What about in ten years, when said Slashdot Geek has long graduated from university and gets promoted to a position where they can start to make purchasing decisions? (Apologies to those with 4-digit UIDs, who may already be old enough for this to have happened.)
Along this line, I should probably also mention that in my CS classes, what looks like at least a quarter (and more likely a third) of the laptops people bring to class regularly run some version of Linux. And when we had a ACM-hosted conference a couple months ago, I'd say that over half of the laptops people had were running Linux.
Your employer likes the idea of Trusted Computing.
Separate issue. And I rather suspect that OS-level trusted computing would be Good Enough, particularly since hardware-level trusted computing (1) is only important if you don't trust the OS, and (2) ties things to specific pieces of hardware, which can fail.
And I'd much rather do heavy coding in java or.net (or a few other languages...), simply for the automatic memory management. Manual new/delete is the cause of more impossible to find bugs.....
I have here a c++ program, with a total of 8 calls to delete in what "wc -l" says is about 64k lines. tr1/memory is your friend.
And garbage collection is really quite efficient. Except in some very few niche cases, or unless you really are the rock star, automatic memory management is going to be more efficient than manual.
And when the language uses that as an excuse to get rid of destructors and stack allocation you suddenly can't use RAII anymore, and managing non-memory resources gets broken.
If it's really this unpopular, new politicians would sail into office on a campaign against IP.
Eh, except such laws appear to be fairly easily ignored (so far). I expect that this should be starting to change as DRM and such force people to take notice.
How did it go a week ago?
There were other, much more important issues there. Like people being annoyed about going to war and such.
Also because it provides a very clear way for entities to profit from information work (of course, there are other less-clear ways that don't rely on these restrictions),
Could you please describe these ways in detail, and give examples where they have played out? Exclude all that rely on charity or non-profit tax status.
Produce custom software that's only intended to be sold once (a number of people here have talked about doing this)? Provide support (Red Hat, etc)? Do live performances rather than rely on selling CDs (I seem to recall hearing of a few bands that consider CDs/downloads as basically advertising for their live performances?)?
Basically, anything where you do specific work for each customer instead of generic work that customers could as easily share as buy.
Then you'd have a tough time explaining why all IP hasn't already been abolished.
Because a large number of large businesses (that spend a lot on lobbying) have chosen business models that depend on it. Also because it provides a very clear way for entities to profit from information work (of course, there are other less-clear ways that don't rely on these restrictions), which has been though to outweigh the harm caused by restricting access to the results of all information work.
They're not singling you out, you're in the path of their drag-net.
It's not like someone breaking into your house or tapping your phone where they have to go to a lot of trouble to get to you specifically. I'm not sure that they understand that you don't have to be targeted specifically to be a victim of identity theft or have your PC zombied.
So talk about that kind of security (caution with email attachments and websites asking for personal info), rather than things like logging out ("proper PC security procedures.... just simple measures like logging off of the PC when it's not in use.").
Logging out has approximately nothing to do with net safety, it has to do with "someone breaking into your house" safety. Which you've just said isn't what this is about, and which they'd be very reasonable to not worry too much about. I don't bother to log off either -- if someone has physical access, that means they broke into my apartment and can just take everything anyway.
I generally have 2 screens (laptop; if I take it anywhere I have to leave the second screen behind), and could probably do well with 3. Each workspace has a maximized window on one screen, a couple smaller windows on the other screen, and sometimes another maximized window also on the other screen.
I currently have 16 windows, but this varies a fair bit depending on what I'm doing. Right now 4 of these are terminals, two of which have multiple tabs.
6 workspaces, of which I usually use 4-5. The first 2 are "general" areas, email/web/usenet/etc. The others are for whatever particular things I'm working on, and will generally have a terminal, an editor (nearly always with multiple documents, and I'm starting to use xemacs with 3 frames for this), and sometimes a browser (nearly always with multiple tabs). I also have an xchat set to always be visible.
Browser windows generally have 4-12 tabs open. If I ever bother to get the tabbar to go back to being vertical, this will go back to more like 6-18+.
Easy. No one country should hold domain. It can still physically reside in the US, but make it part of the UN. And before you scoff, the ITU and WHO are both UN organisations, and I don't hear too many complaints about the UN regulation of the international phone system or their handling of international disease prevention.
I haven't either, but then I don't pay much attention to those orgainizations.
WIPO is also part of the UN, and I *have* heard lots of complaints about them. I'd also think they'd be a better indicator of what UN handling of domain names would be like, particularly since the reasons for wanting to regulate domain names are some of the same reasons that WIPO exists.
The study found that no open source project had fewer software defects than proprietary code. In fact, the analysis demonstrated that proprietary code is, on average, more than five times less buggy. On the other hand, the open-source software was found to be of greater average overall quality.
No, *popular* open-source software is 5x as buggy as *safety-critical* closed software. The linked dissenting opinion is at least partly right; they're comparing apples to oranges.
Maybe they should try comparing open- and closed-source software that's actually trying to solve the same problem? That'd be a bit more valid of a comparison...
That's why internal memos and emails from the top brass (Ballmer and Gates, for instance) bragged to each other about how the IE integration was going to kill Netscape. Not because they wanted to kill the competition, but because they wanted to kill Netscape.
From what I've heard, "Netscape" and "the competition" would have been pretty much synonymous back then.
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
This is because we let people patent the formats/codecs, which can cause annoying legal problems.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
Because it's a program like any other, so you get bugfixes (mostly minor enough that you won't care) and extra features (mostly support for more hardware that you probably don't care about either). There's no reason that you *have* to upgrade it each time.
3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!
I use the nvidia drivers as packaged by my distro. They get automatically upgraded to always match the kernel I'm using (also the version packaged by my distro), so they don't break.
4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier.
Yes, it is a mess. More annoying is that it can't autodetect when I add/remove my second monitor (laptop, but I like having dualhead when at my desk). I haven't personally noticed any slowness, though.
"There is already so much Dark fiber overcapacity that I think the ISP could easily supply bandwidth to grow with the demand."
I thought the expensive part of fiber was the stuff to make it light up. So it'd still take almost as much of a capital investment as without the fiber being there already, and therefore can't happen with today's "only the next quarter matters" short-term thinking.
"And you think they're actually going to charge you less?"
No, I think they'll just not raise prices as much/as fast as they'd otherwise have to, so they don't drive customers away with sticker shock. (Only good in areas with both cable *and* DSL, of course.)
"The tiered-internet thing is just a way to punish the people who actually use the bandwidth they were already sold."
No. That's what bandwidth caps and such are for.
"And an attempt to enact a tax on those who dare to actually provide data that's interesting enough that lots of their customers want it, all at the same time."
Yeah, they want content providers to subsidize their customers, so they can charge less than the service they're providing actually costs them.
However, if linux systems (or any unix system) had easily exploited security flaws then there would be huge numbers of worms and viruses targetting those systems that are out there. If nothing else they would be excellent platforms to launch attacks on the huge numbers of windows systems.
The real reason you don't see that many viruses or worms directed at linux systems is that the concept of least privilege was implemented at the start. Unlike most windows systems which users run with administrator privileges that allow a virus to do whatever it wants once it executes, linux systems users typically don't run everyday applications with admin or root privileges. As such it is much more difficult for a code that is executed on a linux system to gain complete control of the system.
You don't need full control to just use the system to launch attacks. You just need network access and a way to add yourself to the user's session startup files.
"You can easily produce software that does not cause security vulnerabilities. Just run the software in a VM and keep it the hell away from the host system."
And if that software is used to log in to access secure data (like your bank account), then any bugs can still be security vulnerabilities.
"The issue is deeper than that; its the fact that capitalism has failed. We should just cut our losses and put an end to this miserable system before we're really screwed."
The trouble with that is that nobody's found an alternave that hasn't failed worse.
Doesn't have to mean Sun in on the way out, it could just be that that particular hardware was getting old. I know some of the computer labs here upgraded from sparc/SunOS to Sun's Opteron/Linux boxes. That produced lots of no-longer-used Sun hardware, but just because they replaced it with newer Sun hardware.
"Given that the chance of any random person being in the computer labs at UIUC (whatever that is) is itself pretty low, that doesn't really make much of a hole in the grandparent's claim."
Big university, one of the better ones for CompE....Come to think of it, the earthquake center at U. of Memphis has (had?) Sun machines for probably over half their workstations, too (and one for their server). Assuming these places are anywhere close to representative, Suns aren't anywhere near as rare you seem to be claiming.
Ah, yes, the "mailing list" defense for "why we should allow spam". Because mailing lists might get blocked. Well, mailing lists are obsolete now. They've been replaced by RSS.
You are a complete and total idiot, sir. Or have you forgotten that there are other types of mailing list, like -devel lists and discussion lists, where messages *don't* all come from the same sender? Do you not realize that RSS is *not* techinically superior, just newer and different (polling vs. interrupts (WRT "email clients poll the server anyway", that's polling an aggregator, and less inefficient that polling 10 seperate places with 1/10th the messages each.))? Do you not understand "ease of use" or "user-friendly"? Are you aware of the world of people beyond your mother's basement?
(
Also, I think email clients should be able to tell the server "I'm online now", and get emails relayed upon arrival until the server fails to connect (or the client announces that it's going offline). Then it can go back to storing messages until the client comes back online. Unfortunately, any ISPs with "pay us extra if you want to run a server" firewalls would make this not work so well.
)
Slashdot Mirror
What about in ten years, when said Slashdot Geek has long graduated from university and gets promoted to a position where they can start to make purchasing decisions? (Apologies to those with 4-digit UIDs, who may already be old enough for this to have happened.)
Along this line, I should probably also mention that in my CS classes, what looks like at least a quarter (and more likely a third) of the laptops people bring to class regularly run some version of Linux. And when we had a ACM-hosted conference a couple months ago, I'd say that over half of the laptops people had were running Linux.
Separate issue. And I rather suspect that OS-level trusted computing would be Good Enough, particularly since hardware-level trusted computing (1) is only important if you don't trust the OS, and (2) ties things to specific pieces of hardware, which can fail.
I have here a c++ program, with a total of 8 calls to delete in what "wc -l" says is about 64k lines. tr1/memory is your friend.
And when the language uses that as an excuse to get rid of destructors and stack allocation you suddenly can't use RAII anymore, and managing non-memory resources gets broken.
Um, aren't those fundamentally incompatible?
Eh, except such laws appear to be fairly easily ignored (so far). I expect that this should be starting to change as DRM and such force people to take notice.
There were other, much more important issues there. Like people being annoyed about going to war and such.
Produce custom software that's only intended to be sold once (a number of people here have talked about doing this)? Provide support (Red Hat, etc)? Do live performances rather than rely on selling CDs (I seem to recall hearing of a few bands that consider CDs/downloads as basically advertising for their live performances?)?
Basically, anything where you do specific work for each customer instead of generic work that customers could as easily share as buy.
Because a large number of large businesses (that spend a lot on lobbying) have chosen business models that depend on it. Also because it provides a very clear way for entities to profit from information work (of course, there are other less-clear ways that don't rely on these restrictions), which has been though to outweigh the harm caused by restricting access to the results of all information work.
So talk about that kind of security (caution with email attachments and websites asking for personal info), rather than things like logging out ("proper PC security procedures. ... just simple measures like logging off of the PC when it's not in use.").
Logging out has approximately nothing to do with net safety, it has to do with "someone breaking into your house" safety. Which you've just said isn't what this is about, and which they'd be very reasonable to not worry too much about. I don't bother to log off either -- if someone has physical access, that means they broke into my apartment and can just take everything anyway.
I generally have 2 screens (laptop; if I take it anywhere I have to leave the second screen behind), and could probably do well with 3. Each workspace has a maximized window on one screen, a couple smaller windows on the other screen, and sometimes another maximized window also on the other screen.
I currently have 16 windows, but this varies a fair bit depending on what I'm doing. Right now 4 of these are terminals, two of which have multiple tabs.
6 workspaces, of which I usually use 4-5. The first 2 are "general" areas, email/web/usenet/etc. The others are for whatever particular things I'm working on, and will generally have a terminal, an editor (nearly always with multiple documents, and I'm starting to use xemacs with 3 frames for this), and sometimes a browser (nearly always with multiple tabs). I also have an xchat set to always be visible.
Browser windows generally have 4-12 tabs open. If I ever bother to get the tabbar to go back to being vertical, this will go back to more like 6-18+.
I haven't either, but then I don't pay much attention to those orgainizations.
WIPO is also part of the UN, and I *have* heard lots of complaints about them. I'd also think they'd be a better indicator of what UN handling of domain names would be like, particularly since the reasons for wanting to regulate domain names are some of the same reasons that WIPO exists.
No, *popular* open-source software is 5x as buggy as *safety-critical* closed software. The linked dissenting opinion is at least partly right; they're comparing apples to oranges.
Maybe they should try comparing open- and closed-source software that's actually trying to solve the same problem? That'd be a bit more valid of a comparison...
SHA-1? Any other good hash function?
"not require proprietary vendor lock-in formats(ACC)"
Um, it's AAC, not ACC, and it's not proprietary. And I can play them on Linux, IIRC without even the kind of patent issues that mp3 has.
From what I've heard, "Netscape" and "the competition" would have been pretty much synonymous back then.
This is because we let people patent the formats/codecs, which can cause annoying legal problems.
Because it's a program like any other, so you get bugfixes (mostly minor enough that you won't care) and extra features (mostly support for more hardware that you probably don't care about either). There's no reason that you *have* to upgrade it each time.
I use the nvidia drivers as packaged by my distro. They get automatically upgraded to always match the kernel I'm using (also the version packaged by my distro), so they don't break.
Yes, it is a mess. More annoying is that it can't autodetect when I add/remove my second monitor (laptop, but I like having dualhead when at my desk). I haven't personally noticed any slowness, though.
The fiber is there, but the equipment to light it up isn't. That nice fancy cable does you no good if you've nothing to plug it in to.
I thought the expensive part of fiber was the stuff to make it light up. So it'd still take almost as much of a capital investment as without the fiber being there already, and therefore can't happen with today's "only the next quarter matters" short-term thinking.
No, I think they'll just not raise prices as much/as fast as they'd otherwise have to, so they don't drive customers away with sticker shock. (Only good in areas with both cable *and* DSL, of course.)
No. That's what bandwidth caps and such are for.
"And an attempt to enact a tax on those who dare to actually provide data that's interesting enough that lots of their customers want it, all at the same time."
Yeah, they want content providers to subsidize their customers, so they can charge less than the service they're providing actually costs them.
And if that software is used to log in to access secure data (like your bank account), then any bugs can still be security vulnerabilities.
The trouble with that is that nobody's found an alternave that hasn't failed worse.
Doesn't have to mean Sun in on the way out, it could just be that that particular hardware was getting old. I know some of the computer labs here upgraded from sparc/SunOS to Sun's Opteron/Linux boxes. That produced lots of no-longer-used Sun hardware, but just because they replaced it with newer Sun hardware.
Big university, one of the better ones for CompE. ...Come to think of it, the earthquake center at U. of Memphis has (had?) Sun machines for probably over half their workstations, too (and one for their server). Assuming these places are anywhere close to representative, Suns aren't anywhere near as rare you seem to be claiming.
I'd guess that about half the systems in the engineering computer labs here at UIUC are Suns.
How is forgetting the existence of -devel lists geeky?
( Also, I think email clients should be able to tell the server "I'm online now", and get emails relayed upon arrival until the server fails to connect (or the client announces that it's going offline). Then it can go back to storing messages until the client comes back online. Unfortunately, any ISPs with "pay us extra if you want to run a server" firewalls would make this not work so well. )