Any word on if this program is available for ppl in the US. China is not the only country with privacy, eavesdroppong issues.
This isn't about privacy or about eavesdropping. It's about censorship. There might be issues concerning the FCC and its regulation of TV or radio, but there really is no censorship of the Internet by the US government. Besides, if you're worried about privacy on the Internet, it's really no easier for the government to "wiretap" your Internet activity than it is to for any other person; most Internet traffic is unencrypted, so you shouldn't expect any guarantee of secrecy if the websites you're using don't provide an encrypted connection.
The very first thing we did during the siege of Fallujah was take out the hospitals (the military viewed them as being sympathetic to the insurgents because they'd release civilian casualty figures, in addition to the obvious fact that they were rescuing wounded insurgents for medical care).
I can't claim to be an expert on this topic, but it's well-known that insurgents in Iraq and Israel use buildings like mosques and hospitals to store munitions and for protection. Ambulances are often used in a similar way. If you were a soldier fighting the insurgents, would decide to simply take fire from a mosque or hospital without being able to respond? You may want to consider that the medical helicopters the US military uses cannot carry guns by law; even though they often draw fire from the ground, they cannot defend themselves except by getting away fast. It's difficult and sometimes impossible to obey the rules of war if the other guys aren't.
I'm not trying to excuse everything the US is doing in Iraq; I'm just trying to point out that there's a very important context for those decisions by the military that you're leaving out.
Copyright is an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
Only because easy copying is a fairly recent technological construct. I assume by "fairly recent" you are talking about "in the last several centuries."
Has there actually been cases of brands being stolen in this way? Everyone seems to talk about it as though it were inevitable, but it seems plausible that even if copyright laws allowed a rival company to steal it's franchise, actual fans would always prefer the original makers, and view the copy as an entirely separate work.
It never happens that brands are "stolen" because it's illegal (because of trademark). On the other hand, since I know nothing about TV shows, let's go to software and look at the case of Firefox. Do you prefer Netscape over Firefox because you "always prefer the original makers," or do you prefer Firefox because you prefer the better browser? Whatever your answer is, the majority prefers Firefox, and I suspect a lot of the non-nerds who use Firefox have no idea it comes originally from the Netscape source code.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics. It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable.
Last time I checked, prohibiting homicide goes completely against the laws of biology. It's a human construct designed to make humans unkillable.
Come on, this is insightful? Legal laws don't make things physically impossible. If something was physically impossible, there would be no point in banning it; by your logic, every law "violates" scientific laws.
What you do, as with free software, is accept -- indeed welcome -- the fact that bits can be copied. You then charge people for your time.
Charge people for what time? For my time spent programming? This is exactly not what happens with free software. If I'm a free software "customer," and I want an operating system, here's what I do. I go on the Internet and google "free operating system". I find a GNU/Linux distribution, I download it, and I install it. Through this process, I have paid the authors of the software in the distribution not a single penny for their many hours writing the programs I get to use. Yes, I can choose to pay for the programs, but optionally giving money is effectively a donation, not a purchase. The programmers aren't charging me for their time; they're merely asking for donations for their time.
Now, you may mean "charge for supporting the software," as Stallman recommends. People other than the programmers can and do support free software, and therefore the people spending the most time (the programmers) don't get to charge any money for their time. Even if the authors are bundling the support with the software, there's a semi-conflict of interest. The worse your program is, the more support your customers need, and the more money you make. You have a financial incentive to do a bad job, which isn't a good thing.
For "packaged" software (software that goes is used widely in essentially unmodified form; i.e. the opposite of in-house or contracted software projects), the only way to "charge for your time" as a programmer is to restrict the redistribution of the software. If you know of a different way that does, I'd love to hear about it.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole.
There is a simple reason why this analogy is completely ridiculous. People do not create air; they can only consume it. People do create intellectual works, like books, music and software. If every person on the planet disappeared, there would be plenty of new "air" (I presume by "air" you mean oxygen) produced by plants. If every person disappeared, even an infinite number of plants would not produce a single new book, song or program.
Oxygen is almost every where we live, within easy reach of our eager mouths to inhale. It doesn't take a refinery to get it ready for us. On the other hand, creating a song or program takes hours and hours of hard, patient work, as anyone who has done either knows. It's not like Metallica's music (used as an example because of their actions against Napster) had been out in the open before Metallica came along, ready for anybody to "inhale" into their ears, when they rudely came and put a bubble over it, called it "theirs," and started selling it. They put lots of work into the music, and put an artificial restriction on it. They did this because it's impossible to sell access to intellectual works without such restriciton (at best you can make money from donations).
Yes, right now you could remove the restriction and Metallica's music would be like oxygen in the sense that anyone with an Internet connection could access it. But the danger is that in the future, Metallica and other artists will be less able (they have mouths to feed) or less motivated to produce music. Will music disappear completely? Certainly not. That's why open source software can survive; people simply enjoy making music and software. But will there be less music? Probably. Bands that are less successful and get fewer donations will probably have to find second jobs to support themselves, which means less time doing what they do best. Musicians like making music, but they also like having money (and at least a little money is always necessary). If they can do both, they will; and because they are the reason we get to even have their creative works in the first place, they have the right to restrict it so that they get compensation for their work. Don't like it? Go make your own music and share it with the world freely; no one is stopping you.
Let me ask - when did you last tweak your network settings? Replace your DNS server? Patch a web server? Install a new printer and/or driver? Upgrade your anti-virus server? Find a way to run a one-off application written 25 years ago on new hardware? Roll out 20 new systems in 5 days? Dig through vendor documentation of a commercial product to find out WHY it won't work the way the cusomer thinks it should, and find an acceptable replacement?
By "tech support" I was referring to tech support within the context of this article: plugging in an XBox, setting up a LAN, configuring a dial-up connection to the Internet. This is what I meant by "mundane tasks." I've done a few things on your list (tweak network settings, web server patching, and install printers/drivers), but obviously I didn't mean all or even most tech support jobs are mundane. I was talking about doing things for people that most "power users" think of as trivial jobs, like connecting to a LAN.
CS is a "deep" subject and tech support is "shallow" by comparison - but it's a damn sight "wider" than you think. You get to develop solutions to problems, while we support folks just have to find them... and we have a lot more problems to solve.
I completely agree with you. Although CS is more, as you say, "deep," I'm by no means saying that tech support is a brainless job; you've got to know a heck of a lot, and you've got to know it well. What I would say is pretty "shallow" by any comparison (and I think you would agree with me) is knowing how to connect an XBox or dialup to the Internet. *That* is what I meant is "simply not that nerdy."
If your definition of geekiness is esoteric knowledge about system internals, I'll call your bet and raise you $50 - I build systems every day at work & at home, I keep current on trends & threats in hardware AND software, and I actively test new applications & OS's. What makes your CS degree (attained ~n years in the past) such a great signifier of geek prowess?
Degrees don't really carry that much weight in my mind; I'm much more impressed by what geeks do than what a diploma says they can do. In that respect, I'll bet we're on exactly the same footing. My definition of geekiness isn't "esoteric knowledge about system internals;" it's basically learning about and innovating with computers not because you have to (for a living), but because it's fun. I love tinkering with new hardware and software too; in fact I stayed up all last night with FreeBSD, which I don't know much about at the moment, but I want to change that. I have similar late night sessions with programming, just because it's so much fun. That's what I consider geeky, and I'm sure you enjoy such activities too.
How does the Earthlink commercial go - "nerds & geeks know about computers, but geeks get things done"? I am definitely a geek. You?
By that standard, I'd say I'm a geek too, and I'm sure you are too. What I'm merely saying is that geeks (or nerds, take your pick) do things because they are fun and interesting (at least most of the time), not because they are necessary. That doesn't mean geeks are lazy and don't do anything they don't like; I'm just saying that what makes a geek a geek is what he does in his spare time, not what he does for work (unless he genuinely loves his job).
The "oh well its only shared libraries" excuse is just that - an excuse. Admittedly, the fault may not be with the author of the text editor application but more with the hyper-bloated "desktop" that he links to his application -- however, he should be aware of the implication of using those bloated desktop libraries, and probably do a bit more work to avoid their use.
Look at it this way. Let's say you (and everyone else in your community) wanted a way to go across town. You have two choices: you can either build a public transportation medium or even system, or every person can provide their own transportation.
If you want to provide your own transportation, you basically have to start from scratch. If you build a bicycle, that would probably take many hours and something like $50 of parts to build, or maybe $200 or more if you choose to buy a prebuilt one. You could even walk for miles and miles for free if you wanted to.
So once you're done, you'll report to your community "I spent $200 on a bike, and I spent about a month clearing brush and building a road for my route to the other side of the city." Sounds pretty reasonable.
But suppose for a moment the city decided to build a system of roads that everyone can use, and then they even set up a bus or subway for people to commute with. In the end, the project costs, say, $20 million. Ouch.
But let's look at the big picture. Yes, you alone spent only $200 on your bike, but if everyone has to do that, and you have, say, 100,000 people in your city, that's $20 million in bikes. Plus, you have to clear brush every time you want to go to a different place.
Now, I'm not trying to take my analogy too far, but if we had a 'ps' for this city, it would ask a given citizen, "How much did it cost for you to get across town?" and he would say "$200" in the first city and "$20 million" if he lived in the second.
This is why shared libraries aren't just an "excuse." To get a simple GUI text editor running, it takes a *lot* of software. You have to have a basic C (or other language) library, a windowing system, a window manager, and widget toolkit before you can even start on the actual text editor code. Your suggestion is that everyone write their own libraries for their own programs, so that they can say "hey! my text editor takes only 500 KB of memory." I'm sure that if you wrote your own specialized C library, windowing system, and widget toolkit for your own text editor, it would show up smaller on ps than Kedit. But no one will want to use your program or your libraries because your libraries will only work for your program. That means your program can't interoperate with any other software because they're all using different libraries, and when they want to run other software, they will have to run a completely different windowing system and widget toolkit. Plus, they will run out of memory very quickly because they will have thirty different programs doing the same task (windowing) by themselves inside their own memory.
Code reuse isn't an "excuse for bloatware." It's an effective way to avoid reinventing the wheel and not having thirty different wheels spinning when one will suffice. Shared libraries help make RAM use more efficient, make programmers more efficient, and help make users more efficient through a consistent interface. I'd rather use 25 MB once for 30 different programs than use 30 programs that each use 5 MB, and I definitely would never want to write the latter.
If you sort by PID or process name or something else less volatile than CPU percentages, the processes all stay in the same place in top, too. However, if you're looking for programs that are using a lot of CPU over time, it's probably worth sorting by cumulative CPU time instead.
So, people don't know how to interpret the output of ps? And that's a Slashdot frontpage story?
Slashdot isn't only about breaking tech news; it's about keeping geeks generally informed. Many Linux geeks (including myself) probably learned something from the article that they didn't know. It's a well-written, informative article, and I'm glad Slashdot posted it because otherwise I probably would have never seen it. Not every Slashdotter already knows everything there is to know about Linux like you apparently do, and I imagine this isn't quite "common knowledge," so it's helpful for some of us.
What have I done wrong in my settings to deserve such trivial items?
No one forced you to click on "Read More." Sorry that you wasted a couple seconds reading the summary and realizing you already knew all about ps, but you didn't need to waste even more of your time trolling.
Something will bog down my machine, I will run 'top' and discover that no process is using more than 10% of the available resources. OK, so why is my machine bogging?
The "feature" that I find annoying about top, though it's really rather necessary for a CLI program, is that only the most CPU-intensive programs at a given instant get to the top. This isn't a problem with truly CPU-intensive programs that are constantly running. But all too often there's a program that's spiking to 30% or more CPU intermittently, and so the program might flash at the top every now and then, but for the most part it's low on the list where you can't see it. I'm not saying that top is bad, it's a very nice command line tool that works well; I'm just saying that the CLI has its limitations, and thus top does too. I find that KSysGuard works pretty well for this, since the processes all stay in the same place, and you can see when a process flashes %40 or whatever in the CPU column, and then kill it. You can use ps for this as well to an extent, but it's much harder (hit ps over and over and scroll up (or worse, use 'less' or 'more') to see how much CPU is being used by each process).
Why don't we throw the modifier of "every *compotent* computer scientist knows how to do the mundane tasks" into your original statement.
Sure. I'm sure there are incompetent people in computer science, like any other field. Obviously I mean that people who know about the ideas behind computers are also familiar with "mundane tasks," not people who don't know anything.
Support staff, from the lowest level of the help desk to the highest level of systems administration, have the same love of computers that that coders have.
Let me clarify a little. By "tech support" I was referring to the types of people described in the article. These are people who know how to run anti-virus programs, connect you to the Internet, how to set up a LAN, etc., and they help their clients (these celebrities) with these tasks. If this is the extent of their "love of computers," I would hardly call them nerdy. The analog of computer nerd for cars would be the engineers that work for auto companies to design new vehicles. The analog of these tech support is the driver's ed instructor or perhaps a chauffeur. A chauffeur may have to become familiar with how to operate a car, but besides having to learn how to operate slightly different cars, he's not interested in gaining a lot of knowledge about cars. A driver's ed instructor may know how to drive, and he might have to learn new stuff if traffic laws change.
What separates the chauffeur from the engineer? The engineer truly loves technology, wants to learn more about it whenever he can, and if possible apply new knowledge in designing new vehicles. The chauffeur drives because he has to earn a living, not because it's intellectually stimulating. That's not to say that a chauffeur might not be a nerd in his spare time, if for whatever reason he didn't get a "nerdy" job. He might be building cars and car parts in his garage, which would make him an exception. What I'm talking about is the chauffeur who does his job, goes home, and has nothing more to do with cars.
The same applies to some guy who gets hired to connect Bono's XBox. If he's nerdy, he'll find plugging in a few color-coded cables rather uninteresting. He'd be more interested in how the circuits of the XBox operate, or perhaps in how games are written for the XBox, and if he could, he would try writing his own simple games for XBox.
I know people who think that they are "computer geeks" because they can install Firefox, play video games, play D&D, and can run antivirus programs on their friends' computers, even though they never want to actually learn something about hardware or programming; such pseudo-nerds are usually satisfied just playing video-games. These people can do tech support quite well, and often they get tech support jobs. That doesn't make them incompetent tech support; it just doesn't make them nerds. Nerds don't just want to know how to install a hard drive or reinstall their operating system. They want to know how their hard drives and operating systems really work, and they'll probably be interested in trying their hands at building at least simple hardware or software. If tech support people also share this interest, but just don't do it for a living, then of course they're nerds. All I'm saying is that being on tech support doesn't automatically qualify you as being very geeky.
CS tends to deal more with the code and mathematics/science behind the code (not pretty)
What do you mean "not pretty?" That's really the only "pretty" thing about computers: the neat ideas behind them that make them tick. As you said, every computer scientist knows to do the mundane tasks of computers (how to run an anti-virus program, how to set up an email program, etc.) because it goes with what they do; but such plumbing jobs aren't pretty and they aren't why true geeks really like computers. Yes, tech support people don't need to learn CS or how to write software. That's why tech support people simply aren't that nerdy.
Tell me again... why do taxpayer dollars have to pay for security at this game? Let the NFL pay for their own damn security. Or is the NFL technically a "foreign country"?
To the extent that the government shouldn't be involved in doing special favors for various private interests, I agree with you. However, the job of Homeland Security isn't just to protect public buildings (the White House, Capitol, etc.); it's to protect the *public*, no matter where the public is. The police provide security for political party conventions, for example, because some of the public is there, and they are definitely a target. The federal government provides security at airports because a lot of the public flies, even though everyone flies on private airlines. Today, the government provides security for lots of skyscrapers in cities, even though most of them house private, corporate offices (the World Trade Center did).
The government will provide security, at least in theory (and the public should make sure it happens in practice), to whoever needs it, whether it's the NFL or anyone else. If you decide to have a large gathering of people that should be considered a terrorist target, Homeland Security is supposed to be there to protect you, even though your gathering may not be a public function, because A) terrorists do not only want to attack government targets (as 9/11 demonstrated) and B) it is good for society if large gatherings of people can happen without being completely vulnerable to attack.
Thanks for the link to that very interesting article.
That said, I think that following the shuttle group's practices is only a good idea up to a point. As the end of the article says, such a methodical, careful process is very expensive in terms of both time and money. For stuff that must absolutely, never ever fail (like the shuttle) this is is appropriate. But almost no software lives under such requirements. I'd rather have, say, a full-featured media player that can play lots of formats and has lots of features that might crash every now and then, than a program that plays a single WAV file every time without fail.
Now, the submitter's program probably falls somewhere in between. People aren't going to die if his program fails, but crashes will be significantly more costly than having to double click your media player launcher. The article suggests he's working on this project alone, so having a whole other team looking over and testing his code probably is impractical, but if possible some kind of peer-review would probably help. Maybe blueprinting how the program works would be a good idea, and definitely having some kind of database on the code, i.e. version control like Subversion, is practically necessary for almost any major software project.
The reason why programmers perhaps aren't as rigorous as other kinds of engineers in their design is because software is much easier to modify and fix (usually). If you're an architect building a building, you can't just move a beam from here to there, "recompile," and see what happens. In software, you can usually make a change, rebuild it, and try it out within a matter of seconds; that's that's rare if possible at all in other possible. An exception to this is the shuttle group, since they get only one shot.
Anyways, all I'm saying is that programmers are generally sloppy because they can get away with it. This particular group can't, so they are very careful. The submitter can learn some from the group, but their methods shouldn't be seen as the holy grail of software development.
Nobody arrested them "when they showed up," even though, as we later found out, several of them were already known to law enforcement as being "up to no good."
I think it's you who is missing the whole point. There were lots of failures by the government to prevent 9/11. Checking IDs isn't effective if other parts of law enforcement aren't effective; it depends on the people at the airport being able to find out if the passengers are on law enforcement's "radar." Obviously that capability wasn't in place at the time. If it had been, 9/11 might have been prevented.
So, I am not saying that checking IDs alone is effective. I'm saying that 1) checking IDs, 2) collecting intelligence on suspected terrorists, and 3) having a way at the airport to check whether a passenger is a suspected terrorist is effective. This is what the whole no-fly list is all about. Obviously doing those steps in isolation is pointless. Together however, it's quite obvious why it would make aircraft more secure.
With the amount of attacks against the free market in the form of intellectual monopoly 'property', that freedom of the market doesnt appear to be very revered or holy.
For whatever reason, some Slashdotters seem to believe that "free market" means "no regulation at all."
Events like the 1929 crash, Enron, and others have shown that capitalism can fail without a referree. In the case of Enron, the company had an agreement with the shareholders: you buy our shares, we give you dividends, voting power, and accurate information about the company. The Enron executives broke that agreement with accounting shenanigans. The lesson was that someone (the SEC) needs to better police what companies are reporting to the public.
You call copyright a "monopoly." In one sense, yes it's a monopoly; when you copyright your work, you can exclusive control over it. On the other hand, if I go buy a plot of land, you might also consider that a "monopoly" because I have gained exclusive control over it. If anything, the monopoly you get over land is worse than the monopoly of copyright; there is only so much land on the planet, while there's an essentially unlimited expanse of possible creative works you can create and copyright.
So yes, you gain a monopoly under copyright over *your own work*, just like when you buy physical property you gain a monopoly over it. But if I write a song and copyright it, that in no way prevents you from writing your own song. In a monopoly, the monopolist prevents competition by becoming the only significant seller in a market. By your logic, Ford is a monopolist because it is the only seller of Ford vehicles. That's a completely oversimplified and narrow view. Ford is not a monopolist because there are many competing auto manufacturers, all of which are the only sellers of their own cars.
So, the entire point of copyright is to let authors require customers to pay a fee as compensation for their work. Without copyright, authors would no longer be able to require these fees and would thus become dependent on donations for compensation.
I love open source, and I am in no way saying that proprietary software, music, etc. is necessarily the best way to create work. I'm also not saying that copyright hasn't been misused or that there are no problems with copyright law. But this claim that somehow the basic idea behind copyright is "anti-free market" is really silly. Copyright is nothing more than an economic agreement between two parties that has been standardized by the government because it's so ubiquitous. If copyright is anti-free market, so is any contract between two parties that prevents them from doing whatever they please. Free markets depend on such contracts, one of them being copyright.
The sad part of this is it's because investors weren't happy with profits being up "only" 82%. They had expected more. So they sold.
Is the stock market full of asshats or what?
No, what you forget is that stock prices are determined by how valuable people think the shares are. If I expect profits to be up, say, 90%, I might be willing to buy shares for $450 each, but if I expect them to be up 82%, I might only be willing to pay $400 per share. So, if my expectation of 90% growth isn't met, but I've already bought my $450 shares, I may sell to cut my losses before others sell.
Look at it this way: "only" 82% profit is a lot of growth, but the stock price has also gone up a lot over the past year. The market made a wrong prediction on how Google would do, so it corrected for its excess-enthusiasm for Google. Even if the stock price had gone up to "only" $390, it would still have increased enormously.
i was not sure why would you need it if you use amarok - but that's for their streams, right ?
Yes, that's their streaming service.
i think somewhere on this same thread was also information about last.fm removing normal streams and perl script to listen to the music in normal players again;)
I'm sure that is completely possible, since the player is GPLed. The player already has a capability to stream from your local system, and you can listen to the stream from another media player, though it seems to have problems on my system.
So far, the balance of the comments seem to be in favour, or at least neutral to the idea of implementing Linux within a device that will no doubt end up killing a good few people. In contrast, should Linux ever be used for DRMs, which have, as far as I know, not killed anyone, most people here would be up in arms, if the recent story on GPL and the DRM is to be taken as a guide.
First of all, basically everyone recognizes the right of the military to use Linux; heck, anyone, whether good or evil, has an equal right to use it. So no one disputes that Linux can be used for DRM (after all, Linux is (and always will be, according to Linus) under GPL 2, not 3).
Second, whether or not you agree with the wars the military is currently fighting, as long as you recognize that military force is necessary in *some* cases and can do in *some* situations, you can see a good use for this technology. On the other hand, many Slashdotters probably see no "good" use for DRM. Personally, I see it as more of a nuisance than anything ethically wrong (you're not forced to use it if you don't want to), but the main point is that it will always be futile. If the data is there, in some form, unless the manufacturer/content provider/software developer is in complete, absolute control of what the user is using to access the data, there will always be some person who cracks the DRM. Unfortunately for the copyright holders, it's a pointless endeavor.
Overall, I see DRM on Linux as making life for us Linux users a little harder and annoying. That said, if some kind of open source DRM is developed so that we can use DRMed media without much hassle, that's great. So in a nutshell, DRM is a waste of time, but DRM development on Linux might mean we have to waste less of our time working around a proprietary DRM.
Why not just release it from a country with saner ip laws that allow reverse-enigineering made by a single person?
I should have also mentioned in my previous reply that there is some reasonable logic for the US rules about reverse-engineering. In the US, the reverse-engineer has to examine whatever is being reverse-engineered and then write documentation on how they think it works. Then, a "clean" engineer has to try to implement a system based on the documentation. The reason for this is that if the same person who is writing the documentation gets to write the implementation, that person is very tempted to simply copy directly from the original implementation, which would be a violation of copyright law. The separation eliminates this temptation, thereby keeping the reverse-engineered copy (hopefully) free of copyright conflicts.
Why not just release it from a country with saner ip laws that allow reverse-enigineering made by a single person?
Because then people from other countries can't use it. In fact, it makes sense to have the work done according to the most "strict" reverse-engineering rules.
Go here. You should download the program on the right, the Last.fm player. (You can compile from source if you want, but you'll need Qt4, so unless you already have that, save yourself hours of downloading and compiling.) That program sort of works as your "radio" and plays songs it thinks you will like.
Could it be that everyone using Firefox switched to Seamonkey?
Probably not, but it may be that some Firefox users are going to other non-IE browsers. I've switched from Firefox to Konqueror, mainly because of its KDE integration and file browsing capabilities. Maybe others are doing the same?
Slashdot Mirror
Any word on if this program is available for ppl in the US. China is not the only country with privacy, eavesdroppong issues.
This isn't about privacy or about eavesdropping. It's about censorship. There might be issues concerning the FCC and its regulation of TV or radio, but there really is no censorship of the Internet by the US government. Besides, if you're worried about privacy on the Internet, it's really no easier for the government to "wiretap" your Internet activity than it is to for any other person; most Internet traffic is unencrypted, so you shouldn't expect any guarantee of secrecy if the websites you're using don't provide an encrypted connection.
The very first thing we did during the siege of Fallujah was take out the hospitals (the military viewed them as being sympathetic to the insurgents because they'd release civilian casualty figures, in addition to the obvious fact that they were rescuing wounded insurgents for medical care).
I can't claim to be an expert on this topic, but it's well-known that insurgents in Iraq and Israel use buildings like mosques and hospitals to store munitions and for protection. Ambulances are often used in a similar way. If you were a soldier fighting the insurgents, would decide to simply take fire from a mosque or hospital without being able to respond? You may want to consider that the medical helicopters the US military uses cannot carry guns by law; even though they often draw fire from the ground, they cannot defend themselves except by getting away fast. It's difficult and sometimes impossible to obey the rules of war if the other guys aren't.
I'm not trying to excuse everything the US is doing in Iraq; I'm just trying to point out that there's a very important context for those decisions by the military that you're leaving out.
Copyright is an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
Only because easy copying is a fairly recent technological construct. I assume by "fairly recent" you are talking about "in the last several centuries."
Has there actually been cases of brands being stolen in this way? Everyone seems to talk about it as though it were inevitable, but it seems plausible that even if copyright laws allowed a rival company to steal it's franchise, actual fans would always prefer the original makers, and view the copy as an entirely separate work.
It never happens that brands are "stolen" because it's illegal (because of trademark). On the other hand, since I know nothing about TV shows, let's go to software and look at the case of Firefox. Do you prefer Netscape over Firefox because you "always prefer the original makers," or do you prefer Firefox because you prefer the better browser? Whatever your answer is, the majority prefers Firefox, and I suspect a lot of the non-nerds who use Firefox have no idea it comes originally from the Netscape source code.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics. It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable.
Last time I checked, prohibiting homicide goes completely against the laws of biology. It's a human construct designed to make humans unkillable.
Come on, this is insightful? Legal laws don't make things physically impossible. If something was physically impossible, there would be no point in banning it; by your logic, every law "violates" scientific laws.
What you do, as with free software, is accept -- indeed welcome -- the fact that bits can be copied. You then charge people for your time.
Charge people for what time? For my time spent programming? This is exactly not what happens with free software. If I'm a free software "customer," and I want an operating system, here's what I do. I go on the Internet and google "free operating system". I find a GNU/Linux distribution, I download it, and I install it. Through this process, I have paid the authors of the software in the distribution not a single penny for their many hours writing the programs I get to use. Yes, I can choose to pay for the programs, but optionally giving money is effectively a donation, not a purchase. The programmers aren't charging me for their time; they're merely asking for donations for their time.
Now, you may mean "charge for supporting the software," as Stallman recommends. People other than the programmers can and do support free software, and therefore the people spending the most time (the programmers) don't get to charge any money for their time. Even if the authors are bundling the support with the software, there's a semi-conflict of interest. The worse your program is, the more support your customers need, and the more money you make. You have a financial incentive to do a bad job, which isn't a good thing.
For "packaged" software (software that goes is used widely in essentially unmodified form; i.e. the opposite of in-house or contracted software projects), the only way to "charge for your time" as a programmer is to restrict the redistribution of the software. If you know of a different way that does, I'd love to hear about it.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole.
There is a simple reason why this analogy is completely ridiculous. People do not create air; they can only consume it. People do create intellectual works, like books, music and software. If every person on the planet disappeared, there would be plenty of new "air" (I presume by "air" you mean oxygen) produced by plants. If every person disappeared, even an infinite number of plants would not produce a single new book, song or program.
Oxygen is almost every where we live, within easy reach of our eager mouths to inhale. It doesn't take a refinery to get it ready for us. On the other hand, creating a song or program takes hours and hours of hard, patient work, as anyone who has done either knows. It's not like Metallica's music (used as an example because of their actions against Napster) had been out in the open before Metallica came along, ready for anybody to "inhale" into their ears, when they rudely came and put a bubble over it, called it "theirs," and started selling it. They put lots of work into the music, and put an artificial restriction on it. They did this because it's impossible to sell access to intellectual works without such restriciton (at best you can make money from donations).
Yes, right now you could remove the restriction and Metallica's music would be like oxygen in the sense that anyone with an Internet connection could access it. But the danger is that in the future, Metallica and other artists will be less able (they have mouths to feed) or less motivated to produce music. Will music disappear completely? Certainly not. That's why open source software can survive; people simply enjoy making music and software. But will there be less music? Probably. Bands that are less successful and get fewer donations will probably have to find second jobs to support themselves, which means less time doing what they do best. Musicians like making music, but they also like having money (and at least a little money is always necessary). If they can do both, they will; and because they are the reason we get to even have their creative works in the first place, they have the right to restrict it so that they get compensation for their work. Don't like it? Go make your own music and share it with the world freely; no one is stopping you.
Let me ask - when did you last tweak your network settings? Replace your DNS server? Patch a web server? Install a new printer and/or driver? Upgrade your anti-virus server? Find a way to run a one-off application written 25 years ago on new hardware? Roll out 20 new systems in 5 days? Dig through vendor documentation of a commercial product to find out WHY it won't work the way the cusomer thinks it should, and find an acceptable replacement?
... and we have a lot more problems to solve.
By "tech support" I was referring to tech support within the context of this article: plugging in an XBox, setting up a LAN, configuring a dial-up connection to the Internet. This is what I meant by "mundane tasks." I've done a few things on your list (tweak network settings, web server patching, and install printers/drivers), but obviously I didn't mean all or even most tech support jobs are mundane. I was talking about doing things for people that most "power users" think of as trivial jobs, like connecting to a LAN.
CS is a "deep" subject and tech support is "shallow" by comparison - but it's a damn sight "wider" than you think. You get to develop solutions to problems, while we support folks just have to find them
I completely agree with you. Although CS is more, as you say, "deep," I'm by no means saying that tech support is a brainless job; you've got to know a heck of a lot, and you've got to know it well. What I would say is pretty "shallow" by any comparison (and I think you would agree with me) is knowing how to connect an XBox or dialup to the Internet. *That* is what I meant is "simply not that nerdy."
If your definition of geekiness is esoteric knowledge about system internals, I'll call your bet and raise you $50 - I build systems every day at work & at home, I keep current on trends & threats in hardware AND software, and I actively test new applications & OS's. What makes your CS degree (attained ~n years in the past) such a great signifier of geek prowess?
Degrees don't really carry that much weight in my mind; I'm much more impressed by what geeks do than what a diploma says they can do. In that respect, I'll bet we're on exactly the same footing. My definition of geekiness isn't "esoteric knowledge about system internals;" it's basically learning about and innovating with computers not because you have to (for a living), but because it's fun. I love tinkering with new hardware and software too; in fact I stayed up all last night with FreeBSD, which I don't know much about at the moment, but I want to change that. I have similar late night sessions with programming, just because it's so much fun. That's what I consider geeky, and I'm sure you enjoy such activities too.
How does the Earthlink commercial go - "nerds & geeks know about computers, but geeks get things done"? I am definitely a geek. You?
By that standard, I'd say I'm a geek too, and I'm sure you are too. What I'm merely saying is that geeks (or nerds, take your pick) do things because they are fun and interesting (at least most of the time), not because they are necessary. That doesn't mean geeks are lazy and don't do anything they don't like; I'm just saying that what makes a geek a geek is what he does in his spare time, not what he does for work (unless he genuinely loves his job).
The "oh well its only shared libraries" excuse is just that - an excuse. Admittedly, the fault may not be with the author of the text editor application but more with the hyper-bloated "desktop" that he links to his application -- however, he should be aware of the implication of using those bloated desktop libraries, and probably do a bit more work to avoid their use.
Look at it this way. Let's say you (and everyone else in your community) wanted a way to go across town. You have two choices: you can either build a public transportation medium or even system, or every person can provide their own transportation.
If you want to provide your own transportation, you basically have to start from scratch. If you build a bicycle, that would probably take many hours and something like $50 of parts to build, or maybe $200 or more if you choose to buy a prebuilt one. You could even walk for miles and miles for free if you wanted to.
So once you're done, you'll report to your community "I spent $200 on a bike, and I spent about a month clearing brush and building a road for my route to the other side of the city." Sounds pretty reasonable.
But suppose for a moment the city decided to build a system of roads that everyone can use, and then they even set up a bus or subway for people to commute with. In the end, the project costs, say, $20 million. Ouch.
But let's look at the big picture. Yes, you alone spent only $200 on your bike, but if everyone has to do that, and you have, say, 100,000 people in your city, that's $20 million in bikes. Plus, you have to clear brush every time you want to go to a different place.
Now, I'm not trying to take my analogy too far, but if we had a 'ps' for this city, it would ask a given citizen, "How much did it cost for you to get across town?" and he would say "$200" in the first city and "$20 million" if he lived in the second.
This is why shared libraries aren't just an "excuse." To get a simple GUI text editor running, it takes a *lot* of software. You have to have a basic C (or other language) library, a windowing system, a window manager, and widget toolkit before you can even start on the actual text editor code. Your suggestion is that everyone write their own libraries for their own programs, so that they can say "hey! my text editor takes only 500 KB of memory." I'm sure that if you wrote your own specialized C library, windowing system, and widget toolkit for your own text editor, it would show up smaller on ps than Kedit. But no one will want to use your program or your libraries because your libraries will only work for your program. That means your program can't interoperate with any other software because they're all using different libraries, and when they want to run other software, they will have to run a completely different windowing system and widget toolkit. Plus, they will run out of memory very quickly because they will have thirty different programs doing the same task (windowing) by themselves inside their own memory.
Code reuse isn't an "excuse for bloatware." It's an effective way to avoid reinventing the wheel and not having thirty different wheels spinning when one will suffice. Shared libraries help make RAM use more efficient, make programmers more efficient, and help make users more efficient through a consistent interface. I'd rather use 25 MB once for 30 different programs than use 30 programs that each use 5 MB, and I definitely would never want to write the latter.
If you sort by PID or process name or something else less volatile than CPU percentages, the processes all stay in the same place in top, too. However, if you're looking for programs that are using a lot of CPU over time, it's probably worth sorting by cumulative CPU time instead.
:-) Thanks for the tip!
I stand corrected.
So, people don't know how to interpret the output of ps? And that's a Slashdot frontpage story?
Slashdot isn't only about breaking tech news; it's about keeping geeks generally informed. Many Linux geeks (including myself) probably learned something from the article that they didn't know. It's a well-written, informative article, and I'm glad Slashdot posted it because otherwise I probably would have never seen it. Not every Slashdotter already knows everything there is to know about Linux like you apparently do, and I imagine this isn't quite "common knowledge," so it's helpful for some of us.
What have I done wrong in my settings to deserve such trivial items?
No one forced you to click on "Read More." Sorry that you wasted a couple seconds reading the summary and realizing you already knew all about ps, but you didn't need to waste even more of your time trolling.
Something will bog down my machine, I will run 'top' and discover that no process is using more than 10% of the available resources. OK, so why is my machine bogging?
The "feature" that I find annoying about top, though it's really rather necessary for a CLI program, is that only the most CPU-intensive programs at a given instant get to the top. This isn't a problem with truly CPU-intensive programs that are constantly running. But all too often there's a program that's spiking to 30% or more CPU intermittently, and so the program might flash at the top every now and then, but for the most part it's low on the list where you can't see it. I'm not saying that top is bad, it's a very nice command line tool that works well; I'm just saying that the CLI has its limitations, and thus top does too. I find that KSysGuard works pretty well for this, since the processes all stay in the same place, and you can see when a process flashes %40 or whatever in the CPU column, and then kill it. You can use ps for this as well to an extent, but it's much harder (hit ps over and over and scroll up (or worse, use 'less' or 'more') to see how much CPU is being used by each process).
Why don't we throw the modifier of "every *compotent* computer scientist knows how to do the mundane tasks" into your original statement.
Sure. I'm sure there are incompetent people in computer science, like any other field. Obviously I mean that people who know about the ideas behind computers are also familiar with "mundane tasks," not people who don't know anything.
Support staff, from the lowest level of the help desk to the highest level of systems administration, have the same love of computers that that coders have.
Let me clarify a little. By "tech support" I was referring to the types of people described in the article. These are people who know how to run anti-virus programs, connect you to the Internet, how to set up a LAN, etc., and they help their clients (these celebrities) with these tasks. If this is the extent of their "love of computers," I would hardly call them nerdy. The analog of computer nerd for cars would be the engineers that work for auto companies to design new vehicles. The analog of these tech support is the driver's ed instructor or perhaps a chauffeur. A chauffeur may have to become familiar with how to operate a car, but besides having to learn how to operate slightly different cars, he's not interested in gaining a lot of knowledge about cars. A driver's ed instructor may know how to drive, and he might have to learn new stuff if traffic laws change.
What separates the chauffeur from the engineer? The engineer truly loves technology, wants to learn more about it whenever he can, and if possible apply new knowledge in designing new vehicles. The chauffeur drives because he has to earn a living, not because it's intellectually stimulating. That's not to say that a chauffeur might not be a nerd in his spare time, if for whatever reason he didn't get a "nerdy" job. He might be building cars and car parts in his garage, which would make him an exception. What I'm talking about is the chauffeur who does his job, goes home, and has nothing more to do with cars.
The same applies to some guy who gets hired to connect Bono's XBox. If he's nerdy, he'll find plugging in a few color-coded cables rather uninteresting. He'd be more interested in how the circuits of the XBox operate, or perhaps in how games are written for the XBox, and if he could, he would try writing his own simple games for XBox.
I know people who think that they are "computer geeks" because they can install Firefox, play video games, play D&D, and can run antivirus programs on their friends' computers, even though they never want to actually learn something about hardware or programming; such pseudo-nerds are usually satisfied just playing video-games. These people can do tech support quite well, and often they get tech support jobs. That doesn't make them incompetent tech support; it just doesn't make them nerds. Nerds don't just want to know how to install a hard drive or reinstall their operating system. They want to know how their hard drives and operating systems really work, and they'll probably be interested in trying their hands at building at least simple hardware or software. If tech support people also share this interest, but just don't do it for a living, then of course they're nerds. All I'm saying is that being on tech support doesn't automatically qualify you as being very geeky.
CS tends to deal more with the code and mathematics/science behind the code (not pretty)
What do you mean "not pretty?" That's really the only "pretty" thing about computers: the neat ideas behind them that make them tick. As you said, every computer scientist knows to do the mundane tasks of computers (how to run an anti-virus program, how to set up an email program, etc.) because it goes with what they do; but such plumbing jobs aren't pretty and they aren't why true geeks really like computers. Yes, tech support people don't need to learn CS or how to write software. That's why tech support people simply aren't that nerdy.
Am I the only one who read the title to this article and though this would be about space and tech support?
Nope, I thought exactly the same thing.
Tell me again... why do taxpayer dollars have to pay for security at this game? Let the NFL pay for their own damn security. Or is the NFL technically a "foreign country"?
To the extent that the government shouldn't be involved in doing special favors for various private interests, I agree with you. However, the job of Homeland Security isn't just to protect public buildings (the White House, Capitol, etc.); it's to protect the *public*, no matter where the public is. The police provide security for political party conventions, for example, because some of the public is there, and they are definitely a target. The federal government provides security at airports because a lot of the public flies, even though everyone flies on private airlines. Today, the government provides security for lots of skyscrapers in cities, even though most of them house private, corporate offices (the World Trade Center did).
The government will provide security, at least in theory (and the public should make sure it happens in practice), to whoever needs it, whether it's the NFL or anyone else. If you decide to have a large gathering of people that should be considered a terrorist target, Homeland Security is supposed to be there to protect you, even though your gathering may not be a public function, because A) terrorists do not only want to attack government targets (as 9/11 demonstrated) and B) it is good for society if large gatherings of people can happen without being completely vulnerable to attack.
Thanks for the link to that very interesting article.
That said, I think that following the shuttle group's practices is only a good idea up to a point. As the end of the article says, such a methodical, careful process is very expensive in terms of both time and money. For stuff that must absolutely, never ever fail (like the shuttle) this is is appropriate. But almost no software lives under such requirements. I'd rather have, say, a full-featured media player that can play lots of formats and has lots of features that might crash every now and then, than a program that plays a single WAV file every time without fail.
Now, the submitter's program probably falls somewhere in between. People aren't going to die if his program fails, but crashes will be significantly more costly than having to double click your media player launcher. The article suggests he's working on this project alone, so having a whole other team looking over and testing his code probably is impractical, but if possible some kind of peer-review would probably help. Maybe blueprinting how the program works would be a good idea, and definitely having some kind of database on the code, i.e. version control like Subversion, is practically necessary for almost any major software project.
The reason why programmers perhaps aren't as rigorous as other kinds of engineers in their design is because software is much easier to modify and fix (usually). If you're an architect building a building, you can't just move a beam from here to there, "recompile," and see what happens. In software, you can usually make a change, rebuild it, and try it out within a matter of seconds; that's that's rare if possible at all in other possible. An exception to this is the shuttle group, since they get only one shot.
Anyways, all I'm saying is that programmers are generally sloppy because they can get away with it. This particular group can't, so they are very careful. The submitter can learn some from the group, but their methods shouldn't be seen as the holy grail of software development.
Nobody arrested them "when they showed up," even though, as we later found out, several of them were already known to law enforcement as being "up to no good."
I think it's you who is missing the whole point. There were lots of failures by the government to prevent 9/11. Checking IDs isn't effective if other parts of law enforcement aren't effective; it depends on the people at the airport being able to find out if the passengers are on law enforcement's "radar." Obviously that capability wasn't in place at the time. If it had been, 9/11 might have been prevented.
So, I am not saying that checking IDs alone is effective. I'm saying that 1) checking IDs, 2) collecting intelligence on suspected terrorists, and 3) having a way at the airport to check whether a passenger is a suspected terrorist is effective. This is what the whole no-fly list is all about. Obviously doing those steps in isolation is pointless. Together however, it's quite obvious why it would make aircraft more secure.
With the amount of attacks against the free market in the form of intellectual monopoly 'property', that freedom of the market doesnt appear to be very revered or holy.
For whatever reason, some Slashdotters seem to believe that "free market" means "no regulation at all."
Events like the 1929 crash, Enron, and others have shown that capitalism can fail without a referree. In the case of Enron, the company had an agreement with the shareholders: you buy our shares, we give you dividends, voting power, and accurate information about the company. The Enron executives broke that agreement with accounting shenanigans. The lesson was that someone (the SEC) needs to better police what companies are reporting to the public.
Similarly, an economy based on financial incentive for intellectual work (whether it's software, music, movies or books) depends on an agreement between the author and the customer. The author sells access to the work to the customer, and the customer agrees not to distribute copies to other customers without permission. Because this agreement is so common, the government provides a standard called copyright so that we don't have to read and sign a lengthy legal agreement everytime we buy a copyrighted book or music CD. All we have to do is learn how copyright works once, and then we know that everything with "©" falls under that standard agreement.
You call copyright a "monopoly." In one sense, yes it's a monopoly; when you copyright your work, you can exclusive control over it. On the other hand, if I go buy a plot of land, you might also consider that a "monopoly" because I have gained exclusive control over it. If anything, the monopoly you get over land is worse than the monopoly of copyright; there is only so much land on the planet, while there's an essentially unlimited expanse of possible creative works you can create and copyright.
So yes, you gain a monopoly under copyright over *your own work*, just like when you buy physical property you gain a monopoly over it. But if I write a song and copyright it, that in no way prevents you from writing your own song. In a monopoly, the monopolist prevents competition by becoming the only significant seller in a market. By your logic, Ford is a monopolist because it is the only seller of Ford vehicles. That's a completely oversimplified and narrow view. Ford is not a monopolist because there are many competing auto manufacturers, all of which are the only sellers of their own cars.
So, the entire point of copyright is to let authors require customers to pay a fee as compensation for their work. Without copyright, authors would no longer be able to require these fees and would thus become dependent on donations for compensation.
I love open source, and I am in no way saying that proprietary software, music, etc. is necessarily the best way to create work. I'm also not saying that copyright hasn't been misused or that there are no problems with copyright law. But this claim that somehow the basic idea behind copyright is "anti-free market" is really silly. Copyright is nothing more than an economic agreement between two parties that has been standardized by the government because it's so ubiquitous. If copyright is anti-free market, so is any contract between two parties that prevents them from doing whatever they please. Free markets depend on such contracts, one of them being copyright.
The sad part of this is it's because investors weren't happy with profits being up "only" 82%. They had expected more. So they sold.
Is the stock market full of asshats or what?
No, what you forget is that stock prices are determined by how valuable people think the shares are. If I expect profits to be up, say, 90%, I might be willing to buy shares for $450 each, but if I expect them to be up 82%, I might only be willing to pay $400 per share. So, if my expectation of 90% growth isn't met, but I've already bought my $450 shares, I may sell to cut my losses before others sell.
Look at it this way: "only" 82% profit is a lot of growth, but the stock price has also gone up a lot over the past year. The market made a wrong prediction on how Google would do, so it corrected for its excess-enthusiasm for Google. Even if the stock price had gone up to "only" $390, it would still have increased enormously.
i was not sure why would you need it if you use amarok - but that's for their streams, right ?
;)
Yes, that's their streaming service.
i think somewhere on this same thread was also information about last.fm removing normal streams and perl script to listen to the music in normal players again
I'm sure that is completely possible, since the player is GPLed. The player already has a capability to stream from your local system, and you can listen to the stream from another media player, though it seems to have problems on my system.
So far, the balance of the comments seem to be in favour, or at least neutral to the idea of implementing Linux within a device that will no doubt end up killing a good few people. In contrast, should Linux ever be used for DRMs, which have, as far as I know, not killed anyone, most people here would be up in arms, if the recent story on GPL and the DRM is to be taken as a guide.
First of all, basically everyone recognizes the right of the military to use Linux; heck, anyone, whether good or evil, has an equal right to use it. So no one disputes that Linux can be used for DRM (after all, Linux is (and always will be, according to Linus) under GPL 2, not 3).
Second, whether or not you agree with the wars the military is currently fighting, as long as you recognize that military force is necessary in *some* cases and can do in *some* situations, you can see a good use for this technology. On the other hand, many Slashdotters probably see no "good" use for DRM. Personally, I see it as more of a nuisance than anything ethically wrong (you're not forced to use it if you don't want to), but the main point is that it will always be futile. If the data is there, in some form, unless the manufacturer/content provider/software developer is in complete, absolute control of what the user is using to access the data, there will always be some person who cracks the DRM. Unfortunately for the copyright holders, it's a pointless endeavor.
Overall, I see DRM on Linux as making life for us Linux users a little harder and annoying. That said, if some kind of open source DRM is developed so that we can use DRMed media without much hassle, that's great. So in a nutshell, DRM is a waste of time, but DRM development on Linux might mean we have to waste less of our time working around a proprietary DRM.
Why not just release it from a country with saner ip laws that allow reverse-enigineering made by a single person?
I should have also mentioned in my previous reply that there is some reasonable logic for the US rules about reverse-engineering. In the US, the reverse-engineer has to examine whatever is being reverse-engineered and then write documentation on how they think it works. Then, a "clean" engineer has to try to implement a system based on the documentation. The reason for this is that if the same person who is writing the documentation gets to write the implementation, that person is very tempted to simply copy directly from the original implementation, which would be a violation of copyright law. The separation eliminates this temptation, thereby keeping the reverse-engineered copy (hopefully) free of copyright conflicts.
Why not just release it from a country with saner ip laws that allow reverse-enigineering made by a single person?
Because then people from other countries can't use it. In fact, it makes sense to have the work done according to the most "strict" reverse-engineering rules.
Go here. You should download the program on the right, the Last.fm player. (You can compile from source if you want, but you'll need Qt4, so unless you already have that, save yourself hours of downloading and compiling.) That program sort of works as your "radio" and plays songs it thinks you will like.
Could it be that everyone using Firefox switched to Seamonkey?
Probably not, but it may be that some Firefox users are going to other non-IE browsers. I've switched from Firefox to Konqueror, mainly because of its KDE integration and file browsing capabilities. Maybe others are doing the same?