I actually have a child in the target group, so I downloaded the game to check it out.
Game-wise, it's nothing special. It's a flash based game with limited user interaction, less than exceptional graphical content, and it plays at 800x600 regardless of your resolution - no full screen capability. In their defense, most games targetting my kids show the same properties.
In the five minutes I played, I was able to click maybe 4 times, with the remainder of the time spent listening to the characters walk me through the game. The general idea they are trying to get across - building conflict resolution skills - is very apparent. I think my child will enjoy this game - although I think she won't choose it very often over other games that she has available such as Dora or Care Bears titles. Frankly, I think the commercial titles offer a much more clear educational experience, but that's not to say I don't like the game at all.
Personally - I think community developed games like those built with Scratch have a much brighter future. Lord knows how many tax dollars were spent on this game, and if you had 5 involved parents working together for a month and a half, you could have something much better and more open to derivative updates.
Scratch is still flash, but at least you have the ability to update games developed with it - and tailor them to your specific needs/target audience.
This work, authored by F.J. Lennon, was funded in whole or in part by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service under U.S. Government contract Nos. 2006-0039 and 2005-0090, and is, therefore, subject to the following license: The Government is granted for itself and others acting on its behalf a paid-up nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license in this work, to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, by or on behalf of the Government. All other rights are reserved by the copyright owner.
Interesting that the government has an irrevocable license, but seemingly the constituents that make up said government do not.
If I'm not mistaken, anything the government develops is public domain - but that's been obscured a lot by the government contracting outsiders to do things.
I finally found a reference and it was UMG v. Lindor that they discussed. From ARS Technica:
There was a conference this morning to go over the proposed jury instructions. Judge Davis began moving through them sequentially until he got to number 14. "Let's skip number 14 for now, because I think we're going to spend some time on that one," he said. After some minor tweaks to the other instructions, the parties returned to the instruction at issue.
Gabriel cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com and the original Napster case to support the RIAA's view that making a file available for distribution over a peer-to-peer network was a violation of the Copyright Act. "If there's an index and something behind it, that's distribution," argued Gabriel.
The judge seemed particularly interested in UMG v. Lindor, and while that particular case was being discussed, Matt Oppenheim of the Oppenheim Group, whom Gabriel referred to as "my client," was consulting the "anti-RIAA blog" The Recording Industry vs The People. Gabriel noted that he was lead counsel in that case as well and that the decision cited in the case wasn't applicable to the matter at hand.
Toder disagreed, but at the end, Judge Davis amended the instruction to say that the "act of making available for electronic distribution... violates the copyright owner's exclusive copyright." That decision should make it easier for the jury to find Thomas liable.
It is very strange indeed that the subject came up, it was discussed in conference, both attorneys knew about the subject ahead of time, and neither brought up this case. I suppose there was a lot going on, and I am not surprised the RIAA lawyer forgot to bring it up - but this does seem to be the most relevant case that can be found on the subject.
You were watching this trial. Wasn't there an argument just at the end of the trial where the Defendant said "There's this case here that you should follow" and the Plaintiff's lawyer said "I argued that case. That was an entirely different argument altogether and doesn't apply here."
Maybe it was a different case being cited, but I could swear that the argument happened. I seem to remember being surprised that the Defendant's lawyer didn't respond with arguments as to why the case was applicable.
I do find it interesting that the "intellectual elite" seem to forego the actual facts of a case in favor of theoretical postulation as to the reasoing behind past and future court decisions.
It goes to show how easily an education can be politically tainted.
While it's easy to point to a "White House Conspiracy" about this kind of thing, I don't think it's very realistic at all.
Not only would putting together a conspiracy like this be extraordinarily difficult given the number of people involved who would potentially leak information about said conspiracy, it would be a terrific success of social engineering coupled with a vastly incompetent plan to begin with. Hardly a month has gone by in the Bush administration where there wasn't a scandal, big news or a big decision of some sort that hit the newswire.
It would be far easier to use an external e-mail address to simply avoid the archiving requirements than to push an archiving implementation project out 6+ years. It would be far less conspicuous to delete individual e-mails than to delete days and weeks of e-mail. It would be far easier to destroy an entire archived collection than to find and hunt down e-mail from specific days and weeks.
During election cycles its easy to get sucked into propoganda, and sometimes its even fun. But more often than not, when you get sucked into political propoganda, there is something else that you should really be paying attention to.
Sending a guy who works for white house IT to jail might make you feel better, but it sounds like sour grapes to me - sourced from an overall frustration with the administration. Most of us here have worked on projects that went south at some point or another, and in large part it wasn't because of a lack of technical knowledge, but instead from other factors. We're talking about missing e-mail. How many of us work for companies that can find e-mail messages that are 6 years old? Most enterprises that I work with only started mass data retention projects within the last 2 years, and I would guess that there are a few days here and there where things didn't quite work as expected.
Yeah, it seems convenient that these particular days went missing, but with loose parameters, any day of missing e-mails in the last 8 years could be tied to a white house scandal.
An associated issue with open source is paradigm exposure.
How many people out there would really know SQL if it weren't for open source databases? The end user base has grown significantly because of it - but also the knowledge within the development community. If it weren't for open source, the closed source vendors would have a much smaller pool of potential employees and they would be paying larger salaries to less qualified people.
The same holds true for countless other horizontal markets.
Open Source drives people in a way that no University can. It opens up a learning environment to people who otherwise would not be interested in pursuing things. Sure, if you can't make a product better than an open source one, it hurts - but if that's the case, the value of the intellectual property your company has invested in is much lower than you realized.
Flamebait... I hate when I get that moderation. My intention was just the opposite.
I would sincerely hope that the military was segmented from the rest of the network. Certainly - if you take this idea with extreme optimism it is a good one. Experience tells me that optimism on large projects, especially where multiple disparate enterprises are concerned, is not the right way to look at things.
I understand the logic. I simply feel that the logic does not take into account reality. In large projects, corners are cut in very illogical places - either because of management or executive level politics, or because the major sponsors of the project do not understand the technical aspects of that which they are undertaking.
If the military is a part of the project, that lends a bit more credibility to it because they would be very concerned about the things that can go wrong, AND they would have the clout to push through what is necessary to address any specific concerns they have.
But really, we aren't just talking about one organization, and we aren't just talking about connecting a few network cables to a new hub. There are very real and complex issues at the heart of this project that have to be managed technically, and there are equally as many human level issues that have to be managed as well. There is an inherent resistance to change in any enterprise. More so when you are talking about taking power away from an entity which previously had control over their own network.
While there are a few agencies that are probably looking at improved network connectivity and an alleviation of responsibilities, there are probably many more who will feel negative affects - both real and perceived.
You make a series of pretty huge assumptions here, many of which are unlikely.
1) you assume that the 50 gateway points will be managed properly. 2) you assume that access to those gateway points will be managed effectively. 3) you assume that the underlying network design is intelligently put together.
Since this is government work, I would throw in an entirely different set of assumptions:
1) The contractor doing the work will be foreign. 2) The contractor doing the work will have less than solid training in putting together nationwide internet scale networks. 3) The underlying networks will mostly have already been compromised. 4) The project will take at least 2 times longer than predicted to complete. 5) The project will be considered complete before most of the network guru's here on slashdot would consider it complete. 6) The project will likely introduce a 2 or 3 point of failure potential rather than a 50 point of failure potential. If you have trouble imagining such a poor design, you haven't experience with government contracts.
I think the missing tag here is "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?". Knowing that something major WILL go wrong, as with all federal projects, you have to weigh the risk of moving forward against the risk of not moving forward. The realistic risk of moving forward is:
1) a significant portion of the networks will go down and leave several agencies without the capability of getting anything done. 2) a downtime in the network will present a very real and very dangerous national security issue.
The risk of not moving forward? 1) Data currently deemed secure is widely compromised. (in fact, this has probably already happened)
It's an arguably good idea on the surface. But really, shouldn't the nation that brought the world the internet have the most well thought out and effective network infrastructure in the world? A change to the underlying network is a solid idea. This change? This change is the result of small minded thinking and government work.
Left hand: Better Suspend/Resume Support Right hand: Microsoft-style reliability, blue screens, and wierd crash codes.
Did someone seriously think about this and decide it was a good idea? Rarely have I had a desire to criticize what Red Hat is doing, but between SELinux and BSOD's, they really have me wondering what is going on over there.
Here's to hoping this is one of those weekend articles that's just plain wrong.
I have looked into developing for screen readers in the past, but the biggest problem I've run into is the software being used by the disabled.
1) there are great disparities between how the screen readers interpret things. 2) the most popular screen readers are expensive, and offer no free versions for developers.
The Microsoft Narrator didn't hit my radar. I don't know anything about it, but if it's free and of high quality, that's a major step forward.
Many of us have run into limitations - both with Postgres and with MySQL. You can pit one against the other and come up with reasons to use (and not to use) each of them, but the important thing to take from an announcement like this is that open source databases are improving.
By and large, the database application implementations I've seen over the last decade use the underlying data management software as a storage facility - neither taking advantage of platform specific performance tuning possibilities, nor taking advantage of platform specific data integrity features. Most applications are quite simple in their database usage.
One thing I have consistently noticed over the last decade is that sales staff from the major (not free) vendors are considerably under-trained as to what exactly their licensing requirements actually are. That means that major projects end up with unforeseen budget shortfalls, they end up over-spending on licensing, and inevitably the time and energy of many very expensive employees and contractors get wasted discussing licensing issues that should be answered clearly by the vendor at first contact, with very little trouble.
As MySQL grows, and as Postgres grows, we see alternative possibilities to the commercial offerings - alternatives with very clear cost parameters. 1 in 50 projects I've seen really needs a commercial database platform from a performance perspective or from a feature dependency perspective. I'd say 40 out of 50 I've seen require a commercial platform because the software vendor does not support OSS. That's a pretty big gap, but as we see improvements like these I suspect long term we'll see more enterprises standardizing on open source and we'll see more application vendors supporting OSS.
Frankly, I don't see why more vendors don't support an underlying platform that is free. Why create a product that has an underlying cost that is both unavoidable and from which your company will see no profit?
That was a case under very specific circumstances. The takedown notice was actually filed with the copyright office before being sent. It specifically contained a "do not publish" clause within the takedown notice. And it was sent specifically to goad the recipient into publishing the takedown notice, as other very suspect takedown notices sent by that law firm had been published publicly by that particular site.
That's not to say that the big guns wouldn't just follow suit with that strategy, but the easy way around it has been around for years - although admittedly it doesn't scale very well.
Last week, I started perusing kernel sources for the first time in an effort to figure out how to build a particular device driver that I needed. A quick trip to safari brought me to a book that helped explain a lot of the code that I was looking at. From a security standpoint, this was a very cursory review - I wasn't looking for anything nasty, just trying to figure out some things on my own. But there are a lot of people like me. A lot of programmers have reviewed small pieces of code for an incredibly vast variety of reasons.
This isn't to say that nobody could ever build a security breach into the source of linux, but hiding code is a difficult task with so many different eyes on the code at any given point and time. The counterpoint is a closed source system with a heavy security review process. The security reviewers are a small group in any organization, they have tendencies that can be leveraged by a potential breacher, and they are subject to corruption. Neither situation is really ideal, but I don't think you could say that the closed source scenario is significantly better than the open source one unless you have a very small end user base.
Powerful - I'm not big on benchmarks in general, but power does not necessarily mean speed. I would consider the fact that I can open up a 4GB text file on Linux with out-of-the-box tools as more powerful - but then again, that only matters to those of us who have the need to open a 4GB text file. I would consider that their is more free (quality) software available for Linux as more powerful, but somebody might point out all the shareware-junk that is out their for windows. Regardless, there are countless things I can do in linux faster than I can do in windows, and their are countless things I can do in Linux that I can't do in windows. Windows does have the edge in some market segments, but those areas are much less important to me for what I do most of the time.
Stable: Are you kidding me? You have to be kidding. Either you really don't know how to work with Linux and you have made some fundamental mistakes that cause crashes frequently (though I can't for the life of me think of any that would be that bad), or you really don't throw much at your windows installations (or maybe you are just plain lucky with your peripheral purchases and the software that you use). BSODs are less frequent than they used to be. They are WAY more frequent in my experience than crashes in any *nix environment.
Simple: Personally, I'd never call any OS simple. Linux is less complex to install than any other OS, but that's about it.
Inexpensive: you don't get less expensive than free. If you consider the total cost of ownership, Linux wins any reasonable analysis. Linux means training. Windows means paying not just for the OS repeatedly and going through forced upgrades with great frequency (upgrades = rollouts = licensing + project planning and execution cost), but also paying for a great many things that are free in a linux environment. When 80% of your end user base uses Word as a typewriter, E-mail, and Calendaring as their only computer tasks, it makes you wonder why you spend upwards of $700 on software alone per end user when you could have it all for free. Besides, show me an environment where end users don't need training on how to use their PC's and I'll show you an environment where end users are not properly trained.
I would submit that contemplated action is always more effective than emotional discussion.
I would further state that there are always many people talking about the way things should be, but very few people who actually put forth concentrated effort to change things. If discussion is your only redress then you have not thought thoroughly through your options of effective solutions. This nation was born of great leaders who's greatness was not the sum of their collective careers, but of great leaders who came to action with thought, strategy, and a sense of justice.
The capability of changing a nation, of changing the world, lies within each of us. Most simply lack the motivation and the awareness of our own potential to do so.
It was not my intention to imply that political silence is desirable, but rather that thoughtful action is more effective than discussion.
I reviewed the Declaration of Independence today, and wrote this. I feel it is somewhat relevant. Though there still exists the problem of pushing the bill through the Senate, and then overriding the inevitable veto if this bill were to go through (neither of which is likely), the fact that the House did not just roll over to provide retroactive immunity shows that there is some sense of reason within at least a few of our elected leaders.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes
While most people would consider the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness clause the most important part of the document, I would argue that the above quoted phrasing is even more important. As non-transient as the issues of today seem, they are mostly transient when you think in terms of decades and generations rather than in terms of months and years.
There will always be power grabs, wars, attacks on civil liberties, etc., but the government is structured in such a way that the government will always shift towards both the will of the people and the fundamental principals of freedom.
We must have faith that in times when the strength and fortitude of our founding principals appear to be fading, at least one man will stand up and do what is right for the nation, and in the absence of such, we must individually stand up and be that man.
When you are enraged by policy or the behaviors of those in governing position, think about whether you are enraged by propoganda that led you in that direction or whether you are enraged by an actual afront to your personal values. Be it propoganda, take time to think about how you have fallen under the spell. Be it personal values, hold your tongue and determine a course of action such that you can actually make a difference.
As a percentage of our GDP, the US is lowest. The US is also the highest donor of foreign aid when you look at the total money given away.
It's much like the tax argument. Many people think that the rich should pay more taxes to be fair, but the flip side of the argument is that the wealthy already pay much more in taxes than anybody else.
The only way the US gives more money away is if we increase taxes - which 90% of us think we pay too much already. I'm not going to pay yet another tax so that the people of Zimbabwe can have better toilets. If YOU want to give them money, feel free, but don't assume that the rest of us want to do the same.
Developed countries get more money because they spend more money on lobbying. Poor countries can lobby the US government just the same for less money if they organized themselves properly, but they don't. Rarely do US lawmakers pick up causes on their own and start funding them - it's more often the case that somebody is knocking on their door and providing a good argument for the fact that they deserve funding.
If you look closely at the foreign aid the US gives, I would guess that a solid 75% of it is waste. If you really want to make a difference, why not take a close look at the existing aid programs and figure out ways to better manage the money and submit your ideas to those in a position to do something about it. Yeah, it's a long arduous process and it's a lot easier to just complain that it's not done right, but if you put a little elbow grease into anything you end up with a sense of personal satisfaction that outweighs any momentary happiness that complaining gives you.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually have a child in the target group, so I downloaded the game to check it out.
Game-wise, it's nothing special. It's a flash based game with limited user interaction, less than exceptional graphical content, and it plays at 800x600 regardless of your resolution - no full screen capability. In their defense, most games targetting my kids show the same properties.
In the five minutes I played, I was able to click maybe 4 times, with the remainder of the time spent listening to the characters walk me through the game. The general idea they are trying to get across - building conflict resolution skills - is very apparent. I think my child will enjoy this game - although I think she won't choose it very often over other games that she has available such as Dora or Care Bears titles. Frankly, I think the commercial titles offer a much more clear educational experience, but that's not to say I don't like the game at all.
Personally - I think community developed games like those built with Scratch have a much brighter future. Lord knows how many tax dollars were spent on this game, and if you had 5 involved parents working together for a month and a half, you could have something much better and more open to derivative updates.
Scratch is still flash, but at least you have the ability to update games developed with it - and tailor them to your specific needs/target audience.
Interesting that the government has an irrevocable license, but seemingly the constituents that make up said government do not.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Coll_FJLennon/CoolCurriki/CoolCurriki.zip/CoolCurriki.html
the software was developed by these folks:
http://www.fmcs.gov/
If I'm not mistaken, anything the government develops is public domain - but that's been obscured a lot by the government contracting outsiders to do things.
Wait - Opera isn't adware anymore? I guess it's time to check it out again.
It is very strange indeed that the subject came up, it was discussed in conference, both attorneys knew about the subject ahead of time, and neither brought up this case. I suppose there was a lot going on, and I am not surprised the RIAA lawyer forgot to bring it up - but this does seem to be the most relevant case that can be found on the subject.
Mr. Beckerman -
You were watching this trial. Wasn't there an argument just at the end of the trial where the Defendant said "There's this case here that you should follow" and the Plaintiff's lawyer said "I argued that case. That was an entirely different argument altogether and doesn't apply here."
Maybe it was a different case being cited, but I could swear that the argument happened. I seem to remember being surprised that the Defendant's lawyer didn't respond with arguments as to why the case was applicable.
LOL. Too true. In the spirit of all those great frenchmen (both of them), I surrender.
Given the theme on slashdot today, I would say we are living through episode 5 right now.
1984 should be mandatory reading for every elected or appointed government official. As should be Farenheit 451.
Oddly, the Tesla Motors website was missing from both the slashdot submission and the article.
http://www.teslamotors.com/
I do find it interesting that the "intellectual elite" seem to forego the actual facts of a case in favor of theoretical postulation as to the reasoing behind past and future court decisions.
It goes to show how easily an education can be politically tainted.
While it's easy to point to a "White House Conspiracy" about this kind of thing, I don't think it's very realistic at all.
Not only would putting together a conspiracy like this be extraordinarily difficult given the number of people involved who would potentially leak information about said conspiracy, it would be a terrific success of social engineering coupled with a vastly incompetent plan to begin with. Hardly a month has gone by in the Bush administration where there wasn't a scandal, big news or a big decision of some sort that hit the newswire.
It would be far easier to use an external e-mail address to simply avoid the archiving requirements than to push an archiving implementation project out 6+ years. It would be far less conspicuous to delete individual e-mails than to delete days and weeks of e-mail. It would be far easier to destroy an entire archived collection than to find and hunt down e-mail from specific days and weeks.
During election cycles its easy to get sucked into propoganda, and sometimes its even fun. But more often than not, when you get sucked into political propoganda, there is something else that you should really be paying attention to.
Sending a guy who works for white house IT to jail might make you feel better, but it sounds like sour grapes to me - sourced from an overall frustration with the administration. Most of us here have worked on projects that went south at some point or another, and in large part it wasn't because of a lack of technical knowledge, but instead from other factors. We're talking about missing e-mail. How many of us work for companies that can find e-mail messages that are 6 years old? Most enterprises that I work with only started mass data retention projects within the last 2 years, and I would guess that there are a few days here and there where things didn't quite work as expected.
Yeah, it seems convenient that these particular days went missing, but with loose parameters, any day of missing e-mails in the last 8 years could be tied to a white house scandal.
The tables for LM hashes have already been generated and are downloadable if you google around.
MD5 is more secure than LM, but it's not impossible to do, it just requires more horsepower.
If I'm not mistaken, there's an open source live cd that uses rainbow tables to get you into a windows machine within a few minutes.
An associated issue with open source is paradigm exposure.
How many people out there would really know SQL if it weren't for open source databases? The end user base has grown significantly because of it - but also the knowledge within the development community. If it weren't for open source, the closed source vendors would have a much smaller pool of potential employees and they would be paying larger salaries to less qualified people.
The same holds true for countless other horizontal markets.
Open Source drives people in a way that no University can. It opens up a learning environment to people who otherwise would not be interested in pursuing things. Sure, if you can't make a product better than an open source one, it hurts - but if that's the case, the value of the intellectual property your company has invested in is much lower than you realized.
Flamebait... I hate when I get that moderation. My intention was just the opposite.
I would sincerely hope that the military was segmented from the rest of the network. Certainly - if you take this idea with extreme optimism it is a good one. Experience tells me that optimism on large projects, especially where multiple disparate enterprises are concerned, is not the right way to look at things.
I understand the logic. I simply feel that the logic does not take into account reality. In large projects, corners are cut in very illogical places - either because of management or executive level politics, or because the major sponsors of the project do not understand the technical aspects of that which they are undertaking.
If the military is a part of the project, that lends a bit more credibility to it because they would be very concerned about the things that can go wrong, AND they would have the clout to push through what is necessary to address any specific concerns they have.
But really, we aren't just talking about one organization, and we aren't just talking about connecting a few network cables to a new hub. There are very real and complex issues at the heart of this project that have to be managed technically, and there are equally as many human level issues that have to be managed as well. There is an inherent resistance to change in any enterprise. More so when you are talking about taking power away from an entity which previously had control over their own network.
While there are a few agencies that are probably looking at improved network connectivity and an alleviation of responsibilities, there are probably many more who will feel negative affects - both real and perceived.
You make a series of pretty huge assumptions here, many of which are unlikely.
1) you assume that the 50 gateway points will be managed properly.
2) you assume that access to those gateway points will be managed effectively.
3) you assume that the underlying network design is intelligently put together.
Since this is government work, I would throw in an entirely different set of assumptions:
1) The contractor doing the work will be foreign.
2) The contractor doing the work will have less than solid training in putting together nationwide internet scale networks.
3) The underlying networks will mostly have already been compromised.
4) The project will take at least 2 times longer than predicted to complete.
5) The project will be considered complete before most of the network guru's here on slashdot would consider it complete.
6) The project will likely introduce a 2 or 3 point of failure potential rather than a 50 point of failure potential. If you have trouble imagining such a poor design, you haven't experience with government contracts.
I think the missing tag here is "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?". Knowing that something major WILL go wrong, as with all federal projects, you have to weigh the risk of moving forward against the risk of not moving forward. The realistic risk of moving forward is:
1) a significant portion of the networks will go down and leave several agencies without the capability of getting anything done.
2) a downtime in the network will present a very real and very dangerous national security issue.
The risk of not moving forward?
1) Data currently deemed secure is widely compromised. (in fact, this has probably already happened)
It's an arguably good idea on the surface. But really, shouldn't the nation that brought the world the internet have the most well thought out and effective network infrastructure in the world? A change to the underlying network is a solid idea. This change? This change is the result of small minded thinking and government work.
Let's see:
Left hand: Better Suspend/Resume Support
Right hand: Microsoft-style reliability, blue screens, and wierd crash codes.
Did someone seriously think about this and decide it was a good idea? Rarely have I had a desire to criticize what Red Hat is doing, but between SELinux and BSOD's, they really have me wondering what is going on over there.
Here's to hoping this is one of those weekend articles that's just plain wrong.
I have looked into developing for screen readers in the past, but the biggest problem I've run into is the software being used by the disabled.
1) there are great disparities between how the screen readers interpret things.
2) the most popular screen readers are expensive, and offer no free versions for developers.
The Microsoft Narrator didn't hit my radar. I don't know anything about it, but if it's free and of high quality, that's a major step forward.
Many of us have run into limitations - both with Postgres and with MySQL. You can pit one against the other and come up with reasons to use (and not to use) each of them, but the important thing to take from an announcement like this is that open source databases are improving.
By and large, the database application implementations I've seen over the last decade use the underlying data management software as a storage facility - neither taking advantage of platform specific performance tuning possibilities, nor taking advantage of platform specific data integrity features. Most applications are quite simple in their database usage.
One thing I have consistently noticed over the last decade is that sales staff from the major (not free) vendors are considerably under-trained as to what exactly their licensing requirements actually are. That means that major projects end up with unforeseen budget shortfalls, they end up over-spending on licensing, and inevitably the time and energy of many very expensive employees and contractors get wasted discussing licensing issues that should be answered clearly by the vendor at first contact, with very little trouble.
As MySQL grows, and as Postgres grows, we see alternative possibilities to the commercial offerings - alternatives with very clear cost parameters. 1 in 50 projects I've seen really needs a commercial database platform from a performance perspective or from a feature dependency perspective. I'd say 40 out of 50 I've seen require a commercial platform because the software vendor does not support OSS. That's a pretty big gap, but as we see improvements like these I suspect long term we'll see more enterprises standardizing on open source and we'll see more application vendors supporting OSS.
Frankly, I don't see why more vendors don't support an underlying platform that is free. Why create a product that has an underlying cost that is both unavoidable and from which your company will see no profit?
That was a case under very specific circumstances. The takedown notice was actually filed with the copyright office before being sent. It specifically contained a "do not publish" clause within the takedown notice. And it was sent specifically to goad the recipient into publishing the takedown notice, as other very suspect takedown notices sent by that law firm had been published publicly by that particular site.
That's not to say that the big guns wouldn't just follow suit with that strategy, but the easy way around it has been around for years - although admittedly it doesn't scale very well.
Last week, I started perusing kernel sources for the first time in an effort to figure out how to build a particular device driver that I needed. A quick trip to safari brought me to a book that helped explain a lot of the code that I was looking at. From a security standpoint, this was a very cursory review - I wasn't looking for anything nasty, just trying to figure out some things on my own. But there are a lot of people like me. A lot of programmers have reviewed small pieces of code for an incredibly vast variety of reasons.
This isn't to say that nobody could ever build a security breach into the source of linux, but hiding code is a difficult task with so many different eyes on the code at any given point and time. The counterpoint is a closed source system with a heavy security review process. The security reviewers are a small group in any organization, they have tendencies that can be leveraged by a potential breacher, and they are subject to corruption. Neither situation is really ideal, but I don't think you could say that the closed source scenario is significantly better than the open source one unless you have a very small end user base.
Powerful - I'm not big on benchmarks in general, but power does not necessarily mean speed. I would consider the fact that I can open up a 4GB text file on Linux with out-of-the-box tools as more powerful - but then again, that only matters to those of us who have the need to open a 4GB text file. I would consider that their is more free (quality) software available for Linux as more powerful, but somebody might point out all the shareware-junk that is out their for windows. Regardless, there are countless things I can do in linux faster than I can do in windows, and their are countless things I can do in Linux that I can't do in windows. Windows does have the edge in some market segments, but those areas are much less important to me for what I do most of the time.
Stable: Are you kidding me? You have to be kidding. Either you really don't know how to work with Linux and you have made some fundamental mistakes that cause crashes frequently (though I can't for the life of me think of any that would be that bad), or you really don't throw much at your windows installations (or maybe you are just plain lucky with your peripheral purchases and the software that you use). BSODs are less frequent than they used to be. They are WAY more frequent in my experience than crashes in any *nix environment.
Simple: Personally, I'd never call any OS simple. Linux is less complex to install than any other OS, but that's about it.
Inexpensive: you don't get less expensive than free. If you consider the total cost of ownership, Linux wins any reasonable analysis. Linux means training. Windows means paying not just for the OS repeatedly and going through forced upgrades with great frequency (upgrades = rollouts = licensing + project planning and execution cost), but also paying for a great many things that are free in a linux environment. When 80% of your end user base uses Word as a typewriter, E-mail, and Calendaring as their only computer tasks, it makes you wonder why you spend upwards of $700 on software alone per end user when you could have it all for free. Besides, show me an environment where end users don't need training on how to use their PC's and I'll show you an environment where end users are not properly trained.
I would submit that contemplated action is always more effective than emotional discussion.
I would further state that there are always many people talking about the way things should be, but very few people who actually put forth concentrated effort to change things. If discussion is your only redress then you have not thought thoroughly through your options of effective solutions. This nation was born of great leaders who's greatness was not the sum of their collective careers, but of great leaders who came to action with thought, strategy, and a sense of justice.
The capability of changing a nation, of changing the world, lies within each of us. Most simply lack the motivation and the awareness of our own potential to do so.
It was not my intention to imply that political silence is desirable, but rather that thoughtful action is more effective than discussion.
While most people would consider the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness clause the most important part of the document, I would argue that the above quoted phrasing is even more important. As non-transient as the issues of today seem, they are mostly transient when you think in terms of decades and generations rather than in terms of months and years.
There will always be power grabs, wars, attacks on civil liberties, etc., but the government is structured in such a way that the government will always shift towards both the will of the people and the fundamental principals of freedom.
We must have faith that in times when the strength and fortitude of our founding principals appear to be fading, at least one man will stand up and do what is right for the nation, and in the absence of such, we must individually stand up and be that man.
When you are enraged by policy or the behaviors of those in governing position, think about whether you are enraged by propoganda that led you in that direction or whether you are enraged by an actual afront to your personal values. Be it propoganda, take time to think about how you have fallen under the spell. Be it personal values, hold your tongue and determine a course of action such that you can actually make a difference.
As a percentage of our GDP, the US is lowest. The US is also the highest donor of foreign aid when you look at the total money given away.
It's much like the tax argument. Many people think that the rich should pay more taxes to be fair, but the flip side of the argument is that the wealthy already pay much more in taxes than anybody else.
The only way the US gives more money away is if we increase taxes - which 90% of us think we pay too much already. I'm not going to pay yet another tax so that the people of Zimbabwe can have better toilets. If YOU want to give them money, feel free, but don't assume that the rest of us want to do the same.
Developed countries get more money because they spend more money on lobbying. Poor countries can lobby the US government just the same for less money if they organized themselves properly, but they don't. Rarely do US lawmakers pick up causes on their own and start funding them - it's more often the case that somebody is knocking on their door and providing a good argument for the fact that they deserve funding.
If you look closely at the foreign aid the US gives, I would guess that a solid 75% of it is waste. If you really want to make a difference, why not take a close look at the existing aid programs and figure out ways to better manage the money and submit your ideas to those in a position to do something about it. Yeah, it's a long arduous process and it's a lot easier to just complain that it's not done right, but if you put a little elbow grease into anything you end up with a sense of personal satisfaction that outweighs any momentary happiness that complaining gives you.