Sure, sure. What I'm saying is that fears of "real-time" "satellite" monitoring of everything are a bit silly, given the current exorbitant costs of putting platforms into space. If someone really wanted to spy on you, they'd do it differently.
And, I have done my work. Since, say, I'm employed to do such things. Satellites make sense for doing long-term analysis. Real-time high-resolution imaging of everything is still a ways off even for governments. Hence, the NYTimes article's premise is a bit silly.
Satellite imagery for analysis of things that change gradually, like vegetation, forests, areas of ozone depletion, cities, etc., is great and is an area in which satellite imagery really shines. Well, at least since Ikonos, Landsats 4,5 and 7, and some other sensing platforms were launched. Haven't gotten many good images from Landsat 6, though.;-)
IANAL - however, there was a treaty signed which declared that "space" could not be owned by any one country. I'm sure someone more ambitious than I could find the text.
Have you any idea the amount of space required to store this stuff? Bandwidth costs?
Let's say you have a (currently non-existant) 1mm imaging platform on a satellite. 1mm per pixel of resolution allows you to identify most things fairly well, but you still might have trouble reading a newspaper's body clearly. Headlines would come through okay - keeping in mind, of course, that you have to make the shot obliquely to get some sort of an angle on it - straight down doesn't help here. Now take a picture of a square 200km by 200km. How many pixels is that? Let's say you take that picture with 24 bits per pixel denoting colour (and not, say, the way you would do it which is with more than three bands... but I digress). How many bits is that?
It's easier, by far, to do things like fly over the area you want at a less sexy height, like 20,000 feet, with a high-end remote imaging and sensing platform mounted inside your medium-to-low end plane. 500TB cartridges store a good amount of images, and you can jack them directly into your central machine back home while the computers go to work analysing the data they contain.
I see your point in invoking Godwin here, but all of those guys (Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Caesar, Alexander, Mao, etc..) were indeed pretty successful at what they did. Do I agree with what any of these men did? Not particularly. But you can't argue with results, especially if you're attempting to apply the deaths of millions to computer science theory.
Are you sure everyone should be able to execute/bin/laden? Well, okay, I'll take it. Nice work. Too bad the US Navy runs on Windows, then. They'll have a hard time executing/bin/laden. Maybe with Cygwin?
I'll agree. This is plainly inflammatory. You have no proof that Ashcroft wants to do anything but ensure the internal security of the United States. His is not the check. The Congress is. That is to say, he should want to go overboard, and have the Supreme Court and the Congress say what is or isn't legal.
And for all those who say, "has always led to abuse", please inform me of a free society which devolved into a dictatorship *after* national identity was required. The Nazis had it, but they were always fascists. The Russians had it, but they were always fascists/socialists (same deal, different words).
And who says that the National ID card is a means of spying? It's simply a way to conglomerate the vast amount of personal data on you (at the Credit Agencies, at the DMV, and at the hospital) which exists, and whose current diverse storage mechanism is hindering the efforts of those trying to root out terrorism.
I've said it once and I'll say it again, THINGS ARE GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE. How a National ID card takes away freedom is beyond me. You already have a Social Security Card. You already have a license. You already have all of these things. Why is this conglomerate card any different?
On the other hand, this sounds suspiciously like Revelation 13:16-17: "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name."
If this war lasts 42 months I will be very very frightened.
I believe what the poster was trying to say was that he'd be hard-pressed to find a geek guy who wouldn't like the idea of becoming romantically involved with someone that he could share the part of himself that was geeky with. Geeks tend to truly enjoy talking shop whenever and wherever. I'd love to find someone with whom I could share the other true love of my life with - wouldn't you? And simply because he thinks that female geeks are cool - why is that sexist? Is he required to also think that male geeks are cool? People can feel what they want about the sexes. It's when they discriminate negatively against them that it's sexism. Unless he's bisexual or gay, a male is going to discriminate against other males when looking for a partner. Is that negative sexism? Probably not - at least as long as he's not bashing gays, etc.
Anyway, I feel like this whole issue is completely overblown. If it's not cool for a girl to be a programmer - fine. If hacker boys are excluding girls, think real hard about the number of times those boys have had dates, etc. Odds are, they've been excluded by society and by women simply for their geekiness. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter. If you can code, you can code. If you can't, you can't. Simple as that.
I agree with you. I'm to the point where if I need to call tech support, I feel like an idiot for needing help with some commercial product which has tech support. But I guess that's the nature of being the type of computer user who'd rather spend the 10 hours deciphering poor documentation (or 10 minutes reading good documentation) to *learn* about the program and solve the problem, rather than having someone on tech support fix it for me. Teach a man to fish...
Of course, along with feeling like an idiot, I generally blame the problem on either excessively poor documentation or an excessively poorly designed product that I can't understand;)
...the Corel guys said that they were working with Cygnus to tune egcs for the WINE project. Now that Corel is positioning itself as a competitor to RH, how will the Cygnus buy out [sic] affect Corel and their distro?...
Umm... as an earlier poster commented on Cygwin - why would RH *not* want there to be optimizations in egcs/gcc for WINE? How does a strong WINE with good compiler backing hurt RH in any way?
By allowing Windows users to easily migrate to Linux, and by allowing Windows programmers to easily port to Linux - this hurts RH? I think not. To answer your question, it won't affect Corel, or their distro. GCC is GPLed, so any changes would benefit the entire community.
The strength of the OS only helps *all* distributions. Distributions seek to gain and maintain market share by offering value-adds. Since many programs which could be considered value-adds are GPLed, there's not really any danger of any one company taking over because they own WINE, for instance. It's a lot like the difference between, say, Mandrake and Slackware. They're marketed and developed for different audiences. And let us not forget, children, about the primary source of revenue in the coming years, by distribution - the ever-popular service and support model. Further, Corel will be able to successfully value-add their Wordperfect product, probably bundling it in with at least a year of support and their Linux distro. This is how things will be done - with service, support, and closed-source value-adds. As a community, we need to highly discourage the use of closed-source products, in order to prevent any one distribution company from attaining the Microsoftian level of market dominance. The question I pose now is, "Does the Linux community really want to prevent *any* Linux company from turning a profit?"
Remember, boys and girls - free speech, NOT free beer.
I hate to jump in here, because this discussion is silly, but...
Cancer works by evading the mechanisms the body uses to tell the cells to stop growing. There's basically a counter on the end of a chromosome (and I'm simplifying this *greatly*) which, every time the cell reproduces, takes one off. Once it's all gone, the cells stop reproducing. Hence the way our body slows growth after puberty. Sex cells never lose their counters, apparently (hence our children get a fresh counter).
Cloning has seen repercussions of this: when they cloned Dolly, even though the sheep was a year old, the cells appeared to be as old as any cell in 3 year-old Dolly's body, because their counters weren't reset. Cancer cells apparently ignore the counter and reproduce uncontrollably. Interestingly, geneticists may be able to slow or stop aging by simply being able to tell our body not to stop reproducing cells (but only to reproduce them when other cells die off). Weird wild stuff...
It didn't "work out" that people "prefer to buy the movie", this was designed. VHS was forced on an unwitting consumer market due to its built-in limitations on copying. VHS degrades *greatly* with each successive copy. One can make about 3 levels of generation while leaving the tape somewhat viewable. Betamax, on the other hand, has all of the same features as VHS and two further enhancements: 1: better image resolution/quality, 2: can make many more generations of copies. Is it really any wonder why we have VHS?
Unfortunately I can't shed any tears for you here. You didn't take any of the financial risk, so why should you reap any of the financial gain? There are plenty of artists/novelists out there. If you get your book published, you're going in knowing what's going on. $50,000 is more than you had when you started. But how the hell do you think you're going to print, market, distribute, and sell 100,000 copies of your own book? Therefore unless you market it some other way, out of your pocket, then you're not taking any financial risk. Sure, you're the "talent", but there's plenty of talent running around. If you want to sell it, you've got to be a salesman. And these companies are.
Just had to call you out on a point. You can record audio at 44.1khz and 16bits in stereo all you want. It's not professionally produced. Or did you really use that $10,000 microphone and the $15,000.00 effects processor, etc.... in a 250,000 acoustically perfect room? Didn't think so.
Jon Katz is a journalist. It's called journalistic writing technique. Pick up a magazine and you'll see what I mean. Have you all gotten so used to shitty technical writing that you can't recognize well-written stuff? Not that I'm saying you have to like Katz or his writing style, but from a writing standpoint, it has merit.
I dunno, the DVD folks did a great job of making something which is playable completely unsecurable. If DVD were less secure, we'd have a player for Linux. We don't. Guess why?
Probably. Lawyers will be lawyers, after all. Most corporations have a Legal department which handles all of these types of issues. They'd like to keep themselves employed, so farming out a duty that they're capable of performing is rather silly, to them. Further, this is the way licensing has worked in the "Real World" for a long time. The idea that many many unrelated developers would all use the same license must seem very strange. Yet there's the GPL. I wouldn't worry - RMS and Perens' respective organizations should be able to jump on non-open-source licenses masquerading as such. There are many ways to accomplish the same purpose...
The problem with this idea is that there has to be a central command structure and means of enforcement (even if it's only ostracization). If the union strikes, the union has to be visible. You want to know who went to work anyway (therefore placing them in the "bad" category) and who was with you at the picket line. Yes, we're geeks, but a failed strike generally means unemployment for those who went along with it.
As some (alarmingly few) in this discussion have noted, the Slashdot community has become increasingly fanatical in its beliefs, as evidenced by the increasing amount of poorly researched, no humour-having, "immature 11 year-old" posts. These inside forces are what threaten to tear free software apart, not whether or not TC likes RMS. A simple personality dispute is one thing, reaching critical mass in religious-like belief is something entirely different...
The kernel *source* is getting large due to the insanely large amount of architectures we support. A regular kernel can be as small or as large as you want it to be...
Have you even bothered to use IE5 vs. Netscape 4.61 on a Windows box yet? And god forbid you compare IE5 on (Win32|Mac) to Netscape on Linux. Netscape is the only application I use every day on Linux which crashes 4 or 5 times a day. This behaviour has gotten a *little* bit better since I've installed the glibc2.1 version that comes with Redhat 6.0, but it still bombs out, and it's not even multithreaded! Try and web-browse while your mail client is asking for a password: it doesn't work. IE5, by comparison, is fast, renders webpages accurately, and doesn't crash And don't even get me started about font support. Tried reading "this page generated by Five Angry Squirrels for spiritu" at the top of a Slashdot mainpage? Looks readable at 1280x1024 on Windows, but I can *barely* make out the font at 1152x864 on Linux even with 100 dpi and truetype fonts. I hate it when you blind-as-bats faithful-as-christians windows-hating linux bigots ASSume that everything on Linux is better. Netscape 4 is *terrible*. If MS released IE5 for Linux tomorrow, I'd be the first to download it. Anything but this buggy-ass POS that we've got today. I hope and pray that Opera or Mozilla5 get released for Linux soon...
But if IE beats them to the punch, more power to 'em... competition is the ruler of the open marketplace, and if M$ manages to beat Linux at its own game, shame on us. But I'll still use a better browser than Netscape 4.
Excellent point. It's sort of the dilemma of living forever. Right now the population of the planet isn't dying as fast as it's expanding. This is leading to some massive problems as people live longer. Pretty soon we'll have to start finding other places to put people - or deal with seeing crime rates skyrocket, employment crises, major racially motivated wars, etc... the list goes on. It's rather scary to imagine what might happen...
I stop at saying "you're an idiot", but no one runs 386's anymore.
I'm actually impressed if M$ was "forced" or "scared" into improving their product simply to stay ahead of Linux. It's amazing how this idea works. I think I'll be the first to name this new concept "competition". If Linux does nothing but keep Microsoft on their toes, I'd be happy. Either way, the consumer (read: me and you) wins.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, sure. What I'm saying is that fears of "real-time" "satellite" monitoring of everything are a bit silly, given the current exorbitant costs of putting platforms into space. If someone really wanted to spy on you, they'd do it differently.
;-)
And, I have done my work. Since, say, I'm employed to do such things. Satellites make sense for doing long-term analysis. Real-time high-resolution imaging of everything is still a ways off even for governments. Hence, the NYTimes article's premise is a bit silly.
Satellite imagery for analysis of things that change gradually, like vegetation, forests, areas of ozone depletion, cities, etc., is great and is an area in which satellite imagery really shines. Well, at least since Ikonos, Landsats 4,5 and 7, and some other sensing platforms were launched. Haven't gotten many good images from Landsat 6, though.
IANAL - however, there was a treaty signed which declared that "space" could not be owned by any one country. I'm sure someone more ambitious than I could find the text.
Have you any idea the amount of space required to store this stuff? Bandwidth costs?
Let's say you have a (currently non-existant) 1mm imaging platform on a satellite. 1mm per pixel of resolution allows you to identify most things fairly well, but you still might have trouble reading a newspaper's body clearly. Headlines would come through okay - keeping in mind, of course, that you have to make the shot obliquely to get some sort of an angle on it - straight down doesn't help here. Now take a picture of a square 200km by 200km. How many pixels is that? Let's say you take that picture with 24 bits per pixel denoting colour (and not, say, the way you would do it which is with more than three bands... but I digress). How many bits is that?
It's easier, by far, to do things like fly over the area you want at a less sexy height, like 20,000 feet, with a high-end remote imaging and sensing platform mounted inside your medium-to-low end plane. 500TB cartridges store a good amount of images, and you can jack them directly into your central machine back home while the computers go to work analysing the data they contain.
It also costs signficantly less.
I see your point in invoking Godwin here, but all of those guys (Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Caesar, Alexander, Mao, etc..) were indeed pretty successful at what they did. Do I agree with what any of these men did? Not particularly. But you can't argue with results, especially if you're attempting to apply the deaths of millions to computer science theory.
Are you sure everyone should be able to execute /bin/laden? Well, okay, I'll take it. Nice work. Too bad the US Navy runs on Windows, then. They'll have a hard time executing /bin/laden. Maybe with Cygwin?
First Drudge Report
I'll agree. This is plainly inflammatory. You have no proof that Ashcroft wants to do anything but ensure the internal security of the United States. His is not the check. The Congress is. That is to say, he should want to go overboard, and have the Supreme Court and the Congress say what is or isn't legal.
And for all those who say, "has always led to abuse", please inform me of a free society which devolved into a dictatorship *after* national identity was required. The Nazis had it, but they were always fascists. The Russians had it, but they were always fascists/socialists (same deal, different words).
And who says that the National ID card is a means of spying? It's simply a way to conglomerate the vast amount of personal data on you (at the Credit Agencies, at the DMV, and at the hospital) which exists, and whose current diverse storage mechanism is hindering the efforts of those trying to root out terrorism.
I've said it once and I'll say it again, THINGS ARE GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE. How a National ID card takes away freedom is beyond me. You already have a Social Security Card. You already have a license. You already have all of these things. Why is this conglomerate card any different?
On the other hand, this sounds suspiciously like Revelation 13:16-17: "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name."
If this war lasts 42 months I will be very very frightened.
I believe what the poster was trying to say was that he'd be hard-pressed to find a geek guy who wouldn't like the idea of becoming romantically involved with someone that he could share the part of himself that was geeky with. Geeks tend to truly enjoy talking shop whenever and wherever. I'd love to find someone with whom I could share the other true love of my life with - wouldn't you? And simply because he thinks that female geeks are cool - why is that sexist? Is he required to also think that male geeks are cool? People can feel what they want about the sexes. It's when they discriminate negatively against them that it's sexism. Unless he's bisexual or gay, a male is going to discriminate against other males when looking for a partner. Is that negative sexism? Probably not - at least as long as he's not bashing gays, etc.
Anyway, I feel like this whole issue is completely overblown. If it's not cool for a girl to be a programmer - fine. If hacker boys are excluding girls, think real hard about the number of times those boys have had dates, etc. Odds are, they've been excluded by society and by women simply for their geekiness. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter. If you can code, you can code. If you can't, you can't. Simple as that.
I agree with you. I'm to the point where if I need to call tech support, I feel like an idiot for needing help with some commercial product which has tech support. But I guess that's the nature of being the type of computer user who'd rather spend the 10 hours deciphering poor documentation (or 10 minutes reading good documentation) to *learn* about the program and solve the problem, rather than having someone on tech support fix it for me. Teach a man to fish...
;)
Of course, along with feeling like an idiot, I generally blame the problem on either excessively poor documentation or an excessively poorly designed product that I can't understand
...the Corel guys said that they were working with Cygnus to tune egcs for the WINE project. Now that Corel is positioning itself as a competitor to RH, how will the Cygnus buy out [sic] affect Corel and their distro?...
Umm... as an earlier poster commented on Cygwin - why would RH *not* want there to be optimizations in egcs/gcc for WINE? How does a strong WINE with good compiler backing hurt RH in any way?
By allowing Windows users to easily migrate to Linux, and by allowing Windows programmers to easily port to Linux - this hurts RH? I think not. To answer your question, it won't affect Corel, or their distro. GCC is GPLed, so any changes would benefit the entire community.
The strength of the OS only helps *all* distributions. Distributions seek to gain and maintain market share by offering value-adds. Since many programs which could be considered value-adds are GPLed, there's not really any danger of any one company taking over because they own WINE, for instance. It's a lot like the difference between, say, Mandrake and Slackware. They're marketed and developed for different audiences. And let us not forget, children, about the primary source of revenue in the coming years, by distribution - the ever-popular service and support model. Further, Corel will be able to successfully value-add their Wordperfect product, probably bundling it in with at least a year of support and their Linux distro. This is how things will be done - with service, support, and closed-source value-adds. As a community, we need to highly discourage the use of closed-source products, in order to prevent any one distribution company from attaining the Microsoftian level of market dominance. The question I pose now is, "Does the Linux community really want to prevent *any* Linux company from turning a profit?"
Remember, boys and girls - free speech, NOT free beer.
I hate to jump in here, because this discussion is silly, but...
Cancer works by evading the mechanisms the body uses to tell the cells to stop growing. There's basically a counter on the end of a chromosome (and I'm simplifying this *greatly*) which, every time the cell reproduces, takes one off. Once it's all gone, the cells stop reproducing. Hence the way our body slows growth after puberty. Sex cells never lose their counters, apparently (hence our children get a fresh counter).
Cloning has seen repercussions of this: when they cloned Dolly, even though the sheep was a year old, the cells appeared to be as old as any cell in 3 year-old Dolly's body, because their counters weren't reset. Cancer cells apparently ignore the counter and reproduce uncontrollably. Interestingly, geneticists may be able to slow or stop aging by simply being able to tell our body not to stop reproducing cells (but only to reproduce them when other cells die off). Weird wild stuff...
It didn't "work out" that people "prefer to buy the movie", this was designed. VHS was forced on an unwitting consumer market due to its built-in limitations on copying. VHS degrades *greatly* with each successive copy. One can make about 3 levels of generation while leaving the tape somewhat viewable. Betamax, on the other hand, has all of the same features as VHS and two further enhancements: 1: better image resolution/quality, 2: can make many more generations of copies. Is it really any wonder why we have VHS?
Unfortunately I can't shed any tears for you here. You didn't take any of the financial risk, so why should you reap any of the financial gain? There are plenty of artists/novelists out there. If you get your book published, you're going in knowing what's going on. $50,000 is more than you had when you started. But how the hell do you think you're going to print, market, distribute, and sell 100,000 copies of your own book? Therefore unless you market it some other way, out of your pocket, then you're not taking any financial risk. Sure, you're the "talent", but there's plenty of talent running around. If you want to sell it, you've got to be a salesman. And these companies are.
Check ASCAP, BMI, and Harry Fox's webpages for information on artist reimbursement.
the legal responsibilities of the executives of a company are to their shareholders. You can be thrown in jail for violating this. Check your facts.
Just had to call you out on a point. You can record audio at 44.1khz and 16bits in stereo all you want. It's not professionally produced. Or did you really use that $10,000 microphone and the $15,000.00 effects processor, etc.... in a 250,000 acoustically perfect room? Didn't think so.
Jon Katz is a journalist. It's called journalistic writing technique. Pick up a magazine and you'll see what I mean. Have you all gotten so used to shitty technical writing that you can't recognize well-written stuff? Not that I'm saying you have to like Katz or his writing style, but from a writing standpoint, it has merit.
I dunno, the DVD folks did a great job of making something which is playable completely unsecurable. If DVD were less secure, we'd have a player for Linux. We don't. Guess why?
Probably. Lawyers will be lawyers, after all. Most corporations have a Legal department which handles all of these types of issues. They'd like to keep themselves employed, so farming out a duty that they're capable of performing is rather silly, to them. Further, this is the way licensing has worked in the "Real World" for a long time. The idea that many many unrelated developers would all use the same license must seem very strange. Yet there's the GPL. I wouldn't worry - RMS and Perens' respective organizations should be able to jump on non-open-source licenses masquerading as such. There are many ways to accomplish the same purpose...
The problem with this idea is that there has to be a central command structure and means of enforcement (even if it's only ostracization). If the union strikes, the union has to be visible. You want to know who went to work anyway (therefore placing them in the "bad" category) and who was with you at the picket line. Yes, we're geeks, but a failed strike generally means unemployment for those who went along with it.
I think that the point is this:
As some (alarmingly few) in this discussion have noted, the Slashdot community has become increasingly fanatical in its beliefs, as evidenced by the increasing amount of poorly researched, no humour-having, "immature 11 year-old" posts. These inside forces are what threaten to tear free software apart, not whether or not TC likes RMS. A simple personality dispute is one thing, reaching critical mass in religious-like belief is something entirely different...
The kernel *source* is getting large due to the insanely large amount of architectures we support. A regular kernel can be as small or as large as you want it to be...
Have you even bothered to use IE5 vs. Netscape 4.61 on a Windows box yet? And god forbid you compare IE5 on (Win32|Mac) to Netscape on Linux. Netscape is the only application I use every day on Linux which crashes 4 or 5 times a day. This behaviour has gotten a *little* bit better since I've installed the glibc2.1 version that comes with Redhat 6.0, but it still bombs out, and it's not even multithreaded! Try and web-browse while your mail client is asking for a password: it doesn't work. IE5, by comparison, is fast, renders webpages accurately, and doesn't crash And don't even get me started about font support. Tried reading "this page generated by Five Angry Squirrels for spiritu" at the top of a Slashdot mainpage? Looks readable at 1280x1024 on Windows, but I can *barely* make out the font at 1152x864 on Linux even with 100 dpi and truetype fonts. I hate it when you blind-as-bats faithful-as-christians windows-hating linux bigots ASSume that everything on Linux is better. Netscape 4 is *terrible*. If MS released IE5 for Linux tomorrow, I'd be the first to download it. Anything but this buggy-ass POS that we've got today. I hope and pray that Opera or Mozilla5 get released for Linux soon...
But if IE beats them to the punch, more power to 'em... competition is the ruler of the open marketplace, and if M$ manages to beat Linux at its own game, shame on us. But I'll still use a better browser than Netscape 4.
Excellent point. It's sort of the dilemma of living forever. Right now the population of the planet isn't dying as fast as it's expanding. This is leading to some massive problems as people live longer. Pretty soon we'll have to start finding other places to put people - or deal with seeing crime rates skyrocket, employment crises, major racially motivated wars, etc... the list goes on. It's rather scary to imagine what might happen...
I stop at saying "you're an idiot", but no one runs 386's anymore.
I'm actually impressed if M$ was "forced" or "scared" into improving their product simply to stay ahead of Linux. It's amazing how this idea works. I think I'll be the first to name this new concept "competition". If Linux does nothing but keep Microsoft on their toes, I'd be happy. Either way, the consumer (read: me and you) wins.
Spiritu