Try doing real, novel science without a Ph.D. Sure, you can go into IT or even software engineering without a degree, but there's tons of interesting stuff that you simply won't be able to comprehend without years of school.
You can go to school for many years without earning a degree. In fact, if you find the right schools and the right professors, you can take just about any class without any degree. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, that an intelligent person can't learn without even attending a single class, let alone earning a degree.
in my field, a degree isn't really that useful and prospective employers rarely care if you've completed college at all.
OK, but we can't all be e.e. cummings. In most fields, having a degree is important. In some it's actually required.
college degrees, especially these days, are a guarantee of nothing other than having a piece of paper.
It's not about getting a guarantee. It's about increasing your chances of getting the job you want. And in some cases, it's a necessary step to getting the job you want.
for many people and many fields the real learning is accomplished by doing rather than absorbing theory.
I think there's some benefit to the classroom environment for a lot of learning. But that doesn't have very much to do with getting a degree. You can sit in on classes at most schools for free - maybe it's not within the rules, but you can usually convince a professor to let you. Even beyond that, the cost to audit a class for no credit is usually much less than the cost of taking the class in full. And without the worry of getting good grades, you can waste a lot less time on things that aren't very productive for you.
the educational system is geared towards very specific professions at the exclusion of many viable, valuable professions that don't require their teaching. i don't believe it's done out of any malice but rather just a lack of information.
I think most professions overvalue the college degree. I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and I easily could have learned what I learned in a year or two going to classes part time. I could have learned enough to do the job I did in even less time, or in about a year with on the job training.
Now I'm working in accounting, and it's even worse. All the self-study I've done is completely neglected, all that matters is how many credits I've earned in certain required courses in a college environment. I'm going to have to spend years in college learning how to do many of the things which I already do in my job. It's really annoying.
It's a neat hack, but I seriously doubt it is cost effective, and it certainly is less environmentally friendly, compared to just running an air conditioner. Now hey, maybe you have other reasons not to run an air conditioner. But pointing out the cost and the environmental issues in the writeup led us to believe that you had invented something which was either cheap or environmentally friendly compared to buying an air conditioner.
Let me put it another way. If a Linux guru costs just $10,000/year more than a Windows guru, which I don't think is at all out of the question, and your project is only expected to last a single year, then you would need to have that single guru installing and maintaining more than 66 systems before a $150 per box license cost saved money.
Sure, a unix guru is going to cost about the same as a Linux guru, maybe even more, but unix operating systems aren't designed with being easy to operate as the main goal.
Please realize that I'm not saying that the total cost of ownership of Windows is less than that of Linux. That depends on what you're doing. What I'm saying is that the cost of licensing the operating system itself is just not a significant factor in the total cost of ownership.
I can't think of any realistic business where the operating system licensing costs aren't tremendously outweighed by the costs of installing, running, maintaining, and using the operating system. You'd need to have an enormous number of really cheap servers running the OS. One business that came to mind was google, but they're definitely using the fact that they have the OS source code and the right to modify it - they've created their own filesystem after all. Of course, you're now comparing Linux to Unix OSes, in which case you can buy many of the same freedoms offered by Linux, such as access to the source, the right to modify the OS, and the right to make copies. Linux just offers these freedoms for free. HP and Sun offer them for lots of money. And as far as I know, Microsoft doesn't offer them at all (but maybe I'm wrong, is it possible to get a source code license for Windows?).
Anyway, the businesses CEO might not be able to recite the GPL by heart, but someone involved with making the decision surely is aware of most of the actual differences between the licenses offered by the OS companies.
Unless you have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, I suspect that the overall system is not actually all that environmentally friendly.
And if you do have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, the solar panels or windmills are probably not directly attached, and you could just plug in your solar powered or wind-powered air conditioner.
The water isn't really what's getting wasted, it's the energy to move the water around (out of the ground and into the water tower, for instance). The specifics really depend on where you live, but consider those people who have wells right in their backyard, and can then dump the water back in their backyard when they're done with it.
Even this could be saved, at least for heating the upstairs, if you kept the water in some reservoir and used it later. In fact, if you could redirect it into your hot water heater you'd actually save energy as your hot water heater would only have to heat from room temperate as it empties out. On a smaller scale, if you don't want to repipe everything, you could leave buckets by the toilet and wouldn't need to use water whenever you flush. Now, granted, flushing the toilet a couple times a day isn't going to use up all that water, but if you've got enough storage you'd be able to flush all year without using any additional water.
Generate a public/private keypair for them using a computer at home. Make sure to use relatively small prime numbers. Now, read them the public key over the telephone, and have them generate a shared key, encrypt it with your public key, and read the result back to you (in binary, of course).
From now on you don't need the public/private keypair, have them burn any note paper that they might have used while calculating the message. Make sure they put the ashes in at least 4 different trash cans in different parts of town. From now on you will communicate with them using the shared key. This will be much easier to do by hand, and you can use a slightly larger key size. In fact, maybe it's best if you use some shared source for a one-time pad. For instance, they can probably get a copy of the NIV bible, and you can get one too. Pick a particular passage to start at, and there you go, you have a one-time pad. But don't use the NIV bible, because someone reading this post will have a much easier time cracking the message. Instead, pick a source and send that in the encrypted message. Keep the messages short. You can communicate most of the information over the phone unencrypted, just make sure the sensitive data is encrypted.
Now, have them send you all their current passwords (these would be encrypted, of course). You should now log in and change all those passwords to random ones which you generate. From now on, if they need to access something, they should call you up (or email you using a newly created email account) and tell you what they need to access. You will then change their password, and send the new one encrypted to them. They will decrypt the password by hand, possibly using a calculator if they can ensure that there is no keylogger installed on it (obviously don't use a calculator on the possibly compromised machine). Once they are done using the site, they should contact you and you'll change the password again, to something new and random.
Obviously all of this would have been a lot easier if they had set things up before leaving. For instance, when I'm at work I only connect to my home computer via https using a a password which automatically changes every single time I connect. My home computer contains the actual passwords to the sites and thus it logs in for me and relays the information. I carry around the next 15 passwords every time I go, though they are obviously encrypted using a special scheme which I have memorized and can perform in my head. Yes, it's possible the browser itself is compromised, but that's a lot less likely than that a keystroke logger is installed. I used to use a secureID device which automatically changed the password every 5 seconds, but then someone told me that the NSA installed a backdoor into those devices.
Oh yeah, I'm just kidding about all this... Or am I?
Actually, you are free to do anything with it as long as you have time to do it.
Pretty much. There are a few license restrictions, but for the most part they aren't things that you're likely to want to do.
My freedom is limited with my time, and Linux requires much more time than alternatives.
I'm sure you could hire someone to install whatever is needed to watch DVDs whenever you buy the DVD player, so I wouldn't really say there's a limit on your freedom there. Sure, there's an additional cost involved, but the cost is no comparison to the cost of doing certain things with a Windows Operating System.
This is true for only a very small number of people. For most people, software licensing ideologies mean nothing, and what matters is how well the system does the tasks they want it to do.
And go figure, only a very small number of people use Linux.
The real problem for Linux is that it has to be not just as good as Windows, but better than Windows and its other competitors.
Interesting. So OSX > Linux > Windows, but in terms of market share Windows > OSX > Linux. If Linux is so much better than Windows, and Linux is free (hell, let's say you want the ease of installation of a CD and say Linux costs $5 compared to $150 for Windows), why exactly do so many people still use Windows?
It's unacceptable that in 2005 a Linux distribution (FC3, in my case) doesn't recognize a three-button+wheel USB mouse out-of-box or that setting up a TV card requires you to edit some config-files by hand.
I somewhat agree (though I don't think that particular issue is "unacceptable"), but I really don't understand this coming from a Mac user. It's not like you can buy any old product and expect it to run on a Mac, after all.
He's the guy who said, "Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything." I'm beginning to think he's right.
If you're referring to "free" in the sense of cost, he is right. But the main reason to use Linux isn't the cost, it's the legal freedom to do pretty much whatever you want with it (and/or to hire others to help you modify it to do whatever you want). That's something you can't get from Windows (without paying millions or billions of dollars, anyway) - access to the source.
This seems to me more like a desperate cry for attention in which Zawinski says he is switching platform in the hope that the Linux mob will cry "Don't leave us Jamie!" and he can then return in a blaze of glory.
Not at all. He's just a somewhat famous guy who has a blog. He switched from Linux so he wrote about it in his blog. He specifically said that he didn't want Slashdot to post about this, although I guess you could argue he said that precisely so Slashdot would post about it.
But it seems to me that switching from Linux is just a significant enough event in his life for him to put it in his blog. I suppose you could say that anyone running a blog is putting out a desperate cry for attention, but I think that's a bit too cynical. Is Howard Stern crying out for attention when he talks about his personal life on the radio, or bitches about how he's not going to vote for Bush? I guess some people would say yes, but I'd say no.
I really appreciate everything that he has done for OSS, and I hope others do too, but I can't condone something like this.
Well, I hope it's just a temporary thing. If so, I can't blame him. I don't use Linux (or any Free OS) for my desktop machine either.
Mod me troll you like, but he seems frighteningly cynical.
Well, yeah, that's who JWZ is. He's a very cynical guy. I doubt even he would disagree with that, and anyone who has read his blog for any significant period of time probably would too.
If some individuals would spend the time they do hunting down negative comments about Linux, to actually fix Linux, you wouldn't have to worry about people exposing how difficult Linux is for the average user.
Part of the problem is that it isn't well publicized just *how* to go about fixing Linux. I used to be a kernel programmer for Hewlett Packard, and when I came to work I was surrounded by lots of smart people who knew a lot about what they were doing. I had dozens of various HP boxes set up with serial consoles and just waiting for me to load up a test kernel. I had fairly good documentation, a decent bug tracking system, and a whole suite of functional and reliability tests to run.
Give me just half that kind of support and I'd gladly spend a bit of my spare time hacking Linux. But that's not how it works. Instead it seems 99% of the work is just figuring out how to get started.
Anyway, I'm probably wasting my breath, but if an experienced Linux kernel programmer wants to help me get started, leave a message here with some way I can get in contact with you.
That's really too bad. Jamie is a smart guy, presumably has a good deal of money, and has a bit of a pulpit (as evidenced by this Slashdot article). I really wish he had taken the "fix it" approach rather than switch. That said, I can understand the frustration, personally I've had enough trouble with Linux that I'm forced to use Windows for my main operating system. But my solution is meant to be temporary, and hopefully JWZ's is too. It takes a long time to build an operating system, especially when you rely mainly on people working for free.
Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.
Hey, you're the one who said "HUMAN" first, not me. I'm just pointing out that it's perfectly reasonable to apply HUMAN values to characters which claim to be HUMAN, especially when those characters exhibit mainly HUMAN characteristics. Yes, their environment is different, but that doesn't change BASIC HUMAN VALUES.
The authorities start a contest such as this, an unsuspecting programmer submits a malicious program, and he or she is arrested and charged with a variety of computer crimes.
What computer crimes would be broken?
Frankly, I won't participate in this contest considering the current legal state of America.
No, you won't participate because of yor current state of paranoia over the legal state of America.
Agreed, you can't get the full experience from watching the series just once. It's like watching Shawshank Redemption - you don't want to know the "end" the first time around, but to really appreciate the movie you've gotta watch it again after knowing the ending.
I've got 4-5-6 in my blockbuster queue. Apparently enough others have the same idea that there's a waiting list, though.
Re:It's funny that the GPL itself isn't GPL.
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
The GPL is for software. RMS never suggested that people use the GPL for text.
Slashdot Mirror
Try doing real, novel science without a Ph.D. Sure, you can go into IT or even software engineering without a degree, but there's tons of interesting stuff that you simply won't be able to comprehend without years of school.
You can go to school for many years without earning a degree. In fact, if you find the right schools and the right professors, you can take just about any class without any degree. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, that an intelligent person can't learn without even attending a single class, let alone earning a degree.
in my field, a degree isn't really that useful and prospective employers rarely care if you've completed college at all.
OK, but we can't all be e.e. cummings. In most fields, having a degree is important. In some it's actually required.
college degrees, especially these days, are a guarantee of nothing other than having a piece of paper.
It's not about getting a guarantee. It's about increasing your chances of getting the job you want. And in some cases, it's a necessary step to getting the job you want.
for many people and many fields the real learning is accomplished by doing rather than absorbing theory.
I think there's some benefit to the classroom environment for a lot of learning. But that doesn't have very much to do with getting a degree. You can sit in on classes at most schools for free - maybe it's not within the rules, but you can usually convince a professor to let you. Even beyond that, the cost to audit a class for no credit is usually much less than the cost of taking the class in full. And without the worry of getting good grades, you can waste a lot less time on things that aren't very productive for you.
the educational system is geared towards very specific professions at the exclusion of many viable, valuable professions that don't require their teaching. i don't believe it's done out of any malice but rather just a lack of information.
I think most professions overvalue the college degree. I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and I easily could have learned what I learned in a year or two going to classes part time. I could have learned enough to do the job I did in even less time, or in about a year with on the job training.
Now I'm working in accounting, and it's even worse. All the self-study I've done is completely neglected, all that matters is how many credits I've earned in certain required courses in a college environment. I'm going to have to spend years in college learning how to do many of the things which I already do in my job. It's really annoying.
Is this a joke? Not only do many people do all those things you've mentioned, I myself have.
It's a neat hack, but I seriously doubt it is cost effective, and it certainly is less environmentally friendly, compared to just running an air conditioner. Now hey, maybe you have other reasons not to run an air conditioner. But pointing out the cost and the environmental issues in the writeup led us to believe that you had invented something which was either cheap or environmentally friendly compared to buying an air conditioner.
Let me put it another way. If a Linux guru costs just $10,000/year more than a Windows guru, which I don't think is at all out of the question, and your project is only expected to last a single year, then you would need to have that single guru installing and maintaining more than 66 systems before a $150 per box license cost saved money.
Sure, a unix guru is going to cost about the same as a Linux guru, maybe even more, but unix operating systems aren't designed with being easy to operate as the main goal.
Please realize that I'm not saying that the total cost of ownership of Windows is less than that of Linux. That depends on what you're doing. What I'm saying is that the cost of licensing the operating system itself is just not a significant factor in the total cost of ownership.
I can't think of any realistic business where the operating system licensing costs aren't tremendously outweighed by the costs of installing, running, maintaining, and using the operating system. You'd need to have an enormous number of really cheap servers running the OS. One business that came to mind was google, but they're definitely using the fact that they have the OS source code and the right to modify it - they've created their own filesystem after all. Of course, you're now comparing Linux to Unix OSes, in which case you can buy many of the same freedoms offered by Linux, such as access to the source, the right to modify the OS, and the right to make copies. Linux just offers these freedoms for free. HP and Sun offer them for lots of money. And as far as I know, Microsoft doesn't offer them at all (but maybe I'm wrong, is it possible to get a source code license for Windows?).
Anyway, the businesses CEO might not be able to recite the GPL by heart, but someone involved with making the decision surely is aware of most of the actual differences between the licenses offered by the OS companies.
In order for this to work you can't have your room as a closed system.
His room is clearly not a closed system. For instance, there is an input of energy from his power lines.
If it is laws of thermodynamics say no matter what you do it will only get hotter.
That's not exactly what the laws say. Be more specific, and you'll see why you're wrong.
Unless you have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, I suspect that the overall system is not actually all that environmentally friendly.
And if you do have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, the solar panels or windmills are probably not directly attached, and you could just plug in your solar powered or wind-powered air conditioner.
The water isn't really what's getting wasted, it's the energy to move the water around (out of the ground and into the water tower, for instance). The specifics really depend on where you live, but consider those people who have wells right in their backyard, and can then dump the water back in their backyard when they're done with it.
Even this could be saved, at least for heating the upstairs, if you kept the water in some reservoir and used it later. In fact, if you could redirect it into your hot water heater you'd actually save energy as your hot water heater would only have to heat from room temperate as it empties out. On a smaller scale, if you don't want to repipe everything, you could leave buckets by the toilet and wouldn't need to use water whenever you flush. Now, granted, flushing the toilet a couple times a day isn't going to use up all that water, but if you've got enough storage you'd be able to flush all year without using any additional water.
Generate a public/private keypair for them using a computer at home. Make sure to use relatively small prime numbers. Now, read them the public key over the telephone, and have them generate a shared key, encrypt it with your public key, and read the result back to you (in binary, of course).
From now on you don't need the public/private keypair, have them burn any note paper that they might have used while calculating the message. Make sure they put the ashes in at least 4 different trash cans in different parts of town. From now on you will communicate with them using the shared key. This will be much easier to do by hand, and you can use a slightly larger key size. In fact, maybe it's best if you use some shared source for a one-time pad. For instance, they can probably get a copy of the NIV bible, and you can get one too. Pick a particular passage to start at, and there you go, you have a one-time pad. But don't use the NIV bible, because someone reading this post will have a much easier time cracking the message. Instead, pick a source and send that in the encrypted message. Keep the messages short. You can communicate most of the information over the phone unencrypted, just make sure the sensitive data is encrypted.
Now, have them send you all their current passwords (these would be encrypted, of course). You should now log in and change all those passwords to random ones which you generate. From now on, if they need to access something, they should call you up (or email you using a newly created email account) and tell you what they need to access. You will then change their password, and send the new one encrypted to them. They will decrypt the password by hand, possibly using a calculator if they can ensure that there is no keylogger installed on it (obviously don't use a calculator on the possibly compromised machine). Once they are done using the site, they should contact you and you'll change the password again, to something new and random.
Obviously all of this would have been a lot easier if they had set things up before leaving. For instance, when I'm at work I only connect to my home computer via https using a a password which automatically changes every single time I connect. My home computer contains the actual passwords to the sites and thus it logs in for me and relays the information. I carry around the next 15 passwords every time I go, though they are obviously encrypted using a special scheme which I have memorized and can perform in my head. Yes, it's possible the browser itself is compromised, but that's a lot less likely than that a keystroke logger is installed. I used to use a secureID device which automatically changed the password every 5 seconds, but then someone told me that the NSA installed a backdoor into those devices.
Oh yeah, I'm just kidding about all this... Or am I?
Actually, you are free to do anything with it as long as you have time to do it.
Pretty much. There are a few license restrictions, but for the most part they aren't things that you're likely to want to do.
My freedom is limited with my time, and Linux requires much more time than alternatives.
I'm sure you could hire someone to install whatever is needed to watch DVDs whenever you buy the DVD player, so I wouldn't really say there's a limit on your freedom there. Sure, there's an additional cost involved, but the cost is no comparison to the cost of doing certain things with a Windows Operating System.
This is true for only a very small number of people. For most people, software licensing ideologies mean nothing, and what matters is how well the system does the tasks they want it to do.
And go figure, only a very small number of people use Linux.
That's great, so you can use a three button USB mouse with a scroll wheel without tweaking. That's all I've ever asked for from an operating system.
The real problem for Linux is that it has to be not just as good as Windows, but better than Windows and its other competitors.
Interesting. So OSX > Linux > Windows, but in terms of market share Windows > OSX > Linux. If Linux is so much better than Windows, and Linux is free (hell, let's say you want the ease of installation of a CD and say Linux costs $5 compared to $150 for Windows), why exactly do so many people still use Windows?
It's unacceptable that in 2005 a Linux distribution (FC3, in my case) doesn't recognize a three-button+wheel USB mouse out-of-box or that setting up a TV card requires you to edit some config-files by hand.
I somewhat agree (though I don't think that particular issue is "unacceptable"), but I really don't understand this coming from a Mac user. It's not like you can buy any old product and expect it to run on a Mac, after all.
He's the guy who said, "Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything." I'm beginning to think he's right.
If you're referring to "free" in the sense of cost, he is right. But the main reason to use Linux isn't the cost, it's the legal freedom to do pretty much whatever you want with it (and/or to hire others to help you modify it to do whatever you want). That's something you can't get from Windows (without paying millions or billions of dollars, anyway) - access to the source.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of contributors to Linux are actually unpaid these days.
It would, but when it comes to desktop things like sound support I bet the percentage is even higher.
This seems to me more like a desperate cry for attention in which Zawinski says he is switching platform in the hope that the Linux mob will cry "Don't leave us Jamie!" and he can then return in a blaze of glory.
Not at all. He's just a somewhat famous guy who has a blog. He switched from Linux so he wrote about it in his blog. He specifically said that he didn't want Slashdot to post about this, although I guess you could argue he said that precisely so Slashdot would post about it.
But it seems to me that switching from Linux is just a significant enough event in his life for him to put it in his blog. I suppose you could say that anyone running a blog is putting out a desperate cry for attention, but I think that's a bit too cynical. Is Howard Stern crying out for attention when he talks about his personal life on the radio, or bitches about how he's not going to vote for Bush? I guess some people would say yes, but I'd say no.
I really appreciate everything that he has done for OSS, and I hope others do too, but I can't condone something like this.
Well, I hope it's just a temporary thing. If so, I can't blame him. I don't use Linux (or any Free OS) for my desktop machine either.
Mod me troll you like, but he seems frighteningly cynical.
Well, yeah, that's who JWZ is. He's a very cynical guy. I doubt even he would disagree with that, and anyone who has read his blog for any significant period of time probably would too.
If some individuals would spend the time they do hunting down negative comments about Linux, to actually fix Linux, you wouldn't have to worry about people exposing how difficult Linux is for the average user.
Part of the problem is that it isn't well publicized just *how* to go about fixing Linux. I used to be a kernel programmer for Hewlett Packard, and when I came to work I was surrounded by lots of smart people who knew a lot about what they were doing. I had dozens of various HP boxes set up with serial consoles and just waiting for me to load up a test kernel. I had fairly good documentation, a decent bug tracking system, and a whole suite of functional and reliability tests to run.
Give me just half that kind of support and I'd gladly spend a bit of my spare time hacking Linux. But that's not how it works. Instead it seems 99% of the work is just figuring out how to get started.
Anyway, I'm probably wasting my breath, but if an experienced Linux kernel programmer wants to help me get started, leave a message here with some way I can get in contact with you.
That's really too bad. Jamie is a smart guy, presumably has a good deal of money, and has a bit of a pulpit (as evidenced by this Slashdot article). I really wish he had taken the "fix it" approach rather than switch. That said, I can understand the frustration, personally I've had enough trouble with Linux that I'm forced to use Windows for my main operating system. But my solution is meant to be temporary, and hopefully JWZ's is too. It takes a long time to build an operating system, especially when you rely mainly on people working for free.
Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.
LOL.
Hey, you're the one who said "HUMAN" first, not me. I'm just pointing out that it's perfectly reasonable to apply HUMAN values to characters which claim to be HUMAN, especially when those characters exhibit mainly HUMAN characteristics. Yes, their environment is different, but that doesn't change BASIC HUMAN VALUES.
The authorities start a contest such as this, an unsuspecting programmer submits a malicious program, and he or she is arrested and charged with a variety of computer crimes.
What computer crimes would be broken?
Frankly, I won't participate in this contest considering the current legal state of America.
No, you won't participate because of yor current state of paranoia over the legal state of America.
you people need to quit trying to apply EARTH and HUMAN values and concepts to what is supposed to be an ALIEN and NON_TERRAN society
The main characters in Star Wars are human. This is stated throughout the scripts.
Agreed, you can't get the full experience from watching the series just once. It's like watching Shawshank Redemption - you don't want to know the "end" the first time around, but to really appreciate the movie you've gotta watch it again after knowing the ending.
I've got 4-5-6 in my blockbuster queue. Apparently enough others have the same idea that there's a waiting list, though.
The GPL is for software. RMS never suggested that people use the GPL for text.