If you had ever worked for a large company like Microsoft, you would know that very rarely your career will be on the line, because you have spent about 50 per cent of your work day playing the Blame Game, also known as Covering Your Ass. Which means that when (or rather, if -- we don't hear about too many Microsoft employees getting fired for security lapses, do we) it hits the fan, the blame gets deflected, passed around, watered down, and it quickly becomes "everybodys fault". In fact, the first reaction in a large company will not be "how do we fix it" but rather "whose fault is this". This is the reason why most large companies respond to problems with the speed an oil tanker turning in a tar pit.
Now, return to Open Source. If there is a mistake in the code, you and you personally are to blame, and everybody on the whole planet knows, because it says "stratjakt" right in the program. You're afraid that your peers will snicker and point, your mother will cry, and your wife will run away because she can't stand the shame. A coding error at a big company is a "problem requiring prompt service to our respected consumers", but Open Source is as personal as a punch in the guts, and you can't avoid dealing with it by playing office games. Your code, your glory; and your mistake, your blemish.
So the question of why Open Source is and will be superior on the long run to Closed Source comes down to one simple factor: Human nature. The Free Market works because it harnesses greed; Free Software works because it harnesses pride.
Yeah, and then all they'll do someday is sell your data to the highest bidder. Anybody who registers anywhere he or she doesn't absolutely have to is asking for a flood spam and a life of stuffed mailboxes. Sure, the NYT might tell you that, oh no, that will never happen, but we've heard that one before, haven't we. Why do they want my data in the first place?
Me, I just don't use their website at all. Too much trouble, and there are news sources -- free, high quality news sources -- all over the web.
A while ago I pointed out that DRM in hardware will lead to one thing and one thing only: A hardware fork, with the US of A going off in one direction and everybody else in another. Does anybody here truly believe that, say, Germany, Japan, or France are going to buy computers that have an American-controlled chip that in turn controls the content?
Same goes for legislation: The US Congress has no power of Great Britian or South Korea, and the combined non-US-market is still larger than the US. The Asian chipmakers will just start a special (and therefore more expensive) product line for the US, and keep turning out their normal stuff for everybody else. If Peru and Venezuela and - to a lesser extent - Germany are actively switching away from Linux to get out of the grip of an American software monopoly, what makes anybody think that they will suddenly rush out and buy American controled hardware?
Anyway, I've just about had it with HP. I'm just glad I bought my RPN calculator back in the days when it was a real tech company with real tech products and put hard-core quality before shareholder value...
Why Python 2.1 and not 2.2, which has Iterators and a whole lot of other new power toys? If I remember correctly, my SuSE 8.0 came with 2.2 (not 2.2.1) months ago...
There is an interesting article on
zdnews about Sun betting the company on Java - if that is true, this might not be quite the way to do it. Getting bad press like this is only going to make more people to look around and notice that, for example, Python (or rather Jython, the variant of Python based on Java instead of C)
is a powerful and free alternative for quite a number of applications.Once you start with alternatives like that, you might not want to come back to Sun.
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid large companies can be. What did they think, nobody would notice?
...which is a shame, since IMHO it beats the pants off of most of the languages you mentioned, especially with the new stuff like generators. I'm not sure what the best website would be (www.python.org and the links there have been good enough for me so far), but there is an awesome tutor mailing list for Python that is full of people who are helpful, friendly, and witty. Haven't had a question yet that they couldn't answer. See here for details.
My wife and I have "Kira" marked down as the name of a future daughter - it is short, it doesn't sound artificial, and it is far more unique then, say, Betty or Jackie. We're stumped for good names for boys, though.
One of my all time favorite names, though I can't actually stand the guy, is "Wolf Blitzer". Now that is pretty cool.
There are media claims that Germany's secretary of state, Otto Schily, was talking about government-sponsored DOS attacks on Nazi sites - which would mean the German government, for example, trying to take down all of those U.S. sites that violate Germany's anti-right-wing censorship laws. There was some discussion, however, just what was proposed by whom, as Schily's spokesperson later denied anything of the sort. Check
Heise here for more information (in German).
This is another example of a problem that is mostly due to the antics of the 18th Century legal system the U.S. insists on keeping. Copyright laws should be written down in a book, with all relevant details specified, not thrashed out on a case-by-case base so some local court like this one can cause all kinds of confusion nation-wide.
This is how modern legal systems have handled the same problem: German courts (which have professional judges, not the trial-by-jury lottery, and federal law books) have decided that you, the buyer, own that copy of Windows you just paid for and can do with it whatever you want to, since this is basically just another business transaction. Microsoft can claim all they want that you are just "renting" their programs in the EULA, but since German law is (still) above Microsoft's will, they can't touch you if you sell that copy. End of story, at least until the laws are changed. Microsoft, of course, doesn't like to talk about this at all.
But because of this ruling, the German magazine "c't" legally (!) printed a very detailed account on how to create a complete copy of Windows out of that backup CD included with your laptop. A really nice article ["c't", except for their increasingly anti-Linux stance, are IMHO the number one computer magazine on the planet] that probably had Microsoft Germany screaming in the hallways. But notice they didn't try to sue "c't", because they know they would have lost, and the German legal system (well, usually) doesn't just give the prize to the guy with the most money.
(This, by the way, is one of the most anyoing things about Slashdot: Considering how international the user base has become, the editors' outlook is so U.S. centric it make you want to cry. I'm still amazed that they actually use kilobytes instead of bitfeet or cyberinches...).
I'm not sure if those of you in the U.S. realize how viciously perfect RMS' timing is on this one. Since Friday noon (GMT), everybody on this planet (with the exception of the U.S., Canada, and Afghanistan) only have one thing on their mind: The Soccer World Cup in South Korea and Japan. It will interesting to see if the United Linux people manage to tear themselves away from their TV screens long enough to formulate a esponse.Germany plays Saudi Arabia on Saturday (11:30h GMT), so that knocks out SuSE right away. If RMS is lucky, it will take United Linux until Monday to formulate a response, and by then, their reputation in the Linux community will have been severely damaged.
If I remember correctly, Bike was where Yuri Gagarin lifted off to do the first human orbit in space. Kinda sad to see how run down the place has become...must be rather depressing working there these days.
Okay, let's assume this becomes U.S. law. Now, is the rest of world going to say: Hey, look at this new technology invented by the U.S. government that will let U.S. industry control our computers and stereos and CD players to protect the interests of giant U.S. media corporations. Wow! What a fantastic idea! Let's adopt it!
I think not.
I don't see the Germans buying computers with U.S. mandated content control chips for their parliament, or Sony putting in U.S. designed chips into the CD players they sell in Tokyo, or the Russians forcing all tape decks off their market that haven't been approved by some U.S. media consortium. The idea that the U.S. can force the rest of the world to implement what will be immediately seen as a U.S. designed and controlled crypto system into every machine that blinks, beeps, or boots is so brain dead that you just know it can only come from a member of the U.S. Congress.
This is the Clipper Chip all over again.
When it comes down to it, the rest of the planet doesn't give a rat's ass if their citizens aren't cooperating when 20th Century Fox, Microsoft, or AOL-Time-Warner try to make the next billion Dollars so that these <I>American</I> companies can get richer, give that money to their <I>American</I> stockholders and top <I>American</I> executives and maybe even pay <I>American</I> taxes that help finance <I>American</I> infrastructure, or, to put it bluntly, the <I>American</I> military machine. They'd rather see their citizens spend their money on local bratwursts, sushi, or vodka: That way it gets fed back into the local economy. their citizens rip, copy, and burn anything out of America they possibly can. If you are a Chinese CS student, you can either spend money on a Windows license, which means that your Yuan would join those 40/billion/ Dollars that Microsoft is stockpiling to buy Iceland and turn the whole place into a ski resort for their top executives. Or, you can pirate the Windows CD, and spend that money on, say, a Chinese book on C programming at your local Beijing book store and kick those running imperialist pig-dogs with Red Flag Linux. China is interested in getting their economy on an information age footage, and they need operating systems for that, the less expensive, the better. Why should they want machines that prevent that?
No, what will happen if that law is passed - and remember, we're talking about the country blissfully that is ignoring the fact that the rest of the world has basically adopted one common mobile phone standard (not to mention the metric system), still transfers money by sending slips of paper in the mail, and who live with a television standard that is aptly named NTSC - Never The Same Color - is that those people in Taiwan and Korea will happily produce hobbled computer, CD, radio, TV, DVD and other parts for the U.S. market, while continuing to ship the free technology to the rest of the world. Hey, it's a global economy with billions of people hungry for computers, and only about 270 million Americans who's computer market is saturated anyway. What would you do?
Now because Content Controlled America is getting specially made parts, they immediately miss out on the price cutting effects of mass production. In other words: Hardware and electronics prices in the U.S. skyrocket, because the other 5.75 billion people on the planet are using the old, free, trusted, mass produced hardware, while Americans effectively have to have every chip custom built. What we have after a few years of this is a /hardware fork/ - the U.S. goes off into one direction, the other countries in the other. In the mean time, U.S. customs has started rectal searches of all long-haired males coming back from Paris, France to make sure they aren't smuggling free RAM into the country. You can't buy a CD in Britain because they won't run on your content controlled player - just like the DVD regional codes, but for real. And your TV station doubles the number of ads during the next Olympics because they had to pay for those signals to be transfered into U.S. content controlled format...
One of the reasons I filter out every ad I can (Junkbuster at my host, wwwoffle on my machine, and Opera cutting out images) is that they target a U.S. audience. If you live in Germany, buying something from Dipshit, Utah is just not something you are interested in - imagine Slashdot was carrying ads from Albania, or South Korea, or even Great Britain, and you'll get the point. Slashdot is openly U.S. centric, which was fine when the rest of the world wasn't on the Internet. Putting U.S. ads in a place - real or virtual - where in the near future the majority of people are going to be Non-Americans is not going to work.
On a more general level, ads are an attempt to manipulate the subconscious, to program you to think of a certain brand name when you think of a product. It tries to create an artificial need, convince their target group they are inadequate, ugly, and missing some trend. As a cumulative force, ads are enormously effective: Almost all young women in Western cultures feel bad about their body, and people in American and Europa go into debt to buy stuff the don't really need. But there is no reason I personally should go along with this.
There is a difference between Capitalism, which brought material wealth to the masses, and our current subtype of Consumer Capitalism, which relies on ads to create fake markets for crap products. I support Capitalism wholeheartedly. But I see no reason to support its current form which has turned a country's citizens into consumers, has the president of the United States going out and telling the people be patriotic and buy stuff, and destroys people's privacy with the excuse that more marketing data will be good for the country. Consumer Capitalism, like the system of Shareholder Value it is paired with, is a historical dead end, and the sooner we get it over with the better.
Unfortunately, is probably also the beginning of the end for Slashdot. Apart from the problem of reading a text when half of your screen is filled with an ad, Slashdot is associated with the Open Source movement, which is directly opposed to the Consumer Capitalism philosophy of closed source from companies like Microsoft. If there is any place these ads do not belong, it is here - this is more of a Tyler Durden kind of place.
I assume that other people will be taking the Slashdot software soon and setting up their own versions, specialized to a certain topic; this is what the Internet tends to do when a site is killed by advertising. It has been a fun place to read, and a fun place to write, and more than once made Internet history.
As an American who grew up in Germany during the Cold War, I've stopped even thinking about who is reading my snailmail or email, who is bugging my phone, going thru my trash, or who, every time I flush, starts filtering my - well, you get the point.
From the German government's Lauschangriff to Echelon to the NSA to my provider [Hi, guys! Keep up the good work!] to some company that routes my data to people I haven't even heard of, I would just assume that anybody who can listen in will listen in. Germany does have a constitutional Right to Privacy that the U.S. Bill of Rights doesn't, but I don't think that is going to impress too many of those people - what am I going to do, sue the people who run Echelon?
My suggestion: Live with it and use crypto where you can.
Region coding does make sense with DVDs. You see, there's often a long delay before US movies are released in other countries.
That would make sense if only new DVDs come out with regional encoding, but my copy of "Alien" here - which was released quite a while back - is limited to Code 2. Everything gets coded, ancient or still on the big screen. This makes the "delay" argument look kinda silly.
I mean, people are bitching about how their rights are being taken away and everything, but let's face it: How many of them are actually using imports?
In Europe (somewhat more than 360 million people, I should point out), a lot of people. This is because there is a greater selection of DVDs in the U.S. than in Europe. Also, some DVDs are in German translation only ("Flash Gordon", the new version with Queen's music, is one of them). And third and most important, DVDs from different countries are censored in different ways. Europeans (especially Germans) take out the violence (the German version of "Fight Club" is somewhat of a joke), while the U.S. has this problem with nudity and sex ("Color of Night" is one that comes to mind).
If you want to see the film the way the director intended, sooner or later you're going to have to import you stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, return to Open Source. If there is a mistake in the code, you and you personally are to blame, and everybody on the whole planet knows, because it says "stratjakt" right in the program. You're afraid that your peers will snicker and point, your mother will cry, and your wife will run away because she can't stand the shame. A coding error at a big company is a "problem requiring prompt service to our respected consumers", but Open Source is as personal as a punch in the guts, and you can't avoid dealing with it by playing office games. Your code, your glory; and your mistake, your blemish.
So the question of why Open Source is and will be superior on the long run to Closed Source comes down to one simple factor: Human nature. The Free Market works because it harnesses greed; Free Software works because it harnesses pride.
Me, I just don't use their website at all. Too much trouble, and there are news sources -- free, high quality news sources -- all over the web.
Same goes for legislation: The US Congress has no power of Great Britian or South Korea, and the combined non-US-market is still larger than the US. The Asian chipmakers will just start a special (and therefore more expensive) product line for the US, and keep turning out their normal stuff for everybody else. If Peru and Venezuela and - to a lesser extent - Germany are actively switching away from Linux to get out of the grip of an American software monopoly, what makes anybody think that they will suddenly rush out and buy American controled hardware?
Anyway, I've just about had it with HP. I'm just glad I bought my RPN calculator back in the days when it was a real tech company with real tech products and put hard-core quality before shareholder value...
Why Python 2.1 and not 2.2, which has Iterators and a whole lot of other new power toys? If I remember correctly, my SuSE 8.0 came with 2.2 (not 2.2.1) months ago...
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid large companies can be. What did they think, nobody would notice?
...which is a shame, since IMHO it beats the pants off of most of the languages you mentioned, especially with the new stuff like generators. I'm not sure what the best website would be (www.python.org and the links there have been good enough for me so far), but there is an awesome tutor mailing list for Python that is full of people who are helpful, friendly, and witty. Haven't had a question yet that they couldn't answer. See here for details.
My wife and I have "Kira" marked down as the name of a future daughter - it is short, it doesn't sound artificial, and it is far more unique then, say, Betty or Jackie. We're stumped for good names for boys, though.
One of my all time favorite names, though I can't actually stand the guy, is "Wolf Blitzer". Now that is pretty cool.
There are media claims that Germany's secretary of state, Otto Schily, was talking about government-sponsored DOS attacks on Nazi sites - which would mean the German government, for example, trying to take down all of those U.S. sites that violate Germany's anti-right-wing censorship laws. There was some discussion, however, just what was proposed by whom, as Schily's spokesperson later denied anything of the sort. Check Heise here for more information (in German).
This is another example of a problem that is mostly due to the antics of the 18th Century legal system the U.S. insists on keeping. Copyright laws should be written down in a book, with all relevant details specified, not thrashed out on a case-by-case base so some local court like this one can cause all kinds of confusion nation-wide.
This is how modern legal systems have handled the same problem: German courts (which have professional judges, not the trial-by-jury lottery, and federal law books) have decided that you, the buyer, own that copy of Windows you just paid for and can do with it whatever you want to, since this is basically just another business transaction. Microsoft can claim all they want that you are just "renting" their programs in the EULA, but since German law is (still) above Microsoft's will, they can't touch you if you sell that copy. End of story, at least until the laws are changed. Microsoft, of course, doesn't like to talk about this at all.
But because of this ruling, the German magazine "c't" legally (!) printed a very detailed account on how to create a complete copy of Windows out of that backup CD included with your laptop. A really nice article ["c't", except for their increasingly anti-Linux stance, are IMHO the number one computer magazine on the planet] that probably had Microsoft Germany screaming in the hallways. But notice they didn't try to sue "c't", because they know they would have lost, and the German legal system (well, usually) doesn't just give the prize to the guy with the most money.
(This, by the way, is one of the most anyoing things about Slashdot: Considering how international the user base has become, the editors' outlook is so U.S. centric it make you want to cry. I'm still amazed that they actually use kilobytes instead of bitfeet or cyberinches...).
I'm not sure if those of you in the U.S. realize how viciously perfect RMS' timing is on this one. Since Friday noon (GMT), everybody on this planet (with the exception of the U.S., Canada, and Afghanistan) only have one thing on their mind: The Soccer World Cup in South Korea and Japan. It will interesting to see if the United Linux people manage to tear themselves away from their TV screens long enough to formulate a esponse.Germany plays Saudi Arabia on Saturday (11:30h GMT), so that knocks out SuSE right away. If RMS is lucky, it will take United Linux until Monday to formulate a response, and by then, their reputation in the Linux community will have been severely damaged.
A truely beautiful frag.
If I remember correctly, Bike was where Yuri Gagarin lifted off to do the first human orbit in space. Kinda sad to see how run down the place has become...must be rather depressing working there these days.
Okay, let's assume this becomes U.S. law. Now, is the rest of world going
/billion/
to say: Hey, look at this new technology invented by the U.S. government
that will let U.S. industry control our computers and stereos and CD
players to protect the interests of giant U.S. media corporations. Wow!
What a fantastic idea! Let's adopt it!
I think not.
I don't see the Germans buying computers with U.S. mandated content control
chips for their parliament, or Sony putting in U.S. designed chips into the
CD players they sell in Tokyo, or the Russians forcing all tape decks off
their market that haven't been approved by some U.S. media consortium. The
idea that the U.S. can force the rest of the world to implement what will
be immediately seen as a U.S. designed and controlled crypto system into
every machine that blinks, beeps, or boots is so brain dead that you just
know it can only come from a member of the U.S. Congress.
This is the Clipper Chip all over again.
When it comes down to it, the rest of the planet doesn't give a rat's ass
if their citizens aren't cooperating when 20th Century Fox, Microsoft, or
AOL-Time-Warner try to make the next billion Dollars so that these
<I>American</I> companies can get richer, give that money to their <I>American</I>
stockholders and top <I>American</I> executives and maybe even pay <I>American</I>
taxes that help finance <I>American</I> infrastructure, or, to put it bluntly,
the <I>American</I> military machine. They'd rather see their citizens spend
their money on local bratwursts, sushi, or vodka: That way it gets fed back
into the local economy.
their citizens rip, copy, and burn anything out of America they possibly
can. If you are a Chinese CS student, you can either spend money on a
Windows license, which means that your Yuan would join those 40
Dollars that Microsoft is stockpiling to buy Iceland and turn the whole
place into a ski resort for their top executives. Or, you can pirate the
Windows CD, and spend that money on, say, a Chinese book on C programming
at your local Beijing book store and kick those running imperialist
pig-dogs with Red Flag Linux. China is interested in getting their economy
on an information age footage, and they need operating systems for that,
the less expensive, the better. Why should they want machines that prevent
that?
No, what will happen if that law is passed - and remember, we're talking
about the country blissfully that is ignoring the fact that the rest of the
world has basically adopted one common mobile phone standard (not to
mention the metric system), still transfers money by sending slips of paper
in the mail, and who live with a television standard that is aptly named NTSC
- Never The Same Color - is that those people in Taiwan and Korea will
happily produce hobbled computer, CD, radio, TV, DVD and other parts for
the U.S. market, while continuing to ship the free technology to the rest
of the world. Hey, it's a global economy with billions of people hungry
for computers, and only about 270 million Americans who's computer market
is saturated anyway. What would you do?
Now because Content Controlled America is getting specially made parts,
they immediately miss out on the price cutting effects of mass production.
In other words: Hardware and electronics prices in the U.S. skyrocket,
because the other 5.75 billion people on the planet are using the old,
free, trusted, mass produced hardware, while Americans effectively have to
have every chip custom built. What we have after a few years of this is a
/hardware fork/ - the U.S. goes off into one direction, the other countries
in the other.
In the mean time, U.S. customs has started rectal searches of all
long-haired males coming back from Paris, France to make sure they aren't
smuggling free RAM into the country. You can't buy a CD in Britain because
they won't run on your content controlled player - just like the DVD
regional codes, but for real. And your TV station doubles the number of ads
during the next Olympics because they had to pay for those signals to be
transfered into U.S. content controlled format...
Great idea, guys.
One of the reasons I filter out every ad I can (Junkbuster at my host,
wwwoffle on my machine, and Opera cutting out images) is that they target a
U.S. audience. If you live in Germany, buying something from Dipshit,
Utah is just not something you are interested in - imagine Slashdot was
carrying ads from Albania, or South Korea, or even Great Britain, and
you'll get the point. Slashdot is openly U.S. centric, which was fine when
the rest of the world wasn't on the Internet. Putting U.S. ads in a place -
real or virtual - where in the near future the majority of people are going
to be Non-Americans is not going to work.
On a more general level, ads are an attempt to manipulate the subconscious,
to program you to think of a certain brand name when you think of a
product. It tries to create an artificial need, convince their target group
they are inadequate, ugly, and missing some trend. As a cumulative force,
ads are enormously effective: Almost all young women in Western cultures
feel bad about their body, and people in American and Europa go into debt
to buy stuff the don't really need. But there is no reason I personally
should go along with this.
There is a difference between Capitalism, which brought material wealth to
the masses, and our current subtype of Consumer Capitalism, which relies on
ads to create fake markets for crap products. I support Capitalism
wholeheartedly. But I see no reason to support its current form which has
turned a country's citizens into consumers, has the president of the
United States going out and telling the people be patriotic and buy
stuff, and destroys people's privacy with the excuse that more marketing
data will be good for the country. Consumer Capitalism, like the system
of Shareholder Value it is paired with, is a historical dead end, and the
sooner we get it over with the better.
Unfortunately, is probably also the beginning of the end for Slashdot.
Apart from the problem of reading a text when half of your screen is filled
with an ad, Slashdot is associated with the Open Source movement, which is
directly opposed to the Consumer Capitalism philosophy of closed source
from companies like Microsoft. If there is any place these ads do not
belong, it is here - this is more of a Tyler Durden kind of place.
I assume that other people will be taking the Slashdot software soon and
setting up their own versions, specialized to a certain topic; this is what
the Internet tends to do when a site is killed by advertising. It has been
a fun place to read, and a fun place to write, and more than once made
Internet history.
Add me to the list - go for, it, man, and don't worry that she can read everything you do at work every day from anywhere in the world...
From the German government's Lauschangriff to Echelon to the NSA to my provider [Hi, guys! Keep up the good work!] to some company that routes my data to people I haven't even heard of, I would just assume that anybody who can listen in will listen in. Germany does have a constitutional Right to Privacy that the U.S. Bill of Rights doesn't, but I don't think that is going to impress too many of those people - what am I going to do, sue the people who run Echelon?
My suggestion: Live with it and use crypto where you can.
That would make sense if only new DVDs come out with regional encoding, but my copy of "Alien" here - which was released quite a while back - is limited to Code 2. Everything gets coded, ancient or still on the big screen. This makes the "delay" argument look kinda silly.
I mean, people are bitching about how their rights are being taken away and everything, but let's face it: How many of them are actually using imports?
In Europe (somewhat more than 360 million people, I should point out), a lot of people. This is because there is a greater selection of DVDs in the U.S. than in Europe. Also, some DVDs are in German translation only ("Flash Gordon", the new version with Queen's music, is one of them). And third and most important, DVDs from different countries are censored in different ways. Europeans (especially Germans) take out the violence (the German version of "Fight Club" is somewhat of a joke), while the U.S. has this problem with nudity and sex ("Color of Night" is one that comes to mind).
If you want to see the film the way the director intended, sooner or later you're going to have to import you stuff.