Re:I don't buy it
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're missing the point. Sure, you have more opportunities to meet different people, but you're completely ignoring the tendancy for people to seek out comfortable situations. In being able to have more control over who you meet, and when, and how, and being able to meet lots more people (no one is arguing that that isn't true) you're participating in a form of self-censorship that anthropologists and psychologists tend to point out is the mental equivilent of pigging out on chocolate.
No YOU are missing the point. Technology increases freedom. Freedom always pisses off elitists who think that they know whats best for everybody else. Do you think I give a rats ass if "anthropologists and psychologists" are alarmed if my behavior isn't to their liking?
It's not like pigging out on chocolate, it's like being able to shop at a grocery store instead of eating at the dorm caffeteria. Some people may use that freedom to pig out on chocolate. So what. Others will become chefs.
develop the neccessary skills to deal with adversity, diametric ideologies, different thinking, etc... It seems to me that it is actually the technologically inept that seem to have these problems worse.
In other words, just because you enjoy or interpret the technology around you as 'good for you', doesn't mean that it is. The world is what it is. Trying to imposes some sort of value judgement on how others exercise their freedom on activities that affect only themselves is an act of elitism that bothers me a lot more than people who eat too much chocolate or don't talk to their next door neighbor because they'd rather chat on the internet with somebody they have more common interests with.
Frankly, I've learn quite a bit about alternate world-views on the internet. For an American like me, I come in contact with many people from other countries, whose opinions I might not ever be exposed to otherwise.
Lets say that before technology X is invented, the set of cataloged human interaction is M. Technology X creates new modes of interaction (call the new modes set N). If the ones in set N are more efficient communication mechanisms in some circumstances, one would expect that people would naturally tend to use those in places, where before they were using a less efficient mechanism M.
The result is more efficient total communication, but a bean counter measuring it who doesn't adapt to the change and include the modes from N in his calculations will will conclude that there is less human interaction. In truth, there is less in set M, but that loss is more than offset by gains in N, because the only time someone swithches from M to N is when it benefits them.
For example, I happened to run into somebody who lives in Seatle two weeks ago on IRC. I travelled there last week from Texas, so it was a valueable conversation. I had absolutely no chance to meet someone like this before the internet.
Is this guy in my "community"? The internet has removed the correlation between the set of people I'm likely to converse with and those geographically close to me, and accordingly the meaning of the word community has to decide between two concepts that used to be equivalent.
So the fact that citizens of a third world country are being persecuted by people in their own country gives the US the right to come in and do the same?
The only people we "persecuted" were the ones who were persecuting to begin with. You seem to think that all the Somalis were against the US. In fact, only a small part of the population was loyal to Aidid, and in fact many of them supported our attacks on him, since they found this preferable to starving to death as Aidid stole their food shipments.
Your link is an interpretation of Mark Bowden's book that differs dramatically from the book that I read.
As for shooting "civilians", you neglect to mention that these people approached the combat area specifically for the purpose of exploiting the US rules of engagement. In my book, a woman or child who rushes to a combat scene so they can play human shield is a combatant and is fair game. I'd rather they die than an American. If US rules of engagement don't call for firepower to be directed against such people, then that is a failure to articulate a realistic engagement policy. Aidid's people literally skinned several captured Pakistani's alive, so if you were looking for a nice war, you picked the wrong group of people to sympathize with.
Nobody fucking cares about your boo-hooing about supposed "civilians" dying. War is hell, people die, often civilians. Get used to it. If somebody doesn't want to die, they generally take cover and don't run out into the fight.
The other pathetic barb in your article is when it says that by the end "their discipline and organisation had disintegrated". Huh? You can argue all you want about the policy merits of being there in the first place, but these guys had to improvise a plan in a contingency that their leaders believed to be remote. They survived hours in the middle of an urban enemy stronghold outnumbered 35-to-1 without armor or bomber support and managed to take only 19 dead while killing 1000 of the enemy. If that is undisciplined and disorganized, then I'd hate to see what you'd consider organized and disciplined.
This article is written by a clueless baffoon who has absolutely no appreciation for the lives of US soldiers, and would have been happier had the US done nothing and let 300,000 somalis starve than get involved and kill 1000 people who defend Aidid, who caused the situation in the first place.
True to its post-9/11 government-sanctioned role as US war propaganda headquarters, Hollywood has released "Black Hawk Down," a fictionalized account of the tragic 1993 US raid in Somalia
The book was released August of 2000, and was destined to be a film before Sept 11. Bowden, the author, who is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, spends 37 pages documenting his sources in the book. Those sources consist primarily of talking to the actual participants.
Your garbage article is by some chump who quotes US hating communist wacko Noam Chomsky. Sorry, but he's got zero credibility. The only "fictionalized account" is his.
We were indeed at war with Aidid, because after our main forces withdrew, he continued to use military force to seize UN food shipments. You attempt to play this as some kind of religious persectution is truly sickening: In fact, US and UN troops waged an undeclared war against an Islamic African populace that was hostile to foreign interests. Of course, you neglect to mention that the other political groups in Somalia (who were being starved by Aidid) were also islamic, as were the 20 Pakistani soldiers that were killed (skinned alive, in fact) by Aidid.
You left wing freaks really make me sick. The US attacks a warlord who was purposefully trying to starve 300,000 Somalis and then you people call it "incompetence" and a "slaughter of 1000 Somailis". Frankly, I'm glad Aidid's men were killed and I wish we had finished off the other 4000. The only reason we failed at that was because Clinton was such a pussy about fully supporting the mission (he denied armored vehicles and AC-130's).
If the "peace" you are selling requires tolerating genocidal maniacs like Aidid, then go and peddle it someplace else, because I prefer the kind of peace that doesn't involve whole nations starving to death.
...has there been such an engrossing movie about Americans getting their butts kicked
Aidid militia killed: ~1000 ( = 20% of 5000)
US Rangers killed: 19 (= 12.7% of 150)
If you had to choose one of the sides to be on, I don't think you would pick Aidid's. It was a butt kicking, but I think you are confused about which butt was kicked.
Politically, Clinton proved what a completely incompetent commander in chief he was. The Ranges asked for armored vehicles and AC-130 support, but he thought it was OK to deny them this. Most of the causualties happened because the convoy wasn't armored. Then, in obvious embarrassment , Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and ran away like a true wuss. Why were we using military force in the first place if we weren't willing to see it through to the end? Clinton couldn't take the political heat for why were there. That's not the Ranger's fault.
The real unfair part is that Deep Blue could use its opening book, while Kasparov couldn't. Considering that Kasparov lost the final game by playing a known losing opening move, this literally was the differnece.
If the player has to use only memory for openings, so should the computer.
The kernel seemed to show more stability. Then we hit kernel 2.4.15.
Linux version 2.4.15 contained a bug that was arguably worse than the VM bug. Essentially, if you unmounted a file system via reboot -- or any another common method -- you would get filesystem corruption. A fix, called kernel 2.4.16, was released 24 hours later.
Look, anybody who is deploying a kernel on the day it is released on a production server deserves what they get. One day turnaround on a bug fix is phenomenal. Even if these are marked as "stable" kernels, trying to track the new versions in real time is a dumb thing to do.
This guy has written a moan and groan article based on a small set of bugs, some of which he only could have experienced if he is experimenting on his production system. He obviously requires extreme stability and says he needs this over the new 2.4 features (SMP, 2G memory, 2G files), which makes me ask: why was he putting new kernels on his production system before emperical evidence was there about high stability?
Open source will fix bugs faster the proprietary. It doesn't change reality to make bugs impossible. This is true even in "stable" releases, especially if you are talking about highly stressful production environments.
Re:The first Slashdot troll post investigation
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Another reason is that +5 actually means "3 or more" people willing to mod up exist. (Assuming it was posted by a logged in user with good karma so it starts at +2).
Why are mods limited to +5?
Why can you only moderate a few messages under an article?
LL: I am not optimistic, however. Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical. You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder.
Thanks for responding to my question, but I think you misunderstood it a bit. I am not apolitical, not inactive, not doing "nothing". Rather I have contacted my Congressmen, submitted comments to the Copyright Office, joined the EFF, and even helped write an Amicus brief submitted by Openlaw in the DVD case.
I've been heavily involved with the fight against the DMCA, and am looking back *after the fact* and wondering whether the process was capable of finding the voice of "The People".
Mine was **NOT** a question asking forgiveness for apathy because I have been anything but apathetic. I not "disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians" at all, because I am one. In fact, I have directed input toward all three branches of government. As a result each branch has issued opinions/statements that are unresponsive and incompetent at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
For example, in my comment to the Copyright Office, I pointed out that in PREI v Columbia, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the "owner" of a movie had a first sale right to private performance. The Copyright Office issued a report which completely ignored this point, even though they were tasked by Congress with identifying the DMCA affects on first sale. I believe that they did so because the process was a futile exercise that achieved nothing other than allowing them to say that they had received public input.
Um, there already is an eleventh circuit, with jurisdiction over Florida. There are also Federal and D.C. Circuits.
In general, creating "special" courts like the Federal Circuit, which handles Patent and Trademark cases is a REALLY, REALLY bad idea, since it creates a single point of failure for the regulated special interests to infiltrate. Just look at the complete mess in patent law for examples, but hurry because I hear somebody has filed a patent for answering questions using a computer.
The judicial system is actually are slowly piercing these hot air balloons. A HUGE step foward occured recently in Softman/Adobe case, where a court ruled specifically that "software is sold, not merely licenced".
Of course, the DMCA puts a bigtime spike into First Sale, because your right to use your property doesn't transfer to you when you buy it, but that is a different issue.
It seems increasingly appearent to me that Intellectual Property law generally and Copyright law specifically, has become a corrupt instrument whereby campaign finance coffers are filled by metering out favors to large monied special interests. I am basing this on personal observation after having attempted to participate in the process. For example, I participated in several of the Copyright Office requests for public comment that produced easily 10X as many anti-DMCA comments as pro, only to see the Copyright Office ignore what seemed to me to be the clearly expressed objections of actual people in favor of the large corporations who lobbied for the bill. Worse, no serious attempt (in my view) was made to respond to the issues raised by the public. Congress is even less responsive, in my observation.
If and when I conclude that the deck truly is stacked, such that the political process producing copyright regulation is a sham, should I not also conclude that the best course of action is to engage in covert civil disobediance targeted to deprive the specific entities responsible for the corruption of profits? My question is not whether the DMCA is a corrupt law, but rather what moral obligation one has to obey a law that you earnestly believe symbolizes corrupt government.
After all, if push comes to shove, the anti-circumvention provisions are utterly unenforcable (to the point of being a joke) if they are disregarded in ways that do not attract attention. I'm not someone who has decrypted any DVD's or downloaded many MP3's, but I'm wondering what reason there could possibly be not to start.
First of all, MS office for Linux would probably do very poorly, not because it wouldn't be any good, but because most Linux users are avid Microsoft haters.
But if you have MS Office on linux, then some of the more moderate users who see advanatages in having the best of both worlds might also get on board with Linux. (And then down the road perhaps they take the other step).
Of course, many of the nay-sayers here don't want to have an extra option on linux because then they have to intermingle with people who choose it. They'd rather chase somebody away who wants to use linux and kde or gnome but use MS Office too because such people aren't willing to spout the fundamentalist rhetoric about all proprietary software being evil.
Between Mozilla, Konqueror, and Galeon I just don't see much value in having IE on Linux. Now forcing IE to be standards compliant would be much more significant.
Remember that many major security holes are in MS apps, not just the OS. Also remember that you'll be inviting VB macros, spyware, etc onto your desktop. Finally, remember that MS will have negative incentive to produce a reliable, stable product for Linux - and they don't do that good a job of that for their own OS.
That's a bogus argument.
First of all, nobody is going to force you to use Office on Linux if you don't want to, so having an extra option can't hurt you. Even if your CIO might insist you use MS Office, the alternative there is him forcing you to use it on Windows, so don't complain).
Second, once people are on Linux, MS Office will have to compete on it's own quality against the open source office apps, which a year from now will be pretty damn good. If MS Office on linux is buggy or unstable, then the migration to a completely MS free environment is much more likely.
I want to use linux as my desktop OS at work. Right now I can't. Having MSOffice available on linux would eliminate some of the reasons.
Having it would ease the migration for both home users who aren't power users but are willing to try something different and for corporate IT departments who want CYA, risk mitigation, and change in small doses.
OS wise open source is ready to replace MS. There is lots of good development occuring in the Office apps sector, but right now it's not uniformly ready. Even if it was, I shouldn't have to tie changing my spreadsheet to changing my word processor to changing my presentation software to changing my corporate email app. With MS Office on Linux, larger numbers of people would be able to try out individual office apps without converting wholesale.
I think Kuhn and RMS have a very convoluted view of the nature of individual power.
First of all, picking a copyright licence, GPL or not is precisly "to make decisions that affect others more than you". Under the GPL, the author grants some, but not all of the "exclusive rights" given to him by the Copyright Act. If Kuhn and RMS believe that retaining exclusive rights is an "exercise of power" per their definition of this term, then they should advocate placing software into the public domain. Instead they retain some of the power to exclude and use it to achieve their particular agenda. That agenda is not a bad one, but the idea that it is the only one that is acceptable is ludicrous.
In no sense is the exclusion of others from using your software for their own proprietary interests "being able to make decisions that affect mainly you". Who are they talking to when they say "you"? They drift back and forth between the interests of the users, authors, and other developers so it's hard to tell. Their definition of power focuses on "you" being the decision maker, ie the author, so deciding conditions for the exercise of your exclusive rights your code definitely "affects mainly others", since it will be the basis for the exercise of governmental force against them if they violate it.
The essay really moves to the far far left fringe. I think MS was wrong when they called the GPL "un-American", but with essays like this, they aren't far of the mark. The idea that exercising a "right to exclude" is a "power" (presumed bad) and not a "freedom", is simply contrary to mainstream American values. Isn't property by definition an exclusive right? In fact, all rights involve defining a space of action and giving exclusive moral sanction in that space to somebody and denying it to either the government or others or both.
Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms.
The first sentence is profoundly wrong. If you don't want to be in a "position of power", simply proclaim the software public domain. Of course, the GPL doesn't do this, which compounds the error with hypocracy.
Next follows the most troubling part of the whole essay: that last quoted sentence is a whopper. The implication that it is unethical to exercise your rights if those involve excluding others is the essence of the communist belief system. The Bill of Rights restricts government from violating individual rights, and most prominent among these is the right to property, which includes proprietary interests in intellectual property as a subset of statutory and contractual assets generally.
In summary, the essay is a convoluted parade of offsetting errors: the GPL violates the very principle the authors imply is "unethical" (retaining exclusive rights = "power") , but the idea that it is unethical to exclude others from your property is a far worse concept.
And it seems to me that the folks suggesting this is just another typical internet chain-email hoax missed the part where Junis had written to Katz before!
Oh come on. You don't really expect people to read the article carefully before they bash Katz do you? They already know he has the cushy job writing on slashdot that they all want, so what difference does it make whether or not they read the article -- it just takes them longer to find something to bash about him when they are constrained by the facts.
There is clearly a need to move on to object databases, but installed base and skill set inertia have blocked this transition, with the result that database-oriented applications have remained hamstrung in their friendliness and feature set.
The "impedance mismatch" is little more than the fact that object oriented approaches generally do not obey the rules of 3rd normal form data modelling, especially in the way they represent many-to-many relationships. If anything, it's a problem caused with object orientation and it's assumption that efficient software development overhead is "the goal". That's true if the data is throwaway or only persistent in small quantities. When the amount of data is large, and you are paying for "big iron" to support many simultaneous users and transactions, as are both typical for enterprise grade applications, the software reuse benefits of object oriented methods lose significance relative to structural data integrity enforcement and transaction efficiencty.
OO works great in the GUI and business rule layers, but consider the way OO represents many-to-many relationships. For example, suppose I have students and courses. Generally, I might have students with a collection of course objects or vice versa or both. If you use both, then you've got redundant data and ACIDity and data integrity will add resource overhead and complexity. If you put the collection in only one of the objects (say in the student object), then when you ask a question like "who are all the students in class X" then your application will crawl as you have to ask every student who exists if they are in taking that class. If there are a couple thousand students, then it's not a big deal. If there are 400 million, then it is a very big deal.
Or is it better simply to use a relational database that can output in XML, or script your way to achieve the same goal?"
I believe that RDBMS's should add functionality to read/write XML, especially as the XML Schema recommendations is basically done.
The idea that XML should be the permanent storage format is a bad one. There is a lot of power in a normalized data model -- it enforces data integrity , while eliminating data fragmentation automatically and it minimizes transaction resources.
Consider XML representations for different entities that all share some kind of child entity. For example: people, businesses, and schools all share addresses. In XML, you want the addresses to appear in the description of the individual object. Does that mean you want to store the addresses separately that way? Absolutely not, because then when you enforce constraints or ask questions about addresses, your data is fragmented in three places. For that matter, how do you know all the entities that might use addresses? In an RDBMS, you can inspect all the foreign keys to the address entitity. What's the XML analog?
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. Sure, you have more opportunities to meet different people, but you're completely ignoring the tendancy for people to seek out comfortable situations. In being able to have more control over who you meet, and when, and how, and being able to meet lots more people (no one is arguing that that isn't true) you're participating in a form of self-censorship that anthropologists and psychologists tend to point out is the mental equivilent of pigging out on chocolate.
...
No YOU are missing the point. Technology increases freedom. Freedom always pisses off elitists who think that they know whats best for everybody else. Do you think I give a rats ass if "anthropologists and psychologists" are alarmed if my behavior isn't to their liking?
It's not like pigging out on chocolate, it's like being able to shop at a grocery store instead of eating at the dorm caffeteria. Some people may use that freedom to pig out on chocolate. So what. Others will become chefs.
develop the neccessary skills to deal with adversity, diametric ideologies, different thinking, etc
It seems to me that it is actually the technologically inept that seem to have these problems worse.
In other words, just because you enjoy or interpret the technology around you as 'good for you', doesn't mean that it is.
The world is what it is. Trying to imposes some sort of value judgement on how others exercise their freedom on activities that affect only themselves is an act of elitism that bothers me a lot more than people who eat too much chocolate or don't talk to their next door neighbor because they'd rather chat on the internet with somebody they have more common interests with.
Frankly, I've learn quite a bit about alternate world-views on the internet. For an American like me, I come in contact with many people from other countries, whose opinions I might not ever be exposed to otherwise.
Oh, B.S.
Please post a link to one of these posts.
Lets say that before technology X is invented, the set of cataloged human interaction is M. Technology X creates new modes of interaction (call the new modes set N). If the ones in set N are more efficient communication mechanisms in some circumstances, one would expect that people would naturally tend to use those in places, where before they were using a less efficient mechanism M.
The result is more efficient total communication, but a bean counter measuring it who doesn't adapt to the change and include the modes from N in his calculations will will conclude that there is less human interaction. In truth, there is less in set M, but that loss is more than offset by gains in N, because the only time someone swithches from M to N is when it benefits them.
For example, I happened to run into somebody who lives in Seatle two weeks ago on IRC. I travelled there last week from Texas, so it was a valueable conversation. I had absolutely no chance to meet someone like this before the internet.
Is this guy in my "community"? The internet has removed the correlation between the set of people I'm likely to converse with and those geographically close to me, and accordingly the meaning of the word community has to decide between two concepts that used to be equivalent.
We're on the side that says information is not a crime, but attacking someone is.
Writing a DoS tool is not a crime. Using it on someone else is. What's so hard to understand?
So the fact that citizens of a third world country are being persecuted by people in their own country gives the US the right to come in and do the same?
The only people we "persecuted" were the ones who were persecuting to begin with. You seem to think that all the Somalis were against the US. In fact, only a small part of the population was loyal to Aidid, and in fact many of them supported our attacks on him, since they found this preferable to starving to death as Aidid stole their food shipments.
Your link is an interpretation of Mark Bowden's book that differs dramatically from the book that I read.
As for shooting "civilians", you neglect to mention that these people approached the combat area specifically for the purpose of exploiting the US rules of engagement. In my book, a woman or child who rushes to a combat scene so they can play human shield is a combatant and is fair game. I'd rather they die than an American. If US rules of engagement don't call for firepower to be directed against such people, then that is a failure to articulate a realistic engagement policy. Aidid's people literally skinned several captured Pakistani's alive, so if you were looking for a nice war, you picked the wrong group of people to sympathize with.
Nobody fucking cares about your boo-hooing about supposed "civilians" dying. War is hell, people die, often civilians. Get used to it. If somebody doesn't want to die, they generally take cover and don't run out into the fight.
The other pathetic barb in your article is when it says that by the end "their discipline and organisation had disintegrated". Huh? You can argue all you want about the policy merits of being there in the first place, but these guys had to improvise a plan in a contingency that their leaders believed to be remote. They survived hours in the middle of an urban enemy stronghold outnumbered 35-to-1 without armor or bomber support and managed to take only 19 dead while killing 1000 of the enemy. If that is undisciplined and disorganized, then I'd hate to see what you'd consider organized and disciplined.
This article is written by a clueless baffoon who has absolutely no appreciation for the lives of US soldiers, and would have been happier had the US done nothing and let 300,000 somalis starve than get involved and kill 1000 people who defend Aidid, who caused the situation in the first place.
True to its post-9/11 government-sanctioned role as US war propaganda headquarters, Hollywood has released "Black Hawk Down," a fictionalized account of the tragic 1993 US raid in Somalia
The book was released August of 2000, and was destined to be a film before Sept 11. Bowden, the author, who is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, spends 37 pages documenting his sources in the book. Those sources consist primarily of talking to the actual participants.
Your garbage article is by some chump who quotes US hating communist wacko Noam Chomsky. Sorry, but he's got zero credibility. The only "fictionalized account" is his.
We were indeed at war with Aidid, because after our main forces withdrew, he continued to use military force to seize UN food shipments. You attempt to play this as some kind of religious persectution is truly sickening: In fact, US and UN troops waged an undeclared war against an Islamic African populace that was hostile to foreign interests. Of course, you neglect to mention that the other political groups in Somalia (who were being starved by Aidid) were also islamic, as were the 20 Pakistani soldiers that were killed (skinned alive, in fact) by Aidid.
You left wing freaks really make me sick. The US attacks a warlord who was purposefully trying to starve 300,000 Somalis and then you people call it "incompetence" and a "slaughter of 1000 Somailis". Frankly, I'm glad Aidid's men were killed and I wish we had finished off the other 4000. The only reason we failed at that was because Clinton was such a pussy about fully supporting the mission (he denied armored vehicles and AC-130's).
If the "peace" you are selling requires tolerating genocidal maniacs like Aidid, then go and peddle it someplace else, because I prefer the kind of peace that doesn't involve whole nations starving to death.
Aidid militia killed: ~1000 ( = 20% of 5000)
US Rangers killed: 19 (= 12.7% of 150)
If you had to choose one of the sides to be on, I don't think you would pick Aidid's. It was a butt kicking, but I think you are confused about which butt was kicked.
Politically, Clinton proved what a completely incompetent commander in chief he was. The Ranges asked for armored vehicles and AC-130 support, but he thought it was OK to deny them this. Most of the causualties happened because the convoy wasn't armored. Then, in obvious embarrassment , Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and ran away like a true wuss. Why were we using military force in the first place if we weren't willing to see it through to the end? Clinton couldn't take the political heat for why were there. That's not the Ranger's fault.
The real unfair part is that Deep Blue could use its opening book, while Kasparov couldn't. Considering that Kasparov lost the final game by playing a known losing opening move, this literally was the differnece.
If the player has to use only memory for openings, so should the computer.
I almost took this guy seriously until this part:
The kernel seemed to show more stability. Then we hit kernel 2.4.15.
Linux version 2.4.15 contained a bug that was arguably worse than the VM bug. Essentially, if you unmounted a file system via reboot -- or any another common method -- you would get filesystem corruption. A fix, called kernel 2.4.16, was released 24 hours later.
Look, anybody who is deploying a kernel on the day it is released on a production server deserves what they get. One day turnaround on a bug fix is phenomenal. Even if these are marked as "stable" kernels, trying to track the new versions in real time is a dumb thing to do.
This guy has written a moan and groan article based on a small set of bugs, some of which he only could have experienced if he is experimenting on his production system. He obviously requires extreme stability and says he needs this over the new 2.4 features (SMP, 2G memory, 2G files), which makes me ask: why was he putting new kernels on his production system before emperical evidence was there about high stability?
Open source will fix bugs faster the proprietary. It doesn't change reality to make bugs impossible. This is true even in "stable" releases, especially if you are talking about highly stressful production environments.
Another reason is that +5 actually means "3 or more" people willing to mod up exist. (Assuming it was posted by a logged in user with good karma so it starts at +2).
Why are mods limited to +5?
Why can you only moderate a few messages under an article?
LL: I am not optimistic, however. Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical. You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder.
Thanks for responding to my question, but I think you misunderstood it a bit. I am not apolitical, not inactive, not doing "nothing". Rather I have contacted my Congressmen, submitted comments to the Copyright Office, joined the EFF, and even helped write an Amicus brief submitted by Openlaw in the DVD case.
I've been heavily involved with the fight against the DMCA, and am looking back *after the fact* and wondering whether the process was capable of finding the voice of "The People".
Mine was **NOT** a question asking forgiveness for apathy because I have been anything but apathetic. I not "disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians" at all, because I am one. In fact, I have directed input toward all three branches of government. As a result each branch has issued opinions/statements that are unresponsive and incompetent at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
For example, in my comment to the Copyright Office, I pointed out that in PREI v Columbia, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the "owner" of a movie had a first sale right to private performance. The Copyright Office issued a report which completely ignored this point, even though they were tasked by Congress with identifying the DMCA affects on first sale. I believe that they did so because the process was a futile exercise that achieved nothing other than allowing them to say that they had received public input.
Um, there already is an eleventh circuit, with jurisdiction over Florida. There are also Federal and D.C. Circuits.
In general, creating "special" courts like the Federal Circuit, which handles Patent and Trademark cases is a REALLY, REALLY bad idea, since it creates a single point of failure for the regulated special interests to infiltrate. Just look at the complete mess in patent law for examples, but hurry because I hear somebody has filed a patent for answering questions using a computer.
The judicial system is actually are slowly piercing these hot air balloons. A HUGE step foward occured recently in Softman/Adobe case, where a court ruled specifically that "software is sold, not merely licenced".
Of course, the DMCA puts a bigtime spike into First Sale, because your right to use your property doesn't transfer to you when you buy it, but that is a different issue.
The common person has a lot more chance of understanding that than say the IRS tax code.
What's your point?
It seems increasingly appearent to me that Intellectual Property law generally and Copyright law specifically, has become a corrupt instrument whereby campaign finance coffers are filled by metering out favors to large monied special interests. I am basing this on personal observation after having attempted to participate in the process. For example, I participated in several of the Copyright Office requests for public comment that produced easily 10X as many anti-DMCA comments as pro, only to see the Copyright Office ignore what seemed to me to be the clearly expressed objections of actual people in favor of the large corporations who lobbied for the bill. Worse, no serious attempt (in my view) was made to respond to the issues raised by the public. Congress is even less responsive, in my observation.
If and when I conclude that the deck truly is stacked, such that the political process producing copyright regulation is a sham, should I not also conclude that the best course of action is to engage in covert civil disobediance targeted to deprive the specific entities responsible for the corruption of profits? My question is not whether the DMCA is a corrupt law, but rather what moral obligation one has to obey a law that you earnestly believe symbolizes corrupt government.
After all, if push comes to shove, the anti-circumvention provisions are utterly unenforcable (to the point of being a joke) if they are disregarded in ways that do not attract attention. I'm not someone who has decrypted any DVD's or downloaded many MP3's, but I'm wondering what reason there could possibly be not to start.
First of all, MS office for Linux would probably do very poorly, not because it wouldn't be any good, but because most Linux users are avid Microsoft haters.
But if you have MS Office on linux, then some of the more moderate users who see advanatages in having the best of both worlds might also get on board with Linux. (And then down the road perhaps they take the other step).
Of course, many of the nay-sayers here don't want to have an extra option on linux because then they have to intermingle with people who choose it. They'd rather chase somebody away who wants to use linux and kde or gnome but use MS Office too because such people aren't willing to spout the fundamentalist rhetoric about all proprietary software being evil.
Between Mozilla, Konqueror, and Galeon I just don't see much value in having IE on Linux. Now forcing IE to be standards compliant would be much more significant.
Remember that many major security holes are in MS apps, not just the OS. Also remember that you'll be inviting VB macros, spyware, etc onto your desktop. Finally, remember that MS will have negative incentive to produce a reliable, stable product for Linux - and they don't do that good a job of that for their own OS.
That's a bogus argument.
First of all, nobody is going to force you to use Office on Linux if you don't want to, so having an extra option can't hurt you. Even if your CIO might insist you use MS Office, the alternative there is him forcing you to use it on Windows, so don't complain).
Second, once people are on Linux, MS Office will have to compete on it's own quality against the open source office apps, which a year from now will be pretty damn good. If MS Office on linux is buggy or unstable, then the migration to a completely MS free environment is much more likely.
I agree. ABSOLUETELY.
I want to use linux as my desktop OS at work. Right now I can't. Having MSOffice available on linux would eliminate some of the reasons.
Having it would ease the migration for both home users who aren't power users but are willing to try something different and for corporate IT departments who want CYA, risk mitigation, and change in small doses.
OS wise open source is ready to replace MS. There is lots of good development occuring in the Office apps sector, but right now it's not uniformly ready. Even if it was, I shouldn't have to tie changing my spreadsheet to changing my word processor to changing my presentation software to changing my corporate email app. With MS Office on Linux, larger numbers of people would be able to try out individual office apps without converting wholesale.
From my submissions page:
* 2001-11-01 22:49:31 Federal Court: Adobe Software is Sold, not Licenced (yro,news) (rejected)
But nearly a full month later they realize it actually is news! Old news, but news.
It is a fantastic opinion justifying the decision that everyone should read if you haven't yet.
I think Kuhn and RMS have a very convoluted view of the nature of individual power.
First of all, picking a copyright licence, GPL or not is precisly "to make decisions that affect others more than you". Under the GPL, the author grants some, but not all of the "exclusive rights" given to him by the Copyright Act. If Kuhn and RMS believe that retaining exclusive rights is an "exercise of power" per their definition of this term, then they should advocate placing software into the public domain. Instead they retain some of the power to exclude and use it to achieve their particular agenda. That agenda is not a bad one, but the idea that it is the only one that is acceptable is ludicrous.
In no sense is the exclusion of others from using your software for their own proprietary interests "being able to make decisions that affect mainly you". Who are they talking to when they say "you"? They drift back and forth between the interests of the users, authors, and other developers so it's hard to tell. Their definition of power focuses on "you" being the decision maker, ie the author, so deciding conditions for the exercise of your exclusive rights your code definitely "affects mainly others", since it will be the basis for the exercise of governmental force against them if they violate it.
The essay really moves to the far far left fringe. I think MS was wrong when they called the GPL "un-American", but with essays like this, they aren't far of the mark. The idea that exercising a "right to exclude" is a "power" (presumed bad) and not a "freedom", is simply contrary to mainstream American values. Isn't property by definition an exclusive right? In fact, all rights involve defining a space of action and giving exclusive moral sanction in that space to somebody and denying it to either the government or others or both.
Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms.
The first sentence is profoundly wrong. If you don't want to be in a "position of power", simply proclaim the software public domain. Of course, the GPL doesn't do this, which compounds the error with hypocracy.
Next follows the most troubling part of the whole essay: that last quoted sentence is a whopper. The implication that it is unethical to exercise your rights if those involve excluding others is the essence of the communist belief system. The Bill of Rights restricts government from violating individual rights, and most prominent among these is the right to property, which includes proprietary interests in intellectual property as a subset of statutory and contractual assets generally.
In summary, the essay is a convoluted parade of offsetting errors: the GPL violates the very principle the authors imply is "unethical" (retaining exclusive rights = "power") , but the idea that it is unethical to exclude others from your property is a far worse concept.
And it seems to me that the folks suggesting this is just another typical internet chain-email hoax missed the part where Junis had written to Katz before!
Oh come on. You don't really expect people to read the article carefully before they bash Katz do you? They already know he has the cushy job writing on slashdot that they all want, so what difference does it make whether or not they read the article -- it just takes them longer to find something to bash about him when they are constrained by the facts.
There is clearly a need to move on to object databases, but installed base and skill set inertia have blocked this transition, with the result that database-oriented applications have remained hamstrung in their friendliness and feature set.
The "impedance mismatch" is little more than the fact that object oriented approaches generally do not obey the rules of 3rd normal form data modelling, especially in the way they represent many-to-many relationships. If anything, it's a problem caused with object orientation and it's assumption that efficient software development overhead is "the goal". That's true if the data is throwaway or only persistent in small quantities. When the amount of data is large, and you are paying for "big iron" to support many simultaneous users and transactions, as are both typical for enterprise grade applications, the software reuse benefits of object oriented methods lose significance relative to structural data integrity enforcement and transaction efficiencty.
OO works great in the GUI and business rule layers, but consider the way OO represents many-to-many relationships. For example, suppose I have students and courses. Generally, I might have students with a collection of course objects or vice versa or both. If you use both, then you've got redundant data and ACIDity and data integrity will add resource overhead and complexity. If you put the collection in only one of the objects (say in the student object), then when you ask a question like "who are all the students in class X" then your application will crawl as you have to ask every student who exists if they are in taking that class. If there are a couple thousand students, then it's not a big deal. If there are 400 million, then it is a very big deal.
Or is it better simply to use a relational database that can output in XML, or script your way to achieve the same goal?"
I believe that RDBMS's should add functionality to read/write XML, especially as the XML Schema recommendations is basically done.
The idea that XML should be the permanent storage format is a bad one. There is a lot of power in a normalized data model -- it enforces data integrity , while eliminating data fragmentation automatically and it minimizes transaction resources.
Consider XML representations for different entities that all share some kind of child entity. For example: people, businesses, and schools all share addresses. In XML, you want the addresses to appear in the description of the individual object. Does that mean you want to store the addresses separately that way? Absolutely not, because then when you enforce constraints or ask questions about addresses, your data is fragmented in three places. For that matter, how do you know all the entities that might use addresses? In an RDBMS, you can inspect all the foreign keys to the address entitity. What's the XML analog?