I suggest you don't have experience of both.
Hey, that's interesting. I didn't know that was the case with Macs (it's absurd, in my opinion--files should have extensions which indicate what they do, and only certain extensions should imply executability.) Are there any safeguards against accidentally executing such a disguised program?
Oh, for heaven's sake, metadata should not be embedded in names! That is such a 1960s idea - it was obsolete when UN*X was first written. Particularly critical metadata which does things like selectively launch applications. It is one - not the only one, by any means, but assuredly one - of the really bad, obsolete design ideas in Windows.
Are any of those implementations, free or not, really secure?
Or am I going to have to patch the software on my mobile too?
Security has a number of dimensions. A heterogenous environment is more secure because a disease vector can spread less rapidly; and in a population with a dominant phenotype, disease vectors which attack that phenotype will be more successful and spread much more rapidly than ones which attack the recessive phenotype. Which is part of why there are fewer successful malware attacks on Linux than on Windows, on Firefox than on IE, but more on Apache than IIS. It's not (only) because Linux and Firefox are open; it also because they're subdominant. So if in future there's a serious malware attack on Flash, it's quite likely that Gnash will be immune, even if Gnash isn't, in and of itself, more secure than Flash.
Why Debian? A desktop distro? That's got to be one of the least scalable and cluster-friendly distros. If they would invest a little to set things up properly they could get a lot more performance out of their machines.
Debian isn't - and never has been - a desktop distro. If you want a desktop distro built on Debian architecture, you get Ubuntu, or Knoppix, or one of a dozen others. Debian's unique selling proposition is a combination of stability, which is very important to production servers, and a rigorous commitment to free software. Packages don't make it into Debian Stable until they have been thoroughly tested. Debian also has the best package management system in the industry.
Frankly, I wouldn't run a server with anything else.
I agree with much of what he said in the review - I tried to read The Silmarillion, but just couldn't get into it. I too was expecting a LOtR experience, was was very much disappointed by what I found.
I'm certainly not alone.
I know you're not alone, but can I put the opposite point of view? I was brought up on the works of Snorre Sturlasson, in particular the Hiemskringla (which I love - you can't get an anti-hero to beat Olaf Tryggvason). You have to see the Silmarillion against that sort of background. You can't assess it as a modern novel, because it isn't a modern novel. It's a synthetic mythos, and consequently it can only be compared against real mythic texts. And it compares very well.
In my opinion, both Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion are seriously flawed - but they're seriously flawed masterpieces; among the great cultural creations of the twentieth century. And for my money, Silmarillion is better than Lord of the Rings.
I bought (as in paid full price for) most of the games that Loki (remember them) ever ported to Linux. I still play Alpha Centauri sometimes - it still runs on modern Linux (though sadly their port of Civ3 no longer runs - doesn't get on with modern libraries in some way I haven't bothered to diagnose). I bought Neverwinter Nights when it first came out, because it was available in a Linux port (and it still runs very nicely, and yes, I still sometimes play it - mostly user-generated content, too). And I'm one of the only 597 people world-wide who have so far pre-ordered Apricot.
And that's kind of the point.
It costs money to develop commercial games; quite a lot of money. The people who develop them want to sell them. If there were enough Linux users prepared to spend real money on games, we'd have more commercial games. Over the last few weeks I've been playing (and really enjoying) The Witcher. It runs on an updated version of Bioware's Aurora engine, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to port it to Linux. But I don't expect we'll see a Linux port, because Atari, who sell it, clearly don't think enough of us would pay for it. And sadly I think they're probably right.
I've haven't found many open source game projects which are compelling to me. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and half-finished projects. Globulation is quite polished and seems to me quite innovative, and plays well; but it's also quite shallow - you'll enjoy it for a week but you won't still be playing it in a year. Oolite is genuinely good and you might still be playing it in a year - but that's largely because it is a faithful reconstruction of Elite, which is one of the great classics of computer games. Flightgear may be good but it isn't my thing.
To create a new game takes a lot of vision and a lot of work. Until you've done a lot of work it's hard to communicate the vision, so it's hard to recruit people. And even then, too many of the talented people prefer to tinker with some project of their own which they'll never get finished, than co-operate to deliver someone else's vision. I'd like to be wrong on this. But what I see on Freshmeat is lots of 'alpha' and 'beta' projects, and very little that's genuinely playable.
As far as marketing capabilities, I hardly ever see a Microsoft commercial. When I do they don't ever specify any particular product in the commercial. How does that really sell Windows or Office? All the marketing seems to happen behind the scenes from the point of view of the end consumer using deals that happen between OEMs and Microsoft salespeople.
We clearly don't read the same media. I would guess that 50% of all adverts I ever see are directly from Microsoft, and another 20% from companies selling Microsoft's products. That's a gobsmackingly huge advertising spend.
And it's what's necessary and just to put pressure on Cuba to stop being a vicious dictatorship and actually respect its citizens' human rights. I'm not being sarcastic.
Errrmmm... There's one place that human rights are not respected on Cuba. It's called 'Guantanamo Bay'.
One good reason is that aluminum is a limited resource.
Uhhmmm... Aluminium is ( by a considerable margin) the most abundant metal on Earth, and the third most abundant element on Earth after oxygen and silicon. It makes up 8% or the mass of the Earth's crust. We're not going to run out any time soon.
Moreover I'd say looking for good programmers in general is going to make you SOL for the most part.
I'd pose to you a give-a-man-a-fish metaphor. Why work on finding good programmers when you can find a good project manager - probably with a PhD - who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.
There's way too much mystique over "superstars" who bring their midas-touch of computation to a company.
Frederick Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month, wrote that good programmers are 100 times more productive than average programmers. That accords with my experience; I've been working in this game for twenty years, both as programmer and as project manager; I've seen a lot of average programmers, and two or three good ones. The whole ethos that programmers are grunts who work for and are managed by project managers gets the whole pyramid upside down. Even the best project managers can do nothing to improve the work of a good programmer, but much to impede it.
Personally I'm still of the opinion that Frederick Brooks recommendation of the 'surgical programming' model is the best - you identify your star programmer, and everyone else works for them. Brooks recommended about five support staff for each programmer: a 'co-pilot', who worked in a sort of junior pair-programming role, essentially learning from the senior programmer; a librarian, who wrote up and managed documentation, looked after releases, and such like things; a tester, who just tested; a toolsmith, who built small scripts and utilities; an administrator, who handled business issues; and several other optional roles. Modern tools can automate some of these roles, but it's still the case that good programmers are so much more productive than ordinary ones that it makes economic sense to unload all the routine tasks off them to less able people.
Good programmers really do make or break technical companies - they add far more to the bottom line than anyone else. And if you don't recognise that, you won't be able to hire them, you won't keep them if you do hire them, and you won't get anything like the full potential out of them if you do hire them. Keep your programmers in the dark and feed them on shit, as most companies do, and in a very short time you'll have no-one left but shit programmers.
Who cares about the pay, once you are earning above a certain amount, being happy with what you do is far more important than earning more money. programming sounds far more fun than managing things and people. Give me t-shirts and jeans, screw wearing shirts, ties, suits and overpriced uncomfortable stuff like that.
H'mmm... Having been either a technical director or managing director of IT companies for fifteen years, I'm back being just a software engineer. Why? Mostly because I enjoy it more. But I'm sitting here at my desk about to start work, with my long hair and my beard and wearing a cycling jersey. Idiocy about corporate uniform makes me tired; it's just so old. If you don't enjoy what you're doing, stop now. If you don't feel comfortable in what you're wearing, wear something different. Life is too short, and money is frankly just not worth it.
But as a quick aside, the business suit is worn these days by lawyers, politicians, salesmen and the financial services industry - in other words, it's the uniform of the professionally dishonest. Is that really how you want people to see you?
You should probably amend that to five digits, I've got six and I'm just a huge nerd that likes to yell loudly at people and be generally argumentative.
For example.. perhaps this WAS a case of theft. We're short of details...
But saying this is copyright infringement is misleading when it is actually piracy.
Piracy is seizing a ship on the high seas, outside territorial waters. What ship was seized, and where is it now? If you cannot tell me what ship was seized, it was copyright infringement, not piracy.
The Slashdot community has this amusing mix of copyright haters and copyright lovers. See, we're supposed to be all geeks, so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
Most of the older (six digits or fewer) users of Slashdot are software people, and, as such, we make our reputation and most of us our living from copyrighted software. So we know exactly what copyright means. When you steal my bike, that's theft. When you copy my code against the terms of the license I grant you, that's copyright infringement. I'll come after you if you do either of them, but I know what the difference is.
"people who defend 'intellectual property' are usually the same people as the people who decry big government,"
What? Are you insane? People on all ends of the political spectrum defend IP.
I don't think so. Very few people defend 'intellectual property', and they're almost exclusively on the hard right.
It's always easy to deny others property when you don't have a chance to ever own something. Even easier when intellect (or lack thereof) comes into play.
I've made the whole of my living for the past twenty-five years out of copyright - so I know what I'm talking about. Do you?
"people who defend 'intellectual property' are usually the same people as the people who decry big government,"
What? Are you insane? People on all ends of the political spectrum defend IP.
I don't think so. Very few people defend 'intellectual property', and they're almost exclusively on the hard right. A lot more people defend copyright, the limited, short term monopoly on copies granted to creators of new artistic works, and patents, the still more limited, short term monopoly granted to technical innovators. Neither of things remotely resemble property.
Arguing with an AC is always fraught with risk, but hey, this is/. so...
You seem to be arguing that intellectual property 'isn't, as in 'isn't property'. That would so cleverly explain why this thing, which 'isn't property', is so coveted as to be copied and produced.
Non sequitor.
Many thinks which aren't property are coveted; thy neighbours wife and thy neighbours ass, among others.
I'm not a great believer in property even in physical things, but so-called 'intellectual property' isn't even property in legal theory. It's a disparate set of short term grants of monopoly given by the power of big government, and given because they have in the past been believed to have overall economic benefit for the community. Whether they do or not, the people who defend 'intellectual property' are usually the same people as the people who decry big government, and government intervention in markets, and that sort of thing.
The reason the Chinese own the United States has nothing to do 'theft of intellectual property'; it doesn't even have much to do with trade. It has to do with debt. You keep borrowing, and the Chinese, who are thriftier than you are, keep lending. And they've now lent you so much that you have to borrow more even to pay the interest. Face it - the Third World War is already over, and the United States lost.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly what the cited article complains has been done.
Hypocritical much?
Two things about that:
Mind you, anyone stupid enough to pay attention to the Daily Wail is probably incapable of taking part in rational debate.
I remember when IBM was the evil empire. I was in this industry then. But no-one ever loved 'the scrappy underdog Microsoft' because Microsoft never was a scrappy underdog. By the time it had come onto anyone's radar Microsoft had developed a reputation for poor business ethics and sharp practice. It always was a company of wide boys; if not certainly an evil empire in the making, at least a SCO in the making.
If you think Ubuntu would be harder than Windows to provide support for in a heterogenous office environment then I suggest you don't have experience of both.
Oh, for heaven's sake, metadata should not be embedded in names! That is such a 1960s idea - it was obsolete when UN*X was first written. Particularly critical metadata which does things like selectively launch applications. It is one - not the only one, by any means, but assuredly one - of the really bad, obsolete design ideas in Windows.
Or am I going to have to patch the software on my mobile too?
Security has a number of dimensions. A heterogenous environment is more secure because a disease vector can spread less rapidly; and in a population with a dominant phenotype, disease vectors which attack that phenotype will be more successful and spread much more rapidly than ones which attack the recessive phenotype. Which is part of why there are fewer successful malware attacks on Linux than on Windows, on Firefox than on IE, but more on Apache than IIS. It's not (only) because Linux and Firefox are open; it also because they're subdominant. So if in future there's a serious malware attack on Flash, it's quite likely that Gnash will be immune, even if Gnash isn't, in and of itself, more secure than Flash.
That is, until it becomes dominant.
Debian isn't - and never has been - a desktop distro. If you want a desktop distro built on Debian architecture, you get Ubuntu, or Knoppix, or one of a dozen others. Debian's unique selling proposition is a combination of stability, which is very important to production servers, and a rigorous commitment to free software. Packages don't make it into Debian Stable until they have been thoroughly tested. Debian also has the best package management system in the industry.
Frankly, I wouldn't run a server with anything else.
I agree with much of what he said in the review - I tried to read The Silmarillion, but just couldn't get into it. I too was expecting a LOtR experience, was was very much disappointed by what I found.
I'm certainly not alone.
I know you're not alone, but can I put the opposite point of view? I was brought up on the works of Snorre Sturlasson, in particular the Hiemskringla (which I love - you can't get an anti-hero to beat Olaf Tryggvason). You have to see the Silmarillion against that sort of background. You can't assess it as a modern novel, because it isn't a modern novel. It's a synthetic mythos, and consequently it can only be compared against real mythic texts. And it compares very well.
In my opinion, both Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion are seriously flawed - but they're seriously flawed masterpieces; among the great cultural creations of the twentieth century. And for my money, Silmarillion is better than Lord of the Rings.
I bought (as in paid full price for) most of the games that Loki (remember them) ever ported to Linux. I still play Alpha Centauri sometimes - it still runs on modern Linux (though sadly their port of Civ3 no longer runs - doesn't get on with modern libraries in some way I haven't bothered to diagnose). I bought Neverwinter Nights when it first came out, because it was available in a Linux port (and it still runs very nicely, and yes, I still sometimes play it - mostly user-generated content, too). And I'm one of the only 597 people world-wide who have so far pre-ordered Apricot.
And that's kind of the point.
It costs money to develop commercial games; quite a lot of money. The people who develop them want to sell them. If there were enough Linux users prepared to spend real money on games, we'd have more commercial games. Over the last few weeks I've been playing (and really enjoying) The Witcher. It runs on an updated version of Bioware's Aurora engine, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to port it to Linux. But I don't expect we'll see a Linux port, because Atari, who sell it, clearly don't think enough of us would pay for it. And sadly I think they're probably right.
I've haven't found many open source game projects which are compelling to me. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and half-finished projects. Globulation is quite polished and seems to me quite innovative, and plays well; but it's also quite shallow - you'll enjoy it for a week but you won't still be playing it in a year. Oolite is genuinely good and you might still be playing it in a year - but that's largely because it is a faithful reconstruction of Elite, which is one of the great classics of computer games. Flightgear may be good but it isn't my thing.
To create a new game takes a lot of vision and a lot of work. Until you've done a lot of work it's hard to communicate the vision, so it's hard to recruit people. And even then, too many of the talented people prefer to tinker with some project of their own which they'll never get finished, than co-operate to deliver someone else's vision. I'd like to be wrong on this. But what I see on Freshmeat is lots of 'alpha' and 'beta' projects, and very little that's genuinely playable.
As far as marketing capabilities, I hardly ever see a Microsoft commercial. When I do they don't ever specify any particular product in the commercial. How does that really sell Windows or Office? All the marketing seems to happen behind the scenes from the point of view of the end consumer using deals that happen between OEMs and Microsoft salespeople.
We clearly don't read the same media. I would guess that 50% of all adverts I ever see are directly from Microsoft, and another 20% from companies selling Microsoft's products. That's a gobsmackingly huge advertising spend.
Please could someone explain what Lessig means by an 'earmark' in the article?
Errrmmm... There's one place that human rights are not respected on Cuba. It's called 'Guantanamo Bay'.
A real mathematician would have worked it out with logs (an engineer would have worked it out with a slide rule).
Yes, the old ones are the best.
s/perfected/never learned/
Uhhmmm... Aluminium is ( by a considerable margin) the most abundant metal on Earth, and the third most abundant element on Earth after oxygen and silicon. It makes up 8% or the mass of the Earth's crust. We're not going to run out any time soon.
I'd pose to you a give-a-man-a-fish metaphor. Why work on finding good programmers when you can find a good project manager - probably with a PhD - who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.
There's way too much mystique over "superstars" who bring their midas-touch of computation to a company.
Frederick Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month, wrote that good programmers are 100 times more productive than average programmers. That accords with my experience; I've been working in this game for twenty years, both as programmer and as project manager; I've seen a lot of average programmers, and two or three good ones. The whole ethos that programmers are grunts who work for and are managed by project managers gets the whole pyramid upside down. Even the best project managers can do nothing to improve the work of a good programmer, but much to impede it.
Personally I'm still of the opinion that Frederick Brooks recommendation of the 'surgical programming' model is the best - you identify your star programmer, and everyone else works for them. Brooks recommended about five support staff for each programmer: a 'co-pilot', who worked in a sort of junior pair-programming role, essentially learning from the senior programmer; a librarian, who wrote up and managed documentation, looked after releases, and such like things; a tester, who just tested; a toolsmith, who built small scripts and utilities; an administrator, who handled business issues; and several other optional roles. Modern tools can automate some of these roles, but it's still the case that good programmers are so much more productive than ordinary ones that it makes economic sense to unload all the routine tasks off them to less able people.
Good programmers really do make or break technical companies - they add far more to the bottom line than anyone else. And if you don't recognise that, you won't be able to hire them, you won't keep them if you do hire them, and you won't get anything like the full potential out of them if you do hire them. Keep your programmers in the dark and feed them on shit, as most companies do, and in a very short time you'll have no-one left but shit programmers.
Nonononononononono...
This was a geek site. Like, ten years ago, maybe eight, even.
Now it's a site for wannabes, soi disant k3wl kidz and Microsoft astroturfers.
(Yes, I am getting old. So are you. So what?)
H'mmm... Having been either a technical director or managing director of IT companies for fifteen years, I'm back being just a software engineer. Why? Mostly because I enjoy it more. But I'm sitting here at my desk about to start work, with my long hair and my beard and wearing a cycling jersey. Idiocy about corporate uniform makes me tired; it's just so old. If you don't enjoy what you're doing, stop now. If you don't feel comfortable in what you're wearing, wear something different. Life is too short, and money is frankly just not worth it.
But as a quick aside, the business suit is worn these days by lawyers, politicians, salesmen and the financial services industry - in other words, it's the uniform of the professionally dishonest. Is that really how you want people to see you?
For example.. perhaps this WAS a case of theft. We're short of details...
RTFA.
No theft involved.
Piracy is seizing a ship on the high seas, outside territorial waters. What ship was seized, and where is it now? If you cannot tell me what ship was seized, it was copyright infringement, not piracy.
Most of the older (six digits or fewer) users of Slashdot are software people, and, as such, we make our reputation and most of us our living from copyrighted software. So we know exactly what copyright means. When you steal my bike, that's theft. When you copy my code against the terms of the license I grant you, that's copyright infringement. I'll come after you if you do either of them, but I know what the difference is.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
What? Are you insane? People on all ends of the political spectrum defend IP.
I don't think so. Very few people defend 'intellectual property', and they're almost exclusively on the hard right.
It's always easy to deny others property when you don't have a chance to ever own something. Even easier when intellect (or lack thereof) comes into play.I've made the whole of my living for the past twenty-five years out of copyright - so I know what I'm talking about. Do you?
What? Are you insane? People on all ends of the political spectrum defend IP.
I don't think so. Very few people defend 'intellectual property', and they're almost exclusively on the hard right. A lot more people defend copyright, the limited, short term monopoly on copies granted to creators of new artistic works, and patents, the still more limited, short term monopoly granted to technical innovators. Neither of things remotely resemble property.
Shocking lack of truth.Indeed. But not on my part.
You seem to be arguing that intellectual property 'isn't, as in 'isn't property'. That would so cleverly explain why this thing, which 'isn't property', is so coveted as to be copied and produced.
Non sequitor.
Many thinks which aren't property are coveted; thy neighbours wife and thy neighbours ass, among others.
I'm not a great believer in property even in physical things, but so-called 'intellectual property' isn't even property in legal theory. It's a disparate set of short term grants of monopoly given by the power of big government, and given because they have in the past been believed to have overall economic benefit for the community. Whether they do or not, the people who defend 'intellectual property' are usually the same people as the people who decry big government, and government intervention in markets, and that sort of thing.
Shocking lack of intellectual rigour.
The reason the Chinese own the United States has nothing to do 'theft of intellectual property'; it doesn't even have much to do with trade. It has to do with debt. You keep borrowing, and the Chinese, who are thriftier than you are, keep lending. And they've now lent you so much that you have to borrow more even to pay the interest. Face it - the Third World War is already over, and the United States lost.
China owns you.