They claim that they will lose money by not calling people who have indicated that they do not wish to be called?
So they are really saying that people who signed up do not know what is good for them, and they really would like to buy what the telemarketers are selling? What an insult. The overwhelming response to the do-not-call list makes it difficult for these people to continue to pretend that they are not leeches.
He always goes on about how he is doing Linux a huge favor, but his company is getting by far the better end of the deal.
When was the last time you heard BitKeeper mentioned on any article or site where Linux was not also mentioned? Linux is probably the reason the vast majority of Slashdot readers have even heard of BitKeeper. Go to the BitKeeper site and look how almost all of their news items are about Linux.
This guy is a complete asshole and almost a charicature of all the worst things about proprietary software.
Maybe this brutal slashdotting will cure telemarketers of their delusion that most people like being called at home and informed about their great products and services.
I wasn't calling theft moral. I wasn't expressing my own personal views about the morality of theft or copyright or anything.
My point is that a law that the majority of people in a society don't care to follow is a waste of time, and actually hurts the society. Enforcement becomes impossible. If people are constantly told by the law that what they are doing is illegal and that they are filthy thieves, yet their own conscience does not make them feel the same the way, they will lose respect for the law in general.
When the laws of a society are at odds with the moral views of the vast majority of people, that society has a large problem on its hands which is usually worse than the original problem that the law is attempting to solve (think Prohibition).
Laws only codify the morals of the majority of society, they do not define it. This has been proven time and time again.
Computers still crash because your average use doesn't care that they crash. All the computers he has ever used have crashed regularly and he accepts this as a fact of life. Not to point fingers, but the dominant operating system for the past 15 years has created a culture where crashing is an accepted, even expected, part of the computing experience.
Most people use computers in a task-oriented way. As long as they can accomplish their task in a reasonable amount of time, they don't care if their machine crashes once or twice in the process. They are not interested in tweaking things or making things run more smoothly.
I think people have a sense of powerlessness when it comes to computers. I have seen people continue to use machines that crash constantly, everything is a mess, hard drive is full, etc. for years. Members of my family got infected with some windows pop-up message annoyware, and they just accepted the fact that they constantly had to close these spam messages popping up.
Determining what is and what is not a blog will be a lot harder than determining what is and is not in a newsgroup.
I think this is a bad idea. Google has made a mistake if they think what we call currently call "blogs" are a novelty item. Blogs are the future of the web, even if a lot of people are using the technology for toy purposes today.
I want to be able to search the entire web in a single index, blogs and all. If PageRank is giving too much noise and not enough signal due to blogs, then fix PageRank.
The most important thing about blogging IMO is that it allows the average person to easily be a producer on the net instead of just a passive consumer (ala TV). Weblogs also allow for the publication of very obscure and specific content that would not exist otherwise (such as a weblog about various things to wget and curl).
Sure, there is a lot of crap in blogs, but everyone has something worthwhile to say once in a while. There are a lot of very smart people who write weblogs.
Those in power always resist something new that empowers the masses in what was formerly their exclusive domain (such as news organizations suppressing the weblogs of reporters, and elitist intellectuals who think expressing opinion should be their privilege only).
What feedback have you received from members of the general public who use Lindows? I would be interested to hear what the average person who bought a Lindows-loaded PC at Wal-mart and used it for a while had to say about it.
Does your company use Lindows for day-to-day (including non-technical) tasks?
GPL has anti-DRM built in?
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If someone creates a version of the Linux kernel that only runs signed binaries, and the GPL forces them to release their source, couldn't someone simply hack their kernel to run unsigned binaries? It wouldn't even require any reverse engineering.
It seems to me that the GPL is inherently at odds with DRM, as DRM depends heavily on being proprietary and obfuscated (and this still doesn't stop people).
This sounds like a tool for control freaks to find patterns and reinforce those patterns in themselves
over and over. Patterns breed stagnation. This is the whole problem with commercial radio.
I say embrace randomness. That's why I prefer to listen to streams instead of local mp3s anyway. In fact I would like to see a tool which mixed hundreds of streams into a single stream. When a song ended on one stream, it would find another stream where a song was just beginning and switch to it.
I read somewhere (might have been Hackers by Steven Levy) that you have a highly idiosyncractic and paranoid coding style, checking and double-checking everything. Is this true? What can you tell us about it?
This is not my perception of the gaming industry. I think there are far more programmers who want to work in game programming than there are jobs available. Especially the big names (Blizzard, id, etc.) can afford to be extremely selective, taking the cream of the crop of programmers. I seriously doubt that the insurance industry inspires the same response.
Also consider that of all programmers, probably 0.001% work on video games, and the rest work in run-of-the-mill transaction-based business systems, embedded systems, etc.
Any game programmers out there who can back me up on the relative difficulty of finding work in this area?
Could an automated dupe checker be created? When posting an article it could check if it has the same links as a previous article, has similar words in the title and text, etc.
Slashdot has plenty of material to test it with and fine-tune it.
This actually sounds like an interesting project. Maybe something like this ?
... make the ads as large as you want. As long as I control the client, I will never see most of them.
Right now I don't allow popups and I block any banner ad servers that I can. Soon, sophisticated regular expression based blocking, will allow me to block ads which are served from the the same server as the site's non-ad images.
Do I feel bad about this? Not any worse than I feel when I get up to get a beer during a television commercial or when I drive by billboards without looking at them.
It does not concern me at all that P2P content is currently mostly illegal warez, music, movies and porn. It's an excellent testbed for the ability of the technology to withstand technological and legal attack.
It does however comfort me that P2P works and is widely deployed. The average person is familiar with it and knows how to use it. If corporations and government ever get too oppressive, P2P is an powerful tool that the people can use to preserve their rights. Current P2P networks could easily be put into this type of service at need.
I see the net just now starting to realize the ideals that is was founded under. Decentralization, free access to information for all, everyone can easily be both producer and consumer, etc. All trends (wireless, weblogs, P2P) point to this.
This is one way to deal with spam, but if you spam a spammer, you will become a spammer (...) So @ the end the whole internet will slow down. I think we can better look for better alternatives.
That's why they are retaliating via an out-of-band channel (the United States Postal Service) that is already slow as hell. Junk paper mail is way more annoying anyway.
Although some may argue they aren't sci-fi, the universes created by Philip K. Dick are my favorite. Reading his work seems to turn me into one of the paranoid, twisted characters that populate it.
You can never be sure of anything while reading a Philip K. Dick novel. This makes you feel more like a character in the story, instead of the omniscient reader.
What is a string library? It's a way to pretend that computers can manipulate strings just as easily as they can manipulate numbers.
Computers can manipulate strings more easily than numbers, and a computer's notion of "numbers" and "arithmetic" are abstractions on manipulating strings of symbols.
The notion that computers were generalized symbol string manipulators rather than numerical and arithmetical by nature was realized by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century.
Slashdot Mirror
The everything2 node for introvert has some interesting information and mentions Carl Jung, who invented this type of classification.
They claim that they will lose money by not calling people who have indicated that they do not wish to be called?
So they are really saying that people who signed up do not know what is good for them, and they really would like to buy what the telemarketers are selling? What an insult. The overwhelming response to the do-not-call list makes it difficult for these people to continue to pretend that they are not leeches.
I think you want your bugzilla bounce to point to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70213
When I go to the link it has now, it asks me to log in.
He always goes on about how he is doing Linux a huge favor, but his company is getting by far the better end of the deal.
When was the last time you heard BitKeeper mentioned on any article or site where Linux was not also mentioned? Linux is probably the reason the vast majority of Slashdot readers have even heard of BitKeeper. Go to the BitKeeper site and look how almost all of their news items are about Linux.
This guy is a complete asshole and almost a charicature of all the worst things about proprietary software.
Every statement I have heard from Andreessen in the past few years has involved him shitting all over something.
Meanwhile, what has he done recently?
Maybe this brutal slashdotting will cure telemarketers of their delusion that most people like being called at home and informed about their great products and services.
I wasn't calling theft moral. I wasn't expressing my own personal views about the morality of theft or copyright or anything.
My point is that a law that the majority of people in a society don't care to follow is a waste of time, and actually hurts the society. Enforcement becomes impossible. If people are constantly told by the law that what they are doing is illegal and that they are filthy thieves, yet their own conscience does not make them feel the same the way, they will lose respect for the law in general.
When the laws of a society are at odds with the moral views of the vast majority of people, that society has a large problem on its hands which is usually worse than the original problem that the law is attempting to solve (think Prohibition).
Laws only codify the morals of the majority of society, they do not define it. This has been proven time and time again.
Computers still crash because your average use doesn't care that they crash. All the computers he has ever used have crashed regularly and he accepts this as a fact of life. Not to point fingers, but the dominant operating system for the past 15 years has created a culture where crashing is an accepted, even expected, part of the computing experience.
Most people use computers in a task-oriented way. As long as they can accomplish their task in a reasonable amount of time, they don't care if their machine crashes once or twice in the process. They are not interested in tweaking things or making things run more smoothly.
I think people have a sense of powerlessness when it comes to computers. I have seen people continue to use machines that crash constantly, everything is a mess, hard drive is full, etc. for years. Members of my family got infected with some windows pop-up message annoyware, and they just accepted the fact that they constantly had to close these spam messages popping up.
Determining what is and what is not a blog will be a lot harder than determining what is and is not in a newsgroup.
I think this is a bad idea. Google has made a mistake if they think what we call currently call "blogs" are a novelty item. Blogs are the future of the web, even if a lot of people are using the technology for toy purposes today.
I want to be able to search the entire web in a single index, blogs and all. If PageRank is giving too much noise and not enough signal due to blogs, then fix PageRank.
The most important thing about blogging IMO is that it allows the average person to easily be a producer on the net instead of just a passive consumer (ala TV). Weblogs also allow for the publication of very obscure and specific content that would not exist otherwise (such as a weblog about various things to wget and curl).
Sure, there is a lot of crap in blogs, but everyone has something worthwhile to say once in a while. There are a lot of very smart people who write weblogs.
Those who think blogging is pretentious should read the following entry on Dave Winer's Scripting News.
Those in power always resist something new that empowers the masses in what was formerly their exclusive domain (such as news organizations suppressing the weblogs of reporters, and elitist intellectuals who think expressing opinion should be their privilege only).
What feedback have you received from members of the general public who use Lindows? I would be interested to hear what the average person who bought a Lindows-loaded PC at Wal-mart and used it for a while had to say about it.
Does your company use Lindows for day-to-day (including non-technical) tasks?
If someone creates a version of the Linux kernel that only runs signed binaries, and the GPL forces them to release their source, couldn't someone simply hack their kernel to run unsigned binaries? It wouldn't even require any reverse engineering.
It seems to me that the GPL is inherently at odds with DRM, as DRM depends heavily on being proprietary and obfuscated (and this still doesn't stop people).
This sounds like a tool for control freaks to find patterns and reinforce those patterns in themselves over and over. Patterns breed stagnation. This is the whole problem with commercial radio.
I say embrace randomness. That's why I prefer to listen to streams instead of local mp3s anyway. In fact I would like to see a tool which mixed hundreds of streams into a single stream. When a song ended on one stream, it would find another stream where a song was just beginning and switch to it.
Besides, consciousness interacts with random physical systems. How can you be sure you didn't really want to hear that song?
I read somewhere (might have been Hackers by Steven Levy) that you have a highly idiosyncractic and paranoid coding style, checking and double-checking everything. Is this true? What can you tell us about it?
This is not my perception of the gaming industry. I think there are far more programmers who want to work in game programming than there are jobs available. Especially the big names (Blizzard, id, etc.) can afford to be extremely selective, taking the cream of the crop of programmers. I seriously doubt that the insurance industry inspires the same response.
Also consider that of all programmers, probably 0.001% work on video games, and the rest work in run-of-the-mill transaction-based business systems, embedded systems, etc.
Any game programmers out there who can back me up on the relative difficulty of finding work in this area?
Could an automated dupe checker be created? When posting an article it could check if it has the same links as a previous article, has similar words in the title and text, etc.
Slashdot has plenty of material to test it with and fine-tune it.
This actually sounds like an interesting project. Maybe something like this ?
Right now I don't allow popups and I block any banner ad servers that I can. Soon, sophisticated regular expression based blocking, will allow me to block ads which are served from the the same server as the site's non-ad images.
Do I feel bad about this? Not any worse than I feel when I get up to get a beer during a television commercial or when I drive by billboards without looking at them.
It does not concern me at all that P2P content is currently mostly illegal warez, music, movies and porn. It's an excellent testbed for the ability of the technology to withstand technological and legal attack.
It does however comfort me that P2P works and is widely deployed. The average person is familiar with it and knows how to use it. If corporations and government ever get too oppressive, P2P is an powerful tool that the people can use to preserve their rights. Current P2P networks could easily be put into this type of service at need.
I see the net just now starting to realize the ideals that is was founded under. Decentralization, free access to information for all, everyone can easily be both producer and consumer, etc. All trends (wireless, weblogs, P2P) point to this.
This is one way to deal with spam, but if you spam a spammer, you will become a spammer (...) So @ the end the whole internet will slow down. I think we can better look for better alternatives.
That's why they are retaliating via an out-of-band channel (the United States Postal Service) that is already slow as hell. Junk paper mail is way more annoying anyway.
Although some may argue they aren't sci-fi, the universes created by Philip K. Dick are my favorite. Reading his work seems to turn me into one of the paranoid, twisted characters that populate it.
You can never be sure of anything while reading a Philip K. Dick novel. This makes you feel more like a character in the story, instead of the omniscient reader.
What is a string library? It's a way to pretend that computers can manipulate strings just as easily as they can manipulate numbers.
Computers can manipulate strings more easily than numbers, and a computer's notion of "numbers" and "arithmetic" are abstractions on manipulating strings of symbols.
The notion that computers were generalized symbol string manipulators rather than numerical and arithmetical by nature was realized by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century.
Check out Project Cryo.