It's going to be quite interesting to see where linux goes now that so many new users are starting to stream in from completely different backgrounds. What I mean by that is that it used to be that linux was difficult enough with the installation and configuration that J. Random Newbie couldn't really run it. Now that's not true. Can you imagine a new class of linux users that don't know how to use a UNIX shell? Well, that's where it's going.
I'm not going to be a crusty old bastard and say that everybody should have to do it the painful way, because I don't believe that. But it will definately change linux to have a new breed of users becoming a dominant percentage of the user base.
It used to also be that people mostly used linux because they found other systems not meeting their needs, or for a challenge. The people that I meet nowadays that are learning linux want to know how to do the things that they do on windows, only on linux. Things like gmc really give them a stiffy.
I don't have anything against new users who don't get their hands dirty in the guts of UNIX, but I do think it would be a shame to use linux like you use windows. Sort of like owning a $100,000 ferrari and only driving it through parking lots.
Remember the Hacker's Dictionary entry for Knuth? I think the basic jist of it was that since Knuth is a computing god, and TAOCP contains almost everything, it was known as a very generic hacker answer to tough technical questions, "Oh, I think you can find that in Knuth".
The funny part is that I've heard the same thing about Steven's books. If you ask a really tough question about the nitty gritty of tcp or udp and nobody knows the answer, more likely than not you're going to hear, "Oh, go read UNIX Network Programming by W. Richard Stevens".
So in that way, I suppose Stevens has reached the same amount of acclaim as Knuth, albeit in the network area. His books kicked ass. His death was a great loss.
...get viewers. What does media want more than anything else? (It's not to tell the truth, although they do try to do that most of the time) Media wants viewers.
Just as provocative blanket statements like "KDE SUCKS!!!!" or "GNOME SUCKS!!!" starts flamewars and piles up the comments, provocative stories about how MS is going to completely disappear draws readers like flies to a pile of shit.
But that doesn't mean that it has anything to do with reality. I'm no Microsoft fan, but they do have one of the best PR and sales forces in the universe, and I really doubt that they're going to fade into oblivion. Maybe, just MAYBE in a few years linux could grab the majority of the market, but to say that MS is going to become a legacy vendor is well...
This kind of crap doesn't have anything to do with software. It has to do with good old fashioned corporate greed.
Spying on each other? Screwing each other over? Unethical contracts? Back stabbing? Welcome to corporate america, not just the software industry.
Software companies may engage in this more than other companies, but if so, it's only because the stakes are higher and larger amounts of money are changing hands. If you made the toilet plunger industry into a multibillion dollar industry that was moving as quickly and savagely as the software industry was, they'd act the same way.
So it probably makes free software look pretty good. Or maybe it just makes us look more and more like extremist dope smoking hippies because everybody knows that tech companies are our economic saviors.
If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
I'm with you on your argument, but this doesn't make any sense. If they've gotten all that they're going to get from it, why are they being such bastards about it? Companies don't do things to spite you, they do things for profit. Whether or not they spite you is just a side effect.
So obviously since they're protecting it, they must think that they can still squeeze something out of it. (Either get a positive benefit, or avoid a negative consequence)
The trick is convincing them that this is not the case.
I really wish this was an option with PHBs, but it's not.
I work in a place that pays Oracle hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a support contract. I asked a PHB once what all that money was going for. He said technical support, with the added protection that should anything go wrong that Oracle can't fix within 24 hours, they can sue.
Kinda funny, since the last thing the company wants is to sue anybody. It's long, slow, expensive, and it's much easier from the start to just have it done right. Oh, by, let's see...by RTFM and doing it yourself.
But keep in mind that support contracts are mostly for PHBs who want to have that warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Contracts should come with a free blanket and teddy bear or pacifier if you ask me.
They can be useful, but most of the time they're just a crutch.
Malda suppresses anti-VA stories because he's owned by them!!!!!!!!!
Oh, wait a second....revise that conspiracy theory a little bit for extra paranoia...
Malda is only posting this story to lull us into a false sense of saftey with him! He's throwing us this little scrap of a "VA sucks" post on slashdot to make us THINK that he's not owned by VA, but in reality, you know he really is. You can just wait for the other shoe to drop!
Does that about cover the bases here? Or is there some extra piece of paranoia I'm missing out on?
The Ayn Rand folks tend to flock to Libertarian Party gatherings, because the major parties will not give them time of day, and the LP needs numbers at the polls if they are ever going to get major party status.
Makes sense to me - but is this backwards? I'm not claiming I'm right, but originally I thought that it was the libertarians who were becoming objectivists rather than the other way around.
Funny, because the objectivist philosophy seems quite similar to some of the economic policies of the GOP (friend of big business, hands off the economy, "self-regulation" is your friend)
on an unrelated note...
Their current national candidate is a former White House press-relations staffer who keeps making frequent overtures to the neo-nazis and then acts surprised when people get angry at him.
Yeah, just goes to show that even though you might have founded the party, it doesn't mean that you get the final say in the candidate of that party. Just ask Mr. Perot, who I understand is quite pissed about Buchanan.
a purely Laissez-Faire economy merely replicates the "natural state" that we form governments to escape in the first place!
An excellent point, but it brings up a lot of other extremely stick questions. I tend to agree with you on this one, but if humans tend to revert to this "natural state", then aren't we really fooling ourselves trying to defeat our own "programming" and imposing artificial order on things? What are the implications on liberty if we've established that:
Humans tend (and seem to want) to go back to this "natural state" that is undesireable
We don't want this to happen
What we've got is a situation where we cannot allow humanity to have what they want. Your choices are to bite the bullet and be free with a lousy economy, or to discourage natural "instinct" in the name of possibly artificial (and ultimately doomed) order?
Objectivists have a rigid moral system, based around self-interest (or "selfishness"),
This is what made me think of this question in reading the book review was the "selfishness" aspect. I think that most objectivists would refer to this as "enlightened selfishness", but as far as I've ever seen, it's just regular selfishness.
Furthermore, Objectivism has a strict system of epistemology (reason), metaphysics (objective reality), and aesthetics (strongly resembling the works of Ayn Rand... just kidding, sort of).
Yep - that's why I was making the distinction between a political philosophy and a more general philosophy. What I don't understand is why in my experience (and I was also fishing to find out if anyone else had the same experience) they seem to go hand in hand.
In short: Libertarians believe that people should be free because intelligent people can differ. Objectivists believe that people should be free -- but that there is still only one "true way."
Ah but there's an important distinction to be made - objectivists would probably say that there is only one true way when reason is being used, while libertarians say that intelligent people can differ, but they're not necessarily using reason. For example, libertarians support drug legalization (or at least decriminilization) just like most of us, but I don't think that they'd say that an individual's decision to use drugs is based out of pure reason per se. Libertarians would support freedom of religion staunchly, where religion has little to do with reason, etc.
OK all of you libertarians - come on out of the works now.
Are most/some of libertarians also objectivists? (As in the philosophy put forward by Ayn Rand?) It seems that all of the libertarians that I know are also objectivists. While I myself tend to lean left (and way left) I'm interested in why these two things seem to be connected. They have some obvious parallels, but it's not necessarily intuitive that somebody who buys a certain political philosophy would also buy a certain more general philosophy.
So what's up with "you people"? (That last phrase added to stir a few people to respond, because I'm honestly interested)
This should be a standard measurement for articles concerning Microsoft. Call it the "bogosity" index of the article at hand.
Ah, but you missed multiple occurances of innovat on a line. It may be that there are more than than. (I'm not saying that there are, but it's possible. Something like a line:
I'm a vegetarian, and I have a lot of vegan friends who wish to boycott companies who are particularly horrible to the environment and to animals and so on. So not suprisingly, many of them boycott McDonalds. But you can't really boycott just McDonalds, in order for the boycott to be economically effective you have to do the same for both their subsidiaries and their parent company.
ever noticed how mcdonalds serves nothing but coke, taco bell only pepsi, KFC only pepsi, and so on? I think this is because the soft drink companies together own about 80% of the fast food joints in the nation. This makes it very hard to boycott one company, because regardless of how hard you try, unless you know about all of the corporate incest that goes on constantly, you can't tell who you're REALLY buying from.
I think it's probably the same with record companies. Geffen owns a lot of smaller labels, as does sony. Things like subpop and other labels have been bought long ago AFAIK, and the only real places that haven't been gobbled up are your tiny local labels that only have a dozen artists on them. And rest assured, if they get another dozen high-profile artists, they'll be gobbled too.
I've heard that the NSA is the largest employer of PhD mathematicians in the world.
Is this true?
Also, what type of work goes on at the NSA that will be useful to society and to the scientific community as a whole? I understand there is a lot going on in the name of national defence, but it would be horrible to have all of those ideas locked up forever. How does the NSA go about declassifying ideas to benefit science as a whole? How often has that issue come up?
People have given a lot of lip service in the past year to the idea that consumers on the internet really value their privacy, and are willing to take a stand against companies that abuse it. But I don't see it. I am one of those people, and I'm sure that a lot of people on slashdot are too, but I don't see that in the general IE using, priceline.com and ebay.com surfing general public. I don't think they're capable of caring, because for the most part, the technology used to track them isn't very well known. Of all websurfers, what percentage would you say even know about doubleclick, much less know what it is that doubleclick does?
I figure that while 98% of the population continues to be oblivious to the problem, market droids will never stop exploiting customer information on the net. You can't make people care about issues, particularly when they're not informed about them.
These Katz articles in that regard make me feel like he's preaching to the choir on this and other topics.
I can't believe that things like this happen and still we're going to be hearing people in the future talk about how people who speak anonymously are being irresponsible or childish.
This type of thing only reinforces in my mind the need to have anonymous speech available as a tool for citizens to use, since you may want to be able to express your opinion without worrying about gestapo style tactics from companies who find out that you don't like their product.
What do you think about the current political problems with KDE in debian, the possible removal of non-free, and any other 'political' issues you care to comment on?
How has debian converged or diverged from what you originally wanted it to be?
If you were Wichert, which direction would you take debian in now?
but when I'm feeling nasty, I use the root account's email address on that system. I.e. if I'm signing up for foobar service's something-or-other, my email address is root@foobar.com. Most web forms (if not all) don't catch this, and the BOFH gets the spam.
Sure, that's not exactly kind, but you can also put your email address as abuse@yourisp.com which will forward all spam to the spam account.
Or maybe sales@microsoft.com. I'm sure they can use some more...
Keep in mind that there is only a 5% genetic variance between monkeys and humans.
Which means, that unless they checked and double checked this data, if you actually try to compile it into a human, you may end up with a 5-nosed purple haired, blind and deaf armadillo-platypus mix with ESP and a penchant for buggery.:)
They really do need to GPL this, if for no other reason than for the NO WARRANTY clause.
Slashdot Mirror
It's going to be quite interesting to see where linux goes now that so many new users are starting to stream in from completely different backgrounds. What I mean by that is that it used to be that linux was difficult enough with the installation and configuration that J. Random Newbie couldn't really run it. Now that's not true. Can you imagine a new class of linux users that don't know how to use a UNIX shell? Well, that's where it's going.
I'm not going to be a crusty old bastard and say that everybody should have to do it the painful way, because I don't believe that. But it will definately change linux to have a new breed of users becoming a dominant percentage of the user base.
It used to also be that people mostly used linux because they found other systems not meeting their needs, or for a challenge. The people that I meet nowadays that are learning linux want to know how to do the things that they do on windows, only on linux. Things like gmc really give them a stiffy.
I don't have anything against new users who don't get their hands dirty in the guts of UNIX, but I do think it would be a shame to use linux like you use windows. Sort of like owning a $100,000 ferrari and only driving it through parking lots.
Remember the Hacker's Dictionary entry for Knuth? I think the basic jist of it was that since Knuth is a computing god, and TAOCP contains almost everything, it was known as a very generic hacker answer to tough technical questions, "Oh, I think you can find that in Knuth". The funny part is that I've heard the same thing about Steven's books. If you ask a really tough question about the nitty gritty of tcp or udp and nobody knows the answer, more likely than not you're going to hear, "Oh, go read UNIX Network Programming by W. Richard Stevens". So in that way, I suppose Stevens has reached the same amount of acclaim as Knuth, albeit in the network area. His books kicked ass. His death was a great loss.
...get viewers. What does media want more than anything else? (It's not to tell the truth, although they do try to do that most of the time) Media wants viewers.
Just as provocative blanket statements like "KDE SUCKS!!!!" or "GNOME SUCKS!!!" starts flamewars and piles up the comments, provocative stories about how MS is going to completely disappear draws readers like flies to a pile of shit.
But that doesn't mean that it has anything to do with reality. I'm no Microsoft fan, but they do have one of the best PR and sales forces in the universe, and I really doubt that they're going to fade into oblivion. Maybe, just MAYBE in a few years linux could grab the majority of the market, but to say that MS is going to become a legacy vendor is well...
This kind of crap doesn't have anything to do with software. It has to do with good old fashioned corporate greed.
:)
Spying on each other? Screwing each other over? Unethical contracts? Back stabbing? Welcome to corporate america, not just the software industry.
Software companies may engage in this more than other companies, but if so, it's only because the stakes are higher and larger amounts of money are changing hands. If you made the toilet plunger industry into a multibillion dollar industry that was moving as quickly and savagely as the software industry was, they'd act the same way.
So it probably makes free software look pretty good. Or maybe it just makes us look more and more like extremist dope smoking hippies because everybody knows that tech companies are our economic saviors.
They are, aren't they? Aren't they?
If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
I'm with you on your argument, but this doesn't make any sense. If they've gotten all that they're going to get from it, why are they being such bastards about it? Companies don't do things to spite you, they do things for profit. Whether or not they spite you is just a side effect.
So obviously since they're protecting it, they must think that they can still squeeze something out of it. (Either get a positive benefit, or avoid a negative consequence)
The trick is convincing them that this is not the case.
And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids! (obligatory scooby doo reference)
:)
I'll not even start in on your pathetic ploy at reverse-reverse-reverse-psychology that is a sad cry for a +1 funny moderation.
Yeah, well, that's a separate consideration. I was just posting that as a parody of slashdot lunacy, and look what it got me. -1 Troll. :)
:)
Just goes to show that sarcasm doesn't always translate well into print.
I really wish this was an option with PHBs, but it's not.
I work in a place that pays Oracle hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a support contract. I asked a PHB once what all that money was going for. He said technical support, with the added protection that should anything go wrong that Oracle can't fix within 24 hours, they can sue.
Kinda funny, since the last thing the company wants is to sue anybody. It's long, slow, expensive, and it's much easier from the start to just have it done right. Oh, by, let's see...by RTFM and doing it yourself.
But keep in mind that support contracts are mostly for PHBs who want to have that warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Contracts should come with a free blanket and teddy bear or pacifier if you ask me.
They can be useful, but most of the time they're just a crutch.
Malda suppresses anti-VA stories because he's owned by them!!!!!!!!!
Oh, wait a second....revise that conspiracy theory a little bit for extra paranoia...
Malda is only posting this story to lull us into a false sense of saftey with him! He's throwing us this little scrap of a "VA sucks" post on slashdot to make us THINK that he's not owned by VA, but in reality, you know he really is. You can just wait for the other shoe to drop!
Does that about cover the bases here? Or is there some extra piece of paranoia I'm missing out on?
The Ayn Rand folks tend to flock to Libertarian Party gatherings, because the major parties will not give them time of day, and the LP needs numbers at the polls if they are ever going to get major party status.
Makes sense to me - but is this backwards? I'm not claiming I'm right, but originally I thought that it was the libertarians who were becoming objectivists rather than the other way around.
Funny, because the objectivist philosophy seems quite similar to some of the economic policies of the GOP (friend of big business, hands off the economy, "self-regulation" is your friend)
on an unrelated note...
Their current national candidate is a former White House press-relations staffer who keeps making frequent overtures to the neo-nazis and then acts surprised when people get angry at him.
Yeah, just goes to show that even though you might have founded the party, it doesn't mean that you get the final say in the candidate of that party. Just ask Mr. Perot, who I understand is quite pissed about Buchanan.
An excellent point, but it brings up a lot of other extremely stick questions. I tend to agree with you on this one, but if humans tend to revert to this "natural state", then aren't we really fooling ourselves trying to defeat our own "programming" and imposing artificial order on things? What are the implications on liberty if we've established that:
What we've got is a situation where we cannot allow humanity to have what they want. Your choices are to bite the bullet and be free with a lousy economy, or to discourage natural "instinct" in the name of possibly artificial (and ultimately doomed) order?
Just playing a little devil's advocate...
Objectivists have a rigid moral system, based around self-interest (or "selfishness"),
... just kidding, sort of).
This is what made me think of this question in reading the book review was the "selfishness" aspect. I think that most objectivists would refer to this as "enlightened selfishness", but as far as I've ever seen, it's just regular selfishness.
Furthermore, Objectivism has a strict system of epistemology (reason), metaphysics (objective reality), and aesthetics (strongly resembling the works of Ayn Rand
Yep - that's why I was making the distinction between a political philosophy and a more general philosophy. What I don't understand is why in my experience (and I was also fishing to find out if anyone else had the same experience) they seem to go hand in hand.
In short: Libertarians believe that people should be free because intelligent people can differ. Objectivists believe that people should be free -- but that there is still only one "true way."
Ah but there's an important distinction to be made - objectivists would probably say that there is only one true way when reason is being used, while libertarians say that intelligent people can differ, but they're not necessarily using reason. For example, libertarians support drug legalization (or at least decriminilization) just like most of us, but I don't think that they'd say that an individual's decision to use drugs is based out of pure reason per se. Libertarians would support freedom of religion staunchly, where religion has little to do with reason, etc.
OK all of you libertarians - come on out of the works now.
Are most/some of libertarians also objectivists? (As in the philosophy put forward by Ayn Rand?) It seems that all of the libertarians that I know are also objectivists. While I myself tend to lean left (and way left) I'm interested in why these two things seem to be connected. They have some obvious parallels, but it's not necessarily intuitive that somebody who buys a certain political philosophy would also buy a certain more general philosophy.
So what's up with "you people"? (That last phrase added to stir a few people to respond, because I'm honestly interested)
That's a cool one...I don't use tr much. (In perl either really)
:)
Just goes to show that while perl is cool, it was not the originator of TMTOWTDI. The shell and its 1000s of utilities was.
That's while() not while(). Damn HTML filter...
This should be a standard measurement for articles concerning Microsoft. Call it the "bogosity" index of the article at hand.
Ah, but you missed multiple occurances of innovat on a line. It may be that there are more than than. (I'm not saying that there are, but it's possible. Something like a line:
"We're innovating using other innovations...")
how about
lynx -dump some_URL | perl -e 'my $count=0; while(){ while(m/innovat/gi){ $count++; } } print $count,"\n"; '
(I'm sure there's a quicker way to do it with sed or something else, I just tend toward perl)
this has always been a huge problem.
I'm a vegetarian, and I have a lot of vegan friends who wish to boycott companies who are particularly horrible to the environment and to animals and so on. So not suprisingly, many of them boycott McDonalds. But you can't really boycott just McDonalds, in order for the boycott to be economically effective you have to do the same for both their subsidiaries and their parent company.
ever noticed how mcdonalds serves nothing but coke, taco bell only pepsi, KFC only pepsi, and so on? I think this is because the soft drink companies together own about 80% of the fast food joints in the nation. This makes it very hard to boycott one company, because regardless of how hard you try, unless you know about all of the corporate incest that goes on constantly, you can't tell who you're REALLY buying from.
I think it's probably the same with record companies. Geffen owns a lot of smaller labels, as does sony. Things like subpop and other labels have been bought long ago AFAIK, and the only real places that haven't been gobbled up are your tiny local labels that only have a dozen artists on them. And rest assured, if they get another dozen high-profile artists, they'll be gobbled too.
XPDF also works, albeit it's not the most beautiful program visually ever written.
There are schloads of RPMs and debs out there for those who need it. It's in woody.
I've heard that the NSA is the largest employer of PhD mathematicians in the world.
Is this true?
Also, what type of work goes on at the NSA that will be useful to society and to the scientific community as a whole? I understand there is a lot going on in the name of national defence, but it would be horrible to have all of those ideas locked up forever. How does the NSA go about declassifying ideas to benefit science as a whole? How often has that issue come up?
I don't know that you can.
People have given a lot of lip service in the past year to the idea that consumers on the internet really value their privacy, and are willing to take a stand against companies that abuse it. But I don't see it. I am one of those people, and I'm sure that a lot of people on slashdot are too, but I don't see that in the general IE using, priceline.com and ebay.com surfing general public. I don't think they're capable of caring, because for the most part, the technology used to track them isn't very well known. Of all websurfers, what percentage would you say even know about doubleclick, much less know what it is that doubleclick does?
I figure that while 98% of the population continues to be oblivious to the problem, market droids will never stop exploiting customer information on the net. You can't make people care about issues, particularly when they're not informed about them.
These Katz articles in that regard make me feel like he's preaching to the choir on this and other topics.
This column is strange for Katz - the word "geek" never occurred in the column.
Eh, I think that we should replace Katz with Senor Cranky.
I can't believe that things like this happen and still we're going to be hearing people in the future talk about how people who speak anonymously are being irresponsible or childish.
This type of thing only reinforces in my mind the need to have anonymous speech available as a tool for citizens to use, since you may want to be able to express your opinion without worrying about gestapo style tactics from companies who find out that you don't like their product.
What do you think about the current political problems with KDE in debian, the possible removal of non-free, and any other 'political' issues you care to comment on?
How has debian converged or diverged from what you originally wanted it to be?
If you were Wichert, which direction would you take debian in now?
Well, I usually use 'foo@bar.com'...
but when I'm feeling nasty, I use the root account's email address on that system. I.e. if I'm signing up for foobar service's something-or-other, my email address is root@foobar.com. Most web forms (if not all) don't catch this, and the BOFH gets the spam.
Sure, that's not exactly kind, but you can also put your email address as abuse@yourisp.com which will forward all spam to the spam account.
Or maybe sales@microsoft.com. I'm sure they can use some more...
Keep in mind that there is only a 5% genetic variance between monkeys and humans.
:)
Which means, that unless they checked and double checked this data, if you actually try to compile it into a human, you may end up with a 5-nosed purple haired, blind and deaf armadillo-platypus mix with ESP and a penchant for buggery.
They really do need to GPL this, if for no other reason than for the NO WARRANTY clause.