The global warming deniers haven't come up with better science.
The global warming "deniers" argue that the proponents have not yet established a valid link between human activity and planet-wide climate change. No one denies that climate is changing. But for all the hand-waving and pushing of doomsday scenarios, no one knows if we are in the beginning, middle or tail end of a cycle which we simply do not understand. We know damn little about this planet we live in, and political posturing does not change that one bit. We've been tracking weather in meaning ful ways only for a few hundred years. This planet is fucking 4 billion years old. It's an outrage that someone will challenge the established age of the Earth, but it's perfectly A-OK for some dude to tell me he has the lowdown on epoch-scale macro climate change because he poured over dodgy weather reports from 1887 and would you like to see Al Gore's latest work?
I was trained as a scientist, though I don't work in that field anymore. I've been following this debate since it started and I still haven't seen proof that climate is affected in any meaningful way by all the stupid things we've been doing for the past hundred years.
And as far as public opinion goes, it doesn't help when the hole in the ozone layer is gone and the predicted "disastrous" hurricane season of 2006 (and now 2007, and probably 2008) never materialized, and probably won't. We obviously can't make simple short term predictions, and we sure as hell can't make long-term ones, either. The bottom line is that we still don't understand what the fuck is going on. Show me real, repeatable scientific proof of your "we're destroying the planet" claims and I'll immediately accept it. Ad hominems, political bullshit and doublespeak are useless.
Other than that, doing things like reducing fossil fuel emissions are not a bad idea, and we should be implementing them. But they shouldn't be attached to the big scary climate change monster.
Though in this case the OS in question is irrelevant, I doubt how "Knoppix" would have prevented this:
In September 21, 1997 while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing a divide by zero error in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.
I just don't see how the operating system plays into this.
Oh, wait. You are going with that meme that Windows NT caused the ship to fail. HAHAHAHA! Wow, I get it. Very clever.
Solar panels in near orbit have never been a problem, because for all practical purposes the orbital platform is exactly at the same distance to the sun than the surface of the Earth.
Interestingly enough, NASA has already unveiled plans for a deep space probe called Juno that will use solar panels exclusively for the first time ever. Apparently they've become so efficient that the enormous distance to the Sun ceases to become a problem. This also bodes well for civilian uses of solar panels, I imagine. Hell, if the NASA budget gives us actually usable, cheap solar panels that get us at least partially off fossil fuels it will have paid for itself many times over.
I gather that the annoying treehuggers will be very happy about that, though I always have an urge to kill them all when they protest when NASA sends out a lump of plutonium to space because there's a 1:100,000,000 chance that it might cause contamination in the event of an accident. What better use for radioactive material is there than powering a spacecraft?
Where do you see that? It's not on my LUG or in the class I help teach.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I've seen it enough that while I don't necessarily think it's pervasive, it's certainly a problem.
This is no different than your wacky claims that you haven't seen a Vista laptop in your school, so therefore no one is buying Vista and it's a flop.
There's a nice Latin term for these types of disingenuous conclusions: reductio ad absurdum.
I'd believe you if you were running some other software to monitor your network activity
You seem to know a lot about my setup. Perhaps you'd like my IP address to see what you'll find between my boxes and the interwebs? You might be surprised. And as long as we're all having fun proving negatives and questioning each other's network and security expertise, how about you show me proof that your Linux boxes are not rooted?
I think they have vastly underestimated the problem, that botnets are entirely Windoze driven
We've been through this before. No one is contesting that the vast majority of machines in botnets run Windows (oh, "Windoze", HAHAHA!). But the implication that all botnets are completely made up of nothing but Windows machines is a lie that is easily debunked. In fact it has, but you conveniently choose to ignore that.
using Microsoft's auto-update is the surest way to have your computer broken.
Wow, we're in full-fledged FUD mode now!
Free software welcomes the people you and M$ despise
If free software is populated by pathological liars, psychotic haters and FUDsters like you, I'd rather they just stay with "M$ Windoze". Freedom at the expense of sanity is no freedom at all.
Wait, why don't you just claim that they actually employ 7,000 employees (you know Microsoft always lies), and make up a bunch of clever numbers with that instead? Or better yet, take another number in that report and give it a negative slant that vaguely implies some sort of misconduct that can whip your friends into a frenzy of outraged "M$ suxxorz" comments?
Alternatively, you could just stop trying to come up with meaningless extrapolations and dumb conspiracy theories using numbers from a SEC filing that you clearly don't understand.
This is a Windows problem and the relative risks should be published.
I don't know what "the relative risks" means, but since none of my Windows machines are in a botnet, and there are millions and millions of them that are not, this is not a Windows problem. It's a basic user education problem. Windows may have more attack vectors than other OSes, but that doesn't mean they are not known or are impossible to avoid. Simple common sense goes a long way. People get infected with botware because they download things they shouldn't or don't bother to keep their machines up to date by turning on automatic updates so they don't have to worry about anything.
If you think one chmod +x is an insurmountable obstacle to turning your shiny Linux or OS X box into a bot, remember that people get infected by executables in password protected ZIP files and that all of the most massively distributed worms have all required significant user intervention to propagate. Maybe one of these days you'll inherit 800 million completely clueless users, and maybe then you'll call it a "Linux problem"?
1. I don't see why not, but it depends on what it is you're doing. People get in trouble because they distribute custom versions of Linux without also releasing the modifications. If you're shipping a "stock" Linux with your apps on top, you're OK. Userspace applications and drivers are not "infected" by the GPL. I don't believe the GPLv3 changes this at all.
2. NVidia does it, why not you?
3. I'm not sure what this means. If you're using C++ then you're already giving out machine code basically, but anything can be reverse-engineered given enough time and motivation.
4. If you link to a GPL library or use GPL code, yes. But again, we don't know what you're doing so if you're not stepping on #1 you're OK.
5. Pretty much, yeah. Or at least it would be simpler. These days you need to rent a lawyer to interpret the GPL. The BSD license does not restrict your rights in regards to distribution and it does not compel you to do anything if you're just linking. There's lots more software for Linux than there is for the BSDs though.
As for the "join us or die" crowd, I'd just stay away from the residentzealots and you'll be OK. There are a lot of people who care about free software and are willing to help around here.
Not unlike your interpretation of them, regardless of your creative spelling and phrases like "mouth of the beast". Who are you trying to impress? The moderators?
You're spinning the 2.1 billion per quarter as some evil thing that somehow results in some more evil? Do you even understand how corporations work? Didn't you learn anything in school? Oh, wait. Apparently not:
The sited report has a strange 1.6 billion for "cost of revenue"
That would be a term that covers cost of good production (or just "cost of goods"), if I remember my remedial econ course from high school. Did you say once you had a PhD or something?
and a further 1.8 billion in "research"
It doesn't really matter if you use quotes around it. Why don't you browse around the MSR website for a while and educate yourself? That would be grand, because maybe we wouldn't have to hear all your pointlessFUD.
No prob. I'm not dumb enough (yet!) to assume that my personal experience is reflective of reality, especially in a situation where any number of things could have caused whatever automation code added by RH to detect and mount devices didn't work. So I guess that while my comment might have seemed harsh, it needs to be looked at in the context of what I was replying to. It certainly wasn't my intention to claim that all card readers fail to work with all versions of all Linux distros. Unlike some people around here vis-a-vis Windows =)
I usually expect more from a device that's billed as an information management platform than from an MP3 player. But maybe that's just me. Oh, and companies don't deploy MP3 players to their employees, either.
But hey, someone modded you up to +5 so your analogy must be correct.
Interesting. I recall running Win3.x under DR-DOS 5 (I think), which is why I know first hand it worked perfectly well. But as far as games go I don't really remember running anything other than maybe Prince of Persia (the original pixelated horizontal scroller!) on it. By the time I got into "real" gaming with the early Star Wars titles (like TIE Fighter and so on) I was already running MS-DOS thanks to upgrades and whatnot so I never really saw those problems, though I don't doubt they existed.
OT, I remember my complete amazement the first time I bought a game that came on CD-ROM instead of 12 floppies. It installed so freakin' fast! =)
As for high-end apps, in truth I really never got to run any in DOS. Mostly it was things like Photostyler, PageMaker, CorelDRAW and so on under Windows.
Yes, I'm sure that by showing my "PHB" some stats from a website that is as far away from mainstream as you can get I'll convince him that "M$" is evil.
You had me at "Developing to a specific browser is worse than developing to a coin toss."
Do you have something usefull to say about integrated features, desktop search, Google, software at all?
Sure, I replied to you in this thread. You didn't notice? Of course by the contents of that thread one can safely say that you certainly do not.
By the way, I find it interesting that you didn't start your insults with a denial that this is one of your sockpuppet accounts. You've pretty much given up pretending, eh?
twitter apparently does not like the troll moderations he's gotten in this thread so far, so he's switched to his sockpuppet account. Compare this post to this one. Same MO, same links, same spelling errors, same everything.
Did you ask the same insightful questions about Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross when the Mozilla foundation started raking in the millions from Google? Just wondering.
Instead of accusing everyone who disagrees with you of being employed by Microsoft and coming up with non sequiturs, why don't you just provide proof of your claims. Prove that I can't disable the Vista indexing service and install GDS if I want to. To bolster up your argument, here's a start.
Google knows it's platforms and has a sterling reputation.
It's things like these among many others that will start chipping away at Google's "sterling reputation" and reveal them as what they are: a corporation with shareholders.
M$ has been proved guilty of sabotage in the DRDOS case above and Netscape
I won't contest the DR-DOS issue at all, and I think it was stupid of Microsoft to try that. However, that happened more than fifteen years ago, and involved detection code in a beta version that never made it to production. Why don't you read up on the actual facts:
Though DR-DOS was almost 100% binary compatible with applications written for MS-DOS, Microsoft nevertheless expended considerable effort in attempts to break compatibility. In one example, they inserted code into the beta version of Windows 3.1 to return a non-fatal error message if it detected a non-Microsoft DOS. With the detection code disabled (or if the user canceled the error message), Windows ran perfectly under DR-DOS. This code was removed from final release of Windows 3.1 and all subsequent versions, however.
Emphasis in bold above is mine. How much longer are you going to complain about code in a beta version of Windows that never shipped?
The Netscape issue was certainly not a case of "sabotage", other than Netscape sabotaging themselves. It's disingenous to trot out the same bullshit time and time again to make your points. Bruce Perens once claimed ESR wanted to kill him, but I don't use that every day to claim people associated with the free software movement are schizo paranoids. The reality is that outside of DR-DOS with the caveats I pointed out, you have exactly nothing other than FUD and imaginative inferences.
It's obvious you are on the M$ side, I just wonder why.
It's obvious your technical preferences serve as your religion, we just wonder why.
As you point out, OSX, KDE and Gnome all have similar tools that don't bother Google.
As you didn't point out, OSX KDE and GNOME don't have 95% market share, which is why I'm sure Google couldn't care less about them. So in this case the "but X does Y as well" argument is irelevant.
M$ has a long and court proved history of breaking their competitor's programs on Windoze.
Well, I think Microsoft ("M$") has a right to add whatever they want to their operating system ("Windoze"), as long as they don't actually break anything, as Macthorpe and many other people here pointed out, though of course it's easier for you to just say they're all employed by Microsoft, as usual.
As to actually breaking competitor's applications, you've tried that FUD before. Didn't go well then, either. OTOH, if you actually have some proof now, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.
Really twitter, you had nothing of value to say about the article, so you decided you feel "offended" by a banner with some faux socialist image, you linked to rotten.com (!) and then you started making paranoid connections between this blog and thinktanks you happen to dislike. And where the heck do you get the association between that website and "free software is not communism"?
Other people have also
So anyone outside of the FSF that writes about patents should be automatically dismissed, correct?
A large grain of salt should be taken when reading their stuff
Which can be clearly translated to "The current code base is a mess and we'd be committing suicide if we tried to do this simple thing with it. Therefore, we need to rewrite large chunks, and that's going to take a bloody eternity, so don't hold your breath"
However, I believe the OP was referring to the Mozilla UI core. Is that affected by the JS engine since the browser itself is a XUL component? I have no idea. I tried to look at the Firefox code once and nearly gouged my eyes out after a few hours.
But that blog entry really sounds like a mix of "I'm smarter than you" and remedial marketspeak.
Slashdot Mirror
The global warming "deniers" argue that the proponents have not yet established a valid link between human activity and planet-wide climate change. No one denies that climate is changing. But for all the hand-waving and pushing of doomsday scenarios, no one knows if we are in the beginning, middle or tail end of a cycle which we simply do not understand. We know damn little about this planet we live in, and political posturing does not change that one bit. We've been tracking weather in meaning ful ways only for a few hundred years. This planet is fucking 4 billion years old. It's an outrage that someone will challenge the established age of the Earth, but it's perfectly A-OK for some dude to tell me he has the lowdown on epoch-scale macro climate change because he poured over dodgy weather reports from 1887 and would you like to see Al Gore's latest work?
I was trained as a scientist, though I don't work in that field anymore. I've been following this debate since it started and I still haven't seen proof that climate is affected in any meaningful way by all the stupid things we've been doing for the past hundred years.
And as far as public opinion goes, it doesn't help when the hole in the ozone layer is gone and the predicted "disastrous" hurricane season of 2006 (and now 2007, and probably 2008) never materialized, and probably won't. We obviously can't make simple short term predictions, and we sure as hell can't make long-term ones, either. The bottom line is that we still don't understand what the fuck is going on. Show me real, repeatable scientific proof of your "we're destroying the planet" claims and I'll immediately accept it. Ad hominems, political bullshit and doublespeak are useless.
Other than that, doing things like reducing fossil fuel emissions are not a bad idea, and we should be implementing them. But they shouldn't be attached to the big scary climate change monster.
Though in this case the OS in question is irrelevant, I doubt how "Knoppix" would have prevented this:
I just don't see how the operating system plays into this.
Oh, wait. You are going with that meme that Windows NT caused the ship to fail. HAHAHAHA! Wow, I get it. Very clever.
You know, jokes are one thing, but this is just painful. Is this what you mean when you say anyone who doesn't think like you is "against freedom"?
Interestingly enough, NASA has already unveiled plans for a deep space probe called Juno that will use solar panels exclusively for the first time ever. Apparently they've become so efficient that the enormous distance to the Sun ceases to become a problem. This also bodes well for civilian uses of solar panels, I imagine. Hell, if the NASA budget gives us actually usable, cheap solar panels that get us at least partially off fossil fuels it will have paid for itself many times over.
I gather that the annoying treehuggers will be very happy about that, though I always have an urge to kill them all when they protest when NASA sends out a lump of plutonium to space because there's a 1:100,000,000 chance that it might cause contamination in the event of an accident. What better use for radioactive material is there than powering a spacecraft?
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I've seen it enough that while I don't necessarily think it's pervasive, it's certainly a problem.
This is no different than your wacky claims that you haven't seen a Vista laptop in your school, so therefore no one is buying Vista and it's a flop.
There's a nice Latin term for these types of disingenuous conclusions: reductio ad absurdum.
http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
You seem to know a lot about my setup. Perhaps you'd like my IP address to see what you'll find between my boxes and the interwebs? You might be surprised. And as long as we're all having fun proving negatives and questioning each other's network and security expertise, how about you show me proof that your Linux boxes are not rooted?
We've been through this before. No one is contesting that the vast majority of machines in botnets run Windows (oh, "Windoze", HAHAHA!). But the implication that all botnets are completely made up of nothing but Windows machines is a lie that is easily debunked. In fact it has, but you conveniently choose to ignore that.
Wow, we're in full-fledged FUD mode now!
If free software is populated by pathological liars, psychotic haters and FUDsters like you, I'd rather they just stay with "M$ Windoze". Freedom at the expense of sanity is no freedom at all.
Alternatively, you could just stop trying to come up with meaningless extrapolations and dumb conspiracy theories using numbers from a SEC filing that you clearly don't understand.
I don't know what "the relative risks" means, but since none of my Windows machines are in a botnet, and there are millions and millions of them that are not, this is not a Windows problem. It's a basic user education problem. Windows may have more attack vectors than other OSes, but that doesn't mean they are not known or are impossible to avoid. Simple common sense goes a long way. People get infected with botware because they download things they shouldn't or don't bother to keep their machines up to date by turning on automatic updates so they don't have to worry about anything.
If you think one chmod +x is an insurmountable obstacle to turning your shiny Linux or OS X box into a bot, remember that people get infected by executables in password protected ZIP files and that all of the most massively distributed worms have all required significant user intervention to propagate. Maybe one of these days you'll inherit 800 million completely clueless users, and maybe then you'll call it a "Linux problem"?
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Using GCC to compile a binary doesn't automatically force the GPL on your code. No one would use it if that were the case.
2. NVidia does it, why not you?
3. I'm not sure what this means. If you're using C++ then you're already giving out machine code basically, but anything can be reverse-engineered given enough time and motivation.
4. If you link to a GPL library or use GPL code, yes. But again, we don't know what you're doing so if you're not stepping on #1 you're OK.
5. Pretty much, yeah. Or at least it would be simpler. These days you need to rent a lawyer to interpret the GPL. The BSD license does not restrict your rights in regards to distribution and it does not compel you to do anything if you're just linking. There's lots more software for Linux than there is for the BSDs though.
As for the "join us or die" crowd, I'd just stay away from the resident zealots and you'll be OK. There are a lot of people who care about free software and are willing to help around here.
Not unlike your interpretation of them, regardless of your creative spelling and phrases like "mouth of the beast". Who are you trying to impress? The moderators?
You're spinning the 2.1 billion per quarter as some evil thing that somehow results in some more evil? Do you even understand how corporations work? Didn't you learn anything in school? Oh, wait. Apparently not:
That would be a term that covers cost of good production (or just "cost of goods"), if I remember my remedial econ course from high school. Did you say once you had a PhD or something?
It doesn't really matter if you use quotes around it. Why don't you browse around the MSR website for a while and educate yourself? That would be grand, because maybe we wouldn't have to hear all your pointless FUD.
Cheers.
But hey, someone modded you up to +5 so your analogy must be correct.
OT, I remember my complete amazement the first time I bought a game that came on CD-ROM instead of 12 floppies. It installed so freakin' fast! =)
As for high-end apps, in truth I really never got to run any in DOS. Mostly it was things like Photostyler, PageMaker, CorelDRAW and so on under Windows.
You had me at "Developing to a specific browser is worse than developing to a coin toss."
Sure, I replied to you in this thread. You didn't notice? Of course by the contents of that thread one can safely say that you certainly do not.
By the way, I find it interesting that you didn't start your insults with a denial that this is one of your sockpuppet accounts. You've pretty much given up pretending, eh?
More here.
Do not reward people who game the system by using multiple accounts.
Did you ask the same insightful questions about Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross when the Mozilla foundation started raking in the millions from Google? Just wondering.
It's things like these among many others that will start chipping away at Google's "sterling reputation" and reveal them as what they are: a corporation with shareholders.
I won't contest the DR-DOS issue at all, and I think it was stupid of Microsoft to try that. However, that happened more than fifteen years ago, and involved detection code in a beta version that never made it to production. Why don't you read up on the actual facts:
Though DR-DOS was almost 100% binary compatible with applications written for MS-DOS, Microsoft nevertheless expended considerable effort in attempts to break compatibility. In one example, they inserted code into the beta version of Windows 3.1 to return a non-fatal error message if it detected a non-Microsoft DOS. With the detection code disabled (or if the user canceled the error message), Windows ran perfectly under DR-DOS. This code was removed from final release of Windows 3.1 and all subsequent versions, however.
Emphasis in bold above is mine. How much longer are you going to complain about code in a beta version of Windows that never shipped?
The Netscape issue was certainly not a case of "sabotage", other than Netscape sabotaging themselves. It's disingenous to trot out the same bullshit time and time again to make your points. Bruce Perens once claimed ESR wanted to kill him, but I don't use that every day to claim people associated with the free software movement are schizo paranoids. The reality is that outside of DR-DOS with the caveats I pointed out, you have exactly nothing other than FUD and imaginative inferences.
It's obvious your technical preferences serve as your religion, we just wonder why.
As you didn't point out, OSX KDE and GNOME don't have 95% market share, which is why I'm sure Google couldn't care less about them. So in this case the "but X does Y as well" argument is irelevant.
Well, I think Microsoft ("M$") has a right to add whatever they want to their operating system ("Windoze"), as long as they don't actually break anything, as Macthorpe and many other people here pointed out, though of course it's easier for you to just say they're all employed by Microsoft, as usual.
As to actually breaking competitor's applications, you've tried that FUD before. Didn't go well then, either. OTOH, if you actually have some proof now, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.
So it worked for you? Congratulations. I must be hallucinating, or lying. Thanks for clearing that up, with a "bzzt" no less.
So anyone outside of the FSF that writes about patents should be automatically dismissed, correct?
No kidding.
Fedora:
I figure I should have stopped the presses after #3 here. Your thoughts?
Windows:
However, I believe the OP was referring to the Mozilla UI core. Is that affected by the JS engine since the browser itself is a XUL component? I have no idea. I tried to look at the Firefox code once and nearly gouged my eyes out after a few hours.
But that blog entry really sounds like a mix of "I'm smarter than you" and remedial marketspeak.