If you want to erase your deleted files, just fill up the disk (as root) with "cat/dev/zero > junkfile; rm junkfile". This will necessarily reuse all the empty data space on your file system. It works on pretty much ever OS and file system type. There may still be a little bit of data in the file system journal if you use a journaling file system, but it's probably good enough in those cases.
If you want to check whether a particular piece of information is still there, just "grep" for it: "set history=0; fgrep mysecret/dev/hda".
You speak like a true manager. At issue isn't whether MQSeries supports all the platforms in question (lots of software does that), at issue is whether it satisfies the latency and performance requirements and whether its platform support on NT is suitable for the environment where it's being deployed. You can't answer those questions without having the technical people on the project look at it in detail (although the range of features that MQSeries supports already suggests that it is not the optimal choice for this application).
Come on--PVR and the surrounding ideas (automatic download of programming information, automatic selection of programs according to keywords or preferences, etc.) are pretty obvious. The price for components drops to the point that companies can build a PVR for the home market and one company tries to corner the market by applying for some obvious patents. That is not nice.
There are plenty of alternatives. Get yourself a PC with PVR software, preferably free and open source. You'll get something that's more flexible and useful than a PVR to boot.
Well, are you paying the MP3 licensing fees or using a commercial encoder? If not then you, like millions of other users, are infringing the MP3 patents and saying "to hell with it".
Furthermore, transcoding MP3 into Vorbis is not hard. You could probably do it with a simple Perl script running in the background and not even notice it.
If you don't have a computer arbitrating USB traffic, the USB devices are useless.
How long do you think it will take until someone comes out with a $30 fat cable that does the "arbitration"? It won't work as well as a system designed for it, but that hasn't kept lots of other poor technology from catching on.
Their latest gadget is really neat: high speed transfers via USB2.0 (I'd prefer FireWire, but...), and it can do MP3 music quality recording and encoding right in the box. They are a bit bigger than the iPod, but so is the Rio probably.
Palm Pilots are cheap, allow some programming in Lua and Python, and make good organizers, but more general programming for them is a pain.
The Sharp hardware is really nifty, but it doesn't run X11. That greatly limits its usefulness to Linux developers. I'd stay away from it until Sharp has changes over to X11. In the Sharp's favor is that it comes with a Java runtime environment, if that matters to you, although I doubt it comes with a Java development environment.
I have used the iPaqs with Familiar Linux, and they make great little machines. You can ssh in/out, run X11 remotely in both directions, and stuff ports to them really easy. The Yopy looks like an even nicer piece of hardware, since it comes with Linux and X11 preinstalled, as well as a keyboard. For Java, they probably run Kaffe, gcj, and Jikes, which is no worse than what the Sharp likely has.
If people decide a-priori that the answer to your middleware problems is "package X" without actually having answered the kinds of questions you are asking, you have a serious management problem at your company. Unless your company is big enough that it will stay around out of sheer inertia, these kinds of problem can be fatal--maybe working on your resume is more important at this point.
Companies know how to set prices based upon their cost to create products or provide services. They then add a reasonable profit and you suddenly have a price. Then that product will either sell or not sell at that price. Your definition seems to imply that a company needs competition to take care of determining the prices the market will tolerate.
Companies don't know whether the cost at which they are producing a widget is optimal, and therefore, the price they arrive at by adding a "reasonable" profit margin to their cost is not necessarily the correct price (even if they were to use such a silly pricing strategy). In fact, monopolies become famously complacent about their costs in the absence of competition. Bonuses, plush offices, and other perks all become "costs", when they are really just profit that is distributed to employees (who are often also owners).
A company can provide excellent product/service directly to a consumer without any competition at all. The consumer decides if the company has provided a compelling reason to part with their money.
Sorry, but that's incompatible with basic economics. There isn't some fixed price threshold above which people don't buy and below which everybody buys. Demand is elastic, and monopolies hire monopoly economists to set prices for them that optimize their profit. And those prices are usually above what you would pay in a competitive market. Except under unrealistic assumptions, unregulated monopolies don't operate efficiently and don't give you the lowest prices.
And Microsoft, in particular, certainly does not operate efficiently, peddling 20 year old technology at completely inflated prices. You don't even have to look at their products or technology to reach that conclusion--just look at their profits and cash reserves.
The word itself is untranslatable. It refers to an undefined state between extremes, "not too much, not too little". The dictionary suggest "just right, just enough, sufficiently, adequate, fitting, appropriate, moderate", which hardly captures the inner subjective logic of this genuinely Swedish value.
That kind of moderation and temperance have been fundamental values in many different societies, religions, and philosophical movements over millenia. You will still find it in many regions of the US as well. And the terms "moderation" or "temperance" seem to capture it pretty well.
Copyright law was not designed to be used with computer programs. Its extension to computer programs has happened in a haphazard way via case-law. Only later did some legislation get passed, strongly favoring large business interests.
Originally, the view prevailed that binary code was not copyrightable because it was obviously (usually) not something created by humans that was readable by them. But by analogy with encrypted cable channels, and because of a general bias towards business interests, that view changed. Today, not only are binaries copyrighted, publishers are permitted to impose onerous contracts on purchasers, something that would be obviously ridiculous if it were done with printed books. In fact, software companies are permitted to get patents without providing a working implementation (often the hard part), they can get a copyright yet fail to comply with fair use doctrines, and they keep trade secrets on stuff that they also claim copyrights on.
What all that means is that we need to rethink what intellectual property should mean for computer programs.
Now, RMS's position, is one way in which one might think about changing copyright law. It's not about some communist utopia (no-cost software may or may not be the side-effect, but it's not the goal), it's about the ability to modify programs that you paid for and share the modifications with others, and for that you need source code. You might imagine an open source requirements in which everybody who sells software and claims copyright is required to ship sources with it, but you cannot redistribute sources or binaries you receive yourself, although you may redistribute patches and other users can buy the base software from the same vendor you did. You might imagine legislating that any software license must give you at least the rights of something like the QPL, protecting commercial interests but allowing free software and giving commercial users source access. You might also imagine a requirement to put works that are not available anymore into the public domain or into some clearinghouse (this is also an issue with out-of-print books).
While some form of proprietary software, as opposed to free software, may be beneficial, I think it is pretty clear that the current legal mechanisms by which proprietary software is protected are not working very well.
I can imagine instances where a defined monopoly could co-exist with their competitors. If said monopoly dosen't use their market leverage to squash or to create artificial barriers to market entry then they are allowing competition and would most probably be relying on the strengths of their products to maintain market share.
If companies knew how to, and were willing to, price products equitably and correctly in the absence of competition, we wouldn't need a free market for any goods. The fact is that no company knows the correct pricing of their products without competition, and, furthermore, they would be violating their fiduciary duty to their stockholders if they priced them as if there were competition. A market doesn't work efficiently unless it is divided among many comparable players.
Second, 95% is incorrect. It was incorrect then, and no. I would suspect worldwide that the actual number of licensed, legal, Windows users is in the range of %60-%70.
Oh? What, praytell, makes up the other 30-40% in your opinion? The simple fact is that 95% of all desktop operating systems people buy are Windows. And 95% of all desktop operating systems actually run (which includes unlicensed copies) are likely to be Windows, too.
Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly
Economically, they would be a monopoly. Legally, US legislators have their panties in knots whenever it comes to limiting the power of big businesses, hence the US legal system has a rather oddball definition of "monopoly". But that's an issue with available legal remedies, not diagnosing the problem.
Re:Too bad we can't moderate articles
on
Apache 2.0 vs. IIS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Instead of providing a sound technical response, you just accuse people who you disagree with of trolling. I have no doubt that if you could, you would moderate down any article you don't like. That kind of attitude kills any rational discussion. Stop being trigger happy on your moderation and start contributing.
There is nothing wrong with Smith, Keynes, and the other economists: free markets work, and they work well. The problem is that our economy is increasing not a free market economy. You cannot have a free market economy in which the economy is dominated by a few large players (even if they are publically traded). You cannot have a free market economy in which players can buy the lawmakers. And a "free market" doesn't mean absence of government regulations, it means plenty of government regulations that create a level playing field for economic agents. "Free" there refers to the freedom to decide who you trade with at what price, it doesn't mean freedom to do anything you want.
The irony is that the "money is power" issue you bemoan so much is in large part a result of driving a lot of freedoms to an absurd conclusion. Amassing fortunes running in the billions of dollars may seem like an "inalianable right", the right to property, but if you allow that to happen, everybody else's freedoms and rights get limited and the market stops working.
If you live with other people, you have to make compromises and give up some freedoms. The compromise we should make is to limit the size of corporations, ensure that each market has many players in it, to regulate markets and behavior tightly so that companies behave responsibly, and to reduce the disparity between the wealthy and the poor via taxation and social policies. Conservative economists are right when they say that that will lower the GDP, income, competitiveness, and monetary wealth of the nation. They are wrong when they say that that's a bad thing. A nation in which a few percent of the population have 50% of the wealth may be just as good to an economist as a nation in which the wealth is more evenly distributed, but it isn't as good for the people. And our current laissez faire policies lead to the former kind of nation, not the latter.
This does not hold [for Java] - you may compile different languages to the JVM, but integrating them at the object level is not possible.
I don't understand what you (or Microsoft) are talking about when making that claim.
I regularly mix Python and Java objects. Python is a dynamically typed language with multiple inheritance and Java is a statically typed language with single inheritance. I can subclass Java objects in Python and use Java objects in Python and vice versa. If this is possible for languages as different as Java and Python, it would seem to be possible for many other languages as well (and many other languages implemented on top of the JVM claim to provide the same level of integration--I just haven't used them). The Java native code interfaces also allow for similar levels of integration with native code.
The CLR does clean up some idiosyncracies and minor messes in the JVM and JVM spec. Mostly, those cleanups give a bit more handholding to less experienced language implementors to figure out what to do. But that doesn't seem to give the CLR significantly more functionality or performance overall.
If you claim CLR is "demonstrably better", maybe you can be a little more concrete in your "demonstration"? Where specifically are these demonstrable advantages, and how specifically can you not achieve the same functionality in the JVM?
UNIX is still a live trademark of AT&T. I also suspect that the UNIX hackers at AT&T would not call OSX "UNIX" (although some of the more diplomatic ones might call it "UNIX-like" or "mostly UNIX compatible"). So, I'm not sure in what sense "UNIX doesn't stand for it's [sic] original Thompson implementation" (actually, it doesn't; it stands for a whole family of systems derived from Bell Labs source code, but not Linux or OSX).
Microsoft has faced the problem of platform-dependence for years: NT on Alpha, NT on PPC, CE on various handhelds, Word on Mac and Windows, etc. And should they optimize for 386, 486, Pentium, AMD? Another problem is that batch-compiled binaries (in particular for RISC machines) are much bigger and load more slowly.
Java would have been godsend for Microsoft, addressing all these problems, but they didn't control it and it would have given people not only hardware independence but also Microsoft independence.
Technically, there are no significant differences between the CLR and the JVM. The CLR isn't any more or less powerful than the JVM, it won't run much faster or slower, and it won't be any easier or harder to implement. You already have Java compilers for the CLR, and you will see C# compilers for the JVM soon. But Microsoft controls the evolution of the CLR, and that is what matters to them. While Microsoft will probably implement the ECMA standard, they will extend the CLR and libraries in numerous proprietary ways, and that will give them exactly the control they want.
I can do the same on Windows or VMS or Linux, and those systems aren't "UNIX" (although they may be "UNIX compatible" or "emulating UNIX"). In fact, I think it's good that Apple has chosen a kernel with a more modern architecture.
It's called "X11". X11 isn't really a "window system", it's a network transparent graphics library. X11 gives you the low-level graphics, access to hardware acceleration, and network transparency. You can build whatever "window system" (in the Windows/Apple sense) on top of that: your own APIs, your own window management, your own input methods, etc.
Sure, and I actually used to use that a little. That didn't keep Apple marketing and Apple zealots from telling everybody that, in effect, it didn't really matter if MacOS was a bit unstable as long as it looked nice.
And apparently the Apple zealots on/. have no sense of humor about it, given their trigger happy moderation. The worst thing about Apple is the smugness of the company and its users: according to them, Apple can never do anything wrong.
If being Unix is running on 30 years old computers, I guess Mac OS X is far from it.
Indeed. That's my point. The Darwin kernel is nicer and more modern than the BSD kernel or the old UNIX kernel. Why does Apple keep calling it "UNIX"? It's all marketing, because UNIX has a good reputation. Maybe one shouldn't complain about it, but that doesn't make it correct. And I'm sure the old UNIX hackers at AT&T would give you an earful about all the things that are wrong, according to them, with the Darwin architecture.
Well, why doesn't anyon? I mean, the underlying idea is pretty simple: a graphic engine that renders everything as PDFs - you could probably repurpose a lot of GhostScript code.)
Well, perhaps people don't do it because it's not such a good idea after all. Apple's applications look slick and are often easy to use, but that doesn't mean that they made the best choice for the underlying graphics model.
In fact, the open source community does have something like this: Display PostScript (in multiple implementations). And there are good reasons why people don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to check whether a particular piece of information is still there, just "grep" for it: "set history=0; fgrep mysecret /dev/hda".
You speak like a true manager. At issue isn't whether MQSeries supports all the platforms in question (lots of software does that), at issue is whether it satisfies the latency and performance requirements and whether its platform support on NT is suitable for the environment where it's being deployed. You can't answer those questions without having the technical people on the project look at it in detail (although the range of features that MQSeries supports already suggests that it is not the optimal choice for this application).
There are plenty of alternatives. Get yourself a PC with PVR software, preferably free and open source. You'll get something that's more flexible and useful than a PVR to boot.
Furthermore, transcoding MP3 into Vorbis is not hard. You could probably do it with a simple Perl script running in the background and not even notice it.
How long do you think it will take until someone comes out with a $30 fat cable that does the "arbitration"? It won't work as well as a system designed for it, but that hasn't kept lots of other poor technology from catching on.
Their latest gadget is really neat: high speed transfers via USB2.0 (I'd prefer FireWire, but...), and it can do MP3 music quality recording and encoding right in the box. They are a bit bigger than the iPod, but so is the Rio probably.
The Sharp hardware is really nifty, but it doesn't run X11. That greatly limits its usefulness to Linux developers. I'd stay away from it until Sharp has changes over to X11. In the Sharp's favor is that it comes with a Java runtime environment, if that matters to you, although I doubt it comes with a Java development environment.
I have used the iPaqs with Familiar Linux, and they make great little machines. You can ssh in/out, run X11 remotely in both directions, and stuff ports to them really easy. The Yopy looks like an even nicer piece of hardware, since it comes with Linux and X11 preinstalled, as well as a keyboard. For Java, they probably run Kaffe, gcj, and Jikes, which is no worse than what the Sharp likely has.
If people decide a-priori that the answer to your middleware problems is "package X" without actually having answered the kinds of questions you are asking, you have a serious management problem at your company. Unless your company is big enough that it will stay around out of sheer inertia, these kinds of problem can be fatal--maybe working on your resume is more important at this point.
Isn't SonicBlue the company that has been causing problems with their patents on digital video recorders? I don't think it's good to support them.
Companies don't know whether the cost at which they are producing a widget is optimal, and therefore, the price they arrive at by adding a "reasonable" profit margin to their cost is not necessarily the correct price (even if they were to use such a silly pricing strategy). In fact, monopolies become famously complacent about their costs in the absence of competition. Bonuses, plush offices, and other perks all become "costs", when they are really just profit that is distributed to employees (who are often also owners).
A company can provide excellent product/service directly to a consumer without any competition at all. The consumer decides if the company has provided a compelling reason to part with their money.
Sorry, but that's incompatible with basic economics. There isn't some fixed price threshold above which people don't buy and below which everybody buys. Demand is elastic, and monopolies hire monopoly economists to set prices for them that optimize their profit. And those prices are usually above what you would pay in a competitive market. Except under unrealistic assumptions, unregulated monopolies don't operate efficiently and don't give you the lowest prices.
And Microsoft, in particular, certainly does not operate efficiently, peddling 20 year old technology at completely inflated prices. You don't even have to look at their products or technology to reach that conclusion--just look at their profits and cash reserves.
That kind of moderation and temperance have been fundamental values in many different societies, religions, and philosophical movements over millenia. You will still find it in many regions of the US as well. And the terms "moderation" or "temperance" seem to capture it pretty well.
Originally, the view prevailed that binary code was not copyrightable because it was obviously (usually) not something created by humans that was readable by them. But by analogy with encrypted cable channels, and because of a general bias towards business interests, that view changed. Today, not only are binaries copyrighted, publishers are permitted to impose onerous contracts on purchasers, something that would be obviously ridiculous if it were done with printed books. In fact, software companies are permitted to get patents without providing a working implementation (often the hard part), they can get a copyright yet fail to comply with fair use doctrines, and they keep trade secrets on stuff that they also claim copyrights on.
What all that means is that we need to rethink what intellectual property should mean for computer programs.
Now, RMS's position, is one way in which one might think about changing copyright law. It's not about some communist utopia (no-cost software may or may not be the side-effect, but it's not the goal), it's about the ability to modify programs that you paid for and share the modifications with others, and for that you need source code. You might imagine an open source requirements in which everybody who sells software and claims copyright is required to ship sources with it, but you cannot redistribute sources or binaries you receive yourself, although you may redistribute patches and other users can buy the base software from the same vendor you did. You might imagine legislating that any software license must give you at least the rights of something like the QPL, protecting commercial interests but allowing free software and giving commercial users source access. You might also imagine a requirement to put works that are not available anymore into the public domain or into some clearinghouse (this is also an issue with out-of-print books).
While some form of proprietary software, as opposed to free software, may be beneficial, I think it is pretty clear that the current legal mechanisms by which proprietary software is protected are not working very well.
If companies knew how to, and were willing to, price products equitably and correctly in the absence of competition, we wouldn't need a free market for any goods. The fact is that no company knows the correct pricing of their products without competition, and, furthermore, they would be violating their fiduciary duty to their stockholders if they priced them as if there were competition. A market doesn't work efficiently unless it is divided among many comparable players.
Oh? What, praytell, makes up the other 30-40% in your opinion? The simple fact is that 95% of all desktop operating systems people buy are Windows. And 95% of all desktop operating systems actually run (which includes unlicensed copies) are likely to be Windows, too.
Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly
Economically, they would be a monopoly. Legally, US legislators have their panties in knots whenever it comes to limiting the power of big businesses, hence the US legal system has a rather oddball definition of "monopoly". But that's an issue with available legal remedies, not diagnosing the problem.
Instead of providing a sound technical response, you just accuse people who you disagree with of trolling. I have no doubt that if you could, you would moderate down any article you don't like. That kind of attitude kills any rational discussion. Stop being trigger happy on your moderation and start contributing.
The irony is that the "money is power" issue you bemoan so much is in large part a result of driving a lot of freedoms to an absurd conclusion. Amassing fortunes running in the billions of dollars may seem like an "inalianable right", the right to property, but if you allow that to happen, everybody else's freedoms and rights get limited and the market stops working.
If you live with other people, you have to make compromises and give up some freedoms. The compromise we should make is to limit the size of corporations, ensure that each market has many players in it, to regulate markets and behavior tightly so that companies behave responsibly, and to reduce the disparity between the wealthy and the poor via taxation and social policies. Conservative economists are right when they say that that will lower the GDP, income, competitiveness, and monetary wealth of the nation. They are wrong when they say that that's a bad thing. A nation in which a few percent of the population have 50% of the wealth may be just as good to an economist as a nation in which the wealth is more evenly distributed, but it isn't as good for the people. And our current laissez faire policies lead to the former kind of nation, not the latter.
I don't understand what you (or Microsoft) are talking about when making that claim.
I regularly mix Python and Java objects. Python is a dynamically typed language with multiple inheritance and Java is a statically typed language with single inheritance. I can subclass Java objects in Python and use Java objects in Python and vice versa. If this is possible for languages as different as Java and Python, it would seem to be possible for many other languages as well (and many other languages implemented on top of the JVM claim to provide the same level of integration--I just haven't used them). The Java native code interfaces also allow for similar levels of integration with native code.
The CLR does clean up some idiosyncracies and minor messes in the JVM and JVM spec. Mostly, those cleanups give a bit more handholding to less experienced language implementors to figure out what to do. But that doesn't seem to give the CLR significantly more functionality or performance overall.
If you claim CLR is "demonstrably better", maybe you can be a little more concrete in your "demonstration"? Where specifically are these demonstrable advantages, and how specifically can you not achieve the same functionality in the JVM?
UNIX is still a live trademark of AT&T. I also suspect that the UNIX hackers at AT&T would not call OSX "UNIX" (although some of the more diplomatic ones might call it "UNIX-like" or "mostly UNIX compatible"). So, I'm not sure in what sense "UNIX doesn't stand for it's [sic] original Thompson implementation" (actually, it doesn't; it stands for a whole family of systems derived from Bell Labs source code, but not Linux or OSX).
Java would have been godsend for Microsoft, addressing all these problems, but they didn't control it and it would have given people not only hardware independence but also Microsoft independence.
Technically, there are no significant differences between the CLR and the JVM. The CLR isn't any more or less powerful than the JVM, it won't run much faster or slower, and it won't be any easier or harder to implement. You already have Java compilers for the CLR, and you will see C# compilers for the JVM soon. But Microsoft controls the evolution of the CLR, and that is what matters to them. While Microsoft will probably implement the ECMA standard, they will extend the CLR and libraries in numerous proprietary ways, and that will give them exactly the control they want.
I can do the same on Windows or VMS or Linux, and those systems aren't "UNIX" (although they may be "UNIX compatible" or "emulating UNIX"). In fact, I think it's good that Apple has chosen a kernel with a more modern architecture.
It's called "X11". X11 isn't really a "window system", it's a network transparent graphics library. X11 gives you the low-level graphics, access to hardware acceleration, and network transparency. You can build whatever "window system" (in the Windows/Apple sense) on top of that: your own APIs, your own window management, your own input methods, etc.
And apparently the Apple zealots on /. have no sense of humor about it, given their trigger happy moderation. The worst thing about Apple is the smugness of the company and its users: according to them, Apple can never do anything wrong.
Indeed. That's my point. The Darwin kernel is nicer and more modern than the BSD kernel or the old UNIX kernel. Why does Apple keep calling it "UNIX"? It's all marketing, because UNIX has a good reputation. Maybe one shouldn't complain about it, but that doesn't make it correct. And I'm sure the old UNIX hackers at AT&T would give you an earful about all the things that are wrong, according to them, with the Darwin architecture.
Well, perhaps people don't do it because it's not such a good idea after all. Apple's applications look slick and are often easy to use, but that doesn't mean that they made the best choice for the underlying graphics model.
In fact, the open source community does have something like this: Display PostScript (in multiple implementations). And there are good reasons why people don't use it.
I fully agree: for better or worse, Linux is not UNIX. (The Linux kernel architecture, however, is more similar to UNIX than OSX's is.)
Darwin is UNIX, period.
Oh, and what is the reason you think that?