I have been posting on/. for a couple of months now. I had read Slashdot for several years, and had always been repulsed by the level of ignorance and mob culture that reigned here.
So I decided to get a user account and test my theory that only posts that would be favoured by the masses would get moderated up, and that posts that closely corresponded to the communist zealoutry of "free" software were certain to be favourably received.
The results showed that this was indeed the case. Pandering to the "utopian" ideal of open source with its socialist political undertones guaranteed my success. Provided these posts appear sufficiently close to the beginning of the message board they would be seen and moderated up by individuals (or were they behaving as individuals; that is a pertinent question) who sought to promote their narrow minded bigotry, to spread their seed of poison against the stability of society and the natural human processes of capitalism.
If I wished to have a +5 Informative/Interesting/Insightful (for these tags in themselves are arbitrary markers; do Slashdot readers even understand what is truly meant by "Insightful"? I very much doubt it.) then I was certain to achieve it merely by waiting patiently reloading the/. homepage for the next article to appear.
I saw the moderation points come in, and my Karma climb up from Neutral to Positive to Good to Excellent. The accuracy with which I could predict the moderations and replies astounded me; it frightened me. Is this representative of all society? Is there really no such thing as individual thought? Are we all just a member of some mob or another?
You can see from my history that what I say about being moderated up is true, although the earliest examples were best and can no longer be seen. I didn't try as hard to mould my comments perfectly into the Slashdot mindset after my initial successes, knowing how easily my prey fed were caught even in those mouse traps with rotten cheese.
I urge you to reconsider your opinions on free and open source software. I do not say that they are wrong, or that they have no place. Open source software may have a place, but anticapitalism does not. Without capitalism we won't have jobs to pay for food, accomodation, our families and recreation. Those who benefit most from the furious communism of the GPL are the large players like IBM and Novell. It doesn't benefit the small, innovative firm struggling for a foothold. The BSD license, MIT license, and to an extent less restrictive variants of the LGPL like the Mozilla Public License or wxWindows (now wxWidgets) license are beneficial to the developer community, firms large and small, and end users alike. It is closer to the academic/commercial partnership that has worked in the past for scientific and other industries.
I also urge you to be objective, to think about your viewpoints, and those of others whose views you embrace. Perhaps I will return to Slashdot one day when an "Insightful" moderation really means Insightful, and is not merely a doubleplusgoodduckquack to use Orwell's terminology.
The system was only piloted in a few areas during the last election and even those pilots were flawed.
It was piloted in my constituency.
You should read the report before making any comments about the accuracy of the count. If the Commission don't think it is accurate, how can you suggest it is ?
Are you just trolling? Why don't you RTFA. That's not what they said at all:
On the basis of its review of expert reports, submissions received and other relevant information to
date, the Commission finds that it is not in a position to recommend with the requisite degree of
confidence the use of the chosen system at elections in Ireland in June 2004.
The Commission wishes to emphasise that its conclusion is not based on any finding that the system
will not work, but on the finding that it has not been proven at this time to the satisfaction of the
Commission that it will work.
They just haven't had enough time to do rigorous testing in time for the next elections, but they do think it's accurate from what they've seen so far.
keeping the source code open so that it can be truly stress-tested and understood.
Even Micro$oft provides source code to government users for security review. Other proprietary developers can do the same; it's not an advantage to use open source in this case.
We only just got the evoting system in Ireland and used it in the last election. It seems a shame to scrap it now. It's much faster and surely more accurate than counting by hand.
Maybe all the lobbyists are the same people who lost their jobs as ballot counters;-)
Yet, even with excess RAM turning off swap is disasterous.
I find that swap partitions in Linux and FreeBSD are just a nuisance once you've got enough RAM for your apps. Swap files are preferable because you can change the size and number of the files after installation. Swap partitions are just wasting valuable space on your HDD.
I have 1Gb of RAM on my laptop and Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 98 SE and Windows XP all run fine without any swap partitions or files on my quadruple boot.
The virtual memory algorithms in Linux, *BSD and NT all prefer you to have 1.5 times the virtual memory as you have physical memory. When you have 1Gb of RAM that's a hell of a lot of space to waste, especially in a multiboot situation.
At any rate it has little affect on the total memory available in practice to Windows 98. I used to play around a lot with DJGPP which is a port of gcc to DOS DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface). I worked out that the maximum theoretical amount of memory you could have with such a DPMI memory manager was 512Mb, which some people had reportedly achieved using OS/2's DOS emulator. So I used to think Microsoft were pretty smart to be able to support 1Gb on my laptop on Windows 98 until I saw the BSODs with the "Out of Memory" exceptions when wordpad was running!
I don't believe it: Atlantis was predicted to be found in 2012!
And people have searched for it and failed for centuries. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from that;-)
"Scientists claim to have found the lost city of Atlantis, off the coast of Cyprus"
I thought that the popular theory was that Atlantis was actually in Antarctica. Antarctica once had a tropical climate, and there are remains of tropical rainforests there today.
I have karma to burn so I'm going to point to the moderators out that it is in fact the parent AC that's the troll and not R. M. Stallman or Marc Rochekind. Probably a troll with an axe to grind against Stallman or something.
If you look at the user page for Marc Rochekind he posted only on the article on Marc Rochekind's book. We'd have to be really getting into conspiracy theories if we thought he wasn't really Marc Rochekind.
As for Stallman, the comments are very Stallmanesque so unless you think Stallman is indeed a troll I wouldn't mod him as such.
I hope the moderators have worked out that the parent and grandparent are recently created trolls by the same person -- the user ids are very similar.
And you're an AC. Whom do you think I'm going to take more seriously?
Please don't mod these people up, even if what they are saying is sensible. It's called trolling.
I'm not sure exactly how such a large, disparate group of developers will be able to defend their copyright if it comes to that.
That's true of any open source project. However, the bad publicity a company would get from abusing a third party's copyright could be damaging to their credibility.
I don't see anything on SpecOpsLabs site that talks about the fact that WINE falls under the LGPL.
Take a look at ReWind. It is an MIT licensed fork of WINE. Many of the key developers licensed their code under both MIT and LGPL licenses when the WINE license changed in mid 2002. With the exception of the developers employed by Codeweavers and a couple of others, most of the main developers have allowed their WINE patches to be used in ReWind. If SpecOps Labs used ReWind as a base, then they have no legal issues to be concerned with with respect to WINE code they may have used.
Don't forget though that UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group, so even though SCO has (claims to have?) the rights to the UNIX source code they don't own the name.
I spotted the first edition of this book in my university library when I was doing some coding on FreeBSD. Whilst it didn't have anything specific to FreeBSD it was still a handy reference. I look forward to reading the additions in this version. Perhaps I'll get the university library to order it for me;-)
Once upon a time Apple provided the dominant solution for a friendly GUI OS and it was tied to their own hardware. Along came the cheaper PCs and their marketshare has decreased to the few % it is today.
IBM created the personal computer. They also licensed DOS from Microsoft for their PCs. IBM's dream would have been to have everyone using IBM PCs with IBM's version of DOS. However, IBM PC clones emerged, and Microsoft had the sense to retain the rights to distribute DOS themselves. So there was no need to stay tied to IBM's offerings. Nor was any hardware vendor going to jump at the possibility of shipping OS/2 when it would have been supporting a direct competitor.
Similarly, consider Sun with the SPARC workstations and servers and their own UNIX based operating system, SunOS later called Solaris.
Whilst all 3 of these companies do their own hardware and software as you say and they still have profitable businesses they are not the biggest players in the largest computer market which is of course the PC market. All 3 would have liked to have been provided the hardware/software package that most people used, but as it turned out one company (Microsoft) got an OS/software monopoly but no one company was allowed to have a hardware monopoly. This is what I mean by saying you can't have both the hardware and the software market and it is a well recognised fact, that has been recognized time and time again in the industry.
"Sun is not coming back. It is a giant company without a business."
I think the article went a bit too far in predicting Sun's demise. Whilst it's true that the rating of their stock is poor and they have really failed in many areas where they would have liked to succeed, I'd say there are signs
they may be coming back.
Now they have a collaboration of some description with Micro$oft; it's hard to get an ally with more punch than them, regardless of what you might think (or indeed Sun and Scott McNealy might think!) of them.
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there. Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
My favorite solution is to have all websites pertaining to porn be labelled with an.XXX suffix.
That possibility was discussed on/. once before. However, a lot of people thought it could result in governments censoring material they found unfavourable by insisting it by on a.xxx domain that people are less likely to take seriously.
I think the compromise policy here would be for companies to make reasonable attempts to block spam and provide warnings to employees about potential nature of spam. That's all they can practically do. They can't block out everything that could be offensive, any more than they could if it were spam sent by snailmail or offensive prank telephone calls, etc.
Putty is available under the terms of an MIT style license actually. I agree that it rocks though, I use it to manage the Debian Linux servers in my college.
You're right. I wasn't joking; I was serious. I have no idea why I was modded funny. It's very inconvenient to schedule a reboot on a server (and making sure someone is in the server room in case it all goes horribly wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
I have been posting on /. for a couple of months now. I had read Slashdot for several years, and had always been repulsed by the level of ignorance and mob culture that reigned here.
/. homepage for the next article to appear.
So I decided to get a user account and test my theory that only posts that would be favoured by the masses would get moderated up, and that posts that closely corresponded to the communist zealoutry of "free" software were certain to be favourably received.
The results showed that this was indeed the case. Pandering to the "utopian" ideal of open source with its socialist political undertones guaranteed my success. Provided these posts appear sufficiently close to the beginning of the message board they would be seen and moderated up by individuals (or were they behaving as individuals; that is a pertinent question) who sought to promote their narrow minded bigotry, to spread their seed of poison against the stability of society and the natural human processes of capitalism.
If I wished to have a +5 Informative/Interesting/Insightful (for these tags in themselves are arbitrary markers; do Slashdot readers even understand what is truly meant by "Insightful"? I very much doubt it.) then I was certain to achieve it merely by waiting patiently reloading the
I saw the moderation points come in, and my Karma climb up from Neutral to Positive to Good to Excellent. The accuracy with which I could predict the moderations and replies astounded me; it frightened me. Is this representative of all society? Is there really no such thing as individual thought? Are we all just a member of some mob or another?
You can see from my history that what I say about being moderated up is true, although the earliest examples were best and can no longer be seen. I didn't try as hard to mould my comments perfectly into the Slashdot mindset after my initial successes, knowing how easily my prey fed were caught even in those mouse traps with rotten cheese.
I urge you to reconsider your opinions on free and open source software. I do not say that they are wrong, or that they have no place. Open source software may have a place, but anticapitalism does not. Without capitalism we won't have jobs to pay for food, accomodation, our families and recreation. Those who benefit most from the furious communism of the GPL are the large players like IBM and Novell. It doesn't benefit the small, innovative firm struggling for a foothold. The BSD license, MIT license, and to an extent less restrictive variants of the LGPL like the Mozilla Public License or wxWindows (now wxWidgets) license are beneficial to the developer community, firms large and small, and end users alike. It is closer to the academic/commercial partnership that has worked in the past for scientific and other industries.
I also urge you to be objective, to think about your viewpoints, and those of others whose views you embrace. Perhaps I will return to Slashdot one day when an "Insightful" moderation really means Insightful, and is not merely a doubleplusgoodduckquack to use Orwell's terminology.
Thank you for your time.
mcx101
I wouldn't consider Pravda to "back up" anything.
My wit was clearly wasted on the moderators how modded me Informative instead of Funny. Don't blame me :-(
That 512MB is an OS/2 limit.
Perhaps so, but it is most certainly the limit you can get from DPMI.
Would you have got the joke if I had written the winking smiley after both lines and not just the first?
It's not my fault if /. moderators mod funny posts Informative...
The system was only piloted in a few areas during the last election and even those pilots were flawed.
It was piloted in my constituency.
You should read the report before making any comments about the accuracy of the count. If the Commission don't think it is accurate, how can you suggest it is ?
Are you just trolling? Why don't you RTFA. That's not what they said at all:
They just haven't had enough time to do rigorous testing in time for the next elections, but they do think it's accurate from what they've seen so far.
keeping the source code open so that it can be truly stress-tested and understood.
Even Micro$oft provides source code to government users for security review. Other proprietary developers can do the same; it's not an advantage to use open source in this case.
We only just got the evoting system in Ireland and used it in the last election. It seems a shame to scrap it now. It's much faster and surely more accurate than counting by hand.
Maybe all the lobbyists are the same people who lost their jobs as ballot counters ;-)
Yet, even with excess RAM turning off swap is disasterous.
I find that swap partitions in Linux and FreeBSD are just a nuisance once you've got enough RAM for your apps. Swap files are preferable because you can change the size and number of the files after installation. Swap partitions are just wasting valuable space on your HDD.
I have 1Gb of RAM on my laptop and Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 98 SE and Windows XP all run fine without any swap partitions or files on my quadruple boot.
The virtual memory algorithms in Linux, *BSD and NT all prefer you to have 1.5 times the virtual memory as you have physical memory. When you have 1Gb of RAM that's a hell of a lot of space to waste, especially in a multiboot situation.
At any rate it has little affect on the total memory available in practice to Windows 98. I used to play around a lot with DJGPP which is a port of gcc to DOS DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface). I worked out that the maximum theoretical amount of memory you could have with such a DPMI memory manager was 512Mb, which some people had reportedly achieved using OS/2's DOS emulator. So I used to think Microsoft were pretty smart to be able to support 1Gb on my laptop on Windows 98 until I saw the BSODs with the "Out of Memory" exceptions when wordpad was running!
Just a link to back up that comment about Antarctica here.
I don't believe it: Atlantis was predicted to be found in 2012!
And people have searched for it and failed for centuries. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from that ;-)
"Scientists claim to have found the lost city of Atlantis, off the coast of Cyprus"
I thought that the popular theory was that Atlantis was actually in Antarctica. Antarctica once had a tropical climate, and there are remains of tropical rainforests there today.
I have karma to burn so I'm going to point to the moderators out that it is in fact the parent AC that's the troll and not R. M. Stallman or Marc Rochekind. Probably a troll with an axe to grind against Stallman or something.
If you look at the user page for Marc Rochekind he posted only on the article on Marc Rochekind's book. We'd have to be really getting into conspiracy theories if we thought he wasn't really Marc Rochekind.
As for Stallman, the comments are very Stallmanesque so unless you think Stallman is indeed a troll I wouldn't mod him as such.
I hope the moderators have worked out that the parent and grandparent are recently created trolls by the same person -- the user ids are very similar.
And you're an AC. Whom do you think I'm going to take more seriously?
Please don't mod these people up, even if what they are saying is sensible. It's called trolling.
That's right; you're trolling.
I'm not sure exactly how such a large, disparate group of developers will be able to defend their copyright if it comes to that.
That's true of any open source project. However, the bad publicity a company would get from abusing a third party's copyright could be damaging to their credibility.
I don't see anything on SpecOpsLabs site that talks about the fact that WINE falls under the LGPL.
Take a look at ReWind. It is an MIT licensed fork of WINE. Many of the key developers licensed their code under both MIT and LGPL licenses when the WINE license changed in mid 2002. With the exception of the developers employed by Codeweavers and a couple of others, most of the main developers have allowed their WINE patches to be used in ReWind. If SpecOps Labs used ReWind as a base, then they have no legal issues to be concerned with with respect to WINE code they may have used.
When was their market share larger than it is today?
Now it's stagnant at about 2%. It's a bit higher for all years for US only.
So there marketshare is about one fifth of the 1990 figure. Were you just trolling or did you not even think before posting?
There has been a huge amount of variation between UNIX implementations, but in more recent times standards like POSIX have emerged.
Don't forget though that UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group, so even though SCO has (claims to have?) the rights to the UNIX source code they don't own the name.
I spotted the first edition of this book in my university library when I was doing some coding on FreeBSD. Whilst it didn't have anything specific to FreeBSD it was still a handy reference. I look forward to reading the additions in this version. Perhaps I'll get the university library to order it for me ;-)
... BASIC's much acclaimed successor, Visual Basic ;-)
And a quote from the linked article from the Reg: "Sun is hoping that Solaris x86 becomes the standard Unix option on x86 boxes."
Well, if people will choose Linux over FreeBSD, maybe they'll choose Solaris over Linux too ;-)
What do you mean, look at Apple and IBM?
Once upon a time Apple provided the dominant solution for a friendly GUI OS and it was tied to their own hardware. Along came the cheaper PCs and their marketshare has decreased to the few % it is today.
IBM created the personal computer. They also licensed DOS from Microsoft for their PCs. IBM's dream would have been to have everyone using IBM PCs with IBM's version of DOS. However, IBM PC clones emerged, and Microsoft had the sense to retain the rights to distribute DOS themselves. So there was no need to stay tied to IBM's offerings. Nor was any hardware vendor going to jump at the possibility of shipping OS/2 when it would have been supporting a direct competitor.
Similarly, consider Sun with the SPARC workstations and servers and their own UNIX based operating system, SunOS later called Solaris.
Whilst all 3 of these companies do their own hardware and software as you say and they still have profitable businesses they are not the biggest players in the largest computer market which is of course the PC market. All 3 would have liked to have been provided the hardware/software package that most people used, but as it turned out one company (Microsoft) got an OS/software monopoly but no one company was allowed to have a hardware monopoly. This is what I mean by saying you can't have both the hardware and the software market and it is a well recognised fact, that has been recognized time and time again in the industry.
"Sun is not coming back. It is a giant company without a business."
I think the article went a bit too far in predicting Sun's demise. Whilst it's true that the rating of their stock is poor and they have really failed in many areas where they would have liked to succeed, I'd say there are signs they may be coming back.
Now they have a collaboration of some description with Micro$oft; it's hard to get an ally with more punch than them, regardless of what you might think (or indeed Sun and Scott McNealy might think!) of them.
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there. Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
My favorite solution is to have all websites pertaining to porn be labelled with an .XXX suffix.
That possibility was discussed on /. once before. However, a lot of people thought it could result in governments censoring material they found unfavourable by insisting it by on a .xxx domain that people are less likely to take seriously.
I think the compromise policy here would be for companies to make reasonable attempts to block spam and provide warnings to employees about potential nature of spam. That's all they can practically do. They can't block out everything that could be offensive, any more than they could if it were spam sent by snailmail or offensive prank telephone calls, etc.
Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
Putty is available under the terms of an MIT style license actually. I agree that it rocks though, I use it to manage the Debian Linux servers in my college.
I'm not sure what to make of this now; it seems they have made a presentation of the technology to the press. Is it a scam or is this for real?
It's not like Slashdot to mod Darl up :-)
You're right. I wasn't joking; I was serious. I have no idea why I was modded funny. It's very inconvenient to schedule a reboot on a server (and making sure someone is in the server room in case it all goes horribly wrong).