while(i TIME_TO_DEATH_OF_SUN_IN_OPERATING_SYSTEM_LIFECYCLE _TIME_UNITS) { Make the old operating system old and broken. Make the new operating system run everything (it will run everything forever, obviously, we'll never leave this one behind). old operating system = new operating system; new operating system = really new operating system; really new operating system = gleam_in_bill_gates'_eye(i); i++; } return OH_CRAP_THE_SUN_IS_GONE;
In 1996 I would have said, "most non-technical users just dial up to AOL for its wonderful proprietary content, check their e-mail, and do word processing and stuff, which requires say 8MB of RAM at most" (at least that's what I had on my Macintosh at the time after upgrading it). "If some crazy software wants 32MB, I don't even think my computer supports that shit! System 7.1 forever!"
People will still use old software on their old hardware, and when they get new hardware (and they will) they'll get new software.
Well... I think it's more like connections to terrorism in the US government have become like comparisons to Hitler in any online forum.
Which means that we need a parallel to Godwin's law applying to the government and terrorism or something.
Well, I'm not quite sure what to make of this particular story, but I think I'm going to go download some Hollywood movies off of Bittorrent just to be safe. It'll be just like that time I bought groceries and 3% of the proceeds went to my local elementary school (maybe)!
Hell, back in the day Winamp had a minibrowser that used the IE rendering engine. There are tons of "webbrowsers" out there that use the IE rendering engine and just provide their own UI around them. I fail to see how this is at all innovative. It's Firefox, with the ability to use the IE rendering libraries. Big deal.
And after all these other programs have done this, Netscape comes out with a product that can't do it without hosing the IE installation. Isn't this well-enough tred territory by now that such mistakes shouldn't be made?
Most people don't respond to phishing e-mails, it's just really easy to send a lot of them for cheap. I don't know whether there's a higher success ratio for phishing e-mails than for analog-type scams; however, I do know that I've read of studies where people claimed to be doing a study on passwords and security and gathered many peoples' passwords in person off the street.
(It's equally amazing that a web browser would do anything on link mouseover EXCEPT show the real target of a link!)
Absolutely! It amazes me that webbrowsers are so willingly stupid. That's why I use something like Links or Lynx for certain browsing tasks. Unfortunately, even Links has javascript these days... so I'm probably just relying on security by obscurity to some degree.
There's a distro that probably will run pretty quick on your computer with just 64MB RAM: Vector Linux (vectorlinux.com). I have a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 64MB RAM, and Vector runs pretty well on that. The installation wasn't too hard, though it helps to know the hardware configuration of your computer. Since it's based on Slackware, it will work well with Slackware packages (as long as you match up versions), and also works well with anything you want to compile from scratch because there's no need to bother with telling some package manager about dependencies you've fulfilled if you compile your own libraries (this also means you have to manage dependencies yourself, but since the core of the system is already set up it's not too much to worry about).
The version of Vector I used offered IceWM (kinda Windows-y) and FCDE (I think that's what it's called... people say it's made a lot of progress lately but I don't really know much about it) as window managers installed by default; I installed WindowMaker myself because I like WindowMaker. I also like fluxbox for a quick window manager.
I never knew that patent numbers were in hex! Maybe the patent office really is made up of geeks... and all these crazy patents are being let in intentionally!
"[and which is also the lesson that FOSS types should take away from this]"
Really? Perhaps maintaining backwards compatibility helps you build and maintain dominance in the market. But it also makes it more difficult to make corrections and changes later on when you still are trying to support lots of old code. If the goal is "make Linux/BSD/whatever dominant" then I think backwards compatibility helps. If the goal is "make Linux/BSD/whatever a good system", then it might hinder. Of course, there are many people with different goals for FOSS projects. The Linux kernel folks have no qualms with breaking backwards compatibility.
On an FOSS operating system backwards compatibility is much less-needed, because source code is available for most applications and they can be recompiled if binary backwards compatibility is broken. Of course, this along with the diversity of directory preferences and library combinations among different unixy OSes makes FOSS operating systems a difficult target for non-FOSS applications. Whether this is a big deal or not, for you, is for you to decide.
It might have a good steady job running Linux and serving your web pages, but is it truly happy? Have you ever asked your 500MHz K6-II if it had any of its own aspirations? Have you ever really taken the time to get to know your 500MHz K6-II? Do you know its name, its partner, its children? Have you asked your 500MHz K6-II about those empty whiskey bottles under its desk? Maybe it's not as happy as you let on.
"This compromise would allow profitable copyrights to be held (for example the beatles back catalogue) whilst the vast majority of work would enter the public domain. This might keep Disney happy although they would obviously prefer there current plan, copyright which never expires." says the parent.
Why do we want the profitable copyrights of the Beatles' songs to be held when half of the Beatles are dead?
A copyright tax, unless set quite high, would just be another trifle to large holders like sheet music publishers and record companies that would likely just automatically pay the tax to keep their entire catalogue under control. Including the pieces they're not publishing. I mean, if Warner Bros. music is willing to buy the copyright to Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata (this is an example I've run into) and then *not print it*, I have a hard time believing they'd just let their copyright die.
Why do we want anyone holding the copyright on Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata when Bernstein is dead? Why do we want anyone holding the copyright on the circa 1954 edition of the clarinet part, which has not been printed in years, when there is a new (and much uglier) edition out?
In fact, it's questionable that music for certain types of ensembles, such as the concert band, would even continue to be published. Almost all concert bands are tied to educational institutions. In fact, I'd bet that even in the case of the orchestra (that of the classical or romantic tradition to be specific:)) publishers make most of their money selling to schools.
Your main point is right on: this would result in diminishing the incentive to publish music. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you to decide.
A jury of peers determines guilt or innocence, but is told a story in a legal system where often prosecutors have an inside track. And, of course, your ability to defend yourself depends on how much money you have for a lawyer. The number of wrongful convictions is astounding.
There's a reason why former Governor George Ryan put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois... as it happens, he was in the midst of a truck licensing scandal that led to unqualified drivers getting commercial licenses for bribes. Some of these drivers got in fatal accidents. The drivers were imperfect, the bribing companies were imperfect, the bribed officials were imperfect, everyone that turned a blind eye on the fact that it was happening was imperfect. And at the same time our justice system is imperfect, and Ryan recognized that. Democracy is imperfect. A jury of your imperfect peers can determine guilt or innocence, whether another person lives or dies, based on imperfect evidence presented by imperfect lawyers and imperfect judges, not all of whom have perfect motives. Is it a prosecutor's charge to find truth? No, it is the prosecutor's charge to present evidence for guilt. If the defense attorney is shoddy, there's nobody else that's allowed to pick up the pieces and argue the points that were missed.
I love portage and apt and all those. They're great. Unfortunately, if there's an exploit in the wild then you have to wait for a package maintainer to get the security update into the package before you can update. Hopefully that's not too much time, but there's no guarantee.
Furthermore, emerge --sync can sometimes mean a lot of downloading. Hope you have a fast connection. In the meantime, you can download new firefox sources or binaries and install them. Of course, this wrecks your beautiful package-managed system, unless you just do a temporary install somewhere else, which might be hard to remember, especially if you're not the only person that uses your computer.
It's kinda hard to reconcile simple package management with simple auto-updates from application creators. I run gentoo. Naim (ncurses AIM client) always phones home to tell me there's a more recent version available. It's not available in portage. This is annoying to me, and would be confusing for someone that hasn't thought about the issues involved.
Perhaps something like a webbrowser that you'd want to frequently upgrade and isn't a library with many packages depending on it is not something that you should install through your package manager. Especially if you want most other things on your system to remain stable... doing an emerge --sync can sometimes cause subsequent emerges to updgrade packages that break other packages (something recently broke gnuplot's ability to properly parse expressions on my computer. I don't know what it was! I should have known better). I'm certainly considering not using portage for firefox in the future.
I don't think it's that hilarious. I think that a lot of Linux users are willing to try new things, especially when it comes to a desktop environment where they know that they can switch over and back without really losing anything. So when they don't like some of Gnome's new defaults, it becomes a catalyst for giving KDE a shot. Maybe KDE, for whatever reason, sticks.
It probably wasn't too different from my switch from Thunderbird to mutt. Thunderbird was taking a long time to start and I didn't like its fonts. I read that there were fairly simple ways to improve the starting time, and fonts are easy to change. I also saw a page on the internet about mutt. I said, "I know I like my console font; maybe I should give mutt a try". And it stuck.
Oh wow... so that explains some odd Firefox behavior that differs from Windows... I use the autoscroll (middle-click enables smooth scrolling) extension because middle-click in browser window to scroll was expected behavior for me coming from Windows. But now that I run Linux, if I make my ending click a middle-click and click outside the autoscroll area, it tries to load a new page using clipboard text as the URL.
I know this is a rather dumb post that I shouldn't waste my time responding to, but... a 3x processor speed advantage doesn't give you a 3x performance advantage.
You'd also need 3x faster memory and bus speeds, and 3x faster hard drive speed for many applications. For a web server you'd need a faster network card and a faster surrounding network.
I think, really, they're fairly independent. There are geniuses with great interpersonal skills, and geniuses without. It can sometimes be harder to notice genius in people with good interpersonal skills for a number of reasons. One is that by communicating their ideas more effectively they make them sound less difficult. Also they might try to quietly improve things rather than making lots of noise about things they disagree with. And when working in groups they do a better job of involving the other group members.
As a fairly smart person with mediocre interpersonal skills, these are things I've noticed about many smart people with good interpersonal skills that I've worked with.
You never justified why pre-release leaks would have a bigger impact on sales than post-release piracy, and there's no obvious reason that I can think of, so please enlighten me.
I know this is a musical example, where you say the argument is weaker (without any reason), but Radiohead albums Kid A and Hail To The Thief were leaked to the internet pre-release, and everyone I know that downloaded the tracks did it because they were anticipating the release of the albums that they were already planning to buy. That's how they knew about the albums in the first place, they were big fans and following the news. People who download after the album is already out are more likely to just have a casual interest.
Would you have had permission to write to/dev/scd as non-root anyway? That probably varies from system to system, but you might have had to become root to do that anyway.
The same thing happened to me yesterday with google.com. I was in a computer lab at the time a few other people in the lab thought the lab's internet connection was down because they couldn't connect to google. They were smart people, as it happened. They just figured that google would never go down...
I, on the other hand, tried the search engine I haven't used since probably before y2k, Altavista.
Would be interesting to know what caused the outage, but I don't give a large enough portion of a rat's ass to look it up.
Wow. It must be crappy argument day here on/.! First, GP appeals to the ideas of the founding fathers as if their ideas were necessarily the best and wisest for running the country always. Then parent mentions the situation in China to prove that... oh wait, he really isn't addressing anything with that point.
Be sure to call/. and tell them how much you love this! Maybe if it gets enough calls, they'll extend crappy argument day to tomorrow!
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it from Microsoft's perspective:
E _TIME_UNITS) {
i = 0;
while(i TIME_TO_DEATH_OF_SUN_IN_OPERATING_SYSTEM_LIFECYCL
Make the old operating system old and broken.
Make the new operating system run everything (it will run everything forever, obviously, we'll never leave this one behind).
old operating system = new operating system;
new operating system = really new operating system;
really new operating system = gleam_in_bill_gates'_eye(i);
i++;
}
return OH_CRAP_THE_SUN_IS_GONE;
In 1996 I would have said, "most non-technical users just dial up to AOL for its wonderful proprietary content, check their e-mail, and do word processing and stuff, which requires say 8MB of RAM at most" (at least that's what I had on my Macintosh at the time after upgrading it). "If some crazy software wants 32MB, I don't even think my computer supports that shit! System 7.1 forever!"
People will still use old software on their old hardware, and when they get new hardware (and they will) they'll get new software.
Well... I think it's more like connections to terrorism in the US government have become like comparisons to Hitler in any online forum.
Which means that we need a parallel to Godwin's law applying to the government and terrorism or something.
Well, I'm not quite sure what to make of this particular story, but I think I'm going to go download some Hollywood movies off of Bittorrent just to be safe. It'll be just like that time I bought groceries and 3% of the proceeds went to my local elementary school (maybe)!
Hell, back in the day Winamp had a minibrowser that used the IE rendering engine. There are tons of "webbrowsers" out there that use the IE rendering engine and just provide their own UI around them. I fail to see how this is at all innovative. It's Firefox, with the ability to use the IE rendering libraries. Big deal.
And after all these other programs have done this, Netscape comes out with a product that can't do it without hosing the IE installation. Isn't this well-enough tred territory by now that such mistakes shouldn't be made?
Most people don't respond to phishing e-mails, it's just really easy to send a lot of them for cheap. I don't know whether there's a higher success ratio for phishing e-mails than for analog-type scams; however, I do know that I've read of studies where people claimed to be doing a study on passwords and security and gathered many peoples' passwords in person off the street.
(It's equally amazing that a web browser would do anything on link mouseover EXCEPT show the real target of a link!)
Absolutely! It amazes me that webbrowsers are so willingly stupid. That's why I use something like Links or Lynx for certain browsing tasks. Unfortunately, even Links has javascript these days... so I'm probably just relying on security by obscurity to some degree.
Rock. Kids in the Hall is great stuff.
I am crushing your head!
There's a distro that probably will run pretty quick on your computer with just 64MB RAM: Vector Linux (vectorlinux.com). I have a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 64MB RAM, and Vector runs pretty well on that. The installation wasn't too hard, though it helps to know the hardware configuration of your computer. Since it's based on Slackware, it will work well with Slackware packages (as long as you match up versions), and also works well with anything you want to compile from scratch because there's no need to bother with telling some package manager about dependencies you've fulfilled if you compile your own libraries (this also means you have to manage dependencies yourself, but since the core of the system is already set up it's not too much to worry about).
The version of Vector I used offered IceWM (kinda Windows-y) and FCDE (I think that's what it's called... people say it's made a lot of progress lately but I don't really know much about it) as window managers installed by default; I installed WindowMaker myself because I like WindowMaker. I also like fluxbox for a quick window manager.
I never knew that patent numbers were in hex! Maybe the patent office really is made up of geeks... and all these crazy patents are being let in intentionally!
"[and which is also the lesson that FOSS types should take away from this]"
Really? Perhaps maintaining backwards compatibility helps you build and maintain dominance in the market. But it also makes it more difficult to make corrections and changes later on when you still are trying to support lots of old code. If the goal is "make Linux/BSD/whatever dominant" then I think backwards compatibility helps. If the goal is "make Linux/BSD/whatever a good system", then it might hinder. Of course, there are many people with different goals for FOSS projects. The Linux kernel folks have no qualms with breaking backwards compatibility.
On an FOSS operating system backwards compatibility is much less-needed, because source code is available for most applications and they can be recompiled if binary backwards compatibility is broken. Of course, this along with the diversity of directory preferences and library combinations among different unixy OSes makes FOSS operating systems a difficult target for non-FOSS applications. Whether this is a big deal or not, for you, is for you to decide.
It might have a good steady job running Linux and serving your web pages, but is it truly happy? Have you ever asked your 500MHz K6-II if it had any of its own aspirations? Have you ever really taken the time to get to know your 500MHz K6-II? Do you know its name, its partner, its children? Have you asked your 500MHz K6-II about those empty whiskey bottles under its desk? Maybe it's not as happy as you let on.
"This compromise would allow profitable copyrights to be held (for example the beatles back catalogue) whilst the vast majority of work would enter the public domain. This might keep Disney happy although they would obviously prefer there current plan, copyright which never expires." says the parent.
Why do we want the profitable copyrights of the Beatles' songs to be held when half of the Beatles are dead?
A copyright tax, unless set quite high, would just be another trifle to large holders like sheet music publishers and record companies that would likely just automatically pay the tax to keep their entire catalogue under control. Including the pieces they're not publishing. I mean, if Warner Bros. music is willing to buy the copyright to Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata (this is an example I've run into) and then *not print it*, I have a hard time believing they'd just let their copyright die.
Why do we want anyone holding the copyright on Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata when Bernstein is dead? Why do we want anyone holding the copyright on the circa 1954 edition of the clarinet part, which has not been printed in years, when there is a new (and much uglier) edition out?
In fact, it's questionable that music for certain types of ensembles, such as the concert band, would even continue to be published. Almost all concert bands are tied to educational institutions. In fact, I'd bet that even in the case of the orchestra (that of the classical or romantic tradition to be specific :)) publishers make most of their money selling to schools.
Your main point is right on: this would result in diminishing the incentive to publish music. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you to decide.
A jury of peers determines guilt or innocence, but is told a story in a legal system where often prosecutors have an inside track. And, of course, your ability to defend yourself depends on how much money you have for a lawyer. The number of wrongful convictions is astounding.
There's a reason why former Governor George Ryan put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois... as it happens, he was in the midst of a truck licensing scandal that led to unqualified drivers getting commercial licenses for bribes. Some of these drivers got in fatal accidents. The drivers were imperfect, the bribing companies were imperfect, the bribed officials were imperfect, everyone that turned a blind eye on the fact that it was happening was imperfect. And at the same time our justice system is imperfect, and Ryan recognized that. Democracy is imperfect. A jury of your imperfect peers can determine guilt or innocence, whether another person lives or dies, based on imperfect evidence presented by imperfect lawyers and imperfect judges, not all of whom have perfect motives. Is it a prosecutor's charge to find truth? No, it is the prosecutor's charge to present evidence for guilt. If the defense attorney is shoddy, there's nobody else that's allowed to pick up the pieces and argue the points that were missed.
I love portage and apt and all those. They're great. Unfortunately, if there's an exploit in the wild then you have to wait for a package maintainer to get the security update into the package before you can update. Hopefully that's not too much time, but there's no guarantee.
Furthermore, emerge --sync can sometimes mean a lot of downloading. Hope you have a fast connection. In the meantime, you can download new firefox sources or binaries and install them. Of course, this wrecks your beautiful package-managed system, unless you just do a temporary install somewhere else, which might be hard to remember, especially if you're not the only person that uses your computer.
It's kinda hard to reconcile simple package management with simple auto-updates from application creators. I run gentoo. Naim (ncurses AIM client) always phones home to tell me there's a more recent version available. It's not available in portage. This is annoying to me, and would be confusing for someone that hasn't thought about the issues involved.
Perhaps something like a webbrowser that you'd want to frequently upgrade and isn't a library with many packages depending on it is not something that you should install through your package manager. Especially if you want most other things on your system to remain stable... doing an emerge --sync can sometimes cause subsequent emerges to updgrade packages that break other packages (something recently broke gnuplot's ability to properly parse expressions on my computer. I don't know what it was! I should have known better). I'm certainly considering not using portage for firefox in the future.
I don't think it's that hilarious. I think that a lot of Linux users are willing to try new things, especially when it comes to a desktop environment where they know that they can switch over and back without really losing anything. So when they don't like some of Gnome's new defaults, it becomes a catalyst for giving KDE a shot. Maybe KDE, for whatever reason, sticks.
It probably wasn't too different from my switch from Thunderbird to mutt. Thunderbird was taking a long time to start and I didn't like its fonts. I read that there were fairly simple ways to improve the starting time, and fonts are easy to change. I also saw a page on the internet about mutt. I said, "I know I like my console font; maybe I should give mutt a try". And it stuck.
Oh wow... so that explains some odd Firefox behavior that differs from Windows... I use the autoscroll (middle-click enables smooth scrolling) extension because middle-click in browser window to scroll was expected behavior for me coming from Windows. But now that I run Linux, if I make my ending click a middle-click and click outside the autoscroll area, it tries to load a new page using clipboard text as the URL.
I've never understood why until now.
Thank you, sir!
I know this is a rather dumb post that I shouldn't waste my time responding to, but... a 3x processor speed advantage doesn't give you a 3x performance advantage.
You'd also need 3x faster memory and bus speeds, and 3x faster hard drive speed for many applications. For a web server you'd need a faster network card and a faster surrounding network.
I think, really, they're fairly independent. There are geniuses with great interpersonal skills, and geniuses without. It can sometimes be harder to notice genius in people with good interpersonal skills for a number of reasons. One is that by communicating their ideas more effectively they make them sound less difficult. Also they might try to quietly improve things rather than making lots of noise about things they disagree with. And when working in groups they do a better job of involving the other group members.
As a fairly smart person with mediocre interpersonal skills, these are things I've noticed about many smart people with good interpersonal skills that I've worked with.
You never justified why pre-release leaks would have a bigger impact on sales than post-release piracy, and there's no obvious reason that I can think of, so please enlighten me.
I know this is a musical example, where you say the argument is weaker (without any reason), but Radiohead albums Kid A and Hail To The Thief were leaked to the internet pre-release, and everyone I know that downloaded the tracks did it because they were anticipating the release of the albums that they were already planning to buy. That's how they knew about the albums in the first place, they were big fans and following the news. People who download after the album is already out are more likely to just have a casual interest.
Would you have had permission to write to /dev/scd as non-root anyway? That probably varies from system to system, but you might have had to become root to do that anyway.
The same thing happened to me yesterday with google.com. I was in a computer lab at the time a few other people in the lab thought the lab's internet connection was down because they couldn't connect to google. They were smart people, as it happened. They just figured that google would never go down...
I, on the other hand, tried the search engine I haven't used since probably before y2k, Altavista.
Would be interesting to know what caused the outage, but I don't give a large enough portion of a rat's ass to look it up.
What kind of "System Admin Config util" were you able to get into as non-root?
If that's really true, that could be a hell of a security leak.
Wow. It must be crappy argument day here on /.! First, GP appeals to the ideas of the founding fathers as if their ideas were necessarily the best and wisest for running the country always. Then parent mentions the situation in China to prove that... oh wait, he really isn't addressing anything with that point.
/. and tell them how much you love this! Maybe if it gets enough calls, they'll extend crappy argument day to tomorrow!
Be sure to call
I'd assume GPG to be a similar case as GCC, the encrypted jumble made from your plaintext message the analog to a binary program compiled from source.
I don't think that programs you compile with GCC are necessarily GPL'd, unless of course you just happen to link against GPL'd libraries.
But then again, I might be wrong.