Just like a buggy application program should never crash the operating system (and if it does it indicates something wrong with the OS), a buggy add-on for the browser shouldn't crash the browser, no matter how bad the add-on is. Quicktime bringing the browser down is akin to a fprintf(NULL, "hello") bringing the OS down.
There's really no legitamate reason to use AeBPr (Lost the
book? Show the receipt, get a new one. There - no need for backup.
Yeah, sure, there's no legitimate reason - because nobody ever uses more than one computer, or wants to view a book in an alternate form. Our computers are just dumb applicances not connected to any kind of a network or anything.
What bothers me, is let?s take the converse situation. A MS employee is giving a talk overseas and is jailed
by the local government because MS violates local business practice law.
And that would be just as wrong as what happened to Sklyarov. Despite how much I think MS broke the law, and deserves to burn in hell (If I believed in such a place) the things they did are not the fault of their underlings, but the decision makers higher up - the directors and VP's and so on.
And as long as the MS person didn't violate the foriegn country's law WHILE HE WAS THERE, they shouldn't be able to arrest him for it.
And the spy plane incident is the same as well. The spying occurred JUST OUTSIDE Chineese territory. At worst, the Chineese could nab the crew on airspace laws violated after they crossed the border and did their landing.
But the "crime", if you call it that, was committed IN RUSSIA. He did nothing illegal because it wasn't illegal WHERE HE DID IT. When he came to the US, if he had come with a satchel full of copies of his software and started selling it on a table at the conference, THEN you might have had a point. The right-side-of-the-road example was a perfect analogy. It would be like the FBI arresting a British person for "reckless driving" when he visited New York, based on the fact that he's driven on the left side of the road
on numerous occasions back in the UK (even though he didn't do so here.)
you will have a HARD time finding another country that recognizes free speech as a right, let
alone finding one that respects it MORE that the US.
If you are referring to the law on paper, that is true. The US constitution mentions the right to free speech explicitly, and a lot of others do not. If, on the other hand you are talking about de-facto laws, as they get practised (rather than the alleged ideals on paper), the US has gone downhill in the last 10 years when it comes to free speech rights. The rule is that you have free speech *except* in the following situations (insert list of situations here). That list has gotten larger and larger in the last 10 years, due mostly to ignorant fools who know nothing about computers making laws about computers. I have no problem with someone being ignorant of computers. Many of my friends are in that category. Some people's expertise lays elsewhere. That's fine. I, however, would have a problem with it if they started passing laws that screw up my job (and more importantly, my hobby) of computer programing based on their ignorant assumptions.)
It has now reached the absurd point where a Russian is getting worse treatment in our country than he would get at home. In RUSSIA, for crying out loud, he's got more free speech rights than here.
So, what's the address for sending donations to the EFF? I think it's well past time I started.
And your analogy with the Firestone truck is flawed: the information of flaws in the tyres is of public
interest and did not emerged throug eavesdropping in the company's files.
If some software company lies by claiming they have good encryption, when in fact it is merely rot-13, the DMCA makes it illegal to TELL anyone about this fact. Are you trying to imply it isn't in the public interest to be told that a company is lying about their product?
I realize that your 72 mph figure is a max when all is going well, but it does raise a question - if the car's top speed is above the legal speed limit, at what point does the race become pointless because legality is the limiter rather than technology? (I assume you still have to drive legally in this race (otherwise the cars wouldn't bother with turn signals and headlights. (Uh - okay, scratch the headlights part - I just realized that putting headlights on a solar powered car is rather pointless - but they do have turn signals installed, and from that I assume they have to obey the laws on this trip.)) )
Your sig should be attributed to A.C. Clarke, not Issac Isamov. (Due to the nature of sigs on slashdot, if you fix this my comment will look weird because the fix will appear retroactively in your post, but hey, I can live with that.
I read the article looking for typical MS bully tactics, like arrogantly assuming that all computers have Windows on them so the orginization must buy a Windows license for each computer owned, or forcing the users to use MS office through bully tactics. I could find nothing like that. All I read was an article about some teachers who thought that their school shouldn't have to pay for a product they use because, well, they're a school, and schools are neato. Bzzzt. Sorry - I don't agree. If you use a commercial product, you pay what the company charges or you get the balls to go use something else and tell the company where to stick it (an option I would favor when it comes to Microsoft). Ideally, I'd rather see them not even using Office in schools, but IF they do, and it's by their own choice (rather than a bully "incentive" program), then yes they should have to pay for it.
My opinion would be different if there were evidence of some of the bully tactics I've seen MS pull at other places, such that the teachers didn't have a choice but to use Office. But the article never mentioned any of these tactics being used in this case.
If the schoolteachers want to cut the costs, stop using overpriced software like Office.
Your bathtub experiment isn't appropriate. Only the ice at the north pole is currently floating in the ocean. At the south pole it sits on top of Antarctica - on top of land - up out of the ocean.
To make your analogy appropriate, you'd have to have two big blocks of ice - put one directly in the water, floating. That's the north polar ice. Then put a stool or chair in the tub so its seat is up out of the water. Put the second block of ice on top of that. That's the south polar ice. Now wait for both to melt. The north pole ice won't make any difference in water level at all, but the south pole icewater will be added to the bathtub water and it wasn't displacing any bathtub water when it was on the stool.
I'm rather neutral on this issue, since unlike conservative pundits I *recognize* that I am ignorant about climate science. I don't know if global warming is happening, because BOTH sides of this debate have political incentives to lie. I can't get a dispassionate opinion from anyone. But I *do* recognize BS when I see it, and you are generating a huge amount of it by convieniently not mentioning that the ice in antarctica isn't currently displacing any water right now so your experiment doesn't apply.
The problem with many online info "sales" is that they can't tell you whether or not the product is worth it without actually giving you the product. I have no idea if I want to look at a news article until I know if the article is any good. And I won't know that until I'm done reading it. By then it's too late to charge me for it. Since online transactions are generally done by giving out a credit card number, and people are genuinely worried about the "forgetting to opt out" charges that can come from that, people aren't willing to pay for single piece of info by giving out "bend me over and charge me for the rest of my life" access to their finances.
Why not just use/sbin/lsmod to see which drivers are loaded?
If you do that and see that a driver is not loaded, can you tell the difference between that driver not being loaded because it failed at start-up (didn't see the right hardware), vs that driver not being loaded because the attempt was never made to do so?
Requiring a BSD-style license on any federally funded code that's released to the public seems reasonable
to me.
But what about the already existing GPLed code that came from publicly funded places? The nature of the GPL is such that GPL code cannot be relicensed later under BSDL - once GPL, always GPL. So do the people working on those projects suddenly have to stop their work or quit their public positions? What a travestry that would be. Espicially since it's not easy to draw the line between a government employee working on GPL code "on his own" vs one doing it for his job. If he makes software to finish one simple task at work, and then GPLs it for others to use is that the same as if he spent 100% of his time on it, and it was his major research project?
I agree with getting rid of ads and versions, but NOT with getting rid of good status messages. The difference between a driver being silent because it isn't even being loaded in the first place and a driver being silent because it was working okay is a HUGE difference. It's something I want to know when I'm trying to figure out why I can't get my new WidgetMasterProBlaster device to work.
Read all the way to the bottom. He also rants about not wanting "yup, I worked" messages to show up either. I agree about the copyright and version numbers, but NOT about pruning the "it worked" messages. Take them out and now "This driver worked just fine" looks exactly the same as "The kernel never loaded this driver in the first place." When you are trying to figure out why some piece of hardware doesn't seem to be working, that is a relevant difference.
There are two ways a driver could "fail". One is to try to do something and fail, the other is to never get called in the first place because the kernel didn't recognize that the hardware was of the appropriate type for that driver to be called.
It would be handy to tell the difference between the two. Today you can because today if the driver is being called you will get either a good or a bad message, but you know you will get *something*. If you see no message, then you know it didn't even *try* the driver in the first place, and that helps you figure out the exact type of error you are dealing with (probably a driver that's older than the hardware, so it doesn't recognize its ID string.)
The big concern with geneticly modified plants shouldn't be the environmental worries, which are mostly red herrings. The concern should be business ethics, or lack therof, on the part of those using these plants. Monsanto makes plants that are sterile so that farmers must buy seed from Monsanto each year instead of using seed from their previous year's crop. This seems perfectly reasonable at first, and it would be if it stopped there. But it doesn't. Just because these plants don't breed doesn't mean they don't "try". When one farmer plants these crops, his neighbor's crops start getting cross-pollenated with the sterile Monsanto crops. So if your neighbor plants Monsanto, and you don't, some of your crops don't produce viable seeds either. The solution? Just buy Monsanto seed for your own farm next year instead of trying to grow from your own seed...
Actually Hollywood is often terrible at getting American accents correct too. Anyone here see Fargo? If it's not in the big media cities of New York and Los Angeles, they don't seem to be able to pull off the accent.
And, hey, you Brits aren't any better. I still laugh at Monty Python skits where one of them was pretending to be an American (and it's not because of the humour). Especially the "Big Business Boardroom" scene from the Crimson Assurance skit.
Of course, what they fail to mention is that spawning of new processes is much MORE costly in NT than in UNIX, and that's probably the reason they had to change it. They had to alter the application to accomodate the limitations of the OS they were moving it to.
In Unix, you use threading only if you really absolutely need it, but multi-process does the trick 9 times out of 10. In NT, you use threading because you *need* to to get any reasonable performance at all, because NT sucks at multi-processing.
They certainly do not have that integrety. Read the Register article linked to in the blurb. They edited the content of the original WSJ article before putting it up on MSN, so as to soften it up.
The real root of the problem is that the servers are dumb and the clients are where all the smarts are. This means that the clients are in charge of *everything* about how your gameworld works, from how your character moves, to how you shoot, to whether or not you can see other people through walls. Thus one doesn't need to hack the server to cheat - one only has to fiddle with one's own copy of the game on one's own computer. That's why this sort of cheating is inevitable.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Putting the smarts in the server probably isn't feasable given how complex these games are. (No way are you going to be able to dedicate 32 meg of ram and the equivilent of 500 Mhz of clock cycles per simultaneous user on your server, for example.)
With non-action games (for example, online chess), having smart clients doesn't lead to cheating because all that matters to the game is the moves and the board. If one player is seeing a bland 2-d board and the other is seeing a fancy 3-d board, with full animation, it doesn't really matter. The rules are so simple that they *can* be enforced, because it is trivial to write code that can detect if a client is trying to do something that should be "impossible".
This is part of what I dislike about the current run of online games. There's no way I'm ever going to bother working hard at getting good at a game when all that work will pale in comparasin to some jerk who's willing to cheat. (And the same principle applies to both action games and RPGs.)
Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers?
For the same reasons internet filter software can't tell when someone is being obscene. They're dumb and don't understand context.
If you implement a cheat-detector that occasionally detects a false posative, the people who got screwed by it will scream foul, and rightly so. (Assuming they even know what happened to them.)
1. I've never fscking heard of these people before, or this product. I think that has more to do with their problem than anything else. You can't pay for what you don't know exists. If they want to make a Linux version profittable, then in addition to the techincal issues there's also the advertising issues - Linux people don't read the same trade mags as Windows people.
2. You falsely assume that the only reason these companies can't make profit on their product is because Linux people don't pay. That's bull. The problem is that the market is so small that even if all those who use it pay, with zero piracy, that's still sometimes not enough money to keep the product afloat. Especially if the port was a monumental effort because Unix was never in the design plans at the start. (In general, companies that already produce some sort of Unix software to begin with (like Oracle) can roll out a Linux port with a lot less effort than someone who does not. Then even if the market is small, there's still profit to be made because the development effort was small. From the sound of things, this wasn't the case here.)
3. I will gladly pay for a product I *like*, but I'm not going to go out and buy every damn thing that comes out for Linux just to up the numbers. Some things I have paid for include: Civ:CTP from Lokisoft, Xess from (can't remember right now), Applixware, and of course the Linux distros themselves.
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Just like a buggy application program should never crash the operating system (and if it does it indicates something wrong with the OS), a buggy add-on for the browser shouldn't crash the browser, no matter how bad the add-on is. Quicktime bringing the browser down is akin to a fprintf(NULL, "hello") bringing the OS down.
And as long as the MS person didn't violate the foriegn country's law WHILE HE WAS THERE, they shouldn't be able to arrest him for it.
And the spy plane incident is the same as well. The spying occurred JUST OUTSIDE Chineese territory. At worst, the Chineese could nab the crew on airspace laws violated after they crossed the border and did their landing.
But the "crime", if you call it that, was committed IN RUSSIA. He did nothing illegal because it wasn't illegal WHERE HE DID IT. When he came to the US, if he had come with a satchel full of copies of his software and started selling it on a table at the conference, THEN you might have had a point. The right-side-of-the-road example was a perfect analogy. It would be like the FBI arresting a British person for "reckless driving" when he visited New York, based on the fact that he's driven on the left side of the road on numerous occasions back in the UK (even though he didn't do so here.)
It has now reached the absurd point where a Russian is getting worse treatment in our country than he would get at home. In RUSSIA, for crying out loud, he's got more free speech rights than here.
So, what's the address for sending donations to the EFF? I think it's well past time I started.
I realize that your 72 mph figure is a max when all is going well, but it does raise a question - if the car's top speed is above the legal speed limit, at what point does the race become pointless because legality is the limiter rather than technology? (I assume you still have to drive legally in this race (otherwise the cars wouldn't bother with turn signals and headlights. (Uh - okay, scratch the headlights part - I just realized that putting headlights on a solar powered car is rather pointless - but they do have turn signals installed, and from that I assume they have to obey the laws on this trip.)) )
Your sig should be attributed to A.C. Clarke, not Issac Isamov. (Due to the nature of sigs on slashdot, if you fix this my comment will look weird because the fix will appear retroactively in your post, but hey, I can live with that.
My opinion would be different if there were evidence of some of the bully tactics I've seen MS pull at other places, such that the teachers didn't have a choice but to use Office. But the article never mentioned any of these tactics being used in this case.
If the schoolteachers want to cut the costs, stop using overpriced software like Office.
I'm rather neutral on this issue, since unlike conservative pundits I *recognize* that I am ignorant about climate science. I don't know if global warming is happening, because BOTH sides of this debate have political incentives to lie. I can't get a dispassionate opinion from anyone. But I *do* recognize BS when I see it, and you are generating a huge amount of it by convieniently not mentioning that the ice in antarctica isn't currently displacing any water right now so your experiment doesn't apply.
Why not just use /sbin/lsmod to see which drivers are loaded?
If you do that and see that a driver is not loaded, can you tell the difference between that driver not being loaded because it failed at start-up (didn't see the right hardware), vs that driver not being loaded because the attempt was never made to do so?
I agree with getting rid of ads and versions, but NOT with getting rid of good status messages. The difference between a driver being silent because it isn't even being loaded in the first place and a driver being silent because it was working okay is a HUGE difference. It's something I want to know when I'm trying to figure out why I can't get my new WidgetMasterProBlaster device to work.
Read all the way to the bottom. He also rants about not wanting "yup, I worked" messages to show up either. I agree about the copyright and version numbers, but NOT about pruning the "it worked" messages. Take them out and now "This driver worked just fine" looks exactly the same as "The kernel never loaded this driver in the first place." When you are trying to figure out why some piece of hardware doesn't seem to be working, that is a relevant difference.
There are two ways a driver could "fail". One is to try to do something and fail, the other is to never get called in the first place because the kernel didn't recognize that the hardware was of the appropriate type for that driver to be called. It would be handy to tell the difference between the two. Today you can because today if the driver is being called you will get either a good or a bad message, but you know you will get *something*. If you see no message, then you know it didn't even *try* the driver in the first place, and that helps you figure out the exact type of error you are dealing with (probably a driver that's older than the hardware, so it doesn't recognize its ID string.)
The big concern with geneticly modified plants shouldn't be the environmental worries, which are mostly red herrings. The concern should be business ethics, or lack therof, on the part of those using these plants. Monsanto makes plants that are sterile so that farmers must buy seed from Monsanto each year instead of using seed from their previous year's crop. This seems perfectly reasonable at first, and it would be if it stopped there. But it doesn't. Just because these plants don't breed doesn't mean they don't "try". When one farmer plants these crops, his neighbor's crops start getting cross-pollenated with the sterile Monsanto crops. So if your neighbor plants Monsanto, and you don't, some of your crops don't produce viable seeds either. The solution? Just buy Monsanto seed for your own farm next year instead of trying to grow from your own seed...
And, hey, you Brits aren't any better. I still laugh at Monty Python skits where one of them was pretending to be an American (and it's not because of the humour). Especially the "Big Business Boardroom" scene from the Crimson Assurance skit.
In Unix, you use threading only if you really absolutely need it, but multi-process does the trick 9 times out of 10. In NT, you use threading because you *need* to to get any reasonable performance at all, because NT sucks at multi-processing.
They certainly do not have that integrety. Read the Register article linked to in the blurb. They edited the content of the original WSJ article before putting it up on MSN, so as to soften it up.
What about divorces where the couple doesn't have children?
I'm not sure what the solution is. Putting the smarts in the server probably isn't feasable given how complex these games are. (No way are you going to be able to dedicate 32 meg of ram and the equivilent of 500 Mhz of clock cycles per simultaneous user on your server, for example.)
With non-action games (for example, online chess), having smart clients doesn't lead to cheating because all that matters to the game is the moves and the board. If one player is seeing a bland 2-d board and the other is seeing a fancy 3-d board, with full animation, it doesn't really matter. The rules are so simple that they *can* be enforced, because it is trivial to write code that can detect if a client is trying to do something that should be "impossible".
This is part of what I dislike about the current run of online games. There's no way I'm ever going to bother working hard at getting good at a game when all that work will pale in comparasin to some jerk who's willing to cheat. (And the same principle applies to both action games and RPGs.)
In order for your reply to be convincing to me, I'd have to agree with the unstated premise that divorce is relevant in discussions of morality.
For the same reasons internet filter software can't tell when someone is being obscene. They're dumb and don't understand context.
If you implement a cheat-detector that occasionally detects a false posative, the people who got screwed by it will scream foul, and rightly so. (Assuming they even know what happened to them.)
2. You falsely assume that the only reason these companies can't make profit on their product is because Linux people don't pay. That's bull. The problem is that the market is so small that even if all those who use it pay, with zero piracy, that's still sometimes not enough money to keep the product afloat. Especially if the port was a monumental effort because Unix was never in the design plans at the start. (In general, companies that already produce some sort of Unix software to begin with (like Oracle) can roll out a Linux port with a lot less effort than someone who does not. Then even if the market is small, there's still profit to be made because the development effort was small. From the sound of things, this wasn't the case here.)
3. I will gladly pay for a product I *like*, but I'm not going to go out and buy every damn thing that comes out for Linux just to up the numbers. Some things I have paid for include: Civ:CTP from Lokisoft, Xess from (can't remember right now), Applixware, and of course the Linux distros themselves.