For everything bad you can say about Windows Update (and I certainly do), for the vast majority of users (and if you can somewhat accurately consider yourself technically competent, you're not in it) it's by far the lesser of evils.
You could scheme up an illegal copy of Linux, though I've never heard of one.
There's an idea for an annual FOSS (well, sort of) community competition for you: most original illegal Linux distro created.
You have to give "doesn't include the source code and thus violates the license" a pass. It's too easy, like shooting barrel in a barrel. Such as:
- Distro that ships with 100 pirated movies. - Distro that ships with the latest Britney Spears.mp3. (And the software to play it!) - Distro that includes illegal pornography. - Distro that includes documents which violate some NDA or other. - Distro that automatically sets up an offshore casino and starts gambling. - Distro that automatically tries to hack cia.gov on startup. - Distro that includes Tiannamen Square massacre photos and articles (for China distribution only) - Distro that includes utilities to execute phishing attacks aimed at particular ethnicities. (Quick, think of a clever name that includes 'Hate Crime'!) - A pledge to kill an endangered non-penguin species for each download. - Distro that rebroadcasts Major League Baseball games without express written consent.
Incidentally, if you read the rest of the essay (link to it's in my post above), he has some interesting things to say about Apple as well. Some of it's no longer topical (Mac OS isn't quite what it was when he wrote it), but some of it's pretty insightful.
This reminds me of Stephenson's In The Beginning There Was The Command Line, which is a little dated now but still pretty funny. He describes the various OSes as different car dealerships, and Windows as an unreliable station wagon that for some reason 90% of the potential customers buy.
"With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."
And:
"The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?""
Selling an OS is, in this respect, not a lot different from selling a car.
Some buy their cars for the greatest reliability. Some for performance or efficiency. Some people buy their car to have the newest and flashiest on the block. Some for safety. Some because they know the brand or it's what their friends have.
And some people just fall in love with the color or, wow, big cupholders or heated seats, and they're sold.
For what it's worth, I was recently picked to be on a jury in a (totally unrelated) criminal case, and the judge's instructions to us were very specific that it was our job as jury to decide what the facts of the case were, but that it was not our job to decide what the law said or whether the law was fair or not. I'd guess this jury received some similar instructions.
(I know that, historically, some juries have refused to find a defendant guilty when they thought the punishment excessive for the crime or didn't agree with the law. I'm just throwing this out there because I suspect it'll be relevant to some of the posts to follow.)
Two/three part question:
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Do you still read Slashdot yourself regularly?
If so, what are your favorite and least favorite things about the community?
The problem with your analogy is that all of your examples harm or don't harm the person who's doing or not doing them (if correct), whereas screwing with the environment enough harms everyone.
Which, by your logic:
But of course you're free to believe in anything you like and observe what rituals you like provided they don't directly harm anyone else.
means that we actually should force people to not screw with the environment.
Does driving a Hummer screw with the environment enough that it needs to fall on the 'must stop' side of that line? Probably not. Does detonating two dozen nuclear bombs across the rain forest? Probably. Where do you draw the line in between? Hell if I know.
Now, whether or not modern science has it right or whether or not some of the actions humanity's taken in pursuit of not screwing with the environment have actually screwed it more -- I'm not arguing that point.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't consider myself an environmentalist. I recycle some. I try not to buy a Hummer. That's about it.
The thing about the environment is that if it's screwed up enough, everyone dies. I don't know that humanity even can do that if they wanted to, but I'll assume yes.
It's sort of like sticking your wang into a blender that you're pretty sure was unplugged the last time you looked. Probably, that's safe, but who really wants to take that chance?
Screwing with the environment is like sticking humanity's collective meta-wang into that blender. Maybe it's okay, but ohhhh the pain if you're wrong.
It makes sense to me that people would try to err on the side of caution.
(I don't consider the parent a troll, incidentally.)
A Java or a C# programmer will have a hard time moving to modern idiomatic C++ (complete with template metaprogramming goodness). On the other hand, a Java programmer won't have much trouble moving to C#, and vise versa.
I haven't done serious work with C++ in a number of years at this point; if you're saying things have changed recently to push C++ and Java further apart, I'll take your word for it.
It may just be the kinds of projects I've worked on, but Java programmers I knew who had to do a C++ project or vice versa didn't have big problems with the transition. I think you could put together a decent argument that it's a bigger leap of thinking to move from working in C to working in C++ -- and by that I mean, actually doing decent OOP and using the C++ features reasonably correctly, vs. using C++ to basically write C code -- than it is from C++ to Java.
There's no "C#" library though (aside from a few core classes such as Object which are defined by the ISO C# language standard). There's.NET Framework and the BCL, and comparing those to J2SE is a whole different kettle of fish.
I don't think you can really talk about C# without thinking of System.* as part of it, or talk about Java without thinking about java.* as part of it. I mean, obviously you can split that hair and you could try to forgo them as some kind of intellectual exercise, but I can't think of any non-trivial C# program I've ever seen
that doesn't pull in something from the System namespace, and I can't think of any non-trivial Java program I've ever seen that doesn't at least use java.util.something. If you hire a developer for a real project and you're looking for C# experience or Java experience, what you're looking for has to include experience with using those piles of company-that-put-out-the-language-provided code as at least as important as anything else.
Out of curiosity, how much work have you done with Java and C#?
C# is to Java as Java is to C++ as C++ is to C on to infinity. To say that C# is just a copy of Java is about as much true and about as much false as saying Java is just a copy of C++. It is, and it isn't.
In each case you have a "new" language created based strongly on an old one, benefiting from the "mistakes" of the previous language.
The tricky part is, what's a mistake in the design of a language varies depending on your perspective and what you're trying to do it with -- and so the "evolved" language ends up better for some tasks and worse for others. Java addresses a ton of things that C++ doesn't do well (or require a much more seasoned C++ developer to do well), at the cost of becoming unsuitable (or at least, less suitable) for some uses, such as embedded programming or high-end game programming.
C# is that same kind of quasi-evolution from Java. It makes some things a lot easier to get right, but at a cost of giving up some of the things that are good about Java. The key here is that the differences between the two aren't as much in the base language's syntax as in the core frameworks/libraries that are built around them. That's what makes the chance to see more of what makes those libraries tick and why they made the design decisions they did interesting.
No offense intended, but I'm not sure how a post like this got modded so far up. Are we passing out tinfoil hats at the door now? (I know, I know. I must be new here.)
Let's take as a given that Microsoft would like all developers to be using their technologies. In their perfect happy world, every developer is using Visual Studio as their IDE, their language of choice is a.NET language, everyone's writing apps to run on Windows, etc. Microsoft all over the place.
In pursuit of that goal, is it more logical that they would make this move to:
A) Allow.NET devs to see/debug through the.NET libraries, making developing using their stuff more attractive to some subset of the developer community, or
B) Begin an intricate long-ranging litigation scheme against something like Mono, that even fewer developers than the subset in (A) know much about, that in no way is currently posing any kind of threat to their dominance (such as it is), on the off chance it might bear some kind of fruit years down the line?
Shit, Bond villains don't even bust out plans like the scenario you've concocted.
Sure, MS is greedy. Sure, they don't hold sacred the principles of freedom that you do. Sure, they may be evil -- but they're a generally *sensible* kind of evil, the kind that isn't building an elaborate cannon that shoots heads of lettuce while guns are available.
I spent the better part of last year working at a client site that used Lotus Notes for e-mail, and thus, so did I, at least for their corporate stuff. I found it incredibly frustrating to use and frequently wished I could use something with a more satisfying user experience. Say, pine or elm.
One of my lifelong best friends worked as a developer for IBM at the time, so naturally the next time I saw him I bitched at him about how much I hated Notes and asked how he could stand it. His reply? "Oh, I wouldn't know about that. We use Outlook."
I'm sure there must be some (maybe even most) departments of IBM that use Notes, but man. To foist that dog food on the world and not even eat it yourself? That's the devil right there.
I'm puzzled at this patent, but no more than I am about Notes in general.
Some people won't move to the next Windows until SP2. A lot won't move until SP1 is out. SP1 isn't ready yet, ergo, accomodate the wait-for-SP1 crowd.
You'll see a lot of other interpretations on Slashdot, but I just don't see them bearing out for most businesses or in the non-Slashdot world in general.
That's a really interesting point. I wonder if we'll be talking about this era of record company business in fifty years the same way people say that the alcohol prohibition era in the U.S. gave organized crime its first big growth.
That's true, and I've done it (stuck with my existing copy of 2000 rather than upgrade to XP); but, that being said, I doubt more than 1% of the U.S. market of people choosing XP right now is doing that.
Joe Sixpack Businessman is probably doing something like ordering a dozen new WinXP OEM machines from Dell if he's choosing XP.
That makes sense to me. Granted, you can't count on the RIAA to do what makes sense.
I picture a bunch of RIAA executives in some bland conference room, and one of them's saying, "Yeah! When those piratical bitches see that we'll even throw the motherfuckin' book at their grandma they'll get scared and stop stealing music. Booyah!"
I guess it all depends. Do you want people to think you're in the right, or do you want them to be irrationally scared of you? It's pretty clear they decided to err on the side of option #2.
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
Microsoft beating down Suse at this stage? Sure, I think they could do that much in the manner you describe.
Question is, what does that really get you, if you're Microsoft?
It doesn't make Linux in general go away.
Even if we take as granted the idea that Microsoft is evil and focused on the utter destruction of all that is free, this isn't a smart way to do it. They're in a better position to influence the community and drive business their way by supporting Suse than by crushing it.
I've got to assume that has more to do with licenses and contracts than Amazon's reluctance to let you stuff money in their metaphorical pants.
U.S. only isn't the worst thing for a beta test. Maybe contracts for other countries is something they're working on? It couldn't hurt to write them and express your interest in international support.
They tried all kinds of things (where things are defined as 'things that don't involve spending money or anyone working less) to increase employee morale as people began to leave the company like a sinking ship, so I can honestly say that we did have a Hawaiian shirt day. I don't think it was Friday, though. Last Tuesday of the month or something ridiculous like that.
A good friend of mine used to always say that no experience in that life was that bad if you got a good story to tell out of it. From that perspective, even the worst parts of my career haven't been that bad.
Slashdot Mirror
For everything bad you can say about Windows Update (and I certainly do), for the vast majority of users (and if you can somewhat accurately consider yourself technically competent, you're not in it) it's by far the lesser of evils.
You could scheme up an illegal copy of Linux, though I've never heard of one.
.mp3. (And the software to play it!)
There's an idea for an annual FOSS (well, sort of) community competition for you: most original illegal Linux distro created.
You have to give "doesn't include the source code and thus violates the license" a pass. It's too easy, like shooting barrel in a barrel. Such as:
- Distro that ships with 100 pirated movies.
- Distro that ships with the latest Britney Spears
- Distro that includes illegal pornography.
- Distro that includes documents which violate some NDA or other.
- Distro that automatically sets up an offshore casino and starts gambling.
- Distro that automatically tries to hack cia.gov on startup.
- Distro that includes Tiannamen Square massacre photos and articles (for China distribution only)
- Distro that includes utilities to execute phishing attacks aimed at particular ethnicities. (Quick, think of a clever name that includes 'Hate Crime'!)
- A pledge to kill an endangered non-penguin species for each download.
- Distro that rebroadcasts Major League Baseball games without express written consent.
I mean, they're cranking out The Sims expansions like clockwork.
Incidentally, if you read the rest of the essay (link to it's in my post above), he has some interesting things to say about Apple as well. Some of it's no longer topical (Mac OS isn't quite what it was when he wrote it), but some of it's pretty insightful.
This reminds me of Stephenson's In The Beginning There Was The Command Line, which is a little dated now but still pretty funny. He describes the various OSes as different car dealerships, and Windows as an unreliable station wagon that for some reason 90% of the potential customers buy.
"With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."
And:
"The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?""
Selling an OS is, in this respect, not a lot different from selling a car.
Some buy their cars for the greatest reliability. Some for performance or efficiency. Some people buy their car to have the newest and flashiest on the block. Some for safety. Some because they know the brand or it's what their friends have.
And some people just fall in love with the color or, wow, big cupholders or heated seats, and they're sold.
For what it's worth, I was recently picked to be on a jury in a (totally unrelated) criminal case, and the judge's instructions to us were very specific that it was our job as jury to decide what the facts of the case were, but that it was not our job to decide what the law said or whether the law was fair or not. I'd guess this jury received some similar instructions.
(I know that, historically, some juries have refused to find a defendant guilty when they thought the punishment excessive for the crime or didn't agree with the law. I'm just throwing this out there because I suspect it'll be relevant to some of the posts to follow.)
Do you still read Slashdot yourself regularly?
If so, what are your favorite and least favorite things about the community?
Damn, beat me to it. I'll spare y'all the obligatory joke about mindworm attacks.
I expected this kind of argument.
The problem with your analogy is that all of your examples harm or don't harm the person who's doing or not doing them (if correct), whereas screwing with the environment enough harms everyone.
Which, by your logic:
But of course you're free to believe in anything you like and observe what rituals you like provided they don't directly harm anyone else.
means that we actually should force people to not screw with the environment.
Does driving a Hummer screw with the environment enough that it needs to fall on the 'must stop' side of that line? Probably not. Does detonating two dozen nuclear bombs across the rain forest? Probably. Where do you draw the line in between? Hell if I know.
Now, whether or not modern science has it right or whether or not some of the actions humanity's taken in pursuit of not screwing with the environment have actually screwed it more -- I'm not arguing that point.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't consider myself an environmentalist. I recycle some. I try not to buy a Hummer. That's about it.
The thing about the environment is that if it's screwed up enough, everyone dies. I don't know that humanity even can do that if they wanted to, but I'll assume yes.
It's sort of like sticking your wang into a blender that you're pretty sure was unplugged the last time you looked. Probably, that's safe, but who really wants to take that chance?
Screwing with the environment is like sticking humanity's collective meta-wang into that blender. Maybe it's okay, but ohhhh the pain if you're wrong.
It makes sense to me that people would try to err on the side of caution.
(I don't consider the parent a troll, incidentally.)
.NET Framework and the BCL, and comparing those to J2SE is a whole different kettle of fish.
A Java or a C# programmer will have a hard time moving to modern idiomatic C++ (complete with template metaprogramming goodness). On the other hand, a Java programmer won't have much trouble moving to C#, and vise versa.
I haven't done serious work with C++ in a number of years at this point; if you're saying things have changed recently to push C++ and Java further apart, I'll take your word for it.
It may just be the kinds of projects I've worked on, but Java programmers I knew who had to do a C++ project or vice versa didn't have big problems with the transition. I think you could put together a decent argument that it's a bigger leap of thinking to move from working in C to working in C++ -- and by that I mean, actually doing decent OOP and using the C++ features reasonably correctly, vs. using C++ to basically write C code -- than it is from C++ to Java.
There's no "C#" library though (aside from a few core classes such as Object which are defined by the ISO C# language standard). There's
I don't think you can really talk about C# without thinking of System.* as part of it, or talk about Java without thinking about java.* as part of it. I mean, obviously you can split that hair and you could try to forgo them as some kind of intellectual exercise, but I can't think of any non-trivial C# program I've ever seen that doesn't pull in something from the System namespace, and I can't think of any non-trivial Java program I've ever seen that doesn't at least use java.util.something. If you hire a developer for a real project and you're looking for C# experience or Java experience, what you're looking for has to include experience with using those piles of company-that-put-out-the-language-provided code as at least as important as anything else.
Sadly I've been forced to use ActiveX for things I'd never admit to under oath. Woe is the consultant.
Still, I maintain that Microsoft is sometimes evil and sometimes stupid, but rarely both. ActiveX mostly goes in my stupid pile.
Out of curiosity, how much work have you done with Java and C#?
C# is to Java as Java is to C++ as C++ is to C on to infinity. To say that C# is just a copy of Java is about as much true and about as much false as saying Java is just a copy of C++. It is, and it isn't.
In each case you have a "new" language created based strongly on an old one, benefiting from the "mistakes" of the previous language.
The tricky part is, what's a mistake in the design of a language varies depending on your perspective and what you're trying to do it with -- and so the "evolved" language ends up better for some tasks and worse for others. Java addresses a ton of things that C++ doesn't do well (or require a much more seasoned C++ developer to do well), at the cost of becoming unsuitable (or at least, less suitable) for some uses, such as embedded programming or high-end game programming.
C# is that same kind of quasi-evolution from Java. It makes some things a lot easier to get right, but at a cost of giving up some of the things that are good about Java. The key here is that the differences between the two aren't as much in the base language's syntax as in the core frameworks/libraries that are built around them. That's what makes the chance to see more of what makes those libraries tick and why they made the design decisions they did interesting.
No offense intended, but I'm not sure how a post like this got modded so far up. Are we passing out tinfoil hats at the door now? (I know, I know. I must be new here.)
.NET language, everyone's writing apps to run on Windows, etc. Microsoft all over the place.
.NET devs to see/debug through the .NET libraries, making developing using their stuff more attractive to some subset of the developer community, or
Let's take as a given that Microsoft would like all developers to be using their technologies. In their perfect happy world, every developer is using Visual Studio as their IDE, their language of choice is a
In pursuit of that goal, is it more logical that they would make this move to:
A) Allow
B) Begin an intricate long-ranging litigation scheme against something like Mono, that even fewer developers than the subset in (A) know much about, that in no way is currently posing any kind of threat to their dominance (such as it is), on the off chance it might bear some kind of fruit years down the line?
Shit, Bond villains don't even bust out plans like the scenario you've concocted.
Sure, MS is greedy. Sure, they don't hold sacred the principles of freedom that you do. Sure, they may be evil -- but they're a generally *sensible* kind of evil, the kind that isn't building an elaborate cannon that shoots heads of lettuce while guns are available.
I spent the better part of last year working at a client site that used Lotus Notes for e-mail, and thus, so did I, at least for their corporate stuff. I found it incredibly frustrating to use and frequently wished I could use something with a more satisfying user experience. Say, pine or elm.
One of my lifelong best friends worked as a developer for IBM at the time, so naturally the next time I saw him I bitched at him about how much I hated Notes and asked how he could stand it. His reply? "Oh, I wouldn't know about that. We use Outlook."
I'm sure there must be some (maybe even most) departments of IBM that use Notes, but man. To foist that dog food on the world and not even eat it yourself? That's the devil right there.
I'm puzzled at this patent, but no more than I am about Notes in general.
Funny that "threat mitigation" doesn't exist in the aerospace industry...
What would you call passing through airport security to fly on a passenger aircraft?
Airplanes typically don't stand up to serious attacks. I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this analogy.
Some people won't move to the next Windows until SP2. A lot won't move until SP1 is out. SP1 isn't ready yet, ergo, accomodate the wait-for-SP1 crowd.
You'll see a lot of other interpretations on Slashdot, but I just don't see them bearing out for most businesses or in the non-Slashdot world in general.
That's a really interesting point. I wonder if we'll be talking about this era of record company business in fifty years the same way people say that the alcohol prohibition era in the U.S. gave organized crime its first big growth.
That's true, and I've done it (stuck with my existing copy of 2000 rather than upgrade to XP); but, that being said, I doubt more than 1% of the U.S. market of people choosing XP right now is doing that.
Joe Sixpack Businessman is probably doing something like ordering a dozen new WinXP OEM machines from Dell if he's choosing XP.
That makes sense to me. Granted, you can't count on the RIAA to do what makes sense.
I picture a bunch of RIAA executives in some bland conference room, and one of them's saying, "Yeah! When those piratical bitches see that we'll even throw the motherfuckin' book at their grandma they'll get scared and stop stealing music. Booyah!"
I guess it all depends. Do you want people to think you're in the right, or do you want them to be irrationally scared of you? It's pretty clear they decided to err on the side of option #2.
This article doesn't make any sense.
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
Microsoft beating down Suse at this stage? Sure, I think they could do that much in the manner you describe.
Question is, what does that really get you, if you're Microsoft?
It doesn't make Linux in general go away.
Even if we take as granted the idea that Microsoft is evil and focused on the utter destruction of all that is free, this isn't a smart way to do it. They're in a better position to influence the community and drive business their way by supporting Suse than by crushing it.
I've got to assume that has more to do with licenses and contracts than Amazon's reluctance to let you stuff money in their metaphorical pants.
U.S. only isn't the worst thing for a beta test. Maybe contracts for other countries is something they're working on? It couldn't hurt to write them and express your interest in international support.
They tried all kinds of things (where things are defined as 'things that don't involve spending money or anyone working less) to increase employee morale as people began to leave the company like a sinking ship, so I can honestly say that we did have a Hawaiian shirt day. I don't think it was Friday, though. Last Tuesday of the month or something ridiculous like that.
A good friend of mine used to always say that no experience in that life was that bad if you got a good story to tell out of it. From that perspective, even the worst parts of my career haven't been that bad.