Really. Who the hell rides these things in any serious way? Aren't they rightly seen as comedy transport on a par with pogo sticks and unicycles?
The idea behind the Segway is stupid: provide motorised transport at little more than jogging pace in a society where almost a third of the population are already suffering obesity from lack of exercise; where distances between amenities are some of the longest in the world, and where the car reigns supreme.
That's really going to take over the world - ooh yes.
SCO's market performance should be a reality check for ALL of us (myself included) who oppose them and their actions: the world outside thinks they have been doing the right thing, and has bought their stock because of it.
I point this out so that we get some perspective here. In terms of SCO's business they are not "on crack", "talking shit" etc.
In our little/. universe we have a perspective on the GPL and software "copyright" in general that does NOT necessarily fit with that of the rest of the world.
We need to present more mature arguments against SCO than "blah blah blah and more blah."
> I, for one, wouldn't trust any of the other > open source packages for any computers that > I deemed critical insofar as security goes.
Would you include OpenSSH and OpenSSL as systems you trust?
If not, then you are affectively saying you would not trust GNU/Linux at all for anything mission-critial.
But since 99% of computer systems are no way near mission critical - what's the big deal? Security is about trust and a jugement of effort to secure over convenience.
So use Solaris and commercial SSH, etc. or some other flavour that you trust. It's not as if it's a straight choice between GNU/Linux and Windows or whatever.
If you'd said "I work for a web development house that used to produce everyting using J2EE, then we discovered PHP..." I'd be more interested in what you had to say about the merits of PHP over Java. Let me guess - you also can't undertand why anyone would use Oracle when MySQL is so easy and fast, yes?
It's all about horses for courses.
There is an "overhead" in Java, because it's not designed for quick-n-dirty deployment of something trivial. Getting the whole J2EE thing together to deliver a mail form is obviously going to take you 5 times longer in Java than it will in, say, perl or PHP.
Really, what's a "fad" in this context, and how does it "pass"?
If by "fad" is meant "something that makes headlines" then of course it will pass, but does that make it less used, or fit for its purpose, or what? I remember when colour TV was a "fad" - at least, it was a common topic of conversation and generated lots of exitement (will snooker become the new baseball?). But how often do you hear about it now? Is that because nobody watches colour TV any more?
If something comes along to REPLACE it then that's a different matter. P2P will probably "pass" in that case - but I think that's unlikely.
There are at least a couple of languages that do not have or need any punctuation - I know Latin doesn't, and Japanese only uses punctuation to end sentences, which is also the only time when convention demands a space. I have seen whole books in Japanese written without any spaces anywhere within paragraphs though.
> But in reality antivirus software is playing a losing game
There is a huge Emperor's New Clothes factor with the anti-Virus industry. Consumers say to eachother "I must have anti-virus. My virus databases are updated once every nano-second. I am secure... blah blah."
But when was the last time your A-V system actually stopped a NEW virus before it did you significant damage?
ExploreZip: We had Norton on all desktops and up- to-date. Screwed us up purdy good. We sent most users home at lunchtime.
"I Love You" - same again. But this time, users asked if they could take the rest of the day off around about 11:00am.
Klez - a pattern emerging...
SoBig - SAFE! NO INFECTIONS! YIPEE!... why?
BECAUSE AFTER KLEZ WE DECIDED TO BAN ALL EXECUTABLES FILES, THAT'S WHY.
I overheard our IT Director griping that Norton have almost doubled their bill for the renewal of our corporate license this year. Sounds like we might just tell them to fuck themselves.
I think you'll find that 90% of those are so old (e.g. not being able to run under Win95+, or work by infecting things that are now absent in Windows, etc.) that you needn't worry about them.
The number of signatures in an AV database isn't really the issue. It's whether it's up to date with the current ones that counts.
True, clam doesn't do polymorphic checks and stuff, but how many times have you seen a virus blocked by a polymophic check? Once? Twice in a million scans?
It is now for ever more locked in people's minds as "comedy transport" along with monocycles and pogosticks.
Does anyone know what Dean Kamen was thinking when he came up with this idea? What was his elevator pitch? "Americans have such a small country, take far too much physical exercise and hate driving cars - they will all jump at the chance to ride electrified sticks on wheels."
Yes, you can copyright the words "American Heritage" because such a phrase is sufficiently unusual and not in common parlance for it to be a mark.... becuase Americans HAVE no heritage.
> handle about 100 Requests per second before it starts to get hot.
Didn't the original post talk about 100 *concurrent* connections per second? In which case, that's one hell of different metric to simply 100 reguests per second. Each of those connections could be doing 100 requests in the second, for instance.
It can't be "romajii" (with two "i" s), becuase that would make the "i" sound long, which would make it a completely different word.
The length of vowel sounds are very significant, and getting it wrong - e.g. asking for a map ("chizu") and being given some cheese ("cheezu") - makes it just about the only major mistake English speakers make when pronouncing Japanese.
The one I'm most familar with is Hepburn, which would render "beer" as "biru" with a macron over the "i" to indicate a long "i" sound.
Incidentally, "Biru" without the macron would be the Japanese word for a large or otherwise significant building (not, as is sometimes wrongly assumed, simply a "building", for which the Japanese use the native word "tatemono").
I believe just about all non-Romanised languages (Chinese, Mayan, Xosa etc.) have "official" ways of rendition in English - so there's not much point arguing about it unfortunately.
Of course it's bollocks that "everyone has to approve of everything or they oppose free speech", but like I said, playing the free speech card on this is not the issue.
You say "FreeNet appears to have an all-or-nothing approach [by design]" - but that's because it's FreeNet! It would't BE FreeNet if it wasn't like that. It would some other peer-to-peer system and we wouldn't be having this debate.
You're right about the individual's choice to weigh up the pros and cons of the system. I think on balance most people who think like that would decide not to use FreeNet. However, it seems to me like this is akin to Schrodiger's Cat: you can't know whether your hard drive contains kiddie porn, so in the end why should you care? Your mobile phone network might be used by drug dealers... and so it goes on.
> It's hard to tell what's being encrypted; but > it's easy to tell that crypto is being used.
I'm glad you mentioned that - because I'm designing a stegonographic layer for Freenet that would make its use very hard to detect. Passing it over SSL or SSH ports, or even hiding it in transfers of images over FTP...
Just give me some time, a team developers and bingo. Stego is the velvet glove over the steel fist of crypto.
Bwah ha ha haaa!
(Several secret messges are hidden in this post by the way.)
By that logic you would be in favour of outlawing the telephone system, since I can use that to make a drug deal, or incite racial hatred.
Or what about beds? I can have sex with minors in my bed. Make beds illegal!
You're right - it's not about free speech, but it *is* about balance. Balancing the good with the evil.
If you can find a way to design Freenet so that kiddie porn is difficult or impossible to upload without altering the system so much as to make it useless for everybody, then go ahead.
If you work for IBM, can you tell me why Lotus originally chose the name "Domino"?
I don't know about you, but the word "domino" brings to mind things that fall down, and cause other things to fall with them - the "domino effect".
As far as product names go, that choice has always mystified me. There's a bus company in the UK called "Impact" and that's always made me laugh a bit as well given the fact that road accidents involving busses are quite common.
When I was in Japan, I was asked if I wanted a cup of "cow piss" which turned out to be a product called Calpis.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we can but hope.
I interpret most of what SCO are doing as an attempt to prolong things on the very, very slim chance that they win.
It should be poll.
Really. Who the hell rides these things in any serious way? Aren't they rightly seen as comedy transport on a par with pogo sticks and unicycles?
The idea behind the Segway is stupid: provide motorised transport at little more than jogging pace in a society where almost a third of the population are already suffering obesity from lack of exercise; where distances between amenities are some of the longest in the world, and where the car reigns supreme.
That's really going to take over the world - ooh yes.
I wouldn't call this being in deep shit.
/. universe we have a perspective on the GPL and software "copyright" in general that does NOT necessarily fit with that of the rest of the world.
SCO's market performance should be a reality check for ALL of us (myself included) who oppose them and their actions: the world outside thinks they have been doing the right thing, and has bought their stock because of it.
I point this out so that we get some perspective here. In terms of SCO's business they are not "on crack", "talking shit" etc.
In our little
We need to present more mature arguments against SCO than "blah blah blah and more blah."
> I, for one, wouldn't trust any of the other
> open source packages for any computers that
> I deemed critical insofar as security goes.
Would you include OpenSSH and OpenSSL as systems you trust?
If not, then you are affectively saying you would not trust GNU/Linux at all for anything mission-critial.
But since 99% of computer systems are no way near mission critical - what's the big deal? Security is about trust and a jugement of effort to secure over convenience.
So use Solaris and commercial SSH, etc. or some other flavour that you trust. It's not as if it's a straight choice between GNU/Linux and Windows or whatever.
No - use ASP.NET (if you must)
... and don't even THINK about COM.
ASP is Visual Basic. Visual Basic is just shit for anything other than a five-line knock-up.
If you'd said "I work for a web development house that used to produce everyting using J2EE, then we discovered PHP..." I'd be more interested in what you had to say about the merits of PHP over Java. Let me guess - you also can't undertand why anyone would use Oracle when MySQL is so easy and fast, yes?
It's all about horses for courses.
There is an "overhead" in Java, because it's not designed for quick-n-dirty deployment of something trivial. Getting the whole J2EE thing together to deliver a mail form is obviously going to take you 5 times longer in Java than it will in, say, perl or PHP.
But that's obvious, isn't it?
OK, it's been over 100 years now...
I think it's time people who accused other people of being "communists" understood what that term actually means.
If you are against property rights (in general, not just intellectual) then you are an anarchist. Like the Diggers, the Levellers, the Autonomen, etc.
You are absolutely, totally and utterly NOT a communist!
Is/was Usenet a "passing fad"?
Really, what's a "fad" in this context, and how does it "pass"?
If by "fad" is meant "something that makes headlines" then of course it will pass, but does that make it less used, or fit for its purpose, or what? I remember when colour TV was a "fad" - at least, it was a common topic of conversation and generated lots of exitement (will snooker become the new baseball?). But how often do you hear about it now? Is that because nobody watches colour TV any more?
If something comes along to REPLACE it then that's a different matter. P2P will probably "pass" in that case - but I think that's unlikely.
There are at least a couple of languages that do not have or need any punctuation - I know Latin doesn't, and Japanese only uses punctuation to end sentences, which is also the only time when convention demands a space. I have seen whole books in Japanese written without any spaces anywhere within paragraphs though.
I thought that, then I installed the latest version of OpenOffice and I realised - the rules *have* changed!
> But in reality antivirus software is playing a losing game
... why?
There is a huge Emperor's New Clothes factor with the anti-Virus industry. Consumers say to eachother "I must have anti-virus. My virus databases are updated once every nano-second. I am secure... blah blah."
But when was the last time your A-V system actually stopped a NEW virus before it did you significant damage?
ExploreZip: We had Norton on all desktops and up-
to-date. Screwed us up purdy good. We sent most users home at lunchtime.
"I Love You" - same again. But this time, users asked if they could take the rest of the day off around about 11:00am.
Klez - a pattern emerging...
SoBig - SAFE! NO INFECTIONS! YIPEE!
BECAUSE AFTER KLEZ WE DECIDED TO BAN ALL EXECUTABLES FILES, THAT'S WHY.
I overheard our IT Director griping that Norton have almost doubled their bill for the renewal of our corporate license this year. Sounds like we might just tell them to fuck themselves.
> has definitions for just shy of 69K
I think you'll find that 90% of those are so old (e.g. not being able to run under Win95+, or work by infecting things that are now absent in Windows, etc.) that you needn't worry about them.
The number of signatures in an AV database isn't really the issue. It's whether it's up to date with the current ones that counts.
True, clam doesn't do polymorphic checks and stuff, but how many times have you seen a virus blocked by a polymophic check? Once? Twice in a million scans?
> We're a small (100 person) company that averages about 4,000 internet emails a week
That's almost exactly the same size as us, but our mailstats show Sobig is 2.03% of our traffic.
I wonder why we have such a huge disparity?
The segway is dead.
It is now for ever more locked in people's minds as "comedy transport" along with monocycles and pogosticks.
Does anyone know what Dean Kamen was thinking when he came up with this idea? What was his elevator pitch? "Americans have such a small country, take far too much physical exercise and hate driving cars - they will all jump at the chance to ride electrified sticks on wheels."
Oh yeash! What a fantastic ideah!
The article doesn't say Windows as NO remote admin capabilities. It says GNU/Linux ones are better.
I happen to believe they are, because they're a lot easier for me to use. And I don't have to pay for the privilege of using them, obviously.
The former is - as you point out - a matter of debate. I don't know anythig about VBscript, but if you say it's horrid I'll take your word for it.
The latter is not.
So why is bandwidth a scarce resource exactly?
Yes, you can copyright the words "American Heritage" because such a phrase is sufficiently unusual and not in common parlance for it to be a mark. ... becuase Americans HAVE no heritage.
FLAME ON!
only joking only joking only joking
> handle about 100 Requests per second before it starts to get hot.
Didn't the original post talk about 100 *concurrent* connections per second? In which case, that's one hell of different metric to simply 100 reguests per second. Each of those connections could be doing 100 requests in the second, for instance.
It can't be "romajii" (with two "i" s), becuase that would make the "i" sound long, which would make it a completely different word.
The length of vowel sounds are very significant, and getting it wrong - e.g. asking for a map ("chizu") and being given some cheese ("cheezu") - makes it just about the only major mistake English speakers make when pronouncing Japanese.
There are actually two official methods of spelling Japanese words in English: the Hepburn System and the Mombusho System.
A quick Google brings up this on the subject
The one I'm most familar with is Hepburn, which would render "beer" as "biru" with a macron over the "i" to indicate a long "i" sound.
Incidentally, "Biru" without the macron would be the Japanese word for a large or otherwise significant building (not, as is sometimes wrongly assumed, simply a "building", for which the Japanese use the native word "tatemono").
I believe just about all non-Romanised languages (Chinese, Mayan, Xosa etc.) have "official" ways of rendition in English - so there's not much point arguing about it unfortunately.
Of course it's bollocks that "everyone has to approve of everything or they oppose free speech", but like I said, playing the free speech card on this is not the issue.
You say "FreeNet appears to have an all-or-nothing approach [by design]" - but that's because it's FreeNet! It would't BE FreeNet if it wasn't like that. It would some other peer-to-peer system and we wouldn't be having this debate.
You're right about the individual's choice to weigh up the pros and cons of the system. I think on balance most people who think like that would decide not to use FreeNet. However, it seems to me like this is akin to Schrodiger's Cat: you can't know whether your hard drive contains kiddie porn, so in the end why should you care? Your mobile phone network might be used by drug dealers... and so it goes on.
> It's hard to tell what's being encrypted; but
> it's easy to tell that crypto is being used.
I'm glad you mentioned that - because I'm designing a stegonographic layer for Freenet that would make its use very hard to detect. Passing it over SSL or SSH ports, or even hiding it in transfers of images over FTP...
Just give me some time, a team developers and bingo. Stego is the velvet glove over the steel fist of crypto.
Bwah ha ha haaa!
(Several secret messges are hidden in this post by the way.)
By that logic you would be in favour of outlawing the telephone system, since I can use that to make a drug deal, or incite racial hatred.
Or what about beds? I can have sex with minors in my bed. Make beds illegal!
You're right - it's not about free speech, but it *is* about balance. Balancing the good with the evil.
If you can find a way to design Freenet so that kiddie porn is difficult or impossible to upload without altering the system so much as to make it useless for everybody, then go ahead.
If you work for IBM, can you tell me why Lotus originally chose the name "Domino"?
I don't know about you, but the word "domino" brings to mind things that fall down, and cause other things to fall with them - the "domino effect".
As far as product names go, that choice has always mystified me. There's a bus company in the UK called "Impact" and that's always made me laugh a bit as well given the fact that road accidents involving busses are quite common.
When I was in Japan, I was asked if I wanted a cup of "cow piss" which turned out to be a product called Calpis.
Is it just me or is this off-topic?
Anyone who's read the excellent "A Deepness In the Sky" will recognise these goggles as the "huds" in that book.