Absolutely. Everyone builds off of others ideas. Since Apple and Microsoft are the dominant desktop OS competitors they will take ideas from each other.
Yeah, because every media outlet out there offers their raw footage to everyone. All major journalists edit their video footage and have ever since video has been available.
Exactly. The hardware is a off-the-shelf commodity. Well, a pretty big shelf, but I will bet that Robotic Parking just specifies someone else's hardware and a contracted construction company builds the garage.
So the smart thing to do here would be for the hardware manufacturers to fund some OS software. That way barrier to entry for their product would be much lower. The hardware manufacturer has the best motivation for a license free system to interface with their product.
what part of repeatedly going to someone's profile and checking to see if they have new pictures of themselves isn't stalking??
So if I go to my friend's blog to see if they've posted new pictures of their kids it's stalking? Maybe if I go to CNN to look for pictures of President Bush I'm stalking him?
Sure, what you are describing now could be construed as 'anonymous stalking' and in your particular situation it may have been, but to describe anyone that goes out to myspace and browse the profiles a stalker is extreme. In fact, unless you are obsessing over one particular individual it stalking shouldn't be used at all. If you are just out checking pictures of the hot girls, while potentially creepy, its not stalking.
Liability - any failure is at large your responsibility, developers can be knowingly negligent and not be liable in any way
Developers can be knowingly negligent anyway. In fact, I bet 'knowing' negligent is much more common in closed source projects where developers are just getting paid to be there than it is in OS projects where developers have an interest in the project. The company ownership, and their insurance company, may be liable, but how likely is it that the liability is going to stretch down to the individual developer?
Support - you OS product might not have any support, if it does its costs are not fixed and you have to tie part of your budget into emergency and contingency funds
Any closed source product may have it's support dissappear at any given time. If the vendor goes out of business, or decides to significantly increase it's support prices you have the same situation. Unless you are buying from IBM with a long term contract this is still a very real risk.
Standard compliance - forget ISO or any safety/regulations compliance
You may have a valid point, but any OS project could achieve this. Just because no one is normally willing to pay for the audits doesn't mean it's not achievable.
Need for internal support - OS will require you to maintain dedicated personnel capable of troubleshooting the system
Again, no reason this issue is isolated to OS as opposed to CS. There are plenty of closed source hardware and software products that require internal support, or at least indpendent contractors (Microsoft Exchange, Cisco routers, etc...).
OS works well for non-critical wide-use applications but I don't see it moving into other areas in the near future.
OS is already working well in critical applications. There is a reason companies like IBM and HP have moved away from using their proprietary software and focused on delivering OS solutions.
You do make one valid point. Limited use applications are much more difficult for the OS model. Anyone who funds a major limited--use project, like controlling parking robots, is unlikely to release unde an open source license. The only way I can see this working is if a number of users of the software and manufacturers of the hardware band together to fund it's development. Even this is a difficult proposition - how can they handle the johnny-come-lately's who want to jump on board and use software others have paid to develop?
...but you should be aware that it is wrong, if you have someone to be loyal to..
That's all well and good, but to call browsing myspace 'anonymous stalking' isn't an accurate assesment. Cheating is cheating. Obviously, the status of the relationship is something two people have to decide for themselves, but browsing/meeting women on myspace is not much different than going to the bar and hitting on women. If you are doing it behind a girlfriend's back, it's wrong (if she knows about it and is OK with it that's completely between you two).
I'm not condoning any unethical behaviour that would undermine a relationship, I just don't like the idea of acceptable, from a legal standpoint, web activities like myspace being equated to, an illegal act, stalking.
2) Admin -- This is harder in Linux. In windows, there are only a few differences between configuration locations between Win2K, XP, Win2K3, etc., and of course the registry is a common feature among all versions of Windows.
Nonsense. In Linux you have a standard, robust set of tools to use. There are, to my knowledge, only two commonly used startup script configurations in Linux distros. Windows has many differing software installers from homegrown stuff to MSI (which changes from time to time itself). The real advantage in Linux are the networking tools. It's much easier to help a user with her machine if you can telnet/ssh directly in and see what's going on - an ability is not native to Windows.
Developer -- It is fairly difficult to release binary packages of your software when you don't know whether or not a particular library will be present on the target system.
Actually, it's not. Offer a static build like Opera does. Not feasible in all circumstances, but definitely doable for many projects. Besides, DLL hell is one of the most renown problems in Windows. I've worked on Windows software releases. Attempting to support one Windows platform with all of it's potential library issues is hard enough. Throw in support for versions back to Windows 98 and (shudder) Windows Me, that becomes complex, especially if your application has networking capability.
So, large-scale software manufacturers choose to restrict what distros they provide support for, due to the fact that they do not want to be responsible for supporting some random distro that they have not heard of or done any testing on.
Not exactly. Large-scale software manufacturers (or any software manufacturer) is going to only test on platforms that will make them money. Testing is a lengthy, expensive process. Support even more so. If a vendor can control their testing and support costs by restricting them to the most lucrative platforms they will do so. It has nothing to do with what they've heard of, it has everything to do with what their customer base requires. If enough users start using the new Linux distro of the hour a successful vendor will need to support it in some fashion.
Maybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens...
No, actually he's arguing that the market won't allow telecoms to make tiered bandwidth a viable economic model. There's no need for regulation because the competition in the market will prevent the kind of abuses that are alleged.
Pre-emptive legislation is unnecessary. Regulation can always be enforced after someone attempts to abuse the system. Just the threat of potential Net Neutrality laws should be adequate to keep the telecoms from doing anything too nasty.
You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.
Deregulation demands more responsibility on the consumers part. Government regulation can make things safer for the consumer, but they also limit a consumer's choices. Inevitably some of these unavailable choices will be better options for the consumer. In this particular instance the consumer will only get the shaft if they choose to either continue to do business with an ISP that demands a tiered service or if they choose not to circumvent the throttling by other means. Net Neutrality will only protect the consumers that don't actually care about their service adequately to show their ISPs that they won't stand for bandwidth throttling. Ebay, Google, Yahoo, etc... are pushing the Net Neutrality because they stand to loose the most from it. Many consumers may accept the restrictions put for the by the ISPs and those restrictions will cut directly into Google's profits.
Total deregulation may not be an acceptable alternative, but we need an acceptable method to eliminate the corruption and greed from our government officials. The problem isn't the regulation itself, it's the actions of those conducting the regulation.
What I'm getting at is the author of the original article seems to be trying to imply tbat a laisser faire approach is some kind of clever compromise...
I didn't get that from the article at all. The author is simply pointing out that government regulation has a history of supporting the interests of big business, not the consumer. The Net Neutrality camp's campaign may very well backfire on them. I think his points are very well presented. If the citizens of this country refuse to look at the historical performance of government regulation we deserve exactly what we will get.
Dude - you have NO idea how things work in the real world. We have see the world without the FDA.
Yeah, like Vioxx?
Again, I will reiterate, I'm not saying we don't need some kind of drug review. All I'm saying is getting FDA approval on a product is one of the most difficult and expensive steps in the pharmaceutical business. Current estimates are that FDA approval costs $800 million dollars. The US is the most expensive country in the world to get approval. Heck, the FDA still can't agree on the benefits of ASPIRIN for heart attack patients.
The FDA panel was merely being scientifically "pure" in making this vote. One of the panel members noted that what was needed is a seven-year trial enrolling 15,000 patients in the moderate-risk group, and until such data was available FDA should not give its stamp of approval.
But while agreeing with this opinion, another panel member further noted that aspirin's overall benefits have been so well-documented that it would probably be unethical (and certainly unfeasible) to actually perform such a trial.
It's quite possible that the FDA has cost as many lives as it has saved by being slow and expensive to approve drugs. I think you are the one who has NO idea how things work in the real world.
since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!
The net neutrality legislation? I wasn't aware that any net neutrality legislation had passed congress. In fact, I was pretty sure there hadn't been any. Until a bill is written, discussed, amended, voted on, passed and signed into law there are no guarantees what form it will take. Congress could easily put the FCC back in charge. In fact, I can't imagine who else they would put in charge. The FCC will probably have to enforce this and we all know they are pretty busy making sure the children don't see nipples on TV.
And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?
The whole quote was
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want.
We don't need any (new) legislation to allow the ISPs to do whatever they want.
...no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry)
One of the major prohibitive costs in many industries, (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry) are directly due to regulation. Pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing wouldn't be as cost prohibitive if it wasn't for the FDA hoops that have to be jumped through and all the patents that have to be filed and defended. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some kind of approval proscess for drugs, but many industries would be much more competitive if the government regulation didn't get completely out of hand.
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.
No, TFA recommends preserving the status quo (which is as good or better than where we are ultimately going to end up) rather than wasting a few billion taxpayer dollars letting the government get involved.
A prime example is Adobe Photoshop. That is an amazing program, far superior to Gimp (for graphics designers that is, I use Gimp). Until Gimp can match it feature for feature, Photoshop will remain dominant, and rightly so.
Photoshop is the probably the best example and really drives at the heart of what TFA is attempting to address. The point isn't that everything should be open source, the point is it's frustrating to have to access an inferior operating system (Windows) to use quality applications like Photoshop. I do some web development work and MUCH prefer using vim on linux to any environment on Windows (even cygwin sucks, it's way too slow). Unfortunately I have clients that constantly send me Word documents and neither open office or abiword get them right, plus I can't find a good flash authoring tool for Linux and finally there is the old 'have to check everything in IE since it doesn't adhere to any standard ever'.
I would gladly purchase Photoshop, Flash, MS Office and a copy of Internet Explorer if these titles were available for Linux. Instead I have to purchase a separate machine just for accessing two or three programs on occcasion.
I appreciate the open source products that are out there, but I don't want everything to be open source. I just want access to some of the quality products that are currently only available under Windows without having to spend time setting up an emulator like Wine.
Actually, in our modern society an extended blackout could be life threatening. Lack of refrigeration could disrupt the food supply, lack of power could impact water treatment facilities, no TV could cause riots in the street (just kidding on that one).
Our modern way of life has been designed around a system of power, clean water, transportation and an accessible infrastructure. If any one of these items breaks down completely it could be catastrophic. It may not mean the end of the world, but the number of deaths could be staggering.
Wish there was some unsettled place on this hunk of rock the free thinking minority of this country could migrate to and start up a new country.
Yeah, good luck with that. It would take about 2 days before the supposedly 'free thinking minority' started arguing about what color to paint the new white house or some other such inane concept.
Slashdot Mirror
The real point is that there are people out there who will never be good in a particular field no matter how much work they put into it!
And anyone who doesn't believe that should watch Rudy.
Enough of the copycat this, rip-me-off that.
Absolutely. Everyone builds off of others ideas. Since Apple and Microsoft are the dominant desktop OS competitors they will take ideas from each other.
Yeah, because every media outlet out there offers their raw footage to everyone. All major journalists edit their video footage and have ever since video has been available.
Exactly. The hardware is a off-the-shelf commodity. Well, a pretty big shelf, but I will bet that Robotic Parking just specifies someone else's hardware and a contracted construction company builds the garage.
So the smart thing to do here would be for the hardware manufacturers to fund some OS software. That way barrier to entry for their product would be much lower. The hardware manufacturer has the best motivation for a license free system to interface with their product.
what part of repeatedly going to someone's profile and checking to see if they have new pictures of themselves isn't stalking??
So if I go to my friend's blog to see if they've posted new pictures of their kids it's stalking? Maybe if I go to CNN to look for pictures of President Bush I'm stalking him?
Sure, what you are describing now could be construed as 'anonymous stalking' and in your particular situation it may have been, but to describe anyone that goes out to myspace and browse the profiles a stalker is extreme. In fact, unless you are obsessing over one particular individual it stalking shouldn't be used at all. If you are just out checking pictures of the hot girls, while potentially creepy, its not stalking.
Liability - any failure is at large your responsibility, developers can be knowingly negligent and not be liable in any way
Developers can be knowingly negligent anyway. In fact, I bet 'knowing' negligent is much more common in closed source projects where developers are just getting paid to be there than it is in OS projects where developers have an interest in the project. The company ownership, and their insurance company, may be liable, but how likely is it that the liability is going to stretch down to the individual developer?
Support - you OS product might not have any support, if it does its costs are not fixed and you have to tie part of your budget into emergency and contingency funds
Any closed source product may have it's support dissappear at any given time. If the vendor goes out of business, or decides to significantly increase it's support prices you have the same situation. Unless you are buying from IBM with a long term contract this is still a very real risk.
Standard compliance - forget ISO or any safety/regulations compliance
You may have a valid point, but any OS project could achieve this. Just because no one is normally willing to pay for the audits doesn't mean it's not achievable.
Need for internal support - OS will require you to maintain dedicated personnel capable of troubleshooting the system
Again, no reason this issue is isolated to OS as opposed to CS. There are plenty of closed source hardware and software products that require internal support, or at least indpendent contractors (Microsoft Exchange, Cisco routers, etc...).
OS works well for non-critical wide-use applications but I don't see it moving into other areas in the near future.
OS is already working well in critical applications. There is a reason companies like IBM and HP have moved away from using their proprietary software and focused on delivering OS solutions.
You do make one valid point. Limited use applications are much more difficult for the OS model. Anyone who funds a major limited--use project, like controlling parking robots, is unlikely to release unde an open source license. The only way I can see this working is if a number of users of the software and manufacturers of the hardware band together to fund it's development. Even this is a difficult proposition - how can they handle the johnny-come-lately's who want to jump on board and use software others have paid to develop?
...but you should be aware that it is wrong, if you have someone to be loyal to..
That's all well and good, but to call browsing myspace 'anonymous stalking' isn't an accurate assesment. Cheating is cheating. Obviously, the status of the relationship is something two people have to decide for themselves, but browsing/meeting women on myspace is not much different than going to the bar and hitting on women. If you are doing it behind a girlfriend's back, it's wrong (if she knows about it and is OK with it that's completely between you two).
I'm not condoning any unethical behaviour that would undermine a relationship, I just don't like the idea of acceptable, from a legal standpoint, web activities like myspace being equated to, an illegal act, stalking.
2) Admin -- This is harder in Linux. In windows, there are only a few differences between configuration locations between Win2K, XP, Win2K3, etc., and of course the registry is a common feature among all versions of Windows.
Nonsense. In Linux you have a standard, robust set of tools to use. There are, to my knowledge, only two commonly used startup script configurations in Linux distros. Windows has many differing software installers from homegrown stuff to MSI (which changes from time to time itself). The real advantage in Linux are the networking tools. It's much easier to help a user with her machine if you can telnet/ssh directly in and see what's going on - an ability is not native to Windows.
Developer -- It is fairly difficult to release binary packages of your software when you don't know whether or not a particular library will be present on the target system.
Actually, it's not. Offer a static build like Opera does. Not feasible in all circumstances, but definitely doable for many projects. Besides, DLL hell is one of the most renown problems in Windows. I've worked on Windows software releases. Attempting to support one Windows platform with all of it's potential library issues is hard enough. Throw in support for versions back to Windows 98 and (shudder) Windows Me, that becomes complex, especially if your application has networking capability.
So, large-scale software manufacturers choose to restrict what distros they provide support for, due to the fact that they do not want to be responsible for supporting some random distro that they have not heard of or done any testing on.
Not exactly. Large-scale software manufacturers (or any software manufacturer) is going to only test on platforms that will make them money. Testing is a lengthy, expensive process. Support even more so. If a vendor can control their testing and support costs by restricting them to the most lucrative platforms they will do so. It has nothing to do with what they've heard of, it has everything to do with what their customer base requires. If enough users start using the new Linux distro of the hour a successful vendor will need to support it in some fashion.
First, how do you know it was anonymous. Maybe he has a page that accurately portrays himself.
Second, how is it stalking? The girl created a myspace page and encouraged people to look at it. Looking at her page is NOT stalking.
Maybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens...
No, actually he's arguing that the market won't allow telecoms to make tiered bandwidth a viable economic model. There's no need for regulation because the competition in the market will prevent the kind of abuses that are alleged.
Pre-emptive legislation is unnecessary. Regulation can always be enforced after someone attempts to abuse the system. Just the threat of potential Net Neutrality laws should be adequate to keep the telecoms from doing anything too nasty.
You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.
Deregulation demands more responsibility on the consumers part. Government regulation can make things safer for the consumer, but they also limit a consumer's choices. Inevitably some of these unavailable choices will be better options for the consumer. In this particular instance the consumer will only get the shaft if they choose to either continue to do business with an ISP that demands a tiered service or if they choose not to circumvent the throttling by other means. Net Neutrality will only protect the consumers that don't actually care about their service adequately to show their ISPs that they won't stand for bandwidth throttling. Ebay, Google, Yahoo, etc... are pushing the Net Neutrality because they stand to loose the most from it. Many consumers may accept the restrictions put for the by the ISPs and those restrictions will cut directly into Google's profits.
Total deregulation may not be an acceptable alternative, but we need an acceptable method to eliminate the corruption and greed from our government officials. The problem isn't the regulation itself, it's the actions of those conducting the regulation.
What I'm getting at is the author of the original article seems to be trying to imply tbat a laisser faire approach is some kind of clever compromise...
I didn't get that from the article at all. The author is simply pointing out that government regulation has a history of supporting the interests of big business, not the consumer. The Net Neutrality camp's campaign may very well backfire on them. I think his points are very well presented. If the citizens of this country refuse to look at the historical performance of government regulation we deserve exactly what we will get.
Dude - you have NO idea how things work in the real world. We have see the world without the FDA.
Yeah, like Vioxx?
Again, I will reiterate, I'm not saying we don't need some kind of drug review. All I'm saying is getting FDA approval on a product is one of the most difficult and expensive steps in the pharmaceutical business. Current estimates are that FDA approval costs $800 million dollars. The US is the most expensive country in the world to get approval. Heck, the FDA still can't agree on the benefits of ASPIRIN for heart attack patients.
The FDA panel was merely being scientifically "pure" in making this vote. One of the panel members noted that what was needed is a seven-year trial enrolling 15,000 patients in the moderate-risk group, and until such data was available FDA should not give its stamp of approval.
But while agreeing with this opinion, another panel member further noted that aspirin's overall benefits have been so well-documented that it would probably be unethical (and certainly unfeasible) to actually perform such a trial.
It's quite possible that the FDA has cost as many lives as it has saved by being slow and expensive to approve drugs. I think you are the one who has NO idea how things work in the real world.
since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!
The net neutrality legislation? I wasn't aware that any net neutrality legislation had passed congress. In fact, I was pretty sure there hadn't been any. Until a bill is written, discussed, amended, voted on, passed and signed into law there are no guarantees what form it will take. Congress could easily put the FCC back in charge. In fact, I can't imagine who else they would put in charge. The FCC will probably have to enforce this and we all know they are pretty busy making sure the children don't see nipples on TV.
And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?
The whole quote was
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want.
We don't need any (new) legislation to allow the ISPs to do whatever they want.
...no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry)
One of the major prohibitive costs in many industries, (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry) are directly due to regulation. Pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing wouldn't be as cost prohibitive if it wasn't for the FDA hoops that have to be jumped through and all the patents that have to be filed and defended. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some kind of approval proscess for drugs, but many industries would be much more competitive if the government regulation didn't get completely out of hand.
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.
No, TFA recommends preserving the status quo (which is as good or better than where we are ultimately going to end up) rather than wasting a few billion taxpayer dollars letting the government get involved.
Only very recently did the FCC change that rule
Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.
Exactly. This just means everyone is on salary and a 'professional' now so they don't have to pay you.
Due to our 40-hour work week we spend 2.5 more weeksand three months moreat work than do our Japanese and western European counterparts, respectively
Yeah, a great example of regulation working for us.
A prime example is Adobe Photoshop. That is an amazing program, far superior to Gimp (for graphics designers that is, I use Gimp). Until Gimp can match it feature for feature, Photoshop will remain dominant, and rightly so.
Photoshop is the probably the best example and really drives at the heart of what TFA is attempting to address. The point isn't that everything should be open source, the point is it's frustrating to have to access an inferior operating system (Windows) to use quality applications like Photoshop. I do some web development work and MUCH prefer using vim on linux to any environment on Windows (even cygwin sucks, it's way too slow). Unfortunately I have clients that constantly send me Word documents and neither open office or abiword get them right, plus I can't find a good flash authoring tool for Linux and finally there is the old 'have to check everything in IE since it doesn't adhere to any standard ever'.
I would gladly purchase Photoshop, Flash, MS Office and a copy of Internet Explorer if these titles were available for Linux. Instead I have to purchase a separate machine just for accessing two or three programs on occcasion.
I appreciate the open source products that are out there, but I don't want everything to be open source. I just want access to some of the quality products that are currently only available under Windows without having to spend time setting up an emulator like Wine.
I noticed ubuntu.com/server wasn't coming up... I'm guessing their own server didn't survive.
They must have started their Slackware server - it's working now.
You forgot the old lady who the police made take down her "Our dogs are fed on Jehovah's Witnesses" sign.
Anyway, the point of this whole rambling anti-AOL post was that AOL already puts ads everywhere
I haven't used AOL in 10+ years and I remember the ads. They were always trying to sell something.
Actually, in our modern society an extended blackout could be life threatening. Lack of refrigeration could disrupt the food supply, lack of power could impact water treatment facilities, no TV could cause riots in the street (just kidding on that one).
Our modern way of life has been designed around a system of power, clean water, transportation and an accessible infrastructure. If any one of these items breaks down completely it could be catastrophic. It may not mean the end of the world, but the number of deaths could be staggering.
Assuming you mean these Pilgrims, I hardly think they would fit most definitions of 'free thinking'.
Wish there was some unsettled place on this hunk of rock the free thinking minority of this country could migrate to and start up a new country.
Yeah, good luck with that. It would take about 2 days before the supposedly 'free thinking minority' started arguing about what color to paint the new white house or some other such inane concept.