Re:That's a very poorly constructed argument.
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
The problem I have with pro-Marijuana websites is the writing rambles on and on without accomplishing a damn thing, and all the banner ads are for cheap high-fat junkfoods.
(Warning: the above text contains sarcasm, don't hold a flame against it or it will *poof* into vapour)
Yes, it was what gets called "social engineering." Of course, the term "social engineering" is one of those euphemisms, like "ethnic cleansing," that obscure what is really going on.
"Social engineering" could also be called:
Fraud, Lying, Deception.
Taking advantage of the good nature of other people is not by any stretch of the imagination a form of 'engineering.' People like Mr. Mitnick are just plain vanilla criminals who've adopted some sort of an aura about them because of the circles they run in.
No Linux isn't a fluke. It's a fairly stable operating system for a lot of people. It has it's admirable qualities.
Wether the much vaunted Open Source Development Model is a fluke is still a matter up for debate, of course. We'll see, and of course if it is "The One True Way (TM)" we can deal with it then. Right now it's somewhat of a religious crusade.
The number of people you say are 'working on bug fixes and patches worldwide for Linux' is a rather uncountable number. Yes, that's by the nature of the development model it uses. But it's far fewer people than you imply. I would bet that less than 1 in 500 people using Linux these days has ever done more than rebuild the kernel source after a 'make xconfig'.
Some figures on the total number of different people who have submitted kernel patches would be in order. Plus maybe a list of the average number of people who have done so each month over the last six months.
I suspect it will end up being fewer individuals than are employed at Microsoft(~1) on Windows 2000.
It's a good thing you said UNIX/POSIX and left out the 'L' os. The GNU community is reknowned for thumbing their nose at standards committees. (text like POSIX_ME_HARDER in the gnu source) There's a vigorous discussion of GCC as an embrace-and-extend development platform crossposted on several of the newsgroups (I'm following it on one of the bsd groups).
Yesterday, the maintainer of BASH admitted publicly that he doesn't even have access to the POSIX specifications. In a thread where somebody was trying to make the claim that BASH is an implementation of the POSIX shell spec.
Reality check- Anybody who needs a 'workstation' grade OS like Windows 98 to stay up for more than "weeks at a time" is mis-applying the OS. So your sarcasm is misdirected.
Anybody who's not running a continuous-duty 'Server' application, who leaves the system running 24/7 in order to log those oh-so-important uptime hours is, well, playing a little ego game.
I mean, get real kids. Yes, it's cheap fun because you don't pay the electric bill in your dorm room, but come on...
Almost everybody has tons of libraries and code installed on their Linux systems, because there is such tremendous fragmentation when it comes to developing X apps. I remember what fun I had building XCDRoast on my Linux system. I didn't have Tix installed. Tix needed to be integrated with TCL. I had to rebuild TCL with debug turned on in order for Tix to integrate with it.
I may be forgetting a few of the details in this mess (nitpickers, have at it! we'll all be fascinated by your recall of arcana!) but I remember what a horrible mess it seemed at the time.
Microsoft included an entire separate CD-ROM of Visual C++ Version 1.52 in the shrinkwrapped box that Visual C++ 4.0 came in, because VC 4 can't build Win16 (or DOS) binaries.
The fact is, each of the separate Windows "fragments" represents a bigger 'market' than Free Software as a whole. So while it can be said the market is fragmented, each fragment is a big healthy bunch of customers for a product.
There was a transition period when software vendors felt it necessary to sell multiple versions (Win16 and Win32) of Windows programs in the same shrink-wrapped package. I bought a fax program packaged like that a few years back.
People hold onto and continue to use some of the more mature Win16 products (Office 4.3 is a good example) because they are solid programs that work well at what they're designed for. In a way, the high quality of Office 4 has undercut Microsoft's ability to sell newer versions. A happy customer isn't clamoring for an upgrade.
(yes, I know I've said incenderary things here. Some of the more unstable torches will doubtless go off now. Here's the first spoonful of baking soda to try to put out the fire: "Windoze~1 5UX")
Reactors are still being built and operated, in spite of the risk and the history of accidents, because of the Price-Anderson Act. In the early days of promoting "civillian nuclear power" the Military needed weapons grade plutonium. The only way to kickstart a civillian nuclear power industry (to produce that plutonium) was to grant blanket immunity for any potential nuclear accidents. The utilites could never have afforded the cost of liability insurance for as unknown and major of a risk as a major accident at a nuclear power plant.
So congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which grants blanket immunity to the power industry for nuclear accidents.
Civillian nuclear power wouldn't exist if the companies had to pay insurance premiums to operate the plants. (something people like to refer to as a free market) Thats how safe they are considered by insurance company actuaries. Of course, congress knows a lot more than the insurance industry. Or, they wanted more weapons grade plutonium and didn't care. Pick and choose which one you want to believe.
The men who were killed at Fermi, of course, were military personel. That is why you always hear "there have been no civilian deaths caused by nuclear power."
At least one of the dead men's heads and extremities had to be severed and buried as high level radioactive waste.
With no corporate interests selling MP3 players, you're looking at a format that won't have any players sold for it.
If players are produced, by smaller vendors, it will be in a "pirate satellite dish" kind of market. In other words, it won't go anywhere. If it does, it'll be taken down.
One thing worth pondering, in the light of the serious period companies with commercial Unices like HP and SGI are now facing, is wether the success of Linux is what's killing the companies. People don't have to go for a big bucks system anymore like a decade ago. They can throw Linux on a PII system for pennies on the dollar.
Linux certainly has changed the Unix market. It might even have hastened the death of Unix (as a viable commercial platform).
If they "give away the store" before going belly up, creditors might then take after Linux, one would think. One would think that anything that SGI GPLs will be credited to them, and creditors might justifiably claim it was a fire-sale move and get the technology transfer declared illegal. Maybe the GPL could see it's day in court.
Remember, no matter how much people might think of Linux and the GPL as a "buck the system, take it down" movement, it all rests on the validity of current copyright law. As such, GPL advocates have to play by the rule. Linux contributors are more "bought into the system" than many people are willing to recognize.
Software for critical life-care situations isn't some web application that can crash and you just hit the reset switch.
There are design methodologies for high reliability software. And it isn't just throw it out into a bazaar and let a bunch of hackers pound away at it.
There are controls, oversight, audits. Everything is documented, and virtually everything is traceable.
Hint- people like it that way. You don't, but we'll give you a few years to catch a clue. You won't be let near any critical life care development anyway, with your attitude.
I have already started moving away from Linux as an OS I want to run on a regular basis.
It seems in the last year like the focus of the "Linux community" has changed. The sentiment used to be that Microsoft was irrelevant. These days it seems to be a primary target. As more anything-but-Microsoft people crowd into the room, it becomes a less interesting place to spend any time. I also use Microsoft OSes on a daily basis, at work and home (at work I run builds across a network that involve OS/2 and Solaris systems). Integration is the name of the game these days, and people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and learn how to make it all work together are gonna be the ones who get ahead.
I have used Linux off and on since I plugged in the first edition of Yggdrasil's Plug-and-play Linux (Fall 1993 edition). I've tried periods of "total immersion" at home, and I've bought a commercial Motif (SWiM), Applixware, and Wabi, among other products. I've run Slackware, RedHat, and SuSE systems. Right now the Linux box I still run at home has Slackware 4.0 on it.
I've essentially moved to NetBSD for my Unix fix these days. My fastest "Unix-like" hardware has that OS installed. It's a tigher system, more thoroughly integrated, and it's the "Classic Unix" environment I enjoy using the most. I grew tired of the "Linux for the masses" sentiment, dumbed down GUI administration tools, etc. I am not anti-GUI per-se (I use Windows 98 and it can't get more gooey than that), I am just opposed to mediocre half-baked attempts at GUI tools, and that's what I seem coming out of places like Red Hat.
NetBSD lets me install a clean tight base system, and build the packages I need from source out of a well-defined 'ports' collection. Another benefit I feel in using NetBSD is that there aren't 10,000 sites all over the internet trying to yank me this way and that and tell me how to run the system. I can crack open any Unix administration book less than 15 years old and just read and learn. The other BSDs haven't seemed like an option to me either, though I have little experience with them. I've watched the FreeBSD usenet newsgroups gradually fill up with newbies complaining that their sound card, modem, etc. isn't working. The crowd may be arriving on that scene. No thanks.
Anyhow, all I am trying to describe in this article is what is right for me. I've grown weary of advocacy people who try to run everybody else's lives.
Really, I just need to go back down in the lab and start working on some of the hardware/firmware projects I have planned. Mostly these involve stuff single board and single chip designs, (Motorola, PIC, some Z80, etc) running hand coded assembly language. I'm an embedded programmer and a hardware/firmware guy. The high level stuff is just for running my schematic capture, emulators, eprom programmer, and cross assembler. My best efforts at coding are a combination of solder, wire-wrap, and assembly language anyhow.
The old "UNIX" license plates were intended as humor. People wanted a Unix license. So somebody produced one. Get rid of the GPL and we can have such fun again.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with pro-Marijuana websites is the writing rambles on and on without accomplishing a damn thing, and all the banner ads are for cheap high-fat junkfoods.
(Warning: the above text contains sarcasm, don't hold a flame against it or it will *poof* into vapour)
Yes, it was what gets called "social engineering." Of course, the term "social engineering" is one of those euphemisms, like "ethnic cleansing," that obscure what is really going on.
"Social engineering" could also be called:
Fraud,
Lying,
Deception.
Taking advantage of the good nature of other people is not by any stretch of the imagination a form of 'engineering.' People like Mr. Mitnick are just plain vanilla criminals who've adopted some sort of an aura about them because of the circles they run in.
Oh, some of us understand.
We shake our heads sadly and wish a better life for you, but we understand.
No Linux isn't a fluke. It's a fairly stable operating system for a lot of people. It has it's admirable qualities.
Wether the much vaunted Open Source Development Model is a fluke is still a matter up for debate, of course. We'll see, and of course if it is "The One True Way (TM)" we can deal with it then. Right now it's somewhat of a religious crusade.
The number of people you say are 'working on bug fixes and patches worldwide for Linux' is a rather uncountable number. Yes, that's by the nature of the development model it uses. But it's far fewer people than you imply. I would bet that less than 1 in 500 people using Linux these days has ever done more than rebuild the kernel source after a 'make xconfig'.
Some figures on the total number of different people who have submitted kernel patches would be in order. Plus maybe a list of the average number of people who have done so each month over the last six months.
I suspect it will end up being fewer individuals than are employed at Microsoft(~1) on Windows 2000.
It's a good thing you said UNIX/POSIX and left out the 'L' os. The GNU community is reknowned for thumbing their nose at standards committees. (text like POSIX_ME_HARDER in the gnu source) There's a vigorous discussion of GCC as an embrace-and-extend development platform crossposted on several of the newsgroups (I'm following it on one of the bsd groups).
Yesterday, the maintainer of BASH admitted publicly that he doesn't even have access to the POSIX specifications. In a thread where somebody was trying to make the claim that BASH is an implementation of the POSIX shell spec.
Reality check- Anybody who needs a 'workstation' grade OS like Windows 98 to stay up for more than "weeks at a time" is mis-applying the OS. So your sarcasm is misdirected.
Anybody who's not running a continuous-duty 'Server' application, who leaves the system running 24/7 in order to log those oh-so-important uptime hours is, well, playing a little ego game.
I mean, get real kids. Yes, it's cheap fun because you don't pay the electric bill in your dorm room, but come on...
It's a bit stretching it to say so, but yes, the proprietors of Slashdot do benefit when they can fan the flames.
Look! I saw a black helicopter swoop down! Twelve rolls of astroturf fell out of it! Now they're coming for me!
You'd think this was a talk-about-tech (platform neutral) site.
Why OS/2, when you could choose Coherent?
Palm III is a port, not an embedded Linux.
There are real embedded Linux projects out there (I don't have a URL, I am sure somebody else can supply them to this thread).
Almost everybody has tons of libraries and code installed on their Linux systems, because there is such tremendous fragmentation when it comes to developing X apps. I remember what fun I had building XCDRoast on my Linux system. I didn't have Tix installed. Tix needed to be integrated with TCL. I had to rebuild TCL with debug turned on in order for Tix to integrate with it.
I may be forgetting a few of the details in this mess (nitpickers, have at it! we'll all be fascinated by your recall of arcana!) but I remember what a horrible mess it seemed at the time.
XCDRoast was great, once I had it installed.
For the record:
Microsoft included an entire separate CD-ROM of Visual C++ Version 1.52 in the shrinkwrapped box that Visual C++ 4.0 came in, because VC 4 can't build Win16 (or DOS) binaries.
The fact is, each of the separate Windows "fragments" represents a bigger 'market' than Free Software as a whole. So while it can be said the market is fragmented, each fragment is a big healthy bunch of customers for a product.
There was a transition period when software vendors felt it necessary to sell multiple versions (Win16 and Win32) of Windows programs in the same shrink-wrapped package. I bought a fax program packaged like that a few years back.
People hold onto and continue to use some of the more mature Win16 products (Office 4.3 is a good example) because they are solid programs that work well at what they're designed for. In a way, the high quality of Office 4 has undercut Microsoft's ability to sell newer versions. A happy customer isn't clamoring for an upgrade.
(yes, I know I've said incenderary things here. Some of the more unstable torches will doubtless go off now. Here's the first spoonful of baking soda to try to put out the fire: "Windoze~1 5UX")
Reactors are still being built and operated, in spite of the risk and the history of accidents, because of the Price-Anderson Act. In the early days of promoting "civillian nuclear power" the Military needed weapons grade plutonium. The only way to kickstart a civillian nuclear power industry (to produce that plutonium) was to grant blanket immunity for any potential nuclear accidents. The utilites could never have afforded the cost of liability insurance for as unknown and major of a risk as a major accident at a nuclear power plant.
So congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which grants blanket immunity to the power industry for nuclear accidents.
Civillian nuclear power wouldn't exist if the companies had to pay insurance premiums to operate the plants. (something people like to refer to as a free market) Thats how safe they are considered by insurance company actuaries. Of course, congress knows a lot more than the insurance industry. Or, they wanted more weapons grade plutonium and didn't care. Pick and choose which one you want to believe.
The men who were killed at Fermi, of course, were military personel. That is why you always hear "there have been no civilian deaths caused by nuclear power."
At least one of the dead men's heads and extremities had to be severed and buried as high level radioactive waste.
However, it's also 1910, and the only place to buy gasoline is at the hardware store. In one gallon tins.
Get out the soldering iron, then.
With no corporate interests selling MP3 players, you're looking at a format that won't have any players sold for it.
If players are produced, by smaller vendors, it will be in a "pirate satellite dish" kind of market. In other words, it won't go anywhere. If it does, it'll be taken down.
One thing worth pondering, in the light of the serious period companies with commercial Unices like HP and SGI are now facing, is wether the success of Linux is what's killing the companies. People don't have to go for a big bucks system anymore like a decade ago. They can throw Linux on a PII system for pennies on the dollar.
Linux certainly has changed the Unix market. It might even have hastened the death of Unix (as a viable commercial platform).
If they "give away the store" before going belly up, creditors might then take after Linux, one would think. One would think that anything that SGI GPLs will be credited to them, and creditors might justifiably claim it was a fire-sale move and get the technology transfer declared illegal. Maybe the GPL could see it's day in court.
Remember, no matter how much people might think of Linux and the GPL as a "buck the system, take it down" movement, it all rests on the validity of current copyright law. As such, GPL advocates have to play by the rule. Linux contributors are more "bought into the system" than many people are willing to recognize.
Oh, please.
Software for critical life-care situations isn't some web application that can crash and you just hit the reset switch.
There are design methodologies for high reliability software. And it isn't just throw it out into a bazaar and let a bunch of hackers pound away at it.
There are controls, oversight, audits. Everything is documented, and virtually everything is traceable.
Hint- people like it that way. You don't, but we'll give you a few years to catch a clue. You won't be let near any critical life care development anyway, with your attitude.
You know the saying:
If all you have is a hammer, all the world looks like nails and lumber.
I have already started moving away from Linux as an OS I want to run on a regular basis.
It seems in the last year like the focus of the "Linux community" has changed. The sentiment used to be that Microsoft was irrelevant. These days it seems to be a primary target. As more anything-but-Microsoft people crowd into the room, it becomes a less interesting place to spend any time. I also use Microsoft OSes on a daily basis, at work and home (at work I run builds across a network that involve OS/2 and Solaris systems). Integration is the name of the game these days, and people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and learn how to make it all work together are gonna be the ones who get ahead.
I have used Linux off and on since I plugged in the first edition of Yggdrasil's Plug-and-play Linux (Fall 1993 edition). I've tried periods of "total immersion" at home, and I've bought a commercial Motif (SWiM), Applixware, and Wabi, among other products. I've run Slackware, RedHat, and SuSE systems. Right now the Linux box I still run at home has Slackware 4.0 on it.
I've essentially moved to NetBSD for my Unix fix these days. My fastest "Unix-like" hardware has that OS installed. It's a tigher system, more thoroughly integrated, and it's the "Classic Unix" environment I enjoy using the most. I grew tired of the "Linux for the masses" sentiment, dumbed down GUI administration tools, etc. I am not anti-GUI per-se (I use Windows 98 and it can't get more gooey than that), I am just opposed to mediocre half-baked attempts at GUI tools, and that's what I seem coming out of places like Red Hat.
NetBSD lets me install a clean tight base system, and build the packages I need from source out of a well-defined 'ports' collection. Another benefit I feel in using NetBSD is that there aren't 10,000 sites all over the internet trying to yank me this way and that and tell me how to run the system. I can crack open any Unix administration book less than 15 years old and just read and learn. The other BSDs haven't seemed like an option to me either, though I have little experience with them. I've watched the FreeBSD usenet newsgroups gradually fill up with newbies complaining that their sound card, modem, etc. isn't working. The crowd may be arriving on that scene. No thanks.
Anyhow, all I am trying to describe in this article is what is right for me. I've grown weary of advocacy people who try to run everybody else's lives.
Really, I just need to go back down in the lab and start working on some of the hardware/firmware projects I have planned. Mostly these involve stuff single board and single chip designs, (Motorola, PIC, some Z80, etc) running hand coded assembly language. I'm an embedded programmer and a hardware/firmware guy. The high level stuff is just for running my schematic capture, emulators, eprom programmer, and cross assembler. My best efforts at coding are a combination of solder, wire-wrap, and assembly language anyhow.
The old "UNIX" license plates were intended as humor. People wanted a Unix license. So somebody produced one. Get rid of the GPL and we can have such fun again.
If we all showed up at big friendly 2600 meetings, whom would be left to "human engineer"? (translation- lie to, deceive, and steal from).