i think it's great that slashdot didn't edit out the comments and left that for us to pull out what was meaningful. and for me there were three comments he made that were of perticular interest. before i quote them here, i do want to make one point: a recent entry of crypto-gram made the point that if the information is brought down to a system there's no technical way to control what gets done with it. no copy-protection, encryption, or proprietary client will stop a determined person from making a (damn near perfect) copy of it. in my opinion there are three ways to stop unauthorised copying: ethics, laws, and ettiquitte. personally i'd rather not use the law and instead work to raise peoples' levels of courtesy and ethics. i think it was larry wall who mentioned that the ethically immature mistake giving for taking? or something of that nature.
also, i'm not a metallica fan, but after reading this i have respect for lars. he makes good points. techno-clueful or no, he sees the big picture a lot better than many people who post here. here is where i think he makes his points best:
[...] And I want the right to control what is mine. And if I decide to give -- I respect the next guy, who wants to put his music on Napster, but I want him to respect the fact that maybe I don't. It's that simple. It's really the point.
[...] when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band.
[...] I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say, 'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it. That's where it gets really tricky. There are people who are far smarter than me on this, people that will ultimately... I believe that five years from now, there will be systems in place where the artists and the owners of the intellectual property -- and remember, we're not just talking about music.
gee, that's old. i tried it on netscape (3.x?) back in 1996 or 1997 iirc. i downloaded it recently but it seems to annoy the hell out of x and netscape so i dropped it.
Why is changing the engine in my car so complicated? i bought the damn thing and there's no way i'm going to trade in my ford ka *just* to get a better engine. i bought a new engine that said it would fit, but it's *so* much harder to do then the other things i do with my car (i.e. drive, fill the tank, change the oil, wash it, etc).
there are all these bolts and screws and the tools! dear god the tools. i need a "hydrolic lift," wtf?!
i'm tellin' ya, these ford people had better get their act together.
and when the dual port nic dies and takes both interfaces with it you switch to psychic networking? i'd really suggest two nics not a single dual one.
that said, linux can do routing. why not set up a loopback device and then have it route through either nic? ip was designed to deal with multiple routes, why must your consultant reinvent the wheel? (loopback addresses are published, so they'll be seen on the network)
in fairness i seem to remember reading in the redhat 6.2 install notes that the berkeley print system was going to go away - no indication of what was next.
ok, since you won't research lori fena, i will. and what i found from a google search on her name does question a negative assessment of her commitment to privacy. i'd be interested to see slashdot do an interview of her, and see what her impressions of the privacy board are.
some links follow in case you're too lazy to hit google. but most of these are not current - 1995-1998 seem to be the ranges. this could just be google's problem, but again i think a slashdot interview with her would be in order.
As far as Lori Fena is concerned, what evidence do *you* have that she is commited to privacy? Advertisers do want info on their target audience - it's a requirement to do their job effectively. Therefore it's very fair to assume she would not be a staunch defender of privacy.
i think you've gone beyond knee-jerking here - we're talking multiple joints going at high speed here. take a breath and then go do the research you request *yourself*.
you're making the claims now, go back them up. find one of those people who's been active in advocating privacy for consumers. in fact, find a majority of them.
gee, slashdot does a fair bit of research *and* writes a story with a pretty obvious bias, and you're upset. you would prefer a subtle bias or do you actually believe journalists can write with complete objectivity?
Fantastic reporting. Great job slashdot! Now I hope the comments will be equally enlightening in this - can anyone else here dectibe the backgrounds of other company's "privacy boards," if any such animals exist elsewhere?
Also, does anyone have a contact address for doublclick to protest this? I would really *like* to see company's self-regulate themselves, but if this is their idea of doing it then I hope national gov'ts regulate them to insane degrees.
a client would scan the user's browsing history (from ~/.netscape and ~/.mozilla directory) and then query a server to see what else a user would probably download next. then download the predicted web pages (via the squid proxy).
the server would need to keep track of browsing patters in some fashion (that would be the ai part).
alternatively you could use the squid cache itself to do the predictions, but then you're dealing with multiple people's browsing patterns: experimentation might come into play here to see how well that works.
anyway it would be an interesting project in terms of speeding up web access by utilising "downtime" in net connections.
i dunno if i posted in the hellmouth articles. i don't much care either. i think a lot of people had an outlet on slashdot, and i think that's great. it's obvious the mainstream media generally ignored those people so it's good that there was an outlet.
however it's an outlet that has a very limited audience. many people who should have heard from the people posting in the hellmouth articles will never visit a web site in general, and those that do probably will never see slashdot.
will the book be biased? i have no doubt that it will, but it's a point of view that was not raised very often or very well in the public discussions following the shootings.
i hope the slashdot developers add whatever buttons people want for allowing comments to be published. i hope they can get some agreement on how to publish their book since i think it would be good for other people outside of the geek community to hear their voices.
no, patents aren't good. or at least i don't believe software patents are good. that said, patents can and will be used against free software and the only way to defend oneself against software patents is for the free software community to get their own pool of patents to defend ourselves with.
does it suck? yes. is it neccesary? sadly, yes.
we do not exist in a vaccuum, your argument ignores that simple fact.
free for enthusiasists, must pay to use in commercial product. that isn't open source. it's nice that you want to be more open, but it's not open source. (get it yet?)
you quote George Mason saying that "all the people" were the militia. this is the same group of folks that began the constitution with "we the people..." at the time "we the people" were property owning white males. blacks were considered 3/5ths of a person - and only because southern states wanted to boost their population counts.
gay men and women are not allowed in the us military - so obviously if they're "out" then they can be stripped of their right to bear arms, yes? and women in the military aren't allowed in combat, so their right to guns is questionable.
blah, blah, blah.
thankfully i moved to ireland. not only are guns severely restricted, but even the police are (mostly) unarmed. friends and co-workers are astonished on a regular basis about school and office shootings in the states - i patiently explain that the gun nuts who have congress's ear are just that: nuts.
Sounds like a very intelligent book. Wish we had that here in Ireland since gun ownership is severely restricted (even most of the police don't have guns) and we have sooooo much violent crime.
Ahem.
I wonder if you're aware that even at the height of Troubles in the North, it was safer in Belfast then in most U.S. cities.
you're trying to imply that there are two options: release the spec the ms did or not release the spec at all. they could have released the spec like the developers of kerberos (or pam or nis or nfs or ext2...) did.
the "legalese" you refer to can't be described as anything else *but* a dirty trick. it essentially states that by reading the document you cannot do any development on a competing implementation. and then they release the document out in the wild. in a sense slashdot should cancel all the posts that microsoft has requested canceled (including the ones with links and or instructions) BECAUSE THEY ENDANGER FREE SOFTWARE PROJECTS TRYING TO MAKE ALTERNATIVES TO MS KERBEROS.
you excuse a lot of crap ms is doing with an "oh well, wish it could be different" attitude. just how often will you say that before you need to quit?
it's what people want! there are tons of mailers for unix.
mh for example - you utilise it through the commandline (you're never *in* a mailer as such, all the commands to deal with your messages are run from the shell). people have then used mh as a base for building gui based mailers - the great point being that if you;re at your desktop you can use the gui, but when you're telnetting/sshing into your box you can use the commandline.
or you can use mutt which combines a large number of features from various unix mailiers like mail, elm, and pine.
i suspect that as evolution goes farther you'll find that it will have features unknown to outlook: security, and the ability to deal with large amounts of mail spring to mind.
man, the boy is really clawing at reasons not to get nailed. sad really.
but in all seriousness there's a nugget of truth in there. keeping in mind that there *may* have been a backdoor in iis for about four years, and that w2k was released with thousands of bugs (demonstrating that no one person understands the whole rats nest), and that microsoft employees supposedly have a devotion of sorts to their leader... well, what might happen if ms gets broken up?
lets say some programmer there really wanted to work on the "kernel," even though she was slaving away on outlook or office, etc. ms splits and suddenly any hopes she has of going on the nt dev team vanish. she's stuck in the apps company, but she's very familiar with the kernel internals (the minus to closed s/w - black hats having access to it can be much more destructive) so she redirects her rage to the society that robbed her of her chance. "you destoyed microsoft! you've taken away our ability to innovate! you'll get yours now you ungrateful world!"
sounds a bit extreme but ms hires thousands of people, surely there are some that would follow that path. if i had nt servers, i'd be nervous about now - particularly since gates has given folks like that the seed of the idea.
they wrote it, or paid to get it written. why not?
you're welcome to edit the source to remove it, just like you can do with all the other stuff that gets spewed. no one forces you to have them there, you're within your rights to change them.
Slashdot Mirror
i think it's great that slashdot didn't edit out the comments and left that for us to pull out what was meaningful. and for me there were three comments he made that were of perticular interest. before i quote them here, i do want to make one point: a recent entry of crypto-gram made the point that if the information is brought down to a system there's no technical way to control what gets done with it. no copy-protection, encryption, or proprietary client will stop a determined person from making a (damn near perfect) copy of it. in my opinion there are three ways to stop unauthorised copying: ethics, laws, and ettiquitte. personally i'd rather not use the law and instead work to raise peoples' levels of courtesy and ethics. i think it was larry wall who mentioned that the ethically immature mistake giving for taking? or something of that nature.
... I believe that five years from now,
also, i'm not a metallica fan, but after reading this i have respect for lars. he makes good points. techno-clueful or no, he sees the big picture a lot better than many people who post here. here is where i think he makes his points best:
[...]
And I want the right to control what is mine. And if I decide to give
-- I respect the next guy, who wants to put his music on Napster, but I
want him to respect the fact that maybe I don't. It's that simple. It's
really the point.
[...]
when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up
with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one
downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit
there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for
unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and
you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then
we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's
going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and
your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band.
[...]
I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about
before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with
a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will
want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the
hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult
to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say,
'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use
it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have
to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it. That's where
it gets really tricky. There are people who are far smarter than me on
this, people that will ultimately
there will be systems in place where the artists and the owners of the
intellectual property -- and remember, we're not just talking about music.
gee, that's old. i tried it on netscape (3.x?) back in 1996 or 1997 iirc. i downloaded it recently but it seems to annoy the hell out of x and netscape so i dropped it.
perlplus i think it's called.
Why is changing the engine in my car so complicated? i bought the damn thing and there's no way i'm going to trade in my ford ka *just* to get a better engine. i bought a new engine that said it would fit, but it's *so* much harder to do then the other things i do with my car (i.e. drive, fill the tank, change the oil, wash it, etc).
there are all these bolts and screws and the tools! dear god the tools. i need a "hydrolic lift," wtf?!
i'm tellin' ya, these ford people had better get their act together.
isn't there some lion you should be providing sustanence for?
out of curiousity, will all three microsoft's go after slashdot?
and when the dual port nic dies and takes both interfaces with it you switch to psychic networking? i'd really suggest two nics not a single dual one.
that said, linux can do routing. why not set up a loopback device and then have it route through either nic? ip was designed to deal with multiple routes, why must your consultant reinvent the wheel? (loopback addresses are published, so they'll be seen on the network)
look in the RELEASE-NOTES on a redhat 6.2 cdrom. it's pretty far down, but there's a list of deprecated packages.
t /redhat-6.2/i386/RELEASE-NOTES
ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/redha
in fairness i seem to remember reading in the redhat 6.2 install notes that the berkeley print system was going to go away - no indication of what was next.
kword and konquer existed on windows 5 years ago?
seriously, com is just a take off on corba - and corba's been around for quite a bit longer. and to the best of my knowledge corba is what kde uses.
and you're right - both kde and gnome are younger then ole/activex. by about five years. of course windows is younger then unix - by about 20 years.
spell much?
sentence.
you freak.
some links follow in case you're too lazy to hit google. but most of these are not current - 1995-1998 seem to be the ranges. this could just be google's problem, but again i think a slashdot interview with her would be in order.
As far as Lori Fena is concerned, what evidence do *you* have that she is commited to privacy? Advertisers do want info on their target audience - it's a requirement to do their job effectively. Therefore it's very fair to assume she would not be a staunch defender of privacy.
i think you've gone beyond knee-jerking here - we're talking multiple joints going at high speed here. take a breath and then go do the research you request *yourself*.
you're making the claims now, go back them up. find one of those people who's been active in advocating privacy for consumers. in fact, find a majority of them.
gee, slashdot does a fair bit of research *and* writes a story with a pretty obvious bias, and you're upset. you would prefer a subtle bias or do you actually believe journalists can write with complete objectivity?
Fantastic reporting. Great job slashdot! Now I hope the comments will be equally enlightening in this - can anyone else here dectibe the backgrounds of other company's "privacy boards," if any such animals exist elsewhere?
Also, does anyone have a contact address for doublclick to protest this? I would really *like* to see company's self-regulate themselves, but if this is their idea of doing it then I hope national gov'ts regulate them to insane degrees.
how about an intelligent caching server?
this assumes the user is behind a squid cache.
a client would scan the user's browsing history (from ~/.netscape and ~/.mozilla directory) and then query a server to see what else a user would probably download next. then download the predicted web pages (via the squid proxy).
the server would need to keep track of browsing patters in some fashion (that would be the ai part).
alternatively you could use the squid cache itself to do the predictions, but then you're dealing with multiple people's browsing patterns: experimentation might come into play here to see how well that works.
anyway it would be an interesting project in terms of speeding up web access by utilising "downtime" in net connections.
i dunno if i posted in the hellmouth articles. i don't much care either. i think a lot of people had an outlet on slashdot, and i think that's great. it's obvious the mainstream media generally ignored those people so it's good that there was an outlet.
however it's an outlet that has a very limited audience. many people who should have heard from the people posting in the hellmouth articles will never visit a web site in general, and those that do probably will never see slashdot.
will the book be biased? i have no doubt that it will, but it's a point of view that was not raised very often or very well in the public discussions following the shootings.
i hope the slashdot developers add whatever buttons people want for allowing comments to be published. i hope they can get some agreement on how to publish their book since i think it would be good for other people outside of the geek community to hear their voices.
no, patents aren't good. or at least i don't believe software patents are good. that said, patents can and will be used against free software and the only way to defend oneself against software patents is for the free software community to get their own pool of patents to defend ourselves with.
does it suck? yes. is it neccesary? sadly, yes.
we do not exist in a vaccuum, your argument ignores that simple fact.
free for enthusiasists, must pay to use in commercial product. that isn't open source. it's nice that you want to be more open, but it's not open source. (get it yet?)
you quote George Mason saying that "all the people" were the militia. this is the same group of folks that began the constitution with "we the people..." at the time "we the people" were property owning white males. blacks were considered 3/5ths of a person - and only because southern states wanted to boost their population counts.
gay men and women are not allowed in the us military - so obviously if they're "out" then they can be stripped of their right to bear arms, yes? and women in the military aren't allowed in combat, so their right to guns is questionable.
blah, blah, blah.
thankfully i moved to ireland. not only are guns severely restricted, but even the police are (mostly) unarmed. friends and co-workers are astonished on a regular basis about school and office shootings in the states - i patiently explain that the gun nuts who have congress's ear are just that: nuts.
Sounds like a very intelligent book. Wish we had that here in Ireland since gun ownership is severely restricted (even most of the police don't have guns) and we have sooooo much violent crime.
Ahem.
I wonder if you're aware that even at the height of Troubles in the North, it was safer in Belfast then in most U.S. cities.
bzzzzt! thanks for playing.
...) did.
you're trying to imply that there are two options: release the spec the ms did or not release the spec at all. they could have released the spec like the developers of kerberos (or pam or nis or nfs or ext2
the "legalese" you refer to can't be described as anything else *but* a dirty trick. it essentially states that by reading the document you cannot do any development on a competing implementation. and then they release the document out in the wild. in a sense slashdot should cancel all the posts that microsoft has requested canceled (including the ones with links and or instructions) BECAUSE THEY ENDANGER FREE SOFTWARE PROJECTS TRYING TO MAKE ALTERNATIVES TO MS KERBEROS.
you excuse a lot of crap ms is doing with an "oh well, wish it could be different" attitude. just how often will you say that before you need to quit?
it's what people want! there are tons of mailers for unix.
mh for example - you utilise it through the commandline (you're never *in* a mailer as such, all the commands to deal with your messages are run from the shell). people have then used mh as a base for building gui based mailers - the great point being that if you;re at your desktop you can use the gui, but when you're telnetting/sshing into your box you can use the commandline.
or you can use mutt which combines a large number of features from various unix mailiers like mail, elm, and pine.
i suspect that as evolution goes farther you'll find that it will have features unknown to outlook: security, and the ability to deal with large amounts of mail spring to mind.
man, the boy is really clawing at reasons not to get nailed. sad really.
but in all seriousness there's a nugget of truth in there. keeping in mind that there *may* have been a backdoor in iis for about four years, and that w2k was released with thousands of bugs (demonstrating that no one person understands the whole rats nest), and that microsoft employees supposedly have a devotion of sorts to their leader... well, what might happen if ms gets broken up?
lets say some programmer there really wanted to work on the "kernel," even though she was slaving away on outlook or office, etc. ms splits and suddenly any hopes she has of going on the nt dev team vanish. she's stuck in the apps company, but she's very familiar with the kernel internals (the minus to closed s/w - black hats having access to it can be much more destructive) so she redirects her rage to the society that robbed her of her chance. "you destoyed microsoft! you've taken away our ability to innovate! you'll get yours now you ungrateful world!"
sounds a bit extreme but ms hires thousands of people, surely there are some that would follow that path. if i had nt servers, i'd be nervous about now - particularly since gates has given folks like that the seed of the idea.
they wrote it, or paid to get it written. why not?
you're welcome to edit the source to remove it, just like you can do with all the other stuff that gets spewed. no one forces you to have them there, you're within your rights to change them.
since i was too young when you wrote hhgttg, i've always wondered: which came first: lint collecting navels, or your book encouraging lint collecting?