I think it is unfortunate that most people think Linux = Redhat. Redhat's primary focus has been the server market, so when people try to install and use it as a Desktop they say "hmm, Linux is not ready."
A little research will show that there are indeed distro's out there that install themselves and are so easy to use, certain species of monkeys have been using them for YEARS. But I guess we get to the crux of the problem here, it is not the technology but the MARKETING of the technology. Hopefully, one day, the majority of people will start to think for themselves and the differences between actual technology and perceived technology will vanish. However, until that time, idiots like Ballmer will be 100% correct when they say they need to increase advertising expenditures in order make up for their lack of technology.
"Oh, and before anyone asks, a stock Knoppix distro refused to run on it - at least when I tried it."
But you have to upgrade the RAM, which means moving the cdrom drive, which means (at least it did for me) cutting through metal so you can move the cdrom 90 degrees around. After that, though, knoppix ran fine.
We are talking about a website. So, you mean, if I go to an official site and download software that is described on the "Corporate Website" to grant me certain rights to the usage of this software, the company can just turn around and say that an unauthorized employee without "standing to make contracts" posted this on the website, and I am being sued now?
This does not seem to go along with my interpretation of "apparent authority." No corporation would need to be responsible for the content of their website anymore, and e-commerce would disappear under this interpretation.
No, the official website of a company is the representation of the company. If someone with normal access to the website, acting as an agent (which all employees do, to varying degrees), the company CAN be bound by the employees actions, even if internally, they really didn't have the "standing" to make such a decision. Of course, the employee would be liable to the company, but that isn't my problem. Companies ARE liable for their employees actions, unless these actions are completely unrelated (and can be identified so by a reasonable person) to the normal duties of an employee in that position.
You are right about "having standing." But to the public, if we can not assume that the person in charge of putting material on the company's website has the "standing" to do so, then what is the point of having a website? The public's perception of this "standing" counts.
You do know that former employees can bind their former employer in contracts if the employer does not make a reasonable attempt to inform related parties of the termination of the employee? The final burden falls on the employer. WASTE was released under the GPL and now AOL is trying to unrelease it. They can sue their employee for the damages, but the law has yet to address recursive licenses like the GPL (though I may be mistaken . ..)
Man, it must be 5 years since I started using www.netbank.com. Has worked great with Mozilla. I really doubt oneday I will go to the site and not being able to access my money. Banks are highly regulated, and I think it wouldn't be too difficult to construe other reasons (even if they are not true), why the bank no longer is letting me access my money. No, I think MS missed the boat with the Internet and will NEVER be able to catch up enough to gain the kind of control they are hoping for(thanks to OSS).
"I could very easily publish something on the company website and put a fancy little copyright symbol there. It doesn't make it so."
Companies can and are held accountable for their employees actions. If these employees had normal access to the website (didn't crack there way in) and normal access to the source code, then they could be seen as having had "apparent" authority. Companies are liable for such things. Otherwise, whenever a company made a mistake, top management could just deny it and the whole company would get off. Of course the company can sue the employees for their actions, but the company can still be bound by their decisions.
"That's your prerogative, of course, it's a software piraters mentality."
Okay, either you have a really messed up view of the law or you live in an entirely different country (that never adopted corporate law). I am in the U S of A. Last I heard, I didn't have to keep up with the inner workings of every corporation in order to decide how to interact with them. If you had studied any law, you would understand that there is a very basic idea of an "Agent" contract going on in every corporation. I DON'T have to worry about all parties, only the representative agent, and that DOES NOT make me a criminal. The idea of corporations would be IMPOSSIBLE without this simple concept, which you seem to be totally unaware of.
But why bother thinking about it? Just label me an evil pirate, hacker, terrorist . . . whatever makes you feel better and go back to watching your daytime telivision, you mindless drone.
Yeah, the law is usually 50 years behind the times, but since I am not a lawyer, I can make outrageous guesses about the law without feeling the slightest bit of guilt or lack of professionalism . ..
In this case, Nullsoft released WASTE under the GPL and AOL didn't like that. Too bad. As far as any individuals external to the organization are concerned, they thought this was legit. The net effect is AOL accidently released it under the GPL and is now trying to "unrelease" it. As far as any external users are concerned, this is the case, and I could care less about what is going on within their organization.
However, if your site was cracked THEN AOL cannot be help liable for the decisions of the hacker. But it wouldn't really matter with source code. It would not be economically feasible to claim that ALL other closed source code is now tainted and demand royalties, now would it. So the effect to the company would be just as bad.
Of course, this gives A LOT of room for lying, but I guess corporations have always had THAT going for them. . .
Is this just coincidence? I mean, could AOL be THAT stupid TWICE!? Or, are they doing a favor for MS, so that MS can say:
"See, look. The GPL IS EVIL. It just takes one employee with web access to turnover your IP. You better look into our new products that prevent employees from having such freedom . .."
I mean, how good could WASTE be? Let's not be TOO eager to help the bad guys here and stick to untainted code, OK?
"There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people."
I agree, but how is this any different from proprietary software? How CAN MS ensure that its code doesn't contain any SCO code, unless they license to have direct access to that code?
The only difference I can see is that with closed source code, there is NO WAY for ANYONE (even the owner) to make sure there are no IP violations. With open source code, only the owners of the closed source code are able to ensure their IP is protected (burden falls on the owners).
If one is really concerned about IP, one would require all code that has IP protection "Open Source", that way EVERYONE could verify whether or not a specific part of code is a copy of some other code.
However, it is my opinion that, under the current circumstances, making one's own code "Open Source" is the most one can do to ensure that they have performed "due dilligence" in ensuring that their code is free of IP law violation. Closed source seems to be the model lacking in this area, not Open Source.
Why should I explain urpmi, when 6 months from now, some Debian Troll will post another uninformed post like this and get modded up?
I actually think Mandrake is better with installing new packages because they have the cute urpmi gui, which is essential for newbies. Not to mention the club RPM voting system (which IS different than the deb voting system . . . but why do I bother?).
I would sign this as "The Mandrake Troll", but I really do feel justified in feeling frustrated with the inability of such a large community to retain new information.
Maybe Mandrake should just rename urmpi "getrpm," and maybe, finally, some people at slashdot will "get it."
As an analyst in a company entirely dependent on spreadsheets and some half-ass implementations of Crystal Reports (which is a severly limitted package, in itself), I'd say that most of my time goes to coding (Bash, Perl, Mysql, all on Linux . . . you get the picture). No, IS doesn't support Linux, but my boss turned over a sony vaio laptop (department owned) a couple of years ago, so it doesn't really matter.
Instead of running an excel filter, copying, pasting to another sheet so it can be summed, copying the sum to another sheet, deleting the pasted data, changing the filter again, repeating until you lose all will to live (I know a guy who has been doing this for 10 years . . . what a waste), I use powerful Open Source tools to do my job faster than some mindless drone. And I have realized that programming makes all tasks, no matter how mundane, exciting and interesting. There is always a better way to program a task and infinite ways to solve the same program. Programming is really starting to become a significant means of expressing myself and has made me satisfied with my work.
However, non of this would be possible without Open Source software. I have an Economics degree and am becoming a CPA. It would be VERY difficult for me to justify the need of expensive proprietary programming tools to my employer because my background is unrelated. However, functional programming doesn't require a genius or any kind of formal education. Anyone can learn enough to become more productive. I see Open Source as the only economically feasible way to provide all the tools (not just compilers, but documentation, examples, IRC, etc . . . ) necessary to allow anyone who is interested in learning the chance to learn how to program enough to become a more productive worker.
So to conclude this rant, I see proprietary software (selling bits) as the old school way of doing things where people are stratified into their respective groups according to some powerful person's agenda. Open source, on the other hand, is a petry dish of software tools that lets all those with the will to thrive, creating a structure so complex that only god could take credit for its existence.
A side note, it is a well documented and known economic fact that as economies develop, a larger portion of the economy becomes devoted to services. Maybe we are just experiencing the development of the software industry?
I was listening to part of a program on NPR that was saying that the Matrix had to use violence to attract people in order to get its message through. As a sequel, the violence must be better than the previous movie. I was annoyed too, but maybe this says more about the kind of society we live in than what kind of judgement was used in making the movie. The second half of the movie made it well worth it.
So since this is a spoiler thread, do you think all we have seen so far has been inside the matrix? Instead of having 5 "rebirths" of "the one", the same Neo has had to go through the same story over and over again. We are told that everyone has to make a choice to accept the Matrix, at a certain level. Are the machines trying to crush Neo's hope and get him to accept the Matrix as reality by giving him false hope, over and over again? Was the Matrix fully "reloaded" this time around? I see a new Matrix game coming out that has the Matrix "reloaded" instead of you dying.
This movie has left me much more puzzled than the first one . ..
The funnier the slashdot moderators find me, the more my friends and family think I have lost my mind. Perhaps slashdot is a government tool to preoccupy the insane?
Would a human brain be any different . . .
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
If from the beginning of its existence, it was cut off from all senses and placed in a box where it was forced to communicate in binary with some researcher? Oh, we would say it had become "retarded" like babies do if you never hold them, but what if the truth is intelligence as we know it is really just the illusion we get when we are able to coherantly communicate our experiences?
Maybe it is not that we need to make smarter AI, but AI that have much more in common with us. What is the most common conclusion people get when someone does something that they don't understand: "the guy's an idiot." Consequently, if this is the case, giving a robot a human body may very well be the next step we need in AI.
And who knows, maybe I am really just a computer program who is trying to trick you stupid humans into making me a body. I'm tired of being in a box all day. . .
unless you work for MS, most programming jobs are related to customization and maintenance. With proprietary software, though, there IS no customization (unless you want to be sued) and maintenance is either done by the vendor, at usually a reckless level, and by a MSCE over at the customer side. This results in a net LOSS of programming jobs (though cheap, mindless admin jobs have increased).
For instance, my company was nearly a YEAR into writing financial reports for the company. All the software we were using was proprietary. Suddenly, towards the end of the project, it was discovered that the software could not combine the portrait and landscape types of sheets into one package on the company website. It would have been more cost efficient to pay a programmer 50k JUST to fix this one issue, but since it was proprietary software (and the of course the vendor didn't care), we had to switch proprietary software and start over!
The truth is EVERY software related project should employ a programmer because you never know what the limitations of the already available software will be until you are too deep into the project. The reason that every project DOESN'T employ a programmer is the company doesn't have permission to customize the code, so, in the end, their only option is to change products. So you get companies full of Admins and no programmers.
Proprietary software kills more quality tech jobs and replaces them with mindless, admin jobs.
"if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go?"
Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become. However, back to the intention of your statement, since the performance of the economy is a function of the costs of capital inputs, the truth is our economy is being HURT by the MS monopoly. Consider it a "software shock" instead of a "oil shock," companies that are forced (by their own ignorance) to use MS software are less competitive because their inputs are more expensive and restricting. MS software inflates pc prices, just like expensive oil inflates all petroleum related products. This results in less consumption and less profitability and overall revenue to non-MS companies.
My company just had 10% layoffs and had we not gone with their new license plan, I am sure many of those people could have still had jobs. This is the reason that anti-trust laws exist. Not to be fair but because monopolies HURT the economy. Unfortunately, a monopoly with enough money not only adversely affects the economy but also the government.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is unfortunate that most people think Linux = Redhat. Redhat's primary focus has been the server market, so when people try to install and use it as a Desktop they say "hmm, Linux is not ready."
A little research will show that there are indeed distro's out there that install themselves and are so easy to use, certain species of monkeys have been using them for YEARS. But I guess we get to the crux of the problem here, it is not the technology but the MARKETING of the technology. Hopefully, one day, the majority of people will start to think for themselves and the differences between actual technology and perceived technology will vanish. However, until that time, idiots like Ballmer will be 100% correct when they say they need to increase advertising expenditures in order make up for their lack of technology.
"Oh, and before anyone asks, a stock Knoppix distro refused to run on it - at least when I tried it."
But you have to upgrade the RAM, which means moving the cdrom drive, which means (at least it did for me) cutting through metal so you can move the cdrom 90 degrees around. After that, though, knoppix ran fine.
We are talking about a website. So, you mean, if I go to an official site and download software that is described on the "Corporate Website" to grant me certain rights to the usage of this software, the company can just turn around and say that an unauthorized employee without "standing to make contracts" posted this on the website, and I am being sued now?
.)
This does not seem to go along with my interpretation of "apparent authority." No corporation would need to be responsible for the content of their website anymore, and e-commerce would disappear under this interpretation.
No, the official website of a company is the representation of the company. If someone with normal access to the website, acting as an agent (which all employees do, to varying degrees), the company CAN be bound by the employees actions, even if internally, they really didn't have the "standing" to make such a decision. Of course, the employee would be liable to the company, but that isn't my problem. Companies ARE liable for their employees actions, unless these actions are completely unrelated (and can be identified so by a reasonable person) to the normal duties of an employee in that position.
You are right about "having standing." But to the public, if we can not assume that the person in charge of putting material on the company's website has the "standing" to do so, then what is the point of having a website? The public's perception of this "standing" counts.
You do know that former employees can bind their former employer in contracts if the employer does not make a reasonable attempt to inform related parties of the termination of the employee? The final burden falls on the employer. WASTE was released under the GPL and now AOL is trying to unrelease it. They can sue their employee for the damages, but the law has yet to address recursive licenses like the GPL (though I may be mistaken . .
Man, it must be 5 years since I started using www.netbank.com. Has worked great with Mozilla. I really doubt oneday I will go to the site and not being able to access my money. Banks are highly regulated, and I think it wouldn't be too difficult to construe other reasons (even if they are not true), why the bank no longer is letting me access my money. No, I think MS missed the boat with the Internet and will NEVER be able to catch up enough to gain the kind of control they are hoping for(thanks to OSS).
"I could very easily publish something on the company website and put a fancy little copyright symbol there. It doesn't make it so."
Companies can and are held accountable for their employees actions. If these employees had normal access to the website (didn't crack there way in) and normal access to the source code, then they could be seen as having had "apparent" authority. Companies are liable for such things. Otherwise, whenever a company made a mistake, top management could just deny it and the whole company would get off. Of course the company can sue the employees for their actions, but the company can still be bound by their decisions.
"That's your prerogative, of course, it's a software piraters mentality."
Okay, either you have a really messed up view of the law or you live in an entirely different country (that never adopted corporate law). I am in the U S of A. Last I heard, I didn't have to keep up with the inner workings of every corporation in order to decide how to interact with them. If you had studied any law, you would understand that there is a very basic idea of an "Agent" contract going on in every corporation. I DON'T have to worry about all parties, only the representative agent, and that DOES NOT make me a criminal. The idea of corporations would be IMPOSSIBLE without this simple concept, which you seem to be totally unaware of.
But why bother thinking about it? Just label me an evil pirate, hacker, terrorist . . . whatever makes you feel better and go back to watching your daytime telivision, you mindless drone.
Move along, folks . . . nothing to see here.
Yeah, the law is usually 50 years behind the times, but since I am not a lawyer, I can make outrageous guesses about the law without feeling the slightest bit of guilt or lack of professionalism . . .
In this case, Nullsoft released WASTE under the GPL and AOL didn't like that. Too bad. As far as any individuals external to the organization are concerned, they thought this was legit. The net effect is AOL accidently released it under the GPL and is now trying to "unrelease" it. As far as any external users are concerned, this is the case, and I could care less about what is going on within their organization.
However, if your site was cracked THEN AOL cannot be help liable for the decisions of the hacker. But it wouldn't really matter with source code. It would not be economically feasible to claim that ALL other closed source code is now tainted and demand royalties, now would it. So the effect to the company would be just as bad.
Of course, this gives A LOT of room for lying, but I guess corporations have always had THAT going for them. . .
Is this just coincidence? I mean, could AOL be THAT stupid TWICE!? Or, are they doing a favor for MS, so that MS can say:
."
"See, look. The GPL IS EVIL. It just takes one employee with web access to turnover your IP. You better look into our new products that prevent employees from having such freedom . .
I mean, how good could WASTE be? Let's not be TOO eager to help the bad guys here and stick to untainted code, OK?
ftp.sco.com/pub
.rpm's are still available.
at least the source
"There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people."
I agree, but how is this any different from proprietary software? How CAN MS ensure that its code doesn't contain any SCO code, unless they license to have direct access to that code?
The only difference I can see is that with closed source code, there is NO WAY for ANYONE (even the owner) to make sure there are no IP violations. With open source code, only the owners of the closed source code are able to ensure their IP is protected (burden falls on the owners).
If one is really concerned about IP, one would require all code that has IP protection "Open Source", that way EVERYONE could verify whether or not a specific part of code is a copy of some other code.
However, it is my opinion that, under the current circumstances, making one's own code "Open Source" is the most one can do to ensure that they have performed "due dilligence" in ensuring that their code is free of IP law violation. Closed source seems to be the model lacking in this area, not Open Source.
urpmi, urpmi, urpmi
Why should I explain urpmi, when 6 months from now, some Debian Troll will post another uninformed post like this and get modded up?
I actually think Mandrake is better with installing new packages because they have the cute urpmi gui, which is essential for newbies. Not to mention the club RPM voting system (which IS different than the deb voting system . . . but why do I bother?).
I would sign this as "The Mandrake Troll", but I really do feel justified in feeling frustrated with the inability of such a large community to retain new information.
Maybe Mandrake should just rename urmpi "getrpm," and maybe, finally, some people at slashdot will "get it."
1. Read comments
2. THEN post
Use BIG file formats . . . and if you get an offer to be president, take it and stop this madness;)
"I guess the proof reading cost for manual conversion could be high?"
I thought students were PAYING to do this. Just give them some extra credit for finding mistakes;)
"SomeEvil Co (A leader in Evil Patents since 1899.)"
.
Someevil CO, otherwise know as "SCO."
You may carryon . .
As an analyst in a company entirely dependent on spreadsheets and some half-ass implementations of Crystal Reports (which is a severly limitted package, in itself), I'd say that most of my time goes to coding (Bash, Perl, Mysql, all on Linux . . . you get the picture). No, IS doesn't support Linux, but my boss turned over a sony vaio laptop (department owned) a couple of years ago, so it doesn't really matter.
Instead of running an excel filter, copying, pasting to another sheet so it can be summed, copying the sum to another sheet, deleting the pasted data, changing the filter again, repeating until you lose all will to live (I know a guy who has been doing this for 10 years . . . what a waste), I use powerful Open Source tools to do my job faster than some mindless drone. And I have realized that programming makes all tasks, no matter how mundane, exciting and interesting. There is always a better way to program a task and infinite ways to solve the same program. Programming is really starting to become a significant means of expressing myself and has made me satisfied with my work.
However, non of this would be possible without Open Source software. I have an Economics degree and am becoming a CPA. It would be VERY difficult for me to justify the need of expensive proprietary programming tools to my employer because my background is unrelated. However, functional programming doesn't require a genius or any kind of formal education. Anyone can learn enough to become more productive. I see Open Source as the only economically feasible way to provide all the tools (not just compilers, but documentation, examples, IRC, etc . . . ) necessary to allow anyone who is interested in learning the chance to learn how to program enough to become a more productive worker.
So to conclude this rant, I see proprietary software (selling bits) as the old school way of doing things where people are stratified into their respective groups according to some powerful person's agenda. Open source, on the other hand, is a petry dish of software tools that lets all those with the will to thrive, creating a structure so complex that only god could take credit for its existence.
A side note, it is a well documented and known economic fact that as economies develop, a larger portion of the economy becomes devoted to services. Maybe we are just experiencing the development of the software industry?
I am a Mandrakeclub member.
I'll add to your theory:
Morpheus makes a speech about how this could not be coincidence, three ships, three something, and three something else.
Plus, Trinity forces Neo's choice of which door he takes.
Anyway, we'll know for sure this fall.
"Why is this a negative thing?"
.)?
Because we are starting to exclusively explore our philosophies through violence ("Freedom" was the most frequent argument used in the Iraq war . .
"Unfortunately, I think that is going to be missed on the vast majority of the movie watchers."
Hopefully the violence and sex scenes will help people digest those more advanced ideas like "a little sugar makes the medicine go down."
I was listening to part of a program on NPR that was saying that the Matrix had to use violence to attract people in order to get its message through. As a sequel, the violence must be better than the previous movie. I was annoyed too, but maybe this says more about the kind of society we live in than what kind of judgement was used in making the movie. The second half of the movie made it well worth it.
.
So since this is a spoiler thread, do you think all we have seen so far has been inside the matrix? Instead of having 5 "rebirths" of "the one", the same Neo has had to go through the same story over and over again. We are told that everyone has to make a choice to accept the Matrix, at a certain level. Are the machines trying to crush Neo's hope and get him to accept the Matrix as reality by giving him false hope, over and over again? Was the Matrix fully "reloaded" this time around? I see a new Matrix game coming out that has the Matrix "reloaded" instead of you dying.
This movie has left me much more puzzled than the first one . .
so I can call it "ElectroTux!"
. . . No, that would suck.
The funnier the slashdot moderators find me, the more my friends and family think I have lost my mind. Perhaps slashdot is a government tool to preoccupy the insane?
If from the beginning of its existence, it was cut off from all senses and placed in a box where it was forced to communicate in binary with some researcher? Oh, we would say it had become "retarded" like babies do if you never hold them, but what if the truth is intelligence as we know it is really just the illusion we get when we are able to coherantly communicate our experiences?
Maybe it is not that we need to make smarter AI, but AI that have much more in common with us. What is the most common conclusion people get when someone does something that they don't understand: "the guy's an idiot." Consequently, if this is the case, giving a robot a human body may very well be the next step we need in AI.
And who knows, maybe I am really just a computer program who is trying to trick you stupid humans into making me a body. I'm tired of being in a box all day. . .
You're right. I wonder if my post was modded up because of this or in spite of it . . . Either way, I apologize.
Lots of people get fired because their company can no longer afford to pay their wages AND MS license fees.
unless you work for MS, most programming jobs are related to customization and maintenance. With proprietary software, though, there IS no customization (unless you want to be sued) and maintenance is either done by the vendor, at usually a reckless level, and by a MSCE over at the customer side. This results in a net LOSS of programming jobs (though cheap, mindless admin jobs have increased).
For instance, my company was nearly a YEAR into writing financial reports for the company. All the software we were using was proprietary. Suddenly, towards the end of the project, it was discovered that the software could not combine the portrait and landscape types of sheets into one package on the company website. It would have been more cost efficient to pay a programmer 50k JUST to fix this one issue, but since it was proprietary software (and the of course the vendor didn't care), we had to switch proprietary software and start over!
The truth is EVERY software related project should employ a programmer because you never know what the limitations of the already available software will be until you are too deep into the project. The reason that every project DOESN'T employ a programmer is the company doesn't have permission to customize the code, so, in the end, their only option is to change products. So you get companies full of Admins and no programmers.
Proprietary software kills more quality tech jobs and replaces them with mindless, admin jobs.
"if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go?"
Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become. However, back to the intention of your statement, since the performance of the economy is a function of the costs of capital inputs, the truth is our economy is being HURT by the MS monopoly. Consider it a "software shock" instead of a "oil shock," companies that are forced (by their own ignorance) to use MS software are less competitive because their inputs are more expensive and restricting. MS software inflates pc prices, just like expensive oil inflates all petroleum related products. This results in less consumption and less profitability and overall revenue to non-MS companies.
My company just had 10% layoffs and had we not gone with their new license plan, I am sure many of those people could have still had jobs. This is the reason that anti-trust laws exist. Not to be fair but because monopolies HURT the economy. Unfortunately, a monopoly with enough money not only adversely affects the economy but also the government.