The point that numerous people have already made is not to contradict the fact that, in many ways, Microsoft Windows made the Internet available to average people -- it did. However, that's pretty much irrelevant in this context. If Windows hadn't caught on as the standard OS for home users, something else would have; probably Macintosh or even OS/2.
Microsoft was in the right place at the right time. That's all. They didn't do anything particularly innovative which in and of itself brought the 'net to the masses.
"He's trying to destroy desktop Linux, and doing a pretty successful job."
Umm... ok. Care to provide any specific examples? Exactly which Mono-based application do you think is destroying desktop Linux? Is it F-Spot, the powerful and easy-to-use photo manager? Is it Beagle, the fast and efficient desktop search tool? Perhaps your thinking of Banshee, which is a darn good audio player and podcast agregator, which supports many popular MP3 players. Which one of those is destroying desktop Linux?
Now, I'm a Java fan myself, so I have little use for Mono, personally. However, the fact remains that it seems to be a very well managed open source project, and a lot of developers are doing some pretty cool stuff with it. Kudos to them. If you want to use it, great. If you don't want to use it, that's cool too. Exactly which part of that is a problem for you?
Of course, if you're just ranting illogically because that's the way debates go on/. then, by all means, don't let me interrupt with the facts...
Good point. However, shouldn't this be at the library's discretion rather than a state law? That is, libraries that feel that this is a problem can set up a proxy locally that bans access to myspace, and libraries where this isn't a problem (because they are too far away from a school) wouldn't need to.
I work for a public library and, yes, we are perfectly capable of handling this without crazy legislation being shoved down our throats by clueless politicians. The simple solution is to reserve a portion of our computers for non-recreational use and locate them far enough away from the ones that noisy teens frequent so that people can get real work done in peace and quite.
Wow, that was simple! We even managed to come up with that all on our own, without any help from Big Brother. We librarians are might smart and resourceful people, let me tell you./sarcasm
As the network administrator for an Illinois public library, I agree that this would indeed be a implementation nightmare (and that's not even taking into account the major ethical dilemma that such censorship presents for librarians). Exactly how does Senator Murphy propose that this be implemented if it becomes law? The bill doesn't even give a definition of what should be considered "social networking."
There's probably no sane way to detect "social networking" features based on a pages content, so the only possibly way to block them would be a gigantic black list. Any who exactly is going to maintain that? The state of Illinois? I don't think so. If they try it, I wish them much luck in compiling their list of every social networking site on "that intarweb thingy."
Given that I'd still say this bill is absolutely ridiculous. A better solution would be implementing blocks on a few clearly labeled computers, or allow librarians to use their judgment to give serious users preference over frivolous users if necessary. For some reason I doubt it will pass anyway.
I work for a public library, and this is exactly what we do now. Every day when school gets out, we're inundated with junior high kids coming in to monopolize our computers for their daily MySpace, RuneScape, and AIM fix. The solution that we've come up with is to reserve one third of our computers for "non recreational use." Specifically, this means no social networking sites, recreational IM, MMORPGs, or games of any kind. Basically, it's at the discretion of the staff to determine when this policy is being violated, and to discus it with the patron.
In short, we've already solved this problem without any help from our meddling "representatives" in Springfield. Same goes for porn. We don't filter our Internet access, but we do reserve the right to ask people to avoid sites that include explicit content, because the computers are all in a publicly viewable area. This is part of our own Internet Use Agreement, not some piece of legislation dreamed up by Senators with nothing better to do. In other words, we're perfectly capable of handling most of the perceived problems with public access computers without any interference from the government.
No, it's not. Read the text of the bill. It doesn't specify anything about pedophiles or anonymous access. Heck, it doesn't even attempt to specify what exactly constitutes a "social networking." This aspect alone makes this bill virtually impossible to implement in any meaningful way.
Secondly, even if there was a definitive definition of social networking, just how on earth would you be able to block all sites that fit that profile? A gigantic black list? I'm happen to be the network admin for a small Illinois library, so if this becomes law, I'm one of the people who's going to have to deal with the mess. I'd be very interested in knowing exactly how the heck Senator Murphy thinks this would work. My guess is that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but thought that this would play well with the "think of the children" crowd.
Anyone else find it interesting that this is coming up just before an election where several of the leading Democratic candidates (Barack Obama and John Edwards come to mind) are using social networking sites as a central part of their campaign strategy? Even if this bill wasn't proposed for purely political reasons, it's still a very ill-conceived idea. These days, almost any well-know website has aspects that could be deemed "social" in nature.
Disclosure: I'm a registered Republic, although philosophically I'm closer to Libertarian. This isn't a cheap shot at Republicans... but it is the first thing that came to mind when I read the bill.
I love the wandering line of thought of some slashdot responses. Chess player runs for president of Russia... Fucking Chinese!
I love the way most poster on Slashdot don't seem to actually read the post that they're replying to. The GP was giving his opinion about why he thinks Russia needs new leadership, one of which is what he perceives as threat from an increasingly powerful China. I'm not going to take sides on that one, but it's a valid argument.
This is correct. For the most part, "Enterprise" versions of Linux distributions differ from their workstation counterparts only in that the use repositories containing only the most stable and well-tested version of a given application package, while the workstations can afford to use ones that may be less stable, but contain more cutting-edge features. The other major distinction is the level of support that you're paying for. Most companies probably don't need 24/7 technical support for workstations, while this can be critical for a server.
This is not the case with Windows. Vista's seven different editions are all essentiall Vista Ultimate, but with various levels of handicapping imposed on them.
So what? Users have been to change the default search engine in IE for a long time. It's much easier to just change the default than download a customized version of the browser, if that's what a user wants. Besides, most people who get IE7 will either have it delivered via Windows Update or pre-installed on their new Vista computer, in both of which cases the default will be MSN Search (or Windows Live now, I suppose) anyway.
This is good news for MS, not bad news. Do you think the boys in Redmond would rather have Google pimping IE7 or Firefox? Hmm...
You must be new here... Just to bring you up to speed, must Slashdot regulars don't bother to read the article(s) linked in the summary, let alone those linked from comments!:)
I think you're missing the point. The point of this ruling is that businesses will be required to keep this information. Intentionally destroying those e-mails could potentially land your company in some hot water if you were ever required to produce them in court.
Why was this modded troll? It's a fair point, really. Book burnings and other attempts to destroy written material considered subversive has long been a tactic for governments to control the populace. Besides, even if certain knowledge can genuinely be used for malicious purposes doesn't prove that the reader has any intention of using it that way. I've read The Anarchist Cookbook before, and found it to be a very interesting read. However, I've never once had the urge to go blow up my neighbors car or cook up a batch of napalm in my garage because of it.
...how about, because MS would much rather sell you Windows Server 2003? Honestly, does the market really need another commercial Linux? As far as I can tell, Red Hat seems to be doing a pretty good job in that area. Do you really think MS could build a better distro that Red Hat, or even Novell? Microsoft isn't going to compete against their own flagship product line. It's true that MS has enough mindshare that many companies might buy into an MS Linux distro. However, once they're using MS Linux, it would be much easier for them to switch to some non-MS version. That's exactly why Microsoft is never going to encourage Linux use. It's much safer to keep customers locked the Windows platform.
Ahem, I think you mean tubes. And, yes, given that the Internet is a series of tubes, it stands to reason that buying more tubes would allow you to get your Internets faster. After all, it's not just a truck that you can dump stuff on. Good grief, everyone knows that, you loser.
Nah, PHB's wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. Given that there seems to be very little "managing" at all in the way Google runs projects, adopting "the Googleway" would be to force themselves into early retirement. No, they'll just stick to the same old bureaucratic methods that allow them to look good while doing very little.
Yeah, except for the fact that when by the time Google releases a beta, the product is usually quite usable. If all of their new betas were half-baked and buggy, then you could call it "pre-announcing." However, as it stands, I think Google's betas are generally of far higher quality than many "1.0" releases from other companies.
No, the post is refering to the maintainer of electoral-vote.com, Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum, who in 1992 instigated a heated debate with Linus Torvlads on the comp.os.minix newsgroup about the relative merits of microkernels vs. monolithic kernels. Tanenbaum maintained that "LINUX is obsolete" and suggested that "people who want a **MODERN** "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that." Of course, history tells us that millions of businesses and individuals disagree with his position.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's exactly what I tweeted when I first heard the news!
He told the truth. Taxes will go up for 100% of Americans.
Knuth really was a smart guy.
Is. Knuth is a smart guy. He's still very much alive, and still teaching at Stanford.
The point that numerous people have already made is not to contradict the fact that, in many ways, Microsoft Windows made the Internet available to average people -- it did. However, that's pretty much irrelevant in this context. If Windows hadn't caught on as the standard OS for home users, something else would have; probably Macintosh or even OS/2.
Microsoft was in the right place at the right time. That's all. They didn't do anything particularly innovative which in and of itself brought the 'net to the masses.
"He's trying to destroy desktop Linux, and doing a pretty successful job."
/. then, by all means, don't let me interrupt with the facts...
Umm... ok. Care to provide any specific examples? Exactly which Mono-based application do you think is destroying desktop Linux? Is it F-Spot, the powerful and easy-to-use photo manager? Is it Beagle, the fast and efficient desktop search tool? Perhaps your thinking of Banshee, which is a darn good audio player and podcast agregator, which supports many popular MP3 players. Which one of those is destroying desktop Linux?
Now, I'm a Java fan myself, so I have little use for Mono, personally. However, the fact remains that it seems to be a very well managed open source project, and a lot of developers are doing some pretty cool stuff with it. Kudos to them. If you want to use it, great. If you don't want to use it, that's cool too. Exactly which part of that is a problem for you?
Of course, if you're just ranting illogically because that's the way debates go on
I work for a public library and, yes, we are perfectly capable of handling this without crazy legislation being shoved down our throats by clueless politicians. The simple solution is to reserve a portion of our computers for non-recreational use and locate them far enough away from the ones that noisy teens frequent so that people can get real work done in peace and quite.
Wow, that was simple! We even managed to come up with that all on our own, without any help from Big Brother. We librarians are might smart and resourceful people, let me tell you.
As the network administrator for an Illinois public library, I agree that this would indeed be a implementation nightmare (and that's not even taking into account the major ethical dilemma that such censorship presents for librarians). Exactly how does Senator Murphy propose that this be implemented if it becomes law? The bill doesn't even give a definition of what should be considered "social networking."
There's probably no sane way to detect "social networking" features based on a pages content, so the only possibly way to block them would be a gigantic black list. Any who exactly is going to maintain that? The state of Illinois? I don't think so. If they try it, I wish them much luck in compiling their list of every social networking site on "that intarweb thingy."
I work for a public library, and this is exactly what we do now. Every day when school gets out, we're inundated with junior high kids coming in to monopolize our computers for their daily MySpace, RuneScape, and AIM fix. The solution that we've come up with is to reserve one third of our computers for "non recreational use." Specifically, this means no social networking sites, recreational IM, MMORPGs, or games of any kind. Basically, it's at the discretion of the staff to determine when this policy is being violated, and to discus it with the patron.
In short, we've already solved this problem without any help from our meddling "representatives" in Springfield. Same goes for porn. We don't filter our Internet access, but we do reserve the right to ask people to avoid sites that include explicit content, because the computers are all in a publicly viewable area. This is part of our own Internet Use Agreement, not some piece of legislation dreamed up by Senators with nothing better to do. In other words, we're perfectly capable of handling most of the perceived problems with public access computers without any interference from the government.
No, it's not. Read the text of the bill. It doesn't specify anything about pedophiles or anonymous access. Heck, it doesn't even attempt to specify what exactly constitutes a "social networking." This aspect alone makes this bill virtually impossible to implement in any meaningful way.
Secondly, even if there was a definitive definition of social networking, just how on earth would you be able to block all sites that fit that profile? A gigantic black list? I'm happen to be the network admin for a small Illinois library, so if this becomes law, I'm one of the people who's going to have to deal with the mess. I'd be very interested in knowing exactly how the heck Senator Murphy thinks this would work. My guess is that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but thought that this would play well with the "think of the children" crowd.
Anyone else find it interesting that this is coming up just before an election where several of the leading Democratic candidates (Barack Obama and John Edwards come to mind) are using social networking sites as a central part of their campaign strategy? Even if this bill wasn't proposed for purely political reasons, it's still a very ill-conceived idea. These days, almost any well-know website has aspects that could be deemed "social" in nature.
Disclosure: I'm a registered Republic, although philosophically I'm closer to Libertarian. This isn't a cheap shot at Republicans... but it is the first thing that came to mind when I read the bill.
I love the wandering line of thought of some slashdot responses. Chess player runs for president of Russia ... Fucking Chinese!
I love the way most poster on Slashdot don't seem to actually read the post that they're replying to. The GP was giving his opinion about why he thinks Russia needs new leadership, one of which is what he perceives as threat from an increasingly powerful China. I'm not going to take sides on that one, but it's a valid argument.
"Why can't everybody just get along?"
Hi, you must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
This is correct. For the most part, "Enterprise" versions of Linux distributions differ from their workstation counterparts only in that the use repositories containing only the most stable and well-tested version of a given application package, while the workstations can afford to use ones that may be less stable, but contain more cutting-edge features. The other major distinction is the level of support that you're paying for. Most companies probably don't need 24/7 technical support for workstations, while this can be critical for a server. This is not the case with Windows. Vista's seven different editions are all essentiall Vista Ultimate, but with various levels of handicapping imposed on them.
So what? Users have been to change the default search engine in IE for a long time. It's much easier to just change the default than download a customized version of the browser, if that's what a user wants. Besides, most people who get IE7 will either have it delivered via Windows Update or pre-installed on their new Vista computer, in both of which cases the default will be MSN Search (or Windows Live now, I suppose) anyway.
This is good news for MS, not bad news. Do you think the boys in Redmond would rather have Google pimping IE7 or Firefox? Hmm...
You must be new here... Just to bring you up to speed, must Slashdot regulars don't bother to read the article(s) linked in the summary, let alone those linked from comments! :)
I think you're missing the point. The point of this ruling is that businesses will be required to keep this information. Intentionally destroying those e-mails could potentially land your company in some hot water if you were ever required to produce them in court.
Hey, that goes both ways. If you are French, then you owe your very freedom to the Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France
If it weren't for the USA, you'd all be speaking German right now. Let's just call it even, shall we?
Why was this modded troll? It's a fair point, really. Book burnings and other attempts to destroy written material considered subversive has long been a tactic for governments to control the populace. Besides, even if certain knowledge can genuinely be used for malicious purposes doesn't prove that the reader has any intention of using it that way. I've read The Anarchist Cookbook before, and found it to be a very interesting read. However, I've never once had the urge to go blow up my neighbors car or cook up a batch of napalm in my garage because of it.
...how about, because MS would much rather sell you Windows Server 2003? Honestly, does the market really need another commercial Linux? As far as I can tell, Red Hat seems to be doing a pretty good job in that area. Do you really think MS could build a better distro that Red Hat, or even Novell? Microsoft isn't going to compete against their own flagship product line. It's true that MS has enough mindshare that many companies might buy into an MS Linux distro. However, once they're using MS Linux, it would be much easier for them to switch to some non-MS version. That's exactly why Microsoft is never going to encourage Linux use. It's much safer to keep customers locked the Windows platform.
They keep using that word... I do not think it means what they think it means.
Ahem, I think you mean tubes. And, yes, given that the Internet is a series of tubes, it stands to reason that buying more tubes would allow you to get your Internets faster. After all, it's not just a truck that you can dump stuff on. Good grief, everyone knows that, you loser.
Nah, PHB's wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. Given that there seems to be very little "managing" at all in the way Google runs projects, adopting "the Googleway" would be to force themselves into early retirement. No, they'll just stick to the same old bureaucratic methods that allow them to look good while doing very little.
Yeah, except for the fact that when by the time Google releases a beta, the product is usually quite usable. If all of their new betas were half-baked and buggy, then you could call it "pre-announcing." However, as it stands, I think Google's betas are generally of far higher quality than many "1.0" releases from other companies.
No, the post is refering to the maintainer of electoral-vote.com, Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum, who in 1992 instigated a heated debate with Linus Torvlads on the comp.os.minix newsgroup about the relative merits of microkernels vs. monolithic kernels. Tanenbaum maintained that "LINUX is obsolete" and suggested that "people who want a **MODERN** "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that." Of course, history tells us that millions of businesses and individuals disagree with his position.
p pa.html
O'Reilly has a transcript:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/a
Dell had an agreement with MSN, maybe. Now they're partnering with Google for their branded portal page: http://www.google.com/ig/dell
One more reason for MS to feel very uncomfortable right now.