So the end result will be that news sites sill be less likely to use AFP photos, because once they do, they will not be indexed by Google.
How do you figure?
I mean, Google News has a bunch of links and a bunch of pictures. The two are not actually related, though -- that is, the picture next to the story is from one of the articles in that category but not necessarily from the one excerpted. Really, go check it out.
Google indexes both images and small snippets of the stories, and displays them automagically together on the Google News frontpage. Not indexing AFP photos will only mean that AFP photos won't be on the front page, not that the news source that purchase AFP material won't be indexed. Do you see the difference?
Lots of articles don't have images, and yet they still get indexed. Do you see how this works? The photos are irrelevant.
Quoting a snippet is certainly fair use, but displaying a photo on your site that other people had to pay to use probably isn't.
Ergo, the sites that buy AFP content still get indexed, but AFP pictures don't end up on Google News. And obviously, Google knows full well which pics are AFP pics -- they actually automagically cut out the copyright notice on those picture before they display them. Seems like they were asking for it.
So essentially what you're saying is, it's only appropriate to defend one's civil liberties when the infraction is, by some unspecified measure, large enough?
I believe you're deliberately misrepresenting the grandparent's point, which was that our freedom is being stripped from us by unjust laws and practices, and that we must take a stand against those laws and practices.
In essence, your rebuttal: "The civil rights movement and the anti-DRM movement are not on the same level because I see the import of the former, but fail to appreciate the relevance of the latter."
Really, your rebuttal is (deliberately, I believe) an attack not on his argument, nor his point, but on his analogy -- which amounted to nothing more than a (perhaps poor) way to underscore a citizen's moral obligation to oppose tyranny in any form, no matter how extreme -- as was the case in the south -- or how subtle, as in the case of Digital Restrictions Management.
It is also worth noting that comparisons between the cause pursued by the American Civil Rights movement and the cause pursued by the American Revolution -- comparisons common in the 1960s -- drew the same sort of disdain from nationalistic racists who appreciated the importance of the latter but saw the former as nothing short of an aberration. Their responses were shockingly similar to yours -- a pretended disbelief that a social revolution granting civil rights to niggers could have the same importance, on any level, as a military revolution guaranteeing white men "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
Now, from our enlightened perspective, we see that anything short of complete social equality for African Americans is unacceptable, and we continue, as best we can, to fight the good fight because that war has not yet been won.
Unfortunately, DRM is a much more subtle thing -- it is an example of a power grab by corporations seeking to limit the flow of information, because they understand all too well that information is power. You think of it as an issue relevant only to file trading pirates bent on having "free music". I see it as an encroachment first on music, then on movies, then on books, and eventually on everything. It is the sort of thing that must be nipped in the bud. It may not have as spectacular social consequences as the American Civil Rights Movement, which sought to right an existing wrong and thus changed society. No, it will be subtle, because it is a fight to prevent freedom from being ripped from our fingers for the betterment of the priviledged few.
We are protecting the status quo -- you may be willing to give up your freedom for convenience, but I am not. I would suggest that you reconsider your position. This fight -- the fight to determine whether it is the People who control information flow, or a select clique of the wealthy and powerful -- is every bit as important as any other major social movement in the history of this nation or indeed any other.
We are entering the information age, and this is more important now than ever. But even historically, consider how power has been centered in the hands of the few in every nation on earth -- through control of education, through control of information. The Catholic Church in Europe, the Scholar class in Imperial China, and yes, the practice of keeping African slaves illiterate -- all these are early examples of how information is power. Real power.
They've controlled it for centuries. But now, we are taking it back.
If that's the case, then it seems extremely unlikely that they would be able to enforce the patent, because of prior art. Check out this link. In particular:
The "style" menu was interesting -- you could load a style sheet to define how you liked your documents rendered. You could also set the paragraph style to an HTML element's style - as lists didn't nest, the user could think of the process as styles (heading1, heading 2, list element, etc) and then this implied an HTML structure when the document was written back.
As this was in the first web browser ever written, it seems rather unlikely they could make much of a claim.
However, CSS was first implemented in IE, if I recall correctly. So it seems as though they had a lot to do with its development at some stage, at least.
Whatever the case, IE's lack of halfway decent CSS support is one of the worst things about the web today. Either MS needs to seriously work on bringing their CSS support up to speed, or a competing, standards-compliant browser needs to take the lead from IE. I would happy with either situation.
It's interesting to see who takes issue with this post. It was posted at a time when most of North America was asleep, and quickly climbed to +5 Insightful, presumably being moderated primarily by Europeans/Asians.
Then, I went to sleep (I live in Asia) and when I wake up, it's been modded Troll and Overrated by a lot of people (presumably) in the North American timezones. Overrated, perhaps... Troll is an interesting spin, though.
I'm actually not complaining about the moderation, as I have karma to burn. But what I do think is interesting is that it seems as though North Americans -- that is, a bunch of people who are primarily a) monoglots and b) English speakers -- are far more prone to finding my observations insulting or inaccurate than people who very likely speak English as a second language.
I wonder if that helps or hurts my point.
Re:Can anyone elaborate on this LLVM v. RMS issue?
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For what it's worth, at least with respect to the English and the Americans, both are true (they are/were powers both in terms of trade and military capacity).
Hawk makes a very good point regarding the way the words are typically used, though. In this case, though, I primarily meant mercantile prowess, not military prowess... but I can see how my post may have been ambiguous.
Note for example that while the USSR was indisputably a world power, the use of Russian as an "international language" only ever gained any currency in those areas (communist countries) where they were a major trade presence. Because of their rather isolationist policies regarding the west, Russian was never an important language anywhere else. So I think Hawk's point certainly stands... I just don't think it was any different from my point;)
Tell me, what on earth does the popularity of a language have to do with how friendly the people that speak it are? Because I was always under the impression that people learned languages primarily because they were useful.
English has become the de facto international language because the last two dominant world powers -- the English and now we Americans -- speak it. There is no other reason.
I don't know why I bother responding to these sorts of poorly thought out comments. Perhaps you were just so taken by your own dislike for the French that you couldn't hold yourself back, accuracy be damned? Honestly, for the sake of everyone here, try to at least use that one brain cell you surely own and consider what you're saying before you hit that "Submit" button. It would go a long way to advance the cause of intelligent discourse here.
Seriously though, if you take the time to learn a few other languages you'll realize that English is pretty terse and concise. Communicating in programming languages is rather limiting, as we humans aren't computers. The Lojban people made a good go at it, but they mostly did that by taking a complex language and removing ambiguity as much as possible, thus allowing a computer to simply "throw out" the information that it doesn't need.
I mean, cents = 2, for example, relays far less meaning than my 2 cents. Consider, for example, that cents is actually a unit of measure, not a variable. Think about how much information a typical English sentence communicates -- do you honestly think there is any easy way to make it more terse, more concise?
I think we humans have figured out how to maximize our signal to noise ratio when it comes to aural transfer of meaning. Programming languages are far more suited to recipe-writing.
You'd be limiting yourself rather much if you tried to communicate only in recipes.
I agree with the spirit of what you're trying to say -- most native English speakers have never seriously tried learning another language and have no appreciation for how difficult it is.
However, as someone who speaks 4 languages, may I say that I very much appreciate grammar nazis. Of course it depends on the delivery -- if the post simply ridicules the parent's english and makes no attempt to correct or explain his mistakes, then it is worth less than the space it takes up. If, however, the delivery is abrupt (or even rude) but corrects the mistake and (perhaps more importantly) explains the rationale behind the grammatical rule in question, it is, quite simply, invaluable. Of course, if they can do all that and not be rude, that's a plus -- but this is Slashdot, let's not set our standards too high.
The truth is that Americans, Brits and Aussies are far, far too polite. The result is that people who live in one of those countries can speak broken English for their entire stay and never be told by any of the smiling natives that they're speaking like a retard. The result? Your year or two abroad doesn't help your English anywhere near as much as you hoped it would.
Now, take France. The French will happily tell you, in no uncertain terms, and to your face, that you are butchering their language. They will correct you, often impatiently, and act as if you're a retard for not speaking correctly. This is considered "rude" by many people, but you know what? I have met a few Americans/Brits that have lived in France for a few years, and they speak nearly perfect French (I am a natively bilingual in French and English). I mean they have good pronunciation, good grammar (French grammar is reasonably difficult), and are conversationally adept.
Now it may be that I just had the fortune of meeting a few people that were graced with unusual linguistic talent. It may be that the numerous people I've met that lived in the US, for example, for a few years, just couldn't learn English because they truly were retarded. But I think there's more to it than that.
Grammar nazis provide an invaluable service, especially to ESL learners. They most annoy native speakers, who feel that their English is adequate (though it most often is not) and find a GN's pedantic attention to detail obnoxious.
If you are a non-native speaker, you should thank English speakers that are direct enough to correct your English -- you should not harbour any assumption whatsoever that your English is correct or adequate, no matter how long you've been studying it, and you should take any knowledgeable correction as someone helping you take one more step towards complete, native-level fluency.
I always tell friends whose language I cannot speak too well to correct me anytime I make a mistake, and to not be concerned with my feelings -- after all, I know I'm not stupid. The favour they do me is invaluable when they tell me that I've made a mistake -- they offer me the opportunity to not make that same mistake again.
Re:Can anyone elaborate on this LLVM v. RMS issue?
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It's not that. It's that those of us who have been around for a while have learned something about RMS: agree with him or not, he usually has insightful reasons for his positions, and he backs them up very well.
Too well, in fact. The result is that most people that disagree with him don't bother trying to refute his points, because his points are simply too well argued. Instead, they resort to ad homniem attacks -- either some snide remark about GNU/Linux, or hygiene, or his beard, or whatever.
The result is that those of us that care what he has to say immediately discount any presentation of RMS's stance that is littered with such juvenile drivel. This isn't to say that RMS can't be wrong -- he's certainly said some things I disagree with. But then, this is hardly surprising, as different people generally have different opinions and any free thinking person will inevitably have opinions of his own.
Experience has shown that people that hate RMS with a passion are generally threatened by his ideas and the sway that they have in the hacker community. They often (but not always) lack the intellectual rigour to actually argue with him convincingly. So they take the "you can't agree with that GNU/Hippy bearded zealot, can you?" tack. Slashdot has a lot of morons like this lurking around.
If RMS dislikes something, he probably has a good reason for it, and behooves us to know what that reason is. Once we know, we can make up our own mind about it.
The people that follow RMS blindly are just as stupid, really, as the people that blindly discount everything he says. But the fact remains that RMS is an extremely thoughtful and intelligent guy. His opinion matters.
For what it's worth, Leo, I tend to seek out your posts in a thread and read them, because I find them interesting and generally well thought out. Plus, despite my lack of interest in Apple, your extremely detailed and technical knowledge of the company and its technology impresses me. I feel like you frequently teach me new things.
But it doesn't surprise me that many of your posts are modded down for "not toeing the party line", as it were.
The examples I'm sure we're both thinking of: you're as rabidly pro-IP as many Slashdotters are rabidly anti-IP, and post frequently to that effect; you're extremely pro-Apple, but to the exclusion of other, competing technologies (in other words, you're prone to insulting other OSs and their users).
Now, your opinions are generally well thought out, even though I don't particularly agree with some of them. The thing that gets you modded down, I think, is your delivery. You come across as having a chip on your shoulder.
Sometimes it also seems as though you not so privately think of yourself as being much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of people on here.
Now, for what it's worth, my impression of you from your posts is that you do have a chip on your shoulder of some sort, and that you are much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of the people on here.
However, what you no doubt think of as calling an idiot an idiot (goodness knows its a sacred hacker tradition) often comes off as offensive and belittling, and this is what I think has people modding you as Troll every so often (despite your clearly not being one).
Essentially, it's the delivery that matters.
Now, you're probably thinking that you shouldn't need to sugar coat your opinions just because they're unpopular here, and in a perfect world, you'd be right. But while we geeks pride ourselves on our lack of social graces, the truth of the matter is that the Slashdot community, despite its inherently geeky nature, is a community like any other, with its own set of norms. And like most communities, it is mostly made up of leaders and followers, and you're expressing opinions that go against the grain.
So you have two options, really. You can post whatever you want, and bugger the moderators. Frankly, someone as lucid and intelligent as yourself will probably always have karma that is good enough to be able to burn it with an occasional Troll or Flamebait mismoderation. Of course, this path (the one I see you've taken so far) has the side effect of pushing some of your posts below the thresholds of heathens that don't read at -1, thus lessening their impact. But you can be as cutting and arrogant as you want to be.
The other possibility is to act as though the people you're talking to aren't sheep, but actually are capable of making their own opinions, and are entitled to them. You can say exactly the same thing, but you'll need to establish, at least in the sous-texte of your post, that you are not actually all that different from them. In a sense, you're pushing to win them to your side.
It would be a perfect world if moderators actually moderated based on the insight of the post, how informative it is, etc, but as you've noticed, they don't; they usually just mod things up that they agree with. So you need to make it sound as though you basically agree with them, or at least think they are reasonably intelligent folks, but are just trying to show them a different way of framing the problem in question.
Because let's face it: if you meet someone rabidly anti-IP, your rabidly pro-IP stance isn't going to win them over. If you meet someone that hates Apple and thinks they're the next evil overlord, telling them "It ain't so and you're a retard" isn't going to win them over.
If you don't care about winning them over, then you're not having a discussion, you're just jacking off on Slashdot.
Actually, it was criticized for lack of plot, crappy kung fu, and excessively bad Mandarin on the part of Chow Yun Fat.
The thing that you're missing here is that all of these criticisms are pretty much on the money, when you compare it to most of the films of this genre produced in China today. If you're comparing it to the cardboard kung fu movies produced by Hong Kong in the 80s (which is most of what's available in the west) then, I agree with you 100% -- and in the interest of full disclosure, I own CTHD on DVD.
Having said all that, though, the dialogue in CTHD was pretty wooden, and not very complex. The Chinese like complex plots and long dialogues, preferably written poetically. CTHD seems to have been written with subtitle readers in mind, which is fine, if you're a subtitle reader (hence its popularity in the west) but less fine if you're a native speaker of the language, who expects more.
Next time you watch it, notice how beautifully it's filmed, how much time is spent on long, panoramic desert shots and imagery. The movie is appealing to Western audiences precisely because being able to understand the nuances is not important in this film -- it is eye candy. Beautiful actors, beautiful kung fu, not a whole lot of dialogue. (Well, the Chinese didn't like the Kung Fu, but that's something else all together... they're spoiled in this regard.)
I really enjoyed it.
But these are the reasons the Chinese didn't, and I understand completely.
Funny, that. It did extremely well in the US despite being available only in Mandarin. However, in China, where most of the population speaks Mandarin natively, it flopped. Big time.
In fact, Chinese people seem to be constantly making fun of foreigners for liking the film.
I've been typing Chinese on Linux for well over three years now. When I got into it, a mature, useable (although admittedly not "pretty") solution was already available: XCIN. It, in turn, had been based on the work of folks in Taiwan from around, I think, 1995. The Japanese have been hacking on OSS for ages too, and Japanese input has been around for even longer.
Nowadays, there's SCIM, which rules, and it didn't just come into being "this month", although I'll admit that it is new. It's much prettier looking than XCIN, and it has a better pinyin input method, which is important for people that type Chinese that way (I use wubi). SCIM's wubi support has some small problems when used with alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak that were relatively trivial to work around in XCIN.
Frankly, when I'm forced to use the stock input methods that come with Chinese Windows (MSPinYin, gag), its user unfriendliness is absolutely horrible. No one in China really uses it, they all install third party input methods.
The ability to write third party input methods has existed as long as the XIM standard for the X Window System has, which, oh, lets see, would be the late 80s? It's just a matter of market share. Until recently, few people in Asia were using Linux. Now they are, and so they're writing input methods.
I'm pointing this out because Chinese input has nothing whatever to do with Linux. It has to do with the X Window System, which has supported a framework to input CJK text forever. Windows' stock Chinese input method sucks so much that no one here uses it.
I mean, it's just a completely moronic comparison, and I don't know why it keeps getting modded up.
Oh, and with respect to Mac OS X: I hate to burst your bubble, but Mac OS X's CJK input method sucks a fat one. My girlfriend (she's not Chinese) has a Mac, and SCIM rocks all over that POS. The only nice feature it has is the zooming character thing, which is kind of cool (but like most sort-of-cool things, gets annoying really fast and I'm not sure how to turn it off.)
Given the recent state of things, I'd have to say that you're wrong about what most people care about.
Perhaps that's what they should care about. But when it comes down to it, people don't seem to be overly concerned about people they don't know being uneducated, starving, or dying in wars. You'll note, for example, that America is still in Iraq.
All good arguments, I'll admit. For the record, I'm not against your position, if that's how you feel. But one thing you should consider is future-proofing.
It's true that using ALAC is a lot simpler if you use iTunes all the time. But the whole idea behind a lossless format is that you can rip all your CDs and be able to re-encode them easily in whatever the format-du-jour is, and not have to worry about stuff like your CDs falling apart, getting scratched, etc.
When you have a format with that much staying power -- I mean, one you might want to open again in 40 years time -- do you really want to trust a company with that data? It's not even that Apple is evil, per se, just that in 40 years, iTunes may no longer be available, and because its format is undocumented, you have a bunch of big files with valuable data in them that you can't access anymore. It's like people who realize, with frustration, that no software on the market today can open Word documents they created in the early 80s. Sort of sucks if you're a writer.
Now, we have an OSS decoder. It will probably always be around, but it might be illegal to use, depending on how Apple/the MPEG consortium wants to enforce its patents. Furthermore, given that it was reverse engineered instead of written from an open spec, who knows whether there aren't places where it doesn't work properly?
Plus, ALAC will likely evolve, but always be called ALAC. So perhaps the OSS decoder available now works on today's files, but will it work on tomorrow's? Hard to tell. As long as you have iTunes, well, you're in good shape. But what if iTunes doesn't exist in 20 years? Lots of other Apple products are no longer around. It wouldn't be the first. iPod is on top today, but will it be tomorrow? After all, MS started out writing software for Apple computers... think about that.
The nice thing about Free Software is that, for better or for worse, you'll always have it, because it is free (by which I mean unencumbered by IP restrictions that might prevent you from accessing your own data down the road). You can have whatever viewpoint you want about OSS operating systems, word processors, and the like, but think long and hard about committing data you care about to a proprietary format.
You would not be the first to find that in a decade or two, nothing will open it (legally).
Plus, from what I've read, FLAC works better than ALAC. There are QT plugins for it, too... so you can use it with iTunes, after a one-time install. More hassle, yes. But piece of mind is worth it, or should be.
I agree completely. You'll notice I didn't say that Windows was more secure than Linux. All I said is that Trojans (which is what we're talking about here, that's what spyware is, generally, stuff users install on their own computers) are a social engineering thing, not a technical security thing. So no matter how much more technically secure OS A is to OS B, a stupid user makes trojans equally likely on both.
And when it comes to stupid users, I'm sure you'll agree that MS has something of a monopoly.
With popularity comes idiots, it's the way of the world (look at Slashdot). It'll be true of GNU/Linux, too, if it ever hits that critical mass.
I think it's important to seperate the two arguments here: a) the reason Windows has worms and viruses is because it's more popular and b) the reason Windows has more malware is because it's more popular.
At first I really wasn't going to bother responding to this, because it sounds to me as though you care about this much more than I do. But no matter how much you care, you're wrong. Here's why.
First of all, security features that exist on Windows that are never used by anyone don't contribute to Windows being architecturally more secure than anything else, because if you start making those arguments, we can start talking about capabilities and SELinux and all sorts of security features that exist for the Linux kernel that people don't often use; and if we do that, you essentially immediately lose. You can't say, "Windows, when people use all sorts of exotic security features, is more secure than Linux, presuming that none of Linux's exotic security features are in use, and therefore, Windows is more secure than Linux." I mean, I hope you can see the holes in your own argument. They're big enough to drive a truck through.
Plus, I'm not a zealot, bub. You picked the wrong guy to flame. I'm quite aware that the NT kernel's low level ACL structure is superior in design to the UNIX root/normal user paradigm. You're talking to an old VMS hand.
However, as you yourself pointed out, basically no operating systems limited by such a simple security model anymore, and this includes Linux. ACLs are part of the POSIX spec and SELinux style policies are supported out of the box in the 2.6 kernel series.
The difference is habit; UNIX has always been multi-user (well, except for the very early research versions) and so UNIX utilities have been designed to work with as few permissions as possible, for security reasons. Security is a much bigger deal on a multi-user system, for obvious reasons. This philosophy persists to this day in the UNIX world, and application designers generally don't make GUIs that run as root -- hell, lots will refuse to run as root.
On the Windows side of things, we're coming from Win95 and earlier, DOS. It doesn't matter that Microsoft ripped out the DOS crap and put in the vastly improved NT kernel with all its security features. Software vendors developing for MS platforms were used to being able to mess with anything on the system, and they continued to do so. Worse, most installs of Windows default to a user with Admin access (that logs in automatically, no less). It's a matter of culture. Convincing Windows users to run as non-administrator is hard because a) they aren't used to it and b) almost nothing runs, because in the old days, there was no Admin user, and most modern Windows apps share code with their Win95 ancestors. This shouldn't be hard to understand.
Windows is far less secure than GNU/Linux, for lots of reasons. Very few people that know what they're talking about doubt the quality of the NT kernel (although putting the GDI in ring 0 was stupid, and a major reason NT 3.5 was so much more stable than 4). But unfortunately, as RMS is always trying to point out, there's much more to an OS than just the kernel. Windows, as a whole, suffers from a history of not caring about security. Its users are only now starting to care; its application developers don't seem to care; no one seems to care.
This is not true in GNU/Linux.
And as for GNU/Linux being a fort, who said that? UNIX-like OSs have always been caught with their pants down when compared to systems like VMS, MVS, and EROS. Within the UNIX world, pretty much any one of the BSDs blows the pants of Linux (except perhaps Mac OS X, if you can call it a BSD).
But it remains far, far more secure than Windows.
And as for the whole "Why isn't Apache more vulnerable than IIS" line, I wouldn't have brought it up, because I think it's a bit silly. But your attempt at refuting it is even more ridiculous. You're comparing Apache2 to IIS 6? I believe the reason people always bring up the Apache vs. IIS argument is because Apache has more marketshare than IIS, but is attacked less.
I don't think so. The truth is, most people who play music on their computer don't know the difference between lossless and lossy, and usually still don't get it very well even after you try to explain it to them. To them, music is mp3, although they may be vaguely aware of other formats such as wma and perhaps (if they own an iPod) AAC.
The people who use lossless encoding and understand what it is and what its benefits are are a much more technical crowd.
So while the Mac fanatics will of course use Apple Lossless because it's produced by Apple, many other people already have most of their CD collection encoded in FLAC and are probably happy with FLAC's less (not?) patent-encumbered, open source nature.
You know, open formats and all that.
I personally wouldn't even consider Apple Lossless. FLAC is an open, documented format with encoders and decoders that work on every platform imagineable. Not only that, but FLAC is a very competitive format, being as good or better on average than essentially any other lossless format out there for most samples.
Simply put, FLAC is a well known and trusted brand among people that know about lossless audio compression, why it's good, and why they should use it. Apple lossless is some other proprietary format that might (due to patents, for example) eventually require a license to be able to legally decode.
And I think I speak for most people that have already encoded hundreds of CDs losslessly for convenience and storage when I say, thanks, but no thanks.
Although, one has to wonder. Your argument certainly holds true for worms and viruses, but trojans are a different sort of beast. They are, in a sense, socilally engineered rather than technologically engineered. Most even tell you (in fine print) exactly what they're going to install and how, but people don't bother reading it.
Now, for most GNU/Linux distros, there is a centralized packaging system which, by virtue of being centralized, cannot be added to by someone without root access. Therefore, a newbie GNU/Linux user (assuming he hasn't been convinced by Lindows or some other stupid company to run as root all the time) will know at least that in order to install software he wants, he must be root.
So when he downloads Bonzi Buddy for GNU/Linux, do you think he'll think it odd if he needs to su before he can install the conveniently packaged rpm or deb? Hardly. He'll just click through the EULA without reading it, just as he does with Windows, provide his root password, and bume, he's owned.
As a result, unless he's using GNU/Linux in a corporate environment where he doesn't have the root password (and in many companies -- for example mine -- that use Windows, it's standard for people not to have Admin rights to their own computers either) he's going to be vulnerable to the same sorts of social attacks as he would on Windows.
Furthermore, he will be vulnerable on pretty much any platform with as simple a security model as GNU/Linux, OS X, and even Windows (ie, admin/user two-tier security levels). Because he'll just be coerced by the pretty purple ape and/or animated cursor to provide his root password. Voila!
The truth is, there are two reasons there's not much malware for non-Windows systems. One is because of market share, and the other is because the users of minority operating systems tend to be a little more technically savvy than the soccer moms and nascar dads that make up the Windows world. This is even true for Mac users, simply because you are more aware of your computer when most of the world's software isn't compatible with it.
I mean, the thing to recognize here is that security isn't just having secure programs, but also having a security minded admin. My impression of most GNU/Linux users today is that they aren't all that security minded, but because most people aren't leveling attacks at them, it doesn't much matter. If on top of that you had a whole legion of computer illiterate folks clicking on the pretty GNU/Linux widgets, well... let's just say it doesn't bode well.
For me, I'll never have any of this crap because I'm committed to software freedom, and no malware author is going to provide the source code of his program under a license I'm comfortable with.
When Windows users say, "There aren't as many viruses/worms/exploits for GNU/Linux/BSD/MacOS X because there are more Windows machines," flame the shit out of them, because they're ignorant as all get out about the architectural differences between these systems.
But when we're talking about trojans, I'm afraid GNU/Linux, on its own, will not save you.
What a load of crap. I live and work in China, write a lot of Chinese, and I use Debian exclusively.
Unless you're running stable (which really is better suited for servers than desktops), you're just spreading FUD. I run testing, FWIW.
Previously, I used XCIN for input, although I used SCIM these days.
It always baffles me when people are like, "Distribution X" doesn't have Y! Especially with Debian, which has nearly every piece of free software under the sun packaged. You just install the packages you want. Sheesh.
Well, you know, there's an old saying: physicists grow up to be engineers, and mathematicians grow up to be accountants. I don't think it's true (nothing bores me more than number crunching, I'd never go into accounting) but you have to admit, neither of our fields are particularly applicable, at least in their purest forms.
All my physics friends took jabs at engineers non-stop, too, back in school. Now they either work as engineers, or are paid much less. But then, look at Business majors.:)
Not that I blame them for making fun of engineers or anything. Engineers are... well, engineers, which reminds me of an old joke, as I veer dangerously off-topic. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all asked to define Pi.
The mathematician says, "Pi is equal to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter."
The physicist says, "Pi is equal to 3.141592653589, plus or minus 3 in the last digit."
Actually, Mathematicians don't say that. Mathematicians say that a closed curve is homeomorphic to S^1, and a line to R^1, ie, there exists a bijective, bicontinuous mapping between the sets.
The "topology" of a space is actually the set of all open sets in that space. (Which trivially could not be a set like S^1.) In essense, the thesis of general topology is that all continuity related problems can be redefined in terms of open sets. If you'll recall, in classic analysis an open set is defined as an open ball with respect to the metric of the space in question. This produced spaces that while perhaps not equivalent to R^n were very similar in many ways, in particular because there existed a way to meaningfully define the distance between any two points.
In topology, we do away with the metric definition of an open set entirely, and leave the concept of an open set essentially undefined (well, subject to a few sanity restrictions involving unions and intersections of open sets). This allows mathematicans to study spaces that really are nothing like the ones we experience regularly, and the vast majority of them are really, really unfriendly, which is one of the reasons that topology is the course that scares many math majors away.
However, it gives way to Algebraic Topology, which is without a doubt one of the most beautiful branches of pure math.
Physics is cool and all, if you're not quite bright enough to make it in Math. Ha ha. *jab*
Slashdot Mirror
How do you figure?
I mean, Google News has a bunch of links and a bunch of pictures. The two are not actually related, though -- that is, the picture next to the story is from one of the articles in that category but not necessarily from the one excerpted. Really, go check it out.
Google indexes both images and small snippets of the stories, and displays them automagically together on the Google News frontpage. Not indexing AFP photos will only mean that AFP photos won't be on the front page, not that the news source that purchase AFP material won't be indexed. Do you see the difference?
Lots of articles don't have images, and yet they still get indexed. Do you see how this works? The photos are irrelevant.
Quoting a snippet is certainly fair use, but displaying a photo on your site that other people had to pay to use probably isn't.
Ergo, the sites that buy AFP content still get indexed, but AFP pictures don't end up on Google News. And obviously, Google knows full well which pics are AFP pics -- they actually automagically cut out the copyright notice on those picture before they display them. Seems like they were asking for it.
So essentially what you're saying is, it's only appropriate to defend one's civil liberties when the infraction is, by some unspecified measure, large enough?
I believe you're deliberately misrepresenting the grandparent's point, which was that our freedom is being stripped from us by unjust laws and practices, and that we must take a stand against those laws and practices.
In essence, your rebuttal: "The civil rights movement and the anti-DRM movement are not on the same level because I see the import of the former, but fail to appreciate the relevance of the latter."
Really, your rebuttal is (deliberately, I believe) an attack not on his argument, nor his point, but on his analogy -- which amounted to nothing more than a (perhaps poor) way to underscore a citizen's moral obligation to oppose tyranny in any form, no matter how extreme -- as was the case in the south -- or how subtle, as in the case of Digital Restrictions Management.
It is also worth noting that comparisons between the cause pursued by the American Civil Rights movement and the cause pursued by the American Revolution -- comparisons common in the 1960s -- drew the same sort of disdain from nationalistic racists who appreciated the importance of the latter but saw the former as nothing short of an aberration. Their responses were shockingly similar to yours -- a pretended disbelief that a social revolution granting civil rights to niggers could have the same importance, on any level, as a military revolution guaranteeing white men "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
Now, from our enlightened perspective, we see that anything short of complete social equality for African Americans is unacceptable, and we continue, as best we can, to fight the good fight because that war has not yet been won.
Unfortunately, DRM is a much more subtle thing -- it is an example of a power grab by corporations seeking to limit the flow of information, because they understand all too well that information is power. You think of it as an issue relevant only to file trading pirates bent on having "free music". I see it as an encroachment first on music, then on movies, then on books, and eventually on everything. It is the sort of thing that must be nipped in the bud. It may not have as spectacular social consequences as the American Civil Rights Movement, which sought to right an existing wrong and thus changed society. No, it will be subtle, because it is a fight to prevent freedom from being ripped from our fingers for the betterment of the priviledged few.
We are protecting the status quo -- you may be willing to give up your freedom for convenience, but I am not. I would suggest that you reconsider your position. This fight -- the fight to determine whether it is the People who control information flow, or a select clique of the wealthy and powerful -- is every bit as important as any other major social movement in the history of this nation or indeed any other.
We are entering the information age, and this is more important now than ever. But even historically, consider how power has been centered in the hands of the few in every nation on earth -- through control of education, through control of information. The Catholic Church in Europe, the Scholar class in Imperial China, and yes, the practice of keeping African slaves illiterate -- all these are early examples of how information is power. Real power.
They've controlled it for centuries. But now, we are taking it back.
Offtopic, but I really find the passé simple (the narrative past tense that you likely encountered in Flaubert's work) incredibly beautiful.
It's true, though, that it is rarely (read: never) used in day to day speech.
If you read Molière, you'll find the various examples of past forms of the subjunctive mood. Not common today, to be certain -- but very pretty.
If that's the case, then it seems extremely unlikely that they would be able to enforce the patent, because of prior art. Check out this link. In particular:
As this was in the first web browser ever written, it seems rather unlikely they could make much of a claim.
However, CSS was first implemented in IE, if I recall correctly. So it seems as though they had a lot to do with its development at some stage, at least.
Whatever the case, IE's lack of halfway decent CSS support is one of the worst things about the web today. Either MS needs to seriously work on bringing their CSS support up to speed, or a competing, standards-compliant browser needs to take the lead from IE. I would happy with either situation.
It's interesting to see who takes issue with this post. It was posted at a time when most of North America was asleep, and quickly climbed to +5 Insightful, presumably being moderated primarily by Europeans/Asians.
Then, I went to sleep (I live in Asia) and when I wake up, it's been modded Troll and Overrated by a lot of people (presumably) in the North American timezones. Overrated, perhaps... Troll is an interesting spin, though.
I'm actually not complaining about the moderation, as I have karma to burn. But what I do think is interesting is that it seems as though North Americans -- that is, a bunch of people who are primarily a) monoglots and b) English speakers -- are far more prone to finding my observations insulting or inaccurate than people who very likely speak English as a second language.
I wonder if that helps or hurts my point.
I agree completely.
For what it's worth, at least with respect to the English and the Americans, both are true (they are/were powers both in terms of trade and military capacity).
;)
Hawk makes a very good point regarding the way the words are typically used, though. In this case, though, I primarily meant mercantile prowess, not military prowess... but I can see how my post may have been ambiguous.
Note for example that while the USSR was indisputably a world power, the use of Russian as an "international language" only ever gained any currency in those areas (communist countries) where they were a major trade presence. Because of their rather isolationist policies regarding the west, Russian was never an important language anywhere else. So I think Hawk's point certainly stands... I just don't think it was any different from my point
Goodness, you're daft.
Tell me, what on earth does the popularity of a language have to do with how friendly the people that speak it are? Because I was always under the impression that people learned languages primarily because they were useful.
English has become the de facto international language because the last two dominant world powers -- the English and now we Americans -- speak it. There is no other reason.
I don't know why I bother responding to these sorts of poorly thought out comments. Perhaps you were just so taken by your own dislike for the French that you couldn't hold yourself back, accuracy be damned? Honestly, for the sake of everyone here, try to at least use that one brain cell you surely own and consider what you're saying before you hit that "Submit" button. It would go a long way to advance the cause of intelligent discourse here.
many of whom, not which :)
Seriously though, if you take the time to learn a few other languages you'll realize that English is pretty terse and concise. Communicating in programming languages is rather limiting, as we humans aren't computers. The Lojban people made a good go at it, but they mostly did that by taking a complex language and removing ambiguity as much as possible, thus allowing a computer to simply "throw out" the information that it doesn't need.
I mean, cents = 2, for example, relays far less meaning than my 2 cents. Consider, for example, that cents is actually a unit of measure, not a variable. Think about how much information a typical English sentence communicates -- do you honestly think there is any easy way to make it more terse, more concise?
I think we humans have figured out how to maximize our signal to noise ratio when it comes to aural transfer of meaning. Programming languages are far more suited to recipe-writing.
You'd be limiting yourself rather much if you tried to communicate only in recipes.
I agree with the spirit of what you're trying to say -- most native English speakers have never seriously tried learning another language and have no appreciation for how difficult it is.
However, as someone who speaks 4 languages, may I say that I very much appreciate grammar nazis. Of course it depends on the delivery -- if the post simply ridicules the parent's english and makes no attempt to correct or explain his mistakes, then it is worth less than the space it takes up. If, however, the delivery is abrupt (or even rude) but corrects the mistake and (perhaps more importantly) explains the rationale behind the grammatical rule in question, it is, quite simply, invaluable. Of course, if they can do all that and not be rude, that's a plus -- but this is Slashdot, let's not set our standards too high.
The truth is that Americans, Brits and Aussies are far, far too polite. The result is that people who live in one of those countries can speak broken English for their entire stay and never be told by any of the smiling natives that they're speaking like a retard. The result? Your year or two abroad doesn't help your English anywhere near as much as you hoped it would.
Now, take France. The French will happily tell you, in no uncertain terms, and to your face, that you are butchering their language. They will correct you, often impatiently, and act as if you're a retard for not speaking correctly. This is considered "rude" by many people, but you know what? I have met a few Americans/Brits that have lived in France for a few years, and they speak nearly perfect French (I am a natively bilingual in French and English). I mean they have good pronunciation, good grammar (French grammar is reasonably difficult), and are conversationally adept.
Now it may be that I just had the fortune of meeting a few people that were graced with unusual linguistic talent. It may be that the numerous people I've met that lived in the US, for example, for a few years, just couldn't learn English because they truly were retarded. But I think there's more to it than that.
Grammar nazis provide an invaluable service, especially to ESL learners. They most annoy native speakers, who feel that their English is adequate (though it most often is not) and find a GN's pedantic attention to detail obnoxious.
If you are a non-native speaker, you should thank English speakers that are direct enough to correct your English -- you should not harbour any assumption whatsoever that your English is correct or adequate, no matter how long you've been studying it, and you should take any knowledgeable correction as someone helping you take one more step towards complete, native-level fluency.
I always tell friends whose language I cannot speak too well to correct me anytime I make a mistake, and to not be concerned with my feelings -- after all, I know I'm not stupid. The favour they do me is invaluable when they tell me that I've made a mistake -- they offer me the opportunity to not make that same mistake again.
It's not that. It's that those of us who have been around for a while have learned something about RMS: agree with him or not, he usually has insightful reasons for his positions, and he backs them up very well.
Too well, in fact. The result is that most people that disagree with him don't bother trying to refute his points, because his points are simply too well argued. Instead, they resort to ad homniem attacks -- either some snide remark about GNU/Linux, or hygiene, or his beard, or whatever.
The result is that those of us that care what he has to say immediately discount any presentation of RMS's stance that is littered with such juvenile drivel. This isn't to say that RMS can't be wrong -- he's certainly said some things I disagree with. But then, this is hardly surprising, as different people generally have different opinions and any free thinking person will inevitably have opinions of his own.
Experience has shown that people that hate RMS with a passion are generally threatened by his ideas and the sway that they have in the hacker community. They often (but not always) lack the intellectual rigour to actually argue with him convincingly. So they take the "you can't agree with that GNU/Hippy bearded zealot, can you?" tack. Slashdot has a lot of morons like this lurking around.
If RMS dislikes something, he probably has a good reason for it, and behooves us to know what that reason is. Once we know, we can make up our own mind about it.
The people that follow RMS blindly are just as stupid, really, as the people that blindly discount everything he says. But the fact remains that RMS is an extremely thoughtful and intelligent guy. His opinion matters.
For what it's worth, Leo, I tend to seek out your posts in a thread and read them, because I find them interesting and generally well thought out. Plus, despite my lack of interest in Apple, your extremely detailed and technical knowledge of the company and its technology impresses me. I feel like you frequently teach me new things.
But it doesn't surprise me that many of your posts are modded down for "not toeing the party line", as it were.
The examples I'm sure we're both thinking of: you're as rabidly pro-IP as many Slashdotters are rabidly anti-IP, and post frequently to that effect; you're extremely pro-Apple, but to the exclusion of other, competing technologies (in other words, you're prone to insulting other OSs and their users).
Now, your opinions are generally well thought out, even though I don't particularly agree with some of them. The thing that gets you modded down, I think, is your delivery. You come across as having a chip on your shoulder.
Sometimes it also seems as though you not so privately think of yourself as being much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of people on here.
Now, for what it's worth, my impression of you from your posts is that you do have a chip on your shoulder of some sort, and that you are much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of the people on here.
However, what you no doubt think of as calling an idiot an idiot (goodness knows its a sacred hacker tradition) often comes off as offensive and belittling, and this is what I think has people modding you as Troll every so often (despite your clearly not being one).
Essentially, it's the delivery that matters.
Now, you're probably thinking that you shouldn't need to sugar coat your opinions just because they're unpopular here, and in a perfect world, you'd be right. But while we geeks pride ourselves on our lack of social graces, the truth of the matter is that the Slashdot community, despite its inherently geeky nature, is a community like any other, with its own set of norms. And like most communities, it is mostly made up of leaders and followers, and you're expressing opinions that go against the grain.
So you have two options, really. You can post whatever you want, and bugger the moderators. Frankly, someone as lucid and intelligent as yourself will probably always have karma that is good enough to be able to burn it with an occasional Troll or Flamebait mismoderation. Of course, this path (the one I see you've taken so far) has the side effect of pushing some of your posts below the thresholds of heathens that don't read at -1, thus lessening their impact. But you can be as cutting and arrogant as you want to be.
The other possibility is to act as though the people you're talking to aren't sheep, but actually are capable of making their own opinions, and are entitled to them. You can say exactly the same thing, but you'll need to establish, at least in the sous-texte of your post, that you are not actually all that different from them. In a sense, you're pushing to win them to your side.
It would be a perfect world if moderators actually moderated based on the insight of the post, how informative it is, etc, but as you've noticed, they don't; they usually just mod things up that they agree with. So you need to make it sound as though you basically agree with them, or at least think they are reasonably intelligent folks, but are just trying to show them a different way of framing the problem in question.
Because let's face it: if you meet someone rabidly anti-IP, your rabidly pro-IP stance isn't going to win them over. If you meet someone that hates Apple and thinks they're the next evil overlord, telling them "It ain't so and you're a retard" isn't going to win them over.
If you don't care about winning them over, then you're not having a discussion, you're just jacking off on Slashdot.
So you might want to rethink your angle, a bit
Pretty much everyone, male or female, that reads Slashdot has a habit of touching themselves. With extreme frequency.
Actually, come to think of it, I've never met anyone who doesn't, though lots of people say they don't.
I'm of course completely aware that that's not what you meant, but go back and read it. You have to admit that it sounds pretty funny.
I'll leave it at that.
Actually, it was criticized for lack of plot, crappy kung fu, and excessively bad Mandarin on the part of Chow Yun Fat.
The thing that you're missing here is that all of these criticisms are pretty much on the money, when you compare it to most of the films of this genre produced in China today. If you're comparing it to the cardboard kung fu movies produced by Hong Kong in the 80s (which is most of what's available in the west) then, I agree with you 100% -- and in the interest of full disclosure, I own CTHD on DVD.
Having said all that, though, the dialogue in CTHD was pretty wooden, and not very complex. The Chinese like complex plots and long dialogues, preferably written poetically. CTHD seems to have been written with subtitle readers in mind, which is fine, if you're a subtitle reader (hence its popularity in the west) but less fine if you're a native speaker of the language, who expects more.
Next time you watch it, notice how beautifully it's filmed, how much time is spent on long, panoramic desert shots and imagery. The movie is appealing to Western audiences precisely because being able to understand the nuances is not important in this film -- it is eye candy. Beautiful actors, beautiful kung fu, not a whole lot of dialogue. (Well, the Chinese didn't like the Kung Fu, but that's something else all together... they're spoiled in this regard.)
I really enjoyed it.
But these are the reasons the Chinese didn't, and I understand completely.
Funny, that. It did extremely well in the US despite being available only in Mandarin. However, in China, where most of the population speaks Mandarin natively, it flopped. Big time.
In fact, Chinese people seem to be constantly making fun of foreigners for liking the film.
I've been typing Chinese on Linux for well over three years now. When I got into it, a mature, useable (although admittedly not "pretty") solution was already available: XCIN. It, in turn, had been based on the work of folks in Taiwan from around, I think, 1995. The Japanese have been hacking on OSS for ages too, and Japanese input has been around for even longer.
Nowadays, there's SCIM, which rules, and it didn't just come into being "this month", although I'll admit that it is new. It's much prettier looking than XCIN, and it has a better pinyin input method, which is important for people that type Chinese that way (I use wubi). SCIM's wubi support has some small problems when used with alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak that were relatively trivial to work around in XCIN.
Frankly, when I'm forced to use the stock input methods that come with Chinese Windows (MSPinYin, gag), its user unfriendliness is absolutely horrible. No one in China really uses it, they all install third party input methods.
The ability to write third party input methods has existed as long as the XIM standard for the X Window System has, which, oh, lets see, would be the late 80s? It's just a matter of market share. Until recently, few people in Asia were using Linux. Now they are, and so they're writing input methods.
I'm pointing this out because Chinese input has nothing whatever to do with Linux. It has to do with the X Window System, which has supported a framework to input CJK text forever. Windows' stock Chinese input method sucks so much that no one here uses it.
I mean, it's just a completely moronic comparison, and I don't know why it keeps getting modded up.
Oh, and with respect to Mac OS X: I hate to burst your bubble, but Mac OS X's CJK input method sucks a fat one. My girlfriend (she's not Chinese) has a Mac, and SCIM rocks all over that POS. The only nice feature it has is the zooming character thing, which is kind of cool (but like most sort-of-cool things, gets annoying really fast and I'm not sure how to turn it off.)
Given the recent state of things, I'd have to say that you're wrong about what most people care about.
Perhaps that's what they should care about. But when it comes down to it, people don't seem to be overly concerned about people they don't know being uneducated, starving, or dying in wars. You'll note, for example, that America is still in Iraq.
All good arguments, I'll admit. For the record, I'm not against your position, if that's how you feel. But one thing you should consider is future-proofing.
It's true that using ALAC is a lot simpler if you use iTunes all the time. But the whole idea behind a lossless format is that you can rip all your CDs and be able to re-encode them easily in whatever the format-du-jour is, and not have to worry about stuff like your CDs falling apart, getting scratched, etc.
When you have a format with that much staying power -- I mean, one you might want to open again in 40 years time -- do you really want to trust a company with that data? It's not even that Apple is evil, per se, just that in 40 years, iTunes may no longer be available, and because its format is undocumented, you have a bunch of big files with valuable data in them that you can't access anymore. It's like people who realize, with frustration, that no software on the market today can open Word documents they created in the early 80s. Sort of sucks if you're a writer.
Now, we have an OSS decoder. It will probably always be around, but it might be illegal to use, depending on how Apple/the MPEG consortium wants to enforce its patents. Furthermore, given that it was reverse engineered instead of written from an open spec, who knows whether there aren't places where it doesn't work properly?
Plus, ALAC will likely evolve, but always be called ALAC. So perhaps the OSS decoder available now works on today's files, but will it work on tomorrow's? Hard to tell. As long as you have iTunes, well, you're in good shape. But what if iTunes doesn't exist in 20 years? Lots of other Apple products are no longer around. It wouldn't be the first. iPod is on top today, but will it be tomorrow? After all, MS started out writing software for Apple computers... think about that.
The nice thing about Free Software is that, for better or for worse, you'll always have it, because it is free (by which I mean unencumbered by IP restrictions that might prevent you from accessing your own data down the road). You can have whatever viewpoint you want about OSS operating systems, word processors, and the like, but think long and hard about committing data you care about to a proprietary format.
You would not be the first to find that in a decade or two, nothing will open it (legally).
Plus, from what I've read, FLAC works better than ALAC. There are QT plugins for it, too... so you can use it with iTunes, after a one-time install. More hassle, yes. But piece of mind is worth it, or should be.
Think about it.
I agree completely. You'll notice I didn't say that Windows was more secure than Linux. All I said is that Trojans (which is what we're talking about here, that's what spyware is, generally, stuff users install on their own computers) are a social engineering thing, not a technical security thing. So no matter how much more technically secure OS A is to OS B, a stupid user makes trojans equally likely on both.
And when it comes to stupid users, I'm sure you'll agree that MS has something of a monopoly.
With popularity comes idiots, it's the way of the world (look at Slashdot). It'll be true of GNU/Linux, too, if it ever hits that critical mass.
I think it's important to seperate the two arguments here: a) the reason Windows has worms and viruses is because it's more popular and b) the reason Windows has more malware is because it's more popular.
a) is patently false, but b) is probably true.
At least, that's how I see it.
At first I really wasn't going to bother responding to this, because it sounds to me as though you care about this much more than I do. But no matter how much you care, you're wrong. Here's why.
First of all, security features that exist on Windows that are never used by anyone don't contribute to Windows being architecturally more secure than anything else, because if you start making those arguments, we can start talking about capabilities and SELinux and all sorts of security features that exist for the Linux kernel that people don't often use; and if we do that, you essentially immediately lose. You can't say, "Windows, when people use all sorts of exotic security features, is more secure than Linux, presuming that none of Linux's exotic security features are in use, and therefore, Windows is more secure than Linux." I mean, I hope you can see the holes in your own argument. They're big enough to drive a truck through.
Plus, I'm not a zealot, bub. You picked the wrong guy to flame. I'm quite aware that the NT kernel's low level ACL structure is superior in design to the UNIX root/normal user paradigm. You're talking to an old VMS hand.
However, as you yourself pointed out, basically no operating systems limited by such a simple security model anymore, and this includes Linux. ACLs are part of the POSIX spec and SELinux style policies are supported out of the box in the 2.6 kernel series.
The difference is habit; UNIX has always been multi-user (well, except for the very early research versions) and so UNIX utilities have been designed to work with as few permissions as possible, for security reasons. Security is a much bigger deal on a multi-user system, for obvious reasons. This philosophy persists to this day in the UNIX world, and application designers generally don't make GUIs that run as root -- hell, lots will refuse to run as root.
On the Windows side of things, we're coming from Win95 and earlier, DOS. It doesn't matter that Microsoft ripped out the DOS crap and put in the vastly improved NT kernel with all its security features. Software vendors developing for MS platforms were used to being able to mess with anything on the system, and they continued to do so. Worse, most installs of Windows default to a user with Admin access (that logs in automatically, no less). It's a matter of culture. Convincing Windows users to run as non-administrator is hard because a) they aren't used to it and b) almost nothing runs, because in the old days, there was no Admin user, and most modern Windows apps share code with their Win95 ancestors. This shouldn't be hard to understand.
Windows is far less secure than GNU/Linux, for lots of reasons. Very few people that know what they're talking about doubt the quality of the NT kernel (although putting the GDI in ring 0 was stupid, and a major reason NT 3.5 was so much more stable than 4). But unfortunately, as RMS is always trying to point out, there's much more to an OS than just the kernel. Windows, as a whole, suffers from a history of not caring about security. Its users are only now starting to care; its application developers don't seem to care; no one seems to care.
This is not true in GNU/Linux.
And as for GNU/Linux being a fort, who said that? UNIX-like OSs have always been caught with their pants down when compared to systems like VMS, MVS, and EROS. Within the UNIX world, pretty much any one of the BSDs blows the pants of Linux (except perhaps Mac OS X, if you can call it a BSD).
But it remains far, far more secure than Windows.
And as for the whole "Why isn't Apache more vulnerable than IIS" line, I wouldn't have brought it up, because I think it's a bit silly. But your attempt at refuting it is even more ridiculous. You're comparing Apache2 to IIS 6? I believe the reason people always bring up the Apache vs. IIS argument is because Apache has more marketshare than IIS, but is attacked less.
Most Apache ins
I don't think so. The truth is, most people who play music on their computer don't know the difference between lossless and lossy, and usually still don't get it very well even after you try to explain it to them. To them, music is mp3, although they may be vaguely aware of other formats such as wma and perhaps (if they own an iPod) AAC.
The people who use lossless encoding and understand what it is and what its benefits are are a much more technical crowd.
So while the Mac fanatics will of course use Apple Lossless because it's produced by Apple, many other people already have most of their CD collection encoded in FLAC and are probably happy with FLAC's less (not?) patent-encumbered, open source nature.
You know, open formats and all that.
I personally wouldn't even consider Apple Lossless. FLAC is an open, documented format with encoders and decoders that work on every platform imagineable. Not only that, but FLAC is a very competitive format, being as good or better on average than essentially any other lossless format out there for most samples.
Simply put, FLAC is a well known and trusted brand among people that know about lossless audio compression, why it's good, and why they should use it. Apple lossless is some other proprietary format that might (due to patents, for example) eventually require a license to be able to legally decode.
And I think I speak for most people that have already encoded hundreds of CDs losslessly for convenience and storage when I say, thanks, but no thanks.
Free Software for me.
Although, one has to wonder. Your argument certainly holds true for worms and viruses, but trojans are a different sort of beast. They are, in a sense, socilally engineered rather than technologically engineered. Most even tell you (in fine print) exactly what they're going to install and how, but people don't bother reading it.
Now, for most GNU/Linux distros, there is a centralized packaging system which, by virtue of being centralized, cannot be added to by someone without root access. Therefore, a newbie GNU/Linux user (assuming he hasn't been convinced by Lindows or some other stupid company to run as root all the time) will know at least that in order to install software he wants, he must be root.
So when he downloads Bonzi Buddy for GNU/Linux, do you think he'll think it odd if he needs to su before he can install the conveniently packaged rpm or deb? Hardly. He'll just click through the EULA without reading it, just as he does with Windows, provide his root password, and bume, he's owned.
As a result, unless he's using GNU/Linux in a corporate environment where he doesn't have the root password (and in many companies -- for example mine -- that use Windows, it's standard for people not to have Admin rights to their own computers either) he's going to be vulnerable to the same sorts of social attacks as he would on Windows.
Furthermore, he will be vulnerable on pretty much any platform with as simple a security model as GNU/Linux, OS X, and even Windows (ie, admin/user two-tier security levels). Because he'll just be coerced by the pretty purple ape and/or animated cursor to provide his root password. Voila!
The truth is, there are two reasons there's not much malware for non-Windows systems. One is because of market share, and the other is because the users of minority operating systems tend to be a little more technically savvy than the soccer moms and nascar dads that make up the Windows world. This is even true for Mac users, simply because you are more aware of your computer when most of the world's software isn't compatible with it.
I mean, the thing to recognize here is that security isn't just having secure programs, but also having a security minded admin. My impression of most GNU/Linux users today is that they aren't all that security minded, but because most people aren't leveling attacks at them, it doesn't much matter. If on top of that you had a whole legion of computer illiterate folks clicking on the pretty GNU/Linux widgets, well... let's just say it doesn't bode well.
For me, I'll never have any of this crap because I'm committed to software freedom, and no malware author is going to provide the source code of his program under a license I'm comfortable with.
When Windows users say, "There aren't as many viruses/worms/exploits for GNU/Linux/BSD/MacOS X because there are more Windows machines," flame the shit out of them, because they're ignorant as all get out about the architectural differences between these systems.
But when we're talking about trojans, I'm afraid GNU/Linux, on its own, will not save you.
What a load of crap. I live and work in China, write a lot of Chinese, and I use Debian exclusively.
Unless you're running stable (which really is better suited for servers than desktops), you're just spreading FUD. I run testing, FWIW.
Previously, I used XCIN for input, although I used SCIM these days.
It always baffles me when people are like, "Distribution X" doesn't have Y! Especially with Debian, which has nearly every piece of free software under the sun packaged. You just install the packages you want. Sheesh.
Haha. :)
:)
Well, you know, there's an old saying: physicists grow up to be engineers, and mathematicians grow up to be accountants. I don't think it's true (nothing bores me more than number crunching, I'd never go into accounting) but you have to admit, neither of our fields are particularly applicable, at least in their purest forms.
All my physics friends took jabs at engineers non-stop, too, back in school. Now they either work as engineers, or are paid much less. But then, look at Business majors.
Not that I blame them for making fun of engineers or anything. Engineers are... well, engineers, which reminds me of an old joke, as I veer dangerously off-topic. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all asked to define Pi.
The mathematician says, "Pi is equal to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter."
The physicist says, "Pi is equal to 3.141592653589, plus or minus 3 in the last digit."
The engineer says, "It's about 3."
Yuck yuck.
You do sound like a Physicist :)
Actually, Mathematicians don't say that. Mathematicians say that a closed curve is homeomorphic to S^1, and a line to R^1, ie, there exists a bijective, bicontinuous mapping between the sets.
The "topology" of a space is actually the set of all open sets in that space. (Which trivially could not be a set like S^1.) In essense, the thesis of general topology is that all continuity related problems can be redefined in terms of open sets. If you'll recall, in classic analysis an open set is defined as an open ball with respect to the metric of the space in question. This produced spaces that while perhaps not equivalent to R^n were very similar in many ways, in particular because there existed a way to meaningfully define the distance between any two points.
In topology, we do away with the metric definition of an open set entirely, and leave the concept of an open set essentially undefined (well, subject to a few sanity restrictions involving unions and intersections of open sets). This allows mathematicans to study spaces that really are nothing like the ones we experience regularly, and the vast majority of them are really, really unfriendly, which is one of the reasons that topology is the course that scares many math majors away.
However, it gives way to Algebraic Topology, which is without a doubt one of the most beautiful branches of pure math.
Physics is cool and all, if you're not quite bright enough to make it in Math. Ha ha. *jab*