You have got to be kidding me. You get modded up as insightful because you are brainless enough to invoke one of the most Ancient Holy Wars in tech geek existence? The parent you're responding to was already veering off topic since the article clearly states it doesn't want to get into comparing the OSs look/feel/convenience etc.
Jeez. I've got an idea. Why don't I take this opportunity to tell you that you should be using the One True Bracing style when coding so we can really flame on into useless obscurity.
The problem with your idea that "the compiler debugger etc." could "check for bad, icky results" is that it assumes that enough is known about genetic processes to codify them and "error check". If you spend any time in the field at all, you quickly realize how little is really known about how the DNA blueprint is transformed into living breathing things. Scientista are beginning to look at genetics with a systems biology approach to identify complex behavior, but the amount left to understand is truly staggering.
And that's what always makes me nervous about any kind of GMO stuff. It will be a long time before we can predict results with any kind of safety since modeling can only help you when you know enough to construct the model.
Record companies give musicians much help -- there are so many things that are hard for an independent musician to do that a big company already has 900 lbs of existing gorilla weight to do.
Like promotion. I can get on the phone to radio stations and maybe one by one convince them to give my music a listen. Maybe some of them will even play it on the air (once or twice). A big record company gives a push to their artists that can actually get something on the playlist.
Or touring. Yeah, small bands can tour a lot and do all right. But what if, god forbid, they want to get *off* the road for a little while? Road life is hard - give a listen to the big established acts about the rigors of the road then imagine doing it without the fancy tour bus, without hotel rooms (sleeping on people's floors).
And booking. Booking even a short tour (1 - 2 weeks) is hard. You need to call each club over and over to finally book the gig. A booking agent makes that so much easier.
Bottom line is that it can be done without any of that support structure, but it's hard as hell which is why so many people are willing to sell their souls to big record labels in return for the exposure and some of the perks.
Oh, Jesus, tell me you DIDN'T just post something claiming that one bracing style is clearly superior to another.
You might as well break into a rant about how emacs is clearly superior to vi and launch the whole ridiculous flame war much more efficiently.
Oh, and by the way, java is a better language than perl, downloading music through P2P is clearly just copyright infringement not theft, and RedHat is obviously superior to Gentoo...
And your favorite band sucks.
Dear Mr. Anderson
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Dear Mr. Anderson
Thanks for posting an article to Slashdot that might possibly be of some interest to those that read it. Of course, the fact that you're the editor of Wired magazine means that many of the holier than thou slashdotters will now take the opportunity to tell you how much they dislike your publication, how irrelevant it is, how many cooler publications they've read etc.
Some may even go so far as to suggest that they have the opportunity to fsck actual chicks with both stolen and non-stolen dicks (see parent above).
God forbid, you may have actually posted this article because you frequent slashdot and thought it might be interesting to those here.
Really? Did you know that the US currently maintains over 700 military bases on foreign soil? And that's just the ones the Pentagon will publicly admit.
How is our continuing occupation of the entire island of Okinawa just "necessary to bury our dead"? S. Korea? Guantanamo Bay? Germany?
Why is it necessary for us to maintain military presence around the world? Is there any other reason than to ensure military influence?
Check the growth of bases in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War (ok, I'm too lazy to find the statistic). At the beginning of that war, we were forced to use Saudi Arabia as a launching point for the military action; today we have dozens of bases scattered throughout Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates. Think the permanent bases now being built in Iraq are going to disappear any time soon?
So remind me again how we've "never taken any more ground than was necessary to bury our dead"?
Dr. Seuss first coined the word nerd is his 1950 book "If I Ran the Zoo".
From the book: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It- Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!"
Yet more mastery from one of my favorite 20th century authors....(go read the Lorax now, dammit)
Naturally, you're aiming for a funny mod, but your post reveals exactly why executives do this in secret. Sure, you, me & and many other slashdotters *know* how to work a computer, but teaching someone clueless how to do WITHOUT being a patronizing pain in the ass is the skill required for this job. The lack of that kind of understanding in many IT depts. is what makes the instructor who has it worth $50/hr.
Where I work they have a pretty lax internet use policy -- blah blah blah no pr0n please blah blah as long as you get your work done blah blah
All of a sudden last week, the sysadmins sent out notice that they will be blocking commonly used P2P ports out of fear of being sued by the RIAA. This is a small non-profit company that's just managing to keep its head above water. No way could we deal w/a lawsuit. It's another case of money buying the legal system - whether RIAA could ultimately win the lawsuit in court is irrelevant since this company doesn't have the $$ to even risk it. Personal/Non-business/just plain folks have it even worse
This is good news for the consumer. I've held off switching carriers precisely because I would be forced to get a new number - losing the one everyone's used to reaching me at. Yeah, yeah, I could try to update people, but yer always gonna miss someone.
Hopefully this will encourage the carriers to improve their service to stay competitive rather than relying on customers who are locked in.
In two weeks, The SCO Group Inc. intends to begin showing analysts where the Unix code it owns has been illegally copied into the Linux kernel. The source code will be made available to parties who agree not to disclose the Unix source code, but they will be able to share publicly their assessments of SCO's claim. SCO has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and other claims and has warned some 1,500 businesses that they may be using Linux at their legal peril.
In an interview with Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau, SCO's Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Division, the group within SCO in charge of enforcing the company's intellectual property, discussed the company's position.
Why should Linux users take your claim seriously?
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. We fully believe there are many contributions made by good, hard-working individuals into Linux that are not of issue. But based on the research that we have
done, we have identified specific Unix System V code for which we have ownership rights that have ended up in Linux against our wishes. There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux. The development process has no one that is ensuring that inappropriate code is not getting into Linux. All that's there is an honor system, and obviously there are a few, at least, that have broken that honor.
Your letter to 1,500 end-user companies outlining your claim was vague. What is it that you want from these companies? The one thing that we specifically want from those 1,500 companies that we directly sent those letters to is for them to not take our word on the warning that we sent... but to seek an opinion of their legal counsel as to the issues that we raised.
What do you see as a company's options in the
face of your warning? I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out. But first get that opinion of your legal counsel. If they say there is no problem and no issue, then you probably have nothing to worry about. But I doubt there is any attorney worth his salt that is going to say there is no potential of an issue here. There is a big issue.
Should companies remove Linux from their systems? We're not making any specific recommendations at this time. We're still getting our arms around the size of this problem. We're still identifying more and more code from Unix System V that is in Linux, and so we haven't even fully scoped the problem. It's hard to come up with solutions until you have the full problem identified, and as you may guess, it's a very big problem.
Are you considering suing Linux users that you notified? Anything is always a possibility. If you are going to enforce your contracts, claims and intellectual property, you have to be able to go to ultimately the endpoint of infringement.
You're claiming that Linux has been polluted with Unix code that you own, but you have not produced any evidence of that. Will you? We will actually be providing some of the evidence next month to various industry analysts, respected press people and other industry leaders so that they don't have to take our word for it or wait until we show some of that evidence in court. We will actually be showing the code, and the basis for why we have made the allegations that we have. We are very confident about our case. Because we are dealing with confidential source code that we have never released without confidentiality agreements, we will have to put in place nondisclosures [agreements] simply to protect the source. But people will be able to give their opinion as to what
Good. As a happily employed programmer for 5 years who graduated with an English degree, I can safely say that the proliferation (whoo, big word, no? look it up) of small minded idiots like you has made the climate easier for people like me to keep getting jobs.
I love programming, started when I was 12 and kept in it one or way or another. I loved being an English major as well; it's a broad-minded course of study that teaches you to think and communicate clearly. If you just graduated 6 months ago, then you have NO idea how valuable a techie who can talk to other humans is. Requirements gathering mean anything to you? I work for a bioinformatics firm; our main clients are Biology PH.Ds. Any idea how lost the whole project would be if we couldn't communicate clearly with each other?
Okay, rant completed. Just a little sick of the hypocrisy reigning in the comments on this article. On the one hand, everyone agrees that students shouldn't be taking CS classes in the hopes of making money, but for the love of it. Then on the other everyone gleefully bashes those "clueless" liberal arts majors who study what they love even though there's no cut 'n' dry career track waiting at the end?
Someone please tell this guy it's Puget Sound, not Pudget Sound. Pudget Sound looks like the words used to describe the noises a short fat person might make....
I'm with you. I for one am not terribly excited about the prospect of humanity spreading to other planets/heavenly bodies so we can pillage them as thoroughly as have this one. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of space exploration & travel (heck, if it becomes possible to take tourist visits to the moon & elsewhere for a semi-reasonable price in the near future, put me on the waiting list now), but I have more than a little cynicism when it comes to my faith in commercial organizations' & governments' abilities to sensibly colonize other planets without repeating the mistakes we've made here.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez. I've got an idea. Why don't I take this opportunity to tell you that you should be using the One True Bracing style when coding so we can really flame on into useless obscurity.
And that's what always makes me nervous about any kind of GMO stuff. It will be a long time before we can predict results with any kind of safety since modeling can only help you when you know enough to construct the model.
Easier access to porn here I come!
.xxx because it's just toooo hard to find porn on the internet now...
Riiiggght. Because we need
It would also simplify finding porn.
Because god knows it's just too damn difficult to find porn on the internet now....
Like promotion. I can get on the phone to radio stations and maybe one by one convince them to give my music a listen. Maybe some of them will even play it on the air (once or twice). A big record company gives a push to their artists that can actually get something on the playlist.
Or touring. Yeah, small bands can tour a lot and do all right. But what if, god forbid, they want to get *off* the road for a little while? Road life is hard - give a listen to the big established acts about the rigors of the road then imagine doing it without the fancy tour bus, without hotel rooms (sleeping on people's floors).
And booking. Booking even a short tour (1 - 2 weeks) is hard. You need to call each club over and over to finally book the gig. A booking agent makes that so much easier.
Bottom line is that it can be done without any of that support structure, but it's hard as hell which is why so many people are willing to sell their souls to big record labels in return for the exposure and some of the perks.
You might as well break into a rant about how emacs is clearly superior to vi and launch the whole ridiculous flame war much more efficiently.
Oh, and by the way, java is a better language than perl, downloading music through P2P is clearly just copyright infringement not theft, and RedHat is obviously superior to Gentoo...
And your favorite band sucks.
Thanks for posting an article to Slashdot that might possibly be of some interest to those that read it. Of course, the fact that you're the editor of Wired magazine means that many of the holier than thou slashdotters will now take the opportunity to tell you how much they dislike your publication, how irrelevant it is, how many cooler publications they've read etc.
Some may even go so far as to suggest that they have the opportunity to fsck actual chicks with both stolen and non-stolen dicks (see parent above).
God forbid, you may have actually posted this article because you frequent slashdot and thought it might be interesting to those here.
How is our continuing occupation of the entire island of Okinawa just "necessary to bury our dead"? S. Korea? Guantanamo Bay? Germany?
Why is it necessary for us to maintain military presence around the world? Is there any other reason than to ensure military influence?
Check the growth of bases in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War (ok, I'm too lazy to find the statistic). At the beginning of that war, we were forced to use Saudi Arabia as a launching point for the military action; today we have dozens of bases scattered throughout Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates. Think the permanent bases now being built in Iraq are going to disappear any time soon?
So remind me again how we've "never taken any more ground than was necessary to bury our dead"?
From the book: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It- Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!"
Yet more mastery from one of my favorite 20th century authors....(go read the Lorax now, dammit)
Just food for thought....
All of a sudden last week, the sysadmins sent out notice that they will be blocking commonly used P2P ports out of fear of being sued by the RIAA. This is a small non-profit company that's just managing to keep its head above water. No way could we deal w/a lawsuit. It's another case of money buying the legal system - whether RIAA could ultimately win the lawsuit in court is irrelevant since this company doesn't have the $$ to even risk it. Personal/Non-business/just plain folks have it even worse
This is good news for the consumer. I've held off switching carriers precisely because I would be forced to get a new number - losing the one everyone's used to reaching me at. Yeah, yeah, I could try to update people, but yer always gonna miss someone. Hopefully this will encourage the carriers to improve their service to stay competitive rather than relying on customers who are locked in.
In an interview with Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau, SCO's Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Division, the group within SCO in charge of enforcing the company's intellectual property, discussed the company's position.
Why should Linux users take your claim seriously? 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. We fully believe there are many contributions made by good, hard-working individuals into Linux that are not of issue. But based on the research that we have done, we have identified specific Unix System V code for which we have ownership rights that have ended up in Linux against our wishes. There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux. The development process has no one that is ensuring that inappropriate code is not getting into Linux. All that's there is an honor system, and obviously there are a few, at least, that have broken that honor.
Your letter to 1,500 end-user companies outlining your claim was vague. What is it that you want from these companies? The one thing that we specifically want from those 1,500 companies that we directly sent those letters to is for them to not take our word on the warning that we sent ... but to seek an opinion of their legal counsel as to the issues that we raised.
What do you see as a company's options in the face of your warning? I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out. But first get that opinion of your legal counsel. If they say there is no problem and no issue, then you probably have nothing to worry about. But I doubt there is any attorney worth his salt that is going to say there is no potential of an issue here. There is a big issue.
Should companies remove Linux from their systems? We're not making any specific recommendations at this time. We're still getting our arms around the size of this problem. We're still identifying more and more code from Unix System V that is in Linux, and so we haven't even fully scoped the problem. It's hard to come up with solutions until you have the full problem identified, and as you may guess, it's a very big problem.
Are you considering suing Linux users that you notified? Anything is always a possibility. If you are going to enforce your contracts, claims and intellectual property, you have to be able to go to ultimately the endpoint of infringement.
You're claiming that Linux has been polluted with Unix code that you own, but you have not produced any evidence of that. Will you? We will actually be providing some of the evidence next month to various industry analysts, respected press people and other industry leaders so that they don't have to take our word for it or wait until we show some of that evidence in court. We will actually be showing the code, and the basis for why we have made the allegations that we have. We are very confident about our case. Because we are dealing with confidential source code that we have never released without confidentiality agreements, we will have to put in place nondisclosures [agreements] simply to protect the source. But people will be able to give their opinion as to what
subject line should read: chaos ensues as thousands realize they have no life...
I love programming, started when I was 12 and kept in it one or way or another. I loved being an English major as well; it's a broad-minded course of study that teaches you to think and communicate clearly. If you just graduated 6 months ago, then you have NO idea how valuable a techie who can talk to other humans is. Requirements gathering mean anything to you? I work for a bioinformatics firm; our main clients are Biology PH.Ds. Any idea how lost the whole project would be if we couldn't communicate clearly with each other?
Okay, rant completed. Just a little sick of the hypocrisy reigning in the comments on this article. On the one hand, everyone agrees that students shouldn't be taking CS classes in the hopes of making money, but for the love of it. Then on the other everyone gleefully bashes those "clueless" liberal arts majors who study what they love even though there's no cut 'n' dry career track waiting at the end?
Someone please tell this guy it's Puget Sound, not Pudget Sound. Pudget Sound looks like the words used to describe the noises a short fat person might make....
I'm with you. I for one am not terribly excited about the prospect of humanity spreading to other planets/heavenly bodies so we can pillage them as thoroughly as have this one. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of space exploration & travel (heck, if it becomes possible to take tourist visits to the moon & elsewhere for a semi-reasonable price in the near future, put me on the waiting list now), but I have more than a little cynicism when it comes to my faith in commercial organizations' & governments' abilities to sensibly colonize other planets without repeating the mistakes we've made here.