Much as the folks at our little dear software companies (VA, RedHat, etc.) are nice and civil about the whole ethics thing, people need to stop expecting civil behavior from large companies. It's the CEO's legal responsability to provide the maximum profit for the company's stockholders. Everything else comes second. Whether it be MSFT, AOL, or f'n Corel for that matter, everything a corporation does is motivated by profit alone. Stop pretending it's special news when one of them reneges on an idealogical crusade. We all know what's going on.
we're starting to see the results of the gross abuses of capitalism, as it runs smack into the power of the Information Age(tm).
I'm sorry, but I don't think your revolution is at hand. The power of the Information Age is what has allowed these groups of profit-seekers called 'corporations' to become so large and well-coordinated and profitable. In fact, revolution and FUD can be compared to one another... In both cases, the existing regime says, "Hey, just wait awhile for Social Reform 2.0, it's great, it'll double your happiness. Do your really want to try and use the system cooked up by those revolutionary whackos?" And right now, the system works well enough that nobody wants to take that risk.
It's true, the middle class is gradually thinning out, the wage gap between rich and poor is widening, and things are starting to become slightly tense here and there... But don't underestimate the power of greed and desire. The poorer North American citizen (who is not really poor in comparison to the rest of the world, don't ever forget that) will, 95% of the time, it seems, stick to his job, buy lottery tickets, anything to try and achieve the material opulence that commercials tell us is desireable.
The only future I see for revolution is in eighty or 100 years, when the oil runs out. That's when the shit's going to hit the fan. There'll be a world war over who gets to exploit the last dredges of the barrel, the OPEC countries versus the USA and the rest of the (me) first world. Hopefully we'll kill a lot of our population off, and maybe some wise people will have the insight that maybe our system doesn't work so well after all and we should just try a different way. Look at ourselves. For the first time in human history, we're soiling our own nest. When we run out of gas, how are we going to deal with nuclear waste? With neurotoxings from pulp and paper plants causing mutations in amphibians? With holes in the ozone layer? With the mass extinction and homogenization of species, whether they be crops or animals? I could go on.
There will (sadly) not be a revolution, IMO, until we've consumed and expanded ourselves to the very edge of the cliff. I'm sure humans will survive, but this will be looked back on as "The Golden Age".
One last thing... (90% of readers have moved on by now, I'm sure) Think of this little tidbit. Trees grow at 2% a year. If we logged at a sustainable rate of 2% a year, we'd never run out of trees. But interest rates are 10% a year. It's much more cost effective to cut down all the trees -now-, and invest the money in the stock market. How does that make sense?
Sorry to be sarcastic, but honestly. History's next social revolution? All we have here is a bunch of computer users (whether they be NSA agents, script kiddies as you claim, or international Men of Mystery) exploiting the vulnerabilities of TCP/IP to overload prominent websites. It's not a revolution. And it's not "the equivalent of a... formal organized protest", it's a Denial of Service. The virtual people going to sell their souls to the capitalist god on Yahoo aren't seeing any virtual protesters, they're simply getting a blank screen and an annoyed look on their faces. It's not a protest unless the participants state their opinions and goals and the public has a chance to understand why the shutdown of XYZ matters to the protesters.
I won't try and tackle your label of "Bloodthirsty marketers" in full. You're going to have to accept that we live in a capitalist society, and given the technology to organize businesses on a large scale, large companies are going to form for the exclusive purpose of making money. That's the way it is. Nothing will eliminate the Big Evil Corporations save for complete social reform, which doesn't look too likely (communism's not looking too hot as a replacement). And reform will certainly not stem from the Internet, we're just all too rich! Look at yourself! Do you own the computer you're reading this with? Do you have a job? Your own house? Congratulations, you're safely ensconced in capitalism. You can whine and kick and scream, but knocking down web sites is not going to touch off any revolution. All it'll do is give the Powers That Be excuses to implement more security to protect the livelyhood of the folks at yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and CNN. This effort is counter-productive. You know of better ways to educate people about the problems of North American society than this! Please don't support the script kiddies (if that is who did this, the NSA's not ruled out for sure).
Moderators, realize that not every message with "Moderate me down if you must" deserves to be moderated up! Ignore that trash!
This is all just guessing, but I've got a feeling that it's just the plain vanilla BeFS. What reason would Be have to invest more man-hours in revamping a filesystem that works perfectly? I think it's just Be's famed marketing people (the Buzzword-Enabled-OS) strutting their stuff. Anyone disagree?
Time is limited for me to post, so this'll be brief.
I'm just curious as to how many hackers and crackers use drugs to enhance their cognitive abilities for brief periods of time? The reason I ask this is because I seem to recall some famous page being hacked a little while back, and the perpetrator leaving a note that had, amongst other things, an apology for his spelling because he was "on methadiachromanphetamines" or something. Anybody have an idea as to what effects amphetamines can have on the problem-solving abilities of the human brain?
If you want another example of something that bodes well for user interfaces, check out moonlight3d, an open-source graphics rendering program.
Re:Closed Development vs OSS for BeOS
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
While I don't think I can back up most of my inflammatory comments, I have a few nits to pick.
It may be a process of beating it into shape rather then careful artistic planning, but the end result seems to be the same.
Example - X Windows, an old system designed for the amazing purpose of running remote applications through a GUI! However, it is now bundled with every distro as a regular GUI for use on your own computer. So, X programmers have to connect to an X server, and jump through local loopback hoops to get a simple window open and working. (not a programmer, so correct me if I'm spouting hot air). The Berlin Consortium, faced with the daunting task of making a modern windowing system for Linux, have struggled along slowly, 'cause not that many people want to code for them when X works 'fine'.
Second, it fosters an almost Darwinian approach to software development. Many ideas are put forward, and the best selected.
The competitive struggles of Open Source projects differ slightly from the other Darwinian selection going on in the software industry today. In a commercial setting, the motivation for improving your product is making money by attracting new customers. As we all know, marketing can also accomplish this goal if your product is 'adequate'. But with OSS, the reason to improve your product is just for the sake of improving it! Beautiful! In the commercial setting, competitors trying to steal your marketshare drive development. In OSS, dissatisfied users and perfectionists drive development. SO - Why is it good that Gnome and KDE are doing exactly the same thing? Especially when KDE does it so much better?
You don't put forward any arguments for either of your points: BeOS "better designed" then Linux
It's hard for a sunday fanatic like me to realize that not too many people are going to agree with my opinions without proof. Okay, the way I see it, Linux is based on the UNIX philosophy. "Good programs don't die, they just migrate". Or something. Portable code is the objective, and the speed problems "will be taken care of by next year's machine". That's a Good Thing (tm), but it doesn't lend itself to really tight, slick projects! The BeOS has
Universal data translators, so programs don't need to concern themselves with decoding PNGs or whatever...
Massive multithreading, so that a second CPU gives you a 99% increase in processing power, and so that the system and programs, if they're well designed are *always* responsive until a crash/:)
A GUI with a (fast) Alpha channel, an anti-aliased font display engine, full OpenGL support (pending hardware rendering from chipset makers), and the ability to change resolutions/refresh rates/color depths on the fly.
Journaling file system with full MIME extension support, yes, I know, ReiserFS, XFS, blah...:)
Device drivers that load without asking, take up only a few hundred K of space (even video drivers), and can play that funky music.
And finaly, the oft-touted "Boots in 20 seconds", which is more of an indicator of the level of "togetherness" than a virtue in itself. Except that it takes about as much time to boot from a system running Windows as, say, Photoshop.
Better this time around? Hope you're still following up on this comment. I recognise your sig, so I'm sure you're very active here...
I should probably put some text in here so that my post won't get auto-moderated down for briefness. The subject is about all I have to say.
Re:Open Source and innovation
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
The Internet is a creation of OSS network development.
First off, call me dumb, but could anyone (previous poster even) dig up a link to a page which explains how OSS created the internet? I thought Al Gore did that.
But seriously - The BeOS would never have been developed if it was open source. The sheer slickness of it is testament to how much close planning and discussion went into its design. The business model, in Be's case at least, can work very well for developing high-quality products, because of the fact that each programmer is working in sync with everyone else. Look at Gnome and KDE. Two projects aiming to accomplish the same thing, and thousands of hours of work wasted. Yes, I know, the programmers are doing it for fun, so the effort is technically not 'wasted', but seriously - Couldn't the people who are duplicating each other's work in C and C++ respectively be doing something more innovative with their time?
The fact is that the BeOS is a more technically sophisticated, better designed OS that Linux, and it is thanks to closed source design that it has gotten this far.
I personally would not volunteer a child of mine for such experiments, even if I'd designed the device myself.
Damn straight. My kid's not going to have holes punched in his head either. And that's a big hurdle for this sort of research to clear. Experiments on the human brain are exclusively done to volunteers, usually those who have no real alternative to this sort of surgery. And let's face it, how many people want to have their brain poked at?
There's no way to get around this. Dr. Mengele is about the only other option. *shudder*
I'm a seasoned Linux user, that is I've figured out pretty much how to use Linux as a desktop computer. I'm fidgeting around right now, wanting KDE 2.0 and XFree 4 to be released so I can toy around with them.
I'm wondering if trying out FreeBSD would be at all interesting? How much help is there with installation problems? HOWTOs?
Makes you wonder if, as a baby, you had some strange thing (IR port, GPS, radio) wired into your brain just after birth, would you learn how to use it, just as you learn how to stand up, talk, and focus your eyes? The possibilities for this sort of thing would be very interesting if the problems could be worked out.
Anyone want to donate their kid to research? If he survives, he'll be able to do 23-digit factoring in his head... specifically in the math coprocessor under his skin.
My college roommate in first year played Quake II all first term. He passed all his exams, 'cause he had been very well prepared back in high school, with his parents and teachers motivating him to work. Second term was spent on IRC and StarCraft, and he failed all his courses with about 4% or so. He's wasting his entire life and he doesn't admit to it... Silly.
They have been doing this in Touring Car coverage for about a year now. It started out looking fairly fake - There would be a logo superimposed on the track surface, but if a tarmac-colored car went over it, it would mess up.
They fixed that problem fairly quickly, and the ads are now pretty much indistinguishable until they cut to a secondary camera and you see the same terrain, minus fake ads. Spooky.
But it's not foolish to try and set up artifical barriers against software copying.
Quake has a reputation now where every FPS player and their dog wants to get a copy and play it. ID software is now in a position where the 'unneccesary inconvenience' of copy protection will not dent their sales one bit (minus you). If they want to reap the rewards of all the hard work which they've put into it, they must prevent Quake III from suffering the same fate as Quake II, pirated beyond belief. Besides, since Q3 depends on internet access, the central CD-key database is the most logical and least inconveniencing form of copy-protection around...
If their central authorization server goes down, you can better believe that it'll be back up soon. 'Till then, play against some bots.
Also, Id's urging for people to protect their CD-key is simply to cut down on the number of people who give away their number to joe244243@bigfoot.com and call Id up to whine.
Note: I'm not pure as driven snow, I'm in fact a fair asshole when it comes to paying for software that I use. But I fully support the efforts of software developers to protect their intellectual property from theft.
It just means I'll have to go opening boxes at Wal-Mart with a pen and paper handy... (kidding, don't slaughter me, moderators...)
If I had to recommend a tool for MS types to work with foreign partitions, it would have to be Partiton Magic 4. The floppy-disk version of it (tagged as a "rescue disk") is probably the most useful tool one can have if you want to mess around with partitions but you're not hardcore.
You know how they'd get jobs? Doing something that directly benefitted their communities instead of cutting the manufacturing costs of the factory owners. Or if they did work in factories, they'd be local factories in which the products they made benefitted their community. Honestly, how much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes that cost $200 in the store? $20? $30? Anyone? You have to realize that This is how our standard of living is so high! No amount of work we do here can provide the living standard we enjoy. Our lovely gasoline-powered lifestyle is a direct byproduct of exploiting the poor.
And yes, I recognize the irony that the very system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. But that's exactly why priviledged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream- until everyone has everything they need.
This protest is certainly in fine form for the West Coast - A year and a half ago the protest in Vancouver against President Suharto attending the APEC (Asian-Pacific Economic Community) conference resulted in the RCMP breaking out the pepper spray with a little too much enthusiasm. This Seattle protest, however, was more than just a bunch of University students standing around with signs and setting up tents on campus (I live in Vancouver, I saw it all). This protest involved shutting down a huge chunk of downtown Seattle, and I believe was a success. It's too bad that crowds tend to attract the violent, as now the backlash against this incident is likely to fuel the conservatives for another few elections....
Think about free trade for a second. What free trade is is a way for the rich to get richer. Those who can afford to set up manufacturing plants in foreign third world countries and ship manufactured goods benefit immensely from Free Trade. It allows them to exploit the rest of humankind for our North American benefit, and profit ridiculously for doing it. That's all I have to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Much as the folks at our little dear software companies (VA, RedHat, etc.) are nice and civil about the whole ethics thing, people need to stop expecting civil behavior from large companies. It's the CEO's legal responsability to provide the maximum profit for the company's stockholders. Everything else comes second. Whether it be MSFT, AOL, or f'n Corel for that matter, everything a corporation does is motivated by profit alone. Stop pretending it's special news when one of them reneges on an idealogical crusade. We all know what's going on.
I'm sorry, but I don't think your revolution is at hand. The power of the Information Age is what has allowed these groups of profit-seekers called 'corporations' to become so large and well-coordinated and profitable. In fact, revolution and FUD can be compared to one another... In both cases, the existing regime says, "Hey, just wait awhile for Social Reform 2.0, it's great, it'll double your happiness. Do your really want to try and use the system cooked up by those revolutionary whackos?" And right now, the system works well enough that nobody wants to take that risk.
It's true, the middle class is gradually thinning out, the wage gap between rich and poor is widening, and things are starting to become slightly tense here and there... But don't underestimate the power of greed and desire. The poorer North American citizen (who is not really poor in comparison to the rest of the world, don't ever forget that) will, 95% of the time, it seems, stick to his job, buy lottery tickets, anything to try and achieve the material opulence that commercials tell us is desireable.
The only future I see for revolution is in eighty or 100 years, when the oil runs out. That's when the shit's going to hit the fan. There'll be a world war over who gets to exploit the last dredges of the barrel, the OPEC countries versus the USA and the rest of the (me) first world. Hopefully we'll kill a lot of our population off, and maybe some wise people will have the insight that maybe our system doesn't work so well after all and we should just try a different way. Look at ourselves. For the first time in human history, we're soiling our own nest. When we run out of gas, how are we going to deal with nuclear waste? With neurotoxings from pulp and paper plants causing mutations in amphibians? With holes in the ozone layer? With the mass extinction and homogenization of species, whether they be crops or animals? I could go on.
There will (sadly) not be a revolution, IMO, until we've consumed and expanded ourselves to the very edge of the cliff. I'm sure humans will survive, but this will be looked back on as "The Golden Age".
One last thing... (90% of readers have moved on by now, I'm sure) Think of this little tidbit. Trees grow at 2% a year. If we logged at a sustainable rate of 2% a year, we'd never run out of trees. But interest rates are 10% a year. It's much more cost effective to cut down all the trees -now-, and invest the money in the stock market. How does that make sense?
I won't try and tackle your label of "Bloodthirsty marketers" in full. You're going to have to accept that we live in a capitalist society, and given the technology to organize businesses on a large scale, large companies are going to form for the exclusive purpose of making money. That's the way it is. Nothing will eliminate the Big Evil Corporations save for complete social reform, which doesn't look too likely (communism's not looking too hot as a replacement). And reform will certainly not stem from the Internet, we're just all too rich! Look at yourself! Do you own the computer you're reading this with? Do you have a job? Your own house? Congratulations, you're safely ensconced in capitalism. You can whine and kick and scream, but knocking down web sites is not going to touch off any revolution. All it'll do is give the Powers That Be excuses to implement more security to protect the livelyhood of the folks at yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and CNN. This effort is counter-productive. You know of better ways to educate people about the problems of North American society than this! Please don't support the script kiddies (if that is who did this, the NSA's not ruled out for sure).
Moderators, realize that not every message with "Moderate me down if you must" deserves to be moderated up! Ignore that trash!
This is all just guessing, but I've got a feeling that it's just the plain vanilla BeFS. What reason would Be have to invest more man-hours in revamping a filesystem that works perfectly? I think it's just Be's famed marketing people (the Buzzword-Enabled-OS) strutting their stuff. Anyone disagree?
I'm just curious as to how many hackers and crackers use drugs to enhance their cognitive abilities for brief periods of time? The reason I ask this is because I seem to recall some famous page being hacked a little while back, and the perpetrator leaving a note that had, amongst other things, an apology for his spelling because he was "on methadiachromanphetamines" or something. Anybody have an idea as to what effects amphetamines can have on the problem-solving abilities of the human brain?
Though it may be in need of work, the Sabre flight combat simulator is functional and fun. Check it out.
If you want another example of something that bodes well for user interfaces, check out moonlight3d, an open-source graphics rendering program.
It may be a process of beating it into shape rather then careful artistic planning, but the end result seems to be the same.
Example - X Windows, an old system designed for the amazing purpose of running remote applications through a GUI! However, it is now bundled with every distro as a regular GUI for use on your own computer. So, X programmers have to connect to an X server, and jump through local loopback hoops to get a simple window open and working. (not a programmer, so correct me if I'm spouting hot air). The Berlin Consortium, faced with the daunting task of making a modern windowing system for Linux, have struggled along slowly, 'cause not that many people want to code for them when X works 'fine'.
Second, it fosters an almost Darwinian approach to software development. Many ideas are put forward, and the best selected.
The competitive struggles of Open Source projects differ slightly from the other Darwinian selection going on in the software industry today. In a commercial setting, the motivation for improving your product is making money by attracting new customers. As we all know, marketing can also accomplish this goal if your product is 'adequate'. But with OSS, the reason to improve your product is just for the sake of improving it! Beautiful! In the commercial setting, competitors trying to steal your marketshare drive development. In OSS, dissatisfied users and perfectionists drive development. SO - Why is it good that Gnome and KDE are doing exactly the same thing? Especially when KDE does it so much better?
You don't put forward any arguments for either of your points: BeOS "better designed" then Linux
It's hard for a sunday fanatic like me to realize that not too many people are going to agree with my opinions without proof. Okay, the way I see it, Linux is based on the UNIX philosophy. "Good programs don't die, they just migrate". Or something. Portable code is the objective, and the speed problems "will be taken care of by next year's machine". That's a Good Thing (tm), but it doesn't lend itself to really tight, slick projects! The BeOS has
Better this time around? Hope you're still following up on this comment. I recognise your sig, so I'm sure you're very active here...
I should probably put some text in here so that my post won't get auto-moderated down for briefness. The subject is about all I have to say.
First off, call me dumb, but could anyone (previous poster even) dig up a link to a page which explains how OSS created the internet? I thought Al Gore did that.
But seriously - The BeOS would never have been developed if it was open source. The sheer slickness of it is testament to how much close planning and discussion went into its design. The business model, in Be's case at least, can work very well for developing high-quality products, because of the fact that each programmer is working in sync with everyone else. Look at Gnome and KDE. Two projects aiming to accomplish the same thing, and thousands of hours of work wasted. Yes, I know, the programmers are doing it for fun, so the effort is technically not 'wasted', but seriously - Couldn't the people who are duplicating each other's work in C and C++ respectively be doing something more innovative with their time?
The fact is that the BeOS is a more technically sophisticated, better designed OS that Linux, and it is thanks to closed source design that it has gotten this far.
This answers better than I can
So you mean I can watch the glowing blue hockey puck streak for real now? Whoo!
Damn straight. My kid's not going to have holes punched in his head either. And that's a big hurdle for this sort of research to clear. Experiments on the human brain are exclusively done to volunteers, usually those who have no real alternative to this sort of surgery. And let's face it, how many people want to have their brain poked at?
There's no way to get around this. Dr. Mengele is about the only other option. *shudder*
His implant was put in in 1978, I'm sure we could do a better job today.
I'm wondering if trying out FreeBSD would be at all interesting? How much help is there with installation problems? HOWTOs?
One cop: What're you going to do tonight?
Other cop: Jack off the computer, I guess.
Anyone want to donate their kid to research? If he survives, he'll be able to do 23-digit factoring in his head... specifically in the math coprocessor under his skin.
My college roommate in first year played Quake II all first term. He passed all his exams, 'cause he had been very well prepared back in high school, with his parents and teachers motivating him to work. Second term was spent on IRC and StarCraft, and he failed all his courses with about 4% or so. He's wasting his entire life and he doesn't admit to it... Silly.
Bender shits a brick.
They fixed that problem fairly quickly, and the ads are now pretty much indistinguishable until they cut to a secondary camera and you see the same terrain, minus fake ads. Spooky.
Quake has a reputation now where every FPS player and their dog wants to get a copy and play it. ID software is now in a position where the 'unneccesary inconvenience' of copy protection will not dent their sales one bit (minus you). If they want to reap the rewards of all the hard work which they've put into it, they must prevent Quake III from suffering the same fate as Quake II, pirated beyond belief. Besides, since Q3 depends on internet access, the central CD-key database is the most logical and least inconveniencing form of copy-protection around...
If their central authorization server goes down, you can better believe that it'll be back up soon. 'Till then, play against some bots.
Also, Id's urging for people to protect their CD-key is simply to cut down on the number of people who give away their number to joe244243@bigfoot.com and call Id up to whine.
Note: I'm not pure as driven snow, I'm in fact a fair asshole when it comes to paying for software that I use. But I fully support the efforts of software developers to protect their intellectual property from theft.
It just means I'll have to go opening boxes at Wal-Mart with a pen and paper handy... (kidding, don't slaughter me, moderators...)
If I had to recommend a tool for MS types to work with foreign partitions, it would have to be Partiton Magic 4. The floppy-disk version of it (tagged as a "rescue disk") is probably the most useful tool one can have if you want to mess around with partitions but you're not hardcore.
You know how they'd get jobs? Doing something that directly benefitted their communities instead of cutting the manufacturing costs of the factory owners. Or if they did work in factories, they'd be local factories in which the products they made benefitted their community. Honestly, how much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes that cost $200 in the store? $20? $30? Anyone? You have to realize that This is how our standard of living is so high! No amount of work we do here can provide the living standard we enjoy. Our lovely gasoline-powered lifestyle is a direct byproduct of exploiting the poor.
Propaghandi, a punk band from Winnipeg
Think about free trade for a second. What free trade is is a way for the rich to get richer. Those who can afford to set up manufacturing plants in foreign third world countries and ship manufactured goods benefit immensely from Free Trade. It allows them to exploit the rest of humankind for our North American benefit, and profit ridiculously for doing it. That's all I have to say.
ZNet, a community of people concerned with social change.