Firstly, walk into any non-bargain-bin CD shop, take a CD case up to the counter, say "Can I listen to this?", and they'll let you, free of charge, perfectly legally.
Secondly, noone is twisting your arm behind your back, forcing you to listen to certain music. If you think the deal is bad, or the risk is too great, the answer is to BOYCOTT the product, not to steal it.
Thirdly, the world does not owe you the fruits of other peoples creativity. If you want free music, download some amateur works from mp3.com, or buy a guitar and make your own. If you think that mp3 is a viable distribution medium, then go around convincing _artists_ of that -- if you achieve this, then the record companies will become irrelevant.
If you want the record companies' music music, however, don't whine about the terms they ask - it's their product. If you didn't consume it, they wouldn't exist. If you consume it without agreeing to their terms, you're a criminal. Pay up or shut up.
Charles Miller (Having fun being moderated down for the totally unacceptable crime of disagreeing with the slashdot mob mentality...) --
YES! Now I SEE THE LIGHT! ALL CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL! The profit motive is EVIL! Handing personal information over to anyone online must be EVIL! We should BAN ALL ONLINE SHOPS because they're all run by EVIL CORPORATIONS and we have to enter our PERSONAL INFORMATION before they send us ANYTHING!
Give me a break, please.
P3P makes it easier for a user to give personal information out. It does not send that information automatically unless it's told to. It does not force the user to send that information.
When I go to a site that requires registration to enter, I ask three things. 1) What will my information be used for? 2) What is the information on this site worth to me? and 3) How much information do I have to hand over? Right now, I also have to ask 4) how long will it take to fill in this bloody form?
So, bring on P3P, I say. Let me decide, simply and through a defined protocol, what information each site can get from me. If they demand too much, either they lose my eyeballs, or I use my browser's profile manager to switch to being Bob Bobson, of Bobtown. People are incredibly paranoid about the Internet already, I can't imagine a browser manufacturer risking the user backlash of a hostile implementation of P3P.
Please, Gods, save me from people who want to "protect me from myself".
Napster was never intended for illegal acts. They do absolutely everything they can legally and fairly do to prevent piracy; granted this isn't much (a copyright warning in the splash screen is all you can do), but they do everything they can.
What _particular_ drugs were you on when you wrote this?
Do you think Napster would have been anything but a failed technical exercise if it wasn't the most convenient way to find copyright mp3's?
Do you think they'd have got any of this Venture Capital without it? There's nothing technically exceptional about Napster, their only "product" is the content to be found on their network - that is, links to mp3's, most of which are being distributed against the wishes of the copyright holder.
If Metallica could find 300,000 copyright abusers in one week, isn't that an indication that there's a lot more that Napster can do to police their database?
Are you really so naive that you believe that the popularity of Napster asa way to distribute copyright mp3's _isn't_ an essential part of Napster Inc's business plan?
Defending Napster seems to be an exercise in sophistry. Let's see just how much of Napster's deliberate positioning of itself we can ignore, just because we like having a convenient way to download songs without paying for them.
If an ISP said "We are not responsible for spam. Our mail and newsservers are merely a conduit for our users", how would the net.community react?
What if they set up an open server, called it "Spam 'R' Us"? Would they still be held unaccountable by the net community because they're just a server, and it's the users doing the damage?
What if they promised they'd ban every spammer within a few working days of having their names reported?
Why does Napster have a different standard of care?
I'd love for someone to parse the articles, and find out just how many people who are supporting Napster in this case, are the same people who screamed so loudly at those GPL violations last month. I mean hey, it's all copyright.
If IBM forked a binary-only Linux modification, would it be okay so long as they only distributed it over Gnutella?
How does limiting the reporting of security bugs make the source less open? The source is still there. All they're limiting, is access to certain portions of the Bugzilla database. There's only a limited number of people who can perform commits on the mozilla.org CVS tree, too, and yet the project is still Open Source
I can't think of any open source project (off the top of my head) that doesn't recommend you report security bugs in private to the maintainers, and give them a chance to fix it before going to bugtraq. Most advisories you read on bugtraq contain those magic words "I contacted the maintainer about this, and [the fix is available here | they did not respond]". This is the correct way to do things. Report the bug to the maintainers. Give them a reasonable amount of time to patch it. When it's patched, or if the maintainers fail to respond, release the information. The only exception I can think of is if you know that the bug is already being exploited in the wild, and the users need immediate protection.
There is nothing stopping anyone who finds a bug in mozilla from immediately posting it to bugtraq, alt.2600, or mailing it in a brown parcel to their maiden aunt. All the Mozilla maintainers are saying is that if a security bug is reported to their Bugzilla system, it'll be kept to a limited number of developers until a fix is found.
The only problem with the system was the one that was being talked about in the referenced post - security bugs are being marked "Netscape-Only", which meant giving Netscape employees who didn't work on Mozilla access, while cutting trusted non-Netscape Mozilla developers out of the loop.
Fair enough.
<offtopic>
Over the last few days, slashdot has really showed the result of its descent into the Animal Farm mentality, bleating its "four legs good, two legs bad" editorial mantras about really complicated subjects such as copyright law, the ethics of service theft, and now the question of publicising security holes.
At the same time, the signal-to-noise has plummetted to new depths. My occasional forays into M2, that once averaged showing me 8 good posts and 2 troll/flamebait posts, are now more likely to be 2 good posts, 2 bad posts wrongly moderated up, and six troll/flamebait posts. Of the posts that do end up under articles, it's getting harder and harder to find the well-informed posters, as distinct from the wannabes who think they know what they're talking about when actually they don't.
Oh well. I guess it's time to go back to Usenet. At least there I can score posts on my own criteria.
They should be made to stick to standards, or to submit their ideas into the standard. There should be some kind of "Open Standards Licence", like the GPL, so that if you take a standard and make some changes to it, you have to release the changed to that standard.
This is a Very Bad Idea. If you allow for licenses on how standards are implemented, Microsoft could kill samba, and then demand royalties on any program that can interpret MS Word documents.
What you can do, is trademark the name of the standard, and require that any product bearing that mark pass your test suite. Of course, as soon as you do that, the Open Source community will try to beat you to death with big sticks because your standard isn't open enough. (Consider the Java(tm) or Unix(tm) marks)
And then the embracer and extender just implements their broken version anyway, and quite legally calls it "J", or "Unix-like operating system".
On the other hand, if the DOJ forced Microsoft to publish all their APIs and network protocols, in a similar vein to what was done to IBM, then the problem in this instance would be moot, and few other companies are powerful enough to use embrace and extend in this way.
Finding a FAQ is very, very easy. You have a choice between the well laid-out archive on ftp://rtfm.mit.edu, or searching Dejanews for groupname+FAQ. Most FAQs are also mirrored on the web, so check google as well.
If none of these techniques works, then you can feel quite justified in posting "My foobar is broken, and why isn't your FAQ in any of the regular places?"
Finding out about the person who made a post on Usenet is the same as it is in slashdot. If someone chooses to give away nothing about themselves, you'll learn nothing. If someone decides they want people to know more about them, they'll put their website in their.sig.
Usenet isn't moving to the web. There's nothing inherently better about the web as a medium for discussion. If there's one thing slashdot has demonstrated, it's that it has exactly the same life-cycle as any Newsgroup that starts off cool, and then finds popularity, trolls, dick-size wars, and People Who Just Don't Get It.
The only difference is that VA Linux can't buy a newsgroup. Conspiracy theorists would see a significance in this, and the fact we've had two "Death of Usenet" articles on/. this weekend.
There are many, many methods of moderation on Usenet.
Scoring killfiles are a God-send. Once you've read a newsfroup for a few months, you can tell who is most likely to produce content, and score them up, and score down those more likely to produce noise. Don't have enough time to read the entire group today? Doesn't matter, the cream should have floated to the top of your newsreader. Just read down the list as far as you want, then bin the rest.
The other "plus" of this method is that you know when you load the group and there's nothing with a positive score, it's time to move on and find somewhere else to amuse you.
The most similar to/. moderation would be "nocem". nocem messages are advisories in which any reader of Usenet can list message-IDs that they either consider a must-read, or that they think should be immediately trashed.
The difference is that you can verify the source of a nocem using PGP, and you can choose which moderators you trust.
This would dispose of most of the complaints about./ moderation. Choosing between standard discussion, or Natalie Portman posts would simply be a matter of choosing which moderators you trust. Moderators can mark as many posts as they want, even their own, in discussions they're taking part in. If you find the moderator is moderating badly, all you have to do is remove their key from your trust file.
This is also something that couldn't be implemented on a web-based forum. Dealing with such fine-grained moderation preferences would bring the site to its knees. The beauty of Usenet is that aside from the spam-filtering, the rest of the work is done by the client, so you can set up your own moderation to your own preferences.
Usenet isn't dead. It's not even dying. Web based forums are incredibly clumsy in comparison, and only good for short-lived discussions.
Look at slashdot for an example. Unless you get in the first hour or two after a topic is posted, the chances of having your post read, or responded to is minimal. The chance of carrying on a discussion that lasts more than a few hours is almost non-existant - everyone will have moved on to the next topic.
On Usenet, on the other hand, discussions can go on for days, weeks, months, years, or occasionally forever. Those who are interested in the thread will continue to read it, those who aren't will just score it down or killfile it, and move on to something new.
I'd like to see how a slashdot/NNTP gateway would deal with this obvious change in mentality would be interesting. Expiring posts after 24 hours would be the obvious, if brutal solution.
Yeah, I know this is probably a troll, but anyway...
How are they progressing? I haven't heard jack about Java as a few years ago when it was getting so much hype
Then you obviously haven't been listening very hard. Even on/. there are heaps of stories you could read to catch up.
How many real world apps are being developed in Java?
A lot. You don't see, and you probably won't see any big commercial apps or games in Java. The language just isn't suited to that. But the majority of programming isn't for commercial apps or games, it's building customised applications for businesses. Java has carved itself a pretty huge niche there.
For example, I need to write an app that runs on a Linux server, to act as a central clearing point for transactions to be routed to 'n' proprietary credit-card processing gateways, each running a different protocol, most of them on NT boxen. Gluing everything together with Java has saved me a hell of a lot of time and effort.
Have they sped things up? Their UI framework was a dog from what saw.
The UI framework improved immeasurably with the introduction of Swing, which is a lot more feature-rich than AWT. It's still slow compared to the equivalent C program, but not critically so.
All I see Java doing for me is making my browser crash, and I am not joking. 1 out of every 5 webpages I access which use Java crashes the browser.
Repeat after me: "Java is not just applets. If your browser's implementation of Java sucks, blame your browser vendor."
Has Microsoft done anything more with Java as well?
Aside from trying to kill it? Not much. IBM is a lot better role model for what to do with Java. Microsoft tried to take the name, and screw with the standard, while IBM are committed to the standard, but don't care if they get to use the name. (IBM press release) --
You're kidding, right? I've always figured MelbourneIT are already making a fortune. I work at a pretty average-sized ISP, and we could be registering three or four.com.au's a day.
Multiply that by the number of ISPs in Australia, and you start seeing just how much money MelbourneIT could be making on new registrations alone, not even counting existing registrations.
And it's not like domain names have a huge overhead. You can do 95% of the processing automatically, and running the root nameserver for the TLD would cost many orders of magnitude less than the per-domain fee.
Meanwhile, there are no plans for any competition in the.au namespace, making MelbourneIT an even more attractive proposition.
I really don't see what the fuss is about at all. So you have to download the Linux support as an optional extra. Woohoo, big deal.
If you think about it, this turns out to be better for the Linux users. If the Linux version were packaged with the Windows version, there would never be any figures on how many Linux users actually bought the game, so noone would ever know if porting to Linux had been worth the effort or not.
This way, Linux users have a chance to show their presence. I say buy the game. Download the Linux conversion. Slashdot the FTP server.
The game rocks, it beats Quake 3 hands down IMHO, and when the reports start rolling in of the FTP server melting under the demand from Linux users, game programmers and distributors will know how many copies of the game ended up in the hands of Linux users (legally, please), and maybe they'll consider upping their support of the OS.
I'll be swayed by the weight of the "open source games" argument when you can point to something that _isn't_ a carbon copy of a five to ten year old game.
I mean, what do you have to present as a counter-argument? Freeciv and Pingus. A Civilisation clone, and a Lemmings clone. Clones of games that still might play well, but are way past their use-by dates as far as the available technology goes.
Open source evanglism is all well and good, but eventually you'll have to come up with the goods. Show me an open source StarCraft or Half Life, and _then_ I'll be listening.
Until then, until the open source movement comes up with something of the same calibre as Civ:CTP, then I'll be happy to continue to support Loki, and their uber cool games.
Free Software is at its strongest when it takes an existing idea, say a C compiler, or a Unix-like OS, makes a lifesize copy, and then keeps adding features until it is as good as, or better than, the commercial competition. I'd hazard a guess that very, very few Free Software projects are doing anything but copying, cloning, or porting existing products.
So if you're looking to throw a few million into research and development, in order to turn your Cool New Idea for the Next Killer App into a reality, do you really want to have to be asking yourself "So... how long until a few bearded hippies come up with a free (speech/beer)knock-off?"
There's a lot of talk about how venture capitalists are wary of high-tech startups, because they fear that if the product is too successful, Microsoft will just clone it and give it away with Windows. The Open Source factor is just as dangerous. Any product, useful or not, highly profitable or just scraping by, is fair game if a few hackers decide they want to clone it.
That said, Microsoft's "Defend the right to innovate" line is crap. I mean, since when have they innovated anything?
Back in the 2.0.foo days, ircd under Linux would fall over and die about when it hit 1000 simultaneous users (for the individual server, not the network).
The main problem was the way you had to hack the kernel to allow ircd to open more than 256 file descriptors, and the fact that this hack didn't mesh perfectly with the rest of the kernel, because it was a hack.
This problem was fixed, but not quickly enough to prevent most IRC networks from switching all servers and development to some form of BSD. Linux's failure on IRC also made the networks wary of trying it again.
IRC servers on big networks use up enough resources that they're the only thing running on the machine, so switching OS's to suit the prejudices of the network you're applying to really isn't too much of a problem.
Also, DALnet ircd development moved to FreeBSD, and the developers were loath to optimise it for Linux use, because since all the servers run FreeBSD anyway, what's the point?
The entirety of Microsoft's success has been based on its ability to use its Operating System monopoly to lever its way into the market until its product matures into the defacto standard.
The problem Microsoft will face is that it'll be in an entirely alien position. Sony, Sega and Nintendo are not small-fry software startups waiting to be crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut. Nor are they lumbering giants past their use-by dates. Between them they've owned the console market for about as long as MS have owned the PC market, and they don't seem to be showing too many signs of vulnerability.
Microsoft's OS monopoly will be meaningless in this market. Sure, they could stick CE on it, and make it do email and web-browsing, but in the end, a gaming console is about the games, and the OS is just the screen you get when you've got no CD/cartridge in the slot.
On the other hand, if they fix it so that their console games will also run on a Wintel PC with a 3d card and DirectX, then that'll get the developers on board pretty sharply. This is something that console manufacturers could never do, because every PC version of their game that sold would be a reason not to buy the console. But for MS, it's just moving from one of their products over to another.
So the big, and very interesting question is how Microsoft is going to adjust to being the small fish in a big pond, and what cards they're going to play to drain some of the water.
Amazon can conform to this if they want-but this is going on at ebay and other auction sites as well. As far as thats concerned, what is stopping Amazon and others from ignoring the request and allowing business as usual?
Trademark law.
You're not allowed to sell your product labeled with the trademark of another company, even if your product is an exact copy. Attempts to do so will get you sued.
What I don't understand is the Heinz Ketchup comparison...If you want to compare it to this situation, wouldn't it still be the exact same Heinz Ketchup-maybe without the label? The ingredients would be the same, because they came from the same factory, but with less info about the product.
This happens all the time in the real world. A name-brand food manufacturer will often sell their surplus to be repackaged as a cheap, supermarket no-name brand. Same ingredients, lower price, no trade-mark or logo.
And, of course, no guarantee that the repackager won't add a few extra preservatives, mix it with an inferior product, or accidentally drop a few pieces of broken glass in while putting it in the new bottles.
Similarly, there's no guarantee that in burning your knock-off RedHat CD, you haven't included a few rpms of things that you like, but that have huge security holes, or messed up the permissions and broken the HD install, or removed the gnome packages because you think they're a waste of space.
Sure, RedHat could do all this by itself, but it only wants to be held to blame for its own mistakes, not those of anonymous resellers.
Because of this, RedHat need to protect its name, and make sure it only gets applied to products it has control over.
Free speech has only been implied into the Australian Constitution with regards to political speech. Even then, it was only done by a pretty narrow High Court majority that could be overturned in a subsequent case.
In other words, I wouldn't rely on it for anything.
It was exciting, it had swordfights, chase-scenes, and romance. It had Good and Evil, without shades of grey. It had borderline abysmal acting. It had whiz-bang special effects that made you think you were watching a real space battle. But it didn't exactly exercise those brain-cells.
It was, as Lucas has said so many times, a Saturday morning movie for the kids. The fact that it was a damn good example of the genre, made squillions of dollars, and is still enjoyed by millions of people doesn't change that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, walk into any non-bargain-bin CD shop, take a CD case up to the counter, say "Can I listen to this?", and they'll let you, free of charge, perfectly legally.
Secondly, noone is twisting your arm behind your back, forcing you to listen to certain music. If you think the deal is bad, or the risk is too great, the answer is to BOYCOTT the product, not to steal it.
Thirdly, the world does not owe you the fruits of other peoples creativity. If you want free music, download some amateur works from mp3.com, or buy a guitar and make your own. If you think that mp3 is a viable distribution medium, then go around convincing _artists_ of that -- if you achieve this, then the record companies will become irrelevant.
If you want the record companies' music music, however, don't whine about the terms they ask - it's their product. If you didn't consume it, they wouldn't exist. If you consume it without agreeing to their terms, you're a criminal. Pay up or shut up.
Charles Miller
(Having fun being moderated down for the totally unacceptable crime of disagreeing with the slashdot mob mentality...)
--
YES! Now I SEE THE LIGHT! ALL CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL! The profit motive is EVIL! Handing personal information over to anyone online must be EVIL! We should BAN ALL ONLINE SHOPS because they're all run by EVIL CORPORATIONS and we have to enter our PERSONAL INFORMATION before they send us ANYTHING!
Give me a break, please.
P3P makes it easier for a user to give personal information out. It does not send that information automatically unless it's told to. It does not force the user to send that information.
When I go to a site that requires registration to enter, I ask three things. 1) What will my information be used for? 2) What is the information on this site worth to me? and 3) How much information do I have to hand over? Right now, I also have to ask 4) how long will it take to fill in this bloody form?
So, bring on P3P, I say. Let me decide, simply and through a defined protocol, what information each site can get from me. If they demand too much, either they lose my eyeballs, or I use my browser's profile manager to switch to being Bob Bobson, of Bobtown. People are incredibly paranoid about the Internet already, I can't imagine a browser manufacturer risking the user backlash of a hostile implementation of P3P.
Please, Gods, save me from people who want to "protect me from myself".
Charles Miller
--
You mean "second-person plural", of course. It's one of those things that's useful, but missing in the language, so people tend to invent their own.
In Australia, the most common second-person plural is "yous" (or "youse"), although it's still often qualified, for example "yous guys" or "yous all".
Charles Miller
--
Napster was never intended for illegal acts. They do absolutely everything they can legally and fairly do to prevent piracy; granted this isn't much (a copyright warning in the splash screen is all you can do), but they do everything they can.
What _particular_ drugs were you on when you wrote this?
Do you think Napster would have been anything but a failed technical exercise if it wasn't the most convenient way to find copyright mp3's?
Do you think they'd have got any of this Venture Capital without it? There's nothing technically exceptional about Napster, their only "product" is the content to be found on their network - that is, links to mp3's, most of which are being distributed against the wishes of the copyright holder.
If Metallica could find 300,000 copyright abusers in one week, isn't that an indication that there's a lot more that Napster can do to police their database?
Are you really so naive that you believe that the popularity of Napster asa way to distribute copyright mp3's _isn't_ an essential part of Napster Inc's business plan?
Defending Napster seems to be an exercise in sophistry. Let's see just how much of Napster's deliberate positioning of itself we can ignore, just because we like having a convenient way to download songs without paying for them.
Charles Miller
--
If an ISP said "We are not responsible for spam. Our mail and newsservers are merely a conduit for our users", how would the net.community react?
What if they set up an open server, called it "Spam 'R' Us"? Would they still be held unaccountable by the net community because they're just a server, and it's the users doing the damage?
What if they promised they'd ban every spammer within a few working days of having their names reported?
Why does Napster have a different standard of care?
Charles Miller
--
I'd love for someone to parse the articles, and find out just how many people who are supporting Napster in this case, are the same people who screamed so loudly at those GPL violations last month. I mean hey, it's all copyright.
If IBM forked a binary-only Linux modification, would it be okay so long as they only distributed it over Gnutella?
Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury.
Charles Miller
--
How does limiting the reporting of security bugs make the source less open? The source is still there. All they're limiting, is access to certain portions of the Bugzilla database. There's only a limited number of people who can perform commits on the mozilla.org CVS tree, too, and yet the project is still Open Source
I can't think of any open source project (off the top of my head) that doesn't recommend you report security bugs in private to the maintainers, and give them a chance to fix it before going to bugtraq. Most advisories you read on bugtraq contain those magic words "I contacted the maintainer about this, and [the fix is available here | they did not respond]". This is the correct way to do things. Report the bug to the maintainers. Give them a reasonable amount of time to patch it. When it's patched, or if the maintainers fail to respond, release the information. The only exception I can think of is if you know that the bug is already being exploited in the wild, and the users need immediate protection.
There is nothing stopping anyone who finds a bug in mozilla from immediately posting it to bugtraq, alt.2600, or mailing it in a brown parcel to their maiden aunt. All the Mozilla maintainers are saying is that if a security bug is reported to their Bugzilla system, it'll be kept to a limited number of developers until a fix is found.
The only problem with the system was the one that was being talked about in the referenced post - security bugs are being marked "Netscape-Only", which meant giving Netscape employees who didn't work on Mozilla access, while cutting trusted non-Netscape Mozilla developers out of the loop.
Fair enough.
<offtopic>
Over the last few days, slashdot has really showed the result of its descent into the Animal Farm mentality, bleating its "four legs good, two legs bad" editorial mantras about really complicated subjects such as copyright law, the ethics of service theft, and now the question of publicising security holes.
At the same time, the signal-to-noise has plummetted to new depths. My occasional forays into M2, that once averaged showing me 8 good posts and 2 troll/flamebait posts, are now more likely to be 2 good posts, 2 bad posts wrongly moderated up, and six troll/flamebait posts. Of the posts that do end up under articles, it's getting harder and harder to find the well-informed posters, as distinct from the wannabes who think they know what they're talking about when actually they don't.
Oh well. I guess it's time to go back to Usenet. At least there I can score posts on my own criteria.
</offtopic>
Charles Miller--
This is a Very Bad Idea. If you allow for licenses on how standards are implemented, Microsoft could kill samba, and then demand royalties on any program that can interpret MS Word documents.
What you can do, is trademark the name of the standard, and require that any product bearing that mark pass your test suite. Of course, as soon as you do that, the Open Source community will try to beat you to death with big sticks because your standard isn't open enough. (Consider the Java(tm) or Unix(tm) marks)
And then the embracer and extender just implements their broken version anyway, and quite legally calls it "J", or "Unix-like operating system".
On the other hand, if the DOJ forced Microsoft to publish all their APIs and network protocols, in a similar vein to what was done to IBM, then the problem in this instance would be moot, and few other companies are powerful enough to use embrace and extend in this way.
Charles Miller
--
Finding a FAQ is very, very easy. You have a choice between the well laid-out archive on ftp://rtfm.mit.edu, or searching Dejanews for groupname+FAQ. Most FAQs are also mirrored on the web, so check google as well.
.sig.
/. this weekend.
If none of these techniques works, then you can feel quite justified in posting "My foobar is broken, and why isn't your FAQ in any of the regular places?"
Finding out about the person who made a post on Usenet is the same as it is in slashdot. If someone chooses to give away nothing about themselves, you'll learn nothing. If someone decides they want people to know more about them, they'll put their website in their
Usenet isn't moving to the web. There's nothing inherently better about the web as a medium for discussion. If there's one thing slashdot has demonstrated, it's that it has exactly the same life-cycle as any Newsgroup that starts off cool, and then finds popularity, trolls, dick-size wars, and People Who Just Don't Get It.
The only difference is that VA Linux can't buy a newsgroup. Conspiracy theorists would see a significance in this, and the fact we've had two "Death of Usenet" articles on
Charles Miller
--
There are many, many methods of moderation on Usenet.
/. moderation would be "nocem". nocem messages are advisories in which any reader of Usenet can list message-IDs that they either consider a must-read, or that they think should be immediately trashed.
./ moderation. Choosing between standard discussion, or Natalie Portman posts would simply be a matter of choosing which moderators you trust. Moderators can mark as many posts as they want, even their own, in discussions they're taking part in. If you find the moderator is moderating badly, all you have to do is remove their key from your trust file.
Scoring killfiles are a God-send. Once you've read a newsfroup for a few months, you can tell who is most likely to produce content, and score them up, and score down those more likely to produce noise. Don't have enough time to read the entire group today? Doesn't matter, the cream should have floated to the top of your newsreader. Just read down the list as far as you want, then bin the rest.
The other "plus" of this method is that you know when you load the group and there's nothing with a positive score, it's time to move on and find somewhere else to amuse you.
The most similar to
The difference is that you can verify the source of a nocem using PGP, and you can choose which moderators you trust.
This would dispose of most of the complaints about
This is also something that couldn't be implemented on a web-based forum. Dealing with such fine-grained moderation preferences would bring the site to its knees. The beauty of Usenet is that aside from the spam-filtering, the rest of the work is done by the client, so you can set up your own moderation to your own preferences.
Usenet isn't dead. It's not even dying. Web based forums are incredibly clumsy in comparison, and only good for short-lived discussions.
Look at slashdot for an example. Unless you get in the first hour or two after a topic is posted, the chances of having your post read, or responded to is minimal. The chance of carrying on a discussion that lasts more than a few hours is almost non-existant - everyone will have moved on to the next topic.
On Usenet, on the other hand, discussions can go on for days, weeks, months, years, or occasionally forever. Those who are interested in the thread will continue to read it, those who aren't will just score it down or killfile it, and move on to something new.
I'd like to see how a slashdot/NNTP gateway would deal with this obvious change in mentality would be interesting. Expiring posts after 24 hours would be the obvious, if brutal solution.
Charles Miller
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Yeah, I know this is probably a troll, but anyway...
Then you obviously haven't been listening very hard. Even on /. there are heaps of stories you could read to catch up.
A lot. You don't see, and you probably won't see any big commercial apps or games in Java. The language just isn't suited to that. But the majority of programming isn't for commercial apps or games, it's building customised applications for businesses. Java has carved itself a pretty huge niche there.
For example, I need to write an app that runs on a Linux server, to act as a central clearing point for transactions to be routed to 'n' proprietary credit-card processing gateways, each running a different protocol, most of them on NT boxen. Gluing everything together with Java has saved me a hell of a lot of time and effort.
The UI framework improved immeasurably with the introduction of Swing, which is a lot more feature-rich than AWT. It's still slow compared to the equivalent C program, but not critically so.
Repeat after me: "Java is not just applets. If your browser's implementation of Java sucks, blame your browser vendor."
Aside from trying to kill it? Not much. IBM is a lot better role model for what to do with Java. Microsoft tried to take the name, and screw with the standard, while IBM are committed to the standard, but don't care if they get to use the name. (IBM press release)
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I wish people wouldn't respond to obvious flamebait.
Charles Miller
You're kidding, right? I've always figured MelbourneIT are already making a fortune. I work at a pretty average-sized ISP, and we could be registering three or four .com.au's a day.
.au namespace, making MelbourneIT an even more attractive proposition.
Multiply that by the number of ISPs in Australia, and you start seeing just how much money MelbourneIT could be making on new registrations alone, not even counting existing registrations.
And it's not like domain names have a huge overhead. You can do 95% of the processing automatically, and running the root nameserver for the TLD would cost many orders of magnitude less than the per-domain fee.
Meanwhile, there are no plans for any competition in the
I really don't see what the fuss is about at all. So you have to download the Linux support as an optional extra. Woohoo, big deal.
If you think about it, this turns out to be better for the Linux users. If the Linux version were packaged with the Windows version, there would never be any figures on how many Linux users actually bought the game, so noone would ever know if porting to Linux had been worth the effort or not.
This way, Linux users have a chance to show their presence. I say buy the game. Download the Linux conversion. Slashdot the FTP server.
The game rocks, it beats Quake 3 hands down IMHO, and when the reports start rolling in of the FTP server melting under the demand from Linux users, game programmers and distributors will know how many copies of the game ended up in the hands of Linux users (legally, please), and maybe they'll consider upping their support of the OS.
I'll be swayed by the weight of the "open source games" argument when you can point to something that _isn't_ a carbon copy of a five to ten year old game.
I mean, what do you have to present as a counter-argument? Freeciv and Pingus. A Civilisation clone, and a Lemmings clone. Clones of games that still might play well, but are way past their use-by dates as far as the available technology goes.
Open source evanglism is all well and good, but eventually you'll have to come up with the goods. Show me an open source StarCraft or Half Life, and _then_ I'll be listening.
Until then, until the open source movement comes up with something of the same calibre as Civ:CTP, then I'll be happy to continue to support Loki, and their uber cool games.
Charles Miller
Speaking as "the bloke from work".
Free Software is at its strongest when it takes an existing idea, say a C compiler, or a Unix-like OS, makes a lifesize copy, and then keeps adding features until it is as good as, or better than, the commercial competition. I'd hazard a guess that very, very few Free Software projects are doing anything but copying, cloning, or porting existing products.
So if you're looking to throw a few million into research and development, in order to turn your Cool New Idea for the Next Killer App into a reality, do you really want to have to be asking yourself "So... how long until a few bearded hippies come up with a free (speech/beer)knock-off?"
There's a lot of talk about how venture capitalists are wary of high-tech startups, because they fear that if the product is too successful, Microsoft will just clone it and give it away with Windows. The Open Source factor is just as dangerous. Any product, useful or not, highly profitable or just scraping by, is fair game if a few hackers decide they want to clone it.
That said, Microsoft's "Defend the right to innovate" line is crap. I mean, since when have they innovated anything?
Charles Miller
Back in the 2.0.foo days, ircd under Linux would fall over and die about when it hit 1000 simultaneous users (for the individual server, not the network).
The main problem was the way you had to hack the kernel to allow ircd to open more than 256 file descriptors, and the fact that this hack didn't mesh perfectly with the rest of the kernel, because it was a hack.
This problem was fixed, but not quickly enough to prevent most IRC networks from switching all servers and development to some form of BSD. Linux's failure on IRC also made the networks wary of trying it again.
IRC servers on big networks use up enough resources that they're the only thing running on the machine, so switching OS's to suit the prejudices of the network you're applying to really isn't too much of a problem.
Also, DALnet ircd development moved to FreeBSD, and the developers were loath to optimise it for Linux use, because since all the servers run FreeBSD anyway, what's the point?
Charles Miller
The entirety of Microsoft's success has been based on its ability to use its Operating System monopoly to lever its way into the market until its product matures into the defacto standard.
The problem Microsoft will face is that it'll be in an entirely alien position. Sony, Sega and Nintendo are not small-fry software startups waiting to be crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut. Nor are they lumbering giants past their use-by dates. Between them they've owned the console market for about as long as MS have owned the PC market, and they don't seem to be showing too many signs of vulnerability.
Microsoft's OS monopoly will be meaningless in this market. Sure, they could stick CE on it, and make it do email and web-browsing, but in the end, a gaming console is about the games, and the OS is just the screen you get when you've got no CD/cartridge in the slot.
On the other hand, if they fix it so that their console games will also run on a Wintel PC with a 3d card and DirectX, then that'll get the developers on board pretty sharply. This is something that console manufacturers could never do, because every PC version of their game that sold would be a reason not to buy the console. But for MS, it's just moving from one of their products over to another.
So the big, and very interesting question is how Microsoft is going to adjust to being the small fish in a big pond, and what cards they're going to play to drain some of the water.
Charles
Amazon can conform to this if they want-but this is going on at ebay and other auction sites as well. As far as thats concerned, what is stopping Amazon and others from ignoring the request and allowing business as usual?
Trademark law.
You're not allowed to sell your product labeled with the trademark of another company, even if your product is an exact copy. Attempts to do so will get you sued.
Charles Miller
What I don't understand is the Heinz Ketchup comparison...If you want to compare it to this situation, wouldn't it still be the exact same Heinz Ketchup-maybe without the label? The ingredients would be the same, because they came from the same factory, but with less info about the product.
This happens all the time in the real world. A name-brand food manufacturer will often sell their surplus to be repackaged as a cheap, supermarket no-name brand. Same ingredients, lower price, no trade-mark or logo.
And, of course, no guarantee that the repackager won't add a few extra preservatives, mix it with an inferior product, or accidentally drop a few pieces of broken glass in while putting it in the new bottles.
Similarly, there's no guarantee that in burning your knock-off RedHat CD, you haven't included a few rpms of things that you like, but that have huge security holes, or messed up the permissions and broken the HD install, or removed the gnome packages because you think they're a waste of space.
Sure, RedHat could do all this by itself, but it only wants to be held to blame for its own mistakes, not those of anonymous resellers.
Because of this, RedHat need to protect its name, and make sure it only gets applied to products it has control over.
Free speech has only been implied into the Australian Constitution with regards to political speech. Even then, it was only done by a pretty narrow High Court majority that could be overturned in a subsequent case.
In other words, I wouldn't rely on it for anything.
Australia also has one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the world.
These things express themselves in different ways.
Charles Miller
"A New Hope" wasn't "intelligent".
It was exciting, it had swordfights, chase-scenes, and romance. It had Good and Evil, without shades of grey. It had borderline abysmal acting. It had whiz-bang special effects that made you think you were watching a real space battle. But it didn't exactly exercise those brain-cells.
It was, as Lucas has said so many times, a Saturday morning movie for the kids. The fact that it was a damn good example of the genre, made squillions of dollars, and is still enjoyed by millions of people doesn't change that fact.
Carlfish
Ideally, in the future, we won't need to be as proactive in pointing out the benefits of Linux -- they will be obvious.
Why do we need to now?
Can anyone seriously tell me why I should care if Grandma Joe uses Linux?
Charles Miller
And when will Americans realise that the entire rest of the English speaking world have an entirely different definition of the word "Fanny"?
Oh well at least it keeps me vaguely amused.