I don't think it is a matter of them injecting extra delay - I think the reasoning basically is that the users who rent a high number of DVDs per month pay the same fee as the users who only rent a few DVDs. So, the renters who rent just a few pay a hgher price for each DVD than those who rent more often. What do those renters get for paying more? Well, one thing Netflix can do is prioritize those people that rent fewer movies. This way, those customers who rent a lot get value from the service because of the flat fee, where customers who rent less often enjoy fast response time.
Honestly, while I usually agree with Slashdot on these kinds of things, I think what Netflix is doing is totally reasonable. Unless Netflix has been screwing people over in a big way that I haven't heard about yet (injecting delays just for the sake of delay, rather then merely prioritizing users who rent fewer DVDs), I'm happy they are trying to optimize their service and deliver value to all their users, not just those that want to rip the DVDs the day they get them and then return them.
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
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Songbird Flies Today
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I see this type of comment a lot here...it really isn't a valid observation.
In essence, you're correct, they don't want open source. But they do want the things that open source offers: upgraded, new clients that provide features that the community wants to see, lack of DRM, cross platform code (eventually), open standards, etc.
This is like saying the average driver doesn't care about having a new-fangled fancy hybrid engine. You're right, they don't. But they do like to believe they drive a car with fewer emissions that is better for the environment, they do like being able to drive in the carpool lane even if they are driving alone, they do like getting 40-50 MPG, and they do like getting the tax break.
So, while the benifits aren't synonymous with the method, the engine that drives the development (or car) determines its features, some of which are desirable to more people than only the set that understand the engine in-depth.
No, your statement is not true. Your statement said:
"Which is why HURD will never see the light of day in any substantial fashion. Philosophy doesn't yield code."
If you simply want to argue over the semantics of whether or not philosophy yields code or people yield code, read no further; I have nothing to say to you. The point of this post realtes to substance, not semantics. (And before you stop reading, ask yourself this: what is philosophy without people?)
Your second statement is clearly a generalization you're drawing from your first, and in incorrect one, at that. As GP alluded to, the GNU in GNU/Linux is all the utilities you use on the command line, up to and including the command line itself, and is under the copyright of the FSF. I haven't done recent SLOC counts on GNU vs. Linux, but I would be surprised if they weren't at least comparable - I'd expect that GNU actually has produced substantially more source code (that is used all the time by all manner of users and developers) than the Linux kernel itself these days. Back in 2002, RedHat 7.1 was studied and though the kernel was the largest single body of source (~2.5 million lines), there are GNU programs all over that quickly outstrip the kernel in sheer volume of source: gcc alone is huge (~900k lines), but emacs (~600k lines) and glibc (~600k lines) are both quite large as well. Those are only three GNU programs, the directory of FSF software contains (as an estimate) hundreds, including the Hurd itself.
Indeed, philosophy is a manner of viewing of the world and is expressed not by some abstract theoretical paper you write, but in how you choose to live and contribute your work to others. In this sense, philosophy is very much responsible for yielding code - do you honestly think that without the philosophical buy-in of its contributors, free software would be anything today?
Yeah, the whole thing is kind of weird. It's not like all the music on iTunes isn't already on the net for free...I'm not sure what DRM does to help things. If people want to get the music free instead of pay, they already can. All the DRM does is annoy the paying customers, and put off people like me who would be willing to pay, if it weren't for the DRM.
Sure it does. It just depends which side of the slope a company wants to be on after the dust settles. Currently, Linux is held back because of lack of application support, and companies don't develop applications because it has such a small market share. At some point, Linux will have enough users that it will be worth it to them to develop for it. They can either be recognized as a company that did so early on (id Software, Epic, Sun, NVidia, Introversion, Abode (somewhat), VMWare, etc.) which makes for a good reputation, or they can be viewed as a company that only did what they absolutely had to (Microsoft, Intuit, Blizzard, Adobe (somewhat), most everyone else, etc.).
It pays in terms of company reputation and customer loyalty to be in that first group and to be recognized as a leader that sees and adopts new, good technologies early on and supports their customers in doing so as well.
For a company that is internet based and uses Linux heavily on the backend, I'm kind of surprised they don't support Linux more in their product lines to give back something to the community that helped them start up.
I browsed through pack.google.com but didn't see any mention of a Linux offering now or in the future. I'd love to see Google Earth and Google Desktop on Linux, not to mention the video stuff.
When the Constitution was written, it wasn't written so that speech was only free so long as those words didn't make anyone uncomfortable, or were only convenient to everyone in power. It was written so that people could say whatever they liked (so long as they weren't endangering others, i.e. "FIRE!" in a crowded theater) without fear of it being a crime. There are some well known cases were saying certain things can lead to injury, huge monetary losses and even death. These are the cases we should spend time examining to see if we might possibly want to look into restricting speech.
But slowly, we are finding a way to to come up with clever excuses why "Free Speech" isn't such a good idea, and rationalize perfectly legal free speech into a felony (or some other crime).
This kid (man, whatever - he's 18) didn't pay anyone to do his bidding, he didn't automate some script that installed itself on people's computers to DDoS the server, he merely posted a link and suggested that people refresh the link to "crash the school's server." This is in the noise level, people.
I see a lot of analogies that argue that this should be wrong. But, for the most part, the analogies are simply not appropriate:
1) A lot of analogies talk about paying someone or setting a process in motion where no further human intervention is required (sometimes using people's computers without their knowledge as in a DDoS attack using zombie Windows machines). These are not valid because paying and/or automating the process makes you the proximate cause of whatever the action was. He was not the proximate cause in this case: there were a number of other people (hundreds?) that had to make the decision to visit his site, read it, click the link, and keep refreshing. They all could have perfectly well decided not to, and he had no way to further influence their decision. The decision was made by those people, not by the kid in question.
2) Another set of analogies talks about inciting behavior that is *illegal* - robbing a bank, killing someone, trespassing, etc. These are not valid because the action he suggested was perfectly legal - visit a link on the web and refresh the page mutliple times. Heck, I'd bet every Slashdotter does this multiple times a day with Slashdot itself.
The point is that he didn't have final say in what action was taken, he was not paying anyone to execute the action or aurtomating the process using a script, he was not the final decision maker that determined the outcome of whether someone executed his idea, and the idea was perfectly legal in the first place. He wrote an idea on a website and provided a link.
We need to be careful what we decide is a crime and not let the line slide too far. There are perfectly reasonable ways to deal with this: the actual posting of the blog is in no way a crime, and I certainly hope he gets a lawyer good enough to explain this to the judge. The school has the option to enforce their terms of use, as the blog post was posted from a school computer. As such, he violated that terms of use and can held accountable for that in terms of loss of computer priviledges and perhaps detention of other school-initiated internal action.
To tie up *criminal* law enforcement with this kind of noise-level transgression is the real crime. We need to be careful where we draw the line between civil matters and criminal matters. This of course segues perfectly into the copyright-infringement issue because that is often merely a civil matter, even though there are tons of warnings about the FBI chasing your ass down for copying a movie for personal use (i.e. not for sale to others). But I won't go there right now.
The point is that we need to handle these kinds of issues at the correct level, and with the correct resources. Using police resouces (nevermind the courts) to handle this really is a *crime*: those resources are better spent catching people who prey on other for their own gain (muggers, rapists, thieves). We will never totally eliminate those people, and every second we spend on this kid is a second farther we are from dealing with criminals that ruin people's lives.
My reaction exactly, except I use Linux instead. =) I know that a lot of users simply *need* Windows (or at least think they need Windows). Since I found that VMWare Player can create images and manage snapshots quite well, I've been happy to recommend running Windows inside Linux to my friends/family that feel the need. I might even set up a VMWare image for myself of XP when I get back home after the holidays.
Which leads me to my point: I wonder how Vista will handle VMWare. We've been hearing about all this crazy DRM (remember the story about the monitors having to support DRM?) and now rules about DVD drives, I wonder if VMWare can simply emulate a certain type of hardware inside the VM, and Windows would never have to know whether you're running "officially supported" hardware or not. It seems like the virtual machine market will be challenged with some of Vista's requirements regarding hardware. "Now supporting DRM emulation!" Yea!
I'm not sure I agree with this. In games (and movies) there is a natural tendency to move towards an illusion of 3 dimensions because the goal of those media is immersion: to make you feel as if you are "there". 3D is a natural way to go, since we tend to perceive the world in 3D. Of course, it is an unnatural act, because we choose to display those immersive environments on a 2D screen, so we naturally experience some sheer during transition.
But, with a computer operating environement, I simply don't see the attraction. The environment of a computer is not in the business of being immersive, or distracting you from reality. It is in the business of making information available to you as quickly and accurately as possible. This goal does not particularly lend itself to 3D - as long as we have had langauge, it has always been expressed in 2D, whether it be carved or painted on walls of caves, chiseled into stone, brushed onto papyrus, or printed on newsprint. Even now, as I type this, I do so onto a 2D digital "paper" that is my LCD monitor. Would 3D lend any additional utility? I can't think of any.
I attended JavaOne last May and went to a session on Looking Glass, Sun's 3D desktop environment. As much as it was attractive, it didn't really add a whole lot to everyday tasks. Sure, they could represent a filesystem in 3D, but it wasn't really any more efficient than midnight commander. You can "fold" away windows to the side of the display, rotating them back into the monitor to get them "out of the way", but it essentially boils down to window shading, only horizontally, rather than vertically.
Of course, there are exceptions. Sun demonstrated a music program where you could add instruments to a song as tracks, and control their volume and balance by moving them in 3D in relation to your real life speakers. To make something softer, you could move it further "into" the monitor. To make it only audible on the left speaker, you could move it to the left side of the screen. Quite novel, but certainly not an application that necessitates a 3D "desktop" environment. It could just as well be run as a standalone program in Windows, Linux, or Mac as they are today.
So while I agree that if we were to have a 3D desktop, it would be nice to have a 3D input device, neither seem to add much utility. Personally, I'm stunned that the multi-desktop (virtual desktop) navigation system hasn't made more inroads. I'm addicted to it in KDE, and Windows' powertool feels like a cheap hack by comparison. I'm stunned that neither Windows nor Mac come with it by default. Mac uses Expose, which strikes me as a complex work around to achieve a similar effect. In the future, I think we'll use other subtle advancements like virtual desktops to extend the functionaility of the user interface in ways that allow us to *organize* the information as we access and use it, rather than displaying it in some drastically different way, like a 3D desktop.
Funny you should mention it. In fact, there is a project called Democracy 2.0 that attempts to do exactly what you describe.
Though there is quite a bit of unpolished stuff, there is also a surprising amount of good ideas. Anarchy? I would say not, though perhaps not as organized as some might like. Makes for an interesting read in any case, especially given your post.
Have you even *read* Godel, Escher, Bach? The issue is quite a bit more complex than simply if we can "reverse engineer" the human brain - this presumes that the structure in our brains has a certain analog (digital?) in computers, which is far from certain. We can simulate certain activities that we usually associate with intellengence (playing chess), but *true* intelligence is far from given in this context.
Religious? This has nothing to do with religion as far as I can tell. =)
I'd say that we should jump off the same way we did with cell phones: basically only have one provider, and have roaming charges. What ends up happening is that you get the provider that supplies your city/area, and when you travel, you pay a little extra.
Later, after the infrastructure is in place, the companies will get competitive (as happened with cell phones) and start to drop the roaming charges and you end up basically having the equilvalent of a single, nationwide provider (sort of like we have now will cell - does anyone pay "roaming" anymore?)
I don't know if this would work, but I'd love to see ubiquitous wi-fi, even if it cost me a little extra.
At least in the case of software, more and more companies (like Blizzard and IBM) are asserting that the first sale doctrine does not apply because they are not selling the work to you, they are licensing it, and can thus prohibit reverse engineering, ripping, or just about anything they want in the license agreement. These arguments are winning in courts left and right, even thought in a lot of cases they call for end users to give up rights that are preserved for them in copyright law. (Look at IBM's license agreement for their Java VM for some interesting verbage about first sale, and the EFF has the (depressing) decisions in the bnetd case for examples of first sale being ignored).
This may or may not be true with movies/music, but the cases I've followed in software have always gone the big companies' way if the user agreed to the license. First sale in particular was shown to have no bearing in software "sales" because they were merely a licensing, not a sale.
Personally, I think the whole thing is a travesty and needs to be overhauled. But this is where we stand.
The expectation that the console should operate in a typical living room environment (in a carpeted area, near a TV, probably in an entertainment center) is not something that I (or anyone other consumer) made up. It is the operating environment in which the manufacturers of these units wish to compete.
Again: they are competing to sell me a device that operates in my living room. The expectation that it will work in a typical living room is NOT unreasonable, nor is it some fantasy that I, along with millions of other console owners, are engaging in. The consumers did not create the expectation, the manufactuers did.
So please, stop arguing that the expectation is defective, because MS and Sony sold that expectation right along with their consoles. Without it, many people simply wouldn't buy the product.
You know, it was MS (and Sony) that decided that this "media center" should be residing in the living room. It was *their* idea that gaming should be centered around the TV, rather than around the PC. It was *their* idea that the next-gen consoles should be psuedo-DVRs, DVD players, music jukeboxes AND gaming machines.
If they want to compete in that arena, where VCRs, DVD players, stereos, and the last generation of consoles lived (and every console before that), then they better make damn sure their hardware works in that environement. After all, *they* are the ones that want to compete in the living room. The console must conform to the entertainment center, not the other way around...the $400 purchase simply won't drive the design of a living room for 95% of the people buying one (that number was made up...but I'm sure it is a vast majority).
If this is not the case, then the XBox360, PS3 and whatever else just become another type of PC, with an entire area set up to accomodate that particular piece of hardware. Trust me when I say that this is not what most consumers want, and is certainly ot what MS (Sony) wants. If we are going to do that, just get a nice PC and game there. At least PCs are upgradeable as you go along to accomodate new requirements as games come out.
The solution? Design a friggin' power supply that doesn't overheat when it sits on a carpeted floor, or in the back of a entertainment center. It's been done thousands of times before, and we need to see this for what it is: a defect. Just like the release of the PSP, just because the manual says that "8 or fewer dead/stuck pixels are normal and not a defect." doesn't *actually mean* that 8 or fewer dead/stuck pixels isn't a defect. MS can tell us that the power supply should be placed in the bottom shelf of your freezer to "properly" set up the XBox360, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a problem with the unit.
NOTE: I am not a bitter Xbox360 owner (I don't own one at all), just simply observing from the sidelines. I agree people should do their research, but that doesn't mean the company can make whatever demands they want on the consumer in the manual and they become reasonable.
That uses one buffer (i.e. KDE's or Gnome's buffer). Not only is it standard, but it is the exact same shortcuts as those used in Windows!
X's buffer is used by: Select: Copy Middle-mouse : Paste
You don't need to know about one to use the other. They work independently of one another. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I've never has a problem cutting and pasting between application under Gnome, KDE and Ion3.
Config files? System wide are in/etc. User config files are in ~, usually as.application or, perhaps, in the case of KDE, in.kde subdirectory. Again, in almost 8 years of use, finding a config file has never been an issue.
I find it odd you would choose these things to complain about. Now, if you want to talk about wireless drivers, it's a whole different ballgame... =)
Well, you touch on the heart of the debate and treat as though the resolution were a fait accompli. Here is another section of the article:
Every week, the letters page carries columns of worried correspondence: "Dear Editor, TV is very bad for our country... it controls our minds... and makes [us] crazy. The enemy is right here with us in our own living room. People behave like the actors, and are now anxious, greedy and discontent."
This is in direct contradiction of one of my beliefs, and even some beliefs that are taught to even the youngest members of our society: personal responsiblity. The TV didn't make these people do anything, they did it of their own volition. The lesson we teach our children is to think on their own: "If little Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you jump off too?" We reinforce this mantra time after time in various ways: your decisions are your own; don't blindly follow what you see others doing.
And yet, I find we continually want to blame some outside source for the stupid things we do. This is simply a new form of the fundamental attribution error, except it is on a much larger scale.
What this really all leads to is two camps. There are those who believe that we can prevent crime by isolating people from the evils of the world (as seen in this article; I like to call it the "Garden of Eden syndrome"). Once the idea has been put in someone's mind, it then requires an internal filtering process to occur: is the behavior I saw others engage in in appropriate for me? But if the idea never reaches you, then you don't have to filter anything yourself....you can simply rely on someone "greater" to decide what you should see.
I don't hold to that. I believe this comes down to freedom and choice. I should be free to see and read all kinds of ideas. With that freedom comes the responsibility to filter appropriately and determine how to act. If others wish to blame their poor behavior on those around them, the TV shows they watched or the games they played, they are free to do that. But, in the end, their behavior was the result of their choices, and it is better to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions than to push that responsiblity off on someone who doesn't even know you exist (the maker of the game, the creator of the TV show, etc.)
That is my philsophical take on your post. From a logical perspective, you (and the article) are making the fundamental logical mistake of post hoc ergo propter hoc: just because the crime occurred after TV was made available does not mean the crime was caused by the TV's appearance. I think the post above mine treats this topic better than I can, though I thought I would point it out as an aside to my main point.
There are actually a few errors, unless I'm gravely mistaken. First, the article talks about SUSE when the.pdf only mentioned RHEL3 in any meaningful way. You've already mentioned this.
Also, I never found any mention the 68% figure quoted in the article. In fact, there is no mention of the subject of upgrading in support of business needs at all; it deals only with deployment/use of a database server. Not to mentioned that the Windows system in the study is Server 2003, not Windows 2000, as is mentioned in the article.
In fact, now that I think about it, they MUST have linked to the wrong.pdf, because the study I read (linked above AND in the original article) have nothing to do with the statsitics quoted. (The link I followed is here.) Further, the.pdf was written in June 2005, but the article is from November...something is up...
Looking at the Microsoft site, they make no mention of those statistics either in regards to the linked report. Their summary page is here and links back to the study the article links to.
In fact, I did several google searches (and MS searches!) to try to find ANY study in the Microsoft whitepapers section that has any mention of upgrading from SUSE Linux 8 to 9, or a mention of "hitting the wall", or a mentioned on Linux taking 68% longer than Windows to upgrade to suit business needs. I found no results. In fact, there was only one result on the entire Microsoft site regarding SUSE Enterprise Linux 9, and it wasn't relevent. Oh, and Vnunet didn't provide a copy of the report as the submitter states...that link goes back to an (incorrect) page at Microsoft.
In short, can I read the study that this article is talking about? I'm curious to see what it says... =)
Slashdot Mirror
It was a Kaypro II running CP/M. Wordstar, EasyCalc, BASIC, Ladder, Castle and Catch-um. Nice!
I don't think it is a matter of them injecting extra delay - I think the reasoning basically is that the users who rent a high number of DVDs per month pay the same fee as the users who only rent a few DVDs. So, the renters who rent just a few pay a hgher price for each DVD than those who rent more often. What do those renters get for paying more? Well, one thing Netflix can do is prioritize those people that rent fewer movies. This way, those customers who rent a lot get value from the service because of the flat fee, where customers who rent less often enjoy fast response time.
Honestly, while I usually agree with Slashdot on these kinds of things, I think what Netflix is doing is totally reasonable. Unless Netflix has been screwing people over in a big way that I haven't heard about yet (injecting delays just for the sake of delay, rather then merely prioritizing users who rent fewer DVDs), I'm happy they are trying to optimize their service and deliver value to all their users, not just those that want to rip the DVDs the day they get them and then return them.
I see this type of comment a lot here...it really isn't a valid observation.
In essence, you're correct, they don't want open source. But they do want the things that open source offers: upgraded, new clients that provide features that the community wants to see, lack of DRM, cross platform code (eventually), open standards, etc.
This is like saying the average driver doesn't care about having a new-fangled fancy hybrid engine. You're right, they don't. But they do like to believe they drive a car with fewer emissions that is better for the environment, they do like being able to drive in the carpool lane even if they are driving alone, they do like getting 40-50 MPG, and they do like getting the tax break.
So, while the benifits aren't synonymous with the method, the engine that drives the development (or car) determines its features, some of which are desirable to more people than only the set that understand the engine in-depth.
"Which is why HURD will never see the light of day in any substantial fashion. Philosophy doesn't yield code."
If you simply want to argue over the semantics of whether or not philosophy yields code or people yield code, read no further; I have nothing to say to you. The point of this post realtes to substance, not semantics. (And before you stop reading, ask yourself this: what is philosophy without people?) Your second statement is clearly a generalization you're drawing from your first, and in incorrect one, at that. As GP alluded to, the GNU in GNU/Linux is all the utilities you use on the command line, up to and including the command line itself, and is under the copyright of the FSF. I haven't done recent SLOC counts on GNU vs. Linux, but I would be surprised if they weren't at least comparable - I'd expect that GNU actually has produced substantially more source code (that is used all the time by all manner of users and developers) than the Linux kernel itself these days. Back in 2002, RedHat 7.1 was studied and though the kernel was the largest single body of source (~2.5 million lines), there are GNU programs all over that quickly outstrip the kernel in sheer volume of source: gcc alone is huge (~900k lines), but emacs (~600k lines) and glibc (~600k lines) are both quite large as well. Those are only three GNU programs, the directory of FSF software contains (as an estimate) hundreds, including the Hurd itself.
Indeed, philosophy is a manner of viewing of the world and is expressed not by some abstract theoretical paper you write, but in how you choose to live and contribute your work to others. In this sense, philosophy is very much responsible for yielding code - do you honestly think that without the philosophical buy-in of its contributors, free software would be anything today?
Consider spamgourmet.com.
Yeah, especially since the article even says that Lexar already struck a deal with MS to license FAT for their drives in anticipation of this outcome.
Yeah, the whole thing is kind of weird. It's not like all the music on iTunes isn't already on the net for free...I'm not sure what DRM does to help things. If people want to get the music free instead of pay, they already can. All the DRM does is annoy the paying customers, and put off people like me who would be willing to pay, if it weren't for the DRM.
Sure it does. It just depends which side of the slope a company wants to be on after the dust settles. Currently, Linux is held back because of lack of application support, and companies don't develop applications because it has such a small market share. At some point, Linux will have enough users that it will be worth it to them to develop for it. They can either be recognized as a company that did so early on (id Software, Epic, Sun, NVidia, Introversion, Abode (somewhat), VMWare, etc.) which makes for a good reputation, or they can be viewed as a company that only did what they absolutely had to (Microsoft, Intuit, Blizzard, Adobe (somewhat), most everyone else, etc.).
It pays in terms of company reputation and customer loyalty to be in that first group and to be recognized as a leader that sees and adopts new, good technologies early on and supports their customers in doing so as well.
...Linux support?
For a company that is internet based and uses Linux heavily on the backend, I'm kind of surprised they don't support Linux more in their product lines to give back something to the community that helped them start up.
I browsed through pack.google.com but didn't see any mention of a Linux offering now or in the future. I'd love to see Google Earth and Google Desktop on Linux, not to mention the video stuff.
Anyone heard anything about this?
Listen, there is this thing called "Free Speech".
When the Constitution was written, it wasn't written so that speech was only free so long as those words didn't make anyone uncomfortable, or were only convenient to everyone in power. It was written so that people could say whatever they liked (so long as they weren't endangering others, i.e. "FIRE!" in a crowded theater) without fear of it being a crime. There are some well known cases were saying certain things can lead to injury, huge monetary losses and even death. These are the cases we should spend time examining to see if we might possibly want to look into restricting speech.
But slowly, we are finding a way to to come up with clever excuses why "Free Speech" isn't such a good idea, and rationalize perfectly legal free speech into a felony (or some other crime).
This kid (man, whatever - he's 18) didn't pay anyone to do his bidding, he didn't automate some script that installed itself on people's computers to DDoS the server, he merely posted a link and suggested that people refresh the link to "crash the school's server." This is in the noise level, people.
I see a lot of analogies that argue that this should be wrong. But, for the most part, the analogies are simply not appropriate:
1) A lot of analogies talk about paying someone or setting a process in motion where no further human intervention is required (sometimes using people's computers without their knowledge as in a DDoS attack using zombie Windows machines). These are not valid because paying and/or automating the process makes you the proximate cause of whatever the action was. He was not the proximate cause in this case: there were a number of other people (hundreds?) that had to make the decision to visit his site, read it, click the link, and keep refreshing. They all could have perfectly well decided not to, and he had no way to further influence their decision. The decision was made by those people, not by the kid in question.
2) Another set of analogies talks about inciting behavior that is *illegal* - robbing a bank, killing someone, trespassing, etc. These are not valid because the action he suggested was perfectly legal - visit a link on the web and refresh the page mutliple times. Heck, I'd bet every Slashdotter does this multiple times a day with Slashdot itself.
The point is that he didn't have final say in what action was taken, he was not paying anyone to execute the action or aurtomating the process using a script, he was not the final decision maker that determined the outcome of whether someone executed his idea, and the idea was perfectly legal in the first place. He wrote an idea on a website and provided a link.
We need to be careful what we decide is a crime and not let the line slide too far. There are perfectly reasonable ways to deal with this: the actual posting of the blog is in no way a crime, and I certainly hope he gets a lawyer good enough to explain this to the judge. The school has the option to enforce their terms of use, as the blog post was posted from a school computer. As such, he violated that terms of use and can held accountable for that in terms of loss of computer priviledges and perhaps detention of other school-initiated internal action.
To tie up *criminal* law enforcement with this kind of noise-level transgression is the real crime. We need to be careful where we draw the line between civil matters and criminal matters. This of course segues perfectly into the copyright-infringement issue because that is often merely a civil matter, even though there are tons of warnings about the FBI chasing your ass down for copying a movie for personal use (i.e. not for sale to others). But I won't go there right now.
The point is that we need to handle these kinds of issues at the correct level, and with the correct resources. Using police resouces (nevermind the courts) to handle this really is a *crime*: those resources are better spent catching people who prey on other for their own gain (muggers, rapists, thieves). We will never totally eliminate those people, and every second we spend on this kid is a second farther we are from dealing with criminals that ruin people's lives.
My reaction exactly, except I use Linux instead. =) I know that a lot of users simply *need* Windows (or at least think they need Windows). Since I found that VMWare Player can create images and manage snapshots quite well, I've been happy to recommend running Windows inside Linux to my friends/family that feel the need. I might even set up a VMWare image for myself of XP when I get back home after the holidays.
Which leads me to my point: I wonder how Vista will handle VMWare. We've been hearing about all this crazy DRM (remember the story about the monitors having to support DRM?) and now rules about DVD drives, I wonder if VMWare can simply emulate a certain type of hardware inside the VM, and Windows would never have to know whether you're running "officially supported" hardware or not. It seems like the virtual machine market will be challenged with some of Vista's requirements regarding hardware. "Now supporting DRM emulation!" Yea!
Well met. Of course, you are correct. I may have been a bit tired when I posted that, or it may have just been a mistake. =) Thanks...
I'm not sure I agree with this. In games (and movies) there is a natural tendency to move towards an illusion of 3 dimensions because the goal of those media is immersion: to make you feel as if you are "there". 3D is a natural way to go, since we tend to perceive the world in 3D. Of course, it is an unnatural act, because we choose to display those immersive environments on a 2D screen, so we naturally experience some sheer during transition.
But, with a computer operating environement, I simply don't see the attraction. The environment of a computer is not in the business of being immersive, or distracting you from reality. It is in the business of making information available to you as quickly and accurately as possible. This goal does not particularly lend itself to 3D - as long as we have had langauge, it has always been expressed in 2D, whether it be carved or painted on walls of caves, chiseled into stone, brushed onto papyrus, or printed on newsprint. Even now, as I type this, I do so onto a 2D digital "paper" that is my LCD monitor. Would 3D lend any additional utility? I can't think of any.
I attended JavaOne last May and went to a session on Looking Glass, Sun's 3D desktop environment. As much as it was attractive, it didn't really add a whole lot to everyday tasks. Sure, they could represent a filesystem in 3D, but it wasn't really any more efficient than midnight commander. You can "fold" away windows to the side of the display, rotating them back into the monitor to get them "out of the way", but it essentially boils down to window shading, only horizontally, rather than vertically.
Of course, there are exceptions. Sun demonstrated a music program where you could add instruments to a song as tracks, and control their volume and balance by moving them in 3D in relation to your real life speakers. To make something softer, you could move it further "into" the monitor. To make it only audible on the left speaker, you could move it to the left side of the screen. Quite novel, but certainly not an application that necessitates a 3D "desktop" environment. It could just as well be run as a standalone program in Windows, Linux, or Mac as they are today.
So while I agree that if we were to have a 3D desktop, it would be nice to have a 3D input device, neither seem to add much utility. Personally, I'm stunned that the multi-desktop (virtual desktop) navigation system hasn't made more inroads. I'm addicted to it in KDE, and Windows' powertool feels like a cheap hack by comparison. I'm stunned that neither Windows nor Mac come with it by default. Mac uses Expose, which strikes me as a complex work around to achieve a similar effect. In the future, I think we'll use other subtle advancements like virtual desktops to extend the functionaility of the user interface in ways that allow us to *organize* the information as we access and use it, rather than displaying it in some drastically different way, like a 3D desktop.
Though there is quite a bit of unpolished stuff, there is also a surprising amount of good ideas. Anarchy? I would say not, though perhaps not as organized as some might like. Makes for an interesting read in any case, especially given your post.
Wow, if that's true, it should have it's own Slashdot headline, and we should probably notify the entire population of the planet:
"Dictionaries never were and never will be a source of information about the english language!"
Good thing they're useful as firestarter!
By the way, it should be "English" language...look it up if you don't believe me. =)
Have you even *read* Godel, Escher, Bach? The issue is quite a bit more complex than simply if we can "reverse engineer" the human brain - this presumes that the structure in our brains has a certain analog (digital?) in computers, which is far from certain. We can simulate certain activities that we usually associate with intellengence (playing chess), but *true* intelligence is far from given in this context.
Religious? This has nothing to do with religion as far as I can tell. =)
Good points.
I'd say that we should jump off the same way we did with cell phones: basically only have one provider, and have roaming charges. What ends up happening is that you get the provider that supplies your city/area, and when you travel, you pay a little extra.
Later, after the infrastructure is in place, the companies will get competitive (as happened with cell phones) and start to drop the roaming charges and you end up basically having the equilvalent of a single, nationwide provider (sort of like we have now will cell - does anyone pay "roaming" anymore?)
I don't know if this would work, but I'd love to see ubiquitous wi-fi, even if it cost me a little extra.
Simply not true.
At least in the case of software, more and more companies (like Blizzard and IBM) are asserting that the first sale doctrine does not apply because they are not selling the work to you, they are licensing it, and can thus prohibit reverse engineering, ripping, or just about anything they want in the license agreement. These arguments are winning in courts left and right, even thought in a lot of cases they call for end users to give up rights that are preserved for them in copyright law. (Look at IBM's license agreement for their Java VM for some interesting verbage about first sale, and the EFF has the (depressing) decisions in the bnetd case for examples of first sale being ignored).
This may or may not be true with movies/music, but the cases I've followed in software have always gone the big companies' way if the user agreed to the license. First sale in particular was shown to have no bearing in software "sales" because they were merely a licensing, not a sale.
Personally, I think the whole thing is a travesty and needs to be overhauled. But this is where we stand.
The expectation that the console should operate in a typical living room environment (in a carpeted area, near a TV, probably in an entertainment center) is not something that I (or anyone other consumer) made up. It is the operating environment in which the manufacturers of these units wish to compete.
Again: they are competing to sell me a device that operates in my living room. The expectation that it will work in a typical living room is NOT unreasonable, nor is it some fantasy that I, along with millions of other console owners, are engaging in. The consumers did not create the expectation, the manufactuers did.
So please, stop arguing that the expectation is defective, because MS and Sony sold that expectation right along with their consoles. Without it, many people simply wouldn't buy the product.
You know, it was MS (and Sony) that decided that this "media center" should be residing in the living room. It was *their* idea that gaming should be centered around the TV, rather than around the PC. It was *their* idea that the next-gen consoles should be psuedo-DVRs, DVD players, music jukeboxes AND gaming machines.
If they want to compete in that arena, where VCRs, DVD players, stereos, and the last generation of consoles lived (and every console before that), then they better make damn sure their hardware works in that environement. After all, *they* are the ones that want to compete in the living room. The console must conform to the entertainment center, not the other way around...the $400 purchase simply won't drive the design of a living room for 95% of the people buying one (that number was made up...but I'm sure it is a vast majority).
If this is not the case, then the XBox360, PS3 and whatever else just become another type of PC, with an entire area set up to accomodate that particular piece of hardware. Trust me when I say that this is not what most consumers want, and is certainly ot what MS (Sony) wants. If we are going to do that, just get a nice PC and game there. At least PCs are upgradeable as you go along to accomodate new requirements as games come out.
The solution? Design a friggin' power supply that doesn't overheat when it sits on a carpeted floor, or in the back of a entertainment center. It's been done thousands of times before, and we need to see this for what it is: a defect. Just like the release of the PSP, just because the manual says that "8 or fewer dead/stuck pixels are normal and not a defect." doesn't *actually mean* that 8 or fewer dead/stuck pixels isn't a defect. MS can tell us that the power supply should be placed in the bottom shelf of your freezer to "properly" set up the XBox360, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a problem with the unit.
NOTE: I am not a bitter Xbox360 owner (I don't own one at all), just simply observing from the sidelines. I agree people should do their research, but that doesn't mean the company can make whatever demands they want on the consumer in the manual and they become reasonable.
Every PS3 hard drive is shipping with Linux onboard.
That was awesome! I'm surprised it took the crowd at /. that long to get to it! =)
Copy: Ctrl-C
/etc. User config files are in ~, usually as .application or, perhaps, in the case of KDE, in .kde subdirectory. Again, in almost 8 years of use, finding a config file has never been an issue.
Cut: Ctrl-X
Paste: Ctrl-V
That uses one buffer (i.e. KDE's or Gnome's buffer). Not only is it standard, but it is the exact same shortcuts as those used in Windows!
X's buffer is used by:
Select: Copy
Middle-mouse : Paste
You don't need to know about one to use the other. They work independently of one another. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I've never has a problem cutting and pasting between application under Gnome, KDE and Ion3.
Config files? System wide are in
I find it odd you would choose these things to complain about. Now, if you want to talk about wireless drivers, it's a whole different ballgame... =)
This is in direct contradiction of one of my beliefs, and even some beliefs that are taught to even the youngest members of our society: personal responsiblity. The TV didn't make these people do anything, they did it of their own volition. The lesson we teach our children is to think on their own: "If little Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you jump off too?" We reinforce this mantra time after time in various ways: your decisions are your own; don't blindly follow what you see others doing.
And yet, I find we continually want to blame some outside source for the stupid things we do. This is simply a new form of the fundamental attribution error, except it is on a much larger scale.
What this really all leads to is two camps. There are those who believe that we can prevent crime by isolating people from the evils of the world (as seen in this article; I like to call it the "Garden of Eden syndrome"). Once the idea has been put in someone's mind, it then requires an internal filtering process to occur: is the behavior I saw others engage in in appropriate for me? But if the idea never reaches you, then you don't have to filter anything yourself....you can simply rely on someone "greater" to decide what you should see.
I don't hold to that. I believe this comes down to freedom and choice. I should be free to see and read all kinds of ideas. With that freedom comes the responsibility to filter appropriately and determine how to act. If others wish to blame their poor behavior on those around them, the TV shows they watched or the games they played, they are free to do that. But, in the end, their behavior was the result of their choices, and it is better to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions than to push that responsiblity off on someone who doesn't even know you exist (the maker of the game, the creator of the TV show, etc.)
That is my philsophical take on your post. From a logical perspective, you (and the article) are making the fundamental logical mistake of post hoc ergo propter hoc: just because the crime occurred after TV was made available does not mean the crime was caused by the TV's appearance. I think the post above mine treats this topic better than I can, though I thought I would point it out as an aside to my main point.
Also, I never found any mention the 68% figure quoted in the article. In fact, there is no mention of the subject of upgrading in support of business needs at all; it deals only with deployment/use of a database server. Not to mentioned that the Windows system in the study is Server 2003, not Windows 2000, as is mentioned in the article.
In fact, now that I think about it, they MUST have linked to the wrong .pdf, because the study I read (linked above AND in the original article) have nothing to do with the statsitics quoted. (The link I followed is here.) Further, the .pdf was written in June 2005, but the article is from November...something is up...
Looking at the Microsoft site, they make no mention of those statistics either in regards to the linked report. Their summary page is here and links back to the study the article links to.
In fact, I did several google searches (and MS searches!) to try to find ANY study in the Microsoft whitepapers section that has any mention of upgrading from SUSE Linux 8 to 9, or a mention of "hitting the wall", or a mentioned on Linux taking 68% longer than Windows to upgrade to suit business needs. I found no results. In fact, there was only one result on the entire Microsoft site regarding SUSE Enterprise Linux 9, and it wasn't relevent. Oh, and Vnunet didn't provide a copy of the report as the submitter states...that link goes back to an (incorrect) page at Microsoft.
In short, can I read the study that this article is talking about? I'm curious to see what it says... =)