Do you honestly think that most companies are really going to support Linux if it is even more of a pain in the ass to write good device drivers that don't let out the company IP than it is for Windows? People like you make it quite easy for these major companies to just write off Linux entirely for most of their hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, GCC, Python, Tomcat and am posting this from Firefox, but this is such total bullshit on the face of it that you'd have to be either holed up in the Ivory Tower or an open source zealot who just wants to stick it to The Man to think that this is a good idea. 20,000 developers? That's ALL?! Microsoft currently has probably almost that many working for them, so the only thing that I can conclude from this proposal is that it would be an unmitigated disaster for the developer labor market if implemented.
Why not just come out and admit a cold, hard fact: open source software has been an abysmal failure if making a lot of money and keeping a lot of people employed is the goal. This proposal is a blatant admission that open source has not and will not work as a mainstream business model for anything but infrastructure software because that's the only software where support and custom development consulting is a major source of revenue. Can anyone point to solid evidence of desktop apps like cd burners, office suites and things of that nature thriving through support models? I can't seem to find any, and OpenOffice is not a good example because the project would probably implode if Sun pulled out.
Why is it that almost every single major open source projects aimed at software development with great documentation and consistent naming conventions are based on closed source products. Yeah, Classpath and Mono have designs and documentation that rival Sun and Microsoft's products, but that's because they're functional clones of them!
One of the things that I have gotten truly sick of is the hobbyist argument used to defend open source projects in so many cases. Desktop Linux has been maturing along the same timeframe as MacOS X has been in development--I remember seeing the proclamations of its ascension RSN in 1997-1999--and yet it is still very far away in terms of quality and capability. If Windows is "good enough" and Desktop Linux cannot meet or exceed it... any guess what that says about it?
The federal government has always failed to prevent things like this for two reasons: bureaucratic bullshit like fiefdoms in the middle of the CIA and FBI that don't like each other and petty politics. For the last 15 years the CIA lost most of its overseas operational assets, especially in its special operations commando units. These were the people who quietly "got the job done" behind a building with a silencer-equipped pistol or high-powered rifle. You never heard of it happening, except when it was abused like in Latin America.
Here's a dirty little fact for the neoconservatives and the Bushitler wants to annihilate all non-born again Christians lunies. You cannot combine anti-terrorism units with law enforcement and you cannot expect things to be clean regardless of the solution. Yes, if we let the CIA quietly murder these terrorists without judicial oversight it could be abused. But it's a lesser evil than relying on the bumbling law enforcement apparatus in this country to do its job. The FBI spends as much time doing PR and lobbying as it does on enforcing the law; we really need to get a high barrier between a group like the CIA and everybody else and let that agency do its job in secrecy.
Yes, let people outside the chain of command know what is happening, but don't let the spooks work with law enforcement unless the police are operating in a purely, unequivocably subordinate position so that they cannot lean on the spooks for more power and resources. What concerns me is precisely this beefing up of John Q. Cop's police powers, not the CIA and others being able to discretely beat up and kill people who want to rape, pillage and murder civilians of ANY nationality. I'd have no problem with the CIA torturing the hell out of, then executing some scumbag terrorist in Afghanistan or Iraq like Zarqawi who vascillates between blowing up our soldiers and innocent women and children.
This stuff isn't going to get the job done, unless the job is to create a more effective police state. The real section to fear isn't a strong intelligence apparatus, but a law enforcement one whose resources and powers are almost instinguishable from the spooks. The spooks have, when allowed to do their job, much more to worry about than domestic issues. Be very afraid of this and increased efforts to force them to work together, especially when the FBI are jockying for the CIA's foreign intelligence role and the CIA wants to keep its turf. Nothing good can come out of it, and the most probable motive for making the police so powerful is precisely to squash domestic trouble and not of the terrorist variety.
Think RICO and Operation Rescue if you need a starting point on how these special police powers tend to show their true, ugly purpose once they're firmly established in the law so that no lawyer can imagine living without them to "protect us."
Let's say that they change the license for Innobase, what can MySQL do now except fork the codebase and work hard at trying to play catch up? I can't think of anything at this point and the very reason that MySQL is in this position is precisely because they relied on another company to do a lot of their R&D for them.
Granted, I did a benchmark with the application my group is developing using MySQL and PostgreSQL and MySQL was much faster. MySQL has certainly done a good job for what they intended MySQL to be used for, but let's be realistic about something: Oracle has MySQL by the balls now unless MySQL really beefs up their internal R&D to compensate for the loss of Innobase.
And yes, when your biggest competitor buys out the company whose IP your product uses, you are at their mercy in many ways. While Oracle can't outright crush them, they can certainly make life a living hell for MySQL until MySQL gets serious and does a lot more of its own R&D. Personally I just wish that my professors would require us to use a real, powerful open source database server like PostgreSQL, not MySQL.
iTunes could be extended to allow people to burn the content they buy as a DVD. Imagine being able to pay $3-$5/episode for something like Firefly. That would probably be enough to really fuel the success of such a project. With technology what it is today, Apple could easily offer a service where they let people burn that content to DVD thus destroying the rental market and making a new alternative to downloading movies possible.
This technology if taken to its fullest potential could be what truly expands the movie industry for the next decade or more. If they work with Apple to create an alternative payment processing system that takes a fee of only $0.05-$0.20 per transaction the amount of money they could make on selling eventually a full length movie for $7.00-$8.00 on iTunes would be amazing and would allow them to undercut their hated ally Wal-Mart.
Btw, my dad bought one of those portable TVs back in the 80s and if you have ever seen one, you know why it was a failure. The display sucked and the reception sucked even worse. The iPod by comparison lets people have a gorgeous display and can hold hours of stored video.
An interesting answer to a previous story
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Space Tourism?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The amount of scientific research necessary to make regular space travel useful is tremendous. It actually gives companies an incentive to invest research money into pure research because there is soooo much we have to figure out before it can really become part of normal life.
Let's cut the idealistic bullshit on something too. There is something about the government-centric approach to space that needs to be brought up. Who do you really trust to spend money wisely, an eccentric businessman who is getting involved directly like this or Congressmen and government bean counters? The government chose to lock us out of space travel on a private basis for a while and then did nothing to advance it.
This is just more evidence to me of why socialism cannot be trusted to provide for new and edgy research or art. This businessman doesn't have to think about the greater good, he only cares about his ability to fly into space and maybe advancing this for general society. I remember asking a socialist friend why a government owned media outlet would publish counter-culture works and small-time art/literature since there was no proven audience and it was all based on tax funds to produce it (thus an obligation to not be wasteful in publishing art). She couldn't give an honest answer. I think here we see the clear superiority of the free market. There is a lot of money to be made in space so there is a lot of reason for people to support research in this area.
It makes no sense why they didn't buy out Innobase a while ago. Now that Oracle owns Innobase, they are ultimately at Oracle's mercy for much of their development since MySQL uses Innobase's code for a lot of their work. They really should have bought them out a while ago and integrated them into MySQL as a company before Oracle could get their hands on them.
Prior to Windows XP, Windows did so well with the average user because it was "good enough." It wasn't technically the best, in fact 9X was technically inferior in many areas to even Linux circa 1995-1997. So here's the problem. If Linux cannot meet or exceed Windows in every area that matters to a user, why switch to Linux instead of staying with Windows or going to MacOS X? I have a Mac Mini, it could end up being a major threat to desktop Linux for the people out there who are less concerned with having all of their options open and more concerned with getting a system that is cheap, small and just works. If you're not going to use all of the resources available on a new system, why spend $800 for a new Dell system when you can pay $500 for Mac Mini? For the average user there is no reason to pay the extra $300 if they get the software they need.
Desktop Linux needs to grow up in a hurry. That means it needs to be as easy for the average user to use as Windows XP is by the time Vista comes out. I've used a beta of Vista and was incredibly impressed... and I'm a Mac fan first and foremost. Vista is a major threat to Linux and will solidify Microsoft's control, not end it, if things don't change.
If the Windows box is cheaper, why not buy it so that you have a Windows license laying around in case you need one. It's not like it's going to hurt you to have a copy laying around in the even that say... you need it to do work from home.
Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
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Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Open source software has worked pretty well in areas that provide services such as operating systems, development tools and server software because in those areas the people who need them also need support and have a vested interest that they are aware of in supporting the tools they use. I don't think that desktop software which is typically sold, however, works well in that respect. Most users have no reason to believe that they have a vested interest in supporting OpenOffice and I would bet that if Sun dropped their support the project would implode.
Let's be serious about this. The GPL provides **no** protection to companies whose business model is built on selling software that doesn't need support contracts or anything like that. If selling software is your business, then the GPL is basically a suicide pact for your company and the same applies to all other open source licenses because your competition can repackage your millions and billions of R&D dollars/Euros/Yet/etc. and you get... precisely what?
It's funny how much having a girlfriend that you are working toward marrying and realizing that your idealism cannot feed your children will change your perspective on open source software. I like Linux, love Tomcat and am eager to give PostgreSQL a shot and I run my own nightly builds of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird on my Windows laptop, so I am definitely not some fanboy for either side. So let me just say this to most of the zealots: OSS is never going to win in the long run because developers have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs (though sometimes they seem a little bit like bronze) that pay the bills and support one's spouse and children.
Get to that point and you'll realize that Microsoft is good because they create work for you. Same thing with Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc. Infrastructure can and in some areas should be open. However, no one is going to make money on open sourcing things like Quicken or TurboTax and other common user apps unless they are utterly useless without some expensive services provided by the company that makes them. How else are they going to make money, eh? We ought to eliminate software patents and EULAs, those are things the OSS movement is right about. However, the OSS movement if successful (and I doubt it will be in the long run) will end up making it very hard to make money in software development and maintanence. Good for this company that they realized that before it was too late. I'm glad that they chose to protect their employees and stockholders instead of pursuing Stallman's dream of a world in which software developers effectively cannot make a living directly off their code.
A lot of normal users I know use Firefox, Opera or Safari because they got fed up with having to worry about security holes that can easily compromise their entire system. Yes, Firefox has security problems, but not as bad as IE can offer. However, many IT groups I see around here in town still push IE because it's easy to lock down. If the Firefox developers would come up with an administration kit that would do things like lock down certain settings, bar certain plug-ins from being deactivated or removed and stuff like that, it'd be REALLY cool and good for their marketshare.
Let's also be realistic about something, though, and that is that until security becomes a liability for John Q. Average Citizen, people will continue to blindly accept what is pushed on them. If I were running a company, I would fire that little ol' secretary or bean counter who couldn't be bothered to read the "don't click on attachments" policy. No mercy, nothing. I'd fire them on the spot if they spread a worm throughout the company and shut down the mail servers by not following the policy. One of the things we do need is a law that says that if you run software that is exposed to the internet that is consistently attacked and used to attack others, you by law must take reasonable steps to secure your software by at least patching it. The way things are today would be akin to not requiring even basic safety inspections for vehicles so that when they fall apart at high speeds and kill someone, the owner gets to shrug and say "whatever."
But seriously though, let's stop BSing ourselves here. When patched properly, IE is "good enough" for the average user. What will cause people to stop using IE is if some l33t h@x0r writes an ActiveX control that puts people in danger of a felony. It'd have to be something damn serious too like a P2P ActiveX control for sharing kiddy porn and classified documents so that anyone who doesn't take their security seriously gets a shot at having armed G-men pay them a visit with a warrant for their arrest for distributing extremely felonious materials online. It'd have to be something that big to make "good enough" turn into "too dangerous to consider." Until then, Firefox is going to have to be clearly a lot better.
Is human nature. Greed is a vice, not a virture, for a reason. Greed causes people to do evil and harmfull things and should not be confused with ambition. The ambitious man wants to build a business that is rich and successful, the greedy man wants to build an empire that will rule the economy with an iron fist and drain every last drop of wealth out of it that it can.
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how accurate Judao-Christian scripture is about teaching about human nature. We see the result of greed in the dotcom bubble burst and we see the natural lack of general altruism all around us from the greedy bastards like Andrew Fastow that tanked Enron to the people now trying to scam FEMA and Red Cross by claiming to be refugees. Human nature toward economics is greed, not altruism and not enlightened self-interest. That is why both pure Capitalism and essentially all forms of Socialism have utterly failed.
The problem I have with long patents is that they subject the economy to the control of lazy, greedy men and women. I and other fiction bloggers are proof that you don't need a long monopoly on your ideas to want to produce literature, music and discover new ideas. I have probably about 25-30 pages worth of just fiction material up for free for the other Christian sci-fi fans that read it, yet I don't really care right now about making money off of it. My muse is Christ, what is your muse?
Shorter monopolies will light a fire under the asses of these people and force them to create new things. I hate to break it to the laissez faire purists, but the security afforded by these long monopolies breeds **sloth**, not creativity. Too many seem to have forgotten that old saying: necessity is the mother of all invention.
Here's a scenario for you. Saudi Arabia is virulently anti-American and even anti-Non-Muslim. It is the seat of Wahabi Islam, a sect of Islam that calls for systematic elimination of the Shia and Sufi Muslims as well. Now, a bunch of Saudi terrorists drop a backpack nuke in NYC and kill 80,000 Americans and foreigners.
What do we do, aside from wringing our hands and saying we can't kill large number of civilians to fight terrorism? The terrorists bomb us, tens of thousands of Americans or Brits or French or Japanese, etc. die. No massive response against the popular terrorists' home base. The result is a population that sees the attacked country/ethnic/religious group as weak, vulnerable and in the case of Islamic terrorism, which is the majority of terrorism today, it is a "sign from Allah that the enemy is going to lose."
So we don't nuke Riyadh and kill a bunch of the people who gave their moral support to the enemy. This is the best option we have short of getting ourselves either into a guerrilla war or just letting the enemy kill us. And here's something that the hand-wringing pacifists will never accept: our enemy knows us and hates us. People who are as dedicated toward killing you as most terrorists are cannot and will not be reasoned with or otherwise be converted to liking you. Either they die, or you and your children die because after you're dead, chances are damn good they'll kill every last one of yours that they can get ahold of.
We have to kill people who even just strongly SUPPORT terrorism overseas if we can to drive home the point we are serious. If we don't, then many of those people will be saying "sign me up" right after the American paper tiger has been defanged by the "martyrs." The Iranian government is already openly boasting that we are weak and totally exposed thanks to our blithering idiots in government from Nagin to Blanco to Bush to almost all of the bureaucrats in between.
The threat is real, and it can indeed be better solved through the threat of military force, especially mass destruction by nuclear weapons. In 1992, the only way we were able to keep Saddam from hitting us and the Israelis with bio weapons was we told him we were prepared to fire off a few of our nuclear weapons against Iraq.
It really does suck that we are pushed to this point, but how else are we going to intimidate the governments and populations that would whole-heartedly jump into the terrorism game? Huh? I'd like to see some serious proposals that don't revolve around us sacrificing all of our rights and sending massive amounts of aid to these groups on a regular basis like some sort of tribute in exchange for not bombing us. And let's cut the bullshit. The Muslim terrorists whine and bitch and moan not just about the fact that we support Israel and have/had troops on their holy grounds, but that *gasp* Spain is actually ruled today by the Spanish and not those imperialist Moores. Repeat the same claims about Greece, Romania, a few other countries in Europe occupied by the Ottomans, India and well... you get the idea. Pretty much any country where the non-Muslims gave their Muslim overlords a swift kick in the ass right out the door.
Blame the enemy, not us. Most Americans do not want to rule the world. Hell, most Americans would really be happy if the rest of the world would just leave us alone and we could get our government to reciprocate to them. But I can say this, as much of an isolationist, live-and-let-live southerner as I am, if my girlfriend and our families were killed in the Northern Virginia area by an Al Qaeda nuclear weapon, I wouldn't care about freedom of speech or conscience in Saudi Arabia. Like many, I'd support anyone who would drive a nuclear bomb right into the middle of those fuckers dancing in the streets celebrating "The Great Satan(tm)" getting nuked.
For the love of God, terrorism is about slaughtering women and children. It is a low-key form of genocide and is beyond mere criminality. A population that supports it and encourages it doesn't deserve to be let off the hook when it unleashes that on another group.
We may gripe about having less job security in the US, but at least we don't have the unemployment rate that France does. Just imagine how lazy many Americans would be if they had the job security that their European counterparts have. Part of the problem with security is that it breeds complacency which keeps a country from taking the risks it needs to grow its economy.
If a few Chinese moonbats ranting about the Malays' alleged racial inferiority is enough to spark a conflict, the people of Singapore should just go ahead and prepare for war because clearly their neighbors are itching for a fight. Besides, the only way to get an honest dialog going is to let people speak their minds. If people are forced to censor themselves so as to not offend the people they already consider inferior then guess what you've done? You've just made them even more convicted in their racism!
Yes, that's right. If you take a group of people who already view themselves as racially, not culturally, superior to another and force them to limit their liberties so as to not offend the group they condescend to, their natural reaction will be to condescend even more because "clearly, those people are so weak that they can't even handle a bad attitude."
Conflicts like this usually have very, very deep roots and it never ceases to amaze me how American left-liberals can never fail to suggest to change a group's natural reaction instead of accepting it. Hate to break it to you people, but the reality is that the strong do not typically respect those that are weaker than they are. That is life. You do not expect a lion to respect a terrier, so why expect a group that is very economically and militarily powerful in their region to respect a group that is by comparison very weak? Are we not animals as well, and do not both religion and science agree that the strong does not respect the weak?
Yes, let's encourage them to reevaluate their attitudes and seek to become better people by accepting others' weakness. Do as the Bible idealizes, and encourage the lion to have the strength of will and character to lay down with the sheep. But do not think that it is natural, and do not think that a weekly class on "tolerance" is going to make them like those they tend to look down on. Besides, technically they already show tolerance toward them because tolerance simply means live-and-let live. It doesn't imply you like them or want anything to do with them. It means you tolerate them, which is basically what most people do to small children who behave like brats or yappy little dogs. What they need is brotherly/sisterly reconciliation between their groups, not some half-assed bullshit called tolerance.
I have my own share of problems with America, but at least we still have freedom of religion and speech, unlike Canada and even with a corporatist president like Bush, somehow we still managed to get things like the Do-Not-Call list passed and the FTC's spam complaint system passed. I've never understood the left-wing rubes that want to "flee to Canada" whenever Bushitler does something they dislike (such as getting reelected in a landslide this time) or when the word "draft" is used seriously by elected officials. If I were going to expatriate for a while, I'd go to Ireland, Italy, Costa Rica or some place like that. Even if it were no freer in many ways than the US, at least it'd be a lot cooler than effectively fleeing to America Lite.
Hopefully more stuff like this will show the sheep in the USA that Canada is not the land of Good Government(tm), abundant liberty for all and milk and honey that they think it is. It is a regular country, like every other one, with its own major problems, just like the US. I have nothing against Canada, personally, and in fact am one of those rare American righists who actually likes and respects France for the most part. It's just that stuff like this makes me laugh because Canada is presented as such a utopia by so many leftists in America.
Attacking companies' online presence and preventing them doing business is only a step away from being as bad as smashing a store's windows in and tossing a stink/smoke bomb in and clearing the store out for an entire day while the workers clean up. If they were to destroy all of the databases, corrupt the server settings and destroy the web applications, it would be almost as bad as throwing a pipe bomb in through the window at night after everyone is gone. This is no more honorable than hiring the mafia to "protect you" from competitors.
People will just click right through any dialog box that askes them for their password, not even reading it. Then this little beast will tear their system limb-from-limb and they'll blame Apple. And you know why? Most people today expect others to do all of their security for them. I can't even count the number of times I meet people who just expect the police to provide for their security, and that includes girls with stalkers and crazy exs. Do they take responsibility for their own security? No because that would require effort.
This is all part of a larger societal trend. One of my friends basically said she shouldn't have to really worry about securing her PC. Can anyone imagine taking that attitude toward their house? "I shouldn't have to lock up at night." The same people often say that they shouldn't have to buy a gun and learn how to use it if someone is harassing them with possibly injurious or murderous intent.
What we need are really strong policies at work that say to people that if they refuse to follow policies such as not opening attachments from unknown sources they get fired. Are you a 70 year old secretary who can't learn them new fangled compooters? Too bad, you get fired because you couldn't be bothered to take responsibility. The only solution is to force people to take responsibility, and I have plenty of more examples, but then again so do most slashdoters..
Really reinforces why my girlfriend and the other women in my life prefer a male-dominated office to a female-dominated office. Hell, my mom won't work for another woman again unless either she knows her well or hell freezes over thanks to the last time...
Anyone else get sick and tired of the media always explaining and reexplaining things like what open source means to the public? I've seen things as common sense as "programming language" defined for the public. Anyone who cannot figure out what most of these things mean by now is willfully ignorant or too stupid to be worried about.
I guess it's just an easy way for them to fill up space to get closer to their 750 word limit.
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Do you honestly think that most companies are really going to support Linux if it is even more of a pain in the ass to write good device drivers that don't let out the company IP than it is for Windows? People like you make it quite easy for these major companies to just write off Linux entirely for most of their hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, GCC, Python, Tomcat and am posting this from Firefox, but this is such total bullshit on the face of it that you'd have to be either holed up in the Ivory Tower or an open source zealot who just wants to stick it to The Man to think that this is a good idea. 20,000 developers? That's ALL?! Microsoft currently has probably almost that many working for them, so the only thing that I can conclude from this proposal is that it would be an unmitigated disaster for the developer labor market if implemented.
Why not just come out and admit a cold, hard fact: open source software has been an abysmal failure if making a lot of money and keeping a lot of people employed is the goal. This proposal is a blatant admission that open source has not and will not work as a mainstream business model for anything but infrastructure software because that's the only software where support and custom development consulting is a major source of revenue. Can anyone point to solid evidence of desktop apps like cd burners, office suites and things of that nature thriving through support models? I can't seem to find any, and OpenOffice is not a good example because the project would probably implode if Sun pulled out.
Why is it that almost every single major open source projects aimed at software development with great documentation and consistent naming conventions are based on closed source products. Yeah, Classpath and Mono have designs and documentation that rival Sun and Microsoft's products, but that's because they're functional clones of them!
One of the things that I have gotten truly sick of is the hobbyist argument used to defend open source projects in so many cases. Desktop Linux has been maturing along the same timeframe as MacOS X has been in development--I remember seeing the proclamations of its ascension RSN in 1997-1999--and yet it is still very far away in terms of quality and capability. If Windows is "good enough" and Desktop Linux cannot meet or exceed it... any guess what that says about it?
Does it allow me to burn a DVD-quality video once and maybe a few more times for backup?
The federal government has always failed to prevent things like this for two reasons: bureaucratic bullshit like fiefdoms in the middle of the CIA and FBI that don't like each other and petty politics. For the last 15 years the CIA lost most of its overseas operational assets, especially in its special operations commando units. These were the people who quietly "got the job done" behind a building with a silencer-equipped pistol or high-powered rifle. You never heard of it happening, except when it was abused like in Latin America.
Here's a dirty little fact for the neoconservatives and the Bushitler wants to annihilate all non-born again Christians lunies. You cannot combine anti-terrorism units with law enforcement and you cannot expect things to be clean regardless of the solution. Yes, if we let the CIA quietly murder these terrorists without judicial oversight it could be abused. But it's a lesser evil than relying on the bumbling law enforcement apparatus in this country to do its job. The FBI spends as much time doing PR and lobbying as it does on enforcing the law; we really need to get a high barrier between a group like the CIA and everybody else and let that agency do its job in secrecy.
Yes, let people outside the chain of command know what is happening, but don't let the spooks work with law enforcement unless the police are operating in a purely, unequivocably subordinate position so that they cannot lean on the spooks for more power and resources. What concerns me is precisely this beefing up of John Q. Cop's police powers, not the CIA and others being able to discretely beat up and kill people who want to rape, pillage and murder civilians of ANY nationality. I'd have no problem with the CIA torturing the hell out of, then executing some scumbag terrorist in Afghanistan or Iraq like Zarqawi who vascillates between blowing up our soldiers and innocent women and children.
This stuff isn't going to get the job done, unless the job is to create a more effective police state. The real section to fear isn't a strong intelligence apparatus, but a law enforcement one whose resources and powers are almost instinguishable from the spooks. The spooks have, when allowed to do their job, much more to worry about than domestic issues. Be very afraid of this and increased efforts to force them to work together, especially when the FBI are jockying for the CIA's foreign intelligence role and the CIA wants to keep its turf. Nothing good can come out of it, and the most probable motive for making the police so powerful is precisely to squash domestic trouble and not of the terrorist variety.
Think RICO and Operation Rescue if you need a starting point on how these special police powers tend to show their true, ugly purpose once they're firmly established in the law so that no lawyer can imagine living without them to "protect us."
Let's say that they change the license for Innobase, what can MySQL do now except fork the codebase and work hard at trying to play catch up? I can't think of anything at this point and the very reason that MySQL is in this position is precisely because they relied on another company to do a lot of their R&D for them.
Granted, I did a benchmark with the application my group is developing using MySQL and PostgreSQL and MySQL was much faster. MySQL has certainly done a good job for what they intended MySQL to be used for, but let's be realistic about something: Oracle has MySQL by the balls now unless MySQL really beefs up their internal R&D to compensate for the loss of Innobase.
And yes, when your biggest competitor buys out the company whose IP your product uses, you are at their mercy in many ways. While Oracle can't outright crush them, they can certainly make life a living hell for MySQL until MySQL gets serious and does a lot more of its own R&D. Personally I just wish that my professors would require us to use a real, powerful open source database server like PostgreSQL, not MySQL.
iTunes could be extended to allow people to burn the content they buy as a DVD. Imagine being able to pay $3-$5/episode for something like Firefly. That would probably be enough to really fuel the success of such a project. With technology what it is today, Apple could easily offer a service where they let people burn that content to DVD thus destroying the rental market and making a new alternative to downloading movies possible.
This technology if taken to its fullest potential could be what truly expands the movie industry for the next decade or more. If they work with Apple to create an alternative payment processing system that takes a fee of only $0.05-$0.20 per transaction the amount of money they could make on selling eventually a full length movie for $7.00-$8.00 on iTunes would be amazing and would allow them to undercut their hated ally Wal-Mart.
Btw, my dad bought one of those portable TVs back in the 80s and if you have ever seen one, you know why it was a failure. The display sucked and the reception sucked even worse. The iPod by comparison lets people have a gorgeous display and can hold hours of stored video.
The amount of scientific research necessary to make regular space travel useful is tremendous. It actually gives companies an incentive to invest research money into pure research because there is soooo much we have to figure out before it can really become part of normal life.
Let's cut the idealistic bullshit on something too. There is something about the government-centric approach to space that needs to be brought up. Who do you really trust to spend money wisely, an eccentric businessman who is getting involved directly like this or Congressmen and government bean counters? The government chose to lock us out of space travel on a private basis for a while and then did nothing to advance it.
This is just more evidence to me of why socialism cannot be trusted to provide for new and edgy research or art. This businessman doesn't have to think about the greater good, he only cares about his ability to fly into space and maybe advancing this for general society. I remember asking a socialist friend why a government owned media outlet would publish counter-culture works and small-time art/literature since there was no proven audience and it was all based on tax funds to produce it (thus an obligation to not be wasteful in publishing art). She couldn't give an honest answer. I think here we see the clear superiority of the free market. There is a lot of money to be made in space so there is a lot of reason for people to support research in this area.
It makes no sense why they didn't buy out Innobase a while ago. Now that Oracle owns Innobase, they are ultimately at Oracle's mercy for much of their development since MySQL uses Innobase's code for a lot of their work. They really should have bought them out a while ago and integrated them into MySQL as a company before Oracle could get their hands on them.
Prior to Windows XP, Windows did so well with the average user because it was "good enough." It wasn't technically the best, in fact 9X was technically inferior in many areas to even Linux circa 1995-1997. So here's the problem. If Linux cannot meet or exceed Windows in every area that matters to a user, why switch to Linux instead of staying with Windows or going to MacOS X? I have a Mac Mini, it could end up being a major threat to desktop Linux for the people out there who are less concerned with having all of their options open and more concerned with getting a system that is cheap, small and just works. If you're not going to use all of the resources available on a new system, why spend $800 for a new Dell system when you can pay $500 for Mac Mini? For the average user there is no reason to pay the extra $300 if they get the software they need.
Desktop Linux needs to grow up in a hurry. That means it needs to be as easy for the average user to use as Windows XP is by the time Vista comes out. I've used a beta of Vista and was incredibly impressed... and I'm a Mac fan first and foremost. Vista is a major threat to Linux and will solidify Microsoft's control, not end it, if things don't change.
A constructor, methods and variables.
It's more like a construction company offering discount insurance for the buildings they sell.
If the Windows box is cheaper, why not buy it so that you have a Windows license laying around in case you need one. It's not like it's going to hurt you to have a copy laying around in the even that say... you need it to do work from home.
Open source software has worked pretty well in areas that provide services such as operating systems, development tools and server software because in those areas the people who need them also need support and have a vested interest that they are aware of in supporting the tools they use. I don't think that desktop software which is typically sold, however, works well in that respect. Most users have no reason to believe that they have a vested interest in supporting OpenOffice and I would bet that if Sun dropped their support the project would implode.
Let's be serious about this. The GPL provides **no** protection to companies whose business model is built on selling software that doesn't need support contracts or anything like that. If selling software is your business, then the GPL is basically a suicide pact for your company and the same applies to all other open source licenses because your competition can repackage your millions and billions of R&D dollars/Euros/Yet/etc. and you get... precisely what?
It's funny how much having a girlfriend that you are working toward marrying and realizing that your idealism cannot feed your children will change your perspective on open source software. I like Linux, love Tomcat and am eager to give PostgreSQL a shot and I run my own nightly builds of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird on my Windows laptop, so I am definitely not some fanboy for either side. So let me just say this to most of the zealots: OSS is never going to win in the long run because developers have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs (though sometimes they seem a little bit like bronze) that pay the bills and support one's spouse and children.
Get to that point and you'll realize that Microsoft is good because they create work for you. Same thing with Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc. Infrastructure can and in some areas should be open. However, no one is going to make money on open sourcing things like Quicken or TurboTax and other common user apps unless they are utterly useless without some expensive services provided by the company that makes them. How else are they going to make money, eh? We ought to eliminate software patents and EULAs, those are things the OSS movement is right about. However, the OSS movement if successful (and I doubt it will be in the long run) will end up making it very hard to make money in software development and maintanence. Good for this company that they realized that before it was too late. I'm glad that they chose to protect their employees and stockholders instead of pursuing Stallman's dream of a world in which software developers effectively cannot make a living directly off their code.
A lot of normal users I know use Firefox, Opera or Safari because they got fed up with having to worry about security holes that can easily compromise their entire system. Yes, Firefox has security problems, but not as bad as IE can offer. However, many IT groups I see around here in town still push IE because it's easy to lock down. If the Firefox developers would come up with an administration kit that would do things like lock down certain settings, bar certain plug-ins from being deactivated or removed and stuff like that, it'd be REALLY cool and good for their marketshare.
Let's also be realistic about something, though, and that is that until security becomes a liability for John Q. Average Citizen, people will continue to blindly accept what is pushed on them. If I were running a company, I would fire that little ol' secretary or bean counter who couldn't be bothered to read the "don't click on attachments" policy. No mercy, nothing. I'd fire them on the spot if they spread a worm throughout the company and shut down the mail servers by not following the policy. One of the things we do need is a law that says that if you run software that is exposed to the internet that is consistently attacked and used to attack others, you by law must take reasonable steps to secure your software by at least patching it. The way things are today would be akin to not requiring even basic safety inspections for vehicles so that when they fall apart at high speeds and kill someone, the owner gets to shrug and say "whatever."
But seriously though, let's stop BSing ourselves here. When patched properly, IE is "good enough" for the average user. What will cause people to stop using IE is if some l33t h@x0r writes an ActiveX control that puts people in danger of a felony. It'd have to be something damn serious too like a P2P ActiveX control for sharing kiddy porn and classified documents so that anyone who doesn't take their security seriously gets a shot at having armed G-men pay them a visit with a warrant for their arrest for distributing extremely felonious materials online. It'd have to be something that big to make "good enough" turn into "too dangerous to consider." Until then, Firefox is going to have to be clearly a lot better.
Is human nature. Greed is a vice, not a virture, for a reason. Greed causes people to do evil and harmfull things and should not be confused with ambition. The ambitious man wants to build a business that is rich and successful, the greedy man wants to build an empire that will rule the economy with an iron fist and drain every last drop of wealth out of it that it can.
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how accurate Judao-Christian scripture is about teaching about human nature. We see the result of greed in the dotcom bubble burst and we see the natural lack of general altruism all around us from the greedy bastards like Andrew Fastow that tanked Enron to the people now trying to scam FEMA and Red Cross by claiming to be refugees. Human nature toward economics is greed, not altruism and not enlightened self-interest. That is why both pure Capitalism and essentially all forms of Socialism have utterly failed.
The problem I have with long patents is that they subject the economy to the control of lazy, greedy men and women. I and other fiction bloggers are proof that you don't need a long monopoly on your ideas to want to produce literature, music and discover new ideas. I have probably about 25-30 pages worth of just fiction material up for free for the other Christian sci-fi fans that read it, yet I don't really care right now about making money off of it. My muse is Christ, what is your muse?
Shorter monopolies will light a fire under the asses of these people and force them to create new things. I hate to break it to the laissez faire purists, but the security afforded by these long monopolies breeds **sloth**, not creativity. Too many seem to have forgotten that old saying: necessity is the mother of all invention.
If you are using Windows, then you have to have Eraser.
Here's a scenario for you. Saudi Arabia is virulently anti-American and even anti-Non-Muslim. It is the seat of Wahabi Islam, a sect of Islam that calls for systematic elimination of the Shia and Sufi Muslims as well. Now, a bunch of Saudi terrorists drop a backpack nuke in NYC and kill 80,000 Americans and foreigners.
What do we do, aside from wringing our hands and saying we can't kill large number of civilians to fight terrorism? The terrorists bomb us, tens of thousands of Americans or Brits or French or Japanese, etc. die. No massive response against the popular terrorists' home base. The result is a population that sees the attacked country/ethnic/religious group as weak, vulnerable and in the case of Islamic terrorism, which is the majority of terrorism today, it is a "sign from Allah that the enemy is going to lose."
So we don't nuke Riyadh and kill a bunch of the people who gave their moral support to the enemy. This is the best option we have short of getting ourselves either into a guerrilla war or just letting the enemy kill us. And here's something that the hand-wringing pacifists will never accept: our enemy knows us and hates us. People who are as dedicated toward killing you as most terrorists are cannot and will not be reasoned with or otherwise be converted to liking you. Either they die, or you and your children die because after you're dead, chances are damn good they'll kill every last one of yours that they can get ahold of.
We have to kill people who even just strongly SUPPORT terrorism overseas if we can to drive home the point we are serious. If we don't, then many of those people will be saying "sign me up" right after the American paper tiger has been defanged by the "martyrs." The Iranian government is already openly boasting that we are weak and totally exposed thanks to our blithering idiots in government from Nagin to Blanco to Bush to almost all of the bureaucrats in between.
The threat is real, and it can indeed be better solved through the threat of military force, especially mass destruction by nuclear weapons. In 1992, the only way we were able to keep Saddam from hitting us and the Israelis with bio weapons was we told him we were prepared to fire off a few of our nuclear weapons against Iraq.
It really does suck that we are pushed to this point, but how else are we going to intimidate the governments and populations that would whole-heartedly jump into the terrorism game? Huh? I'd like to see some serious proposals that don't revolve around us sacrificing all of our rights and sending massive amounts of aid to these groups on a regular basis like some sort of tribute in exchange for not bombing us. And let's cut the bullshit. The Muslim terrorists whine and bitch and moan not just about the fact that we support Israel and have/had troops on their holy grounds, but that *gasp* Spain is actually ruled today by the Spanish and not those imperialist Moores. Repeat the same claims about Greece, Romania, a few other countries in Europe occupied by the Ottomans, India and well... you get the idea. Pretty much any country where the non-Muslims gave their Muslim overlords a swift kick in the ass right out the door.
Blame the enemy, not us. Most Americans do not want to rule the world. Hell, most Americans would really be happy if the rest of the world would just leave us alone and we could get our government to reciprocate to them. But I can say this, as much of an isolationist, live-and-let-live southerner as I am, if my girlfriend and our families were killed in the Northern Virginia area by an Al Qaeda nuclear weapon, I wouldn't care about freedom of speech or conscience in Saudi Arabia. Like many, I'd support anyone who would drive a nuclear bomb right into the middle of those fuckers dancing in the streets celebrating "The Great Satan(tm)" getting nuked.
For the love of God, terrorism is about slaughtering women and children. It is a low-key form of genocide and is beyond mere criminality. A population that supports it and encourages it doesn't deserve to be let off the hook when it unleashes that on another group.
We may gripe about having less job security in the US, but at least we don't have the unemployment rate that France does. Just imagine how lazy many Americans would be if they had the job security that their European counterparts have. Part of the problem with security is that it breeds complacency which keeps a country from taking the risks it needs to grow its economy.
If a few Chinese moonbats ranting about the Malays' alleged racial inferiority is enough to spark a conflict, the people of Singapore should just go ahead and prepare for war because clearly their neighbors are itching for a fight. Besides, the only way to get an honest dialog going is to let people speak their minds. If people are forced to censor themselves so as to not offend the people they already consider inferior then guess what you've done? You've just made them even more convicted in their racism!
Yes, that's right. If you take a group of people who already view themselves as racially, not culturally, superior to another and force them to limit their liberties so as to not offend the group they condescend to, their natural reaction will be to condescend even more because "clearly, those people are so weak that they can't even handle a bad attitude."
Conflicts like this usually have very, very deep roots and it never ceases to amaze me how American left-liberals can never fail to suggest to change a group's natural reaction instead of accepting it. Hate to break it to you people, but the reality is that the strong do not typically respect those that are weaker than they are. That is life. You do not expect a lion to respect a terrier, so why expect a group that is very economically and militarily powerful in their region to respect a group that is by comparison very weak? Are we not animals as well, and do not both religion and science agree that the strong does not respect the weak?
Yes, let's encourage them to reevaluate their attitudes and seek to become better people by accepting others' weakness. Do as the Bible idealizes, and encourage the lion to have the strength of will and character to lay down with the sheep. But do not think that it is natural, and do not think that a weekly class on "tolerance" is going to make them like those they tend to look down on. Besides, technically they already show tolerance toward them because tolerance simply means live-and-let live. It doesn't imply you like them or want anything to do with them. It means you tolerate them, which is basically what most people do to small children who behave like brats or yappy little dogs. What they need is brotherly/sisterly reconciliation between their groups, not some half-assed bullshit called tolerance.
I have my own share of problems with America, but at least we still have freedom of religion and speech, unlike Canada and even with a corporatist president like Bush, somehow we still managed to get things like the Do-Not-Call list passed and the FTC's spam complaint system passed. I've never understood the left-wing rubes that want to "flee to Canada" whenever Bushitler does something they dislike (such as getting reelected in a landslide this time) or when the word "draft" is used seriously by elected officials. If I were going to expatriate for a while, I'd go to Ireland, Italy, Costa Rica or some place like that. Even if it were no freer in many ways than the US, at least it'd be a lot cooler than effectively fleeing to America Lite.
Hopefully more stuff like this will show the sheep in the USA that Canada is not the land of Good Government(tm), abundant liberty for all and milk and honey that they think it is. It is a regular country, like every other one, with its own major problems, just like the US. I have nothing against Canada, personally, and in fact am one of those rare American righists who actually likes and respects France for the most part. It's just that stuff like this makes me laugh because Canada is presented as such a utopia by so many leftists in America.
Attacking companies' online presence and preventing them doing business is only a step away from being as bad as smashing a store's windows in and tossing a stink/smoke bomb in and clearing the store out for an entire day while the workers clean up. If they were to destroy all of the databases, corrupt the server settings and destroy the web applications, it would be almost as bad as throwing a pipe bomb in through the window at night after everyone is gone. This is no more honorable than hiring the mafia to "protect you" from competitors.
the cause.
People will just click right through any dialog box that askes them for their password, not even reading it. Then this little beast will tear their system limb-from-limb and they'll blame Apple. And you know why? Most people today expect others to do all of their security for them. I can't even count the number of times I meet people who just expect the police to provide for their security, and that includes girls with stalkers and crazy exs. Do they take responsibility for their own security? No because that would require effort.
This is all part of a larger societal trend. One of my friends basically said she shouldn't have to really worry about securing her PC. Can anyone imagine taking that attitude toward their house? "I shouldn't have to lock up at night." The same people often say that they shouldn't have to buy a gun and learn how to use it if someone is harassing them with possibly injurious or murderous intent.
What we need are really strong policies at work that say to people that if they refuse to follow policies such as not opening attachments from unknown sources they get fired. Are you a 70 year old secretary who can't learn them new fangled compooters? Too bad, you get fired because you couldn't be bothered to take responsibility. The only solution is to force people to take responsibility, and I have plenty of more examples, but then again so do most slashdoters..
Really reinforces why my girlfriend and the other women in my life prefer a male-dominated office to a female-dominated office. Hell, my mom won't work for another woman again unless either she knows her well or hell freezes over thanks to the last time...
Anyone else get sick and tired of the media always explaining and reexplaining things like what open source means to the public? I've seen things as common sense as "programming language" defined for the public. Anyone who cannot figure out what most of these things mean by now is willfully ignorant or too stupid to be worried about.
I guess it's just an easy way for them to fill up space to get closer to their 750 word limit.
I have contributed probably a good 600-625 work units to them so far, and I'd like to know how far those clock cycles have gone toward the research.