Many people say things like "well, people shouldn't be allowed to put crap like this on Wikipedia. We should do something about it". What nobody has done is advance a clear picture of how this can be done, aside from "put a cabal in charge", which raises the question of "who keeps the cabal from putting crap in?"
Wikipedia accepts that problems will arise, and it has mechanisms in place (like the edit history) to mitigate the effects. When a slashdot story goes up saying "House staffers screw around with articles", that's a victory for the Wikipedia system.
It rocks my world. AIM and Yahoo screen names feed right into GAIM 1.3, my GNOME taskbar calendar shows my appointments right then and there, and it runs fast (at least for me).
Well, Clem, ah dunno what yew city folk use, but us rural country folk use this here "cvs" and "subversion", which do alla that.
Seriously, you do realize that any non-trivial project is already using revision control software of some kind, that submissions are logged, and that users are authenticated before they can commit to the repository, right?
I guess if you absolutely must automate from within your document, this is all well and good. For a lot of the problems that macros tend to solve, though, there is another option: namely that the OO.org formats are open, and hence a lot of people have written Perl, Java, PHP, etc. importers and exporters for them. This is not a cure-all, and I don't expect it to be. But it is a free, and very useful, capability that Office makes difficult or impossible.
Bad software design can emerge from a monoculture. Linux et al. is mostly virus-free because there is no Linux Inc. who writes email clients that auto-execute attachments simply because some corporate customers like it that way. The design goals and objectives of FOSS are capable of being highly secure because there is no central management ensuring that something else takes priority at all costs.
"Hey, that's an awfully full heap ya's gots there, pally... be a shame if anything were to... HAPPEN to it."
Seriously, this is a good step they're taking. Instead of the same old "we take it up the ass for backwards compatibility" drill, fixing core parts of the OS is important. If an app breaks, so be it. They've announced this well in advance. No dev has an excuse not to know about it by the zero hour.
ESR is a voice in the Open Source movement BECAUSE HE IS ONE. A lot of people interview him for things. A lot of people seek his opinions. He gets invited to speak and consult. People listen to him. He is the embodiment of the movement's very principles! If you don't like how he does "spokesperson", I suggest you go try and replace him. Put out a better implementation - yourself, or whoever. Let the two compete on merit, and may the best man (or woman) win. But don't sit with your thumb up your ass and whine about how this man doesn't represent open source, when in fact that very meritocratic process is how he arrived in the role.
"x++;" is a line. So is the one-liner of Perl floating around that performs DVD-CSS decryption. One is entirely obvious; the other is not.
Copying source code a line at a time is more than cutting and pasting an EOL-terminated character string. It is also copying (and hence gaining the benefit of) all the knowledge that went into crafting that line. For trivial code, this is no big deal. But if you copy code that had man-months of research invested into it, along with the associated costs to do that research, you need to be standing on solid ground as far as your rights to copy it goes.
The exploitation of space comes down to economic and human factors, once the technology is there. The hman reasons are easy: you expand outward to preserve the species, and by giving people more room to live in you avert conflict, to some extent. The economic reasons are many: stuff like helium-3, asteroid mining and so forth.
The problem is that you cannot just leap from a planet-bound existence to a space-based one. The expense of reaching orbit or escaping gravity entirely is slowly coming down, and at each stage it's essential to approach the problem of reducing costs still further in different ways. At one stage, only governments can afford to put things into space. Then, corporations. We're there now - you can pay for satellite launches. Who's going to pay for the next stage? Probably the people who can throw money at something just because they want it - namely, the rich. And what do wealthy people want from space, at this point? Gratification.
You'll get your moon colonies once those space-tourists start cutting down the cost per pound of space launches.
I'm surprised bars haven't started doing this earlier. When their principal product is a substance that IMPAIRS JUDGEMENT (judgement like when to stop taking more of it), I would think they are WELL within their right to make sure that you, the voluntary consumer of this stuff, don't cause their establishment too much trouble. And if they can find out that you just smashed up 3 bars up the road and are going for 4, that's great. More power to them. It's their place of business.
It's not like bars are a fucking government service. You don't pay your Bar Tax on the federal, state and local level to maintain access to alcohol. You go to someone's house, you abide by their rules. You go to a place of business, you abide by theirs. If you don't like it, go to the liquor store for something, go home and rent porn, if you can't get a date with a sober woman.
You obviously don't run a business where your software depended on a specific environment, which the vendor (Microsoft) has made obsolete, or has "patched" into utter brokenness. Freedom is important when you need a stable base for applications, because freedom comes with the ability to accept upgrades, or to stay where you are because what you have is what works best for you.
This can even happen in the Linux world (with a lot of people complaining about RH's updates policy, when they're happily running RH7.3 machines).
It wouldn't do to sell ALL the stock just yet. There's still the possibility of a buy-out by SOMEBODY, especially if the trial proceedings swing at all in SCO's favor.
One of the linked pages provides a list of several vulnerabilities, one of which was announced recently.
If slashdot is going to post stories for subscribers well in advance, can it put some of its filthy lucre toward hustling some subscriptions from computer professionals of long experience, people literate in the English language, and other hard-to-find folks to fact-check BEFORE yet another elementary blunder makes the front page?
Cliff Stoll assumes that one's neighbors and family are interesting, desirable or safe to be around. This is not always the case.
Try living in a small town where your closest (within 5 miles) neighbors are "salt of the land" farmers and look down on you as some sort of budding Satanist, or even better, some large city like Washington, D.C. where you are only a block away from a permanently-stationed police car and people who walk around with planks of wood with nails driven through them, looking unpleasant.
After those experiences, I welcome anything that provides me with a little more "compatible" socialization, even if it's over a computer.
I set up LUFS last night, and blithely opened a Nautilus window to a mount-point I'd created (to a VERY remote SSHFS-mounted machine). Big mistake.
I had forgotten, of course, that I had Nautilus turned on to do all its previews, subdir counting, etc. on local files - which of course it was treating this mount point as. And I cursed gnome-vfs2 for not automatically sensing the "remoteness", by reading the list of system-wide mount points and detecting which filesystem was handling the directory into which I'd gone.
KDE faces a similar problem, ultimately. Until we see "kdesh" or some sort of LD_PRELOAD to offer ioslaves to traditional UNIX utilities, there will be a rift between the well-integrated solutions that KDE and GNOME offer, but which don't interact with lower-level utilities, and the kernel/hybrid solutions which don't provide information to any layer higher than they are (or worse, which are ignored by that higher layer, because of NIH syndrome).
SHFS is not the wrong answer. If it has caching and LUFS lacks it, maybe some of that code will migrate into LUFS. That's the entire point of open source, people - let the better project win, not just the more established one. But ultimately, neither project is the answer I favor, until the people at work on these various layers of VFS switching start to accept that other peoples' work may be running on the same system their code is.
The idea that someone spends $100K to $1M for "big iron" and attendant software packages is considered (at least in the speech) to be inferior to the open-source OS approach, namely that you can upgrade your systems much faster if you pay for lots of cheap systems instead of a single very expensive system. If the OS is free, and the hardware on which it runs is a commodity product, you've reduced the costs of upgrading by the amount you'd pay for OS and hardware otherwise - all that's left is the costs of your enterprise applications.
Let's say that an office keeps their files centralized on some Windows Filesharing-compatible server. That's fine, but what if the server is running (say) Samba? NT permissions need not apply. Nor do they matter if you do what everyone seems enthralled with, emailing multi-megabyte Word documents around for consideration.
Download managers aren't really the problem, except when you don't have the bandwidth to sustain parallel downloading. If you have enough pipe, parallel DLs ARE faster than a single serial download.
The problem the paper is describing is at the larger "router's eye view" scale, where multiple routes out to the rest of the network exist, and where only the fastest route is used - the other two pipelines are basically starved of packets.
After a certain point, the internal developer politics will affect the quality of the code. You have a similar situation in Linux, where virtual machines, framebuffers and so forth can be chosen not based on "merit" but on some personal preference.
While this may or may not affect the openness of the code, it's vital to be able to see for the developers at every tier - if a VM that does a job I need done is dropped in favor of another VM, for example, I can see why, and I can even go talk to the guy whose VM got dumped if I want more patches for it.
Next time, submit your review to the queue as well. Saying "my (better) review" is meaningless self-aggrandisement. Put your money where your mouth is.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? In this culture, bad PR and accusations of corruption or wrongdoing are the things a Congressman has most to fear.
Many people say things like "well, people shouldn't be allowed to put crap like this on Wikipedia. We should do something about it". What nobody has done is advance a clear picture of how this can be done, aside from "put a cabal in charge", which raises the question of "who keeps the cabal from putting crap in?"
Wikipedia accepts that problems will arise, and it has mechanisms in place (like the edit history) to mitigate the effects. When a slashdot story goes up saying "House staffers screw around with articles", that's a victory for the Wikipedia system.
It rocks my world. AIM and Yahoo screen names feed right into GAIM 1.3, my GNOME taskbar calendar shows my appointments right then and there, and it runs fast (at least for me).
Well, Clem, ah dunno what yew city folk use, but us rural country folk use this here "cvs" and "subversion", which do alla that.
Seriously, you do realize that any non-trivial project is already using revision control software of some kind, that submissions are logged, and that users are authenticated before they can commit to the repository, right?
If you are personally offended by this site, then you are probably the sort of person the site was made to parody.
I guess if you absolutely must automate from within your document, this is all well and good. For a lot of the problems that macros tend to solve, though, there is another option: namely that the OO.org formats are open, and hence a lot of people have written Perl, Java, PHP, etc. importers and exporters for them. This is not a cure-all, and I don't expect it to be. But it is a free, and very useful, capability that Office makes difficult or impossible.
Bad software design can emerge from a monoculture. Linux et al. is mostly virus-free because there is no Linux Inc. who writes email clients that auto-execute attachments simply because some corporate customers like it that way. The design goals and objectives of FOSS are capable of being highly secure because there is no central management ensuring that something else takes priority at all costs.
"Hey, that's an awfully full heap ya's gots there, pally... be a shame if anything were to... HAPPEN to it."
Seriously, this is a good step they're taking. Instead of the same old "we take it up the ass for backwards compatibility" drill, fixing core parts of the OS is important. If an app breaks, so be it. They've announced this well in advance. No dev has an excuse not to know about it by the zero hour.
ESR is a voice in the Open Source movement BECAUSE HE IS ONE. A lot of people interview him for things. A lot of people seek his opinions. He gets invited to speak and consult. People listen to him. He is the embodiment of the movement's very principles! If you don't like how he does "spokesperson", I suggest you go try and replace him. Put out a better implementation - yourself, or whoever. Let the two compete on merit, and may the best man (or woman) win. But don't sit with your thumb up your ass and whine about how this man doesn't represent open source, when in fact that very meritocratic process is how he arrived in the role.
Lines of code are not created equal.
"x++;" is a line. So is the one-liner of Perl floating around that performs DVD-CSS decryption. One is entirely obvious; the other is not.
Copying source code a line at a time is more than cutting and pasting an EOL-terminated character string. It is also copying (and hence gaining the benefit of) all the knowledge that went into crafting that line. For trivial code, this is no big deal. But if you copy code that had man-months of research invested into it, along with the associated costs to do that research, you need to be standing on solid ground as far as your rights to copy it goes.
The exploitation of space comes down to economic and human factors, once the technology is there. The hman reasons are easy: you expand outward to preserve the species, and by giving people more room to live in you avert conflict, to some extent. The economic reasons are many: stuff like helium-3, asteroid mining and so forth.
The problem is that you cannot just leap from a planet-bound existence to a space-based one. The expense of reaching orbit or escaping gravity entirely is slowly coming down, and at each stage it's essential to approach the problem of reducing costs still further in different ways. At one stage, only governments can afford to put things into space. Then, corporations. We're there now - you can pay for satellite launches. Who's going to pay for the next stage? Probably the people who can throw money at something just because they want it - namely, the rich. And what do wealthy people want from space, at this point? Gratification.
You'll get your moon colonies once those space-tourists start cutting down the cost per pound of space launches.
New software contains new bugs. Hardware upgrades are expensive. NAT is not a magic bullet.
Does this man write a regular column called "The Obvious"? He should.
Big Brother is alive and well? What the fuck?
I'm surprised bars haven't started doing this earlier. When their principal product is a substance that IMPAIRS JUDGEMENT (judgement like when to stop taking more of it), I would think they are WELL within their right to make sure that you, the voluntary consumer of this stuff, don't cause their establishment too much trouble. And if they can find out that you just smashed up 3 bars up the road and are going for 4, that's great. More power to them. It's their place of business.
It's not like bars are a fucking government service. You don't pay your Bar Tax on the federal, state and local level to maintain access to alcohol. You go to someone's house, you abide by their rules. You go to a place of business, you abide by theirs. If you don't like it, go to the liquor store for something, go home and rent porn, if you can't get a date with a sober woman.
You obviously don't run a business where your software depended on a specific environment, which the vendor (Microsoft) has made obsolete, or has "patched" into utter brokenness. Freedom is important when you need a stable base for applications, because freedom comes with the ability to accept upgrades, or to stay where you are because what you have is what works best for you.
This can even happen in the Linux world (with a lot of people complaining about RH's updates policy, when they're happily running RH7.3 machines).
It wouldn't do to sell ALL the stock just yet. There's still the possibility of a buy-out by SOMEBODY, especially if the trial proceedings swing at all in SCO's favor.
One of the linked pages provides a list of several vulnerabilities, one of which was announced recently.
If slashdot is going to post stories for subscribers well in advance, can it put some of its filthy lucre toward hustling some subscriptions from computer professionals of long experience, people literate in the English language, and other hard-to-find folks to fact-check BEFORE yet another elementary blunder makes the front page?
Cliff Stoll assumes that one's neighbors and family are interesting, desirable or safe to be around. This is not always the case.
Try living in a small town where your closest (within 5 miles) neighbors are "salt of the land" farmers and look down on you as some sort of budding Satanist, or even better, some large city like Washington, D.C. where you are only a block away from a permanently-stationed police car and people who walk around with planks of wood with nails driven through them, looking unpleasant.
After those experiences, I welcome anything that provides me with a little more "compatible" socialization, even if it's over a computer.
I set up LUFS last night, and blithely opened a Nautilus window to a mount-point I'd created (to a VERY remote SSHFS-mounted machine). Big mistake.
I had forgotten, of course, that I had Nautilus turned on to do all its previews, subdir counting, etc. on local files - which of course it was treating this mount point as. And I cursed gnome-vfs2 for not automatically sensing the "remoteness", by reading the list of system-wide mount points and detecting which filesystem was handling the directory into which I'd gone.
KDE faces a similar problem, ultimately. Until we see "kdesh" or some sort of LD_PRELOAD to offer ioslaves to traditional UNIX utilities, there will be a rift between the well-integrated solutions that KDE and GNOME offer, but which don't interact with lower-level utilities, and the kernel/hybrid solutions which don't provide information to any layer higher than they are (or worse, which are ignored by that higher layer, because of NIH syndrome).
SHFS is not the wrong answer. If it has caching and LUFS lacks it, maybe some of that code will migrate into LUFS. That's the entire point of open source, people - let the better project win, not just the more established one. But ultimately, neither project is the answer I favor, until the people at work on these various layers of VFS switching start to accept that other peoples' work may be running on the same system their code is.
This is his entire point, actually.
The idea that someone spends $100K to $1M for "big iron" and attendant software packages is considered (at least in the speech) to be inferior to the open-source OS approach, namely that you can upgrade your systems much faster if you pay for lots of cheap systems instead of a single very expensive system. If the OS is free, and the hardware on which it runs is a commodity product, you've reduced the costs of upgrading by the amount you'd pay for OS and hardware otherwise - all that's left is the costs of your enterprise applications.
There's a difference. the Word format is proprietary. X's protocol is merely arcane.
Let's say that an office keeps their files centralized on some Windows Filesharing-compatible server. That's fine, but what if the server is running (say) Samba? NT permissions need not apply. Nor do they matter if you do what everyone seems enthralled with, emailing multi-megabyte Word documents around for consideration.
Download managers aren't really the problem, except when you don't have the bandwidth to sustain parallel downloading. If you have enough pipe, parallel DLs ARE faster than a single serial download.
The problem the paper is describing is at the larger "router's eye view" scale, where multiple routes out to the rest of the network exist, and where only the fastest route is used - the other two pipelines are basically starved of packets.
After a certain point, the internal developer politics will affect the quality of the code. You have a similar situation in Linux, where virtual machines, framebuffers and so forth can be chosen not based on "merit" but on some personal preference.
While this may or may not affect the openness of the code, it's vital to be able to see for the developers at every tier - if a VM that does a job I need done is dropped in favor of another VM, for example, I can see why, and I can even go talk to the guy whose VM got dumped if I want more patches for it.
Ranma 1/2, in ANYTHING like its original animated form, will probably never be seen on Cartoon Network. The problem? In a word, "breasts".
Next time, submit your review to the queue as well. Saying "my (better) review" is meaningless self-aggrandisement. Put your money where your mouth is.