This license is full of technical problems, the least of which is the attempt to eliminate the MIT/BSD license "ambiguity" about whether alternative licenses can be used with it.
It may sound like I'm biased, but, like most Microsoft products, it attempts to enable a quick and simple implementation by implementing the obvious, but wrong elements of the theory.
Start with the name.
Permissive? Relative to the license, it is not permissive at all. No other license can be mixed in -- no perl artistic license, no GPL 1, 2, or 3, no Apache 1 or 2, no Mozilla, no BSD/MIT, not even a plain "Do with it what you want and I don't give a wooden nickel!" one liner license. At this point, I'm not sure even public domain source could be mixed in without opening a project that uses this Microsoft Permissive License up to lawsuits.
Relative to the source code, it is way too permissive. Anybody can join Microsoft's commune, so to speak. Anyone that can bring all contributors to the table, anyway. It's all a ("happy?") playground where everyone plays under the gentle gaze of the original authors who claim the original copyright of the original source code. For practical purposes, forks won't work well.
(Think of how it would be if someone with a strong personality like Theo, but lacking the commitment to freedom, were to release something like openbsd under this license.)
Freedom and openness are _not_ permissive. We are clear, are we not, that the GPL is by no means permissive? You are allowed to use the software only under the principles of protecting everyone's freedom to use the software. They way the license structures the limits and grants gives project leaders the authority to maintain their natural stewardship over the project while allowing _freedom_ minded individuals and groups to join in.
One way they can join in is to fork the project, but the license provides the framework for a clean fork. You can legally move on without leaving your source behind you, and that is a huge part of the freedom.
Even the BSD/MIT licenses are not truly permissive. The apparent ambiguities effectively allow room for project leaders to maintain their stewardship, and allow room for clashes to result in project forks.
The BSD/MIT licenses also technically allow "darkening" a fork, where a user refuses to pay his natural duty to the community by contributing back his or her changes. But the license provides no inherent leverage for the dark forks to use against the open forks. The license also allows the natural consequences of darkening a fork to occur. (Darkened forks naturally tend to wither away.)
(This "Microsoft Permissive License", on the other hand, will effectively work agaist project forks, and will effectively work in favor of keeping project leaders in charge way beyond their time.)
Again, the apparent permissiveness of the BSD/MIT licenses is in comparison to the radical pseudo-traditional idea that source code should be closed from public view. (Closed is actually very permissive, because whatever was done was done behind closed doors, and the guy with the biggest pocketbook got to play with whomever whenever with relatively few social consequences.)
The terms of the Microsoft Permissive License are inverted. The limitations are stated after the grants, which is going to make for some really difficult-to-untangle legal arguments.
The use-at-your-own-risk warning almost appears to not be there, which is probably appropriate for Microsoft's sales machine, but is not at all appropriate for the end users.
The grants are not complete. In the end, your lawyer is going to be telling you, you can't do that more often than not, preventing the implementation of useful features which is one of the primary benefits of truly open licenses.
The patent protection clause is a club, not a shield. Very one-way.
The above is just a start. Like I said, it is a typical product of Microsoft, implementing the wrong stuff simply, to sell to the unwashed masses.
If society is what keeps you honest, society is your God.
If you don't understand that, you still don't understand what you argue against when you argue against religion.
It's about 3:00 am here, I should be in bed, I probably am not lucid, but I'll try outlining things.
When we define a God, we define our God according to our priorities -- what is most important to us. Those priorities become attributes of the God we define. Your assertion that you don't believe in God is okay as an assertion that you don't believe in _my_ God (or in anyone else's defined God).
But when your assertion that you don't believe in God becomes an assertion that God can't exist, you essentially do violence to your own language.
The semantics of God being the base of definition of priorities is buried in every human language except perhaps the artificial ones that have not existed long enough.
If you want to define a base of priorities that transcends religion, you will need to start coining language. But you should note that thousands of religious philosophers (_religious_ philosophers, mind you) have been trying the same thing for millenia, and failing. Our priorities are based on our beliefs, our beliefs are a hodge-podge of stuff that is taught to us, stuff that is instinctual, and stuff that is derived from experiments.
You can't live without belief. People stripped of belief in _something_ just generally quit doing the things necessary to maintain life (like eating). If the probability of the sun rising in the morning cannot be said to be high, seriously, why bother wasting money on food to put in the fridge? Or, in the extreme, why bother keeping a spare dollar in the pocket for an egg McMuffin in the morning?
People have various reasons for wanting to fence off all religion as superstition, but it isn't that simple. If you do, you lose the ability to talk about the intangibles in any reasonable way.
That was a little meandering about the personal, individual aspects of belief in God. Shifting gears a little bit, and becoming even more random:
Why should God be referred to in the masculine pronoun? Well, using the neutral pronoun, "It", tends to make God sound more like a monster. Some religionists do believe God is a monster. But most who claim God is a monster claim not to believe in The Monster.
So, if you want to discuss God in a neutral (non-antagonistic) way, English has only the gendered pronouns, and the masculine pronoun has a long tradition of being used when gender cannot be otherwise specified. (Attempts to break this tradition, although somewhat successful in certain groups, don't seem to be getting much traction yet. Thus, you will find some computer science papers talking about the user in the feminine, but such usage is definitely still swimming against the current.)
Also, as the parent points out, using the feminine to refer to God indicates a specific belief that the nature of God is female in principle.
The argument that much of what was once considered supernatural is now understand as operations of nature cuts both ways. Those who believe in God will tend to believe that God Himself is supernatural from our point of view precisely because we don't (or can't) understand His nature.
You acknowledge that much of your argument against religion as a principle is actually a collection of disagreements with specific religions. In doing so, you acknowledge that part of your argument with the principle is actually a desire to (at minimum) defend yourself from specific religions you don't like. That weakens your attempt to argue the principle, because it acknowledges that you are asserting _your_ priorities (and thus your God) over the priorities (and Gods) of others.
It's good to assert the right of the individual to believe in God as he or she may.
It's also good to defend oneself against the tyranny of another person's religion, if that other person is trying to press his or her priorities on you via the expressi
You have to start with some sort of belief, otherwise, you don't even dare experiment. If you can't experiment, you can't get evidence. If you can't get evidence, you are stuck with superstition.
Even believing an experiment will produce results requires belief. And who is going to perform an experiment (correctly) without some sort of belief in results?
Sorry about the non-linear here, but it's late at night where I am.
Truth be told, I missed that you said openid instead of that thing MS is offering.
However, concerning the e-mail being a single point of failure, that's your fault.
I don't do that. I have at least three e-mail accounts, and I spread registrations around as appropriate. ssl login helps tighten up at least one of my e-mail accounts. The single point of failure is the user account I log into them all with. (Not on M$Windows.) (There's a reason I'm being vague on numbers.)
I haven't looked at openid, but if it allows you to trust someone else with your keys, it's just plain missing on the most important concept. Your own server is the correct direction to be headed, and even that has its limits. Yes, I'm talking about man-in-the-middle, among other things, if, for instance, you plan on accessing your keychain equivalent on it from outside your local LAN.
I have to go to work in two hours, and I have to exercise first, so I don't have time to explain, but you can consider that some unknown interlocuter on/. encourages you to think twice about any solution that uses a general purpose browser, and encourages you to keep your financial stuff off-line as much as you can. (Good luck with that, these days, 'though.)
The solution to your headache -- a little more of the hair of the dog that bit you.
General purpose security? That's an oxymoron, mathematically speaking.
What we need to be doing is moving to dedicated browsers for financial and other high-security sites. But, no, Microsoft, in their wisdom, decides to tape single-sign-on on top of M$IE.
(Does anyone besides me read "MS Internet Explorer" as "Mi$iEry"?)
Dedicated browsers are only a stop-gap, but they could at least help getting the general crowds moving away from M$IE.
what if someone you trust happens to accidentally (virus in a critical MSWindows server or something) reveal your high-trust password? And some guy who sees it decides to add your password to his brute-force dictionary?
No, your e-mail account_s_ (plural) are not single points of attack, unless you use _all_ your e-mail accounts to sign up for everything you sign up for.
Your idea that your own server should be manager your keys is as close as you have come to a reasonable solution, but it is still subject to all sorts of man-in-the-middle.
Don't understand how your final comment about controlling your password for single-sign-on at all. Does some would-be single-sign-on vendor want to take even the final password away? Or do you misunderstand the concept of keys instead of passwords? Or what?
Apple's keychain is managed on your local machine, as opposed to being managed by a large corporation that wants to sell people on the idea that they can handle all the "hard" problems to day-to-day living.
Was Gore party to Clinton and Gates suggestion that the internet could lead to "frictionless money" (or whatever they called it)?
I'm having trouble believing you got so many responses defending single-sign-on.
The safest way to do single-sign-on is like Apple does it. (And I think there is a similar GNU tool with gpg?) You have a password that unlocks your keychain, and the keychain software negotiates with the sites you visit. Theoretically, the keychain software doesn't miss red flags, such as sites requesting keys/passwords that don't belong to them.
The problem with keychains is that they fall when your login account falls. Well, the tokens may be stored encrypted, and the user may be smart enough to have a separate password on the keychain, but all it takes is a well-hidden keylogger. I'm pretty sure no one is handling the issues that allow hidden keyloggers to be left lying around as long as we are browsing the web with the same effective user that we logged in as.
Single-sign-on is just plain wrong for any information that could hurt you if the wrong people get it.
Even a separate hardware token keychain which connects "directly" to the internet (instead of through your general-purpose PC) has to somehow deal with the man-in-the-middle. General purpose keys are a bad idea.
and I seem to have problems with candida albicans.
(Yes, I have been tested for diabetes. Inconclusive results.)
I've been living with this more than twenty years. I don't mind the gas. My wife and kids sometimes complain. Living without simple sugars is fine with me, but the hour and a quarter workout every day to kick me into gear before work is sometimes a frustration when I would prefer spending the time on some project.
If I'm going to just be watching, I prefer to go watch the rugby team of the school I teach at over watching professional sports. I, a middle-aged old man, prefer to participate, myself, help out the coaching staff, hold the tackling dummy while the kids practice hitting it low, let them "teach" me how to hit the tackle low so they can figure out what they are supposed to be doing, etc.
I suppose there is some useful medical research being done in professional sports. And I suppose there is even the occasional exploring of a "new" technique (generally harvested from the amateur arena) and the rules that the new technique requires to keep the games "fair". It's not a total waste, but it sure seems like the pros have gone way over the top.
(I suppose there may be some jealousy here -- I could start a good software company or two with just a tenth of what the biggest names bring down in a year.)
But, in general, I prefer seeing (and sometimes joining with) a bunch of amateurs exploring and being creative, over watching a bunch of pros polishing their schtick while they face the inevitability of middle age.
Yeah, I don't know what Microsoft is doing. I read the packages, it says "Feature A, B,...." I open the package and start reading the manual: Feature A only works if conditions P && Q && R, and a full moon on a Monday are met. I can't believe they would seriously mean that so I try to use feature A anyway. Turns out feature B conflicts with feature A. Can I turn off feature B? Only when !P || !Q || !R or it's not a full moon on a Monday. WtFrustrations?
I don't need feature B anyway, I need feature A. But if I contact Microsoft, they tell me that everybody is using feature B. If I'm not, I'm not on the bandwagon. Feature A is not where it's at. I'm not going to make money there this year.
Hungry people who don't know that money only buys (the equivalent of) a Big Mac also tend to be attracted by money.
There is something to be said for hunger, I suppose. Hunger motivates people to get _something_ out the door.
As for all the "leading edge" stuff that Microsoft is doing, I'll be awfully surprised if Microsoft ever turns out anything but mock-ups of yesterday's leading-edge dreams of famous professors, filtered through the minds of their students who were best adept at regurgitating those dreams on the tests.
The first time I hated Microsoft was back in 1987 or so when I tried to use a C function pointer according to the description in the manual, without reading all the caveats, and without understanding that the "This doesn't work yet." warnings not only meant that the features weren't yet implemented, but also meant that they probably would never be.
I've been seriously bitten by Microsoft three times, and I have never gained anything I consider valuable from using their products. (I have, on the other hand, gained a fair amount of value in using Linux and other "FOSS" stuff. Also gained a fair amount of value buying and using Mac stuff.)
I think I should respect them the way I should respect, what was it someone said? a rabid cougar?
Well, not exactly, but I got a used notebook drive. A year after I started using that notebook as my home web server, heat and centrifugal force and such seems to have spun the grease away from the contact surfaces of the bearings. Or, the disks may have been sleeping and restarting every ten minutes to run the dynamic dns client. (I really need to figure out how to keep that script and the perl it uses in a RAM disk or something.)
Anyway, it started humming from the re-seeks caused by disks that couldn't maintain speed, and then eventually the disk froze.
Thought I had lost the data.
But I thought twice about it. If I just trashed the drive, the data was gone. I couldn't afford to send it in to a professional recovery service, and I did have backups that were sort of recent, anyway. And I wanted to show the insides of the drive to my son.
So I opened the enclosure, showed it to my son but didn't let him touch it, rotated the disks by hand (very carefully avoiding touching or letting dust fall on the disk surfaces), closed it up, plugged it into a USB shirt-pocket enclosure, and pulled off my data.
Turns out I can still use the drive to carry unimportant data around. (Very light use.) I don't trust critical data on it, of course.
That's not enough. In addition to atime and mtime, I think we need a real creation time stamp, as well. And a flag to show whether the current file was created ex-nihilo, by copying an existing file, or from an intentional template. Or by overwriting with a new version not immediately derived from the current one on the system.
To help keep this making sense, the OS would, by default, want to implement edit-by-copy-and-rename instead of edit-in-place.
A count of edits-from-creation could be interesting. It might be used to flag the difference between creation ex-nihilo and creation-by-copy, but then you would be back to not being able to tell the difference between an edit and a branch.
Yeah, I think version control should be built into the OS for general use computers. It would sure help me keep all the cruft out of my backups.
Metadata in the directory record might help reduce the overhead of tracking all that, but versioning definitely slows a system down.
Of course, as many have already noted, many parts of the directory tree don't need to track atime, which is the worst burden. But it would sure be nice to be able to look at the metadata and have an idea, modulo deliberate or accidental manipulation of metadata, which files in the system directories were unaltered from the install of that version of the OS.
Of course, while I can sit here and daydream, I can't be bothered to actually implement any of this.
I'll even put special features on it for you, such as laser sighting and recoil suppression and a silencer. (The silencer is so you can hear yourself scream.)
If you report a creation time, you should report a creation time.
That would mean your file system would be able to tell the difference between a file opened and saved under a different name and a file opened and created from scratch. And, since the concept of template is somewhere between ex-nihilo creation and simple editing, the file system should be able to tell the difference between ex-nihilo and templated creation, and saving under a different name.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the casualties in the war, erm, Microsoft is waging.
(You are being sarcastic, right?)
(I posted this at Linux.com, as well.)
This license is full of technical problems, the least of which is the attempt to eliminate the MIT/BSD license "ambiguity" about whether alternative licenses can be used with it.
It may sound like I'm biased, but, like most Microsoft products, it attempts to enable a quick and simple implementation by implementing the obvious, but wrong elements of the theory.
Start with the name.
Permissive? Relative to the license, it is not permissive at all. No other license can be mixed in -- no perl artistic license, no GPL 1, 2, or 3, no Apache 1 or 2, no Mozilla, no BSD/MIT, not even a plain "Do with it what you want and I don't give a wooden nickel!" one liner license. At this point, I'm not sure even public domain source could be mixed in without opening a project that uses this Microsoft Permissive License up to lawsuits.
Relative to the source code, it is way too permissive. Anybody can join Microsoft's commune, so to speak. Anyone that can bring all contributors to the table, anyway. It's all a ("happy?") playground where everyone plays under the gentle gaze of the original authors who claim the original copyright of the original source code. For practical purposes, forks won't work well.
(Think of how it would be if someone with a strong personality like Theo, but lacking the commitment to freedom, were to release something like openbsd under this license.)
Freedom and openness are _not_ permissive. We are clear, are we not, that the GPL is by no means permissive? You are allowed to use the software only under the principles of protecting everyone's freedom to use the software. They way the license structures the limits and grants gives project leaders the authority to maintain their natural stewardship over the project while allowing _freedom_ minded individuals and groups to join in.
One way they can join in is to fork the project, but the license provides the framework for a clean fork. You can legally move on without leaving your source behind you, and that is a huge part of the freedom.
Even the BSD/MIT licenses are not truly permissive. The apparent ambiguities effectively allow room for project leaders to maintain their stewardship, and allow room for clashes to result in project forks.
The BSD/MIT licenses also technically allow "darkening" a fork, where a user refuses to pay his natural duty to the community by contributing back his or her changes. But the license provides no inherent leverage for the dark forks to use against the open forks. The license also allows the natural consequences of darkening a fork to occur. (Darkened forks naturally tend to wither away.)
(This "Microsoft Permissive License", on the other hand, will effectively work agaist project forks, and will effectively work in favor of keeping project leaders in charge way beyond their time.)
Again, the apparent permissiveness of the BSD/MIT licenses is in comparison to the radical pseudo-traditional idea that source code should be closed from public view. (Closed is actually very permissive, because whatever was done was done behind closed doors, and the guy with the biggest pocketbook got to play with whomever whenever with relatively few social consequences.)
The terms of the Microsoft Permissive License are inverted. The limitations are stated after the grants, which is going to make for some really difficult-to-untangle legal arguments.
The use-at-your-own-risk warning almost appears to not be there, which is probably appropriate for Microsoft's sales machine, but is not at all appropriate for the end users.
The grants are not complete. In the end, your lawyer is going to be telling you, you can't do that more often than not, preventing the implementation of useful features which is one of the primary benefits of truly open licenses.
The patent protection clause is a club, not a shield. Very one-way.
The above is just a start. Like I said, it is a typical product of Microsoft, implementing the wrong stuff simply, to sell to the unwashed masses.
joudanzuki
If society is what keeps you honest, society is your God.
If you don't understand that, you still don't understand what you argue against when you argue against religion.
It's about 3:00 am here, I should be in bed, I probably am not lucid, but I'll try outlining things.
When we define a God, we define our God according to our priorities -- what is most important to us. Those priorities become attributes of the God we define. Your assertion that you don't believe in God is okay as an assertion that you don't believe in _my_ God (or in anyone else's defined God).
But when your assertion that you don't believe in God becomes an assertion that God can't exist, you essentially do violence to your own language.
The semantics of God being the base of definition of priorities is buried in every human language except perhaps the artificial ones that have not existed long enough.
If you want to define a base of priorities that transcends religion, you will need to start coining language. But you should note that thousands of religious philosophers (_religious_ philosophers, mind you) have been trying the same thing for millenia, and failing. Our priorities are based on our beliefs, our beliefs are a hodge-podge of stuff that is taught to us, stuff that is instinctual, and stuff that is derived from experiments.
You can't live without belief. People stripped of belief in _something_ just generally quit doing the things necessary to maintain life (like eating). If the probability of the sun rising in the morning cannot be said to be high, seriously, why bother wasting money on food to put in the fridge? Or, in the extreme, why bother keeping a spare dollar in the pocket for an egg McMuffin in the morning?
People have various reasons for wanting to fence off all religion as superstition, but it isn't that simple. If you do, you lose the ability to talk about the intangibles in any reasonable way.
That was a little meandering about the personal, individual aspects of belief in God. Shifting gears a little bit, and becoming even more random:
Why should God be referred to in the masculine pronoun? Well, using the neutral pronoun, "It", tends to make God sound more like a monster. Some religionists do believe God is a monster. But most who claim God is a monster claim not to believe in The Monster.
So, if you want to discuss God in a neutral (non-antagonistic) way, English has only the gendered pronouns, and the masculine pronoun has a long tradition of being used when gender cannot be otherwise specified. (Attempts to break this tradition, although somewhat successful in certain groups, don't seem to be getting much traction yet. Thus, you will find some computer science papers talking about the user in the feminine, but such usage is definitely still swimming against the current.)
Also, as the parent points out, using the feminine to refer to God indicates a specific belief that the nature of God is female in principle.
The argument that much of what was once considered supernatural is now understand as operations of nature cuts both ways. Those who believe in God will tend to believe that God Himself is supernatural from our point of view precisely because we don't (or can't) understand His nature.
You acknowledge that much of your argument against religion as a principle is actually a collection of disagreements with specific religions. In doing so, you acknowledge that part of your argument with the principle is actually a desire to (at minimum) defend yourself from specific religions you don't like. That weakens your attempt to argue the principle, because it acknowledges that you are asserting _your_ priorities (and thus your God) over the priorities (and Gods) of others.
It's good to assert the right of the individual to believe in God as he or she may.
It's also good to defend oneself against the tyranny of another person's religion, if that other person is trying to press his or her priorities on you via the expressi
I've tried that. It doesn't work.
Screwed me up royal.
You have to start with some sort of belief, otherwise, you don't even dare experiment. If you can't experiment, you can't get evidence. If you can't get evidence, you are stuck with superstition.
Even believing an experiment will produce results requires belief. And who is going to perform an experiment (correctly) without some sort of belief in results?
Sorry about the non-linear here, but it's late at night where I am.
Truth be told, I missed that you said openid instead of that thing MS is offering.
/. encourages you to think twice about any solution that uses a general purpose browser, and encourages you to keep your financial stuff off-line as much as you can. (Good luck with that, these days, 'though.)
However, concerning the e-mail being a single point of failure, that's your fault.
I don't do that. I have at least three e-mail accounts, and I spread registrations around as appropriate. ssl login helps tighten up at least one of my e-mail accounts. The single point of failure is the user account I log into them all with. (Not on M$Windows.) (There's a reason I'm being vague on numbers.)
I haven't looked at openid, but if it allows you to trust someone else with your keys, it's just plain missing on the most important concept. Your own server is the correct direction to be headed, and even that has its limits. Yes, I'm talking about man-in-the-middle, among other things, if, for instance, you plan on accessing your keychain equivalent on it from outside your local LAN.
I have to go to work in two hours, and I have to exercise first, so I don't have time to explain, but you can consider that some unknown interlocuter on
The solution to your headache -- a little more of the hair of the dog that bit you.
General purpose security? That's an oxymoron, mathematically speaking.
What we need to be doing is moving to dedicated browsers for financial and other high-security sites. But, no, Microsoft, in their wisdom, decides to tape single-sign-on on top of M$IE.
(Does anyone besides me read "MS Internet Explorer" as "Mi$iEry"?)
Dedicated browsers are only a stop-gap, but they could at least help getting the general crowds moving away from M$IE.
what if someone you trust happens to accidentally (virus in a critical MSWindows server or something) reveal your high-trust password? And some guy who sees it decides to add your password to his brute-force dictionary?
No, your e-mail account_s_ (plural) are not single points of attack, unless you use _all_ your e-mail accounts to sign up for everything you sign up for.
Your idea that your own server should be manager your keys is as close as you have come to a reasonable solution, but it is still subject to all sorts of man-in-the-middle.
Don't understand how your final comment about controlling your password for single-sign-on at all. Does some would-be single-sign-on vendor want to take even the final password away? Or do you misunderstand the concept of keys instead of passwords? Or what?
Apple's keychain is managed on your local machine, as opposed to being managed by a large corporation that wants to sell people on the idea that they can handle all the "hard" problems to day-to-day living.
Was Gore party to Clinton and Gates suggestion that the internet could lead to "frictionless money" (or whatever they called it)?
I'm having trouble believing you got so many responses defending single-sign-on.
The safest way to do single-sign-on is like Apple does it. (And I think there is a similar GNU tool with gpg?) You have a password that unlocks your keychain, and the keychain software negotiates with the sites you visit. Theoretically, the keychain software doesn't miss red flags, such as sites requesting keys/passwords that don't belong to them.
The problem with keychains is that they fall when your login account falls. Well, the tokens may be stored encrypted, and the user may be smart enough to have a separate password on the keychain, but all it takes is a well-hidden keylogger. I'm pretty sure no one is handling the issues that allow hidden keyloggers to be left lying around as long as we are browsing the web with the same effective user that we logged in as.
Single-sign-on is just plain wrong for any information that could hurt you if the wrong people get it.
Even a separate hardware token keychain which connects "directly" to the internet (instead of through your general-purpose PC) has to somehow deal with the man-in-the-middle. General purpose keys are a bad idea.
WtFoulup was their excuse for this waste of paper?
and I seem to have problems with candida albicans.
(Yes, I have been tested for diabetes. Inconclusive results.)
I've been living with this more than twenty years. I don't mind the gas. My wife and kids sometimes complain. Living without simple sugars is fine with me, but the hour and a quarter workout every day to kick me into gear before work is sometimes a frustration when I would prefer spending the time on some project.
I know this from personal experience.
Refined carbohydrates put me to sleep and give me headaches.
Unrefined carbohydrates give me gas.
Engineering tradeoffs?
In whose opinion?
... ." I open the package and start reading the manual: Feature A only works if conditions P && Q && R, and a full moon on a Monday are met. I can't believe they would seriously mean that so I try to use feature A anyway. Turns out feature B conflicts with feature A. Can I turn off feature B? Only when !P || !Q || !R or it's not a full moon on a Monday. WtFrustrations?
If I'm going to just be watching, I prefer to go watch the rugby team of the school I teach at over watching professional sports. I, a middle-aged old man, prefer to participate, myself, help out the coaching staff, hold the tackling dummy while the kids practice hitting it low, let them "teach" me how to hit the tackle low so they can figure out what they are supposed to be doing, etc.
I suppose there is some useful medical research being done in professional sports. And I suppose there is even the occasional exploring of a "new" technique (generally harvested from the amateur arena) and the rules that the new technique requires to keep the games "fair". It's not a total waste, but it sure seems like the pros have gone way over the top.
(I suppose there may be some jealousy here -- I could start a good software company or two with just a tenth of what the biggest names bring down in a year.)
But, in general, I prefer seeing (and sometimes joining with) a bunch of amateurs exploring and being creative, over watching a bunch of pros polishing their schtick while they face the inevitability of middle age.
Yeah, I don't know what Microsoft is doing. I read the packages, it says "Feature A, B,
I don't need feature B anyway, I need feature A. But if I contact Microsoft, they tell me that everybody is using feature B. If I'm not, I'm not on the bandwagon. Feature A is not where it's at. I'm not going to make money there this year.
You want to lecture me about groupthink?
My Aggie brother in law will never let me live this one down.
(If he ever reads it.)
(erk.)
mascot.
Flourine.
Just because there is a temporary excess of Flourine in the atmosphere right now doesn't mean that one should just breathe it.
people who are hungry for money.
Hungry people who don't know that money only buys (the equivalent of) a Big Mac also tend to be attracted by money.
There is something to be said for hunger, I suppose. Hunger motivates people to get _something_ out the door.
As for all the "leading edge" stuff that Microsoft is doing, I'll be awfully surprised if Microsoft ever turns out anything but mock-ups of yesterday's leading-edge dreams of famous professors, filtered through the minds of their students who were best adept at regurgitating those dreams on the tests.
The first time I hated Microsoft was back in 1987 or so when I tried to use a C function pointer according to the description in the manual, without reading all the caveats, and without understanding that the "This doesn't work yet." warnings not only meant that the features weren't yet implemented, but also meant that they probably would never be.
I've been seriously bitten by Microsoft three times, and I have never gained anything I consider valuable from using their products. (I have, on the other hand, gained a fair amount of value in using Linux and other "FOSS" stuff. Also gained a fair amount of value buying and using Mac stuff.)
I think I should respect them the way I should respect, what was it someone said? a rabid cougar?
and Marx, Lenin, and Malthus were wrong about a few things.
Maybe more than a few.
PHBs are evidence that devolution occurs.
Well, not exactly, but I got a used notebook drive. A year after I started using that notebook as my home web server, heat and centrifugal force and such seems to have spun the grease away from the contact surfaces of the bearings. Or, the disks may have been sleeping and restarting every ten minutes to run the dynamic dns client. (I really need to figure out how to keep that script and the perl it uses in a RAM disk or something.)
Anyway, it started humming from the re-seeks caused by disks that couldn't maintain speed, and then eventually the disk froze.
Thought I had lost the data.
But I thought twice about it. If I just trashed the drive, the data was gone. I couldn't afford to send it in to a professional recovery service, and I did have backups that were sort of recent, anyway. And I wanted to show the insides of the drive to my son.
So I opened the enclosure, showed it to my son but didn't let him touch it, rotated the disks by hand (very carefully avoiding touching or letting dust fall on the disk surfaces), closed it up, plugged it into a USB shirt-pocket enclosure, and pulled off my data.
Turns out I can still use the drive to carry unimportant data around. (Very light use.) I don't trust critical data on it, of course.
joudanzuki
atime?
That's not enough. In addition to atime and mtime, I think we need a real creation time stamp, as well. And a flag to show whether the current file was created ex-nihilo, by copying an existing file, or from an intentional template. Or by overwriting with a new version not immediately derived from the current one on the system.
To help keep this making sense, the OS would, by default, want to implement edit-by-copy-and-rename instead of edit-in-place.
A count of edits-from-creation could be interesting. It might be used to flag the difference between creation ex-nihilo and creation-by-copy, but then you would be back to not being able to tell the difference between an edit and a branch.
Yeah, I think version control should be built into the OS for general use computers. It would sure help me keep all the cruft out of my backups.
Metadata in the directory record might help reduce the overhead of tracking all that, but versioning definitely slows a system down.
Of course, as many have already noted, many parts of the directory tree don't need to track atime, which is the worst burden. But it would sure be nice to be able to look at the metadata and have an idea, modulo deliberate or accidental manipulation of metadata, which files in the system directories were unaltered from the install of that version of the OS.
Of course, while I can sit here and daydream, I can't be bothered to actually implement any of this.
joudanzuki
What, you want to shoot yourself in the foot?
Let my sell you the gun.
I'll even put special features on it for you, such as laser sighting and recoil suppression and a silencer. (The silencer is so you can hear yourself scream.)
If you report a creation time, you should report a creation time.
That would mean your file system would be able to tell the difference between a file opened and saved under a different name and a file opened and created from scratch. And, since the concept of template is somewhere between ex-nihilo creation and simple editing, the file system should be able to tell the difference between ex-nihilo and templated creation, and saving under a different name.
We think we can't see God, so we decide there is none. But we wonder why we can't see ETIs, so we invent reasons.
All very ironic, especially when the answer to both questions is basically that we can't see the forest for the trees.
joudanzuki