The prominence of this article (linked from the front page of news.bbc.co.uk) is really interesting. Millions of normal BBC news website readers will have seen that, and those people are not your average techies.
The BBC clearly sees this as a mainstream, political, non-technical issue, which is an interesting change in attitude.
MS is now a political party. They want to use their enormous ill-gotten wealth to brainwash the whole public into liking them, having failed to convince a single judge.
Performance would be utterly dreadful, but it'd be quite cool to have an encrypted VPN on top of the normal internet, with loads of redundant connections which dropped in and out of existence. Ok, this isn't workable.
It'll be a big win for the DoJ if it can get a guilty finding against Microsoft. This will allow other people to sue MS much more easily. Caldera was bought off by the rich boys from Redmond in a case which could have done *serious* PR damage to MS. The DoJ prevented a settlement by making it appear that it wanted to break MS up. Now it's saying it doesn't want a breakup, leaving MS no time at all in which to come up with a proposed deal which doesn't involve this.
Well done, guys. You've beaten them at their own game.
Let's hope that the Europeans actually get round to investigating MS's other racket: MS Office.
PLEASE get this right. They'll be charged with (if under UK law) "obtaining services by deception", NOT with theft. Their local legal system will make a similar distinction. The only people looking silly for calling it theft are those repeating and trumpeting the allegations; the authorities will use the right wording and not sound idiotic when it actually comes to charging/arraigning these people.
One of the worst things about online discussions of geeks' political affiliations is the assumption (especially when considering US geekdom) that geeks are more politically homogenous than they are (namely, that they are generally libertarian).
I'm deeply suspicious of ANYONE who says that people generally think the same way about important issues.
It's interesting.. the media really helped take the message of free software and open source to the masses (in a suitably diluted, palatable form); now they're going after the Patents Office.
This is good news... having journalists crawling all over you is the next worst thing to hordes of enraged lawyers smelling blood.
I wonder if these people are liable under faulty product legislation for representing as CDs things which aren't Red Book compliant.
I've often dreamt of suing Microsoft for their so-called TELNET programme which actually doesn't. (It violates the protocol, or at least the Win95 version did).
The things needed for realtime (the utime patch from Kansas, etc) don't seem to be taken seriously by Linus, AFAICS.
There is some good research out there showing how we can have sane realtime and quality of service guarantees for apps; this is vital for timing critical tasks like burning CDs and videoconferencing; with Linux we should be able to compile kernels safely whilst doing those things. But currently, we're blocked on patches getting into the kernel. Ah well.
Remember that the only thing holding NSI in place is the fact that their root DNS system is the one chosen by the majority of the nameserver administrators on the planet. If all these people could be convinced to switch over to a better system (and not a trashy opportunistic one like AlterNIC but a responsible one run by the Net for the Net), things would be a lot better.
It's strange that they even managed to get X to run on these beasts; they use on-motherboard Matrox G200s with a non-standard clock rate; we had to hack the X server and the kernel fb driver even to get a picture to appear.
Maybe there are several HP Vectra P3 450 models, or maybe X and the kernel have caught up now.
Well, having access to all the useful protocols and even some which are less useful would be great. One thing I'd really like to see would be an inbuilt Mozilla telnet client with support for a sort of VTHTML, which would make MUDding a lot better if supported by MUD servers.
Most importantly, Mozilla should make it hard to disable telnet. It's so frustrating when you have a strange anonymous computer to use, and you can do web but can't telnet to check your mail, etc.
Exactly - Linux is now able to be treated as normal (take corporate press release, and rewrite bits of it; pass off as news; repeat), which it certainly couldn't this time last year.
The thing I was thinking of wasn't actually an error, it was just a weird exaggeration. I think you said that the support for IRIX's EFS would be "key" to something or other (though I can't see how it'd be key to anything other than interoperability with IRIX (utterly vital in my experience - had to use EFS to export an IRIX CD by NFS rather than leave the building and go to the real CD drive))
This is another of those tiny little telltale signs that the media has been won over. This story shows they even seem to "get" the kernel development process. However, they're putting it in terms that the mainstream can understand: Big computer company Siemens helps littler Linux computer company SuSe to write an extension for Linux. Kernel boffin also cooperating.
My best example of this was when I saw a rehash of Pravenich's 2.4 kernel thing on a tech news site - they'd duplicated his mistakes, and were brainwashing the masses with the stuff!;)
Now that people can choose to be anonymous, it's not very different from allowing ACs to choose any name they want. You could abolish ACs and allow them to choose a name for each post. Next to their name there'd be a little [AC] tag to show that it's not a registered user.
ACs could choose whether or not to identify themselves as the same person in a thread, which would help them and the registered users.
The other thing is that if people can now forgo their karma bonus to prevent their silly posts from getting too high a score, maybe they should be allowed to moderate their own posts down as much as they like (so that moderators don't blow their own points on doing this)
Calm down. I'm just saying that I didn't think it was on topic. I'm perfectly capable of not reading on topical stuff that I disapprove of for other reasons (e.g., I can't be bothered with JonKatz most of the time)
I see that the other person who replied managed to point out that it this story is on topic. Why couldn't you have done that rather than being so impolite?
Your observation in the last paragraph is certainly correct; I used to have a karma level which put my posts at 2 automaticly, and so they stopped getting moderated up.
Just because a lot of nerds may well have vaguely anti-authoritarian views, it doens't mean/. has to devolve into a political organ for such views. Stop submitting this crap; we can read it on CNN (those of us who even bother following American "politics")
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC clearly sees this as a mainstream, political, non-technical issue, which is an interesting change in attitude.
They are not the enemy per se
MS is now a political party. They want to
use their enormous ill-gotten wealth to
brainwash the whole public into liking them,
having failed to convince a single judge.
Performance would be utterly dreadful, but it'd be quite cool to have an encrypted VPN on top of the normal internet, with loads of redundant connections which dropped in and out of existence. Ok, this isn't workable.
It'll be a big win for the DoJ if it can get a guilty finding against Microsoft. This will allow other people to sue MS much more easily. Caldera was bought off by the rich boys from Redmond in a case which could have done *serious* PR damage to MS. The DoJ prevented a settlement by making it appear that it wanted to break MS up. Now it's saying it doesn't want a breakup, leaving MS no time at all in which to come up with a proposed deal which doesn't involve this.
Well done, guys. You've beaten them at their own game.
Let's hope that the Europeans actually get round to investigating MS's other racket: MS Office.
PLEASE get this right. They'll be charged with
(if under UK law) "obtaining services by
deception", NOT with theft. Their local legal
system will make a similar distinction. The
only people looking silly for calling it
theft are those repeating and trumpeting
the allegations; the authorities will use the
right wording and not sound idiotic when it
actually comes to charging/arraigning these
people.
affiliations is the assumption (especially when considering US geekdom)
that geeks are more politically homogenous than they are (namely, that
they are generally libertarian).
I'm deeply suspicious of ANYONE who says that people generally think
the same way about important issues.
It's interesting .. the media really helped take the message of free software and open source to the masses (in a suitably diluted, palatable form); now they're going after the Patents Office.
This is good news ... having journalists crawling all over you is the next worst thing to hordes of enraged lawyers smelling blood.
I've often dreamt of suing Microsoft for their so-called TELNET programme which actually doesn't. (It violates the protocol, or at least the Win95 version did).
No, you STILL have it wrong!
Do change the title.
Do you think we'll see capabilities begin to replace root in Linux? What will that world be like? When will it happen?
There is some good research out there showing how we can have sane realtime and quality of service guarantees for apps; this is vital for timing critical tasks like burning CDs and videoconferencing; with Linux we should be able to compile kernels safely whilst doing those things. But currently, we're blocked on patches getting into the kernel. Ah well.
Remember that the only thing holding NSI in place is the fact that their root DNS system is the one chosen by the majority of the nameserver administrators on the planet. If all these people could be convinced to switch over to a better system (and not a trashy opportunistic one like AlterNIC but a responsible one run by the Net for the Net), things would be a lot better.
Maybe there are several HP Vectra P3 450 models, or maybe X and the kernel have caught up now.
I like that one; I think I'll use it.
Most importantly, Mozilla should make it hard to disable telnet. It's so frustrating when you have a strange anonymous computer to use, and you can do web but can't telnet to check your mail, etc.
Ok, so I'm posting too much in this non-thread.
Exactly - Linux is now able to be treated as
normal (take corporate press release, and
rewrite bits of it; pass off as news; repeat),
which it certainly couldn't this time last year.
The thing I was thinking of wasn't actually
an error, it was just a weird exaggeration.
I think you said that the support for IRIX's
EFS would be "key" to something or other
(though I can't see how it'd be key to
anything other than interoperability with IRIX
(utterly vital in my experience - had to use
EFS to export an IRIX CD by NFS rather than
leave the building and go to the real CD drive))
My best example of this was when I saw a rehash of Pravenich's 2.4 kernel thing on a tech news site - they'd duplicated his mistakes, and were brainwashing the masses with the stuff! ;)
ACs could choose whether or not to identify themselves as the same person in a thread, which would help them and the registered users.
The other thing is that if people can now forgo their karma bonus to prevent their silly posts from getting too high a score, maybe they should be allowed to moderate their own posts down as much as they like (so that moderators don't blow their own points on doing this)
I see that the other person who replied managed to point out that it this story is on topic. Why couldn't you have done that rather than being so impolite?
Your observation in the last paragraph is
certainly correct; I used to have a karma
level which put my posts at 2 automaticly,
and so they stopped getting moderated up.
Just because a lot of nerds may well have /. has to devolve into a political organ
vaguely anti-authoritarian views, it doens't
mean
for such views. Stop submitting this crap;
we can read it on CNN (those of us who even
bother following American "politics")