I had no idea. Thanks for pointing that out; I feel right foolish for having used the term without knowing what it meant all this time. Happily, I'm now (somewhat more) educated.:-)
There's no easy answer to your conundrum. On the one hand, I bet you that even if the statement "there's never been as exciting a time to be alive as now" has always been true (to the extent we can agree that it's a good thing, and not exciting as in that "interesting times" Chinese curse kind of way) it must at least be possible to more acutely feel it these days than ever before. We're literally seeing quantum leaps in just about every avenue of innovation and development.
On the other hand, besides your other fingers, there's the issue, so seldom pondered, of whether every step forward is really a step in the right direction. I'm not sure that came out right, as I'm not about to argue in favour of being a Luddite, but for quite some time now, it has seemed to me as though people felt that progress was something that was happening to them, not something they were themselves driving. (Perhaps that's just telling of the kind of people I've been around, but even so, I'm making a point here). Now clearly unless you're in the top tier and at the very forefront of the cutting edge, you'll probably be able to relate, or at least know someone who can, whenever you hear something uttered along the lines of this: "I don't know why they're changing all this, the old system was working just fine." In some cases, the people saying that just have trouble letting go. In other cases, they're perfectly right.
Yeah, no, I don't have an answer for you. It troubles me greatly that the very definition of progress is advancement, and our tendency to narrow things down leads us to see that as linear progression along a vector that we've tagged as "good" or "beneficial", when in fact there are times when it feels like the next-gen implementation of what was once a great idea feels for all the world as though it's really a step back. And sometimes, the reason it feels that way is because it is.
I believe the poster you replied to asked his question with a jesting undertone, but you afforded him/her the courtesy of a serious reply, and so I'll do the same to you.
While it's unlikely that Microsoft has used any code from the Samba project, it's certain that they optimised their SMB/CIFS implementation in Windows 2000. And prior to that, it had been verified (and heavily marketed, if you remember) that SGI servers running Samba achieved better performance than Windows NT servers. Hence it is not impossible that this served to motivate Microsoft to improve their implementation, proving how the benefits of GPL'ed code fosters innovation and betterment.
However, the SMB protocol was not created by Microsoft. If any one entity, corporate or otherwise, is to be credited with the design of this protocol, it is IBM corporation. It IS true that Microsoft then developed the protocol further from its early LANMAN days, however.
Regardless of whether what you suggest would or would not be legal, it isn't necessary. As the article points out, the document is obsolete and the methods it describes are not even in use by Microsoft anymore. Besides, they are inappropriate for a Posix/Unix implementation, so alternative methods have been in use for some time anyway.
It seems to me that Vivendi is trying to prevent the bnetd project from ever earning any money as a result of their efforts by denying them every right to use their work - even for noncommercial purposes.
Is this kind of approach at all legal? I'm not even to interested in what might be the state of affairs if bnetd some day did become for-profit, but is it even possible to sue them as long as they're not?
I'd be surprised if you took the time to read all responses on this thread - but I do believe it is the thought that counts. I'm delighted on your behalf and I wish you both the very best!
... was mostly very small, very simple stuff. There's the old "disable the kernel's ability to use the kernel speaker" by making the first statement in linux/drivers/char/vt.c function _kd_mksound a simple return().
The next thing I did was to make a/proc/pcspeaker entry to which I could echo 1 in order to enable the speaker and 0 to disable it.
Allright, so it's very banal and easy, but the key is that it was my first delving into the kernel and it was all possible to figure out by simply watching the existing code in there and duplicating what existed elsewhere.
I think that's the best approach if you just want to start getting your hands dirty; dive in there and look at the small bits you can easily affect while still knowing what you're doing. Then, as you grow bolder, you'll probably want to reach for those FAQs and manuals - but at least you'll have outgrown the initial fear of even touching the kernel source, and from that only good can come.
I cannot believe you were moderated up to "Informative" (at the time of my reading)
Anyways: You, sir, are obviously trolling. Your first post had a touch of subtlety, but in this one you have tripped yourself up.
Linux does have support for journalled filesystems and symmetrical multi-processing. I don't know what you mean by memory protection, so I'll leave that one open.
There is no such gcc release as 3.1 - at the time of this writing, gcc 3.0.2 is the most recent version.
Perhaps it is due to good reasoning that popular belief would have it that VB, an interpreted language (as opposed to a compiled one) leaves a lot to be desired when compared with C. I'd like to hear more about how you can "go as low" as with C, and please do not leave out such tidbits as program size and memory footprint.
I'd love to say that I like the occasional troll, but the truth is I don't. Please go away.
It's hardly surprising to find ourselves at this juncture. What we face today has after all come about as the result of Slashdot's evolution, and evolution doesn't stand still at any given moment even though it may seem that way, since by contrast it appears to move forwards by leaps and bounds rather than a steady pace.
Slashdot is now 4 years old. That's an amazing acomplishment right there. On the other hand, I think we can all agree that what we come back for everyday - what we came here for today - is fairly different from the Slashdot of four years ago. We've come a long way - and a lot of people have climbed aboard along that way.
Now, is it so far-fetched to think that this growth is exactly what prompts the change? I don't want Slashdot to change anymore than CmdrTaco (or the rest of you) do, but it makes perfect sense that it must. I'd even claim that it's a little naive to think that rising popularity - for any website - won't, in the long term, spell change, and not necessarily for the better.
In the face of the announced changes, some shrug and carry on while others threaten to leave. I'm left hoping that nobody feels cheated and that those who leave realize what is happening and why.
And who knows. Maybe if a large enough portion of the crowd that visits Slashdot regularly feel offended by the changes and decide not to come back, then the aforementioned growth will subside and the problem goes away (snap) just like that!
It's very interesting to notice that a majority of people indicate that they do not care about personal encryption, primarily for their electronic mail communication. I recall reading in the PGP readme, when I first discovered it - version 2.x or 3.x at the time, I think - how it made perfect sense to use encryption to ensure your privacy. After all, did you not prefer to send your most personal thoughts using letters within envelopes rather than postcards?
However, when I try to advocate encryption to those I know and hope to influence, they all seem to indicate that they aren't all that concerned about their email. And yet those same people never fail to be annoyed when I walk up to their computer and pretend to read their email in order to prove my point.
Perhaps most people are unaware of how easy their email can be intercepted and read? After all, an email address might appear to be like a telephone number - a direct link to whomever one might wish to contact. And we're comfortable with the phones - after all, wiretaps seem hard (or at least laboureous) to obtain, and we suspect that capacity prevents wiretaps from being universally applied. Not so with email, though - it's child's play to intercept any SMTP communication that passes through your network. And if you happen to be centrally located, in a network topological sense, there's no theoretical limit to the amount of communication you can eavesdrop on.
I must admit that I'm not being entirely altruistic when I advocate encryption - my wish for broad adoption of personal encryption technology is first and foremost self-serving. To tap again into the old PGP readme files; sending mail in "sealed" envelopes is not currently suspicious due to the fact that the practice is so widespread. Untill encryption becomes commonplace it remains far too easy to label it suspicious behaviour.
Here's to hoping that free encryption will carry on where the commercial offerings have failed. Cheers.
Could it be that possibly, just possibly, that, Microsoft produces, the, *GASP*, best solution for some people? Is that completely beyond comprehension?
Maybe there is some confusion as to what "the best solution" might mean.
You see, for quite a few of us, the best solution is not purely based on technical merit. I am for the purpose of this post completely ignoring the fact that Linux is technically superior to any similar Microsoft offering in several aspects, just as I won't repeat your point that perhaps, for technical reasons, a Microsoft product might seem the better tool in other situations.
It's about ethics, I guess. And I'll venture to guess further that it's about whether you choose to care or not. If you can't be bothered to think of something so trivial as the ethical foundation for your choice of software then perhaps you shouldn't waste time reading the rest of my post.
For me, Microsoft isn't an option, regardless of what it allows me to do. Just as I won't by a DVD player, because I feel that I'm being denied fundamental consumer rights and freedoms over my own purchase, I won't use Microsoft code because it violates a whole range of principles that are critically important to me.
Now admittedly, you were talking about some people, whereas I have only been talking about myself. But perhaps for some people there's more to the question of what the best tool for the job is than what gets it done the quickest/slickest.
It's getting to be quite uncommon to see a topic posted on slashdot without someone railing against it with a reply along the lines of: "So? What's the big deal? It's not like I care."
The point I'm trying to make is that whether or not you care, yourself, is exactly as interesting - to you - as it is to others to have opinions of their own. Whether or not you personally mind using search engines where the content returned might have more to do with financial transactions that you remain ignorant of, or the fact that they exist at all, doesn't make it a poor story.
Running a search engine certainly isn't free, but if you want to make up for that by changing what a search engine IS, or at least what it is commonly (and perhaps naively) perceived to be, without telling anyone about it, then that most certainly is deceptive advertising.
The right of search engines to charge money for returning their result isn't in question, it's how they do it that is the issue. When you ask your teacher at school how to solve a particular problem, you expect him to answer to the best of his ability, not according to what he's paid to say, right? And if what he tells you is influenced by some form of remuneration, whether it's secret or not, wouldn't you prefer to be told about it?
It's all about playing an open game. It's what MSNBC do whenever they mention Microsoft and add a comment to the effect that MSNBC is a joint venture held by, among others, Microsoft. It's about confessing to a prejudice when you're asked for an opinion. If you don't reveal whatever motivation that might slant what you say, then you must accept that people who discover this motivation later could come to see what you said, and perhaps you yourself, in a new light.
We all agree that telling something that isn't the truth is deceptive, but to not tell something which is true seems to be more of a gray area.
Hm, I'd say that's a flaw right there, in their distribution system - *and* in pissing customers off as in your case. It's not "innovative" as I like to think of it.
I might feel motivated to actually browse by this gigex thing and see what I need to download the demo for Linux, though I'll be severly surprised to find anything.
Hrmph! "Gigex 2.0 is the leading Internet delivery, fulfillment and logistics service for senders of digital packages. Gigex offers guaranteed delivery!"
Uhm, since you mentioned the Spec Ops product, I decided to drop them a visit, but it seems the only way of getting a demo is by using some "gigex" thing which seems to rely on Windows. That's a problem I think I can cope with, when it comes to actually playing the game, but Windows networking is sort of out of the question. Is there not perhaps some more convenient way of obtaining this demo? Like, good old-fashioned ftp? There is a Specops.exe file in their FTP site, but it's only 84 K and contains the word "gigex" all over the place...
...is not really going great lately, or so it seems to me. Of course, that is probably only because my opinion of a great computer industry is rather opposite of those that are driving it now. I'd even think that if you asked them, they'd say it's going great and that they're nearly where they want to be now.
It upsets me that products reach the market and the only thing the producers care about are how they perform. Okay, sure - most of the time the producers are only tossing cash at it, and only want cash back - but still, so few worry about how their product will fare out there.
If I ever published something - sadly, that's highly unlikely;) - I'd be worrying sick about how it would be received. Not in terms of how well it would do commercially, because that wouldn't really be a sign of what people thought of my product. I would be worried about whether they liked it, if they liked those little bits I put in it that probably contradicted a lot of other things but that *meant* something to me, if they *got* the points I'd have been trying to make.
Most of all, I'd be worried about if I could walk arround proudly and smile when people looked twice upon hearing my name, saying: "Yes, I'm the one who made that. Hey, glad you liked it."
Even if I made a million buckazoids, I'd be horrified if I discovered that my product was really terrible - though it's unlikely it would have been published in the first place if that were the case.
What I'm trying to say is that I find it sad that only the financial success of a product seems to matter nowadays. Though the pressure of making something that will sell well does tend to result in a number of hours of work spent polishing a product, you can easily tell if something is a labour of love, something that was almost hard to let go of, or if something is floating on the wave of ambition that lies in trying to score bucks.
Utterly sad. Though my heart is not all cold and void, for there still exists one community in which people care about what they create. A community in which people only create things because they care about them, actually. A community of which I am proud to say that I belong to.
Slashdot Mirror
I had no idea. Thanks for pointing that out; I feel right foolish for having used the term without knowing what it meant all this time. Happily, I'm now (somewhat more) educated. :-)
There's no easy answer to your conundrum. On the one hand, I bet you that even if the statement "there's never been as exciting a time to be alive as now" has always been true (to the extent we can agree that it's a good thing, and not exciting as in that "interesting times" Chinese curse kind of way) it must at least be possible to more acutely feel it these days than ever before. We're literally seeing quantum leaps in just about every avenue of innovation and development.
On the other hand, besides your other fingers, there's the issue, so seldom pondered, of whether every step forward is really a step in the right direction. I'm not sure that came out right, as I'm not about to argue in favour of being a Luddite, but for quite some time now, it has seemed to me as though people felt that progress was something that was happening to them, not something they were themselves driving. (Perhaps that's just telling of the kind of people I've been around, but even so, I'm making a point here). Now clearly unless you're in the top tier and at the very forefront of the cutting edge, you'll probably be able to relate, or at least know someone who can, whenever you hear something uttered along the lines of this: "I don't know why they're changing all this, the old system was working just fine." In some cases, the people saying that just have trouble letting go. In other cases, they're perfectly right.
Yeah, no, I don't have an answer for you. It troubles me greatly that the very definition of progress is advancement, and our tendency to narrow things down leads us to see that as linear progression along a vector that we've tagged as "good" or "beneficial", when in fact there are times when it feels like the next-gen implementation of what was once a great idea feels for all the world as though it's really a step back. And sometimes, the reason it feels that way is because it is.
I believe the poster you replied to asked his question with a jesting undertone, but you afforded him/her the courtesy of a serious reply, and so I'll do the same to you.
While it's unlikely that Microsoft has used any code from the Samba project, it's certain that they optimised their SMB/CIFS implementation in Windows 2000. And prior to that, it had been verified (and heavily marketed, if you remember) that SGI servers running Samba achieved better performance than Windows NT servers. Hence it is not impossible that this served to motivate Microsoft to improve their implementation, proving how the benefits of GPL'ed code fosters innovation and betterment.
However, the SMB protocol was not created by Microsoft. If any one entity, corporate or otherwise, is to be credited with the design of this protocol, it is IBM corporation. It IS true that Microsoft then developed the protocol further from its early LANMAN days, however.
Regardless of whether what you suggest would or would not be legal, it isn't necessary. As the article points out, the document is obsolete and the methods it describes are not even in use by Microsoft anymore. Besides, they are inappropriate for a Posix/Unix implementation, so alternative methods have been in use for some time anyway.
It seems to me that Vivendi is trying to prevent the bnetd project from ever earning any money as a result of their efforts by denying them every right to use their work - even for noncommercial purposes.
Is this kind of approach at all legal? I'm not even to interested in what might be the state of affairs if bnetd some day did become for-profit, but is it even possible to sue them as long as they're not?
IANAL, and so I'm lost in confusion.
I'd be surprised if you took the time to read all responses on this thread - but I do believe it is the thought that counts. I'm delighted on your behalf and I wish you both the very best!
... was mostly very small, very simple stuff. There's the old "disable the kernel's ability to use the kernel speaker" by making the first statement in linux/drivers/char/vt.c function _kd_mksound a simple return().
/proc/pcspeaker entry to which I could echo 1 in order to enable the speaker and 0 to disable it.
The next thing I did was to make a
Allright, so it's very banal and easy, but the key is that it was my first delving into the kernel and it was all possible to figure out by simply watching the existing code in there and duplicating what existed elsewhere.
I think that's the best approach if you just want to start getting your hands dirty; dive in there and look at the small bits you can easily affect while still knowing what you're doing. Then, as you grow bolder, you'll probably want to reach for those FAQs and manuals - but at least you'll have outgrown the initial fear of even touching the kernel source, and from that only good can come.
Anyways: You, sir, are obviously trolling. Your first post had a touch of subtlety, but in this one you have tripped yourself up.
I'd love to say that I like the occasional troll, but the truth is I don't. Please go away.
This must be in horrible taste, but I found it quite amusing to discover the name of one of the directors of the board:
William G. Reed.
A more honestly named director you will not find.
It's hardly surprising to find ourselves at this juncture. What we face today has after all come about as the result of Slashdot's evolution, and evolution doesn't stand still at any given moment even though it may seem that way, since by contrast it appears to move forwards by leaps and bounds rather than a steady pace.
Slashdot is now 4 years old. That's an amazing acomplishment right there. On the other hand, I think we can all agree that what we come back for everyday - what we came here for today - is fairly different from the Slashdot of four years ago. We've come a long way - and a lot of people have climbed aboard along that way.
Now, is it so far-fetched to think that this growth is exactly what prompts the change? I don't want Slashdot to change anymore than CmdrTaco (or the rest of you) do, but it makes perfect sense that it must. I'd even claim that it's a little naive to think that rising popularity - for any website - won't, in the long term, spell change, and not necessarily for the better.
In the face of the announced changes, some shrug and carry on while others threaten to leave. I'm left hoping that nobody feels cheated and that those who leave realize what is happening and why.
And who knows. Maybe if a large enough portion of the crowd that visits Slashdot regularly feel offended by the changes and decide not to come back, then the aforementioned growth will subside and the problem goes away (snap) just like that!
It's very interesting to notice that a majority of people indicate that they do not care about personal encryption, primarily for their electronic mail communication. I recall reading in the PGP readme, when I first discovered it - version 2.x or 3.x at the time, I think - how it made perfect sense to use encryption to ensure your privacy. After all, did you not prefer to send your most personal thoughts using letters within envelopes rather than postcards?
However, when I try to advocate encryption to those I know and hope to influence, they all seem to indicate that they aren't all that concerned about their email. And yet those same people never fail to be annoyed when I walk up to their computer and pretend to read their email in order to prove my point.
Perhaps most people are unaware of how easy their email can be intercepted and read? After all, an email address might appear to be like a telephone number - a direct link to whomever one might wish to contact. And we're comfortable with the phones - after all, wiretaps seem hard (or at least laboureous) to obtain, and we suspect that capacity prevents wiretaps from being universally applied. Not so with email, though - it's child's play to intercept any SMTP communication that passes through your network. And if you happen to be centrally located, in a network topological sense, there's no theoretical limit to the amount of communication you can eavesdrop on.
I must admit that I'm not being entirely altruistic when I advocate encryption - my wish for broad adoption of personal encryption technology is first and foremost self-serving. To tap again into the old PGP readme files; sending mail in "sealed" envelopes is not currently suspicious due to the fact that the practice is so widespread. Untill encryption becomes commonplace it remains far too easy to label it suspicious behaviour.
Here's to hoping that free encryption will carry on where the commercial offerings have failed. Cheers.
Maybe there is some confusion as to what "the best solution" might mean.
You see, for quite a few of us, the best solution is not purely based on technical merit. I am for the purpose of this post completely ignoring the fact that Linux is technically superior to any similar Microsoft offering in several aspects, just as I won't repeat your point that perhaps, for technical reasons, a Microsoft product might seem the better tool in other situations.
It's about ethics, I guess. And I'll venture to guess further that it's about whether you choose to care or not. If you can't be bothered to think of something so trivial as the ethical foundation for your choice of software then perhaps you shouldn't waste time reading the rest of my post.
For me, Microsoft isn't an option, regardless of what it allows me to do. Just as I won't by a DVD player, because I feel that I'm being denied fundamental consumer rights and freedoms over my own purchase, I won't use Microsoft code because it violates a whole range of principles that are critically important to me.
Now admittedly, you were talking about some people, whereas I have only been talking about myself. But perhaps for some people there's more to the question of what the best tool for the job is than what gets it done the quickest/slickest.
It's getting to be quite uncommon to see a topic posted on slashdot without someone railing against it with a reply along the lines of: "So? What's the big deal? It's not like I care."
The point I'm trying to make is that whether or not you care, yourself, is exactly as interesting - to you - as it is to others to have opinions of their own. Whether or not you personally mind using search engines where the content returned might have more to do with financial transactions that you remain ignorant of, or the fact that they exist at all, doesn't make it a poor story.
Running a search engine certainly isn't free, but if you want to make up for that by changing what a search engine IS, or at least what it is commonly (and perhaps naively) perceived to be, without telling anyone about it, then that most certainly is deceptive advertising.
The right of search engines to charge money for returning their result isn't in question, it's how they do it that is the issue. When you ask your teacher at school how to solve a particular problem, you expect him to answer to the best of his ability, not according to what he's paid to say, right? And if what he tells you is influenced by some form of remuneration, whether it's secret or not, wouldn't you prefer to be told about it?
It's all about playing an open game. It's what MSNBC do whenever they mention Microsoft and add a comment to the effect that MSNBC is a joint venture held by, among others, Microsoft. It's about confessing to a prejudice when you're asked for an opinion. If you don't reveal whatever motivation that might slant what you say, then you must accept that people who discover this motivation later could come to see what you said, and perhaps you yourself, in a new light.
We all agree that telling something that isn't the truth is deceptive, but to not tell something which is true seems to be more of a gray area.
Heh, cheers ;-)
Hm, I'd say that's a flaw right there, in their distribution system - *and* in pissing customers off as in your case. It's not "innovative" as I like to think of it.
I might feel motivated to actually browse by this gigex thing and see what I need to download the demo for Linux, though I'll be severly surprised to find anything.
Hrmph! "Gigex 2.0 is the leading Internet delivery, fulfillment and logistics service for senders of digital packages. Gigex offers guaranteed delivery!"
Whatever is wrong with TCP?
Uhm, since you mentioned the Spec Ops product, I decided to drop them a visit, but it seems the only way of getting a demo is by using some "gigex" thing which seems to rely on Windows. That's a problem I think I can cope with, when it comes to actually playing the game, but Windows networking is sort of out of the question. Is there not perhaps some more convenient way of obtaining this demo? Like, good old-fashioned ftp? There is a Specops.exe file in their FTP site, but it's only 84 K and contains the word "gigex" all over the place...
...is not really going great lately, or so it seems to me. Of course, that is probably only because my opinion of a great computer industry is rather opposite of those that are driving it now. I'd even think that if you asked them, they'd say it's going great and that they're nearly where they want to be now.
;) - I'd be worrying sick about how it would be received. Not in terms of how well it would do commercially, because that wouldn't really be a sign of what people thought of my product. I would be worried about whether they liked it, if they liked those little bits I put in it that probably contradicted a lot of other things but that *meant* something to me, if they *got* the points I'd have been trying to make.
It upsets me that products reach the market and the only thing the producers care about are how they perform. Okay, sure - most of the time the producers are only tossing cash at it, and only want cash back - but still, so few worry about how their product will fare out there.
If I ever published something - sadly, that's highly unlikely
Most of all, I'd be worried about if I could walk arround proudly and smile when people looked twice upon hearing my name, saying: "Yes, I'm the one who made that. Hey, glad you liked it."
Even if I made a million buckazoids, I'd be horrified if I discovered that my product was really terrible - though it's unlikely it would have been published in the first place if that were the case.
What I'm trying to say is that I find it sad that only the financial success of a product seems to matter nowadays. Though the pressure of making something that will sell well does tend to result in a number of hours of work spent polishing a product, you can easily tell if something is a labour of love, something that was almost hard to let go of, or if something is floating on the wave of ambition that lies in trying to score bucks.
Utterly sad. Though my heart is not all cold and void, for there still exists one community in which people care about what they create. A community in which people only create things because they care about them, actually. A community of which I am proud to say that I belong to.