I lost interest in slashdot (and let my sponsorship lapse) when I lost moderation privileges. I was never told I was black listed. I simply stopped receiving mod points. It doesn't really matter if the editors or the hive mind blacklisted me; the result is the same.
Who says you got blacklisted? You do realise that not every Slashdot user gets given mod points right, even ones who have been here for ages? It took years of "excellent" karma before I started being allocated mod points, and sometimes I am not given any for months (possibly because sometimes I let them lapse). But I don't bitch, because ultimately, mod points are a responsibility and not a toy. Actually properly allocating mod points takes more effort than just reading the comments, so it's no big deal when I don't have them.
At any rate, I'd say it's likely Slashcodes allocation algorithms is simply not putting you in the top whatever % for being granted moderator access rather than "blacklisting".
And why did they care about beating Netscape? Because they were scared shitless of web apps. All this came out in the trial, there are some very candid memos about the importance of Win32. For instance, from a DoJ report:
In an April 4, 1996 internal Microsoft memorandum, entitled "FY97 Planning Memo
'Winning the Internet platform battle'," Brad Chase wrote, "Go for maximum browser
share. Why should you care? This is a no revenue product, but you should worry
about your browser share, as much as BillG because: we will loose [sic] the Internet
platform battle if we do not have a significant user installed base. The industry would
simply ignore our standards. Few would write Windows apps without the Windows
user base. -- at your level, if you let your customers deploy Netscape Navigator, you
loose [sic] the leadership on the desktop." GX 39, at MS6 5005720 (emphasis in
original)
"The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead..."
"It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [...] Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move."
"In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago."
Yeah, I don't want to defend Netscape too much, they certainly had enough cracked out ideas (of which JSSS is the one that instantly springs to mind). On the other hand, IE vs Netscape wasn't really my point originally, it was more that Netscape were adding features at a huge rate and Microsoft put an end to that. Even though some of the features were rather misguided, I'd still take that over nothing at all which is what we've got now.
"Evil" is not a useful word to use here because it carries too many connotations... it's a cartoon word that conjures images of forked tails and lightning.
A better word to use might be "damaging". If you say Microsoft are "evil" of course you open yourself to criticism because people tend to reserve the word evil for things that are genuinely horrifying, and Microsoft actions really aren't horrifying, they're just bad.
The book you're referring to is "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan, and is indeed an excellent read. They turned it into a movie too but I never saw that.
The authors central theme is that a corporation is a psychopathic institution.... as legally they are treated the same as people, and as the law obliges them to serve their shareholders interests, the corporation is effectively a person beholden to self-interest above all else, which he claims makes them psychopathic.
It's a rather harsh way to put it but the book does a good job of supporting his argument, and also provides a fascinating history of how corporations came to be. I'd recommend it!
They're hosting the photo albums of pretty much the entirety of the US college population. I've seen image server numbers go up to 500 and above, and that's probably conservative... it's a massive operation, so I bet the money goes fast.
The real thing I'm wondering is why they need VC at all given their high profile advertisers?
I could have also sworn that at the time IE came out, the only other browsers were horrid and stagnant.
Let's see. Internet Explorer was introduced at a time that Netscape, for better or worse, was adding features at a relentless speed. Why do you think they threw so much money at it?
IIRC Netscape 2 added Java, frames, plugins, several new elements and one or two other things I forget. Netscape 3 added JavaScript, a HUGE change which is basically what makes web apps possible in the first place. They also added cookies (or was that v2) and SSL at some point, which made online shopping possible. Netscape 4 added DHTML and lots more CSS support. Netscape Navigator evolved so fast that the term "internet time" was coined to describe it. Then IE came out and cut the funding for competing browsers to a big fat zero. That is when things started to stagnate.
To claim that IE somehow re-energised the market is a gross misunderstanding... and even if IE was better back then (and by v6 I'd say it was better) this doesn't change the fact that it wasn't built to be competitive. It was built to destroy the competition and then halt the progress of the web. That's just bad, no two ways about it.
Well, there are two glaring faults with this comment. The first one is that you didn't actually read the comment you replied to before posting. The second is that a corporation is not legally a person, it simply has some of the same rights as one.
I did read it - the comment asserted that the "ethos" of a corporation can't be equated with the ethics of a person. I don't see why not given that a corporation is legally treated the same as a person, and at some level the law is an encoding of ethics.
As to whether a corporation is legally a person or not, well, I have a vague feeling this is just playing with words. If an entity has the same rights as something in the eyes of the law, then legally they are either similar or the same no? The law doesn't care about people per se, but rather, what they can and cannot do (their rights...).
But, to equate individual ethical behavior somehow with a collective corporate ethos doesn't add up, the calculus is flawed. In my opinion, Microsoft as a corporation exhibits behavior that could be considered evil, certainly some/much of its behavior has been found in a court of law to be illegal.
It's interesting to note that legally speaking a corporation IS a person, and so it makes total sense to discuss a corporation using terms one would apply to an individual. You can't have it both ways, either a corporation isn't a person in which case we have to throw out most corporate law (not a bad thing imho) and we can make personal comments about it, or it isn't, in which case generalization would indeed be bad.
Is Microsoft, the corporate person, evil? I would say it certainly was in the past. Whether it still is or not is harder to judge, partly because it hasn't done a whole lot lately.
Why would I say Microsoft, the corporate person (as opposed to the people that make up that corporate person!), is evil? For me it's simple.
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
It's not that IE is a bad product, though by todays standards it is. It's that it was created for the sole purpose of destroying technical progress on the web, a job it has succeeded at admirably and still continues to do even to this day.
Google are working on an AJAX word processor we hear. They already have a rather spiffy email program. Microsoft feared this future in which Win32 might not be relevant and they destroyed the thing they feared by disbanding the IE team the moment it wiped out Netscape.
The web is perhaps one of the greatest and most important inventions of the 20th century, certainly, it's up there with TV and the motor car in terms of impact on our society. Microsoft deliberately throttled it and continue to do so. They were found guilty of this in court, and I find this behaviour bad enough to warrant the label of "evil".
Now this guy may protest that it wasn't him, and all the people he works with are lovely, and I'm sure they are lovely and wonderful and ethical and everything. But clearly a significant number of people are not because IE wasn't just magicked out of somebodies ass, it required the co-operation of hundreds of people over a period of years to build. What the fuck did they think they were doing all that time? Were they really all that surprised when the project was cancelled? And if not how can they claim to be ethical and only interested in customers?
This guy is living in the middle of a reality distortion field, and doesn't even know it. Sad.
It's also stupid because it generalizes out to a whole population. I write open source software and have spent a LOT of time writing documentation and helping users out on IRC and other forums. This typically means answering the same questions over and over again, even if they're in an FAQ etc. I don't mind doing this because sometimes I go ask questions of others that could probably have been answered with enough manual searching too.
I very, very rarely get problems with serious "snobbery". I think this is more common in server land than desktop land, but can't really be sure. Suffice it to say that the documentation we've got for autopackage makes me proud - everybody in the project works on it, we have lots of forums with which to contact developers, and people are usually polite.
So what's up with the bashing? It makes about as much sense as people claiming all Mac users are elitist, all blacks have rhythm etc...
How do you know that you two produce the same level of work? Even if you compare raw code, how do you know that the guys extra experience is worthless? Can the guy spot a race in 5 seconds of looking at the code? If so, can you? Java is a very, very limited language (designed to be...) and it's hard to tell coders apart just by looking at Java code. But that's OK - being a "good coder" is a whole lot more than knowing Java.
And not even that lucky. Convincing a modern distribution to play DVDs is an exercise in pain - last time I simply gave up and used Windows (purchasing a codec along the way). Sure it can be done, if you track down libdvdcss, libdvdread, make sure DMA is enabled on your drive (mine is blacklisted but works fine), find a player with the right codecs, find you need some wacko AAC decoder which you have to build from CVS or whatever.... argh just sell my a DRMd player already!
Seriously I'm just waiting for Fluendo to sell me a player. I'll happily buy one to bypass the crap you have to go through to get real DVD playback on Linux.
That said, having never used RealProducer or any Helix software, why would I want to use it?
Because it's really, really good. I use it on OpenSUSE because:
It plays MP3s out of the box. No screwing around with downloading codecs from random RPM repositories in Hungary. It plays other codecs too, including Flash.
It is fast and light, starting almost instantly on my old computer. Being light is important for a program that runs constantly on my desktop. It's written in C++, which may be old-school, but so far Mono can't beat it.
It is robust. GStreamer, aRts, etc - these media player frameworks have always given me problems in the past. I hear GStreamer 0.10 is supposedly very solid, but I haven't tried that yet. Even if the underlying framework is stable I've always had lots of problems with RhythmBox due to threading issues (ie it's quite easy to crash, for me at least).
It looks great. It's a 100% fully native GTK2 app, with a HIG compliant UI. It feels like something a competent open source team would produce.
It is open source. So I guess it doesn't just feel that way, it is that way.
It is a good net radio player. I have a big-ish library of music but most iTunes clones like RhythmBox or Banshee focus exclusively on managing your library to the detriment of all else. Banshee (the "official" Novell audio player) doesn't even seem to support net radio! RealPlayer offers a simple favourites list and robust support for most of the stations I listen to.
It has Real behind it, who actually have the clout and ability to license codecs. They also run a music store. I haven't played with it much, for some reason on my (development) system it says it can't find RealPlayer in the system path. But nonetheless it DOES look, and it DOES let me onto the attractive and fast site with Firefox on Linux. No crappy web-sites-within-a-player, no crappy "Please upgrade to Internet Explorer" etc.
Put simply, Real - at least on Linux - is a reformed company. No two ways about it. Their engineers even take part on open source desktop Linux project lists.
AppArmor is interesting. Having played with both, I'd say that for the case of locking down a server running a few must-protect apps, AppArmor is probably a lot easier.
AppArmor has another advantage over SELinux at least for desktop machines: SELinux requires an incredible slow "relabel" process every so often, as Red Hat push out updates to the policy. It takes places at bootup and you may as well go get lunch whilst it occurs. The idea is that every system object that may be confined has a unique label and then the centralized policy defines how objects with those labels interact. One of the top SELinux NSA guys has said "pathname based security considered harmful", though I forget exactly which list he said this on...
Anyway I think it's a good idea in principle but in practice real world SELinux implementations like in Fedora (and I guess RHEL as well) actually are pathname based.... they have a massive list of regular expressions that match pathnames to allocate labels to things. AppArmor uses paths directly. So it boils down to something similar.
That said, SELinux is theoretically more powerful and I think it'd be easier to use it to implement some interesting security scenarios - for instance you could use it to totally eliminate prompting for root passwords whilst still having a more secure system at the end. SELinux has been integrated with other services like DBUS and X11 so you can restrict what programs can access each other via X and so on.... so it's kind of more "solid" in that sense. But that stuff doesn't matter much if all you want to do is restrain apache.
Nobody cares about system files that can be replaced within hours. The important stuff generally does not require write access to do it.
All in all, this system that I use is fairly immune to viruses. I'm sorry yours is not, but at least you have the ability to make it so on a Unixish system.
Well done, you have bent over backwards to lower privileges. Most users won't, and so, this point doesn't really prove anything.
You simply don't on a Windows system.
Incorrect. Look at CoreLabs Core Force. What's that you say? Not many people know about CoreForce? No, well, not many people know how to do what you have done either.
Regular users rarely install programs, and I never do.
Often in security discussions I see lots of uninformed speculation as to what "regular users" do. Suffice it to say that "regular users" do install software in large enough numbers that simply ignoring the issue is not enough.
Basically you've put together a badly hacked up version of what toolkits like SELinux, AppArmor or CoreForce give you in a much cleaner and more elegant way, which is commendable but not a route I'd recommend nor would I expect others to follow it. And don't get me started on trusted GUI paths. No consumer OS today gets this right - none. Just go read a usability study of trusted path systems to see what fun we're going to have integrating this into mainstream technology.
Huh. Medical student says money should be spent on medicine. Somehow I'm not surprised.
Consider this. Medical bills are infinite in scope. Disease is constant, and even in the West where we have truly vast resources to throw at the problem there are still people dying because they cannot afford the drugs to treat their conditions.
So, I am sceptical of any argument that says "There are still people in the world dying! Let's not do anything else until this is solved". There are many populations in the world who are not crippled with disease or lack of fresh water, who have the basics, and want to move on up in the world. How do they do that without education? I don't know. I think education is important enough that it deserves resources just as much as doctors do.
Some people have questioned the educational value of a laptop. This is reasonable - educational IT usage in the west is mostly worthless and really just a vehicle to train kids how to use Office. But now consider this - a single $100 laptop can contain the entirety of the Wikipedia (or some other encyclopedia), which whatever you think of OLPC or Wikipedia as projects is a truly vast amount of information, far more than could ever be distributed to children using paper. And that is just the start of what can be done with this technology.
So whilst I've seen some good arguments against the $100 laptop project, I'm currently broadly supportive of it.
I've also come across statistics which indicate that under load testing the XBOX 360 chips seem to run at about half the speed their clock rate would indicate on real world branch-heavy game code, because they lack OOO execution. Sure, maybe in theory the compiler can remove the need for this, but that approach worked real well for the Itanium didn't it...
Uh, why? As pointed out elsewhere,.NET is hardly "new" and many useful applications and utilities in the Linux world ARE being created using.NET: this includes OS components such as the updater service in SUSE 10.1
What a weird idea. You realise that whether something is classified as a toy or not is entirely up to the tax man, right?
The fact that it has a general purpose OS on it won't make much difference to the Inland Revenues eyes if it's marketed as a games console, which it will be. And of course you can make Linux into something that's not general purpose quite easily. I've met one of the people who work on PlayStation Linux (she's giving a talk at LugRadio Live in the UK soon, so if you're near Wolverhampton at that time come along), and the she gave some very sound reasons why they did Linux on the PlayStation. Obviously they were never concerned about people playing Tetris on Linux, there were other motivations.
I guess you could argue Sony would never tell their own staff that the work was for a tax dodge, but Linux for the PS2 came out after the PS2 did anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this more detailed post that's what they're going to do.
Who says you got blacklisted? You do realise that not every Slashdot user gets given mod points right, even ones who have been here for ages? It took years of "excellent" karma before I started being allocated mod points, and sometimes I am not given any for months (possibly because sometimes I let them lapse). But I don't bitch, because ultimately, mod points are a responsibility and not a toy. Actually properly allocating mod points takes more effort than just reading the comments, so it's no big deal when I don't have them.
At any rate, I'd say it's likely Slashcodes allocation algorithms is simply not putting you in the top whatever % for being granted moderator access rather than "blacklisting".
While I don't think editors should "bitchslap" threads, it's hard to ignore the fact that every single comment in that thread is in fact off-topic ....
And why did they care about beating Netscape? Because they were scared shitless of web apps. All this came out in the trial, there are some very candid memos about the importance of Win32. For instance, from a DoJ report:
That was from here. And another one:
Yeah, I don't want to defend Netscape too much, they certainly had enough cracked out ideas (of which JSSS is the one that instantly springs to mind). On the other hand, IE vs Netscape wasn't really my point originally, it was more that Netscape were adding features at a huge rate and Microsoft put an end to that. Even though some of the features were rather misguided, I'd still take that over nothing at all which is what we've got now.
A better word to use might be "damaging". If you say Microsoft are "evil" of course you open yourself to criticism because people tend to reserve the word evil for things that are genuinely horrifying, and Microsoft actions really aren't horrifying, they're just bad.
I meant Facebook. IIRC MySpace images are hosted by an Akamai style edge network ...
The authors central theme is that a corporation is a psychopathic institution .... as legally they are treated the same as people, and as the law obliges them to serve their shareholders interests, the corporation is effectively a person beholden to self-interest above all else, which he claims makes them psychopathic.
It's a rather harsh way to put it but the book does a good job of supporting his argument, and also provides a fascinating history of how corporations came to be. I'd recommend it!
The real thing I'm wondering is why they need VC at all given their high profile advertisers?
Let's see. Internet Explorer was introduced at a time that Netscape, for better or worse, was adding features at a relentless speed. Why do you think they threw so much money at it?
IIRC Netscape 2 added Java, frames, plugins, several new elements and one or two other things I forget. Netscape 3 added JavaScript, a HUGE change which is basically what makes web apps possible in the first place. They also added cookies (or was that v2) and SSL at some point, which made online shopping possible. Netscape 4 added DHTML and lots more CSS support. Netscape Navigator evolved so fast that the term "internet time" was coined to describe it. Then IE came out and cut the funding for competing browsers to a big fat zero. That is when things started to stagnate.
To claim that IE somehow re-energised the market is a gross misunderstanding ... and even if IE was better back then (and by v6 I'd say it was better) this doesn't change the fact that it wasn't built to be competitive. It was built to destroy the competition and then halt the progress of the web. That's just bad, no two ways about it.
I did read it - the comment asserted that the "ethos" of a corporation can't be equated with the ethics of a person. I don't see why not given that a corporation is legally treated the same as a person, and at some level the law is an encoding of ethics.
As to whether a corporation is legally a person or not, well, I have a vague feeling this is just playing with words. If an entity has the same rights as something in the eyes of the law, then legally they are either similar or the same no? The law doesn't care about people per se, but rather, what they can and cannot do (their rights ...).
It's interesting to note that legally speaking a corporation IS a person, and so it makes total sense to discuss a corporation using terms one would apply to an individual. You can't have it both ways, either a corporation isn't a person in which case we have to throw out most corporate law (not a bad thing imho) and we can make personal comments about it, or it isn't, in which case generalization would indeed be bad.
Is Microsoft, the corporate person, evil? I would say it certainly was in the past. Whether it still is or not is harder to judge, partly because it hasn't done a whole lot lately.
Why would I say Microsoft, the corporate person (as opposed to the people that make up that corporate person!), is evil? For me it's simple.
It's not that IE is a bad product, though by todays standards it is. It's that it was created for the sole purpose of destroying technical progress on the web, a job it has succeeded at admirably and still continues to do even to this day.
Google are working on an AJAX word processor we hear. They already have a rather spiffy email program. Microsoft feared this future in which Win32 might not be relevant and they destroyed the thing they feared by disbanding the IE team the moment it wiped out Netscape.
The web is perhaps one of the greatest and most important inventions of the 20th century, certainly, it's up there with TV and the motor car in terms of impact on our society. Microsoft deliberately throttled it and continue to do so. They were found guilty of this in court, and I find this behaviour bad enough to warrant the label of "evil".
Now this guy may protest that it wasn't him, and all the people he works with are lovely, and I'm sure they are lovely and wonderful and ethical and everything. But clearly a significant number of people are not because IE wasn't just magicked out of somebodies ass, it required the co-operation of hundreds of people over a period of years to build. What the fuck did they think they were doing all that time? Were they really all that surprised when the project was cancelled? And if not how can they claim to be ethical and only interested in customers?
This guy is living in the middle of a reality distortion field, and doesn't even know it. Sad.
I very, very rarely get problems with serious "snobbery". I think this is more common in server land than desktop land, but can't really be sure. Suffice it to say that the documentation we've got for autopackage makes me proud - everybody in the project works on it, we have lots of forums with which to contact developers, and people are usually polite.
So what's up with the bashing? It makes about as much sense as people claiming all Mac users are elitist, all blacks have rhythm etc ...
How do you know that you two produce the same level of work? Even if you compare raw code, how do you know that the guys extra experience is worthless? Can the guy spot a race in 5 seconds of looking at the code? If so, can you? Java is a very, very limited language (designed to be ...) and it's hard to tell coders apart just by looking at Java code. But that's OK - being a "good coder" is a whole lot more than knowing Java.
I should try VLC I guess. I think my mistake was trying to give the included players DVD playback. If VLC can do it out of the box, I'm all for it ...
RealPlayer 10 is still a good media player for Linux though.
Seriously I'm just waiting for Fluendo to sell me a player. I'll happily buy one to bypass the crap you have to go through to get real DVD playback on Linux.
Because it's really, really good. I use it on OpenSUSE because:
Put simply, Real - at least on Linux - is a reformed company. No two ways about it. Their engineers even take part on open source desktop Linux project lists.
AppArmor has another advantage over SELinux at least for desktop machines: SELinux requires an incredible slow "relabel" process every so often, as Red Hat push out updates to the policy. It takes places at bootup and you may as well go get lunch whilst it occurs. The idea is that every system object that may be confined has a unique label and then the centralized policy defines how objects with those labels interact. One of the top SELinux NSA guys has said "pathname based security considered harmful", though I forget exactly which list he said this on ...
Anyway I think it's a good idea in principle but in practice real world SELinux implementations like in Fedora (and I guess RHEL as well) actually are pathname based .... they have a massive list of regular expressions that match pathnames to allocate labels to things. AppArmor uses paths directly. So it boils down to something similar.
That said, SELinux is theoretically more powerful and I think it'd be easier to use it to implement some interesting security scenarios - for instance you could use it to totally eliminate prompting for root passwords whilst still having a more secure system at the end. SELinux has been integrated with other services like DBUS and X11 so you can restrict what programs can access each other via X and so on .... so it's kind of more "solid" in that sense. But that stuff doesn't matter much if all you want to do is restrain apache.
Nobody cares about system files that can be replaced within hours. The important stuff generally does not require write access to do it.
Well done, you have bent over backwards to lower privileges. Most users won't, and so, this point doesn't really prove anything.
Incorrect. Look at CoreLabs Core Force. What's that you say? Not many people know about CoreForce? No, well, not many people know how to do what you have done either.
Often in security discussions I see lots of uninformed speculation as to what "regular users" do. Suffice it to say that "regular users" do install software in large enough numbers that simply ignoring the issue is not enough.
Basically you've put together a badly hacked up version of what toolkits like SELinux, AppArmor or CoreForce give you in a much cleaner and more elegant way, which is commendable but not a route I'd recommend nor would I expect others to follow it. And don't get me started on trusted GUI paths. No consumer OS today gets this right - none. Just go read a usability study of trusted path systems to see what fun we're going to have integrating this into mainstream technology.
Consider this. Medical bills are infinite in scope. Disease is constant, and even in the West where we have truly vast resources to throw at the problem there are still people dying because they cannot afford the drugs to treat their conditions.
So, I am sceptical of any argument that says "There are still people in the world dying! Let's not do anything else until this is solved". There are many populations in the world who are not crippled with disease or lack of fresh water, who have the basics, and want to move on up in the world. How do they do that without education? I don't know. I think education is important enough that it deserves resources just as much as doctors do.
Some people have questioned the educational value of a laptop. This is reasonable - educational IT usage in the west is mostly worthless and really just a vehicle to train kids how to use Office. But now consider this - a single $100 laptop can contain the entirety of the Wikipedia (or some other encyclopedia), which whatever you think of OLPC or Wikipedia as projects is a truly vast amount of information, far more than could ever be distributed to children using paper. And that is just the start of what can be done with this technology.
So whilst I've seen some good arguments against the $100 laptop project, I'm currently broadly supportive of it.
I've also come across statistics which indicate that under load testing the XBOX 360 chips seem to run at about half the speed their clock rate would indicate on real world branch-heavy game code, because they lack OOO execution. Sure, maybe in theory the compiler can remove the need for this, but that approach worked real well for the Itanium didn't it ...
Uh, why? As pointed out elsewhere, .NET is hardly "new" and many useful applications and utilities in the Linux world ARE being created using .NET: this includes OS components such as the updater service in SUSE 10.1
The fact that it has a general purpose OS on it won't make much difference to the Inland Revenues eyes if it's marketed as a games console, which it will be. And of course you can make Linux into something that's not general purpose quite easily. I've met one of the people who work on PlayStation Linux (she's giving a talk at LugRadio Live in the UK soon, so if you're near Wolverhampton at that time come along), and the she gave some very sound reasons why they did Linux on the PlayStation. Obviously they were never concerned about people playing Tetris on Linux, there were other motivations.
I guess you could argue Sony would never tell their own staff that the work was for a tax dodge, but Linux for the PS2 came out after the PS2 did anyway.
This is not correct. The .NET framework has indeed been run on Wine in the past, though I do not know it's current status.