However people who create software still need to be paid for their work, and the only way to do that is to control dissemination of the software.
Bull. Lots of people get paid to write software which doesn't have controled dissemination. RedHat pays them, IBM pays them, SuSE pays them, Sun pays them, a bunch of companies pay them. How far it will extend, and in what ways, is a good question, but it's clear that selling shinkwrapped boxes and support is one solution, as is selling customizations to the customer's needs.
I guess some of the socialists out there believe that corporations only want SOME of your money. They want money from all sides, no matter how many outlets they own. Therefore, you can expect all points of view to be expressed.
My net wealth is 33 million dollars. I can take a hundred thousand dollar advertising run, or I can help sink the man who would cost me two hundred thousand in taxes. Gee, decisions.
For spam to American e-mail addresses to be effective, a product has to be delivered TO an American physical address.
Any judgement against the spam should be enforced against the money being transacted to the spamvertiser.
Cut off the money supply to the spammer's customer, cut off spam.
On of the first spams I got was for a Russian carpet cleaning service. I frequently get spams in Korean and other Asian languages. They aren't targetting American consumers; they just get caught in the spread. You can't stop that from America.
Re:I think I know what SCO is doing
on
SCO Group Lawsuit Q&A
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously, when was the last time that *every* post on an interview was outraged or disgusted? Even Microsoft doesn't manage to build up that much animosity.
Microsoft builds a real competitor to Linux. No matter how much FUD and general crap (from both sides) gets thrown, people have to admit that Windows is a viable platform with some strengths over Linux. I consistently hear stories of people switching from SCO to Linux 10 years ago, despite Linux's infancy, because SCO sucked that bad. And nothing I hear gives me any evidence that they've improved. Then they make a lie filled lawsuit claiming that without IBM ripping them off, Linux would be nowhere? The only place I see SCO engineers contributing to open source is GCC, and that's just to keep it running on SCO.
They get no respect for their code, no respect for their contributions, and no respect for blantly lying about Linux.
People like to shun programs that are "so easy my mom can use it." To which I ask "If its so easy, why are you doing things the hard way?"
Because if it's so easy my mom can use it, it'll be orientated towards stepping you through the process instead of letting you blow through the procedure as fast as possible. For example, I use a command-line program (wrapped in a Bash script) for scanning because I couldn't make three scans a minute on anyhing that bothered me with what I just scanned or made me touch the mouse. It's not friendly; it's highly tuned to doing exactly what I need as fast as possible.
Wrong! QT has the SAME license as GTK+, the GPL. It ALSO is licensed under the [QPL] [...] If anything QT is LESS restrictive than GTK+ since it lets you sidestep the virus nature of the GPL if you want to.
Wrong! GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, which doesn't have the "virus" nature of the GPL. You can use GTK+ with any code you want to run under Linux, because libc is also under the LGPL. All the LGPL requires is the ability to change the library. So, overall, GTK+ is less restrictively licensed then QT because GTK+ allows proprietary software to be written with it.
Fulfilling the needs of a whiny end user who doesn't give a damn about anything but "cheap and Windows clone" is really far down on the list. "
The arrogance that permeates this statement is sadly too common in Open Source. How can you despise people and then expect them to buy in to your vision? Unfortunately the impression it leaves is that Open Source is a self-serving ego trip for individuals who really aren't at all interested in the public good.
Your post is so crappy; why didn't you use the standard quoting style and put italics around your quote? I'm not going to read your posts until you do so.
Now did that convince you to change your quoting style? If you think we all do this for the public good and that we like abuse, then you're gravely mistaken. What's arrogant about doing what we like? I know a dozen friends that have no hobbies that enrich the world; but those of us who build toys for the world to use are "self-serving" because we don't spend our free time doing things we don't enjoy for people who have gone out of their way to make themselves not endeared to us?
Anyone who has a degree has a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population. There is nothing here that makes programmers special.
But do programmers have a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate then the average person who has a degree? This is not something that can be resolved by pure logic and argument; it takes study.
The vast majority of programming in the world is not creative. It's a skilled craft, sure, but it's not about creativity - that is, making something exist that did not exist before. One database application, or web site, or GUI etc is really much like another.
And one novel is really much like another in the same genre, especially if you ignore all the fine details.
The details differ, but it is not pushing the envelope of the possible, like scientists and engineers do every day
Oh, yeah. Go build a bridge across this river, pretty much like every other bridge. Go sequence this creature's DNA, which is pretty much like every other creature's DNA. Go study this plant, which lives like pretty much every plant.
On the flip side, you're ignoring the programmers whose job it was to write the first compiler, the first simulation, the first first-person shooter, the first computer typesetter, the first OCR program, the first speech-recognization program, etc.
If a programmer's flow is interrupted it can take a large amount of time for her to regain the state, sometimes up to an hour.
This is just mystical hand-waving. I half expected the next paragraph to be about "using the force".
Clearly, you've never been distracted, and had to turn back and ask "Now what was I doing here . ..". Whether or not this is worse for programming and/or programmers is a question that is easily subject to experiment, and thus is not mystical hand-waving.
its because they dont have shit to do with american stocks. What the fuck does a Qatari news agency need access to american stock markets?
Because if they stop sending money and oil to American stock markets, it might send said stock market into a fall, which might send the entire world into a world-wide depression? No country is an island, least of all the US.
It is universally recognized that with any right comes responsability. Inciting riots and cultural hatred on the scale of entire nations and ethnicities is equivalent to screaming fire in a crowded building.
And it's an act committed by most media at some time. How many American stations have published baseless Iraqi propaganda?
In the end either Al-Jazeera is going to learn to report in a responsible manner or they'll berelegated to reporting only local Quatari news.
Heh. Why don't you apply a Care Bear stare to them, or whatever works in your universe, and I'll stand over here in the real universe, where sensational news sells and responsible news doesn't.
That is the only way they can be a viable commercial business, which requires attracting viewers so there are people to consume advertisements. Their purpose is NOT to groom us into better world citizens with a sympathetic ear to the hundreds of 3rd world countries and religions.
So why are you complaining about Al Jazeera? If they're saying whatever evil thing you claim they say, it's just to be a viable commerical business. If people want to hear details on how to kill Dan East, that's what the media should run, right?
secure computing is getting worse on the level of one order per generation of new programming languages.
Possibly the worst software disaster ever - the TheraRad accidents - came out of code written in assembly. Most security holes I've heard about come out of C and C++ code. Multics is not the end all and be all of programming studies, and we certainly aren't hearing about an order of magnitude more Java and Perl security holes, absolutely or percentage-wise.
Security is a process, not a product. HLL's can be misused just as effectively as LLL's.
There's an old Arab phrase: trust in Allah, but tie up your camel. Trust in programmers all you want, but protect yourself from their mistakes.
Try these two bits of code:
int sum (int a[], int first, int last) {
int foo = 0;
for (int i = first; i <= last; i++) foo += a[i];
return foo; }
and
function Sum (A: array of Integer; First: Integer; Last: Integer) return Integer is
Foo: Integer:= 0; begin
for I in First.. Last loop
Foo:= Foo + A(I);
end loop;
return Foo; end Sum;
One of these pieces of code will never have a buffer overflow. Give the right arguments to the other one, and it will also function as a exec function. This is unfixable in C; you have to call it right to avoid buffer overflows. Given that buffer overflows are probably the most common security hole, Ada will certainly make for fewer security problems, and at least leave you more time to think about the other security flaws your code could have.
They get the inside scoop with wonderful governments likethe Taliban and Saddam Husayn by acting as their propaganda arm.
From everything I've heard, they're one of the most unbiased sources of Arab news. Do they give the Taliban and Saddam Hussian a voice sometimes? Yes. Why should only one side get to speak?
write a tiny app to pass around that would start DOSing their site.
Using force to shut up those you disagree with. How noble of you.
They've even been tossed out of Iran.
So they're willing to tell the truth about what's going on in Iran, even though the Iranian government doesn't like it, and you disapprove of them for that?
the DMCA was passed, not as an enforcement tool for the RIAA and MPAA, but as protection for virtually all vendors of copyrighted material, and producers of commercial products that dont fall under patent or copyright areas.
The use of it as a strongarm tactic is just a by-product of what was intended to be (and should be, basically) a just and good law
Why should producers of commerical products that aren't copyrightable or patentable get protection? If they should get protection, then there should be a law giving them protection, not a law protecting encryption. The people I can think of in this group is the printer manufacturers who don't want you to refill your own ink cartridges, or people who toss public domain stuff on a CD or a DVD and want to stop you from using it, neither of which should be encouraged.
Also, how does this protect copyrighted material? It's clear it has no teeth; everyone who wants to can rip a DVD, and you don't need to decrypt the DVD to copy it; but it stops consumers from playing DVDs they own on Linux.
There are parts of the DMCA that are good - those relating to ISPs, for example - but those parts that concern the decryption of encrypted material was soley so that the MPAA and RIAA and similar organizations can club people who want to do anything with copyrights the MPAA or RIAA don't like.
public domain (copyright expired, and copyright didn't even exist until the 1700s)
Wrong. Shakespeare was actually under copyright, and was one of the first major copyright battles, as the publishers wanted the copyright on Shakespeare to last forever.
I can't believe how many people don't test their software before. If it is that critical, you should have a testing environment.
I spend a lot of time on this computer, so it's important to me that it works right. That doesn't mean I have the money to buy another computer, or even that I'm willing to put the time and trouble into setting up a chroot and testing everything there.
These weather changes were long before man came on the scene. I'm all for Michigan becoming tropical again but that is likely to cause problems for the southern part of the US.
That wasn't weather; that was the movement of the continents, taking at least a thousand times as much time.
The difference is that egcs was s fork that improved a product and was going down the same path as the original. This is different. There is a fundemental schism occuring inside of XFree that makes it closer to KDE/GNOME.
# Politics: The group is closed and controlled from topside the way old companies do things. # Tech Vision: XFree's top ppl are wishing to move away from what makes X interesting and follow what has been popular and easier to do (yes, it has also been faster).
I don't believe it's all that different. GCC was closed and controlled from topside, where as EGCS was designed to be inclusive. EGCS also had a goal to merge all the frontends and backends floating around that GCC mainatainers weren't willing to merge into the core.
No, X accepts input from your terminal (keyboard, mouse, etc.), and produces output to your terminal (video, and yes, audio *should* be included too). Why should audio be treated any differently?
Because I want to play my MP3s from the console the exact same way I play them from X.
There was an old story, possibly apocryphal, about the USMC evaluating a piece of kit from DEC. A marine driving a forklift accidentally dropped a fighter jet engine on it, but the VAX wasn't damaged. The Marine Corps signed the purchase order that day.
I can believe that. I just bought one of those (for $5), and the thing must have weighted at least a half a ton. All the internals, panels and doors stripped, the chassis still weighted maybe 600 pounds. I don't remember a bit of plastic used for a container or support in the whole thing, and the steel top has a steel cover. It's a heavy duty computer.
Compatibility at the X layer is overblown, how many people really run apps from so long ago?
Lots of people. Starting with stuff like xterm and LyX, there's a lot of stuff that's directly X-wired or runs on TK or FLTK or Xforms or Athena (gv, and yes, some of us still run the original gv).
Please know that with the next coming XFree86 version you get a lot of GNOME components without even knowing it. code like, GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development
Oh, dear God! People who know what a modern desktop system needs are making XFree86 a better platform for such! They're even going so far as making it possible to use the X font system for something besides western European and east Asian languages!
If KDE people want to work on XFree86, they should go for it. But don't bitch because desperately needed new features get implemented by Gnome people if you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
But, MAN, how can he take $2,000,000 from the US Gov't and still criticize them at the same time?
It's patently absurd to say that the two million people employed by the US government are restricted from critizing it, and massively undemocratic.
However people who create software still need to be paid for their work, and the only way to do that is to control dissemination of the software.
Bull. Lots of people get paid to write software which doesn't have controled dissemination. RedHat pays them, IBM pays them, SuSE pays them, Sun pays them, a bunch of companies pay them. How far it will extend, and in what ways, is a good question, but it's clear that selling shinkwrapped boxes and support is one solution, as is selling customizations to the customer's needs.
I guess some of the socialists out there believe that corporations only want SOME of your money. They want money from all sides, no matter how many outlets they own. Therefore, you can expect all points of view to be expressed.
My net wealth is 33 million dollars. I can take a hundred thousand dollar advertising run, or I can help sink the man who would cost me two hundred thousand in taxes. Gee, decisions.
For spam to American e-mail addresses to be effective, a product has to be delivered TO an American physical address.
Any judgement against the spam should be enforced against the money being transacted to the spamvertiser.
Cut off the money supply to the spammer's customer, cut off spam.
On of the first spams I got was for a Russian carpet cleaning service. I frequently get spams in Korean and other Asian languages. They aren't targetting American consumers; they just get caught in the spread. You can't stop that from America.
Seriously, when was the last time that *every* post on an interview was outraged or disgusted? Even Microsoft doesn't manage to build up that much animosity.
Microsoft builds a real competitor to Linux. No matter how much FUD and general crap (from both sides) gets thrown, people have to admit that Windows is a viable platform with some strengths over Linux. I consistently hear stories of people switching from SCO to Linux 10 years ago, despite Linux's infancy, because SCO sucked that bad. And nothing I hear gives me any evidence that they've improved. Then they make a lie filled lawsuit claiming that without IBM ripping them off, Linux would be nowhere? The only place I see SCO engineers contributing to open source is GCC, and that's just to keep it running on SCO.
They get no respect for their code, no respect for their contributions, and no respect for blantly lying about Linux.
People like to shun programs that are "so easy my mom can use it." To which I ask "If its so easy, why are you doing things the hard way?"
Because if it's so easy my mom can use it, it'll be orientated towards stepping you through the process instead of letting you blow through the procedure as fast as possible. For example, I use a command-line program (wrapped in a Bash script) for scanning because I couldn't make three scans a minute on anyhing that bothered me with what I just scanned or made me touch the mouse. It's not friendly; it's highly tuned to doing exactly what I need as fast as possible.
Wrong! QT has the SAME license as GTK+, the GPL. It ALSO is licensed under the [QPL] [...] If anything QT is LESS restrictive than GTK+ since it lets you sidestep the virus nature of the GPL if you want to.
Wrong! GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, which doesn't have the "virus" nature of the GPL. You can use GTK+ with any code you want to run under Linux, because libc is also under the LGPL. All the LGPL requires is the ability to change the library. So, overall, GTK+ is less restrictively licensed then QT because GTK+ allows proprietary software to be written with it.
Fulfilling the needs of a whiny end user who doesn't give a damn about anything but "cheap and Windows clone" is really far down on the list. "
The arrogance that permeates this statement is sadly too common in Open Source. How can you despise people and then expect them to buy in to your vision? Unfortunately the impression it leaves is that Open Source is a self-serving ego trip for individuals who really aren't at all interested in the public good.
Your post is so crappy; why didn't you use the standard quoting style and put italics around your quote? I'm not going to read your posts until you do so.
Now did that convince you to change your quoting style? If you think we all do this for the public good and that we like abuse, then you're gravely mistaken. What's arrogant about doing what we like? I know a dozen friends that have no hobbies that enrich the world; but those of us who build toys for the world to use are "self-serving" because we don't spend our free time doing things we don't enjoy for people who have gone out of their way to make themselves not endeared to us?
Anyone who has a degree has a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population. There is nothing here that makes programmers special.
.". Whether or not this is worse for programming and/or programmers is a question that is easily subject to experiment, and thus is not mystical hand-waving.
But do programmers have a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate then the average person who has a degree? This is not something that can be resolved by pure logic and argument; it takes study.
The vast majority of programming in the world is not creative. It's a skilled craft, sure, but it's not about creativity - that is, making something exist that did not exist before. One database application, or web site, or GUI etc is really much like another.
And one novel is really much like another in the same genre, especially if you ignore all the fine details.
The details differ, but it is not pushing the envelope of the possible, like scientists and engineers do every day
Oh, yeah. Go build a bridge across this river, pretty much like every other bridge. Go sequence this creature's DNA, which is pretty much like every other creature's DNA. Go study this plant, which lives like pretty much every plant.
On the flip side, you're ignoring the programmers whose job it was to write the first compiler, the first simulation, the first first-person shooter, the first computer typesetter, the first OCR program, the first speech-recognization program, etc.
If a programmer's flow is interrupted it can take a large amount of time for her to regain the state, sometimes up to an hour.
This is just mystical hand-waving. I half expected the next paragraph to be about "using the force".
Clearly, you've never been distracted, and had to turn back and ask "Now what was I doing here . .
its because they dont have shit to do with american stocks. What the fuck does a Qatari news agency need access to american stock markets?
Because if they stop sending money and oil to American stock markets, it might send said stock market into a fall, which might send the entire world into a world-wide depression? No country is an island, least of all the US.
How can you honor a child
molester and think you have credibility all at the
same time?
Because you can't boil a life down to one thing? A person is not just a child molester; they have other facets to their life.
It is universally recognized that with any right comes responsability. Inciting riots and cultural hatred on the scale of entire nations and ethnicities is equivalent to screaming fire in a crowded building.
And it's an act committed by most media at some time. How many American stations have published baseless Iraqi propaganda?
In the end either Al-Jazeera is going to learn to report in a responsible manner or they'll berelegated to reporting only local Quatari news.
Heh. Why don't you apply a Care Bear stare to them, or whatever works in your universe, and I'll stand over here in the real universe, where sensational news sells and responsible news doesn't.
That is the only way they can be a viable commercial business, which requires attracting viewers so there are people to consume advertisements. Their purpose is NOT to groom us into better world citizens with a sympathetic ear to the hundreds of 3rd world countries and religions.
So why are you complaining about Al Jazeera? If they're saying whatever evil thing you claim they say, it's just to be a viable commerical business. If people want to hear details on how to kill Dan East, that's what the media should run, right?
secure computing is getting worse on the level of one order per generation of new programming languages.
Possibly the worst software disaster ever - the TheraRad accidents - came out of code written in assembly. Most security holes I've heard about come out of C and C++ code. Multics is not the end all and be all of programming studies, and we certainly aren't hearing about an order of magnitude more Java and Perl security holes, absolutely or percentage-wise.
There's an old Arab phrase: trust in Allah, but tie up your camel. Trust in programmers all you want, but protect yourself from their mistakes.
Try these two bits of code:andOne of these pieces of code will never have a buffer overflow. Give the right arguments to the other one, and it will also function as a exec function. This is unfixable in C; you have to call it right to avoid buffer overflows. Given that buffer overflows are probably the most common security hole, Ada will certainly make for fewer security problems, and at least leave you more time to think about the other security flaws your code could have.
They get the inside scoop with wonderful governments likethe Taliban and Saddam Husayn by acting as their propaganda arm.
From everything I've heard, they're one of the most unbiased sources of Arab news. Do they give the Taliban and Saddam Hussian a voice sometimes? Yes. Why should only one side get to speak?
write a tiny app to pass around that would start DOSing their site.
Using force to shut up those you disagree with. How noble of you.
They've even been tossed out of Iran.
So they're willing to tell the truth about what's going on in Iran, even though the Iranian government doesn't like it, and you disapprove of them for that?
the DMCA was passed, not as an enforcement tool for the RIAA and MPAA, but as protection for virtually all vendors of copyrighted material, and producers of commercial products that dont fall under patent or copyright areas.
The use of it as a strongarm tactic is just a by-product of what was intended to be (and should be, basically) a just and good law
Why should producers of commerical products that aren't copyrightable or patentable get protection? If they should get protection, then there should be a law giving them protection, not a law protecting encryption. The people I can think of in this group is the printer manufacturers who don't want you to refill your own ink cartridges, or people who toss public domain stuff on a CD or a DVD and want to stop you from using it, neither of which should be encouraged.
Also, how does this protect copyrighted material? It's clear it has no teeth; everyone who wants to can rip a DVD, and you don't need to decrypt the DVD to copy it; but it stops consumers from playing DVDs they own on Linux.
There are parts of the DMCA that are good - those relating to ISPs, for example - but those parts that concern the decryption of encrypted material was soley so that the MPAA and RIAA and similar organizations can club people who want to do anything with copyrights the MPAA or RIAA don't like.
public domain (copyright expired, and copyright didn't even exist until the 1700s)
Wrong. Shakespeare was actually under copyright, and was one of the first major copyright battles, as the publishers wanted the copyright on Shakespeare to last forever.
I can't believe how many people don't test their software before. If it is that critical, you should have a testing environment.
I spend a lot of time on this computer, so it's important to me that it works right. That doesn't mean I have the money to buy another computer, or even that I'm willing to put the time and trouble into setting up a chroot and testing everything there.
These weather changes were long before man came on the scene. I'm all for Michigan becoming tropical again but that is likely to cause problems for the southern part of the US.
That wasn't weather; that was the movement of the continents, taking at least a thousand times as much time.
The difference is that egcs was s fork that improved a product and was going down the same path as the original. This is different. There is a fundemental schism occuring inside of XFree that makes it closer to KDE/GNOME.
# Politics: The group is closed and controlled from topside the way old companies do things.
# Tech Vision: XFree's top ppl are wishing to move away from what makes X interesting and follow what has been popular and easier to do (yes, it has also been faster).
I don't believe it's all that different. GCC was closed and controlled from topside, where as EGCS was designed to be inclusive. EGCS also had a goal to merge all the frontends and backends floating around that GCC mainatainers weren't willing to merge into the core.
No, X accepts input from your terminal (keyboard, mouse, etc.), and produces output to your terminal (video, and yes, audio *should* be included too). Why should audio be treated any differently?
Because I want to play my MP3s from the console the exact same way I play them from X.
There was an old story, possibly apocryphal, about the USMC evaluating a piece of kit from DEC. A marine driving a forklift accidentally dropped a fighter jet engine on it, but the VAX wasn't damaged. The Marine Corps signed the purchase order that day.
I can believe that. I just bought one of those (for $5), and the thing must have weighted at least a half a ton. All the internals, panels and doors stripped, the chassis still weighted maybe 600 pounds. I don't remember a bit of plastic used for a container or support in the whole thing, and the steel top has a steel cover. It's a heavy duty computer.
Compatibility at the X layer is overblown, how many people really run apps from so long ago?
Lots of people. Starting with stuff like xterm and LyX, there's a lot of stuff that's directly X-wired or runs on TK or FLTK or Xforms or Athena (gv, and yes, some of us still run the original gv).
Please know that with the next coming XFree86 version you get a lot of GNOME components without even knowing it. code like, GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development
Oh, dear God! People who know what a modern desktop system needs are making XFree86 a better platform for such! They're even going so far as making it possible to use the X font system for something besides western European and east Asian languages!
If KDE people want to work on XFree86, they should go for it. But don't bitch because desperately needed new features get implemented by Gnome people if you don't.