Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America.
The incremental costs of posting to Slashdot are nil. The same is true for writing an editorial for the local newspaper.
It isn't money that prevents free speech, it's fear of imprisonment for conducting cutting-edge research or for finding flaws in government policies. One of the worst aspects of things like the PATRIOT Act or the DMCA aren't the laws themselves but the resulting chilling effect they cause. They are an example of the direct effect that regulation has on stifling innovation an progress.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++.
The ones that exploit buffer overflows are due to C and C++. This is an entire class of bugs removed by Java. This is not something to laugh at.
The social engineering viruses/worms are due to Microsoft making them so convienient and effortless to write. Of course, there is no silver bullet for this stuff.
Re:The US has central planning of consumer product
on
The Next Path for Joy
·
· Score: 1
the need for anti-monopoly provisions to keep a market free.
Wal-Mart is very unlikely to ever become a monopoly. Wal-Mart clearly excels in certain things, but they still fall short on things like produce (veggies, fruits, etc.), some clothing, gardening, etc. They are certainly fierce competition, but I still go to regular grocery stores, hardware/warehouse stores, etc. I usually buy clothes from places like Marshalls/TJ Max, where I can get better deals than even Wal-Mart.
Retail sales is one thing I'm confident will never become a monopolist-controlled market. Only extortion would lead to that, and extortion is illegal (unless you are the US Government doing it, of course).
For example, I had to make a 15 minute presentation of an informal study to a group of engineers (information only, not used for any decisions), and it took thousands of dollars with 10 internal reviews over 4 months with up to 5 internal managers -- not to review the information (after the first review), but to make sure the fonts were ok, the plots were well aligned and zoomed they way they wanted them, etc.
This must be heaven for middle-managers. There was a time where type-written reports with all the figures in an appendix was perfectly acceptable and encouraged.
It's too bad that people like Claudette get to vote.
Having a right to vote is good, but the downside is that there is no way to enforce that people actually make an informed vote. How many people actually read the newspapers and the canidates' platform document before voting? How many people just vote for who their parent/preacher/boss/Britney Spears tells them to? How many people vote just because they want more free money and services from the Democrats?
I think it's in relatively little danger of exploding sitting in the Smithsonian.;)
Err...I think they're hiring writers from The Simpsons to work out the new security procedures, so I wouldn't rule out any spontaneous unjustified-yet-massive explosions.
I thought we had non-visible-light cameras by now...perhaps even hundred-dollar camcorders have it already...but what do I know--I don't work for NASA.
The politics of today are focussed on military expenditures...
Don't forget that universal healthcare might be on the horizon. I can't wait to wait for three hours to get a check-up by a civil servant with guaranteed job security and a pension who says I don't qualify for treatment XYZ because I don't fit the racial or economic profile alloted by Congress.
Let's see if we can dump some of that massive defense budget and sink that cash into a more active space program.
Social security is a much larger slice of the pie that could be better spent on technology development. Regardless, it is getting to the time where the private sector can take over. I think Rutan's X-Prize entry is an example of how entrepeneurs can take us forward.
Perhaps they can use some of those lucrative educational discounts to outfit their network backbone with multi-gigabyte-per-second interfaces to stay ahead of the bandwidth curve. Perhaps the most effective thing would be to set their dorm switches to 10Mb/sec to each room, so the aggregate totals stay managable. Students can each request 100Mb/sec or 1000Mb/sec if they can give a credible academic reason, such as a university sanctioned research project.
I wonder what happened to when being part of a University network was a good thing. Is there no idealism, anymore?
What about students who are interested and motivated to do research that can be helped by P2P. I don't even need to try to think of examples, because a university environment should expect any. Well, I guess since the only research done, anymore, is that which the university can sell to industry at a profit, so perhaps this whole Slashdot thread is just irrelevant.
No they don't. They want a computer with a word processor. Microsoft simply manipulated the OEMs such that Windows and Office were the only choices in an certain price range (read: below Apple/Sun/SGI/etc. but above going without). OpenOffice.org/StarOffice is beginning to seriously change this.
it can't become some great unifying thing like he wants
If someone uses the word "unified" in his/her proposal for anything, odds are it will fall far short of expectations and become a kludge. The real result is dozens of "unified" interfaces all overlapping in functionality yet not fufilling the needs of the users.
Ambition leads one's eyes to be bigger than their stomach, frequently.
I never said anything about them being evil, only ignorant or arrogant or short-sighted in their quest for "freedom." I guess their form of freedom is that proposed by the Democrats (you can be free...but we'll take away your ability to choose regarding these miscellaneous political issues....and if you refuse to pay for our social programs we'll put you in prison).
Bash
It removes backward compatibility with the very essential and very mature UNIX tool: the shell. Also, it would be better to work around that Bobix bug by eliminating the use of that feature in the shell scripts, rather than adopt a more complex tool. Unless, of course, the bug is so horrendous that Bobix is trash, anyway, making those who chose it look foolish (if "Bobix" even exists, for that matter).
manpages work fine and can be parsed with a text editor.
And when used with a good pager, they'll work with the vi command set, too.
I think info was an attempt to force book-sized documentation into a man-like interface. Once the information threshhold of a man page is surpassed, the timesavings of info over other documentation methods is debatable.
Info was a solution in search of a problem.
Exactly. Linux is almost looking like it was the result of a pork-barrel government contract. It's "to save the children", so it must be the right solution, right?
autoconf scripts are there explicitly for portability
In reality, anymore, it is there for people who can only manage "./configure; make; make install" on a GNU/Linux system. It doesn't stop the programmers from putting asinine assumptions into the autoconf script in the name of convenience when it breaks every platform other than Ret Hat and SuSE. Also, the configure and libtools scripts are together 15000 LOC. This is absurd for any shell script. On top of that, they are speghetti code. They'll break, I'll find that the advertised command-line switches don't work, and, then, my only option is to hunt through 7000 lines of script to figure out where to force the value of a variable.
Autoconf helps portability as long as the system is GNU/Linux.
otherwise we'd just write crappy makefiles that don't run anywhere else
No, we'd write POSIX makefiles and use easy-to-edit text files containing whatever environment variables and defines needed to be set. A 15 line shell script can launch the build. It would be much easier for the OSS community to set up a website of system profiles for different versions of operating systems (Solaris 6/7/8/9, Red Hat 5/6/7/8/9, etc. etc.) and, for systems that don't fit this mold, it would be transparent and easy for people to hand-edit the configuration to meet their needs.
It's called good software engineering.
only a very small amount of Linux developers have access to a *BSD box.
Dual boot?
A couple of weeks after Linux got a sendfile() syscall, FreeBSD discussed it and then introduced a version that was incompatilby different... for no good reason.
Then, either don't use sendfile() or take these things and isolate them to one module of the program. Just because there is a man page for something doesn't mean that feature has to be used.
Portability just takes some planning. Then, whatever fires are left to fight will be fewer and farther apart. If after all the effort, there are thousands of fires cropping up endlessly, then the planning stage failed.
In case you've forgotten, you're in the minority... we don't "owe" you anything... we aren't going to have to conform anytime soon.
I didn't ask for anything (suggestions are not requests). Regardless, this is one of the failure modes of pure democracy, but I digress.
Well, if GNU is not Unix, isn't the distinction explicit?
Only in the commercial sense...otherwise, GNU's aim for POSIX compliance would be kind of odd. My main gripe is people who use non-standard defines from header files, put broken assumptions into configure scripts, etc. This is a cultural problem, where there is a vast naivte/ignorance/arrogance among OSS programmers who think only GNU/Linux counts for anything and that people who use Solaris/BSD/whatever should go rot somewhere. GNU/Linux is becoming the Windows of the OSS world...I guess because that's the type of people being attracted to it.
If someone comes up with a whizbang new boot system. great. Just make sure that if something goes wrong, or something needs to be changed, it's:
1. Easy to determine where the problem is.
The OSS communitiy dispensed with this long ago. Or do people really and truly love libtool and configure scripts?!? How about the hard-coded path names in dozens of GNOME files?!? Not only are people recreating the look-and-feel of Windows but the very things that made us dispise Microsoft and Windows in the first place!
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America.
The incremental costs of posting to Slashdot are nil. The same is true for writing an editorial for the local newspaper.
It isn't money that prevents free speech, it's fear of imprisonment for conducting cutting-edge research or for finding flaws in government policies. One of the worst aspects of things like the PATRIOT Act or the DMCA aren't the laws themselves but the resulting chilling effect they cause. They are an example of the direct effect that regulation has on stifling innovation an progress.
A Chevette tricked out with a spoiler, ground effects, and a resonater is still a Chevette.
print "Hello World"
in Basic
Or a UNIX shell.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++.
The ones that exploit buffer overflows are due to C and C++. This is an entire class of bugs removed by Java. This is not something to laugh at.
The social engineering viruses/worms are due to Microsoft making them so convienient and effortless to write. Of course, there is no silver bullet for this stuff.
the need for anti-monopoly provisions to keep a market free.
Wal-Mart is very unlikely to ever become a monopoly. Wal-Mart clearly excels in certain things, but they still fall short on things like produce (veggies, fruits, etc.), some clothing, gardening, etc. They are certainly fierce competition, but I still go to regular grocery stores, hardware/warehouse stores, etc. I usually buy clothes from places like Marshalls/TJ Max, where I can get better deals than even Wal-Mart.
Retail sales is one thing I'm confident will never become a monopolist-controlled market. Only extortion would lead to that, and extortion is illegal (unless you are the US Government doing it, of course).
For example, I had to make a 15 minute presentation of an informal study to a group of engineers (information only, not used for any decisions), and it took thousands of dollars with 10 internal reviews over 4 months with up to 5 internal managers -- not to review the information (after the first review), but to make sure the fonts were ok, the plots were well aligned and zoomed they way they wanted them, etc.
This must be heaven for middle-managers. There was a time where type-written reports with all the figures in an appendix was perfectly acceptable and encouraged.
It's too bad that people like Claudette get to vote.
Having a right to vote is good, but the downside is that there is no way to enforce that people actually make an informed vote. How many people actually read the newspapers and the canidates' platform document before voting? How many people just vote for who their parent/preacher/boss/Britney Spears tells them to? How many people vote just because they want more free money and services from the Democrats?
As matter of fact, China already announced its intentions - to fly to the Moon and beyond. What transpired at NASA? You guessed it. Nothing.
What if China announces the moon sovereign territory? Or has an international treaty already covered this?
They could give it its old name back... OV-100 Constitution, to wave the flag, so to speak.
Well, if the Constitution blew up, would the irony of that situation suprise anyone, given recent Democratic and Republican rule?
I think it's in relatively little danger of exploding sitting in the Smithsonian. ;)
Err...I think they're hiring writers from The Simpsons to work out the new security procedures, so I wouldn't rule out any spontaneous unjustified-yet-massive explosions.
adequate ascent video can be obtained
I thought we had non-visible-light cameras by now...perhaps even hundred-dollar camcorders have it already...but what do I know--I don't work for NASA.
The politics of today are focussed on military expenditures...
Don't forget that universal healthcare might be on the horizon. I can't wait to wait for three hours to get a check-up by a civil servant with guaranteed job security and a pension who says I don't qualify for treatment XYZ because I don't fit the racial or economic profile alloted by Congress.
Wheeeeeee...thud.
Let's see if we can dump some of that massive defense budget and sink that cash into a more active space program.
Social security is a much larger slice of the pie that could be better spent on technology development. Regardless, it is getting to the time where the private sector can take over. I think Rutan's X-Prize entry is an example of how entrepeneurs can take us forward.
IT does give a shit about the students.
Perhaps they can use some of those lucrative educational discounts to outfit their network backbone with multi-gigabyte-per-second interfaces to stay ahead of the bandwidth curve. Perhaps the most effective thing would be to set their dorm switches to 10Mb/sec to each room, so the aggregate totals stay managable. Students can each request 100Mb/sec or 1000Mb/sec if they can give a credible academic reason, such as a university sanctioned research project.
Unfortunately you are on their network...
I wonder what happened to when being part of a University network was a good thing. Is there no idealism, anymore?
What about students who are interested and motivated to do research that can be helped by P2P. I don't even need to try to think of examples, because a university environment should expect any. Well, I guess since the only research done, anymore, is that which the university can sell to industry at a profit, so perhaps this whole Slashdot thread is just irrelevant.
In many respects, Solaris has been at a standstill for the past 10 years.
Have you tried Solaris 8 and 9?!?
consumers want Windows and Office.
No they don't. They want a computer with a word processor. Microsoft simply manipulated the OEMs such that Windows and Office were the only choices in an certain price range (read: below Apple/Sun/SGI/etc. but above going without). OpenOffice.org/StarOffice is beginning to seriously change this.
it can't become some great unifying thing like he wants
If someone uses the word "unified" in his/her proposal for anything, odds are it will fall far short of expectations and become a kludge.
The real result is dozens of "unified" interfaces all overlapping in functionality yet not fufilling the needs of the users.
Ambition leads one's eyes to be bigger than their stomach, frequently.
Oh yes, the GNU folks are such evil, evil people
I never said anything about them being evil, only ignorant or arrogant or short-sighted in their quest for "freedom." I guess their form of freedom is that proposed by the Democrats (you can be free...but we'll take away your ability to choose regarding these miscellaneous political issues....and if you refuse to pay for our social programs we'll put you in prison).
Bash
It removes backward compatibility with the very essential and very mature UNIX tool: the shell. Also, it would be better to work around that Bobix bug by eliminating the use of that feature in the shell scripts, rather than adopt a more complex tool. Unless, of course, the bug is so horrendous that Bobix is trash, anyway, making those who chose it look foolish (if "Bobix" even exists, for that matter).
manpages work fine and can be parsed with a text editor.
And when used with a good pager, they'll work with the vi command set, too.
I think info was an attempt to force book-sized documentation into a man-like interface. Once the information threshhold of a man page is surpassed, the timesavings of info over other documentation methods is debatable.
Info was a solution in search of a problem.
Exactly. Linux is almost looking like it was the result of a pork-barrel government contract. It's "to save the children", so it must be the right solution, right?
GNU software is better, cheaper and freer than its UNIX counterparts.
Must this turn into a BSD license flamewar?
autoconf scripts are there explicitly for portability
... for no good reason.
... we don't "owe" you anything ... we aren't going to have to conform anytime soon.
In reality, anymore, it is there for people who can only manage "./configure; make; make install" on a GNU/Linux system. It doesn't stop the programmers from putting asinine assumptions into the autoconf script in the name of convenience when it breaks every platform other than Ret Hat and SuSE. Also, the configure and libtools scripts are together 15000 LOC. This is absurd for any shell script. On top of that, they are speghetti code. They'll break, I'll find that the advertised command-line switches don't work, and, then, my only option is to hunt through 7000 lines of script to figure out where to force the value of a variable.
Autoconf helps portability as long as the system is GNU/Linux.
otherwise we'd just write crappy makefiles that don't run anywhere else
No, we'd write POSIX makefiles and use easy-to-edit text files containing whatever environment variables and defines needed to be set. A 15 line shell script can launch the build. It would be much easier for the OSS community to set up a website of system profiles for different versions of operating systems (Solaris 6/7/8/9, Red Hat 5/6/7/8/9, etc. etc.) and, for systems that don't fit this mold, it would be transparent and easy for people to hand-edit the configuration to meet their needs.
It's called good software engineering.
only a very small amount of Linux developers have access to a *BSD box.
Dual boot?
A couple of weeks after Linux got a sendfile() syscall, FreeBSD discussed it and then introduced a version that was incompatilby different
Then, either don't use sendfile() or take these things and isolate them to one module of the program. Just because there is a man page for something doesn't mean that feature has to be used.
Portability just takes some planning. Then, whatever fires are left to fight will be fewer and farther apart. If after all the effort, there are thousands of fires cropping up endlessly, then the planning stage failed.
In case you've forgotten, you're in the minority
I didn't ask for anything (suggestions are not requests). Regardless, this is one of the failure modes of pure democracy, but I digress.
+1, Interesting?
Look at the name of the game being discussed.
Well, if GNU is not Unix, isn't the distinction explicit?
Only in the commercial sense...otherwise, GNU's aim for POSIX compliance would be kind of odd. My main gripe is people who use non-standard defines from header files, put broken assumptions into configure scripts, etc. This is a cultural problem, where there is a vast naivte/ignorance/arrogance among OSS programmers who think only GNU/Linux counts for anything and that people who use Solaris/BSD/whatever should go rot somewhere. GNU/Linux is becoming the Windows of the OSS world...I guess because that's the type of people being attracted to it.
If someone comes up with a whizbang new boot system. great. Just make sure that if something goes wrong, or something needs to be changed, it's:
1. Easy to determine where the problem is.
The OSS communitiy dispensed with this long ago. Or do people really and truly love libtool and configure scripts?!? How about the hard-coded path names in dozens of GNOME files?!? Not only are people recreating the look-and-feel of Windows but the very things that made us dispise Microsoft and Windows in the first place!