there's this thing called a "telephone", you use it to convey voice signals long distances, like to someone in the other place who can powercycle the machine for you.
There's also this thing called a "salary". It means that you have to pay the person at the other end of the telephone to do this. If this tech gets cheap enough, you can save money by using this instead of so many on-site helpers.
"Beta" == not ready for production use. Despite what you want it to mean in your little fantasy world.
Interesting how age old stuff gets different semantics when used by a Linux advocate.
Nah, that's the point! Even the beta stuff is generally better than the MS supposedly-production-ready software.
Do you run them 24/7, or do you shut them down after surfing for two hours?
Yep. What's your point?
The point is probably that many of the Windows bugs come out of the woodwork when the system left on, which is why Windows servers have such bad contiuous-uptime stats.
Just suggesting things the way your like them doesn't make true.
Now I really can't see where this one came from. The only suggestion made recently was that you switched off your XP/NT boxen after a short while, and you just confirmed it!
Sorry, but I don't. I couldn't find "child"ish or "juv"enile or "imma"ture or anything similar in the article you mentioned. Could you please explain?
Being pedantic doesn't help your case at all.
About what is he/she being pedantic? The only reason that those boot messages are being nixed is that Linux gives too much debug output on startup, rather than any immaturity or childishness of the comments themselves.
The above refers to a comment that was since mercifully modded down. However, the engine doesn't show this, so set your threshold to -1 and check the parent before you condemn this as offtopic!
...how about reading previous stories first? I'll bet you submitted that as a story, and then here when it was rejected - wake up - it was rejected for a reason, and reposting old info will not get you karma (you're an AC anyway) or prestige. Grow up!
First off, I'd like to point out that Linux is not the same as Open Source software.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
From this I conclude that you have never had to administrate an MS-based network. We keep up with the latest stuff, use all-MS solutions, and our sysadmin has to put out fires semi-daily. SO much for claiming to represent those in the trenches.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
I use dodgy hardware a lot of the time, and my machines frequently get nuked by power cuts. I have never had anything that fsck has not fixed automatically. Ever (OK, one exception - I had to enter the root pasword and follow the simple on-screen instructions to run fsck manually). I have, however, seen several fs's get nuked completely by a power off, and they were all - guess what? - windows FAT partitions. I can see the word "scandisk" appearing on your lips, but that didn't do a thing - and because of the behind-the-scenes and non-configurable system startup, when it touched something vital, I had to bloody reinstall the whole OS rather than just the bit which had failed.
The upcoming 'solution' to this, EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'.
EXT3 doesn't try to fix these (as far as I can see) nonexistant grave problems. It is simply what you say it is - a hack to get journalling onto EXT". Incidentally, journalling does give far better crash support so I can't really see what you're whining about there.
This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
See my earlier comments about comparing DOS/FAT filesystems with EXT2. Plus, of course, the objection is mostly that MS chose such a cruddy OS to build themselves around (8.3 filenames? Yeeuurgh!), rather than just emulating it (which is what they do now with the NT codebase, and is far less brain-damaged).
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally.
Examples? A reference to some of the downtime-statistics pages would be useful, as last time I checked I found Linux-hosted sites were far harder to push over than Win2K ones. (This is in addition to personal experience with our network).
Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
I have worked with old and buggy as well as bleeding-edge kernels, and I have still never had a crash apart from with dodgy memory (which also nuked Winblows on startup with no diagnostic info whatsoever), and the teardrop attack, which is now defended against.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
As you accuse others of evidence-free FUD, could you come up with a defence of this please? What buggy stuff, apart from the things labelled beta? What badly-implemented UNIX features?
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude. And as for specifications, Linux is considered one of the reference POSIX implementations.
The talent in abundance is indicated by the fact that you rarely see any of these error messages. Plus, of course, I far prefer to see an "oops" and an apology from the programmer when a crash occurs, rather than Windows' cold wording and habit of blaming it all on the "current application".
I could go on and on, but the conclusion is clear. This is an uninformed troll, possibly an astroturf, with little grounding in reality or experience.
Translating java bytecode back into source code is not very hard. LimeWire, being a java app, was halfway open source already.
Not at all. The thing about that is that you would be breaking their copyright (and ergo the law) if you modified and/or redistributed the code. This way, it's properly free (RMS-sense), as opposed to just crackable.
...Given the choice of having the NSA/FBI read my e-mail, and having more terrorist attacks like those on 9/11, I would gladly concede a bit of my privacy. If it would save the lives of other innocent people, I would personally print out all of my communications and had them to the FBI.
So would I, as long as I was sacrificing my privacy for the prevention of more attacks. Fact is, these proposals give you neither. Terrorists will use strong encryption (without backdoors).
When you make wiretapping a law, the only people you can snoop on are law-abiding citizens.
In a perfect world, this would be an OK argument, indeed one I would accept (see below). However, this is by no means a perfect world:
An FBI agent technically needs a court order to follow you around either way, but the physical one requires him to show you a signed document allowing him to. If you trust the FBI/NSA/whatever, you would have no problem with assuming that they would get said document before snooping electronically. However, based on their track record, I would not trust such a secretive, unaccountable institution with anything, whereas I trust the checks and balances that come into play once a court gets involved.
Indeed, I willingly submit to a Carnivore-type automatic monitoring system, plus reams of logfiles, on our school system, because I know and trust both the people who do it and the procedures that keep my data private unless stictly necessary. If my trust in the FBI were to be restored, I would have no problems with putting my key in escrow. However, note that I did not just say that I would support a cryptographic backdoor, for the following reason:
A back-door only needs to be compromised once. After that, all my personal stuff is up for grabs, and all that of anyone, anywhere - banks, bits of the government, you name it. Even if we wanted to give the FBI control of our crypto, this is not the way to do it. Anyway, I believe (IANAL) that a private key can be subpoena'ed from you, but that requires me to see the court order, at which point I am happy that there are checks and balances in place.
If you put it on the net, it's not private. Period.
Would you like to go get that PGP-encrypted love-letter off my website and mail it to me in plaintext? Thought not.
It is possilbe to keep something private when it is encrypted.
Internet voting, etc is another kettle of fish. The danger there is that the system will get cracked and meddled with, not the encrypted data. Data in plaintext might get screwed with, but nothing encrypted. System security and encryption crackability are not the same thing.
So in other words, if an FBI agent followed you around wherever you went (physically), and looked at all your private papers and letters, it wouldn't be a breach of rights, just an inconvenience. In an electronic sense, this is exactly what this kind of thing does.
What in the hell is he thinking? He's copywriting this little blurb? What a damn hypocrite!
Not really. That notice neatly ensures that no-one can quote it out of context, as they are obliged to put in all the context. It's an astute move, and I'm sure natural to someone who has tangled with legal issues as much as RMS has.
To summarise: Give him a break! There may be things that he does or says that you do not agree with, but this is just petty.
Check your biology book. Genetic damage is something that's passed down, not a simple deformity to an individual. There are no elevated rates of such things in the population of survivors.
OK, so the damage is not passed on. That doesn't stop it being horrific! However, my apologies for being wrong on a technical point there.
A troll is a mistatement designed to pull out ignorant responses.
Do I detect some irony here?:-) Anyway, I was using the Jargon File definition. And that comment is still not a troll.
The answer is that there is no unifying/. ideology - even the famed pro-linux, anti-Microsoft bias is now complete rot - say something pro-OSS and you get at flamed far more rabidly than if you'd taken a pro-MS stance.
Also, the DMCA is generally held around here to be an unjust situation (Oh crap, I just contradicted myself, didn't I? Well, on *most* subjects there's no such thing as a cohesive/. ideology), whereas depriving a firm of profits and generally making havoc is generally regarded as bad.
8 Months is a slap on the wrist for a crime that that benefited nobody and inconvienenced millions. There can be no justification for DOS or virus writing, they do not only gain no benefit for the criminal, they can cost Millions of dollars to effected corporations.
This is fair enough, but compare it to other crimes committed at that age, and this is a serious punishment.
Plus, at that age, a sentence "measured in years" would only serve to remove all chance of rehabilitation he had.
OK, now I realise that I'm setting myself up to be flamed here, I ask those people to grow up. I'm also hoping for some reasoned responses, which I eagerly await.
What, exactly, is wrong with aborting based on Downs syndrome as opposed to ordinary abortion? (I'm not talking about whether abortion as a whole is right, perhaps another thread should discuss that). A genetic test can be taken and decided upon long before the legal threshold, so what is the difference? If you are allowed to choose not to have a baby, aren't you allowed to choose not to have one based on the results of whether they have a very disabilitating genetic disease?
Assides that this is an offtopic troll (ie not a first person account of anything but you spamming your friends email and slashdot with a long winded piece of garbage.)
Not offtopic (it is a thought-provoking piece about the topic in hand, and the vast majority seem to agree with you, considering the moderation), and definitely not a troll, which is defined as something designed to provoke a predictable response or flames.
There is no evidence of elevated rates of genetic damage in survivors of nuclear weapons in Japan. Sorry, it's not there and they are as healthy as you and me.
Go look up some history, come back, and tell me that again with a straight face. There are still Hiroshima babies and survivors alive now - many of the former were born grossly deformed, and you say there's "no evidence". Wake up and smell the mushroom cloud, mate!
This is, in fact, a troll according to the proper definition, and I've just given the "predictable response and/or flame", but at the moment I just don't care.
I think you do everyone an injustice to think that we consider American lives more important.
It's just so close to home. Likewise, those in the Balkans will think less of this tragedy than we do, because it's not their countrymen - neighbors and relatives in many cases - who got murdered in a mass, unfocused attack.
And anyway, we're not standing too idle in the Balkans (well, some people would like us to, but I disagree), so calling us uncaring is to misunderstand human nature.
My brother's gf was in the area and is okay, though extremely shaken. That's what I hear through my mother anyway.
I am so glad to hear that. I was worrying myself...strange, that. Even when you know there are several thousand who definitely died, you still worry about individuals the moment you know of one...anyway, I am very glad she's safe.
Before today, I really don't think that Americans would react remotely similarly if something like this happened over there. As I said in my first post, I think most Americans are largely saddened by the violence in the Middle East
I think that the keyword here is most. Just because an anti-american government wouldn't stop the celebrations doesn't mean that the demographics are necessarily very different. I should imagine that most Arabs would be as shocked as we are, perhaps more, as evidence points to some of them last time I checked...
To be completely honest, I don't think I would have complained much if police started shooting into that crowd of celebrators
Now I'll use this as a microcosm of what would happen if we went to war - imagine that they had. Imagine that they had completely levelled the street. Now think of how many innocent people's families would have to go through what you so nearly did with your brother's girlfriend. Along the path to war lies destruction and grief, and there are innocents on both sides.
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Anyone who wants to implement laws like this is really missing the point.
If you make backdoors a law, then you will only ever be able to snoop on law-abiding citizens
Is there no-one in the govt that understands this?
I just cant wait for the portable Xbox.
It's PC hardware, isn't it? Well, why not just attch an LCD to one of those CD-ROM sized PCs?
I don't think that anyone really thinks of this as useful, just very, very cool indeed :^)
That said, doesn't one of the more famous quotes about the microship go something like "But what is it useful for?"
We shall have to see...
I suspect that it isn't necessarily :-) - I bet someone's been fairly annoyed when he bumped it into something and he lost his game!
That said, CD error recovery is so good that quite possibly you could have a brief slowdown or wobble and recover from it. Any CD gurus out there?
there's this thing called a "telephone", you use it to convey voice signals long distances, like to someone in the other place who can powercycle the machine for you.
There's also this thing called a "salary". It means that you have to pay the person at the other end of the telephone to do this. If this tech gets cheap enough, you can save money by using this instead of so many on-site helpers.
"Beta" == not ready for production use. Despite what you want it to mean in your little fantasy world.
Interesting how age old stuff gets different semantics when used by a Linux advocate.
Nah, that's the point! Even the beta stuff is generally better than the MS supposedly-production-ready software.
Do you run them 24/7, or do you shut them down after surfing for two hours?
Yep. What's your point?
The point is probably that many of the Windows bugs come out of the woodwork when the system left on, which is why Windows servers have such bad contiuous-uptime stats.
Just suggesting things the way your like them doesn't make true.
Now I really can't see where this one came from. The only suggestion made recently was that you switched off your XP/NT boxen after a short while, and you just confirmed it!
Sorry, but I don't. I couldn't find "child"ish or "juv"enile or "imma"ture or anything similar in the article you mentioned. Could you please explain?
Being pedantic doesn't help your case at all.
About what is he/she being pedantic? The only reason that those boot messages are being nixed is that Linux gives too much debug output on startup, rather than any immaturity or childishness of the comments themselves.
The above refers to a comment that was since mercifully modded down. However, the engine doesn't show this, so set your threshold to -1 and check the parent before you condemn this as offtopic!
...how about reading previous stories first? I'll bet you submitted that as a story, and then here when it was rejected - wake up - it was rejected for a reason, and reposting old info will not get you karma (you're an AC anyway) or prestige. Grow up!
First off, I'd like to point out that Linux is not the same as Open Source software.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
From this I conclude that you have never had to administrate an MS-based network. We keep up with the latest stuff, use all-MS solutions, and our sysadmin has to put out fires semi-daily. SO much for claiming to represent those in the trenches.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
I use dodgy hardware a lot of the time, and my machines frequently get nuked by power cuts. I have never had anything that fsck has not fixed automatically. Ever (OK, one exception - I had to enter the root pasword and follow the simple on-screen instructions to run fsck manually). I have, however, seen several fs's get nuked completely by a power off, and they were all - guess what? - windows FAT partitions. I can see the word "scandisk" appearing on your lips, but that didn't do a thing - and because of the behind-the-scenes and non-configurable system startup, when it touched something vital, I had to bloody reinstall the whole OS rather than just the bit which had failed.
The upcoming 'solution' to this, EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'.
EXT3 doesn't try to fix these (as far as I can see) nonexistant grave problems. It is simply what you say it is - a hack to get journalling onto EXT". Incidentally, journalling does give far better crash support so I can't really see what you're whining about there.
This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
See my earlier comments about comparing DOS/FAT filesystems with EXT2. Plus, of course, the objection is mostly that MS chose such a cruddy OS to build themselves around (8.3 filenames? Yeeuurgh!), rather than just emulating it (which is what they do now with the NT codebase, and is far less brain-damaged).
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally.
Examples? A reference to some of the downtime-statistics pages would be useful, as last time I checked I found Linux-hosted sites were far harder to push over than Win2K ones. (This is in addition to personal experience with our network).
Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
I have worked with old and buggy as well as bleeding-edge kernels, and I have still never had a crash apart from with dodgy memory (which also nuked Winblows on startup with no diagnostic info whatsoever), and the teardrop attack, which is now defended against.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
As you accuse others of evidence-free FUD, could you come up with a defence of this please? What buggy stuff, apart from the things labelled beta? What badly-implemented UNIX features?
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude. And as for specifications, Linux is considered one of the reference POSIX implementations.
The talent in abundance is indicated by the fact that you rarely see any of these error messages. Plus, of course, I far prefer to see an "oops" and an apology from the programmer when a crash occurs, rather than Windows' cold wording and habit of blaming it all on the "current application".
I could go on and on, but the conclusion is clear. This is an uninformed troll, possibly an astroturf, with little grounding in reality or experience.
Translating java bytecode back into source code is not very hard. LimeWire, being a java app, was halfway open source already.
Not at all. The thing about that is that you would be breaking their copyright (and ergo the law) if you modified and/or redistributed the code. This way, it's properly free (RMS-sense), as opposed to just crackable.
...Given the choice of having the NSA/FBI read my e-mail, and having more terrorist attacks like those on 9/11, I would gladly concede a bit of my privacy. If it would save the lives of other innocent people, I would personally print out all of my communications and had them to the FBI.
So would I, as long as I was sacrificing my privacy for the prevention of more attacks. Fact is, these proposals give you neither. Terrorists will use strong encryption (without backdoors).
When you make wiretapping a law, the only people you can snoop on are law-abiding citizens.
even though i seem to have a typing deficiency
:-)
:-)
Well, if you look at the title of the original comment, you'll see that I'm not so hot with my keyboard either
Oh, well, a compiler is one of the world's least forgiving spell-checkers
...and done very well indeed - Google!
:^)
Take a look this - doesn't sound like they've been hit too bad by this downturn...boy I'd love to work there!
I hear they use massive Linux clusters, too, which I'd love to get my mitts on.
Indeed, I willingly submit to a Carnivore-type automatic monitoring system, plus reams of logfiles, on our school system, because I know and trust both the people who do it and the procedures that keep my data private unless stictly necessary. If my trust in the FBI were to be restored, I would have no problems with putting my key in escrow. However, note that I did not just say that I would support a cryptographic backdoor, for the following reason:
212.219.8.164 - come get some! I'll put something private up there just to spite you - if you can break PGP encryption, you've earned it :-)
If you put it on the net, it's not private. Period.
Would you like to go get that PGP-encrypted love-letter off my website and mail it to me in plaintext? Thought not.
It is possilbe to keep something private when it is encrypted.
Internet voting, etc is another kettle of fish. The danger there is that the system will get cracked and meddled with, not the encrypted data. Data in plaintext might get screwed with, but nothing encrypted. System security and encryption crackability are not the same thing.
So in other words, if an FBI agent followed you around wherever you went (physically), and looked at all your private papers and letters, it wouldn't be a breach of rights, just an inconvenience. In an electronic sense, this is exactly what this kind of thing does.
What in the hell is he thinking? He's copywriting this little blurb? What a damn hypocrite!
Not really. That notice neatly ensures that no-one can quote it out of context, as they are obliged to put in all the context. It's an astute move, and I'm sure natural to someone who has tangled with legal issues as much as RMS has.
To summarise: Give him a break! There may be things that he does or says that you do not agree with, but this is just petty.
Check your biology book. Genetic damage is something that's passed down, not a simple deformity to an individual. There are no elevated rates of such things in the population of survivors.
:-) Anyway, I was using the Jargon File definition. And that comment is still not a troll.
OK, so the damage is not passed on. That doesn't stop it being horrific! However, my apologies for being wrong on a technical point there.
A troll is a mistatement designed to pull out ignorant responses.
Do I detect some irony here?
The answer is that there is no unifying /. ideology - even the famed pro-linux, anti-Microsoft bias is now complete rot - say something pro-OSS and you get at flamed far more rabidly than if you'd taken a pro-MS stance.
/. ideology), whereas depriving a firm of profits and generally making havoc is generally regarded as bad.
Also, the DMCA is generally held around here to be an unjust situation (Oh crap, I just contradicted myself, didn't I? Well, on *most* subjects there's no such thing as a cohesive
8 Months is a slap on the wrist for a crime that that benefited nobody and inconvienenced millions. There can be no justification for DOS or virus writing, they do not only gain no benefit for the criminal, they can cost Millions of dollars to effected corporations.
This is fair enough, but compare it to other crimes committed at that age, and this is a serious punishment.
Plus, at that age, a sentence "measured in years" would only serve to remove all chance of rehabilitation he had.
OK, now I realise that I'm setting myself up to be flamed here, I ask those people to grow up. I'm also hoping for some reasoned responses, which I eagerly await.
What, exactly, is wrong with aborting based on Downs syndrome as opposed to ordinary abortion? (I'm not talking about whether abortion as a whole is right, perhaps another thread should discuss that). A genetic test can be taken and decided upon long before the legal threshold, so what is the difference? If you are allowed to choose not to have a baby, aren't you allowed to choose not to have one based on the results of whether they have a very disabilitating genetic disease?
Assides that this is an offtopic troll (ie not a first person account of anything but you spamming your friends email and slashdot with a long winded piece of garbage.)
Not offtopic (it is a thought-provoking piece about the topic in hand, and the vast majority seem to agree with you, considering the moderation), and definitely not a troll, which is defined as something designed to provoke a predictable response or flames.
There is no evidence of elevated rates of genetic damage in survivors of nuclear weapons in Japan. Sorry, it's not there and they are as healthy as you and me.
Go look up some history, come back, and tell me that again with a straight face. There are still Hiroshima babies and survivors alive now - many of the former were born grossly deformed, and you say there's "no evidence". Wake up and smell the mushroom cloud, mate!
This is, in fact, a troll according to the proper definition, and I've just given the "predictable response and/or flame", but at the moment I just don't care.
I think you do everyone an injustice to think that we consider American lives more important.
It's just so close to home. Likewise, those in the Balkans will think less of this tragedy than we do, because it's not their countrymen - neighbors and relatives in many cases - who got murdered in a mass, unfocused attack.
And anyway, we're not standing too idle in the Balkans (well, some people would like us to, but I disagree), so calling us uncaring is to misunderstand human nature.
My brother's gf was in the area and is okay, though extremely shaken. That's what I hear through my mother anyway.
I am so glad to hear that. I was worrying myself...strange, that. Even when you know there are several thousand who definitely died, you still worry about individuals the moment you know of one...anyway, I am very glad she's safe.
Before today, I really don't think that Americans would react remotely similarly if something like this happened over there. As I said in my first post, I think most Americans are largely saddened by the violence in the Middle East
I think that the keyword here is most. Just because an anti-american government wouldn't stop the celebrations doesn't mean that the demographics are necessarily very different. I should imagine that most Arabs would be as shocked as we are, perhaps more, as evidence points to some of them last time I checked...
To be completely honest, I don't think I would have complained much if police started shooting into that crowd of celebrators
Now I'll use this as a microcosm of what would happen if we went to war - imagine that they had. Imagine that they had completely levelled the street. Now think of how many innocent people's families would have to go through what you so nearly did with your brother's girlfriend. Along the path to war lies destruction and grief, and there are innocents on both sides.