Are people really naive enough to think that DOS attacks don't almost always harm innocent bystanders?
Judging from the unsympathetic tone in 99% of the responses here, those who do know don't care.
I especially enjoyed the unattributed quote at the end of the article suggesting that the bystanders switch hosting providers. That was spoken like a true elitist geek in a bubble completely isolated from the unglamorous work of counting costs and paying bills. What an asshole.
And I suppose that the use of computer systems on modern jet fighters to keep the plane from breaking apart in mid-flight means that the pilots are a bunch of fakes, huh? And the photographer who uses a camera with faster-than-human-reflex autofocus is just a wannabe who ought to be using a wooden view camera and glass negatives? Or the accountant who uses a spreadsheet instead of his fingers is a poseur? How about the paraplegic who uses a motorized wheelchair instead of dragging himself along the ground? Give me a break.
The whole idea behind all technology is to augment natural human ability.
I hate to break it to the suddenly Luddite masses on Slashdot, but musical recording and, for that matter, electrically-amplified live performances are completely and entirely products of fairly sophisticated technology from beginning to end. Personally, I don't give a rat's patoot how the end product is arrived at as long as it's good. If I want to appreciate raw human nature, I'll go look at 19th century porn daguerrotypes. If I want good music, I'll drop a digital CD into my computerized stereo system and listen to it with my computer-designed speakers. Sheesh.
My first thought on reading about this, as someone who can play the guitar fairly well but can't sing worth a shit was cool, I want one.
I think he is implying Darwinism. I.E. Those that do not adapt to virii attack, become extinct.
The problem is that those who survive get better at surviving viruses, but that diverts energy away from the constructive activities that we could be undertaking if we weren't defending ourselves from the unholy alliance of Bill Gates and half-assed teenaged code wankers.
Weed out the week and stupid, leave only the competent. We need less computer users anyway. We can go back to good old BBSing and a USENET free of assholes.
I don't recall that BBSes and USENET had fewer assholes back in the day, though I'll grant you that fewer of them were dumb assholes.
Although AOL may have over zealous policies as of late they do have a postmaster number which they could call and have the validity of the block checked. I had done this in the past and had resolution in ~24hours.
As little as I care for AOL, I can vouch for this, too. The company I work for does large bulk mailings to its customers, and AOL is actually pretty helpful about letting legitimate bulk mail through. We've occasionally been blocked, and our contact at AOL has helped us isolate the cause of the problem in a very constructive way. They expect legitimate bulk mailers (by which I mean bulk mail to actual customers) to do a few things:
1. Make sure reverse DNS works for the sender's mail servers.
2. Set up a dedicated email account to receive AOL user complaints (generated by pressing the spam button in the latest version of their mail client) and immediately unsubscribe anyone who complains.
3. Make sure all bounce messages are accepted, and all email addresses connected to terminated accounts are purged from the mailing list.
4. Avoid exceeding the complaints-per-24-hour threshold. They won't say exactly what this is, but in practice it appears to be in the neighborhood of 500 to 1000, which is not hard to hit if your mailing list is large, as most bulk lists are.
Frankly, my experience with AOL is that they are perfectly happy for you to send tons of bulk mail to their users (we send about 850,000 every two weeks) as long as it isn't outright unsolicited spam. They'll even give you free tech support to help you do it. If CI Host got blocked, they must have gone pretty far out of their way to piss AOL off.
And finally, AOL ought to be able to run their mail servers any way they damn well please. If they don't want to accept mail from Domain X, then Domain X needs to piss off and shut up. AOL is not the USPS, and neither is any other company.
Well, if it's nine percent of my incoming spam that they want... the state can have it.
It would be so nice if people would read the actual article. (Yes, I realize the above was a joke.) Here's the vital line:
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.
What they're talking about, in nine cases out of ten, would be taxing equipment depreciation. (I assume that they're referring to dedicated WAN lines when they talk about annual lease payments, since I don't know anyone who leases LANs.)
What's really boneheaded about this is that LANs are so cheap, even for relatively large LANs, that equipment expenses are more likely to be written off as capital expense rather than being depreciated over time. Even then -- since annual depreciation is usually defined by tax codes -- most LANs would last well beyond their depreciation period, resulting in an exemption from further taxation.
What'll be interesting to see is how they define what a LAN actually is. Hubs, routers, switches, and spools of CAT-5 or coax, sure, but will they be including NICs -- which are arguably part of the PC rather than the network proper -- or network operating systems?
The worst part is that this won't be a good source of revenue, but will impose considerable expense on businesses to comply with the reporting requirements.
A few years ago, when I got a stereoscopic microscope and an ultrasonic cleaner, I cleaned and examined all of the hundreds of mineral and fossil specimens I'd collected over the years. In so doing, I noticed something interesting and unexpected. (Actually, I noticed several interesting and unexpected things, but only one of them is germane here.)
The specimens that were the most interesting to the naked eye were generally duller than heck at a microscopic scale. The really interesting microscopic features were almost always on stones that were completely unremarkable to the naked eye.
I suggest that the MGS scientists sit down and make a list of the areas on Mars they consider least interesting and take pictures of random locations within those areas. They might indeed turn out to be uninteresting, but on the other hand, the surest way to find unexpected things is to look where you don't expect to find anything.
A lot of slashdotters write that "if you don't want it read, don't post it"... but really there's a difference between putting something up so that global interested parties can check it out, and having it swarmed on by the masses. Makes me wonder if I should append a "property of owner XYZ, please do not copy or link this article without permission"... at least to cover my ass in some form if such an article got in the wild.
I have a friend whose site was hammered by a major media outlet -- other than Slashdot -- and got stuck with a four-digit bandwidth bill. It seems to me that there ought to be some legal liability there, considering anyone running a high-volume website like Slashdot or CNN must know the costs involved in sustaining that kind of traffic.
There are some things you can do, depending on the level of control you have over your site.
Use Javascript to redirect users when their referer header contains "slashdot", "cnn", and so on. The drawback to this is that it's an all-or-nothing sort of thing and it only protects you against sites you already know about.
Use a server-side scripting language to maintain hit counts per referring domain on a short time interval -- 15 minutes to an hour -- and begin redirecting loads when they exceed a certain rate. The drawback to this is that you have to have access to a server-side scripting language.
Do it at the server level. There are a number of existing Apache modules that throttle usage on a per-IP basis; presumably it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to write a module to do it on a per-referer basis. Maybe such a module already exists.
Last but not least, make sure your hosting provider will at least pull the plug on your site before a pre-arranged bandwidth cost is exceeded. This may or may not be practical for many commercial sites, but it makes good sense for non-commercial and personal sites.
Of course, the best solution would be for commercial sites (and that includes Slashdot) not to abuse the nice people whose freely-available content helps sell their advertising. If it were me, I'd ask permission to copy the desired content into the story body. (Of course, if it were me, everyone on my staff would be able to spell "ludicrous" and "ridiculous" correctly, and there would occasionally be some basic fact-checking.)
The whole concept of cooperation and sharing is completely off the radar of these people
It's not off the radar -- it's just that they hold any form of altruism in utter contempt. Just look at the snide Forbes editorials about the SCO debacle. These are the kind of people who think that any act of uncompensated generosity is a sign of unfitness to survive. Sharing, in their view, indicates weakness and is an invitation to attack.
Pure businessmen -- by which I mean people whose primary activity is selling something other people create -- are by their very nature people who spend the majority of their time how to extract money from other people. There's nothing inherently corrupt about that but, to paraphrase Frank Herbert, it's the kind of thing that tends to attract the easily corruptable. There's a culture that goes with it, and like most cultures regards itself as the cause and reason for the existence of the rest of civilization. To them, you and me are marks who serve the dual, contemptible roles of workers and consumers.
Software developers suffer from the same skewed perspective. We tend to think of software -- and, around here, free software -- as being tremendously important. It may or may not be important in an absolute sense, but the indisputable fact is that very few people share that view. The difference between us and the executive class is that we do not have the money and influence to simply impose our will on the people around us. We have the additional burden learning to think in new ways, adopt new strategies, and learn to understand the opposition's capabilities and mindset. Left unchallenged, they can just buy the outcome they desire.
This point has been beaten to death, but it can be beaten some more: We are playing in the big leagues now. We must therefore stop acting like this is the office softball team. The stakes are real and they are high.
Re:dan bernstein's position on this
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DNSSEC: Good Enough?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is he living on the same earth we do? It's going to be a long time before manually enterable -- and verifiable -- hostnames become redundant (if they ever do).
Ever watch end users? I mean, really watch end users? They almost never type in domain names. If it isn't a link or a bookmark, it seldom gets visited. Some of the brighter ones will go to Google and type a domain name into the search box (which exasperates me to no end -- "Location bar? What's that?"), but that's it.
The only time most end users type a domain name is as part of an email address. And I think we can all agree that the existing email infrastructure is in desperate need of a complete overhaul. (We can all probably agree that's as likely as "non-partisan" hearings in Congress, too.)
Not that Bernstein's proposed solution is all that great, but it's not as far-fetched as it seems at first blush.
I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code.
Is it just me, or is anyone else getting the impression that it's corporate coders working for proprietary software companies whose coding practices are sloppy and reckless about intellectual property, and not us long-haired hippie commie free software freaks?
SCO has been going on about Linux being in violation of the law, IBM being in violation of the law, Linux users being in violation of the law, and now, incredibly, the GPL being in violation of the law on the grounds that copyright ownership prohibits you from transferring copying privileges, all of which point to the big question that nobody so far has asked:
Isn't having an entire company full of people smoking crack in violation of the law?
There's more to diamond than CPUs and rings
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The Diamond Age
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oddly absent -- though perhaps not so considering the source is Wired -- is any consideration of the significance of cheap diamond for optics. Diamond has a substantially higher refractive index than glass and is less subject to thermal and mechanical deformation than glass. What that would mean in practice would require a deeper knowledge of optics than I have, but it sure would be interesting to see what kind of lenses and prisms could be made out of it for cameras, telescopes, and microscopes.
Re:But is the reverse true?
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The Diamond Age
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· Score: 4, Funny
The slick executive types will propose with dual Athlons, while the poor struggling college student will have to resort to a 6502 or something.
Wanker. If you were a Real Programmer, you could impress your fiance by doing something useful in 6502 assembly language in a 64k address space that the slick executive did in 128 megs of RAM with a development team of fifteen on an Athlon. Quit your bitching and get a MOV on.
in the larger scheme of things it just makes SCO's complaint look valid
Hardly. Any random judge picked at random might be technically clueless, but I'm sure they all understand the logic behind hedging one's bets against litigation -- aside from seeing it every damn day of their working lives, they are all lawyers, after all.
Re:How about something marine?
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TAM 5 Has landed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder how many of us have also daydreamed of a small autonomous submersible?
Well, there's me, though I was only interested in submersion as a means of riding out nasty storms. Technically, it's almost trivial since, as you note, making something that floats isn't very difficult and you don't have the size and power constraints that you would in an airplane. The one thing I haven't figured out is how to send back large quantities of data -- like a jpeg every few minutes -- without getting into expensive stuff like satellite phones. Get around that problem, and you could mount a digital camera with a 180 fish-eye lens vertically, and use a script with panotools to create a navigable hemispherical panorama back at the base. How cool would that be?
Now, what I'd really like to do is build an autonomous zeppelin that stays aloft on solar power and replenishes its hydrogen supply by electrolyzing captured moisture, but that would be mind-bogglingly expensive...
I'm as paranoid as the next guy about RFID tags, but folks, remember this -- there isn't an RFID tag on the planet that can survive fifteen seconds, probably much less, in your househould microwave oven. Most of the goods to which they are attached, on the other hand, would be largely unaffected.
Now mind you, it's theoretically possible that microwaving your shoes would then violate the DMCA, but prosecution is practically unlikely unless Hilary Rosen is sitting inside your microwave right now.
In which case, set it to maximum intensity for an hour.
In other words, Bruce Perens could call every person inside IBM headquarters by name an uncle fucker and it wouldn't change their tactics.
While it is true that profit is foremost on the mind of IBM as a collective organization, the people at IBM are people, and just like Bruce Perens, they have feelings and egos to protect. Piss off enough people, and the damage will accumulate to the point that it will eventually matter.
A sterling example of this is Daniel Bernstein. His djbdns is hands-down a better product than BIND in every way -- it's cleaner, more stable, more efficient, easier to use, more secure -- but it's not all that widely adopted largely because Bernstein is personally abrasive.
Being considerate of other people matters, particularly when you are acting as an ambassador of sorts.
Personally, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to buy and sell virtual goods. It's not like this doesn't happen all the time in other areas; you're certainly not getting a real live performance when you download music from iTunes. What you are buying in both cases is entertainment, and though the electronic form blurs the distinction between goods and services, it's not really anything novel. (Not that it would surprise me if some USPTO drone sees matters otherwise.) There's even a fairly nifty graphical chat service for teens in the UK, Habbo Hotel, whose entire business model is based on selling virtual furniture for users' private chat rooms.
The idea that gaming-for-profit would somehow ruin the purity of online games is just silly. It's not like the game companies are doing this as a labor of love, after all. Considering all the other challenges their developers have faced, including active cheating, I'm sure they can find a way to maintain game balance for both "professional" gamers and amateurs.
I suspect that the main motivation the game companies have for prohibiting the sale of game items is their own legal liability. (There's probably also a great deal of internal debate on how they can get a cut of that action, too.)
I think it would be to their benefit to allow and encourage virtual trading via their own eBay-like percentage-taking interfaces rather than let it happen clandestinely in the wild. It might attract more paying users as well. I've never played anything like Everquest, but I might give it a spin if I could make a profit, or at least get the habit to pay for itself.
IBM e-Business on Demand General Manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger seemed surprised to hear of Perens' comments. "The question has never come up with Linux," Wladawsky-Berger says. IBM's history of working with open communities like the World Wide Web Consortium should reassure developers, he adds, but he encourages Perens to contact IBM to discuss the issue.
In other words -- again -- Perens started shooting off his mouth about possible bad intentions from IBM before even discussing it with IBM. That's just plain bad form, since it means Wladawksy-Berger was caught off-guard by an unexpected question from a reporter. That's not a good way to treat people whose cooperation you desire.
I hope that someday, the Open Source/Free Software community will have spokespeople who comport themselves professionally instead of brilliant but socially-impaired people with a tendency to ill-considered public tantrums. You can get away with that as a developer, at least sometimes, but when you get into the PR business, basic manners are a fundamental requirement of the job.
If Perens had talked to IBM at length and gotten nowhere, it would have been acceptable to say, "We talked to IBM at length and got nowhere." Just calling the press and saying, "IBM hasn't spontaneously stepped up to the plate and I'm starting to have paranoid fantasies," doesn't cut it.
After IBM & Red Hat finish these pathetic twits off in court, their stock will be probably no more than 10 cents per share. The open source community needs to buy them
Sigh. This let's-buy-them-out line of thought really needs to die. In case there is anyone left who hasn't heard yet, and apparently there are quite a few, 80% of SCO is in the hands of a single shareholder. If you managed to buy the remaining 20%, including the tiny quantities yet to be dumped by SCO executives, all you would have is a minority share in a dying company.
You want a stock tip? Buy IBM.
Re:From a European viewpoint
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Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It is, however, illegal to urge people to break the law, and advocating the violent overthrow of the government certainly falls in that category. It is not incompatible with freedom of speech in any of the usual ways. Arguably, advocating the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government ought to be deeply, deeply repugnant to a free society in a way that advocating the overthrow of autocratic governments is not. Part of the point of democracy, after all, is the regularly scheduled non-violent overthrow of unpopular governments at the polls.
Had the defendant in this case merely presented bomb-making information, he probably could have gotten off on First Amendment grounds, but by stepping outside of what the First Amendment protects, and being dumb enough to do so during a national panic, one year in prison is not all that outrageous.
If enough people feel oppressed enough, they should be able to advocate that revolution.
As a practical matter, if you are really being severely oppressed, advocating revolution is a great way to be unpersoned. In the event of real oppression, you need to fight a revolution, not cut-and-paste crap from the Anarchists' Cookbook to your website. At present, however, most real oppression being conducted by the US Government is happening outside of its borders.
Meanwhile, this is the kind of oppression that does lead to a revolution.
Piff. This is the kind of routine law enforcement that leads to stupid bumper stickers.
That would make GIMP the fine set of brushes, oil paints and canvas. And people like you, hacks.
What a pompous load of shit. This is like arguing that artists who buy ready-made oil paints are just hacks and real artists gather minerals in the field and grind their own pigments by hand.
Yes, you can do in GIMP most of what you can do in Photoshop, but the simple fact of the matter is that you can do it more quickly and easily in Photoshop. If you're a prima donna fine artist (or fancy yourself one, which sounds like the case here), then you can afford to screw around with whatever tool floats your boat. If you are a commercial artist, you are generally producing "art" to satisfy the specifications and budget constraints imposed by a client who doesn't give a rat's ass what tool you use as long as the end product is on time and under budget.
Which is why commercial artists tend to have mortgages and car payments and fine artists tend to have attitude problems.
The GIMP is on a par with Photoshop 3 or 4. Those who say otherwise need to become more familiar with the current Photoshop featureset. This is all painfully familiar of the whining I used to hear from TeX users about how Word didn't do such-and-such that TeX did, when in actual fact Word did have the feature in question.
This is why I laughed at the original post -- if the Camel book is a "short, sharp introduction," I'd hate to see the reviewer's idea of a sprawling book.
To be fair, a sprawling language like Perl needs a sprawling reference, and the Camel book does a decent job of it.
Personally, I don't often refer to K&R, but that's because C is a simple language that you can learn in its entirety without too much effort. Who truly knows all of Perl? Or C++ or COBOL, to mention two other giant languages? A small percentage of the users of all three. Which is not a criticism of Perl per se -- I use C and Perl and enjoy both -- but comparing C with Perl is like comparing apples and, uhm, county-fair-prize-winning giant pumpkins.
Slashdot Mirror
Are people really naive enough to think that DOS attacks don't almost always harm innocent bystanders?
Judging from the unsympathetic tone in 99% of the responses here, those who do know don't care.
I especially enjoyed the unattributed quote at the end of the article suggesting that the bystanders switch hosting providers. That was spoken like a true elitist geek in a bubble completely isolated from the unglamorous work of counting costs and paying bills. What an asshole.
Vigilantism is always bad press.
And I suppose that the use of computer systems on modern jet fighters to keep the plane from breaking apart in mid-flight means that the pilots are a bunch of fakes, huh? And the photographer who uses a camera with faster-than-human-reflex autofocus is just a wannabe who ought to be using a wooden view camera and glass negatives? Or the accountant who uses a spreadsheet instead of his fingers is a poseur? How about the paraplegic who uses a motorized wheelchair instead of dragging himself along the ground? Give me a break.
The whole idea behind all technology is to augment natural human ability.
I hate to break it to the suddenly Luddite masses on Slashdot, but musical recording and, for that matter, electrically-amplified live performances are completely and entirely products of fairly sophisticated technology from beginning to end. Personally, I don't give a rat's patoot how the end product is arrived at as long as it's good. If I want to appreciate raw human nature, I'll go look at 19th century porn daguerrotypes. If I want good music, I'll drop a digital CD into my computerized stereo system and listen to it with my computer-designed speakers. Sheesh.
My first thought on reading about this, as someone who can play the guitar fairly well but can't sing worth a shit was cool, I want one.
Do you think three-valued logic is a good idea? 1. Yes, 2. No, 3. Maybe
It certainly will make it easier to accommodate ambiguous design specs and non-committal clients.
I think he is implying Darwinism. I.E. Those that do not adapt to virii attack, become extinct.
The problem is that those who survive get better at surviving viruses, but that diverts energy away from the constructive activities that we could be undertaking if we weren't defending ourselves from the unholy alliance of Bill Gates and half-assed teenaged code wankers.
Weed out the week and stupid, leave only the competent. We need less computer users anyway. We can go back to good old BBSing and a USENET free of assholes.
I don't recall that BBSes and USENET had fewer assholes back in the day, though I'll grant you that fewer of them were dumb assholes.
Although AOL may have over zealous policies as of late they do have a postmaster number which they could call and have the validity of the block checked. I had done this in the past and had resolution in ~24hours.
As little as I care for AOL, I can vouch for this, too. The company I work for does large bulk mailings to its customers, and AOL is actually pretty helpful about letting legitimate bulk mail through. We've occasionally been blocked, and our contact at AOL has helped us isolate the cause of the problem in a very constructive way. They expect legitimate bulk mailers (by which I mean bulk mail to actual customers) to do a few things:
1. Make sure reverse DNS works for the sender's mail servers.
2. Set up a dedicated email account to receive AOL user complaints (generated by pressing the spam button in the latest version of their mail client) and immediately unsubscribe anyone who complains.
3. Make sure all bounce messages are accepted, and all email addresses connected to terminated accounts are purged from the mailing list.
4. Avoid exceeding the complaints-per-24-hour threshold. They won't say exactly what this is, but in practice it appears to be in the neighborhood of 500 to 1000, which is not hard to hit if your mailing list is large, as most bulk lists are.
Frankly, my experience with AOL is that they are perfectly happy for you to send tons of bulk mail to their users (we send about 850,000 every two weeks) as long as it isn't outright unsolicited spam. They'll even give you free tech support to help you do it. If CI Host got blocked, they must have gone pretty far out of their way to piss AOL off.
And finally, AOL ought to be able to run their mail servers any way they damn well please. If they don't want to accept mail from Domain X, then Domain X needs to piss off and shut up. AOL is not the USPS, and neither is any other company.
Well, if it's nine percent of my incoming spam that they want... the state can have it.
It would be so nice if people would read the actual article. (Yes, I realize the above was a joke.) Here's the vital line:
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.
What they're talking about, in nine cases out of ten, would be taxing equipment depreciation. (I assume that they're referring to dedicated WAN lines when they talk about annual lease payments, since I don't know anyone who leases LANs.)
What's really boneheaded about this is that LANs are so cheap, even for relatively large LANs, that equipment expenses are more likely to be written off as capital expense rather than being depreciated over time. Even then -- since annual depreciation is usually defined by tax codes -- most LANs would last well beyond their depreciation period, resulting in an exemption from further taxation.
What'll be interesting to see is how they define what a LAN actually is. Hubs, routers, switches, and spools of CAT-5 or coax, sure, but will they be including NICs -- which are arguably part of the PC rather than the network proper -- or network operating systems?
The worst part is that this won't be a good source of revenue, but will impose considerable expense on businesses to comply with the reporting requirements.
A few years ago, when I got a stereoscopic microscope and an ultrasonic cleaner, I cleaned and examined all of the hundreds of mineral and fossil specimens I'd collected over the years. In so doing, I noticed something interesting and unexpected. (Actually, I noticed several interesting and unexpected things, but only one of them is germane here.)
The specimens that were the most interesting to the naked eye were generally duller than heck at a microscopic scale. The really interesting microscopic features were almost always on stones that were completely unremarkable to the naked eye.
I suggest that the MGS scientists sit down and make a list of the areas on Mars they consider least interesting and take pictures of random locations within those areas. They might indeed turn out to be uninteresting, but on the other hand, the surest way to find unexpected things is to look where you don't expect to find anything.
I have a friend whose site was hammered by a major media outlet -- other than Slashdot -- and got stuck with a four-digit bandwidth bill. It seems to me that there ought to be some legal liability there, considering anyone running a high-volume website like Slashdot or CNN must know the costs involved in sustaining that kind of traffic.
There are some things you can do, depending on the level of control you have over your site.
Of course, the best solution would be for commercial sites (and that includes Slashdot) not to abuse the nice people whose freely-available content helps sell their advertising. If it were me, I'd ask permission to copy the desired content into the story body. (Of course, if it were me, everyone on my staff would be able to spell "ludicrous" and "ridiculous" correctly, and there would occasionally be some basic fact-checking.)
The whole concept of cooperation and sharing is completely off the radar of these people
It's not off the radar -- it's just that they hold any form of altruism in utter contempt. Just look at the snide Forbes editorials about the SCO debacle. These are the kind of people who think that any act of uncompensated generosity is a sign of unfitness to survive. Sharing, in their view, indicates weakness and is an invitation to attack.
Pure businessmen -- by which I mean people whose primary activity is selling something other people create -- are by their very nature people who spend the majority of their time how to extract money from other people. There's nothing inherently corrupt about that but, to paraphrase Frank Herbert, it's the kind of thing that tends to attract the easily corruptable. There's a culture that goes with it, and like most cultures regards itself as the cause and reason for the existence of the rest of civilization. To them, you and me are marks who serve the dual, contemptible roles of workers and consumers.
Software developers suffer from the same skewed perspective. We tend to think of software -- and, around here, free software -- as being tremendously important. It may or may not be important in an absolute sense, but the indisputable fact is that very few people share that view. The difference between us and the executive class is that we do not have the money and influence to simply impose our will on the people around us. We have the additional burden learning to think in new ways, adopt new strategies, and learn to understand the opposition's capabilities and mindset. Left unchallenged, they can just buy the outcome they desire.
This point has been beaten to death, but it can be beaten some more: We are playing in the big leagues now. We must therefore stop acting like this is the office softball team. The stakes are real and they are high.
Is he living on the same earth we do? It's going to be a long time before manually enterable -- and verifiable -- hostnames become redundant (if they ever do).
Ever watch end users? I mean, really watch end users? They almost never type in domain names. If it isn't a link or a bookmark, it seldom gets visited. Some of the brighter ones will go to Google and type a domain name into the search box (which exasperates me to no end -- "Location bar? What's that?"), but that's it.
The only time most end users type a domain name is as part of an email address. And I think we can all agree that the existing email infrastructure is in desperate need of a complete overhaul. (We can all probably agree that's as likely as "non-partisan" hearings in Congress, too.)
Not that Bernstein's proposed solution is all that great, but it's not as far-fetched as it seems at first blush.
I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code.
Is it just me, or is anyone else getting the impression that it's corporate coders working for proprietary software companies whose coding practices are sloppy and reckless about intellectual property, and not us long-haired hippie commie free software freaks?
SCO has been going on about Linux being in violation of the law, IBM being in violation of the law, Linux users being in violation of the law, and now, incredibly, the GPL being in violation of the law on the grounds that copyright ownership prohibits you from transferring copying privileges, all of which point to the big question that nobody so far has asked:
Isn't having an entire company full of people smoking crack in violation of the law?
Oddly absent -- though perhaps not so considering the source is Wired -- is any consideration of the significance of cheap diamond for optics. Diamond has a substantially higher refractive index than glass and is less subject to thermal and mechanical deformation than glass. What that would mean in practice would require a deeper knowledge of optics than I have, but it sure would be interesting to see what kind of lenses and prisms could be made out of it for cameras, telescopes, and microscopes.
The slick executive types will propose with dual Athlons, while the poor struggling college student will have to resort to a 6502 or something.
Wanker. If you were a Real Programmer, you could impress your fiance by doing something useful in 6502 assembly language in a 64k address space that the slick executive did in 128 megs of RAM with a development team of fifteen on an Athlon. Quit your bitching and get a MOV on.
in the larger scheme of things it just makes SCO's complaint look valid
Hardly. Any random judge picked at random might be technically clueless, but I'm sure they all understand the logic behind hedging one's bets against litigation -- aside from seeing it every damn day of their working lives, they are all lawyers, after all.
I wonder how many of us have also daydreamed of a small autonomous submersible?
Well, there's me, though I was only interested in submersion as a means of riding out nasty storms. Technically, it's almost trivial since, as you note, making something that floats isn't very difficult and you don't have the size and power constraints that you would in an airplane. The one thing I haven't figured out is how to send back large quantities of data -- like a jpeg every few minutes -- without getting into expensive stuff like satellite phones. Get around that problem, and you could mount a digital camera with a 180 fish-eye lens vertically, and use a script with panotools to create a navigable hemispherical panorama back at the base. How cool would that be?
Now, what I'd really like to do is build an autonomous zeppelin that stays aloft on solar power and replenishes its hydrogen supply by electrolyzing captured moisture, but that would be mind-bogglingly expensive...
I'm as paranoid as the next guy about RFID tags, but folks, remember this -- there isn't an RFID tag on the planet that can survive fifteen seconds, probably much less, in your househould microwave oven. Most of the goods to which they are attached, on the other hand, would be largely unaffected.
Now mind you, it's theoretically possible that microwaving your shoes would then violate the DMCA, but prosecution is practically unlikely unless Hilary Rosen is sitting inside your microwave right now.
In which case, set it to maximum intensity for an hour.
In other words, Bruce Perens could call every person inside IBM headquarters by name an uncle fucker and it wouldn't change their tactics.
While it is true that profit is foremost on the mind of IBM as a collective organization, the people at IBM are people, and just like Bruce Perens, they have feelings and egos to protect. Piss off enough people, and the damage will accumulate to the point that it will eventually matter.
A sterling example of this is Daniel Bernstein. His djbdns is hands-down a better product than BIND in every way -- it's cleaner, more stable, more efficient, easier to use, more secure -- but it's not all that widely adopted largely because Bernstein is personally abrasive.
Being considerate of other people matters, particularly when you are acting as an ambassador of sorts.
If you run into trouble with micropayments, you can try several systems, including PECUNIX.
If you need to use money in a game, you could consider PECUNIX.
If you run afoul of gambling laws, you can evade the letter of the law with PECUNIX.
Plus, if you need to secure your system, you could read the informational material from PECUNIX.
Is is possible that this is less of an article about game economics than a sales pitch for PECUNIX?
Personally, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to buy and sell virtual goods. It's not like this doesn't happen all the time in other areas; you're certainly not getting a real live performance when you download music from iTunes. What you are buying in both cases is entertainment, and though the electronic form blurs the distinction between goods and services, it's not really anything novel. (Not that it would surprise me if some USPTO drone sees matters otherwise.) There's even a fairly nifty graphical chat service for teens in the UK, Habbo Hotel, whose entire business model is based on selling virtual furniture for users' private chat rooms.
The idea that gaming-for-profit would somehow ruin the purity of online games is just silly. It's not like the game companies are doing this as a labor of love, after all. Considering all the other challenges their developers have faced, including active cheating, I'm sure they can find a way to maintain game balance for both "professional" gamers and amateurs.
I suspect that the main motivation the game companies have for prohibiting the sale of game items is their own legal liability. (There's probably also a great deal of internal debate on how they can get a cut of that action, too.)
I think it would be to their benefit to allow and encourage virtual trading via their own eBay-like percentage-taking interfaces rather than let it happen clandestinely in the wild. It might attract more paying users as well. I've never played anything like Everquest, but I might give it a spin if I could make a profit, or at least get the habit to pay for itself.
IBM e-Business on Demand General Manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger seemed surprised to hear of Perens' comments. "The question has never come up with Linux," Wladawsky-Berger says. IBM's history of working with open communities like the World Wide Web Consortium should reassure developers, he adds, but he encourages Perens to contact IBM to discuss the issue.
In other words -- again -- Perens started shooting off his mouth about possible bad intentions from IBM before even discussing it with IBM. That's just plain bad form, since it means Wladawksy-Berger was caught off-guard by an unexpected question from a reporter. That's not a good way to treat people whose cooperation you desire.
I hope that someday, the Open Source/Free Software community will have spokespeople who comport themselves professionally instead of brilliant but socially-impaired people with a tendency to ill-considered public tantrums. You can get away with that as a developer, at least sometimes, but when you get into the PR business, basic manners are a fundamental requirement of the job.
If Perens had talked to IBM at length and gotten nowhere, it would have been acceptable to say, "We talked to IBM at length and got nowhere." Just calling the press and saying, "IBM hasn't spontaneously stepped up to the plate and I'm starting to have paranoid fantasies," doesn't cut it.
After IBM & Red Hat finish these pathetic twits off in court, their stock will be probably no more than 10 cents per share. The open source community needs to buy them
Sigh. This let's-buy-them-out line of thought really needs to die. In case there is anyone left who hasn't heard yet, and apparently there are quite a few, 80% of SCO is in the hands of a single shareholder. If you managed to buy the remaining 20%, including the tiny quantities yet to be dumped by SCO executives, all you would have is a minority share in a dying company.
You want a stock tip? Buy IBM.
It is, however, illegal to urge people to break the law, and advocating the violent overthrow of the government certainly falls in that category. It is not incompatible with freedom of speech in any of the usual ways. Arguably, advocating the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government ought to be deeply, deeply repugnant to a free society in a way that advocating the overthrow of autocratic governments is not. Part of the point of democracy, after all, is the regularly scheduled non-violent overthrow of unpopular governments at the polls.
Had the defendant in this case merely presented bomb-making information, he probably could have gotten off on First Amendment grounds, but by stepping outside of what the First Amendment protects, and being dumb enough to do so during a national panic, one year in prison is not all that outrageous.
If enough people feel oppressed enough, they should be able to advocate that revolution.
As a practical matter, if you are really being severely oppressed, advocating revolution is a great way to be unpersoned. In the event of real oppression, you need to fight a revolution, not cut-and-paste crap from the Anarchists' Cookbook to your website. At present, however, most real oppression being conducted by the US Government is happening outside of its borders.
Meanwhile, this is the kind of oppression that does lead to a revolution.
Piff. This is the kind of routine law enforcement that leads to stupid bumper stickers.
That would make GIMP the fine set of brushes, oil paints and canvas. And people like you, hacks.
What a pompous load of shit. This is like arguing that artists who buy ready-made oil paints are just hacks and real artists gather minerals in the field and grind their own pigments by hand.
Yes, you can do in GIMP most of what you can do in Photoshop, but the simple fact of the matter is that you can do it more quickly and easily in Photoshop. If you're a prima donna fine artist (or fancy yourself one, which sounds like the case here), then you can afford to screw around with whatever tool floats your boat. If you are a commercial artist, you are generally producing "art" to satisfy the specifications and budget constraints imposed by a client who doesn't give a rat's ass what tool you use as long as the end product is on time and under budget.
Which is why commercial artists tend to have mortgages and car payments and fine artists tend to have attitude problems.
The GIMP is on a par with Photoshop 3 or 4. Those who say otherwise need to become more familiar with the current Photoshop featureset. This is all painfully familiar of the whining I used to hear from TeX users about how Word didn't do such-and-such that TeX did, when in actual fact Word did have the feature in question.
This is why I laughed at the original post -- if the Camel book is a "short, sharp introduction," I'd hate to see the reviewer's idea of a sprawling book.
To be fair, a sprawling language like Perl needs a sprawling reference, and the Camel book does a decent job of it.
Personally, I don't often refer to K&R, but that's because C is a simple language that you can learn in its entirety without too much effort. Who truly knows all of Perl? Or C++ or COBOL, to mention two other giant languages? A small percentage of the users of all three. Which is not a criticism of Perl per se -- I use C and Perl and enjoy both -- but comparing C with Perl is like comparing apples and, uhm, county-fair-prize-winning giant pumpkins.