Yah, I need to avoid these discussions. I know you're wrong, but saying why just isn't worth the risk of saying too much. Many of the facts are public information--but some are not, and this discussion is not worth the research effort that would be required to make sure which are which. I suppose the only pretty safe thing is to note that Microsoft certainly has failed as regards Windows Mobile--but not for the reasons you evidently think...
Well, I can publicly say you're wrong, but I can't in public say why I know you're wrong. I can't even offer to explain in email, unless you can prove to me that you're somewhere in the same food chain as I am--and if you were higher in that food chain than I am, then you wouldn't have written what you wrote...
Hmm... This is the problem with secret information.
I'm just going to say that if you're some kind of corporate spy fishing for information, then "I know nothing. Nothing!"
FUD? Sorry, I'm convinced you're the fuddy duddy here. Good economic models usually win in the market place. Linux has NOT won and poses no threat, Microsoft's whining notwithstanding. Or should it be "whinging"?
I suppose I better include a bit on my qualifications to have an opinion. At home I use Linux (Ubuntu) exclusively on two machines, and in a virtual machine on the third. I've tried lots of distros, but I've mostly been with Ubuntu for several years now. In terms of computer time, I probably spend 95% of my time at home using Linux and regard it as basically superior to Windows. The situation at work is rather more bleak, but I don't feel I should go into details.
However, you're fundamentally very confused and befuddled, especially about the economics. A computer without an OS is worthless, and insofar as you think computers have any value, the OS is part of that value. Microsoft has succeeded primarily by pretending the OS is free. Microsoft hides their charges by forcing the makers to pay up front, and the makers deliver turnkey bundles with Microsoft's profits buried inside the price. (The Linux people are also pretending the OS is free, but they aren't getting any money out of the makers, and truly free is NOT a working economic model. Someone somewhere is ultimately paying for the beer or the lunch or the OS.)
With regards to your comment about well-paid programmers, I have to speak rather carefully or circumspectly. I am in the food chain of what is probably the largest of the "companies" of which you speak, and I surely have access to some information that is not regarded as public information. I think there are three appropriate comments within the bounds of what I can say:
(1) I do think the company is sincere about the money they put into open source software.
(2) Though the amount of money the company puts into open source software sounds very large by the scale of open source software, on the scale of all of our software development costs, it is not very noticeable. I suppose it's even possible that it's tapped off of the training or competitive research or public good will budgets. What sounds like a lot of money to the open source people probably sounds like a sneeze to Microsoft.
(3) When push comes to shove, the projects that are making money are the ones that get more money invested into them.
Remember, those are just some of my opinions, and if you don't like them, I have others--but none of them should be taken as in any way representative of my company's official positions.
Actually I'm in the IBM food chain, but my impression is that very little of that money comes from Linux. I don't feel I'm at liberty to say anything substantive about the internal dynamics of the Linux situation, but summaries of the financial results are available online. Just my opinion, but I definitely regard much of our Linux-specific "investment" as closer to "charity" or "advertising".
As regards Redhat your figures are ridiculous. No one has over 80% of profit from their total sales. Well, maybe Bernie Madoff--but even he couldn't keep it up. However, the last time I did look into the Redhat situation, their actual revenue was almost purely from specialized services. Their choice to specialize in Linux rather than Windows does impact their financial model, but...
From your lack of response to the main body of my post, I receive the impression that you didn't understand my main point. Kind of hard to think you agreed with it or found it too obvious. Perhaps it will be easier to understand in reverse? Microsoft has a business model that most people understand and that definitely works, regardless of the ethical considerations.
That's not possible without competition to define the true value of the software. A big chunk of Microsoft's business model has always been to hide the price from the actual customers by bundling their software in with hardware so that most of the end users don't even know what it cost them.
The problem with pretending that any Linux distro is a competitor to anything is that none of the Linux distro's have a viable economic model. Living on charity doesn't cut it for real programmers.
My suggestion of a new economic model for open source software is 'reverse auction charity shares'. The wannabe programmers would sell a certain number of shares to pay for the effort of the project, and start work once it was funded. The reverse auction part is that they could sell extra shares at decreasing costs. It's still charitable since their profits are not increasing and since the finished software becomes part of the public domain, but the wannabe users have an incentive to "sell" the software to their friends so that everyone gets a lower price per share.
You could actually extend the model to other forms of charity. For example, PBS could sell shares for various programs and possible programs so the donors would help them decide what gets on the are. Political parties could auction shares in politicians so their funding would be visible and linked to the public rather than done underground by lobbyists.
So the editor is surprised no one told/. about the recent news? Hey, they only missed that story by a few months. Surprise? That's a funnier laugh than the best of XKCD, which is saying a bit, since some of them are pretty funny.
Gee, you don't suppose the so-called editor could be in a position to do something to improve/. to the point where interesting news and humor would again be visible around here?
Of course personal recollection is just one data point at best, but... Some years ago I used to visit/. quite often, perhaps several times a day versus several times a week these days--unless a month or two has gone by. On an average visit I expected to see at several very interesting articles and at least one first report that I hadn't seen elsewhere versus my current expectation of seeing one or two non-boring stories and nothing that I haven't seen elsewhere one or two days earlier. A typical visit would reveal a number of very witty comments and usually one or two actually funny and new jokes versus the current crop of a scattering of very tired memes. I remember looking at a relatively large thread (which are relatively rare these days) and finding exactly one comment that had even been moderated as funny--and that one wasn't even amusing.
Most importantly, the moderation used to be pretty poor instead of downright horrendous. Apparently the lousy moderators have won that game--and I expect the moderation of this post to prove my point (yet again).
But the so-called editors are apparently quite satisfied with the devolution of the system. I guess lower traffic on/. means less so-called work for them?
Love of freedom is a disease? Excuse me, but I disagree. Freedom is about meaningful choice, and Microsoft is dedicated to the removal of any choice that doesn't maximize their profits. The choices that Microsoft 'freely' offers are almost always false or poisonous.
I was just reading about foxes and hedgehogs as metaphors for human personalities. This article makes me think Linus must be a near-sighted hedgehog focused on the idea of technology as a good thing, while the more complex reality (as perceived by the foxes like me (of course)) is that technology is morally neutral.
Riddle me this: If you cut Microsoft into 5 companies and gave each of them a copy of the source code to start with, would it result in more choice and more freedom, or less?
Not certain, but from the short example of your writing, I'm already inclined to believe you should designate me as your foe so that I won't see you in the future. I'm also inclined to believe this request is too polite.
And in conclusion, this 63-word reply seems to be 64 more words than your comment merits.
The initial mods were negative, presumably to stifle discussion of those aspects of the topic. My reply to that moron was mostly because I conclude that I've suffered too many/. fools too gladly in the past.
However, it should also be obvious that I'm somewhat seriously concerned by the potential of a Warhol Worm to build a very large zombot very quickly. There were several replies that considered variations on the configurations, but my focus is just on any open vulnerability that can be exploited without user involvement on the default configuration of Microsoft's most dominant OS of the day. I'm not sure how many machines are on the Web at any time, but I am sure that the biggest monoculture is pre-pwned by Microsoft. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/, the current Internet user population is around 1.5 billion... Now I think I've scared myself by thinking it through...
As far as being insightful, I think that's a different stretch for that post, but I'm not supposed to complain about that, am I? It's more in the sense of a revelation, which a wise friend told me is always obvious--AFTER you hear it.
Seems a waste to include suggestions for improvements to the fossil that/. has become, but... In general I think the moderation system should be more directly reflected in the dimensionality of the karma, and the dimensionality of the moderation should be cleaned up. People with high karma in a particular dimension should have extra clout in that dimension, but in general the mod points should be much more widely distributed. I also think the mod point reporting should be logarithmic. I got to playing with the numbers and now feel like the natural log would be better than the base-10 log. That would mean that +5 funny would have to have about 150 mod points behind it.
Acknowledged. I should clarify that I am thinking of a Warhol Worm that includes a rooted backdoor for a large-scale DDoS attack. We've already had plenty of problems with zombots around 10^4, but imagine the hassles of a 10^7 zombot... I don't think it would be possible to simply cut the infected machines off the net, but rather it would be necessary to partition the entire network and rebuild in pieces.
To the spineless cowardly censorious moron with the negative mod points:
Exactly what part of the post were you unable to understand? If you don't ask questions, you'll just continue being a bloody ignorant twit.
And your mother wore army boots, too.
However, I do thank you for your additional evidence of the quality of most of the moderation on/.--but it was scarcely needed. I've pretty much given up looking for funny or witty posts these days. A moderation of +5 funny apparently means that some moderators recognized at least one of the traditional 'funny' memes in the post.
Me? I've quit playing the moderation game and opted out of moderation long ago. If/. wasn't so poorly programmed, I suppose that might exempt my posts from moderation. Something like 'judge not and be not judged'?
Microsoft has become a single point of failure that poses and unacceptably enormous risk to our society's normal functioning. Consider it in light of the birthday paradox. Even if each failure is 99% safe, sooner or later we're going to have a major Warhol Worm that brings the entire Internet to its knees--along with large portions of the world's economy. Actually, I'd wager that the NSA already has the capability, and probably several other state actors, too.
Massive monoculture is always dangerous. The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.
I'm not saying we should kill Microsoft. Just cut it up into four or five small pieces, give each of them a copy of the source code, and tell them to run with it. No non-public communications permitted, and let the customers actually have the MEANINGFUL freedom to pick and choose. Not only will there be more pressure to produce new versions, but within a few versions we'll have enough diversity to prevent totally massive fails.
Point of clarification: I'm not arguing against standards--but they need to be open and agreed upon, not imposed by and for the sake of monopoly.
Very substantive reply, but mostly misdirected. You seem to have quite a bit of confusion about solipcism, but that just leads to the old joke about analytic philosophers: The philosophers know the label of everything and the meaning of nothing. (My apologies to the original joke about economists knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.)
To placate you, I will slightly clarify my comments. I am not saying that fantasy can directly become reality--but fantasies do have import and affect how people act upon the world. The result is that the real world will be changed as a result. In Cheney's case, he is fundamentally a coward and the result of his faith-based actions was to make the world a MORE fearful place, not less.
On average, things do get better--but the individual events are NOT average. The great decision of our epoch is whether we shall become nothing more than the most vicious animals or whether we can become something better. However, before we can become better, we must first imagine what that is.
More could be said, but this is basically a stale and dead discussion in the motif of/. (which is yet another of/.'s theoretically curable problems). Ergo, for now I'll just say that some aspects of deeper responses will probably appear in later posts on other topics--though probably not very soon, since my interest in/. is declining pretty steadily these years. I really find it annoying to see the software tools being misused so badly.
Gosh, that was such a terribly worded article summary I can't decide if the author is a regular 'editor' of/. or just a typical reflection of the poor taste and low competence of the/. editors. Would you prefer one lump of incompetence or two with your/. articles?
Anyway, I'd hate to generalize from my poor abilities as a former pilot, but I tend to favor machines over humans. As Einstein noted, there are no limits to human stupidity, but you can design any degree of redundancy you want into mechanical systems. The simple question is cost versus probabilistic safety.
As should be expected from/., the treatment of the design trade-off in the article summary was amazingly shallow. In extreme cases, the designers create planes that cannot possibly be flown by humans. Such fly-by-wire planes may involve control optimization with negative dynamic stability and feedback loops that can only be satisfied at computer speeds. In particular I'm thinking of a fairly recent jet fighter that had to have PROPER corrective feedback something like every tenth of a second.
As regards the storm, I actually came close to getting killed when something like that caught me off guard. Scaling those possibilities up... Well, that's a big chunk of the reason I mostly avoid flying these years.
With regards to planes, my fuzzy recollection is that the DC-10 had the worst safety record for commercial airplanes. However, every time I look at a 747 it boggles my imagination that the thing can fly. Continuing with Airbus, I remember an interesting crash in Nagoya a few years ago that involved the pilots essentially getting into an argument with the fly-by-wire system...
Thanks for proving my main underlying point about the damage shitty moderation is doing to/. these days. I'd be utterly unsurprised if that's your biggest contribution to the world.
Of course, I understand why you don't reply substantively. It's certainly not that my words are enlightened revelations etched in stone. It's just that you're a mindless little scumbag, and you can't formulate any argument more complicated than clicking on a negative mod.
To any other readers of this post:
Per my sig, I've opted out of moderation until such time as/. fixes the moderation system. I suppose hell will freeze over first, eh?
Why am I not surprised that only one post in the entire discussion (so far) mentions "reality"? This/. place has really declined over the years...
Our imagination, the mental images and models that we construct in our minds, these unreal things are not without import. Very often we use them to create reality.
Amusingly enough, reality persists in being evasive towards our simplifications. It is obviously true that for some people the horrible images are just escapism and those people never attempt to act out their fantasies. In other cases, the harms can be enormous. I think the greatest fantasy-based harm of the recent past is actually the big dick Cheney's faith-based war in Iraq. The economic cost of that fantasy is most optimistically estimated around $1 trillion--but the meter is still running. I suppose the cost in lives is much more important. We have a pretty solid number over 4,000 for American lives--but no one has a solid count for the trivial Iraqi lives. (Having studied a lot of math and a fair bit of sociology, I actually buy into the demographic approach that comes up with a statistical estimate of over 1 million prematurely deceased Iraqis.) All because of Cheney's fantasies? Or was it just for the sake of enriching Haliburton?
I think these computer games are quite bad because they are more personally involving and easier to follow. However, in recent years I've mostly been wondering about horror-suspense writers who create these super-vicious criminals in their minds--and then skillfully transfer their insane ideas to their readers. I suspect the success of Silence of the Lambs may explain a lot of the bad things that have happened to America and to the world...
Your defeatist attitude is neither helpful nor constructive. The spammers love you for it.
We can make progress fighting against the spammers, and every little victory counts. Making the Internet work is a highly cooperative enterprise, and that includes the efforts to fight spammers.
In either case, I feel compelled to say something nice about/., since the rating system left you invisible to me. I only stumbled across your post by the replies. If you're a troll, you're evidently a mighty troll.
Unfortunately, I don't care. In either case, my only request is that you designate me as a foe so I'll have an even lower chance of seeing you in the future.
My qualifications to be your foe? Well, first of all, I'm highly educated, including a degree in history. Second, I'm a highly devout agnostic, and I have nothing but contempt for people whose own religious beliefs are as weak and indefensible as yours. I could come up with more reasons, but you obviously have no interest in reason, and I've already wasted far more time than you're worth.
No brainer--but we are talking about McDonalds, aren't we?
Announce a policy of turning off the WiFi when the McDonalds is too full, and post a schedule of the normal times when free access is available. No skin off their noses if they have some extra customers when there are empty seats, eh?
Since this is McDonalds, I feel obliged to note that the nose skin goes into the hot dogs. Does McDonalds serve hot dogs? That's how long it's been since I've eaten there... Wait! Sausage. I'm pretty sure they had some kind of morning sausage, and they can use the nose skin for the sausage. I'm pretty sure--but even more sure that I don't want to know for sure. No one wants to know the truth about sausage.
Actually, I read a couple of books about fast food a few years ago, and these days I don't eat at many fast food places. Must be a coincidence, eh?
It is coming from the domain registrar's side. If it was not valid, then one would believe that the spammer would find it slightly difficult to register the new domains. In other cases, it is coming back as the admin address for ISPs who are sending spam.
However, I admit that I will not test tedjok's gmail address, because I think it quite likely that email address would be harvested. At the very least, he has some sort of working relationship with the spammers.
I'm still more annoyed by Google's new pro-spammer policy of censoring spam complaints in their Groups.
Before the mangling by the/. censorship system, that particular email included a Gmail address for the fake opt-out at the bottom. Wonderless/. was also unable to deal with the content, which was a Japanese advertisement for women with big tits. Technically, it's supposed to be illegal in Japan, but the actual accommodation is apparently to look the other way as long as they're above high school.
Google has actually done a pretty good job of reducing the spammers' websites that they were hosting directly on places like blogger. Gmail also kills spamming email addresses pretty quickly Those seem to be the only two fronts they are still fighting on. Fake opt-outs are quite common, as well as administrative contacts for spammers or for spammer front men. There are also lots of fake headers pointing to Gmail. I acknowledge it's hard to blame anyone for the Joe jobs, but Google should at least care about their reputation.
Instead, it is obvious that Google's new motto is "Live and let spam."
Me? I think every form of support for the spammers should be cut off. Google could do MUCH more to fight the spammers.
Funny/. should mention Google's increasingly anti-social behavior. My primary interaction these days has been to complain about the spammers they support, such as the example below. For those of you who don't read Japanese, it will probably suffice to note that the content includes the expression for "big boobs". Google's support in this particular case is the fake opt-out at the bottom. If you think the yakuza who sent this spam will honor their opt-out requests, please post your email address here, and I'll get back to you with a wonderful offer.
When I started complaining too publicly about the spam support by Google, they first killed the Gmail address, and then banned me completely from their Groups.
Google fighting evil? Gee, I always thought censorship and spammers were evil, but if Google loves censorship and spam, then I must have been mistaken, right?
(And/. has lameness filters, too, so at least their censorship is mindlessly evil. Is that a better flavor of evil? I wound up having to delete all of the evidence of Google's support of evil./. at it's typical worst.)
X-Apparently-To: via 202.93.86.18; Tue, 05 May 2009 22:32:06 +0900 X-YahooFilteredBulk: 203.155.246.205 X-Originating-IP: [203.155.246.205] Return-Path: Received-SPF: softfail (PC11: domain of transitioning na-ka-ke-n.zzzxxxccc?9o@ezweb.ne.jp does not designate 203.155.246.205 as permitted sender) receiver=PC11; client-ip=203.155.246.205; envelope-from=na-ka-ke-n.zzzxxxccc?9o@ezweb.ne.jp; Authentication-Results: mta322.mail.ogk.yahoo.co.jp from=; domainkeys=neutral (no sig) Received: from 203.155.246.205 (HELO PC11) (203.155.246.205)by mta322.mail.ogk.yahoo.co.jp with SMTP; Tue, 05 May 2009 22:32:06 +0900 Subject: Message-ID: 20090505223207 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="SHIFT_JIS" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Length: 786
How could you possibly be so stupid as to trust a spammer?
By the way, I think the only way spam could be addressed is by changing the economic game. Right now the spammers think they are dividing by zero. They think the marginal cost of sending another million spams is zero, so if they find one more sucker who sends them some money, the RoI looks infinite.
We need to change the odds so that sending spam has a much higher probability of negative consequences. The so-called zero must be eliminated. Okay, so we can't send the spammers to Guantanamo, but at least we can nuke their spamvertised websites, cancel their domain registrations, and cut their ISP accounts. If a webhost, registrar, or ISP doesn't want to cooperate, we should put them out of business, too.
I really think Google could do this by implementing a powerful "Good Samaritan" anti-spam system in Gmail. Combine human intelligence to help make sure the correct people get notified quickly--and much quicker than the spammer can find the sucker.
Like the sucker who started this discussion by nicely asking the spammers to cease and desist.
I think they should hire a reformed pirate from Somalia. After all, it takes a pirate to stop a pirate.
Seriously, copyright is dead already. It no longer makes sense to pretend that the point of reproduction is a choke point for publication. Yes, we do need to reward creativity, but no, corporate-controlled copyright focused on profit-maximization (based on an ancient paradigm of killing more trees) is NOT the solution.
Sure what it sounded like to me. Ubuntu seems to do all of that at the specified price.
However, what pisses me off most about Microsoft is the in-your-face WGA assumption that everyone is a thief. No, just because we are forced to use your trashy software, that does NOT mean we want to steal it. This week they installed a new and more intrusive in-your-face version of WGA. Pile it higher and deeper? Sorry, Microsoft, no kudos to you.
Actually, there are lots of reasons to hate Microsoft. I think my deepest reason for hating Microsoft is that Microsoft is anti-freedom, and I like my freedom. The meaning of freedom is that you get to make meaningful choices, but Microsoft interprets that to mean "We don't have to show you any source code, so you don't really know anything about what we are offering, but the only choices we feel like offering are minor variations of the same garbage. Now send us more money. NOW. And we Microsoftians still assume you're a bunch of thieves. So what are you twits going to do about it?"
P.S. What I did is switch to Ubuntu and Redhat as much as possible. Unfortunately, my work still requires me to use Windows much of the time.
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Yah, I need to avoid these discussions. I know you're wrong, but saying why just isn't worth the risk of saying too much. Many of the facts are public information--but some are not, and this discussion is not worth the research effort that would be required to make sure which are which. I suppose the only pretty safe thing is to note that Microsoft certainly has failed as regards Windows Mobile--but not for the reasons you evidently think...
Congratulations. You "win".
See you at the bank.
Well, I can publicly say you're wrong, but I can't in public say why I know you're wrong. I can't even offer to explain in email, unless you can prove to me that you're somewhere in the same food chain as I am--and if you were higher in that food chain than I am, then you wouldn't have written what you wrote...
Hmm... This is the problem with secret information.
I'm just going to say that if you're some kind of corporate spy fishing for information, then "I know nothing. Nothing!"
FUD? Sorry, I'm convinced you're the fuddy duddy here. Good economic models usually win in the market place. Linux has NOT won and poses no threat, Microsoft's whining notwithstanding. Or should it be "whinging"?
I suppose I better include a bit on my qualifications to have an opinion. At home I use Linux (Ubuntu) exclusively on two machines, and in a virtual machine on the third. I've tried lots of distros, but I've mostly been with Ubuntu for several years now. In terms of computer time, I probably spend 95% of my time at home using Linux and regard it as basically superior to Windows. The situation at work is rather more bleak, but I don't feel I should go into details.
However, you're fundamentally very confused and befuddled, especially about the economics. A computer without an OS is worthless, and insofar as you think computers have any value, the OS is part of that value. Microsoft has succeeded primarily by pretending the OS is free. Microsoft hides their charges by forcing the makers to pay up front, and the makers deliver turnkey bundles with Microsoft's profits buried inside the price. (The Linux people are also pretending the OS is free, but they aren't getting any money out of the makers, and truly free is NOT a working economic model. Someone somewhere is ultimately paying for the beer or the lunch or the OS.)
With regards to your comment about well-paid programmers, I have to speak rather carefully or circumspectly. I am in the food chain of what is probably the largest of the "companies" of which you speak, and I surely have access to some information that is not regarded as public information. I think there are three appropriate comments within the bounds of what I can say:
(1) I do think the company is sincere about the money they put into open source software.
(2) Though the amount of money the company puts into open source software sounds very large by the scale of open source software, on the scale of all of our software development costs, it is not very noticeable. I suppose it's even possible that it's tapped off of the training or competitive research or public good will budgets. What sounds like a lot of money to the open source people probably sounds like a sneeze to Microsoft.
(3) When push comes to shove, the projects that are making money are the ones that get more money invested into them.
Remember, those are just some of my opinions, and if you don't like them, I have others--but none of them should be taken as in any way representative of my company's official positions.
Actually I'm in the IBM food chain, but my impression is that very little of that money comes from Linux. I don't feel I'm at liberty to say anything substantive about the internal dynamics of the Linux situation, but summaries of the financial results are available online. Just my opinion, but I definitely regard much of our Linux-specific "investment" as closer to "charity" or "advertising".
As regards Redhat your figures are ridiculous. No one has over 80% of profit from their total sales. Well, maybe Bernie Madoff--but even he couldn't keep it up. However, the last time I did look into the Redhat situation, their actual revenue was almost purely from specialized services. Their choice to specialize in Linux rather than Windows does impact their financial model, but...
From your lack of response to the main body of my post, I receive the impression that you didn't understand my main point. Kind of hard to think you agreed with it or found it too obvious. Perhaps it will be easier to understand in reverse? Microsoft has a business model that most people understand and that definitely works, regardless of the ethical considerations.
That's not possible without competition to define the true value of the software. A big chunk of Microsoft's business model has always been to hide the price from the actual customers by bundling their software in with hardware so that most of the end users don't even know what it cost them.
The problem with pretending that any Linux distro is a competitor to anything is that none of the Linux distro's have a viable economic model. Living on charity doesn't cut it for real programmers.
My suggestion of a new economic model for open source software is 'reverse auction charity shares'. The wannabe programmers would sell a certain number of shares to pay for the effort of the project, and start work once it was funded. The reverse auction part is that they could sell extra shares at decreasing costs. It's still charitable since their profits are not increasing and since the finished software becomes part of the public domain, but the wannabe users have an incentive to "sell" the software to their friends so that everyone gets a lower price per share.
You could actually extend the model to other forms of charity. For example, PBS could sell shares for various programs and possible programs so the donors would help them decide what gets on the are. Political parties could auction shares in politicians so their funding would be visible and linked to the public rather than done underground by lobbyists.
So the editor is surprised no one told /. about the recent news? Hey, they only missed that story by a few months. Surprise? That's a funnier laugh than the best of XKCD, which is saying a bit, since some of them are pretty funny.
Gee, you don't suppose the so-called editor could be in a position to do something to improve /. to the point where interesting news and humor would again be visible around here?
Of course personal recollection is just one data point at best, but... Some years ago I used to visit /. quite often, perhaps several times a day versus several times a week these days--unless a month or two has gone by. On an average visit I expected to see at several very interesting articles and at least one first report that I hadn't seen elsewhere versus my current expectation of seeing one or two non-boring stories and nothing that I haven't seen elsewhere one or two days earlier. A typical visit would reveal a number of very witty comments and usually one or two actually funny and new jokes versus the current crop of a scattering of very tired memes. I remember looking at a relatively large thread (which are relatively rare these days) and finding exactly one comment that had even been moderated as funny--and that one wasn't even amusing.
Most importantly, the moderation used to be pretty poor instead of downright horrendous. Apparently the lousy moderators have won that game--and I expect the moderation of this post to prove my point (yet again).
But the so-called editors are apparently quite satisfied with the devolution of the system. I guess lower traffic on /. means less so-called work for them?
Love of freedom is a disease? Excuse me, but I disagree. Freedom is about meaningful choice, and Microsoft is dedicated to the removal of any choice that doesn't maximize their profits. The choices that Microsoft 'freely' offers are almost always false or poisonous.
I was just reading about foxes and hedgehogs as metaphors for human personalities. This article makes me think Linus must be a near-sighted hedgehog focused on the idea of technology as a good thing, while the more complex reality (as perceived by the foxes like me (of course)) is that technology is morally neutral.
Riddle me this: If you cut Microsoft into 5 companies and gave each of them a copy of the source code to start with, would it result in more choice and more freedom, or less?
Your comment is constructive how?
Not certain, but from the short example of your writing, I'm already inclined to believe you should designate me as your foe so that I won't see you in the future. I'm also inclined to believe this request is too polite.
And in conclusion, this 63-word reply seems to be 64 more words than your comment merits.
The initial mods were negative, presumably to stifle discussion of those aspects of the topic. My reply to that moron was mostly because I conclude that I've suffered too many /. fools too gladly in the past.
However, it should also be obvious that I'm somewhat seriously concerned by the potential of a Warhol Worm to build a very large zombot very quickly. There were several replies that considered variations on the configurations, but my focus is just on any open vulnerability that can be exploited without user involvement on the default configuration of Microsoft's most dominant OS of the day. I'm not sure how many machines are on the Web at any time, but I am sure that the biggest monoculture is pre-pwned by Microsoft. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/, the current Internet user population is around 1.5 billion... Now I think I've scared myself by thinking it through...
As far as being insightful, I think that's a different stretch for that post, but I'm not supposed to complain about that, am I? It's more in the sense of a revelation, which a wise friend told me is always obvious--AFTER you hear it.
Seems a waste to include suggestions for improvements to the fossil that /. has become, but... In general I think the moderation system should be more directly reflected in the dimensionality of the karma, and the dimensionality of the moderation should be cleaned up. People with high karma in a particular dimension should have extra clout in that dimension, but in general the mod points should be much more widely distributed. I also think the mod point reporting should be logarithmic. I got to playing with the numbers and now feel like the natural log would be better than the base-10 log. That would mean that +5 funny would have to have about 150 mod points behind it.
Acknowledged. I should clarify that I am thinking of a Warhol Worm that includes a rooted backdoor for a large-scale DDoS attack. We've already had plenty of problems with zombots around 10^4, but imagine the hassles of a 10^7 zombot... I don't think it would be possible to simply cut the infected machines off the net, but rather it would be necessary to partition the entire network and rebuild in pieces.
To the spineless cowardly censorious moron with the negative mod points:
Exactly what part of the post were you unable to understand? If you don't ask questions, you'll just continue being a bloody ignorant twit.
And your mother wore army boots, too.
However, I do thank you for your additional evidence of the quality of most of the moderation on /.--but it was scarcely needed. I've pretty much given up looking for funny or witty posts these days. A moderation of +5 funny apparently means that some moderators recognized at least one of the traditional 'funny' memes in the post.
Me? I've quit playing the moderation game and opted out of moderation long ago. If /. wasn't so poorly programmed, I suppose that might exempt my posts from moderation. Something like 'judge not and be not judged'?
Microsoft has become a single point of failure that poses and unacceptably enormous risk to our society's normal functioning. Consider it in light of the birthday paradox. Even if each failure is 99% safe, sooner or later we're going to have a major Warhol Worm that brings the entire Internet to its knees--along with large portions of the world's economy. Actually, I'd wager that the NSA already has the capability, and probably several other state actors, too.
Massive monoculture is always dangerous. The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.
I'm not saying we should kill Microsoft. Just cut it up into four or five small pieces, give each of them a copy of the source code, and tell them to run with it. No non-public communications permitted, and let the customers actually have the MEANINGFUL freedom to pick and choose. Not only will there be more pressure to produce new versions, but within a few versions we'll have enough diversity to prevent totally massive fails.
Point of clarification: I'm not arguing against standards--but they need to be open and agreed upon, not imposed by and for the sake of monopoly.
Very substantive reply, but mostly misdirected. You seem to have quite a bit of confusion about solipcism, but that just leads to the old joke about analytic philosophers: The philosophers know the label of everything and the meaning of nothing. (My apologies to the original joke about economists knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.)
To placate you, I will slightly clarify my comments. I am not saying that fantasy can directly become reality--but fantasies do have import and affect how people act upon the world. The result is that the real world will be changed as a result. In Cheney's case, he is fundamentally a coward and the result of his faith-based actions was to make the world a MORE fearful place, not less.
On average, things do get better--but the individual events are NOT average. The great decision of our epoch is whether we shall become nothing more than the most vicious animals or whether we can become something better. However, before we can become better, we must first imagine what that is.
More could be said, but this is basically a stale and dead discussion in the motif of /. (which is yet another of /.'s theoretically curable problems). Ergo, for now I'll just say that some aspects of deeper responses will probably appear in later posts on other topics--though probably not very soon, since my interest in /. is declining pretty steadily these years. I really find it annoying to see the software tools being misused so badly.
Gosh, that was such a terribly worded article summary I can't decide if the author is a regular 'editor' of /. or just a typical reflection of the poor taste and low competence of the /. editors. Would you prefer one lump of incompetence or two with your /. articles?
Anyway, I'd hate to generalize from my poor abilities as a former pilot, but I tend to favor machines over humans. As Einstein noted, there are no limits to human stupidity, but you can design any degree of redundancy you want into mechanical systems. The simple question is cost versus probabilistic safety.
As should be expected from /., the treatment of the design trade-off in the article summary was amazingly shallow. In extreme cases, the designers create planes that cannot possibly be flown by humans. Such fly-by-wire planes may involve control optimization with negative dynamic stability and feedback loops that can only be satisfied at computer speeds. In particular I'm thinking of a fairly recent jet fighter that had to have PROPER corrective feedback something like every tenth of a second.
As regards the storm, I actually came close to getting killed when something like that caught me off guard. Scaling those possibilities up... Well, that's a big chunk of the reason I mostly avoid flying these years.
With regards to planes, my fuzzy recollection is that the DC-10 had the worst safety record for commercial airplanes. However, every time I look at a 747 it boggles my imagination that the thing can fly. Continuing with Airbus, I remember an interesting crash in Nagoya a few years ago that involved the pilots essentially getting into an argument with the fly-by-wire system...
To the cowardly and shit-faced negative modders:
Thanks for proving my main underlying point about the damage shitty moderation is doing to /. these days. I'd be utterly unsurprised if that's your biggest contribution to the world.
Of course, I understand why you don't reply substantively. It's certainly not that my words are enlightened revelations etched in stone. It's just that you're a mindless little scumbag, and you can't formulate any argument more complicated than clicking on a negative mod.
To any other readers of this post:
Per my sig, I've opted out of moderation until such time as /. fixes the moderation system. I suppose hell will freeze over first, eh?
Why am I not surprised that only one post in the entire discussion (so far) mentions "reality"? This /. place has really declined over the years...
Our imagination, the mental images and models that we construct in our minds, these unreal things are not without import. Very often we use them to create reality.
Amusingly enough, reality persists in being evasive towards our simplifications. It is obviously true that for some people the horrible images are just escapism and those people never attempt to act out their fantasies. In other cases, the harms can be enormous. I think the greatest fantasy-based harm of the recent past is actually the big dick Cheney's faith-based war in Iraq. The economic cost of that fantasy is most optimistically estimated around $1 trillion--but the meter is still running. I suppose the cost in lives is much more important. We have a pretty solid number over 4,000 for American lives--but no one has a solid count for the trivial Iraqi lives. (Having studied a lot of math and a fair bit of sociology, I actually buy into the demographic approach that comes up with a statistical estimate of over 1 million prematurely deceased Iraqis.) All because of Cheney's fantasies? Or was it just for the sake of enriching Haliburton?
I think these computer games are quite bad because they are more personally involving and easier to follow. However, in recent years I've mostly been wondering about horror-suspense writers who create these super-vicious criminals in their minds--and then skillfully transfer their insane ideas to their readers. I suspect the success of Silence of the Lambs may explain a lot of the bad things that have happened to America and to the world...
Your defeatist attitude is neither helpful nor constructive. The spammers love you for it.
We can make progress fighting against the spammers, and every little victory counts. Making the Internet work is a highly cooperative enterprise, and that includes the efforts to fight spammers.
Are you a troll, or a sincere idiot?
In either case, I feel compelled to say something nice about /., since the rating system left you invisible to me. I only stumbled across your post by the replies. If you're a troll, you're evidently a mighty troll.
Unfortunately, I don't care. In either case, my only request is that you designate me as a foe so I'll have an even lower chance of seeing you in the future.
My qualifications to be your foe? Well, first of all, I'm highly educated, including a degree in history. Second, I'm a highly devout agnostic, and I have nothing but contempt for people whose own religious beliefs are as weak and indefensible as yours. I could come up with more reasons, but you obviously have no interest in reason, and I've already wasted far more time than you're worth.
No brainer--but we are talking about McDonalds, aren't we?
Announce a policy of turning off the WiFi when the McDonalds is too full, and post a schedule of the normal times when free access is available. No skin off their noses if they have some extra customers when there are empty seats, eh?
Since this is McDonalds, I feel obliged to note that the nose skin goes into the hot dogs. Does McDonalds serve hot dogs? That's how long it's been since I've eaten there... Wait! Sausage. I'm pretty sure they had some kind of morning sausage, and they can use the nose skin for the sausage. I'm pretty sure--but even more sure that I don't want to know for sure. No one wants to know the truth about sausage.
Actually, I read a couple of books about fast food a few years ago, and these days I don't eat at many fast food places. Must be a coincidence, eh?
It is coming from the domain registrar's side. If it was not valid, then one would believe that the spammer would find it slightly difficult to register the new domains. In other cases, it is coming back as the admin address for ISPs who are sending spam.
However, I admit that I will not test tedjok's gmail address, because I think it quite likely that email address would be harvested. At the very least, he has some sort of working relationship with the spammers.
I'm still more annoyed by Google's new pro-spammer policy of censoring spam complaints in their Groups.
Before the mangling by the /. censorship system, that particular email included a Gmail address for the fake opt-out at the bottom. Wonderless /. was also unable to deal with the content, which was a Japanese advertisement for women with big tits. Technically, it's supposed to be illegal in Japan, but the actual accommodation is apparently to look the other way as long as they're above high school.
Google has actually done a pretty good job of reducing the spammers' websites that they were hosting directly on places like blogger. Gmail also kills spamming email addresses pretty quickly Those seem to be the only two fronts they are still fighting on. Fake opt-outs are quite common, as well as administrative contacts for spammers or for spammer front men. There are also lots of fake headers pointing to Gmail. I acknowledge it's hard to blame anyone for the Joe jobs, but Google should at least care about their reputation.
Instead, it is obvious that Google's new motto is "Live and let spam."
Me? I think every form of support for the spammers should be cut off. Google could do MUCH more to fight the spammers.
Funny /. should mention Google's increasingly anti-social behavior. My primary interaction these days has been to complain about the spammers they support, such as the example below. For those of you who don't read Japanese, it will probably suffice to note that the content includes the expression for "big boobs". Google's support in this particular case is the fake opt-out at the bottom. If you think the yakuza who sent this spam will honor their opt-out requests, please post your email address here, and I'll get back to you with a wonderful offer.
When I started complaining too publicly about the spam support by Google, they first killed the Gmail address, and then banned me completely from their Groups.
Google fighting evil? Gee, I always thought censorship and spammers were evil, but if Google loves censorship and spam, then I must have been mistaken, right?
(And /. has lameness filters, too, so at least their censorship is mindlessly evil. Is that a better flavor of evil? I wound up having to delete all of the evidence of Google's support of evil. /. at it's typical worst.)
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How could you possibly be so stupid as to trust a spammer?
By the way, I think the only way spam could be addressed is by changing the economic game. Right now the spammers think they are dividing by zero. They think the marginal cost of sending another million spams is zero, so if they find one more sucker who sends them some money, the RoI looks infinite.
We need to change the odds so that sending spam has a much higher probability of negative consequences. The so-called zero must be eliminated. Okay, so we can't send the spammers to Guantanamo, but at least we can nuke their spamvertised websites, cancel their domain registrations, and cut their ISP accounts. If a webhost, registrar, or ISP doesn't want to cooperate, we should put them out of business, too.
I really think Google could do this by implementing a powerful "Good Samaritan" anti-spam system in Gmail. Combine human intelligence to help make sure the correct people get notified quickly--and much quicker than the spammer can find the sucker.
Like the sucker who started this discussion by nicely asking the spammers to cease and desist.
I think they should hire a reformed pirate from Somalia. After all, it takes a pirate to stop a pirate.
Seriously, copyright is dead already. It no longer makes sense to pretend that the point of reproduction is a choke point for publication. Yes, we do need to reward creativity, but no, corporate-controlled copyright focused on profit-maximization (based on an ancient paradigm of killing more trees) is NOT the solution.
Sure what it sounded like to me. Ubuntu seems to do all of that at the specified price.
However, what pisses me off most about Microsoft is the in-your-face WGA assumption that everyone is a thief. No, just because we are forced to use your trashy software, that does NOT mean we want to steal it. This week they installed a new and more intrusive in-your-face version of WGA. Pile it higher and deeper? Sorry, Microsoft, no kudos to you.
Actually, there are lots of reasons to hate Microsoft. I think my deepest reason for hating Microsoft is that Microsoft is anti-freedom, and I like my freedom. The meaning of freedom is that you get to make meaningful choices, but Microsoft interprets that to mean "We don't have to show you any source code, so you don't really know anything about what we are offering, but the only choices we feel like offering are minor variations of the same garbage. Now send us more money. NOW. And we Microsoftians still assume you're a bunch of thieves. So what are you twits going to do about it?"
P.S. What I did is switch to Ubuntu and Redhat as much as possible. Unfortunately, my work still requires me to use Windows much of the time.