True, but careful release of a zombie virus will allow the shopping to continue. In fact I think I've seen some beta testing of the virus at the shopping mall.
When you have folks skilled in certain areas, they can be a force for good or for evil. But if you want the good you cannot avoid some of the evil. Intelligence and creativity, unlike other more mechanistic human activities, cannot be harnessed safely. It's in the nature of knowing how to think outside the box.
Hallway conversations are a hassle and waste of much time, at least the ones I'm involved in:
"Hey X, I've been waiting to catch you this morning. The alpha server app is hanging at midnight when we do backups and restart the db. What do you think is the problem?"
"No idea. You'll have to email me the logs and point me at the current source for that app. Then give me an hour and I'll have some suggestions for you. I had some time this morning; you could have emailed me last night when you got alerted and I might have had a fix for you already."
"Well uh, I wanted to discuss it with you in person."
"Not much to go on with just a verbal description - can't help you until later."
(inefficient...happens to me all the time, people who prefer talk over writing an email)
But if you are not available to participate with the others *right now*, they will meet and make decisions without your input. If you cannot supply answers to the boss when he needs them, he will start consulting someone else and your value to him drops.
Basically when the rest of the Borg collective are collaborating without you and progressing toward the future, you are being left behind and treated as non-essential. You had better produce some kick-ass value when you do choose to engage others or you are gone.
I actually sympathize with you and live in the disconnected world you describe but I also work hard to provide great value to offset my inconvenience to others. It works but many are not cut out for that way of life - it can be stressful and you better not stumble.
> I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. I'm leaving the country.
I feel the same way but that isn't the solution, because the reach of the U.S. is global. Just look at the postings of Europeans here, and the U.S. military complex. There is no place to hide on Earth. This monster has to be fought, not run from until it dies of old age.
No the original poster had it right, the GPL ensures freedom of the "recipient" (enduser) of the code to do what they want, which is open it up to make changes and fix bugs. And the BSD does not guarantee that freedom.
Your comment about redistribution of aggregated and derivative works places you in the category of "producer" of code, not "recipient", so his statement about BSD is correct as well.
And some FOSS developers do it because they fervently want Microsoft and similar companies to suffer economically, as payback for the pain they have caused, the crimes they continue to commit and the freedom they attempt to take away.
For those people, no amount of money could replace the pleasure of driving Microsoft et. al. into the ground, salting the earth and sticking a sign there saying, "so shall it be to all such tyrants".
"Modern western businesses are generally run like the military, at least in form if not function."
I hear this often, but when I do, I always wonder how a company could be run differently. I mean, could a business really be run democratically and survive? What would such a company look like? Where anyone can declare their candidacy for president of the company, with the IT part putting up John and the HR nominating Mary. And then a company convention where nominations are decided and the employees vote for their leaders. Would it look just like a union-dominated company or could something more enlightened be designed for the 21st century workplace? Would management's decisions be any worse or better than what we have now?
Sure, the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. It runs X and this past weekend I gave a presentation where programs running on it were displayed on the overhead projector, using my laptop as an X display. It doesn't even need ethernet, just a USB cable between the phone and the laptop.
> Yeah. Making nomenclature consistent across industries > is damned inconvenient! Why bother?
Heh, the computer industry has problems enough with terminology that is never going get fixed.
- Our floppies are no longer floppy.
- Why are ROMs called "read-only memory" but RAMs are not called
"read-write memory"?
- And why "random access memory" when ROMs are (usually) randomly
accessible as well?
- And the word "computer" for something that does so much more
in today's world - yes machine code is "computing" in the
technical sense but a better word could have been used for
these machines.
- And now we call removable solid-state storage "flash drives"
but flash doesn't have to be removable and I suspect when we
have holographic storage crystals we'll probably still call
them "flash drives" by tradition.
> The issue is that the new GPL is being forced onto us. It is being forced > in a concerted effort to force as many people as possible to use it in > order to be under the new obligations.
I think you're greatly abusing the word "force", and should use another word.
Imagine you've been invited to a party at John's house. It's free, you arrive and have a great time. Now around midnight some people suggest going over to Mary's house to continue the party. You balk, saying that you don't want to go to Mary's house. We say, fine, you can stay here. But, you say, if enough of you go, this party will die and become boring. That those who are going are "forcing" you to go to Mary's house when you don't want to. We say, no one is forcing you -- you can stay here at John's and you can leave and go home. And in fact, if you insist that we stay here at John's, you are indeed "forcing" us, by your definition, to not go to Mary's house. And that is unfair to those of us who like Mary and want to go see her.
The GPL is about choice. It is about the right to collaborate with those of like mind, and not to collaborate with those who don't share our values. You can say that being picky about collaborators impacts IT, impacts society, impacts corporatism, perhaps in a negative fashion. We say nevertheless, we have the right to make that choice for ourselves, and no one should make it for us.
We're going down the street to the GPLv3 party -- come along, it's going to be a blast!
> Some people claim that the GPL is much more effective at creating and > fostering community. I disagree.
Unlike a futile BSD vs GPL debate, this is a rather factual one. There are more and larger communities using GPL than BSD. If nothing else, look at the size of the Linux community vs the sum of the BSD ones. The GPL ones are larger and growing ever larger. How can you disagree with those numbers?
The reason is that more people are those paranoid GPL types than are the sharing BSD types. Some may wish it otherwise and some may work to change it, but let's not hide from the facts.
> Existing software will continue to run on the individual processor cores. Something that > they've done for a long period of time. Old software may not get any faster due to a > change in focus toward parallelism vs. increased core speed, but it's not going to > suddenly come to a screeching halt any more than my DOS programs from 15 years ago are.
It _will_ run slower if Intel follows its design path. Did you read about their prototype 80-core CPU? Those cores are not of the computing power we have now but trimmed down processors, such that 80 of them combined result in an overall improvement. But if your old software of 2007 uses only one core -- you are going to run slower than you do today.
>> compelling reasons why your favorite software will soon be rendered deadly slow
> Secondly, multicore systems are not a problem. Software (especially server software!) has > been written around multi-processing capabilities for a long time now.
I read that as your favorite -desktop- software - people don't usually have favorite server software, as that is invisible to most folk. But people develop an attachment to their preferred desktop apps.
If you're only using it for archive, writing anew each time, then skip the file system altogether. Treat the media like a block device, tar or otherwise archive your backup and just write the tar as a single, linear sequence of bytes. And don't compress it, so that a bit error early in the sequence doesn't mess up later blocks.
Now which archive format is best - tar, cpio, etc.? I've heard that cpio is a much simpler underlying format.
And if you have the space, write the archive sequence multiple times onto the block device, so if one block is destroyed you can pick it from from a peer location.
I'm not up on the pine scene but why aren't the patches folded into the upstream? Seems if you're checking out, you'd submit them all before you turn off the lights, but perhaps there is some legal reason.
> have to go to certain places to file my taxes this year > because otherwise that's a different kind of infringement, > patent infringement - and it doesn't matter if I read the > law myself and saw that this is possible
I'm as outraged as you, but patents don't apply to personal use, AFAICT. You can read patents all day and build devices in your private home. They only come into play when you start producing stuff for other people, usually commercial but gifts may be restricted.
So you can still do your own taxes using these strategies, but the various accounting firms are in trouble.
While I for one would be very glad, I don't get everyone thinking that things will "return to normal" when Shrub leaves office. While the man may leave, the party and entrenched system will put someone in place just like him. I mean, he didn't pull all this off by himself. He ain't that smart.
> I think that the government would be well off to invest more time and money into smaller, > more off the wall brainstorming sessions with the thinkers that are far outside the > normal trains of thought. We just might find ourselves a bit safer.
But many of those creative, out-of-the-box thinkers don't _want_ to work for an oppressive government helping them to enslave their populace. They'd be cutting their own throat. An oppressive government in the long run tends to eliminate free thinkers, so why would those people who can think flexibly work to protect it? Other than money, which often those thinkers don't consider as a primary factor when choosing where to work.
The enemy is not some rag tag group in a 3rd world country, but our own government who seeks to eliminate our freedoms.
> "Laws" per se are written by "lawmakers" - you know, politicians. > A lot of these folks are barely literate in their own language, > much less requiring them to learn another.
That's something that puzzles me -- they do seem awfully poor at crafting readable, correctly scoped, airtight laws yet so many politicians _did_ get a law degree in which they are graded on being able to generate legal contracts with those properties. Well, maybe not always 'readable' but a lawyer who writes a leaky, poorly worded contract is going to flunk out. Yes, I know colleges churn out some lawyers with poor skills but _that_ many (or why do they all congregate in politics)?
I mean, most have law degrees so they're not semi-literate non-college folk. Yet their behavior would indicate otherwise. How did they get thru law school being unable to compose a paragraph?
With one big difference - the green phone lets a developer rebuild the Linux kernel while those other Wifi phones appears to retain tight control over the core software. So many phones only let you write Java apps in the safe sandbox, not get down and dirty with the underlying infrastructure.
Also those other phones tend to require you to jump thru hurdles to become a developer, restricting the market to only the big boys. The green phone looks to permit the little guy into the game.
Admittedly we'll have to see once these phones are actually available, but freely available access to the source will be key for significant adoption.
I agree. The assumption that engineers are more intelligent or have more sense than janitors is flawed.
If we take the assumption that those above you in the hierarchy are smarter, by virtue that they wouldn't hold that position if they weren't, then how do you explain Dilbert-style management? They're above the engineers so must be smarter? And yet those same engineers would apply that to themselves and reason they must be better than janitors. Don't you think managers do the same to the engineers?
Besides, people are NOT necessarily stratified by intelligence or sense. It may be because they lack educational credentials, or office discipline/punctuality (something I'm not good at), office fashion sense/emotional/social skills, social connections or they don't enjoy playing the corporate climb-the-ladder game.
And if your engineers are designing products for the cleaning industry, a janitor on the team may be exactly what you need.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're quite young, _never_ put dates for your old stuff on your resume. Use a skills resume style instead of a chronological style.
True, but careful release of a zombie virus will allow the shopping to continue. In fact I think I've seen some beta testing of the virus at the shopping mall.
Illegal for a reason - not disputed.
When you have folks skilled in certain areas, they can be a force for good or for evil. But if you want the good you cannot avoid some of the evil. Intelligence and creativity, unlike other more mechanistic human activities, cannot be harnessed safely. It's in the nature of knowing how to think outside the box.
>> I used to be all about the tech, but as I age I'm finding not only that I can't keep up, but that I don't want to keep up.
Then you will be left behind... are you sure that is really better? Perhaps it is, for your comfort zone but not for your career.
Hallway conversations are a hassle and waste of much time, at least the ones I'm involved in:
"Hey X, I've been waiting to catch you this morning. The alpha server app is hanging at midnight when we do backups and restart the db. What do you think is the problem?"
"No idea. You'll have to email me the logs and point me at the current source for that app. Then give me an hour and I'll have some suggestions for you. I had some time this morning; you could have emailed me last night when you got alerted and I might have had a fix for you already."
"Well uh, I wanted to discuss it with you in person."
"Not much to go on with just a verbal description - can't help you until later."
(inefficient...happens to me all the time, people who prefer talk over writing an email)
But if you are not available to participate with the others *right now*, they will meet and make decisions without your input. If you cannot supply answers to the boss when he needs them, he will start consulting someone else and your value to him drops.
Basically when the rest of the Borg collective are collaborating without you and progressing toward the future, you are being left behind and treated as non-essential. You had better produce some kick-ass value when you do choose to engage others or you are gone.
I actually sympathize with you and live in the disconnected world you describe but I also work hard to provide great value to offset my inconvenience to others. It works but many are not cut out for that way of life - it can be stressful and you better not stumble.
> I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. I'm leaving the country.
I feel the same way but that isn't the solution, because the reach of the U.S. is global. Just look at the postings of Europeans here, and the U.S. military complex. There is no place to hide on Earth. This monster has to be fought, not run from until it dies of old age.
No the original poster had it right, the GPL ensures freedom of the "recipient" (enduser) of the code to do what they want, which is open it up to make changes and fix bugs. And the BSD does not guarantee that freedom. Your comment about redistribution of aggregated and derivative works places you in the category of "producer" of code, not "recipient", so his statement about BSD is correct as well.
And some FOSS developers do it because they fervently want Microsoft and similar companies to suffer economically, as payback for the pain they have caused, the crimes they continue to commit and the freedom they attempt to take away. For those people, no amount of money could replace the pleasure of driving Microsoft et. al. into the ground, salting the earth and sticking a sign there saying, "so shall it be to all such tyrants".
"Modern western businesses are generally run like the military, at least in form if not function." I hear this often, but when I do, I always wonder how a company could be run differently. I mean, could a business really be run democratically and survive? What would such a company look like? Where anyone can declare their candidacy for president of the company, with the IT part putting up John and the HR nominating Mary. And then a company convention where nominations are decided and the employees vote for their leaders. Would it look just like a union-dominated company or could something more enlightened be designed for the 21st century workplace? Would management's decisions be any worse or better than what we have now?
Those who do not control their technology will be controlled by it.
Sure, the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. It runs X and this past weekend I gave a presentation where programs running on it were displayed on the overhead projector, using my laptop as an X display. It doesn't even need ethernet, just a USB cable between the phone and the laptop.
> Yeah. Making nomenclature consistent across industries
> is damned inconvenient! Why bother?
Heh, the computer industry has problems enough with terminology that is never going get fixed.
- Our floppies are no longer floppy.
- Why are ROMs called "read-only memory" but RAMs are not called
"read-write memory"?
- And why "random access memory" when ROMs are (usually) randomly
accessible as well?
- And the word "computer" for something that does so much more
in today's world - yes machine code is "computing" in the
technical sense but a better word could have been used for
these machines.
- And now we call removable solid-state storage "flash drives"
but flash doesn't have to be removable and I suspect when we
have holographic storage crystals we'll probably still call
them "flash drives" by tradition.
> The issue is that the new GPL is being forced onto us. It is being forced
> in a concerted effort to force as many people as possible to use it in
> order to be under the new obligations.
I think you're greatly abusing the word "force", and should use another word.
Imagine you've been invited to a party at John's house. It's free, you arrive and have a great time. Now around midnight some people suggest going over to Mary's house to continue the party. You balk, saying that you don't want to go to Mary's house. We say, fine, you can stay here. But, you say, if enough of you go, this party will die and become boring. That those who are going are "forcing" you to go to Mary's house when you don't want to. We say, no one is forcing you -- you can stay here at John's and you can leave and go home. And in fact, if you insist that we stay here at John's, you are indeed "forcing" us, by your definition, to not go to Mary's house. And that is unfair to those of us who like Mary and want to go see her.
The GPL is about choice. It is about the right to collaborate with those of like mind, and not to collaborate with those who don't share our values. You can say that being picky about collaborators impacts IT, impacts society, impacts corporatism, perhaps in a negative fashion. We say nevertheless, we have the right to make that choice for ourselves, and no one should make it for us.
We're going down the street to the GPLv3 party -- come along, it's going to be a blast!
> Some people claim that the GPL is much more effective at creating and
> fostering community. I disagree.
Unlike a futile BSD vs GPL debate, this is a rather factual one. There are more and larger communities using GPL than BSD. If nothing else, look at the size of the Linux community vs the sum of the BSD ones. The GPL ones are larger and growing ever larger. How can you disagree with those numbers?
The reason is that more people are those paranoid GPL types than are the sharing BSD types. Some may wish it otherwise and some may work to change it, but let's not hide from the facts.
Hmmm, so 20Gb corresponds to 25 hours of video, and you pull down 60 Gb in a week, so that's 75 hours of video in a week.
;-) At 10.7 hours/day are you doing anything else?
;-) ;-)
Geez, how much TV are you watching?
> If people aren't going to cut back dramatically on their
> viewing, bandwidth caps will have to go.
Cutting back from 10 hours/day of TV is probably a reasonable restriction on customers. They need to get a job and a life.
> Existing software will continue to run on the individual processor cores. Something that
> they've done for a long period of time. Old software may not get any faster due to a
> change in focus toward parallelism vs. increased core speed, but it's not going to
> suddenly come to a screeching halt any more than my DOS programs from 15 years ago are.
It _will_ run slower if Intel follows its design path. Did you read about their prototype 80-core CPU? Those cores are not of the computing power we have now but trimmed down processors, such that 80 of them combined result in an overall improvement. But if your old software of 2007 uses only one core -- you are going to run slower than you do today.
>> compelling reasons why your favorite software will soon be rendered deadly slow
> Secondly, multicore systems are not a problem. Software (especially server software!) has
> been written around multi-processing capabilities for a long time now.
I read that as your favorite -desktop- software - people don't usually have favorite server software, as that is invisible to most folk. But people develop an attachment to their preferred desktop apps.
If you're only using it for archive, writing anew each time, then skip the file system altogether. Treat the media like a block device, tar or otherwise archive your backup and just write the tar as a single, linear sequence of bytes. And don't compress it, so that a bit error early in the sequence doesn't mess up later blocks.
Now which archive format is best - tar, cpio, etc.? I've heard that cpio is a much simpler underlying format.
And if you have the space, write the archive sequence multiple times onto the block device, so if one block is destroyed you can pick it from from a peer location.
-Jeff
I'm not up on the pine scene but why aren't the patches folded into the upstream? Seems if you're checking out, you'd submit them all before you turn off the lights, but perhaps there is some legal reason.
> have to go to certain places to file my taxes this year
> because otherwise that's a different kind of infringement,
> patent infringement - and it doesn't matter if I read the
> law myself and saw that this is possible
I'm as outraged as you, but patents don't apply to personal use, AFAICT. You can read patents all day and build devices in your private home. They only come into play when you start producing stuff for other people, usually commercial but gifts may be restricted.
So you can still do your own taxes using these strategies, but the various accounting firms are in trouble.
1. ... when Shrub leaves office in 2008
While I for one would be very glad, I don't get everyone thinking that things will "return to normal" when Shrub leaves office. While the man may leave, the party and entrenched system will put someone in place just like him. I mean, he didn't pull all this off by himself. He ain't that smart.
> I think that the government would be well off to invest more time and money into smaller,
> more off the wall brainstorming sessions with the thinkers that are far outside the
> normal trains of thought. We just might find ourselves a bit safer.
But many of those creative, out-of-the-box thinkers don't _want_ to work for an oppressive government helping them to enslave their populace. They'd be cutting their own throat. An oppressive government in the long run tends to eliminate free thinkers, so why would those people who can think flexibly work to protect it? Other than money, which often those thinkers don't consider as a primary factor when choosing where to work.
The enemy is not some rag tag group in a 3rd world country, but our own government who seeks to eliminate our freedoms.
> "Laws" per se are written by "lawmakers" - you know, politicians.
> A lot of these folks are barely literate in their own language,
> much less requiring them to learn another.
That's something that puzzles me -- they do seem awfully poor at crafting readable, correctly scoped, airtight laws yet so many politicians _did_ get a law degree in which they are graded on being able to generate legal contracts with those properties. Well, maybe not always 'readable' but a lawyer who writes a leaky, poorly worded contract is going to flunk out. Yes, I know colleges churn out some lawyers with poor skills but _that_ many (or why do they all congregate in politics)?
I mean, most have law degrees so they're not semi-literate non-college folk. Yet their behavior would indicate otherwise. How did they get thru law school being unable to compose a paragraph?
With one big difference - the green phone lets a developer rebuild the Linux kernel while those other Wifi phones appears to retain tight control over the core software. So many phones only let you write Java apps in the safe sandbox, not get down and dirty with the underlying infrastructure.
Also those other phones tend to require you to jump thru hurdles to become a developer, restricting the market to only the big boys. The green phone looks to permit the little guy into the game.
Admittedly we'll have to see once these phones are actually available, but freely available access to the source will be key for significant adoption.
I agree. The assumption that engineers are more intelligent or have more sense than janitors is flawed.
If we take the assumption that those above you in the hierarchy are smarter, by virtue that they wouldn't hold that position if they weren't, then how do you explain Dilbert-style management? They're above the engineers so must be smarter? And yet those same engineers would apply that to themselves and reason they must be better than janitors. Don't you think managers do the same to the engineers?
Besides, people are NOT necessarily stratified by intelligence or sense. It may be because they lack educational credentials, or office discipline/punctuality (something I'm not good at), office fashion sense/emotional/social skills, social connections or they don't enjoy playing the corporate climb-the-ladder game.
And if your engineers are designing products for the cleaning industry, a janitor on the team may be exactly what you need.