(And I got modded insightful for my own whining? WTF?)
Simple. Different discussions on/. tend to attract a different group of people - and some are more prone to attracting the "armchair expert" than others. This discussion has clearly attracted a number of experienced developers who know there's more to developing code than just sitting down churning it out and going out of your way to offend anyone whose viewpoint is even remotely different from yours.
Certainly in most businesses that's the case because most businesses don't want to hire people and then tell them exactly what to do. They want to hire people with whom they can discuss what the business needs, thrash out an appropriate solution and then those people they've hired go off and do it.
(On a side note, I recently interviewed at a company and a question I asked was "what's the business driver for this team?". I was rather surprised to find that the manager interviewing me didn't know.)
Which demonstrates oh-so-nicely the state of Linux on the desktop.
Desktop User: I want to be able to drag and drop between any arbitrary application. Is that so hard? Dev: Well, yes it is actually. Desktop User: Microsoft and Apple have been doing it for over 10 years. Dev: Off you go then. Use one of those.
(On a side note: I don't debate that it is a security chasm but somehow I doubt Microsoft or Apple really care that much about it. I daresay a determined attacker could find loads of holes in that little aspect of the desktop but they wouldn't be easily remotely exploitable. In the real world, it may be better to worry about security holes which are actually likely to have an impact and to design systems so the impact of any given issue is minimised rather than spending ages fretting over hypothetical issues which haven't even been tested in practise)
That's a failing with the US legal system, not copyright itself. Here in the UK, in most civil cases the damages you can generally ask for are no more than would be necessary to put you back in the same position had the situation never occurred. (Having said that, we also have a "loser pays" system so the balance that should be redressed by not allowing excessive damages is promptly lost to whoever has the most money).
They are convicted for little to no evidence.
In this case, they had a little evidence and once they had it the defendant said "Yes, you're quite right, I did do it but there's nothing wrong with that". The part that needs a court to rule on is "...there's nothing wrong with that".
Disclaimer: My wife is a therapeutic radiographer. She treats cancer patients all day long. What I've posted here is what I understand from her, which may be completely wrong because I'm not qualified to understand everything she says.
If you were to believe the press, a cure for cancer is found on average 2-4 times a year. Except it isn't, for a number of reasons:
1. The "cure" is usually in the early stages of trials. Sometimes it hasn't even been taken out of the test tube and put into any living creature. (This is one of the better articles in that respect - it seems like the initial clinical trials to test whether or not it'll do any harm in humans have been passed)
2. There's no such thing as a generic cure for cancer because there's no such thing as a generic cancer. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different types. Some tend to grow very quickly, others more slowly. Some tend to spread to other parts of the body, others don't. Some we know the main causes of, others we have no idea. Some are easy to treat and have a high success rate, others rather less so.
This is good news because by and large the cancers which are easy to detect (and therefore tend to get treated early) are the ones which are fairly easy for a lay person to spot something wrong - think skin, breast, testicle. Cancers of internal organs which are able to function for some time with little noticeable impairment (eg. liver) are far more likely to be detected too late.
Hence a more effective treatment for something like bowel cancer is definitely a Very Good Thing.
The office application suite was a pretty nifty idea, for example.
WordPerfect did it first. As did Lotus, IIRC.
Um... hrm... Active directory? I think that was original, and it was damned nice.
Active Directory is LDAP, which was not at all new at the time. The only thing Microsoft did new was follow it through to its logical conclusion - if you've got a database available on the network which you control the schema of, why not use it to configure every aspect of every PC on the network, rather than as nothing but a fancy password repository?
Bringing you 10 year old unix technology.... TODAY!! (but crippling it enough so they can't be prosecuted for stealing it)
More like 40 year old Unix technology. Which there are enough variants of with permissive enough licensing that they could do so while keeping their source code closed and with no fear of prosecution.
Well, it's anecdotal evidence so make of it what you will, but my employer used to purchase Sony laptops a few years ago. Then I tried to buy a replacement battery for an 18-month old laptop.
Let's just say my employer no longer purchases Sony laptops.
Separately, my sister in law has a fairly recent Vaio - I have never seen a laptop with such poor build quality in my life. Even Dell's cheapest Vostro laptops are rather better put together.
We don't have a DMCA and as far as I am aware, the ISP cannot be sued by the content provider for allowing copyright infringement.
So, why does the ISP police its users like this? Simple. The content industry went to the government and said "waah waah piracy is costing us billions every week!" and the government came back with an ultimatum to ISPs: "do something about it or we'll pass a law forcing you to".
Now we have a situation where instead of this policing following a law (which at least generally has the good grace to deal with such things as providing a due process and an appeals procedure), it's based on your contract with your ISP which they can rewrite on a whim.
Rather sounds to me like it's a hardware issue for which a software workaround exists, unfortunately the software workaround hasn't been implemented in the Linux driver.
What's the phrase. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." or something to that effect.
Seeing as Microsoft has been promising the Earth and delivering on about 10% of their promises for over 20 years now (OS/2, anyone?), I'd rewrite that phrase.
I'd disagree with you, if only because (certainly in the technology field), the real winner quite often isn't the company that was first to market with a new idea.
The winners have been those who have sat on the fence, watched others with the great ideas burn stacks of cash, fail then picked up those ideas, learning from the others mistakes.
See also: Microsoft Windows from about 1992 onwards. Not a new idea at all, but the first time the idea had a decent amount of marketing behind it. See also: the iPod.
"Able to speak grammatically correct ${LANGUAGE} when in a classroom environment, there's little background noise and everything is being enunciated nice and slowly" is a thousand times removed from "Able to hold a conversation in ${LANGUAGE} as well as any native ${LANGUAGE} speaker".
You raise some good points, but my perspective is different to yours as I'm in the UK.
Our ISPs have a slightly different model when you buy a leased line - usually, they run the line and provide a managed router and the demarcation point where it becomes your problem is the ethernet cable on the your side of the router. What technology they use to get the Internet connection to that router - E1, OC3, carrier pigeon - is not normally something the customer has to care about.
And if you go with either of the two largest providers, they are very reliable. Major outages are the kind of thing that hits the national IT news.
If you follow SaaS to the extreme, this would leave someone like me managing a few switches and a DHCP server.
And a business with up to 50 people is going to hire someone full time - paying fulltime wages - for that?
A lot depends on the kind of client that would go for SaaS.
Companies that depend on their IT to give them the edge over the competition? Probably not.
Companies that are sufficiently big & complicated that there will never be a "one-size fits all" solution that suits them? Probably not.
Companies that do something that is not directly related to IT and just see the computer as a sophisticated calculator/typewriter/balance sheet? Ah, now that's more likely.
And I'll tell you now that companies in the final category make up the great majority of companies in the world today.
There are thousands of businesses around the world that are just large enough to need a couple of full-time IT people of some description. These businesses account for a lot of IT jobs. If you actually crunch the numbers, the huge companies of this world don't employ that many people as a percentage of the working population.
SaaS allows a business to grow much larger before it needs a full-time IT presence than was previously possible - all those crappy little applications (of which there are thousands) that IT technicians, sysadmins etc. got to know backwards and inside out and were next to useless in their next job are going the way of the dodo. PC so full of viruses and spyware it's virtually unusable? Considering the amount of money you'll pay per month for a full-time member of staff, it may well be cheaper to keep a couple of spares in the cupboard and just bin it when you hit trouble.
This is great for the business - they can get more done for less money. Not so much for the sysadmin.
Gentoo is great for learning how to fix things that are broken. That's because it's not uncommon to find a new version you want to install breaks something - eg. the config file syntax has changed subtly and the ebuild doesn't warn you of this before you carry out the upgrade. The longer you leave between doing an emerge -uD world, the more likely this is to happen.
And while you should keep a separate test network to test these things on, IME the test network is never quite a 100% accurate representation of the real one.
Learning how to fix things that are broken is good practice for any Linux admin. But putting a distribution that is driven by a desire to remain up to date at the expense of manageability into an installation that's meant to meet military specs?
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sorry, Courtney Love. D'oh!
How true do you reckon the arguments made by the likes of Courtney Cox about how the "gold ring" isn't such a great deal are, in general terms?
wait.. what? what do you mean no?
What part of the word "no" are you having difficulty with?
(And I got modded insightful for my own whining? WTF?)
Simple. Different discussions on /. tend to attract a different group of people - and some are more prone to attracting the "armchair expert" than others. This discussion has clearly attracted a number of experienced developers who know there's more to developing code than just sitting down churning it out and going out of your way to offend anyone whose viewpoint is even remotely different from yours.
Certainly in most businesses that's the case because most businesses don't want to hire people and then tell them exactly what to do. They want to hire people with whom they can discuss what the business needs, thrash out an appropriate solution and then those people they've hired go off and do it.
(On a side note, I recently interviewed at a company and a question I asked was "what's the business driver for this team?". I was rather surprised to find that the manager interviewing me didn't know.)
Which demonstrates oh-so-nicely the state of Linux on the desktop.
Desktop User: I want to be able to drag and drop between any arbitrary application. Is that so hard?
Dev: Well, yes it is actually.
Desktop User: Microsoft and Apple have been doing it for over 10 years.
Dev: Off you go then. Use one of those.
(On a side note: I don't debate that it is a security chasm but somehow I doubt Microsoft or Apple really care that much about it. I daresay a determined attacker could find loads of holes in that little aspect of the desktop but they wouldn't be easily remotely exploitable. In the real world, it may be better to worry about security holes which are actually likely to have an impact and to design systems so the impact of any given issue is minimised rather than spending ages fretting over hypothetical issues which haven't even been tested in practise)
he's lower than even the lowest bottom-sucker.
<pedant>
It's "bottom feeder", and it refers to fish that feed near the bottom of the ocean. Can't get much physically lower than that.
</pedant>
Having said that, comparing a lawyer to someone who likes to suck on arseholes is an entertaining vision, and it's brightened my morning no end.
these people are convicted for -insane- damages.
That's a failing with the US legal system, not copyright itself. Here in the UK, in most civil cases the damages you can generally ask for are no more than would be necessary to put you back in the same position had the situation never occurred. (Having said that, we also have a "loser pays" system so the balance that should be redressed by not allowing excessive damages is promptly lost to whoever has the most money).
They are convicted for little to no evidence.
In this case, they had a little evidence and once they had it the defendant said "Yes, you're quite right, I did do it but there's nothing wrong with that". The part that needs a court to rule on is "...there's nothing wrong with that".
Disclaimer: IANAL, ICBW.
Disclaimer: My wife is a therapeutic radiographer. She treats cancer patients all day long. What I've posted here is what I understand from her, which may be completely wrong because I'm not qualified to understand everything she says.
If you were to believe the press, a cure for cancer is found on average 2-4 times a year. Except it isn't, for a number of reasons:
1. The "cure" is usually in the early stages of trials. Sometimes it hasn't even been taken out of the test tube and put into any living creature. (This is one of the better articles in that respect - it seems like the initial clinical trials to test whether or not it'll do any harm in humans have been passed)
2. There's no such thing as a generic cure for cancer because there's no such thing as a generic cancer. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different types. Some tend to grow very quickly, others more slowly. Some tend to spread to other parts of the body, others don't. Some we know the main causes of, others we have no idea. Some are easy to treat and have a high success rate, others rather less so.
This is good news because by and large the cancers which are easy to detect (and therefore tend to get treated early) are the ones which are fairly easy for a lay person to spot something wrong - think skin, breast, testicle. Cancers of internal organs which are able to function for some time with little noticeable impairment (eg. liver) are far more likely to be detected too late.
Hence a more effective treatment for something like bowel cancer is definitely a Very Good Thing.
The office application suite was a pretty nifty idea, for example.
WordPerfect did it first. As did Lotus, IIRC.
Um... hrm... Active directory? I think that was original, and it was damned nice.
Active Directory is LDAP, which was not at all new at the time. The only thing Microsoft did new was follow it through to its logical conclusion - if you've got a database available on the network which you control the schema of, why not use it to configure every aspect of every PC on the network, rather than as nothing but a fancy password repository?
Bringing you 10 year old unix technology .... TODAY!! (but crippling it enough so they can't be prosecuted for stealing it)
More like 40 year old Unix technology. Which there are enough variants of with permissive enough licensing that they could do so while keeping their source code closed and with no fear of prosecution.
Well, it's anecdotal evidence so make of it what you will, but my employer used to purchase Sony laptops a few years ago. Then I tried to buy a replacement battery for an 18-month old laptop.
Let's just say my employer no longer purchases Sony laptops.
Separately, my sister in law has a fairly recent Vaio - I have never seen a laptop with such poor build quality in my life. Even Dell's cheapest Vostro laptops are rather better put together.
Yes I do, actually. Virtually every Microsoft product in the whole of history.
It's not quite as simple as that.
We don't have a DMCA and as far as I am aware, the ISP cannot be sued by the content provider for allowing copyright infringement.
So, why does the ISP police its users like this? Simple. The content industry went to the government and said "waah waah piracy is costing us billions every week!" and the government came back with an ultimatum to ISPs: "do something about it or we'll pass a law forcing you to".
Now we have a situation where instead of this policing following a law (which at least generally has the good grace to deal with such things as providing a due process and an appeals procedure), it's based on your contract with your ISP which they can rewrite on a whim.
I think I'd have preferred the law.
Rather sounds to me like it's a hardware issue for which a software workaround exists, unfortunately the software workaround hasn't been implemented in the Linux driver.
What's the phrase. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." or something to that effect.
Seeing as Microsoft has been promising the Earth and delivering on about 10% of their promises for over 20 years now (OS/2, anyone?), I'd rewrite that phrase.
you can't have 3D (or a composited desktop) in Linux. This is apparently a hardware limitation.
The Windows Vista/7 Aero driver has no such limitation, and I don't think the OS X driver does either.
Are you aware that those two sentences contradict each other?
On Vista it takes at most 10 mouse clicks and 30 seconds, and everything works perfectly.
Really? Took about zero mouse clicks on OS X <g>
I sleep on the couch when I use that, but I never lose a 'best judgment' argument.
So in exchange for winning the argument, you get to sleep on the couch? Clearly this is a new definition of "win" of which I was previously unaware.
I'd disagree with you, if only because (certainly in the technology field), the real winner quite often isn't the company that was first to market with a new idea.
The winners have been those who have sat on the fence, watched others with the great ideas burn stacks of cash, fail then picked up those ideas, learning from the others mistakes.
See also: Microsoft Windows from about 1992 onwards. Not a new idea at all, but the first time the idea had a decent amount of marketing behind it. See also: the iPod.
"Able to speak grammatically correct ${LANGUAGE} when in a classroom environment, there's little background noise and everything is being enunciated nice and slowly" is a thousand times removed from "Able to hold a conversation in ${LANGUAGE} as well as any native ${LANGUAGE} speaker".
You raise some good points, but my perspective is different to yours as I'm in the UK.
Our ISPs have a slightly different model when you buy a leased line - usually, they run the line and provide a managed router and the demarcation point where it becomes your problem is the ethernet cable on the your side of the router. What technology they use to get the Internet connection to that router - E1, OC3, carrier pigeon - is not normally something the customer has to care about.
And if you go with either of the two largest providers, they are very reliable. Major outages are the kind of thing that hits the national IT news.
If you follow SaaS to the extreme, this would leave someone like me managing a few switches and a DHCP server.
And a business with up to 50 people is going to hire someone full time - paying fulltime wages - for that?
A lot depends on the kind of client that would go for SaaS.
Companies that depend on their IT to give them the edge over the competition? Probably not.
Companies that are sufficiently big & complicated that there will never be a "one-size fits all" solution that suits them? Probably not.
Companies that do something that is not directly related to IT and just see the computer as a sophisticated calculator/typewriter/balance sheet? Ah, now that's more likely.
And I'll tell you now that companies in the final category make up the great majority of companies in the world today.
And I say that as a sysadmin myself.
There are thousands of businesses around the world that are just large enough to need a couple of full-time IT people of some description. These businesses account for a lot of IT jobs. If you actually crunch the numbers, the huge companies of this world don't employ that many people as a percentage of the working population.
SaaS allows a business to grow much larger before it needs a full-time IT presence than was previously possible - all those crappy little applications (of which there are thousands) that IT technicians, sysadmins etc. got to know backwards and inside out and were next to useless in their next job are going the way of the dodo. PC so full of viruses and spyware it's virtually unusable? Considering the amount of money you'll pay per month for a full-time member of staff, it may well be cheaper to keep a couple of spares in the cupboard and just bin it when you hit trouble.
This is great for the business - they can get more done for less money. Not so much for the sysadmin.
Oh dear me no. No, no and thrice no.
Gentoo is great for learning how to fix things that are broken. That's because it's not uncommon to find a new version you want to install breaks something - eg. the config file syntax has changed subtly and the ebuild doesn't warn you of this before you carry out the upgrade. The longer you leave between doing an emerge -uD world, the more likely this is to happen.
And while you should keep a separate test network to test these things on, IME the test network is never quite a 100% accurate representation of the real one.
Learning how to fix things that are broken is good practice for any Linux admin. But putting a distribution that is driven by a desire to remain up to date at the expense of manageability into an installation that's meant to meet military specs?