Copyright law in the US was formed a devil's bargain from the beginning. The founding fathers understood the purpose of such laws was the promotion of creative arts. They never wanted people to own ideas, which they correctly understood as something other than property.
Software is not an idea. If you think that way, you're a clearly messed up person. Software is a creative work.
You're clearly distorting the whole concept of an "idea" by making that absurd affirmation. An idea is something like "we should sell red soccer balls", and not 200 million lines of C. A song an idea too? HELL NO.
My comment has nothing do to with "measuring security", so enough with the negative "this has nothing to do with security" comments about quoting defacing statistics.
You said:
By your reasoning, hackers would concentrate on Apache instead of IIS because it runs more servers. Wrong, they still attack IIS more.
I say: You are WRONG.
From Zone-h.org:
324 single IP
1896 mass defacements
Linux (81.4%)
Win 2003 (9.3%)
FreeBSD (4.1%)
Win 2000 (3.8%)
Unknown (0.5%)
SolarisSunOS (0.4%)
MacOSX (0.4%)
Win NT9x (0.0%)
Whatever the most secure server might be, Apache is most likely (as Zone-h only shows the O.S.) the current hacker target. It's an statistical fact, not a conclusion.
Install a Fedora RPM and look how many shared libraries are installed private to that RPM. You will find damn few packages like this.
Now install just about any commercial software package for Windows, and count the number of DLLs that get dumped in application-private directories.
Yet Windows will not load a different module if the private and public dlls are the same ones. If a programmer decides to use his own copy of windows dlls, that's his problem.
Under Windows, for various reasons (including the lack of a sane update and library dependency management system), applications all have their own damn copies of all the shared libraries.
No, they won't. You're just bullshitting, I'm sorry.
If your sole criteria is "Progress is good, as long as no one gets harmed in the progress," then nothing will ever get done, as it's next to impossible to make a decision that everyone agrees with and "harms" no one.
Then step out of the "I want my benefit" line and voluteer for getting harmed. What are you waiting for?
No problem if someone starts to run any kind of legal business that attract a lot of people usually involved in illegal activities to your neighborhood, right? I mean, what kind of sick person considers a "harm" not being able to raise your children in the same place you were born? I mean, people need to "get things done", dont you think?
It's pretty obvious that we all draw the line in places that are far, far away from our space.
BTW: I'm not against big decisions that change the world around us. But there is a clear difference between a widely-discussed issue involving a huge investment and a common plan (involving the majority of society) and dream, and some stupid Power Company trying to get cheap (with use rigths enforced by the local police and not the land owner and neighborhood needs) realstate to build their industrial infrastructure.
This is not about "OH MY GOD, BLACKOUTS ALL OVER THE PLACE, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING", but about "Power Companies are trying to get cheaper implementation costs do to something they are already supposed (by law) to do in the first place". If local society turns on the red light for this solution, for any reason, the Power Company will just look somewhere else to install Windmills, coal turbines or anything else.
We live in a society and we take benefits from that society. Sometimes we need to pay for these benefits and this is just one way it happenes. I would suggest instead of fighting it, make provisions in allowing it so that many concerns are addressed. It falling property values because of this happen, then ask for insurance or something of the sort to guarente the present market value. If the power lines start causing cancer in children like claims indicate in the past, then ask for asurance in relocation. If underground wiring is going to be used, make sure it follows property lines so you can still build on your property and as little space possible will be efected.
Yeah, real nice. Wait for your kids to start dying and then "do something", right? I mean: everything can be fixed, right? Well, all these semiconductor factory workers handling toxic materials because their bosses don't give sh*t about their health: they are just paying for the benefits that "society" gave them, right?. And if someone passes out in the middle of work, you just relocate the worker into some office position.
You say that "someone needs to pay for all these benefits", but I'm pretty sure that you're obviously not going to become a volunteer and just "pay society". It's pretty fucking easy to tell someone else to "have it and shut up".
I would suggest instead of fighting it, make provisions in allowing it so that many concerns are addressed
Yep, like your voice is really going be heard in this kind of situation. This kind of industrial implementation is not that flexible as you think. And most of its lack of flexiblity comes from the fact that the big company guys implementing the system will not give a flying fuck about what you ask, think or need.
No, it's attitudes like this one that will be our downfall. Look genius, even a casual reading of the article indicates that they're looking to place these things in RURAL areas (e.g. farmland), while you make it sound like some idiot's going to plant one in the back yard of his half acre subdivision.
You're trying to make this situation sound as if they're going to have individual, solitary, wind turbines occupying a smallish part of a giant farm. It's not about "land size" but about "density".
Here's an idea. Rather than making a "sacrifice", how about we let the farmer in our example decide for himself if the reward compensates for the potential risk? And not pressure him on one side by the idiots in government, nor on the other by the idiots for whom any change is evil.
If his decision does not affect his neighbours in any way, then I'm all for it. But things doesn't always work like this. In fact, they don't, most of the time.
Would you like to live close to a giant (yet in someone else's property) "BILL GATES IS GAY" poster? Maybe a "THIS THE HOME OF DEMOCRAT (or REPUBLICAN) PEOPLE" or maybe any kind of phrase you might find offensive? I mean, the giant poster is not on your property, so it's not your problem, right?
What about having your house value decrease because of someone else's decision? Is it OK for you? What about the kind of decision you were against of, in the first place? Is it "acceptable in the name of progress" to lose money (the real world representation of what might be years of work) to allow the Power Company of some politician's brother to have giant profits? Oh no, it's for "The Country", right?
Progress is good, as long as no one gets harmed in the progress. I mean, all these black slaves, who cares if they're suffering? Worker rights? Are these people insane? Are they fighting TO STOP PROGRESS?
Where do we draw the line on what's really "evil", Mr. Patriot?
Though I'd like to take all of the people who're making protests and cut off their power for a month or so. Just so they can have a taste of what's coming.
It would be much better to cut all of your citizen right's "for a month or so". Just so you can have a taste of what's "not fighthing progress".
there is a windmill turbine at the bottom of Duffering St in toronto. I stood under it and was amazed as how quiet it was.
Quiet enough to visit it or to have it on your backyard, running 24/7, even when you're trying to sleep? Even some computers can be considered "quiet", yet they can really piss you off when they're the only noise you hear at the time you want to sleep.
I don't like the idea of installing industrial production machinery on people's backyards. The maintenance might not bother people when things run smoothly, but in case of any problem, you'll need a few days (maybe weeks) at a hotel.
Besides all of that, I bet that the wiring infrastructure is also going to be a big mess, either with visible suspended cables or nasty backyard-stealing underground cabling. And I'm pretty sure that most people are not going to have a choice about what they want, they'll just sign the contract and will have to accept any kind of solution they might install. Even the extremely bad looking aereal cables. Right over your house.
T-1 cards are lower volume and are much more fault tolerant than any ADSL card. Suggesting that Cisco buys T1 IP from a Chinese company proves you have no idea what you are talking about.
This kind of fault-tolerant-design is not such a big secret anymore, as it was 10 years ago. You can find the same level of integrated circuit complexity of a extremely-fault-tolerant T1 Card in a lot of consumer electronics like DVD-Players, Photo printers, etc. etc..
I repeat: the technology needed for this kind of device is really old. So old that even the most complex designs can fit inside of a single unit of what I called a "cheap-ass FPGA". The kind of FPGA so cheap that you'll find better ones inside the cheapest ADSL modems in the market.
All this "fault-tolerant" talk made sense only 10 years ago, when the required circuitry and microprocessing power needed for this kind of application was extremely expensive and had no mass-production market. Heck, today you can even BIT-BANG (software signal generation) a T1 connection with these 10-dollar embedded 400MHz SoCs that WiFi routers use these days.
FPGAs are cheap because they can be made in quantity and the IP costs are much lower than say an Athlon. ASICs are even cheaper in many cases. The actual physical costs of the ASICs I work on is probably around 5-6 cents per die. Of course, selling them at a dime each wouldn't even pay for the compute farm we needed to run our regression tests on the actual design.
New products really have huge development costs. But this kind of legacy stuff don't.
'industry standard hardware designs'?? There is no such thing. Not even commerical PCI IP cores are drop-in, not USB cores, not graphics cores, not IrDA cores, none of them are zero work.
I'm sorry, but you're just... wrong. While it's pretty obvious that there is no such thing as development with zero-work, that's not my point. I'm talking about low cost, and today's cores are pretty much drop-in. About the HW designs: reference designs can even be found for free today at any semiconductor company website. Others will cost you no more than a few thousand dollars.
Any company could build what we build just as easily as I could copy any mathematics textbook.
If can license a textbook's content and sell it yourself. The older the textbooks, cheaper the license.
With increasing competition from Europe, Japan, China, India, and other areas and nations, America will have to make a choice. They can choose to continue innovating, and perhaps maintain a lead over other nations. Otherwise, they can choose to let legalities unnecessarily interfere with progress, and they will fall behind those countries who aren't bogged down with pointless and greed-driven lawsuits.
Ok then. "America" is waiting for you to become a volunteer for this precious project, before these nasty foreigners steal "America's progress". I'm sure you wouldn't mine having your father's (even if it's yours now) house, or even your own, lose a share of its value and forcing you to spend a few bucks on soundproof windows.
And I bet you wouldn't mind to transform your house exterior area into an extremely noisy place. Who likes to go outside, anyway? Oh, and don't mind these maintenance dudes hanging out at your garden every once in a while, as they're a part of the project too.
Oh, I forgot to tell you: sometimes, engineering products fail. In a small fraction of these situations, they can fail catastrophically, like with a giant blade falling over your house and killing you and your family. I mean, the odds are really small, I mean, REALLY small, and even if you die, you gave your life for "America", right?
We can't wait for you to apply for volunteering.
If a nation's progress (I'm not talking about extreme situation survival) depends on sacrifice, then it's not worth having it. It's much better to change this structural mistake before "progress" begins. It's much better to live this kind of sacrifice system alone, or leave it to China, Vietnam, North Korea, Africa and the rest of the Third World.
But I guess we can count on your sacrifice for your country. Good luck bringing an industrial production system to your backyard, and actually paying for it with all the thousand dollars in realstate value you just lost.
A Cisco dual channel T1 controller, part VWIC-2MFT-T1 is $2,000 new list price. A small reseller will pay 70% of list or about $1,400 for it in distribution, while a large reseller might only pay $1,100 or so. Below we see a tinyurl link to an Ebay auction for a new boxed unit at only $227 or 11.3% of list price. I guarantee if you contact the seller you can get six dozen of them for the same price.
Maybe because most Cisco's products are just cheap versions of industry standard hardware designs. This card is mostly a cheap-ass FPGA with a small associated analog circuitry. I bet the counterfeiters don't even need to copy Cisco's firmware (probably licensed from some cheap-ass chinese company), as most T1-related signal processing algorithms can be licensed for free or just real cheap.
Any chinese company can build this kind of product, as the related technologies (and component prices) can be complex as manufacturing an ADSL modem.
But that's Cisco TODAY. Back in The Day when the components and technologies necessary to build a T1 signal interface were really expensive, their prices at least made some sense. Today the amount of signal processing necessary for a full-featured ADSL modem is larger than for this kind of communications card.
Today's Cisco is just a seller of overpriced commodity hardware.
My 2 cents: The less of these thousands of documents are stored in a proprietary format the better for everybody, including visually impaired. What am I missing?
When you're blind, you can't care less about the "Proprietary Vs. Open Source" wars if one of these tools can't provide you with the basic functionality you need for your life.
Will you be the one to tell a blind person "I'm sorry, but you can't access this document, because of my ideology-related political issues with Microsoft software.". Well, you can also tell them to die and be born again, this time with a functioning vision system, right? Well, NO.
You can't stop a government building being adapted for people with disabilities because you think "building companies are evil". They need access to the building, PERIOD.
My thoughts exactly. This is not a "prototype", it's just another concept. Only this concept is even less feasable that the original. Originally, Negroponte said it would have a projection screen because an LCD display would be too expensive. Now it has an LCD touchscreen display. And it's convertable to a tablet like some of the newest high-end notebooks. And all for $100. Yeah, that'll happen. Then again, if he stalls long enough (like, say, 10 years), it might just be possible to sell one of these for $100 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Even worse: the old homepage talked about a "rollable paper display". WTF? Paper display? For a computer? And no, I'm not talking about e-Ink as that was a completely separate option.
Unfortunately, their homepage disallows (I wonder why...) archive.org, so there is no historical record on that. Still, the affirmation was so absurd ans abvious that anyone who actually read the project page at the time it was launched can remember that.
Even worse than all this tech vaporware is the political side of the project. The most intensive efforts in this project are about self-promotion and not technical implementation. In the same line, there is also another creepy thing about this project: it talks about a future laptop but it shows a lot of children holding a laptop at some rural school.
My words were: "Every time a Linux developer tries Mono, he/she is wasting resources in a doomed technology". Read again: I'm not saying.NET is doomed; I'm saying Mono is doomed.
Ok, my mistake then.
Think desktop applications, not websites.
Desktop applications? The market where Java sunk like a 100 Ton rock dropped in the water?
Mono is not going to deliver that in the long term. Unlike Java (one language, many platforms),.NET is a platform lock-in technology (many languages, one platform).
Except that some people (actually, a lot of them) don't need to be able to run their applications on another O.S.. Actually, the extreme majority of desktop applications fit this category. Most desktop applications don't need extreme portability at all.
Right now Mono serves to MS's purpouses, as an excuse for DOJ (see, we're nice!) and a waste of effort from FOSS community. As soon as Mono starts costing MS real money, it will be crushed like a bug.
To me, and the real world, Mono is just Miguel's project. Nothing to do with Microsoft's purposes. Save your conspiracy theories for another time.
Duh. Of course, I'm not talking about websites, but desktop applications. That's where cross-platform actually matters. The others that commented seemed to understand this.
Then I don't know what you keep talking about Java, the platform with little if not almost zero penetration in the desktop software market.
Zealot, me? Is that a compliment?:-) I think you missed the IF in my words. I said "Even if.NET is headed to be a total failure (...)". So, if you could read english better, you would know that I'm not "thinking MS is heading to failure".
Well, you said it clearly:.NET is a doomed technology. I think the word "doomed" is very clear about what you think.
I just think that cross-platform development is important from a business POV, and Mono (.NET) is NOT a long term solution for the problem.
Yes, it is important. But not essential. A lot of applications and solutions can be platform-specific. Well, for most people, running the same application on Windows and Linux is more than enough, it's like "ultimate cross-platform development".
Those who really need extreme portability are always free to use something else. It's not like missing a small portion (needing portability, at the same time, on Linux + Windows + Solaris + AIX + Who_knows_what_else) of the developer community is a good definition of "doomed technology". You don't need a one-size-fits-all product to stay alive, you just need a stable and profitable market. And the MS Windows software market is far from disappearing.
May I ask again? WHERE ARE THE TSUNAMI OF.NET APPLICATIONS? Actual software, not books, please. Damn, Microsoft itself did not ported their own applications...:-)
Where? At Dell's website? At the majority of Fortune 500 websites developed in the last months? Inside a lot of companies? At SAP's product portfolio? Inside our government (big.NET system for payment handling)?
About Microsoft porting software: Well, check out MSDN for *extreme* coverage on.NET. More documentation, samples and articles than any (even 10-year-old ones) Open Source Software can have.
I failed in my search to find a blog entry where a former Microsoft insider (and still sympathetic to MS) had a bleaker assessment than what you would call reality.
Well, I think that a large and closed company like MS is way too complicated to be analyzed the way these people are doing. However, I think that comments about internal inneficiences at these companies are very interesting. But it's just micro (and not macro) analysis.
So, reality might tell us that Microsoft has a problem, today. The future is not clear.
As another comment that stated (which I was tempted to reply to) posed the damaging effect of MS dropping all those developers. it has happened before and will again whenever MS thinks its best interests are threatened. All those that follow the present trends blindly with no independent analysis are open to suffer the consequences.
Even with preparation (due diligence) the future is hard to predict.
Exactly. That's why words like "doomed" and such are a clear demonstration of reality denial. If nobody can't predict the future, but some people think they can, specially when their prediction is convenient to their beliefs, they are... denying reality.
Well, that's what I think they're doing. Not (thankfully) the absolute truth, BTW.
While this message does sound inflammatory, I would like to say that it's just not my intention to cause a flamefest. I just feel like I need to make some things clear to the Slashdot audience, as most people today are having a lot of problems (orkut, kiddie crackers, lame IRC behavior, just to name a few...) with us brazillians.
Perhaps.NET is just not that popular in Brazil? It's extremely popular in the US.
Actually,.NET is extremely popular on Brazil. Almost every single international book about.NET have a brazillian portuguese translation, and they're really good sellers. In fact, most people from good universities and good jobs are dealing with.NET in their work environments, sometimes in a mixed Java-.NET IT infrastructure.
The real problem is that, mostly because we (brazillians) live in a country where the capitalist culture was responsible for the sponsoring of dictatorships and social injustice, most people tend to act in a "I hate everything that's big and sucessfull" way. What I'm saying is that some people tend to act in a envious way, wich is a good motivation for being an "alternative" person.
When brazillians want to be zealots regarding Microsoft, Open Source and stuff, omg, they can be a real pain in the ass. And yes, I'm talking about nutjob conspiracy theories, nonsense hate-speech, extreme reality denial, (sometimes violent) harassment against non-"alternative" people (*), and all kiddie-like behavior you can imagine.
My point is? This guy is just being a zealot. He is just denying reality, because it makes him feel better thinking that good ol' and bad Microsoft is heading to imminent failure.
And people like him keep talking to each other about these theories and made-up versions of reality, creating this whole new version of the truth, by reapeating these lies to each other, one thousand times.
Is is just a brazillian kind of behavior? Hell no. A lot of people here in/., mostly from other countries, act this way too, but not with the same intensity.
(*) Our zealots here sometimes act like irrational animals, mostly because they are protected by anonymity and groupthink. It's not uncommon for a brazillian zealot to make death threats and abuse their position as (low-hierarchy) government employees with access to a lot of information about the people they hate.
Yahoo must be insane to have allowed this to happen, especially when their main competitor has a published philosophy including the statement: "You can make money without doing evil".
I'm sorry, but Google is one of the biggest contributors of the Chinese Censorship System.
...are just small examples of this. Google can say "Do no evil" whenever they want, but it'll not change reality: the real world is about what you really do, not about what you say you would do.
Well, while I don't know if you're making fun of the situation, I'd like to say that it's not a matter of sides or anything like that.
I just think that bringing results is a better method to change the world, prove a point or even spread and ideology. Stallman and others did show us that Open Source can be really useful and even mainstream companies are using this kind of software. Why? Results.
Why is not everyone dumping closed-source software and converting to RMS religion? Because they need results. I can pretty much say that circus-monkey clothing is the only ethical thing to wear and call it "Free Cloth" (and add "free as in freedom, not as in beer"), however that won't mean shit to the real world. When even philosophers need to bring results (insights, conclusions, observations, etc.), I can't see why Stallman's cause shouldn't need to.
And I'm really sick of all the "It's free because I say so, I don't need to prove that everything else is not free and even use a coherent description of the word freedom". Free Software my ass, it's more like "Open Source Software That Adheres to the GPL Restrictions".
So, assuming you pay your people shit, office is still a pretty minor expense. If it saves each person an average of 3 minutes a day(who knows!), it is paying for itself in reduced labor costs. Software is cheap, all of it, people are expensive.
That also means that any "economy" (0$ + $Training$ + $Installation$ + $Etc$) brought by using Open Office will be useless when the user spends his first 15 minutes wondering why the hell is OO acting different than MSO.
You can't define "doing good" as "not whining", sorry. The two are not mutually exclusive. Stallman does both, although the whining is simply the clear restatement of a case that many people choose to ignore because they can't be bothered facing up to questions which go beyond "how can I best get to the end of the day".
Fools whine. Useful people move their asses and change the world. It's naive to expect (normal - forget about nerds needing to BELONG) people to listen to you and do what you say before you bring any results.
Stallman has shown us that Free Software is really nice, can be really useful and allow people to access things and do things that they would not be able, either for $$ reasons or even availability reasons. That's nice. I don't even have to listen to any of his rants to know that. But, his speech about Free Software being the only "moral" choice, and source code being a "right", well, it's just... cheap talk. You have to actually prove that closed source software is "immoral", and cheap "think of the children" manipulations of the word "freedom" are not useful at all...
In what ways does Stallman defend his cause with lies, half-truths and violence? I mean come on, violence?.
Sorry, I was not being specific to him. However, I do think that his final objectives (forcing Open Source thru laws) are offensive (and violent) to my rights.
About the lies and half-truths, just browse www.gnu.org for a nice collection of biased and naive BS.
Tell me which open source laws you have a problem with?
Who is "forcing" the government to adopt open source? Or are you saying the government is forcing someone else to do so?
Who is making decisions about what's best for you? Well, people make those decisions all the time, because that's just a matter of adopting a moral position. The question really is, who is forcing decisions upon you?
Well, RMS thinks that closed source software should be forbidden. That means he wants to force me, that he would force me if he could, and that he is trying to force me.
Yes, and he states those beliefs very clearly and people like you have a strong tendency to misrepresent them.
No, you're wrong. He states his beliefs as the answer to life, the universe and everything else. That's the real RMS, not the funny-bear cute-kitten RMS version you're trying to create.
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You're clearly distorting the whole concept of an "idea" by making that absurd affirmation. An idea is something like "we should sell red soccer balls", and not 200 million lines of C. A song an idea too? HELL NO.
You said: I say: You are WRONG.
From Zone-h.org: Whatever the most secure server might be, Apache is most likely (as Zone-h only shows the O.S.) the current hacker target. It's an statistical fact, not a conclusion.
No problem if someone starts to run any kind of legal business that attract a lot of people usually involved in illegal activities to your neighborhood, right? I mean, what kind of sick person considers a "harm" not being able to raise your children in the same place you were born? I mean, people need to "get things done", dont you think?
It's pretty obvious that we all draw the line in places that are far, far away from our space.
BTW: I'm not against big decisions that change the world around us. But there is a clear difference between a widely-discussed issue involving a huge investment and a common plan (involving the majority of society) and dream, and some stupid Power Company trying to get cheap (with use rigths enforced by the local police and not the land owner and neighborhood needs) realstate to build their industrial infrastructure.
This is not about "OH MY GOD, BLACKOUTS ALL OVER THE PLACE, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING", but about "Power Companies are trying to get cheaper implementation costs do to something they are already supposed (by law) to do in the first place". If local society turns on the red light for this solution, for any reason, the Power Company will just look somewhere else to install Windmills, coal turbines or anything else.
You say that "someone needs to pay for all these benefits", but I'm pretty sure that you're obviously not going to become a volunteer and just "pay society". It's pretty fucking easy to tell someone else to "have it and shut up".
Yep, like your voice is really going be heard in this kind of situation. This kind of industrial implementation is not that flexible as you think. And most of its lack of flexiblity comes from the fact that the big company guys implementing the system will not give a flying fuck about what you ask, think or need.
Would you like to live close to a giant (yet in someone else's property) "BILL GATES IS GAY" poster? Maybe a "THIS THE HOME OF DEMOCRAT (or REPUBLICAN) PEOPLE" or maybe any kind of phrase you might find offensive? I mean, the giant poster is not on your property, so it's not your problem, right?
What about having your house value decrease because of someone else's decision? Is it OK for you? What about the kind of decision you were against of, in the first place? Is it "acceptable in the name of progress" to lose money (the real world representation of what might be years of work) to allow the Power Company of some politician's brother to have giant profits? Oh no, it's for "The Country", right?
Progress is good, as long as no one gets harmed in the progress. I mean, all these black slaves, who cares if they're suffering? Worker rights? Are these people insane? Are they fighting TO STOP PROGRESS?
Where do we draw the line on what's really "evil", Mr. Patriot? It would be much better to cut all of your citizen right's "for a month or so". Just so you can have a taste of what's "not fighthing progress".
I don't like the idea of installing industrial production machinery on people's backyards. The maintenance might not bother people when things run smoothly, but in case of any problem, you'll need a few days (maybe weeks) at a hotel.
Besides all of that, I bet that the wiring infrastructure is also going to be a big mess, either with visible suspended cables or nasty backyard-stealing underground cabling. And I'm pretty sure that most people are not going to have a choice about what they want, they'll just sign the contract and will have to accept any kind of solution they might install. Even the extremely bad looking aereal cables. Right over your house.
I repeat: the technology needed for this kind of device is really old. So old that even the most complex designs can fit inside of a single unit of what I called a "cheap-ass FPGA". The kind of FPGA so cheap that you'll find better ones inside the cheapest ADSL modems in the market.
All this "fault-tolerant" talk made sense only 10 years ago, when the required circuitry and microprocessing power needed for this kind of application was extremely expensive and had no mass-production market. Heck, today you can even BIT-BANG (software signal generation) a T1 connection with these 10-dollar embedded 400MHz SoCs that WiFi routers use these days. New products really have huge development costs. But this kind of legacy stuff don't. I'm sorry, but you're just... wrong. While it's pretty obvious that there is no such thing as development with zero-work, that's not my point. I'm talking about low cost, and today's cores are pretty much drop-in. About the HW designs: reference designs can even be found for free today at any semiconductor company website. Others will cost you no more than a few thousand dollars. If can license a textbook's content and sell it yourself. The older the textbooks, cheaper the license.
And I bet you wouldn't mind to transform your house exterior area into an extremely noisy place. Who likes to go outside, anyway? Oh, and don't mind these maintenance dudes hanging out at your garden every once in a while, as they're a part of the project too.
Oh, I forgot to tell you: sometimes, engineering products fail. In a small fraction of these situations, they can fail catastrophically, like with a giant blade falling over your house and killing you and your family. I mean, the odds are really small, I mean, REALLY small, and even if you die, you gave your life for "America", right?
We can't wait for you to apply for volunteering.
If a nation's progress (I'm not talking about extreme situation survival) depends on sacrifice, then it's not worth having it. It's much better to change this structural mistake before "progress" begins. It's much better to live this kind of sacrifice system alone, or leave it to China, Vietnam, North Korea, Africa and the rest of the Third World.
But I guess we can count on your sacrifice for your country. Good luck bringing an industrial production system to your backyard, and actually paying for it with all the thousand dollars in realstate value you just lost.
Any chinese company can build this kind of product, as the related technologies (and component prices) can be complex as manufacturing an ADSL modem.
But that's Cisco TODAY. Back in The Day when the components and technologies necessary to build a T1 signal interface were really expensive, their prices at least made some sense. Today the amount of signal processing necessary for a full-featured ADSL modem is larger than for this kind of communications card.
Today's Cisco is just a seller of overpriced commodity hardware.
Will you be the one to tell a blind person "I'm sorry, but you can't access this document, because of my ideology-related political issues with Microsoft software.". Well, you can also tell them to die and be born again, this time with a functioning vision system, right? Well, NO.
You can't stop a government building being adapted for people with disabilities because you think "building companies are evil". They need access to the building, PERIOD.
Unfortunately, their homepage disallows (I wonder why...) archive.org, so there is no historical record on that. Still, the affirmation was so absurd ans abvious that anyone who actually read the project page at the time it was launched can remember that.
Even worse than all this tech vaporware is the political side of the project. The most intensive efforts in this project are about self-promotion and not technical implementation. In the same line, there is also another creepy thing about this project: it talks about a future laptop but it shows a lot of children holding a laptop at some rural school.
My words were: "Every time a Linux developer tries Mono, he/she is wasting resources in a doomed technology". Read again: I'm not saying .NET is doomed; I'm saying Mono is doomed.
.NET is a platform lock-in technology (many languages, one platform).
Ok, my mistake then.
Think desktop applications, not websites.
Desktop applications? The market where Java sunk like a 100 Ton rock dropped in the water?
Mono is not going to deliver that in the long term. Unlike Java (one language, many platforms),
Except that some people (actually, a lot of them) don't need to be able to run their applications on another O.S.. Actually, the extreme majority of desktop applications fit this category. Most desktop applications don't need extreme portability at all.
Right now Mono serves to MS's purpouses, as an excuse for DOJ (see, we're nice!) and a waste of effort from FOSS community. As soon as Mono starts costing MS real money, it will be crushed like a bug.
To me, and the real world, Mono is just Miguel's project. Nothing to do with Microsoft's purposes. Save your conspiracy theories for another time.
Duh. Of course, I'm not talking about websites, but desktop applications. That's where cross-platform actually matters. The others that commented seemed to understand this.
Then I don't know what you keep talking about Java, the platform with little if not almost zero penetration in the desktop software market.
Zealot, me? Is that a compliment? :-) I think you missed the IF in my words. I said "Even if .NET is headed to be a total failure (...)". So, if you could read english better, you would know that I'm not "thinking MS is heading to failure".
.NET is a doomed technology. I think the word "doomed" is very clear about what you think.
.NET APPLICATIONS? Actual software, not books, please. Damn, Microsoft itself did not ported their own applications... :-)
.NET system for payment handling)?
.NET. More documentation, samples and articles than any (even 10-year-old ones) Open Source Software can have.
:P
Well, you said it clearly:
I just think that cross-platform development is important from a business POV, and Mono (.NET) is NOT a long term solution for the problem.
Yes, it is important. But not essential. A lot of applications and solutions can be platform-specific. Well, for most people, running the same application on Windows and Linux is more than enough, it's like "ultimate cross-platform development".
Those who really need extreme portability are always free to use something else. It's not like missing a small portion (needing portability, at the same time, on Linux + Windows + Solaris + AIX + Who_knows_what_else) of the developer community is a good definition of "doomed technology". You don't need a one-size-fits-all product to stay alive, you just need a stable and profitable market. And the MS Windows software market is far from disappearing.
May I ask again? WHERE ARE THE TSUNAMI OF
Where? At Dell's website? At the majority of Fortune 500 websites developed in the last months? Inside a lot of companies? At SAP's product portfolio? Inside our government (big
About Microsoft porting software: Well, check out MSDN for *extreme* coverage on
PS: Go Internacional, leading the league!
I failed in my search to find a blog entry where a former Microsoft insider (and still sympathetic to MS) had a bleaker assessment than what you would call reality.
Well, I think that a large and closed company like MS is way too complicated to be analyzed the way these people are doing. However, I think that comments about internal inneficiences at these companies are very interesting. But it's just micro (and not macro) analysis.
So, reality might tell us that Microsoft has a problem, today. The future is not clear.
As another comment that stated (which I was tempted to reply to) posed the damaging effect of MS dropping all those developers. it has happened before and will again whenever MS thinks its best interests are threatened. All those that follow the present trends blindly with no independent analysis are open to suffer the consequences.
Even with preparation (due diligence) the future is hard to predict. Exactly. That's why words like "doomed" and such are a clear demonstration of reality denial. If nobody can't predict the future, but some people think they can, specially when their prediction is convenient to their beliefs, they are... denying reality.
Well, that's what I think they're doing. Not (thankfully) the absolute truth, BTW.
While this message does sound inflammatory, I would like to say that it's just not my intention to cause a flamefest. I just feel like I need to make some things clear to the Slashdot audience, as most people today are having a lot of problems (orkut, kiddie crackers, lame IRC behavior, just to name a few...) with us brazillians.
.NET is just not that popular in Brazil? It's extremely popular in the US.
.NET is extremely popular on Brazil. Almost every single international book about .NET have a brazillian portuguese translation, and they're really good sellers. In fact, most people from good universities and good jobs are dealing with .NET in their work environments, sometimes in a mixed Java-.NET IT infrastructure.
/., mostly from other countries, act this way too, but not with the same intensity.
Perhaps
Actually,
The real problem is that, mostly because we (brazillians) live in a country where the capitalist culture was responsible for the sponsoring of dictatorships and social injustice, most people tend to act in a "I hate everything that's big and sucessfull" way. What I'm saying is that some people tend to act in a envious way, wich is a good motivation for being an "alternative" person.
When brazillians want to be zealots regarding Microsoft, Open Source and stuff, omg, they can be a real pain in the ass. And yes, I'm talking about nutjob conspiracy theories, nonsense hate-speech, extreme reality denial, (sometimes violent) harassment against non-"alternative" people (*), and all kiddie-like behavior you can imagine.
My point is? This guy is just being a zealot. He is just denying reality, because it makes him feel better thinking that good ol' and bad Microsoft is heading to imminent failure.
And people like him keep talking to each other about these theories and made-up versions of reality, creating this whole new version of the truth, by reapeating these lies to each other, one thousand times.
Is is just a brazillian kind of behavior? Hell no. A lot of people here in
(*) Our zealots here sometimes act like irrational animals, mostly because they are protected by anonymity and groupthink. It's not uncommon for a brazillian zealot to make death threats and abuse their position as (low-hierarchy) government employees with access to a lot of information about the people they hate.
In fact, the Interrupt Service Routine latency for Win CE 3.0 on very slow (100MHz) x86 hardware seems impressive: 2.9 us average latency.
You can find the data here.
Yes, hardly 5us, more like 2,9 us average: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnce30/html/realtimecapabilities.as p
Yahoo must be insane to have allowed this to happen, especially when their main competitor has a published philosophy including the statement: "You can make money without doing evil".
h ina_censorship_working_google_workers_happy/
s _200409/ai_n7184506
...are just small examples of this. Google can say "Do no evil" whenever they want, but it'll not change reality: the real world is about what you really do, not about what you say you would do.
I'm sorry, but Google is one of the biggest contributors of the Chinese Censorship System.
This: http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/04/15/c
and
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/i
Or are you just hating Intel because they're not the "opressed one"?
Well, while I don't know if you're making fun of the situation, I'd like to say that it's not a matter of sides or anything like that.
I just think that bringing results is a better method to change the world, prove a point or even spread and ideology. Stallman and others did show us that Open Source can be really useful and even mainstream companies are using this kind of software. Why? Results.
Why is not everyone dumping closed-source software and converting to RMS religion? Because they need results. I can pretty much say that circus-monkey clothing is the only ethical thing to wear and call it "Free Cloth" (and add "free as in freedom, not as in beer"), however that won't mean shit to the real world. When even philosophers need to bring results (insights, conclusions, observations, etc.), I can't see why Stallman's cause shouldn't need to.
And I'm really sick of all the "It's free because I say so, I don't need to prove that everything else is not free and even use a coherent description of the word freedom". Free Software my ass, it's more like "Open Source Software That Adheres to the GPL Restrictions".
Stallman has shown us that Free Software is really nice, can be really useful and allow people to access things and do things that they would not be able, either for $$ reasons or even availability reasons. That's nice. I don't even have to listen to any of his rants to know that. But, his speech about Free Software being the only "moral" choice, and source code being a "right", well, it's just... cheap talk. You have to actually prove that closed source software is "immoral", and cheap "think of the children" manipulations of the word "freedom" are not useful at all... Sorry, I was not being specific to him. However, I do think that his final objectives (forcing Open Source thru laws) are offensive (and violent) to my rights.
About the lies and half-truths, just browse www.gnu.org for a nice collection of biased and naive BS. Well, RMS thinks that closed source software should be forbidden. That means he wants to force me, that he would force me if he could, and that he is trying to force me. No, you're wrong. He states his beliefs as the answer to life, the universe and everything else. That's the real RMS, not the funny-bear cute-kitten RMS version you're trying to create.