Actually, IIRC, the Mac OS version of Office is really more or less a separate product. They don't share much of a codebase at all (according to something I read long ago that I can no longer attribute or back up).
If there were ever to be an Office on Linux, my money would be on it being a port from the OS X Office, not the Win32 Office. I don't know which OS X API they've used, but such a port would still have at least some aspects of a simple Unix-to-Unix port.
They don't like the DRM scheme their favorite publisher offers
I think that's one major problem right there: I don't have a favorite publisher, and I doubt that most other people do as well. (Unless maybe you count O'Reilly, but then that's different). When talking about materials other than technical manuals (e.g., fiction, non-technical non-fiction), I buy books b/c they interest me, and rarely if ever pay attention to the publisher. Therefore, publisher-specific DRM schemes are a nuisance. I couldn't care less about the publisher, or the specific DRM scheme they've chosen to implement.
ISPs will either quit messing with packets to and from their customers, or customers will become so harassed by ISPs that do so and fear lawsuits that they'll leave in droves. It's a tough cure, I'll grant you.
Yeah, I'd say! But I don't quite follow your logic. You seemed to imply in your original post that making ISPs responsible for the actions of their users will lead to the ISPs no longer messing with traffic...but I don't see B naturally following from A there. I think it's just as likely (if not more) that the ISPs, faced with possible lawsuits on the one hand and freed from any responsibility to provide equal, unbiased service on the other, will start to not only quietly drop packets (as they apparently already do), but also actually shut down ports left and right. "You'll get port 80 and you'll like it, b/c all those other ports are just used by pirates, hackers and bandwidth thieves, and you're not one of those, are you?"
In other words, I can see how being freed from the possibility of being called a common carrier would cause ISPs to become more evil, but I don't see how it gives them an incentive to become less evil, and it's this confusion that led me to suggest (perhaps rudely) that you don't know what "common carrier" means. Your quote above, about ISPs either leaving traffic alone or having customers leave in droves, is probably true, but I think it can (and will) happen completely independently of the common carrier status of the ISP. I don't see how it's not an orthogonal concern. It depends more on having a non-monopolistic environment where real competition exists within a market.
(Also, to be clear (and you may already know this), most of these ISPs don't actually have common carrier status at the moment...the current set of court rulings on the matter are contradictory and somewhat absurd, making a distinction between an ISP and an "information service" when both are offering the same service, just via different physical media. The ISPs that aren't common carriers already (like cable providers) don't really want it, or so I've read...it offers them some protection, but also some burdens they'd rather not have, like the onerous responsibility not to discriminate in a non-competitive way. The jury is still out about whether they should be common carriers, though if common carrier ends up meaning what I suspect it will when applied to digital communications, I tend to think that they should. So anyway, this is partly just a theoretical disucssion, b/c you can't really pull common carrier status from a group that doesn't have it).
I hope this was a troll. This has got to be the most ass-backward wrong thing I've heard on Slashdot in some time...
Do you really want your ISP breathing down your neck about what you do with the bandwidth you paid for b/c they're afraid that they'll be sued for what you do? What you suggest will have the exact opposite effect from what you seem to think. I suspect that perhaps you don't understand what common carrier status actually means. (Your choice of the word "legal theory" to describe it seems to back up that suspicion).
Any event handlers that access form controls now throw exceptions unless they're specifically commanded not to, since the controls aren't thread-safe.
It has always been well-documented that you were in undefined behavior land if you tried this, so you can't very well complain now that the system is actually calling you on it. It's trying to _help_ you identify code that has undefined behavior. By just shutting off those exceptions, you're effectively plugging your ears and closing your eyes and saying, "I can't see you! I can't hear you!" while the water rises around you.
It also becomes somewhat harder to debug concurrency issues when one of those zillion Invoke() calls that now litter your code decides to deadlock, since things that weren't waiting to join() other threads now are, and it's out of your hands.
Use BeginInvoke instead of Invoke unless you need synchronous behavior, and if you do need synchronous behavior, are you really sure you should be using separate threads? If your code is littered with Invokes now, then 2.0 wasn't the problem -- you had a bad concurrency design to begin with.
I don't understand why everyone keeps using the word "port" about this WMF thing. There seems to be a massive amount of (willful?) misunderstanding here. Do you seriously believe that Microsoft starts from scratch every time they release a new Windows version? (That's not really directed at the parent poster, who apparently gets it, but rather to everyone who's been using the word "port" as if Microsoft was doing the equivalent of moving code from BSD to Linux).
Microsoft has three operating systems that share the Windows name, and only two of those are still sold: CE and NT. Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista are all succeeding versions of NT given different names by Marketing. (IIRC, they are NT 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and ???, respectively).
So, buggy NT code was never "ported" to 2000, XP or Vista anymore than some bug or feature in Linux 2.6 was "ported" from Linux 1.2. Vista is not a new OS. It's NT 6. (I don't have access to a Vista beta, so somebody who does could call GetVersionEx and correct me if I'm wrong...but if I am, it'll be b/c Vista is NT 5.3 or 5.4, not 6.0). I would be more surprised if the first beta of Vista _didn't_ have this problem, b/c that would imply that Microsoft really did already know about the problem.
If you use something like dyndns.org to run a personal server from your home even w/ a dynamic IP address, you want a low TTL (mine is 5 min) so that, when your IP address changes, you've only (theoretically) got 5 minutes of downtime.
Of course, it may be that many who will post "Right on!" comments just to be at the top of the list really want to see their names there at the top. I don't usually see first posts by Anonymous Coward (though more prolific slashdotters may see patterns I have not noticed). An anonymous voting system on the quality of the articles may be useful in and of itself, but I don't know that it would get anywhere near solving the actual problem of idiotic first posts. I thought that was what moderation was for...
"Who defines the questions that define you as a member of the voting elite?"
Who indeed? Direct voting on that would definately not be a possibility; everyone would vote for the easy questions;-)
I personally think, however, that to break the possible voting "classes" down into the "intellectually superior" and the "feeble minded underclass" is a bit naive (sp?). People run the whole range of sensibility and education.
Even given the class premise, though, I don't quite follow your argument. You seem to be very much against legislation by the elite, but then you defend the American system of government, which is set up quite that way: legislation by "elite", but where these elite are chosen by the people as a whole. I'm not holding a flamethrower; I just want to know specifically what you mean. I think that maybe you're confusing 'legislation' with 'rule'. No one wants to be *ruled* by the more intelligent among us, but I'm sure that everyone would prefer that the people who's job it is to take the time to learn about and vote on the issues be educated.
This is very similar to the modern day electoral college used to elect the president. And it may turn out just the same; how many people are really consciously aware that, when they vote for president, they're actually voting for someone else, a proxy, who has said that he will probably vote for a particular president?
This actually sounds like a very intruiging (sp?) system. However, I would have to ask, in town meetings, those who have a compelling interest in debating must actually go somewhere and debate, don't they? And then, who specifically gets to vote? Whoever is there? I think that with electronic democracy, you would have quite a bit of "Hey, man, there's an vote tonight on 'blah' and I need your support. Vote 'yes'." You might have people calling all their friends and telling them to spend five minutes going to a web site and voting to support something that doesn't even affect them. It's much easier to get your friends and acquantances, or anyone who knows you as a biggie in the community, to help you out in votes where they themselves might not usually want to vote. It would be, in other words, the same political system we have now, with political leaders and followers, but the best idea doesn't necessarily win; the belief proposed by the guy with the most followers does.
Your ideas do sound reasonable, and much of what I said depends on the relative maturity of the community (not in age but rather in intelligence). It might work; I'd be interested to hear about experiments where such a system is being tried.
"Maybe there should be an 'I don't care' option in addition to yes or no."
This is one of the functions of the party system: give those who don't care or don't know or can't decide about an issue a consistent stance in line with that of the party.
If those who think alike are in the same party, then it stands to reason that, had they an opinion, it would be the same one held by the party. This doesn't always happen of course, and the instances where it does not are usually newsworthy (politicians switching party because of continual disagreement, dissenters in impeachment trials, etc.), so the public hears about them more. But in the vast majority of issues where a politician might not care about or be knowledgable of an issue, their vote is decided by the party's vote. Politicians in America need to take a side on most issues, even those that they don't care or know about, because politicians with weak or inconsistent voting records tend to get cast aside. I don't know whether this is good or bad, really...you could call say that the public forces politicians to take sides on issues in which they have no business taking a side, but also that this public pressure forces politicians to think about issues they wouldn't normally ponder if they were free to only vote on issues they care about. I think, probably, that the second possibility is flawed because, as I said, they don't necessarily have to think about those issues; they just have to vote with the party.
On the national level, the big problem with purely-democratic electronic democracy is that it would require that everyone who's voting directly be educated on what they're voting on in order to vote intelligently. One of the reasons that the US is a republic as well as a democracy, ie. the reasons why we have a legislative body, is the bad roads and slow travel prevalent 200 years ago, as stated in the prediction. However, the body also exists to create an intelligent "firewall" of sorts between the everyday man and the law. In a recent Slashdot post, someone stated that, in order to survive with AI, every single person must achieve the equivalent of a college education (I think it was Clarke, actually), and it was widely agreed that this simply would *not* happen. I think direct democracy is similar; for it to work, the vast majority of Americans would have to have a college-equivalent education. As desirable as this would be (personally, anyway), I too believe this won't happen, and therefore, the vast majority of people will either be too ignorant of the issues or simply too stupid (yes, there are stupid people in the world, unfortunately) to vote intelligently on legislation.
It is the job of the representative in the US to learn enough about an issue to vote intelligently on it when it comes up. One of the functions of the party system is to provide a party platform for representatives to join because even someone who makes it his or her job to learn about legislation issues can't keep up with absolutely everything (without sacrificing depth of knowledge). Of course, there can be some debate as to how well representatives perform in this respect, but I can only assume that they still make better decisions than the average Joe who doesn't begin to have time to gain in in-depth knowledge of an issue. To tell the truth, I myself don't want to have to gain an in-depth knowledge of every issue that comes up, but rather only those that matter or are of interest to me. And I'm sure that most people in the US would rather handle their own business as well. The point: proper legislation is a full time job.
I think that probably a form of direct democracy will prevail in the future. Local governments seem like better candidates for direct democracy to work (it has worked in many communities from day one in town meetings and such). But I think nationally, and even in the state and county/province level, there will still be a need for professional legislators. I'd rather have an educated firewall, even a partisan and sometimes petty one, between the public and the law than not.
The whole point of doing this to reduce illegal workers is kind of a moot point: employers who don't require background checks now won't require background checks with the new cards.
How can you say that you lose your identity when someone can tell, with little room to doubt, that you are who you say you are? Is your identity something which can only be defined by your ability to lie about who you are?
As far as the legalities go, something like this would be a good thing for security, and would inevitably result in legislation to limit what can be done with the inforamation aside from simply securely verifying that you are who you say you are. The legislation, given that the country seems to, horribly, be going very conservative (whatever that means; it's too much of a buzzword to carry a very strict meaning), is likely to be fairly strict about just what the information can be used for. As far as being charged for copyright violation for having kids, so what? The lawsuit will die in court and the prosecution will be shamed by pretty much everyone in the world (says the prophet). Lawsuits like that *are* going to happen; what people have to remember is, they're not likely to be won by the prosecution. The supreme court will not likely allow something so idiodic to stand, and even if they let it, congress will receive so much pressure to change the laws thereafter that it won't matter for very long anyway. Just try not to forget that the US system of government is fairly stable, and not likely to fall into a 1984ish nightmare simply because it'll be harder for you to lie about who you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, IIRC, the Mac OS version of Office is really more or less a separate product. They don't share much of a codebase at all (according to something I read long ago that I can no longer attribute or back up).
If there were ever to be an Office on Linux, my money would be on it being a port from the OS X Office, not the Win32 Office. I don't know which OS X API they've used, but such a port would still have at least some aspects of a simple Unix-to-Unix port.
In Vista, sound and graphic drivers are moving out of the kernel.
They don't like the DRM scheme their favorite publisher offers
I think that's one major problem right there: I don't have a favorite publisher, and I doubt that most other people do as well. (Unless maybe you count O'Reilly, but then that's different). When talking about materials other than technical manuals (e.g., fiction, non-technical non-fiction), I buy books b/c they interest me, and rarely if ever pay attention to the publisher. Therefore, publisher-specific DRM schemes are a nuisance. I couldn't care less about the publisher, or the specific DRM scheme they've chosen to implement.
ISPs will either quit messing with packets to and from their customers, or customers will become so harassed by ISPs that do so and fear lawsuits that they'll leave in droves. It's a tough cure, I'll grant you.
Yeah, I'd say! But I don't quite follow your logic. You seemed to imply in your original post that making ISPs responsible for the actions of their users will lead to the ISPs no longer messing with traffic...but I don't see B naturally following from A there. I think it's just as likely (if not more) that the ISPs, faced with possible lawsuits on the one hand and freed from any responsibility to provide equal, unbiased service on the other, will start to not only quietly drop packets (as they apparently already do), but also actually shut down ports left and right. "You'll get port 80 and you'll like it, b/c all those other ports are just used by pirates, hackers and bandwidth thieves, and you're not one of those, are you?"
In other words, I can see how being freed from the possibility of being called a common carrier would cause ISPs to become more evil, but I don't see how it gives them an incentive to become less evil, and it's this confusion that led me to suggest (perhaps rudely) that you don't know what "common carrier" means. Your quote above, about ISPs either leaving traffic alone or having customers leave in droves, is probably true, but I think it can (and will) happen completely independently of the common carrier status of the ISP. I don't see how it's not an orthogonal concern. It depends more on having a non-monopolistic environment where real competition exists within a market.
(Also, to be clear (and you may already know this), most of these ISPs don't actually have common carrier status at the moment...the current set of court rulings on the matter are contradictory and somewhat absurd, making a distinction between an ISP and an "information service" when both are offering the same service, just via different physical media. The ISPs that aren't common carriers already (like cable providers) don't really want it, or so I've read...it offers them some protection, but also some burdens they'd rather not have, like the onerous responsibility not to discriminate in a non-competitive way. The jury is still out about whether they should be common carriers, though if common carrier ends up meaning what I suspect it will when applied to digital communications, I tend to think that they should. So anyway, this is partly just a theoretical disucssion, b/c you can't really pull common carrier status from a group that doesn't have it).
I hope this was a troll. This has got to be the most ass-backward wrong thing I've heard on Slashdot in some time... Do you really want your ISP breathing down your neck about what you do with the bandwidth you paid for b/c they're afraid that they'll be sued for what you do? What you suggest will have the exact opposite effect from what you seem to think. I suspect that perhaps you don't understand what common carrier status actually means. (Your choice of the word "legal theory" to describe it seems to back up that suspicion).
Any event handlers that access form controls now throw exceptions unless they're specifically commanded not to, since the controls aren't thread-safe.
It has always been well-documented that you were in undefined behavior land if you tried this, so you can't very well complain now that the system is actually calling you on it. It's trying to _help_ you identify code that has undefined behavior. By just shutting off those exceptions, you're effectively plugging your ears and closing your eyes and saying, "I can't see you! I can't hear you!" while the water rises around you.
It also becomes somewhat harder to debug concurrency issues when one of those zillion Invoke()
calls that now litter your code decides to deadlock, since things that weren't waiting to
join() other threads now are, and it's out of your hands.
Use BeginInvoke instead of Invoke unless you need synchronous behavior, and if you do need synchronous behavior, are you really sure you should be using separate threads? If your code is littered with Invokes now, then 2.0 wasn't the problem -- you had a bad concurrency design to begin with.
I don't understand why everyone keeps using the word "port" about this WMF thing. There seems to be a massive amount of (willful?) misunderstanding here. Do you seriously believe that Microsoft starts from scratch every time they release a new Windows version? (That's not really directed at the parent poster, who apparently gets it, but rather to everyone who's been using the word "port" as if Microsoft was doing the equivalent of moving code from BSD to Linux).
Microsoft has three operating systems that share the Windows name, and only two of those are still sold: CE and NT. Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista are all succeeding versions of NT given different names by Marketing. (IIRC, they are NT 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and ???, respectively).
So, buggy NT code was never "ported" to 2000, XP or Vista anymore than some bug or feature in Linux 2.6 was "ported" from Linux 1.2. Vista is not a new OS. It's NT 6. (I don't have access to a Vista beta, so somebody who does could call GetVersionEx and correct me if I'm wrong...but if I am, it'll be b/c Vista is NT 5.3 or 5.4, not 6.0). I would be more surprised if the first beta of Vista _didn't_ have this problem, b/c that would imply that Microsoft really did already know about the problem.
The paper got too expensive, so they use PowerPoint for everything now.
If you use something like dyndns.org to run a personal server from your home even w/ a dynamic IP address, you want a low TTL (mine is 5 min) so that, when your IP address changes, you've only (theoretically) got 5 minutes of downtime.
Of course, it may be that many who will post "Right on!" comments just to be at the top of the list really want to see their names there at the top. I don't usually see first posts by Anonymous Coward (though more prolific slashdotters may see patterns I have not noticed). An anonymous voting system on the quality of the articles may be useful in and of itself, but I don't know that it would get anywhere near solving the actual problem of idiotic first posts. I thought that was what moderation was for...
"Who defines the questions that define you as a member of the voting elite?"
;-)
Who indeed? Direct voting on that would definately not be a possibility; everyone would vote for the easy questions
I personally think, however, that to break the possible voting "classes" down into the "intellectually superior" and the "feeble minded underclass" is a bit naive (sp?). People run the whole range of sensibility and education.
Even given the class premise, though, I don't quite follow your argument. You seem to be very much against legislation by the elite, but then you defend the American system of government, which is set up quite that way: legislation by "elite", but where these elite are chosen by the people as a whole. I'm not holding a flamethrower; I just want to know specifically what you mean. I think that maybe you're confusing 'legislation' with 'rule'. No one wants to be *ruled* by the more intelligent among us, but I'm sure that everyone would prefer that the people who's job it is to take the time to learn about and vote on the issues be educated.
This is very similar to the modern day electoral college used to elect the president. And it may turn out just the same; how many people are really consciously aware that, when they vote for president, they're actually voting for someone else, a proxy, who has said that he will probably vote for a particular president?
This actually sounds like a very intruiging (sp?) system. However, I would have to ask, in town meetings, those who have a compelling interest in debating must actually go somewhere and debate, don't they? And then, who specifically gets to vote? Whoever is there? I think that with electronic democracy, you would have quite a bit of "Hey, man, there's an vote tonight on 'blah' and I need your support. Vote 'yes'." You might have people calling all their friends and telling them to spend five minutes going to a web site and voting to support something that doesn't even affect them. It's much easier to get your friends and acquantances, or anyone who knows you as a biggie in the community, to help you out in votes where they themselves might not usually want to vote. It would be, in other words, the same political system we have now, with political leaders and followers, but the best idea doesn't necessarily win; the belief proposed by the guy with the most followers does.
Your ideas do sound reasonable, and much of what I said depends on the relative maturity of the community (not in age but rather in intelligence). It might work; I'd be interested to hear about experiments where such a system is being tried.
"Maybe there should be an 'I don't care' option in addition to yes or no."
This is one of the functions of the party system: give those who don't care or don't know or can't decide about an issue a consistent stance in line with that of the party.
If those who think alike are in the same party, then it stands to reason that, had they an opinion, it would be the same one held by the party. This doesn't always happen of course, and the instances where it does not are usually newsworthy (politicians switching party because of continual disagreement, dissenters in impeachment trials, etc.), so the public hears about them more. But in the vast majority of issues where a politician might not care about or be knowledgable of an issue, their vote is decided by the party's vote. Politicians in America need to take a side on most issues, even those that they don't care or know about, because politicians with weak or inconsistent voting records tend to get cast aside. I don't know whether this is good or bad, really...you could call say that the public forces politicians to take sides on issues in which they have no business taking a side, but also that this public pressure forces politicians to think about issues they wouldn't normally ponder if they were free to only vote on issues they care about. I think, probably, that the second possibility is flawed because, as I said, they don't necessarily have to think about those issues; they just have to vote with the party.
/ramble
On the national level, the big problem with purely-democratic electronic democracy is that it would require that everyone who's voting directly be educated on what they're voting on in order to vote intelligently. One of the reasons that the US is a republic as well as a democracy, ie. the reasons why we have a legislative body, is the bad roads and slow travel prevalent 200 years ago, as stated in the prediction. However, the body also exists to create an intelligent "firewall" of sorts between the everyday man and the law. In a recent Slashdot post, someone stated that, in order to survive with AI, every single person must achieve the equivalent of a college education (I think it was Clarke, actually), and it was widely agreed that this simply would *not* happen. I think direct democracy is similar; for it to work, the vast majority of Americans would have to have a college-equivalent education. As desirable as this would be (personally, anyway), I too believe this won't happen, and therefore, the vast majority of people will either be too ignorant of the issues or simply too stupid (yes, there are stupid people in the world, unfortunately) to vote intelligently on legislation.
It is the job of the representative in the US to learn enough about an issue to vote intelligently on it when it comes up. One of the functions of the party system is to provide a party platform for representatives to join because even someone who makes it his or her job to learn about legislation issues can't keep up with absolutely everything (without sacrificing depth of knowledge). Of course, there can be some debate as to how well representatives perform in this respect, but I can only assume that they still make better decisions than the average Joe who doesn't begin to have time to gain in in-depth knowledge of an issue. To tell the truth, I myself don't want to have to gain an in-depth knowledge of every issue that comes up, but rather only those that matter or are of interest to me. And I'm sure that most people in the US would rather handle their own business as well. The point: proper legislation is a full time job.
I think that probably a form of direct democracy will prevail in the future. Local governments seem like better candidates for direct democracy to work (it has worked in many communities from day one in town meetings and such). But I think nationally, and even in the state and county/province level, there will still be a need for professional legislators. I'd rather have an educated firewall, even a partisan and sometimes petty one, between the public and the law than not.
The whole point of doing this to reduce illegal workers is kind of a moot point: employers who don't require background checks now won't require background checks with the new cards.
How can you say that you lose your identity when someone can tell, with little room to doubt, that you are who you say you are? Is your identity something which can only be defined by your ability to lie about who you are?
As far as the legalities go, something like this would be a good thing for security, and would inevitably result in legislation to limit what can be done with the inforamation aside from simply securely verifying that you are who you say you are. The legislation, given that the country seems to, horribly, be going very conservative (whatever that means; it's too much of a buzzword to carry a very strict meaning), is likely to be fairly strict about just what the information can be used for.
As far as being charged for copyright violation for having kids, so what? The lawsuit will die in court and the prosecution will be shamed by pretty much everyone in the world (says the prophet). Lawsuits like that *are* going to happen; what people have to remember is, they're not likely to be won by the prosecution. The supreme court will not likely allow something so idiodic to stand, and even if they let it, congress will receive so much pressure to change the laws thereafter that it won't matter for very long anyway.
Just try not to forget that the US system of government is fairly stable, and not likely to fall into a 1984ish nightmare simply because it'll be harder for you to lie about who you are.