Pirates, as we all know, are people who forcibly hijack vessels at sea, usually stealing their cargo and occasionally killing the previous crew. This activity must not be allowed to continue. Far too many innocent sailors have been killed in recent years. Pirates using advanced compootanator technology have dramatically enhanced their communication networks. These pirates must be stopped! It's long past time to end terror on the high seas. Ping-flood or smurf your local pirate operation at every opportunity. Furthermore, I believe Slashdot should, as a public service, create a pool of DDoS volunteers and assign them to known pirate groups a la distributed.net. This is an opportunity to do good; don't be left out!
Oh. You meant people who violate copyrights, not pirates. That's quite different. Carry on, then, with the flame fest.
One of my professors encouraged his students to work together on any project as much or as little as they liked. It was perfectly acceptable for the entire class to turn in the exact same code. There was a catch, however - you had to give credit for anyone else's code or ideas that you used. The grading policy was that you would receive credit for the part of the work you did. So you could easily use a few ideas from other people, and give them a few as well, and earn a high grade. If you failed to give credit, you received an F in the course.
There were also separate team projects, which seems like a pretty realistic scenario - most times, you'll be given a small part of a project and told to just go do it. Later you'll integrate it with others' parts, but for the most part they're independent if well-designed enough. You can get ideas and help from others but you can't rely on coworkers to do all your work for you. Pretty close on parallel in my experience. Maybe the real problem is the "academic honesty" policy. Code sharing is not necessarily cheating.
Well, as for some nefarious agenda, I can't really say that I believe the entire government has one. The global corporations, yes, and thus also Congress to the extent that it has been sold. Also a few select institutionally paranoid parts, such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA. I would claim that, to whatever extent the government does have a nefarious agenda, it is probably due to the wishes and actions of less than 1000 people. Nevertheless, those 1000 people are some of the wealthiest and most powerful in all the world. Whatever agenda they may or may not have, they surely have to power to make it happen.
Now, as for whether this is actually happening, the record is clear. Nefarious agenda or no, the governments of this and many other supposedly free countries have expanded dramatically in scope, power, expenditures, and scale, beginning shortly after the most recent government was put in place. Whether this is indeed due to the nefarious agenda of the powerful elite or it is simply the nature of government to grow in power until it is overthrown, I lack the wisdom to say. But there's no doubt that there *is* a Big Brother and it should be feared and restricted to the greatest extent possible.
I'm sure you're joking. Otherwise everyone would simply claim to practice whatever religion receives the most points. Not to mention the blatant unconstitutionality of it. And the useless nature of the information. And so on.
I'm not sure what an equitable peace between Palestinians and Israelis would be. As long as they hate one another so strongly they will never be able to coexist. That means that land must be divided, not shared. And how do you divide land among people who can all make legitimate claims to it? The best thing the US can do in that age-old conflict is to get out. Support neither side. Offer to act as a neutral broker of peace only at the request of both parties. But it's long past time to stop supporting Israel. I really can't believe that the Jewish political base in the US is so powerful that this obvious and sane course of action is deemed impossible by every major politician in the country. This simple act would make a lot of people around the world a lot more comfortable with the US and go a long way toward calming the justifiable beliefs of parts of the Muslim world that the US is an instigator of "Zionist oppression of Islam."
Minimalist foreign policy. Not isolationism, noninterventionism. We can engage in diplomacy without taking sides. Why not try it?
The 10-year-long campaign of bombing in the North doesn't count? I seem to remember that something like 10 times as many bombs were dropped on North Vietnam as were dropped in all of WW2. The problems in Vietnam went way beyond an unwillingness to send US ground troops to the North. The war was fought improperly by politicians instead of military leaders, the few occasions when military leaders were allowed to operate freely they fucked up, and the overall premise of the war was murky and ill-defined.
Whom shall we nuke, exactly? Convince me that nuking {persons X, Y, Z,...} will solve anything. Go ahead, I'm listening. Maybe it *is* the right solution; the burden is on you to justify it.
I would really like to think that some of the so-called "leaders" have an awareness of what went wrong in Vietnam. But I think I have a different idea of exactly what that was. Straight-up, you can't win a war against people who already have nothing.
The NVA fought with rifles. The farmers and villagers had antiquated handguns and knives. The VC had a few grenades and bombs. The few large factories and power plants and other traditional targets of war were always located in or near civilian centers, which, for political reasons, were deemed off-limits. So for 10 years the US bombed the hell out of bamboo bridges, huts, and broken-down trucks. It had no effect because the Vietnamese are resourceful, clever people and were determined to win. They were the ultimate distributed network - take out one part, and another will step up to replace it while a small crew repairs the damaged area.
Contrast this with the US - large, highly visible targets of obvious importance. Choke points and centers of strength. With a few million dollars' worth of bombs you could easily lower Americans' standard of living by half. The US is well-equipped to fight a war against a similar enemy - like the Soviet Union of yesteryear. It is ill-equipped and inexperienced to fight a lengthy guerilla war, on foreign soil, against people who are at once civilian and military, against people with radically different values and standards than our own. The Geneva convention is likewise unable to cope with this reality - killing civilians is illegal, but who qualifies for this protection? If a man shoots at enemy aircraft from his home while his unarmed wife and children are present, how can the pilot justify shooting back? How can the pilot justify *not* shooting back?
This, I believe, was the fundamental question during Vietnam. And as we're thankfully starting to see, it will be the fundamental question in Afghanistan and wherever else the US may elect to demonstrate its might. In guerilla and terrorist warfare it is difficult or impossible to distinghuish innocents from combatants. Even the Israelis, who have dealt with this problem for many years, have never found a solution that permits both humanity and security. The US, in 10 years in Vietnam, never did either.
But philosophical discussions aside, if I honestly believed that dropping bombs on Afghanistan until 6,333 people died would cure forever the prospect of terrorist attacks, I would suck it up, pray a lot, and give my government the green light. It wouldn't be right, but at least it would be equitable and most importantly effective.
Of course, killing people, even killing the right people (and there's no real way to be sure who are the right people), has yet to solve anything. Executing the Nazi war criminals did nothing to prevent the atrocities committed by Pol Pot, Stalin, and others. Killing a few VC guerillas did nothing to prevent the fall of Saigon. And killing every Afghani in all the world, and parading bin Laden's head on a platter, will not assure Americans or anyone else of their security.
And that, my friends and countrymen, is why going to war over this is pointless. War is a great evil, a last desperate measure when there is simply no alternative. If a nation is to make the decision to go to war, then there must be a clearly-defined objective, and the actions of war must be suitable for reaching it. This situation, like Vietnam, fails both tests. The government has never made clear any specific objective for action against Afghanistan - to get bin Laden? (We won't present any evidence against him, so what right do we have to demand his extradition?) - to punish the Taliban for being naughty? - to simply exhaust some grief and rage against some people unloved by many and mostly unable to retaliate? In no case has anyone actually pretended that even a 100% successful war against Afghanistan would prevent terrorism, but then one would really have to wonder why do it at all. In any case, even if we were to settle on one of these objectives, there is no clear evidence that even a successful war would achieve any of them. It's difficult enough to support killing when it's truly deserved. Witness the debates over capital punishment. It's even difficult, though perhaps less so, to support killing when it's truly necessary. But senseless killing to achieve no defined goals, with no clear purpose, of people who cannot be clearly identified as "enemies" is entirely unacceptable in a civilized society. And we are one, right? Right?
Not caring about quality because your company doesn't is a most excellent way to hate your work and lose your spark utterly. Don't do it. The paycheck isn't worth what that will do to you if you take such advise. I know what I am talking about.
I don't doubt it at all. But in a choice between destroying my love for my profession - or even my life - and being out of work for a year or more in the midst of what will eventually be known as The Greater Depression, well, I'll find a different career when somebody's hiring again. For now I'll concentrate on keeping food on the table and having the heat on for at least an hour or two a day if possible. If it means I hate computers and people and my company, so what? I don't have the bankroll needed to speak my mind.
Yep. In this economy you should be thankful to be working at all. Most companies suck. They don't care about quality and many of them are so short-sighted they won't survive another year. Your goal should be to remain working, even for a shitty deadpool-bound company, long enough to see the recovery. Then, and only then, should you make a move. You have to be in it to win it, and right now taking a stand on quality, or anything else, will simply knock you out. If the company doesn't care about quality, neither should you. I've never seen a better time to be a yes-man.
While not strictly a computer book, The Mythical Man Month is essential reading for anyone interested in software or engineering in general. No library is complete without it.
Exactly. The new logo means it's probably a piece of crap. If it has the new logo but isn't a piece of crap, you'll know because it takes up your entire machine room.
Actually, I think you managed to be +5 insightful without even noticing it. Your comment that "the culture expects the software to be [F]ree" was spot-on. As in, even if this software were available to me in $FAVOURITE_OS under the same terms as the DOS version, I wouldn't likely use it. I'd guess a lot of others feel the same way. The inclination is to produce our own software, using our own development practices and our own licenses.
There's an even deeper conclusion to be reached here - instead of putting together a costly porting effort, they could do something that makes everyone happy - publish the programmer's manual to the device. DOS users get their software - subject to approval by their OS vendor - and everyone else gets to write their own, including the necessary low-level code. Who loses? In a commodity market, nobody. Digital camera interfaces are hardly revolutionary - the improvements are all inside the box - so a competitor would not likely find the documentation valuable. In short, there is a solution to this project that places the cost of development right where it belongs - on the users.
Of course, in that scenario, people who use Microsoft-unapproved operating systems will end up winning, because they will have freedom to choose which of the 71 apps they downloaded and built they will use at any given time. Meanwhile, the Microsofties will be using whatever they're told to use. Which is just the way they like it.
*sigh* So I use a little excess profanity. It probably wasn't necessary. So your parody of my style is appreciated for what it is.
What is *not* appreciated is the idea that I was advocating the GPL, or any particular license or competing product. In fact, I never once mentioned anything like that. Do not assume that because I post to/. I must favour any certain model of software licensing. In fact, if you must know, my preferred alternative to Microsoft is nothing. I don't believe most people need computers at all, much less the giant bloated applications so many people try to use. It would be fine with me if the entire consumer computing market went away. Microsoft is really just a symptom, an elegant cautionary example of what large numbers of stupid people can do.
Flame all you like, but I *am* this IS department at my company. I provide infrastructure support, and Unix desktop support. Because I'm so good at what I do, and Unix is so much more powerful than Windows, it's well known that people who use Unix desktops receive much better support than those who use Microsoft ones. Because I sabotage the infrastructure to be Microsoft-unfriendly? No. Because Microsoft has done that to themselves. The infrastructure must be reliable and reproducible. Only Unix offers that. Since the marginal cost of maintaining Unix desktops in the presence of Unix infrastructure is so low, the Unix users receive better service at no additional cost. In short, I use the tools that allow me to best serve my customers, and they do seem to appreciate it.
I'm sorry if you work for a fascist company that doesn't understand things like "cost" and "quality" but some of us are a little more fortunate. I provide excellent service, and my customers are happy. And I do it without Microsoft products. Amazing how that works.
I'm beyond trying to understand how this is relevant. Everyone already *knows* Microsoft does these things, and most people already believe that it's evil. And as long as you continue to buy their products, Microsoft will continue these practices.
Fucking put up or shut up, folks. Don't like Microsoft's evil business practices? Then it's so simple: don't buy their products. So much righteous indignation, and yet so little sense... It's hard to argue with Mr. Gates when he says his customers like his products...after all, you keep buying them, don't you?
You apparently have never tried to boot VMS off of a SCSI drive over 1.2GB on a VAX. Or for that matter any drive larger than 2GB on a 68K Mac. The machines will puke.
*shrug* Just proof that anybody stupid enough can always fuck up a good thing. I could probably fuck up $bootloader so that it won't boot from any disk. Does that mean the bus is broken?
Also for that sparcstation make sure you have that 180GB drive well cooled. There is nothing quite like spending $2000 on a drive including controller card and having it fail in six months.
Why would I need a new controller? There's one built in. Granted, it won't give me much performance, but the point I was making is that it will work, unlike plugging your miracle 150 gig IDE crap-o-rama into a 4-year-old controller. In any case, cooling isn't a problem if you attach the disks externally in a proper enclosure. Which in fact virtually all real computers also support out of the box, and something most IDE controllers still don't. Probably because the 2-device per channel limitation makes external attachment fairly pointless given the cost of reasonable quality cables.
The moment I can justify spending over five times per GB for something inherently less reliable and not appreciably faster I'll talk to you.
I wasn't claiming that buying a 180GB disk was necessarily the right solution. Like any first-generation disk it's bound to be slow and less reliable. I was instead indicating that SCSI is infinitely more extensible and flexible than IDE, without having a new hackjob "standard" every six months. Personally I would be more likely to use 16 18GB disks in a 0+1. Similar capacity, much faster, and much more reliable for not much more money. But hey, the fact is that I have a choice and either will work if I do it right.
I don't know about you but I know four 7.2k 75GB IDE doing RAID 0 (striping if you didn't know) are always going to be faster than one 180GB Ultra160 even in an Adaptec 29160 in a 64 bit PCI slot.
Hmm, RAID 0 with consumer-grade disks. Fucking brilliant. Can I hire you to run my production database servers? By the way, downtime is 300 large an hour. And if the outage is due to your choice of inadequate equipment that deviates substantially from accepted industry best practices, you *will* pay it out of your own pocket.
Oh wait a minute there are no consumer grade PCs with 64 bit PCI slots.
Nobody who actually needs a computer uses peecees anyway. And peeceei is hardly the only bus in the world. Get over yourself; the peecee is dead because the technology is grossly inferior and was misdesigned (if designed at all) from day one. I really get a kick out of all you people who jabber on about how great "commodity" hardware is and how cost-effective it is to stick it to the makers of Real Computers by buying cheap peecees and using them in ways they were never intended. You people are complete idiots; if you have a job in IT my hat is off to your boss; he or she must be the biggest fuckwit the world has ever seen. Repeat after me: peecee hardware is fundamentally and entirely inferior to Real Computer equipment and is unsuitable for all but the least important of tasks (personally, I wouldn't even use a peecee for games - even relaxation is too important to let a flaky CPU or cosmic-ray-ified DIMM interrupt it). It is not cost-effective. It is not "power to the people." It is a bunch of shit that costs more than it should and doesn't deliver even the minimal results it promises. Get with the fucking program. How can a person be as stupid as you? I'm seriously baffled as to how you survived childhood.
The entire history of this interface consists of hack after hack after hack to get around this or that "barrier." First it was 540MB, then it was 8GB (with 2GB thrown in for people using crappy OSs), then 30-something, and now 147. But I can put a state of the art 180GB SCSI disk in a 14 year old sparcstation 1 and it will work just fine - all the disk will be addressable (and even bootable!) with no third-party drivers, no upgrades, no special cables, just the standard equipment and software that's been in use from day one.
There have been a lot of improvements to ATA since it first appeared. But when I see so many changes and improvements year after year just to approach the same level of performance (and not really even try for the same flexibility) as SCSI has had since day 1, I can only conclude that ATA was, and presumably still is, misdesigned from the start. That's why I don't use it, and why you shouldn't either. Use SCSI, or 1394, or FC, or one of the hot new technologies that you can't buy yet. It's long past time for ATA to die. They blew it from the start and have never really recovered.
Of course, in that regard, ATA and the peecee are a match made in hell. Neither one has ever let the cost of competent design work raise the price by even 1 dollar. You might say you get what you pay for, but if you're buying this stuff you must be paying for rape.
The important thing to note here is none of these OS belong to the relevant market.
If the courts are free to define markets however they like, could they not simply define the market as "Microsoft operating systems?" In fact, it seems that for all practical purposes this is what they've done. Under that definition it would be very difficult indeed not to conclude that Microsoft holds a monopoly.
That's what made today's victory a hollow one for Microsoft.
What makes their "victory" a hollow one is that despite their best efforts, they haven't succeeded in forcing a single person to use any of their products. The trial is a mere nuisance; a way to make the citizenry believe the government is looking after their interests. The battle in the marketplace is the relevant one, and that's where Microsoft is suffering the greatest setbacks. Say what you like about their evil business practices, but short of government intervention nobody will ever be forced to buy or use their products. I don't, you shouldn't, and nobody has to. The trial is a farce and the case should be dismissed. I look forward to seeing the Supreme Court so order.
There are no limits on who can be wrong. So a mere 8 people exercised poor judgment. I can cite numerous examples from history in which far greater numbers of people have erred, including a great many who certainly should have known better.
As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. And last I checked, fora such as this were intended to be used precisely for the expression of opinions. I'm truly sorry if it seems today like Slashdot is for First Posts and BSD trolls and raising goatse.cx's Google ranking. But last I checked the purpose of Slashdot was open discussion, and certainly not blindly faithful adherence to and confidence in the latest edict of a small number of men and women appointed to their posts for life with the express purpose of keeping them out of touch with reality.
In any case, good Sir, I am intrigued by your offer of employment in a judicial capacity. Praythee we meet soonest to discuss this mutually beneficial appointment. If I may be so bold, I dare say you will not be disappointed by my sagacious dispensation of justice.
You must have not been alive when DOS was the only operating systerm.
Was that before or after V7 Unix, System V, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Multics, os/360, CP/M, VMS, SunOS, IRIX, and Linux? A quick check indicates that those products' lifespans include the entire duration of modern computing's existence...in fact the union of their lifetimes wholly contains that of DOS. So, no, kind Sir, I was never alive during such a time as you describe; indeed, I do fear your search for such a person will be confounded by his paradoxical nature.
...your 6 pc mini-network
Not one of the 6 boxes is a peecee. And of greater interest is the fact that disproving something requires only a single counterexample. Which I provided. If you prefer larger-scale counterexamples, I offer the following: dgux, dynix, solaris, sunos, aix, xenix, macos, lunix, mvs, vms, os2, plan9, inferno, riscos, ultrix, nextstep, netware, unixware, openbsd, netbsd, freebsd, linux, hurd, tru64/digital unix, irix, unicos, amoeba, and os/400, to name merely a few of the more popular products which compete or have competed with Microsoft in the OS market. Since one might assume that an educated person is already familiar with those, I felt a direct example from my personal experience might be an appropriate mechanism for disproving the assertion that Microsoft holds an OS monopoly. Please forgive my overestimation of your knowledge.
You're confusing monopoly with monopolistic competition. In order to be a true monopoly no other competition can exist. The distinction is that Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft software but not on software. In such a situation they will receive monopoly profits on their own products, but their customers always have the opportunity to find alternatives. Their monopoly power only extends to customers who refuse to consider other sources. This goes to "excessive market power" but does not by itself constitute a monopoly.
It is so obvious that MS is a monopoly it's not worth discussing.
Really? In what market does Microsoft hold a monopoly? Operating systems? Browsers? Evil? Hardly. If someone is a monopoly that means that it has no competitors in the market in question; that is, if you have a product belonging to that market, you must have obtained it from the monopoly. That is the economic definition of a monopoly; it is not disputable.
Given the definition, does Microsoft hold a monopoly in any market? No. To disprove this, I need only examine my network. Not only aren't all of my [operating systems|browsers|other software] Microsoft products, none of them are. That's right, not one. So somehow I've managed to build an entire mini-network (6 machines) without a single product from a company that holds a monopoly over the markets in which I would need to buy products to build it. Friends, we have a conundrum here. Either my network doesn't really exist (it certainly seems to; I'm using it to post this) or Microsoft does not in fact hold a monopoly in these markets. To resolve the paradox, we can only conclude that Microsoft does not in fact hold a monopoly over any relevant market.
The proof is simple and direct. The conclusion is the only one possible. Microsoft holds no monopoly in any market. I make no attempt to resolve whether it may have excessive market power as defined by law. That is an entirely different and much more nebulous matter. As for a monopoly on evil, I can't really argue for that either - there's no shortage of competitors - Rambus, Gracenote, Oracle, Sun, the US Government, the EU governments, the Chinese government, Al Gore, and that Krusty the Klown doll to name but a few. Unfortunately being evil is not illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. You meant people who violate copyrights, not pirates. That's quite different. Carry on, then, with the flame fest.
There were also separate team projects, which seems like a pretty realistic scenario - most times, you'll be given a small part of a project and told to just go do it. Later you'll integrate it with others' parts, but for the most part they're independent if well-designed enough. You can get ideas and help from others but you can't rely on coworkers to do all your work for you. Pretty close on parallel in my experience. Maybe the real problem is the "academic honesty" policy. Code sharing is not necessarily cheating.
Now, as for whether this is actually happening, the record is clear. Nefarious agenda or no, the governments of this and many other supposedly free countries have expanded dramatically in scope, power, expenditures, and scale, beginning shortly after the most recent government was put in place. Whether this is indeed due to the nefarious agenda of the powerful elite or it is simply the nature of government to grow in power until it is overthrown, I lack the wisdom to say. But there's no doubt that there *is* a Big Brother and it should be feared and restricted to the greatest extent possible.
I'm sure you're joking. Otherwise everyone would simply claim to practice whatever religion receives the most points. Not to mention the blatant unconstitutionality of it. And the useless nature of the information. And so on.
Minimalist foreign policy. Not isolationism, noninterventionism. We can engage in diplomacy without taking sides. Why not try it?
The 10-year-long campaign of bombing in the North doesn't count? I seem to remember that something like 10 times as many bombs were dropped on North Vietnam as were dropped in all of WW2. The problems in Vietnam went way beyond an unwillingness to send US ground troops to the North. The war was fought improperly by politicians instead of military leaders, the few occasions when military leaders were allowed to operate freely they fucked up, and the overall premise of the war was murky and ill-defined.
Whom shall we nuke, exactly? Convince me that nuking {persons X, Y, Z, ...} will solve anything. Go ahead, I'm listening. Maybe it *is* the right solution; the burden is on you to justify it.
The NVA fought with rifles. The farmers and villagers had antiquated handguns and knives. The VC had a few grenades and bombs. The few large factories and power plants and other traditional targets of war were always located in or near civilian centers, which, for political reasons, were deemed off-limits. So for 10 years the US bombed the hell out of bamboo bridges, huts, and broken-down trucks. It had no effect because the Vietnamese are resourceful, clever people and were determined to win. They were the ultimate distributed network - take out one part, and another will step up to replace it while a small crew repairs the damaged area.
Contrast this with the US - large, highly visible targets of obvious importance. Choke points and centers of strength. With a few million dollars' worth of bombs you could easily lower Americans' standard of living by half. The US is well-equipped to fight a war against a similar enemy - like the Soviet Union of yesteryear. It is ill-equipped and inexperienced to fight a lengthy guerilla war, on foreign soil, against people who are at once civilian and military, against people with radically different values and standards than our own. The Geneva convention is likewise unable to cope with this reality - killing civilians is illegal, but who qualifies for this protection? If a man shoots at enemy aircraft from his home while his unarmed wife and children are present, how can the pilot justify shooting back? How can the pilot justify *not* shooting back?
This, I believe, was the fundamental question during Vietnam. And as we're thankfully starting to see, it will be the fundamental question in Afghanistan and wherever else the US may elect to demonstrate its might. In guerilla and terrorist warfare it is difficult or impossible to distinghuish innocents from combatants. Even the Israelis, who have dealt with this problem for many years, have never found a solution that permits both humanity and security. The US, in 10 years in Vietnam, never did either.
But philosophical discussions aside, if I honestly believed that dropping bombs on Afghanistan until 6,333 people died would cure forever the prospect of terrorist attacks, I would suck it up, pray a lot, and give my government the green light. It wouldn't be right, but at least it would be equitable and most importantly effective.
Of course, killing people, even killing the right people (and there's no real way to be sure who are the right people), has yet to solve anything. Executing the Nazi war criminals did nothing to prevent the atrocities committed by Pol Pot, Stalin, and others. Killing a few VC guerillas did nothing to prevent the fall of Saigon. And killing every Afghani in all the world, and parading bin Laden's head on a platter, will not assure Americans or anyone else of their security.
And that, my friends and countrymen, is why going to war over this is pointless. War is a great evil, a last desperate measure when there is simply no alternative. If a nation is to make the decision to go to war, then there must be a clearly-defined objective, and the actions of war must be suitable for reaching it. This situation, like Vietnam, fails both tests. The government has never made clear any specific objective for action against Afghanistan - to get bin Laden? (We won't present any evidence against him, so what right do we have to demand his extradition?) - to punish the Taliban for being naughty? - to simply exhaust some grief and rage against some people unloved by many and mostly unable to retaliate? In no case has anyone actually pretended that even a 100% successful war against Afghanistan would prevent terrorism, but then one would really have to wonder why do it at all. In any case, even if we were to settle on one of these objectives, there is no clear evidence that even a successful war would achieve any of them. It's difficult enough to support killing when it's truly deserved. Witness the debates over capital punishment. It's even difficult, though perhaps less so, to support killing when it's truly necessary. But senseless killing to achieve no defined goals, with no clear purpose, of people who cannot be clearly identified as "enemies" is entirely unacceptable in a civilized society. And we are one, right? Right?
Thank God you express this so poorly. Too bad so many others will express it much better, and win. Oh well, there's always Brazil.
I don't doubt it at all. But in a choice between destroying my love for my profession - or even my life - and being out of work for a year or more in the midst of what will eventually be known as The Greater Depression, well, I'll find a different career when somebody's hiring again. For now I'll concentrate on keeping food on the table and having the heat on for at least an hour or two a day if possible. If it means I hate computers and people and my company, so what? I don't have the bankroll needed to speak my mind.
Yep. In this economy you should be thankful to be working at all. Most companies suck. They don't care about quality and many of them are so short-sighted they won't survive another year. Your goal should be to remain working, even for a shitty deadpool-bound company, long enough to see the recovery. Then, and only then, should you make a move. You have to be in it to win it, and right now taking a stand on quality, or anything else, will simply knock you out. If the company doesn't care about quality, neither should you. I've never seen a better time to be a yes-man.
While not strictly a computer book, The Mythical Man Month is essential reading for anyone interested in software or engineering in general. No library is complete without it.
Exactly. The new logo means it's probably a piece of crap. If it has the new logo but isn't a piece of crap, you'll know because it takes up your entire machine room.
There's an even deeper conclusion to be reached here - instead of putting together a costly porting effort, they could do something that makes everyone happy - publish the programmer's manual to the device. DOS users get their software - subject to approval by their OS vendor - and everyone else gets to write their own, including the necessary low-level code. Who loses? In a commodity market, nobody. Digital camera interfaces are hardly revolutionary - the improvements are all inside the box - so a competitor would not likely find the documentation valuable. In short, there is a solution to this project that places the cost of development right where it belongs - on the users.
Of course, in that scenario, people who use Microsoft-unapproved operating systems will end up winning, because they will have freedom to choose which of the 71 apps they downloaded and built they will use at any given time. Meanwhile, the Microsofties will be using whatever they're told to use. Which is just the way they like it.
What is *not* appreciated is the idea that I was advocating the GPL, or any particular license or competing product. In fact, I never once mentioned anything like that. Do not assume that because I post to /. I must favour any certain model of software licensing. In fact, if you must know, my preferred alternative to Microsoft is nothing. I don't believe most people need computers at all, much less the giant bloated applications so many people try to use. It would be fine with me if the entire consumer computing market went away. Microsoft is really just a symptom, an elegant cautionary example of what large numbers of stupid people can do.
I'm sorry if you work for a fascist company that doesn't understand things like "cost" and "quality" but some of us are a little more fortunate. I provide excellent service, and my customers are happy. And I do it without Microsoft products. Amazing how that works.
Fucking put up or shut up, folks. Don't like Microsoft's evil business practices? Then it's so simple: don't buy their products. So much righteous indignation, and yet so little sense... It's hard to argue with Mr. Gates when he says his customers like his products...after all, you keep buying them, don't you?
*shrug* Just proof that anybody stupid enough can always fuck up a good thing. I could probably fuck up $bootloader so that it won't boot from any disk. Does that mean the bus is broken?
Also for that sparcstation make sure you have that 180GB drive well cooled. There is nothing quite like spending $2000 on a drive including controller card and having it fail in six months.
Why would I need a new controller? There's one built in. Granted, it won't give me much performance, but the point I was making is that it will work, unlike plugging your miracle 150 gig IDE crap-o-rama into a 4-year-old controller. In any case, cooling isn't a problem if you attach the disks externally in a proper enclosure. Which in fact virtually all real computers also support out of the box, and something most IDE controllers still don't. Probably because the 2-device per channel limitation makes external attachment fairly pointless given the cost of reasonable quality cables.
The moment I can justify spending over five times per GB for something inherently less reliable and not appreciably faster I'll talk to you.
I wasn't claiming that buying a 180GB disk was necessarily the right solution. Like any first-generation disk it's bound to be slow and less reliable. I was instead indicating that SCSI is infinitely more extensible and flexible than IDE, without having a new hackjob "standard" every six months. Personally I would be more likely to use 16 18GB disks in a 0+1. Similar capacity, much faster, and much more reliable for not much more money. But hey, the fact is that I have a choice and either will work if I do it right.
I don't know about you but I know four 7.2k 75GB IDE doing RAID 0 (striping if you didn't know) are always going to be faster than one 180GB Ultra160 even in an Adaptec 29160 in a 64 bit PCI slot.
Hmm, RAID 0 with consumer-grade disks. Fucking brilliant. Can I hire you to run my production database servers? By the way, downtime is 300 large an hour. And if the outage is due to your choice of inadequate equipment that deviates substantially from accepted industry best practices, you *will* pay it out of your own pocket.
Oh wait a minute there are no consumer grade PCs with 64 bit PCI slots.
Nobody who actually needs a computer uses peecees anyway. And peeceei is hardly the only bus in the world. Get over yourself; the peecee is dead because the technology is grossly inferior and was misdesigned (if designed at all) from day one. I really get a kick out of all you people who jabber on about how great "commodity" hardware is and how cost-effective it is to stick it to the makers of Real Computers by buying cheap peecees and using them in ways they were never intended. You people are complete idiots; if you have a job in IT my hat is off to your boss; he or she must be the biggest fuckwit the world has ever seen. Repeat after me: peecee hardware is fundamentally and entirely inferior to Real Computer equipment and is unsuitable for all but the least important of tasks (personally, I wouldn't even use a peecee for games - even relaxation is too important to let a flaky CPU or cosmic-ray-ified DIMM interrupt it). It is not cost-effective. It is not "power to the people." It is a bunch of shit that costs more than it should and doesn't deliver even the minimal results it promises. Get with the fucking program. How can a person be as stupid as you? I'm seriously baffled as to how you survived childhood.
There have been a lot of improvements to ATA since it first appeared. But when I see so many changes and improvements year after year just to approach the same level of performance (and not really even try for the same flexibility) as SCSI has had since day 1, I can only conclude that ATA was, and presumably still is, misdesigned from the start. That's why I don't use it, and why you shouldn't either. Use SCSI, or 1394, or FC, or one of the hot new technologies that you can't buy yet. It's long past time for ATA to die. They blew it from the start and have never really recovered.
Of course, in that regard, ATA and the peecee are a match made in hell. Neither one has ever let the cost of competent design work raise the price by even 1 dollar. You might say you get what you pay for, but if you're buying this stuff you must be paying for rape.
If the courts are free to define markets however they like, could they not simply define the market as "Microsoft operating systems?" In fact, it seems that for all practical purposes this is what they've done. Under that definition it would be very difficult indeed not to conclude that Microsoft holds a monopoly.
That's what made today's victory a hollow one for Microsoft.
What makes their "victory" a hollow one is that despite their best efforts, they haven't succeeded in forcing a single person to use any of their products. The trial is a mere nuisance; a way to make the citizenry believe the government is looking after their interests. The battle in the marketplace is the relevant one, and that's where Microsoft is suffering the greatest setbacks. Say what you like about their evil business practices, but short of government intervention nobody will ever be forced to buy or use their products. I don't, you shouldn't, and nobody has to. The trial is a farce and the case should be dismissed. I look forward to seeing the Supreme Court so order.
On that point, I cannot disagree. The economic and legal definitions of monopoly appear never to have met one another at all.
As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. And last I checked, fora such as this were intended to be used precisely for the expression of opinions. I'm truly sorry if it seems today like Slashdot is for First Posts and BSD trolls and raising goatse.cx's Google ranking. But last I checked the purpose of Slashdot was open discussion, and certainly not blindly faithful adherence to and confidence in the latest edict of a small number of men and women appointed to their posts for life with the express purpose of keeping them out of touch with reality.
In any case, good Sir, I am intrigued by your offer of employment in a judicial capacity. Praythee we meet soonest to discuss this mutually beneficial appointment. If I may be so bold, I dare say you will not be disappointed by my sagacious dispensation of justice.
Was that before or after V7 Unix, System V, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Multics, os/360, CP/M, VMS, SunOS, IRIX, and Linux? A quick check indicates that those products' lifespans include the entire duration of modern computing's existence...in fact the union of their lifetimes wholly contains that of DOS. So, no, kind Sir, I was never alive during such a time as you describe; indeed, I do fear your search for such a person will be confounded by his paradoxical nature.
Not one of the 6 boxes is a peecee. And of greater interest is the fact that disproving something requires only a single counterexample. Which I provided. If you prefer larger-scale counterexamples, I offer the following: dgux, dynix, solaris, sunos, aix, xenix, macos, lunix, mvs, vms, os2, plan9, inferno, riscos, ultrix, nextstep, netware, unixware, openbsd, netbsd, freebsd, linux, hurd, tru64/digital unix, irix, unicos, amoeba, and os/400, to name merely a few of the more popular products which compete or have competed with Microsoft in the OS market. Since one might assume that an educated person is already familiar with those, I felt a direct example from my personal experience might be an appropriate mechanism for disproving the assertion that Microsoft holds an OS monopoly. Please forgive my overestimation of your knowledge.
You're confusing monopoly with monopolistic competition. In order to be a true monopoly no other competition can exist. The distinction is that Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft software but not on software. In such a situation they will receive monopoly profits on their own products, but their customers always have the opportunity to find alternatives. Their monopoly power only extends to customers who refuse to consider other sources. This goes to "excessive market power" but does not by itself constitute a monopoly.
Really? In what market does Microsoft hold a monopoly? Operating systems? Browsers? Evil? Hardly. If someone is a monopoly that means that it has no competitors in the market in question; that is, if you have a product belonging to that market, you must have obtained it from the monopoly. That is the economic definition of a monopoly; it is not disputable.
Given the definition, does Microsoft hold a monopoly in any market? No. To disprove this, I need only examine my network. Not only aren't all of my [operating systems|browsers|other software] Microsoft products, none of them are. That's right, not one. So somehow I've managed to build an entire mini-network (6 machines) without a single product from a company that holds a monopoly over the markets in which I would need to buy products to build it. Friends, we have a conundrum here. Either my network doesn't really exist (it certainly seems to; I'm using it to post this) or Microsoft does not in fact hold a monopoly in these markets. To resolve the paradox, we can only conclude that Microsoft does not in fact hold a monopoly over any relevant market.
The proof is simple and direct. The conclusion is the only one possible. Microsoft holds no monopoly in any market. I make no attempt to resolve whether it may have excessive market power as defined by law. That is an entirely different and much more nebulous matter. As for a monopoly on evil, I can't really argue for that either - there's no shortage of competitors - Rambus, Gracenote, Oracle, Sun, the US Government, the EU governments, the Chinese government, Al Gore, and that Krusty the Klown doll to name but a few. Unfortunately being evil is not illegal.