Dunno what metric SF uses to calculate activity, but I'm certain a few of the highly "active" projects have two people working on the source, one of whom likes tab indentation and the other of whom likes space indentation. Both of them busily generate deltas...
Apple's never going to start up clones again after getting burned so bad on them last time (and as a result, I'm never going to get an Apple system again.)
Also, what company would be stupid enough to throw tons of money at building up a brand only to be at Apple's mercy? That takes a lot of faith, and you saw what happened last time someone had faith in Apple not to screw them over...
Can rejoice -- looks like this is what you were waiting for (assuming that this is what it looks like -- an open sourcing of the client codecs).
It was sort of a no-brainer. The video/audio codec is one area where the OSS community has kicked the crap out of the closed source community with free, technically excellent stuff like divx and vorbis. You want to compete with WMV, you need every edge you can get.
This is quite impressive. Apple's gone to a BSD core, Real open sourcing their software...
It's pretty much come down to the rest of the world using UNIX-like stuff/open source versus Microsoft. If this can't take down MS, then there's not a lot of hope for anything ever doing it.
Ok...that right there is nothing more than putting words in my mouth to make it easier for you to lump me into a group that you can just casually dismiss. No offense, but fuck you. You don't know me any more than I know you.
My point is that I have no reason to spend time talking about all the reasons it could be bad for Russia or China to have weapons of mass destruction, since most Americans will happily agree. The reason they *will* agree is primarily because of all they've been fed by the general US media, which is, for most citizens, the only way they find out what is going on. I don't believe I put words into your mouth.
Are you aware that they airdropped leaflets urging people to flee the city way in advance before doing it, telling them exactly what was going to happen? Actually, by most people's calculations, it did save lives on both sides.
Actually, while they did in some conventional cases, they specifically did *not* do so before Hiroshima. It was completely unanounced. There *were* leaflets dropped afterwards to citizens urging them to help convince the Japanese leadership to surrender.
I recommend the following link, which discusses in depth the diplomatic non-necessity of Hiroshima.
You can think of me what you like, but from everything I have read, the U.S. was FAR more ethical the most countries with reguards to WWII. Yes...we have/had muscle...yes, we used it.
Yes, because you're reading US sources. No one has particularly clean hands in the World Wars, though the darkest crimes of the losers were made much of.
The U.S. gets dragged into alot of other people's messes because they can't deal with them properly.
Oh, bullshit. There is absolutely no way we get "dragged" into bombing the crap out of a country. We may have incentives, like better oil prices, but the US hasn't looked at an invasion for two hundred years now.
Prior to that point in history [WWII], the U.S. didn't do much on the world state...we got dragged into it because Europe couldn't clean up their own back yard.
What was World War I? A backyard picnic?
It's like the cold war prick waving contest between the USSR and the USA...both had enough nukes to end the world x number of times. Kinda pointless really, bragging rights aside.
No, it's because of expected attrition -- assume some don't work, assume some are destroyed before launch, assume anti-ICBM defenses are developed and able to take out N missiles. It's why China is a lot more upset over ABM than Russia -- it'd be a bitch to stop all of the ICBMs from Russia, but China's arsenal could be neutralized.
For that matter, Saddam is the one actually using the stuff these days...on Kurds in his own country.
It would be more justifiable to use it on another country? We had CIA folks stirring up *revolution* over there! If Hussein had secret agents come over and get a bunch of militias here to bomb the White House, and the government here *killed* everyone in the militias, would you call that unjustified? Granted, we'd probably use conventional weaponry, but what matters here is mostly who's foot the shoe is on, not the shoe itself.
No...there is nothing magical about a nuke that makes it good or evil.
I didn't say there was. I'm just dubious about how realistic one can be about it being a good idea to actually set off a nuke. Almost all of their effectiveness comes from their threat, not from their use.
Okay, that's true. I'm not saying that I expect it to be perfect, though. Just not something thrown together by a half-assed programmer that all the users then have to suffer through.
Over time, I've noticed that every person posting to Slashdot seems to claim that "their" approach is the best.
People who went to an expensive college smirk about their degree and talk about how employers are looking for knowledge of abstract concepts.
People who didn't attend college at all constantly seem to be justifying their lack of doing so by claiming that they have more "real world" experience and that the college approach is "wrong".
I'd say it's a fair bet that they're both wrong -- a degree is valued much less by most employers than the Ivy League types think, and the "skip college" approach is looked down upon somewhat more by employers than the skippers think.
Plus, I suppose, it depends on the field. If you want to be a cryptographer, you're probably going to be a pretty sorry one without a (nice) degree, but if you're going to run wire and set up Apache and IIS...
I am not trying to be a troll or leave the wrong impression, but Saddam and his crew are not the types you want to have that kinda stuff.
Yes, nukes should only be in the hands of responsible types like China, Russia, and the US.
I'm sure you already have a bad enough opinion of China and Russia, thanks to US media, but let's take a brief look at the US: only country ever to actually nuke another. Did said nuking *not* at a linchpin point in the war *or* in a tactical manner, but against an entire city to "reduce US casualties" after the war was essentially won. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether the US just wanted to flex those new muscles we'd spent huge sums of money developing...
US...leading developer of chemical (and up until two decades ago) a leading developer of bioweapons. Largest single source of arms floating around the world. I *think* (although this is pulled out of my ass) that the US has been in conflicts with more countries than any other single country over the last century.
Now, that doesn't mean I think Saddam should get nukes. I can't imagine very many organizations that I'd remotely trust with them -- perhaps the United Nations as a whole. But is the US likely to use them "responsibly" either? The most responsible thing you can do with nukes is *not use them*, and we've already failed that test...
Let's see, Saddam is a brutal dictator who gasses innocents in the name of political terror and genocide,
Not *quite*. He was worried about a revolution. If you look at the Civil War and Sherman, you'd notice that the US government wasn't exactly nice to the people opposing it, either. Granted, not genocide...
the US is a democracy defending itself and freedom by selectively attacking only those who attacked it first, and in the process bringing freedom to millions.
And this is why Bush is trying to attack...uh...Iraq? When exactly did Iraq attack the United States of America again?
such as a medium-sized business we recently switched over that had been running a T1 with public addresses on every desktop
Big deal. The only justifiable reason for using NAT is saving money on address space. Treating it as a "security" measure does nothing other than give you a false sense of security. IT types that insist on using non-routable IPs for "security" reasons piss me off, particularly since I usually spend a ridiculous amount of time working around whatever idiotic restrictions they put in place.
confidential filesharing servers (with public IPs) with IRC, RPC, NNTP, and thirty other services running
This public IP hangup is crazy. And if they happen to be running all those services...so? Nothing inherently wrong, as long as they're aware of what they're doing. You can certainly run a secure system with a bunch of servers (though I probably wouldn't...). You might want to chroot a few things, but it's not the end of the world.
and absolutely *zero* firewalling/security/etc.
I'm going to be a bit unfair to you here and not give you the advantage of the doubt. By "zero firewalling/security/etc", what you *really* mean is "zero firewalling", right?
Firewalls are the most oversold, least useful security technique on the market. IT types get off on them because they represent only a single system to poke at, instead of company-wide changes on each client. You can also get a great support contract with your firewall, so you don't have to know the first damn thing about networking, and still have a firewall.
I *hate* firewalls. Stuff is exposed to the Internet for a reason -- because you want to access the damn service. If I want to put up an FTP server, I should be able to put up an ftp server. Nothing -- with the possible exception of transparent proxies -- is more annoying to the end user. Blocking outgoing DNS requests. Blocking outbound email. Blocking incoming ssh. Argh.
You know what happens after you put your stupid firewall up? It gets VPNed by the first user who gets pissed off enough at you, everything gets tunneled through some port you left open, and you have the same degree of security that you did in the *first* place, but have a more complicated, fragile network.
"The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
They got replaced with a rackmount Mikrotik router system and were immediately firewalled, RFC 1918 standard private IP network, etc.
So you made it a fricking pain for them to set up services to be accessed from the outside. No kidding, they were pissed off.
Their response? Forget about thank you
Surprise, surprise.
no, they won't buy VPN software - think cheap
Wow. I'd *hate* you if you were running my network. I have an SSH server that I use to grab files from to do occasional work at home. You take away my IP. I get upset, ask why it doesn't work, and you tell me to purchase some VPN software, because you're living high on your pet configuration? You expect users to be happy? Are you mad?
can't run personal websites on desktops
I don't have a problem with this at all. I'm running Apache on my desktop at this very minute. Blocking it would piss me off to no end.
open relaying on their Exchange server was "broken"
I think it's kind of sad that open relaying can't be used any more, and I've certainly been frusterated with mail admins before. I *do* think that no one should ever have a less lenient policy than:
* local IPs get automatic relaying wherever * anyone that auths themselves via *any* (i.e. don't just support MD5 or something annoying like that) SMTP auth mechanism to be a valid local user gets relaying wherever * any remote IP can send to any local email addresses. I bitterly hate things like the DUL. I have a mail server on my computer. It's convenient, and I don't have to remember to change my "mail server" in all my mail clients when I move from place to place. The DUL is a ridiculously overagressive anti-spam measure, which basically makes life miserable for anyone who wants to run a simple, convenient mail server like this.
"We don't want to know about those details. We just want it to work the way it did before without spending more money."
And that's your job, pretty much. Make the functionality they need available to them with as little impact on them as possible. yours is a support role -- you should be keeping them purring along, never impacting work efficiency. If you have some brilliant scheme to improve security, fine, but make it convenient for them and make it *not* cut into any functionality that they're wanting to use.
Users will insist on being stupid about IP, security, etc. (I only mention this because it is part of the mindset you need to understand to see where the service provider is going to come from).
Yup. And network admins will insist on caring about their own "pet" security/network models over user convenience. Same thing always happens. If the guy's a Kerb fan, the network's going to be running Kerberos. If the guy is into SSH, telnet's going to be banned and everyone *will* use SSH. If the guy is operating under a "public IPs are bad" mindset, he's going to take away everyone's IPs.
Come on... do you expect these folks to be experts about business policy? We train our guys to provide option A or B - A = installed our way, B = no install, goodbye and good luck. 90% of the customers are never an issue, but the 10% "I design websites, so therefore I'm a networking expert" types micromanage everything and work hard to screw it all up.
Now *this* I like. A lot. I wish everyone had your good attitude here. Nothing pisses one off like a lack of your option B. Some ISPs think they *must* force everyone to undergo the installation procedure. Quite a turnoff.
By loading this software, I ensure that my configuration will probably stay on top of all the nonsense you put in there, and I can actually have a clue what is going on when you manage to screw it up still.
And of course, whatever shitty VB-programmer written crap is getting tossed into their system is probably immature and flaky, and probably has half-assed or *no* diagnostic features. I have a really low opinion of home-brew software from ISPs.
It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to use PayPal despite the number of pissed off people that feel that they've been ripped off. If you're dumb enough to *use* it, despite their by-now-well-known policies, I hate to say it, but I don't feel entirely sympathetic if you lose money.
It sucks that an Open Source project got ripped off, but it also sucked that one of the people involved decided to use PayPal.
Con Zymaris, why are you complaining? People on Slashdot have been complaining for ages about media companies having an "out of date" business model. Now they bring it up to date with an efficient, fast, online delivery mechanism...and you don't like it.
Could it be that people claiming things like "business models" just want to rip people off? They aren't interested in "business models" at all...they're just old-fashioned shoplifter types?
Why try to stop them? Just cap their bandwidth (if you *really* want to be snazzy, have a per-week uncapped alotment, which when exceeded, goes down to a capped rate. Only the P2P people suffer, but they can still get work done (abeit a bit slower)).
Trying to stop information flow on the Internet is well-nigh impossible.
The fact that users will blow $200-$800 on a second monitor just illustrates the fact that Windows badly needs virtual desktops.
I worked summer before last on a system with two twenty inch monitors running Windows. Last summer, I had the opportunity to set it up (unfortunately, again Windows), and used a single monitor with virtual desktops.
It turns out that as long as you have a decent mouse speed and fast edge flippping (i.e. no resistance), you can do much better with the virtual desktops.
Two 20" monitors are too big to keep in your field of view. I have to look different places. When I'm working with a big virtual desktop, I zip the mouse to where I want to go. It takes me somewhere between an eight and a quarter of a second to fully traverse my 3x4 grid of viewports.
OTOH, I *do* think that getting your single monitor up to 1600x1200, 19" is worthwhile. That you *can* keep in your field of vision.
>Why is it wrong for an executive to borrow a plane >to take his family on a trip and right for an employee >to use the broadband connection to share music.
I'm with you on the looking over the shoulder bit. Really disturbing. OTOH, if there were monitoring software on my computer, I probably wouldn't experience the same sensation, though that would undoubtedly be more intrusive.
Fine. Then, since the music is something fun for *you*, and not something that you should be getting paid to do, burn your CDs or whatever at *home* during *your time* and take them in. Don't be dicking around at work swapping music.
This has honestly got to be the lamest argument that gets consistently modded up to +5 on/.
Yup.
Piracy has nothing to do with "obsolete business models". If you want to complain about distribution methods, that's okay. If the RIAA is attacking an e-retailer of music, I'd be with you. But they're just going against people not doing their work and swiping copies of music at work. I'm with them all the way there.
How is warning CEOs that there could be illegal trading going on at their company "changing laws"?
Plus, people dicking around at work piss me off. I don't read Slashdot at work, and I sure as hell don't pirate MP3s at work. Nothing's worse than working your ass off and finding that your coworkers are goofing off instead of holding up their end of the project.
If someone's playing with Kazaa at work instead of working, during time they're getting paid and using resources that the company paid for to do work, I sure as heck don't have a problem with them getting canned.
Look, there's a lot of good arguments to *not* release on a more frequent cycle.
First, stable releases suck for a lot of developers. A lot of people do this in their spare time, and all of a sudden they have a bunch of deadlines.
Second, feature freezes reduce devel speed, since a lot of developers (who *could* be doing work) have to cool their heels and wait for everyone to stablilize their code.
Third, there's context switching time. It's a lot of work to release a new stable kernel, and you have to put out this big chunk of work, pretty everything up...and that's time that could be more productively spend working on features to go into the next release.
What specific features in the new kernel do you need? Tens of thousands of threads? Linus *still* says it's a dumb idea to have more threads than processors, so unless you have a machine with 10K processors, it's not a big deal. Sure, it makes for sexy benchmarks, but they're pointless for real world apps.
Latency? This is nice, but it's mostly helpful for hard realtime systems. From a user standpoint, the time latency is an issue (assuming you're doing the HZ-redefine, etc stuff that you can do with 2.4) pretty much exclusively when the disk is saturated with requests and part of an app needs to be swapped in or a file read.
ALSA? I already use it, as do quite a few distros. I know that at least SuSE uses it out of box, and it's pretty easy to build.
Most of the changes seem to be pretty small (though cute). New driver work, input changes, the ability to use the PC speaker as a microphone...
Slashdot Mirror
How about the Office source instead?
When you get it in, get the wget team to put out a release. There are a lot of us out here that would very much like to get our hands on this. :-)
95% activity on SourceForge!
Dunno what metric SF uses to calculate activity, but I'm certain a few of the highly "active" projects have two people working on the source, one of whom likes tab indentation and the other of whom likes space indentation. Both of them busily generate deltas...
Nullsoft does have a Linux release of WinAmp out. Of course, I don't know why you'd use it when you have xmms...
Apple's never going to start up clones again after getting burned so bad on them last time (and as a result, I'm never going to get an Apple system again.)
Also, what company would be stupid enough to throw tons of money at building up a brand only to be at Apple's mercy? That takes a lot of faith, and you saw what happened last time someone had faith in Apple not to screw them over...
This whole thing reminds me of this (older, 680x0 era) book "Build your own Macintosh and Save a Bundle".
Can rejoice -- looks like this is what you were waiting for (assuming that this is what it looks like -- an open sourcing of the client codecs).
It was sort of a no-brainer. The video/audio codec is one area where the OSS community has kicked the crap out of the closed source community with free, technically excellent stuff like divx and vorbis. You want to compete with WMV, you need every edge you can get.
This is quite impressive. Apple's gone to a BSD core, Real open sourcing their software...
It's pretty much come down to the rest of the world using UNIX-like stuff/open source versus Microsoft. If this can't take down MS, then there's not a lot of hope for anything ever doing it.
Ok...that right there is nothing more than putting words in my mouth to make it easier for you to lump me into a group that you can just casually dismiss. No offense, but fuck you. You don't know me any more than I know you.
My point is that I have no reason to spend time talking about all the reasons it could be bad for Russia or China to have weapons of mass destruction, since most Americans will happily agree. The reason they *will* agree is primarily because of all they've been fed by the general US media, which is, for most citizens, the only way they find out what is going on. I don't believe I put words into your mouth.
Are you aware that they airdropped leaflets urging people to flee the city way in advance before doing it, telling them exactly what was going to happen? Actually, by most people's calculations, it did save lives on both sides.
Actually, while they did in some conventional cases, they specifically did *not* do so before Hiroshima. It was completely unanounced. There *were* leaflets dropped afterwards to citizens urging them to help convince the Japanese leadership to surrender.
I recommend the following link, which discusses in depth the diplomatic non-necessity of Hiroshima.
You can think of me what you like, but from everything I have read, the U.S. was FAR more ethical the most countries with reguards to WWII. Yes...we have/had muscle...yes, we used it.
Yes, because you're reading US sources. No one has particularly clean hands in the World Wars, though the darkest crimes of the losers were made much of.
The U.S. gets dragged into alot of other people's messes because they can't deal with them properly.
Oh, bullshit. There is absolutely no way we get "dragged" into bombing the crap out of a country. We may have incentives, like better oil prices, but the US hasn't looked at an invasion for two hundred years now.
Prior to that point in history [WWII], the U.S. didn't do much on the world state...we got dragged into it because Europe couldn't clean up their own back yard.
What was World War I? A backyard picnic?
It's like the cold war prick waving contest between the USSR and the USA...both had enough nukes to end the world x number of times. Kinda pointless really, bragging rights aside.
No, it's because of expected attrition -- assume some don't work, assume some are destroyed before launch, assume anti-ICBM defenses are developed and able to take out N missiles. It's why China is a lot more upset over ABM than Russia -- it'd be a bitch to stop all of the ICBMs from Russia, but China's arsenal could be neutralized.
For that matter, Saddam is the one actually using the stuff these days...on Kurds in his own country.
It would be more justifiable to use it on another country? We had CIA folks stirring up *revolution* over there! If Hussein had secret agents come over and get a bunch of militias here to bomb the White House, and the government here *killed* everyone in the militias, would you call that unjustified? Granted, we'd probably use conventional weaponry, but what matters here is mostly who's foot the shoe is on, not the shoe itself.
No...there is nothing magical about a nuke that makes it good or evil.
I didn't say there was. I'm just dubious about how realistic one can be about it being a good idea to actually set off a nuke. Almost all of their effectiveness comes from their threat, not from their use.
Okay, that's true. I'm not saying that I expect it to be perfect, though. Just not something thrown together by a half-assed programmer that all the users then have to suffer through.
I've used, the slightest debris on the mouse area can render the mouse useless until you clean it.
I purchased a 3M Precision Mousing Surface and have had any problems since. Quite impressive little device.
Over time, I've noticed that every person posting to Slashdot seems to claim that "their" approach is the best.
People who went to an expensive college smirk about their degree and talk about how employers are looking for knowledge of abstract concepts.
People who didn't attend college at all constantly seem to be justifying their lack of doing so by claiming that they have more "real world" experience and that the college approach is "wrong".
I'd say it's a fair bet that they're both wrong -- a degree is valued much less by most employers than the Ivy League types think, and the "skip college" approach is looked down upon somewhat more by employers than the skippers think.
Plus, I suppose, it depends on the field. If you want to be a cryptographer, you're probably going to be a pretty sorry one without a (nice) degree, but if you're going to run wire and set up Apache and IIS...
Weren't they the defense contractor with the absolutely awful security in Cliff Stoll's _The Cuckoo's Egg_?
I am not trying to be a troll or leave the wrong impression, but Saddam and his crew are not the types you want to have that kinda stuff.
Yes, nukes should only be in the hands of responsible types like China, Russia, and the US.
I'm sure you already have a bad enough opinion of China and Russia, thanks to US media, but let's take a brief look at the US: only country ever to actually nuke another. Did said nuking *not* at a linchpin point in the war *or* in a tactical manner, but against an entire city to "reduce US casualties" after the war was essentially won. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether the US just wanted to flex those new muscles we'd spent huge sums of money developing...
US...leading developer of chemical (and up until two decades ago) a leading developer of bioweapons. Largest single source of arms floating around the world. I *think* (although this is pulled out of my ass) that the US has been in conflicts with more countries than any other single country over the last century.
Now, that doesn't mean I think Saddam should get nukes. I can't imagine very many organizations that I'd remotely trust with them -- perhaps the United Nations as a whole. But is the US likely to use them "responsibly" either? The most responsible thing you can do with nukes is *not use them*, and we've already failed that test...
Let's see, Saddam is a brutal dictator who gasses innocents in the name of political terror and genocide,
Not *quite*. He was worried about a revolution. If you look at the Civil War and Sherman, you'd notice that the US government wasn't exactly nice to the people opposing it, either. Granted, not genocide...
the US is a democracy defending itself and freedom by selectively attacking only those who attacked it first, and in the process bringing freedom to millions.
And this is why Bush is trying to attack...uh...Iraq? When exactly did Iraq attack the United States of America again?
such as a medium-sized business we recently switched over that had been running a T1 with public addresses on every desktop
Big deal. The only justifiable reason for using NAT is saving money on address space. Treating it as a "security" measure does nothing other than give you a false sense of security. IT types that insist on using non-routable IPs for "security" reasons piss me off, particularly since I usually spend a ridiculous amount of time working around whatever idiotic restrictions they put in place.
confidential filesharing servers (with public IPs) with IRC, RPC, NNTP, and thirty other services running
This public IP hangup is crazy. And if they happen to be running all those services...so? Nothing inherently wrong, as long as they're aware of what they're doing. You can certainly run a secure system with a bunch of servers (though I probably wouldn't...). You might want to chroot a few things, but it's not the end of the world.
and absolutely *zero* firewalling/security/etc.
I'm going to be a bit unfair to you here and not give you the advantage of the doubt. By "zero firewalling/security/etc", what you *really* mean is "zero firewalling", right?
Firewalls are the most oversold, least useful security technique on the market. IT types get off on them because they represent only a single system to poke at, instead of company-wide changes on each client. You can also get a great support contract with your firewall, so you don't have to know the first damn thing about networking, and still have a firewall.
I *hate* firewalls. Stuff is exposed to the Internet for a reason -- because you want to access the damn service. If I want to put up an FTP server, I should be able to put up an ftp server. Nothing -- with the possible exception of transparent proxies -- is more annoying to the end user. Blocking outgoing DNS requests. Blocking outbound email. Blocking incoming ssh. Argh.
You know what happens after you put your stupid firewall up? It gets VPNed by the first user who gets pissed off enough at you, everything gets tunneled through some port you left open, and you have the same degree of security that you did in the *first* place, but have a more complicated, fragile network.
"The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
They got replaced with a rackmount Mikrotik router system and were immediately firewalled, RFC 1918 standard private IP network, etc.
So you made it a fricking pain for them to set up services to be accessed from the outside. No kidding, they were pissed off.
Their response? Forget about thank you
Surprise, surprise.
no, they won't buy VPN software - think cheap
Wow. I'd *hate* you if you were running my network. I have an SSH server that I use to grab files from to do occasional work at home. You take away my IP. I get upset, ask why it doesn't work, and you tell me to purchase some VPN software, because you're living high on your pet configuration? You expect users to be happy? Are you mad?
can't run personal websites on desktops
I don't have a problem with this at all. I'm running Apache on my desktop at this very minute. Blocking it would piss me off to no end.
open relaying on their Exchange server was "broken"
I think it's kind of sad that open relaying can't be used any more, and I've certainly been frusterated with mail admins before. I *do* think that no one should ever have a less lenient policy than:
* local IPs get automatic relaying wherever
* anyone that auths themselves via *any* (i.e. don't just support MD5 or something annoying like that) SMTP auth mechanism to be a valid local user gets relaying wherever
* any remote IP can send to any local email addresses. I bitterly hate things like the DUL. I have a mail server on my computer. It's convenient, and I don't have to remember to change my "mail server" in all my mail clients when I move from place to place. The DUL is a ridiculously overagressive anti-spam measure, which basically makes life miserable for anyone who wants to run a simple, convenient mail server like this.
"We don't want to know about those details. We just want it to work the way it did before without spending more money."
And that's your job, pretty much. Make the functionality they need available to them with as little impact on them as possible. yours is a support role -- you should be keeping them purring along, never impacting work efficiency. If you have some brilliant scheme to improve security, fine, but make it convenient for them and make it *not* cut into any functionality that they're wanting to use.
Users will insist on being stupid about IP, security, etc. (I only mention this because it is part of the mindset you need to understand to see where the service provider is going to come from).
Yup. And network admins will insist on caring about their own "pet" security/network models over user convenience. Same thing always happens. If the guy's a Kerb fan, the network's going to be running Kerberos. If the guy is into SSH, telnet's going to be banned and everyone *will* use SSH. If the guy is operating under a "public IPs are bad" mindset, he's going to take away everyone's IPs.
Come on... do you expect these folks to be experts about business policy? We train our guys to provide option A or B - A = installed our way, B = no install, goodbye and good luck. 90% of the customers are never an issue, but the 10% "I design websites, so therefore I'm a networking expert" types micromanage everything and work hard to screw it all up.
Now *this* I like. A lot. I wish everyone had your good attitude here. Nothing pisses one off like a lack of your option B. Some ISPs think they *must* force everyone to undergo the installation procedure. Quite a turnoff.
By loading this software, I ensure that my configuration will probably stay on top of all the nonsense you put in there, and I can actually have a clue what is going on when you manage to screw it up still.
And of course, whatever shitty VB-programmer written crap is getting tossed into their system is probably immature and flaky, and probably has half-assed or *no* diagnostic features. I have a really low opinion of home-brew software from ISPs.
It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to use PayPal despite the number of pissed off people that feel that they've been ripped off. If you're dumb enough to *use* it, despite their by-now-well-known policies, I hate to say it, but I don't feel entirely sympathetic if you lose money.
It sucks that an Open Source project got ripped off, but it also sucked that one of the people involved decided to use PayPal.
Con Zymaris, why are you complaining? People on Slashdot have been complaining for ages about media companies having an "out of date" business model. Now they bring it up to date with an efficient, fast, online delivery mechanism...and you don't like it.
Could it be that people claiming things like "business models" just want to rip people off? They aren't interested in "business models" at all...they're just old-fashioned shoplifter types?
Why try to stop them? Just cap their bandwidth (if you *really* want to be snazzy, have a per-week uncapped alotment, which when exceeded, goes down to a capped rate. Only the P2P people suffer, but they can still get work done (abeit a bit slower)).
Trying to stop information flow on the Internet is well-nigh impossible.
because Napster is dead
:))
Napster, Inc. no longer exists. Servers using the Napster protocol are alive, large, and well.
most of those non techy folks don't use P2P anymore
I'm a little dubious. I find that more people than ever use P2P.
(they have all just gone back to using hidden ftp sites!
A single site (or handfull of sites) can't come close to the sheer amount of content available over the span of a decent-sized P2P network.
The fact that users will blow $200-$800 on a second monitor just illustrates the fact that Windows badly needs virtual desktops.
I worked summer before last on a system with two twenty inch monitors running Windows. Last summer, I had the opportunity to set it up (unfortunately, again Windows), and used a single monitor with virtual desktops.
It turns out that as long as you have a decent mouse speed and fast edge flippping (i.e. no resistance), you can do much better with the virtual desktops.
Two 20" monitors are too big to keep in your field of view. I have to look different places. When I'm working with a big virtual desktop, I zip the mouse to where I want to go. It takes me somewhere between an eight and a quarter of a second to fully traverse my 3x4 grid of viewports.
OTOH, I *do* think that getting your single monitor up to 1600x1200, 19" is worthwhile. That you *can* keep in your field of vision.
>Why is it wrong for an executive to borrow a plane
>to take his family on a trip and right for an employee
>to use the broadband connection to share music.
Because one is illegal and the other is not?
How is either one of them legal?
I'm with you on the looking over the shoulder bit. Really disturbing. OTOH, if there were monitoring software on my computer, I probably wouldn't experience the same sensation, though that would undoubtedly be more intrusive.
Fine. Then, since the music is something fun for *you*, and not something that you should be getting paid to do, burn your CDs or whatever at *home* during *your time* and take them in. Don't be dicking around at work swapping music.
This has honestly got to be the lamest argument that gets consistently modded up to +5 on /.
Yup.
Piracy has nothing to do with "obsolete business models". If you want to complain about distribution methods, that's okay. If the RIAA is attacking an e-retailer of music, I'd be with you. But they're just going against people not doing their work and swiping copies of music at work. I'm with them all the way there.
How is warning CEOs that there could be illegal trading going on at their company "changing laws"?
Plus, people dicking around at work piss me off. I don't read Slashdot at work, and I sure as hell don't pirate MP3s at work. Nothing's worse than working your ass off and finding that your coworkers are goofing off instead of holding up their end of the project.
If someone's playing with Kazaa at work instead of working, during time they're getting paid and using resources that the company paid for to do work, I sure as heck don't have a problem with them getting canned.
Look, there's a lot of good arguments to *not* release on a more frequent cycle.
First, stable releases suck for a lot of developers. A lot of people do this in their spare time, and all of a sudden they have a bunch of deadlines.
Second, feature freezes reduce devel speed, since a lot of developers (who *could* be doing work) have to cool their heels and wait for everyone to stablilize their code.
Third, there's context switching time. It's a lot of work to release a new stable kernel, and you have to put out this big chunk of work, pretty everything up...and that's time that could be more productively spend working on features to go into the next release.
What specific features in the new kernel do you need? Tens of thousands of threads? Linus *still* says it's a dumb idea to have more threads than processors, so unless you have a machine with 10K processors, it's not a big deal. Sure, it makes for sexy benchmarks, but they're pointless for real world apps.
Latency? This is nice, but it's mostly helpful for hard realtime systems. From a user standpoint, the time latency is an issue (assuming you're doing the HZ-redefine, etc stuff that you can do with 2.4) pretty much exclusively when the disk is saturated with requests and part of an app needs to be swapped in or a file read.
ALSA? I already use it, as do quite a few distros. I know that at least SuSE uses it out of box, and it's pretty easy to build.
Most of the changes seem to be pretty small (though cute). New driver work, input changes, the ability to use the PC speaker as a microphone...