I don't think anybody could succesfully argue that no idealism has motivated any Linux development work.
Sure...but the same goes for "just wanting to write the best code." I even think that more people are motivated by being really interested in making something *good*, maybe becoming known for doing so.
No...Apple *is* fairly competitive in laptops, but they still don't match their competitors on price.
A bottom-of-the-line iBook is $999, and a bottom-of-the-line Dell (Inspiron 1100) is $749 (after $150 rebate). (The Dell has 16 megs less of VRAM, which I didn't consider significant, since hardly anyone is going to be doing 3d gaming on a bottom-of-the-line laptop anyway).
As for the desktops, Apple's computers are a percentage more than PCs, not $N thousand more. So, sure, at the bottom end there isn't a $1000 difference.
Apple doesn't have any interest in competing on price. Once you have a commodity product, you make *far* less money.
Wouldn't it be amazing if hardware in the near-future included an "add-on" chip (something like Altivec that works in conjuction with the PPC processor) that emulated the x86 hardware? Maybe it would give Mac users the ability to run Windows and PC software, not via software emulation, but with hardware assistance. Imagine the interest Apple could draw if they presented the world with a machine that runs the Classic, OS X, Unix and Windows applications... all in one environment and almost seamlessly.
Not going to happen.
(1) IP issues.
(2) Reliability issues. It can't work 85% of the time.
(3) Apple wants to keep control over their (quite lucrative) market. Using Windows software takes that away.
(4) Cost. Macs are expensive, and this would make it worse. It's cheap to get an old PC.
I suppose that one shouldn't push the "ideology" that treating others worse than one would ever want to be treated one's self, either?
You can certainly argue for it. The difference is that Stallman has steadily kept nagging Linus about GPL and Free Software issues, and Linus is pretty obviously and publically not interested. If Stallman wants a kernel to use as a political weapon, I say let him write his own. If he just wants a nice piece of software that he can sit down and work with the source freely, then Linux fits the bill.
Do we let others pursue their chosen "ideology" of murder? If not, then why not, and what makes us "right" and others "wrong"? These are the (hard) questions to ask.
Probably not, because societies that allow this (well, unrestrictedly -- I suppose certain types of restricted murder could probably be worked with, like dueling or something) have a tendancy to die out. If I can't trust the guy next to me not to knock me off, my actions are significantly limited, which in turn tends to limit society. I think that bringing "right" and "wrong" into the picture, with the whole confused moral baggage that come with it, tends to muddy the picture, but I guess that a reasonable working definition would be that "right" for an organism is that which tends to ensure its continued existence (using organism in a slightly nonstandard way that really shouldn't matter for this discussion, anyway).
A very strong argument can be made that non-free software is so harmful that it ought to be outlawed.
Okay, that *is* an interesting point to debate over, but it really isn't relevant to the article, or to what I said. Stallman's relevant views are not "free software is good", but that DRM should be fought tooth and nail. Stallman thinks intellectual property is a fundamentally broken concept -- Linus, AFAIK, is far less extreme. So the question is whether DRM is so harmful *and* that it won't go away on its own (through consumer choice) *and* that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of using the highly respected Linux kernel, and throwing away some of its reputation for usefulness on a political war. Linus has said since the beginning that he's really interested in just writing great software. This is not an about face -- it's just that Stallman has been steadily trying to recruit him for years. It's not Linus' fault that Stallman's kernel project failed.
he's not putting a gun to Linus' head to "comply", is he?
No, but he does keep nagging him, hence Linus's frequent annoyed references to Stallman.
Stallman's "force" is nothing more than strength of conviction.
No, though it is driven by strength of conviction.
Torvalds' political apathy, on the other hand is irritating
To you, perhaps. I don't find it that way -- I don't think that people need to take an extreme standpoint one way or othe other on every subject. Linus tends to like avoiding DRM, but doesn't think that it's worth pissing off some people that might use Linux to try to fight it, or even that trying to use Linux as a political tool is appropriate. I think that's pretty straightforward.
in the same way that Canada's wishy-washy stance on the war in Iraq is irritating: trying to please all by doing nothing.
Okay, *you* may happen to feel that way, but you also aren't in the driver's seat. Canada has a very powerful ally that wants the war in Iraq to go through, and a huge number of citizens that don't. The war was going to go ahead, regardless of what Canada did anyway (aside from something completely idiotic like attacking the United States). Canada's interest is to avoid pissing off as many people as possible, which has worked fairly well, and is what most countries have done.
Guess what: driven people have strong opinions, and are willing to risk unpopularity (and often, much worse things), to stand by them.
Yup. I'd say Stallman fits the bill.
Re:This is what has made Linux successful,
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Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
RMS has been preaching this longer than Linus.
The difference is that RMS is a preacher, and Linus is an engineer.
Linus wasn't trying to be particularly rigorous. What he said was pretty clear to everyone. He doesn't like DRM, but he's not going to use his code as a political weapon. This is quite different from RMS, who is entitled to use his own code as a political weapon if he so desires.
My revisions, with justification
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Linus on DRM
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Gates: VERY BAD!
Gates is the worst of the worst. He's bad, and competently so.
Ellison: BAD!
I think Ellison is fine. Yes, he's arrogant, immature, and runs a big company with tight licenses...but he also spends his days having fun taking swipes at Gates. He wins because he's a lesser of two evils. If Gates weren't around, he'd probably be a bad guy.
McNealy: BAD!
Doesn't seem to be particularly bad or good, in my book. Some good things, some bad things.
Carly (HP): VERY BAD!
She's bad, but incompetently so. Reminds me of AOL execs -- sure, they fall into the bad category, but they're far less dangerous than their MS competitors, so I'll root for them just as the underdog.
IBM CEO: What day is it?
IBM's happening to be nice ATM, but...
Linus: See above
Linus is great.
ESR is great too...sorta like Linus. The emphasis is on engineering.
RMS is a jerk, but I suppose that you have to have an extremist to lead a movement.
Linus' pet operating system would not even exist, and have a strong ethical footing supporting the "goodness" of that existance, were it not for RMS' philosophical views. While this does not represent a "debt", per se., decent people generally respond to kindness (yes, the GPL is an act of kindness), by reciprocating.
Uh...Linus does. Stallman and Co. handed him lots of code to use. In return, he did the same, and now "GNU/Linux" has the best kernel around.
OTOH, I don't think that Stallman should be trying to push his ideology on Linus any more than Linus should be trying to do so to Stallman. The difference is that Stallman tries to do exactly that with Linus, and Linus doesn't do so to Stallman.
1) This means having an extra PC lying around. I do not.
While this is semi-possible, you only really need a 486. If you don't have one, chances are quite good that *someone* you know has one lying around that they haven't used for years and don't want.
2) You also have to have a PLACE to put this PC. If I tried stuffing another PC in the corner of the family room, my wife would freak!
Okay, I guess this could be a problem. Older computers are usually pretty quiet, and I'd just put it right next to the other one for ease of access, though.
You will either need to a) give it its own keyboard and monior (big and uses another outlet), or switch keyboards and monitors (move main PC, unplug cables, etc.). Neither are good options (Yes, you can telnet once it is set up, but when first installing the OS, you need a keyboard/monitor).
Yeah, but switching 'em once is a five minute job at *most*, if you have them sitting near each other (at least for setup).
Setting up a headless router is a pretty low-labor issue...I mean, I've blown more time trying to help a friend with their consumer NAT box (lame firmware, decided that MTU was six bytes larger than it should have been) by *far* than it would have taken to unplug a monitor and a keyboard. You'll never plug the thing in again, so....
gtk-gnutella has the ability to autodownload anything grabbed from search results flying past you on the wire that match some set of criteria you set. So if you leave it running, and tell it to download everything with "friends AND episode" in it and a search result comes past reading "two underage lolita girls fuck their friends [kiddie porn episode].avi", your filter will match, and the client will start yanking it down.
Of course. This logic is what has led to such a resounding success in the War On Drugs, which as we all know, ended in 1986, after a few years of fighting the suppliers.
Uh...so your logic is that the War On Drugs should go after end users as well? It *does*.
I think the same problem applies to kiddie porn. People want it, and it's essentially impossible to keep it from flowing (it's *data* for chrissake...we use the same argument about the RIAA and music).
An idiot... put up an FTP server using IIS. If you ever end up in a situation like that, look for a new job, stat, because it will be obvious that management had its head up its own ass far enough to look out its own mouth.:-)
You don't need a God-damned firewall for that
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The Virus Did It
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The degree to which firewall vendors can get away with overselling their product amazes me. It even dwarfs the antivirus vendors of the last decade (matter of fact, a coupla companies sell both -- similar marketing skills). You keep people afraid and they keep giving you money.
(a) You *do* realize that those TCP connections you saw with netstat could be all sorts of things? Old waiting-to-time-out http connections, etc. They don't mean that someone's controlling your computer from the outside.
(b) If it's in "My Documents", the chances are a million to one that it was someone using the computer locally. Someone in your family, or a friend, or whatnot.
(c) If it really is a security issue, it's cheaper and less intrusive to just turn off shares/flip off the web server/etc that you're running, instead of leaving all that crap in place and snapping a firewall on top.
Re:Personal Responsibility Today
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The Virus Did It
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But it's just as likely that he willingly downloaded those images, and using some bogus excuse to absolve himself.
I'd be surprised that a hacker would use his *own* computer if he wanted to obtain child porn, given the current legal climate. Make much more sense to go through someone else's.
Or another possibility -- defendant's fifteen-year-old son downloaded images of the fifteen-year-old subjects.
Why the current legal system is the way it is
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The Virus Did It
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You approach the situation and the person starts running away. I do not know exactly what I would do but there is a chance that the average person would be inclined to chase him down and cause great harm with any weapon they could find.
If you happen to accidentally instead blow away the police officer who's been trying to track down the guy for peering into a window a few houses down thirty minutes ago, then you're causing more damage to society.
Our legal system is designed to, if at all possible, defer punishment until it can be reviewed in a levelheaded manner by a jury of peers, and to prevent escalation of a situation. Why? Because preventing people from making sudden, potentially nasty calls in the heat of the moment tends to be a good idea.
Obviously, that doesn't work if someone has a knife to your throat. You *can't* defer judgement then, which is why we have a self-defense defense.
If everyone carried guns and was legally entitled to fire at a fleeing suspect that is not threatening them, then a case of mistaken identity and a couple of people making mistakes in the heat of the moment could cause a sudden large shootout.
Tom, I don't want to be overly critical, and I realize that aesthetics are pretty subjective, but I find their webpage much more intuitively navigable than your snoot site.
Because every release of HTML (or now XHTML, whatever) that comes out makes things more and more annoying to code by hand.
I still do so, but I don't have some ugly chopped-up-graphics page that's buzzword complient. This, however, is a necessity for any corporation's home page.
successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy.
Technically, because of Caldera, SCO is now a failed Linux company (If you call 1-888-GO-LINUX, you'll get SCO). I saw a lot of negative comments from their CEO about how it's impossible to make money on Linux, so there may be some bitter feelings.
You didn't like Gollum? I thought he was pretty much perfect. I could definitely envision a critter that moved and acted the way he did, and I didn't see any traditional CG-produced artifacts.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anybody could succesfully argue that no idealism has motivated any Linux development work.
Sure...but the same goes for "just wanting to write the best code." I even think that more people are motivated by being really interested in making something *good*, maybe becoming known for doing so.
Because Macs are slow and expensive compared to x86 hardware, but Mac users want their OS.
No...Apple *is* fairly competitive in laptops, but they still don't match their competitors on price.
A bottom-of-the-line iBook is $999, and a bottom-of-the-line Dell (Inspiron 1100) is $749 (after $150 rebate). (The Dell has 16 megs less of VRAM, which I didn't consider significant, since hardly anyone is going to be doing 3d gaming on a bottom-of-the-line laptop anyway).
As for the desktops, Apple's computers are a percentage more than PCs, not $N thousand more. So, sure, at the bottom end there isn't a $1000 difference.
Apple doesn't have any interest in competing on price. Once you have a commodity product, you make *far* less money.
Wouldn't it be amazing if hardware in the near-future included an "add-on" chip (something like Altivec that works in conjuction with the PPC processor) that emulated the x86 hardware? Maybe it would give Mac users the ability to run Windows and PC software, not via software emulation, but with hardware assistance. Imagine the interest Apple could draw if they presented the world with a machine that runs the Classic, OS X, Unix and Windows applications... all in one environment and almost seamlessly.
Not going to happen.
(1) IP issues.
(2) Reliability issues. It can't work 85% of the time.
(3) Apple wants to keep control over their (quite lucrative) market. Using Windows software takes that away.
(4) Cost. Macs are expensive, and this would make it worse. It's cheap to get an old PC.
I suppose that one shouldn't push the "ideology" that treating others worse than one would ever want to be treated one's self, either?
You can certainly argue for it. The difference is that Stallman has steadily kept nagging Linus about GPL and Free Software issues, and Linus is pretty obviously and publically not interested. If Stallman wants a kernel to use as a political weapon, I say let him write his own. If he just wants a nice piece of software that he can sit down and work with the source freely, then Linux fits the bill.
Do we let others pursue their chosen "ideology" of murder? If not, then why not, and what makes us "right" and others "wrong"? These are the (hard) questions to ask.
Probably not, because societies that allow this (well, unrestrictedly -- I suppose certain types of restricted murder could probably be worked with, like dueling or something) have a tendancy to die out. If I can't trust the guy next to me not to knock me off, my actions are significantly limited, which in turn tends to limit society. I think that bringing "right" and "wrong" into the picture, with the whole confused moral baggage that come with it, tends to muddy the picture, but I guess that a reasonable working definition would be that "right" for an organism is that which tends to ensure its continued existence (using organism in a slightly nonstandard way that really shouldn't matter for this discussion, anyway).
A very strong argument can be made that non-free software is so harmful that it ought to be outlawed.
Okay, that *is* an interesting point to debate over, but it really isn't relevant to the article, or to what I said. Stallman's relevant views are not "free software is good", but that DRM should be fought tooth and nail. Stallman thinks intellectual property is a fundamentally broken concept -- Linus, AFAIK, is far less extreme. So the question is whether DRM is so harmful *and* that it won't go away on its own (through consumer choice) *and* that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of using the highly respected Linux kernel, and throwing away some of its reputation for usefulness on a political war. Linus has said since the beginning that he's really interested in just writing great software. This is not an about face -- it's just that Stallman has been steadily trying to recruit him for years. It's not Linus' fault that Stallman's kernel project failed.
he's not putting a gun to Linus' head to "comply", is he?
No, but he does keep nagging him, hence Linus's frequent annoyed references to Stallman.
Stallman's "force" is nothing more than strength of conviction.
No, though it is driven by strength of conviction.
Torvalds' political apathy, on the other hand is irritating
To you, perhaps. I don't find it that way -- I don't think that people need to take an extreme standpoint one way or othe other on every subject. Linus tends to like avoiding DRM, but doesn't think that it's worth pissing off some people that might use Linux to try to fight it, or even that trying to use Linux as a political tool is appropriate. I think that's pretty straightforward.
in the same way that Canada's wishy-washy stance on the war in Iraq is irritating: trying to please all by doing nothing.
Okay, *you* may happen to feel that way, but you also aren't in the driver's seat. Canada has a very powerful ally that wants the war in Iraq to go through, and a huge number of citizens that don't. The war was going to go ahead, regardless of what Canada did anyway (aside from something completely idiotic like attacking the United States). Canada's interest is to avoid pissing off as many people as possible, which has worked fairly well, and is what most countries have done.
Guess what: driven people have strong opinions, and are willing to risk unpopularity (and often, much worse things), to stand by them.
Yup. I'd say Stallman fits the bill.
RMS has been preaching this longer than Linus.
The difference is that RMS is a preacher, and Linus is an engineer.
Linus wasn't trying to be particularly rigorous. What he said was pretty clear to everyone. He doesn't like DRM, but he's not going to use his code as a political weapon. This is quite different from RMS, who is entitled to use his own code as a political weapon if he so desires.
Gates: VERY BAD!
Gates is the worst of the worst. He's bad, and competently so.
Ellison: BAD!
I think Ellison is fine. Yes, he's arrogant, immature, and runs a big company with tight licenses...but he also spends his days having fun taking swipes at Gates. He wins because he's a lesser of two evils. If Gates weren't around, he'd probably be a bad guy.
McNealy: BAD!
Doesn't seem to be particularly bad or good, in my book. Some good things, some bad things.
Carly (HP): VERY BAD!
She's bad, but incompetently so. Reminds me of AOL execs -- sure, they fall into the bad category, but they're far less dangerous than their MS competitors, so I'll root for them just as the underdog.
IBM CEO: What day is it?
IBM's happening to be nice ATM, but...
Linus: See above
Linus is great.
ESR is great too...sorta like Linus. The emphasis is on engineering.
RMS is a jerk, but I suppose that you have to have an extremist to lead a movement.
Linus' pet operating system would not even exist, and have a strong ethical footing supporting the "goodness" of that existance, were it not for RMS' philosophical views. While this does not represent a "debt", per se., decent people generally respond to kindness (yes, the GPL is an act of kindness), by reciprocating.
Uh...Linus does. Stallman and Co. handed him lots of code to use. In return, he did the same, and now "GNU/Linux" has the best kernel around.
OTOH, I don't think that Stallman should be trying to push his ideology on Linus any more than Linus should be trying to do so to Stallman. The difference is that Stallman tries to do exactly that with Linus, and Linus doesn't do so to Stallman.
1) This means having an extra PC lying around. I do not.
While this is semi-possible, you only really need a 486. If you don't have one, chances are quite good that *someone* you know has one lying around that they haven't used for years and don't want.
2) You also have to have a PLACE to put this PC. If I tried stuffing another PC in the corner of the family room, my wife would freak!
Okay, I guess this could be a problem. Older computers are usually pretty quiet, and I'd just put it right next to the other one for ease of access, though.
You will either need to a) give it its own keyboard and monior (big and uses another outlet), or switch keyboards and monitors (move main PC, unplug cables, etc.). Neither are good options (Yes, you can telnet once it is set up, but when first installing the OS, you need a keyboard/monitor).
Yeah, but switching 'em once is a five minute job at *most*, if you have them sitting near each other (at least for setup).
Setting up a headless router is a pretty low-labor issue...I mean, I've blown more time trying to help a friend with their consumer NAT box (lame firmware, decided that MTU was six bytes larger than it should have been) by *far* than it would have taken to unplug a monitor and a keyboard. You'll never plug the thing in again, so....
Most people on here can just set up a Linux router that *doesn't* support sFlow, and do NAT with that.
The only people that'd get fucked is Joe Windows User types with hardware router/DHCP thingamabobs.
gtk-gnutella has the ability to autodownload anything grabbed from search results flying past you on the wire that match some set of criteria you set. So if you leave it running, and tell it to download everything with "friends AND episode" in it and a search result comes past reading "two underage lolita girls fuck their friends [kiddie porn episode].avi", your filter will match, and the client will start yanking it down.
Of course. This logic is what has led to such a resounding success in the War On Drugs, which as we all know, ended in 1986, after a few years of fighting the suppliers.
Uh...so your logic is that the War On Drugs should go after end users as well? It *does*.
I think the same problem applies to kiddie porn. People want it, and it's essentially impossible to keep it from flowing (it's *data* for chrissake...we use the same argument about the RIAA and music).
An idiot ... put up an FTP server using IIS. If you ever end up in a situation like that, look for a new job, stat, because it will be obvious that management had its head up its own ass far enough to look out its own mouth. :-)
The degree to which firewall vendors can get away with overselling their product amazes me. It even dwarfs the antivirus vendors of the last decade (matter of fact, a coupla companies sell both -- similar marketing skills). You keep people afraid and they keep giving you money.
(a) You *do* realize that those TCP connections you saw with netstat could be all sorts of things? Old waiting-to-time-out http connections, etc. They don't mean that someone's controlling your computer from the outside.
(b) If it's in "My Documents", the chances are a million to one that it was someone using the computer locally. Someone in your family, or a friend, or whatnot.
(c) If it really is a security issue, it's cheaper and less intrusive to just turn off shares/flip off the web server/etc that you're running, instead of leaving all that crap in place and snapping a firewall on top.
But it's just as likely that he willingly downloaded those images, and using some bogus excuse to absolve himself.
I'd be surprised that a hacker would use his *own* computer if he wanted to obtain child porn, given the current legal climate. Make much more sense to go through someone else's.
Or another possibility -- defendant's fifteen-year-old son downloaded images of the fifteen-year-old subjects.
You approach the situation and the person starts running away. I do not know exactly what I would do but there is a chance that the average person would be inclined to chase him down and cause great harm with any weapon they could find.
If you happen to accidentally instead blow away the police officer who's been trying to track down the guy for peering into a window a few houses down thirty minutes ago, then you're causing more damage to society.
Our legal system is designed to, if at all possible, defer punishment until it can be reviewed in a levelheaded manner by a jury of peers, and to prevent escalation of a situation. Why? Because preventing people from making sudden, potentially nasty calls in the heat of the moment tends to be a good idea.
Obviously, that doesn't work if someone has a knife to your throat. You *can't* defer judgement then, which is why we have a self-defense defense.
If everyone carried guns and was legally entitled to fire at a fleeing suspect that is not threatening them, then a case of mistaken identity and a couple of people making mistakes in the heat of the moment could cause a sudden large shootout.
Tom, I don't want to be overly critical, and I realize that aesthetics are pretty subjective, but I find their webpage much more intuitively navigable than your snoot site.
Because every release of HTML (or now XHTML, whatever) that comes out makes things more and more annoying to code by hand.
I still do so, but I don't have some ugly chopped-up-graphics page that's buzzword complient. This, however, is a necessity for any corporation's home page.
SCO isn't going to tell anyone because it'd get written off immediately.
If they had a legitimate claim, it'd be entirely to their advantage to bring it up now. No reason to hide it.
The only reason you'd want to keep it hidden is if you don't have a good claim at all and you want your adversary to lose marketshare through FUD.
successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy.
Technically, because of Caldera, SCO is now a failed Linux company (If you call 1-888-GO-LINUX, you'll get SCO). I saw a lot of negative comments from their CEO about how it's impossible to make money on Linux, so there may be some bitter feelings.
Bonus points go to the first person to break into the www.sco.com website and use their site to mirror the article...
Ooops...yeah, misspoke.
Thank God they weren't in charge of making Batman.
Even Gollum didn't look this bad.
You didn't like Gollum? I thought he was pretty much perfect. I could definitely envision a critter that moved and acted the way he did, and I didn't see any traditional CG-produced artifacts.