It's supposed to be a Windows clone, but it can't use device drivers written for Windows?
So somebody installs it on his PC instead of MS Windows and then finds that his sound card doesn't work, he can't print, and his screen is 800x600 instead of 1280x960?
Even Linux, with hundreds of top-notch volunteer developers, has this problem to some extent. But this turkey will not only have fewer good drivers than Linux, it will also arouse greater expectations in users. It looks like Windows and it claims to run Windows software. So Joe User will expect it to support his low-end Lexmark printer and all the other devices Windows supports. He's going to be upset when he discovers it doesn't - and rightly so.
The only criteria considered in the article (development speed, execution speed, memory usage) are of secondary importance. Most of the money spent on software development is spent on maintenance. Maintenance is what most programmers do.
The most important criterion for language choice in the real world is: how easy is it for someone to understand a program written in this language?
That's why Lisp is, and deserves to be, a loser.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
It's amazing that ANYONE can field the number of mistakes that Intel has, and get away with it
I don't think they'll get away with this 130-watt room-heater. Remember that 130 watts is just the processor. Everybody thought that the first Alphas had a power problem - and they were only 30 watts! Forget this thing for the desktop, it's going to need cooling fans that will make so much noise you won't be able to think in the same room.
The reason for believing the police
state will happen is simple; that's where we've headed over the past few years. But the good reason for believing we won't is also obvious --
this has happened before in the past, and it was defeated then, too.
It was defeated by people who were willing to risk their "lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred honour". Many of whom did in fact lose everything. I don't see many of today's US citizens risking anything for their freedom. They didn't do anything when the Bill of Rights was trashed to further the war on drugs.
"In one sentence, the maintenance of technologically obsolete copyright regimes requires a police state."
It depends what "police state" means. By the standards of 25 years ago, the War on Drugs has already destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. One of the terrible things the Gestapo used to do in Nazi Germany was to come knocking at your door at 2 a.m. (instead of when you're awake). Today's police forces in the US and Britain make this look like quaint old-world courtesy: if they've had a drugs tip-off, they don't knock at all, they smash your door down without warning and enter (with drawn firearms, in the US).
The US and other western governments will continue to reduce the liberties of their citizens, either for their own ends or when manipulated by wealthy corporations, until a sufficient number of those citizens are willing to risk their lives, and all they own, to stop them. (And if that sounds overblown or extreme to you, you need to read some history.) I don't see that happening until long after it's too late.
I don't care what you run on a 386DX based computer, even the DOS prompt is so slow that I can type faster than my input will be displayed on the screen!
Either you have a bionic hand that can type 10x faster than any human being, or you've never run DOS on a 386DX. In the days of DOS, there were word processors running on 10 Mhz 286 machines that could keep up with the fastest human typists.
A troll is a provocative comment which is intended to generate strong reaction. It's bad because it usually doesn't lead to reasoned discussion. "Troll" can also mean a person who posts a troll.
(Anyone have a URL to a real glossary?)
Drepper has done some good work, but did you really have to give publicity to his rant in which he calls Richard Stallman a "raging manic" among other things?
Whatever his technical abilities, Drepper seems to be lacking in maturity, to say the least.
anyone who's been following the news for longer than a day or two realizes that the internet is moving towards regulation
But that's not the point addressed by the article. The question is whether the regulation will be effective.
The article was missing a few clues on this. The bit about why offshore businesses cannot avoid US law ('even if offshore firms are
legal in their home bases, their owners have to be willing to not come
back to the United States.') seems to assume
that the world is populated entirely by
US residents. I'm not sure which planet
they're talking about, but it certainly
isn't Earth.
There's a conflict between the people who
want to control our lives, and those of us
who don't want to be controlled. The outcome
is still unclear. The article added nothing.
Will some sane moderator please mod up the "Internet or IP -- not both" post? ("Score 1, troll" is bloody stupid.) The post may be right or it may be wrong, but the issue raised is interesting and important.
Successful businesses are based on adding value to something, then selling it. E.g. you turn $1000 worth of sheet metal, parts, and paint into a $20000 car.
The Ebooks idea is a value-subtracted business model. You turn a copyable, lendable, read-anywhere, permanent book that people will pay $10 to own, into a copy-protected, time-limited, restrictively-licensed, inconvenient "ebook" that very few people will pay anything for. You do all that work, and what you end up with is worth less in the marketplace than what you started with. Show me someone who thinks this is a rational basis for a business, and I'll show you someone who's likely to have other nutty ideas... like attracting mindshare by getting innocent people thrown in jail, perhaps.
IMHO, the reason why people complain about lame content in Ep. 1 is because they... grew up.
No. I first saw Star Wars when I was 31. It was popular with my contemporaries and was certainly not seen (except possibly be literati who affect to despise all SF) as a "kids' movie".
I was disappointed by Ep I because it clearly is aimed at kids, and unless I hear that
Ep II is different (unlikely, under any name) won't bother to see it.
I have to wonder how old the judge in this case was, i'm guessing they were over 40 years old..
Over 40! Terrible! You mean the judge was old enough to have received a decent education? Maybe he can even write an English sentence in which the pronoun matches its antecedent? That's always a giveaway, you have to have an attention span longer than 10 seconds to be able to do that.
I'm getting a little sick of this notion that everything should be free.
Have you actually read any post on Slashdot that expresses that notion? I haven't. Why don't you read people's opinions before attacking them?
Of course, a lot of us are getting a little sick of this notion that information should be subject to extraordinary property laws. Laws that allow the "owner" of some piece of information to prohibit me from communicating that information to someone else. Laws as unreasonable as this should be resisted by all means, including civil disobedience.
The fact that nearly all of the material on the SSLUG web site is in a language (Danish) that 98% of Europeans do not understand, tells me something about the grip on reality that the SSLUG people have, and about their chances of success.
The phrase "value-removed business model" deserves wider circulation. It accurately summarizes the basic idea, and at the same time, explains why it will fail. Did you invent it? If so, congratulations. If not, where did you first see it?
Here in Washington, there used to be some smart TV reporters. But they weren't photogenic enough, so they were fired, or offered bad jobs/pay cuts. So now, WUSA has a bunch of young, attractive morons on the payroll.
Right on (tho "morons" is a bit strong). The main problem, though, is that they are ignorant. Perhaps it's natural that most young people in TV have spent more time watching TV than reading books, but it doesn't make for informed reporting.
A chunk of the money you spend on a new PC goes to Microsoft, even if it doesn't have Windows installed. If you don't believe me, go to (e.g.) the Dell site and check out the price of a PC with Windows installed, and the price of an identically configured PC with Linux. You will find they are EXACTLY THE SAME. There are a few vendors who will sell you a PC without a Microsoft contribution, but they are small, a neglible market presence.
I do not agree that "Design Patterns" will stand the test of time. A C++ programmer needs the book to be able to understand a lot of recent code. But in my opinion, the value of the Patterns movement in typical application development has been greatly overrated. Programmers are using design patterns because they are perceived to be state-of-the art... but some of them produce obscure, unmaintainable designs. They don't understand that it is 100 times more important to produce a simple, clear design, expressed in simple, clear code, than to use the currently-fashionable ideas.
many people want to let Microsoft off the hook as some kind of "benevolent" monopoly
Those of us who have been in IT for a long time saw the same attitudes towards IBM in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM maintained a monopoly of the mainframe market by illegal practices. They defended themselves against the DoJ by employing more and better lawyers than the DoJ. But a lot of career IT professionals seemed to be in favor of a continuing IBM monopoly. Partly, perhaps, because it made their lives easier - they didn't have to learn about anything outside the world of IBM. But mainly, I fear, because a lot of human beings just want to be led. They don't want to think for themselves, or learn for themselves, or have any real freedom. They want to be told what to do.
This is a non-problem.
You publish on the web to get wide distribution. Then once a year (or whatever) the maintainer of the web site prints 3 copies of everything and sends them to the repositories in its country. The repositories are the places to which a copy of every publication must be sent, by law. In the UK, I think these are the British Museum, the Cambridge University library, and the Bodleian library. In the US, the Library of Congress is one (I don't know the others). This ensures preservation of a paper copy.
Slashdot Mirror
It must also fit onto a 4.7G DVD-R disk, 75% of commercial DVDs will not fit.
What you're saying is that 75% of commercial DVDs can't be copied onto the DVD media that 99% of us will use, right?
It's supposed to be a Windows clone, but it can't use device drivers written for Windows?
So somebody installs it on his PC instead of MS Windows and then finds that his sound card doesn't work, he can't print, and his screen is 800x600 instead of 1280x960?
Even Linux, with hundreds of top-notch volunteer developers, has this problem to some extent. But this turkey will not only have fewer good drivers than Linux, it will also arouse greater expectations in users. It looks like Windows and it claims to run Windows software. So Joe User will expect it to support his low-end Lexmark printer and all the other devices Windows supports. He's going to be upset when he discovers it doesn't - and rightly so.
The only criteria considered in the article (development speed, execution speed, memory usage) are of secondary importance. Most of the money spent on software development is spent on maintenance. Maintenance is what most programmers do.
The most important criterion for language choice in the real world is: how easy is it for someone to understand a program written in this language?
That's why Lisp is, and deserves to be, a loser.
It's amazing that ANYONE can field the number of mistakes that Intel has, and get away with it
I don't think they'll get away with this 130-watt room-heater. Remember that 130 watts is just the processor. Everybody thought that the first Alphas had a power problem - and they were only 30 watts! Forget this thing for the desktop, it's going to need cooling fans that will make so much noise you won't be able to think in the same room.
The reason for believing the police state will happen is simple; that's where we've headed over the past few years. But the good reason for believing we won't is also obvious -- this has happened before in the past, and it was defeated then, too.
It was defeated by people who were willing to risk their "lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred honour". Many of whom did in fact lose everything. I don't see many of today's US citizens risking anything for their freedom. They didn't do anything when the Bill of Rights was trashed to further the war on drugs.
"In one sentence, the maintenance of technologically obsolete copyright regimes requires a police state."
It depends what "police state" means. By the standards of 25 years ago, the War on Drugs has already destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. One of the terrible things the Gestapo used to do in Nazi Germany was to come knocking at your door at 2 a.m. (instead of when you're awake). Today's police forces in the US and Britain make this look like quaint old-world courtesy: if they've had a drugs tip-off, they don't knock at all, they smash your door down without warning and enter (with drawn firearms, in the US).
The US and other western governments will continue to reduce the liberties of their citizens, either for their own ends or when manipulated by wealthy corporations, until a sufficient number of those citizens are willing to risk their lives, and all they own, to stop them. (And if that sounds overblown or extreme to you, you need to read some history.) I don't see that happening until long after it's too late.
I don't care what you run on a 386DX based computer, even the DOS prompt is so slow that I can type faster than my input will be displayed on the screen!
Either you have a bionic hand that can type 10x faster than any human being, or you've never run DOS on a 386DX. In the days of DOS, there were word processors running on 10 Mhz 286 machines that could keep up with the fastest human typists.
A troll is a provocative comment which is intended to generate strong reaction. It's bad because it usually doesn't lead to reasoned discussion. "Troll" can also mean a person who posts a troll.
(Anyone have a URL to a real glossary?)
Drepper has done some good work, but did you really have to give publicity to his rant in which he calls Richard Stallman a "raging manic" among other things?
Whatever his technical abilities, Drepper seems to be lacking in maturity, to say the least.
I have never read a comment by Stallman that I would describe as "anal and vitriolic".
Certainly nothing remotely as obnoxious as Ulrich Drepper's comments.
anyone who's been following the news for longer than a day or two realizes that the internet is moving towards regulation
But that's not the point addressed by the article. The question is whether the regulation will be effective.
The article was missing a few clues on this. The bit about why offshore businesses cannot avoid US law ('even if offshore firms are legal in their home bases, their owners have to be willing to not come back to the United States.') seems to assume that the world is populated entirely by US residents. I'm not sure which planet they're talking about, but it certainly isn't Earth.
There's a conflict between the people who want to control our lives, and those of us who don't want to be controlled. The outcome is still unclear. The article added nothing.
Will some sane moderator please mod up the "Internet or IP -- not both" post? ("Score 1, troll" is bloody stupid.) The post may be right or it may be wrong, but the issue raised is interesting and important.
Successful businesses are based on adding value to something, then selling it. E.g. you turn $1000 worth of sheet metal, parts, and paint into a $20000 car. ... like attracting mindshare by getting innocent people thrown in jail, perhaps.
The Ebooks idea is a value-subtracted business model. You turn a copyable, lendable, read-anywhere, permanent book that people will pay $10 to own, into a copy-protected, time-limited, restrictively-licensed, inconvenient "ebook" that very few people will pay anything for. You do all that work, and what you end up with is worth less in the marketplace than what you started with. Show me someone who thinks this is a rational basis for a business, and I'll show you someone who's likely to have other nutty ideas
IMHO, the reason why people complain about lame content in Ep. 1 is because they ... grew up.
No. I first saw Star Wars when I was 31. It was popular with my contemporaries and was certainly not seen (except possibly be literati who affect to despise all SF) as a "kids' movie".
I was disappointed by Ep I because it clearly is aimed at kids, and unless I hear that Ep II is different (unlikely, under any name) won't bother to see it.
I have to wonder how old the judge in this case was, i'm guessing they were over 40 years old..
Over 40! Terrible! You mean the judge was old enough to have received a decent education? Maybe he can even write an English sentence in which the pronoun matches its antecedent? That's always a giveaway, you have to have an attention span longer than 10 seconds to be able to do that.
I'm getting a little sick of this notion that everything should be free.
Have you actually read any post on Slashdot that expresses that notion? I haven't. Why don't you read people's opinions before attacking them?
Of course, a lot of us are getting a little sick of this notion that information should be subject to extraordinary property laws. Laws that allow the "owner" of some piece of information to prohibit me from communicating that information to someone else. Laws as unreasonable as this should be resisted by all means, including civil disobedience.
The fact that nearly all of the material on the SSLUG web site is in a language (Danish) that 98% of Europeans do not understand, tells me something about the grip on reality that the SSLUG people have, and about their chances of success.
The phrase "value-removed business model" deserves wider circulation. It accurately summarizes the basic idea, and at the same time, explains why it will fail. Did you invent it? If so, congratulations. If not, where did you first see it?
Here in Washington, there used to be some smart TV reporters. But they weren't photogenic enough, so they were fired, or offered bad jobs/pay cuts. So now, WUSA has a bunch of young, attractive morons on the payroll.
Right on (tho "morons" is a bit strong). The main problem, though, is that they are ignorant. Perhaps it's natural that most young people in TV have spent more time watching TV than reading books, but it doesn't make for informed reporting.
A chunk of the money you spend on a new PC goes to Microsoft, even if it doesn't have Windows installed. If you don't believe me, go to (e.g.) the Dell site and check out the price of a PC with Windows installed, and the price of an identically configured PC with Linux. You will find they are EXACTLY THE SAME.
There are a few vendors who will sell you a PC without a Microsoft contribution, but they are small, a neglible market presence.
I do not agree that "Design Patterns" will stand the test of time. A C++ programmer needs the book to be able to understand a lot of recent code. But in my opinion, the value of the Patterns movement in typical application development has been greatly overrated. Programmers are using design patterns because they are perceived to be state-of-the art ... but some of them produce obscure, unmaintainable designs. They don't understand that it is 100 times more important to produce a simple, clear design, expressed in simple, clear code, than to use the currently-fashionable ideas.
many people want to let Microsoft off the hook as some kind of "benevolent" monopoly
Those of us who have been in IT for a long time saw the same attitudes towards IBM in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM maintained a monopoly of the mainframe market by illegal practices. They defended themselves against the DoJ by employing more and better lawyers than the DoJ.
But a lot of career IT professionals seemed to be in favor of a continuing IBM monopoly. Partly, perhaps, because it made their lives easier - they didn't have to learn about anything outside the world of IBM. But mainly, I fear, because a lot of human beings just want to be led. They don't want to think for themselves, or learn for themselves, or have any real freedom. They want to be told what to do.
This is a non-problem.
You publish on the web to get wide distribution. Then once a year (or whatever) the maintainer of the web site prints 3 copies of everything and sends them to the repositories in its country. The repositories are the places to which a copy of every publication must be sent, by law. In the UK, I think these are the British Museum, the Cambridge University library, and the Bodleian library. In the US, the Library of Congress is one (I don't know the others). This ensures preservation of a paper copy.
Presumably a lot of countries are considering ratification of the WIPO treaty. Does somebody have a list? Or links to lists?
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Can you give me the source of this quote?
He made it up. And now it will be re-quoted endlessly until people think it is "authentic".