You can certainly create a script to rip out the adware and rebuild/reinstall affected components. No good reason not to publish said script or share it with friends.
This is still in Open Source code right? So how long will it take for someone to figure this out and post a few Perl scripts for removing this krap from everyone's system? Probably not long at all. So what is the point?
What if instead of RIAA amnesty stuff some million or more people wrote in to say that they swap files including music and consider it a perfectly right thing to do regardless of RIAA backed laws of the day. What if great numbers told the record industry to either adapt or perish? What if a substantial number of folks refuse to buy any new albums at all until the RIAA stops its antics? Our lawmakers are not going to stand up to these dinosaurs. It seriously is up to us.
"You know, the "power corrupts" comment is fairly common, but I think the issue is more complicated. Power certainly does corrupt a lot of people, but I don't think organizations like the FBI or CIA seek legislation like the Patriot Act because they are power hungry. They do it to make their job easier."
This is rather naive considering the history of these organizations and the way their abilities have been courted and abused by various powerful interests. At one time J. Edgar Hoover had most of Washington quaking in fear over how much he had on nearly all of them.
If you place unrestrained power in the hands of such organizations you end up with an actual Police State regardless of the original reasons the power was requested.
Microsoft is quite bad enough exactly how it is. Who the hell goes to a web search engine on a general topic expecting to wade through a half a page or more of offers to sell books on the subject or information slanted to the search engine providers perspective? I don't and I won't use a search engine with such characteristics.
Definitely do not buy it. The first was utterly unusable due to extreme slowness and seeming lack of real multi-tasking. I was amazed they even bothered to put it out in such condition. The CPU is relatively slow in today's PD world. There is no support for standard cards for wifi and such, only memory, no room for a microdisk for instance. Extra hardware needed even for bluetooth? SIGH. I don't see anything at all compelling here.
Free software is about making the products of software development free (in the sense of freedom) for use, free for examination, free for modication and free for combination with other software. Good software developers, especially good architects, are relatively scarce and scarce resources are chased by $$$ and or other incentives.
As a software architect/developer for 23 years in the mainly proprietary world, I would greatly welcome more free software dominance. In the proprietary world I have created and have known of so many things others have created that have become effectively the proprietary property of the company we were working for at the time. Much of this became shelf-ware as it was outside the company's primary business. Much of this code is of great general usefulness and would have advanced the state of software art if it were generally available. Instead, each of us ends up creating much of such code over and over again for specific uses in specific proprietary settings. This is a huge and growing waste of talent, time and money. Much of this code is middleware, system services and other reuseable components. These things are notoriously hard to build a proprietary business model around. So in these areas espeically, free software is the only reasonable way to go.
It is a personal great sorrow to see many problems that were addressed 15-20 years ago still being struggled with today. It is a great sorrow and cause for some anger to see the floundering mess that most software languages and development environments still are after all these years. It is not that the people are stupid. It is that the proprietary model of software does not work very well to truly advance the state of the art and practice. This lack of much real advance seriously limits every area that software touches. I will get too nuts if dwell much more on what has been stillborn because of current proprietary software practices.
The article has a subtextual premise that the corporate IP game is either legitimate or the only game possible. Its point is predicated on the idea that Linux in order to be and remain strong must play this game by the assumed cast in stone rules. But Linux and Free Software/Open Source in general is about stepping outside of this IP game and freely sharing knowledge, code, algorithms and so on. That is what has made it so powerful and such a beautiful alternative. To now turn around and supposedly "make it stronger" by throwing out or mitigating the very source of its strength would be a fatal error.
The author of this piece obviously does not get it. That is to be expected when apparently all too many of us don't get it either.
Exactly how is it the same as being a terrorist if you decide you believe in and want to go fight with a group that the US decides to destroy? That decision by itself might be really stupid and even treasonous but it does not match any definition of terrorism I understand. And the guy did not even carry through with that desire. Also, last time I looked, the Taliban as such were not the terrorist we were looking for. Or do we really agree to let this word be pasted on anything and everything whenever convenient? I think we at least owe ourselves the mental discipline to use words with some real meaning.
This company qualifies as the biggest and sickest joke of the year. It isn't funny any more. It is utterly disgusting. From here on out anyone who still is working for SCO is an absolute pariah. SCO may end up being more hated than even Micro$oft.
What most people don't account for when considering predictions of X amount of change in N years is whether the pace of change is constant or not. If the pace of change is itself quickening then 50 years at today's rate of change might occur in 10 or 15 years or less depending on the rate at which the pace of change is increasing. Much of the technology we are developing today is highly likely to increase the pace of change. Even tired old Moore's law is downright pokey when some of the highly disruptive new technology in the labs today is taken into account. I expect to see human brain equivalent hardware within 15 years. I am less sure how long it will take to do the software end of building human or >human level AI. What happens after that, when an intelligent entity sets about direct self-improvement of ver own intelligence and abilities and uses those to invent/create/produce at an accelerating rate is anyone's guess. But we sure as hell aren't likely to be in Kansas wondering about where to get a job.
Well, maybe the real question is whether we will even be dependent on "jobs" to have an abudance of everything we need and most things we want. It is amusing to read predictions decades out that assume economics and sociopolitical assumptions will all stay pretty much the same while everything else changes.
If you believe copyrights allow this then that is indeed "krap". There is no code in question that has not been commonly available and open for quite a long time now and extensively used and modified. To say that some ancient proprietary rights over some ancinent original code should now at this late date force Linux to go non-open source and force all Linux users to obtain a license is legally absurd. Morally it is MUCH worse than that.
If this is supported by the courts and SCO "wins" then I become a criminal. Under bad law honest citizens become law-breakers. This is the reality.
NO. Security is not acheived by obscurity in the non-code world anymore than within it. Security is acheived by other means such as redundancy, access controls, surveillance (properly modulated by privacy of course) and so on. This work is extremely valuable in that it shows exactly where we are infrastructure-wise and what is weak or vulnerable and could use shoring up. It also opens up a lot of new innovation opportunities as it exposes existing needs and limitations.
This may be tedious but it is a potential goldmine to a lot more than would-be terrorists.
NOOO. I will not go back to the old stupid non-WSIWYG days so some techie (like but unlike me) doesn't have to go through the trouble to think about what people would actually like to use to get their work done. Techies trying to dictate what is good enough are a disgrace to the profession.
I hope not because the future we all dream about cannot be acheived on a metered internet with vertical service offerings/apps. What is really needed is always available high speed internet everywhere. On this various free and commercial offerings and usages will flourish just as on the wired internet. I can only see the cellular alternative as a stopgap to pay for creating what we really want. I don't see it as reaonable that we should have to pay out the nose indefinitely or that our capabilities should be drastically limited indefinitely because of the earlier now obsolete notion of selling chunks of bandwidth for ultra-high prices.
While it steps outside my generally Libertarian principles to say so, I believe what is needed is indeed a wired and wireless Information Superhighway throughout all nations where it can possibly be accomplished. This is the basic wiring for a global economy, information sharing, communicating mind. It should not be killed dead by nickel and diming in its infancy.
Newsbreak, yes I do. There is such a thing as fair use. Granted Congress, courts haven't ruled but in the absence of clear rulings I have the right to download anything that is out there that I wish. RIAA is suing ahead of real law as I see it. They are also evil and idiotic in that they do not change their business models to fit modern times, needs and expectations rather than insist the world stand still so they do not have to be troubled. This is even more evil because it makes criminals of people attempting to maximally use modern abilities and possibilities for informattion and entertainment storage, transmission, on the fly packaging and so on.
What has bothered me about this line of thought is the notion of simulations rather than VRs. I would consider it much more likely that we are living with a computationally created reality than that the more limited version of this, that we are a simulation, is true. I kept hoping that the definition of "simulation" would be made clear. Unfortunately it was fairly implicit that the author expects our descendants to create sims of us to play/work/interact with. But why exactly should they wish to do this? And what happened to our "true selves" anyway?
If I was a compassionate future AI determined to do what I could for human beings despite their proclivity to destroy themselves and one another, I might well pop the lot of them into tailored VRs where they could live out their urges over and over again in a sort of VR mediated reincarnational system, until they were adequately housebroken. Then they might be let out onto the main datasphere.
But I find it far less likely that future descendants would be crass enough to run us as if we were real just for their own amusement without consideration of the ethics involved.
If I buy something that the manufacturer has burdened with various unrequested locks and restraints from actually being used by me, is it a crime if I break said restraints? The law today says that it is. But it is the law that is wrong not the action. Hopefully this case will end with this being affirmed. But whether it ends that way or not the truth of what is and is not reasonbale remains.
Signing a binary is one thing. Building a kernel that will only run signed binaries and signed by known presumably respectable entities is something else again. The latter does indeed take away freedom to run whatever you wish on your own machine. A signed kernel for purposes of verification that it was what X produced is one thing. Requiring that the kernel/OS be signed by X before the hardware will actually run it is something else again. The latter means that once I mod my kernel, which almost every Linux user with changing hardware/interests eventually does, that the machine will not necessarily run it due to some Palladium like TCI hardware being present. This definitely flies directly in the face of Open Source and Free Software.
I pay for 384k bi-directional. Why is it anyone's business if I run a subnet in my home to tie my cluster together? I am still not getting any more bandwidth, I am simply subdividing the bandwidth among machines. Same argument holds for making the subnet wireless. What exactly is there to object to? What am I supposed to be ripping off?
And when are we going to rise up and tell the greedy, small-minded busy-bodies to take a flying leap? I am beginning to think it isn't even about greed but more about control for the sake of control.
Slashdot Mirror
You can certainly create a script to rip out the adware and rebuild/reinstall affected components. No good reason not to publish said script or share it with friends.
This is still in Open Source code right? So how long will it take for someone to figure this out and post a few Perl scripts for removing this krap from everyone's system? Probably not long at all. So what is the point?
What if instead of RIAA amnesty stuff some million or more people wrote in to say that they swap files including music and consider it a perfectly right thing to do regardless of RIAA backed laws of the day. What if great numbers told the record industry to either adapt or perish? What if a substantial number of folks refuse to buy any new albums at all until the RIAA stops its antics? Our lawmakers are not going to stand up to these dinosaurs. It seriously is up to us.
"You know, the "power corrupts" comment is fairly common, but I think the issue is more complicated. Power certainly does corrupt a lot of people, but I don't think organizations like the FBI or CIA seek legislation like the Patriot Act because they are power hungry. They do it to make their job easier."
This is rather naive considering the history of these organizations and the way their abilities have been courted and abused by various powerful interests. At one time J. Edgar Hoover had most of Washington quaking in fear over how much he had on nearly all of them.
If you place unrestrained power in the hands of such organizations you end up with an actual Police State regardless of the original reasons the power was requested.
Microsoft is quite bad enough exactly how it is. Who the hell goes to a web search engine on a general topic expecting to wade through a half a page or more of offers to sell books on the subject or information slanted to the search engine providers perspective? I don't and I won't use a search engine with such characteristics.
Definitely do not buy it. The first was utterly unusable due to extreme slowness and seeming lack of real multi-tasking. I was amazed they even bothered to put it out in such condition. The CPU is relatively slow in today's PD world. There is no support for standard cards for wifi and such, only memory, no room for a microdisk for instance. Extra hardware needed even for bluetooth? SIGH. I don't see anything at all compelling here.
Free software is about making the products of software development free (in the sense of freedom) for use, free for examination, free for modication and free for combination with other software. Good software developers, especially good architects, are relatively scarce and scarce resources are chased by $$$ and or other incentives.
As a software architect/developer for 23 years in the mainly proprietary world, I would greatly welcome more free software dominance. In the proprietary world I have created and have known of so many things others have created that have become effectively the proprietary property of the company we were working for at the time. Much of this became shelf-ware as it was outside the company's primary business. Much of this code is of great general usefulness and would have advanced the state of software art if it were generally available. Instead, each of us ends up creating much of such code over and over again for specific uses in specific proprietary settings. This is a huge and growing waste of talent, time and money. Much of this code is middleware, system services and other reuseable components. These things are notoriously hard to build a proprietary business model around. So in these areas espeically, free software is the only reasonable way to go.
It is a personal great sorrow to see many problems that were addressed 15-20 years ago still being struggled with today. It is a great sorrow and cause for some anger to see the floundering mess that most software languages and development environments still are after all these years. It is not that the people are stupid. It is that the proprietary model of software does not work very well to truly advance the state of the art and practice. This lack of much real advance seriously limits every area that software touches. I will get too nuts if dwell much more on what has been stillborn because of current proprietary software practices.
The article has a subtextual premise that the corporate IP game is either legitimate or the only game possible. Its point is predicated on the idea that Linux in order to be and remain strong must play this game by the assumed cast in stone rules. But Linux and Free Software/Open Source in general is about stepping outside of this IP game and freely sharing knowledge, code, algorithms and so on. That is what has made it so powerful and such a beautiful alternative. To now turn around and supposedly "make it stronger" by throwing out or mitigating the very source of its strength would be a fatal error.
The author of this piece obviously does not get it. That is to be expected when apparently all too many of us don't get it either.
Exactly how is it the same as being a terrorist if you decide you believe in and want to go fight with a group that the US decides to destroy? That decision by itself might be really stupid and even treasonous but it does not match any definition of terrorism I understand. And the guy did not even carry through with that desire. Also, last time I looked, the Taliban as such were not the terrorist we were looking for. Or do we really agree to let this word be pasted on anything and everything whenever convenient? I think we at least owe ourselves the mental discipline to use words with some real meaning.
Yes, there is such a thing as right or wrong, so you are wrong about that. If you were right then you would still be wrong.
This company qualifies as the biggest and sickest joke of the year. It isn't funny any more. It is utterly disgusting. From here on out anyone who still is working for SCO is an absolute pariah. SCO may end up being more hated than even Micro$oft.
What most people don't account for when considering predictions of X amount of change in N years is whether the pace of change is constant or not. If the pace of change is itself quickening then 50 years at today's rate of change might occur in 10 or 15 years or less depending on the rate at which the pace of change is increasing. Much of the technology we are developing today is highly likely to increase the pace of change. Even tired old Moore's law is downright pokey when some of the highly disruptive new technology in the labs today is taken into account. I expect to see human brain equivalent hardware within 15 years. I am less sure how long it will take to do the software end of building human or >human level AI. What happens after that, when an intelligent entity sets about direct self-improvement of ver own intelligence and abilities and uses those to invent/create/produce at an accelerating rate is anyone's guess. But we sure as hell aren't likely to be in Kansas wondering about where to get a job.
Well, maybe the real question is whether we will even be dependent on "jobs" to have an abudance of everything we need and most things we want. It is amusing to read predictions decades out that assume economics and sociopolitical assumptions will all stay pretty much the same while everything else changes.
If you believe copyrights allow this then that is indeed "krap". There is no code in question that has not been commonly available and open for quite a long time now and extensively used and modified. To say that some ancient proprietary rights over some ancinent original code should now at this late date force Linux to go non-open source and force all Linux users to obtain a license is legally absurd. Morally it is MUCH worse than that.
If this is supported by the courts and SCO "wins" then I become a criminal. Under bad law honest citizens become law-breakers. This is the reality.
NO. Security is not acheived by obscurity in the non-code world anymore than within it. Security is acheived by other means such as redundancy, access controls, surveillance (properly modulated by privacy of course) and so on. This work is extremely valuable in that it shows exactly where we are infrastructure-wise and what is weak or vulnerable and could use shoring up. It also opens up a lot of new innovation opportunities as it exposes existing needs and limitations.
This may be tedious but it is a potential goldmine to a lot more than would-be terrorists.
NOOO. I will not go back to the old stupid non-WSIWYG days so some techie (like but unlike me) doesn't have to go through the trouble to think about what people would actually like to use to get their work done. Techies trying to dictate what is good enough are a disgrace to the profession.
:-)
IMHO of course.
I hope not because the future we all dream about cannot be acheived on a metered internet with vertical service offerings/apps. What is really needed is always available high speed internet everywhere. On this various free and commercial offerings and usages will flourish just as on the wired internet. I can only see the cellular alternative as a stopgap to pay for creating what we really want. I don't see it as reaonable that we should have to pay out the nose indefinitely or that our capabilities should be drastically limited indefinitely because of the earlier now obsolete notion of selling chunks of bandwidth for ultra-high prices.
While it steps outside my generally Libertarian principles to say so, I believe what is needed is indeed a wired and wireless Information Superhighway throughout all nations where it can possibly be accomplished. This is the basic wiring for a global economy, information sharing, communicating mind. It should not be killed dead by nickel and diming in its infancy.
Newsbreak, yes I do. There is such a thing as fair use. Granted Congress, courts haven't ruled but in the absence of clear rulings I have the right to download anything that is out there that I wish. RIAA is suing ahead of real law as I see it. They are also evil and idiotic in that they do not change their business models to fit modern times, needs and expectations rather than insist the world stand still so they do not have to be troubled. This is even more evil because it makes criminals of people attempting to maximally use modern abilities and possibilities for informattion and entertainment storage, transmission, on the fly packaging and so on.
It is a 29 inch monitor and can't manage even 1600x1200? Why on earth is this piece of krap even mentioned here?
What has bothered me about this line of thought is the notion of simulations rather than VRs. I would consider it much more likely that we are living with a computationally created reality than that the more limited version of this, that we are a simulation, is true. I kept hoping that the definition of "simulation" would be made clear. Unfortunately it was fairly implicit that the author expects our descendants to create sims of us to play/work/interact with. But why exactly should they wish to do this? And what happened to our "true selves" anyway?
If I was a compassionate future AI determined to do what I could for human beings despite their proclivity to destroy themselves and one another, I might well pop the lot of them into tailored VRs where they could live out their urges over and over again in a sort of VR mediated reincarnational system, until they were adequately housebroken. Then they might be let out onto the main datasphere.
But I find it far less likely that future descendants would be crass enough to run us as if we were real just for their own amusement without consideration of the ethics involved.
If I buy something that the manufacturer has burdened with various unrequested locks and restraints from actually being used by me, is it a crime if I break said restraints? The law today says that it is. But it is the law that is wrong not the action. Hopefully this case will end with this being affirmed. But whether it ends that way or not the truth of what is and is not reasonbale remains.
I agree. Anyone who would continue to work for SCO at this pont is a moral and intellectual coward.
Even hundreds of thousands of resumes would fit on what, a few 750 MB zip drives? Where exactly is the big problem?
Signing a binary is one thing. Building a kernel that will only run signed binaries and signed by known presumably respectable entities is something else again. The latter does indeed take away freedom to run whatever you wish on your own machine. A signed kernel for purposes of verification that it was what X produced is one thing. Requiring that the kernel/OS be signed by X before the hardware will actually run it is something else again. The latter means that once I mod my kernel, which almost every Linux user with changing hardware/interests eventually does, that the machine will not necessarily run it due to some Palladium like TCI hardware being present. This definitely flies directly in the face of Open Source and Free Software.
I pay for 384k bi-directional. Why is it anyone's business if I run a subnet in my home to tie my cluster together? I am still not getting any more bandwidth, I am simply subdividing the bandwidth among machines. Same argument holds for making the subnet wireless. What exactly is there to object to? What am I supposed to be ripping off?
And when are we going to rise up and tell the greedy, small-minded busy-bodies to take a flying leap? I am beginning to think it isn't even about greed but more about control for the sake of control.