Actually I think that yes, no, fud, notfud, and the like are some of the most useful tags a story can get. Normal tagging has its advantages but I find it also tends to be fairly hit and miss on whether people made the associations you're counting on for your search, as well I don't really like the idea of having people do what search engines are designed for (but that's just my own anti-tag bias).
The/. tagging however has evolved into essentially a quick informal vote about the story (where the users make up the poll options). If you look at a story and see the most popular tag is fud while notfud is way back in the list than the story is probably fud. As well tags can tag a story as filler material, trolls, or anything else. The tags offer a venue for highly abstracted user generated feedback directly on the frontpage without going to the comments and I feel this is becomming a valuable part of/., in fact I would like if they show counts of each tag so you could see something like fud (666) notfud (42) to emphasize the polling ability of the tags.
It hurts Debian. They could simply have moved it to non-free, and many would have respected Debian for sticking to the letter of the DFSG. But instead, they chose this snarky little twist.
No they couldn't.
The the freeness of the logos was only part of the issue but it resulted in the second part of the issue. It was the fact that Debian like to maintain their releases for a very long time, longer than the Mozilla foundation does, and as a result Debian wants to still patch security holes in the version of firefox they ship even after the Mozilla foundation has stopped supporting that version. This would mean that the version of firefox that Debian was shipping would no longer be the same as the version that the Mozilla foundation shipped, as a result Mozilla doesn't want their trademark used in this situation.
Moving it to non-free was a non-option since it would still be violating Mozilla's trademark. Debian really only had a few options, 1) Upgrade the browser after Mozilla stops reporting it, some distros do this but Debian in general doesn't want to do full version upgrades in stable shipped systems. 2) Get approval from Mozilla for every security patch they do, not a good option as this is a slow and cumbersome process which you don't want for security fixes. 3) Do what they did, take out the Mozilla trademarks.
Please let me know if I made any errors in my summary of the situation.
Even if I had the skills, I don't have the time. And I can't afford to pay someone who can. So no - I can NOT maintain the code if it is intimately tied to a single developer. To suggest that I can is as farcical as suggesting that OSS is more secure because many eyes are critiquing the code - when in actual practice very few eyes are involved in most of the code on sourceforge etc.
Most of the code on sourceforge only matters to a handful of people, and if any of them really need it after the developer(s) quit they can either maintain it themselves or hire someone to (if they really need it they'll make the time).
For a major project like reiserfs if the lead developer goes than it's important enough that it will be easy to find new maintainers. Of course these new maintainers may not be as good or as familiar with the code (as with any project) and it may cause some delays during the transition but there's no question that reiserfs will continue to exist (even if it does change names).
Actually if wikipedia is to be believed Tucker Carlson, the conservative host of Crossfire that Stewart went the hardest on, actually resigned from Crossfire sometime before that for exactly the reasons that Stewart was talking about when he was on the show. That's probably the reason that he didn't fight back much, he actually agreed with what Stewart was saying.
What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?
The same as there are with current journalism, the rest of the mob.
Every time I watch the news or read a news report and I watch a report of event X in country Y I have to wonder how accurate a picture I'm getting. For the basic facts it's easy to look up a few different sources on google news, but to get an interpretation that isn't misleading me in some way seems almost impossible (definitely impossible to confirm it's unbiased).
Just look at any story that comes up concerning the US president and notice how there are at least two very valid sounding and completely contradictory viewpoints in the mainstream media. I'm beginning to feel that I can't trust the media for anything more than the bare facts (which themselves can be misleading when chosen carefully). Maybe citizen journalism will help to keep the mainstream media in check, or maybe I'm doomed to live in a cloud of uncertainty.
How about "I'm paying forty bucks a month for my cable bill, and wasn't that supposed to let them get by without ads?"
They could, but as I said less money coming in from ads means less money going to the shows as well, this could have effects such as fewer niche shows and lower budgets for other shows.
How about "I'm only paying for my cable bill because Roadrunner is faster than DSL, I haven't watched TV in 10 years?"
When I was in Toronto I paid for cable internet without paying for cable TV, they can't give internet without supplying TV but I didn't use it and they didn't charge for it, I don't know if it was the effect of locals laws but it's unfortunate if you can't do the same.
How about "I don't care what business model they use, because I don't care if they stay in business?"
Does that mean that you don't care if those specific companies stay in business (I don't) or you don't care if the television industry as a whole survives, because if you don't why the heck are you participating in this discussion? The fact is that to deliver watchable television we need some kind of business model.
How about "Isn't it their job to figure out how to make me want to watch it?"
I assume you mean the ad, in which case, they are trying very hard to make ads you want to watch (as they always have), but that's not an easy task and the old business model depended on packaging a show with the ads to make you want to watch the whole package. Now people can drop the ad part of the package which means the old model delivers less revenue regardless.
How about "These are supposed to be the smartest and best motivators on the planet, and they can't figure out how to motivate me to watch their ad?"
No they can't, at least not in amounts sufficient to sustain the industry at anything near its current level (that's why they put those things they call "shows" between some of the ads). Should the television industry die as a result or should we find something that works?
They're already begrudging the 20-22 minutes of non-advertising they have to show in each half an hour of eyeball time. They don't need excuses to cut into it, they do it anyway. Turn off your non-interactive video-game and go outside. Or at least play some Katamari Damarci.
If you want to go do something more productive with your time that's awesome. However, a lot of people like some of the content on television and if you're only contribution to the discussion on how to find a business model that co-exists with the technologies like the internet and PVRs is to whine, complain, and claim all their problems would go away if they just made more enjoyable ads (like they've been trying to do forever) then please go outside and stop adding noise to the discussion.
This is exactly the type of comment in these discussions that irritates me, no useful content, just complaints and solutions that fall apart on even the most cursory examination. If we want any say as a community on how things like this turn out with respect to the law and industry we're going to need to supply a lot more than contentless rants.
There are a lot of people here either complaining that they'll have to see the ad or rejoicing that they will be able to skip the ad easier.
My question to them is what do they want as a business model for television?
There are several possibilities.
1) No commercials, this is synonymous with the people who claim that should advertising adapt to become more interesting so people will willingly watch as I simply don't buy that argument (viewer interest is one of their primary motivations already).
In order to achieve content without commercials you need modifications to the system.
One is to pay significantly more for your television service (satellite or cable), I don't know how much more but likely not a trivial amount.
Another is to fund television primarly through things such as DVD sales (the broadcast of the show serves as an ad for the DVD), of course to increase DVD sales you need to reduce syndication and/or do something like make the season finale available only on the DVD version.
Of course another option is just to give the shows smaller budgets. Of course while some costs such as big name actors will come down without much of a loss of quality a significantly lower budget will inexorably lead to lower quality television overall.
Another way the industry could go is 2) Forced full length commercials, this is in the way of DRM and wouldn't allow you to fast forward through commercials (and probably a bigger war on bittorrent). Doesn't require the industry to adapt much but isn't very fun for us.
3) The final way is to fit in the advertising some other way.
One way here is product placement, if they can't get you to watch the ad seperatly from the show they may just make it part of the show. Of course this is done already but I see it becoming a lot more prevalent if traditional 15/30 second ads are no longer an option.
Another way is what they've described, substituting a minor ad in for the skipped one. The effect will be smaller and have some of the effects in 1) but it doesn't force the user to spend more time than they would have on ads already.
I'm sure I've missed some scenarios and made some logical errors but that's my quick take on this.
A lot of people here seem quite opposed to the idea that Linux becoming mainstream has tangible benefits and in fact seem to believe that it will actually hurt the application of Linux towards their interests.
I don't agree with this belief.
First consider the supposed drawbacks, the main being that the move towards increase usability for the masses will cripple the technical user. However, Apple has already successfully done the opposite with OS X, creating an OS usable for the technical user without compromising usability for the masses. Now I personally find the OS X interface a little constraining when I do technical work on a Mac but I consider this a good sign rather than a bad sign. With Apple, where a user friendly operating system tried to become technical, when the two considerations come into conflict the usability aspect wins. With Linux, where the core constituent is technical (particularly due to the grassroots developer base) I believe that when the two come into conflict that the technical user will win out.
Moreover, the nature of Linux means one can largely ignore the eye-candy one doesn't like. I don't use graphical file browsers nor many other graphical applications for routine tasks (copying files, extracting tarballs, burning CDs), however, when a task comes up for which I don't know the command line tools I'll often start with a graphical tool just to get a feel for the process. I'm not aware of any instance (other than Gnome removing the terminal from the context menu) where a push towards greater usability has harmed the technical user (btw the gnome thing just needs nautilus-open-terminal).
As for benefits, they are numerous, the biggest being involved in the future of the internet. How much of the internet and consumer devices are being built around DRM-loaded music stores and proprietary codecs and technologies? It's already happening, iTunes under Linux? Maybe using some pseudo-legal project or wine (haven't tried), Linux users are finding themselves locked out of a lot of places the internet is going and are being forced to make some very serious compromises if they want to go along for the ride. I feel the only way to combat this 1) Legisation mandating all formats and technologies be open (like that's going to happen) or 2) Linux acquires a significant marketshare. In addition by spreading Linux to people who aren't fully aware of FLOSS we start spreading some of those ideas to a wider audience and showing them they can succeed. Heck, maybe we give some of these developers stuck re-implementing proprietary wheels something more productive to do with their time.
Is some level of compromise necessary currently? I'd hazard no just because I think with google installing proprietary codecs like lame should be simple enought for any user technically advanced enough to use Linux on a regular basis as to not justify sacrificing our ideals. However, in the end and as Linux usability improves further a little pragmatism in select cases might do a lot more to service freedom than a strict adherance to open source principals.
I'm sorry but can you honestly say there is no difficutly in taking over any given airliner and flying it to a specific destintation?
I'm saying it's quite feasible as was proven in various hijackings before 9/11, with the liquid explosives many of those steps have no such proven feasibility.
But couldn't we have made all these drawn out "first they'd have to learn how to fly commercial jetliners, not necessarily knowing which types they'd eventually board, then they'd have to successfully get to the cockpit without being incapacitated, and THEN they'd have to make the pilots think they were hijacking the plane, then kill them, and if all that weren't enough, then they'd have to actually divert the planes successfully to their targets as inexperienced pilots, AND hit them once there"-type things about 9/11, too?
Not only that, first they'd have to move to the US, then they'd have to find some sort of living arrangements, they'd need some way to pay not only for their residence but food and beverages on a daily basis just to stay alive before they even got to the airport!
I'm sorry but none of the things you mentioned sound that complicated to me, but the actions required to pull off a liquid explosives attack on an airplane do.
My understanding is that a lot of the security problems in MS Office comes from bad design wrt things like macros which make it very hard to secure the system. If OpenOffice is working towards compatibility with MS Office they may be having to deal with the same types of security issues in trying to secure bad macros and such. Thus it makes sense that OpenOffice would be just as, or even more, insecure than OpenOffice, not only do they have many of the same classes of exploits, but they also have greater pressure to rush these features out (for compatibility reasons) and up till now haven't had the motivation of attackers actively exploiting them to force them to spend the necessary time on security.
It possible that they're both right. That xen is stable enough for Novell but not for Red Hat.
That isn't a shot a Novell, the two companies just have customers that expect a different balance with regards to price, support, and stability, if you look at the market Red Hat is really trying to position itself as having stability and support on par with traditional Unix vendors (such as Sun) while Novell is looking to a lot of the businesses who would find Red Hat's offering too pricey. A xen install that is stable enough for Novell customers may not be sufficient for Red Hat customers.
Because reading at +5 is, apparently, too much effort.
Interesting to note though that I had a comment backslashed a while back. In the original story it was modded up to 3 and drew a couple minor replies and no one else in the comments covered what I discussed at all. Then when the story was off the front page (or just about) the comment suddenly shot up to +5 and showed up in backslash (where again everyone ignored the topic in the comments:).
I have a strong hunch that Timothy reads through a lot of the comments (at least down to +3) and looks for unique pieces of brilliance (ok, my hunch might be a little biased since I got picked...) and any that he finds he backslashes and makes sure they're at +5.
I personally enjoy the backslash articles since I don't always have time to read all the comments at 4/5 and many at that level are quite redundant. It's nice to get a quick summary of the discussion that highlights the main views and points.
My laptop has an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900- and I bought it specifically because it had the open source i810 driver. It can't play a lot of games but it plays tuxracer and tremulous (albeit on the lowest settings and with FPS from 10-20 when there's action). Most importantly it works out of the box with FC5 and I would much rather have this slow card that can't play a lot of games than some NVidia or ATI card where I would have to constantly update their proprietary drivers.
Actually you could have reversed the analogy entirely, Japan being involved in a war with China then inexplicably picking a fight with the US and diverting the majority of their troops towards that effort!
For the analogy to work, your non-cowardly ex-isolationists would have to declare war on Japan, and then inexplicably divert the bulk of military force to conquering, say, Indonesia.
Not to suggest that I even remotely support Bush going into Iraq or that these circumstances are comparable...
But in WWII the US did divert the bulk of their military force to conquering Germany before they went to Japan:)
i run about 40-50 xen clients on a handful of moderate server hosts.
perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT
quickly reproducible, adjustable resourcing, and lets me give devs root acces on their own clients.
i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'
That it worked in your configuration doesn't means it lacks serious issues. Xen is still a relatively immature product in the virtualization market and probably has a was to go before it's bulletproof enought to compete with VMware.
This article explains it a little better. " The big-name vendors may do well to follow Scott's methodical approach to Xen as well, according to Haff. "Look how long it took [VMware] to evolve into a production role; how long it took IBM to develop virtualization on Power. My belief is that Novell is doing Xen a disservice by taking an enterprise-class distribution and including what amounts to an experimental early-stage product. What if someone tries it and their reaction is VMware is so much better than this?
"They could end up giving Xen a black eye," Haff said. "
From what I can gather from the article this policy is actually harming security.
They say Treasury guidelines are sending more people to informal money transfer networks called "hundis" or "hawalas" that have been used by gangsters and terrorists because they circumvent such scrutiny.
"Sending money by hawala is cheaper and it does not get checked by banks, so it is quicker," said a Pakistani taxi driver who called himself Munir Ahmed. "They say it is not legal, but it is a reliable alternative to Western Union."
If law abiding people are avoiding official institutions what makes them think that terrorists are stupid enough to use them?!?
More than that by driving additional people to the hawalas it circumvents existing security measures. For starters it means that more money (even the legit stuff) is moving around and they have no idea where it went, also the additional people using the hawalas will mean they are more developed for the terrorists use them. Additionally when you uncover a hawala network it will be that much harder to pick out the terrorists since you've added all these false positives, and finally for the terrorists who would have used official institutions in the past since it was easy and the hawalas weren't developed, now you no longer have a money trail you can inspect later on.
All this security measure does is inconvenience and alientate a whole bunch of people while making the world a little less safe.
it creates a new and as-yet-uncracked DRM format and larger file sizes so complete rips will be more difficult to trade online.
Not many people on slashdot are talking about it but my major concern with the new formats is how much tougher the DRM will be.
Currently with DVDs DRM is no longer an issue for me, with the relatively straightforward installation of an rpm I can dependibly play DVDs on my Linux box, as a result I have bought a fair number of DVDs.
If their new DRM is unbroken -- or even just partially broken so you don't know if you can play a disk when you buy it -- than I will not be able to play these new disks and thus I will not buy them. Thus when they eventually eliminate traditional DVDs entirely I will have only four choices
1) find some proprietary player for Linux which will likely suck (since it can't be customized for my distro) 2) switch to a proprietary OS such as windows or mac, no way that's gonna happen 3) forego big media entirely, possible but not very fun 4) become a pirate
well I have a pretty good idea what my choice is gonna be
Everyone seems to be making comments like this is some mistake or tactic by the RIAA and that piracy is still going to destroy them.
But from the sounds of it they're just starting to accept what we have been saying all along. That the industry CAN coexist with a certain level of piracy and the best way to combat piracy is with good music downloading services.
Hopefully this is a signal that they're going to start scaling pack their allout war on piracy and any technology that has the potential to enable piracy.
Im no linux expert, but the PS3 will be running some form of it, and, afaik, drivers for things like cd/dvd drives are programmed into the kernel, so I assume sony would have to put the driver for it there. Since linux is GPL'd they would also have to release their modified code, which would have all the necessary blu-ray details taken care of.
I'm not sure if all kernel modules have to be open source but even if they do Sony could do the same as NVIDIA and have an open source module which somehow interacts with a proprietary driver (I don't know the technical details but I know it allows NVIDIA to have a proprietary driver).
Though even if they did make the driver open source that's not really the important thing, the problem is the player which contains the decryption keys necessary to decrypt the data on the DVDs, this isn't anymore a part of the kernel than xine or mplayer and this does not have to be open source.
Even if Sony in some un-Sonylike gesture actually released their proprietary player on Linux it's still not nearly enough. It means I have to be running a configuration that they support, not just ppc vs i386, even running a different distribution could lock me out, and of course it would mean I'd be stuck with their player as opposed to one of my choosing.
I've come to the conclusion that any DRM is too much DRM since the moment you add DRM it becomes fundamentally incompatible with open source software.
Slashdot Mirror
Will work for food.
Actually I think that yes, no, fud, notfud, and the like are some of the most useful tags a story can get. Normal tagging has its advantages but I find it also tends to be fairly hit and miss on whether people made the associations you're counting on for your search, as well I don't really like the idea of having people do what search engines are designed for (but that's just my own anti-tag bias).
/. tagging however has evolved into essentially a quick informal vote about the story (where the users make up the poll options). If you look at a story and see the most popular tag is fud while notfud is way back in the list than the story is probably fud. As well tags can tag a story as filler material, trolls, or anything else. The tags offer a venue for highly abstracted user generated feedback directly on the frontpage without going to the comments and I feel this is becomming a valuable part of /., in fact I would like if they show counts of each tag so you could see something like fud (666) notfud (42) to emphasize the polling ability of the tags.
The
It hurts Debian. They could simply have moved it to non-free, and many would have respected Debian for sticking to the letter of the DFSG. But instead, they chose this snarky little twist.
No they couldn't.
The the freeness of the logos was only part of the issue but it resulted in the second part of the issue. It was the fact that Debian like to maintain their releases for a very long time, longer than the Mozilla foundation does, and as a result Debian wants to still patch security holes in the version of firefox they ship even after the Mozilla foundation has stopped supporting that version. This would mean that the version of firefox that Debian was shipping would no longer be the same as the version that the Mozilla foundation shipped, as a result Mozilla doesn't want their trademark used in this situation.
Moving it to non-free was a non-option since it would still be violating Mozilla's trademark. Debian really only had a few options,
1) Upgrade the browser after Mozilla stops reporting it, some distros do this but Debian in general doesn't want to do full version upgrades in stable shipped systems.
2) Get approval from Mozilla for every security patch they do, not a good option as this is a slow and cumbersome process which you don't want for security fixes.
3) Do what they did, take out the Mozilla trademarks.
Please let me know if I made any errors in my summary of the situation.
Actually no.
I can not maintain the code.
Even if I had the skills, I don't have the time. And I can't afford to pay someone who can. So no - I can NOT maintain the code if it is intimately tied to a single developer. To suggest that I can is as farcical as suggesting that OSS is more secure because many eyes are critiquing the code - when in actual practice very few eyes are involved in most of the code on sourceforge etc.
Most of the code on sourceforge only matters to a handful of people, and if any of them really need it after the developer(s) quit they can either maintain it themselves or hire someone to (if they really need it they'll make the time).
For a major project like reiserfs if the lead developer goes than it's important enough that it will be easy to find new maintainers. Of course these new maintainers may not be as good or as familiar with the code (as with any project) and it may cause some delays during the transition but there's no question that reiserfs will continue to exist (even if it does change names).
Actually if wikipedia is to be believed Tucker Carlson, the conservative host of Crossfire that Stewart went the hardest on, actually resigned from Crossfire sometime before that for exactly the reasons that Stewart was talking about when he was on the show. That's probably the reason that he didn't fight back much, he actually agreed with what Stewart was saying.
Although it's still in the early stages Red Hat is working on developing a pretty nice debugger http://sourceware.org/frysk/
What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?
The same as there are with current journalism, the rest of the mob.
Every time I watch the news or read a news report and I watch a report of event X in country Y I have to wonder how accurate a picture I'm getting. For the basic facts it's easy to look up a few different sources on google news, but to get an interpretation that isn't misleading me in some way seems almost impossible (definitely impossible to confirm it's unbiased).
Just look at any story that comes up concerning the US president and notice how there are at least two very valid sounding and completely contradictory viewpoints in the mainstream media. I'm beginning to feel that I can't trust the media for anything more than the bare facts (which themselves can be misleading when chosen carefully). Maybe citizen journalism will help to keep the mainstream media in check, or maybe I'm doomed to live in a cloud of uncertainty.
How about "I'm paying forty bucks a month for my cable bill, and wasn't that supposed to let them get by without ads?"
They could, but as I said less money coming in from ads means less money going to the shows as well, this could have effects such as fewer niche shows and lower budgets for other shows.
How about "I'm only paying for my cable bill because Roadrunner is faster than DSL, I haven't watched TV in 10 years?"
When I was in Toronto I paid for cable internet without paying for cable TV, they can't give internet without supplying TV but I didn't use it and they didn't charge for it, I don't know if it was the effect of locals laws but it's unfortunate if you can't do the same.
How about "I don't care what business model they use, because I don't care if they stay in business?"
Does that mean that you don't care if those specific companies stay in business (I don't) or you don't care if the television industry as a whole survives, because if you don't why the heck are you participating in this discussion? The fact is that to deliver watchable television we need some kind of business model.
How about "Isn't it their job to figure out how to make me want to watch it?"
I assume you mean the ad, in which case, they are trying very hard to make ads you want to watch (as they always have), but that's not an easy task and the old business model depended on packaging a show with the ads to make you want to watch the whole package. Now people can drop the ad part of the package which means the old model delivers less revenue regardless.
How about "These are supposed to be the smartest and best motivators on the planet, and they can't figure out how to motivate me to watch their ad?"
No they can't, at least not in amounts sufficient to sustain the industry at anything near its current level (that's why they put those things they call "shows" between some of the ads). Should the television industry die as a result or should we find something that works?
They're already begrudging the 20-22 minutes of non-advertising they have to show in each half an hour of eyeball time. They don't need excuses to cut into it, they do it anyway. Turn off your non-interactive video-game and go outside. Or at least play some Katamari Damarci.
If you want to go do something more productive with your time that's awesome. However, a lot of people like some of the content on television and if you're only contribution to the discussion on how to find a business model that co-exists with the technologies like the internet and PVRs is to whine, complain, and claim all their problems would go away if they just made more enjoyable ads (like they've been trying to do forever) then please go outside and stop adding noise to the discussion.
This is exactly the type of comment in these discussions that irritates me, no useful content, just complaints and solutions that fall apart on even the most cursory examination. If we want any say as a community on how things like this turn out with respect to the law and industry we're going to need to supply a lot more than contentless rants.
There are a lot of people here either complaining that they'll have to see the ad or rejoicing that they will be able to skip the ad easier.
My question to them is what do they want as a business model for television?
There are several possibilities.
1) No commercials, this is synonymous with the people who claim that should advertising adapt to become more interesting so people will willingly watch as I simply don't buy that argument (viewer interest is one of their primary motivations already).
In order to achieve content without commercials you need modifications to the system.
One is to pay significantly more for your television service (satellite or cable), I don't know how much more but likely not a trivial amount.
Another is to fund television primarly through things such as DVD sales (the broadcast of the show serves as an ad for the DVD), of course to increase DVD sales you need to reduce syndication and/or do something like make the season finale available only on the DVD version.
Of course another option is just to give the shows smaller budgets. Of course while some costs such as big name actors will come down without much of a loss of quality a significantly lower budget will inexorably lead to lower quality television overall.
Another way the industry could go is 2) Forced full length commercials, this is in the way of DRM and wouldn't allow you to fast forward through commercials (and probably a bigger war on bittorrent). Doesn't require the industry to adapt much but isn't very fun for us.
3) The final way is to fit in the advertising some other way.
One way here is product placement, if they can't get you to watch the ad seperatly from the show they may just make it part of the show. Of course this is done already but I see it becoming a lot more prevalent if traditional 15/30 second ads are no longer an option.
Another way is what they've described, substituting a minor ad in for the skipped one. The effect will be smaller and have some of the effects in 1) but it doesn't force the user to spend more time than they would have on ads already.
I'm sure I've missed some scenarios and made some logical errors but that's my quick take on this.
A lot of people here seem quite opposed to the idea that Linux becoming mainstream has tangible benefits and in fact seem to believe that it will actually hurt the application of Linux towards their interests.
I don't agree with this belief.
First consider the supposed drawbacks, the main being that the move towards increase usability for the masses will cripple the technical user. However, Apple has already successfully done the opposite with OS X, creating an OS usable for the technical user without compromising usability for the masses. Now I personally find the OS X interface a little constraining when I do technical work on a Mac but I consider this a good sign rather than a bad sign. With Apple, where a user friendly operating system tried to become technical, when the two considerations come into conflict the usability aspect wins. With Linux, where the core constituent is technical (particularly due to the grassroots developer base) I believe that when the two come into conflict that the technical user will win out.
Moreover, the nature of Linux means one can largely ignore the eye-candy one doesn't like. I don't use graphical file browsers nor many other graphical applications for routine tasks (copying files, extracting tarballs, burning CDs), however, when a task comes up for which I don't know the command line tools I'll often start with a graphical tool just to get a feel for the process. I'm not aware of any instance (other than Gnome removing the terminal from the context menu) where a push towards greater usability has harmed the technical user (btw the gnome thing just needs nautilus-open-terminal).
As for benefits, they are numerous, the biggest being involved in the future of the internet. How much of the internet and consumer devices are being built around DRM-loaded music stores and proprietary codecs and technologies? It's already happening, iTunes under Linux? Maybe using some pseudo-legal project or wine (haven't tried), Linux users are finding themselves locked out of a lot of places the internet is going and are being forced to make some very serious compromises if they want to go along for the ride. I feel the only way to combat this 1) Legisation mandating all formats and technologies be open (like that's going to happen) or 2) Linux acquires a significant marketshare. In addition by spreading Linux to people who aren't fully aware of FLOSS we start spreading some of those ideas to a wider audience and showing them they can succeed. Heck, maybe we give some of these developers stuck re-implementing proprietary wheels something more productive to do with their time.
Is some level of compromise necessary currently? I'd hazard no just because I think with google installing proprietary codecs like lame should be simple enought for any user technically advanced enough to use Linux on a regular basis as to not justify sacrificing our ideals. However, in the end and as Linux usability improves further a little pragmatism in select cases might do a lot more to service freedom than a strict adherance to open source principals.
I'm actually Canadian :)
I'm sorry but can you honestly say there is no difficutly in taking over any given airliner and flying it to a specific destintation?
I'm saying it's quite feasible as was proven in various hijackings before 9/11, with the liquid explosives many of those steps have no such proven feasibility.
But couldn't we have made all these drawn out "first they'd have to learn how to fly commercial jetliners, not necessarily knowing which types they'd eventually board, then they'd have to successfully get to the cockpit without being incapacitated, and THEN they'd have to make the pilots think they were hijacking the plane, then kill them, and if all that weren't enough, then they'd have to actually divert the planes successfully to their targets as inexperienced pilots, AND hit them once there"-type things about 9/11, too?
Not only that, first they'd have to move to the US, then they'd have to find some sort of living arrangements, they'd need some way to pay not only for their residence but food and beverages on a daily basis just to stay alive before they even got to the airport!
I'm sorry but none of the things you mentioned sound that complicated to me, but the actions required to pull off a liquid explosives attack on an airplane do.
My understanding is that a lot of the security problems in MS Office comes from bad design wrt things like macros which make it very hard to secure the system. If OpenOffice is working towards compatibility with MS Office they may be having to deal with the same types of security issues in trying to secure bad macros and such. Thus it makes sense that OpenOffice would be just as, or even more, insecure than OpenOffice, not only do they have many of the same classes of exploits, but they also have greater pressure to rush these features out (for compatibility reasons) and up till now haven't had the motivation of attackers actively exploiting them to force them to spend the necessary time on security.
It possible that they're both right. That xen is stable enough for Novell but not for Red Hat.
That isn't a shot a Novell, the two companies just have customers that expect a different balance with regards to price, support, and stability, if you look at the market Red Hat is really trying to position itself as having stability and support on par with traditional Unix vendors (such as Sun) while Novell is looking to a lot of the businesses who would find Red Hat's offering too pricey. A xen install that is stable enough for Novell customers may not be sufficient for Red Hat customers.
Because reading at +5 is, apparently, too much effort.
Interesting to note though that I had a comment backslashed a while back. In the original story it was modded up to 3 and drew a couple minor replies and no one else in the comments covered what I discussed at all. Then when the story was off the front page (or just about) the comment suddenly shot up to +5 and showed up in backslash (where again everyone ignored the topic in the comments:).
I have a strong hunch that Timothy reads through a lot of the comments (at least down to +3) and looks for unique pieces of brilliance (ok, my hunch might be a little biased since I got picked...) and any that he finds he backslashes and makes sure they're at +5.
I personally enjoy the backslash articles since I don't always have time to read all the comments at 4/5 and many at that level are quite redundant. It's nice to get a quick summary of the discussion that highlights the main views and points.
My laptop has an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900- and I bought it specifically because it had the open source i810 driver. It can't play a lot of games but it plays tuxracer and tremulous (albeit on the lowest settings and with FPS from 10-20 when there's action). Most importantly it works out of the box with FC5 and I would much rather have this slow card that can't play a lot of games than some NVidia or ATI card where I would have to constantly update their proprietary drivers.
Actually you could have reversed the analogy entirely, Japan being involved in a war with China then inexplicably picking a fight with the US and diverting the majority of their troops towards that effort!
For the analogy to work, your non-cowardly ex-isolationists would have to declare war on Japan, and then inexplicably divert the bulk of military force to conquering, say, Indonesia.
:)
Not to suggest that I even remotely support Bush going into Iraq or that these circumstances are comparable...
But in WWII the US did divert the bulk of their military force to conquering Germany before they went to Japan
i run about 40-50 xen clients on a handful of moderate server hosts.
perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT
quickly reproducible, adjustable resourcing, and lets me give devs root acces on their own clients.
i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'
That it worked in your configuration doesn't means it lacks serious issues. Xen is still a relatively immature product in the virtualization market and probably has a was to go before it's bulletproof enought to compete with VMware.
This article explains it a little better.
"
The big-name vendors may do well to follow Scott's methodical approach to Xen as well, according to Haff. "Look how long it took [VMware] to evolve into a production role; how long it took IBM to develop virtualization on Power. My belief is that Novell is doing Xen a disservice by taking an enterprise-class distribution and including what amounts to an experimental early-stage product. What if someone tries it and their reaction is VMware is so much better than this?
"They could end up giving Xen a black eye," Haff said. "
From what I can gather from the article this policy is actually harming security.
They say Treasury guidelines are sending more people to informal money transfer networks called "hundis" or "hawalas" that have been used by gangsters and terrorists because they circumvent such scrutiny.
"Sending money by hawala is cheaper and it does not get checked by banks, so it is quicker," said a Pakistani taxi driver who called himself Munir Ahmed. "They say it is not legal, but it is a reliable alternative to Western Union."
If law abiding people are avoiding official institutions what makes them think that terrorists are stupid enough to use them?!?
More than that by driving additional people to the hawalas it circumvents existing security measures. For starters it means that more money (even the legit stuff) is moving around and they have no idea where it went, also the additional people using the hawalas will mean they are more developed for the terrorists use them. Additionally when you uncover a hawala network it will be that much harder to pick out the terrorists since you've added all these false positives, and finally for the terrorists who would have used official institutions in the past since it was easy and the hawalas weren't developed, now you no longer have a money trail you can inspect later on.
All this security measure does is inconvenience and alientate a whole bunch of people while making the world a little less safe.
Pack the sucker in foam, put it in a box and send it UPS insured for $1k or actual value, whichever is more. They'll handle it like a newborn kitten.
And that's supposed to be a good thing?!
I tried sending a newborn kitten just like that via UPS once, I don't think you'd want a laptop ending up like that kitten did!
it creates a new and as-yet-uncracked DRM format and larger file sizes so complete rips will be more difficult to trade online.
Not many people on slashdot are talking about it but my major concern with the new formats is how much tougher the DRM will be.
Currently with DVDs DRM is no longer an issue for me, with the relatively straightforward installation of an rpm I can dependibly play DVDs on my Linux box, as a result I have bought a fair number of DVDs.
If their new DRM is unbroken -- or even just partially broken so you don't know if you can play a disk when you buy it -- than I will not be able to play these new disks and thus I will not buy them. Thus when they eventually eliminate traditional DVDs entirely I will have only four choices
1) find some proprietary player for Linux which will likely suck (since it can't be customized for my distro)
2) switch to a proprietary OS such as windows or mac, no way that's gonna happen
3) forego big media entirely, possible but not very fun
4) become a pirate
well I have a pretty good idea what my choice is gonna be
aaarrrr
Everyone seems to be making comments like this is some mistake or tactic by the RIAA and that piracy is still going to destroy them.
But from the sounds of it they're just starting to accept what we have been saying all along. That the industry CAN coexist with a certain level of piracy and the best way to combat piracy is with good music downloading services.
Hopefully this is a signal that they're going to start scaling pack their allout war on piracy and any technology that has the potential to enable piracy.
Im no linux expert, but the PS3 will be running some form of it, and, afaik, drivers for things like cd/dvd drives are programmed into the kernel, so I assume sony would have to put the driver for it there. Since linux is GPL'd they would also have to release their modified code, which would have all the necessary blu-ray details taken care of.
I'm not sure if all kernel modules have to be open source but even if they do Sony could do the same as NVIDIA and have an open source module which somehow interacts with a proprietary driver (I don't know the technical details but I know it allows NVIDIA to have a proprietary driver).
Though even if they did make the driver open source that's not really the important thing, the problem is the player which contains the decryption keys necessary to decrypt the data on the DVDs, this isn't anymore a part of the kernel than xine or mplayer and this does not have to be open source.
Even if Sony in some un-Sonylike gesture actually released their proprietary player on Linux it's still not nearly enough. It means I have to be running a configuration that they support, not just ppc vs i386, even running a different distribution could lock me out, and of course it would mean I'd be stuck with their player as opposed to one of my choosing.
I've come to the conclusion that any DRM is too much DRM since the moment you add DRM it becomes fundamentally incompatible with open source software.