You're a LibDem councillor, right Tim - and possibly a Bristolian (by birth) to boot.
there are lots of councils outside London, and they are caught by rules which seem completely daft and irrelevant and bizarre until you have managed to work out which parochial little London squabble caused them to be invented.
Indeed. And there are also alot of councils which seem to bend over backward to impose bizarre, daft and irrelevant rules on the people who elected then.
The Lib Dem group in South Gloucester spring to mind in this connection - wasting public money persecuting motorists in the name of cutting "congestion" simply because the LibDems have decided that The Car Is Bad. They won't spend money building a much needed motorway link road and they won't invest in a decent tram or light railway system.
That's why I take a dim view of local councils. I'd be glad to see them abolished completely.
Sure, but the market is rising right now, so it will continue to rise for ever, right? I mean, we'll never have another of those annoying bursts, surely?
Of course it will rise forever! How can it not?
1) Al Gore (re)invents the internet
2) Millions of websites created to sell "something"
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
On a more serious note however, I was referring to people willing to speculate in SCO stock, rather than the market generally.
Actually, the reason is that you buy stock like SCOX as a speculation, not an investment. It's a simple theory that boils down to this: no matter how dumb it is for you to own the stock, someone dumberer will buy it off you for more.
Yes and those dumber people are speculators. It's called a bubble and it bursts when there is nobody left who is willing to continue speculating.
I have to say that I've also noticed problems with rendering slashdot over the past couple of days. I've used Firebird 0.6.1 on Win2000 and "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030519 Mozilla Firebird/0.6" on Linux.
Yesterday (8th October) the stories on the main page wouldn't load until I'd cleared my cache. Periodically, the prob returned. Have also experienced kludged page rendering on the Post COmment page and when viewing a users HomePage.
As far as I can tell, just to be slightly on-topic, slashdot isn't using CSS. All style information seems to be "hard coded" into the HTML for each page.
to stop Microsoft from distributing its IE software until they remove Eolas' patented technology for running plug-ins, or pay up for a license.
or reach a multi-million $$$ out of court settlement like that reached with Be inc over alleged misuse of monolopy - the type of settlement in which the details are hidden from public scrutiny.
Wonder what the world would be like if Microsoft were forced to not distribute IE? Not that it'll ever happen.
This quote by Bill Joy sums up XFree86 for me;
That reflects a lack of design discipline, which means that as the system grows, so does the ambiguity of the software itself. The result is a system encrusted with multiple layers of things that weren't really designed in so much as bolted on
The point is that users who desire to use a rich desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) suffer because of the extra layer of abstraction provided by the toolkit and needed to provide that richness.
X may very well be quick, but to be truly usable, in the sense that we understand usability when speaking of modern GUIs, a toolkit and other functionality is needed. As soon as that is added, performance decreases.
I think a redesign is needed and this project at lease takes steps to address that.
That reflects a lack of design discipline, which means that as the system grows, so does the ambiguity of the software itself. The result is a system encrusted with multiple layers of things that weren't really designed in so much as bolted on
I think Sun lost its way a long time ago. McNealy et al don't seem able to decide if they're a hardware company or a software company. The idea, pre-Java, was that Solaris shifted the Sparc boxes.
However, now we have tight hardware margins, cheap commodity (intel) boxes muscleing in, and nowhere left for the dot in dot com to go.
There seems to be no clear strategy for Java (branding everything hardware and software as the Java Platform just isn't making sense to me), no clear strategy for Linux (talk it down one week, offer it to your customers the next), no clear strategy to deal with the the threat from commodity boxes and Linux on Intel (buy Cobalt and end of line its products).
The writing was on the wall back in 1998 when Sun purchased Forte Software in a multi-million dollar deal. Anyone who knows what Forte was will realise the potential there was to avoid the inelegent mess that J2EE has turned into.
Forte was a system for rapidly building distributed systems, with failover and loadbalancing working out of the box. The gem in its crown was a technology called Application Partitioning which allowed developers to write and test code on one machine and partition (distribute it) to all machines in the target environment with one mouse click. In many ways it was ahead of its time.
I think Forte is called Sun Unified Server these days and it's due to be end-of-lined within the next two years. Sun are hoping that it's customers will "upgrade" (downgrade) to J2EE. They'll probably move to.NET...
Really, Sun needs a clear strategy and clear direction.
Unfourtanately, I don't agree with the Lib Dems either. I live in a Unitary Authority area which is under Lib Dem control.
Last June, at at local election time, most people voted strategically for the Conservatives in an attempt to unset the LibDems. We ended up with a Hung Council - no party has overall control - which is deemed to be a sight better than the previous situation.
Sorry, I don't like the Greens either, or the UK Freedon party.
If you break the law by speeding you deserve all you get
Aren't you being a little bit too simplistic?
I wonder why it is that the police are allowed to break the law in order to catch me breaking the law. I may be driving at 35mph in a 30mph limit, but I'm *not* parked on double yellow lines expressly put in that location because parked cars present a hazard to other road users. And it's not just double yellows, it's traffic islands, slip roads, pavements (sidewalks)..the list goes on.
In Bristol, recently, the chief constable had to issue an apology after several fines were overturned by the courts precisely because the police were causing a greater hazard than the "speeding" motorists they were trying to snag.
The second point is this; Police speed cameras only operate in areas where they are likely to catch motorists exceeding the speed limit - and therefore maximise revenue. It's not necessarily unsafe to exceed the speed limit on these roads - it's just easier to catch people doing so because the conditions of the road make it easier to drive safely at 35 or 40 mph.
This whole safety camera thing isn't about stopping "cowboy" drivers who think their "car is a toy" - it's about RAISING REVENUE FOR THE POLICE. I suggest that it's you who needs to get real and get your eyes open to the broader picture - citizens rights are gradually being eroded so that government agencies can misapply law in order to attain non-primary goals, such as raising revenue.
What is Blairs government up to?
Compulsory ID cards - which I read that Blunkett is still trying to get introduced, monitoring car speeds via satellite transmission/receivers, mobile police radar "saftey" (speed) cameras used by illegally parked police who refuse to divulge the amount of revenue they raise from issuing tickets etc.
I'm beginning to think that Blair is big brother. Next time, I won't be voting for his lot or any of the others. They're all as bad as each other.
When I read the piece, my initial reaction was, "They really should arrest Bill Gates". However, on some reflection, I'm not so sure Microsoft is the sole source of all the disruption over these worms.
OK, so the MS software makes worms and virus spreading relatively easy, due to activeX, executable mail attachments and bad security "out of the box" (open ports, exposed services such as RPC etc).
Still, if a motor manufacturer sold a mass market car without locks, windows or an alarm system, would anybody buy it?
The answer is, probably not. There's the issue of personal responsability to obtain a secure car. Same with software. Maybe it's all of those major businesses and misguided "CIOs" who keep buying Microsoft who ought to be arrested. Between them and the Microsoft execs, they've managed to create an environment which makes it easy for these bored young men to create worms.
Poor 18 year old guy. Why should he be arrested? After all, what's a script(kiddie) among friends?
This kind of prating is exactly the type of nonsense I can't abide.
Yeah, 3000 people may be killed in road accidents each year, and that may be a worse stat than for the rail system. So why aren't the same government, who are proposing these crackpot measures, *INVESTING IN RAIL TRAVEL - ESPECIALLY LIGHT RAILWAYS and TRAMS* - mass transport systems which would help to cut down on car use and cut down on motor accidents? Could it be because it's easier and more PROFITABLE to install speed cameras, toll roads, two-plus lanes and charging zones which do more to raise revenue than to actually address the problems of road usage?
I, for one, would be happy to use public transport, if it was reasonably cheap, convienient and available when I needed it - as a motor car is. I suspect the same applies to most drivers in the UK.
Idiot monitoring measures which force people to drive according to artificial conditions are designed for one thing and one thing only. TO RAISE REVENUE.
I won't be voting for Blair or that dunce Prescott next time, I can assure you.
Hmmm, well "businesses" use one of the recent variants of MS operating systems (NT,2000,XP), the latter two of which ship with an "indexing server" specifically for indexing intranet sites.
Yet said businesses are still willing to pay money for a google indexing server. Why?
My point is maybe a "free"(beer- to save money) indexing server isn't what businesses require.
BSD licence is 100% responsible for the fact that people write IE only web sites. BSD (or the MIT) licence is 100% responsbile for active directory being incompatible with anything else. BSD licence is 100% responsible for the Microsft domination of the internet. MSD license has ruined computing, and enabled MS to have a monopoly.
You're so wrong. I'm glad there's ONE internet. It runs on an open, non-propritary protocol. The universites and innovation which spawned the world wide web and led to the various open LAMP technologies continue to innovate for that one internet.
Thankyou BSD blah. That's my last word. F**k whatever else you say.
I think it was a net loss to the world to let MS have TCP/IP. They have used it to wage war against open source and the internet. The sad thing is that they won. They have ruined HTML, email, kerberos, ldap, and every other standard protocol in the world. People should learn from history. If you want the ideas you came up with to survive and benefit future generations GPL the damned thing. The alternative is to have an army of idiot Web designers writing IE only web sites.
That's the biggest load of s**t I've heard for a long time. If you can't see that an established "windows-net" would inevitably lead to the end of ALL TCP/IP internetworks as we know them, you're beyond help.
The only thing currently preventing this is MS being forced to compete with non-mircosft server-side products - especially apache. They have to compete because they use the same network protocol. They use the same network protocol because BSD had a TCP/IP network stack licenced under the BSD licence.
You said it yourself - websites being written for IE only - why? Because IE has 95% of the market. Why? Beause viable competition (from Mozilla/Netscrape) has finished. Microsoft, having established a de facto standard for browsing, are now content not to bother innovating. From here on in, they call the browser shots. What you're advocating is that they own the server space and the netprotocol space too. Linux is big today not just because of the GPL, but because Microsoft made the mistake of using BSD licenced code.
I repeat. Thank you BSD licence for saving the world.
As a result windows users would not be on the internet but BSD users (through samba like re-engineering) would have been on the windows-net (ms proprietary internet). All in all it wold have been a good thing. A windows-less internet and a separate and proprietary windows-net for all the fuckups.
I hope you understand that the seperate and proprietary windows-net would have to be the network which "won out" in the end, simply because MOST WEB BROWSING IS DONE USING WINDOWS MACHINES.
Arguably, the continued rise of Linux, enterprise java, PHP, apache, perl and all non-microsoft technologies which are internet related, is due to Windows users being forced to use the non-proprietary protocol (TCP/IP) and (inter)network on which said technologies/communities depend.
Unfourtanately, windows is where the critical mass for end users is and a microsoft windows net would have lead to proprietary web servers, proprietary web protocols and proprietary web services which all ISPs would have implemented. Eventually, TCP/IP would have been dropped by the majority (if not all) ISPs and where would that leave the non-mickeysoft technologies?
Slashdot Mirror
You're a LibDem councillor, right Tim - and possibly a Bristolian (by birth) to boot.
there are lots of councils outside London, and they are caught by rules which seem completely daft and irrelevant and bizarre until you have managed to work out which parochial little London squabble caused them to be invented.
Indeed. And there are also alot of councils which seem to bend over backward to impose bizarre, daft and irrelevant rules on the people who elected then.
The Lib Dem group in South Gloucester spring to mind in this connection - wasting public money persecuting motorists in the name of cutting "congestion" simply because the LibDems have decided that The Car Is Bad. They won't spend money building a much needed motorway link road and they won't invest in a decent tram or light railway system.
That's why I take a dim view of local councils. I'd be glad to see them abolished completely.
No doubt Mr.Blair would too...
Sure, but the market is rising right now, so it will continue to rise for ever, right? I mean, we'll never have another of those annoying bursts, surely?
Of course it will rise forever! How can it not?
1) Al Gore (re)invents the internet
2) Millions of websites created to sell "something"
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
On a more serious note however, I was referring to people willing to speculate in SCO stock, rather than the market generally.
..no not Michael Jacksons chimp..:)
Actually, the reason is that you buy stock like SCOX as a speculation, not an investment. It's a simple theory that boils down to this: no matter how dumb it is for you to own the stock, someone dumberer will buy it off you for more.
Yes and those dumber people are speculators. It's called a bubble and it bursts when there is nobody left who is willing to continue speculating.
I have to say that I've also noticed problems with rendering slashdot over the past couple of days. I've used Firebird 0.6.1 on Win2000 and "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030519 Mozilla Firebird/0.6" on Linux.
Yesterday (8th October) the stories on the main page wouldn't load until I'd cleared my cache. Periodically, the prob returned. Have also experienced kludged page rendering on the Post COmment page and when viewing a users HomePage.
As far as I can tell, just to be slightly on-topic, slashdot isn't using CSS. All style information seems to be "hard coded" into the HTML for each page.
to stop Microsoft from distributing its IE software until they remove Eolas' patented technology for running plug-ins, or pay up for a license.
or reach a multi-million $$$ out of court settlement like that reached with Be inc over alleged misuse of monolopy - the type of settlement in which the details are hidden from public scrutiny.
Wonder what the world would be like if Microsoft were forced to not distribute IE? Not that it'll ever happen.
My wife straightened them out. I can just imagine all those pretty-girls saying "Oh, what's this? You mean this is what they call a calculator?
Your wife was the ugly one, right?
This quote by Bill Joy sums up XFree86 for me; That reflects a lack of design discipline, which means that as the system grows, so does the ambiguity of the software itself. The result is a system encrusted with multiple layers of things that weren't really designed in so much as bolted on
The point is that users who desire to use a rich desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) suffer because of the extra layer of abstraction provided by the toolkit and needed to provide that richness.
X may very well be quick, but to be truly usable, in the sense that we understand usability when speaking of modern GUIs, a toolkit and other functionality is needed. As soon as that is added, performance decreases.
I think a redesign is needed and this project at lease takes steps to address that.
From the article;
That reflects a lack of design discipline, which means that as the system grows, so does the ambiguity of the software itself. The result is a system encrusted with multiple layers of things that weren't really designed in so much as bolted on
This sounds just like X11 to me..!
I think Sun lost its way a long time ago. McNealy et al don't seem able to decide if they're a hardware company or a software company. The idea, pre-Java, was that Solaris shifted the Sparc boxes. However, now we have tight hardware margins, cheap commodity (intel) boxes muscleing in, and nowhere left for the dot in dot com to go. There seems to be no clear strategy for Java (branding everything hardware and software as the Java Platform just isn't making sense to me), no clear strategy for Linux (talk it down one week, offer it to your customers the next), no clear strategy to deal with the the threat from commodity boxes and Linux on Intel (buy Cobalt and end of line its products). The writing was on the wall back in 1998 when Sun purchased Forte Software in a multi-million dollar deal. Anyone who knows what Forte was will realise the potential there was to avoid the inelegent mess that J2EE has turned into. Forte was a system for rapidly building distributed systems, with failover and loadbalancing working out of the box. The gem in its crown was a technology called Application Partitioning which allowed developers to write and test code on one machine and partition (distribute it) to all machines in the target environment with one mouse click. In many ways it was ahead of its time. I think Forte is called Sun Unified Server these days and it's due to be end-of-lined within the next two years. Sun are hoping that it's customers will "upgrade" (downgrade) to J2EE. They'll probably move to .NET...
Really, Sun needs a clear strategy and clear direction.
I'm thinking that if I want to get through the next season of TV and the Holiday season at home I need to add at least a Terabyte of storage.
I'm thinking that you've got a serious problem to deal with...
Firewire is 400 M Bytes per seconds or 3.2 G bits per seconds
Are you sure? AFAIK, FireWire (IEEE 1394) is 400M bits per second, which means that it's slower than Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbits/second)
USB is rated at 12 Mbits/second and USB2 at 480Mbits/second.
Both USB2 and FireWire are faster than 100Mbit ethernet and USB is faster than 10Mbit Ethernet.
What's stopping me from becoming the Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer?
The fact that you keep trolling on Slashdot, perhaps?
Won't this thing make an astonishingly large target for terrorists, or even for enimies in a wartime situation?
imagine the propagana and demoralising effects a hit on such a target could produce.
Ok, so the shuttle seems less practicle, but this isn't the answer.
I think it's a pipe dream - a nice, exciting pipe dream, but still a pipe dream
Unfourtanately, I don't agree with the Lib Dems either. I live in a Unitary Authority area which is under Lib Dem control.
Last June, at at local election time, most people voted strategically for the Conservatives in an attempt to unset the LibDems. We ended up with a Hung Council - no party has overall control - which is deemed to be a sight better than the previous situation.
Sorry, I don't like the Greens either, or the UK Freedon party.
If you break the law by speeding you deserve all you get
Aren't you being a little bit too simplistic?
I wonder why it is that the police are allowed to break the law in order to catch me breaking the law. I may be driving at 35mph in a 30mph limit, but I'm *not* parked on double yellow lines expressly put in that location because parked cars present a hazard to other road users. And it's not just double yellows, it's traffic islands, slip roads, pavements (sidewalks)..the list goes on.
In Bristol, recently, the chief constable had to issue an apology after several fines were overturned by the courts precisely because the police were causing a greater hazard than the "speeding" motorists they were trying to snag.
The second point is this; Police speed cameras only operate in areas where they are likely to catch motorists exceeding the speed limit - and therefore maximise revenue. It's not necessarily unsafe to exceed the speed limit on these roads - it's just easier to catch people doing so because the conditions of the road make it easier to drive safely at 35 or 40 mph.
This whole safety camera thing isn't about stopping "cowboy" drivers who think their "car is a toy" - it's about RAISING REVENUE FOR THE POLICE. I suggest that it's you who needs to get real and get your eyes open to the broader picture - citizens rights are gradually being eroded so that government agencies can misapply law in order to attain non-primary goals, such as raising revenue.
What is Blairs government up to? Compulsory ID cards - which I read that Blunkett is still trying to get introduced, monitoring car speeds via satellite transmission/receivers, mobile police radar "saftey" (speed) cameras used by illegally parked police who refuse to divulge the amount of revenue they raise from issuing tickets etc.
I'm beginning to think that Blair is big brother. Next time, I won't be voting for his lot or any of the others. They're all as bad as each other.
When I read the piece, my initial reaction was, "They really should arrest Bill Gates". However, on some reflection, I'm not so sure Microsoft is the sole source of all the disruption over these worms.
OK, so the MS software makes worms and virus spreading relatively easy, due to activeX, executable mail attachments and bad security "out of the box" (open ports, exposed services such as RPC etc).
Still, if a motor manufacturer sold a mass market car without locks, windows or an alarm system, would anybody buy it?
The answer is, probably not. There's the issue of personal responsability to obtain a secure car. Same with software. Maybe it's all of those major businesses and misguided "CIOs" who keep buying Microsoft who ought to be arrested. Between them and the Microsoft execs, they've managed to create an environment which makes it easy for these bored young men to create worms.
Poor 18 year old guy. Why should he be arrested? After all, what's a script(kiddie) among friends?
This kind of prating is exactly the type of nonsense I can't abide.
Yeah, 3000 people may be killed in road accidents each year, and that may be a worse stat than for the rail system. So why aren't the same government, who are proposing these crackpot measures, *INVESTING IN RAIL TRAVEL - ESPECIALLY LIGHT RAILWAYS and TRAMS* - mass transport systems which would help to cut down on car use and cut down on motor accidents? Could it be because it's easier and more PROFITABLE to install speed cameras, toll roads, two-plus lanes and charging zones which do more to raise revenue than to actually address the problems of road usage?
I, for one, would be happy to use public transport, if it was reasonably cheap, convienient and available when I needed it - as a motor car is. I suspect the same applies to most drivers in the UK.
Idiot monitoring measures which force people to drive according to artificial conditions are designed for one thing and one thing only. TO RAISE REVENUE.
I won't be voting for Blair or that dunce Prescott next time, I can assure you.
Now that I've seen those words, my time at Slashdot is done. I can move on.
I can't. I'm still waiting for some enlightenment regarding Darl mcBride, Natalie Portman and the Hot Grits connection...
Hmmm, well "businesses" use one of the recent variants of MS operating systems (NT,2000,XP), the latter two of which ship with an "indexing server" specifically for indexing intranet sites.
Yet said businesses are still willing to pay money for a google indexing server. Why?
My point is maybe a "free"(beer- to save money) indexing server isn't what businesses require.
Well, all I can see there is something called Eiffel Envision 1.2 which is a plugin for MS-Visual Studio.NET...
one internet, one protocol, one "space", one love.
BSD licence is 100% responsible for the fact that people write IE only web sites. BSD (or the MIT) licence is 100% responsbile for active directory being incompatible with anything else. BSD licence is 100% responsible for the Microsft domination of the internet. MSD license has ruined computing, and enabled MS to have a monopoly.
You're so wrong. I'm glad there's ONE internet. It runs on an open, non-propritary protocol. The universites and innovation which spawned the world wide web and led to the various open LAMP technologies continue to innovate for that one internet.
Thankyou BSD blah. That's my last word. F**k whatever else you say.
I think it was a net loss to the world to let MS have TCP/IP. They have used it to wage war against open source and the internet. The sad thing is that they won. They have ruined HTML, email, kerberos, ldap, and every other standard protocol in the world. People should learn from history. If you want the ideas you came up with to survive and benefit future generations GPL the damned thing. The alternative is to have an army of idiot Web designers writing IE only web sites.
That's the biggest load of s**t I've heard for a long time. If you can't see that an established "windows-net" would inevitably lead to the end of ALL TCP/IP internetworks as we know them, you're beyond help.
The only thing currently preventing this is MS being forced to compete with non-mircosft server-side products - especially apache. They have to compete because they use the same network protocol. They use the same network protocol because BSD had a TCP/IP network stack licenced under the BSD licence.
You said it yourself - websites being written for IE only - why? Because IE has 95% of the market. Why? Beause viable competition (from Mozilla/Netscrape) has finished. Microsoft, having established a de facto standard for browsing, are now content not to bother innovating. From here on in, they call the browser shots. What you're advocating is that they own the server space and the netprotocol space too. Linux is big today not just because of the GPL, but because Microsoft made the mistake of using BSD licenced code.
I repeat. Thank you BSD licence for saving the world.
As a result windows users would not be on the internet but BSD users (through samba like re-engineering) would have been on the windows-net (ms proprietary internet). All in all it wold have been a good thing. A windows-less internet and a separate and proprietary windows-net for all the fuckups.
I hope you understand that the seperate and proprietary windows-net would have to be the network which "won out" in the end, simply because MOST WEB BROWSING IS DONE USING WINDOWS MACHINES.
Arguably, the continued rise of Linux, enterprise java, PHP, apache, perl and all non-microsoft technologies which are internet related, is due to Windows users being forced to use the non-proprietary protocol (TCP/IP) and (inter)network on which said technologies/communities depend.
Unfourtanately, windows is where the critical mass for end users is and a microsoft windows net would have lead to proprietary web servers, proprietary web protocols and proprietary web services which all ISPs would have implemented. Eventually, TCP/IP would have been dropped by the majority (if not all) ISPs and where would that leave the non-mickeysoft technologies?
That's why the BSD licence has saved the world...