It's not what Beatles Beatles is linking to that makes him a 'troublemaker.' It's the problem of Beatles Beatles using Slashdot to spam Google PageRank.
By linking to his sites, we are allowing him to participate in the ruining of a perfectly good tool. So when people Google for 'Beatles,' they're going to get his site, and all because he's abusing the Slashdot submission system.
But maybe you're right. He is submitting good stories and that's good. Maybe the Google PageRank problem is Google's problem to solve and not Slashdot's.
The problem is that some of us old-time hackers think it is our job to make the Internet work. The fact is that it's not anymore, and it's up to the companies like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft that have stepped at and taken control to make it work. It's not ours anymore, and we shouldn't worry about it.
I find that hard to believe, but even if it's true, it's hardly representative of most SUV vs. passenger car crashes. It's just not. Perhaps the H2 is just poorly constructed in terms of side-impact protection or something, I can't say since I'm not familiar with it, but imagine that same collision occurring head-on. It barely matters what equipment each car has, because the H2, having much more mass, is going to decelerate much less violently. It's just not going to experience as serious a collision as the smaller car will.
Actually, what you might be interested out that the H2 is very, very typical in terms of SUV construction. The H2 is built on GM's GMT800 platform, making roughly similar to GM's Yukon/Denali SUVs, with the main differences being in the interior and the design of the body panels. (Disclaimer: I worked at GM at the time the H2 was being designed).
I agree with you. I blogged [blogspot.com] about it today, before I submitted the article to slashdot. I'd love to see a bigger experiment from the FCC on privatizing and anarchizing (sp?) airwaves to see how it works.
I think the end result would be almost a total abandonment of a large part of the spectrum by commercial companies... you'd see radio being used mostly by hobbyists and individuals...
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I believe the next step beyond the protocol will be the need to find a way to properly packet-ize information better. I guess ZIP or RAR is fine, but it isn't enough. A sender of any media (website, file, e-mail, etc) would need to implement the data into a packet and set that packet as public or private. Public packets could be dropped into the "Sharing" folder, which replaces the temporary internet files folder completely. Users would instantly share the webpage packets, the image packets and even the music or programs they download.
This sounds a lot like Freenet. The problem with Freenet, though is that it's very, very slow. Some of that is because Freenet tries to mask the sender of the data, and some of is that the distributed nature of Freenet makes locating pieces of data a very very slow process.
It seems the best way to do something like this is to compromise a bit on masking the sender and doing things somewhat the way BitTorrent does them.
Would it be easier to check and see if there was a Coral Cache'd version and then serve that up instead? Why build a new network (which using BT for would be silly as small-sized content over BT is ridiculous) when you could just utilize something that already exists?
Because Coral Cache is an anonymous proxy, and a lot of corporate (and governmental) firewalls block anonymous proxies. Plus, if certain legislative bodies get what they want, you'll find ISPs being forced to block anonymous proxies as well.
Windows is a critical part of a computer. If you don't want that part, go build your own computer.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't astroturfing or trolling...
The operating system is a critical part of a computer and it doesn't have to be Windows. Your Maxtor analogy isn't quite correct. An HDD is an HDD -- it performs the same function regardless of maker. Some are faster, some are slower, some are SCSI, some are IDE, but most HDD manufacturers make all types.
Operating systems, OTOH, are very different. While the choice of HDD isn't likely to limit your choices much as to what sort of applications you can use on your computer, the choice of operating systems is.
Unless you're insane, you probably don't want to run an Internet Web server on Windows -- just as if your primary application is a gaming box, choosing Linux or MacOS X is likely to limit your choices as to what sort of games you can run.
Just as Dell and other manufacturers offer a variety of choices of monitors, HDD types and sizes, keyboards, mice, and processors -- all critical parts of the computer -- they should offer a choice of operating systems and application suites. But they don't. And the fact that they don't means there is a monopoly, at least on the Desktop.
Roblimo's observations are evidence of Microsoft's monopoly coming to an end, but it hasn't yet. Not by a long shot.
And that's why people refer to it as an 'operating system' tax.
Microsoft was declared a monopoly by a court in 1999, but I'm not sure if they ever fit the dictionary definition of monopoly as the submitter seems to now be holding them to:
You cite a court case, but then you argue against the ruling using a dictionary of common usage.
Does anyone else see the irony in this?
Thing is, there is a difference between the common usage of the term 'monopoly' and the legal definition of the term monopoloy. The following is the definition from the law.com legal dictionary.
a business or inter-related group of businesses which controls so much of the production or sale of a product or kind of product as to control the market, including prices and distribution. Business practices, combinations and/or acquisitions which tend to create a monopoly may violate various federal statutes which regulate or prohibit business trusts and monopolies or prohibit restraint of trade. (emphasis mine)
It's not important whether what Microsoft is or was fits a dictionary of common usage, but whether or not what Microsoft is or was fits the legal definition of what constitutes a monopoloy. General Motors was convicted of being a monopoly with just 60% of the market in 1949.
'Bring as many to people to faith...' Hmm... this seems to imply that those who have faiths that are different than your own have no faith. It makes the fatal assumption that all other religions are somehow invalid or untrue. The thing is that of all the world's religions, only Christianity and Islam share the fundamental belief that 'for my faith to be right, everyone else's has to be wrong.'
This is just plain wrong thinking and is not even close to what the actual teachings of Jesus were. (And before you dispute that, think about what it actually says in your Bible, as opposed to what your religious fanatic clergy have told you.)
But what do I know about Chrisianity? I'm not even Christian, so you may as well ignore me.
Not entirely true. It was included in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, which, really, aside from some horrible themes and font smoothing, was the only real reason to spend the ~US$50 on the stupid thing.
Competition? In what? Seriously. Opera is hardly competition for Microsoft. The Internet Explorer browser does not represent any significant revenue stream for Microsoft. They make money selling operating systems, office suites, programming languages, a few games, and a few odd bits of hardware like mice, trackballs, keyboard, oh...and some little video game console named "Xbox".
But browsers? Can anyone name the last time Microsoft sold a browser?
I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?
No. And I wish people would put this red herring to rest. OOo's MS-Office compatibility is very good, and it's even better with the 2.0.x releases. The compatibility doesn't have to perfect. Heck, speaking of perfect, when MS Office took over, it did so by including imperfect compatibility for the two major reigning apps of the day: WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
The are lots of reasons why people haven't switched to OpenOffice. But not all of them -- and in fact most of them do not -- have to do with file format compatibility.
A lot of banks internal politics won't let them run a solution that isn't supported by a "major vendor". Besides which Diebold no longer loads new ATM's with OS/2 so they would have to develop their own or work with a smaller player who would.
I've seen ATM machines running Linux. In fact, Banrisul in Brazil replaced all of their MS-DOS-based ATMs with Linux some time ago. What defines a 'major vendor'? Is Red Hat? Is Novell/SuSE? What defines 'support'?
The thing is I often find the knee-jerk reaction of "We can't run something that isn't supported by a 'major vendor'" to more or less translate to "We can't run something that isn't supported by a vendor who's not giving us kickbacks."
If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?
It doesn't matter. All that matters for a company is that expenses income. If someone could find a business model to make it work, they will. Are you entirely certain that NO business model could be established to pay these expensive bills? I wouldn't be. There are plenty of businesses with huge piles of cash just waiting to be burnt should an opportunity like that present itself.
And with this change, every mac on the internet will become even more secure than their Windows based counterparts.
Other than this is an arguable statement. It's possible that whatever browser has the highest usage rating will have the most virii written for it. If Firefox becomes the dominant browser, it might even be safer to have IE installed on your computer to avoid the latest virus. Yes, a Firefox virus is fixed faster than an IE virus, but it's still a liability.
Y'know, you're argument about whatever [browser/OS/MUA/office suite/etc.] having the highest usage rating having the most virii written for it is really a loaded statement. The problem is that it's true, but it seems to make the presumption that there will be the same amount of virii created for X as there is for Y if Y were as popular as X is now.
The fact is that X and Y are different applications and have different vulnerabilities. In this case, X is a security nightmare because the people who wrote and architected the code had no experience whatsoever in developing applications for the Internet before they began doing so. And then they integrated it into operating system Z! OTOH, Y was written by coders who live and breathe on the Internet, who have vast amounts of experience in coding applications that are designed to run the Internet, and who have had security, reliability and performance in mind from the beginning (well, not counting Netscape 4.x, anyway).
I'm not saying that most virii wouldn't be written to target Y if it were as popular as X is now, because that's true. But I'm saying that there would be far FEWER virii written and far LESS DAMAGING virii written if Y were as popular as X is now.
From spying on American citizens, to government-mandated DRM, to the removals of our fundamental rights to free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms, the government has taken away more and more of our rights each year.
And we bend over and grease up year after year because they tell us that it's for the good of the children, for our own safety, or for the stability of our economy.
The fact is, as long as we allow these fascists to rule our government by NOT voting them out of power, it is not as simple as the take over of the fascist state -- it is we who are the fascists, even though most of us don't even know it.
It's time to become aware of what's going on around us and STOP it. It's time to start voting for candidates who support freedom as opposed to special interests. Forget about such minor issues as social security and taxes and start focusing on the core reasons that made this country the great nation it once was -- liberty and freedom for all of her citizens.
Okay, okay, I'm getting off of my soap box now...;)
And it is much better than say the linux kernel, because they're also moving all the drivers in userland
Moving all the drivers to userland won't necessarily improve stability. There still needs to be some kind of "stub" in kernel mode that provides access to the hardware.
And not all Windows (or any other OS crashes) are due to driver crashes. Many are due to bugs in the OS. Some users may never encounter these bugs -- where Windows draws a lot of criticism from technically-knowledgeable folk is because technically-knowledgable folks, like, say, systems programmers, are constantly pushing against the boundaries of the OS and uncovering these bugs.
We do agree on a lot of things, I think. But one thing I don't think we agree on is that government force should necessarily be taken away in every case that it's abused. Unfortunately, the government has to have some power and authority in order to function. That power is supposed to be, ultimately, limited by the Constitution.
Although we see massive abuses of power, including some cases of blatant ignorance of the Constitution, one that a lot of people miss out on is that the vast majority of the time, the government does abide by the Constitution. In every criminal court room in the land, the Constitution is being observed daily. It's only the cases where the government violates the Constitution that we notice and get upset about.
We have the means of correcting abuses of power in government -- it's called an election ballot. Unfortunately, most people in this country are simply too uninformed -- and too ignorant -- to make intelligent voting decisions. The problem isn't the system as it exists, the problem is the people that put the system in place -- the voters.
It's just like computing systems -- garbage in, garbage out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not what Beatles Beatles is linking to that makes him a 'troublemaker.' It's the problem of Beatles Beatles using Slashdot to spam Google PageRank.
By linking to his sites, we are allowing him to participate in the ruining of a perfectly good tool. So when people Google for 'Beatles,' they're going to get his site, and all because he's abusing the Slashdot submission system.
But maybe you're right. He is submitting good stories and that's good. Maybe the Google PageRank problem is Google's problem to solve and not Slashdot's.
The problem is that some of us old-time hackers think it is our job to make the Internet work. The fact is that it's not anymore, and it's up to the companies like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft that have stepped at and taken control to make it work. It's not ours anymore, and we shouldn't worry about it.
Score: -1 Jailbird ;-).;;.....,
I find that hard to believe, but even if it's true, it's hardly representative of most SUV vs. passenger car crashes. It's just not. Perhaps the H2 is just poorly constructed in terms of side-impact protection or something, I can't say since I'm not familiar with it, but imagine that same collision occurring head-on. It barely matters what equipment each car has, because the H2, having much more mass, is going to decelerate much less violently. It's just not going to experience as serious a collision as the smaller car will.
Actually, what you might be interested out that the H2 is very, very typical in terms of SUV construction. The H2 is built on GM's GMT800 platform, making roughly similar to GM's Yukon/Denali SUVs, with the main differences being in the interior and the design of the body panels. (Disclaimer: I worked at GM at the time the H2 was being designed).
What has changed since the 28th when the story was last published?
A check from AllPeers to OSTG?
Until a killer app comes out that ONLY runs on a Video-based OS, nobody'll switch. One word: pr0n.
I agree with you. I blogged [blogspot.com] about it today, before I submitted the article to slashdot. I'd love to see a bigger experiment from the FCC on privatizing and anarchizing (sp?) airwaves to see how it works.
... you'd see radio being used mostly by hobbyists and individuals...
;)
I think the end result would be almost a total abandonment of a large part of the spectrum by commercial companies
Or maybe that's what you had in mind...
Nah, that's okay. Think I'll pass.
I believe the next step beyond the protocol will be the need to find a way to properly packet-ize information better. I guess ZIP or RAR is fine, but it isn't enough. A sender of any media (website, file, e-mail, etc) would need to implement the data into a packet and set that packet as public or private. Public packets could be dropped into the "Sharing" folder, which replaces the temporary internet files folder completely. Users would instantly share the webpage packets, the image packets and even the music or programs they download.
This sounds a lot like Freenet. The problem with Freenet, though is that it's very, very slow. Some of that is because Freenet tries to mask the sender of the data, and some of is that the distributed nature of Freenet makes locating pieces of data a very very slow process.
It seems the best way to do something like this is to compromise a bit on masking the sender and doing things somewhat the way BitTorrent does them.
Would it be easier to check and see if there was a Coral Cache'd version and then serve that up instead? Why build a new network (which using BT for would be silly as small-sized content over BT is ridiculous) when you could just utilize something that already exists?
Because Coral Cache is an anonymous proxy, and a lot of corporate (and governmental) firewalls block anonymous proxies. Plus, if certain legislative bodies get what they want, you'll find ISPs being forced to block anonymous proxies as well.
I couldn't find it by following the link in the article. All I found was a free online chapter. Anyone else find it?
Windows is a critical part of a computer. If you don't want that part, go build your own computer. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't astroturfing or trolling ...
The operating system is a critical part of a computer and it doesn't have to be Windows. Your Maxtor analogy isn't quite correct. An HDD is an HDD -- it performs the same function regardless of maker. Some are faster, some are slower, some are SCSI, some are IDE, but most HDD manufacturers make all types.
Operating systems, OTOH, are very different. While the choice of HDD isn't likely to limit your choices much as to what sort of applications you can use on your computer, the choice of operating systems is.
Unless you're insane, you probably don't want to run an Internet Web server on Windows -- just as if your primary application is a gaming box, choosing Linux or MacOS X is likely to limit your choices as to what sort of games you can run.
Just as Dell and other manufacturers offer a variety of choices of monitors, HDD types and sizes, keyboards, mice, and processors -- all critical parts of the computer -- they should offer a choice of operating systems and application suites. But they don't. And the fact that they don't means there is a monopoly, at least on the Desktop.
Roblimo's observations are evidence of Microsoft's monopoly coming to an end, but it hasn't yet. Not by a long shot.
And that's why people refer to it as an 'operating system' tax.
Does anyone else see the irony in this?
Thing is, there is a difference between the common usage of the term 'monopoly' and the legal definition of the term monopoloy. The following is the definition from the law.com legal dictionary.
It's not important whether what Microsoft is or was fits a dictionary of common usage, but whether or not what Microsoft is or was fits the legal definition of what constitutes a monopoloy. General Motors was convicted of being a monopoly with just 60% of the market in 1949.'Bring as many to people to faith...' Hmm... this seems to imply that those who have faiths that are different than your own have no faith. It makes the fatal assumption that all other religions are somehow invalid or untrue. The thing is that of all the world's religions, only Christianity and Islam share the fundamental belief that 'for my faith to be right, everyone else's has to be wrong.' This is just plain wrong thinking and is not even close to what the actual teachings of Jesus were. (And before you dispute that, think about what it actually says in your Bible, as opposed to what your religious fanatic clergy have told you.) But what do I know about Chrisianity? I'm not even Christian, so you may as well ignore me.
It depends on how the filesystem is designed, actually.
You COULD make it so that all metadata is acesssible to all users.
Or, you could make it so that if you don't have access to the file, you don't have access to the metadata for that file, either.
So it *IS* implementation specific. Sorry.
Any bets on which approach Microsoft took?
As if there were only Opera and Microsoft. Ever heard of these people? Or these people, who seem to be coming up in the news a lot lately? Plus there's always these people, these people and these people.
The smartphone market is a very competitive place.
Microsoft never sold a browser.
Not entirely true. It was included in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, which, really, aside from some horrible themes and font smoothing, was the only real reason to spend the ~US$50 on the stupid thing.
Competition? In what? Seriously. Opera is hardly competition for Microsoft. The Internet Explorer browser does not represent any significant revenue stream for Microsoft. They make money selling operating systems, office suites, programming languages, a few games, and a few odd bits of hardware like mice, trackballs, keyboard, oh...and some little video game console named "Xbox".
But browsers? Can anyone name the last time Microsoft sold a browser?
Hey, my name is Tom Qwerty, you insensitive clod!
I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?
No. And I wish people would put this red herring to rest. OOo's MS-Office compatibility is very good, and it's even better with the 2.0.x releases. The compatibility doesn't have to perfect. Heck, speaking of perfect, when MS Office took over, it did so by including imperfect compatibility for the two major reigning apps of the day: WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
The are lots of reasons why people haven't switched to OpenOffice. But not all of them -- and in fact most of them do not -- have to do with file format compatibility.
A lot of banks internal politics won't let them run a solution that isn't supported by a "major vendor". Besides which Diebold no longer loads new ATM's with OS/2 so they would have to develop their own or work with a smaller player who would.
I've seen ATM machines running Linux. In fact, Banrisul
in Brazil replaced all of their MS-DOS-based ATMs with Linux some time ago. What defines a 'major vendor'? Is Red Hat? Is Novell/SuSE? What defines 'support'?
The thing is I often find the knee-jerk reaction of "We can't run something that isn't supported by a 'major vendor'" to more or less translate to "We can't run something that isn't supported by a vendor who's not giving us kickbacks."
If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?
It doesn't matter. All that matters for a company is that expenses income. If someone could find a business model to make it work, they will. Are you entirely certain that NO business model could be established to pay these expensive bills? I wouldn't be. There are plenty of businesses with huge piles of cash just waiting to be burnt should an opportunity like that present itself.
The fact is that X and Y are different applications and have different vulnerabilities. In this case, X is a security nightmare because the people who wrote and architected the code had no experience whatsoever in developing applications for the Internet before they began doing so. And then they integrated it into operating system Z! OTOH, Y was written by coders who live and breathe on the Internet, who have vast amounts of experience in coding applications that are designed to run the Internet, and who have had security, reliability and performance in mind from the beginning (well, not counting Netscape 4.x, anyway).
I'm not saying that most virii wouldn't be written to target Y if it were as popular as X is now, because that's true. But I'm saying that there would be far FEWER virii written and far LESS DAMAGING virii written if Y were as popular as X is now.
From spying on American citizens, to government-mandated DRM, to the removals of our fundamental rights to free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms, the government has taken away more and more of our rights each year.
;)
And we bend over and grease up year after year because they tell us that it's for the good of the children, for our own safety, or for the stability of our economy.
The fact is, as long as we allow these fascists to rule our government by NOT voting them out of power, it is not as simple as the take over of the fascist state -- it is we who are the fascists, even though most of us don't even know it.
It's time to become aware of what's going on around us and STOP it. It's time to start voting for candidates who support freedom as opposed to special interests. Forget about such minor issues as social security and taxes and start focusing on the core reasons that made this country the great nation it once was -- liberty and freedom for all of her citizens.
Okay, okay, I'm getting off of my soap box now...
And it is much better than say the linux kernel, because they're also moving all the drivers in userland
Moving all the drivers to userland won't necessarily improve stability. There still needs to be some kind of "stub" in kernel mode that provides access to the hardware.
And not all Windows (or any other OS crashes) are due to driver crashes. Many are due to bugs in the OS. Some users may never encounter these bugs -- where Windows draws a lot of criticism from technically-knowledgeable folk is because technically-knowledgable folks, like, say, systems programmers, are constantly pushing against the boundaries of the OS and uncovering these bugs.
We do agree on a lot of things, I think. But one thing I don't think we agree on is that government force should necessarily be taken away in every case that it's abused. Unfortunately, the government has to have some power and authority in order to function. That power is supposed to be, ultimately, limited by the Constitution.
Although we see massive abuses of power, including some cases of blatant ignorance of the Constitution, one that a lot of people miss out on is that the vast majority of the time, the government does abide by the Constitution. In every criminal court room in the land, the Constitution is being observed daily. It's only the cases where the government violates the Constitution that we notice and get upset about.
We have the means of correcting abuses of power in government -- it's called an election ballot. Unfortunately, most people in this country are simply too uninformed -- and too ignorant -- to make intelligent voting decisions. The problem isn't the system as it exists, the problem is the people that put the system in place -- the voters.
It's just like computing systems -- garbage in, garbage out.