Aside from the questionable quality of the writing, the period they're starting to tell stories from in the ST universe reminds me of the Silmarillion/Books of Lost Tales by Tolkien. It's the background material that served to deepen the original, more popular and more "recent" (in its own timeline) material. The problem is, I'm afraid a TV show won't be given the indulgence that a Tolkien with a Lord of the Rings behind him was given, so the "Enterprise" material may lack the deep mystery and cobwebbiness of its analogue. Anyway.
> It other words, it prevents computers from reading the book to you, making it more
> difficult for one to create an audio tape or CD of the book and selling it for free.
Leaving aside the confusing concept of "selling it for free", the point you're missing I think is that Adobe has packaged a free book and is saying it isn't free any more. What's wrong with creating a freely available audio CD of Alice in Wonderland, or anything in Project Gutenberg? To me this is the exact kind of exploitation of free stuff that (old school, pre-good-licensing) open source folks have always worried about. "What if someone takes my stuff I offer for free and sells it?"
Hopefully informed people (and then other people) will resist buying such an eBook product until issues like this are resolved. But what will probably happen is that this product, or some other, will make itself so seductive and convenient that we will deprioritize our indignation about selling free stuff and buy it anyway. I include myself in this grim prediction. Oh well. I lost hope when GWB became president anyway.
Don't people get sick of complaining about the RBL? There's nothing new in this article. When I read it through, I kept waiting for some big news about the RBL that I missed when I read through all the MAPS literature ages ago (hint, hint).
It's so easy to forget, I suppose, that the terms and implementation of the RBL have been the same for quite a long time. I happen to love the RBL, but if you don't like it, a) you have a lot of nerve being surprised at this stage, and b) don't use it! And if your upstream uses it and it actually prevents you from seeing websites, etc., then complain to your upstream.
It's not MAPS' fault if the info is used too strictly (to block more than SMTP in inappropriate instances), and at the same time if the RBL is to be effective it must adhere to its own terms, and that means putting providers like Media3 on the list when they don't "play ball," that is, deal responsibly with their customers who spam.
To me, complaining about the RBL is like panickingly posting about the Good Times virus.
You make a good point, but my question is: how did RedHat and TurboLinux -- arguably the most commercial of distros -- just *happen* to be the only ones who managed to get this info? And that's not a preanswered question... I would like to know how this kind of info typically gets disseminated, whether this was just bad planning on the other distros' parts, etc.
But the Rambus thing... sheesh. That alone is enough to make me question whether Intel has one tiny clue.
If you felt like naming that consulting firm, perhaps in private email (which this post would be if user "bunge" had an email addy listed), I would be most grateful.
Coincidentally, I'm planning to move to Germany early next year (Berlin) and will be seeking an IT job. Every source of information is telling me that unless I am displacing a German from a job, it will be no problem. My German is pretty good, and once I'm there I have no doubt I will be near-fluent (in High German anyway) in a few months just like when I was there in 1994 (couldn't find work then, though).
It is also useful to note that EU citizens and citizens of the US even have the luxury of going to Germany under a tourist visa and then applying to change your visa status once you're there. Apparently it's not usually very difficult to get them to grant you Aufenthaltserlaubnis (permission to stay) for a three-month period so that you can look for a job. I did this in '94, even before Germany loosened up its foreign worker laws a bit.
Germany is really hard up for good IT professionals, and even if I didn't speak German very well, I imagine I wouldn't have too hard a time (as Wirr said above, most Germans have taken English in school).
Sorry, I don't seem to be as convinced as you of this well-known problem that open source has failed to innovate. You seem to be stating as given that there is no innovation in open source, and then springboarding from there into a slippery slope about how open source developers will end up doing nothing more than half-assed knockoffs of existing (and implied better) programs. Not to mention that you also imply that only closed-source programs see multiple versions.
Whatever.
These arguments, apart from the fact that they're fallacious, don't even address the fundamental problem with what Moody is claiming, which is that a higher tally of posts on Bugtraq makes one operating system worse than another.
Does he even read Bugtraq? Probably only the statistics report. Anyway, Moody's half-assed article, spawned no doubt by a fortuitous and recent discovery of Bugtraq, doesn't even try to make comparisons among the severity of the reported bugs, or the speed with which each bug is addressed (I don't often see MS developers posting hurried fixes to Bugtraq). This is the kind of article that gets everyone all whipped up into a frenzy over no real content.
Agreed, mostly. The idea of certification is very good. But:
1) None of my employers used certification as a criterion for hiring me or my peers (UNIX sysadmin), and when I was a manager, I didn't use it either, simply because I had many certified people traipsing past me who were useless, and there were other, more easily identifiable factors (like asking actual technical questions, or similar experience) to test for.
(This is not to say that more of the good employees didn't end up being certified, just that it was a less reliable factor. However, the principle of survival of the fittest would indicate that spending money and time getting certified might not be worth it, if you're doing it to get a better job.)
2) There is, and I hope there continues to be, a difference in perception regarding *n?x certification and MS certification, which I think is an outgrowth of the perception of the quality of the OS. I happen to think that perception is correct, but even if you (plural) disagree with me, my point is not the quality of the OS/certification, but the perception.
What I mean to say is, I hope RedHat certification never becomes as badly respected as MS certification, and if so I hope it doesn't drag the perception of ?n*x certification down with it. Because someday I kinda hope I *will* have reason to use certification to hire employees.
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I'm betting it's a Gibson reference. "LF" :)
Aside from the questionable quality of the writing, the period they're starting to tell stories from in the ST universe reminds me of the Silmarillion/Books of Lost Tales by Tolkien. It's the background material that served to deepen the original, more popular and more "recent" (in its own timeline) material. The problem is, I'm afraid a TV show won't be given the indulgence that a Tolkien with a Lord of the Rings behind him was given, so the "Enterprise" material may lack the deep mystery and cobwebbiness of its analogue. Anyway.
> It other words, it prevents computers from reading the book to you, making it more
> difficult for one to create an audio tape or CD of the book and selling it for free.
Leaving aside the confusing concept of "selling it for free", the point you're missing I think is that Adobe has packaged a free book and is saying it isn't free any more. What's wrong with creating a freely available audio CD of Alice in Wonderland, or anything in Project Gutenberg? To me this is the exact kind of exploitation of free stuff that (old school, pre-good-licensing) open source folks have always worried about. "What if someone takes my stuff I offer for free and sells it?"
Hopefully informed people (and then other people) will resist buying such an eBook product until issues like this are resolved. But what will probably happen is that this product, or some other, will make itself so seductive and convenient that we will deprioritize our indignation about selling free stuff and buy it anyway. I include myself in this grim prediction. Oh well. I lost hope when GWB became president anyway.
Don't people get sick of complaining about the RBL? There's nothing new in this article. When I read it through, I kept waiting for some big news about the RBL that I missed when I read through all the MAPS literature ages ago (hint, hint).
It's so easy to forget, I suppose, that the terms and implementation of the RBL have been the same for quite a long time. I happen to love the RBL, but if you don't like it, a) you have a lot of nerve being surprised at this stage, and b) don't use it! And if your upstream uses it and it actually prevents you from seeing websites, etc., then complain to your upstream.
It's not MAPS' fault if the info is used too strictly (to block more than SMTP in inappropriate instances), and at the same time if the RBL is to be effective it must adhere to its own terms, and that means putting providers like Media3 on the list when they don't "play ball," that is, deal responsibly with their customers who spam.
To me, complaining about the RBL is like panickingly posting about the Good Times virus.
You make a good point, but my question is: how did RedHat and TurboLinux -- arguably the most commercial of distros -- just *happen* to be the only ones who managed to get this info? And that's not a preanswered question... I would like to know how this kind of info typically gets disseminated, whether this was just bad planning on the other distros' parts, etc.
But the Rambus thing... sheesh. That alone is enough to make me question whether Intel has one tiny clue.
If you felt like naming that consulting firm, perhaps in private email (which this post would be if user "bunge" had an email addy listed), I would be most grateful.
Coincidentally, I'm planning to move to Germany early next year (Berlin) and will be seeking an IT job. Every source of information is telling me that unless I am displacing a German from a job, it will be no problem. My German is pretty good, and once I'm there I have no doubt I will be near-fluent (in High German anyway) in a few months just like when I was there in 1994 (couldn't find work then, though).
It is also useful to note that EU citizens and citizens of the US even have the luxury of going to Germany under a tourist visa and then applying to change your visa status once you're there. Apparently it's not usually very difficult to get them to grant you Aufenthaltserlaubnis (permission to stay) for a three-month period so that you can look for a job. I did this in '94, even before Germany loosened up its foreign worker laws a bit.
Germany is really hard up for good IT professionals, and even if I didn't speak German very well, I imagine I wouldn't have too hard a time (as Wirr said above, most Germans have taken English in school).
My $0.02, wenn es Euch hilft...
Sorry, I don't seem to be as convinced as you of this well-known problem that open source has failed to innovate. You seem to be stating as given that there is no innovation in open source, and then springboarding from there into a slippery slope about how open source developers will end up doing nothing more than half-assed knockoffs of existing (and implied better) programs. Not to mention that you also imply that only closed-source programs see multiple versions.
Whatever.
These arguments, apart from the fact that they're fallacious, don't even address the fundamental problem with what Moody is claiming, which is that a higher tally of posts on Bugtraq makes one operating system worse than another.
Does he even read Bugtraq? Probably only the statistics report. Anyway, Moody's half-assed article, spawned no doubt by a fortuitous and recent discovery of Bugtraq, doesn't even try to make comparisons among the severity of the reported bugs, or the speed with which each bug is addressed (I don't often see MS developers posting hurried fixes to Bugtraq). This is the kind of article that gets everyone all whipped up into a frenzy over no real content.
Can we get back to talking about DeCSS now?
Agreed, mostly. The idea of certification is very good. But:
1) None of my employers used certification as a criterion for hiring me or my peers (UNIX sysadmin), and when I was a manager, I didn't use it either, simply because I had many certified people traipsing past me who were useless, and there were other, more easily identifiable factors (like asking actual technical questions, or similar experience) to test for.
(This is not to say that more of the good employees didn't end up being certified, just that it was a less reliable factor. However, the principle of survival of the fittest would indicate that spending money and time getting certified might not be worth it, if you're doing it to get a better job.)
2) There is, and I hope there continues to be, a difference in perception regarding *n?x certification and MS certification, which I think is an outgrowth of the perception of the quality of the OS. I happen to think that perception is correct, but even if you (plural) disagree with me, my point is not the quality of the OS/certification, but the perception.
What I mean to say is, I hope RedHat certification never becomes as badly respected as MS certification, and if so I hope it doesn't drag the perception of ?n*x certification down with it. Because someday I kinda hope I *will* have reason to use certification to hire employees.