I'm concerned that someone at BitTorrent actually divulged the IP addresses of the uploader, regardless of this story. I don't know but the article implies that they don't normally do this as a rule. I'd think that privacy concerns would be more important than finger pointing at who uploaded the torrent.
> Actually, with new desktops costing only a few hundred dollars now most people will probably just junk the broken machine and get a new one.
People are usually more concerned their data on the machine more than the machine itself. Not to mention sentimental reasons and the reasonable unwillingness to go through the pain of setting up a new machine. And not to mention the wide variability of what cheap is to people. A few hundred dollars is not cheap for most of us out in the world.
> I've always been confused how publicly traded companies can be considered "monopolies" in any situation except
> where your governments regulate them into becoming monopolies. If you don't like how a company acts, buy some
> stock and get your friends and family and cohorts to do the same, then go in and work to change it.
This sounds good in theory but not in reality. Although the only time this effectively works is by a powerful investor activist that decides to work his way on the board of directors via buying a lot of stock and through various business contacts (and getting a good portion the business press to agree with him on major points). Then once you're on the board you have to replace the other members with people that will agree with you. Even then this normally always fails.
What is voted on is decided by the board not the investors. Things like this would not be up for vote by the shareholders. To really change things you have to control the board but even then you will probably fail in changing things, especially in the long run, and may open yourself up to all kinds of litigation. The system is carefully regulated (by law and many other ways) in order to maximize profit and not be swayed unimportant things like minority or majority mandate not the other way around. You have a better chance swaying a private company. This kind of change cannot be made within the system. This is why it requires regulation.
I used to want that before too but now I think ':!', ':r!' and the like works even better for this type thing along with the use of 'c_CTRL-R' and and those type of tools (:help c_CTRL-R).
I worry about this a lot too. On a hopefully helpful related story, I recently thought about using Amazon's S3 storing my essential data backups. Sure, they seem to have a great record of always being available and secure and all that, but who knows. My critical data would be handled by a corporation, which is black-box to me, who knows what is going on in there, or what might happen in the future. Also by them being a big company they would be a huge target for black-hat hackers. Could you imagine the cracker cred that someone would get for hacking into things like Gmail or S3? Plus, we all know that anything can be hacked given enough time.
The short story is basically I can get a better, safer, cheaper backup plan by making copies on DVD's, or what have you, and storing one copy at home and one at a friend's house (in case of fire, etc.).
I'm currently considering running my own email server at home and ditching my online mail accounts for the same sorts of reasons.
There is a lot of holes in what you are saying. Most of it simply isn't true. I think generally you are assuming that if something will increase the quality of the project then F/OSS developers won't do it because it takes some work and they are just doing it for fun or something. I think you are also assuming that commercial developers don't have a choice and must do it "the right way".
This is not really true for either case in my experience. I've done a lot of commercial software and I'll tell you the focus is never on the quality of the product beyond just getting the damn thing done while meeting the known requirements and under budget. The little bit of F/OSS software that I've worked on was all about the quality of the work, there were no budgets or running to meet some sales deadlines or expectations or what have you, just the natural desire that developers have to do good work. This desire is overshadowed by other needs of the company in commercial software.
Since commercial software is participating in a market, it's not the quality of the software that matters so much but it's the revenue that it can generate. Mostly the business and marketing is the key player in success of these products not quality of product. In F/OSS the main goal is the software itself so they don't have to worry about all that other junk. They are the ones that are free to do it right.
Why is this marked as funny? It's pretty upsetting that there "may be dangerous levels of plutonium and uranium below ground, and a further clean up could be necessary".
Personally I really liked the A9 toolbar. Using multiple machines I used the bookmarks very often and the history was very helpful a more than a handful of times. I'll miss it but at the same time giving Amazon access to all that data on me started to bug me so I'm glad it's gone so I won't be tempted to use it anymore. I just hope they trash all that past data on everyone.
Are there maybe open source alternatives to the bookmarks and history in the toolbar that maybe I could serve from my own box?
Give us back our control, and we'll open our wallets. 'Til then, go fuck yourselves.
Amen. I'm with you on this one. DRM is main reason why I don't want to go HDTV, etc. Sure the picture is better, but God damn that's a lot of money (and time) to spend on something that wants to control the way I use it, when I can just use a perfectly good proven technology to watch what I want and how I want to watch it. Screw that.
the "Information wants to be free crowd" here at Slashdot thinks that Apple should hide the information...
I'd tend to agree with sentiment behind this statement. I find it tiring that "information wants to be free" and other sentiments like it need to be qualified when we're talking about huge powerful entities like companies. This is basically the way the agruement goes in my eyes oftentimes,
"Oh that's different, they need to do X because that's the way we do things. Besides, how could they continue to be big and powerful without such tactics; they'd probably even go out of business without it. Therefore, we need to allow them some slack on this 'ultrustic' issue."
Just because a company is wildly successful like Apple, does that make sense to give them a free reign to do whatever morally sketchy endevour? I'd think the opposite should be true. The more successful and powerful a company is the more we should keep a tighter reign on them, least we may end up with a wild beast on our hands tearing up our society (and the world society) for their own gain.
Interesting idea. I haven't thought of that in terms of agile game development. In the teams that I've worked on the 'user' in this case is really the developers themselves (I'm an indie developer) so the users are really close at hand.
Generally in this topic, from what I've heard, small teams of developers already have been using this type of approach for a long time now. But the reality, a lot of the time, LOT of code and assets had to be done at the beginning of the project to get to anywhere near a playable state, so sure in that part of the project it's not agile. But after that point a good team of developers would usually play through the game again and again in development and tweak it again in again which is basically what agile development is aiming for. This has been going on since the beginning of game development as far as I can tell. It is the basic approach that I've always used.
I really like agile development as a concept. To me the most important agile idea is that self forming teams are more effective than teams that have imposed structure from above, everything else is just a bag of handy tools, that should be picked and choosen for the occasion. I know most people would disagree but to me this seems to be the true core idea of that whole ball of wax. Also you really don't have to be experianced in my opinion to self form your team. If you take a bunch of newbie developers and stick them together to build something I deeply believe that they will have a better chance of success than even the most experianced developers under a rigid development structure. Experiance doesn't mean much if you're in a rigid structure, since you have to abide by that structure.
Anytime you see a post on Slashdot by someone in the game development chances are pretty good that the reason that person has the time to waste is they aren't valuable enough to be busy doing actual work on game development.
Seriously though, I'd say writing about game development is contributing to actual work on game development in a very meaningful way. Just because it's not contributing to one of the milestones on a project doesn't mean critically thinking about the process is meaningless.
Agreed. Sorry, I believe I misunderstood your point of view here a bit.
It's also even more disturbing when a monopolistic company like MS says this in the fine print when most average users expect that it will do what it advertises it will do and not destroy their data or whatever if they don't use it properly. A lot of people are at risk here unknowingly. I think most users believe that they will be protect by MS's software and that MS is there to help them in case of a problem; and rightfully so. That's basically what they are sold, but most of us know that this is not true in practice.
Usually with OSS the everyone is very explicit and up front about this sort of thing and don't try to hide it in some fine print in order to get a sale or whatever. I think this is the essential feature of free-as-in-beer software in this case. It is not that it is free so you don't pay much for it, so the user can say, "I get what I paid for" if something goes wrong, rather very the nature of trying to sell software for money encourages the seller to hide this dangerous fact about the software rather than be honest and open about it.
> I must say I admire Microsoft's savvy more each day in their EULA -- crafted
> to absolve Microsoft of any responsibility for bad things happening to users
> because of Microsoft's software. It must be reassuring to offer a product and
> not have to assume responsibility. What a unique privelege
This is not specific to MS. Most EULA's, even OSS licences have this type of clause.
In the open letter it shows that this would not be so simple plus it would be costly. But even if it is not so costly to do this type of fix he is still in need of restitution here. There is the simple fact that D-Link is in clear violoation of the terms of the NTP and accounts for the majority of traffic of his NTP, which is costing him significant resources.
> For Linux to survive and grow, money has to come from somewhere.
I disagree. For Linux to survie and grow the labor has to come from somewhere. Money is not important.
As far as I know most games are single threaded. At least in the main game pipeline (rendering, input, simulation, network). Usually games are coded so everything in the pipeline happens in proper order. Although there surely can be a benefit to threading these operations and have critical timing stuff still happen in proper order, it's not normally done at this date simpily because most people run single core, unless you're developing for a next gen console, of course, then you can take the additional dev time hit and see a clear benefit, but that is outside of what this article is talking about.
I've worked on a handful of multithreaded pc game myself too, but it was basically single threaded with a handfull of little threads just to handle network calls for unlocking the game via the internet and other "out of game" admin stuff like that. i doubt that the game would get any performace gain from running on a multi-core.
One side may be wrong, but at least give them a chance to talk about it to reach a consensus on the subject. If one side perceives a risk that is found to not be there, it is important to alleviate the perception of risk, otherwise they might do something logical and try to protect themselves from the false risk. Like, in this case, maybe breaking into his house and dismantling his cyclotron.
Also, discussing a subject with people who don't share your opinion about it is not the same as agreeing that they might be correct on the subject.
"Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started
with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed
from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?"
Um, is it just me or isn't this the primary goal of just about every operating system built since practically the first OS (but, obviously excluding OS's from MS). They could just pick up a 25+ year old book on operating system concepts to know how to build this thing. This is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But I guess if MS didn't "invent" it then it can't be taken seriously by MS.
Exactly! I couldn't agree with you more. That was the reason that corporations where created in the first place (at least in the US), but it's changed a lot since then in practice. We need to get back to that.
Slashdot Mirror
as long as the project lead wants to.
I'm concerned that someone at BitTorrent actually divulged the IP addresses of the uploader, regardless of this story. I don't know but the article implies that they don't normally do this as a rule. I'd think that privacy concerns would be more important than finger pointing at who uploaded the torrent.
Ads on a "Wikipedia". No thanks. There's going to be some people writing articles just for ad revenue.
> Actually, with new desktops costing only a few hundred dollars now most people will probably just junk the broken machine and get a new one.
People are usually more concerned their data on the machine more than the machine itself. Not to mention sentimental reasons and the reasonable unwillingness to go through the pain of setting up a new machine. And not to mention the wide variability of what cheap is to people. A few hundred dollars is not cheap for most of us out in the world.
> I've always been confused how publicly traded companies can be considered "monopolies" in any situation except
> where your governments regulate them into becoming monopolies. If you don't like how a company acts, buy some
> stock and get your friends and family and cohorts to do the same, then go in and work to change it.
This sounds good in theory but not in reality. Although the only time this effectively works is by a powerful investor activist that decides to work his way on the board of directors via buying a lot of stock and through various business contacts (and getting a good portion the business press to agree with him on major points). Then once you're on the board you have to replace the other members with people that will agree with you. Even then this normally always fails.
What is voted on is decided by the board not the investors. Things like this would not be up for vote by the shareholders. To really change things you have to control the board but even then you will probably fail in changing things, especially in the long run, and may open yourself up to all kinds of litigation. The system is carefully regulated (by law and many other ways) in order to maximize profit and not be swayed unimportant things like minority or majority mandate not the other way around. You have a better chance swaying a private company. This kind of change cannot be made within the system. This is why it requires regulation.
Same thing happened to me. I was trying to imagine someone killing an audit process and was then able to debug it.
I used to want that before too but now I think ':!', ':r!' and the like works even better for this type thing along with the use of 'c_CTRL-R' and and those type of tools (:help c_CTRL-R).
I worry about this a lot too. On a hopefully helpful related story, I recently thought about using Amazon's S3 storing my essential data backups. Sure, they seem to have a great record of always being available and secure and all that, but who knows. My critical data would be handled by a corporation, which is black-box to me, who knows what is going on in there, or what might happen in the future. Also by them being a big company they would be a huge target for black-hat hackers. Could you imagine the cracker cred that someone would get for hacking into things like Gmail or S3? Plus, we all know that anything can be hacked given enough time.
The short story is basically I can get a better, safer, cheaper backup plan by making copies on DVD's, or what have you, and storing one copy at home and one at a friend's house (in case of fire, etc.).
I'm currently considering running my own email server at home and ditching my online mail accounts for the same sorts of reasons.
There is a lot of holes in what you are saying. Most of it simply isn't true. I think generally you are assuming that if something will increase the quality of the project then F/OSS developers won't do it because it takes some work and they are just doing it for fun or something. I think you are also assuming that commercial developers don't have a choice and must do it "the right way".
This is not really true for either case in my experience. I've done a lot of commercial software and I'll tell you the focus is never on the quality of the product beyond just getting the damn thing done while meeting the known requirements and under budget. The little bit of F/OSS software that I've worked on was all about the quality of the work, there were no budgets or running to meet some sales deadlines or expectations or what have you, just the natural desire that developers have to do good work. This desire is overshadowed by other needs of the company in commercial software.
Since commercial software is participating in a market, it's not the quality of the software that matters so much but it's the revenue that it can generate. Mostly the business and marketing is the key player in success of these products not quality of product. In F/OSS the main goal is the software itself so they don't have to worry about all that other junk. They are the ones that are free to do it right.
Why is this marked as funny? It's pretty upsetting that there "may be dangerous levels of plutonium and uranium below ground, and a further clean up could be necessary".
Are there maybe open source alternatives to the bookmarks and history in the toolbar that maybe I could serve from my own box?
Not to mention covering the massive ongoing costs of their profit.
Are they going to find an enzyme that gives us a predilection to be consumers. Hopefully by then we'll have a pill to combat buyers remorse.
I'd tend to agree with sentiment behind this statement. I find it tiring that "information wants to be free" and other sentiments like it need to be qualified when we're talking about huge powerful entities like companies. This is basically the way the agruement goes in my eyes oftentimes,
Just because a company is wildly successful like Apple, does that make sense to give them a free reign to do whatever morally sketchy endevour? I'd think the opposite should be true. The more successful and powerful a company is the more we should keep a tighter reign on them, least we may end up with a wild beast on our hands tearing up our society (and the world society) for their own gain.
Interesting idea. I haven't thought of that in terms of agile game development. In the teams that I've worked on the 'user' in this case is really the developers themselves (I'm an indie developer) so the users are really close at hand.
Generally in this topic, from what I've heard, small teams of developers already have been using this type of approach for a long time now. But the reality, a lot of the time, LOT of code and assets had to be done at the beginning of the project to get to anywhere near a playable state, so sure in that part of the project it's not agile. But after that point a good team of developers would usually play through the game again and again in development and tweak it again in again which is basically what agile development is aiming for. This has been going on since the beginning of game development as far as I can tell. It is the basic approach that I've always used.
I really like agile development as a concept. To me the most important agile idea is that self forming teams are more effective than teams that have imposed structure from above, everything else is just a bag of handy tools, that should be picked and choosen for the occasion. I know most people would disagree but to me this seems to be the true core idea of that whole ball of wax. Also you really don't have to be experianced in my opinion to self form your team. If you take a bunch of newbie developers and stick them together to build something I deeply believe that they will have a better chance of success than even the most experianced developers under a rigid development structure. Experiance doesn't mean much if you're in a rigid structure, since you have to abide by that structure.
Anytime you see a post on Slashdot by someone in the game development chances are pretty good that the reason that person has the time to waste is they aren't valuable enough to be busy doing actual work on game development.
Seriously though, I'd say writing about game development is contributing to actual work on game development in a very meaningful way. Just because it's not contributing to one of the milestones on a project doesn't mean critically thinking about the process is meaningless.
It's also even more disturbing when a monopolistic company like MS says this in the fine print when most average users expect that it will do what it advertises it will do and not destroy their data or whatever if they don't use it properly. A lot of people are at risk here unknowingly. I think most users believe that they will be protect by MS's software and that MS is there to help them in case of a problem; and rightfully so. That's basically what they are sold, but most of us know that this is not true in practice.
Usually with OSS the everyone is very explicit and up front about this sort of thing and don't try to hide it in some fine print in order to get a sale or whatever. I think this is the essential feature of free-as-in-beer software in this case. It is not that it is free so you don't pay much for it, so the user can say, "I get what I paid for" if something goes wrong, rather very the nature of trying to sell software for money encourages the seller to hide this dangerous fact about the software rather than be honest and open about it.
> I must say I admire Microsoft's savvy more each day in their EULA -- crafted > to absolve Microsoft of any responsibility for bad things happening to users > because of Microsoft's software. It must be reassuring to offer a product and > not have to assume responsibility. What a unique privelege This is not specific to MS. Most EULA's, even OSS licences have this type of clause.
In the open letter it shows that this would not be so simple plus it would be costly. But even if it is not so costly to do this type of fix he is still in need of restitution here. There is the simple fact that D-Link is in clear violoation of the terms of the NTP and accounts for the majority of traffic of his NTP, which is costing him significant resources.
> For Linux to survive and grow, money has to come from somewhere. I disagree. For Linux to survie and grow the labor has to come from somewhere. Money is not important.
I've worked on a handful of multithreaded pc game myself too, but it was basically single threaded with a handfull of little threads just to handle network calls for unlocking the game via the internet and other "out of game" admin stuff like that. i doubt that the game would get any performace gain from running on a multi-core.
Also, discussing a subject with people who don't share your opinion about it is not the same as agreeing that they might be correct on the subject.
"Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?"
Um, is it just me or isn't this the primary goal of just about every operating system built since practically the first OS (but, obviously excluding OS's from MS). They could just pick up a 25+ year old book on operating system concepts to know how to build this thing. This is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But I guess if MS didn't "invent" it then it can't be taken seriously by MS.
Exactly! I couldn't agree with you more. That was the reason that corporations where created in the first place (at least in the US), but it's changed a lot since then in practice. We need to get back to that.