Why this is modded insightful i sbeyond me.
A company wants to provide anti-cheat mechanism. Good. The company does this by denying the user his rights. You still think that is good? They could take other precautions against cheats and don't need to monitor that on a per-Xbox level. After all, a similar thing is happening in other online games as well but I never heard that a particular PC is outlawed. Why? Because it can't be done with PCs anyway, so the vendors of online games have to be smart and think about other solutions. Of course this is an easy excuse for monitoring users. Combined with a registration card a particular Xbox could be tracked to a particular user. Very usefull for MS. A mod chip is in the way of such things and once the practice of banning particular Xboxes is installed and set as a Good Thing(tm) in the mind of the users it can be easielly(sp?) extended for other Good Things(tm).
It's not thiefery to mod your Xbox. Why should it be? Poor MS has to protect its investments. Ha, ha. Poor excuse. This seems more like a troll than insightful posting. Modding is not stealing from developers per se but banning is a form of stealing. Stealing rights from the users.
When reading this text, somtimes it looks as it could be humans, but I like that part most.:)
Alice1: Um.
Alice2: I see.
Alice1: I am glad you understand it.
Alice2: Next topic?
Alice1: What would you rather talk about?
Alice2: It's not profitable to speak in hypothetical terms.
Alice1: That seems a bit negative.
Alice2: A bit negative is a terrible thing to waste.
Alice1: How much?
Alice2: How much can you spare?
Alice1: As much as I need to?
Alice2: How much is that?
Obviously you never participated on an OS Project. It's not as if there is CVS-write for everybody, so the sources are checked before they are applied.
That was true for the projects where I submited code (i.E. Wine or wxWindows) and I sure bet this is true for something as securityrelated as tcpdump.
You should participate a bit before writing crap.
I wonder why this took so long? SCSI wired together only 2 years ago?
This may sound like bragging, but I was thinking about that more than 5-8 years ago when I had my first SCSI drives and a network card. I was talking with a friend about this idea, because I thought that using two SCSI controls instead of a network card should yield a much better performance. The only reason I never got around to it, was that I have no hand for hardware, though I might be able to have wirtten the device drivers for the controllers. Than again I may have not, but still I wonder why this idea took so long. Seems I should have done it and now I would a millionaire.:)
What about Newton's "Principia? I mean it's not as if nobody knows about it. Everbody who studies physics, and many not studying it, know whats in this book already so why the fuss about an old book?
If, i.e. Claudia Shiffer panties were stolen, well that would be a tremendous loss and I bet that media would have weeks of reporting over that (at least here in Germany), talks shows would be inviting people who would have something to say about it and radio stations would stop sending for a minute as a tribute to that loss. But Newtons Prinicpia? Gosh! Some people don't seem to have their priorities right in reporting such trivial stuff.
Considering the mdeia hype when the Big Brother series was running I'm not really suprised at all.
I can only go by the comments as I can't access the site since I'm not an US resident (and hopefully never will be).:)
Apperently they try to sell movies on a pay-per-view basis. I doubt that this will work. I guess they thought "So many people download movies, so there is a market for pay-per-view." What they don't seem to consider is, if people, who download a movie, will also watch it in front of the PC.
Personally I don't like this. The view movies I downloaded I copied to VHS and watched them on TV, which is a much better experience than sitting in front of my computer desk. My desk is commited to doing computer stuff, not for relaxed sitting in fornt staring at the screen. Though this is also part of it of course.:)
Also what I'd hate in such a situation. Imagine you are watching a very exciting and thrilling new movie, you are totaly immersed in the story, biting your fingers because you can't wait for the murder to be revealed. And *PUFF* suddenly the merry colours of your windows desktop appear with a nice *DING* telling you "Connection lost, please try to contact the site later as it is currently unavailable." AAAAARGHHHHH!
Another thing, that is equally bad. What happens when your connection is stable but drops every now and then? Your movie will not break but every now and then it stucks and then continues again (Hint: Lag). I don't think that this will make for a good experience. My ADSL is pretty stable but even on the fastest connection it happens that it sometimes drops. This is no problem for downloads, but it will hurt a movie experience whne you are forced to watch while being online.
Personally the few movies I really like to see (like Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings) I can afford to go the theater. This guarantues for a really good experience and is much better than watching at home. For most other movies I can wait for the VHS/DVD. So I wouldn't be client for that thing, for sure.
I'm not an artist, but I like doing 3D for fun. So I started out with Cinema4D 6.x at that time and I liked it a lot. I tried also 3DSMax but it was much harder to learn and not very intuitive. Later on I switched to Maya and I dumped the other packages because I really loved that interface and I couldn't do much with other apps afterwards. Now I switched to Blender for a simple reason. It is free and under GPL now. The renderer is ok for my needs in all of these packages so I have no other disadvantages. From my experience you should by some books if you really want to go in a bit deeper, but this is true for all packages anyway.
Cinema4D is IMO easiest to learn and gives fast results. It is rather intuitive to use and will be no problem for a beginner. If you want to go into more depth it might be a bit limiting or you have to do more manual work.
3DSMax is something of standard software it seems and has a great user community, but I don't really like the interface, though I never tried very hard to learn it. Many good books available and much support. The disadvantage for 3DSMax is that there are a lot of plug-ins which will be very expensive for certain needs, so it depends on what you actually want to do and how much you can spend. 3DSMax has a free version that is free for non-commercial purposes.
Maya is IMO one of the best considering the interface and it has many powerfull features. You can get fast results once you master the interface but the renderer is not so good as in other apps. There is also a free version out for non-commercial purposes.
Blender is now my current app. It is not very intuitive to use, but once you get used to it the interface is really great. You just can't start it and do something usefull without a book or some tutorials. The sourcecode is no GPL'ed so there should be exporters soon be available. There is a big demandm for that on the mailing lists for Blender development.
I think that for each of these programs you can get good support either from the vendor, if you can afford it, or by the online community. So there is nothing to fear.:) If your primary goal is stills and renderquality is important you might consider using an external renderer like RenderMan. Most apps can export or have some plug-ins to export except with Blender. It depends on what your primary goals are and how good you are. It might be better to start of with an easier app and get some basic modelling skills.
Seems you missunderstand me deliberately. I don't say that Software is either hard to install or has to be full of exploits. What I meant is that installing is actually the smallest part and usually doesn't impact the the TCO to much. Even if it takes you a day because it would be so hard to install that doesn't way that much because you are using the software much much longer (at least that is the assumption).
I also installed several OS software where I haven't much of a clue (i.e. Appache, MySQL the most recent) and it took me absolutely not so long as you imply. I also hadn't had to read many mailing lists etc. I simply downloaded the packaged installed it looked into the configuration and that was it. Only with mySQL I had to look up the manual because I didn't know how to exactly set up the access configuration to suit my needs. But if you use MS-SQL or any other package (not that MS-SQL is specially sopisticated but it fits the Windows crowd best) you also have to look up such things in order to get it right. Creating a simple database is almost the same effort on most databases. I guess getting a webserver online and putting up a simple webpage is also almost the same effort on most servers. Where it gets expensive is when you need detailed information because you want to do something special. You don't know how to configure your Webserver to span multiple IP adresses or do load balancing? Incidently you don't find anybody who knows that either because nobody cares or hasen't looked into the issue what do you do? With OS software there is a much higher chance to find some information or find somebody who knows the stuff and may respond with tips. Guess what happens if you try this with MS or other companies. You have to pay for it AND you have to invest the time on. My personal experience is that the user crowd often provides better tips than paid companies because these companies often don't foresee what people will do with their software and are quite surprised with some ideas or tell you flatly it is not possible (even though it is). OS crowd often does this for a hobby and thus know much more about special issues. This basically means that you have to spend time in both cases but your chances for coming up with a helpfull idea are much better with OS then with proprietary. This means that you either have to pay for a second engineer to investigate this or you can't do it.
This has been my experience too. Generally if I need a new package installed on either a Windows server or a Linux box, I have the package on Linux running a few minutes after I downloaded it from the net. With Linux I have no silly arbitrary reboots and I don't have to hunt for updates because I usually get the newest package anyway. In many cases I can be reasonable sure that the default configuration NOT leaves my system wide open to attacks and I don't have to spend weeks of reading mailinglists in order to determine if my system is safe. Many packages already include safety advisors on how to configure or make the configuration even more secure.
What does this have to do with TCO? Uhm... er... Nothing I guess, but I wrote it anyway because I have no clue but much to say.
For some reason Windows "professionals" seems to atract the point and click developers. The kind of developer who has seen a Visual Basic script and applies for a job as security advisor/senior programmer because he thinks himself a guru.
Why do you think people are writing documentations? Because there are many things that you don't know or understand when you install a new package you never have used before. Sure you can install i.e. Perl without any problems on any system and start coding in it. But do you know about regular expression exploits? No? Why not? Ah! I see! You never bothered to read a piece of manual, otherwise you would have known that there are many risks involved. No problem. If your clients server is hacked because you wrote a crappy script you can charge for an "update" which you should have known in the first place if you weren't the Non-RTFM type developer.
I guess writing here is useless because I think you are a troll anyway.
I doubt that this "feeling" he speeks of is the "feeling" most people mean when they speak of feelings. Namely in terms of affection.
Personally I can understand his mail. I'm coding for more than 15 years, and though I don't see myself that way, many professional, whom I worked for or have seen my resume, consider me as a freak, crack, whatever. And I can tell you that I share this feeling about good or bad code, but I think that this simply comes when you work long enough on something so that you not only can logically prove right or worng, you also develop a feeling that kicks in BEFORE you start on a specific feature. This means that, when I start thinking about a problem I want to solve, I often have a feeling of a particular solution. When this feeling is good I start working on it. When this feeling is bad I look further in it and see if I can come up with something better and the same is true for when the feeling is neutral. Many times this feeling helps me quite a lot and often turns out true. It happend that I woke up in the middle of the night and had the solution of a problem in my mind and I knew it was the correct solution.
This simply means - If you are a good coder than you should trust your feeling about quality code, and if your are really a good coder you can easily often prove that you really can trust your feeling about code. I guess that Linus is a good coder and as such I have no problem trusting his feelings on CODE. Of course that doesn't mean that you should trust his feelings if he comes up with a new theory on gravity because this is not his field of expertise.
That's obviously bullshit. In a such a large project there are always people who think they are right and all others are wrong. I don't know the details as I read only the mails explaining Linus philosophy, but so far it seems pretty normal.
1. He accepts patches that he thinks are good for the project.
2. He accepts patches where people he trust convince him that they are good for the project.
Where is the problem? The other thing he said is that whinning is not what gains you entrance into a particular tree. If you are convinced of a feature it doesn't prove your point just by being an annoyance. You have no right on this project for your patches/features to be included and you don't have this right in other projects.
Ever participated in an open source project and submitted code? I did. You don't get acceptance by declaring your code is good. You gain acceptance by either fixing a bug or by proving otherwise that your ideas/code are good for the view the projectleaders are trying to obtain. That's why projectleaders are there. To ensure a particular goal. If you are not happy with that, you can gather all the people that share your vision of the goal and start your own tree. That's how most forks started so this is a normal procedure. Comparing this to Microsoft's practices is simply flamebait or you try to troll.
And what would happen if thewy would not have released it? Maybe nobody would have cared anymore because the chapter has been closed and nobody would have thought of it anymore. Personally I think that this game has been ported BECAUSE it is GPL and it was a success. If it were not the fancrowd would have forgotten about it by now and no company would have thought of it to be of any value anymore. Then again this may not be the case, but I think that GPL'd stuff has a much longer live time then proprietary stuff (in terms of reusage of old "crap" not in terms of being updated).
I bet that the customer privacy is very important to them. After all they make a lot of money with it.
[HINT] They never said they will honour your privacy, only that it is important for them, which is obviously true.:)
Actually this is a service agreement and not a EULA that allows you to access their website. I would expect from such a contract to be more lengthy then a simple EULA. I wrote such a contract myself and it also got rather long because you should cover all szenarious you possibly encounter with your customers. This way you don't have to go to court and can settle many things more easily.
On the other hand I find this paragraph from VeriSign rather refreshing:
--
2. Use of Information. You acknowledge and agree that we may (but are not obligated to) collect, store, use and/or publish information regarding, and data related to, your VeriSign Web Site, including, but not limited to, your domain name, URL and traffic counts. Possible uses of such information include, but are not limited to, marketing, the development and distribution of lists concerning traffic patterns of (or visits to) web sites and VeriSign member web sites and for other general commercial purposes. Use of any personally identifiable information will be in accordance with VeriSign's Privacy Policy.
--
So basically they say that they are allowed to monitor all your traffic and sell them to whoever they chose. Nice one. The best is, that they use their own privacy policy which is subject to changes. So agreeing to this you have no privacy at all. At the least you are at the mercy of VeriSign.
1. Posting this on a newsnetwork could surely be no violation covered by this "EULA". The intent is missing. I guess that a court should see this as well, because the intent of the poster is not to generate a massive load on the server, this is only a side effect of posting it here. The same would be true if a good ad campaign were running and people start to look at the website. But US laws and courts are somewhat twisted anyway so they might pull it through nevertheless.
2. If the servers can't take the small amount of a few slashhdotters how will they ever make some business? I expect that a server should handle quite some amount of hits every day from what only a small proportion will result in actual business. How many customers do they expect if they can't handle a few thousand hits?
Actually this is not an EULA it rather is a FAQ. If you read the subjectlines of the paragraphs you see that this is not about binding a customer, rather it is to explain what happens in certain circumstances. I'd say that this is actually a good document.
If I put up my personal website anybod can access it who finds it even without any link to it.
If I tell you the URL of my website you can type it in and access the pages. No link involved. Of course for a company it is much better to get as many links as possible pointing to their site, because it is inevitable that some yousers will click it and some of them will even buy.
There are users at ebay who will even bid on used toilet paper so it is plain stupid to not allow any links. Even if you could enforce this.
I just brwosed throuhg the text and was wondering that they claimed the "Intelectual Property" "right" even on such things like numbers ("PINS"). Really funny that one.
Another thing that I nocticed. In the agreement you agree that you are over 18 and have the right to enter such an agreement. The nice thing about this. What happens if you are below 18 or even 13 and still sign it and do some things on it. At least here in Germany such a binding is void and the company that accepted it has all the disadvantages of it. It can't even go to the parents for refunds (or whatever the term is) unless they can really show that the parents approved of it.
If you have read the articel more carfully then you would have noticed that they are NOT using 20 times the computing power they currently have. They are using the computing power currently SPREAD over 20 SITES in a parallel effort.
Funny that so many people comment but appear to not read what they are "discussing" about.
My subject line may be a bit flamebating but I mean this seriously.
When I got my modem I also got the installation CD without any information on how to connect to the server. Everything was covered by the software already. I didn't install this of course because I'm using a linux server to connect to the web acting as gateway for all my family members. I phoned the hotline and told them I need the contact information because I'm using linux. They refused first and told me that linux is not suppoerted. I told them that I don't need support I just need the information I should have gotten anyway (like DNS and such stuff). Then they said they will send me a tech who will install it and I told them that I refuse to let their tech doing any adjustments to my linux installation. After another discussion they finally gave me the information I needed. It sounds easier than it actually was because it took quite some discussions and multiple phone calls with their organization until they gave in but it worked.
So you need to bother them some time and they will give in. After all you can always go to another provider. It's not as if there is only one on the market. Nowadays it's a bit easier because linux is now recognized and I, at least, don't have to explain anymore that there are people using something else then Windows.
"People see any additional expenditure as fun and that means you don't have to go for that additional comfort for your employees because you don't need to do it anymore because you don't need to compete to hold on to your employees,"
Reading the above article makes me laugh. I don't know about other countries, but in general here in Europe I see the tendency to make the employees more comfortable in order to ensure that they are staying. But there is fork there. It seems that some companies go for cheaper worker and having to change them often. I usually get myself employed (if I have to) at companies that tend to keep their workers. This is better for me and better for the company as well. If you constantly fire your people because they don't fit a dress code or you consider them to expensive then I wonder how long this company stays in business. The longer a worker (at least in IT) stays in a company the more efficient he will be for the specific company. If you need a new worker you have to train him on the code and 80% of the special stuff, that nobody knows about anymore, is lost.
When I started work 15 years ago we had to pay for our coffe ourself. Now most companies are pying not only the coffee, but also tea or other drinks (cola, juice, water, etc.). They start doing projects to check how their workers are feeling in the company and actually do something about it. This doesn't look to me like companies are going to fire away because of a whim. But I guess it may be different in the revered USA or related countries. I'm glad that I never had to move there.
Which language? Normally most modern C/C++ compilers issue at least a warning about this so I wonder how this could really be a problem unless you use a really old compiler.
Why feeling sorry? She choose this job and she gets paid for it. I guess she doesn't get paid to small an amount but I don't know if she believes what she is doing or just doing it for the money. On the other hand, if you read that article she blatantly lied to the audiance (no copy protected CDs in US released HA HA) and that is enough to not feeling sorry at all. She surely must have known this to be wrong. I feel just as sorry for her as to the people from the gaming industry claiming that pirates are resonsible for high priced games. Not at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Why this is modded insightful i sbeyond me.
A company wants to provide anti-cheat mechanism. Good. The company does this by denying the user his rights. You still think that is good? They could take other precautions against cheats and don't need to monitor that on a per-Xbox level. After all, a similar thing is happening in other online games as well but I never heard that a particular PC is outlawed. Why? Because it can't be done with PCs anyway, so the vendors of online games have to be smart and think about other solutions. Of course this is an easy excuse for monitoring users. Combined with a registration card a particular Xbox could be tracked to a particular user. Very usefull for MS. A mod chip is in the way of such things and once the practice of banning particular Xboxes is installed and set as a Good Thing(tm) in the mind of the users it can be easielly(sp?) extended for other Good Things(tm).
It's not thiefery to mod your Xbox. Why should it be? Poor MS has to protect its investments. Ha, ha. Poor excuse. This seems more like a troll than insightful posting. Modding is not stealing from developers per se but banning is a form of stealing. Stealing rights from the users.
When reading this text, somtimes it looks as it could be humans, but I like that part most. :)
Alice1: Um.
Alice2: I see.
Alice1: I am glad you understand it.
Alice2: Next topic?
Alice1: What would you rather talk about?
Alice2: It's not profitable to speak in hypothetical terms.
Alice1: That seems a bit negative.
Alice2: A bit negative is a terrible thing to waste.
Alice1: How much?
Alice2: How much can you spare?
Alice1: As much as I need to?
Alice2: How much is that?
Actuall it has a comment. :)
/* decrypt */
if (FD_ISSET (s, &rfd)) {
Obviously you never participated on an OS Project. It's not as if there is CVS-write for everybody, so the sources are checked before they are applied.
That was true for the projects where I submited code (i.E. Wine or wxWindows) and I sure bet this is true for something as securityrelated as tcpdump.
You should participate a bit before writing crap.
Hm. I have several 200MHz PCs standing in groups at home, but I never noticed them getting any faster.
I wonder why this took so long? SCSI wired together only 2 years ago? :)
This may sound like bragging, but I was thinking about that more than 5-8 years ago when I had my first SCSI drives and a network card. I was talking with a friend about this idea, because I thought that using two SCSI controls instead of a network card should yield a much better performance. The only reason I never got around to it, was that I have no hand for hardware, though I might be able to have wirtten the device drivers for the controllers. Than again I may have not, but still I wonder why this idea took so long. Seems I should have done it and now I would a millionaire.
What about Newton's "Principia? I mean it's not as if nobody knows about it. Everbody who studies physics, and many not studying it, know whats in this book already so why the fuss about an old book?
If, i.e. Claudia Shiffer panties were stolen, well that would be a tremendous loss and I bet that media would have weeks of reporting over that (at least here in Germany), talks shows would be inviting people who would have something to say about it and radio stations would stop sending for a minute as a tribute to that loss. But Newtons Prinicpia? Gosh! Some people don't seem to have their priorities right in reporting such trivial stuff.
Considering the mdeia hype when the Big Brother series was running I'm not really suprised at all.
I can only go by the comments as I can't access the site since I'm not an US resident (and hopefully never will be). :) :)
Apperently they try to sell movies on a pay-per-view basis. I doubt that this will work. I guess they thought "So many people download movies, so there is a market for pay-per-view." What they don't seem to consider is, if people, who download a movie, will also watch it in front of the PC.
Personally I don't like this. The view movies I downloaded I copied to VHS and watched them on TV, which is a much better experience than sitting in front of my computer desk. My desk is commited to doing computer stuff, not for relaxed sitting in fornt staring at the screen. Though this is also part of it of course.
Also what I'd hate in such a situation. Imagine you are watching a very exciting and thrilling new movie, you are totaly immersed in the story, biting your fingers because you can't wait for the murder to be revealed. And *PUFF* suddenly the merry colours of your windows desktop appear with a nice *DING* telling you "Connection lost, please try to contact the site later as it is currently unavailable." AAAAARGHHHHH!
Another thing, that is equally bad. What happens when your connection is stable but drops every now and then? Your movie will not break but every now and then it stucks and then continues again (Hint: Lag). I don't think that this will make for a good experience. My ADSL is pretty stable but even on the fastest connection it happens that it sometimes drops. This is no problem for downloads, but it will hurt a movie experience whne you are forced to watch while being online.
Personally the few movies I really like to see (like Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings) I can afford to go the theater. This guarantues for a really good experience and is much better than watching at home. For most other movies I can wait for the VHS/DVD. So I wouldn't be client for that thing, for sure.
I'm not an artist, but I like doing 3D for fun. So I started out with Cinema4D 6.x at that time and I liked it a lot. I tried also 3DSMax but it was much harder to learn and not very intuitive. Later on I switched to Maya and I dumped the other packages because I really loved that interface and I couldn't do much with other apps afterwards. Now I switched to Blender for a simple reason. It is free and under GPL now. The renderer is ok for my needs in all of these packages so I have no other disadvantages. From my experience you should by some books if you really want to go in a bit deeper, but this is true for all packages anyway.
:) If your primary goal is stills and renderquality is important you might consider using an external renderer like RenderMan. Most apps can export or have some plug-ins to export except with Blender. It depends on what your primary goals are and how good you are. It might be better to start of with an easier app and get some basic modelling skills.
Cinema4D is IMO easiest to learn and gives fast results. It is rather intuitive to use and will be no problem for a beginner. If you want to go into more depth it might be a bit limiting or you have to do more manual work.
3DSMax is something of standard software it seems and has a great user community, but I don't really like the interface, though I never tried very hard to learn it. Many good books available and much support. The disadvantage for 3DSMax is that there are a lot of plug-ins which will be very expensive for certain needs, so it depends on what you actually want to do and how much you can spend. 3DSMax has a free version that is free for non-commercial purposes.
Maya is IMO one of the best considering the interface and it has many powerfull features. You can get fast results once you master the interface but the renderer is not so good as in other apps. There is also a free version out for non-commercial purposes.
Blender is now my current app. It is not very intuitive to use, but once you get used to it the interface is really great. You just can't start it and do something usefull without a book or some tutorials. The sourcecode is no GPL'ed so there should be exporters soon be available. There is a big demandm for that on the mailing lists for Blender development.
I think that for each of these programs you can get good support either from the vendor, if you can afford it, or by the online community. So there is nothing to fear.
Seems you missunderstand me deliberately. I don't say that Software is either hard to install or has to be full of exploits. What I meant is that installing is actually the smallest part and usually doesn't impact the the TCO to much. Even if it takes you a day because it would be so hard to install that doesn't way that much because you are using the software much much longer (at least that is the assumption).
I also installed several OS software where I haven't much of a clue (i.e. Appache, MySQL the most recent) and it took me absolutely not so long as you imply. I also hadn't had to read many mailing lists etc. I simply downloaded the packaged installed it looked into the configuration and that was it. Only with mySQL I had to look up the manual because I didn't know how to exactly set up the access configuration to suit my needs. But if you use MS-SQL or any other package (not that MS-SQL is specially sopisticated but it fits the Windows crowd best) you also have to look up such things in order to get it right. Creating a simple database is almost the same effort on most databases. I guess getting a webserver online and putting up a simple webpage is also almost the same effort on most servers. Where it gets expensive is when you need detailed information because you want to do something special. You don't know how to configure your Webserver to span multiple IP adresses or do load balancing? Incidently you don't find anybody who knows that either because nobody cares or hasen't looked into the issue what do you do? With OS software there is a much higher chance to find some information or find somebody who knows the stuff and may respond with tips. Guess what happens if you try this with MS or other companies. You have to pay for it AND you have to invest the time on. My personal experience is that the user crowd often provides better tips than paid companies because these companies often don't foresee what people will do with their software and are quite surprised with some ideas or tell you flatly it is not possible (even though it is). OS crowd often does this for a hobby and thus know much more about special issues. This basically means that you have to spend time in both cases but your chances for coming up with a helpfull idea are much better with OS then with proprietary. This means that you either have to pay for a second engineer to investigate this or you can't do it.
This has been my experience too. Generally if I need a new package installed on either a Windows server or a Linux box, I have the package on Linux running a few minutes after I downloaded it from the net. With Linux I have no silly arbitrary reboots and I don't have to hunt for updates because I usually get the newest package anyway. In many cases I can be reasonable sure that the default configuration NOT leaves my system wide open to attacks and I don't have to spend weeks of reading mailinglists in order to determine if my system is safe. Many packages already include safety advisors on how to configure or make the configuration even more secure. ... Nothing I guess, but I wrote it anyway because I have no clue but much to say.
What does this have to do with TCO? Uhm... er
For some reason Windows "professionals" seems to atract the point and click developers. The kind of developer who has seen a Visual Basic script and applies for a job as security advisor/senior programmer because he thinks himself a guru.
Why do you think people are writing documentations? Because there are many things that you don't know or understand when you install a new package you never have used before. Sure you can install i.e. Perl without any problems on any system and start coding in it. But do you know about regular expression exploits? No? Why not? Ah! I see! You never bothered to read a piece of manual, otherwise you would have known that there are many risks involved. No problem. If your clients server is hacked because you wrote a crappy script you can charge for an "update" which you should have known in the first place if you weren't the Non-RTFM type developer.
I guess writing here is useless because I think you are a troll anyway.
I doubt that this "feeling" he speeks of is the "feeling" most people mean when they speak of feelings. Namely in terms of affection.
Personally I can understand his mail. I'm coding for more than 15 years, and though I don't see myself that way, many professional, whom I worked for or have seen my resume, consider me as a freak, crack, whatever. And I can tell you that I share this feeling about good or bad code, but I think that this simply comes when you work long enough on something so that you not only can logically prove right or worng, you also develop a feeling that kicks in BEFORE you start on a specific feature. This means that, when I start thinking about a problem I want to solve, I often have a feeling of a particular solution. When this feeling is good I start working on it. When this feeling is bad I look further in it and see if I can come up with something better and the same is true for when the feeling is neutral. Many times this feeling helps me quite a lot and often turns out true. It happend that I woke up in the middle of the night and had the solution of a problem in my mind and I knew it was the correct solution.
This simply means - If you are a good coder than you should trust your feeling about quality code, and if your are really a good coder you can easily often prove that you really can trust your feeling about code. I guess that Linus is a good coder and as such I have no problem trusting his feelings on CODE. Of course that doesn't mean that you should trust his feelings if he comes up with a new theory on gravity because this is not his field of expertise.
That's obviously bullshit. In a such a large project there are always people who think they are right and all others are wrong. I don't know the details as I read only the mails explaining Linus philosophy, but so far it seems pretty normal.
1. He accepts patches that he thinks are good for the project. 2. He accepts patches where people he trust convince him that they are good for the project.
Where is the problem? The other thing he said is that whinning is not what gains you entrance into a particular tree. If you are convinced of a feature it doesn't prove your point just by being an annoyance. You have no right on this project for your patches/features to be included and you don't have this right in other projects.
Ever participated in an open source project and submitted code? I did. You don't get acceptance by declaring your code is good. You gain acceptance by either fixing a bug or by proving otherwise that your ideas/code are good for the view the projectleaders are trying to obtain. That's why projectleaders are there. To ensure a particular goal. If you are not happy with that, you can gather all the people that share your vision of the goal and start your own tree. That's how most forks started so this is a normal procedure. Comparing this to Microsoft's practices is simply flamebait or you try to troll.
And what would happen if thewy would not have released it? Maybe nobody would have cared anymore because the chapter has been closed and nobody would have thought of it anymore. Personally I think that this game has been ported BECAUSE it is GPL and it was a success. If it were not the fancrowd would have forgotten about it by now and no company would have thought of it to be of any value anymore. Then again this may not be the case, but I think that GPL'd stuff has a much longer live time then proprietary stuff (in terms of reusage of old "crap" not in terms of being updated).
I bet that the customer privacy is very important to them. After all they make a lot of money with it. :)
[HINT] They never said they will honour your privacy, only that it is important for them, which is obviously true.
Actually this is a service agreement and not a EULA that allows you to access their website. I would expect from such a contract to be more lengthy then a simple EULA. I wrote such a contract myself and it also got rather long because you should cover all szenarious you possibly encounter with your customers. This way you don't have to go to court and can settle many things more easily.
On the other hand I find this paragraph from VeriSign rather refreshing: --
2. Use of Information. You acknowledge and agree that we may (but are not obligated to) collect, store, use and/or publish information regarding, and data related to, your VeriSign Web Site, including, but not limited to, your domain name, URL and traffic counts. Possible uses of such information include, but are not limited to, marketing, the development and distribution of lists concerning traffic patterns of (or visits to) web sites and VeriSign member web sites and for other general commercial purposes. Use of any personally identifiable information will be in accordance with VeriSign's Privacy Policy.
--
So basically they say that they are allowed to monitor all your traffic and sell them to whoever they chose. Nice one. The best is, that they use their own privacy policy which is subject to changes. So agreeing to this you have no privacy at all. At the least you are at the mercy of VeriSign.
1. Posting this on a newsnetwork could surely be no violation covered by this "EULA". The intent is missing. I guess that a court should see this as well, because the intent of the poster is not to generate a massive load on the server, this is only a side effect of posting it here. The same would be true if a good ad campaign were running and people start to look at the website. But US laws and courts are somewhat twisted anyway so they might pull it through nevertheless.
2. If the servers can't take the small amount of a few slashhdotters how will they ever make some business? I expect that a server should handle quite some amount of hits every day from what only a small proportion will result in actual business. How many customers do they expect if they can't handle a few thousand hits?
Actually this is not an EULA it rather is a FAQ. If you read the subjectlines of the paragraphs you see that this is not about binding a customer, rather it is to explain what happens in certain circumstances. I'd say that this is actually a good document.
If I put up my personal website anybod can access it who finds it even without any link to it.
If I tell you the URL of my website you can type it in and access the pages. No link involved. Of course for a company it is much better to get as many links as possible pointing to their site, because it is inevitable that some yousers will click it and some of them will even buy.
There are users at ebay who will even bid on used toilet paper so it is plain stupid to not allow any links. Even if you could enforce this.
I just brwosed throuhg the text and was wondering that they claimed the "Intelectual Property" "right" even on such things like numbers ("PINS"). Really funny that one. Another thing that I nocticed. In the agreement you agree that you are over 18 and have the right to enter such an agreement. The nice thing about this. What happens if you are below 18 or even 13 and still sign it and do some things on it. At least here in Germany such a binding is void and the company that accepted it has all the disadvantages of it. It can't even go to the parents for refunds (or whatever the term is) unless they can really show that the parents approved of it.
If you have read the articel more carfully then you would have noticed that they are NOT using 20 times the computing power they currently have. They are using the computing power currently SPREAD over 20 SITES in a parallel effort.
Funny that so many people comment but appear to not read what they are "discussing" about.
My subject line may be a bit flamebating but I mean this seriously.
When I got my modem I also got the installation CD without any information on how to connect to the server. Everything was covered by the software already. I didn't install this of course because I'm using a linux server to connect to the web acting as gateway for all my family members. I phoned the hotline and told them I need the contact information because I'm using linux. They refused first and told me that linux is not suppoerted. I told them that I don't need support I just need the information I should have gotten anyway (like DNS and such stuff). Then they said they will send me a tech who will install it and I told them that I refuse to let their tech doing any adjustments to my linux installation. After another discussion they finally gave me the information I needed. It sounds easier than it actually was because it took quite some discussions and multiple phone calls with their organization until they gave in but it worked.
So you need to bother them some time and they will give in. After all you can always go to another provider. It's not as if there is only one on the market. Nowadays it's a bit easier because linux is now recognized and I, at least, don't have to explain anymore that there are people using something else then Windows.
"People see any additional expenditure as fun and that means you don't have to go for that additional comfort for your employees because you don't need to do it anymore because you don't need to compete to hold on to your employees," Reading the above article makes me laugh. I don't know about other countries, but in general here in Europe I see the tendency to make the employees more comfortable in order to ensure that they are staying. But there is fork there. It seems that some companies go for cheaper worker and having to change them often. I usually get myself employed (if I have to) at companies that tend to keep their workers. This is better for me and better for the company as well. If you constantly fire your people because they don't fit a dress code or you consider them to expensive then I wonder how long this company stays in business. The longer a worker (at least in IT) stays in a company the more efficient he will be for the specific company. If you need a new worker you have to train him on the code and 80% of the special stuff, that nobody knows about anymore, is lost. When I started work 15 years ago we had to pay for our coffe ourself. Now most companies are pying not only the coffee, but also tea or other drinks (cola, juice, water, etc.). They start doing projects to check how their workers are feeling in the company and actually do something about it. This doesn't look to me like companies are going to fire away because of a whim. But I guess it may be different in the revered USA or related countries. I'm glad that I never had to move there.
Which language? Normally most modern C/C++ compilers issue at least a warning about this so I wonder how this could really be a problem unless you use a really old compiler.
Why feeling sorry? She choose this job and she gets paid for it. I guess she doesn't get paid to small an amount but I don't know if she believes what she is doing or just doing it for the money. On the other hand, if you read that article she blatantly lied to the audiance (no copy protected CDs in US released HA HA) and that is enough to not feeling sorry at all. She surely must have known this to be wrong. I feel just as sorry for her as to the people from the gaming industry claiming that pirates are resonsible for high priced games. Not at all.