This question sounds a little fishy to me. Maybe it's just my personal opinion, but we aren't ready to go underground yet, are we? For one thing, that would eliminate any sympathy that we might have from the mainstream (it's hard to imagine the public rallying behind a group of anonymous hackers.) Furthermore, our legal system will never change if we simply circumvent it. It's not designed to work that way. Without any (openly) dissenting voices, only the opponents of free speech will be heard. Hiding only reinforces the picture that the government has successfully been painting, of a tiny group of immature hooligans who pay lip-service to "free speech," but really just want to cause trouble.
I'm sure you all think I'm naive, and I'm underestimating the damage that a lawsuit can do, but it strikes me as incredibly cowardly to do otherwise. Personally, I've sent copies of the musical version of DeCSS (a link would be helpful here) to all my friends, so that they can play it on their radio shows. None of them have blinked. Like most "broadcasters" (including authors), they know that because of their position, it is their duty to be the first line of defense against the thought police.
(Aside: Why do all my friends have radio shows? Do hand them out at concerts or something? I want a radio show!)
Drive down demand for VCRs (anyone who believes that even marginally-desirable programming won't be copy protected is fooling themselves. No more taping "The Simpsons"... but for only $29.95 you can buy three episodes on DVD!)
Luckily the companies that make VCR's are mostly the same companies that make the content these days, so they can absorb the cost of such changes. We (as in the "we" that does not read Slashdot) will never notice any difference.
Reasons why you might want to support a large number of users.
Maybe I should be saying "multiple simultaneous interactive users". That's all that Win2K is missing. Win2K has no problem partitioning its resources among multiple users, each running his own processes in his own memory space. The catch is that only one user can have interactive access at a time. (Actually, Win2K has a fully functional telnet server, but that's another story.)
All I'm claiming is that that sort of multi-user capability is realy not all that important, and if you need that functionality for some reason (i.e. to offer shell accounts,) then you probably should be running UNIX anyway.
Your solution here is "Don't use UNIX, just buy another Workstation"?
Not exactly. I just think that although the flexibility of true multi-user OS's is great, it's hard to come up with any real use for it... and in the few cases where it is useful, Win2K wouldn't be appropriate anyway.
My point is that although multiple simultaneous users support is very useful in certain situations, it's absolutely irrelevant in 95% of OS installations.
Instead of allowing each user to customize various aspects of application behaviour with small text files in their home directory, much system behaviour is controlled instead by a single central repository.
NT is not Linux. One of the biggest differences between NT and Linux is the security model -- NT's security pervades the whole OS, not just the file system. Even though the Registry is a monolithic database, access is controlled on a per-key basis. This allows much finer control over access to program settings, although I admit that it sounds like a nightmare to use.
If it helps, think of the Registry as a virtual file system, that happens to reside in a single file on disk.
I must say, though, Win2K is not a multi-user OS in the UNIX sense. I don't know why people make such a big deal out of that. It was not designed to be a multi-user OS (excluding the Terminal Server hack), and it is not marketed as such. How many people really need a multiple-simultaneous-user OS, anyway? Workstations are cheap.
On the topic of Word: How hard is it to just have a simple word processor package?
When you're using your hypothetical "simple word processor package", do you ever plan to use charts, or tables, or graphics? You probably do. Now, there are two ways that developers can add that sort of feature. They can write a complete spreadsheet/chart/graphics package from scratch, and #include it in the word processor... or they can create a mechanism that allows objects from other programs to be embedded in your document.
Regardless of the security implications, no sane programmer would chose the former method. It wastes time, it makes the UI inconsistent, it bloats the code, and it creates many more opportunities for bugs. Even if those limitations aren't a problem, it would still never happen, because good programmers would sooner quit than be forced to cut-and-paste code (instead of using shared libraries.)
Microsof chose the latter option. All "active documents" can contain elements from any other COM object provider. The "downside" of this is that Office programs are now "too flexible" for many Slashdot types. IMHO, for the reasons above, I think that this is a fair trade-off.
Sure, bashing Microsoft is an easy way to boost your karma. But what exactly is your complaint about their support?
Personally, I've had two experiences with MS support. The first was when my MS mouse stopped working. MS sent me a new mouse, no questions asked, without even asking me to send the broken one back. The second was due to an obscure bug in Win2K that happened to affect a game that I was playing a lot. That one took a bit longer to solve, but eventually the support guy actually contacted the relevant programmer and had him send me a fixed DLL, hot off the compiler.
If only all software companies had that kind of support, the world would be a much better place.
I just downloaded and installed K-Meleon, just to try it out.
The fact that the whole download and installation process took about four minutes was the first thing that impressed me.
After browsing a few pages with it, it doesn't make me say "Wow, that's fast!" It does, however, make me say, "Wow, my hard drive isn't thrashing at all!" (Interestingly, that has been my experience with Linux as well.)
I appreciate their attempt to follow Windows standards, but I don't think they needed to clone the IE interface that closely. It's a little creepy.
I am ambivalent about the Mozilla widgets. (I should note that this is also my first experience with Mozilla, period.) Since most of the widgets only appear within web pages, the fact that they don't follow the user interface conventions might actually be a good thing (since the "web page" paradigm should be separate from the "dialog box" paradigm.) However, scroll bars are not part of the page, so there's no excuse for not using standard Windows scroll bars. (Unfortunately, from what I know of Mozilla's internals, that's probably hard to fix.)
The scroll bars are the only part that I really can't deal with. If they fix them, I would seriously consider using K-Meleon (instead of IE) for web browsing.
You are if you happen to be one of the people specifically covered by the judgement
IANAL, but doesn't this precedent mean that if I put on a DeCSS t-shirt and the MPAA orders me to take it off, they can now get that order rubber-stamped by a judge without much hassle?
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
Source code is speech, and is subject to the restrictions of the First Ammendment. It's disgraceful that an attempt to supress this speech has gotten so far (although I'm still pretty confident that it won't last.)
Unfortunately, many of the loudest pro-DeCSS voices have another agenda entirely, as the judge noted above. I don't think that most intelligent Americans would agree with the contention that "information wants to be free," against the wishes of its authors. Besides, even if copyright is wrong, it's still the law of the land, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that a judge would have little sympathy for people who flagrantly disregard it.
Anti-IP folks remind me of the pro-hemp crowd. Sure, hemp should probably be legal. Maybe it really is environmentally friendly, and dirt cheap, and stronger than Kevlar (or whatever.) I'm still not going to take those claims seriously when I know that few (if any) hemp supporters could give a shit about making rope.
We need to have a clearer separation between the two arguments in favor of DeCSS. (The first being that it is protected speech, and the second being that evil corporations don't have any right to control the information that they create.) As long as the second argument keeps drowning out the first, our freedom of speech will continue to erode... and free speech is much more important that free DVDs.
(Since this will undoubtedly be a hot topic, let me repeat that I do not agree with the judge's decision. For that matter, I think drugs should be legal too.)
There's nothing wrong with having a space in a compound word. "Buzz word" is a compound noun (although I would probably write "buzzword" anyway.) "Black board" is a compound noun. "Red light" is a compound noun in some dialects of English, but not others (which drives me nuts when I hear it.)
Linguists aren't really interested in orthography at all. What ultimately define a language are the structures that represent it in our minds... evidence about those structures can be found (for this case) by looking at things like stress and hyper-articulated speech. Spelling isn't very useful at all.
Just off the top of my head, I can see at least two things that might have been different if programming languages weren't designed by English-speakers.
The most obvious difference would be word order. Conventional expression syntax (i.e. "1 + 2") is clearly SVO, like English. Function calls are SVO, too, if you remember to include the subject: "subject = verb(object);" None of those conventions had to be that way. In fact, SOV order is easier to implement in some ways. (That's why a CS student's first expression parser will always be in RPN.)
It kinda makes you wonder if VSO speakers think that LISP is perfectly natural, and C is incomprehensible... (I doubt it, though.)
Another English-biased element of programming languages is their isolating nature. If I showed you a programming language in which the return type of a function is indicated by a suffix, i.e. "strlenint foostr;" you'd be right to scream and run away. For a native speaker of Southern Tiwa, though, it might seem perfectly natural.
I speak fluently arabic (native speaker), french (nearly native) and english, I can say for sure that english has absolutly no influence on programming languages.
I only speak one language fluently, but I've had some experience with linguistics, and I find your assertion amusing.
French and English are basically the same language. Arabic is a bit more exotic, particularly because of its wacky infixes and circumfixes, but it's still very similar to the first two. I believe it's still SVO, also, or at least mostly SVO. Coming to a conclusion about human language based on your experiences with French, English, and Arabic, is like coming to a conclusion about music based on your experiences with Brittney Spears, Christine Aguilera, and maybe Puff Daddy. There is a lot more diversity in language, and it could definitely affect programming languages... I'll post my opinions on that later if I have the energy.
Your second claim is pretty fishy too, but there is something to it: English is very good at compounding words, which makes it easy to express new concepts such as "astronaut" or "e-commerce" (blech) or "batmobile". Whether that has had an influence on technological development or not, I couldn't say.
Right now husbands and wives can cast separate votes on issues and not have it thrust in their faces, so they get by.
Actually, that's a really interesting point... secret ballots are one of those quirky cases when restricting a citizen's rights actually enhances his freedom. With are current voting system, it is impossible (as far as I know) to prove that you voted a particular way; consequently, it is impossible for someone to try to require you to vote in a particular way. If some goons threaten to beat me up if I don't vote for their candidate, I can always just lie and say that I did. On the other hand, if I can choose whether to keep my vote secret, then others can take that choice away from me.
It's just like those signs they have outside of convenience stores, that say something like "Clerk cannot open safe." Restricting the clerk's priveleges may save his life.
The reason why they hold on to the copyright is because they don't have any proof that they do not have any more value. (Follow that?)
Yup. But the act of releasing old software also has value, maybe considerable value. (Just picture the chaos on Slashdot the day that MS frees Win 3.1...)
There's just one catch... Execs choose to hold onto their copyrights because they think that they are more valuable closed than open. They can be wrong... in fact, in the case of software, they are almost always wrong. (IMHO) But that's incompetence, not malice. That's why the original poster's claim about movie copyrights set me off... destroying movies with expired copyrights would not benefit the owners in any way that I can see, and I just can't believe that they would do it out of sheer malice.
Actually, I was trying for something like, "If you don't like what the government is doing, just vote for a different RIAA next time!", but I couldn't make the sarcasm work.
How many letters have you written your representatives lately?
That's an excellent point, and you're probably right that letters (original letters) are an effective and underutilized way to fight lobbyists. The theory, I suppose, is that one letter represents a thousand votes, and there's no surer way to cut your income from bribes than to get yourself voted out of office.
However, writing letters is less effective when dealing with the increasingly subtle and complicated issues that our governments have been tackling lately, for two reasons:
First, I don't think my congressman would believe that his position on the DMCA (for example) is going to affect a single vote, let alone the outcome of the election. Frankly, even I wouldn't change my vote based on an issue like that. That leaves me with nothing to bargain with, so the lobbyists win by default.
Second, let's look at this from a politician's perspective: These guys are not rocket scientists. Even with support from his staff, a politician just isn't going to understand any particular issue as well as an expert in the field would. I think that's a large part of the reason why organizations like the RIAA have so much influence... because they provide the (genuine) expertise that politicians lack, at the expense of objectivity. In other words, legislators let the lobbyists think for them simply because it's easier than thinking for themselves.
Maybe the moral of this story is, vote for the smart guy! There has been a backlash against intellectuals in this country since the 60's, which may be part of the problem. Despite my strong political opinions, I'd rather vote for a candidate who thinks differently than I do, than one who doesn't think at all.
(This presidential election is going to be really painful for me...)
Grumble... I was trying to come up with a +1 Funny way of saying this, but it's not happening, so I'll just put it straight:
Does it bother anyone that the RIAA (and the MPAA and the SPA and the AARP and the NAACP and the AFL/CIO and lots of other TLA's) are rewriting the laws of this country? I thought only elected representatives could do that.
Too many. Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain.
Do you have any evidence of this? Considering that all films made since 1927 (I believe) are still under copyright, it seems hard to believe.
There's one thing that I don't understand about all these anti-IP fanatics. You guys like to throw around words like "evil" a lot, and compare Bill Gates to Satan, but of course everyone knows that big corporations aren't really evil -- they just want to make as much money as possible.
That's why the whole abandonware argument doesn't make much sense. The fact that companies still protect old software is proof that it still has some value. Are we really supposed to believe that executives hold on to copyrights just because they enjoy making people suffer?
It has some other interesting and unpleasant problems.
I don't know where you're getting that info from. When I switched to Win2K from Win98, I was pleased to find that the command prompt was much more functional. It absolutely does wildcard expansion; it also supports the full range of pipe operators, command history, and just about anything else you'd expect from a UNIX shell. (Except tab completion... that always gets me.)
if i want an HTML editor stuck between two translucent animated buttons which pull up a hex editor and a MP3 player..i shouldnt have to *code*
And that's precisely why you won't find those features in libraries... it's an organized effort amoung programmers to prevent people like you from writing programs with translucent animated buttons and built-in MP3 players (and no capital letters.)
You know, I was joking when I wrote that, but now that I think about it... Flashy and unusable GUI's are almost always written in Visual Basic, which happens to be a language that's very extensible. I would never suggest that a language be crippled to keep it from being misused by idiots (*cough* Windows Scripting Host *cough*), but I wonder how much more useful our computers would become if OCX's went away?
Slashdot Mirror
This question sounds a little fishy to me. Maybe it's just my personal opinion, but we aren't ready to go underground yet, are we? For one thing, that would eliminate any sympathy that we might have from the mainstream (it's hard to imagine the public rallying behind a group of anonymous hackers.) Furthermore, our legal system will never change if we simply circumvent it. It's not designed to work that way. Without any (openly) dissenting voices, only the opponents of free speech will be heard. Hiding only reinforces the picture that the government has successfully been painting, of a tiny group of immature hooligans who pay lip-service to "free speech," but really just want to cause trouble.
I'm sure you all think I'm naive, and I'm underestimating the damage that a lawsuit can do, but it strikes me as incredibly cowardly to do otherwise. Personally, I've sent copies of the musical version of DeCSS (a link would be helpful here) to all my friends, so that they can play it on their radio shows. None of them have blinked. Like most "broadcasters" (including authors), they know that because of their position, it is their duty to be the first line of defense against the thought police.
(Aside: Why do all my friends have radio shows? Do hand them out at concerts or something? I want a radio show!)
Older versions of Windows Media Player used to play contemporary versions of the RealMedia format. Quicktime, too.
The government fixed that.
Doesn't RCA have content connections too? Does RCA even still exist?
It would be nice if somebody would track the extent of these monopolies, and publish a nice diagram or something.
All I'm claiming is that that sort of multi-user capability is realy not all that important, and if you need that functionality for some reason (i.e. to offer shell accounts,) then you probably should be running UNIX anyway.
My point is that although multiple simultaneous users support is very useful in certain situations, it's absolutely irrelevant in 95% of OS installations.
If it helps, think of the Registry as a virtual file system, that happens to reside in a single file on disk.
I must say, though, Win2K is not a multi-user OS in the UNIX sense. I don't know why people make such a big deal out of that. It was not designed to be a multi-user OS (excluding the Terminal Server hack), and it is not marketed as such. How many people really need a multiple-simultaneous-user OS, anyway? Workstations are cheap.
Regardless of the security implications, no sane programmer would chose the former method. It wastes time, it makes the UI inconsistent, it bloats the code, and it creates many more opportunities for bugs. Even if those limitations aren't a problem, it would still never happen, because good programmers would sooner quit than be forced to cut-and-paste code (instead of using shared libraries.)
Microsof chose the latter option. All "active documents" can contain elements from any other COM object provider. The "downside" of this is that Office programs are now "too flexible" for many Slashdot types. IMHO, for the reasons above, I think that this is a fair trade-off.
Sure, bashing Microsoft is an easy way to boost your karma. But what exactly is your complaint about their support?
Personally, I've had two experiences with MS support. The first was when my MS mouse stopped working. MS sent me a new mouse, no questions asked, without even asking me to send the broken one back. The second was due to an obscure bug in Win2K that happened to affect a game that I was playing a lot. That one took a bit longer to solve, but eventually the support guy actually contacted the relevant programmer and had him send me a fixed DLL, hot off the compiler.
If only all software companies had that kind of support, the world would be a much better place.
I just downloaded and installed K-Meleon, just to try it out.
The fact that the whole download and installation process took about four minutes was the first thing that impressed me.
After browsing a few pages with it, it doesn't make me say "Wow, that's fast!" It does, however, make me say, "Wow, my hard drive isn't thrashing at all!" (Interestingly, that has been my experience with Linux as well.)
I appreciate their attempt to follow Windows standards, but I don't think they needed to clone the IE interface that closely. It's a little creepy.
I am ambivalent about the Mozilla widgets. (I should note that this is also my first experience with Mozilla, period.) Since most of the widgets only appear within web pages, the fact that they don't follow the user interface conventions might actually be a good thing (since the "web page" paradigm should be separate from the "dialog box" paradigm.) However, scroll bars are not part of the page, so there's no excuse for not using standard Windows scroll bars. (Unfortunately, from what I know of Mozilla's internals, that's probably hard to fix.)
The scroll bars are the only part that I really can't deal with. If they fix them, I would seriously consider using K-Meleon (instead of IE) for web browsing.
I don't find that funny.
Unfortunately, many of the loudest pro-DeCSS voices have another agenda entirely, as the judge noted above. I don't think that most intelligent Americans would agree with the contention that "information wants to be free," against the wishes of its authors. Besides, even if copyright is wrong, it's still the law of the land, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that a judge would have little sympathy for people who flagrantly disregard it.
Anti-IP folks remind me of the pro-hemp crowd. Sure, hemp should probably be legal. Maybe it really is environmentally friendly, and dirt cheap, and stronger than Kevlar (or whatever.) I'm still not going to take those claims seriously when I know that few (if any) hemp supporters could give a shit about making rope.
We need to have a clearer separation between the two arguments in favor of DeCSS. (The first being that it is protected speech, and the second being that evil corporations don't have any right to control the information that they create.) As long as the second argument keeps drowning out the first, our freedom of speech will continue to erode... and free speech is much more important that free DVDs.
(Since this will undoubtedly be a hot topic, let me repeat that I do not agree with the judge's decision. For that matter, I think drugs should be legal too.)
Linguists aren't really interested in orthography at all. What ultimately define a language are the structures that represent it in our minds... evidence about those structures can be found (for this case) by looking at things like stress and hyper-articulated speech. Spelling isn't very useful at all.
Just off the top of my head, I can see at least two things that might have been different if programming languages weren't designed by English-speakers.
The most obvious difference would be word order. Conventional expression syntax (i.e. "1 + 2") is clearly SVO, like English. Function calls are SVO, too, if you remember to include the subject: "subject = verb(object);" None of those conventions had to be that way. In fact, SOV order is easier to implement in some ways. (That's why a CS student's first expression parser will always be in RPN.)
It kinda makes you wonder if VSO speakers think that LISP is perfectly natural, and C is incomprehensible... (I doubt it, though.)
Another English-biased element of programming languages is their isolating nature. If I showed you a programming language in which the return type of a function is indicated by a suffix, i.e. "strlenint foostr;" you'd be right to scream and run away. For a native speaker of Southern Tiwa, though, it might seem perfectly natural.
French and English are basically the same language. Arabic is a bit more exotic, particularly because of its wacky infixes and circumfixes, but it's still very similar to the first two. I believe it's still SVO, also, or at least mostly SVO. Coming to a conclusion about human language based on your experiences with French, English, and Arabic, is like coming to a conclusion about music based on your experiences with Brittney Spears, Christine Aguilera, and maybe Puff Daddy. There is a lot more diversity in language, and it could definitely affect programming languages... I'll post my opinions on that later if I have the energy.
Your second claim is pretty fishy too, but there is something to it: English is very good at compounding words, which makes it easy to express new concepts such as "astronaut" or "e-commerce" (blech) or "batmobile". Whether that has had an influence on technological development or not, I couldn't say.
It's just like those signs they have outside of convenience stores, that say something like "Clerk cannot open safe." Restricting the clerk's priveleges may save his life.
There's just one catch... Execs choose to hold onto their copyrights because they think that they are more valuable closed than open. They can be wrong... in fact, in the case of software, they are almost always wrong. (IMHO) But that's incompetence, not malice. That's why the original poster's claim about movie copyrights set me off... destroying movies with expired copyrights would not benefit the owners in any way that I can see, and I just can't believe that they would do it out of sheer malice.
Actually, I was trying for something like, "If you don't like what the government is doing, just vote for a different RIAA next time!", but I couldn't make the sarcasm work.
*shrug*
However, writing letters is less effective when dealing with the increasingly subtle and complicated issues that our governments have been tackling lately, for two reasons:
First, I don't think my congressman would believe that his position on the DMCA (for example) is going to affect a single vote, let alone the outcome of the election. Frankly, even I wouldn't change my vote based on an issue like that. That leaves me with nothing to bargain with, so the lobbyists win by default.
Second, let's look at this from a politician's perspective: These guys are not rocket scientists. Even with support from his staff, a politician just isn't going to understand any particular issue as well as an expert in the field would. I think that's a large part of the reason why organizations like the RIAA have so much influence... because they provide the (genuine) expertise that politicians lack, at the expense of objectivity. In other words, legislators let the lobbyists think for them simply because it's easier than thinking for themselves.
Maybe the moral of this story is, vote for the smart guy! There has been a backlash against intellectuals in this country since the 60's, which may be part of the problem. Despite my strong political opinions, I'd rather vote for a candidate who thinks differently than I do, than one who doesn't think at all.
(This presidential election is going to be really painful for me...)
Grumble... I was trying to come up with a +1 Funny way of saying this, but it's not happening, so I'll just put it straight:
Does it bother anyone that the RIAA (and the MPAA and the SPA and the AARP and the NAACP and the AFL/CIO and lots of other TLA's) are rewriting the laws of this country? I thought only elected representatives could do that.
There's one thing that I don't understand about all these anti-IP fanatics. You guys like to throw around words like "evil" a lot, and compare Bill Gates to Satan, but of course everyone knows that big corporations aren't really evil -- they just want to make as much money as possible.
That's why the whole abandonware argument doesn't make much sense. The fact that companies still protect old software is proof that it still has some value. Are we really supposed to believe that executives hold on to copyrights just because they enjoy making people suffer?
You know, I was joking when I wrote that, but now that I think about it... Flashy and unusable GUI's are almost always written in Visual Basic, which happens to be a language that's very extensible. I would never suggest that a language be crippled to keep it from being misused by idiots (*cough* Windows Scripting Host *cough*), but I wonder how much more useful our computers would become if OCX's went away?