If you read the article, the Google security engineer tried for 5 days to negotiate a fixed time table for it to be fixed within. I think it was something like 60 days. MS apparently wasn't too keen on doing it and so he posted the flaw online.
If so, that is pretty damning of Ormandy -- that he thought 60 days was an appropriate timeframe for a fix, and even thinking it was reasonable for a fix to take that long decided to publicise it after only 5 days. Saying "I think 60 days is reasonable, so I'm going to publish in 60 days" is perhaps defensible; saying "I think 60 days is reasonable, but since you won't sign on the dotted line I'm publishing it 55 days earlier" sounds irresponsible.
I was in the same spot, hired as a web content person, next thing I knew I was IT manager for the corporation doing PC support, hands-on sever, PBX, twisted pair, web development and CSM rec, integration and more. I was working 60-80 a week and after 6 months I got a "good job" and no raise, another 2 months and I had to ask for a raise. I got a big "why and NO", needless to say my enjoyment of my job went to zero and it showed. I was asked to resign 3 weeks later. They has to hired 2 people to replace me.
So this is part of the issue: under those circumstances what you ask for is not a "raise" but an appointment to the position you are doing (which co-incidentally happens to come with a jump in salary). If they see it as "Joe Bloggs wants more money" they'll tend to say no. HR and management are well-practiced in trying to minimise salary creep across their organisations. If they see it as "Joe Bloggs is asking to step up to the next stage of his career, he's clearly been gaining the experience necessary, and if we say no he's likely to take that step up elsewhere" they are more likely to say yes. HR and management are also well-versed in how they are *supposed* to support career-development (even though it takes prodding to get them to do it), and the fact they have given you extra responsibilities suggests you are an employee they don't want to lose. Of course, you also have to be 'not bluffing' -- if they don't move on the appointment, don't be grumpy but just go elsewhere using the experience and skills they have given you. It's a small world, and you may well end up working for them again in a more senior role later.
No. The real question is: "So, how long before the Aussies figure out that enough is enough, and they tell their government to stop being so damned paranoid?"
Given that a fair chunk of users (including many slashdotters) use GMail, YahooMail, or HotMail I'm not so sure people really are fretful about a service provider of their choosing holding a record of their email... I don't see this causing the same storm of controversy as the filter. And ISPs keeping logs also isn't such an emotive issue because I'm pretty sure most people think they already do.
No, some people in Turkey want a religious government, some would like sharia law, and a few would like a dictatorship.
If I recall correctly, however, sharia and democracy are to an extent mutually exclusive. The rationale being that sharia claims itself to be "the law of god" and under sharia the views of man (ie, democracy) cannot trump "the law of god". So, once you are under sharia law, it's hard to vote to get rid of it, and many of your other democratic rights also get eroded. Or at least I understand that was the view of the 1998 Constitutional Court of Turkey when they banned the Refah Party.
Actually, as somebody who's played with this stuff, I can tell you that you have no idea what you're even talking about. Do you realise how hard it is to actually pick up a single conversation from outside a house.
Very easy. I can sit on my back deck and hear conversations going on in the four houses surrounding us. Most people don't shut their windows, and some even have lunch on their back decks, nattering away perhaps 2 metres from me with no walls in between. That their conversation is audible in public does not give me permission to record and sell who was having conversations with whom and when, let alone "accidentally" record the words that were spoken.
Driving past with a friggin $20 wifi card, I can pickup all your *open* wifi traffic.
Driving past with a 2c carrier bag to put it in, I can steal the mail from your letterbox. With a $2 screwdriver, I can rip the whole letterbox off your fence. Does that make it legal?
If you're retarded enough to not turn on the password on your laptop, I'm sorry...but...it's just ridiculous in this day and age. Five years ago, when Wifi was "new" maybe, but not now. And your signal is being broadcast *outside* over somebody else's airspace, so it's not even trespass..
And if you had turned on your password (as most do) and even hidden the SSID -- Google would still have recorded that you had a WiFi, including any information it could gather about its make, model, and the likely ISP you are using, and would have sold that information to third parties without your permission as was their explicit original intention. Short of lead-lining your house there were *no actions* you could take to prevent Google from recording and selling some information about what you were doing in your home.
Is this the world's favorite new way to waste time, suing google for recording publicly available information from wifi spots as they drive?
I hope they prosecute the pants off them. Suppose it wasn't Google but Microsoft. Would you still be happy for them to be intentionally gathering data (be it records of who has which WiFi device or the actual conversations) just because the electromagnetic fields were leaking through your walls? After all, the heat radiation that escapes through your walls and windows is "publicly available" so surely it'd be ok for them to sit outside with a thermal camera pointed at your house. And the sound radiation that leaks through too -- so there'd be "no problem" with them pointing very sensitive directional microphones towards your bedroom window and recording that too... I mean, it's just your own silly fault for not installing a lead-lined cone of silence over your bed...
No, this is just slashdot giving Google a free pass (Slashdot's Google love-in), even though Google explicitly intended to gather and sell data about you without your permission. Their excuse is "oops, we didn't mean to gather quite that much data" not that they didn't mean to do it at all.
Even aside from religious beliefs, it is very difficult for many people to believe that the world and people as they are came about because of chance. Just look at the number of references in popular culture to fate and "the meaning of life". Going back even as far as the Greeks, it was a major theme of their literature and plays. The notion that natural selection determines that outcome of the universe is, to many people, a profoundly unsettling explanation.
For most religions, as I understand it, the issue is actually much more fundamental than that. (Trying to describe this here is going to be a little like trying to describe the socialist rationale to George W Bush, but here goes:)
For a moment, set aside the pure materialist assumption that everything is mechanical and repeatable (historically that was viewed as a sweeping and unproven claim to make) and consider the world from a perspective more akin to mathematics or philosophy.
Here is a mathematical description of the empty set: {}. That empty set does not contain time for there to be an opportunity for anything to appear within it, even by chance. Pure materialists talk about the outcome of the universe as "why is the universe the way it is" (that is what science [actually, my job] can address) whereas more fundamental/basic philosophies, actually including religions, are more concerned with "why is there any universe at all" and "what makes this universe qualitatively different than any other mathematical set I could write on paper". (That we can only ask the question because we exist isn't a sufficient answer, because it is the meaning of "exist" that is questioned.) This is true, for instance, in old testament philosophy, in which God's word is true not merely because God is trustworthy but because God's word defines the universe. (God creates the rules.) To use a trite but famous example, it is not "And God said 'Let there be light' and then an army of angels went and created bits of light" but "And God said 'Let there be light' and there was light". In old testament philosophy, it is a definition not an order. In short the most fundamental claim is that it is God's declaration of this universe that gives it the special quality of actually existing in a way that the set of all fictional universes I could dream up does not. That is a very long way out of the scope of things I can address in my job as a scientist. ID, for its proponents, comes later as a speculation about progressive definition of creatures in a declared universe. If you've already deduced/decided that God exists then it seems like a fairly simple thing to speculate; if you've already deduced/decided that God does not exist then it seems "obviously" ridiculous and unlikely. And thus, as we've seen its proponents and opponents go at each other hammer and tongs each thinking the other is a bit daft. And personally I reckon that's because they are arguing about step 2 in their reasoning when their basic disagreement is about step 1.
We remove some of the ethical concerns that go with stem cell research. This should go a long way in advancing medical science.
I'm pretty sure it's not the vegetarian vote that has been most concerned about stem cell research! (This is still about embryonic stem cells, so it still involves a pre-natal death, which has been the much more vociferous ethical debate.)
That may well be part of Google's intention. Microsoft and Google have long been trying to kill each other. Tech companies seemed to have a policy of trying to scorch some earth around their market -- pre-emptive strikes against companies that might move into their competitive market in the future. So, Microsoft spent large quantities of cash to kill Netscape and AOL. Google are spending much moer than they are earning on Google Docs to try to kill Microsoft's Office market. Microsoft are spending large quantities of cash to try to kill Google's search advertising market. And more recently Google are spending lots of cash to try to kill Microsoft's Windows market. Taking the pain of moving a lot of staff from one operating system to another sounds like another effort in that regard. They hit Microsoft in PR ("see, one of the world's biggest companies doesn't use Windows at all -- it's not necessary for business"), and they particularly boost Linux's desktop user base and market reputation (they also boost Apple, but Apple needs it less). Not to mention the extra 20% time that desktop Linux projects might soon be getting...
It's amazing that BP can drill for oil with no provable solution to a catastrophic failure. It's like operating on a patient and going 'Trust me, I'm a doctor'.
#4 hits it out of the park. STOP making me register for your site! I already have hundreds of passwords--I don't need to remember another one from your crappy web site!
You mean you don't have a Google/Hotmail/Yahoo crap account used exclusively for registering one-time-only accounts on websites? Ah, a new web site I have to remember. Yes, Mr Web Registration Form, I really am McGurgle McCrap of 123 Sodoff St, Crapsville, honest guv...
But can it utilize revolutionary interfaces to productize cross-media e-services to mesh extensible niches which helps to incubate end-to-end communities and to drive sticky functionalities while scaling collaborative systems in an effort to monetize open-source convergence?
We are all about transitioning value-added web-readiness here.
Bah, these young pups who think they know management speak. Get off my leverage.
And for the elevnty-hojillionth freaking time, MORE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER! Not EVERYONE needs to do EVERYTHING! Plenty of people CAN get by with a very limited device.
Really? Have you ever tried even writing your resume and then printing it out on an iPad? Was it a nice experience for that large amount of editing, layout tweaking, and then hooking up to a $100 Epson printer that was the one you bought cheaply from KMart? (It's not exactly a specialist task.) Or keeping the 10s of GB of photos you've accrued? I'm pretty certain that there is NOBODY who only owns an iPad and does not also own a more traditional PC/laptop device. The iPad is not supplanting the PC market, it is growing a previously underserved market segment.
There is no debate. Everyone that has some programming experience with unicode and multi language support knows that the *only* sane way is to have case sensitive file systems.
And on the day that most computers or other file systems are bought by programmers, maybe the market will listen to you. But today by far the majority of people buying filesystems (be they computers or USB drives) are not programmers, and just don't want to have to deal with Accounts.xls being different from accounts.xls. If that makes a very few programmers' lives very slightly harder, so be it.
The DRM is not even the only issue. If you run anything that is binary and closed-sourced on your GNU/Linux machine, with your user privileges, you are basically asking for a punch in the gut. Keep doing it, folks; with so many willing targets, all of us who actually give two shits about security will be that much safer.
I came to realize that I do not particularly want proprietary games to leave Windows. This way, I have my Windows machine, which is basically a dedicated game device and a public-terminal-level-security Internet appliance. With native GNU/Linux ports, I would still have to have two separate machines, and still treat one of them as a rogue, although I would be able to save a few bucks on OS.
That's a spurious argument. There's no guarantee that anybody has inspected code you download just because it is open source. Even in popular systems, significant holes have existed for a very long time (eg, the Debian key bug), and it is perfectly possible for a "rogue committer" to get nefarious code into an open source project and have it survive long enough that users download and execute it. So, in practice even for an open source product you would have to inspect the code yourself or still treat it as being "rogue". While you have the right to do that, I think it's a fair guess that you do not in fact inspect all of the code for every open source package you download, and even if you did you wouldn't spot 100% of the security flaws. While open source is an excellent strategy to develop secure software, that does not mean that a customer can treat software as being secure (or even "more secure") just because it is open source.
Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property.
Although this is true (for instance they make it very hard to re-sell a game), in practice most of the customer base doesn't care even if you educate them about it. Why? Well, it really is only a game. While a few on Slashdot might care deeply about being able to play them in perpetuity, actually most game buyers never even bother to finish them. Not even the good games. That makes it very different to music or videos that people want to play over and over again. Why would a customer care that "they might not be able to play this again at some indefinite point in the future" if they don't even care to finish playing it once now?
So please, don't blame the kind people a MPEG for MPEG-LA. Blame MPEG-LA themselves, http://mpegla.com/
It's that blasted media franchising culture again, isn't it! CSI, great. CIS-Miami, wall to wall sunglass gestures. CSI NY, ghastly. MPEG, lovely. MPEG-LA, rubbish. And you just know the next one's going to be MPEG-Hawaii or something equally horrible.
I don't know... Microsoft Surface and Project Natal were both pieces of cool research that have moved into products. MS are aware that it's been hard to transition technology between Microsoft Research and the product teams, but it is an issue they are working on, and seem to be getting better at.
The one that is a bit iffy however is that it does hinder your Right of First Sale. Purchase a real game and you can sell it second hand. Purchase a Steam game, and it's much harder (including a fee to Valve). You also have to realise that this really is an explicit intention of Steam. The record execs might care about piracy. The game companies care about second hand sales. Whatever number of BitTorrenting pirates there might be out there, there's an EBGames or a GameStop with a wall-ful of second hand copies in every shopping centre.
You: Free Software doesn't attract funding from the business sector because such investments are seen as benefiting competitors more than they benefit the investor.
Me: Well, actually it does see quite a bit of business investment...
You: Those cases do not count. They benefit the business more than its competitors.
So my problem is that I don't think you can demonstrate that "all cats are white" by saying "that cat doesn't count because it is black".
Now if your point was that there are a number of cases where the open nature of free software acts as a disincentive to corporate investment, then I would have to agree with you.
But with all due respect, that isn't what you said.
No, with all due respect your paraphrasing is a blatant fabrication. I think you'd be hard pressed to find two consecutive words that are common between what I said and what you are now claiming I said. I stand by my original statement as I wrote it in its entirety. If you wish to have little fantasy arguments in which you shoot down things you'd like people to have said (rather than what they did say), well that's up to you. I have to say I think it's a bit childish though.
That's your line, right there. The points you'd like to discard are all the cases (which you've conceded occur) where business does in fact invest in Free Software.
I really don't see the issue you are taking with this. That was the line and the conclusion. There was no other unstated conclusion. The cases (which I haven't simply "conceded" occur; I originally explicitly stated occur) where a business invests in GPL software is when it returns a positive ROI to them themselves (rather than to the industry as aggregate). The value to IBM of Samba is greater than the cost of paying its developers so IBM is willing to pay its developers. The value to IBM of KDE being a truly successful consumer market competitor to Windows is less than it would cost to achieve that, so, even though it would save consumers around the world billions in total, they don't put that level of cash into it. What a surprise, corporate finance doesn't like playing the "spend $1 to only get $0.03 back" game*.
So what's your problem?
*(This is complicated by there being a monetary value to killing your competitors, and a marketing value to being seen as a nice open source player, but since you're struggling with the simple stuff let's not go into more advanced areas.)
So what are you saying? That it doesn't count if it actually makes sound business sense? It sounds to me like you've drawn your line first, and now you're discarding all the data points that don't lie on it.
Have a look back a few posts at my original reply to you. That's the line I'm talking. (Much more specific and limited than you seem to want to widen it to.)
You know, I'm actually ok with that.
Nobody's holding a gun to your head, making you buy it.
Man, Microsoft would have loved it if the DOJ bought that argument! (And Apple do seem to be gaining a monopoly on touch-tablets, and that seems to be a reason why the volume of rhetoric has stepped up)
Which has to be balanced against the rather larger economy of not having to write, test and debug 30 million lines of code (in the case of the Linux kernel). I'll grant that this probably doesn't greatly mitigate the corporate disincentives you mention, but "ineconomy of scale" nevertheless seems a little harsh.
Actually, no. The answer to OpenOffice being behind the times (in some respects) is to buy a copy of Word or use Google Docs, not to roll your own wordprocessor from scratch. Likewise, before Linux companies bought a Unix or Windows, they didn't write their own. The cost saving is the much lesser one of a license fee. (Technically, the saving aggregated across all companies is actually the vendor's profit margin.)
That isn't actually true. Start any discussion on Linux vs Windows, and you'll get a dozen astroturfers queuing up to explain how Linux is mainly written by guys working for Novell and IBM and isn't really an amateur effort any more. (I'm not sure why they think this makes a difference, but they're correct to say that business is funding a lot of linux development).
Nope, economically the changes made to Linux by Novell and IBM are the ones that are expected to produce a positive return on investment to Novell and IBM. (ie, IBM pays for the ones that are worth more to IBM themselves than it costs to make -- IBM never thinks "this'll really help Oracle, so even though it costs us a lot of money, let's do it"). The ones that would produce a positive return across the market in total but not to the company paying for the development don't happen. Ever wondered why the "year of the Linux desktop" never happened? It was never economic for any one company to put up the cash to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article, the Google security engineer tried for 5 days to negotiate a fixed time table for it to be fixed within. I think it was something like 60 days. MS apparently wasn't too keen on doing it and so he posted the flaw online.
If so, that is pretty damning of Ormandy -- that he thought 60 days was an appropriate timeframe for a fix, and even thinking it was reasonable for a fix to take that long decided to publicise it after only 5 days. Saying "I think 60 days is reasonable, so I'm going to publish in 60 days" is perhaps defensible; saying "I think 60 days is reasonable, but since you won't sign on the dotted line I'm publishing it 55 days earlier" sounds irresponsible.
I was in the same spot, hired as a web content person, next thing I knew I was IT manager for the corporation doing PC support, hands-on sever, PBX, twisted pair, web development and CSM rec, integration and more. I was working 60-80 a week and after 6 months I got a "good job" and no raise, another 2 months and I had to ask for a raise. I got a big "why and NO", needless to say my enjoyment of my job went to zero and it showed. I was asked to resign 3 weeks later. They has to hired 2 people to replace me.
So this is part of the issue: under those circumstances what you ask for is not a "raise" but an appointment to the position you are doing (which co-incidentally happens to come with a jump in salary). If they see it as "Joe Bloggs wants more money" they'll tend to say no. HR and management are well-practiced in trying to minimise salary creep across their organisations. If they see it as "Joe Bloggs is asking to step up to the next stage of his career, he's clearly been gaining the experience necessary, and if we say no he's likely to take that step up elsewhere" they are more likely to say yes. HR and management are also well-versed in how they are *supposed* to support career-development (even though it takes prodding to get them to do it), and the fact they have given you extra responsibilities suggests you are an employee they don't want to lose. Of course, you also have to be 'not bluffing' -- if they don't move on the appointment, don't be grumpy but just go elsewhere using the experience and skills they have given you. It's a small world, and you may well end up working for them again in a more senior role later.
No. The real question is: "So, how long before the Aussies figure out that enough is enough, and they tell their government to stop being so damned paranoid?"
Given that a fair chunk of users (including many slashdotters) use GMail, YahooMail, or HotMail I'm not so sure people really are fretful about a service provider of their choosing holding a record of their email... I don't see this causing the same storm of controversy as the filter. And ISPs keeping logs also isn't such an emotive issue because I'm pretty sure most people think they already do.
No, some people in Turkey want a religious government, some would like sharia law, and a few would like a dictatorship.
If I recall correctly, however, sharia and democracy are to an extent mutually exclusive. The rationale being that sharia claims itself to be "the law of god" and under sharia the views of man (ie, democracy) cannot trump "the law of god". So, once you are under sharia law, it's hard to vote to get rid of it, and many of your other democratic rights also get eroded. Or at least I understand that was the view of the 1998 Constitutional Court of Turkey when they banned the Refah Party.
Actually, as somebody who's played with this stuff, I can tell you that you have no idea what you're even talking about. Do you realise how hard it is to actually pick up a single conversation from outside a house.
Very easy. I can sit on my back deck and hear conversations going on in the four houses surrounding us. Most people don't shut their windows, and some even have lunch on their back decks, nattering away perhaps 2 metres from me with no walls in between. That their conversation is audible in public does not give me permission to record and sell who was having conversations with whom and when, let alone "accidentally" record the words that were spoken.
Driving past with a friggin $20 wifi card, I can pickup all your *open* wifi traffic.
Driving past with a 2c carrier bag to put it in, I can steal the mail from your letterbox. With a $2 screwdriver, I can rip the whole letterbox off your fence. Does that make it legal?
If you're retarded enough to not turn on the password on your laptop, I'm sorry...but...it's just ridiculous in this day and age. Five years ago, when Wifi was "new" maybe, but not now. And your signal is being broadcast *outside* over somebody else's airspace, so it's not even trespass..
And if you had turned on your password (as most do) and even hidden the SSID -- Google would still have recorded that you had a WiFi, including any information it could gather about its make, model, and the likely ISP you are using, and would have sold that information to third parties without your permission as was their explicit original intention. Short of lead-lining your house there were *no actions* you could take to prevent Google from recording and selling some information about what you were doing in your home.
Is this the world's favorite new way to waste time, suing google for recording publicly available information from wifi spots as they drive?
I hope they prosecute the pants off them. Suppose it wasn't Google but Microsoft. Would you still be happy for them to be intentionally gathering data (be it records of who has which WiFi device or the actual conversations) just because the electromagnetic fields were leaking through your walls? After all, the heat radiation that escapes through your walls and windows is "publicly available" so surely it'd be ok for them to sit outside with a thermal camera pointed at your house. And the sound radiation that leaks through too -- so there'd be "no problem" with them pointing very sensitive directional microphones towards your bedroom window and recording that too... I mean, it's just your own silly fault for not installing a lead-lined cone of silence over your bed...
No, this is just slashdot giving Google a free pass (Slashdot's Google love-in), even though Google explicitly intended to gather and sell data about you without your permission. Their excuse is "oops, we didn't mean to gather quite that much data" not that they didn't mean to do it at all.
Even aside from religious beliefs, it is very difficult for many people to believe that the world and people as they are came about because of chance. Just look at the number of references in popular culture to fate and "the meaning of life". Going back even as far as the Greeks, it was a major theme of their literature and plays. The notion that natural selection determines that outcome of the universe is, to many people, a profoundly unsettling explanation.
For most religions, as I understand it, the issue is actually much more fundamental than that. (Trying to describe this here is going to be a little like trying to describe the socialist rationale to George W Bush, but here goes:)
For a moment, set aside the pure materialist assumption that everything is mechanical and repeatable (historically that was viewed as a sweeping and unproven claim to make) and consider the world from a perspective more akin to mathematics or philosophy.
Here is a mathematical description of the empty set: {}. That empty set does not contain time for there to be an opportunity for anything to appear within it, even by chance. Pure materialists talk about the outcome of the universe as "why is the universe the way it is" (that is what science [actually, my job] can address) whereas more fundamental/basic philosophies, actually including religions, are more concerned with "why is there any universe at all" and "what makes this universe qualitatively different than any other mathematical set I could write on paper". (That we can only ask the question because we exist isn't a sufficient answer, because it is the meaning of "exist" that is questioned.) This is true, for instance, in old testament philosophy, in which God's word is true not merely because God is trustworthy but because God's word defines the universe. (God creates the rules.) To use a trite but famous example, it is not "And God said 'Let there be light' and then an army of angels went and created bits of light" but "And God said 'Let there be light' and there was light". In old testament philosophy, it is a definition not an order. In short the most fundamental claim is that it is God's declaration of this universe that gives it the special quality of actually existing in a way that the set of all fictional universes I could dream up does not. That is a very long way out of the scope of things I can address in my job as a scientist. ID, for its proponents, comes later as a speculation about progressive definition of creatures in a declared universe. If you've already deduced/decided that God exists then it seems like a fairly simple thing to speculate; if you've already deduced/decided that God does not exist then it seems "obviously" ridiculous and unlikely. And thus, as we've seen its proponents and opponents go at each other hammer and tongs each thinking the other is a bit daft. And personally I reckon that's because they are arguing about step 2 in their reasoning when their basic disagreement is about step 1.
We remove some of the ethical concerns that go with stem cell research. This should go a long way in advancing medical science.
I'm pretty sure it's not the vegetarian vote that has been most concerned about stem cell research! (This is still about embryonic stem cells, so it still involves a pre-natal death, which has been the much more vociferous ethical debate.)
The year of Linux on...
Never mind.
That may well be part of Google's intention. Microsoft and Google have long been trying to kill each other. Tech companies seemed to have a policy of trying to scorch some earth around their market -- pre-emptive strikes against companies that might move into their competitive market in the future. So, Microsoft spent large quantities of cash to kill Netscape and AOL. Google are spending much moer than they are earning on Google Docs to try to kill Microsoft's Office market. Microsoft are spending large quantities of cash to try to kill Google's search advertising market. And more recently Google are spending lots of cash to try to kill Microsoft's Windows market. Taking the pain of moving a lot of staff from one operating system to another sounds like another effort in that regard. They hit Microsoft in PR ("see, one of the world's biggest companies doesn't use Windows at all -- it's not necessary for business"), and they particularly boost Linux's desktop user base and market reputation (they also boost Apple, but Apple needs it less). Not to mention the extra 20% time that desktop Linux projects might soon be getting...
In millilitres per day, of course (from your bleeding heart).
I'm here all week, try the bean salad...
It's amazing that BP can drill for oil with no provable solution to a catastrophic failure. It's like operating on a patient and going 'Trust me, I'm a doctor'.
I've got some scary news for you about what doctors actually do... (195,000 deaths from medical error per year, etc)
#4 hits it out of the park. STOP making me register for your site! I already have hundreds of passwords--I don't need to remember another one from your crappy web site!
You mean you don't have a Google/Hotmail/Yahoo crap account used exclusively for registering one-time-only accounts on websites? Ah, a new web site I have to remember. Yes, Mr Web Registration Form, I really am McGurgle McCrap of 123 Sodoff St, Crapsville, honest guv...
But can it utilize revolutionary interfaces to productize cross-media e-services to mesh extensible niches which helps to incubate end-to-end communities and to drive sticky functionalities while scaling collaborative systems in an effort to monetize open-source convergence?
We are all about transitioning value-added web-readiness here.
Bah, these young pups who think they know management speak. Get off my leverage.
And for the elevnty-hojillionth freaking time, MORE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER! Not EVERYONE needs to do EVERYTHING! Plenty of people CAN get by with a very limited device.
Really? Have you ever tried even writing your resume and then printing it out on an iPad? Was it a nice experience for that large amount of editing, layout tweaking, and then hooking up to a $100 Epson printer that was the one you bought cheaply from KMart? (It's not exactly a specialist task.) Or keeping the 10s of GB of photos you've accrued? I'm pretty certain that there is NOBODY who only owns an iPad and does not also own a more traditional PC/laptop device. The iPad is not supplanting the PC market, it is growing a previously underserved market segment.
There is no debate. Everyone that has some programming experience with unicode and multi language support knows that the *only* sane way is to have case sensitive file systems.
And on the day that most computers or other file systems are bought by programmers, maybe the market will listen to you. But today by far the majority of people buying filesystems (be they computers or USB drives) are not programmers, and just don't want to have to deal with Accounts.xls being different from accounts.xls. If that makes a very few programmers' lives very slightly harder, so be it.
The DRM is not even the only issue. If you run anything that is binary and closed-sourced on your GNU/Linux machine, with your user privileges, you are basically asking for a punch in the gut. Keep doing it, folks; with so many willing targets, all of us who actually give two shits about security will be that much safer.
I came to realize that I do not particularly want proprietary games to leave Windows. This way, I have my Windows machine, which is basically a dedicated game device and a public-terminal-level-security Internet appliance. With native GNU/Linux ports, I would still have to have two separate machines, and still treat one of them as a rogue, although I would be able to save a few bucks on OS.
That's a spurious argument. There's no guarantee that anybody has inspected code you download just because it is open source. Even in popular systems, significant holes have existed for a very long time (eg, the Debian key bug), and it is perfectly possible for a "rogue committer" to get nefarious code into an open source project and have it survive long enough that users download and execute it. So, in practice even for an open source product you would have to inspect the code yourself or still treat it as being "rogue". While you have the right to do that, I think it's a fair guess that you do not in fact inspect all of the code for every open source package you download, and even if you did you wouldn't spot 100% of the security flaws. While open source is an excellent strategy to develop secure software, that does not mean that a customer can treat software as being secure (or even "more secure") just because it is open source.
Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property.
Although this is true (for instance they make it very hard to re-sell a game), in practice most of the customer base doesn't care even if you educate them about it. Why? Well, it really is only a game. While a few on Slashdot might care deeply about being able to play them in perpetuity, actually most game buyers never even bother to finish them. Not even the good games. That makes it very different to music or videos that people want to play over and over again. Why would a customer care that "they might not be able to play this again at some indefinite point in the future" if they don't even care to finish playing it once now?
So please, don't blame the kind people a MPEG for MPEG-LA. Blame MPEG-LA themselves, http://mpegla.com/
It's that blasted media franchising culture again, isn't it! CSI, great. CIS-Miami, wall to wall sunglass gestures. CSI NY, ghastly. MPEG, lovely. MPEG-LA, rubbish. And you just know the next one's going to be MPEG-Hawaii or something equally horrible.
I don't know ... Microsoft Surface and Project Natal were both pieces of cool research that have moved into products. MS are aware that it's been hard to transition technology between Microsoft Research and the product teams, but it is an issue they are working on, and seem to be getting better at.
The one that is a bit iffy however is that it does hinder your Right of First Sale. Purchase a real game and you can sell it second hand. Purchase a Steam game, and it's much harder (including a fee to Valve). You also have to realise that this really is an explicit intention of Steam. The record execs might care about piracy. The game companies care about second hand sales. Whatever number of BitTorrenting pirates there might be out there, there's an EBGames or a GameStop with a wall-ful of second hand copies in every shopping centre.
Well, as I read it, the exchange went like this:
You: Free Software doesn't attract funding from the business sector because such investments are seen as benefiting competitors more than they benefit the investor.
Me: Well, actually it does see quite a bit of business investment...
You: Those cases do not count. They benefit the business more than its competitors.
So my problem is that I don't think you can demonstrate that "all cats are white" by saying "that cat doesn't count because it is black".
Now if your point was that there are a number of cases where the open nature of free software acts as a disincentive to corporate investment, then I would have to agree with you.
But with all due respect, that isn't what you said.
No, with all due respect your paraphrasing is a blatant fabrication. I think you'd be hard pressed to find two consecutive words that are common between what I said and what you are now claiming I said. I stand by my original statement as I wrote it in its entirety. If you wish to have little fantasy arguments in which you shoot down things you'd like people to have said (rather than what they did say), well that's up to you. I have to say I think it's a bit childish though.
That's your line, right there. The points you'd like to discard are all the cases (which you've conceded occur) where business does in fact invest in Free Software.
I really don't see the issue you are taking with this. That was the line and the conclusion. There was no other unstated conclusion. The cases (which I haven't simply "conceded" occur; I originally explicitly stated occur) where a business invests in GPL software is when it returns a positive ROI to them themselves (rather than to the industry as aggregate). The value to IBM of Samba is greater than the cost of paying its developers so IBM is willing to pay its developers. The value to IBM of KDE being a truly successful consumer market competitor to Windows is less than it would cost to achieve that, so, even though it would save consumers around the world billions in total, they don't put that level of cash into it. What a surprise, corporate finance doesn't like playing the "spend $1 to only get $0.03 back" game*.
So what's your problem?
*(This is complicated by there being a monetary value to killing your competitors, and a marketing value to being seen as a nice open source player, but since you're struggling with the simple stuff let's not go into more advanced areas.)
So what are you saying? That it doesn't count if it actually makes sound business sense? It sounds to me like you've drawn your line first, and now you're discarding all the data points that don't lie on it.
Have a look back a few posts at my original reply to you. That's the line I'm talking. (Much more specific and limited than you seem to want to widen it to.)
You know, I'm actually ok with that. Nobody's holding a gun to your head, making you buy it.
Man, Microsoft would have loved it if the DOJ bought that argument! (And Apple do seem to be gaining a monopoly on touch-tablets, and that seems to be a reason why the volume of rhetoric has stepped up)
Which has to be balanced against the rather larger economy of not having to write, test and debug 30 million lines of code (in the case of the Linux kernel). I'll grant that this probably doesn't greatly mitigate the corporate disincentives you mention, but "ineconomy of scale" nevertheless seems a little harsh.
Actually, no. The answer to OpenOffice being behind the times (in some respects) is to buy a copy of Word or use Google Docs, not to roll your own wordprocessor from scratch. Likewise, before Linux companies bought a Unix or Windows, they didn't write their own. The cost saving is the much lesser one of a license fee. (Technically, the saving aggregated across all companies is actually the vendor's profit margin.)
That isn't actually true. Start any discussion on Linux vs Windows, and you'll get a dozen astroturfers queuing up to explain how Linux is mainly written by guys working for Novell and IBM and isn't really an amateur effort any more. (I'm not sure why they think this makes a difference, but they're correct to say that business is funding a lot of linux development).
Nope, economically the changes made to Linux by Novell and IBM are the ones that are expected to produce a positive return on investment to Novell and IBM. (ie, IBM pays for the ones that are worth more to IBM themselves than it costs to make -- IBM never thinks "this'll really help Oracle, so even though it costs us a lot of money, let's do it"). The ones that would produce a positive return across the market in total but not to the company paying for the development don't happen. Ever wondered why the "year of the Linux desktop" never happened? It was never economic for any one company to put up the cash to do it.