The difference between common sense and science is the difference between observation and understanding.
That's probably a debatable topic in its own right but in this context, I'll concede that point.
Sure it's common sense that loud sounds and flashing lights are distracting. However, it would be a wonderful advance in medical science if we knew exactly what reactions loud sounds and flashing lights cause in our brains that makes them more distracting than the huge amount of sensory information our brain is bombarded with anyway.
Again, given the example, I concur. But I object to "scientific" findings when those findings are subjective in nature which is what I perceive this case to be.
From the article:
Call it O.C.D. -- online compulsive disorder.
How about we refrain from calling "it" anything until we have conclusive proof (instead of just anecdotal testimony) that "it" is a problem?
I remember the line of the hacker character in the movie The Core (paraphrasing): "I multitask like you breathe." Perhaps some people really can operate on multiple levels on multiple problems at the same time and perhaps the psychological academia can't quite wrap their minds around that concept yet. It's easy to spout theories and coin acronyms but it's much more difficult to attempt to understand that which is so easy to label.
Personally, I think that if learning new things is an "addiction", then the next killer app should be an online "info-pill".
Linus seems to favor all out performance over "bloated" abstraction and information hiding.:-\
Why do you consider this philosophy to be a Bad Thing (tm)?
Abstraction breeds inefficiency. It (abstraction) also breeds ignorant programmers. The very last thing we need in a Linux kernel is inefficiency.
I'm not advocating a hard-line "all your programs are belong to assembler" stance, but I'm a victim of "point-click-compile" programmers and I curse their software every day because their programs SUCK and they get in my way.
Personally, I'm very happy that Linus has enough of a technical clue to avoid unnecessary kernel-bloat. If you want bloated, insecure, semi-stable code...stick with Windows.
Another thing, seeing as I am working for a telemarketing company right now, I know first hand that there are plenty of people that have no problem purchasing products and services over the telephone.
That's great, seriously. It is nice to know that there is a market for people in the telemarketing business so that they don't all lose their jobs. I do believe, however, that the enormous early adoption of the federal do-not-call list appears to be early evidence that this market is much smaller than many in the direct marketing industry would like to admit.
To sum up this artice: Blah blah blah, software should be free, blah blah blah, SCO is evil and wrong for what they're doing, blah blah blah, GNU is good, blah blah blah, the GPL should be the only license EVER.
(Before I address this post, I think it is important to remind the community that Offtopic means not relevant to the subject at hand and that even ACs with against-the-grain opinions should have a voice. This particular post might be a Troll...but then again it seems to express a sentiment that is commonly seen here. Please open your mind and use your mod-points to stimulate interesting discussions between intelligent people with opposing opinions.)
To sum up your post: Blah blah blah, RMS is an unwashed hippie, blah blah blah, non-free software is good for the economy, blah blah blah, intellectual property is a good thing.....ad nauseum.
Arguments like that don't do much to advance the debate. RMS is at one end of the spectrum of the software debate and SCO is at the other end of that spectrum. A healthy debate between two such polarized positions usually results in a compromise that advances a position which is generally acceptable to everyone in between.
Left-side: Ideas cannot be controlled because the cost of their propagation is negligible on the Internet. Software is simply an expression of ideas in computer-understandable language.
Right-side: People that contribute new ideas to society deserve the right to control the use of those ideas perpetually in order to collect compensation for the effort they put forth to generate those ideas.
The balance lies somewhere in the middle, and I believe that that is the position RMS advances and which recent history supports. Linus gave his hard work away, yet last I heard he was driving a BMW convertible sports car. RMS himself somehow manages to fly around the world and appear at conferences, yet he doesn't charge a dime for his code.
It always seems to come down to control. Those who profit from control are threatened by those who seek to undermine that control. So then we have to ask why people seek control as well as why others seek to destroy control. In this light, I believe that RMS' intentions are mostly benign (I say "mostly" because I find it hard to believe that he doesn't have an ego at this point). RMS is a very fact-driven individual with little to no interest in personal wealth. He understands the fact that 1s and 0s cannot be constrained so he resists any effort to impose a false-property regime over those 1s and 0s; obfuscation is something every good programmer instinctually avoids.
On the other hand, our economy is built upon the concept that people who contribute to society are properly compensated. I don't believe that RMS would dispute this; I just think his idea of the mode of compensation flies in the face of accepted industry norms.
There's an acceptable middle-ground that we're still trying to find...but inflammatory rhetoric just hinders that process.
Just like I don't help people at work who have problems with Windows even though I am an expert.
Hehe, I've had this urge (I mean, it gets rediculous after you've had to remove the Lovegate virus from 20 co-workers' PCs) but I guess I value teamwork more than GNU/Linux advocacy or any antipathy towards Microsoft. I just can't say no when one of my friends or family needs some technical help.
The somewhat surprising side-affect of this willingness to help my neighbor has been that they now value my opinion and they are increasingly curious about GNU/Linux because while I'm fixing their problem they frequently hear me muttering things like "why people pay for this crap when they can have something better for free boggles the mind".
I guess for me, helping people is more fun and important than my own personal stance on software (and this from a bootable-card-carrying hippie communist member of the FSF!).
But if congress passes a law they are very unlikely to strike that same law. In fact most of the time they just make more laws and don't get rid of the old ones.
That's a really interesting point and given my layman's knowledge of the law, I agree. This gives rise to a problem that most every programmer has faced: at some point, you just know your code is bloated and kludgy. At that point, you are faced with the choice of a severe code-audit or a total rewrite.
Now I'm sure that you can't directly map legal code to computer code but there seem to be some conceptual similarities and I wonder if this is one of them. Is our legal code bloated and, if so, aren't lawyers just hacking the loopholes created by such a system? Lawyers == Hackers? ACK!:) But it's something to think about.
And what I was talking about was what the common citizen (or group) could still do to fight the law. Well besides write your congressmen, because you know they care.
I think the current P2P debacle proves that the most effective method that a common citizen can employ to "fight the law" is to simply ignore it and press on. This is not a new concept.
..if the MPAA is going to sue the Washington Post for the same reason that they sued 2600. I doubt they've got the chutzpah for that legal fight, but it would be quite interesting if they did.
This at least helps me separate the true artists from the greedy jerks. Linkin Park and Green Day are disappointing...I've actually enjoyed some of their music. Madonna and Jewel come as no surprise.
The only groups I'm familiar with that have a leg to stand on in the assertion that their entire album is one piece of work are Enigma and the Trans Siberian Railroad Orchestra. I'm sure there are more, so this is not an entirely unreasonable position IMO. But the artists named in the article are either clueless or under a lot of contractual pressure from the labels.
Well, it's too late for Napster, but now a judge that isn't smoking crack has agreed that Grokster and Morpheus aren't responsible for the copyright violations, and the RIAA is now forced to go after individual users who are breaking the law.
Is it a bad law, one that no longer applies to the world we live in? Maybe. But it's still the law.
I think that's the point that the entertainment industry and their paid-off congresscritters haven't quite come to grips with yet. People route around stupid laws. Put another, more politically correct way, I believe that people disregard laws that favor monied, elite societal niches. When the code of law conflicts with the norms of society, problems are inevitable. When the code of law favors an elite societal minority, I believe that history shows that the favored societal minority has either given ground or been trampled by the people that made them rich.
When people are breaking the law without the slightest idea that they are doing so, I think it is only logical to question the law.
Is there any history or precedent for a class-action barratry lawsuit?
Seems to me that we should be as legally adept as the entertainment cartels; when threatened, counter-attack and when one target slips off the hook immediately move the crosshairs onto the next most likely candidate. (Financial considerations might be a barrier to entry for most of us, but what about IBM?)
Perhaps it's time to take a hard look at the law firms and lawyers who are willing to represent companies like SCO in actions like this. I don't mean to suggest that moronically litigous companies and people should be let off the hook, but I think it might be easier (in the short term) to discourage the tools of their trade. Of course, that theory is based on what is probably an over-optimistic assumption: that the supply of lawyers might dry up due to the fear of litigation against themselves.
Which leads to yet another pretty interesting question that I've been thinking about: Why are we hearing so much about doctors protesting the rising costs of malpractice insurance in the US and almost nothing from the lawyers who also "practice" their trade? (Not trolling, honestly curious.)
Thats just wrong. Inventors need to eat, but many of them want the palaver of having to commercially exploit their own inventions. Ergo, the right to sell patents to someone else in order to pay the rent until the next useful invention to come along is helpful in incouraging invention.
Wouldn't royalties constitute commercial exploitation of one's patent, thus providing the palaver to the inventor? At risk of creating yet another/. IANAL thread, I'm curious about the differences between selling, transferring, and licensing a patent. I wholeheartedly agree that inventors need to eat, but I also believe that their need to eat should be balanced against my ability (note, I said "ability"...not "right"...that's probably another whole debate) to build upon their ideas...which, as I understand it, was the goal of the limited terms applied to most American IPR laws in the first place.
Yes. I tend to carry on conversations with people that swap circuit packs that, if done improperly, might inconvenience you for five seconds.
They have to deal with thousands of emails a day, most of them lame RTFM questions. So they tend to send out a lot of boilerplate, which is what this obviously is.
Given that attitude, I sincerely hope that you are my competitor.
IE is required? I have no problem administering my BEFSR41 with Mozilla.
That's interesting, slugo3. I'm curious about the firmware version of your BEFSR41 and whether you're using Mozilla from a Windows platform or a GNU/Linux distro?
but setting konqueror or mozilla to send MSIE identification HTTP directives did the trick.
That's a great experiment that I have not yet tried and I will give it a shot if for no other reason than to identify the underlying problem that open standards are being usurped. Thanks for the pointer, SHEEN.
I sent an email asking Linksys why IE was required to use their web-based admin tool for my BEFSR41.
Here's their reply:
Again, thank you for contacting Linksys Customer Support.
Unfortunately, we do not have an advice yet when will Linksys support other
operating systems. Rest assure that your message will reach the right
department.
If you have further questions, please contact us at (800) 326-7114 or send
us an email at support@linksys.com so that we may further assist you.
Please use this phone number given as reference for future support calls.
Thank you and have a nice day.
That's right. And I don't want the customer, my co-workers or my boss to see little anomalies. I consider it just too important and irritating.
That's certainly a valid position but I wonder how much your customer, co-workers, and boss are willing to pay to avoid such minor anomalies when the alternative is vendor lock-in and future license costs.
I see much wailing and gnashing of teeth against ESR because it is perceived that:
He is changing the jargon file
and
He is skewing it to match his own beliefs/interets.
You can keep the personal attacks...I don't buy them because they seem to spring from either long-held grudges or unsubstantiated claims against Eric's character.
What bothers me is the apparent willingness of this community to attack a person that has done a lot to bring us all here in the first place. If you don't like ESR's version of the jargon file, feel free to fork your own, or email ESR with your specific complaints and work it out.
I'm not disappointed that Taco posted this story because it's not a bad idea to question those we consider leaders in this loose society that is the FOSS community...but I'm surprised and a bit disappointed at how quickly we turn into a bunch of sharks willing to devour each other. The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory part of my brain thinks that any proprietary-software-funded trolls have certainly earned their money in this thread.
While it has very good Word im-/export, it's not yet faultless (and won't be any time soon, because of inherent limitations of OpenOffice). And you NEED that import, because otherwise you can't exchange documents outside of your department.
I keep hearing this criticism of Open/StarOffice, that it does ok with Word docs but doesn't work with most of the other MS Office file formats. I got curious about this so I've been forwarding various Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to my home email address from work just to test opening up files with OpenOffice. (If you're reading this, Boss, don't worry I delete everything right after the test!)
While there are some very minor little anomalies that I've noticed, I've been able to read and manipulate the data for every file that I've opened (and I've opened them all right from the email that they were attached to). So I'm wondering if my lack of problems is isolated to Red Hat 9.0 being my distro or if it's something else? Just last night, I opened up two PowerPoint presentations (the second even had sound transitional effects that played) with absolutely no problem. I don't mean to suggest that anyone reporting problems is spreading FUD; I'm just curious as to why I haven't experienced those problems.
What really confuses me is that some of the core developers of Linux are UNIX developers, how could anyone not expect it these developers to throw some of their original material in the mix.
I haven't read about any contributions from Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson for a while...but I'm willing to ask them what they think if the/. community really thinks it's relevant. But before I bother them, WTF makes you equate GNU/Linux developers to the UNIX innovators?
The message is clear: SCO is a house of cards inflated by their own hot air. Someone needs to light a match.
No, really, I think SCO is fscked and has been fscked and this is their last dying gasp. They figure if they're gonna go out, they might as well go out in style, eh?
Well, I guess they have a different sense of style than I do...but your point is made.:)
Here's a question (and mod me Redundant if someone's already pointed this out...I'm in a hurry): Why can't they just point out the infringing source code in the kernel without revealing their own proprietary code that is being infringed upon? Are they afraid that we might reverse-engineer the genie that is already out of the bottle or is this all just more obfuscation about what is really a legal non-issue?
Also, anyone that has ever worked for a pretty large corporation is aware of the Executive Summary; that being, get the gist of your meaning across very quickly because your average executive has a shorter attention span than a four-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder. It is interesting to me that the lead answer in this interview is: Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand. There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people.
At this point, I was hearing the Monty Python song with the
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably a debatable topic in its own right but in this context, I'll concede that point.
Again, given the example, I concur. But I object to "scientific" findings when those findings are subjective in nature which is what I perceive this case to be.
From the article:
How about we refrain from calling "it" anything until we have conclusive proof (instead of just anecdotal testimony) that "it" is a problem?
I remember the line of the hacker character in the movie The Core (paraphrasing): "I multitask like you breathe." Perhaps some people really can operate on multiple levels on multiple problems at the same time and perhaps the psychological academia can't quite wrap their minds around that concept yet. It's easy to spout theories and coin acronyms but it's much more difficult to attempt to understand that which is so easy to label.
Personally, I think that if learning new things is an "addiction", then the next killer app should be an online "info-pill".
--K.
Why do you consider this philosophy to be a Bad Thing (tm)?
Abstraction breeds inefficiency. It (abstraction) also breeds ignorant programmers. The very last thing we need in a Linux kernel is inefficiency.
I'm not advocating a hard-line "all your programs are belong to assembler" stance, but I'm a victim of "point-click-compile" programmers and I curse their software every day because their programs SUCK and they get in my way.
Personally, I'm very happy that Linus has enough of a technical clue to avoid unnecessary kernel-bloat. If you want bloated, insecure, semi-stable code...stick with Windows.
--K.
That's great, seriously. It is nice to know that there is a market for people in the telemarketing business so that they don't all lose their jobs. I do believe, however, that the enormous early adoption of the federal do-not-call list appears to be early evidence that this market is much smaller than many in the direct marketing industry would like to admit.
--K.
(Before I address this post, I think it is important to remind the community that Offtopic means not relevant to the subject at hand and that even ACs with against-the-grain opinions should have a voice. This particular post might be a Troll...but then again it seems to express a sentiment that is commonly seen here. Please open your mind and use your mod-points to stimulate interesting discussions between intelligent people with opposing opinions.)
To sum up your post: Blah blah blah, RMS is an unwashed hippie, blah blah blah, non-free software is good for the economy, blah blah blah, intellectual property is a good thing.....ad nauseum.
Arguments like that don't do much to advance the debate. RMS is at one end of the spectrum of the software debate and SCO is at the other end of that spectrum. A healthy debate between two such polarized positions usually results in a compromise that advances a position which is generally acceptable to everyone in between.
Left-side: Ideas cannot be controlled because the cost of their propagation is negligible on the Internet. Software is simply an expression of ideas in computer-understandable language.
Right-side: People that contribute new ideas to society deserve the right to control the use of those ideas perpetually in order to collect compensation for the effort they put forth to generate those ideas.
The balance lies somewhere in the middle, and I believe that that is the position RMS advances and which recent history supports. Linus gave his hard work away, yet last I heard he was driving a BMW convertible sports car. RMS himself somehow manages to fly around the world and appear at conferences, yet he doesn't charge a dime for his code.
It always seems to come down to control. Those who profit from control are threatened by those who seek to undermine that control. So then we have to ask why people seek control as well as why others seek to destroy control. In this light, I believe that RMS' intentions are mostly benign (I say "mostly" because I find it hard to believe that he doesn't have an ego at this point). RMS is a very fact-driven individual with little to no interest in personal wealth. He understands the fact that 1s and 0s cannot be constrained so he resists any effort to impose a false-property regime over those 1s and 0s; obfuscation is something every good programmer instinctually avoids.
On the other hand, our economy is built upon the concept that people who contribute to society are properly compensated. I don't believe that RMS would dispute this; I just think his idea of the mode of compensation flies in the face of accepted industry norms.
There's an acceptable middle-ground that we're still trying to find...but inflammatory rhetoric just hinders that process.
--K.
Hehe, I've had this urge (I mean, it gets rediculous after you've had to remove the Lovegate virus from 20 co-workers' PCs) but I guess I value teamwork more than GNU/Linux advocacy or any antipathy towards Microsoft. I just can't say no when one of my friends or family needs some technical help.
The somewhat surprising side-affect of this willingness to help my neighbor has been that they now value my opinion and they are increasingly curious about GNU/Linux because while I'm fixing their problem they frequently hear me muttering things like "why people pay for this crap when they can have something better for free boggles the mind".
I guess for me, helping people is more fun and important than my own personal stance on software (and this from a bootable-card-carrying hippie communist member of the FSF!).
--K.
That's a really interesting point and given my layman's knowledge of the law, I agree. This gives rise to a problem that most every programmer has faced: at some point, you just know your code is bloated and kludgy. At that point, you are faced with the choice of a severe code-audit or a total rewrite.
Now I'm sure that you can't directly map legal code to computer code but there seem to be some conceptual similarities and I wonder if this is one of them. Is our legal code bloated and, if so, aren't lawyers just hacking the loopholes created by such a system? Lawyers == Hackers? ACK!
I think the current P2P debacle proves that the most effective method that a common citizen can employ to "fight the law" is to simply ignore it and press on. This is not a new concept.
--K.
..if the MPAA is going to sue the Washington Post for the same reason that they sued 2600. I doubt they've got the chutzpah for that legal fight, but it would be quite interesting if they did.
--K.
Seven.
Boycotts do work and idiots do get exposed (read: Orrin Hatch flap).
Society doesn't turn on a dime but if enough people lean on the steering wheel long enough, it can negotiate a curve.
--K.
Finally, an acronym to replace all the various **IA, (MP|RI)AA, etc. etc. Nice one, Tibor!
I just hope the real Family doesn't take offense. Historically, they've had much more business sense than the entertainment cartels.
--K.
This at least helps me separate the true artists from the greedy jerks. Linkin Park and Green Day are disappointing...I've actually enjoyed some of their music. Madonna and Jewel come as no surprise.
The only groups I'm familiar with that have a leg to stand on in the assertion that their entire album is one piece of work are Enigma and the Trans Siberian Railroad Orchestra. I'm sure there are more, so this is not an entirely unreasonable position IMO. But the artists named in the article are either clueless or under a lot of contractual pressure from the labels.
--K.
I'm sure you would...especially since the RIAA and all of its apologists can't seem to figure it out.
--K.
I think that's the point that the entertainment industry and their paid-off congresscritters haven't quite come to grips with yet. People route around stupid laws. Put another, more politically correct way, I believe that people disregard laws that favor monied, elite societal niches. When the code of law conflicts with the norms of society, problems are inevitable. When the code of law favors an elite societal minority, I believe that history shows that the favored societal minority has either given ground or been trampled by the people that made them rich.
When people are breaking the law without the slightest idea that they are doing so, I think it is only logical to question the law.
--K.
Is there any history or precedent for a class-action barratry lawsuit?
Seems to me that we should be as legally adept as the entertainment cartels; when threatened, counter-attack and when one target slips off the hook immediately move the crosshairs onto the next most likely candidate. (Financial considerations might be a barrier to entry for most of us, but what about IBM?)
Perhaps it's time to take a hard look at the law firms and lawyers who are willing to represent companies like SCO in actions like this. I don't mean to suggest that moronically litigous companies and people should be let off the hook, but I think it might be easier (in the short term) to discourage the tools of their trade. Of course, that theory is based on what is probably an over-optimistic assumption: that the supply of lawyers might dry up due to the fear of litigation against themselves.
Which leads to yet another pretty interesting question that I've been thinking about: Why are we hearing so much about doctors protesting the rising costs of malpractice insurance in the US and almost nothing from the lawyers who also "practice" their trade? (Not trolling, honestly curious.)
--K.
Wouldn't royalties constitute commercial exploitation of one's patent, thus providing the palaver to the inventor? At risk of creating yet another
--K.
Yes. I tend to carry on conversations with people that swap circuit packs that, if done improperly, might inconvenience you for five seconds.
Given that attitude, I sincerely hope that you are my competitor.
--K.
As soon as I finish this Twinkie, I think I'll get offended.
--K.
So why would they (or did they) tell me that IE is their only supported platform?
I know that I was moderated Funny but that was a real quote from Linksys.
Any Linksys geeks reading this, I can supply info.
--K.
That's interesting, slugo3. I'm curious about the firmware version of your BEFSR41 and whether you're using Mozilla from a Windows platform or a GNU/Linux distro?
--K.
That's a great experiment that I have not yet tried and I will give it a shot if for no other reason than to identify the underlying problem that open standards are being usurped. Thanks for the pointer, SHEEN.
--K.
Here's their reply:
--K.
That's certainly a valid position but I wonder how much your customer, co-workers, and boss are willing to pay to avoid such minor anomalies when the alternative is vendor lock-in and future license costs.
--K.
and
You can keep the personal attacks...I don't buy them because they seem to spring from either long-held grudges or unsubstantiated claims against Eric's character.
What bothers me is the apparent willingness of this community to attack a person that has done a lot to bring us all here in the first place. If you don't like ESR's version of the jargon file, feel free to fork your own, or email ESR with your specific complaints and work it out.
I'm not disappointed that Taco posted this story because it's not a bad idea to question those we consider leaders in this loose society that is the FOSS community...but I'm surprised and a bit disappointed at how quickly we turn into a bunch of sharks willing to devour each other. The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory part of my brain thinks that any proprietary-software-funded trolls have certainly earned their money in this thread.
--K.
I keep hearing this criticism of Open/StarOffice, that it does ok with Word docs but doesn't work with most of the other MS Office file formats. I got curious about this so I've been forwarding various Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to my home email address from work just to test opening up files with OpenOffice. (If you're reading this, Boss, don't worry I delete everything right after the test!)
While there are some very minor little anomalies that I've noticed, I've been able to read and manipulate the data for every file that I've opened (and I've opened them all right from the email that they were attached to). So I'm wondering if my lack of problems is isolated to Red Hat 9.0 being my distro or if it's something else? Just last night, I opened up two PowerPoint presentations (the second even had sound transitional effects that played) with absolutely no problem. I don't mean to suggest that anyone reporting problems is spreading FUD; I'm just curious as to why I haven't experienced those problems.
--K.
I haven't read about any contributions from Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson for a while...but I'm willing to ask them what they think if the
The message is clear: SCO is a house of cards inflated by their own hot air. Someone needs to light a match.
--K.
Well, I guess they have a different sense of style than I do...but your point is made.
Here's a question (and mod me Redundant if someone's already pointed this out...I'm in a hurry): Why can't they just point out the infringing source code in the kernel without revealing their own proprietary code that is being infringed upon? Are they afraid that we might reverse-engineer the genie that is already out of the bottle or is this all just more obfuscation about what is really a legal non-issue?
Also, anyone that has ever worked for a pretty large corporation is aware of the Executive Summary; that being, get the gist of your meaning across very quickly because your average executive has a shorter attention span than a four-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder. It is interesting to me that the lead answer in this interview is: Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand. There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people.
At this point, I was hearing the Monty Python song with the modifier applied.
--K.