The guy does have a point. The description of the patches gives malicious coders a good detail of what to exploit.
This is completely true. Publishing the details of a hole certainly draws attention to that hole.
However, it doesn't change either the facts or history: many holes were exploited long before MS either published a description, or a patch. If MS did not publish patches, crackers would *still* discover holes, and exploit those holes.
There are several levels of cracker. There's the script kiddie, which accounts for the largest number; there's the typical malicious coder, who can create a new exploit based on the description of a hole; and there are the true malicious hackers (the ones that deserve the term, bastards as they are), who can find a hole and write an exploit.
Many security firms find holes in MS-Windows. This is without code or anything else. If good guys can find holes, why would you assume the bad guys sit around waiting for patch descriptions? That's very poor logic.
Yes, upgrading and patching will make you more secure. But, security is also dependent on the quality of the OS you run, and no amount of MS-Spin (tm) or outright lieing can change that.
The large businesses/corporations of Japan have considerable influence in their government, moving beyond petty lobbying towards very strong and well-set puppet strings.
Most of us aren't surprised. But, why sit still? The fact that it is normal operating procedure scares me even more.
Yeah, I'm not some naive hick. I know that money buys policy. That doesn't mean we have to bend over and take it up the ass just because business has a woody for our pocket change. Like the guy said, I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
Re:Similiaries to Netscape vs MS not unfounded
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Google v. Microsoft
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Perhaps an anti-trust office (either US or EU) will be quick to force MS to make any search features work with any search engine one wants.
This is a good idea. But, nobody will use it. At least, only a few people will use it. Most people will just use the default, which will certainly be Microsoft's.
And like the man says, Whoever controls knowledge controls society. Or something like that.
It shouldn't even be a remotely fair competition in console software sales month to month for the top 10 spots, and yet it is.
There are many potential reasons for this. First, the actual number of games sold may be 7x higher for the PS2; with a wide variety of good games from which to choose, it's easy to spread a bunch of purchases over several good titles, instead of the few dozen decent titles on the XBox. Another potential reason is game playability: PS2 games may have a longer play life than XBox games. Another possibility is the demographics: the people who buy XBox may have more money to throw away on games.
Yet another reason may be bundling. It's difficult to purchase an XBox without bundled games. One of the ways Microsoft (and other console vendors, too) boosts sales (and therefor hype) of a game is to bundle a game in with the purchase of a console.
Whatever the case, Microsoft has hyped the success of their console way beyond the reality.
I think it's a fun little idea, but buying an XBox and putting Linux on it seems kind of unfair to Microsoft since it's unlikely you'll be making up their loss by buying the overpriced games.
They set they price. It's not up to us to make sure they make a profit. In fact, no company is *owed* anything beyond the asking price. That's called "free market."
And part of the free market is doing whatever the hell you want with the products you purchase, as long as it doesn't interfere with copyright laws. Mod chips do not interfere with copyright laws.
If Microsoft wants to compete in the market, it's up to them to set the price fairly. It's not up to us to make up their loss leader by purchasing lousy games.
SCOX doesn't "manufacter" SCO Unix; they copy it, and sell those copies. SCO Unix/Unixware hasn't changed much since Caldera purchased it from the Santa Cruz Operations (now Tarentella). Since Caldera became SCO (in a blatant effort to confuse investors and customers), SCO Unix has pretty much stagnated.
In fact, the biggest news from the most recent release of SCO Unix has been Samba.
Despite the fact that I dislike Microsoft's tactics, it's hard to dispute that their dominance of the market has encouraged adoption of computing by the masses by making computers more useful through easy interoperation:...
This is a myth caused by confusing a corellation as cause and effet. Microsoft did not encourage the expansion of home computing-- that happened because the market was right for it. Computers were already beginning their drastic increase in sales before Microsoft came on the scene. IBM's delay in the entry into "toy computing" (as they saw it at the time) proved benficial: they released their IBM PC at the same moment home computers were becoming commodities. The IBM name encouraged market penetration in the business sector, even though the PC was no more capable than the other similarly-priced computers in the market.
Microsoft has never encouraged easy interoption with anything other than Microsoft products. Other companies produced interoperation software (such as Novell, with their Netware systems). It is not ease-of-use or interoperability that drove the sales of Microsoft software: it was brutal control of the distribution chain, through predation, exclusive contracts, manipulation of market perception, and outright illegal practices.
The problem with the "free market" as practiced by the US and other corporations is this: it is like a game of king-of-the-mountain, but the higher up on the mountain you get, the bigger and quicker and meaner *you* get. So the further up you go, the better equiped you are at knocking others off the mountain. That is exactly what Microsoft was able to do: get to the top on the back of IBM (who was already king of their own computer mountain some distance off), and start knocking everyone else off the mountain.
Microsoft has arguably done nothing to help the industry at all. In fact, there is a strong case against them, and in all likelihood, they have harmed the industry tremendously, to the point where the only real competition is software created for fun and profit by a loose collection of geeks throughout the world. That is the sign of a sick, sick market, not a healthy one.
But, Free Software has the right idea: if you can't win by playing king of the mountain, win by *not* playing the game.
I won't get into the question of whether X does remoting right for the most common modern cases of remote access (i.e. not dumb terminals, plenty of CPU resources all over, except in niche cases like wireless handheld devices)...
The whole concept of remoting is not about horsepower; it's about administration. It's much easier for me to install and upgrade an application in one location (a server) than multiple locations (individual servers).
I triple-your-money-back guarantee it is easier to administer a well-designed X-based system of desktops than it is to administer the same number of MS-Windows based desktops.
The added benefit of modular horsepower is, of course, very important, as well; the average lifespan of a desktop PC running MS-Windows is about 3 years. If those were instead the same PCs running an X-based desktop, the lifespan would be much, much greater. We have NCD X terminals that are 8 years old still in service, providing very useful work.
But that gets back to the "lots of desktop horsepower" discussion, which I said isn't important to establish the value of application remoting. (As opposed that stupid desktop remoting so prevalent in the MS-Windows world.)
I have used MS-Windows; and although some functions are faster in MS-Windows, X is quite responsive. With a lightweight window manager (say, WindowMaker or Black Box), X is *very* responsive. Some applications are slow; others are quite fast. It all depends on how well coded they are, just like in the MS-Windows world.
All-in-all, there is nothing intrinsically slow about X. Some video drivers are slow, and you will definitely see the difference between X and MS-Windows when the video driver on Linux blows chunks; but that isn't the fault of X.
Once Unix (including Linux and the BSDs) gain more popularity, card manufacturers will either release specs and allow good drivers to be written, or write good drivers themselves.
Hopefully that will happen when the kernel module interface in Linux stabilizes, so a driver written for the 3.2 kernel will work no matter the sub-minor version number is.
It won't happen soon; but it will happen sooner than Microsoft thinks.
WTF are you talking about? The OS doesn't support devices or software. Hardware vendors produce drivers; that is why Microsoft is able to (legitimately) claim that 70% of all MS-Windows failures are due to bad drivers. It is the hardware vendors that produce the drivers to the OS, not the other way 'round.
Same with software. Software is targetted *toward* an OS; the operating system is (hardly) never written towards an application.
Microsoft has made a company from destroying competition, yet (ironically) a lot of software is targetted toward the MS-Windows operating system.
This is due mostly to Microsoft's early control of the hardware distribution chain. By controlling the software that was installed when there was very little choice, they have managed to lock out other software from being included today. Since that control translated to 90% desktop market share, other software companies felt they were safe targetting the MS-Windows platform.
Apple does not have a history of driving other software companies out of business by bundling their own software with their OS; Microsoft does have that reputation. So your comments are extremely ironic, and display a certain ignorance of history.
That's all well and good; admirable, even. But, SCO doesn't care if they lose Unixware licensees. They aren't making money off Unixware anyway, and it costs money and effort to upkeep, and they have to deal with pesky user problems.
They just want you to send them money. It's the perfect business: no product, no staff, just a lot of money rolling in due to the past efforts of other, complete strangers (both on the Unix side and the Linux side), and the gullibility of people who believe every official-looking letter they receive.
SCO is comprised of every kind of sheister who ever followed a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme, put sawdust in the tranny, or used inferior concrete and rebar when building a dam a mile up the river from a town. They don't care about anyone else, nor the consequences of their actions, nor whether they actually deserve the money.
It's the money that matters, not the users. And if they can get rid of the actual users in the process, all the better.
This is seriously distorting his already bent definition of "free". Freedom, as he defines it, can be applied to software (and with a bit of work books, music etc) and while you might argue with the word used it's a useful concept to have.
Here though, he applies the word free to users, and this is a different thing entirely. Worse, he asserts that all it takes is one piece of non-free software to spoil his utopian dream.
(Note: Although I seem to be speaking for RMS, I do not. I am merely representing his argument as I understand it.)
Information cannot be free. Information is, in itself, nothing more than an artifact. People can be free to know the information, or use it (listen to music, run programs) and share it. Those are the freedoms RMS speaks of when he talks about the freedom of information-- the freedom of the people to do what they want with the information they have.
He is addressing what he sees as a bug in society: the restriction of the flow of information for the purpose of individual profit.
The concept is simple: if information is useful, it will benefit society more if access to that information is unfettered. So, if there is a single case in which the free exchange of information is inhibited, society is diminished.
Some people agree; others do not. I do agree. I believe it is my duty as a member partaking of the benefits of society to contribute back to society, and not hold out potential benefit for the purpose of personal profit.
Iraq may be better off without Saddam, but there's no denying that we went to war for the WMD's, only for the WMD's, and solely for the WMD's. There are no WMD's, so the war was wrong.
We went to war to distract the US population from the fact we haven't solved a damned thing in Afghanistan; we went to war for the oil; we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people.
We went to war because the American people demanded some sort of retaliation for 9/11/2001. (Side note: after the shuttle blew up on re-entry, it took 3 days to get 2 separate investigations going. Why did it take 18 fucking *months* to begin investigating the 9/11 attacks? And why was the crime scene cleaned up by then?)
No. The war was not over WMDs. Bush may have used the threat of WMDs to whip the citizenship of the US into a war frenzy, and he used falsified documents to do it, but that wasn't what the war was about.
As for the grandparent post: Saddam was not a threat at all to the region. He was a threat to the people of Iraq, but not to anyone else. If you want a continuing threat to the region, take a look at Isreal and Palistine and Saudi Arabia, two of which enjoy American protection and aid.
Free in use? Linux is NOT free in use. It's published under the GPL which has certain LIMITATIONS OF USE.
Must... not... feed... troll....
Damn. I'm gonna anyway.
Name one restriction the GPL puts on use of GPLd products. You can use GPLd products in any way you wish; you can even give the GPLd product away to friends if you desire.
How is that restrictive?
What the GPL restricts is the use of other people's copyrights against their wishes. It restricts stealing of code for use in proprietary products. That is not a restriction in the use of GPLd products, which is what you claim. It's a restriction in the use of the copyrighted source code, and not the product itself.
However, if you can enlighten me, please do. How does the GPL restrict the use of GPLd products? (Not source code, but products, which is what you are claiming.)
It's been said before, and will be repeated until slashdot fucking gets it. A word means what the majority of people using the word think it means. Period. End of line. There is no longer any meaningful debate to be had on this subject, it's already been decided years ago.
Hardly. Just because the general population misuses such words as "theory" and "science" and "innovation" doesn't mean those words do not have a precise definition, and that we should stop using them simply because most of the population doesn't speak properly.
Hell, should I start referring to my computer as "the CPU" just because everyone calls the whole fucking box the CPU? Back in the day, I never called a 3.5" floppy a "hard disk" just because it was encased in plastic. Should I start referring to MS-Windows (any version) as "Microsoft?" (As in the start of every support call: "What operating system do you use?" "Oh, Microsoft.")
Language changes; but the term "hacker" is still in active use as a label given to someone who excels at programming.
Hey! Should I stop using the word "excel" except in reference to spreadsheet programs? And then, can I call *all* spreadsheet programs "excel?"
You are viewing the future through the lens of the present. This is natural; but, I believe you are overlooking a lot of the changes currently taking place.
First, there is the matter of data integration. As it gets easier to collect data, it becomes harder to do anything useful with it. Management will want to synthesize this data from these disparate datastores. That is going to require constant interface writing, etc.
Back in the early nineties, Ed Yourdon predicted the "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." He said jobs would move offshore as CASE and OO tools made programming more of a drudge and less of an art. Partly, he was correct; but he missed too many things.
Mostly, he made predictions about the future as if the future were like the present, without knowing that much about the present. The present of 1992 included the Internet (though used almost entirely by educational institutions), the booming consumer software market, etc.
Now we have many smaller businesses that can afford the kinds of ERP software that were available only to big business just a few years ago. These sites will require installation and customisation, just like the big corps. This is one emerging market, helped on (to a large part) by freely-available software.
There are other markets for software developers. Yes, they may have to specialize in one area, and write variations on the same interface over and over, but it's still work.
I don't think there's any prediction concerning availability of programming jobs we can make today that will be accurate in 4 years. That's like trying to predict the next nation on which the US is going to declare a "war on X," where X contains the subset "terrorism," "drugs," "badly-dubbed movies," and "women with facial hair."
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is one of my two favorite books of all time. The other is "Gateway," by Frederick Pohl. Definitely start with "TMIAHM," which will give you a very good overview of all of Heinein's strange beliefs, and have you agreeing with most of them. (If only human nature were so pure.)
I'd agree with the assessment that everything from "Farnhham's Freehold" and later is generally oversexed and underplotted rehashes of his old ideas. I'd recommend "Stranger in a Strange Land," not so much for quality, but because of social impact. It is both the most-referred-to Heinlein book, and his most widely read. It isn't good, per se, but it isn't terrible, like "I Will Fear No Evil," "Friday," "Number of the Beast," "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," etc.
His short stories are generally very good. Some suck, but most are well worth reading.
Now, since the conditions for the existence of each target are unknown and incalculable in these cases, you can't even compute a probability. Hence, I declare (according to our present knowledge and understanding) that all of these things DO NOT EXIST.
Yeah, because atoms didn't exist until we discovered them. Likewise, the sun really did revolve around the earth until we discovered otherwise. And disease was caused by bad spirits, and were nothing a good bleeding couldn't cure.
Yes, we can never prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns. As far as we know, the prerequisites for invisible pink unicorns (IPU) do not exist in this universe.
But we already have the evidence for one (marginally) intelligent species in the universe. Ergo, they exist, and we know the prerequisites for intelligent life also exist.
It would be extreme foolishness to claim there is no other intelligent life in the universe.
Sorry, this is a little late; I didn't see this comment until just a minute ago.
Which may well be the reason Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution exists in the first place.
Funny how the constitution and modern law seem to be at odds. The constitution seems so clear in this, yet modern law seems to obfuscate the original intention. Worse yet is the practice of calling such thought "communist," or "anti-capitalist."
I never realized growing up that the beliefs my parents taught me were so close the those formalized into the constitution. I thought I was a free thinker; as it turns out, I merely think that we should all work together to make this the best world possible; and that our US forefathers thought very similar thoughts (while practicing slavery and other less-than-savory things-- sign of the times, I guess).
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The guy does have a point. The description of the patches gives malicious coders a good detail of what to exploit.
This is completely true. Publishing the details of a hole certainly draws attention to that hole.
However, it doesn't change either the facts or history: many holes were exploited long before MS either published a description, or a patch. If MS did not publish patches, crackers would *still* discover holes, and exploit those holes.
There are several levels of cracker. There's the script kiddie, which accounts for the largest number; there's the typical malicious coder, who can create a new exploit based on the description of a hole; and there are the true malicious hackers (the ones that deserve the term, bastards as they are), who can find a hole and write an exploit.
Many security firms find holes in MS-Windows. This is without code or anything else. If good guys can find holes, why would you assume the bad guys sit around waiting for patch descriptions? That's very poor logic.
Yes, upgrading and patching will make you more secure. But, security is also dependent on the quality of the OS you run, and no amount of MS-Spin (tm) or outright lieing can change that.
When I no longer hear or see a BSOD ... Then Windows will be truly secure.
What do you mean? MS-Windows is most secure when it is in a BSOD. I have *never* had an intrusion or DoS attack against a BSOD machine.
The large businesses/corporations of Japan have considerable influence in their government, moving beyond petty lobbying towards very strong and well-set puppet strings.
Fortunately, American companies don't influence our government.
training and support do cost a hell of a lot in any shop.
Very true. However, you cannot assume that the cost of training for an MS product is zero either, simply because you paid for the product.
Just because something is "free" does not mean its of great value.
Also, the converse is true-- just because you paid a great deal for something does not mean it has great value.
Personally, I thought the interview (both the questsion and answers) light-weight. There were no hard questions, and the answers had no real content.
Normal operating procedure.. why act suprised?
Most of us aren't surprised. But, why sit still? The fact that it is normal operating procedure scares me even more.
Yeah, I'm not some naive hick. I know that money buys policy. That doesn't mean we have to bend over and take it up the ass just because business has a woody for our pocket change. Like the guy said, I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
Perhaps an anti-trust office (either US or EU) will be quick to force MS to make any search features work with any search engine one wants.
This is a good idea. But, nobody will use it. At least, only a few people will use it. Most people will just use the default, which will certainly be Microsoft's.
And like the man says, Whoever controls knowledge controls society. Or something like that.
It shouldn't even be a remotely fair competition in console software sales month to month for the top 10 spots, and yet it is.
There are many potential reasons for this. First, the actual number of games sold may be 7x higher for the PS2; with a wide variety of good games from which to choose, it's easy to spread a bunch of purchases over several good titles, instead of the few dozen decent titles on the XBox. Another potential reason is game playability: PS2 games may have a longer play life than XBox games. Another possibility is the demographics: the people who buy XBox may have more money to throw away on games.
Yet another reason may be bundling. It's difficult to purchase an XBox without bundled games. One of the ways Microsoft (and other console vendors, too) boosts sales (and therefor hype) of a game is to bundle a game in with the purchase of a console.
Whatever the case, Microsoft has hyped the success of their console way beyond the reality.
I think it's a fun little idea, but buying an XBox and putting Linux on it seems kind of unfair to Microsoft since it's unlikely you'll be making up their loss by buying the overpriced games.
They set they price. It's not up to us to make sure they make a profit. In fact, no company is *owed* anything beyond the asking price. That's called "free market."
And part of the free market is doing whatever the hell you want with the products you purchase, as long as it doesn't interfere with copyright laws. Mod chips do not interfere with copyright laws.
If Microsoft wants to compete in the market, it's up to them to set the price fairly. It's not up to us to make up their loss leader by purchasing lousy games.
SCOX doesn't "manufacter" SCO Unix; they copy it, and sell those copies. SCO Unix/Unixware hasn't changed much since Caldera purchased it from the Santa Cruz Operations (now Tarentella). Since Caldera became SCO (in a blatant effort to confuse investors and customers), SCO Unix has pretty much stagnated.
In fact, the biggest news from the most recent release of SCO Unix has been Samba.
Despite the fact that I dislike Microsoft's tactics, it's hard to dispute that their dominance of the market has encouraged adoption of computing by the masses by making computers more useful through easy interoperation:...
This is a myth caused by confusing a corellation as cause and effet. Microsoft did not encourage the expansion of home computing-- that happened because the market was right for it. Computers were already beginning their drastic increase in sales before Microsoft came on the scene. IBM's delay in the entry into "toy computing" (as they saw it at the time) proved benficial: they released their IBM PC at the same moment home computers were becoming commodities. The IBM name encouraged market penetration in the business sector, even though the PC was no more capable than the other similarly-priced computers in the market.
Microsoft has never encouraged easy interoption with anything other than Microsoft products. Other companies produced interoperation software (such as Novell, with their Netware systems). It is not ease-of-use or interoperability that drove the sales of Microsoft software: it was brutal control of the distribution chain, through predation, exclusive contracts, manipulation of market perception, and outright illegal practices.
The problem with the "free market" as practiced by the US and other corporations is this: it is like a game of king-of-the-mountain, but the higher up on the mountain you get, the bigger and quicker and meaner *you* get. So the further up you go, the better equiped you are at knocking others off the mountain. That is exactly what Microsoft was able to do: get to the top on the back of IBM (who was already king of their own computer mountain some distance off), and start knocking everyone else off the mountain.
Microsoft has arguably done nothing to help the industry at all. In fact, there is a strong case against them, and in all likelihood, they have harmed the industry tremendously, to the point where the only real competition is software created for fun and profit by a loose collection of geeks throughout the world. That is the sign of a sick, sick market, not a healthy one.
But, Free Software has the right idea: if you can't win by playing king of the mountain, win by *not* playing the game.
I won't get into the question of whether X does remoting right for the most common modern cases of remote access (i.e. not dumb terminals, plenty of CPU resources all over, except in niche cases like wireless handheld devices)...
The whole concept of remoting is not about horsepower; it's about administration. It's much easier for me to install and upgrade an application in one location (a server) than multiple locations (individual servers).
I triple-your-money-back guarantee it is easier to administer a well-designed X-based system of desktops than it is to administer the same number of MS-Windows based desktops.
The added benefit of modular horsepower is, of course, very important, as well; the average lifespan of a desktop PC running MS-Windows is about 3 years. If those were instead the same PCs running an X-based desktop, the lifespan would be much, much greater. We have NCD X terminals that are 8 years old still in service, providing very useful work.
But that gets back to the "lots of desktop horsepower" discussion, which I said isn't important to establish the value of application remoting. (As opposed that stupid desktop remoting so prevalent in the MS-Windows world.)
I have used MS-Windows; and although some functions are faster in MS-Windows, X is quite responsive. With a lightweight window manager (say, WindowMaker or Black Box), X is *very* responsive. Some applications are slow; others are quite fast. It all depends on how well coded they are, just like in the MS-Windows world.
All-in-all, there is nothing intrinsically slow about X. Some video drivers are slow, and you will definitely see the difference between X and MS-Windows when the video driver on Linux blows chunks; but that isn't the fault of X.
Once Unix (including Linux and the BSDs) gain more popularity, card manufacturers will either release specs and allow good drivers to be written, or write good drivers themselves.
Hopefully that will happen when the kernel module interface in Linux stabilizes, so a driver written for the 3.2 kernel will work no matter the sub-minor version number is.
It won't happen soon; but it will happen sooner than Microsoft thinks.
WTF are you talking about? The OS doesn't support devices or software. Hardware vendors produce drivers; that is why Microsoft is able to (legitimately) claim that 70% of all MS-Windows failures are due to bad drivers. It is the hardware vendors that produce the drivers to the OS, not the other way 'round.
Same with software. Software is targetted *toward* an OS; the operating system is (hardly) never written towards an application.
Microsoft has made a company from destroying competition, yet (ironically) a lot of software is targetted toward the MS-Windows operating system.
This is due mostly to Microsoft's early control of the hardware distribution chain. By controlling the software that was installed when there was very little choice, they have managed to lock out other software from being included today. Since that control translated to 90% desktop market share, other software companies felt they were safe targetting the MS-Windows platform.
Apple does not have a history of driving other software companies out of business by bundling their own software with their OS; Microsoft does have that reputation. So your comments are extremely ironic, and display a certain ignorance of history.
I can't believe you rejected my article on MS teaming up with Nitendo on Xbox II.
So Microsoft is *finally* admitting they can't design a decent game console on their own? 'bout time!
That's all well and good; admirable, even. But, SCO doesn't care if they lose Unixware licensees. They aren't making money off Unixware anyway, and it costs money and effort to upkeep, and they have to deal with pesky user problems.
They just want you to send them money. It's the perfect business: no product, no staff, just a lot of money rolling in due to the past efforts of other, complete strangers (both on the Unix side and the Linux side), and the gullibility of people who believe every official-looking letter they receive.
SCO is comprised of every kind of sheister who ever followed a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme, put sawdust in the tranny, or used inferior concrete and rebar when building a dam a mile up the river from a town. They don't care about anyone else, nor the consequences of their actions, nor whether they actually deserve the money.
It's the money that matters, not the users. And if they can get rid of the actual users in the process, all the better.
This is seriously distorting his already bent definition of "free". Freedom, as he defines it, can be applied to software (and with a bit of work books, music etc) and while you might argue with the word used it's a useful concept to have.
Here though, he applies the word free to users, and this is a different thing entirely. Worse, he asserts that all it takes is one piece of non-free software to spoil his utopian dream.
(Note: Although I seem to be speaking for RMS, I do not. I am merely representing his argument as I understand it.)
Information cannot be free. Information is, in itself, nothing more than an artifact. People can be free to know the information, or use it (listen to music, run programs) and share it. Those are the freedoms RMS speaks of when he talks about the freedom of information-- the freedom of the people to do what they want with the information they have.
He is addressing what he sees as a bug in society: the restriction of the flow of information for the purpose of individual profit.
The concept is simple: if information is useful, it will benefit society more if access to that information is unfettered. So, if there is a single case in which the free exchange of information is inhibited, society is diminished.
Some people agree; others do not. I do agree. I believe it is my duty as a member partaking of the benefits of society to contribute back to society, and not hold out potential benefit for the purpose of personal profit.
Iraq may be better off without Saddam, but there's no denying that we went to war for the WMD's, only for the WMD's, and solely for the WMD's. There are no WMD's, so the war was wrong.
We went to war to distract the US population from the fact we haven't solved a damned thing in Afghanistan; we went to war for the oil; we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people.
We went to war because the American people demanded some sort of retaliation for 9/11/2001. (Side note: after the shuttle blew up on re-entry, it took 3 days to get 2 separate investigations going. Why did it take 18 fucking *months* to begin investigating the 9/11 attacks? And why was the crime scene cleaned up by then?)
No. The war was not over WMDs. Bush may have used the threat of WMDs to whip the citizenship of the US into a war frenzy, and he used falsified documents to do it, but that wasn't what the war was about.
As for the grandparent post: Saddam was not a threat at all to the region. He was a threat to the people of Iraq, but not to anyone else. If you want a continuing threat to the region, take a look at Isreal and Palistine and Saudi Arabia, two of which enjoy American protection and aid.
Free in use? Linux is NOT free in use. It's published under the GPL which has certain LIMITATIONS OF USE.
Must... not... feed... troll....
Damn. I'm gonna anyway.
Name one restriction the GPL puts on use of GPLd products. You can use GPLd products in any way you wish; you can even give the GPLd product away to friends if you desire.
How is that restrictive?
What the GPL restricts is the use of other people's copyrights against their wishes. It restricts stealing of code for use in proprietary products. That is not a restriction in the use of GPLd products, which is what you claim. It's a restriction in the use of the copyrighted source code, and not the product itself.
However, if you can enlighten me, please do. How does the GPL restrict the use of GPLd products? (Not source code, but products, which is what you are claiming.)
It's been said before, and will be repeated until slashdot fucking gets it. A word means what the majority of people using the word think it means. Period. End of line. There is no longer any meaningful debate to be had on this subject, it's already been decided years ago.
Hardly. Just because the general population misuses such words as "theory" and "science" and "innovation" doesn't mean those words do not have a precise definition, and that we should stop using them simply because most of the population doesn't speak properly.
Hell, should I start referring to my computer as
"the CPU" just because everyone calls the whole fucking box the CPU? Back in the day, I never called a 3.5" floppy a "hard disk" just because it was encased in plastic. Should I start referring to MS-Windows (any version) as "Microsoft?" (As in the start of every support call: "What operating system do you use?" "Oh, Microsoft.")
Language changes; but the term "hacker" is still in active use as a label given to someone who excels at programming.
Hey! Should I stop using the word "excel" except in reference to spreadsheet programs? And then, can I call *all* spreadsheet programs "excel?"
That'd be neat.
You are viewing the future through the lens of the present. This is natural; but, I believe you are overlooking a lot of the changes currently taking place.
First, there is the matter of data integration. As it gets easier to collect data, it becomes harder to do anything useful with it. Management will want to synthesize this data from these disparate datastores. That is going to require constant interface writing, etc.
Back in the early nineties, Ed Yourdon predicted the "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." He said jobs would move offshore as CASE and OO tools made programming more of a drudge and less of an art. Partly, he was correct; but he missed too many things.
Mostly, he made predictions about the future as if the future were like the present, without knowing that much about the present. The present of 1992 included the Internet (though used almost entirely by educational institutions), the booming consumer software market, etc.
Now we have many smaller businesses that can afford the kinds of ERP software that were available only to big business just a few years ago. These sites will require installation and customisation, just like the big corps. This is one emerging market, helped on (to a large part) by freely-available software.
There are other markets for software developers. Yes, they may have to specialize in one area, and write variations on the same interface over and over, but it's still work.
I don't think there's any prediction concerning availability of programming jobs we can make today that will be accurate in 4 years. That's like trying to predict the next nation on which the US is going to declare a "war on X," where X contains the subset "terrorism," "drugs," "badly-dubbed movies," and "women with facial hair."
You're new to capitalism, aren't you?
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is one of my two favorite books of all time. The other is "Gateway," by Frederick Pohl. Definitely start with "TMIAHM," which will give you a very good overview of all of Heinein's strange beliefs, and have you agreeing with most of them. (If only human nature were so pure.)
I'd agree with the assessment that everything from "Farnhham's Freehold" and later is generally oversexed and underplotted rehashes of his old ideas. I'd recommend "Stranger in a Strange Land," not so much for quality, but because of social impact. It is both the most-referred-to Heinlein book, and his most widely read. It isn't good, per se, but it isn't terrible, like "I Will Fear No Evil," "Friday," "Number of the Beast," "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," etc.
His short stories are generally very good. Some suck, but most are well worth reading.
Now, since the conditions for the existence of each target are unknown and incalculable in these cases, you can't even compute a probability. Hence, I declare (according to our present knowledge and understanding) that all of these things DO NOT EXIST.
Yeah, because atoms didn't exist until we discovered them. Likewise, the sun really did revolve around the earth until we discovered otherwise. And disease was caused by bad spirits, and were nothing a good bleeding couldn't cure.
Yes, we can never prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns. As far as we know, the prerequisites for invisible pink unicorns (IPU) do not exist in this universe.
But we already have the evidence for one (marginally) intelligent species in the universe. Ergo, they exist, and we know the prerequisites for intelligent life also exist.
It would be extreme foolishness to claim there is no other intelligent life in the universe.
Reeeaaallly. I can't wait to see this in action. I knew they could never let Microsoft Bob die.
Sorry, this is a little late; I didn't see this comment until just a minute ago.
Which may well be the reason Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution exists in the first place.
Funny how the constitution and modern law seem to be at odds. The constitution seems so clear in this, yet modern law seems to obfuscate the original intention. Worse yet is the practice of calling such thought "communist," or "anti-capitalist."
I never realized growing up that the beliefs my parents taught me were so close the those formalized into the constitution. I thought I was a free thinker; as it turns out, I merely think that we should all work together to make this the best world possible; and that our US forefathers thought very similar thoughts (while practicing slavery and other less-than-savory things-- sign of the times, I guess).