Their intent is still the same. The 11 points for inclusion of patented methods into W3C standards are anything but clear, but the upshot is a restatement of RAND as Royalty Free. If the use of a patent as a patent may be used is too restrictive for their standards they should simply not use or encourage patents.
The terms used are still vauge, and what the first condition means is NOT DEFINED:
A Royalty-Free license shall mean a non-assignable, non-sublicensable license to make, have made, use, have used, sell, have sold, offer to sell, import, and distribute and dispose of implementations of the Recommendation that:
1. shall be available to all implementers of the specification worldwide, whether or not they are W3C Members;
That and other conditions leave lots of room for abuse. Would a no cost add-in to Micro$haft's Visual $tudio count as available? Might they standardize MP3 because it is "available" to all? Availability is not always usable, especially if the tools of use are in some way encumbered. It does me little good if I can unencode something if I can't turn around and create content.
The Patent Policy Working Group believes that the RF license as proposed is compatible with all major Open Source licenses except the GPL. We are still working on GPL-related issues.
They have a lot of work to do and I'd like to see what "Open Source" support they have besides their belief system. The crux of their thinking is this:
A claim is necessarily infringed hereunder only when it is not possible to avoid infringing it because there is no non-infringing alternative for implementing the required portions of the Recommendation. Existence of a non-infringing alternative shall be judged based on the state-of-the-art at the time the specification becomes a Recommendation.
There is always an alternative! If there is not, the law and patent process is broken. Laws and standards should bend towards morals rather than morals and standards bend toward broken laws. W3C should not lend it's support to broken laws.
One man's waste is another man's treasure. My uncle collected and sold pallets of old dead computers to Asia. People there paid money for them. The folks pictured next to the rubish heaps are simply the last recipients. I like to think that many of those dead machines were used for more than gold extraction, but it's hard to blame my uncle if the recievers have poor waste and environmental laws. You can bet everyone in that chain would complain if the shipments stopped.
If you read a little Dickens or brush up on your American West gold rush history you might come off your high horse. Just 100 years ago streams flowed purple with coal tars and green with copper cynide compounds here in the first world. It was dirty, but we are rich today from such efforts. Rich enough to clean up. Try telling a man who might die of starvation or common disseases next month that his current activities might give him cancer in thirty years. He will laugh, before he eats you.
All we can do is shout that it's wrong and point out propper methods of disposal. Hopefully, the world will hear and work on other things like sanitary sewerage, potable drinking water and other basic public health issues.
Would your Basel Convention prevent the transfer of new working computers? What other great things should the US ratify for you?
you might configure your computer to use an independent (or your own) DNS server that the ISP doesn't control. Therefore the ISP can't get marketing kickbacks for screwing with your DNS.
What make you think your ISP can't catch all your requests to the root servers and feed you what they want? ICANN might start by encypting their communications streams, but I doubt that's on the corporate agenda. Then again, your ISP can substitute any kind of IP for IP you request.
I don't really know the ins and outs of the protocal but running DNS is trivial with Debian. It's a binary install that sets itself up and works, no fuss. I'd prefered to use the at home DNS, but it never worked and they only offered me one machine to chose from in a different state. Needless to say, mine worked much better.
As the wired article points out, email itself is under attack here. Yesterday, I got a stupid snail mail advert from Earthlink with much the same stuff in it as I'm reading here. While promissing "raw unfiltered internet" they also claimed to be blocking more "spam"(70%) than other ISPs, AOL (40%), MSN(40%), ATT(40%). As you can see, spam is a marketing tool. Should we be supprised when compainies with the morals of M$ abuse open relays to send messages like "fck me like a slut"? Would it be supprising if a large country trying to halt communications between it's people and other countries also abused email? The abusers all have the same goal, to destroy email. The more you block, the happier they are.
It's scared because it wants you to have to watch hours of crap everyday. If you could get what you wanted, when you wanted you would not be tempted to wait for something worthwhile and you would continue to soak up hours of adverts every day. This will destroy their revenue stream because their affiliates would no nonger be able to charge.
Their only recourse is to own the internet itself and forbid all "servers". Gee, that kind of looks like the new Cox.net Terms of Service. Time/Warner AOL ToS anyone? I suppose the Bells will co-operate if the cable companies keep people from using their bandwith for long distance voice comunications. M$ might make some money collecting extortion fees from various media companies to protect content with the new XP EULA and Digital Rights Denial Patents. Looky there, all the big publishing interests CAN be happy with new technology after all. What a deal, all use of your bandwith is stripped, you computer is a TV.
Kinda sucks life. All I want to do is run my own mail, and share pictures of my two month old girl with my friends and family. No can do, those tools make me a Pirate and endanger the profits of major publishers. I don't watch TV.
Fine. Let the RIAA price their crap right off of the web. The last thing I want competing with pictures of my three month old daughter is a no save copy of a Lars drum lick. This will, hopefully, leave the big five music publishers further in the past and encourage more people to sign with independent studios and publishers like MP3.com sought to be. Let them rule their litle airwave monopolies, let their listnership decline to zero and let them all perish, but keep that shit off the web.
Older versions of Word Perfect for Linux were true X apps. It looked nothing like their Windoze stuff and ran very well. I thought that they had ported to Solaris etc first then to Linux. I've still got the CD of their "Personal Edition" of Word Perfect 8 that I got from Linux Central. The Wine stuff that was their 2000 suite was insane as it made their linux ports dependent on M$ whims. If Wine was not perfect all the time, all else would be painful. If it really was running under wine, it fooled me.
Corel dropped a big advantage. I can use that old CD to install under an older version of Red Hat and ship.wp documents to most government offices. Those same offices won't touch unstable MicroSquish formats. You would think that they could have sold plenty of this. How on earth did they let such a huge advantage slip away like that? My siser is a lawer, she curses her desktop daily.
I'm not sure about all the technical limitions of various monitors, but the color wheel sitting on my desk looks like the answer. It has complementary colors 180 degrees apart. So Red is opposite of green, blue from orange, purple from gold etc. These are all optimal contrasts, except for people who are red green color blind. Combinations that are close with respect to angle, like red and red-violet do not contrast much.
Try using the color sum, R+B+G for radius and the ratio of colors for angle. The outside would be white, the center black and a mean radius would have R+B+G = 256 and so contain the pure colors. Limits of acceptable difference could be set to accomodate for any crappy old monitor.
If no one else has come up with this rather obvious aproach to digital color, I hearby delcare first art and grant anyone and everyone the right to use this basic IDEA without further consultation. You'll have to do some work to make that idea practical, but the basic idea seems to have been working for designers, graphic artists, archetects and plain old painters for a long time.
This means that OSS has the *potential* to be more secure, but as shown by the article, that potential is not fully realized.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what he says because his Mailman program from Red Hat 6. had holes. What a rotten extrapolation! Let's not FUD ourselves into a stupid panic.
The point of free software is to develop a community of users and gain mutual benifit by sharing code and development effort. Mailman? Pardon my ignorance of a bell on the "proffesional" Red Hat distro I never owned. How widely deployed was this package? If it was never that widely used, of course the bugs would remain. Thousands of downloads does not translate into thousands of users really and we might assume that a large portion of those users have upgraded their machines. It is much more correct to extrapolate free software security from Apache, sendmail, exim, openssh, xfree86, the list is very long indeed, where there is a real comunity of users. If a bell or whistle is broke, it can be replaced.
Red Hat, by coming closer to the bad old days of software distribution has left their user base open to some of the bad old day problems. Difficulty in getting updates makes problems. Who would put 6.2 on a machine? No one expects a CD to heal itself yet I'm tempted. I've heard good things about up2date but it's not as easy or dependable as apt-get update and upgrade by a long shot. That cozey old 6.2 environment... nah. Shifting focus from service and equipment sales to software vending is a bad bad idea. Should we let some small problems Red Hat has had run us back into the arms of MicroShit and the like? Nope.
The good news is that low usage also translates into low venerabilty for the rest of us. It's not like Mailman is "the standard" forced on everyone, and I doubt any of it's bugs are as bad as say Outlook's. Think about it. Did we suffer Code-RedMan a few months ago? No we did not. Nor did we suffer network instability over BIND problems and or any other Linux/BSD holes.
The free distribution methods are showing themselves to be best. While I know it's possible for my poor little Debian boxes to be cracked, I also know that the chances are far less than any windoze compooter. The most common applications ARE well reviewed, the rest are so variable as to make life hard for the would be Linux cracker. What potential is ever fully realized in nature?
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
When did the strong spirit of these beautiful ideas become so meaningless?
So look up subject and property in a current and in a 1770 dictionary. You might find the differences disturbing. English language evolution has been co-opted by five music publishers and three broadcasters for the last 60 years, are you supprised that your words serve your masters?
Later this month, the House of Representatives will vote on the hotly debated Tauzin-Dingell broadband deregulation bill, which would allow Bells to offer broadband data services regardless of whether they open their local phone networks to competition.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 currently requires incumbents such as the Bells to prove that they have opened their historical local monopolies to competition before they offer any long-distance services.
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who opposed today's decision to publish the proposed rule, said he believed that the agency was going too far down the road toward setting competition policy.
"I fear we are out-driving the range of our headlights," Copps said. "We are not ready to go as far as this notice takes us."
So you see, the FCC has more than one opinion but they are being driven by pressure from Congress, specifically that Toe-Zan (might still be a democrat, it's hard to keep up with people who have no priciples) looser from right here in Louisana. So the cycle is comming to completion where a network built under government franchise protection and therefore public is being given to a few large private companies. I suppose that will make it easier for Toe-Zan to collect bribes as he knows where to go every year.
I should have seen it comming. The local Bell has used it's ownership of those lines to screw would be DSL providers all along. They have manipulated the process very well. They own the database of potential customers and use it to make telephone solicitations while failing to update the one they are forced to share with their competitors. It's funny how I was not available to have DSL when I moved less than a mile and had to kill my Telocity contract. Stranger still when I recieved a solicitation from BellSouth that it was available two weeks later, but Telocity could not sign me up. Finally, it became unavailable before the whole process could be gone through. So, no supprise they would push laws to obliterate those they have been ignoring for the last eight years.
Consequence: You ain't getting any. Large traditional publishers now own all broadband. Hollywood/TimeWarner own cable, the telcos own DSL and the traditional broadcasters (owned by GE, Westinghouse and Disney) own the airwaves. All of these intities have reasons to keep you from using the internet that should be obvious. Telcos wish to continue raping you per minute of conversation. Opinion control is the reason large companies are in broadcast, and they will not tollerate competition. Not being able to push crap through restricted channels would ruin more than Hollywood. Expect DHCP over all forms of connectivity, and worse forms of "intelligence" being added to networks. The internet is becoming a new form of comercial broadcast faster than I thought possible just two years ago.
Toby, are modding yourself again? You know you can go blind doing that. As your post here proves, any idiot can be published. With an abusable mod system, it can even look like you have peer approval. I suppose you will make yourself +5, but I modded you -1 flamebait.
The facts, as has been documented here and elsewhere, are that reputable scientists are trying to move publication of peer review journals into the future. They know their peers, and can organize themselves on line. If it becomes too much for them, some profesional society will step in and organize it for them but the restrictions on publishing elswhere and great cost of dead trees will become a thing of the past. The internet provides a low cost means of ditributing information and it will be expoited.
One very good example of this is the Journal of the American Medical Association, now online and mostly free. The New England Journal of Medicine is not as available, but is online. The physics people have been doing this for a long time, and everyone is following. Science and peer review will not die with the outmoded dead tree journal publication industry. Abusers like you will be weeded out, as will greedy publishers who abuse their reputations to try to make a few extra bucks.
Think about setting up an adoption agency down at the sperm bank. A little room in the back could house hundreds of them and bring life to as many highly desirable children the "market" will support. Oh yeah, the real orphans will have to sit in institutions. They will be joined by the 75% (like Dolly!) of those hudreds that fail to be perfect every year. Those that live that is. Won't it be nice to subsidize such a place by institutionalizing all of defective products? Kinda sucks for the legitmate orphans too that they can only go to the people who can't afford to get a perfect child. One day the technology will be better than that. When it's more reliable than natural birth, it should be considered. Even then it should be well considered. People are not cattle and should never be sired like them.
an axe and cutters would hit that fiber so fast it'd make your head spin. Shutting down services on your panel selectivly MY ASS.
Me to! No way I'm going to let them use this new IP over 480V to stop power to my house! Soon as I see them put a kill switch onto my compressor, I walk out back and axe that line. Oh wait.
OK OK, I'll have to figure out how to fake out the black box. Sooner or later, they will make a black box that can't be fooled and throw you in jail for trying.
These brown out intiatives are pure evil. Let the freaking power companies build new plants, people! They have been telling you about impending shortages for 20 years. The bad economics of the early to mid 80's then the 90's and some power saving devices helped forstall the crunch, but you can't expect that to last forever. We can have boxes or we can just make more power for ourselves and keep things nice cheap and regulated.
Oh yeah, the ususal bull. "You don't understand all the bullshit terms we've invented and all the things we promise you it will do." Sure.... You have to look at what works now, not what M$ says will work in the future.
How can these companies run their entire IT infrastructure on a platform so buggy that applications will never work???
Painfully, and by selling new "upgrades" to replace the broken functionality of "obsolete" tools. I know, I work in one of those places with a M$ IT infrastructure.
Yeah, I guess it would take a half hour to click the radio button that says "Disable all automatic updates" the first time you run XP.
Radio Button says, "Disable", but License says "Screw you all day long!" I wonder which one will really hold force? I also wonder just how good this fine program will be at turning off the kill feature of XP so that your computer will continue working after you disable this "feature." Forget it, the slavery is made manifest and the number one condition of any oppresive EULA is the company saying that they can terminate your license and destroy your work at will. This is really that clause put into action.
Yes, it really is the best windows ever. I don't like it and I don't use it. I have one surviving windows 98 box that I've tried to make blind to the network. It never really worked that well, but I expect the EULA that came with it to reamain in force that way. XP, "Hunh, have you ever been eXPerienced?!" Not me.
They have been trained, but there is hope.
on
Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 3, Interesting
They don't get it yet, and those that do are embarassed.
Everyone sees those service packs and weekly "anti-virus" updates. A few of them know that M$ is changing everything under their feet all the time. Some of them have even figured out that M$ is not the only program they have that calls home. They have been beat down with FUD and convinced that they need that "automatic" hand in there fixing things. To them this is the same feeling they get when they pay for a $100 oil change. They feel ripped off, but don't see a way out.
The people who know the most are the most embarrased. Here it is, laid bare, all those evil things the free software people have been telling them for years. The MicroTurds have led their companies down the rosy path all this time, ignoring poor perfomance and increasingly ugly control from M$. The waste of ever shifting formats was a demoralization they were willing to live with because they thought it would end one day. Now they look around and see the chains. The latest changes in document formats came as a huge shock to them because they know of no other applications than M$ for Windoze. So it is now obvious that the changes will never end and that they are being used as the upgrade train. Last thursday a co-worker told me that M$ was shifting all of their licensing to XP and rental only by next June. He was really shocked. IT is demoralized completely, especially the die hard M$ pushers. "What can we do?" they wonder.
People I work with are now interested in Linux and other free software. These are rank and file engineers who, as one of them put it, "use software like toilet paper, I use what's on the roll." I'm amazed. What I've told a few people about the concepts of free software, its motives licenses and current state, sunk in.
I have three old computers that I'm lending to people so they can see for themselves. I've warned them that I'm NOT a CS or IT dude, and that the machines could be better configured by someone that knew better or cared for things like noise, TV and movies. What I lend them are basic Debian machines with Gnome applications, Netscape, Mozilla, a few window managers and some kind of network connection. This way they don't feel like Free software robbed them of anything (I leave that to dying M$ junk), and I don't have to spend hours at their house figuring out their computer. In short, I try to give them the tools they use for 95% of their work and let them know that there are better tools available for people who really need them, like Latex for typesetters, databases and noise makers.
It is very possible that.NET will suceed where Java failed - true cross platform, high-quality application development environment.
Who told you that? Steve Baller?
Let's summarize the article as, "A tool that claims to do all things for all people in all places, generally does nothing well." Hey, its good for my writing skills =:> As the authors point out:
Programming languages exist in wide variety, not only because different tasks (from systems programming to artificial intelligence) require different tools, but also because there is no One True Way to serve even one domain.
Yup, it's true and he goes on to show us how C Pound is gimped by the limits of each of the languages it wishes to extend and extinguish.
The CLS only supports single, static inheritance.
Languages such as C++ and Eiffel need multiple inheritance of implementation. Cross-language support for MI may not be possible, as MI creates some hard problems (like repeated inheritance and name clashes) that different languages solve in different, incompatible ways.
Yup!
There is currently zero support for generic programming in the CLS.
Compile-time mechanisms like C++ templates are supported, but they are not cross-language: no way to instantiate your stack.
He goes on with a few more damming examples including how incompatible different (VB buzzord!) Methods are. His conclusion is both damning and accurate:
For the CLR, we can certainly rely that everything is optimized to favor C#. The result will be inferior performance for any language which behavior is significantly different from C#.
Someone asked what people are "up in arms about." I suppose the Java people, who have made a fine and stable standard, are upset because the MicroTurds are going to spend lots of money saying this new C# is better than their work when it is not. They will back it up with the usual spred specturm attack of poor performance for all other languages under their platofrm. I feel their pain. Me? I'm not up in arms because I could care less, M$ is irrelavant. Even if they built the best freaking comiler in the world, their underlying OS is still so buggy and screwed up applications will never work right. People have noticed. The other folks up in arms are M$ dependents who are consistently let down. Their demise is the demise of my coworkers and it brings me no joy.
"Is the superiority of C#/.NET enough to offset the costs of moving to it from J2EE."
A tool that claims to do all things for all people never does anything well. C pound is one of those tools. The article does a good job showing how each of the implimented launguages applies its flaws to C pound rather than it's strengths. The result is a crippled java without multiple inheritences and most of the rest of java's strengths.
The reason people write that they don't like the new M$ toy is not because they don't like M$, it's because they don't like the new toy.
C pound has all the stench of the M$ fortran effort. Before they were the Empire of the Dumb, it was interesting to see a nice little DOS fortran compiler. Next they extended it to include support for their Win3.1 GUI with the user kernel. That was replaced with a 32 bit DOS extended compiler, which was in turn replaced with a module for their Developer, which promised to unite VB, C++ fortran and Java(? I can't remember if java made it in there). After all that jerk around, each transition breaking the previous extentions, the finally dropped it alltogether. They never seriously focused on the isssues that needed to be solved to make it more than a toy, ie be able to compile the tremendous body of legacy code, and in the end trashed it on their platform all together. These days real fortran work is a pain in the ass on M$, with each OS shift breaking the kludge that got around the last limitations. It's much easier to pick up comercial Linux compilers of G77, as everyone else focused on the strengths of fortran and made comilers that do useful work. M$'s effort to extinguish fortran on their platform has simply shifted physisists and others to other platforms.
Go download the.NET STANDARD, and go find the documents that Sun publishs about their technology.
Do you know what a standard is? The above shows not.
Re:I think some people are missing the point...
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
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· Score: 2
Hmmmm. This might be a fun way to get rid of all those 500M hard drives in the closet. Take the cover off, put on seran wrap, pull a power chord and IDE cable out of a case. Plug it in and mount it as/var for a while. Yeah, with nothing but seran wrap and duct tape holding it to the side of the case.
Slashdot Mirror
The terms used are still vauge, and what the first condition means is NOT DEFINED:
A Royalty-Free license shall mean a non-assignable, non-sublicensable license to make, have made, use, have used, sell, have sold, offer to sell, import, and distribute and dispose of implementations of the Recommendation that:
1. shall be available to all implementers of the specification worldwide, whether or not they are W3C Members;
That and other conditions leave lots of room for abuse. Would a no cost add-in to Micro$haft's Visual $tudio count as available? Might they standardize MP3 because it is "available" to all? Availability is not always usable, especially if the tools of use are in some way encumbered. It does me little good if I can unencode something if I can't turn around and create content.
The Patent Policy Working Group believes that the RF license as proposed is compatible with all major Open Source licenses except the GPL. We are still working on GPL-related issues.
They have a lot of work to do and I'd like to see what "Open Source" support they have besides their belief system. The crux of their thinking is this:
A claim is necessarily infringed hereunder only when it is not possible to avoid infringing it because there is no non-infringing alternative for implementing the required portions of the Recommendation. Existence of a non-infringing alternative shall be judged based on the state-of-the-art at the time the specification becomes a Recommendation.
There is always an alternative! If there is not, the law and patent process is broken. Laws and standards should bend towards morals rather than morals and standards bend toward broken laws. W3C should not lend it's support to broken laws.
If you read a little Dickens or brush up on your American West gold rush history you might come off your high horse. Just 100 years ago streams flowed purple with coal tars and green with copper cynide compounds here in the first world. It was dirty, but we are rich today from such efforts. Rich enough to clean up. Try telling a man who might die of starvation or common disseases next month that his current activities might give him cancer in thirty years. He will laugh, before he eats you.
All we can do is shout that it's wrong and point out propper methods of disposal. Hopefully, the world will hear and work on other things like sanitary sewerage, potable drinking water and other basic public health issues.
Would your Basel Convention prevent the transfer of new working computers? What other great things should the US ratify for you?
What make you think your ISP can't catch all your requests to the root servers and feed you what they want? ICANN might start by encypting their communications streams, but I doubt that's on the corporate agenda. Then again, your ISP can substitute any kind of IP for IP you request.
I don't really know the ins and outs of the protocal but running DNS is trivial with Debian. It's a binary install that sets itself up and works, no fuss. I'd prefered to use the at home DNS, but it never worked and they only offered me one machine to chose from in a different state. Needless to say, mine worked much better.
As the wired article points out, email itself is under attack here. Yesterday, I got a stupid snail mail advert from Earthlink with much the same stuff in it as I'm reading here. While promissing "raw unfiltered internet" they also claimed to be blocking more "spam"(70%) than other ISPs, AOL (40%), MSN(40%), ATT(40%). As you can see, spam is a marketing tool. Should we be supprised when compainies with the morals of M$ abuse open relays to send messages like "fck me like a slut"? Would it be supprising if a large country trying to halt communications between it's people and other countries also abused email? The abusers all have the same goal, to destroy email. The more you block, the happier they are.
Their only recourse is to own the internet itself and forbid all "servers". Gee, that kind of looks like the new Cox.net Terms of Service. Time/Warner AOL ToS anyone? I suppose the Bells will co-operate if the cable companies keep people from using their bandwith for long distance voice comunications. M$ might make some money collecting extortion fees from various media companies to protect content with the new XP EULA and Digital Rights Denial Patents. Looky there, all the big publishing interests CAN be happy with new technology after all. What a deal, all use of your bandwith is stripped, you computer is a TV.
Kinda sucks life. All I want to do is run my own mail, and share pictures of my two month old girl with my friends and family. No can do, those tools make me a Pirate and endanger the profits of major publishers. I don't watch TV.
Fine. Let the RIAA price their crap right off of the web. The last thing I want competing with pictures of my three month old daughter is a no save copy of a Lars drum lick. This will, hopefully, leave the big five music publishers further in the past and encourage more people to sign with independent studios and publishers like MP3.com sought to be. Let them rule their litle airwave monopolies, let their listnership decline to zero and let them all perish, but keep that shit off the web.
Don't they have cable TV in prison yet?
Corel dropped a big advantage. I can use that old CD to install under an older version of Red Hat and ship .wp documents to most government offices. Those same offices won't touch unstable MicroSquish formats. You would think that they could have sold plenty of this. How on earth did they let such a huge advantage slip away like that? My siser is a lawer, she curses her desktop daily.
Try using the color sum, R+B+G for radius and the ratio of colors for angle. The outside would be white, the center black and a mean radius would have R+B+G = 256 and so contain the pure colors. Limits of acceptable difference could be set to accomodate for any crappy old monitor.
If no one else has come up with this rather obvious aproach to digital color, I hearby delcare first art and grant anyone and everyone the right to use this basic IDEA without further consultation. You'll have to do some work to make that idea practical, but the basic idea seems to have been working for designers, graphic artists, archetects and plain old painters for a long time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what he says because his Mailman program from Red Hat 6. had holes. What a rotten extrapolation! Let's not FUD ourselves into a stupid panic.
The point of free software is to develop a community of users and gain mutual benifit by sharing code and development effort. Mailman? Pardon my ignorance of a bell on the "proffesional" Red Hat distro I never owned. How widely deployed was this package? If it was never that widely used, of course the bugs would remain. Thousands of downloads does not translate into thousands of users really and we might assume that a large portion of those users have upgraded their machines. It is much more correct to extrapolate free software security from Apache, sendmail, exim, openssh, xfree86, the list is very long indeed, where there is a real comunity of users. If a bell or whistle is broke, it can be replaced.
Red Hat, by coming closer to the bad old days of software distribution has left their user base open to some of the bad old day problems. Difficulty in getting updates makes problems. Who would put 6.2 on a machine? No one expects a CD to heal itself yet I'm tempted. I've heard good things about up2date but it's not as easy or dependable as apt-get update and upgrade by a long shot. That cozey old 6.2 environment... nah. Shifting focus from service and equipment sales to software vending is a bad bad idea. Should we let some small problems Red Hat has had run us back into the arms of MicroShit and the like? Nope.
The good news is that low usage also translates into low venerabilty for the rest of us. It's not like Mailman is "the standard" forced on everyone, and I doubt any of it's bugs are as bad as say Outlook's. Think about it. Did we suffer Code-RedMan a few months ago? No we did not. Nor did we suffer network instability over BIND problems and or any other Linux/BSD holes.
The free distribution methods are showing themselves to be best. While I know it's possible for my poor little Debian boxes to be cracked, I also know that the chances are far less than any windoze compooter. The most common applications ARE well reviewed, the rest are so variable as to make life hard for the would be Linux cracker. What potential is ever fully realized in nature?
When did the strong spirit of these beautiful ideas become so meaningless?
So look up subject and property in a current and in a 1770 dictionary. You might find the differences disturbing. English language evolution has been co-opted by five music publishers and three broadcasters for the last 60 years, are you supprised that your words serve your masters?
Later this month, the House of Representatives will vote on the hotly debated Tauzin-Dingell broadband deregulation bill, which would allow Bells to offer broadband data services regardless of whether they open their local phone networks to competition.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 currently requires incumbents such as the Bells to prove that they have opened their historical local monopolies to competition before they offer any long-distance services.
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who opposed today's decision to publish the proposed rule, said he believed that the agency was going too far down the road toward setting competition policy.
"I fear we are out-driving the range of our headlights," Copps said. "We are not ready to go as far as this notice takes us."
So you see, the FCC has more than one opinion but they are being driven by pressure from Congress, specifically that Toe-Zan (might still be a democrat, it's hard to keep up with people who have no priciples) looser from right here in Louisana. So the cycle is comming to completion where a network built under government franchise protection and therefore public is being given to a few large private companies. I suppose that will make it easier for Toe-Zan to collect bribes as he knows where to go every year.
I should have seen it comming. The local Bell has used it's ownership of those lines to screw would be DSL providers all along. They have manipulated the process very well. They own the database of potential customers and use it to make telephone solicitations while failing to update the one they are forced to share with their competitors. It's funny how I was not available to have DSL when I moved less than a mile and had to kill my Telocity contract. Stranger still when I recieved a solicitation from BellSouth that it was available two weeks later, but Telocity could not sign me up. Finally, it became unavailable before the whole process could be gone through. So, no supprise they would push laws to obliterate those they have been ignoring for the last eight years.
Consequence: You ain't getting any. Large traditional publishers now own all broadband. Hollywood/TimeWarner own cable, the telcos own DSL and the traditional broadcasters (owned by GE, Westinghouse and Disney) own the airwaves. All of these intities have reasons to keep you from using the internet that should be obvious. Telcos wish to continue raping you per minute of conversation. Opinion control is the reason large companies are in broadcast, and they will not tollerate competition. Not being able to push crap through restricted channels would ruin more than Hollywood. Expect DHCP over all forms of connectivity, and worse forms of "intelligence" being added to networks. The internet is becoming a new form of comercial broadcast faster than I thought possible just two years ago.
The facts, as has been documented here and elsewhere, are that reputable scientists are trying to move publication of peer review journals into the future. They know their peers, and can organize themselves on line. If it becomes too much for them, some profesional society will step in and organize it for them but the restrictions on publishing elswhere and great cost of dead trees will become a thing of the past. The internet provides a low cost means of ditributing information and it will be expoited.
One very good example of this is the Journal of the American Medical Association, now online and mostly free. The New England Journal of Medicine is not as available, but is online. The physics people have been doing this for a long time, and everyone is following. Science and peer review will not die with the outmoded dead tree journal publication industry. Abusers like you will be weeded out, as will greedy publishers who abuse their reputations to try to make a few extra bucks.
Have a nice day.
Think about setting up an adoption agency down at the sperm bank. A little room in the back could house hundreds of them and bring life to as many highly desirable children the "market" will support. Oh yeah, the real orphans will have to sit in institutions. They will be joined by the 75% (like Dolly!) of those hudreds that fail to be perfect every year. Those that live that is. Won't it be nice to subsidize such a place by institutionalizing all of defective products? Kinda sucks for the legitmate orphans too that they can only go to the people who can't afford to get a perfect child. One day the technology will be better than that. When it's more reliable than natural birth, it should be considered. Even then it should be well considered. People are not cattle and should never be sired like them.
Me to! No way I'm going to let them use this new IP over 480V to stop power to my house! Soon as I see them put a kill switch onto my compressor, I walk out back and axe that line. Oh wait.
OK OK, I'll have to figure out how to fake out the black box. Sooner or later, they will make a black box that can't be fooled and throw you in jail for trying.
These brown out intiatives are pure evil. Let the freaking power companies build new plants, people! They have been telling you about impending shortages for 20 years. The bad economics of the early to mid 80's then the 90's and some power saving devices helped forstall the crunch, but you can't expect that to last forever. We can have boxes or we can just make more power for ourselves and keep things nice cheap and regulated.
Oh yeah, the ususal bull. "You don't understand all the bullshit terms we've invented and all the things we promise you it will do." Sure.... You have to look at what works now, not what M$ says will work in the future.
Painfully, and by selling new "upgrades" to replace the broken functionality of "obsolete" tools. I know, I work in one of those places with a M$ IT infrastructure.
Radio Button says, "Disable", but License says "Screw you all day long!" I wonder which one will really hold force? I also wonder just how good this fine program will be at turning off the kill feature of XP so that your computer will continue working after you disable this "feature." Forget it, the slavery is made manifest and the number one condition of any oppresive EULA is the company saying that they can terminate your license and destroy your work at will. This is really that clause put into action.
Yes, it really is the best windows ever. I don't like it and I don't use it. I have one surviving windows 98 box that I've tried to make blind to the network. It never really worked that well, but I expect the EULA that came with it to reamain in force that way. XP, "Hunh, have you ever been eXPerienced?!" Not me.
Everyone sees those service packs and weekly "anti-virus" updates. A few of them know that M$ is changing everything under their feet all the time. Some of them have even figured out that M$ is not the only program they have that calls home. They have been beat down with FUD and convinced that they need that "automatic" hand in there fixing things. To them this is the same feeling they get when they pay for a $100 oil change. They feel ripped off, but don't see a way out.
The people who know the most are the most embarrased. Here it is, laid bare, all those evil things the free software people have been telling them for years. The MicroTurds have led their companies down the rosy path all this time, ignoring poor perfomance and increasingly ugly control from M$. The waste of ever shifting formats was a demoralization they were willing to live with because they thought it would end one day. Now they look around and see the chains. The latest changes in document formats came as a huge shock to them because they know of no other applications than M$ for Windoze. So it is now obvious that the changes will never end and that they are being used as the upgrade train. Last thursday a co-worker told me that M$ was shifting all of their licensing to XP and rental only by next June. He was really shocked. IT is demoralized completely, especially the die hard M$ pushers. "What can we do?" they wonder.
People I work with are now interested in Linux and other free software. These are rank and file engineers who, as one of them put it, "use software like toilet paper, I use what's on the roll." I'm amazed. What I've told a few people about the concepts of free software, its motives licenses and current state, sunk in.
I have three old computers that I'm lending to people so they can see for themselves. I've warned them that I'm NOT a CS or IT dude, and that the machines could be better configured by someone that knew better or cared for things like noise, TV and movies. What I lend them are basic Debian machines with Gnome applications, Netscape, Mozilla, a few window managers and some kind of network connection. This way they don't feel like Free software robbed them of anything (I leave that to dying M$ junk), and I don't have to spend hours at their house figuring out their computer. In short, I try to give them the tools they use for 95% of their work and let them know that there are better tools available for people who really need them, like Latex for typesetters, databases and noise makers.
Who told you that? Steve Baller?
Let's summarize the article as, "A tool that claims to do all things for all people in all places, generally does nothing well." Hey, its good for my writing skills =:> As the authors point out:
Programming languages exist in wide variety, not only because different tasks (from systems programming to artificial intelligence) require different tools, but also because there is no One True Way to serve even one domain.
Yup, it's true and he goes on to show us how C Pound is gimped by the limits of each of the languages it wishes to extend and extinguish.
The CLS only supports single, static inheritance.
Languages such as C++ and Eiffel need multiple inheritance of implementation. Cross-language support for MI may not be possible, as MI creates some hard problems (like repeated inheritance and name clashes) that different languages solve in different, incompatible ways.
Yup!
There is currently zero support for generic programming in the CLS.
Compile-time mechanisms like C++ templates are supported, but they are not cross-language: no way to instantiate your stack.
He goes on with a few more damming examples including how incompatible different (VB buzzord!) Methods are. His conclusion is both damning and accurate:
For the CLR, we can certainly rely that everything is optimized to favor C#. The result will be inferior performance for any language which behavior is significantly different from C#.
Someone asked what people are "up in arms about." I suppose the Java people, who have made a fine and stable standard, are upset because the MicroTurds are going to spend lots of money saying this new C# is better than their work when it is not. They will back it up with the usual spred specturm attack of poor performance for all other languages under their platofrm. I feel their pain. Me? I'm not up in arms because I could care less, M$ is irrelavant. Even if they built the best freaking comiler in the world, their underlying OS is still so buggy and screwed up applications will never work right. People have noticed. The other folks up in arms are M$ dependents who are consistently let down. Their demise is the demise of my coworkers and it brings me no joy.
A tool that claims to do all things for all people never does anything well. C pound is one of those tools. The article does a good job showing how each of the implimented launguages applies its flaws to C pound rather than it's strengths. The result is a crippled java without multiple inheritences and most of the rest of java's strengths.
The reason people write that they don't like the new M$ toy is not because they don't like M$, it's because they don't like the new toy.
C pound has all the stench of the M$ fortran effort. Before they were the Empire of the Dumb, it was interesting to see a nice little DOS fortran compiler. Next they extended it to include support for their Win3.1 GUI with the user kernel. That was replaced with a 32 bit DOS extended compiler, which was in turn replaced with a module for their Developer, which promised to unite VB, C++ fortran and Java(? I can't remember if java made it in there). After all that jerk around, each transition breaking the previous extentions, the finally dropped it alltogether. They never seriously focused on the isssues that needed to be solved to make it more than a toy, ie be able to compile the tremendous body of legacy code, and in the end trashed it on their platform all together. These days real fortran work is a pain in the ass on M$, with each OS shift breaking the kludge that got around the last limitations. It's much easier to pick up comercial Linux compilers of G77, as everyone else focused on the strengths of fortran and made comilers that do useful work. M$'s effort to extinguish fortran on their platform has simply shifted physisists and others to other platforms.
Go download the .NET STANDARD, and go find the documents that Sun publishs about their technology.
Do you know what a standard is? The above shows not.
If the only thing the authors have in common is your readership, they might be right and you might be wrong.
Tera Pax.
Giga Tex.
Spot the madness!
5PM time for dinner, chow!
You'll shoot your eye out kid!
It was a better flame blank. =;]