Did you read the piece? The author's biggest problem is X's code-bloat (I can't testify for or against that). He isn't forcing any standards down anyone's throat. In fact, he wants more features, e.g. anti-aliased fonts.
....that guy who trolls every single article with his thing about the manufacture of MDMA (or is it some other drug) can get sent away for life.:) Now all we need is for hot grits to get classified as a narcotic.
Many industry historians see Bill Gates's article "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" as the beginning of the software industry selling software as a commodity rather than developing cooperatively. It's taken RMS 20 years to try to get people to start thinking that way again, and we're still not at the level we were in the late 70's. If Microsoft brought one new idea to the industry, it's proprietary software.
The Rosetta stone allowed those who understood one language to understand two others which were previously not understood, right? So take some of the art our society values most - perhaps one piece from each country or language - translate it into every language we can find, and stick it on a durable disk! Wouldn't that be a godsend to archaeologists? The medium would even allow us to put movies on there and subtitle or dub them. Just a thought....
Amen. I can't think of another 70's movie that relied heavily on SFX in which the SFX don't look lame today. The small-spacecraft battles in (barf) Independence Day were almost identical to those in Episode 4, 20 years later. Yeah, Mark Hamill was corny, but Harrison Ford still excites the badass in me to this day. And Luke's whole conflict has a lot for adults to chew on. Star Wars is one of the few pieces of work (the Muppet Show comes to mind as another) that can genuinely entertain both kids and their parents simultaneously.
At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a lot of imagination. That is my biggest problem with mp3 sharing - it doesn't seem to have expanded many horizons at all. (Except, as she says, in the techno genre.) Bubble-gum pop and frat rock (neither of which I totally despise) seem to be the dominant uses of Napster. I always hear that Napster is good because "I don't have to buy a 12-song album to hear the 2 songs I want to hear." But when I buy a 12-song album for 2 songs, half the time I end up loving the other 10 even more, even though radio didn't expose me to them. I worry that if the entire album-rock paradigm goes the way of the 8-track, the music community will lose something other than money....
You can talk about the wonderful feel of cracking the binding of a new book, and all such things, and you may be right, but I think it's more simple than that. I think it's just physically easier to read large amounts of text from a book than off a monitor. I don't know whether it's because of neck position, eye strain, or something else, but I think most people just don't enjoy reading novels on monitors. I am a hardcore Stephen King fan, and I got his online book, only to find I couldn't pay attention to it on the screen. When it comes out in "dead tree", I'll be the first to drop the money for it.
Am I saying there's no point to releasing books online? Hell no. If I want to reference a passage from a paper document, I have to hope it's in the index or else page through it. On a computer I can hit Ctrl-F and be there in seconds. If I want to quote it, I can copy and paste. (Assuming it's not in one of the unusable e-book programs.)
So the bottom line is that online books are extremely useful, but pose no threat to the sale of paper books.
Before Napster, you could get MP3's. You could hang out with 1337 d00dz on IRC and hope they'd be nice to you. You could hope your friends had it. You could go to ftp sites that made you visit porno sites and click banners to get passwords that half the time would result in being told there were too many users.
What made Napster special is that it was EASY. No more "in crowds". No more day-long quests for one song. You typed in the title, you got the song.
As I understand it, when Davies invented packet switching, circuit switching was the dominant paradigm. This is how telephone networks operate, and it means that if A wants to communicate with Z, A opens a dedicated connection to Z which stays up until they are finished. It's obviously the most intuitive way, which is why most communication is still implemented using the illusion of "Sockets", but it's incredibly wasteful of resources. Packet switching allows data to be rerouted in mid-transmission without interrupting it. If the Internet relied on circuit switching, it would be nowhere near as efficient if it is now.
My point is this: if Davies hadn't thought of it, it's extremely possible nobody else would have. And without that, we might have no Internet as we know it.
Personally, I like the idea of sleeping late, smelling the fresh sea air, hearing the crash of the waves, and reading Slashdot. There's nothing inherently unrelaxing about technology.
If they sold their GUI alone as a windowmanager, I'd snap it up. The more I think about it, the more I realize there's a lot money to be made in that proposition. Imagine Apple selling a proprietary GUI to run on top of Linux. Distributors could pay Apple to have it be part of their distribution. With a little advertising, it could conceivably be the most popular distro ever. BTW, I'm not saying I would LIKE this situation. I recognize that it would set back the cause of free software. It's just food for thought.
From the MPAA page: DeCSS is akin to a tool that breaks the lock on your house. Uh, I prefer to think of it as a tool that lets ME break locks on my own possessions. Ugh. I don't know what to think about the fact that they called the creators "hackers". Guess we can't argue with it.:)
Yahoo! keeps my password on their site in a cookie. Now any site can obtain my Yahoo! password and read my Yahoo! email. I don't want others reading my email. Do I sound like a paranoid kook for this?
This is not a case of OS security at all. It's a case of the client. If Linux ever dominates the desktop, there's a good chance we'll see an office suite with integrated email, where attachments can be easily opened by the suite. And if the word processor has macros.... Now, you'll tell me that open-source development is smarter than to let that happen. And you'll be right. But the immunity of Linux users to things like "ILOVEYOU" right now comes from the lack of application interoperability, not from OS security.
... but in reality they are kicking off anyone (such as this guy) with the string "Metallica" in a filename. Way back when the average mp3 would have taken 3 days and nights to download, I used to have similar debates on the propagation of live music bootlegs. I always pointed out that most bands would LOVE to have dirt-cheap recordings of themselves being passed around at no cost to the band. I just don't get how artists who were on the right side (pardon the arrogance, i mean MY side) of that debate can be so thick-headed about Napster.
The GNU Project was launched in 1984, and although it was intended to create an operating system, I think you would agree that its main contribution to the world was the concept of free (as in speech) software, and the license that goes with it. However, during the 80's and 90's, thousands of programmers began writing "freeware" code. It seems fair to say that most wrote their programs for no personal gain, and for the good of the end-users. Yet it was never suggested that, since no material gain was involved, they might release their source code and their control over the software. Sites like Tucows continue to this day to distribute free (as in beer) programs like this. How did FSF's message fail to reach these programmers? Do you feel that it is the fault of the programmers themselves, or do you see it as a failing on your part?
My "Topics in Math" seminar at Rutgers did this for the past month. We were divided up into groups, and then into smaller groups. I was part of the American section, which was divided into FBI, ACLU, and EFF. We had to represent and argue the views of the section we represented. Fortunately, I got to be with the ACLU. We discussed national crypto laws, crypto regulations, and I got to cover CyberPatrol and deCSS. If you're trying to argue a side, the ACLU's homepage has a lot of articles in their favor. We got in (and won, I might add) some fun arguments with the FBI group, who were trying to advocate the illegalization of crypto software that doesn't contain backdoors for the government. My main advice on how to make it interesting and persuasive is to counter all common opposing arguments using logic, without sounding extreme, paranoid, or arrogant. And it's not that hard.
Am I the only person who thought that the point was that Canada SHOULDN'T be blamed, and Kyle's mom was only blaming them because she is, as any fan knows, the biggest bitch in the whole wide world? Cuz, um, if South Park's satire is going over your head, you must think it's pretty damn anti-Semitic too. But wait, if it were anti-Semitic, you shouldn't be offended by anything a Jewish character (like Kyle's mom) says, right? Damn, not getting jokes is hard work.
When you hit "back" from that story, you get a popup window telling you to subscribe to Time! I thought only porno and warez sites did annoying crap like that.
I want to think you're right, Jon. I really do. But if these corporations get their way, as they seem to have done for at least the last 100 years, they might figure out a way to MAKE it censorable. Or just plain kill it. These are legitimate things to worry about.
Roblimo's "apology" sarcastic and disrespectful.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments. I was curious to see what Roblimo's apology was. I was certainly not expecting a snide attack on the entire Slashdot community. Does this mean you will no longer be working on the Slashdot staff, Robin? I sincerely hope so. No one with your open disdain for the site's users should be involved with it.
Most wireless internet algorithms, AFAIK, are variants of what eventually became Ethernet, (ALOHA, CSMA, etc.) and as such entail everything *I* broadcast being sent to everyone in my subnet/district/whatever. Assuming I'm smart enough to SSH my way past the eavesdroppers (it'd be no less secure than your average college dorm network) What would stop every asshole in America from broadcasting an endless stream of null characters or goatse.cx and making the network unusable? At least in a college dorm, your identity is known and you're jamming your own net access. I can buy a dirt cheap radio device and just drop them all over the city to jam the wireless Internet, and not affect myself at all. Is there any ALOHA-variant that prevents DOS? ---- "Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the piece? The author's biggest problem is X's code-bloat (I can't testify for or against that). He isn't forcing any standards down anyone's throat. In fact, he wants more features, e.g. anti-aliased fonts.
....that guy who trolls every single article with his thing about the manufacture of MDMA (or is it some other drug) can get sent away for life. :)
Now all we need is for hot grits to get classified as a narcotic.
Many industry historians see Bill Gates's article "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" as the beginning of the software industry selling software as a commodity rather than developing cooperatively. It's taken RMS 20 years to try to get people to start thinking that way again, and we're still not at the level we were in the late 70's. If Microsoft brought one new idea to the industry, it's proprietary software.
Everyone say thank you to Bill.
The Rosetta stone allowed those who understood one language to understand two others which were previously not understood, right? So take some of the art our society values most - perhaps one piece from each country or language - translate it into every language we can find, and stick it on a durable disk! Wouldn't that be a godsend to archaeologists? The medium would even allow us to put movies on there and subtitle or dub them. Just a thought....
Amen. I can't think of another 70's movie that relied heavily on SFX in which the SFX don't look lame today. The small-spacecraft battles in (barf) Independence Day were almost identical to those in Episode 4, 20 years later. Yeah, Mark Hamill was corny, but Harrison Ford still excites the badass in me to this day. And Luke's whole conflict has a lot for adults to chew on. Star Wars is one of the few pieces of work (the Muppet Show comes to mind as another) that can genuinely entertain both kids and their parents simultaneously.
Without Amazon, we would never have been able to do anything with one mouse click!
At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a lot of imagination.
That is my biggest problem with mp3 sharing - it doesn't seem to have expanded many horizons at all. (Except, as she says, in the techno genre.) Bubble-gum pop and frat rock (neither of which I totally despise) seem to be the dominant uses of Napster.
I always hear that Napster is good because "I don't have to buy a 12-song album to hear the 2 songs I want to hear." But when I buy a 12-song album for 2 songs, half the time I end up loving the other 10 even more, even though radio didn't expose me to them. I worry that if the entire album-rock paradigm goes the way of the 8-track, the music community will lose something other than money....
.... when people start playing The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane while they're driving! Get off the roads now!
Sheryl Crowe
Billy Corgan (formerly of Smashing Pumpkins)
Against:
L.L. Cool J.
You can talk about the wonderful feel of cracking the binding of a new book, and all such things, and you may be right, but I think it's more simple than that. I think it's just physically easier to read large amounts of text from a book than off a monitor. I don't know whether it's because of neck position, eye strain, or something else, but I think most people just don't enjoy reading novels on monitors. I am a hardcore Stephen King fan, and I got his online book, only to find I couldn't pay attention to it on the screen. When it comes out in "dead tree", I'll be the first to drop the money for it.
Am I saying there's no point to releasing books online? Hell no. If I want to reference a passage from a paper document, I have to hope it's in the index or else page through it. On a computer I can hit Ctrl-F and be there in seconds. If I want to quote it, I can copy and paste. (Assuming it's not in one of the unusable e-book programs.)
So the bottom line is that online books are extremely useful, but pose no threat to the sale of paper books.
Before Napster, you could get MP3's. You could hang out with 1337 d00dz on IRC and hope they'd be nice to you. You could hope your friends had it. You could go to ftp sites that made you visit porno sites and click banners to get passwords that half the time would result in being told there were too many users.
What made Napster special is that it was EASY. No more "in crowds". No more day-long quests for one song. You typed in the title, you got the song.
As I understand it, when Davies invented packet switching, circuit switching was the dominant paradigm. This is how telephone networks operate, and it means that if A wants to communicate with Z, A opens a dedicated connection to Z which stays up until they are finished. It's obviously the most intuitive way, which is why most communication is still implemented using the illusion of "Sockets", but it's incredibly wasteful of resources. Packet switching allows data to be rerouted in mid-transmission without interrupting it. If the Internet relied on circuit switching, it would be nowhere near as efficient if it is now.
My point is this: if Davies hadn't thought of it, it's extremely possible nobody else would have. And without that, we might have no Internet as we know it.
Personally, I like the idea of sleeping late, smelling the fresh sea air, hearing the crash of the waves, and reading Slashdot. There's nothing inherently unrelaxing about technology.
If they sold their GUI alone as a windowmanager, I'd snap it up.
The more I think about it, the more I realize there's a lot money to be made in that proposition. Imagine Apple selling a proprietary GUI to run on top of Linux. Distributors could pay Apple to have it be part of their distribution. With a little advertising, it could conceivably be the most popular distro ever.
BTW, I'm not saying I would LIKE this situation. I recognize that it would set back the cause of free software. It's just food for thought.
From the MPAA page: DeCSS is akin to a tool that breaks the lock on your house. Uh, I prefer to think of it as a tool that lets ME break locks on my own possessions. Ugh. I don't know what to think about the fact that they called the creators "hackers". Guess we can't argue with it. :)
Yahoo! keeps my password on their site in a cookie. Now any site can obtain my Yahoo! password and read my Yahoo! email. I don't want others reading my email. Do I sound like a paranoid kook for this?
This is not a case of OS security at all. It's a case of the client. If Linux ever dominates the desktop, there's a good chance we'll see an office suite with integrated email, where attachments can be easily opened by the suite. And if the word processor has macros....
Now, you'll tell me that open-source development is smarter than to let that happen. And you'll be right. But the immunity of Linux users to things like "ILOVEYOU" right now comes from the lack of application interoperability, not from OS security.
... but in reality they are kicking off anyone (such as this guy) with the string "Metallica" in a filename. Way back when the average mp3 would have taken 3 days and nights to download, I used to have similar debates on the propagation of live music bootlegs. I always pointed out that most bands would LOVE to have dirt-cheap recordings of themselves being passed around at no cost to the band. I just don't get how artists who were on the right side (pardon the arrogance, i mean MY side) of that debate can be so thick-headed about Napster.
The GNU Project was launched in 1984, and although it was intended to create an operating system, I think you would agree that its main contribution to the world was the concept of free (as in speech) software, and the license that goes with it.
However, during the 80's and 90's, thousands of programmers began writing "freeware" code. It seems fair to say that most wrote their programs for no personal gain, and for the good of the end-users. Yet it was never suggested that, since no material gain was involved, they might release their source code and their control over the software. Sites like Tucows continue to this day to distribute free (as in beer) programs like this.
How did FSF's message fail to reach these programmers? Do you feel that it is the fault of the programmers themselves, or do you see it as a failing on your part?
My "Topics in Math" seminar at Rutgers did this for the past month. We were divided up into groups, and then into smaller groups. I was part of the American section, which was divided into FBI, ACLU, and EFF. We had to represent and argue the views of the section we represented. Fortunately, I got to be with the ACLU. We discussed national crypto laws, crypto regulations, and I got to cover CyberPatrol and deCSS.
If you're trying to argue a side, the ACLU's homepage has a lot of articles in their favor. We got in (and won, I might add) some fun arguments with the FBI group, who were trying to advocate the illegalization of crypto software that doesn't contain backdoors for the government.
My main advice on how to make it interesting and persuasive is to counter all common opposing arguments using logic, without sounding extreme, paranoid, or arrogant. And it's not that hard.
Am I the only person who thought that the point was that Canada SHOULDN'T be blamed, and Kyle's mom was only blaming them because she is, as any fan knows, the biggest bitch in the whole wide world?
Cuz, um, if South Park's satire is going over your head, you must think it's pretty damn anti-Semitic too.
But wait, if it were anti-Semitic, you shouldn't be offended by anything a Jewish character (like Kyle's mom) says, right?
Damn, not getting jokes is hard work.
When you hit "back" from that story, you get a popup window telling you to subscribe to Time! I thought only porno and warez sites did annoying crap like that.
The Net isn't censorable.
I want to think you're right, Jon. I really do. But if these corporations get their way, as they seem to have done for at least the last 100 years, they might figure out a way to MAKE it censorable. Or just plain kill it. These are legitimate things to worry about.
But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments.
I was curious to see what Roblimo's apology was. I was certainly not expecting a snide attack on the entire Slashdot community. Does this mean you will no longer be working on the Slashdot staff, Robin? I sincerely hope so. No one with your open disdain for the site's users should be involved with it.
Most wireless internet algorithms, AFAIK, are variants of what eventually became Ethernet, (ALOHA, CSMA, etc.) and as such entail everything *I* broadcast being sent to everyone in my subnet/district/whatever. Assuming I'm smart enough to SSH my way past the eavesdroppers (it'd be no less secure than your average college dorm network) What would stop every asshole in America from broadcasting an endless stream of null characters or goatse.cx and making the network unusable? At least in a college dorm, your identity is known and you're jamming your own net access. I can buy a dirt cheap radio device and just drop them all over the city to jam the wireless Internet, and not affect myself at all. Is there any ALOHA-variant that prevents DOS?
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."