"Believe me, for an Average Joe desktop user, startup time is WAY important."
Correction: for an Average Joe WINDOWS user, startup time is way important (both boot up and launch app time).
D'you know why? Because Average Joe Windows user tends to boot up frecuently and start and close apps frecuently too.
But here we are not talking about Windows, but about Linux, and Average Joe Linux user tends to use his computer on quite a different manner. Since the OS is quite stable, she tends to let her computer powered on at least monday to friday, so boot up importance goes down the line; because things like virtual desktops and the way window managers helps you use your GUI (remember opened apps and their positiions, rolling up on double click, autorise, focus follows mouse, etc.) Linux users tend to ask the wm to open all the typical apps at session's begining and open they stay till end of session. That means, all apps are opened early in the morning and closed late at evening, or you just start a session monday morning and close it friday evening so, again, apps launch time importance goes doooown the line.
"However, a certain vasp case takes almost a month to compute on 4 nodes. That 3% increase just translated into a days worth of saved time. What about year long runs? Maybe save an entire month?"
Simple maths: 3% is always 3%.
3% from 4 seconds is 4*0.03=0.12 seconds; 3% from 1 month is 1*0.03=0.03 months (more or less 21 hours, not "days"). 3% from 1 year is 1*0.03=0.03 years (more or less 11 days, not "months").
So your 4 seconds app goes to 3.9 seconds, which is hardly a significative difference. Your one month app goes to 29 days, which is hardly a significative difference. Your one year app goes to eleven months and twenty days which, again, is hardly a significative difference.
There's no magic that converts 3% into 10% percent when you go from few seconds to a year.
"Yeah, but the example in this case is OO.o vs. MS Office"
Not at all! The example is "open source" vs "closed source". I need to consider all elements, but Ms Office has a strong handicap from the very beginnig since it forces on my the choice of a single privative operative system. Does this mean I *always* would reject choicing Ms Office as the proper solution for a given problem? No. It only means is quite difficult for Ms Office to become a solution since it limits itself to single platform and that puts it down, down on my list.
The day you can run Ms Office on, say, Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD it might truly compete; today the strongest point with Ms Office usually is "you are already locked in", and my usual sugestion is "the sooner you break with Ms Office lock in, the cheaper it will cost you".
"If Linux became majority, it'd die. Malware would be written and lack or resources to patch it would kill it."
Well, that's your bet, we will see.
But just to point it out, here I already said that saying "linux" when one should say "a given linux distribution" is a strong source of misconception.
Maybe tomorrow Linux distribution "X" manages to become majority by dismiss security and technicalities in order to make tomorrow's "Linux that even a dumb monkey can use" quite ala Microsoft, in such a way is as wide open as Windows is to worms, virus, security holes and everything.
Now: how is it suppoused all that problems on "Linux distribution X" will affect "Linux distribution Y" which still does things the way they should be, say "Debian GNU/Linux"?
The main problem with Windows is not that all malware is written against it, but that Windows is wide open, by its own way about this bussiness, to such malware, so it always have to react instead of prevent to such malware. Avoid risk practices and most of the danger will simply vanish.
Well... I wouldn't worry too much about what seems to be such a rare event. Only about 40% of all born human beings have ever died......And of that 40% almost noone has died more than once.
"Without being overly argumentative, your basic premise is that with OSS *you* can provide better service."
Yes; it is the basic premise of the *second* part of my message. You seem to forgot that the basic premises of the first part were "because Microsoft hurts me when others use it" and "because I know in the long run open source choices will be more useful to them".
"I think you missed the point of the article. The author asks why do you care?"
And I strictly answered why do I care, so I don't see how did I miss the point. Even if we stay with only the second part of my message, please tell me how wouldn't it would be a proper answer to the question "why do I care?" to say "I do care because I can provide better service, thus better insuring my incomes".
"if someone brings in a car to your repair shop are you going to turn away work? Of course not"
Still, I do tell them which brand they should better buy, and I try them to change if their car is the "wrong" brand.
"I think the real question the author was asking is "Why should you care when the business doesn't?""
Then, I answered to that question too: because I can make more money out of supporting open source than closed source (since my clients will be more satisfied).
"Why do you care what products other people using?"
Because, sometimes, their choice indeed affects me. Let's go with the tipical car comparations: It could be said that whatever car other peoples drive its their bussiness so why should I care if, say, model X brakes are known to be faulty, after all is them who will kill themselves against a tree in a curve... except when they don't crash against a tree but against myself, of course!
I do use Debian GNU/Linux so malware doesn't affect me... except by the ton of spam and mail worms I recieve from windows zombies; except for latency on my Internet connection when malware activity arises; except that some destinations won't accept mail directly from my computer since so much windows-based malware has made them block residential or dynamic IP blocks...
On the other hand, I have to take care about what hardware I buy (PDA, scanner, video cards and the like) since lots of them are not properly supported for Linux, and most of the time it is the cheapest ones; more Linux users would mean easy access to more supported components/gadgets.
Finally, let's return to the car comparation: even if there were no choice for the other car to crash against me I am a sensible person anyway, so it's my pleasure to avoid their pain if I can help to.
This is all from my "Linux fan" point of view. Let's put now my "professional hat": I do consulting for a living for soho and soho-like companies (a department within a bigger corp, for instance), and my client-base depends greatly on my own reputation. Specially with Microsoft, but it is extensible to privative software in general, there is so much I can do when things go wrong, but no more. For those that use mainly Microsoft environment I am basically an expends issue: from time to time, no matter what, a virus at some box, or an antivirus which hangs a computer, or an Office component which go nuts... for too many of these problems, once you applied the recipies there's not too much you can say but "well, let's talk to Microsoft" (and I am still waiting for the first time for them to resolve me an issue) or "time to reinstall". Not to talk about when they ask me "can [new feature] be implemented", and I have to answer "errr... yes, it will be some [big money here]". You see, mainly they pay me for things to stay the way they were. No surprise they don't see me with nice eyes.
On the other hand, when I can deploy open source solutions, I am on the drive site; there can be problems, of course, but they are resolved -and quite fast most of the time, never to return. I know I even have access to the source code if nothing else will do (and I restorted to that option in some ocassions). When they ask me "Is X doable", I usually can aswer them "Yes, open source solution X will do, at my standard hour fees". These people, quite on the contrary to the others see me as the friend that make their systems grow with time being always better and better and when problems arise, the one that always come with the solution.
Now, *I* am the one that makes things happen (so I take a merit that is not mine: obviously Wietse Venema merits much more than myself when I install Postfix and they have stable e-mail from that day on) in one case, but *I* am the one that fails too even when I say, "what do you want? Trying to correct a Windows 2000 problem is much alike to try to repair a car engine without the ability to open the hood, because in both cases I am the "human being" that they see around "doing things" and taking their money for that. So what should I do? It's funnier working with Linux and open source than with Windows and privative software, and my clients are more satisfied too, so no wonder I try to push open source on them!
"Good to see the gov't is realizing the benefits of SF and OSS..."
Sorry to deillusion you, but in this case the only benefits will be PR and, maybe HR, nothing too technical, specially not "to enable true collaborative software development" which, in this case, just can't happen.
This software, even if it is not directly involved with something launched to space (it's a code validator) it is still a political issue (as anything related to the space race) and that means there can't be "real" collaborative software development as in "hey, Ax0R, your last three patches are good enough, so I'll give you a write-allowed account to the repo for you to directly check in your code", and then just checkout and build. No: every code will have to be scrutinized by NASA people and then, if accepted, checked in to the *real* source code repository well protected within NASA facilities so, for practical purpouses, the public repo will be a "read only" one.
"True collaboration" is all about mutual confidence, and this cannot be grown at a NASA project, no matter SF or not.
"Incorrect. It's their network and their connectivity costs"
Then if I say it's 'my data' and 'my bussiness', how the hell can I be incorrect and corrected by saying "nay, it's 'their network' and its 'their connectivity costs'"?
Last time I checked, 'my data' != 'their network' and 'my bussiness' != 'their connectivity costs'.
"If a University or business blocks specific types of traffic, it's perfectly legal and justified."
Yes... up to a point. Being the point that no university has any bussiness about my private data. They, of course, can disallow my private data being hosted, or travelling through, their fabrics (up to the limits stablished by local laws), but if they allow it (like in a student dorm), all they can do is take care of their bussiness (fixing alotted bandwith, for instance) but, again, my data is not their bussiness.
"That said, universities are blocking p2p traffic because it eats up most of the bandwidth"
Yes, I know, and that I already called "the lazy cheap way". If the University is worried about everybody having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs, then make sure everybody is having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs! But once you (ie the University) have decided that a given portion is for my private use, then you are nobody to further fiscalize how my "private use" is; if you allott me 10Kbs, that's OK, let it be 10Kbs, but don't tell me if it should be HTTP, SMTP, SSH or whatever even child pornography*1, as harsh as it might sound, that's not your bussiness!
*1 Of course while me exchanging child pornography is not the "carrier" bussines, it will be police's one, and if police traces it to the University THEN they can come with a judicial order to sniff my traffic for instance. But only under founded suspicion about an illegallity and only under legal judicial knowledge and approval.
But this is not the case of "just" being pedantic (think of "it's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux or the like).
This time, the misconception about "Linux" and "a given Linux distribution" leads to genuine mistake to the one that reads it, so I feel my rant justified. Just look at the answer the original poster got in the lines of "ah! so you can renice X and then everything goes fine? tell me how" when more than probably it is not a solution (if he uses -he probably does, a distribution that already renices X on 2.4 kernels) or might even be a problem by itself (if he uses 2.6 kernel or a 2.4 with a kolivas patch, for instance).
Indeed, the "linux vs linux distribution" misconception is one that I tend to rant about since it is on the basis of a very great percentage of nonsenses to be read around here, so I try -albeit pedantically, it seems, to give my 2 cents to make people more aware about what the real advantages or Linux as open source can give to them.
"So is your argument that people who leave open WiFi acess points available to the random public bear no responsibility for the actions taken using them?"
How can you come to such a "translation" of what has really being said? Just the opposite what it was said was the ISP cannot held accountable for such a practice, because in this case is clearly the user's fault.
In such a case, you should go after the user on grounds of negligence, and he should lose the case and repair for your damages. Immediatly after that, the user would sue and win the company which installed the WiFi point and let it wide open (if such is the case).
Were the case your site is attacked by a bunch of Windows zombi boxes, you should go after their owners and win; they on their side should go against the worm writer *and* Microsoft and win too.ç
In any of both cases is the ISP (the carrier) to be involved.
"No, but they will gladly block unwanted pay-numbers if I ask them to."
If YOU ask them to. That's the whole point.
"I think an internet equivalent would be for ISPs..."...doing exactly the same: you ask them to block something, then they block something. Any other case I contracted full connection to the Internet, so I demand full connection to the Internet.
"The thing to do is to hold the ISP accountable if they don't hold the user accountable."
Yeah, just the way we must hold the bus company accountable if one of its buses carries a terrorist to his objective, or the telephone company if one of its lines is used to blackmail me.
"If I start making prank calls from my phone, the phone company will kill my line if they get called about it."
Don't know about the USA, but you can bet that if the company does such a thing as block a public service in Spain (and in any civilized country for that fact) without an order from a judge on the grounds that another user asked for it, it will loose the case on tribunals and will have to compensate damages.
ISPs are truly the less guilty in this case, after (in no particular order) the "mischevious kid" that writes a silly worm (if you see the majority of all malware running out there, something that I just read in another post on this thread seems to fit perfectly: they are a "hacker" no more than the one that writes something rude on the wall of a public bathroom is a "crime mastermind"); the user that doesn't take care of a "system" at a "public service" facility (it really doesn't matter if we are talking about a computer on the Internet or a man with a dog on the street, or a driver on the road); or the company that knowlingly sells a product which is to be used on "public facilites" without regarding minimal security concerns about it. Why ISPs are then to be overloaded with the burden of taking care about problems they don't create nor empower?
"Mischievous school kids post articles on Slashdot, linking to sites they want to DDoS."
Yes... and on this lines, first I thought about the headlines is, well... if they are "mischievous school kids" who is *really* to blame? I mean, of course the kids are probably mischievous but, can be considered IT staff like truly professional if those "mischievous kids" go with it?
After all, imagine a newspaper with a header like "Twelve year-old mischievous kid with a plastic gun and a donald duck cardboard mask over his face manages to steal two million dollars from Fifth National Bank office at Springfield"; maybe the kid is mischievous but, hell, it's damn sure neither that bank nor its security service's reputation is going to skyrocket (not to talk about the fact that the kid just exposes himself to be brought back home by a very seriously-faced police agent just to scare the boy and let him learn not to do such sillynessess no more)!
Still, most "penetrations" and "security violations" require neither more ability nor planning than the bank example, but in this case, the "michievous kid" is the one to hold all blame and, in some cases, the one to affront legal actions that seem more proper for an active al-qaeda terrorist.
"That process only takes a few clock cycles"...and a ton of I/O operations.
I don't know about Win2003, but I do know for sure both WinNT4 and Win2000 don't seem to be too clever about when releasing caches or dumping pages to swap; from my own experience it always seems to get some two/three seconds too late. It's a bit disappointing when you see you have a lot of free (cached) RAM and still it takes some three four seconds to "bring back" the Word document you left unused for ten minutes.
"The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero)The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero)"
Again, the same ol'story.
You can talk about "Linux" as (only) the kernel, or you can talk about "Linux distribution [X]", where [X] is the distribution you are talking about, but talking about "Linux makes things this or that way" is simply nonsense.
So, in order not to seem a dumb ignorant, please avoid saying things like "Linux doesn't run on less than 128MB", or "Windows XP is [faster|slower] than Linux" or "X-Window runs on Linux with 0 niceness by default".
Just as an example; the X-Window system runs by default at -10 niceness on Linux... on Debian GNU/Linux "Woody", I mean. Other distributions, other defaults.
"It appears to either be inconsistently licensed or that the copyright holders of Rekall don't understand what the GNU General Public License actually says."
No; it is not that way.
What they are saying makes sense and is no more than what other people (name Troll Tech with Qt or MySQL AB with MySQL) is already doing: double licensing.
You can get Rekall from theKompany as a GPLed product or you can get it under a "commercial" license.
Of course, if you get Rekall under the GPL, you can modify it and redistribute under GPL terms *but* you cannot call your product "Rekall", since this is a Trade Mark from TheKompany, and trade marks are out of the GPL scope. You can recieve Rekall under a "commercial" agreement and, of course, you will be bound to that agreement.
As you suspect, for this to be possible, TheKompany has to retain copyrights for the whole of the code, so what implicitly they are saying to you is that if you want some patch/modification/etc to be included within the bunch of source code TheKompany names "Rekall" (the "Rekall code base"), you will have to pass to them your copyright over such code of yours. In such a way, TheKompany will retain its ability to double-license the product.
Of course, if you don't want such a state of things you can always start a fork from the GPL code *BUT* you won't be able to call it "Rekall" (a Trade Mark from TheKompany), nor you will be able to double-license your fork (since you won't have full copyrights for that code).
As I told you, just the same that happens with Qt, MySQL or all the code under the GNU umbrella (in this case copyright must be passed to the... was it the FSF or SPI?)
"When you're drinking black (Indian) tea (not green tea, as in the far east and parts of Greece/turkey), it tastes unpleasantly bitter without milk (even with sugar)."
But it tastes perfectly good with sugar and some lemon, or with dry anis ("Chinchón seco, I mean", not something sweet like "Marie Brizard anisette").
"Indian tea also has an awful lot of tannins"
It is nothing but grandma's stories. At usual concentrations, black tea is even moderately digestive, specially with some alcohol in it.
All this being said, I still do prefer black spresso coffee the way it is meant to be (hot, bitter, strong and dense).
"how is the IT staff supposed to know which BT packets are "good" and which are "bad"?"
I don't know. But I DO know one thing. What am I uploading/downloading is not AT ANY RATE something IT staff has anything to do with. That is MY data and MY bussiness, not theirs.
I don't know about the USA, but surely enough that's the way things are in civilized parts of the world like, to name one, Turku.
Being said that, usage trends of IT fabrics IS IT staff bussiness; One thing they can do, for instance is shape traffic usage so everybody takes a fair portion of the cake (while it is easily just to close down port ranges for IP blocks that's neither "the proper way" nor something within tech staff duties; it is simpy "the lazy cheap way"). How they take advantage of his part of the case is enterily up to them; if they use it for something dubious or illegal, that's bussiness between them and police, certainly not between them and IT staff.
Well, try to tell this to me if we are ever face to face just to see how my unexistant fist breaks your teeth (the Diogene's approach... by the way, do the solipsist's teeth exist?).
I know my fist is not a refutation for your solipsism, but I can sure you unexistant-I would make good laugh at it, anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
"Believe me, for an Average Joe desktop user, startup time is WAY important."
Correction: for an Average Joe WINDOWS user, startup time is way important (both boot up and launch app time).
D'you know why? Because Average Joe Windows user tends to boot up frecuently and start and close apps frecuently too.
But here we are not talking about Windows, but about Linux, and Average Joe Linux user tends to use his computer on quite a different manner. Since the OS is quite stable, she tends to let her computer powered on at least monday to friday, so boot up importance goes down the line; because things like virtual desktops and the way window managers helps you use your GUI (remember opened apps and their positiions, rolling up on double click, autorise, focus follows mouse, etc.) Linux users tend to ask the wm to open all the typical apps at session's begining and open they stay till end of session. That means, all apps are opened early in the morning and closed late at evening, or you just start a session monday morning and close it friday evening so, again, apps launch time importance goes doooown the line.
"However, a certain vasp case takes almost a month to compute on 4 nodes. That 3% increase just translated into a days worth of saved time. What about year long runs? Maybe save an entire month?"
Simple maths: 3% is always 3%.
3% from 4 seconds is 4*0.03=0.12 seconds;
3% from 1 month is 1*0.03=0.03 months (more or less 21 hours, not "days").
3% from 1 year is 1*0.03=0.03 years (more or less 11 days, not "months").
So your 4 seconds app goes to 3.9 seconds, which is hardly a significative difference.
Your one month app goes to 29 days, which is hardly a significative difference.
Your one year app goes to eleven months and twenty days which, again, is hardly a significative difference.
There's no magic that converts 3% into 10% percent when you go from few seconds to a year.
"Yeah, but the example in this case is OO.o vs. MS Office"
Not at all! The example is "open source" vs "closed source". I need to consider all elements, but Ms Office has a strong handicap from the very beginnig since it forces on my the choice of a single privative operative system. Does this mean I *always* would reject choicing Ms Office as the proper solution for a given problem? No. It only means is quite difficult for Ms Office to become a solution since it limits itself to single platform and that puts it down, down on my list.
The day you can run Ms Office on, say, Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD it might truly compete; today the strongest point with Ms Office usually is "you are already locked in", and my usual sugestion is "the sooner you break with Ms Office lock in, the cheaper it will cost you".
Well, that's your bet, we will see.
But just to point it out, here I already said that saying "linux" when one should say "a given linux distribution" is a strong source of misconception.
Maybe tomorrow Linux distribution "X" manages to become majority by dismiss security and technicalities in order to make tomorrow's "Linux that even a dumb monkey can use" quite ala Microsoft, in such a way is as wide open as Windows is to worms, virus, security holes and everything.
Now: how is it suppoused all that problems on "Linux distribution X" will affect "Linux distribution Y" which still does things the way they should be, say "Debian GNU/Linux"?
The main problem with Windows is not that all malware is written against it, but that Windows is wide open, by its own way about this bussiness, to such malware, so it always have to react instead of prevent to such malware. Avoid risk practices and most of the danger will simply vanish.
Well... I wouldn't worry too much about what seems to be such a rare event. Only about 40% of all born human beings have ever died... ...And of that 40% almost noone has died more than once.
"Without being overly argumentative, your basic premise is that with OSS *you* can provide better service."
Yes; it is the basic premise of the *second* part of my message. You seem to forgot that the basic premises of the first part were "because Microsoft hurts me when others use it" and "because I know in the long run open source choices will be more useful to them".
"I think you missed the point of the article. The author asks why do you care?"
And I strictly answered why do I care, so I don't see how did I miss the point. Even if we stay with only the second part of my message, please tell me how wouldn't it would be a proper answer to the question "why do I care?" to say "I do care because I can provide better service, thus better insuring my incomes".
"if someone brings in a car to your repair shop are you going to turn away work? Of course not"
Still, I do tell them which brand they should better buy, and I try them to change if their car is the "wrong" brand.
"I think the real question the author was asking is "Why should you care when the business doesn't?""
Then, I answered to that question too: because I can make more money out of supporting open source than closed source (since my clients will be more satisfied).
"However, Especially for those of us in the IT field, that "poorly written software" is crucial to our existence."
It is not the first time the "broken glass" fallacy is mentioned here.
"Why do you care what products other people using?"
Because, sometimes, their choice indeed affects me. Let's go with the tipical car comparations: It could be said that whatever car other peoples drive its their bussiness so why should I care if, say, model X brakes are known to be faulty, after all is them who will kill themselves against a tree in a curve... except when they don't crash against a tree but against myself, of course!
I do use Debian GNU/Linux so malware doesn't affect me... except by the ton of spam and mail worms I recieve from windows zombies; except for latency on my Internet connection when malware activity arises; except that some destinations won't accept mail directly from my computer since so much windows-based malware has made them block residential or dynamic IP blocks...
On the other hand, I have to take care about what hardware I buy (PDA, scanner, video cards and the like) since lots of them are not properly supported for Linux, and most of the time it is the cheapest ones; more Linux users would mean easy access to more supported components/gadgets.
Finally, let's return to the car comparation: even if there were no choice for the other car to crash against me I am a sensible person anyway, so it's my pleasure to avoid their pain if I can help to.
This is all from my "Linux fan" point of view. Let's put now my "professional hat": I do consulting for a living for soho and soho-like companies (a department within a bigger corp, for instance), and my client-base depends greatly on my own reputation. Specially with Microsoft, but it is extensible to privative software in general, there is so much I can do when things go wrong, but no more. For those that use mainly Microsoft environment I am basically an expends issue: from time to time, no matter what, a virus at some box, or an antivirus which hangs a computer, or an Office component which go nuts... for too many of these problems, once you applied the recipies there's not too much you can say but "well, let's talk to Microsoft" (and I am still waiting for the first time for them to resolve me an issue) or "time to reinstall". Not to talk about when they ask me "can [new feature] be implemented", and I have to answer "errr... yes, it will be some [big money here]". You see, mainly they pay me for things to stay the way they were. No surprise they don't see me with nice eyes.
On the other hand, when I can deploy open source solutions, I am on the drive site; there can be problems, of course, but they are resolved -and quite fast most of the time, never to return. I know I even have access to the source code if nothing else will do (and I restorted to that option in some ocassions). When they ask me "Is X doable", I usually can aswer them "Yes, open source solution X will do, at my standard hour fees". These people, quite on the contrary to the others see me as the friend that make their systems grow with time being always better and better and when problems arise, the one that always come with the solution.
Now, *I* am the one that makes things happen (so I take a merit that is not mine: obviously Wietse Venema merits much more than myself when I install Postfix and they have stable e-mail from that day on) in one case, but *I* am the one that fails too even when I say, "what do you want? Trying to correct a Windows 2000 problem is much alike to try to repair a car engine without the ability to open the hood, because in both cases I am the "human being" that they see around "doing things" and taking their money for that. So what should I do? It's funnier working with Linux and open source than with Windows and privative software, and my clients are more satisfied too, so no wonder I try to push open source on them!
"Good to see the gov't is realizing the benefits of SF and OSS..."
Sorry to deillusion you, but in this case the only benefits will be PR and, maybe HR, nothing too technical, specially not "to enable true collaborative software development" which, in this case, just can't happen.
This software, even if it is not directly involved with something launched to space (it's a code validator) it is still a political issue (as anything related to the space race) and that means there can't be "real" collaborative software development as in "hey, Ax0R, your last three patches are good enough, so I'll give you a write-allowed account to the repo for you to directly check in your code", and then just checkout and build. No: every code will have to be scrutinized by NASA people and then, if accepted, checked in to the *real* source code repository well protected within NASA facilities so, for practical purpouses, the public repo will be a "read only" one.
"True collaboration" is all about mutual confidence, and this cannot be grown at a NASA project, no matter SF or not.
"Incorrect. It's their network and their connectivity costs"
Then if I say it's 'my data' and 'my bussiness', how the hell can I be incorrect and corrected by saying "nay, it's 'their network' and its 'their connectivity costs'"?
Last time I checked, 'my data' != 'their network' and 'my bussiness' != 'their connectivity costs'.
"If a University or business blocks specific types of traffic, it's perfectly legal and justified."
Yes... up to a point. Being the point that no university has any bussiness about my private data. They, of course, can disallow my private data being hosted, or travelling through, their fabrics (up to the limits stablished by local laws), but if they allow it (like in a student dorm), all they can do is take care of their bussiness (fixing alotted bandwith, for instance) but, again, my data is not their bussiness.
"That said, universities are blocking p2p traffic because it eats up most of the bandwidth"
Yes, I know, and that I already called "the lazy cheap way". If the University is worried about everybody having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs, then make sure everybody is having their fair portion of bandwith at proper costs! But once you (ie the University) have decided that a given portion is for my private use, then you are nobody to further fiscalize how my "private use" is; if you allott me 10Kbs, that's OK, let it be 10Kbs, but don't tell me if it should be HTTP, SMTP, SSH or whatever even child pornography*1, as harsh as it might sound, that's not your bussiness!
*1 Of course while me exchanging child pornography is not the "carrier" bussines, it will be police's one, and if police traces it to the University THEN they can come with a judicial order to sniff my traffic for instance. But only under founded suspicion about an illegallity and only under legal judicial knowledge and approval.
But this is not the case of "just" being pedantic (think of "it's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux or the like).
This time, the misconception about "Linux" and "a given Linux distribution" leads to genuine mistake to the one that reads it, so I feel my rant justified. Just look at the answer the original poster got in the lines of "ah! so you can renice X and then everything goes fine? tell me how" when more than probably it is not a solution (if he uses -he probably does, a distribution that already renices X on 2.4 kernels) or might even be a problem by itself (if he uses 2.6 kernel or a 2.4 with a kolivas patch, for instance).
Indeed, the "linux vs linux distribution" misconception is one that I tend to rant about since it is on the basis of a very great percentage of nonsenses to be read around here, so I try -albeit pedantically, it seems, to give my 2 cents to make people more aware about what the real advantages or Linux as open source can give to them.
"So is your argument that people who leave open WiFi acess points available to the random public bear no responsibility for the actions taken using them?"
How can you come to such a "translation" of what has really being said? Just the opposite what it was said was the ISP cannot held accountable for such a practice, because in this case is clearly the user's fault.
In such a case, you should go after the user on grounds of negligence, and he should lose the case and repair for your damages. Immediatly after that, the user would sue and win the company which installed the WiFi point and let it wide open (if such is the case).
Were the case your site is attacked by a bunch of Windows zombi boxes, you should go after their owners and win; they on their side should go against the worm writer *and* Microsoft and win too.ç
In any of both cases is the ISP (the carrier) to be involved.
"No, but they will gladly block unwanted pay-numbers if I ask them to."
...doing exactly the same: you ask them to block something, then they block something. Any other case I contracted full connection to the Internet, so I demand full connection to the Internet.
If YOU ask them to. That's the whole point.
"I think an internet equivalent would be for ISPs..."
"The thing to do is to hold the ISP accountable if they don't hold the user accountable."
Yeah, just the way we must hold the bus company accountable if one of its buses carries a terrorist to his objective, or the telephone company if one of its lines is used to blackmail me.
"If I start making prank calls from my phone, the phone company will kill my line if they get called about it."
Don't know about the USA, but you can bet that if the company does such a thing as block a public service in Spain (and in any civilized country for that fact) without an order from a judge on the grounds that another user asked for it, it will loose the case on tribunals and will have to compensate damages.
How can this be considered "flamebait"?
ISPs are truly the less guilty in this case, after (in no particular order) the "mischevious kid" that writes a silly worm (if you see the majority of all malware running out there, something that I just read in another post on this thread seems to fit perfectly: they are a "hacker" no more than the one that writes something rude on the wall of a public bathroom is a "crime mastermind"); the user that doesn't take care of a "system" at a "public service" facility (it really doesn't matter if we are talking about a computer on the Internet or a man with a dog on the street, or a driver on the road); or the company that knowlingly sells a product which is to be used on "public facilites" without regarding minimal security concerns about it. Why ISPs are then to be overloaded with the burden of taking care about problems they don't create nor empower?
"Mischievous school kids post articles on Slashdot, linking to sites they want to DDoS."
Yes... and on this lines, first I thought about the headlines is, well... if they are "mischievous school kids" who is *really* to blame? I mean, of course the kids are probably mischievous but, can be considered IT staff like truly professional if those "mischievous kids" go with it?
After all, imagine a newspaper with a header like "Twelve year-old mischievous kid with a plastic gun and a donald duck cardboard mask over his face manages to steal two million dollars from Fifth National Bank office at Springfield"; maybe the kid is mischievous but, hell, it's damn sure neither that bank nor its security service's reputation is going to skyrocket (not to talk about the fact that the kid just exposes himself to be brought back home by a very seriously-faced police agent just to scare the boy and let him learn not to do such sillynessess no more)!
Still, most "penetrations" and "security violations" require neither more ability nor planning than the bank example, but in this case, the "michievous kid" is the one to hold all blame and, in some cases, the one to affront legal actions that seem more proper for an active al-qaeda terrorist.
"That process only takes a few clock cycles" ...and a ton of I/O operations.
I don't know about Win2003, but I do know for sure both WinNT4 and Win2000 don't seem to be too clever about when releasing caches or dumping pages to swap; from my own experience it always seems to get some two/three seconds too late. It's a bit disappointing when you see you have a lot of free (cached) RAM and still it takes some three four seconds to "bring back" the Word document you left unused for ten minutes.
"The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero)The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero)"
Again, the same ol'story.
You can talk about "Linux" as (only) the kernel, or you can talk about "Linux distribution [X]", where [X] is the distribution you are talking about, but talking about "Linux makes things this or that way" is simply nonsense.
So, in order not to seem a dumb ignorant, please avoid saying things like "Linux doesn't run on less than 128MB", or "Windows XP is [faster|slower] than Linux" or "X-Window runs on Linux with 0 niceness by default".
Just as an example; the X-Window system runs by default at -10 niceness on Linux... on Debian GNU/Linux "Woody", I mean. Other distributions, other defaults.
"It appears to either be inconsistently licensed or that the copyright holders of Rekall don't understand what the GNU General Public License actually says."
No; it is not that way.
What they are saying makes sense and is no more than what other people (name Troll Tech with Qt or MySQL AB with MySQL) is already doing: double licensing.
You can get Rekall from theKompany as a GPLed product or you can get it under a "commercial" license.
Of course, if you get Rekall under the GPL, you can modify it and redistribute under GPL terms *but* you cannot call your product "Rekall", since this is a Trade Mark from TheKompany, and trade marks are out of the GPL scope. You can recieve Rekall under a "commercial" agreement and, of course, you will be bound to that agreement.
As you suspect, for this to be possible, TheKompany has to retain copyrights for the whole of the code, so what implicitly they are saying to you is that if you want some patch/modification/etc to be included within the bunch of source code TheKompany names "Rekall" (the "Rekall code base"), you will have to pass to them your copyright over such code of yours. In such a way, TheKompany will retain its ability to double-license the product.
Of course, if you don't want such a state of things you can always start a fork from the GPL code *BUT* you won't be able to call it "Rekall" (a Trade Mark from TheKompany), nor you will be able to double-license your fork (since you won't have full copyrights for that code).
As I told you, just the same that happens with Qt, MySQL or all the code under the GNU umbrella (in this case copyright must be passed to the... was it the FSF or SPI?)
"When you're drinking black (Indian) tea (not green tea, as in the far east and parts of Greece/turkey), it tastes unpleasantly bitter without milk (even with sugar)."
But it tastes perfectly good with sugar and some lemon, or with dry anis ("Chinchón seco, I mean", not something sweet like "Marie Brizard anisette").
"Indian tea also has an awful lot of tannins"
It is nothing but grandma's stories. At usual concentrations, black tea is even moderately digestive, specially with some alcohol in it.
All this being said, I still do prefer black spresso coffee the way it is meant to be (hot, bitter, strong and dense).
"how is the IT staff supposed to know which BT packets are "good" and which are "bad"?"
I don't know. But I DO know one thing. What am I uploading/downloading is not AT ANY RATE something IT staff has anything to do with. That is MY data and MY bussiness, not theirs.
I don't know about the USA, but surely enough that's the way things are in civilized parts of the world like, to name one, Turku.
Being said that, usage trends of IT fabrics IS IT staff bussiness; One thing they can do, for instance is shape traffic usage so everybody takes a fair portion of the cake (while it is easily just to close down port ranges for IP blocks that's neither "the proper way" nor something within tech staff duties; it is simpy "the lazy cheap way"). How they take advantage of his part of the case is enterily up to them; if they use it for something dubious or illegal, that's bussiness between them and police, certainly not between them and IT staff.
"You lose at solipsism."
Well, try to tell this to me if we are ever face to face just to see how my unexistant fist breaks your teeth (the Diogene's approach... by the way, do the solipsist's teeth exist?).
I know my fist is not a refutation for your solipsism, but I can sure you unexistant-I would make good laugh at it, anyway!