Unfortunately a large percentage of people REALLY DO think like that, and literally don't understand why it's wrong. So perhaps it's best that, after all, you do articulate the reasons. The masses need to understand.
Think longer-term. Right now, what is legal or illegal more or less corresponds to most peoples' moral values, so sure, right now, there may be little cause for concern, because you're "not doing anything illegal" right now.
But you are handing over more and more powers to the government, and the government changes over time. You have no idea what the laws will be ten, twenty, thirty or forty years from now. You are effectively, bit by bit, handing away all your rights to the government of the future that you have NO IDEA WHAT THEY WILL BE LIKE.
You, or your kids, may want, or need, to fight what might become an increasingly oppressive police state, in 2030, or 2050, or 2070. But because YOU thought it was OK to keep giving the goverment more and more powers NOW (based on the "people with nothing to hide" argument), your, or your kids', hands will be tied - they will be powerless to fight that government.
The primary reason you have a right to bear arms in the USA is that the founding fathers understood that the people might need to protect themselves, one day, from their very own government. Not giving the government the right to 'surveil' every aspect of your life is merely an extension of the same principle --- your ability to defend yourself against this possible oppressive government of the future will depend on your ability to carry out some sort of resistance movement, and that is mostly taken away from you if the government has too many surveillance powers. It's merely an extension of the general concept embodied in the idea of the gun as weapon against the government.
As an example, South African blacks of the early 1900s had NO IDEA that apartheid would be coming around mid-century. If they had then given the SA government such extraordinary and broad powers of surveillance as the US is gaining on it's own citizens (assuming the technology had been available then), based on the notion that "well, unless you're doing something wrong, what reason would you have to hide it?", then when apartheid DID arrive, they would have been almost powerless against the state, and would have been unable to effectively carry out the armed resistance movement that in large part led to the fall of apartheid.
NO program will work if the appropriate codepages or fonts are not installed. Who's blaming Microsoft? I know it is fun to shoot down anyone who appears to be "just blaming Microsoft for everything", but I simply listed them as a possible cause for the problem, WHICH THEY WERE AND YOU CAN'T DENY THAT, so what is your problem? Grow up. Someone with an iota of technical literacy would understand that there are many possible causes for a problem like this, (no RTL text support in Mac, no RTL text support in the software used, correct codepages/fonts not installed, no proper Unicode support, etc) and the list of potential causes of the problem INCLUDES MICROSOFT, whether you like it or not. What you just did is remove Microsoft from a list of potential causes NOT because of sound technical reasons that they are NOT to blame, but because you like to shoot down anyone who appears to be criticising Microsoft (in your opinion). The poster did not say in the original post that he tried anything other than IE, so OF COURSE Microsoft belongs on the list of possible causes for the problem.
It's not about "blame", good heavens grow up, it's PURELY a technical issue of finding the cause of the problem. Not "blame". Honesly, how childish.
True, bugger-all went wrong, but remember, billions of dollars were spent upgrading millions of systems that were genuinely affected by the y2k bug (including computer systems in nuclear power plants, and those controlling electricity supply grids). Surely one must acknowledge that this might have been at least part of the reason that there were no major catastrophes?
True, but one of the reasons is that Windows advances very slowly over the years; the DLLs are mostly stable because Microsoft just plain doesn't add very much in each new release (definitely not considering how long they take for new releases). Linux distros tend to evolve/change quite a lot faster, always adding new libraries, new versions of libraries, new programs, older programs being taken out, etc. In Windows, if you look beyond the facelifts in each new 'major' version, you find most of the same old utils and libraries, barely even recompiled.
Yes I know they do add and improve things, but the way they go about it is very different, and changes come slowly. I think this 'stability' is part of why companies prefer Windows - it seldom changes much at all, so there are very few retraining costs between, say, Windows 95 and Windows XP. OTOH, compare the Linux of '95 to the Linux of today!
Re:Umbrella terms for this type of tech
on
Sentient Data Access
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, you're wrong about HLA. Firstly, HLA provides NO SIMULATION CONCEPTS at all, as it is designed in a generic way that contains no concepts of simulations at all. Secondly, HLA does a helluva lot LESS than CORBA, HLA does not even provide a system for distributed computing or calling remote procedures. All HLA does is provide a standardized way of describing the data framework for networked applications - in other words, a standardized way of describing what the content of network packets will be. There is no RPC mechanism at all. There is a mechanism for passing ownership of HLA objects between federates, but that is all.
HLA does not even standardize the communications interface, that is left up to users.
There is NOTHING NEW in HLA, no new technology, no new concepts. It is ONLY a way of standardizing the content of network packets, so that people developing simulators that must interact with one another have a standard way of letting one another know what information they will receive on the network and have to send, etc. Basically HLA lets you specify what is the equivalent of an XML DTD - a document containing a hierarchical description of what packets will be sent. That is all. Basically HLA gives you a document describing your network protocol, and a standardized API for connecting to HLA 'federations'. Nothing else. It is even left up to you to figure out how to send that data to other computers (or you can license 3rd party APIs).
Sorry, but hearing buzzwords get thrown around doesn't mean you understand them.
Re:I have a theory about why this is not happening
on
Sentient Data Access
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The idea reminds me a bit of the Java-based software 'agents' we briefly studied in an undergrad distributed computing course I did.. hmm.. probably eight years ago. In fact the whole idea sounds a lot like much of the rationale behind Java in the first place. Each device runs a 'common language' (Java), and the network allows special-purpose software tools (agents) to travel through the network and run on the general-purpose tool/device (or agent clients using some sort of RPC to the server module through the network).
So if you were, say, busy using your power drill, and suddenly felt like doing some Internet banking, you could call up the Internet banking software module, it would download itself to your power drill (which happens to have LCD display and mini keyboard on the side) through this huge network (perhaps being automatically routed through your toaster & fridge), and voila, you do Internet banking from your power drill.
Big whoop. The truly practical applications are rather limited. And anyway, MS pretty much killed Java (and Sun is doing a fairly good job of killing the remains too), so now the new trend is "Web services" (.NET) instead - a less powerful, more bloated, rehashed, slower, more memory-hungry version of the same concepts (and goals). Which itself is based on a reinvention of +/- 30-year old UNIX concepts.
"What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?"
Answer: it's none of your business.
Seriously. If I paid an ISP for bandwidth that they claimed they would provide at a given price, I DO NOT HAVE TO JUSTIFY my bandwidth usage to ANYONE, provided I don't break the law.
If ISPs don't want to provide more than a certain amount of bandwidth, there are technological, non-intrustive means to limit their customers' usage so that the overall income still exceeds their own bandwidth costs. The second step for them is to simply be honest in their advertising.
But really, there are MANY possible legitimate uses "in the real world" of 40 GB of bandwidth. Nobody needs to justify what they use the bandwidth for if they've paid for it and the ISP claimed, at sign-up, that they would provide it.
Microsoft understands the minds of their clients. Most people have a very poor understanding of computers, and think that computers "just crash" (the public doesn't understand that hardware memory protection available since 1985 on the 386 should have more or less put an and to blue screen crashes eighteen years ago).
So the majority of people actually really think that Microsoft is just wonderful for having "figured out how to make computers stop" blue-screening, those dang geniuses at MS - they don't realise that it was MS's fault in the first place that the computers crashed so much.
computers have caught up with their demands, in terms of power and disk capacity.
Computers have NOT caught up enough. X 'feels' noticably slower than Windows - on the same machine - and we're talking about really fast hardware / graphics card etc.
We can *and should* do better than X, yet nobody seems to like hearing any criticism of X. One has to acknowledge that there are issues as the first step in improving.
Don't 'we' the Linux community want to be REALLY BETTER than the other operating systems, rather than just "good enough"? Honestly, engineers and computer programmers with a clue can see that X is not even as 'good'/fast etc as friggin Windows XP (of all things). Come on, we can and should do better. We want to be the best, don't we? We want to be able to confidently say to people "Linux is the best", right? And not just "yeah well Linux is good enough", "Linux isn't sooo bad", "X isn't sooo slow", "but so many programs all having their own look and feel is a *good* thing"... come on, that is lame, and people can see through the crap.
I really recommend reading the report on Y. It is really very good, this is not "yet another X replacement", this one is good and well-thought out - from almost every aspect, this really has a lot of potential to be "the" X replacement.
Either you're the best or you're not. As long as we keep sticking with bad technical choices (i.e. X), we will look like fools, pretending that it is good. Microsoft got a lot of criticism for getting stuck in the past with DOS in the name of backwards compatibility, and now the Linux world does exactly the same thing with X. "Everyone is already using it". Great, so we'll still be second-best 10 years from now because we refused to change.
Today X still compares favorably to Mac OS and Windows in terms of functionality and even in terms of things like 3D game frame rate
Come on... "compares favorably to..." is just a nice way of saying, "it is slower than...".
Come on, wouldn't you *rather* want to be telling people *confidently* that X *is the fastest*? The Linux community shouldn't settle for anything less than being *the best*. And as long we keep advocating and pushing solutions that intelligent people can see are not the best, we will look like fools. "Use Linux, it's not quite as fast as Mac or Windows, doesn't look as good, the apps don't have a consistent look and feel, but hey, it doesn't need to be the best, because it's only Linux".
What nonsense. The kernel developers settle for nothing less than fastest, and keep striving to be ever faster. The X crowd refuses, not willing to acknowledge when they really are not up to scratch.
The "slow driver" argument is old now. You can install Red Hat 9 on a fast Pentium 4 system with the fastest GeForce 4 FX, and a programmer will be able to FEEL that X is slower than Windows XP, even with the correct drivers installed. And this is not even at 3D - just stupid plain 2D widgets!! I know, we did this at work, and the other programmers could feel that X is slow. How can I advocate Linux (without looking like a fool) when X can clearly be seen to be inferior by other engineers and programmers? "Yes it's worse, but you should use it anyway?" Get real. And to be inferior to Windows *XP* of all things, that is just low. We need a wake-up call.
I read his "Y report". It really is very good, and it is clear that he is smart.
I suggest anyone here actually *read* the report before criticising Y.
Actually, Unisys probably did fairly well with their.gif fees. Many companies, such as Adobe, who create software such as Adobe Photoshop, paid license fees to Unisys for including the.gif encoder as part of the package. Adobe, of course, simply passes this cost directly on to its customers, in the form of a slightly higher price for Photoshop. Companies and individuals, in turn, who then have increased costs for Photoshop, either (a) pass those costs onto their customers, or (b) get by on narrower margins - meaning, for example, slightly lower potential salaries for people working for such companies.
We've all paid for GIFs, in one way or another, most of us without consciously realising it. Unisys never cared that they could not collect royalties from the "man on the street", because the money was in the big easy targets, like Photoshop. But of course, the costs always trickle down to you and me, one way or another, so long as we are "consumers" of GIF files. I doubt that Unisys made billions, but they probably "settled for" millions..
Until you find out you (or a loved one) have a terminal illness that has a chance of being cured as a result of research that uses animal. Whats worse, using some animals in experiments, or letting millions of people suffer and/or die from disorders and diseases that we may be able to cure much faster using animal experiments?
Would you rather watch your own mother die from an illness, just to protect some rats from experimentation in a lab?
Obviously using animals to create/test cosmetics is wrong. But this isn't as black and white as you first thought, is it.
Assuming such taxes put an end to spam, the rest of (the NON-spammers) end up paying higher costs to use e-mail. Isn't that one of the main complaints about spam, that the cost burden for it is placed on non-spammers?
Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place.
I was with you up until this silly statement. Of course the people of Pakistan are capable of imagining improving their lives. It might interest you to know that Pakistan is actually in the middle of a mini economic boom at the moment.
There are many reasons why poor countries seem to struggle to crawl out of it, but the idea that it is because they lack the imagination to imagine a better life is definitely not one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
Unfortunately a large percentage of people REALLY DO think like that, and literally don't understand why it's wrong. So perhaps it's best that, after all, you do articulate the reasons. The masses need to understand.
Think longer-term. Right now, what is legal or illegal more or less corresponds to most peoples' moral values, so sure, right now, there may be little cause for concern, because you're "not doing anything illegal" right now.
But you are handing over more and more powers to the government, and the government changes over time. You have no idea what the laws will be ten, twenty, thirty or forty years from now. You are effectively, bit by bit, handing away all your rights to the government of the future that you have NO IDEA WHAT THEY WILL BE LIKE.
You, or your kids, may want, or need, to fight what might become an increasingly oppressive police state, in 2030, or 2050, or 2070. But because YOU thought it was OK to keep giving the goverment more and more powers NOW (based on the "people with nothing to hide" argument), your, or your kids', hands will be tied - they will be powerless to fight that government.
The primary reason you have a right to bear arms in the USA is that the founding fathers understood that the people might need to protect themselves, one day, from their very own government. Not giving the government the right to 'surveil' every aspect of your life is merely an extension of the same principle --- your ability to defend yourself against this possible oppressive government of the future will depend on your ability to carry out some sort of resistance movement, and that is mostly taken away from you if the government has too many surveillance powers. It's merely an extension of the general concept embodied in the idea of the gun as weapon against the government.
As an example, South African blacks of the early 1900s had NO IDEA that apartheid would be coming around mid-century. If they had then given the SA government such extraordinary and broad powers of surveillance as the US is gaining on it's own citizens (assuming the technology had been available then), based on the notion that "well, unless you're doing something wrong, what reason would you have to hide it?", then when apartheid DID arrive, they would have been almost powerless against the state, and would have been unable to effectively carry out the armed resistance movement that in large part led to the fall of apartheid.
NO program will work if the appropriate codepages or fonts are not installed. Who's blaming Microsoft? I know it is fun to shoot down anyone who appears to be "just blaming Microsoft for everything", but I simply listed them as a possible cause for the problem, WHICH THEY WERE AND YOU CAN'T DENY THAT, so what is your problem? Grow up. Someone with an iota of technical literacy would understand that there are many possible causes for a problem like this, (no RTL text support in Mac, no RTL text support in the software used, correct codepages/fonts not installed, no proper Unicode support, etc) and the list of potential causes of the problem INCLUDES MICROSOFT, whether you like it or not. What you just did is remove Microsoft from a list of potential causes NOT because of sound technical reasons that they are NOT to blame, but because you like to shoot down anyone who appears to be criticising Microsoft (in your opinion). The poster did not say in the original post that he tried anything other than IE, so OF COURSE Microsoft belongs on the list of possible causes for the problem.
It's not about "blame", good heavens grow up, it's PURELY a technical issue of finding the cause of the problem. Not "blame". Honesly, how childish.
NO program will work if the appropriate codepages or fonts are not installed.
OSX definitely supports Unicode, so the problem probably was more likely caused by the correct codepages/fonts not being installed, or this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/25742.html .
Don't automatically blame Apple ..
True, bugger-all went wrong, but remember, billions of dollars were spent upgrading millions of systems that were genuinely affected by the y2k bug (including computer systems in nuclear power plants, and those controlling electricity supply grids). Surely one must acknowledge that this might have been at least part of the reason that there were no major catastrophes?
True, but one of the reasons is that Windows advances very slowly over the years; the DLLs are mostly stable because Microsoft just plain doesn't add very much in each new release (definitely not considering how long they take for new releases). Linux distros tend to evolve/change quite a lot faster, always adding new libraries, new versions of libraries, new programs, older programs being taken out, etc. In Windows, if you look beyond the facelifts in each new 'major' version, you find most of the same old utils and libraries, barely even recompiled.
Yes I know they do add and improve things, but the way they go about it is very different, and changes come slowly. I think this 'stability' is part of why companies prefer Windows - it seldom changes much at all, so there are very few retraining costs between, say, Windows 95 and Windows XP. OTOH, compare the Linux of '95 to the Linux of today!
No, you're wrong about HLA. Firstly, HLA provides NO SIMULATION CONCEPTS at all, as it is designed in a generic way that contains no concepts of simulations at all. Secondly, HLA does a helluva lot LESS than CORBA, HLA does not even provide a system for distributed computing or calling remote procedures. All HLA does is provide a standardized way of describing the data framework for networked applications - in other words, a standardized way of describing what the content of network packets will be. There is no RPC mechanism at all. There is a mechanism for passing ownership of HLA objects between federates, but that is all.
HLA does not even standardize the communications interface, that is left up to users.
There is NOTHING NEW in HLA, no new technology, no new concepts. It is ONLY a way of standardizing the content of network packets, so that people developing simulators that must interact with one another have a standard way of letting one another know what information they will receive on the network and have to send, etc. Basically HLA lets you specify what is the equivalent of an XML DTD - a document containing a hierarchical description of what packets will be sent. That is all. Basically HLA gives you a document describing your network protocol, and a standardized API for connecting to HLA 'federations'. Nothing else. It is even left up to you to figure out how to send that data to other computers (or you can license 3rd party APIs).
Sorry, but hearing buzzwords get thrown around doesn't mean you understand them.
The idea reminds me a bit of the Java-based software 'agents' we briefly studied in an undergrad distributed computing course I did .. hmm .. probably eight years ago. In fact the whole idea sounds a lot like much of the rationale behind Java in the first place. Each device runs a 'common language' (Java), and the network allows special-purpose software tools (agents) to travel through the network and run on the general-purpose tool/device (or agent clients using some sort of RPC to the server module through the network).
So if you were, say, busy using your power drill, and suddenly felt like doing some Internet banking, you could call up the Internet banking software module, it would download itself to your power drill (which happens to have LCD display and mini keyboard on the side) through this huge network (perhaps being automatically routed through your toaster & fridge), and voila, you do Internet banking from your power drill.
Big whoop. The truly practical applications are rather limited. And anyway, MS pretty much killed Java (and Sun is doing a fairly good job of killing the remains too), so now the new trend is "Web services" (.NET) instead - a less powerful, more bloated, rehashed, slower, more memory-hungry version of the same concepts (and goals). Which itself is based on a reinvention of +/- 30-year old UNIX concepts.
"What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?"
Answer: it's none of your business.
Seriously. If I paid an ISP for bandwidth that they claimed they would provide at a given price, I DO NOT HAVE TO JUSTIFY my bandwidth usage to ANYONE, provided I don't break the law.
If ISPs don't want to provide more than a certain amount of bandwidth, there are technological, non-intrustive means to limit their customers' usage so that the overall income still exceeds their own bandwidth costs. The second step for them is to simply be honest in their advertising.
But really, there are MANY possible legitimate uses "in the real world" of 40 GB of bandwidth. Nobody needs to justify what they use the bandwidth for if they've paid for it and the ISP claimed, at sign-up, that they would provide it.
Microsoft understands the minds of their clients. Most people have a very poor understanding of computers, and think that computers "just crash" (the public doesn't understand that hardware memory protection available since 1985 on the 386 should have more or less put an and to blue screen crashes eighteen years ago).
So the majority of people actually really think that Microsoft is just wonderful for having "figured out how to make computers stop" blue-screening, those dang geniuses at MS - they don't realise that it was MS's fault in the first place that the computers crashed so much.
So would X Windows then be like, "hey, I'm an ex-Windows user"?
computers have caught up with their demands, in terms of power and disk capacity.
Computers have NOT caught up enough. X 'feels' noticably slower than Windows - on the same machine - and we're talking about really fast hardware / graphics card etc.
We can *and should* do better than X, yet nobody seems to like hearing any criticism of X. One has to acknowledge that there are issues as the first step in improving.
Don't 'we' the Linux community want to be REALLY BETTER than the other operating systems, rather than just "good enough"? Honestly, engineers and computer programmers with a clue can see that X is not even as 'good'/fast etc as friggin Windows XP (of all things). Come on, we can and should do better. We want to be the best, don't we? We want to be able to confidently say to people "Linux is the best", right? And not just "yeah well Linux is good enough", "Linux isn't sooo bad", "X isn't sooo slow", "but so many programs all having their own look and feel is a *good* thing" ... come on, that is lame, and people can see through the crap.
I really recommend reading the report on Y. It is really very good, this is not "yet another X replacement", this one is good and well-thought out - from almost every aspect, this really has a lot of potential to be "the" X replacement.
Either you're the best or you're not. As long as we keep sticking with bad technical choices (i.e. X), we will look like fools, pretending that it is good. Microsoft got a lot of criticism for getting stuck in the past with DOS in the name of backwards compatibility, and now the Linux world does exactly the same thing with X. "Everyone is already using it". Great, so we'll still be second-best 10 years from now because we refused to change.
Today X still compares favorably to Mac OS and Windows in terms of functionality and even in terms of things like 3D game frame rate
Come on ... "compares favorably to ..." is just a nice way of saying, "it is slower than ...".
Come on, wouldn't you *rather* want to be telling people *confidently* that X *is the fastest*? The Linux community shouldn't settle for anything less than being *the best*. And as long we keep advocating and pushing solutions that intelligent people can see are not the best, we will look like fools. "Use Linux, it's not quite as fast as Mac or Windows, doesn't look as good, the apps don't have a consistent look and feel, but hey, it doesn't need to be the best, because it's only Linux".
What nonsense. The kernel developers settle for nothing less than fastest, and keep striving to be ever faster. The X crowd refuses, not willing to acknowledge when they really are not up to scratch.
The "slow driver" argument is old now. You can install Red Hat 9 on a fast Pentium 4 system with the fastest GeForce 4 FX, and a programmer will be able to FEEL that X is slower than Windows XP, even with the correct drivers installed. And this is not even at 3D - just stupid plain 2D widgets!! I know, we did this at work, and the other programmers could feel that X is slow. How can I advocate Linux (without looking like a fool) when X can clearly be seen to be inferior by other engineers and programmers? "Yes it's worse, but you should use it anyway?" Get real. And to be inferior to Windows *XP* of all things, that is just low. We need a wake-up call.
I read his "Y report". It really is very good, and it is clear that he is smart. I suggest anyone here actually *read* the report before criticising Y.
Actually, Unisys probably did fairly well with their .gif fees. Many companies, such as Adobe, who create software such as Adobe Photoshop, paid license fees to Unisys for including the .gif encoder as part of the package. Adobe, of course, simply passes this cost directly on to its customers, in the form of a slightly higher price for Photoshop. Companies and individuals, in turn, who then have increased costs for Photoshop, either (a) pass those costs onto their customers, or (b) get by on narrower margins - meaning, for example, slightly lower potential salaries for people working for such companies.
..
We've all paid for GIFs, in one way or another, most of us without consciously realising it. Unisys never cared that they could not collect royalties from the "man on the street", because the money was in the big easy targets, like Photoshop. But of course, the costs always trickle down to you and me, one way or another, so long as we are "consumers" of GIF files. I doubt that Unisys made billions, but they probably "settled for" millions
Until you find out you (or a loved one) have a terminal illness that has a chance of being cured as a result of research that uses animal. Whats worse, using some animals in experiments, or letting millions of people suffer and/or die from disorders and diseases that we may be able to cure much faster using animal experiments?
Would you rather watch your own mother die from an illness, just to protect some rats from experimentation in a lab?
Obviously using animals to create/test cosmetics is wrong. But this isn't as black and white as you first thought, is it.
Assuming such taxes put an end to spam, the rest of (the NON-spammers) end up paying higher costs to use e-mail. Isn't that one of the main complaints about spam, that the cost burden for it is placed on non-spammers?
I think you are confusing Pakistan with Palestine.
Above post = troll (matrix spoiler in 2nd last paragraph)
Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place.
I was with you up until this silly statement. Of course the people of Pakistan are capable of imagining improving their lives. It might interest you to know that Pakistan is actually in the middle of a mini economic boom at the moment.
There are many reasons why poor countries seem to struggle to crawl out of it, but the idea that it is because they lack the imagination to imagine a better life is definitely not one of them.