Well written and very insightful except for one thing...the guy really was trolling.
Ever heard of the principle of non-resistance? If he really was trolling then my post will affect him more than it could affect anyone else.
I don't really think he was. I think he made an emotional outburst reflecting his view of an unpleasant (but improving) situation. That can seem like trolling especially when it turns into a big story (among techies anyway) like this did. But I don't claim to know his heart and I could be wrong, in which case the above applies.
Don't know, but to most people, math seems to be nothing more than "money see, monkey do". Understanding never comes into it.
Public schooling was never intended to encourage curiosity and deep understanding. People like that would be too difficult to manipulate via advertising, PR, carefully cherry-picked news, and other forms of propaganda. No one in politics or business wants that.
disagree: mocking people for making mistakes that they should know better is a way to help that person permanently try harder to avoid those mistakes in the future.
with failure, comes mockery, especially if you are skilled and it should never have happened.
mistakes can't go unpunished, even if the person doing the punishing is yourself, you can't tell other people to back off, you deserve it, sit back and take it on the chin and try harder next time otherwise people won't have any reason to try, because the penalty for failure is barely noticeable.
That's the old-school view, in which one's self-esteem is based on achievement of some kind. Those who achieve little or nothing had low self-esteem and this was a principal incentive to identify one's own weaknesses and overcome them with directed effort. The extreme form is Japanese students throwing themselves off buildings (etc.) because their grades didn't quite measure up, making them nobodies.
The newer view is that everyone is a special snowflake. No matter what. The extreme form is shown by the public schools that play soccer without keeping score, because scoring implies winners and losers and that might hurt someone's feelings.
I mostly agree with you in that actions have consequences and you should accept the consequences of your own actions. Otherwise nothing really matters and there is no reason to improve yourself and you turn into one of these "perpetual victims" who never take responsibility for anything while simultaneously wondering why nothing ever changes. But that should be tempered with the fact that some mistakes are much more preventable (less understandable) than others, and as Orlando Battista once said, an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
There's no reason to metaphorically crucify someone for an honest mistake, but certainly there is going to be a reaction to it and people aren't going to like it. That's to be expected. It's reasonable to expect someone to accept that and yes, it is an incentive to learn something from the experience and be more careful in the future. If I were a programmer and found that completely unacceptable, I could always choose not to work on such an important project critical to the security of so many.
As an aside: I think replying to you is much more edifying than being like the cowards who modded you down to -1 without once putting forth their own viewpoint which they clearly think is superior. There's too much of that going on at this site. There is no "-1 Disagree" mod for a reason.
As for why so many bugs, "so many eyes" only works if you still have tons of people actively participating in the project's development. At a glance, it seems like the OpenBSD guys are saying the OpenSSL project was getting stale. Stale projects do not have anywhere near as many eyes going through their code nor as many people actively looking for potential bugs to fix before they get reported in the wild.
Yes the "logic" used by many in this thread is specious at best.
Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.
Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false. Herp derp.
Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.
Conclusion: some people dislike Open Source for ideological reasons and saw this as a chance to take cheap shots at it and show everyone how clever they are... and failed because of faulty reasoning. Just like what you see in politics - if you happen not to like something, it must be BAD!! and cannot possibly have merits that you simply don't value.
I know this is an old thread... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.
I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.
If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.
What if your concept of absolute determinism as implied here is actually not absolute and has limitations?
Then it wouldn't be Conway's Game of Life, would it?
A person or two mentioned Conway's Game of Life. Unless I specifically say so, I am not binding myself to only mentioning that one thing and never moving on to any related ideas which happen to be outside its scope. And I didn't specifically say so. Therefore I see no value in pointing that out.
This is probably more than just shit-slinging. The more reasons they have to create more paperwork and more time in court for an individual plaintiff, the more money it costs on both sides in legal fees. How much would it cost in legal fees to fight the validity of just this point of the EULA? They don't care if they lose the individual battle, they have much deeper pockets for legal fees than an individual, or even a class in a class-action lawsuit, so delaying and/or running the plaintiff out of money means winning the war.
Am I the only one who thinks the entire notion of a "class-action lawsuit" was a bad idea?
If a company materially harms 250,000 individuals, let them defend against 250,000 individual lawsuits. That would be a massive disincentive against harming people. Having to pay lawyers for that many separate lawsuits would be a lot more like the predicament (during a standard isolated case) of the one individual trying to have a legal battle against a huge multination corporation. Seems fair to me.
Plus in many class-action lawsuits, only the lawyers really win. The former customers might get a $10 coupon or something like that.
They're different. You're actually signing (or clicking through) something with them. This sounds like they're trying to say if you like them on Facebook (no EULA pops up when you like something) that you can never sue them. This will never stand up in court.
Is there any chance that the lawyers who knowingly and intentionally come up with such ideas and try to implement them could be disbarred? Few measures would more effectively discourage the practice.
It's no less trifling than the average Slashdot user obsessing over what operating system/software people choose to use.
The difference being, there is some chance the Slashdot user was actually involved in producing that software (or has enough expertise to competently discuss its merits and faults). There's also a chance they're responding to people who chose to use shoddy software when better alternatives were available, and are now complaining about the results.
A personal file server doesn't offer anything in the way of backup.
That depends on where it's located.
If you took it upon yourself to assume "right next to the machine being backed up" or "running on the same machine to be backed up" then don't ascribe to me your own assumption. It was no accident or omission that I said no such things.
It's also impractical for someone who doesn't have a system that runs 24/7.
Right, just like a pilot's license is useless to someone with no access to an aircraft. Personally I deal with that by running the file server 24/7. When you enable various power management options and have a clue about SSH and your favorite shell, it's really not a problem. If that doesn't describe you, find another solution. Simple and much more productive than complaining that there is no Final Ultimate Answer that is 100% suitable for all people at all times.
Intel-powered Android tablets can run almost all Android-ARM apps. Those that are native ARM apps are handled through binary translation. It works very well. I've used a Dell Venue 8 (Intel CloverTrail+ Android) and did not find any apps that wouldn't run just fine.
Is that done in hardware? Is there a performance penalty?
A related question about the programs you tried: were these computationally intensive games, or things like office apps and file managers?
Try SpiderOak. Free 2 GB, zero-knowledge, secure. Works on a load of OSs and devices.
I'm a completely satisfied customer.
Or... get a free dynamic DNS hostname (there are still plenty available) and take a few minutes to learn about SSH/SFTP (and SSHGuard if you are using passwords) and set up your own personal file server. It doesn't have to allow shell access.
Now the companies can do whatever they want because you did the little bit of learning it took not to care.
Not if he gave them free willl, meaning even the ability to do things that were "outside" of the creator's will/temperament.
Can you explain what that means within the context of "THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES", please? Because otherwise you are making zero sense whatsoever.
It makes perfect sense. What if your concept of absolute determinism as implied here is actually not absolute and has limitations? That's what he was saying, at least as I understood it. That would mean that some subset of everything would be steady, regular, unpredictable, and unsurprising. The rest wouldn't.
An analogy could be a program that takes certain actions based on the output of a high-quality random number generator of some kind. The compiled program code itself is completely deterministic, behaving as designed each time it is run. The randomness adds an unpredictable element; it determines which of the predetermined (that is, available or achievable) outcomes actually ends up happening. You can't break fundamental rules of physics but plenty of other things could play out in myriad ways.
The only people surprised by Snowden's leaks were people who had a false sense of security.
... caused by a false belief in an inherent benevolence of government, compounded by this denial-apathy thing concerning the casual lies coming from every major institution and corporation on a regular basis.
If you imagine for a moment that there were aliens observing the earth, you could not blame them for refusing to initiate first contact.
I fall into that category. In fact, I'm quite proud to be part of the white noise NSA has to filter out to get at the good stuff - as long as my only foibles are those which NSA doesn't really care about, that is...
... and as long as that never changes in the future, and nothing you do today that is considered harmless enough is later perceived to be suspicious.
You don't pay for a subscription to reward the editors. You do it because occasionally someone will say something so insightful you want to review everything else he's ever written here.
But your payment does reward the company and its staff. There is no way around that. They don't deserve it, their shoddy work hasn't earned it, and no fringe benefit of extra database access is enough to convince me otherwise.
Your value system may vary. I for one was speaking for myself.
How would [providing third-party updates to Windows XP components] be different from (i.e. less legitimate than) publishing a device driver, AV suite, or other system-level software?
Device drivers, antivirus suites, and the like don't need to replace Windows system files with fixed versions of the same code to function. Windows updates do. And because they'd be providing versions of the same (Microsoft) code without the permission of the owner of copyright in that code, they would likely infringe* Microsoft's copyright.
* Slashdot posts aren't Legal Advice(tm).
It wouldn't be possible to provide only a binary patch that contains just the modifications to said files? That would also infringe copyright?
"As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'
what on earth does that sentence mean? this is even worse than Timothy's earlier oversight of re-running the same article less than a week after its first run. we know slashdot doesn't pay editors to edit, but could they at least show enough pride in their job to read what they post?
This kind of poor quality work is what long ago dissuaded me from ever paying for a Slashdot subscription. I block ads, too, since before my karma level gave me the option of having Slashdot do it for me. That was all before Malda sold out to Dice Holdings. It's not improved since.
Seriously? Nobody even bothered to read the first sentence of the submission?
Apparently lots of people did and are also griping about it. Are Slashdot "editors" capable of feeling embarassment?
Back to the discussion...
Since Microsoft clearly intends to create a disparity, there will certainly be those who defy it. What will Microsoft do to prevent bootleg patches of XP from being sold to the unwashed masses? How will they stop China from supporting 100 million bootleg XP users? And how easily will it be to crack Microsoft's controls? How big will the Windows XP patch market be?
Unless these third-party patch vendors are claiming to be Microsoft then they're not in any way "bootleg". If Microsoft no longer wants to do this but someone else does, what's the problem? How would this be different from (i.e. less legitimate than) publishing a device driver, AV suite, or other system-level software?
Do the submitter and "editor" not understand what the word "bootleg" means, or is there a real problem here I'm just not seeing?
Of course Obama has pushed EOs further then any of his predecessors. He has directly modified obamacare without any legal basis. Gonna suck for the Ds when the shoe is on the other foot.
Yes I am sure they'll put on a nice show and make a phony speech or two against it. Truth is, the corporate sponsors, bankers, and financiers who own both parties will be pleased and they're the ones who matter.
Substitute "blacks", "gays", or "Jews" for "Libertarians" and you will understand the way you sound.
It's the typical pattern. Hate someone for being different from yourself, then go back and act like every one of them harmed you in some way that justifies it.
There's plenty of sites that require you to give them CC info even when they're (supposedly) not charging you for anything. Often claimed to be a form of adult verification (and thus unsurprisingly mostly a tactic of adult sites) which is absolutely stupid since you can get a CC well before 18 in many jurisdictions so on top of being invasive and probably untrustworthy, it couldn't possibly even accomplish the claimed purpose.
I'm ignorant about the back-end of credit card systems, so this raises a couple of questions for me.
While you can get a CC under the age of 18, doesn't the credit card issuer have information like your date of birth? Can merchants request this information if they can uniquely identify the account (by the CC number and expiration date, say)?
Slashdot Mirror
Well written and very insightful except for one thing...the guy really was trolling.
Ever heard of the principle of non-resistance? If he really was trolling then my post will affect him more than it could affect anyone else.
I don't really think he was. I think he made an emotional outburst reflecting his view of an unpleasant (but improving) situation. That can seem like trolling especially when it turns into a big story (among techies anyway) like this did. But I don't claim to know his heart and I could be wrong, in which case the above applies.
Don't know, but to most people, math seems to be nothing more than "money see, monkey do". Understanding never comes into it.
Public schooling was never intended to encourage curiosity and deep understanding. People like that would be too difficult to manipulate via advertising, PR, carefully cherry-picked news, and other forms of propaganda. No one in politics or business wants that.
disagree: mocking people for making mistakes that they should know better is a way to help that person permanently try harder to avoid those mistakes in the future.
with failure, comes mockery, especially if you are skilled and it should never have happened.
mistakes can't go unpunished, even if the person doing the punishing is yourself, you can't tell other people to back off, you deserve it, sit back and take it on the chin and try harder next time otherwise people won't have any reason to try, because the penalty for failure is barely noticeable.
That's the old-school view, in which one's self-esteem is based on achievement of some kind. Those who achieve little or nothing had low self-esteem and this was a principal incentive to identify one's own weaknesses and overcome them with directed effort. The extreme form is Japanese students throwing themselves off buildings (etc.) because their grades didn't quite measure up, making them nobodies.
The newer view is that everyone is a special snowflake. No matter what. The extreme form is shown by the public schools that play soccer without keeping score, because scoring implies winners and losers and that might hurt someone's feelings.
I mostly agree with you in that actions have consequences and you should accept the consequences of your own actions. Otherwise nothing really matters and there is no reason to improve yourself and you turn into one of these "perpetual victims" who never take responsibility for anything while simultaneously wondering why nothing ever changes. But that should be tempered with the fact that some mistakes are much more preventable (less understandable) than others, and as Orlando Battista once said, an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
There's no reason to metaphorically crucify someone for an honest mistake, but certainly there is going to be a reaction to it and people aren't going to like it. That's to be expected. It's reasonable to expect someone to accept that and yes, it is an incentive to learn something from the experience and be more careful in the future. If I were a programmer and found that completely unacceptable, I could always choose not to work on such an important project critical to the security of so many.
As an aside: I think replying to you is much more edifying than being like the cowards who modded you down to -1 without once putting forth their own viewpoint which they clearly think is superior. There's too much of that going on at this site. There is no "-1 Disagree" mod for a reason.
As for why so many bugs, "so many eyes" only works if you still have tons of people actively participating in the project's development. At a glance, it seems like the OpenBSD guys are saying the OpenSSL project was getting stale. Stale projects do not have anywhere near as many eyes going through their code nor as many people actively looking for potential bugs to fix before they get reported in the wild.
Yes the "logic" used by many in this thread is specious at best.
... and failed because of faulty reasoning. Just like what you see in politics - if you happen not to like something, it must be BAD!! and cannot possibly have merits that you simply don't value.
Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.
Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false. Herp derp.
Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.
Conclusion: some people dislike Open Source for ideological reasons and saw this as a chance to take cheap shots at it and show everyone how clever they are
I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.
I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.
If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.
Welcome to the Internet.
Then it wouldn't be Conway's Game of Life, would it?
A person or two mentioned Conway's Game of Life. Unless I specifically say so, I am not binding myself to only mentioning that one thing and never moving on to any related ideas which happen to be outside its scope. And I didn't specifically say so. Therefore I see no value in pointing that out.
This is probably more than just shit-slinging. The more reasons they have to create more paperwork and more time in court for an individual plaintiff, the more money it costs on both sides in legal fees. How much would it cost in legal fees to fight the validity of just this point of the EULA? They don't care if they lose the individual battle, they have much deeper pockets for legal fees than an individual, or even a class in a class-action lawsuit, so delaying and/or running the plaintiff out of money means winning the war.
Am I the only one who thinks the entire notion of a "class-action lawsuit" was a bad idea?
If a company materially harms 250,000 individuals, let them defend against 250,000 individual lawsuits. That would be a massive disincentive against harming people. Having to pay lawyers for that many separate lawsuits would be a lot more like the predicament (during a standard isolated case) of the one individual trying to have a legal battle against a huge multination corporation. Seems fair to me.
Plus in many class-action lawsuits, only the lawyers really win. The former customers might get a $10 coupon or something like that.
They're different. You're actually signing (or clicking through) something with them. This sounds like they're trying to say if you like them on Facebook (no EULA pops up when you like something) that you can never sue them. This will never stand up in court.
Is there any chance that the lawyers who knowingly and intentionally come up with such ideas and try to implement them could be disbarred? Few measures would more effectively discourage the practice.
It's no less trifling than the average Slashdot user obsessing over what operating system/software people choose to use.
The difference being, there is some chance the Slashdot user was actually involved in producing that software (or has enough expertise to competently discuss its merits and faults). There's also a chance they're responding to people who chose to use shoddy software when better alternatives were available, and are now complaining about the results.
A personal file server doesn't offer anything in the way of backup.
That depends on where it's located.
If you took it upon yourself to assume "right next to the machine being backed up" or "running on the same machine to be backed up" then don't ascribe to me your own assumption. It was no accident or omission that I said no such things.
It's also impractical for someone who doesn't have a system that runs 24/7.
Right, just like a pilot's license is useless to someone with no access to an aircraft. Personally I deal with that by running the file server 24/7. When you enable various power management options and have a clue about SSH and your favorite shell, it's really not a problem. If that doesn't describe you, find another solution. Simple and much more productive than complaining that there is no Final Ultimate Answer that is 100% suitable for all people at all times.
Intel-powered Android tablets can run almost all Android-ARM apps. Those that are native ARM apps are handled through binary translation. It works very well. I've used a Dell Venue 8 (Intel CloverTrail+ Android) and did not find any apps that wouldn't run just fine.
Is that done in hardware? Is there a performance penalty?
A related question about the programs you tried: were these computationally intensive games, or things like office apps and file managers?
Try SpiderOak. Free 2 GB, zero-knowledge, secure. Works on a load of OSs and devices. I'm a completely satisfied customer.
Or ... get a free dynamic DNS hostname (there are still plenty available) and take a few minutes to learn about SSH/SFTP (and SSHGuard if you are using passwords) and set up your own personal file server. It doesn't have to allow shell access.
Now the companies can do whatever they want because you did the little bit of learning it took not to care.
Not if he gave them free willl, meaning even the ability to do things that were "outside" of the creator's will/temperament.
Can you explain what that means within the context of "THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES", please? Because otherwise you are making zero sense whatsoever.
It makes perfect sense. What if your concept of absolute determinism as implied here is actually not absolute and has limitations? That's what he was saying, at least as I understood it. That would mean that some subset of everything would be steady, regular, unpredictable, and unsurprising. The rest wouldn't.
An analogy could be a program that takes certain actions based on the output of a high-quality random number generator of some kind. The compiled program code itself is completely deterministic, behaving as designed each time it is run. The randomness adds an unpredictable element; it determines which of the predetermined (that is, available or achievable) outcomes actually ends up happening. You can't break fundamental rules of physics but plenty of other things could play out in myriad ways.
The only people surprised by Snowden's leaks were people who had a false sense of security.
... caused by a false belief in an inherent benevolence of government, compounded by this denial-apathy thing concerning the casual lies coming from every major institution and corporation on a regular basis.
If you imagine for a moment that there were aliens observing the earth, you could not blame them for refusing to initiate first contact.
I fall into that category. In fact, I'm quite proud to be part of the white noise NSA has to filter out to get at the good stuff - as long as my only foibles are those which NSA doesn't really care about, that is...
... and as long as that never changes in the future, and nothing you do today that is considered harmless enough is later perceived to be suspicious.
It wouldn't be possible to provide only a binary patch that contains just the modifications to said files? That would also infringe copyright?
That depends on how a particular judge decides to apply precedents related to Apple v. Psystar.
Considering how *ahem* clear and reasonable copyright law has always been, perhaps I can understand why someone might not be eager to do this...
You don't pay for a subscription to reward the editors. You do it because occasionally someone will say something so insightful you want to review everything else he's ever written here.
But your payment does reward the company and its staff. There is no way around that. They don't deserve it, their shoddy work hasn't earned it, and no fringe benefit of extra database access is enough to convince me otherwise.
Your value system may vary. I for one was speaking for myself.
How would [providing third-party updates to Windows XP components] be different from (i.e. less legitimate than) publishing a device driver, AV suite, or other system-level software?
Device drivers, antivirus suites, and the like don't need to replace Windows system files with fixed versions of the same code to function. Windows updates do. And because they'd be providing versions of the same (Microsoft) code without the permission of the owner of copyright in that code, they would likely infringe* Microsoft's copyright.
* Slashdot posts aren't Legal Advice(tm).
It wouldn't be possible to provide only a binary patch that contains just the modifications to said files? That would also infringe copyright?
"As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'
what on earth does that sentence mean? this is even worse than Timothy's earlier oversight of re-running the same article less than a week after its first run. we know slashdot doesn't pay editors to edit, but could they at least show enough pride in their job to read what they post?
This kind of poor quality work is what long ago dissuaded me from ever paying for a Slashdot subscription. I block ads, too, since before my karma level gave me the option of having Slashdot do it for me. That was all before Malda sold out to Dice Holdings. It's not improved since.
Seriously? Nobody even bothered to read the first sentence of the submission?
Apparently lots of people did and are also griping about it. Are Slashdot "editors" capable of feeling embarassment?
Back to the discussion...
Since Microsoft clearly intends to create a disparity, there will certainly be those who defy it. What will Microsoft do to prevent bootleg patches of XP from being sold to the unwashed masses? How will they stop China from supporting 100 million bootleg XP users? And how easily will it be to crack Microsoft's controls? How big will the Windows XP patch market be?
Unless these third-party patch vendors are claiming to be Microsoft then they're not in any way "bootleg". If Microsoft no longer wants to do this but someone else does, what's the problem? How would this be different from (i.e. less legitimate than) publishing a device driver, AV suite, or other system-level software?
Do the submitter and "editor" not understand what the word "bootleg" means, or is there a real problem here I'm just not seeing?
Of course Obama has pushed EOs further then any of his predecessors. He has directly modified obamacare without any legal basis. Gonna suck for the Ds when the shoe is on the other foot.
Yes I am sure they'll put on a nice show and make a phony speech or two against it. Truth is, the corporate sponsors, bankers, and financiers who own both parties will be pleased and they're the ones who matter.
Substitute "blacks", "gays", or "Jews" for "Libertarians" and you will understand the way you sound.
It's the typical pattern. Hate someone for being different from yourself, then go back and act like every one of them harmed you in some way that justifies it.
Sometimes an issue raised by a single company is bigger than that one company.
There are lots and lots of privacy concerns on the Internet.
There's plenty of sites that require you to give them CC info even when they're (supposedly) not charging you for anything. Often claimed to be a form of adult verification (and thus unsurprisingly mostly a tactic of adult sites) which is absolutely stupid since you can get a CC well before 18 in many jurisdictions so on top of being invasive and probably untrustworthy, it couldn't possibly even accomplish the claimed purpose.
I'm ignorant about the back-end of credit card systems, so this raises a couple of questions for me.
While you can get a CC under the age of 18, doesn't the credit card issuer have information like your date of birth? Can merchants request this information if they can uniquely identify the account (by the CC number and expiration date, say)?
Or is the whole thing complete bullshit?