You think that programmers only like hard-to-use, unapproachable, syntactically impenetrable languages? I would argue that Smalltalk is easy-to-use, approachable and occasionally 'English-like', and I don't have any problems with it. I've never used Applescript, but as an experienced programmer, I don't think you should be making generalizations like that.
I think the point that was being made here is that English and other human languages are great for communicating with humans, but they are just not structurally appropriate for writing programs. A programming language should be concise and clear, and must be absolutely unambiguous. Human languages are not, by nature, any of these things. The requirements that the two kinds of languages are designed to meet are completely different.
The problem with English-like programming languages such as AppleScript and COBOL -- both of which I have used -- is that they are designed to solve the wrong problem. It is assumed that end users cannot understand programming languages because they are syntactically obscure. This is, of course, crap. You can teach any person of average intelligence the syntax of C in a couple of days, possibly excluding the irrational mix of pre- and postfix pointer notation. Given a couple of months, that person could have a pretty good grasp of the ISO/ANSI specification for the language. But even if Joe Average could go on ANSI Jeopardy and answer, "Alex, what is dereferencing a NULL pointer?" he still could not write a complex application.
And that's really it -- knowing a programming language no more makes you a programmer than knowing English makes you a novelist. Having an English-like programming language like COBOL will not make it possible for non-technical management to look at source code and understand what's going on. All English-like syntax accomplishes is to very slightly shorten the initial learning curve for the syntax and the syntax alone, while it becomes a real pain in the ass later on once you understand algorithms and data structures and all of the meta-linguistic knowledge that is the real meat of writing software.
Compulsory speech is already illegal. The Pledge of Mindless Obedience to the State should be no exception.
Let me tell you a story. When I was a teenager, I had a bumper sticker on my car -- I don't even remember what it said, except that it was critical of some government policy or other -- that depicted an upside-down American flag, which is a traditional signal of distress.
On account of this bumper sticker, I was accosted in a parking lot by a clutch of Nazi skinhead punks, beaten bloody, and with a combat boot on my trachea, coerced into saying "I love my country."
Actually, I do love my country, but I have a bottomless hatred for those who, like those skinheads, would subvert the principles of freedom to force worship of its external symbols. I don't see any difference in kind between the Nazis who assaulted me and third-grade teachers who coerce students into reciting that ridiculous, subversive, and un-American pledge. The difference, if there is one, is in degree only.
So the advocates of the mandatory pledge can take their political and religious doctrines and shove them up their subversive asses. You are traitors to the ideals of the American republic and idolaters of symbols you don't even understand. The next person who wants to violate my First Amendment rights that way will get a quick refresher course on my Second Amendment rights.
This is the Steven Levy who has been writing about computers for two decades now, whose books include...
...a bunch of sensationalistic crap written for people whose industry credentials amount to having thought about what it might be like to be a programmer.
Crikey, didn't you ever go to high school? Not only is it possible to write about something you don't know about, if your audience is equally ignorant, you can get high marks for it.
I dunno 'bout you, but my experience with Linux on my Thinkpad has been pretty miserable thanks to slim-to-nonexistent support from the major distro vendors.
A fact of life with laptops is that network connectivity is generally dependent on a PCMCIA card, and if you haven't tried mucking with PCMCIA support under Linux -- especially if you are using older or less popular hardware -- skip it and try something pleasant instead, like being dragged by a helicopter through a valley full of broken glass. Worse, a lot of laptops don't have CD-ROM drives (like my old slimline Thinkpad).
Can't install from the network or a CD? Fine. Copy the install CDs to a FAT32 partition; some distros support installing that way. Don't have a large enough hard drive for the latest bloated RedHat release? Fine. Try floppies instead. Oh wait -- the only "major" distro that supports much of a floppy install is Debian. (Forgive me if I err -- I haven't tried SuSE.)
So let's give a big round of applause to the Debian folks, but before we send a big razzberry to IBM, let's extend one first to the I-wanna-outbloat-Microsoft fiends who make the commercial Linux distributions.
How do the open source programmers feed their families ?
Except for the minority who get paid specifically to write free software, most of them do it by working day jobs. Artists, writers, and musicians -- among many other serious "hobbyists" -- operate in much the same way.
All this being said, I think one incredibly important point is being missed, namely, the existence of several free operating systems and hundreds of high-quality free applications. The question is not "how will open source programmers make money?" but "how have open source programmers been making money all along?". Obviously, the status quo works and it works pretty well. Whether or not Linux or some other free system will ever seriously challenge Microsoft on the desktop, and whether the open model will work for end user applications my grandmother could use are separate questions. In the fairly substantial realm in which open source software operates, it is doing really damn well. It has felled SCO, cornered Sun, invaded IBM, and has Microsoft seriously concerned. That's pretty damn good if you ask me.
Are there business models that would enable substantial numbers of programmers to work on free software full time? Obviously not yet. Maybe there never will be. But I rather suspect -- given the unique nature of software as compared to other kinds of goods -- that there eventually will be.
Spoken like someone who's never done LSD. If I had to choose, acid beats Fractint hands down, even if it's Fractint projected onto my retina with anti-aliased subsampling, real-time zoom, and the appearance of an 84-inch display. Until there are some major advances in graphics technology, no PC can produce the impression of a five-dimensional alien entity simultaneous receding into the past and accelerating into the future while interpenetrating all possible points in the universe at the speed of light accompanied by a soundtrack based on the contents of my subconscious mind.
Now, Fractint with acid -- that's the best of both worlds.
It's funny this comes up now, because I was talking to a fellow modemer from the old days yesterday, talking about possibilities:
1. Take an old 486 running DOS and a multinode BBS package with a multiport serial card.
2. Take a modern PC running Linux with a cable modem or DSL connection and a multiport serial card.
3. Write a program that acts as a login shell. When a user logs in under that special account, it checks for a free serial port and, emulating the behavior of the sort of modem the BBS software on the DOS box expects, sends the appropriate RING string. Once the BBS answers, the program just passes data back and forth between the serial port and the net.
Result: an Internet capable BBS system that would have been the envy of the town back when you had to buy multiple phone lines to support this sort of thing.
Of course, it may be some time before I have a couple of spare weekends to code this (and perhaps longer to review serial programming under Linux), so if you have the time and the expertise, beat me to it!
The rest of the restrictions are pretty much ordinary and within the law, but the specific prohibition on a particular religion runs afoul of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. That being said, if you really want to find a host for Satanic content, it's probably easier to visit a Satanist website and see who their host is than to go through the ordeal of filing a civil rights lawsuit.
This isn't directly related to evaluation software as such, but it's really annoying and does you no good: stupid Flash intros to your website. I can almost understand this if you're selling games or some other kind of entertainment or general consumer software, but if you're selling an IDE or a network backup package? Who cares how good the Flash developers at your advertising firm are? Tell the PHB who approved it that he may be a technically inept goofball who's impressed with animated monkeys, but unless those animated monkeys are actually shovelling packets or writing code, we aren't impressed.
On a more on-topic note, the evaluation keys I ordered for WinGate yesterday at 8pm (it's a little after noon on the next day now) just now arrived. Jerks. The choice between reviving an old Linux box running ipchains and buying WinGate just got a lot easier.
If you're serious about trying out the software and would seriously consider purchasing it, giving them an e-mail so a representative can contact you for support makes sense. Not really for like winzip, but if you're downloading a trial of a professional software package it's more professional, in my opinion, if after downloading it you get an e-mail from Bob Soandso and his phone number if you have any questions about how to use the software, etc.
Oh piff. If you're really interested in making sure I can get my questions answered, give me your email address. If you're planning to email or call me to "see how things are going," what you're really looking for is an opportunity to give me a sales pitch. If I want a sales pitch, believe me, I know how to pick up a phone and ask for a salesman. I generally don't, because if you can't explain the benefits of your product in text on your website, your salesman is probably just going to attempt to deceive me.
Definitely list a price on your site. Except for packages like Oracle that fall into the if-you-need-it-you'll-pay-for-it-no-matter-the-pri ce category (and odds are your app doesn't), the absence of a price tells me that, like buying an automobile, the price is going to be as high as your high-pressure sales team can make it. That doesn't make me want to do business with you.
Contrary to the suggestion that "you Slashdotters just don't want to pay for anything" (as if anyone wants to pay for things), I am perfectly willing to pay quite a bit if the product is worth it to me. What I am not willing to do is put up with sales drones. Give me the facts, don't ask me any questions, be ready to answer mine (better: have them already answered on your site), and leave me to my own best judgement.
And BTW, 30 days is a little tight -- not because I'm looking for a free ride, but because I have many times downloaded an evaluation package, forgotten about it, and then come back to find that the eval period has expired and a hidden key in my registry prevents me from reinstalling. (Are you listening UltraEdit?) If it's something I really need, I'll go to the trouble of trying the eval on another machine, but do you only want to sell me the stuff I absolutely need? God help you if you're selling minor utilities or games, then.
I'm afraid there's a lot more to monitoring communications than just keyword searches, which are not necessarily even the first thing an email monitoring system would examine.
When examining a communications network -- which is what we would be doing if we were trying to track illegal activity through email -- the first thing we look at is not the content of the messages, but the pattern of communications between nodes. We would only have to start with keywords if we had no suspects, and that would be the sort of fishing expedition that is prohibited by law. But odds are we do have a suspect, so we look at who he's talking to, who those people are talking to, and so on, until we are eight or nine steps away from the suspect. (Much further than that is not only impractical but generally pointless.)
Having established a clique, we can examine the volume of mail between nodes, and see who is the best-connected (and therefore likely to be exerting some kind of administrative control). If, in the course of this, we see some people who are suspects in a previously unrelated investigation, we can explore the possibility of hitherto unknown connections.
Without once having looked at the content of a single message, we have developed a pretty clear picture of the relationships between our suspect, people not yet suspected of anything, and if we are lucky, other suspects.
Then we can start using keyword searches on a reasonable volume of mail to serve as a starting point for manual examination of message contents.
In any event, the word 'terrorist' is not going to be a problem for law enforcement, because terrorists don't call themselves terrorists -- that's a label that our propagandists apply to them. Judging from what has been released to the public, they refer to themselves as 'freedom fighters', 'fighter brethren', 'mujahideen', and several other labels -- which points out another thing we can exploit: people who belong to cliques, especially tight-knit underground ideological factions, develop their own characteristic jargon. Simple word-frequency analysis as well as more complicated techniques such as n-gram analysis and Markov chains, can be used to pick these out of the crowd once you have a 'model text' to study. (These techniques can be applied with significant but lesser accuracy to less-cohesive cliques, such as professions, religious affiliations, and ordinary political factions.)
In short, it is wise to bear in mind that however misguided federal law enforcement agencies may be, they are not stupid or naive, and neither are the computer scientists who work for them. Even if they were, the kind of programming involved is not especially challenging -- ninety percent of what you'd need to know can be found in Knuth.
Quoth the Chamber of Commerce, "This proposal is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem."
Actually, it's closer to the truth to say that the CoC and the DMA are problems desperately seeking to evade a solution.
There is a serious imbalance here in intellectual property right. Media and software companies impose draconian licenses to prohibit even common-sense personal uses of data we pay for, drug companies claim proprietary rights over genes found in nature and research paid for with tax money, the executive branch of the government routinely invokes some vague executive privilege to keep secret evidence of wrongdoing on the grounds that it might impede future wrongdoing -- and then these turkeys want to turn around and say that we, as customers and citizens, have no right to control our own personal data?
This isn't just unfair, it's a scam. Moreover, there is already legal precedent to cite in defense of individual control over one's personal information. If Big Flipping Corporation wanted to use my photograph to market their products, they would not legally be able to do so without my consent (and, trust me, some serious royalty payments). And that's just my picture, which is not really integrally me in a more than superficial sense. But then, we are told that Big Flipping Corporation can use my gender, race, religious and political beliefs, and a list of my purchases at Amazon.com to market their (and others') products without my permission? Um, not to put too fine a point on it, but bullshit.
The really disturbing thing here is the level of arrogance involved. Yes, of course I realize that "customer service" is just a noise that comes out of the colons of marketing people, but there's some truth to the idea. In a free market (or what passes for one), it is not my privilege to purchase goods and services from a company -- it is their privilege. It would be refreshing if these corporate titans, full of their own Reagan-era hogwash, would clue into the fact that making money is morally neutral of itself, and does not entitle them to special privileges or to erode the foundations of personal privacy and liberty in the name of "creating jobs" or "fueling the economy" or whatever they're calling the accumulation of shareholder wealth these days.
I submit to them that if I want companies to stop calling me, stop sending me spam, and, for that matter, stop sending me paper junk mail, and definitely to stop using my personal information -- in short, if I demand that they stop harrassing me -- I have a right to force their compliance, and bigod, for once, Senator Disney has my support on something even if it doesn't go nearly far enough.
Well, exactly. Besides, the movie doesn't really have any impact on the book. Frank Herbert's Dune series is just as fabulous after the equally horrid David Lynch and Sci-Fi channel butcherings of it as it was before. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is still a remarkable book despite Paul Verhoeven's (only tangentially related) film version.
Frankly, I think it's a little silly to even compare movies and books. Talking about the movie version of a book is a bit like hoping for the sculpture version of Beethoven's Fifth. The relationship is tenuous at best.
Therefore, it's fair to give them a "heads up", especially, say, if they've got a teen who's spending a lot of time online and ordering more stuff than you think he could afford, or similar situations... this merely provides a bit of awareness to the technologically naive.
If your teen has unrestricted use of a credit card, you're naive about a lot more than just technology.
At least, that was the case when I was a teenager with naive parents. They learned quick, though.
First of all, there is no way Microsoft can enforce conditions upon the implementation of a standard (read: "standard"). Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.
Secondly, this is a -- if not the -- prime example of what's wrong with the "intellectual property" faction of anti-GPL types. The GPL in no way inhibits intellectual property. It is simply a software license that imposes contractual conditions on the use of software. It is only unusual in that it does not require payment.
Here's the argument that Microsoft and other anti-GPL nutballs are making: "You're not making any money off this, so we want to steal your intellectual property, violate the hell out of your license, and make money from our criminal activities." The underlying, unstated argument is, of course, that unless you're in it for profit, you have no intellectual property rights. This is utter bullshit, of course, and serves only to show what basically unethical and indecent people we're dealing with.
This would be exactly parallel to a clothing manufacturer telling people that they have established a pattern for shirts with two sleeves, and you are therefore not allowed to make shirts with two sleeves unless you promise not to donate your old shirts to the poor.
It's a pity that certain political factions like to lionize Microsoft as bastions of capitalism when Microsoft is itself devoted to strangling the free market at every turn. If Microsoft is as good as they say they are, why are they so afraid of competing in an open and fair market? Why have they adopted such a deeply un-American stance towards the fundamental values of political and economic liberty? Ballmer can spew all he wants about the GPL being communist, but as near as I can tell, it is Microsoft that is seeking to create a command economy.
Security is not the end all and be all--folks should have the freedom to make informed rational decisions to make their systems less secure. Perhaps it's just a web server and not mission critical?
This is an excellent example. The company I work for (which shall not be named, thank you) maintains a cluster of webservers dishing up dynamic content backed by a pair of MySQL servers. We make a good effort to make sure the things are reasonably secure, but there comes a point when the time required to tighten the last bolt exceeds the time it would take to restore the systems from backup in the event of an intrusion. Mind you, we *did* put a good deal of effort into building tools to do that restore quickly and painlessly from a secure (read: air-gapped) backup copy. And we aren't a financial institution -- fifteen to thirty minutes of downtime would suck, but it wouldn't be a disaster.
Note for the curious: the backup system images are stored on a SCSI drive in a cheap external enclosure. If one of the webservers is trashed, we insert a custom boot disk (modified from tomsrtbt) and attach the drive. The original state of the HD is automatically restored, and the box is rebooted. Total cost of system: about $300 worth of development time, a spare drive laying around, and an $80 external enclosure. Obviously, this will not be suitable for databases, but it works pretty well with web servers.
The important point is to keep in mind how much security you actually need. Financial data needs alot; other stuff might not need so much. Actually take the time to calculate the cost of restoring lost data (or dealing with stolen data, if applicable) versus how much time it would take for those nice fellows making $50-$80/hr. to (maybe) prevent it from happening.
When I worked as a contractor for Intel, this was part of the standard contract -- which of course I did not read, and only became aware of later. Intel had a procedure in place for employees to petition for exceptions for code which was not related to their job and developed entirely off-hours and without company resources. They were mainly interested in keeping their own IP in-house and avoiding "contamination" of their own code with the dreaded GPL. In my experience, they were pretty reasonable about it, and my open-source project (a C library that duplicates most of Perl's functionality) was granted an exemption.
On the other hand, if I had actually read the contract, I would have turned down the job. And no, it wasn't negotiable. I've seen similar clauses elsewhere since, and sometimes they're negotiable and sometimes they're not. I've never seen anyone get upset by discussing the possibility of striking it from the contract -- although this is occasionally politely refused -- and one employer was willing to amend the contract after the fact. IMHO, it should not be legal to claim anyone's own-time work, but the fact is that it is legal, so pay attention, be assertive, and be prepared to say no and walk away.
The problem with popularity-based systems such as Google and Freenet is that popular != good. For years, the most popular television show in America was Married with Children, a program of such ungodly awful lowest-common-denominator content that it frankly horrifies me to think that alien civilizations may someday receive those television signals and decide not to contact us. The books on the bestsellers lists are often the lowest grade of junk -- Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon, anyone? -- and, as is often lamented by Slashdot stories and posters, the most popular songs on the radio are also of dubious value. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the web.
When rating systems -- including Slashdot's -- increase the visibility of what is already popular, they only serve to reinforce the status quo. What's "cool" stays cool, not even necessarily because the audience is that monotonically unimaginative, but because new and different things are filtered out. If, for example, Microsoft actually managed to produce a solid, reliable, inexpensive, and reasonably licensed piece of software, this is about the last place you'd hear about it. With Google's link-popularity system, websites presenting unpopular or dissenting views are much, much harder to find than knee-jerk me-too reactionary sites. This is no small issue, considering that the benefits of a free society are built, ultimately, upon dissent -- and the ability to spread dissent. This is no less true when the dissent is artistic than when it is political.
Almost a decade ago, I used to laugh at the efforts of old-media companies to transform the web into another form of television. It's a lot harder to laugh now, as the chief gateways to the net for the vast majority of the population use sophisticated software to dumb down the net. Sure, the "other" stuff is still out there, but if you can't find it, it may as well not be.
I may be mistaken (it's happened before) but the availability of drivers for graphics cards specializing in real-time 3D graphics rendering is mainly an issue to gamers, game developers, graphics specialists (most of whom use other platforms because that's where the software is). While gaming is not an inconsiderable market, it's only a tiny fraction of the market represented by servers and corporate desktops. I certainly don't mean to disrespect the gaming and graphics crowd, but the lack of drivers for high-end graphics cards means little or nothing to me and, I suspect, the vast majority of potential users. When it does, you can be sure that the drivers will become available.
Folks, fiction ain't technology. There are no new ideas in the world of plot and characterization. Depending on how finely you slice it, there are only a dozen or so possible plots that make sense to Western minds. You can twiddle with the setting, juggle the characters around a bit, but all you will ever do is create a variation on one of a handful of dreadfully familiar themes. What distinguishes good fiction (and art in general) from bad is the author's mastery of his technique. How many blues songs are based on minor variations of the same twelve-step chord progression? Most of them, both good and bad.
Milking the franchise? I suppose that's what Sophocles was doing with his Oedipus trilogy which is, IMHO, the ultimate source of the Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker/Obi Wan Kenobi subplot. I wonder if we can have a nice thread now about how Oedipus at Colonus was much less imaginative than Oedipus Tyranneus.
Re:You are not anal enough either. (IAAL)
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You may be a lawyer, but no other lawyers seem to agree with you.
You may have somehow missed out on this, but lawyers are paid to disagree with other lawyers. No matter what your lawyer says, I guaran-goddamn-tee it that every other lawyer on earth will disagree with him if I pay them to do so.
The question you should be asking your lawyer is not "What do you think this contract means?" but instead "Do you think you could win this case?"
On second thought -- don't ask your lawyer if he thinks he could win the case. The other thing lawyers make money from is claiming to be able to win cases for you. Ask some other lawyer if he thinks your lawyer could win the case after making it clear that you can't afford his services.
Wow, either Craig Mundie is a total fscking moron, or a baldfaced liar. Less software sold means fewer deductible expenses, and therefore more taxable income and more taxes paid.
For those of you who don't have the dubious privilege of paying taxes on your business, let me provide a slightly oversimplified explanation. Unlike personal income taxes, businesses pay taxes on their profits, not on the income that ended up going into operating expenses and equipment purchases. (The big exception is payroll, but that's not germane here.) If I use "free" software instead of M$ software, there's nothing for me to deduct. Instead, I have to either invest the money in something else (thereby stimulating the economy, and passing the tax burden to my vendors) or pay taxes on it.
Does it really matter if the disks are unreadable? If the data wasn't important enough that somebody didn't say, "hey, we need to transfer this stuff to new media," then maybe it's not such a big deal. At a minimum, I presume that it means that the data wasn't being used by anyone, or they'd have noticed that it was about to become unavailable.
Wow, that's astonishingly short-sighted and narrow-minded. There are a lot of important things whose importance was not realized at the time, or for some time afterwards. The most obvious example that springs immediately to mind is Gregor Mendel's experimental work, upon which our entire understanding of genetics was originally based, and which went unpublished and ignored for years.
Unlike technical manuals, the value of other forms of information is not necessarily proportional to how recently they've been produced. Even in the hard sciences, studies designed to support theories subsequently disproven can be valuable sources of experimental data further down the road. Certainly something like a census could be immensely valuable to historians -- and only become more so the older it gets.
Moreover, a lot of valuable data is in danger of being lost not because it isn't worth anything or because no one notices it or wants to preserve it, but because the expense of transferring the data to new media (from, perhaps, acidified paper, microfilm, old digital media, or some other perishable product) is too high.
The key lesson here -- which I wish the easily-swayed-by-gee-whiz-technology crowd would clue into -- is that media companies think in terms of next quarter, not in terms of anything as vague and unprofitable as posterity. Preserving important information on digital media is little different from burning books. If you want permanence, you need good paper -- a centuries-old technology that the so-called digital revolution has absolutely nothing on in terms of permanence.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point that was being made here is that English and other human languages are great for communicating with humans, but they are just not structurally appropriate for writing programs. A programming language should be concise and clear, and must be absolutely unambiguous. Human languages are not, by nature, any of these things. The requirements that the two kinds of languages are designed to meet are completely different.
The problem with English-like programming languages such as AppleScript and COBOL -- both of which I have used -- is that they are designed to solve the wrong problem. It is assumed that end users cannot understand programming languages because they are syntactically obscure. This is, of course, crap. You can teach any person of average intelligence the syntax of C in a couple of days, possibly excluding the irrational mix of pre- and postfix pointer notation. Given a couple of months, that person could have a pretty good grasp of the ISO/ANSI specification for the language. But even if Joe Average could go on ANSI Jeopardy and answer, "Alex, what is dereferencing a NULL pointer?" he still could not write a complex application.
And that's really it -- knowing a programming language no more makes you a programmer than knowing English makes you a novelist. Having an English-like programming language like COBOL will not make it possible for non-technical management to look at source code and understand what's going on. All English-like syntax accomplishes is to very slightly shorten the initial learning curve for the syntax and the syntax alone, while it becomes a real pain in the ass later on once you understand algorithms and data structures and all of the meta-linguistic knowledge that is the real meat of writing software.
Compulsory speech is already illegal. The Pledge of Mindless Obedience to the State should be no exception.
Let me tell you a story. When I was a teenager, I had a bumper sticker on my car -- I don't even remember what it said, except that it was critical of some government policy or other -- that depicted an upside-down American flag, which is a traditional signal of distress.
On account of this bumper sticker, I was accosted in a parking lot by a clutch of Nazi skinhead punks, beaten bloody, and with a combat boot on my trachea, coerced into saying "I love my country."
Actually, I do love my country, but I have a bottomless hatred for those who, like those skinheads, would subvert the principles of freedom to force worship of its external symbols. I don't see any difference in kind between the Nazis who assaulted me and third-grade teachers who coerce students into reciting that ridiculous, subversive, and un-American pledge. The difference, if there is one, is in degree only.
So the advocates of the mandatory pledge can take their political and religious doctrines and shove them up their subversive asses. You are traitors to the ideals of the American republic and idolaters of symbols you don't even understand. The next person who wants to violate my First Amendment rights that way will get a quick refresher course on my Second Amendment rights.
...a bunch of sensationalistic crap written for people whose industry credentials amount to having thought about what it might be like to be a programmer.
Crikey, didn't you ever go to high school? Not only is it possible to write about something you don't know about, if your audience is equally ignorant, you can get high marks for it.
Ding! Thanks for playing!
I dunno 'bout you, but my experience with Linux on my Thinkpad has been pretty miserable thanks to slim-to-nonexistent support from the major distro vendors.
A fact of life with laptops is that network connectivity is generally dependent on a PCMCIA card, and if you haven't tried mucking with PCMCIA support under Linux -- especially if you are using older or less popular hardware -- skip it and try something pleasant instead, like being dragged by a helicopter through a valley full of broken glass. Worse, a lot of laptops don't have CD-ROM drives (like my old slimline Thinkpad).
Can't install from the network or a CD? Fine. Copy the install CDs to a FAT32 partition; some distros support installing that way. Don't have a large enough hard drive for the latest bloated RedHat release? Fine. Try floppies instead. Oh wait -- the only "major" distro that supports much of a floppy install is Debian. (Forgive me if I err -- I haven't tried SuSE.)
So let's give a big round of applause to the Debian folks, but before we send a big razzberry to IBM, let's extend one first to the I-wanna-outbloat-Microsoft fiends who make the commercial Linux distributions.
How do the open source programmers feed their families ?
Except for the minority who get paid specifically to write free software, most of them do it by working day jobs. Artists, writers, and musicians -- among many other serious "hobbyists" -- operate in much the same way.
All this being said, I think one incredibly important point is being missed, namely, the existence of several free operating systems and hundreds of high-quality free applications. The question is not "how will open source programmers make money?" but "how have open source programmers been making money all along?". Obviously, the status quo works and it works pretty well. Whether or not Linux or some other free system will ever seriously challenge Microsoft on the desktop, and whether the open model will work for end user applications my grandmother could use are separate questions. In the fairly substantial realm in which open source software operates, it is doing really damn well. It has felled SCO, cornered Sun, invaded IBM, and has Microsoft seriously concerned. That's pretty damn good if you ask me.
Are there business models that would enable substantial numbers of programmers to work on free software full time? Obviously not yet. Maybe there never will be. But I rather suspect -- given the unique nature of software as compared to other kinds of goods -- that there eventually will be.
Spoken like someone who's never done LSD. If I had to choose, acid beats Fractint hands down, even if it's Fractint projected onto my retina with anti-aliased subsampling, real-time zoom, and the appearance of an 84-inch display. Until there are some major advances in graphics technology, no PC can produce the impression of a five-dimensional alien entity simultaneous receding into the past and accelerating into the future while interpenetrating all possible points in the universe at the speed of light accompanied by a soundtrack based on the contents of my subconscious mind.
Now, Fractint with acid -- that's the best of both worlds.
It's funny this comes up now, because I was talking to a fellow modemer from the old days yesterday, talking about possibilities:
1. Take an old 486 running DOS and a multinode BBS package with a multiport serial card.
2. Take a modern PC running Linux with a cable modem or DSL connection and a multiport serial card.
3. Write a program that acts as a login shell. When a user logs in under that special account, it checks for a free serial port and, emulating the behavior of the sort of modem the BBS software on the DOS box expects, sends the appropriate RING string. Once the BBS answers, the program just passes data back and forth between the serial port and the net.
Result: an Internet capable BBS system that would have been the envy of the town back when you had to buy multiple phone lines to support this sort of thing.
Of course, it may be some time before I have a couple of spare weekends to code this (and perhaps longer to review serial programming under Linux), so if you have the time and the expertise, beat me to it!
If you don't want other sites to link to your content, just check HTTP_REFERER and redirect to your damn home page.
I hate it when clueless morons invoke the law to accomplish a purpose better served by one frigging line of code.
The rest of the restrictions are pretty much ordinary and within the law, but the specific prohibition on a particular religion runs afoul of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. That being said, if you really want to find a host for Satanic content, it's probably easier to visit a Satanist website and see who their host is than to go through the ordeal of filing a civil rights lawsuit.
On a more on-topic note, the evaluation keys I ordered for WinGate yesterday at 8pm (it's a little after noon on the next day now) just now arrived. Jerks. The choice between reviving an old Linux box running ipchains and buying WinGate just got a lot easier.
Oh piff. If you're really interested in making sure I can get my questions answered, give me your email address. If you're planning to email or call me to "see how things are going," what you're really looking for is an opportunity to give me a sales pitch. If I want a sales pitch, believe me, I know how to pick up a phone and ask for a salesman. I generally don't, because if you can't explain the benefits of your product in text on your website, your salesman is probably just going to attempt to deceive me.
Definitely list a price on your site. Except for packages like Oracle that fall into the if-you-need-it-you'll-pay-for-it-no-matter-the-pri ce category (and odds are your app doesn't), the absence of a price tells me that, like buying an automobile, the price is going to be as high as your high-pressure sales team can make it. That doesn't make me want to do business with you.
Contrary to the suggestion that "you Slashdotters just don't want to pay for anything" (as if anyone wants to pay for things), I am perfectly willing to pay quite a bit if the product is worth it to me. What I am not willing to do is put up with sales drones. Give me the facts, don't ask me any questions, be ready to answer mine (better: have them already answered on your site), and leave me to my own best judgement.
And BTW, 30 days is a little tight -- not because I'm looking for a free ride, but because I have many times downloaded an evaluation package, forgotten about it, and then come back to find that the eval period has expired and a hidden key in my registry prevents me from reinstalling. (Are you listening UltraEdit?) If it's something I really need, I'll go to the trouble of trying the eval on another machine, but do you only want to sell me the stuff I absolutely need? God help you if you're selling minor utilities or games, then.
When examining a communications network -- which is what we would be doing if we were trying to track illegal activity through email -- the first thing we look at is not the content of the messages, but the pattern of communications between nodes. We would only have to start with keywords if we had no suspects, and that would be the sort of fishing expedition that is prohibited by law. But odds are we do have a suspect, so we look at who he's talking to, who those people are talking to, and so on, until we are eight or nine steps away from the suspect. (Much further than that is not only impractical but generally pointless.)
Having established a clique, we can examine the volume of mail between nodes, and see who is the best-connected (and therefore likely to be exerting some kind of administrative control). If, in the course of this, we see some people who are suspects in a previously unrelated investigation, we can explore the possibility of hitherto unknown connections.
Without once having looked at the content of a single message, we have developed a pretty clear picture of the relationships between our suspect, people not yet suspected of anything, and if we are lucky, other suspects.
Then we can start using keyword searches on a reasonable volume of mail to serve as a starting point for manual examination of message contents.
In any event, the word 'terrorist' is not going to be a problem for law enforcement, because terrorists don't call themselves terrorists -- that's a label that our propagandists apply to them. Judging from what has been released to the public, they refer to themselves as 'freedom fighters', 'fighter brethren', 'mujahideen', and several other labels -- which points out another thing we can exploit: people who belong to cliques, especially tight-knit underground ideological factions, develop their own characteristic jargon. Simple word-frequency analysis as well as more complicated techniques such as n-gram analysis and Markov chains, can be used to pick these out of the crowd once you have a 'model text' to study. (These techniques can be applied with significant but lesser accuracy to less-cohesive cliques, such as professions, religious affiliations, and ordinary political factions.)
In short, it is wise to bear in mind that however misguided federal law enforcement agencies may be, they are not stupid or naive, and neither are the computer scientists who work for them. Even if they were, the kind of programming involved is not especially challenging -- ninety percent of what you'd need to know can be found in Knuth.
Actually, it's closer to the truth to say that the CoC and the DMA are problems desperately seeking to evade a solution.
There is a serious imbalance here in intellectual property right. Media and software companies impose draconian licenses to prohibit even common-sense personal uses of data we pay for, drug companies claim proprietary rights over genes found in nature and research paid for with tax money, the executive branch of the government routinely invokes some vague executive privilege to keep secret evidence of wrongdoing on the grounds that it might impede future wrongdoing -- and then these turkeys want to turn around and say that we, as customers and citizens, have no right to control our own personal data?
This isn't just unfair, it's a scam. Moreover, there is already legal precedent to cite in defense of individual control over one's personal information. If Big Flipping Corporation wanted to use my photograph to market their products, they would not legally be able to do so without my consent (and, trust me, some serious royalty payments). And that's just my picture, which is not really integrally me in a more than superficial sense. But then, we are told that Big Flipping Corporation can use my gender, race, religious and political beliefs, and a list of my purchases at Amazon.com to market their (and others') products without my permission? Um, not to put too fine a point on it, but bullshit.
The really disturbing thing here is the level of arrogance involved. Yes, of course I realize that "customer service" is just a noise that comes out of the colons of marketing people, but there's some truth to the idea. In a free market (or what passes for one), it is not my privilege to purchase goods and services from a company -- it is their privilege. It would be refreshing if these corporate titans, full of their own Reagan-era hogwash, would clue into the fact that making money is morally neutral of itself, and does not entitle them to special privileges or to erode the foundations of personal privacy and liberty in the name of "creating jobs" or "fueling the economy" or whatever they're calling the accumulation of shareholder wealth these days.
I submit to them that if I want companies to stop calling me, stop sending me spam, and, for that matter, stop sending me paper junk mail, and definitely to stop using my personal information -- in short, if I demand that they stop harrassing me -- I have a right to force their compliance, and bigod, for once, Senator Disney has my support on something even if it doesn't go nearly far enough.
Oh, thank god. I'd hate to think any language actually had a word for "small wireless device".
Well, exactly. Besides, the movie doesn't really have any impact on the book. Frank Herbert's Dune series is just as fabulous after the equally horrid David Lynch and Sci-Fi channel butcherings of it as it was before. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is still a remarkable book despite Paul Verhoeven's (only tangentially related) film version.
Frankly, I think it's a little silly to even compare movies and books. Talking about the movie version of a book is a bit like hoping for the sculpture version of Beethoven's Fifth. The relationship is tenuous at best.
If your teen has unrestricted use of a credit card, you're naive about a lot more than just technology.
At least, that was the case when I was a teenager with naive parents. They learned quick, though.
First of all, there is no way Microsoft can enforce conditions upon the implementation of a standard (read: "standard"). Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.
Secondly, this is a -- if not the -- prime example of what's wrong with the "intellectual property" faction of anti-GPL types. The GPL in no way inhibits intellectual property. It is simply a software license that imposes contractual conditions on the use of software. It is only unusual in that it does not require payment.
Here's the argument that Microsoft and other anti-GPL nutballs are making: "You're not making any money off this, so we want to steal your intellectual property, violate the hell out of your license, and make money from our criminal activities." The underlying, unstated argument is, of course, that unless you're in it for profit, you have no intellectual property rights. This is utter bullshit, of course, and serves only to show what basically unethical and indecent people we're dealing with.
This would be exactly parallel to a clothing manufacturer telling people that they have established a pattern for shirts with two sleeves, and you are therefore not allowed to make shirts with two sleeves unless you promise not to donate your old shirts to the poor.
It's a pity that certain political factions like to lionize Microsoft as bastions of capitalism when Microsoft is itself devoted to strangling the free market at every turn. If Microsoft is as good as they say they are, why are they so afraid of competing in an open and fair market? Why have they adopted such a deeply un-American stance towards the fundamental values of political and economic liberty? Ballmer can spew all he wants about the GPL being communist, but as near as I can tell, it is Microsoft that is seeking to create a command economy.
decisions to make their systems less secure. Perhaps it's just a web server and not mission critical?
This is an excellent example. The company I work for (which shall not be named, thank you) maintains a cluster of webservers dishing up dynamic content backed by a pair of MySQL servers. We make a good effort to make sure the things are reasonably secure, but there comes a point when the time required to tighten the last bolt exceeds the time it would take to restore the systems from backup in the event of an intrusion. Mind you, we *did* put a good deal of effort into building tools to do that restore quickly and painlessly from a secure (read: air-gapped) backup copy. And we aren't a financial institution -- fifteen to thirty minutes of downtime would suck, but it wouldn't be a disaster.
Note for the curious: the backup system images are stored on a SCSI drive in a cheap external enclosure. If one of the webservers is trashed, we insert a custom boot disk (modified from tomsrtbt) and attach the drive. The original state of the HD is automatically restored, and the box is rebooted. Total cost of system: about $300 worth of development time, a spare drive laying around, and an $80 external enclosure. Obviously, this will not be suitable for databases, but it works pretty well with web servers.
The important point is to keep in mind how much security you actually need. Financial data needs alot; other stuff might not need so much. Actually take the time to calculate the cost of restoring lost data (or dealing with stolen data, if applicable) versus how much time it would take for those nice fellows making $50-$80/hr. to (maybe) prevent it from happening.
When I worked as a contractor for Intel, this was part of the standard contract -- which of course I did not read, and only became aware of later. Intel had a procedure in place for employees to petition for exceptions for code which was not related to their job and developed entirely off-hours and without company resources. They were mainly interested in keeping their own IP in-house and avoiding "contamination" of their own code with the dreaded GPL. In my experience, they were pretty reasonable about it, and my open-source project (a C library that duplicates most of Perl's functionality) was granted an exemption.
On the other hand, if I had actually read the contract, I would have turned down the job. And no, it wasn't negotiable. I've seen similar clauses elsewhere since, and sometimes they're negotiable and sometimes they're not. I've never seen anyone get upset by discussing the possibility of striking it from the contract -- although this is occasionally politely refused -- and one employer was willing to amend the contract after the fact. IMHO, it should not be legal to claim anyone's own-time work, but the fact is that it is legal, so pay attention, be assertive, and be prepared to say no and walk away.
The problem with popularity-based systems such as Google and Freenet is that popular != good. For years, the most popular television show in America was Married with Children, a program of such ungodly awful lowest-common-denominator content that it frankly horrifies me to think that alien civilizations may someday receive those television signals and decide not to contact us. The books on the bestsellers lists are often the lowest grade of junk -- Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon, anyone? -- and, as is often lamented by Slashdot stories and posters, the most popular songs on the radio are also of dubious value. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the web.
When rating systems -- including Slashdot's -- increase the visibility of what is already popular, they only serve to reinforce the status quo. What's "cool" stays cool, not even necessarily because the audience is that monotonically unimaginative, but because new and different things are filtered out. If, for example, Microsoft actually managed to produce a solid, reliable, inexpensive, and reasonably licensed piece of software, this is about the last place you'd hear about it. With Google's link-popularity system, websites presenting unpopular or dissenting views are much, much harder to find than knee-jerk me-too reactionary sites. This is no small issue, considering that the benefits of a free society are built, ultimately, upon dissent -- and the ability to spread dissent. This is no less true when the dissent is artistic than when it is political.
Almost a decade ago, I used to laugh at the efforts of old-media companies to transform the web into another form of television. It's a lot harder to laugh now, as the chief gateways to the net for the vast majority of the population use sophisticated software to dumb down the net. Sure, the "other" stuff is still out there, but if you can't find it, it may as well not be.
I may be mistaken (it's happened before) but the availability of drivers for graphics cards specializing in real-time 3D graphics rendering is mainly an issue to gamers, game developers, graphics specialists (most of whom use other platforms because that's where the software is). While gaming is not an inconsiderable market, it's only a tiny fraction of the market represented by servers and corporate desktops. I certainly don't mean to disrespect the gaming and graphics crowd, but the lack of drivers for high-end graphics cards means little or nothing to me and, I suspect, the vast majority of potential users. When it does, you can be sure that the drivers will become available.
Folks, fiction ain't technology. There are no new ideas in the world of plot and characterization. Depending on how finely you slice it, there are only a dozen or so possible plots that make sense to Western minds. You can twiddle with the setting, juggle the characters around a bit, but all you will ever do is create a variation on one of a handful of dreadfully familiar themes. What distinguishes good fiction (and art in general) from bad is the author's mastery of his technique. How many blues songs are based on minor variations of the same twelve-step chord progression? Most of them, both good and bad.
Milking the franchise? I suppose that's what Sophocles was doing with his Oedipus trilogy which is, IMHO, the ultimate source of the Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker/Obi Wan Kenobi subplot. I wonder if we can have a nice thread now about how Oedipus at Colonus was much less imaginative than Oedipus Tyranneus.
You may have somehow missed out on this, but lawyers are paid to disagree with other lawyers. No matter what your lawyer says, I guaran-goddamn-tee it that every other lawyer on earth will disagree with him if I pay them to do so.
The question you should be asking your lawyer is not "What do you think this contract means?" but instead "Do you think you could win this case?"
On second thought -- don't ask your lawyer if he thinks he could win the case. The other thing lawyers make money from is claiming to be able to win cases for you. Ask some other lawyer if he thinks your lawyer could win the case after making it clear that you can't afford his services.
For those of you who don't have the dubious privilege of paying taxes on your business, let me provide a slightly oversimplified explanation. Unlike personal income taxes, businesses pay taxes on their profits, not on the income that ended up going into operating expenses and equipment purchases. (The big exception is payroll, but that's not germane here.) If I use "free" software instead of M$ software, there's nothing for me to deduct. Instead, I have to either invest the money in something else (thereby stimulating the economy, and passing the tax burden to my vendors) or pay taxes on it.
So do your patriotic duty and use free software!
Wow, that's astonishingly short-sighted and narrow-minded. There are a lot of important things whose importance was not realized at the time, or for some time afterwards. The most obvious example that springs immediately to mind is Gregor Mendel's experimental work, upon which our entire understanding of genetics was originally based, and which went unpublished and ignored for years.
Unlike technical manuals, the value of other forms of information is not necessarily proportional to how recently they've been produced. Even in the hard sciences, studies designed to support theories subsequently disproven can be valuable sources of experimental data further down the road. Certainly something like a census could be immensely valuable to historians -- and only become more so the older it gets.
Moreover, a lot of valuable data is in danger of being lost not because it isn't worth anything or because no one notices it or wants to preserve it, but because the expense of transferring the data to new media (from, perhaps, acidified paper, microfilm, old digital media, or some other perishable product) is too high.
The key lesson here -- which I wish the easily-swayed-by-gee-whiz-technology crowd would clue into -- is that media companies think in terms of next quarter, not in terms of anything as vague and unprofitable as posterity. Preserving important information on digital media is little different from burning books. If you want permanence, you need good paper -- a centuries-old technology that the so-called digital revolution has absolutely nothing on in terms of permanence.