So people who aren't ready for Linux aren't ready to have a computer heh? Why should non linux literate people not have computers, even linux based computers? With an OS this stable it should be possible to cover it well enough they don't need to be linux gurus to do their work. There are a lot of knowledge professionals out there who aren't computer gurus, have no time to be computer gurus but desperately need good office and professional applications NOW. This is a bit more than just an "interent appliance". It doesn't matter whether you want them using a computer or not. They have to if they are going to be competitive in their own fields.
Excuse me but you don't need a lawyer to see that what the industry wants in copy restrictions is grossly unreasonable. It basically does say that I cannot do anything with any commercially avaialable music or video except watch it and single copy it on devices that the music industry approves. These are basically devices that go out of their way to limit your ability to interact with the material in line with industry wishes. This utterly hamstrings the digital revolution and should be opposed quite sharply. Yes, there is a problem of how artists get protected and compensated. But that problem is not resolved by draconian law and legal threats.
What good would getting a lawyer do anyway? You can get as many opinions generally as you have money to pay for different lawyers. Especially in the area of digital copyright and intellectual property.
Well, lets see what a port of Office would really take. Unless you rewrote all the code from scratch you would first have to port all of OLE/COM/DCOM as Office and most MS products are totally dependent on that. Then you would need to port Visual Basic or at least Visual Basic for Applications as this is how extensions and macros are written in Office packages. You would need to support of course the full DLL structure of Windoze to make COM and most applications work. You would need either a registry (bad, bad idea) or a true multi-user version of Active Directory. And, oh yeah, you would need a windowing system or overlay that acted much like MFC.
I've probably left out quite a bit. When you get done with all of that will the result still be Linux? If you don't do most of that will the product be MS Office on Linux? I believe both answers are No. Such a beast would be a real nightmare. Not because it is so good and would steal more market for Microsoft but because it would be hideously ugly and painful but people would try to use it anyway to be "compatible".
It seems to me there is a tension between the desire for more customized services and offerings and privacy concerns. Sites cannot customize to a particular person without tracking information and even web habits. It is not at all clear that it is a boon to my interests to have to reestablish this information with every single site that I visit. We need to find a good middle ground. Perhaps some kind of information packet that I carry with me virtually that has various levels of trust/access to the sites I visit? But even this would not be enough necessarily as sites would need to analyze this information over many customers to tune their offerings.
My point is that there are legitimate and worthwhile reasons for gathering some of this information. It is not a black and white issue. The polarization of the issue as if it were does not help anyone.
I laughed so hard I cried. Three senior researchers spend 1 1/2 years on this idiocy yet. This is too much. Unix folks have been using symbolic links judiciously for an awfully long time and a lot more flexibly than this wierd scheme implies.
Well now, it could simply be that the behemoth is finally recognizing that trying to be top dog in both channel and content and trying to control both is not the fastest way to making good money. Some company or companies is going to get very rich providing high bandwidth 2-way wire to every home in America. It isn't just a matter of corporate understanding and will though, we have a hodgepodge of very outdated regulations that prevent this from really taking off fully. But whoever does wire up the nation for full multi-media speed bidrectionally will become very rich. Trying to only allow your content on the wire would be counter-productive and stand in the way.
There is some truth in the idea that women in computing don't have as much of an ego stake generally in what we do as guys seem to. Or at least that we are less likely to go out of our way to make sure our efforts are noticed. We tend to get ignored in more male pyschology centric organizations and meetings. But that isn't because we are touchy or lack self-presence. It is because we don't come off the same way guys do. Not entirely or principally our problem really.
We take insults and injury personally sometimes regardless of the fact that men tend to sling them around as a form of comraderie. That doesn't mean we take things "too personally".
There are a lot of insults toward women in this industry. We know. We live there. It has nothing to do with being a minority.
Look at basic anthropology of women? Excuse me? Cite studies please. What anthropology are you talking about? Did you mean pyschology maybe? Supported by what evidence? WHat "hard-wiring"? Supported by what studies? Oh, you don't have any? Then take your idiotic sexist drivel to the local bar but don't spew the nonsense here. Do I have to give you a basic who's who of famous women scientists and software engineers and yes, hackers, or do you get the point through your pointy little head? (either one of them will do)
We who would like to do all our work on Linux care. We care very much. We who would like to see a decent alternative to Micro$oft care. I don't need a "hobby". I need a good dependable basis for software systems that isn't polluted beyond recognition with greed and stupidity. Given that system I want to use it everywhere including in the paying world and I want to see it spread.
Who cares if Linux can cut it in the real world of business computing? I care. Don't you?
The community is not relevant particularly to users who simply want a good dependendable OS and working environment. They aren't out for a "community experience" but simply to get their work done in a more efficient and useful way than they do today. To try to impose some community mindset on these people would be to utterly miss the point.
Linux most certainly can fail. It can fail to be a viable alternative that displaces MS on the desktop. It can fail to live up to its current high expectations and start being refused as an alternative in settings that it is at least beginning to be fully acceptable in. That a lot of the traditional community would still use it in those circumstances is irrelevant to whether it failed to live up to its promise in the larger world.
Being a powerful full-featured OS means that necessarily it must be hard to install? Come again? You don't need thousands of options to install for the handful of general configurations that first time users require. When their needs extend they could have tools to add those features to their system again without having to dive down into the guts of the thing. Believe it or not, not everyone likes to play at the lower levels.
Are we reduced to crying poor mouth and begging? The guy in the example who works for $7/hour and codes device drivers in his spare time is a friggin idiot. Those skills can very easilly net a day job for a lot more money, a lot as in nearly an order of magnitude. In case no one noticed there is plenty of interest (including monied interest) in Open Source and Linux and such these days. It shouldn't be too hard to take off the hair shirts and stop subsisting on beans and wearing only hand-me-down threads. Unless, of course, some of us mistakenly think it is our mark of saintliness.
Re:Newbie Documentation?
on
Giving Back
·
· Score: 1
Amen. One of the things I do miss from the MS world is the MSDN help system. Not always great but a lot more integrated, complete and easy to use than your average LDP, man, info etc. offerings. LDP is wonderful to have but I note that many of its articles are extremely dated, some in areas where up-to-date information is really needed.
No. You are paying for a software product you have reasonable expectations to use to your advantage. Use of what you paid for is implied. No contract that is internal to the installation (as most are) and that you are forced to sign to even use what you have already paid for is valid. It is legally extremely questionable to attempt to impose such contracts.
The software companies that use such methdos would like us to believe we are paying for a license but that view is empty of any real meaning.
I don't read/. for general op-ed type pieces. Most of what Jon Katz writes here are of that type, oriented somewhat, sometimes somewhat loosely, around technological subjects. If we are going to do more general op-ed pieces that range over politics and economics and such then that literary space should not be monopolized by a single voice. But I don't believe that is what/. is about or should be about.
I do believe there should be spaces for talking about and opinioning on the implications and ramifications of technology and airing POVs concerning various aspects of the world in detailed pieces of writing. But is this a space for it? I don't think so. It isn't set up for such.
On the christo-geek thing, I have no beef with anyone's religous choices and views. I only have a beef when they assume others should kowtow to their views or that others are simply too damaged or moronic to understand. At one time I was extremely religious and seriously headed for ministry (even considered being a nun though of some non-Christian vintage). Over time I came to the position that religion of all kinds truly is an opiate. It is a drug that is very tempting and difficult to break from. But I am convinced it leads people away from reality, away from genuine involvment in life and the world and substitutes some fake [R]eality instead that is supposed to be oh so vastly superior. Bah humbug. Show me evidence for this other [R]eality or kindly leave the bandwidth to non-chimeras. The christo-geek does the normal insulting religious person thing and assumes those who see things differently have some kind of problem, some psychological scar or flaw that keeps them from seeing the light. Perhaps we simply see more clearly and see the false for false. Perhaps we have been blined by the light and learned to filter it until we could see what is and is not behind it.
Huh? The caffiene story says it causes the dendrites to grow and grow more spines but we do not yet know what this does or doesn't do for long term memory. The sleep deprivation story says that sleep dev turns off parts of your brain and other parts get hyper to try to compensate. But in particular it says it lowers math ability. Last time I checked coding and math ability are pretty strongly correlated. So I would be very surprised if sleep dev improved hacking.
If patenting Linux derivatives is wrong then it is wrong regardless of how cool the party in question may or may not be. It is not a personality issue.
Open Source publication seems more than sufficient proof of prior art which should stop any hostile patent attempt. This is not good news. It is someone claiming the right to decide who gets true Open Source and who doesn't. It is WRONG.
This article ignores that VA Linux is solidly behind Open Source and is built on quite strong principles with no real difference (in principle) from Andover and/. It ignores that unless VA does business differently than a Compaq or a DELL and offers something different and better it will get creamed. It ignores that contractually/. cannot be coerced into puff-pieces for VA or anyone else, as if VA would be stupid enough to want such, especially from a source it owns.
Most of all the article and most of the comments ignore that VA Linux is on the same side as most of us supposedly are. Acting as if it is one step from VA to Redmond is ridiculous and scandalously offensive.
What I object to about the merger is much simpler. I object to $900 million of investor money being diverted from research, development and marketing to acquire Andover when there is no real great value in such an acquisition as Andover and VA are pretty much on the same team in stated principles anyway. Hmmm. Maybe I am missing something. VA must plan to have Andover and/. do something different than what they would do anyway in order to justify that level of investment. Just providing more powerful hosting and room for expansion of/. and reaping tons more goodwill and name recognition and more eyeballs just doesn't seem like $900 million worth of benefit. Does someone out there understand where the beef is in this thing? What makes Andover worth acquiring for $900 million real dollars?
You give corporations too much credit. Spread some to the people who have forgotten what rights really are, the proper role of government and how to stand for true rights and limited government. Before the corporation can practise legalized abuse the state must first have acquired powers which do not legitimately belong to it. Before you can write or support a sane licensing practice you must first understand a bit of ethical and political philsophy. Just blaming "big corporations" without saying much about what makes this stuff possible is useless and mostly reactionary.
Amen. The massive traffic in the last day or two from these attacks drowned my sDSL vendor and flooded the house routers for several hours. The traffic on the net to attack and bring down a Yahoo isn't on some narrow direct pipe to the target but is eating major bandwidth all over the net. This is an ecosystem folks. People who spread poison poison us all.
You admire pure lawless trashing of the net and everyone on it? You admire it for what reason? That you like to see someone's finger in someone else's eye as long as the receiver has money? What a juvenile trip. I am amazed that such a lowbrow fuck-the-establishment post got a rating as high as 5. There is nothing revolutionary about raising hell with no objectives, no agenda, no plan, just raising hell. There is not a damn thing in the slightest admirable about that and if I catch the folks doing it I will do my best to them quite thoroughly punished. This is info-terrorism. And mindless info-terrorism at that.
As a handicapped person myself I don't buy the notion that everyone else in the civilized world has to go out of their way to accomodate my handicap. I think this is largely and excuse for more government intrusion in people's lives and in business especially.
Actually, I think a mailing list backup of online forums like/. would have many of the characteristics we would like NNTP style for. And there is open software for managing mailing list archives that give capabilities at leasts as good as news readers.
Some things should be quite easy to add in. Like the ability to auto-respond to a non-anonymous poster who has that feature turned on. One thing I don't understand about most online web forums is why they are so limited. It would not be that difficult to write one that had a message content pane at the bottom and on top a message list showable in different ways like subject tree, dated list, from list and so on. Yet none of the online forums to the best of my knowledge have done even this much. Without such elementary capabilities there really should be a tie-in to email-NNTP in order to be able to filter, review, search and manage the information.
I am not totally convinced that NNTP is "the way". I think it is time for something new to be born. But I am bit fuzzy on what that is.
Slashdot Mirror
So people who aren't ready for Linux aren't ready to have a computer heh? Why should non linux literate people not have computers, even linux based computers? With an OS this stable it should be possible to cover it well enough they don't need to be linux gurus to do their work. There are a lot of knowledge professionals out there who aren't computer gurus, have no time to be computer gurus but desperately need good office and professional applications NOW. This is a bit more than just an "interent appliance". It doesn't matter whether you want them using a computer or not. They have to if they are going to be competitive in their own fields.
Excuse me but you don't need a lawyer to see that what the industry wants in copy restrictions is grossly unreasonable. It basically does say that I cannot do anything with any commercially avaialable music or video except watch it and single copy it on devices that the music industry approves. These are basically devices that go out of their way to limit your ability to interact with the material in line with industry wishes. This utterly hamstrings the digital revolution and should be opposed quite sharply. Yes, there is a problem of how artists get protected and compensated. But that problem is not resolved by draconian law and legal threats.
What good would getting a lawyer do anyway? You can get as many opinions generally as you have money to pay for different lawyers. Especially in the area of digital copyright and intellectual property.
Well, lets see what a port of Office would really take. Unless you rewrote all the code from scratch you would first have to port all of OLE/COM/DCOM as Office and most MS products are totally dependent on that. Then you would need to port Visual Basic or at least Visual Basic for Applications as this is how extensions and macros are written in Office packages. You would need to support of course the full DLL structure of Windoze to make COM and most applications work. You would need either a registry (bad, bad idea) or a true multi-user version of Active Directory. And, oh yeah, you would need a windowing system or overlay that acted much like MFC.
I've probably left out quite a bit. When you get done with all of that will the result still be Linux? If you don't do most of that will the product be MS Office on Linux? I believe both answers are No. Such a beast would be a real nightmare. Not because it is so good and would steal more market for Microsoft but because it would be hideously ugly and painful but people would try to use it anyway to be "compatible".
It seems to me there is a tension between the desire for more customized services and offerings and privacy concerns. Sites cannot customize to a particular person without tracking information and even web habits. It is not at all clear that it is a boon to my interests to have to reestablish this information with every single site that I visit. We need to find a good middle ground. Perhaps some kind of information packet that I carry with me virtually that has various levels of trust/access to the sites I visit? But even this would not be enough necessarily as sites would need to analyze this information over many customers to tune their offerings.
My point is that there are legitimate and worthwhile reasons for gathering some of this information. It is not a black and white issue. The polarization of the issue as if it were does not help anyone.
I laughed so hard I cried. Three senior researchers spend 1 1/2 years on this idiocy yet. This is too much. Unix folks have been using symbolic links judiciously for an awfully long time and a lot more flexibly than this wierd scheme implies.
Thanks for nothing Bill. Except good yuks.
Well now, it could simply be that the behemoth is finally recognizing that trying to be top dog in both channel and content and trying to control both is not the fastest way to making good money. Some company or companies is going to get very rich providing high bandwidth 2-way wire to every home in America. It isn't just a matter of corporate understanding and will though, we have a hodgepodge of very outdated regulations that prevent this from really taking off fully. But whoever does wire up the nation for full multi-media speed bidrectionally will become very rich. Trying to only allow your content on the wire would be counter-productive and stand in the way.
There is some truth in the idea that women in computing don't have as much of an ego stake generally in what we do as guys seem to. Or at least that we are less likely to go out of our way to make sure our efforts are noticed. We tend to get ignored in more male pyschology centric organizations and meetings. But that isn't because we are touchy or lack self-presence. It is because we don't come off the same way guys do. Not entirely or principally our problem really.
We take insults and injury personally sometimes regardless of the fact that men tend to sling them around as a form of comraderie. That doesn't mean we take things "too personally".
There are a lot of insults toward women in this industry. We know. We live there. It has nothing to do with being a minority.
Look at basic anthropology of women? Excuse me? Cite studies please. What anthropology are you talking about? Did you mean pyschology maybe? Supported by what evidence? WHat "hard-wiring"? Supported by what studies? Oh, you don't have any? Then take your idiotic sexist drivel to the local bar but don't spew the nonsense here. Do I have to give you a basic who's who of famous women scientists and software engineers and yes, hackers, or do you get the point through your pointy little head? (either one of them will do)
We who would like to do all our work on Linux care. We care very much. We who would like to see a decent alternative to Micro$oft care. I don't need a "hobby". I need a good dependable basis for software systems that isn't polluted beyond recognition with greed and stupidity. Given that system I want to use it everywhere including in the paying world and I want to see it spread.
Who cares if Linux can cut it in the real world of business computing? I care. Don't you?
The community is not relevant particularly to users who simply want a good dependendable OS and working environment. They aren't out for a "community experience" but simply to get their work done in a more efficient and useful way than they do today. To try to impose some community mindset on these people would be to utterly miss the point.
Linux most certainly can fail. It can fail to be a viable alternative that displaces MS on the desktop. It can fail to live up to its current high expectations and start being refused as an alternative in settings that it is at least beginning to be fully acceptable in. That a lot of the traditional community would still use it in those circumstances is irrelevant to whether it failed to live up to its promise in the larger world.
Being a powerful full-featured OS means that necessarily it must be hard to install? Come again? You don't need thousands of options to install for the handful of general configurations that first time users require. When their needs extend they could have tools to add those features to their system again without having to dive down into the guts of the thing. Believe it or not, not everyone likes to play at the lower levels.
I agree about shipping Linux preinstalled though.
Are we reduced to crying poor mouth and begging? The guy in the example who works for $7/hour and codes device drivers in his spare time is a friggin idiot. Those skills can very easilly net a day job for a lot more money, a lot as in nearly an order of magnitude. In case no one noticed there is plenty of interest (including monied interest) in Open Source and Linux and such these days. It shouldn't be too hard to take off the hair shirts and stop subsisting on beans and wearing only hand-me-down threads. Unless, of course, some of us mistakenly think it is our mark of saintliness.
Amen. One of the things I do miss from the MS world is the MSDN help system. Not always great but a lot more integrated, complete and easy to use than your average LDP, man, info etc. offerings. LDP is wonderful to have but I note that many of its articles are extremely dated, some in areas where up-to-date information is really needed.
Really. What is the problem with highly encrypting things like credit card information?
No. You are paying for a software product you have reasonable expectations to use to your advantage. Use of what you paid for is implied. No contract that is internal to the installation (as most are) and that you are forced to sign to even use what you have already paid for is valid. It is legally extremely questionable to attempt to impose such contracts.
The software companies that use such methdos would like us to believe we are paying for a license but that view is empty of any real meaning.
I don't read /. for general op-ed type pieces. Most of what Jon Katz writes here are of that type, oriented somewhat, sometimes somewhat loosely, around technological subjects. If we are going to do more general op-ed pieces that range over politics and economics and such then that literary space should not be monopolized by a single voice. But I don't believe that is what /. is about or should be about.
I do believe there should be spaces for talking about and opinioning on the implications and ramifications of technology and airing POVs concerning various aspects of the world in detailed pieces of writing. But is this a space for it? I don't think so. It isn't set up for such.
On the christo-geek thing, I have no beef with anyone's religous choices and views. I only have a beef when they assume others should kowtow to their views or that others are simply too damaged or moronic to understand. At one time I was extremely religious and seriously headed for ministry (even considered being a nun though of some non-Christian vintage). Over time I came to the position that religion of all kinds truly is an opiate. It is a drug that is very tempting and difficult to break from. But I am convinced it leads people away from reality, away from genuine involvment in life and the world and substitutes some fake [R]eality instead that is supposed to be oh so vastly superior. Bah humbug. Show me evidence for this other [R]eality or kindly leave the bandwidth to non-chimeras. The christo-geek does the normal insulting religious person thing and assumes those who see things differently have some kind of problem, some psychological scar or flaw that keeps them from seeing the light. Perhaps we simply see more clearly and see the false for false. Perhaps we have been blined by the light and learned to filter it until we could see what is and is not behind it.
Sorry for rambling on.
Huh? The caffiene story says it causes the dendrites to grow and grow more spines but we do not yet know what this does or doesn't do for long term memory. The sleep deprivation story says that sleep dev turns off parts of your brain and other parts get hyper to try to compensate. But in particular it says it lowers math ability. Last time I checked coding and math ability are pretty strongly correlated. So I would be very surprised if sleep dev improved hacking.
If patenting Linux derivatives is wrong then it is wrong regardless of how cool the party in question may or may not be. It is not a personality issue.
Open Source publication seems more than sufficient proof of prior art which should stop any hostile patent attempt. This is not good news. It is someone claiming the right to decide who gets true Open Source and who doesn't. It is WRONG.
This article ignores that VA Linux is solidly behind Open Source and is built on quite strong principles with no real difference (in principle) from Andover and /. It ignores that unless VA does business differently than a Compaq or a DELL and offers something different and better it will get creamed. It ignores that contractually /. cannot be coerced into puff-pieces for VA or anyone else, as if VA would be stupid enough to want such, especially from a source it owns.
/. do something different than what they would do anyway in order to justify that level of investment. Just providing more powerful hosting and room for expansion of /. and reaping tons more goodwill and name recognition and more eyeballs just doesn't seem like $900 million worth of benefit. Does someone out there understand where the beef is in this thing? What makes Andover worth acquiring for $900 million real dollars?
Most of all the article and most of the comments ignore that VA Linux is on the same side as most of us supposedly are. Acting as if it is one step from VA to Redmond is ridiculous and scandalously offensive.
What I object to about the merger is much simpler. I object to $900 million of investor money being diverted from research, development and marketing to acquire Andover when there is no real great value in such an acquisition as Andover and VA are pretty much on the same team in stated principles anyway. Hmmm. Maybe I am missing something. VA must plan to have Andover and
You give corporations too much credit. Spread some to the people who have forgotten what rights really are, the proper role of government and how to stand for true rights and limited government. Before the corporation can practise legalized abuse the state must first have acquired powers which do not legitimately belong to it. Before you can write or support a sane licensing practice you must first understand a bit of ethical and political philsophy. Just blaming "big corporations" without saying much about what makes this stuff possible is useless and mostly reactionary.
Amen. The massive traffic in the last day or two from these attacks drowned my sDSL vendor and flooded the house routers for several hours. The traffic on the net to attack and bring down a Yahoo isn't on some narrow direct pipe to the target but is eating major bandwidth all over the net. This is an ecosystem folks. People who spread poison poison us all.
You admire pure lawless trashing of the net and everyone on it? You admire it for what reason? That you like to see someone's finger in someone else's eye as long as the receiver has money? What a juvenile trip. I am amazed that such a lowbrow fuck-the-establishment post got a rating as high as 5. There is nothing revolutionary about raising hell with no objectives, no agenda, no plan, just raising hell. There is not a damn thing in the slightest admirable about that and if I catch the folks doing it I will do my best to them quite thoroughly punished. This is info-terrorism. And mindless info-terrorism at that.
As a handicapped person myself I don't buy the notion that everyone else in the civilized world has to go out of their way to accomodate my handicap. I think this is largely and excuse for more government intrusion in people's lives and in business especially.
Actually, I think a mailing list backup of online forums like /. would have many of the characteristics we would like NNTP style for. And there is open software for managing mailing list archives that give capabilities at leasts as good as news readers.
Some things should be quite easy to add in. Like the ability to auto-respond to a non-anonymous poster who has that feature turned on. One thing I don't understand about most online web forums is why they are so limited. It would not be that difficult to write one that had a message content pane at the bottom and on top a message list showable in different ways like subject tree, dated list, from list and so on. Yet none of the online forums to the best of my knowledge have done even this much. Without such elementary capabilities there really should be a tie-in to email-NNTP in order to be able to filter, review, search and manage the information.
I am not totally convinced that NNTP is "the way". I think it is time for something new to be born. But I am bit fuzzy on what that is.