Which of these sentences sounds ridiculous: "My computer has no Norwegian parts.", or "My computer has no American parts."
Um, my computer has no American parts. In fact, none of my computers have American parts. They're either made in China or Taiwan or Singapore or some other place in Asia. And we should derive from this, what? That China is the world's most technologically advanced country? Well, that sounds all good and well, but my American flag is also made in China. Are the Chinese the world's most patriot Americans?
to convince the people of America that it should be legal to write software to steal from companies
So you're saying that if I play my DVDs in Linux and read my eBooks on my PDA, I'm "stealing from companies"? And you have a +1 bonus? *sigh* Slashdot is falling apart...
You know what the difference is between Linux and Mac OSX? Linux is written by control freaks. Fortunately, the fine folks who are working on the various parts of the Linux system differ from your average Slashdot sheep in that they care more about system security and less about "widespread Linux adoption". That's why you will never see such a thing as "insecure Linux".
Yes, it's possible that Linux companies will eventually start putting out windows-ified Linux distros that will sacrifice security for ease of use to make it more appealing to the unwashed masses, but so what? Viruses work so well in Windows territory because there's Only One Windows, and everything works exactly the same on millions of computers. Look at all the different Linux distros from a virus writer's perspective and ask yourself if you could really write an effective virus and expect it to work the same on all of them. My answer is no. Not with the huge diversity of libraries and programs and kernel versions out there. What's a virus writer to do? Spread the virus as source file and ask the user to type./configure? I guess you could do that, but you'd be the laughing stock of the virus writers' community, if there is such a thing.
And if you're going to suggest that Linux will eventually standardize and everybody will use the same distro (or all distros will be functionally identical), and all the programs and libraries will reach stable versions updated only once every six months in service packs, then you obviously have no idea what you're talking about, which is what I would half expect from someone who says things like "welcome to real life, kids".
It is NOT only "a matter of time". If Linux programmers will ever get the idea to make Linux login as root by default, to write email clients that allow scripts to be executed without user's permission, to ship their OS without a firewall mechanism in place and to make the whole system a sitting duck to any running script via a conveniently accessible registry file, THEN you will start seeing viruses for Linux. But by then us security conscious people will have long since moved on to another more decent OS.
So who says you have to listen to RMS? Feel free to ignore him, it's not like he's the President or anything. However, you do have to respect the wishes of other coders who chose to GPL their code. You want to use somebody else's code in your program but can't because it's GPLed? Well tough. Go buy yourself some proprietary helper code if you love it so much. Other coders are as free to decide what happens to their code as you are, and if they want to GPL it, it's because they decided GPL works best for them, not because RMS told them to.
Those who want to make their code free should be able to make their code free and prevent anything non-free from interacting with it. Those who want to write proprietary software should be equally able to do so under whatever terms and conditions they wish. It's ultimately up to users to decide what kind of software they want to use. The "best" license is not the license that RMS or O'Reilly say is best, but the one that gets the most support from people at large.
Really? Did someone make you emperor of the Universe and gave you absolute power? Because I fail to see how else you can proclaim things to be "universal", and reality sure doesn't agree with you. Moral codes vary widely in space as well as in time. "Fair treatment of man" is something that has either no meaning, or a very different one outside of the Western world. Even the Western culture has interpretted it differently in time. A few hundred years ago, slaves were not "men". A hundred years ago women were not "men". Fifty years ago black people were not "men". Today, poor people are not "men", unless you consider lack of health care and poor education to be "fair treatment". And now you want whole civilizations with thousands of years of cultural heritage that make American history look like a bad joke to just adopt a set of values that you do not practice yourselves in your own countries, simply because of some theory about "universal moral codes" that infatuated Westerners made up? Get serious...
...is that the same people who constantly bitch and moan over "American cultural imperialism" and how American media corporations pollute other cultures with their Hollywood produced "intellectual fast food" and yadda yadda, the same people get up in arms when the same American corporations just want to sell a product and NOT bundle American morals with it. Make up your minds already, people...
What's confusing me is that there were a few thousand *STUDENTS* in Tiananmen. You know, students. As in "educated, above-average people who are as different from anything you can call 'majority' as you get". As in "bah, they'll grow up and they'll come to their senses eventually". As in "we're 1.2 billion people here, we need someone with authority to rule us; that fancy democracy thing is not for us, but those 'intellectual' pricks just don't understand". Is it clear now?
And btw, the majority may be silent, but it's never timid.
Yeah, except the government controls internet access at the source. They can pop up all they want, but not as "Internet" bars since there'll be no more Internet for them.
I have, however, met numerous people who have not read them commenting on how the hype is uncalled for.
Well, I've never read them and I don't consider the hype uncalled for. It doesn't do any harm and it can be safely ignored. I personally had absolutely no clue what Harry Potter was until this article on Slashdot. For all I knew it could have been a brand of cutlery or something.
As for "urging everyone" to read the books, thanks but no thanks. I have too many *really* important books on my read list to have time for children's "literature".
I now know that Katz lives in some alternate dimension unto his own
So do you. All of us do. You don't really expect everybody to just accept YOUR opinion about things as the only valid one, do you? Then what's your point? Katz and other people saw something in the Matrix. You saw something else. That's how art works. Deal with it.
You can go on making assumptions about how software is somehow tied to PCs and Windows and GUIs, but that will not make all the mainframes and workstations and servers of the world dissappear. One operating system? Hah. Which one are you talking about? Irix, Solaris, AIX, AUX, Linux, QNX, HP-UX, BSD, OS/X? Dude, wake up. If there are programmers out there who only use one operating system, they are developing Windows software. Only Windows developers can be so ignorant and self-sufficient as to think that their OS is the ONLY OS.
as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does
As a professional Windows software developer. Please, make the distinction. The quality of being a software developer does not somehow imply that, for some reason, one should know how Windows works. I'm a professional software developer myself and the last Windows I've seen was Windows 95 about 5 years ago in a totally non-programming related context. I don't even know what the rest of them look like.
if a game is worth spending money on, it has to be a Linux version, period
C'mon, man, games are JUST games, i.e. entertainment. They're not what you would call "important". Therefore, I *will* play games that are not for Linux. That doesn't mean that I will touch Windows with a 10 foot pole, mind you, but I don't have anything against console games.
My beef is not with OO programming. I would use nothing but OOP when I write an application server in Java, or a KDE app in C++. OOP has its place, and it's a very good solution for a lot of problems. However, there ARE places where OOP is totally inappropriate. Like CGI/mod_perl, or admin-related scripts. Perl was a perfect fit for this kind of things, because it was fast and powerful. Now when all the Perl internals are going to be rewritten to fit the OO paradigm in Perl6, not only will this impose a performance overhead (the interpreter WILL be slower, unless the dev team has out-of-this-world coding skills), but it will also force YOU to think in OO terms, even when all you want is to solve simple problems that would be better off dealt with in the old procedural way. But hey, that's just my opinion. Fortunately, there will be a Perl5 compatibility mode in Perl6, so I don't really have many reasons to bitch.:)
If you don't like a particular feature of the language don't use it.
Oh yeah? I don't like Perl6's object-orientedness. Could you be so kind as to tell me how can I turn that off? Yeah, I thought so.
Look, all this "change is great no matter what's changing and INTO what" is bullshit. Perl used to be a great language for admin stuff, CGI and glue code. Now can you please tell me why the fsck do I need a full-fledged object-oriented language to write scripts for cron jobs and CGI? Have *you* ever tried to write CGI in a fully object-oriented language? Why don't you go ahead and do that before you start accusing people of resistence to change?
Bah. From what I could make of Larry's "Apocalypse", perl6 is going to be the next fsckin' Java. Bloated, slow and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing I'm a DirecTV Internet subscriber, at least they're less likely to go bankrupt. People still buy those TV things, don't they?
Which of these sentences sounds ridiculous: "My computer has no Norwegian parts.", or "My computer has no American parts."
Um, my computer has no American parts. In fact, none of my computers have American parts. They're either made in China or Taiwan or Singapore or some other place in Asia. And we should derive from this, what? That China is the world's most technologically advanced country? Well, that sounds all good and well, but my American flag is also made in China. Are the Chinese the world's most patriot Americans?
to convince the people of America that it should be legal to write software to steal from companies
So you're saying that if I play my DVDs in Linux and read my eBooks on my PDA, I'm "stealing from companies"? And you have a +1 bonus? *sigh* Slashdot is falling apart...
P.S. Nice troll.
You know what the difference is between Linux and Mac OSX? Linux is written by control freaks. Fortunately, the fine folks who are working on the various parts of the Linux system differ from your average Slashdot sheep in that they care more about system security and less about "widespread Linux adoption". That's why you will never see such a thing as "insecure Linux".
Yes, it's possible that Linux companies will eventually start putting out windows-ified Linux distros that will sacrifice security for ease of use to make it more appealing to the unwashed masses, but so what? Viruses work so well in Windows territory because there's Only One Windows, and everything works exactly the same on millions of computers. Look at all the different Linux distros from a virus writer's perspective and ask yourself if you could really write an effective virus and expect it to work the same on all of them. My answer is no. Not with the huge diversity of libraries and programs and kernel versions out there. What's a virus writer to do? Spread the virus as source file and ask the user to type ./configure? I guess you could do that, but you'd be the laughing stock of the virus writers' community, if there is such a thing.
And if you're going to suggest that Linux will eventually standardize and everybody will use the same distro (or all distros will be functionally identical), and all the programs and libraries will reach stable versions updated only once every six months in service packs, then you obviously have no idea what you're talking about, which is what I would half expect from someone who says things like "welcome to real life, kids".
It is NOT only "a matter of time". If Linux programmers will ever get the idea to make Linux login as root by default, to write email clients that allow scripts to be executed without user's permission, to ship their OS without a firewall mechanism in place and to make the whole system a sitting duck to any running script via a conveniently accessible registry file, THEN you will start seeing viruses for Linux. But by then us security conscious people will have long since moved on to another more decent OS.
So who says you have to listen to RMS? Feel free to ignore him, it's not like he's the President or anything. However, you do have to respect the wishes of other coders who chose to GPL their code. You want to use somebody else's code in your program but can't because it's GPLed? Well tough. Go buy yourself some proprietary helper code if you love it so much. Other coders are as free to decide what happens to their code as you are, and if they want to GPL it, it's because they decided GPL works best for them, not because RMS told them to.
Those who want to make their code free should be able to make their code free and prevent anything non-free from interacting with it. Those who want to write proprietary software should be equally able to do so under whatever terms and conditions they wish. It's ultimately up to users to decide what kind of software they want to use. The "best" license is not the license that RMS or O'Reilly say is best, but the one that gets the most support from people at large.
Some moral codes are universal.
Really? Did someone make you emperor of the Universe and gave you absolute power? Because I fail to see how else you can proclaim things to be "universal", and reality sure doesn't agree with you. Moral codes vary widely in space as well as in time. "Fair treatment of man" is something that has either no meaning, or a very different one outside of the Western world. Even the Western culture has interpretted it differently in time. A few hundred years ago, slaves were not "men". A hundred years ago women were not "men". Fifty years ago black people were not "men". Today, poor people are not "men", unless you consider lack of health care and poor education to be "fair treatment". And now you want whole civilizations with thousands of years of cultural heritage that make American history look like a bad joke to just adopt a set of values that you do not practice yourselves in your own countries, simply because of some theory about "universal moral codes" that infatuated Westerners made up? Get serious...
...is that the same people who constantly bitch and moan over "American cultural imperialism" and how American media corporations pollute other cultures with their Hollywood produced "intellectual fast food" and yadda yadda, the same people get up in arms when the same American corporations just want to sell a product and NOT bundle American morals with it. Make up your minds already, people...
What's confusing me is that there were a few thousand *STUDENTS* in Tiananmen. You know, students. As in "educated, above-average people who are as different from anything you can call 'majority' as you get". As in "bah, they'll grow up and they'll come to their senses eventually". As in "we're 1.2 billion people here, we need someone with authority to rule us; that fancy democracy thing is not for us, but those 'intellectual' pricks just don't understand". Is it clear now?
And btw, the majority may be silent, but it's never timid.
"Timid majority"? Heh. There were a few thousand students in Tiananmen square. China has a population of 1.2 billion. You do the math.
Yeah, except the government controls internet access at the source. They can pop up all they want, but not as "Internet" bars since there'll be no more Internet for them.
I have, however, met numerous people who have not read them commenting on how the hype is uncalled for.
Well, I've never read them and I don't consider the hype uncalled for. It doesn't do any harm and it can be safely ignored. I personally had absolutely no clue what Harry Potter was until this article on Slashdot. For all I knew it could have been a brand of cutlery or something.
As for "urging everyone" to read the books, thanks but no thanks. I have too many *really* important books on my read list to have time for children's "literature".
It's been impossible to avoid the hype on this film.
I did manage to completely avoid the hype on this film, until some bozo wrote an article about it on Slashdot.
I now know that Katz lives in some alternate dimension unto his own
So do you. All of us do. You don't really expect everybody to just accept YOUR opinion about things as the only valid one, do you? Then what's your point? Katz and other people saw something in the Matrix. You saw something else. That's how art works. Deal with it.
You can go on making assumptions about how software is somehow tied to PCs and Windows and GUIs, but that will not make all the mainframes and workstations and servers of the world dissappear. One operating system? Hah. Which one are you talking about? Irix, Solaris, AIX, AUX, Linux, QNX, HP-UX, BSD, OS/X? Dude, wake up. If there are programmers out there who only use one operating system, they are developing Windows software. Only Windows developers can be so ignorant and self-sufficient as to think that their OS is the ONLY OS.
as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does
As a professional Windows software developer. Please, make the distinction. The quality of being a software developer does not somehow imply that, for some reason, one should know how Windows works. I'm a professional software developer myself and the last Windows I've seen was Windows 95 about 5 years ago in a totally non-programming related context. I don't even know what the rest of them look like.
if a game is worth spending money on, it has to be a Linux version, period
C'mon, man, games are JUST games, i.e. entertainment. They're not what you would call "important". Therefore, I *will* play games that are not for Linux. That doesn't mean that I will touch Windows with a 10 foot pole, mind you, but I don't have anything against console games.
Both.
No mention of any digital management controls on the device
Digital management controls on the device would be nice, actually. Digital rights management controls, on the other hand...
My beef is not with OO programming. I would use nothing but OOP when I write an application server in Java, or a KDE app in C++. OOP has its place, and it's a very good solution for a lot of problems. However, there ARE places where OOP is totally inappropriate. Like CGI/mod_perl, or admin-related scripts. Perl was a perfect fit for this kind of things, because it was fast and powerful. Now when all the Perl internals are going to be rewritten to fit the OO paradigm in Perl6, not only will this impose a performance overhead (the interpreter WILL be slower, unless the dev team has out-of-this-world coding skills), but it will also force YOU to think in OO terms, even when all you want is to solve simple problems that would be better off dealt with in the old procedural way. But hey, that's just my opinion. Fortunately, there will be a Perl5 compatibility mode in Perl6, so I don't really have many reasons to bitch. :)
If you don't like a particular feature of the language don't use it.
Oh yeah? I don't like Perl6's object-orientedness. Could you be so kind as to tell me how can I turn that off? Yeah, I thought so.
Look, all this "change is great no matter what's changing and INTO what" is bullshit. Perl used to be a great language for admin stuff, CGI and glue code. Now can you please tell me why the fsck do I need a full-fledged object-oriented language to write scripts for cron jobs and CGI? Have *you* ever tried to write CGI in a fully object-oriented language? Why don't you go ahead and do that before you start accusing people of resistence to change?
Bah. From what I could make of Larry's "Apocalypse", perl6 is going to be the next fsckin' Java. Bloated, slow and useless.
Well, then Joe User will not use Road Runner. Problem solved.
So what's the big deal? Us Linux users have been there for quite some time, and we're still alive. :)
No, no monitor adapter. Just a cheap video capture card + xawtv.