Don't fool yourself. The muggers all knew that already anyway. The only difference now is that you know they know.
Why do some people always think that bad things come from freedom of information. Don't you see that the Bad Guys will already have gone to the effort of finding this sort of stuff out anyway? If they didn't they would get locked up very quickly. This info only helps the people who don't already know it. ie, people who won't get locked up for what they are doing. ie, the Good Guys.
You seem to have directly equated "compensation for their hard work" with "financial compensation for their hard work." That is a very broad and incorrect assumption to make.
The "compensation" I get when I write code is not primarily finincial, because I do it for the love of it, not just to make money. Similarly some of my friends write music for the same reasons. I can't say I have friends who do graphical artwork, but I imagine there are people who do it for fun.
Maybe the question you should ask is:
If there are coders who work very well for the love of it and produce excellent code, and they do not demand money for their efforts, then what gives musicians the right to make similar demands?
Am I the only one who wants a laptop with fewer features, not more?
How about no dvd, no floppy, no firewire, no parallel port, no pcmcia, NO M$ WINDOWS!, no external svga socket, no built in modem, no built in ethernet, no sound, no irda, no 1e+34 key keyboard, no ps/2 mouse port, no ps/2 keyboard port, no kitchen sink.
All I want is
1) Reasonable CPU and memory
2) Decent size HDD
3) 1024x768 screen
4) USB port (thats all the expandability i need (except maybe extra memory))
All the extra features I don't need probably cost very little each to add, but they do add up and mean more cost and more weight and in some cases more power consumption, and If i find I do need ethernet, or cdrw, or sound, or an external mouse or keyboard then these can all be added later via USB.
standardisation and centralisation of policy for reasons of convenience, all at the expense of diversity, freedom of choice and (therefore) long term darwin-style improvement of policy.
Why do you need the FTC to block Windows XP? You can block it yourself using the method known as "not buying it" if you don't like it.
It seems to be taking some people quite a while to figure it out, but I've tried it and I can tell you it certainly works. It's considerably more effective than the method called "grubmle and moan to your friends about microsoft and then go out and buy their products" that most people seem to be using.
The compression is always going to be slow, but thats only a problem for those making downloads available (eg, redhat etc)
For the downloaders, everything should be faster.
Downloads certainly will be. As for uncompressing, you never need the uncompressed image on your drive. "zcat blah.iso.gz | cdrecord" will work fine on all but the very slowest machines with fast drives. cdrecord is the bottleneck so it will take no longer than usual to burn once downloaded.
Its a win for every user. The only losers are (a) Redhat etc because they have to wait for a gzip to run - BFD, and (b) ppl who use operating systems that lack decent command piping. *cough*windows users*cough*
Comments on ISO files and cheap cd sets
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why do people not gzip the iso files before they put them on the ftp sites? It's something I have never understood. Even with a great deal of the content already compressed, I have got a typical saving of ~10-15% on various distro install disks. Saving 80 odd megabytes of download per disk, per user is a lot. And how hard is it to type "zcat blah.iso | cdrecord" when you have it?
Never mind that anyway - don't download it, buy it from Redhat instead. But does anyone else wish RH would sell cheap disk sets like mdk do? I bet it would only improve their profits. They would be bought mostly by ppl who currently download the isos (like me), not the ppl who currently buy the boxed sets ('cos they all want manuals etc otherwise they would download also)
How can you say this is not interference when clearly it obviously is?
That doesn't make it good or bad, but it is interference.
In this case, IMO it is interference thats only ended up being needed because of earlier interference by government in the first place that allowed such powerful organisations to form. ie, the ridiculous rights granted to copyright holders (or from another perspective, removed from everyone else) by the state.
If that hadn't happened and copyright terms are were shorter there would be a more competitive market and this counter-interference would be unneccessary.
The length that copyright should apply for is debatable, but right now it is much too long. I would say that if power tends to become concentrated among a small minority of powerful companies then the time is too long. On the other hand, if it becomed anarchic with no artists able to make a living then it is too short. Is should be adjusted and played about with until the correct balance is found. Jobs and companies will be lost (as well as new ones created) in doing that which is why no government will dare, but that is the cost of drastically improving the situation for absolutely everyone else in society.
Maybe it's about time the Open Source world started paying more attention to testing?
I think you have to ask the question that when Linus releases a new kernel, who is that aimed at? IMO, these days it is at the distributors, the kernel developers and enthusiastic individuals. It is no longer the case that most Linux users download and compile their own kernels. Because of this the release of the kernels to the distributers actually forms part of the testing itself. ie, don't consider a release to be stable just because its in the so-called stable series. Consider it stable when you either (1) get it from a distributor who will have tested it and guarentee (sp?) it's stability or (2) downloaded and tested it yourself before production use.
Yes, it would of course have been better it this hadn't crept in but it's not really a big deal. How many users do you see around you who have lost work because of this bug?
It isn't a bug with all symlinks. It occurs (if I understand it correctly) if you create a file via a dangling symlink, which is really not a good thing to do anyway. (but Suse's YAST does this)
Does anyone else remember the brown paper bag bug at the begining of the 2.2 series?
Yes, it was around 2.2.8 or 2.2.9 IIRC. What I do remember though is that after that happenned Linus decided it was time to fork to the 2.3 series around the same time.
Maybe now this has happenned he will start 2.5 and hand over 2.4.x to Alan who IMO keeps kernel series stable better than Linux does.
Filetrading will return to something like BBS only online and via TCP/IP.
I predict people will end up using BBS software over ssh and downloading using zmodem. (as some ppl are doing already)
I'd like to see the RIAA have ssh banned.
The sooner these goons realise that they cannot stop whats happening the better for them and for everyone else. Their business model is obsolete because copyright has outlived its usefulness to society in many areas.
I have a UK based analogous example of why it might be bad.
True statistic:
"Most muggers in London are young black men"
If a system of cameras in the street were looking for potential muggers and it could get false positives then based on appearance it would get an unfairly high number of young black men.
IOW, it would discriminate instead of treating every individual equally. Instead of "most muggers are young black men" it would be effectively be saying "a young black individual is more likely to be a mugger than a white man" which is clearly bollocks and is racist. (In fact it is exactly the kind of "institutionalised racism" that the UK police have fairly recently been heavily criticised for)
What if these airports were looking for known Bin Laden associates. We would see queues of men of eastern origin queueing to be searched while the white men and all women walk through freely.
false negatives can be accepted because although the system isnt perfect it does no harm and does some good. False positives here would do harm and arguably do more harm than good.
Do you think that the people implementing this kind of thing do so because they think it improves security and safety?
If so I think you have made a mistake. They are implementing it because they think it will make the public think that it improves security and safety.
Giving the public what they think is best is always easier that giving them what is actually best. (and of course you might be wrong about whats best and the public right but thats another issue)
The only solution to this kind of thing is to reduce the gap between the real best solution and the publics belief of what the best solution is.
That means two things. Unlazy authorities and education of the people. Don't hold your breath on the former. Help out yourself with the latter.
.. that there are still people around these days who are stupid enough to believe that this kind of regulation can do any good at all. How many times do they need to be proven wrong, and how often do we need our rights reducing before these stupid (but well intending although angry) people realise they are WRONG?
I fear they will not stop until we reach orwellian levels of monitoring, banning and regulation.
I find it ironic that the US are moving more towards stopping technologies that are evil, (which incidentally is a complete nonsense in itself,) yet none of us would like to live under (for example) the rule of the Taleban. Look again at the Tabeban - all they do is ban, monitor and control things they think are "evil" - just the knod of action we are talking about here.
The world needs to learn that people are good and bad. "Things" are indifferent. Banning or restricting "things" simply hides bad people from view. An interesting side effect that governments find useful from that is that it increases temporarily the perception of safety.
4
< SARCASM> Oh... like theres no incentive for companies to write open source software you mean?
</SARCASM>
What you say sounds perfectly resaonable, but there is very little real evidence to suggest what you say is true.
Whatever the reasons, experience is showing us that people can and do make a living producing and selling products that can be and are openly copied (and hence more often improved - but thats another argument)
I'm afraid your argument is one based purely in the fear of what might happen and not on real life facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't fool yourself. The muggers all knew that already anyway. The only difference now is that you know they know.
Why do some people always think that bad things come from freedom of information. Don't you see that the Bad Guys will already have gone to the effort of finding this sort of stuff out anyway? If they didn't they would get locked up very quickly. This info only helps the people who don't already know it. ie, people who won't get locked up for what they are doing. ie, the Good Guys.
You seem to have directly equated "compensation for their hard work" with "financial compensation for their hard work." That is a very broad and incorrect assumption to make.
The "compensation" I get when I write code is not primarily finincial, because I do it for the love of it, not just to make money. Similarly some of my friends write music for the same reasons. I can't say I have friends who do graphical artwork, but I imagine there are people who do it for fun.
Maybe the question you should ask is:
If there are coders who work very well for the love of it and produce excellent code, and they do not demand money for their efforts, then what gives musicians the right to make similar demands?
For those interested, the preemptable patch against 2.4.16-pre1 also applies cleanly to 2.4.16 final.
ask your mum to get you a sarcasm detector for xmas :)
my post was not supposed to be informative (although strictly it is as you point out)
Those who share my sense of humour might have said funny rather than informative.
Is this Freshmeat or Slashdot ?
It's slashdot. You can tell it is because it says "Slashdot - News for nerds" at the top.
You can easily recognise freshmeat when you see it as well - it has a logo at the top with "FM" written in it.
I'm surprised you have difficulty telling them apart. They really are quite different.
At least one PCMCIA slot is a must tho, if there's no builtin ethernet.
USB ethernet works just fine. And I use it as my emergency spare for desktops also.
Am I the only one who wants a laptop with fewer features, not more?
How about no dvd, no floppy, no firewire, no parallel port, no pcmcia, NO M$ WINDOWS!, no external svga socket, no built in modem, no built in ethernet, no sound, no irda, no 1e+34 key keyboard, no ps/2 mouse port, no ps/2 keyboard port, no kitchen sink.
All I want is
1) Reasonable CPU and memory
2) Decent size HDD
3) 1024x768 screen
4) USB port (thats all the expandability i need (except maybe extra memory))
All the extra features I don't need probably cost very little each to add, but they do add up and mean more cost and more weight and in some cases more power consumption, and If i find I do need ethernet, or cdrw, or sound, or an external mouse or keyboard then these can all be added later via USB.
standardisation and centralisation of policy for reasons of convenience, all at the expense of diversity, freedom of choice and (therefore) long term darwin-style improvement of policy.
Say something new??
Whats more important, saying something new or saying something right?
Why do you need the FTC to block Windows XP? You can block it yourself using the method known as "not buying it" if you don't like it.
It seems to be taking some people quite a while to figure it out, but I've tried it and I can tell you it certainly works. It's considerably more effective than the method called "grubmle and moan to your friends about microsoft and then go out and buy their products" that most people seem to be using.
OY! That's my comment, you thief!! :-)
(Go to here and search for MartinG)
And 7.1 was solid, so 7.2 could be dangerous
/.
INSIGHTFUL???!??!?!??!
This is about the most ridiculous logic I have ever read on
What next?
"My horoscope said I should be cautious this week because of Jupiters entry into the astral phase, so Redhat 7.2 is probably unstable"
"Its a full moon next week which is a bad omen so Redhat 7.2 is probably cursed."
The compression is always going to be slow, but thats only a problem for those making downloads available (eg, redhat etc)
For the downloaders, everything should be faster.
Downloads certainly will be. As for uncompressing, you never need the uncompressed image on your drive. "zcat blah.iso.gz | cdrecord" will work fine on all but the very slowest machines with fast drives. cdrecord is the bottleneck so it will take no longer than usual to burn once downloaded.
Its a win for every user. The only losers are (a) Redhat etc because they have to wait for a gzip to run - BFD, and (b) ppl who use operating systems that lack decent command piping. *cough*windows users*cough*
Why do people not gzip the iso files before they put them on the ftp sites? It's something I have never understood. Even with a great deal of the content already compressed, I have got a typical saving of ~10-15% on various distro install disks. Saving 80 odd megabytes of download per disk, per user is a lot. And how hard is it to type "zcat blah.iso | cdrecord" when you have it?
Never mind that anyway - don't download it, buy it from Redhat instead. But does anyone else wish RH would sell cheap disk sets like mdk do? I bet it would only improve their profits. They would be bought mostly by ppl who currently download the isos (like me), not the ppl who currently buy the boxed sets ('cos they all want manuals etc otherwise they would download also)
MartinG.
How can you say this is not interference when clearly it obviously is?
That doesn't make it good or bad, but it is interference.
In this case, IMO it is interference thats only ended up being needed because of earlier interference by government in the first place that allowed such powerful organisations to form. ie, the ridiculous rights granted to copyright holders (or from another perspective, removed from everyone else) by the state.
If that hadn't happened and copyright terms are were shorter there would be a more competitive market and this counter-interference would be unneccessary.
The length that copyright should apply for is debatable, but right now it is much too long. I would say that if power tends to become concentrated among a small minority of powerful companies then the time is too long. On the other hand, if it becomed anarchic with no artists able to make a living then it is too short. Is should be adjusted and played about with until the correct balance is found. Jobs and companies will be lost (as well as new ones created) in doing that which is why no government will dare, but that is the cost of drastically improving the situation for absolutely everyone else in society.
This seems true, as I recieved my 3-cd set from Mandrake yesterday.
Maybe it's about time the Open Source world started paying more attention to testing?
I think you have to ask the question that when Linus releases a new kernel, who is that aimed at? IMO, these days it is at the distributors, the kernel developers and enthusiastic individuals. It is no longer the case that most Linux users download and compile their own kernels. Because of this the release of the kernels to the distributers actually forms part of the testing itself. ie, don't consider a release to be stable just because its in the so-called stable series. Consider it stable when you either (1) get it from a distributor who will have tested it and guarentee (sp?) it's stability or (2) downloaded and tested it yourself before production use.
Yes, it would of course have been better it this hadn't crept in but it's not really a big deal. How many users do you see around you who have lost work because of this bug?
It isn't a bug with all symlinks. It occurs (if I understand it correctly) if you create a file via a dangling symlink, which is really not a good thing to do anyway. (but Suse's YAST does this)
Does anyone else remember the brown paper bag bug at the begining of the 2.2 series?
Yes, it was around 2.2.8 or 2.2.9 IIRC. What I do remember though is that after that happenned Linus decided it was time to fork to the 2.3 series around the same time.
Maybe now this has happenned he will start 2.5 and hand over 2.4.x to Alan who IMO keeps kernel series stable better than Linux does.
2.4.12 has a new bug that crept in with the parport update that Tim Waugh did.
Check lkml archives for a patch to fix it.
Filetrading will return to something like BBS only online and via TCP/IP.
I predict people will end up using BBS software over ssh and downloading using zmodem. (as some ppl are doing already)
I'd like to see the RIAA have ssh banned.
The sooner these goons realise that they cannot stop whats happening the better for them and for everyone else. Their business model is obsolete because copyright has outlived its usefulness to society in many areas.
I have a UK based analogous example of why it might be bad.
True statistic:
"Most muggers in London are young black men"
If a system of cameras in the street were looking for potential muggers and it could get false positives then based on appearance it would get an unfairly high number of young black men.
IOW, it would discriminate instead of treating every individual equally. Instead of "most muggers are young black men" it would be effectively be saying "a young black individual is more likely to be a mugger than a white man" which is clearly bollocks and is racist. (In fact it is exactly the kind of "institutionalised racism" that the UK police have fairly recently been heavily criticised for)
What if these airports were looking for known Bin Laden associates. We would see queues of men of eastern origin queueing to be searched while the white men and all women walk through freely.
false negatives can be accepted because although the system isnt perfect it does no harm and does some good. False positives here would do harm and arguably do more harm than good.
Do you think that the people implementing this kind of thing do so because they think it improves security and safety?
If so I think you have made a mistake. They are implementing it because they think it will make the public think that it improves security and safety.
Giving the public what they think is best is always easier that giving them what is actually best. (and of course you might be wrong about whats best and the public right but thats another issue)
The only solution to this kind of thing is to reduce the gap between the real best solution and the publics belief of what the best solution is.
That means two things. Unlazy authorities and education of the people. Don't hold your breath on the former. Help out yourself with the latter.
.. that there are still people around these days who are stupid enough to believe that this kind of regulation can do any good at all. How many times do they need to be proven wrong, and how often do we need our rights reducing before these stupid (but well intending although angry) people realise they are WRONG?
I fear they will not stop until we reach orwellian levels of monitoring, banning and regulation.
I find it ironic that the US are moving more towards stopping technologies that are evil, (which incidentally is a complete nonsense in itself,) yet none of us would like to live under (for example) the rule of the Taleban. Look again at the Tabeban - all they do is ban, monitor and control things they think are "evil" - just the knod of action we are talking about here.
The world needs to learn that people are good and bad. "Things" are indifferent. Banning or restricting "things" simply hides bad people from view. An interesting side effect that governments find useful from that is that it increases temporarily the perception of safety.
4
< SARCASM> Oh... like theres no incentive for companies to write open source software you mean?
</SARCASM>
What you say sounds perfectly resaonable, but there is very little real evidence to suggest what you say is true.
Whatever the reasons, experience is showing us that people can and do make a living producing and selling products that can be and are openly copied (and hence more often improved - but thats another argument)
I'm afraid your argument is one based purely in the fear of what might happen and not on real life facts.