Re:But his obnoxiousness overshadows the rest.
on
Linus Is A Hero
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· Score: 1
Fair or not, RMS the extremist cannot be separated from RMS the coder. And that limits the appeal of RMS the coder.
While I agree with your first statement, I tend to approach the RMS code/philosophy issue differently. To me, the code that RMS produced caused me to give more weight to his arguments. His ideas are truly revolutionary, but I'd hesitate to call him an extremist; I just think he's either 10 years ahead of his time (our society is not ready to accept the concept of totally free information) or he's completely wrong (and DRM will prevail).
The reason I'm interested in those questions is because I'm inclined to believe that people can't even imagine a world without (for lack of a better term) "push" advertising. I would be curious to discover what their choices would be if given alternatives.
I don't mean any offense, but your handle suggests to me that you're a very pragmatic person and if that's the case, good! We need pragmatic people to keep people like me from thinking too far out of the box. Your factoid re: magazine cards was very informative and suggests that you're more informed than I am about marketing issues. Have any links to info that I can read?
I have to agree with you that, these days, Occam's Razor would tend to support the concept of marketing fueling product sales. In fact, it is that very reason that makes me question the business of marketing in the first place.
I would love to see the output of a truly objective study which asks people some simple questions:
Would you approve of a televion industry move to put all commercials on specific channels?
Would you ever watch those channels?
Does advertising influence your buying decisions?
If advertising were available to you, but not pushed to you, would you seek it out?
/. university students, go forth and survey...but please don't bother if your major is marketing.:)
I couldn't agree more...which is why I prefer Linux.
One aspect of Linux that I believe keeps Joe_AOL away is....maybe it's name.
If you're a/. superuser, you know that Linux has come a long way and even without the GUI you'd probably love it simply because of the power of command-line UNIX. But I think some Joe_AOLs out there see the word "Linux", mentally overwrite their stack with the word "UNIX", and picture hulking mainframes guarded by secretive "system administrators".
I'm not saying the name should be changed or anything, but these days when I'm trying to convince someone how easy it can be to use Linux, I usually find myself putting a distro's name in front of Linux just to reinforce that Linux != 1970's-era UNIX.
Of course, it is funny to hear people whining about co-opting the name, when the name itself is a pun on GNU and a yummy chocolate spread. If they're going to use a silent G in their name, they ought to honor that convention and conduct development of the protocol in an open manner, and GPL their reference implementation.
If they did that, would they have to call it GNU/Gnutella? The redundancy might be too much even for RMS! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
"Otherwise serves "millions of impressions a day," but to keep from oversaturating Web surfers, the company works with publishers to put a frequency cap on the number of ads someone will see in a 24-hour period, Rattin added. 'We try and minimize the annoyance for people.'"
Is it just me or could that last sentence be restated as: "We want to annoy you...but only a little bit."
God save us from clever programmers and clueless marketers.:)
I suppose that's one way to look it. But keep in mind that famous old quote: "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes".;) Even crappy bands can get lucky and put out a couple of decent tunes.
That being said, I do agree with your point: we should support good bands with our money and just enjoy the blind squirrels if/when their songs are on the radio.
Give it up, Tom. The disconnect lies in the definition of "real work". You're never going to convince a Gen Y "programmer" that it's possible (God forbid, preferable!) to execute commands from a command prompt and/or write programs without the "help" of Visual Studio.
Welcome to what I call the Microsoft generation of progammers. "I point, I click, I compile!"
Dunbar, I hope you get modded up because you really do bring out one of the many sticky issues with the DMCA.
"Firstly, the act of opening a lock without the proper key isn't technically a crime - it's all the other circumstances that typically surround that act that are crimes - tresspassing, theft, damage to another's property, etc. But with the DMCA the act of bypassing the encryption in and of itself is a crime no matter what you may chose to do before and after it. And even worse, under the DMCA it is also a crime to tell anyone else how it can be done."
To expand upon this: If I lock myself out of my apartment and I know how to use a credit card to gain access, I'm not violating the law. But if I go next door and use my credit card on my neighbor's lock, I have crossed the legal boundary and am now guilty of trespassing. The crime is not the method I used to gain access, but that I used that method inappropriately.
Further, if the concepts of the DMCA were applied in the real world, I could be arrested just for showing someone how to use a credit card to gain access to their own apartment.
--K.
P.S. The first one of you freaks that shows up at my door with a credit card will be the first to discover that I'm also a supporter of the 2nd Amendment: The right to keep and arm bears; my bear's name is Uber.:)
I couldn't quite determine whether you were being serious or sarcastic, AKnightCowboy. If sarcastic, disregard with my apologies for lacking a sense of humor.
But if you're serious, your recommendation presents its own problems since the department that you're advocating control these vital hubs is the same one that would have the most interest in monitoring every piece of traffic that passed through those hubs.
I believe that (for the US) the best solution would be for companies to control these hubs, with oversight from a governmental agency, (oh boy am I gonna get nailed for this analogy) similar to the way that the FCC oversees the telecom business.
Moreover, you can help fight snail-mail spam by really passing the cost back to the spammers. You know all of those pre-paid return envelopes? Just remove any identifying information about yourself and stuff their crap back into those envelopes and send them back. Make snail-mail spammers pay those bulk mailing fees and maybe we won't have to see the price of stamps keep going up!
Given the proposed circumstances, it becomes more of an ethical dilemna than a financial crisis.
You work for a company and they lay you off. 5 months later, your former boss calls you for help. Maybe you bail them out for free in order to help any friends that still work there and who might be adversely affected by the problem. Maybe (as stated) you bail them out to avoid burning bridges (although, IMHO, this is unprofessional blackmail on the part of the former employer). Maybe you just do it out of the kindness of your heart, or (probably more applicable to/. readers) out of solving the problem for the pure challenge.
I wouldn't advocate that anyone "work" for free, especially if they were fired by a company that they previously "worked" for. But there can be mitigating circumstances. And anyone that equates an IT professional providing free advice to a whore performing sexual acts for free...well, I guess I could equate all independent IT consultants to ambulance-chasing lawyers. The two comparisons, while wrong, are comparable.
Powell is running the show.
You're opinion, duly noted.
Enough said.
Ummm. ok.
You know he didn't get his job because of his intellect I hope they raise rates to 100 dollars a month.
You did a magnificent job of spelling intellect correctly. However, you might want to do some research in the field of run-on sentences.
Maybe some of you will rebel against this corporate takeover of the net.
You bet I'll rebel...against the RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, TCPA, and every congress-critter that votes against my digital rights. But how does the AT&T Broadband / Comcast merger constitute a "corporate takeover of the net"??
However offtopic it might be, this is the only objective post I've read thus far.
I have yet to read a well-reasoned, objective criticism of the merger (with links to references).
Please refrain from all of your horror-stories about Comcast, AT&T, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Illuminati and just focus on the issue at hand, which is the merger of AT&T Broadband and Comcast.
I suppose a large part of your problem with the open-source movement stems from a belief that proprietary software sparks innovation and the only purpose of OSS or Free Software is to rip off or replicate that innovation. Hence, your challenge to open-source hackers to innovate.
While you're certainly entitled to your opinion, you should probably study a little bit of PC history. We wouldn't be where we're at today if people with different philosophies about software didn't "rip off" ideas.
You should also understand a very fundamental philosophical difference between F/OSS coders and their peers who don't believe it's possible to make a buck if they share their source code: software is supposed to be "ripped off". It should be "ripped off", copied, modified, made better, and then re-submitted for more people to "rip it off" so that they can do the same.
If you refuse that basic philosophy, then you will probably never understand the free or open-source movements, which is perfectly ok.
As for your argument that innovation doesn't take place in the open-source world, I have one word for you: EMACS. (I use vi but there are guys at work that go ballistic whenever a server is upgraded and emacs isn't loaded on it.)
I'm disappointed by the decision but I'm even more disappointed by the inability of my fellow slashdotters to make a difference.
It's easy to bash Microsoft and praise Linux here. But what are you doing IRL? Are you leveraging your knowledge at your company to advocate OSS platforms....or do you just weigh in here and mod posts?
When a product is truly better (as I believe GNU/Linux to be) and when some really big companies are willing to back it (like IBM and Sun), all it takes is the backing of us "computer geeks" to affect the market.
Example: The last time a coworker came to me complaining about a Windows 98 problem that kept them from being able to boot to anything but safe mode, I didn't even try to explain that one of their virtual device drivers was corrupted. I fixed the driver problem, while telling them that the problem would probably never have occurred if they were running a different OS. That person happened to be one of the VPs of my company and they are now curious about GNU/Linux.
Unless you're actively affecting change, all your bitching is just noise.
I can tell you that the Lucent 5ESS switches (as well as all of the adjuncts that hang off them) most definately do run on UNIX.
Currently, at my big (think VERY big) company we use Sparc 5 workstations running Solaris as the maintenance platform. However, there seems to be a very big push by the muckety-mucks to migrate everything to PCs running Windows. Apparently, everyone in the sector is looking at the competition and seeing "them" move to Windows, so they take it for conventional wisdom that that's the thing to do. (Hey, don't ask me, I just work here.)
I have no idea why some of the brightest minds in the telecom sector haven't asked this very simple question: If we depend on UNIX to run the switches that make up the largest network in the world, why on earth shouldn't we use a *NIX platform to maintain that network?
Or maybe we could all pop our heads out of our ass and stop lapping up troll-shit.
I love the movie Canadian Bacon because it pokes fun at US foreign policy while at the same time complimenting Canadian domestic policy.
Canadians and Americans are here on one big piece of rock and, so far, we've managed to coexist by manifesting our hostilities in the sports arena. If you want to escalate that relationship out of some kind of jingoism, that's your call. Personally, I'd rather just play hockey.
--K
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with your first statement, I tend to approach the RMS code/philosophy issue differently. To me, the code that RMS produced caused me to give more weight to his arguments. His ideas are truly revolutionary, but I'd hesitate to call him an extremist; I just think he's either 10 years ahead of his time (our society is not ready to accept the concept of totally free information) or he's completely wrong (and DRM will prevail).
RMS aside, though, I'm happy for Linus.
--K.
The reason I'm interested in those questions is because I'm inclined to believe that people can't even imagine a world without (for lack of a better term) "push" advertising. I would be curious to discover what their choices would be if given alternatives.
I don't mean any offense, but your handle suggests to me that you're a very pragmatic person and if that's the case, good! We need pragmatic people to keep people like me from thinking too far out of the box. Your factoid re: magazine cards was very informative and suggests that you're more informed than I am about marketing issues. Have any links to info that I can read?
--K.
I would love to see the output of a truly objective study which asks people some simple questions:
--K.
I couldn't agree more...which is why I prefer Linux.
/. superuser, you know that Linux has come a long way and even without the GUI you'd probably love it simply because of the power of command-line UNIX. But I think some Joe_AOLs out there see the word "Linux", mentally overwrite their stack with the word "UNIX", and picture hulking mainframes guarded by secretive "system administrators".
One aspect of Linux that I believe keeps Joe_AOL away is....maybe it's name.
If you're a
I'm not saying the name should be changed or anything, but these days when I'm trying to convince someone how easy it can be to use Linux, I usually find myself putting a distro's name in front of Linux just to reinforce that Linux != 1970's-era UNIX.
--K.
If they did that, would they have to call it GNU/Gnutella? The redundancy might be too much even for RMS! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
--K.
Is it just me or could that last sentence be restated as: "We want to annoy you...but only a little bit."
God save us from clever programmers and clueless marketers.
--K.
I suppose that's one way to look it. But keep in mind that famous old quote: "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes". ;) Even crappy bands can get lucky and put out a couple of decent tunes.
That being said, I do agree with your point: we should support good bands with our money and just enjoy the blind squirrels if/when their songs are on the radio.
--K.
Give it up, Tom. The disconnect lies in the definition of "real work". You're never going to convince a Gen Y "programmer" that it's possible (God forbid, preferable!) to execute commands from a command prompt and/or write programs without the "help" of Visual Studio.
Welcome to what I call the Microsoft generation of progammers. "I point, I click, I compile!"
If this is progress, God help us.
--K.
To expand upon this: If I lock myself out of my apartment and I know how to use a credit card to gain access, I'm not violating the law. But if I go next door and use my credit card on my neighbor's lock, I have crossed the legal boundary and am now guilty of trespassing. The crime is not the method I used to gain access, but that I used that method inappropriately.
Further, if the concepts of the DMCA were applied in the real world, I could be arrested just for showing someone how to use a credit card to gain access to their own apartment.
--K.
P.S. The first one of you freaks that shows up at my door with a credit card will be the first to discover that I'm also a supporter of the 2nd Amendment: The right to keep and arm bears; my bear's name is Uber.
I couldn't quite determine whether you were being serious or sarcastic, AKnightCowboy. If sarcastic, disregard with my apologies for lacking a sense of humor.
But if you're serious, your recommendation presents its own problems since the department that you're advocating control these vital hubs is the same one that would have the most interest in monitoring every piece of traffic that passed through those hubs.
I believe that (for the US) the best solution would be for companies to control these hubs, with oversight from a governmental agency, (oh boy am I gonna get nailed for this analogy) similar to the way that the FCC oversees the telecom business.
--K.
Moreover, you can help fight snail-mail spam by really passing the cost back to the spammers. You know all of those pre-paid return envelopes? Just remove any identifying information about yourself and stuff their crap back into those envelopes and send them back. Make snail-mail spammers pay those bulk mailing fees and maybe we won't have to see the price of stamps keep going up!
Given the proposed circumstances, it becomes more of an ethical dilemna than a financial crisis.
/. readers) out of solving the problem for the pure challenge.
You work for a company and they lay you off. 5 months later, your former boss calls you for help. Maybe you bail them out for free in order to help any friends that still work there and who might be adversely affected by the problem. Maybe (as stated) you bail them out to avoid burning bridges (although, IMHO, this is unprofessional blackmail on the part of the former employer). Maybe you just do it out of the kindness of your heart, or (probably more applicable to
I wouldn't advocate that anyone "work" for free, especially if they were fired by a company that they previously "worked" for. But there can be mitigating circumstances. And anyone that equates an IT professional providing free advice to a whore performing sexual acts for free...well, I guess I could equate all independent IT consultants to ambulance-chasing lawyers. The two comparisons, while wrong, are comparable.
--K.
Powell is running the show.
You're opinion, duly noted.
Enough said.
Ummm. ok.
You know he didn't get his job because of his intellect I hope they raise rates to 100 dollars a month.
You did a magnificent job of spelling intellect correctly. However, you might want to do some research in the field of run-on sentences.
Maybe some of you will rebel against this corporate takeover of the net.
You bet I'll rebel...against the RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, TCPA, and every congress-critter that votes against my digital rights. But how does the AT&T Broadband / Comcast merger constitute a "corporate takeover of the net"??
--K.
However offtopic it might be, this is the only objective post I've read thus far.
I have yet to read a well-reasoned, objective criticism of the merger (with links to references).
Please refrain from all of your horror-stories about Comcast, AT&T, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Illuminati and just focus on the issue at hand, which is the merger of AT&T Broadband and Comcast.
Thanks,
--K.
Oh please. Insightful? If you're going to moderate, at least try to be objective and non-partisan. Sheesh. --K.
I suppose a large part of your problem with the open-source movement stems from a belief that proprietary software sparks innovation and the only purpose of OSS or Free Software is to rip off or replicate that innovation. Hence, your challenge to open-source hackers to innovate.
While you're certainly entitled to your opinion, you should probably study a little bit of PC history. We wouldn't be where we're at today if people with different philosophies about software didn't "rip off" ideas.
You should also understand a very fundamental philosophical difference between F/OSS coders and their peers who don't believe it's possible to make a buck if they share their source code: software is supposed to be "ripped off". It should be "ripped off", copied, modified, made better, and then re-submitted for more people to "rip it off" so that they can do the same.
If you refuse that basic philosophy, then you will probably never understand the free or open-source movements, which is perfectly ok.
As for your argument that innovation doesn't take place in the open-source world, I have one word for you: EMACS. (I use vi but there are guys at work that go ballistic whenever a server is upgraded and emacs isn't loaded on it.)
Cheers,
--K
I'm disappointed by the decision but I'm even more disappointed by the inability of my fellow slashdotters to make a difference.
It's easy to bash Microsoft and praise Linux here. But what are you doing IRL? Are you leveraging your knowledge at your company to advocate OSS platforms....or do you just weigh in here and mod posts?
When a product is truly better (as I believe GNU/Linux to be) and when some really big companies are willing to back it (like IBM and Sun), all it takes is the backing of us "computer geeks" to affect the market.
Example: The last time a coworker came to me complaining about a Windows 98 problem that kept them from being able to boot to anything but safe mode, I didn't even try to explain that one of their virtual device drivers was corrupted. I fixed the driver problem, while telling them that the problem would probably never have occurred if they were running a different OS. That person happened to be one of the VPs of my company and they are now curious about GNU/Linux.
Unless you're actively affecting change, all your bitching is just noise.
--K.
I can tell you that the Lucent 5ESS switches (as well as all of the adjuncts that hang off them) most definately do run on UNIX. Currently, at my big (think VERY big) company we use Sparc 5 workstations running Solaris as the maintenance platform. However, there seems to be a very big push by the muckety-mucks to migrate everything to PCs running Windows. Apparently, everyone in the sector is looking at the competition and seeing "them" move to Windows, so they take it for conventional wisdom that that's the thing to do. (Hey, don't ask me, I just work here.) I have no idea why some of the brightest minds in the telecom sector haven't asked this very simple question: If we depend on UNIX to run the switches that make up the largest network in the world, why on earth shouldn't we use a *NIX platform to maintain that network?
Or maybe we could all pop our heads out of our ass and stop lapping up troll-shit. I love the movie Canadian Bacon because it pokes fun at US foreign policy while at the same time complimenting Canadian domestic policy. Canadians and Americans are here on one big piece of rock and, so far, we've managed to coexist by manifesting our hostilities in the sports arena. If you want to escalate that relationship out of some kind of jingoism, that's your call. Personally, I'd rather just play hockey. --K