Don't know what the profit margins are between the specific companies. I imagine it varies considerably, and a lot of music companies might very well be making less actual profit than Philips, depending on how many "stars" they have on their labels.
A quick Google shows Philips Electronics actually making about 900 million Euros net profit in the most recent quarter, but most of that was from sales of some shares in another company. They actually only made $177 million in operating profit.
OTOH, another Google shows Warner Music, which owns Atlantic Records, lost $35 million in the last quarter excluding one time items, and coincidentally about the same $179 million loss total as Philips made in profit.
That issue is surfacing right now with my favorite band, The Corrs, because they have a new album coming out this fall, and it's not certain it will be released by Atlantic Records in the US because it's mostly covers of traditional Irish songs instead of pop rock. Somebody posted an article on the Corrboard mentioning that this was a hassle earlier in their career as well, with their manager having to mediate between two divisions of Atlantic, one that wanted to release an earlier album, one that didn't.
The music companies sure are making less profit than the entire tech industry, though - hell, less than Microsoft alone.
Actually, that's scary. Microsoft could buy the entire music industry with their existing cash and I couldn't listen to The Corrs anymore (legally, anyway) without paying Bill!
That Charles Stross' sci-fi story Accelerando mentioned here a couple weeks ago actually had this being done by the protagonist: I forget the details, but he arranged to get all the out-of-copyright music in the world, set up a front company, and when the RIAA Mob (they were actual Mob thugs in the story) came around, he set up the whole thing to be uploaded to every file-sharing network there was - or something like that. He "set the music free" technologically was the concept anyway.
That's actually a good point, and it's been brought up before by others in exactly this context - that Sony makes music and also makes devices that can easily be used to "pirate" music.
It just emphasizes my point. Sony is just the most schizophrenic example.
And when you figure out how to make perfect software that never crashes, I'm sure you'll open source it.
And like I said, whether you lose your work or not when X crashes depends on the application. If it saves open buffers periodically, like some editors do (even Microsoft Word), you can recover.
Actually, that's a feature I'd like to see put in the kernel - save open app buffers, maybe with some new system call.
The bottom line is people are still reaching for reasons not to use Linux and harping on the existence of the command line, which is equally necessary in Windows. So the criticism is bullshit (I almost typed "billshit", which sounds like a great new term for "Microsoft shill bullshit".)
There is no way that X crashes can be compared to BSOD's, either in frequency or severity. Period. One is a server crash, one is an OS crash. Period.
WHILE STILL IN THE PLANNING STAGES [My emphasis], the OSDL patent commons project will initially involve the following:
* A library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software.
* A collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.
Do I have to do all your work? I found Moglen's email in one Google search with his name and Columbia and I just entered OSDL and went to the link for their home page, where the announcement is.
Hard, huh? How the hell do you make it to/. with those Internet skills?
That's really scraping for some reason not to use Firefox over IE.
Not to mention that Bill probably gave away 100,000 copies of IE to some kids in Africa or something as part of his "charity" work just to boost the numbers...
It's ridiculous the way the tech press seizes on every little change in a situation to prognosticate on how the entire industry has been changed.
Somebody drops a percentage point, they're doomed forever in the minds of the IT press. Somebody goes up a percentage point, they're going to dominate IT forever and we all have to change our ways to implement whatever it is yesterday.
Wannabe journalists who would like to be covering Iraq but you could get killed there so instead they cover Intel vrs. AMD.
Reminds me of "since 9/11, the world has changed". Bullshit. Nothing has changed except people's fantasies about reality - and they fluctuate with the wind.
"Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
That might be true, too, since 2030 is perhaps a bit too soon to be expecting fully developed ubiquitous nanotech enabling full Transhuman ascendancy. It COULD happen by then, but I'm guessing closer to 2050.
Besides, I'd really like some life-size full-res holographic porn. And nanotech applied to computers should enable that before 2030.
Because Phillips makes CD recording equipment for consumers which allow you to pop a CD in your player and record it on another drive in the same device.
And they don't sue Philips for contributing to "piracy" because Philips as a company is bigger than the entire US music industry.
From the Philips Web Site:
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies, as well as the largest in Europe, with 159,709 employees in over 60 countries and sales in 2004 of Eur 30.3 billion.
Whereas GLOBAL music sales were worth $32 billion USD in 2003.
Same reason they don't sue Sony for making the same sort of consumer devices.
Why the massively larger tech industry feels compelled to bow down before these morons is beyond me. Tell them to take a fucking hike.
No problem. I've had worse troll comments than yours here, heh, heh! I don't even count yours as a troll - you'd have to have meant it that way to be a troll.
Yes, and one guy had a problem with the fact that his video drivers weren't even installed, let alone working.
That's not X's fault. The bottom line is that MOST of the time, using killx or CTRL-ALT-BS will restart X and MOST of the REST of the time, a virtual terminal will allow the user to kill and restart X.
If Windows hoses the boot config file (happened to me), and the end user doesn't know how to use the Recovery Console, he ends up reinstalling.
My point is that there is NO point in bringing up situations where a Linux end user has to use the command line as some sort of defect in Linux that Windows doesn't have because Windows has EXACTLY the same sort of issues and Microsoft provides the Recovery Console for the same situations.
In another post, I mentioned the case where Windows Explorer crashes regularly, or crashes when you try to even click on a file name. This has happened to me several times. Do a Google for how often the first situation happens to people. The second situation I still haven't solved except by booting into Linux to delete the file. Most Windows users would either have to ignore the file altogether forever, or reinstall.
The original issue IIRC is that somebody referred to the BSOD, and somebody else said that an X crash is the same thing. Well, it isn't. X is recoverable in MOST situations. Nobody said ALL situations AFAIK.
Nitpicking about WHICH situations is pointless because for every nitpick where some Linux user has to go to the command line, you can find a situation in Windows where a Windows user has to go to the command line.
As I've repeatedly said here and elsewhere: 1) Windows is CRAP. 2) Linux is ALSO CRAP. 3) BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
The point is, surveillance only prevents certain kinds of crimes - namely, those intended for profit.
Terrorists aren't criminals in that sense. If they can't get to some place under surveillance, they will either go somewhere that isn't, or take the cameras out or evade them in some way - or just ignore them and go ahead and blow everything up including themselves.
The point is that most of the "War on Terror" measures are utterly useless against terrorists. The ONLY effective measure against terrorists is to infiltrate their organization, find them before they strike, and take them out. And this is really hard to do if their organization is tight-knit and properly designed for counterintelligence.
Randomly looking around for terrorist activity by looking at people on the subway or the street is an utter waste of time. It works for keeping down minor street crime but that's it. Terrorists don't work like street dope dealers or pickpockets or idiot niggers and rednecks with tattoos on their foreheads and guns bulging out of their pockets. Those guys might as well wear a sign.
Of course, you can do racial profiling and just search and surveil everybody who even remotely looks like a Muslim. And the US is apparently doing that, given the number of complaints from Muslims in the US about harassment.
That will work until the Muslim groups start outsourcing US operations to Germans or South Americans or Asians or whoever. That was done before by the PLO or one of the other Middle Eastern groups - that's who Carlos the Jackal was working for, if you remember. He was a Latin working for Arabs. Try to pick him out of a crowd in New York.
Actually this reminds me of the time a few years ago when San Francisco had this Chief of Police who used to be a Supervisor. A gay paper published a cartoon of him being sodomized with a nightstick or something. So he shows it to one of his officers and makes some comment about getting this stuff off the street.
So the officer gets a bunch of cops together and they run around removing the papers from all the street distribution boxes and destroy them.
Well, of course, the gay paper found out about this, and the Police Chief got blamed and fired.
This is probably the same sort of deal - some local cop who's a Bush supporter got offended by this guy's remarks and decided to overstep his authority. Cops do this crap all the time.
I got the news from some article sent to me by a guy who sends me emails with various news articles. I don't have the link anymore, I delete this stuff after reading. I tried a Google search but didn't find anything.
The guy sounded like some cantakerous old guy who got on some local talk radio and called Bush a liar, etc. No actual threats or anything except maybe a demand to impeach Bush. Next thing he knows eight local cops run onto his property with no search warrant or anything, and they wander around looking for pot, apparently. He said they eyed one of his bushes which doesn't even remotely resemble pot. Then he gets the local game warden coming onto his place.
It's probably just local cops overreacting or trying to intimidate him into keeping his mouth shut, but this sort of thing seems to be happening at least in red states.
Well, if your drivers aren't even installed, let alone working, X is not exactly the cause of your problems, is it?
Your average end user isn't going to be upgrading from X to Xorg and reinstalling video drivers anyway.
Now, if they have a situation where X gets corrupted and crashes on boot, yes, they probably won't know how to drop to a command line, set init to run level 3, and debug the config file or reinstall the drivers or X from rpm or whatever.
But how often is that going to happen? And compared to Windows, if Windows manages to screw the boot loader config (which has happened to me), if you don't know how to use the Recovery Console to edit the config file, you're hosed there, too.
My point is simply that in the vast majority of cases where X crashes or freezes, killing the server from xkill or the CTRL-ALT-BS works, and if it doesn't, switching to a virtual terminal will.
If the problem is more serious than that, as in your case, yes, people need to know more.
And that is exactly the same on Windows. So there is no superiority in either case.
On the other hand, try doing something like the screen utility in Windows...
Another example: have you ever had a file on Windows be utterly UNTOUCHABLE? It's REALLY frustrating. By this, I mean a file that as soon as you click on it in Explorer or ANY file manager, the file manager INSTANTLY crashes. No waiting, no error messages, boom, it instantly dies. NOTHING can touch that file - not even from the Windows command line!
I've had this several times, and it drives me nuts. I have to boot into Linux to delete the damn file because absolutely nothing in Windows will touch that file without crashing.
I have still to determine what causes this problem - Google has been no help. There are tons of situations described on Google where Windows Explorer crashes and/or crashes regularly, and most of the time people have to reinstall because it's nearly impossible to determine the cause - because there are no config files, only incomprehensible Registry keys that may be corrupted. There are problems with corrupted thumbnails so Explorer preview bombs, and the like. Do a Google search for "Explorer crashes" and read a few pages.
Confront a Windows user with those problems sometime, and see if they can solve it without a reinstall (or just ignoring that one file forever!)
I keep telling people there is no point in bringing up situations where Linux has problems that can only be fixed from the command line because Windows has exactly the same sorts of issues, if different causes.
I keep telling people: 1) Windows is CRAP. 2) Linux is ALSO CRAP. 3) BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
You obtain a virtual terminal from the keystrokes that go to the terminal driver, NOT X. There is a terminal driver running which handles terminal connections. X has nothing to do with it.
Jesus, learn something about Linux before running your mouth.
Yup. This is how the "War on Terror" seems to be working.
Got lots of people getting patted down in airports and New York subway riders getting randomly searched and people's library books getting inspected - and some old guy in the midWest called Bush a liar on talk radio and got raided by the local cops - and no terrorists in sight - unless you count the London underground...which of course you have to.
I've just had two responses from Bruce on the issue, and I've responded to him.
He clarified his position that he supports opposing patent laws and reversing patents that Eben outlined, but maintains that the commons project may "lull people into believing the problem is solved."
I told him I respect his bringing up the issue, but that his comments about "spitting into the wind" were excessive and his argument is really weak because it is entirely speculative and does not outweighh the probable benefits of having a commons project in at least some cases.
If his comments were intended honestly but undiplomatically, I would drop my suggestion that he acted to start a flame war or for his own PR purposes. However, I have no way of actually knowing what his motivation was, as you correctly state. That's why I said "presumably". "Presumably" means "I don't know, but it seems that..."
I told Bruce just now that if he were to publicly clarify his support for the other aspects of the program he'd get a lot less criticism from me and others.
Because he basically is right in one respect: none of this is going to stop Microsoft from doing what they want to do. But if it even helps stop another SCO - which was Eben's point - then it's useful.
The bottom line is: his argument is too weak to support the tone of the comments he made and he ignored the other aspects of the program (AFAIK until his comments to me). Now it's all water under the dam and he'll have to deal with any backlash. I don't think his comments are going to have any effect on anybody directly involved anyway.
When X crashes, you do Alt-F1 to bring up a virtual terminal which is a CONSOLE app, and then you kill X. It has nothing to do with whether the X server is responding to keyboard input - you're using kill -9 from the console to tell the kernel to kill the job.
It's done every day by somebody somewhere. I've done it on rare occasions when X has locked up.
And whether you lose your work or not depends on the app that's running. Many editors, for instance, can reload a previous buffer that wasn't closed properly. I think vi does that, but I don't use it much, so I can't remember. Even in Windows, Word will recover a document in some circumstances.
Like I said, provide some evidence, ANY evidence, that lulling people - significant people who are directly involved in this issue - is in even the slightest way likely or significant.
You harp on patents - forget that. We agree on that. Software patents and business patents are bad. I go further and say ALL patents are bad, and trying to fight any patents by supporting some patents is not a good martial art technigue - but forget that.
The bottom line is if your argument against a patent commons project is that it will result in lulling people into thinking the problem is solved, that's a really weak argument against doing it anyway. There is obviously a potential practical benefit in having such a commons in dealing with frivolous lawsuits which isn't outweighed by the mere possibility that some people might overlook more serious efforts.
Especially when your argument is pure speculation as to the side effects.
I respect your bringing up the issue, but you should have been a bit more diplomatic and less dismissive of the concept. You'd get a lot less criticism from me and others if you'd publicly clarify your support for the rest of the program Eben outlined as you did in your earlier post to me. That's all I'm saying.
Shale oil extraction should be feasible with nanotech.
Not to mention dumping nanotech into an oil field instead of water, thus avoiding destroying the oil fields like Saudi Arabia has been doing.
More efficient solar cells and wind turbines and wave energy extractors will of course be possible as well.
Not to mention more efficient engines to use the energy extracted.
Could even lead to enabling technologies that might make figuring out how to do fusion easier - even cold fusion (nanotech instrumentation might be the only way to prove that legit, if it is.)
Well, actually, AFAIK no such metals have ever been discovered at UFO crash sites. Metals, yeah, but nothing superstrong - just unusual alloys.
In fact, most of the stuff found from UFOs is some weird fluffy stuff. Like maybe alien semen from some bug jerking off as he flies over Washington...
Or maybe that's how they flush their johns...
There's a limit to how strong a physical material can be, IIRC, and we're not far from it now with some of our materials. Nanotech will only improve that so much. Drexler pointed that out in his first book, "Engines of Creation" IIRC.
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Don't know what the profit margins are between the specific companies. I imagine it varies considerably, and a lot of music companies might very well be making less actual profit than Philips, depending on how many "stars" they have on their labels.
A quick Google shows Philips Electronics actually making about 900 million Euros net profit in the most recent quarter, but most of that was from sales of some shares in another company. They actually only made $177 million in operating profit.
OTOH, another Google shows Warner Music, which owns Atlantic Records, lost $35 million in the last quarter excluding one time items, and coincidentally about the same $179 million loss total as Philips made in profit.
That issue is surfacing right now with my favorite band, The Corrs, because they have a new album coming out this fall, and it's not certain it will be released by Atlantic Records in the US because it's mostly covers of traditional Irish songs instead of pop rock. Somebody posted an article on the Corrboard mentioning that this was a hassle earlier in their career as well, with their manager having to mediate between two divisions of Atlantic, one that wanted to release an earlier album, one that didn't.
The music companies sure are making less profit than the entire tech industry, though - hell, less than Microsoft alone.
Actually, that's scary. Microsoft could buy the entire music industry with their existing cash and I couldn't listen to The Corrs anymore (legally, anyway) without paying Bill!
That Charles Stross' sci-fi story Accelerando mentioned here a couple weeks ago actually had this being done by the protagonist: I forget the details, but he arranged to get all the out-of-copyright music in the world, set up a front company, and when the RIAA Mob (they were actual Mob thugs in the story) came around, he set up the whole thing to be uploaded to every file-sharing network there was - or something like that. He "set the music free" technologically was the concept anyway.
That's actually a good point, and it's been brought up before by others in exactly this context - that Sony makes music and also makes devices that can easily be used to "pirate" music.
It just emphasizes my point. Sony is just the most schizophrenic example.
"But, it still exists and it shouldn't"
And when you figure out how to make perfect software that never crashes, I'm sure you'll open source it.
And like I said, whether you lose your work or not when X crashes depends on the application. If it saves open buffers periodically, like some editors do (even Microsoft Word), you can recover.
Actually, that's a feature I'd like to see put in the kernel - save open app buffers, maybe with some new system call.
The bottom line is people are still reaching for reasons not to use Linux and harping on the existence of the command line, which is equally necessary in Windows. So the criticism is bullshit (I almost typed "billshit", which sounds like a great new term for "Microsoft shill bullshit".)
There is no way that X crashes can be compared to BSOD's, either in frequency or severity. Period. One is a server crash, one is an OS crash. Period.
moglen@columbia.edu
/. with those Internet skills?
That help?
Christ, he gave a talk about an initiative. Who knows how far along it is? So there's no Web site. So what?
Try this: the announcement. Note the following there:
WHILE STILL IN THE PLANNING STAGES [My emphasis], the OSDL patent commons project will initially involve the following:
* A library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software.
* A collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.
Do I have to do all your work? I found Moglen's email in one Google search with his name and Columbia and I just entered OSDL and went to the link for their home page, where the announcement is.
Hard, huh? How the hell do you make it to
That's really scraping for some reason not to use Firefox over IE.
Not to mention that Bill probably gave away 100,000 copies of IE to some kids in Africa or something as part of his "charity" work just to boost the numbers...
It's ridiculous the way the tech press seizes on every little change in a situation to prognosticate on how the entire industry has been changed.
Somebody drops a percentage point, they're doomed forever in the minds of the IT press. Somebody goes up a percentage point, they're going to dominate IT forever and we all have to change our ways to implement whatever it is yesterday.
Wannabe journalists who would like to be covering Iraq but you could get killed there so instead they cover Intel vrs. AMD.
Reminds me of "since 9/11, the world has changed". Bullshit. Nothing has changed except people's fantasies about reality - and they fluctuate with the wind.
Needless to say given my handle, I agree.
OTOH:
"Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
That might be true, too, since 2030 is perhaps a bit too soon to be expecting fully developed ubiquitous nanotech enabling full Transhuman ascendancy. It COULD happen by then, but I'm guessing closer to 2050.
Besides, I'd really like some life-size full-res holographic porn. And nanotech applied to computers should enable that before 2030.
Because Phillips makes CD recording equipment for consumers which allow you to pop a CD in your player and record it on another drive in the same device.
And they don't sue Philips for contributing to "piracy" because Philips as a company is bigger than the entire US music industry.
From the Philips Web Site:
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies, as well as the largest in Europe, with 159,709 employees in over 60 countries and sales in 2004 of Eur 30.3 billion.
Whereas GLOBAL music sales were worth $32 billion USD in 2003.
Same reason they don't sue Sony for making the same sort of consumer devices.
Why the massively larger tech industry feels compelled to bow down before these morons is beyond me. Tell them to take a fucking hike.
The Mob certainly is telling them that.
No problem. I've had worse troll comments than yours here, heh, heh! I don't even count yours as a troll - you'd have to have meant it that way to be a troll.
Yes, and one guy had a problem with the fact that his video drivers weren't even installed, let alone working.
That's not X's fault. The bottom line is that MOST of the time, using killx or CTRL-ALT-BS will restart X and MOST of the REST of the time, a virtual terminal will allow the user to kill and restart X.
If Windows hoses the boot config file (happened to me), and the end user doesn't know how to use the Recovery Console, he ends up reinstalling.
My point is that there is NO point in bringing up situations where a Linux end user has to use the command line as some sort of defect in Linux that Windows doesn't have because Windows has EXACTLY the same sort of issues and Microsoft provides the Recovery Console for the same situations.
In another post, I mentioned the case where Windows Explorer crashes regularly, or crashes when you try to even click on a file name. This has happened to me several times. Do a Google for how often the first situation happens to people. The second situation I still haven't solved except by booting into Linux to delete the file. Most Windows users would either have to ignore the file altogether forever, or reinstall.
The original issue IIRC is that somebody referred to the BSOD, and somebody else said that an X crash is the same thing. Well, it isn't. X is recoverable in MOST situations. Nobody said ALL situations AFAIK.
Nitpicking about WHICH situations is pointless because for every nitpick where some Linux user has to go to the command line, you can find a situation in Windows where a Windows user has to go to the command line.
As I've repeatedly said here and elsewhere:
1) Windows is CRAP.
2) Linux is ALSO CRAP.
3) BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
Google is your friend. Try the EFF.
Don't take my post so literally.
I never said it WAS running Windows, I said it probably would be just because doing something dumb like that would be par for the course with NASA.
I mean, JPL lost a Mars probe because some idiot didn't convert metric measurements (supposedly) and nobody caught it. How dumb was that?
The point is, surveillance only prevents certain kinds of crimes - namely, those intended for profit.
Terrorists aren't criminals in that sense. If they can't get to some place under surveillance, they will either go somewhere that isn't, or take the cameras out or evade them in some way - or just ignore them and go ahead and blow everything up including themselves.
The point is that most of the "War on Terror" measures are utterly useless against terrorists. The ONLY effective measure against terrorists is to infiltrate their organization, find them before they strike, and take them out. And this is really hard to do if their organization is tight-knit and properly designed for counterintelligence.
Randomly looking around for terrorist activity by looking at people on the subway or the street is an utter waste of time. It works for keeping down minor street crime but that's it. Terrorists don't work like street dope dealers or pickpockets or idiot niggers and rednecks with tattoos on their foreheads and guns bulging out of their pockets. Those guys might as well wear a sign.
Of course, you can do racial profiling and just search and surveil everybody who even remotely looks like a Muslim. And the US is apparently doing that, given the number of complaints from Muslims in the US about harassment.
That will work until the Muslim groups start outsourcing US operations to Germans or South Americans or Asians or whoever. That was done before by the PLO or one of the other Middle Eastern groups - that's who Carlos the Jackal was working for, if you remember. He was a Latin working for Arabs. Try to pick him out of a crowd in New York.
Actually this reminds me of the time a few years ago when San Francisco had this Chief of Police who used to be a Supervisor. A gay paper published a cartoon of him being sodomized with a nightstick or something. So he shows it to one of his officers and makes some comment about getting this stuff off the street.
So the officer gets a bunch of cops together and they run around removing the papers from all the street distribution boxes and destroy them.
Well, of course, the gay paper found out about this, and the Police Chief got blamed and fired.
This is probably the same sort of deal - some local cop who's a Bush supporter got offended by this guy's remarks and decided to overstep his authority. Cops do this crap all the time.
I got the news from some article sent to me by a guy who sends me emails with various news articles. I don't have the link anymore, I delete this stuff after reading. I tried a Google search but didn't find anything.
The guy sounded like some cantakerous old guy who got on some local talk radio and called Bush a liar, etc. No actual threats or anything except maybe a demand to impeach Bush. Next thing he knows eight local cops run onto his property with no search warrant or anything, and they wander around looking for pot, apparently. He said they eyed one of his bushes which doesn't even remotely resemble pot. Then he gets the local game warden coming onto his place.
It's probably just local cops overreacting or trying to intimidate him into keeping his mouth shut, but this sort of thing seems to be happening at least in red states.
Well, if your drivers aren't even installed, let alone working, X is not exactly the cause of your problems, is it?
Your average end user isn't going to be upgrading from X to Xorg and reinstalling video drivers anyway.
Now, if they have a situation where X gets corrupted and crashes on boot, yes, they probably won't know how to drop to a command line, set init to run level 3, and debug the config file or reinstall the drivers or X from rpm or whatever.
But how often is that going to happen? And compared to Windows, if Windows manages to screw the boot loader config (which has happened to me), if you don't know how to use the Recovery Console to edit the config file, you're hosed there, too.
My point is simply that in the vast majority of cases where X crashes or freezes, killing the server from xkill or the CTRL-ALT-BS works, and if it doesn't, switching to a virtual terminal will.
If the problem is more serious than that, as in your case, yes, people need to know more.
And that is exactly the same on Windows. So there is no superiority in either case.
On the other hand, try doing something like the screen utility in Windows...
Another example: have you ever had a file on Windows be utterly UNTOUCHABLE? It's REALLY frustrating. By this, I mean a file that as soon as you click on it in Explorer or ANY file manager, the file manager INSTANTLY crashes. No waiting, no error messages, boom, it instantly dies. NOTHING can touch that file - not even from the Windows command line!
I've had this several times, and it drives me nuts. I have to boot into Linux to delete the damn file because absolutely nothing in Windows will touch that file without crashing.
I have still to determine what causes this problem - Google has been no help. There are tons of situations described on Google where Windows Explorer crashes and/or crashes regularly, and most of the time people have to reinstall because it's nearly impossible to determine the cause - because there are no config files, only incomprehensible Registry keys that may be corrupted. There are problems with corrupted thumbnails so Explorer preview bombs, and the like. Do a Google search for "Explorer crashes" and read a few pages.
Confront a Windows user with those problems sometime, and see if they can solve it without a reinstall (or just ignoring that one file forever!)
I keep telling people there is no point in bringing up situations where Linux has problems that can only be fixed from the command line because Windows has exactly the same sorts of issues, if different causes.
I keep telling people:
1) Windows is CRAP.
2) Linux is ALSO CRAP.
3) BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
Christ, you still don't get it.
You DON'T CRASH TO THE CONSOLE.
You obtain a virtual terminal from the keystrokes that go to the terminal driver, NOT X. There is a terminal driver running which handles terminal connections. X has nothing to do with it.
Jesus, learn something about Linux before running your mouth.
Yup. This is how the "War on Terror" seems to be working.
Got lots of people getting patted down in airports and New York subway riders getting randomly searched and people's library books getting inspected - and some old guy in the midWest called Bush a liar on talk radio and got raided by the local cops - and no terrorists in sight - unless you count the London underground...which of course you have to.
"War on Terror" = "stupid rock".
Works for me, Bruce. Thanks.
Since the original post is titled "Stop the infighting", it's good that we ended up there.
I've just had two responses from Bruce on the issue, and I've responded to him.
He clarified his position that he supports opposing patent laws and reversing patents that Eben outlined, but maintains that the commons project may "lull people into believing the problem is solved."
I told him I respect his bringing up the issue, but that his comments about "spitting into the wind" were excessive and his argument is really weak because it is entirely speculative and does not outweighh the probable benefits of having a commons project in at least some cases.
If his comments were intended honestly but undiplomatically, I would drop my suggestion that he acted to start a flame war or for his own PR purposes. However, I have no way of actually knowing what his motivation was, as you correctly state. That's why I said "presumably". "Presumably" means "I don't know, but it seems that..."
I told Bruce just now that if he were to publicly clarify his support for the other aspects of the program he'd get a lot less criticism from me and others.
Because he basically is right in one respect: none of this is going to stop Microsoft from doing what they want to do. But if it even helps stop another SCO - which was Eben's point - then it's useful.
The bottom line is: his argument is too weak to support the tone of the comments he made and he ignored the other aspects of the program (AFAIK until his comments to me). Now it's all water under the dam and he'll have to deal with any backlash. I don't think his comments are going to have any effect on anybody directly involved anyway.
No, no, no.
X does not control your keyboard in console mode.
When X crashes, you do Alt-F1 to bring up a virtual terminal which is a CONSOLE app, and then you kill X. It has nothing to do with whether the X server is responding to keyboard input - you're using kill -9 from the console to tell the kernel to kill the job.
It's done every day by somebody somewhere. I've done it on rare occasions when X has locked up.
And whether you lose your work or not depends on the app that's running. Many editors, for instance, can reload a previous buffer that wasn't closed properly. I think vi does that, but I don't use it much, so I can't remember. Even in Windows, Word will recover a document in some circumstances.
You definitely don't need a reboot.
Like I said, provide some evidence, ANY evidence, that lulling people - significant people who are directly involved in this issue - is in even the slightest way likely or significant.
You harp on patents - forget that. We agree on that. Software patents and business patents are bad. I go further and say ALL patents are bad, and trying to fight any patents by supporting some patents is not a good martial art technigue - but forget that.
The bottom line is if your argument against a patent commons project is that it will result in lulling people into thinking the problem is solved, that's a really weak argument against doing it anyway. There is obviously a potential practical benefit in having such a commons in dealing with frivolous lawsuits which isn't outweighed by the mere possibility that some people might overlook more serious efforts.
Especially when your argument is pure speculation as to the side effects.
I respect your bringing up the issue, but you should have been a bit more diplomatic and less dismissive of the concept. You'd get a lot less criticism from me and others if you'd publicly clarify your support for the rest of the program Eben outlined as you did in your earlier post to me. That's all I'm saying.
"All data collected during the survey is entrusted to a single cube"
Which unfortunately is running Windows which BSODs upon hitting Earth's atmosphere, rendering the entire project worthless.
Typical of NASA's reliance on single points of failure (or multiple points like fucking foam?)
If you swarm outward, why not swarm inward and replicate the data so you're sure it gets back?
And I don't even have a college degree and I can figure out that much.
I guess that's why NASA is now developing a reputation for failure instead of success - too many geeks, not enough common sense.
You forgot:
1) Make things small.
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
Shale oil extraction should be feasible with nanotech.
Not to mention dumping nanotech into an oil field instead of water, thus avoiding destroying the oil fields like Saudi Arabia has been doing.
More efficient solar cells and wind turbines and wave energy extractors will of course be possible as well.
Not to mention more efficient engines to use the energy extracted.
Could even lead to enabling technologies that might make figuring out how to do fusion easier - even cold fusion (nanotech instrumentation might be the only way to prove that legit, if it is.)
Well, actually, AFAIK no such metals have ever been discovered at UFO crash sites. Metals, yeah, but nothing superstrong - just unusual alloys.
In fact, most of the stuff found from UFOs is some weird fluffy stuff. Like maybe alien semen from some bug jerking off as he flies over Washington...
Or maybe that's how they flush their johns...
There's a limit to how strong a physical material can be, IIRC, and we're not far from it now with some of our materials. Nanotech will only improve that so much. Drexler pointed that out in his first book, "Engines of Creation" IIRC.