Implying that we're all getting shipped off to the Gulag for using Azureus: Sensationalist
Deliberately confusing copyright with freedom of speech and trying to make a point that it should be eliminated because you don't like it, when the problem is really in the enforcement: Disingenuous.
Posting on the same thread with four different accounts and trolling Mactrope and willyhill: Dishonest.
I would add that I feel that P2P traffic (or any type of traffic) should not be throttled, regulated, filtered or otherwise meddled with simply because the vast majority of it revolves around copyright infringement is wrong. However, that's also disingenuous because it ignores the problem and makes the case that it could be fixed if the people who produce the content would just be nice enough to bend over and enjoy it.
They threatened their OEM pricing and other sabotage.
Why is Dell selling PCs with Ubuntu preinstalled. Please explain why they were "whacked" then and not "whacked" now. More importantly, please explain what version/distro of "GNU/Linux" (you mean Linux, correct?) Dell would have installed on a computer in 2000?
The slap down and Dell's cave in response is part of the reason HP pulled ahead of them for a while.
Please, prove this.
It won't work today because Vista is a flop.
Someone must be connecting all these boxes of Vista you say are not being sold to the internet, then?
in this rebellion.
Bwahahaha. I'm all for PC manufacturers selling things other than Windows, but please keep the bullshit down.
By the way, how many sockpuppets do you have now? I've been away for about five days, I think. How many? 12? 15? Sorry, but I lose track. Could you make a list and put it in your journal for reference? Right next to your lame "failure log" so everyone can check it when they're not sure if some weird post is actually you or someone else.
For a business relying on critical software, being able to legally and practically hire a contractor to fix a problem in open source software is a huge advantage over having to track down a developer legally and technically able to fix a problem.
I never said that wasn't the case, but businesses and consumers select, purchase and use software in very different ways. It's also simply not true that a commercial package being EOL'ed is invariably a tragedy of epic proportions to its users, just as it's also not the case that a FLOSS product will always be vibrantly alive simply because the source is available.
The IBM one of course is very old, but the list of acquisitions since 2000 is gynormous. Oh, and the Oracle one is not even close to complete, I think.
We can go through the entire Debian package repository and make the same point about just about anything in there.
There's precious little revolutionary innovation nowadays, in any field. The vast majority of it is evolutionary.
Search engines, semantic algorithms, large distributed systems and web crawlers existed before Google, after all. But I don't see anyone arguing that Google has not innovated, because they have. Curiously the goal posts seem to move every time the topic is Microsoft.
In any case, that doesn't seem to stop people from trotting out the "LOLOL MS has never done anything worthwhile!!!", which besides being ridiculous it usually means you have an agenda in your shoulder and a chip in your bag - or you're a twitter sockpuppet. I hope it's the former.
Your scenario would be exactly the same if we were talking about anything I can download from SourceForge because, well, for 99% of the people who use software, there is absolutely no advantage whatsoever to having the source code. Or are you truly claiming that FLOSS is inherently superior in that regard to commercial software? I don't know what you're specifically referring to or if you're just generalizing, but I find myself just about as likely to hit Google trying to find a solution to an obscure problem when I'm using Windows and Linux.
Abandoned software is hardly unique to the commercial or shareware worlds, and while the likelihood of someone picking up the slack with an open source project is obviously far better, that's far from being consistently the case.
One thing that Windows has over other OSes though is Microsoft's we'll-do-it-even-if-it-kills-us adherence to backwards compatibility. That means that I can run things like Corel DRAW 3.0 (released in 1993) on Windows XP today, or some of the Command & Conquer games from the late 90s on Windows Vista. So even if documentation is sparse and the company has long gone under or stopped supporting the software, as long as it ran to begin with your chances of pulling it off tend to be pretty good.
I'd say try that with [insert your favorite OS here] but that would be bordering on facetious.
Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint.
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.
I'm not. And if IBM got into the game they must have seen potential in it, something which I would have agreed with and ended up being certainly true.
Having said that, I'd rather not run my business on top of hobby software, but that label does not necessarily say anything about the quality of the end product. Just the way it is incorporated (or not) into business and home use.
Take a look at the photo of Steve looking smug - have you ever seen such gay body language? I almost felt sorry for him - but then I remembered he was responsible for all this.
WTF. Defensive body language? What are you, a behavioral psychologist and a whiney mac fanboy? Can you whistle Beethoven's 5th with your nose as well?
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
I'm not going to go into the rest of your fabrications, infantile creative spelling and links to - wait for it - El Reg that you think somehow validate your opinion, but even if they're being deliberately obtuse about the above, there's a good point to be made about your claim.
In the beginning, FLOSS was nothing more than a hobbyist movement. It continued to be that for a long time, until corporations like IBM got into the game, and for-profit corporations like RedHat and MySQL AB and others were created around what used to be loosely related FLOSS projects.
This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years, in the sense that it went from "here's a tarball, run make install on it, perform the specified incantations, pray to Chtuhlu and you're all set" to actually mainstream, usable tools. It's that involvement that not only has employed people who otherwise would be hobby developers as well-paid professionals, but has created an entire ecosystem in which these efforts can be carried out by more and more people.
That doesn't mean that your usual "FLOSS uber alles" claim is valid in any sense, because "non free" (what the hell is that, BTW. As in "non tasty"?) software has also improved and evolved enormously in the past three decades. Some of that has come from "M$", and some hasn't. There's a lot of extremely good commercial software out there about which you have been evidently living in complete ignorance of for about as long as the same three decades I mentioned.
This is maybe similar to the mason guilds of the middle ages, who improved their collective lot by organizing themselves into sponsored groups working on well-defined and focused projects, which in turn served to lay the ground rules for formalized architecture and civil engineering.
No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet.
twitter, that would be funny if it wasn't so damn dishonest. How many accounts are we at now? 12? Maybe your nemesis can jump in here and give us the full list again, and then you can insult him as usual.
I didn't RTFA (trying to keep with tradition) but is there any mention of how the developers (you know, the people who actually write the code) benefited from this? Money? Girls? Coverage?
Girls?
Seriously, I think it's cool that they're building gadgets with VLC but the news here is that an open source project like it - hosted in SourceForge and no doubt started to scratch an itch - has actually paid off in a financial sense for the people who put the effort into creating it. If that's the case then it should be publicized. It proves that it doesn't take a corporation the size of RedHat or MySQL AB to make a living out of volume or "support contracts".
I find all Microsoft programs to be user-hostile, especially the OSes.
That might be the case I suppose, on some level. I'd say most software is user-hostile to a certain extent, especially anything that's not trivial or not designed by Jakob Nielsen.
But by your faux outrage use of the "Microsoft shills" thing I assume that you are some sort of Linux user? Believe me, after a few years of using distros like Mandriva, Ubuntu and Fedora, I have to say you ain't a good monkey and you ain't got no branch to fling crap from. At least Microsoft spends some money trying to figure out what works, even though they don't necessarily get it right every time. Projects like KDE just change the interface every three point releases to match whatever Apple and Microsoft are doing, or just change it because the developer (or the "usability experts", hahaha) decided it totally needed more shiny things to be relevant. Even XFCE (the previous king of balance between speed, usability and functionality) feels bloated, unstable and cluttered these days.
If I see that comment when I metamoderate
OMG, and you're angry too. Skipped your meds this morning? I don't think anyone with more than a few working brain cells around here gives a crap about that.
Chances are, this guy just chose the wrong party to blog for.
No twitter, there is no "wrong party", this is the Hatch Act. Go. Read. A. Book.
The Bush administration has been "for us or against" us for a long time.
That's true, but it's hilarious coming from the top "use GNU/Everything or die" evangelist on the internets.
There's good reason the phrases "war on science" and "war on integrity" are common.
blah blah, please mod me up, I'm with groupthink
It's easy to make fun when it's not you that has to go 180 days without pay.
It's also easy to follow the laws that apply to civil servants, which I assume they were informed about when they were first hired. Wanna work for the government? Sure, just don't try to get the one you favour elected (or the other ones kicked out of office). Simple, no?
Somehow I just knew you were going to jump in here to cry censorship and trot out the Republikkan conspiracy to keep you and yours down. Don't you at least read the 150+ comments that were posted before yours to get a feel for what's happening?
Back in 2004, I announced my intentions to make more accounts.
Awesome. Back in August of 2007, I called Superbowl XLII and prophesied that there would be an earthquake in China this year. You can see the date of my journal entry, so clearly I can blog about Python and predict the future.
It is critical that the Civil Service function between changes in administration. If a new President came in and fired everyone to give overpaid jobs to the "friends and family plan" for the party and his supporters, you'd have a completely inept government, instead of our mostly inept one.
Yes, that is exactly the way it works in countries like Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and many others in Africa and Asia. Every single time a presidential term ends (assuming it's not a coup), the entire upper to middle echelons of the civil service are essentially laid off and the New Man's "people" brought in. We're not talking about just the presidential cabinet, this is widespread and down to the equivalent of middle management through out every branch of government.
You can imagine the disruption in the "quality" of whatever work any given government agency was doing at the time.
Of course in these countries the government is a fiefdom and the federal and state/municipal budgets the personal checking accounts of politicians. It's a system that has devastating consequences on the quality of life of their citizens.
Gah, I hate replying to myself but I forgot my main point, which is to incorporate the blocking mechanism in the data structure itself. I would simply never have thought of that, and I think that's pretty much the novel thing about this whole idea.
Talk about thinking outside of the box... probably the reason I don't work for Google =)
I worked on a high-concurrency application a few years ago (not multi-CPU). The problems inherent to today's x86 hardware vis-a-vis concurrency are very interesting indeed. We had a few thousand threads at any given point trying to access something that would pass as a hashtable with millions of key-value pairs. We ran into all sorts of problems until I created a lightweight structure that looked like a cross between a mutex and a Win32 critical section, which I derived from an old MSDN code sample written for Windows CE, of all things. Along with the excellent implementation of I/O completion ports introduced with Windows 2000, I'd have to say we did a good job. As far as I know all that code is still running 24/7/365 without problems and scales perfectly well across machines. This was all C++, by the way.
Also, I'd like to just say "thank you". It's not often here on/. that one gets to read comments like these. I'd have to wonder why you're not modded up to +5.
it's clear that Slashdot either doesn't care or doesn't think it's a problem.
Apparently not. Well, obviously not if the moderation of the past few days on those insane "look at me, I reply to myself" threads is any indication.
Actually it's interesting that he's pretty much dropped the "M$" thing lately and seems obsessed with the injustices perpetrated on humanity by the RIAA. Not to say that he doesn't have a point sometimes, other than the fact he's just pretending to agree with himself and that gets him moderated positively even more.
I think he's just racking up the karma so he can go back to the usual crap later. But this time he'll do it with three or four accounts posting at +2, instead of -1.
Should be amusing if nothing else. The guy is a real tool.
I really don't know what the guidelines are for small providers. I would think they are the same, though probabl not implemented with the same zeal. But I was serious in my recommendation to report them if you see things like that happening. After all, it's your medical records that are on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe (though I might be wrong) that we can all blame that on Elvis Presley and his gyrating hips - never actually shown on the Ed Sullivan show.
Deliberately confusing copyright with freedom of speech and trying to make a point that it should be eliminated because you don't like it, when the problem is really in the enforcement: Disingenuous.
Posting on the same thread with four different accounts and trolling Mactrope and willyhill: Dishonest.
I would add that I feel that P2P traffic (or any type of traffic) should not be throttled, regulated, filtered or otherwise meddled with simply because the vast majority of it revolves around copyright infringement is wrong. However, that's also disingenuous because it ignores the problem and makes the case that it could be fixed if the people who produce the content would just be nice enough to bend over and enjoy it.
Rich.
Why is Dell selling PCs with Ubuntu preinstalled. Please explain why they were "whacked" then and not "whacked" now. More importantly, please explain what version/distro of "GNU/Linux" (you mean Linux, correct?) Dell would have installed on a computer in 2000?
Please, prove this.
Someone must be connecting all these boxes of Vista you say are not being sold to the internet, then?
Bwahahaha. I'm all for PC manufacturers selling things other than Windows, but please keep the bullshit down.
By the way, how many sockpuppets do you have now? I've been away for about five days, I think. How many? 12? 15? Sorry, but I lose track. Could you make a list and put it in your journal for reference? Right next to your lame "failure log" so everyone can check it when they're not sure if some weird post is actually you or someone else.
I never said that wasn't the case, but businesses and consumers select, purchase and use software in very different ways. It's also simply not true that a commercial package being EOL'ed is invariably a tragedy of epic proportions to its users, just as it's also not the case that a FLOSS product will always be vibrantly alive simply because the source is available.
Sorry for the late response, BTW...
I love how he replied to the same post with two socks, kinda like a Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde thing. The man has some serious issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Symantec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_eBay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Apple_Inc.
And the two more amusing ones, if only because they're the darlings of the "typical Microsoft" crowd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_acquisitions_and_spinoffs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions
The IBM one of course is very old, but the list of acquisitions since 2000 is gynormous. Oh, and the Oracle one is not even close to complete, I think.
Here's the Microsoft one.
Memes are fun, aren't they?
There's precious little revolutionary innovation nowadays, in any field. The vast majority of it is evolutionary.
Search engines, semantic algorithms, large distributed systems and web crawlers existed before Google, after all. But I don't see anyone arguing that Google has not innovated, because they have. Curiously the goal posts seem to move every time the topic is Microsoft.
In any case, that doesn't seem to stop people from trotting out the "LOLOL MS has never done anything worthwhile!!!", which besides being ridiculous it usually means you have an agenda in your shoulder and a chip in your bag - or you're a twitter sockpuppet. I hope it's the former.
Abandoned software is hardly unique to the commercial or shareware worlds, and while the likelihood of someone picking up the slack with an open source project is obviously far better, that's far from being consistently the case.
One thing that Windows has over other OSes though is Microsoft's we'll-do-it-even-if-it-kills-us adherence to backwards compatibility. That means that I can run things like Corel DRAW 3.0 (released in 1993) on Windows XP today, or some of the Command & Conquer games from the late 90s on Windows Vista. So even if documentation is sparse and the company has long gone under or stopped supporting the software, as long as it ran to begin with your chances of pulling it off tend to be pretty good.
I'd say try that with [insert your favorite OS here] but that would be bordering on facetious.
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.
I'm not. And if IBM got into the game they must have seen potential in it, something which I would have agreed with and ended up being certainly true.
Having said that, I'd rather not run my business on top of hobby software, but that label does not necessarily say anything about the quality of the end product. Just the way it is incorporated (or not) into business and home use.
WTF. Defensive body language? What are you, a behavioral psychologist and a whiney mac fanboy? Can you whistle Beethoven's 5th with your nose as well?
I'm not going to go into the rest of your fabrications, infantile creative spelling and links to - wait for it - El Reg that you think somehow validate your opinion, but even if they're being deliberately obtuse about the above, there's a good point to be made about your claim.
In the beginning, FLOSS was nothing more than a hobbyist movement. It continued to be that for a long time, until corporations like IBM got into the game, and for-profit corporations like RedHat and MySQL AB and others were created around what used to be loosely related FLOSS projects.
This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years, in the sense that it went from "here's a tarball, run make install on it, perform the specified incantations, pray to Chtuhlu and you're all set" to actually mainstream, usable tools. It's that involvement that not only has employed people who otherwise would be hobby developers as well-paid professionals, but has created an entire ecosystem in which these efforts can be carried out by more and more people.
That doesn't mean that your usual "FLOSS uber alles" claim is valid in any sense, because "non free" (what the hell is that, BTW. As in "non tasty"?) software has also improved and evolved enormously in the past three decades. Some of that has come from "M$", and some hasn't. There's a lot of extremely good commercial software out there about which you have been evidently living in complete ignorance of for about as long as the same three decades I mentioned.
This is maybe similar to the mason guilds of the middle ages, who improved their collective lot by organizing themselves into sponsored groups working on well-defined and focused projects, which in turn served to lay the ground rules for formalized architecture and civil engineering.
twitter, that would be funny if it wasn't so damn dishonest. How many accounts are we at now? 12? Maybe your nemesis can jump in here and give us the full list again, and then you can insult him as usual.
Girls?
Seriously, I think it's cool that they're building gadgets with VLC but the news here is that an open source project like it - hosted in SourceForge and no doubt started to scratch an itch - has actually paid off in a financial sense for the people who put the effort into creating it. If that's the case then it should be publicized. It proves that it doesn't take a corporation the size of RedHat or MySQL AB to make a living out of volume or "support contracts".
That might be the case I suppose, on some level. I'd say most software is user-hostile to a certain extent, especially anything that's not trivial or not designed by Jakob Nielsen.
But by your faux outrage use of the "Microsoft shills" thing I assume that you are some sort of Linux user? Believe me, after a few years of using distros like Mandriva, Ubuntu and Fedora, I have to say you ain't a good monkey and you ain't got no branch to fling crap from. At least Microsoft spends some money trying to figure out what works, even though they don't necessarily get it right every time. Projects like KDE just change the interface every three point releases to match whatever Apple and Microsoft are doing, or just change it because the developer (or the "usability experts", hahaha) decided it totally needed more shiny things to be relevant. Even XFCE (the previous king of balance between speed, usability and functionality) feels bloated, unstable and cluttered these days.
OMG, and you're angry too. Skipped your meds this morning? I don't think anyone with more than a few working brain cells around here gives a crap about that.
I hope this "funny" mod you got was the actual thing that you were aiming for, because otherwise you're just a troll. And not a very good one at that.
No twitter, there is no "wrong party", this is the Hatch Act. Go. Read. A. Book.
That's true, but it's hilarious coming from the top "use GNU/Everything or die" evangelist on the internets.
blah blah, please mod me up, I'm with groupthink
It's also easy to follow the laws that apply to civil servants, which I assume they were informed about when they were first hired. Wanna work for the government? Sure, just don't try to get the one you favour elected (or the other ones kicked out of office). Simple, no?
Somehow I just knew you were going to jump in here to cry censorship and trot out the Republikkan conspiracy to keep you and yours down. Don't you at least read the 150+ comments that were posted before yours to get a feel for what's happening?
Awesome. Back in August of 2007, I called Superbowl XLII and prophesied that there would be an earthquake in China this year. You can see the date of my journal entry, so clearly I can blog about Python and predict the future.
Just who do you think you're fooling?
I'd say this post makes you a shill.
The problem with this is that it's too close to the actual thing, so it's funny but pathetic at the same time.
Yes, that is exactly the way it works in countries like Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and many others in Africa and Asia. Every single time a presidential term ends (assuming it's not a coup), the entire upper to middle echelons of the civil service are essentially laid off and the New Man's "people" brought in. We're not talking about just the presidential cabinet, this is widespread and down to the equivalent of middle management through out every branch of government.
You can imagine the disruption in the "quality" of whatever work any given government agency was doing at the time.
Of course in these countries the government is a fiefdom and the federal and state/municipal budgets the personal checking accounts of politicians. It's a system that has devastating consequences on the quality of life of their citizens.
Talk about thinking outside of the box... probably the reason I don't work for Google =)
Also, I'd like to just say "thank you". It's not often here on /. that one gets to read comments like these. I'd have to wonder why you're not modded up to +5.
Cheers.
Apparently not. Well, obviously not if the moderation of the past few days on those insane "look at me, I reply to myself" threads is any indication.
Actually it's interesting that he's pretty much dropped the "M$" thing lately and seems obsessed with the injustices perpetrated on humanity by the RIAA. Not to say that he doesn't have a point sometimes, other than the fact he's just pretending to agree with himself and that gets him moderated positively even more.
I think he's just racking up the karma so he can go back to the usual crap later. But this time he'll do it with three or four accounts posting at +2, instead of -1.
Should be amusing if nothing else. The guy is a real tool.
I really don't know what the guidelines are for small providers. I would think they are the same, though probabl not implemented with the same zeal. But I was serious in my recommendation to report them if you see things like that happening. After all, it's your medical records that are on the line.