where sandwiched in between kneejerk, paranoid ranting articles about encroaching invasions on your privacy, are fawning articles about google doing the SAME DAMN THING
pure blindness and hypocrisy at work on slashdot
Diversity of opinion? NO! That way lies madness!!
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Seriously - it did occur to you that these points of view might be held by different individuals. Didn't it?
Re:Princeton Libraries are NOT FREE.
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
One other thing: The libraries at Princeton are most decidedly NOT free:
Indeed. My mistake. I used a pretty poor example.
To gain admittance, you need to pony up $33,000 in tuition and $11,000 in room and board.
Each year.
Not true. From your own links, the libraries are open to local residents (i.e. non-students) at USD 300 per year, and transferable borrowing cards are available to other universities at a slightly higher than normal rate, but well below the numbers you offer.
Re:Libraries are NOT FREE.
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If they really want mathematics to be "free", then they can post the LaTeX's & the PDF's of these books on the internet for anyone to download, and they can pay for the server disk space & bandwidth THEMSELVES.
In the meantime, they can take their marxist hypocrisy and shove it right up their good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses.
Would these be the same kind of good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses who brought us Special Relativity while working in a lowly position in the Patent Office in Bern? You know, the kind who got together with friends to peruse and discuss the latest freely available scientific texts, the same texts that led him to revolutionise science more than anyone since Newton?
The books in the Princeton Library are free, thanks to the generousity of far-seeing individuals who realised that their money was better spent on a library than a new yacht. They, at least, saw the benefit of sharing knowledge with everyone, regardless of their means. I can only hope that, somewhere in that misanthropic little husk you call a heart, you will some day find room for a similar spirit of openness and sharing.
Nobody really wants ISPs to be common carriers. Part of being a common carrier is that you are required to be content-agnostic. Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc.
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
My point being that they may just buy the computer and not even know that they are using Linux or that it even matters. This doesn't really show that Linux is ready for all the masses, just the ones that buy it in $200 bargain computers for word processing and internet, which is a small representation of Linux on the desktop.
I take your point, but that's borderline circular logic you're using. By your reasoning, one could argue that there are no masses - only many many sub-groups, each of which has particular needs.
The fact of the matter is that Linux is particularly good for a bunch of thin little slices of the group that we, for convenience's sake, call the masses. All it takes is for someone - like, say, WalMart - to decide to take on one niche at a time. Eventually, there's a computer for every need, and each one is running Linux.
If Linux could be said to have a strategy[*], it would be: Take the ground a yard at a time and hold it. From what I've seen, Linux has yet to give ground to any competitor anywhere it's made incursions. While very few people are maniacally plotting World Domination, I think it's inevitable that Linux (in all its hundreds of guises) will become ubiquitous enough to permanently subvert any corporation's lock-in policies before too long.
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[*] Linux doesn't have a strategy, as such, because there's no really no such thing as Linux, per se. There is only a horde of like-minded companies and developers, each of whom has individually decided that this agglomeration of software collectively called Linux scratches their particular itch. One could reasonably argue, however, that this flexibility is exactly what RMS had in mind when the FSF was founded, and that events are proceeding as planned.
Microsofts biggest fear is people will learn that computers don't have to be based on windows. Once that happens, they can't sell licenses to business and government, because the people won't only know windows so the businesses won't get it.
I couldn't agree more. I've written a more extended assessment elsewhere, but it really comes down to this:
Microsoft has no other ambition than blocking access to any other operating system. They want Windows everywhere, all the time. Their entire strategy is contingent on the ubiquity of the Windows platform. The XO laptop is one of the most significant threats to their hegemony, and for once they're forced to fight on someone else's turf. Having to eat crow and announce XP support for the XO laptop is a huge concession to make.
If the standards bodies aren't credible, than the only "standard" that matters is "what's dominant in the marketplace today", and Microsoft has that locked up right now.
This tactic has been used in international negotiations in the past. A certain Last Remaining Superpower (who shall remain nameless) has done this with numerous international committees since about 2000. Even when they have no interest in the outcome of a given bit of work, they insist on joining the group and actively sabotaging it unless it meets their strategic priorities. It's not enough that it has nothing to do with them; unless these groups are actively supporting the Superpower's agenda, they are blocked and frustrated at the procedural level.
It's not inconceivable that MS would use such tactics. But given the circumstances, I'm inclined to say that if that's what they intended, they could have done it much better. Ultimately, though, even I have trouble believing they could have planned such an outcome.
If you catch a large fish, don't eat the whole thing... eat some, and share around to dilute the risk.
Here in the South Pacific, we actually give a little to the nearest dog or cat, then watch them to see if they show any ill effects. Not kind, but better than the alternative, which is months of discomfort and real pain.
People have known this for over 30 years.
I think you mis-spelled '3000'. 8^)
Large fish have higher risk just because they are older.
Not exactly. Large fish are more risky because the poison concentrates in them. This is not necessarily a function of age, but of the fact that tiny fish have tiny concentrations of the toxin. They get eaten by small fish, who develop concentrations orders of magnitude larger, who get eaten by the big ones, who develop really dangerous concentrations.
Note also that this toxin only appears in reef fish. Deep water fish are perfectly safe to eat.
(Robotic Google voice) "May we suggest... Chez Panisse... which is 2.4 miles from your present location, Bill, and 1.3 miles from your present location, Karen. Reservations are available at 7:30 and 7:45 PM. A reservation has been made for you at 7:30. Bill, please turn right on Western. Karen, go 1 mile straight ahead to Central, then turn left on Western. Chez Panisse is at 1540 Western. Have a nice dinner, and thank you for choosing Google for your phone service."
Okay, it's funny, and it's a little scary. But consider that, in a gift economy, this kind of interaction might actually prove beneficial. Imagine, for example, if Chez Panisse actually turned out to be the right place for a date? Bruce Sterling wrote a charming story about this, titled Maneki Neko. While the spectre of Big Brother and Total Information Awareness looms large over any information-based society, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that this power can be used for good as well.
They key to this is to understand one of the second-level effects of the adage 'Information is Power'. As long as nobody gets a stranglehold on the information, it can be used to mitigate and even subvert the efforts of governments and corporate entities to control the message, to tell us how we feel. To the extent that Google is willing to do help with this, I support them.
I'm a long-time lurker who reads this Slashdot site assiduously. The pro-Microsoft astroturfing started very suddenly and all at once at a very defineable time (I didn't log the exact date, but it was a year or two ago, very noticeable, an almost overnight change). There is no doubt whatsoever that it is a *very* calculated move... one so calculated, that on the contrary, rather than seeming "conspiratorial," the odds are extremly doubtful that it isn't precipitated by the organization itself.
Yep, it's possible to pick out the talking points that the astro-turfers get handed for a particular topic. A few old chestnuts:
'Damned if they do, damned if they don't.' (Hypocrites pick on MS when it doesn't do something, then pick on it again when it does.)
'Slashbot', 'groupthink' and 'fanboi'. (This last one has unfortunately got some traction among the rest of the community.)
Testimonials: 'I administer Linux systems, but $WINDOWS is my desktop of choice....', 'I love Mac/Linux, but....'
Linux doesn't support X, ergo no Linux for anyone, anywhere!
Deliberate misconstruction of 'Standards', 'Free' and 'Open'.
It would be amusing if it weren't such a pain. The worst part, though, is that they used to spend all their time modding their comrades up, but now they've moved on to modding 'inconvenient' posts down.
What's all this certainity business? I have no problems keeping crap off of my Windows boxes, and I'm not alone. All it takes is some common sense.
It is certain that the vast majority of my customers (including the users of my corporate customers' systems) will not consistently behave with what you describe as 'common sense'. If they do not consistently behave using such 'common sense', Windows users face near certain compromise. Therefore I face a 100% certainty that my customers will be continually and consistently compromised by malware if they continue using Windows.
Last time I did an informal survey of time spent cleaning compromised machines, I arrived at a rough figure that 40% of all service calls were caused by malware. Since I've begun reducing people's dependence on the Microsoft 'stack', malware-related service calls have dropped significantly. More importantly, though: 100% of all malware-related service calls were for Windows machines.
I challenge anyone to enumerate all the steps necessary to defend an Internet-connected Windows computer and demonstrate that each of them is self-evident enough to merit the term 'common sense'.
Start with 'run anti-virus software'. I once explained the rationale behind anti-virus software to a very smart but not very technical person. He replied, 'That's like taking antibiotics because you're too lazy to clean your food!'
So the solution to thinking your protected on Windows but not really is to move to thinking you are magically protected because "Linux and Mac don't get viruses"?
That's absolutely right. Effectively, Linux and Macs don't get viruses.
Look, we can talk till the cows come home about technical details and 'potential' risk. But it all comes down to this: Am I willing to trade potential exposure tomorrow for the certainty of malware infection today? The answer to that is a gimme.
I sell computer systems, and my first advice to people is, 'If you don't absolutely need Windows, buy a Mac. If you do absolutely need Windows, try a Mac with Parallels installed.' And I don't even sell Macs.[*] I support only Linux/Unix on the server, period. And none of the non-Windows machines I support gets infected by malware.
Risk Analysis 101: Immediate threats require immediate action. Provided the cost of failure isn't too high, potential threats can wait. Moving from Windows to Linux or a Mac is a wise course of action, with no immediate downsides. And I have more faith in the Linux community and (to a lesser degree) Apple that they will find ways to effectively deal with whatever threats may arise in the future.
---------- [*]I make my real money off services. Hardware is just a necessary element of the overall service offering.
No, it is not better. It does have more RAM, a faster CPU and a larger disk. However, it does not have a 24 hour battery life, the ability to run without a mains supply....
I've been evaluating an XO prototype for the last month, and I love it. But at least on the laptop that I was using, the battery life was more like 2 1/2 - 4 hours, depending on how heavily it was being used.
"Assuming this device can survive its harsh environment and continue to function over a period of a half-dozen or more years (still a stretch, in my estimation), a single lightweight (but rugged) device, could easily outlast 100 textbooks in a hot and humid environment. And, by any measure, a $100 laptop equipped with 100 electronic textbooks could be worth its weight in gold in such a third-world setting."
I've been doing IT work in a Least Developed country for the last four years, and I've evaluated the latest XO prototype. I love it. It's really as robust as they say, and I believe it will stand up to the local climate better than anything else. But 6 years is an unreasonable expectation no matter how you look at it.
Where I live, the average 'normal' laptop survives less than a year in the field, perhaps a year in town, if the owner takes extra steps to protect it. About half of the desktop systems deployed outside of the capital are returned for service within 6 months. Dust, humidity, bad power, ants and geckoes (they love to lay their eggs in there), rain, general abuse and ignorance all make life in the boonies miserable and short for the typical computer.
The XO is special. It's built tough, but nonetheless, we have to accept that children might cherish their XO, but they will treat it roughly, too. Try to imagine a child walking several kilometres to school through monsoon rains with nothing but a big taro leaf as an umbrella, horsing around with his friends, dropping the laptop onto the ground to kill birds with his slingshot, tripping and falling in the mud on the river bank.... You get the idea. If we could get two good years out of one of these laptops, we'd be miles ahead of anything else, at a fraction of the expense.
Nonetheless, I agree wholeheartedly with the last sentence of that quotation. The XO holds incredible potential value.
And no mention about who is going to pay for the infrastructure needed for the machines either, if they reach the 5,000 goal. Not only do they need a support apparatus, but the machines themselves need electricity (the crank never came out, and the other battery charging implements are still not in production, if they ever will be) and Internet (the applications on the XO are leased and have to be renewed over Internet every so often).
Sources, please. Based on my experience with the XO laptop in the field, I'm inclined to say that every single one of those points is pure malarkey.
Infrastructure: Every computing device needs support, but I can say from experience that the support requirements of this machine, in cost/benefit terms, are lower than any other available technology. And by 'technology', I include not only computers, but books, fax machines, telephones, blackboards and chalk.
Power: I can't say for certain where they sourced them, but the 20 XO laptops some colleagues of mine installed in the Solomon Islands pilot all had pull-string flywheel mechanisms. In any case, the cost of a solar charging station for 20 of these is between USD 2-300. Again, this is cheaper than any available alternative.
Leased Applications: This makes no sense whatsoever. You can't mean leased in the commercial sense, so I'll have to assume that you mean they're time-limited in some way. To which I reply that unless the OLPC people I've been dealing with are hiding something, you've completely misunderstood how the software works. And even if it were somehow crippled, well, it's all Free Software. Disabling any sort of product (de)activation feature would be a very finite task.
I won't perpetuate the popular stereotype of straw huts and rampant starvation and disease, but I don't buy into this assumption that African progress is being hindered by a lack of cheap computers, of all things.
I believe it was Duke Ellington who, when asked what Jazz is, famously said, "Man, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know."
(And while we're at it: You are aware that the majority of the developing world is not in Africa, I hope?)
If you don't get why improved access to information is a fundamental prerequisite for development, then the XO will always look like wings on a fish. If, however, you can accept the premise that inadequate communications is one of the biggest stumbling blocks we face when trying to perform any kind of development work, then you will quickly see why people are so excited about this project.
I met a young doctor yesterday whose initial reaction was almost exactly the same as yours. She's dedicated to health education in the developing world, and she's very good at what she does. When she first read about the work we've been doing in the South Pacific, she immediately scoffed and insisted that we should try getting a steady supply of antibiotics and anti-malarials first. But just last week as she was conducting a walking tour of one of the poorest areas in the country, she realised what she could achieve if most or all of the children there had these laptops. She's since signed on to our national OLPC project as a content developer.
Solving communications is a necessary - but not sufficient - element of development. The XO doesn't remove the need for vast amounts of material aid, but it makes it so much easier for development projects to actually succeed.
Despite some of my reservations (some of them in common with Pogue) I really hope that this "little laptop that could" becomes widely adopted. If it is, it will be game changing on so many levels. It is so much more than a teaching tool. Not only will it redefine who gets to participate in the market of ideas, it will change the pricing for laptop prices across the board. Perhaps even quicken the convergence between cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other media centers. The little device is just wicked cool.
I've been using one for over a month to provide demonstrations of its capabilities in a Least Developed Country in the South Pacific, and I can guarantee you that your comments are spot on. In 15 years of work, some of it in the most remote places in the world, I've never seen any hardware that succeeds as well as this one. The design goals are clear and they've been achieved.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say, and the one thing that convinces me that the XO is the real thing is the fact that everyone who sees it immediately asks, "How can I get one for my child?"
These are important people, decision-makers who have risen from a simple existence in the village to positions of responsibility. They're typically university-educated, but without exception they come from villages with no power or running water, with limited accessibility. They all know what computers are for, concretely and potentially, and they know, more intimately than you or I ever could, just what life is like in the places the XO is destined to go. Nobody, in my opinion, is better qualified to judge the appropriateness of the design.
Sure, MS is greedy. Sure, they don't hold sacred the principles of freedom that you do. Sure, they may be evil -- but they're a generally *sensible* kind of evil, the kind that isn't building an elaborate cannon that shoots heads of lettuce while guns are available.
You, my friend, have obviously never taken a close look at ActiveX. Not only does the gun shoot lettuce, it's e. coli-laden lettuce, and it fires it straight out the back of the barrel down the shooter's throat. 8^)
Sounds good. So then let's take a situation some years in the future where it's law. What happens when you are watching TV, and all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering. You call your cable company angry. They explain that TV is now delivered over IP, like everything else. Currently you have some neighbours hitting the P2P really heavy and it is using up enough of the segment that it is interfering with video traffic. They'd love to have video have a higher QoS, but alas the law says they can't. The "contents of your packets are none of their business."
I know you're just responding to the GP, who is off the mark as well, but can we please get something straight: Net Neutrality is not about traffic shaping!
These silly digressions are really aggravating. We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not. So let's try to keep this topic simple:
If you believe that people should only pay once for Internet, then you support Net Neutrality. If you think telcos have a right to charge twice for the same service, then you're against it.
The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting telcos decide which providers get preferential service, based either on corporate allegiance or on the provider's ability to pay whatever the extortion rate du jour is.
Anybody who knows anything about multi-user networks knows that some amount of traffic shaping is necessary. While the GP and I probably agree that less is more, there is no real-world scenario in which no QoS occurs. The telcos want us to focus on this red herring, precisely because they know they can win this argument.
But if we could just stop our collective knee from jerking for a moment, we could consider what is really proposed:
Google wants to provide the world with search-related services. To that end, they pay gobzillions of dollars for state of the art data centres with tubes so big that even Ted Stevens couldn't comprehend them. The consumer wants state of the art Internet services, of which quick and easy searching is a pretty significant part. So consumer goes to telco and subscribes for X megabits at Y dollars per month.
So Google have paid for their Internet access. Consumers pay for their access. But telco's still feeling hungry. The Lear jet's in the shop and baby needs a new silver spoon. So they go to Google and say, "It's going to cost you Z dollars per megabyte that you transmit to our consumers. If you don't want to pay, that's okay, we'll just throttle your service and let Yahoo! through quicker."
Consumer never sees this. All that consumer sees is that Google is 'slow' and Yahoo! is 'fast'.
Ultimately, what we're looking at is a situation where telcos aren't satisfied with Y dollars per month from the consumer, and gobzillions more from Google. They want to charge Google more for the right to access their particular bunch of consumers.
There is nothing morally, ethically or even legally right about this model. Telcos know this, so they're lobbying governments around the world to make it legal. The problem that we face is that consumers will never actually see the effect of this legislation, if it ever passes. The only people who will know that things could be different are the geeks. And for all anyone cares, we'll simply be a voice in the wilderness.
You are arguing something different than the GP - you are saying that for any given line of code, the probability of it being written by a paid programmer is high, what he is saying is that the probability that a given FOSS programmer is paid is low. For example, if 5% of the people did 95% of the work, and those 5% were paid, then both of your claims are correct. I suspect it is probably something more like 10-25%, though not all paid, and 75-90%, but I no data to back that up. What he is concerned about is that for those who are only able to contribute a couple hours a week, spending even 15 minutes trying to figure out what license to release under, he will have lost 1/8th of his time.
You're probably right about the proportions, but that's not an accurate scenario. Those aren't the people choosing the license, nor even the people to whom the license matters most. Look at it this way: If you're only coding for a couple of hours a week, your project had better not depend on you. And if it doesn't, then either you don't have standing to decide which license you release under, or you've made the choice already by deciding to commit to a particular project.
We could have a very fruitful discussion about the distinction between community contribution and code contribution. It's a topic that's often misunderstood. There's a ton of work that doesn't require 133T H4x0r skills, and that core developers just don't have time for. I would be genuinely interested to see whether there's any relationship between license decisions and overall community involvement.
But what I took issue to was the GP's use of bad analysis to draw a false conclusion. The plain fact is that the people to whom software licensing matters the most (or arguably, those who get to decide) are the very ones who consistently choose the GPL more than the sum of all other licenses. Without suggesting that 'everybody's doing it' is sufficient, I do think it's important to ask oneself why this license is consistently preferred by the people to whom it matters most.
Most open source developers work a full-time job elsewhere, and have a very limited amount of time to contribute to their open source projects of choice.
Where did you get that datum? I think if you read any decent analysis, you'll find that the vast majority of code in active FOSS projects is written by programmers paid to do so. This means that project leaders, i.e. the ones who invest the most in the project have every incentive to think long and carefully about the future of their project, because it affects their professional future, too.
The one solution I see is to just avoid the GPL family of licenses.
You only see that one solution because you haven't done your analysis properly.
You are aware that GPL (v2) is the single most popular software license right now, aren't you? Actually, I wasn't. Where did you acquire this statistic?
Sorry, I honestly thought this was common knowledge, but some informal checking with colleagues demonstrated that it isn't quite so widespread as I thought. Here's a fairly well-researched source:
Slashdot Mirror
pure blindness and hypocrisy at work on slashdot
Diversity of opinion? NO! That way lies madness!!
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Seriously - it did occur to you that these points of view might be held by different individuals. Didn't it?
Indeed. My mistake. I used a pretty poor example.
Not true. From your own links, the libraries are open to local residents (i.e. non-students) at USD 300 per year, and transferable borrowing cards are available to other universities at a slightly higher than normal rate, but well below the numbers you offer.
Would these be the same kind of good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses who brought us Special Relativity while working in a lowly position in the Patent Office in Bern? You know, the kind who got together with friends to peruse and discuss the latest freely available scientific texts, the same texts that led him to revolutionise science more than anyone since Newton?
The books in the Princeton Library are free, thanks to the generousity of far-seeing individuals who realised that their money was better spent on a library than a new yacht. They, at least, saw the benefit of sharing knowledge with everyone, regardless of their means. I can only hope that, somewhere in that misanthropic little husk you call a heart, you will some day find room for a similar spirit of openness and sharing.
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
I take your point, but that's borderline circular logic you're using. By your reasoning, one could argue that there are no masses - only many many sub-groups, each of which has particular needs.
The fact of the matter is that Linux is particularly good for a bunch of thin little slices of the group that we, for convenience's sake, call the masses. All it takes is for someone - like, say, WalMart - to decide to take on one niche at a time. Eventually, there's a computer for every need, and each one is running Linux.
If Linux could be said to have a strategy[*], it would be: Take the ground a yard at a time and hold it. From what I've seen, Linux has yet to give ground to any competitor anywhere it's made incursions. While very few people are maniacally plotting World Domination, I think it's inevitable that Linux (in all its hundreds of guises) will become ubiquitous enough to permanently subvert any corporation's lock-in policies before too long.
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[*] Linux doesn't have a strategy, as such, because there's no really no such thing as Linux, per se. There is only a horde of like-minded companies and developers, each of whom has individually decided that this agglomeration of software collectively called Linux scratches their particular itch. One could reasonably argue, however, that this flexibility is exactly what RMS had in mind when the FSF was founded, and that events are proceeding as planned.
I couldn't agree more. I've written a more extended assessment elsewhere, but it really comes down to this:
Microsoft has no other ambition than blocking access to any other operating system. They want Windows everywhere, all the time. Their entire strategy is contingent on the ubiquity of the Windows platform. The XO laptop is one of the most significant threats to their hegemony, and for once they're forced to fight on someone else's turf. Having to eat crow and announce XP support for the XO laptop is a huge concession to make.
This tactic has been used in international negotiations in the past. A certain Last Remaining Superpower (who shall remain nameless) has done this with numerous international committees since about 2000. Even when they have no interest in the outcome of a given bit of work, they insist on joining the group and actively sabotaging it unless it meets their strategic priorities. It's not enough that it has nothing to do with them; unless these groups are actively supporting the Superpower's agenda, they are blocked and frustrated at the procedural level.
It's not inconceivable that MS would use such tactics. But given the circumstances, I'm inclined to say that if that's what they intended, they could have done it much better. Ultimately, though, even I have trouble believing they could have planned such an outcome.
Here in the South Pacific, we actually give a little to the nearest dog or cat, then watch them to see if they show any ill effects. Not kind, but better than the alternative, which is months of discomfort and real pain.
I think you mis-spelled '3000'. 8^)
Not exactly. Large fish are more risky because the poison concentrates in them. This is not necessarily a function of age, but of the fact that tiny fish have tiny concentrations of the toxin. They get eaten by small fish, who develop concentrations orders of magnitude larger, who get eaten by the big ones, who develop really dangerous concentrations.
Note also that this toxin only appears in reef fish. Deep water fish are perfectly safe to eat.
"Hey, let's have dinner tonight"
(Robotic Google voice) "May we suggest ... Chez Panisse ... which is 2.4 miles from your present location, Bill, and 1.3 miles from your present location, Karen. Reservations are available at 7:30 and 7:45 PM. A reservation has been made for you at 7:30. Bill, please turn right on Western. Karen, go 1 mile straight ahead to Central, then turn left on Western. Chez Panisse is at 1540 Western. Have a nice dinner, and thank you for choosing Google for your phone service."
Okay, it's funny, and it's a little scary. But consider that, in a gift economy, this kind of interaction might actually prove beneficial. Imagine, for example, if Chez Panisse actually turned out to be the right place for a date? Bruce Sterling wrote a charming story about this, titled Maneki Neko. While the spectre of Big Brother and Total Information Awareness looms large over any information-based society, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that this power can be used for good as well.
They key to this is to understand one of the second-level effects of the adage 'Information is Power'. As long as nobody gets a stranglehold on the information, it can be used to mitigate and even subvert the efforts of governments and corporate entities to control the message, to tell us how we feel. To the extent that Google is willing to do help with this, I support them.
Wrong. The first tenants of the free market are the poor.
Or did you mean tenet? 8^)
Yep, it's possible to pick out the talking points that the astro-turfers get handed for a particular topic. A few old chestnuts:
It would be amusing if it weren't such a pain. The worst part, though, is that they used to spend all their time modding their comrades up, but now they've moved on to modding 'inconvenient' posts down.
It is certain that the vast majority of my customers (including the users of my corporate customers' systems) will not consistently behave with what you describe as 'common sense'. If they do not consistently behave using such 'common sense', Windows users face near certain compromise. Therefore I face a 100% certainty that my customers will be continually and consistently compromised by malware if they continue using Windows.
Last time I did an informal survey of time spent cleaning compromised machines, I arrived at a rough figure that 40% of all service calls were caused by malware. Since I've begun reducing people's dependence on the Microsoft 'stack', malware-related service calls have dropped significantly. More importantly, though: 100% of all malware-related service calls were for Windows machines.
I challenge anyone to enumerate all the steps necessary to defend an Internet-connected Windows computer and demonstrate that each of them is self-evident enough to merit the term 'common sense'.
Start with 'run anti-virus software'. I once explained the rationale behind anti-virus software to a very smart but not very technical person. He replied, 'That's like taking antibiotics because you're too lazy to clean your food!'
So the solution to thinking your protected on Windows but not really is to move to thinking you are magically protected because "Linux and Mac don't get viruses"?
That's absolutely right. Effectively, Linux and Macs don't get viruses.
Look, we can talk till the cows come home about technical details and 'potential' risk. But it all comes down to this: Am I willing to trade potential exposure tomorrow for the certainty of malware infection today? The answer to that is a gimme.
I sell computer systems, and my first advice to people is, 'If you don't absolutely need Windows, buy a Mac. If you do absolutely need Windows, try a Mac with Parallels installed.' And I don't even sell Macs.[*] I support only Linux/Unix on the server, period. And none of the non-Windows machines I support gets infected by malware.
Risk Analysis 101: Immediate threats require immediate action. Provided the cost of failure isn't too high, potential threats can wait. Moving from Windows to Linux or a Mac is a wise course of action, with no immediate downsides. And I have more faith in the Linux community and (to a lesser degree) Apple that they will find ways to effectively deal with whatever threats may arise in the future.
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[*]I make my real money off services. Hardware is just a necessary element of the overall service offering.
I've been evaluating an XO prototype for the last month, and I love it. But at least on the laptop that I was using, the battery life was more like 2 1/2 - 4 hours, depending on how heavily it was being used.
I've been doing IT work in a Least Developed country for the last four years, and I've evaluated the latest XO prototype. I love it. It's really as robust as they say, and I believe it will stand up to the local climate better than anything else. But 6 years is an unreasonable expectation no matter how you look at it.
Where I live, the average 'normal' laptop survives less than a year in the field, perhaps a year in town, if the owner takes extra steps to protect it. About half of the desktop systems deployed outside of the capital are returned for service within 6 months. Dust, humidity, bad power, ants and geckoes (they love to lay their eggs in there), rain, general abuse and ignorance all make life in the boonies miserable and short for the typical computer.
The XO is special. It's built tough, but nonetheless, we have to accept that children might cherish their XO, but they will treat it roughly, too. Try to imagine a child walking several kilometres to school through monsoon rains with nothing but a big taro leaf as an umbrella, horsing around with his friends, dropping the laptop onto the ground to kill birds with his slingshot, tripping and falling in the mud on the river bank.... You get the idea. If we could get two good years out of one of these laptops, we'd be miles ahead of anything else, at a fraction of the expense.
Nonetheless, I agree wholeheartedly with the last sentence of that quotation. The XO holds incredible potential value.
Sources, please. Based on my experience with the XO laptop in the field, I'm inclined to say that every single one of those points is pure malarkey.
I believe it was Duke Ellington who, when asked what Jazz is, famously said, "Man, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know."
(And while we're at it: You are aware that the majority of the developing world is not in Africa, I hope?)
If you don't get why improved access to information is a fundamental prerequisite for development, then the XO will always look like wings on a fish. If, however, you can accept the premise that inadequate communications is one of the biggest stumbling blocks we face when trying to perform any kind of development work, then you will quickly see why people are so excited about this project.
I met a young doctor yesterday whose initial reaction was almost exactly the same as yours. She's dedicated to health education in the developing world, and she's very good at what she does. When she first read about the work we've been doing in the South Pacific, she immediately scoffed and insisted that we should try getting a steady supply of antibiotics and anti-malarials first. But just last week as she was conducting a walking tour of one of the poorest areas in the country, she realised what she could achieve if most or all of the children there had these laptops. She's since signed on to our national OLPC project as a content developer.
Solving communications is a necessary - but not sufficient - element of development. The XO doesn't remove the need for vast amounts of material aid, but it makes it so much easier for development projects to actually succeed.
I've been using one for over a month to provide demonstrations of its capabilities in a Least Developed Country in the South Pacific, and I can guarantee you that your comments are spot on. In 15 years of work, some of it in the most remote places in the world, I've never seen any hardware that succeeds as well as this one. The design goals are clear and they've been achieved.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say, and the one thing that convinces me that the XO is the real thing is the fact that everyone who sees it immediately asks, "How can I get one for my child?"
These are important people, decision-makers who have risen from a simple existence in the village to positions of responsibility. They're typically university-educated, but without exception they come from villages with no power or running water, with limited accessibility. They all know what computers are for, concretely and potentially, and they know, more intimately than you or I ever could, just what life is like in the places the XO is destined to go. Nobody, in my opinion, is better qualified to judge the appropriateness of the design.
You, my friend, have obviously never taken a close look at ActiveX. Not only does the gun shoot lettuce, it's e. coli-laden lettuce, and it fires it straight out the back of the barrel down the shooter's throat. 8^)
I know you're just responding to the GP, who is off the mark as well, but can we please get something straight: Net Neutrality is not about traffic shaping!
These silly digressions are really aggravating. We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not. So let's try to keep this topic simple:
If you believe that people should only pay once for Internet, then you support Net Neutrality. If you think telcos have a right to charge twice for the same service, then you're against it.
The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting telcos decide which providers get preferential service, based either on corporate allegiance or on the provider's ability to pay whatever the extortion rate du jour is.
Anybody who knows anything about multi-user networks knows that some amount of traffic shaping is necessary. While the GP and I probably agree that less is more, there is no real-world scenario in which no QoS occurs. The telcos want us to focus on this red herring, precisely because they know they can win this argument.
But if we could just stop our collective knee from jerking for a moment, we could consider what is really proposed:
Google wants to provide the world with search-related services. To that end, they pay gobzillions of dollars for state of the art data centres with tubes so big that even Ted Stevens couldn't comprehend them. The consumer wants state of the art Internet services, of which quick and easy searching is a pretty significant part. So consumer goes to telco and subscribes for X megabits at Y dollars per month.
So Google have paid for their Internet access. Consumers pay for their access. But telco's still feeling hungry. The Lear jet's in the shop and baby needs a new silver spoon. So they go to Google and say, "It's going to cost you Z dollars per megabyte that you transmit to our consumers. If you don't want to pay, that's okay, we'll just throttle your service and let Yahoo! through quicker."
Consumer never sees this. All that consumer sees is that Google is 'slow' and Yahoo! is 'fast'.
Ultimately, what we're looking at is a situation where telcos aren't satisfied with Y dollars per month from the consumer, and gobzillions more from Google. They want to charge Google more for the right to access their particular bunch of consumers.
There is nothing morally, ethically or even legally right about this model. Telcos know this, so they're lobbying governments around the world to make it legal. The problem that we face is that consumers will never actually see the effect of this legislation, if it ever passes. The only people who will know that things could be different are the geeks. And for all anyone cares, we'll simply be a voice in the wilderness.
Change the punctuation a bit, and that's Microsoft's game plan in a nutshell....
You're probably right about the proportions, but that's not an accurate scenario. Those aren't the people choosing the license, nor even the people to whom the license matters most. Look at it this way: If you're only coding for a couple of hours a week, your project had better not depend on you. And if it doesn't, then either you don't have standing to decide which license you release under, or you've made the choice already by deciding to commit to a particular project.
We could have a very fruitful discussion about the distinction between community contribution and code contribution. It's a topic that's often misunderstood. There's a ton of work that doesn't require 133T H4x0r skills, and that core developers just don't have time for. I would be genuinely interested to see whether there's any relationship between license decisions and overall community involvement.
But what I took issue to was the GP's use of bad analysis to draw a false conclusion. The plain fact is that the people to whom software licensing matters the most (or arguably, those who get to decide) are the very ones who consistently choose the GPL more than the sum of all other licenses. Without suggesting that 'everybody's doing it' is sufficient, I do think it's important to ask oneself why this license is consistently preferred by the people to whom it matters most.
Where did you get that datum? I think if you read any decent analysis, you'll find that the vast majority of code in active FOSS projects is written by programmers paid to do so. This means that project leaders, i.e. the ones who invest the most in the project have every incentive to think long and carefully about the future of their project, because it affects their professional future, too.
You only see that one solution because you haven't done your analysis properly.
There are very good reasons why more FOSS developers choose the GPL than all the other licenses combined. Perhaps you should investigate those reasons before discarding it as a nuisance.
Because if there actually was a way to make something digital into something real, the porn industry would long ago have found it.
Sorry, I honestly thought this was common knowledge, but some informal checking with colleagues demonstrated that it isn't quite so widespread as I thought. Here's a fairly well-researched source:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html
Rhetoric notwithstanding, this guy does check his facts.