I just signed up for Jabber, I encourage all of you to do the same. Microsoft is going to try to use its monopoly to club all the other IM clients AND protocols. Time to jump off their ship.
I think you're using quite a broad brush with "socialism". I tried to find some proper references on the internet from which to argue, but they all seem to be kooks and nuts. Anyway, I thought that the distinction between socialism and capitalism was more to do with who has control over the production of goods, so it's not clear how laws such as environmental policy, etc, are "socialist". I think it's a problem of relative perspective. If you think that the market should be the foundation of most or all aspects of society, then I suppose you could claim that any non-market system is "socialist". This would seem to be a strange position (consider the justice system). On the other hand if you consider socialism and capitalism to be nothing more than economic systems, rather than some sort of grand philosophy, then environmental regulations would appear to be sort of neutral.
You bring up another interesting point about the cost of pro-environmental policies. It has been my experience that there is a cost associated with every choice, and such costs are frequently overlooked when they are passed on to future generations. Consider my favorite example of suburban sprawl. On the surface, it would seem that land is cheap, so we can build lots of houses with big yards and have our cities extend for miles and miles. Cars and gasoline are relatively affordable, and people are willing to commute if they can own a nice house at a good price. All of this sounds very attractive. But there is a cost to doing all of this, and that cost will be borne by future generations of homeowners who live in the area.
The problem is that once you lay down roads, they never seem to go away. As decades go by, future incarnations of the neighbourhood will have exactly the same layout; and as things like personal transportation and land become more expensive, the inefficiencies of this design will become very clear. To live in these neighbourhoods, people have to own a car (or something like it), and pay whatever it costs to run it, regardless of how expensive that is. You can't walk to a store to get groceries, you have to drive everywhere - more costs. Public transit isn't feasible, because the population density is always too low - more costs. The list goes on and on, and although right now these problems seem irrelevant (everyone has an SUV, maybe two), in 30 years these will be huge, expensive problems.
You might think that I've diverged a little bit with my rant there, but exactly the same point can be made about environmental regulations. For the most part, those regulations are intended to head off future problems, and it's quite reasonable to expect that those future problems would be much more expensive than the cost of implementing the regulation. If that is the case, how is it a "socialist" policy ? If the regulations enjoy popular support, isn't it simply a case of a majority of people saving themselves the future costs of shortsightedness ?
Have any TCO studies included the cost of worms and virus outbreaks ? Of course, this sort of thing can happen on any operating system, but you see these estimates flying around in the media: "such and such worm cost X billion dollars". How much of that was borne by your company ? I think this issue makes a strong case for Linux on some desktops, particularily secretaries and people who don't need specialized applications.
Indeed, as the SCO case has shown, Corporate America can effectively outlaw the distribution of anything that infringes on their income model by doing little more than filing a lawsuit.
If every distro _defaulted_ to the "standard" desktop, but they all had "advanced" options allowing people who are interested in such things to explore the complete range of current and future choices, would that not satisfy everyone?
The problem here, and everyone feels it in their gut, is that making a global default interface will kill development for everything else. Suppose we choose KDE, then most new applications will be written for KDE, and anyone using any other window manager will have to load half of KDE to run their apps. Ditto for Gnome (although not as bad).
I think people need to realize that part of the reason Linux is such a strong contender is that there is diversity and competition at almost every level. Improvements in Gnome spur improvements in KDE, and vice versa. Sometimes a program becomes so good as to become a de-facto standard for a while, but because it's open source anybody can take the functionality and write their own competing program. Freedom and competition go hand in hand, and they are even given a boost by the development model. Trying to impose standards will not improve the quality of Linux software at all, and in the long run it will actually limit it.
Sorry, the link referred me to the wrong paper. So the grandparent IS mistaken, and I was too. Here is the abstract for the real paper.
Denial of Service attacks are presenting an increasing threat to the global inter-networking infrastructure. While TCP's congestion control algorithm is highly robust to diverse network conditions, its implicit assumption of end-system cooperation results in a wellknown vulnerability to attack by high-rate non-responsive flows. In this paper, we investigate a class of low-rate denial of service attacks which, unlike high-rate attacks, are difficult for routers and counter-DoS mechanisms to detect. Using a combination of analytical modeling, simulations, and Internet experiments, we show that maliciously chosen low-rate DoS traffic patterns that exploit TCP's retransmission time-out mechanism can throttle TCP flows to a small fraction of their ideal rate while eluding detection. More-over, as such attacks exploit protocol homogeneity, we study fundamental limits of the ability of a class of randomized time-out mechanisms to thwart such low-rate DoS attacks.
Did the other people not read the first line of the abstract ?
Group subscription is a useful mechanism for multicast congestion control: RLM, RLC, FLID-DL, and WEBRC form a promising line of multi-group protocols where receivers provide no feedback to the sender but control congestion via group membership regulation. Unfortunately, the group subscription mechanism also offers receivers an opportunity to elicit self-beneficial bandwidth allocations. In particular, a misbehaving receiver can ignore guidelines for group subscription and choose an unfairly high subscription level in a multi-group multicast session. This poses a serious threat to fairness of bandwidth allocation. In this paper, we present the first solution for the problem of inflated subscription. Our design guards access to multicast groups with dynamic keys and consists of two independent components: DELTA (Distribution of ELigibility To Access) a novel method for in-band distribution of group keys to receivers that are eligible to access the groups according to the congestion control protocol, and SIGMA (Secure Internet Group Management Architecture) a generic architecture for key-based group access at edge routers.
Your sig is hilarious. The average/. reader is an idiot. Half of/. readers are below average. Are you scared yet? You're confusing average with median, and I'm more concerned about people who post:)
In Monday's decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case, because the DVD code was never meant to be public.
Exactly when are trade secrets "meant" to be public ? Does this ruling really place "trade secrets" above free-speech ? Unreal.
Nor did the code itself contribute significantly to a debate over whether DVDs should be encrypted at all, the judges said.
Is the publics' role simply to debate things that they can't do anything about ? DeCSS added plenty to the public debate, because it enabled people to do something that they couldn't previously do. It IS the debate.
I've re-encoded some of my dvds, yet I probably wouldn't have done so if I had to break CSS on my own. The crux of the matter is that only a few people have the expertise, willingness, and time required to figure it out, and the law targets the disemination of knowledge.
I overlooked ICQ as well. I honestly don't think Microsoft will ever be able to shove all their competitors out of the market. As new technology emerges and becomes popular, new software will be required to use it, and Microsoft is never first. I think we will however, find ourselves in a situation where a $150 operating system covers 90% of everyday users' needs. I wouldn't be so hasty to blame this on Microsoft though, I think it has more to do with the nature of software and reusable code.
I think Microsoft would find itself in an undefendable position were it to integrate a feature such as antivirus directly into Windows. That would be using monopoly powers to stifle competition...
Zone Labs, Realnetworks, Netscape, Novell, Stac, Quarterdeck, and many other companies have had the functionality of their main product absorbed into Microsoft's operating system. The fact is, Microsoft is a competitor to everyone. They are strong precisely because they leverage their monopolies to push everyone else out of the market.
I find it hilarious that this article is posted. Don't just trust all the tech-saavy nerds at slashdot, we've got a column from the Washington Post... woo hoo.
Slashdot Mirror
I just signed up for Jabber, I encourage all of you to do the same. Microsoft is going to try to use its monopoly to club all the other IM clients AND protocols. Time to jump off their ship.
I think you're using quite a broad brush with "socialism". I tried to find some proper references on the internet from which to argue, but they all seem to be kooks and nuts. Anyway, I thought that the distinction between socialism and capitalism was more to do with who has control over the production of goods, so it's not clear how laws such as environmental policy, etc, are "socialist". I think it's a problem of relative perspective. If you think that the market should be the foundation of most or all aspects of society, then I suppose you could claim that any non-market system is "socialist". This would seem to be a strange position (consider the justice system). On the other hand if you consider socialism and capitalism to be nothing more than economic systems, rather than some sort of grand philosophy, then environmental regulations would appear to be sort of neutral.
You bring up another interesting point about the cost of pro-environmental policies. It has been my experience that there is a cost associated with every choice, and such costs are frequently overlooked when they are passed on to future generations. Consider my favorite example of suburban sprawl. On the surface, it would seem that land is cheap, so we can build lots of houses with big yards and have our cities extend for miles and miles. Cars and gasoline are relatively affordable, and people are willing to commute if they can own a nice house at a good price. All of this sounds very attractive. But there is a cost to doing all of this, and that cost will be borne by future generations of homeowners who live in the area.
The problem is that once you lay down roads, they never seem to go away. As decades go by, future incarnations of the neighbourhood will have exactly the same layout; and as things like personal transportation and land become more expensive, the inefficiencies of this design will become very clear. To live in these neighbourhoods, people have to own a car (or something like it), and pay whatever it costs to run it, regardless of how expensive that is. You can't walk to a store to get groceries, you have to drive everywhere - more costs. Public transit isn't feasible, because the population density is always too low - more costs. The list goes on and on, and although right now these problems seem irrelevant (everyone has an SUV, maybe two), in 30 years these will be huge, expensive problems.
You might think that I've diverged a little bit with my rant there, but exactly the same point can be made about environmental regulations. For the most part, those regulations are intended to head off future problems, and it's quite reasonable to expect that those future problems would be much more expensive than the cost of implementing the regulation. If that is the case, how is it a "socialist" policy ? If the regulations enjoy popular support, isn't it simply a case of a majority of people saving themselves the future costs of shortsightedness ?
Have any TCO studies included the cost of worms and virus outbreaks ? Of course, this sort of thing can happen on any operating system, but you see these estimates flying around in the media: "such and such worm cost X billion dollars". How much of that was borne by your company ? I think this issue makes a strong case for Linux on some desktops, particularily secretaries and people who don't need specialized applications.
Sinatra to McBride : "You better knock this pinko lawsuit crap off, or it's ring-a-ding-ding for you bozos !"
The US has a lot of protectionism, and I don't see how environmental protections are a socialist policy.
Please mod parent up. Whoever modded this "troll" is either malicious or a total idiot.
Run it on your own network.
This is actually a great idea.
Buyer beware and I'd rather not have software doing things behind my back.
What happens when 5% of your laundry says "warm" and the rest says "hot" ?
Your washing machine blue-screens and sends an error report to Microsoft.
Indeed, as the SCO case has shown, Corporate America can effectively outlaw the distribution of anything that infringes on their income model by doing little more than filing a lawsuit.
How exactly has the SCO case shown this ?
If every distro _defaulted_ to the "standard" desktop, but they all had "advanced" options allowing people who are interested in such things to explore the complete range of current and future choices, would that not satisfy everyone?
The problem here, and everyone feels it in their gut, is that making a global default interface will kill development for everything else. Suppose we choose KDE, then most new applications will be written for KDE, and anyone using any other window manager will have to load half of KDE to run their apps. Ditto for Gnome (although not as bad).
I think people need to realize that part of the reason Linux is such a strong contender is that there is diversity and competition at almost every level. Improvements in Gnome spur improvements in KDE, and vice versa. Sometimes a program becomes so good as to become a de-facto standard for a while, but because it's open source anybody can take the functionality and write their own competing program. Freedom and competition go hand in hand, and they are even given a boost by the development model. Trying to impose standards will not improve the quality of Linux software at all, and in the long run it will actually limit it.
I thought it was only commercial developers writing to Win32 that had to pay.
Sorry, the link referred me to the wrong paper. So the grandparent IS mistaken, and I was too. Here is the abstract for the real paper.
Denial of Service attacks are presenting an increasing threat to the global inter-networking infrastructure. While TCP's congestion control algorithm is highly robust to diverse network conditions, its implicit assumption of end-system cooperation results in a wellknown vulnerability to attack by high-rate non-responsive flows. In this paper, we investigate a class of low-rate denial of service attacks which, unlike high-rate attacks, are difficult for routers and counter-DoS mechanisms to detect. Using a combination of analytical modeling, simulations, and Internet experiments, we show that maliciously chosen low-rate DoS traffic patterns that exploit TCP's retransmission time-out mechanism can throttle TCP flows to a small fraction of their ideal rate while eluding detection. More-over, as such attacks exploit protocol homogeneity, we study fundamental limits of the ability of a class of randomized time-out mechanisms to thwart such low-rate DoS attacks.
Did the other people not read the first line of the abstract ?
Group subscription is a useful mechanism for multicast congestion control: RLM, RLC, FLID-DL, and WEBRC form a promising line of multi-group protocols where receivers provide no feedback to the sender but control congestion via group membership regulation. Unfortunately, the group subscription mechanism also offers receivers an opportunity to elicit self-beneficial bandwidth allocations. In particular, a misbehaving receiver can ignore guidelines for group subscription and choose an unfairly high subscription level in a multi-group multicast session. This poses a serious threat to fairness of bandwidth allocation. In this paper, we present the first solution for the problem of inflated subscription. Our design guards access to multicast groups with dynamic keys and consists of two independent components: DELTA (Distribution of ELigibility To Access) a novel method for in-band distribution of group keys to receivers that are eligible to access the groups according to the congestion control protocol, and SIGMA (Secure Internet Group Management Architecture) a generic architecture for key-based group access at edge routers.
Sounds like they've finally thought of a ride for adults. The first thing I'd do is take on a rampage through "It's a Small World" !
Licences! We don need no stinkin' licences!
But Red Hat sounds like it's a product of communism !
Your sig is hilarious. The average /. reader is an idiot. Half of /. readers are below average. Are you scared yet? You're confusing average with median, and I'm more concerned about people who post :)
In Monday's decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case, because the DVD code was never meant to be public.
Exactly when are trade secrets "meant" to be public ? Does this ruling really place "trade secrets" above free-speech ? Unreal.
Nor did the code itself contribute significantly to a debate over whether DVDs should be encrypted at all, the judges said.
Is the publics' role simply to debate things that they can't do anything about ? DeCSS added plenty to the public debate, because it enabled people to do something that they couldn't previously do. It IS the debate.
I've re-encoded some of my dvds, yet I probably wouldn't have done so if I had to break CSS on my own. The crux of the matter is that only a few people have the expertise, willingness, and time required to figure it out, and the law targets the disemination of knowledge.
One thing that annoys me is people who say "alot" as if it were a word.
I overlooked ICQ as well. I honestly don't think Microsoft will ever be able to shove all their competitors out of the market. As new technology emerges and becomes popular, new software will be required to use it, and Microsoft is never first. I think we will however, find ourselves in a situation where a $150 operating system covers 90% of everyday users' needs. I wouldn't be so hasty to blame this on Microsoft though, I think it has more to do with the nature of software and reusable code.
I think Microsoft would find itself in an undefendable position were it to integrate a feature such as antivirus directly into Windows. That would be using monopoly powers to stifle competition...
Zone Labs, Realnetworks, Netscape, Novell, Stac, Quarterdeck, and many other companies have had the functionality of their main product absorbed into Microsoft's operating system. The fact is, Microsoft is a competitor to everyone. They are strong precisely because they leverage their monopolies to push everyone else out of the market.
I find it hilarious that this article is posted. Don't just trust all the tech-saavy nerds at slashdot, we've got a column from the Washington Post... woo hoo.